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.
A tangent to the question of things that occur naturally... I find it interesting that there are more democratically elected communist governments in the world than libertarian (assuming there are any?). Makes me wonder which is more "natural" to the human condition.
Yes, but acknowledging that there is even a give and take between rights and government - or social systems like money/debt and government/religion - knocks out some of the flavors of libertarian thought that have become popular with Rand and Rothbard, since at their base they have to attack government because of the strong interpretation of the non-aggression principle. (Then they have to wave hands to create exceptions which allow *some* government - this conflict in ideology needs to be resolved in some way.) Again, my problem is that *some* of the primary axioms of the modern libertarian party seem to be unsupported by evidence, and the fact that libertarianism has not arisen again and again throughout history - unlike most other forms of government, whether national or local - seems to me to be a powerful counter-argument against it being built on basic, grounding human social principles.
It's worth noting that the Free State Project, after 15 years, has about 1/10 of its original goal for resettlement. About 2000 people have moved to New Hampshire as part of it, out of 20,000 pledged. In a country of 320M or so, that's not perhaps a groundswell of support. "If you build it, they will come" really seems to be dependent on the game you're building the field for.
A tangent to the question of things that occur naturally... I find it interesting that there are more democratically elected communist governments in the world than libertarian (assuming there are any?). Makes me wonder which is more "natural" to the human condition.
I think what's natural to the human condition is the comfort of the familiar. Except maybe for the Maoists in Nepal, maybe it's a case of, "Oh well, good old Ochirbat made 90% of the trains run more or less on time, let's vote him in." If ever a libertarian became an incumbent, maybe it'd be, "Well, Rand managed to sell off all the railroads for a tidy sum before deregulating them, so it's not his fault the trains show up early, or late, or on fire; let's keep him around."
Anarchist (and similar) groups don't tend to show up for long in history, either, and I think that's because a group built around a core value denouncing power structures doesn't hold for long in the context of ... power structures.
I'm mostly just tagging this thread, but I'll quickly note my general thoughts on the philosophy. I'm not a libertarian in many respects, but the failure of the American left to push back on Bush and Obama's surveillance state made me realize that I could not consider myself a liberal, either.
I now view a strong Libertarian Party as the most plausible mechanism to push back on the authoritarian tendencies of the Democratic and Republican parties, and I fully support the LP's efforts to gain popularity even while disagreeing with many elements of its platform.
Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at with it, too. There's a great deal of capital-L Libertarianism that I think is very wrongheaded, and the fact that it gets confused so much with Objectivism worries me. And this confusion happens even with people who consider themselves libertarian, which is a little scary. Objectivism is very different.
Regardless, parts of it are deadly, deadly accurate, and I find it disheartening that we've been banging the drums about this sh*t for fifteen years, ever since the Patriot Act, and first conservatives, and then liberals, cheered these measures on, because it made them feel safe. As long as Their Team was in charge, everything was fine, no matter how vile the programs involved.
Only now that their friends are threatened, do liberals start crying. Only now do we start seeing people talking about scrubbing their data from the Web.... sometimes the same people who were scorning those of us concerned about surveillance. (Hell, I just had someone over in Tech and Help push back at me for disliking the NVidia spyware bullsh*t.)
This team-based thinking is incredibly destructive. It was bad fifteen years ago, and now it's probably too goddamn late to fix it.
I find I'm really quite pissed at Team Democrat and Team Republican, and I think they collectively owe the Libertarians a real apology. Especially the Democrats, the people I think should know better.
This team-based thinking is incredibly destructive. It was bad fifteen years ago, and now it's probably too goddamn late to fix it.
I find I'm really quite pissed at Team Democrat and Team Republican, and I think they collectively owe the Libertarians a real apology. Especially the Democrats, the people I think should know better.
Do you not see a problem with this? What good will an apology do you if people are being deported, tortured or sent to prison? It will make you feel better? Is that supposed to make team "I like civil liberties" feel better? It won't do any good.
People who have been banging the drum about privacy for over a decade or more now need to stop the impulse for recriminations and start educating people about what they can do to protect themselves. We need to be talking about moral stances people can take now that they see the light. It's a time for reaching out and building a consensus on civil liberties. It's not a time for "I told you so's". That's completely pointless, unhlepful and possibly destructive.
need to stop the impulse for recriminations and start educating people about what they can do to protect themselves.
They can't. They can't protect themselves.
need to stop the impulse for recriminations and start educating people about what they can do to protect themselves.They can't. They can't protect themselves.
Nevermind.
Well, go ahead, if you've got suggestions. But I think it's too little, too late. When Pence takes power, some people are going to end up really, really f*cked, and there's probably not much they can do about it.
Well, go ahead, if you've got suggestions. But I think it's too little, too late. When Pence takes power, some people are going to end up really, really f*cked, and there's probably not much they can do about it.
Your rightness isn't going to save anyone either. Nor is mine. I've offered up suggestions and I'm working on concrete things elsewhere. This thread is useless if you don't think Libertarianism has anything to offer other than "I told you so".
Libertarianism is about not giving the government too much power in the first place, on the theory that you should never hand a chainsaw to a child, and the next government may always have children in it.
Now that it HAS that power, it's not going to give it up. Will. not. happen.
Libertarianism is about not giving the government too much power in the first place, on the theory that you should never hand a chainsaw to a child, and the next government may always have children in it.
Now that it HAS that power, it's not going to give it up. Will. not. happen.
Cool...
/thread I suppose.
Libertarianism is about making sure that what's happening now can't happen.
It's too late, now. It's a preventative, not a cure.
Libertarianism is about making sure that what's happening now can't happen.
It's too late, now. It's a preventative, not a cure.
You're really not making a great case for libertarianism by saying it's a fragile philosophy that can't recover from a nonoptimal situation. It sounds like the utopian population of non cheaters that can never persist. It's too lucrative for the first few cheaters and they proliferate until a new equilibrium involving cheaters is reached.
Reminds me of the old saw that *real* communism is great, it just hasn't been tried yet. Systems that are more robust and can recover from a moderate perturbation are a lot more attractive to me. We'll see if our current system is such a one when we try to recover from our authoritarian fling.
One thing I keep coming back to is that libertarian principles can be implemented in the framework of our Democracy. This isn't a radical deviation, it's a form of governance that is fully supported by the Constitution.
It's tempting to view the Libertarian agenda and extrapolate out to a Randian anarcho-capitalist nightmare. But the thing is, in a Democracy, there are always compromises. The LP wouldn't magically win over the entire population, but it could win over enough people to start informing the conversation. And that is what I hope they can do.
What I see now is a time when libertarian principles can be presented to potentially receptive liberals, who are frightened of Trump using all of the tools Obama built up. One doesn't have to be libertarian to oppose authoritarianism, and I feel that is the most important part of their message.
Telling people that they have already failed and that things are now hopeless is really pointless.
I'll cover the basics real quick:
Let's say that tomorrow, America just goes 100% Libertarian. Will that make the powerful & wealthy *more* powerful and wealthy, or less?
This depends. If the wealthy in question are dependent on government market protection or largesse, they would likely become poor in short order. If, on the other hand, they were powerful and wealthy because they did a good job serving the public, they would likely stay wealthy and influential.
As far as political power goes, that would largely vanish without the "legitimacy" of forcing other people to do what you want. Other forms of influence - the prominence of wealth, perceptions of status in various occupations, etc - those would remain, and likely flourish.
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?
One of the many lessons we can take away from the rise of market economies in the last two centuries is that no one is ever too far ahead to lose everything - and fast. With the vast majority of modern wealth tied up in capital investments, all it takes is a scandal, mismanagement, or crisis to wipe away billions. Consider what happened to the shareholders in Wells Fargo after the recent fraud debacle - Warren Buffet, for example, lost $2.5 billion in less than a month. And Wells Fargo is a government-protected entity - think how much worse things would be with no protection to fall back on.
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?
Unfortunately, this question is moot. The sale of government assets would have to go to provide some recompense to the government's numerous creditors.
How do we spin off government owned schools?
There's no need, and honestly no sane private entity would have anything to do with the current public school organizations. I doubt the modern education market would even be interested in the buildings.
Do we have to get rid of corporations, because Libertarianism is about freedom for real people and not for fictions created by government laws?
Yes and no. The modern corporation's foundation is built on government power, so clearly it would have to go. On the other hand, membership in whatever replaces it - new corporations, co-ops, partnerships, whatever - would still not remove people's rights, and contracts could still limit liability in some cases. If a corporation wanted to spend money advocating for the return of larger government and progressivism, that would be their right (however foolish that might be as a business decision in a libertarian society).
Is this document more or less accurate?
It's a decent start. Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt, is also a good start and easy read. This list from libertarianism.org is pretty good as well, although I'd skip Rand both because she's familiar to people here, and she really is a terrible writer.
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.
Libertarians would strongly disagree. 
The primary argument for spontaneous order and innovation, and against government-controlled development, is that such systems are beyond deliberate human design and control. Language is, in fact, a human-created institution, but not one that came about by any intention or government program; it evolved on its own in response to people's needs for communication. Likewise, the idea that markets and trade require uniform money enforced by governments and the rule of law is provably false. We know for that fact that historical trade flourished not only before money existed, but across incredible distances and every conceivable political or social boundary.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylo...
Even the briefest discussion of the Code of Hammurabi acknowledges that there were extensive sets of legal rules and customs that existed in Babylonian society long before it, and quite a bit is known about what these various customs were (look up Sumerian Family Laws). The Code did not simply spring out of thin air, fully formed, nor was it the product of a deliberate constructive process.
The importance of the Code is not that it was among the first know legal systems, but rather that it was the first set of codified, written laws, literally set in stone. In other words, the monarch couldn't simply change his mind, and the law, on a whim. The Code was essentially the first constitution - the first known, documented constraint on the absolute power of government.
A tangent to the question of things that occur naturally... I find it interesting that there are more democratically elected communist governments in the world than libertarian (assuming there are any?). Makes me wonder which is more "natural" to the human condition.
There are some solid historical examples, but even quasi-libertarian societies have been vanishingly rare until the last couple of centuries. However, libertarians strongly believe that it's not an accident the incredible development of our global economy and civilization has been accompanied by an equally broad and substantial reduction in government authority and control.
There is no question that historically, brutally authoritarian government is the more "natural" human system. I personally have dubbed this the "Strongman Effect" - I believe humans are evolutionarily wired to both elevate a member of their group to the leadership position, and grant that person extensive social leeway to do things that would normally be morally unacceptable in the pursuit of group protection. This translates in modern society to the messiah-like treatment of prominent politicians (Obama, Trump) and the extensive tolerance of police brutality and the use of government to forcibly implement the whims of would-be societal engineers.
It doesn't have to be this way though. Humans are also extremely adaptable, and we can change. A good example of this is the treatment of slavery. For thousands of years, slavery was simply a part of life and society. Today, there isn't a country in the world where slavery is still officially legal, and virtually no one views it as morally acceptable. As a civilization, we have rejected slavery.
Now that it HAS that power, it's not going to give it up. Will. not. happen.
It's true that governments tend to grow, rather than shrink, but it's just that - a tendency, not an absolute rule. There is plenty of historical precedent for governments giving up power peacefully (not because of a war or rebellion). The fundamental feature of those events, though, was the firm belief of the vast majority of the population that the government did not have a right to the power it claimed.
Before such a thing could happen in modern American society, the conservatives and progressives will have to give up their dreams of forcible social engineering. That is the current primary obstacle to government restraint, and I don't expect it to go away quietly.
It's worth noting that the Free State Project, after 15 years, has about 1/10 of its original goal for resettlement.
It's also worth noting that the current mover levels were almost entirely voluntary - the project plan was to gather 20,000 signers, and then "trigger the move" to get most of those 20,000 to move to New Hampshire within five years. Since the project didn't reach 20,000 signers until just eight months ago, it's a little early to be dismissing the numbers. And I can tell you from personal experience, the people who are here are having an outsized impact on New Hampshire politics.
About 2000 people have moved to New Hampshire as part of it, out of 20,000 pledged. In a country of 320M or so, that's not perhaps a groundswell of support. "If you build it, they will come" really seems to be dependent on the game you're building the field for.
Libertarians have long been aware that we are a very, very small minority. That's actually a big part what the FSP is about - to get enough people concentrated to begin work on developing a groundswell of support, and to start providing the answer to the question "what does a libertarian society really look like?"
I haven't read the whole thread but I skimmed most of it. My thoughts are that government power should be measured in two distinct ways -
- power over citizens
- power over corporations
If America went 100% libertarian I would be extremely concerned over the latter. If there is no check on the power of corporations we'd all be in trouble. Would the Wells Fargo scandal have stopped? What about food & drug safety? What about giant corporations gobbling up all the smaller ones with no check on monopoly power? What happens when even fewer companies control media?
I get that true libertarians say that capitalism itself would keep the power of corporations in check. Word of mouth and the internet would spread and stop shenanigans. I'm not convinced. If giant corporations control the media and the internet there'd be way to spread dissenting voices. It'd be a dystopia just as bad as 1984 but with different masters.
Even the briefest discussion of the Code of Hammurabi acknowledges that there were extensive sets of legal rules and customs that existed in Babylonian society long before it, and quite a bit is known about what these various customs were (look up Sumerian Family Laws). The Code did not simply spring out of thin air, fully formed, nor was it the product of a deliberate constructive process.
The importance of the Code is not that it was among the first know legal systems, but rather that it was the first set of codified, written laws, literally set in stone. In other words, the monarch couldn't simply change his mind, and the law, on a whim. The Code was essentially the first constitution - the first known, documented constraint on the absolute power of government.
See, this is where you go into your own reality. The first part of your argument simply pushes back the origin to smaller cities and tribes, it doesn't address the question at hand. And the latter part directly contradicts your source material (see below).
The "early law" was put in place - and enforced - by tribes and city states. This law - the *family* law - was subject to a leading class - usually priests and tribal leaders, later priests and feudal nobles - and enforcement was done by that class in the society. That is... government. That led to centuries of consistent precedent, collected by the priesthood (an arm of government of both tribes and cities). As noted in the article you cited (which I did read before my original post), Hammurabi's insight was that prior practice was to conquer an area, but mostly leave it's local laws intact. He realized he could cut out the specific, family/tribe-oriented stuff and apply the same law to all his subjects. And so he did it. He was an autocrat, just like the leaders of tribes and cities, and he functioned the same way they did, putting laws under the enforcement power of the ruling class.
The early history of Mesopotamia is the story of a struggle for supremacy between the cities. A metropolis demanded tribute and military support from its subject cities but left their local cults and customs unaffected. City rights and usages were respected by kings and conquerors alike. When the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples settled in the cities of Mesopotamia, their tribal customs passed over into city law.As late as the accession of Assur-bani-pal and Shamash-shum-ukin, we find the Babylonians appending to their city laws that groups of aliens to the number of twenty at a time were free to enter the city; that foreign women, once married to Babylonian husbands, could not be enslaved; and that not even a dog that entered the city could be put to death untried.[citation needed]
The population of Babylonia was multi-ethnic from early times, and intercommunication between the cities was incessant. Every city had a large number of resident aliens. This freedom of intercourse must have tended to assimilate custom. It was, however, reserved for the genius of Hammurabi to make Babylon his metropolis and weld together his vast empire by a uniform system of law.
Hammurabi's Code[edit]
By Hammurabi's time, almost all trace of tribal custom had already disappeared from the law of the Code. It is state law—self-help, blood-feud, and marriage by capture, are all absent; though code of family solidarity, district responsibility, ordeal, and the lex talionis (an eye for an eye), are primitive features that remain. The king is a benevolent autocrat, easily accessible to all his subjects, both able and willing to protect the weak against the highest-placed oppressor. The royal power, however, can only pardon when private resentment is appeased. Judges are strictly supervised, and appeal is allowed. The whole land is covered with feudal holdings, masters of the levy, police, etc. There is a regular postal system. The pax Babylonica is so assured that private individuals do not hesitate to ride in their carriage from Babylon to the coast of the Mediterranean. The position of women is free and dignified.The Code did not merely embody contemporary custom or conserve ancient law. It is true that centuries of law-abiding and litigious habitude had accumulated, in the temple archives of each city, vast stores of precedent in ancient deeds and records of judicial decisions and that intercourse had assimilated city custom. The universal habit of writing, and perpetual recourse to written contract, further modified primitive custom and ancient precedent.
If the parties themselves could agree to the terms, the Code as a rule left them free to make contracts. Their deed of agreement was drawn up in the temple by a notary public and confirmed with an oath "by god and the king." It was publicly sealed and witnessed by professional witnesses, as well as by collaterally interested parties. The manner in which it was executed may have been sufficient guarantee that its stipulations were not impious or illegal. Custom or public opinion doubtlessly ensured that the parties would not agree to "wrong". If a dispute arose, the judges dealt first with the contract. They might not sustain it, but if the parties did not dispute it, they were free to observe it. The judges' decision might, however, be appealed. Many contracts contain the proviso that in case of future dispute, the parties would abide by "the decision of the king." The Code made known, in a vast number of cases, what that decision would be, and many cases of appeal to the king were returned to the judges with orders to decide in accordance with it. The Code itself was carefully and logically arranged, its sections arranged by subject matter. Nevertheless, the order is not that of modern scientific treatises, so a somewhat different order than either is most convenient for our purpose.
Nowhere in the article, or the relevant pieces above, is there any suggestion that laws arose or were capable of being enforced outside of the relevant governments, whether tribal leadership, cities or nations. That idea is modern, and is just not supportable. And at best, what it does is to say that *before* tribal organizations, there *could* have been libertarian societies with no true coercive leaders. But all the archaeological evidence we have shows us power structures existed. The idea that that power would not be *used* to control the lives of others is very, very hard to justify.
The amazing thing that Hammurabi did was not to de-power the state, but to enforce its rules uniformly. His genius was in laying down that principle as a basic part of good governance (even though he was an autocrat). He did not *remove* the power of the state; instead, he held back the power of pardon, and handed the rest to a government structure that would survive him.
But that's not libertarian in intent. He intended that consistent *government* would survive, not that it would whither away. And note too, all this depends on *government* use of force to get people to comply. That is, coercion. Hammurabi worked from a position of power to somewhat limit his power, yes, but he did not *give up* power. He wanted to maintain it, but still be fair to those below him. He was a benevolent autocrat, not a libertarian in any way.
Your point here is desperately uncertain; it's simply not a good foundation for the philosophy that follows. (Consider - if previous laws had their origins in peaceful trade and cooperative societies, why was there constant warfare between these city-states and tribes, for thousands of years? For laws to arise naturally as you claim, without coming from government, there would already have to be what amounts to a libertarian, freedom-based society in place. Something that by the archaeological evidence existed precisely nowhere...).
As I said earlier, the fact that we see certain types of government repeated over and over and over and over in history, and yet libertarianism is not one of them, is highly suggestive that modern libertarianism does not arise naturally in human societies. At least, not yet. Maybe you guys can pull it off in NH.
If there is no check on the power of corporations we'd all be in trouble.
This displays a belief that, in the libertarian view, is unfounded - that governments provide any kind of check on modern corporate power in the first place. Consider that corporations, especially as they exist today in the United States, are legal entities, granted special legal privileges by the government. Corporate lobbyists routinely write legislation. Corporations are routinely granted government contracts without competition, and corporations that don't play the government game are so routinely bullied that a DC office is considered a must-have.
Would the Wells Fargo scandal have stopped?
Yes - and that is, in fact what happened, despite the empty noise of the hearings. The current sum total of government action against Wells Fargo as a result of the scandal is a pitifully small $185 million fine - a rounding error in Wells Fargo's income. The story wasn't the result of regulatory discovery or action by state or federal bureaucrats - although they would really like you to think so - but rather was broken by former employees and customers who sued Wells Fargo and the story was picked up by the LA Times ... three years ago. In other words, it took sustained public outcry and multiple lawsuits before state and federal regulators even bothered to investigate, and it's unlikely that anything more than additional slaps on the wrist will come of the investigations even if they do find anything they can prosecute. Meanwhile, the real regulation is already occurring, with Wells Fargo's new business taking a massive dive, their stock taking hits, and the company furiously backpedaling away from the fraudulent practices and putting millions into ads attempting to restore confidence in their brand.
What about food & drug safety? What about giant corporations gobbling up all the smaller ones with no check on monopoly power? What happens when even fewer companies control media?
I'll cover these briefly, as we've dealt with them before. There is ample precedent for private regulatory bodies that are more reliable, more effective, and far less expensive than equivalent government bodies.
As for monopolies, the only actual monopolies that have ever existed for any significant amount of time are created and sustained by the government. There are no - none, zero - examples of sustained monopolies in even somewhat competitive markets. One of the most notorious examples, AT&T, was essentially built on an illegal, unofficial quid-pro-quo agreement with the government. And there is fairly compelling evidence that initial American anti-trust laws were not aimed at monopolies, but were instead passed to attack personal and business enemies of the sponsor.
If giant corporations control the media and the internet there'd be way to spread dissenting voices. It'd be a dystopia just as bad as 1984 but with different masters.
Assuming a free market and a societal distaste for violent aggression, it's simply not possible for giant corporations to "control" anything. They can only offer goods and services; they can't make people buy them. While large corporations (Comcast, etc) have monopoly control over physical Internet cabling in many localities, that control is based on government-granted privileges - it would be impossible to maintain in a competitive market, and indeed has more-or-less collapsed due to cabling convergence and large-scale wireless technologies (another market where government-granted monopolies reduce competition and raise prices).
Ask yourself this question: in the libertarian dystopian future you envision, how do the corporations exercise their control? Through violence? What happens to someone who simply doesn't buy what the corporations are selling, and instead does something else? If you have a society that rejects violent aggression, what's to stop the rest of society from doing something else, leaving the corporation with no money and no business? If someone like Winston fought back and killed the corporate agents sent to arrest and torture him, what would happen?
The fact is that 1984-style dystopias are only conceptually possible through the societal permission for violent aggression by the people who make up the government. Remove that, and the entire thing falls apart. If that grant is transferred to large entities such as corporations, then they become the government, and the same logic applies.
The first part of your argument simply pushes back the origin to smaller cities and tribes, it doesn't address the question at hand.
It directly addresses the question at hand. I was refuting your argument:
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.
The entire point of the Code was that, up until that point, the law had never been codified - it was largely a set of traditions that developed spontaneously and independently amongst the various families and tribes, and varied wildly between families and across time, based on who happened to be in charge. It can't possibly have been codified by a ruler and imposed on citizens because those things didn't exist at the time it was developed.
And the latter part directly contradicts your source material (see below).
Huh?
Nowhere in the article, or the relevant pieces above, is there any suggestion that laws arose or were capable of being enforced outside of the relevant governments, whether tribal leadership, cities or nations.
Allow me to quote the relevant portion again:
The Code did not merely embody contemporary custom or conserve ancient law. It is true that centuries of law-abiding and litigious habitude had accumulated, in the temple archives of each city, vast stores of precedent in ancient deeds and records of judicial decisions and that intercourse had assimilated city custom. The universal habit of writing, and perpetual recourse to written contract, further modified primitive custom and ancient precedent.
And at best, what it does is to say that *before* tribal organizations, there *could* have been libertarian societies with no true coercive leaders. But all the archaeological evidence we have shows us power structures existed. The idea that that power would not be *used* to control the lives of others is very, very hard to justify.
You're shooting at a strawman here. I never claimed there were proto-libertarian societies predating the Code. I was refuting your point about spontaneous organization, and how legal traditions and codes were spontaneously developed before writing was a technology, and thus could be used to codify laws. I think it's plain from all the evidence we've discovered that non-coercive systems never existed during that time. You need only look at some of the laws recorded from the time to understand just how brutal and coercive these societies were.
The amazing thing that Hammurabi did was not to de-power the state, but to enforce its rules uniformly. His genius was in laying down that principle as a basic part of good governance (even though he was an autocrat). He did not *remove* the power of the state; instead, he held back the power of pardon, and handed the rest to a government structure that would survive him.
And what system did that replace? Ah, right, the "today's word of the ruler is law", where the guy in charge was and anyone who disagreed with him, or pointed out that he was inconsistent from day to day, could get beheaded.
But that's not libertarian in intent.
... I never claimed it was?
Hammurabi worked from a position of power to somewhat limit his power, yes, but he did not *give up* power.
You do realize that this statement is logically inconsistent, right? How could he limit his own power without giving some of it up? That's what "limit" means.
For laws to arise naturally as you claim, without coming from government, there would already have to be what amounts to a libertarian, freedom-based society in place. Something that by the archaeological evidence existed precisely nowhere...
How does that make sense? The traditions and codes that spontaneously developed as "law" before writing was a thing almost certainly first arose in tiny hunter-gatherer family groups, and the first agricultural settlements. There was no society, so there can't have been any kind of society, let alone a libertarian one.
modern libertarianism does not arise naturally in human societies.
Perhaps not, but I like to think we can improve. Genocide is something that arises naturally in human societies, but it's not exactly an admirable trait of humanity, is it?
I'll just point out that even in small hunter-gatherer groups, there were societies with hierarchies and leaders - government on a small scale. We have strong evidence of complex societies deep into the Neolithic, and every reason to think they existed before then as well. For example, there were kingdoms dominating North and South Egypt by 3300 BC. There were multi-settlement polities in China several thousand years before that.
A flood of new insights on the issue, coming in a rush that has made it one of the hottest topics in archeology, is causing scientists to abandon the prevailing image of Stone Age foragers as simple, nomadic people who lived hand-to-mouth in small, egalitarian bands. The image was reinforced by modern examples of hunter-gatherer cultures like the bushmen of the Kalahari in southern Africa.
But such modern hunter-gatherers are proving to be misleading guides to ancient societies, many archeologists say. ''You can't expect fancy things in deserts,'' the home of today's hunter-gatherers, said Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois, who studies complex foraging societies from the Ice Age in central Russia. ''But people 20,000 years ago weren't all living in deserts. They were living in great places, too.''
Displacing the Kalahari model is a new profile, drawn from archeological discoveries over the last few years in all parts of the world. Among the findings are beads and pendants, produced in Western Europe around 32,000 years ago by standardized methods and worn by their owners to denote social identity; settlements of mammoth-bone houses in central Russia, dating to around 20,000 years ago, and elaborate villages occupied by Middle Eastern foragers nearly 13,000 years ago.
In the emerging new profile, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were much more diverse and highly organized than has been thought. They tended to stay in one place. They established decision-making hierarchies. They formally regulated social relations and behavior, usually through ritual.
The preagricultural foragers developed what amounted to banking systems, in which food surpluses were stored, with some people owning more than others. They traded goods over long distances, fashioned a burgeoning number and variety of tools and implements, and produced luxury goods, ceramics and art.
One of my points is that social rules, traditions and eventually laws *reflect* the societies they develop in. We see nothing to indicate a libertarian society under the earliest laws and rules we have (even fragmentary) records of. Instead, we see cultures run by established priesthoods and ruling families, with clear governments, even well before Babylonia arose.
I can see an argument that we simply can't tell how laws arose, but I can argue from the evidence (and have) that they are established and manipulated by governments, in large part because enforcing them requires a judicial system with "coercive" punishment and rules. But when you say things like "there can't have been any society", I can't imagine what source you're getting that from, because as far as we can tell human societies have existed even on small scales for tens of thousands of years. Heck, we have evidence of organized religion among *Neanderthals*. But we also have definite evidence of inequality and power structures in these societies, dating back to before the Ice Age.
Again, my point here is that if the philosophy requires this kind of counter-factual to stand on its own, it's pretty fragile, because it ignores the evidence we've gathered over the last few decades about human societies. I applaud the general direction of libertarian thought, as an influence on democracy, but it's pretty clear to me that trying to break free of an existing "coercive" government as a framework is not going to work. What you'll end up with is a highly inequitable "freedom democracy", at best (think Gilded Age capitalism), and feudalism at worst.
We also have no evidence at all that back in the Neolithic anything like modern ideas of "freedom" and "liberty" existed. Their cultures and societies were deeply different in their everyday beliefs, even though some ideas have been passed down through us (presumably through their utility). And those don't include individual liberty as a basis for social groupings; that's a European concept that developed during the Enlightenment.
To me, projecting libertarian values into the deep past is kind of like projecting modern Christian values onto earlier Christians. While both share some ideas in common, the everyday understanding and functioning of society was so different that we would mostly be deeply uncomfortable with Christianity for much of its history.
Here's an example of my problems with the article I cited a while back, and Aetius approved of (in general). In it, Jefferson is quoted as supporting a greatly reduced role for government, bolded below:
The Virtue of Production. Much of the impetus for libertarianism in the seventeenth century was a reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the productive labor of other people. Libertarians defended the right of people to keep the fruits of their labor. This effort developed into a respect for the dignity of work and production and especially for the growing middle class, who were looked down upon by aristocrats. Libertarians developed a pre-Marxist class analysis that divided society into two basic classes: those who produced wealth and those who took it by force from others. Thomas Paine, for instance, wrote, “There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.” Similarly, Jefferson wrote in 1824, “We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn, against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers.
Here's Jefferson's letter to William Ludlow in full (it's pretty short). In it, he says:
You seem to think that this advance has brought on too complicated a state of society, and that we should gain in happiness by treading back our steps a little way. I think, myself, that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. I believe it might be much simplified to the relief of those who maintain it. Your experiment seems to have this in view. A society of seventy families, the number you name, may very possibly be governed as a single family, subsisting on their common industry, and holding all things in common. Some regulators of the family you still must have, and it remains to be seen at what period of your increasing population your simple regulations will cease to be sufficient to preserve order, peace, and justice. The experiment is interesting;I shall not live to see its issue, but I wish it success equal to your hopes, and to yourself and society prosperity and happiness.
Note the bolded part. This refers to Ludlow's establishment of New Harmony, an experimental community in Indiana, which existed from 1826 to about 1828. It was indeed a utopian community based on the ideas of Robert Owen, who held that ideal communities were about five hundred to several thousand people in size, well-equipped, with work for all, and self-contained. These communities, through their successes, would lead to the establishment of others, who would spontaneously self-organize into "circles" of interacting communities, until the whole world was subsumed.
In reality, New Harmony and it's sister project lasted about 2 years each. And in case you were scratching your head about a few phrases above, Josiah Warren, one of the participants, believed that the failures were mainly from a lack of personal property and individual sovereignty (his phrase). (He went on to create base ideas for anarcho-capitalism).
Wait, what? No personal property and curtailed individual rights in the interests of the whole? How is Jefferson's quote relevant to libertarianism, them?
It's not, unless it's devoid of context, because as Jefferson knew, Ludlow and Owen were famous Socialists. So what Jefferson was admiring was a simplification of government by reducing individual sovereignty and reducing the complexity of governing a society. Owenites, for example, held all property in common, took children from their parents at age three to raise them communally, and provided for a day of "8 hours of work, 8 of recreation and 8 of rest". (Contemporary sources described these communities as "idyllic" for workers while they lasted, until they tore themselves apart in various ways.)
In other words, Jefferson's quote, held up as one of two supporting the right of the productive to keep what they earn, was in actuality approving a Socialist experiment that would make modern libertarians chew the end off of their cigars while harrowing the back 40.
Aetius, I keep finding historical claims like this, and I hope you can understand how I'm not impressed by the revisions of history I see over and over again in modern libertarian writings. I feel that it's really important to understand the historical roots of things, and in this case (and many others), claims are made that are factually incorrect.
It's my hope that you'll read beyond your usual sources, critically, to understand where the ideas are solid (the maintenance of personal liberty in society) and where they are less well grounded (the ideas of spontaneous order, or the association of government with "coercion" while simultaneously calling for the rule of law.) It's just a shame that, in digging into this, blatant misrepresentations appear over and over again in the arguments that underpin the philosophy. And it should be clear that that is a dire problem for building a functional society on top of those ideas, since if they are founded on mistaken understandings of history, where else are they flawed?
I do thank you though for an introduction to some fascinating history.
cheeze_pavilion wrote:Let's say that tomorrow, America just goes 100% Libertarian. Will that make the powerful & wealthy *more* powerful and wealthy, or less?
This depends. If the wealthy in question are dependent on government market protection or largesse, they would likely become poor in short order. If, on the other hand, they were powerful and wealthy because they did a good job serving the public, they would likely stay wealthy and influential.
As far as political power goes, that would largely vanish without the "legitimacy" of forcing other people to do what you want. Other forms of influence - the prominence of wealth, perceptions of status in various occupations, etc - those would remain, and likely flourish.
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?One of the many lessons we can take away from the rise of market economies in the last two centuries is that no one is ever too far ahead to lose everything - and fast. With the vast majority of modern wealth tied up in capital investments, all it takes is a scandal, mismanagement, or crisis to wipe away billions. Consider what happened to the shareholders in Wells Fargo after the recent fraud debacle - Warren Buffet, for example, lost $2.5 billion in less than a month. And Wells Fargo is a government-protected entity - think how much worse things would be with no protection to fall back on.
Quoting more than I'm responding to, because I did read it, but I'm a bit hung up on that first part, maybe because I see "wealthy" as a significant subset of "powerful": If someone is powerful because they have a lot of wealth (in whatever "objective" sense holds for you—mineral resources, perhaps?), then I don't see them as necessarily falling into "did a good job serving the public." But then they may only depend on government protection in terms of defending their property rights. And still, this hypothetical magnate may control the lives of many, through being a major employer of low-skill workers in a region that doesn't have much else going on, economically. (Yes, in theory, those workers could train up and ship out, but that process assumes a significant investment outlay, and the free time / funding reserves to make it happen.)
My guess is that the main way that government interacts with the magnate is via regulations that force minimum compensation for workers, and attempt to minimize externalities generated by the magnate's business (such as both local and longterm effects on third parties caused by the magnate's mineral extraction practices).
I think that the magnate gains in power if the government flips to fully Libertarian overnight, right?
... I'm not impressed by the revisions of history I see over and over again in modern libertarian writings. I feel that it's really important to understand the historical roots of things, and in this case (and many others), claims are made that are factually incorrect.
Quibbling, but I see a lot of thought that was offered by famous intellectuals with compelling arguments, but not necessarily compelling evidence. It's not really shocking to me—I'm used to revering names like Locke and Rousseau more than I am accustomed to reading their critics (and for that matter, I'm honestly still more inclined to revere their names than to actually read their work). In terms of the social sciences, academics have really only just recently started insisting on empirical evidence to some of the Big Claims that floated around for a long time.
I was referring not to philosophical musings, but to the verifiable facts that underlie (or don't) claims.
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