I’ve long been a fan of Matt Bruenig’s battles with the “serious” libertarians. What he shows is what I know from experience: libertarians don’t think very deeply. It is a political ideology that appeals to people on a superficial level, because it has a certain mathematical simplicity to it. The arguments you most hear are that no one has a right to bother you if you aren’t infringing on their rights. Thus, libertarians tend to be in favor of the very governmental functions that are most often used by governments to oppress their people: the military and police.

The philosophical basis of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle: the idea that one cannot initiate force against another. But what does it mean to initiate force? This is where libertarians get into so much trouble. They believe in private property. Thus, if you think you own a piece of land and I step on it, you think that I am initiating force. But if I don’t accept the idea of private property, then I think you are initiating force. So the non-aggression principle is begging the question. The real issue is whether there should be private property or not. But libertarians pretty much never even mention that question — they take it as given.

So all libertarianism is left with is a particularly belligerent approach to property rights — one where a person can initiate all the aggression they like as long as they (or more likely, their ancestors) staked a claim before anyone else got there. To me, there is a real sense in libertarian thought that it works backwards from the result it is looking for. Proponents want absolute rights to their property, and so they work back to the non-aggression principle. But actually what they do is a lot of intellectual busy work that goes nowhere: I must have absolute rights to my property because I must have absolute rights to my property.

Unless we are going to get into Inequality: the Monopoly Analogy, all people born should receive an equal share of the earth’s resources. Obviously, that would be pretty hard to do as a practical matter. So as a result, we as a society, have come up with other mechanisms to facilitate this — at least to a small extent. These include things like safety net programs, public education, and so on. Is that really so hard to understand? Apparently it is to libertarians. To them, it is absolutely right and fitting that Donald Trump and someone else born to poor parents on 14 June 1946 get absolutely divergent resources because of the accidents of their births.

Say what you will about aristocrats, at least they had a theory for why one’s lot in life was totally random. Libertarians offer no excuse for why Trump deserved to inherit his fortune other than that history itself is a kind of God that must be worshiped. That is ultimately what the non-aggression principle means in practice: no one is to do violence to the way things are. And I fully acknowledge that in such a world, there are some born with great dis-fortune who will do well, and vise versa. But libertarianism stacks the deck heavily — providing the opposite of equality of opportunity.

During my lifetime, I’ve seen the laws change to make personal bankruptcy get harder and harder. At the same time, corporate bankruptcy has gotten easier. It’s kind of like how the banks were bailed out in 2008, but not the homeowners. The banks just had to sign a two page document to get billions of dollars in low interest loans. There was a program to help homeowners, of course; but it was incredibly difficult to qualify for. Most people didn’t. And those who did spent years doing it.

That’s the thing. As far as the government is concerned, there are the right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. The right kind of people are the rich and they are lavished with money because they always land on their feet. Of course, it’s a bizarre kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where the government “knows” the rich are good for any help they get because the government makes sure that they get help whenever they get in trouble. Meanwhile, if you are poor, you’re screwed. I once thought about applying for food stamps in the relatively liberal state of California, and I was handed a packed of about 50 pages of forms to fill out. If I had done it, I would have received about $20 per week in food.

Robert Reich wrote a very interesting article the other day, Donald Trump Proves What’s Wrong with Bankruptcy Laws in America. And he provided a way of looking at corporate bankruptcy and the economy at large that I had never thought about:

Think about about. When an individual goes bankrupt, it doesn’t affect the rest of the economy that much. Yes, some creditors end up with less money. But no individual is going to make or break a credit card company. But when corporations are allowed to go bankrupt, they can destroy the lives of thousands of works — sometimes far more. Yet our government has decided that the far more destabilizing kind of bankruptcy is the one that should be encouraged. Obviously, such policies have little to do with what is best for the nation as a whole.

Most of Reich’s article is about how the finance industry has warped the law for its own gain and against the people of the nation. Long ago, there was this idea that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. That certainly wasn’t true — even when it provided really good union jobs for tens of thousands of workers. But now we operate as though what is good for Goldman Sachs is good for America. And that’s simply a bizarre notion.