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

[Arya Rules!]

How is that tinfoil hat treating you?

About the same as being a state worshipping war pig. I assume you want to play in the kiddie pool since your specifics are lacking.

[MerenthaClone]

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.

No, you see, you could just move to a place where such a thing would never happen. That this argument does not apply to current states wrt taxation is somehow studiously ignored.

The reason I think you see a bunch of people, myself included, posting screeds against something that isn't being argued is that you have a bunch of consequentialists/utilitarians/people who give a damn about ramifications attacking a philosophy that, put bluntly, doesn't. Yes, you dying in the street of starvation is better because at least you didn't take away anyone's freedom to refuse you food/care/whatever. So, in my case, I take a philosophy, look at what I see is the most likely outcome of said philosophy, and go "fuck THAT" and kind of skip the whole "but we have more freedoms!" bit.

[The Killer Snark]

Kalbear - Involuntary force on certain necessary issues is essential to even a minarchist society, of that there is no doubt. Some of this is simple relativism. The degree of force depends on circumstance. There is no doubt that centuries of constitutionally permitted gun ownership in the States has been an absolute disaster. It's too late to change that now because gun ownership is so endemic; all you can do in that case is exact more necessary controls. To deprive people of the right to bear firearms at all is unworkably utopian reasoning, because criminals will always be able to get them anyway through shady contacts without the right of the average citizen to protect their person and their home. In the UK, we do not have this problem because we lack the necessary Amendment, and even under a libertarian government in Britain we would never permit private ownership of firearms on the grounds that most of our criminals don't have firearms, so we'd only be causing the problem of arming our peacable citizens but arming a lot of our criminals as well.

MerenthaClone: As stated I'm a libertarian, and even I believe a policy of voluntary taxation is socio-economically deranged.

[The guy from the Vale]

No, you see, you could just move to a place where such a thing would never happen. That this argument does not apply to current states wrt taxation is somehow studiously ignored.

The reason I think you see a bunch of people, myself included, posting screeds against something that isn't being argued is that you have a bunch of consequentialists/utilitarians/people who give a damn about ramifications attacking a philosophy that, put bluntly, doesn't. Yes, you dying in the street of starvation is better because at least you didn't take away anyone's freedom to refuse you food/care/whatever. So, in my case, I take a philosophy, look at what I see is the most likely outcome of said philosophy, and go "fuck THAT" and kind of skip the whole "but we have more freedoms!" bit.

Actually, you couldn't even move to another place in libertarian utopia, because the roads would be privately owned, and if these road owners denied you passage based on your race, you would have no choice but to stay where you are. Really, unfettered libertarianism in a racist society would directly lead to a (re-)installment of slavery in the name of freedom: the have-nots would have to be working tirelessly just to get food and shelter, without any way of escaping that situation.

@Killer Snark: You're a bit optimistic about there being no appreciable racism or xenophobia in the British right. UKIP's obsession with Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians comes to mind.

[The Killer Snark]

theguyfromtheVale - I reckon UKIP are a little more discriminatory than they pretend to be, but there are indeed a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians who've been arriving en masse to the UK in the last few years to try and get benefits. When they fail to, they add to the numbers of our homeless, which were already serious enough, but whenever you walk down Glasgow City Centre now, you meet homeless people pretty much on every major street, and at least half that number are Romanian and Bulgarian. The governments of these countries are doing nothing to stem a socio-economic problem the EU is giving them far too much leeway with its policy of open borders to be inclined to sort out. My point is that xenophobia rises to suit such uncontrolled situations. I personally blame the EU for not taking action in response to the natural rights of the countries within it. Countries that conduct their own economy so recklessly their citizens go on mass immigrations to richer countries should be kicked out of the EU unless they decide to sort themselves out a bit out of responsibility to other countries. But I'm not going to vote for UKIP, because they are too authoritarian for me, and although they aren't actually a racist party, you do get racists who vote for them. I took a punching from one at night-time once who would have been better off voting BNP because the only reason he supported UKIP was down to racism, not overall politics. The reason why he punched me was because he said I looked Left Wing, a bit of a laugh if you think about it, because he should have been voting for the national socialist BNP.

I agree with your points in your last post. There has to be limits of accountability on both big business and privatisation, for libertarianism to work with any competence without falling into a non quality controlled feudalist state.

[Larry of the Lawn]

MerenthaClone: As stated I'm a libertarian, and even I believe a policy of voluntary taxation is socio-economically deranged.

Far be it from me to tell you what you are, but based on what you've written on this board, I wouldn't call you a libertarian, at least not in the way the word is used in the US.

[Liffguard]

theguyfromtheVale - I reckon UKIP are a little more discriminatory than they pretend to be, but there are indeed a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians who've been arriving en masse to the UK in the last few years to try and get benefits. When they fail to, they add to the numbers of our homeless,

Numbers? Sources?

[Galactus]

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.

Bwahaha, 20 years ago? Try 200. And even then I suspect the very nature of colonialism in the new world made such a thing impossible for practical purposes.

[TrueMetis]

So what exactly is a "war state"? Cause Rome was at war a lot, like almost constantly.

[The Undead Martyr]

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.

I will have to disagree with you on this. I feel that, considering the history of racial and economic discrimination in America (and the two are very heavily linked) leaving things to "the market" is insufficient. IOW I feel the right to not be discriminated against on the basis of your skin tone trumps any right to be "an asshole" as a private property owner, for reasons I have articulated.

As to the minimum wage, in one of my classes last year there was a primary document on a hearing on worker safety in 19th century Britain. One of the panelists asked a factory worker why they didn't take measures, and he responded that without laws forcing some standard he would lose out on profits to institute them earlier. How do you avoid the prisoner's dilemma without some system of unilateral enforcement?

Wages, in my mind, and to a lesser extent jobs, should not be treated like commodities on market. People enter the job market to find a job to buy crap- the dynamic is totally different than shoes for example. Hence why I think minimum wages are necessary- the market won't find a suitable solution because it is a non-market problem. This is even before you factor in the frequent power differential between employers and prospective employees.

As to pollution, what exactly are you suggesting, that the EPA be replaced by some other system? How would you negotiate contracts with every person affected by environmental damage except through something the size of a government?

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.

Yes, I misspoke. Democracy is "voluntary" insofar as one buys into the Social Contract, but for the most part I think very few of us stop to question just what we are doing or why. Frankly it is ludicrous to expect people to be even casually aware of the full breadth of human society let alone its impracticality.

I agree, libertarianism, in extremis, is more Noam Chomsky than Ron Paul.

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.

This sort of foolishness really irritates me. One need only look to any of the Keystone XL pipeline, gay rights, abortion, or taxation to understand the difference between the parties.

Obama has not spent billions invading a country that poses zero threat for goals that remain obscure to this day.

He has stepped up the Drone program (and this is something I hold against him, more than probably anything else), but honestly that to me seems a failure of almost everyone in America- there simply isn't enough awareness/agitation for it to change, sadly.

Obama's budget is also not at all comparable to Bush's.

His actions in Libya may be criticized for the recent turmoil there but not to the extent of the FUBAR that is Iraq.

He didn't step up for a public option but the Insurance Companies must have got to him. That or he foolishly thought starting with a private insurance reform system was good negotiating.

Both parties are corrupt. One at least tries to get stuff done, however, and the other has a rather disproportionate number of crazies.

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

No

Yes

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

1. Can a federal republic like the US constitute a "voluntary association" a la Chomsky style libertarianism? If not, what do you propose to replace it, especially given the context of heavily globalized 21st century society?

2. Why not?

3. Why?

4. There are limitations placed on our behaviors. Many of these come from the government, which (ideally, though in practice it historically more often served as the system of enforcing the upper class's will) supposedly represents the enforcement mechanism of the social contract. How would you account for something like the pollution problem I posited earlier- there are many, many parties potentially affected/injured by such pollution, and if the miners refuse to budge, citing market cooperativeness/practical concerns or whatever, what recourse do e.g. the fishermen down the creek have to stop this behavior?

[Galactus]

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.

Well, to be fair, the main other ideology intimately interested in the acquisition of property is marxism.

O

[Arya Rules!]

Fix is a big word. If we just agreed that it takes an act of Congress to start a foreign occupation, we could have saved a lot. 200 million demopublicans following a human dildo on TV to multiple illegal wars, doesn't lend itself to principles. Conservatives loved Bush's wars, Liberals love Obama's multiple acts of treason. Dick Cheney masturbates to Obama's foreign policy.

[Seli]

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

That arbitrary line, yes. The one where a system where everyone pays for the infrastructure they are using is somehow considered coercive when the payment is made to society/government.

[Hereward]

The Killer Snark,

I hate to inject facts into the debate, but far from affirmative action being "rampant" in the UK, with two minor exceptions (Northern Ireland and all female political shortlists), it's actually illegal.

[The Killer Snark]

Hereward - It's supposed to be, in theory, but people do it anyway because there's no law and therefore no legal accountability against it. Black people make up approximately 6 percent of the UK population, with the greatest majority of them in England. The BBC, and they were championed for this in The Guardian, who historically as sheltered recipients of Leftist middle class nepotism think London is a microcosm of the rest of the UK, have decided to raise the number of black people they have working at the Corporation at administrative and high office level as well as working as main actors and extras in their programmes, within this year, to 40 percent. You do the maths. That is a gigantic discriminatory advantage over applicants of another colour, in addition to minority groups who aren't black. The poetry publisher Bloodaxe, whose published output is utterly rotten, base their output on quota setting instead of quality by admission; their editor is a self-acknowledged Marxist who says he was radicalised in Paris during the 1968 student riots, and he has gone on record saying that the 60 percent of female poets he prints, which looking at their output is in fact a conservative estimate, is not only deliberate, but something other publishers should fall in line with. The thing is, they already do. There are all female anthologies everywhere, and I stopped submitting to the small press that used to print me when their jury became all female and they rejected almost every male submitter in order to prioritise the work of female poets. I was privy to private e-mail comments that proved there was contention over this. The public sector in Britain has by its own admission prioritised women over male applicants, and by focussing on mostly younger females for admin jobs they are also ageist into the bargain. And this in spite of the fact that women aren't even a minority, either in population count or personal power terms. There was even a Guardian article recently that was ridiculed on Twitter where they belatedly seemed to be admitting that affirmative action, at university level, had entailed negative consequences on account of the much smaller representation in UK universities, relative to other groups, of white (specifically non middle-class, and therefore less politically coercible) males. There is a no platform policy through UK universities denying the right of those in imaginary power groups to counteract the total platform policy of those in self-stated power minority groups, such as Radical Feminists, for example, to spread what is essentially gender-supremacist or communizing propaganda based on prejudice against the purported 'capitalist exploitations' of the white race. If none of this blatant and self-acknowledged favouritism is not affirmative action, then I don't know what is.

[Hereward]

As far as the BBC goes, none of your claims are accurate. The diversity target is 10% by 2017. This is a target not a quota. As a senior manager at the BBC I can assure you that we attempt to recruit the right person regardless of background. Our recruitment stats are monitored so things like a 100% job offer rate to Cornish unipeds could be investigated to see if coincidence or bias is at play.

And the UK ethnic minority share is about 12%, so even the 10% target is hardly a brutal assault on the oppressed natives.

[Hereward]

PS I imagine the issues in poetry are more to do with the consumers all being vegan sustainable muesli weavers.

[The Killer Snark]

Hereward - In my defence, that wasn't exactly how The Guardian reported it, and they weren't exactly aiming to curry Right Wing favour either. Here's the original article. I actually picked the wrong end of the stick up, but you can see how I managed to do so regarding the wording in the article. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/20/bbc-director-general-diversity-plan-minorities-on-air. But 10 percent as a target is still quota setting in my eyes, especially given the non proportionally disproportionate representation of non white actors in almost every episode of current Dr Who. I've seen even black people bringing this up online, saying they'd accept less over-representation on the programme if they were given less token parts.

The only people who buy modern poetry are the same people you've just mentioned, but they do not form the majority of those who actually love poetry. This is why contemporary poetry does not have a large audience, as opposed to that written before the middle of the last century, because it's of very poor quality and only written to suit a clique.

[Ormond]

I'm sorry, but it really seems that getting upset over "Dr. Who" is just silliness. Who cares about such a thing on a science fiction program where a lot of it is set in the future, and who knows what the racial make-up of the UK or anyplace else on the planet will really be in a few centuries?

[Summah]

Oh the pitiful, oppressed white mens.