Libertarians love this quote by Henry David Thoreau: "That government is best which governs least." They are stuck in the Utopian fantasy world where government is expelled from their beloved "free market" and are so caught up in this flawed ideology that they fail to see it for the contradictio in terminis it actually is.
source: The Blue Diamond Gallery
Contradictio in terminis - refers to a combination of words whose meanings are in conflict with one another. Examples are "liquid ice", "independent colony", "square circle" and "Lil Bazooka".
source: Wikipedia
Libertarianism. It sounds so damn attractive, and let's be honest here: who doesn't want more freedom? I know I do. I suspect you do to, dear reader. Why then, you might ask, do I criticize the ideology that has freedom as one of its core values so much and so rigorously? Why am I not opposed to government when it's evident for all thinking beings to see that government, or the state, is precisely the institution that limits our freedoms in the most egregious and obvious ways? The short answer is: because of capitalism. Because markets can never be free. Because a big and strong government is intrinsic to capitalism.
If we substitute "government" with "the state", here's what many socialists believe its function has been throughout all economic systems in human history: the role of the state is to enforce the class divisions in society. Just like capitalism. Economy is, in the end, the way we produce and distribute wealth, and throughout our history the model of production and distribution has never changed; if it's slavery, with masters and slaves, feudalism, with feudal lords and serfs, or capitalism, with employers and employees, it's always been a minority holding the means of production, the capital, who've wielded power over a powerless majority. Democracy was introduced to do away with that power, but to say that in our current form of democracy, where we vote every four years or so, we've now reached a point where we all have equal influence on the shaping of society, is akin to living in another Utopian fantasy.
Throughout its history capitalism has always needed a strong state apparatus to protect the capitalists' property with its unique right to the use of violence, to act as a protective wall between the classes. The dreamed "free market" has never been free, and democracy has never been able to attack that wall in any meaningful way. Capitalism at its core constantly widens the gap between the classes, and throughout its history we occasionally see a popular uprising against this fundamental injustice, reducing that gap and creating an extra, transitional class; the middle class. Keep that in mind, my dear libertarian comrades; the middle class is solely the product of the fight against your dreamed free market. Government is needed dearly to protect the markets against their own destruction; and real, thinking capitalists know this all too well, and they promote the IDEA of truly free markets to keep the divide alive. The economy, expressed as a model for producing and distributing wealth, has always been a minority that impresses upon the psyches of their underlings the ideas that benefit them, not us, to keep us caught and imprisoned in their preferred model of producing and distributing wealth.
"The leading ideas of any age, are the ideas in the leaders of that age." - Karl Marx
Modern day free market advocate Trump didn't reduce the size of government nor its power; his tariffs and trades world war should make that clear to anyone. Reducing the amount of regulations controlling the producers and employers does not result in more freedom of the majority, it accomplishes the exact opposite. The libertarian call for less government in a capitalist economy is defeating the liberty they aim for; it's a self-contradicting ideology, and the extremists among them, the anarcho-capitalists, have no clue about what they're fighting for... And the truly sad thing is that socialism, when it's understood correctly, is exactly the ideology they're looking for as it's the only ideology that seeks to fundamentally change the relationship between the classes, to upset the power imbalance that's intrinsic to the capitalist model of production and distribution. Democracy is at the heart of this radical change, but true democracy, economic democracy.
If you truly want to get rid of the state, you want to get rid of capitalism. As much as possible if you're content with the state just becoming a lot smaller. The power imbalance we see in society is a reflection of the power imbalance we see inside our places of production; inside the workplace. When you clock in, you submit yourself to the will of the board of directors, a tiny group that decides everything; what to produce, where to produce, what to do with the surpluses, decide who does and does not have a job, decide when and who to threaten with the loss of that job and so on. Bring democracy, the will of the majority, everyone in fact, with "one person, one vote", which is what "the people's ownership of the means of production" amounts to, and see how much government we would still need in the wider society. My guess is a lot less, and none once we grow up as a species and erase the borders which were also invented by the same ruling class. This is not Utopian, nor self-contradicting; this is very possible when we finally see our current economic model for what it really is, when the libertarians finally join us in the only true fight for freedom. In closing, here's another debunking of libertarianism:
Libertarianism Debunked.
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