As someone consistently concerned that my social affinity for libertarians will be misconstrued as sympathy for their ideas, let me link to, and endorse, the sentiments contained in this essay by Matt Yglesias. I'd add that the nexus between libertarianism -- and in this post, I'm talking about the business of professional political libertarianism as it exists in the Beltway, not the populist movement of libertarianism as it exists in right wing militias who vote the libertarian ticket -- and corporate interests is only weird if you understand libertarianism to be pro-market, rather than sort of dumbly anti-state. As Matt neatly demonstrates, though it has proven convenient for libertarians to pretend their ideology is synonymous with efficient markets, it's not something they take particularly seriously. Rather, it's useful insofar as it provides some vaguely plausible-sounding answer to what would happen if you removed the state, but is tossed out the window whenever government regulation would improve the functioning of the market. As example, Matt expresses some confusion that libertarians aren't more supportive of revenue-neutral carbon pricing plans, which work to correct a clear market failure, and instead appear to prefer letting corporations dump unlimited amounts of pollution into the atmosphere and groundwater. That is confusing if you imagine libertarians to be guided by an empirical analysis that favors markets, but not if you assume them operating from a personal bias that's mainly reflexively anti-state. This also gets at the weird nexus between libertarianism and corporate interests. Anti-state is not the same as pro-corporation, and insofar as a lot of liberals understand libertarians to be simple corporate stooges, they're not quite right. In certain places -- notably tech and patent issues, which is one of those spots where government policy and corporate interests converge -- there's nearly unanimous opposition to the position that's most closely associated with corporate profits. And so Cato doesn't get a lot of contributions from the recording industry. But there are plenty of spaces where corporations or other wealthy economic actors see profit in avoiding or repealing certain regulations and laws -- energy is notable here, as is the estate tax -- and so libertarians find themselves rather well-funded. And then there are spaces where corporations want to profit from a service the government currently controls -- like Social Security -- and libertarians are quite happy to create an ideological argument for corporate self-interest. Crucially, it's not that libertarians are always and everywhere in favor of corporate profits, but that they often are, and corporations find that useful, and so you have frequent marriages of convenience that also end up ensuring that the priorities of professional libertarians priorities are those that most effectively support corporate profits, as those are the projects that get funded.
