Freedom VS Liberty

The libertarian right cast themselves as the defenders of freedom and the opponents of government over-reach and oppression.

In practice their definition of freedom is very selective, and always seems to boil down to economic freedom for elites to mistreat employees, pollute the environment and give big business control over all the essential services currently handled by government.

And the wholly predictable result of such policies is a decrease in freedom and an increase in oppression.

We've seen the results over the last few decades of slashing away at regulation of business, attacking unions (the freedom of employees to join together collectively to defend their interests is NOT among the freedoms that Libertarians cherish.) and constantly reducing the contribution of the wealthy and big business to the social contract and the results have not been pretty.

When Reagan came in he slashed away at the tax burden on the wealthiest and the regulation of the financial sector brought in by FDR that had led to decades of stability and prosperity. Within just a few years the result was the Savings and Loan debacle as financial cowboys including the Bush clan used that deregulation to loot their customers and the American taxpayer for billions while the Republican tax policies starved the state of funds to protect the weakest from the depredations of the strongest. None of this reduced the Republican appetite for deregulation and the results of the next round of eliminating Wall Street regulation were seen by us all last year.

The results of the rampant deregulation of other industries can be seen today in the Gulf of Mexico.

Democracy and wide disparities in wealth are fundamentally incompatible and massive disparities of wealth are the sine qua non of libertarian ideology.

How much freedom and liberation from oppression do you have when a tiny gilded minority live in gated splendour while ever more aggressive private law policing is keeping the ever hungrier majorities in line in the devastated polluted zones outside the fences?

This is the world promoted by organizations like the Fraser Institute. The rich get richer and contribute less every year to the society that helped make them rich, while the world gets more poisoned and rigid social control over the restive majority needs to get ever more draconian and aggressive to keep those majorities in line.

Right wing libertarianism is the most anti-freedom ideology out there absent fascism itself, and leads inexorably to an oppressive police state to protect the interests of the elites who promote it.

There's a reason why right wing libertarians tend to get all misty eyed over the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that sustained it's elite serving 'free market' with torture chambers and death squads.