Libertarian Islands?

[ImprobableJoe]

I've put it in spoiler tags for those who don't want to read a long-ish response.

Probably for the best, because ohcac is a liar, and is exactly the sort of ignorant, uneducated, amoral libertarian that we've been addressing all along.

 

[Aught3]

1) A libertarian is somebody who believes that individual freedom constitutes the fundamental principle for a free society. The implications of this philosophy typically mean a minimization of the state as much as possible, promotion of less regulated market exchange, and less taxation; to name but a few. I believe that
Aught3 is essentially correct in his definition to my estimation.

Glad I got something right. There are of course moral objections to the libertarian ethic. For example, if I can do whatever I like with the things I own - including myself - then I should be able to sell part of myself, perhaps a kidney, to someone who needs it. Maybe this situation could do some good, if the buyer is sick and needs a kidney transplant to survive, then it seems fine. But maybe the buyer is an affluent collector who wants a new conversation piece to hang above the mantle and thinks a human kidney is just the ticket! Hell, if he's paying maybe he will get both for a bargain price. Under libertarianism there is nothing wrong with this situation.

What objections are more sound? For one thing, the "externalities" argument: An externality is a case when the costs and benefits of activities affect third parties. These can be positive or negative, and an example of a negative externality would be heavy pollution, and there are countless examples that are easy to think of. However, all that externalities prove is that property rights need to be enforced.

I could equally say that all externalities prove is that taxation needs to be leveled or that regulations need to be enforced. Any of these solutions has the effect of decreasing externalities. If someone doesn't want to see an 'egregious' expansion of private property rights your solution is not going to look very appealing. Would this even work? Presumably the new owners of the air would have to get together and sue, under some kind of tort law, the petrol companies and energy generators. Talk about job killing! And what exactly is their supposed loss, how do we quantify it into a dollar value? Also how is it posible for future generations to exert current property rights, especially given the libertarian argument that we should only look out for ourselves.

The word "free" as you can see above doesn't really mean "free" in the sense of "do whatever the hell you want"; but "operate under a code of fair private property rights".

So I can say we have free markets now. Where "free" doesn't really mean "free" in the sense of "do whatever the hell you want"; but "operate under a code of fair public regulation".

On the point of coercion, markets can be incredibly coercive. In some sense we can say a homeless man chose to sleep under a bridge rather than on a park-bench or the sidewalk but does he really prefer to sleep under a bridge than in an apartment? Probably not. We need to know something about his circumstances to know whether he is acting out of freedom or necessity. We can apply this question to market choices generally including the kinds of jobs people take. What people decide to do in a market may not reflect freedom but a lack of options. If a homeless person is frozen to death because they have no where to sleep, or a child is starving because they have no food, or a gunshot victim bleeds out in a hospital because they have no insurance is that their choice or a lack of alternatives? Markets employ a different kind of compulsion, but they are extremely coercive.
Also a justification for taxation here.

And on education, I would look at overseas models of public education because the US system is pretty shocking.

 

[Dean]

@Aught3
As a follow-up to Aught3's intelligible remarks, I would like to add that economics is also loaded with value paradigms being passed off as objective, roughly modelled along political cleavages, such as Keynesian socialistic and Friedman liberalistic strains; what we now have is a hybrid of both, despite all the posturing about so called "free markets". Then there's the curious Western characteristic of campaigning for free trade abroad while maintaining protectionism domestically, ever since the 1800s again - as I went into earlier.

And as you said, there is no such thing as a free market, since ALL markets have government restrictions and internal limitations on what can be traded and associated within the society.

 

[kenandkids]

2) There are some objections with free markets that are understandable, and some objections that are totally false. The "monopoly" objection is borderline ridiculous: it lacks a viable mechanism for natural monopoly formation; the mechanisms for free market "monopoly" breaking are too numerous to count; etc.

You, like most libertarians, are entirely full of crap and badly need to have a history lesson. Regulation was essentially non-existent in the 1700-1800s and the richest man in town generally owned the town. The largest and wealthiest ranchers owned whole counties and drove off competitors. Companies that extracted resources, like coal companies, also owned whole counties and did as they wished. If you didn't work for them, you were physically encouraged to leave, sometimes to death.

These were all monopolies, they demonstrate what happens without government protections and regulations. You can even see it today, with 85% of cell service in America being controlled by only four companies, and it nearly just became three.

 

[Arcus]

I've yet to discuss with someone claiming to be libertarian which has even a fundamental grasp of the IS/LM model, which is why I usually can't be bothered...

 

[ImprobableJoe]

You, like most libertarians, are entirely full of crap and badly need to have a history lesson. Regulation was essentially non-existent in the 1700-1800s and the richest man in town generally owned the town. The largest and wealthiest ranchers owned whole counties and drove off competitors. Companies that extracted resources, like coal companies, also owned whole counties and did as they wished. If you didn't work for them, you were physically encouraged to leave, sometimes to death.

These were all monopolies, they demonstrate what happens without government protections and regulations. You can even see it today, with 85% of cell service in America being controlled by only four companies, and it nearly just became three.

Well... that's part of what my earlier example was about. Libertarians are incredibly... ahistorical? Is that a word? They are divorced from reality AND history, and ignore the fact that the society we have now grew in part as a reaction to the negative outcomes of earlier ways of doing things. They stupidly and immaturely pretend that rules and regulations were created because the government is a big giant meanie that just likes controlling people and is inherently evil and bad.

 

[Prolescum]

They are divorced from reality AND history, and ignore the fact that the society we have now grew in part as a reaction to the negative outcomes of earlier ways of doing things.

He's already ignored it once...

The struggle to lift our societies out of poverty, destitution and abuse at the hands of a few has been a long and hard-fought battle that is not yet complete. I'll be fucking damned if I let it revert to the barely civilised fiefdoms of old, as proposed by many libertarians.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

He's already ignored it once...

Ignored it in the past, in the present, and likely to continue to ignore it. You can't accept reality and really remain a libertarian, at least not this type. People need to drop this "free market" nonsense in general, there ain't no such thing and markets don't DO anything let alone solve problems.

 

[ohcac]

You guys win. I won't post all of the details now, but all I will say is that detailed examination of my property rights structure was flimsy and inconsistent, going of a "natural rights" stance. But the real trigger was my examination of the flaws in the Austrian business cycle theory. Their conception of fractional reserve banking as evil turns out to be unfounded and inflation could pragmatically continue forever at a healthy rate; their formulations for how recessions occur are flawed, banks would have to go to *full reserve* which has never happened in history, and their structure simply doesn't explain how recessions occur (although it correctly predicts many variables of recessions, but this is a red herring).

I also failed to notice that while I implicitly endorsed "taxation as theft" I also implied that the free rider problem of national defense was probably insurmountable; which is obviously a logical error. Because the free rider problem is pragmatically insurmountable, it would imply taxation :| . Now, one could resolve the problem by trying to convert the military into a "club good" but more detailed thinking will reveal that some sort of concatenation of military service with something like, say, polycentric law would yield a military structure that libertarians favor more than the current military structure; in fact, there is good evidence that it wouldn't.

I would, however, like to give a final, small defense of a few things:

1) To Prolescum: Actually, you did strawman my position with the "toddler talk" portion of your post. You merely picked a portion of it in which you did *not* strawman my previous position with your reference

That said, coming from Americans, it's almost always along the lines of... "This is mine. Weally, it's all mine. You can't touch it because it's mine. Don't twy to steal fwom me, mr gubbmint man. Also, don't weguwate stuff, it's against my wights, MY WIGHTS! No, wights awen't gwanted by gobbmints, they... they... er... Fwee mawkets awe bettah becoz gubbmint ain't involved, don't steal mr gubbmint man, taxes are theft. I'll bild me own roads, won't need hospitals or a emewgensy sewvice like fiermen or powice men. I can buy my own pwotection fwom fugs and I ain't stupid enough to set my own stuff on fier. Safety weguwations are dumb. I don't need to take anywun else into confidewation, It's my wight to do what I want. MY WIGHT!!! I'm Amewican goddamit, the constitution guawantees me wights! No, wait, the gubbmint upholds taht. It's natuwal wights! I'll pay fow a pwivate skool coz I'll still have money. No, gubbmint don't need any say in money I use gold that I get from... Stop steawing my wights, you commie bawsteds! No I don't need sewers or akwaducks, bwidges, powerlines or taps. I'll buy water fwom the gang that will own the ex-gubbmint faciwity wiv mah gold which I will definitewy have."

Being forced by coercion to pay for a service you may potentially never use is convoluted to me for the vast majority of offer-able services, with the exception of *maybe* (and that's a huge maybe) services that suffer from the free rider problem (one of which is firefighting/law enforcement; although this could potentially be resolved by being able to choose neighborhoods that don't provide these services; the other of which is national defense

The quote of mine directly above shows that I did give heavy consideration the necessity of some services, particularly "fiermen" and "powice men". Nowhere did I state that I thought "safety regulations are dumb" because libertarians acknowledge examples of the effectiveness of market safety regulations. No libertarian thinks that buying water from a gang that hijacked an ex-government facility is the optimal plan for water consumption. Now, you may *think* that libertarianism would *lead* to this eventually being true, and you *may even be correct*. However, you did not say that this was merely a satirical representation of what libertarians think, you defended the position implying that you thought it was literally the statements normally expounded by a libertarian. Since they are not, and you claimed they are, you are constructing an effective strawman. I know what a strawman is, dude.

So, I'm going back to the drawing board on this one. I don't agree with all of your arguments, but I don't feel like rebutting them because I've sort of abandoned the ideology I set out to defend. Congratulations, I guess. :geek:

 

[televator]

What? No dancing? No, no, no.... You're doing it all wrong. Usually....other people...who've defended libertarian ideology were much more brazenly dogmatic than this. Paint them into a corner and watch them dance all over the place while pretending they aren't getting any paint on their shoes. :lol:

Actually, I'm pretty relieved it didn't go that way.

 

[Prolescum]

:lol:

I'd counter your charges, but it's really not worth the effort at this point.

You have my respect (for whatever that's worth to you) for acknowledging, to some degree, the flaws inherent in libertarian thought.

 

[Arcus]

You guys win.

Since you are magnanimous in defeat and actually bother to read and do research which conflict with your original opinion, I'll give you a few links which can be food for further thought.

Deregulation has a tendency to lead to a so called 'race to the bottom'. Ask yourself, why are so many US companies incorporated in tiny Delaware? Why do so many banks have offices on the Cayman Islands?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom

Could there be any good scientific reasons for regulation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem

Or perhaps for taxes on certain things, both positive/disincentive and negative/incentive taxes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

How about government supplied goods and services?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods

Is private property absolutism always a good idea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Why was the Fed set up in 1913 and why do countries have central banks? Could it be that they wanted to avoid the boom and bust economy so prevalent in the 19th century?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_and_bust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank#Activities_and_responsibilities

Is a gold standard a good idea in a modern economy?
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-plank/what-would-happen-if-we-adopted-the-gold-standard
http://nationalinterest.org/article/critique-pure-gold-5741
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There are plenty of critiques and clarifications regarding Libertarianism and the policies it advocates. Before self-labeling a political standpoint, it's always a good idea to do some thorough research on the subject to ensure that you understand the full extent of the implications of what you advocate.