Reddit mentions of Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

When I was in college, I minored in philosophy. I took a bunch of philosophy classes, including Ethics, which introduced a variety of moral systems like utilitarianism or Kantianism with its categorical imperative.

We'd go over each of these systems, and each time I'd think, "You know, I can see a kernel of truth in this system, and I can see how they've tried to take that kernel and then strive to build a single unified morality with it." But inevitably, we'd find that every time you tried to formalize things and make an objective morality out of a certain philosophy, it had problems.

With utilitarianism, for instance, it is concerned with net utility or happiness for society, but includes no provisions for the individual or for the method to achieve this; thus under basic utilitarian principles we might say that if a healthy man walks into a hospital where 5 people need organ transplants or else they'll die, the moral action is to kill the man and give his organs to the 5 sick people, because they'll have more net utility than the single guy living. It should go without saying that if that is the logical endpoint, we've clearly gone down the wrong path for morality.

But you can see how it started; "we should try to increase everybody's utility/happiness" sounds like a reasonable proposition. It's just that when you try to universalize it and have it be the single arbiter of morality, it produces cases which are clearly wrong, and collapses under the weight of itself.

I view libertarianism similarly; the idea that every person should enjoy freedom sounds reasonable. But then you start defining things and trying to formalize it and universalize it, and you start running into problems. If one man's freedom depends upon another man being a pauper, do you maintain freedom at all costs, up to and including starvation? If nobody has the right to use aggression on anyone, who enforces the laws? (please, spare me ideas about voluntarily self-binding court decisions.) If the current system is rigged to favor certain groups, but changing it requires governmental action, must we live under a rigged system forever? If there are public goods that are better for everyone but that naturally will not be built absent taxation, but taxation is theft, how do we solve that? Perhaps most importantly, why is the Non-Aggression Principle defined primarily in the form of Non-Aggression against property, which primarily benefits the rich who have the most property?

Ultimately, libertarianism is something that sounds good, if you're relatively well-off and don't face a ton of structural barriers to success. But in reality, it's mostly about (or is mostly used for) defending the rich and their property, and defending the status quo which enriched them in the first place, keeping a rigged system in place rather than allowing for the kinds of government changes necessary to promote true meritocracy.

Thus, I see Libertarians as misguided accidental defenders of the elites, of the special interests, of big business. Perhaps the best example of this is Libertarian Economist Tyler Cowen, who recently released a book literally entitled, "Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-hero."

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Edit: P.S.--Before modern times, wealth was primarily accrued in the form of land; thus Georgism was basically a wealth tax aimed at redistributing wealth. Given that wealth is now held in a variety of ways, it's also a kind of outdated philosophy that no longer is targeted at the things it's supposed to be targeting.