How is that different than saying that if the majority of people in a society being governed want to do something their beliefs outweigh those they are trying to coerce? “I’m right because more people agree with me” seems mighty arrogant from the perspective of the disenfranchised, the enslaved, the segregated, and the marginalized.
What a ridiculous vehicle to levy every single cliched criticism of libertarianism in the book.
Libertarians want to force their way of life onto everyone? That must be why they are big believers in bombing, jailing, taxing and gun-pointing while progressives, liberals, and conservatives are known for their tolerance.
Wacky stuff in that OP.
I will admit that individual libertarians can be quite arrogant. That’s only because they are more likely to be politically active. IMO liberals and conservatives are equally if not more arrogant when it comes to those who are politically active.
Absolutely. True, radical Libertarianism come close, but regular libertarianism is quite reasonable and the opposite of arrogant.
This is a misunderstanding of what the free market is. When people say the free market will take care of something it means the collective intelligence of mankind. When people say the government should do something it means politicians should design it and the bureaucracy should implement it.
I think alot of my own intelligence but I realize that the task of organizing millions of individuals with different values and different goals is literally impossible for me. Si the best answer is to leave everything possible for the free market to deal with. Thus the collective intelligence of mankind will produce a solution far better than even I could have produced. For that reason I think anyone who thinks they can design a solution better than the free market except in a few rare circumstances to be arrogant. The more power they want to give the government the more arrogant they are. So the most arrogant are the communists who want to the government to run everything and the least are the libertarians who want the government to run nothing.
In the case of the latter the businesses become the government.
And atheism is the most arrogant religion. :rolleyes:
A little off topic here, but if you want to start a thread inquiring about atheism, I’m sure there will be no shortage of people willing to explain it to you.
There’s no such thing as the “collective intelligence of mankind”. There are *separate *intelligences of billions of people, all of them caring about themselves first, all of them at cross purposes with all of the others. Asking them to do something for the benefit of all is like asking a bomb to act like a rocket - the force is the same, but there’s just no focus.
Anarchy is the preference for no government. There are as many philosophies associated with that preference as there are people who prefer it. To call it arrogant is silly. Bald is far more a hair style and atheism is far more a religion than anarchy is arrogance.
What you’ve just described is the Constitution. The Constitution prohibits the government from doing a lot of things despite what the majority wants.
Any one Libertarian (or Objectivist) claiming they have the one true interpretation and all others claiming the title are deluded poseurs, if not fifth columnists.
I don’t expect people to understand it without explanation. I* also* don’t expect them to shoot their mouths off about what it is or isn’t, *absent *that explanation.
Not sure this is a political philosophy per se, but there’s something to be said for “might makes right” philosophy of a certain brand. The “It doesn’t matter if we’re right, we have a stronger military/more voters/better political machine than you.”
Only because the majority of us agreed that there are certain rights that are protected by the Constitution and are placed outside of normal legislative restriction.
Ehhhhhh, sort of. I think it’s more that the Constitution was written by elites, and that the right idea is to have the elites set the boundaries of government and then let the public decide what the government will do within those boundaries. That wasn’t of course what the Founders wanted, they wanted elite control all the way, they just wanted it to be a LOT of elites(white male landowners). But with suffrage extended to all citizens of good character over 18, it’s more of a real democracy now. However, the Founders basic ideas of how to structure a government were sound and have made it to the 21st century with few changes.
First comes liberty.
Second comes rule of law.
Third comes the will of the people.
While not a true comprehensive philosophy, I do see a lot of arrogance sometimes from people who think democracy is an end rather than a means. The will of the people must be subservient to individual liberty and rule of law. Otherwise we’re just a gang, not a polity.
Because there’s a vast difference, not in only in degree but in kind, between one individual saying “I speak for society” and the majority saying “We speak for society”. Society only has one majority so that represents a common voice. But society has a large number of individuals. How does one individual say that their voice should outweigh everyone else’s else without being arrogant?
Consider this example. There’s a state with a hundred thousand people living in it. And ninety thousand of those people feel that it’s a good idea to require dog owners to get a license for their dogs. I’ll clearly concede that’s a government infringement on individual liberty. But I feel the majority has the right to choose to infringe individual liberty - even if I disagree with the particular law. I accept that the voice of the majority is a more valid authority than my own individual voice.
A libertarian would not agree. (At least most libertarians wouldn’t agree. One of the problems of libertarianism is every self-proclaimed libertarian has his own version of libertarianism.) A libertarian would say that the government is not allowed to require dog licenses even if the overwhelming majority of people want it. The libertarian is saying his individual belief of what the government is allowed to do is a greater authority than the ninety thousand individuals who disagree with him. That’s arrogance.
The specific example given was slavery. How legal is that nowadays?
That’s a relevant point. The majority has the means to amend the Constitution and we’ve used it when the majority of us no longer agree with what the Constitution says. So the Constitution represents the current majority view and not just the majority view of the people who wrote the original text. If the majority of us really wanted to abolish freedom of speech, we would abolish it.
I agree with posts giving absolute monarchy (or cult-of-personality totalitarian dictatorship) as closest to fitting the definition of the word ‘arrogant’, as a political philosophy. The autocrat must self evidently be believed superior either in ability or God given right to everyone else. But even in that case it’s only strictly speaking arrogant from the POV of the autocrat if he or she truly believes in the system, not all the subjects who believe in the system, as some undoubtedly and truly did or do.
But every political philosophy of the post Enlightenment West at least claims to be based on equality, at least within the self governing community it recognizes. The accusation to the contrary by one of those philosophies against another is just a biased view, or claim of the ‘de facto effect’ of what the other philosophy insists it does not believe, or which involves the question of whom the community comprises (eg. do people from other countries have a right to come to the US?).
There was a comical line in the OP about ‘conservatives are sometimes like this too [arrogant]’, as if you wouldn’t find tons of people whose opinion is equal to yours (under any non ‘arrogant’ political philosophy) who think the modern left is highly arrogant. It’s subjective and biased either way IMO, no point in debating whether modern left or right is more ‘arrogant’.
The thing with tends to distinguish people who primarily call themselves ‘libertarians’ IME is they are more like to prescribe a society more different than today’s than the average person calling themselves liberal or conservative, and more likely to come up with policy based on a simple (or simplistic) formula. Some liberals and conservatives are either simplistic or look for a society very different than now, but as a rule IME all the people willing to accept the label liberal or conservative are on average more likely to see more shades of gray or have arguably inconsistent positions on various issues (for practical reasons, they’d say) than people who choose to call themselves libertarians and won’t accept the other labels (as opposed to say ‘conservative but with a libertarian tendency’ etc).
I wouldn’t characterize it as greater authority. It’s not the number of people who agree, but the underlying rightness or wrongness of an action that is more important. The slave who protests or rebels against their enslavement is not arrogant - though they would feel their beliefs should outweigh the majority who are enslaving them. I would not call that an exaggerated sense of self importance, but an accurate one.
And those that believed differently from you would make the same claim.