Libertarians:
Socially Indifferent & Fiscally Predatory
Or, you can just lie to yourself. You can always still call yourself socially progressive but economically conservative. And fortunately for you, your life won’t change, because it’s never your life that’s at stake.
What I found particularly compelling about this sentence was that you point out how libertarian positions lie in the realm of pure speculation completely divorced from the costs and consequences of the policies and positions that they support.
Their central claim is often that if the government doesn’t regulate or provide, private industry and non-profit organizations will fill those gaps more effectively and more efficiently.
Though, everything in history tells us that the members of the ruling classes have never just gotten up and thought oh regulating wages, improving work conditions, regulating dumping and environmental hazards that will cost us money are great ideas that we should implement immediately.
Mike Epifani, you are right when you say that their lives are never at stake. And that is precisely why they can afford to experiment.
They Are Hostile to Democracy: The Peter Thiel Phenomenon
Peter Thiel and his intellectual compatriots have decided that democracy is truly incompatible with their economic freedoms.
Our democratic republic poses a threat to the manifestation of their will to power. This is the case so much so that the support of Trump was the most rational freedom-enhancing choice.
As a financial beneficiary of Trump’s policies , Thiel’s Palantir is efficiently and economically helping to remove undocumented immigrants. But these are not socially progressive or even humane policies.
But his economic freedom has been expanded as American tax dollars, which libertarians believe should not be collected in the first instance, are being seamlessly transferred to Palantir.
And that is an example of why they are fiscally predatory.
It is not that the government shouldn’t be collecting tax dollars or spending it in certain ways, rather they are concerned about from whom the taxes are collected and to whom the contracts are granted.
One thing that socially liberal, fiscally conservative economic libertarians have done well is build an intellectual framework to expand support for their ideas and positions.
I would be interested in conversing with people of like minds. I am interested in being a part of a community of intellectuals and activists interested in refuting and challenging their positions in a sustained and academic manner.
I don’t think a society-wide emphasis on individualism is good for our democracy, but I also know how seductive the libertarian ego-building project can be when its central point of departure is that your excellence is being hampered by the shackles of the mediocre classes.
If any of this resonates, shoot me an email Khullani.Abdullahi (at) gmail.com. I am also keeping a Medium Series: Libertarians: Socially Indifferent & Fiscally Predatory to generate ideas for future articles.
