Why libertarianism is a load of crap.

Post Reply New Topic

But why would the government really be a check on moneyed interests though? They're the ones in the government. (Note, that's an oversimplification, however, these interests will have more interest in the laws and ability to be interested in the process of crafting them than "the people")

That being said, you're using "always" as a way of reframing the debate rhetorically. The problem is that a person who is generally negative towards government, and generally regards non-governmental agencies in a more positive light is going to also likely be in the ideological spectrum that could be labeled "libertarian", so I don't see the need for that framing.

It depends on the context. Some products do use "corporate social responsibility" as part of their strategy. Sometimes the external groups do not have a relevant interest. Some of these issues can just be legal rights-oriented. Even further, if there are competing interest groups, then why can't they bargain? One of the solutions to externally imposed costs is illustrated through Coase's theorem, in which parties do bargain.

I still believe that there do exist some truly prinipled politicians who genuinely believe in making society more fair and just. I mean, look at the founding fathers. Clearly, they were of the "elite" class, but they still managed to come up with some ideas that were not 100% self-serving. I realize it's not "cool" to believe that a politician could possibly have good intent in this cynical age. I guess I've just grown so cynical that I'm cynical of cynicism, especially the brain-dead conspiracy-minded cynicism of the post-Bush era.

I don't get what you're saying.

These days libertarians seem to be deeply opposed to any kind of reform that entails expansion of government power. Things like government controlled health insurance aren't controversial at all, not even among the more conservative parties, in other strongly capitalist countries. Yet the introduction of a government health insurance program is extremely controversial in the US.

It doesn't seem like libertarians and conservatives in the US have just a "general tendency" to be against government expansion. In order to have merely a "general tendency" to oppose government expansion there would have to be some instances where these groups did not oppose the expansion of government power. Instead, government expansion is always opposed, on rigid ideological grounds. The opposition position is also usually pushed using a lot of unfounded paranoia.

There are many very obvious reasons why the parties often can't bargain on a level playing field. In these cases, only a legal entity can possibly level the playing field. The laws must ultimatelly be backed with force which pretty much rules out non-government entities. If there is no forceful intervention the "little guy" will always lose.

Would it matter whether they did or did not? Even if we assume they did believe in this, we still cannot assume that they don't need support from special interests, and we cannot assume that they even have a foggy clue as to what will actually be helpful.

As for the founding fathers, well, assuming you mean the US, then YES PLEASE LOOK AT THEM! Look at Thomas Jefferson's idiotic embargo, which deeply hurt the US economy. Look at John Adams and his alien and sedition act. Regardless of whether these men meant well, they did things that were ATROCIOUS. There is no reason to think that some modern politician will be so much grander than these founding fathers, and yet they still sucked.

I am really not going to get into the whole matter of the "lump sum libertarian". However, I really don't see why you are pointing to "government controlled health insurance" as the big sign of intellectual invalidity.

1) Government controlled health insurance seems to mostly be a redistributionary policy, as otherwise why not just keep it private? This really could be opposed easily on "ideological" grounds.

2) The big reason I hear about, adverse selection, really doesn't seem credible to me. While this sounds strange, I would really bet that an actuary would, in general, tend to know more about my health risks based upon my background than I would. Particularly given that a large source of risk is just going to be environmental factors.

3) I generally do not consider the government to have a great incentive structure for these matters, but rather I do think that the problems of mismanagement that still plague private companies will still end up hounding any government agency, and will be more difficult to dislodge.(Well, except in the case of certain automotive and finance companies) The hope of private industry is that it gets rid of poor performers

4) A big factor will still be whether we are going to pay for this in a rational manner. Deficit financing, whether it is tax cuts or spending increases are common, but they are also self-destructive.

What do you mean by "level the playing field"? All that I really can think of is either alterations of the bargaining structure, or attempting to create a solution that is "as-if" there was equal bargaining power.

Even further though, there is always the policy question of whether the effort actually makes things better overall/whether it will really work as intended.

Our cover story this month describes the historic and stunningly rapid restoration of the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right that must be respected throughout the United States. As you luxuriate in that momentous victory of individuals over their governments, allow me to direct your attention to a tale that is microscopic by comparison: On page 43, in the midst of a long and remarkable exchange between reason’s finest and the Cleveland City Council, two different city councilors attempt to explain to TV funnyman and Reason Foundation trustee Drew Carey why the owner of a local car wash faced a four-month approval process to install a commercial sign on his own property.

Council President Martin J. Sweeney’s explanation was, alas, good enough for government work: “If you apply for a sign that’s within our regulation, it would take somewhere between three and five days. If it’s outside the regulations, it needs to be [no bigger than] four foot by eight foot, no more than two or three colors. If you want to go 10 by 10, and put it up a little bit higher, and have 10 colors on it, you have to get approval to go outside the variance,” Sweeney said. “The three to five days is if you stay within the regulations, if you agree with them. If you want to go outside, it’s six weeks to put it on the calendar and have it heard. And then all the other steps…because there has to be some type of structure.”

There has to be some type of structure. From this one default setting springs all manner of tyrannies, from the trivial to the profound.

Carey had the best comeback to this Office Space-meets-Kafka gibberish: “You should be able to put up whatever sign you want, man.” But it’s elected officials like Sweeney, from Bakersfield to Bangor, from the statehouses to Capitol Hill, who too often have the last laugh. Every day brings fresh reminders that we are not technically free to go about our business.

In August, Multnomah County health inspectors in Portland, Oregon, shut down a lemonade stand at an art fair because its 7-year-old proprietor failed to obtain the necessary food distribution license. Days earlier, a Quincy, Illinois, man was arrested via a sting operation (for a second time) for the crime of offering free rides home to inebriated bar patrons; the service conflicted with some new taxi cartel–influenced language in the relevant city ordinance. And all summer long, councilmen in recession-ravaged Los Angeles, who earn higher salaries than any municipal lawmakers in the country, threatened to crack down on one of the few interesting and growing business models left in L.A.—food trucks—despite the fact that the only people complaining about them are nonmobile restaurant owners who don’t like the competition.

On the federal level things get even worse. In July the Department of Labor unveiled new child labor regulations that make it a crime for 17-year-olds to clear brush (a classic summer job in timber-heavy states such as Oregon) or for 15-year-olds to wave signs on the roadside, which the last time I looked was about the only job teenagers could still get in Southern California. ObamaCare requires every single vending machine and restaurant chain with 20 or more outlets in the country to list calorie counts for its products, under threat of federal sanction.

The financial regulation bill enacted in July, like the health care law that preceded it, asserted vast new governmental powers over an industry’s operations while delegating to future rule makers the task of telling the industry exactly what is and is not now legal. As Associate Editor Peter Suderman wrote when the law was being passed, “For regulators in Washington, this is a He-Man moment: They get to lift thousands of pages of legislation above their heads and declare, ‘I have the power!’ The trouble seems to be figuring out what to do with that power once they have it.”

There are any number of unhappy consequences from this relentless public push into private activity, not least of which is, as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains on page 11 (“Bono vs. Buttman”), the inevitably arbitrary enforcement of vaguely written laws. People who don’t know if their day-to-day behavior will trigger criminal prosecution are not truly free. As the great civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate observed in a 2009 book of the same name, Americans on average now commit “three felonies a day.” That means our basic liberty exists at the discretion of law enforcement. If cops or motivated government attorneys decide they don’t like you, life can soon become hell.

What’s perhaps more frightening than the existence of such an all-powerful enforcement apparatus is the argumentation supporting it even in the face of public outrage and ridicule. Car wash signs need four months of approval because there has to be some type of structure. Lemonade stands need to be forcibly shut down because, in the words of Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, “The county has the responsibility to fairly enforce the rules on permits.” U.S. News & World Report columnist Mary Kate Cary, while pointing out that ObamaCare is “not fiscally responsible” and “creates a nearly trillion-dollar new entitlement program that doesn’t pay for itself,” nonetheless gushes that the new calorie count requirement “may change American diets.” Once you take it as a given that the government has an important say in what you do with your property or put in your body, a whole universe of appalling actions and apologia becomes possible.

It’s time to change the default setting. Every victory of a citizen over the government in the never-ending struggle to do as we please is worthy of a 21-gun salute, whether on the individual level, as in pornographer John Stagliano’s successful fight against federal obscenity charges, or on a group level, in the case of those who want to own handguns. The battles are usually uphill, as with the 21 states suing the federal government over ObamaCare’s abuse of the Commerce Clause (see “Rogue States,” page 44), but the liberation is exhilarating. We can all learn from the examples of those who fought back and won, such as the 7-year-old lemonade entrepreneur Julie Murphy, who was helped and encouraged at the art fair by a group of Portland anarchists and eventually won an official apology from Multnomah County.

But sometimes it feels like we’re losing a game of whack-a-mole. For every outrage reversed through bad publicity or expensive lawyering, there are untold dozens of quiet capitulations to a rampaging state. Think of all the government restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your own house, to say nothing of the taxes the government collects on it. At some point the burden of proof should shift to the government, which should have to persuasively explain why an industry needs to be managed from Washington or why an individual needs a license to act like a human being.

The U.S. is in an economic, fiscal, and public policy crisis with no end in sight. Indeed, it looks almost certain to get far worse. We can and will talk about what rights need to be reasserted, what programs need to be cut, what sectors of this American life need to be left the hell alone. But until we make a dent in the widespread notion that there always has to be some type of government structure or some taxpayer-financed watchdog to police every imaginable peaceable transaction, any contemplated fix to the mess we’re in will be temporary at best.

Yes, you can point out potential flaws and pick apart anything I say on and on to the point of utter absurdity. The point is, I'm not satisfied with the way things work when all is left to the whims of the "free market". The libertarian stance seems to be "well, that's the best we're ever going to get, no point in trying to have a fairer system with more protections because government is corrupt/incompetent etc...", yet at the same time it's usually the wealthiest people who are most fervently promoting the philosophy. The people with the least to lose and the most to gain from such a system. Doih!

And a lot of libertarians act as though government regulation is some unnatural alien force that goes against human nature. It's not. Government regulation is natural and will spontaneously arise in any society. It's just a matter of how far people are willing to let things slide before a large enough group decides "hey, this isn't fair" and rises up. When there is no government regulation the angry mob becomes the regulator. Of course things have to get really bad before people are willing to resort to violence as a means to bring change. So government regulation and it's attendant bureaucracy is something that will naturally arise in order to provide a path of least-resistance and restore order. This is the alternative to living under the pressure-cooker cycle of anarchy and violence.

I wasn't saying the position is intellectually invalid. I'm saying it's extremist. It's putting rigid adherence to an ideology above considerations of morality and compassion.

Yes. That's obvious. I get the feeling we're talking past each other.

??? Does not compute.

That depends on your definition of poor performance. If poor performance is profitable it will not be gotten rid of. Look at Microsoft.

Whether deficit spending occurs is largely a matter of how urgent the problem at hand seems. When it comes to war people will feel that there is no choice but to deficit spend. Yet improving social services is never seen as urgent. I wonder why? Could it be that the politicians aren't the ones suffering?

I mean devising laws that rectify an unfair situation involving moneyed interests throwing their weight around and getting away with destructive practices. I don't see what's so complicated about what I'm saying.

And doing nothing is only acceptable to those who haven't had the experience of being screwed over and having no recourse.

I would generally think promoters of libertarianism to be in the middle class more than anything else.

I think moving from there, all we have is framing issues. You know that the framing of libertarianism to libertarians isn't "well, that's the best we're ever going to get...", but rather libertarians tend to be individualists who dislike collective action seeing it as harmful and meddling, while the individual action does show potential.

Ok, but the libertarian claim is that government regulation is some force that often distorts the functioning of markets and through this causes problems.

Talk about "angry mobs" really doesn't seem relevant.

Umm.... "extremist" is relative to a position considered to be in the "middle".

Umm.... ok, to start from the beginning, one of the arguments for government provided insurance is that buyers know more than sellers, so what happens is that buyers exploit their greater knowledge to make insuring unprofitable. This will make insurance unprofitable at those levels, causing insurance rates to increase, which will cause further abuse.

The issue is that I doubt that people know their health that well compared to health actuaries with detailed medical histories. This means that this major efficiency case seems questionable tome.

Microsoft's products are very commonly used. This is pretty good performance. I'd say that a big problem is that competitors are poorly marketed, in that very few people know about them and their advantages.

Yes, libertarians tend to view themselves as 'individualists'. Yet liberals and centrists don't view themselves as 'collectivists'. They view themselves as pragmatists. Some regulations are good, others cause more harm than good. It's a balancing act between individual liberties and principles of fairness/social-justice. Which side I'm on depends on the issue at hand and the particular collective solution being proposed. I'm not automatically going to err on one side vs. the other just based on what ideology I happen to subscribe to. I want to look at the actual issues, their consequences, and the consequences of collective action vs the consequences of inaction.

Sometimes yes, other times no. They never prove that this is always the case.

Taken in context it is totally relevant. At a higher level of abstraction, "government" and "angry mob" are subcategories of "collective agents which act through force rather than through bargaining". Get rid of government and "angry mob" occurs in it's place. Actually, in all likelihood there will be more than one angry mob and they will be fighting each other. Bargaining only goes so far in resolving conflicts or restoring social-justice. Sometimes force (or the threat of force) is needed.

I consider extremism to be a rigid adherence to an ideology. "Utopian" may be the better word though. Look at the very first post in this thread. The article the OP attacks looks very "Utopian" to me.

I haven't really promoted that view. I'm not sure I even understand it.

The issue isn't that. It's that Microsoft has already got it's share of the market nailed down because a lot of people don't want to invest the energy of learning a different operating system. People stick with an inferior product if that's what they're used to. I'm one of them. There's also all the complications with software compatibility, some of it due to unfair anti-competitive tactics by Microsoft. As of now Macintosh has had superior marketing and have thus made a large dent in the operating system market share.

No, by "libertarian", you likely mean Rothbardian. The issue is that anarcho-capitalism doesn't entail a particular view of property as it is an ideology(like liberalism, socialism, conservatism, etc), not just a single political theory (although, as a note, anarcho-capitalism is a fringe ideology), and David Friedman, one of the fathers of the ideology, more often approaches the issue of property from the notion of economics rather than moral theory.

I'm not sure, it seems that a lot of right-libertarians I've debated over the years tend to view property rights in an absolutist and overly axiomized way. Part of the reason being is that many right-libertarians (falsely) fancy themselves as modern day Founding Father proteges and subscribte to the highly outdated notion of "natural rights". Few tend to be aware that reality isn't so neatly divided and that there's a shoot-load of cases that muddle the notion.

I'm not surprised. It is just that Rothbard is the anarcho-capitalist who is known for a natural rights view of property, and Marshall also stated "anarcho-capitalist". Really, there are a lot of possible influences, such as Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and his followers, and well that Enlightenment heritage.

It still isn't a necessary trait though.

As it stands, my defense is that few people are really aware that reality isn't neatly divided. I mean, Master_Pedant, the root flaw is really human essentialism, and most human beings are essentialists and it is likely a natural propensity.

The problem is that a lot of right-libertarians seem a lot worse then most other ideologues when it comes to tempering their essentialism with reality and nuances from history.

My opinion on fiscal conservatism summarized.

"Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business."
-Unabomber

http://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/libertarianism-is-for-rich-white-people/

Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only.
July 14, 2009 — Restructure!

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that is fiscally conservative, but socially liberal—except when it concerns social issues that involve money or property. Stereotypically, libertarianism is self-consistent only in a toy universe abstracted away from the messiness and social inequalities of the real world.

Several years ago, a libertarian introduced to me a flash video that was intended to promote libertarianism. I was amazed to find that the unrealistic abstraction and idealism that is stereotypical of libertarianism was manifested even in the video’s visuals. An unintentional visual self-parody, the video—The Philosophy of Liberty—illustrates libertarianism with abstract stick figures representing people devoid of race, gender, and historical context.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I&[/youtube]

One of the recurrent problems in this video is the confusion between the ideal and the actual. Specifically, the video confuses normative statements with descriptive statements. A normative statement is a statement about how things should be, while a descriptive statement is a statement about how things are. For example, many people, usually white, may claim “Race doesn’t matter”, when race actually matters in the real world. The truth is that race shouldn’t matter for things like employment and housing, not that it doesn’t. Doctors should be motivated by pure altruism and not money, some may argue, but people’s normative statements have no effect on descriptive facts about reality.

The Philosophy of Liberty video makes normative claims about the nature of property, but presents them as descriptive claims. The intent is to convince the viewer that people have a natural right to their property, and to reduce or eliminate taxation and other types of wealth redistribution by the government. Here is an example of a normative claim about property presented as a descriptive claim through the use of “is” instead of “should be”:



This is absolutely false as a descriptive statement. In the real world, people acquired property through genocide, invasion, murder, assault, and theft. The United States invaded, colonized, and committed genocide against the indigenous people of North America. It enslaved people from Africa to quickly build up its nation with little overhead. Most of the valuable “property” recognized in American law belongs to white Americans, but it was acquired by violating the rights of Native Americans and African Americans.

At the same time, of course, the use of force is contrary to libertarian ideals:



If The Philosophy of Liberty is self-consistent, then property that was acquired from stealing land from Native Americans and from enslaving African Americans is illegitimate. However, most (white) libertarians are against paying reparations to African Americans and are against returning the land to Native Americans.

Clearly, American libertarians, who are mostly white, use libertarianism to rationalize their class privilege and white privilege. Libertarianism is an inconsistent philosophy in the context of the real world, and the only consistency among most libertarians is that they are against being taxed. For most American libertarians, if the government taxes rich white Americans, it is theft, but if rich white Americans stole African American labor, time, energy, and talent, it happened a long time ago and accounts should be cleared.

Obviously, the people who currently have the most wealth, class privilege, and white privilege want to support a system that minimizes or eliminates wealth redistribution. If these same people were reduced to poverty through force—such as from a Mexican reconquista or Chinese invasion—they too would demand reparations. From the perspective of those who do not benefit from libertarian politics or are less selfish, libertarian propaganda like this video is a thinly-veiled attempt to help rich people stay rich, based on internally inconsistent rationalizations. When people happen to be on top of the wheel of fate, they search for philosophies that confirm the rightfulness of their place, holding on to them desperately at the expense of self-consistency.