RichmondLiberty.org

by Robert Russo

Many voters automatically discount our party at election time because the issue that interests them is banking, social security or trade which they believe we cannot maintain, either because we are founded on other issues or are too ideological in general to provide solutions for a complex system. One article entitled "No Such Thing As a Free-Market Economist" reads "It seems pretty clear that explicit ideological predispositions like those embodied in the term free-market economics have no place in the social sciences.".*
Such general statements are unbecoming, like saying Orthodox Christians cannot make good economists because they believe money is evil. One's ideology does not determine their skill. What mainstream planners fail to see (in finance, the sciences, education and defense) is that every field is a political arena of competing doctrines, and theirs has simply been monopolized by a single competitor so much that there is no longer a difference, so all other methods out there "cease to be". A scientist in a developing country may hold no degree, or may refuse to abide by the code of others in his profession, but still make a discovery that rewrites textbooks. No one political faction has the power to prevent this from happening. This knowledge is what free-market economists bring to the table.
It is not just government that is elitist, it is our culture that is elitist. Anyone can be elected to office but they will still only appoint the mainstream business advisors they know about. It is these appointed men, this "club", that is a far greater threat than government because they govern the sciences, the workplace, what we are taught. A fierce debate raged over the prospect of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because the preferred methods of extraction are environmentally harmful, and yet industrialists yielded no middle ground (it is not efficiency that prevents people from backing alternative technologies but priority, even if you have to draw oil ten times slower with one tenth of the environmental impact).**
An unspoken rule of government spending is that quality materials and labor must be bought at top dollar. A state park in Virginia with a condemned building on its grounds must leave it standing until it can afford a grant for a top-notch reconstruction, even though there is a full staff of groundsmen capable of bulldozing it. One can imagine the spending cuts that would be accomplished by appointing minds such as the NASA designer who builds a spacecraft by getting the same quality materials and performance at a quarter of the usual cost. A panel assembled by a free-market economist would be a true cross-section of American industry with every approach represented down to the genius who works out of his basement.
"…whatever the subconscious influence of ideology, economists—and academics more generally—have a professional responsibility to actively steer clear of their own ideological biases, insofar as they interfere with the truth-seeking enterprise of science."* Attitudes like this are blind to the incredible extent their own ideology governs them. Capitalism itself is an ideology. There is no truth-seeking enterprise in economics because it is based entirely on speculation (money has value because people agree it has value). It is dependent on a small vein of experts with far more eloquent dissertations than this one simply because they have spent their lives studying this game. A free-market economist doesn’t play games. He brings the wisdom of reality into the equation.
Economy is a growing pit of dependency that burdens the consumer from spending as he chooses (much like the workplace steals his time so that he cannot spend his life as he chooses), requiring greater brilliance from each generation to make it work. A free-market system encourages honest bartering and a life of personal choice and responsibility, therefore it is freedom from economy that Libertarian leadership provides. It’s easy for members of the dominant method to assume everyone is a subscriber and differences represent oversight, when in fact people have different values. The current administration holds maintenance as its highest priority whereas an anarchist sees destruction as the key to success in a stagnant system. So we are not like the Green Party where people assume we put our economic interests on the back burner, we have a very clear vision of economy. Like the oil companies this is not a threat to what is needed, but to what the leading faction wants, the prospect that their field will take a different turn for the first time in their lives. For information on free-market economics go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market.

*http://the-idea-shop.com/article/42/no-such-thing-as-a-free-market-economist
**http://www.savearcticrefuge.org/

Question of the Week: Many libertarians support privatization of business, but many Americans believe private corporations themselves are as corrupt as government agencies. Is there a middle ground? Please send your opinions to henrico@richmondliberty.org.

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