I remain amazed by the degree to which libertarians are taken seriously in certain parts of the liberal blogosphere. Oh sure, I guess compared to their foaming at the mouth right wing brethren they seem respectable -- they've gone to good schools, can string together a coherent set of sentences, and spew a lot less vitriol that their fellow travelers. They won't call you "morans" and won't write that most complete of right wing sentences - "also." But in the end, the Reason magazine set espouse a philosophy so juvenile, so at odds with life as it's actually lived, I really can't imagine engaging in a dialogue with these folks. There's something about their absolute lack of empathy and imagination that just stuns me.
The illustrative piece that's making the rounds is by Jacob Hornberger extolling the highwater mark of freedom -- America in 1880. No, seriously. Okay, others have pointed out-- rightly and obviously -- that 1880 wasn't exactly the golden age of freedom for women, who were forty years away from the franchise; or blacks, who were recently freed, but heading towards a violent and systematic disenfranchisement that would last nearly another century; or Native Americans, who literally hovered on the brink of extinction; or Chinese immigrants, who were subject to periodic pogroms and hatreds so profound that they resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Libertarians are by definition white guys. Even the women. When any of them are magically transported back to the golden age of freedom known as the "Gilded Age" they are karmically incarnated as white men -- no doubt with abundant side burns, copious bellies, and pocket watches.
Now I know a bit about the period in question and can't really imagine anyone waxing nostalgic for it, nor can I see how anyone of sound mind could characterize it as an epoch of freedom in bloom -- well unless I was a railroad or steel magnate or a Wall Street titan. And therein lies the rub -- all of these little 21st century Galts must imagine that they would be sitting at J.P. Morgan's right hand or buying steel companies along side Andrew Carnegie or crushing railroad competitors with Jay Gould. Clearly none of them picture themselves in the lives that even most white men were living at the time -- laying rails and pounding spikes, mining coal, struggling on failing farms, laboring in the inferno of the steel mills -- in a word, working with their hands and their backs under the control of either corporate power or at the mercy of markets and monetary policy designed to their detriment.
I seriously wonder if Hornberger knows anything about 1880. (By the way, I was shocked to see that the guy is a middle aged lawyer and former military member -- I assumed based on this piece that he must have been 23 and in his first "job.") The American economy was still reeling from the "Long Depression" triggered by the Panic of 1873, the longest period of economic contraction in American history -- (65 months versus the 43 months of contraction during the Great Depression). Another recession would follow in 1882, lasting for 38 months, and still another in 1893-94, which lasted for 17 months. Farmers suffered brutally during this period, workers were subject to massive wage cuts, strikes were suppressed by a combination of private and government sanctioned violence, union leaders were jailed, political radicals executed.
Violence was a central feature of the culture of the era. President Garfield would be assassinated in 1881 -- following Lincoln's death in 1865, and with McKinley''s to follow in 1901 -- three Presidents murdered in thirty-six years. Paramilitary groups, such as the "White League" perpetrated atrocities like the Colfax Massacre as part of a systematic campaign of violence against Black Americans in the South. Workers who asserted their rights via strikes would be met time and time again with violence and murder -- during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Affair of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Pullman Strike of 1894 for example. The systematic expulsion of American Indians from their lands would continue unabated, climaxing in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.
I could go on and on I suppose -- but you get the point.
As for the putative "small" government of 1880, well it is true that workers were not burdened with work places inspected by OSHA, the minimum wage, overtime requirements, or legally sanctioned unions, old people weren't oppressed by Social Security pensions or health care provided by Medicare, but the government was hardly impotent -- the Civil War had seen a draft which sent at least tens of thousands of conscripts to their deaths, the federal government was indispensable in building the Transcontinental railroad, which also featured one of the great land giveaways to private interests of all time, an industrial policy based on a high tariff on imports was in effect, land grant colleges were being built under the Morrill Act, the Homestead Act had encouraged a wave of migration west, and monetary policy favored banks and industrial interests at the expense of workers and farmers. In short, the federal government played a substantial and deliberate role in shaping the country to come, creating winners and losers in the process, and not being shy about coercing the disfavored many for the benefit of the powerful few.
The only respect in which the United States in 1880 and its surrounding age could be described as libertarian is that business owners were free to exploit their workers and monied interests were given pride of place in the political order. Of course, this is really what libertarians value -- not the freedom of individuals to live lives in which their interests are valued, their safety and security matter, their voices can best be heard -- no the libertarian wants freedom for the so-called "productive" members of society to be able to take that which they want without any countervailing institutions to get in their way. In the end, libertarians are the slavish servants of capital, courtiers of wealth, without the wit or wisdom to understand that a life spent at the caprice of the employer class is decidedly less free than one in which responsive political institutions act to protect collective interests, in the process protecting individuals.