We Believe in One God, the Invisible Hand, and His One and Only Son, the Invisible Hand

It is an undeniable fact that meanings and meaning or symbol systems are at the heart of human life, human experience, and the human construction of “reality”. Most humans, of course, don’t want to admit that they construct the "reality" that they mistake for reality. They don’t want to admit that that which they think is “real” is, in actuality, a social and cultural construction, because that would mean that those norms, rules, regulations, values, behaviours, and intellectual models, that they have come to believe in, have followed, and have come to see as universals are nothing more than ideological particulars fetishised usually by the powerful.

I was recently reminded of just how central meanings and meaning systems were and are in everyday human life by a post by Libertarians on Facebook. The post, topped off with one of those typically silly memes that dominate social media today, had a smiling Milton Friedman, one of the high priests of the Church of Laissez Faire, proclaiming that “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Putting aside the fact that there is no evidence that Freidman ever said this, something that any analyst of the libertarian mind might revealing, I think the belief among some of the faithful that Friedman did say this and the meanings inherent in this statement provides analysts with a key symbol that allows meaning archaeologists to explore the libertarian mind.

So what does this key or central symbol tell us about the libertarian mind? The fact that this statement, whether it is meant as a joke or not, is empirically wrong—the 9 million square mile Sahara Desert is part of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia—reveals that those who lead and those who worship in the Church of Laissez Faire are akin, in terms of their mentalities, to the faithful of religious communities in general. This statement is a statement of faith, of dogma, of theology, rather than a statement of fact.

At the heart of the Libertarian Faith is fetishised ideologies masquerading as universal verities, universal verities expressed in its creed, “We Believe in the One Free Market” and endlessly in its catechisms, “We Believe in the One Free Market”. Befitting a religion, the Church of Laissez Faire has its own Torah. Its Exodus is the tale of how the Invisible Hand created the world. Its Numbers is the tale of how its Invisible Hand deus ex machina instantiated the Logos, his son the Invisible Hand, in the world it created, in the form of mechanical self operating mathematical formulae. Its Leviticus is the tale of how access to the Logos is only possible through the medium of the holy Laissez Faire Priesthood. Its Exodus is the tale of how the knowledge of the Logos was lost thanks to monopolising monarchs and heretical Keynesians. Its Deuteronomy is the tale of how the Logos was resurrected by the holy Laissez Faire priesthood in those years after they returned from the wildernesses of monarchical mercantilists and the Keynesian welfare states after the 1970s.

Libertarianism is like religious meanings systems in a variety of ways. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its orthodox, the Holy Laissez Faire priesthood, and its heretics, Keynesians, Communists, Socialists, and, most prominently these days “liberals”, ironic since libertarians too are liberals. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its scapegoats, usually, these days, an evil “liberal” government in thrall to crony capitalism. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has been subject to sectarianism. You have, for example, your Straussians, your Friedmanians, your Randians, your Christian Libertarians, your Steinerians, your Rothbardians, and your Blockians, to name just a few. Like any religion the Libertarian Faith ignores evidence that contradicts its statements of faith, such as, for example, the fact that the Saharan Desert is still there despite being the part of several governments and despite the realities of climate change it helped bring about.