Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Brad Delong's writing is always good, but this is among the best.

Shorter Libertarian: pipe dreams! free markets! invisible hands! utopia! ponies!

Reminds me of a guy I met in grad school who was writing a paper of "If the Roman's Had Jets and Airplanes, How would Roman Law Deal with Air Rights."

The Bush/Cheney Solution to Anarcho-Socialism

First read this Pentagon paper for context: http://www.ems.org/climate/pentagon_climate_change.pdf

Of course, this end-time premise has been around since the 1970's in one form or another, mass starvation, overpopulation, resource exhaustion, but now that Bush/Cheney are in office, the Pentagon is churning up a storm of libertarian reasons why our property should become theirs, why our freedoms should become Statist reforms.

Problem: Mass starvation and dislocation of 3rd world populations in the face of global warming and the US:WTO foreign trade policies threatens the Homeland Security of America (somehow).

The Pentagon solution, first articulated in http://http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/
is a nuclear version of the potato gun.

"Large frozen chunks of meat, vegetables, fresh water or fuel sealed in 55-gallon drums can be precisely targeted to anywhere around the globe.

A complex telecommunications system connects
refugee centers to corporate headquarters at ConAgra & Tyson Foods & Exxon-Mobil. The word flashes in by satellite phone, "100,000 new
refugees in Ghana need relief supplies!"

The UN authorizes the World Bank to wire a bank letter of credit to Con-Tyson-Exxon, who wires the launching fees to NASA, then frozen drums of food and oil roll on, then off taxpayer-funded
high-speed Amtrak train cars connecting the great
nuclear rail guns on the East and West Coast, where 24x7, with a great whoomp and red-white-blue iridescent contrails, drums of desparately needed relief aid arc through the air on their way to parachute into distant continents."

The Pentagon Bushits make Libertarians look good!

Are you sure you should have invited Joseph de Maistre? I mean, I love that nutty ultramontane. But I spent many agreeable years in the Catholic schools. What's your excuse?

But there is a libertarian paradise - Somalia! Look how it is a hot bed of entrepreneurial growth and libertarians are just lining up to get there!

Oh wait, they aren't. As Will Rodgers used to say "they want to preach against the pie after they have had their slice."

But more seriously - libertarianism is, to a great extent, the intellectual equivalent of communism in the 19th century. In the 19th century industrialization, corporatization and expansion were the solutions to most problems. The philosophical analogy of a defense lawyer sprang up - to put a burden of proof.

That doesn't mean you want them in charge of anything...

You can throw in the second amendment people. They all think "If I've got my gun, no one will mess with me". But in the known societies within which self-protection was the rule, the clans with 500 rifles brutalized the clans with 50 rifles. Second-amendment guys (besides having some sort of hysterical fear of The Other) also always imagine that they alone will be armed and fearless in the utopian world of armed self-defense. They don't imagine that their three worst and cruelest enemies will also be armed and fearless.

Somewhere I read a report, perhaps Gellner's, from north Africa. "Our clan has fifty rifles" was the standard opening sentence of a clan self-description.

" Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York....'

But the examples given didn't exist in a libertarian utopia. Suggesting that there are some problems with traditional democracy too.

Iain Banks has an interesting science fiction series with a well realized future anarcho-socialist state. He basically escapes all of these problems by assuming a class of superintelligent, benevolent machines that do all the work and the important planning, and don't seem to suffer from many of the human urges towards misuse of power. So they are trusted to enforce the punishment of socially isolation of people who have been violent. They make up a combined managerial-worker-military class that power doesn't corrupt because, well, they aren't human, and the humans are basically consumers. I thought it was clever in its handling of the major problem of most utopias ("Human nature? We can replace that with nonhuman nature.")

Before you fully discount the existence of a pre-nineteenth century libertarianism, you might want to invite Rousseau and Locke to your party.

In libertarian utopia, where the right of free association is absolute, there's nothing to stop the 99 people from blacklisting the holdout, and refusing to business of any sort with him. Most likely he'd cave pretty quickly.

So the libertarians could still have this public good, or any that a majority wants. Of course it's perfectly ridiculous to regard such an arrangement as any less coercive than ours.

So, when the Free State Project brings the Libertarian utopia to New Hampshire, will the railroads still run? Or will someone build a house on the tracks, and no one will bother to stop him?

I can't wait to find out!

Patrick has stumbled onto an important truth. If you compare the imaginary to the actual, the imaginary is always much better. In the libertarian utopia, everyone has a pony.

Unless you have a bad imagination, I guess.

Let's climb into the wayforward machine, and get a glimpse of civilization 400 years from now: Quantum computation has been a reality for 360 years and this has enabled humankind to practically solve innumerable distribution and production problems. We have become much less dependent on energy, food production ceased being a problem 340 years ago, there is an abundance of cultural activities including college-level courses in ancient languages such as English, Spanish and French. Putonghua has become the universal language. Unfortunately, Fibreoptic cables have been incapable of providing communication for our highly mobile civilization. We still rely on frequency multiplexing electromagnetic broadcast for communication. Ever since government regulation was abolished because it was regarded as evil or an infringement of individual liberties, bloody clan wars (using jamming to interfere with our basic infrastrcuture) have been fought over control of the precious frequency spectrum. New technologies involving frequency hopping message redundancy etc., have never been able to deal with these attacks.

Many of the libertarians I talk to are blind or ignorant of the role that government has in the very infrastructure that makes their modern existence possible. I comparing intrusions into the private lives of Americans by government and business and business practices, businesses are far more intrusive. What many libertarians resent is forcing businessess that would otherwise encroach to not excessively violate individual rights.

Actually, if you completly remove the government, (I know, sort of a strawman, but I digress) the world you would get would be very similar to the makeup of the world in the book "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. However, the one problem with the background in that book, is why isn't there some sort of military outfit trying to expand and conquer?

About:

However, the one problem with the background in that book, is why isn't there some sort of military outfit trying to expand and conquer?

I am reminded of 14th century France, where private armies were such a problem that absolute monarchy looked good by comparison.

As to:
" Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York....'

But the examples given didn't exist in a libertarian utopia. Suggesting that there are some problems with traditional democracy too.

Some of us think that the problems given existed more or less to the extent that the societies in which they took place did resemble a libertarian utopia. In any event, the soluctions that worked in the real world certainly weren't liberterian. Now if only the Mafia would really go away...

as an aside, I amended the proverb many years ago to:- If wishes were hondas, beggars would ride.

You forgot the other important component of libertarian reasoning: the hasty generalization.

In other words, find one single example, maybe TWO, of say, government annoyance, and use it to conclude that all instances of government behavior should be stopped.

For example, did you know that when the a government in Florida banned a certain kind of detergent containing phosphates, people started wanting it even more, and would smuggle and stockpile huge amounts of it? (mentioned here). Clearly, regulation NEVER works! People will ALWAYS evade the ban? Don't you see that? Does the "Boston Tea Party" ring a bell?

Of course, when the government declares a child safety seat unsafe, I don't see people lining up to buy that model off the black market. They may exist, but I've never know anyone to stockpile a lifetime supply of the Firestone Wilderness AT tires that the government forced recall beacuse of all those deaths.

Single examples prove very little, and are certainly not relevant to the kinds of empirical claims needed by libertarians to make their case. You may have shown a clear example of government overreach; yet you have to prove that this is representative of all instances of government behavior in order to reach the the libertarian conclusion. You have to show that cost > benefit for every government function you want to eliminate. Of course, that's a lot harder to do than to trot out a few single examples that might present an illusion of establishing that.

Thanks for this nice post. I think the radical libertarian influence should be countered. They don't have much electoral influence -I think most people recognize that there is something strange about their arguments, so they never get more than a few percentage points in an election. But they have a large influence through think tanks and whatnot.

But maybe I shouldn't be so negative, since I don't understand what they say, and do still occaisionally wonder if is because there is something I don't understand, rather than that they make no sense.

I think DeLong made a very important point in his recent posts on Nozick. It is very difficult for libertarians to make a coherent argument that there vision would work in the real world. The contractarian radical libertarians want to say that everything should be based on entitlements and contracts, but then they have to argue that contracts are complete, and there is decision process that will resolve disputes regarding property rights under all sorts of unexpected scenarios. This is very hard to do so very often they sneak in utilitarian arguments so they can escape absurdities or have some kind of social dcision process where entitilements thinking produces a big question mark.

Then there what I think of as the optimality radical libertarians. They say that the results of free choice are always optimal because of the magic of the market (and everything is a market) or that this conclusion is an logical implication of the moral nature of man as an rational animal that can exercise free choice. The results of this thinking are revealed preference arguments gone stark raving mad, basically saying that everything is optimal otherwise something else would have happened.

Paul Samuelson has an article on how to separate revealed preference arguments that have some empirical content from those that are facile tautologies. He even has a little mathematical programming example to make his argument concrete. Its in one of the first three volumes of his collected papers. And Bishop Buter I said something on this point with respect to what would nowadays be called revealed preference arguments to prove that we must all be selfish egotists.

And then when you get to the any anarcho-radical libertarians... then I give up completely.

And... none of the founding fathers were libertarians. No, not even Jefferson. Embargo. Majority rule. Rights have spheres of influence and are to be interpreted in an overall social vision of human beings and society.

". . . . . Life and liberty are generally said to be of more value, than property. An accurate view of the matter would nevertheless prove that property is the main object of Society. The savage State is more favorable to liberty than the Civilized; and sufficiently so to life. It is preferred by all men who have not acquired a taste for property. . . . . . [The savage state] was only renounced for the sake of property, which could only be secured by the restraints of regular Government... If property then was the main object of Government, certainly it ought to be one measure of the influence due to those who are to be affected by the Government."

--Gouverneur Morris, who drafted the US Constitution

You forgot the other important component of libertarian reasoning: the hasty generalization.

And don't forget its close cousin, the ubiquitous slippery slope--meaning the capacity to find in, say, seat belt laws, sure evidence that we are headed straight towards totalitarianism.

nice quote, Roger Bigod, but I don't quite get your point. Jefferson has a similar view regarding the relative virtues of savage versus civilized life, but he did not emphasize private property quite so much as the purpose of civilization.

Anyway, you will have to explain this quote to me. The point is that anarcho libertarianism is incompatible with stable property rights and civilization? So this is the same point that DeLong is making?

Or am I misunderstanding? Not enough context for me to understand the quote.

What was Governour Morris on the spectrum anyway? He was a pretty aristocratic, and wanted the govt to have what was called in those days "a very high tone" -against too much democracy. Certainly was big on property rights. But was big supporter of, and I think helped oversee, building of Erie Canal -that was a public works project financed by the state of New York. Got so pissed at one point over Madison's policies during War of 1812, advocated New England secession. That sounds pretty anarcho-libertarian, at least in regards to federal govt. Very anti-slavery too, so that is libertarian.

But on balance he doesn't sound very libertarian to me. Is that your point?

What was the book Smith's dialog referred to? "The Wealth of Nations" was the one everyone's claimed to have read, but I can't decide for the other between "Lectures on justice, police, revenue, and arms" which has an appropriate title but is actually a set of lectures, and "The theory of moral sentiments" which seems to be an actual book.

(Comment crossposted from Calpundit, and apologies to those who, like me, frequent both Brad's and Kevin's blogs.)

Back to the primary topic -- snark about the perceived unrealism of many self-identified libertarians -- in connection with which, I would fain offer a point of perspective.

Consider the analogy of the environmental movement and public perceptions thereof.

The majority of environmentalists are people who have made their peace with science and industry, and who recognize that the fruits of technology are not all bad. They would like to see the worst side effects and externalities of industry mitigated, and would also like to see the niches for raw nature rather more well-defended than they now are.

The environmental movement is also home to a very small number of people who self-identify as Deep Green and the like. These are what I would call neo-Rousseauites, people who loathe and abhor most technology beyond the late Neolithic stage.

A friend used to work for Greenpeace. At one point he stopped and asked one co-worker, "Hey, in your personal view, where are we going with all this? What's the desired endpoint you are trying to get to?"

She replied that her personal goal was to produce a world in which humans essentially were reduced to glorified hunter-gatherers again (albeit without yucky hunting), and spent their entire lives being what my friend referred to as "caring nature bunnies".

I don't think that her goal is realizable without having at least three-quarters of the global population eliminated. Nor do I consider it particularly attractive as a goal; if you were to propose it to a certain sort of fuzzy-minded person, they might at first consider it a fine idea, but almost no one would want to go through with it once realizing how painful and difficult life can be in the suggested condition.

Nature has a lot of sharp edges on her that 21st century urbanites have long since forgotten about. And people who have lived with machines to do the heavy lifting plus medicine to soothe their fevered brows aren't likely to enjoy living without machines nor medicine.

Yet there are people on the extreme fringe of the environmental movement who do still seriously believe in trying to attain this goal. My friend, whom I would consider a sensible moderate environmentalist as described above, left Greenpeace a few months after having the conversation in question.

There's an epiphenomenon here that bears witnessing. It's common on the right to caricature mainstream environmentalism by picking out extreme views such as the ones my friend encountered firsthand -- and then presenting those extreme views as though they were commonly held among typical self-identified environmentalists.

And that's a brutally inaccurate and dishonest canard. If you were to poll self-ID'd environmentalists, you would almost certainly find that Deep Green sentiment is very rare among them.

Here's where I as a libertarian see certain parallels. My personal goal would be to reduce the sphere of government oversight and intrusion to, say, half of what it is today.

That would be a BIG change, mind you, from the current state of affairs, and would be sufficiently radical as to require us all to pause at that level and assess whether it's at all feasible and desirable to go any further.

However, again, as a self-identified libertarian, persons like myself who are aiming to cut the reach of government by fifty percent get lumped in with people who are hoping to cut it to *five* percent of what it is now. Or 0.005%.

I don't think that those goals are necessarily desirable, and I think they're also impossible to attain.

It doesn't really make any more sense to suggest that my views are of a parcel with theirs than it does to imply that Deep Green sentiments are widespread among environmentalists.

Yet, if I demur from the War on Certain Drugs, I find myself saddled with the charge that I approve of having crystal meth sold to preschoolers.

If I defend Second Amendment rights, it is routinely assumed that I must think anyone should be able to buy a .50 caliber heavy squad machine gun over the counter with no ID.

It's a frustrating condition to be in, constantly fighting the fallacy of composition, to wit, "Some X are Y, therefore, all X are Y."

Some libertarians are moony-eyed theoreticians fond of describing an unworkably free world -- therefore, all libertarians are.

And since libertarians are nuts by definition, any necessity of addressing libertarian argument, however moderate and temperate and factual that argument might be, is automatically removed.

just googled Morris. Was a high Federalist -more Hamilton than Hamilton. Can't be a libertarian!
The bio said this:
"[Morris] was appointed (1792) U.S. minister to France. During the French Revolution his sympathies lay with the royalists; he even helped plan a scheme to rescue Louis XVI."

Wow, and I thought Jefferson was the biggest meddler in the revolution.

Not a libertarian.

Unless informed otherwise, I will assume your quote supports my position.

marquer,
Well, I specified radical libertarians, and I think from the quotes DeLong put up, that is what he was talking about.
My exerience is that there is higher proportion of very extreme radical people among some groups that others. I have met many more extreme radicals among libertarians than I have in environmental groups. But I don't lump them all together, and wouldn't jump to conclusions just because you dislike the current drug laws or are big on right to bear arms.

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned the number one influence on Libertarian thought---at least in the US: pot. Libertarians are pot-smoking hippies who don't want to be considered
leftist---I think it's their own special brand of mass market "non-conformism. It's no wonder they can't think straight.

The "other book" is _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_.

Nice dialogue! My favourite line:

"Adam Smith: I have written a big book about this, which very few of you have read--although everyone here at least claims to have read my other book..."

"Lectures on justice, police, revenue, and arms" which has an appropriate title but is actually a set of lectures,"

That's *Lectures on Jurisprudence*, based on two sets of student lecture notes (the first discovered in the late 19th century, the other in the 1950s).

I quoted Morris as a point on the spectrum, what an extremely intelligent, realistic guy thought at the time. He believed the US Constitution was a good idea, but he thought it wouldn't work in France because the citizenry wouldn't exercise power responsibly. He thought extending the franchise too far was self-defeating, since the rich would simply buy the votes of the many (hmmmmmm!). Vote buying would be acceptable for a libertarian, no?

I'll have to think about it, but Morris would probably be a social libertarian. The quote about property is one of the few general statements I know of. I think he'd be happy to see some functions of the state wither, but he recognized that some projects like the Eirie Canal needed government backing.

Great post brad. I'd like to add that I am, myself, a descendant of a practicing 20th century (or perhaps I mean late nineteenth century) libertarian/leftist. I just finished reading my great grandfather's memoir of his failed (alas) anarchist/libertarian farm commune in Michigan. I highly recommend it for its prototypical jewish humor, and the amazing array of ways in which the libertarian/anarchist dream goes bad (inevitably) when the people running the show are really, really nice and really, really well meaning and the greater mass of co-workers are not. Its called "Quest for Heaven." by Joseph Cohen.

Kate

"But the examples given didn't exist in a libertarian utopia."

Which libertarian Utopia are you talking about - the one that exists at the Hoover Institute or the American Enterprise Institute?

A comment on a post waaaay before: Locke and Rousseua are not particularly good candidates for libertarianism. One of Locke's key points, in the Second Tretise, is that we form government precisely because the state of nature cannot adequately proptect our life, liberties, and estates. Rousseua ain't a right-libertarian (propety as a terrible thing and all that), and he isn't much of a left one either (making ones own chains, instantiating the general will, and all that).

The best that can be said of Libertarianism is that it's a path, not a destination.

And I speak as a guy with some deep Libertarian sympathies.

I agree with above writer that this has to be one of Brad's best postings ever. There seem to be a fair number of conservatarian tax scrooges who post here, and interestingly enough they never do seem to want to deal with the endpoint of their purported policies. As for Brian above, I would argue that one has to keep an idea in mind of where your policies might take you. If you want 19th century Victorian England, then maybe that is a reason to be a right libertarian. I tend to favor a 1950-1970 New Deal-style America, myself.

non-economist:
I'm not sure 19th century Victorian England was libertarian. Maybe late Roman Repubic? (-except for the grain dole) Haiti? some one mentioned Somolia?
One grand, the others squalid. Both violent and unstable.

I would pay well to read a debate between Brad and David Friedman on the subject of anarcho capitalism.

P.S David's historical example of choice Iceland

"M]edieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions. Killing was a civil offense resulting in a fine paid to the survivors of the victim. Laws were made by a "parliament," seats in which were a marketable commodity. Enforcement of law was entirely a private affair. And yet these extraordinary institutions survived for over three hundred years, and the society in which they survived appears to have been in many ways an attractive one. Its citizens were, by medieval standards, free; differences in status on rank or sex were relatively small; and its literary output in relation to its size has been compared, with some justice, to that of Athens. "

David Friedman (1979,400)

Yes, Medieval Iceland was no doubt an attractive place. A hotbed of scientific and technical innovation. One of the centers of the renaissance and enlightenment. Second to none in the artistic creativity and splendor represented in the huge number of famous icelandic sculptors and painters. Not to mention the powerful pre-industrial economy that made Iceland such a dominating medieval nation-state. Indeed, sod farming next to glaciers would be an attractive lifestyle for any of us in the modern world.

Libertarians take a half truth -- freedom -- and run it into the ground. But then, many leftists take a half truch -- justice -- and run it into the ground.

The trick is to get these two half-truths to live together. But easier said than done. They can't live with each other, and they can't live without each other.

Life is full of delicious paradoxes.

And what look what happened to poor Iceland!

"Iceland's Scandinavian-type economy is basically capitalistic, yet with an extensive welfare system (including generous housing subsidies), low unemployment, and remarkably even distribution of income."
from CIA factbook...

Let libertarians weep! It was corrupted somehow. But it must be better now because the current state is "revealed preferred" to their medieval state. They could always go back -medieval technology is available, or could easily be developed. But but... that can't be right. No, the revealed perferredness is corrupted by some kind of collective decision process, and therefore that revealedness is not admissible and must be bad somehow.

But seriously, I question some of Friedman's thinking in that quote. Many traditional societies accept monetary compensation for death, and private law enforcement, they are not particularly libertarian concepts.

And I do not remember reading that there was an *organized* market for seats in the parliament. And if not, how was it different from other legislatures, including ours? (but I may be wrong, maybe you could legally sell a seat, I need to look it up.)

One thing I do find very odd, and that is the love that some *radical* libertarians have for things like turning murder into a property crime, and private law enforcement. How conceptually does that match with everyone having equal inalienable rights to life and liberty? I need to ask a libertarian about these issues. My hunch, when I am feeling nasty and ungenerous, is that behind the facade of rationality and respect for human rights, radical libertarians who advocate these things may be really worshiping nothing but nihilistic power. Whoever has enough money to buy some one off, or beat some on up is right, as long as it is not a result of an organized collective decision making process. In which case it is evil, for some reason or other.

They may not be aware of that, but that is what I think when I am in a bad, uncharitable mood.

But in a more charitable spirit, there is something inspiring about medieval Iceland, at least I thought it was cool when I first read about it, and I thought it might be one of the nicer places to live in Europe at that time. The question is whether its libertarian nature was a product of a specific historical situation and very specific cultural values of the inhabitants. That does not mean it should be recommended for other situations and other peoples.

But what about this business of medieval Icelandic parliament seats for sale? Anyone know? I to not remember reading that.

Let's see, prices fixed by vote, required joining of a social group which redistributed wealth, feudal requirement of sole employer in return for protection.

Looks like regular early feudalism of the 800-1000 period, made possible by a lack of threat of invasion from the outside preventing a single lord from demanding fealty from the other lords. And, as soon as there was such outside pressure, the common wealth collapsed.

Icelandic law of the medieval period is like evolution on New Zealand, the lack of external pressure created the possiblity of pure plutocracy, which is what happened.

As for Iceland: its civilization came into being when a bunch of Norwegian chiefs refused to yield to the growing power of the king and preferred to emigrate, together with their followers, to Iceland. They did indeed create an interesting political system and a great literature as well: NJAL's SAGA is a magnificent work, right there with the greatest pieces of prose literature Western civilization ever produced. Yet, this "egaliterian libertarian" civilization led to the centralization of power in the hands of a very few clan-leaders, who fought each other to a terrible deadlock, bled Iceland white and in the end forced the Icelanders to beg the Norwegian king to take them back under his rule. The Icelandic experiment proved ultimately a failure.

Well yes, it is also marked by the very "protection racket" style of police power which theory predicts should occur.

After all, one's life is worth just about everything one has.

So what's the libertarian concept of private enforcement of intellectual property? Or are libertarians only interested in tangible assets?

Same as their concept of anything - as soon as they decide you've violated their rights, they peacefully and non-coercively hire someone to blow you away.

"Libertarians take a half truth -- freedom -- and run it into the ground. But then, many leftists take a half truch -- justice -- and run it into the ground."

I would claim that the ideal leftists run into the ground is equality, not justice.

Explaining libertarianism to a leftist is a lot like explaining flight to a goldfish ("how on Earth can you possibly have a society if better and wiser people aren't telling the rabble the right thing to do?). Hell, one can't even broach the subject of schools being private without making their brains start to smoke.

But it's worth noting that many reasonable liberarians are not anarchists, but limited-government libertarians. Very limited.

For a more reasoned outlook on this concept, try Ayn Rand's "Nature of Government:"

http://www.ccsindia.org/lss/2nature_of_govt.pdf

Take note of her opinions on anarchy.

Yeah, well, before it got nasty, medieval Iceland seemed like a cool place to be.

Like many starry eyed readers of history, I was not planning to be alive for the following part:

"[they] bled Iceland white and in the end forced the Icelanders to beg the Norwegian king to take them back under his rule."

But it was the result of free individual inconstrained choice so it was optimal, or moral, or both, by definition.

Sorry, I have to work today, so am grumpy. And the idea of liberty while working on Sat incites me to keep logging on and coming back to this thread in horrified fascination.

Thersites: "And don't forget its close cousin, the ubiquitous slippery slope--meaning the capacity to find in, say, seat belt laws, sure evidence that we are headed straight towards totalitarianism."

Laugh it up. Going beyond seatbelts, it is now illegal for me to buy a car that doesn't have airbags, the deployment of which kills about 1 person for every 30 that is saved, and prevents me from carrying children anywhere near these bombs. Try and imagine the outrage at a private manufacturer of, say, life vests, where about 1 in 30 of them would, if you fell in the water, fill up with water and drop you to the bottom like a rock.

And I have heard serious proposals for speed governors on car engines.

non economist,

You misunderstood my post. I don't say Libertarianism is a path to itself, but a path to an enlightened future. Which won't _be_ Libertarian but will (one hopes) provide as much personel freedom as possible.

It has something in common with late 19th, early 20th century Socialism. While (for example) America is _not_ Socialist, much of what Socialists, then, wanted from the future is a part of our culture _now_.

Above all else I choose politics of the possible, not the ideologue.

Marky
"I'm surprised no one here has mentioned the number one influence on Libertarian thought---at least in the US: pot. Libertarians are pot-smoking hippies who don't want to be considered
leftist---I think it's their own special brand of mass market "non-conformism. It's no wonder they can't think straight."

Are you troll or do you honestly believe this? I have Libertarian tendancies but I've never smoked pot. The most intense mind altering 'drug' that I've taken was Soju and once was enough.

Your post _reads_ like Establishment Victorians dismissing all Socialists as opium-smoking Free Love proponents.

"Libertarians take a half truth -- freedom -- and run it into the ground. But then, many leftists take a half truch -- justice -- and run it into the ground."

And moderates think that by lying about the whole problem that it will just go away.

T Hobbes - Poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short.
Thom was a smart guy, but didn't bother much with history. people are almost never willing to be solitary no matter how horribly they treat each other. This is true also when there is empty land.

I see a connection between medieval Iceland and Nozick. The idea that there is only one just and legitimate price as found in feudal societies like medieval Iceland is necessary for his argument. He has profit maximizing security providors gaining 100% membership in their territories. He somehow concludes that they must sell security at cost. The idea that they might charge more and give some of the surplus to the poor doesn't seem to enter his head. In any case, he would have to conclude that natural freedoms do not include the freedom to charge what the market will bear.

"What does government produce?", the economizers always ask. Security. Government has one of its principle roots in the organization of violence for external defense (or for the aggressive acquisition of territory) and, as such, there is always a residue of violence at the core of government qua sovereignty, government as the organized monopoly of legitimate violence. But governments must needs come to understand that the establishment of security requires the securing of its relations with its citizens/subjects. Hence it comes to understand that it must provide the means of securing those relations, some of which go by the name of "rights". And thus security comes to evolve into trust, which is what we mean by "legitimation". But it is not just security and trust between government and its citizens/subjects that is thereby produced, but security and trust between those citizens/subjects independent of government operations, which can evolve into spheres of activity outside the direct control of the state and even into activities directed against the state.

Now the function of government, aside from the maintenance of means of defense by which the collective existence and interests of the nation can be secured in a world of other sovereign states, is to balance out conflicting and competing interests and groups within the subject society and integrate them within an overall framework of agreed-upon policy, thus providing some overall steering capacity for that society, in which, in principle, all citizens have an equal potential to participate. To be sure, governments have interests of their own and they are subject to capture, wholely or in part, by particular interests that do not necessarily correspond to the interests or the good of the public as a whole- (though this latter conception is a highly differentiated and cantankerous beast.) But it is only within the framework of politics generated by the security and trust producing function of government that such matters can come into the light of day at all.

Hegel and Marx both thought that politics was pre-eminently a realm of alienation. But for Hegel, this was basically a good thing, something to be evaluated positively, as, through alienation, we rise above our narrow and particular selves and our pre-occupation with self-interest into a consideration of the universal perspective. (And we should all be reading those Greeks, so as, by passing over into the land of fabulous otherness, we return to ourselves with a deeper, higher, more impersonal and universal understanding of ourselves.) Marx, by contrast, thought such alienation, which Hegel had provided a "false", idealististic reconciliation for in the state, needed to be abolished and could only be done with through a socio-economic revolution which would re-absorb the state back into the horizons of civil society. I myself come down in the middle here. I think politics is inerradicably a realm of alienation, which is why resentment, suspicion and determined ignorance play such a large part in it. ("Politics", said Karl Kraus," is what a man does to conceal himself and what he does not know.") But I don't think government can be meaningfully dispensed with, for all its well known evils, since that would be tantamount to vanquishing the civil society, whose existence it provides for. It is a matter of struggling to bring about a mode of governance that is responsive and responsible to a strong, differentiated and pluralistic public sphere- (differentiated because matters are complex and there is a problem of overburdening with information overload and pluralistic because not all matters effect all people to the same extent and in the same way.) But we are far gone into the alienation, whereas, in matters of the public sphere, we only continue to regress.

Libertarians and liberals, in my view, both hold on to an unreflected account of human agency- ("freedom")- which, to some extent, is their common ground, and which is the basis from which they make their doctrinal deductions. The difference is that, while libertarians absolutize "freedom" as a magical, metaphysical property, liberals constrain its exercise by the recognition of the equal right of others to its exercize. But, in my view, both fail to recognize how human agency is, in fact, actually generated out of human interaction, and thus is already a common and conflictual property, and is, by the very same token, a limited and conditioned "thing"- perhaps especially when it is a matter of exercizing "choice". It is because human agency is a limited and conditioned matter, and thus one that is highly vulnerable in its practice, that it needs to be protected and safeguarded by the institution of rights, not because it is such a grand and glorious thing, the metaphysical wonder of the universe. Both liberals and libertarians interpret human agency qua freedom in terms of "autonomy", literally, self-law, and I think it would be good to reflect upon the Greek metaphysical origins of the notion of autonomy. (I did post a bit about this last week at "Crooked Timber" on the "Passolini" thread.)

Doesn't the word "bezerk" come from the Icelandic Sagas?

Libertarianism is highly phony for lots of reasons. There's the problem of original justification of the dominion rights of private estates, no more clearly warranted than the powers of governments (Sure, there's farming, which ought to get you something, but what are all those realtor's signs doing outside plots of trees and grass?) Like I say: If taxation is theft, then so is rent. Then there's the fact that corporations are granted artificial recognition as legal persons with limited liability for the investors, a privilege that the grantor (the public, ultimately!) can require conditions and compensation for (like, how much to pay the rest of us who work there.) Then, there's the modern monetary system. You can't really have a "free economy" when new money has to be created to support expanding credit and productivity - unlike the trading of goods for hard currency, a political decision has to be made on how to allocate the new money. (The current system of monetizing the debt from private banks is a welfare system for financiers.) Indeed, government has more right to control money than anything else, it being the ultimate public and socially-conditioned item (It's physically made by the government - wouldn't a private company that made something that useful charge us to use it? The acceptance of it is conditioned on collective agreement, it's expanded and that is like giving it away in various degrees to some persons and institutions, so we can ask for more back from them, and so on. Get over it.) That's a start, and there's more. The only credit I give them is some specific proposals to get some things done in better ways, but not the overall perspective, which is based on evasion of the whole issue of validating *anyone's* claims to power, whether nation or ranch. (This point was brought up by Dr. DeLong in a previous discussion started by him.)

"Laugh it up. Going beyond seatbelts, it is now illegal for me to buy a car that doesn't have airbags, the deployment of which kills about 1 person for every 30 that is saved,"

It is terrible that we prevent you from removing yourself from the gene pool, but, being the inventive sort you ar, I'm sure you will find some other means to do so.

I'm amazed that Law Professor Epstein doesn't understand contracts -- he uses the term to refer to an immediate exchange, while contracts actually involve the exchange of promises of future performance. Contracts add the temporal dimension, and involve *giving up* one's freedom to act other than as promised, so they require enforcement mechanisms, like courts.

I'm not so surprised that Epstein doesn't understand taxes. He favors a flat tax as a limit on government power to unfairly pick on one segment, but the choice of what to tax and when is surely more important than whether to allow surtaxes or brackets.

With all due respect, you folks realize that you are looking at one end of the libertarian spectrum while making generalizations about the whole, right?

This, from Mr. Halasz, strikes me as a wholly inaccurate infantilizing of the positions of most libertarians I know: "The difference is that, while libertarians absolutize "freedom" as a magical, metaphysical property, liberals constrain its exercise by the recognition of the equal right of others to its exercize."

The short answer to that charge is that for those who argue from an ideological point of view, as opposed to a consequentialist one, liberty is a value of great weight. Now, one can clearly hold other values and weigh them differently, but the first axiom of libertarian thought is hardly that Freedom exists independent of human interaction. It is infact inherent in the libertarian notion of negative freedom that freedom depends PRIMARILY on the actions of others. One does not say that one is coerced by the law of gravitation, for example. Of course freedom means freedom from harms imposed by other humans.

In other words, nearly every libertarian I personally know would agree that rights are necessary in large part because of the consequences of their absence. The more compelling question for the libertarian is, once we make a consequentialist argument for the existence of any rights at all, how do we determine what those should be? Some libertarians at this point engage in the exercise of deriving rights from axioms such as self-ownership and meaninglessness of The Common Good, while a great many others continue along the path of consequences to say that a right to serve its purpose must look like thus and so, must be constrained in such and such a way, and so on.

At the end of the day, is the fairy of human liberty more of a mythological creature than the will of Society?

Stirling shows an all too common disregard for opportunity costs. It really doesn't matter to you that the previous poster would have done something else with the money that he spent on an airbag that to him is valueless?

Picking on Libertarians is like beating up quadraplegics.

"Stirling shows an all too common disregard for opportunity costs. It really doesn't matter to you that the previous poster would have done something else with the money that he spent on an airbag that to him is valueless?"

Well, since making airbags mandatory reduces their unit costs (under standard economies of scale/standardization assumptions) this is really mostly a wealth transfer from those who want to give their kid a 1/31 chance of survival to those who want to give it a 30/31 chance. A tax on recklessness, so to speak.

Just curious.

Is there any political philosophy which, when taken to its logical extreme, is not patently ridiculous?

Maybe Aristotle was on to something – Moderation in all things.

another good example of libertarianism ... though obscure to those not versed in central european history ... would be poland during the 17th and 18th centuries. at the beginning of that time, poland was one of the super-powers of central/eastern europe and even at one point had soldiers in moscow and a puppet on the russian throne (think of the story of mussorgsky's opera boris godunov). sometime thereafter, the polish parliament (the "sejm") instituted the "liberum veto," wherein any legislation could be defeated if just ONE member of the sejm voted against it. this helped to make poland ungovernable, its government unable to effectively respond to changing circumstances (such as cossack revolts, the schemes of rival neighboring states like russia and prussia) -- leading to the country's power and wealth being dissipated over time. by the end of the 18th century, poland had been partitioned between the austrians, the prussians, and the russians.

Sterling: Sorry, I have two kids, so I'm already pretty well along in the gene pool. I have no idea how smart you are, or what qualifies someone like you to decide for me what safety features--features that affect only the driver's safety, nobody else's--I need in a car. I'm talking airbags, not headlights.

As for myself, I'm an aerospace engineer, and I'm getting a little tired of asshats in Washington, most of whom are lawyers, and probably don't even know how an internal combustion engine works, making my decisions for me.

I understand that the need to control others is almost irresistable in some people. I also understand that there are far too many people who are just fine with letting others make their decisions for them. It's beginning to show in our society.

"But there is a libertarian paradise - Somalia! Look how it is a hot bed of entrepreneurial growth and libertarians are just lining up to get there!"

Obviously you have no idea how nucking futs libertarians (or at least, the hardcore "zero government" anarcho-capitalist variety) are.

I took a philosophy course in anarcho-capitalism in university. The professor (who was one) proceeded to argue that Somalia isn't all that bad. Sure it was chaos and warfare, but tribes out in the boonies did just fine without the state. [This is because they still have a surviving old-style tribal social organization].

David Friedman, an anarcho-capitalist who unfortunately hangs around the same newsgroups I do, has been known to argue against government by comparing it to the mafia. Then whenever someone says that "private security firms" would be much like the mafia, he says the mafia actually isn't all that bad, keeps down the level of criminal violence, and so on.

I am not kidding. Apparently you really do have to be that twisted to be an anarcho-capitalist. All of them I've encountered are quite remarkable for their utter lack of critical thinking skills, possession of stupendously biased standards of proof, and so on. None of them were ignorant - in fact they were usually very well educated and fairly intelligent. They just happened to be utterly atrocious at what I would consider basic reasoning and critical thinking skills, and plain common sense. Having met a number of people who are honest-to-god Marxists even today, I have to say that even they have a lot more sense than the anarcho-capitalists.

Tbrosz

Three points on the safety features
1) The need to have enough volume to make the safety feature affordable in a mass produced product - i.e. if you could “opt out” of air bags, the production line would be more complex and the cost of production more expensive. Your “choice” makes my car more expensive.
2) The cost to society of mass opt outs – most people would opt out of pollution control equipment on cars if they could, and we would have deadly air in most of our cities on a much more frequent basis. A short term benefit to you, a long term cost to me and most everyone else.
3) The increased cost of my automobile insurance because you and drivers like you would skew the accident statistics in an unfavorable and more expensive way – why should you be able to force my insurance premium to go up?

Robert McNamara in “Fog of War” talks about Ford’s introduction of the seat belt. There is NO doubt it saved many lives. Is that not a good reason to accept some minimal limits on your freedom?

"As for myself, I'm an aerospace engineer, and I'm getting a little tired of asshats in Washington, most of whom are lawyers, and probably don't even know how an internal combustion engine works, making my decisions for me."

Yet another government employed libertarian. Some jokes just write themselves.

Has anyone figured out why libertarians are disproportionately concentrated in industries which would not exist without government demand? And why they use the internet - an industry created by government demand and researched at government expense? And why they do a huge amount of work to evangelize for libertarianism - for free?

There has got to be a nobel prize in biology for the person who can figure out how a group of people can be so self deluded.

Brad Delong:

"...the right-libertarians who currently populate Reason (who for some reason break the dream of perfect human freedom and communal solidarity by creating "ownership").
Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters"

Human freedom is impossible without the right to ownership of property! Close your own eyes Brad Delong, and just try to imagine a free people without the individual right to ownership of property.

But, you don't have to imagine the monumental human tragedies that have been part of the history of States that have disallowed ownership because there are many real world examples since you never find the latter without the former.

Lets see Brad; Pinkerton's, Wells Fargo, etc, sure don't seem much like the mafia, or street gangs.

Call me cruel, but I'm willing to let Tbrosz take care of his two little contributions to the gene pool any way he wants to.

Don't fret, Texas Toast. There was a previous thread on Social Security where Tbrosz stated he wanted to make SSI voluntary as well.

Personally, I think Libertarians go to the extremes of their delusional thinking patterns in otherwise reasonable intellects due to a pathological reaction to paying taxes. They are fundamentally fairly greedy, and would just prefer to not pay taxes and have everything be just the way it is in the US (i.e. low crime rate, relatively good infrastructure, governmental supported technology research, etc.)

The impulse for greediness is what distorts the thinking, such that they can not see that taxes are what make all of the rest possible.

As far as individual rights, I have yet to meet a libertarian who values them over their tax burden. They would almost exclusively rather vote for a conservative republican who is more likely to restrict freedoms but reduce tax burdens than liberal democrats who would be more likely to allow personal freedoms but increase tax burdens in exchange for more social services. That, more than anything else, shows where their true motivation lies- not in utopia, but in greed.

"Thomas Hobbes: I know what it's like much better than David Friedman does. I lived through the English Civil War."

It was a civil war between the forces of the crown and those of parliament. The contest was over who could be the government. The winning general made himself a military dictator. How does this reflect on David Friedman views?

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~crossby/ECW/history/index.html

“The tension between Charles and Parliament was still great, since none of the issues raised by the Short Parliament had been resolved. This tension was brought to a head on January 4th, 1642 when Charles attempted to arrest five members of parliament. This attempt failed, since they were spirited away before the king's troops arrived.

Charles left London and both he and parliament began to stockpile military resources and recruit troops.

Charles officially began the war by raising his standard at Nottingham in August, 1642. Robert Devereux (3rd Earl of Essex) was made parliamentary commander.”

On the laughable examples of private enforcement agencies of the past, throw in also Chinese banditti, Italian condotierri, German mercenaries of the Thirty Years War, etc.
Beyond that, the more anarcho or quasi-anarcho versions of libertarianism offer no protection against a major fear of the Founding Fathers -- the tyranny of the majority.
To claim that the Founders were by and large libertarians is a crock.

"Beyond that, the more anarcho or quasi-anarcho versions of libertarianism offer no protection against a major fear of the Founding Fathers -- the tyranny of the majority.
To claim that the Founders were by and large libertarians is a crock."

I dont know of anyone who claims that the founding fathers were anarcho capitalist libertarians. The claim instead is that several of them resemble minarchist libertarians in beliveing "That government is best which governs least."

Reaction from a backslidden libertarian:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/michaelduff/118163.html

Oldstyle Republicans like myself have found this Adminstration to be generally horrifying in its completely oblivious blend of mendacity and corruption. Even the initiatives that we did support where conducted and executed in a fashion that seemed designed to both offend the greatest number of people possible and wreak the greatest possible long term damage to American interests. This takes the cake. While I think that those who claim that this Administration is the worst in American history have a history deficit, it is true that this damage comes at a historically sensitive period that magnifies the harm done to American interests.

One could imagine these fellows trying to defeat Hitler and deal with Stalin in WWII. The terrifying thing is that even after all of this, apparently Bush has even up odds of winning the November election. If he should win ... it will almost essentially ensure further terroist disaster in the States, America's financial bankruptcy, a failed structural economic modernization, and a transformation of the United States into an impoverished crony capitalism run by economic oligarchies.

It is easy to mock individuals like Chavez or Mugabe for their victimization rhetoric, unfair politic tactics, and populist demagogery that allows them to persist however unpopular in power. However, it is significantly less amusing to contemplate that the most powerful nation in the recorded history of the world may also have produced an inbred leadership of pronounced mendacity. Reading about the 'Let them eat Cake,' days of the stratified aristocratic governments that fell because of failure to adapt and perform minimal government functions makes interesting bedtime reading.

Then there is the less sanguine contemplation that we too may be living through such times, fastforwarded on the timeline of human history. This is of course the other side of the coin of Brad Delong's otherwise brilliant criticism of Libertarianism. Yes, anarchy is a fool's choice and property dependent upon the stability of the rule of law provided by institutional style governance. However, the other end of the spectrum is factional paralysis, corrupt bureacracies, and entrenched incompetent elitist oligarchies that practice demagogery and militarism in order to seize political control.

Seen in that light, the criticisms of Libertarianism can make a great deal of sense as a form of ultra-cynicism regarding the nature of the man. Lord Archon's summary of the proportional corrupting influence power is well advised. While we bash the neo-Republicans today, it shouldn't be forgotten that it was stagnation and abuses by Congressional Democrats over a period of decades while they controlled the Federal Legislature that helped spawn the admittedly greater excesses of the current neo-Republican regime.

I call them neo-Republican because as far as I can tell they actually don't represent the interests of rank and file Republicans or classical conservative tenets. Very few Republicans are rich. Most are working or middle class Americans who prefer social traditionalism, a strong nationalist attitude, fiscal prudence, and a military posture dedicated to direct national security threats rather than neo-liberal or neo-conservative nation building. Alas, we have all been betrayed by the men in power.

That's why even though I voted for the Bush Senior, I voted against the Bush Junior in 2000 ... and am working with Democrats for a electoral defeat of Bush43 in November. We are at a crucial junction in history. This cannot be allowed to continue, or less we will all suffer for it.

Back from work now and just to respond a bit to Jason Ligon:

A metaphysical notion of freedom would be, e.g., "freedom is the pure upsurge of the for-itself from the sheer inertness and inertia of the in-itself." But human freedom derives from the condition of language, which involves both a relation to the other qua other and interaction with such others. This is a non-metaphysical conception of freedom because it relies upon undeniable fact rather than arbitrary postulation. And it means the freedom is always as much a collective and cross-implicated condition as an individual one. The other is always there, at the very inception of one's freedom, obtruding upon one, and this weighs upon one's freedom with a pressure of decision. From this, freedom, as a limited and conditional reality, is generated. To claim that there is a set of social arrangements, in which unfettered freedom is possible without any implication of coercion, without people yanking on each other's chains, is question begging, to say the least. What if coercion and constraint are what render freedom possible? (The case is similar to those nominalists who claim that language means whatever one wants it to mean. Lewis Carroll had his fun with that. Just try to construct a language from such a principle.)

I was basically agreeing with Prof. DeLong in my post, restating his case in somewhat different terms and then adding some twists that would not accord with his presumed preferences. The issue was: is there a condition of freedom that does not depend on narrow ties of kinship and locality and to what extent does such a condition depend upon the existence of a government? Libertarianism, in my view, is not so much a political ideology,- (for one thing, it fails to make a distinction between public and private, whereas its best effects are precisely in emphasizing a public right to privacy)- as an anti-political ideology, a self-satisfied fantasy of dis-alienation that alienates all the further and generates preposterous claims in the process. But politics is precisely a condition of alienation, of passing over into otherness, of existing in a realm of differences held in common, a condition of plurality. Can there be really existing freedom amongst strangers without structures of governance? I am claiming that, no matter how deplorable or disappointing empirical, i.e. actually existing, governments may be, it is the condition of governance that provides for the political realm, in which, unavoidably, the potential of human freedom is to be realized.

Is freedom a weighty value? I am of mix opinion about that. Certainly, it can be held quite lightly. But value predicates do not apply to beings who are not free.

Oh! As to Rick Barton's claim that freedom is to be closely associated with the right to own porperty:

Freedom is an attribute of human agency. Even in the most oppressive regimes, freedom, qua human agency, does not cease to exist. (This is a terrible thought.) Property, whatever its forms, is a socially instituted convention. To identify human agency with the possession of property is a profound self-reification. We never dispose over ourselves as we dispose over our property.

Though really, Prof. DeLong, Joseph de Maistre? And a good friend of David Hume?

When I was a ten-ager, in the 1950's, I was amused by the fact that the policies of the Socialilst International were pretty much the same as the values Eisenhower and Readers Digest claimed to espouse.

Deja vu all over again: here we have American liberalsm trying to bring in balanced budgets, protection of the Constitution, support for the Armed Services... All that Reublican stuff.

* * *

Moving right along now, how's this for a new politics: we define the Right as tha party which robs the young to provide sllekness to the old; we define the Left as the party which taxes the productive to subsidise infants and children.

The Right, then, is the consumers of wealth; the Left is the party of investors in the future.

Up against the wall, AARP.

Good post Brad, but I think you'll find that there were many "libertarians" (given the term's change in meaning it is probably more accurate to call them anarchists) before the 19th century.

The first Christian communities and many Jewish sects including the Essenes are thought to have been anarcho-socialists in organization.

As well the 16th century Anabaptists repudiated all law and believed that an anarchist utopia would arise if people's actions were guided by the Holy Spirit.

Back in 1649, the True Levellers, better known as the Diggers, were an agrarian communitarian movement that attempted to eliminate the system of enclosures that existed in Britain at the time.

The philosophical position was first codified by William Godwin (1793) who wrote what may have been the first philosophical anarchist treatise.

However, I think you're right about individualistic anarchism. The reasons you give--I think--are exactly correct for the absence of the individualist strain until the 19th century. That was a hybrid of anarcho-socialism and laissez faire liberalism that found strongest expression in the US.

Unlike individualistic libertarianism, socialist or communitarian anarchism was thought to be one of the solutions to the "clan lord" problem (by that point, the landlord problem) as seen by the actions of the Diggers. Sadly, since the government was largely controlled by the landowners, both private and public might were turned against those anarchists. And that experiment in human organization ended quite poorly.

Quoting tbrosz: "As for myself, I'm an aerospace engineer, and I'm getting a little tired of asshats in Washington, most of whom are lawyers, and probably don't even know how an internal combustion engine works, making my decisions for me."

Tbrosz: you're assuming the alternative to having Washington lawyers (who are subject to some set of pressures and constraints, of course, ideally "democratic" ones) making such a choice is YOU making it. But would't a brief look at the world we in fact live in suggest that the alternative is automobile manufacturer marketing departments making the decision. And of course, marketing departments are subject to various pressures and constraints, too...and it's hard to argue they are very democratic at all. Yes, they are very much subject to "market" pressure, but unless you ideologize markets into an unconditioned "good" -- one typical fallacy of positions ranging from libertarians to neo-liberals--that simply leads to the conclusion that we need to scrutinize the value, consequentialist or ideological, of the constraints that different decision-makers about airbag availability are subject to. What we can't simply assume is that the alternative to government choice is unconditioned individual choice, I think.

Off topic!

1. Has anyone else noticed that "oxytocin" appears to be a rising new meme? Just don't confuse it with Oxycontin!

2. Kudos to Brad or Moveable Type for (apparently) finally fixing the "posting bug" -- may this be the end of stutter posts!

john c. halasz:
"Oh! As to Rick Barton's claim that freedom is to be closely associated with the right to own porperty:"
"Freedom is an attribute of human agency. Even in the most oppressive regimes, freedom, qua human agency, does not cease to exist."

This is an attempt to refute my comments @ March 6, 09:57 PM by limiting the definition of freedom to an affirmation of free will. But, what we're talking about here of course is political freedom.

That's what Brad Delong's comments were concerning, the content of which I thought was incorrect so I made mine. One may replace the word "freedom" with "individual liberty" and the case for the necessity of the right to property still obtains.

> The "other book" is _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_

Thanks, Brad.

I find the liberatarian-bashing quite humourous coming from people taking advantage of the best of libertarianism in our society: The Internet.

Ignored in the arguments at the top is that libertarians don't believe in a utopia - not a socialist one, and not a libertarian one. Libertarians know that perfection is not an option.

Live and let live.

"I find the liberatarian-bashing quite humourous coming from people taking advantage of the best of libertarianism in our society: The Internet."

Yeah, Internet the product of government and academe is the best of libertarianism?

"Ignored in the arguments at the top is that libertarians don't believe in a utopia - not a socialist one, and not a libertarian one. Libertarians know that perfection is not an option."

What they believe is that you do not have to think to do thing always right. Do not think and you achieve perfection. It is not an option: by not thinking you cannot avoid perfection.

"Live and let live."

As long as you cannot kill...

DSW

For a long time I have wondered how much of the debate we now see is a product of economists teaching the perfectly competitive model in introductory economics. So we actually turn out a large number of people that took only the one economic class
and than believe the perfectly competitive model really describes reality or a desirable outcome?

Calling the Internet a "product of government" is not accurate. Although in it's infancy some of the first research was done by the Rand corporation on a government grant, there were private initiatives as well. Today, and for a long time, it has been largely without government taxation and regulation, which is why it is so wonderfully vibrant.

Rick Barton

Your assertion "Calling the Internet a "product of government" is not accurate." is surely subject to debate. The original ArpaNet was funded largely by ARPA, part of DOD, which is the government. Rand had a node on the the initial ArpaNet, but research on the whole concept of a time multiplexed communication system implemented at several layers of abstraction (e.g. physical layer IP layer TCP layer) involved many organizations, universities and places such as Rand, with much of the funding coming from---the government.

The internet is vibrant, but we shouldn't be so confident that it won't be spammed out of existence without regulation. And I wouldn't be too happy with Bill Gates doin' the regulatin'.

Spencer, I've often had the exact same thought. No one takes the class where they tell you about externalities, for example.

And Rick, you simply do not know what you are talking about. The Internet is based on Arpanet, which was created by the U.S. DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its first node was at UCLA. Can I assume you at least know know that UCLA is a public, not private university? Or would that be jumping to conclusions?

I believe Rick Barton is referring to the Internet's current form, not its creation. After all, the technology that came from the early government research could have turned into something like France's Minitel, which is controlled by France Telecom. The Internet backbones are all privately owned, and the flow of information comes from agreements between networks. It's not like there's a law saying you must use protocols or standards like TCP/IP or HTTP. Can you imagine an Internet where every website required an FCC license?

In the Highlands, everyone was seen as either a clan member to be helped, a clan enemy to be killed, or a stranger to be robbed.

No fair on the C17 jocks. The clans recognised lots of social obligations, particularly with respect to hospitality to be offered to strangers. That's why the Glencoe massacre came as such a shock; it was a breach of the obligation of hospitality.

(John Campbell to Jack Campbell: Och, Jack, haggis for tea again!
Jack: Och, aye, I could murder a McDonalds!)

Freedom is the right to own poetry,
when the law is Starve Without Alms.
Arbeit Macht Frei, uber alles, even
if we can't pay down our plastic...

dragoon: Ah les français. Ils sont toujours la pour les flinguer; Que ferait-on sans eux!

Certainly this discussion on the internet is somewhat off-topic.

-- "The Internet backbones are all privately owned"

You're right, that's been true for quite a while. However, for many years the backbone was not a private affarir (it may have been run by private companies e.g. BBN, but under contract to the gov't). Do you remember "fair use policy"?

-- "It's not like there's a law saying you must use protocols or standards like TCP/IP"

No, but you wouldn't get far unless you had enough market influence to attempt to impose your own lower level protocols, which MSoft tried and failed to do in the early 90's

-- "HTTP"

This is an application level protocol. At this level, you can more easily do whatever you want. All you need is peers. (This is also technically true of the lower levels, but not ture in practice)

--"Regulation"

This does not require every website to have an FCC license. It does require the regulation of a commodity market for frequency (fourier multiplexing) or a commodity market for intervals (time multiplexing).

Nota Bene: Regulation does not require control of content (we do have good enough encryption to prevent uncontrolled snooping) but of course our government would like to make this a crime (or may have already done so).

>

I don't think that's exactly it...

Libs believe that you should act in your own self-interest (while doing no harm to others), based on the best information possible (a free press and freedom of speech are important) and that the synergy of millions doing this in a society leads to productivity and prosperity for all.

"Not thinking" seems to imply a disregard for information that may influence you and therefore may change your decisions about what is in your best interest.

It's not perfection because no one will have access to all information and therefore will never be 100% able to know what is in their interest. But libertarians know that utopia is not an option.

Sorry, the quoted text from the post above got lost. Here is the quote I was referring to:

"What they [libertarians] believe is that you do not have to think to do thing always right."

Some interesting comments here.

non economist wrote: "I would argue that one has to keep an idea in mind of where your policies might take you"

Yesbut. Yes, but true minarchist libertarianism is so far away from current policies. If libertarians had political power I believe they would very gradually change society. They might, for example, start a gradual 10 or 20 year process of reducing down to zero, in dollar terms, all the trappings of 'big' government: business subsidies, welfare programs, government involvement in the arts, sciences, etc. The detailed effects of this have been argued endlessly, often by the libertarian think tanks.

This would be step #1. If you could order the 100 areas of government change libertarians would want, privatizing the system of roads (which even I have a hard time with) would be about #95. If we got to step #94, and then figured privatizing the roads wouldn't work, we wouldn't do it. As you move down the steps, things get better and better; at any point you can stop.

taktile wrote: "Single examples prove very little, and are certainly not relevant to the kinds of empirical claims needed by libertarians to make their case. You may have shown a clear example of government overreach; yet you have to prove that this is representative of all instances of government behavior in order to reach the the libertarian conclusion. You have to show that cost > benefit for every government function you want to eliminate. Of course, that's a lot harder to do than to trot out a few single examples that might present an illusion of establishing that."

I disagree. It can be viewed as a cost/benefit tradeoff. But it can also be viewed as a moral issue. And libertarians generally feel that a libertarian society is the only moral one. Ayn Rand did, imo, a great job with justifying capitalism on a moral basis.

A lot, maybe most of it, comes down to freedom to engage in commerce, or, capitalism. Libertarians are as passionate about this as most Americans are about our 1st amendment rights, which in this country are very well protected. In China, there is less protection of freedom of speech, in exchange for greater 'social and political stability' (they might say, e.g., speaking out against the government causes problems). Would you try to convince a Chinese communist that our free speech is better on a cost/benefit basis? You could, but you can also argue that that is irrelevant. People have the right to free speech, even if it does cause a political mess.

non economist wrote: "As far as individual rights, I have yet to meet a libertarian who values them over their tax burden. They would almost exclusively rather vote for a conservative republican who is more likely to restrict freedoms but reduce tax burdens than liberal democrats who would be more likely to allow personal freedoms but increase tax burdens in exchange for more social services. That, more than anything else, shows where their true motivation lies- not in utopia, but in greed."

It's not so much worrying about 'tax burdens', its the desire for the freedom to engage in commerce, and not just for greedy purposes (though we feel that greed is good! ;-) ). After all, we feel that taxes do violate our individual rights. Libertarians (especially admirers of Ayn Rand) enjoy, at a deep personal level, being productive people, who take great pride in their chosen profession, and resent constant government intrusion.

Of course, the current batch of Republicans aren't doing very well at advancing capitalism, I'll admit.

Just to add: if you even claim to have read _The Wealth of Nations_ but not _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_, then you have no claim to being able to discern Smith's position with any accuracy.

Mr. Halasz writes about the absence of metaphysical freedom, then asks:

"Can there be really existing freedom amongst strangers without structures of governance?"

Libertarians of two stripes have two answers: the anarchist says, yes, freedom requires only voluntary action, but the minarchist says, the government is necessary, BUT the measure of its worth is entirely the extent to which it enables negative