Sidebar for Plaintiffs

That depends what you imagine “libertarianism” is.

I, for one, began wondering about it years ago and have analyzed my way into carving it into bits here, in this blog. I attacked it (and attached it) as a code word sort of invented by the likes of the Koch Brothers, whose point in such fakery was two fold: first, like all powerful industrialists who can’t think beyond their industries, they wanted the “liberty” to do whatever they wanted to do with their businesses and their money. That is, fuck us.

The Kochs’ kind of liberty was focused, naturally, on getting rid of the U.S. Government’s agencies — especially the EPA — which laid out restrictions for their operations, restrictions which I need to emphasize came about when industrial waste polluted the land and water we depend on for life and We The People objected. (I first became aware of such industrial negligence and corporate amorality when Love Canal became big news.)

So that’s what “libertarian” is to industrialists: their freedom/our poison, no cost to them.

The second goal of the Koch machine’s “libertarian” had to do with voting. They had to sell voters on the idea that “libertarianism” meant “liberty!” for the voters: freedom from government restrictions! And the voters they knew they could convince were primarily white guys and gals without much education or with lazy brains. (That “movement” became the Tea Party and, somehow, without going through any sort of meaningful evolutionary process, became MAGA. This is because all of these labels dissolve into one base essence: racism. Two essences: racism and stupidity.)

Somewhere in learning about all this, I read Nancy MacLean’s great if terrifying political/social history, Democracy in Chains, which introduced me to the founding father of all of these awful people: James McGill Buchanan.

Because it should inspire schadenfreude while it punches out “libertarian” “intellectuals,” here’s what Wikipedia says about Democracy in Chains:

In 2017 MacLean published Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. The book focuses on the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan and his work developing public choice theory, as well as the roles of Charles Koch and others in nurturing the libertarian movement in the United States. MacLean argues that these figures undertook “a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.”^[18] According to MacLean, Buchanan represents “the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right”.^[19] Some academic critics, mostly libertarians, have disputed the book’s argument and have called MacLean’s thesis a “conspiracy theory“.^[20][21][22]

Gee, “conspiracy theory”?? “Reverse-engineer all of America?” MacLean’s argument is precisely what we’re living through right now.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you all about Buchanan, because we’re in a permanent state of outrage and nausea thanks to Trump, and Buchanan, in his own utterly weird way, tops Trump in his ability to sicken us.

One little tale which should summarize Buchanan and everyone he’s influenced even post mortem (he’s dead, the gods be praised), is what follows, a 9/1/2017 letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review. This nice gentleman, who met Buchanan, is responding to the Times’s review of Democracy In Chains:

At a seminar on law and economics at Stanford in the late ’60s, I summarized for James McGill Buchanan (whose biography was reviewed on Aug. 20) some judicial opinions that emphasized the protection of unsophisticated consumers against merchants who took advantage of them. His response encapsulated his characteristic blend of economics and politics: “You mean you’ll allow these people to vote?” — Marshall S. Shapo, Evanston, Ill.

Note: I got the impression that Buchanan, a Nobel Prize Grouch, didn’t have a sense of humor. He was serious when he said the above.