This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community. This question comes from Dan Testen.
I want to talk about this question because it affects so much of what we hear in the way of
economics, politics and policy. Dan's question focuses on the work of the Senator Rand Paul.
He's an excellent example, a bit more extreme than most, of these formulations, a bit more cut loose
even from the normal levels of reality that these folks come from, but nonetheless a good target
for us to focus on. And what is Dan interested in? Well, in this case Rand Paul was talking about
President Biden's three and a half trillion dollar infrastructure upgrading proposal.
He made the same argument he makes all the time. It really doesn't matter what the topic is,
Senator Rand is a conservative Republican, but he likes to add an adjective to that – a libertarian
conservative republican. What this seems to mean, what Senator Rand seems to want to conserve,
is a libertarian principle. Since we have limited time, and I have limited patience, I'm not going
to be too polite here. The project of the libertarian conservatives is simply explained.
Every time capitalism does something
difficult, painful, unfair, grotesque, unjust, you name it, these folks arrive on the scene,
usually within minutes, to explain to all of us that the cause of the problem,
the driver of the problem, the evil behind the problem, is – get ready – the government.
That's right. These are the people who specialize in tracing everything that's bad
back to the government. They praise everything that's good as the result of the non-government.
In economics it's the private sector, the business community. But often their language is quoted and
set up as the evil government versus all the rest of us. You know, you and me as employees,
side-by-side with the folks who are employers. Because the difference and the tensions and the
conflicts between employers and employees is not where the conservative libertarians want you to go
with your thinking when there's a problem. No, no, no, no. They want you to stay with the difference
between the government and all the rest of us. We are private citizens and therefore what we do
is good, productive, prosperous, and all the rest. What the government does is evil, bad,
destructive, you name it. This is doing the dirty work of the employer class. I wish I could say
that the employer class paid them well for this dirty work, and indeed some of them are paid well,
but an awful lot of them do it for free, because they believe what they're saying.
They want the government to be the whipping boy. The one you punish.
Let me give you some examples. Unemployment comes to an area. People are suffering. Jobs
have been lost. Family budgets have been hurt by the lost jobs, and so on. In come
the conservative libertarians to tell you that the job loss that's hurting you was because of this,
or that, or the other government program. If it weren't for the government program, of course,
then the lovely employer would never have fired you. He would have loved you and kept you.
Notice the people who fire you when you lose a job are called employers. They're the ones that
tell you not to come back Monday morning. It's the job of the libertarian conservative to take
your upset, your resentment, your sadness, your bitterness, your anger, and focus them anywhere
else, but at the employer who actually fired you. Focus it on somewhere else – that's their job.
Here's another example. Prices of milk and bread are going up
more than your wages are and so you are kind of falling behind. You're not able to afford what you
used to be able to provide to your family. We call that an inflation, when prices rise like that.
That's a problem that the capitalist system has dumped on you. Oh no. In come the conservative
libertarians to tell you – oh, no. Yes, there's an inflation, but the employer isn't to blame. Oh
no. It's the government. Then they'll find some program, some policy, some bad
politician, that is doing it to us again. No matter what the issue is. I could give you
as many examples as the next 25 hours would allow us. But I don't want you to get lost in the weeds
of the examples. The important understanding is that the job of the conservative libertarian
is to make sure that every problem capitalism has, and offloads onto the working class,
leads the working class to blame somebody other than the capitalist system.
Because that's what conservative libertarianism is there to preserve at all costs.
Is this a celebration of the government, of course not. Do governments do bad things? All the time.
But let me leave you with this thought. Why do you think private enterprise in America
spends a fortune of money maintaining an army of lobbyists, not just in Washington,
but in every one of the fifty state capitals, working night and day, in huge offices, with
highly paid professionals, whose job it is to make the law bend a little this way,
add this paragraph, that clause? Why are they there shaping what the government does?
Answer: because they want the government to take care of them. Which it does. So, when you do
what the conservative libertarian wants you to do, and get angry at the government, add the obvious
question that the conservative libertarians don't. Why? If the government is doing something
genuinely bad, and not just being bad-mouthed, why is it doing that? And here's what you'll discover.
For everything our government does, there's an army of private capitalist enterprise agents
there to make the government do exactly that. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.