I don’t like any form of purity or absolutism. I hate it when people call Democrats Communists, for example.
It’s much better to think of a political philosophy as a direction or tendency or as a set of priors, rather than a pure desination. Because it we are going to criticize liberarianism for that, we have to do the same for progressivism, socialism, etc.
So as a libertarian, my current preference is to look for libertarian solutions to problems first. But as a good Bayesian, that’s subject to change if the conditions change.
Maybe a better way to say it is that a libertarian has priors that push them in that direction, while Democrats have priors that push them in another. But I imagine that even a Democrt whose priors tend to make them support government would jump off that train somewhere along the way to Communism and start looking like Libertairians for a while. And if we had anarchy, you can be damned sure I would apbe advocating for more government.
The second document I linked tries to figure out what makes Libertarians tick as opposed to Conservtives and Liberals.
Totally agree. And I can’t think of a better rgument against central planning and in favor of petting economies emerge under a system of basic rules that allow people to cooperate as independent actors.
What about those situations where central planning is the best solution to a problem? If you just assume central planning is never the right answer and dismiss it as a possibility, you’ll never arrive at the best solutions to those problems.
What!?!?! They not only maniulated the image to synchronize his lips with the English words that were put on voice over, but they gave the voice his tone and an Argentinian accent? OK, that was a lesson.
What he said was crap nonetheless.
How about law enforcement and fire fighting? Those were originally done by private companies. But I feel they’re better done as a public service provided by the government.
Before government provision of mail service and schooling, private mail service and private schools were the only options. The reason that mail service and schools are also provided by the government is that having universal mail delivery and universal schooling have large public benefits in addition to their private benefits. Let’s look at schooling, in particular. If only the wealthy are educated, most of the population is confined to low-wage, low-skill jobs. The economy suffers and the country does not prosper. Moreover, if only the wealthy are educated, they will control the political agenda. Universal primary and secondary education, combined with subsidized higher education ensures the possibility of equal opportunity for all to move into high-skill, high-wage jobs and to effectively participate in politics. A larger population of high-wage earners contributes to economic growth.
Economists refer to goods like schooling, mail service, vaccinations against communicable diseases, roads, and bridges, just to name a few, as having positive externalities. They would be provided privately for those who could pay, but having them available benefits many more people than those willing to pay privately. If large numbers of people are vaccinated, we can prevent pandemics, such as the 1918 flu epidemic. Everyone benefits from having roads and bridges. There is also an important coordination benefit from public support for the production of goods with positive externalities. The public mail service maintains a database of all addresses and zip codes that private mail services also use. The Centers for Disease Control coordinates information on diseases and adjusts vaccinations to account for changes in diseases. The National Weather Service coordinates information on weather that everyone can use to plan for everything we do in our lives, from weekend picnics to airline travel to agricultural planning to disaster preparation.
Just as in the case of pure public goods, the private market does not have a mechanism for determining each person’s benefit from having such goods available. And, as in the case of public goods, there are complicated ways to figure out what each person or family is willing to pay. However, it is simpler and more acceptable politically to fund such goods (or the subsidies in addition to private payments) through the tax system.
For more examples pointed from a liberal point of view:
Libertarians are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
The reason humans dominate all other species is because we evolved to become the ultimate cooperators. That certainly doesn’t imply communism or socialism, but all human societies are highly cooperative. Libertarians seem to be utterly clueless about human nature and why we succeed. It’s very hard to have a serious debate with people who are the social/political equivalent of flat earthers.
[At the risk of invoking the Only True Libertarian spectre] Has any authentic Libertarian ever been elected to head the government of a sovereign nation, anywhere, at any time? Free markets, but also free minds, for everyone, equal rights and protection under the law and all that?
If we skip labels, I’d venture that Singapore is the closest. Yes, they have public funded services, and quite a lot of regulations. But from their quasi-democracy1 it’s very, very liberal when it comes to economics.
1
From wikipedia:
The president is directly elected by popular vote for a renewable six-year term. Requirements for this position, which were enacted by the PAP government, are extremely stringent, such that only a handful of people qualify for the candidacy. These qualifications include that a candidate needs to be a person at least 45 years of age who is no longer a member of a political party, to either have held public office for at least 3 years in a number of specific public service leadership roles, or to have 3 years experience as chief executive of a fully profitable private sector company with at least S$500 million in shareholders’ equity, be a resident in Singapore for at least 10 years, not have a criminal record, and more
I’d add Hong Kong before the Chinese takeover. When Britain took over Hong Kong, the colonbial government specifically adopted a ‘laissez-faire’ governance posture and let Hong Kong develpp without interfererce. You could open a business in Hong Kong by filling out a half-page form to register it, and that was it.
Hong Kong went from being an island nation of cheap labor and few resources to one of the richest places o Earth.
Of course there are no ‘pure’ libertarian governments, just like there are no ‘pure’ governments of any other style. You have to simply look at the results in countries with maximal freedom and compare them to countries where the people are more tied down through taxes and regulations.
While consistently freer than most places, Hong Kong has never been a libertarian paradise. Government-subsidized housing has long dominated Hong Kong’s residential market, with 60 percent of residents living in it at one time. And the government manipulated (and continues to do so) the land market to maximize sales revenues for public coffers, which plays an important role in causing the housing shortages that required the public housing “solution.” Medical care has also long been socialized. Moreover, Hong Kong had serious corruption problems even during the height of the Cowperthwaite era, with the police in the 1960s and early 1970s “riddled with corruption,” according to former Governor Patten.
Then there is Hong Kong’s persistent “democratic deficit.” Hong Kong managed to escape the post-World War II wave of democratization in the rapidly dwindling British Empire because, as one British official put it in a radio interview in 1968, “the electorate of Britain didn’t care a brass farthing about Hong Kong.” Indeed, Britain showed almost no interest in expanding representative government in the colony until it became clear that Hong Kong would “return” to China in 1997 when the lease on the New Territories expired.
In some sense this democratic deficit served Hong Kong well, for men like Cowperthwaite and Patten held classical-liberal ideas on economic freedom and so largely refrained from actions that might have won popular approval (and certainly would have in Britain). But the lack of representative government also allowed Britain to treat Hong Kong’s residents shamefully when Britain rejected allowing Hong Kong passport holders the right of residence in Britain, fearing a flood of refugees in advance of the return to China. (The rest of Europe behaved no better.)
That was from a business professor that contributes to the Cato Institute, I would not trust him for biology information though.
Toddleresque resentment about ever being told what to do, plus
Inflated perceptions of one’s own rationality and intelligence, produces
Naively impractical political philosophy!! Yay!!
Conveniently permitting cherry-picking of which “results” one decides to consider significant, and which aspects of different countries are considered “comparable”.
I’m going to say this, not sure I won’t regret it.
I think you guys are a little unfair to Sam. True Libertarianism, as in, burn the FDA, privatize police, and ban all environmental regulations, isn’t something that I think really exists. Sure, there are probably a few nutters out there, but I think we can probably find some people who want to return to farm collectives too. I pay them no mind.
There are elements of libertarianism that resonate with me. For instance, I think we have way too many property restrictions. Zoning and code enforcement is out of control where I live; the cities have way too much control over what you do with your property and many of the residents think they have some right to preserve the character of their town. Drives me nuts. Tell that to the farmer who used to own your land.
That said, handing control of your currency to someone else is nuts. You don’t put the fire in coal bunker 3 out by sinking the ship.
Yes, and what I perceive is that many of the so-called “Libertarians” in our countries seem interested (or satisfied) virtually exclusively with laissez-faire in the economics sphere while being perfectly willing to allow/adopt illiberal policies on the social aspect.
If you want to have a good time in a group of libertarians, ask them if a business owner should be allowed to ban people from carrying guns on his property.
There must be a name for a group of libertarians, wonder what it is. It probably is not a hive of libertarians, but perhaps a cluster? A band, a mob, a herd, an obstinacy?
Or perhaps there isn’t as they don’t form lasting groups: on closer inspection, they have nothing in common to hold them together and they fly apart. Perhaps they form an ephemerion of libertarians?
Ayn Rand sometimes humorously called her organization “The Collective”, and “A collective of libertarians” not only sounds like a, umm, collective noun, it would also provide pwnage opportunities against what libertarians as don’t possess a sense of humor.
Yeah, but “elements” like that basically fall in the zone of debatable issues within traditional realism-based political viewpoints, such as mainstream conservatism and liberalism. We can all have valid opinions about what should be the optimum degree of private property regulation in the form of zoning restrictions, without needing to spin them off into some grandiose new brand of political philosophy that supposedly by its very existence demonstrates our superior commitment to freeeeedom.
IME, self-described libertarians frequently want “Libertarianism” as a political brand to get the credit for all the rationally debatable, commonsensical ideas about minimizing regulation, while simultaneously handwaving away the responsibility for the ridiculous impracticality of most of the fundamental aspects of “True Libertarianism”.
Sorry folks, but if you (generic “you”) are gonna claim you own the horse, then you also own the horseshit.
In my experience it’s the opposite. There are ‘libertarians’ who are totally fine with numerous restrictions on business, so long as they can smoke pot and have maximal personal freedom to do what they want.
And I don’t know a single libertarian who is a social conservative in the traditional sense of opposing gay marriage, abortion rights, etc.
That sounds like a caricature of libertarians. I don’t know a single one who would take more than a second to say, “Their property, their rules.”