Categorically speaking, there are two explanations for political differences between people. Mistake Theory posits that the reason libertarians and, say, Marxist-Leninists, don’t agree with each other is that we have firmly-held, genuine beliefs about how to solve problems in the world. Politics is simply “the science of society,” and good politics tends towards the greatest good. Most people simply differ on how best to achieve the greatest good.
Conflict theory, on the other hand, maintains that politics is the result of concentrated human effort to gain at the expense of others. Communists certainly believe in a conflict of economic classes throughout history. Many right-wingers believe in a conflict between civilizational or racial groups. If you asked many modern self-identified libertarians or “classical liberals,” they would instinctively reject the idea of conflict theory; it calls back to a more brutish, less cooperative way of seeing and interacting with the world. Economics is not a zero-sum game, so why not apply the same thinking to politics?
However, there’s a long liberal tradition of class conflict. Indeed it can be said that modern class theory originated not with Marx, but with the classical liberals of 18th century Europe. Our class theory is that of the plundering class and the plundered class. The violent apparatus of the state, its executive directors, and parasitic clients and vassals make up the plundering class, stealing from and lording over the mass of men that work for a living. Frederic Bastiat used the term “legal plunder” to refer to this in activity, similar to exploitation’s place in Marx’s theory. …
Murray Rothbard also understood the importance of elites in the loss of liberalism to statism, not only in our own period—in his great posthumous work, The Progressive Era—but at the very founding of our country—in volume 5 of Conceived in Liberty—documenting the way a small, directed core of nationalists contrived to replace the Articles of Confederation with the centralizing, anti-libertarian Constitution:
The nationalist leaders, in contrast to their wavering opponents, knew exactly what it wanted and strove to obtain the most possible. The initiative was always in the hands of the Federalist Right, while the Anti-federalist Left, weakened in principle, could only offer a series of defensive protests to the reactionary drive. The battles were consequently fought on the terms set by the aggressive nationalist forces.
Pareto’s studies tell us libertarian activists cannot simply wait for the masses—or a nascent elite—to come to our point of view. We must train a dedicated cadre of intellectuals who take our ideas with grave moral seriousness. We need men who “Hate the State,” and we need men who understand that our principal opponents are not fools on social media, but the plundering class that educates them and teaches them that true liberalism was guilty of a litany of atrocities, just as much as it is the men who enforce those rules. Vilfredo Pareto’s work in uncovering the truth about elites—how they gain power, and how they lose it—is essential to any fight for liberty having a chance of success.
Once again it is the political means versus the economic means, getting resources through force or getting them through voluntary exchange. It seems the liberals, by which is meant liberals in the old-time meaning of anti-state, pro-laissez-faire types. Pareto was the liberal’s liberal and probably suffered for his proclivities during the fascist era of Europe. He is one of the people bringing what we now call libertarianism through the dark ages of fascism and communism. Isn’t he the guy that also found a lot of other rules and economic facts?