The hypocracy of libertarian anti-government, pro-deregulation position
Posted: July 13th, 2010 by: h2
Recently I read a response to a fairly typical corporate type apologist in theoildrum.com comment thread. If you don’t follow theoildrum.com, it has a real problem, as do many US based forums/blogs that cater to any industry, with libertarian neo-conservative ant-government/deregulation notions among some, luckily not all, of its members.
This is about the most concise, accurate, rebuttal of the deregulation position I’ve ever seen.
syncro on July 13, 2010 – 8:53pm
Obeying regs is not going to provide a defense. But I am more interested in your point that“BP’s response plan was filed and APPROVED by MMS as good enough. It wasn’t but that’s not BP’s fault…”
What catches my interest is that a lot of the conservative politicians argue that we should have less regulation. Some even say no regulation. Throw in the problem of the undue influence of corporate lobbyists and political cash. You wind up with a weak regulatory body that is instructed by the president to basically act as a force for promoting drilling. The new head cuts back funding for enforcement. Regs. are loosely enforced if at all. In other words, it is an ideal regulatory body from the point of view of the politicians who preach against regulation. And then when the corporate citizen causes a disaster through reckless conduct, you blame the hollowed-out regulatory body and let the corp. off the hook entirely.
It’s a bit hypocritical, no?
While the comment ends there, it’s worth looking at the question a bit more. The essence, as far as I can tell of all libertarian thinking is NOT, repeat, not, a true desire to achieve freedom for all. No, it’s rather the desire to achieve freedom to achieve wealth/power using whatever means necessary.
There’s a reason almost all libertarian types love the third rate fiction author Ayn Rand, who writes what are essentially teenage fantasy novels about rising above all the other riff-raff. The fantasy presented is appealing to those who strive to either be master or to serve the master. In other words, it’s about as far away from actual freedom as you can get.
Libertarians want a return to basic feudalism, where power lies in the hands of kings, who allocate it dukes, earls, and so on. Serfs, aka feudal employees, and consumers, are the foundation of the wealth, not land. That’s the only real difference. Government regulations form the only real block to corporate type power, and so of course are blindly opposed, no matter how irrational that position appears to be from an outside perspective.
Alleged ‘intellectuals’, like Alan Greenspan, are simply small men (literally small in his case) who strive to become great by promoting the interests and agenda of such corporate structures. Kings of yore used the same tools to consolidate their power, only the names were different.
So in essence, my only real objection to the entire libertarian project is the intense intellectual dishonesty they engage in, pretending to be promoting personal freedom when what they really are promoting is the freedom to achieve maximum political power and wealth. But if this honesty appeared, then none of their power base, or almost none of it, would vote for them, so they can’t be honest. Plus I think they aren’t actually capable of thinking their position through in the first place.