Exposing Libertarianism: The Belief That We Should Give More Power to Those Who Are Corrupting Government

by Allen Clifton

Anyone who follows me knows I am not the biggest fan of libertarians. In fact, I loathe the whole ideology. I’m not saying that all libertarians are bad people (I know a few who are great people), I just happen to believe their ideology is ridiculous and doesn’t make any sense. These people believe in an ideology that’s never thrived anywhere on this planet at anytime in human history.
The United States has never been run under libertarian ideologies. In fact, our government was at its smallest back when slavery existed, women couldn’t vote, and segregation was legal. We had to enact laws, fight a war and pass Constitutional Amendments (you know, grow government) to protect people from those who exploited a “smaller government” that allowed for such barbaric behavior.
The truth is, when you look around the world at countries with:
Few regulations Low taxes Guns Small governments They’re typically dirt poor, violent, and controlled by the select few who are extremely rich – because there was no government put in place to prevent the rich and powerful from essentially rigging the entire system.
Hell, even in a country like the United States, with regulations, the rich and powerful often do whatever they can to try to rig our system and corrupt our government. Could you imagine what these people would do if there weren’t laws stopping them from doing whatever the hell they wanted? Or do these millions of people really believe that the rich, powerful and these giant corporations would act more ethically with fewer regulations? Do they really think that regulations are what led to our 2008 crash; the BP oil spill; the chemical spill in West Virginia; the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas; and the downfall of Enron?
While libertarians like to whine and complain about how corrupt and inefficient our government is, the truth is their ideology is based upon giving more power (via deregulations and a smaller government) to the very people who are responsible for making our government inefficient and corrupt.
Their “plan” is to massively shrink our government, handing over an unregulated and unchecked amount of power to the very people who are constantly trying to buy our government so they can get rules that would help them bypass the regulations that they don’t like.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Oh, but it’s okay. Libertarians believe that consumer power and “the market” would correct all of this. Tell me, how would the “market” have prevented any of the disasters I listed above? Hell, without regulations they would likely have been much worse.
But even libertarians themselves prove that the entire ideology is absurd. I’ve often joked that if you got 10 libertarians together to define what it means to be a libertarian, you’d get 10 different answers. I’ve literally have debates with libertarians where by the end of the discussion they were bickering about who was or wasn’t a “real libertarian” because even they couldn’t agree on the “true meaning” of libertarianism.
To say nothing about their overly simplified and often dangerous beliefs on foreign policy and national security.
In a perfect libertarian utopia where things like human nature, greed, reality and facts didn’t exist, libertarianism might work. But, unfortunately for libertarians, all of those things do exist. That’s why when I ask them to name a successful society, either now or in the past, that’s been built on their ideologies – they can’t name one.
The truth remains that libertarianism is built on fantasy and driven by the avoidance of reality.