There is a common thread that runs through many of the policies that are destroying America. It winds its way through civil unrest, healthcare, economics, and even foreign policy, propelled by a dogmatic belief. That common thread is economic laissez-faire libertarianism, and it is toxic.
Libertarianism is literally killing us.
Many libertarians claim to believe in “limited government,” upon closer inspection, such declarations ring hollow. What libertarian critics of progressive capitalism believe in is the delegation of state power into the hands of a small but powerful faction of wealthy individuals – private coercion. Such delegation threatens liberal democracy. The task at hand is to be wary of such excessive grants of coercive power, as they easily morph into the means of oppression and lead to the unmitigated inequality that we see today. It is libertarian conservatism, not a progressive form of capitalism, that forces an individual into “serving another man’s ends without advancing his own.”[i]
For example, libertarian thought drives President Trump’s pandemic policy. Its apologists surround Trump. Dr. Scott Atlas, now front and center on his Coronavirus Task Force, is neither a virologist (the study of viruses) nor an epidemiologist (the study of the spreading of diseases). Instead, he is a libertarian who happens to be a radiologist. If the President needed advice on CAT scans that would be fine, but obviously not in combating deadly pandemics. His economic outlook is best defined by the fact he is a fellow at the Hoover Foundation, a think tank dedicated to advancing laissez-faire policies. When Dr. Atlas gives advice to the president, it comes from more of an economic outlook than a scientific one.
Dr. Atlas is now telling the president to ignore the advice of an expert such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who believes in the use of masks and very small public gatherings in order to limit the spread of the virus. Instead, the Hoover Institute fellow believes in herd immunity – meaning letting the disease run its course through the public. This would mean the deaths of possibly millions of Americans, including many front-line health care workers. It is the modern equivalent of how the Soviet Army used to clear German minefields in World War II: Have the soldiers march through the minefield and the ones who get blown up, well, too bad.
What is behind such policy is that libertarian thought views everything through a transactional lens. Profit comes before all else, including human life. Opening up the economy at all costs is their highest priority. The fact that almost 230,000 Americans are dead because of this virus seems to be nothing more than the cost of doing business.
Even the precaution of wearing masks in public has been elevated to the point of civil unrest by economic libertarians. In Michigan, where the issue first came to ahead this past April, protests were organized with help from the Michigan Freedom Foundation – an organization that has been significantly funded with donations from current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
The DeVos family is includes many ardent libertarians. Betsy DeVos has been a driving force behind privatizing education and hostile towards public education.
Granted, regardless of any libertarian agenda there would be those who, for whatever reason, would interpret legal mandates to wear a medical mask during a pandemic as an infringement on their personal liberties. Yet it cannot be denied that certain economic conservatives are exacerbating the issue in order to further an agenda of laissez-faire privatization. They do so by encouraging behavior that could spread the virus and thus endanger health care workers and first responders. These are questionable examples of liberty that violate John Stuart Mill’s harm principle -- that a person can do whatever he wants as long as his behavior does no harm to others. They are miscast as acts of Colonial era-style civil disobedience. News outlets provided ample images of assault weapons toting Michigan protestors wearing no masks screaming into the face of police officers in that state’s capital building. A number of the protesters came from neo-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys while others waved confederate or Nazi flags. In the process, the Right is destroying the norms of acceptable civic discourse.
Libertarian economic theory also poses a danger to Americans that depend upon recent health care reform. If Obama-era legislation were to be thrown out by U.S. Supreme Court the well-being of millions of Americans with preexisting and chronic conditions would be in immediate danger of being left without affordable health care insurance.
Using my own example, here’s how it would happen: When my wife lost her job which provided us with health care coverage, we were able to get insurance through the Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or “Obamacare”). Two extremely important provisions in the ACA are: 1) No more caps on lifetime coverage; and 2) No higher premiums or denial for people with preexisting conditions (I have a preexisting condition).
Now, what Trump and the GOP want to do is pretend they will protect preexisting conditions, but that is a ruse. What will really happen is if the ACA is overturned, I will eventually have no coverage because I can be dropped as there will be no more rules in place no matter what Trump and his libertarian enablers say – and he knows that.
If the GOP gets their plan in place, what they want to do is create special high risk pools for people like me, which would allow insurance companies to discriminate on the prices they charge people with preexisting conditions. That would send my premiums through the roof and make my insurance unaffordable.
If the lifetime caps were also to be removed, that would limit coverage to a set lifetime amount, say for the sake of argument, $350,000 for an insured’s family.
Imagine what that would mean for someone hospitalized for long periods of time with Covid-19. If a respirator is required, one average cost has been pegged at over $88,000. Add that to a catastrophic illness to another family member or even equipment for long-term chronic conditions, and that is a recipe for disaster. But for a libertarian, that fits their stilted definition of “freedom” and “liberty.”
In 1952 the economist and legal scholar Robert L. Hale (1884–1969) warned us not to overlook the danger of “private persons” that make up a “private government,” which “unless restrained by law, is as capable in some circumstances of destroying individual liberty as is the public government itself.”[ii] Such private power is what is at the heart of the present threat.
Conservatives almost never discuss (let alone, acknowledge the existence of) the role unrestrained private governing power plays in denying economic liberty to the average American — private coercion. Hale, along with others of his generation articulated this danger. Besides Hale, others such as Morris R. Cohen (1880-1947) and John M. Clark (1884–1963), have been largely forgotten. That is unfortunate, because their ideas still lay waste to laissez-faire libertarian doctrine. Through them we more clearly see how such theory is truly built upon an amalgamation of permissiveness, unproven axioms and unreasonable self-interest – what is good for me but oppressive to the larger community.
Indeed, the examples cited above illustrate perhaps the biggest fallacy that lies at the heart of laissez-faire libertarianism: that the pursuit of individual self-interest is harmonious with communal self-interest. Clearly, the agendas of Doctor Scott Atlas, Betsy DeVos and other libertarians who wholeheartedly support the Trump agenda are not in harmony with that of the average American. it is why they want to limit democracy by suppressing voting rights. The very thing they fear is an engaged public that will use the power oft he ballot box to stop their coercive economic behavior. For them democracy is only a means and not an end. And it is only a means when it suits their narrow economic agenda.
If capitalism, liberal democracy —and, by extension, our very lives are to be saved, then the many fallacies of laissez-faire libertarianism must be exposed to disinfecting sunlight. A long-overdue effort must be waged to unmask the lie for what it is. That begins with awareness that the current embrace of laissez-faire represents a movement away from capitalism and towards a feudal system. It is a paradigm when the average Americans ‘s life is devalued in favor of a ruling wealthy elite.
Economic libertarianism is indifferent to the potential suffering and deaths of millions of Americans. And without exaggeration, Libertarianism is killing us.
[i] Paraphrasing F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1944, Pages 133-147
[ii] Hale, Robert L., Freedom Through Law: Public Control of Private Power, Columbia University Press, New York 1952, P. vii.