Tax breaks are handed out for political reasons, not economic reasons.
I’m assuming that’s a “divine right of kings” reference, although I’m not sure how to verify the “most of history” part. It’s not the most unreasonable assertion he’s made.
Actually, government fiddling around with taxes is distortionary and rarely a good idea.
Yeah? My position has logic on its side. What does yours have?
I want taxes to distort the market. Without taxes and government spending, wealth would be even more concentrated in the hands of a few. The wealthy do not spend the same percentage of their income as the poor and middle class; most of it gets invested, frequently overseas where it does not grow our economy. Taxes and government spending are the means to keep the domestic middle class growing. A completely free and unregulated market is unsustainable and undesirable.
Why Libertarianism is so dangerous.
This video does a pretty good takedown on Libertarianism. Will Farnaby, what do you say in response to this?
I’m not Will Farnaby, nor am I on his side on this, but my response would be
“I’m not going to watch a 13 minute testimonial. Why don’t you summarize it for me or give me some of the arguments that were presented in the video.”
People come here to debate other people, not YouTube videos.
It’s not very substantial. Basically, the video states that if all governments disappeared overnight, because “there’s always going to be bad people”, violent marauding gangs of bandits would conquer everything, then eventually form a despotic de facto government, with all the same flaws as current governments, but worse because it’s based solely on violence instead of the consent of the governed. Eventually, the de facto government would be indistinguishable from the pre-disappearance governments and be organized as nation-states.
I agree that anarchist libertarianism is unworkable (I’m a minarchist), but the video makes a very weak case for it. Firstly, of course the sudden disappearance of all governments overnight would have awful consequences. Any such shocking disruption of civic order would have that effect. The fall of a dictatorship has similar effects, but that doesn’t mean we should work to prop them up. This overnight shift is fundamentally impossible, and so it amounts to a strawman. All serious thought on the subject I’ve encountered assumes that libertarian principles being enacted would be the result of people slowly adopting them. That is to say, Libertaria could only be populated by libertarians. This isn’t unique to libertarianism, of course. Very similar arguments could be made against any modern political system, because on some level they all depend on people agreeing on common principles: the guy who wins the election gets to be in charge, we all get a day in court, you can’t take other people’s things, and so forth.
He also claims that the existence of such “bad people” has “apparently never occurred” to libertarians, which is asinine.
So, a pretty weak case, though on the side I consider to be the correct one.
13 minutes is not very long. I don’t know why people have an issue with that. I actually like when people post interesting videos relevant to the discussion at hand. Plus, the video does a much better job at explaining the concept than I can.
But, ill give it a shot. It’s basically saying that “bad” people will always exist, and you can’t expect them to follow the non-aggression principle. Without government, these people would rise up, form gangs, and basically run shit. It sort of shows how that basically progressed to the system we have today consisting of nation-states and their armies. Slightly off topic, I know. But, I consider it relevant when you take into account the purposes for taxes as social services.
Happy?
13 minutes is a long time. It took me far less time than that to read Human Action’s reply, your reply, and write this.
Response to op,
It used the word ‘should’. To me that’s reducible to ‘I want’, in this case ‘shouldn’t’. Anyway, that invalidates an entire arguement for me, like invoking a wish. Why should. Or why shouldn’t, is what I want to know.
I think, if taxes were correctly and honestly used, instead if the wholesale criminal indiscriminate war machine we got for a government, I think its possible u wouldn’t have problems with taxes. It ain’t the taxes, but their theft and other misuse.
That’s me anyway, ymmv.
Empirical evidence. Tax loopholes rarely achieve what they set out to. And many more tax loopholes get added than your ideal.
Neither ‘your’ economy nor you exist in a bubble. I find it ironic that people who follow a political and economic philosophy that apparently cares more for others are so antithetical to investment outside the US. Most of that investment helps in improving the lives of people who live in conditions few in the US can imagine, let alone experience.
This isn’t a particularly strong rebuttal to anarchist libertarianism, though, and the weaknesses in the video mirror the weaknesses in your summary above. For instance, note the unexplained jump from “bad people exist, and will try to steal” to “bad people conquer all the good people”. There’s a step missing, you see, which is “the bad people are strong and numerous enough to pull this off”. “Bad” people aren’t the only ones capable of violence, or of being good at it. Historically, conquerors have enjoyed material advantages over the conquered. It could be numbers, superior technology, superior tactics, superior organization, any number of things. It’s never been “superior badness”.
Further, the fact that we have nation-states today doesn’t mean that it’s the only sort of society we could have, any more than hunter-gathering or feudalism were. A conscious, majority-backed effort to slowly remove the state and replace it with private, volunteer efforts might well succeed (though I think such a society would be inferior to our present one in many respects). “Your ideas wouldn’t work in this hyper-unlikely hypothetical under which most ideas wouldn’t work!” is not a reasoned argument.
It’s a counter to the non-aggression principle which is fundamental to Libertarianism. The “bad” people are the ones who violate this principle, while the “good” ones do not. You can’t get around the fact that these “bad” people will exist, and the good people will have no choice but to surrender or retaliate. It simply shows that Libertarianism is a nice idea, but it will not work. Even if you could devise volunteer efforts, there still would be people willing to do bad things in order to exploit them for their own personal gain. Again, people end up fighting. Without a system in place, people are going to fight over control and resources. Eventually ending up with nation states like we have today. So, I fail to see how this is a weak argument.
This was what I think is the fault of a lot of utopias. Skinner’s Walden II had the same problem: one real stinker, who somehow managed to fall through the cracks, would run riot in such a place. It’s a little like the Hawks and Doves simulation in classical game theory. If you have an environment consisting almost entirely of Doves, a few Hawks will have an unrestricted advantage. (And the other way around, too: a small colony of Doves in a world of Hawks have advantages also.)
Some form of government seems to be the only immunization against corruption and violent bullying. It’s a bit like having a standing army: you want one that’s big enough to keep Graustark from invading us, but not so big that it ends up running the country…as it does in Graustark. There is probably an ideal minimum-energy saddle-point of some sort.
I’ll let you reassess this sentence.
Doves are defenseless against hawks. Moral people are not defenseless against immoral people. There’s your difference. You made a false analogy. The concept of a voluntary society is not a utopia. What characteristics of the concept of a voluntary society make it utopian to you?
Their misuse is what gets my attention. Then if you shine a light on the reality of taxation, you realize that it is no more than legalized extortion.
Non-aggressive individuals are in fact doves.
It’s a weak argument because:
-
Bad people can wreck any system, so they all need a method to limit the damage bad people can do.
-
Anarchist libertarianism has such a method: voluntary associations of mutual defense, or voluntary contracts with others to defend you. This is a fairly simple concept with historical precedent, such as militias. I have no doubt that in the face of roving bandits, like-minded people would gather together to defend themselves.
Where the voluntary aspects of anarchist libertarianism begin to break down is in abstract matters of externalities and jurisdiction, not the simple, concrete one of mutual defense. Hence, there are much stronger arguments that can be brought to bear.
- There are bad people ready and willing to exploit all human systems, and yet many of them function all the same.
Where I quibbled with WillFarnaby on this specific aspect was in his insistence that such a society could be called a voluntary one. Because it requires that everyone adhere to the non-aggression principle or face coercive force, it is not, in fact, a voluntary society.
ETA: Furthermore, demanding that a “system”, be it governmental or private, spring up overnight, rather than developing over time, is foolishly, and nearly poisoning the well. Would you accept that democracy can’t work, because if you threw 200 strangers together on an island, they didn’t form a perfect, functioning democracy overnight?
And if they lose?