The Zebra changes his spots

Anarchists, Libertarians, and other pseudo-leftists deal with corporate crime

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
6/30/02
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/anarchists.htm

If there is one good thing about the corporate accounting meltdown that is wreaking havoc on Wall Street and putting the national economy in crisis, it’s that it will make the free market fundamentalists shut up and go away.

Throughout the Clinton years, we were all treated to a steady chorus from a group that on Usenet were loosely self-identified as "libertarians", but in fact included a wide variety of anti-social and anti-socialist types that called themselves by such names as "anarcho-capitalists" and "classic liberals." They tended to be rude and overbearing, although on Usenet that’s not exactly unusual behavior.

Waco really set them off. They went into gibbering paroxysms of rage that an ugly bull dyke like Janet Reno would torch all those innocent men, women and children over a few guns and a minor disagreement with the local cops. Having realized that the government was a sinister, evil force bent on killing all free thinking property owners in America, they looked and discovered that the government had shot at women and babies at a place called Ruby Ridge. Oh. My. GAW! They all screeched, and started jumping up and down screaming that BATF troops were waiting to kill anyone who dared whisper a word of protest. There’s no telling how many of them died whispering protests on the web.

Waco set off howls about Ruby Ridge, an incident that up until then had been largely ignored, and the libertarian crowd so conflated the two incidents, separated by over a year, that a surprising number of people think that Ruby Ridge happened while Clinton was President.

While a lot of them liked to get into elaborate conspiracies spun by the VRWC regarding the Clintons, most of them regarded themselves as leftists. Most of them pointed out that they opposed the war on some drugs and laws regarding marriage and sexuality (items they became curiously silent about after Putsch stole office) and this made them "Classic Liberals". Of course, they frequently pretended that normal liberals also opposed the WOSD and the GOP war to desecularize the country in suffocating folds of anti-intellectual and anti-individual freedom televangelism, and what this made them was just Classic Liars.

`Marching in lockstep behind the teachings of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, they beat the drum for a capitalist utopia. But their notion of freedom did more than just embrace capitalism. They didn’t want just ordinary capitalism. They wanted Hyper capitalism. Society as a dogfight capitalism. Social Darwinist capitalism. Devil-take-the hindmost-and-throw-the-sick-and-elderly-to-the-wolves capitalism.

Basically, their notion of freedom was that those with the means could amass as much wealth and power as they could possibly grab. In an interesting twist of logic, they maintained that if the government didn’t regulate this, there would be no opportunities for criminal activity.

If that sounds suspiciously like a claim that we could eliminate crime if we just got rid of all the cops, courts and prisons, that appears to be exactly what they were saying. Criminals don’t cause crime. Criminals getting caught cause crime. If they don’t have to evade legal authorities, then they aren’t committing criminal acts.

Bush I, pulling the strings of the benign and befuddled Reagan, started implementing this policy, and began a massive transfer of wealth and power from the general population of America to the top one percent. At the end of those twelve years, the process was very nearly complete, and Clinton did nothing to reverse or even slow this disastrous tide.

The results were profound, and devastating to the democracy and freedoms that those "Classic Liberals" so professed to love. In a time when we have a corrupt Supreme Court and an illegitimate "president", a majority of the nation’s wealth has transferred to the top one percent of the population. Indeed, it’s said that the Forbes’ 500 alone control over half of America’s wealth.

The result has been a catastrophic breakdown in our electoral process, where lavish amounts of money buy up most of the candidates in advance and drown out the few opposing voices left. Employee rights, never very strong in America, have dwindled to nearly nothing, with such few pitiful guarantees of privacy, minimum pay, and time off under constant assault from the "classic liberals" (One quick way to tell a real liberal from the ersatz libertarian variety: ask for an opinion on "employer rights" to drug-testing of employees on a random basis, and monitoring of all work activity on the company computers. The libertarian thinks that freedom is dependent on eliminating the first and fourth amendments from the work place.)

Despite the constant chorus of whines about our terrible and repressive government, no nation of wealthy were as coddled, secure, and unburdened as those in America in the closing years of the twentieth century. No group had more wealth, or enjoyed a lighter tax burden (in the past year, the government has even encouraged corporations to headquarter for a nominal fee in tax-free havens such as Bermuda or the Antilles, so that they can enjoy even more freedom, a freedom made secure by an American military, for which the beneficiaries would no longer pay any taxes!). Corporations had more licence and less regulation than in any other developed nation, but bleated longingly for the ability, enjoyed by corporations in the third world, to dump raw pollutants into the adjoining river while paying workers a dollar a day. The pushed hard for ever more relaxation of health, safety, and pollution standards, and, controlling who ran for office, they had considerable luck in getting this.

Now, according to the logic - if that’s the word for it - of the "Classic Liberals", the beneficiaries of this particular utopia would create a business society so vital, so dynamic, so overwhelmingly efficient and effective that everybody in the society should benefit. Ronald Reagan was coached to call it a rising tide raises all boats." Joe Lieberman called it "feeding the birds by giving oats to the horse."

Classic Liberals didn’t grasp the simple fact that raw capitalism is anti-competitive, and money, left to its own paths, accumulates drastically in the hands of a very small elite, and with it, all societal power.

You can’t have freedom without some measure of empowerment, but libertarians, who lived in dread of “coercion (which meant taxes, stealing from your employer, and demanding job safety rules) didn’t see any possibility that stripping people of their empowerment might result in coercive activities on the part of those few with the power. Never mind that human history has never indicated that anything ELSE would happen in such a situation

But vast wealth and power also breeds vast corruption. Again, this is not an original concept, unproven by history. Indeed, it has been the leading cause of the fall of nations throughout history.

So we wound up with a monied elite with immense power and a general lack of accountability that would be the envy of the aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France.

How did our brave captains of industry comport themselves in return for this largesse?

They robbed us blind. They didn’t just rob us of our voice in government, or workplace rights, or even the right to establish our own society (American manners and fads are determined to a frightening extent by marketing). No, that wasn’t enough.

They had to rob their employees and investors, and their chief supporters.

The mushroom cloud of corporate scandal that began with the Enron meltdown is already the biggest and most expensive scandal in human history, dwarfing even that libertarian failure of the eighties, the savings and loans. Some economists think that the amount of money that was flat out stolen by this privileged elite may exceed half a trillion dollars, and worry openly if the American economy can survive this.

Given how badly these ideological robbers have damaged the American political system and American society, it isn’t too extreme to ask if America will survive them.

The worst lies ahead for us. Economists describe the confluence of events as an economic "perfect storm", with declining confidence in the market, a collapsing dollar, a huge debt aggravated by foolish tax cuts, a vast and ineffective military, and the biggest balance of trade deficits in history. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s going to get bad. People joke that Clinton was the last elected President of the United States. Putsch may be the last, period.

But at least the insane folly of free market fundamentalism has been killed for a generation or two.

Just as it was in 1929.

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"The trouble with capitalism is that it has capitalists.
They're just too damned greedy"
-- Herbert Hoover