If you define progressive as liberty winning in all spheres, then you’re right. Moralistic snobbery is losing both on the social front and the economic front.
The libertarians will never achieve total victory, but they are winning, moving the ball forward a few inches at a time every year.
A sampling of cases where the “line” didn’t move to where the progressives wanted it:
Eugenics
Command economies and central planning
The abolition of the family
Prohibition
After the fact, it’s easy to trumpet a progressive policy as being successful and inevitable. In the moment, much less so.
A large fraction of all groups, of all mentalities, thought this was a good idea. However, almost none of it was ever enacted in law, except for some sterilization laws and those were all at the state level. Go state’s rights!
If you take the pejorative tone out of this, then both World Wars and the New Deal did this, and most people cheered at the time and after. Otherwise you’re confusing the progressive movement with the socialist movement and that never had much support.
No. Just no.
Prohibition was primarily put forward by conservative Protestants, who had passed laws in most of the conservative areas of the country before several weird confluences allowed them to get it into national law. Progressives generally agreed that the evil effects of the rampant alcoholism in the country needed fixing, but they weren’t the drivers of the movement.
What I actually said was that the trendline of America - and much of the so-called Western world, for that matter - may be sawtooth but is continually upward, if up is defined as more progressive. I did not claim that any individual progressive policy or idea is inevitable. I did not say that every conservative policy or idea has no chance. I said that in the long term you can’t reset the line and you can’t make the trend go downward. All attempts to do so have failed.
The short answer to the OP’s question is “no”. Objectivism (the proper term for Ayn Rand’s philosophy) Laissez-faire free market economics and Libertarianism were never considered mainstream economic theories in the first place.
The closest thing would be the Chicago school of economics put forth by economists like Milton Friedman and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.
In contrast, you also have Keynesian economics (John Maynard Keynes) which believes that believes public sector spending and monetary policy is often required to counteract inefficiencies caused by the private sector.
In any event, any simplistic absolutist ideology is typically wrong.
Paul Krugman?
That is incorrect. Objectivists, Laissez-faire free marketers and Libertarians believe that there is no such thing as some monolithic “public good of society”. There are only millions of people with different vested interests. They believe that no one should have the right to take away your life, liberty, economic freedom or personal assets to benefit the “greater good”.
Society as a whole benefits from the free market (Adam Smith’s so-called “Invisible Hand”) because ambition and talent are channeled into those activities which are most in demand. Failure and inefficiency are ruthlessly culled and those resources and assets are redistributed for more productive use elsewhere.
If anything, “tragedy of the commons” and other negative externalities could be a case for greater privatization. TotC occurs when negative effects lack any clear owner. There is no cost to polluting the air or sucking all the water out of a river because no one owns the rights to it.
I have already responded to this line of argument in the second paragraph of post #84 and I see no need to repeat myself.
Yes.
I have a funny feeling that you’re thinking of mentioning slavery, but I’ve already explained that I was not including that when talking about the conditions of the working poor in America in the 19th century.
I have already noted that the USA had protective tariffs and other measures that were not libertarian. I do not dispute that. What I said was that the economy of the USA was more free than any other country. A typical individual in 19th-century America had more autonomy in economic decision-making than a typical individual in France or any other country.
I then pointed out that America had a remarkable economic boom. When founded in 1776, the country wasn’t wealthy. By 1900, it was the wealthiest country in the history of the world. There must be an explanation for this. I proposed America’s unique economic freedom as the best explanation.
You say that economics is complex and that America’s economc boom can’t be pinned down as due to only one factor? Okay, I agree; I’m only asserting that economic freedom is the largest factor. Other things played a role, but I’m looking for something that can explain why America’s economic results differed so hugely from every other country’s. You point to the trusts and the use of government power to break unions. Both important parts of our economic history to be sure, but they don’t explain why America became so much wealthier than the rest of the world. The trusts were only a dominating factor at the tail end of the period we’re discussing–Standard Oil was founded in 1870–and I’ve already noted that the scale of labor unrest was much smaller in America than across Europe, suggesting that workers were happier here on average.
You don’t think millions of acres of sparsely populated prime farmland essentially free for the taking by a rapidly expanding population might have had something to do with it?
It’s hard NOT to get rich with that level of expansion, even if you have the crappiest economic system in the world.
Then explain all the other countries/regions with similar climate that failed to thrive. And explain all the countries without sparsely populated farmland that thrive.
South America is case in point where crappy economic systems crippled them even though they should have been richer than the US. Do a quick google search for how much money can be made from an acre of land that grows cocaine vs corn.
"1 hectare gets you 1.864 metric tons of dry coca leaf.
1 metric ton of dry coca leaf gets you 0.0034 metric tons of cocaine (3.4kg)."
Which can work out to about $97,444.32 on the street. An acre of corn might get you $1000.
If I remember correctly, in the Connections series, Burke seemed to think the reason the US outpaced the rest of the world during the industrial revolution and beyond was cultural. I think he called America a country of tinkers or something along those lines. I guess the idea was that a bunch of gearheads are going to get farther along using machines than a bunch of 18th century wig wearing fops (no offense to those here descended from the Fop motherland 
- half foppish here).
edit: I guess you can read in a subtext there - that such innovation is only encouraged and nurtured by a free market. IDK.
If I were you I wouldn’t want to repeat the faceplant that was post 84 either.
Um, I don’t think the global cocaine trade much of an economic juggernaut in 1776-1900.
South America, of course, was also nowhere near as depopulated as the US was at the time. The “intermix and integrate” model doesn’t tend to lead to as much prosperity for the colonizer as the “drive out and take over” version. Tellingly, Argentina was among the richest places in the world for much of this period- and their version of western expansionism into fertile farmland looked quite similar to ours.
Do you have any idea of the way the United States has treated South America (and elsewhere) since those nations won their de jure independence? De Facto independence has only come in the last fifteen years or so, and the story isn’t over yet. I’m not counting FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” as it did not last nearly long enough.
South America is among many places to demonstrate the failure of neoliberalism, not its success, which is why it had to be imposed by force.
No. usually it means letting the rich and powerful run wild, and having the government run interference for them when they start cheating, hurting and killing people.
Doing so out of greed or malice on the other hand is just fine with them. In fact, it’s outright virtuous in their eyes; if you can hurt someone, that “proves” they are weak and deserve to be tormented, exploited and killed. They’re all about the just-world fallacy.
I’m sorry, that was really unclearly put.
Even without an evil government “creating a monopoly,” you may find you don’t have the freedom to walk away. The existence of owned capital means that not all of us really have equal access to capital or equal opportunity.
Of course, a Libertarian Socialist would say that property is the creation of the state, so true freedom from oppression means no private property, or something. I’m not clear how that works.
Society needs laws, or customs, or regulations, that ensure that individual freedom to walk away. Remember your Rousseau: We give up maximum personal freedom to gain broad freedom for more persons.
And you’re *proud *of the fact that you’re not a “moralistic snob” demanding “equality of opportunity” or “fair treatment.” So what are you? Immoral? Amoral? Or just a believer in a counter-morality?
Seems to me that libertarians are also “moralistic snobs.” They love their own ethics and despise other people’s moral concerns.
Ok, before I address the above, I need to know how you define “progressive”, and what constitutes a “progressive policy or idea”.
It’s a tangent, so if you don’t want to get into it, that’s fine too.
All political labels are loose and slippery terms that evolve and change and mutate over time. It does make discussion difficult nigh unto impossible. However, I’ve complained of lack of definition in this thread so I can’t avoid it.
My involvement on this tangent started as a response to ITR champion’s post #75 which referred to 19th century workers. The Progressive movement (both capitalized as a party and uncapitalized as a set of ideals) grew out of what contemporary workers saw as overwhelming exploitation by business and their powerlessness in a political universe dominated by business. Both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually stole large handfuls of its platform, which says a lot about how appealing it must have been. (This leads to hilarious consequences when today’s posters assume that the Dems and Reps then were identical to the parties today and make statements about conservative and liberal. Roosevelt had three progressive Republicans in his cabinet rather than use conservative Democrats.)
Anyway, digressions aside, the movement, originally considered radical, swiftly became the source of broadly agreed-upon, even bedrock, principles that form much of the basis for today’s post-WWII conception of what makes America America. What are they? I haven’t read it through word for word, but the Wikipedia page on the Progressive Era seems a good summary. They emphatically were not Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, or even the Populists that they are often confused with. Nor were they necessarily right on every issue or how to implement their program. But who is? That page is a pretty good set of ideals.
I hope this makes my points about history clearer.
Libertarianism is not anarchism. It’s just the recognition that man can either govern himself, or he can’t. If he can, then he only needs government do the things that can only be done collectively. If he can’t, then government is not fit to govern him, since government is made up of men, at least until the Second Coming or an alien invasion.
I assume the first precept, that man is fit to govern himself and that’s why we live in a free country. And getting freer, despite government and various busybodies fighting constantly to make us less free for our own good.
It’s the “anarchism of the right”. It wants the wealthy and wannabe-wealthy to have the right to screw over everyone else, and for the main function of the government to be protecting such people from their victims. It should really be called something like “neofeudalism”, since it aims to drag the world back to a regime of lords and serfs.
That’s a false choice. A government can have all sorts of built in safeguards, elections and separation of powers and so on, to make it far more effective at governing than a random collection of people. As well, a government is full of specialist organizations and people who are going to be much better than a bunch of poorly equipped amateurs at performing its functions, and less motivated by the profit motive.
If anything we’re getting less free, and the libertarians are working hard to eliminate all freedom for anyone who isn’t rich and amoral.