Anticommunist societies will tend to repress communists etc. They will have laws that make it hard to run communes etc as legal entities.

Communist societies similarly will tend to repress private businesses, as if a large company was a nascent government.

Other things equal, libertarian societies will presumably repress aspects of the world that are hard to own. How would libertarians handle ownership of the vast passenger pigeon flocks? They eat a lot of crops; they take from farmers. Then they fly away. It seems to me that the simples solution would be to get rid of the passenger pigeons and keep animals that are easier to own.

A lot of the problems people can point out about libertarian approaches are like that. If we tried a strict libertarian approach the problems would just go away like passenger pigeons.

The question is whether some of those problems would make us go away instead.

It’s that way with whatever system we impose on the world, not just libertarians.

This is a shame but human), because it blunts the libertarian message in explaining what libertarians understand very well – that environmental problems arise when property rights over resources are not clearly defined or enforceable, and also when governments (mis)manage resources.

The key point of disagreement here seems to be the understanding that property rights are only given and protected by states (and should have a cost to prevent hoarding) and that governments are not all the same (i.e. government is improvable). Surely you are not suggesting that the atmosphere and oceans should be in their entirety privately owned? And if so who should get those rights and who has the right to grant them.

I know many Libertarians don’t take a pragmatic approach to these issues but treat it as a question of “natural” rights. But if we look at the real natural world, the accumulation of territory comes at a (-n energy) cost that imposes a natural upper limit.

I’ve been doing my best to upbraid them myself over the past few years; if you’re interested in a libertarian criticism of libertarians, you click to some of my blog posts (which the libertarian Mises group hosts despite my criticism), or try Googling “tokyotom and Reisman”.

Could this be astroturfing? If libertarians have been declining they could be replaced by fakes. Or the media could ignore real libertarians and pay attention to fake ones. For example, libertarians who support the Libertarian Party could be considered irrelevant because of that.

When I google news “libertarian party” I get about 3500 hits, compared to 141,000 for “democratic party”, 50,000 for “GOP” and 80,000 for “republican party” so that’s probably about right.

The issue is more prominent bloggers and commentators etc who speak as libertarians but who actually represent big business.

Regards,

Tom

But to claim they’re honestly ambivalent about the government spying on it’s citizens? You’ve got to be kidding me. In 1976, at least locally, this was a huge concern. Similarly, to claim that libertarians can be honestly ambivalent about torture (while patting themselves on the back for being ‘classic liberals’, yet) is just plain ridiculous, ditto for invading foreign countries under false pretexts.

Those cannot be in any way, shape or form said to be anything libertarians can be said to be ‘ambivalent’ about. Otoh, they could very easily have a political platform; it would just be opposed to the Republican one. That’s why they don’t have one.

The trouble I see here is that they don’t have much of a political platform. Once you assume that everything government does is negative and you want to stop it, there isn’t a lot to campaign for. So you can do pro-gun and pro-abortion, pro-prostitution and a few more such things, and after that it’s all anti.

The social freedoms that people argue tend to be symbolid things like abortion. The economic freedoms tend to be things that big business can exploit better than anybody else. It’s easy to come out as a shill for big business without intending to.

I’m not clear where a libertarian should come out about privacy. Should a libertarian object to government eavesdropping, or should he object to government restricting private eavesdropping? Do we have an innate right to privacy or do we have an innate right to know what our neighbors are up to?