A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Libertarians as social parasites?

George Monbiot writes a scathing column about a British scientist-turned-businessman who used biological research to argue for laissez-faire but then turned to the gummint for a bailout when his business failed.

The charge of hypocrisy seems accurate in this particular case, but applied to libertarians as a whole this column is a cheap shot, especially as Monbiot rather breezily skirts over the issue that motivates a lot of libertarian thinkng, viz. that if humans are essentially self-seeking (a point he concedes) then restraining the State becomes of paramount importance:

Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people’s resources, they will dump their waste in other people’s habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

Now surely Monbiot realizes that “treat[ing] the state like a member of the hominid clan and punish[ing it] when it acts against the common good” is easier said than done! This is where Hobbes’ argument for an all-powerful Leviathan runs into trouble. Hobbes says that, in order to guarantee social cooperation and avoid the war of each against all we need Leviathan to keep things in check. But who will keep Leviathan in check? Especially if, per Hobbes’ scheme, it’s invested with nigh-absolute power.

Indeed, as some anarchists have argued, on those terms you’re better off staying in the state of nature since your chances of surviving the depredations of your fellow human beings seem better when vast power isn’t concentrated in a single entity. It’s this drastic imbalance of power that makes the subject’s position vis a vis the State so precarious.

I’m not disagreeing with the need for regulation of business; Monbiot makes a good point when he says that globalization makes it easier for businesses to skirt responsibility to the communities it does business in or with. But I’ve always thought that progressives tend to overestimate the ability of governments to wisely and disinterestedly regulate things. If humans are fundamentally self-interested, then that goes for lawmakers and bureaucrats too.

The trick, it seems to me, is to make both business and government accountable to the people whom their actions affect. I’ve become convinced that small-d democracy needs to extend to the economic sphere as well as the political sphere. But I wonder if there’s a way of doing that without concentrating more power in the national state (or, worse, a kind of global superstate). The libertarian critique of state power can’t be so easily dismissed.

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2 responses to “Libertarians as social parasites?”

  1. gaius sempronius gracchus

    As Gore Vidal said to the interviewer in “Why We Fight,” we live in the United States of Amnesia; nobody remembers anything before Monday morning.

    We in the US have had decades of progress from the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights movement and Great Society of the late sixties to forget what a great gain the welfare state was.

    And we had even longer, from the beginning of the 20th Century, to forget what a great gain the regulatory state was.

    We have had too long to forget what life and America were like before these things.

    We have had too long to forget the damage wrought by a market dominated by private, corporate power.

    And we had too long to forget the need for the government to restrain the corporations rather than letting the corporations hollow out, gut, subvert, and abuse the government.

    And in the meanwhile we had the rise and fall of Communism and the much quicker rise and fall of Fascism to teach us the dangers of overwhelming state power in the hands of irresistible, paranoid dictators.

    [From what we read, Mao in his old age lived much like the old Tiberius, amusing himself for much of his time, when not in the hands of his doctors, with crowds of human sexual toys.

    Did he any longer believe anything? Was there any longer any purpose to his power?

    I am guessing there was nothing left in him, at all. That he had become, if he had not always been, a sociopath.

    Under other circumstances he would have been a serial killer. Worse luck for China, he became the irresistible tyrant of the most populous nation on Earth.

    “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”? The triumph of the Id.]

    Now, after all of that and then thirty years of the propaganda of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and Manchesterism, the last thing Americans with any political convictions at all can be accused of is too great confidence in government power.

    In truth, their problem for long – or rather the problem of the political elites for decades in the US and throughout, at least, the Anglosphere – has been a complete lack of skepticism and mistrust toward the accumulation of great economic, social, and political power in the hands of corporations and the great oligarchs who dominate them.

    Globalization has made the corporate program of subversion of state power all over the world a vast conspiracy of international dimensions, instead of a set of relatively independent national conspiracies.

    It has not fundamentally altered the stakes or the players.

    And capital flight, by the way, was a problem with a name long before the fall of the Communism, and hence long before the rise of globalization.

    In the case of America, closing union plants in Michigan to open non-union plants in Alabama was a precursor.

    PS.

    Odd, isn’t it, that the old contrast between those who believe in the inherent wickedness of man and those who believe in inherent goodness has been repeated among secularists as a contrast between nature and nurture?

    Between socio-biologists and people who insist that everything not obviously physical about us is malleable, given the right upbringing and education?

    PPS.

    Of course, it isn’t that anybody who lived any of that history and is alive still, Alzheimer’s apart, forgot it all. The problem of American “amnesia” really is just the normal effect of the succession of generations.

    But the result is that the relevant political knowledge gained by many hard lessons is lost.

    Born too late to learn from personal experience, those who do not learn well at school – those who so often seem even to brag that they “don’t know much about history” – do not learn these things at all.

    And then drowning the state in the bathtub begins to sound as if it might make sense, as do books with titles like “Our Enemy, The State.”

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  2. Lee

    I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that. Still, that doesn’t mean that state power is problem-free as a solution to the problems of economic concentration & power. And many libs would aruge that the growth of the state actually abetted such concentrations (corporations exist by virtue of state-granted privileges after all). I’m certainly open to the possibility that something like social democracy or the mixed economy is the best we can hope for, but at the same time there remains the nagging fact that state power is based on coercion and that this is inherently morally problematic (if ultimately justifiable) and possibly inefficient and counterproductive in many cases.

    It’s also worth pointing out that many early classical liberals thought of themselves as men of the Left because they were opposing entrenched privilege. This is true of someone like E.L. Godkin who founded the Nation.

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