Woops, I misread the Constitution:
Looks like these restrictions apply only to persons. Now, our political tradition would imply that only persons can serve as representatives. However, the language of the Constitution is vauge on this point.
That depends, Erratum.
If you ask me what libertarianism would do about so-and-so, I try to answer it as best I can, so long as it isn’t one of those questions about the giant squids. If you will list and number your questions (assuming your sincerity to be genuine), I will list and number your answers. But as has been pointed out, a hypothetical question might have a million possible answers.
Plus, I think a string of three questions about the same thing should be counted as one and not three. Don’t you agree? Don’t you think that’s true? Doesn’t that make sense to you? That’s one question, not three.
Unfortunately, as the record shows, the trend usually goes like this:
-
Antilib asks Lib a question.
-
Lib answers.
-
Libhater and Screwlib join Antilib in asking five follow-up yes-but questions that are surrounded by ten rhetorical ones.
-
Lib types feverishly to keep up.
-
Antilib, Libhater, and Screwlib now make the issues personal. Lib is evasive because he hasn’t answered every single thing with a question mark, or even things that don’t have question marks but were intended as implied questions.
-
Lib provides links so that genuine inquirers can get their questions answered.
-
That ain’t good enough.
“Well, there it is.” — the Austrian Emperor
So you quit cause you didn’t get your way? Because not everyone felt the same as you did? Not surprising. Your idea of freedom has always seemed less like ‘no coercion’ and more like ‘my way or the highway’.
Incredible.
I felt that the poor and the elderly mattered more than a booth at the fair, and you find fault in that. Were I to say that the sky is blue, you would likely spin it as a libertarian rant.
And another thing.
As a matter of fact, what happened between me and the libertarian party was very, well, libertarian. I didn’t like what I was seeing, and so I seceded.
I have gone to great pains to point out, and you have gone to great pains to ignore, that what’s my way for me might not be your way for you. I didn’t make anyone else leave the party, and the party didn’t make me man the booth.
I think you might be stuck in a rut where you say your way has to be everybody’s way.
Sorry it took me so long to respond - I’m doing this on my lunch hours.
The market IS the fundamental tool for building consensus. It is much, much better at doing so than the crude hammer that is the federal government.
Let’s examine the nature of democracy for a moment. A democratic government is set up to draw a compromise between force and choice. People are allowed to vote, and the results of the vote will set the direction of the government, which then used force or the threat of it to enforce the wishes of the majority.
Note that the presence of force is crucial here - without force, there is no need for government, as it has no power. All government decrees, regulations, and operations have at their root the threat of force if you do not go along with them.
To find a reasonable balance between the power of the government and the wishes of the governed, we therefore have a democracy. And we protect ourselves still further by having a constitution which sets hard limits on what the government can or cannot do. Hence, 51% of the people cannot vote to execute the other 49%.
But within the broad framework of the democratic process, there are still victims, who are not represented because their desires do not fall within the range of desires of the majority. This is the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The result of it is permanent disenfranchisement of whole sectors of the population. Rural blacks rarely get the government they want.
Can we agree that a better democracy would result if somehow each vote could be made to count in some way? Well, that’s exactly what the marketplace is! Every time you buy something, you are casting a ‘vote’. Buy an Apple, and you have strengthened Apple Corp slighly as compared to the competitors. Eat Fritos, and you have cast a vote in favor of potato chips over popcorn. The information from your ‘vote’ is propagated by the market and the price system directly to the very people who would best make use of that information - the retailers, shippers, and producers of the products you want.
There are plenty of goods and services that cater to rural blacks, because even though they are in the minority their votes COUNT in the marketplace.
Therefore, the free market is the most ‘fair’ democracy in the world, with billions of people casting votes thousands of times a year, and this wonderful, intricate system shifting and changing to conform to their wishes.
I would suggest that whenever you want to override this system at gunpoint, the burden of proof should be on YOU to show me why you know what’s best for the people, and that your particular insight is somehow more important than those of the people who are actually spending their money and their labor on the things they want.
There IS a need for government, and a constitutional democracy is the best current form for that government. But it should be used as a last-resort, when there are clear, severe problems that the marketplace can’t address.
More in the next message…
**On Market Failures<\b>
The market works when there is a clear financial connection between all parties affected by a transaction. Where it breaks down is when damages from a transaction have no clear individual victims. An example of this would be industrial air pollution. Releasing pollution into the atmosphere damages the property of the people forced to live in that environment. Unfortunately, any one individual may not be affected enough to want to fight for his rights. When very small damages occur to a large group of people, market failure can result.
In essence, what is happening is that the industry is being subsidized by the populace against their wishes. Some mechanism is required to prevent this from happening. A libertarian society would still maintain class action suits, and other torts that would act as a check on companies. But even this may not be enough. So some government may be required here. But note the fundamental reason for the involvement of government - the market failed at resolving the true costs and benefits between producers and consumers.
Contrast this with typical government involvements in the marketplace - Trade tariffs, industry subsidies and directed taxes, regulations dictating what an employer may pay someone, mandated workplace standards, etc. All of these are attempts not to correct market failures, but to change the decisions that the market has made, because someone in power doesn’t like them. Social engineering. The control of individuals for ‘their own good’, or the ‘good of society’.
These types of regulations are abhorrent. If I want to buy John’s product, and he wants to sell it to me, you have NO RIGHT to step between us with a gun and tell me that I can’t buy that product because I’m too stupid to know what I’m doing, or because you’re trying to promote a competitor’s product, or because you are trying to build employment in some area of the country that doesn’t make John’s product. I am a free citizen, spending the fruits of my own labor. John expended his labor to build something I wanted. We came to a mutual agreement. We are both adults, and no one has the right to assume that we don’t know what we are doing or need to be ‘protected’ from each other.
On The Proper Function of Government
As I said in the last message, the fundamental difference between government and other societal institutions is that government has been granted a legal monopoly on the use of force. Why?
The main reason is objectivity. We need an entity that exists to police criminals, to defend us from tyrants, and to settle civil disputes with some mechanism for enforcing the settlement. In building such an entity, the most important feature is objectivity. Those libertarians who believe in private police forces don’t understand this - When you give someone a gun and the legal right to use it against other people, he’d better not have a vested interest in one party over the other.
To solve this problem, we set up a sovereign government, and give it the power to rule over us to some degree. In turn, we set up a legal system to protect us from bias, with courts and juries. We set up a military, but place them under the command of a civilian elected official, who must answer to the people.
The net result is that we intentionally distance our government from ourselves, so that if we run into disputes or have crimes committed against us, an impartial system can step in to serve justice or solve the dispute. The only other option is lynch mobs and posses, which do farm more damage to liberty than the government.
So, we need a government to enforce contracts, to police our streets, and to run a military. And, we may need a government to deal with issues of market failure.
So there you have it - those three messages pretty much define the ‘mainstream’ Libertarian viewpoint. They don’t match the extreme elements of the party, or perhaps even the party platform as it is currently written (I haven’t seen it for years). What it DOES match is the vision of people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Adam Smith, all of whom were Libertarians.
If you’d like to discuss more practical aspects of the philosophy, I’m game.
Sorry about the screwed up HTML in the first two messages. Some days it’s not worth getting out of bed.
Jodih -
I don’t have ‘faith’ - I have the analysis about about 99% of the world’s economists, all of whom agree that the marketplace WORKS. They are unanimous on the benefits of free trade. They are unanimous on the efficiency of the market to regulate the affairs of men. The market has fundamental rules, and those rules create structure.
Just as the wonderful complexities and efficiency of nature are the result of some fundamental genetic rules, the wonderful complexity and efficiency of the market is the result of some fundamental rules of human interaction. This is what Adam Smith was getting at with his ‘invisible hand’ - a multitude of people, each acting in his or her own self-interest, will be guided as if by an invisible hand to create things and benefit people that were not necessarily part of their original intent.
You can run a computer simulation if you like - this is an interesting new area of computer science. Noting that the fundamental nature of the market involves the issues of allocating finite resources, some researchers are solving problems of network bandwidth sharing and other allocation problems by building a market, with a price system and all, and then letting the machines that use those resources bid for them as in a real market. Given an ‘AI’ mechanism for modifying behaviour based on the results of the market, some astounding and complex systems have arisen spontaneously to solve these problems. Much like genetic algorithms being used to solve routing problems like the ‘travelling salesman’.
Aside from theoretical research, I also have empirical evidence. The fundamental rule of the market is that if there is a need for something, someone will fill it. And as I watch society develop new needs and whole new, complex markets spring up to provide those needs, I have empirical evidence that the system works, and that it does the best job.
Once again I have to point to the computer industry. This is an industry that has virtually no government regulation, and has managed to balance phenomenal growth and innovation with practical standards and product safety and reliability. All through the forces in the market. No government needed to ‘protect’ the owners of 8086 processors from obsolescence, because Intel saw that there was a market need for backwards compatibility. On the other hand, power users who didn’t care about that weren’t left in the cold, because other vendors saw a gap in the market from Intel’s insistence on compatibility and produced higher-performing chips. No one had to protect users from buggy software - companies that produce it go out of business, and the ones that don’t get paid more and can spend more money on new products. Is there anyone here who thinks a government computer from a government factory built to government standards could do better? Is there anyone here who thinks the government could make and distribute SHOES as well as the marketplace does? If not, why are you so adament that the government do all these other things? If the government can’t make quality shoes, why do you want to give it a monopoly on the education of your children? If, after having done so you’re finding that children are graduating from high school without the ability to read, why are you so unwilling to consider alternatives? Why are you afraid to let people buy the goods they want or take the medicines they want? Is the siren call of having an authority make decisions for you really that powerful?
Sorry, Lib, but it’s hard to feel sorry for you.
First of all, you complain about having a hard time keeping up with the responses from non-Libertarians. Given your tendency to inject libertarianism into discussions that have nothing to do with it, you’re reaping what you’ve sown.
Second, you suggest that your adversaries in the debate tend to be first to make things personal. You’ve got a pretty fair tendency of personalizing the debate early and often yourself.
Third, your ideas tend to present a moving target. A libertarian government wouldn’t be anarchy, you say, but to pin you down on what structure a libertarian government would or wouldn’t have is next to impossible.
Fourth, presenting links isn’t generally considered sufficient as an answer, without at least a brief summary of the point you expect the link to make on your behalf.
Fifth, you’ve hardly been alone in defending libertarianism in the broad sense. I’ve seen techchick, Sam Stone, ExTank, meara, and others taking the libertarian side as well.
If you’re feeling more heat than they are, perhaps there is a reason. The others, for the most part, are assuming some basic level of ‘coercive’ power residing in a central government - enough authority to provide an adequate revenue stream, via taxation, for the libertarian holy trinity of the military, the courts, and the police.
While many of us believe such a system would be less than satisfactory, as we judge things, we believe that such a government would be able to work, at least to the basic extent of maintaining its existence.
Based on what we know so far, we can’t see how your version of a libertarian state could even manage that. It appears to me that a lot of the questions aimed particularly at you have the goal of proving that. But your answers are sufficiently enigmatic that the incoming questions multiply. Which makes it even harder for you to keep up with the replies.
So ease up a bit on the persecution complex. You’ve worked hard to earn the response your posts now get. You should enjoy it more. 
Libertarian: “If you will list and number your questions (assuming your sincerity to be genuine), I will list and number your answers. But as has been pointed out, a hypothetical question might have a million possible answers.”
1 - Do you favor a purely fee-for-service government, or do you believe that taxation is an appropriate function for government?
2 - Do you believe that the functions normally performed by the government (police, military, etc.) should be performed by firms in the private sector?
3 - Do you accept the premise that many services normally associated with government are likely to be natural monopolies?
4 - Do you accept that it is in the best interest of every busninessperson to be a monopolist, and that philosophical preference for “free and competitive markets” do not overrule the desire for high profits for an individual, and that therefore companies and individuals cannot be trusted to regulate themselves (i.e. some outside agent – either competitors or another agency must take action) to prevent anti-competitive behavior?
5 - Do you accept that when a firm has a monopoly in one sector, they are frequently able to leverage that strength into dominance in an unrelated sector, to the deteriment of consumers, disrupting the “natural” self-correcting behavior of the market? Do you agree that this is a bad thing?
6If yes to 2, 3, 4, and 5, isn’t that a big problem?
I’m going to explain the “free rider” problem, which is the same issue as my previous post about the “tragedy of the commons”. This “example” is going to be exaggerated to make a point. It is not intended to be a literal example of what will actually happen. It is intended as an exaggerated illustration of the problem. Please try to understand the underlying class of problems that I am concerned about rather than dismissing this as a ridiculous hypothetical. The example: You and I both own widget factories across the street from each other. The widget business is fiercly competitive, and we have very low margins on our widgets. The President of the Evil Enemy Country begins threatening air raids against what his propagandists calls our “decadent capitalist state”. You, being a civic minded sort, decide to install a surface-to-air missile launcher at your factory to shoot down any enemy planes that attack. I hear about your order to SAMs-R-Us, and realize: “Aha! If he detects an incoming enemy plane, he won’t be able to tell if it’s targetting my factory or if it’s targetting his factory – he’ll shoot it down either way, so my factory gets defended for free!”. I therefore do not buy a SAM launcher. Now, our businesses are equal in every way, except your costs are higher because you have to buy and maintain your SAM launcher. Therefore, my factory is more profitable, and your stockholders start complaining because you are not as profitable as I am. You eventually decide that the immediate threat of bankruptcy is greater than the potential threat of air raids, and you sell your SAM launcher to compete. The enemy planes promptly bomb us both. The market rewarded the “wrong” behavior (i.e. it rewarded me for being a greedy jerk, and punished you for being a civic-minded person who was concerned about enemy attack).
7 - Do you understand that there is a real concern here, or do you intend to dismiss any questions which relate to this thing as a meaningless hypothetical?
8 - How do you prevent these problems under your system?
9 - Do you conceed that problems like this, and others, can result in what economists call “market failures”?
10 - Do you agree with Sam Stone when he says “some government may be required here”?
11 - If yes to 11, who decides what is a market failure and what is not, and who decides how to rectify the situation? What would you say to a legislator who claimed that high unemployment in a particular area was a market failure the required rectifying?
12 - Do you believe that a society predicated on “pure” Libertarianism would “work”? If not, why not?
13 - Do you believe that a society predicated on “pure” Marxism would “work”? If not, why not?
I’ll let you answer these before bringing more questions.
Sam Stone: “Contrast this with typical government involvements in the marketplace - Trade tariffs…”
How do you reconcile this statement (which I read to cast tariffs in a bad light) with techchick’s desire to abolish broadly based taxes like the income tax and fund the federal government exclusively via tariffs and excise taxes?
Sam Stone: “Therefore, the free market is the most ‘fair’ democracy in the world, with billions of people casting votes thousands of times a year, and this wonderful, intricate system shifting and changing to conform to their wishes.”
How do you then resolve this paradox: 1) Ross Perot is a raving loony. 2) Ross Perot is a billionare. 3) Raving loonies should have less say in the way the government works than I do. 4) Billionaires have more market power than I do.
“The fundamental rule of the market is that if there is a need for something, someone will fill it.”
That is similar to the evolutionary rule “all niches get filled”. However, they’re both wrong. Some environments are not inhabited by forms of life, even though forms of life could theoretically exist there. Similarly, some products do not exist, even though they would be profitable.
If you don’t mind, I’ll take a crack at a few of these.
1 - Do you favor a purely fee-for-service government, or do you believe that taxation is an appropriate function for government?
Many libertarians are not opposed to taxes, as long as the tax is being used to pay for the legitimate functions of govenment. What they would object to are taxes that are used to re-distribute wealth or pay for social engineering programs.
2 - Do you believe that the functions normally performed by the government (police, military, etc.) should be performed by firms in the private sector?
The military, police and courts need to be controlled by the government, for the reasons ‘Sam Stone’ mentioned above. But then, it’s no surprise that I agree with him… (-:
3 - Do you accept the premise that many services normally associated with government are likely to be natural monopolies?
No. Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? OSHA? HHS? Public schools?
No doubt you are thinking of things like the interstate highways, but these are actually a very small part of the government’s budget. The vast bulk of today’s government activities involve taking money from one citizen and giving it to another.
4 - Do you accept that it is in the best interest of every busninessperson to be a monopolist, and that philosophical preference for “free and competitive markets” do not overrule the desire for high profits for an individual, and that therefore companies and individuals cannot be trusted to regulate themselves (i.e. some outside agent – either competitors or another agency must take action) to prevent anti-competitive behavior?
No, no, and no. Companies often flourish and become more profitable in industries where there is viable competition. And while the proper function of a business is to maximize profit for its shareholders and owners, this does not necessarily translate into the desire to monopolize.
But the far more important question is, even if a business did want to monopolize an industry, just how easy is that to do? I’m having a hard time thinking of ANY businesses that have managed to gain a monopoly position in a market and hold it for any length of time, other than companies that were granted special dispensation from the government. The last three major anti-trust actions by the government were specious at best, including the current action against Microsoft.
It is incredibly hard for a company to hold on to even a majority market share, let alone a complete monopoly. Look at the current situation with Microsoft - it is actually losing market share to a free operating system, and another very tiny company (Be). In the 1960’s, IBM held close to a monopoly on mainframe and mini computers, yet trivial errors by management caused the rapid growth of competitors that took away the majority of their market.
Even natural monopolies don’t necessarily behave like monopolies - Canada Nickel owns 95% of the world’s nickel resources, yet Nickel is priced very competitively. Why? Because there are alternatives to nickel, and CN will lose market share if they use their monopoly position to overprice their products. So even though they have a monopoly, the consumer is not hurt by it.
On the other hand, there are plenty of GOVERNMENT monopolies, and they often do behave like bullies, forcing inflated prices and below-average products on the consumer and limiting choices by force.
5 - Do you accept that when a firm has a monopoly in one sector, they are frequently able to leverage that strength into dominance in an unrelated sector, to the deteriment of consumers, disrupting the “natural” self-correcting behavior of the market? Do you agree that this is a bad thing?
Give me some examples. Offhand, I can’t think of a firm that HAS a monopoly in one sector, so your question is hypothetical.
6. If yes to 2, 3, 4, and 5, isn’t that a big problem?
Even if monopolies did occur in some rare cases, this would not be nearly as big a problem as the government has become.
I’m going to explain the “free rider” problem…
On this we can agree. There are cases of market failure, and there is a legitimate role for government there. However, the portrait you paint is not very common, and the market DOES have tools to prevent it. Contracts are the primary way in which companies work together to solve the free-rider problem. In some cases it breaks down. But rarely. While there may be a role for government in some of these situations, it had better be a last resort and not a FIRST resort, which is the current common reaction to any perceived flaw in the market.
7 - Do you understand that there is a real concern here, or do you intend to dismiss any questions which relate to this thing as a meaningless hypothetical?
While there is real concern, I believe that much of the concern is due to being ill-informed. The existance of monopolies is greatly over-stated, and the handful of companies that even come close do it not through gouging the consumer but by being hyper-competitive. Microsoft has gotten into trouble not because it is gouging the consumer and raping the markets, but because it is TOO competitive, selling products for low prices and giving away high-quality internet tools. The classic fear is that they are doing this to gain a monopoly which they will then somehow exploit by raping us all, but I see absolutely no evidence that this is possible, especially in an industry as dynamic and easy to enter as the computing industry.
8 - How do you prevent these problems under your system?
I don’t have to - the market will. Again, the burden of proof is on you. Please describe some monopolies that have arisen in the marketplace, and what damage was done to consumers by them. And please don’t drag out Standard Oil - try at least to stick to this century. Problems that haven’t occurred in 100 years may not be problems. Anyway, Standard attained its monopoly in large part through government land grants and exclusive rights.
9 - Do you conceed that problems like this, and others, can result in what economists call “market failures”?
Yes, but very, very rarely. Certainly not commonly enough that we need a 1.6 trillion-dollar government with its fingers in every aspect of our daily lives.
10 - Do you agree with Sam Stone when he says “some government may be required here”?
What a surprise - I DO agree with him!
11 - If yes to 11, who decides what is a market failure and what is not, and who decides how to rectify the situation? What would you say to a legislator who claimed that high unemployment in a particular area was a market failure the required rectifying?
High unemployment in one area is never a ‘market failure’. Market failures arise for very specific reasons - poor information connection between producers and consumers, technical monopoly (ownership of a land bridge or squatting on airwaves), etc. Broad social trends are never the result of a market failure. Calling something you don’t like a market failure is missing the whole concept. Capitalism is dynamic, and there will always be winners and losers. The losers are not always the victims of market failure. In fact, they almost never are.
To more directly answer your question, before I would agree that the government should be involved in the affairs of free citizens you would have to show me the exact nature of the market failure and show that there is no known mechanism for the failure to be resolved through the market. And, there should be a history of this problem and no sign of a market-oriented solution. Factory pollution is one example that springs immediately to mind, but the DRAM shortage of a couple years ago doesn’t. Note that statists were screaming ‘market failure’ all over the place during that time, but the problem fixed itself very shortly, and what meagre attempts the government made to get involved made things much, much worse.
**12 - Do you believe that a socie
God bless you, sir or madam. Perhaps, if we can establish a civil dialog, you will, having brought all your questions to me, entertain the notion of answering a few of the bazilliion question I have myself for antilibertarians.
[Note 1: I am answering these questions, as I do all such questions, as a purist libertarian, deriving my answers from a single principle, and justifying whatever end by those ethical means. Therefore, if I speak of a free market, I mean a market free from coercion and fraud, and so on. All answers assume a purely libertarian context.]
[Note 2: I pray you will allow me to answer with explanation and clarification, and not always require of me a simple yes or no, particularly when I believe a question is loaded.]
[Note 3: I pray you will give me leave from answering a postcedent question when its answer was already given. I will mark such answers as “op. cit.” and give you reference numbers. I pray also that you will recognize that when one question is predicated on a particular answer to another question, it might render the new question moot. For example, “If yes, then…” is moot when the answer was no.]
[Caveat: Keep in mind, please, that the giving of one answer does not preclude a million others that can also be applications of noncoercion.]
I do not believe that the seizure of property against the will of its owner, provided the owner is peaceful and honest, is an appropriate function for any entity. Inasmuch as taxation is not voluntary, then it is precluded a priori by the NP.
I believe in the nobility of man — all men — and therefore the sanctity of consent. I see no ethical difference in having your property seized by your neighbor or your magistrate. I do not believe that extra “rights”, such as the “right” to tax you, are conferred by title or consensus.
All except one, the function of securing your rights. That is the sole function of any legitimate government. Even Jefferson, a slave-owning hegemonist, understood this. “It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.”
In my opinion, therefore, police and military are legitimate — even necessary — when used for the purpose of protecting you from the coercion and economic fraud of others. But they are illegitimate when used for any other purpose.
Not necessarily, not when put just like that.
Many of the services offered by modern nanny government could be a boon to entrepreneurship and competition. The Food and Drug Administration is one example. There could be competition among Underwriters Laboratory type private agencies, which themselves could be certified and reviewed by independently competing watchdog groups.
As an Austrian, I believe that a natural monopoly arises in a free market when consumers decide that it will. It is consumers who make and break monopolies in a free market.
Yes. Yes.
If by regulate, you mean suppress coercion, then yes.
No. Well, I think not. I’m not sure what sort of anti-competitive behavior you mean.
If, for example, Mr. Jones comes up with a secret way to make a widgit for $10 that no one else has figured out how to make for less than $20, then even though he might still be making a huge profit, he should be allowed to set his prices however the market will bear them.
Any action taken, in my opinion, should be nothing more than the suppression of coercion and fraud. If Mr. Jones is operating peacefully and honestly, then he is doing nothing ethically wrong.
Yes, in a Fabianist market. No, in a free market.
It is a bad thing if the will of consumers is bent. If all consumers have decided freely and willingly to buy everything from no one but Mr. Jones, then it must be a good thing because they have made their decisions freely and willingly.
Op. cit. 2, 3, 4a, 4b, and 5b.
Well, since it is a hypothetical, I get to play too.
You say, “Aha! If he detects an incoming enemy plane, he won’t be able to tell if it’s targetting my factory or if it’s targetting his factory – he’ll shoot it down either way, so my factory gets defended for free!”.
Up until now, in the hypothetical, you have presented yourself as a savvy, alert man, who fiercely competed (without violence or dishonesty, we will assume) with me. This implies a certain intelligence and a will to live. Now, inexplicably, you will trust your very life to a man you have been unable to outwit.
I think that in your hypothetical, you should be allowed to do as you please, but I am going to change what you have me doing in it.
I did not purchase any SAMs. I have been paying about four thousand dollars a year (sixty percent of two trillion divided by three hundred million) for protection of my plant by the government of Libertaria. I have developed an ad campaign directed against your irresponsibility with the slogan: “If they don’t care about their own safety, what makes you think they’ll care about yours?”
Initial marketing tests project a sales increase of about fifty percent.
Well, you have my answer already, but let me just clarify one thing for you.
Libertarianism never claims to solve any problems. It isn’t a system at all, but merely a context that allows you to solve your own problems free from the coercion and fraud of other people.
Any system can operate libertarianly. Inasmuch as it secures the rights of its citizens, all of them and not just the majority, any system, from a monarchy to a democracy, can be libertarian.
[quote]
9 - Do you [conced] that problems like this, and others
Sorry, but this really irked me. Roman Catholics do not, I repeat, do not worship Mary.
I would suppose that is as irksome as hearing that libertarians favor no government.
14 - I did not fully understand your answer to 1. Are you an advocate of “voluntary taxes”, funding the government like we fund private charieties?
15 - Do you advocate social stigmatization to compel people to contribute to the government (e.g. your response to the SAM example)?
16 - If I create an elective board, selected in the exact same way as our current representatives to congress, and their sole job is to investigate people, and determine how much money they contribute to charities and the government of Libertaria, and if that contribution level falls below 30%, they send out mass mailings to that person’s neighbors and employers saying “______ is a degenerate, untrustworthy scumbag, and probably a commie, too”, isn’t that very similar to a coercive government? Is this situation different from the “ad campaign” you suggested was the solution?
17 - “The Food and Drug Administration is one example. There could be competition among Underwriters Laboratory type private agencies, which themselves could be certified and reviewed by independently competing watchdog groups.” Wouldn’t the only way to determine the effectiveness of these groups to be to determine how many “bad” drugs they let “slip through”? Wouldn’t the process of weeding out the bad watchdogs virtually require people to get hurt by their unsafe practices? How else could you tell they weren’t maintaining the requisite level of safety? What mechanism do you have in mind to judge whether the “FDA privatization experiment” is “working”? Are there any instances where you would put an end to the market based FDA?
18 - “I’m not sure what sort of anti-competitive behavior you mean.” If Mr. Jones invents the super-cheap widget, it is generally considered “fair” for him to use that invention to dominate the widget industry. He, after all, has superior production capabilities, and should “win” in the market. Do you think that it is appropriate to call Mr. Jones’ actions “anti-competitive” if he uses his dominance and profitability in the widget industry to boost his business for another product, foo-fooflers? For example, Mr. Jones sells his foo-fooflers at cost, but his business is able to stay profitable because of his widget profits. His competitors are unable to stay profitable selling foo-fooflers at cost (since that is their only product), so they close up shop. Jones jacks up the price on foo-fooflers whenever he faces no competition. Is that anticompetitive? If you replace Jones with Gates, widgets with OS’s, and foo-fooflers with browsers, is that anti-competitive?
19 - “Any action taken, in my opinion, should be nothing more than the suppression of coercion and fraud. If Mr. Jones is operating peacefully and honestly, then he is doing nothing ethically wrong.” If Jones says “I have decided to only sell my widgets along with foo-fooflers. If you want one, you have to buy both”, is that a form of coercion?
20 - “Now, inexplicably, you will trust your very life to a man you have been unable to outwit.” The explanation was that I was relying on your own self-interest to protect me. I don’t like muggers on the streets, but if Batman is going to get rid of them for free (from my perspective), then I don’t have to do anything about it. In your hypothetical, how is the army of Libertaria going to protect your factory but let mine be destroyed? Am I not still a “free rider”? If widgets are commodities (as is generally assumed in the widget business, no matter how much my PR guys pump into branding :D) then your ad campaign may be ineffective. Assuming that is the case for the moment, do you have an alternative solution?
21 - “The market, if free from coercion and fraud, represents nothing more than the will of consumers. Any failure is a failure of their own will. Those who risk and lose, they will fail I suppose, in that sense.” If you look at the notion of “market” broadly in terms of the entire world being a market, then it is clear that there are some processes that are not affected by market forces. Having children is one of those. If a person who would be a successful businessman if he had access to capital is born to a poor family, is unable to get any capital of his own, and is unable to secure any credit to get his business off the ground, is this a market failure? Assume, for the purposes of argument, that the person has some crippling disability which prevents him from being a productive laborer, but his brilliant mind would make him a successful businessman. If this is a form of market failure, then who were the consumers that caused it, and how will they fix it?
22 - “every citizen shall be guaranteed freedom from coercion and economic fraud” The term “economic fraud” seems, to me, to be very subjective. Why is your ad campaign about the SAMs not economic fraud (you consider it true, I claim it’s false) but my ad campaign of “Lib has no respect for intellectual property, he reverse engineered my widget and is selling low quality knock-offs” (you know it’s false, I claim it’s true) is economic fraud? Who decides, and how can you tell if you don’t know if I’m being dishonest or am “honestly” misinformed? If you allow for honest mistakes, how do you prevent a Clinton-esque “convenient” honest mistake?
Libertarian: “God bless you, sir or madam.”
Sir.
“Perhaps … you will … entertain the notion of answering a few of the bazilliion question I have myself for antilibertarians.”
Don’t feel compelled to wait until my questions are finished, ask away. But remember that the group of people who oppose Libertarianism is by far more diverse in their political thinking than those who support Libertarianism (as would be true for any school of thought that wasn’t held by a majority of the population), so I can’t pretend to speak for everyone.
dhanson: “If you don’t mind, I’ll take a crack at a few of these.”
I don’t mind at all. I intend to respond to some of your answers, but I don’t have time right now. I don’t want anyone to feel excluded! 