Forgive me if this has been gone over before, but I’m tired and I’m not up to researching every thread on the board. I had two questions about libertarianism: First, how do libertarians address the problem that in a free society, one of the things people would be free to do would be to seek to organize governments? Second, how does libertarianism address the power of corporations against individuals? For example, I am theoretically in favor of extremely broad freedom to possess firearms, but the thought of corporate armies makes me shudder.
Not sure what you mean by the first question, but it could be like a homeowner’s association. Any “government” formed wouldn’t be allowed to violate any laws in existence.
As for corporate “armies”, are you thinking about them operating in foreign countries? No reason a libertarian country would allow domestic security guards to have any more authority than they do in the US today.
Corporations can hire people with guns now. Security is a pretty big industry.
As to whether you’re going to see corporate ARMIES, probably not. War is a money loser. A business can make a lot of money selling arms to the government, but what’s the profit in actually maintaining an army?
Power. Cheap or slave labor. The destruction of potential rivals. You can use it to round up workers, intimidate or kill those who resist, destroy competing businesses and so on. Of course, usually in a society with libertarian tendencies I’d expect them to just have the government do most of that for them, just like in the the Gilded Age or the Third World right now.
Libertarianism doesn’t equal anarchy. So, the first answer is that it wouldn’t seek to prevent people from organizing government. As for the second question, again libertarianism doesn’t equal anarchy, so laws would be how it addresses the power of corporations verse individuals…same as today.
I don’t think you need worry about corporate armies preventing you from owning firearms…firearms corporations will be the ones competing to sell them to you. 
You probably don’t need to worry about a libertarian government taking over either…we aren’t exactly moving in that direction from either the left or right wings in the US, and I don’t think Europe is exactly a hotbed of libertarian thinking.
-XT
I can imagine some corporations using heavy-handed against their competitors, as well as against people who try to organize to stop them from engaging in, say, environmentally destructive activities.
So yes, I can envision open warfare between corporations and radicalized environmentalists.
My question about libertarianism is, whither organized crime? On the one hand, conditions would favor those willing to be ruthless and violent. OTOH, organized crime thrives when there are lots of things that are illegal.
Do they do that today? Why would they do it under a libertarian government? Again, libertarianism does not equal anarchy. We’d still have laws, we’d still have courts, we’d still have police and we’d still have military. So, I can’t see corporations going to war with each other under any conditions short of all out anarchy or some sort of science fictional world where the corporations completely take over and become nation states in their own right. I don’t see them going to war with radical environmentalists either.
Crime would always be with us, regardless of whether it’s a libertarian government or a totalitarian nightmare like in North Korea. THEY still have crime and so would we. That’s why we’d still have police and laws and courts. Organized crime catering to illicit drugs and such might go away, and prostitution would render some of the illicit sex industry obsolete, but people would probably still sell illegal drugs and sex on the black market no matter how you liberalized the laws…and they would still do other stuff that would be illegal.
-XT
Corporate armies waging violent private wars is essentially what’s happening today in Mexico among drug cartels. If the US were to move in a more libertarian direction by legalizing marijuana, it would eliminate one of the major underpinnings of that violence.
:eek: Way to miss the point. It’s not that I won’t be able to arm myself, it’s that someone’s making money selling guns’n’ammo to organized crime, or arming their own band of intimidation specialists, etc.
Because Libertarianism is about as workable as Communism. Looks neat on paper, utterly impossible in the real world.
As you just noted Libertarianism is not anarchy. So, when they start walking down the list of things that they must have in a government it takes no time at all for every Tom, Dick & Harry (and Susie for good measure) to demand that this or that thing be in place.
The result? Pretty much what we have today.
The point you missed is that libertarianism isn’t anarchy. We’d still have laws, we’d still have police, we’d still have courts. Where do you guys get the impression that libertarianism would be roving bands of corporate private armies battling it out in some sort of Mad Max world??
Pretty much. It would look a lot like what America looks like today, from a practical perspective but with perhaps a lower level of regulation and nanny state I Know What’s Good For You-ism. But making a lot of stuff that’s illegal today legal isn’t going to turn the world on it’s head or into some sort of criminal state…quite the opposite I should think, since a lot of crime today is due to the sheer amount of money available (and the widespread use of illegal substances and other illicit things that large percentages of the population actually indulge in).
But we’ll still have police, courts, judges and all the rest…those things aren’t going to magically go away, and I don’t even think that most of the rational and sane libertarians either want or advocate that they will. The military…yeah, I could see a large part of the US military that’s used for power projection being decommissioned and only a basic skeleton military for internal defense and to respond to internal emergencies being kept. But police? Law and order? None of that’s going to change at all.
It’s probably even less workable from a practical perspective than communism, since libertarian types are hardly going to use totalitarian methods to force people to go along.
-XT
Are you sure police forces will get as much funds as they do today? Or will the significantly lower taxes and the reduced importance people assign to government functions also affect their budgets?
These faux governments would have no power except over those who specifically choose to join them. But if you want to create some hippie commune somewhere, you’ve got my blessing.
There is no difference between a corporation and a faux government of the sort you suggested in the first question. Why the double standard?
While a libertarian government would probably strive for efficiency and possibly take time to audit various government functions to determine where the waste and duplication of efforts were and attempt to address those, initially I’d say that things will work exactly as they work now and at the same levels, budget wise. No one could possibly come in and radically change the US overnight, and certainly no one is going to de-fund the police, fire department or emergency services (as well as parks and rec staff and all the other myriad folks who provide services to the public that the public wants). As laws were past that made things that were illegal in the old system legal there will be a lot of initial friction and some strife as folks figure out how to live with the new changes. I could see after a few years them dropping the numbers of police in some places because the crime level fell, but I don’t see libertarians getting rid of ALL government functions, though they might try and privatize quite a few (like those parks and rec guys)
I don’t know how much budgets would actually be reduced, especially initially, and I seriously doubt that taxes would drop right off either. I know libertarians want to substantially reduce our spending on the military, but unless you want a lot of nasty short term problems you’d have to reduce the military over a fairly long period of time…simply don’t allow many or any services people to re-up when their time in service comes to a close. Mothball ships, vehicles and planes, etc, when we draw down to levels where we can no longer support them. As we lower the budgets start to incrementally lower taxes across the board. The same would go for many social programs…some would probably be phased out, some would be revamped with firmer missions and more efficiency, but nothing would be done instantly…it would all happen over the course of years or even decades.
-XT
Because that’s the general result when they get to put some of their ideas into practice. And any police or courts we still had would be a joke, existing only to benefit the wealthy - again, that’s how it always works out.
It equals anarchy for the rich. Libertarianism is about stripping away all government protection from the common people, leaving them no legal recourse to deal with their grievances against the powerful. But keeping the police in place so that when these desperate people turn to strikes or extralegal methods, the only ones they have left, they’ll be smashed down.
And piles of bodies from the toxic medicines, contaminated foods, riots, strikebreaking, starvation, plagues, collapsed building, terrorism, etc. And lesser offenses like rapes will go way up - plenty of women will be told to take off their clothes and bend over for the boss or they’ll be fired.
Of course it will. Just like the good old days of the Gilded Age, they will be back to being nothing more than a club to keep the commoners in line. The main experience most people will have of the police will be when they wade into some strikers and start breaking bones, or when they haul away some guy who shot his boss because the boss demanded sexual services from his daughter in return for his continued employment.
Oh look, a thread about Libertarianism! Has anyone mentioned yet how we’ll all become slaves and get food poisoning? Cause that’s what I heard will happen, roving gangs turns us into slaves then give us a nasty case of the funny poops, then everyone becomes an orphan and dies in the streets. And without a government there are not city workers to go around collecting the dead. But that’s not the scary part. What will really suck is that without government regulations in the dead-collecting-industry there won’t be any inspectors to make sure live people aren’t collected by accident. I know this because I saw it in a documentary once.
It’s conceivable that police would get more money than they do today. The pie would be smaller, but the slice would be bigger. Libertarians generally consider these basic functions to be legitimate uses of government power:
Police
Courts
Military (defense).
There are certainly some hawkish libertarians, but they are in the minority, and we would see a diminished DoD under a libertarian government. And before one of our many libertarian-bashers tries to say otherwise, I will note that in the last thread we had on the subject I linked to the Libertarian Party’s official stance against the Iraq war.
To clarify my OP: a quick look at “libertarianism” on Wiki gives a brief rundown on the multiple different meanings attached by different groups to the term. I chose libertarian rather than anarchist because in the original 19th century radical meaning of the term anarchist meant people who were violently anti-propertarian, which isn’t what I had in mind. I suppose what I envisioned was closer to the fictional world depicted in The Probability Broach, a fascinating if very unlikely alternate history.
As to corporations, I was thinking of something like the violent range wars and railroad and coal strikes of the latter ninetheenth century. If it’s a matter of everyone could have any weapons they could afford, then today it would be bands of individuals armed with automatic rifles versus corporations with tanks and helicopter gunships. Which of course leads into a whole debate in itself: given the economic power of corporations and the near-extinction of self-sufficiency for ordinary people, in the absence of a strong state how could you avoid corporate feudalism?
Bah. Libertarianism means whatever somebody who hates paying taxes, but wants to claim there’s actually some higher principle involved, wants it to mean. If it seems incoherent and chimerical to you, that’s because it is.
You don’t need a giant welfare system in order to have a “strong state”. Where are you getting the idea that Libertarianism = weak policing power? As I noted above, the police authority could just as easily be stronger under a libertarian government.