Nothing illustrates the impoverishment of political discourse in the United States today than the emergence of U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as potential GOP presidential candidates, both of whom have expressed support for libertarian political ideas.
As a political movement, libertarianism in the United States traces its
ancestry to the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and
Milton Friedman who urged a return to the ideas of classical liberalism
with its emphasis upon extreme anti-social individualism, negative
freedom, individual rights, protection of private property, the
inviolability of contacts, minimal government and laissez-faire
economics. In its American expression, classical liberalism owes its
inspiration to an extremely selective emphasis upon a number of ideas
expressed in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith,
David Hume and David Ricardo, as their ideas were extrapolated and
applied to the American political experience by Jefferson, Madsion,
Adams and others.
When Ted Cruz first ran for the United
States Senate, he professed to be an advocate of limited government,
states' rights, an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment, and
hostility to government regulation of the economy. Cruz's support for
libertarian ideas and his antipathy to government regulation of the
economy date back to his early adolescence when, reportedly at the age
of thirteen, his father enrolled him in an entity called "the Free
Market Education Foundation." In that study group, which apparently was
organized in manner somewhat similar to early twentieth century Marxist
indoctrination groups, Cruz was schooled in the "free-market"
ideologies of economic philosophers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
In a similar vein, Rand Paul, son
of the former Republican Congressman and Libertarian Party presidential
candidate Ron Paul describes himself as a libertarian. As a U.S.
Senator, he has expressed support for term limits for Congress, a
balanced budget amendment, and extensive reductions in federal taxation,
and spending, especially as the latter relates to helping the poorest
among us.
As one example, in 2012, Senator Paul advocated
substantially reducing the food stamp program because of the various
wastes and fraudulent activities that have been perpetrated by some of
its users. "We do not have an endless supply of money. I think that
Americans would be just flabbergasted at the amount of money and some of
these programs are duplicative so people getting food stamps for a meal
are also getting a free lunch at school. Some of these programs were
actually advertising for applicants," he said. "In my hometown they
advertised to try to promote to get people to come in and eat the free
lunch during the summer time. It's not that we won't help people, we
just need to be conscious of how much money we have and can we help only
those who cannot help themselves?"
There are important
questions that need to be asked of both of these Senators and of
libertarians in general, but that are rarely, if ever, raised in the
mainstream media. Are their ideas desirable or workable? Would
families in the United States be better or worse off government
regulation, including environmental and safety laws, food and drug laws,
anti-discrimination and public accommodation laws, and labor laws, all
already weak by European standards, were further relaxed and government
taxation and regulation of businesses and corporations was
substantially curtailed?
The evidence of the last forty plus
years in which government regulation of the economy has been rolled
back, while the wages of employees have continued to decline and as the
U.S. became a net debtor, service economy in which corporations, in the
name of freed trade, outsourced almost all of this country's
manufacturing capacity, suggests otherwise.
All of the
grim economic news that continues to hobble the U.S. economy confirms
one of the central paradoxes of libertarian political philosophy as it
plays out in the liberal democracy of the United States: the inability
of that ideology to reconcile the tension between the pursuit of
self-interest and equality. If self-interest, as expressed in the
pursuit and acquisition of property, is a natural right since, as Locke
put it, "God gave it to the use of the industrious and the rational (and
labour was to be his title to it)" and the primary role of government
is the protection of that property, isn't it inevitable that, over the
span of generations, because of the complicity in not protecting such
inheritances, and because of social and genetic distinctions among "the
industrious and the rational" and those who are not, inequality will
increase?
The magnitude and the duration of the existing
economic crisis raises other questions that libertarians and classical
liberal ideology --and the latter's economic expression, market
capitalism--cannot answer. Of what value is the meaning of individualism
to most individuals if, in the competitive roulette of "survival of the
fittest," the fit and the victors increasingly number only a few, while a
significant number of the population are vanquished or declared to be
unfit?
Isn't the pursuit of self-interest by individuals,
each of whom is in competition with all others, self-defeating? Doesn't
unfettered competition often have deleterious effects upon the public
interest? Isn't it an economic fact of life that, in a market economy,
individual actors--whether human beings, corporations or governmental
units--seek to maximize their advantages and to minimize their risks in a
capitalist economy? Isn't it also true that, when each actor
"hunkers down" during an economic crisis, the self-replicating
behavior--as reflected in job losses, withdrawal of investment and the
collapse of consumer demand--ripples through the economy to the detriment
of all but the few, most fortunate? Doesn't that behavior then
exacerbate the very problems that individual actors seek to inoculate
themselves against, the public consequences of their behavior be damned?
At that point, doesn't Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons become rather than a parable, an empirical reality?
Doesn't even Locke's concept of negative freedom--because it does not
provide for an economic underpinning--become, especially in times of
economic misery, a platitude or a meaningless abstraction?
The historian Thomas Franks has expressed his suspicions about the
reasons why libertarian ideas have been able to insinuate themselves so
prominently into the public square, "Libertarianism," he argues,
"helps conservatives pass off a patently probusiness political agenda
as a noble bid for human freedom. Whatever we may think of
libertarianism as a set of ideas, practically speaking, it is a doctrine
that owes its visibility to the obvious charms it holds for the wealthy
and the powerful. The reason we have so many well-funded libertarians
in American these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired
an enormous grassroots following, but because it appeals to those who
are able to fund ideas. Like social Darwinism and Christian Science
before it, libertarianism flatters the successful and rationalizes their
core beliefs about the world. They warm to the libertarian idea that
taxation is theft because they themselves don't like to pay taxes. They
fancy the libertarian notion that regulation is communist because they
themselves find regulation intrusive and annoying."
Franks'
suspicion that, aside from protecting and promoting economic
self-interests, libertarians are not really concerned about freedom for
ordinary people is exemplified by Rand Paul's unqualified endorsement of
government intrusion into the bedrooms of Americans and his support for
the micro-regulation of every woman's uterus. His website proudly
proclaims, "I am 100% pro-life. I believe life begins at conception and
that abortion takes the life of an innocent human being. It is the duty
of our government to protect this life as a right guaranteed under the
Constitution. For this reason, I introduced S. 583, the Life at
Conception Act on March 14, 2013. This bill would extend the
Constitutional protection of life to the unborn from the time of
conception."
Ted Cruz insists that he, too, is
"pro-life," and that the only exception to abortion that he would allow
is when a pregnancy endangers the mother's life; and he opposes same-sex
marriage, professing his belief that marriage is "between one man and
one woman."
The late Christopher Hitchens once observed, "I
have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement
[Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish
enough."
The irony is that self-proclaimed libertarians such
as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have entered into Faustian bargains with the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which they have agreed to support the most
selfish agendas of the economic elite, no matter how short-sighted,
destructive or harmful such policies may be to the immediate and
long-term best interests of the constituents they claim to actually
represent or to the public interest. Their hypocrisy and illogic speak
volumes about their qualifications for public office and are a sad
commentary on the intelligence of the voters of Kentucky and Texas to
whom they pandered so successfully.
