And because I hate it when someone comes into a thread, doesn’t address the OP, let’s compare 19th century US to the current Libertarian party platform. Yes, I know, not all libertarians belong the Libertarian party, but the platform at least provides specifics we can compare to 19th century life.
Being a bit literal about being forced to sacrifice, various forms of conscription existed so that’s not ideal to Libertarians. I’m not quite understanding the statement, so if conscription is irrelevant, then maybe the fact that mandatory school prayers were allowed? I think that would be anti Libertarian too.
Seems pretty broad. A guy claiming to be a film maker promising a role to a woman if she sleeps with him is fraud, but I don’t think Libertarians would be for making that illegal, would they?
Anyway, as for fraud, my Google-foo is weak, but I’d assume there was more of it going on then because of fewer laws against it, but I could be wrong.
And as for force, Native Americans were being forced onto reservations, company towns could force residence to be trapped by having them forever in debt with high prices and low wages.
Interestingly, a quote from the company town link “Paternalism was considered by many nineteenth-century businessmen as a moral responsibility, or often a religious obligation, which would advance society whilst furthering their own business interests.” Doesn’t sound very Libertarian to me.
There were a lot more laws legislating morality back then. I’m assuming there were more Blue laws on the books. Up until 2003 some states had anti sodomy laws.
I think that Judeo-Christian type morality laws would have bothered Libertarians.
OK, I’m didn’t look at the whole page when I started this, so to keep this post from getting too long, I just say that I don’t think there was enough freedom from coercion to make Libertarians happy.
Of course I was using a little bit of hyperbole. I thought that was implied. Of course you’ll literally find two or more libertarians who agree on just about everything.
So why did you try and prove that statement with some cites when I explicitly asked you if you believed it was “literally true”? Why didn’t you just say you did not believe it was literally true?
So instead of just admitting you were wrong, you choose to move the goal post. I literally see no reason to accept anything you assert on this subject unless it’s backed up with cites.
Wait, what? My point was that in discussions about libertarians it’s difficult,if not impossible to pin down specifics. My cites back me up on that. I guess I was confused about your first question because I thought it was obvious that “no two libertarians can agree on what a libertarian country would look like” wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
I do take it literally; no two libertarians have exactly the same set of values. There are so many different issues, with so many gradations of possible answers, as to span the entire set. No two liberals and no two conservatives are exactly the same. There are that many potential viewpoints.
I have never had an actual representative in Congress, or at the State Capital, or in City Hall, and I know I never will. I will settle for a significant level of overlap in opinions and values.
People too often think of libertarianism purely in terms of regulations on business practices, but things like sodomy laws, blue laws, or the “bad tendency” test for restricted speech are more odious.
That’s right, the American system was all about government intervention in the economy and protectionism, the opposite of freedom. It was such a defining quality of the American system it was even called the American System.
OK. Let’s ignore 50, heck let’s make it 65, years of history. Let’s ignore the de facto slavery in the South that went on much, much longer. Let’s ignore the treatment of, say Chinese immigrants forced to work on the railroad. Let’s ignore life in the big cities and let’s just cherry pick the Westward Expansion by those hardy, rugged Little House on the Prairie types.
That’s the Libertarian ideal isn’t it? Individual families set free to prosper on their own little patch of happiness?
Of course this was only possible because of all the wide open empty farmland.
And the wide open empty farmland was there due to
a) Accidental Genocide - the introduction of Old World diseases 200 years before
b) Deliberate Genocide - I don’t think you’ll find many Native Americans who were big fans of The Trail of Tears etc.
Is this the best Libertarian fantasy there is? Proto-Lebensraum?
“19th Century USA,” is too broad a descriptor to be useful; What is now Wisconsin in 1801 was probably as different from Boston in 1895 as either is from the US today.
The earlier part of the century would be far more libertarian than the latter – IF you were caucasian, preferably protestant and male. The whole slavery/genocide-against-natives thing is kind of dealbreaker. By the latter part of the century, you have government deeply in bed with big business, possibly even more than it is now, and many of the big cities were being run by political gangs. The wilder parts of the west were not “ideal” either, since libertarians seek limitedgovernment, not a weak or absent one. And of course, by the end of the century, we were beginning our adventures in imperialism.
In sum, I’d say some times and places were very libertarian, others not so much. I suspect “ideal” depends on what exact weight you give to various factors (e.g. “how willing are you to not care about your government does to other people in return for leaving you alone.”)
ETA: ditto to everything Human Action said. I think it’s very possible the most libertarian place will be the US in 2100.
I think it’s pretty clear, though, that people are comparing it in terms of economics, not social issues. There’s definitely some ways in which the two are inseparable, particularly with issues like corruption and child labor laws, but it’s not like having sodomy laws or non-universal suffrage were inherent to the running of a lightly-regulated free market system.
Anyways, one other point I’d make is that because state and local governments did have relatively much more power, there were definitely places that were more “libertarian” than others. Things evolved through the century as well. When people say the “19th century US” was a very (classically) liberal system, they’re clearly not talking about a plantation in 1801. The system people are describing began to take form in the Northeast in the period before the Civil War, but didn’t fully develop or spread to the rest of the country until near the end of the century.
I would say the first half of the 19th century was the most libertarian period. The government was small and did little. The change came with the invention of railroads and the telegraph requiring a more modern monetary system and public access to land for the rails and lines.
That’s a whole other conversation, though. The “libertarian ideal” isn’t just about economic freedom, and it never has been. Nor is it the libertarian economic ideal as simple as fewer regulations = better; unrestricted pollution, for instance, certainly doesn’t concord with libertarianism.