Andrew Napolitano just published — a powerfully accurate libertarian indictment of the United States' failed democracy — but is his implied cure workable?

22 April 2017

Brilliant

Former judge Andrew Napolitano recently posted a superbly delivered attack on anti-democratic American government:

What if our belief in self-government is a belief in a myth?

What if the election of one political party over the other to control Congress changes only appearances? What if taxes stay high and regulations stay pervasive and the government stays oppressive and presidents fight wars no matter what the politicians promise and no matter who wins elections?

What if the true goal of those whom we elect to Congress is not to be our agents of self-government or even to preserve our personal liberties but to remain in power by getting re-elected?

What if each political party is controlled by a small leadership group that punishes members who defy it?

What if the laws that Congress has written about the CIA have delegated congressional power to a small secret committee of members . . . .

[W]hat if the effect of the decisions of the small secret committee is that the committee is basically a Congress within Congress?

What if the data seen and discussed and the decisions made in secret by the Congress within Congress are generated by the CIA and other intelligence agencies?

What if these intelligence agencies selectively reveal and selectively conceal data to manipulate the decisions of the Congress within Congress?

What if we don’t really govern ourselves? What do we do about it?

But looking ahead — is Napolitano's implied fix likely to solve the anti-democracy problem?

Implied in Napolitano's critique is a solution that almost certainly embraces his libertarian philosophy. Let's glance at its implications.

Libertarians think that the minimized government regulation and enforcement desirably leads to more personal freedom. Libertarians often boil their core thinking down into an aphorism like, "My freedom ends at the tip of your nose." Or something similarly vacuous.

Lost, to the overwhelming majority of these governance minimalists, are the two obvious realities that:

(a) a fruitful Commons requires enforced regulatory protection

and

(b) the scope of this Commons extends outward in often surprisingly non-obvious ways.

A planet of 7.5 billion people is going to have to look further than metaphorically defining where our noses end.

After the revolt, then what?

If U.S. government is destined to remain the often murderous, oppressive monstrosity that it has become — would libertarianism's quasi-anarchy constitute an appealing choice over the long haul?

Libertarians have:

an excellent grasp of what people generally want personally,

but

a surprisingly naive idea of how these desires would play out against each other — in a minimally regulated, but highly populated, social system.

Unregulated avarice and selfishness are exactly what got American government to where it is today.

Those who had clout eventually seized enough power to write the regulations that aided them in effectuating most of the evils that Napolitano objects to.

Stephan Richter once wrote something pertinent

About societal focus, he said — with regard to the United States' decaying physical infrastructure:

[T]his collection of extremely smart people . . . can't even get their act together to establish and maintain state-of-the-art infrastructure?

The best answer . . . is found in the rock-bottom preference of many either wealthy or smart Americans for outright libertarianism.

Their rationale is simple:

As long as I fend for myself, why should I worry about matters of collective action, collective rationality?

Underneath this dilapidated state of the infrastructure, there is a deliberate, almost devilish toying with the risk of societal collapse — not only of not caring about the public good, but almost of enjoying to play it this riskily, of not making investments in the future.

Ideological solutions collapse in Reality's face

Is American government today, seized (as it is) by the rich and power-hungry, much different than that which would foreseeably be generated by dismembering it in a libertarian way?

If we revolt in favor of establishing more primevally free personal currents, would the structural change not eventually take us right back to where we are now? Do not selfishly sociopathic people and corporations always capture the most minimally regulated systems?

How do libertarians think that we got to where we are?

Troubling ideological glitches

Libertarianism is a society-organizing principle that incorporates the foreseeable death of freedom into its very prescription for freedom.

Libertarianism fails to take human societal nature, and our dependence upon each other and the planet, into realistic long-term account.

Libertarianism is a Freedom Idealist's unrealistically pure solution to the insolubly competing difficulties presented by:

(a) varied human fulfilment desires

and

(b) the unavoidable conflicts presented by trying to achieve them.

I give Judge Napolitano great artistic credit for crafting his outstanding closing argument

But the former judge's implied long-term prescription (inferred from his many previous libertarian writings) misleads us into rendering a probably mistaken verdict — regarding which social direction we should take in solving the problems he points to.

The moral? — Even the most brilliant Americans characteristically suffer from short-term-itis

Tactical solutions masquerading as strategic plans generally fail. We Americans usually get our priorities backwards. Our short-sighted actions do not anticipate Reality's consequences.

Ambiguity culturally offends us. The process of trying to dynamically balance grayish and changing solutions to competing difficulties frightens us.

We are too fond of isms and unwarranted simplicities. And, in contrast, too little enamored of thoughtful experimentation and rationally based course corrections.

A German optometrist, whose primary client base is American, told me recently — here paraphrased for clarity — "Americans abandon quality in favor of cheapness."

That is a penetratingly accurate cultural statement. Across more contexts than we would care to admit.

PeteFree.com

Andrew Napolitano just published — a powerfully accurate libertarian indictment of the United States' failed democracy — but is his implied cure workable?