Those amoral libertarians! #greshampodcasts

In the unlikely event that you did not know, I am very keen on podcasts provided by Gresham College. The are free and fascinating lectures on a wide variety of topics, and in the main, the lecturers are incredibly clever, entertaining and amusing. Indeed, I posted a particularly sound one yesterday.

However, no-one is perfect, and in one particularly special podcast, they chose an MP to pontificate on the lack of acceptability in boardroom pay.

Just savour that for a nanosecond: an MP, the very epitome of entitlement and thieving self-righteousness, passing comment on someone else. However, in the main, he didn't do a bad analysis of some of the issues and some of his proposed solutions are actually quite thought-provoking, if slightly impractical.

But then, of course, he goes off the rails. First he says:

In 1970 Milton Friedman famously wrote that the only social responsibility of business is to make as much money as possible. To gung-ho libertarians this provided the perfect justification for unrestricted plundering, irrespective of the consequences for society or the rest of the economy.

And also:

So rewards for failure subverts the very principle of private property itself. Yet the libertarian right’s response is to do away with regulation altogether.

Now, this is typical statist thinking. And frankly, it's quite annoying. The most militant libertarians I know are quite happy to voluntarily contribute to their own welfare provision and to the welfare of others.

Health and other welfare insurance works in the same way as insurance does: by pooling risks, some people win, some lose, but everyone has a greater degree of certainty in the provision for the unexpected. This gives everyone an incentive to share the burden of providing for welfare, even in an anarchist society.

And because there is a much greater social interdependence as there is no state "safety net", there is also a much greater likelihood of people actually taking care of each other, simply because you don't know whether you may not wind up needing their help in years to come. It's naked self-interest working to keep others.

There is certainly no indication in any libertarian or anarchist literature I've ever read that says that libertarianism is, by definition, amoral or any more selfish than any other form of society. Indeed, because there are so few of the protections of the powerful that are offered in modern social democracy, I would actually argue that the exposure of unlimited liability would make most businesses much more careful and conservative in the way they transact.

On the other hand, it's not entirely surprising that one of the entitled thugs who currently tells us all how to live our lives should be so disparaging of a philosophy that holds that his class of arrogant, self-righteous bullying is not and has never been necessary for a civilised, tolerant, economically stable and integrated society.