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Friday, October 24, 2008 Hey, Did You Know Libertarians Run the Government? By Paula Hall @ 1:40 PM Yes! It's true! Libertarians have been running the country for years. How do I know? I know because Jacob Weisberg, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Slate Group (which publishes the online magazine), has just penned an article describing for us immature Ayn Rand naifs how it is that the financial collapse killed libertarianism. A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little... Utopians of the right, libertarians are... convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along. To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. [Emphasis in original.] That's all by way of introduction. He follows with a bunch of haphazard facts strung together in a string of non sequiturs that I've become bored with, they're so ubiquitously offered as proof the financial crisis was caused by the "free market." So forgive me if I don't quote here the "facts" the article supposedly marshals in support of its conclusions (check out the full article if you're not easily nauseated). Weisberg concludes with slap at, of all people, Ayn Rand: The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. This article is yet another gob-smacking exercise in tortured rationalization of the avoidance of uncomfortable facts by someone steeped in the rhetorical method not of thrust-and-parry, but avoid-and-slime. Weisberg first avoids the facts that 1) Libertarians have never run the American government, 2) it's a non sequitur to declare that financiers and corporate-welfare statists who run to the government for a bailout believe in the free market (!) and 3) Libertarianism has been rejected wholesale, outright, and damn near shrilly by Ayn Rand and the philosophy of Objectivism. Weisberg then slimes principled Objectivists as "immature" and "ideologues," and by playing on the flat ignorance of most of the public of the tenets of Objectivism. (Not to mention trotting out that tired when-are-you-going-to-grow-out-of-it smear.) I would label this a serious example of the pot calling the kettle black except that there is no "kettle." There's definitely a "pot" -- Weisberg's beloved regulatory state has failed. There is no "kettle"; there has never been a free market upon which to blame the current financial crisis or any so-called "market failure," and I defy Weisberg and his ilk to identify when that state of affairs has subsisted. I'm not up for reinventing the wheel this morning, so I'll just send everyone to the new Repeal The Bailout site for an excellent compilation of Objectivist thought leadership on the current economic situation and offer some closing thoughts on Weisberg's article. Perhaps the biggest thing Weisberg evades is that we Objectivists who advocate for a truly free market are entirely principled on this: we hold that if you regulate any aspect of the economy, to any degree, it is not free. (I mean, really -- you'd think that someone calling Objectivists "ideologues" would jump at the chance to point out how just how "utopian" we are about what we're saying.) He seems to pay lip service to this fact but then proceeds brazenly to avoid even the most elementary logical implications of the principled consistency of Objectivism. If she could, I'm sure Ayn Rand would be rolling over in her grave at the willful ignorance of those who persist in equating Libertarianism, which has rightly been repeatedly discredited, with a philosophy so diametrically opposed to it. But let's accept for a fleeting moment and for the sake of Weisberg's "argument" his nonsensical conflation of Objectivism and its true free market principles with Libertarianism. Weisberg must nevertheless be charged with his unapologetic evasion of the fact that he's celebrating the demise of a Libertarian hegemony that has never existed. The man is deliriously dancing on an empty grave. Labels: Finance, Politics Share |    E-mail Paula Hall     PermaLink ()    Comments (New Page)   Subscribe to NoodleFood Blog Posts via Feed Reader   via E-mail Subscribe to NoodleCast Podcasts M4A via iTunes (MP3)   via Feed Reader   via E-mail

Comments
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 13:05:12 mst Comment ID: #1 Name: Michael Labeit E-mail: logician169(at)yahoo.com URL: http://unit-perspective.blogspot.com I write on my blog that I've found myself distinguishing between capitalism and corporatism to students, professors, and professional economists so often these last several months that it is both aggravating and frightening. The inability (or unwillingness) to contrast capitalism with the American mixed economy and to contrast Objectivism with libertarianism is a conceptual disease that runs rampant in contemporary journalism. Weisberg is a journalist for an online magazine!!! - he is not an intellectual. The editors of Slate will not scrutinize his literature too severely because the typical readers of Slate fail to make the same necessary distinctions that Weisberg fails to make. He's a lightweight, a hack. As a result, he can commit himself to non sequitors and false causes - who's going to call him on his intellectual transgressions? Paula did identify his fallacies but nevertheless, his piece will successfully console those readers who want to believe that under capitalism, all is permitted.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 13:51:27 mst Comment ID: #2 Name: IchorFigure Nice summary Paula, glad to see a new post of yours. I've just spent the last 20 minutes or so leaving a string of comments on a long list of articles today claiming Greenspan (and hence Rand) was at fault for the financial mess. If anyone else is interested in commenting on those articles, check the Randex. It's just ridiculous either how incredibly ignorant and stupid these authors can be, or simply how dishonest. On the bright side, one article actually identifies that Greenspan was *not* acting in accordance with what Rand actually advocated. http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/23/greenspan_follies_t ...
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 14:16:27 mst Comment ID: #3 Name: BrianS "...he's celebrating the demise of a Libertarian hegemony that has never existed. The man is deliriously dancing on an empty grave." But that is precisely the *purpose* of a straw man: to beat the stuffing out of it, to kill it, to burn it and bury its ashes, and then to dance upon its grave - all the while hoping the *actual* idea will somehow be buried with it.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 14:28:55 mst Comment ID: #4 Name: Wayne Blaming liberty for the financial crisis? This is like the cyanide at Jonestown blaming the grape Flavor Aid.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 14:55:49 mst Comment ID: #5 Name: Brad Williams URL: http://scripsit.blogspot.com "We have narrowly avoided a global depression" How could someone know this? I would like to know this too.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 15:15:15 mst Comment ID: #6 Name: Harold "...dancing on an empty grave" I like that.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 16:38:14 mst Comment ID: #7 Name: Jim May E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com Yet another standard Leftist operating procedure: when things go bad, define wherever we happen to be as "laissez-faire" and push for more government control.
	Friday, October 24, 2008 at 19:07:26 mst Comment ID: #8 Name: William H. Stoddard E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/ * On this point, the difference between libertarians and Objectivists is nearly irrelevant. Most actual libertarian organizations take the same view of the causes of the crisis as Objectivists; that is, they attribute it to unsound financial practices growing out of credit expansion made possible by central banking. Which isn't really surprising, because they are basing their analysis on Austrian economics, which is also the basis of Objectivist thought on these issues. * What the term "libertarian" or "laissez-faire" means to the commentators who are using it is not the ideas of any actual libertarian organization or commentator. It's the policies of the Bush administration. And George W. Bush doesn't have even the vague biographical association with libertarianism that Alan Greenspan has with Objectivism. * When these commentators say that libertarianism has been discredited, they mean "the belief in laissez-faire" or in "free market economics," and they are classifying Objectivists as libertarians and saying that Objectivist beliefs in those things have been discredited too. * The methodology of claims of this kind seems to be that of conspiracy theory. Alan Greenspan associated with Ayn Rand in his youth and wrote an essay for one of her books; therefore, even though he explicitly repudiated her ideas in his autobiography, all his policies can be blamed on her. It's much like Naomi Klein's attacks on Milton Friedman. There is no journalism of ideas; there's only journalism of personal encounters and factional alliances.
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