True Libertarianism

Chris Clarke at Pandagon has a great post up about those pesky libertarians with some much-appreciated advice on how to talk to such strange creatures.

I especially appreciated this YES! moment in his post:

Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #3: Mentioning Libertarianism’s blindspot.

That accumulation of serious political power is the end result of the Libertarian political wankdream, and yet somehow boss-based coercion escapes the Libertarian scrutiny to which municipal zoning boards and feminist bloggers with itchy banning fingers are routinely subjected.

Look at it this way: what would you call a political system that regulates its subjects activities on a minute-by-minute basis; that often requires of its citizens prior restraint on freedom of speech; that controls where its subjects go, what they wear, and who they talk to; that restricts online reading material in a Beijing-style manner; that has a rigid hierarchy to enforce edicts from the upper echelons and do routine surveillance of the rank and file; that denies its subjects privacy even to the point of demanding the right to examine their urine; and that punishes infractions by permanent banishment?

Some people would call it a dictatorship. But many of us call it “the workplace.” Somehow, Libertarians never seem to object to restrictions of Liberty done by The Boss. “You can always get another job,” they say, as if that answers anything, as if the class of people who can leave a job blithely isn’t the same class that’s most likely to be able to pick up and move away from a conventional, state-based dictatorship. And as corporations extend their control to people outside their employ, with DRM and increasingly prevalent, shameless propaganda and their own armed forces and even co-optation of the nominal forms of governmental authority, the truth of our next useful sentence becomes ever more manifestly clear, that sentence being:

“Corporations are governments.”

Which is, of course, the libertarian socialist criticism of Libertarianism in soundbite form. I’ve never known a Libertarian to be able to answer that one without changing the subject completely, usually to a defense of Guantanamo from a Libertarian POV. At which point they’ve been made incapable of influencing anyone who’s not a fellow Libertarian, which means you can get on with your life. Try it and see!