RIGHT-WING LIBERTARIAN WET DREAM!

From AlterNet:

Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee

Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” -- and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets -- we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. It’s a picture of a society in which “rugged individualism” run amok means every man for himself.

Call it Ayn Rand’s stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, Cranick “said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.”

The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Pressed by the local NBC news team for an explanation, Mayor David Crocker said, “if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.”

More here.

So I never got around to writing about the Republican US Senate nominee from Tennessee Rand Paul, who comes from a heavy Libertarian background, and his big gaffe asserting that it violates white racist restaurant owners' property rights when the federal government forces them to serve African-Americans. The take my buddy Matt, a moderate who understands what Libertarians are all about, offered at the time via email was that Paul simply articulated his view extraordinarily badly, and that's an interpretation with which I'm inclined to agree.

I mean, Paul's a smart guy, and well aware of long-lasting Southern racism in the part of the country where's he's seeking office, so it is also entirely possible that he was nudging and winking at such white trash in order to court their votes at the same time he was waxing philosophic about Libertarianism. It's complicated. But the point is that, from the Libertarian worldview, with its near absolute stance on property rights, denying a service to anybody, for any reason, is the sacred right of the property owner who provides that service. To the Libertarian, it isn't about kicking black people out of restaurants: it's about an individual doing whatever he wants with his property, and keeping at bay the tyranny of a government that would force him to do otherwise--barring black people from a racist's restaurant is an unfortunate consequence of the sacred rights of property.

See? Paul's no racist; it's just that freedom, Libertarian "freedom," means freedom to be a big dick, freedom to use your property to oppress others, freedom to fuck over people who have nothing because they aren't the heirs to centuries of a social system that rewards you based on the color of your skin. See? Libertarians, neoliberals, whatever you want to call them, aren't racists. They champion "freedom."

That's Rand Paul's point, albeit filtered through a left-wing lens. Here's mine.

Such a society, the one envisioned by anti-government Tea Partiers, Libertarians, supply-siders, Republicans, conservatives, and the rest of the fucktard circus of misinformed and willfully ignorant reactionary assholes, may not be philosophically motivated by racism, or classism, or any other kind of hate, at least, not at face value, but racism, class warfare, and good old fashioned social oppression are necessarily the net result. That is, a truly Libertarian society, one where the government is small, and allows property owners to do literally anything they want with their property, is also an extraordinarily mean-spirited society, one where it's every man for himself, one where it doesn't matter if the guy next door has a heart attack because it's not your problem, you know, the kind of society toward which we are rapidly devolving right now.

Think it through. If you really look at the philosophical principles embedded within the false big/small government dichotomy, and factor in how people actually behave in the real world, you simply cannot escape the conclusion that Libertarian philosophy would literally destroy society. I mean, you can call the smoldering husk of civilization left behind by such "philosophy" a society if you want, but I, for one, wouldn't want to live in it. For most Americans, life would be reduced to nothing more than an exercise in survival.

Yeah, I know the above linked story is about the action, or to be more precise, inaction, of a government entity. But it's a damned good snapshot of how the private sector would rule if it got the chance. Your house is on fire? Pay up, buddy. Your mother is dying? Too fucking bad, not my problem. Restaurant won't let you in because you're black? Well, that's their right. This is the America conservatives want.

And it makes me sick to my stomach.

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