Robert Burns shared his post. 6 hrs
The Libertarian Party would likely better be called the ‘Plutocratic Party’ (but that name does not score well with focus groups). While plutocracy is already successfully subverting and replacing our republic, the Libertarian Party remains on the vanguard in that subterfuge. To understand more completely, the linked essay provides a libertarian democratic socialist critique of the Libertarian™ Party platform. In summation, liberty requires a restoration of our republic and an end to plutocratic incursions within government. The ‘liberty’ advanced by the Libertarian Party is instead the false liberty of our plutocratic rulers to rule without limit: enjoying ever more concentrated ruling power, wealth, and income and eventually depriving us entirely of the hard won liberties of the American Revolution. Robert Burns Notes on the Libertarian Party Platform Below, I respond to the Libertarian Party Platform of 2014, from a Libertarian Democratic Socialist perspective. The Libertarian Party Platform is quoted in its entirety (a left vertical bar), and my comments are interspersed within the quoted platform. Overall, the Libertarian Party failing is in its support for the substitution of a plutocratic (and capitalist) ‘establishment’ controlled government for our Constitution’s inscribed republican (proto-socialist and even fully socialist) government. Such a change in our governmental form undermines any prospects for liberty, since the plutocratic capitalist influences grow like a cancer and eventually annihilate its libertarian democratic socialist (constitutional republic) host. In effect, the Libertarian Party’s acceptance of the creeping plutocracy that is supplanting our constitutional republic, leaves the party advocating for the ‘liberty’ of the plutocratic rulers. Unconstrained liberty for our rulers leads to tyranny for everyone else. When the party succeeds in privatizing—really pluotcratizing—all our commons, our civil liberties essentially vanish. Our Constitution essentially becomes moot, because the plutocrats adjudicate their own disputes, and we merely lease our resources from the plutocrats who universally own everything. In terms of subsidies, the Libertarian Party platform tends to uncritically accept the traditional subsidies of government to criminal justice, civil justice, or military defense, but then rejects those subsidies to education, public assistance, and other programs that are often complements or more cost efficient substitutes to incarceration, for example. In many ways it is these other vital government subsidies that also prevent the subversion of our republic by plutocratic interests. For example, if public assistance is an expected penance for government serving plutocratic interests, then the only way to reduce expenditures on public assistance is to stop serving the plutocrats in redistributing wealth and income from the many to the few. Such acceptance of the status quo also leads the Libertarian Party to uncritically accept the ‘regulation of the individual’ (to use their language) in traditional criminal justice matters, yet oppose the ‘regulation of the individual’ in areas such as harmful economic activities that can undermine our republic. In the endeavor to gently coax assent to our social contract, their commitment to traditional State power but opposition to new more gentle State institutions (such as public assistance) leads them to support far more draconian State power measures when far more libertarian State measures are available as a substitute. For example, education programs, public assistance programs, public insurance programs—these can all do wonders in reducing crime and remedying losses in property crimes—and often obviate the need for deprivations of liberty such as incarceration for long sentences. Yet the Libertarian Party opposes these measure that avoid incarceration often because it might restrict the liberty of plutocrats to pilfer the public treasury. Or at worst such measure might have the contributions to social insurance funds not perfectly aligned with the experience rating of the insured (in other words, those damaging or stealing property might not be the one’s contributing their fair share to the property insurance pool, causing other to contribute a slight bit more). Yet when we look at it from the perspective of a social contract, those criminals who do not necessarily assent to the social contract are much like acts of nature. We merely ensure against acts of nature, such as a hurricane, without expecting the hurricane to contribute to the insurance risk pool. Plutocracy, and the rent-seeking frenzy it fosters, breeds criminal activity. First it breeds criminal activity by depriving far too many of the means by which to live. Second plutocracy breeds criminal activity in the contempt for our social contract it sets by example. To keep our heads above water we all must engage in the rent-seeking frenzy from whatever endowment predicament we find ourselves. For the Wall Street plutocrats the rent-seeking frenzy is prestigious and they receive rewards in proportion to their ability to defraud the public. For a street criminal, the rent-seeking frenzy is entirely criminalized. In short, the Libertarian Party demonstrates it is not in favor of limited government nor liberty. Rather it is opposed to our constitutional republic and in favor of unlimited plutocratic government: plutocratized control of our common resources such as transport networks and insurance risk pools. Once these commons are fully plutocratized, we no longer enjoy freedoms. For example, free speech only remains in the privacy of our own home, because the plutocrats decide what goes over the public airwaves (for example). These necessarily public commons (those resources we share in common) cannot be truly privatized (because they are by definition public commons). The only thing that can be done to them is change the form of their government from republic to plutocratic. [Due to Facebook’s arbitrary and capricious limits on the length of a note, I have separated this into three additional notes: Libertarian Party Platform Notes (part 1): Preamble, Statement of Principles, and 1.0 Personal Liberty, and 2.0 Economic Liberty Libertarian Party Platform Notes (part 2): 2.0 Economic Liberty Libertarian Party Platform Notes (part 3): 3.0 Securing Liberty and 4.0 Omissions _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
