(no subject)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I love ideals. They're an incredible tool in the process of accomplishing your goals. But at some point your ideals have to intersect with reality, and to me this is the biggest problem libertarianism has. A little is good to cleanse the palate, but a strict libertarian view on all things is veering from idealism into unreality. I came across the following post, and I thought it was an amusing take on the issues I have with big-L libertarians. And so here you go:


Libertarianism in One Lesson

No, this isn't David Bergland's evangelistic text. This is an outsider's view of the precepts of libertarianism. I hope you can laugh at how close this is to real libertarianism!

Introduction

One of the most attractive features of libertarianism is that it is basically a very simple ideology. Maybe even simpler than Marxism, since you don't have to learn foreign words like "proletariat".

This brief outline will give you most of the tools you need to hit the ground running as a freshly indoctrinated libertarian ideologue. Go forth and proselytize!

Philosophy:

• In the beginning, man dwelt in a state of Nature, until the serpent Government tempted man into Initial Coercion.


• Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.


• We must worship the Horatio Alger fantasy that the meritorious few will just happen to have the lucky breaks that make them rich. Libertarians happen to be the meritorious few by ideological correctness. The rest can go hang.


• Government cannot own things because only individuals can own things. Except for corporations, partnerships, joint ownership, marriage, and anything else we except but government.


• Parrot these arguments, and you too will be a singular, creative, reasoning individualist.


• Parents cannot choose a government for their children any more than they can choose language, residence, school, or religion.


• Taxation is theft because we have a right to squat in the US and benefit from defense, infrastructure, police, courts, etc. without obligation.


• Magic incantations can overturn society and bring about libertopia. Sovereign citizenry! The 16th Amendment is invalid! States rights!


• Objectivist/Neo-Tech Advantage #69i: The true measure of fully integrated honesty is whether the sucker has opened his wallet. Thus sayeth the Profit Wallace. Zonpower Rules Nerdspace!


• The great Zen riddle of libertarianism: minimal government is necessary and unnecessary. The answer is only to be found by individuals.

Government

• Libertarians invented outrage over government waste, bureaucracy, injustice, etc. Nobody else thinks they are bad, knows they exist, or works to stop them.


• Enlightenment comes only through repetition of the sacred mantra "Government does not work" according to Guru Browne.


• Only government is force, no matter how many Indians were killed by settlers to acquire their property, no matter how many blacks were enslaved and sold by private companies, no matter how many heads of union members are broken by private police.


• Money that government touches spontaneously combusts, destroying the economy. Money retained by individuals grows the economy, even if literally burnt.


• Private education works, public education doesn't. The publicly educated masses that have grown the modern economies of the past 150 years are an illusion.


• Market failures, trusts, and oligopolies are lies spread by the evil economists serving the government as described in the "Protocols of the Elders of Statism".


• Central planning cannot work. Which is why all businesses internally are run like little markets, with no centralized leadership.


• Paternalism is the worst thing that can be inflicted upon people, as everyone knows that fathers are the most hated and reviled figures in the world.


• Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. Therefore, we should avoid it entirely, as we do all forms of combustion.

Regulation

• The FDA is solely responsible for any death or sickness where it might have prevented treatment by the latest unproven fad.


• Children, criminals, death cultists, and you all have the same inalienable right to own any weaponry: conventional, chemical, biological, or nuclear.


• All food, drugs, and medical treatments should be entirely unregulated: every industry should be able to kill 300,000 per year in the US like the tobacco industry.


• If you don't have a gun, you are not a libertarian. If you do have a gun, why don't you have even more powerful armament?


• Better to abolish all regulations, consider everything as property, and solve all controversy by civil lawsuit over damages. The US doesn't have enough lawyers, and people who can't afford to invest many thousands of dollars in lawsuits should shut up.

Libertarian Party

• The Libertarian Party is well on its way to dominating the political landscape, judging from its power base of 100+ elected dogcatchers and other important officials after 25 years of effort.


• The "Party of Oxymoron": "Individualists unite!"


• Flip answers are more powerful than the best reasoned arguments, which is why so many libertarians are in important government positions.


• It's time the new pro-freedom libertarian platform was implemented; child labor, orphanages, sweatshops, poorhouses, company towns, monopolies, trusts, cartels, blacklists, private goons, slumlords, etc.


• Libertarianism "rules" Internet political debate the same way US Communism "ruled" pamphleteering.


• No compromise from the "Party of Principle". Justice, happiness, liberty, guns, and other good stuff come only from rigidly adhering to inflexible dogmas.


• Minimal government is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.


• Government is "moving steadily in a libertarian direction" with every change libertarians approve of; no matter if it takes one step forward and two steps backwards.


• Yes, the symbol of the Libertarian Party is a Big Government Statue. It's not supposed to be funny or ironic!

Political Debate Strategy

• Count only the benefits of libertarianism, count only the costs of government.


• Five of a factoid beats a full argument.


• All historical examples are tainted by statism, except when they favor libertarian claims.


• Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc.


• The most heavily armed libertarian has the biggest dick and thus the best argument.


• The best multi-party democratic republics should be equated to the worst dictatorships for the purposes of denouncing statism. It's only a matter of degree.


• Inviolate private property is the only true measure of freedom. Those without property have the freedom to try to acquire it. If they can't, let them find somebody else's property to complain on.


• Private ownership is the cure for all problems, despite the historical record of privately owned states such as Nazi Germany, Czarist and Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China.


• Require perfection as the only applicable standard to judge government: libertarianism, being imaginary, cannot be fairly judged to have flaws.


• Only libertarian economists' Nobel Prizes count: the other economists and Nobel Prize Committee are mistaken.


• Any exceptional case of private production proves that government ought not to be involved.

Comments

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

Here's an interesting article that attempts to define Conservatism and its goal:
http://www.takeoverworld.info/conservatism.htm

A little extreme in some spots, but interesting nonetheless...

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I've found that article extremely illuminating.

For those skeptical of his model, I offer his comments immediately after 9/11 (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/war.html), which proved uncannily prophetic.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

OK, looking at this:

War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified.

__________________

As an analysis of what war was supposed to be, this is rather a misreading of what war was. Wars in the modern sense have five categories, of which two are relevant to disprove this assertion. First, the wars of the 17th/18th Century, fought with linear tactics by small armies of hired professional mercenaries. The largest armies of the time were used by France in Western Europe, Russia and the Ottomans in Central/Eastern Europe, the Mughals, and the Qing Empire. Large armies were tools of the autocracy but as much for police work as for actually fighting.

War was also not really temporary, but then its aims were limited and its goals limited, and with a professional caste fighting it its goals could thus become one of perpetual coalition warfare for ends that amounted to minimal fighting and minimal changes in territory and loss of life.

The other converse is the Wars of Italian and German Unification where Piedmont and Prussia fought limited wars for total ends, and succeeded. Those two states, however, were extremely conservative and the primary advantage of Prussia over its enemies was having good leadership and a good staff. Neither Prussia nor Piedmont gave two shakes of a rat's ass about long-term social issues, else neither would have done those unification wars.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The main precedent for this looming war is the boundaryless pseudo-war against communism, and yet the precedent is misleading. The Cold War was a war of the mind at home and a war of the jungles in the distant locales where conflicts were conducted by proxy. Its foundation was the intellectual control that, for a time and to a remarkable degree still, prevented those proxy wars from registering in the minds of a populace that otherwise was fairly free. Infrastructural war is something quite different. The Cold War promoted a paranoia of a quite abstract sort: the hidden traitors that supposedly lay behind the social ideals of reformers. Infrastructural war promotes a paranoia of a different kind: the ramifying maze of blind spots in the security arrangements of a technological society which a highly skilled enemy might exploit. Thus the uncanny sense of violation that compounds the sheer violence of the attacks on the east coast, and thus on a less dramatic level the myth-making around security vulnerabilities in "cyberspace".

The Cold War's most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally misconstrues these dangers. The great drama of the Cold War was a supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization and decentralization. Never mind that the Cold War societies of the First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments; despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against dangers of many types. In reality, the infrastructure of our highly technological society is centralized in many ways. There are three economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone else. In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology of the Cold War would promote. The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets.

So what to do? First we need a new concept of war. This is not easy, partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy. It follows that we can't get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is dangerous in itself. The military intellectuals' new concept of war is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything else. Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world without clear boundaries. Instead of permanent, total war, conducted under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends squarely in view. Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion, of the conditions of democracy.

______________________________

Leaving aside the number of occasions in the Cold War and where both superpowers directly intervened in so-called proxy wars, there are plenty of modern wars that indicate the US generals were right and Rumsfeld was talking out of his ass.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I agree, and I think Agre would, too.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Agre has a pretty short horizon in this description, which he sloppily does not acknowledge. But I think it's fair to say that the conception of war he describes was the unspoken ground on which warfare was discussed in the US in the 20th century.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure. The USA, after all, fought in the Philippines from 1898-1913, and Vietnam for 25 years, in both cases more for shits and giggles than any actual logic and reason behind it. The USA has yet to fully demobilize from WWII and has not had an actual peacetime economy since the 1930s.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Philipine and Vietnam interventions lasted a long time, but they did have definitive end states. And while the wartime economy of WWII continued in a sense past the end of the war (never to truly end), other political and social institutions mostly returned to their peacetime state.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem is that they did not have clear beginning states or even really clear purposes. The USA basically blundered into war by a sequence of actions it never fully understood, against enemies it never at all understood, for a purpose it did not comprehend, by means that were inherently flawed. And it did this TWICE.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Much more than twice, if you count all the smaller and/or more covert interventions the US got into in the 20th century. Madness.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, but such interventions in intention at least are intended to not be direct control and influence in and of and over a region. Now, what they can turn into on the other hand can be a quite different thing.