Socialists and libertarians continually accuse each other of ivory tower intellectualism. They are both right.
It just gets amazinger and amazinger.
in the same post as this:
Emphasis mine. Do you have an idea why that’s amazing? If not, we’re just gonna go round and round for a long time and shoot past each other every time we talk. You are tallying rights according to their merit. If I were a practicing homosexual, or an illiterate hispanic, or otherwise on the outside of your political machine, I would be scared to death of men like you. Upon your whims would hinge my whole happiness or dispair.
[slowly shaking head in incredulous disbelief…]
At any rate, you have now reduced our two models to identical cousins, both played by Patty Duke (apologies to Bill Maher). In either model, there exists the “threat” that a cabal will take over. In either model, morons make decisions that profoundly affect their lives. In either model, the race is to the swiftest — in yours, the swiftest have the most political clout; in mine, the most property.
So is that it? Not quite. There remains a difference that you haven’t addressed. In your model, the politicians must initiate force to underwrite their ownership. In mine, they cannot. Sure, if they were to begin initiating force, the model would break down; after all, it would no longer be libertarian. But by the same token, if your model ceased initiating force, it too would fall apart, and your democracy would become anarchy (how would it collect its taxes?).
In one model, a man depends on his own good sense; in the other he depends on the good sense of Jesse Helms. And that’s the difference between us. I am willing to let people decide for themselves. I am willing to let the Rasta smoke his pipe so long as he initiates no force or fraud in his dealings. I am willing to let the gay man or lesbian be happy by having sex with his or her lover. I am willing to let people uphold the charities that they believe have merit.
You, on the other hand, see the Rasta as a trivial individual whose rights, within those of the abstract entity called society, are trivial and only “remotely reasonable”. I wager you are more sympathetic to homosexuals, illiterate blacks, and the like. Unfortunately, your sympathy, expressed, I suppose, by your votes, is drowned out by the great majority who think prison is the best solution for such scum. And you seem willing to let a tiny cabal of very wealthy people — mostly straight white men — decide what charitable needs have merit, along with who will pay what for them. (Notice they do not offer their own services as charity. Examine their salaries and staff allowances.)
In the end, I believe that you are entitled to give your consent to the governors whom you favor; you do not extend the same civility to other men.
Goit it.
I stand corrected with only the fig leaf of relying on other authors for support.
On the other hand, it strikes me that the issue of water like goods, club goods as you will, is equally as challenging as public goods per se in re Lib’s overly simplistic approach.
If a man is trying to force a certain end from a macroscopic study of billions and billions of minute praxes, then he damn well better brace himself for a deluge of complications, else he runs the risk of being simplistic. You’re mistaking non-participation for over-simplification.
You bet I do, because I see it and you don’t.
You can look on airline transport as a consumer good among other consumer goods, but if you talk about it that way, you’re overlooking its role as infrastructure - a good or service that makes other transactions a lot more possible, as opposed to a good that is essentially an end in itself.
Same idea with speech, if you deal with it as one right among others: you’re missing the fact that unfettered speech allows us to have the discussion of whether the Rasta can smoke that joint, or whether you should get that dick out of your mouth - and over the long run, free speech seems to push acceptance of other ‘peaceful, honest’ practices.
Even during my few decades of awareness, I can see what speech rights have done for acceptance of atheism, homosexuality, and so forth: increasingly, these things are turning into rights. (I expect to live to see a time beyond the demagoguery of the Drug War when the Rastas can smoke their joints, too.) But all the dope-smoking or gay sex in the world won’t bring about free speech, free assembly, right to trial by jury, and all the other rights that I feel lucky to take for granted.
So you bet I give unfettered speech pride of place. In addition to its importance as a right for its own sake, it is the right from which other rights flow.
Addendum:
The only other right that I can see putting in the same category is the right to bear arms: if there are some less-than-peaceful people in your world, as there always will be, and you can’t fend them off when they come a-conquering, you ain’t got no rights, no matter what your government, context, or whatever. My saying that may surprise some people (if they’re reading this), but it needs to be said.
Well, it surprised the hell outta me, I gotta say!
At any rate, we’ll just have to agree to disagree once again, RT. Unless you just want to have a flame war, there isn’t much more to be said here. You’re starting to scare me as you begin morphing into an anarchist. Despite what you said about all rights flowing from free speech (which was a featured right in the Soviet Union, by the way), I think you believe they really come from guns.
Or should we say, from whoever owns the guns? 
Nah, not me. Besides, I don’t want to shock UncleBeer and the other pro-gun types too much in one thread. 
*[sub]You left out the phrase ‘the barrel(s) of’. ;)[/sub]
I know you love lists, but shouldn’t there be a (b) there?
Public property creates a privileged class, namely, the public. Thus, being able to use this public stuff is a reward for following the state’s rules. Break the wrong ones and you lose the privilege. You are rewarded for following the law, and punished for not. Given the appropriate crime, the punishment will be a revocation of the privileges. America is nice enough to let you keep your rights, however.
That public property is a privilege, a reward for following the right rules. Not quite as strict as the country club, to be sure.
Perhaps you need to go to jail. How convenient that you can tolerate the laws (I know, you don’t live here, but lets pretend).
[sub]The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea[/sub]
RTFirefly
My problem is with people against it, though I don’t know what Lib specifically has in mind. I really have problems with all forms of government, including ones where they are absent.
arl - I’ve read the Illuminatus! trilogy cover-to-cover probably a half-dozen times; it’s a wild. hilarious ride of a book.
But, as you can tell, it still hasn’t persuaded me at all, philosophy-wise. 
Must have deleted it by accident.
That is nonesensical. In your line of reasoning all property will create a privileged class.
And I don’t accept your underlying premise that the “State’s” rules are not necessarily society’s rules. Excluded middle.
Welcome to living in a society of people rather than an individual bubble. I don’t see this as argument frankly.
Jail is a punishment for violating rules. All societies will have rules, and will have to resort to punishment. Whether the application of those rules achieves some modicum of justice, and this being an imperfect world there will always be imperfections, that strikes me as the reasonable question. To simply say you don’t like rules, which is what you are effectively saying stripping away the dressing, strikes me as unrealistic and in fact irrelevant.
In other words, your problem is with living in society with other human beings. I’m afraid that this is not a solvable problem.
No, I believe the point was just that 19th Century Argentina was not a libertarian society by even the remotest stretch of the imagination. And that it is disingenious to use it as an example of what can happen in a libertarian society.
No one has claimed that the inability of Rastafarians to smoke pot on public sidewalks is the reason we want to change the world. It was simply offered as an example of how public property doesn’t necessarily lead to whatever rights you want.
Your claim is that without public property, our freedom of expression is limited to whatever someone with land will let us say on his property. We (libertarians) have countered that on public property one is still subject to the whims of others when one wants to express oneself. We desire to move to a context of peaceful and honest people being free of coercion because we like the idea on its own merits, not because of a single right we feel should exist.
But they’ll spend their time trying to stifle your voice through any means possible, right?
Driving competitors out of business makes a hell of a lot more sense than attempting to make destitute random uninvolved people who could even potentially be customers. When society is poor, business suffers as well. A business will be more successful if it’s competing against fewer other businesses, but accrues no benefit from driving a business in a different market out of business.
The major difference is profit motive. A wise sage once pointed out that corporations only care about the bottom line. If it costs me nothing to allow residents of my apartment complex to leave and go about their lives as they please, I have no incentive for being randomly capricious and driving possible tennants away. As a benefit, I can probably charge a little more thanks to Goofball Terrace being nearby, and probably make enough money to buy it as well. Of course, in your world, I’d now attempt to force my tennants into serfdom.
In comparison, record companies don’t offer many singles because singles don’t really sell any more. If you are trying to draw a parallel between a commodity with very low demand and one with almost universal demand, I don’t think you should be complaining about others misunderstanding market forces.
So, poor people get taken advantage of. Sad, tragic and all that, but people will do such things if forced to regardless of what the government is like. Although, I’m pretty sure that the selling of children constitutes coercion in Libertaria. As for the example of the Apartment California (“you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”), I suppose that in any society, if there was anyone offering such a thing, and there were people poor enough to accept it, it would occur whether or not there were rules against it. There really isn’t anything one can do in such a situation. I suppose you sleep easier at night knowing that if anyone were to take advantage of you like that, there would be some law that was being broken in the process, but that doesn’t really help me.
Actually, in this case, isn’t it the Chicago Reader’s gracious offering of their private property that is allowing this debate?
Jeremy, I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to say, but it all boils down to this. You are beautiful. Thank God that you exist.
Wow. That’s probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever recieved (and in the Pit, no less), due to both the words and the respect I have for you. I don’t really know what to say. Thank you.
I take it, then, that I haven’t misrepresented your philosophy.
But how can we all get along if everything is private property??? hahaha
Most libertarians do this by assuming that the capacity for meaningful choice is not limited by circumstance; that path-dependence, malice, envy and/ or irrationality do not affect negotiation; and that bargaining is not affected by power derived from prior and largely arbitrary distributions of wealth. Or – like Marxists – assuming away the behavioural foundations of political problems by supposing that people are peaceful and honest or will be persuaded to be so or can be practically isolated from having an influence on outcomes or “rights”.
Well, obviously we couldn’t, Ayn. Just look at all those condos at the beach. Ten and twenty stories of private owners in one building. It’s no wonder they are constantly on the news with their toilets that don’t work, their broken elevators and graffiti ridden dark hallways. Oh, wait. That’s public housing. Okay, how 'bout all them riots and fires and general mayhem. Oh, wait. That’s on public streets.
Well anyway, we couldn’t because fire would rain down from the sky, civilization would end as we know it, and giant sentient squids would rise from the ocean floor to come back here and claim their property. Surely, this is common knowledge.
Good heavens, Picmr. If we thought all that, we’d just go ahead and advocate anarchy. There would be no need for any government to secure a peaceful honest context.
To those of you who still have a mind that considers things on the merits, instead of through the glasses of a fixed ideology, and who may be tempted to take one on by what has come before, the following is directed:
From G Washington’s Farewell Address:
One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.
'Nuff said. 225 years of liberty under a real and functioning government should, I hope, be sufficient refutation to the people above.
So, my ideas of what a perfectly moral society would be like are refuted simply because this form of government has persisted for 225 years?
In 1776, the British monarchy had existed for 710 years, but some people, including the one you quote, thought there might be a better way to organize themselves. It seems to have proved at least equally successful. The day I think the world is just fine the way it is is the day that, for all intents and purposes, I die. And if that means ignoring one thing George Washington said, I can live with that.
I do very much love my country, and appreciate the freedoms it has provided. I gladly stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and feel something stirring in my heart when the National Anthem is played. I will serve in the Navy when I leave college shortly. But I will never blindly accept its every whim as perfection, and do not even feel that it is the ideal form of government.
I’ve always liked that Washington speech. Of course, I would have highlighted this way:
One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the RIGHTS OF PERSON AND PROPERTY.
Incidentally, libertarianism fits nowhere on the antiquated left-right political line, which dates back to the 1790s when the French Assembly separated Republicans from Monarchists in order to maintain order in the hall. Republicans went on the left, and Monarchists on the right, with soldiers strategically posted between them. (Source for Marxists. Source for others.)
David Noland, founder of the Libertarian Party, was featured as one of the 2000 outstanding intellectuals of the 20th century by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, England, in part for his development of the “Nolan Chart”, a two-axis political map.
You can find out for yourself by taking a Short Political Quiz where you fall on the Nolan Chart. If you’ve ever thought about Stalin on the left and Mussolini on the right, and which of the two you feel closer to, you can see how inadequate the one dimensional left-right line is.