A Further Note on Libertarian Strategy

By Robert Wenzel

I continue to see in the comments here at Target Liberty and at EPJ, whenever I discuss a point of libertarian theory or free market economics or Austrian school economics, frustration along the lines of "Well, good luck with that point, the masses don't get it. All they want are their handouts."

But the point is that Target Liberty and  EPJ are not aimed primarily at the masses.

These sites are aimed at high-level libertarians and free market types that are doing deep thinking about liberty. I would estimate that this group is less than even 1% of the population.

There are another maybe between 3% to 5% of the population who identify to some degree as libertarians but these people make my head spin when I notice some of the points they make in the name of libertarianism.

It is us, the Liberty One Percenters, who ultimately are the ones that can influence change. Pretty much everyone else is a trend follower of one sort of another, with a lowered ability to think in a deep fashion about complex issues.

The masses are what Jordan Peterson calls the low-resolution thinkers. They are never going to come close to a deep understanding of liberty. The best we can do with them is nudge them on simple points. But we need to know the deep points to know how to nudge them and how far we can nudge particular individuals.

The more and more I think about socialists, the more I realize their Achilles heel is that they are just not deep thinkers.

This is a point we should continually make: Socialism=lack of deep thinking.

They just can't think more than once step deep about issues that are complex and require very deep thinking.

That is, it is so easy for them to fall into the "give away, give me" trap. They think it is a sound solution to just have government give things to them. But this ignores many problems. The immediate problem being, which some get, is where is the money going to come from?

The simple mass thinker then, of course, counters with the simple notion: "tax the rich."

But this ignores these deeper thoughts: Taxing the rich will not be enough to pay for all the giveaways. But even deeper is the problem of killing incentive and even deeper and more serious, it shrinks the capital structure.

It is very difficult for the socialists to understand this because their low-resolution thinking prevents them from even understanding that there are two types of capitalists, evil crony capitalists and productive capitalists. They just lump them all together as one evil bunch, not recognizing how important productive capitalists are.

Henry Hazlitt tried to reach some of the masses with his important book Economics In One Lesson. A more accurate title would be, "What the Shallow Thinkers Don't Get About Economics."

And so at a very base level, our point to the socialists should be simple: Socialism is about shallow thinking. With the very simple amongst them, this will be the extent of the attack we can make against socialism.

But there will be some who are deeper thinkers who haven't been introduced to deeper, sound complex thinking about economics and society in general. And this is where we can become more aggressive by taking these people as deep as we can into the beautiful but complex structure of freedom. We hone our skills at sites like Target Liberty and EPJ so that we can then provide doses of the red pill for those who are capable of tolerating it. There are many, certainly far from all of the masses, but many who can be reached. To the non-thinkers, there is not much more we can say to them other than speak truth and tell them that socialism lacks deep thinking. But the important thing is that the shallower a thinker, the more of a trend follower that thinker is. They will follow along with what deeper thinkers hold as truth and so our task is to introduce complex thinking to those who can absorb.

Now, this will work with many but not all. There are people on this planet who are clever thinkers but desire power. They will never be converted. The drive for power overwhelms any other thoughts, but they can be neutered to the degree that others become suspicious of central power---and that is our goal, to breed suspicion about central power since, for those who understand it, it is clear central power is never good for anyone except those in power.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.