The Libertarian History paradox

I have just recently been able to formulate something that I have known at an instinctual level for a long time: that libertarian ideology faces a serious paradox when confronted with historical fact, and that so far libertarians have only managed to find two solutions - both of them quite absurd - to this paradox.

Libertarians start from the premise that free market capitalism is good for the vast majority of the population. But then they encounter a problem when faced with the reality of the fact that the vast majority of the population of every country at almost any given time in history has opposed their brand of extreme free market capitalism.

How do you reconcile your belief that free markets are good for the people with the reality that the people do not want free markets? Clearly, the people must be either stupid or deceived.

Those libertarians who conclude that people are too stupid to know what's good for them take an elitist approach to politics and often end up as bitter reactionary opponents of democracy. Hans-Herman Hoppe, for example - the leader of the Mises Institute - is an extremist libertarian and an advocate of absolute monarchy. This kind of ideological stance can only be described as bizzare; it takes a lot of doublethink to believe at the same time that people are perfect rational actors in the market but somehow too stupid to see their own interests in the voting booth.

The second and more common libertarian solution to the apparent paradox described above is to postulate the existence of some kind of vast statist conspiracy that has somehow managed to brainwash the majority of the population. This stance does not require any orwellian doublethink, but it does require a high dose of paranoia and historical revisionism. It requires you to believe that the 19th century was a golden age when everyone was happy and life was only getting better, until some dark group of evil statists magically persuaded the people that they were unhappy (when in fact everyone was happy and singing kum ba yah). It requires you to believe that all the depictions we have of the extreme misery, poverty and filth that engulfed the life of ordinary people in the 19th century are statist propaganda.

I have not yet met a single libertarian who did not fall into either one of these two categories: elitist doublethinker or conspiracy theorist. Libertarian ideology is too easily refuted by simple historical fact unless you either believe that the people are stupid or that recorded history is a lie.