[Debate] We all know we're going to wind up talking about Libertarianism anyway, so...

See the first post for the new theme of this thread; otherwise, two things that are not up for discussion:

1) the Libertarian definition of "aggression": as I understand it, "aggression" in non-pacifist Libertarianism refers to violence that is not in self-defense. Such violence is 'coercion'. Violence that IS in self-defense is not aggression/coercion.

2) by extension, in non-anarchist Libertarianism, government violence is not necessarily 'aggression'. In other words, if Person A could use violence against Person B, and it would be self-defense, then the government can help Person A defend themselves, and that's still not aggression. That's just government-backed self-defense.

Also, threads about Libertarianism tend to attract snark and bad faith arguing. Please don't do that. That's why the scope was narrowed--I'm hoping this is a focused enough topic to keep things on track.

Note: this thread's scope has been narrowed significantly--sorry for the confusion/inconvenience! Details below:

Let's say that tomorrow, America just goes 100% Libertarian. Will that make the powerful & wealthy *more* powerful and wealthy, or less? Does their power depend on continued capture of the government's powers of violence and using them for coercion, or are the powerful & wealthy already so far ahead that it's too late to be saved by Libertarianism?

I think it might be interesting to look at that question through the lens of what we do with the massive resources now owned by the U.S. Government. What do we do with them? Just sell them off and share the profits equally per capita or with an eye towards economic equality? How do we spin off government owned schools? Do we have to get rid of corporations, because Libertarianism is about freedom for real people and not for fictions created by government laws? Things like that!

edit: eh, on second thought, I don't know if I have the enthusiasm anymore to give these sorts of conversations the attention they deserve. Like I wrote, not so much 'pointless' as 'obsolete'.

What's pointless and obsolete? I don't follow... Unless you're arguing that the idea that thoughts can define actions is obsolete?

The lag between choice and consciousness of choice does not mean that every decision is completely independent of our thinking on a subject. If that were the case, our actions would be essentially random. So there is a causal relationship between how we think and how we act. It's just not as clean and simple as we used to believe. We do have frameworks of belief that affect our actions in consistent, predictable ways. This is true whether the actual mechanism that drives thought to action is unconscious, or conscious.

The fact that our sense of self may be an illusion does not mean that underneath that we are random and directionless.

Robear wrote:

What's pointless and obsolete? I don't follow... Unless you're arguing that the idea that thoughts can define actions is obsolete?

In an earlier time when people would attack those trying to make the world a better place on the basis of their political philosophy, you needed a defensible political philosophy and the ability to undermine the political philosophies of people trying to make the world a *worse* place (either intentionally or not).

It just feels like we're in a post-political philosophy age. A very political age, but one in which a lot of these conversations are labelled just thought experiments. The world will not be a better or worse place no matter what comes out of these kinds of conversations. So I don't know--these conversations seem obsolete, like relics of a different time.

A claim about history is a claim about the real world, not a thought experiment. That's why I reacted. I was curious about the provenance of your stance - I'm interested in it's philosophical lineage - and that's why I offered counter-examples. I believe what I stated (and I mark speculation quite clearly when I engage in it).

You never know what comes from conversations. And even though we may not be able to directly affect the course of political change, we can at least understand it better, and hold to a consistent world view that is supported by evidence and prior thought. That's useful for keeping the ability to analyze events in all parts of our lives, if nothing else.

I believe logic and evidence are useful even if they are unpopular. It sounds like you're just letting the spirit of the election campaign grind you down... Don't! Being able to see the world clearly and defend that view, and learn from it and modify according to observation, that's part of being a functional adult. Stop learning, stop thinking that you and those around you matter, and you're ending any chance of affecting the world around you, however small. (And I know from direct personal experience that conversations with ordinary people can have extraordinary, world-scale results.)

So don't give up. I'm not trying to game you with this; that's not how I roll. I simply disagreed with your position and wanted know more about it. But if you aren't in a mood to go into it, I totally understand. It's a very wearing time for everyone.

Robear wrote:

I'm starting to realize that libertarianism's base assumptions pre-date the 18th/19th century ideas that underlie the concept of "social justice".

While libertarian thought draws from many Enlightenment thinkers and early classical economists like Bastiat and Mill, it draws even more heavily from 20th century sources like Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Rothbard. Social justice is at the core of libertarian philosophy. It is, indeed, what the non-aggression principle is all about - that individuals have an inviolable right not to be subject to aggression and oppression.

there is a bias in libertarian thought that does not allow it to encompass the idea that bad outcomes can come through no fault of the individual.

Anyone who understands the free market, entrepreneurship, and market risk-taking understands that bad market outcomes happen all the time, and for all sorts of reasons, only some of which are under the control of the participants. In fact, if anything, libertarians would argue strongly that there are not nearly enough bad outcomes occurring in our current economy, especially for companies like the big banks and Wall Street investment firms.

This could explain why the social implications of libertarian theory always seem to circle back to the idea that the wealthy *should* have more power than others in society, and the corollary that they are assumed to do the right thing with that wealth, overall.

The social implications of libertarian theory are that the wealthy *do* have more power than others in society, and they exercise that power through government aggression to preserve their privileged positions - which usually involves doing some pretty terrible things. Thus, the effects of wealth in society can be reduced, but not eliminated, by removing the societal acceptance of government aggression and the protection of the wealthy elite that goes with it.

libertarianism retains elements of feudalism because it solidified before labor and the rights of workers had become part of social theories.

Libertarianism, with its rejection of aggression and honoring of individual self-ownership, is almost entirely incompatible with feudalism, which relied on unconstrained aggression and collective ownership (typically everything belonged to the King, i.e. the government). Imagine, for a moment, a feudal lord who was unable to use physical coercion to control his subjects; the entire system would have collapsed in a few weeks.

With the government "aggression" removed, what maintains the rule of law and prevents the rich from establishing their own fiefdoms? Alternatively, what prevents the rich from maintaining their own private security and doing as they wish with it; as, indeed, has been common in the past?

Part of the reason for modern republics and democracies is to control the power of kings and the wealthy. By removing government's capabilities for "aggression" - that is, the threat of force to enforce its decisions on citizens? - the rule of law is decreased. To be replaced by...?

Robear wrote:

With the government "aggression" removed, what maintains the rule of law and prevents the rich from establishing their own fiefdoms?

The courts. Just look at how the Bundy's immediately complied with court orders...

For matters of Agression/Coercion/etc. see the new Scope of Discussion section

(I know it's bad form to play the hokey-pokey with thread participation, but I created the thread so I still feel a responsibility to keep it from turning into a mess--hopefully the revised Scope will keep things running well)

edit: the conversations here and where we came from gave me an idea for a debate with a narrowed scope. I think this change avoids some of the bad tendencies of P&C and is more in the spirit of the new D&D.

Obviously, my first two posts were in response to an entirely different point. But after reading the clarification, there's a certain amount of wave-hands here.

Aetius points to reducing the government's aggression, but that means reducing it's ability to enforce the laws. By doing that, its ability to help citizens "defend themselves" is reduced. And what does that mean, anyway? Does the government pay for my legal defense if I'm sued by someone with vastly larger resources? Does it station someone within a few minutes response time if I feel my land or livelihood is threatened? What if the threat is much larger and more well-equipped than the local defenses? Is there a standing army for that? How will the police be armed - presumably better than the locals? But I thought that gun restrictions were bad, so the police will be *very* heavily armed indeed?

It seems to me that the more permissiveness granted to the citizens, the stronger the government needs to be, just to protect the rights of the poor, if nothing else. Otherwise, the power balance will naturally tend to the rich. And with reduced regulations and oversight, what prevents the police and government from becoming abusive?

Aetius wrote:

Libertarianism, with its rejection of aggression and honoring of individual self-ownership, is almost entirely incompatible with feudalism, which relied on unconstrained aggression and collective ownership (typically everything belonged to the King, i.e. the government). Imagine, for a moment, a feudal lord who was unable to use physical coercion to control his subjects; the entire system would have collapsed in a few weeks.

Let me put this another way. Feudalism was a way of life in which people *voluntarily* swore allegiance to - joined in a contractual relationship with - other people, in order to manage an area in such a way as to safeguard it's habitability. At it's core, it's a *contractual, legal* relationship governed by the laws of the land. How would this *not* be allowed in a libertarian system?

Robear wrote:

And what does that mean, anyway? Does the government pay for my legal defense if I'm sued by someone with vastly larger resources? Does it station someone within a few minutes response time if I feel my land or livelihood is threatened? What if the threat is much larger and more well-equipped than the local defenses? Is there a standing army for that? How will the police be armed - presumably better than the locals? But I thought that gun restrictions were bad, so the police will be *very* heavily armed indeed?

If you're going to make these kinds of arguments against Libertarianism, then I really am obsolete! ; D

Cheeze, you're totally confusing me. I've been asking these questions for a long time, but every time the discussion arises, we get theory, not actual proposals. That's... A little scary, actually.

I really don't get the *structural* proposals for governance inherent in libertarianism. It's all well and good to say "We need to reduce aggression in society" and "We need to reduce government power" and "We need to reduce regulation" and "We need to reduce taxes" and so forth, but the problem that I see is that those desires are contradictory. Further, we have good records from when the country didn't have the regulatory structure or even the rule of law that we have today; that's why so many of us refer to going back to the 19th century when the topic comes up. We remember that life was much harder and more dangerous then.

I don't intend that anyone try to answer all those questions specifically, really. I'm more interested in the proposed *systems* of government, law enforcement and regulatory restrictions on natural freedoms, and how they differ so radically from what we have today. But most of all, how they will be implemented without making the lot of individual citizens even harder than it is today.

Robear wrote:

Cheeze, you're totally confusing me.

Don't worry about it--as long as we steer clear of another fruitless argument about the semantics of aggression/coercion/self-defense, I feel my job as scope-setter for the thread is accomplished.

I'm more interested in the proposed *systems* of government, law enforcement and regulatory restrictions on natural freedoms, and how they differ so radically from what we have today. But most of all, how they will be implemented without making the lot of individual citizens even harder than it is today.

So am I, and that's where my objections to Libertarianism lie.

Spoiler:

Well, really, my objection to just about any system based on an idea of justice is that most people want kids, and they're going to have them no matter what. Any moral system has to deal with that fact. So in the end, we're going to wind up devoting so much of society's resources towards what we owe children that we might as well have a system geared towards prosperity, because we're going to wind up subsidizing the lifestyle choices of parents anyway.

Oh, I see now what you were joking about. Sorry. It's been a really busy month.

Is this document more or less accurate? If so, I have serious issues with the claims of "spontaneous organization". For example, language evolved; it's not a human-created "institution", like labor unions or sports clubs. Law was not something that developed spontaneously, but rather something that from it's earliest records was codified by rulers and imposed upon the citizens. In turn, the rule of law allowed the development of money (as opposed to item barter). And markets depend not only on the presence of uniform money across a large area, but on the rule of law.

So one issue with modern libertarianism is that it has to claim that things that were developed and enabled by government were actually somehow spontaneously generated. That's... kind of a reach.

I'd love to see a cite for an actual historical analysis of the development of these claims, rather than a summary. What is the evidence, for example, that the Code of Hammurabi was *not* created by a ruler as part of a system of governance? How do we *know* that laws arose spontaneously?

In turn, the rule of law allowed the development of money (as opposed to item barter).

I don't think that's as true as we were taught in school. Anthropological evidence seems to indicate that we had social debts and obligations that were replaced by currency, and the conversion was done mostly through a dynamic of temple wealth and pillage.

The currency was framed and controlled by government decree, as were the debts, and enforced by law (by the time money was happening, mind you - I'm not talking about barter economies).

The temples were tied to governance, directly, the kings being in many cases considered gods or their representative. Not sure what "pillage" means in this context.

Mind you, this is the Cartalist view. The Free Market view, while acknowledging governments generally have controlled the creation and issuance of money (and usually for very good reason), argues that because informal monetary systems arise (in prisons, for example), that money is a system that arises spontaneously.

The problem I see there is that those informal systems derive largely from barter, and don't require (or have) the backing of law to maintain their value. Most of them use non-representational currency (you can eat Ramen noodles, or bundles of Mesopotamian wheat). They are much less efficient over time and over a wide-spread economy than systems set up nationally and backed by law, because it's hard to push family or tribal standards beyond the social units they evolved in to a national scale without government linking those groups together. And those government systems of coinage have no need of barter-value in their specie or coinage (unlike private mints, which essentially packaged metals in easy-to-weigh-and-transport increments), because they are backed by obligation from the monarch.

(Yes, yes, government bad, they abuse coinage rights, yes. Welcome to the human race.)

To me, the claim that money is *always* and *necessarily* going to rise from the bottom of society is as false as the claim that it *always* and *necessarily* descends from government. However, if you want a stable currency, then the rule of law will precede that, and that requires government. And I think you'll find that even in pseudo-barter economies, and ones with private mints, because when you concentrate value in one spot, you'd better be able to protect it, not just from raiders but from government itself. And that leads naturally to government taking on the role of issuer, either directly or indirectly.

There's got to be more to government getting involved than "...but they always make competing currencies illegal, wah!". The fact is that government is *always* involved, and the rule of law is *always* necessary for anything like money to arise on a national basis. The latter could come first, yes, but the fact that money *can* arise spontaneously as a form of barter does not remove either from the equation.

I'm not talking about barter economies

That's the part I am talking about though. The old story is that we were barter economies until the advent of currency. It's becoming more clear, though, that we were debt-based local economies, rather than barter. Temples amassed valuables through asserting that their followers owed debts to gods or priests. But there wasn't really any trade to speak of yet at that point. Every village was pretty much a closed system of debts owed. That system became more formal as record-keeping advanced.

Two things started to happen. Commodities started escaping the local system, and they became more fungible. Rulers, armies, and some merchants started moving commodities outside of the local, closed social-debt systems. (The biggest wealth transfers happened due to pillaging armies carrying off loot.) Eventually the commodities were made more regular by governments and religious orders (see, for example, Hebrew laws regarding standard weights and measures). And from there, set amounts of a precious metal were replaced by coins.

It feels like I'm quibbling, but if we're going to talk about human interaction as part of a long continuum (and to potentially reference "natural" ways of doing things), I think it's worth getting that pre-history right.

I'm curious, can you recommend some reading to me?

My point comes into your story where the commodities are regularized by government. That's still not money. Money starts with coinage, and by your own account, that seems to have originated with governments.

And long-distance trade, as well as functional debt economies, still depend on the rule of law enforcing obligations.

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years has a pretty good overview.

Doesn't Graeber himself argue that "markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence"? That's my point. Good or bad, markets are the result of government and the rule of law.

Note that his interpretation of that as "systematic state violence" is his anarchist bias.

He's totes a flyer of the black flag.

Sophisticated modern markets are founded and maintained by systematic state (and now, parastate) force, yeah. A hippie commune's markets operate more on social pressure, which I'd say is a distant cousin of state force.

Once again, libertarianism is not being proposed on the level of 100 individuals. It's being proposed for a nation. Yes, communes can work with all sorts of economic systems, largely because they self-select for people dedicated to an ideal. But national schemes need some form of rule of law that is consistent across all belief systems.

Don't forget, while we're down here in the weeds, why we are here. The claim made by libertarians is that markets, money and other economic constructs arise naturally, and can be maintained, without government coercion. If there is any serious doubt that that narrative is correct - and I believe that I've shown that there is - then it's an awfully shaky base to plant an entire system of government on. Governments of all sorts arise and create their own rules of law, all the time throughout history. But of those, libertarian systems are vanishingly rare, and I believe non-existent on a national scale. (We have seen the effects of anarchy, of course, and they are not pretty, even in short-scale events like week-long protests, much less in places like Mogadishu.)

It seems natural to ask why humans create "traditional" government and rule of law systems spontaneously and in massive varieties, while libertarian ones seem to be incredibly uncommon. At the same time, research suggests that altruism is (necessarily) dominant over selfishness in human communities; the ones which see more than a small fraction of people acting in their own interests ahead of the group tend to disintegrate. Rand's theory that altruism is a "disease" has taken a tremendous beating from evolution and anthropology, but it still seems to underlie much of libertarian thought. (Yes, not all are Randian, I know.)

This is why I'm interested in the *systems* of libertarianism, because the function of those social systems needs to accord with what we see in the world, and in history. And if the basic ideas are flawed, then the systems will necessarily be flawed as well.

The ability to define the systems that underpin governance is also a prerequisite for making that argument that an ideology can be converted into reality successfully.

Yeah, I think we're running in parallel. I'm just pointing out that the standard narrative of commerce being a natural human occurrence is only "natural" if you're OK with calling institutionalized religions and roving warrior bands "natural."

In terms of human culture and history, it's hard for me to think of things that arise more frequently.

I do see religion as being intimately tied to very early forms of community and national governance, as well as commerce. To refocus, what's your take on the article I referenced above? The claims of spontaneous organization seem dubious to me in some of the categories (in others, sure).

It strikes me as an extraordinary claim, given that examples in the real world are severely lacking. That's worrying in a system of governance. I'd expect the evidence in support of the claims to be unquivocal and plentiful, if self-interest is indeed *the* guiding force in human society. Instead, I see study after study showing that it exists only in balance with altruism, and necessarily in a smaller ratio.

I have trouble with arguments for ideological stances that turn out to be pragmatically reduced in practice. Why not just go with the pragmatic recommendation and be done with it? I have no trouble with prescriptions for more freedoms in many areas. But that can be achieved without prescribing change that would plunge millions into a horrible state of existence in a transition that may well not be sustainable.

The fact that Libertarians even exist in a state whose highest elevation is some 10 feet above sea level and is prone to storm surge from Atlantic hurricanes is the perfect illustration of how that economic and moral philosophy is all just window dressing. They are like housecats. Convinced of their independence, but utterly helpless without the warm, paternal hand of the evil gubmint.

My brother is a die-hard Libertarian and gave me a copy of Murray Rothbard's manifesto. I'm making my way through it with care, but just wanted to check that the modern Libertarian set of ideals are largely in compliance with the book. Are there any other suggested reading lists more in tune for today and/or for people interested in learning more?

I've been catching up on the Freakanomics podcast and recently they had an interesting conversation with Gary Johnson. There are a lot of things I like about Johnson but his supporters are a bit scary. For example, he's gotten lots of flack from other libertarians for supporting basic things like driver's licenses or building permits.

Robear wrote:

In terms of human culture and history, it's hard for me to think of things that arise more frequently.

I do see religion as being intimately tied to very early forms of community and national governance, as well as commerce. To refocus, what's your take on the article I referenced above? The claims of spontaneous organization seem dubious to me in some of the categories (in others, sure).

Honestly, it sounds like someone read the opening paragraph of some good social thought, and hand-waved it from there. There are plenty of thinkers who've said similar things, but: 1) they're often more careful about avoiding causation (because "naturally" adds a fairly positive spin, whereas, for example, "these things tend to happen, one way or another" doesn't); and 2) in acknowledging that some things do tend to occur, and withholding the positive spin, they're more free to then say that some things that occur in human organizations should be resisted—without having to go on a tangent about whether that means that "nature" is bad.