# Will Libertarianism ever be more than a fringe movement? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 11, 2009, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776 "2009-01-11T07:10:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 17
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2009, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/321 "2009-01-16T22:58:56Z")
Why invoke thalidomide? What happens when some idiot decides to save a buck and use Cheapo Brand MagicCure for his tuberculosis instead of that expensive FDA-approved medicine? He’ll infect a bunch of people before he himself pays the ultimate price for his poor decison. The point is that most decisons people make don’t just affect them. They may be the person most affected by their decisions but a lot of other people are as well. ---
**Author:** ![IdahoMauleMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/71c47a/32.png) [@IdahoMauleMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IdahoMauleMan)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/322 "2009-01-17T00:48:56Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > **IdahoMauleMan** -what about the case of the [thalidomide children](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide)? In that instance, it wasn’t the the one taking the drug who had to live with the consequences-but an innocent “bystander”, let’s say. In this case, YOUR choice to take a drug could affect someone else. (Well, had you been a woman) > > Thanks to the FDA, only 17 children in the US were affected, compared to aprox. 10,000 in Europe and Africa, due to inadequate testing. > > What about those who have to make choices for others-children, the mentally disabled, the elderly (who are unable to care for themselves anymore, etc). You’re right. The government should step in and decide what prospective parents should do for the benefit of as-yet born children. Like outlawing abortion. And preventing same-sex marriage and adoption of children by non-heterosexual couples. And outlawing alcohol and tobacco consumption for pregnant women. And demanding (backed by force of law, of course) that pregnant women eat healthy fruits and vegetables, avoid McDonalds, get plenty of sleep each night, and do yoga for 90 minutes each day. I’m glad you brought that up. It was an oversight on my part. Good catch. ---
**Author:** ![IdahoMauleMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/71c47a/32.png) [@IdahoMauleMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IdahoMauleMan)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/323 "2009-01-17T01:02:56Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > **IdahoMauleMan** -what about the case of the [thalidomide children](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide)? In that instance, it wasn’t the the one taking the drug who had to live with the consequences-but an innocent “bystander”, let’s say. In this case, YOUR choice to take a drug could affect someone else. (Well, had you been a woman) > > Thanks to the FDA, only 17 children in the US were affected, compared to aprox. 10,000 in Europe and Africa, due to inadequate testing. > > What about those who have to make choices for others-children, the mentally disabled, the elderly (who are unable to care for themselves anymore, etc). Sorry. I couldn’t help being a bit of a smart-ass when you asked a perfectly legitimate question. It’s from being inundated with the metric ton of ridiculous strawmen from all the other posters. Sounds like the FDA did a pretty damn good job there. That is exactly the sort of info that might cause me to select them as my drug approver, if I’m a pregnant woman and considering an ‘FDA approved drug’ vs ‘Joe Schmoes approved drug’, or no approval at all. Wonderful. So what are we waiting for? Let’s spin off the FDA as an independent entity, eliminate the mandatory testing requirements they now impose on companies, and invite competition. You can select their approved drugs if you wish. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/324 "2009-01-17T04:40:58Z")
> [@](#): > > You’re right. The government should step in and decide what prospective parents should do for the benefit of as-yet born children. No, they shouldn’t. See how easy it is to stop the government? Unless you can convince a hundred million other people to agree with you, the government is not going to tell prospective parents how to act. The government is not irrational because the people as a whole are not irrational. Sure there are a few nutcases out there but the majority of us keep them in line - that’s how democracy works. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/325 "2009-01-17T04:46:13Z")
Actually, there’s a much better answer to the FDA’s problems - simply get rid of the ‘efficacy’ requirements established in 1962. They do more than anything to add to the length of trials and drive up costs. Everyone here has been talking about the FDA’s effect on drug safety. Fine. Let’s keep the safety testing. But why should we have them test for efficacy? That’s a much harder standard to prove, takes much more time, and no one will die if they don’t do this. And in fact, they don’t really do it anyway, so it’s almost pointless. Details to follow. I’m going to start a separate thread specific to the FDA. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/326 "2009-01-17T05:21:00Z")
Seeing as we’ve gotten on to medical issues, what are the Libertarian views on these issues. One I’ve already mentioned. A person has tuberculosis (or some other readily contagious but treatable disease). What would be the policy on this in Libertopia? Would he be required to take medicine to treat his disease? Would he be allowed to refuse treatment? If he refused to treat his disease would he be allowed to interact with the general public? Would he have to take the medicine that the doctors determined was the best treatment or could he follow his own medical regime? Suppose he claimed that beer was all he needed to treat his disease? The second issue is antibiotics. I’m sure most of you know that antibiotics lose their effectiveness over time - as germs are exposed to them they develop a resistance. So widespread antibiotic use (much of it unwarranted by health need) creates stronger diseases. What would be the policy on antibiotics in Libertopia? Would anyone who wanted them be able to purchase and use them? Or would their use be regulated and restricted? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/327 "2009-01-17T05:28:48Z")
> [@IdahoMauleMan](#): > > Sounds like the FDA did a pretty damn good job there. That is exactly the sort of info that might cause me to select them as my drug approver, if I’m a pregnant woman and considering an ‘FDA approved drug’ vs ‘Joe Schmoes approved drug’, or no approval at all. > > Wonderful. So what are we waiting for? Let’s spin off the FDA as an independent entity, eliminate the mandatory testing requirements they now impose on companies, and invite competition. You can select their approved drugs if you wish. Which would, of course, injure and kill millions with the resulting flood of untested drugs, and turn the FDA into something quite unlike itself. Something much less reliable. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/328 "2009-01-17T08:54:52Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Regulations and laws make it more expensive for _everyone_ to operate. Which raises prices and reduces the purchasing power of individuals. Since price correlates to quality, it can ultimately mean less aggregate quality for the population. For example, regulations to improve the safety of cars have driven up the price and weight of cars. The greater weight of these cars decreased gas mileage, which required even more expensive technology to overcome. This has kept more people on the margin in older vehicles which are far less safe and more polluting. In this case, it’s precisely the outliers who are being hurt, so the middle class can feel safer. In the short term, absolutely. But ten cents a pound more for safe beef might save a lot of money in hospital bills. Plus, requirements drive innovation. Saturns don’t have metal skin, they have plastic skin, are fairly light, and have instead a very good frame for safety. I know this, because it saved my wife’s life when some fool ran a red light and rammed into the driver side door. We hear so much that companies just can’t do it, can’t make profitable products that meet regulations. I have more faith in private enterprise than that. Again and again someone comes up with a solution that both saves money and lives. Lots of big businesses are inherently conservative, and need a push, especially when there are high barriers to entry. > [@](#): > > It does, huh? I take it then that your assertion is that all the quality products I see around me only have quality because of government regulation? If ‘my system’ is thrown right out the window, what’s left? Are you even trying to understand what I’m saying? You say you teach Six Sigma, so surely you understand the concept of outliers. Saying that government screens outliers is not the same as saying government creates quality. You can’t test in quality, but you can keep bad stuff from getting out. > [@](#): > > What a typically glib, clueless liberal statement. “Oh, we care more about safety than we do the profits of companies.” How nice for you. Except that those companies are making their profit despite the average $200 million it costs to put a drug through FDA trials. Guess who’s paying for it? You don’t suppose it would be your Aunt Edna, who’s trying to buy drugs from Canada or settling on the latest ‘herbal’ drug because the proper drugs cost $100/week? Perhaps Edna would have gladly traded a slight increase in risk in exchange for only paying $20/week. But we’ll never know, will we? That information dies when the nice people from the FDA refuse to let the market decide how much it is willing to pay for drug safety. So, how much is a life worth to you? Before you test, you don’t know if your wonder drug will give you a headache or a heart attack, will you? Are you ready to guarantee Aunt Edna that her cheaper drug won’t hurt her? Just like with phones, today people assume their drugs are safe. Buying a bad phone is an inconvenience, buying a bad drug is slightly worse. In the US, due to a stupid (Democratic) senator, supplements are unregulated. Homeopathic remedies are doing a thriving business. If your educated consumer actually checked even Uncle Cecil, this water wouldn’t sell a bit. You think people are going to check real drugs more carefully? And thank you for admitting that liberals want to keep innocent patients from dangerous drugs. > [@](#): > > And of course, the skyrocketing cost of drugs is yet another reason for statists to demand even more government control. So now we’re going to have government-run health care. This would be a perfect illustration of Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’. Oh you from Socialist Canada, warning us of your pain. We’re so lucky that we’re protected from such socialist policies as allowing the government to negotiate prices with drug companies. Oh, the pain. > [@](#): > > And money isn’t always the issue. If a new drug can save 50,000 lives per year, but it’s held up in FDA trials for 10 years, that’s 500,000 lives lost. Risk aversion can cost lives. Maybe it would have been much better to accept a 10% increase in side-effect risks in exchange for getting the drug out five years earlier. But the FDA is risk-averse, and its incentives are different than those of sick people. I’ve already brought this up as a place where there are legitimate tradeoffs to be made. That’s balancing life against life, not life against dollars. I’m in favor of terminal patients being allowed access to unapproved drugs, by the way. > [@](#): > > Where do you get this from? I filed two patents in the last year, and you’d better believe that my company’s lawyers made sure that patent searches were done. In fact, I had to document my own patent searches before legal would even accept my filing for their review. Then they did their own patent searches. Do you know why? Because it’s really damned expensive to spend 50 million dollars on a product, only to find you’ve infringed on someone else’s patent. Ask RiM how their Blackberry patents worked out for them. I’m not talking about filing patents, I’m talking about designing something that might be covered by someone else’s patents. In the US, in any case, the patent office gets funded from fees, and have been pushing patents through. My first two patents, about 15 years ago, both had prior work identified by the examiner which had to be addressed. So did everyone in my group who filed a patent. My last two patents, in the past five years, sailed through without a response. You can see why there is justification for a law saying that knowing infringement is worse than inadvertent infringement. Given that, isn’t the policy of making sure you don’t know reasonable? After all, your average engineer isn’t good at identifying whether or not they infringe, and so if they find patents that might cover their new design, they might spend a lot of time trying to design around it. > [@](#): > > As for intentionally not doing research to avoid uncovering negative facts… Liability lawyers LOVE companies who do this. Those are the companies that pay not just damages, but huge punitive damages when juries learn what they tried to pull. But how much testing to do? No matter how much you can do, some lawyer can accuse you of not doing enough. Are companies going to do as much testing as the FDA requires in any case? If not, can you prove the FDA is requiring too much? Maybe if no drugs fail. In any case, the possibility of law suits didn’t stop the Pinto from getting out. In any case, the CEO is going to lose a bonus or get fired from not being competitive with company B that cuts back on testing. Getting sued is bad, but it isn’t coming from his pocket. You doubt that he’d be able to get expert advice that additional testing wasn’t necessary? We’d start, no doubt, with a little cut back, and it would accelerate as people got away with it. Just like how the level of risk CEOs accepted increased on Wall Street. > [@](#): > > I sit in meetings all the time where new products are discussed, and I’ve been involved in new products from conception to completion. I have NEVER heard anything remotely like what you’re claiming. What I DO hear all the time is that we have to stay focused on quality, that we have to make sure that we’re legal, that we always do due diligence, and that any safety concerns must always be elevated up the food chain. We have anonymous reporting practices for those who are afraid that their careers will be hurt by reporting this stuff. > > We also have to take annual recurrent training on legal obligations, on how we must never do things like delete e-mails once a regulatory review has been called, etc. I have no doubt that your company does this. But, haven’t you ever seen anyone waive a test requirement when the impact was small and the delay great? Especially if a competitor was breathing down your neck? Jack Tramiel sent out the first batch of Commodore 64s with a known defect, and made a fortune by being first to market. (Source - a friend of mine who was a Commodore VP at the time.) No prob - they weren’t being used in life critical situations. But quality does get traded off all the time. > [@](#): > > And what happened to them again? How many billions did they get sued for? Sure, the government finally won after decades upon decades of the cigarette companies winning every case and making tons of money. You think a CEO in 1965 thinks he made the wrong decision? During his term they didn’t pay a penny. How long would a tobacco CEO who said he wasn’t going to sell harmful product last? > [@](#): > > How would you know? What evidence do you have that the FDA approval process represents the best cost/benefit tradeoff, both in terms of money and overall lives saved? How do you balance off the skyrocketing price of drugs against drug safety? What makes you think we wouldn’t be better off with a more flexible regulatory scheme and drugs that cost half as much, even if drugs were, on balance, slightly riskier? [This article](http://pharmalicensing.com/public/articles/view/1080562872_406814b87105d) notes that 30% of drug company revenues go to marketing while 17-20% go to R&D. I suspect that clinical trials are a small part of that (another site said marketing cost $30 billion a year, which would make all R&D cost $17 billion.) Some of the costs of clinical trials would have to be done, FDA or no. (I’d hope!) Trials obviously can’t be rushed either, which is a lot of the cost. I saw another site that said 75% of the cost of trials is tax deductible, which seems fair to me. So, it doesn’t look like FDA approval is much responsible for high drug costs. I’ve seen some data that says your value for the cost of approval isn’t far off. If 30% of that is over what the company would have done anyway, that is $60 million a drug, which is chicken feed. If you have data supporting your contentions rather than assertions, you are welcome to present it. > [@](#): > > No, actually it doesn’t. The complexity of the tax code generally comes from years of congressional wheeling and dealing and repeated attempts to use the tax code to influence behavior and distort the market. No Sam, congressmen don’t wake up and say to their spouses “I’m going to the Hill to distort the market today.” The intentions of lots of them are good - probably the intentions of all the ones not written by lobbyists are good. Some are useful, some aren’t. The tax code definitely does influence behavior, but it will no matter how you write it. Put in a fair tax? You’ll create a black market. Put in an R&D tax credit. You get more R&D. Let’s at least influence it in ways the majority of people want to see happen. > [@](#): > > That’s not what I meant at all. What I meant was that the government has no way of knowing what other products and services would have been created had the money not been taxed out of the economy and redirected to government programs. It is not possible to know, because the information doesn’t even exist unless the money is left in the economy. Sure, and we have no way of knowing if a policy that saved a life saved one that will really change things in the future. You can say the same thing anytime a corporate budget gets cut also. Really good ideas will happen anyhow, marginal ones may not. > [@](#): > > You can’t balance ‘aggregate economic loss’ if you don’t know what it is. I rather suspect there are models of this that economists use. We can’t forecast benefits accurately either. It’s a judgment call, like anything else. > [@](#): > > Well, that’s turning the argument on its head. You’re saying that we need government to take our money and give it to others because it’s in a better position to know where that money should be better spent? Need I point out that the government doesn’t know whether the student needs it more than I do either. In fact, it doesn’t know anything about _either_ of us. How is it supposed to make a rational decision, exactly? We do know how much extra money a college grad makes over his or her lifetime. Assuming we’re funding a student who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend college (through subsidized loans say) we can compute extra tax revenue we’ll get, and see, no doubt, that it is a good investment. I’ve filled out lots of FAFSA forms for my kids, and I can confidently say that the government knows quite a bit about us. Sure the money for investment comes from somewhere, but in a democracy it is okay to say that Warren Buffett can afford to pay a little more for this investment - and that it probably yields higher too. We’d need to add the benefits of a better educated workforce also. > [@](#): > > What makes you think war and disasters distort the market? All they do is change supply and demand. Government should _most especially_ stay out of price fixing during times of disaster, because that’s the one time when you really, really don’t want hoarding and shortages, and price controls are bound to create both. I never realized that war profiteers were heroes to you. My apologies. > [@](#): > > So you think price controls are good in ‘health threatening’ situations? Do you realize that price controls generally cause shortages? Is that what you want when the product saves lives? Say a company can make a sandbag for $1, and the river is about to flood. Would there be a shortage if we required them to sell it for $2 rather then the $10 or $20 they could get from desperate people? [/quote] And I can think of nothing more destructive to the health insurance industry than imposing price controls on it. Health insurance has a definite market failure associated with it, but it’s one of information asymmetry, and price controls won’t solve that, and will in fact make the problem worse. [/quote] The health insurance industry requires far more extensive modification, and I agree that simple price controls would do nothing useful. I was using it as an area where government intervention would be warranted due to its critical nature, unlike the PC industry. And we’ve gone through this debate plenty of times already. > [@](#): > > Don’t carry the analogy too far. But if we’re going to, let’s not forget that this system is adaptive and has feedback loops so that bad units are quickly isolated and removed, and better than average units are given more power. Just trying to be realistic. And when these more powerful units suffer from silent data corruption, we’re really screwed, since their track record means that no one checks their results anymore. > [@](#): > > NOTHING like the FDA. If each unit is constantly checking other units, that’s more like a market. What would be more like the FDA would be if you had a central ‘unit checker’ that made each unit go offline and submit to a battery of tests, and if it passed, injecting it back into the system and telling every other unit that it’s good and to trust it implicitly and never do error correction or fault testing on it. You’d have a Western Electric 3B20 computer, the heart of the #5ESS switch, which did exactly that. Except for no fault testing - FDA approval doesn’t mean there is no followup. > [@](#): > > Then God help you if you initial testing missed a defect. FDA approved drugs sometimes have problems (a perfect test is too expensive) and they get caught. No initial test is perfect. > [@](#): > > Oh, that’s rich. I’m the one telling you that a modern economy is far to complex for a central authority to manage, and that information about our needs and capabilities is created through market transactions and not available to government, and that trying to control it is like trying to design an ecosystem by constantly tinkering with the balance of plants and animals in an attempt to ‘engineer’ a result that’s better than what millions of years of evolution managed to do through spontaneous order and without a grand designer. > > You, on the other hand, toss out old cliches about trading lives for profits and tell stories about how companies don’t research their own products so they don’t find out how bad they are, and then you accuse me of being simplistic. Amazing. There you go again, equating regulation with management. Everyone not a libertarian is a socialist. And there you go again, claiming that no one would do bad things that would destroy his company in the long run, when the investment banks did exactly that. I can just hear you (and Greenspan, so you’re in good company) say that market regulation is unnecessary because of this, and it hurts competition. No regulator forced banks to buy mortgage backed securities. None forced them to buy credit default swaps. None forced the mortgage brokers not covered by DCA to issue subprime mortgages. The meltdown is impossible under your model, but it happened. Maybe time to rethink the model. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/329 "2009-01-17T08:57:44Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Representative democracy doesn’t have the general population “running the country”; they just decide the general direction, not the details. Deciding what direction the country goes requires general knowledge; running the country requires the knowledge of a great many specialists in a great many fields doing a great many different things at the same time. No one person can know that much or pay attention to that many different things. And as we both know from living in California, when you start having the voters do the details, like the initiative process, you have a mess since they only look at the initiative in isolation, not as part of a bigger budget picture with tradeoffs between ways of spending money. ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 9:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/330 "2009-01-17T09:17:03Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Sure there are a few nutcases out there but the majority of us keep them in line - that’s how democracy works. Well, allow me to be the first to applaud you for the great job you are doing. If not for people like you, several states might have decided to ban same-sex marriage. And before that, you stopped the government from wasting billions of dollars by waging an unnecessary war on false pretenses. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 11:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/331 "2009-01-17T11:12:08Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > And as we both know from living in California, when you start having the voters do the details, like the initiative process, you have a mess since they only look at the initiative in isolation, not as part of a bigger budget picture with tradeoffs between ways of spending money. A good example. Normal people don’t have a staff or the legal & economic & whatnot education to analyze a prospective law, any more than they have a lab to test their food or drugs or insulation. That requires specialists and resources and time that a normal person just doesn’t have. The initiative process is a good example of why representative democracy is better than direct democracy. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/332 "2009-01-17T14:40:32Z")
In short, that is why “libertarianism” is always going to continue to be the fringe, even fruitcake ideology that it has always been, despite the attraction of Rand’s mind-porn to loners - it is not derived from or even compatible with the ways real people interact with each other. ---
**Author:** ![haymarketmartyr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/35a633/32.png) [@haymarketmartyr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/haymarketmartyr)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/333 "2009-01-17T14:51:16Z")
I must agree. Having posted on other boards like this for several years, and having discussed this with libertarians at length (sure wish I could get that time back to my life) it is obvious that the libertarians will remain a fringe movement and are more than comfortable as such. They have no plan to go beyond it. In fact, I suspect that the vast majority of libertarians are fully aware that their ideas are limited to discussions such as this and would never survive the harsh realities of the real world, with real people and real problems. I remember when I read “Atlas Shrugged” in college and was struck by the idea that Rand had to invent a world of her own to come up with all the various dynamics to make her message work. She could not even place her characters in a real USA with real laws and real problems. It all had to be created so her own ideas would then fit into the places she wanted them to fit. ---
**Author:** ![IdahoMauleMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/71c47a/32.png) [@IdahoMauleMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IdahoMauleMan)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/334 "2009-01-17T15:25:51Z")
> [@haymarketmartyr](#): > > I must agree. > > Having posted on other boards like this for several years, and having discussed this with libertarians at length (sure wish I could get that time back to my life) it is obvious that the libertarians will remain a fringe movement and are more than comfortable as such. They have no plan to go beyond it. In fact, I suspect that the vast majority of libertarians are fully aware that their ideas are limited to discussions such as this and would never survive the harsh realities of the real world, with real people and real problems. > > I remember when I read “Atlas Shrugged” in college and was struck by the idea that Rand had to invent a world of her own to come up with all the various dynamics to make her message work. She could not even place her characters in a real USA with real laws and real problems. It all had to be created so her own ideas would then fit into the places she wanted them to fit. You keep bringing up Ayn Rand…here, and in other threads like the Hong Kong and BB&T threads, as a crutch for your argument. I’m not sure why that is. I’ve never read ‘Atlas Shrugged’. I couldn’t care less what Ayn Rand says about this or that. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care about voting for the Libertarian party candidate, or the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate or whatever they want to call themselves. All I’m concerned about is the freedom to make my own choices, with my own money, and to try convince as many as my fellow citizens as possible not to disempower themselves and remove choices from their lives and hand them over to an unaccountable government bureaucrat. Since I went on my long, rambling polemic in post #230, I have seen absolutely nothing to dissuade me from my original hypothesis as to ‘Why Libertarianism will be nothing more than a fringe party?’. In fact, the posts in-between have only confirmed it. All of the posters have responded in very predictable ways, except for MichaelQReilly. He was gracious enough to indulge me for a little while in the canned-meat example and explain _why he would make his own choices_. Nobody else has done that. Although he squirted away a little bit at the end, by failing to show up for the Big Dance: accepting the consequences for his choices. Everybody else engages in something…anything…to avoid self-reflection on why they make choices or not. And the consequences of those choices. They attack me for non-existent claims of superiority, calling me ‘Superman’ or some such thing. They point out examples over here, or over there, about ‘What happens to those people?’ They concoct ridiculous strawmen. They respond to rational posts about business tradeoffs and decision-making with comebacks about evil villians who are out to get them. They trot out the Moral High Ground argument every now and then. They talk about ‘society’ and ‘stability’ and ‘us’ with large, conclusive sweeping waves of the hand, but rarely use the words ‘me’ and ‘I’ in their posts. And never a real bite on the most simplest of libertarian setups on the FDA question: 1. Do exactly as you do today by selecting the FDA 2. Or leave yourself open the option for another choice, should you want to The posters would prefer to permanently, irrevocably give away the right to Number 2 above. What other conclusion is there to draw? I’m open to hearing more arguments, but I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. You are afraid of taking responsibility for your own choices. You attack others and concoct ridiculous strawmen to try and avoid that fact, whether consciously or via your subconscious. I think that is the answer to the original OP. Because I think we have reached a tipping point where 51% of the voting populace is wired this way. Arizona recently had a referendum on this issue in the health-care arena that was fascinating to watch. You can read about it if you wish, but basically it boiled down to the 2-item choice above. And the people voted away item 2. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/335 "2009-01-17T15:46:15Z")
The martyr act doesn’t help either. ---
**Author:** ![haymarketmartyr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/35a633/32.png) [@haymarketmartyr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/haymarketmartyr)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/336 "2009-01-17T16:04:02Z")
Idaho … we all reach our destination by whatever path we want to take. At the end of post #230, you conclude that libertarianism will never be more than a fringe movement. In my posts I agree with you. It matters little to me that your line of reasoning is different than others here. The conclusion is all that is important in the end. I respect that Ayn Rand is not important to you. That is fine and I do not quibble with that. There are many libertarians who first came to the belief through Rand… and she is still considered an important person in the libertarian movement by many in it. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/337 "2009-01-17T17:16:47Z")
> [@](#): > > Well, allow me to be the first to applaud you for the great job you are doing. If not for people like you, several states might have decided to ban same-sex marriage. And before that, you stopped the government from wasting billions of dollars by waging an unnecessary war on false pretenses. Let me say - again - that real world politics are not perfect. (Only fantasy politics are perfect.) But if we had been Libertarian all along, we’d still have slaves and serfs and we’d probably be burning witches. Democracy is at least making progress. ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/338 "2009-01-17T17:29:24Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Let me say - again - that real world politics are not perfect. (Only fantasy politics are perfect.) Then please don’t claim that the nutcases are a minority that are being kept in line, if it isn’t actually true. > [@](#): > > But if we had been Libertarian all along, we’d still have slaves and serfs and we’d probably be burning witches. Democracy is at least making progress. Libertarians _do_ support laws against slavery and murder, believe it or not. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/339 "2009-01-17T20:58:44Z")
> [@Grumman](#): > > Then please don’t claim that the nutcases are a minority that are being kept in line, if it isn’t actually true. Compared to what would happen without government or under a libertarian regime, they are. > [@Grumman](#): > > Libertarians _do_ support laws against slavery and murder, believe it or not. No; they only support laws against specific techniques. The techniques that average people have access to. They have no problems with a rich man or corporation using economic coercion to force people into servitude, or starving them to death. And his point was clearly that if libertarianism had been in charge we’d STILL be doing such things; that libertarians would never have opposed them, that it was other sorts of people who did. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2009, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776/340 "2009-01-17T23:20:26Z")
> [@MichaelQReilly](#): > > Not really, because in his examples the purpose of the laws is to protect life, which pretty much everyone, including the Supreme Court, agrees is one of government’s most legitimate functions. Your examples, on the other hand, aren’t based on motivations nearly so sacrosanct. That, of course, is precisely my point. His examples fall within the range of government intervention permitted by libertarianism; mine do not. The problem is that he uses his examples in defense of unbounded majority rule, with wide-open latitude to make any old kind of “laws restricting or controlling what other people can do”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776.md?page=16) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-libertarianism-ever-be-more-than-a-fringe-movement/480776.md?page=18)