Libertarian Conservatives
As for the libertarian conservatives, they substitute the “free market” for the supernatural power of God. Instead of miracles brought about by God’s invisible hand, Darwinian competition in a marketplace is supposed to be meritocratic and self-regulating. Just as natural selection produces the “miracle” of designed (adapted) organisms, the unfettered market in which competition is allowed to occur with minimal if any interference produces the miracles of the correct price of goods, innovative products, and growing economies. The market is an environment that selects for economic excellence by bankrupting failures, producing a functional economy that preserves everyone’s freedom to compete.
Note that the libertarian is as scientistic as the liberal humanist, effectively reducing economics to biology (the reduction is thought to be accomplished by Game Theory). Note also that self-consistent libertarianism must speak only of functional markets, not of meritocratic or otherwise normative ones. This is because there are no norms or values--such as ethical or aesthetic ones--in the part of the world explained by biologists. Natural selection creates functional traits, in that the traits will work as their ancestors did, because the ancestors and descendents are built by the same genetic code, which is all that’s directly selected by the environment in which the host organisms live long enough to sexually reproduce members of their type. The prevailing designs in an environment that’s home to replicators are in no sense objectively best; they’re simply the results of some animals’ survival under certain conditions. When the conditions change, other species are built by mutated genes, and the process goes on and on. The animals themselves may approve of their ability to survive thanks to their adapted body-types, but that’s a subjective source of the value of those types.
Now, if that’s all a free market is, an arena for an economic version of natural selection, the products of free market forces are in no way objectively right or wrong, or better or worse. The myths to the contrary, put out by economic conservatives to hype various bubble markets and persuade people to support deregulation, commit the fallacy of social Darwinism, which is a variant of the naturalistic fallacy that infers an “ought” from an “is,” a prescription by a norm or value from a description of an objective fact. A social Darwinist takes Darwin’s biological theory to imply that human societies ought to be just like life in the wild, and that raw competition between humans is best because that’s our most natural state. There’s no such implication, and to the extent that free market libertarianism is a version of social Darwinism, libertarianism is logically flawed.
What the libertarian can add, by way of showing how the free market could be meritocratic, is that the free market produces goods that are appreciated, in that they’re goods that people choose to buy. The value of those goods, though, would be subjective and thus dependent on the quality of the consumers. The questions would remain whether a free market economy tends to elevate or lower the standard of the character of participants in that economy, and whether, in the latter case, the laissez faire economy is sustainable.
In any case, talk of subjective value has no place in libertarian conservatism if the libertarian has scientific aspirations for her political theory. And once we appreciate the scientism of that political theory, we can identify the minority whom the libertarian must say should rule over the majority. The minority must be just those select predators who do actually rise to the top of their food chain in the wild (free) economy. The libertarian isn’t committed to preserving a bloodline, like a defender of aristocracy; instead, the libertarian is religiously adamant that what must be preserved at all costs is an economy’s wildness, since brutal struggle in the wilderness is the selection mechanism for functional, well-adapted members of a society. Oligarchs may come and go, but what should be constant is everyone’s freedom to leap into the capitalistic jungle and do battle, to test his or her capacity to succeed in the conflict of ideas or wills, or whatever is supposed to be the social analogue of genes. The majority who should be ruled, then, consists just of those who are actually ruled in a free market, namely those who wind up having relatively little money or control over the mainstream media or the superficially-democratic political system.
Again, the scientistic reduction of economics to biology has no normative implications. But what makes some libertarian conservatives religious is their use of myths to sanctify the marketplace and to veer into fallacious social Darwinian glorification of economic struggles. (The historian Thomas Frank documents much of this in One Market Under God.) It’s one thing to compare economic competition in a harsh marketplace to natural selection, but it’s another to help oneself to normative evaluations of either natural process, worshipping business leaders for being “rewarded” by something ethereal and reified called The Market, and hyping capitalism as qualitatively superior to any other economic system. Whether capitalism is superior depends on which social goals are best, and thus on the relevance of those sets of statistics that the libertarian conservative likes to trot out when in a scientistic mood. And as a pseudoscientist, that sort of conservative has no authority to speak on the normative, cultural question of the direction in which a society should head. It may be that a fine social goal is to maintain the ecosystem so that organisms can continue to live in it, and that capitalistic systems tend not to be so self-regulating that they take that long-term concern into account.
Regardless, the religious libertarian conservative (as opposed to a traditional monotheistic one) adds a half-baked theology to quasibiological economics, mythologizing and obscuring what actually happens in a minimally-regulated market. For example, competition tends to stop when a monopoly or an oligopoly naturally forms and potential competitors are bought up before they can effectively challenge the ruling companies. The rulers then rig the system in their favour, purchasing politicians with campaign contributions and with the implicit promise of a cushy private sector job; writing bills with their armies of lobbyists; and concocting bubble markets that amount to massive frauds, escaping unpunished when their handiwork--planned for obsoleteness--crumbles. Thus, the “winners” in a once-competitive market tend to violate the libertarian’s creed that the market shall not be artificially regulated, since the oligarchs eliminate competition or “uncertainty” for themselves whenever possible, preferring socialism for the wealthy and wild competition for the rabble.
