Michael Lind vs. the Libertarians

Great Debates
61

I don’t know why it is so hard to get people to understand the difference between libertarianism and anarchy. It’s almost like they don’t want to understand because it’s too useful to hit libertarians over the head with an anarchist hammer.

But for the record:

This is probably the most common definition of a libertarian state that I see in the literature:

  1. Maintenance of a military, to protect citizens from external aggression and coercion.
  2. Maintenance of a police force to protect citizens from internal aggression and coercion.
  3. Maintenance of courts of law to objectively settle disputes among the citizenry.

As far as what is considered coercion, most libertarians would include such things as extortion, overt fraud, ‘protection’ rackets, and most other physical crimes such as burglary, vehicular recklessness, etc. In other words, most crimes that exist today, except for ‘victimless’ crimes such as drug use, prostitution and the like. Anything two adults consent to which does not injure a third would be considered non-criminal.

Of course, there are radicals who think the police and military should be privatized, but their arguments are pretty easy to shoot down. You usually find these types in college dorm bull sessions, where you also find the earnest young Marxists.

Now, outside of that basic formulation, there are other levels of government action that some libertarians will accept. For example, most libertarians I know believe that the state has a role in regulating externalities, on the principle that forcing an uninvolved party to pay part of the costs of a transaction they had nothing to do with is a form of coercion. Hence, you have no right to pollute the air that I breathe or foul my drinking water. And since externalities are by definition a problem the market cannot solve, there is a role here for government regulation.

That said, libertarians are generally hyper-vigilant about the growth of state power, and such regulatory bodies would be kept on a very short string and not be allowed to mission-creep their way into being general ‘safety nazis’ or inventing externalities or exaggerating them in order to increase their power.

Going even further, many libertarians, myself included, believe that a democratic state cannot exist without a civil society, and a civil society can not be maintained without some sort of social safety net. We cannot let people starve in the streets or die for lack of medical care in a wealthy first world nation. Not only is it wrong to do so, but on practical grounds a state so callous would not long survive until there was a popular uprising. Therefore, as a practical matter we need a welfare system and a system of basic universal health care.

But once again, libertarians are hyper-vigilant about encroaching government and are very wary of moral hazards, so most of us believe that if there is to be welfare, it should be difficult to be on it if you’re able bodied, and it should be uncomfortable enough that anyone who is on it should be trying their damnedest to get off of it.

In addition, Libertarians believe that whenever possible private social organization is a much preferable form of welfare than is the state, and that state welfare tends to displace private organization. Therefore, state assistance should be an absolute last resort and not the first place people look to.

Frankly, most libertarians aren’t even that extreme - they’re just libertarian as a direction away from the status quo. Their primary beef with the government is not with basic welfare and such, but with an ever-encroaching regulatory state that seeks to regulate consensual behavior, use the tax code to attempt to shape society, pick winners and losers in the marketplace, control speech, regulate what we put into our bodies, etc. Their primary beef is with agencies like the DEA, the FDA, OSHA, the NLRB, and other intrusions into what they see as the sphere of private contract and free choices.

I should have the right to offer a job on whatever terms I feel reasonable, and you have the right to accept or turn down my offer. So far as no one is hiding pertinent information, no third party has a right to stop us for our ‘own good’ or for the good of ‘society’. There should be no minimum wage laws, no affirmative action, no drug laws except those that are aimed at reckless behavior that threatens others, etc. The tax code should be based on required revenue, and made as flat as possible within the constraints of being able to raise enough revenue to pay for the government we think is reasonable to have. The tax code should not be a tool of redistribution of wealth or social change.

And of course, the state has no right to spy on the citizenry, for any reason absent probable cause in a criminal investigation…

Those are the kinds of issues that animate modern libertarians.

62

Actually, the word I was thinking of was “brand.” In a nonmetaphorical sense. :smiley: Let’s see, Rand’s favorite icon was the $ dollar sign . . .

63

Actually, they are probably the majority of those who self-identify under that name; the “Libertarians” of the Pew study probably mostly do not. No cite, I’ve just met a lot of self-ID’d Libertarians and very few who did not fit into the radical category. (Some would frighten WillFarnaby.)

64

The difference is that anarchism derives from a LW political tradition very closely associated with Marxism, and objects to the state as the force preserving private property, a thing which every version of libertarianism I’ve ever heard called that is deeply concerned with protecting.

65

In those terms, would what Lind posits qualify?

66

Of those, I would say a flat tax, but there would be disagreement over whether it should be an income tax or a sales tax. eliminate most (not all) environmental and occupational regulations, and maybe the gold standard. I’d like to say that a gold standard is a fringe belief because I don’t think it would work or is advisable, but I have to admit it’s a fairly popular libertarian position.

The rest of it, no. Private police is controversial with libertarians. Most libertarians want some kind of minimalist safety net, but differ on what that would look like. I don’t think libertarians want completely free movement of of foreigners in and out of the country without regulation because there are valid national security concerns that give the state the right to control entry to some degree.

To be perfectly candid, here is where libertarianism can go wrong: Libertarians are typically confident, motivated personality types. They’re comfortable enough in their skills or their ability to gain skills that they are not afraid of competing in the marketplace. In short, they are not the downtrodden and the disaffected. They may be poor, but they’re a motivated poor confident that this will not be the case forever.

But there are a lot of people who are not like that. There are people who are discriminated against, who lack in confidence or skill or even desire to ‘compete’ in the marketplace. There are people with disabilities, or simply those who wound up on the left side of the bell curve through the vagaries of fate. You cannot expect these people to rejoice in a system that rewards people like you and ignores people like them. They have political power, and they will use it.

This is the real reason why a pure libertarian state has never existed: In a democracy, a large percentage of the people do not want it. That percentage shifts as the state grows and shrinks in size. When it moves too far to the right, the center shifts and the low-motivation voters on the left start coming out. You can maybe convince them to go a certain direction down that road, but once you go any further you lose the majority, and then the direction starts to reverse.

67

Anecdotally, I always ascribed it to the autistic tendanies I’ve observed among those who end up in engineering.

68

Sam! You’re back! Welcome back, dude. I thought you had died.

Is it time to start revisiting the SDMB Message Board again? You, Measure for Measure, Hellestal, Exapno Mapcase and a few others were the only reason I ever showed up in the first place.

Nicely put above. Well-posted. As always, I feel like you are wasting your time and talents with such articulate posts on this Board. But I will selfishly read them, and enjoy them, when you do.

69

Sam’s description of libertarianism sounds pretty much like moderate US Republicanism.

I wonder why most other descriptions of libertarianism don’t sound so reasonable. I also wonder why there needs to be two labels for the same thing.

70

They aren’t the exact same thing although there is some overlap. Libertarians tend to be more socially liberal than moderate Republicans. However, it doesn’t usually take the same form as the activist social liberalism that liberals and progressives favor. Libertarians believe that social liberty comes from an absence of restrictions in the first place rather than more laws of government programs to remedy perceived injustices.

For example, almost all libertarians have no problem with gay marriage but they don’t see the issue the solution the same way that other groups do. The obvious cause to libertarians is that those restrictions should never have been made law in the first place or, more radically, perhaps the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all. You could leave it up to individuals to work out there own arrangement under normal contract law however they see fit.

Repeat that type of thinking for all major social issues and that is where you will find the main split between libertarians and mainstream moderate Republicans. They are usually more closely aligned of the economic policy issues.

71

From the TVTropes Useful Notes page on Political Ideologies:

72

BrainGlutton, I cut down that TVTropes quote. It was huge, and a link and a brief excerpt should be enough to give people the general idea.

73

So Libertarianism is the best system it’s just that the majority of people under it don’t like it. Isn’t that a little contradictory?

I find this amusing since it seems to me that one of the main qualities of Libertarianism is the that it is based on sweeping statements of fact.

Here is a test: In 30 words or less describe the political philosophy of the Democratic or Republican party. There is no way you could possibly succeed. Both parties are a hodgepodge of policy ideas based on what they think would be best on practical grounds for the nation. There will be disagreements as to whether or not they are correct, and there are various philosophies that are at their base but most of their ideas are put forward because the parties think they will work best in practice.

As for Libertarianism, it entirely follows from the single belief that “the only purpose of government should be to prevent coercion”. Done in 10 words. Its as much a definition of Libertarianism as the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is a definition of Christian. As you say there are disagreements of exactly what constitutes coercion but according to theory the best achievable society would exist if we just followed this one rule.

The problem is that such a simple theoretical mission statement cannot deal with the complexities that is the real world. In order to make things workable you are going to have to fudge things to the point that you end up with a hodgepodge like the Democrats and Republicans. Although I disagree with them, I don’t have too much of a problem with Libertarianesque Republicans who think that government should be smaller for various practical reasons. But when they justify their conclusions with the moral imperative “the only purpose of government should be to prevent coercion” is the point at which I think they open themselves up to ridicule.

74

Every self-professed libertarian I know talks a great game about ending foreign entanglements, reducing government, repealing the marijuana laws, etc., but when it comes time to vote, there they are in the booth, pulling the lever for the Republican Party, the party that might as well holler WE’RE GOING TO DO NONE OF THOSE THINGS from the rooftops. This little dance of theirs has been going on for decades. All libertarianism (or Libertarianism for that matter) gets from me is an eye roll and a “whatever, chief.”

75

Wow! Well said!

This is exactly my problem with Libertarianism. It works great for those at the top of the heap, but it sucks for those not at the top. Even those at the bottom of the heap who aspire to be at the top and therefore support this system may find that in spite of their hard work and motivation they don’t rise to the top and the system fails them. The difference between the bottom and the top of the heap is 5% inspiration 30% perspiration and 65% luck.

Ever since Plato advocated a political system ruled by philosophers, people have found rationalizations as to why the best political system happens to be the one that works in their own best interest. It is natural that those among the elite (not a pejorative) would feel that a system that rewards them would be the best system which is why it finds its highest support among the well off and well educated. But a political system that fails the majority is not a good one even if it works well for a very worthy minority.

76

I find it amusing that he thinks engineers are particularly good at dealing with complexity.

77

I didn’t say they were particularly good at it: I said they have to deal with it.

Society is a complex adaptive system. So is the economy. So is the human brain. One of the traits of such systems is that they can look simple when viewed from a distance, but as you drill in, layers of complexity emerge. The farther down you drill the more complexity reveals itself.

As an example, there are people who think that health care digitization is an easy and obvious thing to do. From 10,000 ft, it looks fairly simple: you have all these hospitals out there, using paper records in the 21st century! This makes it hard to coordinate health care delivery, find waste and fraud, make records transportable when people move, etc. So you always hear about grand plans to digitize the health care system. It sounds simple enough - you just make electronic forms, and you standardize them so that information typed in one hospital can be used in another. How hard can that be?

As it turns out, it’s incredibly difficult. As you drill down into the problem, you run into the first problem: Lack of standards. Hospitals record things differently. Not just the kinds of information they record, but the format they record it in. A simple thing like one hospital encoding an address into one “Address:” field while another breaks it down into two fields can be very difficult to overcome.

Then you drill down further, and find out that there are usability problems with digital forms. Doctors start cutting and pasting diagnoses, and it starts to affect the way they think. Data Entry errors can be life-threatening. Machines break down and digital record-recording isn’t available all the time.

You can go on and on, and the farther down you drill, the harder the problem gets. But to a politician in Washington or a big thinker in a university, it all looks like a simple and obvious thing to do.

I just finished a digitization project in a single factory. This was a factory that simply wanted to take its own paper processes and build a digital system for it. This project has been going on for YEARS. Even in a single place, the layers of complexity are staggering, starting with the fact that the management in charge of the project didn’t even know what their own processes were, because people with local knowledge on the floor had invented their own optimizations that took advantage of the paper, making little symbols on cover sheets to denote concerns, etc. Take away the paper, and the whole thing got less flexible and all these undocumented but critical processes surfaced.

That’s what I mean. Engineers are the guys who have to take these grand plans and make them work in the real world, and they know that it’s almost never as easy as it looks from a distance. They tend to be skeptical of central planners and their big schemes for reshaping society through large regulatory systems.

For example, the designers of Obamacare just assumed that it would be no problem to build a large database that would record and track information about employers and workers so that they could assign fines and subsidies accordingly. This little requirement was almost an afterthought in the bill. As an engineer, I looked at that and thought, “Are you kidding? You’re going to have that up and running in two years, starting from nothing?” As it turns out, they can’t do it. They’re not even close. That’s why the business mandate is being waived for another year. I’m willing to bet it won’t be ready next year, either. These are incredibly hard problems, and to just toss them out as a minor requirement in a massive regulatory program makes me wonder about all the other complexity the guys in Washington failed to understand.

A market economy functions because it’s self-organizing. Order emerges from the chaos due to feedback and the ability to iterate constantly. That’s how all stable complex systems work. They cannot be managed from the top down, and attempts to try result in unintended consequences and distortions that damage the entire thing.

Liberals seem to understand this when it comes to things like the environment. The Precautionary Principle is based in part on the understanding that man is not capable of manipulating a complex system like an ecology, and unpredicted consequences will occur. But when it comes to the economy or human social organization, they’re perfectly happy to issue mandates and tinker with complex structures they cannot hope to understand.

78

Then you’re a neoliberal.

79

They are not the same thing; see post #37.

80

Well, that’s just it. Libertarianism at its core is based not on economic or sociological theories but on moral judgments, rejecting as unjust most of the community’s or state’s traditional claims on the autonomy or property of the individual. If you prefer system X on the grounds it is more just than system X, it is hardly relevant whether anybody likes system X.

The same holds for Marxism, more or less, but that tends not to be noticed because the moral assumptions about the injustice of capitalism are assumed to be so obvious that they never are stated or defended, and the arguments are dressed up in economic analyses.