My friend and editor, David S., has been sending me libertarian reading material. And I have read a lot. A major focus, recently, has been on the way the Global Internet may make libertarianism more salient. Bitcoin has added to the tumult.
I disagree.
My adult life has been focused on how social systems work. You can see some of my work on my 300 public radio programs; Social Thought, free.
There are weighty problems with libertarian thought.
First, we are all raised in a culture, usually by parents. We are pretty much formed by early adolescence in a particular culture. Nearly all of us stop learning by age 23, we have been formed by that time, because we are simians. We can move to a different nation state before adolescence and usually adjust to the new nation state and much of its culture. Child rearing is an institution that is central to our being, our core identity. The child-rearing institutions can not be discarded or changed by political intent.
Second, the vast institutions that we call ‘America’ are the cumulative development of many refinements and evolutions over many centuries; millennia. We are not aware of 98% of them. The child-rearing institutions can not be changed and modified by volition.
I have suggested some minor modifications to ‘America’ in the form of a sortition form of political selection. That would change the type of characters who manage our government. Important but not major.
Third, our current American ruling class disaster, ‘the swamp’ is the by-product of a change that occurred in the period 1955 to 1965. Politics can’t reverse it.
We lost the hereditary elite that moderated our ruling class before that period. The free form melange that we were left with, after 1965, allowed meritocracy to thrive but simultaneously promoted the second most powerful American organization, unions, that then ascended to power. The triumphant union values are anti-meritocratic and anti-individual. Anti-American.
Fourth, the brief reign of Donald Trump showed that the most vital missing ingredient in our current society are pro-commerce values. Trump has shown us that the majority of Americans support a pro-commerce value system. But our dominant current political system, the ‘swamp’ is antithetical to commerce.
Trumpism is what we need today. It is not a political ideology. It is a worldview that is outside the current political spectrum.
Summarizing, we have in America a finely evolved social system; equitable, innovative, vigorous and vital for human well-being. What we need today is not political change or new politics. We need a pro-commerce world view.