talkpolitics | Entries tagged with libertarianism

First of all, I get the impression a lot of people say they're libertarians because they hate being called partisan. It's like an inoculation. "Who said I'm a Republican?!"

But really why would a person who practically fetishizes liberty support a person whose initial campaign was based on using government to jail his opponents? Three years in, he's all about retribution and consequences for personal thoughts he disagrees with. He's grabbed more power than any prior president.

His dislike of ANY regulation even seems to be more based on spite for his predecessor than any logic. Who wants tainted meat and carcinogenic water?

So tell me: why would a libertarian support His Nibs?

luzribeiro

Today Paul Ryan finally got to pass the piece of legislation he’s been dreaming about since he was a boy. I'm talking of this pile of tripe:

Or its alternate title, "It's OK To Be An Asshole Because I Said So", by Ayn Rand.

It is kind of ironic ("and SAAAAD") that the Republicans hold what is essentially an anti-Christian book as their political Bible. Ayn Rand teaches that Jesus is a fraud, and the individual is a god, and that the ego rules everything - and Paul Ryan and his gang have personally chosen to follow a set of ideas to the letter that are otherwise pretty wild and fringe, not to mention how boring.

But back to this bill. Someone who passes a bill that hugely benefits the ultra-rich, not just the merely-rich, and will make wealth inequality so much worse, has no moral right to cite "We The People" as their creed. None whatsoever.

The really "SAAAD" thing, though? Millions of people who'll be directly affected by this, have chosen to vote these crooks into office - and will likely continue to do so, no matter what.

dreamville-bg.livejournal.com

With the popularity contest between the two presumptive nominees for the upcoming US presidential election not going so well (record unfavorability rates, and all that), it's natural to turn to the possibility of a third party making some impact, and rallying much of the fence-sitting electorate - if only to flip the bird at both establishment parties.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/01/opinions/third-party-candidate-options-robby-soave/

Enter the Libertarian Party, the eternal third horse in what's largely a two-horse race. Some pundits have claimed the LP is going to be this summer's hottest trend, despite having largely been ignored by the mainstream media for most of the presidential campaign. Naturally, Gary Johnson is the presumptive LP nominee, and now he seems to suddenly be racking up the headlines. His argument? It doesn't have to be a choice between two evils. Compelling, right?

( While we are about those pesky Libertarians... )

mahnmut.livejournal.com

Well, seems like the fairy tale is over, ladies and gentlemen. After a long "stand-off" which saw the authorities not moving a finger to take over the shack that the Bundys & Co. had occupied in their bid for glory & liberty, and after those noble freedom-fighters against the oppressive Gubmint(TM) had started running out of food, booze, and ammo I suppose, and had started to beg folks for supplies... Now comes this.

Oregon standoff spokesman Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum killed, Bundys in custody after shooting near Burns

First off, "LaVoy Finicum". Why does this remind me of "santorum" in some way? (Note the lower case). Oh don't mind me, I digress.

Alas, this whole soapie had to come to an end so abruptly. Why did they have to leave the comfy safety of their liberty nest and hit the road, dammit!? I was sooo rooting for a few months of Survivor-style reality-show that would see those guys living in the woods and shitting alongside the bears, and eating roots and berries. Wouldn't that have been glorious?

( But here`s the main question )

ddstory.livejournal.com

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Two things stick out for me from this whole failed experiment. One, the consequences of Brownback's tax policy have essentially exposed the very same people who voted for it as being as much of "liberal" big-government leeches as they used to accuse everyone who opposed the experiment and who didn't agree with their libertarian tax-free utopia.

And two, it finally provided the real-life example that we've been hearing in discussions with libertarians all the time. You see, libertarian paradise is possible, only, big government won't allow it to be tried and tested anywhere, for fear that it might actually work. Well, there you have it. Kansas is your case-in-point that you so much hoped for.

( Things have slid downhill a little bit for Kansas now, haven't they? )

gunslnger.livejournal.com

Picking up Demos’s Gauntlet

If you are going to argue against libertarian philosophy, you should know what it is before you end up making straw man arguments. Demos (a left-wing think tank) has apparently decided to focus some energy on libertarians, so this reply to them is a helpful start to all people who want to make arguments against libertarian thought. There are especially certain people in this forum who don't seem to understand some of these points.

These two points in particular are consistently gotten wrong on here:

We care deeply about the poor, the helpless, and the marginalized. In fact, the forebears of libertarianism practically invented it. Many attacks on libertarians fall short because they imply that libertarians are libertarians because it hurts the poor and the marginalized while helping the rich and the establishment. These charges are laughable.

This one tends to happen because people want to demonize their opponent when they don't have a good argument themselves.

We are not “market fundamentalists,” a term many have used to describe us. We are “strong market presumptionists,” some stronger than others. We presume that markets will supply goods and services more efficiently than governments, create more innovation, engender more harmony, and be more congruent with what people actually want...Governments are very good at providing things that only a select few actually want, whether it is statues of dictators or roads to nowhere, and then making everyone else pay for them.

This may seem like a mere terminology distinction, but it is a difference that matters. The first inaccurate term is vague and allows for all kinds of knee-jerk reactions. Most libertarians are not extremists, just like other philosophies.

There are other points in the article, feel free to respond to any of them, not just the two I highlighted. If you want more personal opinion, read the article; everything it says I could have said myself.

underlankers.livejournal.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22204076?print=true

^In this story, a man's been indicted for fraudulently providing fake bomb detectors that have gotten people killed all around the world. He justified it by saying that these devices made money, which is what they were supposed to. How does a libertarian/conservative (not that there's any real difference nowadays) approach rein in such fraud, other than pretending it doesn't exist and/or minimizing repeated patterns as a number of similar isolated incidents? Is there any means for the free market, in fact, to regulate fraud or to prosecute it? Even if the fraud, as this does, costs human lives?

IMHO, the answers to all those questions are "there is no such mechanism and in a libertarian economy this will be the norm, not any kind of exception, as it's much easier to make money by fraud than by legitimate means,"

paft.livejournal.com

So The Mercatus, a right-wing think tank, has declared North Dakota -- which recently passed an incredibly restrictive anti-abortion law, one of the free-est of all the fifty states

Once again, we see that when right wing libertarians use the word "liberty," they're using their own extra-special definition of it. As Salon has pointed out reproductive freedom apparently isn't even entered into the calculations,

Women, you see, just don't count.

*

Mood: irritated

peristaltor.livejournal.com

I don't care who writes a nation's laws . . .
if I can write its economics textbooks.

—Paul Samuelson

When last I wrote, I noted that a notorious crank who published questionable economics treatises and strange but lofty philosophical works has been today largely glorified as a visionary. Even more interesting, the Alpha Dog economist with whom this crank sparred early in his career, John Maynard Keynes, has been systematically dismantled in our history and economics texts, even though quite a bit of his work stands the test of empirical scrutiny.

But Keynes' writings and theories lacked what that crank Hayek's had; simplistic clarity, for one, and most importantly, ( Step III — Profit! )

peristaltor.livejournal.com

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

—Bastiat

I just heard a fascinating interview over at From Alpha 2 Omega with Philip Pilkington. Mr. Pilkington has recently finished a fine debunking of Friedrich Hayek. The problems with Hayek were many, and noted not just by Pilkington but by many, many others. At first, Hayek focused on "pure" economic theory, often exchanging ideas with the biggest name in economics at the time, John Maynard Keynes. The two would exchange ideas in both letters and by publishing articles in economic journals, such as Economica:

Cooler heads than Hayek and Keynes may have spotted the many similarities between their arguments and concentrated on the interesting differences. Instead, in their sharp exchanges in Economica and in their subsequent private correspondence, Keynes and Hayek became deeply entangled in efforts to determine the meaning of the terms they used in an attempt to decipher what the other was saying. Even for a trained economist with the benefit of decades of hindsight, the differences between the two men are often erudite to the point of impenetrability.

(Nicholas Wapshot, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2011, p. 98.)

It's difficult, if not impossible, to craft economic policy based upon esoteric minutia that no one can understand. For that reason, Hayek, who had less of an affinity to vocalize his theories in ways more could understand (largely hampered by his English, heavily distorted through his Austrian accent), Hayek "turned instead to constructing political philosophies and honing a metaphysics rather than engaging in any substantial way with the new economics that was emerging."

( Which leads us down the unrealistic, non-empirical rabbit hole from which many fail to ever emerge. )

luzribeiro.livejournal.com

Glenn Beck Defends Gay Marriage: Republicans Need To 'Expand Our Own Horizon'
http://www.businessinsider.com/glenn-beck-defends-gay-marriage-video-2012-12#ixzz2Em5wKk7K

"Conservative firebrand Glenn Beck has joined a growing chorus of Republican commentators in defending gay marriage, laying out a strong case for ending government opposition to letting same-sex couples wed."
...
""Let me take the pro-gay marriage people and the religious people - I believe that there is a connecting dot there that nobody is looking at, and that's the Constitution," Beck said during a recent segment of his online talk show. "The question is not whether gay people should be married or not. The question is why is the government involved in our marriage?""
...
""What we need to do, I think, as people who believe in the Constitution, is to start looking for allies who believe in the Constitution and expand our own horizon," Beck said. "We would have the ultimate big tent.""

( Choosing the right side of history, pandering to a broader electorate, or just being consistent with libertarianism? )

underlankers.livejournal.com

Another libertarian politician has left Congress and in the process has decided that democracy, or as he phrases it 'pure democracy' is now a bad thing. I suppose that if the government is not an oligarchy that a certain variety of libertarian must mistake the absence of a total monopoly on power on the part of the few over the many for living in the most horrendous despotism since that of Fransisco Solano Lopez. After all, if the rich are not entitled to do whatever it is that they would, that is the horrendous sacrifice of 'liberty' that costs a state truly and dearly, at least in the view of Senator Ron Paul. Alexander H. Stephens and Robert B. Rhett would have greatly approved of the concept that society is only truly free when the majority are subject to a minority and denied any chances to speak for themselves because the oligarchs know better than they do:

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/ron-pauls-farewell-speech-congress-lays-bare-his-hatred-pure-democracy-and-love?paging=off

underlankers.livejournal.com

This is a hypothetical thought experiment for the purposes of deciding how a particular subtype of ideology decides what is or is not a 'Big' Government. Suppose that government over a very wide-spread area was to privatize 99% of its existing functions. The only one it's left with are maintaining garrisons of a professional army and taxation. All others are in the hands of very wealthy, private citizens. Is this too much government? Things that we would consider public business are in this hypothetical situation handled by wealthy private individuals, such as libraries, maintaining urban infrastructure, et panem et circenses.

If this is too much government, then the assumption would logically follow that even the political system of 2,000 years ago under the Roman Empire is too much government for some people in the 21st Century, leading to an equally logical question of what is sufficient government? What is the government allowed to do? Where are those lines drawn? If libertarians and their more militant cousins the objectivists do not like the government as it is now, what kind of government would they replace it with? This is a thread where negative answers, what you would have government not, is not acceptable. What you would have government do, OTOH, very much is.

To me the biggest, most glaring flaws in libertarianism and its various stripes is that they're ultimately the ideology of 'NO', without so much as a fractional basis of what they would allow in practice. To start with the most obvious point, a modern military is extremely expensive, so maintaining it will require a taxation rate that would itself be much higher than the average libertarian mentality that taxation is theft would allow for. So this means either privatizing the armed forces, like in the 'Good Old Days' or confessing that in practice libertarianism would simply neuter the contemporary Welfare state while retaining intact the bloated and wasteful military and security apparatus. Either way it's hypocrisy.

weswilson

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/28/can-mutually-beneficial-exchanges-be-exp

Can Mutually Beneficial Exchanges Be Exploitative?
The importance of context-keeping in libertarian thought

When two people not under duress enter into an exchange for goods or labor services, both must be expecting to benefit or the exchange would not occur. In any such exchange there necessarily exists a double inequality of value. Each trader gives up something to obtain what he or she prefers. Moreover, we have at least prima facie grounds for pronouncing the exchange legitimate since no compulsion is apparent.

( Surprising libertarian rationale behind the cut... )

ddstory.livejournal.com

Most of you have probably heard about this already. Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and one of the first investors in Facebook, has invested one and a quarter million dollars in the Seasteading Institute company, which funds a project by one Patri Friedman, a former engineer at Google. The project is to build the perfect libertarian utopia on artificial islands off the coast of California.

The islands are expected to be constructed on floating platforms powered by diesel engines. The weight of each platform should be 12 thousand tons and one of those things should host up to 270 people. The islands will float some 370 km away from San Francisco, which means in international waters. The project includes building a whole archipelago of these islands and eventually hosting millions of people by 2050.

The first floating office will be built sometime during this year, and in 2019 the first towns will appear in the Pacific, ready to be populated.

( Some details & a hypothetical question )

allhatnocattle.livejournal.com

http://hotdogfactory.blogspot.com/2012/01/is-stephen-harper-going-to-sell-jasper.html

There is a rumour being passed around via email and facebook saying PM Harper is planning to privatize Jasper National Park (5 hr drive from here) with considerable uproar. Would you Libertarians in this community really support private enterprise to run your national parks?

You Libertarians say you want smaller government. Government is inefficient and untrustworthy. So how far would you allow private corporations to rule your country? Would you sell off your Park Systems? What about environment controls? The Post Office? The Military? The CIA and Secret Service to be put on tender for the highest bidder? Or how about the Senate? Screw elections how about whomever raises the most cash simply wins their seat in the House of Representatives and Whitehouse? Why or why not?

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. )

malasadas.livejournal.com

Skeptics occupy an important place in our collective psyche, and I say that without irony. After all, skeptics are a vital part of any healthy debate, often asking questions mainstream sources do not even think to ask. Skeptics offer us counternarratives to evaluate, and in the larger culture, they even pick thoughtfully at collective mythologies and can slowly force a culture and society to reevaluate assumptions about what is and is not true.

( That is, if they are doing so honestly... )

sophia-sadek.livejournal.com

One of the heroes of libertarian ideology is the railroad ~~robber baron~~ entrepreneur James J. Hill. He is contrasted with the other ~~robber barons~~ entrepreneurs who built the intercontinental railroad. The big difference is that Hill did not leverage public financing to construct his ~~empire~~ organization.

Hill derived his wealth from his ~~serfs~~ yeoman farmers who settled on his land to raise abundant harvests for transport to distant markets on Hills road. The settlers were ~~forced~~ encouraged to sell their produce to grain elevator ~~shysters~~ entrepreneurs at ~~rock bottom~~ market prices. These ~~pilfering~~ enterprising middlemen held on to the grain until a more favorable price was offered on the grain market and they obtained rate rebates by shipping in bulk. (They also ~~bilked~~ optimized grain prices from farmers by underrating the quality of the grain.)

When we look at the surface of Hill's story, it appears that no public planning went into this development. The libertarian historian has conveniently avoided looking at the planning that took place years before Hill obtained his ~~fiefdom~~ property. ~~Racist~~ Forward-looking politicians deliberately ~~expropriated~~ acquired the land from its native inhabitants for the purpose of economic development. Hill and his settlers maintained their holdings under the protective hand of federal and state ~~thugs~~ military personnel, lest it fall back into the hands of ~~the original proprietors~~ uncivilized people.

Although the Solyndra investment appears to be a piece of failed public planning, it has more of the earmarks of traditional ~~robber baron~~ private development. Back in the day, ~~a thieving~~ an enterprising operator would run his business into the ground and sell off the depleted stocks to a ~~shifty~~ trusted new partner, leaving the original investors with little or no return on their capital.

Were it not for public planning, this Internet space would not be available for us to use. In fact, I would not have the capacity to communicate as well as I do had it not been for public planning.

Is there really such a thing as unplanned economic development?

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Talk politics.

A place to discuss politics without egomaniacal mods.

Entries tagged with libertarianism

Libertarians for Trump, huh?

A libertarian's pipe dream come true

The third horse

And thus endeth the good fight of the liberty lovers

The failed experiment

(no subject)

A question to the libertarian/conservative members of the community:

Apparently, Lots of Libertarians Don't Think Women are People Either

Paving The Road to Derpdom

The Road To Derpdom

So he's "evolving" too, now?

Ah, Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish:

How little government is too much?

Libertarians and Exploitation

A libertarian seasteading project

Privatization

(no subject)

The Luxury of Skepticism

The Myth of Unplanned Economic Development

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June 2025

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