Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is Keith Farrell, a Students For Liberty campus coordinator at the University of Connecticut (“Why the Pope is Wrong on Inequality,” City A.M., Aug. 21). He accuses the Pope of “scapegoating world poverty on the wealthy” and credits Marx with first coming up with the idea “that the success of some hurts others economically and that the rich have only gotten rich at the expense of the poor.” Farrell quotes a South Korean: “If someone has made a fortune for himself, fair and square, and has a lot of money, I don’t think that’s something to be condemned.”

An interesting hypothetical, but just how much of the economic elite’s growing concentration of wealth actually was made “fair and square?” Throughout his op-ed, Farrell implicitly equates the system we live under now with “economic freedom” and “free enterprise.” But that’s an example of what I call “vulgar libertarianism,” defending actually existing corporate capitalism as though it were a free market, and using “free enterprise” rhetoric to defend wealth and economic power which corporate capitalists have actually amassed through an overwhelmingly statist system of power.

Marx was hardly the first to figure out that in a class society, ruled by a class state, the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. It probably dawned on some Sumerian or Chinese peasant busting his hump with a hoe trying to produce enough to live on after paying rent to a temple priesthood. And plenty of radical free market thinkers — Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Franz Oppenheimer — have drawn the same conclusion more recently. The capitalist system we live under today is the lineal heir to the state-enforced class systems of thousands of years ago.

“Free markets,” far from structurally defining capitalism, are permitted to operate on its margins only to the extent that they’re compatible with the propertied interests controlling the state. Even in the supposedly “laissez-faire” nineteenth century, “free enterprise” was a superstructure erected on a foundation of centuries of massive robbery — the enclosure of land and dispossession of the peasantry, first in the industrializing West and then the colonial world, massive restrictions on the free movement and association of working people in industrial Britain, slave labor and the seizure of global mineral wealth. Today many of the fruits of that robbery, like absentee titles to vacant land and corporate ownership of Third World natural resources, and a monopoly on the supply of credit and the medium of exchange by the owners of stolen wealth, are still legally enforced.

Corporate capitalism today depends on even more statism — “intellectual property,” regulatory cartels and other entry barriers, and massive direct subsidies in such forms as the Military-Industrial Complex and the civil aviation and Interstate Highway systems.

It’s true, as Farrell says, that standards of living have increased in absolute terms despite the rise in inequality — true as far as it goes. But the advantages of technological progress are governed by the same targeted pricing that governs all monopolies: Giant corporations use patent monopolies to enclose technological progress and let just enough of the benefits of increased productivity trickle down to the working classes to make it worthwhile for them to keep buying, while appropriating the rest as monopoly rents for themselves.

Farrell’s statement that “capitalism has brought freedom and abundance” to South Korea bears similar looking into. South Korean capitalism was built on the foundation of US military occupation and a military regime installed by the occupation authority, which subsequently liquidated the quasi-anarchist society of self-governing village communes and self-managed factories that had emerged after the Japanese pullout in 1945. This regime put anarchists and leftists of all kinds in mass graves, and during its decades in power wasn’t exactly friendly to the “economic freedom” of — say — Korean workers who wanted to unionize.

Interestingly, Farrell shares one erroneous assumption with Pope Francis: That reducing inequality requires government “redistribution of wealth.” They’re both wrong. What we have now amounts to an upward redistribution of wealth, with “taxes” on the producing classes in the form of the state-enforced monopoly rents we pay to landlords and capitalists. We don’t need state intervention to redistribute wealth downward. We need revolution to stop the state from redistributing wealth upward.

It’s time for free marketers to stop acting as hired prize-fighters for the present system of power, and start using free market ideas to defend actual economic justice.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, Por qué el Papa está menos equivocado que Keith Farrell.

First, an article in Monthly Review (Lauren Regan, “Electronic Communications Surveillance,” July/August) describes the revolving door of personnel between federal law enforcement and the oil and gas industry’s private goon squads, and how “the U.S. government has colluded with private corporations and extractive industries to ratchet up their COINTELPRO-esque tactics upon climate justice activists.” The fossil fuel industries like to spin off private “security” and “public relations” firms (often staffed by retired federal and state cops) to spy on perfectly legal activist groups, infiltrate and disrupt them, and give intelligence to PR staff — who then cook up scary “fact sheets” to discredit activists to both media and law enforcement. Extractive corporations like TransCanada also give PowerPoint presentations to various levels of law enforcement advocating surveillance and prosecution of activists as “terrorists” — something the cops are all prepared to eat up, what with the proliferation of “Fusion Centers” looking for stuff to panic over.

The other item: According to a study by Katie Keranen of Cornell University, almost all of the 2,500 small earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past five years have been the result of high pressure wastewater injections related to fracking. The change of stress on existing fault lines from the injection of water can trigger them — with water travelling along fault lines and causing earthquakes up to 22 miles away. And other states — Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio — have also seen sharp rises in small earthquakes corresponding to the introduction of fracking there. Youngstown, Ohio — which hadn’t previously been bothered by earthquakes — was hit by 109 of them in 2011 following the creation of an injection well.

Somehow I’m guessing even the minor structural damage to homes from thousands of earthquakes in five states, breakage of possessions, and the like, would cumulatively amount to a significant sum of money — enough to have a real impact on the bottom line of an industry that has problems with financial sustainability as it is and is highly reliant on a bubble financing Ponzi scheme. And we haven’t even gotten into the poisoning of groundwater from injection of toxic chemicals into geologically unstable areas.

At every step of the way, the state steps in to subsidize the operating costs of the fossil fuel industry, steal land for it to build pipelines on, and indemnify it against liability through regulatory preemption of tort law or even flat out statutory caps on liability for damage. And yet self-proclaimed libertarians like the Koch Brothers and much of the right-wing libertarian think tank and periodicals establishment loudly proclaim their support for fracking and Keystone in the name of the “free market.”

Sorry, folks. Fracking and pipelines have nothing to do with the free market. They’re creations of the state from beginning to end.

Diese letzte Beschreibung ist, was ich „vulgären Libertarismus“ nenne. Sie bezieht sich auf das Unvermögen einiger libertärer Kommentatoren sich, von einem Moment zum anderen, daran zu erinnern, ob sie Prinzipien des freien Marktes als solche verteidigen oder lediglich eine zynische Entschuldigung für die Interessen großer Unternehmen und der Plutokratie, verhüllt in falsche Rhetorik eines „freien Marktes“, abgeben. Der vulgär-libertäre Kommentator wird oft prinzipiell die Existenz korporatistischer, betrügerischer Absprachen anerkennen und zugeben, dass die gegenwärtige Wirtschaft auf vielfältige Weise von einem freien Markt abweicht, wovon die großen Unternehmen profitieren, doch kurz danach wird er umschalten und damit fortfahren, die gegenwärtige Größe und den Wohlstand der großen Unternehmen auf der Basis von „wie unsere freie Marktwirtschaft funktioniert“ zu verteidigen. Das vulgär-libertäre Argument hängt davon ab, eine fragwürdige Stellung dazu einzunehmen, ob die existierende korporatistische Wirtschaft eine freie Marktwirtschaft ist oder nicht, um dann die Position derart zu wechseln, dass daraus ein Argument im Sinne des Big Business wird.

Ein gutes Beispiel hierfür erschien kürzlich auf dem Mises Blog: „A Marketplace to Loathe.“ Ich sollte im Voraus erwähnen, dass der Autor (Christopher Westley) korporatistisches Rent-Seeking in anderen Artikeln eingeräumt hat. Er gab im Kommentarbereich zu, dass Konzerne im Bunde mit dem Staat eine Bedrohung sein könnten, und entschuldigte sich dafür, dass er dies möglicherweise nicht in seinem Artikel klargestellt hatte. Er erklärte mir zudem, in einer sehr höflichen E-Mail, dass das Ziel seiner Attacke die unhinterfragte linke Annahme war, korporatistische Macht sei eher das normale Produkt eines freien Marktes als staatlicher Intervention in den Markt. Und er versicherte mir, dass er, anders als viele Kommentatoren im Kommentarbereich des Artikels, meine Entgegnungen nicht als Erbsenzählerei angesehen hat. Lassen Sie mich also klarstellen, dass ich sein Argument weder als bösartig noch als vorsätzlich unehrlich betrachte (obwohl ich erhebliche Vorbehalte gegenüber einigen der Kommentatoren habe).

Nichtsdestotrotz beinhaltet sein ursprünglicher Artikel keine dieser Nuancen, die er später festgelegt hat. Er erhebt nicht einmal die Frage, ob es sich um einen freien Markt handelt oder nicht, oder behandelt diese Frage als den entscheidenden Streitpunkt zwischen Libertären und Linken. Daher ist sein ursprüngliches Argument auf den ersten Blick ein vulgär-libertäres.

Der Gegenstand seines Artikels war ein Kommentar auf NPR’s Marketplace Programm. Hier ist der Abschnitt, den er zitierte:

Ich habe eine Bitte. Können Sie bitte tun was notwendig ist um den Glauben an die Unternehmen wiederherzustellen, ein Glaube, der in den letzten Jahren sehr beschädigt wurde? Die großen Türme, die unsere Unternehmen beherbergen, sind die neuen Paläste unserer Zeit, die Orte, an denen sich wirkliche Macht befindet, doch diese Türme sind voller Paradoxe. Gemacht aus Glas, kann man nicht hineinsehen. Sie sind die Säulen unserer Demokratie, doch sie werden wie totalitäre Staaten geführt. Ihre Namen sind reduziert zu einer Menge von Initialen. Ihre Führer sind der Außenwelt unbekannt. Sie sind haftbar, zum größten Teil, gegenüber anderen Institutionen, die sich in ähnlichen anonymen Türmen befinden. Für den Durchschnittsmenschen sind sie fremde Gebilde, eingehüllt in Geheimnisse. Es ist nicht verwunderlich, dass wir sie mit Argwohn betrachten, berührt mit Neid.

Westleys Erwiderung:

… Selbst das größte Unternehmen hat keine Macht über das Individuum, es sei denn das Individuum gewährt diese, somit … kann der Konsument General Motors eine lange Nase machen und GM kann nichts tun als stärker zu versuchen ihm gefällig zu sein, wenn es seinen Auftrag möchte.

Auch wenn es nur, nebenbei bemerkt, sekundär ist, kann ich es nicht unterlassen Westleys Charakterisierung von Marketplace als eine „marxistische Wirtschaftsshow“ und seine Bezeichnung des Kommentators – Charles Handy – als den „Kommunisten des Tages“ zu kommentieren. Der „Marketplace“ –Homepage zufolge ist Handy ein „London Business School“-Gründer und ein „Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Business Professor…“ Dies lässt mich glauben, dass, wie sehr Handy auch den interventionistischen Staat unterstützten mag, er dies nicht aus einer marxistischen Perspektive heraus tut. (Ebenso wie die britischen besitzenden Klassen, die für das Enclosure gestritten haben aufgrund dessen, dass die arbeitenden Klassen nur dazu gezwungen werden konnten härter zu arbeiten, wenn sie von ihrem Land vertrieben wurden, auch keine Marxisten waren.) Roy Childs‘ Beobachtung, dass linke Intellektuelle – historisch – öfter die Lakaien des Big Business waren, ist vermutlich näher am Ziel. Ich denke es ist gefahrlos zu sagen, dass Handy eine Gesellschaft als normal ansieht, in der große Unternehmen die „Säulen unserer Demokratie“ sind, und lediglich die korporatistische Herrschaft stabilisieren will. Und für all seinen zweifelsfrei aufrichtigen Glauben mit seinen eigenen progressiven Beweggründen laufen die meisten der „reformerischen“ Maßnahmen, die er empfiehlt, praktisch auf das hinaus, was der New Leftist Gabriel Kolko in The Triumph of Conservatism „politischen Kapitalismus“ nennt:

Politischer Kapitalismus ist die Nutzung politischer Ventile, um zu Bedingungen zu gelangen, die Stabilität, Vorhersehbarkeit und Sicherheit – um Rationalisierung zu erreichen – zu gewährleisten… [Mit Rationalisierung] meine ich … die Organisation der Wirtschaft und der weiteren politischen und sozialen Sphären in einer Weise, die Unternehmen erlaubt in einer vorhersehbaren und sicheren Umgebung zu arbeiten, die es zulässt, angemessene Profite auf lange Sicht zu erzielen.

Ich bin sicher, dass Handy die schlechten Aspekte korporatistischer Macht als Ergebnisse eines unregulierten Marktes sieht (als Gegensatz dazu, alle korporatistische Macht und die diese bedingende staatliche Intervention als an sich schlecht anzusehen). Doch dieses Problem taucht erst gar nicht in Westleys Artikel auf. Er zitierte lediglich einen Hinweis auf totalitäre korporatistische Macht, um dann zu bestreiten, dass diese überhaupt existieren kann, da das nicht die Weise ist, wie der freie Markt arbeitet (arbeitet, Präsenz Indikativ, nicht würde arbeiten). Gleichwohl er es später klarstellte, zitierte sein ursprünglicher Artikel lediglich einen Hinweis auf korporatistische Macht und antwortete mit einer Gegenbehauptung, dass korporatistische Macht nicht existieren kann – da der „freie Markt“ es nicht erlauben würde.

Jedenfalls war dies die Kernaussage meines Kommentars unter dem Artikel:

GM und andere Unternehmen können (und tun es auch!) betrügerische Absprachen mit dem Staat vereinbaren, um Marktbarrieren zu errichten und den Umfang von Wettbewerb zu begrenzen.

Also sollten Sie tatsächlich nicht sagen, dass die größten Unternehmen „keine Macht haben“, sondern dass die größten Unternehmen „in einem freien Markt keine Macht haben WÜRDEN.“

Und da dies kein freier Markt ist sondern vielmehr (wie Rothbard es formulierte) ein korporatistischer Staat, der die Akkumulation von Kapital und die Geschäftskosten des Big Business subventioniert, lag der Radiokommentator vollkommen richtig mit der Macht, die in solchen korporatistischen Türmen ausgeübt wird.

Sie sollten ergründen, was Ihre eigentliche Absicht ist: Prinzipien des freien Marktes als solche zu verteidigen, oder lediglich die Profite und Macht des Big Business unter dem Anschein von Prinzipien des „freien Marktes“ zu verteidigen.

Mehrere reguläre Mises Blog Kommentatoren reagierten unverzüglich auf meine Kritik, auf etwas fragwürdige Weise. Einer von ihnen wartete mit diesem Juwel auf:

Wann kommen Sie über dieses gleiche, müde Argument hinweg? Muss der Autor jede Bemerkung würdigen? Ist dies eine wissenschaftliche Fachzeitschrift oder ein Blogartikel?

Ja, Kevin, wir leben nicht in einem freien Markt.

Ja, Kevin, viele (wenn nicht alle) Unternehmen machen Lobby für und akzeptieren Almosen.

Oh warte, was ist das? Es ist ein Wal-Mart Artikel den Sie nicht für seinen Mangel an „dies ist kein freier Markt“-Eignung gescholten haben. Los, jag ihn, Fido! Tschüss.

Während ich denke, dass es vertretbar ist, Westley seine Ehrlichkeit und guten Absichten anzurechnen, sind die Kommentatoren jedoch ein völlig anderer Fall.

Ich bin äußerst verblüfft, dass 1) ein Kommentator einen Hinweis auf korporatistische Macht machen kann; 2) ein Kritiker ihn aufgrund der unmöglichen Existenz von korporatistischer Macht auf einem „freien Markt“ als „Marxisten“ ablehnen kann; und 3) die Verteidiger des Kritikers die Frage, ob ein freier Markt tatsächlich existiert oder nicht, als eine Wortklauberei und Ablenkung abweisen und die Person, die sie gestellt hat, beschuldigen können, die Symmetrie des schönen Arguments des Kritikers mit einem Bündel gemeiner, alter Fakten zu verderben. Wenn Partei A auf die Existenz korporatistischer Macht hinweist und Partei B die Gegenbehauptung aufstellt, dass Unternehmen keine Macht in einem freien Markt haben (nicht „haben könnten“), ist die Frage, ob tatsächlich ein freier Markt überhaupt existiert, keine reine Wortklauberei. Sie ist der zentrale Streitpunkt um zu ergründen, ob die Behauptung der Partei A richtig oder falsch ist, oder ob Partei B ihr eine Entschuldigung schuldet.

Aber betrachten wir das Ganze einmal allgemeiner. Obwohl Handy nicht – in der von Westley zitierten Passage – explizit korporatistische Macht als das natürliche Ergebnis des Marktes behandelt oder für Staatsintervention als einzige Möglichkeit zur Verhinderung selbiger plädiert, implizierte er es jedoch stark in dem vollen Kommentar, woraus sie herausgezogen wurde. Doch Westley machte nicht das Ausmaß der Rolle der Regierung bei korporatistischer Macht zum Gegenstand seines Artikels; er leugnete lediglich, vollkommen, dass korporatistische Macht existiert, basierend darauf, wie der Markt funktioniert.

Aber was wenn Handy tatsächlich, und ich denke, es ist wahrscheinlich, implizit annimmt (was ich als die typische vulgär-linke Annahme betrachte), dass der freie Markt in korporatistischer Macht resultiert, wenn der Staat nicht zur Verhinderung interveniert: was – dies ist dann die effektivste Antwort – wenn unser Ziel die Förderung libertärer Ideen in der Gesellschaft als Ganzes ist? Nicht, wie Westley es tat, reflexmäßig die Ehre des Big Business verteidigen und leugnen, dass korporatistische Macht existiert.

Die effektivste Antwort wäre etwas Ähnliches wie:

Ich stimme mit Ihnen überein, dass korporatistische Macht existiert, und teile Ihre Sorge bzgl. ihrer üblen Auswirkungen, aber ich glaube, dass Sie hinsichtlich der Gründe und der Lösung falsch liegen. Die üblen Auswirkungen korporatistischer Macht resultieren nicht aus dem staatlichen Versagen, Big Business einzuschränken, sondern weil die Regierung es überhaupt erst aufgerichtet hat: Diese staatliche Unterstützung beinhaltet Subventionen für die Geschäftskosten des Big Business und den Schutz des Big Business vor dem marktwirtschaftlichen Wettbewerb durch Markteintrittsbarrieren, regulatorische Kartelle und spezielle Privilegien wie sogenanntes „geistiges Eigentum“.

Eine libertäre Bewegung, die die öffentliche Sorge über wirklich reale Probleme, offensichtlich für jeden mit Augen im Kopf, ablehnt durch doktrinäre Verneinungen, dass diese existieren oder nicht existieren, ist eine libertäre Bewegung, die zur Irrelevanz verdammt ist.

Hier ist was Mises schrieb, in Epistemological Problems of Economics, über offenkundige Konflikte der Theorie mit der Erfahrung:

Wenn ein Widerspruch auftaucht zwischen der Theorie und der Erfahrung müssen wir immer annehmen, dass eine Bedingung, zuvor vermutet von der Theorie, nicht vorhanden war, oder dass es einen Fehler in unserer Beobachtung gibt. Die Unstimmigkeit zwischen der Theorie und den Fakten der Erfahrung zwingen uns regelmäßig die Probleme der Theorie wieder zu durchdenken. Doch solange ein Umdenken der Theorie keine Fehler in unserem Denken enthüllt, sind wir nicht befugt, ihre Wahrheit anzuzweifeln.

Die Vulgär-Libertären hinterfragen jedoch weder ihre Anwendung von Mises‘ Theorie noch ihr Verständnis der Fakten. Stattdessen fordern sie uns heraus: „Wem werden Sie glauben: Mises oder Ihren lügenden Augen?“

Wir wissen alle, dass korporatistische Macht existiert. Jede libertäre Bewegung, die auf mehr hofft als auf Selbst-Marginalisierung, muss direkt die Wahrnehmung des gesunden Menschenverstandes, dass korporatistische Macht existiert, und die öffentlichen Sorgen, die darauf beruhen, ansprechen und erklären, warum der Markt gut und der Staat schlecht ist bei diesem Problem.

Der Ansatz, den ich bei zu vielen durchschnittlichen libertären Veranstaltungen sehe, ist das moralische Äquivalent zu jemandem, dessen Haus abbrennt, zu sagen: „Dein Haus kann nicht abbrennen, weil Häuser nicht ohne Sauerstoff abbrennen können, du dreckiger Kommunist!“ – um dann die Frage, ob tatsächlich Sauerstoff in der Luft ist, als „Wortklauberei“ abzulehnen.

Wir leben in einer Gesellschaft, in der die Übel des staatskorporatistischen Nexus, direkt resultierend aus der Größe der Unternehmen und der Macht, die dadurch aufkommt, die zentralen Probleme und Sorgen für einen Durchschnittsmenschen darstellen. Ein viel zu großer Anteil der gegenwärtigen libertären Bewegung lehnt diese Sorgen als motiviert durch „ökonomischen Analphabetismus“ ab (obwohl ihre eigene wirtschaftsfreundliche Verteidigung womöglich offener für diese Anschuldigung ist), um dann umzuschwenken zu dem, was als wirkliche, nach Lösung schreiende Probleme von Ungerechtigkeit gesehen wird: dreiste Gewerkschaftsmitglieder, Sozialhilfeempfänger, die sich in ihrem Luxus wälzen, und „Strafverteidiger“.

Für zu viele durchschnittliche Libertäre sind die Übel staatskorporatistischer betrügerischer Absprachen etwas anerkennenswertes, und korporatistische Wohlfahrt ist irgendwie schlecht, prinzipiell, denke ich, und vielleicht sollten wir eines Tages etwas dagegen tun … . Aber Wohlfahrt, die den Armen hilft statt den Reichen, ist flammendroter Ruin auf Rädern!

Und so historisch unbewandert und unlogisch wie einige Kommentatoren bei Daily Kos auch sind, wenn sie ihre oberflächlichen „pot-smoking Republicans“ Abweisungen von Libertarismus machen: Wenn man es sich genau anschaut, können sich durchschnittliche Libertäre hierfür nur selbst Vorwürfe machen. Statt die historische Unkenntnis und Unlogik mit durchdachten Argumenten anhand dem oben von mir Beschriebenen anzusprechen – die Rolle, die der Staat in der Schaffung und Bewahrung von korporatistischer Macht gespielt hat, und wie der Markt diese bedroht – leugnen durchschnittliche Libertäre lediglich, dass korporatistische Macht überhaupt existiert und untermauern diese Position mit ähnlicher historischer Unkenntnis und Unlogik. Wenn ich denken würde, dass „freie Märkte“ und „freier Handel“ wirklich das meinen würden, was neoliberale Fernsehsprecher damit meinen, würde ich sie auch hassen.

Tatsächlich gibt es große Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen der vulgär-libertären und der vulgär-linken Interpretation der Geschichte. Sowohl der typische Stammgast des Mises Blog als auch der typische Daily Kos Kommentator würde übereinstimmen, dass die gigantischen Konzerne des zwanzigstens Jahrhunderts aus dem „laissez-faire“ Markt des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts entstanden sind, und dass sich im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert eine gemischte Ökonomie aus dem Versuch entwickelt hat, Big Business einzuschränken. Der einzige Unterschied ist, ob entweder Big Business oder Big Government das „Gute“ darstellen.

Der ursprüngliche Artikel wurde geschrieben von Kevin Carson und veröffentlicht am 10. März 2008.

Übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Achim Fischbach.

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills  — written by ALEC — that  prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

But to see the true vulgar libertarianism in the Mercatus report, one should look at how they evaluate economic freedom. One significant portion of their evaluation of states was based on their “lawsuit climate.”  But litigation is an important way to hold companies accountable for damage in a free society, and has in fact been unjustly limited by the rise of the regulatory state. They also treat “right to work laws” as a boon to freedom, even though the laws are a violation of free contract.

This ranking system is an embarrassment to libertarians. As an anarchist, I am skeptical about whether we can even rank governments on how compatible they are with freedom. However, if I were to develop rankings, I would not use the criteria employed by Mercatus. Their attitude seems to be that the rights  of marginalized individuals are trivial and that “them pore ol’ bosses need all the help they can get.”

[A]nti-anti-sprawl libertarianism will exist so long as there are libertarians who hate hippies more than they hate central planning …

Someone — I think it may have been J. Neil Schulman — slapped me around awhile back for referring to “bourgeois libertarians.”

My use of the term was meant to diverge a bit from Kevin Carson’s “vulgar libertarians” label, which he characterizes thusly: For vulgar libertarians, “[i]n every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury.”

I’d say that my “bourgeois libertarians” are a sub-set of Kevin’s “vulgar libertarians.” I’m using “bourgeois” in the sense of “conforming to the standards and conventions of the middle class” (Source: WordNet).

Vulgar libertarianism may, in many cases, be a failure of theory or ideology — its adherent may be incorrectly applying principles, or may be ignorant of this or that historical fact which is important to the issue, or whatever.

Bourgeois libertarianism is a failure not of theory or of ideology, but of imagination: Bourgeois libertarians simply can’t get their heads around the idea that a real free market or a real free society might produce outcomes or phenomena that they aren’t already familiar and comfortable with.

The bourgeois libertarian’s Libertopia is the same house he lives in now, on the same suburban street that house is on now, with the same brands of clothing in the closet and the same shows on TV (minus Keith Olbermann, perhaps).

He still mails out checks for services — they go to private contractors instead of government tax collectors, but the services are probably pretty much the same. The more efficient market means those checks represent a smaller percentage of his income, though, so maybe he’s added a sunroom to the back of that house, has a couple of extra pairs of Nike^® shoes in that closet, and watches a 52″ plasma screen TV instead of a 26″ CRT model.

I have nothing against the bourgeois libertarian’s personal aspirations and preferences, mind you. As a matter of fact, I share some of them. There’s a lot to be said for the lifestyle options available even in our relatively unfree (compared to Libertopia) society. But the bourgeois libertarian reacts negatively and viscerally to the suggestion that Libertopia may not turn out as a carbon copy of the present-day Peoria metro, only with private label police cruisers.

And so, bourgeois libertarianism tends to produce knee-jerk reactions in favor of comfortable life-food like “suburban sprawl” as if those comfortable, well-known, beloved phenomena had been produced by a free market … when in fact suburban sprawl has been a rider on the trend toward bigger, not smaller, government.

We hope to improve our presentation and production value, but in the meantime: Release Early, Release Often!

Even granting the distributist premise that smaller businesses have been swallowed up by larger firms, it is by no means obvious that it is always preferable for a man to operate his own business rather than to work for another. It may well be that a man is better able to care for his family precisely if he does not own his own business or work the backbreaking schedule of running his own farm, partially because he is not ruined if the enterprise for which he works should have to close, and partially because he doubtless enjoys more leisure time that he can spend with his family than if he had the cares and responsibilities of his own business. Surely, therefore, we are dealing here with a matter for individual circumstances rather than crude generalization.

This makes the unwarranted assumption that working for someone else is the only way of reducing risk, as opposed to cooperative ownership, federation, etc.. It assumes, as a basic premise, the very thing that distributism objects to: that capital is concentrated in the hands of a few owners who hire wage labor, instead of widely distributed among the general population who pool it through cooperative mechanisms.

And the proper contrast is not between the work schedule of an American farmer, producing for a capitalist commodity market, despite the hindrances of banks and railroads, versus the early 19th century factory labor. The proper contrast is between a laborer making a subsistence living off a small family plot with access to a common, and supplementing his income when necessary with wage labor, versus that same factory worker. To compare the hours and quality of work of a genuine subsistence farmer with the mind-numbing 12- or 14-hour days in a dark satanic mill is a joke.

Suppose, moreover, that “distributism” had been in effect as the Industrial Revolution was developing in Britain in the late 18th century. We would have heard ceaseless laments regarding the increasing concentration of economic power and the dramatic growth in the number people working for wages. What we probably wouldn’t have heard about was the actual condition of those people who were seeking employment in the factories. They weren’t lucky enough to be able to make a profitable living in agriculture, and their families had not provided them with the tools necessary to enter an independent trade and operate one of the small shops that delight the distributist.

Had they not had the opportunity to work for a wage, therefore, they and their families would simply have starved. It is as simple as that. Capitalism, and not distributism, literally saved these people from utter destitution and made possible the enormous growth in population, in life expectancy, in health, and in living standards more generally that England experienced at the time and which later spread to western Europe at large….

To back this up, Woods quotes Mises and Hayek with variations on the “best available alternative” defense of working conditions in the early industrial revolution. That argument was the subject of my first “Vulgar Libertarianism Watch” piece. As I showed then, it is not “as simple as that.” And “luck” had nothing to do with it–the land expropriations of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the “downsizing” of the agricultural population, were a case of the propertied classes making their own “luck.” And the story if this, their luck, is written in letters of fire and blood.

Those who care to support locally based and smaller-scale agriculture have already been doing so for two decades now by means of community-supported agriculture, which is booming. On a purely voluntary basis, people who wish to support local agriculture pay several hundred dollars at the beginning of the year to provide the farmer with the capital he needs; they then receive locally grown produce for the rest of the year. The organizers of this movement, rather than wasting their time and ours complaining about the need for state intervention, actually did something: they put together a voluntary program that has enjoyed considerable success across the country. Perhaps, if distributists feel as strongly about their position as they claim, this example can provide a model of how their time might be better spent.

This is one thing I agree with, sort of. Belloc strikes me as profoundly pessimistic. He assumed that concentration of property in a few hands was the natural tendency of a free market, and that state intervention was needed to reverse that natural process. In fact, the concentration of wealth is overwhelmingly owing to existing state intervention. The working of a free market would break it up. Belloc might have been more optimistic had he seen the free market as working in favor of distributism rather than against it.

What wouldn’t be a “waste of time,” though, would be for the community-supported agriculture movement to lobby for an end to the subsidies and other competitive advantages the federal government provides to corporate agribusiness.

To the extent that the anti-corporate Left sees state intervention as necessary to break the present power of big business, it’s owing to the fact (as Nock said), that vulgar libertarians and state socialists have a common interest in obscuring the nature of the present system. Vulgar libertarian apologists for big business like to pretend that the current winners got that way through superior efficiency in the market. And state socialists like to pretend, likewise, that a bureaucratic apparatus controlled by themselves is the only way to counter the natural outgrowth of big business from the free market.

So I’ve decided to go with the original impulse, and regularly feature “Vulgar Libertarianism Watch” without making it the main focus of the blog. And what better way to kick things off than with the first installment of this feature?

First, a note on what vulgar libertarianism is. The term, coined as far as I know by yours truly, alludes both to the “vulgar Marxism” of twentieth century Marxoids, and to what Marx called the “vulgar political economy” of the generation after Ricardo and Mill. The defining feature of vulgar political economy, as Marx described it, was that it had ceased to be an attempt at the scientific explication of the laws of economics, and had become a hired prize-fighter on behalf of plutocratic interests. Classical political economy was a revolutionary creed that threatened the interests of the landed oligarchy and the mercantilists. And it was amenable to even more revolutionary uses, as evidenced by the Ricardian socialists. The most famous socialist treatment of Ricardo, of course, is that of Marx. But the socialist development of classical political economy also included free marketers like Thomas Hodgskin (the most preeminent of Ricardian socialists), the mutualist and individualist anarchists from Warren to Tucker and Spooner, and many Georgists. My own work falls within this latter array of petty bourgeois deviationationists. But with the triumph of the industrial owning classes in 1830s Britain, the focus of political economy shifted from scientific investigation and a radical challenge to the power of the Old Regime, to an apology for the status quo.

I described vulgar libertarianism as an ideology in the opening section of Chapter Four of my Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Since that passage is as coherent a description as I am likely to write, rather than reinvent the wheel I’ll just take the lazy man’s way out and paste in the relevant paragraphs:

This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: “Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.” For every imaginable policy issue, the good guys and bad guys can be predicted with ease, by simply inverting the slogan of Animal Farm: “Two legs good, four legs baaaad.” In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury. As one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, consider Ayn Rand’s characterization of big business as an “oppressed minority,” and of the Military-Industrial Complex as a “myth or worse.”

The ideal “free market” society of such people, it seems, is simply actually existing capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a hyper-thyroidal version of nineteenth century robber baron capitalism, perhaps; or better yet, a society “reformed” by the likes of Pinochet, the Dionysius to whom Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys played Aristotle.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works”–implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”

So, without further ado, we proceed to dissect the first specimen of libertarianus vulgaris. It would have been too much of a coincidence for me to stumble across such an egregious example by chance at the same time I was planning to kick off my blog. In fact, what happened was just the opposite: I stumbled across this article and decided that it was too good a target to pass up. If I can’t get into gear and start blogging when something this good falls into my lap, I might as well just give up.

In “That Taco Bell Brouhaha,” Art Carden addresses the boycott (by the Wobblies, various student anti-sweatshop coalitions, and others) of Taco Bell on behalf of the Immolakee Indians who pick its tomatoes. In response to charges that Taco Bell’s wages are exploitative, Carden responds:

This is precisely wrong. Taco Bell’s wage policy alleviates the “continued misery of farmworkers and their families” rather than contributing to it. Wages are not foisted upon workers; they agree to pick tomatoes for “sub-poverty wages” for a reason. In a market economy, they do so because the ‘sub-poverty wages” paid by Taco Bell suppliers are a better deal than anyone else is offering. It’s the same reason people line up for “sweatshop” jobs in developing countries. Far from contributing to “continued misery,” Taco Bell is making workers’ lives a little bit better by offering something better than their next-best option.

Before we rush to condemn free markets and market forces, we have to ask where the workers are coming from. In many cases, Taco Bell suppliers employ migrant workers who are making their own “run for the border.” Migrant workers in Immokalee come from places like Haiti, Mexico, and Central America—areas where markets have been crippled by state intervention for generations. The end result is a veritable army of workers who have not been allowed to build a skill set through free market employment and who are now suited to do nothing better than pick tomatoes for pennies. Far from being the enemies of labor, American markets are offering migrant workers an opportunity to substantially improve their standards of living and the prospects of their children.

There are so many features of vulgar libertarianism here, it’s hard to decide where to begin. The defense of the behavior of big business under “actually existing capitalism” in terms of “how the free market works” is, as I already pointed out in the passage above from Mutualist Political Economy, an immediate tipoff that we’ve encountered a vulgar libertarian.

It’s quite jarring, though, to encounter such writing at the website of an institution so closely associated with the memory of Murray Rothbard. A central theme of Rothbard’s work, and that of left-Rothbardians like Joseph Stromberg, has been the essentially statist (and exploitative) nature of corporate capitalism in its existing form. As Rothbard put it in “The Student Revolution” (The Libertarian, May 1, 1969), “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.” So to pass from reading an excellent piece of free market analysis like this or this [PDF], to reading an apology for the status quo like the piece under consideration here, is positively obscene.

Especially typical of the vulgar libertarian style is the argument that Taco Bell offers a “better deal” than the “next-best option.” This argument can be found, phrased in slightly different words, in pseudo-“free market” boilerplate in just about any issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty or any daily installment of the Adam Smith Institute blog. Here are several almost identical examples culled from The Freeman:

But are the “low-wage, non-union” Ecuadorian laborers better off working now for some foreign corporation? Apparently they think so, or else they would have stayed with what they were doing previously. (Would you leave your job for one with less pay and worse conditions?)[Barry Loberfeld. “A Race to the Bottom” (July 2001)]

People line up in China and Indonesia and Malaysia when American multinationals open a factory. And that is because even though the wages are low by American standards, the jobs created by those American firms are often some of the best jobs in those economies. [Russell Roberts. “The Pursuit of Happiness: Does Trade Exploit the Poorest of the Poor?” (September 2001)]

What the Industrial Revolution made possible, then, was for these people, who had nothing else to offer to the market, to be able to sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for wages. That is why they were able to survive at all…. As Mises argues, the very fact that people took factory jobs in the first place indicates that these jobs, however distasteful to us, represented the best opportunity they had. [Thomas E. Woods, Jr. “A Myth Shattered: Mises, Hayek, and the Industrial Revolution” (November 2001)]

In nineteenth-century America, anti-sweatshop activism was focused on domestic manufacturing facilities that employed poor immigrant men, women, and children. Although conditions were horrendous, they provided a means for many of the country’s least-skilled people to earn livings. Typically, those who worked there did so because it was their best opportunity, given the choices available….

It is true that the wages earned by workers in developing nations are outrageously low compared to American wages, and their working conditions go counter to sensibilities in the rich, industrialized West. However, I have seen how the foreign-based opportunities are normally better than the local alternatives in case after case, from Central America to Southeast Asia. [Stephan Spath, “The Virtues of Sweatshops” (March 2002)]

More recently, the argument was reincarnated by Radley Balko, who referred to Third World sweatshops as “the best of a series of bad employment options available” to laborers there. Within a couple of days, this piece was recirculated over the “free market” [sic] blogosphere, along with numerous comments that “sweatshops are far superior to third-world workers’ next best options…,” or to similar effect (the last phrase comes from another article by Carden posted on the Mises blog last May, by the way). For more examples of the same argument, just Google “sweatshops”+”next-best alternative”.

But the grand-daddy of this argument was Ludwig von Mises, writing in Human Action:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. [Regnery Third Revised Edition, 619-20]

See, laborers just happen to be stuck with this crappy set of options–the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider.

In the world the rest of us non-vulgar libertoids inhabit, of course, things are a little less rosy. There was a great deal of continuity between the Whig landed aristocracy that carried out the enclosures and other abrogations of traditional rights to the land, and the employing classes of early industrial Britain. The early industrialists of Manchester, far from being (as Mises portrayed them) an upstart class who accumulated capital through their own parsimony, were junior partners of the landed oligarchy; the latter were a major source of investment capital. And the factory owners benefited, in addition, from near-totalitarian social controls on the movement and free association of labor; this legal regime included the Combination Acts, the Riot Act, and the law of Settlements (the latter amounting to an internal passport system).

In addition, the general legal framework (as Benjamin Tucker described it) restricted labor’s access to its own capital through such forms of self-organization as mutual banks. As a result of this “money monopoly,” workers were forced to sell their labor in a buyer’s market on terms set by the owning classes, and thus pay tribute (in the form of a wage less than their labor-product) for access to the means of production.

Lysander Spooner, a hero to many anarcho-capitalists, in Natural Law described the process in somewhat less than capitalistic language:

In process of time, the robber, or slaveholding, class—who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth—began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class—their former owners—for just what the latter might choose to give them. Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative—to save themselves from starvation—but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the landholders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor. They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course, dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters.

The consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their own safety and the safety of their property, to organize themselves more perfectly as a government and make laws for keeping these dangerous people in subjection; that is, laws fixing the prices at which they should be compelled to labor, and also prescribing fearful punishments, even death itself, for such thefts and tresspasses as they were driven to commit, as their only means of saving themselves from starvation.