Wolves and Sheep

Those who criticize democracy liken the process to two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. A republic (or representative democracy) could then be characterized as a society of mostly sheep who can only vote for wolves to represent them. Both of these political theories involve voting, one implies voting for representatives specifically, and neither guarantee universal suffrage for all adults. Libertarians suggest individual liberty should be the guiding principle of all laws and governing bodies but this view is a political fallacy that does not function in reality where social dynamics put individuals at cross purposes to one another. In the wolves and sheep analogy, the libertarian scenario amounts to the law of the jungle in which the wolves are free to eat the sheep and the sheep is free to be eaten by wolves. "Libertarian" is not a mode of government but rather an ambiguous ideal that doesn't take into account that one's liberty ends where another's begins. Or as my grandfather used to say "Your rights end where mine begin."

In the united states, we have what we call a democratic republic, and it is often referred to as an ongoing experiment in democracy. But a pure democracy has never truly been practiced by any nation, state, kingdom or empire, not even by the Athenians who first conceived it. The Ancients Greeks experimented with direct democracy, representative democracy, and aristocracy, but never implemented universal suffrage acknowledging the equality of all citizens. Rome followed in kind but eventually undermined their republic in favor of an aristocratic empire. And to be fair, "Aristocracy" literally translates into the "rule of the best" which doesn't sound bad and may have been started with the best of intentions. But it quickly became the rule of a nepotist elite, a plutocracy of ruling families who retained the bulk of land and wealth. It took thousands of years for universal suffrage to become a moral question, and then a civil movement, and then the hard won rights of many, but not most people around the world.

Until relatively recently the experiments of democracy have been carried out entirely among the wolves, who rarely debated what to have for dinner. And as the wolves sustained themselves by extracting their nourishing riches from the poor, the sheep, the 99%, they grew very fat and passed on their ill-gotten wealth to each new generation. If libertarians could go back to zero, and argue for the liberty of all people, and protect those liberties before the wolves had plundered the sheep for thousands of years, they may have been a powerful political force in the history of democracy. But to argue for liberty in a world turned upside down by wolves who take what they want and then fiercely defend it as their rightful property, is to prevent the sheep from ever turning the world right side up again. Most of the wealthy, the 1% especially, do not directly identify with the Libertarian party, or it's main advocates, but they do appreciate the validation and the shield it provides to wealthy property owners. And the one thing they hold in common is that they believe in money over people, capital over labor, inherited property over earned property.

It's true there are "Socialist Libertarians" out there, but they might be seen as the black sheep, in keeping with our analogy. So even among the Libertarian fold there is disagreement on issues such as redistribution of wealth, or caps on wealth as FDR suggested in his Economic Bill of Rights. The most frustrating slogan coming from the Libertarian party is "Free Markets Free People" as if the two were one and the same. As if taking part in the market were itself not a privilege of those who have adequate capital (wealth) or access to credit, capital, or wealth. And all those who participate in the market may not be wolves, but those who dominate the market are, and they go on to manipulate the powers that are intended to keep them in check. This is the basic process we call corruption and it requires little or no conspiring, in fact it's exactly how the system is designed so we can expect the end product to be corruption every time. But the free market concept is an oxymoron, nothing in the market is "free", something is either "Free" or "Traded" but there is no such thing as "Free Trade."

Unfortunately, if there ever was any purity to the Libertarian agenda, it was at some point co-opted by the same people who decided that corporations are people, but with more rights, more power, more liberty than those of us with belly buttons. To them the Bhopal disaster may have been a tragedy, but there should be no laws to prevent something like that from re-occurring in the future. They don't see any problem limiting the liability of corporations, but to limit the liberty of corporations, to drill where they please, or dump toxic waste into the oceans and streams is an affront to freedom. Only under the guise of a word as pure and saintly as "Liberty" could anyone get away with the obvious advocacy of freedom without accountability. The agenda of the Libertarian party is so off kilter that it exposes their callous disregard, if not ignorance of the delicate balance that is liberty for all. This is not a group of disadvantaged underdogs fighting for truth and justice, it is a group of mostly white, affluent, and often wealthy, land owning conservatives who don't recognize just how much liberty they have, they only know where it's limits are and they don't like to be limited.

Is it possible that Libertarians have always been wolves in sheep's clothing?