"Libertarianism" at the airport

Herbert Hoover: he was against the "fascist" New Deal and Roozevelt socialism, too

Continuing my grumbling about "libertarianism" from Friday, there's a good example of how dingy "libertarian" dogma can be at Antiwar Radio (on Antiwar.com). Dated 10/05/07, it's an audio interview by Scott Horton with Becky Akers, who the site describes as follows:

Becky Akers discusses the case of Carol Anne Gotbaum who was killed while being detained by cops at the Phoenix airport, how the government’s control over TSA [Transportation Safety Administration] and countless other entities results in waste and mismanagement, the benefits of free-market security and America’s descent into despotism.

It also identifies her as a regular contributor to the neo-Confederate site LewRockwell.com.

Both interviewers who are currently featured at Antiwar Radio, Charles Goyette and Scott Horton, seem to assume that we already live in a "police state" in the US. Akers is on board with that concept. Now, I'm not familiar with the details of the Carol Anne Gotbaum case, where a woman died after being taken custody by police at the Phoenix airport. But I'm not sure from the interview how familiar Akers is with it either. She mainly uses it to rant about the evils of government.

It's a good example of how "libertarians" come up with surprising arguments which are often unfamiliar to those who are not immersed in Ayn Rand when we first hear them.

Akers complains that the government has anything to do with airport security. And even that the government owns airports. In her utopia, private businesses would own airports and they, working together with the airlines, would provide security. And that security, being sprinkled with the magic of the Private Sector, would be far better than what the TSA currently provides. Because the airlines and the private airports would know their customers wanted security, so they would provide it.

But wait, you may be saying, isn't that what happened prior to 9/11? Those airlines used to provide security. And being responsive in the free market to their customers' complaints about the annoyance of the security checks, they tried to minimize the checks. Being subject to the competitive pressures of the free markets, they tried to keep ticket prices for major routes down. And being under the sovereign authority of their stock holders in the free market, they were under tremendous pressure to show rising profits each year and each quarter, which means they needed to cut costs wherever they could.

The result of this lovely free-market process? Inadequate security equipment, inadequate procedures, and very low-paid security personnel, many of whom were in jobs with more than 100% turnover in a year. This also meant that the personnel were often inexperienced, poorly trained, not terribly motivated and often not very friendly. So how is it going to help things if we go back to that system?

Oh, silly you. You obviously don't understand the, uh, depths of libertarian dogma. Because, you see, the airlines are government, too! True, they're technically private companies. But they get subsidies from the federal government! That means they're all just another set of socialistic institutions crushing out our liberty in the police state. (Hey, the hardcore libertarians actually do talk this way.)

In Aker's utopian free-market Eden, the airlines, the airports and all the security people will be privately owned. (A bit of a slip there; I guess it is the security services which will be privately owned, not the security people: but with libertarians, you can't be sure.) They will all be free of government safety and security regulations, they won't have to worry about all those pesky financial reporting standards or about lawsuits from irate customers, and of course they won't have hassle with any of those dang unions!

And what if these companies foolishly cut corners to squeeze out a bit of extra profit or just skim the company funds? Well, you don't need to worry, because we'll all be able to carry the weapons of our choice onto the airplanes with us. Akers was really irritated that people coming into the airports are "disarmed". Shoot, once we can bring our Glocks and Uzis and double-barrelled shotguns onto the plane with us, we won't have to worry about no terrorists. Somebody starts talkin' Arabic or some funny language like that, or if you hear somebody say something that sounds like "Allah", or some dark-skinned guy stands up and looks like he's up to something, the passengers can just gun him down right away. Who needs these socialistic government-paid police?

Akers griped that when she goes to the airport now, she feels helpless because "I don't have my gun, I don't have my knife". This, she says, is destroying civility and even civilization itself.

You get the drift. You can listen to the interview if you want to hear Akers explain how somebody named Leviathan has a giant conspiracy going through the TSA to make middle-class and wealthy white folks think like poor black people. Or something like that. It starts around minute 16. Mr. Leviathan's ultimate goal, she says, is to have police stationed in all our neighborhoods to make us go through scanners before we enter our houses. Scott Horton reminded her that there would be eyeball scans, too. And he gets in his usual plug for the crackpot rightwinger Ron Paul.

Now, this is the sort of thing that you can only take seriously if you grew up doing something like spending your every waking hour by the pool at the country club. If fans of this kind of stuff are antiwar, it's probably because they think war threatens to raise taxes on rich people and risks subjecting nice white youngsters to a military draft. No true AynRandian individualist would want to compromise his soul by having to spend a couple of years in a collectivist institution like the Army. And this idea that the wealthy should have to pay taxes or do anything else to support their country, why that's just another version of fascocommunistislamistdefeatocratism!
Sure, libertarians when you catch them running loose like on that radio interview will say things that don't sound like your standard stodgy Republican, such grouching about the cops or whining about intrusions on privacy.

But, in practice, to the extent that libertarians have any noticeable impact on American politics, it tends to be through advocacy of their free-market, no-regulations-on-business ideas, like through the "libertarian" think-tank, the Cato Institute. As of this writing, the following items are featured on their Web site's homepage:

"The Antitrust Religion", which looks to be a polemic against gubment regulation of business

"Cato Scholar Testifies on Reforming Health Care in Wisconsin" (hint: he's not demanding a broad new government program to plug gaps in health insurance)

"Bush Vetoes SCHIP Expansion", praising Bush's veto of the dangerous socialistic program to provide health care for more children, with links to several articles explaining why such dreadful threats to American liberty have to be blocked

"Supreme Court Begins New Term", bitching about how That Man Roosevelt turned the Supreme Court into stark raving socialists, or something to that effect

Less prominent items on the front page include an article about "what FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 1930s". Follow the link and you can read about the "surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler". Well, Stalin, too, but it's a review of a book that focuses on the other three.

This is not unusual. While the Antiwar.com site usually presents the antiwar and civil-libertarian side of libertarianism, that's not the main focus of the small libertarian movement. Theoretically, libertarians generally may be concerned with such things. But their main influence is to promote Republican-friendly, "pro-business", anti-regulation, anti-union causes. Their political and philosophical affinities, and those of some of their biggest bankrollers, are much closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats.

In the end, so is their narrowly-nationalistic, isolationist foreign policy perspective. They mostly share the unilateralist outlook of Dick Cheney and George Bush. They just don't approve of their current wars.

Tags: antiwar.com, becky akers, isolationism, libertarianism, republican party, scott horton