The Death of Libertarianism

What is libertarianism?

Stephen Landsburg complains that Arizona law protecting religious people from being forced to enthusiastically support and endorse gay marriage is unlibertarian.

Bryan Caplan, a libertarian and theoretically an anarcho capitalist, wants the Mexican underclass moved here to live on welfare, crime, the production of anchor babies, and voting Democrat.

Esr recently used exterminationist rhetoric against “racists”. I doubt he knows what “racist” means, but those that put that exterminationist rhetoric into action will know that “racist” is simply a hostile word for white.

As the Overton Window moves ever leftwards, there is no more room for anti statism, and so libertarians, seeking to remain inside the Overton Window, have abandoned their anti statism, becoming just another variant of progressive, thus totalitarian statist.

If genuinely libertarian or anarcho capitalist, then have to abandon the Overton Window, whereupon anarcho capitalism becomes feudalism, and you are a reactionary.

(If we actually had anarcho capitalism, we would not have borders, but we would not have welfare either, and likely we would have the death penalty for most crimes typical of the underclass, and serfdom or slavery for vagrants and sturdy beggars. Let us introduce the death penalty for everything, abolish voting, at least for the poor and the stupid, and reintroduce serfdom or some similar way of getting people disinclined to work out of circulation, and then we can open the borders.)

Landsburg argues against allowing anyone to refuse to embrace Gay Marriage supposedly because he does not want to privilege the religious. I seem to recall that the first amendment privileges the religious and the owners of presses, so obviously that needs to go also – and in fact it already has.

Most “libertarians” have, as libertarianism comes close to being illegal, abandoned libertarianism. It is now an entirely dead doctrine.

Originally libertarianism was “classic liberalism”, an alliance between economists, and the religious left, the descendents of the puritans well on the way to becoming unitarians.

The economists assumed that slaves were homo economicus, economically rational man. Therefore, if the slaves were freed, they would be able to make the same deal with the former slave owners, doing the same work as before, only for better pay, and without whips or chains. Of course this did not eventuate. The great majority of the former slaves could not make the same deal, because they could not be trusted to do the same work, and so the former slaves were economically far worse off, and a lot of them died, making worse decisions for themselves than their former owners had made for them. The economists could have argued that the outcome was still better than slavery, but that is not the argument that they made, nor the outcome that they expected. Rather, they just ignored the discrepancy. Homo economicus is a reasonably good approximation for males of IQ 105 and above, particularly white males of IQ 105 and above, thus a reasonably accurate approximation for businessmen, for the people who make the economy tick, thus a reasonably good approximation for the economy. It is a poor approximation for most people, and a very poor approximation for most black people.

As the religious part of the alliance moved ever left, the economists split off, becoming libertarians. As the religious part continued to move ever leftwards, the Overton Window ceased to permit libertarians. And so, libertarians have ceased to be. If you used to be a libertarian, you can become a progressive, or a reactionary.