A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of…

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting on a pair of socks. /1

Because society runs by team sports, have a look at how often FOI legislation is driven by political conservatives and libertarians. They're often the instigators, it's a major plank in their continuous assault on public institutional life. /2

To be clear, everybody wants accountability. But look at the accountability FOI offers. It's standard populist libertarian thinking, of individuals holding institutions to account. Yes organisations also use FOI, but the framework here is binary. /3

Government, and 'customers' of government. It shifts the locus of accountability outside the institutions of government itself. Away from the checks and balances and due process built into any well-run government. It engineers a deliberately antagonistic relationship. /4

Yes some might say it's just one more layer of checks and balances, to sit alongside the rest. But anybody who works with FOI will be able to say just how much that's true. A huge number of FOI requests are deep conspiracy lunacy. Government institutions are swamped. /5

And again, this happens because the way government has historically been made accountable, through its permanent, tenured officials whose interests are not aligned with popularly-elected leaders, has been under assault for decades. Slogans about 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'. /6

As with public health, well-functioning democracies do a lot of this due process work through skilled officials that are more or less invisible to most of the public, most of the time. That's the design, so people can get on with their own lives. /7

But if the leadership level then directs opposition to these mechanisms themselves, which is what the political libertarians do constantly, then society begins eating itself. And the libertarians don't care, because they don't think society even exists. /8

Just as a justification for social media is that it apparently provides lots of information to the public, to help it make decisions. Codswallop, functioning representative democracies *deliberately* restrict this flow of information. It's the design. /9

Nobody would ever get a thing done if we were all supposed to be across all of the details of everything going on. It's such a stupid belief that's it's astonishing it ever became widespread. The root social war we're in the middle of is a war on TRUST. /10

That's the war the libertarians started and want, to destroy trust in institutional democratic life. To undermine all expertise and authority, and place it instead in the hands of every person, no matter how stupid, venal and violent. Look how that played out, for Covid. /11

Where motivated fantasies about 'living with' novel pathogens suddenly became common sense, ably assisted by the boosting algorithms of social media. our public health institutions knew what to do in a pandemic, and for a while in Oz they were allowed to. /12

Which is why we were kicking Covid's arse, more or less eliminating it from community circulation. The next stage of that deep expertise would have been the shift to workplace and home-focused infection control, but that was never going to be allowed to happen. /13

Because it represented far too much 'State' control, for the libertarians. We jumped insanely straight from emergency action, to 'personal responsibility'. Like building an airport, then saying 'ok, everybody go and fly your planes however you like'. Offensively stupid. /14

To finish, also never be fooled into thinking political libertarians actually believe in this shift to individuals running societies. THEY want to run the societies. The individualist nonsense is just their Trojan Horse way of stripping away *anybody else* challenging them. /15

Any collective action to regulate public life will be opposed as more 'red tape', except their own regulatory actions, designed to reinforce their own positions. Why I say always focus on the team sports. These are social battles, between teams. /16

The beliefs are just fodder, you can point out all day long to libertarians that their beliefs make no sense on any measure. It's not the point. They don't believe them either. They use them strategically, to make their team win. /end