Libertarianism

Beware Of Right Deviations That Have Emerged From The Crisis Of US Imperialism

July 10, 2020 Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. Educate! COVID-19, Democratic Party, Libertarianism, US Imperialism

The events of the last three-plus months have exposed another political trend to be wary of. COVID-19’s devastating impact on the United States coupled with an economic collapse and a mass uprising against racist policing has activated a long-standing political tendency within the imperialist world: libertarianism. Libertarianism is often viewed as an anti-government, pro-capitalist ideology that worships the free market doctrine of Adam Smith. However, such a definition does not consider the racist context of the United States. Libertarianism, like all capitalist ideologies, is bound with white supremacy. Libertarians oppose the predations of monopoly capital in words but become most active in their hatred for Black people. While neoliberal Democrats and corporate “resistance” forces have decried the rise of the so-called alt-right throughout the Trump era in part to avoid accountability for their role in the American Nightmare, libertarian forces have played a problematic role in promoting political confusion and racist demagogy over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic with little fanfare.

How US Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics

August 13, 2017 Lee Fang, theintercept.com Educate! Imperialism, Latin America, Libertarianism

By Lee Fang for the Intercept. The international meeting of libertarian activists was sponsored by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a leadership-training nonprofit now known simply as the Atlas Network, which Chafuen has led since 1991. At the Brick Hotel, Chafuen was reveling in recent victories; his years of work were starting to pay off, thanks to political and economic circumstances — but also because of the network of activists Chafuen has been working for so long to cultivate. Over the past 10 years, leftist governments have used “money to buy votes, to redistribute,” said Chafuen, seated comfortably in the lobby. But the recent drop in commodity prices, coupled with corruption scandals, has given an opportunity for Atlas Network groups to spring into action. “When there is an opening, you have a crisis, and there is some demand for change, you have people who are trained to push for certain policies,” Chafuen noted, paraphrasing the late Milton Friedman. “And in our case, we tend to favor to private solutions to public problems.” Chafuen pointed to numerous Atlas-affiliated leaders now in the spotlight: ministers in the new conservative government in Argentina, senators in Bolivia, and the leaders of the Free Brazil Movement that took down Dilma Rousseff’s presidency. . . .

Misinforming The Majority: A Deliberate Strategy Of Right-Wing Libertarians

July 10, 2017 Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org Educate! Libertarianism, Propaganda, Right-Wing

By Mark Karlin for Truthout - Many individuals who follow politics and journalists think that the right-wing playbook began with the Koch brothers. However, in her groundbreaking book, Nancy MacLean traces their political strategy to a Southern economist who created the foundation for today's libertarian oligarchy in the 1950s. Mark Karlin: Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States? Nancy MacLean: The modern extreme right wing I'm talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President Eisenhower called them "stupid" and fashioned his approach -- calling it modern Republicanism -- as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda. He didn't. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state.

Main Street Conservatives?

September 22, 2013 W. James Antle III, www.theamericanconservative.com Educate! Corporatism, Libertarianism

Just as Upton Sinclair afflicted the comfortable and brought about policy reform a century ago, a small group of conservative journalists seek to do much the same thing through libertarian means today. Among them is Tim Carney, once understudy to veteran Washington journalist Robert Novak, who compared his protege to Sinclair and praised as him as the “best political reporter among the outstanding young men and women who worked for me starting with the redoubtable John Fund in 1981.” Since an editor first urged him to dig into the obscure topic of the Export-Import Bank, Carney has developed a beat writing about the incestuous relationship between big government and big business, often assumed to be adversaries. Challenging this assumption jumbles all sorts of political categories.

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