To be more precise, the United States of America has a representative democracy. The citizens are an inconvenient (but mathematically necessary) part of this govt structure.
Also, saying that “govt is the citizens” is absolutely correct regarding democratic political science theory… however in practice, this statement is meaningless when most of its citizens are illiterate to how the government actually functions.
Don’t think in theoretical terms of political science. A country can move along a certain trajectory regardless of any particular political science label it gave itself at a particular moment in time.
I’m guessing that Roman citizens were scratching their heads when the Roman Republic (rule by people) turned into the Roman Empire (rule by dictator). “WTF! I thought we were a republic?!?!? WTF happened?” Governments do not obey political science labels as if they were some immutable law of gravity.
Germany was also a democracy before Nazi Rule. (I’m well aware of Godwin’s Law but the German example is one that easily comes to mind for me.) When citizens are poor and hungry and want “safety”, they will gladly give up “democracy” for something “better” – political science be damned.
This is so ass-backwards it’s hard to know where to begin.
Really? The government sent slaves free? The same government that codified ‘all other persons in service’ and counted them as 60% of a person for census purposes at our country’s founding moment?
The same government that had Presidents as slave-owners?
The same government that enforced Jim Crow laws in the South?
It’s only when enough people, not the government, decided that the oppression of minorities was intolerable enough that they used the vehicle of federal government, the law, and it’s enforcement, to make changes. For the first 150 years or so of our country’s history enough people didn’t care. Or didn’t think that minorities were people with rights anyway, as defined and protected by the Constitution.
How do you think the ‘government’ (whomever or whatever that is) suddenly woke up one morning and decided to set people free?
The government is us, dude. Unless we are willing to give up that precious right, and disempower ourselves and toss over the keys for decision-making in our lives to unaccountable bureaucrats. Which we seem to be doing with increasing regularity.
Which touches on a point I was going to make: Libertarianism hasn’t caught on because however compelling a philisophical or political viewpoint, what’s its economic basis? As long the overwhelming majority of Americans are utterly dependent upon corporations and the government/finance system for their living, Libertarianism will remain a joke.
The example of Rome turning from a democracy to an empire for example: arguably, what happened was that the success of the wars of conquest undercut the yeoman farmer class that had been the backbone of the republic. Imported slaves let the upper class get richer while pushing the small farmer out of business, leaving a class of (in the orginal use of the term) proletariats who could either join the legions and become professional soliders (allowing the republic-cum-empire to expand even further), or go on the public dole. Both classes of which sold their support to whomever could promise them the best deal.
I don’t know what ‘utterly dependent’ on corporations means.
I agree that if government employment continues to expand at its present pace, at some point we will probably reach a tipping point (if we haven’t already) where enough of the voting public is disincentived to reduce government. Because it means most of them will be out of a job.
In the private sector, the % of unionized workers has dropped into the single digits. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but one only has to take a look at the most heavily unionized industries with the highest historical wages - steel, autos, airlines, fixed-line telecommunications, etc. - and marvel at the high-R2 correlation between heavy unionization and horrible global competitiveness. The heavily-unionized, capital-intensive industries are slowing strangling themselves and putting themselves out of business. And a tough economic shock like the one we’re going through now might put a stake in their heart for good.
The thriving, growing industries that pay good wages, particularly those in the knowledge and/or professional services sectors, don’t have a prayer of becoming unionized.
On the other hand, the % of government employees that are unionized is about 50%. Why do you think that is? What do you think the consequences of that will be? Is there a chance for the government to receive signals that its services are uncompetitive, cost too much and employ too much labor, and therefore need to be downsized? Why or why not?
I think that, as the Republican & Democratic parties do, Libertarianism can survive by changing its positions until it finds a “platform” that entices a large proportion of the public.
However, from what I hear from people calling themselves Libertarians, they’re too dogmatic at the current time to garner any realistic support.
IMO, it would make sense for the Libertarians to agree on a slightly larger set of things they’re willing to allow government to manage, based primarily on issues where the free market cannot or will not function in peoples’ best interests in an acceptable time frame. I’m happy to hear the some Libertarians might allow the government to provide “infrastructure” such as roads and bridges, as well as national defense, but that’s not far enough.
In areas such as health care and education, where the “free market” might take too long to achieve some sort of idealistic equilibrium, we’ll get several generations of uneducated, unemployable people until “market forces” result in a plausible system. As a childless person, I would like my tax dollars to help educate the younger generation, at least to the point where we don’t have roving gangs of uneducated people wandering the streets, looking for weaker people to rob because they have not had any (or sufficient) education to give them skills and education to have alternative, non-criminal occupations.
I think it’s obvious at this point that when a business exists only to maximize profits regardless of any other constraints, they’ll have (and sometimes succomb to) incredible motivation do things that will get them the most profits in as short a time as possible. Which might result in outcomes that the majority of the people would rather have their government try to prevent. Example: the entire world is circling around the toilet bowl, partially as a result of Alan Greenspan, who recently stated before Congress (paraphrased) that his entire perception of reality for his entire professional career had been wrong.
The problem with all these “free market” wet dreams of the Libertarians, is that many of the functions currently allocated to government might be better performed by the private sector in some idealized future, but we, being humans with limited life spans, need to have a road map to get us through the present reality to that better future. We can’t risk the sacrifice of a few generations by immediately having full-private education, because in less than a generation we might lose the critical mass to be able to provide education to a significant part of the population. Same with medical care. The effects of bad management (e.g., providing too little care in order to maximize profits) can only be observed over years of operation, when we can lose many lives and lose the critical mass to support the research needed to keep the human species viable.
So, in my opinion, the most vocal Libertarians tend to demonize all activities of the government, except for those for which they can’t provide sufficient arguments against. Face it, we’re still evolving as a culture, and for the past eighty years we’ve been experimenting with which activities we want to allocate to the government (which was defined by and exists for the service of we people). Sure, I think the government has no business providing set top converter boxes for the switch to digital TV, but I strongly believe we need government to manage the electromagnetic spectrum. Because managing that spectrum is useful to all of us, the same way traffic lights are.
A useful cite that should make you want to kill him:
I think it’s inconsistent and a little naive to be against all regulation, up until the time we have kids dying of chemicals in imported toys and people dying of e-coli and salmonella. Likewise, if you’ve previously been against regulations in the banking industry, your ass has just been saved by the socialist actions of GWB (and those which will naturally be continued by Obama). So, we people who think it’s okay for the government to have a larger role in safety, education, health, business regulation and research would appreciate it if the (sterotypical) libertarians STFU for the next few decades, because we’re paying taxes to bail you out.
I frequently get a kind of condescending vibe from libertarians that if people were just smarter and had a good work ethic, they could all pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But really, it sounds like a college sophomore having just read their first Ayn Rand. The view that all people are just economic units which can live or die to serve an imaginary ideal of self-sufficiency provided by a survival-of-the-fittest ideology is, frankly, quite ignorant of the real world we live in. We have smart, energetic entrepeneurs, but we also have a limited life span and a tendency to make decisions based on our immediate needs, without taking in a larger perspective about what will be good for society as a whole.
We need laws and regulations and taxes, because without them society will cease to function. We can agree or disagree on what should be on the list, but there absolutely is a list, and it’s being refined over and over as we learn more about how to create and maintain a functional society.
I, being quite the responsible person, have a lot of money in my 401K (less so in the past year, but that’s the result of my decisions), but I want Fidelity Investments to be regulated to the degree that I can count on the money being there in 15 years.
We are productive enough to desire the ability to provide charitable support for those less fortunate then ourselves. IMO this is not a required part of our government, but I think it’s appropriate for me to pay some taxes to provide for these people (subject to sensible policies). Knowing that there are lazy people who might abuse this aid is part of what I accept in order to support those truly in need, and I hope we can gradually adjust those policies until we get a system that maximizes utility (but that utility must also include costs and benefits far off into the future).
[personal anecdote]
My mother fraudulently received welfare when I was growing up, and apparently so did Obama’s (cite). I can’t prove a causal relationship, but I strongly believe my mother’s welfare fraud helped give me just enough of a trajectory to make it into college, and I’ve ended up being a person who pays a lot of taxes. In my family’s case, I believe the details of the AFDC guidelines when I was younger were not fully correct, at least for my family. I completely agree that welfare policies, probably focused in the 70s and 80s, were lax enough to have contributed in some way to some families having multiple generations depending on welfare, but I’d rather err on the side of giving the needy people the aid they need to survive. Let’s bitch about how (and whether or not) the government does things, not just kick it out of the picture entirely because it is inconsistent with a seemingly narcissistic philosophy which requires that its adherents deny the existence of the benefits they’ve received from our real less-than-perfect philosophy.
If you were born in North America in the past fifty years, I believe you’ve already received far more benefits than a purely Libertarian society would provide. It’s a good goal to have in the discussions, and we should try to limit the role of government as much as possible, but it must be modified to accommodate whatever level of humanity we want to have.
[/personal anecdote]
I basically agree with this. You can’t convert 300 million Americans into a country of Libertarians. Maybe over several later generations it could be done (or it would be forced on them because of government self-disintegration.)
Historically, it seems like the only opportunity for Libertarian-style thinking to really flex itself was the availability of new land (European Protestants sail to New World or early American settlers hitch their wagons west, etc). The freedom to move to a different physical space seems like a critical catalyst for Libertarian enthusiasm. Today unfortunately, the entire globe has been staked out and accounted for. There is no livable “uninhabited island” for Libertarians to go. Well, the British gave Israel to the Jews … maybe the United Nations can give New Zealand to the Libertarians?
If precious unclaimed land is gone, a replacement catalyst could be government’s tendency to eat itself to ruin. The government that the people so approvingly wanted will no longer be able to offer “safety” for its citizens when its treasury is drained.
Crap. Missed the edit window; sorry about at least two typos, and I’d like to change
to
…existence of the benefits they’ve received from our real less-than-perfect society.
ETA: I think we may need government regulation regarding the length of time we get before the edit window closes :).
In other words, a society full of poor, uneducated, unemployable, starving, sick people; living in the cold, in the dark. Desperate people in other words, who’ll be looking for something to save them - like the government.
The reason why libertarianism will never last in a democracy is that the hungry will vote for whomever promises them food. And the same for people with other needs. The people who want to strip away all these government services are the ones who never expect to need them. Libertarianism is the ideology of the spoiled and selfish.
In other words, nothing that actually makes us an enlightened Western democracy, then? The people with money count, fuck the common man? If you’re too ill-informed to know which food manufacturers are using melamine as filler, you’re not fit to live anyway?
When do we get to the discussion about toll roads? That’s always my favorite part.
You needn’t worry about Libertarians dismantling any social programs. The massive government entitlements+services will crumble to insolvency all by itself.
… and it’s also the ideology of last resort when government has become too corrupt to keep the promises it made. Everybody is actually a “closet” libertarian but they haven’t had their “coming out” party yet because government still looks like it’s running fine.
Not without the help of libertarianish types who want to run the economy and government into the ground as an excuse to dismantle those evil, evil social programs; “starving the beast” it’s called. And even then, they’ll just be reinstated as soon as the government & economy recover, unless a libertarian dictatorship is in power. And don’t give me the speech about how libertarians believe in freedom; they believe in absolute freedom for THEMSELVES, including the right to crush anyone who gets in their way. Perfectly compatible with a dictatorship, as long as they are the dictator or at least his flunky.
Garbage. If everyone was a libertarian society would eat itself; we’d be a failed state. Libertarianism only works for the predators.
And the “ideology of last resort” is “what will keep me alive”. Whatever ideology that may be; if the Communists offer a starving man food, then by Marx he’ll be a Communist. Libertarianism isn’t the ideology of the desperate; it’s the ideology of the privileged.
Yep. Looks like everybody’s entrenched into their respective positions. Let’s close up SDMB (or at least the GD subforum).
I vaguely remember reading a few years ago about plans to start some libertarian nation somewhere. How has that worked out? If libertarians could buy some island and organize a society based on libertarian principles and make it work they might earn more respect. Particularly if they could attract regular working people rather millionaires looking for a tax haven.
More practically countries, with proportional representation could see a libertarian party which attracts, say, 10% of the vote and wins a similar proportion of seats. If the libertarians could be part of a larger coalition they could exert influence of specific issues. I don’t know if there is a libertarian party in that kind of position in any major democracy.
I think the Internet will also help libertarians; clearly they are far more numerous online than in the real world. The Internet is becoming a major force in shaping public opinion and groups that are over-represented online will therefore become more influential. At the margins libertarians could have some influence on a few issues.
Realistically I doubt libertarians will ever come to power in a major democracy; their appeal is just too limited. However if they become more politically savvy and pick their issues they could gain more influence.
(re toll roads) The point of that was: If those people can’t come up with a plausible position even on something that straightforward, then actual *governing *is simply inconceivable.
And that’s not even bringing up the superintelligent giant squids…
I think the answer to the question is absolutely positively NO in letters 100 feet high carved from the most timeless marble with huge spotlights bathing it in light so that it can be seen from miles away.
Is that a clear answer?
So I guess its now “why”?
First of all, libertarianism is out of step with the vast majority of Americans. There are no polls of any kind that show it is beyond a fringe group. That is the single most important reason they go nowhere in the electoral power structure.
Second, in electoral politics, libertarians do not even get one-half of one percent of the popular vote for offices like President of the USA. And it matters not who the candidate of the party is. They elect no members of Congress, they control no government of any kind.
Third, it is the nature of the libertarian to be a purist about their beliefs and ideals. This runs completely counter to the ability to make political alliances based on compromises and mutual self interests. If you get five libertarians in a room you will probably get at least than many differing opinions… perhaps more because a few of them may change as the discussion evolves.
Fourth, libertarians tend to be the opposite of action oriented. They love to preach about their beliefs, values, philosophies and all type of cerebral trivia but that is as far as they go. They are as harmless politically as a castrated eunech in a whorehouse. They are terrible at grass roots organization which is necessary to actually put beliefs into achieved actions. They do nothing other than talk.
Fifth, there is not one person pushing the libertarian agenda that is a national figure with a national following that people can get behind. They have no Ralph Nader or Ross Perot or George Wallace to unite them and garner more followers outside of the usual True Believers.
Sixth, its all pie-in-the-sky theory and promises built on idealogical BS. They have no track record to show the people anything about their hopes and promises beyond rhetoric. People are not anxious to buy the proverbial pig in a poke especially with something as important as the government of the nation. They have nothing to point to in the real world to show the philosophy actually works on a day to day basis.
Seventh, to buy into libertarianism, you have to buy into a whole new way of thinking with a whole new set of beliefs, new defintions that change the meaning of traditional words and concepts and accept a whole new set of goals for yourself. They have no chance of winning anything so you have to adopt the mentality of the True Believer who will go to the grave accomplishing nothing outside of perhaps winning over a few converts. That appeals to very few people.
Is that enough?
Libertarianism is a philosophy. Minarchism is an implementation of that philosophy in the real world. Anarcho-capitalism is another, flawed in my opinion, implementation of that philosophy. Anarcho-capitalism is pure anarchy with a capitalist economy; minarchism recognizes that as long as people can use force over others, there can never be a capitalist economy, so the citizens agree to give up a little liberty to create an organization above them with a monopoly on force and to give everyone an equal share in this organization.
Der Trihs et al., what makes you think that private organizations can’t perform any of those functions, just because they can’t use arms to force people to comply? Consider an FDA like the organization that rates movies pr the ESRB: it’s totally voluntary, but no movie or game would sell if it refused to be rated. And saying libertarianism will never be viable as long as people can vote away others’ property is like communism will never be viable as long as people can vote in a capitalist government; it’s a complete strawman.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Ooooh - thans to Vox for reminding me of number Eight:
They way they argue really pisses people off. Their invocation of the Locical Fallacies as if they are debating at the Yale Logic Club in 1887 or something. Their beloved use of such socially endearing tactics as constantly telling you that you do not know how to intelligently discuss anything with them and simply do not know what you are talking about.
Sure fire ways to win friends and influence people.