The following is an excerpt from the Thom Hartmann Radio Program, 5/26/2015, which I edited for brevity and clarity. Thom discusses how Conservatives (including fiscally conservative Libertarians) hate democracy and desire oligarchy.
Thom: Mitch McConnell, back in 2011, when he said "the Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We've tried persuasion, we've tried negotiations, we've tried elections. Nothing has worked".
Huh? We've tried elections? Nothing has worked? What Mitch McConnell is complaining about is the same stuff Conservative have been complaining about from the founding of our Republic. Which is that they don't believe in small "d" democracy and a small "r" republic. They believe in oligarchy.
Alexander Hamilton, in the Constitutional convention, suggested that the President should be called "his royal highness" and should be appointed for life. That we should basically have a king. He was laughed out of the assembly. He was so offended, so embarrassed and so angry, he went back to New York city the next day and didn't come back for 2 months. But he proposed it.
This has always been the problem that Conservative have. They genuinely believe the Biblical story that we're all born out of a woman and all evil, as it were, because Eve made that deal with the snake. And therefore democracy is a problem.
This is essentially what [Libertarian] Charles Murray is saying. What he's calling for, or what is generally being called for by Conservatives, is rule by the rich.
We're back to Calvinism. How do we know that someone is actually good? That didn't get that original sin when they came through mom's birth canal? How do we know who the people are who God has blessed? How do we know who the statesmen are versus the politicians, the people you can actually trust are going to do the best thing for the country?
The way you know is that they're rich. This is Calvinism's contribution to American democracy. Basically oligarchy's contribution. This has been the justification for hereditary kingdoms for centuries. Now they want to bring it to the United States, and the Koch Brothers are obliging. They're going to spend 800 million dollars and help decide some elections.
Which they've been doing for the last decade. And it's just not the Koch brothers, of course. As Charles Murray correctly points out, we have a class of billionaires, created as a consequence of the Reagan tax cuts and the Reagan compensation law change, so that CEOs could pay themselves with stock options.
The result of this is the rise of the Billionaire class that now has enough financial power that (to paraphrase Henry Wallace, the vice president of the United States in 1944) can reach out for government power and use the power of the government and the power of the marketplace at the same time to destroy unions and keep the common man in eternal subjection (see "The Danger of American Fascism" Point 11).
[End Thom Hartmann Rant]
Yeah, Libertarians are usually atheist, but they agree with the Religious Right that the rich are a breed apart. This is the basis of Ayn Rand's Objectivism - that wealthy people are superior humans (and conversely poor people are subhuman leeches).
Concerning oligarchy, this is what Conservative and Libertarians desire, but Libertarians foolishly believe that the rich can be prevented from reaching out to control government. Or they believe that they can fool Libertarian adherents into thinking this is possible. Which it is not.
Which is why Libertarianism is such utter bullcrap. The wealthy will ALWAYS attempt to control government. The only way to limit the power of the wealthy is to limit their wealth. This is why democracy degrades when inequality increases.
If we wish to preserve democracy we need to prevent people from becoming uber-wealthy (via economic policy, including high taxation). Frankly I don't buy it that these Libertarians can be so naive as to believe that people can be allowed to siphon unlimited amounts of money out of our economy and the result will not be the corruption of democracy.
Some are that stupid, but I honestly do not believe they all are. The non-stupid know the endgame is a takeover of the State by the oligarchs... and that is exactly what they want.
SWTD Tags: Class Warefare, Libertarianism, Thom Hartmann, Wealthy Worship.
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