Aesthetic Anarchism: The Question I Asked that Made Me Realize that ‘Thin’ or ‘Political’ Libertarianism was Wrong

What is aesthetic anarchism? I’m not sure anyone else has defined it or even used the term, so my definition is: opposing the arbitrary exercise of power over people, regardless of the source. Like any other definition there's a gray area to move around in, but it works well enough for me. How did I come to this position?

Libertarianism is defined by many people in many different ways. As a political philosophy it’s about what is and is not properly legal. Those who take it further would say its ethical and moral implications go beyond what should or should not be legal or illegal. Generally I agree with the latter, but I didn’t always agree with them. I changed my mind when a question kept popping up: why aren’t politicians the wealthiest people around?

More than a few lines of argument lead to me asking this question. When leftists complain about billionaires, the invariable response from most libertarians is that the government is to blame for setting up the system to include handouts and legal protections for those billionaires. Sure, the billionaires have their profits bolstered by those handouts and protections, and sure they even ask and lobby for them quite often, but somehow they’re either not at fault, or at a lesser fault, because the state has the ultimate power, and in the eyes of many libertarians this seems to absolve all such businesspeople of benefiting from the state’s interventions. “They’re just trying to run a business…”

Likewise I’ve noticed that libertarians, especially those of the Austrian Economics variety, almost invariably take the side of businesses in any labor dispute. No matter how corrupt the business, no matter how much they’ve taken in direct handouts, no matter how much they’ve benefited from theft via inflation, no matter how many legal protections they get, and crucially no matter how abusive and shitty they are toward their employees, the libertarian response to anyone unhappy with their employment is to simply get another job. But how is that to be done when employers are given de facto control of the markets by working with these politicians?

Businesses take handouts, funded by taxes imposed on the salaries they pay their employees, essentially taking a portion of their income back, and the employees have to just accept this. Businesses get legal protections from the government, and this reduces the competition for labor in their industry sectors and restricts the creation of competing employment opportunities, driving wages down by creating pools of unemployment, and the employees have to just accept this. Businesses take handouts that are also funded by inflationary spending/lending, money printed out of thin air. This drives wages even further down, but also creates the business cycle. Austrian types get obsessed with the crash, but the reality is that is just the crescendo of the cycle’s entrepreneurial error, but that error is consistent and present all the time. That means there’s more churn in the labor markets for these businesses than there otherwise would be, and this puts yet more downward pressure on wages, and the employees have to just accept this. However, whenever any individual suggests they’re feeling the pinch of this, the only answer proffered by most libertarians is, “find another job.” What’s left unsaid is to find another job… in the market your employer partially controls. Find another job… but get paid in the same perpetually devalued currency. Find another job… as the taxes imposed upon you climb so your employer can socialize their losses but keep their profits private, and the state can ossify the economy to keep the major players in place without burdening them with the need to compete for business, which would have otherwise long ago fled to alternative providers. And, as before, the employees have to just accept this.

Through all of this I ask, why aren’t politicians the wealthiest people around?

If they are the font of all power, surely they should also be the destination of most of the stolen money, and yet they aren’t. Politicians are surely among the wealthiest people out there, but they’re almost never the wealthiest. Why is that? Certainly, when governments collapse a portion of them are often the ones who ‘survive’ as the country is subjugated, and many businesses get nationalized, but in both cases not all or even most. Not all politicians or business people survive those. Through all these maneuvers there is this persistent shell game, very notable here in the US. The business people claim they have no choice, that they’re just trying to run a business, and they have to ‘play ball’ with the politicians. The politicians claim they have no choice, that to get elected they just have to accept these bribes from businesses, but if you vote for them one more time they’ll fix everything.

Why aren’t politicians the wealthiest among us? Because the state isn’t the ultimate problem, the ultimate problem’s roots are the thieves and the busy bodies who would steal our incomes and live off the sweat of our brows while also dictating to us how we should live. These people find places in both the private and public sector where they can impose themselves on others. This is why I oppose the arbitrary exercise of power over people regardless of who does it, because totalitarians exist everywhere, even in the ostensibly libertarian, conservative, anarcho capitalist movement today. These people have often never confronted the possibility that a truly free society wouldn’t produce a world they would want to live in. You see this in the push by some people for ‘localism,’ or ‘covenant communities’ where some people, and they rarely clarify who they mean, must be ‘removed’ for the good of the community.

The benefits and dynamism of freedom are not just economic, they are social. You can’t have a dynamic economy with a static culture, and you can’t have a dynamic culture with a static economy. Totalitarianism in one breeds totalitarianism in the other, dynamism in one breeds dynamism in the other. You can’t have one or the other, you either have both or neither. That is why the old ‘muh private company’ defense lost its luster, that is why the new paleo strategy of the Mises Caucus will never work. ‘Muh private company’ still wields power over people, with or without the state enabling them and these days it almost always is enabling them, and the swing of the LP toward more right leaning culturally conservative types will only breed conflict with those people’s inherent desire for a static culture.

If you truly want change in the direction of freedom then you have to oppose the arbitrary exercise of power over anyone for any reason, and whether or not it is the state doing it or an ostensibly ‘private’ actor. The fight for freedom is therefore a long haul fight, there really isn’t a shortcut through ‘the system’ in any way. You have to convince people, one by one, over a long period of time concurrently, and hopefully, while technology makes the state increasingly irrelevant. The reason politicians aren’t always the wealthiest people is because they aren’t the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the desire to dominate others and dictate how they live their lives. You’ll find that desire, that vice, to be equally strong in the leftists who want to hang you for using the wrong pronouns that were just invented five minutes ago as it is in the Christian conservatives who want to force gays and trans people back into closets under the pretext that their mere existence is ‘promoting’ a lifestyle the Christians find distasteful.

They are all totalitarians, and they should all be opposed.