| Libertarianism in an Age of Economic Crisis: Why being truculent, oppositional, and hard to pigeonhole are not signs of ideological death |
| Monday, February 16, 2009 |
By Brian Doherty
Reason Magazine
Many aspects of America’s future are at risk as politicians and public intellectuals respond to the current economic crisis. The politicians are shaping how (far too much of) Americans’ money, resources, and precious bodily fluids will be expended, both now and in the very far future. Beyond the (completely insane) spending explosion per se, the specifics of how banking and technology policy will be dealt with, along with the detailed shopping list of Washington spending, show that D.C.’s strength in shaping how agents in the “free market” (that is, us human beings out here) move through the world is growing at an alarming rate. The incentives—and yes, even whims—of free individual choice are increasingly losing out to the commands and decisions of special interests in Washington. That will prove more dangerous in the long term than even the spending.
That this crisis is changing America in ways as significant as the Great Depression and the New Deal appears to be the settled opinion of both those who cheer that fact and those who lament it. But the real sea change arising from the crisis—if a sea change is really at hand—is more a matter of ideology and perspective than one of government action.
After all, though the partisans of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have muddied our view of this, the Bush years (indeed most of the American postwar experience) have been a time of constant stimulus and deficit spending, and a gradual (sometimes stop-and-start) centralization of the control of resources and decision making.
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posted by citizen jerk @ 9:31 PM   |
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