In browsing Libertarianism in wikiit seems kind of an impractical paradigm for societal organization given the basic nature of man. Granted It might have some purchase as a social compact if you had a society mainly comprised of a highly motivated and well educated population, but it seems hopelessly naive with respect the realities of what governments and societies must do to function efficiently and survive.
Why does it persist as a popular notion in the light of this crippling defect?
You’re going to have to elaborate on that if you want a debate. I think pure anarcho-capitalism is unworkable and a stupid idea, but I am a minarchist: I think that the government should ideally provide only law & order (including laws against violence against others, laws protecting property (including pollution of it), and enforcing contract law, etc.) and national defense.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Ummm … because people disagree with you?
I consider myself more-or-less libertarian, and I’d argue that the United States was basically libertarian for the first ~100-150 years of its existence. There have been plenty cases of places under nominal rule that were de facto “libertarianships” – colonial Hong Kong being the most famous.
Estonia is currently governed by a professedly libertarian party. I’ve also heard Chile and New Zealand described as having adopted elements of libertarianism.
But also consider that increasing govt social programs helps to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of creating citizens who are not “highly motivated” which then conveniently proves your point. It’s difficult to take “basic nature of man” as a baseline for discussion when that baseline may be altered or distorted.
It’s easy to practice social engineering on any population to make them dependent on an “outside” entity for a rewarding life. History has shown this pattern repeatedly.
Has’t the past 8 years been enough! I mean, the idiotic “war on drugs”-has caused thousands of deaths in Mexico and Columbia-corrupted the police and local politicians. The same with the “war on terror”-the net result is another useless Federal bureaucracy.
I would argue that a true libertarian philosophy would solve a lot of problems, and reduce the enormous tax burden on us.
f course, it ain’t gonna happen-the existing government and legal industry likes things the way they are.
People don’t want freedom.
They want safety.
Whether or not you believe Benjamin Franklin on the issue of giving up freedom for safety, the sad fact of the matter is that pretty much everyone in today’s society would.
There simply isn’t enough popular support. People like the generic idea of freedom, but they also want the portion that they suckle off of the government teat.
The federal government has ballooned to the point where almost everyone has his hands in the cookie jar. People want limited government, and no wasteful spending, but the small piece that THEY get, they don’t consider it wasteful at all. In fact they consider it vital.
So what happens is that nothing ever gets done. In a world with trillion dollar deficits and trillion dollar stimulus packages, it is naive at best to think that we will return to the world of 1810 where the federal government only does a handful of enumerated things…
You’ve pretty much defined libertarianism as I know it. You just changed the name.
I think that as long as people can vote to take property away from others with impunity, libertarianism won’t become mainstream. The rewards are too attractive – why should I work if I can force you to do it for me?
Trading freedom for safety is not in conflict with Libertarian philosophy. The use of government for defense and protection of basic personal and property rights is a core tenet.
It’s when ‘safety’ starts to get thrown around in other areas that conflicts arise. Safety from a defective consumer product. Safety from job loss at a unionized plant. Safety from a fraudulent businessman stealing your money. Safety from an insurance company selling you a product you don’t understand. Safety from unfair cheap textile imports, that benefit millions of consumers, but provide a competitive threat to a textile plant owner in a certain Congressman’s district.
And I’m not sure I disagree with you that the majority of the public is willing to trade freedom for ‘safety’, even when safety is defined as the issues in the above paragraph.
There is a disheartening, knee-jerk reaction and clamor for the government to ‘do something’ whenever something unfortunate happens, somewhere, to someone. And not enough debate and clear-headedness to see that the government cannot make things better, cannot provide the ‘safety’ its citizens deserve, cannot create wealth, jobs and improved living standards.
And that by ‘doing something’ the Law of Unintended Consequences will kick in, and destroy value and freedom somewhere else to a far greater degree, and that particular slice of freedom will rarely - if ever - come back because you have now created a government bureaucracy that has no incentive to perform well, has no real accountability to its customers if doesn’t deliver, and has every reason to ask for a bigger and bigger budget every year to perpetuate itself.
But unfortunately, by then, it is usually too late. Power that resided in the citizens’ hands, to make decisions for themselves with their own resources, has been transferred to the government. And it ain’t coming back.
I know quite a few people like myself that would characterize themselves as ‘wishy-washy’ libertartians. That is, they don’t go all the way to the hard-core Ayn Rand-type government base of common defense, a judicial system, and protection of property rights. Their additions to the basic platform look something like:
Energy security and the reduction of our dependence on fossil-fuel imports is an essential national priority. A carbon tax, or a flat tax on retail sales of gasoline and diesel, is the best way to achieve this. Nuclear power is also a helpful lever to pull. It might even put a dent in the whole global warming thing.
The education of our citizens is essential for continued growth, prosperity and we are willing to support investments (usually in the way of vouchers, and not delivered by pubic-sector unions) for education.
Rare, but catastrophic loss from events such as cancer can be devastating to entire families and that some sort of subsidy for the working poor, to purchase insurance against such events, is necessary.
With 1-2 others on the fringe that I support, but some of my colleagues don’t, and that provide good grist for debate around the coffeehouse.
There can be enormous transaction costs associated with start-up of huge infrastructure projects (bridges, highways, rail lines) that only the government can overcome with any reasonable effort. But that should be immediately put out to bid for private ownership afterwards to get them off the government books, and to provide price signals as to what the projects are actually worth.
There are a few precious jewels in our National Park system that need to be protected, because if you screw them up, they ain’t coming back. You can’t re-order them.
But that’s about it. No FDA. No Dept of Education. No Dept of Labor. No Export-Import Bank. No state insurance commissioners. No Dept of Energy. No Social Security. No Medicare. No Bridges to Nowhere (unless a private company was willing to buy it upon completion, as discussed above).
Items 1-5 might seem like a lot of ‘extras’, and a big departure from standard libertarian philosophy. That’s OK. That’s why I like debating them.
But after stripping out national defense, it’s still about 97% less government than we have today. At both the federal and state levels. The amount of government is so far less than what we have today that I don’t even bother getting into idealogical arguments with other libertarians about whether my level is right or wrong, or their’s is too much or too little.
I would prefer to be pragmatic and just start to get going on reducing the amount of government in our lives. Unfortunately, we as a country seem to be rushing headlong in the other direction, with dispatch.
People who aren’t safe aren’t free. Fear, after all, is as bad as slavery.
And people who aren’t free certainly aren’t safe.
Which means that one must balance freedom and safety in order to safeguard both.
I would rather be a victim to a state with too many freedoms than a slave to a state with too few.
It’s dependence upon ethereal, abstract, not-reality-based “principles” such as seen in the last few posts that hamper the acceptance of a prescriptive ideology, no?
Libertarianism will always have support among these groups, but no more:
The problem is that some libertarians feel disconnected from the government. It’s a democracy; we are the government. So instead of looking at the government as some seperate body that is trying to enslave them they should look at it as a tool they can use to protect themselves from being enslaved.
Look at how genuine slavery worked. The slaves weren’t owned by the United States or Virginia or Alabama. They were owned by other people. It was people that took away the freedom of other people. And it was government action that set them free.
Prezackly. The very basis of libertarianism denies the existence and importance of community, defining human interactions with other humans in solely economic and power terms. The very idea of *collective *action and responsibility, of a community that means more than a collection of individuals, is antithetical to the ideology. Other people are either mere abstractions or outright enemies, whose very interactions with us constitute “coercion” of some kind, or even “enslavement”.
No wonder that attitude has never caught on. It’s too silly.
But don’t stop there with your analysis… keep going…
When the govt enslaves its citizens, what higher power greater than that govt sets the people free? Intergalactic supreme aliens arriving by spaceship to liberate everyone? A religious Messiah on judgment day? A cosmic asteroid collision to render govt structure useless?
Or would it be the more earthly cycle of govt expanding into a monster that eventually fails to “feed” its own citizens – which spurs a revolution.
In a democracy, the govt is the citizens. Scroll up.
There is a difference between forced collective and/or artificial collective organization decreed by government. Humans since the dawn of man have been cooperating and collaborating collectively since the dawn of man and didn’t require a flag of libertarianism, capitalism, socialism, communism, etc to do so.
How can a government that is controlled by the people enslave the people? You can’t enslave yourself.