Prompted by a recent tweet, I began to ruminate on the idea that certain people only want to be left alone. Now, that can seem extremely enticing, indeed for some even desirable. The problem is, many of the people who want to be left alone don't really want to leave you alone necessarily.
The tweet in question is provided by famous whistleblower and defector Edward Snowden. In it he compares being afraid of Libertarians politically to being afraid of cats. I do admit that, on some level, there is a bit of a point as the Libertarian Party of the United States is so whacky in its politics that the odds of them ever forming a stable government are damn near impossible. However, the ideas that they do hold are downright terrifying in what they could do to you.
I've never understood the political fear of Libertarians.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 3, 2022
"Sure, they're not in power now, but someday they might take over and... uh, leave you alone, I guess, since that's kind of their whole deal."
It's like being afraid of cats.
Lest it sound like I'm just down on libertarians, I'm not really. Libertarian ideology actually has a few principles in personal liberty, property rights, freedom of speech, and various decriminalization ideas that I do admire. However, most of that was coopted from it's original libertarian socialists/anarchists of the late 20th century and bastardized into an extremely schizophrenic defense of laissez-faire capitalism, which means many of the good things about the ideology do come from a completely different place in the political spectrum. That one of the main ideas of libertarianism is that it wants to completely dismantle many existing government regulations on just about everything and let "the market" take over is really just an enormous problem. Essentially, while I like their take on personal liberty and rights, I find their look at trying to craft a society to be downright horrific.
I've written a bit before using fictional examples of how this is probably a bad idea, but I'd like to just make a quick summary of why that is. For reference, in the Libertarian Party's platform is a stated desire to allow employers to refuse to recognize a worker made union, effectively negating the leverage of collective bargaining or such protections. While it is not against unions, it does not offer any protection or inherit legitimacy, which is an enormous blow to the mere existence of labor organizing when one traces its history.
Secondly, it supports free market solutions to healthcare. The free market solutions in the United States as it already exists are so hideously expensive and inefficient in delivering care that it's near cartoonish, and this is with minimal government intervention in the healthcare system. Among wealthy nations it has the highest rate of hospitalizations from preventable causes, and the highest number of deaths from preventable causes. Quite simply, it spends an enormous amount of money on healthcare, while creating an enormous financial barrier to actually seeking that care (indeed, most bankruptcies in the US result from unexpected medical spending). Any objective analysis would conclude that the problem rests with the issue of making healthcare a commodity rather than a public service, but the Libertarian Party concludes the opposite.
Thirdly, it supports market based solutions to the environmental crisis. This is, put simply, almost so ludicrous that it barely rates a comment. However, it is an insidious idea that is in vogue that we can simply use the free market to get out of climate change, even though oil and gas companies spent decades running climate denial propaganda, and private corporations are notoriously unaccountable for the environmental damage they cause, while overselling their commitment to fighting it. But the market will solve all!
While these are just small examples of what is really wrong with the Libertarian platform and ideology, let me swing this back to Snowden's original message. He says "Sure, they're not in power now, but someday they might take over and... uh, leave you alone, I guess, since that's kind of their whole deal."
Let's look at this for a second; on one hand, he's saying that with a Libertarian government they will say "We can't tell you what to do," and well, sure, here's a question? What's the flip side of "we can't tell you what to do?" It's "You can't tell me what to do."
That's where the problem sets in. It's a similar problem I have with anarchism, where it depends very much on community norms and peer pressure to enforce conformity, but in libertarian ideology the extreme emphasis on individualism creates a Randian nightmare where what you want doesn't really matter if no one is going to bother to help you. With one ideal of libertarian ideology being a "night watchmen state" which merely enforces contracts through the judiciary and police, while enforcing the 'non-aggression principle' through the same and defending liberty with an army, the ability to do much beyond basic property rights becomes a bit complicated.
Broadly speaking this is a problem with both libertarianism and anarchism since both tend to look at the vacuum a loss of government function would create and assume utopia. As the old adage goes, nature abhors a vacuum and so something must fill it. In the libertarian world that's the market, which as I lay out in my longer essay, has no accountability to the public good.
As an example, let's say for instance that a company builds a factory on a river. Since there is no regulation on what kind of waste they can dump into that river, they begin dumping harmful industrial byproducts into it. This causes the local environment to be poisoned, leading to the drinking water supply of a local town to be contaminated and people die. Naturally, some people will organize and try and sue the company that caused it. In the libertarian philosophy, case closed, but is it? Quite a lot depends on the people being able to afford a good legal team, and a company which has the capital to build that factory in the first place will almost overwhelmingly be able to afford a good legal team (or potentially SLAPP suit the problem away before it starts). The corporate legal team will almost inevitably win this, and the people who have lost loved ones or who are still living with a poisoned water supply will still have that problem. The overwhelming legal defense for the corporation might be "it was their individual responsibility to prepare for what might happen, no one stopped them from looking into living downriver from a factory might be like, it's their fault if they weren't prepared!"
If that seems like a ludicrous idea, projective personal responsibility onto the victim, allow me to refer you to the story of the MacDonald's Hot Coffee lawsuit. Despite becoming the poser child for a frivolous lawsuit, most of what you know about the case is actually wrong. The victim, Stella Liebeck, was a 79 year old woman who was in a parked car when she accidentally spilled coffee on herself, because the coffee was at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C) it caused third degree burns to her legs an genitals, nearly killing her, requiring extensive surgeries and skin grafts, costing 20,000$. Liebeck merely wanted her medical expenses covered, but MacDonald's framed this as a case of greed, among a litany of other crazy claims. Indeed, this was framed as a 'personal responsibility issue" and a concentrated effort was made to portray this as a "clumsy, greedy woman wanted money for her own mistake" rather than "company serves coffee capable of melting skin" to the public. That Liebeck won was astonishing.
Though let me give you another, more concretely libertarian example. In his book A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, tells the story of personal liberty run amok in a New Hampshire town called Grafton. A weird mix of libertarian activists moved in and, effectively, took over the town government. They cut services to the bone, paring down police, fire, road maintenance, and even the public library to an absurd degree to the point where they almost existed in name only. The town's legal fees skyrocketed because it became an extremely litigation heavy region, the local police force was so handicapped by budget cuts that they could hardly ever put their single police cruiser on the increasingly pothole cratered roads for fear it was so unsafe, and the number of accidents and medical incidents practically overwhelmed what medical services were available.
The title comes from the fact that, by doing away with bylaws and many other ordinances that prevented big groups of people from living in the woods, trash began to be dumped everywhere. So bears showed up. With easy food, and some people even feeding them just because they enjoyed it, bears lost their fear of humans. That led to confrontations and bear attacks. When some frustrated people got mad at people who fed the bears, they were told that anything that happened wasn't really the bear feeders problem.
As I said, the flip side of "we can't tell you what to do" is "you can't tell me what to do" and as seen here, with the government pared down to nothing, life got immeasurably worse as no one bothered to take responsibility for anything. The book did show a fascinating divide among the libertarian ideology, and how many people had such broad ideas on what libertarianism is. The author treats most of the people sympathetically, and does an excellent job showcasing the slow motion collapse of a civil society. While he treats the people with sympathy (and occasional incredulity) I can say for certain that there was a lot of "fuck you, got mine" on display, which unfortunately tends to be a very common underlying theme in many proponents of libertarianism.
These examples are, overall, just a few reasons why people are genuinely afraid of libertarianism politically. While the broad ideas of freedom and individual liberty are indeed admirable, they come attached to a series of poorly thought out other political ideas. From dismantling healthcare to effectively ceding economic primacy to unaccountable corporations, libertarian political emphasis on individual freedom does not make up for the broad structural damage it could introduce from a lack of protections or responsibility.
