Libertarianism - the perpetual motion machine of U.S. politics thread

[TerraPrime]

This is a mischaracterization. Libertarianism has nothing to say about community, collaboration, mutual aide, safety nets. It merely says those associations must be voluntary.

Yep. This thread has a lot of long-winded, preachy posts attacking a total straw-man.

The argument is that when left to being voluntary, these things will often, though not always, not happen.

Do you dispute that outcome?

[Kalbear]

Libertarianism saying it must be voluntary is saying a great deal about it, actually. That is one of the major sources of frisson about libertarianism.

[The Killer Snark]

That's the thing. Both mid to far libertarianism disagree more among each other on the tax issue than the Conservatives and Labour do regarding the limits of authoritarianism. My own perspective is that libertarianisnm, as a pure ideal, developed out of enmity for other systems that are unpragmatically utopian. All systems that set utopia as an agenda do not recognise that all aspects of society cannot be shoehorned into a single set of brackets without impinging on either individual identity or others' security in self will. One man's idea of a utopia might be nine other people's idea of dystopia. Nine other people's utopia might be another man's hell. One can only provide a society that is as fair as possible to as large a number of people as possible in a manner that recognises the pragmatic allowance for certain things that some will consider evils and others necessities, because society cannot be perfect, and it is dangerous to try and make it so. Therefore:

Some will abuse their right to free speech by expressing contrarian and wrong opinions relative to views on other's freedom and security. They should only be prosecuted for actual instigation of violence, because free speech by and large is a necessity for any civilised fair state.

Taxes must be as low as possible, but not extinguished utterly because there are social services which are necessary to other's personal security which otherwise won't be provided for. These only take up a large amount of the tax bill in the US because it happens to be such a large country. In the UK, they take up less of what people are taxed for. Most of the money goes back to the government to keep MPs rich and to pay for an unnecessarily bloated military and police force. Libertarians in the UK, along with most Right Wingers, are pro welfare reform but not anti social services and anti benefits. It's simply that people on benefits are always the first people to get scapegoated when a UK government's assault on local industry or protectionism to the recklessness of big business forces economic collapse, as happened ultimately with both Thatcher and Blair. Taxes must be minimised but the provision of social services and benefits are necessary. They cannot subsist via voluntary funding because do so would require either very large pieces of charity from very rich individuals which would not be regularly forthcoming, or people would consent to having regular and rising amounts of money withdrawn regularly from their bank accounts in a way most people would not agree to. People are not generally selfish by nature, but nor are we all saints. The view I take myself is that taxation should be equal for both the poor and rich, and equally minimal, but a legally forced minimum of wealth redistribution they'll hardly notice is the price they'll have to pay for a society in which everyone still has the entitlement to find a basic security platform on which they might use their individual enterprise in order to get rich. The small amount of people in the UK who are actually generational benefits fraudsters can hopefully be rooted out by reform, but people such as that are a small price to pay for a society which does not exterminate its poor.

[The Undead Martyr]

This is a mischaracterization. Libertarianism has nothing to say about community, collaboration, mutual aide, safety nets. It merely says those associations must be voluntary.

Democratic government is by definition voluntary, is it not?

Do you agree to the government enforcing anti-discrimination measures against private businesses? Do you wish to repeal the minimum wage?

Every action has a consequence. Someone could "voluntarily" try to dig for coal but the mess he makes affects more than him. What happens if a group of miners pollute a river and people downstream want to get them to stop?

That is why the EPA exists- we, as a society, have come to realize there is a need for environmental protection, and have vested the federal government with the authority to make and enforce those rules.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Democratic government is by definition voluntary, is it not?

It is not.

[The Undead Martyr]

It is not.

What exactly is "voluntary" then? Are libertarians just anarchists who don't criticize property rights?

[The Killer Snark]

The Undead Martyr - Anti discrimination laws should not be enforced upon private businesses unless abuses have been made against an employee after they've already become part of the company. This is even in spite of my own moral aversion to the sentiment. The employer, if private, has the choice to act like an asshole, in terms of a business they themselves have built up and which is hence their personal property, in terms of who they pick for vacancies, and the public has the right to boycott them for acting like an asshole for acting on personal prejudice. This stance becomes unfeasible in terms of bigger, public liable companies for obvious reasons, not least because even in a minarchist government without protectionism they are economic analogues of state. The state should intervene in this case when discrimination has been proven in the selection process or during hours of work. It's not an ideal scenario, but affirmative action is absolutely rampant in the UK, and fixed quota systems within big corporations and Equal Opportunities Questionnaires are responsible for very real discrimination against those of the wrong gene pool and the wrong gender. I can give statistics, and personal experience, in order to validate this, but I suggest that others Google the topic to save me having to waffle on too much. If the choice is between a white male or a black woman as the last person to pick for a position, an employer will pick the latter 100 percent of the time in order to stay on the right side of the UK's increasingly rigid quota regulations, even if this means alienating the opportunities of a group that is wrongly believed to have more opportunities and personal power.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100262973/i-do-wish-leftists-would-stop-confusing-libertarianism-with-bigotry/

The minimum wage shall not be repealed, not in my book anyway. It should be a personal price that an employer should pay in respect of others' right to benefit from allotted work, to save them committing what I'd otherwise call a form of fraudulent unaccountability. You are bang to rights on the 'polluted river' analogy. Existing property rights should cover this, though, and also ecological accountability should be made to cover what other people do with their own property or business when it consitutes a form of recognised violence to anyone else.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

What exactly is "voluntary" then? Are libertarians just anarchists who don't criticize property rights?

Well, properly articulated, I do think that philosophically consistent libertarianism necessarily entails anarchism, and further, that libertarianism necessarily includes some kind of a claim regarding the circumstances under which one can properly assert a claim to ownership of a piece of property. I consider the property rights issue to be unresolved among even left-libertarians, with some extreme views (set forth by Proudhon, Joseph Tucker, and Kevin Carson) hewing strongly towards purely usufructory land ownership while most others stick to standard Lockean/Rothbardianism land acquisition (the Lockean Proviso being an issue all on its own).

I do admit to finding the whole non-libertarian obsession with the libertarian obsession with property rights to be a little amusing. After all, there has to be SOME theory underlying the legitimate acquisition of property. At least libertarians (for all their other faults) try to deal with this issue explicitly. Non-libertarians and non-libertarian systems, after all, have rules addressing the legitimate acquisition of property, too - it's just that these are often not discussed or articulated or debated in any meaningful way.

Although, to go back to the original point, I'm not sure what any of this has to do with democracy being "by definition voluntary" or not.

[Arya Rules!]

We need a party that is not controlled by the state. DemoPublicans believe they are different from each other because the TV tells them that they are different. Bush and Obama are siamese twins on everything important. Bush luvs war, Obama luvs it more. Bush created an illegal Dept. of homeland, Obama expanded the shit out of it. Bush loved giving billions to the bankers, Obama luvs it more. Bush spent the country into oblivion, Obama printed money like he needed to keep a fire going. McCain/Romney loved state controlled helath care, Obama...

We have a one party system of death. Libertarians are the alternative but have no chance in the culture of death these 2 imbeciles created.

Support war, support surveillance, support fiscal insanity. You will be a good lil RepubliCrat. Just keep watching your tv news and it will reassure you that your Orwellian party is looking out for you and is completely different than the other guys.

[MercenaryChef]

We need a party that is not controlled by the state. DemoPublicans believe they are different from each other because the TV tells them that they are different. Bush and Obama are siamese twins on everything important. Bush luvs war, Obama luvs it more. Bush created an illegal Dept. of homeland, Obama expanded the shit out of it. Bush loved giving billions to the bankers, Obama luvs it more. Bush spent the country into oblivion, Obama printed money like he needed to keep a fire going. McCain/Romney loved state controlled helath care, Obama...

We have a one party system of death. Libertarians are the alternative but have no chance in the culture of death these 2 imbeciles created.

Support war, support surveillance, support fiscal insanity. You will be a good lil RepubliCrat. Just keep watching your tv news and it will reassure you that your Orwellian party is looking out for you and is completely different than the other guys.

please explain how libertarians will deliver us from these evils?

all you so far have provided is some radio talk show soundbites.

[The Killer Snark]

Arya Rules - We have the same situation in Britain. Every government from Thatcher's onward has been an economically incompetent, protectionist, authoritarian shambles. A lot of libertarians who pragmatically vote for major Parties have switched their vote from Liberal Democrat or Tory to UKIP because they're fed up of it all, and fed up of continued encroachments on their liberty arising from Political Correctness. But UKIP themselves are only pretending to be relatively libertarian, since they plan to expand the police force and the number of existing prisons through the money they'll save by partly privatising social services, and also lessening the almost non-existent position of accountability for procedure and action of the police. So how are we going to justify such gross expenditure disguised as necessary taxation? That's right. The legal bureaucracy has to expand also in order to create even more useless, expensive and civil rights destroying laws in order to justify the growth of punitive forces, or there will be masses of bored sociopaths in the clothes of policemen finding ways to throw their weight about and harrass and wrongly arrest folk, because of even less accountability to the limitations of law.

[Commodore]

Democratic government is by definition voluntary, is it not?

no, it expresses the will of a majority, not the voluntary choices of individuals

Do you agree to the government enforcing anti-discrimination measures against private businesses?

No

Do you wish to repeal the minimum wage?

Yes

Every action has a consequence.

Right, but that doesn't mean a majority should decide your actions for you.

[TerraPrime]

no, it expresses the will of a majority, not the voluntary choices of individuals

Can you give us some examples of modern democracy, espeially of the Western tradition, where an individual is prevented by force from leaving the jurisdiction?

[Seli]

This is a mischaracterization. Libertarianism has nothing to say about community, collaboration, mutual aide, safety nets. It merely says those associations must be voluntary.

Of course, the drawback is that is uses definitions of voluntary and involuntary that are basically random.

[Ramsay Gimp]

Of course, the drawback is that is uses definitions of voluntary and involuntary that are basically random.

If by random you mean the correct usage, then sure. A system that operates with money taken by force is not voluntary by any reasonable definition.

Try not paying your taxes and it will soon become clear to you what voluntary actually means

[Crom Dubh]

If I live in a community where there is no protection against discrimination and I cannot buy food, for example, how is my resultant starvation (or at the very least, my physical and economic hardship) not involuntary? I didn't choose to be born black in a place where the majority of commerce and production is controlled by racist people. Certainly, they have the voluntary choice of not selling to me, but then I have the hardship involuntarily impressed upon me.

[The Killer Snark]

Ramsay Gimp - I believe that no one paying taxes unless they want to is a completely unworkable and dangerous 'utopian' ideal in line with the forced equality of communism, and I said the same thing to a Far Right libertarian on Youtube who accused me of being a socialist, when I made the case for minimal essential taxation as a form of social damage control. Libertarianism shoul essentially be a form of equal opportunities pragmatism, not the equal outcomes dystopia that communism always falls into, but also not the more opportunities for a plutocracy Far Right libertarianism would engender. A neat comparison between both is the two-tier system the latter would fall into to meet rising homelessness and rising strain on public services. A taxation would eventually follow on a period of zero taxation as a measure of damage control far heavier than the taxation was beforehand. The elimination of the poor from the consumer class would cause more limited production and, sans regulation on big businesses, unmanagable inflation. The middle classes would eventually disappear and you'd just be left with a rich plutocratic minority and everybody else attempting to survive, the exact same system under different terms that exists under the bureaucratic feudalism of communistic states.

Crom Dubh - In my own defence, racism is actually not a problem in the UK to any large degree and hasn't been for half a century, except if you count the BNP, who are a Far Left and not a Right Wing group, without any particularly large support or political power. Racial tension has heightened in the UK since the instutionalisation of PC and uncontrolled immigration of people not contributing to our economy, or working for lower wages than everyone else and thus undermining the indigenous workforce and keeping down the minumum wage. Also, institutionalised PC has caused racial tension in closed communities against whites, because of the total absence of a 'melting pot' scenario. We are constantly forced over here to make allowances for other cultures taking root in our country, not the other way around. A lot of people have no perspective, so racism that otherwise wouldn't exist is in fact exacerbated via such things as 'affirmative action.' If PC would just go away, the situation would be the same as it was before it ran rampant over our legalities; people would be much more willing to accept others as individuals, not as members of a group. The situation is different in America because there's more racism than there is in the UK, but discrimination at employment level in this day and age is terrible business sense in either country. I don't think that many employers would take an economic chance on going down that road unless they were really KKK.

[Arya Rules!]

I think I already explained how Libertarians CAN'T fix this. Much like Rome, a country that devolves into a war state and trashes its currency can't survive. If 20 years ago we had adopted principles and abided by the constitution, there may have been a chance. The population is not capable of obtaining principles at this time so Obama's war machine and surveillance network will just grow no matter which fake party is elected. I am saying clearly, Libertarians cant fix this. Of course this is all by design, and a global currency crash is imminent, designed to "fail forward" into a global currency.

[MercenaryChef]

I think I already explained how Libertarians CAN'T fix this. Much like Rome, a country that devolves into a war state and trashes its currency can't survive. If 20 years ago we had adopted principles and abided by the constitution, there may have been a chance. The population is not capable of obtaining principles at this time so Obama's war machine and surveillance network will just grow no matter which fake party is elected. I am saying clearly, Libertarians cant fix this. Of course this is all by design, and a global currency crash is imminent, designed to "fail forward" into a global currency.

how is that tin foil hat treating you?

[Kalbear]

If by random you mean the correct usage, then sure. A system that operates with money taken by force is not voluntary by any reasonable definition.

Try not paying your taxes and it will soon become clear to you what voluntary actually means

Sure it is. You can volunteer to be part of the system and have things taken from you by force. Slave contracts in BDSM are an example of this - you volunteer to be subservient in certain ways.

If you are choosing to be a citiizen of a country and that country has a tax, you are choosing to pay that tax. You have a choice. Now, what you don't have a choice on is being both a member of that country AND not paying taxes. This is precisely the same as you have a choice on, say, defecating in the street or driving on the right side of the road or doing drugs. Being part of a country has certain conditions set, all of which are enforced via laws and therefore force. If you object to the use of force to enforce these rules then you clearly are supporting an anarchic system where no laws should ever apply to you.

If you are fine with the use of force in some cases but not others you are, as the old joke goes, just haggling on the price. You're fine with force being used - in this case, likely the protection of your personal sake and your property (though as has been mentioned property rights are themselves a hugely forceful and involuntary claim') and dislike other things. But you don't hate taxes specifically. Or if you do, you're just a huge hypocrit who wants to hate taxes because taxes are dumb and stuff.