Zdeno:
These are opinions that I haven't been reasoned into, and thus cannot be reasoned out of.

Right, so they are a prejudice of yours.

Any political philosophy worth a damn, starts with an understanding of the human condition. How people behave when times are good, and how they behave when times are bad. Politics is how to manage human nature.

Now a libertarian philosophy would be fine if we lived a particulate existence, where each and every individual was immaculate, rational, consistent and had no impact on the other. The problem is that we are not elementary particles and original sin(the capacity to be wicked) lives in all of us.

Everyone's right is a reciprocal obligation on everyone else. It would be fine if you could screw up your life and it be of no consequence to everyone else, the problem is though, that in the real world, the world that I inhabit, when a man idiocy results in desperate circumstances he resorts to desperate measures. Including taking the liberties of those who are his betters.

Crime and Socialism are the solutions of the stupid to their to many of their own problems. Most men when put to the test fail. If you want to fill up of cigarettes and lard, that's fine by me. But when your wife starts to mourn your premature death, she lobbies the local congressman for me to pay for expensive care health plans to keep the rest of her prole clique alive. If I refuse, then she and her mates, either gang up upon me through the ballot box, or through the mob, compel me to do what they want. In order to compel them to respect my rights, I have to compel them to do what I want. (There goes you prejudice)

Of course the unjust rich capitalise upon the stupidity of the mob, using them to further disenfranchise the just rich, till the end the just are destroyed. Tyranny ensures.

You see the problem of libertarianism is that it leaves no room for stupidity, evil and human nature. It's premise is that while men are good government(composed of those same men) is wicked, it relies on the assumption that men are immaculate. Its view of human nature is flawed, and it is blind to the political cycle so often shown in human history. It is a system for men that don't exist on this planet.

When times are tough, it takes an exceptional libertarian to take responsibility for their actions, the average libertarian is quite happy to take away another's rights to further his own.

Just take a look at the banking crisis. The U.S financial system was regulation lite and when times were good, the libertarian "free market" was all the rage, post crash everyone's a socialist now, all those free market theorists and irresponsible homeowners had no problem in taking money from the responsible taxpayer to pay the for the stupidity of themselves. In the real world people don't want to take responsibility for their actions. They need to be compelled.
Many people warned about the irresponsibility of lending to sub prime borrowers, but were drowned out by chorus of irresponsible yobs. The crowd chose to listen to the stupid instead of the smart yet in a free society, conspired against others to take the consequences of their actions.

Finally forcing men to take responsibility for the actions would require and armed state which was in proportion to the amount of stupidity in the populace. In the modern west our countries would have to become armed camps. People need to be protected from themselves.

Posted by: slumlord on November 14, 2009 4:51 AM

Steve-O, "the rational being" has not chosen the current path of his "own free will" for the simple reason that we (and our predecessors) are not one rational being of one mind. We're not even shareholders in one corporation, sharing the same single goal of profit-maximization.

We're disparate individuals in a democracy, with near-infinitely diffuse political power. The very same individuals will make very different decisions when, say, shopping at the grocery store, than if they are asked to vote for the "correct" shopping basket of goods for everyone in society. A democracy isn't a market.

Your other question, how can you enforce lawlessness?, does not apply to a libertarian state, which enforces contracts and property rights, but to anarchy, which is a different animal.

Posted by: Isegoria on November 14, 2009 1:23 PM

Slumlord, your critique of libertarianism seems to assume a kind of left-libertarian anarchism that does not enforce laws against criminal behavior — which is the polar opposite of the "night watchman" state that upholds Rule of Law and protects property rights, but does little else.

And upholding Rule of Law and protecting property rights is holding individuals responsible for their own actions, and it rarely requires massive amounts of armed force.

As you point out, politically powerful businessmen will use the rhetoric of free markets to avoid regulation. They'll also use the rhetoric of social responsibility to impose regulations that hurt their competitors. The problem is a political system that allows and rewards such corruption. I don't see how the problem is libertarianism.

Posted by: Isegoria on November 14, 2009 1:41 PM

Left libertarianism, Right libertarianism. The flavour of the libertarianism really depends on the nature of the libertarians.

Posted by: slumlord on November 14, 2009 3:00 PM

@Zdeno: Friedman the Younger and Rothbard, Mises et al would be considered by most as all falling into the anarcho-libertarian camp. Their intellectual disagreements are minute.

(This is based on the assumption that by "non-propertarian anarchists" you're referring to, say, anti-WTO rioters, who, as near as I can tell, are folks who don't find wearing Che t-shirts radical enough. If not, apologies.)

Yours,
Ned

Posted by: Ned on November 14, 2009 9:56 PM

Isegoria,

If not democracy, then what? How would a libertarian state not eventually evolve into what we have today?

I mean we have freedom of speech, the right to own property, and we elect our representatives/leaders. What other rights that don't exist in the current Constitution would you add?

Thanks.

Posted by: Steve-O on November 14, 2009 10:16 PM

If not democracy, then what? Then any number of alternatives.

I suppose the canonical libertarian government would be a republic like the one designed by the Founding Fathers, but designed "right" — that is, with more explicit limits on government power and politicians' capacity to pander to The People.

It's now clear that the US Constitution did not prevent the descent from Republic to Democracy, which the Founding Fathers feared. I have to think that a "better" Constitution could have slowed down the transformation if not prevented it entirely.

Less conventionally, we might consider what would have happened in the American colonies had the Revolution been averted. There would have been no swift ideological shift toward Universal Human Rights, etc., but Americans would have continued on with their extant governors operating under conditions of benign neglect from London. Ironically, this might have led to much more libertarian policies in North America, while retaining the trappings of Monarchy.

If we wanted to institute a libertarian government now, it's not clear that the so-called international community would allow such a thing, but it might resemble not anarchy — Utopian or Mad Max — but corporate governance of a patch of land, not terribly different from how a shopping mall management company "governs" a shared space by owning it and collecting rent from tenants who may come and go, not by taking votes and enacting policies in the name of The People.

Posted by: Isegoria on November 16, 2009 4:11 PM






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