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Celerity

(42,669 posts)
Tue Mar 31, 2020, 12:34 PM Mar 2020

Trump's Disastrous COVID-19 Response Exposes Libertarianism As A Complete Lie

Republicans have told us for decades that government was the problem and now we’re all paying the price for their arrogance.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-disastrous-covid-19-response



Until the MAGA mob and Bernie Bros started competing for “World’s Most Annoying Group of Entitled White Men,” the hands down undisputed champions were libertarians. The perfect intersection of arrogance and ignorance, libertarians smugly proclaim the superiority of their ideology from on top the mountains of privilege their skin color, gender, and happenstance of socioeconomic birth handed to them. They imagine having scaled these heights themselves, fully embracing the myth of the self-made whatever, without mentioning their paid for college tuition and cushy job at the law firm courtesy of a “family friend”. This is why it’s rare to find minority, female, or poor libertarians. These groups don’t live in a world designed to give them every possible advantage while assuring them they earned everything all on their own. But libertarians are oblivious to this reality and will wax on for hours about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and how the federal government only exists to steal your wages and your freedom. For the last 60 years, the entire right wing has been steadily overtaken by this libertarian anti-government ideology and we now see what it looks like in practice. To say it’s an absolute failure would be an understatement.

The Free Market Fails Catastrophically

This will not be an attack on capitalism per se. The coronavirus currently ravaging the planet does not care if your country is rich, poor, communist, or capitalist. All are being impacted and no one is getting through this unscathed. That being said, we have discovered here in America that the free market will not, in fact, save us from a virus. Libertarians have been telling us for decades that the federal government is useless and that the magic of the market will tend to all society’s ailments. Turns out that they were completely full of crap. Who could have possibly guessed that, except anyone paying attention to history? The moment Trump was sworn in he began dismantling the United States government. This was both practical and ideological from Trump’s point of view. He was partly following the direction of his “guru” Steve Bannon who wanted to “destroy all of today's establishment”, but also doing the bidding of the Russian government by hiring Vladimir Putin stooge Rex Tillerson to facilitate the rapid annihilation the State Department and America’s foreign policy capabilities.

But a good chunk of the reason Trump continues to dismantle the government is because he has bought into the libertarian myth that we don’t need the government to do things. Like many privileged white men Trump has lived a life chafing at any and all constraints on his behavior. He wants something? He bribes, bullies, harasses, and cheats until he gets it. He wants money? He just steals it from his workers or cons people out of millions. He wants a woman? “Grab’em by the pussy.” Trump’s loathing of government is what makes him the perfect embodiment of Republicanism. It’s also why the country is in such dire straits. As the coronavirus rapidly spread beyond the borders of China, Trump refused to take any kind of action. When he was finally goaded into it, he followed his xenophobic instincts and shut down travel to China but far too late.

As the virus spread throughout the country, Trump continued to refuse to do anything, hoping the problem would take care of itself. When it finally became apparent that Covid-19 would not disappear “like a miracle,” Trump fully abdicated the federal government’s role in fighting the first global pandemic in a century to America’s governors. It is the libertarian wet dream. Finally, we would see that America did not actually need a Big Brother federal government. We would see how the magic of the free market would be the most efficient means to get medical equipment exactly where it needed to go while companies voluntarily filled the increase in demand. It would be amazing! It would be capitalism at its finest! It has been an absolute disaster on every conceivable level.

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Trump's Disastrous COVID-19 Response Exposes Libertarianism As A Complete Lie (Original Post) Celerity Mar 2020 OP
All you need to do... Newest Reality Mar 2020 #1

Newest Reality

(12,712 posts)
1. All you need to do...
Tue Mar 31, 2020, 12:44 PM
Mar 2020

All you need to do is put a bunch of "libertarians" (the American, pot smoking Republican kind) on an island. Oh, give them enough resources to last a month on their own. In a month or so, their ideology will start to crumble fast or they will all die rather quickly.

The kind they practice just echoes the untenable ideology of Ayn Rand, who did not hesitate to take advantage of public services in her advancing years. The hokum only works as as quasi-religious belief system that allows you to practice a holy form of uneupmanship and make it resemble a strong, independent and even noble World view.

Hokum. Foo!

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