How Could I Have Believed This Crazy Libertarian Stuff? - a Cautionary Tale for Young Activists, by Jay Hilgartner

Here is my mea culpa -- I spent far too much time in my past--from the mid 1970s to the late 1990's--promoting libertarianism. It all started in 1973 while in the Air Force in Alaska when I picked up a copy of Ayn Rand's Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. From there on I was hooked on a revolutionary vision of a radically free market. After a year at Penn State, I moved to Washington, D.C. where I attended my first Libertarian Party (LP) convention. On a fateful day in April 1977, I walked to the LP office in downtown Washington and volunteered my services stuffing envelopes, dropping off news releases, etc. I was hired full-time at the LP office in 1978, working there as a researcher and state ballot-drive coordinator, and then also as a researcher from 1980-81 with the Libertarian Party's Clark for President campaign. In those years I was actually paid to be a libertarian.  

For those not entirely familiar with the Libertarian Party, the three main legs of their platform are 1) a strong support for civil liberties, 2) a pro-peace, noninterventionist foreign policy, and 3) a passion for radical capitalism. I make no apologies for still supporting the first two, which I continue, as a reformed liberal, to advocate. It's my past defense of the radical capitalist libertarian position - as defined as no government regulation or subsidization of the marketplace -- that I regret.

From Libertarian to Liberal

Relatively free markets, with appropriate government regulation for the protection of workers, consumers, the environment, and the smooth functioning of democracy, are terrific. But the radical free market doctrine of American libertarianism, which has been put to the test in actual real-world experience, has produced the exact opposite - gangster rule, oppression, and terror. Take for example the ineffective states of Somalia, the Sudan, Honduras, and those attempting to govern portions of gang-infested Mexico. Once any government becomes weak enough "to drown in a bathtub," as libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously advocates, there is nothing to check the power of concentrated wealth, whether in the form of corporations or criminal gangs. Libertarians would object that this is not a fair statement of what they advocate, arguing that their ideal libertarian society, under their concept of minimal government, would embody a strong rule of law, bringing about a just, innovative, and prosperous society. My position is that, since no such minimal state has existed in modern history, libertarians have much in common with other utopian political visionaries, whose radical dreams, once turned into reality, became nightmares. The burden of proof is on the libertarians.

Radical free markets for me now present a dystopian vision inviting the rule of the wealthy and most ruthless over the many.  And, since people have a tendency to revolt against unjust power and, since we can never be sure the direction revolutions will take, the dogmatic pursuit of an idealized "free market", if effective, will lead to weakened democratic government, tremendous corruption, and possibly even dictatorship. A strong government, strong that is in it's ability to protect individual rights, offset extreme inequality in wealth, and provide for the general welfare and common defense, is essential for a marketplace to function properly and for freedom and democracy to prosper.

So, how did I come to believe in libertarianism's laissez-faire hyper-capitalist doctrine? How could I have once been an advocate for a political philosophy calling for privatizing public lands, including selling the national parks, doing away with public schools, and getting rid of minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination statutes, child labor laws, and numerous other government protections that we take for granted today? How could I have believed this crazy stuff? Here's my excuse, for what it's worth. I became a libertarian because 1) of the times, that is the post Vietnam War/Watergate tumult of the 1970's, which encouraged my disenchantment with government in general, 2) I was seduced by libertarianism's logical consistency and fierce support for civil liberties, open immigration, and peace, all of which made it easier for me to ignore its more extreme radical capitalist positions, and 3) libertarianism gave me in my youth, direction, focus, and a sense of intellectual self-esteem.  

The Times They Were A' Changin

The modern libertarian movement was born in the 1960s and ‘70s.  When I started working for the Libertarian Party at the age of 25, the Vietnam War -- that horrendous war-of-choice against a people who never threatened us in any way -- had ended only a few years before, following a vigorous anti-war and anti-draft movement.  Meanwhile,  much of the world was like an Ayn Rand nightmare with all of Russia, eastern Europe, and China under a gray, seemingly irreversible communist authoritarianism. A good portion of Asia, South America, and Africa to me appeared a depressing collection of dictatorships, many of which the U.S. government had installed and heavily subsidized.  The Soviet Union and the U.S. threatened each other with a combined 60,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.  Annihilation by thermo-nuclear war was a real threat.  The decade of the ‘70’s, then, easily became a giant advertisement for a saner foreign and military policy counseling an end to CIA-backed coups and paying dictators to be our "friends," along with a general military disengagement from the world’s troubles.  Click - the libertarian platform's foreign policy of non-interventionism sounded great to me.

The second leg of the libertarian platform-- civil liberties-- was also a no brainer.  Yes, I was an introverted loner who, like most of my generation, had never been tear-gassed or even marched in a demonstration.  But I was still proud to be a part of the ‘60’s generation.  In my youthful conceit, I believed our generation had invented “free love,” civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.  The legalization of marijuana seemed inevitable and the case against drug prohibition was growing stronger each day. Plus, legal American apartheid had ended in the ‘60’s with the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts.   Then as now, libertarians were also the opposite of today's xenophobes, welcoming open immigration with great moral clarity.  

By the mid 1970s, conservatives were always on the defensive and generally ignored (they would get their revenge later in the Reagan and Bush/Cheney administrations).  Richard Nixon had resigned and liberalism reigned supreme.  I was young and hopelessly naive. In the future, I convinced myself, you wouldn’t need anti-discrimination legislation because racism and sexism would be gone, pot would be legal, and most everyone would be cool.  Civil liberties, the next leg of the libertarian platform, was also easy for me to embrace.

I Wanted to Believe

On economic policy, liberalism was suffering from its own incredible victories.  I grew up in the 50's and 60's when jobs were plentiful, at least for young white guys.  You could fairly easily live on your own, have a car, and set yourself up in a small apartment with a minimum of effort.   You could even work your way through school without incurring much debt at all.  Going bankrupt because of a health problem just didn’t happen to anyone I knew.  Things like a company health plan and workers compensation for on-the-job accidents were totally taken for granted.  In my young mind, organized labor’s great victories, after decades of brave confrontations with company thugs and eventual support from the federal government, were a fait accompli, a natural outcome of American capitalism, a view that took no notice of the blood and guts it took to accomplish.  The New Deal was just ancient history and Big Labor seemed as dirty as the soles of union organizer Jimmy Hoffa’s cement shoes. 

When I started reading radical capitalists like Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, I could easily believe, in my ignorance, that the benefits offered by businesses in those days were the result of free market competition for labor.  Government regulations had nothing to do with my prosperity and unions just got in the way.  I admit now that I was being terribly ungrateful back then, but that attitude, I believe, was common among many in my generation. When you are young and growing up in prosperous times, it is easier to be ignorant of the often decades-long struggles it took many brave people, great dreamers, and government actions, along with sheer happenstance - like the post World War II devastation leaving America largely unscathed -- to get us to that level of economic security.

Then there was the problem of the New Left which, by the mid ‘70’s, seemed increasingly tired and irrelevant in its identity politics and blatant Marxism.  I grew up with my middle class Dad and stepmother on four acres of beautiful Maryland land.  This was when an acre in Baltimore County, close to the city, was only $400 (it's more like $100,000 or more today). My dad was a successful mid-level salesman for General Electric. My step-mom was a secretary for the Kennecott Copper Refining Company. We were not at all wealthy, but we were very comfortable.  A dairy farm was on one side of our property.  On the other side were hundreds of acres of woods preserved by a retired and reclusive heart surgeon.  Below were nestled a few houses where our neighbors minded their own business and kept their land well tended.  My summer jobs were selling vegetables grown locally by a farmer who worked hard for what he had. My experience with private property was totally positive. When I started reading the radical capitalists, their arguments that private property rights are the basis of political freedom and that government was the great monopoly creator was easy for me to embrace, and much of the basics I still agree with.  Ma Bell was a government monopoly.  The war-machine companies (remember this is just after Vietnam) like Boeing, Lockheed, and DuPont seemed to owe their existence to government subsidies and contracts.  The FCC prevented more competition in television and radio.  Trucking and the airlines were protected by the government’s Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board (The later was actually eliminated with the support of Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter - liberals!).   For me, radical capitalism was a pro-private property, anti-corporate welfare alternative to the New Left’s Marxism.   

Also, unlike Marxism, libertarianism didn’t challenge my patriotism. I could honor the best of Jefferson, Paine, and the other Founding Fathers, while still being very critical of the U.S. government.  I suspect this is a very important factor in the current libertarian Right as well today.  In libertarian historiography, the American Revolution is regarded as the first libertarian revolution of consequence.  Therefore, a government small enough “to drown in a bathtub" is a completely patriotic sentiment to libertarians, since that kind of thinking falls in line with what libertarians regard as America's anti-statist tradition. 

What about environmental problems? Human-caused climate change was not even on the national radar until the late 1980's. In the 1970s, the Libertarian Party, where I worked, had released a fascinating booklet written by R. J. Smith covering environmental issues from a radical capitalist perspective. Montana State University also had a number of free market economists doing interesting work on water and land use policy. Pollution, libertarians argued, could be handled by extending private property rights to the air and water, that is by "internalizing the externalities" as we used to say, using economic jargon (yes, we were nerds).  Whales could be saved by private whaling companies with recognized ownership in whale herds, encouraging their profitable management and propagation (Yes, I convinced myself, that would work!).  Private conservation organizations like the Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy could manage the parks, and, hey, my generation invented Earth Day.  Of course we would take care of the environment.  And if there were any fuzzy anti-environment  challenges to my new radical capitalist orthodoxy, I thought, they could be ignored for the time being.

So like that poster on Fox Mulder's wall from the X-Files -- you know the one with the UFO on it and the caption "I Want to Believe"-- I embraced radical capitalism. I would work to eliminate corporate welfare, open up the free market in every way, and, very importantly, suppress any scary possible anti-capitalist reservations I might have. Child labor would never come back in America, I reasoned, as that would be handled as child abuse instead of as economic regulation of the now-holy free market. Social Security and Medicare would be even better privatized, I convinced myself, and besides that's way down the road. First things first -- get rid of the corporate monopolies with a radical free market. So, click in my brain went the third and final leg of my new libertarian dogma - radical capitalism.

Consistency Became a Hobgoblin

Libertarianism all seemed so very logical to me and what was viewed as its philosophical consistency was a great attraction to many of the libertarians I worked with. We would say "both conservatives and liberals are the inconsistent ones -- it is libertarians who want government both out of the economy AND out of the bedroom," and I thought that was neat. When you really think about it, logical consistency is not something that would inspire most people to rise up and start a revolution. Emerson warned that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Consistency is very important to ideologues and religious fundamentalists of any stripe including radical libertarians. And curious, though uneducated, as I was, it was important to me.  

I was struck by the fact that every libertarian political position consistently follows from one central principle, which libertarians refer to as the non-aggression axiom: no one has the right to initiate force against another. Sounds good, right? Most people would have no problem with this. It echoes the famous, more elegantly stated Golden Rule "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." On a one to one basis, it's a great rule for an ethical life. But it's when libertarians apply the non-aggression axiom to property rights and then to government policies that their positions start becoming, in many cases, profoundly strange, defying common sense and historical experience.  

For libertarians, the non-aggression axiom necessarily means no one has the right to initiate force against another's justly acquired property. What exactly constitutes justly acquired property I'll leave to the libertarian philosophers (last I read, it was still being debated). For the sake of brevity, suffice to say that when I joined the Libertarian Party in 1977, existing property relationships in the United States, with some notable exceptions such as land confiscated through eminent domain, were generally viewed as just by libertarians, having been worked out within a pro-property rights, relatively free market legal and political framework.  So, for libertarians, society is not the problem, since they view society as a collection of individuals in some sense almost completely divorced from what ever state governs over them. Society is good to the extent that individuals are able to voluntarily relate with one another forming markets and benefiting each other through free trade. It is government that is the problem for libertarians, not only because government insists on coercively regulating private property, and thus the marketplace, but because all governments rely on taxation to function.  

As the libertarian bumper sticker goes "Taxation is Theft." Refuse to pay your taxes and you wind up in jail or worse. Therefore, libertarians reason, any government, to the extent that it relies on taxation, is illegitimate (of course this means every government is illegitimate, but libertarians get around that by fantasizing about a voluntary government that functions without taxation). Every libertarian political position, especially including the stranger ones, flow from their belief that taxation is legalized stealing. Every libertarian activist, from those misguided souls taking over a government wildlife refuge in Oregon, to Tea Party conservatives battling against increases in the minimum wage, to Charles and David Koch attempting to buy the U.S. government so they can abolish it, I suspect they all justify their actions on some variation of the libertarian non-aggression axiom. It is how libertarians can feel all warm and fuzzy inside while working to eliminate public schools and defund Social Security and Medicare. If more liberals understood this, free market fundamentalism could be attacked more easily...but that's another story.

I just remember that when I embraced libertarian ideas for the first time, what I perceived as it's logical consistency really helped to radicalize me -- the world started to make sense, even if it was, as I came to understand later, an extremely distorted worldview. From my libertarian readings, I learned basic techniques for dissecting an issue or policy, some of which today I still find useful. Also, my enthusiasm for the libertarian alternative stimulated in me a curiosity about history, economics, law, etc. that, even though I was just a dilettante in those subjects at the time, made me feel like I really understood the world and could even carry on an intelligent conversation about the issues of the day.

Embracing My Paradigm

But how could I have held on to such a radical political ideology, especially in the face of competing ideas and newly acquired knowledge, in the years after my "conversion"?  It was actually pretty easy. I was young and ignorant. In my 20's, I had not been exposed to knowledge that would have contradicted my libertarian beliefs (I didn't go to college for my degrees in history and atmospheric science until I was in my 30's).  And once I had my ideology kind of set in my mind, it acted as something of a filter, blocking any serious challenges to my free market fundamentalist beliefs. As with most ideologues, if the facts didn't fit my ideology, I just threw out the facts, or simply ignored the inconvenient ones entirely.  

I realized I had censored myself from alternative, nonlibertarian ideas especially after I was required to read, while in college in the 1980s, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Kuhn described how ideas and viewpoints coalesced to become what he called a paradigm.   A paradigm is one way the human mind handles inadequate knowledge.   None of us can know everything.  In science, by necessity, researchers will be guided by a dominant worldview, or paradigm, that suggests appropriate research paths to follow while, importantly, allowing scientists to ignore facts or new knowledge that may contradict the paradigm they have come to embrace.  A light bulb went on in my head. I realized then that my libertarianism was, like most other highly doctrinaire political philosophies, a paradigm and thus a worldview that also blinded me to alternative viewpoints and explanations...but I get ahead of myself.

The Joy of Knowing "The Truth"

For me, personally, my new libertarian paradigm was exhilarating.  In the 60's and early 70's, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was curious but I could not make much sense of anything.   Libertarianism changed all that.  From the New Left foreign policy revisionists to the Austrian school of economics, I found the readings fascinating. Libertarian writers helped me believe I was acquiring an understanding of how the world worked. Between Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate at one end and the New Left Marxists on the other, libertarianism presented to me a wonderful third alternative. Suddenly I found myself learning with gusto all different sorts of obscure things, such as the effects of the National Flood Insurance Program on housing construction in hurricane-prone areas, or the history of drug prohibition in the United States, or Native American tribes as successful examples of political anarchism -- topics I would never have explored without the fire of libertarian ideas to motivate me.  But of course, when I did tackle a topic, at least in the early days of my conversion, I tended to read  libertarian writers which only, of course, reinforced my paradigm.

Attaching myself to a rigid political philosophy helped give me, however misguided, a sense of purpose.  In this I probably have much in common with many who find themselves a cause to work towards to give their lives meaning.  There is nothing wrong, of course, with working for a cause, except to the extent that you use pride in your work to cover over your own fears and perceived inadequacies. Suddenly, as a libertarian, I "knew" something more than most people.  I had attained special knowledge.  I had my finger on the pulse of the world.  In the worst cases of ideological radicalism, some people will do terrible things “for the cause,” as if preserving their sense of self and their allegiance to their doctrine are more important than the people they are hurting.  When I joined the Libertarian Party in 1977, we weren’t hurting anyone, as far as I could tell.  But I could still hold a smug assurance that I knew basic economics, correct political philosophy, and had a good understanding of history, even though in all of these subjects my understanding was at the most basic, elementary level. Most importantly to me, I had the correct libertarian ethics upon which to judge a particular policy as right or wrong. The world began to make sense, and that felt empowering.

Tool of the Kochtopus

On top of it all, and something which I never dreamed would be so effective but has had great consequences for the politics of today (liberals take note), my knowledge and radicalization was being subsidized in large part by the billionaires Charles and David Koch. The Libertarian Party where I worked in the late '70's was heavily funded by the Kochs. David Koch was the Libertarian Party's Vice-Presidential candidate in 1980 so he could personally bankroll the Clark campaign (where I was employed as a researcher), getting around election law restrictions at the time. I studiously devoured Libertarian Review, Inquiry, Reason , the newsletter of the Council for a Competitive Economy (which later became the Competitive Enterprise Institute), and publications of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, which were also all heavily funded by, you guessed it, the Kochs. I got my first degree (in history) in 1986 from George Mason University, where the Kochs had just donated $30 million to set up a radical capitalist economics department on a campus strategically located near Washington, D.C. I remember a poster on a wall of the old LP office which celebrated "the New Paradigm." At the time, I only partially understood what it meant, but clearly the Kochs, even way back then, knew exactly what they were doing. They were working to build the intellectual foundation for a radical capitalist political revolution.

So in my own small way, I became a grunt helping to lay the foundations for America's growing plutocracy. My apologies. Understand, there were many good and valuable relationships I had, experiences and knowledge I acquired, while being a "professional libertarian" that I appreciate and will always be very thankful for. But as someone still very interested in political freedom, I regret the years I wasted unintentionally helping, in my own small way, to erode democracy, all while ignoring other political/economic viewpoints that offer so much for our country and planet.  

Losing Faith

Radicalism, I suppose of any sort, can carry a kind of momentum in your soul that can last decades. It did for me. The first cracks in my free market fundamentalist beliefs began while pursuing my degree in history at George Mason. But even then it was a slow and incremental process. I found myself reading communitarian anarchists like Ursula Le Guin and pouring through the history of Native American tribes as a kind of libertarian alternative to capitalism. My wife at the time, Cynthia, who I had met while working at the Libertarian Party, combined a progressive Christianity with her anti-statism which also softened for me some of the harder hyper-individualistic edges of strict libertarianism. The problem for me was how to reconcile environmental problems (I couldn't totally buy the pro-privatization arguments) along with the plight of people suffering from poverty, racism, and simple bad luck, with libertarianism's capitalist contempt for the regulatory welfare state. Without reconciliation, I muddled along in my libertarian political beliefs while pursuing Life. Science for me seemed refreshingly unmuddled, and had long been a close competitor with political philosophy for my attention. So, having my fill of politics in Washington, we packed our bags and headed out to Jayhawk country -- Lawrence, Kansas -- for some fresher air and so I could pursue a career in one of my favorite sciences - meteorology.

My disenchantment with the libertarian movement really didn't start developing in a big way until Cynthia and I worked closely with an antiwar group at the University of Kansas opposing the first Persian Gulf War. The antiwar activists, mostly leftists, were intellectually challenging and a joy to work with. I also got an appreciation for communitarian approaches to property, along with an awareness of the historically vicious side to the private property ethic, while doing a series on the Native American tribes of northeast Kanas for KTKA, the Topeka television station I worked for. But even then, through my new career as a broadcast meteorologist in Kansas and Arkansas in the 1990s, I still largely held on to an only mildly-watered-down free market radicalism. That was finally killed by the worse American president in my living memory George W. Bush.  

In Palm Beach County, Florida -- the absolute epicenter of the 2000 Presidential election controversy -- I found myself wasting, absolutely wasting, my vote on the Libertarian Party's candidate for President. Cynthia and I had just moved to Boynton Beach that summer so she could pursue her career as a history professor at a nearby university. So there I was in November 2000 using what was to become the infamous "hanging chad" ballot to play my own small part in helping the Supreme Court send George W. Bush to the White House.  

To those Bernie Sanders supporters foolishly vowing that they will not cast a vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination, let this be a warning to you. My vote really did count in that election in Florida, but instead of voting for Al Gore, who would have made a far better president, I just threw it away, rationalizing to myself that there was no essential difference between Gore and Bush. On the campaign trail, George W. Bush was the "compassionate conservative;" he spoke Spanish to hispanic audiences and advocated immigration reform, and he said he was against "nation building," implying a less interventionist foreign policy. While I still shake my head in disbelief at my thinking back then, given what I know now, at the time I regarded Al Gore and George Bush as tweedle dee and tweedle dum. So, feeling somewhat noble even in my then highly diluted libertarian principles, I punched the chad at the ballot booth for the Libertarian candidate one last time, and the rest is history. 

The Bush administration was a national disaster - launching an unnecessary war-of-choice in Iraq, approving the wide-spread use of torture, cutting taxes while radically increasing spending to end any hopes of balancing the budget, installing anti-regulation "regulators" in the SEC and then watching the economy begin to crash - a total mess, all courtesy of an avowedly pro-free market conservative administration.

Then what followed was almost worse - the mightily obnoxious anti-government conservative revolution that rose to power in the Bush administration's wake. The intellectuals and activists of this new American "Tea Party" thoroughly embraced a very libertarian free market fundamentalism and hostility towards government, combined with a barely disguised racism and terror of feminism. I could not in good conscience align myself with the likes of Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter. And now the libertarian Kochs were openly bankrolling this new radicalized conservative movement, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to any candidates who supported their anti-government doctrine. 

It was during the disaster of the George W. Bush administration that I realized that I finally had to choose between fighting for democracy and good government on one hand or continuing to hold on to what was left of my radical never-worked-in-the-real-world free market ideology on the other. I chose democracy. How could I not? I became a proud liberal, but not at all a doctrinaire one. Ideology is for people with closed minds. Humility is the best temperament to cultivate learning. I volunteered in Florida for John Kerry in 2004 and, after moving back to Maryland, knocked on doors for Barack Obama in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia during his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. I have tried through letters-to-the-editor and occasional radio call-ins to make liberals and independents aware of the huge libertarian contribution to today's radical conservative movement and the danger that free market fundamentalism poses to our country. 

This blog is a part of my efforts to make others realize that the Kochs and the libertarian movement in general must be especially fought against in the realm of ideas. For the Kochs, It's not just about profits but about ideology, as Jane Mayer's excellent new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right finally makes abundantly clear. The tide I think is beginning to turn. It's very possible that the influence of radical capitalist doctrine has peaked in American politics. But what rough beast have the Kochs and the libertarian movement helped to create in its wake? We shall see. In the meantime, defenders of liberal democracy need to stand tall and be proud of what they have accomplished thus far. There should be no resigned slouching towards an American dystopia. We should align with libertarians on issues of civil liberties, immigration, and foreign policy where we can agree. But, like the billionaires who funded the radical free market movement with such effectiveness, democracy advocates have to be similarly smart, organized, and confident. Democracy must be appreciated and cherished like a new garden which must be cultivated and weeded every generation. The best America could ever be, I believe, is still very much a future that can be won. I hope you enjoy this blog, my latest reach for absolution.