Libertarian Smoke
This has been a good week for Ron Paul. He is a libertarian from Texas. I wish he would stay there. But, unfortunately, he seems to surface a lot these days on pretty much any news outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Earlier in the week he was grilling ben Bernanke, and generally bemoaning the evil doings of the Federal Reserve Board. Today he was being interviewed about education. Here’s what he said:
“No one has a right to anyone’s wealth, I don’t have a right to come to you and say my poor kid needs 500 dollars for an education,” Paul replied, “an education is not a right, medical care is not a right.”
That’s the way to build a future.
The importance of what Paul and those like him say, is that it represents a growing sentiment in America. As the crisis forces more and more introspection over costs and what services government should provide – if any – people like Paul garner a lot of support when they argue along strong anti-social lines.
His point is clear: if you want an education, go get one. It is not something the public should pay for. In his extraordinarily limited view of the world an education benefits only the person who gets it. There is no social spillover such that society is better off if it ensures that everyone gets an education. In Paul’s view you and I have no interest in making sure that children have a good education so the country has a good supply of engineers etc in the future. To Paul the benefits of having a well educated workforce are all private or exclusive to those being educated. His conception of society is so weak that he just cannot see or comprehend anything collective.
Thus he can argue that no one should be taxed in order to provide a benefit to someone else’s child.
And before you dismiss him as the nutcase he is: I recall heated arguments in the town I used to live in in New Jersey. There were residents there who objected to paying local taxes towards education on the grounds that there kids had grown up and thus they no longer used the schools. So why pay for them?
Multiply this absence of social connection or thought by many times and you arrive at Paul’s philosophy. So powerful is his commitment to the private market that he imagines everything will be mediated through a market of some kind. There is no need for a government to intervene and establish schools – or health care – because if people want those things they will be willing to pay for them privately. And those who end up uneducated or sick? Well, they obviously chose to be so.
The resemblance of Paul like libertarian thinking and orthodox economics is striking. Both have diminished or non existent roles for any form of collective action. There is no common cause. There is no society. There is no community. There is nothing but the relentless individualism of the child like Ayn Rand imaginings.
In his world Paul sees everything as based upon individual liberty. That implies no cooperation at all, since the benefit of cooperation identifies a common good separate and apart from the sum of individual goods. The exception being common defense. I always find it amusing that rugged individuals need to gather together to defend themselves. Guns and libertarians were evidently made for each other. Apparently being rugged doesn’t extend to being able to defend oneself. And they are all about “teamwork” in their beloved sports, but not so much in the workplace or in education.
Rugged, I think not.
Paul’s utter contempt for the underprivileged shouts loud and clear through his words. He is like those orthodox economists who argue that unemployment is always voluntary. It rests on a naive and perverse interpretation of human behavior. One that splinters society into fragments. One that deprives society of any role to even out the luck of birth. One that eliminates anything at all if it is not self centered, self regarding, or self aggrandizing.
Education may well not be a right in any “natural” sense of that word. But nor is private property by the same token. The sanctity of private property is a modern conception and exists only as far as accepted by society. It is a convention. It exists because it helps normalize relationships between people with respect to the right to dispose of property unmolested by arbitrary power. Somewhere along the way, although many still object, private property was seen as advancing society’s general goals.
So too is a right to education. It becomes a right when society sees a general benefit from raising literacy or other educational standards. It then is moved from being a personal good into being a public good. We all benefit from having a literate workforce, so we reinterpret education as a right, and thus justify the taxes necessary to pay for it.
The notion that there are, and always have been, private rights or goods is an illusion. Ron Paul is arguing against society. He is arguing against history. He is dangerously wrong. He is also dangerously popular.
Libertarian smoke blinds many to its pernicious and anti-social impact.
Likewise the follies of orthodox economics prey on the naive who want to simplify and abstract away humanity from human interaction.
Both rely on an extraordinarily simple set of values that,ultimately, have no value.
Why?
Because all values express a relationship of something with respect to something else. In both libertarianism and orthodox economics there is no something else to hold such an expression. There are no relationships, just rugged individuals struggling to be free. Free of each other.
On the other hand: maybe Ron Paul is onto something. An uneducated electorate may be his best bet to get elected to higher office. He wouldn’t be that self-serving would?
Well, we know he doesn’t think he’s serving the greater good as an elected official. After all there is no greater good to serve.
