The way it seems to work is like this:
A whole lot of business suited guys are holding a person to down and stealing their money. They are also pouring poison on them, maybe gassing them, and taking their land and freedom away. Often they appear to miss and destroy the ground everyone is standing or lying on, but that is part of the fun. Eventually, the suits get a bit bored and they hire a few politicians and think-tank people to do the work for them – as long as they get most of the money and the pleasure of doing the poisoning themselves.
Maybe the person being robbed and poisoned stands up and says “I’m going to sue you guys”, but the person finds out that the suits buy all the best lawyers and they got the politicians to write the laws they wanted, because they can. In pure Capitalistland you get the justice you can afford.
Finally, the person is coughing blood and a group of libertarians comes up and kicks them down again, yelling in perfect unison that: “The rich are better than you. Everyone can do what they want. The only reason you aren’t doing the kicking, thieving and poisoning is because you don’t work hard enough and the market is not free enough. Be grateful. If you give the market what it wants then you will benefit. Give business even more power and you will be free! If you don’t benefit, its all your own fault. Everything you suffer now is the fault of the State!”
The person being beaten up must be stopped from allying with anyone in the same position so as to defend themselves or assert their liberty from suits. And they must be stopped from objecting to the violence in the system and the destruction of the world around them.
Libertarians seem to exist to support the authority and hierarchy of wealth (and hereditary wealth at that), while pretending this hierarchy and power is entirely voluntary. They appear to be prepared to temporarily ally with anyone who wholeheartly supports this hierarchy, and attack anyone who does not. This is why they appear more comfortable supporting Republican authoritarianism or Christian totalitarianism than they are in supporting social democracy, even when the social democracy movement is attacking the power of the state to dictate people’s lives.
Indeed, democracy seems a bad word for them, as it might impact negatively on the ‘natural’ plutocracy. The people might decide they are as worthy as the rich, and don’t want to be ruled by the rich, and this form of evil ‘majoritarianism’ has to be stopped. They also seem to oppose any action which would weaken gender and race hierarchies, by pretending that this would disappear when capitalists had full control. Any other action is, in their minds, an attempt to compel the already dominant to accept equality, which cannot be allowed.
However, Libertarians can be distinguished from fascists as they probably would not support attempts to make these hierarchies more rigid in themselves, to the extent they are not based on wealth. Libertarians also would probably not support the fascist State when it tried to curtail the power of the rich and the market. Indeed it often appears they cannot tell the difference between social democracy and fascism for that reason.
The difference between real anarchists and libertarians is that anarchists realise all capitalism is crony capitalism, all capitalism both requires and sets up a state to protect capitalist power and property, and all capitalism leads to plutocracy and destruction.
Tags: economics, free markets
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