How To Explain Things to Libertarians
Published by Chris Clarke February 23rd, 2007 in Conservatives Sure Are Funny, Libertarians
B. Kliban illustrates one method.
Eventually, it happens to all of us. You’ll be talking to someone, online or in person, who seems completely normal. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the person will say something really weird, like “You can’t fix a problem like underpaid public school teachers by just throwing money at them!” or “Why do they need tax-funded traffic lights at this corner? All the cross-traffic’s already stopped, which shows the Free Market works!” or “Hitler was a Communist! They called themselves the ‘National Socialists’ for a reason!”
You, my friend, have just made the unpleasant discovery that you’ve been talking to a Libertarian.
Now don’t get me wrong! Most smart people are, to a certain extent, libertarians with a lower-case “L.” We all like to be left alone to determine the course of our own lives without state intrusion. But Capital-L Libertarians tend to take those admirable sentiments to their logical extreme, wanting to shrink fire departments and public libraries and FEMA down to the size where they can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub, or, failing that, at least stabbed to death like Marat.
And some of them are smart people despite it all: they’ve just been sadly misled. I blame the proselytizers, who are every bit as creepily efficient as the Scientologists, if not quite as well regarded by society.* Young people, who from time immemorial have had to learn to find their way among varying political philosophies, come upon deceptive “political quizzes” left laying around on the internet like leg-hold traps in a beaver pond, designed to lure the unwary into the clutches of Official Libertarianism. The carefully designed questions display a subtle, nearly undetectable bias in favor of a Libertarian point of view:
Complete this sentence: “That government is best which…”
1) “…takes all the money out of my bank account.”
2) “…bludgeons cute little fluffy baby ducks to death.”
3) “…governs least.”
4) “…takes all the money out of my bank account and bludgeons cute little fluffy baby ducks to death.”
And after about 89 similar questions designed to pinpoint their opinons mathematically, the test-takers are told to plot themselves appropriately on a two-axis political graph. “If you land in the shaded area,” they’re told, “You Just Might Be A Libertarian!”
And they get sucked in from there.
Now most new Libertarians eventually, after repeated contact with
reality, temper their beliefs. This article is not about them, the
people who concede that some taxes are necessary to pay firefighters,
who recognize that their success as business people might just depend
on public education to give them a pool of potentially competent
employees, and so forth. These people are fun to argue with over beer,
once they get past the zealot stage. And it’s just possible that you
might be the person who provides that needed spark of thought, who
points out that, oh, I dunno, the government they decry for limiting
suburban construction in the old growth forest also paves the roads
that make housing developments in other places possible, or that their
popular Free Marketeer blog owes its existence to several decades of
government funding of ARPANET. If those don’t work, sometimes these
people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the
late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian
state they now advocate, and a very few people got very wealthy while
the rest of us died of food poisoning or coal mine collapses or
shirtwaist factory fires. Or you can just give them a copy of Paulina
Borsook’s Cyberselfish.
With repeated exposure to reality, over time, the rational libertarian
will grant that absolutism is not very useful, usually at about the
same time they get their learner’s permit.
But there are some Libertarians who remain unswayed by such ugly facts. Whether through persistent ignorance or sociopathy or a mixture of the two, they hold as an article of near-religious faith that they derive no benefit from the modern regulatory apparatus that they could not duplicate on their own with the homebrew FDA they have in their garage. Or even worse, they manifestly hold the welfare of others as far less important than their own profit and comfort. (As an example of that last, witness this notable Bay Area Libertarian, a meat-packing magnate, who did not want the law to see how his sausage was made.) In a cutthroat economic free-for-all, with the mass of people on the bottom and a handful of ruthless Machiavellian princes at the top, each one of these goobers thinks it’s inevitable that he (gender specificity deliberate) will inevitably become one of the princes.**
You cannot argue these people into rationality, nor can you persuade them by logic to show compassion for their fellow humans. The best you can do is to make their heads explode with simple, fact-based declarative sentences. I’ve found a few reliable ways to do so, which I will describe here briefly. (You might know of others. Feel free to describe them in comments.) Using these sentences will cause Libertarian cultists to sputter, stammer, and occasionally start to think. Worst-case scenario: these sentences will usually at least cause them to shut up, and it’s hard to downplay the importance of that in making your typical day a bit rosier.
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #1: Mentioning Libertarian history.
Most American Libertarians have precious little grasp of the history of their political philosophy. They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife. Libertarianism’s true origins, however, unsettle most Libertarians to the point where the mere acceptance of that history often starts those rusty old mental gears grinding again. To wit, and here is tactical nuclear sentence number one:
“Libertarianism originated in the philosophy of a left-wing French political philosopher who also influenced Karl Marx.”
The French Philosopher in question is, as some of you have guessed (and with whose description a few of you are no doubt ready to quibble), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously penned the Libertarians’ Sekrit Motto, “Property is Theft.” Of course unlike modern Libertarians, Proudhon meant that as a condemnation. Among the pre-Marxist political thinkers strongly influenced by Proudhon was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who under the pen name Max Stirner wrote one of the first true capital-L Libertarian texts, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, which can be translated either as “The Ego and Its Own” or, more literally and more tellingly, “The Individual And His Property.” Stirner became a nucleus of a nascent school of political thought then called “individualist anarchism,”*** whose inheritance-tax-free heirs include Ludwig Von Mises, The Austrian and Chicago Schools, Murray Rothbard, Alan Greenspan, and so on.
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #2: Mentioning Libertarianism’s siblings.
But Proudhon (and to a certain extent, Stirner) also influenced a number of political philosophers and activists who extended the anarchist critique of power relations to the economic sphere: Bakunin, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Goldman, Malatesta, etc. The early twentieth century saw a mass Anarchist movement in the industrial world, and though that got pretty much squelched the philosophy lived on, to influence much of the modern progressive left. Despite the Libertarians’ historically illiterate insistence that socialism is synonymous with totalitarianism, much of current left thought is libertarian at its root, which provides us with the useful sentence:
“I’m a libertarian socialist.”
Of course, it’s easier to say that if you actually are one, but the definitions of both adjectives are broad enough to encompass a range of people from Noam Chomsky to Paul Wellstone. In fact, the boundary between libertarian socialist and liberal democrat is pretty much impossible to delineate with any kind of precision: people who are libertarian socialists in the long view are often liberal democrats in the moment.
What’s the more libertarian way of running the world? Coming up with ever-evolving procedures by which the largest number of people possible have the largest amount of input possible into the policy by which we run the world, moderated by recognizing certain expertise and the efficiency of delegating some decision-making — which is a bright-eyed and optimistic way of describing the mission of liberal democracy**** — or letting the people who are best at accumulating money bribe, bully, and blackmail their way into running huge sections of the world?
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #3: Mentioning Libertarianism’s blindspot.
That accumulation of serious political power is the end result of the Libertarian political wankdream, and yet somehow boss-based coercion escapes the Libertarian scrutiny to which municipal zoning boards and feminist bloggers with itchy banning fingers are routinely subjected.
Look at it this way: what would you call a political system that regulates its subjects activities on a minute-by-minute basis; that often requires of its citizens prior restraint on freedom of speech; that controls where its subjects go, what they wear, and who they talk to; that restricts online reading material in a Beijing-style manner; that has a rigid hierarchy to enforce edicts from the upper echelons and do routine surveillance of the rank and file; that denies its subjects privacy even to the point of demanding the right to examine their urine; and that punishes infractions by permanent banishment?
Some people would call it a dictatorship. But many of us call it “the workplace.” Somehow, Libertarians never seem to object to restrictions of Liberty done by The Boss. “You can always get another job,” they say, as if that answers anything, as if the class of people who can leave a job blithely isn’t the same class that’s most likely to be able to pick up and move away from a conventional, state-based dictatorship. And as corporations extend their control to people outside their employ, with DRM and increasingly prevalent, shameless propaganda and their own armed forces and even co-optation of the nominal forms of governmental authority, the truth of our next useful sentence becomes ever more manifestly clear, that sentence being:
“Corporations are governments.”
Which is, of course, the libertarian socialist criticism of Libertarianism in soundbite form. I’ve never known a Libertarian to be able to answer that one without changing the subject completely, usually to a defense of Guantanamo from a Libertarian POV. At which point they’ve been made incapable of influencing anyone who’s not a fellow Libertarian, which means you can get on with your life. Try it and see!
* And without the soup cans. And also without the practicing medicine without a license. Though the Libertarians would defend the Scientologists’ right to practice medicine without a license.
** This is, of course, known as the Renaissance Faire Fallacy.
*** And now called “classical liberalism”
**** And you can come up with all kinds of objections to that description, I know, and I’d agree with most of them. Give me a damn break. This is a polemic, not an operator’s manual.
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Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #2: Mentioning Libertarianisms’ siblings.
Actually certain libertarians are wont to do this themselves: they’ll say “why do you liberals hate us — we’re the true liberals, not you big government phonies”, and they’ll cite these connections as proof even as they go about supporting the sorts of things about which every lefty (and even “classical liberals”) would be aghast.
Please be my best friend. We’ll have sleepovers. It’ll be great.
(the above exuberance brought to you by a week of battling MRA libertarian trolls)
THANK YOU. I cannot remember how many times I’ve had to tell people pining for the days of nights in shining and damsels in distress that they wouldn’t be either, that statistically, they’d be the peasant living in extreme poverty and dying in their 40s. Chances are they wouldn’t even get their own last name — they’d have to make due with their Lord’s, aka, the person who owned the land to which they belonged.
Knights. Ka-nig-ets. Not nights. Sorry.
I’ve noticed you’ve left those evil Hollywood bastards off this chart? Or are they under that mysterious pink X?
One of the most annoying people I knew at college was a Libertarian. He was one of those seven-year undergraduates who spent most of his time hanging out at the school paper. He occasionally wrote a headline or something, but his main function seemed to be arguing with anyone who would listen. He would argue the most preposterous points: For instance, he spent one evening loudly insisting that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust. His favorite tactic, when cornered, was to screech, “I don’t know what books you’ve read!”
I’m sure that by now, he’s a GS-11 or something, comfortably close to a government-funded retirement.
I dunno, Carl; if the night is shining, then the damsels wouldn’t be in such distress, would they? ;-)
I’ve come to the conclusion is a Libertarian (with the big L) is someone who has never had to live in the real world. Either because he is too young (pimply-faced 17 year old reading Ayn Rand) or because he is with enough money etc. to be shielded from the effects of any of his choices.
The third category (the majority, from what I’ve seen) are computer geeks in their early 20s who think DOOM and Mad Max are realistic and optimal descriptions of human interactions.
(My way of engaging Libertarians’ minds is to point out that there has never been a society which has not had taxation throughout history. Either you pay taxes to the gov’t, or “protection money” to the Mafia, and which would they prefer?)
honestly, I enjoy demonstrative brutal violence. as much fun as they have blathering about Randian Objectivism, it basically means “We get to use the government to enforce the power we like, but all other force isn’t FAAAAIR.” Which is why they want cops with guns to prevent people from robbing them. but a system rigged where they get rich at others expense, it’s “legal” so it doesn’t count.
they want rigged anarchy, and I shall have none of that. Gimme your beer money, or I’ll crack you in the head with a blunt object. It’s my will to power that grants me a right to swing my club, so you better give me a damn good incentive to take my crowbar and leave.
either EVERYONE gets a fair shake, or no one does.
Most hard-core “movement” libertarians are little more than cranks with very little real influence outside of Silicon Valley. BUT tragically some libertarian memes have creeped into common knowledge. These are the worst ones in my opinion:
“The problem with schools is the teachers’ union”
“We should privatize x because the government is inefficient”
“Social security is broken because I could do better investing the money myself”
“Regulation always causes problems”
“People want to go on welfare”
The first pisses me off because EVERYONE believes it. It drives me insane. As if all those broken inner city schools have qualified candidates breaking down the door to make $40k…
THANK YOU!
I get really annoyed by Libertarians that rave on about the “evils of government” and “just want one try” in order to prove that what they are suggesting will actually work … when you point out it’s been tried a few times in history and the results were HORRIBLE (and we’re not speaking mildly annoying here, we’re talking collapse of society horrible).
It basically comes down for me to the point of who would you rather have looking out for your best interests and those of minorities; a company whose bottom line is intrinsically profit, or government that is technically “by the people, for the people”?
I mean, the latter might be a tad ideal, but it still stands, and is fairly self evident the better solution.
[as a snark, my personal fav of the insanely funny morons are the Christian Conservative Theocratic Libertarians … it’s kinda like the mutant child of a porcupine and a spider crab; having you wince merely at the thought]
I am going to use the phrase “Renaissance Faire Fallacy” as many times as possible in the next week or so. Awesome.
I cannot remember how many times I’ve had to tell people pining for the days of nights in shining and damsels in distress that they wouldn’t be either, that statistically, they’d be the peasant living in extreme poverty and dying in their 40s.
White people who speak with dreamy appreciation of the Confederacy in particular and the antebellum South in general seem to have the same kind of fantasies, in my experience.
As do Randroids, although the fantasies are a little different. They tend to think extremely highly of their own abilities and have thoroughgoing contempt for everybody else.
what was it, libertarians are really just republicans with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?
someone posted a link to the ‘Libertarian FAQ’ the other day and that was on it. thought it was very descriptive.
If you just mention the word “externalities” to a libertarian, smoke comes out their ears. Luckily, this gives them the opportunity to complain about anti-smoking advocates, so they end up placated.
Am I the only person on earth who has read Ayn Rand and not been able to find a philosophy in it? Atlas Shrugged should be famous only for being the world’s worst porn.
Also, the last Libertarian I knew used to sit naked on the commons room couch and watch basketball. Do with that as you will.
These are excellent suggestions for dealing with the individual examples.
But what if you stumble into a nest of the beasts?
If you are ganged up on by Libertarians, the best thing to do is just remain silent. They’ll quickly start disagreeing on what “true libertarians” should believe, then the anarcho-capitalists will gang up on the synicalists, and you can just call in the disposal squad.
If you want to help it along, you can start it off by asking, innocently, if Hayek can be reconciled with Rand. Just be prepared to duck.
Carl Rennie, that was my first clue that maybe my first college boyfriend was not somebody I wanted to stick around for long. His confused indifference when I mentioned that his pre- (post-?) technological fantasyland would be maybe not so fun for the women in his life was Clue #2.
In a cutthroat economic free-for-all, with the mass of people on the bottom and a handful of ruthless Machiavellian princes at the top, each one of these goobers thinks it’s inevitable that he (gender specificity deliberate) will inevitably become one of the princes.**
Libertarians certainly do not see themselves as one of the princes. That would imply that they control others. One of the fundamental beliefs of libertarianism is that in order to be free from the controls of others, you must be willing to give up your claims to control others.
I think more of you all fall into that trap. You think that an all-powerful government can work as long as the “right people” are in power. And when you say “right people” you mean yourselves.
back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate
Living in the late 19th century sucked ass compared to the way we live today, but it should be noted that living in the US was better than living anywhere else.
Really, I have no idea if Libertarianism would work in the 21st century. That is why I support the system the Framers envisioned–a weak federal government with states as individual “test tubes” of economic systems. New Hampshire and Wyoming could become libertarian, Massachusetts socialist and the lifestyle that people prefer would become evident pretty quickly.
tzs said:
My experience is similar, but the defining factor seems to be less their own circumstances than a lack of empathy and a blindness to privilege, especially structural. I’ve seen kids whose parents put them through good high schools, expensive after-school programs, and expensive colleges where they had their room and board, books and tuition fully paid for claim that they got where they were entirely on their own merit. They have a hard time imagining that someone without those privileges would find it more difficult to achieve on the same level.
Libertarians often deny that structural barriers to success even exist, and it’s mostly because they haven’t encountered them. I had one person argue with a straight face that a CEO really works 2000 times as hard as a janitor holding down two full-time jobs.
Blue Jean said:
I believe in a market-based approach to communication. If people want to see complete thoughts and proper grammar, and are willing to pay for it, then that’s what’ll win out in a truly free society.
Best. Sentence. Ever. I’m going to use it the very next time I argue with someone about Americans for Tax Reform, and watch the wingnut stumble around trying to remember his European history classes.
Not that I probably need to point folks around here to PZ’s place, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
I think everyone meets one of these guys (I say “guys” advisedly; in my experience, they’re almost universally male) at some point. My libertarian-crank cherry was broken by the VP of the forensics club in college, who (like Bitter Scribe’s acquaintance) was a perpetual undergrad. He was majoring in political science and international relations, and was frustrated that no one wanted to listen to his theories on how China could never be a real economic threat to the US.
The second one I met was a coworker a couple of years ago. He was an otherwise-sane Flash/Director programmer, who idolized not Ayn Rand but Neal Boortz. He actually said to me once, in a heated argument about social safety nets, that “if you can’t afford to buy food, you deserve to starve”.
My snarky, off the cuff, previously typed, definition of Libertarians; “People who talk about the ideals of freedom, but at the end of the day, can’t keep their fucking hands to themselves.”
*nods* ditto on that Carl.
I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist, that there is no social-cultural structural system in place, and that we are merely a collection of individuals. His evidence? He’s never seen a ’society’.
Did I mention he was a white straight guy?
I just sat there with my mouth open and then left. It was pointless, to go any further would be to cross over and get pulled into that singularity of insanity …
utsusemi said:
I know I long for the days when men were men and women all wore tight bodices and spoke in faux-Olde Englishe. I also have a strange craving for mead…
Why on Earth would you want to engage in discourse with these people? I’ve found that “go away” works fairly well, if said in the right tone of voice.
Over at the JREF Politics forum I frequent, they have a lot of intelligent people of different political stripes. They also have a capital-L Libertarian who basically believes that everything is the fault of the government, and if the government were to be shrunk to practically nothing, civilization would achieve utopia. You can’t really change his mind on these things, but trying to reason with him can be an interesting journey into the world of behavioral psychology.
The scary thing is the number of his posts you can read that sound perfectly rational, reasonable, and well-thought out before you hit nuttiness. Well-reasoned posts about privacy and government intrusion will then devolve into rants about how states have the legal right to secede and the evil of coming off the gold standard.
And what is really frightning to me is that this guy votes.
My libertarian-crank cherry was broken by the VP of the forensics club in college,
Q: How do you know if a person is a libertarian-crank-virgin?
A: If their Hayek is intact.
I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist
Hey, Maggie Thatcher said that too. Dunno if she was straight, but definitely white, and macho as they come.
Libertarin cranial detonation techniques 5 & 6:
5. “Libertarianism doen not solve the problem of the asshole.” There are always assholes who will game the system, and Libertarian markets don’t punish them, they reward them. e.g. Lee Raymond, Dick Cheney, Ken Lay, et. al.
6. “Shorter Libertarian dogma: Fuck the poor. They deserve their fate.” In order to believe in Libertarian dogma, you have to believe that all rich people are fundamentally superior to all poor people, and proportionately along the spectrum as well. This means Libertarians have to stipulate that Britney Spears is smarter (richer) than them, and high school science teachers are the moral inferiors of Larry Flynt.
Plus the fact that a real Libertarian society wouldn’t last more than one generation, if that much.
As has been pointed out by people much wiser than I, you’re not going to have very many people raising children–child-raising is totally the opposite to any ideal put out by Ayn Rand. (I also note that Rand did not have any children, nor do they exist that much in her novels.) Why would anyone, attuned to “selfishness” want to put themselves through the burden of raising children?
(This is in fact why I’m not into the “child-free” movement that much–I think the financial and emotional burden of raising children is hard enough already that I encourage any help people can get. And the whining about “property taxes going to SCHOOOOLS!” is silly. If it bothers you that much, move to an apartment.)
LOL, Carl!
Sarah in Chicago, if you ever run into that guy again, try saying “We’ve never seen oxygen either, yet we’d miss it in two seconds if it suddenly vanished.” Then watch his head explode.
Number 7: “Devil in the White City” That is all.
Allison- I read Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, AND The Fountainhead and found no philosophical or literary merit to any of them. Rand is morally bankrupt and she couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag if her life depended on it. I can’t really fathom why such a huge cult has developed around her; her work is drivel and, from all accounts, she was a really terrible person who no one should want to emulate.
tzs- As a current senior in undergrad, my experience with libertarians has been pretty similar to yours. In my time, I have encountered 3 key types of Libertarians:
1. Sheltered middle/upper class kids who never bothered to ask their parents how the family finances work who never read anything other than Ayn Rand. And yeah- a huge number of them are engineering/computer science/hard science students, probably because of the minute amount of time they spend in Humanities classes, which require some amount of critical thought.
2. Republicans who discovered that they like to get high/have consequence-free sex/insert anything else that the Republican moralists decry, but can’t be bothered to care about whether or not other people have access to it. They may be ferreted out by asking them who they voted for- nine times out of ten, they choose money over freedom (which fits right in with the class privilege inherent to that way of thinking),
3. Republicans who don’t want to admit to being reactionary, socially regressive asshats (and have a chance of scoring, ever). They can be spotted by asking them how they feel about abortion or feminism.
I don’t know; I kept falling asleep. Maybe if I kept reading that joyful prose, I could have zzzzzzz……
I love the traffic light analogy, hadn’t heard it before.
But I think you went too far with the Kliban picture. Pigs don’t deserve to be compared to Libertarians.
Very well put Chris, thank you. Although I must point out that Proudhon got taken to the woodshed once by Joseph Déjacque (who coined the term “libertarian”) for proposing that the patriarchy be a part of the anarchist society.
I’m kind of with Carl, it’s a lack of empathy or something that causes this. Perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who just don’t rate on the other mental axis: enlightenment. Which fits into my personal definition of Objectivist Libertarianism: it’s just enlightened self-interest without the enlightenment.
*nods* I have to totally agree with this … I’ve seriously had engineering students in their wonderful superiority sit down to tell me as a sociology phd candidate how society actually operates … I mean, I know wayyyy less than everything (WWAAYYYYY less) but I kinda felt like saying “you know, I kinda do this stuff for a living and all …”
I like to point out to Libertarians that neither government or business is always efficient, but with free elections you get to fire the government every few years. You can’t fire a giant monopoly.
Chris, you are so dreamy.
Oh, no, see… if you’ve ever read an Rand, there’s some sort of ridiculous stipulation that mere possession of money doesn’t make you a Prime Mover–you have to have money and be an emotionless sociopath. So, Britney isn’t a Prime Mover… but Dick Cheney would be.
I like to point out to Libertarians that neither government or business is always efficient, but with free elections you get to fire the government every few years. You can’t fire a giant monopoly.
Actually, you can fire any monopoly anytime you want. If you want to stop using MS Windows, no one forces you to. Forty-nine percent of the people cannot fire the government.
Partial cranial fracture at 4:53 pm.
I’ve used the “Corporations Are Government” argument a lot.
Uh, not using Microsoft Windows is just ignoring the monopoly, not firing it.
Whenever I get into it with libertarians I recommend that they read two books: Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But they always refuse to do all that reading, particularly the Engels book, Engels so notoriously being eee-vil.
Stafish Girl said:
Unfortunately, most of the engineering students I knew who took Humanties/sociology courses managed to get through them with their critical thinking faciilites turned off. I’ve heard “I got an A by just telling the teacher what they wanted to hear in my essays,” as if they’d gotten away with something. This always makes me angry — I just want to say, “congratulations, you’ve managed to spend 10 weeks in a class without learning anything.”
Sarah in Chicago said:
There’s a certain arrogance that comes built-in with being in a hard science. First of all, Barbie aside, math IS hard, and it’s a skill that isn’t widely spread. So people who are good at math tend to think of themselves as better than non-math-geeks, whether or not the feeling is justified (it’s not; lots of people are really really at ping-pong, too). There’s a widespread “understanding” that people studying soft sciences like psych and soc are doing so because they can’t hack it as a real scientist, and hence, as a real smart person.
I took computer science in college, but I almost switched to sociology my senior year — not because I was bad at computer science, but because soc is sooooooo much more interesting. Learning about social structure and interaction was pretty revelatory for me.
The people that crack me up the most are the economists. They’re essentially doing a narrowly focussed version of sociology — the Sociology of Money, if you will — but because they have a built-in system of numbers (money) they get to call it a hard science and most people buy into it.
I actually like Ayn Rand’s writing. I think many pimply-faced teenagers–those who purport to be well-read and intellectual–are attracted to Ayn Rand because public schools are so very socialist and anti-intellectual, and teenagers see Ayn Rand’s so-called philosophy as a way out of that unfairness. That is certainly how I discovered Ayn Rand. The problem, of course, is that libertarianism is ultimately a naive and immature worldview, and most people come to recognize that.
Well, there’s your problem right there. He was just a poser. A real Libertarian would bar the door of the commons room, claim it as his own, sell the couch on the black market, and set up a pay-per-view system for the TV.
True. And some theory types credit Stirner with paving the way for some left feminism, in that he promoted the truth of the individual’s existence over abstract absolutes, one of which absolutes the idea of immutable gender roles could be construed to be.
New Hampshire and Wyoming could become libertarian, Massachusetts socialist and the lifestyle that people prefer would become evident pretty quickly.
Heh. I love when Libertarians say, “Hey, let us take over the infrastructure that’s been built up in New Hampshire for the past 300 years and we’ll make it libertarian.”
Proving once again that Libertarians are parasites living off the body of a real society. When Libertarians manage to completely build a town from the ground up — sewer system, roads, electricity and all — then we can talk about it being a viable philosophy. But until that time, I know that when anyone who says, “I’m a Libertarian,” what they’re really saying is, “I shouldn’t have to pay my fair share to live in this country, because I’m special — Mommy told me so!”
Oh, and The Fountainhead sucks ass. Worst movie ever, and Ayn Rand wrote it her very own self.
I read The Fountainhead in high school (I’ll still read practically anything once). I found it interesting and oddly moving.
After I got a little older, I got curious about the philosophy advertised at the back of all Rand’s books, and started doing some research–and was horrified. The only upside was that this experience happened to me before I read anything by L. Ron Hubbard and got curious about his philosophy.
There is good, healthy, progressive stuff to take away from Rand’s books. Ambition isn’t evil; self-reliance isn’t evil; no one should be forced, out of fear or jealousy, to hide their brilliance. Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.
Inasmuch as they might lead the impressionable towards progressive little-l libertarianism, and therefore away from the ascendant proto-fascism that currently dominates the right wing of American politics, maybe we shouldn’t rip on Rand’s books too much.
(I’m not going to deign to respond to Chris’ pun.)
Regarding Heinlein:
I once spent a lovely week with Heinlein’s wife, Virginia. I asked her about the Ayn Rand award he received and the ever-gracious lady responed with a rather disparaging series of remarks toward libertatians. Too many of Heinlein’s readers assumed that the political opinions he expressed in his books reflected his personal beliefs. A more careful reading of his texts show that he was fascinated by all the varieties of human politics (and the varieties of religions, sexual mores, etc.). Although certain aspects of libertatianism were certainly appealing to him, so were certain aspects of democracy, socialism, and all the other isms. And he was were aware of the excesses of each system! I’m a long time reader and fan of Heinlein (and Pandagon!), and when libertarians (or anyone else) assume that Heinlein (or any other human) was some sort of uber font of wisdom (or evil), then I know I’m talking to a zealot (aka:jackass).
And you’re right: it is fun to watch their heads explode!
I read Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, AND The Fountainhead and found no philosophical or literary merit to any of them.
I would recommend Anthem over any of those books. Less preachy and you can read it on a long lunch hour.
Uh, not using Microsoft Windows is just ignoring the monopoly, not firing it.
OK, fine, you can ignore a monopoly. You can’t really ignore the government.
Allison–her philosophy was in the very hackneyed, and badly-told story, with shades of the thrown in. Honestly, that woman was the queen of the run-on sentence, as well as the ten-page monologue.
BUT–Starfish Girl–she was apparently either very charismatic, was good at finding people who responded to her mercurial personality, or both, because she had quite the devoted and eggshell walking entourage.
As for the whole GUMMIT IS EVIL! EVIL I TELL YA! drivel, all I’ll say is this: I lived in England and Japan. Both places had public transportation systems that were a damn sight better than the MBTA in Massachusetts (and here I have to remind myself that in many places, they don’t have public transit at all). Here in the US, we’re convinced that government-run services are inefficient, corrupt, wasteful, and mismanaged. Not so in other places, where the expectations are high, and the service (such as public transport) lives up to it. I experienced one late train in Osaka in the three and a half years that I lived there. Here in the Boston area, it’s a coin toss when I’ll get to work.
Exactly Hava. And how many of us get to choose our electric or gas or water company. How about trying to find clothes that aren’t made in sweatshops. Even if the people who sew the clothes are treated well, often the people the wove the fabric are not. Christ, even my local co-op market has issues with busting union people. And short of purely electric cars, last time I checked all cars needed something from the oil industry. I don’t own a car, but everytime I take the bus I contribute to the oil industry.
So ya, you can’t fire giant monopolies unless you want to live naked in the woods. Call me a great big sell-out cause I like hot water, electric lights and not being cold and naked all the time.
They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Artemis from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife.
Actually, you are thinking of Athena, there. Artemis was born on the Island of Delos, where she then turn around and served as midwife to her twin brother Apollon.
If the government spent a little more on public education, Libertarians might know that.
My favorite response to Libertarians is the “pay as you go” society:
You don’t want taxes, fine. Every road is pay-per-drive. Gonna take a plane? Dn’t forget the overcharge for airport support, control tower personnel, etc. Oh, and don’t forget the extra $2000 for the weather report before you take off. Etc.
Very quickly, they should realize that the “taxation” thing is the cheapest way to go.
I’ve run into some physicist-libertarians, but the really annoying libertarians seem to be, on the whole, computer geeks.
I think it has to do with the ability to make up things in your system with computers. Don’t like how your simulation is coming out? Just tweak the parameters!
With science, you WILL at some point run up hard against reality and have to Deal With It.
I would guess that the group least prone to libertarianism would be historians, since in general they’re the most cynical group of bastards around. Yet another utopian fantasy, they sigh and mutter under their breath:”not AGAIN….”
It’s funny you say that, because I originally went to college to do comp sci … switched really quick to astrophysics and got a degree in that before discovering sociology …
Yes, we make fun of economists here … there’s a joke about this that an economist, a physicist and an engineer are marooned on a desert island together along with a crate of cans of food. They are sitting around trying to think of how to get the cans open. The physicist comes up with a theoretically possible, but practically impossible solution, the engineer comes up with a practical solution that would destroy the cans … and then finally the economist comes up with an idea … they ask eagerly what it is, and he says “well, first, assume we have a can-opener ….”
It’s a good sign of who is a total geek if they get that :)
Thanks, Dorothy. Brain fart. Corrected.
Which puts her about on par with L. Ron Hubbard.
Hey, I’m sure Wyoming would do just fine without the money it currently receives from the Feds, most of which is generated by taxing the other 49 states.
There is a crazy woman from Manhattan (with a spectacular boob job) who has a site called Atlas Shrugs. She is the nearly the stupidest human being on the planet, second only to Michael Medved (and she ties with Hugh Hewitt). She calls herself a libertarian, yet is the biggest bootlicking authoritiarian I have ever had the displeasure of encountering. She absolutely does not see the cognitive dissonance between her desire to do away with all social programs, public schools, publicly funded emergency services, etc. and her competing desire to see this country ruled by jackbooted fascists who grind liberals into dust and protect ze homeland and ze “real Americans”.
I have never been able to understand these freaks of nature.
“So ya, you can’t fire giant monopolies unless you want to live naked in the woods. Call me a great big sell-out cause I like hot water, electric lights and not being cold and naked all the time.”
That’s why Theodore “UniBomber” Kaczynski was such an influential Libertarian. He showed us all how to throw off the constraints of government and live free!…
“There is good, healthy, progressive stuff to take away from Rand’s books. Ambition isn’t evil; self-reliance isn’t evil; no one should be forced, out of fear or jealousy, to hide their brilliance. Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.”
I suppose I might have taken that message away from her books had they been written so as to take place in a world that could actually exist. As it was, I got a more realistic moral education from Gandalf.
“A real Libertarian would bar the door of the commons room, claim it as his own, sell the couch on the black market, and set up a pay-per-view system for the TV.”
cycles is my new best friend.
Geez, why the hate on engineers?
One of my co-workers is a Libertarian. A good guy, actually, and I don’t really have quite as much contempt for the species as a lot of other lefties I know. It’s always struck me that Libertarians at least try to be intellectually consistent, even if so many of their premises are indefensible.
(One point my friend was unable to answer in a discussion we were having on the nature of property rights was that whatever arguments you might have about whether property is inherently and intrinsically theft, it is an absolute historical certainty that the large majority of land in the United States was stolen from the various tribes. Stolen in direct violation of treaties that the thieves themselves had agreed to.)
Anyway, that wasn’t the point I wanted to make. The funny part is that the company where we work makes software that is used by local governments to run their cities. This means that my Libertarian friend’s salary ultimately comes from tax dollars. He has admitted to an occasional sleepless night over this.
Em said:
Because we’ve spent a lot of time with them?
Well, Em, if it makes you feel any better my least favorite Libertarian is a web-designer.
Stephen Stralka said:
Yeah, the problem isn’t so much in the logic, it’s in the assumptions. A lot of liberatarian philosophy is the very definition of begging the question.
chris says in the essay, ’sometimes these people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate’.
when libertarians say that libertaianism has never been tried, i always say, ‘o contraire, look at the robber baron era: child labor, corporate corruption, tamany hall, monoploies, sweat shops, etc’.
and this year i have also pointed them to that miracle of freedom Russia, as well as Iraq, since after the fall of communism, libertarians rushed in to open wide the free market and the lawlessness that followed. in addition, when the US invaded iraq, libertarian capir=talism was the model the US govt imposed on the society and the market there….we see the joyful results each day, don’t we?’
‘I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist’
i have actually heard that from a number of libertarians…they simply refuse to acknowledge communal behavior. i wonder what they make of the family.
I may have all of you topped. I D-A-T-E-D a libertarian. A female, capital L libertarian!
But, when it came down to it, her philosophy came down to the following:
1. I don’t like to pay taxes
2. The world revolves around ME!
3. Though the prevailing evidence was to the contrary, she thought she was really smart and being a Libertarian, in her little world, was evidence of that intelligence. She was not smart.
4. She went to a private catholic school and thought that public schools should be dismantled.
I could go on. But Libertarians are really annoying, as they usually don’t have a clue.
It really came down to 1 and 2. She didn’t really have a clue as to true Libertarian thought. And not all libertarian thought is wrong. It was one of the few libertarian thinkers who came up with the idea of a guaranteed minimum to be paid out of (omg) taxes. From that concept, we came up with the Earned Income Tax Credit - which is a good idea, and has mostly worked well.
Well, thanks a lot, Carl. Fuck you too.
“But they always refuse to do all that reading, particularly the Engels book, Engels so notoriously being eee-vil.”
Anyone who refuses to educate themselves further about the topic in which they are passionately arguing (for or against) isn’t worth arguing with.
Oh, yeah–one can have a lot of fun with a plurality of Libertarians. I often post over at Reason, albeit under an assumed name, and once got quite a lot of flame going simply by asking them to define the basic tenents of Libertarianism.
The only thing they managed to agree on was they didn’t like paying taxes. No consensus on how to replace them.
Em,
some of my best frieI love some engineers dearly. My father-in-law is one, my spouse’s best friend another.But the profession does seem to carry with it the occupational risks of 1) a greater tendency toward Libertarian thought and b) making embarrassing public statements about intelligent design.
This almost certainly has more to do with certain types being attracted to engineering than with any common trait of all engineers. I mean, we’re probably talking a fraction of a percent of the total here.
Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.
I’m with ya here on the comparison between Rand and Emerson. In High School, we had to read Emerson, Trudeau, et al. We became convinced that Transcendentalism was philosophical Onanism. Indeed, we had quite a bit of fun finding all the references to masturbation in Emerson, et al. … Transcendentalist literature is full of ‘em (or maybe just seemed so ’cause we were just a bunch of horny teenagers who weren’t actually getting any — if we took a more sour grapes attitude toward sex, maybe we’d have embraced the Transcendentalists for their ideas rather than rejecting them as something the English Dept. forced upon us?).
Corporations are governments. I can deal with that.
States are corporations, Mr Socialist Libertarian. (boom)
I’d disagree with those who claim that Libertarians are trying to be consistent–maybe more consistent than Republicans and Democrats, but that’s a pretty low bar to hop over. Those that do try to be consistent have my respect. Most don’t even try.
Anarcho-libertarians I have absolutely no sympathy for, mainly because none of them have ever managed to explain how present-day Iraq isn’t what their perfect society would quickly devolve into. “It’s a civil war!” they bleat. Yes, and the term “anarchy” means…..?
Em said:
Oh, come off it. I’m a (software) engineer, most of my friends are engineers. I am close to people pursuing PhDs in various branches of engineering, physics, biology, and psychology.
The longer answer to your earlier questions is that engineering skills are overvalued in our current society. This overvaluing of skill leads to an unreasonable estimation of intelligence, and in some cases, self-worth. You can still be a very good person with a very inflated opinion of your own intelligence, but it helps to try to keep a sense of humor and humility about it.
Jerry 101, you mean you actually dated Jacqie Mackie Paisley Passey?
You poor bastard…
My full comment got too long to inflict here, so I’ve posted it to my site.
The précis: My favorite anti-Libertarian example is phossy jaw.
People needed matches. Companies made matches. But the white or yellow phosphorus that they used to make matches gave the workers a terrible, disfiguring disease, phossy jaw, which rotted their jawbone until death or until the bone was removed.
Unfortunately, safer red phosphorus for match-making was more expensive, so most companies continued to use deadly white and yellow phosphorus until legislation outlawed its use in matches.
There’s no shortage of examples like this to use on Libertarians who blindly believe in an all-correcting “invisible hand.”
As for Ayn Rand, it’s instructive that her fictional world contains no significant references to the natural environment, children, elderly people, illness, or disability. Though of course even in a world where everyone is a clear-eyed, able-bodied adult, her system would still lead to the modern equivalents of phossy jaw.
I also love that Rand makes such a big deal out of lesser people’s inability to make decisions, unlike her decisive heroes. It takes the focus off the fact that the heroes would need all those lesser people to actually carry out the heroes’ boldly decided plans.
By privileging decision-making rather than action as all-important, Rand flatters do-nothing “managers” who like to pretend their TPM reports make them captains of industry.
Libertarian computer geeks and engineers probably see themselves as the John Galts of Rand’s capitalist utopia. But to a Libertarian CEO, an engineer is just another match girl.
Oh! Oh! I forgot to mention! Engineers (including me) often struggle socially, which leads to the wonderful “People Don’t Like Me Because They Don’t Recognize My Brilliance” fallacy, and the twin evils of arrogance and poor self-esteem. I’ve been there, man, I’ve been there.
Chris, I have honestly never experienced this. The primary trait I’ve noticed in engineers is the cliched social awkwardness. Of course, if I weren’t so awkward myself, perhaps I would have socialized enough with my fellow engineers to discover they secretly harbored libertarian tendencies (which probably would have horrified me to the point of never socializing with them again.).
There’s a certain arrogance that comes built-in with being in a hard science.
The arrogance comes from knowledge of objective truths. Scientific types feel superior because they can only claim things they know to be true, instead of things they feel to be true or want to be true. Can’t say they same for the “subjective” areas of study.
Grilltacular says:
It sounds nice, and yes, this is how people justify it, but it’s bullshit. The “facts” of hard science are outgrowths of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. The application of these “facts” to observed phenomena is necessarily limited by the ability to observe and the framework in which these observations are interpretted.
If anything, science makes you less prepared to deal with phenomena that’s not neatly observable, measurable, and predictable. Meaning that “hard” scientists are among the least qualified to talk about how society works.
Well, plus, if you run into a humdinger of an Engineer with Issues, you’re pretty much set with stories for the rest of eternity. Just one is all you need.
I have to admit that I have some pretty strong libertarian tendencies, though moreso when I was in high school. Yes, I was the pimply teenager who read Ayn Rand and a host of other works.
I realized I couldn’t be fully libertarian once I realized that corporations are out to screw the people over as much as humanly possible. I fully believe in non-coercion of individuals, but people must be protected from the evils of corporations.
Nowadays, I base more of my political philosophy on Daniel Quinn, and I’m a big fan of Penn and Teller. I’d hardly be called a “true libertarian,” and I still think tribalism is the best option possible for humans, though not workable with how many people we have.
As a libertarian (lite), I believe there is no one right way to live. And that your rights end where mine begin.
And you can’t fix the school system by simply throwing more money at it. Read John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down to see why. And because that’s all the NEA wants, they are a big part of the problem. A new approach needs to be created, one that allows many possible choices for education, one that is not controlled by the government (though funded by them). If you take a history of education class, you’ll quickly realize that our current factory style school system was created to make complacent, controllable workers. That, in my not so humble opinion, is deeply deeply wrong. And now, we’re having our little workers learning how to do nothing but take tests, and certainly not teaching them critical thinking or decent history.
For the record, I’m female, and a history student.
i once saw “a libertarian is an anarchist with money or a management level job.
an anarchist is a poor libertarian”
that said, anarcho-libertarianism or left libertarianism makes more sense than capitalist libertarianism…because it desires peaceful cooperative living as opposed to cut-throat competive individualism.
Grilltacular, are you an engineer or a scientist? I ask because most of the scientists I know are rather leery of throwing around terms like “objective truth” — they tend to be more aware than most of the limitations of any theory or or set of explanations.
In fact, the people who I know who use terms like “objective truth” are almost always Christians, for whom “objective truth” is what is revealed to us by the agents of God over an approximately 800-year span ending about two millennia ago.
You know when you were bullied in school and your mom told you, “That’s just because you’re better than the rest of them and they’re jealous”?
Libertarians were the ones who believed it.
Shorter Carl: Engineers are not sociologists. Engineers are arrogant. Now I, an engineer, will explain to you how engineers interact with society. This is not sociology, nor is it arrogant. I can do this b/c I am an Exceptional Engineer who Gets both Math and People.
Arrogance and poor self-esteem? Been there?–you’re clearly still there.
I am lucky enough to have met the rare female Libertarian–my favorite bit was when she complained about the new middle school built in town, saying it really didn’t need to be all that fancy, she didn’t want her tax money going to it, blah blah blah. Of course she sent her kid to a private school. So it’s not good enough for your kid, but too good for other kids? Fucking selfish asshole.
She then went on to complain about poor kids getting breakfast while they were in school.
Problems caused by starving the system of money can usually be at least ameliorated by putting some of that money back. Put down your book and visit an actual public school to see examples.
Yeah, it was the NEA socialists who came up with No Child Left Behind.
Thalia–I knew a girl that used to wear a shirt that she’d made with her own magic markers that said “Worker harder, people on welfare are counting on you!” She was, of course, a trust fund baby.
Veronica, much like the bumper stickers that say, Vote Dem; It’s Easier Than Working.
Ick.
Em said:
No, engineers are not sociologists, though some of them think they are. Sociologists have their own set of quirks, their own lack of insights, and their own issues with arrogance, but libertarianism generally isn’t one of them — at least not in my experience. Since we’re talking libertarianism, they’re not particularly relevant to this conversation.
I’m not attacking engineers, and I’m certainly not attacking you (though if this hits close to home, that’s not my fault). There are certain tendencies that I see in engineers, and hanging out with engineers *does* happen to fall into my area of expertise. I think I’m more intrigued by their foibles than truly bothered, and I certainly wouldn’t stop hanging out with anyone if they disagreed with me.
Engineering does come with its own culture, and that culture has its own set of pitfalls. I certainly don’t hate engineering culture or I wouldn’t be part of it. I don’t think that engineers are uniformly evil or even mostly bad, just that some engineers can be very shortsighted, especially when it comes to their own shortcomings.
I’m not an exceptional engineer. I’m a decent one, but I lack the focus necessary to become a great one.
It’s a daily struggle.
Robert Anton Wilson:
“I was an Objectivist for a while. Then I met Ayn Rand.”
I happen to be one of those “capital L Libertarians”, and you are operating under some misconceptions here. You won’t be detonating my cranium, I can assure you. In the first place, do not make the mistake of confusing Randian Objectivism with Libertarianism. Also, don’t confuse it with capitalistic anarchism either.
“Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #1: Mentioning Libertarian history.”
This is incorrect. Libertarian philosophy owes far more to John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith than it does to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His tag line, which you mention, “Property is theft”, is the antithesis of Libertarian philosophy.
“Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #2: Mentioning Libertarianism’s siblings.”
This, too, fizzles out when given even a cursory examination.
“What’s the more libertarian way of running the world? Coming up with ever-evolving procedures by which the largest number of people possible have the largest amount of input possible into the policy by which we run the world, moderated by recognizing certain expertise and the efficiency of delegating some decision-making \u2014 which is a bright-eyed and optimistic way of describing the mission of liberal democracy or letting the people who are best at accumulating money bribe, bully, and blackmail their way into running huge sections of the world?”
Well, obviously the first mentioned here. As for the second, that’s not Libertarian. That’s what we have right now. How did that come to pass? This is due to the gov’t’s giving unearned “goodies” to corporations. We hear a lot about “welfare queens” from conservatives. Yet, the biggest welfare queens do not live in decaying urban neighbourhoods. No, it’s corporations. Gov’t has even been known to send US troops into other countries to protect corporate inerests, as the Marines were sent into Nicaragua to make that country safe for United Fruit. This is inappropriate and would never occur under a Libertarian regime.
“Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #3: Mentioning Libertarianism’s blindspot.”
As for your statement: “Corporations are governments.”, how did this happen? This was the result of a thoroughly ridiculous Supreme Court decision: http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/santa/ the infamous “Santa Clara” decision. This should never have happened, and would be reversed by any gov’t that took the designation “Libertarian” seriously. Getting corporations back to the original intent: a state charter for limited purposes and durations, subject to review by state gov’t’s, would put a stop to this corruption. Any corporation that attempted that could be dissolved as being against the public interest.
“…sometimes these people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate, and a very few people got very wealthy while the rest of us died of food poisoning or coal mine collapses or shirtwaist factory fires.”
OK, fine. However, technology wasn’t as advanced in those days, and a late 19th century factory was a nasty, noisey, dangerous place to work. As bad as it was, it sure did beat subsistance farming by a very large margin. Let us also not forget that those early factory workers were the seed of an up and coming middle class. Some few did get mega-wealthy, but how did they do it? John D. Rockefeller did so by selling lamp oil (a.k.a. kerosine) Rockefeller’s kerosine was much cheaper than whale oil, so more people could afford it. Not only did he help save the great whales from extinction, he improved a great many lives in the process of accumulating that wealth.
Same with Andrew Carnegie, who took a laboratory curiousity (the Bessemer process) and commercialized it. Carnegie’s steel built a great many things from ships to bridges that enhanced life for the masses.
Not to say that these guys were saints, they weren’t. However, they did get rich by making everyone a bit richer. That beats the old ways of getting rich by far: warring on your neighbours to pillage from them and enslave their citizens.
Buh … what pink rosy fictional book version of history did you read? … that lot got rich through monopolies and stripping everything they possibly could out of their workers … *blink*
I used to think I had an unfair view of Libertarians based on the fact that all of the ones I know are ass hats. By which I mean, “everyone deserves their fate”/fuck the poor, etc. And that as a socialist, my views sharply contrasted with theirs.
And now I read this post and I think this is a common feature O__o.
I’m actually greatful to Libertarianism in a wierd way. When I was 17 and first started using the internet, I was pretty left-wing, but in a very narrow way. When I found all the 17 year old Ayn Rand disciples online, I actually had to think about what I believed, and come to a more open-minded justification of those beliefs. So really, they helped me become a much better bleeding-heart lefty. :)
“If you just mention the word “externalities” to a libertarian, smoke comes out their ears.”
I did that the other day and their response was, “What’s an externality?”
Unfortunately, on some occasions when I have explained this to a Libertarian, he has responded with “Well, 19th Century America was not a TRUE libertarian society, because there was a government/people paid taxes/something else irrelevant”.
Similar, but even more mindboggling, results occur when I mention the lawlessness of Afghanistan: “Well, that’s not a REAL libertarian anarchy, it’s just chaotic warlordism, because they aren’t trying to consciously adhere to libertarian principles.”
Ooooookay, then! No true Scotsman would do that, huh?
The Invisible Hand famously has no sense of humor.
Beppie said:
I’ve always thought that being exposed to alternate viewpoints is essential to understanding your own. The Christian hatred of heresy and blasphemy seems to like the epitome of this; for some reason, the “one true faith” is too weak to withstand broader knowledge, but the “falsehood” of atheism is strong enough to stand up against constant attacks.
Flewellyn said:
A functional libertarian society requires everyone in it to adhere flawlessly to libertarianism? And that’s not seen as a pretty big flaw?
Damn. And I was just talking to someone who said we could fix the problems with our schools by giving them more money.
Proudhon’s link to the Propertarians is historical revisionism by ‘anarcho’-capitalists.
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secGcon.html
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secF7.html
Surely we’re not going to have to explain the difference between equivalence and set membership, are we??
“Corporations are governments” means “corporations belong to the set of types of governments”. It does not mean “corporations are exactly equivalent to governments, and therefor governments are exactly equivalent to corporations”.
For instance, corporations have certain properties that other governments do not necessarily share, the primary example being the profit motive; you could make a decent case for some non-corporate governments being motivated at least partly by profit for the rulers, such as feudal aristocracies, oligarchies, totalitarian dictatorships, and the like, but you will note that those types are in the set of authoritarian governments (of which set corporations are also a member), not the set of ALL governments.
Governments such as the various forms of democracy (republic, constitutional monarchy, direct democracy, etc), which as a rule do not have a profit motive, cannot be considered equivalent to corporations.
Scientific objective truth? bullshit. I knew I loved being a biologist since high school, where the teacher stated the “central dogma” of biology (that’s what they actually called it, for all of about 10 years).
DNA begat RNA which begat the Protien.
and then she’s like, Yeah, except for HIV and all the other retroviruses. Damn dogma allready has a big hole in it. There are allways exceptions.
My favorite libertarian story: I was drunk at a young democrats party and nearly got in a shouting fight with this (female) randroid who seemed to think that individual will to power was the prime mover in life, and that poor people were poor because they were weak and unworthy, and that her actions were moving her inexorably to a wonderful future.
I asked her were she wanted to be in ten years, and what she was doing to make that happen. I asked her what she was doing in the next fifteen min. to make that happen (uh, nothing, partying). Then I asked her what she was doing tommorow morning, and she said she had a court date for her second reckless driving offense.
Oh, here’s Exploding Sentence Number Seven:
“If you contract with a security company for police services, what is to prevent that company from using violent action to subdue or drive off its competitors, thus asserting a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, which is the very definition of a state?”
Fascinating links, BlackBloc. I especially like the alternative take on Stirner.
And of course, as SilverSomething points out above, there were other influences on the early proto-Libertarians. Philosophy is not genetics: a thought can have more than one mother. Proudhon certainly would have found Libertarians anathema. But if they’re gonna quietly claim him as an intellectual forebear, justifiably or no, I think that claim is fair game.
Indy said:
Exactly! Anyone who spends their time dealing with physical phenomena knows that “objective truth” is a constantly moving target. Anyone with a decent grasp of scientific history knows it too.
More importantly, scientists don’t really *talk* about objective truth. They talk about measured data, “the preponderance of evidence”, uncertainty, verifiability. Objective truth is a theological buzzword, not a scientific one.
True, but I can’t help but feel like Rand took that (along with everything else) to an extreme. It’s not enough to not be ashamed of ambition, talent, self-reliance, sex, whatever– you have to be completely vicious to everyone around you in the process. I can get behind the first part, but I can’t fathom how gratuitously sadistic so many of her characters are.
You smell. ;-) (I say this from living in a dorm that seems to be full of them)
In all seriousness, though, I didn’t just criticize engineers- I’ve known equally insufferable people in the other so-called “hard” sciences, and that’s because the same critique that Carl has of engineers applies to them as well. American society really over-values the sciences, in terms of both how well scientists are compensated relative to the rest of the population as well as the social prestige that they are endowed with. There’s this big, culture-wide thing that states that science and math are hard, and the logical conclusion is that everyone who does science and math is smarter than the rest of the population.
The inevitable result of this is a population of smug individuals who think their academic interests make them superior to the general population. Combine that with the fact that many educational institutions don’t require hard science students to have as well-rounded an education as the rest of us, and you get a big, seething, insufferable morass of ignorance and superiority. They are the smartest, they don’t have to know other fields because those fields are for less intelligent people, and they know more about the lesser fields than the people who specialize in them because they’re smarter.
Granted, not all sciencey-types are like that. However, that attitude is really prevalent. I’ve gotten into a number of knock-down drag-outs with my science friends over this stuff- they keep insisting that I make better grades than they do because I am “just an English major” and “everyone knows that humanities classes are easy.” I actually had to write up my schedule, sit them down, and show them just how much time I spend each day reading books, how many pages I read per week/semester, and how many pages I write. It was really, really obnoxious, and I’ve never encountered that attitude from people in other disciplines in the “soft” sciences or humanities.
in every work environemt i have encountered, there’s always been at least one libertarian- a straight, white guy.
the last place i worked the resident libertarian was a short, straight, weirdly charismatic, white guy who wore member’s only jacket with the wrong kind of irony and rapped! he said he was hardcore. he spit rhymes around how if we wanted starbucks to disappear from every street corner we should stop being such slaves to our lattes.
slaves to our lattes, y’all. if we want starbucks to disappear, send a message that the market can hear.
I always seem to join the Really Good discussions late. Instead of a nice, cogent argument, allow me to toss some Rand-grenades :
Corporations are Government
Amen to what Chris Clarke wrote. I’ve written as much here before, too. Corporations are an artificial construct by GOVERNMENT - they cannot exist otherwise. I want to know why Libertarians assiduously avoid explaining that. In fact, given the incredible power that corporations wield in the U.S., why aren’t Libertarians out in front of the idea of abolishing limited liability companies?
Despite its name of “National Socialism”, Nazi Germany was one of the first governments run by the corporate model. As I like to say, Auschwitz was a corporate venture (think IG Farben). The Nazis were big on privatization, too.
The Sanctity of Holy Property
When are we going to give the indians back their land? Or, as I suspect, does “property rights” really mean “white male rights”?
Public Property vs. Private Property
If the extreme Left (unlike Norbizness, who is just The Left) is represented by those who want to abolish all private property, what does that say about those who want to abolish all public property?
Yeah, that Andrew Carnegie. What a friend of the working man he was.
Starfish Girl said:
I think I’d qualify that with “can lead to” instead of “you get”, but yeah, I think that’s pretty much on target.
One of the saddest things I remember from college is friends of mine going into their “diversity” classes with the stated intention of being exactly the same person when they leave as when they went in. They will go into classes sure that they have nothing to learn about the subject, and inevitably, they leave not having learned anything. It’s tragic, a completely squandered opportunity to expand your horizons. I used to sneer at “liberal arts” education, and now I look back on it and wish colleges would make everyone spend their undergrad doing liberal arts, no matter what they wanted to do afterwards.
For the record, some of the kindest, most empathetic, most enlightened and (yes) smartest people I have known have been engineers. This was true back in college, too. Really, it’s up to the individual to react to their experiences, and people react in to the same education and culture in vastly different ways.
Anyway, sorry for the threadjacking. I’m done with this subject =)
“American society really over-values the sciences”
I really don’t think that’s the case. I think it might be more accurate to say that American society mysterizes the sciences, overstating their difficulty so people assume that only a select few can master them.
In a lot of our cultural discourse, the preface “Scientists say” or “Scientists believe” is thrown around so carelessly, it could just as easily be replaced with “Wizards say,” leading plenty of people in our society to dismiss any science that doesn’t suit them.
I think that’s a symptom of society skimming over complex subjects and dumbing them down, not a symptom of society over-valuing science.
The funniest thing about Libertarians is that they tend to view themselves as rugged individualists, islands of rational thought and clear-eyed competence. “Nobody helped me get where I am!” they proclaim in special snowflake certainty. Such bullshit. The only adult Libertarian I know went to public schools with the rest of us, received grants for college, and wouldn’t have survived to age 2 without treatment for his horrible asthma.
Funnily enough, he doesn’t view himself as “surplus” despite his rather obvious health issues.
Aren’t Libertarians just conservatives who want to smoke weed?
I think William F. Buckley used to say that, actually.
Did you compensate Buckley for using his intellectual property, Roxanne?
Actually, I think it was on page 7 of the Baltimore Catechism.
I love when you guys talk about me.
Always cheers me up. Somehow, I can never reconcile your view of “us,” and “us.”
I’ll only say this, if you want to learn about libertarianism, you need to read some “other” authors than those you attack. Talk about “strawmen.”
Rand is easy to attack, but she’s the wrong place to go if you’re genuinely interested in libertarians; on the other hand, she’s a good target for those looking for a strawman.
The only thing I ever got out of Ayn Rand’s books (besides thrills) was her idea that what really hot, hyper-accomplished rich women really dig the most is to be raped by Nordic looking ubermenschen possessing personalities indistinguishable from robots’s. I’d not have guessed that all on my own.
Oh, I still believe it to this day as a matter of revealed wisdom. Of course I’ve never actually met any of these haughty icy goddesses, as I never worked in a corporate office inside a mighty skyscraper. But even if I did, it don’t add up to no poon for me anyhow, on account of I always wear my all2human emotions out on my sleeve.
See? The guy at 8:40 pm is definitely way high.
Combine that with the fact that many educational institutions don’t require hard science students to have as well-rounded an education as the rest of us, and you get a big, seething, insufferable morass of ignorance and superiority.
Well roundedness works in both directions, requiring knowledge of both the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences. General education requirements almost always have a larger number of humanities and social science credits than natural science and math requirements, so it’s quite likely that scientists have more exposure to the humanities than people in the humanities do to science unless you’re at a specialized school like Caltech.
Sarah in Chicago Feb 23rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm:
“Buh … what pink rosy fictional book version of history did you read?”
Any history book which describes conditions in the US during the first decade of the 19th century, and the conditions as they were during the final decade of the same century. I’ll let you pick.
” …that lot got rich through monopolies and stripping everything they possibly could out of their workers … *blink*”
And, where, do you suppose those monopolies came from? Now, it can be said that Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Did those 95 out of every 100 users have someone put a gun to thier heads, march them down to Best Buy, make them buy Windows and install it, then stand by and make sure they used it?
Or did they decide to buy Windows because that’s what they wanted? I hear *a lot* of complaints from users about their Windows systems: “It crashes all the time.”, “I flunked the course when I lost all my work and the professor wouldn’t take ‘Windows ate my homework’ for an excuse”, “I got a nasty virus”, and so forth. When I offer to lend them my Linux install CDs, the excuses start: “It’s too hard”, “I can’t spend time learning a new op-sys”, “I want my games”. Suggest that they buy a Mac, and it’s: “They’re too expensive”. So whose fault is it really that Bill Gates has a desktop monopoly?
Similarly, people could have chosen to sit around in the dark instead of buying Rockefeller’s kerosine. That way, he never would have had a monopoly. They didn’t, and, so he did.
Mnemosyne:
“Yeah, that Andrew Carnegie. What a friend of the working man he was.”
Did you miss the part where I wrote: “Not to say that these guys were saints, they weren’t”? There were a lot of wrongs perpetrated — on *both* sides — then as now. Welcome to the imperfect human race. The disgusting behaviour in Homestead does not change the fact that Carnegie’s steel mills improved the lives of a great many people.
What “other” authors should we read? And why are there quotes around “other”?
Oh, damn, this guy isn’t worth talking to … there are so many fallacies in what he just wrote there’s nothing to start with …
I want to comment that this is a great article. Thanks for posting it.
Oh, I also want to mention that I’m a secretary in an engineering department of a university, and I find the aspiring engineers and (most of the) faculty to be delightful people. Engineers are great (but they won’t build my flying car.)
My usual disclaimer:
Karl Hess once told me that he thought Ayn Rand stole all her best ideas from Max Stirner. I disagreed. I didn’t think she was that well-read.
The piece on Stirner cited by BlackBloc is pretty good. There are no absolute prescriptions or proscriptions to be found in Stirner, save the avoidance of “fixed ideas.” If Mother Teresa were to tell him (and Stirner was a firm atheist), “Very well and good, but _I_ choose to serve _my own_ idea of God,” then what? The philosophy of egoism has no real answer, other than maybe, “Good for you, as long as you’re clear on whose responsibility it is.” And figuring out what one wants, and the getting it, those are the hard parts. What happens when you want contradictory or unrealistic things?
Resolve the contradictions? Isn’t “contradiction” a fixed idea, a spook? And how often have you gotten what you thought you wanted, only to discover that maybe that wasn’t it after all?
Ultimately, Libertarianism fails the Stirner test because Libertarians try to deny such things as empathy, compassion, and community. That constitites a diminishment of the self, not a realization of it.
As Charles Foster Kane fictionally said, it’s not hard to make money if all you’re interested in is making money. Of course, he had inherited a gold mine.
Here’s one of those quizes to test your commitment to libertarian ideals. But this one is much more mainstream.
www.politicalquiz.us
“Similarly, people could have chosen to sit around in the dark instead of buying Rockefeller’s kerosine. That way, he never would have had a monopoly.”
The vast majority of people don’t have the time to vet every single item they purchase to ensure their purchases aren’t supporting anything harmful or unethical or objectionable to them.
That’s why over time, people have charged the government with overseeing businesses: so that individuals can act in economically rational ways (buying the best products at the best price) while remaining at least somewhat assured that their money isn’t going to the Mafia, or a monopoly.
Karl Hess is a person I admired a lot.
Same goes for his son Karl.
Capital L Libertarianism is what happens when somebody spends 18 years in the basement of their parent’s big house playing D & D and dis and re-assembling their computers before deciding they suddenly have insight to personal responsibility, foreign policy, and of how the social structure (if they acknowledge it exists at all) is a Just So story.
I like to tell Libertarians that property is a legal fiction. I like to use the example of a plot of land. The only way you know it’s yours is that some agency that *everyone* adheres to has registered the fact that this bit of land bounded by this feature and that feature is yours.
Of course, I also like to tell them that the only problem I have with taxes is that we don’t pay enough. I think they usually write me off as at lost cause at that point.
I hate to ask, but does the lack of Dana and GBaker on this thread indicate that they’re off doing other things (it is the weekend) or that they’ve been banned?
I’m afraid to go checking in other threads to find out.
(Or, more aptly, I’m about to go out and may forget by the time I come back.)
I’m sort of baffled by the idea that going into the sciences makes one more likely to be a libertarian. Scientists have to be critical thinkers all the time, and they tend to apply it to more than just their work. I’m a physicist, and pretty much all the physicists I know are liberals, some quite far to the left and others just ordinary liberals. It’s rare to find a libertarian or any variety of right-wing person, as far as I can tell.
It also seems to me that you will find many computer programmers who are libertarian (just look at the discussion threads on Slashdot, and be horrified!), but I don’t think it’s so common among computer scientists.
The disgusting behaviour in Homestead does not change the fact that Carnegie’s steel mills improved the lives of a great many people.
Or, to look at it a different way, many poor and oppressed people have improved their lives by taken advantage of whatever opportunities they could find, including those offered by steel mills. I’m not very fond of the Great Man theory of history as it ignores the vast majority of people who have effected societal change.
In the immortal words of my long-ago friend Hannah:
I’ve always felt that this was all that needed to be said on the subject.
I have been bewitched by the Libertarian spell, and have only very recently emerged from it.
It was, I think, the result of a sense of creeping defeatism on my part. I never stopped, ideologically, being a liberal. I just became so intimidated by the Right-Wing juggernaut that I was convinced that we could only beat ‘em by appealing to the one thing we all seem to share in common: an attachment to (at least our own) freedom.
I began to see the light, first of all, when true believers to the Libertarian movement insisted upon calling me a liberal. I was never “real” enough for them, because I remained committed to social and economic justice. Most Libertarians could not possibly care less about those principles.
When I pointed out a fact that has been mentioned here, that a corporation is essentially a government in and of itself, I was tuned out and turned off.
Actually, it’s far easier to escape a particular government than it would be to escape from global corporatism. All you have to do, if you don’t like the government of one country, is move to another one. There is literally nowhere left on this earth you can go to escape the rule of the mega-corporations.
I still consider myself to be a libertarian-leaning (small-L) liberal. But in order to be true to my conviction that forced authority is evil, I must oppose corporatism even more than I do big-government tyranny. Tyranny in one form is no better than tyranny in any other.
I’m still rather disgruntled with the Democratic Party. Third parties have a romantic sort of appeal for me. Does anybody know very much about the Greens? I’ve heard some things about them that are good, and others that are terrible.
Are they really just spoilers who keep Democratic candidates from being elected, or are they the real hope for progressives?
Chris Clarke, editor of Terrain? I have some copies in my file.
Alan Greenspan as a young social darwinist was a member of a libertarian cult headed by none other than Ayn Rand. Libertarians influence on social and economic policies is more than one might expect.
From what I know of Stirner I believe his version of anarcho-individualism was anti-bourgeois and thus completely incompatible with modern libertarianism. His influence is wide but pretty unknown. Marx’s German Ideology is an attack on Stirner and the young Hegelians and is where Marx develops his theory of history. Also it’s thought that Nietsche ripped off a lot of his ideas from Stirner.
According to wiki the first use of the word libertarian was by a French anarcho-communist named Joseph Déjacque. In the non-English speaking world Libertarian is still leftist usually refering to anarchists or anti-leninists marxists.
Dominus Deus, Chris. Did Jim Henley recently hit you with his car?
Or did they decide to buy Windows because that’s what they wanted?
I think in most cases, they decided nothing of the sort, but Microsoft had pressured the computer manufacturer into preloading Windows, and few customers have ever had success getting Microsoft to honor its putative refund for the license they were required to purchase when they bought their computer. But yes, they should have been smart enough to go through Penguin Computing or whatever. That’s one of the things that pours grit into my fancy leather chaps about so many Libertarians: “Oh, well, if you were smart enough, you’d come out ahead.” Lots of people take the path of least resistance with Windows, sure. But why is it the path of least resistance? Its undoubted technical superiority?
Though I gotta say that SilverFox has done pretty well so far with a tough audience [Applause]. As might be expected,
are sentiments I definitely share.
But somehow it’s all spoiled for me by
which suggests that despite some promising skepticism about all concentrated power, SilverFox is a royal libertarian, rather than the real thing. Shame, really.
Carl Rennie
Feb 23rd, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Knights. Ka-nig-ets. Not nights. Sorry.
—–
You made beer shoot up into my sinuses. No fair.
Wow.
Not for ten years. Thanks for remembering!
yeah, mds, we’ve definitely lucked out in this thread with SilverFox being the main Lib contributor.
Sarah in Chicago, says…
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician walk into a room with a fire in the middle and a bucket of water in the corner.
The engineer takes the bucket of water and douses the fire.. The physicist takes the bucket of water pours a circle around the fire and lets the fire burn itself out. The mathematician walks into the room sees the fire and the bucket of water and leaves confident that there is a solution.
ba dum bum
During the French Revolution a priest, a lawyer and an engineer are to be guillotined.
The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing happens. The priest declares that he’s been saved by a miracle! The hand of God!. He’s let go.
The lawyer is put on the block. Same thing happens with the blade. The lawyer points out that pulling the lever constituted execution, and as he can’t be executed twice for the same crime they let him go too.
The engineer’s head goes on the block. He looks up at the guillotine and says, “Wait a minute, I see your problem….”
onymous: Libertarians aren’t necessarily overrepresented in the sciences, they’re overrepresented in engineering fields, including computer engineering and programming. Engineering thought is based on a binary system. Biological sciences, by necessity, have to subject data to far more variable tests than engineering sciences do. The phrase “nature vs. nurture”, for instance, is not a valid phrase in biological sciences, because the real answer isn’t one or the other, it’s both — and both to a lesser or greater degree, in multiple tiers of interaction with various levels of intensity.
The concept of depression, for instance, is something that cannot be approached in a binary fashion. Environment interacts with biology in various and sundry ways, and when the concept of spirituality gets into the mix as well, which it usually does in the case of this particular brain disease, the critical thinking involved is not and cannot be binary. It’s not 1 or 0, it’s both, or neither, or some fraction of the two.
ok, way up there in the thread, someone mentioned that one way to sort out what kind of libertarian you’re talking to is to mention, say, abortion. i think that’s a really true point, although in my experience it hasn’t helped sort out anything because ALL of the self-styled libertarians i’ve met have said shit like “…except on abortion”. what does that even MEAN, dude. i think that’s because all the ones i’ve met have been the “white college guy libertarian” type. i’ve never met a libertarian in the flesh who appeared to know any real libertarian theory (let alone realize the theory didn’t coincide with reality).
also, why didn’t anybody call out that dude who said “yeah the libertarian US of the late-19th century might have sucked, but it was still the best place in the world to live in at the time”? most people here are a lot smarter than i am, so i wish he’d been told to think about history a little. the u.s. was a shitty backwater for most of that century, and has only enjoyed this (arguable) “best place to live” honor for like the last fifty years.
I majored in computer science in the 90’s.
Math major plus stock bubble plus a low level econ course or two equals really, really stanky libertarianism. There’s something about that lack of social ability combined with studying an abstract pretend world of symbols and numbers that results in I wanna be RICH NOW, move to Silicon Valley, fuck the government, sell-your-mom-to-slave traders-libertarianism.
Well as luck had it, turns out that cutting taxes and regulations isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. The jobs moved from the Land of Freedom to Communist China and Socialist India. Yep turns out, all corporations really want is cheap cheap labor.
Most of these arrogant fucks lost their jobs (and so did I) between 2001-3, and they weren’t so mouthy after their jobs got offshored. Heh heh heh.
One thing I’d like to say, as a computer scientist and programmer, is that yes, it’s true a lot of computer science people, at least in college, are Libertarians.
But in my experience, none of the really good ones are anything of the sort.
The Libertarians in my comp-sci classes in college were generally the mediocre programmers who were happy just learning one language (or two, tops), didn’t study things outside of the curriculum, and approached the classes in terms of “completing the assignments to get the course credit”, not “learning to do nifty stuff with technology.”
These are the guys (yes, guys) who go on to work as code-grinding Java programmers in interchangeable jobs in the industry, churning out pages of functional-but-unimaginative code written using by-the-book standard practices, never questioning the methodology they were taught in school, not thinking too much about WHY the things they do work the way they do, and believing that Java/C++/C#/insert corporate flavor-of-the-month language is the best/only way to program. These are (most of) the Libertarians in computer science.
The ones who do truly good work, who know ten or more different languages, work on multiple operating systems, understand the fundamentals of how computers really work, push the boundaries of what’s possible with a computer, and make interesting and imaginative software, by and large are not Libertarian. Or conservative. Those who are political (many aren’t) call themselves liberals, progressives, humanists, or whatever. They’re hardly of a piece, of course, and many of them have differing opinions on various political issues (I’ve met a few who are a bit misogynist, to my chagrin), but Libertarianism is rare among the true greats, in my opinion.
It’s like the difference between Eric S. Raymond (open source evangelist, gun-nut, and Libertarian, who has actually written only a few useful programs and bloviates a lot in the right-wing blogosphere) and, say, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (inventor of the compiler, first woman to achieve the rank of Admiral in the US Navy, a true pioneer of the field and politically a moderate).
THANK YOU. I cannot remember how many times I’ve had to tell people pining for the days of nights in shining and damsels in distress that they wouldn’t be either, that statistically, they’d be the peasant living in extreme poverty and dying in their 40s.
Oh, I come from Irish stock - I know damned well where I’d be in the Middle Ages.
I have to admit I liked the bit in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle where the best aristocratic swordsman in all of England, armed with his pretty three foot long rapier, ran into an Irish bogtrotter - armed with a six foot long stick…
Why would anyone, attuned to “selfishness” want to put themselves through the burden of raising children?
More to the point, anyone who has raised a two year old would not be extolling the virtues of selfishness…
Inasmuch as they might lead the impressionable towards progressive little-l libertarianism, and therefore away from the ascendant proto-fascism that currently dominates the right wing of American politics, maybe we shouldn’t rip on Rand’s books too much.
Nah, I’ll do it if I want.
and this year i have also pointed them to that miracle of freedom Russia
Somalia, dudes and dudettes, Somalia. No government - must be utopia, right?
Sarah in Chicago said:
A functional libertarian society requires everyone in it to adhere flawlessly to libertarianism? And that’s not seen as a pretty big flaw?
Well, shit, if that’s a starting assumption a “real” communist society would beat a libertarian society’s ass.
(Sorry about the screwed up blockquote above)
Leonard:
Okay. All that we ask is that all corporations are as answerable to the people as government is. (We aren’t anti-business. We’re anti-exploitation.)
Regarding Engineers: I went to one of the best engineering schools in the world (granted, not an American engineering school) - and most of my closest friends are engineers in different parts of the world. Of all of these engineer-friends that I have, only one is libertarian. And not a capital L libertarian at that. A lot of my friends work in sustainable development, some of them do research on alternative energy, a large number of them work in Silicon valley, and are definitely left-liberal. They might not like big government, but they are definitely not averse to paying taxes.
It might be a cultural meme, but where I come from, engineers tend to be socially liberal. Even those who read Ayn Rand.
Given my experiences, the generalizations made about engineers seem somewhat unreasonable, but everyone has different perspectives and experiences.
Also…Noam Chomksy works at MIT, and he is very well respected (indeed, almost revered) by the a large portion of the MIT student body. He calls himself a libertarian socialist - which is VERY different from being libertarian.
Externalities are, in fact, the norm in almost every non-trivial case. Externalities are the rule. Not planning for externalities is like not planning for rush hour in your travel plans.
Most Americans are largely libertarian in their instincts thinking; “don’t tread on me” is a common theme across the spectrum. And the country already is largely libertarian, probably 70-80 on a scale of 100. Libertarian extremists want to move it to 99.9.
I was active in the Maryland LP for many years, largely over sexual and drug war issues that elected Democrats outside of Berkeley won’t touch. I am still registered Libertarian in my state to avoid having them - “them” being a large number of people at my wedding, which was largely a libertarian Mafia wedding - suffer ballot access penalties (which are outrageous procedural barriers to self-governance.) But I am working to elect libertarian-leaning Democrats (like Tester, Webb, probably Richardson) and have given up on the National LP since it became clear that moderate libertarians like me had little future in the LP.
For what it is worth, lately I have met QUITE A FEW former Republicans who now call themselves Libertarians, because they are too embarrassed to be associated with the Rethug party anymore.
Radalan, Nazi Germany was one of the first governments run by the corporate model.
Copied that from the Italians to keep the old and new money happy, and dressed up in socialist-but-not-really-rhetoric to get the socialist-leaning workers and the socialist-fearing middle class. And fed money gained by robbery into the system.
On computer scientists, engineers and Libertarianism:
I feel that the appeal of Libertarianism to many computer geeks is twofold. First, they want to be left alone. (And they run into a significant lot of government folly, because there are enough computer-illiterate policy makers). Second is an aesthetic appeal: A stable, running system based on very simple modules and a single mode of interaction. Pretty, like medieval science based on the four elements is pretty.
I wonder, though, why engineers would fall for a system with no error tolerance. (What Nineteen Kilo calls “The problem of the asshole”.)
Trystero: Of course, I also like to tell them that the only problem I have with taxes is that we don’t pay enough.
And I’ve got at least one set of numbers to prove it. Paying for stuff wholesale via taxes was much cheaper than paying for the same “as you go” and feeding a whole hierarchy of overpaid CEOs instead of a handful of civil servants.
Philosophically inclined readers might be interested in the defense of left-libertarianism by Michael Otsuka of University College London: Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
As a capital L, Libertarian I think youve got the ideology all wrong.
Its about the feeling that you depend on yourself in this life.
I agree you are right that if we all work together in a semi-socialist society we will get further…but that is not how I want to live my life.
I don’t want the government to take my hard earned money and give it to some bum(s).
Is that too much to ask for?
Do you like having your money taken from you so that some government employee who has a guaranteed job for life; while the rest of us are at risk of being fired at a moments notice?
If you dont mind your money taken by the government…just dont take mine…thats all I ask.
And yes I agree Somalia is more of a utopia…you are left to your own devices to survive…that is a life worth living..not one where you are baby-sat like in Canada or UK etc
Trystero: Of course, I also like to tell them that the only problem I have with taxes is that we don’t pay enough.
How much did you pay last year?
I was listening to Rush in my car one afternoon on the way to the pistol range (isn’t that a great sentence already?), when a caller attacked him for making eight million dollars a year, but being so cheap he only paid his maid minimum wage (Rush was talking about the minimum wage bill).
Rush proceeded to tell him that he was truly embarrassed and humiliated that some of his listeners might believe he ONLY made eight mil, and that in fact he paid his MANY maids far more than minimum wage. One of the all time funny Ruch episodes. It’s at times like that, I love the guy. Other times, yeeech.
And Chris, I slept all night, and woke up still high. Ah, it’s great to be alive and a libertarian.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004518.html is an article I wrote a while back outlining the argument that it’s not the Government’s business to be insuring investors against liability - that, in fact, the “limited liability corporation” is a massive government subsidy in the form of free liability insurance to the investor.
I’ve yet to see a decent refutation of this position and I think that libertarianism without limited liability is a very interesting - and as far as I can tell, largely unexplored - territory.
What do you think?
I am a Libertarian. Believing in small government does not make you a freak, it’s actually what this country was founded on. That is, until people took the system we had and extended the power of the federal government to the point we’re at today.
I suggest you actually do some research. Visit the Libertarian Party’s website (http://lp.org/) and learn a little more about something you apparently do not understand.
Libertarianism springs, at least for myself, from a simple question of morality: When is it okay for *anyone* to coerce (via threat of imprisonment and/or physical violence) someone else to do something? Is that ever okay for you to do if yourself or a loved one are not under physical threat of danger? That is a seriously perplexing moral problem and libertarians generally consider it to be the most serious one we face when consider giving government the legal right to that power.
Compassion? How often this jibe is thrown at libertarians, that they just lack compassion. What the hell does that have to do with anything? No one is being told they cannot be compassionate (that would be completely anti-libertarian) and we generally resent being coerced to give to someone else’s *idea* of what is compassionate, via the hands of inefficient, money-siphoning government bureaucrats.
“And some of them are smart people despite it all: they’ve just been sadly misled.”
This sounds like a claim of “false consciousness.” Could it be, *gasp*, that libertarians have good and sound reasons for being, well, libertarians?
Here’s a great way to dismiss any kind of philosophical, religious, or political belief system. You think up the most ridiculous and extreme examples of that belief system and then sweep the whole of the movement under that rug. And it works! At least judging by all the critically thinking challenged people who *nod* to some of the silly examples presented here.
Let’s try it with some other groups.
For Liberals: “Oh, all the liberals I have met thought people need to be coddled by the government 24/7. Think of any human action and they’ll say, ‘man, there should be a law against that. People need to be protected.’ Why if they had their way, everyone would be required to walk around wearing helmets wherever they went.”
For Christians: “Every single Christian I have met thinks gay people are going to hell, no woman has the right to get an abortion, the earth is 6,000 years old, we should kill all Iraqis, and that man walked the earth with dinosaurs. god, I hate them.”
For environmentalists: “I really really hate those people. What they all really want is to kill all humans (except themselves) so that the earth can be left to only plants and animals.”
Sure, you can find examples of these people like this in any of these groups. But only the really simple minded think that the most extreme and ridiculous examples define the movements as a whole.
How can it be “fair” that the majority of our tax dollars are spent on the Welfare and Warfare state? Aren’t there millions of American’s who deeply oppose that their dollars are used to fund the occupation of Iraq or the soon to be bankrupt Medicare and Social Security systems? Pacifist shouldn’t have to pay a penny to support the Pentagon, I shouldn’t have to pay a penny into a Public School system which forbids even the poorest parents from obtaining vouchers. Why should anyone be coerced into supporting causes they don’t believe in? How is that a characteristic of a moral or free society? These are the questions I find myself asking when I consider my Libertarian beliefs. Issues that I reflect on when I look at how many different taxes I pay (and how much they take), when I see the horrible results of our public school systems and when I read about the inner-city drug-related gang wars, deaths in Iraq, growth of the nanny state and the answers I get from Democrats and Republicans (the answer is to put more of OUR people into office). Discuss….
Carl R says: You can still be a very good person with a very inflated opinion of your own intelligence
I have a brother who’s an engineer - a good person, active in his church and community service projects - but who is also a smug bastard who thinks that because he is successful, anyone can be. His thinking tends to be literalist; what is, is, with no reason other than that’s the way god did it. I think engineers sometimes fall into this kind of thinking because their profession and skills require them to acquire a vast amount of received information and be good at applying it. They don’t have to have the critical thinking skills that scientists, artists, etc., do.
But if you tell them to read Cyberselfish, they may wind up with the parts about geek sex, such as geeks all being into s/m because otherwise they wouldn’t know what to do next.
Well, based on other contributors who were awake while I was asleep, this engineer = libertarian thing seems to be linked with software engineers and computer science folks. I owe you an apology Carl. I am a ChemE and have worked with fellow ChemEs, MechEs, Material Science folks, and the odd IndustrialE, but never with software engineers (see, I don’t even know if you abbreviate yourselves the way I’m familiar with!). I was pissed not b/c you were ‘hitting close to home’ but that your characterization was something I was wholly unfamiliar with, and disparaging to boot. I still disagree that science (non-computer science, anyway) attracts people with libertarian tendencies. If anything, becoming aware of the interdependence of steps in a process required to achieve a desired outcome should make one less likely to believe in their own total independence or the power of their will. But I’m glad I was able to separate our experiences.
Libertarians can be described as being either:
1) Naive (or stupid, if you feel uncharitble towards them)
2) Cruel
Naive, if they truly believe everyone would benefit from a libertarian society, cruel, if they know better and just do not care.
TomG, you have cleverly hit upon the very reason that liberals get mad at Libertarians.
…when “someone else” doesn’t respect the same rule. If I eschew violence and all forms of coercion, I have no way to influence my next-door neighbor Bob, who beats up people who refuse to give him money. Out of pure selfishness, if I can’t muster any empathy for his other victims, I have a responsibility to prevent Bob from being a violent sociopath; I choose to invest that responsibility in a government, which in turn passes and enforces laws against protection rackets.
It’s a kind of “social contract”, to coin a phrase which I’m absolutely certain wasn’t used by any Enlightenment philosophers of note.
As several someones upthread commented, a free, libertarian society can’t exist if any number of individuals choose to reject its philosophy–and that’s a pretty damned significant flaw.
Hey, look! The entire Libertarian Party came by for a visit.
Oh, I come from Irish stock - I know damned well where I’d be in the Middle Ages.
Heh. The Renaissance Faire Fallacy is not unlike the Shirley MacLaine Conundrum in which everybody was a princess or a warrior or a sage in a past life. I don’t believe in past lives and as someone from a long line of meat packers, train scrubbers and bargewomen I don’t even want to.
Em, I’m pretty sure software engineers don’t call themselves “SoftEs”. (c:
Believing in small government does not make you a freak, it’s actually what this country was founded on.
Oh, so that’s why President Washington invoked martial law to put down the taxpayer revolt known as the Whiskey Rebellion, and had a Treasury Secretary pushing for a strong central bank and powerful federal government. It was all because of his libertarianism. It’s all much clearer now; thank you for stopping by to tell us that we have no understanding of American history.
SilverFox and Libertarian - Thank You!
Please allow me a brief introduction. I am not a trust fund baby and neither of my divorced-when-I-was-four parents had a cent to their name.
My mother held, at one time, 3 jobs, worked for the city, then for the Post Office. My father, with the help of my second Mom, put himself through college, right through his Ph.D. My sister and I defined “Latch-Key Kids” 10 years before the term was ever used.
I did a brief stint - 1 year - in a private school before I was returned to public education for lack of capital - so, essentially, I was “educated” through the public school system. I did attend college and graduated; I got through it with loans, academic scholarships, filing at a law firm, waitressing at diners, working in a distribution plant out in the middle of nowhere, working as an RA and helping people with their PC’s.
There are several people who helped me along the way - not because they had to, but somehow, out of the goodness of their heart, they chose to. So put it in your head right now, that I am not a trust fund baby and I know well that I didn’t get to where I am today without the help of many people. I am keenly aware of and grateful for their contribution.
Now, I AM a Libertarian.
No, I’m not a purist and yes, I know a few. Binary thinking is not my forte unless I’m using a computer.
But I do have a few basic tenets that seem to grate against bleeding-heart liberals. So here we go.
1. My Body, Not-YOUR-Business
Let’s consider abortion. This falls under the “my body, not your business” tenet. We shouldn’t even HAVE abortion laws but some group of someones out there think they know better than me what to do with my body and my life and want to take away my right to self-determination, so now we have a “law” to protect MY inherent, natural right.
Before someone jumps up and screams, “She’s SO selfish!” I’ll submit that a measure of selfishness is required in this life and benefits not only me, but you as well, and potentially the child I may not want. (Sorry, but that is what abortion really boils down to).
What you should come away with here is the “My body, Not-YOUR-Business” tenet. The corollary being, “Your body, Not-MY-Business.”
2. Unless I am hurting YOU or infringing upon YOUR Rights, leave me alone like I leave you alone.
If you want to smoke dope, snort coke, or shoot crack, what business is it of mine? Unless you are infringing upon my rights, this is none of my business.
If I want to have oral sex, anal sex, sex with with another woman, sex in groups, what business is it of yours or the State? It’s not! I promise to let you live your life as you choose. Why? Because it is YOUR life. I expect the same.
Will the country collapse? Fall apart? No. But a few right-wing religious conservatives may lose a bit of income preaching hell, fire and damnation. That’s alright, they’ll find a way to roll with the changes in their business model.
3. My money and property are mine, NOT yours, NOT the State’s.
Does this make me evil? No.
Do I share? Yes. Why? Because I want to. Surprised?
There is a very scary segment of “society” that believes that making money is bad, that any person that makes a profit or business that makes a profit and grows, is evil.
They believe that a business owner is not “working” and is magically “profiting” off the sweat of her employees; that somehow, that business person has no right to take an idea she has, build on it and profit from it. And that if she does, she is the reason why we have poverty in America.
And worse, there are people who think they have a “Right” to the spoils of MY sweat! They’d like to stick their hands in my pocket and claim my profit because I am doing “better” than they are (which, of course, must be wrong).
I am no different than you. There is no silver spoon in my mouth. And even if there was, SO WHAT! You have every right to choose your own path in life.
Really, the issue is one of Personal Responsibility and who we see as determining the course of our lives. I see myself as responsible for my life. I don’t expect you to carry me. And I do not want to carry you. I expect you to be living your life as YOU choose, without making excuses for why you can’t do this and why you can’t do that, or “they” (with reference to “big business”) control everything.
I do not think that 51% of the population of this country should determine HOW I live my life. That is the most dangerous kind of “majority.”
The fact of the matter is, no, you do not need to buy Windows software. And questioning WHY Windows is the path of least resistance just takes the focus off the real issue, which is this: you DO have choices.
(But I will answer your question: Windows is the path of least resistance because people, over the past twenty+ years, have voted with their pocketbooks and MADE IT THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE.)
It’s not anyone’s FAULT you only know Windows and no one is keeping you from learning any other operating system. No one is stopping you from DOING THE WORK OF ACQUIRING NEW KNOWLEDGE.
You do have choices; you are not a victim of some namess, faceless machine.
You really CAN choose not to buy a PC. You can choose to build one yourself, you can choose not to have one, you can choose an Apple product. But if you choose to purchase a PC and use Windows, for God’s sake, don’t complain that you are a victim of Bill Gates.
You can choose to start your own business too. You can choose this. No one is stopping you from taking the risk of entering the free market and doing the work of starting your own business.
You can choose to work for someone else. No one is stopping you from finding the job you are happy with, no one is keeping you in that job, no one is stopping you from making more money.
You CAN find another job, negotiate for the combination of salary and benefits that suit you and you CAN choose other work. Stop complaining that the person or company you work for is “making all of that money.” Get off your butt and do for yourself if you really feel that way! No one is in your way.
My Dad, on occasion, would tell me, “No one said the world was fair.” He’d say this to me because I have a very naive streak in me, still, that wants to believe in goodness and fairness. I want to believe that people will treat all others fairly, and be just.
But when you understand that this is not the case, there there is no law in the Universe that says that all will be treated equally, fairly and justly, you begin to understand your own personal responsibility - to YOURSELF and then to your family should you choose to have one!
You are responsible for yourself - for not only your actions, but for your own protection, as well. You are responsible for protecting the Rights you have as an American. YOU are responsible for protecting yourself from predatory employers, predatory competitors and predatory government. Why? Because there is no law that says the 800lb. gorilla will not eat you because you are a nice, giving person.
The other bit of wisdom my Dad left me with was this: Sometimes, YOU do have to stand up and defend yourself and your rights. When you do not understand your rights, you stand to lose your rights.
You know, my own experience as a science student and engineering intern prepared me to recognize in Marxism a straightforward, robust, sensible and workable model of the capitalist society I actually lived in. Whereas I shared with other Caltech undergrads a near-instinctive revulsion for the so-called “discipline” of mainstream, marginalist economics, which has absolutely no scientific value whatsoever and serves exclusively as an engine of pro-capitalist ideology.
Few of my peers at Tech ever became Marxists, I suppose. But I think fewer still of them have any respect for academic economics, and fewer yet have found any practical application for its vacuous reasoning. Except, I suppose, in that it justifies by handwaving sophistry the social order we’ve got.
“Objectivism,” eh? I wonder how many engineer types who adhere to various so-called “libertarian” theories ever notice the objective fact that few of them are or ever will be independent businessmen, and if they did make that leap they would cease to be engineers. In the real world engineers and scientists are people who draw paychecks working for some institution, public or private (but the private ones generally derive their revenue in the last analysis from guv’mint funding) which they have no control over and for which they produce product for someone else’s profit.
OTOH I fully endorse the theory that such self-glorifying myths are embraced by the geek squad in part because they give a quick and easy self-esteem boost for people who, however valuable their skills may be, generally grew up rather inept socially. Perhaps Caltech was too extreme an instance of this general social pathology to generalize from, but I can testify personally that one motive for me to go into science in the first place was the desire to redeem long years of childhood misery by attaining arcane knowledge that I equated with power, and the notion that I would someday have a general revenge on the dull and cruel kids I was surrounded by had a lot to do with it.
When I learned to mellow out a little and like people better, I dropped out.
Either you’re under the impression that this is a site where people defend anti-abortion laws, or you believe that a federal law exists protecting a woman’s right to choose; either way, you’re sadly mistaken.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the tenets of the Church of Mouse and Disco Ball. The list of sex acts disapproved of at Pandagon of is pretty short, and mostly involves dead animals (and even then, only because of the thorny issue of consent).
These are unrelated statements, but both are false. First, your property is yours because the mechanism of government protects your “right” to own it. Continued generation of income depends on the protected climate provided by government; taxes exist so that the government can continue protecting that climate. Second, you’re battling a strawman: the segment of “society” that believes profit is intrinsically evil is vanishingly small, just as misled as the segment that believes it’s inherently good, and certainly not present in the comments on this thread.
Ursula leGuin has a very interesting book that looks into an anarchist colony. As with much of her work, your point of view can influence your reading of it. I wouldn’t want to live on Anarres, or in Urras for that matter.
Libertarians generally believe someone shouldn’t be able to “initiate” force on another person. If one of those people pulls out a .22 and blows Bob away, that’s self-defense. If every person he ever beat up jumped out of the bushes after the first punch, then too bad for Bob.
I don’t think anyone would object to a third party, such as yourself, stepping in to help someone once violence has been initiated. Most libertarians would say Bob revoked his right not to have force initiated against him when he initiated force on another.
There are also more peaceful means you could use, like contractual agreements (did you & Bob freely join a neighborhood association? Does the contract have a no-violence clause?) or blacklists (”sorry, Bob, you can’t shop here anymore”).
Wow. Another mindless rant against Libertarians. How trite and predictable. No meaningful analysis of what Libertarians actually think, just a pointless smear job using a lot of guilt-by-association. Congratulations, you must be very proud.
Oh, no.
The Libertarians are accusing me of having a simplistic outlook.
(My snark aside, though, I am grateful for those folks who have shown up to argue constructively, even if peeved at me.)
The Pee Wee Herman defense has always been one of my favorites.
There’s case law, though. I get the feeling FemaleLibertarian wants to live in the kind of world that doesn’t need Roe v. Wade.
This might help to clarify positions of aggression/coercion and free association in regards to libertarian theory. It also shows how “social contract” doesn’t necessarily have to exist with a centralized government. I believe that many with libertarian views actually have more faith in society (and the individual’s liberty of free assocaiation in that society) than in government.
www.mises.org/story/1185
Per Dave,
“There’s case law, though”
Thank you Dave for recognizing my quotes around the word, “law.”
And yes, I would like to live in the kind of world that doesn’t need a Roe v. Wade. The crux of Libertarianism for me goes back to a “Live and Let Live” sentiment. (And, yes, I see the irony in that given the abortion topic.)
Heh. This post made it to Reddit, which is just crawling with privileged computer-programmer/engineering type “libertarians.” I suspect that’s where the deluge of simplistic defenses is coming from.
As for libertarianism, I think it’s awfully telling what issues get treated as “social liberty” and what don’t. For most of the libertarians I’ve seen, the “social” side of libertarianism is guns and drugs - issues that directly affect the straight, white, middle-to-upper-class men that form the libertarians’ core demographic. Issues that don’t directly affect these guys get ignored or dismissed. (Hell, even Wendy McElroy has criticized libertarians for not being feminist enough.)
I’ve never seen a libertarian party stance on abortion that’s genuinely pro-choice. They don’t want to alienate the guns-and-drugs conservatives, so if they don’t go all out and call abortion “initiation of force against the fetus” they’ll just say “well, the state shouldn’t pay for it.” Ask them about gay marriage and they’ll say “the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all.” Then you ask them what should happen when a homosexual person dies intestate leaving behind a widow/widower.
There is a very scary segment of “society” that believes that making money is bad, that any person that makes a profit or business that makes a profit and grows, is evil.
They believe that a business owner is not “working” and is magically “profiting” off the sweat of her employees; that somehow, that business person has no right to take an idea she has, build on it and profit from it. And that if she does, she is the reason why we have poverty in America.
That’s quite an impressive strawman you just knocked down.
Making money is, all else being equal, a good thing. As G.K. Chesterton once put it, the problem with too much capitalism is not that it leads to too many capitalists, but that it leads to too few of them.
Yes, Chris, it’s a simplistic argument, and a typical argumentative fallacy, to make sweeping statements and/or to build your arguments on a house of straw. Hyberbole and conflation are other argumentative fallacies offered up here. As well as sarcastic dismissals.
There are also more peaceful means you could use, like contractual agreements (did you & Bob freely join a neighborhood association? Does the contract have a no-violence clause?) or blacklists (”sorry, Bob, you can’t shop here anymore”).
And you enforce these agreements how exactly? With big, bad ol’ government? If so then there goes your whole “no violent, coercive state” thing out the window.
And if you’re asking me (not to overly personalize things here) to help protect your assets then I’d expect to have some kind of stake in the matter. Otherwise we’re really in the Hobbesian state of nature.
I’ll use your comments Chris, as well as many others here, as typical examples of fallacious argumentation for the class I teach in critical writing. Thanks, you’ve given my students a treasure trove of material to work with.
You seem to have confused this post with a forensics team drill, impknish.
Summarizing all the comments:
We smart, they dumb.
Quality discourse!
“And you enforce these agreements how exactly? With big, bad ol’ government? If so then there goes your whole “no violent, coercive state” thing out the window.”
Most libertarians are not against the existence of the state to support negative rights, so it’s not a contradiction that we’d want the police and the courts to function to protect the innocent against aggressors. It’s only the small minority of anarcho-capitalists who would reject a state for this purpose.
Libertarianism is actually a pretty big tent. Personally, I guess I’m a small l libertarian. I’d want a much more limited government than we have now -end foreign interventionism, legalize all drugs, end tariffs and subsidies to offer truly free trade, stop corporate welfare, improve school choice, support civil liberties and stop the government from snooping into our bedroom and other private places (so to speak…), etc. But at the same time, I favor laws to protect the environment (as I see it, pollution and other sorts of environmental damage is also a form of aggression) and I also think government has a place to support a robust social safety net. This net needs to be cast, however, in a way that does not lead to moral hazzard; a negative income tax is a good example of that.
Chris Clarke, how dare you snark at a teacher of critical writing! Don’t you know that one of the tenets (I dearly wanted to write “tenants” but that would have gotten us into all sorts of Propertarian details) of Libertarianism is the right to be free of all snark?
(WARNING: I’m a Libertarian, so feel free to shut your mind now.)
1) You’ve got your libertarian aviary a bit wrong. Yes, many of the most active libertarians are assholes, much like the most active Greens, Republicans, and Democrats. Yes, many Objectivists and L/libertarians use their philosophy as an excuse to neglect their children and spouses and to justify their acerbic tone towards those they disagree with, much like others. However, the most abusive and wingnut libertarians, the most egregious trolls on fora, are not Libertarians. They don’t get along with anyone, especially not individualists who refuse to be bullied. Often they drift off to the Republicans, Democrats, Greens, or attempt to plant their flag on a fledgling political movement. They are never an official anything for very long. Come on over to “Hit and Run” sometime and see your cast offs troll us posing as “D”emocrats.
2) Your political quiz example is a nice piece of rhetoric, but it is nothing more than a mind closer. The political quizzes that are alluded to are usually only 10 questions and are actually very useful for people of all political stripes. (Why didn’t you link to them so that others could see just how “awful” they are?) If you are a Democrat or a Green, you SHOULD truly believe in strongly limiting economic freedom to constrain those with resources from abusing their influence and very moderately to minimally limiting social freedom only in the furtherance of that goal. That’s the party platform and has been for decades now. If you are a Republican, you SHOULD truly believe in limiting social freedom to maintain a traditionally moral society and only limiting economic freedom to facilitate limiting social freedom. I cannot in the slightest imagine how these quizzes could possible “trap” anyone into buying the libertarian philosophy of maximum economic and social freedom.
3) You don’t really need to dig that far to find skeletons in the libertarian, Libertarian, or Objectivist closets. For the most part, they are right out there for all to see. Liberty magazine has repeatedly aired out the dirtiest of mundane laundry in the Libertarian Party. Reason magazine has pretty fully aired out Ayn Rand’s glaring hypocrisies. Would mentioning that Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot and their enormous body counts were a part of the Democrat’s ideological legacy? Somehow I doubt it. Besides, their sins don’t necessarily bear on the ideology, in as much as it is a cohesive one, of the Democratic Party any more than Ayn Rand’s paranoia bear on the principles of the Libertarian Party.
4) [rhetoric] If organizational governance is the Libertarian blindspot, it is also the Democratic sucking chest wound. So, pretending that we live in a world where there is a “class of people” who can’t just “get another job”, where there isn’t a multibillion dollar job search industry, where “Help Wanted” signs for jobs of all wage and skill levels aren’t everywhere you look, the Democrats would have us working for the government essentially. Yeah, our paychecks might say “Megacorp”, but the government would determine if we got fired or got a raise. Democrats also aren’t so fond of federalism, so there’s no state shopping either, just the feds. That means we’ll all be working for one huge monopoly on working conditions, wages, etc. That’s great as long as the great beneficent Democratic Party holds power. What about when they lose an election, after all “majority rules”, right? So, when the Fascists get voted in and have all the gays fired, well that’s just democracy in action, right? I apologize for the rhetoric and I’m out of time to devote to this.
I recommend that you tell the asshole L/libertarians that you meet to go fuck themselves, but that you truly start communicating with the ones who aren’t assholes. We’re over here trying to do the same with the Democrats that we meet. Well, at least some of us are. Cheers.
George Will once said something along the lines of:
“Libertarians will never be powerful but will always be relevant.”
You, on the other hand, will always be neither.
Hi. I’m the Constitution. Remember me? You should read me sometime. I explain everything. In fact, if you did read me, you’d find that most of the government programs out there are unconstitutional. What say you now, liberal?
This seems like the weirdos on one side of the fence casting feces at the weirdos on the other side of the fence. Yes, there are a lot of bizarre people who’ve latched on to parts of libertarianism(and from the sounds of it, anarchism, which they claimed was libertarianism) and given it a bad name. I think I could come up with a similar list of all the strange people who’ve latched on to pieces of other philosophies and ran with them, giving them a bad name as well. Who here hasn’t met the wacko communist, or socialist, or republican.. etc…
This thread is filled with straw men. Although I have to admit having joked that the California Libertarian Party mascot should be a ferret smoking a joint and wearing a Star Trek uniform… but I digress. I understand the point of this thread probably wasn’t to come to some understanding but to vent and make snarky comments. Isn’t that what the internet is all about? But please, at the end of the day, remember that there are some generally well-balanced folks who still believe government is too big, that as much as we’d like it to fix some things, there are things it just can’t do(like be free from corruption, or rebuild Iraq, or raise your children). Then again, there are some things it can do - like provide for the common defense, protect us from each other(not from ourselves), and enforce equal protection for all. The idea, at least to me, is limited government, not no government.
I think we’re getting most of our visitors from Reason. They’re trying to figure out what name I post under. (Snerk!)
The major reason I don’t believe in big-L-Libertarianism is because we have never had a stable society/economy that works on those lines in all of history. If we haven’t had something like it show up already, it’s probably not stable enough to be a realistic social/economic system. We’ve seen some pretty crazy set-ups already–from Calvin’s Geneva to Israeli kibbutzim to Soviet-era communism to 1950s housewife/breadwinner to present-day people living in the wilderness. Notice that none of them last that long. (Heck, the 1950s housewife/breadwinner setup didn’t even last 20 years–as shown by the rebellions in the 1960s.)
Libertarianism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction: the only way a Libertarian society could exist is if all the people involved decided of their own accord to follow all the tenents of libertarianism–which would, in the end, mean control of society through internalized controls.
From THAT viewpoint, the most supremely libertarian society on Earth is Japan.
Actually, the quote is, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
As for the “strawman,” I encounter, on a regular basis, people who blame their “situation” - or whatever they conceive it to be - on “big business” or “the boss.”
Just last week I was listening to a woman tell me she cannot “get ahead,” and proceeded the place the blame on credit card companies, business (all businesses in her opinion!) and her low pay (the government agency she works for doesn’t pay her enough and takes advantage of her); meanwhile, she says, “companies are getting rich.”
As if that is wrong. And as if those companies are the reason she cannot get ahead.
Yes, she feels trapped and I completely understand that feeling. But, she took the credit extended by the credit card companies. She chooses to work for the agency she works for.
This is a woman who has no family obligations, no children to take care of, no mortgage. Yet she feels trapped and blames everyone but herself for her situation.
That strawman is real.
Then there are others who look at the salaries of CEO’s and believe they should not “make” that kind of money. Again, another real strawman.
The argument has nothing to do with who works “harder” (the janitor or the CEO). It has everything to do with perceived value and the availability of persons with the knowledge to deliver that perceived value.
I didn’t know there was a cap on the amount of money a CEO “should” make. I don’t think there is a cap on the amount of money a janitor “should” make.
Do I see some CEO salaries as insane? Yes. Do I think we as a society should implement laws to redistribute those monies. No. It’s not OUR money.
I am not arguing that barriers do not exist, that injustice does not exist and that people do not ever need a helping hand. I’ve experienced discrimination, I’ve had the pleasure of watching an 800 lb. gorilla attempt to extort my business for that which I legally owned and there have been many times in my life when the generosity and kindheartedness of another person helped lift me from my “station.”
I’m just not in favor of an expansion of government that seeks to address those barriers and injustices by forcibly reaching into my pocket for money I have earned while limiting the freedoms granted me by virtue of my American citizenship.
Thank you for putting in the time and effort to painstakingly state the obvious in a manner that even deluded imbeciles should be able to understand.
You made my day.
And this gets back to my question which I ask, over and over: “what is libertarianism?” As soon as you press self-identified (rational) libertarians about things like externalities, they start hedging their bets–well, no, we’ll keep the EPA around. Oh, and the FDA. And yeah, we’ll need enough gov’t to provide police and law courts….and yeah, we’ll agree that you can’t assume information is infinitely available and the time to do due diligence isn’t zero….
Pretty soon, you get them to admit that aside from a few tweaks, the world they would like to see is close to what we have already. (As said, these are the rational ones–the ones that DO admit history has shown we’re either going to get a paying-taxes-to-the-gov’t or a paying-protection-money-to-the-Warlords setup, and the former is better.)
The crazy ones are the ones who run for POTUS on the Libertarian platform.
As a pro market libertarian, I have to say I thought that whole bit about the graphs was pretty funny. Those short political quizes are pretty bogus and it’s about time someone made a good joke about it. As to the short LCDs:
1. American libertarianism is distinct from Continental libertarianism; and anyway focusing on the evolution of the word is obviously entering a game of semantics that is entertaining and interesting at best, distracting at irrelevent at worst.
2. I guess this is the same thing. I know you will accuse me of making an irrelevent point about wasteful inefficiency and functional redundacy, but I won’t.
3. Ok, now this is an actual argument. I won’t ruin the efficacy of your LCD sketch here by going into the details, but this is where we enter not only a discussion of ethics and a politico-economical discussion about the distinction between different types of “government”, but also (and some would say most importantly) a discussion about the logical implications of attempting to realize whatever sort of society you think should exist. That is, here we enter economics, the invisible apodictic, sophist web of deceipt that libertarians have been weaving for over a centruy, waiting to ensare the proletariat…
Bastiat is highly recommended for his discussion of economic sophisms…
Sam
Rimfax said, “I recommend that you tell the asshole L/libertarians that you meet to go fuck themselves, but that you truly start communicating with the ones who aren’t assholes. We’re over here trying to do the same with the Democrats that we meet. Well, at least some of us are. Cheers.”
YES!! I could not agree with you more.
There are many important things progressives can learn from libertarians. Unfortunately the Prick Factor makes it hard to really connect, but there are still libertarians out there who can coherently argue their case without resorting to Randroidisms. It’s worth dropping by Reason Hit&Run from time to time and skimming through the posts. I’ve certainly learned a great deal from it.
The progressive vision of the state has serious implementation problems - too often regulations are promulgated with a bit of a ‘fuck you’ attitude towards the people affected. Progressives need to focus on finding effective policies that deliver results with minimal inconvenience. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s politically smart - minimal intrusiveness means minimal backlash. One of the things I’ve gotten out of reading smart libertarians is a better understanding of the downsides of regulation and the dynamics that create needless drag on the economy. This is really, really important for progressives - as a general rule we prefer small business over megacorps. It’s the small businesses that are hurt most by clumsy regulation. Megacorps have megalawyers, so they can just suck it up knowing that despite the hassle they still benefit from having upstart competitors driven out of business.
It is quite possible to obtain desired outcomes without overly burdensome regulation (at least in many cases), but it won’t happen unless progressives start caring about minimizing burdens as well as managing externalities.
Follow the Money……
Google up funding for the Cato Institute…Then you begin to understand the Libertarians…
tzs-
What is Liberalism? What is Conservatism? What is Marxism? Every ideology is going to have disagreements within it.
tzs,
(I hope this comment gets ordered correctly, I’m not familiar with blogs in general and specifically this setup)
As soon as you press self-identified (rational) libertarians about things like externalities, they start hedging their bets
Why would that not fall in the spectrum of beliefs a libertarian could be expected to have? We’re not anarchists. Obviously political beliefs don’t fall cleanly into discreet bins, and there are a lot of libertarians who fall very close to anarchists, but I think the distinction is usually pretty clear. Your assumption that a libertarian must want to abolish every current function of government is just one more manifestation of the straw man being flamed in this thread.
Do I get to freely choose my “warlord”, or to have no warlord at all?
Yes, my ideal world would be pretty much like what we have today, except with most things the government does today handled by private entities. You mention the FDA, but why can’t we have something like Underwriters Laboratories, but for medicine?
This article and a lot of the comments are a nasty caricature of libertarianism. You’re only describing the nuts! Every political party has its nuts. Any of the various stories that have been told - about the guy who sat naked on the common room couch, the guy who said that Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust - those aren’t about libertarians, they’re about nuts. They could just as easily been a pair of liberals or a pair of conservatives. Also, I find it really interesting that you seem to be seeing Objectivism as the same thing as libertarianism. Atlas Shrugged is a bad book which collapses under the weight of its own philosophizing; people who say they are libertarian and demonstrate Atlas Shrugged as their bible are sadly misguided.
“they want rigged anarchy, and I shall have none of that. Gimme your beer money, or I’ll crack you in the head with a blunt object. It’s my will to power that grants me a right to swing my club, so you better give me a damn good incentive to take my crowbar and leave.”
One of the key libertarian principles is a prohibition on the use of force. Force deprives others of their rights. While this is not always realistic (people have to use force, after all, against somebody who is going to harm them or others), it is telling that you are unaware of it. Libertarians DON’T want rigged anarchy and we don’t want to crack people in the heads with a blunt object, because people don’t have the right to swing a club except in self-defense. It’s an offense against the rights of others.
“6. “Shorter Libertarian dogma: Fuck the poor. They deserve their fate.” In order to believe in Libertarian dogma, you have to believe that all rich people are fundamentally superior to all poor people, and proportionately along the spectrum as well. This means Libertarians have to stipulate that Britney Spears is smarter (richer) than them, and high school science teachers are the moral inferiors of Larry Flynt.
Rich people are only “superior” to poor people in one sense; they (or their family) are better at making money than the poor people. In no sense but that would I call a high school science teacher the inferior of Larry Flynt; certainly it would be ridiculous to say that he was inferior MORALLY. Morals have nothing to do with it.
“I like to point out to Libertarians that neither government or business is always efficient, but with free elections you get to fire the government every few years. You can’t fire a giant monopoly.”
You’re right. As a realistic libertarian you have to admit that government will always exist and will always be needed; the only problem is that it should be small and it should stay out of people’s private lives, two things which are not very synonymous with government at present. In the ultimate libertarian utopia, it wouldn’t exist, but that is just a philosophical construct.
To intrude reality into this discussion a moment, I’d like to point out that CEO salary is negatively correlated with firm performance but positively correlated with director compensation (sorry about the highlighting, but the main article is behind a paywall). So the “perceived value” relating to problematic compensation is based on the interlocking perspectives of some directors and CEOs, and has very little to do with anything resembling a market.
As a mutual fund holder, it is likely that I am a shareholder in at least one of these companies, which would make it “my money”. I tend to think the solution involves better regulations of crony capitalism rather than an outright cap on CEO salary, but then again I hardly ever rant about how “the man” is keeping me down.
What I’m wondering is how the rather proprietary Libertarian perspective on “my money” relates to the rather large government involvement in printing money, backing up paper credit, controlling the non-cash monetary supply, etc? I suppose Alan Greenspan would be the right person to ask about this, but I fear his answer involved a decades-long scam involving Social Security. Is there a Libertarian party plank I can check for references to the gold standard?
John, I think snark is just fine as long as it’s not a substitute for critical thinking. Do you have a real, substantive point to make? Or did you just sneak onto daddy’s computer? (snark).
“Pretty soon, you get them to admit that aside from a few tweaks, the world they would like to see is close to what we have already.”
Tzs, I don’t agree with your assumption. I think that liberty is not an absolute good but is generally a good thing; I believe that occasionally externalities have to be weighed when discussing possible limitations on individual rights. But it doesn’t at all follow from that that things would be pretty much the same if you follow a general rather than an absolute form of libertarianism. Sing it with me now, “Imagine no drug laws. No Patriot Act, too.” A robust support for civil liberty and strong support for our Constitution (not the rejection of it as is currently being played out), a non-interventionist military (that would really be dramatic), totally free trade - not the pro. U.S. protectionistic one we have now that is mistaken for free trade, no corporate welfare, etc., etc. We’d have a federal government dramatically shrunken in other words.
Heh. A pretty good essay. Well written and funny. You’re going to get a lot of people who call themselves libertarians to ’splode their crania with that one.
Of course, if they were sufficiently intellectually honest as to actually allow their heads to explode, they’d probably also have at least made an attempt to address those points in a self-consistent manner. Your more crazed kid that just picked up Rand in highschool and decided to become a libertarian so he could smoke out and claim it was a political statement would likely just ignore these points and say “Fuck you, man - you can’t tell me what to do!” And this is not just true of libertarians. There could be similar pages written on socialists - and again thoughtful socialists would have tried to solve the internal conflicts that the libertarian might point out, while the ones who say “workers unite! fuck the man” becuase they’re pissed at their boss for telling them not to surf the web from work are likely to just point to their Che shirts and tell the libertarian to stop oppressing them.
Indeed, corporate power is identified as a significant problem in many branches of libertarianism. Industries have been using governments to their advantage since the industrial revolution. Someone mentioned water, power, and gas as monopolies that they have to deal with, or be left naked and cold in the woods. This is true, but it is not exactly the result of free-market liberalism. Water is almost invariably a government service - more socialism than free-market liberalism. Gas and electricity are sometimes quasi-socialist in some cities, or government-granted capitolist monopolies in others. It’s important to note that capitalism and free markets are not the same thing. If a government tells one privately owned company that they have sole right to build power lines and provide electricity within their jurisdiction, that’s capitalism, but not a free market.
So one of the challenges facing anyone trying to set up a workable middle-path state is extricating current private business from the privileges they’ve been recieving from the state. Many libertarians decry the excesses of corporations when the government is collusionary in those excesses. Many libertarians are upset about Kelo v New London not because the government forced people to sell their land, but that they did so to benefit a large corporate interest. That’s not to say that if New London were taking that land to build a swanky new city hall that libertarians would be pleased - they’d undoubtedly oppose it - but the honest ones would concede that it was legal and constitutional.
Similarly, many libertarians see current IP law as being skewed in favor of large corporations. Copyright is especially problematic. While it does provide economic incentive to produce new works, it also stifles the rights of others to produce derivative works. Patent law - which is now very permissive to patent holders - also provides government backing to corporate excess.
So libertarians are not (or at least should not be) knee-jerk in favor of the richest guy. They simply aren’t opposed to rich people being rich, and to the rich taking their toys and going home. This is interpreted by those to the left as cold-hearted but it should at least be impartially cold-hearted.
People have discussed the fallacy that Nazis were socialists - and that’s largely true. However, they did share some key features with authoritarian communism - in that it was a planned political economy. People owned businesses, but they weren’t free to run those businesses as they pleased unless they were politically connected to the Nazi regime. Otherwise, the Nazis came and told you how to run your business to support the common good of the fatherland. This is where people get confused thinking that Nazis were communists. You could own a factory, and you could profit from it, but you had limited freedom - just try telling the Wehrmacht you’d rather not produce tanks for them. They’d find a new owner for that factory. Their ‘capitalism’ was more a system of property-privileges than property-rights. Big difference.
Anyway, just some general thoughts in response. Y’all be y’all. Just remember that I’d just as soon you didn’t take a gun and force me to be y’all, m’kay?
Oh, and while there were some good insights in Rand’s work, she was WAY over-the-top with it. I’ve never bought into the extreme tenets of Objectivism. And while The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was fun, and Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the finest parables of non-violent communitarianism out there, Heinlein did get into some wacky shit - Starship Troopers is hardly the non-aggression ideal. And I really would like to opt-out on the whole incest thing he had going on in his later novels.
Oi - sorry for the long post. I’ll go now.
I was tempted to write a long winded response to the more nuanced arguments here. Not the simple-minded detritus I suppose you find on every board with an ideological bent. Just replace the Pinochets with Pol Pots or “randroids” with “moonbats” and you have the standard pabulum that passes as acumen at blogs for Bush and the like.
Like I said, I was tempted, but I have a long day ahead finishing my federal tax return. I started out a couple of weeks ago. I thought one weekend might do it, but there were some problems. For example, I wasted a lot of time trying to find what portion of my wife’s car accident is deductible. Our single car was significantly damaged when a hit-and-run driver sent her pin-wheeling off the freeway (no, no, she’s fine, thanks). As it turns out financial loss due to accidental damages are deductible. The form is longish, and the instructions tend to obfuscate more than not, but I made it through. But in the end I found that only the actual payout greater than 10% of our adjusted gross income could be applied to our itemized deductions. It wasn’t clear from my first cursory reading of the form that this was so. I guess I know now for next year’s return. Let’s hope I don’t need it. Then there is the deduction for state property tax. My state, perhaps like others, assesses tax on all property held through the year. Our car, such that it is, is taxed on it’s value. Well, sort of, and here is the problem. The state tax commission levies the fee, but it is done through the department of motor vehicles at the annual registration. Some portion of the registration is for administrative fees and some portion is based on the year of the automobile, or it’s actual value depending on a lot of crap I’m not inclined to write out. But it’s still called a fee in most of the tax commission’s publications. I looked up the statute that enables the commission to levy the tax, but unfortunately it doesn’t clarify if it is a tax or just a fee. In the end I took the deduction. I hope I’m not audited. If I am audited though, the auditor is allowed to decide if my plain reading of the instructions were reasonable (fingers crossed). There was also a mess with the deduction of the federal telephone excise tax (I hope you all remembered to take it, click my name for details). What they were offering as a flat deduction seemed low. I pulled a few of my bills and it really did seem they owed roughly twice the offered standard deduction. But after an hour of trying to track down the 40 or so odd phone bills I decided just to take the bit offered. And this just scratches the surface. I also found an error in last year’s return. I deducted the previous year’s actual state tax and not the current year’s state withholding. In my defense it was my first year itemizing; we just bought a house. I’ll be starting the amended return today.
I suppose I could pay someone to do this for me, but my wife and I work very hard and I don’t trust someone to be as thorough as I am trying to be (not to mention the cost). And isn’t the whole point of this convoluted tax code, to some extent, to influence my spending and savings in a way that ‘benefits’ society; hybrid auto credit or philanthropy deductions and the like. If you don’t prepare your own return how would you know what sorts of behaviors are rewarded and which aren’t? I feel for less detail oriented people or those not so mathematically inclined. I’m a research scientists; alternative energy, thank you. You might think someone with math, physics, and graduate degrees, someone who makes their living doing tedious detail oriented calculations, wouldn’t be fixing last years mistakes while making some this year.
Who am I to question it though? I’m sure some of you pro government folks can explain how this one small example of state sponsored social engineering is working out “in the real world” where simple-minded libertarian ideals would quickly turn into a quagmire of unintended consequences. I’ll leave you to it, I’m back to work.
Oh god, yes, when you get the Libertarians coupled with the go-back-to-gold-standard people….they start to sound like the nuttiest of the LaRouchites.
If “sensible libertarians” don’t want to be hit with the “warlord or gov’t” choice, they should stop running around claiming that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. NOBODY wants to pay taxes. It’s just that most of us are intelligent enough to agree with the aphorism “taxes are the price of living in a civilized society.”
Please point to a technologically advanced, stable society/economy that does NOT have taxes. And please explain how you plan to support the US miltary, legal system, highway infrastructure etc. without paying taxes.
Also please explain how the US is expected to maintain a position of relative technological strength if we remove all public funding of science and technology, given that other countries such as Japan, China, and the EU *will* be carrying out public funding.
And while The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was fun, and Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the finest parables of non-violent communitarianism out there, Heinlein did get into some wacky shit - Starship Troopers is hardly the non-aggression ideal.
Heinlein was not really dedicated to any one political philosophy. I prefer to read his books without really looking deeply into the philosophy under them, because you’ll just confuse yourself if you try to point at anything and say “that is what Heinlein believed.” Starship Troopers is a really good book, even if I don’t agree with some of the philosophy under it.
“Libertarianism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction: the only way a Libertarian society could exist is if all the people involved decided of their own accord to follow all the tenents of libertarianism–which would, in the end, mean control of society through internalized controls.”
So, if people decided something for themselves, they’d _actually_ be oppressing themselves? Is that really your point? Or are you making a lot of assumption with “in the end”, perhaps?
*nods* I have to totally agree with this … I’ve seriously had engineering students in their wonderful superiority sit down to tell me as a sociology phd candidate how society actually operates … I mean, I know wayyyy less than everything (WWAAYYYYY less) but I kinda felt like saying “you know, I kinda do this stuff for a living and all …”
The fact that you resort so quickly to the logical fallacy of credentialism seems to indicate to me that his feelings of superiority may well have been justified. Engineering is practical by nature. If something doesn’t work in the real world then an engineer is by definition a failure at their profession. The biggest blind spot that they have is in assuming that those they are talking to are as rational as they are.
Contrast this to the “soft sciences” where if you are as spectacularly wrong as Marx was in almost every regard then you get a whole branch of studies christened in your name and they make statues of your likeness. I know it is galling but a PHD in sociology would make your opinion about economic and political systems worth exactly as much as his. Whereas his opinion about internal combustions engines, if that were his field of study, would be worth a lot more than yours. Not because of credentialism but because of the nature of what you are studying.. one is based on repeatable scientific facts and the other is based on interpretation of human behaviour. This is why there are so many jobs for engineers and so few for sociologists.
This essay and most of the replies have no clue about libertarianism. I would recommend reading these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle
to get at least a clue before bashing libertarians.
I also agree with those who state that the present tax system is arcane, over-complex, and stupid. Problem is, it’s a case of special interests whining for special treatment (mortgage interest deductions, anyone?) which then get passed, people looking for loopholes in the system for arbitrage, hastily-passed legislation to cover the loopholes, which just make things more complex….
N years of this and you have the present system. We COULD have had a very simple tax system–either a flat tax, or a graduated tax, with no exemptions. Period. We chose not to.
The problem with idealistic systems is that they are, well, idealistic systems. There’s always the assumption that all the people under it will act in a “virtuous way”, no one will try to game the system, there’s no corruption and no power struggles. This is why Marxism and Libertarianism are, in the end, in the same boat–the assumption of “virtuous activity” by its adherents.
Libertarians also have a touching faith in the activity of non-government entities. I’ve always found it hilarious that privatization of a service of government is supposedly somehow going to magically fix things. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, whether in gov’t or outside. There also are bits and pieces that don’t fit very well in a private-sector setup–as someone once said, “Government is the place of last resort.” It takes care of the burden of supporting those that really shouldn’t be supported, for a cost-efficient point of view. It has the US post office deliver mail to places way out in the wilds of Wyoming still for 39 cents/letter. We have electricity delivered out to rural farms in Kansas, where an accountant would point out the building of such an infrastructure makes no sense at all. We provide medication to the poor and elderly–which again can be argued against from a “supporting productive members of society.”
So–based on the above–what would a libertarian society do instead?
Actually TZS, libertarians are fond of pointing out that when political power is decentralized, the assumption of subjective valuation (if you like it can be greed, or altruism, it need not matter) is all that’s needed to justify libertarianism. Even if the ideals of socialism are worth achieving (and *some* of them certainly are, any good economist will tell you that it just won’t work and is based on many erroneous assumptions. There are a fair share of Randian libertarians, but the majority are not. The foundation for libertarianism lies in economic theory, which addresses the issue of incentives which you noted is very important. Listen to the Paul Krugmans and the Rush Limbaughs if you like, but if you want to understand the implications of any policy proposal, you will need to think of it in economic terms at some point. Having been a socialist originally, I just don’t see that socialists care about economics; most leftists I know have barely gotten into the theory, or if they have it’s invariably confined to a select few economists rather than a more general and complete approach.
Yeah, remember when ENERGY was deregulated? That was G R R E A A T T T ……..we went from having the best, most reliable, and least expensive power grid in the world, to ENRON. Yeah. Regulation, ooooooo, it’s so evil!
Yeah, remember when ENERGY was deregulated? That was G R R E A A T T T ……..we went from having the best, more reliable, and least expensive power grid in the world, to ENRON. Yeah. Regulation, ooooooo, it’s so evil!
Joe Tax Payer said:
My God.
Do you seriously believe that?
If so . . . How can you possibly be smart enough to gain the employment to earn enough income to pay any taxes at all?
Are you really that fucking uninformed?
Try less than one percent.
tzs, L (if I may abbreviate) doesn’t assume virtuous behavior. Not relying on virtual behavior is practically the chief feature of L. Rather, it assumes people look after their own self-interests.
Non-governmental entities are different from the other kind because they are subject to competition, and don’t require participation or public funding.
Since our society is in large degree L, the answer to your last question is probably something like “just what it does now”. But to be less flippant…it doesn’t seem that hard to me to deliver letters to Wyoming, especially if there are a reasonable number of them, so I’d imagine that a private postal service might offer a similar price, or at least an affordable one. About medication: the system in place is already underserving, and it’s a hard problem, I think. The variety of treatments available has expanded so quickly and lifespans have increased so quickly - everything is in flux. Non-market solutions respond more slowly. And this has been a highly regulated market for years.
I’ll think about it more. But your comments are so ignorant that it hardly seems worth it.
I’m a libertarian.
I got down to the “governments aren’t as overbearing as monopolistic corporations” posts and found this gem:
Who do you think selects or runs local utility companies? Yeah. Governments will rescue us from the corporations they grant monopolies to and get cash payments from.
Then there’s:
Wasn’t the Unibomber the one that targeted corporations, not government? An enviroluddite? Well outside the libertarian camp, more of a Green Party liberal.
1. Which is why we have so many Congresspersons in the poorhouse?
2. In government, for-profit corporations, and not-for-profit corporations power is a greater motivation than cash. Power over your life. Backed up by guns and prisons.
What we have in the U.S. right now is a government of two parties who both want to severely restrict individual liberty. The only difference is which rights they target first. Consider the Pink Pistols. (http://www.pinkpistols.org/) They are GLBT gun owners. Who should they vote for? Democrats hate them because the Pink Pistols want to keep guns to defend themselves from Republicans who hate them because they want to get married. Libertarians say, “Keep your guns and marry whoever you want to.” That’s the “fundamental principle” you asked for.
I’d keep going, but I’m selfish so I’ll spend my time more profitably.
Hmm, my comment was automatically truncated. Probably something to do with my bold tag. I can’t recall everything I wrote, but in case Joe needs it spelled out for him:
Less than one percent of our tax dollars is spent on anything remotely resembling welfare.
He is addressing “extremists” here people. You could do the exact same thing for Republicans or Democrats. But you would probably see how ridiculous it was when he got to the part and said “Most Democrats are small d Democrats” or most Republicans are small r Republicans” and that he was only referring to big D and big R Democrat/Republicans. It’s not big L it’s not big D or R, it’s extremists and every group/party has them.
The libertarian objection to welfare has less to do with its direct price tag (taxation), but all its hidden costs. Most libertarians see welfare as an insidious type of slavery.
It happened again. There was more. No tags that time. I give up.
“You can’t fix a problem like underpaid public school teachers by just throwing money at them!”
BTW - Nice straw man argument there. A libertarian would point out that in school districts were teachers are not underpaid you still have the same problem of poorly educated children. They would also point out that many “private school teachers” are paid LESS then the “public school teachers” and yet the children are better educated. They would be in the position to argue that this is evidence that just paying teachers more does not solve our education problems.
See welfare as a lemon-mereingue pie, for all I care. You can’t oppose the >1% of government spending that helps people to just-barely survive and be anything but a selfish, sadistic prick.
“I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist, that there is no social-cultural structural system in place, and that we are merely a collection of individuals. His evidence? He’s never seen a ’society’.
Did I mention he was a white straight guy?
I just sat there with my mouth open and then left. It was pointless, to go any further would be to cross over and get pulled into that singularity of insanity …”
You would think a sociologist would understand the point he was trying to make which is that society is just a name we give to the collective actions of individuals. It is not a physical construct. It does not take up time and space. It cannot be acted upon or act upon others. Only individuals can do these things. This is really not a debateable proposition. It is a fact. Its implications are debateable but not the substance.
Unless you are implying that only “white straight” guys are able to understand that society is an intellectual construct and has no set meaning that is universally agreed upon then I don’t see the relevance of that comment other than to give vent to some underlying prejudices on your part. Which is OK as long as you understand that your prejudices aren’t due to the “culture” in which you live and aren’t the fault of the “society” or “postmodernism” but are actually due to your own failings and inadequacies as an individual.
Somehow, I get the feeling that your interlocutor wasn’t exactly sad to see you go….
tzs wrote, “It’s just that most of us are intelligent enough to agree with the aphorism “taxes are the price of living in a civilized society.””
Sure.
And now I get to takeoff my shoes and throw away my shampoo, tooth paste and hair gel when I go to the airport to get on a commercial plane. I guess that is the price of living in a civilized society.
I get to produce my Driver’s License sp the pharmacist can record my Driver’s License number and home address to buy MucinexD or Primatene Mist (which contains ephedrine) at the pharmacy. I guess that is the price of living in a civilized society.
I’ve also heard of a uniformed police office tell an experienced 35 year, 15,000+ hour pilot at a general aviation airport to shut down the engines of the light twin he was about to test fly because, in the officer’s oh-so-vast and very broad experience, the engines were “too loud.” The officer told the pilot he was comparing the noise of the engines to the noise the cars make as they are driving by the airport. I guess that’s the price of living in a civilized society.
Wake up. Stop giving away your rights, along with mine, by claiming, “I guess it’s the price of living in a civilized society.”
You would think a sociologist would understand the point he was trying to make which is that society is just a name we give to the collective actions of individuals. It is not a physical construct. It does not take up time and space. It cannot be acted upon or act upon others. Only individuals can do these things. This is really not a debateable proposition. It is a fact. Its implications are debateable but not the substance.
In the same way that a “solid” is just a name we give to the collective actions of sub-atomic particles?
Then there are others who look at the salaries of CEO’s and believe they should not “make” that kind of money. Again, another real strawman.
The argument has nothing to do with who works “harder” (the janitor or the CEO). It has everything to do with perceived value and the availability of persons with the knowledge to deliver that perceived value.
I didn’t know there was a cap on the amount of money a CEO “should” make. I don’t think there is a cap on the amount of money a janitor “should” make.
Do I see some CEO salaries as insane? Yes. Do I think we as a society should implement laws to redistribute those monies. No. It’s not OUR money.
You’re using a strawman too. Yes, it’s not a good idea to cap CEO salaries by law. However, you’re ignoring the fact that corporations are legal entities constructed by the government to behave in certain ways and that it’s the responsibility and right of the people to modify the laws that create corporations if they dislike corporate behavior. CEO compensation is tremendously high in the US compared to the rest of the world because US laws regulating corporate governance are quite different from those in other countries.
We need to fix American corporate governance to eliminate the perverse incentives for CEOs and boards of directors to increase each others compensation. It’s much the same situation as Congress voting itself raises, but involving much more money. There’s a growing shareholder movement born from events like Enron and books like Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Copmensation that realizes this fact and has begun to lobby for just this type of solution.
But it’s very different from Congress voting itself raises because we don’t have to pay the money to fund a CEO’s raise.
When is it okay for *anyone* to coerce (via threat of imprisonment and/or physical violence) someone else to do something?
Great. I’ll be round to burgle your house and take your stuff in the morning.
I mean, you not going to stop me by threatening or initiating force against me, are you?
While I’m not exatly a hard-core, this post is just embarassing. Not one mention of Austrian economics, the most obviously influential force in modern libertarianism outside of Rand? And this gem:
“Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously penned the Libertarians’ Sekrit Motto, ‘Property is Theft.’ Of course unlike modern Libertarians, Proudhon meant that as a condemnation.”
That makes no sense. On multiple levels. Nevermind that the whole historical lineage argument is stupid. Ideas rise and fall on their own merit, Not necesarily by who dreamed them up. Eisenhower got the idea for the national highway system from Nazi Germany. Does that make Ike a Nazi or it a bad idea? No and no.
I’ll cede that there are a lot of Libertoids and objectivists who are a bit nuts who carry every libetarian idea to extremes (Tolls on neighborhood roads! Privatize the police!), but none of these arguments would stand a chance against the onslaught of someone well versed in Hayek or Mises, who believe it or not actually anticipated many of these arguments in their writings. But that would require you to read them,you clearly haven’t
I’m not saying there aren’t arguments to make against libertarianism. Quite the contrary. But this post is laughably shallow.
And yes I agree Somalia is more of a utopia…you are left to your own devices to survive…that is a life worth living..not one where you are baby-sat like in Canada or UK etc
Oh, that quote’s a keeper. Vote Libertarian, and move the US towards the Somalian utopia…
Phoenician in a time of Romans:
Man, you simply cannot be that stupid and still be able to type.
For f**k’s sake, stealing is initiation of force.
WTF is wrong with you?
Well that was a excellent with lots of big words and no relevence to the American Libertarian movement. Seriously that must of been one really hot Libertarian who dumped you and left you lost and lonely and oh so bitter. Go vote for Bush you bastard keep getting me in Foriegn Wars. Keep taxing the hell out of me and do nothing to better the lives of the Middle Class. Keep giving money to Wellfare it so obviously gets people out there doing for themselves. Just my 2 cents! Once again congrats on all the big words!
There’s only one argument Libertoonians have to make now. As far as I can tell they haven’t discovered it yet.
Government is out of town without even an
Uh, oh. What will you do?
Ask them about gay marriage and they’ll say “the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all.”
You do know the primary reason states became involved in the marriage business at all was to stop blacks and whites intermarrying, right? If the .gov weren’t involved in marriage, any one could marry whomever they wanted, man or woman. Or lost men and women. Do you have a problem with that?
Similarly, our nation’s first gun laws were put in place largely to prevent blacks, Indians and other “undesirables” from being armed.
Corrected post:
There’s only one argument Libertoonians have to make now. As far as I can tell they haven’t discovered it yet.
Government is out of town without even an American Express Card.
Uh, oh. What will you do?
jw wrote, “We need to fix American corporate governance to eliminate the perverse incentives for CEOs and boards of directors to increase each others compensation.”
We? Who is “we?”
Why should I care what some CEO makes or doesn’t make in a private or public corporation. That, literally, is not my business, unless, of course, I own stock in the corporation.
“Perverse incentives?” Who judges what is perverse?
Most libertarians are not against the existence of the state to support negative rights, so it’s not a contradiction that we’d want the police and the courts to function to protect the innocent against aggressors.
Translation: It’s immoral to use force, but it’s alright for men in uniforms to shoot people if we think it’s okay…
That’s “lots of men and women.”
I don’t know if this has been mentioned, but there’s a discussion of this post going on at the Reason Magazine blog: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118844.html
We need to fix American corporate governance to eliminate the perverse incentives for CEOs and boards of directors to increase each others compensation. It’s much the same situation as Congress voting itself raises, but involving much more money. There’s a growing shareholder movement born from events like Enron and books like Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Copmensation that realizes this fact and has begun to lobby for just this type of solution.
Let’s deconstruct this mass of problems.
1. Who says that CEO’s and BoD’s have perverse incentives? Who says their pay is too high? Once you answer that, tell me why they should have any ability to determine what the people that own that company do?
2. There is no similarity to Congress raising their own pay. First, Congress uses tax dollars to pay themselves. Second, Congress has deliberately constructed a situation where they are not accountable to the people they are supposed to be accountable to. This is not the case for a CEO, or other corporate officer.
3. Shareholders have a simple and effective way to solve the “problem” of executive compensation. They can vote directly to change the BoD, or they can vote indirectly by selling their stock holdings. I have not heard of such a “shareholder movement”, this sounds like a fairly typical claim/construct that can’t be disproved and is bandied about until “everyone knows” that shareholders feel that way.
How do you suggest that high functioning, highly capable business leaders be compensated for their talents? Why aren’t you railing about the “ridiculous” compensation of Hollywood actors and professional athletes? It is, after all, in the same class as that of corporate CEO’s. Not only that, the lowest paid people in those industries are paid about 1% of what the actors and athletes are paid. If you are consistent in your principles, you should object to that. So, let’s hear it, tell us about how wrong it is for Oprah to get compensated like she does!
Here’s my post that responds to Clarke’s significant inaccuracies and provides some interesting and contradictory ideas and facts to consider.
Engineering is practical by nature. If something doesn’t work in the real world then an engineer is by definition a failure at their profession. The biggest blind spot that they have is in assuming that those they are talking to are as rational as they are.
Engineering is dealing with objects and numbers. People are not objects and numbers. Engineers mistake the physical world for the social world, and assume that because they can build models and map the former, they can do the same for the latter. The biggest blind spot they have is assuming that people are just objects to be manipulated.
I suspect strongly that there’s a correlation between mild Aspergers and libertarianism.
Oh, and BTW - Marx was mostly right - when it came to his criticisms on capitalism. He sucked as a prophet, but his take on the flaws within capitalism is still relevent today.
Translation: It’s immoral to use force, but it’s alright for men in uniforms to shoot people if we think it’s okay…
Ever heard of the idea of Rule of Law? Establish a set of laws that treat all people equally. Government exists to enforce the Rule of Law. Nothing more, nothing less. That is the concept of Rule of Law. So, when a libertarian says that they believe in a government that protects the negative rights of individuals and that they oppose the use of force except in self-defense, they are entirely consistent. Apparently, though, it is easier to put words in people’s mouths and then claim that you are correct about what they believe.
Marx incorrectly applied the term Capitalism to Corporatism and Mercantilism. Other than that, he was entirely correct in his critique. Of course, what he was critiquing was not what he said he was critiquing. But that’s not such a big deal, is it?
It is interesting how an all-or-nothing standard must be applied to Marx, that doesn’t apply to other people . After all, we can recognize that Darwin, Maxwell, and Gauss were partly right and partly wrong in their theories.
Phoenician said:
Great. I’ll be round to burgle your house and take your stuff in the morning.
I mean, you not going to stop me by threatening or initiating force against me, are you?
in response to:
When is it okay for *anyone* to coerce (via threat of imprisonment and/or physical violence) someone else to do something?
The statement you are responding to is about coercing someone to do something, not self-defense. Interesting that you acknowledge, indirectly, that the government won’t prevent my house from being burgled, but that I, an individual, clearly can.
“You would think a sociologist would understand the point he was trying to make which is that society is just a name we give to the collective actions of individuals. It is not a physical construct. It does not take up time and space. It cannot be acted upon or act upon others. Only individuals can do these things. This is really not a debateable proposition. It is a fact. Its implications are debateable but not the substance.”
In the same way that a “solid” is just a name we give to the collective actions of sub-atomic particles?
And, CB, these are the people who believe property rights are somehow concrete objects (which you find when you start drilling them on “initiation of force”…)
So, I know an objectivist libertarian traditionalist Catholic. He asked me out one time. I told him “my mother always said never to sleep with someone pro-life,” and then we got into an argument about abortion.
Him: A fetus is a human life.
Me: Morally equivalent to the life of a born person?
Him: Yeah.
Me: So…the government should require me to do things to save that “person’s” life?
Him: Yes.
Me: Okay, so the government should presumably also require me to spend my money to save the lives of starving children in Ethiopia.
Him: No!
Me: Why not? They’re both non-citizens of this country, and so our government has no positive obligation to protect their lives.
Him: Because that’s your PROPERTY.
Me: …so’s my body.
Him: No, you’re sharing it with your baby!
And then my girlfriend showed up.
A very interesting thread. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am a long-time Libertarian and a computer geek.
Yes, many programmers are libertarian. One comment on this thread suggested that this was because programmers could tweak the simulation and avoid reality. I find that comment rather absurd — there are few things as obvious and untweakable as a blue screen of death. I would suggest that programming is frequently a solitary artistic endeavor with demonstrable results — when your code works it is YOUR code that is doing cool things. And when it fails, well, that is usually clear also. Individual effort; individual validation.
I imagine many historians are not libertarians for a number of reasons. First, libertarians are idealists and nothing is quite as disillusioning as history. Second, most history is written about large groups of people doing things under the control of someone — rather the antithesis of libertarian self-direction.
I hope this is a conversation that can be maintained with at least a modicum of mutual respect. The Right in the US has been utterly hijacked by large-government busybodies — and I don’t see their deathgrip loosening in the next few years. If the Left cannot loosen up a bit in terms of a desire for larger and larger government intrusion, than I fear we will be in for a rough ride.
And all Liberals are Communists that want to give everyone’s paycheck to the poor, and all Conservatives are members of the KKK. This satire is way too heavy-handed and people are (obviously) not going to understand that it’s satire.
The whole “reduce the size of fire departments” in the opening is a dead giveaway to some, but most people will read that and really think that Libertarians want everything privatized (the entire military) or eliminated (no more Pure Food and Drug Act or Sherman Anti-Trust law).
The piece is pretty funny, but on the other hand, you have seriously mislead people.
And, CB, these are the people who believe property rights are somehow concrete objects (which you find when you start drilling them on “initiation of force”…)
Wow, where did you get that from? How about providing some substantiation for this claim. Right to property is a right, not a concrete object. I don’t know of anyone that is in the libertarian or classic liberal camp that holds the views you attribute to them. Maybe you would be better served by finding out what they really believe and debating that?
A minute later and I am worrying that you might actually be serious. So much effort apparently went into this.
I mean, you conflate Objectivism and Libertarianism in parts and misidentify the father of Libertarianism (who is Milton Friedman).
Was the piece serious…?
A few random comments:
TZS: you are right that there are fewer history majors/historians that profess as Libertarians, but the ones that do boggle the mind. The ones I have met are all (and I mean all) white, heterosexual males; they are socially conservative, but disaffected with the Republican Party’s move toward right wing zealotry; they are convinced that big business and the “free market” is an almost unqualified good; they believe that no structural barriers to success exist for some classes of people and that no structural privileges exist to boost success for other classes of people; they smoke pot regularly; and most are “rugged individualists” and study the American West (gee…is there a connection?). These same Libertarians often accuse those of us who study cultural/social history as engaging in rank revisionism, but you should see their tortured attempts to make Machiavelli, the age of exploration and conquest, imperialism, et. al. fit their warped perspective on history. Most of them do not continue into graduate school, and if they do, they are much more likely to decide not to pursue a career in academia, but go into public history, journalism, or think tanks.
On “hard” sciences and humanities: As a teacher, my “hard” science majors have been some of the most difficult students to have in my classroom. They are intelligent, no question, but their critical thinking skills are often limited by the inability to conceive that there are multiple “right” answers that can be derived from analyzing evidence (or put another way, that there is not only one possible interpretation of data). They hate it even more when I say that scientific observation is culturally conditioned and therefore not necessarily more objective. In trying to assimilate the idea of multiple valid interpretations, they tend to go to the opposite extreme of assuming all interpretations are valid (they are certainly not alone in this). Many do assume that history is “easy” and get very upset when they do not ace the class- parroting me /= getting an “A”. The ones that have decided to learn something often end up becoming some of my best students; the ones that stubbornly insist that history is a vanity class and not a “real” skill are the ones asking the day before finals how they can raise their “C” to an “A” to keep their scholarship. Do with that information what you will.
I have noticed a big trend recently of social and economic conservatives identifying as Libertarian, but you wouldn’t know it from their voting record (which is almost exclusively Republican). Maybe this has something to do with why most of us have met the “caricature” Libertarian that the self-identified Libertarians on this thread decry.
In my experience, the Libertarians I have met are very egotistical (convinced that they possess superior intellect and capabilities), buy into the exceptionalism myth, are short on empathy and compassion, and generally have the moral reasoning of a toddler (it’s mine! I don’t wanna share! You can’t make me!). I’d be interested to meet some Libertarians who did not project themselves as asshats all the time- maybe it’s just defensiveness?*
*Before anyone accuses me of making them feel defensive, in face to face conversations with Libertarians I never approach them with my sampling bias, I always say “I looked into Libertarianism, but I only agreed with about half the platform.” That way, we can attempt to have an interestng conversation on the assumption that we have some things in common.
or that their popular Free Marketeer blog owes its existence to several decades of government funding of ARPANET. If those don’t work, sometimes these people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate, and a very few people got very wealthy while the rest of us died of food poisoning or coal mine collapses or shirtwaist factory fires.
L(l)ibertarians hear this kind of argument often; the problem is always that you are assuming that an internet or these improvements in living standards would never have happened without government acting the way it did. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine a world in which the internet would have evolved privately (isn’t the WWW at heart just a glorified collection of BBSes?). I also think it’s absurd to say that, without the government interventions of the era, we would still be having the same problems regarding work safety and health standards that we had in the late 1800s. Don’t assume that since history took one particular course and we arrived at a certain result, that we wouldn’t have arrived at another equal, or perhaps better point, by history traversing a different path.
Wow. This article is the biggest cry for help since Britney Spears took an umbrella to K-Fed’s car.
Delusion cloaked by patronization is a hallmark of so-called “progressive” thinking, but the degree to which you try to marginalize people who disagree with you with these rather bizarre arguments is almost clinically disturbing.
Libertarians are more “liberal” by the classic definition. So called progressives are nothing but people regressively clinging to failed crypto-Engles/Marx paradigms that have been proven to fail over and over again in the last century.
So your only hope is to use ad homium arguments and other logical fallacies as some kind of carny smoke and mirrors act.
Next time, I suggest opening your mind to more possibilities than ideology.
Yes, there are extremist libertarians. All political thought has its extremes. But when you start off by saying “You, my friend, have just made the unpleasant discovery that you’ve been talking to a Libertarian.”, you’ve revealed yourself to be a close-minded bigot.
“Progressive”, indeed.
For that matter, one could argue that Engineering isn’t a science. Engineers in designing internal combustion engines can easily “cheat” by specifying the variance of the quantities they deal with. “The spark plug has a gap of .8mm+/- 10%” is a reasonable statement to make in regards to engineering. Because engineers can control the variance of every component that goes into a system, their predictions about the behavior of that system have a high degree of precision.
Scientists who study the behavior of the real world don’t have that luxury. Astronomers can’t define the galaxy as consisting of stars within 10% of solar mass, and my microbiology mentor admitted that the laboratory behavior of select strains of bacteria was of minimal theoretical use in understanding the behavior of bacterial ecosystems (which include hundreds or thousands of unclassified and uncultivated strains.) Because social and behavioral sciences can’t arbitrarily constrain variance, they are forced to use mathematics that are theoretically as tricky and complex as those used in mechanical and electrical engineering. (Unfortunately, Gauss, Fisher, Pascal, and Gosset are not as widely remembered as Edison and Tesla.)
The fact that theories in the Sciences rarely produce predictions with the same precision as theories in Engineering, does not mean that theories of natural, human, and social behavior are without value, or fanciful. It simply reflects the reality that the universe is not a workbench with a wastebasket.
You know, the one thing I’ve got to add to this debate is this: Gupta’s Libertarian Observation, which states:
Free people make free markets, but free markets do not necessarily make free people.
I think that a libertarianism which starts with free people, who then form markets according to their taste and preference to trade is a much stronger libertarianism than one which assumes that the freedom to trade as you will is equivalent to freedom.
A person who sold themselves into slavery is still a slave, even if they are responsible for their own condition.
This is not necessarily acceptable if one starts with the assumption that free people make free markets, but it is acceptable if one assumes that free markets (i.e. freedom of contract) makes free people…
Carts and horses must go in the right order.
Does that help?
As a small “l” libertarian I can certainly understand all the frustration with my big “L” brothers. Some of them simply like to argue a bit too much, often about subjects they have no business discussing. I’m bothered by the intellectual orthodoxy of the movement, but not by its general thrust.
I view libertarianism as a direction, not a goal. I think if we (the movement) were more about pragmatic reform rather than creating a Randian utopia we might find more common ground with the libertarian socialists and whoever else is interested in building a just and free society.
However, I dont want to abandon the moral/intellectual absolutism entirely. There are certain ideas about how to organize a society that have been tested by history and failed.
I believe these things:
Closed states fall behind their more open neighbors.
Politicians given free reign will tend to expand their own power.
People are neither angels or demons, but respond to the incentives and opportunities around them.
As for the police, when was the last time you saw them stop a crime in progress? Never, that’s when. Libertarians tend to agree that they are tools of state power. Someone above said that you could take your pick between the mafia and the government for protection. I for one don’t really see much difference.
CBrachyrhynchos: Gauss, Fisher, Pascal, and Gossett
And here is another good litmus test for determining whether someone is qualified to talk about the social and behavioral sciences. If you can’t describe the contributions these people made to the study of individual and aggregate human behavior, you are probably not qualified to make statements about the methodologies used in the social and behavioral sciences. (I’d also add Zipf as well.)
But it’s very different from Congress voting itself raises because we don’t have to pay the money to fund a CEO’s raise.
Really? CEO salaries just come out of a magic money machine? Cool! Okay, I’m on board.
I notice that it still comes down to the fetishizing of property rights for the fake, or “royal,” libertarians who have stampeded to post here. Property rights are an obejctive immutable fact, but a collective society is complete fiction? Axioms are not automatically truths.
I also think it’s absurd to say that, without the government interventions of the era, we would still be having the same problems regarding work safety and health standards that we had in the late 1800s.
True, because left to their own devices, businesses always seek to improve things for their employees and their communities. We’re back to “externalities” again. It’s not hypothetical when there’s an existing track record. The labor movement and regulation advocates didn’t say, “Well, you’ve had a week, let’s try something else.” They were a response to long-term abuse. How long were people supposed to wait before market forces took care of the problem?
but most people will read that and really think that Libertarians want everything privatized (the entire military) or eliminated (no more Pure Food and Drug Act or Sherman Anti-Trust law).
As to the latter, you might want to look up “minarchist” or “Nozick” in the index of your Libertarian manual. And check under “anarcho-capitalism,” or see how many of your peers are Vinge fans, for the former.
History Mom:
I have noticed a big trend recently of social and economic conservatives identifying as Libertarian, but you wouldn’t know it from their voting record (which is almost exclusively Republican). Maybe this has something to do with why most of us have met the “caricature” Libertarian that the self-identified Libertarians on this thread decry.
First, let’s start with this idea. A libertarian, by definition, would not be a social conservative. They would not believe that society or government has any place in determining the individual values and private behavior of individuals.
I’m not sure what you mean by an economic conservative, except to suppose that you mean someone who likes things to not change a whole lot from how they are now. That, also, would definitely not describe a libertarian.
If this is accurate, it explains a lot about this post and thread.
History Mom:
In my experience, the Libertarians I have met are very egotistical (convinced that they possess superior intellect and capabilities), buy into the exceptionalism myth, are short on empathy and compassion, and generally have the moral reasoning of a toddler (it’s mine! I don’t wanna share! You can’t make me!). I’d be interested to meet some Libertarians who did not project themselves as asshats all the time- maybe it’s just defensiveness?*
Let’s tackle these ideas through my filters. I am a self described “classic liberal” and “libertarian”, but also self-described as not being a Libertarian or Objectivist (Ayn Rand).
I wonder if you would describe me as egotistical. I happen to know that I have an IQ that places me in the top 2% of the population, give or take. My earnings and property place me in the wealthiest 1% globally. My professional position is such that I am at the very peak of my chosen industry and profession. There are, perhaps, 6 or 7 other people in my industry that could legitimately say they are closer to “number one” than I can. This is all stated as objectively as I can speak about myself. For these reasons, I believe that I am a very capable person. You might even say that I have superior capabilities to the majority of the population, even if you insist on narrowing that to people who would directly compete with me. Does that make me exceptional? By the definition of that word it would seem to.
On a side note, I do not have a college degree, and my family could best be described as working poor (food stamps in the 1970’s, for example). I didn’t get where I am by advantages conferred by social privilege or education. My father-in-law is roughly in the same position as I am, by the way, including no college degree, working poor origins, etc. What this all means is that I don’t buy into the position and privilege myth of the left.
Next, empathy and compassion. I presume, since you don’t clearly explain this, that it has to do with the fact that libertarians don’t believe in government provided welfare, social programs or “safety nets”? Especially because such things have to be provided by money taken from us through taxation? If that isn’t the right track for what you mean, let me know.
Given that, it is a mistake, simply because we don’t agree with you on how to take care of the poor, vulnerable and underprivileged in society to decide that we lack in empathy and compassion. I willingly and voluntarily donate significant amounts of money to charity on a regular basis. More, in fact, than I can deduct tax-wise. I get no financial benefit from these donations, in general. I do so because I have empathy and compassion for the poor and vulnerable and want to put money into organizations that directly assist them. I also happen to work for a not for profit institution because I believe in its mission and values, one that directly makes a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of people each and every day.
I have discussed what I perceive to be your position on the empathy and compassion of someone like me with our Director of Ethics. He and I disagree on such things as welfare, safety nets and such. He, however, takes the position that there are multiple solutions to such issues and that reasonable and intelligent people can disagree on which solution will have the best outcome. When you impute a lack of compassion because I don’t agree with your preferred solution, that denies the ability of reasonable, intelligent people to disagree, it directly attacks me as a person, rather than my idea (the ad hominem fallacy), and prevents a reasonable debate of the issue and possible solutions.
The moral reasoning of a toddler statement is interesting. Apparently, if I don’t want to share at gunpoint (i.e. involuntary charity through taxation), I have poor moral reasoning. My money IS mine, as is my property. It is not yours, nor is it society’s. That does not mean I don’t want to share my good fortune, I do. I just don’t want to do so at gunpoint, whether the gun is held by a criminal or a government bureaucrat. I have no problem, at all, with paying taxes to create a government that can defend me from other countries, provide for the Rule of Law and create equality of opportunity. I have significant issues with the idea that I should be forced to give up my wealth through coercion in order to provide for equality of outcome, which is not achievable in any case.
When I was much younger and had much less wealth (making a few dollars an hour in my early 20’s), I was actually far less compassionate, far less willing to part with my money and property, and much more in favor of Libertarian positions than I am today, lest anyone think this is all about selfishly wanting to keep my now acquired wealth. That said, how come you get to define it as selfish to not part with my wealth for things that you think I should?
Now, I wonder if I project myself as an “asshat”? Or if there is any idea here worth discussing further, or even some ideas that you might consider adopting yourself? I suspect, based on some of your comments about history and history students, that you are not very open to that, but we’ll see.
Let’s deconstruct this mass of problems.
1. Who says that CEO’s and BoD’s have perverse incentives? Who says their pay is too high?
I cited a reference that explained this in my original post. The fact that much executive compensation is camoflauged from shareholders also suggests that CEOs and boards think that their shareholders would think their pay is too high if they realized how large it actually was.
Once you answer that, tell me why they should have any ability to determine what the people that own that company do?
Corporations aren’t part of the natural world. They’re a legal fiction created by the people by law, and the people have the right to create them or not create them in whatever ways they wish. This can easily be seen by realizing that the rules governing corporations vary widely over both time (earlier eras had quite different laws) and space (different countries.)
2. There is no similarity to Congress raising their own pay. First, Congress uses tax dollars to pay themselves. Second, Congress has deliberately constructed a situation where they are not accountable to the people they are supposed to be accountable to. This is not the case for a CEO, or other corporate officer.
CEO’s have done exactly the same thing you claim that Congress has done. See the reference I cited above for details.
3. Shareholders have a simple and effective way to solve the “problem” of executive compensation. They can vote directly to change the BoD, or they can vote indirectly by selling their stock holdings.
First, the camoflauging of executive compensations has historically prevented most shareholders from realizing that such a problem exists.
Second, since you like to deconstruct problems, why not deconstruct corporate elections? Like any elections, they can be controlled by controlling the nomation process, by controlling who gets to vote, by controlling who can campaign to the voters and how they can do so, by controlling who has to stand for relection and when, and by how the results are tabulated. Several of these features ensure that it’s extremely difficult to unseat boards, but they can be changed by changing corporate governance laws. Looking back at the last decades of corporate governance, we find that it’s as hard to unseat a director as it is to unseat an incumbent congressmen.
Third, selling stock holdings doesn’t help as this is a systematic problem. All boards are protected under the same laws regarding shareholders and elections, and the biggest source of distorted compensation is interlocking boards of directors, where executives are board members of other corporations and board members are current or former executives of other corporations, creating a network of cronyism.
I have not heard of such a “shareholder movement”, this sounds like a fairly typical claim/construct that can’t be disproved and is bandied about until “everyone knows” that shareholders feel that way.
You could have done a few second google search and found a large number of articles and shareholder proposals on executive compensation.
You can find articles in Business Week, The Economist, and Fortune, and there are a growing number of books on this. Read Warren Buffet’s comments about CEO pay in “CEO Pay: Have They No Shame?,” Fortune, April 13, 2003, for one example, or read some shareholder proposals like this one to Ford: http://www.iccr.org/shareholder/proxy_book05/MEMBER-INITIATED%20ISSUES/GLOBALWARM_EXECCOMP_FORD_HARRINGTON_BLUE.HTM
How do you suggest that high functioning, highly capable business leaders be compensated for their talents?
We need to change the structure of corporate government to increase shareholder power over boards, and shareholders will fix the problem. Shareholders need the power to be able to change corporate governance rules, and boards need to be more accountable by being easier to unseat (no more staggered boards, for example.) See some of the books on the topic for more detailed proposals.
Why aren’t you railing about the “ridiculous” compensation of Hollywood actors and professional athletes?
There are substantially different issues with CEOs, such as me being one of the shareholders responsible for paying the CEOs and me being one of the people responsible for the laws that created corporations and control their governance.
Interesting that you value Warren Buffet as a source of thinking on corporate governance.
Interesting that you value Warren Buffet as a source of thinking on corporate governance.
He’s an extremely successful investor. Why wouldn’t I value his advice?
An extremely successful investor does not make his advice on corporate governance good.
An extremely successful investor does not make his advice on corporate governance good.
If you disagree, you could address the substance of my post or the substance of his advice instead of carping about his name.
Or I could simply point out that you are committing a logical fallacy by citing the authority of Warren Buffet.
“And, CB, these are the people who believe property rights are somehow concrete objects (which you find when you start drilling them on “initiation of force”…)”
Wow, where did you get that from?
Generally from statements like Adam Selene’s above: “My money IS mine, as is my property. It is not yours, nor is it society’s. “
Money does not exist in the absence of society. Property does not exist in the absence of society. Both money and property are predicated on a working, sustained social context. That context both implicitly and explicitly puts limits on the usage and ownership claims to both money and property - including the obligation to help sustain that social context through taxes.
But consider Selene’s comment - he is assuming that property and money exist FIRST, and that the social context exists LATER. Thus HE owns stuff, and society is a mere interloper trying to take away HIS stuff.
The best way to demonstrate this is to closely examine the common libertarian claim that taxing income or property is an “initiation of force” - men with guns coming to take your stuff.
Adam Selene’s money is not HIS money. Rather, it is a SOCIAL claim on exchange values created and sustained within a particular social context, enforced by LAW AND GOVERNMENT and ASSIGNED to him through possession of SOCIALLY ACCEPTED tokens of exchange.
Well, hasn’t Warren Buffet made a lot of money, which as far as we can tell, is the indication of virtue within the Libertarian universe? (/end snark)
If self-professed libertarians don’t want to be tarred with the nuttiness of the BAN ALL TAXES NOW!! or the ANARCHY IS GREAT crowd, they’d better stop accepting them in their tent. If you have enough people running around presenting themselves as Libertarians who claim that Licence Numbers are Evil, then such a statement becomes, de facto, a Libertarian statement.
Which gets back to the question I keep raising: what are Libertarian philosophies and how would an actual, technologically sophisticated society work if it were run according to such principles? (And please don’t bring up The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I’ve read it. I also point out that even that supposedly libertarian society started breaking down at the end, after the revolution succeeded.)
I’d love to see one, but I see NO EVIDENCE that a Libertarian society/economy would be stable in the long term or even in the short term–in fact, the more strongly “Libertarian”, the more likely it will be to break apart or not reproduce itself.
What we’re trying to pound into the heads of our Libertarian visitors here is that the concept of property rights only exists in a social context. They don’t exist in absentia as some intrinsic inalienable part of a good. Otherwise, “property” would only yours until someone bigger and meaner comes along to take it away from you.
If you want an Authority around to “protect” your Property Rights, then the next set of questions are: a) how to define that authority? b) how do you fund that authority? c)what social contract do I have with that authority? d) what authority does it have over me? What can it force me to do?
If you have no government, you end up with Warlords. Someone asked above whether he got a chance to vote for “no warlords”–sorry, that’s not a possibility. We’ve not seen it in history–if you don’t have a gov’t, you get warlords (or you are in such small groups and at such a technological level that you can live as a communual tribe, at which point it’s usually “elders rule.” Or maybe you prefer anarchy?)
And for the commentator above who burst her spleen about my comment that “taxes are the prices we pay for living in a civilized society”–what’s your alternative?