Richard Eskow wrote a piece published at AlterNet a couple of weeks ago entitled “5 Obnoxious Libertarian Oligarchs Who Earned Fortunes from the Government They’d Like to Destroy.” To be fair, not all of the people he identifies want to destroy the government per se, but they certainly fail to appreciate the extent to which said government made their success possible in the first place:

We’re dealing with a cohort of highly fortunate, highly privileged and highly unaware individuals who have been inappropriately lionized by society. That lionization has led them to believe that their wealth and accomplishments are their own doing, rather than the fruits of collaborative effort – effort which in many cases was only made possible through government support.

But instead of thanking the government and the taxpayers for their good fortune, they’ve allowed their own good press to go to their heads. And they’re biting the hand that feeds them, attempting to shut down the system of taxpayer support and government action which created their world.

One of my principle complaints with libertarianism as practiced*, besides its tendency to rely on vague terms like “liberty” and define them in highly self-serving ways, is that it generally ignores all or nearly all of the contributions of the rest of society to certain individuals’ success. (I have many other complaints, but that one sticks out.)

The internet, which came into being because of massive government investment and development, is a singularly ironic place for such disdain for the government to arise. (Any jokes about Al Gore in the comments will get deleted, FYI.) Yes, the private sector made the internet profitable, but it did so once the basic infrastructure was already in place. It’s doubtful that a private company, concerned over quarterly earnings reports and the like, would have taken it upon itself to invent the internet from scratch. Other industries also benefit extensively from “big government.” To give a snarky example, Whole Foods is able to ship and receive products around the company with minimal fear of bandits.

1. Eskow first identifies Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins, who does something involving venture capital, I think, but who clearly doesn’t have a strong understanding of broader American society or European history:

Perkins’ defense of his initial comments on Bloomberg betray the shallowness of his libertarian thought. He insisted that his fellow tycoons are “job creators,” despite the fact that they’ve been paying very low taxes for more than a decade – and there are no jobs!

These guys also tend to discount the role of luck in their success, i.e. that a considerable factor was being in the right place at the right time surrounded by the right people:

Truly smart tech companies are few and far between. Facebook? An accidental discovery by two guys who thought they were creating a college students’ app and still can’t design a decent user interface. Uber? An obvious idea with a nice user interface. Zynga? The less said the better.

2. Whole Foods’ John Mackey is Eskow’s next target:

The “fascist government” Mackey despises provides a number of services which have helped make him become very wealthy. The USDA, for example, certifies that the food sold in his stores is organic. Without that certification, Whole Foods customers would have no way of trusting Mr. Mackey’s claims about his food. His business probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without it.

And that’s not all. Government built and maintains the roads and rails which bring Mr. Mackey’s goods to each of his far-flung stores.  Government regulators ensure that his stores’ food is grown, prepared, packaged, and shipped in a manner that is safe and disease-free.

Without government, John Mackey would still be running a little hippie store in Austin.

He left out the fact that our highways are perhaps freer from bandits than at any time in the nation’s history.

3. Eskow then turns to Peter Thiel, who made a fortune in moving money around the internet, but now seems eager to rid himself of the system that made that possible:

Give him points for honesty: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” writes Thiel.  That’s not an unusual point of view in one strain of libertarian thinking. But it’s unusual to hear it stated so plainly.

In his rather comically grandiose essay, Thiel compares the criticism his undergraduate newspaper received at Stanford to the “carnage” of “trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I.” Thiel, who made his fortune at PayPal with Elon Musk, has shown none of his former partner’s genius for technological and business creativity.

And speaking of grandiosity, Thiel tells us that “the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution” – and presumably controlled instead by the likes of Peter Thiel. He waxes equally excessive about Facebook and other Internet companies, touting their inability to overthrow democracy and replace it with a newer and “freer” (at least for Peter Thiel) digital regime.

Thiel has also been a proponent of seasteading, the creation of independent libertarian utopias on the open sea, free of all governments and their regulations and taxation. I might also add that these artificial island paradises would be free of any oppressive Coast Guard protection, but I’m sure pirates would respect their natural rights and sovereignty.

4. Elon Musk, PayPal’s other founder, gets slightly-less-harsh treatment from Eskow, who notes his concrete contributions to society followed by his trip down the rabbit hole:

Elon Musk differs from the other people on this list in one very important way: He’s a smart guy who actually invents things. They are real things, useful things, tangible things. Where the other Silicon Valley libertarians merely imagine they’re real inventors like Ford and Edison, while doing nothing more than making trivial front-ends for existing technology, Musk really seems to be what he appears: an inventor and entrepreneur in the old-school style.

Unfortunately, he also hangs around with the wrong crowd. Some of their silly ideas seem to have rubbed off on him. We don’t know if that happened when he was working on PayPal with Thiel, or even earlier when they were part of the same conservative circle as undergraduates at Stanford.

Whatever it was, the tendency for ideologically-based hypocrisy has not entirely eluded Musk. As Mother Jones reports, Musk was able to save Tesla Motors – and his sizable ownership stake in it – with a low-interest government loan. “Shortly after paying off his $465 million loan,” Josh Harkinson writes, “Musk proclaimed that government should no longer provide such assistance.”

***

Unfortunately for Musk, a market-driven economy would have never invested in the pure research necessary to develop personal computing technology and the Internet. And without those two platforms, Musk would never have had the financial resources to launch Tesla. So, when Musk tweeted that “Technically, I ‘got rich’ from Zip2 & PayPal w zero govt anything,” he wasn’t demonstrating anything except his own ignorance of the economics and history of his own field.

5. Finally, Eskow describes the support of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for “libertarian and neoliberal efforts to replace public education as we know it with a privatized, for-profit, anti-union nexus of corporations.” The plan for a fleet of Amazon drones also speaks a great deal about the view of some in the high-tech world that government is a useful tool to be discarded at the first opportunity:

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and told the country that in a few years his corporation will deliver its products by drone. All that claim did was reinforce the stereotype of the Silicon Valley libertarian as someone who doesn’t understand the social realities of the world around him.

Anyone who thinks an unmanned aircraft filled with valuable goods will routinely survive a descent path into the most heavily-armed nation on Earth has got another think comin’.

For some people, the drone claim was a surprise. But it was part of what has become a routine pattern for the admittedly brilliant, if ruthless, leader of Amazon: allow the taxpayers to develop a costly new technology (first computers, then the Internet, then drones), adopt it for your own profit-making ends, then cling to a belief system which says that government played no part in the success of people like yourself.

Now enjoy your ARPANET internet, your somewhat-clean running water (made less clean by unregulated businesses), and a system of roads that allows you to cross rivers without getting wet (provided the government has enough funding to maintain the bridges.)

And shut up about Nazis. It’s embarrassing.

Photo credits: Fibonacci Blue [CC-BY-2.0], via Flickr; By Leonard Kleinrock [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; JackDayton at en.wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [CC-BY-3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons.

* By this, I mean please spare me any exhortations to read original works of the Austrian school from the 1930’s, because I suspect that the majority of the people espousing views that could fairly be termed libertarian are not basing their views on specific writings of von Mises et al. This is just yet another version of the Courtier’s Reply. (That said, I have read a bit of Mises, and while his views might be internally consistent, I think they rest on a mistaken foundation.)