Libertarians Against Liberty

Image credit

This article on historian Nancy MacLean's new book struck me as highly interesting as it addresses one of my major themes—liberty—, giving it a paradoxical spin. 

MacLean argues that policies advocated by libertarians actually destroy liberty.

Her argument goes like this: While looking at Public Choice (Buchanan, Tullock et al,) in particular, she contends more generally with regard to neoliberalism that its agenda of libertarian policy recommendations supports the interests of a minority of benefactors, enhances their share of benefits and extends their dominance in society at the expense of the larger population. 

Quite in tune with her claim that the libertarian-leaning attitude seeks ideological dominance over society, she observes efforts to extend 

the principles of the market rationality to areas outside conventional limits of the economy.

Notably Law. Public Choice then is a further initiative to couch all aspects of the public discourse in terms suggesting that the market mechanism is the motor that drives the Good Society.

Accordingly, the overall aim is to redefine all aspects of the social universe in a manner that is consistent with the idea that society's optimal shape is arrived at by giving free reign to market forces.

This is indeed the core message of libertarianism. If people can be convinced of its veracity, it will be the easier to implement the hidden agenda of those instrumentalising the libertarian paradigm for their egotistical and anti-social purposes.

MacLean views the radical right as a group of “true believers” in freedom, an idea they associate with market freedom, aiming to remove public services and replace them with privatized schools and prisons that respond [to] the market, not voters within a democracy. In doing so, MacLean argues that the radical right will eventually reduce freedom for the majority while privileging the propertied minority. The more power the propertied minority has, the less democratic society becomes. The ultimate target of the radical right, which has gained control of the modern Republican Party, is to change American society to privilege capitalism over democracy even more than it does now.

(My emphasis).

Interestingly, my flirt with libertarianism quickly collapsed when I was preparing a presentation on Public Choice. On studying the subject more deeply, I began to sense that the paradigm of a Good Society shaped by markets (a) descriptively left out and (b) prescriptively disallowed too many processes that effectively shape or should be allowed or encouraged to shape society.  

As for (a), I recognised that political action is involved in any transaction, process or institution associated with market activities; concerning (b), I realised that political competition and hence pluralism and democracy are the indispensable core of liberty. To restrict or weaken them is inimical to liberty.

So, in my way, I came to the author's conclusion that libertarian-leaning efforts

... to produce a society that was governed by the market, not by democracy ...

were destructive of liberty, and that the libertarian-leaning were undermining liberty by

... protecting capitalism from democracy ...

(All quotes are taken from the above article.)