Oh, please. They loved the Iraq war and their chance to try to turn Iraq into Libertopia. The only kind of military or police action they actually object to is anything that risks helping someone who isn’t rich.
First of all, Mr. Change-The-Subject, do you disagree with the contention that Jim Crow laws were abolished and improper research curtailed thanks to forceful government action? If not, why cite my comments on the matter?
Are you actually claiming that we can end war by putting libertarians in power?
You do realize that a large number of wars have been and are being fought over that little matter of “securing borders”?
You could drive a huge convoy through that loophole.
I’m not a Ron Paul fan and I don’t know if he’s considered an adequate representative of libertarian thinking but he said:
*Ron Paul in the US House of Representatives, October 8, 2002
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution, which regardless of what many have tried to claim will lead us into war with Iraq. …*
Btw, you didn’t answer the question I asked.
Because I wanted to address your comment in the generalized abstract sense. I interpret your various examples as “I have faith government will correct itself.” I see otherwise.
Sorry, should have been more explicit. I was talking about “securing local borders” of USA such as Mexico and Canada. Maybe include Hawaii too if China wants to try and invade it.
And like Der Trihs, you also didn’t answer my question. I’d like to know what the self-correcting mechanism is because I don’t want my children to die for a bullshit reason. It’s nice and noble to “fight for your country” but it had better be a damn good legitimate reason. So, you got any ideas to stop this government abuse?
Your interpretation is incorrect. My comments were directed at refuting poor examples of “government oppression”.
If there is any underlying theme for you to discern, it’s that libertarianism is a lousy system for combatting injustice.
If you have an allegiance to democracy, there is only one legitimate means of doing so, and that is the election of candidates with an expressed and definite aversion to military adventure. This can’t ensure anything, when the war drums start to pound, even good people lose their fucking minds. But we can try.
And government abuse of military is not an “injustice” to its citizens (and also the civilians of far flung countries)? Or does folding a flag into a triangle and presenting it to the grieving families make up for that?
I say this is impossible because the military complex creates its own euphoria for action. To vote for candidates that will be immune to that is to wish for a certain type of human that doesn’t exist. Sure, the car mechanic and the hairdresser have no vendetta to start a war with Iran but those are never the type of people that will rise up through the ranks of politics. A successful politician has to have a Machiavellian streak to get elected. This applies to both Democrats (Obama) and Republicans.
What libertarians are those, exactly? I’ve heard exactly two comments from self-identified libertarians on unions. The stupid ones say they’re evil; the smart ones more reasonably (though not necessarily correctly) point out that it’s unfair that workers can bargain collectively when businesses can’t. None of them say, “yay unions!”
That’s the advantage in being formless, gormless, and vague. Total big tent, nobody is excluded!
It’s called “voting”. You may have heard of it.
[QUOTE=Deeg]
A libertarian will instead say that the excesses of the market are not as bad as the excesses of government. If you want to stack up the evils of corporations and governments and compare them we can do that. I’ll start with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
[…]
Oy, a lot of you quoted my “corporate” part and ignored the “Cultural Revolution” part. If we’re going to use history as a guide then governments are way more dangerous and oppressive than corporations. For every example of Joe Camel there’s another example of a government torturing its citizens.
[…]
Absolutely, bring it on. You got something worse than the Cultural Revolution? How about the government-run Chernobyl nuclear power plant?
[/QUOTE]
Just making a very narrow point about trying to use wars & atrocities committed by various government, e.g. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, etc, as an indication of something inherently malicious in state power.
This is quite ingenious on account of one of the central properties of conventional nations under some form of rule of law being that they have (more or less) a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are in fact (since the rise of strong nation states) the only entities we’ve entrusted the level of power that could be used to commit atrocities on that scale and because of that historical fact it has been impossible for any other entity than a “state” to commit them.
Rather than being an argument in favor of Libertarianism then, what your those events really shows, Deeg, is that some combination of Democracy and natural rights is the best system for running a nation state we’ve encountered so far to guard against atrocities such as the Holocaust.
But most modern democracies have such appropriate systems in place already and typically do not commit atrocities, whether they be at the moment ruled by political parties that believe in expansive government, or ones believing in limited government.
Through history, corporations have typically not been allowed to wield armies or execute law enforcement, and when they at times in some limited sense have, it has been just that - limited and at the discretion of the state under which jurisdiction they operated; or during the colonial era in collusion with colonial powers and then often committing just as terrible atrocities as the colonial powers themselves did.
So this line of inquiry really tells us nothing unless we’ve tried living in a world where sovereign corporations wielded the military might of e.g. Stalinist Russia. What would such a world be like? Not very pleasant, I suspect. Most likely living in a world of democratic nations where governments are tempered by some set of natural rights is much nicer.
In summary then: nations have committed the worst atrocities because nations are the only entities with the power to do so. We already have a solution to that in place - it’s called democracy and natural rights.
a
ED-209: “YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO DROP YOUR WEAPON!”
Pretty much. And OCP is by all appearances a de facto monopoly and never had to go to war for market share.
Milton Friedman is not a libertarian, although those that associate him with libertarianism can certainly be forgiven. It’s not, at first glance, completely obvious that he is profoundly anti-libertarian in virtually every substantive way, certainly in every of his CONCRETE recommendations and practices. It might at first, superficially, appear that he is some sort of IMF libertarian, lol, as though that were possible. Oh, one could tenuously argue that “the Austrian School” influenced him. But it’s just not true. It’s better and more accurate to argue that Friedman wouldn’t recognize an actual free market, even if it were ****ing his **** for five bucks. Friedman and libertarianism in the same sentence? Preposterous. There is no evidence of it. It’s a red herring, a completely false attribution, at best. A cheap, guilt-by-association ploy at face value. An effete side-stepping, at worst.
Accordingly, the OP has, it seems to me, posed and ill-posed dilemma. Rather like “Hitler was a Democratic Socialist. Therefore Democracy is ridiculous.” Sure, such a condemnation-based-on-guilt-by-association may or may not be true, but it is certainly not true merely by virtue of associating the one system with the other personage.
I know of no evidence that Friedman has, even in the remotest sense, done other than paid cheap lip service [if you will once again please forgive the prostitution analogy] to libertarianism.
It’s rather like the current political faux-debate. “We should support the free market” say the reactionary Tea Partiers, and other simpletons. They say we should “support hedge funds, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, naked short stock and commodity positions, bubble-forming abstract market speculation…” and the list goes on. These things are, ostensibly [extraordinarily superficially], supposed to be “free market”, just as the OP opines that “Milton Friedman is a libertarian”. Moody’s agrees. Goldman Sachs does too. Lehman Brothers might beg to differ, however.
This is all quite humorous to students of these terms and ideas, and, very especially, to those that study the shenanigans of the associated symbolic personages / figureheads. Naturally, every of the toxic financial practices and practitioners that I mention above do not, would not, and could not exist without complicit regulators [government]. [Not that I’m against government, per se, I am merely rising to the defense of an ideology that has been sorely abused via guilt-by-superficial-association in this thread].
Now, give me one piece of concrete evidence that the PRACTICES and POLICIES [which are an unequivocal matter of public record and verifiable history] advocated by Milton Friedman…beloved ally of dictators and childishly idealistic and unrealistic social engineers the world over…are libertarian.
There are none. The very notion is, factually speaking, puerile.
I would add another, hopefully, obvious point. Some of the respondents have engaged in a debate about “who has killed more people and done more bad stuff”, etc., governments or corporations? Obviously some might say “governments” since governments have killed some 100-200 million folks in the last century alone, but I would argue that this is not an entirely encompassing argument. Many counter-arguments appear. Perhaps the barbarian hordes that might have existed instead would have killed even more. Or the poor health-care of said ignorant hordes. Who could know?
But that is not really on-point. More to the point is that: “One cannot effectively differentiate corporations from governments…one never could, and one can’t now”. Governmental mechanisms CLEARLY created [well, I’ll settle for supported, ratified, condoned, consecrated, codified, legitimized, indemnified…etc…and finally LEGALLY PERSONIFIED!!!] the framework that the present corporations use and, equally, nobody posting on this site could possibly be stupid enough to argue against the converse: that corporations clearly have now begun to exercise the same privilege vis. a vis. government. If this is so [i.e. initially/historically no corporations could have gained power without government sanction, and thence more presently/contemporaneously, no government can gain power without corporate sanction], then any attempt to differentiate the two is not useful. Not only is it not useful, it’s not factually arguable. [Ideology is another matter…a faith-based matter…that’s why I’m not exactly a ‘Libertarian’, nor an “anti-Libertarian” […I could never really be either of those silly things, without de-educating, if not demeaning, myself…but even this might be a language issue…and even so, one might imagine a situation in which one had to chose, in real-time, in real-world practice, the entirely manufactured dilemma which of these is the lesser of the two evils. [Just because it’s manufactured doesn’t mean you won’t be faced with it…in fact, virtually every decision you are faced with, the libertarians would argue, is fully manufactured.]
One system that I feel ideologically comfortable with is the Socratic position, or, likewise, that of Wittgenstein. Systematic, contrary, rejection and negation of all things freedom-stifling. Sure, there’s a huge emotional pay-off there. I like to feel that I’m free. But that, in the end, is nothing…a mere dust mote, since I’m much more collectively-minded than that. I get off on helping and cooperating with others. I just love it when I find myself working with one or more other individuals for a common goal. Now, does that FACT about myself make me a socialist? Or does it prove that I’m a libertarian? Does it make me naive? Does it make me enlightened? Well, who cares. Facts are facts. Misrepresentations are exposable as such.
I talked to a Democrat once. Since they all believe the same exact thing, I never have to talk to a Democrat or consider any Democratic ideas ever again, right? If you can refute that without bringing up anything a Democrat has ever said, be my guest.
Decrease the sample size and exaggerate the claim=My claim is exactly the same as yours, right?
I’ve talked to some Democrats. Therefore I don’t have to consider Democrats or their ideas anymore, unless they simplify those ideas down to soundbites for easy dismissal.
Is that better?
The point is that there is NO single belief or platform that a Democrat must believe. There is a range of beliefs, and two democrats could believe entirely different things on every single point, and still call themselves Democrats. The same holds for Libertarians. If you have a problem with one of them, say so, but don’t use one guy, or even an bunch of them, as a reason to dismiss every other Libertarian you run across.
Here’s a tip: Instead of a label, use the name of the person you’re referring to. Put that way, “Bob, Ted and Alice believe stupid thing X, therefore I can dismiss Milton Friedman without consideration”, it sounds pretty fallacious to me. If you don’t feel like talking about what Mr. Friedman says, there are a thousand other threads.
Funny, I was looking through your massive two posts looking for some substantive content as well, but couldn’t find any.
Well, OK, who then? Suppose I gave a shit about libertarian policy on, say, global warming. Who would I ask to get the definitive, totally correct, libertarian viewpoint?
I don’t know if they address that specific issue, but there is a Libertarian Party and they do have a website. And there’s also *Reason *magazine, which has articles on a broad range of subjects. (Or you could as me. 
)
Of course the idea that there is a “definitive” libertarian viewpoint is as silly as asserting there is a “definitive” progressive viewpoint.