Libertarians for social democracy ?

‘This is an important point, and a valid criticism of various forms of central planning. But if we agree that it’s good to expand the range of choices available to everybody, we don’t, in general, reach libertarian policy conclusions.’

But this is the key point. Are there many social democrats (are there even many socialists) who nowadays actually believe in central planning? And what exactly does central planning mean any more? I know perfectly well what it used to mean. It used to mean a situation where the state would say; ‘this year we will aim for the production of x million tonnes of pig iron and the factory will be based in town ‘y’ and it will employ ‘z’ thousand people’ and so on. THAT’S central planning, and when libertarians talk about ‘socialism’ that’s what they tend to be thinking about. But does anybody really believe that that is a realistic option nowadays?

Even stronger than this position is the view (that used to be extremely widely held, even as late as the 1980s) that the desideratum should be that all economic activity should be controlled via central planning. But again, are there many people left who actually think that in some future society markets could (or should) actually be abolished? Parecon gets talked about in certain circles, but does anybody actually believe that it’s a plausible model for the left (or anyone?).

If one removes central planning from the left wing ‘armoury’ as it were, then the major libertarian objection to social democracy/socialism is removed. I know that according to many libertarians, many other ‘government’ activitiy (health and safety legislation, for example) is actually covert central planning, but I don’t understand why they think that.

If you are planning to explore this topic further, it might be worth thinking about the peacetime defence establishment and Eisenhower’s worries regarding the military-industrial complex. Any large supplier of public goods takes on a life of its own. But unlike the French railway system or the UK national health services, the Pentagon and its suppliers really need an enemy at all times. That lobby does a lot more to distort Americans’ perceptions of their national interest than the one Mearsheimer and Walt are worried about – not that diverse pressure-groups can’t work together of course.

So, this mixed half-socialist-half-capitalist welfare-state hybrid – is this the best possible model, the-end-of-history thing?

Oh, so you like PUTTING emphasis in w3ir@ and nonsensic/\l places.

I don’t care. If you believe what you say, you’re not interesting enough to talk to. If you don’t believe what you say, you’re just some dumb troll.

Heh, from another angle, there are these people who continually bemoan how power corrupts and how political parties always seem out to enrich themselves at the expense of their constituents. But then these same people keep wanting to expand these corrupt politicians power.

Mark Twain and Will Rogers had all the answers we will ever need. Either every 4 years you tar and fearther and run out on a rail every one of your politicians, or you leave them so hamstrung they can’t do anything.

‘Heh, from another angle, there are these people who continually bemoan how power corrupts and how political parties always seem out to enrich themselves at the expense of their constituents. But then these same people keep wanting to expand these corrupt politicians power.’

Right this cuts to the chase. First thing: the ‘markets’ (plural. There is no such thing as ‘the’ market) ain’t free, never have been never will be. Or to be more specific, some markets ARE free but they ain’t exactly the best argument for your libertarian. If you want to see the real free market in action, go down to your local red light district and watch for a bit (maybe you already do this, of course). THAT’s the free market. The girls have no health care, they sleep on the streets, there is no advertising (apart from dressing up, hiding track marks), no income tax, no VAT, no permits about how and what you can sell, no credit deals, no nothing. It’s just supply and demand pure and simple.

But the vast majority of market based (or market like) activities in the real world ain’t like that. To set up a store, for example you need to buy one, which means you have to negotiate with a bank about a mortgage, you have to get planning permission to build your store, or negotiate about buying it, there are rules and regulations as to how and why and what you advertise and what you sell, you can get ‘start up’ funds from various government bodies, there are taxes (VAT, income tax) set by central and local government and so on and etc. In other words your ‘free market’ deal occurs in a backdrop of societally negotiated activity, in which politicians play a part. It’s not the case of ‘corrupt politicians’ having ‘more power’. This is a democracy. They have all the power anyway. They run the country, and thank God for that. Even when they decide to ‘give up’ power

a: this means that power is taken away from at least nominally democratically controllable poiticians to unelected businessmen and
b: the politicians usually end up with the power anyway except at a disadvantage.

For example, privatisation is a method of politicians ‘giving up’ power. But in actuality, what happens is that the private firms regain their power via lobbying firms, thus influencing the politicians. So the politicians, in a sense, retain the power but at a disadvantage: whereas in an era of nationalisation at least the politicians power of the industry in question is direct, and they are only answerable to the people, now it is indirect, but they politicans has a responsibility to the people AND to the lobbying firm who will try and bribe, sorry, influence him or her.

The biggest mistake economics ever made was to assume that assume that they could create an autonomous science that paid no attention to sociology, anthropology or psychology. It’s just a fantasy. Markets are always embedded in specific societies, which have and always will have, influence on the behaviour of the markets in question. There never will be free (i.e. autonomous) markets.

As for the idea of leaving politicians ‘so hamstrung they can’t do anything’…this is again a libertarian fantasy. Politicians have ALL the power. Always have always will have. This is a democracy. Elected representatives have TOTAL power over ALL the citizens in the country ( insofar as their (i.e. the politicians’) activities remain within the law). You tie their hands (actually you can’t do that, but even if you could) what will happen is that unelected people outwith any societal control will step in and fill the gap. Might be organised crime, might be ‘militia’, might be ‘big business’ but the gap WILL be filled. Libertarians assume that if politicians hands are tied, then everyone will live in a happy clappy world of sem-anarchism with everyone being nice to everyone else and everyone happily concerned with making money in a mysteriously non-exploitative way. It’s a dream.

Some people would be screwed over by charlatans, but millions of people who are currently shut out of the legal system entirely because of the inflated costs would have access.

Doesn’t it seem kinda likely that all those millions of people who are currently shut out – or even a few more – would be screwed over by charlatans?

John is trying to make a libertarian argument, I’m merely pointing out that from a libertarian perspective, it fails.

On my reading he isn’t trying to do that at all. He is exploring whether the fact that he uses an argument of a vaguely libertarian nature in relation to war obliges him to take libertarians more seriously than he is wont to do in other matters. Does his worry about collective decision-making in relation to war (a public good of a sort) also apply to decisions in relation to other public goods? His verdict is that it doesn’t:

But if we agree that it’s good to expand the range of choices available to everybody, we don’t, in general, reach libertarian policy conclusions.

Do libertarians care about expanding the range of choices available to everybody? If so I have misjudged them. In any case the provision of public goods, paid for by taxation, certainly does expand the range of choices available to people who can’t afford to buy them on the market.

But maybe I’m misreading; some of the comments seem to be about a different post altogether.

” but state redistribution of wealth certainly does for those who benefit from it.”

So do muggings.

Libertarians want people to have the maximum range of choices, consistant with not agressing against other people. Hitting somebody over the head with a tire iron and lifting their wallet may represent “choice” on the part of the person wielding the tire iron, and the money expands what they can do, but it’s not the sort of “choice” we’re interested in promoting.

Even where you delegate the tire iron wielding.

And in the case of public goods, a decision to provide them collectively means that everyone can choose whether or not to take advantage of them

This does not necessarily apply. Eg NZ’s biosecurity controls, which I think are the perfect example of a public good, but you can’t chose not to take advantage of them. You live in NZ, you can’t have a pet snake. You can’t chose to have your farm ravaged by some small South American bug while your neighbour’s farm enjoys the advantages of secure border controls, etc.

The same problem generally applies to defence – while, unlike biosecurity, it may be possible to set up excludable defence systems, on the whole if you’re being defended with modern day technology, so is your neighbour.

Well, John, you see, we have these things that are called “natural rights,” and they’re explained by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and others. Perhaps “asserted” would be more appropriate than “explained.” Fortunately the good libertarians have discovered these axioms (they’re embedded into the universe). “Rights” to social security and the like — so-called positive rights — are just made up because they sound nice.

Or at least this is the sort of explanation I’m used to hearing.

“Or at least this is the sort of explanation I’m used to hearing.”

That’s it in a nutshell.

I don’t think any rights should be “enhanced at the expense of others”, because rights, properly defined, don’t conflict with each other in that way. Conflict between rights is a consequence of improperly defining them.

That the “rights” liberals, as opposed to libertarians, defend, DO conflict with each other, is evidence that the system of rights you’re proposing is logically incoherent.

Rational people don’t insist on axioms which result in logical contradictions, no matter how nice it might be if those axioms were true.

Brett,

“Libertarians want people to have the maximum range of choices, consistant with not agressing against other people.”

Clearly you consider mugging to be such an aggression. Fair enough. But how about pick-pocketing, or any non-violent theft?

What’s happening in such cases? I am taking “money” from you; your money allows you to use certain items, and excludes me from using them. If I try and walk into your house and watch your TV (both yours by virtue of money) you (or the police) will presumably use violence/coercion to prevent me from doing so. Is this aggression in your book?

Basically your right to exclusive use of your property (house, TV, newspaper, car etc.) is really your right to coercively prevent anyone else from using them. According to your libertarian principles you must surely oppose private property, precisely as theft.

Mike,

I am of course being sarcastic. (I’m also familiar with your wonderful site, and I hope you linked the Colin Farrlley piece mentioned in the last thread on libertarianism).

The oft-quoted “nonsense on stilts” remark comes from Mr. Bentham.

Exclusive right to property is especially problematic for libertarians with respect to land, because one person’s ownership necessarily limits what others can own. In my home town, for example, I understand there’s currently a dispute about developing oversized homes on the hillside. Nouveau riche yuppies want to build gaudy, white trash palaces, while others would prefer to keep the area open to the public for bike trails, green space.

That private development restricts people’s choices because they’re prevented from biking on the trail. In another sense it restricts the choices of people who want to build homes.

All this “aggression” nonsense was discussed in Bertram’s aforementioned thread. See the part about “robbers with badges.”

Anything that can pull them down is to the greater liberty of all.

Anything that can pull down a voluntary association of citizens is an increaes in liberty? You’re into deep Republican methods of logic, friend.

Bill Gates won’t shoot me if I install Linux on my personal computer. If Microsoft were a government, that would be a real possibility.

That’s true. There was this guy, who didn’t pay his tax-es, right, and he refused to pay any tax-es, and the feds shot him.

Obviously, Brent, you have not heard of the East India Company, which did quite a bit of shooting in its day. Taking shooting as a criteria, which I think is rather silly. Why not take, oh, breathing asbestos fibers as a criteria? Yeah, it isn’t being shot — in fact, asbestos lung disease is a lot slower and a lot more painful. And companies like W.R. Grace, with vermiculate asbestos mines, had the evidence for this for years, and of course kept it secret. And how could they get away with that? Because they are centrally planned tyrannies.

Real freedom comes from democraticizing the firm.

What puzzles me about libertarian thought, is that I find it either self-evident (in the expand liberty form) or very bizarre (in the robber with badges, brett form). I mean, true, my state requires me to pay taxes, but last time I checked I decided that, through my vote, I decided the amount paid and what will be done with the money. Of course, I don’t get to choose alone, but no-one does either so I am quite happy with this arrangement. More specifically, I have always found extremely peculiar that some libertarians actually seem to think that if a group of people reaches a consensus about their own self-management that is not libertarian (in the brett form), then this consensus is coercion nonetheless.

You’ve got a rather interesting version of “I decided”, haven’t you? You toss three people into a room, and two of them decide to do something, that doesn’t magicly erase the fact that the third didn’t. People are individuals. “Consensus” is just another way of saying “outnumbered”.

Coercion is coercion no matter how many people got together and decided to coerce you. Numbers haven’t got anything to do with it. If a million people decide something, and one decides differently, putting a gun to his head in order to get him to go along with everybody else is still coercion.

This does, however, get the the heart of the disagreement between libertarians and liberals: The belief on your part, and our rejection of it, that people can be treated as some kind of lump, that harming one person, and benefiting another, somehow averages out. So if you take the loot from robbing one person, and use it to benefit two, the fact that you robbed somebody is just peachy, because on average they’re better off.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Voting and democracy are better than the alternatives in cases where there’s no way to avoid everybody getting the same thing. But when there’s no way to avoid everybody getting the same thing, you’re already in a bad situation. And you should be looking for a way out of it, not using it as an example of how you should handle situtations where it’s perfectly feasible to let people make their own free choices.

But you’re not going to agree with this, because we do in fact reason from different axioms, and arrive at different conclusions.

“if you take the loot from robbing one person, and use it to benefit two, the fact that you robbed somebody is just peachy, because on average they’re better off.”

But why, why, why Brett, is it “robbing”? What moral claim does the person have to their goods? Presumably you won’t say “the law”, since that simply means that the state coercively enforces the right of the individual to exclusive ownership of her property at the expense of everybody else.

This, it seems to me, is closer to the “heart” of the difference between right-libertarians and everyone else than is the reification of society at the expense of individuals.

#42: What moral claim do YOU think a person has to his goods? Presumably you won’t say “none”, since that way lies all sorts of unpleasantness, and presumably you won’t say “only those claims conferred by the law”, since that would mean the law can create moral obligations just by virtue of being the law, and that way too lies all sorts of unpleasantness.

“roger – Coase did the basic work on why central planning makes sense in the context of specific business enterprises; basically, he explained why firms exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm”

Actually, Coase did NOT do the basic work. He laid out a theory….and left it there, without satisfactory empirical proof. In fact, there are still no good empirical proofs indicating what actual levels of transaction costs would drive the creation of internal markets (i.e. firms) rather than external markets.

The reality is that the transaction costs would really need to be quite large and easily observable for the Coase theory of the firm to be viable. The difficulty with which any empirical proof of the Coase theorem has been achieved would indicate that it’s not a valid explanation.

The idea that people naturally get more choice about what they “purchase” (either with tax money or with the funds that would have been tax money, did they live in a jurisdiction that relied on taxes) from private firms than from a government seems to me risible on its face.

A government is at least nominally directed toward the benefit of its citizens, and if enough of its citizens see a benefit in unbundling government goods and services for purchase, it will happen. (Yeah, right. But we’re talking utopian ideals here.) Businesses, on the other hand, are dedicated to maximizing shareholder and management return, something that is best done under circumstances of asymmetrical power between business and customer. Under those circumstances, it’s almost a given that customers will pay for a variety of things they don’t want — including some items that actively disserve them — in order to maintain access to the things they do want. And since it’s more profitable to act that way than to unbundle (economies of scale, cross-subsidy and all that), there’s no reason to think that some competing firm will want to act differently.

One hardly knows where to begin with #48, but I think it should definitely meet #2.

asg,

You might well be right that most people don’t share the belief that there is no moral claim to private property – I only expressed that view myself as a fairly provisional answer to your question. As I indicated, the Marxist idea that workers are entitled to the fruit of their labour, that this should not be appropriated by others (i.e. employers) is attractive to me. But it poses obvious problems given that many people won’t be able to work for their living – hence there’s a contradiction with another Marxist idea: “to each according to needs, from each according to ability”.

But surely the implication of the rejection by the vast majority of people of libertarianism (particularly of the idea that taxation/redistribution is morally wrong) is that they do not in fact really think that the property relations produced by the capitalist economy are of themselves just, that people have a moral claim to (all) the wealth that accrues to them in that system.

As for “the idea that people’s entitlements to material resources are based on what societies they live in(!)”, this is obvious. I specified that such entitlements ought, in my opinion, to satisfy not merely basic material needs but also some minimal standard of human dignity. The standard of living required to meet the latter requirement would clearly be different in, say, 21st century America than it would in, say, 13th century Britain. Poverty is always relative to the time and place in which it exists.

Every post on liberalism seems to be advocating taking away a right I currently have. Isn’t there a way to solve these problems without stripping away individual rights?

Every post on liberalism seems to be advocating taking away a right I currently have.

What right you currently have is being taken away here?

What Milton Friedman describes as “neighborhood effects” and the founders as “general welfare” will easily justify almost anything you call “paternalistic coercion”. It’s only a matter of degree, not principle.