Libertarian Lament

In the end the libertarian lament is psychologically no different than the tantrum of a child.

Actual logo of Libertarian Party of Union County.

(CALGARY, Alberta) - People, generally speaking, don’t like to be told what to do. Even if it is demonstrably for their own good or for a publicly acknowledged greater good, there are those who resent or resist or both, what they perceive to be authoritarian coercion.

I can empathize with the libertarian creed because I, too, like to have my personal freedom and to be left alone. Ideally, this only works at Walden Pond although Thoreau still depended on the civilized world for many of his physical needs. He took tools, etc., with him. He was not sui generis but was an extension of the society that formed him.

A true libertarian cannot exist.

So, in principle, libertarianism can only be viable if a very small proportion of citizens opt for that philosophy. They won’t be missed

The real libertarians, it would seem, are the rich and the very rich. One definition of money that I favour is that it is stored work. If you have a few million dollars, for example, you can pay others to do the work you don’t want to do, or don’t have the time to do (i.e., you prefer to do other things). You’re in a position where you don’t have to work at all!

First, a diversion

This reminds me of Britain’s Royal Family. Here is a group of people who have immense hereditary wealth and none of whom have not only never had to work a day in their lives, but also don’t even have to expend much effort while up and around. Cooking and cleaning are done by servants, they have aides to help them navigate any societal overlaps and really have no purpose in life, except a purpose they might invent for themselves. It sounds great to the harried working stiff, but can you imagine how incredibly boring the Queen’s life must be? She has legitimate leisure activities like her art collection, horses and corgis. But, other than that, I cannot imagine why she would ever feel excited to get up in the morning. Another day of cutting ribbons and being polite to a lot of fawning strangers. And she’s been doing it for more than 60 years!

The Queen is listed as one of the wealthiest women in the world. But her wealth, variously estimated at $400 to $700 million doesn’t even admit her to the Forbes rich lists. That’s because much of what she enjoys (like Buckingham Palace) doesn’t belong to her but rather to the UK public. And her wealth doesn’t give her anything but momentary freedom from time to time.

Back to the libertarians

The opposite of a libertarian society is a society that is regulated and has governance of some sort. One of the main foci of libertarians/conservatives is smaller government and lower taxes. These seem to be admirable goals but how achievable are they? Here is an analogy to the automobile.

Calgary has a population of 1.1 million people and about 750,000 registered vehicles. The United States has a population of about 309 million people and about 230 million registered vehicles.

In both cases the per capita auto registration in Calgary is 68 per 100 people and in the U.S. is 74 per 100 people.

A major portion of Calgary’s budget—many billions of dollars over the years—has been spent on streets and roads. There is also a large personnel overhead to maintain this system. Obviously, in principle, Calgary taxpayers could be saved billions in tax dollars if the city government were to cut back on both the expense of building and maintaining streets and roads and at the same time significantly reduced the number of parasitic workers on the public payroll.

In Calgary more than 75% of workers commute to work as either a driver or passenger of a vehicle. Fewer than 8% walk or cycle. We are, in North America, an automobile culture and it is very expensive. So, suppose we cut it back by reducing the number of rules and regulations that people have to abide by? Eliminate driver’s licenses, for example. Driving a vehicle is a right. Agreed?

Calgary, like many cities, is laid out in a four quadrant, grid system. Streets run north/south and avenues run east/west. Let’s begin by eliminating all the rules of the road. Actually, this is not entirely feasible. We would need to keep one rule: everyone drives on the same side of the road. Other than that everyone is as free as a grounded bird.

Huge amounts of money could be saved by eliminating all the traffic lights—no capital investment, electricity or maintenance—thus lots of parasitic public workers could be let go.

Intersections could be governed by stop signs and busier intersections by four way stops. The rule there, of course, is that the vehicle with the biggest tires has the right-of-way.

That’s about it.

There would be a few minor problems to be dealt with. The first would be city gridlock. You could never know for sure how long it would take you to get to work—if you stayed alive long enough to get there. There would be a huge increase in traffic accidents—many dead and injured. But none of these people would be covered by the public purse so no complaints there.

And, with no money wasted on roadway maintenance, the number of potholes, etc., would increase and unless you drove slowly and more carefully, vehicles wouldn’t last as long and need more frequent repair. But that’s a good thing because it would benefit the private sector—auto companies, towing companies, garages and insurance companies.

And road rage? Don’t go there.

After this went on for awhile, some of the surviving libertarians would see a need for a few changes. Actually society has already been through all this. At the outset, when horseless carriages were a rarity, there was no need for any rules or regulations. Then, as their numbers increased, it became self-evident that some regulation was needed for the mutual benefit of all.

As towns grew and became cities, to maintain order for everyone, it was necessary to introduce basic rules like licenses, speed limits, etc. As the number of vehicles and drivers rose to thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions, it was a no brainer to see that for the maximum benefit of the maximum number of people, it was essential that the rules of the road be enforced.

But the rules didn’t end there. In the early 1960s, with Unsafe at any Speed, Ralph Nader exposed the automobile industry as going after profits at the expense of the lives and well-being of its customers—the drivers on the road. People wanted to have increased chances of surviving auto accidents with minimal or no injuries. The auto industry had no choice but to introduce safety features like seatbelts, airbags and so forth.

Conclusion

You can see where this has led us. The automobile world is a mirror of society at large. To avoid chaos and to make life as pleasant as possible for the maximum number of people, publicly agreed upon rules are necessary to minimize social friction.

In my opening paragraph I said: People, generally speaking, don’t like to be told what to do. Even if it is demonstrably for their own good or for a publicly acknowledged greater good, there are those who resent or resist or both, what they perceive to be authoritarian coercion.

Libertarianism, it turns out, is childishness. It’s people who haven’t grown up emotionally and want to believe that their little worlds are more important than the world of society in which they live—more important than the lives of their fellow citizens. As Pierre Elliot Trudeau, late Prime Minister of Canada once concluded:

“A society of egoists quickly becomes a society of slaves; for each man, taken individually, is quite incapable of shaking an established government: such governments are not in the least weakened when a dissatisfied citizen no longer agrees to obey the authorities, for they will simply put him in jail.”

In the end the libertarian lament is psychologically no different than the tantrum of a child. This, it can be argued, is what’s behind the dysfunctionality of so many Western cultures, the U.S. as an example par excellence: Too many children in charge.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class — a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably on a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves — writing and trying to make the world a better place