Depends. The single-payer health care, no. Lower corporate taxes, yes. Less middle-class welfare, yes from both parties.
No thank you. I refuse to follow links to the Cato Institute anymore. I’ve been burned by propaganda way too many times.
I hear from Libertarians all the time that government is what would make sure that entities that accumulate power cannot use it to coerce. So somehow government magically scales to be the right size to deal with all threats internal or external.
But as near as I can tell, there’s nothing to stop monopolies from buying up all the resources and setting their own price. I buy up all the water, and you can either choose to buy water from me or ???
You think UHC, lower corporate tax rates + a VAT, and a flatter income tax system would be more opposed from the left than the right in the US? I highly doubt it.
Old-school “hard liberals” might, but younger liberals like myself aren’t nearly as pro-Union, soak-the-rich, big-government as the old guard.
Perhaps, but then which group is pushing for same sex marriage, legalizing weed, lowing the drinking age, eliminating Blue Laws, and improving the process of immigration? All libertarian beliefs, some of which you might even hold.
Who is being protected by the prevention of alcohol sales on Sundays?
Who is being protected by prohibiting same sex marriage?
Why is the government involved in either of those?
With the exception of same-sex marriage, no one is when you look at major party candidates.
Whose side, exactly, do you think I’m on? Or are you just arguing to hear yourself argue again?
Actually what seems to happen most in these cases is that photogenic or high profile cases get way over funded, while the lower profile less photogenic cases lose out.
If I understand libertarian philosophy certain projects that are in the general welfare of all involved are paid for by taxation through the government, levies for example. In these cases it is seen that everyone needs to pay their fair share since it is in every ones best interest not to get flooded. If people just paid for the levies if they wanted to but didn’t have to, then the levies would probably not get built, or else those who did pay for them would feel that they were taken advantage of. Similarly one could argue that it is in the public good to not have homeless people wandering the streets, and that everyone should pay their fair share to see that that problem is taken care of. Those who don’t pay are freeloading on the homeless free streets of those who aren’t. Suddenly your Libertarian state has welfare. A few more thoughts like that and you start moving from the late 19th century into the late 20th century government, which seemed to the majority of the people at the time to be a step in the right direction.
But one mans coercion is another mans freedom. So you will have to rely a great deal on the wisdom of the governing body, philosopher kings perhaps., to separate the two I don’t see that this is all that different from the communists saying that their government will wisely plan the economy so that every man will have his needs fulfilled.
And those people will either survive by the good will of these strong moral rational men or will die and reduce the surplus population.
I understand that we have differing views of what will happen, but I find that based on history and human nature, in general if left unchecked the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful, while the remainder get more poor and less powerful. Further as power gets more concentrated the set of powerful people becomes more exclusive until you end up with a virtual aristocracy. The only way I see of checking this tendency is with a strong (coercive) government, or with violent revolution.
So you refuse to accept a libertarian think tank’s explanation of what they think? I guess by that token I’m free to discard your testimony about what you think … I’ll ask someone who dislikes you to tell me what you think.
No, there’s no magic involved. Just democracy and trial and error, same as for every other philosophy.
To repeat: libertarians are not opposed to anti-trust laws in all possible circumstances. At the risk of letting an actual libertarian explain what he thinks on the specific example you chose:
[QUOTE=hayek]
So long as the services of a particular person are not crucial to my existence or the preservation of what I most value, the conditions he exacts for rendering these services cannot properly be called “coercion.” … A monopolist could exercise true coercion, however, if he were, say, the owner of a spring in an oasis. Let us say that other persons settle there on the assumption that water would always be available at a reasonable price and then found, perhaps because a second spring dried up, that they had no choice but to do whatever the owner of the spring demanded of them if they were to survive: here would be a clear case of coercion. One could conceive of a few other instances where a monopolist might control an essential commodity on which people were completely dependent."
[/QUOTE]
Hence, in the view of a preeminent libertarian, a water monopoly is a textbook case for government intervention.
There you go again. You look at history with respect to orphans and see (i) a period during which no help was given to orphans and (ii) a period during which the government helped orphans, and you think that’s a point in favor of the idea that we need the government to help orphans if orphans are going to be helped.
Well, putting aside the question of whether that’s a good way to read the history in the first place, where the hell was the government during the first period (when no one helped orphans)? Why does the second period count as a point in favor of government intervention but the first period doesn’t count as a point against it?
I think that a better way to read the history is to view it as (i) a period when no one was interested in helping orphans and (ii) a period when people were interested in helping orphans and chose government programs to help them. Libertarians argue that if you want to help orphans, there’s a better way (better for society as a whole) to do it–use private sector resources instead of the government.
That list is bananas. Switzerland, for one, does NOT have a “small government footprint”. Not by a long chalk. It might not have as large a *federal *government footprint as a lot of Western democracies, but that’s because it’s devolved down to canton level and the almost-direct democracy they practice. But a country with universal male conscription, government-mandated healthcare (and compulsory voting in one canton) and the like does not have a small government footprint.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Swiss system, but I think it’s been mischaracterised in that list, which makes me wonder about Canada and New Zealand and the rest.
If you packaged all those together, (with the understanding that taxes to pay for the UHC would not be coming out of The Rich)? Along with, say, a repeal of regulations ensuring minorities get bank loans, and the repeal of all laws regarding credit-card terms and/or payday loans, and the elimination of rules and tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing? (all the kind of things on the Heritage study) Maybe, but I’m skeptical.
This is a left-leaning board; might be an interesting thread to start.
It’s a good thing that’s not what’s being claimed.
Stuff like compulsory voting or military service have nothing to do with “economic freedom,” and government spending is only one category out of ten.
http://www.heritage.org/Index/Visualize?countries=Switzerland|UnitedStates&src=Ranking
I would further add that the American “right” isn’t libertarian. They love getting into people’s business and mucking around with the economy to further their own interests (namely getting elected).
Here’s another major way in which opponents of Libertarianism smear it: They use historical examples of poor working conditions, compared against a later time when government regulated working conditions and made them ‘better’.
For example: “Under the more libertarian system of the 1700’s, children were used as labor! It took government child-labor laws to eliminate that abuse of capitalism.”
The key fallacy here is to compare a time of relatively low per-capita income against a time of much higher per-capita income. Or more specifically, they draw a direct correlation between the growth of government and the improvement in working and living standards. There was less government in 1750, and more in 1850, and the people in 1850 were better off. Therefore, more government is good.
The obvious rejoinder is that child labor and poor working conditions were the result of the general poverty of the time - children had to work, because the alternative was to starve. Labor conditions improve as the people become wealthier and begin to demand better conditions.
As a matter of fact, most of these laws lag the actual social change. Most children were going to school before the state mandated it. Most child labor had ended before child labor laws came along. Comparing outcomes across periods of massive economic difference is not particularly fair.
What you need to do instead is find changes in a libertarian direction at a time when the population cohort was the same, and look at the differences before and after. For example, take welfare reform. In my province, we spent huge money on welfare. We libertarians were calling for a drastic scaling back of welfare. The left screamed that all those people kicked off welfare would wind up in the streets and in hospitals where they would cost even more. Families would be devastated, there would be an increase in homelessness and crime, etc.
In fact, what happened after welfare reform is that most of the people kicked off welfare simply went to work. The same pattern repeated in Ontario, and then in the U.S.
We can also look at patterns of private charitable giving to see if scaling back on government charity actually will result in increases in private charity. And I believe that you’ll find that that almost always happens. Tax cuts also increase private charity.
Libertarian principles can and have been tested in many ways. Drug legalization is another good one. There are plenty of test cases for countries that have liberalized their drug laws, so we can compare outcomes before and after.
We can study the history of government interventions in the economy in the form of wage and price controls, tariffs, ‘investment’ in government/industry partnerships, etc. We can look at the rates of accidental poisonings in countries that do not have strong federal regulations on drugs and food and compare them to countries that do.
Again, we don’t need to find some ‘pure’ ideal. We don’t even have to know the perfect size of government. All we have to do is find out which way the arrow is pointing at any given time. Given conditions today, in this country, would it be better in general to trend towards less government and more individual autonomy, or do we need more government regulations and more government control of the people? Which path is the better one to go down?
From that general statement, we can get specific and look at individual laws and proposals from a libertarian standpoint. Libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists made predictions about the stimulus. Liberals and liberal-learning economists made different predictions. Which one was closer to the truth? Libertarians made predictions for the outcomes of rent controls in New York, San Fransisco, and Ontario. Were they right? When New Zealand contemplated ending its heavy control and subsidization of the agriculture industry, libertarians made predictions about the outcome, and so did liberals. Who was correct?
Finally, I want to get back to the question of the most libertarian place on earth, and I know where it is: Cyberspace. Yes, the government had a very tiny role in the initial funding of DARPAnet, but what the internet is today, in all its richness and complexity, is almost purely undirected. It is an example of the kind of spontaneous order libertarians say will arise in the absence of government direction.
So look at the internet, warts and all. Yes, there’s spam, and viruses, and web sites the blind can’t read, and badly-designed E-commerce sites that can be hacked to get at your personal information. There are already proposals in congress for new regulatory powers to control the ‘excesses’ of the internet.
But I would argue that these things are a small price to pay for the incredible dynamism of the internet economy. Ask yourself if we’d have an internet anywhere near as useful today if the government had been heavily involved from day one:
Let’s say you had to follow the same procedures to open up a commercial web site as you would for a brick-and-mortar store. Let’s say you had to apply for a web site permit to the government, and before you could get it stamped you had to hire auditors to prove your ADA compliance.
Let’s say the only people who could develop web sites were programmers with industry certification (a movement to do just that has been afoot for twenty years). Let’s say that the government demanded that any web site that served a government agency had to be staffed with union programmers.
Let’s suppose that if you wanted to change the banner on your web site you had to get approval from an internet-zoning officer, and before you could put any sort of database online that held user information you had to pay to have it inspected by a government code reviewer to ensure that it was secure.
Let’s also recognize that these types of approvals cost big money and incur big delays because there is always a shortage of inspectors and a bureaucratic lag. In some cities, it can take months to get an approval from a zoning inspector just to change the signage in the window of a store. ADA compliance requires hiring auditors and inspectors to make sure everything is to spec, and even then small missed item like a sink mounted an inch too high can get you shut down if the government inspector is in a bad mood.
Under those kinds of conditions, what would the internet be like today? I can hazard a guess: There would be very few small ventures. There would be huge corporate presence, but without the pressure from the innovations of small entrepreneurial sites, they’d all have web sites that looked like something out of the 1980’s. There would be no etsy, no facebook, no Twitter, no CafePress, or any of the hundreds of thousands of small commercial web sites that grew out of the basements of self-employed programmers and grew into major enterprises.
Without the demand from huge numbers of small web sites, there would not have been the economic pressure to build up the infrastructure of smaller applications like vBBS that have enabled small ventures like The Straight Dope to employ such sophisticated social media tools.
And of course, the government and big corporations would like it that way. And if we’d had that from the start, someone like me would suggest that maybe, just maybe we should let the market decide if a web site is safe enough, and parents could be trusted to decide what sites their kids could see, and the establishment would go, “Oh, horrors! Think of the children! Without ADA requirements, what about all the handicapped people? They have a right to the internet! In a dog-eat-dog internet world, only the strong will survive!”
Bu take a hard look at the internet today. Look at all the emergent standards such as the Twitter and facebook APIs. Look at the richness of the websites out there. This is an example of spontaneous order. It’s not chaos and anarchy. There are minor problems with compatibility, but by and large everything works together. While there are some security breaches, I feel more comfortable entering my credit card info on a decent web site than I do handing my card to a waitor to carry away into the back of a restaraunt. The internet is a vibrant, dynamic place. My daughter is safe on it with a little guidance from me. It’s made our lives much richer.
The Internet is as complex an economy and ecosystem as anything any government has ever planned, but it became so without government or any other central planner. It is an example of spontaneous order created through the process of billions of economic exchanges between free people. What a concept.
Sure. But note that you’re making predictive and normative statements; I simply don’t grant your assumption…er, make that presumption, to keep with your terms…that those statements are accurate. See also my response to furt below.
Furthermore, I note that you have quite a knack for creating strawmen (not that you’re the only one who does so), which I’m simply ignoring.
First, I did not say that people do not give to charity. Clearly, as you point out, many people do. Second, I cannot recall a single politician running on a “promise to increase charitable donations” plank (and it’s unclear to me what you are saying the politician is promising, but it’s likely unimportant). Perhaps I’ve missed him or her; I’d appreciate a cite to an example of what you mean.
Third, something should be made explicit in this context, as it’s important to both our points: to me, the phrase “funding orphanages” is equivalent to “fully funding orphanages” (or, perhaps more accurately, “adequately funding orphanages”). You seem to believe that because some (or lots of, the qualifier is unimportant to me) charitable giving exists, it will be adequate. Or even more than adequate.
I do not accept that premise. And I find it even more difficult to believe that the premise will hold true during times when it’s most needed – for instance, during a recession. Agreeing to disagree on the premises gets us nowhere, however.
It’s interesting that you use the example of the Internet, Sam Stone. In a Libertarian country, do you think it’s a proper role of government to create things like the Internet? Because let’s not ignore the elephant in this example: the Internet is the child of Big Government.
Now, don’t get me wrong. One important reason the Internet is such a success (both culturally and economically) has a lot to do with government(s) taking a mostly hands-off approach. They’ve wisely let their child grow up without smothering it.
But I don’t see how, in a truly Libertarian society, the Internet would exist at all. First, there is the pure research funded by government that laid the groundwork. Then, there is the physical infrastructure (again, paid for originally by the government) connecting the first networked computers. The basic protocols and programming languages that birthed the infant Internet were developed at least in part at public universities. The government has played a significant role (albeit in coordination with private industry) in bringing connectivity to rural areas that would otherwise not be served.
So while I agree that the Internet has prospered at least in part by a laissez faire approach by government, I find it difficult to see how it could have been created in a truly Libertarian country. How does coercing people to pay for basic research (or physical infrastructure not directly related to defense) consistent with libertarian principles? How could the Internet have been created without this?
Did charitable giving increase during the Bush years? (It’s an honest question: I’ve made attempts – feeble they were, based on my non-results – at finding stats on it in the past, but to no avail.)
Same way as any other major network technology such as telephone, telegraph, and the 500,000 words of the English language. Several people (whether they work for the government or not) see some kind of need, and they go and build it. For example, after the telephone itself was invented, a “telephone switchboard” was “needed” and some folks working at businesses built one. There was no grand plan from the government to build a “communications hub” that utilized the toy devices called a “telephone.”
So if the govt didn’t build the first internet, we’d still some some kind of “internet” today. It just would have been born from different parents. It would be different in some ways. Possibly worse. Possible better. We can’t replay history so nobody can say. However, the ideas were in the air at the time and some kind of “internet” was inevitable.
In my opinion, it’s pretty clear it would be worse. My cite is the telephone network and AT&T before the government-enforced breakup. You couldn’t even hook up a non-Bell phone until the 60’s or so, IIRC.
Except that AT&T was a monopoly. A monopoly at least partially kept in place by the government. I don’t think that’s a good example.
It’s not clear at all because neither of us can replay history.
You’re just picking one example of a particular “negative” from the way the history of the telephone played out because it feels right that govt could have been there from the beginning. How can that even be a thought experiment since the govt dismissed Alexander Graham Bell’s invention for any practical purposes?
If a commercial business(es) created the internet, we’d simply have a different set of positives and negatives. For example, because the private individuals had financial motives, they may have designed the internet protocol packets to include quality-of-service or signature packets. A subsequent timeline of spam abuse might have never happened; but to make up for that positive we’d have a different negative such as special Western Union Compuserve modems required to attach to it. Who knows? Because the original internet started from innocent researchers (who understandably didn’t need to consider packet authenticity, etc), we’ve had to retrofit a bunch of bandaids after the fact to make it work better for ecommerce, Netflix streaming videos, spam filtering, porn, etc. It’s just a different set of positives and negatives.