Libertarians turn me off because they are just so strident and annoying. The policies can be sensible and well designed and based on actual data, but they are supported by such a crowd of self-righteous dicks that I have a hard time listening to ANY Libertarian talk.
But this article looks at an alternative to Trump and Clinton that - while maybe not viable - is based on skilled leaders, with admirable track records, who support policies that are supported by the vast majority of Americans.
Man... I wish I lived in a country where a third party was actually viable.
- Libertarians turn me off because they are just so strident and annoying. The policies can be sensible and well designed and based on actual data, but they are supported by such a crowd of self-righteous dicks that I have a hard time listening to ANY Libertarian talk.
Libertarianism is immoral and worrying, but put that aside and consider what you just said. Do not conflate beliefs with the people who hold them unless absolutely necessary.
- Do not conflate beliefs with the people who hold them
I don’t know why you would qualify this. People and ideas are different things. Disagreeing with a person instead of an idea is lazy and obligates you to start over whenever a different person repeats the idea. (Or you can take the expedient of pre-judging the entire class of people who share an idea.)
- Libertarianism is immoral
You’ll like this: suppose we say it represents a different kind of morality.
“People should fend for themselves” is not a cogent political philosophy, but if we are limited to sound bites, it is correct. What is the alternative, that people should not seek to advance their own interests? In practice, everyone fends for themselves.
Saying that people should look out for their own interests says nothing about what happens when some people inevitably make bad decisions or have bad luck or otherwise fall on hard times. When I consider my own selfish interests, one of them is that I live in a world where people do not go hungry in the midst of wealth, where people can practice their innate social and altruistic instincts, where predators are not a protected class. Most people who hear this will say “Sure, me too, but not everyone is altruistic!” If most people start by saying “me too,” that’s a good start.
Good for us. So, what stops me from feeding the homeless or hiring a foreigner? What stops the poor from finding affordable housing or making money braiding hair?
Outsourcing our interest in helping others to the government is like outsourcing our interest in being protected from foreign conquest. It works, somewhat, but with considerable costs. I think it is worth discussing the costs and benefits of possible alternatives.
The difficulty is that given a choice between helping yourself or helping others, you'll help yourself first and help others with what you're comfortable giving up. That number is nonzero for most people, but it's also the lesser of the two for most people.
Charity and altruism are real things that hold societies together, but without institutionalization they lead to tribalism and exclusion. Rush Limbaugh is reportedly an extravagant tipper - he'll happily give up large sums of money to people who bring him a meal. That's altruism in a way. But Rush Limbaugh would also happily abolish the government's ability to collect tax - in other words, Rush Limbaugh supports altruism for those he selects. It's like the whole faith-based initiative clusterfuck of the Bush administration - want food aid? go to fucking church, infidel.
In order for a society to be fair, diverse and egalitarian, charity and altruism has to be distributed to people we don't think should get the money because they reflect views and cultures other than our own. Rush Limbaugh is not going to support "welfare moms" but reducing poverty requires that welfare moms be supported. Leave it up to personal choice, and...
...well, the Saudis are big on charity.
- charity and altruism has to be distributed to people we don't think should get the money because they reflect views and cultures other than our own
I don't believe it was exclusively the black Roman Catholic community that contributed $3 billion in private donations to Haiti after the earthquake, and I don't think it is only Arab Muslims who are trying to help Syrians now.
You're better than that. C'mon, put your back into it.
- The United Nations said that in total $13.34 billion has been earmarked for the crisis through 2020, though two years after the quake, less than half of that amount had actually been released, according to U.N. documents. The U.S. government has allocated $4 billion; $3 billion has already been spent, and the rest is dedicated to longer-term projects.
There are very few people who will point to Haiti as a success story, but fewer who would say that they'd be in better shape with 1/4 of their aid. Because yeah. $3 billion. But yeah. Still only a quarter of the aid distributed to Haiti.
As far as Syria, the argument is that they've gotten little aid, primarily due to the complex and odious factionalism driving the civil war. Besides which, "Arab Muslims" are Wahabi while Syria is a brew of Sunni, Druze and Shia spread across Alawite, Twelver and Ismaili factions. You're making my point, not yours: Syria isn't getting aid because they're praying to Allah wrong but the problems in Syria are getting all sorts of money because they are.
Here is a tentative summary of the exchange about Haiti above, my side in italics:
- People spend more on themselves than they give to others.
- No disagreement.
- Charity won't reach everyone because people like Rush Limbaugh won't support the out-group.
- Here is evidence that people gave substantial charity to the out-group.
- That doesn't count because the charity did not completely solve the problems, and because government aid was larger than charity.
Is this a fair summary?
No.
Me: The world will be a tyrannical and biased place if aid is determined by the charity of individuals.
You: There was no tyranny in aid to Haiti. Also, look at all the aid people are giving to Syria, and it's not just the Saudis.
Me: Government aid dwarfs private charity in the case of Haiti, therefore your argument is invalid. Also, Syria is an example of aid being withheld for ideological reasons, not where private aid is a success story, except for terrorism, where private aid is showing all the dystopian promise I was pointing out.
Okay, thanks for sharing your perspective.
In my reading, concern about neglected out-groups was the primary thrust of your position, but you did not mention it in your summary.
If I am so incapable of grasping your meaning (I was baffled by your sentence that included the phrases "Syria isn't getting aid" and "the problems in Syria are getting all sorts of money") then we can surely spend our time more usefully doing other things.
- Good for us. So, what stops me from feeding the homeless or hiring a foreigner? What stops the poor from finding affordable housing or making money braiding hair?
I'd still need to be convinced these are ethical rather than economic questions. Anyway, what if the answer is: scaling? Often seemingly-good ad hoc solutions accumulate until in toto they no longer make sense. Humans tend toward systems for a reason, though I remember you disagree with that line of argument.
All four examples appear to be both economic and ethical disasters.
On being the right size: maybe these examples could be excused if they were the exceptional blemishes of large programs which are on balance beneficial. Is that your argument?
I think people revere authority figures for the same reason they fear foreigners. These instincts gave better results among bands of a few dozen members whose interaction with other bands was mostly violent.
Is it better for human systems to exist than not? Probably, maybe. But asking whether they're beneficial is a sidestep from the question 'are they necessary', which is just a silly way of saying 'will they exist no matter what we do'. It seems so. We should figure out why, at minimum, before we undo a millennia-old pattern.
- Libertarianism is immoral and worrying...
Don't leave me hangin, you know I wanna know.
Libertarianism boils down to "I got mine, you get yours" which works so long as you live in a totally closed system. If you're a settler living alone on a frontier with no hostile Native Americans attempting to drive you away, Libertarianism makes perfect sense. Of course, so does anarchy.
But the minute you inject a contested road into that Libertarian paradise, you have a public good, which has to be protected and maintained through communal resources and "communal resources" is where Libertarianism falls apart. Who pays for the road? Everyone equally? But Joe uses it nine times a day and I only use it every other week! So does Joe pay nine times the taxes? But that will encourage Joe to cut his own private road which is going to scare off the bison we all hunt! And why do I have to pay for the defense of the section past the mercantile store when I never go beyond that? The mercantile store should pay for it and incorporate their fee into what I purchase from them so that other mercantile stores have reason to set up on a different road...
The basic idea of Libertarianism is that capitalism can do no wrong and anyone wronged by capitalism deserves to fail out of life. It exists functionally in an even smaller microcosm of success than communism. However, its philosophy tends to attract spoiled rich kids that don't understand and don't care that the society they live in thrives by protecting the disadvantaged from the advantaged. "Greed is good" is a Libertarian sentiment. Libertarianism is fundamentally intellectualized and codified selfishness and there are zero social or political models that don't protect against selfishness as their fundamental basis.
So "Libertarianism" is always "I got mine, you get yours" with varying degrees of "well of course we'll need an Army to protect my homestead against the savages but I won't pay one penny more in taxes" which basically means that any manifestation of Libertarianism is basically pure selfish anarchy with whatever sops the Libertarian has grudgingly agreed are vital to his own personal being. The idea that there might need to be taxes and laws to protect ideas and values that the Libertarian hasn't thought of is anathema.
Show me a libertarian and I will show you a smug, selfish asshole who thinks he understands government and society much better than he actually does. More than that, I'll show you a person who has long since stopped listening to people who do understand things better than he does... not because he's a closed-minded, selfish asshole but because he has "philosophical differences" with "mainstream politics."
And that is why Libertarianism is immoral and worrying. It turns the vice against which society legislates into a virtue and protects it as an asset, not a deficit.
That's an effect, not a cause, though. Principled libertarianism molds that organizations aren't "considered corrupt and unreliable", they're inherently corrupt by design. I don't know if you've ever watched the Ayn Rand institute bend over backwards explaining her Social Security checks but it's instructive: it goes something like "if the system is corrupt then the only non-corrupt thing to do is take advantage of it to the fullest":
- Precisely because Rand views welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder, she thinks the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism” (emphasis hers). The seeming contradiction that only the opponent of Social Security has the moral right to collect it dissolves, she argues, once you recognize the crucial difference between the voluntary and the coerced.
Social Security is not voluntary. Your participation is forced through payroll taxes, with no choice to opt out even if you think the program harmful to your interests. If you consider such forced “participation” unjust, as Rand does, the harm inflicted on you would only be compounded if your announcement of the program’s injustice precludes you from collecting Social Security.
This being said, your moral integrity does require that you view the funds only as (partial) restitution for all that has been taken from you by such welfare schemes and that you continue, sincerely, to oppose the welfare state.
In contrast, the advocate of Social Security on Rand’s view is not the victim but the supporter of legalized plunder, whether he realizes it or not. This fact morally disqualifies him from accepting the spoils “redistributed” by the welfare state.
So: if you hate social security, you should collect it. If you advocate social security, you're part of the problem and should starve.
I had a point, but then I went down that rabbit hole so now I'm just gonna click "reply" and go about my day.
Mmm sort of, not really. I'd take capitalism over socialism every time. That's economics, not morality, though sure yeah they verge on one another. Not that libertarians have all the right economic ideas by any means. The point is you need to separate the two facets of the word.
But really the ethics of individualism are questionable. They fly against nature and the foundation which has gotten us this far. In short, if libertarianism was adopted as a system of belief -- fully, I mean, not just hey let's allow some immigrants -- humanity would destroy itself completely within 500 years. We're currently destroying ourselves now, obviously, and most of that I blame on this modern ethical paradigm. So we'll see.
But then I'm a rampant traditionalist as you know. And cynical, and misanthropic to boot.
I think we agree, along with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the CIA, that a scattered assemblage of warlords was better for the people of Somalia than a brutal despot.
Is this because the warlords were more enlightened and selfless leaders than President Barre? I think it is because they had less power over the Somali people to advance their agendas. Pol Pot might have been a neighborhood nuisance had he not gotten his hands on the levers of political power.
Government does a lot of good. Government also enables the greatest harms humans have ever perpetrated against one another.
I would like to discuss these ideas rather than Rush Limbaugh's dining habits or Onkar Ghate's hairsplitting defense of hypocrisy charges against the Chosen One. I don't think the ideas are diminished simply because they are mouthed by legions of "smug, selfish assholes."
What are the ideas under discussion? We have:
- Principled libertarianism holds that organizations are inherently corrupt by design.
and
- The basic idea of Libertarianism is that capitalism can do no wrong
These are silly ideas, and I join you in dismissing them. Yet I find no mention of them in the platform of the Libertarian Party (itself an organization, and in my view a peculiar concept looking for a reason to exist). I poked around the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, libertarianism.org, even Koch Industries trying to find the source for these notions.
Wikipedia even tells me that some libertarians "seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production."
I am a proponent of capitalism, because I think it is the engine that has delivered billions of people out of poverty, where political institutions did not impede it. But capitalistic organizations can certainly do harm, not often by offering people voluntary opportunities to exchange, more often by scoring special favors from government to keep competitors down or burn food in cars.
Here's a summing-up of your summing-up:
1. We need government to solve the problem of paying for public goods like roads.
This particular problem was solved in antiquity. The United States has a rich history of privately-run turnpikes.
This isn't a perfect solution, especially in our age. But the big challenge is not figuring out how get people to pay for something they want, it is coordinating construction among a disorganized patchwork of property owners. Government does not have a good solution to this problem. Government has a bad solution to this problem: forcing people out of their homes for the greater good.
- In 1993, Donald Trump bought several lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, intending to build a parking lot designed for limousines. Coking, who had lived in her house at that time for about 35 years, refused to sell. When Coking refused to sell to Trump, the city of Atlantic City condemned her house, using the power of eminent domain. Her designated compensation was to be $251,000, about one quarter of what Guccione had offered her 10 years earlier.
I know whose side I am on in that fight, and am relieved that the homeowner prevailed in the end.
(I don't think this example is representative of the way roads get built, but it illustrates the way the weak can fall prey to the strong when the use of coercion is institutionalized.)
The public goods argument is a sound justification for government activity. I believe that only a small fraction of government expense today goes to providing public goods. And where the justification is stronger, as it is for providing national defense, the negative side effects can be enormous.
I believe that self-interested, self-organizing people could provide a lot of what is demanded by others. A free market unleashes incredible creativity. I believe that even people with little spending power would often get better results than they do today. I also have moral qualms about forcing people to pay for anything, but that is one of my more eccentric ideas.
2. Without government, we can't solve difficult tragedy-of-the-commons problems, like protecting bison.
These are very difficult problems, and governments also struggle to deal with overfishing, carbon emission, protection of wildlife, and pollution. Sometimes government appears to make the problem worse. The powerful central governments in the Soviet Bloc created the worst ecological disasters. Sometimes market-based approaches show unexpected promise.
If government had better leaders, and was more efficient, and less subject to special interest influence, it might be more successful. But I don't see a way to relieve government of these defects. I am wary of the argument "Government hasn't solved it yet. Let's try more government."
The polite thing would have been to ask if your summaries correctly reflected my positions before going all Kelo v New London on it. I'm not interested in defending your assessments of my positions. We've done this enough times that neither of us deserves to be straw-manned. Here, let me give you an actual point of discussion that we can debate so that this is two-sided instead of one-sided:
1) We need government to solve the tragedy of the commons. No economic or political system exists without externalities and externalities require regulation in order to protect powerless stakeholders. Or, in plain English, "government should minimize collateral damage to innocent bystanders regardless of the political or economic system." Note the use of "should" rather than "does" or "will" because, as Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried from time to time."
The motive of an elected official is different from the motive of a business. That diversity of motive prevents the wants of the business from externalizing all over citizens. Toll roads, for example, externalize all the fuck over the poor. A ferry is effectively a toll road with zero alternatives and the 2nd and 4th largest ferry systems in the world both operate in and around Puget Sound. Both are heavily subsidized. And on the islands with ferry service, poor people can make a living. On the islands without ferry service, rich people keep their vacation homes, caretakers and float planes. Thing of it is, rich or poor you generate sewage, garbage, carbon dioxide and pollution. Got a friend with a vacation rental in the Philippines. The rich v poor divide there is hella starker than Puget Sound.
These are not "difficult" problems, and government doesn't "appear" to make the problem worse- I've lived on a lake before and after low-nitrogen fertilizers were implemented and you know what? Krugman's right, you're wrong. But that's pretty much the crux of your argument: "here's one example where things went badly, therefore all solutions within the space are bad." Your own link was about a citizen prevailing over Donald Trump through the help of a non-profit and the judgment of the court. "It doesn't always work" is not logically equivalent to "it never works."
And that, really, is the crux of the libertarian argument: if it doesn't work 100% of the time, throw it away.
I don't need a second point. This is a simple argument for complexity, not a complex argument for simplicity. People need governance by forces other than greed or altruism. People don't like governance by forces other than greed or altruism but that doesn't make them invalid, it makes them unpopular.
Complexity is unpopular. But it generally reflects the truth.
- Wikipedia even tells me that some libertarians "seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production."
It says that because prior to being used by right wing intellectuals in the 50s libertarian was a synonym for anarchist, and anarchism is a kind of communism. No one talking about libertarianism without qualifying it as "left libertarianism" means anarchists anymore, because anarchists don't want to be associated with a capitalist political philosophy, and you only see "left libertarian" in contexts where "anarchist" will scare people. The two aren't really related; Murray Rothbard liked Proudhon and Spooner because they were still living in the world of cottage industry and didn't place as much emphasis on anticapitalism as those who actually experienced modern capitalism did, and tried to form an alliance with anarchists in the 60s because 60s anarchists were hippies and hippies were gullible, much like the Republicans did with southern racists, but it didn't last because even the hippies weren't that gullible.
That's the thing the actual anarchists get right. Those dysfunctional general assemblies and the punk rock piety that makes groups of anarchists insufferable is all about figuring out how to make the utopia work before trying to build it. They're starting with the ethics and trying to figure out the politics by experiment. If it ever comes to something they've proven that we don't need hierarchies of power or capitalism to function, if it doesn't, well, trying to transcend violence and exploitation is more admirable than declaring them to be good.
Fair enough. It is true that philosophy before the Age of Reason mostly meant 'a way to live which I think brings societal harmony'. Thus some classical ideas persist to the 21st century and some vanished, Darwin-style. And the best way to demonstrate that you've figured out a really solid philosophical system (read: way to act) is to act that way.
But mostly I had a problem with a) the generalization, and b) the wording. Socrates was a dick sometimes. More importantly, unless someone's actions contradict their beliefs (see for reference Rousseau, many popes, etc), they aren't relevant. Being smug doesn't have anything to do with liking free trade or open borders. The above dismissal is a logical fallacy.