Commentary from the liberterrain…
In his New York Times op-ed, "Can the Working Class Be Saved?" Ross Douthat describes Charles Murray's book Coming Apart as "a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion."
What's brilliant, Douthat says, is Murray's portrait of the demise of "America’s working class." What's exasperating is Murray's solution, which offers "nothing other than [scrapping] all existing government programs and embracing Murray's own libertarian convictions by giving everyone a universal guaranteed income."
This is "libertarian" only if Murray is proposing a purely voluntary, untouched-by-government's-coercive-fingers, "universal guaranteed income."
Which, of course, he isn't, making Murray's "solution" just another government program, thereby exasperating real libertarians.
Douthat also labels as equally exasperating the typical liberal response, that "there’s nothing wrong with America’s working class that can’t be solved by taxing the wealthy and using the revenue to weave a stronger safety net."
The political left, in short, is still brain-locked in the outdated 19th Century concept of class warfare between business and labor. But the real class war today is government vs. people.
America is an anti-freedom corporatist-statist empire in which the class of beings who posses political clout and political connections ride roughshod over those who have neither.
But Douthat himself doesn't get any of that either. What he offers as solutions for "saving the working class" is the usual tepid mainstream status-quo-preserving mashup of government meddling like lightening payroll taxes and tinkering with Social Security funding, imposing a government-mandated "family policy," punishing employers for hiring low-wage immigrant workers, and reducing incarceration rates with "swift, certain punishment and larger police forces" (i.e., expanding the police state) while never mentioning the real answer: abolishing all victimless crimes.
Here's the real libertarian solution:
In a libertarian society there are no social or economic classes. Everyone is an individual. Individual workers can become industrialists and CEOs while business kingpins can become laborers. High society celebs can become bums and the homeless can become success stories.
That's because a libertarian society is a free society, where free actually means free: free will, free trade, free spirit, free social, economic and charitable interactions of every peaceful kind because the one "class" that prevents that freedom, the class of control-freak sociopaths who run the crime syndicate called government, will have been replaced by a mutual aid society of voluntary cooperation.
The anti-freedom government-loving Douthats of the world will, of course, be exasperated by that solution.
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