It's a little long, but Roderick Long's speech, "How to Reach the Left," is a masterful exposition of the radical, revolutionary implications of a truly freed market.
Long begins by distinguishing between the 'aristocratic left,' busybodies who cannot tolerate anyone making choices of which they do not approve (think Cass Sunstein) and the 'antiprivilege left,' who see people getting kicked around and want the government to put a stop to it. Long gives up on the aristocratic left, rightly in my opinion (Cass Sunstein may be the most evil man alive), but observes, again rightly, that the injustices perceived by the antiprivilege left frequently are unjust; the problem is that they misunderstand the cause and cure of these injustices.
Long then points out what I believe is the most pernicious misconception in political discourse today- the belief that our current situation approximates the outcomes that would result from a truly free market. The left- aristocratic and antiprivilege- is led by this false belief to damn free markets, while the right- conservative and libertarian- is led to defend whatever monstrous acts our corporate masters indulge in by the same misconception. Long calls it 'conflationism.'
I agree with Long that the future of libertarianism, if libertarianism is to be anything other than standard American conservatism minus the religion and puritanism, is on the left, and the focus of our efforts should be on the left. Maybe I am biased- my first serious political involvement was as a far leftist- but the left is the side that has energy, motivation and seriousness. The right seems guided mainly by inertia and a plodding adherence to traditional concepts. William F. Buckley was more right than he knew when he described the conservative as "standing athwart the train of history, yelling 'Stop!'" The train, of course, doesn't stop, so the conservative has to run out in front of it before reassuming his stance and shout. The big government conservatism of George W. Bush was not an aberration, but rather a natural outcome of this process. When faced with the truly radical implications of the free market ideology they mouth (open borders, completely free trade, no subsidies for business or favored causes, no military adventures abroad), conservatives are repelled. They mouth their market platitudes because they were, nearly a century ago now, "scared straight" by the specter of revolutionary communism (as Long points out), but they never really got the true religion.
So why don't I think leftists are a lost cause? Well, let me further subdivide the antiprivilege left. Some of them- an ever-shrinking minority- are guided by faith in various nonsensical pseudo-economic philosophies, Marxism foremost among them. These folks aren't as far gone as the Cass Sunsteins of the world, but it's hard to convince a Marxist who has spent years eating all the Marxist fruit- cultural studies, literary theory, sociological and anthropological texts- that the root of the tree is rotten, that their intellectual castle is built on sand. Marxism is based on the Marxist concept of exploitation, which is in turn rooted in the labor theory of value, which is hogwash. For very understandable, very human reasons, committed, lifelong Marxists are loath to abandon their glittering palace of the mind, even when you show them how rotted the foundation is. It's unfortunate, but there it is.
Fortunately for us, this sort of leftist is increasingly thin on the ground as the Sixties recede into the ever more distant past. Today's leftists are driven more by an inchoate outrage at the state of the world around them- much as I was at 15, when I starting wondering why my mother and all her friends worked so very hard in shipyards, building mighty vessels of commerce, and saw so little of the product of their labor themselves. They see hunger in the Third World and plenty on our shelves, and they become (justifiably) angry about the disparity. They are angry that the poor don't get health care, that innocent people die in stupid wars, that minorities face vicious discrimination. The trouble is that we libertarians don't answer their concerns directly. We generally give them a lot of hand-waving and vague chatter about marginal products and trade barriers and the nature of scarcity. And they think we're full of shit, that we're just stooges for corporate interests and that we don't care about the poor and the downtrodden.
What we need to do for the left is twofold. First, on individual issues, we must point out (with evidence and history, not more damned cute parables) the ways in which government interventions- frequently well-meaning ones- create and exacerbate the problems that animate the left. Second, armed again with historical evidence and analysis, we must demonstrate that the state is always and everywhere the puppet of moneyed interests, and that the only real way to address the problems that concern the left is to defang the state. The left suffers from two delusions- first, the conflationism Long describes, and second, the belief that the government is not, or at least does not have to be the handmaiden of wealth.
We also need to examine ourselves and our rhetoric. The Randian spiel about businessmen as supermen and everyone else as parasites is repellent, ignorant, and asinine, as are Ms. Rand's works. Her influence on the libertarian movement has had mixed results, at best. Atlas Shrugged might win us some new teenage converts every year, but these converts are usually worthless douchebags, young Republicans without Jesus. Some of them are eventually deprogrammed and become capable adults, but the damage to the libertarian image the rest of them cause with their bashing of the poor and downtrodden and bile spewed about all attempts to help them is immense. The rhetoric about self-made men, about heroes who achieve it all without government or even in spite of it, that's all horseshit too. The truth is that the state is so thoroughly enmeshed in all aspects of our lives that we are all simultaneously its beneficiaries and victims. I've been pretty frank here about my own personal rent-seeking precisely because I cannot stand hearing libertarians talk about how Everyone Is a Parasite Except Me.
Anyway, this has gotten long and rambling, and I've got a whole other post I want to write today. The upshot of all this that we libertarians need to quit being the fringe of the Republican Party and resume what was (as Long points out) our place on the revolutionary left. Tell me why I am wrong and an idiot in the comments.
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