There were a lot of comments in my post Why I am no longer a Libertarian that I decided I would respond to with a new post.
It is best, perhaps, if I explained my overarching philosophy and why I became a Libertarian, and then partially why I left Libertarianism.
I do not like to abide seeing those with power abuse or take advantage of those without power.
I believe that society functions best when people live according to the golden rule: do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.
It is a very simple philosophy, putting it into practice is much harder.
It was the first part of my philosophy that guided me into Libertarianism. I wanted to keep those in political power in check.
This is why I am a gun owner and fundamentally believe in the Second Amendment. If power ever gets too abusive, I want the tools to fight back.
One of the reasons I started to Leave Libertarianism is that power comes in many forms. Political power is one form, violence is another, and money is a thrid.
Curbing political power is critical. Hence the importance of a Constitution that limits power and court system that enforces those limits. Then gun rights as a last resort.
Violence as power is also a reason why I am a supporter of gun rights. When the thug who lacks the moral compunction against hurting someone to take their property attacks me for my wallet, I want the tools to fight him off.
But what about money as power. More than just the ability to buy political influence. This has been the core of many of my posts about the “McKinsey effect” where top executives who have the economic power to destroy lives for their own profit, do it.
Price gouging is a part of this. Sure, John Stossel can say that with anti-gouging laws some guy won’t fill his truck and trailer with water and generators and drive down to where a twister just happened to magnanimously sell his wares for profit. But as far as I can find, those stories are anecdotal. Looking into price gouging, it seems that the vast majority of people prosecuted are independent store or bodega owners who the day before it was announced the hurricane would hit were selling water for $0.99 a gallon and the day after it was announced were selling the same water from the same inventory for $9.99 per gallon.
These are individuals who suddenly came into power due to an upset and their first thought is “now I have the upper hand so I’m going to fuck everyone I can out of as much money as I can before things return to normal.”
This guy might not be a CEO or politician but his sudden rise to power and desire to abuse it is the same.
One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life was the Cajun Navy. People who volunteered to rescue people stranded off rooftops after Hurricane Katrina.
I was still in college when that happened and remember my Libertarian friends saying those people really should be charging those they rescued. I cannot imagine anything uglier than a guy with a fishing boat pulling up to a house with people on the roof saying “you can get in the boat if you hand over your jewelry and cash.” I’m glad it didn’t happen.
The first thing to remember is that the economy is not a society. There are more important things than money. He who dies with the most stuff doesn’t win.
While the cold hyper-rational economic arguments for price gouging might make sense in an academic setting, what it also creates is social strife and misery.
The grandmother on a fixed income may not have the ability to store large amounts of gasoline or water in advance, or maybe a tree fell on the shed she stored it in and her stockpile was ruined. Letting the gas station owner gouge her might make him temporarily rich, but it also makes her grandson want to cave in his head with a hammer.
So much of what I saw in the Libertarian movement was “I got mine, you can go fuck yourself.” It was selfish and mean spirited.
I don’t think the government can fix most problems. I believe the private sector is far better at managing society. But at the same time, I believe that government is necessary to curb some market abuses. I have no desire to go back to the days of the traveling patent medicine shows or getting paid in script at the company store.
I want to live in a pleasant society where people generally treat each other decently and those who have power, even if it is fleeting and due to some freak incident, do not use that power to take advantage of others.
If that means that the government has to temporarily level the playing field in a crisis by imposing rules, that’s part of living in a civil society that tries to minimize strife. It’s a matter of balancing different powers against one another to come up with the lightest touch that creates an equilibrium in which a polite and civil society can flourish.
Miguel reminded me earlier of what Ayn Rand had to say on this topic:
All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. Anarchists are the scum of the intellectual world of the Left, which has given them up. So the Right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the libertarian movement.
For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.
I have to agree. So much of what I read in the comments just seems like economic anarchy.
And just because I believe that some bodega owner shouldn’t be able to say “there was a run on milk yesterday so when I get my new stock in this morning I’m going to up the price ten times today,” that doesn’t make me Hitler.
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