The Prophet Chesterton on the Anarchy of the Rich

Last updated on: May 31, 2017 at 12:27 am by Mark Shea

The Prophet Chesterton on the Anarchy of the Rich 2017-05-30T11:42:21-07:00 Mark Shea

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From The Man Who Was Thursday, one of the strangest and most novels ever written:

You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.”

The fundamental lie of Libertarian anarchy (which is to say, Libertarianism) is that essentially nothing justifies the existence of the the state and that any state powerful enough to stop evil too powerful to exist. What that boils down to in real life is a political ideology which preaches: “Whenever a gang of rich people are raping a poor woman or robbing a poor man, it is violence for the state to step in and stop it, but it is the invisible Hand of the Market at work for the poor woman and man to suffer the rape or theft and the rich to profit by it.”

Some will object that Libertarians object to rape and theft. In theory, yes. But it is not and never has been the focus of their energies. On the contrary, the great evil and sole focus of their passion is fear of the state as the Number One abuser of what they invariably call “violence” in ordering the common good. For the Libertarian, *every* application of force by the state is an evil that impinges on human liberty. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from Libertarians who endorse that insane dogma. They dream of some individual initiative or some Invisible Hand solution to the problem (and so are theoretically opposed to rape and theft by the immensely powerful and rich). But their monomaniac obsession is with a stateless society that will allow the rich and powerful to prey on the poor and weak at will–with, of course, themselves cast in the role of the virtuous rich and powerful who would not do that sort of thing. Libertarianism is the reliable handmaid of corrupt, predatory rich and the reliable enemy–and moralist scold–of the poor and helpless.

That’s why Ayn Rand disciple Paul Ryan (and his Good White Christian Libertarian lackeys) stand by a lawless sex predator who has, again and again, robbed workers of their just wages and tried to cheat widows out of their property. Libertarians are the reliable defenders of the lawless rich against their victims.

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