What's the matter with libertarians? Thomas Frank blames the freedom movement for Jack Abramoff and George W. Bush.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule - Book review

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, by Thomas Frank, New York: Metropolitan Books, 353 pages, $25

ONE OF THE screwier sentiments circulating in libertarian circles holds that liberals should love George W. Bush. After all, he spends lots of money! It's an analysis for people who'd rather joust lazily with strawmen than engage their opponents' ideas. Real-life liberals don't want the government to spend money willy-nilly; they want it to spend money on specific things. And the items they have in mind are not, by and large, the items chosen by Bush.

In The Wrecking Crew, a brief and breezy polemic by one of the left's rising stars, Thomas Frank offers a similar argument about libertarianism. Under Bush, Frank points out, federal spending has exploded and corruption has oozed from official Washington. Obviously, we're watching the free market in action, because businesses benefit! Really.

Frank, formerly the editor of the radical journal The Baffler and currently the token lefty on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, doesn't just fail to distinguish between crony capitalism and free markets. He actively refuses to recognize the difference. "Laissez-faire," he admits, "has never described political reality all that well, since conservative governments have intervened in the economy with some regularity" Yet that doesn't prevent him from declaring a little later that "what makes a place a free-market paradise is not the absence of government; it is the capture of government by business interests" If you relied on Frank for your information, you would never dream that the idea of laissez faire initially emerged not as a defense against left-wing regulators, who were scarce in the 18th century, but as a critique of subsidies, government-imposed monopolies, and what Adam Smith called the "mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system." In other words, the "free-market paradise" was supposed to be an alternative to "the capture of government by business interests."

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Frank knows that libertarians believe the state is the engine by which some segments of society loot the others. "Governments are instituted among men in order to help one group in society exploit another" he writes, summarizing Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State. They "are then captured by some other class, which sets about exploiting some other group, and so on" For the free market set, says Frank, "there is no conceivable instance in which the state might be reformed or function morally: only oppression succeeding oppression all the way to the far horizon."

Frank won't acknowledge the implicit alternative: a society with much less government, where competition replaces privilege and cooperation replaces coercion. Instead he treats the Nockian perspective as a piece of psychological projection, less a description of state power as it is ordinarily exerted than a forecast of the Bush era. Free marketeers believe the state is essentially a tool for looting the treasury; therefore, Frank concludes, when free marketeers are in power, they loot.

In the waning months of an administration marked by enormous interventions on behalf of business interests, there has been an understandable surge of interest in both libertarianism, the ideal of a government that doesn't intervene on behalf of any particular player, and social democracy, the ideal of a government that manages to help the masses without being captured by corporations. The best way to understand The Wrecking Crew is as propaganda for one of those alternatives against the other.

To that end, the book does everything it can to conflate libertarians not just with the Bush regime but with conservatives in general, regarding the two groups' on-again, off-again alliance since the 1930s as a more permanent and deep-seated connection. "The conservative coalition has changed over the years," Frank...