I don’t think the rich want any responsibility for the poor. They want the government protections that benefit themselves. But they don’t want the civic responsibilities even as they would apply to other rich people. They don’t want a country club. The rich are probably as impacted by Bowling Alone as anyone else.
The same people who support which unions support which choices?
As an outsider, I only know what I read, both here and in the media. I have no idea what’s happening in the school system, but I would have thought that the spread of gated communities was just as alarming.
Most Americans think the British aristocracy is a useless anachronism, and fiercely defend the “American Way”. I have long maintained that the USA has its own aristocracy. Just as in the UK, most of the wealth is in the hands of a few aristocrats, and they will do whatever it takes to keep it.
Yeah, there seems to be an intended “gotcha” here that depends very heavily on describing two very different issues as being simplistically a mere matter of “choice”.
If you support a pregnant woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy on bodily-autonomy grounds, that doesn’t logically imply that you must also support anti-union measures to undermine worker protection and collective bargaining rights. Not unless you’re pretending that there’s no meaningful difference between a pregnant individual choosing an abortion and a society choosing how to regulate the permissible exercise of power by employers over employees.
IAN Balthisar and cannot speak for them, but IME “government monopoly on violence” is routine libertarian-speak for “governmental authority under the rule of law”.
That is, ISTM that what they’re saying is that if using tax revenues to support charter and private schools at the expense of public schools ends up having a really catastrophic effect on universal education, then no biggie, the government can just exercise its legal authority to forcibly defund and/or shut down the charter and private schools and build up the public-school system again.
Needless to say, as a non-libertarian, I think this is… not a particularly smart policy stance. See also: “why worry about predictions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases causing catastrophic climate change, let’s see if it actually happens and if it does, we can throw money at the problem”.
Yeah, there are a whole lot of catastrophic problems that become much more difficult to fix the farther you let them get down that road, and the destruction of a universal primary/secondary education system is one of them, IMHO.
So “government monopoly on violence” is a codeword for collecting taxes? Okay, I thought he was talking about sending troops out to round up children in private schools and force them to go to public schools. Which seemed pretty unlikely.
If it’s taxes, aren’t private schools also part of the “government monopoly on violence” problem? The government has been giving tax money to private schools for decades. And conservatives have been the ones promoting this.
I agree. I think cancer is a good analogy for demonstrating the weakness of this approach. The evidence shows that smoking greatly increases the chances of getting cancer. What policy, as an individual, should you make for yourself based on this knowledge?
One policy, I suppose, would be to deny the evidence and refuse to believe that smoking may cause cancer.
A second policy would be to accept that smoking may cause you to get cancer. But you continue to smoke until you actually have cancer and then you will focus on curing the cancer.
A third policy would be to stop smoking.
It’s often better to change things before a problem occurs in order to prevent the problem rather than waiting for the problem to occur and then trying to fix the problem.
Surely “my body, my choice” also extends to things like whether or not to join a union? Or does bodily autonomy mean abortion and nothing else?
“Bodily autonomy” is specifically about your right to control your body. You can quit a union job if you don’t want your body to be working as a member of a union. You can’t quit a pregnancy if you don’t want your body to be pregnant, except by obtaining an abortion.
Unless you’re going full-on anarchist libertarian, you can’t just argue that being “pro-choice” means one has to oppose anything whatsoever that restricts any kind of choice. By that reasoning, you could also interpret “my body, my choice” as meaning that nobody should have to pay taxes, or abide by antidiscrimination laws, or do anything else they don’t want to do.
For those of us who aren’t anarchist libertarians, that kind of argument isn’t persuasive at all; it’s just silly. You can’t reduce every issue to a single oversimplified framework of personal choice.
Government’s “monopoly on violence” is a political science concept where the government ultimately has the power to enforce the law within the territory or jurisdiction it controls. IOW if someone decides to break the law, the government can send the police, a SWAT team, even the military in some cases to arrest and detain you.
The concept doesn’t really refer to the justness or legitimacy of the government or the laws or the checks and balances it may have in place. The concept just presumes that even under the most democratic, progressive government there may be sociopaths, criminals, militias, seditionists, or other elements who for one reason or another feel that they don’t want to follow the law.
For example, if you look places like some of the favellas in Brazil where local gangs are in control. These neighborhoods are effectively “lawless” and not under the control over the legitimate government.
@msmith537: You’re 100% correct as to the textbook / academic meaning of the term. It describes the opposite of anarchy. And in that, for anyone except an anarchist, the term is value-neutral about what the legit government uses its monopoly to accomplish.
The point you glossed over is that in Libertarian circles, the term “government monopoly on violence” mostly means “The government’s illegitmate overweaning overreach that proves government should be abolished.” It’s essentially a very loud Libertarian dog-whistle.
I can’t say whether the poster who used the term was being academic or dog-whistling. But the possibility exists and so should be critically evaluated rather than ignored.
I know I’m not responding to the latest tit-for-tat between y’all but I’ll suggest to @Kimstu that it’s much simpler than your thoughtful analysis.
What @Digger11 probably meant was close to “Folks in favor of abortions are all Democrats. Folks in favor of unions are all democrats. Democrats are Evil and all think exactly alike. End of thought.”
There’s no such thing. Anarchism and Libertarianism are ideological opposites.
I don’t think that’s right…
That’s not an ideology, that’s Cyberpunk 2077 cosplay
Fair enough. I guess I see a decent overlap between right-wing Libertarian and what passes for “anarchy” these days.
The “ditch the rules and the government and let the market sort it out” types.
Particularly when it comes to schools I find the “abolish the Department of Education and privatize the schools” to be a rather anarcho-Libertarian approach. Whoever spends the most money gets the best education, and the pesky government won’t tell us how to teach our kids.
Read all of your own cite:
Anarchists such as Brian Morris argue that anarcho-capitalism does not in fact get rid of the state. He says that anarcho-capitalists “simply replaced the state with private security firms, and can hardly be described as anarchists as the term is normally understood”.
Libertarianism is still a capitalist system. Anti-capitalism has always been the defining feature of anarchism going back to Proudhon.
Well, for one thing, us anarchists generally don’t call what we advocate anarchy. Or even “anarchy”. We advocate for anarchism. There’s a difference.
Most anarchists I know are in favour of ditching the government, but not rules. And definitely not in favour of “the market”
Yeah, it’s too far off topic to discuss whether anarcho-capitalism is “true” anarchism at all. And it probably devolves into a True Scotsman debate anyways. I think I would tend to agree with you that it isn’t, but the terms have been so hijacked it’s hard to make sense of it.
With regards to this debate I think it’s fair to say that the school-choice supporters are more accurately called Libertarian than anarchist. Very few want to remove government-funded schools. They just want to be able to opt their children out of the system and into one that is better funded and doesn’t have to provide education to everybody regardless of ability or background.
The American elites still pay property taxes, which is the primary method of funding public education. Voucher (or “school choice” as the OP describes it) programs are only available in 15 states, and are usually limited in their use for low income or disabled students.
So most elite parents are still having to pay additional out of pocket costs in addition to their local property taxes to send their children to private schools.
My daughter attended a Title I Spanish immersion school for elementary. We ended up pulling her out in 5th grade due to bullying. We also learned about the same time that she has ADHD in conjunction with a few other learning differences. She has since, attended private college prepartory schools, with much smaller classroom sizes and where the schools will follow through on her 504 plan which provided certain accomodations for her learning disabilities.
We haven’t chosen to enroll our daughter in private school to create an apartheid society. I attended public school through high school in a small rural city. I turned out okay. But I like almost every other parent I know (regardless of socioeconomic background) want our children to have more opportunities than we ourselves had growing up.
It’s an individual choice, not some class conspiracy. And as long as the market provides alternatives to public education that may be better for your individual child and people can afford it you will find parents taking advantage of it, to give their children more opportunity than they themselves had.
What’s the alternative to a society with a government monopoly on violence? A society where everyone is free to use violence? If Libertarians think that’s better, it just shows why most people aren’t Libertarians.
No, silly! Maybe everyone would be free to use violence at first, but soon enough whoever does best at using violence will be able to establish a new monopoly on violence (through lots and lots of violence). When the dust settles, that person will be in charge of the new government!
Then that person and their heirs can rule for years and years, occasionally being replaced with new dynasties through further bloodshed.
Eventually the people will get fed up with fighting and dying for uncaring rulers, so they will (through revolution or reform) impose limitations on the power of the government through a social contract.
This will lead to prosperous societies, but eventually some people in these societies will declare that the government enforcing the social contract is inherently unfair and unjust and shouls be abolished in favor of a libertarian society.
I like Vernor Vinge. But even while I was reading, and enjoying, The Ungoverned I was thinking this society is about as realistic as the Shire. That book was based on the center faulty premise of Libertarianism; that there’s a set of rules that everyone agrees on and will follow even when it would be to their advantage to break those rules.
For example, in this society “law enforcement” was handled by private companies, which competed with each other in a free market. And everyone apparently agreed on what “laws” would be enforced although there was no apparent legislative body. And all of these private companies accepted the existence of competing companies and never tried to drive their smaller competitors out of business and establish a monopoly. And none of these private law enforcement companies (even the one that used a Mafia theme) ever set up protection rackets and forced people to pay them with the threat of hurting them if they didn’t.
And I don’t want to single out The Ungoverned. I saw the same faults in Andy Weir’s Artemis, which is another work I enjoyed.
A lot of what you described shows up in Stephenson’s Snow Crash as well.