Clock's Ticking

When you spend as much time in an university political science department as I have, you spend a lot of time talking politics—with your classmates, colleagues, activist-types around campus, or just random people you meet that want to ask your opinion about some political issue once they find out that you’ve studied poli-sci. While it can be dangerous to put people into ideological boxes, as time goes on you start to notice that there are some broad generalizations you can draw about people and their political beliefs (and if this post ends up infuriating you, please go back and read this last sentence, particularly the broad generalizations part). One type of person that you’re almost sure to run into on a college campus (and the type that caused me to shake my head more often than almost any other) is the self-described libertarian. They’re found in other places too, but I’ve found that university campuses are particularly target-rich environments for these folks.
There’s even a bit of research that backs this up. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of these guys (and yes, they’re predominantly guys, there’s a bit of research on that too), but in case you haven’t, the quick definition (the one used in research I’ve been referencing)--“someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government”. Given the current status of public opinion, you might be thinking “Hey, that sounds just like me.” If you’ll give me a second, I’ll try to explain why that isn’t you (or at least it shouldn’t be).


Esquire writer Charlie Pierce has a  "Five Minute Rule" concerning politicians from the Paul family that I think essentially applies to libertarians in general.


“The Five Minute Rule states that you can listen to any politician from the Paul family for precisely five minutes and agree with pretty much everything that person says. But that at exactly the 5:00:01 mark, the conversation will be Raptured up into the Izonkosphere and the CAPITAL LETTERS will starT to Come OUT.”  


The capital letters that he’s talking about reference the tendency for unbalanced individuals to resort to typing in all capital letters when engaged in political discussions on the internet. I’m not saying that all libertarians are unhinged paranoids, but I do think that any political discussion with a libertarian is destined to eventually go off of the rails whenever the conversation digs past the superficial statements, and gets into the nitty-gritty of how government and society function. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of speaking to a religious fundamentalist. Their ideology can’t fail, it can only be failed. The answer to every question or problem eventually boils down to some combination of “privatize it”, “deregulate it”, and “cut taxes”. 


The tax cutting fetish was on full display earlier this month when Senator Rand Paul  placed part of the blame for the killing of Eric Garner on excessive cigarette taxes.  For the moment, I don’t care what you think about the topic of police violence, I want you to just think about the level of rabid allegiance to your political ideology that it takes to go on television and place the blame for a man’s homicide on cigarette taxes. That’s just one example of how this political movement is at best a three note symphony, attempting to play the keys of deregulation, privatization, and tax cutting in response to any and all issues. They say that they want smaller government in order to make people freer, unfortunately they forget the axiom that “power abhors a vacuum.” That basically means that in the absence of authority, power will be asserted by someone. We don’t need to speculate about whether this is true. Nearly the entire 19^th century is a testament to this fact. The hands-off approach of the U.S. government towards business produced robber barons whose names are still legendary, as are their abuses of the general public. It took the Great Depression, a World War, and the institution of the New Deal for regular Americans to finally begin to realize their fair share of the economic bounty of the country.


As we head towards yet another presidential election, I just want to remind you that the clock is ticking, and that libertarianism’s five minutes are hopefully almost up.