Just like True Scotsmen.
I’m an anarchist. Most people who describe themselves as libertarians have a different perspective and a different set of beliefs and expectations. It’s really NOT fair to dump them in with us, neither to them nor to us.
One short and reasonable answer to why libertarian “hasn’t come to pass” is that, along with a decently large batch of other ideas for alternative ways of organizing human interaction, it hasn’t been given much of a try. In fact we’ve done damn little intentional experimentation to find out what organizing principles are capable of being utilized in actual practice.
Do I myself see potential land mines that would block the implementation of libertarianism? Yeah. Libertarians — those I’ve met, those whose writings I have read — tend to be against authoritarian government (something I, as an anarchist, can certainly relate to) but they tend to refer to and discuss money (wealth, private property) as if it were a self-explanatory and natural phenomenon as opposed to a structured behavior that is, itself, pretty solidly rooted in authoritarian government. (To be sure, there are forms of private property that I think really are self-explanatory and natural, such as your possession of something that you do, in fact, hold in your own hand. But one’s ownership of 3 acres of land is an abstraction and a social contractual thing, and currency of any sort even yet more so).
How about if the libertarians announce they are going to set up shop somewhere and show us how well it works. Pick a town and all move there, or start the town.
At least the communists actually tried and failed. Libertarians want to run the whole country on their pet theories that have never been tried in a developed nation, or anywhere.
It’s an unproven fantasy based on assumptions that people think rationally and act in their own best interests and work hard. There are some people who work hard. Most don’t. There are some people who think rationally, but very, very few. There are people who act in their own best interests, divided up by short term or long term interests, but again, not most.
It isn’t enough to simply say “it’s too bad about all the people who don’t think right, act right and work hard” they can be left behind to do whatever (die). You can’t abandon the coercion of government to get as many people to behave appropriately simply to satisfy the fantasies of a few people who call themselves libertarians. The functions of government are simply too important to indulge an unproven fantasy for the sake of the peace of mind of libertarians.
If the libertarians set up first a commune (sic), then a town, a city, county, state and show us all how successful it can be, then I’ll have enough information to conclude that they aren’t just too lazy to consider the reality of human nature and actually do something. The “invisible hand” doesn’t actually do any work. People do. And people are not rational.
2,500 years ago Aristotle collected hundreds of summaries on city state constitutions and these things have been studied off and on ever since. Perhaps some libertarian can point out a good example of a libertarian state or states that we can examine to see if they will work for our needs. But until we see some examples and study them, if given the choice between listening to teenage potheads discuss music while stoned, or libertarians discussing their fantasies, I’ll go with the stoners.
What I know about “classical” libertarianism I learned in college (40+ years ago) from a couple of books espousing a world where individuals could own the streets and highways, everyone would pay everyone else for using their property and government existed only to set up an army to defend the country, more or less. It was really idealistic and seemed fairly impractical then, though I do recall being very intrigued by it for a while - perhaps because it was both idealistic and impractical. I even voted that way in one election. Then I graduated, got a job and learned about the real world, about real people and their motives and realized that libertarianism (as I’d read about it) was pie-in-the-sky stuff just like communism, except supposedly more rational. Now Libertarianism seems to reflect a lot more confusing set of concepts, at least as far as its proponents present it.
I understand something now that I didn’t before: the reason these threads on libertarianism alway degenerate into definition wars is that defenders of libertarianism hold what Der Trihs derided as the “Pollyanna” school of libertarianism; in other words, detractors insist that the positive ideal of libertarianism is a priori impossible, and therefore their negative view of libertarianism is what libertarianism would inevitably HAVE to be. At least I now understand where the opposition is coming from, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
I suppose the opponents of slavery would have had to simply give the “property” guns, and let the slave owners defend their “rights” as best they could. 
And now I understand anarchism a little better. It’s debatable whether the abolition of government would inevitably mean the end of most private property, but if you suppose it does, then anarchism makes more sense.
It’s been in the news recently that a few small towns here in MN are facing the prospect of losing police protection, since they don’t have their own police departments and the counties they’re in are demanding more money to be patrolled by the county sheriff’s department. There have been a few bull sessions about actually seeing if a town could go without police. We’ll see.
I think you just whooshed yourself.
“Who is John Galt?” is a repearted line from said book (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for those who don’t know). It’s usage is roughly synomous with “such is life”, “why is the sky blue?” or “que sera, sera”. “I don’t know the answer to your question. You might as well ask who the ellusive John Galt is.”
Also, even though they share similar tenets, Rand’s “Objectivism” is a different philosophy from Libertarianism. At least she thought so. Much in the same way Dave Mathews doesn’t consider his band to be a “jam band” or My Chemical Romance balks at being labeled as “emo”.
From Wikipedia, there are apparently different and inconsistent definitions on what Libertarianism is. But in the US, the consensus seems to be it is people who are economically conservative (free markets, balanced budgets) and socially liberal. In a more general sense, I suppose it represents a minimalist government that protects property rights, keeps people from killing each other, handles day to day safety and infrastructure maintenance but otherwise leaves people alone to do whatever they want.
I suppose the reason it hasn’t ever come to pass is that people only like free markets when they profit from them and they only like personal liberty so long as the personal liberty of others doesn’t annoy the shit out of them. This inevetably leads people to make demands from their government which then governs by addressing the needs of whoever makes the most noise.
In which case, they’d be interfering with other people’s property. Essentially, it’s no different than telling a guy who owns a wooded piece of property that he can’t build a house because there’s an endangered species living in it. He stills owns the property but you’re interfering with use of his property. Arming somebody’s slaves would be doing the same thing.
You can argue that opposing slavery would have a higher moral priority than property rights. (John Brown famously made that argument.) But some people would say the same thing about preserving endangered species. As I’ve been saying, there’s not a consensus on what’s right and wrong - people have different opinions of what’s right.
The basic jist of Liberarian is less Government. How do you apply for a job whose basic logic is the job shouldnt exist?
Its a contradiction in terms. I all for less Government, I am not for no Government.
It can’t work as so many different people have their own idea what it is. They’d never agree.
I’m going to go ahead and agree with AHunter3.
Libertarians like to think of “property rights” as something pretty much self-evident. It would be pretty simple to agree on who owns what, and following that the application of libertarian ethics would be easy. Your property, your decision.
Except property rights, especially for things like land or money or corporations or intellectual property, are imaginary. They aren’t natural, they are things we humans invent rules for because we like the outcome we get when we agree to play by certain rules.
If we want property and ownership of land, we need some pretty complicated social arrangements that need constant maintainence. If we want corporations we need state management. If we want safe banks and capital markets we need government oversight, or at least social customs so strict they might as well be governmental.
If I have him in a box, is he alive or dead?
He’s dead Jim, he’s dead
CAPT KIRK
He’s a cat?
Who feeds him?
He’s John Galt. He feeds himself.
Probably “low taxes” should be in there somewhere, too.
I’ve used the analogy of a flock of sheep before. Every year the sheep get together and vote on whether the flock should have sheepdogs.
Some other animals come along and start saying the sheepdogs are not needed. The sheep can all eat grass and feed themselves but the flock has to find food to feed the sheepdogs. And what do they get out of it? The sheepdogs just boss around the sheep and tell them where they can go. The flock would be much better off if every sheep was free to feed itself and go wherever it wanted without any sheepdog around. It sounds great and a lot of sheep thank the other animals for their insights.
The other animals - who are wolves - respond “Think nothing of it. We want to live in a world without sheepdogs just like you guys do.”
Same thing with libertarians. A lot of them think how great it would be to be free of the government regulations that apply to them and which they don’t like. But they don’t think enough about how government regulations also restrict other people from doing things to them which they wouldn’t like.
If the absence of government simply meant that the biggest and strongest group of bullies would take over, then in short order they’d become the government. So libertarianism, if it existed, would have to be based on something more than the simple absence of government; some positive principle preserving it would have to be in effect. I confess I’m not sure just what; maybe a set of values that most people recognized as necessary to keep government or feudalism from taking hold. One work of fiction uses the phrase “there are rules, just no rulers”. A lot of libertarian fiction posits that dueling would be an essential feature of such societies- no one would get to hide behind a gang of underlings, and anyone who violated that rule would immediately become a public enemy. The Der Trihs version of libertarianism where a government exists solely to protect the bullies would be the worst scenerio of all.
A libertarian ethic, a set of values, would have to be taught. It would have to be widely believed to be “a good thing.” The way we, today, believe that liberty, democracy, freedom, choice, and responsibility are.
In any free society, the really big riddle is: what do you do with people who don’t believe in it? The western democracies all have limits on freedom…which mostly apply to efforts to destroy that freedom. I’m not so free that I’m permitted to take steps to overthrow our system of government! We allow the most extreme racist beliefs…but stomp pretty hard on people who practice racist violence…and even on people who engage in racial discrimination in employment, renting, or doing business.
Would a “Libertarian” society have laws to protect its own existence? How coercive would these laws be before the society ceases to be, in fact, Libertarian?
When teaching people to love liberty…what do you do with those who fail – or refuse – to learn the lesson?
The libertarian answer to this is:
If you live in a free society, and don’t agree with its freedom, nothing is stopping you from starting a collective of like-minded people. But you are not allowed to infringe on the liberties of those who are not in your collective.