Determining if harm was done, if that’s in dispute, and how to correct that harm both through reparation to the harmed and legislation to ensure everybody knows going forward that this thing isn’t cool, is one of the key jobs of government, which the Libertarian Party seeks to undermine or eliminate. This is the process by which an insoluble conflict is solved; the facts of the conflict are presented to the people, represented by the judge and jury. The people hear and contemplate the facts from as many angles as they can find, and arrive at a conclusion hopefully based on best public interest, best moral and ethical practice, and best human inclination regarding if this conflict created harm, if that harm is worthy of recompense, how that compensation should be communicated, and whether there need be a written rule to forestall this sort of conflict in the future and, in the event it arises again, make the resolving of it much more efficient because now there’s precedent and rules to look at.
This is a process the Libertarian Party wants to break beyond recognition or destroy completely. They focus on legitimate complaints about the “broken system” but then they recognize that they tend to benefit greatly from that “broken system,” so they keep us focused on fixing “the system” and not fixing the people running it, i.e. not electing fascists, making sure people are educated and as capable as their natural ability can make them of clear critical thought, etc. Because “the system” isn’t the problem, the people running it are, and fundamentally the Libertarian Party is a part of people running the systems. They want government out of the way the same reason a cheating husband wants his wife out of the way – so they don’t get caught and held accountable.
The second key function of government is to act in place of the conscience that business does not have. What we call “conscience” is the series of ideas we’ve constructed to support the universal ethic – the perpetuation and propagation of life. The universal ethic of business is not life but profit – more and more, all the time, ad inifnitum, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. This creates an obvious conflict; the perfect world for business is an unimaginable hell for human beings and ultimately isn’t even self-sustaining because it kills its own consumers, upon whom it relies for those ever-increasing profits.
It is government’s job as the voice of the people to step in and say no you can’t destroy that river, no you can’t pollute the air, no you can’t refuse or fail to protect your employees from known job risks like inhaling poisonous vapors or cutting their arms off, no you can’t hire nine year olds to mine coal, etc. Because demonstrably and consistently, business and industry – more to the point the broken humans who run them and hide behind the notion that a business isn’t just a collection of human beings making decisions – will decide in favor of profit without regard to public impact or even the long-term damage it does to itself.
That is what actual libertarianism looks like – and we have a phrase for it in the US, it’s called “democratic socialism.” Not “you’re free to get hooked on deadly drugs we can profit from, you’re free to die of environmental poisoning because being careful is expensive, you’re free to live at the wrong end of the biggest barrel held by the biggest psycho.” We the people are free from being told what we can do as long as we’re not inflicting harm; profiteers are prevented by legislation and enforcement from inflicting harm. Remember what I said at the beginning? It’s still the same thing, the US people who bought the label just twisted it all out of shape to benefit the wealthy industrialists and keep the rest of us stoned enough to not notice.
This is also part of what the US Libertarian Party wants to break. Fundamentally, before anything else, it’s about deregulation. Abolish the IRS, abolish the EPA, etc. and everyone will just be good and all the corporations will naturally start acting in a forthright, sustainable way. Which, of course, is pure nonsense that flies in the face of literally every possible example of an attempt that you can find anywhere in history…and it’s the entire purpose of the US Libertarian Party. Not to create liberty for individuals, but to ensure that they are holding the chains and keys in which those individuals live; to entice them, through mostly baseless appeals to ego and fun and greed, to do the very labor of forging their own shackles, with a smile.
I don’t know what the current state of the party’s inner core is nor how possible it would be to take it over, but I frankly doubt it’s super vulnerable. A lot of money went into it, and a lot of money goes in to protecting it. Maybe it could happen, maybe not. It would be neat to see an actual leftist libertarian presence in American politics since that’s generally where people in this country fall on an objective political spectrum.
As things stand now, though, it absolutely must be said: if you’re a libertarian, a Libertarian™ is the last thing you want to be.
