Part 2, as promised, although I did change the opening epigram to something more appropriate. Judith Ayers and Barbara Sostatia said it best, "Despite the libertarian rhetoric of individualism, we are all intricately connected, and have been given the opportunity to craft our communities and government together."

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Edmund Burke 1771--Joshua Reynolds by National Portrait Gallery London (Public Domain)

Libertarianism in Its Destructive Phase: Or Why Responsibility for Yourself Just Isn't Enough, Part 2

By Richard Girard

"All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803--82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. The Conduct of Life, "Fate" (1860).

The Anarchist in All of Us

George Bernard Shaw was correct in that statement I quoted earlier: the ordinary man is at heart an anarchist. Much of Libertarianism's allure for so many Americans is the anarchist and minarchist aspects of most Libertarian philosophies. In too many cases, some of the best known and most vocal proponents of libertarianism, fit the model put forth by psychiatrist Donald Black in his book Bad Boys, Bad Men, Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy) , (Oxford Press, 2013), "They rebel against every type of regulation and expectation, seemingly oblivious to the value of living within societies boundaries. Despite all sanctions, parental punishment, ostracism, failure, or jail, they remain stuck in a rut of bad behavior." Except--as clinical psychologist and Harvard Professor Martha Stout pointed out in her 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door-- the sociopaths who have learned to play the game so well that they have learned to appear "normal." These individuals are often highly successful in occupations--such as Wall Street financier--where ruthlessness, and a lack of empathy for those they "step on" on their way up the corporate ladder, is at a premium.

To me, the Libertarian concept of "freedom of association" appears to be an excuse for libertarians to indulge themselves in "freedom from association." I believe it is--for many right-wing libertarians--nothing more than a smoke screen to justify the Libertarian's "right" to avoid having to deal with those against whom he is prejudiced, including those he considers his social, economic, intellectual, or racial inferior. Freedom of association also allows the libertarian to avoid those individuals and situations that might represent a serious challenge to their existing worldview. Because of this, we are left with the society described by British author and critic John Berger in "The Soul and the Operator," ( Expressen , Stockholm; March 19, 1990; reprinted in Keeping a Rendezvous , 1992), "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied " but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing."

Right-wing Libertarians, and many modern conservatives, do not like to be reminded that there--except for a little luck and the grace of God--they might be sitting next to that homeless person, begging for change, because of a drug, alcohol, or mental health issue. Nor do they wish to consider the possibility that because of bankruptcy due to loss of a job, or some serious illness not fully covered by their health insurance, they might be the one stuck at a bus stop with a person going to work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds, hoping that the HR person at work can help them with the paperwork to get their child into their state's CHIP program. The fortunate few, whose life has never come up "boxcars," i.e., bottomed out, as one friend of mine described it, do everything they can to avoid being reminded that the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression--where at one point 23% of the American population was unemployed or underemployed--was caused by the machinations of a disjointed cabal of America's business and financial leaders, attempting to increase their already vast wealth and power. (See Matt Taibbi's superb 2011 Rolling Stone articles "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" and "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes," for more on the machinations that nearly destroyed the World's economy.)

An Invalid Assumption Cannot Form the Moral Basis for a Political System

Libertarianism relies on self-interest as the moral basis for their system. The inherent flaw with self-interest as the moral basis for any system is this: you cannot love my freedom and liberties as much as I do, and in a system based on self-interest, you will always place your own interest, freedom, and liberties ahead of, not equal to, my own. Because self-interest will not recognize duties to others unless they have been specifically agreed to in advance, the selfish individual doesn't believe he has a duty to protect others' freedom and liberties with the same force and diligence that he protects his own. Thus, when it is difficult, inconvenient, or not in the short-term best interest of the individual operating out of self-interest to help protect a neighbor's freedom and liberties (much less when it involves a stranger); they will stay at home, or perhaps even join in oppressing their neighbor in the name of some short-term gain for themselves.

Thomas Jefferson, in an 1814 letter to Thomas Law that I've often referred to before, stated what was wrong with a system of morality based on self-interest with an undeniable moral axiom. The opinion he expresses in this statement corresponds exactly with my own: "Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; Volume 14, page 140; 1904.) We can be responsible for ourselves; we cannot have a duty to ourselves; because duty involves not only our own desires, but in acquiescing to the wishes of others. This is the hypocrisy inherent in Margaret Thatcher's statement: even for the betrayal of the family, duty to the family must first exist; for treason to exist against the nation-state, duty must also exist. You cannot, per se, betray yourself, you can only violate whatever responsibility you believe you have for yourself.

G.K Chesterton was correct (in The Man Who Was Thursday, chapter 11), "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all." Government means rules, in the form of laws and regulations, and the possibility of prison or other punishment. No wonder so many rich people on the far right want less government: they might actually have to pay for their immoral actions; their crimes against humanity itself.

Judith Ayers and Barbara Sostatia wrote a fascinating article titled " What Would Libertarianism Look Like, If It Wasn't Just White People , " for policymic.com, which was picked up by the Associated Press. The final four paragraphs of this article, I find of special interest, because I believe it explains why libertarianism has never, and can never, be adopted as a political system for any large human socio-economic political entity; because as it is promulgated today, libertarianism offers nothing but platitudes for the poor, the working class, or minorities, and little for the middle class:

"When libertarians do reach out to minorities, they often do so with overtones of a white savior complex, claiming that minorities simply need to hear the 'saving gospel' of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, or read more Murray Rothbard in order to see the ills of their ways. This infantilizes minorities ('If they could just see that the state isn't trying to help them!'), and treats minority groups as a 'problem' that must be addressed, rather than as groups of people with agency, goals, perceptions, and purposes of their own. Minorities are not interested in hearing someone's one-size-fits-all gospel. Maybe libertarians should try talking, and listening, to the individuals that they're so intent on 'helping.'

Within today's libertarianism, topics like racism and classism often take the back burner, or are ignored entirely. Issues of inequality and poverty, solitary confinement and prison reform, women's rights, queer and trans* abuse, the dissolution and decline of the family, and drugs and crime within minority communities are often met with hostility. Because there is no conversation between most libertarians regarding these subjects, the movement effectively ignores the social issues confronting many minorities, renders those individuals voiceless, and excludes them entirely.

Despite the libertarian rhetoric of individualism, we are all intricately connected, and have been given the opportunity to craft our communities and government together. [Emphasis added by this article's author.] But we will only be able to do so effectively, judiciously, and peacefully if we listen to marginalized individuals, and consider their unique perspectives. Black communities, and other communities of color, have long traditions of struggling for freedom. Those traditions, when acknowledged by and combined with libertarianism, could create an empowering and radical message.

A true, ideological, libertarian renaissance can, and will only, happen if we learn to listen to those who have lived under government occupation: those who live in poverty, are isolated, and lack access to resources; those who don't have health insurance; those who have suffered in solitary confinement; those who have undergone the destruction of their families, identity, and culture; those of different sexual identities; those who are victims of the drug war, political prisoners, sex workers, domestic workers, or undocumented persons. Libertarians need to talk, and listen to, the survivors, the "others," the voiceless and the ignored."

A System of Selfish Indifference to One's Neighbor

George Moibrot's wrote an article for the December 19, 2011 issue of Great Britain's The Guardian/UK newspaper, "This Bastardized Libertarianism Makes Freedom an Instrument of Oppression," that expresses my point concisely. Mr. Moibrot states the real purpose of the modern Libertarian movement--funded by reactionaries like David Koch, who was the Libertarian Party's candidate for Vice-President in 1976--in a very short and concise manner, "Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardized, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned 'freedom' into an instrument of oppression."

When you think about it, it should not surprise us that the reactionaries of the Tea Party have embraced capitalist libertarianism, and it's even more hideous sister, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, with so much fervor. To quote from Moibrot again (with my own amplification in brackets), " They speak " as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even--among the gun nuts--to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights [comparable to Jefferson's "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness]. They characterize any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow. "

"The freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow." In other words, the difference in the degree of protection of the liberty and rights under the law enjoyed by the "big fish," and the "little fish;" those who are wealthy, and those who are not. They are very different, and have been since our Constitution was adopted in 1789. and even a conservative Chief Justice like John Marshall wrote of this problem peripherally in Marbury v. Madison . (See my February 1, 2011 OpEdNews article " Crime and Punishment ," for more on Chief Justice Marshall and our two-tier justice system.) But only Chief Justice Earl Warren's Supreme Court has ever taken substantial judicial action against this iniquity driven system, with decisions including Brown v. The Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, and Miranda v. Arizona .

Not a Collection of Individuals, or Individuals Who Are Collected

In his 1994 book, Jihad Vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy, Benjamin R. Barber wrote of what he viewed as the great conflict that faced the World in the Twenty-first Century. Jihad--by which Barber meant far more than just its Islamic definition: any system with an insular, nationalistic or even tribal mind-set, attempting to preserve what its proponents perceive as the foundations of a rich cultural past, including it's fundamentalist religious beliefs; against McWorld--an expansionist, homogenous, transnational cultural system with no depth of character, pushed hither and yon solely by the promise of dollars that can be made in its exploitation. Jihad's attempt to preserve the past is running head-on into an ever-changing world around it. What is most interesting to me is that it is Jihad which speaks most clearly to the need of collective values to protect the individual members of society, while publicly McWorld exalts the individual at the expense of the collective, and the society required to maintain McWorld's very existence, as a whole.

A closer examination of the two systems show that both are simply cover for the creation of profound tyrannies. Jihad exalts the collective (in one form or another), and then makes monuments of their individual leaders: living, like Osama bin Laden, and Kim Jong Udon; or dead, like Jesus of Nazareth or Mohammed. This reduces the collective to a subservient appendage of that leader, or his representative, and that individual's "vision." Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin occupied such exalted positions in the then Soviet Union, and together with Mao and Stalin, provided a template for future dictators.

McWorld superficially exalts the individual, and then creates a system where most individuals are crushed beneath the weight of the hierarchical bureaucracy of the corporation and its governmental lackeys. Only if you are fortunate enough to find the right mentor to protect you as you rise through the ranks, do you become anything other than a faceless cog being ground down by the corporate machine. The template for this system was provided by the England of Charles Dickens, the France of Emil Zola, and Gilded Age America.

A nation that is a collective of undifferentiated individuals, or individuals in an undifferentiated collection, are not our only choices. The world of Jihad, which permits children to wear suicide bomb vests, devalues half of our world's population as a matter of course, and kills abortion providers in their place of worship; or McWorld, which has no underlying foundation for its kaleidoscope of values, fills our heads with images rather than knowledge, and measures the worth of any human being solely by their wealth; are not our sole alternatives. There is I believe a third way, a middle way, that celebrates our past while preparing for our future; which understands the value of the individual while strengthening society as a whole.

Mikhail Bakunin wrote in God and the State (1871), "I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation." How can you have freedom without some concomitant degree of equality, especially equality of opportunity? If I am left without choice, if my only option is mere survival: with no realistic chance for growth as a human being in any realistic mental, physical, spiritual, or emotional sense; if I lack any real opportunity to live my life and pursue happiness as I see fit; then why should I allow such an oppressive system to continue to dominate my life?

Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, made an observation that is similar to Bakunin's, "What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition, Volume 7, page 455; 1904.)

Avarice as Addiction and Killer of Morality

I asked in my September 2, 2009 OpEdNews article "How Much is Enough," who the World belongs to? Eighty-five years ago Bertrand Russell gave the answer that the right-wing libertarians and laissez-faire corporate plutocrats are certain to give. Professor Russell, in his essay "Freedom in Society" (Sceptical Essays, 1928) stated the following, "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate." In other words, the world is theirs, they have the bills of sale to prove it, and the armed might to back it up, so be glad we do not call you the serfs that you are, you f*cking peasants. We will continue to grow our businesses, because that is the way that we have always done it, and always will do it.

But, unlimited, continuous growth is the moral philosophy of a cancer, as radio talk show host and author Thom Hartmann has pointed out over and over again. Your freedom to do as you will ends at my nose, or any other distance that might realistically affect me in an adverse way in my life. This includes expanding or otherwise running your business. Profit alone cannot be the final arbiter of a business's policies. You must balance your desire for profit with the needs of not only our community, but the rest of humanity, in both the short and the long term. This is what Kenneth Lux was pointing out in his book, Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality. And as Bertrand Russell pointed out above, restraining their desire for riches is the last thing that the wealthy and powerful, as a class, wish to do.

But it is also the fear that they--the privileged few--might actually be forced to once again become responsible citizens within the greater reality of our nation, and the commonwealth that every citizen should enjoy. As Edmund Burke stated in his A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich." Mr. Burke saw no middle class: only exploiter and exploited." In my experience, they who speak most loudly of personal responsibility are those who go furthest out of their way to avoid responsibility to their community and for their fellow man. I believe that the reason so many Libertarians want little or no government is that they believe their best chance of achieving their idea of success--great wealth--is most easily attained if there are no rules to hinder them. They do not realize that most of those rules have been placed at the behest of the very individuals they are attempting to emulate, just to prevent such an occurrence.

Avoiding Responsibility for One's Government

Libertarianism is also an excuse for the selfish and lazy to not participate in their government, something that is every citizen's duty in the constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic--or representative democracy--that we are supposed to have in the United States of America. Many of the problems this nation faces today could have been fixed easily thirty years ago, without the in-fighting that has caused Congress to grind to a halt today. Too many libertarians, in my experience, want a minimalist government that operates on its own, without any work by them, so they can concentrate on living their lives without the duties owed to his fellow citizens. They think that leaving the government starved for cash is all that is required to prevent it from becoming dangerous.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In many third world countries, a starving the bureaucracy of money has been used over the years to keep government weak and ineffectual. This leads to rampant corruption, and bribery and extortion replace even any pretense of good government. As John Jay Chapman wrote in 1898 (Practical Agitation, chapter 2), "Good government is the outcome of private virtue." Without a reward for virtue, corruption will replace any pretense of good government.

The Middle-class Answer

What I see as the ultimate fault of the Libertarian philosophy, and why it can never work as a political/economic system is this: it would require Madison's angels (The Federalist Papers, No. 51) to function at all, and angels incapable of being tempted and falling from heaven when presented with the opportunity to gain power or position over their fellow angels, or become jealous of God or humanity, in order to function at all. In other words, it requires what has, and never can exist. Avarice, whether it is a desire for power or a desire for money, is a hunger which once whetted, can never be satisfied.

A Libertarian system, in any form, would require a dominant and well educated middle-class to have any hope of working at all. As I have been saying since my February 15, 2011 OpEdNews article " The Ghost of Ancient Hellas ," I believe--like Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt--that a constitutionally limited government, dominated by a strong and informed middle-class, is still the best and most secure form of government available to us today.

The wealthy dislike the middle-class, because that class can say "no' to them if it is large enough, strong enough, and aware of what is going on. They also dislike the middle-class because the middle-class, if it is aware at all of world history, knows instinctively that if it is going to remain strong and vibrant, wealth requires a more even distribution among a nation's population. When the top one percent is receiving only 8-13 percent of the national income, and not the nearly 24 percent that it is "earning" today, our representative democracy is safe from the outrageous, predatory acts of an oligarchic elite. An informed middle-class knows that a concentration of power, whether economic, social, political, or some combination of the three, is the greatest danger that any republic faces, not an external enemy, no matter how powerful or cunning. (Read the original February 7, 2011 Mother Jones article, " It's the Inequality, Stupid ," or watch the YouTube video , for more on how extreme income inequality has become in the United States, as CEO's and corporate officers have ridden the ever increasing productivity of their workers to unimaginable amounts of wealth, while refusing to include their workers in any of the resulting prosperity.)

Libertarians would also do well to learn to not dismiss Karl Marx out of hand. While his solution to the inherent ills of capitalism were generally wrong, his observations on the grievous faults of capitalism, especially regarding the exploitation of workers under an unregulated capitalist system, are more often right than they are wrong. Marx's description of the great fault of the capitalist, as the capitalist falls prey to dehumanizing those who work for them--looking at human beings as replaceable cogs in his money-making machine, rather than individuals who have value in their own right--was succinctly stated in Volume 3 of Das Kapital (p. 58), "Yet the capitalist views economy of his constant capital as a condition wholly independent of, and entirely alien to, his labourers."

To almost all of the truly wealthy today (just as one hundred-years ago) -- that one-tenth of one percent of the population whose riches are measured not in millions, but in tens of millions of dollars or more--you and I are nothing more than a means to an end, and are unworthy of being included in the capitalist's prosperity that we are responsible for. As I have stated before: it is this moment when the wealthy turn those who work for them from human beings into things, that the first great step towards the evils of dehumanization and exploitation of our fellow human beings begins.

To quote Jefferson, " How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object--the happiness of man--to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests. " (Letter to Ellen W. Coolidge, 1825; The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 18, page 341; 1904.) I am tired of being exploited by a tiny minority who place wealth and property above liberty and humankind.

Let us not dwell upon our political differences, but rather concentrate on those areas where we are in agreement. And that begins with the belief that our nation is worth our time and effort to save.

Together, we can make the difference.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'