True Colors of Libertarianism

I finally took Virginia Postrel's blog off my favorites list on IE because of this sanctimonious eulogy
eulogy about the Gipper. I've never had much confidence in the intellectual integrity of libertarians, in part because it is a movement mostly outside academia, but also because it is fairly closely linked to a political party. And I have criticized Postrel's style without substance argument as distinctly uniformed of aesthetics. But I held on to the idea that, since libertarians prattle on about reason, they are at least somewhat immune to ideology.

Well, this economium to the leader who saw the world through blinkered, rosy-colored glasses is proof that Postrel is more interested in power and currying favor. An economist by training, she fails to mention that Reaganomics is all hat and no cattle: after an initial tax cut, Reagan raised taxes two times. And all the analysis I have read suggests that the Kennedy/Johnson years and the Clinton years were better for economic growth. Neither saw an economic crisis on the order of the bankruptcies of savings and loans.

More damning, though, and more worrying in light of the current administration tendencies towards zealousness, are the costs of the black and white stand on communism, which lead to supporting a number of authoritarian regimes in Nicarauga, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Jeanne Kirkpatrick posited (metaphysically) that communist regimes could not evolve into democratic ones, while authoritarians ones could, a thesis that since 1989 has been utterly exploded. Meanwhile, the wholesale imposition of the free market on countries has been shown to bring about authoritarian regimes and impoverish the very people these reforms supposedly help. The bottom line, which the country under Reagan didn't get, is that all nations deserve to determine themselves. Who knows, but if Carter simply had sent aid to Afghanistan and requested UN sanctions instead of trying to pick winners in a country we had nearly no knowledge of, whether a democratic regime might have emerged once the USSR dissolved out of its own inertia. (The agency that repeatedly told us that this wouldn't happen, the CIA, was the one most dependent on the Cold War for its existence.)

In any case, you have to wonder why a professed libertarian would spill such purple prose about a mightily contradictory presidency. The only reason is that ultimately libertarians are little better than conservative Republicans who pretend to pay attention to philosophy. A philosophy that praises the work of the market over the value of human life is not a philosophy, but a rather shallow economics, mostly serving a veneer for basic will-to-power. Poor libertarians, they shall always only be at weak misreaders of Nietzsche.