In the battle of ideas, Austro-Libertarianism – either in spite or because of its logical consistency – is lumbered with several burdens that are not always shared with opposing philosophies. Some of these – such as the fact that libertarianism is not a complete moral philosophy and can look, at best, cold and emotionless, or, at worst, a recipe for rampant selfishness and egotism – we have examined elsewhere. Let us explore a few more of them and suggest reasons for how they can be overcome, or at least mitigated as much as possible.
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Why Governments Lie
Recently, I posted a short article explaining that the essence of the so-called “fake news” phenomenon lies not so much in the relaying of outright falsehoods, but in the selection, ordering and presentation of information in such a way as to lend a wrong impression. In passing, we noted also that the majority of “disinformation” is fostered not by private individuals posting on their Twitter or Facebook accounts, but by the government itself. In this present article, we will attempt to get to the bottom of why it is that the state is committed to disseminating so many officially believed falsehoods. As we shall see, the basic reasons are, at bottom, very simple, and are only tangentially related to the fact that governments are staffed by shameless amoralists.
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Getting to the Heart of “Misinformation”
The war on so-called “misinformation” has been ramped up lately with the (mercifully short-lived) introduction of what has been dubbed the Biden Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”. Across the pond, the UK’s Online Safety Bill – which would require social media firms to police “legal but harmful content” – recently received its second reading in the House of Commons, while the EU’s Digital Service’s Act is also threatening to break out of its chrysalis. The big irony, of course, is that the state itself is the biggest purveyor of falsehoods. The only reason it needs to curb the free dissemination of ideas is not to crush lies but to crush inconvenient truths.
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