Oh, and the “wally” wasn’t meant to be an attack… Just a little smack on the back of the head 
Oh. Bye.
Sorry that you are leaving the conversation Lib. I, for one, certainly respect your views and am trying to formulate a POV on a subject that I have previously known little about. My questions are sincere.
I cannot trust “the kindness of strangers” and generally do not in my day to day existence. I recognize that there are people who are kind and generous always, and some who will be if it doesn’t hurt them too much, and some who will game a system the best they can. I trust that the latter occurs more than the first. I trust my freinds but I always cut the deck.
I think the points made in this thread are best distilled as follows:
There are a variety of situations where “overall good” requires that individual entities perform actions that would be against their own interest if others did not also behave the same. Very much akin to the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma”. Yet if entities all know that everyone is required to comply with the same rules then participation is assured and the risk of disincentive is minimized. We can trust because we know that there is a penelty entailed for failure to live by the agreed upon rules. (As an aside, many belive that brain growth was driven by the need to be excelent cheater detectors in social groups and that some ethics evolved hardwired because we became such good chetaer detecters.) “Requiring all entities” means coercion and loss of freedoms but sometimes such is worth the greater overall good.
Handicappped accessibilty is one such circumstance.
Drug policies are arguably another.
Child labor laws and other child welfare laws are another.
Pollution control is still another such circumstance.
The last two show how the global economy makes these “fair playing field” factors relevant at a macro level. To some extent we operate globally according to liberterian principles. Thus countries that have weaker pollution control and weaker child welfare laws are rewarded with international investments by companies attempting to lower costs.
I am coming to the conclusion that Liberteria shares the same flaw as communism and anarchy … trusting that entities will do the right things because such is human nature … while experience causes us to doubt that human nature is so beneficient.
Lib, there were some things I was going to post if you’d stayed, and I think they still need to be here.
First comment is on governments, politicians, and bureaucracy.
You said:
My belief about human nature is that the Founding Fathers’ assessment was right on. There’s good in people, but we’ve also got a sinful nature, and while the goodness is real, it cannot be trusted to carry the day.
My belief about politicians, bureaucrats, etc. - well, I believe I don’t need a belief. For such critters, we’ve got something better - a track record. Actually, dozens of them. We can even compare the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems, to see if certain ones seem to induce different behaviors on the part of the politicians. But we really don’t have to speculate on how bureaucracies or governments tend to act - we can read the history books and the morning papers, and there it is, all laid out.
From the beginning, Lib, I’ve regarded Libertaria as your baby. The hard part has always been trying to get consistent information about it from you.
And that’s all I expect: that what you say about Libertaria have a basic self-consistency. OK, two things: I expect people to act like real people, rather than like any sort of unlikely ideal human beings. But that’s it.
So you can let Libertaria be whatever you want. But (for instance) you can’t say everyone swims in Libertaria, but it’s in the middle of a desert. You can’t simultaneously say you don’t have the faintest idea what its constitution would look like, but you know what its ordinances regarding trash disposal would be - unless you can explain how the trash disposal ordinances would always come out the same, whether Libertaria was an anarchy or a totalitarian state.
Well, OK, you can say these things. But you can expect me to call you on them.
And you can’t expect me to go along with the notion that all social problems not solved by the market will be taken care of by the generosity of private individuals. You can believe it yourself if you want, but I don’t see others being convinced. (I think we’ve beaten this argument into the ground, this time.)
Lib may have left the building, but if not, I have a few questions for him.
Now if I have the above straight, the system works like this: parents have children; they are assumed to have a contractual duty to care for the children; if the parents fail in their contractual duty, the children or some outside entity may call for their parental abilities to be subjected to review; if the parents fail the review, they may lose their parental rights and/or be punished; the children may be emanicipated as adults or cared for by other people depending on the circumstances; this alternative child care will be provided by charitable agencies or individuals. Now I think I have all of the above right and I have no argument with any of the above.
But I would like to question you on some of the details.
What are the terms of the contract the parent and child have?
Does each parent-child relationship have an identical contract or are they modified for each individual relationship?
Does a breach of contract require bad intent or is there a minimum standard below which a person would be considered as unable to be a parent (severe mental illness or retardation for example) even if they genuinely care for their children and attempt to perform as parents to the best of their ability?
Suppose a person belongs to a group that believes in extreme corporal punishment or denial of medical care for children?
Who decides what the terms of the contract are?
You stated that government is charged with enforcing the contract. What government is this? Is there a national one or is it a community one?
What if the parents have never recognized the authority of the government? Should they be required to comply with the decisions of a government they do not accept?
You stated at one point that the children will be examined to determine whether they are capable of giving meaningful consent. Who does this examination? What are the standards for examiners and who sets them?
What does the examination consist of?
Is the examiner a government representative or a private contracter? Who pays the examiner for their services?
Who chooses the examiner; the parent or the government? If they cannot agree on an examiner, who has the right to decide?
Suppose the parents refuse to recognize the credentials of the examiner. Are they still bound by the examiner’s decision?
Nemo, I’m gonna take a stab at some of this, based on my best recollection of things that Lib has said in other debates. Hopefully erislover can correct me if I get too far off.
Libertaria, on the larger scale, is a ‘context’ within which people are free to contract with the government of their choice, the way we choose a long-distance telephone company or Internet service provider, to provide whatever services those people expect of government. Which vary. Hence my use of the term “government service provider,” or GSP.
Lib has referred to individual GSPs as “Libertaria” also (“Libertaria can be a democracy”), hence my desire for a distinct term to eliminate ambiguity and confusion.
I know nothing - absolutely nothing - about what holds the larger ‘context’ in place, preserving everybody’s freedom to choose whatever GSP they prefer. I keep asking, and hoping for answers. I have no idea whether there’s a context-wide meta-government, or anything like that.
Anyhow, the individual GSPs can have any kind of government you like. Presumably, a single landowner can be his own GSP if he so chooses.
But a Libertarian GSP would have only one rule - the Noncoercion Principle. Lib has been clear on this in the past. (There would be courts and police to enforce the NP.)
I’m assuming on the basis of limited evidence (but adequate evidence enough, I think) that the rules such as Lib describes regarding children and parents, must be (in Lib’s opinion, at least) directly derivable from the NP. I’m not sure whether Libertarian courts build up a body of stare decisis-style precedents to help them figure out how the NP applies to a given situation, or whether they figure it out from scratch each time.
I’m similarly assuming that the examination you ask about is given by the judge (or possibly a contractor), since a Libertarian Libertaria has no extraneous government.
If the parents are their own GSP, I have no idea how any child protections work. I honestly don’t understand why it wouldn’t be legal as church on Sunday for such parents to kill, cook, and eat their children. While I haven’t asked this specific question, I’ve asked a number of closely related ones, and am still awaiting a clear response.
That’s about the limit of my ability to sort this out, on the basis of what Lib has told me about Libertaria.
What happens if the parent-child contract enforced by one GSP is different to the parent-child contract of another? For example, GSP A allows corporal punishment, GSP B forbids it. Perhaps not a good example, but it applies to any services offered by any GSP, e.g. business to business contract law, definition of a criminal offence, gun carrying laws.
More questions:
Are the GSP’s competing entities to which a user can subsribe?
Are the GSP’s geographically separate i.e. like the UK & USA are geographically separate, or can they overlap, like AOL & Tiscali?
Go alien - once again, IANA libertarian, but:
The GSPs are effectively competing entities that each user can choose between. As Lib envisions it, IIRC, the tendency would be toward multiyear contracts between a user and a GSP, rather than the month-to-month arrangements we tend to have with our ISPs. I think that makes sense.
The GSPs are not geographically separate, though; when your contract with your existing GSP expires, you’re free to sign up with any GSP that offers you what you consider adequate governmental services at a price you’re willing to pay, even if no other customer/citizen of that government lives within miles of you.
But in answer to your original question, I don’t know.
See Lib (if you’re still reading); I’m not the only non-libertarian who can postulate working rules for a libertarian society. I think we’re all (those of us participating in this thread) trying to “make it work” in our heads, and coming up with unsatisfactory answers to some of our societal concerns. Now, admittedly satisfaction is determined in part by expectations. It’s a given that libertarians have different expectations for government than us committed statists ( ), but I would be surprised if they hold substantially different societal expectations as well.
I think you are getting sidetracked in the GSPs. Not that your description is terribly inaccurate, but you’re trying to analyze the entire society from the aspect of day-to-day happenings. All societies of any scale are complicated and possibly nonsensical at that level.
Libertaria would presumably have a constitution holding together what we would think of as the Federal Government together, detailing the specific (and temporally indefinite) terms by which it is bound to protect people from non-coercion, setting out the details of non-coercion, and so forth; that is, your typical legal document, albeit one specified in terms of an indefinite contract to the citizens of the country.
We, of course, have GSPs now, except that the cost is masked by blanket taxation worked into every facet of our lives; but of course the government is as departmentalized as the best (worst?) of our big corporations.
So it isn’t that I think the idea of a GSP is inherently good, but rather that it is sort of a red herring.
In my mind, Libertaria is akin to a strong States’ Rights interpretation of government, with strong limitations on states. Lib and I do disagree on several aspects of Libertaria; specifically, the actual obligations the government bears (public education, for instance, is a must IMO), and the manner in which a government obtains funds with which to operate and land on which to operate. The typical libertarian says that taxation is theft, and though I have thought about alternative means with which to gain revenue, none of them strike me as particularly pleasant or possibly even stable, and the last thing I would want is an unstable government.
You have GOT to be kidding me here, though, RT. A child is a person, and as such is entitled to the same protection as anyone else. In addition to this protection, the parents (and possibly the government) have responsibilities to the child given its inability to consent.
Libertaria would have a standing police force and a standing army to protect its citizens from interior and exterior threats respectively. The exact mode of existence is thus not determined by government fiat, but by coexistence from within the government’s protection of property and personal rights.
I honestly believe that RTFirefly has remained cogent and civil throughout this thread, Lib–is it really necessary to take your ball and go home, just because he won’t submit to your (unintentional, I’m sure) sometimes-hyperbolic micharacterization of his statements and positions?
I admit I’ve found Libertarian’s views to be somewhat nebulous in the past. But I genuinely would like to hear his responses and try to understand what his beliefs are.
For example, someone spoke of an absolute noncoercion principle. How can this be reconciled with a governmental ability to take away children from a parent? The government obviously must use coercion to do this.
Or to give a real world example, how would the Libertarian child welfare agency handle Christian Science families. Christian Scientists do not believe in conventional medicine; they feel any illness can be healed by prayer. Suppose the child of Christian Scientist parents has a lethal yet treatable illness or injury. Should the parents be able to deny their child conventional medical treatment in a libertarian society or does the government override their religious beliefs and force them to submit their child to treatment? This is not a giant squid; this is something that society has had to face.
Erislover, I understand that it’s difficult to bring theoretical principle down to the level of day-to-day activity. But that’s what’s required if libertarianism is going to make the leap into reality I wrote of earlier. The thing I’ve found is that on the day-to-day level, libertarianism seems to be just like what we have now; a system of laws agreed upon by majority rule and enforced upon everyone by a system of police and courts.
Here’s some “horse’s mouth” type information about libertarianism. Keep in mind that, like most other political philosophies, libertarianism has a wide variation of beliefs among its adherents.
The noncoercion principle prohibits initiating force against an otherwise peaceful, honest person. A libertarian goverment which acted against abusive, neglectful or absentee parents would be responding to force–force against the child.
And, IMO only, withholding medical care from a child for any reason, including religious belief, would fall under this category. Parents have a fiduciary duty to a child that supercedes religious worship, AFAIC.
So do I have it right?
On the one end is the hard anarchist who feels that individual liberty is tantamount. Coercion is bad and is the consequence of hierarchy. End hierarchy and people will get along and take care of each other.
Next up is the minimal state of liberterianism. Hierarchy is not bad but coercion is. The State can provide for defense and for the enforcement of contracts but that’s it. Here it can start to get blurry. What qualifies as coercion and forcing an outcome onto others? Are there any global goods that can result only from cooperation that individuals (or entities) can be coerced into.
The other end would be a global governing body that enforces all laws across the entire planet with the only consideration being the good of global society as decided by the governmental system.
In between the fulcrum shifts and different realtive values are placed on different global goods and individual freedoms.
Is this close to a correct understanding?
But who decides on the definitions of peaceful and honest? Let’s face it; the two terms are broad enough that you’re guaranteed to get honest differences of opinions on what they mean. I have to assume that the decisions on meanings will be made by the will of the majority as any other solution would be even farther from libertarian principles. So once again we’re back in a situation were a group of people are forming a majority opinion and then enforcing it on those who may disagree with that opinion.
I’m honestly not trying to disparage libertarianism but I’ve never seen any libertarian platform that isn’t either unworkable or indistinguishable from democratic government.
DSeid: I suppose the other end is an authoritarian power, with no Constitutional or traditional protections of liberty.
Whether it is global or local is neither here nor there.
But, as I have indicated in other threads, I think an historical approach is a better way to understand these various stances. Nobody is really serious about establishing Libertaria: at best, it’s a thought experiment.[sup]1[/sup] And anarchy has always been more about 'tude (or perhaps syndicalism) than about comprehensive plans.
[sub]1. Disagree? Fine. I recommend that you -yes, you- establish a Libertarian state. Or at least a webpage with such a plan. I recommend taking over a couple of square miles of the Western Sarhara.[/sub]
Whe ever decides, anywhere at any time in any country, what is peaceful and honest? Peaceful: not initiating violence. Honest: living up to the conditions of any contracts, implied or explicit, you have entered into.
flowbark, I’d disagree on the global vs local because I think that it is a matter of level of analysis. What is the “entitity” that is free from noncoercion? The individual? The corporation? The individual nation-state? The interactions between nation-states is right now failrly liberterian. Meanwhile the interactions within most nation-states is scarcely so.
As a practical matter, one can lean towards the liberterian end of the balance without believing that Liberteria is realistic. This nice liberal social democrat does believe that individual freedom should be trumped by “the greater good” only when a clear case is made that such is really needed and with a fair amount of trepidation.
At the same time I comprehend the complexity of current social contracts which we are all implicitly engaged in.
If George rides his Harley without a helmet at 90 mph and crashes, sustaining a head injury, our society has an implied contract to provide some minimal standard of care for his recovery. Does society in its turn then has a right to require that individuals wear helmets and ride within a speed limit. Is he potentially infringing upon others enough to justify the limiting of his freedom to make a stupid decision?
Susan’s heroin addiction will likely lead her to become not only unproductive but eventually to become counterproductive and to engage in activities that are explicitly coercive. Should society only intervene when it crosses that line or realistically forsee that such is likely to occur and intervene proactively?
I think the best illustration comes out healthcare: immunizations. Immunizations for measles, pertussis, and many others only work because of “herd immunity”. If not for the cooperation of most invividuals the protection to all would be poor. These diseases are worse when had during childhood, when the inividual is not competent to make their own choice. Mandating these immunizations is justifiable. Alternatively there is the Hepatitis B vaccine. This is a great idea and I believe that everybody should get the shots. But. Herd immunity is not a major factor for this vaccine’s efficacy. Most people will not be at great risk for the disease until they are old enough to make a competent decision. It does not cross the line, IMHO, to where the freedom to make what I would think of as a bad decision, should be infringed. Yet our society mandates it.
If you are of liberterian leaning then you will err towards the individual’s freedoms even at substantial societal costs. This is a very defensible POV. But this thread illustrates that it is not very defensible to argue that a liberterian system would reduce those costs to society as a whole; it must argue that the greater goods are just not worth the limitations in particular situations.