If you are among those who think American libertarian theory is from the Bible, you are going to choke on this.
The fundamental law of Creation itself is reflected in the Covenant of Moses. Not that Moses is that law, but that Moses is an expression of that law. That was the whole point: It was God’s will for that people, that time, that place. If you read between the lines of Moses, you’ll discover the heart of God. Jesus said as much several times in the Gospels.
On the one hand, there is no direct equivalence between our society and economy today and that of the Hebrew nation in Palestine. We have an industrialized economy with laborers that simply did not exist in Old Testament Israel. Their society and economy was loaded with rural peasants. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of moral overlap, in that God is concerned with the lowest and broadest segment of any society.
It becomes necessary to point out that the modern communist theory is utterly evil, simply because it is so materialistic. It worships Mammon. Further, it has never really served the interest of the “workers” it claims to represent. It’s always been an elitist tool, an aristocratic revolt against the existing ruling class so as to simply replace it with another. Nobody has ever seen a communist leadership that sacrificed everything they insisted their constituents sacrifice. The privileged class has always existed in materialistic societies.
But if you can get back behind all of that to the original biblical outlook of Moses, you’ll understand how that materialism can be conquered by a genuine mystical outlook. Moses did not hog privilege; he simply submitted to the will of God. God is the one who promoted Moses (and his brother Aaron) and demanded to see him on a regular basis, while refusing to meet directly with anyone else. The scepter belonged to Judah by customary defaults, but the Tribe of Levi was very specifically God’s choice for ritual leadership. Whose rod sprouted almonds?
It was not a privilege, but a very heavy burden Moses bore.
Under God’s hand, the only way to escape the worst of human intransigence is by demanding otherworldly mysticism as the guiding principle. That was inherent in the experience at Mount Sinai. The calculus of material efficiency and effectiveness must be officially rejected by government for God to even consider blessing a nation. Thus, it’s not material prosperity that comes first, but social stability. Those are not the same thing. That’s of the biggest lies of American libertarian theory.
The other big lie is that “the market” is god. The market only reflects the worst of human lust in the aggregate. And it’s widely understood that “the market” is tilted in favor of rentiers, not the people. Again, I’ve rejected Escobar’s and Hudson’s idolatry of the workers already, but their criticism of the rentier oligarchs is wholly justified.
The entire gamut of libertarian cultic religion is just a mask, a damned lie to cover for the rentier oligarchs. It may be impossible to prove that connection via the theoretical writings, but the standard of cui bono is all we need to condemn libertarians as evil. Their first principle is that it doesn’t matter if God exists, nor what He might say. Human reason is what matters most to them. The rising tide of rentier wealth does not float all boats; it takes all the boats away, leaving people to drown in debt.
Because the Jubilee was not restored, God’s wrath is richly justified on the West.
The thing that really killed it for me with libertarianism was the need for authority. They presume authority is immoral (to their credit, just about every worldly authority is bad nowadays), and they assert that a priori. But people will always seek authority and establish it. It’s part of our makeup, I think, to be like that. In that sense, libertarians are no better than the equalists.