Libertarians Are Ultimately Just Children

Let's start with the kids at the Von Mises Institute.

There is some merit to Austrian economics.  Not a ton, but there is some.  It tends to elevate the theoretical over the real world, but they make some good points from time to time.

But true Libertarians are just kind of nutty.  Ed at Gin and Tacos bring us this unbelievable - OK, actually not unbelievable per se, but gob smackingly awful - piece from the writers at the Von Mises Institute about trying to rehabilitate Scrooge.

Click thru and read the damned thing.

First, you have the mindless, reflexive obeisance to free market ideology.  "Bob Cratchett is being paid exactly what the market feels he should be worth."  Then, you have the heartless misanthropy.  "And Cratchett should not be rewarded for foolishly having all those kids."  And then the weird hero worship. "Scrooge is actually a very good and productive man."

This really struck me because I actually had the time and opportunity to read a New Yorker piece yesterday. Something I used to do quite often.  It is on David Thiel, the Silicon Valley investment guy who founded PayPal and funded the early days of Facebook.

In it, we learn of this very bright, precocious young man who went to Stanford and found it somewhat stultifying.  In his mind, education simply seeks to create conformists.  He - apparently by nature - is a contrarian.  And I think that's the first hallmark of a Libertarian.  That whatever is understood and received is probably wrong and should be opposed.

Obviously, this makes it the opposite of Burkean conservatism, which puts a premium on slow, evolutionary change that abides by traditions and standards.

At the end of the article, George Packer is at a dinner party with a bunch of these Silicon Valley Libertarian types.  They disparage college as being a waste of time, when people should be out following their entrepreneurial bliss.  When Packer mentions that maybe reading Great Books and arguing with people who don't come from your same background has value, the response was telling.

Around the table, the response was swift and negative.  (Artificial Intelligence researcher) Yudkowsky reported he was having a "visceral reaction" to what I'd said about great books.  (Biotech specialist) Nosek was visibly upset: in high school, in Illinois, he had failed an English class because his teacher said he couldn't write.

That last part is telling to me.  Libertarians tend not to handle failure well, and most tend not to have to face it. Nosek could not possibly be a bad writer.  School itself must have been the problem. Packer concludes:

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.  An appetite for disruption and risk - two of Thiel's favorite words - reflects, in part, a sense of immunity to the normal heartbreak and defeats that a deadening job, money trouble, and unhappy children deal out to the "unthinking herd."  Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people precisely because they've refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow....Thiel is no different.  He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

That is probably as sympathetic and cutting a definition of the libertarian impulse as you're likely to read.

Oh, and the Tolkien reference? Yeah, that probably wasn't an accident.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Ringsand Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.