Political Autopsy: Libertarians
Libertarianism Didn’t Build a Society. It Built a Fantasy
By Tom Hicks | The Unredacted Bastard Independent Journalist • Democracy’s Fire Alarm • Professional Shit-Stirrer
Bastard’s Law
Any ideology that treats dependence as moral failure will eventually turn power into virtue, cruelty into discipline, and abandonment into freedom.
Here’s the pitch, and I’ll give it this — it’s a fucking good one. Leave people alone. Let them keep their money. Stop micromanaging every transaction from birth to grave like some bureaucratic hall monitor with a clipboard and a god complex. Trust individuals instead of institutions. You hear that, and some part of you goes, yeah, obviously, why isn’t everybody saying this?
Because what they don’t tell you is the part where the whole thing turns to shit.
It doesn’t happen right away, and that’s the con. It holds together just long enough. Long enough for you to nod along, get into it at Thanksgiving, maybe even convince yourself you’ve cracked something everyone else is too timid to say out loud. And then reality shows up — not seminar reality, not white paper reality — actual people with actual rent and actual bodies that break down and actual kids who need things. That’s when the elegant little framework starts dropping pieces like a truck with loose bolts doing ninety on a wet road.
What if we just... didn’t. Didn’t step in, didn’t build systems, didn’t acknowledge that the whole modern world is held together by a scaffold of shared obligations that nobody thinks about until it’s gone. Just show up to a category five hurricane with a dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged and tell people to stop being so fucking dependent.
That’s not a philosophy. That’s a bumper sticker that got way too big for itself.
“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” — Isaiah Berlin
That one lands because it names the mechanism and doesn’t dress it up. Libertarianism treats freedom as if it exists in some frictionless void, untouched by money, leverage, or the basic fact that some people start fifty yards ahead of where other people will ever finish. Strip the guardrails, and you don’t get a level playing field. You get a race where half the runners are already moving, and you call the results merit, and you write books about it.
Power doesn’t disappear when you stop regulating it. It doesn’t retire. It doesn’t develop a conscience and start making fair decisions. It moves. It pools. It buys the ref, the league, and the building the league works in.
You don’t eliminate power.
You privatize it.
And then you call that freedom, and you say it with a straight fucking face.
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“Between the strong and the weak, liberty destroys; the law protects.” — Henri Lacordaire
Look it up, it’s worth it. And once you sit with that — once you actually follow the thread and admit that structure isn’t the enemy of freedom, that sometimes it’s the only goddamn thing that makes freedom real for people who weren’t already born with it — you’ve put a hole in the whole argument. Not the DMV. Not the worst version of government bloat you can imagine. Just something that keeps the system from turning into whoever has the most leverage wins, and we call it liberty.
Which brings me to the thing that pisses me off the most. Every single election cycle, same shit.
The stakes are real. Consequences are stacking. People are holding their breath trying to figure out which disaster they can survive. And right on cue, just outside the blast radius, there’s that voice. Both sides are garbage. Both choices are corrupt. I refuse to compromise my principles.
Sounds noble for about five seconds.
Then it’s just some asshole watching a building burn and critiquing the diameter of the fire hose. Nero with a podcast and a comment section full of people telling him he’s the only one brave enough to say it.
In a vacuum, fine. Vote your conscience. Write in your cat. Stay home and feel good about it.
But we don’t live in a vacuum, and pretending you do doesn’t make you principled; it makes you comfortable while everybody else deals with the wreckage of the world you opted out of. Outcomes still happen. Damage still stacks. Your clean hands are still attached to the same situation as everyone else’s dirty ones, and the self-congratulation doesn’t change that by one fucking inch.
That smug remove is the tell. Easy as hell to have perfect principles when you’re not the one paying for them.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges…” — Anatole France
Equal rules in an unequal world don’t create fairness. They freeze inequality in place and hand it a diploma. And that’s where this whole thing finally gives out — not in a debate, not in a philosophy seminar, but the second it makes contact with how people actually live. People get sick. Companies cut every corner that isn’t nailed down. Markets fail. Monopolies form and sit there grinning. Infrastructure rots while somebody files a quarterly report about it. And the invisible hand — and I really do love this, it never gets old — the invisible hand doesn’t fix any of it.
Sometimes it just takes your wallet and calls it efficiency.
Here’s the actual problem underneath all of it. Libertarianism defines freedom as the absence of interference instead of the capacity to actually function in the world. Those are not the same fucking thing, and pretending they are is either dishonest or stupid, and I’m not sure which is worse. A worker with no leverage isn’t free — they’re unprotected and being told to feel grateful for the distinction. A sick person with no care isn’t free. A kid stuck in a school that’s been starved of resources isn’t free. They’re just on their own. And libertarianism keeps confusing “on your own” with “liberty,” like it’s a rebranding exercise somebody ran in 1975, and nobody bothered to question.
And fine — it can diagnose failure. I’ll give it that much. Some of the institutional skepticism is earned. Occasionally, a libertarian will say something about surveillance or overcriminalization that’s actually worth hearing. But the second you ask it to build something? Replace what it just finished tearing down? That’s where it folds like a cheap card table at a tailgate.
It can explain failure.
It just can’t survive contact with it.
Mix that with the ideological purity that treats engagement like contamination, and what you’ve got isn’t a governing philosophy. It’s a critique machine that refuses to touch the controls and then acts smug about where the plane fucking lands.
That’s not independence.
That’s abdication.
And abdication isn’t neutral. Somebody still decides. Somebody still pulls the lever. In the absence of people who give a shit about outcomes, it’s always — always — the person who already owns the lever.
So if that’s the grand unified theory of freedom —
It’s not a blueprint.
It’s a permission slip for the people who were already winning.
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