Freedom From Each Other

If this ideology has already failed before, why is Alberta reaching for it again

A photo of Danielle Smith's tattoo has led to speculation about the inspiration behind it - “Liberty or Freedom”

Bill Fowler, one of my reader’s, wrote to me last week with a line I haven’t stopped turning over: “Libertarianism only suits the one person. It’s never about us.”

Bill’s earned the right to say it. He’s watched this province and this country cycle through decades of the same promise, that if government would just get out of the way, everything would sort itself out. He’s old enough to remember when that promise first arrived dressed as liberation.

I think about my own path constantly. I’m a principal in rural Alberta because of a chain of people and circumstances I didn’t build alone. Mentors who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. A community in the Northwest Territories that trusted a young upstart to work with their youth. Elders on a First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan who taught me what education owes a community, not just a student. Luck, more than I’d like to admit. Perseverance, yes, but perseverance inside a web of people who caught me when I needed catching. Nobody gets to where they are alone. The libertarian story asks us to forget that, or worse, to be embarrassed by it.

In addition to going back further than Bill’s memory, I’ve read enough of the history to see the shape of it clearly. Thatcher and Reagan sold libertarianism as the cure for a bloated, meddling state. Lower taxes, fewer regulations, get government off your back. The language was freedom. The substance was neoliberalism, a redistribution of power away from the collective and toward those who already held capital. Nobody campaigned on trusting government less because government was untrustworthy in principle. They campaigned on limiting it, specifically limiting its ability to restrain markets, tax wealth, and protect the people markets tend to leave behind. Less government wasn’t the goal. Less accountability for the already powerful was.

We’re watching the same script now with sharper edges. In the US, Musk, who built his fortune on federal contracts and government-backed loans, spent a fortune helping dismantle the very agencies built to catch people when markets fail them. That’s not a contradiction if you understand what libertarianism actually protects. It is never against government. It’s against the parts of government that ask anything of the wealthy in return.

We don't have to look south for the clearest example either. Alberta's own premier has said openly that she considers herself a libertarian, and that she returns to Atlas Shrugged every few years as a kind of guiding text. Danielle Smith's record reads like a checklist pulled straight from Ayn Rand. Public sector workers told to accept austerity and pain. Health care and education treated as line items to be trimmed rather than commitments to be honoured. Privatization casting the individual entrepreneur as the hero, the collective and social programming as a drag on his ambition. This isn't a fringe mindset held by a scattering of frustrated readers. It's the operating philosophy of the government running this province.

At the root of all of it is a simple substitution. Capitalism is a system built around the individual, the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the self-made man. Libertarianism is capitalism’s political theology, the belief that this individual owes nothing back to the system that made his success possible. No debt to the roads, the schools, the courts, the workers, the community that absorbed the risk he didn’t have to. Bill is right. It was never about us. It was always about the one, dressed up in language expansive enough that the rest of us mistook it for our own liberation.

I’ve spent my career in communities where this ideology simply doesn’t hold up against lived experience. In the North, I watched what happens when a government retreats from its obligations to remote communities and calls it respect for local autonomy. In Alberta, I hear the same rhetoric now wrapped in provincial grievance, equalization anger, and talk of going it alone. The pitch hasn’t changed in forty years. Keep more of what’s yours. Owe less to people you’ll never meet. What has changed is how thin the cover story has worn.

A shared vision of the future can’t be built on a philosophy that treats the collective as an inconvenience. Bill used the word “us,” and I think that’s the whole argument in one syllable. Every school I’ve led, every community I’ve served, was built by people who understood they were accountable to each other, not just to themselves. That’s not nostalgia. It’s the only model that’s ever actually worked for the people libertarianism leaves behind.

The ideology isn’t rising because it’s been vindicated. Nothing about the last forty years proves it works. It’s rising because we’ve gotten tired of being asked for anything, tired of taxes, tired of other people’s problems, tired of the sense that we owe strangers something. Libertarianism offers an exit from that fatigue. Stop worrying about the collective. Keep what’s yours. Call it principle instead of exhaustion.

That’s the appeal, and it’s also the flaw baked into the idea from the start. A philosophy built to ask nothing of anyone will always fail the people who need something asked. It failed them under Thatcher and Reagan, when the safety net got called dead weight and wages stagnated while wealth at the top compounded. It’s failing the US and Alberta now, as the same programs get gutted again by leaders who never needed them and never will. This isn’t a case of good ideas poorly executed. Every version of this ideology, run faithfully, produces the same result: less for the many, more for the few who were already ahead, and most importantly, freedom from each other. The machine is working exactly as designed.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.