Do you truly believe that this would never happen in a libertarian government, that all libertarians are above graft and corruption, and too highminded to ever take advantage of a situation?
I have bolded “they” in your quote because they is actually we: government by representation. We have elected officials to represent us, and of course they do it imperfectly; they are human. I agree with the system because I would rather make the mistake of feeding too many than feeding too few (which is, I guess, what makes me a liberal).
My argument is not about graft and corruption, which makes your response a red herring. My argument is about CONSENT.
Your statement that you “agree with the system” implies that you greatly value your own consent. My bone with liberals is that they do not value the consent of other people, such as the minority (given a majoritarian political context).
I would be satisfied could I get Liberals to address the topic of consent. Do you believe (honestly) that Jesse Helms represents me?
I have to confess that I don’t know enough about libertarianism to answer that. I am saying in this thread about liberalism that I do believe in the system of representation and that it can work. I don’t see how it would be feasible to do it any other way. By the graft and corruption remark, I meant that this would probably happen in any system, and your allusion to it in your quote I cited might actually be a red herring itself.
I don’t see that my post contained a red herring in the same way that, say, tomato plants in a discussion of slavery would be, but I would not be offended if you would explain it.
I am trying my best to talk about liberalism, not libertarianism (look back at how many times I have redirected that focus). The matter of consent is already well understood in a libertarian context: a person’s consent is required before she can be governed.
But the matter of consent is apparently irrelevant in a liberal context. The Liberal will do whatever he believes is good for you (read “for himself”) with or without your consent.
Feasible to do what? Redistibute resources?
What is practical depends entirely on what you are practicing. If you are practicing tyranny, then there are any number of feasible ways to practice it, all of which involve the nullification of consent. If you are practicing voluntary human relations in a context of nonaggression and honesty, then there is only one feasible way, namely to honor the right of free people to give or withhold their consent.
“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…”
That used to be a liberal notion, and is why Libertarians are called Classical Liberals.
There is nothing unusual about politicians spending money on their districts. In fact, it is a most overt and traditional practice. It is to be expected, and they do it openly. Most of their campaigns are promises to provide favor in exchange for their election. My point was not about what they do, per se, but about the fact that you have no recourse as an individual when they do what they do. (Take another look.) Yes, you can vote against them next time, but if you vote with the minority, your voice is not heard. You cannot sue them for breach or fraud, like you could a private charity.
Because I was not talking about corruption. I was talking about consent.
In a sense, you contradict yourself here, Lib. I would concur that some doctrinaire socialists and other statists would find “consent” irrelevant to the issue of need. To me, the problem seems to be how to achieve the greatest good for a society of people as a group without unduly trampling on the rights of the individual people in the group. To you, of course, any entry on their rights as defined by your system would be “unduly.” Others, including the more libertarian members of the USSC, are more flexible in their definition of “unduly” – and it would be my humble comment that the real world requires it.
Effectively you set up a straw-man liberal to go along with the other straw men who have appeared in Great Debates, usually shortly before their creators find themselves the subject of Pit threads. Spidey suggested:
And Lib responded:
I found it really easy to understand Spidey as discussing a feasible system of government, under any free ideology, one which depends on the consent of the governed. Unless your electorate is very small and intensely well educated in the issues confronting it, a representative system is the one feasible method of governance. A representative government, responsive to the electors, would be required to provide what governmental needs Libertaria felt were appropriate, unless all men in Libertaria were free to take as much time and resources as necessary to address the issues that government needed to deal with.
The redistribution of resources is a very Red herring to bring into the picture. Certainly some of us feel that there is nothing wrong with taking equally, or proportionately, from all men (anthropoi – be so kind as to allow me the classic common gender, even though it is not P.C.) to ensure that every man is provided for in emergency situations. Others do not, but ordinarily do not find the idea suitable for ire, simply for strong dissent.
My sole observation here would be that we are born into a sinful world, which is of course an entirely different debate. We are born into a society organized to be a representative democracy, raised in it, with our consent not called for. When we become adults, we are willy-nilly members of that society, and our corporate consent becomes incumbent to its continued operation – but we do not give individual consent, except in the matter of remaining within it rather than choosing to emigrate to another society.
How dare you presume to know what is good for me or any man besides yourself. Though you and your legions have declared that the “real world” requires you to coerce innocent people to achieve your self-sanctified ends — though every man alive declare it — it is barbaric. Utterly barbaric. And how dare you lose us, as individuals, whom God loves — individually — in your societal group for whom you care more than us.
Libertaria need not be a so-called representative democracy. Any government, even a monarchy, that secures the rights of its citizens is libertarian. Any government that abridges them, even a democracy, is tyrannical.
What Poly said. As I’ve said before with regard to this issue of “consent of the governed,” in any society substantially larger than, say, a string quartet there’s simply no possibility of making every decision completely and explicitly consensual. In any social structure other than total and permanent anarchy we will always be subjected sometimes to having our representatives legally doing things, ostensibly in our names, that we oppose. And as Gaudere said so well, refusing to permit anything ever to be done in our names that we haven’t given our explicit and fully-informed consent to simply places on us an impractical burden of research and verification.
Where I think Lib is being sloppy is in assuming “majority rule” automatically equals “tyranny of the majority.” Yes, in a representative democracy the majority gets its way much of the time, but that is the very reason that we have strongly established Constitutional rights that the majority can’t legislate out of existence. And if you feel that our current “winner-take-all” system of representation underrepresents minority opinion (on which I completely agree), then I’d think you’d be motivated to work on changing it to a proportional-representation system such as the prototypes the persevering Gadarene has been discussing on various threads. That seems to me like a much more effective approach than simply throwing out representative democracy altogether.
So even if we agree that having representatives sometimes using “your” money to do things that you don’t want done is not specifically a necessary evil of liberalism, but rather a necessary evil of any society whose members try to carry out joint action in some organized fashion, we’re still left with Lib’s complaint about the lack of available retaliation against these “misrepresenting” representatives. But I don’t think the idea that you ought to be able to sue a legally selected rep for legally acting against your individual wishes is a practical idea for a real-life society either.
Presumably the proposed alternative would be something like the “arbiter” system sometimes envisioned in a Libertarian society, where a public official whose salary is paid by taxes adjudicates suits about coercion or breach, and if you don’t like an arbiter’s decision you’re free to sue the arbiter. In terms of effective justice and fairness, though, I hardly see how permitting a theoretically infinite regress of suits against tax-funded officials for doing things you don’t like constitutes an improvement. It seems to me that the abstract satisfaction of thinking “if I don’t agree with what my representative is doing, I can sue him/her for breach!” doesn’t go far to make up for the hassle and red tape of all the fruitless and frivolous suits it would generate. The trouble is that having this “recourse” doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: namely, because people often disagree about how their joint efforts should be carried out, in any organized society you will sometimes end up paying people to do things you don’t want them to do. Permitting legal “retaliation” against these people would be just a cosmetic measure that would mask but not remove this essential intractability of human nature.
Poly is a Christian, and knows better than to impose his own will on other men.
Why can’t you get this?
No one is saying that every decision must be consentual. Just one. The decision whether to be governed.
If you consent that others may make decisions on your behalf, then you have consented to the decisions they make. But if you have not, then every decision they make for you is a usurpation of your right to make your own.
Nonsense. Your ancient scribbles can be ammended.
Who gives a flippin’ whit about whether or not there is a representative democracy. One more time. Any government that secures the rights of its citizens — all of them, every last one, even the ones you don’t like or agree with — is libertarian, no matter what its form. Any government that usurps the rights or consent of those it governs is tyrannical, no matter what its form.
Of course it isn’t “practical”! Just look what you are practicing! I thought we were talking about ethics here, not law.
Utterly gratuitous. A frivolous suit is itself coercive. Has it become that difficult to imagine a society that holds people responsible for their own actions?
Again, no one is saying that you should have to micromanage everything your hired agent does for you. The point is that you should be free to hire (or not) the agent of your choice.
Now, can we please get back to a discussion of liberalism?
Lib: *Now, can we please get back to a discussion of liberalism? *
That’s exactly what we’re discussing. I.e., you’re claiming that these problems relating to governance and consent are due to flaws in liberal philosophies, and I (following other posters like xenophon and Poly am arguing that on the contrary, they’re an inevitable consequence of human beings living in societies. I contend that the way you propose to avoid the difficulty would inescapably end up being either not truly consensual or not a society (i.e., anarchic).
Thank you, Kim. Okay, now please explain exactly what principle it is that subjugates consent to back-burner status for liberalism. (Consent is not a problem for libertarianism.) Is it utility, or what? That seems to be, at least, Poly’s argument: “We can’t leave peaceful honest people along because things might not work out as we, the majority, intend that they do.”
In other words, complete this sentence for me, please:
Liberalism does not recognize the right of individual consent because …
Lib said: In other words, complete this sentence for me, please: “Liberalism does not recognize the right of individual consent because …”
Before providing a dependent clause here, I have to make sure that I agree with the independent clause. Of course, liberalism does think that the consent of the individual is indispensable in many aspects of society, and fights very hard to support our rights to it: for example, the government can’t make any establishment of religion because it would be carrying out its religious functions without the consent of the religious minorities. I’ll assume that what you’re referring to is the “individual consent” mentioned by Poly in the specific context of giving positive consent to the government’s authority to govern, and I’ll venture to rewrite your sentence to reflect that:
“Liberalism does not recognize the right of *the individual to withhold * individual consent to the essential obligations of citizenship status and the consequent necessity of obedience to the law, except by emigration with formal revocation of citizenship, which may be done at will, because…”
…it’s unnecessary. If you don’t want to be subject to a government that permits emigration at will, you can leave without having your life, your liberty, or your property endangered by your act. (It’s true that you can’t go on residing within your former country’s territory if you do that, but the issue of why and how governments have domain over territory is not specifically a liberalism issue. You may not like the fact that renunciation of citizenship, in the world as presently constituted, always implies emigration, but you can’t really blame liberals for it.) If you can leave whenever you want, there’s no real point to requiring any explicitly formal declaration that you’ve chosen to stay.
What Gaudere, Polycarp and Kimstu have said, double.
Since this is not a “bash libertarianism” (or Libertarian) thread, I won’t waste any more time pointing out the myriad problems libertarianism presents when applied to real world conditions.
Since this is (or started out as) a “bash liberalism” thread, I’ll just point out that the OP has morphed his argument from “liberalism is evil” to “all forms of statism are evil” and WOULD DO WELL to consider that, as Hayek and Burke pointed out exhaustively, humans exist as social groups which interact based on the accumulated knowledge and experience embodied in inherited rules and institutions. If one’s argument against liberalism is only that it embodies all the imperfections inherent in any institutionalized system of government, one then cannot argue that liberalism in itself is less desirable than any other political philosophy.
Why should we complete an obfuscatory oversimplification for you, Lib? If you don’t consent to be governed, then secede yourself from the Union and execute the time-honored option of becoming an outlaw.
I believe in modern liberalism because it doesn’t have at its core the twin outrageous presumptions that “initial force” by a government is inherently evil (but usurious contraction of services is part of a free market), and that governmental prevention of oppressive practices is tyranny (but absolute ownership without accountability to society is the natural right of property holders).
Lib: *“If you don’t want to be subject to a government that permits emigration at will, you can leave without having your life, your liberty, or your property endangered by your act.” Emphasis mine. Can you reconcile that, please? *
Sure. Foreign nationals are allowed to own property in the US, and as far as I know that applies to ex-US citizens too. You are also free to realize the value of your property and take the cash away with you.
So I think you have unfairly discounted the strength of the liberal commitment to the importance of the implied consent of the governed. The liberty to emigrate at will isn’t one of the ones that gets talked about a lot, but I don’t think any of the liberals here would accept attempts to infringe it. Personally, I consider it very important to the political health of a country that the citizens have a valid choice as to whether or not to stay in it. So if you’re having trouble with Armed Thugs™ trying to stop you at the border, Lib, call on your liberal allies! Show us the petition and we’ll sign it! Show us the parade and we’ll march!
I realize that your gripe with this is not that you can’t withdraw your consent to be governed but that you can’t do so without leaving the country. But as I said, that’s not a liberalism issue. I’m not even sure if most liberals nowadays even have some kind of common stance on whether governments ought to have domain over territory; it’s simply that we work within the framework of existing political states, all of which are based on territorial dominion. Personally, given a hypothetical case in which geographical proximity didn’t affect issues of governance (hmmm, individuals floating around in separate deep-space bubbles interacting via electronic links?), I don’t see why individuals couldn’t legally switch governments in situ. I just don’t see how it could work given the realities of our current physical setup.
how can this work when everyone’s perceptions of what their individual rights are, may differ? I am sorry I haven’t been lurking at the Libertarian threads, but, how does libertarianism differ from anarchy?
Does this mean, for example, if you don’t wish to be taxed for road repairs, and are not taxed, that you would then eschew the use of the repaired roads? (just an example so I can understand better, I am not trying to anger you). Can you explain this to me along the lines of this same example?
Again, thanks. I think that’s a fair assessment. Am I right to say that liberalism subjugates the right of individual consent to the needs of the society as perceived by agents of the state?
Spidey
I guess, if I understand your question correctly.
Libertrianism differs from anarchy in that the former prohibits initial force (or fraud), whereas the latter does not. For a basic understanding of libertarianism, see the very brief and excellent essay by Joseph Knight, Understanding the Libertarian Philosophy. For a much deeper understanding, visit Free-Market and browse any of the thousands of texts online.
In Libertaria, roads (like power lines in the U.S.) are privately owned. There are no taxes in Libertaria, but there are fees for the services of arbitration and defense. When you consent to be governed, you consent to the arbitration process and the payment of fees.
To anticipate a question, what is the difference between a fee and a tax? Fee: you walk into the lawyer’s office and ask him to be your advocate, and pay him when the two of you agree to terms. Tax: the lawyer comes to your home and seizes whatever he wants from you, then gives you in return whatever, if anything, he pleases.
real quick (although I have many issues to bring up relating to the latest few posts)-
Lib, you keep getting rights and needs backwards. not the definitions, but the processes. You have states over and over again that we see Mr. Jones needs something, so we say he has a ‘right’ to it, and then take something away from mr. smith.
in reality, we have defined rights, and some rights that aren’t clearly defined but about which there is some kind of consensus. If, upon examining a situation, we see that one or more of those rights are being ignored or impinged upon, we seek to rectify that situation. we don, if realizing that little Jeffy Jones doesn’t have shoes that pump, declare “Jeffy has a right to those pump shoes! Take Rando Smith’s!”
