OK, this is getting silly

But from a libertarian standpoint, they were freer than they are on Sex and the City . . .

. . . because on Sex and the City, everyone is required by the director to follow the script.

Libertarian Caplan proposed removing the right to vote unless a voter could pass an “economic literacy” test. Hooray for liberty.

I thought this was pretty astonishing too:

bq. Most non-libertarians will naturally answer that women couldn’t vote. But from a libertarian point of view, voting is at most instrumentally valuable.

So is his view that if the value of a particular right is merely instrumental then the denial of that right to a distinct segment of the population constitutes no restriction on their freedom? Compare: “the right to stay in hotels is at most instrumentally valuable”, does it follow that the denial of the right to stay in hotels to black people is not a restriction on their freedom?

“It began with Ayn Rand, as it proverbially does.“

This is the comment I left there:

“You know, this latest ‘libertarian’ brouhaha reminds me of the pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church, in that it’s really, really hard to find an argument which won’t be eagerly seized upon by apologists. It certainly confirms the stereotypes about libertarians.”

Most non-libertarians will naturally answer that women couldn’t vote. But from a libertarian point of view, voting is at most instrumentally valuable.

I’m curious as to the justifications for breaking away as colony of England. I had thought it was that whole “no taxation without representation” thing, but I’ll readily acknowledge that I may be wrong.

Going back a few threads, isn’t this just another example of libertarians having rather odd definitions of things like “freedom”, “coercion”, “liberty”, etc? Coincidentally, I’m sure, but isn’t this like those crimes a citizen can be charged with, like “resisting arrest” and “failure to comply with a lawful order” that don’t mean what the average person think they would mean?

I think a few folk are extending far too much charity here. By far the most likely explanation for the huge, gaping flaws in libertarian ideology is that libertarians really don’t care at all how their fantasy utopia would affect other people. There is no “blind spot” regarding women, minorities etc. – the truth is that they just couldn’t care less about them and would rather not talk about them, if possible.

Ignoring these issues is also good for them tactically. For as long as libertarianism attracts 99% well-to-do white guys who don’t like paying taxes, they can plough on under the illusion of intellectual coherence. Having absolutely no constituency on either side of the Atlantic serves libertarians well, since they don’t have to deal with troubling matters like selling their ideology to the public. As a political theory, libertarianism exists untainted by the requirements of practicality, it’s no coincidence that that’s just the way its adherents like it.

ScentofViolets, I think you can (and I’m sure they have) come up with a libertarian read on the revolution that would subordinate voting to the general complaint that England was imposing on the colonies’ economic freedom. And that was a huge part of what was at stake, and the reason things like the Boston Tea party happened: Britain’s sense of the colonies was as a place to be exploited, not developed, and the growing commercial interests there wanted tariff reform as much as anything else.

“Representation” as a point of contention becomes a lot more important post-Jacksonian democracy, I would guess, when American democrats were re-creating the revolution as a usable history for their times. And while a lot of the more populist state governments (PA, for example) really did massively expand the franchise as a result of independence, the federal synthesis of 1787 meant subordinating a lot of that emphasis on franchise to the imperative to incorporate and consolidate . In short, as I understand it, 1776 expanded the franchise because populism was on the ascent and it was necessary to give local yokels a stake in the new system (which many were quite resistant to). Buy 1787 happened in the wake of various hinterland backcountry rebellions and so populism and democracy was a lot more questionable to the (extremely elitist) framers, in large part, the thing that a strong central state was necessary to control and subdue.

This is, of course, a highly debated topic, and this is just my take on it; I’m trampling over all sorts of different historical arguments in doing so.

@10

If that isn’t a glaring signal to run away from Kaplan’s work I don’t know what is.

That seems odd to me Harry, though I grant that equality is engaged too. In cases where there is some (non-fundamental) right to phi that is granted to some and denied to others, it sure seems correct to say than those denied the right to phi have their freedom to phi restricted. The unequal distribution of that right to phi makes the restriction salient in a way it might not otherwise be, but whether all or some are prevented from phi-ing is surely, inter alia, a restriction on the freedom of those who are so prevented.

I really am puzzled as to what definition of freedom he’s working from.

It’s the state of being in which well-off white guys don’t have to pay taxes.

Mitchell Rowe:
“Harry this seems to be a stretch. Is a liberty that can be taken away at any time really a liberty? I would argue that it would be better labeled a privilege. Something available to a few when those in power choose to give it to them, but not a “liberty”.”

In other words it IS liberty, always and forever, and as much as anyone will see, for those not in charge.
Your wallet, your “liberty”, your life, to name them in the order they seem to matter to libertarians, starting with the most precious first, can ALWAYS be taken from you by a state determined enough, or by a company determined enough, or any other entity. Please name ONE liberty that can’t in some way be taken away.

We’re back to the Superfreaks saying that the same era was a golden age for prostitutes.

As I noted on the other thread, I was particularly struck by this:

If by “marriage” most people mean “monogamous marriage,” it’s reasonable for monogamy to be the default rule. If by “marriage” most people mean “a marriage where the wife needs her husband’s permission to work,” it’s reasonable for that to be the default rule.

…and if arrangement X is the default rule, most people will conform to it most of the time without the law ever being involved, therefore the law on coverture was meaningless and can be left out of the reckoning.

So Caplan’s idea of freedom extends to freedom for people (including privileged groups) to make and enforce rules governing the behaviour of other people (including un-privileged groups), subject only to the second-order requirement that those rules command general assent. (Which most behaviour-governing rules do, by and large.)

This is an extraordinarily capacious idea of libertarianism. (Actually enslaving another person would still be a no-no, but beyond that I’m not sure what freedom-reducing behaviour it would rule out.) Caplan seems to get to it quite logically, though.

HMDK
I grant that no liberty is absolute. However, there is a difference between a liberty guaranteed by law and a privilege granted on the whim of one who has power over you. In the first case you can seek some redress if your liberty is violated unlawfully in the second case you cannot.

The libertarian would much prefer a strong man leader

cough “Pinochet” cough

“I grant that no liberty is absolute. However, there is a difference between a liberty guaranteed by law and a privilege granted on the whim of one who has power over you. In the first case you can seek some redress if your liberty is violated unlawfully in the second case you cannot.”

Well, no, there really isn’t. There is a fiction of it. The U.S. has pretty clearly demonstrated that. It used to be that no one was above the law, not even the president.
Does anyone actually still beleive this? Did anyone ever, except as a means to further some other political point?
I mean, being responsible for the deaths of thousands…
Curious, we’ve never seen an american president actually reap what he sowed.

“Steve LaBonne 04.12.10 at 2:57 pm

The libertarian would much prefer a strong man leader

cough “Pinochet” cough”

Bingo.

Yes, Mitchell, that’s exactly what I’m saying!
Well, no. And you damn well know it isn’t.
I’m saying that in the end, the power of the law comes from its enforcibility.
And maybe you don’t think it’s easier to enforce laws disadvantegous to those already kept at arms lenght, than to those already in power, but, hey… I’¨m just not that oblivious.

Alternative explanation: Caplan has a friend, also a libertarian, who said something stupid to his wife concerning the 1880s, and is now in a great deal of trouble. Caplan owes his friend a very large favor, and so now makes good on his debt by writing this post, intended to make his friend appear less stupid (and therefore less offensive to his wife). Since Caplan’s marriage is stronger, contractually, he is better able to bear the brunt of his wife’s annoyance. Thus what appeared at first to be ideological obstinance turns out to be an interesting application of the concept of comparative advantage, and an illustration of the bonds that can be formed between persons even in the absence of coercive state power.

More seriously:

Caplan argues: Coverture, preventing married women from owning property or signing contracts, is only a problem if there were no alternative contracts for entering into marriages, and there were!

Caplan then cites prenups, which created a trust to hold property existing prior to the marriage, on the female side, for her heirs; the woman herself had no control over the property, and one fails to see how this resolves the problem at all.

The most hilarious paragraph in the post is of course the one where Caplan attempts to dismiss marital law as unimportant, arguing that relationships between husband and wife are really hashed out between the two of them apart from any law.

The best defense for this suspected parody is that Caplan is trying to mount some argument about the amount of possessed liberty defined simply as the absence of effectuated coercion. So marital law COULD be coercive, but since husbands and wives usually didn’t resort to it to settle disagreements, it was never actually effectuated (a bizarre argument for anyone remotely familiar with how negotiations work, but I see no better one available, and I am concerned that Caplan is woefully unprepared to hold his own in any marital argument).

Well, Mitchell, I guess so, except I don’t make quite the same distinction between them. Not anymore, at least, as regards the U.S.
Because the legal checks and balances has to actually work.
So, while so far, in my own country, they still seem to hold up, somewhat, this does not mean I regard them as some sort of panacea, especially in places where they can be easily circumvented.
In fact, I think we do agree; our difference being the degree of trust we’re willing to place in the distinction.

“Freedom from taxes, of course. I’d thought it was pretty well established that that’s the only freedom that libertarians are really concerned with.”

That, and freedom from any responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of those who share the planet with them.

HMDK
Fair enough.
Thanks for clarifying.

I think all the sex and Jim Crow stuff is only a partial response to the Reason notion that this was a golden age. One can perhaps imagine alterations in the legal status of blacks and women that would be consistent with the kind of government we had in the 1880s’. But aren’t the recurring economic crises — e.g., the Panics of 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893 — the kind of thing that justifies a larger central government; and from about 1945 to 2008 didn’t we get away without that sort of thing? And isn’t Riis’s How the Other Half Lives an indictment of the kind of thing that needed correcting? And how did people survive in their old age in those days? Large numbers in poverty, I believe.

I haven’t followed all the comments on this subject, but hasn’t this sort of thing been missing, and isn’t it the really important part?

But aren’t the recurring economic crises—e.g., the Panics of 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893—the kind of thing that justifies a larger central government

No because free market free market free market.

“No because free market free market free market.”

Thanks. Silly me. How could I have forgotten.

By the way, want to correct my earlier complaint that few had pointed out the economic problems, both societal and individual, that were endemic to the laissez-faire Gilded Age. Substance McGravitas and a few others had referred to them.

But it’s still been a secondary theme here, when you might think that it would be the stronger response to libertarians, who seem to think of liberty almost entirely in economic terms (except that, since they all would have been Rockefellers, the most important thing was “no income tax”).

And free market, genuflect. Also.

“Are there any libertarians who have graduated high school and are allowed out of their rooms?”

Sadly, the field of computer programming is polluted with them. They all think they are self-actualized geniuses of the first order. der Wille zur Macht and all that.

Yes, the Boas article seems to have been written by a thoughtful grown-up, who understands that liberty has many dimensions. The Hornberger piece, against which most of the comments here have been directed, not so much.

@Western Dave:

I saw that article a couple days ago, and thought, “hey, this is Reasonable” /rimshot/, but though the comment count was barely over 400 I wasn’t going to go there. Is there anything good in the comments, or is it the usual abandon-all-hope?

I must agree with John that Caplan’s post is kind of hilarious. The practice he is trying to kinda sorta defend (couverture) is precisely the loss of the freedom modern libertarians hold most dear, the right to private property. Married women lost not just the tax bracket of your choice’s worth of their private property, but *all* of it — proving that, as any 19th-century novel will tell you, the rapacity of the government is as nothing to the rapacity of one’s nearest and dearest.

alex @35:

As an expression of my commitment to individuality and my belief in personal freedom, of course.

You’d best hope that their estate planning didn’t include a provision to be avenged by the private security company they’ve contracted with. Better yet, get a contract with a more powerful security company first … if you can afford it.

I’m pretty impressed by how Caplan is getting his ass handed to him on a platter by the commenters of Econlog – I would have expected them to be a more docile crowd.

Indeed, perhaps this can be a teachable moment provided by all the genuine right-libertarians in the commentariat to correct the thinking of obscure fringe elements such as Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling, or various of the crew at Reason. If nothing else, the more subtle ones will be able to further hone their argument for an “improved 1880s” by providing more detail on how the good developments since then didn’t require federal government action, while the bad developments did.

And speaking of the term “right-libertarians” in the context of “Are there any libertarians who have graduated high school and are allowed out of their rooms?”: Could we perhaps start using at least this fine of a filter, instead of the blanket term “libertarian”? Note that Wilkinson is already closer to the side of the angels on this, and he has some left-libertarian tendencies. (Which, in our current political climate, is to say that he can almost make out Kevin Carson and other mutualists at the horizon, while Chomsky remains red-shifted beyond visibility.) By increments, we could then start more frequently referring to minarchism (mentioned in a prior thread), anarcho-capitalism, etc, etc. Eventually, we might be able to place the most laughable recurring strains of libertarian thought into categories precise enough that not even Sebastian could engage in deliberately disingenuous quibbling about them. Though that is probably setting the bar unreasonably high.

Yes, the Boas article seems to have been written by a thoughtful grown-up, who understands that liberty has many dimensions

It does seem that way, but Boaz is a libertarian, so we know that’s not true. We wouldn’t want Boaz to change our notion of what a libertarian is, so we must instead change our notion of what Boaz is. Given that no libertarians have graduated high school, we can’t imagine Boaz might be a thoughtful grown-up with some understanding of liberty. Alternative explanations, anyone?

David, in NY I absolutely wasn’t trying to attribute the non-italicized portion to you. In fact, I wanted to contrast your fair-minded observation about Boaz the the mostly-unchallenged sneering at libertarianism easily observed throughout the thread.

I regularly read two libertarian blogs–Reason’s Hit and Run and Radley Balko’s The Agitator. Neither has much in common with the caricature of libertarianism so prevalent here.

Well, parse, thank you. I do think that Substance McGravitas has a point, however. They’re not all like Boaz, and by their reactions to him, they’re proving it.

Why’s everybody always picking on me?

alex@35:

As an expression of my commitment to individuality and my belief in personal freedom, of course.

Uh, Sailor Ripley?

Then they should stop- pace the rare exceptions like Boaz

You may be a better judge than me at determining whether Boaz is a rare exception. I spend a fair amount of time reading libertarians who present interesting arguments, found pretty regularly on the blogs I’ve mentioned, and not much at all reading, say, Megan McArdle, who doesn’t produce much I’ve found interesting. But I’m not going to accept your assessment of the state of libertarianism without additional evidence.

Beyond that, some of the characterizations are offensive to me even if libertarianism, by and large, is unrealistic or unhelpful. The crack about virgins, for example. The suggestion that you can judge a man’s intellectual or political acumen on his success in seducing women is one I’d normally expect CT commenters to find jejune, but when applied to libertarians, it’s not merely ignored; it’s celebrated.

Meanwhile, I found that Ron Paul, for all his serious shortcomings, was better on so many issues–the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drug war, domestic surveillance, corporate welfare–than virtually of his opponents, Democrat and Republican alike, in the 2008 campaign. That makes it hard for me to understand why libertarians merit such particular opprobrium.

It’s about English rather than American law, but Caroline Norton’s English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century does a pretty effective job at demolishing the idea that the coverture laws were largely irrelevant or innocuous.

The epigram that opens the book is also of potential interest to this thread: “It was a saying of Jeremy Bentham’s, that ‘if the Poor had more Justice they would need less Charity:’–If Women had more Justice they would have no need of appeals to sympathy. “

Listen, this is a pointless debate. Whoever the libertarian person referred to in the post is, they are not engaged in an intellectually honest task and are simply not worth anyone’s time and effort. Read any well-researched history on the social and economic character of the late 19th century and you will find that the basic factual claims being thrown around by these people are false.

Since I know a bit about economic and labor history but not gender and marriage, please allow me to make my point in that realm and establish that one should not consider this to be a worthwhile debate. Setting aside excellent historical studies, even competent social scientists have identified the lived reality of this period as being overwhelmingly restrictive on any of the dimensions that one might associate with ‘liberty.’ For example, when I teach this era on labor history to undergraduates, I assign Ton Korver, Gregory Clark, Charles Perrow, and William Roy. Any reasonable history of the use of the labor injunction alone would be enough to clarify the coercive nature of the regime governing industrial labor. Unless you are completely delusional about the ‘voluntary’ nature of the labor contracts of this period (and if you are then you might enjoy reading Weiss (1986) on Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline), you can not honestly call economic relations at all free. And speaking of William Roy, the genesis during this period of largely unaccountable rights-bearing corporate entities capable of exercising power through the legal system, the elected political system, and the use of private coercive force should for any honest person jam a wooden stake through the heart of the mythology masquerading as history being peddled here. If the waves of reform since the 1880’s accomplished nothing else, their placing of some limitations on the ability of a synthetic person to mobilize political and coercive power would alone constitute an enormous advance for individual liberty.

My point is that characterizing 1880 as a period of admirable “freedom” is sufficient evidence of either a degree of ignorance of dishonesty that precludes meaningful debate. The only reasonable response to such a claim is to politely suggest that the speaker inform themselves about the period, perhaps providing suggestions for their reading if they are interested, and reconsider their position. Wasting time with anything else is rather like the proverbial agreement to discuss cavalry tactics at Austerlitz with the person claiming to be Napoleon.

As a libertarian should know, there’s no right not to be offended. Bite me.

I’m not a libertarian. And the observation that I find something offensive is something less than a claim that I have a right not to be offended.

(Ron Paul certainly doesn’t believe in liberty where women’s bodies are concerned.)

Absolutely right. Do you think that might be one of the reasons I said Paul had serious shortcomings, and expressed support for some of his positions , rather than for his candidacy?

Keith, when a perennial gold bug and blimp wrangler is right on so many issues where prominent Democratic politicians are wrong, I’m still wondering why libertarian is a dirty word and Democrat isn’t.

It’s Cato scholars all the way down.

Keith, how often is a stopped clocked right? Is it right on the drug war? Is it right on the war in Iraq? Is it right on eminent domain abuse? Is it right on corporate cronyism? Is it right on indiscriminate police surveillance? If libertarianism can guide even a “lunatic” to the right side of these positions, it can’t be all bad, can it?

The Democrats may be the party that gave us civil rights; they are also the party that gave us Jim Crow.

David Boaz, you are so reasonable.

I’ve come to my own conclusions independently long since. . . Now, if you want to persuade me otherwise, feel free to present your argument and the evidence supporting it.

Well, what’s your conclusion? Is David Boaz a rare exception to the high school virgins who represent the remainder of libertarian pundits?

My conclusion is there are enough blogging libertarians making a useful contributions to political thinking that reflexively sneering any time the work “libertarian” is mentioned is unmerited, and identifying the philosophy with its worst exemplars does more harm that good. My evidence is the two blogs I’ve mentioned, which for me meet the very low standard I’ve set all by themselves. Your mileage may vary.

Another libertarian/conservative bit of rhetorical dishonesty, btw.

I’m neither a libertarian nor a conservative. I’ve spent my life working on the left, with a primary focus in gay liberation and sexual freedom, dating from a time when state power was far more likely to be used against those ideals rather than in favor of them. (Not that you can reliably count on state power to be used in favor of them now, at least not in the U.S.) It’s not surprising to me that such experience would leave me with some sympathy for aspects of libertarian thinking, even though my own beliefs are completely different on issues like property and community.

(That same history might account for the whiff of homophobia I get when someone sneers at libertarians for being virgins, an epithet that gets lobbed far more often than its status as a complete non sequitir would lead you to expect.)

Its most representative exemplars.

Well, that’s a question that remains open for me. My own experience is limited and to a great degree self selected, so I’m not assuming it is representative.

My conclusion is there are enough blogging libertarians making a useful contributions to political thinking that reflexively sneering any time the work “libertarian” is mentioned is unmerited, and identifying the philosophy with its worst exemplars does more harm that good. My evidence is the two blogs I’ve mentioned, which for me meet the very low standard I’ve set all by themselves. Your mileage may vary.

Why do I get the impression that if I had put as much effort in the other direction as you did here that you not only wouldn’t “be convinced”, you’d castigate me as a hypocrite for the very laziness a lot of us find in the tribe? In any event, this was an extremely poor attempt at persuasion. Dare I say unschlolarly?

Another libertarian/conservative bit of rhetorical dishonesty, btw.

I’m neither a libertarian nor a conservative.

Did I say that you were? Or are you attempting to attribute to me something that I did not say? If I say it is something of a trademark of the libertarians I have known to be intellectually lazy, does that mean that only libertarians are intellectually lazy?

Please. Try harder. Now, this time, please, try to make a persuasive case to get me to believe otherwise about libertarians.

(That same history might account for the whiff of homophobia I get when someone sneers at libertarians for being virgins, an epithet that gets lobbed far more often than its status as a complete non sequitir would lead you to expect.)

I’d also add that this “whiff” you get is almost entirely in your head. In case it’s not obvious to you yet, a lot of us criticize libertarians for having rather off-the-wall theories of human behaviour (which, unsurprisingly, leads to the frequent suspicion that a lot of these types get their politics from the likes of Robert Heinlein.) Far from being a non sequitur, this type of sneer is just more of the same accusation, dressed up a bit to keep it entertaining. And yes, libertarians do seem to have odd notions about relations between the sexes. Sorry, but look at what Caplan is quoted as having said up above.

Why aren’t you a libertarian?

Because I disagree strongly with the libertarian position on property and community. I think a comittment to individual liberty is enormously important, but I don’t think it’s enough

And who expends great energy whingeing about how unfair it is to tar right-libertarianism with the stated beliefs of major proponents of right-libertarianism.

It hasn’t really been that much energy, and I’m recently unemployed. I hadn’t noticed the criticisms were limited to right-libertarianism, but if I mentally read “right-libertarianism” into every comment on this thread were “libertarianism” was written, I have a far different reaction.

Did I say that you were (a libertarian nor a conservative)?

Well, you said I was probably a person who would want to say something that you identified as another libertarian/conservative bit of rhetorical dishonesty, btw. You were certainly entitled to infer from my response that I understood you to be labeling me a libertarian/conservative, even though I didn’t explicitly say that you were. I think my inference about your remark is similarly reasonable.

I’d also add that this “whiff” you get is almost entirely in your head. In case it’s not obvious to you yet, a lot of us criticize libertarians for having rather off-the-wall theories of human behaviour (which, unsurprisingly, leads to the frequent suspicion that a lot of these types get their politics from the likes of Robert Heinlein.) Far from being a non sequitur, this type of sneer is just more of the same accusation, dressed up a bit to keep it entertaining. And yes, libertarians do seem to have odd notions about relations between the sexes. Sorry, but look at what Caplan is quoted as having said up above.

I didn’t connect homophobia to a general critique about libertarianism but to the specific dismissal of libertarians as virgins. That libertarians might have add notions about relations between the sexes doesn’t rescue that particular jocular dismissal of libertarians from non sequitir. Plenty of people who fuck a lot have odd notions of relations between the sexes, and plenty of virgins have perfectly common notions about them. If I were to present the “high school virgin” theory of libertarianism as the “most representative exemplars” of criticism of the philosophy, I’d be guilty of the same thing I’m complaining about. But I’ve seen enough principled and engaging critiques of libertarian thinking to believe, ScentofViolets, that you and Steve LaBonne don’t have anything useful to contribute.

Substance McGravitas, your reference to Cato is, for me, pertinent but not dispositive.

Substance McGravitas, your reference to Cato is, for me, pertinent but not dispositive.

If the most important libertarian organization in the country if not the world cuts no ice, should it make a difference if all of these stupids have appeared in the not-at-all-capable-of-free-market-support Reason?

Indeed.

Caplan, in response to his commenters, has doubled down on the crazy:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/04/women_liberty_a.html#comments

“[T]he key question is the extent to which these laws [against contraception, etc.] were enforced and changed behavior. How many Gilded Age women were actually prosecuted for fornication? Laws against contraception and reproductive education were probably a bigger deal, but it’s still easy to exaggerate their impact on women’s freedom. How many young women in 1880 didn’t know how to avoid pregnancy? How many actually would have used the crummy contraceptives of the time even if they were perfectly legal? . . . . I know that non-libertarians won’t be satisfied, but the point of my post was to show that women had more libertarian freedom in 1880 than they do today, not convert skeptics to libertarianism.”

I don’t think Caplan has to worry about converting anyone to libertarianism with his arguments.

Got cut off there.

* the least free place in the world is the workplace (see http://realignmentproject.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/industrial-democracy-for-the-21st-century/). But if you try to get a libertarian to analogize between government surveillance and corporate surveillance, or government denial of due process and corporate denial of due process, they suddenly develop selective deafness.

Why aren’t you a libertarian?

Could we at least make some effort here no to succumb to the efforts of a rather small group of people to appropriate a concept with a wide variety of meanings and equate it with their very specific version. FWIW, Wikipedia lists these varieties of “libertarianism”:

Anarcho-capitalism
Geolibertarianism
Left-libertarianism
Libertarian conservatism
Libertarian socialism
Libertarian transhumanism
Minarchism
Mutualism

I’ve always suspected that, if the nation’s small children were to get together and produce their own political ideology, it would be very, very harsh on baths and bedtime and very big on the inalienable and natural right of the individual to eat whatever sweeties he or she liked, no matter how bad for their teeth it is.

Don’t know why it sprung to mind here, though.

Also, the irony of somebody asserting in the same post that a) property is theft and b) libertarians stole the label “libertarian” from the left, is not lost on me. (Personally I’d be quite happy to give the term up if the left were to give us “liberal” back.)

Also, the irony of somebody asserting in the same post that a) property is theft and b) libertarians stole the label “libertarian” from the left, is not lost on me.

Well, it’s lost on some of us, Alanis. Which is to say, those of us who know that (a) and (b) are talking about fundamentally different things. Would “appropriated the label to use for a different, more restrictive system, while usually acting as if their system were the only one to which the definition applies, thereby muddying the philosophical waters” work better than “stole” to make the distinction? It lacks brevity, though. Regardless, I suspect Anarcho was not claiming that royal libertarians and their ilk had literally stolen intellectual property from the left. More that they philosopically corrupted the concept of liberty by using it as cover for inanimate property rights absolutism backed up by state coercion or its practical equivalent.

How you can pretend to believe in liberty and deny self-ownership, I have no idea.

Me either. I suppose you could ask some of these previously-mentioned modern minarchists who call themselves libertarians, and see what they say. Again, though, I’m pretty sure that deep down Anarcho doesn’t really deny self-ownership, but rather the supposed natural law that extends that ownership to land or to the abstraction for representing the labor of other people known as “capital.” Suggesting that hostility to “property” with its almost universal definition in that context is equivalent to denying self-ownership, though? There needs to be a Latin term for “changing definitions in midstream.”

Could we at least make some effort here no to succumb to the efforts of a rather small group of people to appropriate a concept with a wide variety of meanings and equate it with their very specific version.

I was trying to delicately point this out, to no avail, at Comment 64, novakant. Unfortunately, this is what Anarcho is getting at, and Dan is helping to underscore from the right-libertarian camp: that “libertarian” has been largely co-opted to refer to a narrow band of similar right-wing philosophies, by those within and without. It might sting to abandon the exclusive use of the word “liberty” to reactionary royal libertarians, or at best to Tucker aficionadoes, but it’s probably too late. Will Wilkinson is about as left as it’s permissible to be and still get the label by default. Hence Chomsky and Kevin Carson have to be anarchist and mutualist, respectively, rather than libertarians.

Let’s face it, a true libertarian should also be a true anarchist.

‘ Anarchy is not lack of order – its lack of ORDERS ‘

Yet today’s faux libertarians always wimp out just as they get to that threshold. “But someone has to order someone to cut my turf.”

“What’s ‘self-ownership’? Does it only exist in opposition to the idea of being ‘owned’ by someone else, or is it supposed to have a substantive content?”

Both. It means that you have the right to dispose of yourself as you see fit so long as you don’t violate the equal rights of others. ‘Ownership’ implies absolute control within a particular sphere of possible actions.

If it was meant to justify the enclosure movement, it did not do it very well at all.

Yay! I have been waiting for someone (SoV at 96) to mention Heinlein, to give me an excuse for publicizing my recent discovery that, just as Arthur C. Clarke thought up the geostationary communications satellite, Heinlein thought up the Segway!

It turns out that I was not by any means the first to notice, but that saves me from typing out the reference, because Googling “Heinlein” and “Segway” gets it.

It’s in ‘The Roads Must Roll,” which combines one of the dumbest technological ideas (giant moving sidewalks!) with one of the dumbest political ideas (to avoid strikes in essential industries, create a new military service to run them!) to be found anywhere in sci-fi. Which is saying a lot.

Seeing as we’re quoting Proudhon, why not ask them whether they believe “property is freedom”, instead?

Not really, given that Proudhon was arguing for possession rather than property and the whole “property is freedom” argument was showing how state ownership was a bad idea. He was well aware that property became oppressive when it creates wage-labour and landlords (as he explained in “What is Property?” and elsewhere). As I said, agreeing that “property is theft” (and “property is despotism”) is a reliable indicator of whether someone is a genuine libertarian or a propertarian.

“In some sense I have no problem agreeing that the foundation of libertarianism is property – but it’s property in one’s person that is the key, and that is something I think libertarians have no reason to be ashamed about advocating.”

Except that this “property” ensures that real liberty is denied for the many, as people can sell the “property in one’s person” (i.e., their liberty) to others. This creates social relations of domination, oppression and exploitation (up to and including “voluntary slavery”). As Proudhon argued in 1840 and anarchists have argued since.

“How you can pretend to believe in liberty and deny self-ownership, I have no idea.”

Perhaps you should read what these thinkers have to say? I linked to a Carole Pateman article which explains the issues well. How you can pretend to “have no idea” of the arguments involved when they are presented to you?