What’s left of libertarianism? (slightly updated)

On the matter of some “libertarian moment”, I tend to agree. SSM is being achieved by judicial fiat. Nothing libertarian about that, and SSM can go away the same way, depending on the luck of the draw in Supreme court appointments, because nobody seems to have any interest in actually amending the Constitution to put it in there in the text.

Just a triumph of raw judicial power to say the Constitution magically means today what it didn’t mean yesterday, and may not mean tomorrow. To the extent libertarians treasure the rule of law as a bulwark against tyranny, a straight up defeat.

Taking the implicit definition of libertarians as voters who take a hard-right line on economic issues (and are therefore Republicans or Republican-voting independents), but are liberal on sexual freedom issue and drugs …

Well, you shouldn’t. That’s simply buying into the encroachment carried out by the likes of the Koch brothers. There’s far more to it than that, e.g. the mutualist Kevin Carson who describes himself as a “free market anti-capitalist” at his own blog and who these days mostly contributes at Center [sic] for a Stateless Society. There’s a large and thriving non-right wing strand of libertarians. Why, this very afternoon I attended a workshop on “Building a Left Libertarian Alliance” at the fourth annual Melbourne anarchist book fair at Abbotsford Convent.

For a political analyst, you make a good economist.

“I thought libertarians were relatively in favour of action through judiciary decisions, as opposed to democratic decisions?”

If there’s an actual legal/constitutional basis, yes, we’re in favor of constitutional guarantees being enforced judicially. However, the rule of law is very important to restraining government power, and rule by judicial fiat isn’t the same thing as a judiciary enforcing actual laws.

The government that can ignore the written law to advance liberty, is a government that can ignore written law to attack it.

Another way of putting this is, in such a moment of triumph for SSM, why didn’t John consider reviving the ERA, and getting it down in writing?

@4 ever since the Internet came online, I’ve been debating with right and left libertarians – i’m more of statist (democratically accountable that is) – working for a synthesis or towards a coalition.

The drug war, privacy rights, law enforcement, torture etc, in many ways I was a left libertarian, but found the right libertarians to be a waste of time. As Quiggin points out, Democrats are the only ones who’ve done anything worthwhile over marijuana legalization or gay marriage. All Reason and Gillespie do is complain where Democrats fall short (which is often admittedly).

And when the housing bubble and financial crisis caused an epic loss of freedom and liberty, did Reason have any second thoughts about their rightwing economics? Not at all. They’re a waste of time. And they hate Obamacare even though it’s now providing liberty and financial security to many thousands more than before.

To tie back into Quiggin’s post on Reagan, the conservative coalition is riven between two camps as everyone knows. Reagan was one who bridged them, but look a the third party candidates through the years. George Wallace against Nixon. John Anderson of the Rockefeller Republicans against Reagan. Ross Perot (was a mix) against Bush. Perot campaign on deficits and the giant sucking sound from the south. (I forget did he want to raise taxes?)

The glibertarians of the coalition need the votes of the religious, ethnic party of the South to enforce their economic legislation or else America would be much more like Western Europe.

It’s really bizarre that this poll is taken as proof of a coming *libertarian* movement when it explicitly says that people “accept the century-old consensus that government should ensure a certain basic standard of living for those who cannot find the means
to obtain it themselves and that government regulation of business is
necessary to protect the public interest. They support raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor, they think government should guarantee access to health care”.

74% think that the government should guarantee that people have enough to eat and a place to sleep, 69% health insurance and 68% a living wage. And when they tend to oppose redistribution, it’s because it’s framed in terms of reducing inequality rather than in terms of other more substantial policy goals, since they overwhelmingly support taxing people to provide food and housing to others.

Peter K @ 8
“ever since the Internet came online, I’ve been debating with right and left libertarians – i’m more of statist (democratically accountable that is) – working for a synthesis or towards a coalition.”

I’m wary of the efforts by liberals to find common ground with libertarians. There are a few common goals – ending the drug war, non-interventionist foreign policy, etc – but in the end libertarians want to dismantle the welfare state. I’m mindful of the example of the Republicans, who aligned with southern whites in order to win elections, and are now dominated by the rump racist core of their constituency. Lie down with dogs, so they say.

the implicit definition of libertarians as voters who take a hard-right line on economic issues (and are therefore Republicans or Republican-voting independents), but are liberal on sexual freedom issue and drugs

Isn’t that definition a rather narrow one? cf.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

I am not a libertarian, but it’s a mystery to me how anybody who claims to be on the left today cannot be fundamentally opposed to the state when it comes to issues such as increasing curtailment of civil liberties, ever more powerful bureaucracy and ever expanding surveillance. Not to speak of the state acting in collusion with business keeping the good old military-industrial-security complex going at ever higher cost to people’s lives.

novakant at 14 covers the aspect of disillusionment with the state in security and military matters that I forgot

Does it matter that Democrats are ahead of libertarians on this stuff though? It doesn’t seem likely that the Republican base is going to give up on gay rights or the drug war any time soon, which means there would be a fairly long lasting split between Republicans who are still fighting those battles and those more ‘libertarian’ ones who have given up the ghost to focus on economic issues.

“Gay marriage and maryjane decriminalization, effected by local option and grassroots mobilization, in direct and explicit confrontation (DOMA, for instance) with the Democratic Party and its technocracy, could only be considered a triumph of statist liberalism disingenuously.”

Colorado and Washington are blue states not red states. The Democratic Supreme Court judges ruled to give Federal benefits to married couples. Roberts was looking at the state activism where blue states were legalizing gay marriage. Red states will be the last. The redest of the red Mississippi will be the very last.

What does MacManus suffer from? Democratic Party Derangement Syndrome?

“Taking the implicit definition of libertarians as voters who take a hard-right line on economic issues (and are therefore Republicans or Republican-voting independents), but are liberal on sexual freedom issue and drugs, it seems to me that if anything, the chance of a libertarian moment is over.”

Eh? Libertarians have largely got what you say they want as libertarians, rightie economics and more liberal sex and drugs laws. That libertarians have now got what you define them as wanting is therefore proof that the libertarian moment is over?

Isn’t that akin to stating that Obama won election therefore the Democratic Party is done and dusted?

The fundamental libertarian idea that coercion is wrong and should not be allowed, is not going to go away.

It is incomplete but still compelling.

People apply it in a big variety of ways, not at all limited to same sex marriage or marijuana.

Some people accentuate the idea that government should not be allowed to coerce people, and don’t consider as much the problem of people coercing other people.

And some people basicly figure that Mother Nature coerces people all the time, and sometimes it’s Mother Nature coercing people and not other people doing it. Like, if there is only one job available to you and you must take it or die, the person who offers you the job is not in any way coercing you to take it. Even if it’s partly his doing that there are no other jobs available, still it’s your free choice whether to take the offer or not.

These ideas about coercion are going to bounce around for a good long time, regardless of polls or specific goals like marijuana.

I am not a libertarian, but it’s a mystery to me how anybody who claims to be on the left today cannot be fundamentally opposed to the state when it comes to issues such as increasing curtailment of civil liberties, ever more powerful bureaucracy and ever expanding surveillance. Not to speak of the state acting in collusion with business keeping the good old military-industrial-security complex going at ever higher cost to people’s lives.

This is the left’s problem, but make no mistake, it’s also everybody else’s problem as well. Social democracy can be institutionalized in a way that socialist revolutions after the Leninist model can’t be (Stalin to the contrary notwithstanding.) This makes them workable, but rickety, and easy prey to concentrated interests with independent sources of power. Movement conservatism, for example, is an odd duck, but even cobbled together as it is from a selection of monied loons like the Koch brothers and ragbags of atavist populism like the Dixie Christianists, it’s still more focused than the creaky liberal apparat in Washington left over from the New Deal/WWII/Cold War.

And yes, the institutions set up to fight the Depression were too easily repurposed to fight first WWII, and then the Communist Menace. Is anyone genuinely of the Left really surprised that those same institutions now want to fight everybody who isn’t wearing a neoliberal name tag?

This is where bob macmanus and Bruce Wilder collide, I think. Bruce, as an institutionalist, knows that you can’t get anything done with slogans. Bob, as a radical, knows that we haven’t solved the problem of the mutability of power. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need as a management problem cries out for gigantism of one kind or another, but institutional entropy is as fearful conundrum now as it ever was.

The bottom line: we’re all a bit confused. We’ll need more than a bit of luck to sort ourselves out.

If libertarians don’t object to the ever-worsening police/surveillance state, what good are they?

I don’t count “Now that a Democrat is in charge of it, I have a problem.” Nor, “The Koch brothers have to pay too much in taxes, and it’s too hard for them to pollute the environment. Now for a brief word about our government’s torture program.”

So I’m fine with Glenn Greenwald criticizing the hell out of Obama. Obama deserves it. But Reason can go take a long hike off a short pier.
~

Libertarianism is all about how private individuals should be able to exercise their liberties and privileges untrammeled by the state, an institution over which people without money supposedly have some influence.

Privatization of public services is a main tenet of libertarianism. Therefore…
Military contractors are libertarianism in action and it isn’t anti-imperialist.
NSA contractors are also libertarianism in action and it isn’t against surveillance.
Destruction of public schools is libertarianism in action too.

The libertarian moment in the form of a replacement of the Republican Party by the Libertarian Party may never come, but libertarianism in action has and won’t go away.
The intersection of neoliberalism and libertarianism parallels the intersection of imperialism and conservatism in neoconservatism.

The feud between liberals (even the American-style liberals) and right-libertarians seems like a clear case of narcissism of small differences. What is their disagreement about, the exact scale of government authority? To the same end: to expand our freedom and ensure capitalist prosperity, right? Why quarrel and insult each other?

“The feud between liberals (even the American-style liberals) and right-libertarians seems like a clear case of narcissism of small differences. What is their disagreement about, the exact scale of government authority?”

Liberals want social democracy, regulation of capital, and a welfare state; while libertarians want primacy of property rights, a small police force, and nothing else. It’s not a small difference.

I think the relationship between libertarianism and neoliberalism is fascinating. I mean, Hayek was very influential on the broad reaction against the New Deal, including people like Rand, but your typical Randite or libertarian seems to be (?) opposed to the unlimited government intervention (so long as it is not ‘distorting’) that neoliberal doctrines sanction. On the other hand, the recrudescence of eugenics/racial science in the form of ‘evolutionary psycholgy’ and what looks an awful lot like Spencerian or Malthusian moralism, the shrill denunciations of any violation of property rights, the ‘I’ve got mine’-ism etc. seem to be important populist manifestations of neoliberal politics. Is libertarianism a kind of vulgar neoliberalism?

“I think that the US and the West have created some of its own terrorist problems by being the hegemons, but I am sure that simply placating antagonists (e.g. the Palestinians) doesn’t always work.”

This is a small point, but we must acknowledge that the Palestinians gave up international terrorism decades ago, almost certainly because they were placated, e.g. Invited to negotiate directly, given a seat at the table, offered a two-state solution, allowed to form a government, etc.

I’m sure some Israel supporters will say that Pakestinians are still terrorists, but when was the last terrorist attack against the west organized by Fatah, or the PA? Hamas carries out some attacks against Israel, and some of those attacks are terrorist attacks; but Hamas is much more an Islamist organization than a Palestinian one; and in any event their targets and motivation are local, not global.

Layman #33: “So you’re a liberal. If not, why not?”

If you mean “US liberal”, maybe I am, though I am less certain (though I don’t know FDR’s inner thoughts) that most people can understand enough to make democracy work in the case of an imprecisely predictable external threat. Climate change is a case in point, though the Axis powers in WWII might qualify and demonstrate what FDR would do in that case, although they were more than an imprecise threat. So maybe some more weather problems will tip the scales.

If you mean “Western (Enlightenment) liberal”, then I might be, except that I am not nearly as anti-government, and do not have as much faith that people will take the lessons of science, and I do not have as much faith that science can explain everything for the illumination of morality.

So maybe I’m a “post-liberal” (in either sense of “liberal”) or “post-modern liberal” but I think that misses the extreme quality of attention that we should be giving this problem, since I always think of post-modernism as being lazy.

Layman #33: “So you’re a liberal. If not, why not?”

The Civil Rights movement. Vietnam. Jamie Dimon. Robert Kennedy approving wiretapping MLK. Welfare Reform. The Iraq invasion vote. The Patriot Act. John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The ERA. Kyoto. And on and on and on. Liberals came around, some of them on some things, but almost always late in the game. I think “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” explains it quite nicely.

J. Thomas at #23

“The fundamental libertarian idea that coercion is wrong and should not be allowed.” That’s what they say, but American libertarians usually mean, “The fundamental libertarian idea that government coercion is usually wrong and usually should not be allowed.” They don’t seem to be able to even perceive other threats to liberty, much less object to them: http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-settlement-struck-by-apple-google-others/.

“I am not so sure about the second part of this. From ISIS in Iraq/Syria we are hearing calls for a worldwide Caliphate, and this must have enormous religious resonance on the dispossessed (Sunnis) everywhere.”

Are there dispossessed Sunnis everywhere? It’s my impression that there are few Muslim countries where Sunnis don’t control the reigns of power. Iran is an exception, as are Iraq (now) and Syria.

That aside, we really must stop seeing existential threats everywhere. ISIS is a threat to Shi’a Iraqis and the Shi’a-dominated government of Iraq. They’re clearly bad people, but they wouldn’t last 5 minutes if Iran took a hand. Why us? Doesn’t that just exacerbate the ‘hegemony’ problem you raised? The libertarians are right on this matter, though I suspect they’re right in the same way a broken clock is occasionally right.

Patrick in Iowa, my question did not mean “why not be a liberal”, but “how are the views you espouse distinguishable from liberalism”. Sorry for the imprecision, and thank you for that excellent list of examples demonstrating the ills of representative democracy!

Indeed, this is the narcissism of small differences. Liberals and libertarians have converging (though not identical) agendas in the creation of the perfect market and the perfectly non-discriminatory society. They converge in the creation of an utterly homogeneous society where the only activities are maximizing economic and social freedom. But since neither a perfect market nor a perfectly non-discriminatory society are actually feasible, the fight in each case will have to go on indefinitely, albeit about smaller and smaller issues. Certainly in Europe the success of the gay marriage lobby has not slowed the social liberal agenda – if anything it’s encouraged it, with new targets to do with family law and “gender-neutral” education, for example.
In any event, both of these tendencies are political movements, and they can no more rest on their laurels than a cyclist can come to a dead halt without falling over.

“Colorado and Washington are blue states not red states.”

Yeah, but legalisation was through popular ballot initiative – which is a strategy libertarians have run and focused on since at least 1972. I really think people are trying to write out of history libertarians role in this. What’s happening now is the culmination of a very long running strategy, once reform happens this is be a big libertarian success.

In 1984 the Berkeley School Board passed domestic partner legislation, I’m sure by mostly Democrats, but I don’t think credit should accrue to Tip O’Neill and Robert Byrd.

That Washington and Colorado decriminalized marijuana largely in the face of resistance from Washington Democrats is I think a more important indicator of political trends than any collapse of organized right libertarianism. That on many policy implementations Democrats in Washington are moving to state’s rights or local options, independence and autonomous implementation and control by smaller political units denotes a devolution of liberalism that the Party of the Civil Rights Era would not recognize. Medicare and Equal Housing and EPA weren’t done this way.

p.s.
or prob the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, for that matter (though one might debate that, I suppose).

@ r gathman
Ex-Im Bank issue splits some groups that are otherwise aligned on some things. Is the Club for Growth a libertarian group? They’re opposed to Ex-Im.
http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2014/06/more-evidence-of-business-populist.html

Brett’s not teh gay!???

The thread ended with the suggestion that he have ‘I AM NOT GAY,’ tattooed on his forehead, if memory serves. The internet does not record whether or not he took it up.

engels @ 61

Years ago, Colorado had a voter initiative that made it unconstitutional for local municipalities to enact non-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians. I have forgotten the exact wording, but it fell sufficiently afoul of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause that the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down. I had not followed the controversy, wasn’t particularly interested, but by chance channel-surfing, I stumbled onto Virginia Postrel being interviewed on my local CableTV public affairs channel. I knew her slightly, so I listened. (Virginia was a long-time Reason editor and contributer — fiercely smart.) Postrel was aghast that the Supreme Court would enforce the 14th amendment. It was a real light-dawns-on-Marblehead moment for me, as I realized that her freedom rhetoric was just a smokescreen for authoritarianism.

“Look, man, I ain’t fallin’ for no banana in my tailpipe!”

> I understand from Obama, we “tortured some folks” with the best of intentions.

Obama’s training/background is, as I understand it, as a “community organiser”, which — as I understand it — largely involves getting people to change their behaviours without realising that they’ve done so.

What he’s done on torture is perfectly congruent with “community organiser trying to stop torture by getting buy-in from the torturers”, and I’m not seeing any reason to think otherwise.

[we can distinguish here the torture case from the bank-bailout and drone-murder cases, where it’s reasonably clear that Obama’s on the wrong side of history.]

Tactically you could argue that his approach is a bad choice here. I would agree.

BWilder @65
I don’t quite undertstand yr comment, unless you’re referring to O’s statements about Afghanistan during the ’08 campaign, which as I recall were on the equivocal side but didn’t preclude the course (in retrospect, prob. mistaken) that he took in Dec 09 when he announced the Afghanistan ‘surge’. I don’t recall that he broke campaign promises re Iraq — promised to draw down and withdraw US forces, and did. One shd never say never, but my guess is it wd take something more than the current sit. by far to get US ground forces reintroduced in Iraq.

I am critical of the drone use, the Asian pivot, and various other aspects of O’s for. policy, but I assume it’s your irrational hatred of Obama and all his works that has driven you to the level of insult here.

Your quote from him about torture is less than relevant, since it’s acknowledged that the worst abuses in that respect took place during the GW Bush admin, and since the issuance of the exec order banning torture on the 2nd day of Obama’s first term my impression is that ‘enhanced interrogation’ has no longer been a regular practice — tho of course I’m not privy to classified or other such info. The failure to close G.Bay is a reasonable ground for criticism, tho much of the blame for that has to be laid at Congress’ door.

Otherwise I’m assuming you view statements of US presidents as simply tissues of lies and deceit on all subjects at all times, and assimilate all of them to the standards of RMN. Which I don’t. So I wd be careful about throwing around accusations of having been lobotomized: glass houses, and all that.

(Oh yes, one last thing: my health insurance is none of your ******* business.)

“Postrel was aghast that the Supreme Court would enforce the 14th amendment.”

That, I very much doubt. That she was aghast that the Supreme court would so interpret the 14th amendment, THAT I can believe.

There’s a school of thought that the Constitution should just be interpreted to mean whatever is thought to be good, without regard to text or history. I guess it’s understandable that people who approach the Constitution in this manner would conflate not agreeing that the Constitution means some thing, with believing that something isn’t good.

But that’s only to say that one mistake begets another.

W’ev. Point remains that Obama’s words are about what you’d expect someone to say who was trying to build a consensus against torture that included people who tortured.

So it’s reasonable to think that he’s trying to build a consensus against torture that includes people who tortured. Which is what I think he’s doing. I don’t think this is a good strategic choice — I think the intelligence agencies should be pressured until they fold or launch a coup attempt — but I think it’s what he’s doing.

On John Quiggin’s top post and previous one, I agree that libertarianism is finished, except as goofy hot slogan from Rand Paul. Which is part of its current PR positioning I suppose.

And not only is the mishmash of general libertarianism gone past its sell-by date. Also the more pointed and toxic “market” libertarianism is on shaky legs.

It is true that Thatcher and Reagan were just the opportune symbols for a larger global resurgence of the economic elite, but rhetoric has its consequences too. In the US, attachment to Reagan’s speech ideas sent the Right off into 30 more years of fantasizing about the virtues of free-market numbskulleries, all the while denying the growth of inequality under the deregulated plutocracy.

It seems to me now that Reagan was the beginning of the end, because he was so unlucky to be the “great man” who relied intellectually upon the phony hidden-bubble economics.

The US right in the future will find itself forced into accommodation to avoid unrest and violence in the streets of the homeland, and the welfare state is going to get bigger.

There are more than two decent arguments that are winning the same-sex marriage battle, “why can’t he/she have what I can have” being a good’un.

“We tortured some folks.”

And I would have gotten away with obvious-joke-plagiarism if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!

Lee A. Arnold:

It isn’t even a framing though. It is barely inchoate. Neoclassical economics identifies like around 6 (?) different major causes of inequality, never mind the minor, so the next question is, how is this to be thought about, in 25 words or less? Because that’s all most people will allow from you, before their attention is diverted.

Your comment sent me off on a long ponder concerning what constitutes “neoclassical economics” and what “it” can be said to say.

I think you could make a pretty good case that neoclassical economics is the doctrine of a kind of secular, civic religion and what it says about the distribution of income and wealth tends to be more legitimating than explanatory in a scientific sense, but the same analytic apparatus — or one very much like it — could be used to construct a de-legitimating doctrine, as well. Marx did that with the classical economics of Ricardo to great effect.

What matters is whether you can hypnotize people, and create potent emotional associations with key concepts or terms. If you have embedded the framework hypnotically, then you can use slogans of very few words to evoke the emotional resonance and motivate coordinated political action. Very simple, iconic or archetypal stories may make a strong impression; they don’t have to make much sense, just be emotionally potent.

One difficulty is that a de-legitimizing doctrinal analysis of inequality deals in unpleasant emotions: fear, resentment, paranoia, isolation, vulnerability, insecurity, impotence, a sense of living in an arbitrary, dangerous and unjust world. A politically powerful analysis has to be not only brief, but offer, as positive reinforcement for accepting a particular understanding, a way forward, a way to relieve unpleasant tensions and experience hope and even a sense of mastery that one is passing toward a more secure or just world.

In this light, we might consider the common piety that education and “skills” justify higher incomes. Economists talk of skills-biased technical change, and recommend social and individual investment in education. It’s pious and legitimating. The rich are smarter — that’s why they’re rich — but if you, or your children, get smarter and better educated, you will also get richer — mastery of a hazardous world, packaged and delivered!

An alternative truth might, arguably, be that the rich are rich, because they have greater political power, and they exercise that political power to dominate and exploit their employees. Employers organize to hold down wages and prevent workers from organizing to press wage demands. Producers organize to suppress competition and increase prices, limit liability and externalize costs onto the poor, who lack the political organization to fight back effectively. It would not be difficulty to turn such an explanation into futility, resignation, cynicism and distrust of authority; it might be hard to turn it into effective and confident action.

#79 Meredith

Layman’s comment here raises what strikes me as the most puzzling thing about libertarianism, its complete and utter lack of any real theory of property (as far as I can tell — someone correct me if I am wrong). Property is a social construct, dependent on institutions (a good deal more than a small police force) that enable its coming into being as well as its maintenance.

I think that libertarians generally have a more mythic concept of property.

Property starts when one man claims his land and fights off all contenders. Like songbirds. One man and his arsenal. Mine. This land is mine, God gave this land to me.

But one man has to sleep. To make it work, property depends on a man and his armed friends. He helps them defend their land and they help him defend his. Because they all agree about their property rights, and together they will fight off anybody who disagrees.

And if a bigger, better-armed force comes along and defeats them? Pushes them off their land or enslaves them? This happened a lot in the old days. Like the Iliad. Victors and victims. It’s morally wrong for that to happen. It happens especially because government.

If somebody conquers my people that’s *wrong* but it can happen. We must be strong and practice with our weapons.

It’s easy to think about property as *tribal*. Me and the people who agree with me. When you look at military details — that so far armies have worked best with strict hierarchies and people who strictly obey orders with little individualism involved — that’s an uncomfortable topic. Back in the old days the Roman army conquered all the libertarian paradises and settled veterans on the land that was left over after many of the men were killed and the women enslaved. Right-libertarians who face that square on get to either argue that modern technology can change it, or that we need armies to fight other armies but otherwise not much government.

A few idealists can argue that when an invading government-run army comes in they can preach to the soldiers and convert them to libertarianism and after the army falls apart the government will learn not to send more armies which will only make libertarianism stronger when they are converted too.

Sort of bemused by this claim that cannabis legalisation is a libertarian victory. Wanting The Man to get out of the way between me and my pot is an arch-liberal position extending back to the sixties, and so it remains.

To be sure, “libertarians” back the idea in theory, but nine times out of ten it’s simply a low-stakes argument adopted by a yesteryear neocon to prove that really, truly, they’re not just a standard-issue Republican who wants to avoid association with the George W. administration.

Internet libertarians are adamant that pot should be legalised, but it’s clear that if full drug liberalisation would raise the taxes of Koch et al by even a dollar, they’d be calling for a full James Cameron remake of Reefer Madness and demanding harsher sentences.

Layman 91, why are you saying these things? Sorry, but could you possibly believe it? Go read Capitalism and Freedom or something. IIRC, it has a chapter on alleviation of poverty.

Sancho 90, dude, ever heard of Gary Johnson?

Libertarians reject the social contract in the US context. They have aligned themselves with the reactionary Republican party. They reject science, such as climate change, that conflicts with their dogma. I find talking to libertarians to be roughly the same as talking to old school Communists: tons of jargon, lots of dogma, and bizarre and uncritically accepted axioms.

I see little or no common ground. Letting the poor suffer is not an acceptable trade for concern on NSA spying. And a movement that can’t accept the reality of pokitically inconvenient science isn’t one that I have intellectual respect for.

“Layman 91, why are you saying these things? Sorry, but could you possibly believe it? Go read Capitalism and Freedom or something. IIRC, it has a chapter on alleviation of poverty.”

Because I observe them to be true. The two most politically prominent libertarians I’m aware of are Paul Ryan and Rand Paul.

Ryan’s trick is to propose new social welfare programs to replace the existing ones, where the new program either provides substantially less social welfare, or it won’t ever be funded. This is true of his Medicare fix, where he replaces Medicare with much less Medicare; and of his poverty plan, where he proposes a more expensive program centered on counseling while ignoring the additional expense. Think he’d vote to raise taxes to pay for it? And he says poor people need Jesus more than they need government help.

Paul’s poverty plan is apparently to cut taxes on the ‘job creators’. That, and to tell women to close their legs.

Maybe you should give them a reading list?

Ze Kraggash @ 92,

I link here to the platform of the Libertarian Party, which is entirely consistent with what you call my caricature of libertarians. Perhaps you should read it?

http://www.lp.org/platform

MPAVictoria @ 95: Bruce, at some point you are going to have to admit that Obamacare is actually working pretty much as promised.

Let’s say that’s after some point in the future. After the Medicaid expansion (the best part, imho) applies to the whole country. After the annual increase in premiums is less than the inflation rate. After a regulatory apparatus actually limits the ratio of profit to health services. After the “sincere religious beliefs” of the owners of corporations no longer qualify them to unilaterally determine wages and benefits. After the mandate on “small” business in the law is actually enforced. After people have the experience of filing their income taxes and paying the fine, or having their subsidy “adjusted”. After people have some experience with bronze plan deductibles. After people have some experience with in-network restrictions. After the websites — state and federal — which took 4! years to build — actually work reliably. After the Courts decide whether people, who used the Federal website qualify for the subsidy. After the system operates year-around (open enrollment period? wtf!) After a regulatory apparatus exists to audit and enforce the law’s nominal limits on health insurance profits.

Maybe after news stories like this one, from the LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL:

For Kynell and Amber Smith and their five children, the Nevada Health Link has been a six-month nightmare with no end in sight.

“I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get this resolved,” said Kynell Smith, an aircraft parts salesman. “I have contacted and pleaded with elected officials to help and was told I may have to sue to get this resolved. What kind of answer is that?”

The family’s troubles began in February, when Amber Smith delivered daughter Kinsley five weeks prematurely. Kinsley spent 10 days in Summerlin Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, and Amber’s 40-day hospital stay included two surgeries.

The Smiths bought insurance from Anthem Blue Cross through Nevada Health Link in October and made two premium payments in January. Yet the claims are being denied because Amber’s birth year is listed incorrectly on the family’s insurance identification cards, Smith said. It’s one year off — written as 1978, when it should be 1979.

Nor has Smith been able to get baby Kinsley added to the family’s insurance, despite “dozens of calls” to Nevada Health Link and Anthem. So despite never missing a $1,300 premium payment, the Smiths are on the hook for all of Kinsley’s follow-up care. What’s more, some of Amber’s specialists have unexpectedly abandoned provider networks, leaving the family with unexpected out-of-pocket expenses, he said.</blockquote

The family’s grand total? Roughly $1.2 million.

The Smiths are the latest in a line of consumers reporting technical problems with Nevada Health Link, the Xerox-built marketplace through which Nevadans can buy subsidized health insurance to comply with the Affordable Care Act. Las Vegan Larry Basich ran up more than $400,000 in uncovered bills in February after Xerox’s system couldn’t figure out which insurer he signed up with. Basich got coverage in March, after a flurry of media attention.

For-profit health insurance should be a felony. Funneling more billions through a health insurance industry, which makes money by denying coverage, skimming cash and conspiring with corrupt providers, to fund a health care system that costs twice as much as that of any other developed country, and delivers less than mediocre results to more than half the country, and requires sick people and their families to fight epic battles with faceless bureaucracy, is going to work as promised. Real soon now.

I believe! I believe! I’m clapping as hard as I can. Really! Clap-clap-clap!

And because a man, whose personal ethics and expertise as a Constitutional law professor forms no barrier to his conviction that he has the authority to murder people is my hero. A guy, who has prosecuted almost no one in the wake of the greatest financial crisis in 70 years, despite daily revelations in civil settlements that the big banks were engaged in large-scale criminal conspiracies and routinely violated laws against fraud and money-laundering — that guy is going to tame the health insurance sector.

Layman, they say: “The proper and most effective source of help for the poor is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals. We believe members of society will become more charitable and civil society will be strengthened as government reduces its activity in this realm.”

See: reduces, not ceases. Like I said: small differences, technicalities.

Here’s what German commies (I think this is probably a translation from GegenStandpunkt) have to say about the state and its activities:
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/yourfriend.htm

Following this debate has been a little like sitting on a couch that has fleas in it, and wondering why my conversational focus is constantly being interrupted by the urge to scratch. I think my discomfort here has something to do with the subtexts that have threatened to surface at this point or that one, but somehow never fully emerge.

I would have thought that the fact that most libertarians are shmibertarians in JQ’s sense is so well established as to be non-controversial — except of course for the truly committed, who can detect liberal pheromones at a great distance, and are never very far from their running shoes and their bullhorns. Apart from them, though, I wonder at those who genuinely can’t see beyond the tissue of lies erected by the defenders of what once may have arguably been a liberal state, but has since become an almost unrecognizable metastasis of ambition, self regard, and genteel mendacity. Obama the beleaguered defender of the downtrodden still soldiering on against the forces of right-wing misanthropy? The ACA, victory snatched from the jaws of defeat? What in the name of all that’s holy are you folks imbibing these days? Lethe itself never produced a drug so potent.

Bruce no major government program has ever been implemented problem free but. obamacare so far seems to be working. The number of uninsured is down and the cost curve appears to be be bending in the right direction. This is a HUGE success and if you were intellectually honest you would admit this. Unfortunately your hatred for President Obama blinds you to this and so your respond with anecdotes and sarcasm. It is a little sad.

/Read Krugman please.

Lee A Arnold @ 101: May be we should try to make a comprehensive list of the different reasons identified (and sometimes measured) by standard economics for inequality.

Maybe. But, keep in mind, my strong qualification: that standard economics is more a legitimating doctrine than an explanatory doctrine. If we’re going to make a comprehensive list, it seems to me, to make sense of our list, we’re going to have separate the legitimating doctrines from the explanatory ones. Within the terms economics itself lays down, this entails a distinction between normative and positive economic analysis.

As to your first point, economics focuses on “change”, because its first and primary explanations for inequality are differences in prior endowment. Economics has no state of nature, as a ground for its critique of income and wealth distribution. The endowments of talents, familial nurturance, cultural inheritance, institutional inheritance, wealth claims and property ownership are not something economics seeks to explain or to criticize, though the consequences of prior endowments for an equilibrium-seeking process can be examined.

It might seem almost schizophrenic to propose an analytic theory organized around the emergence of equilibrium-seeking systems, and marry it to an unexplained endowment, but that’s what economics does. Economics is an attempt to apply an ergodic analysis to a non-ergodic phenomenon. Put like that, it probably does not seem sensible, but equilibrium thinking is powerful stuff and it does produce insights. It does mean that the analytic focus — the equilibrium analysis — exists on a kind of well-lit proscenium stage, where the functional relationships of the equilibrium process can be examined in detail, while the results of the unexamined dynamics enter from behind a curtain or, magically, through the fourth wall. Observed results of the unobserved dynamics are given awkward names — “skills-biased technical change” — but just like prior history, they can not be examined critically within the equilibrium framework, at least not easily.

Some aspects of inequality have been examined and criticized though. Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, applied as it was to the Gilded Age, deserves mention. Robert H Frank, more recently, has written about conspicuous consumption and what he calls the positional arms race of competition for relative status. These are not explanations for inequality, per se, but they are explanations for why inequality is wasteful, and why interventions to reduce inequality might be construed not to harm anyone.

Anyway, my point is that we cannot just list the explanations, we have to sort them out a bit. Equilibrium analysis can yield some interesting insights on what’s legitimate — Franks on the positional arms race in consumer status competition — but equilibrium analysis may also tend to apply a blanket legitimization to whatever emerges “exogenously”.

“Skills-biased technical change” isn’t an explanation. Economics does not have a theoretical analysis of the dynamics of technical change from which to generate an explanation. It’s a fairy tale attached to an unexplained, emergent phenomenon. So, it serves a legitimating function, but I would challenge its claim to explanatory power. At base, it isn’t that different from attributing inequality to prior endowments; it’s acceptance of a “given” exogenous to the analysis.

Bruce Wilder #108: “…its first and primary explanations for inequality are differences in prior endowment.”

Indeed this is one of the libertarian’s bedrock hypotheses.

But, in regard to the endowment of “talent”, observe that the first and primary explanation in economics insisted that it is NOT the case:

“The difference of natural talents in different men, is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour.” –Smith, Wealth of Nations, book I, chapter 2, penultimate paragraph.

Again: “the difference of…talents…is…much LESS than we are aware of”

We can exclude certain genius, e.g. Mozart, and at the other end of the scale, unfortunates with obvious deficits, and in Smith’s time society placed women and some other races beneath white male abilities.

Smith’s point is that it is the entry into the division of labor which causes the APPEARANCE of differences in talents.

And I imagine he would have extrapolated that the division of labor is also largely responsible for the differences in familial nurturance, wealth claims, etc. — most of the rest of the list — which today’s economists keep exogenous.

If the structure of the division of labor has only few positions of management/ownership at the top, then it cannot an “equilibrium” to begin with (except by positing an unreal amount of competition).

A huge inequality has ensued, which APPEARS to be based on differences in endowments. Or else it is blindly, nervously explained away by economists as caused by education or skills bias.

Further, if Adam Smith was right about the primary cause being the division of labor, then changes to the process of production by automation etc. may change the general, false psychology of expectations about talents and just deserts.

The increasing number of people who have begun to entertain the idea of an historical breakpoint of this kind, could be an early signal of that change.

Ze Kraggash:

‘Layman, they say: “The proper and most effective source of help for the poor is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals. We believe members of society will become more charitable and civil society will be strengthened as government reduces its activity in this realm.”’

Somehow you managed to miss the two sentences immediately preceding, which are more direct & modify the meaning of the two you chose:

“Retirement planning is the responsibility of the individual, not the government. Libertarians would phase out the current government-sponsored Social Security system and transition to a private voluntary system.”

In other words, they mean to end social security over time, and as government reduces it’s role (due to the transition), the expect people to be more personally charitable. In the end, no SS, just personal responsibility and private charity.

“Because I don’t recall anyone promising that it would make my premiums go up, the level of coverage I get go down”

Brett Bellmore, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe your premiums have increased by more than the historic trend in premium increase in your state; and I don’t believe your coverage has declined in any way not predictable from pre-ACA trends in coverage changes. I thing your claim is hogwash, and I invite you to demonstrate your claim.

bianca steele @ 133

It’s always a bit presumptuous to make unqualified generalizations, but it does seem to me that people who are ignorant of history make unreliable political theorists. It doesn’t stop them from plaguing the Intertubes with their political theories, of course, and maybe it shouldn’t — it doesn’t hurt to know, surely, just how dysfunctional our political interactions are down at the roots as well as up in the topmost branches.

I wonder, for example, if libertarians who despise unions, but take their weekends for granted, would be astonished to learn that people in the not so dim past actually died so that they didn’t have to work seven days a week. Would some Christian fundamentalists be astonished to learn that when I was a kid the phrase Under God wasn’t part of the Pledge of Allegiance we said every morning before classes started? Are the people who hold up signs warning the government to keep its filthy hands off their Medicare to be taken seriously? As a threat to all that’s bright and beautiful in our liberal paradise, I suppose they should be, but not as political thinkers.

If, in short, you want to lecture people about how things ought to be, it helps to have at least some idea about how and why things got to be the way they are — if you expect anybody to take you at your word, that is. Unhappily, for reasons obvious and not so obvious, this sort of belligerent ignorance seems to be more common in the U.S. than in the rest of the world these days, with the possible exception of areas ruled by Wahabists. I’d like to think that for at least part of our history we did better, but maybe I’m disposed to think so only because I still have a few illusions of my own that need dispelling.

@ 116 was a reply to bianca steele at 113, not 133. Obvious now, I guess, but later in the thread it might look a little strange.

I can think of some issues–like government surveillance or cryptography–in which it isn’t clear to me which is the “left” side. There there is intellectual property, which seems to divide libertarians, liberals and leftists alike.

I do not claim that any of those issues could lead to a “libertarian moment”, but if it’s unclear what’s Left of Libertarianism, sometimes that might be because the left doesn’t have a clear position that libertarians could side with.

“but it seems silly to deny that it’s working better than most people expected.”

To be fair a lot of people expected it to work exactly how it is working, fairly well with some glitches.

“Radley Balko is great. But he’s about the only libertarian I hear of on these issues.”

Then you must not really be looking. Balko doesn’t write for Reason anymore, but Reason remains full of similar coverage. Searching for ‘SWAT’ on Reason.com pulls up a couple of dozen pieces on police militarization during just in the last couple of months.

http://goo.gl/BNsQuX

The problem with these labels is that they all get co-opted eventually.

liberal = bureaucratic
libertarian = corporatist
progressive = conservative
conservative = fascist

Each time there is a co-option, the True Scotsmen have to come up with another label to differentiate themselves, which gets co-opted. The term “liberal” has stood for both “libertarian” and “progressive” at different points in its history.

As regards scepticism about war, the same is true of the realist school associated with The National Interest (they publish me, and some libertarians as well as old-school realists).

I think this underestimates the impact some libertarians have made on public views of the national security state and imperial aggression. This is an issue that Ron Paul was consistently good on and played a role in legitimizing in the national debate. Cato was/is also good on it. They were more important than the (odious) Glenn Reynolds of the world, and also more important in the public discussion than the academic realists who are for the most part obscure academics.

“Now Google police + militarization. Top links are Huffpo, ACLU, and Salon. Left, left, left. Or centre-left, left, left, at least.”

But also on the first results page I’m also seeing the Wall Street Journal the sometimes libertianish Washington Post (current home of Radley Balko) and even Fox News. Which is all to the good. After all it seems pretty clear that it’s the libertarian and not leftist influence that’s responsible for pushing this stories into places like WSJ and Fox.

I don’t totally understand the point of this argument. So, some percentage of self-described libertarians are against police brutality and bad drug laws and pro-gay-rights. Fine, I guess, and to whatever limited extent they’re able to influence public policy, it’s all to the good. And yet, there are WAY more lefties than libertarians who hold these views, and the lefties have the EXTRA ADDED BONUS of not ALSO supporting horrible economic policies. Why am I supposed to be so excited about libertarians in this context? Do they want half a cookie for only being half awful?

GeoX, the reason I think it’s interesting is that drug reform is really the only libertarian success. You’re right that the rest of their program is mad, and isn’t even close to being enacted, but their drug reforms are a genuine humanitarian achievement – frankly against very large odds.

Secondly, libertarians have actually driven reform both by proposing ballots and by tactically campaigning for legalisation, like using medical marijuana as the thin end of the wedge, because they’re ideologically in favor. The left just hasn’t taken that approach to the same extent, just because ideologically and tactically it’s main concerns are civil rights and social justice, so they’ve mostly tacitly accepted the status quo and aimed at things like police reform.

Thirdly, certainly with marijuana reform, most support is from voters who don’t identify with a party. Unaffiliated voters outnumber those who identify democrat about 2:1, and both support reform roughly the same extent. So this is coming both from outside the party system and outside core voters. Sure, there are only a small number of libertarians, but they’re effectively leveraging the politically indifferent to get reform. Whatever Quiggin says, Democrat politicians are very scared of being tarnished as soft on drugs, democrat supporters don’t have the leadership of numbers to have accomplished this.

Apparently, the way to solve the challenges of improving education in the U.S. (I say improve, not rescue — there is so much that is working that all the scare talk is ridiculous) is to have each parent decide between charters and regular publics and privates and so on (all underwritten by the whole community’s taxes, magically), but the clincher: it will all require fewer resources because the BEST teachers will teach via digital media to everyone. So Rand Paul (according to a Salon piece I cannot find at the moment — sorry). After a while, I don’t give a damn what supposed “political philosophy” is promulgating such nonsense. After a while, I don’t believe any political philosophy is promulgating it. It’s the product of individual ego riding a wave of similarly minded egos. A nearly universally commonly denominator here: male. More specifically, males stuck in adolescent fantasies. In Rand’s case, propped up by some kind of warped natural philosophy. (Cf. Paul Ryan, an RC, whose “natural philosophy” isn’t exactly in line with the pope’s, but what does the pope know about such matters?)

I’ve just finished Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. I highly recommend it. Relevant to, and informative about, just about everything going on today in the U.S (and anywhere the English have left their mark, which is just about everywhere). Including the invocation of natural philosophy, as convenient.

Lee A. Arnold @ 110: The increasing number of people who have begun to entertain the idea of an historical breakpoint of this kind, could be an early signal of that change.

Just one additional note — a subtle shift in the demographics might contribute to a change in consensus opinion about a lot of things. For a long time, the Boomers have been the largest cohorts in the population, but by 2020 the three largest half-decade cohorts in the population will be the 20-34s

Culture shifts are often accelerated by even tiny demographic bulges like that.

This is a pointlessly bad exercise in “shoring up” the Democrats, which type of activity I used to do quite a bit of (what is your opinion of Al Smith, JQ?) Maybe you should be doing a sociological analysis, not airlifting good courage. The kind of American liberalism that social democrats elsewhere could look benignly upon is dead among the under 40s; Norman Lear is no more. There are libertarians, who will sweet talk you with tales of bud and kinky sex, then disquisit about how Richard Nixon was really a good chap. I swear this is commonplace; please, for the sake of your safety, do not mention non-civil unions in their presence. And there are, mirabile dictu, actual socialists, who are after years as nothing starting to figure out the mechanics of modifying public opinion and running for winnable offices. It should be an “interesting” century, like the Chinese proverb.

“self-ID libertarians. These look much more like liberals eg favor both equal marriage and higher minimum wages, and have much the same party ID as the entire population. Make of that what you will.”

I suspect that a lot of self-ID libertarians don’t know what the word means, and are using it simply as an out to avoid getting stuck with another label and like that it sounds kind of liberal. Not understanding that a higher minimum wage is the exact antithesis of libertarianism is rather telling.

People here may find this food for thought.

Some things might be more ‘anathema’ than others.

@157
Yes, you are right, Libertarians keep forgetting about the existance of non-contractual obligations (such as children for instance).

John, libertarian support for drug legalization does not matter because most of them work within the Republican Party, and they have not moved the party their way on this? Lots of people here – and I think this would include you, were you American – are progressives working within the Democratic Party who have not been able to move the party our way. Do our views then not count? If the Paulites took over the R. party and the White House, and reduced military spending and commitments along the lines progressives have long advocated, would it be fair to treat progressives as though we never held those positions because we stuck with a party that we could never get to enact them?

As the claim above that many more liberals than libertarians supported legalization, liberals have higher absolute numbers by most measures, but by percentages? I don’t believe I have ever met a libertarian prepared to defend pot criminalization. I have met a lot of liberals who were. I have never read a libertarian writer who was. Has anyone else? Can anyone identify a libertarian writer who defended the criminalization of pot? Many libertarians cared much more about taxes and such, of course, but not all liberals put the same weight on various issues either.

And it seems to me that “bragging rights” are pretty central to the Democratic Party’s entire political position. Bragging rights on SS, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, etc. I don’t see how we are supposed to evaluate political parties and coalitions with no reference to their history.

As for the map, we have one blue and one purple state that have legalized, the purple one with less hesitation (it implemented more quickly and with fewer restrictions). The next state to get legalization on the ballot was deep-red Alaska, and chances of passage look good. And don’t tell me Alaska is anomalous, because the anomaly is precisely that it is probably the only red state where the libertarians are a strong enough faction of the Republicans to do this. Legalization has proceeded, as mentioned, largely by ballot initiative, and I believe the Libertarian Party in every state where there has been an initiative to legalize, decriminalize, or legalize medical use has endorsed that initiative, while the Democratic Party rarely has until very recently, when it became clear that the Party’s electoral bread is buttered differently now. There is, after all, a difference between coming out against segregation in 1950 and doing it in 1975.

Let’s look at some history here:

1) It was the Democratic Party that made marijuana illegal in the first place. It happened under FDR. It was done through a dishonest catch-22 tax law because it was feared that the conservative Supreme Court would throw out straightforward prohibition.
2) Though the White House may be the central font of blowhardry, the War on Drugs was always primarily legislative. For the most part, it was not that the executive went beyond the law, nor that the judiciary interpreted it more expansively than intended – the War on Drugs was deliberately enacted in legislation. That means “Nixon’s” War on Drugs was passed by a Congress completely dominated by the Democratic Party, and “Reagan’s” escalation was enacted by a Democratic House and sometimes Democratic Senate.
3) The second escalation was “Clinton’s” crime bill. This was passed with a Republican House and Democratic Senate.
4) At least as early as the 80s, extremely prominent Republicans came out against the war on drugs, even while their party was majorly invested in it. This includes Milton Friedman and George Schultz. Has any Democrat comparable to Schultz done this, even now? Vance, Albright, Christopher? Well, Volcker did, a little later, so that’s something, but Volcker was a key figure in the Nixon administration, so he kind of has a foot in each party. In the last two months, Hilary Clinton has finally given an extremely limited endorsement of medical marijuana. As for Friedman, the comparable figure for Democrats is Keynes, who was dead at the time of this controversy. Not when pot was banned, though. Anyone know if Keynes took a position then?
5) I believe the first Presidential primary candidate of either major party to support medical marijuana was Pat Buchanan. Jerry Brown had reduced criminal penalties as governor of California, but stayed out of that fight as a Presidential candidate. He has recently spoken against legalization. Jesse Jackson has recently come out for legalization, but did not as a candidate.
6) I also believe the first Presidential primary candidate of either major party to support legalization was Ron Paul in 2004. In that year, Dennis Kucinich supported only decriminalization. In 2008, Republican and later Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson also supported legalization.
7) The leading organization currently opposing marijuana legalization is SAM (Smart Alternatives to Marijuana). It’s head is Patrick Kennedy, son of Teddy, a man deeply embedded in the Democratic Party elite.

I think the upshot is that both major parties were equally supportive of the prohibition and of the war on drugs generally, which never would have gotten off the ground with serious opposition by either party. But the Republican Party did have more room for dissent on this issue, even in the 80s when they were most invested in the fight, than the Democrats did. The dissent was not even limited to the libertarian wing (Buchanan did not belong to that wing; apparently, he was pandering to it, which means he found it worth pandering to). Given all the crowing about the allegedly essential authoritarian, follow-the-leader mentality of conservatives, this does seem like something liberals and the Democratic Party should be examining critically, rather than pretending that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

And this is why I think this matters. It is not just a matter of giving Libertarians fair credit, though fair is fair. It is that the Democratic Party should answer for its role in the war on drugs, and the success of the Party in suppressing dissent on it for so long should be looked at very critically.

“People here may find this food for thought.”

Not really. He complains that folks who don’t know much about Ayn Rand think it’s part of the Tea Party, recoil from the term libertarianism. I’ve heard Rand speak, read her novels. Real libertarians are way worse than the Tea Party. The Tea Party makes sense (not that it’s pretty, but it makes sense), libertarianism doesn’t. (Libertarianism only makes sense if you have as much money as Romney. For the vast majority of folks, things like unions, workplace safety laws, Medicare and SS are real nice. Libertarians are just nuts. Even if contracts were as nice equitable things as the libertarians claim, tell that to the folks who thought they had pensions from, e.g., Enron. They paid in, but there’s no one to pay out.)

“Libertarians who object to unions or the closed shop, like Rand Paul or the Cato Institute, are obviously fakes or at least intellectually deficient.”

He’s no true Scotsman, that Rand Paul…

Libertarianism has its logic (and quite a simple one, which accounts for its relative popularity). And of course celebrities and politicians associated with it (as well as its ordinary followers) have their inconsistancies and different interpretations, because life is complicated. And what’s so special about that? It’s very common. No one is a true Scotsman. Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist. You can discuss shortcomings of the ideology, or you can discuss Rand Paul.

You can discuss shortcomings of the ideology, or you can discuss Rand Paul.

The aforementioned Gary North offers the Ron Paul Curriculum: http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/

Presumably those home-schooled under it will be calling themselves libertarians and advocating stoning for adultery.

In my anecdotal experience with internet libertarians, when a self-identified US libertarian looks for an example of government overreach, he will cite something like the state mandate for low-flush toilets – “outrageous, the state telling me what I can do in my own bathroom”. A left liberal looking for an example of government overreach will cite torture, surveillance, the gay marriage ban, drug prohibition etc. The self-identified US libertarian may, when challenged, assert that he opposes drug prohibition and surveillance too but it’s rarely what really fires him up to mouth-foaming tirades against government tyranny. The obvious fact is that left or left-liberal activists and publications are consistent and visible in denouncing government oppression, far more visible and consistent than most self-idenfied libertarians. The latter are mostly noticeable for attacking regulation – usually in lock-step with corporate interests.

Huh. Low-flush toilets, while nowhere near as lofty as concerns about torture and surveillance, sounds like something that affects a lot of people, ordinary people. A different sort of politics, more populist perhaps? Actual politics: this is how you recruit in Tea Party, probably. And what do you have in this department?

“Only if the freedom to waste, or the freedom to pollute (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/phosphate-memories), is high on your list of inalienable rights”

Exactly. The thing that unites libertarians is an objection to paying for the externalities they impose on the rest of us. They don’t phrase it that way, but that’s what they mean. Liberty for libertarians is the liberty to hurt people without taking responsibility.

I apologize for the editing failure on my last comment. My cut-and-paste skills in re-arranging a narrative sequence to make sense do not seem to be up to standard.

“It is telling that what they care about is almost always some trivial restriction of their own personal freedom, rather than the actual oppression of other people.”

Perusing our own personal interests is the essence of liberal (in general sense) politics. A low-flowing toilet probably annoys the average person a hundred times more than oppression of other people. If I were a politician, I would make it the centerpiece of my campaign, and you’d have no chance. No shit. To take care of oppression of other people (if they can’t do it themselves) you’d need a philosopher-king or something.

Bruce Wilder @ 175, 176

No apology necessary. As a meta-narrative of our possibly terminal distemper, it’ll serve well enough. In fact, my fantasy of the end of the beginning would be the look on Charlie Rose’s face after an hour spent interviewing you. Maybe it could be run right after Friedman’s interview with the President. At very least no one would then be able to claim that we weren’t warned, not with a straight face, anyway.

Layman 08.13.14 at 1:42 pm @ 164 — In ideological (as opposed to tribal or practical) politics, you are what you say.

“One big problem here, of course, is that the American version of libertarianism is a pretty recent invention, and as essentially phony as the tea party. ”

I would say one big problem here, is that lot of people on the left talk about diversity, but don’t really believe that people can have diverse viewpoints. All opposition to them has to be phony, astroturf, and so forth, because nobody can REALLY disagree with them.

Yes, libertarianism is as phony as the Tea party. Which is to say, genuine.

One big problem here, of course, is that the American version of libertarianism is a pretty recent invention, and as essentially phony as the tea party.

This cannot be stressed too often. It’s a product of the lab, like a Zedonk or Molly the sheep. I wonder if it wasn’t rammed people throats by think tanks and political philosophy departments it might have died off some time since.

engels 08.14.14 at 2:33 pm @ 186 —
What ideology is not an artifice?

Yes, the Tea Party. Which a simple Google search can confirm existed long before the 2008 election.

Sample search results

Seriously, the left may not have noticed the Tea Party until it had a Democratic President to criticize, but it came into being as a reaction to Bush, not Obama.

Ze Kraggash @ 189

Re: your link to euthanasia for the poor, I’m not sure which scares me more, the libertarianism or the Catholicism.

Neither wants to deal with the underlying causes of poverty or make the world a better place. The libertarians do not want social insurance, because it would remove the opportunity to profit from usury. The Catholics want palliative care, because they think the suffering of the poor and sick is good for the soul, but oppose effective birth control, because it might enable too much pleasure.

Consumatopia 08.14.14 at 4:10 pm @ 191 — engels @ 186 was not criticizing the content of libertarianism but its practices, and from the outside. He could have gone on and added that they do not do as they say, but he didn’t. Nor did he support his assertion with evidence. My (equally unsupported) opinion is that, far from being entirely a con game, libertarianism is the fundamentalism of liberalism, a taking-literally of principles most people take with grains of salt or crossed fingers behind their backs, and thus is rather widely if thinly distributed among non-elite types who do not understand the Byzantine subtleties of the pros.

Such people can be conned, but so can be and are many other sects of liberalism. The liberal anti-war movement, for instance, was conned into being a mere instrument of Democratic Party politics during the years of Bush 2, and turned off when the Democrats got their man in.

@Anarcissie, there doesn’t seem to be any relationship at all between what you just wrote @194, and the posts @171 and @186, or your question @188. And my response said @191 still stands.

The trouble is not whether libertarians or liberals are more prone to being “conned” or hypocrites. The trouble is that libertarianism itself is a con.

Consumatopia 08.14.14 at 5:39 pm @ 196 — While it’s clear that anyone who disagrees with me is either a fool or a crook, and therefore wrong, I prefer to differentiate between the two types.

Yeah, libertarians are you, but here’s your real ideological enemy, the super-popular PM of Hungary:

Instead, Orban looked to non-Western models, proclaiming: “a trending topic in thinking is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet making nations successful. Today, the stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia.”

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/14001/hungary-s-orban-a-threat-to-liberal-democracy-and-eu-norms

This might be the next big thing, as a push back against neoliberalism (which is also you).

Unless you delight in human suffering, low flush toilets should be mandatory in areas where water shortages are a problem. (No, the free market should not have the power to decide who loses access to water.) Note that most of the country has, at the very least, occasional droughts. If there is any area of the country that has literally never had a drought, you could make an exception, but that means you have to enforce the regulations at the point at which toilets are installed rather than when toilets are sold, which is harder. It also means manufacturers would have to keep making two kinds of toilets, which means they wouldn’t put as much design time into the low-flush models, and everyone might still be complaining today that they still don’t work.

I’m not talking about false consciousness, and this is why Anarcissie’s dichotomy of crooks and fools is nonsense. It’s not that someone necessarily tricked you into pretending that private power is freedom. You probably just sympathized with private power or the people holding it. It’s not false consciousness, it’s rationalization.

It’s libertarianism that denies the legitimacy of other points of view. Libertarianism force people to accept feudal propertarianism and call it “freedom”. If you resist private power, libertarians are perfectly happy having the police kill you. Let me translate libertarian speak: “People have genuine disagreements. Different starting premises. That’s one of the reasons that bosses and landlords should be free to coerce people.” The most important disagreement we have is on whether the power of government created and enforced property over human beings should be absolute.

If you manage to get the regime you want, Brett, you had better drastically expand the military and the police. I promise you that you will need it.

“The low-flush toilet mandate makes a pretty good example of mindless regulation. Low-flush toilets make sense in some places, less sense in others, and in some places are an actual problem. But they got mandated everywhere.”

Ok, so some early low-flush toilets were poorly designed. Blame the government, not the private companies making them! I recently lived in an apartment with an old, poorly designed high-flush toilet (not sure that’s a proper use of language). I blame the government too: the city should not tolerate such substandard appliances in rental apartments (neither should it tolerate leaky windows and and and). I guess you would disagree. You would probably blame me for voluntarily entering into a contract with a slumlord (I would counter that the “free market” didn’t give me that much choice).

Anyway, I’m gratified by my low-flush toilet example having provoked so much debate but still, are you really not getting the point or just pretending? Yes, some regulation is less than optimal. Some is in fact counterproductive or outright stupid – no liberal will deny that, although we might come up with different examples for what we consider stupid regulation. But that problem cannot be solved by not having any regulation. “the government can’t act without stepping on a lot of toes”, true, but neither can it NOT act without stepping on a lot of toes.

What always amazes me is the lack of a sense of proportion in libertarian complaints. We are all annoyed or maybe aggrieved by certain government policies that we disagree with but most of us recognize the difference between “the government not acting as I would like” and tyranny. There are plenty of cases when genuine fundamental rights – by most people’s standards – are violated by the state, but in my experience, as explained in 170, it is rarely those that right-wing libertarians get worked up about, and it is mostly the so-called “big government” liberals who can be found working to rectify those genuine excesses.

The libertarian complaint against government is a strange one, for a host of reasons. It wants it to guarantee these mysterious “natural rights” that supposedly preexist the human condition, but it also doesn’t want the government to use force. Trace back every private property transaction in America and you’ll get to a place where the land was stolen from someone, by force. Our military did it, our police, our warlords, our robber barons. In every case, there is an origin of theft and violence. And there is violence in keeping that land (and other possessions), if others make claims to the same property.

So, it wants the body it otherwise sees as “tyrannical” to impose arbitrary “rights” to protect its arbitrary ideas of personal possessions which wouldn’t exist in the first place without governments — for good or ill. And it’s often the latter.

Honestly, why would we ever want to limit the function of government to minarchy? To the protection of personal property? That’s just a fancy way of saying “police state.” The only thing that really makes government at all palatable is when it works collectively, on our behalf, to improve quality of life for all. It’s nothing but an official thug for the rich if it does nothing but protect the status quo property arrangements. I’d rather have no government than a minarchy.

“Ok, so some early low-flush toilets were poorly designed. Blame the government, not the private companies making them!”

I don’t blame the private companies for making them, because the private companies didn’t force me to buy them. The government forced me to buy one, despite the fact that it made no sense for me to use one.

You think that’s fine, because it’s more convenient for the government to force everybody to use low flush toilets, even the people who don’t need them. And, how could the market possibly handle selling both regular AND low flush toilets?

Perhaps this decendant of plumbers, who can sweat pipes together, and install toilets, should explain something to you: The nation is chock full of existing infrastructure, household plumbing and sewers, which was designed to function with a certain minimum amount of water per turd. It malfunctions with less water per turd.

It has to do with the angle the pipes are sloped, apparently something too hard for regulators to have asked plumbers about…

I get your point but it proves too much. Would you agree that there should be no product, no building regulation at all? No requirement that wiring, plumbing, etc. adhere to certain standards, no requirement that there needs to be plumbing and toilets in the first place? No safety standards whatsoever on cars, airplanes, drugs? I don’t think any libertarian seriously takes that view – you would frankly just appear as a lunatic. But if you don’t take that radical view, then our positions don’t differ in principle – nobody claims that all regulation is always good. Everybody agrees that some regulations should be changed or abolished (although of course there is no agreement on which those are). The standard libertarian way out is some variant of “let’s minimize regulation”, but that is just hand-waving. People disagree on what the “minimum” should be and there simply is no a priori principle that would allow you to say, “this is the minimum that is consistent with libertarian philosophy and anything in excess is too much”. Just like it’s impossible to pinpoint a “minimum” tax rate that is justifiable and anything in excess is too much. I’m not aware of any US rightwing libertarians that really consistently advocate abolishing state power (as anarchists do), what they are advocating is a preference for certain kinds of state power (e. g. police, courts, enforcement of property rights) over others (e. g. economic regulation, social welfare). It is fine of course if you have these preferences, what I find dishonest is the claim that these preferences are more consistent with liberty (“libertarian”) and “small government” than, say the preferences of left-wing liberalism.

Would you agree that there should be no product, no building regulation at all? No requirement that wiring, plumbing, etc. adhere to certain standards, no requirement that there needs to be plumbing and toilets in the first place? No safety standards whatsoever on cars, airplanes, drugs?

In all fairness, there are various private organizations that create standards, and some of them have standard methods to create standards that tend to work reasonably well. It doesn’t have to be a government doing it. Sometimes governments wind up enforcing the privately-created standards because those standards appear to work. Sometimes people mostly follow the standards even without government enforcement because it just makes sense to.

It’s an open question how well we could do without government regulation. I expect we’d have more problems than we do now, but how much more? Would it be something we can live with? I can’t really predict that.

The “I’ve got mine” complaint is baffling.

Are you saying that what is theirs isn’t actually theirs, but yours?

Or that it is theirs but it’s awfully mean of them not to share, and so they WILL share whether they like it or not, and you will decide how much they share and who gets what?

To complain about “I’ve got mine” suggests a property claim which is never substantiated.

As usual, the left wishes to live off corporate wealth without the unseemly trouble of having to earn it. Win/win.

TM: Michigan doesn’t have a water shortage. (This should be obvious at the moment.) Southern Florida doesn’t have to cope with snow loads on roofs. In Wisconsin they hardly ever experience hurricanes.

Why would somebody, having decided that building codes were necessary, conclude they needed to be uniform across the country? It doesn’t make sense to build homes in Wisconsin to survive hurricanes, why do you think it makes sense to build homes in Michigan to conserve water, as though they were located in a drought prone area?

The point is, not only were there people who were really annoyed by the low-flush mandate, (And don’t get me started about shower heads that just drool on you…) a lot of them, they had good reason to be annoyed. A regulation which made sense in some parts of the country was imposed nation-wide. Imposed on a nation full of infrastructure it wasn’t really compatible with. The cost has been immense, and is ongoing.

And yet, objecting to the low-flush mandate is considered among liberals to be mindless regulation bashing?

I’d like to introduce you to a concept I think more liberals need acquaintance with: Diminishing returns. Just because a little bit of something is beneficial, doesn’t mean a huge heap of it will be.

Ever stop to think that government and regulation might be subject to the law of diminishing returns, and that you might just have taken your love affair with government and regulation too far?

#214 Carl

The “I’ve got mine” complaint is baffling.

Are you saying that what is theirs isn’t actually theirs, but yours?

I don’t say it’s mine, but I say usually their claim is morally weak.

Let’s say your great-great-great-grandfather owned a lot of land because he pushed the Indians off of it. Did he deserve to own that land? Do you deserve to own it today?

OK, let’s say my great-great-great-grandfather was both a surveyor and a lawyer, and he used the law to take that land away from your great^3-grandfather. Did he deserve to own that land? Do I deserve to own it today?

Let’s say John Quiggen’s great-great-grandfather made a fortune selling rotten beef to the Union army during the civil war, and that was the base of a fortune which has passed down to John. Did he deserve that fortune for cheaply supporting a corrupt autocratic government in its successful efforts to oppress people who were trying to be free of it? Does John?

Today, most of “what’s yours” or “what’s mine” is either stolen outright or it’s a case of receiving stolen property. If you provided fair value for money when you sold to a thief, do you really deserve the rewards? But if are an American and you don’t sell to the US government or to people who work for the US government or people who sell to it, then you probably don’t have much at all.

In theory, people ought to be able to own their own stuff that was always theirs or that they earned from other people. But today pretty much everything that you have, you have because the government gave it to you, or the government paid you to do stuff the government wanted, directly or indirectly, or at the very least the government set up corrupt laws that let you prosper in place of somebody else who would have prospered with other laws.

No, you have no particular right to the wealth the government handed to you. When you create your wealth from scratch after the government is gone, without coercing anybody, you’ll deserve that wealth.

In the meantime, what the government hands out, the government can take back. And you can’t stop them until you find a way to stop them.

Michigan has had water shortages in the past.

There are clearly some areas of the country in which the government needs to regulate water use. The question is whether its worth fine-tuning the regulations to only apply to those areas. You make a reasonable case that they should, but given that weather patterns are variable (Michigan doesn’t have a water shortage now…) and uniform regulations are easier to administer (easier to regulate toilet sales than toilet installations), there’s a reasonable case to make that they shouldn’t. Making exceptions to the law for every case in which its suboptimal is also a process with diminishing marginal returns.

Bottom line, we’re talking about many millions of gallons of water a day. It might mean that some people have to flush twice or scrounge up antique toilets, until they change pipes. That doesn’t seem like a terrible trade.

Also, you completely ignored TM’s point, I don’t think he’s defending low flow toilets. I am, though.

“If you are unpopular, or if you belong to a small unpopular minority”

In the real world this is of course a complicated issue, but in a hypothetical ideal world, if you find yourself unpopular and minority, why would you want to stay in that community? It would make sense to either assimilate or leave and join a more suitable one.

“If you have enough friends or relatives to be reasonably sure of at least one person on your side on the jury, then push for letting any one juror stop a judgement.”

Oh dear

Well sure, the rules of the game are designed to reduce that some.

So if the defendant is black, it makes sense to try not to have any blacks on the jury. If he is Jewish then try not to have anybody you think might be Jewish. If he is a university professor then you don’t want any university professors, if he’s an engineer you don’t want any engineers, etc.

The lawyers on each side will try to avoid letting anybody onto the jury who is predisposed to support the other side.

But if you have enough friends, particularly people who are biased in your favor but are willing to lie about it, then you have an advantage you would not otherwise have.

Collin Street wrote:-

In my hypothetical ideal world there wouldn’t be any unpopular minorities.

Unfortunately, there have traditionally been two ways of arranging that: no unpopularity and no minority. Guess which has been tried more often, sometimes effectively.

Unfortunately, there have traditionally been two ways of arranging that: no unpopularity and no minority. Guess which has been tried more often, sometimes effectively.

In the real world you are of course correct.

This being an ideal world I think we’re entitled — obliged! — to presume ideal solutions.

“Yes, same here. I might like a world where everybody agreed to be the same kind of libertarian and there were no unpopular minorities. I don’t expect to see one.”

This is why the idea of sea-steading is so popular in libertarian circles. The idea of communities composed entirely of like-minded volunteers on land that wasn’t expropriated has an obvious appeal. Maybe libertarianism and other isms will get a fair trial once we start colonizing space in a big way.

Who knows, maybe even Plume’s ideas could work, with the right people, and six months’ travel time through vacuum to take the place of a Berlin wall.

News from Nowhere was a libertarian utopia. Any takers?

Brett Bellmore, the oppressor doesn’t have to chase you down, bring home the loot, or make it pay. The oppressor only has to stop enough people getting out from under that enough don’t even try and end up contributing far more than the cost of sending missiles one way after the few who do try anyway. And you can’t see them coming and run away, not if they use the old trick of negotiating a limited autonomy for a few at the price of those few policing the rest, like Maroons who escaped from slavery or Cossacks who were never enserfed; that’s because the freed have all the same resources and locations as the would be free, plus some further help, and so they plug the free ecological niche, so to speak (they don’t have to come back; in fact, it would defeat the object if they tried).

I’m not asserting that proliferation of independent colonies is guaranteed in a space colonization situation. Just that there are factors that make it more feasible than here on Earth. (Where there’s nowhere you can go that’s far enough away from existing governments to matter.)