The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
The August 30th issue of The New Yorker contained an article called Covert Operations by Jane
Mayer.
As of this writing, nearly halfway through September, the piece seems to have just begun
to attract the attention of libertarians.
But attract their attention it should, if only because it's an almost textbook quality
example of what happens when you try to write about libertarianism in current events without
having at least a basic understanding of the libertarian tradition.
On the surface, Mayer's article is an expose of what she takes to be the perfidy of the
by the Koch Brothers, Charles and David of Wichita, Kansas, particularly egregious in her mind is the case of David Koch, who has had the sheer effrontery to move from Wichita to Manhattan and, please imagine gasps of dismay in the background, sees for himself perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, a trusteeship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by the simple expedient of becoming what Mayer calls
One of the city's most prominent philanthropists.
She writes that Koch began giving spectacularly large donations to the arts and sciences during
the early 1990s.
He donated two and a half million dollars toward the American Ballet Theatre Company's
upcoming season and had given many millions before that.
Back in 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center's New
New York State Theatre Building, which now bears his name.
He has given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is
named for him.
This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least $10 million for their renovation.
Meanwhile, Koch had also made himself into an important patron of cancer research, focusing
on Prostate Cancer.
He serves on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more
than $40 million, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.
But wait!
There's more!
For in addition to his gifts to Sloan Kettering, he gave $15 million to New York Presbyterian
in Hospital, $125 million to MIT for cancer research, $20 million to Johns Hopkins University,
and $25 million to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Yet we must not be deceived, Mayor Cautions, for lurking behind this façade of the public-spirited
benefactor and leader of polite and civil society is an evil anti-social monster, a man who
In plain English, with all the muted hysteria removed, Charles and David Koch are guilty
of using some of their money to fund organizations they think can help to advance the political
ideals they believe in, even when those ideals are politically incorrect.
This gross insensitivity to political correctness, this calling for drastically lower personal
and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of
of Industry, especially environmental regulation, is simply beyond the pale, of course. It's
almost like publicly using the n-word or some comparable vulgarity. No wonder Mayer is driven
to approvingly quoting one Lee Fang of the liberal blog Think Progress, who has called
the Kochs the billionaires behind the hate. Expression of libertarian ideas, you see,
is a kind of hate speech. All this is the rankest nonsense, of course, and it is so
because it is based on ignorance of the libertarian tradition. It is clear that Mayer hasn't the
foggiest idea of what libertarianism is all about. It seems likely that she has made no
effort at all to find out what it's all about. Instead, she has been content to go with what
She Thought She Knew About Libertarianism, which runs roughly as follows.
Libertarianism is a variety of conservatism.
Libertarians are, you might say, the most extreme conservatives.
We live in what is still essentially a free market society.
A few trivial regulations have been placed on big corporations in this society after
are great and usually futile struggles by well-meaning men and women who hope to protect the poor
and defenseless from these rapacious corporations.
But in the main, the free market is what we see around us.
Conservatives, which includes libertarians, are working through such institutions as Fox
News, the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party to change government policy in an even
more free-market direction.
Conservatives want to cut back the pitiful handful of regulations the well-meaning men
and women have managed to impose on big corporations.
They want to cut back the few pitiful programs well-meaning men and women have managed to
set up to ameliorate the misery of the poor.
Libertarians want to end these regulations and programs altogether.
They want to do these evil things because they want the rapacious big corporations to
to have complete freedom to grind everyone else under their evil heel.
These rapacious big corporations want free market policies because free market policies
will guarantee them bigger profits.
One can only shake one's head sadly at such a grotesque panoply of misinformation and
outright falsehoods.
One is tempted to dismiss anyone who takes it seriously as delusional.
Yes, of course, something like this is what most Americans think they know about libertarianism.
But this level of ignorance is simply inexcusable in an intellectual journalist, a person who
writes professionally for periodical publication about recent developments and events in the
world of ideas.
Such a professional should always be guided by the knowledge that there is always more
or to any given thing than meets the eye, particularly the uninformed, casually glancing eye.
It is part of the job of the intellectual journalist to provide an accurate, if perhaps
somewhat oversimplified, understanding of ideas that are commonly misunderstood.
Yet Jane Mayer skips along blithely, promoting further misunderstanding.
She writes, for example, of how Charles and David Koch were particularly influenced by
the work of Friedrich von Hayek, and notes that there is little surprising in this, since
Hayek's belief in unfettered capitalism has proved inspirational to many conservatives.
She sees the Koch brothers as representative in a way of a recent trend.
In recent decades, she writes, members of several industrial dynasties have spent parts
She describes several planks in the 1980 libertarian party platform, which she takes as emblematic of the larger libertarian movement of the time, and notes that William F. Buckley Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement anarcho-totalitarianism.
Then, in what can only be called a pièce de résistance of cluelessness, she describes
the libertarian movement as a pro-corporate movement.
This would be laughable, I suppose, if it were not such a common misperception already,
and if the repetition of it in the pages of a nationally respected magazine weren't likely
to further perpetuate one of the great urban myths of the world of ideas.
The tacit assumption here, as I noted earlier, is that large corporations favor a laissez-faire
policy, that they seek a free market.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of corporations, exactly like the overwhelming majority of
individuals, do not favor a free market.
The overwhelming majority of corporations have never favored anything even remotely
resembling a free market.
They have favored a managed market, whether with themselves as the managers or with government
doing the managing under their guidance and influence.
It wasn't well-meaning men and women who hoped to protect the poor and defenseless
from rapacious corporations that gave us the monstrous tangle of laws and commissions that
now regulates business in this country.
It was business itself that gave us these regulations.
In most cases it was business itself, big business specifically, those giant corporations
Jane Mayer and her ilk are so afraid of, that wrote these regulations.
Regulation of business in this country is and always has been a device by which a handful
of big corporations dominate the market with the government's assistance, using laws
is to force the big corporations smaller competitors out of business and guarantee the big corporations
stable shares of the market without the uncertainties and hazards of having to actually compete
for customers.
As Albert J. Nock put it seventy-five years ago, American business never followed a policy
of laissez-faire, never wished to follow it, never wished the state to let it alone.
As Knox saw it, a policy of economic individualism cannot exist where the state makes any positive
interventions upon the individual in his economic capacity.
It can exist only where the state confines itself to purely negative interventions, such
as punishing fraud, enforcing the obligations of contract and the like.
In this country, the state has made positive interventions upon the individual from the
beginning, in rapidly increasing number and variety.
And at whose behest did the state begin making these positive interventions?
American business, Nock wrote, has sought state intervention at every tack and turn
of its affairs, often, in fact, quite regularly, employing most disreputable measures to obtain
it.
All remember the cynical remark of one of our representative industrialists, that it
was cheaper to buy legislatures than to buy voters?
Worse yet, when the state made some primary intervention to confer an economic advantage,
as in the case of our railways, for instance, and its beneficiaries got into a tangle with
one another over the use of it, the regular thing has been to run to the state for another
Another Intervention to Straighten the Tangle out, then another tangle, another agonized
plea to the state, another intervention, which piled complication upon complication, particularity
upon particularity, and then the same sequences, with ever multiplying complications and ever
increasing particularity, repeated again and again.
Who hectored the state into the shipping business, Nock demanded, and plumped for setting up
the shipping board?
Who pestered the state into setting up the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal
Farm Board?
Who got the state to go into the transportation business on our inland waterways?
Who is always urging the state to regulate and supervise this, that and the other routine
One Process of Financial, Industrial and Commercial Enterprise
This was written, as I say, in 1935. It was published in a major American magazine and
reprinted two years later in a collection of Nock's essays, Free Speech and Plain Language,
which was brought out by a major American publisher, William Morrow and Company. Nock
Hayek used the word libertarian to describe himself during this period and properly so.
He was personally acquainted with many and exercised a direct intellectual influence
on most of the founding fathers and mothers of the contemporary American libertarian movement,
which got underway in the 1940s, during and just after World War II.
It is difficult to do much research at all on contemporary American libertarianism without
and at least repeatedly running across the name of Albert J. Nock.
The same might well be said about the name of Murray N. Rothbard, of whom movement historian
Brian Doherty has rightly written that he was the most uniquely and characteristically
libertarian of libertarians, the one whose influence explains most about what makes the
The ideas, behavior and general flavor of American libertarianism unique, the most illustrative
and paradigmatic of the foundational figures of modern libertarianism.
Rothbard took Knox's points about economic intervention by government on behalf of corporations
and reintroduced them into modern libertarian discourse nearly 50 years ago in a series
These are articles that drew on historian Gabriel Kolko's then-current books The Triumph of
Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation.
It would be pretty hard to put very much effort into even a journalist's quick study of the
contemporary American libertarian movement without repeatedly running into the name Murray
Rothbard.
There is, however, not the slightest evidence to support the claim that Jane Mayer, the celebrated
and award-winning journalist has ever heard of, much less read, either Nock or Rothbard.
If she had bothered to read those two luminaries of the libertarian tradition, she'd know
that libertarians have been denouncing government policies designed to benefit corporations
since at least two decades before she herself was born.
And in fact, libertarians have been denouncing such policies far longer than that.
It is Republicans, not Libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations.
And Republicans are not Libertarians.
How should those of us who do know something about Libertarianism respond to Jane Mayer's
historically illiterate article?
I suppose we might weep and gnash our teeth and tear our hair over the state of intellectual
Journalism these days, but perhaps we would do better to count our blessings, and remember
that, as Oscar Wilde put it more than a hundred years ago, there is much to be said in favor
of modern journalism.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of
the community.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.