A free-market is one thing, and libertarianism is another. It is entirely possible for a libertarian collective to be communist, so long as all are volunteers.
You’ll have a tough time convincing me that if Pat Robertson builds such an airport that Ted Turner, the nation’s largest land owner, would not build a competing one.
As to disrupting people’s pacemakers, assuming they are on their own property or on property that they have rented peacefully and honestly, that’s a coercion. See, in Libertaria, you may not abridge the rights of even one person — not one tiny little insignificant impoverished old widow living on her last little acre — even if it means you lose millions of dollars in opportunities that would otherwise avail themselves if you had a Senator in your pocket to legislate her our of your way. Technology in Libertaria has to advance “cleanly”. It can’t just go polluting people’s property and disabling their pacemakers, even if it means that society must develop some other way.
Because you’re creating new crimes. Driving down the road is not illegal now, because the roads are public property. Speeding will get you a ticket, but not arrested. By classifying now-legal things as crimes, you create higher crime levels.
I’d have to say that my representatives in Congress are considerably smarter than the average person. Jon Corzine became the CEO of Goldman Sachs after starting there in an entry-level position. Robert Torricelli has earned both a law degree (Rutgers Law) and a Masters in Public Administration (Harvard). Rush Holt has a PhD in Physics from NYU. I have no control over who other states send to Congress.
That food crack’s one heck of a strawman. I don’t know how your digestive system works, and I certainly wouldn’t want to speak for everyone else here, but I benefit from food everyday, and have done so throughout my life. Police and ambulences, on the other hand, are emergency services. You only need them once in a while. Some people may never need either. (I haven’t yet. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pay for them if I lived in Libertaria, but many people might not. Lots of people don’t pay for insurance as it is.) You also get no warning before a problem arises where you’d need these services, but you do get a warning when you need food. It’s called hunger.
People get hunger pains way before they starve. I believe you can last a couple of weeks without eating before you starve to death, but hunger shows up in a day.
You don’t need that much of the population to elect a president. George W. Bush received 50,456,169 votes. According to latest census figures, we had 281,421,906 people as of April 1, 2000. That’s a mere 17.9% of the population. Even if you only look at people who are old enough to vote under our current laws, we had 209,128,094 people (from here), which means only 24.1% of those eligible to choose who runs our country actually chose the person who is now running the country.
So basically, you’re assuming that everyone (or at least a great majority of the people) will be able to recognize what’s in their own best interests? I think one of the biggest clues that that’s not true is the fact that we even need a seatbelt law in the first place.
Lib, your apology is certainly accepted and appreciated. Thanks!
Anyway, back to the discussion. I disagree that the possiblity of someone using road ownership to abuse someone is remote or unlikely. In my neighborhood, there is exactly one road in and out. Because of the way the neigborhood is laid out and the geography (there’s a foothill in my backyard) there can only be one way in or out, short of plowing down the entire row of houses that parallel mine (which leaves the people on the other side of me screwed)
The plus signs are homes, the equal signs are the road and the little ^ are the foothills
Foothills…trust me: unbuildable for roads. The point of the drawing is to show that it’s not that uncommon for someone to be in the scenario I’m describing
If all roads were private and had I the funds, I’d happily buy the road, charge a modest toll to use it (mothly payments are just dandy, thanks) and pay for a security force to patrol the road out of the profits.
Except for one family. I hate these people. They ride their motorcycle home at 3:00 AM and it’s a LOUD motercycle. They have drunken parties that the cops need to bust up regularly. Their front lawn looks like a dandilion farm/thistle patch and a junk yard. If I owned the road, I’d happily say that I will grant them free access to use it one time. Outward trip only. They are essentially prisoners except at my whim, or they can move. If I catch them trespassing on my road (security force, remember?) I’d get to fine the hell out of them until they went broke. There’s nothing they could do in that scenerio except move, starve or go broke.
As much fun as that is to fantasize about, I don’t want one person to have that kind of power.
I agree with much of what libertarians say, but equal to the the rights of free speech/personal property/keeping and bearing arms is the right of access. There’s a term for this, but I don’t know what it is. The right of an individual to leave (and presumably return). Possibly my number one problem with practical libertarinism (as opposed to it’s philosophical roots) is my inability to reconcile the “right of access to property” (for lack of the proper term) with “private property”.
Lift up your head! Simple mistakes made in the pursuit
of knowledge are not intolerable. In the meantime, those
of us who post can do manual carriage returns. It’s no
big deal. (Note that the preview format is wider than the
eventual format.)
I’m afraid that the power you fear already exists,
and is in the hands of those elected by the dullards
that Glitch mentioned. If Mister Tycoon wants to
create a new development, Senator Fatcat can write
legislation that will force you to move.
You’d be surprised how resourceful free people can be. Consider the case
of some guys in Essex who were concerned about how to
get around on their horses, since public roads had long ago
been abandoned to automobiles, and bridle paths were few
and far between, and not well maintained by The State.
(Apparently, those who define the “public good” determined
that people with horses be damned.)
A professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross
in Worcester, MA, and his son, published Roads, Bridges, Sunlight and Private Property Rights,
dealing with your very scenario, and taking it to an even
greater extreme than you had imagined: a privately owned
road from Boston to Los Angeles that divides the United
States in half! Have a look at their analysis and findings.
Protesilaus:
But you’re ignoring the converse implication. Things that heretofore
were crimes, like smoking pot or having sex with your gay
lover in Georgia, are no longer crimes. Crime has simply
been redefined to mean coercion and fraud. In fact,
Libertaria has one and only one law.
Assuming (generously) that their credentials were earned by
intelligence and not the cunning of political manipulation,
you are a very lucky man indeed if all of your
governors are as smart as they. Here, one of my Senators is
Jesse Helms, who once noted that it is impossible to rape
a woman because if she isn’t excited, “her juices won’t flow”.
Just to the south of us is Senator Strom Thurmond, whose
brain is functioning on auxiliary power at best. Our
local sheriff is none other than Gerald Hege, the
egomaniacal King of the County with a show on Court TV.
He is the guy who painted the jailhouse pink. His oft
repeated motto is “This ain’t Mayberry, and I ain’t
Andy.” One of our mayors was a guy I went to school with,
who wrote a poem rhyming “want” with “don’t”, unaware
that his accent was parochial.
As President Clinton’s campaign adviser, Paul Begala,
said, “Politics is show business for ugly people.”
The satire, lost on you, intended to show that, by the same
token, people ought to see health and crime dangers coming
the same way they do starvation. There are myriad clues
to a person that he might need a health or security service
long before he actually does. My question is, why aren’t
you content to live your own life, and let those who haven’t
the foresight you have live theirs? Why must you nanny them?
Suppose I thought you weren’t exercising enough foresight
by not praying regularly. Ought I to force you to pray?
Well, there you have it.
No, I don’t think that. What I think is that the matter is
irrelevant. I cannot imagine why it would bother you that I
can or cannot think for myself, unless you were under some
artificial obligation to pay for my mistakes. Which you are
now, but wouldn’t be in Libertaria.
Now, I can understand caring about others. I do myself. But
there is nothing in Libertaria to prevent those like you
and I who care from working on our causes. We just can’t
shove our causes down the throats of people who resist us.
Wow, I thought people like me and the Sierra Club were considered to be “radical environmentalists” on this Message Board, but I don’t think any of us have ever advocated only allowing technologies that lead to no pollution (or no pollution outside of the land/air/water that you personally own). It sounds wonderful…but also impossible!
Can you give me an example of a transportation or energy technology that is entirely pollution-free? As others have pointed out, even the production of solar cells involves some pollution.
A recent controversy arose when the State of NJ did not allow the U. of Phoenix to open a branch here. The U. of Phoenix is a for-profit school that focuses on adult education. It operates more efficiently than typical non-profit universities.
The ostensible reason for the blockage was the U. of P.'s over-reliance on the the internet,** althought the state didn’t even allege that U of P students learned any less than students at not-for-profit schools.**
IMHO, this is an example of protectionism, enforced by governmental powers, to the detriment of the public.
BTW I discussed this decision with four liberal professors, who teach at state schools. They were totally in favor of keeping the U of P out.
Several posters have argued that the unfettered property rights of Libertaria
would lead to all sorts of social injustices. Bigotry, segregation,
disregard for the welfare of others are all common themes. Leaving aside the
assumption that everyone in Libertaria is both a bigot and an extremely poor
entrepreneur, I have one question for Glitch, Fenris, Sam Stone
et al.
Do not these concerns apply even more forcefully to the present system in
America? For example, for a large part of our history it was explicit
government policy to enslave vast numbers of people based solely on the color
of their skin. Even after slavery was abolished millions of people were denied
the right to vote, ride buses, eat where they pleased, etc. In fact,
segregation was alive and well in this country as late as the 1960’s.
Official bigotry was not limited to race either, until the early 20th century
half the population was excluded from voting based solely on the fact that
they were women.
I argue that bigotry by the government is far more pernicious and
harmful than bigotry by any individual, no matter how powerful. As Libertarian said, if Pat Robertson owns the local airport and
restricts its use to people he finds desirable, Ted Turner can come along
and open a competing airport to serve those excluded people.
However, if the government decrees that women and blacks may not use
airports, what recourse is there?
Granted, we eventually eliminated most of the official bigotry in our
society, but I don’t think anyone would argue that this was inevitable, or
that it is guaranteed to be permanent.
I have a hypothetical scenario for critics of libertarianism.
If a majority of people in this country elected representatives
who passed an amendment to the Constitution which was then ratified by the
states decreeing that all white people be stripped of their property and
forced into bondage what force exists to counter it? How would America
deal with this social injustice?
Well, let’s break the mantra of, “there can always be competition”, because my assertion is that that isn’t ALWAYS the case.
So let’s take another specific example. Pat Robertson sets up a radio station, and uses a spread-spectrum broadcast to spread the ‘word of god’ across every frequency from 300 khz to 5 ghz. No cellphones, no AM/FM Radio, no cordless phones, no Broadcast TV. Because good ole’ Pat is jamming the entire spectrum.
Now what? For the sake of argument, let’s say that he’s the first one broadcasting in the area, so he has ‘squatter’s rights’.
Is it acceptable that an entire range of radio technologies and entertainment are completely unavailable to the population because Pat Robertson is sitting on it all?
(patiently) What if there isn’t enough room? I could have sworn that Sam anticipated this point himself. Let me see…
Yup, there it is. Seems to me to be a pretty reasonable point, along the lines of Sam’s last post about the broadcast spectrum. Given that resources like airwaves and large tracts of developable land are sadly finite, Lib, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
To put it another way: Just because Ted Turner is the largest land owner doesn’t mean that he owns, or has the capacity to own, enough land near Pat Robertson’s airport to provide an effective alternative.
The major problem I’ve always had with radical Libertarianism is the belief that property rights must supercede all other rights. Telling people that if they have a problem with restrictions others may put on a private road, airport etc. they have the option to build their own road etc. is silly. Pat Robertson could build his airport, and Ted Turner could build his competing airport(providing there is enough land left in the area to build one!), but the average shmo must cater to them what has the money. Basically, Libertarianism boils down to the Golden Rule: He who Has The Gold Makes The Rules.
Screw the airport idea. Do you realize that the cost of a simple road would be prohibitive to most of the population? In Libertaria, roads would be owned by the rich, going to destinations the rich pick. Pollution laws would be written by industry. The airwaves would be dominated totally by those who can spend the most first.
All in all, I’d say that Libertaria would be the last place on Earth the “Common Man” would want to live.
Although “official” bigotry has been (almost) eliminated,
that is, politicians have written down “don’t do that”,
real bigotry is alive and well and, if anything, is more
insidious than ever. Bigots are, by definition, ignorant,
but they do not necessarily lack cunning. There are endless
ways to exercise bigotry, all the while staying within the
guidelines of the scribbles.
Let people who disagree with your point examine the
populations of prisons and ghettos, and explain away the
bigotry therein.
December:
Thanks for that example. There are way too many examples of
government abuse of power to enumerate here. I have yet to
hear of, though I have asked for, an explanation of the
mysterious agent that transforms irresponsible dullards
into benevolent care-givers once they’ve been given the
monopoly powers of government.
JShore:
Sometimes I neglect to illucidate for the benefit of new-
comers. Having made these points again and again, I often
resort to shorthand. There can be no pollution that your
neighbor will not allow. Now, hold on a minute. It’s a
simple application of Hayek’s Theory of Spontaneous Order.
If you prosecute your neighbor because he farted, then you,
too, will be prosecuted whenever you fart.
The threshold is reached whenever one neighbor will not
tolerate a quid pro quo of the other’s pollution. For
example, you might not allow your neighbor to dump dioxin
on your property since you yourself intend to dump none on
his. Thus, if that neighbor needs to dump dioxin, he must
find a way to do it such that your property (and the
property of anyone else who protests) is unaffected.
Alternatively, government regulation of pollution has
resulted in more in justices and blatant political
maneuvering that I have room to list here. See the many Cato
Institute Papers on the EPA and its shenannigans. For
example, guess what is the only entity that is exempt from
NEPA standards.
Sam:
Please don’t invoke Ayn Rand. She hated libertarians and
called us derisively, “hippies of the right”.
Set aside for a moment the phenominal cost of broadcasting
and satellite systems to cover the whole range of
frequencies over all the earth. Regarding Robertson’s radio
station, did you mean jam or broadcast? A jammer can’t
receive or transmit normal radio signals. Either way, Ted
Turner can build his more powerful transmitters and knock
out Robertson’s.
(source) At any rate, governments do this
all the time, jamming whatever frequencies they don’t like.
What principle gives them the right to deny their
people access to these broadcasts?
What is to stop Pat Robertson from buying Hartsfield right
now and requiring that passengers who use his airport
declare their love of Jesus? Would that be illegal? What is
to stop a bigot from opening his private road? Bigotry is
not illegal even in this society.
You are not accounting for the innovative capabilities of
entrepreneurs who see market opportunities in the kind
of nutcase scenarios you are holding up as criticisms of
libertarianism, and who are unencumbered by frivolous
regulations and cost inflating taxes and fees.
By the way, would anyone mind answering some of the
questions that I have asked? Is this thread to be
a gang rape?
Lib: Airlines are ‘common carriers’, and are therefore bound by regulation to allow access. They cannot discriminate against people based on color, sex, etc.
Let’s stick with the radio thing for a minute, because it’s a nice illumination of the problem of technical monopoly. Are you seriously telling me that the Libertarian ‘solution’ to someone broadcasting on all frequencies is to buy a bigger transmitter and drown them out?
And you set up a straw man by claiming that it’s very difficult to cover all frequencies all over the world. I don’t live all over the world. I live here. And I enjoy listening to my radio, using my cell phone and cordless phone, etc. And I’d be mighty pissed off if all the sudden everything I owned either stopped working or started picking up the ‘700 club’. Sorry, but your solution just doesn’t pass scrutiny. And unfortunately, I think Libertarians tend to throw out what sound to others like glib answers to these complex problems. “Hey, build a bigger radio station” just doesn’t cut it as a solution.
The problem is, absent some governmental power to protect people from these things, you’ll have a ‘chilling effect’ which will cause people to not build them at all. Who is going to invest a million bucks in a 50,000 watt radio station if they have absolutely zero insurance that someone next door won’t build a 100,000 watt station with the sole purpose of trying to put them off the air? What happens to free speech when anyone who wants to can jam a signal that they deem to be ‘wrong’?
Please don’t toss this off with a sentence like, “Hey, you should have known who your neighbors were when you moved in.” The whole point to having some sort of structure to society is so that we can live our lives WITHOUT being slaves to the whims of our neighbors. I can build a $300,000 home, safe in the knowledge that zoning laws will prevent me from losing my entire investment if a hog rendering plant opened next door.
Radical Libertarianism really bugs me, because it tends to maginalize my own opinion. I think private police forces and private courts are notoriously silly ideas, and I’m tired of people setting up those straw men against me when they find out I’m essentially Libertarian. And I’m tired of the absolutist argument that property rights are the only thing that matters - In a complex society, there are many ways in which people could exercise their property rights in ways that hurt others. For example, if I own an acre of land in the middle of the city, should I be allowed to put a hog rendering plant on it? After all, it’s MY property. But what about all the people who live around it who will each lose thousands of dollars in property value because of my exercising my property rights? Who’s rights supercede the others here?
Try to imagine a country where there is no minimum wage, no OSHA, no FDA, no RICO laws, no restrictions against monopolies. Try to imagine living in a country where you earn a couple dollars an hour because the industries in your area have reached a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep wages low, and the only answer you get when you cannot fly on “Whiteways Airlines”, drive your semi on “Rockefeller Freeway”, or advertise in the “Sears-Ford” Times is that you are free to build your own airline, build your own freeway, or start your own newspaper(which of course would include running your own distribution center subject to right-of-way on “Rockefeller Freeway”, which has already reached an agreement with the “Sears-Ford Times”).
Sounds fair to me
This post could be described as circular reasoning or begging the question. Let’s be kind and call it poetry.
Czar – if the result you contemplate were the real consequence of economic freedom, you would have a strong case. However, where’s the evidence that, in the absense of regulation, these things would occur?
Try history…If you don’t want to look at current American society, try the more laissez-faire society of, say, the late 1800s. Or, look back at the entire course of human history. Oppression by the economically powerful by those less powerful is an ongoing saga of human existence and there is little reason to believe it will change because some people mutter magic words like “libertarianism” and “free markets”. In fact, the historical evidence points the other way.
[By the way, I wouldn’t choose to summarize libertarianism with the words “economic freedom” unless one chooses to define “freedom” in a rather perverse way, as in “I have the freedom to crack you over the head if I’m bigger than you.”]
Pfui! As was just stated, history teaches us that if you give a man(or corporation) with power an inch, he(or it) will assume that all inches within view are part of the package. Lift regulations and the only guarantees you get are that prices will go up, wages will go down, jobs will emmigrate, and competition will be bought out. What is it with Libertarians and their worship of money, anyway? Government by power can only go in one direction, and history shows that it usually crashes spectactularly when it finally reaches its final destination.
Replace “libertarianism” with “communism” and the thought still makes sense. Hey, as long as everyone is fair and kind, this system will work. The fact is, is that people are greedy. To base a political/economical system on the requirement that all people will “play nice” is a silly concept at best.
The free market system is pretty good but not without its flaws. Since it’s driven mostly by short term gain, someone with a long term plan with enough capital to withstand a short term loss could easily manipulate the system. I believe this is what Sam, Fenris, and Czar are trying to say … once a few people decide to buy up all the roads/air waves/airports, Libertaria soon turns into Oligarchia.
Libertarianism defines freedom as the absence of initiated force and fraud. This seems to me to be as good a definition of freedom as any. It looks at freedom as freedom from something, not freedom to do something, as in the majoritarian definition of freedom, which is freedom to do whatever the majority says you may do. What can be a more free context than if no person, no matter how wealthy, may initiate force or fraud upon any other person, no matter how poor? In majoritarianism, only the majority is free.
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As stated before, a libertarian collective can be communist, so long as all are volunteers. Libertarianism and volunteerism are synonyms.
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I’m sorry if the Noncoercion Principle makes it inconvenient for a man to call himself a libertarian.
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It does not follow that people who are wealthy can exercise more influence within a context of peace and honesty than they can within a context of coercion. It is when the wealthy can buy political favor that wealth becomes dangerous to the common man. In a representative system of majoritarianism, the wealthy can finance their hand-picked puppets into seats of power, whereupon they accrue the political clout to have roads and bridges and airports built to their own advantage and profit, only for far more money than in a free-market and with money that isn’t even theirs. In Libertaria, where there is no legislation, there is no political favor to purchase.
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Comparisons of libertarianism to robber baron capitalism are either specious or disingenuous. The robber barons have Senator Fatcat in their pockets. There is no Senator Fatcat in Libertaria.
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The fact that these giant squid scenarios must be raised to criticize libertarianism is itself testament to libertarianism’s resourcefulness. Consider the case of the man who buys all the land surrounding you because it is his inexplicable and manifest desire to cut off your material existence. You do not fail to mention how he is arbitrarily evil and conniving beyond the pale, but you do fail to mention that all his neighbors are clueless halfwits who, though never forced against their will, nevertheless sell all that they own to him because they want to see his Machiavellian dream succeed. The evil man in your scenario is playing a game of Monopoly where he occupies every seat. The other players do not play, but rather say, “Oh, you go ahead. Let’s skip my turn again this time. I’m more interested in what you can do if I just pretend I’m not here.”
On the other hand, you have failed to address the protest (or any other protest, for that matter) that government can do the same thing you fear, except that people don’t even have to be clueless; they merely have to lack political clout.
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Libertarianism does not oppose regulation. In fact, there is no political context that would more regulate coercion and fraud. Libertarianism regulates by principle, and not by whim.
The many advantages of TSO application to this issue are highlighted in this excerpt from the paper’s executive summary:
No one is suggesting that you ought to suddenly lose your ability to use your telecommunications devices. It is unfair to criticize libertarianism because a given technology might develop differently than it did in some other context. You offer a red herring when you say that radio frequencies must a priori be allocated by government, and then switch to the argument that suddenly changing the system midstream would upset the apple cart.
Unwillingness to do something a different way from the familiar way is understandable. Even many American slaves were wary of freedom for the same reason. As one young woman observed about the end of dictatorship in Indonesia:
