Well, this is one libertarian who agrees with you. Pegging the value of a currency to gold or any finite natural resource is borderline insane in my opininon. The choice is not really a federally controlled currency system or a gold standard. Britain is an example of a place also not on the gold standard yet with currency issued by various private banks.
Yes, as was pointed out, the fed reserve system is vulnerable to govt playing with currency values. The same is true under a gold standard, as someone somewhere must decide that an ounce of gold is worth x amount of dollars.
Indeed, Id say a gold standard gives far more power to the govt over currency than the free floating system today. At least in todays money markets, the value of a currency contains information about the economic health and prospects of the place issuing it. The market can and does react to govts that try to play fast and quick with their currencies, and quickly teaches them that they cannot just do as they want. Under a gold standard, all that information is gone; a currency contains no info as to the health of an economy but merely the amount of gold accumulated. It is far easier under a gold standard for govts to shove things under the carpet so to speak, causing in the long run major catastrophes like occured pretty regularly in the 19th century rather than the small series of market corrections that occur today. Free floating currencies allow the market to act as a check on govts that play with valuations; a gold standard does nothing but remove this check.
Beyond that, the gold standard was the ultimate cause (as opposed to proximate) of much of the 16th to 19th century imperialism. The spanish rape of S. America being one glaring example. When a currency is based on the amount of a finite resource within a political boundery, its only a matter of time before patience with trade and other peaceful means of acquiring more of that resource gives way to more direct means of acquiring it.
Im not defending the Federal Reserve, reform could certainly be used. But going back to a gold standard would be to cut off our head to save our body.
Successful? You do know that technically it is part of a large oppresive communist nation, and it’s very survival is tenuous, right?
It also has taxes. It has laws- and lots of them. It has laws against “victimless crimes”. Other than the fact it has low taxes (which is largely because it does not and can not spend anything on defense), and rather loose economic laws- it isn’t “Libertaria” at all. You don’t even have the right to keep and bear arms- or free speech.
Umm, you do know that it was not part of the PRC until very revently, and it’s success was cemmented long before that. And you know that China is now communist politically, but quite capitalist economically. You know that, right?
Do you know the difference between “close to” and “identical to”? No one is claiming that HK actually IS libertopia. Just that it’s about the closest any place has come to it.
Did you read the entire paragraph? I’ll post it again for your convenience:
Is it really not clear to you that I am referring to Tristan’s “dream sequence”? (Hint: it’s in the first sentence of the paragraph). So the answer to “where did I get that idea?” would be self-evident, I believe. I got that idea from Tristan, to whom I was referring.
Yes, I’m quite serious. I would call a party that gets less than 1% of the vote a “fringe” party. What would you call it?
And in anticipation of what you are going to say in reply, I ask that you look up the meaning of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
Well, thats fair enough…in a skewed kind of way. As a PARTY, certainly the Libertarian party is quite fringe…just like every other party in the US that isn’t one of the big two. However, I wouldn’t call libertarianism quite so fringe…I think there are a lot of libertarians in the US…or people with libertarian leanings. We really can’t judge a political philosophy or issue based on what a party does…otherwise, are you willing to conceed that environmentalism is a fringe issue with people? After all, the Green party didn’t get more than 1% of the vote either (neither did Nader this time), so…
These ‘libertopia’ threads are always entertaining, but seldom very enlightening. It seems as though libertarian thought is too diverse to discuss in any meaningful context, and we can only examine libertarian approaches to very specific problems.
I don’t have any issue with libertarians in general, though I think that the long-term consequences of a libertarian state are poison for its citizens. But I’m still waiting for libertarians to forward a specific policy initiative in detail, and the be ready to respond to the queries of those that have doubts. The law always works when people are reasonable, rational, etc…but what about when they aren’t?
Perhaps being a liberal, it’s easy for me to see the issues. My big question is always ‘what will curb excesses in the absence of government?’ And I am still awaiting an answer.
As for this thread… it’s going to be hard to point out a libertarian state. Inevitably, the libertarians will point out the libertarian policies of successful states, and skeptics will point out the same for unsuccessful states.
I don’t know what you mean by “skewed”, other than just trying to be condescending.
Depends what you mean by “a lot”. Certainly it’s a very small percentage of the population. The “or with libertarian leanings” is a cop-out. Many political philosophies share certain tenets. I could say that a lot of Democrats have “Republican leanings” and vice-versa. That doesn’t get us anywhere as far as telling us how many Republicans there are, or how many Democrats there are.
But environmentalism is not an issue that belongs exclusively to the Green Party. For example, the Democratic party also espouses environmentalism. I would most definitely call the Green Party a “fringe party”. That’s not the same as saying that every issue on the Green Party’s agenda is a fringe issue.
Here’s where I think you’re employing a No True Scotsman type argument. You say we can’t judge how widespread Libertarianism is by how many people are members of the party, right? You’re saying, "Well those are “big L” Libertarians, but there’s more “small l” libertarians. But where’s the evidence of this supposedly high percentage of small l libertarians? I get a sense that there’s this sort of reasoning going on like this:
Libertarians believe in lower taxes and smaller government.
A large percentage of Americans believe in lower taxes and smaller government.
Therefore, a large percentage of Americans are libertarians.
But that’s nonsense. It’s like saying, “My Chevrolet is blue - Many people drive blue cars - Therefore, many people drive Chevrolets.”
The problem with the reasoning is that while many people share some of the tenets of libertarianism, they tend to balk at the more radical aspects. And you can’t just say “Libertarianism is lower taxes and smaller government”. That’s too vague. It’s like saying, “My party is the party of sunshine and happiness.” Of course nobody’s going to disagree with that.
XT: Blowero is right about one thing-- Libs are fringe. Can’t fight the truth, man! And blowero, for what it’s worth, I thought your counter-dream scenario was clever-- I got a good laugh.
Go ahead, pout all you want to. Just remember, Santa Claus is watching you.
It can definitely be discussed, but, depending on what sort of answers you are seeking, you may be disappointed with the results. From my side, it is particularly difficult for someone who is accustomed to a more liberal mindset–specifically, someone accustomed to thinking of the government as an entity that solves problems. Libertarians don’t think of it that way (we think of it as an entity that causes problems), so the result is that many of the questions that are asked are, for us, similar to pointing at a spot in the forest and saying, “What kind of tree will grow there? How tall will it be?”
Often, liberals find our answers to these types of questions singularly unsatisfying, which, unfortunately, exacerbates the difficulty of communicating. Particularly when the debate is periodically interrupted by someone doing a driveby to call out, “There won’t be any trees. Libertarians don’t believe in them.”
I’m not sure what you mean by a “policy initiative”. If it’s a government solution to some problem, you probably won’t see many libertarians proposing it, particularly in a discussion about “utopian” libertarian states. In such a state, the government would be limited to the size and power necessary to protect the citizens’ rights. There would be no policies beyond that.
On the other hand, if you are interested in libertarian ideas about, say, how to improve things in the U.S.–without flipping the big red switch that magically turns it into Libertopia–there is a fair amount of stuff out there. Reason magazine is a monthly news/commentary magazine that discusses current events, commentatry, and ideas from a decidedly libertarian perspective.
If you’re more interested in libertarian thoughts on policy, you should check out the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think-tank. They are continually releasing policy discussions and recommendations. And they have the time, support, and proper backgrounds to discuss the issues to a depth that not many board members–particularly, say, me–would have the time or the interest to pursue.
A well-known example of a libertarian approach to policy is the creation of “vouchers” for industries that pollute, which may be traded or sold. These have been put in use increasingly over the last few years and have been found to be very effective at encouraging companies to cut down on environmental pollution. In essence, they make it profitable to go cleaner sooner and expensive to wait. Reason and Cato have been pushing this sort of arrangement for over a decade.
In general, if you insist on a policy, libertarians will most favor policies that rely on the behavior of markets, as opposed to those that rely on centralized agencies and massibe bureaucracy.
This is another one where I’m not sure I understand the question. If one person is doing harm to another person, then pretty much any libertarian would be in favor of punishment. If one person is not doing harm to another person, why would you care if he is being reasonable or rational?
Well, what curbs excesses in the presence of government? I know this sounds like just an example of my name, but I mean it to give you pause. The few high-profile government actions that make the news are not what keeps business in line, to the extent that it is in line. After the whole Enron fiasco, the government’s big win was a trumped up case against Martha Stewart of all people. Nonetheless, the business environment HAS changed since that mess, but not because of anything Uncle Sam did. It has changed because of the way investors responded.
Of course, I’m just guessing at what you mean by “excesses”. I can think of many other excesses (drug traficking and violence, health care costs, education costs) that are largely caused by the government. So, maybe if you give me a few examples, I can try to offer some answers. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that one of the key themes of libertarian thought is that there is rarely One Best Solution to any problem, and that better solutions are found by allowing many to be tried at once, forcing them to compete for resources.
Yep, pretty much agree with you here. The best libertarians can offer is to try to find examples of libertarian policies within the larger context of a non-libertarian government. Often the most true-to-life answers that libertarians can give are those that point to parts of life where there is little government intervention (which you alluded to earlier). Unfortunately, while the analogy is often clear to us, it is often significantly less clear to those who are working off a different set of assumptions.
Let’s try a question. Do you think that Tristan’s “dream sequence” would be considered a libertarian dream sequence?
Didn’t Tristan himself admit that he has more research to do?
I’ll admit that you’ve most likely got me on the fringe thing. I will say that in my mind it seems to be a matter of degree.
Personally I take it as a sign of how bad things have gotten when, unless a political party spells out exactly how it would force people to behave, its not seen as having any ‘policy’. It seems to be taken for granted that people need to be forced to behave in a particular way. Is that the new definition of ‘policy’?
This is why thinking people have no respect for libertarians. Their position is that government, the entity universally adopted to achieve things, will degrade the common standard of living.
This simply flies in the face of evidence.
Instead it is a libertarian article of faith that human endeavour is fruitless. That societies have failed to learn the elementary lesson of experience. It is elitism and holds humanity to be fools.
Well we aren’t fools. We also know of lot of what passed of as libertarianism is mere distate for paying tax.
I disagree that this flies in the face of evidence. For most of human history people have lived under governments that were tyrannical and murderous, activily lowering the common standard of living by taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The modern prosperous government is the exception, not the rule. The difference is that these governments did certain things (or, refrained from certain other things) that allowed their citizens to become rich.
Of course, you and I both know that you’re referring to modern democries, rather than the Stalin’s USSR. But what you may not realize is that, by saying this, you are in agreement with the underlying sentiment of most libertarians, though disagreement most likely occurs in the scope of the view. The libertarian view is that government does certain things very well (to take a popular example, the military), and it should continue to do those things. Other things, it does very poorly, and reduces the quality of citizens lives by doing them (such as weighing in on the proper religion). Libertarians (small l here) say that government should be restricted to the activities that it is good at (or at least the activities that it does better than private individuals), the area of disagreement is merely a question of what a government’s proper activities are. And that disagreement is fine, and what allows a democracy to properly function, because rational people can disagree on issues without either one of them being an evil person who seeks to destroy society.
As far as I can tell, this is backwards. The free market approach assumes that humanity is not composed of fools, that the person is the best judge of what is in his/her own best interests. The libertarian seeks to give the individual more ability to make this judgement, not less. Certainly no one would give this gift to a person incapable of making this judgement.
I present this post not as a libertarian (though I debatibly am), but as a person who believes that rational discussion of the issues is always a good thing. Over the past election, I have grown to suspect that people from all parties really agree with each other more than they realize, and that if we were made more aware of these agreements, that politics would serve to unify us rather than divide us. I hope the message is recieved this way.
No doubt the Lib party is fringe…I’m certainly well aware of that. My point though was that ALL 3rd parties are fringe…and that many people who would support the Lib party wind up supporting one of the big two instead…just like many people who would support the Green party wind up supporting one of the big two instead…because the big two are the only ones who have a shot at winning basically.
I also conceed that many Libertarian ideals are also quite fringe…hell, I balk at many of the more radical ones. Of course, I balk at many of the planks in both the Democrat and Republican parties also.
No, it wasn’t supposed to be condescending at all. I was merely saying that you can’t base how popular Libertarian ideas are based on how well (or poorly) the party does in any given election.
I suppose if you feel that in order to be a Libertarian one must follow every single tenet then sure…its a pretty small number and definitely a fringe group. Of course, the Democrat and Republican followers must be pretty fringe too, as generally a person picks something thats reasonably close…i.e. I know plenty of Republicans who hold their nose over the psudo-religious crap, and lots of Democrats who don’t go for a lot of the liberal stuff.
Of course…thats my point. The Dems do ‘environmentalism light’ so many people who would normally vote Green end up voting Dem because the Dems are one of two parties that have any reasonable chance to win. Both Dems and Pubs do SOME things that appeal to Libs, so most Libs vote either Dem or Pub.
And of COURSE the Green party is fringe…again, its fringe because of our system which is essentially two party.
But, while many people share some tenets with Republicans and Democrats, they tend to balk up at the more radical aspects of both…but unfortunately they don’t have any other choice so pick one or the other in the end. Either that or ‘throw away their vote’.
BTW, bottom line on Libertarianism is personal freedom. Lower taxes and smaller government stem from that.
That’s not libertarian, that’s everybody. Look around, nobody supports the idea that government is a purpose. It is a way of making things happen. Everybody disagrees on the proper scope of government activities. That’s vigorous democracy for you. And everybody agrees the free market has a role to play in allocating resources.
No, the difficult concept for L’s to get is that everybody holds govt to be a necessary evil. But that is only an idiom and doesn’t mean that the purposes and persons of govt are directed to evil ends.
See, via the free market of public choice, governments are what people choose and it is not because they are fools.
Yet the brutal winnowing of history notes that the only peoples and nations to survive have been those with governments. So they must have been doing something right.
Moreover if your argument is between libertarians and murderous tyrannies from days of yore, then isn’t that an issue for historians rather than us who live in the present day?
Exactly my point. I was simply trying to establish some common ground by using the widest possible definition of libertarian. To constrict the definition some more would be to say that libertarians believe that the government is currently engaging in activities that it should not be engaging in. This is, again, something almost everyone agrees with. The next step would be to say that we should cut government involvement in some areas without any increase in other areas. Here, I think, is where the line starts to form between libertarians and non-libertarians, as some believe that the government should have less influence over personal matters, but more over economic matters (or vice versa).
No, modern governmental institutions are not directed towards evil ends. However, sometimes these institutions do not accomplish their goals, no matter how noble they may be. Sometimes the people who staff these institutions do not have the same goals as those that create them. Libertarians will not, of course, deny that corruption happens in the free market. They will argue that the free market minimizes their effects.
I think I see your point, but I don’t believe that libertarian philosophy argues that people are fools for supporting the government. Libertarians believe that the current method of governmental agencies is not the best method for achieving the good things that their founders set out to achieve. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the founders were fools. Most human knowledge is based on experimentation, and we have been experimenting with various government agencies for a while now. Libertarians have looked at these experiments, and decided that, in many cases, the results are not worth the costs, and feel that they may have a better solution.
And I would just like to point out that I agree that the government being the results of peoples’ choices is a very good thing.
You’re absolutely correct. However, no one is arguing that government should be completely abolished. So yes, the people who had governments were doing something right, but modern history also tells us that the people with governments that promote and respect individual choices are doing even more right than are others. The people with these governments are much better off, and the nations themselves are much more powerful (in terms of military and economic strength), than those with other types of government. We’ve seen that allowing this much personal chioce can be a very good thing, perhaps allowing more will be an even better thing.
Libertarians are not having trouble getting this at all. I don’t know why, but there seems to be a common assumption that libertarians hold their views because either they don’t understand something or they haven’t learned all the facts. In my experience, libertarians tend to be extremely well-informed about history, economics, and current events. What a lot of people don’t seem to get, is that it is in fact possible to be well-informed AND to have a libertarian worldview. Of course, this is not the same as saying that, if you are well-informed, you must be a libertarian. Simple fact is that there are a great many well-informed Republicans, Democrats, libertarians,… The sooner we stop assuming each other to be idiots, the sooner the debate can be about the actual differences in our views.
Along those lines, libertarians don’t believe that government or people in government are necessarily evil. If you are looking for a synopsis of this type, a better one would be that libertarians believe that power corrupts. Even more, though, we believe that there are good people AND bad people. So, if the President now has the authority to unilaterally declare war, there are probably many people who will consider this “power” with respect to the current President. Libertarians are more likely to think, “Oh shit, what if a really bad person becomes president and gets this power?”
The biggest problem that we usually have with government “solutions” is that they act, in practice, like monopolies. And, of course, the problem with monopolies is that they have no competition and, therefore, no incentive to perform well or improve, ever. If I am selling TVs for a living, and I want to keep working, then I must find a way to make people want to buy my TVs. If I work for a government agency, and want to keep working, I must find a way to make my job continue to seem necessary to politicians.
Taking public education as an example, I would not say that no one in education is truly devoted to educating children. I would say, however, that for those who are not devoted to this, there is nothing in the job that would motivate them to focus on successfully teaching. Libertarians are quick to notice things like the way the teachers’ unions fight tooth and nail against any change to the system that would make teachers accountable for the job of teaching they do. In fact, they specialize in ways of blaming the children. Seems like every year there is a new category of children who, for one reason or another, can’t learn or learn slowly. This leads naturally to the assumption that, if a child isn’t learning, he must need a pill or a special class. Which totaly ignores the possiblility that if a child isn’t learning, perhaps the teacher isn’t teaching.
Speaking for myself, I would never say that it wasn’t important for this country to educate its young people. I would say that, if we are going to pay so much money for this, then we ought to be getting what we pay for. Unfortunately, my personal experience has led me to conclude that, in most cases, when you try to “buy” something from government, you don’t get it. After a certain number of iterations of watching the government burn money to produce little to nothing, I have found myself agreeing with libertarian principles.
There is no assumption by libertarians that people are fools. But we also wouldn’t say that people choose governments via a free market. In fact, we would say that the reason why government workers are not productive is precisely because they are not fools: They learn very quickly what behaviors make their jobs more secure, and they specialize in them. Most non-fools would do the same.
There is no need to argue with libertarians about the need for government. We already agree. The disagreement is purely about the powers that are given to the government.
The real point here lies in the difference between an imaginary libertarian government and the tyrannies from days of yore. I would argue that the biggest difference lies in the transferral of decision-making power from centralized government to individual persons. I am convinced that the more power is kept in the individual, the better the world is. And when I look at my own country, the aspects I approve of are those that are more libertarian, and the aspects I am most disturbed by are those that are not.
My point though was that ALL 3rd parties are fringe…and that many people who would support the Lib party wind up supporting one of the big two instead…just like many people who would support the Green party wind up supporting one of the big two instead…because the big two are the only ones who have a shot at winning basically.