Anyone who wants to end the Fed probably counts, and we have a few.
The platform of the Libertarian Party is Radical Libertarian while Ron Paul was just pro-pot legalization Pat Buchanan.
I’m waiting for the obligatory “Libertarinism has been tried. It was called feudalism!”
Anyhow, the Economist piece you linked to ethers Lind in the first sentence.
Libertarian after libertarian has answered this question. I’ll sum it up thusly, if anal propriety is so great, how come prison rape victims just dont get raped?
It’s because there has always been a group of individuals who wished to live off the labor of the rest of the people. These people were able to monopolize force in such a way that it was accepted by the majority. The means through which such acquiescence is ascertained gives you a clue to the “form” of government (i.e. democratic republic vs. dictatorship) but not the “nature”. For the nature of government has been and will forever be the predation of one group upon the production of another.
Yes ending the cartelization of banking and money creation in the US is RADICAL. Ifigured you for trustbuster, BG. Your undying love for the monied elite is a bit disturbing
I seem to have missed the part where Lind got around to addressing the fundamental point raised in counterargument (Every political idea known to man was, at one time, untested; ergo, the argument “X is untested” is clearly insufficient).
So you’re a Marxist, are you?
The point is that libertarianism is – from the radical libertarians’ POV – not something that can be tried or tested piecemeal or by stages; it’s all-or-nothing.
In the second article:
In the third article:
I’d gladly see them swinging from lampposts, but ending the Fed would be no threat to them.
I think that’s true, and I think there’s a very good reason why Engineers tend to be more libertarian while scientists tend to be more liberal: Engineers have to deal with the real world at the very lowest levels where it is the most complex. They have a better understanding of complexity and a wariness of grand plans and sweeping statements of fact. Scientists, on the other hand, often deal in the abstract. This is especially true in the areas of science and mathematics today that are the most contentious - sociology, climate science, economics, psychology, etc. Those also seem to be the areas that collect the most liberal of scientists. In my experience, when you get down to more concrete sciences like geology or particle physics, that liberal dominance starts to vanish although there’s still a disparity.
But it’s true that engineering tends to attract more individualists. In most schools, the engineering faculty is the second-most ‘right wing’ faculty after business.
But there’s another reason scientists today tend to be more liberal - modern science requires a lot of grant writing, a lot of schmoozing, and a lot of political skills. Many scientists spend more time writing grant proposals than they spend in the lab. A lot of the funding comes from government, so scientists have to be okay with that and even advocate for more of it.
Scientists, especially in academia, don’t necessarily get paid based entirely on merit, but rather on their position in the hierarchy based on seniority, political skills, etc. Engineers, on the other hand, tend to be paid based on merit. A 30 year old superstar can be making ten times as much as a 60 year old average engineer. Conservatives tend to like that type of compensation structure.
Also, to become a scientist these days at the Ph.D. level means surviving and thriving for many years in an environment that is decidedly liberal.
I had the opportunity to be a scientist, and I turned towards engineering precisely because of these reasons. I didn’t want to be an abstract thinker subsisting on government funds or constantly going hat in hand to benefactors to plead for resources. To me, the appeal of building things, of being hired because I had skills that were profitable, of testing my ideas in the real world with all its messiness, were more appealing. I was totally okay with being paid based on what I produced rather than on seniority or a collective bargain. That’s probably because I have the type of personality that drives me towards libertarian/conservative thought.
For all these reasons, I think as a generalization engineering selects out the individualists and libertarians while basic science is more attractive to liberals, although there are obviously many exceptions on both sides.
It shouldn’t escape one’s notice that this is the same traditionalist argument that we used to hear from many opponents of gay marriage.
These endless, tedious discussions of ‘pure’ libertarianism are about as useful as are discussions of ‘pure’ progressivism which you can find on the conservative analogs of this board.
I doubt you could get two ‘progressives’ to agree on what their perfect form of government is. And you can always find someone who wears the badge of ‘progressive’ who has claimed to want some pretty outrageous things - including some members of Congress. I’m sure progressives roll their eyes every time someone comes here demanding that they defend the craziest utterance issued by a fellow ‘progressive’ as if they all must believe exactly the same thing.
It would be better for everyone if we discussed these philosophies on an issue-by-issue basis, or treated them as a tendency or direction rather than an absolute destination. Progressives have a tendency to want government to engage more with the problems of society and ‘fix’ them using the power of the regulatory state. They divide people up into oppressors and the oppressed, and want to use government as a tool of mitigation. But that doesn’t mean every progressive wants a totalitarian state where all income is equalized and no one can gain economic power that others don’t have. Those that do would be Communists. ‘Progressive’ is much more slippery a term and can be taken to mean any number of things. But in general, progressives want to move in a direction of more government control in those areas where they see disparities or social problems they think the government can fix.
Likewise, libertarians generally think government is ineffective and that government regulations are coercive and should only be used to stop other forms of coercion. But what constitutes coercion is not easy to pin down, and many libertarians would differ on their definitions. Is fraud coercion? How about hidden defects? How about visible defects that a consumer can’t possibly spot without specialized knowledge? What about the case where a man buys the only road out of town and then begins using that to force people to do his bidding? Where are the lines drawn?
Since we can’t know exactly what individual libertarians think, and because libertarians themselves tend to be individualists and not prone to collective action or collective decision-making, it’s silly to try to force them all into one box and declare that to be ‘true’ libertarianism.
Of course, if your real goal is to simply label them so you can smear them, it’s a fine tactic.
Good point. Legalized abortion had also never been tried - until it was. In fact, the entire argument is pretty much a conservative argument - that change is bad and that there must be a good reason if something hasn’t been tried before.
I thought the whole worldview of Progressivism is that change is good if it brings about more social justice, and that traditonalist arguments are merely window-dressing for the entrenched power structure.
Marx was inspired by the class theory of the classical liberals, no doubt. He was never able to flesh out his own.
Of course, OTOH, it might have something to do with the apparent affinity between Engineers and woo.
I think not; theirs included some perception of class interests in conflict but no element of class struggle or catastrophic class conflict. This is about as lefty as the classical liberals get, and by today’s standards it sounds more like a slightly progressive Democrat than anything else:
“Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.”
– Adam Smith
If you will examine progressive arguments against libertarianism, you will find few are traditionalist in nature. It’s more of a content-vs.-content thing. Not even Lind’s arguments here are traditionalist in nature.
Well said Sam Stone. It is all true. The most basic philosophical definition of a libertarian is someone who values individual rights over the rights of the collective. It is looking at things from the opposite lens philosophies like communism or socialism. In the libertarian viewpoint, societies are primarily a collection of individuals with their own rights that need to cooperate based on their own self-interests. Under more collective philosophies, society itself is the most important thing even if it is made up of individuals that need to be accommodated according to their differing needs. It sound like a rather subtle point on the surface but it has profound implications on how people view practical matters.
Small ‘l’ libertarians do not hold any viewpoints that are exclusive to them. Almost all of them are also part of the platform of the major political parties. The problem arises when you realize that no major party represents your views so you use that term as a descriptor. It is basically short-hand for economic conservatism and social liberalism combined.
That is why I don’t understand why libertarianism gets labeled as a crazy fringe belief because the crazy ones are only a small percentage of the ones that self-identify as libertarians. It is simply an amalgam of different viewpoints that exist in other movements. The Pew study cited above shows that we are well educated and tend to make a lot of money and I think that is a compliment rather than a point of ridicule.
There’s the rub.
Libertarians take great pains to note they are not anarchists.
So, how do they reconcile that they value law and order yet eschew some authority over themselves? They want to live in society (the collective) yet want to ignore the collective’s directives.
If it is not anarchy and there is law then where is the line drawn? Vague hand waving about laws that respect “individual rights” get us nowhere.
What does that mean?
How does that work?
Adolphe Blanqui, protegé of Jean-Baptiste Say in 1837
-Karl Marx
Where’s the line drawn between conservatism and liberalism? Are you expecting there to be a line? Am I not allowed to call myself libertarian unless I fall on the correct side of that line?
What if I want to get rid of tariffs but think that public school is a good idea?
What if I don’t want to label myself at all but agree with certain libertarian points? Most libertarian points? Will you still think I’m a pie-in-the-sky, impractical ninny?