Tag Archive for: libertarian

The Libertarian Socialist Axis

On the surface, it might seem ridiculous to suggest libertarians and socialists work to further the same political agenda. Their ideologies are diametrically opposed. The extreme version of a socialist system is for all property to be owned and controlled by the government. The extreme version of a libertarian system is for all property to be privately owned. And yet the extremes meet.

The unwitting consequence of socialist and libertarian movements in the United States has been to assist in the formation of an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a corporatist elite that has perfected its ability to manipulate both movements.

Policies inspired by socialists make it easier for private corporate and financial interests to form monopolies, since the regulatory excess inspired by socialist ideals drives smaller potential competitors out of business. Examples are plentiful. Complying with environmental regulations requires an overhead burden that will overwhelm the financial capacity of a small company, but can be absorbed easily by large companies. Complying with union work rules and wage demands is easy for monopolistic companies because they pass the higher labor costs on to consumers. But similar compliance kills companies too small to have a captive market. Enforced scarcity caused by mandates designed to combat “climate change” allows vertically integrated companies to raise prices, reap big profits, and expand, since their underlying costs haven’t changed.

In short, socialism eliminates competition, which empowers the biggest corporations on earth to get even bigger.

Policies advocated by libertarians are often sound in principle but almost always fail to achieve the intended results. The following are examples of how libertarians become victims of political jiu-jitsu, wherein the policies they promote end up harming Americans while serving the interests of corporate monopolies.

Dogmatic Libertarians Create More Problems Than They Solve

In most cases, the redirection and corruption of libertarian influence by special interests is due to a failure to recognize that half a solution can be worse than no solution at all. Libertarians have been effectively supporting free trade policies for decades, but have been ineffective in calling for reciprocity. If foreign nations dump subsidized products, manufactured in the absence of environmental and labor standards applicable in the United States, it is impossible for U.S. companies to compete.

This has wiped out entire domestic industries, cost millions of jobs, left the United States at the mercy of foreign nations for everything from antibiotics to computer chips, and caused trade deficits of over a half-trillion dollars per year which translates into foreigners using their surplus dollars to bid up the prices and buy real estate all over the country that ordinary Americans can no longer afford.

Libertarians, if they’re true to their principles, support open borders, but have been ineffective in shrinking the welfare state. Libertarians support relaxed zoning codes to permit densification of American suburbs, but have failed to stop the proliferating array of subsidies and tax incentives that encourage developers to demolish homes in favor of multi-family dwellings, and they have failed to support equivalent deregulation of zoning on the periphery of cities in order to permit developers to build new suburbs on open land.

Land development in general is an area where the corporatist enabling libertarian-socialist axis comes into clear focus. The environmentalist wing of the socialist movement calls for “urban containment,” based on the assumption that human civilization is inherently toxic to the environment. Libertarians, whether unwittingly or not, support this misanthropic argument by opposing government spending on roads or utility infrastructure. A refrain heard all too often from libertarians—perhaps trying to curry favor with progressive socialists—is “we cannot subsidize the car.”

This mentality may be healthy insofar as Americans have witnessed their governments, at all levels, waste trillions of dollars. But the difficult reality is that government spending is not inherently wrong, it is how that spending is prioritized. Americans still benefit from the great civil engineering projects of the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Where would Phoenix or Las Vegas be without Hoover Dam? Seattle without the Grand Coulee Dam? The Tennessee Valley without the rural electrification projects of the 1930s? California without the California Water Project and the Central Valley Projects of the 1950s and 1960s? America, without the interstate highway system? What about trying to get from downtown Boston to Logan Airport before the so-called Big Dig reduced the travel time to 15 minutes?

If any of those projects were proposed today, socialist environmentalists would fight them with everything from litigation to militant obstruction. Which points to another imbalance in libertarian advocacy—demanding the private sector construct infrastructure without recognizing that unless the entire process of major construction is deregulated back to where it was in the 1960s or prior, nothing can possibly be built cost-effectively. Just as in the case of trade, borders, and zoning, libertarian advocacy results in half-solutions that are worse than doing nothing. With infrastructure, libertarians are putting the privatized cart in front of the deregulated horse.

The Corruption of Socialism’s Few Virtues

Socialists used to oppose globalization, and they used to support big infrastructure projects. Today they have embraced globalism as preferable to nationalism, oblivious to the possibility that America might be better equipped to help the aspiring peoples of the world if America wasn’t becoming a hollowed out, financialized shell of a nation. Environmentalism, now a dominant theme in the socialist movement, has rejected practical infrastructure as posing an existential threat to the health of the planet, oblivious to the fact that only conventional transportation, water, and power projects are cost-effective enough to enable broad prosperity.

The beneficiaries of the socialist-libertarian alignment on policies that create scarcity and dependency in America are big corporations and big government. When jobs go overseas, multinational corporations thrive on cheap labor and nonexistent environmental standards. When millions of destitute immigrants and indigent Americans cannot support themselves, government bureaucracies and corporate contractors expand their services. When there are shortages of essential products and inputs, only the biggest corporations have the financial resilience to survive, and they exploit the hardship by gaining market share as smaller competitors go under.

Even policies that at first glance might seem unrelated to an agenda of consolidation and centralization of money and power contribute to its rise. Libertarian and socialist tolerance for drug use and downgrading of property crimes has created chaos and dependency in America’s cities, in turn stimulating a massive socialist expansion of government aid workers and subsidized housing.

Similarly, the ability to censor contrarian narratives is enabled by socialists who have convinced themselves that free speech rights aren’t valid if they contradict “settled science,” make people feel “unsafe,” or in any way support these thin excuses to throw away the First Amendment. Meanwhile, libertarians still tend to view censorship by social media monopolies as the inviolable right of a private company, heedless of the fact these companies only enjoy federal immunity from liability for their content because they are communications platforms, not publishers with editorial discretion.

The relentless concentration of wealth in America into fewer and fewer hands is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-documented economic fact. Every significant policy and trend behind this transfer of wealth is supported by libertarians and socialists alike: coping with the “climate emergency,” lax border security, failed policies that have created an epidemic of drug addiction and crime, inequitable international trade relationships, neglected infrastructure, defacto urban containment, and censorship.

So good luck challenging the prevailing narratives on these issues or any of the myriad policies that derive from them. You will get no help from socialists or libertarians.

Behind these policies is big money. Socialist oligarchs from Silicon Valley to George Soros have been identified as spending billions of dollars to control election outcomes. At the same time, criticism has been directed at “Conservatism, Inc.,” as politicians adhere to the wishes of their donors to the detriment of their constituents. But these “conservative” donors and the political agenda they fund (frequently clothed in libertarian garb) differ only in emphasis and terminology. As noted, common objectives outweigh the differences. Behind their oppositional rhetoric, they share the same tangible goals.

An outspoken, heavily censored critic of globalization in general, and open borders in particular, is Lauren Southern, who, over a decade ago, began reporting on the consequences of mass immigration into her native Canada and went on to report on immigration and displacement in Europe and South Africa. As reflected in her speech to the European Parliament in 2019, Southern’s reporting and documentaries, while controversial, are also thoughtful and reflect a humanitarian compassion that’s not supposed to be associated with someone stereotyped as “far-right.” But when you reject corporatist pieties, doing so with truth and compassion doesn’t matter. Southern has been canceled from most online social media and payment processing services. Earlier this year, Southern, and her parents, were blacklisted by Airbnb.

That earned her an appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where she expressed how thoroughly corporatists have taken over both the Democratic and Republican parties, saying, “we’ve spent so many years having Republicans defend cronyism by pretending it is capitalism and then our failsafe was supposed to be progressives who are supposed to question big corporations, but now they are like an ADHD dog that got distracted by a bone with a pride flag on it and were placated entirely.”

The ideologies that ought—for better or for worse—to inform the idealistic core of both major parties in America, socialism and libertarianism, are both thoroughly co-opted. This helps to explain why America’s establishment, corporate globalist uniparty is unassailable. Until an ideological alternative emerges that is not only coherent but elicits passions equal to those which animate socialists and libertarians alike, there remains a gaping hole in our movement to take back this country.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Libertarian Path to Democrat One-Party Rule

recent article in the Washington Examiner titled “Maybe the libertarians weren’t so irrelevant after all” just scratches the surface of the challenge posed to conservatives in America by the Libertarian Party. To state the obvious, America is a two-party system. When you split the anti-socialist vote, the socialist wins.

When elections are close, and three of America’s last six presidential elections have been decided by razor thin margins, the spoiler doesn’t have to be relevant to be “relevant.” When electoral votes are decided by margins of a few thousand, a one-percent shift to a third party changes who wins.

As Washington Examiner columnist Tiana Lowe put it: “In Arizona, Jorgensen has more than 50,000 votes, with 98% of total votes counted. Biden leads Trump by fewer than 15,000 votes. In Georgia, Jorgensen’s total is nearly six times Biden’s lead. In Wisconsin, it’s nearly double, and in Pennsylvania, it’s almost the same story.”

In the six states where Trump is reportedly losing by the thinnest margins, the impact of the Libertarian candidate either flipped the election to Biden or very nearly did. Notably, the Green Party candidate was not present on the ballot in any of these states except for Michigan, where he only won 0.2 percent of the vote. As the chart below shows, if the voters who’d opted for Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgenson had chosen Trump instead, Biden would now be losing in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, and his lead in Pennsylvania would be just 2,263 votes.

One common argument ventured by Libertarians whenever they are accused of being spoilers is that the people who vote for them are often Democrats, or they are Republicans who weren’t going to support their party’s candidate this year anyway. So, if there had not been a Libertarian candidate, these people wouldn’t have voted at all. Given the success of the NeverTrump movement in convincing some Republicans to abandon Trump, the second half of this argument has some validity. But what about the rest of it? Can Libertarian candidates take votes away from Democrats

This question became especially acute in Georgia’s senate race, where Libertarian candidate Shane Hazel threw the battle between Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff into an upcoming runoff. Perdue earned 49.7 percent of the vote against Jon Ossoff’s 47.9 percent. Did Shane Hazel’s 2.3 percent performance cost Perdue a victory? Probably.

Here’s some of Hazel’s “key messages” as submitted to Ballotpedia:

#EndTheWars – It is long past time to bring the men & women in service home. Undeclared unconstitutional never ending war is used to enslave Americans through debt and taxation. 20 years of war is enough death & destruction for a life time. It is time for Peace.

#EndTheFed – Both democrats & republicans have enslaved every American for generations to come thru a $23,000,000,000,000 debt owed to a faceless, unaccountable international banking cabal that is growing at over $1 Trillion a year. It is time for Free Markets

#EndTheEmpire – The bureaucratic DC cabal is deployed in 150 countries around the world, for the interests of international aristocrats, not Americans, and they need to be exposed and removed. Wars, Taxes, Policies, “Laws”, Permits, Debt are all out of control and must be abolished. It is time for Liberty.”

These talking points—regardless of their coherence or lack thereof—do not attract Democrats, not because there aren’t certain sentiments here that you might have also heard last year from Democrats like Bernie Sanders, (I-Vermont) Tulsi Gabbard, (D-Hawaii) and others. They don’t attract Democrats because “free markets” and “liberty” are known to Democrats as far-right code words.

On the other hand, most everything Shane Hazel has to say in his “key messages” appeals to Republicans. To suggest this candidate didn’t attract 0.3 percent of Republican votes, when he garnered 2.3 percent of all votes, is lunacy.

In a fawning article at Reason, Hazel had this to say to people critical of his role in throwing the Georgia Senate race into a runoff: “Give me your tears. They are delicious.” Apparently Hazel, and the folks at Reason, think this is funny.

Hazel went on to say, “We have principle on our side, we have a great understanding of economics, of peace . . . and when we articulate those things firmly and with no compromise outside our echo chamber, we can do amazing things.”

But even if Hazel has “a great understanding” of economics—which is debatable—does he understand how libertarian “principles” fall short in the real world?

The problem with fighting for limited government on principle is simple—your influence will be decisive, often providing the extra shove that represents the tipping point, but only when the Left and the corporations agree with you.

The Libertarian adherence to principle over practical outcomes helps explain the otherwise paradoxical alliance between the Left and the corporate elites in America. When Democrats advocate a policy where there is Libertarian agreement “on principle,” the winners are leftist pressure groups and big business. But it is a very select list, with critical adjunct policies also advocated by libertarians that are completely ignored.

This is why Libertarians are having a decisive influence on densifying America’s cities through “infill,” but are ineffective when it comes to preventing taxpayer-supported subsidies for the new construction, or enabling development via urban expansion onto open land.

It is why Libertarians successfully oppose government-funded infrastructure projects “on principle,” which stops new freeways from being built but does not stop construction of subsidized light rail or high-speed rail; or stops new dams and desalination plants but does not stop water rationing and mandatory purchases of new “water conserving” appliances that cost a lot, don’t work very well, and break down often.

It is why Libertarians successfully oppose laws that might get drug addicts, psychopaths, and vagrants off American streets, but cannot prevent compassion brigades from providing them free amenities which only attracts more of these unfortunates, nor can they prevent opportunistic developers from coming in to build tax-subsidized “supportive housing” for them at a cost of over a half-million per unit.

Libertarians support “free movement of peoples” on principal, but have no impact whatsoever on the growing welfare state that is a magnet for economic migrants to come to the United States. They support “free trade” without first insisting on reciprocity. And on principle, Libertarians have stood on the sidelines as left-wing billionaires in the Silicon Valley used their online communications monopolies to manipulate what information Americans had access to in order to destroy a sitting president. Because “on principle” these companies are privately owned. So what if they’re monopolies, using their power to swing a presidential election?

We see a common thread to all of these policy outcomes: multinational corporations, international banks, and billionaire investors do well. Ordinary Americans do not. Libertarians have not adequately confronted the fact that their economic “principles” are put to good use when they serve the agenda of corporate globalists, but are indeed irrelevant when they do not.

Worse yet, Libertarians like Shane Hazel claim to want an end to foreign wars, but fail to recognize that rising nations will fill the vacuum wherever Americans withdraw. Even more to the point, they give President Trump zero credit for being the first American President since Jimmy Carter to not start a new war. Trump deescalated tensions all over the world. Biden is bringing back the warmongering Bush-Obama team. Trump stood up to the military-industrial complex, a fact lost on Libertarians.

Which gets us back to the core issue: What did these Libertarian candidates think they were going to accomplish by spoiling the Republicans’ chances? It is quite likely that if Libertarian candidates hadn’t run in the battleground states, Trump would have won the election. It is also possible that Shane Hazel, by forcing a January runoff, could cost Republicans control of the Senate.

One may assume that Hazel, the Libertarian Party, the Reason Foundation, and all the rest of the assorted “libertarian” think tanks and billionaire donors are quite pleased with themselves. They may be the reason that, come January 20, Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Can Libertarians Be Honest About Immigration and Assimilation?

Balanced on the edge of the deplatforming abyss, but still standing, is Vincent James. He is one of the last prominent YouTube video commentators with outspoken views on America’s immigration policies and how they affect America’s electoral politics. Despite his channel being demonetized and algorithmically suppressed, he continues to produce videos that frequently attract over 100,000 viewers. Even if his arguments were odious, and unsupportable with data or logic, James would deserve to speak his mind. But what makes him dangerous is his arguments are always backed up with impeccable data.

In a recent video, James took on America’s libertarians, specifically calling them out on the issue of immigration. At the 9:15 point, he replays a clip of a student challenging Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA) during his Q&A with a college audience. Kirk repeatedly skirts the question of whether or not mass immigration is sustainable by attempting to change the subject to why America needs to attract the best and the brightest of the world. And of course, Kirk can’t help but remind his audience that “this growing anti-immigration portion of the Republican conservative movement is dangerous.”

This is a standard response from a member of what James and others have dubbed “Conservatism Inc.” It is condescending and disingenuous. Condescending because everyone knows we welcome the Albert Einsteins and Elon Musks of the world, disingenuous because that’s not the point. Millions of unskilled immigrants to America will drive down the wages of low income workers and disproportionately collect government benefits. We are not screening these millions of immigrants for valuable skills, much less limiting entry to the handful of scientific and entrepreneurial geniuses that are scattered around the world.

As James puts it:

“The only the thing these people care about is keeping the GDP up. Having enough people flow in here who can buy our shiny products for the corporations that we work for. They don’t care about conservatism. Conservatism Inc. hasn’t conserved anything. It’s time for us to challenge them on their dumb, idiotic, false, paid for ideas. It’s time for us to step in where Conservatism Inc. has failed and take back this country, politically and ideologically. The fact that Charlie Kirk doesn’t care, and says that it’s wonky to talk about the demographic shifts that America has experienced, and what that leads to electorally for conservatives, should tell you everything you need to know.”

What mass immigration as it is presently constituted – and has been for the last fifty years – leads to for Americans, is well documented. Drawing on data from Pew Research and others, and shown on the table below, are votes by ethnicity in the 2016 presidential election. As can be seen, among the major ethnic groups, the only ethnic group that was remotely balanced in their voting choices were Non-Hispanic Whites, who turned out for Trump, by a decisive but nonetheless incremental margin of 21 percent. Black Americans, on the other hand, voted 12 to 1 for Clinton. Hispanics voted more than 2 to 1 for Clinton, as did Asians. 

This trend has been reflected in presidential elections for over 30 years, as the next chart – produced by Vincent James – shows graphically. What’s striking about this data is that only White voters are ever likely to be a swing vote. In the 1992 and 1996 elections, a majority of Whites did not vote for the GOP. While in the other six elections depicted, White voters did lean GOP, in only one election, 1998, did the GOP share of the White vote reach 60 percent.

The historical voting pattern for Hispanic and Black voters, on the other hand, is unambiguously tilted toward the Democrats. The only times in eight tries that the GOP wasn’t outvoted two-to-one in favor of Democrats by Hispanics, was in 2000 and 2004, when in both elections George W Bush managed to eke out a 35 percent and 34 percent share. For African Americans, it’s never even been close. 

What California has experienced demographically over the past fifty years is, based on current national trends, likely to be America’s fate over the next few decades. In 1977, California’s population was 77 percent Non-Hispanic White. Today the Non-Hispanic white share of California’s population has fallen by more than half, to barely one-third at 35 percent.

When America’s liberal and progressive Democrats make race and group identity the foundation of their political platform, it is crazy to say that the rise of Democratic power is merely correlated to the fall in the percentage of Non-Hispanic Whites in the electorate. The question of cause vs correlation is settled. The question to be concerned about is why are Whites the only ethnic group to lean conservative? How did that happen? Is that inevitable?

Do Libertarians Care About Traditional American Culture?

To any libertarian who might find this rhetorical question offensive, and would indignantly suggest “of course we do,” one might respond: prove it. Because the libertarian position on everything from “free” trade to open borders to internet censorship to legalizing hard drugs is the same: It is in lockstep with the agenda of the progressive corporate globalist Left.

On that basis, it would follow that libertarians really don’t care if the national GOP becomes irrelevant, eventually becoming as impotent as the GOP in California. Or if not entirely impotent, then sanitized and merged into the establishment uniparty, claiming credibility by sporting a photogenic, telegenic, Romneyesque facade of opposition to the more extreme antics of the Democrat’s extreme left fringe.

Moreover, on that basis, it would follow that libertarians “only care about keeping the GDP up, having enough people flow in here who can buy our shiny products for the corporations that we work for.”

If open borders means fundamentally transforming the ethnic composition of America, and if fundamentally transforming the ethnic composition of America precludes a nationalist resurgence that might undermine the profits of multinational corporations, and if pretending that White conservatives are racist bigots is a way to guarantee that America’s new, nonwhite residents never vote for conservatives – then pass the donations, pretend to protest, and let the Democrat dominated uniparty turn America from a nation into a commodity.

How Can Libertarians Be As Obtuse As the Liberals They Claim to Oppose?

At the 11:00 minute mark in the video posted by Vincent James, during the same Q&A exchange between Charlie Kirk and an earnest opponent of mass immigration, here is what is said:

Student: “What is it, 1.1 million per year, for a country that is only 300 million people?”

Kirk: “That is a fair question. Here’s a better question. Of the immigrants who are coming, are they coming with skills?

Student: “80 percent of immigrants vote Democrat.”

Kirk: “I actually don’t think you should design immigration policy based around politics, that’s very dangerous.”

To be charitable to Charlie Kirk, he’s only 26 years old, and he’s been pushed onto a big stage at a young age. But what he is saying is dangerous, because for the last fifty years, and especially in the last decade or two, politics is precisely what immigration policy has been based on. Immigration policy has been based on permitting millions of unskilled immigrants to enter America every year, either legally or through willful failure to enforce what laws do exist.

What Kirk was basically saying is that if you want to restrict immigration to people who will rapidly assimilate and embrace conservative values, you’re basing your immigration policy on politics, but if you enable a system that allows millions to pour across the border each year who may never assimilate and embrace liberal and progressive values, you’re not. Go figure.

How Can Americans Preserve Their Culture?

Those of us who have watched the demographic transformation of America unfold over the past decades know that by now the transformative process is already played out. The die was cast way back in 1985, when then Colorado Governor Richard Lamm published The Immigration Time Bomb, and 1987, when Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth. America is now a multi-ethnic nation. But that does not mean that America has to be a multi-cultural nation, certainly not in the divisive, nihilistic parody of civil society version of “multiculturalism” envisioned by the progressives.

The challenge now is to convince the rising new generations in America that ethnicity does not matter, that America will embrace everyone, that assimilation is desirable, that upward mobility is available to everyone, that opportunities are equal and abundant to those with the will to succeed, and that traditional American values of family, faith, freedom, education, hard work, and good character are abiding values that everyone should unite to protect.

Charlie Kirk may wish to consider this: It’s not enough to attract the approbation of Liberalism Inc. Because on one of the most important issues of our time, immigration, we are witnessing a false dichotomy between Conservatism Inc. and Liberalism Inc.

Kirk should ask himself: Would I still have a job if I openly and publicly questioned the dogma of open borders? What would happen if instead of charmingly deflecting the concerns of a student on this topic, I agreed with them, and loudly proclaimed that importing millions of unskilled immigrants each year is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to an electorate that embraces socialism? Would I still get a paycheck? Why not?

What, for that matter, would happen to his employment status if Kirk were to repeatedly wonder as to how much longer America’s institutions can continue to enforce ethnic hiring quotas, when the disparity in academic achievement and scholastic aptitude between Asians and Whites vs Blacks and Hispanics is vast and widening? That’s a tough topic. But kicking people off of YouTube and making sure members of Conservatism Inc. stick their heads in the sand will not help us find the solutions that must be found. Sustainable compassion can only be practiced when the truth is embraced, not suppressed.

And the libertarian mega donors who nurture a network of pundits and scholars who produce a torrent of “paid for ideas” should ask themselves: Do we really want to embitter hard working American patriots like Vincent James, who proudly carry the legacy of generations who struggled to build this nation, and are determined to do everything they can to preserve it?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Coming Socialist-Libertarian Feudalism

Wishful thinking among many libertarian and socialist idealists is that an alliance might form between them. After all, members of both ideologies believe that anything goes when it comes to sex and drugs, neither of them believe in national borders, and both are repelled by conservative ideologues.

The problem with such an alliance of idealists, of course, is that at the core, the socialist believes in big government and the libertarian believes in no government. No matter how you further define those core beliefs, they are incompatible. But the powerful special interests behind the libertarian and progressive movements, respectively, are not idealists, they are pragmatists. And in the dirty realm of real world politics, socialist and libertarian elites have formed a powerful alliance.

Infatuated with the window dressing of personal liberty, ignoring the ultimate collision their worldviews portend, socialist and libertarian mega-donors back candidates and causes that share common goals – the densification of American cities, mass immigration, “free” trade, and a hands-off policy with respect to big-tech communications monopolies.

Urban “densification” is one of the most transformative, cruel, epic policy trends in American history. And hardly anyone is talking about it.

In a recent article by Joel Kotkin, a moderate Democrat, he refers to “conservative free market fundamentalists” as the group that’s “advancing plans that would divorce capitalism from the small property owners whose pieces of property secure the system’s popular support.” Kotkin is referring to libertarians who favor “densification” of cities because they support the property rights of those who own the land and choose to build high density housing.

What the libertarians are doing, while ideologically pure, is absurd. Just because you own a half-acre property, you’re not allowed to demolish the single family home on that property in order to build a 20 story building. For the same reason, you can’t demolish that home and build a rent-subsidized fourplex. In the real world, there are zoning laws that restrict property rights to protect the neighbors! These zoning laws are what people rely on when they purchase a home in a neighborhood filled with similar homes.

Kotkin writes: That [densification] includes California State Senator Scott Wiener’s effort to force high-density on residential areas by allowing fourplexes on virtually any parcel, which produced one of the strangest alliances in recent political history. Free market advocates—many of them funded by the Koch brothers—linked arms with left-wing and green activists reprising the arguments made in the Soviet Bloc against middle-class single-family neighborhoods.”

Densification is going to destroy tranquil residential neighborhoods, everywhere, and it is backed by socialists in the name of providing affordable housing, by environmentalists in order to prevent sprawl, and by powerful financial special interests who benefit from a real estate bubble. Libertarians support densification on principle, without even recognizing that they are ignoring – much less opposing – the flip side of densification, which are new policies to suppress land development outside of the “urban containment boundary.” Densification, also known as in-fill, or “smart growth,” will never provide sufficient new housing to make homes affordable unless it is balanced by similarly relaxed approval processes for homebuilding on open land.

The topic of “smart growth” exposes another special interest favoring densification, the Silicon Valley high tech industry. California’s Silicon Valley is an epicenter not only of concentrated political and economic power, it is also one of the world’s largest ideological fermentation tanks containing potent strains of socialism, progressivism, and libertarianism. And in this “do no evil” caldron of visions, plans, and stupefying power, innovators are building the “internet of things,” so that not only shall we live in stack and pack housing, we will survive on algorithmically managed micro sips of water and energy. And depending on what time we run our clothes dryer, we will pay a bit more or a bit less depending on the spot market price for electricity and water – such a libertarian concept!

More immediately visible is Silicon Valley’s control over the online universe – search results, video suggestions, remarks on Twitter, posts on Facebook – where two salient facts elude libertarians. First, the companies that now control the online universe are monopolies, and the big five – Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook – are the five biggest companies in the world based on their stock market capitalization. Equally important, these companies have been having their cake and eating it too, insofar as they receive an exemption from liability due to their status as a “platform,” yet exercise biased censorship on platform contributors as if they were a publisher. Each of these facts have consequences. Monopolies do not make for healthy market economies. Platforms cannot be publishers. But where are the libertarians?

The vision shared by socialist and libertarian oligarchs alike is what Kotkin refers to as a “Wall Street-dominated rentership society…” where “people remain renters for life, enjoying their video games or houseplants when not coding or doing gig jobs.”

This vision is not only furthered in densification policies that are fruitless in terms of making housing affordable but dazzlingly effective in turning nearly everyone into apartment renters, but also in the internet of things. In the future, you will not own your clothes dryer, or any other major appliance, nor will you own your car, much less video games and software services. Instead you will “subscribe” to these gadgets, so you can receive the latest updates and services. “Subscriptions” will replace lease payments, loan payments, and warranties. Owning anything will become increasingly impossible. Green conservation mandates will ensure compliance. But hey – you’ll be able to watch algorithmically curated videos on your refrigerator!

It is a fatal misconception to consider pragmatic socialists as indistinguishable from communists. Socialist nations, particularly those Northern European ones that are frequently cited by defenders of socialism as exemplars distinct from hellholes like Venezuela, are not ruled by politburos. These socialist nations are ruled by an influential cadre of extremely wealthy, propertied elites, who manage public opinion through their ownership of the primary media sources and through their donations to any effective politicians, regardless of their party. Does this sound familiar?

From this it follows that it is also a fatal misconception to overstate the differences between America’s elite socialist oligarchy and America’s elite libertarian oligarchy. In both cases, they subscribe to the policy of mass immigration, at the same time as they support environmentalist conventional wisdom that condemns Americans to pay taxes to fund the settlement of these tens of millions in rent-subsidized apartments crammed on to every lot that flips, in every neighborhood where people aren’t wealthy enough to hire attorneys to stop it.

Is it even possible for a populist libertarian movement to offer meaningful support to a conservative American political agenda? Or will their “thought leaders” continue to please the donor class, writing predictably bland justifications for free trade, open borders, urban densification, and out-of-control communications monopolies? Will libertarians support privatization to the point where a meter runs every time anyone steps onto a public road, and perpetual subscriptions replace ownership? Why not?

Where do libertarians draw the line? Will they accept Libra, the new cyber-currency that Facebook is about to launch? Will they squawk when cyber-currencies issued by mega-corporations dominate commerce? Will they care when monopolistic “private” companies erase not only the speech platforms of dissidents, but their ability to use their proprietary cyber currency? Why not?

Libertarians don’t have an fully realized political ideology, they have a perspective. As a perspective – smaller government – they are a useful part of the mix. But libertarians aren’t recognizing the real world limitations on libertarianism, or they would choose sides. They would rebel against the donor fueled Socialist-Libertarian Axis. They would ask: Will you fight to preserve your nation and your culture, or won’t you? The libertarian and socialist elites have made their choice, and are working together under the assumption that nations and culture don’t matter, only profit and power.

The only viable, real world version of a libertarian ideology ought to be unrecognizable and troubling to the idealist. It is corporate controlled feudalism that incorporates just enough socialist populist demands to avoid an unpleasant conflagration. The beneficiaries of this political economy are the super rich and the myriad poor. In this world, nationality means nothing, heritage is irrelevant, and the middle class and mid-sized companies alike are exterminated. Tradition and culture become a commercialized afterthought, micro-marketed to the various vestigial niches along with soap and virtual reality.

Idealists do not govern America today. Rather it is a pragmatic axis of socialist and libertarian oligarchs, each with their own gullible constituency, moving together towards a futuristic version of feudalism.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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