Free-market millenarians: Internet Sebastianists who want to sleep with their sisters

One of my favourite books of all time is Mario Vargas Llosa’s Brazilian epic, The War of The End of The World. It is a fictionalised version of the true story of the ill-fated Sebastianist uprising of the early 20th century: a popular rebellion in the unforgiving deserts of the Brazilian north led by an unordained priest calling himself “O Conselheiro”, the messenger.

The uprising (about which Eric Hobsbawm, amongst others has written) was a response to an economic crisis caused by a 30 year drought combined with the transition from a slave economy to a wage earning system. What was interesting about this crisis was that, unlike the revolutionaries who would shortly overthrow (then reestablish) tyranny in Mexico and Russia, the peasants and bandits of the Brazilian Sertao believed that the Kingdom of God was imminent and that, upon its arrival, their dead would be restored to life. Even more bizarrely, they believed that the 16th century regent of Portugal Dom Sebastiao, MIA in Morocco since 1598, would return to lead them to victory (this belief had fascinating roots; the songs of medieval Portuguese troubadours, transplanted to the Brazilian outback, much like the similarly incongruous elf-ridden Anglos-Scots ballads of the Ozarks and the Appalachians).

O Conselheiro and his followers were extreme cases, but all revolutionary movements have a millenarian element, they can’t be divided (as Hobsbawm would wish) into perfectly rational Bourgeois and Proletarian revolutions, and crazy millenarian peasant revolts. The blind faith in “the revolution” as the only instrument of change often creates the belief that it will, in and of itself, solve everybody’s problems; but up till the dawn of the internet, few revolutionary movements explicitly based their ideology on anything as nebulous and supernatural as “The Kingdom of God”.

We now face worthy successors to the pre-modern irrationalism of the Sebastianists, that strange brand of anarcho-capitalist which, in the US, currently sullies the good name of libertarianism. This philosophy rests on the seemingly self-evident concept that everybody has a right to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t involve using violence in anything other than a defensive capacity (what this gang of IT nerd wrong-cocks call “initiation of force”). From this standpoint they argue that any restriction on the use of one’s property amounts to an initiation of force: therefore no taxation, environmental protection laws, labour rights, socialised policing or healthcare, and in some cases, government itself, can be morally defensible.

Here’s the sting; this initiation of force always relates to damage to property (“libertarians” kindly include our bodies amongst our chattels, so even violent crime is crime against property), but not to land (in the economic sense, all natural resources) . No other crimes are recognised. So nobody can prevent the hunting to extinction of any animal, nobody can prevent the poisoning of the air, or, should a company wish to do so, the production of unsafe merchandise, nobody can stop the deforestation of Amazonia, no individual action which is harmful to the collective can be prevented.

Now, perhaps one or two of you can see where the flaws in this plan are(Aside from the obvious moral problem that the only people who get a say in the use the Earth’s resources are put to would be the rich, and that a lack of environmental laws would mean that companies could make a bigger profit by deciding to poison people). But you’d be wrong, “libertarians” assure us that the market will take care of everything.

Q: Won’t people starve? A:No, the market will provide everybody with jobs, there’ll be no tax!
Q:What about people who can’t work? A:Charities will look after them, there’ll be no tax!
Q:Won’t people kill each other for food? A: No, silly! That would be an initiation of force. And there’ll be plenty of money for food, because of the no tax!
Q:Won’t the entire environment be degraded and the Earth turned into a shit tip? A:Why would a good businessman do that? If he owns the land he will manage it better than the state, because it’s his. And there’ll be no tax!
Q:What about the rainforests of Borneo which are being burnt down by their owners to produce palm oil? And the Buffalo hunters who exterminated their own livelihoods, and the Spanish fishermen, and tiger hunters...? A: This wasn’t capitalism!!!!! There was tax! When we have capitalism, there’ll be no tax!!!!
Q: What about all the things the state provides me with now, how much will that cost me when there is no state? A: Market, market, gibber, no tax, Von Mises, Austria, gibber, Friedman was a Socialist, men with guns, gibber, market, no tax, gibber.

These incest-legalising social misfits have a messianically unshakeable faith in the market, and an absolute hatred of any form of collective action. Which is what makes their similarity to raging Trotskyites so amusing: they even have the same slogans when the obvious flaws in their arguments are pointed out:

“That’s not real communism/capitalism (delete as appropriate), real communism/capitalism’s never been tried.”
“In a socialist/free market system, that problem wouldn’t exist”

Well I too would like to dust off a cold war standard for our demented “libertarian” friends, and also suggest a holiday destination so they can see their ideas in action (perhaps in the style of the anglo-soviet friendship tours of old):

“Oy, Atlas Shrugged! If you like anarcho-capitalism so much, why don’t you fuck off to Somalia?”