Technology

I've recently refreshed my mind on Khmer Rouge, and have gotten a very nasty feeling that, in a right (wrong) combination of circumstances, my ideological ideas could eventually lead to something like that. Despite being libertarian.

But one thing very notable about them - despite in ideology being frankly very fascist in addition to communist (fascist in a deep sense, the anti-intellectualism, the reliance on emotion, rejection of modernity and complexity, feeling of soil and violence, the almost deified organization, using 12-14 year olds as the main armed force, all that), many things, like their "struggle sessions" and the "quick and radical" solutions, were, one can say, reliant on wide participation and popular approval.

So. An oligarch is a businessman with power bending the law and allowing them to capture, together with other oligarchs, a sphere of the economy.

Oligarchy is not nice, and eventually always leads to authoritarianism (initially oligarchs install their tools at the top of the state, and then eventually those tools become the primary bearers of power and oligarchs their pockets, and then eventually oligarchs are robbed and the relatives and clansmen of the tools own everything).

However, it has nothing to do with libertarianism, because libertarianism is principally based on freedom of association (oligarchy usually involves suppressing unions and customer associations and cooperatives, and suppressing competition ; this also is about freedom of making a deal), non-aggression (understood as oligopoly being aggression in the means to enforce it, and the same about IP and patents) and natural law, the latter being rigid idea of ownership where what you create fully is yours fully, what you didn't create is not yours at all, and the intermediate (real) things being all compromises between these. That notoriously makes owning territory dubious, which, ahem, is not very good for oligarchy.

That's if there's a working system of enforcing such a libertarian order, and if there's none, then it's not libertarianism.

And why did I mention Khmer Rouge - I don't think blaming everything upon oligarchs and such is useful. Most of the people supporting any existing order are not bosses. If a society has oligarchy, then this means its wide masses are in general in favor of morality of oligarchy (who managed to capture a portion of an industry, deserves to milk it forever, and who managed to capture an institution regulating it, deserves the spoils, and so on), just like wide masses of Khmer peasants were more or less in agreement with that party's ideas, until, of course, it became fully empowered.

It's a failure of education, and I don't think libertarianism is a component in that failure, after all, Kato institute is one of the organizations which haven't ideologically drifted and just do what they are openly intended to do - provide the libertarian perspective on any events. Not drifting into lies in attempt to secure support is something I'd consider a good commendation. Maybe carriers of other ideologies should look at how that was achieved and build their own similar institutions. Then at some point problems might start being resolved by people knowing what they are doing.