Michael Lind, at Salon (“Why libertarians apologize for autocracy,” Aug. 30,) charges libertarians with an affinity for authoritarian regimes when it comes to implementing “free market reform.”
Of course he produces the obligatory quote from Mises on Mussolini having “saved European civilization,” along with the standard anecdotes of Hayek’s Chicago Boys and Pinochet. He makes much, in particular, of Pinochet’s Secretary of Labor and Social Security — now a Cato fellow — Jose Piñera, who privatized the state pension system and “designed the labor laws that introduced flexibility to the Chilean labor market…”
I won’t even get into the question of Hayek’s complicity in specific policies, because that’s a topic for an entire monograph. Suffice it to say I’m skeptical of the extent to which he can be blamed for endorsing any particular measures.
More important is that Pinochet’s so-called “free market reforms” mostly fail a libertarian smell test, and bear little resemblance to anything like genuine free market reform. There are plenty of us left-wing free market libertarians, at Center for a Stateless Society and Alliance of the Libertarian Left, who have nothing but outrage and contempt for Pinochet.
Some right-wing “libertarians,” who care more about defending the interests of big business than about genuine free market principles as such, are fond of saying that Pinochet was “economically libertarian but politically authoritarian.” Balderdash!
Pinochet’s economic policies were more state capitalist than libertarian.
I don’t doubt a bit that Pinochet’s new labor laws “introduced flexibility to the Chilean labor market.” All that hanging from hooks, and assorted other stress holds, would surely limber those uppity workers up just as supple as anyone could please. Lest we forget, even the most orthodox of marginalist economists consider labor to be a coequal “factor of production.” In Chile, owners of that particular “factor of production” who attempted to organize and negotiate a better rate for their services frequently found themselves lying in ditches with their faces hacked off. Factory managers escorted members of the secret police onto the shop floor to point out the labor organizers and agitators, to be subsequently “disappeared,” tortured and murdered — their bellies, as Lind points out, slit open before they were dumped into the ocean from helicopters. You think if a left-wing dictator had taken similar measures against the owners of capital, in order to reduce their bargaining power, it would be described as “politically authoritarian but economically libertarian”?
Genuine libertarians oppose the grant of artificial titles to vacant and unimproved land, by which the landed aristocracy is able to hold the land out of use or charge tribute to those who would homestead and cultivate it. By this libertarian standard, the whole quasi-feudal hacienda system that prevails in Latin America is utterly illegitimate. Up to eighty percent of the land on a hacienda is undeveloped, while neighboring land-poor peasants work as agricultural laborers on the landlord’s property — land which their ancestors probably broke for cultivation. By any legitimate principle of free market libertarianism, this land would belong to the peasants. Pinochet’s partial reversal of Allende’s land reform was just as much an act of theft, by libertarian standards, as the Enclosures in England or forced collectivization in the USSR.
Pinochet’s “privatization” program, like most other examples of such policies carried out around the world under the Washington Consensus, was really corporate looting. The typical “privatization” cycle is this: World Bank technocrats, in collusion with their native counterparts in the state bureaucracy, persuade a regime that’s utterly unaccountable to its people to go deep into hock to fund public infrastructure — mostly the utilities and road infrastructure to subsidize foreign capital investment and make it more profitable. Once the regime is in debt, the World Bank and IMF act like a “company store” to extort desired behaviors from the regime. Besides ratifying “intellectual property” protectionism, such measures usually entail “structural adjustment” policies like “privatizing” the infrastructure, often selling it to the same global investors it was built to subsidize in the first place, at fire sale prices. The sale is often preceded by enormous amounts of government spending to make the assets sufficiently attractive to be salable. The new owners’ first order of business, of course, is stripping assets and selling them off, usually realizing far more than the purchase price. And the newly privatized state services continue to function within a web of state-enforced corporatist protections so the “private” state services don’t have to compete in a free market.
Most “Free Trade Agreements” are really corporate protectionist measures that have about as much to do with free trade as the Ministry of Truth had to do with truth. The same is true of the extent to which most “free market reform” has anything to do with free market reform.
Lind’s critique takes on an extra layer of irony when we consider the role of FDR and Truman in creating the postwar global American Empire, and the role of Cold War liberals in installing reactionary dictators when “communists” like Arbenz menaced the moral sanctity of United Fruit’s bananas. Sukarno and Diem were overthrown as part of Saint Kennedy’s “bear any burden, pay any price” policy of counterinsurgency, and it was carried out by idealistic liberals from Harvard and Georgetown.
Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocrats carried out policies in Russia that were quite similar to Pinochet’s “free market reform” in Chile. And Jeffrey Sachs — you know, the same progressive fellow who hangs with Bono and Warren Buffet these days — was at least as culpable in the process as Friedman ever was.
Lind quotes at length from an 1857 letter from Macaulay:
It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread?
Lind’s problem is that he has a mirror-image view to that of all the “autocracy sympathizers” he criticizes: the state’s “progressive” interventions result from the power of the majority over the minority. He ignores the possibility that the reason all those people had only half a breakfast was that the state was actively intervening to promote the interests of the minority against those of the majority, and that there wasn’t much libertarian about Macaulay’s “vested rights.”
The class polarization in Macaulay’s England was the culmination of a series of events that included both the Tudor and Parliamentary Enclosures, the nullification of copyhold, the Combination Act, and the Laws of Settlement. In England, as J.L. and Barbara Hammond put it, the government took the society apart and put it back together much as a foreign occupier would do with a conquered country. The industrial revolution as it actually took place was a coup d’etat by the state against society, by which the majority of the laboring population was robbed of its property in the land, forcibly turned into a propertyless proletariat, restricted from free association, and constrained in its movements by an internal passport system. The main function of the state, on other words, was to enable a privileged class to live off the rents of artificial property rights and artificial scarcity.
Although right-wingers like to present the issue as one of preventing the state from redistributing wealth downward, the real issue is one of stopping the state from redistributing wealth upward.
Like the supposed friends of autocracy Lind criticizes, Lind himself seems to believe that an ostensible “representative democracy” can function as a genuinely popular government, and present a real threat to entrenched privilege. A century of what Noam Chomsky calls “formal democracy” or “spectator democracy,” however, has shown experiments in representative government to be governed by Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: “It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators.”
The anarchist P. J. Proudhon compared representative democracy to constitutional monarchy: “Instead of saying, as did M. Thiers, the King reigns and does not govern, democracy says, the People reigns and does not govern, which is to deny the Revolution…”
The so-called “progressive” policies of the 20th century welfare-regulatory state, on closer scrutiny, turn out to be measures adopted by the state as “executive committee of the (corporate) ruling class.” Their primary purpose was to stabilize the corporate economy and guarantee a predictable rate of profit by restricting competition, guaranteeing sufficient aggregate demand to fully utilize industrial capacity, and prevent politically destabilizing levels of destitution. As shown by Gabriel Kolko in The Triumph of Conservatism, the primary actors behind the Progressive Era regulatory regime was the regulated industries, which sought to cartelize their respective markets through the state. G. William Domhoff has demonstrated, in a series of heavily documented policy studies, that FDR’s New Deal economic policies reflected the interests of one wing of organized capital. Whatever incidental benefits these policies carried for the average person, they were not primarily the result of democratic pressure from below but a side-effect of the corporate ruling class promoting its own self-interest.
In other words, the political impetus behind the Food Stamps program had a lot more to do with the agribusiness interests in Bob Dole’s constituency than with the immensely powerful voting bloc of unemployed single mothers.
Roderick Long, in a post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (“Libertarians In Jackboots?” August 30), challenges the “generous assumption”
that existing democracies really are majoritarian. As many libertarians have argued, the logic of monopoly government and special-interest capture explains why real-life “democracies” tend to be plutocratic oligarchies in democratic trappings.
On top of everything else, Lind repeats Lawrence O’Donnel’s howler about libertarians’ alleged silence about “abuses by police and the military.” He’s seriously never heard of Radley Balko? Liberals at The Nation have actually treated libertarian criticism of the TSA’s “papers, please” regime as a disingenuous right-wing conspiracy to discredit government. If Lind is honestly unaware of just how prevalent libertarian critiques of the police state and national security state really are, it probably says something about the value of his opinion.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Caia Fora, Lawrence O’Donnell.
[...] Kevin Carson laying down some damn fine left-libertarian points (and loudly plugging Radley Balko at the [...]
A good piece, Mr. Carson.
Credit where credit’s due. Just like someone alibiing himself of a charge of rape by claming he was murdering someone else at the time, these almost certainly really were cases of being “politically authoritarian”. That is, these things weren’t done so much to intimidate the workforce into compliance as to clear away potential threats to the authorities. The economic gains from intimidation were a “twofer” (“two for the price of one”).
Not quite. The agricultural revolution as it actually took place was a coup d’etat by the state against society etc. All that was a necessary preliminary to the industrial revolution for it to take place as it did, and it drew heavily on the effects of that – but the industrial revolution should be considered an add on rather than part and parcel of all that, a secondary opportunistic infection (in its harms) as it were. To the extent that it alleviated harms done separately, the Misoid argument that “sweatshops are good as they are the best option” is correct – but only to that extent, and it does omit any account of real harms done separately.
After Lind quoted that passage from Macaulay, he made the following completely specious statement:-
That’s absolute codswallop. Not only was that not Macaulay’s “solution”, he wasn’t proposing a solution there at all, let alone one predicated on that. He was actually proposing not making detrimental changes away from a status quo, the “first do no harm” thing. Further, he had no such theory; rather, he followed the Whig view of history, in which general improvement was happening all along. He was wrong about that being the inevitable trend of history, but in no sense did he suppose that wealth would trickle down; he supposed that wealth would increase across the board, fructifying in the pockets of the people as Gladstone put it later – the Whig theory of what would happen if burdens were only removed. Not only is that idea about wealth more nearly right, believing it is much more creditable as it is much less prone to self serving self deception.
If Lind is honestly unaware of just how prevalent libertarian critiques of the police state and national security state really are, it probably says something about the value of his opinion.
The overwhelming majority of police violence is directed against non-white people. I’m referring to the constant presence of police in poor minority neighborhoods. The completely routine violations of basic rights – not just as a one time fluke, but a way of life. The beatings and not infrequent murders. The staggeringly unequal rates of drug incarceration despite relatively equal rates of drug use. It’s pretty obvious that black and brown people are far and away the primary victims of the police state.
The overwhelming majority of self-identified libertarians are white. The kind of “police state” they describe is very different. As you point out, one of the centerpieces of this narrative is the TSA. And while the TSA is obviously out of control, and certainly worthy of criticism, one wonders why it warrants such emphasis. One wonders why the libertarian rage flows freely in response to “Don’t Taze Me, Bro”, but is relatively quiet when confronted with the many police murders of non-white people (yes, there are more than just Oscar Grant).
In a nutshell, I think part of the reason libertarians are accused of not addressing civil liberties issues is that libertarians tend not to want to talk about race in a serious way, and that creates a huge blindspot when discussing civil liberties issues. Leftists and liberals have never had a problem with calling out racial injustice, and so they tend to have a more complete critique of the problems of the police state.
If libertarian thought claims to oppose the police state, y’all need to stop ignoring one of its most glaring features: racist oppression of non-white people.
the issue of unaccountable regimes privatisisng their national assets in haste is not new…even in Russia this bidding of the national resouces like Oil and gas, etc occured. When rogue regimes mess up things big time by wretching the economy of the country(by of course siphoning off the public money) , they usually take this route..though the private firms can be bigger robbers then the governments itself by monopolizing the national resources. This privatisation can lead to severe dissence in the public. On must be reminded that such privatisation efforts are just last starw on the public…
In Tucuman, Argentina, in 1997 the population started a civil disobedience campaign against a Vivendi subsidiary, refusing to pay their bills in protest at deteriorating water quality and doubled charges….in the long-run such senseless act can fuel a revolution in the minds of pepople…
My recent post WHILE WORLD WAS WATCHING LIBYA…..
sometimes, cantor's nasally expression that he shows makes me want to punch him in the face sometimes.
Lind assumes "privatization equals free market." Of course, we can't blame liberals, progressives and socialists for not understanding von Mises when even libertarians don't fully understand the radical implications of his work. When mises said "socialism is impossible", he just wasn't talking about commie or social democrat socialism. He was in effect saying that the state is always private. So -like it or not- we never get away from privatization. This insight means that the real debate is privatization versus privatization. For who and whom. Who wins and who loses.
I don't agree with whoknew's comments about Libertarians and the TSA. All I can say is "not so". Libertarians, including "right wing" libertarians like Milton Friedman have been long time and long term and consistent opponents of the drug war. Drug prohibition has been the main tactic used in the state's increasingly militarised war on black people. Opposition to the drug war police state from the progressive left , including left liberals, has been much less consistent and principled that coming from Libertarians. Maybe libertarians need to start calling the mainstream left racist!!
I disagree about the race issue, I have found a wealth of libertarian arguments against certain state policies due to their racist and class bias. From the war on drugs to warrant-less searches to the gun control laws, libertarians seem to have the most consistent civil liberty views. These issues more often affect minority communities disproportionately, so the idea that we don't address racial issues seems absurd to me. I think that libertarians are misrepresented on this because we don't address state violence solely in terms of race, we thoroughly abhor state violence at every level against every human being regardless of race, religion or sex.
Interestingly enough, it was the progressives that started red lining, gun control, housing projects, public schools, interventionist wars, and the drug war. Why aren't they called out for all the abuses of state power they are responsible for?
It was Friedman's Chicago Boys, not Hayek.
This is a wonderful piece. Thank you, and apologies to Kevin for my rudeness in a previous post. I read you just after reading something evil, and it put me it a bad mood. Mea culpa.
I do have one concern. You are doubtless right to criticise the gross injustice of "the Industrial Revolution as it actually happened." My concern~ and it was a libertarian feminist friend who follows your work who suggested this~ is that your critique of the Industrial Revolution "as it actually happened" sometimes feels to close to a critique of the Industrial Revolution as such. I don't think that this is your actual position, but I do feel that the material, intellectual, and cultural achievements of modernity~ achievements which permit me to stay alive~ seem to go unnoticed in your narrative.
Decentralist and localist memes are popular today amond radical intellectuals. This may not itself be objectionable, and properly framed it could be a virtue. But there is a large streak of primitivist anarchism and paleolibertarianism given to romaniticisations of preindustrial life, and such currents of thought are likely to grow stronger in an atmosphere of environmental crisis. Some of the major spokesman of populist Leftism- Chris Hedges is a good example~ go the whole way and rail against modernity with the tone and priorities of a religious preacher.
I may be wrong, but from where I stand it appears that our political discussion is fracturing primarily along centre/periphery lines, with populist radicals opposing the gross injustice of the Empire while elites and their institutions defend the structure of modernity. As things currently stand, I see social justice and humanity taken seriously on one side and reason and science taken seriously on the other. The centre is more atheist, more feminist, and more life-affirmative than the periphery, and intellectuals who refuse to see this are endangering their own lives…
…I feel very nervous when I hear someone like Charles Johnson praising the high Middle Ages against the Rennaisance because the former displayed fewer socioeconomic disparities; to my mind this entirely misses the point as to the foundational requirements of a rational human existence, which is to be able to percieve reality by the judgment of one's own mind. I would rather see an unjust "brown tech" 21st century with space colonisation and a cure for mortality than a 21st century "earth steward" Arcadia. I want to be where the scientists are.
I'd rather see a radical movement which affirmed reason, and clearly chose a humanist and industrial world view over traditional Arcadia. But it doesn't exist, and without clear philosophical guidance I suspect that the next revolution, however justified, will end up more like the Russian than the American variety. The nice humanists in the radical camp are embarassingly ineffectual, and they won't be the types who inherit a populist revolution if one does succeed.