Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win in New York has brought phrase “democratic socialism” into the limelight, and a tidal wave of editorials from the “Right” have risen denouncing the ideology. Which is all well and good, but how many of those editorials have referenced Mises, Hayek or the others who defended the market economy against the socialist intellectuals of the 20th century? By all means, lets drag out the foundations and theories of socialism and pit them against those of a market economy. Let’s have the socialist calculation debate again, let it be discredited for the current generation. In fact, a nice socialist calculation debate should probably be waged every 50 years or so, kind of like a Spring cleaning, to shake out the socialists from not only the Left but also the Right, because the dominant welfare-warfare-ism of the Republican Party and virtually the entire Right Wing has paved the way for national destruction just as surely as the “socialism” of the Left has. The War on Terror, viciously promoted by the Right for a decade after 9/11 was nothing more than socialism the wealthy, connected cronies who build the myriad war goodies that are then used against Third World populations who have no means of defense against such horrors. But I digress.
Many young people who become passionate about politics do so out of a desire to change the world for the better. They’re idealists, they refuse to accept the world they’ve been handed and gravitate toward movements that they feel are working towards change, to a more peaceful, better fed world, one with dignity afforded to more people, more employment, higher wages, and more chances of advancing. Many are attracted to socialism, because, in a superficial sense, it proclaims to be the standard bearer for all the previously-mentioned goals. These are the very people that are primed for the philosophy of liberty, it just takes a non-defensive approach on the part of someone who already understands it.
Libertarianism, and the message of liberty itself, has tragically been co-opted by the Right, who’s buffoonery discredits libertarianism in the eyes of anyone with a hint of idealism. Libertarianism is neither Right nor Left. It’s goals are the goals of the young idealist/socialist, but its path to those goals are vastly different. Libertarians seek to unleash the power of choice, where government is a mere referee to the voluntary exchanges of each individual. Socialism, for all its humanitarian rhetoric, seeks the abolition of choice. Only the State is allowed to make choices. Socialism is authoritarianism in a distilled, pure form. There is nothing democratic about it, as the only type of government that is capable of suppressing markets is totalitarianism.
Advocating libertarianism means stripping it from its association with the “conservative” Right. Conservatives have been the most outspoken in many of the biggest socialist programs in US history. The Drug War, for instance. The Left, and pretty much every young “socialist” is for ending the Drug War. Which, if they examined what they were advocating for, they would see they were advocating for the expansion of choice, because they understand that the restriction of choice in markets for marijuana, cocaine and other substances has led to a crisis of over-incarceration, the growth of a massive police state, and a plague of community-destroying black markets. They only need a slight push to understand that the expansion of choice in every aspect of life would alleviate every social ill that they seek to remedy. But that push can only happen if they aren’t scoffed at and discounted. Idealism is the source of the power of libertarianism, but libertarianism itself has been hijacked by illiterate buffoons both online and on television. It must be reclaimed if it is to regain its persuasive power.
Libartarianism is the true idealism. It’s the home of those who aren’t afraid to advocate for what seems at the present to be a distant Utopia. We see an as-yet unrealized world, a future where the liberty has allowed us to evolve into something more than a species that enslaves, starves, and murders itself, where the spontaneous forces that have arisen from the trillions of choices of billions of people have guided us to something more than we have been thousands of years.
