Why Libertarianism Won't Work (Reason No. 5,472)

Great Debates
21

True, but the main reason federal taxes as a % of GDP are going up (from 18.3% in 1990 to 20.0% in 1998, according to www.enth.com ) is to pay for the megadeficits of the Reagan-Bush era. Federal expenditures as a % of GDP have been steadily dropping since 1992, from 22.5% that year, to 19.4% in 1998. (That’s right - Federal spending as a fraction of GDP has been going down under Clinton!) State and local taxes have steadily totalled about 5.4% of GDP throughout the '90s, FWIW.

Oh, c’mon, that’s an absolutely groundless assertion. Where’d you get that from, and by what ridiculous process did they make it up?

Enough of voting for the lesser of evils - vote Cthulhu 2000!

22

I think a number of us have successfully addressed, in numerous threads, why this is one of the elements of libertarianism that keeps it in Cloud Cuckoo-Land.

23

PeeQueue wrote:

and Gilligan wrote:

Let me get this straight. Every individual, in every generation gets to decide what government they want to opt into or out of? I gather that there is then no geographic element to government? So that a certain set of citizens from all over America could decide to opt into one government, and then another group, also from all over America, could decide to opt into another one? Or each individual could decide to be a government unto themselves?

I’m trying real hard to see the distinction between libertarianism (as you seem to envision it) and anarchy. Because if every person gets to pick and choose what government they want to opt into (if any), it seems like the result would be no effective government at all.

Why would I have any obligation to answer to some government you and a bunch of your buddies cobbled together? Me and my buddies have formed a government of our own. Now I steal your car. Who do I answer to? Your government? Hey pal, I didn’t opt into your government, and I won’t submit to its laws or to any system of dispute resolution it might want to impose. You got a problem with that? Tell it to my government!

Yeah, that’ll work. :rolleyes:

Basically, it sounds like y’all are cooking up some kind of half-assed tribal system.

24

I agree that the patchwork quilt state we’ve talked about before is a fantasy, but only because of the current limitations of technology and human nature. These things change, and while this state might remain impossible forever, I know longer think it is inherently impossible, only logistically. Those with more knowledge of history may correct me, but I think that for a few thousand years, the idea of a moderately socialist representative democracy was also cloud cuckoo land. But here we are.

In thinking about the idea of a nation in which the citizens are free to choose their government, I came up with an analogy. It might be silly and useless to others, and I would never claim it as support of any proposition, but it helped me understand the idea. This analogy is in the area of religion.

In our nation of 300 million (we’ll know the actual number soon, I guess), there are members of organized religions, people with beliefs but not membership, and athiests. Those in organized religions, by their membership itself, agree to live by certain rules. They support their religion, either with money or deeds, or at any rate they accept certain obligations. In return they expect and receive benefits for the mebership. Non-member believers of whatever faith, also accept certain obligations, even if they are personal, and also expect benefits. Athiests don’t participate in any of this.

Many of those in organized religions believe that non-members are damned to eternal torment by their god. They believe non-members are, if not evil, at least not good people because of the lack of faith. On the other hand, many athiests believe religious people are irrational sheep. Despite all this, these people all interact peacefully every day. They work together; they enjoy the same entertainmnet; they eat at the same restaurants; they do business together. Of course these differences of belief cause problems, as do differences of race, ethnicity, and choice of favorite sports team. But overall, we do all get along.

In a libertarian society, I liken the religious believers to the citizens who would contract with the government. Some would even form groups that would impose a broader scope of government on themselves. The athiests are those who don’t support the government, and take care of their own benefits.

Non-libertarians often say that unless everyone agrees to the same government, nothing will ever get done. “We must all answer to the same government or there will be anarchy.” But we don’t even all answer to the same god! (Or any god, for some.) And things get done. If you are a certain brand of Christian, and go into a deli for a cup of coffee, you believe that the athiest serving you will spend eternity in hell. But you still get your coffee. Do you think you would act differently if instead, he merely had a different security service than the one you hire?

I recognize that there isn’t a parallel between these things. As I said, it just helps me understand what the libertarians mean.

By the way, if you steal my car, spoke, you only have to answer to me, or whoever I hire to get it back. Your government may protect you as best it can, but what is its interest in doing so? Do you trust a government that permits theft?

25

So we have police tribes from different governments waring with each other over supposedly stolen cars?

No, they quickly compromise, create a mediatian process between governments/protection agencies/private armies. This mediatian process eventually has powers and a scope so broad that any power that can earn itself a place at the table can influence the lives of those who doesn’t subscribe to that power. And we end up with what we have now, only perhaps not quite as well organized.

26

True, but in England, 932 AD, the autonomous collective of MP&HG truly was a pipe dream.

In the environs of the year 2000, fractal types of geography don’t work for nations. Maybe in the year 2525. :wink:

But I expect that long before then, events will render libertarianism obsolete anyway. The sanctity of private property and its unrestricted use (and the evil of public property) are very much at the philosophical heart of libertarianism, but either that’s gonna go the way of the horse and buggy, or we are.

[Soapbox]

We won’t have to wait until 2525 for most people to realize that we rely on the natural world for a number of indispensable goods and services (as well as some we could do without, but we’d sorely miss), and that we’re chopping up its systems into progressively smaller pieces, compromising their integrity. Regardless of what we’d like to believe, we share a deteriorating but absolutely necessary commons, and must ultimately make concerted ‘coercive’ decisions on how to best preserve its vitality.

[/Soapbox]

People have, and will again. Consider Elizabethan England in the 1570s; Sir Francis Drake stole a bit more than a few cars from the Spanish.

27

Under the patchwork system up there, I assume that there is still an umbrella libertarian government that trumps all the local voluntary governments. This government would still assume responsibility for those who stole or committed crimes against other people who were citizens of the larger country.

28

Where are the “moderate liberatarians” in this debate? What about simply reducing government to it’s Constitutional base and away from social engineering? If politicians are simply deadlocked in petty bi-partisan debate, everything looks just fine on capitol hill to me, new laws are not getting passed, old ones are becoming seldom enforced and obsolete, and the current spending alocations are staying constant as the total GDP increases; perfect!

On the issue of this hypothetical depression when the hypothetical country goes commie, what makes you so sure that this system would exist? Consider the Great Depression which had the greatest amount of government intervention and yet was the depression which took longest to pull out of. The stock market lost more of its value during Black Monday; however, the government did not try to take loans and bail the country out. I do not seem to recall dust bowls or widespread feelings of despair after Black Monday, we basically all got over it, right?

Libertarianism does not require a revolution, nuclear holocaust, or breakdown into a post-apocalyptic state of anarchy, it can be a gradual process. If nothing better, we can let the politicians fail to get anything done and go further that way than if they all got along.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

–Lyndon B. Johnson

29

Freedom - I’m not sure one way or the other. A number of us, in various debates with Lib, have been trying to pin him down on that question, among others. My guess is that we can’t assume that, but I’m not positive.

30

Huh? I’m not sure I follow this.

After the stock market crash in October 1929, the government didn’t intervene to any significant extent, and we didn’t ‘get over it.’ Black Monday was just the opening gun to a wider, deeper economic collapse. If that one day’s market drop had been the whole story, it would have been no different from the 500-point drop in the market in 1987: a momentary aberration. It was the three years of continued economic collapse that paved the way for Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

I’m not sure what your point is about dust bowls, except to indicate the potential hazards of untrammelled market forces for the very land we depend on.

31

Libertarianism shares with Marxism (yes, it does! It shares something with Marxism!) the rather silly notion that “ownership” of land and negotiable resources such as money (or anything else, for that matter) is an empirical fact rather than the result of a matrix of shared understandings and agreements. The Marxist says: “The capitalist has appropriated the labors of the working class and ends up owning the fruits of those labors. The social issue that underlies all others is distribution of property”. The Libertarian says: “The government has interjected itself into the private affairs of the person and his authority to control his property. The social issue that underlies all others is the authority to decide for one’s self and for one’s property”.

Bullshit.

Except for those things that you are capable of carring around in your hands or otherwise occupying personally and physically at all times, you only “own” what the rest of us agree you own, as part of a sort of social contract that is in a perpetual state of renegotiation.

Below (and more fundamental than) the level of property and ownership is the issue of power and coercion, the extent to which one’s behaviors are or are not restricted by some formal system in which actual force may be used against you to enforce such notions as property. The Marxist is justly criticized for being oblivious to the fact that the party leaders in a centralized “Govermnent of the People” possess so much power that an equitable or inequitable distribution of property is largely irrelevant (the power to make the decisions being the most desirable property). The Libertarian is justly criticized for being oblivious to the fact that establishing and maintaining a police force to protect the property of individuals is as much of an intervention in individual affairs as a new law that takes away your 14 acre farm because it could be used as a source of minerals for the state.

Not that power, instead, is the bottom line. It isn’t. Power itself, except, again, in the limited context where the behavior of one person is physically restricted by the immediate intervention of another, isn’t an objective reality, either, but is, again, something that exists as a social construct in a state of ongoing renegotiation.

It is Communication – the interface through which these renegotiations take place – that is the final and ultimate level where social definition takes place. If I am a part of a communications network in which I have as good an access to other people as anyone else, and I am able, as a result of communicating with them, to convince them that I should live on 14 acres of land upstate, then that is where I shall live, with their participation in the establishment of that fact. And unlike systems of economic redistribution or systems that enshrine the dictates of the market economy, I am unlikely to acquire or retain my 14 acres in a fashion that others would find unjust.

Disable Similes in this Post

32

I agree with your concept of ownership, A3, and reject the poster Lib’s view that the right to property comes from God or nature, as he puts it. The poster Rousseau stated what could be my view very well, in the “Civil Criminals” thread.
Rousseau:

You could substitute “my own property” for “free speech” in the above quote.

One point, though: you say that ownership as an empirical fact is a libertarian idea. While most libertarians agree, there are those that don’t. Jan Narveson, for one. A couple of quotes from his works:

33

Freedom wrote:

Ah, then there is a central government. (At least under Freedom’s construct.) Then in an economic crisis, as described in the OP, what is to prevent the citizenry from electing a central government which promises to regulate businesses and impose progressive taxation?

You can’t have it both ways. Either there is a central government (in which case politicians with non-libertarian principles could get elected), or there is no central government, and you wind up with warring tribes. Either way, your libertarian system isn’t going work the way you hope, and it isn’t going last long.

34

What do you mean that the government did not have a wide level of intervention during the Great Depression? The were literally hundreds of government bail-out programs that intended to give money to build things that there was not sufficient market value to do so such as the Labor Corps of Engineers and the creation of hundreds of other jobs.

Spoke, like anything, Libertarianism is not absolute and there is not simply a toggle switch for Libertarian/Communist. There are steps in between and as long as we are closer to Libertarianism (we are still relatively free to express ourselves and commit economic transactions as we wish) than communism yet we retain military protection, basic laws such as homicide laws, and concepts such as contract law, we will continue to be prosperous.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

–Lyndon B. Johnson

35

Threemae wrote:

[quote]
Spoke, like anything, Libertarianism is not absolute…**

Try telling that to the average libertarian. It’s precisely because libertarians do insist, fanatically, that they are absolutely right, that there are no gray areas, and that anybody who says otherwise is heading down the road to communism, that I felt compelled to start this thread.

Libertarians just need to look a little more closely at the vision they are espousing. Do the thought experiment suggested by this thread. Take libertarianism to its logical conclusion, and see what happens. Nothing good.

My own view is this: We Americans are now living in the most properous society in the history of the planet, at the very pinnacle of our nation’s success. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Do Libertarians really want to scrap a system that has produced this amazing outcome??? Why, in God’s name???

Too much government can be a bad thing, yes, but too little government is just as bad, or worse. (We’ve tried it. We know it doesn’t work. That’s how we got the laws and regulations in the first place.)

We can and should debate reasonably over particular governmental interventions, and decide as as nation whether those particular interventions are good ideas. But scrap the whole system??? It would be utter lunacy!!!

36

By the way, I didn’t mean for the last post to seem jingoistic. Obviously, not just Americans are prospering right now. It’s just that most (or all?) of the libertarian posters on this board are American, and I just want them to think about whether there is really any good reason to scrap the current American model.

37

Spoke, do you have a cite on the claim that most libertarians are radicals and wish to completely abolish government? The libertarian organization with which I am most closely related, the Cato Institute, www.cato.org sells tapes of luches, jogs, nad drives with many high government officials such as Alan Greenspan, and William Rehnquist. These are rational discussions about libertarianism like two libertarian-friends might have over lunch, while driving, or while jogging together.

On the issue of Americas prosperity, we are prosperous because we are more free than we are controlled. The government only takes about 20% of our GDP; regardless of whether this is indeed higher than it needs to be, it is far from communism or even socialism.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

–Lyndon B. Johnson

38

I only know what I see. You and your fellow “moderate libertarians” should get together and form a softball team. (Though you might be a couple of players short.) :wink:

Tell me: what do the libertarians espouse, if not the elimination of all but a skeletal government? I’m sure there are many libertarians who recognize that this is a quixotic quest, and have compromised on this goal, and I suppose you would call these libertarians “moderates”. But the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism is inimical to our system, as I have tried to show in my OP.

The credibility of your arguments is undercut by your usage of oxymorons. :wink:

39

Sorry, threemae, I interpreted your post to be saying that things weren’t so bad until the New Deal; that we’d ‘gotten over’ Black Monday, and everything was basically OK until Roosevelt took office. So I was addressing the period between the October 1929 stock market crash and the 1932 election.

My apologies if I misunderstood you.

Thanks for being willing to concede that much. Those of us who have taken a position counter to libertarianism over the past four months are used to having that situation termed ‘tyrannical.’ On the whole, ‘moderate libertarians’ (another oxymoron? ;)) have been drowned out here of late. Welcome to the discussion - I’ll probably disagree with you a great deal, but at least I may have the sense that we’re in the same universe. :slight_smile:

Enough of voting for the lesser of evils - vote Cthulhu 2000!

40

RTF- On this whole same universe thing, I do agree that we DO NEED some governent, I simply think that the percentage of our GDP it should eat up should be closer to Hong Kong’s 6-7% instead of 20%. We absolutely do need government to do things like operate our courts fairly and check the government. I think that our current Supreme Court does a good job of this. William Rehnquist is opposed to judicial activism and takes a relatively conservative view of the constitution. Our government should also protect us from foreign dangers such as invading Canadians (it is the largest unpatroled border in the world) or making sure that contracts are abided by. Imagine the world of business if you could not trust your patron and you had to do things like in kindergarden; you put both things in the middle of the table holding both objects, “we let go on the count of three, okay?” And then the class bully sweeps down and takes bothe the a animal crackers and milk that you were trading from your lunch… it just sucks.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

–Lyndon B. Johnson