5. Selflessness is vile. From libertarian avatar and prophet Ayn Rand: "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves."
Aid workers. Doctors Without Borders. Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. Mother Teresa. In this libertarian view, all of them are "parasites" who make parasites of those they serve -- because, of course, the free market would eventually eliminate poverty. (Never mind the millions who would starve in the meantime.)
Not only are these good people "parasites" in this libertarian view, they are deliberately parasitical ("in motive"). They lack the nobility of character needed to act purely out of self-interest, like the murderer Ayn Rand so admired. As Mark Ames reported in 2012, Rand,
"...became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burn... Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation... on him."
Rand described the child-killer as a "genuinely beautiful soul." But that aid worker sweating in the Darfur heat, spooning food into a skeletal child's mouth? Despicable.
This is not fringe libertarianism. Ayn Rand is its heart and soul.
6. Democracy is unacceptable, especially since we began feeding poor people and allowing women to vote. This isn't a fringe idea, but one that was proclaimed in a prominent libertarian outlet by one of the movement's leading funders:
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women -- two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians -- have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.
"In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one's horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms -- from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ...social democracy."
Translation: Things have gone to hell with all those black and brown poor people around, especially with all those weak-willed women feeling sorry for them and voting to feed them. This isn't your lunatic uncle talking. These are the words of Peter Thiel, PayPal billionaire and leading libertarian, not spoken in a drunken rage at Thanksgiving dinner, but published in Cato Unbound, perhaps the nation's leading libertarian outlet.
Thiel clearly felt the heat on this one, since he was forced to append a statement at the end saying, "It would be absurd to suggest that women's votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us," adding: "While I don't think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
Thiel's prescription? "Escape" democracy by using technology to create spaces where the democratic process cannot go. His ideas include ocean colonization, or "seasteading"; outer space; and inevitably, "cyberspace."
Unfortunately for the libertarian ethos, cyberspace is a government creation. The Internet, and the core technology which enables us to access it, were both created at government expense using government resources. But Thiel's dream, the libertarian dream, is one in which publicly created tools, which should rightly be considered the modern "commons," are usurped by a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals for their own undemocratic and noncompetitive purposes.
7. We can replace death with libertarianism. If they can't bend us to their will in this lifetime, they'll achieve the goal by other means. Thiel begins his Cato essay this way:
"I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual."
That's right. The new libertarian ideology insists that private entrepreneurs will conquer death. Then they'll force us to bend to their will in the new dominion of eternal life, whether in biochemically preserved flesh or as uploaded spirits in a digital netherworld. Either way, their freedom won't be ours. Based on their past behavior, they'll "monetize" our afterlife with advertising and by manipulating our artificial-life experiences.
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