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Saturday, June 09, 2007

More on Libertopian Iraq

Earnest "anti-war" libertarians (not to mention the stupid greedy warmongering market fundamentalist dupes and sloganeers who throng more cynically than earnestly among them) simply must come to terms with the real world implications of the slogans and theories they have been championing all these years with such self-assurance and obliviousness.

From David Harvey's excellent A Brief History of Neoliberalism:
[O]n 19 September 2003... Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, promulgated four orders that included 'the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses... the opening of Iraq's banks to foreign control... [and] the elimination of nearly all trade barriers.' The orders were to apply to all areas of the economy, including public services, the media, manufacturing services, transportation, finance, and construction.... The labor market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted. A highly regressive 'flat tax' (an ambitious tax-reform plan long advocated for implementation by conservatives in the US) was also imposed.

These orders were, some argued, in violation of the Geneva and Hague conventions, since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off. Some Iraqis resisted the imposition of what the London Economist called a 'capitalist dream' regime upon Iraq. A member of the US-appointed Coalition Provisional Authority forcefully criticized the imposition of 'free market fundamentalism,' calling it 'a flawed logic that ignores history.' Though Bremer's rules may have been illegal when imposed by an occupying power, they would become legal if confirmed by a 'sovereign' government. The interim government, appointed by the US, that took over at the end of June 2004 was declared 'sovereign.' But it only had the power to confirm existing laws. Before the handover, Bremer multiplied the number of laws to specify free-market and free-trade rules in minute detail... expressing the hope that these institutional arrangements would 'take on a life of their own' such that they would prove very difficult to reverse.

In that expression of faith in the force of initial arrangements set loose upon the world that would "take on a life of their own" I see the usual libertopian faith in "spontaneous order," the neoliberal fantasy that the "creative destruction" of barriers to "trade" (you know, barriers like public oversight, environmental regulation, safety regulation, penalties for fraud, and so on) will inevitably unleash "market forces" from their shackles to the betterment of all. Or, at least, to the betterment of incumbent elites. Or, at least, the betterment of "our sort" of incumbent elites. Or, at least, to the betterment of, well, who knows who, damn them librul elites!

My point in endlessly flogging this connection is not to imply that market libertarians are insincere in their appalled condemnations of the worst excesses of neoconservative Republican corporate-militarism, but to insist that they should recognize and take some measure of responsibility for the real-world effects of their own libertopian formulations before democratic and progressive anti-war activists accept them as anything like trustworthy allies in our righteous opposition to the endlessly bloodthirsty, endlessly profitable War Machine now loosed so catastrophically upon the world.

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