Do libertarians give a shit about what Adam Smith has to say about economics?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=payHXQZL41o
Adam Smith ain't Murray Rothbard, let alone Ayn Rand. Well... bold of me to even assume that libertarians nowadays even
care about reading Murray Rothbard's insane ramblings or Ayn Rand's
awful prose anymore. That would imply they even read in the first place these days.
Also something that burns my ass: "free markets" alone *do not* a capitalist country make. Capitalism, as we understand it, emerged
because of Adam Smith. Lest we forget, Smith's own ideas were iterated, commentated, deconstructed, reconstructed, and so on
countless times throughout recent history. Colonial European powers drew upon Smith's ideas, even if they diverged significantly in practice. Bismarck was a
staunch anti-socialist and repressed them heavily, yet he was responsible for constructing the modern welfare state to beat socialists at their own game.
We like to think of Burgerland as freedom incarnate where capitalism is the bedrock of our modern society, and we'd be
horribly mistaken if we think along those lines. The USA is a mixed-market economy that actively intervenes within all levels of the economy in both beneficial and harmful ways. Cereal crops and energy are subsidised to maintain artificially lower consumer prices compared to industrial market rates, while maintaining social stability in the process. The federal government is responsible for funding various education and vocational training programmes depending on the circumstances of the time period. Trade policy actively influences finished goods that consumers will actually buy, and the supply chains and businesses that allowed consumers to get those finished goods in the first place. That's not even getting into social welfare programmes, how lower levels of government like state and local have their own variations, and all the other odds and ends.
"True" capitalism is such a fucking nebulous concept because "true" capitalism is just as elusive as "true" socialism. Is true capitalism exactly as Adam Smith laid out in The Wealth of Nations, without a single deviation to factor in past and present realities? Is true socialism exactly as Marx and Engles laid out in The Communist Manifesto, without any deviation or innovations brought in by syndicalists, mensheviks, bolsheviks, and so on? The answer to both is a resounding "no." The boring, mundane truth is that
all governments past, present, and future, will heavily intervene in all things remotely economic. Capitalism didn't exist during the times of Hamurabbi because Babylon was collecting harvest quotas, busting teeth, and forcing slaveowners to pay several gold minas for hurting another man's slaves.
Libertarian discourse, past and present, allegedly wants a capitalism without any government intervention. Yet it's government intervention that allows the Libertarian Party to exist in all 50 states, get additional funding or whatever if they break 5% in an election, and all that other stuff. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged and countless diatribes against the poor and working class, yet she changed her tune once she got old enough to receive social security.
To be a libertarian in any capacity is to be a blithering hypocrite without any iota of self-awareness. Communists get helicopter rides off into the sea, libertarians get a lethal injection with all the heroin they claim the free market should allow us to access.
