Libertarian Nations

Great Debates
101

You know, that’s actually a scary question. In our current system, how many kids do you think have to die before government steps in? What’s the current number of deaths required to get a product recalled? How long does the recall take?

The government is of and for the people, right? Hence, if people don’t want kids dying in the streets they’ll do something about it. No reason to wait for the legislative session to start again after their summer break. Or for the issue to be big enough to get on the ballot, or part of a campaign platform.

If you saw a kid dying in the street, would you do something or write your congressman and wait for the government to show up?

What you don’t realize is that there are a lot of needs out there that are filled without the government getting involved. Lots of non-profits working just fine using private and {gasp} corporate donors. I spent 5 years working with a non-profit that fed people with HIV/AIDS, this charity functioned during a time when the government refused to acknowledge the disease. A time when the majority of the population thought AIDS was a plague that icky people should suffer with. Even the church wouldn’t help.

It took a group of private individuals to raise money within the community, in partnership with local businesses, to feed people dying from AIDS. The government didn’t give a shit, individuals did.

102

To answer this more succinctly: if there isn’t enough private interest, there won’t be enough government interest. The two are not unrelated.

But what you should notice is that for government to act you need a majority (or a super majority). For private you need just one.

103

Nonsense. First, the government acts all the time on issues that don’t have a majority; part of its job is dealing with issues that are too small to interest some corporation. And second, it doesn’t matter if that one private individual takes an interest if he doesn’t have the resources to do anything about it. That after all is much of the point of libertarianism; it aims to strip the common people of the only organization that has the power to actually protect them, and ensure that anyone who stands up for the ordinary person will be isolated and weak, easily crushed.

104

the free-est economies i know are hong kong and singabore.

of course, certain oil-producing islamic states don’t tax their citizens but that’s a different thing altogether.

105

I don’t know that that’s the point of libertarianism. That might be the result, but the point is to stop coercion and maximize human freedom. It doesn’t necessarily work out like that, but that’s generally what libertarians are going for, because they have, what seems to me, a rather naive faith in human nature and volunteerism.

106

I think there are at least some like that; there are others who are perfectly fine with the human suffering and tyranny that their ideology entails. Either because they think it will only fall upon those who deserve to suffer, or because they just don’t care. I’d pretty much divide them up into the naive, the would-be predators, and the cynics who just see the ideology as a tool.

107

If, by “in favour of funding” you mean “will voluntarily contribute their own money”, then…no. No, we cannot presume that.

108

If people aren’t willing to contribute, than those people are okay with children dying in the streets.

If it’s important to people, they should chip in freely and not by coercion.

And whether or not people are okay with that isn’t a function of libertarianism, it’s just a shitty place to live. As witnessed in the hundreds of non-libertarian societies that can’t be bothered to look after orphans.

That last point I’ll make is that nothing in the libertarian manefesto prevents a government run orphanage paid for through public funds. That’s the strawman Der Trihs wants you to fear. If there are children dying in the streets, and enough people care, they may conclude that government is the best way to deal with it. People are free to organize if they so choose.

One again, libertarian is not anarchy. It is not absence of government.

The realization here needs to be that the same powers that allow taxation for an orphanage get bundled up with the same powers that use taxation for failed social policy, bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, and military adventurism. And that same power, through coercion can then able to enact Blue Laws, and then lord over the population by requiring licenses for everything and everything.

As example, why does the DMV need my social security number? The answer is because the government uses that licensing board to then search for dead-beat dads. How are those related? Sure it’s great they’re looking for dead-beats, but the DMV wasn’t set up and funded to search for deadbeats.

Can anyone tell me how preventing liquor sales on Sunday protects the population and keeps children from dying?

109

Gah. After all these years, some of the long-term posters here don’t even seem to understand the first principle of libertarianism, let alone understand enough about it to be able to identify it.

Let’s get this straight: The primary purpose of government in a libertarian society is to protect the citizens from others using force against them. That automatically rules out Somalia or any other anarchistic ‘failed state’. BY DEFINITION.

Saying that Somalia is libertarian because the government has broken down is like saying that Nazi Germany was Communist because it had a big strong government. It’s nothing more than a cheap slur.

The libertarian conception of ‘force’ includes imposing costs on people without their permission (i.e. market externalities like pollution), fraud, contract violation, etc. So in a libertarian society you still have a government with police forces, law courts, and a military. People are free to enter into contract with each other, but the government will have a role in adjudicating those contracts and settling disputes. People who defraud others, or threaten them, or con them will still be breaking the law.

And because Libertarians believe in paying for the services they receive, they also understand that they are collectively responsible for paying for this level of government through what taxation might be required.

I would argue that the closest thing to an attempt to set up a libertarian society was probably the U.S. federal government at its founding. The constitution is a very libertarian-leaning document - its main purpose is to define the rights of individuals and the relatively small sphere of activity restricted to the government. No, it wasn’t perfectly libertarian, and the U.S. never reached that ideal and in fact began diverting from it almost immediately.

Hong Kong is often mentioned as a libertarian example because the British governor of post-WWII Hong Kong took a very deliberate ‘laissez-faire’ approach to governing. Many of the social and economic structures in Hong Kong arose dynamically out of the interactions of the people without a government plan. Opening a business in Hong Kong required little more than filling out a one-page notification to the government. The movement of people and capital was pretty much unregulated, as were wages and working conditions. The social safety net was tiny or nonexistent.

It’s true that no purely libertarian state has existed, just like no pure communist state has ever existed - probably because the nature of man won’t allow for such purity of action across large populations. But here’s where the libertarians and communists differ:

Communists use the lack of purity as an excuse for failed communist states - if only it had been PURE, it would have worked! The glorious vision of true communism was destroyed by flawed people, and must be given another chance. In other words, if it’s ‘true’ communism it doesn’t count, and the failure of almost-communist states cannot be held against communism.

Against such an attitude, it’s entirely fair to point out that pure communism is impossible, and therefore if purity is necessary for success, communism itself fails as a philosophy of government.

Libertarians do not require purity for success. They would argue that countries that move towards that ideal will realize better outcomes for the people. There is no requirement for purity to achieve a good outcome - smaller government is better than bigger government, more freedom is better than less freedom, the more autonomy we give people to sort out their own affairs, the better off they and the rest of us will be.

In that case, there is no need to demand an example of a ‘pure’ libertarian state in order to justify the philosophy. We can simply look at trends and see if the libertarian path seems to be a good one to start traveling.

For example, we can look at Canada when its government was 53% of the economy and contrast it with the Canada that had government at 35% of the economy. We can compare U.S. states that have large intrusive government against states that have smaller government. We can look at the transition of the former communist republics and look at the outcomes of those that embraced the market over those that attempted to maintain more social planning. We can look at the various states in Europe and compare their outcomes against the sizes of their governments.

Today, the Heritage Foundation publishes a list of countries ranked by economic freedom. You can read the 2011 study here: The 2011 Index of Economic Freedom. You can read the report to see their methodology, but it includes things like tax rates, business regulation, trade freedom, labor freedom, freedom from corruption, government share of the economy, etc.

IN 2011, only six countries were rated ‘free’. They were (in order):

Hong Kong
Singapore
Australia
New Zealand
Switzerland
Canada

(the U.S. ranked 9th, just out of the group of ‘free’ countries, and rated ‘mostly free’).

That doesn’t make those six countries libertarian, and it doesn’t include non-economic coercion by government or individuals. But it at least gives you some idea of what kinds of countries have smaller government footprints today. Somalia, they aren’t.

110

How do you deal with other organizations that get very very large? How do you deal with monopolies without infringing on their property rights?

111

Except for the fact that they already do, both in terms of the millions of dollars they already give to charity, and in the fact that they vote in politicians who promise to do it.

Direct aid to orphans – and the very poorest and most vulnerable in general – constitutes a fraction of government spending – a sliver of what goes to agriculture subsidies, corporate welfare, the defense industry, the anti-drug industry, middle-class subsidies and on and on. If people got back the tax money that goes to all those things, and then donated to charity at the rates they already do, there would likely be a net increase in the amount given to the poorest of the poor.
People as individuals will give money for orphans – we know this because they already do.

They are far less likely to be sympathetic and give money to the middle-class guy down the street who wants free money because he’s a homeowner, or the middle-class guy who wants his job protected at the expense of someone else’s, or who wants other people to pay for his daughter’s degree in Art History, or for the rich guy to get “farm” money from his neighbors because he has three goats on his lawn, or to say the guy who’s been making $100,000 a year deserves to get $30,000 a year in charity if he loses his job. People won’t use their “charity” dollars like that – but government will, and we know this because they already do.

112

The major (worthwhile) argument you’re going to get–and it’s largely based on where the self-professed “libertarians” in the U.S. tend to throw their votes/loyalties–is that “economic freedom” is essentially meaningless without accompanying social freedom. The average self-professed “libertarian” we see in the US is a lifelong Republican voter, which puts them in a very poor light with regard to social liberty.

It seems like most of the “libertarians” in the West are laser-focused on economic non-coercion, especially of business entities–for example, one could make an argument that several of the criteria for “labor freedom” amount to allowing coercive practices on the part of employers. It would be easier to argue this one way or another if the Heritage Foundation elaborated on their criteria more.

Regarding your statement that libertarianism is about “minimum effective government” and not “no government”, I give the following quote (and weak excuse/contradiction) from that link:
“No attempt has been made to identify an ideal level of government expenditures. The ideal level will vary from country to country, depending on factors ranging from culture to geography to level of development. The methodology treats zero government spending as the benchmark”

So the major problem “libertarians” have, like just about every other major group of people, is one of “clean your own house”. The voices speaking pro-Libertarianism in today’s US political sphere are not distinguishable from the often racist, anti-gay, pro-Christianity far-right Republicans they’ve chosen as their allies.

113

If they’re using their largeness to coerce other people, that’s where the government has to get involved. Despite what some would have you think, Libertarians are generally leery of Big Business as well as Big Government. They’re not corporate-phobic, but they’re well aware of the capacity of non-government actors to coerce citizens – that’s part of the point of supporting free exchange and markets (which Big Business generally does not). If 100% of the people want to buy from Microsoft, that’s fine. If they’re coercing people into being customers, that’s a problem.

You may find this useful

http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n2/friedman.html
http://www.cato.org/research/articles/cpr28n4-1.html

114

OK so as I understand it, the idea is that individual libertarians will take it upon themselves to support those in need even if its to their own detriment. Further that they will do so even if others are not such that the burden falls unevenly on their own shoulders.

This sound suspiciously similar to the idea that worker in a communist society will be productive out of the goodness of their hearts even if they don’t gain any personal benefit and even if they are shouldering an uneven share of the burden.

Whenever I hear about the true libertarian society, I imagine small communities of strong industrious John Galts all working in perfect harmony with each other, no conflict, no coercion, with everyone’s needs met according to their own hard work. These people look surprisingly similar to the strong industrious moral men who create a workers paradise in the Communist ideal.

A society without coercion where everyone’s needs are met through their own hard work, (or in the case of the truly infirm by the good will of these strong moral rational men) would indeed be a paradise, and would require little in the way of government. In fact it would probably thrive under any system imaginable. Unfortunately the world is filled with small, irrational, greedy men, who would proclaim that what you consider coercion to merely be their exercising their god given freedom, and will be able to use wealth and power to get the government to agree with them.

But libritarian Microsoft isn’t forcing people to be customers (that would be coercive) it just that there are no other computer manufacturers out there. There was Apple, but Microsoft bought the electric company that serves the Apple production plant and decided to charge them $50.00 per KWH as is their right. After all you wouldn’t want to force price controls on them.

115

Bullshit, and manufactured out of your own ignorance.

Here’s the staff of the biggest pro-libertarian publication there is.

Here’s polling data.

116

Is there not a Red Cross where you live? United Way? Salvation Army? United Negro College Fund? American Cancer Society? Feed the Children? First Baptist Church soup kitchen? Make a Wish?

This is not a theoretical construct – this is the real world we already live in, where every day people spend millions to “support those in need even if its to their own detriment.” Don’t you already do this? Most people do; and they’d be able to do more of it if they had more money they earned in the first place.

And depending on the specifics of the case (There’s only one power company, and Microsoft bought it, as well as all the capacity to create new power pants? :dubious:), that might be an entirely appropriate place for government intervention. A libertarian government would likely have anti-trust laws on the books, and enforce them.

117

Not really. People who are fabulously wealthy, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, are noted for very large charitable donations, and yet they live pretty comfortable lives, wouldn’t you say? Even poor people will donate to charities that they think are worthwhile.

Will it be 100% effective? Who knows? If people are literally dying in the streets, that suddenly makes people more willing to be charitable. We see this every time there is some disaster.

Again, not really. Communists think that the state will wither away as the new man emerges to create the ideal communist society. Libertarians have no such misconception, and always recognize that people will try to use coercion against their fellow man (fraud, theft, etc), and a government is always needed to keep that coercion in check. Don’t confuse fictional characters with real life.

Again, not really. Smaller government? Yes. But “little”, no. And no one is claiming that “everyone’s needs are met through their own hard work”. There are always going to be lazy people, people who try to game the system, and people who truly are the victims of just plain ol’ bad luck.

118

Der Trihs, you’ve made your point (such as it is). This level of vitriol is going to impede the discussion, paricularly since a lot of your comments are about libertarians as individuals and not the ideology. Dial it back now.

119

This is a good point (with the caveat that the Reason link includes lots of people not on their staff). There was much talk in 2008 (well, some talk at least) about a potential “Liberaltarianism” fusion between what Pew calls the “post-moderns” and the Libertarian movement.

This all fell apart with the stimulus and (even more so) the health care reform bill (although one is tempted to point out that every one of Sam’s “highly free” countries has universal health care, and most have single-payer of the type that is anathema to the right in the US).

Making the US more like Australia or Canada is not something you’ll see many on the left fighting against.

120

You don’t have to tell me, I’ve got everything Harry Browne’s ever written on my bookshelf.

Who do I see at the national level on my TV claiming to be libertarian? Ron “Racist Newsletter” Paul and Rand “My Campaign Staff Beats the Hell Out of Demonstrators” Paul.

For most Americans, those two and the local crazy guy who’s agitating for marijuana legalization are the only “libertarians” they’ll see. No one who isn’t already Libertarian reads Reason.