Not going Galt

I need education about this “hedge fun industry”. Is it some kind of highly specialised gardening? Or does it relate to those “holiday camps” you used to see films about, where young blonde folk would play volleyball (behind strategically placed hedges)?

“…most public services would probably have to be supplied by external contractor. The cost of that would wipe out any savings from eliminating government inefficiency”.
If you’re saying the government supplies these services “highly inefficiently”, I don’t see how it automatically follows that replacing them with external contractors will cost the same, unless this comes from the high cost of importing goods/services you discuss further down. Could you elaborate?

Tricky stuff this ambiguous language – I’m just relieved I noticed it might be unwise to refer to “strategically placed bushes” in that comment.

D’oh!

Although I generally agree with Charles’s article, you are not using the best arguments to support it here:

Firstly lets talk about the teachers, nurses etc.

Your Libertopia (pop 10,000) is clearly not going to be inhabited exclusively by computer programmers – and if it were they would be a) relatively young and thus as healthy as any geek can be and b) predominantly single, male and childless – which greatly reduces their need for such services anyway.

In fact while I can’t imagine there are that many nurses and schoolteachers who are registered members of the Libertarian Party, given the likely demographics of Libertopia (few children, only rich elderly people allowed in) you are not going to need more than a handful of each – and given that there will be a market for such skills somebody within the community will provide them at a market rate without any compulsion required on parents or patients.

And lets remember that our would-be John Galt probably already pays very considerable sums over and above his taxes for private schooling and private medicine – and is positively happy to do so as long as his money is going to other John and Jane Galts and not the parasitic lower orders.

In fact ask any libertarian if he’d rather pay $20,000 p.a. to Libertopian Healthcare Inc. or $10,000 in taxes and mandatory insurance for ‘socialised medicine’ and they’d all plump for paying more money

For them its really not a zero-sum game – freedom is something that they are well aware has to be paid for.

And as for imports why must Libertopia be an autarky?

Because he is an SF writer Stross is really addressing the loony fantasies of the Heinleinian Space Cadet elements within the Libertarian sub-culture who actually do think that we can one day build such utopian autarkies on the Moon, Mars or Lagrange colonies.

However some giant libertarian cruise ship or an island micro-state that gets taken over by some libertarian millionaire (which actually was attempted in New Caledonia back in the 1970s) is a far less implausible concept .

But why is that a problem? – they believe in free markets and will buy and sell whatever they need in them – nowhere in the works of Rand, Rothbard, the Friedmans or Heinlein does it state that you absolutely cannot enter into commercial transactions with non-libertarians.

Even John Galt himself doesn’t run off into the forest and live off the land rehearsing his impossibly prolix speeches in front of an audience of birds and squirrels like some Randian Tarzan – IIRC (its been a long time since I battled through Atlas Shrugged) he and his disciples just take their bags of money to some rustic retreat and presumably use it to buy the stuff they need in the local general store until society collapses because they are not entrepreneuring away.

So unless every government and company on earth resolves to blockade Libertopia and refuse their money (which is SO going to happen) I can see no logical reason why their standard of living should suffer severely – they either will only accept millionaires who will live off their accumulated pelf or people with valuable skills who can support themselves doing much the same shit as they did back in London or New York.

In fact the greatest long-term threat to Libertopia would in my view be sheer boredom – what would these people do if they didn’t have the parastitic lower orders and their monstrous impositions to kvetch about and if having achieved their hearts desire it actually turns out to be not that different from the Republican suburbs and exurbs they fled from (good call there BTW).

Incidentally if you want an interesting alternative SF take on how Libertopias might co-exist with other forms of society in a world that has devolved into micro-states I highly recommend Ken McLeod’s Fall Revolution series and particularly The Star Fraction which opens it (the third volume in the series The Cassini Division also has the best visualisation of a hi-tech socialist utopia I know of).

Re-reading your final paragraph this does neatly encapsulate the most fundamental problem for Libertopia: the rich and would-be rich already get a pretty good deal from the evil socialist states they live in.

Proportionately they actually pay far less of their income in taxes than the poor, they can be daily whisked in chauffeur-driven limousines from the gated community where their McMansion stands to the offices where they do business without ever having to rub shoulders with the lower orders, they can rest assured that their countries will probably bankrupt themselves to bail out their riskiest investments and that the bill will be met by the little people who pay taxes and not them, they can already spend as much time as they like sailing their yachts in international waters sniffing cocaine off the silliconised breasts of their trophy wives or the highest class hooker, at least in the US their wealth buys them effective immunity from the law from all but the most heinous crimes and misdemeanours, the accumulation of enough money assures that they will be idolised by the mass media – and so on…

In comparison living in Libertopia represents a real risk – if the mega-cruise ship hits a sufficiently large iceberg or a neighbouring dictatorship decides to invade and plunder their island micro-state (or it finally sinks under the waves thanks to the climate change they don’t believe in) they are pretty much fucked.

Plus imagine being trapped in an effectively sealed environment with spotty geeks who fantasise endlessly about space colonisation and with not a single liberal neighbour or relative available to bait and patronise …

You do realize that you’re implicitly assuming that living in a libertarian society has absolutely no advantages, aside from a lower tax rate? Like, maybe, nobody kicking in your door at 2 AM on chance you might have the wrong pharmaceuticals?

Which actually clarifies the real problem: It’s widely understood among libertarians that, were you to actually somehow put together a real libertarian nation, it would immediately be invaded by the non-libertarian nations, unless you made it substantially non-libertarian by cooperating with the war on drugs.

It’s hard enough to try to put together a new country when all the land is already either in use, or subject to international agreements that it NOT be used, how do you manage to start out with a military capable of deterring an attack by the US military? Short of maybe developing nuclear weapons before starting your new country, and getting labeled international terrorists if anybody catches you at it.

The regulatory advantages of a libertarian society aren’t likely to be of any value unless that society is large enough to sustain a fair degree of industry. Which implies that the minimum feasible starting size for such a society is implausibly large.

So it doesn’t happen, and most libertarians who’ve thought about it understand why.

No, but they’ll likely be either competing with or the same as the suppliers to the inefficient looter government. (For argument, I count each state employee as a supplier.) If you want a real world example, look at the wages Dubai, say, has to offer to tempt away engineers, school teachers, etc.

I know this is just a setup for the suburb punchline. But FWIW:

The size and scale that are just-right for experiments in utopian socialist living are either too hot or too cold for the purpose here. For anyone whose image of libertopia involves a shotgun to keep the revenoors off my land, any island-community would be too crowded. For those of us who think that the diverse commercial modern city looks more like freedom, any island-community would be far too small.

(Note that I don’t know how Rand squared the circle here: she wrote one novel in which the great urban skyscraper was the triumph of the human spirit, and then another in which the great spirits went off to subsistence farm in the woods, or something. I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged– is anyone out in Galt’s Gulch building giant manly skyscrapers even though they make no sense without population density?)

At a more fundamental level: as far as I’m concerned part of the libertarian sensibility is that there are more important things in life than politics. All the island-colonizers and seasteaders and so on have always seemed to me profoundly unlibertarian in their conviction that whole lives should be reordered around the quest for political perfection.

Interesting Trotsky quote not because his insight is unique, but because he shares it with most mainstream economists.

It did btw seem for many years that the Soviet Union was too big to fail, relying in particular on its enormous natural resources. Which were utilised in the production of end products that, according to some analysts, in the aggregate were worth less than the raw resources would have fetched on the world market – consistent with Trotsky’s logic that autarky spelled economic and technological backwardness…

I thought we were already living in Libertopia and that it proved to be what others Utopias had always promised to be: hell.

…why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?

Haven’t they heard of Somalia? They’re welcome to go there, in fact I’d cheerfully bear a tax increase so the government can buy them one-way plane tickets there.

Libertopia doesn’t sound like a very appealing place for schoolteachers, nurses, and so on

Why? Libertopia might create private schools similar to Actually Existing Private Schools. There are plenty of these in America, and they find teachers without too much trouble. Is your contention that the industrial schooling model isn’t likely to appear in Libertopia? Do you think that’s bad?

In Libertopia, because there is no licensing distinction between “doctor’s work” and “nurse’s work”, nurses would probably do even better. Experienced nurses could provide some medical services that doctors provide now (obviously not gall bladder surgery) without having to pay for medical school.

Is it a cultural thing, then? Libertopia has too many dorky white guys who look down on female service providers? Otherwise I don’t see why teachers and nurses would find Libertopia unappealing.

ObTopic: Bellmore has hit on the main problem with building Libertopia. A place with perfectly legal trade in heroin, prostitutes, and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers is going to attract investment from criminal syndicates. The American state will crush that pretty quickly; no one muscles in on its business.

Didn’t a lot of Heinlein’s stories have Galtian supermen as space pioneers, making their fortunes with just the contents of a Conestoga wagon at the furthest reaches of interplanetary travel, well beyond the influence of useless academics and moochers? Or is libertarian paradise supposed to be something beyond subsistence, that is, more than that which you can build with your own two hands, those of children your wives bear, and your herd of sentient pack-animals?

Josh: there may indeed be some people enthused about going to a remote island to work in low-wage service jobs, in an environment with minimal public services and social net. But they will be few, and you’d have to jack the salaries up considerably to attract a critical mass.

Myles SG wrote:

some services and industries are simply not that geographically constrained, and so they are located in the most pleasant areas, with more greenery and trees and more spacious parking and so on.

Because we all agree that Sand Hill Road is more pleasant than San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland, as is obvious to anyone who — wait, what?

Hey, a few actual insights here! I don’t, though, see a recognition that utopias are fantasies, and that attempting to situate them in the real world is like trying to keep a bubble from popping — for reasons that Brett touched upon, for example, as well as Trotsky in JK’s quote. Of course, in the last century, those serious utopians, the socialists and fascists, made determined efforts to keep their bubbles intact, regardless of the costs, but this tended to reflect badly on the utopian aspects of their respective experiments.

A couple of other observations: @13, as I recall, “Galt’s Gulch”, while having certain utopian characteristics, was not intended as an alternative to society, but just as a kind of summer camp for those who had withdrawn their labor from society (i.e., for the strikers).
@20, nice to see a recognition, in Crooked Timber, of American exceptionalism, even if accompanied by the requisite signaling of one’s own moral superiority. In contrast to utopian fantasies, this was a political/social experiment that actually advanced the human condition.

there may indeed be some people enthused about going to a remote island to work in low-wage service jobs, in an environment with minimal public services and social net. But they will be few, and you’d have to jack the salaries up considerably to attract a critical mass.

I confess I don’t know much about nursing salaries, but as I understand it, they are not paid poorly. Perhaps Libertopia would value their services less, but I can’t think of any particular reason why off-hand. Your argument would seem to apply much more to, say, Wal*Mart check-out clerks (assuming Wal*Mart can make it in Libertopia; I am deeply skeptical).

As for private school teachers, they are definitely not paid well, but I wouldn’t describe what they do as a “low-wage service job”, and I doubt most other people would either. They’re not janitors (a far more serious issue for Libertopia, imo). While you might attract them to Libertopia by jacking up the salaries, consider that most private school teachers are probably intelligent enough to work in some other field and make far more money already. Money’s probably not their primary motivator in the first place.

wow…..it’s time for the usual crooked T. meme: “Im against scum like Ayn Rand; therefore Im a hip progressive”! which is to say, the typical frat-boy economist hustle, aka strictleee commercial.

“why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?”

What was 1980s Lebanon outside Beirut, or large swathes of present-day Somalia: chopped liver?

More Dogs, Less Crime

‘Stalin’s socialism-in-one-country strikes me as sustainable, if not particularly desirable (while Trotsky’s international version fizzled out quickly). With different Soviet leaders, it might have lasted until today and onward.’

So North Korea (and if we buy into the truth of Juche ideology) is only ordinarily desirable? I’m not about to get into a Stalin vs. Trotsky debate, but I will defend T’s reputation on this point: while he was seen as the dreamer of world revolution against the practical Stalin, Trotsky repeatedly made the correct point that progress meant material progress and that required a world division of labour. For all the nuttiness of his later followers associated with the slogan ‘World Revolution!’, Trotsky was quite right that this was the more practical option, if one was interested in progress. (And, incidentally, that social progress without material progress is necessarily curtailed.)

Whether radical global change is possible is of course another question but this, I think, does bear on questions raised in the thread.

“As for private school teachers, they are definitely not paid well, but I wouldn’t describe what they do as a “low-wage service job”, and I doubt most other people would either. They’re not janitors (a far more serious issue for Libertopia, imo). While you might attract them to Libertopia by jacking up the salaries, consider that most private school teachers are probably intelligent enough to work in some other field and make far more money already. Money’s probably not their primary motivator in the first place.”

I know it wasn’t the intent of the comment, but this sounds like parody Randism. I can just see a Libertarian think tank debating something like:

In a true Libertarian paradise, the real question is whether private school teachers will work for minimum wage out of a sense of respect for themselves and their mental superiors, or instead because of the vastly lower cost of other services and the freedom to teach as they will once we lift the dead hand of government.

In the real world, I feel very confident that teachers accept lower pay because they feel part of a social compact in which people are valued for more than their monetary worth. In any Libertarian society, where people pay market value, look out.

Anyone smug enough to be a libertarian is already living a pretty utopian lifestyle, since the premise of their political philosophy is “I already got mine, now you go away.”

The main difference a utopia would make is putting their philosophy to an actual test. Paying an accountant to cheat on your taxes, and bitching about socialism in the White House, is preferable by far.

The suburbs benefit from urban centers

Suburbs (or libertarians) also benefit from an ideology, like the one L2P described, which ensures hospitals are staffed 24/7/365 and schoolteachers don’t quit no matter how difficult the pupils are, while privately and not-so-privately disparaging that ideology (and quitting themselves, by moving to as-yet undeveloped locales when things get too crowded where they started out).

Keith:
I think you would be surprised at how effective Nurse Practitioners can be at providing basic medical care. Would I want one preforming brain surgery on me? No. Are they perfectly qualified to prescribe antibiotics, bandage a wound or refer someone to the appropriate expert. Yes.
I would encourage you to look into this more.
MPAVictoria

MPAVictoria: I’m well acquainted with nurse practitioners. But the suggestion put forth was that unlicensed NPs could fill most of the roles of a doctor and that in Libertopia, this would be just dandy. It wasn’t the nurse practitioner part of that equation that has me worried, it’s the unlicensed part. My point was that this is why we have licensing boards and regulations, so that you don’t get butcher’s who’ve glanced at a medical book setting up shop as an outpatient surgeon. In Libertopia, this is not just a possibility but the ideal.

sp: entrepreneurial

Of course the US failed to guarantee individual rights to most of the people under its jurisdiction: blacks were livestock, women were chattel, natives were pests, unions were gooned. The libertarian aspects of the US were wound back as the lesser folk started to gain individual rights.

For Vegas-style libertarians at least, utopia means controlling human livestock of various sorts, and opposing unions. Then rich westside liberals generally are in agreement, and for that matter, the casino business (and casino livestock) usually has been tied to Democrats.

Most reasonable people oppose Ayn Rand’s quack economics (or vegas libertarians). Yet… Aynnie praised Jefferson & Co at one point, objected to the bloated US DoD budget, and took on religious zealots (christian, jewish and muslim)—moreover Rand’s sort of pop-Nietzschean thoughts on socialism and union power are not completely without merit—given……… Stalin and Mao. Rand and her acolytes may have been buffoons but more authentically liberal than most current democratic politicians.

For the same reason that libertarians insist that their personal economic beliefs must be enshrined in the constitution, or that governmental gridlock is a good thing because it stops the government from actually operating: they’re so terrified of their ideas failing that they won’t give them that chance, and would rather force their ideas on others in a way that prevents removal, or obfuscate and make excuses until people grow sick of arguing with them.

L2P @ 36:

I know it wasn’t the intent of the comment, but this sounds like parody Randism.

One thing I definitely don’t care about is what Ayn Rand thinks. My comment was not a mustache-twirling “How can we get teachers on the cheap?!?” but more like “If they already value something more than money, I don’t see money as the issue to getting teachers in Libertopia.” If there ever were a Libertopia, most of the early adopters would have to love liberty much more than money anyway.

Ken @ 42:

If the nurse is willing to perform the surgery for a fee, and I’m willing to pay that fee for the services, what would prevent us from forming a contract in the ideal libertarian state?

I’m not saying nurses would be prevented from doing so, only that gall bladder surgery is not something I would expect a nurse to provide. I put that comment in to forestall “Right, we’ll have the nurses remove the gall bladders in Libertopia!!”, which was the next response out of some idiot or other.

Greg B @ 45:

Why would a self-interested actor care about establishing the conditions under which others would be free, so long as said actor was free?

Perhaps libertarians are not as blindly self-interested as you think. Invert your comment, and your question becomes “Why don’t comfortable leftist professors sell all that they have and give it to the poor?” The answer is that leftists and libertarians have a political philosophy, not just a personal ethic. Not every leftist is Jesus and not every libertarian is Thoreau.

@Joshua Holmes
Perhaps libertarians are not as blindly self-interested as you think.

It doesn’t matter whether a libertarian is crassly self-interested or chooses to be altruistic. Libertarianism permits altruism (like I said) but cannot prescribe it without contradicting itself. This returns us to John’s original point: Actually Existing Libertarianism offers a better economic deal for nearly all libertarians than any feasible version of Galt’s Gulch. There is little material incentive to build libertopia and within its political framework there is no moral obligation to do so. A libertarian can say “it is unjust for me to pay taxes; I shouldn’t have to” and try to bring about that state of affairs. However, said individual is entertaining no contradiction or failure if he or she doesn’t try to bring about that state of affairs for others, that is to say, if the libertarian doesn’t want to extend the perimeter of libertopia beyond oneself. The whole point of Galt’s Gulch is that it’s okay to drop the world and turn your back on whatever those left behind do. (Unless one is talking about some non-Randian version of libertarianism, at which point the discussion of Going Galt is misplaced.) So yes, ‘leftist professors’ can fail to meet the obligations they assert people have towards each other. Libertarians cannot since they articulate no such obligations – inaction is the sovereign right of the individual. Why bother making a group utopia when you can just try to carve one out for yourself?

In other words, if I identify as a libertarian, and manage to accrue sufficient means to realize my will without obstacle, then libertopia has been realized. Once a person can consistently utter “screw you, got mine” and back it up, that person is in libertopia. This is almost achievable within current conditions, so there is little incentive to trot off to an island and build a new society.

So Libertopia is not a specific place, but a state of being, like a Temporary Autonomous Zone, only not temporary, extra autonomous and the zone only extends about 6 inches outside the skin of the individual.

My Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 inches from my skin.

So it is meaningful to say that ‘libertarianism prescribes altruism, it is a moral ought under that political philosophy’? No wonder I’m confused.

Yes — that is, it’s certainly “meaningful”, and neither contradictory nor, so far as I can see, confusing. Libertarianism as such simply aims to reduce state coercion to its minimum.

Ah yes, of course, no man is an island, truly the best characterization of libertarian principles.

There are certainly other characterizations of libertarian principles — I’ve given one above, for example — but “no man is an island” is entirely in keeping with libertarian principles.

Once again Brett Bellmore delivers many carats of comedy gold:

You do realize that you’re implicitly assuming that living in a libertarian society has absolutely no advantages, aside from a lower tax rate? Like, maybe, nobody kicking in your door at 2 AM on chance you might have the wrong pharmaceuticals?

I’m not sure what’s funniest here: the idea that those white libertard nerds will all start jacking up once it becomes legal; the idea that Brett himself is or wants to become a heroin user; or the notion of a society of junkies trying to not only just get along but also to prosper. Yet more proof of the fact that libertards know zero about drugs, and have a self-inflated view of their own rebelliousness. Brett, mate, the US govt isn’t going to carpet bomb your libertopia just ’cause you had a few tokes, and we sure as shit know that you and your pasty-faced keyboard warrior mates aren’t going to do anything more serious.

But then this is backed up by further hilarity from Joshua Holmes (though maybe this was intended lightly):

Bellmore has hit on the main problem with building Libertopia. A place with perfectly legal trade in heroin, prostitutes, and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers is going to attract investment from criminal syndicates. The American state will crush that pretty quickly; no one muscles in on its business.

Just a little hint for the reader: the key threat to this society lies not in America’s concern for its moral decay or its criminal syndicates, but in the possibility of a society full of junkies and heroin dealers resolving their differences using shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

God, the bit about private schools, too. There wouldn’t be private schools. In terms of financial investment/expenditure and return/utility, sending your kid to one would be a tremendous stupid waste of resources, even at artificially low cost.

so instead they’ll have heroin users, armed with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, kicking their doors down at 2am to steal their stuff.

A society with open borders, free access to drugs and weapons, and a bunch of computer nerds who don’t know how to defend themselves from the predatory elements of our present society? If they’re contiguous with any state that has a drug problem, they’ll be begging for the US to intercede very fast.

I need education about this “hedge fun industry”. Is it some kind of highly specialised gardening?

Utopiary.

A place with perfectly legal trade in heroin, prostitutes, and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers is going to attract investment from criminal syndicates. The American state will crush that pretty quickly; no one muscles in on its business.

Sounds a bit like Kosovo to me, which was not so much crushed by the American state, as established by an American intervention.

Remember those guys in high school (well, and up through sophomore college) who would speckle their argumentative blurts with convulsive, affected, braying laughter, followed by some arcane, nitpicking fussing that just missed the whole point? Yeah, the nerds. And not the brighter ones.

fwiw, KC has already corrected sg. And Salient, for all his yelling in bold, has corrected himself — for “Nurse Practitioner”, see “doctor”. (The “private school” bit is just, well, wacky.)

Jamey isn’t a nerd, at least, and I don’t think he’s as nasty as maybe he thinks he is. The problem is just that old one of first constructing a straw man that you then knock down — it’s easy, but pointless. It’s an understandable temptation though, and I’ll admit I’ve succumbed to it myself, in dismissing leftists as — surprise! — mostly humungous hypocrites too, who pretend to care for the underprivileged when all they’re really after is other people’s money at best, power at worst.

Yes, I’d say the problem, for those who’ve watched more than the first few “Deadwood” episodes, is that even if you’re Swearengen, then Cy Tolliver shows up, and then George Hearst.

But libertarianism, like all rightwingery, is the seeking of maximized inequality.

Actually, no. It’s the seeking of maximum equality in the formal or status sense, but it sees substantive equality — a goal distinct from simply helping others — as neither here nor there (forced substantive equality, in fact, is seen as a moral wrong). See this, including comments especially, for a further discussion.

Some faction of colonists would coalesce to try to be the Uber-libertarians dominant over the Unter-libertarians

No again. That does happen in socialist societies, it’s true, but such factions would have no means of asserting dominance in a libertarian society.

Especially when people confront the age-old problem of Who Will Do the Dirty Work.

That age-old problem is easily solved by the equally age-old market.

So it appears the big duck by Libertarians so far here has been to simply assume that Libertopia can’t exist because everyone else sucks so much – not because their system has any internal design flaws.

So maybe we ought to lower the bar a bit. How about just taking existing US and state government down a few pegs. But they have to be some of the good stuff. So, no, we’re not talking about your knife collections. How about we do away with… oh say, public schools, street cleaning, and the USDA. (I’d like to add prison guards, since that’s such a tax bugaboo – but I’ve never seen much coherence between the apparent libertarian penchant for retributive justice and the idea that someone has to process all the offenders.) But oh, you can have legalization too.

No means except violence and coercion. For there is no state monopoly on these in Libertopia. So private violence would rule.

No again. Sigh. You people should really do your homework a little better. Libertarianism isn’t anarchism — that’s for lefties. Most versions of libertarianism have a state that does just what states, as such, have to do — monopolize violence in order precisely to prevent one person or one faction from dominating others.

73- monopolize violence to do what exactly? Preventing the lefties faction to dominate the libertarian one? You see, the clue is what one would use state violence for in Libertopias – or do you suggest that in Libertopia violence can be used in a non-coercive fashion?

monopolize violence to do what exactly?

Let me repeat myself: “monopolize violence in order precisely to prevent one person or one faction from dominating others.” I could make that a little more explicit by adding “by force or violence” to the end, which I thought was understood.

And the Puritan founders, of all people on Earth, were least likely to require welfare state and wealthfare state hand-outs to make their state hang together: padded welfare rolls, rotten boroughs, no-bid contracts, insider trading, crony capitalism. These institutional accouterments of decadent post-modern capitalism only evolved after lobbying lawyers, media marketing and demographically divided publics got added to the mix.

I think that sounds better in the original German.

Metamorf, what happens if the people vote that the violence-monopolicing agency also starts a public education system, and a welfare system? That’s what happened before, you know.

Do you ignore those votes, because of freedom? Are you sure no one will vote that way, not even the grandchildren of the original people? Do you split off to found a new libertarian state?

According to the internet, “the national hoops of the bourgeois state” is an accurate quote. Hoops as in the things that keep a barrel together…

…and the state the Israelis set up was not, in fact, characterised by libertarianism. In fact, it was widely considered to be the closest thing to democratic socialism going.

Going back to the original economic point, I think it’s worth pointing out that “being allowed to take whatever drugs you like” may be good, but it’s not a solution to your economic problems. You can’t offer part of your right to do so in exchange for imported goods or services.

And the economic problems are very real; the cost of transport tends to go up with distance (duh) and down with scale. The scale effect is so powerful it often outweighs distance – the container lines’ Europe-Far East loops being exhibit A. The additional cost to the final customer of the transport is negligible. However, it’s common for goods to cost much more over short distances if there’s not much of a market at the far end of the trip, and even more so if there’s a large imbalance of trade and hence no chance of a backload.

Also, if you’re trying to recruit non-libertopians to go and work there, it’s trivially certain you’ll have to pay over the odds – they have to relocate. Relocation is a cost. Therefore, bargaining over their contract, they’ll want that reflected in the consideration they get for it.

The thing about these two points is that they are absolutely certain. Efficiency gains in public services and whatnot are bullshit and ponies until you’re actually holding the cash in your hand. It’s as if you were trying to recognise revenue against forecasts of future sales growth.

If, structurally, you need to pay more for imports, and you’re by definition a small economy relative to the world, this is equivalent to getting paid less. The libertopians will need to put in more time programming or lawyering or growing drugs or being Netvocates in order to maintain their standard of living.

But they’ve actually got bigger problems. Their island will be small (obviously), it will clearly be an open economy (no tariffs), and because they’re libertarians, it will probably have a balanced budget clause and a currency on gold. Small, open economies with a fixed exchange rate are notoriously unstable, and islands are a near classic example of this. Money pours in; credit expands; everyone buys a Chevy Suburban on a yen loan; money pours out; everyone goes bankrupt and libertopians abroad find that their Visa cards don’t work.

I mentioned that there is a way to convert the right to shoot off whatever infantry weapons you like and shoot up whatever drugs you like into foreign exchange. It’s called tourism, and a lot of small islands depend on it. Unfortunately, this implies Libertopia’s streets will be permanently full of hyuking stag-do tourists out of their heads and armed to the teeth, and the Libertopians will simply have to suck it up and call them “sir”. Also, adding a business with notoriously high operational gearing and highly procyclical demand to their economy is…brave.

If I was the Libertopian Central Bank, I’d want to stick to the reliably defensive impunity-services market. Again, this has consequences for the kind of people who will seek the place out, but then you wouldn’t go there if you were looking for congenial company, would you…

No again. Sigh. You people should really do your homework a little better. Libertarianism isn’t anarchism—that’s for lefties. Most versions of libertarianism have a state that does just what states, as such, have to do—monopolize violence in order precisely to prevent one person or one faction from dominating others.

There are certainly people, who call themselves libertarians, floating around the internet who state that all tax is theft therefore they espouse abolishing state controlled anything (including the police). I can accept that you don’t agree with them but thats not the same thing as saying that every flavour of libertarianism automatically wants the state to keep a police force and army.

Ken McLeod’s Fall Revolution novels look at the evolution of libertopia in a rather different way.

Written in the early 90s when it briefly did appear that not just ramshackle empires like the Soviets but nation states in general might just carry on literally disintegrating into smaller and smaller units, he just visualises the gated community and the corporate office block (and the neo-hippie commune or socialist collective or religious community) gradually taking on more and more state functions.

As he is not shackled by the absurd concept that each of these new entities must be completely self-sufficient, then as long as somebody outside has those goods and services that they need and is willing to trade there is obviously no ‘anarcho-capitalism in one country’ problem (we are talking here about capitalists for fucks sake).

While the post-Soviet crisis was a false alarm (or dawn – McLeod himself is properly ambivalent) and the nation state recovered, the idea that some states can literally disintegrate without the wholesale destruction of infrastructure you saw in say Somalia is not an inherently implausible one.

Whether such a world could be in any sense sustainable is another question: in McLeod’s future history its not – the real anarcho-capitalists flee to Mars (which is colonisable due to nanotech handwavium) and eventually we get a real anarcho-communist utopia on earth.

The closest to a libertopia I’ve seen is some 3rd world countries. Picking one name out of the bag based on experience I’d say Nigeria. taxes are low, and the government doesn’t come kicking down your door when you don’t pay taxes. You can mostly do whatever the f*+! you want so long as you don’t try to contest power from those who wield it.

(The “private school” bit is just, well, wacky.)

File under lay comma space let sleeping dogs. Do you really want to give me a valid excuse to whinge about insufficiently imaginative manifestations of abstract educational theory in a CT thread?

I pay taxes. These taxes pay

This would still be true if I had a kid. The social value of education, to me, is not that my kid receives it. It’s that your kid receives it.

They’re taken out of your home and placed in a regularized environment, over the conduct and character of which I have some say, as a citizen. They’re expected to conform to social norms that are roughly homogeneous across public

I don’t help pay for public education for the benefit of my kid: in fact, in terms of the rat-race, my kid would comparatively benefit if I helped defund and destroy public education and schooled my kid in private, teaching them tricks to getting ahead in a dog-eat-dog world, and teaching them to exploit the comparative ignorance of others for their own financial benefit.

I help pay for mandatory public education because it gets your kids away from you, and into an environment where, I hope, they are favorably exposed to ideas that are more progressive/liberal/socialist than you would think to provide them at home.

I help pay for mandatory public education because it homogenizes the population-to-be, and I like social stability

I help pay for mandatory public education because I have input, as a citizen, regarding the character of that homogeneity– the schools may currently be doing a blastedly terrible job teaching the importance of the 14th amendment, but at least I can have hope that this will change, with concerted effort and pressure.

The public school system is the one hope I have to help ensure your kids grow up to be a little more like me, and a little less like you.

(Umm, this would be a good place for me to mention that the ‘you’ here is not directed at anyone in particular.)

So, the schools are the most effective medium through which we may wage long-term political warfare on each other. And that — the combination of social stability/homogeneity and social orientation that they are uniquely able to provide to a growing population — is the principal social role of schools, whether private (and therefore subject to restrictions of class) or public.

In a world without public schools, there’s little need for private schools, except as a class-signaling device, e.g. the boarding schools of yore: and in a libertarian utopia there ought to be no need for class-signaling devices.

I’m being a bit obtuse and provocative here, especially in that last sentence, but only because a very basic point is getting ignored or called “wacky.” I don’t pay taxes so that there are teachers available to teach my kid. I pay taxes so that there is a system in place to yank your kid out of your home for several hours a day, to get taught about lives and lifestyles that you might or might not expose them to, in ways that will help make your kids, on average, more progressive than y’all are.

…somehow the paragraph that would have continued “these taxes pay for the schooling of other people’s kids” got caught off there. (The CT comment box software would like to point out it did what it could there to spare you some bit of my whinging, and would like to apologize for not being more successful.)

KCinDC@67: You’re probably forgetting the gangs of highwaymen Swearengen finances and controls, the ones who slaughter innocent families of migrants.

Salient, that’s an… interesting approach to public schooling. You sound, to be blunt, like an imaginary socialist who has escaped from the inside of the head of a deranged right-winger and emerged into the real world.
“I help pay for mandatory public education because it gets your kids away from you, and into an environment where, I hope, they are favorably exposed to ideas that are more progressive/liberal/socialist than you would think to provide them at home.”
Good grief.

Personally, I help pay for public education because I like living in a rich, advanced nation, and I believe that educating everybody is a good way of ensuring that my country continues to be one.

And, yeah, I have no interest in personally using any drug stronger than caffeine. That doesn’t mean I don’t think self destructive idiots aren’t entitled to drill holes in the tops of their heads and pour in battery acid, if that’s how they get their jollies. Any effort to stop them from doing that is just going to harm less self-destructive people, too.

I nourish the recurrent suspicion that a certain kind of libertarian is against any concerted effort to discourage self-destructive behavior in others because such behavior helps weed out the competition.

97- as long as the self-destructive people do not use the battery acid of the less self-destructive people; if they would try to do that they would save themselves the trouble of drilling holes and such as holes will be drilled in them for them.

they can take my battery acid from my cold, dead frontal lobes.

102- so, Libertopia is constrained by the unfortunate fact that most people do not want to have any of it; that’s about right, I guess.

@Metamorf
Libertarianism as such simply aims to reduce state coercion to its minimum.

Yes, I agree, the point of libertarianism is to keep coercion in private hands where it can be exercised most efficiently.

@Brett Bellmore saying
libertarianism distinguishes between what people ought to do, and what they ought to be compelled to do

In other words, under libertarianism a moral ought is a ‘moral if you feel like it, but it’s cool if you don’t, so it’s not really an ought at all’. (Unless ‘compelled to do’ means ‘forced to do through violence’, but then libertarianism hardly has a monopoly on the above distinction.)

“Efficiency gains in public services and whatnot are bullshit and ponies until you’re actually holding the cash in your hand.”

Just to go wildly off topic that’s not good news for paying for Obamacare through cutting Medicare reimbursement rates then…..

Back to topic…Libertopia might well be more expensive than current not Libertopia arrangements. So? Different people value different things and perhaps there are some (dunno how many of course) who would value the perceived liberty of Libertopia more highly than the increased financial cost (or lower material living standards that such would imply).

It’s not exactly unusual that people are willing to give up purely physical living standards for some held to be greater value: I’d expect all of the contributors here at CT and most of the commenters would sign up to the idea that we should give up a little economic growth in return for a little greater equality, just as one example (just for the sake of the argument, assume that there is such a trade off).

So I’m not sure that the trade off, living standards for liberty, is such a killer argument against Libertopia given that all sorts of people are willing to trade off living standards for all sorts of things.

Brett 9:

It’s widely understood among libertarians that, were you to actually somehow put together a real libertarian nation, it would immediately be invaded by the non-libertarian nations, unless you made it substantially non-libertarian by cooperating with the war on drugs.

What you are describing is the Netherlands, an island of resistance against the worst excesses of the war on drugs that is regularly pressured and threatened (though not yet invaded) by the US and its drug war allies. And as you notice, it is a liberal, not a libertarian example. I hate to get into this fruitless libertarianism debate again but the fact is that most US “small government” types are perfectly happy with the war on drugs. If US libertarians really care about drug freedom, they should really stop hanging around with conservatives.

Libertopia is constrained by the unfortunate fact that most people do not want to have any of it;

No more so than any other utopian fantasy. Back to the real world of incremental, pragmatic progress.

Libertarians are not the rugged individualists they fantasize themselves to be. Film at 11.

Galt –strawman .

Hillarynomics, or rather Larry Summersnomics– differs from vegas-libertarianism merely in degree– say some differences on capital gains tax rates. For that matter, the libertopia of vegas gambling was built by Demos—Bugsy Seigel style demos, that is. Larry Summers wanted de-reg; ergo, he’s a libertarian.

Now that us librals have mostly agreed on the unlikeness of libertarian utopia, who would like to debate why we aren’t doing more, and being more successful, in putting liberal principles to practice? Of course, we won’t even try calling it utopia. After all, who still believes that even the idea of a better society can be brought up in polite company without instantaneous ridicule.

“More broadly, I think it supports my personal definition: Libertarians don’t believe that humans are social animals. “

What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction.

All this libertopian fantasy of the wonders of unregulated health care reminded me of this story in the Guardian. It seems that

One in five Italian dentists is unqualified, along with an estimated 10,000-15,000 doctors, it was reported today.

More than a thousand people were charged in Italy last year with unauthorised exercise of a medical profession. They included fake doctors, spurious dentists and even a few sham nurses.

In an average year, according to police figures, about 1,000 people have been convicted of the offence. But the penalty is only a fine of up to €516 (£440).

“We catch phoney dentists who laugh in our face,” Captain Marco Datti of the carabinieri told the daily La Repubblica. “They say: ‘I’ll just pay €500, change premises and start again’.”

One “dentist” found by his officers in Rome was a plumber who had been filling and extracting teeth for 20 years.

Italy , with its near-anarchic regulatory system, may be close to the libertopian ideal. I’ll take France or Germany, thanks.

I’d extend Quiggin’s question. Has anyone ever known any naturally evolved libertarian society that existed before the emergence of libertarianism as an ideology or thought system.

I’ve known of societies that could be called, socialist, communist, capitalist, fascist etc. which evolved naturally and organically.

Jefferson shouldn’t be considered representative, he was just one guy and unusual for his time. A revolutionary war soldier was interviewed decades later about his reasons for fighting. When asked if the writings of Locke or Paine had anything to do with it, he said nobody he knew read anything other than the bible, almanac and hymnal. The reason he gave for fighting was that they had always governed themselves and the redcoats were trying to change that. A sort of communal* version of “Screw you, I’ve got mine”.
*I believe he was a New Englander, so Albion’s Seed suggests that the corresponding ideal is “ordered liberty”, contrasted with reciprocal liberty of quakers, hierarchical liberty of cavaliers and uppity cussedness of hillbillies.

Some libertarians (the majority, I believe) are minarchists, but some really are anarchists (at least according to them, if not other folks who call themselves anarchists).

Ollie, medieval Iceland is again the primary example. I’ve heard medieval Ireland was similar. What’s really striking is the absence of any libertarian society created by ideological libertarians. Even in modern times, anarchic Somalia had nothing to do with ideology. Colonial Pennsylvania also went through a period when governance failed, though that again wasn’t the intention.

Theophylact, would you say that the black market for drugs is also close to the libertarian ideal? There are some libertarians who believe not only that, but that it’s the way to build the new society within the shell of the old (whle dismantling the latter). They call themselves “agorists”.

I’m sure Patri would tolerate normal banks servicing seasteaders, he just doesn’t want to arouse any anger from other countries by laundering money or assisting in tax evasion/avoidance/whatever.

This seems to suggest that there are elements of the US government which have as a policy objective the invasion the Netherlands …

Well, there is the Hague Invasion Act …

Brett Bellmore:
What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction.

Libertarians who try to build non-coercive societies are leftists or anarchists, and they don’t think of *trade* as the quintessential non-coercive interaction. Lefty libertopias have often been attempted (with varying degrees of success, of course), but they generally take “family” or indeed “love” as their grounding metaphor. They never (that I know of) are structured around private property as a first principle.

Doctor Science, putting your remark and mine together, and with the caveat that IANAN (I am not an anthropologist, but I did do some concentrated reading a few years ago on the origin of war controversy [e.g., Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War]), my impression is that you can say that in small groups you get sharing inside the group (“love” as you say) and you get trade between groups (and there’s always been trade as there have always been multiple groups). But trade between groups requires coercion in the sense of threats of violence. Of course cooperation w/in groups has that threat too (“if you keep hurting people, we’re going to exile you or kill you”).

Kelly distinguishes between individual violence as either norm-breaking or norm-enforcing — which can happen in-group and between-group — and group violence or war, which requires what he calls the “logic of social substitution” that is, it’s no longer “you killed my father, prepare to die” but “kill him, he’s somebody from the group that invaded our land.”

I prefer going Bartleby.

I have been brooding on the arresting example put forward by Bellmore @86, and have formulated the following thought experiment (the kind that involves parallel universes):

On NonLibertarian-Earth, NonL-John Doe is standing on a street corner with a cordless drill and a bottle of H2SO4 (and, I will stipulate, a notarized affidavit around his neck saying IAM DOING THIS ENTIRELY OF MY OWN FREE WILL). Just as he raises the drill to his skull and presses the trigger, a policeman comes along, knocks him down, takes away the drill and the bottle, and hauls him off to the pokey.

On LibertarianEarth, the same thing takes place – but since the cop is bound by the Prime Directive, he watches in silence as L-John Doe drills a hole in his skull, pours in acid, and falls down dead.

The question is: Which is worse off, NonL-Doe, who has been deprived of his liberty, or L-Doe, who is dead? If you vote for the former, I guess you are a libertarian all right.

roac 117:

This seems to suggest that there are elements of the US government which have as a policy objective the invasion the Netherlands because of its tolerance of drugs. I suspect and hope that you have gotten a little carried away here. But if you have evidence, please share it, as that should certainly go on the lists of things that urgently need to be resisted in an organized fashion.

I didn’t think of invasion myself although novakant makes a good point. But you don’t dispute I hope that the US and other countries have been known to exert pressure on the Netherlands to force them to give up their liberal drug policies that American “leaders of the free world” decry as outrageous? I can’t cite direct examples of that, I’m not following these issues that closely, but I do remember the US officially trying to intervene in a recent referendum in Switzerland on assisted heroin treatment. That is perhaps not coercive but it is an act of intervening in domestic affairs that is normally taboo (well it all depends… it is normally taboo between members of the rich countries club). So the point is, yes, US leaders do, for purely ideological reasons, single out countries that they feel are too liberal in their drug policy and try to change these policies.

John Protevi:

Your comments clarify for me that the sort of trade Brett is talking about — strictly fair, balanced, and freely-chosen — does not naturally occur inside human communities. Most basically, what I think I’m saying is that under what you might call “natural” conditions humans do not survive on their own. We live with each other because we *must*, because otherwise we (generally speaking) die.

So on the one hand, we are ecologically coerced to live in groups, that is our niche. On the other hand, our nature is adapted to our natural niche, so we need to live in a group to be happy. We need other people emotionally, in a way that libertarian trade and freely-chosen contracts cannot satisfy; we also ecologically/economically need other people if we are to survive. That’s what I mean by libertarians not believing that humans are social animals.

“it’s not hard to see why no self-respecting libertarian would actually do it.”

But if you are committed to Nozick style libertarianism then you believe in (near) absolute negative rights. Then taxation of yours or anyone else’s property is right violating theft. If you gain economically from that system or not is then irrelevant. You MUST not be a part of rights violations. So any real libertarian MUST immediately move to libertopia regardless of the economic prospects there.

Piglet @116: who would like to debate why we aren’t doing more, and being more successful, in putting liberal principles to practice?

Speak for yourself, American.

Metamorph:

Thank you for the link, that is *extremely* well-put.

I think your essay clarifies what right-libertarians like Brett are looking for: market-like social relations, because they simplify cost/benefit calculations, and thus can be more easily extended over a wider range of social contexts. As you say, traditional donation and obligation are both, by comparison, vague, difficult to predict, and prone to the stress of free-riding, for both sides of the exchange.

Now, those of us who’ve read any anthropology know that the description of a culture traditionally begins with a chapter on kinship — relationships that are not freely-chosen, so in libertarian terms they must be coerced. Because Right-Libertopia wants market-like, freely-chosen social relations, I have *no idea* what their kinship system would be. Without a kinship system, is there any surprise that there is no Libertopia?

A stable framework of repeated trade can produce individual episodes of violence-free trade, but that’s because, I would think, you don’t cheat me because you know me and my boys would come looking for you if you did, or your boys would come looking for you, since you’ve hurt the fairness reputation of the band and that not’s going to help future trade opportunities.

Okay, but this looks like a very fragile framework at best. My point is just that, in the absence of a trusted institutional framework — e.g., a justice system — that can act in lieu of this sort of feud-like retribution, real trade, in an on-going, commercial sense, is going to be difficult or impossible to sustain. The larger point is that commercial trade is not something to be despised, but is a significant achievement of human civilization.

To Doctor Science, thanks for the kind words. I’d only say that, just as trade — i.e., a freely chosen economic relationship — doesn’t preclude human feeling, neither does it preclude kinship, a form of human relationship that isn’t dependent on coercion in any sense that libertarians are concerned with.

The larger point is that commercial trade is not something to be despised, but is a significant achievement of human civilization.

Never said it wasn’t. I really don’t know any leftists who “despise” commercial trade. What we / I despise is making it the basic and / or exclusive organizing principle for all human relations. Which is the neoliberal position in Foucault’s reading in Birth of Biopolitics. Even intra-self relations become marketized: as when life coach gurus tell you to reward yourself with a cookie when you study for an hour, or what have you. If I can tell from our brief exchanges here, you would differentiate this neoliberal pan-marketism from libertarianism. A big question would be though, don’t the pan-marketists use libertarian ideology to promote the spread of their vision?

Unless the libertopians include a lot of women, they can’t possibly establish anything that isn’t basically a club instead of a society.

Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

DeSadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

You know, it is possible to be a libertarian, or a libertarian-symp, and not be actively antisocial (i.e. no Galt’s Gulch fantasies), and not be all that worked up about tax rates.

If you promised me none of my tax money went to pay for unnecessary SWAT teams, you could double my taxes and I would not complain.

There is a pragmatic, small-l libertarianism that a) recognizes the need for the state as providing the basic legal framework that allows society to function with a minimum of coercion, but b) proposes that we work, over time, and in a practical, incremental manner, to reduce the intrusion of this state in our individual lives.

I would agree, but then we have to accept the fact of corporate power, and once we distinguish private morals from concentrated economic power, we can get to work on shrinking the state when the state has tamed the power of corporations. Because right now today in the West it’s corporations I’m worried about more than the government when it comes to messing up my life. (I live in Louisiana, if you see what I’m getting at — okay, I’ll spell it out: BP.)

As I’ve indicated, such a libertarianism is not only compatible with the notion of human beings as social animals, it embraces it. This is because it sees “individual” and “social” not as conflicting concepts but as mutually implicative, and sees the social and/or the public sphere as something much broader and richer than the state.

Sure, but at Ostrom argues, we need the state (which works best when it’s multi-centered and multi-layered) to tame corporations to give us the space for non-market social relations. The social and / or public sphere can be much broader and richer than markets, but only when the state helps us keep corporations at bay.

For neoliberalism as pan-marketism, besides Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics I also like Mirowski and Plewhe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin.

Making the state still more powerful isn’t going to help, but taming it can.

It seems to me that you are drawing a false dichotomy there. The choice isn’t “making the state more powerful” vs. “taming it”. In principal at least, it is possible for us to exert control over more than simply the size axis of the state apparatus. The path John Protevi suggests is presumably along the lines of pursuing various kinds of specific reforms to reduce the influence of corporations and increase the loyalty and responsiveness of the state to the actual well-being of its citizens.

That’s very hard, of course, but it would seem to be very much the same kind of tough problem as “holding onto libertopia” would be.

I’m also quite skeptical of the idea that focusing on just the state is an appropriate way to go, but it usually seems that libertarians and small-government conservatives pay at best lip service to taming corporations at the same time. The picture that comes to my mind from your description of the problem is something like two giants, happily arm-in-arm, romping through the countryside destroying crops and terrorizing the peasantry. That may well be an apt image. However, it is difficult for me to see how neutering just one of the giants is likely to help. You’re still left with an angry giant — one who’s likely to just grow four times as big and destructive. That’d be bad enough, but it also seems to most of us that you are going to need to enlist the first one’s help to keep the other one under control.

In general, there are two distinct strategies: on the one hand, it can attempt to intrude further and further into the actual decisions of corporations (and, for that matter, of individuals) in order to produce desired outcomes, and on the other, it can stand back to set it place and enforce a broad framework of laws.

Again, this strikes me as a false dichotomy. There are many different approaches, and they are not all mutually exclusive. And which is appropriate very much depends on the situation, there’s simply no way to take the broad view from outer space and pick the One True Way.

For example, take something like environmental regulation. Your framework suggests that our choice is between some kind of highly invasive (and capture-able) command-and-control bureaucracy — telling everyone what brand of filters they must put on their chimneys — or an economy where “economic agents are free to act as they each see fit” — and thus presumably harmful externalities Just Happen, except perhaps in rare cases where the costs are so terrible that they swamp the transaction costs of making some kind of Coasean bargain.

But there’re obviously other possible approaches. Like a Pigovian tax or permit system, which still requires some level of bureaucracy and may make huge economic changes, but, as long as it’s framed by a reasonably faithful legislative body, has far less opportunity for capture or abuse, and will almost invariably be more efficient than either of the above choices.

As far as controlling corporate power goes, it really comes down to the fact that there is no such thing as a “broad framework of laws”. Either your laws and regulations are specific and flexible — so that the powerful will seek to manipulate and entwine themselves with them in order to exert greater power — or your laws are general and spare — so that the powerful will simply accumulate even greater power in the lacunae and exert it directly.

The only remedy to either of these is the constant involvement and vigilance of ordinary citizens. Citizen commitment is absolutely necessary to make libertopia work. But then, if you have that level of citizen involvement, you can also make more flexible types of states work much better as well. So much better that it would almost by definition be more efficient than any similar state artificially hamstrung by simplistic concerns about its “size” or whether it’s laws were sufficiently “general”.

Go over to the next thread up. A guy talks sense there, and nobody’s commenting. But isn’t that just like the internet?

haha Brett, keeping up the funny there. It ain’t the non-libertarians who have a funny idea of coercion, Brett., and you just spent several paragraphs proving the point.

Henry’s post linking to Charlie Stross reminded me of one I was planning to do on the question – why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?

Ummm The American West was pretty libertarian, John. In fact most of those communities had private police forces.

Despite the hoopla they seemed to function quite well.

Perhaps you should do a mirror and explain why all heavy duty socialist states have ended up on the scrap heap.

Removing the only powerful actor which is subject to democratic contraints doesn’t sound at all like a recipe for addressing abuses of power at all. Quite the opposite, isn’t the point to allow powerful actors to do what they want? While not specifically encouraging abuses of power, this seems like a strategy that is at best indifferent to such abuses.

Or is the point of the libertarian ideology that monopolies, racism etc all disappear once you stop trying to control them? That is, cure the patient by stopping any treatment whatsoever?

You’re going to define speech and persuasion as ‘coercion’? Art? Music? Doesn’t occur to you that, if you’re expanding the definition of a word to encompass pretty much everything, you’re doing something wrong? Robbing the word of all meaning?

Words are useful only insofar as there are things each word doesn’t mean…

Surprisingly, John, I’m capable of disapproving of something without labeling it “coercion”; Must have something to do with having a vocabulary of more than 750 words…

No, I don’t think people ought to aim advertising for actively harmful products at children, but there’s that ‘room’ I was talking about. I’ve got a child, and you’ve correctly identified whose duty it is to shelter that child.

Greg B, very well said. You’ve offered a very specific example of an everyday social transaction that the abstract theoretics of libertarianism has a hard time processing. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. As you mentioned, human sciences have uncovered not only this, but many, many more ways in which we interact in different social environments.

In a sense, you could say that social democracy, with a powerful state regulation and provision of social services, is actually very *science-based*, where libertarianism and conservatism are not, opting instead to fall back upon squishy notions of tradition and wishful thinking. There is a tendency on the right to be very dismissive of social sciences, assuming they are all theory (in the colloquial sense) and no fact. But the science is very real and the proof is in how predictive they have been. Human behavior isn’t as mysterious as many would like to believe.

Gaaa! It was Norman Lewis who wrote Word Power Made Easy. Evelyn Wood was the speed reading maven.

Bianca Steele: I’ll let Greg B. answer from his perspective, but for me the interest in modern affective neuroscience goes something like this: AFAICT, libertarians want respect for individual freedom. That’s defined as the inviolability of preferences (as long as they don’t limit the freedom of others). I just want to know how preference are formed. To understand that, I think we have to go above and below the individual. Above to various forms of social groups (corporations and governments being only two such forms) and below to affective structures, emotional complexes, whatever you want to call them. It seems to me that libertarians, because of their commitment to methodological individualism, refuse to consider the genesis of, and multiple number of, affective structures w/in the individual, and when it comes to going above the individual, they seem only to be concerned with governments and not with corporations.

The focus on government and corporation, of course, occurs in the modern case. I tried above to engage Brett in a discussion that trade, which for him is voluntary transactions between individuals, requires a coercive social framework [threats of violence for cheating] even in the simplest cases we have on record, band societies, which are not “pre-State” but non-State societies. So the coercive framework is co-extensive with trade, and doesn’t begin with States. But so far he hasn’t responded to me on that point, though I had a nice discussion with Metamorf about it. I guess Metamorf was content to deal with my limited vocabulary.

Greg B, the issue you raise is a good one, and it’s not just a problem for libertarianism. Liberalism also supports the principle of free speech, a principle which was developed prior to the development of psychology as a science. Liberal attempts to address the issue include (1) education, particularly education in critical thinking, (2) restrictions on commercial speech, and (3) attempts to equalize campaign resources so candidates get approximately equal amounts of speech. These are not really solutions but rather attempts to ameliorate the problem a bit. I haven’t seen libertarians trying to come up with ways to ameliorate the problems with libertarianism, probably because the movement is too committed to ideological purity.

My comment crossed with John Protevi’s @ 194.

1) There is the question whose preferences take priority. There will always be situations where one person’s preferences limit others’ (trivially, the preferences of the New Yorker‘s fiction editor and WGBH’s classical music programmers limit (or expand) what I will be able to choose among w/r/t reading and listening). A focus on the individual in the way you’re suggesting would seem to prohibit the consideration of power differentials and the way power plays out.

2) I’ve nothing against psychological forms of analyses, whether they be Freudian, Transactional Analysis, whatever; they are useful metaphors. But I do object that I do not need to query your id or your superego in order to know whether or not I should engage in a “free trade” with you, and I’d resent your doing so (which is what “I want to know how preferences are formed” sounds like to me).

Brett Bellmore: “the threat to cease the provision of positive interactions.” Name one.

It’s somewhat of an over-simplification to say that libertarians oppose all coercion. We want coercion minimized, and oppose it’s initiation. But when somebody enters freely into an agreement, and then violates it, the coercion necessary to get them to deliver on their commitment isn’t wrongful coercion, and it’s initiation is their fault, not the enforcer.

OK, as long as you don’t attribute that over-simplification to me, as I was responding to this comment of yours: What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction. So to recap, you agree that individual episodes of non-coercive, voluntary trade require (or at least are historically co-extensive with) collectively enforced coercive frames.

As for advertising, of course libertarians won’t concede that point. We want the competition between ideas to be fought on the level of ideas, not on the level of who will be permitted to advocate their ideas. That is someplace we really don’t want to go, not in the least because we suspect it gives people with nasty ideas the edge.

Is it really a good characterization of advertising to call it “competition between ideas”? I really would recommend the Hurley piece, as it includes a pretty good review of the literature about violence and media. Not all that media is in the form of advertising, true, but the point would be the permeability of our unconscious emotional structures to social cues. “Exchange of ideas” isn’t nearly a thick enough concept to handle that.

It’s certainly a form of competition libertarians would lose, just because we’d find it immoral to try to win.

I don’t really follow you. Understanding how media works isn’t really a form of competition, but even if it were, there’s no obvious conclusion to draw from the psych research in re free speech . There’s a debate to be had, and I can’t see how it would be “immoral” to participate in that debate. You don’t think it immoral to discuss whether we should or should not have laws against yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater, do you?

I don’t know how things would unfold in Libertopia, but I do know what would happen in America if the Libertarians were able to pursue their agenda without too much resistance.

If they were ever able to gain control of the government, they would not hesitate, of course, to bring an end to the government’s involvement in fire & police protection, road & sewer construction/repair, and even national defense. Of course, in order to reap any real gains in efficiency from such moves, the Libertarians would not only have to privatize these government ‘industries’, they’d also want to see a good number of firms in each of these industries competing with each other to provide the services we want, that the government will no longer be providing. After all, without the pressure of competition, privately-owned firms are no more efficient than governments are.

How would things be different if we were to get the government out of the security industries? Well, for one thing, we’d have to put up with the endless advertisements that competing police forces and competing fire departments would be putting on the air. If you ever found yourself needing to call for a police officer or a team of fire fighters, you’d first have to decide which privately-owned service you’d want to call (assuming you had not already chosen a ‘provider’). You’d have to compare prices and different packages of services that they’d be offering at the time. Of course, the very first thing they would ask you if you were to call is if you were covered by that police company’s protection services and if you had been current in your monthly payments.

Assuming you were covered by one of their services plans, you would then discover if/whether the plan you paid for actually covers the particular kind of service you were calling them for. Of course, some people would not pay for police or fire protection because they would not be able to afford the premiums. They’d take their chances. So if your neighbor’s house caught fire, and he hadn’t paid for any fire protection services, his house would burn down, but perhaps not before it ended up catching your own home on fire. Still others would be able to afford some coverage, but maybe they would have to select the high deductible option on the service package they chose, that they thought they could afford.

If the Republicans had succeeded in getting the government out of the road/sewer construction/repair business when they were in power, we would still see roads and sewers in America, but we’d also have to put up with certain inconveniences, like toll booths every few miles. Of course, in order for there to be any real competition in these industries, we’d also need to have parallel, competing highways and sewer lines. Can you imagine that? Two or more sewer lines dug so that competing firms would be able to offer the same services to the same cluster of customers? In those areas where it would be prohibitive for a private firm to build a competing highway, the fruits of competition would disappear and all users of the single road would pay monopoly prices in order to connect with the main arteries.

And if we really wanted to enjoy the benefits of libertarian freedom in the national defense industry, we’d have to encourage the existence of competing, privately-owned armies. Of course, some Nervous Nellies out there would be concerned about the possibility that these competing armies just might want to go to war with each other some day, or that they might want to use their raw power to impose their will on Congress, but we all know that nothing like that would ever happen in America, right?

@bianca steele
it isn’t yet obvious to me how an analysis of changing minds is relevant to people who think a libertarian utopia would be good or to people who think the idea is stupid

I am not sure I follow your arguments, I’m afraid, but I take the responsibility for that one. I think the point is that a libertarian utopia is not possible because it invokes a poor notion of human nature, one which presumes a peculiar kind of individual. Libertarianism doesn’t, as far as I can see, address very well the issues about freedom I have raised – In libertopia either you are unjustly coerced, i.e. forced through violence (or the threat thereof); or you are left alone with all your negative rights intact and can then pursue various agreements with others, determined in the last instance by the will of the individual. But this seems to me, for the points I gave and others provided in the interim, to not account for how people really behave or for the determining effect circumstances have and how they might compromise rationality/agency/freedom. John Protevi is doing an excellent job at elaborating and extending on what I have said, I believe I am in agreement with him in full at the moment.

@Brett Bellmore’s comment
But when somebody enters freely into an agreement. . .

I generally don’t like to snip what someone else has said, but this ties into my paragraph above to bianca. How do we determine when someone enters freely into an agreement? It is fine to (circularly) say that agreements should be entered into freely and that those agreements are therefore free, but I am left asking: what if I have to enter into an agreement because of circumstances? What if my ability to judge among alternatives is compromised? What if my ignorance, my habits, my means, or my state of mind are exploited? What if my preferences don’t stem from my soul but are a function of concerted non-coercive (read: non-violent) efforts by others? Casting all exchange relations as freely-chosen instances of mutual benefit begs the question.

Greg B: …what if I have to enter into an agreement because of circumstances?

You always have to. And so does the person you’re agreeing with. you’re either entering into the agreement on a pure whim, for no reason, or you have a reason for doing so, and that reason constitutes the “circumstances”, for both parties.

Of course, if you like to think of yourself as simply a robot, forced/’coerced” by the internal mechanisms of your “mind”, that’s okay, but you should bear in mind that the other party is also a robot of the same general type, and is similarly forced/coerced by the operation of “circumstances” on his/her own internal neurological mechanisms. We’re back to that notion of universal coercion so useful to those with an unhealthy interest in power over others.

So the coercive framework is co-extensive with trade, and doesn’t begin with States.

True, but trivial. The coercive framework is coextensive with human interactions of any sort, particularly in the hyper-sensitive manner in which “coercive” is being used here. The point is to develop ways to reduce coercive interactions. But you can easily make that impossible just by making coercion roughly equivalent to interaction, as we see in efforts to define persuasion as coercion above—so, e.g., everyone making a comment on this thread is attempting at least to coerce others into agreement, as we know from various studies of the neurological effects of rhetoric, etc.

There are two problems here. First, we (Greg B and I) are trying to dislodge the voluntary vs coercive exclusive binary by pointing to preference formation techniques wielded by corporations and governments. That’s not coercion if you define coercion as a gun to the head, but it’s not nothing either, and I would like to hear what you call it. The second point is emergence vs methodological individualism. With advertising, we’re not talking about a smoothly-scaled up version of one-on-one communication, as you imply by making our discussions here an “e.g.”. We’re talking about big corporations with lots of money and brainpower and big ad agencies with lots of money and brainpower and a media-saturated environment (TV screens in elevators now!).

I’ll leave your second paragraph alone, because although I generally follow a tit-for-tat policy (witness my interaction with Brett), we’ve had a good discussion so far, so I’m willing to let you slide here. But with another allusion to my secret desire to be a dictator, I’ll have to retaliate: a tit for two tats, as it were.

Greg B: For those who consulted my posts, I was content to concede a quite restricted definition of coercion.

Well, you were content to restrict the definition of the word, but it seemed to me you were still relying on the concept in attempting to make a critique of libertarianism. You say, for example, that your question is ““How does libertarianism address changing the behavior of others in these ways?””, such other ways including art and advertising, as well as “rhetoric, speech, persuasion, marketing, influence, charisma, and so forth. ” But I can’t imagine how such a question could have any point at all unless you felt that such “other ways” really constituted a form of coercion without using the word itself.

If, however, you’re serious about abandoning the concept of coercion as applying to these “other ways” then I’d say good, and we can move on to talk about other things. Because as far as answering the question is concerned, I’d just say libertarianism as such doesn’t address it at all — people are as free to change the behavior of others through persuasion, etc. as they are through flattery, or offers of cooperation, or protest marches, or, for that matter, through wearing white after Labor Day.

John: But with another allusion to my secret desire to be a dictator, I’ll have to retaliate: a tit for two tats, as it were.

Fair enough –more than fair, in fact, as you no doubt know from “the evolution of cooperation”. I’ll just say that my allusion wasn’t to your personal desires, of which I know nothing obviously, but to agendas I thought were implicit in some parts of our political culture.

As for trying to “dislodge the voluntary vs coercive exclusive binary”, see my response to Greg above — I don’t think these poles need to be thought of as a mutually exclusive binary in order to say, as libertarianism does, that it’s preferable to move human interactions toward the voluntary pole and away from the coercive one. I don’t doubt that there are “preference formation techniques wielded by corporations and governments” — but “preference formation techniques” of one sort or another, wielded by varying sized whatsits of varying kinds (e.g., churches, political parties, community organizations, NGOs, activist groups, small companies, academics, artist cooperatives, etc.) with varying amounts of money and brainpower are a constant and ineradicable factor in human relations. The only way to make an issue out of that is to try to make a much more problematic “exclusive binary”, between some Ideal of pure preference formation in the absence of any external influence, on the one hand, and, as I indicated to Greg, a robot-like view of human preference as merely the expression of some alien preference formation technique, on the other.

I don’t doubt that there are “preference formation techniques wielded by corporations and governments”—but “preference formation techniques” of one sort or another, wielded by varying sized whatsits of varying kinds (e.g., churches, political parties, community organizations, NGOs, activist groups, small companies, academics, artist cooperatives, etc.) with varying amounts of money and brainpower are a constant and ineradicable factor in human relations.

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be regulated, precisely to expand the area around the voluntary pole of human interaction.

Anyway, dinner calls. I won’t follow you with reducing corporations to a collection of people, but as the diplomats would say, we’ve had a frank and open exchange of views, and for that I thank you.

… we’ve had a frank and open exchange of views, and for that I thank you.

And I thank you, for the same.

So there is, on one hand, a restricted definition of coercion. Fair enough. There are also voluntary interactions. Between the two we might find all kinds of interactions which form the preferences of others. There are also many interactions which not only form the preferences of others, but which structure their means and their future interactions. We might characterize all those interactions as non-coercive (with the implication they are, to some extent, voluntary). Thus, whatever their consequences, libertarianism sees all non-coercive interactions as unproblematic. Yet facing the argument that those interactions may be unjust – that either at the point of their application or in their long-term consequences, they reduce one’s autonomy, one’s liberty, they move one away from the voluntary pole – the response is that one is redefining coercion unfairly, broadening it so far as to be meaningless. Consequently, it is not possible in the terms of such a debate to argue against the following: anything one might do to others, individually or in concert with one’s peers, as long as you are not coercive, are fine. Manipulation, propaganda, exploitation of others’ faults, and so forth, these will, I presume, either be weeded out by the market (but we might want to look at what happens in the real world) or are admissible.

@Metamorf
“preference formation techniques” of one sort or another, wielded by varying sized whatsits of varying kinds with varying amounts of money and brainpower are a constant and ineradicable factor in human relations

But the distribution of power among these ‘varying sized whatsits’ is not constant and ineradicable, and some distributions of power can be unjust. Furthermore, such distributions of power can result from what are ostensibly voluntary interactions.

@Brett Bellmore
Got a way of determining that this is the case, which is not only objective, but obvious enough that nobody could get away with abusing it?

I would ask the same question to a position which says that every exchange relation is by definition voluntary. Self-reports are hardly sufficient, look at people’s cognitive biases, fallibility in judgment, and so forth. This position also says if there is no coercion (restrictively defined), that the conditions under which the exchange is able to occur warrant no consideration. Why? Because to do so is to try to make ‘coercion’ mean anything, apparently.

I don’t dismiss people’s choices as not their own, I think it is necessary to study how and why people make decisions, and ‘how’ and ‘why’ are variable, and complicate which interactions are expressions of liberty and which are not. Even recognizing Metamorf’s admission that voluntary decisions are not made in a vacuum, Libertarianism takes it as axiomatic that these decisions are voluntary and unproblematic (because non-coercive).

That’s all I think I have to say, otherwise it feels like we are going in circles, though I am genuine that this is not an attempt to claim the last word.

Hey libertards, is it “coercive” or “non-coercive” to run a program of deliberate public misinformation about tobacco and cancer, using tobacco company money, but hiding the source of your funds so people are led to believe you’re an honest, concerned citizen (“just people” to continue the Thatcher line). Is it “coercive” or “non-coercive” to extend that campaign, using tobacco company money, to include attacks on climate science and any other environmentally-related scientific findings, for the stated reason that attacking the integrity of envrionmentally-related science as a whole is useful? Is it “coercive” or “non-coercive” to set up front organisations whose job is to lobby government to ease restrictions on the sale of toxic chemicals, tobacco, or the emission of environmentally destructive greenhouse gases? If someone flies over your house dumping DDT on your kids because those restrictions have been removed, are you being “coerced”? When you move house because of this was your decision “voluntary”?

Is it “coercive” or “non-coercive” when those lobby groups’ campaigns include attempts to destroy the careers of individual scientists, misrepresentation of their work, death threats, and attempts to remove their funding?

If you’re a scientist whose reputation has successfully been trashed by a libertarian think-tank, and you have to get a job as a taxi-driver because no-one will employ you in your chosen field, did you “voluntarily” enter into that new career?

If you’re a prawn fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, and your livelihood was ruined by BP’s poor risk management, and you have to take a job in an unsafe oil clean-up role because it’s all that’s going, did you take that job “voluntarily”? And if the oil spill was only caused because BP employed some fancy lobbyists to get a sympathetic Bush govt to reduce restrictions on their extremely risky drilling program, have you been “coerced” or not?

The libertarian definition of “coercion” and “voluntary contracts” could be dismissed as stupid and naive if it didn’t so clearly and carefully fit their political framework of giving the rich as much coercive power as possible.

Hey libertards

sg, might I suggest that it is rarely worthwhile to spend precious time engaging in conversation (online or otherwise) with groups that you despise so much that you cannot help but indulge in name-calling?

It would be interesting to see how someone of a Libertarian bent tries answering some of your questions, but given how you open your post, it implies very heavily that you are not actually interested in their answers, in which case it is highly unlikely any response will be made. In such case, much of the point of the post has been lost (except perhaps the point that you seem to believe name-calling strengthens your post).

A pity.

Brett Bellmore #180: “Because non-libertarians are (deliberately?) sloppy in their use of the term, “coercion”, to include not just use of actual force, or imposition of actively averse consequences, but also the threat to cease the provision of positive interactions. I suppose because, having fuzzed the notion of “coercion” to include things not objectionable, it becomes easier in your mind to justify using real coercion to achieve your ends, because use of “coercion” so defined becomes unavoidable anyway. Or maybe just because you figure anything you don’t like, including other people not doing things you want, must be bad.”

No, you haven’t drawn the line on coercion either. If you refuse to pay taxes, or, for example, you refuse the mandate to carry health insurance, then you are reducing the total economic welfare of society — because that money is funding a policy, or an institution, that reduces a set of transaction costs for everyone, so giving a savings to everyone that each can spend elsewhere. This is reducing negative liberty. Reducing total economic welfare is actively adverse to the negative liberty of others, because then we are all faced with a set of much larger constraints to have the same standard of living, since we now have to pay higher transaction costs to attain it and maintain it. This is quite objectionable. Your decision to opt out is actively adverse to the negative liberty of others.

Mandated universal healthcare is a good example: without it, people who pay for health insurance policies, and who pay taxes, are really paying MORE than they need to, because the people without insurance are being treated anyway. It is a complex and unnecessary extra cost to people who want to pay for a medical system. And when you, for example, finally end-up non compos mentis, we will take care of you too. It goes even further, because workers without healthcare are less productive, thus reducing everyone’s economic welfare by causing lower economic growth and after that, potential long-term economic growth. This imposition on total economic welfare is completely different from the positive liberty of giving everyone access to healthcare. Therefore, defining “coercion” as what is “objectionable” is certainly not objective. It is an emotional decion, and based on faulty economic reasoning, as I wrote above.

Similarly, you can get fired or quit your job: but this is NOT the sort of coercion at issue. Business firms exist not because the boss can fire you, but because he or she gives orders which you follow, in order to interact with other workers, or to comport with their productive results, and this productive transaction (or transformation) between two workers in the firm is almost NEVER a market transaction. Yet, time and energy are saved in producing the good, often enormous amounts of time and energy, simply because you and your co-worker are NOT out in the market to search, bargain, and secure the results between yourselves (and among all the other workers necessary to produce a complex good), but instead, because you are following orders.

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you like the orders or not. If you don’t like the boss, you can quit and go somewhere else where you do like the boss, but you will still be following orders. This is a good thing. In general, business firms reduce certain transaction costs among the employees, and therefore produce the goods and services with a cheaper price tag. We all have more goods and services, more total economic welfare, because this system exists. If the system of non-market transactions within business firms didn’t exist, it would have actively adverse consequences. It would destroy our negative liberty because we would each be paying a lot more in transaction costs with other people just to recreate the same standard of living as a modern industrial economy. (Of course it would be impossible simply because of the infinite time it would impose on us to negotiate all the extra transactions costs and get all those things produced entirely by market transactions.) So again: why is government any different, and how is the libertarian’s definition of coercion anything other than an emotional preference?

A big part of all this is that liberals and libertarians have huge underlying differences in their mental models of what people are like. The only way a libertopia will work is the same as the way a good department at a university currently works: extreme selection and possible ejection after a trial period.

Lee Arnold @ 227:

I have a little more time to reply to this now than when you said it further up, but it seems misleading to describe work within a corporation or any organization the way you do. Corporations increasingly want employees to be entrepreneurial, for one thing. It’s not anything like the organization leader’s writing a computer program that the members will simply carry out. There are guidelines, procedures, and structures (like the coding standards piglet mentioned a while back, or a rule that the product doesn’t ship if there are any severity 1 problems unresolved), though, functioning as internal feedback.

Bianca Steele, the subject is New Institutional Economics. You are right: employees are not simply cogs in a machine: Adam Smith showed that their work improves through the division of labor by (a) increasing dexterity (b) time saved in closer proximity to materials and (c) familiarity with the materials and the process leading to new invention; there are different forms of contracting and subcontracting (see Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism); there are independent contractors (which moves the outer perimeter of the firm); interdepartmental accounting is usually financial; and management is always looking at new ways to motivate workers including types of free contracting between them as if they were independent market actors. But my question was, how do libertarians decide what “coercion” is, and why do they keep referring to the “free market” as some way to avoid it? If you don’t like what government does, well then, you have the freedom to tell other people, to get elected, and to try to change it. The difference from private business is in the forms of redress and the amount of time it takes. If we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, then we ALREADY live in the libertarian utopia. The libertarians just haven’t thought it through, yet.

“Advertising just isn’t THAT effective, it’s not tantamount to putting a gun to somebody’s head.”

Brett, I always think this is the central issue between the right and left on economics, that is, the idea of what choice is and its relation to human social behavior. Its basically the free will debate, upon which rests all of our assumptions about the way society ought to be structured.

So, advertising is not a gun to someone’s head. But it isn’t nothing either. The fact that it works is evidenced by the billions spent on it every year. It functions in very coercive ways, in the sense that it operates in areas of the unconscious that, by definition, people can’t be said to be consenting. There are any number of examples, but as someone with bad neck pain, I always think of the example of acetaminophen: Tylenol costs 2x as much than the generic, which is *exactly* the same stuff, yet enjoys no million dollar advertising campaign. That’s coercion.

Now, coercion is a pretty negative word, yet I think that it is often quite benign. Just because advertising is coercive, it isn’t necessarily bad. Maybe it’s a net gain for the economy. Maybe people actually feel happier buying Tylenol. That’s a fascinating rabbit hole to go down, but I’ll just say right now that there is an empirical process happening, for good or bad.

Back to “free will”, choice, coercion, etc. There is very good research on human agency, or the ability for people to facilitate their own choices in life. If we were to create a life from scratch, there are optimal and sub-optimal structures we would want that individual to develop within. And our assessment of each is mostly based on how much agency it provides the individual. So things like parenting, culture, nutrition, education, peers, etc. would all be organized around providing the individual maximum efficacy. Another word for this is “freedom”. We want the structures to provide him the maximum development of his ability to facilitate his own freedom.

What liberals (and modern research) says is that citizens have great variation in this self-efficacy because of structures in which they have developed. Thus, in order to maximize freedom, we ought to structure society so that each citizen is guaranteed a minimal amount of freedom, or agency. So for example, an individual who inherits millions, comes from a stable home in a nice neighborhood, goes to school with similar children, learns the important cultural norms, etc. will be – in general – more more free, that is, have much more self-efficacy and agency. This is incredibly predictive. If you look at the numbers the pattern is born out in any number ways.

The counter example is the individual who grows up in poverty, from a broken family in a dysfunctional neighborhood, who goes to school with similar children, who does not learn the norms, etc. will be – in general – less free. He will have much more limited self-efficacy and agency. Again – totally born out in the data.

The standard argument against all of this is essentially absurd: people have free will and make their own choices. Hah! This hypothesis would thus predict that individuals in different circumstances would, on average – being essentially the same biologically (I won’t go into the logic that here begins to feed into racism on the right) – generally end up with similar levels of self-efficacy. Basically, we should see as many millionaire white children in prison as poor blacks. Its preposterous really, but this seems to have never quite been worked out by conservatives/libertarians in general. Like I said previously, this is not rational, evidence-based thinking.

So, in terms of coercion, or the ability of an individual to be free from it, in the sense that he possesses a high degree of consciousness about himself and the world, as Bob Marley put it “emancipated from mental slavery”, individuals all possess it in varying degrees. And it is entirely dependent upon biological and social structure. We all make choices, but upon what do we base those choices? And upon what is that basis itself based? This deterministic conclusion is indeed quite frightening to many. But it isn’t any less true. The facts are facts, no matter how much we wish they might be otherwise.

The real question is what to do about it.

me@233: s.b. “inter-individual”

Bianca, I haven’t responded to you because I haven’t understood what you’ve been saying to me (I’m operating from a consumerist perspective?). But if you are saying that

(like some leftists and progressives) [I focus] on corporations, as somehow kind of almost directly coercing individuals directly through a notional direct application of power to impose mental falsehoods through “advertising”[2], doesn’t seem any more sensical than to imagine our ideas and beliefs are put in our minds directly by God

then I have to admit that you’ve got me dead to rights.

I don’t really understand why you are focusing on corporations and advertising as the greatest evil, and at the same time denying what you have in mind is a consumerist perspective. What happened within and around BP isn’t about consumerism but then it has nothing to do with advertising either, and doesn’t obviously have anything to do with what corporations are like and how they are different from other institutions.

But I don’t “focus” on corporations as “the greatest evil.” Malebranche’s God must have put that idea into your head. I was arguing against Metamorf and Brett Bellmore that libertarians focus on government to the exclusion of corporations, so I brought up corporations *in that context*. I also mentioned government propaganda and first-person shooter games and violent media (the allusion to Hurley’s work), and if you knew of Wexler’s work, you’d see that he cites all sorts of multi-layered social factors. You might also want to google me and read some of my work if you want a more sophisticated treatment than I was able to provide here. Try this Rorotoko interview to start: http://bit.ly/9ji6rl.

OK, no problem. I’d be glad to correspond with you by email if you’d like: protevi [at] lsu [dot] edu.

John, I can see why you want to avoid the free will framing. It’s obviously a loaded, nebulous term. But honestly, I think it is fair to use it in its soft sense. That is, there are obviously broad social trends that determine social development and behavior. But whatever works.

Bianca, I’m sorry you didn’t like my Bob Marley reference, and I’m sorry that you have such corny associations with him. Your loss! I meant it as a lighthearted attempt to bring some poetry to the sterility of abstract philosophical debate. He was merely expressing a concept that is entirely science-based, as I’ve tried to illustrate.

As for the nature of this discussion, I disagree. I think the question of human choice has everything to do with the discussion of coercion. It is fundamental to the divide between the right and left on economic matters. So, if, according to human/social capital theory, a millionaire did not really earn his wealth, but essentially happened upon a fortuitous set of social and biological circumstances, and the crack dealer happened upon a negative set, our laws and social structures should be established accordingly.

I can’t tell you how many conservatives I ‘ve debated whose entire ideological outlook is premised on the fact that social circumstances simply don’t matter, and that everyone can make any choice they like. This is *demonstrably* untrue. As such, it undermines a large portion of their arguments. So much time is wasted in debates because we never resolve these core differences. I mean what use is a discussion of education policy, or any other government program if one believes that they have no utility?

John may be right that the traditional discussion of determinism only clouds things. But no need for semantic rigmarole. I’ll let my analysis speak for itself.

No, Eli, it wasn’t you I had in mind (I don’t know you), but thanks for the kind thoughts.

MM: there’s only so much anyone can do on a blog thread, so I’ll extend to you the same invitation I gave to Bianca, and ask you to read some of my work on this issue and see if you recognize your characterization of it there, to wit, that I “make nebulous monsters or deities” out of the institutions “above” the subject, and that I view “people as simply neural robots” when I go below the subject. That’s not my understanding of what I’m doing. Again, a place to start is this interview: http://bit.ly/9ji6rl.

Talk to the hand, Bianca!

You can view “people” as simply neural robots in a word of systems-theoretic entities, if you like, but then you need to look at what that does to your own political predilections, not to mention your simpler notions of right and wrong, good and bad. I think that olde problem of free-will resurfaces again and again, no matter how quickly you try to change the subject.

Metamorph, you’re not suggesting here that the “systems-theoretic, etc.” model would in any way be dependent on its implications for your personal beliefs? I assume not, but wanted to clarify. Otherwise, I completely agree. And I think there are profound ideological implications for such a model.

Many of our current social structures, not the least of which criminal justice, is very dependent upon this question of ultimate causality. What’s funny to me is that I’ve yet to meet a conservative who does not believe in contra-causal free will (which makes perfect sense). Yet many leftists profess to believe in it as well, even though it would seem to undermine many of their views on the social structures I mentioned. Maybe conservatives, in adopting the more traditional view of human nature and will, which lies at the bedrock of much of our society, are simply on firmer ground. The left may in a sense have “gotten in over their head”, in that they have embraced a concept they had intuited, yet lacked the scientific means from which to defend it. And now that science has caught up, they aren’t quite aware.

But this gets back to John’s point on the squishiness of the free will debate. I think there’s a basic knee-jerk reaction that seems almost inherent to consciousness itself that screams against the concept that we are much less autonomous than we perceive ourselves to be. Yet the fundamental scientific framework itself almost precludes it: causality is built in to the process, and without it the endeavor breaks down.

So it has been up until relatively recently when we’ve been able to actually accumulate enough data in enough different domains to start to put together a coherent picture of human development and consciousness. We’re obviously a long way off from anything like a working model of the mind. But we do have enough clues to firmly place much of the old, tired free will debate in the “solved” category. The mind operates well within the boundaries of causality. Just because we can’t see all of the billions of moving parts that go into creating even a millisecond of conscious thought, we know that there is a physical framework, and that it isn’t difficult to imagine that eventually a better mapping will allow us a pretty good portrait of the causal chain underlying our various thoughts and “choices”.

Okay! Now we’re into the thick of the free-will vs. determinism debate at least — we’ve come a long way from Libertopia! Well, or maybe not.

John, I did read your link, thanks, and it’s definitely interesting, even despite what appears to me to be its fairly explicit political motivations. But it doesn’t seem to me to address the issue that you’re trying, as you say, to avoid — and neither does talk of “nonlinear dynamic systems”, “feedback”, “feedforward”, “epistemological emergence”, “ontological emergence”, etc. (though the 2nd to last actually provides a hint of a way forward, to my mind). Neither does “indeterminacy” — the issue isn’t whether a process is determinable by us, or even whether, like quantum processes, its indeterminate in principle, since, from the point of view of free will and the moral/political consequences that follow from it, saying that a behavior or process is random is no better than saying it’s the result of a causal chain.

But you’re right, John, that there’s a limit to how far we can take these things in a comment thread, so I’ll stop after the following two observations:
1) Science won’t ever get us out of the free-will/determinism dilemma, because of what we are and how we’re situated in the world — the only way out is to hold onto both. This approach actually has a name — compatibilism — and it involves the recognition that we have, and need to have, two distinct stances in regard to our experience and behavior.
2) Trying to mix those stances, as when we try to use science to draw moral/political conclusions, leads us not just into confusion, but into error, both moral and empirical.

What I’m denying is that the vast majority of “non-voluntary manipulations” are of such a nature as to justify denying the non-voluntary character of uncoerced choices.

Advertising just isn’t THAT effective, it’s not tantamount to putting a gun to somebody’s head.

It doesn’t need to be “tantamount to a gun to the head”. The point is that there is a spectrum of influences on our choices that collectively put a lie to any useful concept of a rational individual engaging in free decisions. Advertising obviously isn’t mind control, but it isn’t useless either. Maybe you don’t think it works on you, but statistically it’s extremely effective.

And it’s not just advertising. At the very least, you have to consider things like education levels, search costs, “predictable irrationalities”, etc. There are many implicit restrictions on an individual’s ability to make anything like rational free choices. And of course those are all coupled together, making advertising and the like all the more powerful.

It’s fine if you don’t think this is important. But don’t pretend that that isn’t simply an assumption, or that anything that results from it is going to be convincing to those of us who do think this stuff is important.

1) Science won’t ever get us out of the free-will/determinism dilemma, because of what we are and how we’re situated in the world—the only way out is to hold onto both. This approach actually has a name—compatibilism—and it involves the recognition that we have, and need to have, two distinct stances in regard to our experience and behavior.
2) Trying to mix those stances, as when we try to use science to draw moral/political conclusions, leads us not just into confusion, but into error, both moral and empirical.

Metamorph, I’ve actually been thinking about this recently: I think science can be very helpful in understanding moral and political issues. Of course, there is a danger in taking things to far, in overestimating the importance of a given finding. But especially as science has in the past century has offered us more and more of an understanding of human behavior, tying together a wide variety of fields – from psychology to economics to sociology to neuroscience, etc. Social science is not necessarily any different than any other type of science, in that it makes a hypothesis, collects data, and develops theory.

For instance, there is much that we now know about the development of cognitive processes and language in children that 30 years ago we did not. This has profound implications for political and moral philosophy, specifically as it relates to how different people in different sectors of society develop. We may still not know a specific causal chain of thoughts, be we can say without a doubt that in certain types of environments people will develop differently, and thus possess different capabilities for agency, or freedom of will.

Another example of this is fMRI studies on people convicted of violent crimes. They’ve shown a pronounced underdevelopment of the – I believe – frontal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for impulse control. If that is not will, I don’t know what is!

Saipan is the libertarian utopia

“Henry’s post linking to Charlie Stross reminded me of one I was planning to do on the question – why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia? ”

Medieval Iceland! No executive power, but of course ability for private individuals to prosecute each other in court.

Oops, no executive power means you don’ t have the ability to enforce the judgement except by getting a bunch of your friends with axes and swords to go round to your adversary’s house and force them to give up the judgement.

Hence the reason Icelandic sagas are made up of geneology, lawsuits, and murders followed by more lawsuits and murders and then more geneology so you can understand who’s continuing the feud into the next generation. Then more lawsuits and murders.

“Ollie, medieval Iceland is again the primary example. I’ve heard medieval Ireland was similar. ”

I’d like more on the reasoning behind medieval Ireland.

If you’re talking post-Norman invasion, nope: feudal society where the Anglo-Normans ruled, at least, and clan-dominated tribal society using Brehon Law where they didn’t. IIRC Brehon law had twelve castes, which suggests umm, rather a lot of constraints on one’s behavior.

Also, Ireland didn’t have effective central rule, but not an intentional no-king no-executive function that Iceland opted for when the original exiles (who backed the wrong horse during a war between two kingdoms in what’s now Norway) arrived.

from Galt, Iowa: bad eggs