Well, my usual answer is obviously wrong, here.
Sorry jayarod7, it was just a momentary flood of nostalgia for a former poster who was one of my best frenemies on the Dope for many years, and who often sounded a lot like you.
What I meant to say was, Hello jayarod7, and welcome to the Straight Dope. I’m in favor of a mixed-economy structure rather than an extreme form of either unregulated capitalism or socialist centralization. The problem with the former extreme is that real-life markets don’t work in precisely the same way that the theoretically ideal perfectly competitive markets do.
I’m just going to address a small part of the OP’s point for now, because I just don’t have time for more.
How do you know there would be public pressure? If a business makes tasty and cheap sandwiches for a hungry public but treats their employees like crap, how do you know there wouldn’t be a line out the door for their delicious sandwiches? If a business pollutes the lake but makes cheap and useful widgets, the local customers may protest and boycott, but how do you know that other customers from farther away wouldn’t take advantage of their cheaper and better widgets?
And suppose a business dumps poison into my backyard and my kid gets cancer- how do I make them pay? What if they have good PR and convince my neighbors that my kid got cancer because I run the microwave too much?
Knowing human nature, it sure seems like the powerful and wealthy wouldn’t have much of a problem staying powerful and wealthy in your system.
You mean he’s Noam Chomsky?
Yes, that’s pretty much it. A lot of support for libertarianism comes from big corporations. A good metaphor is some wolves telling a flock of sheep they should get rid of the sheepdogs.
Jayarod, you’ve obviously read a lot of libertarian literature. What you should do now is read something else. Start reading material that isn’t trying to sell one point of view and gain some perspective.
When I explain a “libertarian” society, you have to understand that I don’t have to envision an ideal society in all its particulars to win the argument. In contrast to authoritarian approaches and central economic planning, I have the wisdom to recognize that I don’t know what form of future society a free people can achieve. The value in the market economy is that millions of individual actors create a body of knowledge that no small group of individuals regardless of their qualifications could hope to match regarding how best to allocate scarce resources and solve societies mutual problems.
For example, lets suppose we lived two hundred years ago and I was an abolitionist arguing for the ending of slavery. But my opponent objects and says “if we outlaw slavery, then who will pick the cotton? How could we possibly organize a prosperous economy without slave labor?”
Suppose I told him that in two hundred years we would have giant robots and machines that plant the crops, harvest the crops, till the soil and that due to this less than 1% of the United States population would be involved in farming and we would have abundant food available to feed a population of 300 million people.
He would no doubt assume I am completely insane and have me committed to a mental institution. Yet that is exactly what happened. We need to reject grossly immoral methods of addressing societies problems and infinitely more moral and more effective means will take their place.
It is not a prerequisite for me to explain down to the last detail how everything will be organized in a libertarian society to make the moral case against the predatory and exploitative State. It suffices for me to point and say murder is wrong, thus war except in self defense is unambiguously wrong. Stealing is wrong and thus a tax system where you cannot choose NOT to give your money to the State is morally repugnant. And voluntary associations are ALWAYS superior to force, fraud and coercion in achieving desired social ends.
With that said, I will humor you and give a few general ideas how what a libertarian society could look like.
In the first place, as far as a monetary system is concerned, there would be no “official” money except by voluntary choice and convenience. There would be no laws preventing the use of alternative currencies. Gold and silver COULD be circulated as money, but more likely than not the currencies that would be accepted by free people in their economic transactions would be stable money that does not depreciate and is backed by some finite commodity.
A point that is critical to remember is that when something has to be forced by the threat of violence onto society, it is clearly NOT the best available choice nor is it something that people would voluntarily use. How did gold become known as money, and thus used in the Gold Standard monetary system throughout the world?
The reason is that time and again free peoples chose gold as their money of choice as it has always been recognized as having significant value, it is easily divisible and portable and it has lasted the test of time.
If a free people chose diamonds or silver or a basket of currencies as a backing to their money then that is perfectly fine. The whole point is that there would be no government controlled monopoly on the issuance of currency.
This is entirely nonsensical. If we lived in a world without governments, what power would corporations have to oppress us? Either they would have to form a government, which would require at least the tacit support of the population, or they would have to voluntarily compete in the market for consumer dollars. If they did anything more than that they would not be businesses but petty criminals.
Common law and private arbitration and dispute resolution centers would be able to deal with small time criminals. If there is no monopoly on the use of force in a society, then the power of any single actor to be oppressive and tyrannical is significantly reduced.
That is why corporations feed off the State. All of the corporate wrongdoings you could probably think of are a direct result of protection from liability by the government, or due to collusion with the State to prevent the consumer from having the choice to use a competitor.
How can oppression occur when you have the right to walk away from a bad business and never interact with them again unless you so choose? Workers can quit and work somewhere else. Customers can stop shopping at that business. How can we avoid the income tax? How can we avoid a government that spies on all Americans?
This is a huge contradiction in the thinking of many progressives that NEEDS to be challenged. I am reminded of an interview with Noam Chomsky, who is brilliant on foreign policy but confused and economically illiterate on domestic policy.
In the interview he first states about libertarianism:
“This goes for the whole libertarian philosophy… if you think it through, it’s just a call for corporate tyranny”
Then very shortly following this, he says:
“but it’s all academic, because the business world would never allow it to happen… they cannot live without a powerful nanny state.”
Obviously the second statement completely contradicts the first. If a society without the State would lead to corporate tyranny, you would think they would be lining up to support libertarian causes and would be spending all their money to shrink the government as quickly as they could. As this is demonstrably not the case, it is clearly Chomsky’s second statement which is true and not the first.
I never said that all our early success as a nation was due to a gold standard. I don’t know any libertarian or Austrian economist who says that. I think our success as a nation was partly due to our location and the resources and abundance that this continent offers to us, I think you are partly correct. However I think the ideological construct of individual rights and protected civil liberties that were enumerated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights were the primary reason for our prosperity and standard of living.
I also think that a limited government and a healthy distrust of unchecked State power led to a relatively free market for over half of our existence, which provided the basis for the creation of tremendous prosperity and a vibrant middle class. This further meant that once we abandoned sound money and we allowed the government to grow far being its legitimate functions, we maintained our relative prosperity for a considerable while as the repercussions of government intervention and fiat money were held at bay.
I don’t think that is the case any longer. Our manufacturing base is gone, our infrastructure is crumbling and our middle class is shrinking rapidly.
But government growth was limited by sound money. Our liberties are protected by sound money. It IS a highly important issue that is interlinked with nearly every other facet of economic and political life.
Well let me expand my definitions and say that the solution to ANY of our problems should not include the initiation of violence against peaceful individuals. Do you think this is being too ideologically rigid to claim that we should not use violence against people who pose no threat to us?
If the reality is that government is primarily a violator of the non aggression principle, then we must do away with those government functions.
Let me turn the question back to you. What solutions do you suppose require the initiation of force and violence against your fellow man? Why cannot peaceful cooperation and free exchange be a superior method of solving our problems?
Peaceful cooperation and free exchange are the superior methods of solving problems. But as a practical matter, they’re generally only used between entities of equivalent power. When one entity is significantly more powerful than the other, the more powerful entity will be tempted to simply take what it wants from the weaker rather than pay for it.
Corporations, as you’ve noted, are powerful. Individuals are not. In a contest between corporations and individuals, corporations would win every time. They’ll take whatever they want from individuals.
Government is the equalizer. The government is strong enough to stand up to corporations. So individuals can use the power of government to stop corporations from doing whatever they want.
You don’t prevent force and violence by being weak. You prevent force and violence by showing you are capable of responding back with equivalent force and violence.
Boy, are you going to be at least 25% disappointed.
A large flaw in that argument is the assumption that what a “free people” will want is a libertarian society.
Irrelevant even if true, unless you want to live as a hermit. A state that can’t make people pay what they owe is one that won’t be able to support itself and will collapse. You’ll just end up exchanging the relatively civilized State you hate so much for the local warlord, who’ll just take what he wants by brute force or kill you for fun.
People can do that now. They just don’t want to.
That’s nonsense. Without force or the threat of force society rapidly degenerates into violent chaos. There’s too many predatory or just plain foolish people in the world who need to be kept from stealing, exploiting or ruining things out of greed or stupidity.
They could just hire people to kill you if you disobey. Or blacklist you and let you starve to death. You would work for them as long as they told you, under what conditions they deigned to offer, for whatever wages they deigned to offer, and you’d buy what you’d be told to buy. We know, because that’s how corporations behave when the government doesn’t restrain them.
As for what happens without any government at all, neither corporations nor money would exist in the first place. Just warring armed bands, until one leader became powerful enough to set himself up as a warlord.
Don’t be ridiculous; if there’s no monopoly on the use of force society immediately wars itself into collapse and chaos. There’s no law, common or otherwise and “private arbitration and dispute resolution” consists of armed bands of thugs slaughtering each other.
No. It’s pointing out the incoherence and hypocrisy of the libertarian ideal. If you remove restrictions just on the rich and corporations you get corporate tyranny; if you remove restrictions on everyone society collapses. And corporations are legal institutions defined by the state and can’t exist without one. Unless they become one that is.
Because the world is full of predators, lunatics and stupid people who would destroy society within days if left unchecked.
Okay so gold isn’t money, but Federal Reserve Notes are? If we did not have laws that forced people to use federal reserve notes in their transactions, do you think people would still think of them as real money? In fifty years paper dollars issued by the Federal Reserve will be completely worthless but gold and silver will still be seen as stores of value and will be used in financial transactions around the world.
So which one is closer to the classical definition of “money”?
You also make an astounding claim when you state unambiguously that “all” financial experts that are telling people to buy gold are trying to sell gold. Gold has ALWAYS been seen as a safe investment and a hedge against inflation. This is true of people who are not Austrian economists and not proponents of the Gold Standard.
It is a smart investment, period.
When you state “the psychological value of gold is, in fact, fiat money doesn’t register with them” what is this statement supposed to mean? If you mean that nothing has inherent value the human beings don’t attach to it, you are absolutely right. What does this prove?
This concept has already been expertly detailed the “Subjective Theory of Value” that Mises expounded. Value, as Mises, explained exists in the minds of individual actors in an economy. There is no objective value in money. This explains why some fiat monies seem to maintain their value lost past time that inflationary pressures should have decimated its purchasing power. If people think something is valuable, it has value. But once the public is let on about the debasement of the currency and confidence is lost, again a phenomenon of the mind, then depreciation can spiral out of control very quickly.
In regards to gold vs paper “money”, what you are neglecting is that gold (and other commodity money) is finite in nature. That means that once people accept it as valuable, it stays valuable subject only to minute changes based on increased mining and things like that.
Do you really suppose that people inherently think of paper as money? If this were the case, why do the Federal Reserve and government have to hide behind a monopoly and prevent the circulation of gold and silver (or competing private currencies)? If people honestly view Federal Reserve Notes as inherently valuable and as money, they would use them overwhelmingly even if they had other options.
But you and I both know that is not the case. They are frightened that people will abandon worthless paper for something with more value and thus force people to accept counterfeit pieces of paper.
A too-often underappreciated economy is an economy of words.
They are both equally imaginary.
Gold has some intrinsic value as an engineering material.
That value is a tiny fraction of the selling price.
The difference is a value based on belief. That’s fiat money.
Not near the top of a bubble like we are seeing now.
Gold prices are experiencing irrational exuberance in the face of irrational pessimism.
The world is not ending. Obama has not sold us to the NWA.
Our paper money is worth what it says on the face.
First, I find it sad but not surprising that you had to throw in the claims of racism and sexism that are completely unsubstantiated. I intimately know of the libertarian movement inside and out. I know how the Libertarian Party presents its message. I have never in my life seen any race baiting tactics or sexism coming from the Libertarian Party or any movement libertarians of any stripe.
You could easily make that claim of the paleo conservative Right. People like Pat Buchannan have taken such tactics, but libertarians? Racism and sexism do not exist as part of the modern libertarian movement and to claim otherwise is disingenuous.
As to you criticizing the libertarians “absolutism” regarding the free market or opposing government intervention, you miss the point entirely. I am not entirely sure you even know what a free market is. It is not a way to organize society. It is not a particular institution that is imposed upon a society like a government program. All it implies is the removal of actions that are blatently immoral and unjust from society and what remains is the “free” market, where force, fraud and coercion and prevented and voluntary interactions are all that remain. I don’t have to explain to you exactly where these voluntary interactions will take society. No one can know that. What I can say is that voluntary, peaceful interactions are ALWAYS and everywhere superior to the initiation of force.
If you can give me your vision of a government that does NOT initiate force and violence on peaceful individuals then I would seriously consider it and it would be completely compatible with a libertarian society. See libertarians are not against government per say. We merely see the Non-Aggression Principle as one moral law that IS universal and it is worth being steadfast in its defense.
Look at it this way. What if I came over to your house, stole your money, killed your dog and raped your girlfriend. Would it be a reasonable defense to say that I don’t do that ALL the time? We need a mix of property rights and personal liberty and my desire to expropriate you to do what I wish with your resources?
This would NEVER fly. I don’t think you would question that we should be morally rigid and oppose murder in ALL case. We should oppose burglary in ALL case. We should oppose rape in ALL cases.
The case for being “moderate” in the defense of these fundamental rights is never persuasive. We must start with principles. What you are doing is being wishy washy, practicing moral relativism which essentially grants the government the power to do any number of atrocious acts.
The ends do NOT justify the means. If any person murders, steals, kills or imprisons millions yet achieves an end result that is desirable to you, that does NOT excuse the horrific method that achieved that result.
As we can plainly see when we examine our own lives, all we need to do is apply the same laws and morality that exist in private affairs to the State. When this is done, then the whole facade of Statism comes crashing down.
As far as corporations wanted a free market and a libertarian form of government, you hardly responded to the evidence I presented. Why doesn’t corporate money go to libertarian causes? Look at the amount of money given to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the last election. Can’t you see that Corporate State Fascism is their preferred form of government?
Sure they want low taxes (who doesn’t?) but they certainly want an expansive government, lots of regulations (which they control), and a Federal Reserve to bail them out and prop them up. Subjecting them to competition in the market would be a major step down for them and many wouldn’t survive without the State to prop them up.
Another problem with a Gold Standard is that it artificially favors nations that have gold-bearing mountainous terrain. Great for Peru and Chile, not so nice for Belgium.
The term “liberal” is the correct term. You might call me a libertarian anarchist if you prefer. I used that term to stress that “libertarians” are interested in many of the issues modern leftists CLAIM to support yet a progressive vision for the future requires the elimination of State coercion. The facade that the State is the only thing standing in the way of Corporate tyranny is absurd as it is precisely BECAUSE of the Federal Reserve and unchecked government growth that we are now living under corporate tyranny.
Again I highly recommend Murray Rothbard’s “Left, Right and the Prospects for Liberty” which expands on these concepts and clearly shows why I used terms like liberal and “leftist” in my essay.
Nonsense. Gold isn’t going to be used for “financial transactions around the world”, it’ll be sitting in vaults unused like now. And people aren’t “forced” to use Federal Reserve Notes; they prefer them. You could print your own “Jayarod Dollars” if you wanted or offer to pay people in gold and the government wouldn’t stop you. You don’t because almost no one wants private currency, and gold is clunky & limited.
Only in goldbug-land. In the real world it’s just another commodity that can go up and down in price like any other.
:rolleyes: They do. The only thing preventing people from using alternative currencies and gold is sheer lack of interest, and the fact that gold is both horribly awkward and much too limited to do the job.
Then you haven’t been paying attention, racism and sexism are deeply ingrained in libertarianism.
Nonsense. First, a free market is impossible, an unachievable ideal. And second even approaching one requires the force of a government. A “free market” is a highly artificial and unstable thing maintained by systematic, powerful government regulation and monitoring. Otherwise it quickly degenerates into a mass of fraud, coercion, insider networks and the like.
Not when force is all that works, which is much of the time.
No; libertarians are simply in denial, or hypocrites. The government is all that keeps force from being applied to you, right now. No government means no freedom and no rights.
The government would punish you for it. Which is the reason why the chance of someone doing that to me is very low. Without a government it becomes very high - if you won’t, someone else probably will.
It does. The Republicans are full of libertarians.