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comment by iammyownrushmore
iammyownrushmore  ·  2867 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Articulate, intelligent Presidential candidates with a proven track record?

Oh, trust me, you're preaching to the choir.

What do you think, flagamuffin? :D





user-inactivated  ·  2867 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

kleinbl00  ·  2866 days ago  ·  link  ·  

wasoxygen  ·  2866 days ago  ·  link  ·  

kleinbl00  ·  2866 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Right - in 2007, a scattered assemblage of warlords were better overall for the health of a repressed and victimized country than a brutal despot with centralized military rule.

"Libertarianism - better than Pol Pot."

wasoxygen  ·  2866 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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."

kleinbl00  ·  2865 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

user-inactivated  ·  2865 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    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.

wasoxygen  ·  2864 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    anarchists don't want to be associated with a capitalist political philosophy

Unless they are anarcho-capitalists, of course! Not to be confused with classical liberals. It does seem a shame that the labels get rearranged and recycled so freely.

user-inactivated  ·  2867 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.