Bruce T. Boccardy for BuzzFlash: Libertarianism Is an Existential Threat to Democracy, Including the Pandemic and the Working Class Family
Libertarianism is an obstacle to the public good (michael_swan)
September 23, 2021
By Bruce T. Boccardy
COVID-19 or Libertarianism
The carnage brought to the American working middle class and working class by the COVID-19 variants is a trauma to the nation.
More troubling is the number of people unnecessarily passing away from the COVID-19 virus due to the utter political cynicism and neglect of the Trump administration.
In February 2021 the Lancet Commission reported that 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths could have been averted were it not for the Trump administration’s mishandling of the public health crisis.
Moreover, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reported in April 2021 the increasing number of infected people having serious long-term effects from the virus.
As dreadful as the numbers are with COVID-19 blazing through the unvaccinated, the underlying ideology that drives our economic model is the real existential threat to the lives of working Americans.
That ideology is "Libertarianism." Its proponents assert there are several variations on their spectrum. However, there are basic principles on which libertarians agree.
Development
Libertarianism developed in the late 19th century in Europe and became known as the Austrian School. Today, it is a tiny cabal of economists who reject scientific methods used by conventional economists. For a comprehensive analysis of libertarianism, activist Michael Huben’s website is the gold standard.
Credible academic institutions largely do not take libertarian views seriously. The school does not exist on its scholarly merits, but is heavily bankrolled by oligarchs and large corporations of the American controlling class. Their primary interest is keeping economic power and privilege.
Media and organizations funded by oligarchs promote libertarianism in every state today.
Principles
Libertarians assert that a government must limit its activities in society to a single political principle:
No government is required beyond an army, a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. Ideas emanate from that guiding principle which informs the libertarian belief system.
This view appears harmless on the surface if not an oversimplification of government overreach.
Moreover, economists Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein completely punctured that myth in a June 2021 essay in the Boston Review. They documented heavy government intervention that saved the economy from a collapse forty years ago and continues today.
Ayn Rand
The development of libertarianism is disturbing no matter how much incoherent rhetoric is disseminated to justify it.
The ideological force behind contemporary libertarianism was an erudite woman named Ayn Rand. Rand was an immigrant from the then Soviet Union who arrived in the United States in 1926.
She authored several books that would later become the foundation of her political philosophy-"objectivism."
The foundation of objectivism asserts that the individual can discern existing truth and moral values by relentlessly and shamelessly pursuing self-interest. If everyone acted separately and independently with complete and utter selfishness, society would actually benefit.
The self-indulgence and narcissism in Rand's persona journals reveal a tendency that is far more disturbing.
Michael Prescott, New York Times and USA Today best-selling author is a former libertarian acolyte. He wrote about his time in the libertarian movement and Rand's predispositions that appeared in her personal journals.
In those journals Rand's philosophy was in part forged by a serial murderer named William Edward Hickman.
In 1927, Hickman kidnapped a 12-year-old girl and attempted to collect a ransom from her father, a prominent Los Angeles Banker. The bloody details of the slaughter, mutilation and dismembering of the child by Hickman are grotesque.
However, Rand had a different view of Hickman. She saw him as a living embodiment of the statement :
“What is good for me, is right.”
She wrote that Hickman was:
“The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology that I have ever heard.”
Rand modeled another character in a novel she was planning after Hickman. That character, she wrote in another journal entry:
“…is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness, resulting from the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.”
Rand’s words might have been the hyperbolic expressions of a writer gathering her thoughts to eventually create a complex character with variable personality traits.
This is not the case. Prescott wrote that Rand’s early notes for “The Fountainhead” asserted that:
“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
Again in her journals, she described the main character in the same novel:
“He has learned long ago, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world.”
In the original version of her first novel, “We the Living” Rand writes :
“What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned underfoot for those who deserve it?”
Rand’s personal journals are replete with admiration for characters who would be diagnosed as sociopathic or psychopathic even with the benefits of literary license.
It is from this amoral quagmire that modern libertarians have emerged. Libertarians promote the virtues of an economic model that demands government not interfere with its “freedoms” and ostensible advantages for society.
The concern must be with the results of such a model. Libertarians decry the “interference” of government actions in their idealized model, much like they romanticize the individuals who care nothing about social consequences. For them, private profit is supreme and as Rand asserted in her journal above:
“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
Modern Libertarianism
In September, 2013, Reporter Mark Ames documented that in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries. It might bolster profits from the American public. Pesky regulations that protect the public are anathema to Libertarians.
The Libertarian Party wrapped itself in the language of “freedom” which is a beguiling notion until a context is provided. Then, it gets a little messy and reveals the group that really benefits from its grandiose rhetoric.
The oligarchs and corporations in the controlling economic class recognized that the Libertarian Party could work to their advantage if they could develop a voter base. This base had to be malleable enough to approve of the values promoted by a party based on extreme privatization.
Numerous historical studies prove privatization hurts working people with results of higher costs and lower quality of work; however, privatization keeps popping up like a canker that won’t heal. Its appeal is worshiping the rugged individual that Rand glorified.
Libertarians claim the periodic business cycles that plague our economic model and burden working people were not endemic to that model; rather, the ineptitude and inefficiency of government was to blame. This transparent scapegoating was duly spread by well-funded conservative media outlets and libertarian think tanks.
It was one of the biggest cons perpetrated on working people in our economic history. It still is.
There is an instructive example of the libertarian con adopted by a small town in New Hampshire in 2004.
Libertarian Economic Model Scorecard
A review of recent numbers affecting working people helps to understand the results of our economic model that libertarians rabidly extol.
Wages/Salaries
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases monthly and yearly reports on wages and salaries, and employment.
The Ludwig Institute for Shared Prosperity (LISEP) is a non-profit organization dedicated to reporting on the economic conditions of working people. They released a report in March 2021 that showed wages in America have been stagnant for the last 20 years including appalling racial disparities.
Two Democratic representatives wrote an essay on Aug. 16 titled “America’s Workers are Now in the Driver’s Seat.” Their view of how our economic model is working was notably truncated. The representatives asserted that Americans were enjoying the benefits of significant wage increases.
The numbers cited were totally without context. An increase in wages that is obliterated by inflation is no increase.
For example, the BLS reported in August 2021 that real wages declined cumulatively 1.2 percent from July 2020 to July 2021.
The BLS reported also in August 2021 that prices increased in the same time period 5.4 percent.
These numbers demonstrated that wages for most people in that time frame declined.
Astonishingly, the essay claimed that August 2021 was a historical achievement in wage increases for restaurant and grocery employees.
There are problems with this cheery view. $15.00 an hour is an improvement for grocery and restaurant employees who have been underpaid for decades. Whether or not those increases will remain is questionable. Restaurants operate on paper-thin profit margins and traditionally have relied on low-paid temporary labor of students or it being the second job of a family member.
Also, it doesn’t address what $15.00 an hour purchases for living conditions.
A cost-of-living calculation is more accurate in reporting wage or salary status of working people.
Family Budget
The Economic Policy Institute created an accurate Family Budget calculator. The calculator reports the economic requirements for families or individuals to maintain a “modest” lifestyle with the basics. The budget calculations for the sample size below present a snapshot of four disparate metropolitan areas for a family of four, two adults, two children for one year:
1. Boston-$113,558
2. Atlanta-$78,717
3. Denver-$98,187
4. Los Angeles-$92,295
$15.00 an hour won’t do these folks much good. The “working poor” would be a more accurate description; just having that category in America is spiritually disgraceful.
Unemployment
The standard measure reported by the BLS to the mainstream media from the Current Population Survey is U-3. However, this category excludes discouraged job seekers who searched for work in the previous twelve months, but stopped looking in the last four weeks; also excluded are part time employees who want full time work and those who had part-time work for non-economic reasons.
The BLS report presented the official U-3 unemployment rates below:
1. Aug. 2021-5.2%
2. July 2021-5.4%
3. June 2021-5.9%
4. May-2021-5.8%
The Shadow Government Statistics website releases monthly reports on the unemployment rate based on a complete calculation. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment reporting methodology includes long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence by the BLS in 1994.
The real unemployment rates were:
1. Aug. 2021- 25.4%
2. July 2021- 25.4%
3. June 2021- 25.8 %
4. May 2021-26.0 %
LISEP reported similar numbers in a report released in August 2021 that calculated the real unemployment rate for July 2021 at 23.4 percent.
Underemployment
Underemployment is a persistent problem. The Center for Law and Social Policy released a report in August 2020 based on recalculated BLS numbers. Their more inclusive measure revealed a rate of part-time underemployment rate double the BLS numbers.
Moreover, EMSI Burning Glass Technologies research labor market analytics reported that 43 percent of college graduates are underemployed in their first job; 66 percent of graduates will be underemployed after five years and 75 percent will be underemployed after 10 years.
Economic Model Failing Working People
1. Bankrate reported in January 2021 that one-half of Americans could not pay three months of emergency spending.
2. Magnify Money reported in February 2020 that 53 percent of respondents live paycheck to paycheck, and 62 percent don’t have at least three months of savings to hold them over.
.3. Lending Club reported in July 2021 that 54 percent of consumers are living paycheck to paycheck. 21 percent struggling to pay their bills.
4. Career Builders reported in April 2021 that 34 percent of women and 45 percent of black Americans leaving the workforce accepted a pay cut to become employed.
Numbers Don’t Lie
The economic numbers reveal that libertarians are not really paying attention to the pain of working people from our economic model.
COVID-19 is a grave problem that vaccines will eventually remedy. Unfortunately, libertarianism is a chronic con that offers working people nothing but fanciful hopes based on specious myths.
Bruce T. Boccardy is the economics/labor advisor for Small Planet Institute, former president, the Massachusetts Service Employees International Local 888, Public Sector Division, former labor representative, the Massachusetts Joint Labor-Management Committee, and former consultant for the National Association of Government Employees.