Both the Libertarian Party platform and Gary Johnson’s words reveal a plain reality: The Libertarian movement is, at its core, a ploy to divert Americans from the realities of democracy and capitalism, staging its conception of freedom through a combination of falsehood and social convenience.
In the “Civil Liberties” section of its website, the Johnson campaign writes, “people, not politicians, should make choices in their personal lives. Responsible adults should be free to marry whom they want, arm themselves if they want and lead their personal lives as they see fit — as long as they aren’t harming anyone else in doing so.”
This statement represents the crux of Libertarian thinking — that a proper civil society is one in which citizens have the capacity to make all personal choices for themselves. The federal government, according to Johnson, naturally restricts individual freedoms and should therefore be limited in its capacity to do so. His wording, in fact, is remarkably similar to J.S. Mill’s, who wrote, “As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it… But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself… In all such cases, there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.”
Both Mill and Johnson portray government as an intruder on personal freedom and happiness. Johnson, however, takes this idea even further, arguing that government impedes social welfare by bounding the invisible hand of free market economics. In the realm of education, for instance, he posits the U.S. Department of Education should be abolished, because “the key to restoring education excellence in the U.S. lies in innovation, freedom, and flexibility that Washington, D.C. cannot provide.” While Johnson makes a strong point that educational content should be flexible across state lines, he misses the objective of the Department of Education (and of many federal agencies) entirely: to promote equal access across the nation.
There is a problem with Johnson’s unwavering dedication to the classical idea of freedom. Free markets do not promote social equality without government regulation. This fact is inherent to capitalism itself; in our society, hard work and accumulation of capital correspond to more favorable life experiences and vice versa. Few can make strong arguments against this societal paradigm. However, social stratification can — and must — be limited on both ends of our socioeconomic spectrum; the condition of our nation’s poor must be held to a certain standard, and the opulence of our upper classes must be roped in to limit political oligarchy. We know that regulation (to some extent) is necessary, because we have repeatedly witnessed the greed and inhumanity of our nation’s financial elite in the face of a deregulated economy. Thus, we all have a degree of faith in government-limited capitalism to restrain the exploitive powers of the wealthy. Without a federal government to ensure this relative equality, businesses have no reason to treat workers or consumers by democratically-defined standards.
Regulation is also necessary in individuals’ personal lives. If we accept that choices transpire within the larger context of individuals’ environments, then we can regard personal decisions as atoms that comprise our socioeconomic organism. Social hierarchy and culture are direct results of these choices, and, in a capitalist society, the pressure enacted by these phenomena is fundamentally oppressive toward low-income individuals — regardless of whether it falls under the standard definition of “harm.” This paradox associated with free choice is often labelled the tragedy of the commons, in which “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his [capital] without limit — in a world that is limited.” The tragedy, here, is that free citizens do not act for the benefit of their communities, because they are naturally inclined to take more than they need. In my eyes, the federal government exists to limit our capacity to do so. Nietzsche argued a similar point when he wrote, “we may compare [modern societal culture] to a victor dripping with blood, who, in his triumphal procession, drags the vanquished along, chained to his carriage as slaves.”
Furthermore, I can imagine the field day prosecutors would have if Johnson’s civil liberties proposals were taken to their natural conclusion; no individual would be safe from being indicted under the auspices of “harm,” which would likely lead to a bloated criminal justice system even larger than the one we have now.
For these reasons, I believe Johnson’s proposals are paradoxical. His position presents itself as tolerant of all classes of people, but, in truth, it only tolerates those who already have unfettered freedom to make personal decisions. When individuals (or corporations) face no consequences for their actions, they are naturally inclined to exploit the basic human instincts of greed and opportunism, and in a capitalist society, these choices have devastating impacts on the disadvantaged sector of a population. Gary Johnson is hiding his intolerance under a campaign of fantasies. This is why I’m inclined to respect the Republican Party more; at least William F. Buckley was honest when he famously stated, “Freedom breeds inequality.”
Ryan Gorman is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at r.gorman@cavalierdaily.com.
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