A No Kings Related Note

The Libertarian Noose.

Daley Plaza Chicago

Most will know that today 18 October 2025 marked the second No Kings national protest within and globally against the Outlaw US Empire’s president Donald Trump who is backed by the Empire’s major Libertarian institutions like the Heritage Foundation along with Exceptionalist Zionists and Christians. Our village turned out an excellent crowd with some mimicking the costumed protesters of Portland that have been staging a continual dance party protest around Portland’s Federal Building where only the ICE people riot. There are many image collections of small towns like mine, to mid-sized cites on to the big metropolises. I suggest this page for an excellent sample. As you’ll see, some didn’t march but packed the sidewalks alongside busy streets in many places—thousands. I haven’t seen anything similar since the Anti-Iraq War protests of 2002-3. However, there’s a larger point needing to be articulated that was discussed about two weeks ago, that some readers might recall.

Liberty and the resulting ism is a very old American value and has two primary icons that are often featured together: Lady Liberty and the Liberty Cap.

$5 gold coin from 1796 with Lady Liberty wearing a Liberty Cap/

5 cent Half Dime from 1834 Liberty stamped onto cap worn by Lady Liberty.

1907 $10 gold coin still using similar iconography as WW1 approached.

1925 Double Eagle $20 gold piece. Liberty remains but Lady Liberty and the iconography—adopted in 1907—have greatly changed and says a lot of how Americans viewed themselves and their nation.

The word Liberty remains on most US coins, but Lady Liberty and the Liberty Cap have disappeared, not that anyone nowadays examines the iconography on their coins. The point here is that the ideal of Liberty is seen as a continual value within the USA by the vast majority and is entrenched in the National Myth. Likewise, the Libertarian philosophical path was preached and followed by those who could, and that credo had much to do with igniting the Civil War. In a way, we saw Libertarians in the streets protesting the Libertarians within the Federal Government. And it’s that dynamic that Drs. Wolff and Hudson looked into and discussed at the end of their 2 October chat with Nima, the transcript to which was just posted to Dr. Hudson’s website and entitled “Hegemony’s Last Stand.” Of course, I suggest taking in the entire chat to get all the context, although I’ve distilled what follows enough to illustrate this glaring contradiction within America that digs down to the problem’s tap root:

⁣RICHARD WOLFF: Well, again, I think the contradiction is becoming very painful for libertarians — not that I care. In other words, what you’re watching is a consolidation of government power used in civil society on a scale that must make a good number of them quit. I mean, are you kidding? You champion Mr. Trump, and he is consolidating a destructive government power, the likes of which you imagined, as some of them are saying, only existed in your caricature of socialism.

I mean, let’s be really clear. In the recent speech Mr. Trump gave to the UN, I believe it was there, or if not to some other audience, he equated three things as being the three goals he has: to defeat those that are anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian. Those are the enemies within, which he then asked the military to go deal with. Okay. For a libertarian, that’s not an appropriate thing for a government to be doing — any of those things — because that requires — if you mean it — it requires things like sending troops into cities, not typically a big item on libertarian agendas. I never saw it there. You’d have to attribute it to them as either unconscious, or that they are all, you know, congenital liars.

So, it turns out that for Mr. Trump to try to do what we’re talking about here, he has to violate the libertarian commitments. Okay, that is called an internal contradiction to what he’s trying to do. Look: You can use the government that way, but you’re going to lose a lot of libertarians. Now, that may not matter, but there are other people you’re going to lose. To attack the cities that they keep mentioning is to attack Democrats, and that wasn’t the libertarian idea either — that the way you do the Republican versus Democrat is you send troops, if you have the presidency, into the cities controlled by the other party — a precedent which, in the event of a Democratic president, is going to come home to roost in very painful ways in this society….

Look: He [Trump] could try [to say] in the first few months. It’s all inherited. Now? That’s over. The horrible employment number? That’s Mr. Trump. Your great program to bring jobs back is an enormous failure. Of course, he’ll blame everything he can think of on somebody else. But we have the easy game. It’s his fault. Mamdani is his fault. The growing socialist presence in many cities across the country? That’s his fault. The extreme right wing? That’s his fault. He’s enabling all of that. He is producing civil conflict, which may explode, and if it does, I am very confident that an enormous number of voters in the United States — if it comes to that in the next six months — will blame him. And if he doesn’t understand that? Oh boy, is he going to be in trouble!

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, my definition, my understanding, of libertarianism is the diametric opposite of yours.

Libertarianism was created as a centralized police state, basically, a centralized power. It began with the Austrian School of individualism, as an attack on classical economics and essentially on socialism. And the fights are going on — armed fights — in Vienna. Libertarianism wants to get rid of government. It has created a narrative of economic history, of how all of economic civilization could have existed without any role for government and regulatory agencies, without any ability of the government to interfere with private enterprise.

And if you dismantle the power of government, who is going to be doing the planning and resource allocation of the economy? Wall Street. Libertarianism has always been a defense of Wall Street, not the government. Control by wealth and the rich, not government. Absolute blockage of any attempts by government to interfere with the market, by taxing the rich more, interfering by providing free medical care and education and not leaving this to the free market to make people go into a lifetime of debt to get an education or medical care.

Libertarianism is, in a word, fascism. From the very outset, that was what it is, and that requires a police state to enforce. Libertarianism is the doctrine of the police state to free the market from the socialists. And I’m glad you mentioned Mamdani in New York. Yesterday again (maybe the day before), Trump says, now that there’s a government shutdown that occurred yesterday to begin with, he said: We’re going to begin firing government employees, and I’m going to concentrate on states that have voted Democratic. We’re going to fire Democratic state employees in New York, Massachusetts, California, and Illinois. He’s singled out where he’s going to dismantle government….

⁣RICHARD WOLFF: I want to — if I could, if there’s time, Nima — say a few words about libertarianism. Think of it this way, with the irony: The libertarians have been so frustrated for most of the last century, particularly with the rise of Keynesian economics, when they had to confront a social movement — largely successful — that said that if you leave capitalism to the private enterprise, you get the Great Depression. And so you need government intervention. The government needs to have a fiscal policy. The government needs to have a monetary policy. It has to make up for the demand that is insufficient in the private economy by spending deficits. If it needs to, it has to manipulate the monetary system — quantity of money, interest rates, and so on — in order to manage a capitalism, which, if you don’t manage it, will destroy itself.

The great fear of the Great Depression is that the working class rises up, and says: We’ve had it with this system. It’s too unstable. The crises are increasing. Screw it! Keynes saves the system, but at the price of the government having a major role. The libertarians are horrified. They represent that part of capitalism that hated the government, remembering the absolute monarchies of feudalism, out of which capitalism came, and against which it coined the phrase, ‘leave us alone,’ i.e., Laissez-faire: let us do on our own.

So, they have this deep commitment to not having a government. How ironic, how painful, that they have to bring the government in to save their system! So they then indulge a fantasy. That’s what libertarianism means to me: the fantasy that they ever could, or ever would, be able to function without the government. And so they become — in the bad sense of the term — religious: They indulge a fantasy utopianism about no government. And then, here, now they’re confronted, again, with the same frustration because the only way to move towards no government is to have a massive government power move against all of the accumulated institutions. And then, of course, the poor libertarian will notice that that power of the government grows, and grows, and grows. They’re having the same spectacle unleashed by Mr. Trump that they used to hate in Franklin Roosevelt.

There is no escape, you poor, poor, misled folks. The government is part of a society, unless, of course, you take the Marxist approach and see the government as the expression of a class-divided society. If you think like that, then you might have the idea: If we can develop an economy without opposing classes, we remove the need for a government as a mediator. Aha! Oh, but for people who want to keep away from Marxism, don’t think for one minute about what I just said: Stay pure, stay clean, avoid that Marxist tradition, and just go to church on Sunday.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, of course, you’re right that libertarianism, and much Christianity, is a fantasy. I prefer to think of it as a cover story. It’s always been a cover story saying: We’re ethical, we’re for freedom, we’re for prosperity. But what are they really for?

The church, once it was romanized in the Roman Empire, and taken out of the hands of the early Christians, it was always religion was a tool for — the opium of the people, you could say. It’s a fantasy; it’s opium of the people. It’s to claim to be progressive and caring about people and to protect the poor. It hates the poor! Rather, it loves the rich. It doesn’t love the poor. It loves the rich, and that includes, loving them includes, sharing their antagonism, antipathy towards the poor, and their class hatred of labor, in fact.

So, that’s really the problem. Christianity and libertarianism go together. I think it’s hypocritical. It’s a fantasy by most of the followers. It’s designed to be a fantasy by a small core at the top — the bishops (in Christianity), the cardinals, the leadership. And the followers: the sheep at the bottom. The shepherd and the sheep.

That’s not the socialist idea of the kind of reform that we’re talking about. So, I’m more politically critical and suspicious of just how are we going to enlighten these would-be Christians, these would-be libertarians? How do we say: If you want your ideals — they’re just what you’ve been talking about, Richard.

⁣RICHARD WOLFF: Let me just end by reminding everyone of [Karl] Marx’s teacher [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel. Marx writes, yes, religion is the opiate of the masses. But he also writes, right there, it’s also a haven in a heartless world. He understood why people embrace religion, what it is they’re searching for, and the need — for those of us who are critics — never to forget the real function it serves, the real needs it responds to. Even if we don’t like how that response works, we better understand what it is the response to, so that we understand our task as, partly, to create the alternative response — which is in a sense, if you allow me, what these conversations every week are about. [My Emphasis]

Yes, I cut a few paragraphs that were digressions. The grand contradiction is well laid out in ways the Heritage Foundation and ilk clearly never considered and seem to be blind to. The Grand Idea which the National Myth declares is Liberty for all was the USA’s Grand Purpose, which is why it’s blessed with God’s Grace and thus the rightness of its Manifest Destiny. Look at the Double Eagle’s iconography again—Lady Liberty as the Guiding Light of Freedom forging the way with her torch and outstretched olive branches offering peace. Wilson’s New Freedom foreign policy was going to be driven by Morality as defined by America, an ideal soon torn to shreds, not by WW1 but by American intervention. Dr. Wolff’s depiction of the American elite Libertarianism historically is quite correct, which of course is bound up with other isms like the Protestant Work Ethic and the denial of the real truth regarding Liberty within the USA that I’ll call ethnocentrism, which clearly is very much alive. And we also have the federal government buying controlling positions in a variety of corporations, something no genuine Libertarian would endorse.

Hudson’s unfinished question, “How do we say: If you want your ideals…,” was answered by today’s protests—people want Liberty, Peace, and an economy that works along with a working—functional—government. The National Liberty Myth is a narrative too powerful to overcome since it’s at the core of American indoctrination or socialization or enculturation—choose your definition. I’ll note the Lady Liberty gracing New York Harbor didn’t appear until 1886—103 years after the Treaty of Paris that gave America Liberty from England. So, craft a Liberty Cap to displace MAGA caps. Internationally, people want Liberty from American Imperialism and its continual interventions into the lives and governments of those is other nations. And here in America, most would gladly grant the wishes of the Global Majority. It appears that Libertarianism must be smothered for genuine Liberty to prevail.

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