Libertarian Hypocrisy?

Sorry, this is completely absurd.

The “libertarianism that believes in social justice”/”progressivism that understands power of markets” already has a name:  liberalism. That is a definition of liberalism. Similarly “libertarians who believe is social justice” is obviously an oxymoron. If libertarians were to, by some accident, become interested in social justice, they would thereby become liberals.

The situation with Cato is illustrative of libertarian thought because it shows that they do not, in fact, believe in following their own laws. Like other forms of authoritarian, libertarians believe that laws are for the followers not the leaders. Unlike most authoritarian followers, libertarians mistakenly believe they are leaders. Charles Koch is doing them a favor, showing them this is untrue in a way even they may be able to understand.

Doug Henwood said it best summing up the theory of libertarianism: “I got mine, so fuck you.”

I think some people in the comment thread, and Jessica herself in her original post, are misconstruing my position. My argument in the post is not that  someone who has few alternative options but to stay in a crappy job is coerced (though I’m certainly open to that argument, it’s not what I am saying here).  Nor is it that Sanchez’s job under the Kochs — as he describes and envisions it in his original post — would be merely “disagreeable or objectionable” to him.

My argument is that it is the workplace itself, the job as it often experienced by many American workers (and as Sanchez sort of begins to allude to in his post), that is coercive.  I’ve written about this in my first book *Fear: The History of a Political Idea* (see chapter 8 in particular), or you can take a look at the article link I provide below, just to give you a hint of what I’m talking about.  And by coercion I don’t mean anything fancy: I really mean plain old coercion of the negative liberty type. Or, if you want to use Hayek’s sense of coercion and freedom in Constitution of Liberty: “The state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others is often also distinguished as ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ freedom, and whenever we want to remind the reader that it is in this sense that we are using the word ‘freedom,’ we shall employ that expression.” Just taking that sense of the term, I would argue that the workplace is often the site of coercion.

What I then say is that if the capacity to quit is one way to minimize the reach of coercion over oneself — and I think we all would agree that it is — then it seems to me that if we enhance workers’ capacity to quit, we minimize the reach of coercion.  Now Sanchez in his post says quite clearly that b/c he does not have other encumbrances like a mortgage or a family — and later in a tweet, he made a point of emphasizing that he has lots of options — he can quit quite easily.  I think we would agree that other people can’t.  So from there, I go onto make the point that if other people were materially situated in the same way as Sanchez (and I argue that state transfers and other provisions make that possible), they would be able to remove themselves as easily from a coercive situation.

As I said, I think Sanchez gives us a beginning sense of the coerciveness off the American workplace: he describes what it would be like (or what he imagines it would be like) if he were working under the Kochs, and he says the following: he would be worried that he’d be called on the carpet for saying the wrong things; even if he weren’t called on the carpet, that mere worry would be enough for him not to be able to speak the truth as he sees it.

Now if we extract a bit from that observation, it seems to me like he’s providing a fairly commonsensical definition of coercion (it certainly comports with what Hayek is getting at above).  But even if you don’t accept that extrapolation by me — and it’s fine if you don’t — I would say that many American workers could describe, with far greater pungency and detail, situations that are in fact coercive on anyone’s measure.  So, for instance, in the article I link to below, I describe how workers are denied bathroom breaks by their employers. Especially workers a the low end of the payscale, for whom this is routine. In the workplace of most states, you can be legally fired for driving to work sporting a bumper sticker with a message that the boss doesn’t like (there was a famous case about this in Louisiana during the 2004 presidential campaign). You can be fired by your employer for engaging in First Amendment-protected activities off the job (the ACLU has litigated and lost many of these cases.)  If you engage in political (or any other kind of disfavored) speech during your lunch break, or on other break times, you can be fired. And there’s a lot more that I describe in chapter 8 of my book.

So the workplace is a site of coercion — which, even when that coercion is not exercised (as Sanchez makes clear in his post), can still be intimidating (merely the threat of it can change  one’s behavior).  That’s the point.  And if that’s true — I suspect many of you here will disagree with that, either on the empirical case or the analytical point — my second point is that enhancing the capacity to act (in this case, the capacity to quit, though I would also say that enhancing workers’ rights and capacities to speak up and protest these conditions — i.e., establishing negative and positive liberty) would minimize that coercion, by limiting its reach and diminishing its actual power and exercise (I assume any rational employer would stop acting coercively if s/he faced an exit en masse of workers.)

One final note: someone in this thread says that if the boss’s sanctions don’t follow you out of the workplace, how can that be coercion?  I don’t really get that point. All of us would agree, I assume, that tsarist Russia in the late 1890s, with its pogroms and more/less, featured a hell of a lot of coercion. Yet many Jews and other Russians left it (this is the high tide of Jewish emigration to Britain, the States, and elsewhere). Would we say that b/c that coercion in Tsarist Russia didn’t follow you when you came to the States, that it wasn’t coercion?

Sorry, didn’t mean to go on this long, but I really wanted to make sure people we’re grappling with my argument.

Jessica writes, “In practice, it looks like direct governmental intervention and union support no longer works to the benefit of society’s worst off.” 
This is true, but it is a very incomplete view of the situation. If there were no unions (and you can’t have unions if dues aren’t compulsory for all workers) and no minimum wage laws and no child labor laws and no immigration restrictions and no tariffs and no licensing requirements (etc.), people at the very bottom of the income scale would be better off. Rather than being unemployed, people at the very bottom would be employed at slave wages doing jobs that endanger their health (“Woodja lik’ yer chimney swept, Mista?”). 

However, in this libertarian paradise, a lot of people – at least the next 20% of the income distribution, and probably more like the next 80% – would be a hell of a lot worse off than they currently are. The capitalists in the top 1% would clean up and buy more G6s. (It’s their just deserts, being such awesomely productive über-geniuses, right?) 

So: I object to “Rawlsekianism” and “liberaltarianism” for the same reason that I object to Rawls’ original theory: these views are all myopically focused on the plight of the very worst off. Maybe the system that would be best for the worst off would be terrible for the vast majority. I believe that the system that would in fact be best for the vast majority is Scandinavian-style social democracy. It taps into the productive power of capitalism, but it spreads the wealth. It’s also not too bad for the people at the bottom, but I wouldn’t put all that much weight on that.

“people think they’re scoring some kind of gotcha point when they’re actually exposing the silliness of their own caricature.” 

Objectivists are not heartless people, you clearly do not understand incentives- an Objectivist in a position to easily save a stranger is likely to rescue someone who will feel greatly indebted and likely want to return the favor in some way, putting the Objectivist in a better position than before. 
Don’t make petty swipes at a philosophy standing on clearer and more just premises than your presumptuous ones.  Don’t hide behind compassion to be ignorant.  Objectivists understand it is the productive who move the world forward and to maximize their output we should give them their due.  Study Austrian Economics.