Question Libertarians can't answer (article...)

[kusok]

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the_question_libertarians_just_cant_answer/

 

Hey guys, i was looking at this "article", and needless to say I have "strong feelings" about it, but I'm having some issues of how to put it together into words well. What do you think?

Perhaps Stef can do an episode on this? This article is being linked and discussed already on some boards. 

 

Thanks for any and all thoughts.

 

 

[masonman]

Its such an absurd claim I'm not sure if its worth a video

[JamesP]

If setting the tax slaves free is so great, why have no slaveowners set their slaves free?

[Guest darkskyabove]

And the answer is...

America. From founding until around 1836. At which point the steady influence of statism had made enough of a dent to begin the landslide.

The more direct answer is because the world is full of morons like the writer of the article.

[Libertus]

And the answer is...

 

... the black market.

[JKPgamer]

My first thought when I read this article:

People still think hierarchical systems are the only way to get morality.  Stef has made this argument multiple times that the argument must come from morality to be won.

The ruling class perpetuates the axiom that we need a ruling class.  So of course a society hasn't emerged without one yet.

[Guest darkskyabove]

 

And the answer is...

... the black market.

 

So obvious, I didn't see it staring me in the face. Thanks.

[Wesley]

 

And the answer is...

 

... the black market.

 

Agorism FTW!

[Formelyknown]

Since when libertarism is apealing to peoples? For one pro-libertarian article there is 100 agains it. That guy is not even wrong he is somethng else.

[STer]

I'm not even a libertarian, per se, but anyone who is logical should see that this is an absolutely moronic line of thinking to apply to any idea. Is the author implying that the truth of an idea can be measured by how many people support it? Was the earth not round until after most people accepted it and decided to try living as if it was the case? Is the author claiming that the majority of people can never be wrong, not even to mention that the small minority that get to decide the way countries are run can never be wrong or misguided or selfish or many other things that would keep them from trying a new system, even if it was beneficial to people in general?

A better article, which would actually be very valuable, would be on the topic of why people often reject or do refuse to even try potentially better solutions. And there is a wealth of insight into that question. There is a long history of people resisting good ideas. I could go on and on, but I'll just leave it there for now.

[Magnus]

It's a stupid question -- why aren't States more pro-freedom? 

Answer: States are designed to be anti-freedom.  They exist to enslave people. That's their purpose and function.

It's like asking why more slave-owners weren't advocating for the abolition of slavery.  If they were anti-slavery, they'd just free their slaves, and thus cease to be slave-owners. 

Why aren't the Chinese Triads, Russian mobs, or La Cosa Nostra founding more schools, hospitals and No Smoking campaigns? 

Uh ... that's not what people join those organizations to do.

Every once in a while, some imposter or deluded soul will sneak into the ranks of the Government Class, in the hopes of dismantling it from within.  But you'd have a better chance of working your way up to the top of the Sex Slave Trade with the Secret Master Plan of ending child slavery.

[Metric]

The question was answered already by a proto-libertarian a couple hundred years ago:

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild,[1] and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788[2]

That's why it's rarely happens -- states are constantly in the business of seeking out and capturing new powers.

[nathanm]

Why are there no libertarian countries?

The question is one Statists need to answer, not libertarians.  But here's the answer anyway:  Because it's not logically possible.  States claim ownership over every piece of dirt on this planet not covered by water and will use violence to back it up.  If it were possible to have independent communities with different social experiments going on that would mean that the centralized government did not exist.   If you had AnCapLand and CommieVillage and DemocracyTown all doing their own thing it would mean that everyone is not forced to live in the same mental construct of a country.

[Pepin]

I know it was not needed, but I provided some commentary. The article got worse and worse as it went on. Normally I like dissecting these sorts of articles, but it becomes difficult to have fun when trying to make sense out of gibberish.

Why are there no libertarian
countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they
understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not
a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is
organized along libertarian lines?

What is the argument exactly? That if a
particular political philosophy is advantageous to society at large,
why is it not adopted by those that control the state?

One answer is that people within the
state benefit from taxation, and libertarianism is opposed to
taxation, then the people who benefit from taxation will be opposed
to libertarianism. An institution that claims 50% of your income by
force is partial enslavement, and slave masters are opposed to a
political philosophy that opposes slavery on a moral level.

Another simple answer is that the state
is not an institution that aims to benefit society at large, as any
institution that has the capability of murdering millions upon
millions of the people the claim to serve and claim it to be a virtue
is not interested in what society as a whole. What about all the
people caged in rape rooms for smoking a little vegetation? What
about the millions upon millions who have died in war? What about
those who have not been able to get medicine they needed due to
tariffs, sanctions, and bombing? What about all those who have lost
their livelihood due to the inflation of money?

There is also the rational approach of analyzing the premises and finding faults and contradictions in the argument. This is especial vital to determining the validity of any theory, especially one that has yet to be tried out.

It is doubtful that the author is
capable of making the case of libertarianism due to the phrase "how
best to organize". Libertarianism is more a philosophy that
posits that the state ought not to organize the majority of society. The author is aware of as shown later in the article.

The opposing argument to the above would likely be one in which the
fault is put on Republicans, corporations, or even worse: a concept
called greed. Such a response does not follow logically, but people seem to think it does for some reason.

It’s not as though there were
a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are
193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count
the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by
the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t
at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one
country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free
trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no
public education system?

Does this at all address the
libertarian arguments as to why this does not occur? Does the author
have any understanding of the position they are arguing against?

When you ask libertarians if
they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a
baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this
reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are
countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would
approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security,
for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however,
gives a role to vouchers in schooling.

But this isn’t an adequate response.
Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies
to create an imaginary utopia.

Mixing and matching is what seems to
occur when one criticizes the concept of the state and the beloved
rulers that have supported murder, imprisonment, theft, terrorism,
and enslavement to their fullest extend possible.

Also, the author avoids assessing the
effectiveness of "more voluntary programs", likely because
getting into the empirical aspects of libertarian arguments would
require making an argument, and explaining away statistics would give
you the appearance of a weaker argument.

A real country must function
simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law
enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being
able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least
some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

A “real” country. I don't
understand the author's need to differentiate, besides to give the
appearance of something of value being put forth.

The author offers their political
philosophy, which ends up being a cliché statement unsupported by
evidence and then... reiterates their claim again? I am a little
confused as to how that paragraph slipped by the editor as it is
nonsensical even from a statist point of view.

Some political philosophies pass
this test.

The test of some arbitrary rubric that
is put forth without reasoning and evidence?

Also, the author is looking for a
political philosophy to support their political philosophy. Kind of
reminds me of how adults tend to go for preexisting religions that
are similar to their existing belief structures.

For much of the global
center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social
democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner
described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Other political
philosophies pass the test, even if their exemplars flunk other
tests. Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West
could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist
dictatorships as examples of “really-existing socialism.” They
argued that, while communist regimes fell short in the areas of
democracy and civil rights, they proved that socialism can succeed in
a large-scale modern industrial society.

The fuck is going on in this article?

While the liberal welfare-state
left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in
world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the
failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but
genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic
failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of
socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.

What is the argument here? I mean, my
Science, the author in the article complains earlier about mixing and
matching shit from governments, but this is worse because it isn't
even comprehensible.

But think about this for a
moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist
regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by
the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism
was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the
scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the
world.

I'm sorry, but I did think about it for
a moment, and that line of reasoning does not at all make sense.

 

If socialism is discredited by
empirical failure

And if libertarianism has had no
empirical test

Then why is libertarianism not
discredited by empirical failure

How about education? According
to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4
percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in
2010. For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly
public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent, compared to only
88.5 percent in economically-freer Mauritius.

Infant mortality? In
economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000
live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S.
Maternal mortality in Mauritius is at 60 deaths per 100,000 live
births, compared to 21 in the U.S. Economic liberty comes at a price
in human survival, it would seem. Oh, ­­­­­­­­­­well—at
least Mauritius is economically free!

Even to admit such trade-offs—like
higher infant mortality, in return for less government—would
undermine the claim of libertarians that Americans and other citizens
of advanced countries could enjoy the same quality of life, but at
less cost, if most government agencies and programs were replaced by
markets and for-profit firms. Libertarians seem to have persuaded
themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less
government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy
and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.

I am a little lost as to how the author
could muster up this. I am not really sure what it is, or even how to
address it. I mean, sure, these paragraphs may have been slipped in by a
drunk sailors while petting a seal as some sort of practical joke, but certainly someone should have noticed a seal in the office, nor does it excuse such a terrible argument.

Wait I thought mixing and matching was
not an adequate response.

It’s a seductive
vision—enjoying the same quality of life that today’s
heavily-governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less
regulation. The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced
to return to the question with which we began: if libertarianism is
not only appealing but plausible, why hasn’t any country anywhere
in the world ever tried it?

Libertarians do not claim that people
would enjoy the same quality of life, but a higher quality of life.
The author understands this, but must make us for a lack of substance
through contradiction.

 

Perhaps we are forced return to that
question because the article really has nothing to do with addressing
the question, besides randomly stating it at different points.

[STer]

I was going to add a couple more critiques of this article, but then I think I figured it out.

This article is a form of trolling. In the next couple of days, the author will post a new piece explaining that he was just seeing how many people caught all the fallacies in the article and then going on to explain what they all were. Then we will all have a good laugh together.

[Existing Alternatives]

 

This article is a form of trolling. In the next couple of days, the author will post a new piece explaining that he was just seeing how many people caught all the fallacies in the article and then going on to explain what they all were. Then we will all have a good laugh together.

 

You are funny… I mean, I hope, of course, but…

 

One thing that struck me particularly is the anger in the comments. There were two or three commenters that tried arguing the libertarian side of things, but they were shred to pieces, and not in the intellectual debate kind of way. Ok, so you think libertarians are wrong – go grab your cake! Why the anger? At the end of the day, this was supposed to be an exchange of ideas.

 

[Alan C.]

Why are there no libertarian countries?

Yeah, why don't billions of superstitious, functionally illiterate people embrace libertarianism?

It's a mystery, alright.

[STer]

Does the fact that the author of that article has never been made the leader of a country negate his ideas? If his ideas are so great, howcome everyone hasn't cried out for him being installed in power? Hmmmm? Really makes you think doesn't it?!

[Freedomain]

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkcY7SVBG-4]

[Guest darkskyabove]

Salon.com statist deconstructed by a voice for Reason:

http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/07/michael-linds-obtuse-attack-on-liberty-a