Power Imbalance: The Difference Between Liberal and Libertarian Philosophy
My new column is up at Forbes, and it is one of my favorites I have written for a while (at least it seems so with my current scorpion-induced double vision). It begins with Krugman's recent statement that the Left understands the Right and libertarian positions better than the Right and libertarians understand the Left.
I first demolish this as a pretentious crock, but then wander to more important topics
But I do understand the leftish position well enough to identify its key mistake. As I mentioned earlier, we libertarians are similarly concerned with aggregations of power. We have, at best, a love-hate relationship with large corporations, for example, enjoying the bounties they can bring us but fearing their size and power.
But what the Left ignores is that there is absolutely no power imbalance as large as that between the government and its citizens. After all, you may get ticked off when Exxon charges you $4.00 a gallon for gas for reasons that aren't transparent to you, but you can always tell Exxon to kiss off and buy from someone else, or ride a bike, or stay home. Because Exxon does not have armies and police and guns and prisons.
Every single time we give the government the power to right a perceived imbalance, we give the government more power than the private entity we are trying to contain. In effect, we make things worse. Because we want the government to counter-act the power of oil companies, Congress now has the power to dump large portions of our food supply into motor fuel, to the benefit of just a few politically connected ethanol companies.
One of the reasons the Left often cannot adequately articulate the libertarian position is that the notion of bottom-up emergent order tends to be difficult for many to understand or accept (this is mildly ironic, since the Left tends to defend the emergent order of Darwinian evolution against the top-down Christian creation vision).
The key to much of libertarian economics is not that libertarians trust private actors, but that libertarians trust natural correction mechanisms in free markets far more than it trusts authoritarian power of the government. When, for example, large corporations become sloppy and abusive and senescent, markets will eventually bring them down.
In fact, when government is given power, nominally to correct such imbalances, they tend to use it to protect those in power as often as they do to protect the disenfranchised. Government restrictive licensing of hair dressers, interior designers, and morticians; bailouts of GM, Chrysler, and AIG; corporate welfare to GE and ADM; and use of imminent domain to hand private property to favored real estate developpers -- all are examples of finding government cures for perceived private power imbalances that are worse than the disease.
Isacc Asimov, in a book called Foundation that Paul Krugman recently rated as one of the most influential on his life, related this fable: Once there was a man and a horse, who were both imperiled by a wolf. The man approached the horse, and said that if the horse would put its superior speed at his disposal, he could kill the wolf. And so the horse agreed to take the man's saddle and bridle, and helped the man kill the wolf. The horse said, "great job, now remove your saddle and we can both be free," and the man said "never!"
I hope the moral of the story is clear. In trying to deal with the threat of the wolf, the horse gave the man so much power he became an even bigger threat. So too when we look to government to solve our problems.
Read the whole thing, as they say
"Until then, I know that the old west way of dealing with diversity worked just fine."
Was "a bunch of faggots running around with wedding bands, naked on the streets, poking each other for good measure" a problem that needed to be dealt with very often in the old west?
"Does not the idea that inadvertantly stepping onto some other person’s property by accident, or forced by circumstance giving the land owner the right to kill you give you any pause?"
With all due respect, you don't appear to understand libertarianism very well if that's what you think.
Mary,
Your continued reluctance to offer anything of value makes it hard to respond to you.
I did not say Libertarianism = "might makes right" , in fact, I said the exact opposite. The rude obnoxious unashamed make right and the might gets punished.
"Do not unto others..."? Anyone want to play that game with a Marine? A Mexican crime gang member? Sadomsochist? I think you get my point. Many people in this world are not like you, and have differing levels of "tolerance" for differing events.
and finally
“Your rights end when they infringe upon another’s.”
This is the biggest failure of Libertarianism. Because it is left to every single individual to make up their private culture, "Rights" are just arbitrary man made items that are apt to change over time. Who decides what rights each individual has? I know there seems to be a lower limit in them as in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", but that is just the beginning. To be honest, I personally think the whole idea of libertarianism is really the taking away of our rights and not granting any benefit for those lost rights. I have yet to see a coherent argument for how Libertarianism would allow a cultural group to keep their identity and protect its members from nonphysical assaults from outside groups. If this right and power exists to the group, then why can it no apply at a federal level? And thus, what is the point of libertarianism anyways?
So, feel free to add some substance and articulate to me what rights individuals have, and what rights groups have under the libertarian argument.
Not Sure:
1) Of course not, in the old west they shot them and thus those who might have done so were wise and stayed in the closet like they should.
2) I do understand Libertarianism. Property rights are one of the single highest listed "Rights" Libertarianism has. If you are on my property, I have the right to deal with it as I see fit. If I feel threatened, have I not the right do defend myself and my property? If I live in a society that is significantly diverse, would I not pretty much consider any person whom I am not familiar with to be diverse from me and since they are on my well defined delineated property, and not the part where I welcome guests, I am certainly free to determine that I am under threat and shoot the person. Very very very much libertarian. You just do not understand what you support. Much like the legislators who voted for Obamacare did not understand what they supported.
PS:
Show me a historical society that prospered as a libertarian society. Just one. I will review how it happened and worked out, and if you are correct, I will be converted.
"You just do not understand what you support."
Yeah, that must be it.
You know- the oddest thing is that you seem to be criticizing libertarianism for its support of the right to kill people for some transgression, when you have specifically stated that you want that right for yourself.
No, not at all not sure. it is the criteria in which coercion would be applied. Coercion is everything that includes up to death penalty. The extreme level, but lets just say it is being called to the courthouse to defend yourself and possibly be charged a moderate fine, for doing nothing other than trying to make others leave you alone, even if they are not physically aggressive towards you. At some point, when an unrelenting group of people continually harass you, some steps must be taken to make them stop, if the group will only be stopped by violence, then they become the victims in libertarian society that I see promoted. That is not right, there either has to be the ability to defend your rights without the government stepping in or the government has to defend them, but libertarians will never ever accept the idea that harassment through freedom to assemble and free speech is in fact a stepping upon another individual or group rights.
As you know, you are the "experts" on libertarianism, I am but a humble naive student watching from the sardine seats section. All I know about it is what people write about it, I have never lived it or experienced it or seen where it has successfully ever been implemented. I am sure that since you are such strong believers in it that you are not just taking it on faith alone that it can function in creating a fair, balanced and open environment from which any group of individuals could create a thriving prospering society. Name the dates, name the locations and name the peoples for which this miraculous social structure has been implemented.
Diversity = conflict... = violence.
Tolerance = suffering... = coercion.
Diversity + Tolerance Libertarian utopia without significant coercive powers being brought to bear upon the individual.
"Name the dates, name the locations and name the peoples for which this miraculous social structure has been implemented."
I'm sure you'll find this example wanting, but still...
For most of their journey, travelers on the overland trail to California in the 1840s and 1850s were beyond the reach of the law and its enforcers, the police and the courts. Yet, not only did the law play a large role in life on the trail, it was a law hardly distinguishable from the one the emigrants had left behind. John Phillip Reid demonstrates how seriously overlanders regarded the rights of property and personal ownership when they went west as he explores their diaries, letters, and memoirs, giving an unusually rich and vivid picture of life on the overland trail. For most of their journey, travelers on the overland trail to California in the 1840s and 1850s were beyond the reach of the law and its enforcers, the police and the courts. Yet, not only did the law play a large role in life on the trail, it was a law hardly distinguishable from the one the emigrants had left behind. John Phillip Reid demonstrates how seriously overlanders regarded the rights of property and personal ownership when they went west as he explores their diaries, letters, and memoirs, giving an unusually rich and vivid picture of life on the overland trail.
Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail
Another example of people living together peacefully, without needimg the force of government to keep them in line:
The miners needed no criminal code. It is simply and literally true that there was a short time in California, in 1848, when crime was almost absolutely unknown, when pounds and pints of gold were left unguarded in tents and cabins, or thrown down on the hillside, or handed about through a crowd for inspection. . . .
Men have told me that they have known as much as a wash-basinfulof gold-dust to be left on the table in an open tent while the owners were at work in their claim a mile distant.
Fisher and Holmes quote a writer, Sarah Royce, as saying "I had seen with my own eyes, buckskin purses half full of gold-dust, lying on a rock near the road-side, while the owners were working some distance off. So I was not afraid of robbery." They quote an Idaho attorney of that period who said:
life was safe, property was safe. My first month there I lived in a tent. I have often had in this tent as much as two tons of grub, something in a district so far removed from civilization as this, second only in value to gold. I have tied my tent flap shut in the early morning and returned late at night, day after day, but never have I lost so much as a toothpick.
From Gold rushes and mining camps of the early American West By Vardis Fisher, Opal Laurel Holmes
And if you're going to insist on examples from others, I think it's only fair to request that you provide some evidence of where, exactly, people have been hassled by faggots running around having sex in the streets.
One more, for good measure:
The West during this time often is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private
agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on "keeping order." They soon discovered that "warfare" was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts,etc.) resulted.
https://mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_2.pdf
Not Sure:
Westburo. Nough said... next question...
yes, and those private agencies used coercion and force and even death penalties to get those results. Please tell me that those will be available in the libertarian utopia, then go out and make certain that all your libertarian friends are a-ok with that that. That is pretty much what I was asking for in the whole mess. The ability to use coercive force against others to make certain that they either followed an acceptable to me cultural norm or they remained completely hidden from my life. Was that so hard for you to come forward with? No other libertarian has offered what you just said was available to the old west, which is the basis for what I consider reasonable government. You steal my horse, me and my buddies get together, run you down, and string you up, when the government comes along and asks what happened, we say he infringed upon our property rights and we took care of it, they mossy along to talk to the next group of people. All orderly like.
"yes, and those private agencies used coercion and force and even death penalties to get those results."
Apparently, you didn't read my post:
"These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on “keeping order.” They soon discovered that “warfare” was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts,etc.) resulted."
so I'm afraid I'll have to conclude you didn't persue any of the information included in the links/books referenced.
It appears you've come to the party with your mind made up already- pity.
"Westburo. Nough said."
That's enough for you? Really?
astonerii:
Your original argument on libertarians thinking that people should be allowed to have sex in the streets is not well taken. This construct of yours could only exist under government forces that forced you to accept that the people in the streets have greater liberties than you do. I as well as possibly most libertarians believe in a society where when liberties interfere each individual gives equally of their liberties in mutual agreement without the outside effects of government. The simplest way to think of this society is to think of bubble structure. Think of each persons liberty as a bubble. In low density the bubbles do not interact with each other at the sphere of liberty is unimpeded. It is when bubbles come in contact that a perfect plane is formed neither bubble giving up more than the other. As more bubbles crowd in the more squared your bounds become but no one bubble has to give up more than any of its neighbors. In this example government represents the thin film between the bubbles. A non libertarian government would be like adding a hardening factor to some bubbles but not others. This results in some bubbles with convex intersections with others having concave intersections. IE someone unjustly has to give up more liberty.
For a more human example think of a man with a gun. In the wild completely away from any other person the man can shoot the gun in any direction he wants and no one gets hurt. Once the man gets within range of another man with a gun the laws of liberty would say that either man can shoot their gun in any direction they want except at each other. If either man does not like this new restriction on their liberty they are free to move sufficiently far away to be out of range again. To bring this argument into the dense city consider the same man with a gun in an apartment building. Not knowing if discharging this weapon could strike someone outside of the apartment one would first think that their liberty to shoot the gun has been completely removed. This is not the case. The man now has two choices. First he could move out to an open space where the weapon can be discharged in one or more directions (firing range or wilderness). Second he could line the bounds of his apartment with a bullet proof material. The bubble of his liberty in the apartment has been completely squared off but still exists. A true libertarian would allow these choices. A libertarian government would only impose when one individual bursts another individuals bubble. IE the bullet escaping the apartment. Whether or not it actually hits someone else is irrelevant to anything but the punishment for the level of destruction of liberty. The liberty of the neighbor was lost even if they were not home because the liberty of living in a safe environment has been lost.
Back to your people having sex in the streets. This goes back to neighbors having a mutually agreed upon equal loss of liberty. By your own statements you have not agreed upon the loss of the liberty to raise your children in a moral environment. Now the question comes down to resolution of the situation. The libertarian government lets the individuals try to work out a solution on their own to bring the balance of liberty back. Failing that it is for the government by the people to determine where the balance should lie. A proper libertarian government would review the status of liberty prior to the transgression. Was this a neighborhood where people have always been having sex in the streets? Or did these people just move to town recently. Did you just recently have kids and decide that the long practiced behavior is no longer suitable for your family? The government should decide in such a manner that the newly imposed liberty is not given more weight than those that previously existed. This is the old story of the new guy that moves next to the airport and complains about the noise. Many solutions exist including the people having sex in the streets agreeing to limit their activity to certain times of day or to certain blocks or one party or the other moving away. Societies need to allow for changes to their composition without destroying the basis on which they were founded. After all maybe after a while the people having sex in the streets become parents and decide that they don't want to expose their kids to such behavior anymore.
Well to those whom spelling is most important I have corrected everything underlined above. Hope this satisfies you.
To the other libertarians out there I hope I have done justice to the libertarian argument.
What would you define as "warfare" Not Sure? Of course criminals in a lawless part of the country would find themselves at the receiving end of private justice. Suppose those gold miners caught a thief who heard about all the unattended gold? Chances he'd be hung. I doubt Libertarians would ever argue that there'd be no private force rather private force would be personal rather than include all taxpayers.
You argued that the old west way of doing things worked fine. I agree with you. You just are myopic in what you want to see happening in the old west. It was not just simply law enforcement officials who kept the peace going in the old west. As you stated, it was hired non governmental groups. It was also posse's formed on the fly and it also included as needed vigilantism. Without all of them working together, the wild west was, well wild. Now, the hired non governmental groups had the ability to shoot wanted men if they chose not to come in peaceably, did they not? Of course they did, just as did any individual who was chasing someone who had just committed a crime against them.
At the time someone is infringing on your rights, are you supposed to sit back and wait for the government or their non governmental agents to come in put thing right straight away. Do you think that would be a good direction to take? You miss the massive tracts of the problem with your version of a good government, you focus on a single silly statement, the faggots running the street. Oh boy, your such a grown up and talented debater there. You understand the argument I make, and you understand that at present it would be considered an exaggeration, but not an impossibility under your rules of what is legal and not legal under libertarianism, particularly considering that a city which is highly libertarian, although called liberal, already has faggots roaming the streets naked, and acting out the sex instead of actually having the sex right on the street. I know it is hard for you to imagine, but now think of a society that could not imprison these degenerates if they progressed that one last very tiny little step to actually performing sodomy right on the street in front of a family business. Gee, pretty hard to follow. Glad to see we got strong thinkers around here who can look at current events, current trends, factual evidence which is widely known and put it all together to say, nope, nothing there in your argument, there are no faggots running the street sodomizing each other, never has been, so your argument is false.
Your argument will not work on me not because my mind is made up, but because your argument is not persuasive, all the history of mankind from first written knowledge to present viewed knowledge condemns your argument as false, and you have not shown a single instance of a society where the Libertarianism you are talking about IMPOSING on people has ever existed for one and successfully produced a thriving prosperous culture for two. The old west only thrived because of two things, and it was not libertarianism and freedom, it was usable resources and a nearly homogenous culture of people. Where there were no resources, there was no people, where there were diverse cultures there were gunfights, until one side won and the other was dead or retreated. While the whole of the wild west was not Homogenous, the individual communities were. There was no non coerced diversity of cultures present and there was no freedom to chose your own moral code and get away with it. When you did have individuals do this, what you got was an entire community up in arms producing posse after posse to first chase the degenerate out of town, and if that did not work chase the degenerate down and imprison, and if that still did not work the degenerate was likely to be soon found dead. That pretty much kept the degenerates either dead, someplace else, or in the closet.
By the way, "the group remained in action for three months, swelling its membership to more than eight thousand.
[pg]15 AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT IN ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
During this period, San Francisco had only two murders, compared with more than a hundred in the six months before the committee was formed." Pretty much sums up my argument, not yours. It is the coercive power of the many and the homogeneity that comes about from that coercive power that results in peace and tranquility. I am not looking for a killing field world. If you read my arguments of people having the power to kill those intruding on their rights as such, then that is your personal bias, not my problem. When people know they can be killed by the other people around them, particularly without repercussion against the killer, they will tend to not step on the others toes, they will conform to accepted norms, or honestly try if those norms are foreign to them. We all know that getting along creates prosperity, but what is required to get along? That would be missing from Libertarian law, as libertarianism is the unshackling of the individual from the binds of the conformity required to get along, and what of those who want that conformity, why they are made to be the bad person worthy of government coercive power to keep from forcing others to fit into their society.
If there is too much here for you to digest, and you have locked onto just a single sentence to bark about, then I am pretty much through replying to you, as you will have shown yourself to be more a troll than a debater.
peter:
That is a good start, and a good argument. So, laws are passed in the neighborhood and enforced? What level of power to prevent infringements that the community agrees upon may the community execute to ensure that the laws are obeyed. Basically, some people simply are not going to take no as an answer to their desired activity when they are told that they live in a libertarian society where people can choose any activity they want, and maybe they were even born in that city and decided a rebellious lifestyle was for them. This is where my concern comes in, if the government is sufficiently libertarian, would it not side with the individual against the community? What prevents it from doing so?
>> Maybe my argument is not perfect.
It's ludicrous. Your personal emphasis on its quality is vastly overrated.
And, as far as your societal arms suggestion goes, RAH already suggested much of what you say in his very first novel, "Beyond This Horizon" back around 1942. Not his best but many of the features you speak of are certainly a part of it. It also lies behind his argument, "An Armed Society is a Polite Society". I don't fully agree with its premises, but there are some nice seeds of useful societal measures in it.
>> I did not say Libertarianism = “might makes right” , in fact, I said the exact opposite. The rude obnoxious unashamed make right and the might gets punished.
“Do not unto others…”? Anyone want to play that game with a Marine? A Mexican crime gang member? Sadomsochist? I think you get my point. Many people in this world are not like you, and have differing levels of “tolerance” for differing events.
Your concepts of what "the average person wants" show a remarkable personal attitude of "let me get away with anything, and I'll try to do it". In other words, you're saying not that the AVERAGE joe can't handle freedom. You're saying YOU can't handle freedom. Most people just want to be left alone to do the small piddly sh-- that is the majority of life. The stuff like raising your kids, mowing the lawn, and spending the 4th with the family. Just because a small percentage want to mow the lawn at 4am in the morning does not invalidate the precept that MOST people grasp the idea that consideration for others is at the heart of society.
"Have you been out in the real world? Where do you find consideration for others?"
Yeah, you're right there -- the question that exists here is, "is this a product of the breakdown of society or is this in the nature of all humans?"
I believe it's the latter. The lack of general consideration today is a product of the breakdown in social mores. It's NOT a self-generating artifact of human nature applicable to all humans in (almost all) places and times. MOST humans, when raised well, understand that with freedom comes responsibility (there's that NASTY 'r' word).
The freedom to stand up and yell "FIRE!" goes hand-in-hand with the responsibility to not do so.
The freedom to mow your lawn when you feel like it goes hand-in-hand with the responsibility to recognize the natural desire of your neighbors to not be awoken at 4am in the morning by same.
"Well, if there are any failures, then the system itself above is bad and can't work".
Oh, bite me. Here you're using a typical libtard trick of attempting to claim absolute perfectionism in all systems except that which you support. Just because it DOES require police and it DOES require some degree of interventionism does not mean the system does not work at all. Not only do you confuse, conflate, and intermix the concept of libertarianism with anarchism (the latter being the notions behind libertarianism taken to ridiculous and preposterous extremes), you hold what DOES happen to a far higher standard of acceptable error and/or failure than your own position rates.
>>> "if they progressed that one last very tiny little step to actually performing sodomy right on the street in front of a family business."
See para immediately above.
I provide the reader with a list of fallacies
I believe we can rig up a game of "Bingo!" based on people reading what you've argued in this thread and looking for the fallacious elements in every sentence combined with its antecedents. There should be more than one winner by the time the reader reaches the final thread comment.
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society:
It only takes 1 bad person to ruin a perfect society, not a majority and not all. Particularly a society that will refuse to defend its own identity.
People live amongst others under limited circumstances, if those are not met, then they fight amongst each other. The diverse society requires coercive activity to prevent the fighting. As a society moves towards homogeneity, coercive forces are reduced. As a society moves toward absolute diversity it moves towards absolute coercion to remain in tact. Thus, the whole idea of a society based on mutual respect of the rights of others where the others are allowed wide variations in their "culture" where the government form is based upon all "culture" to be equivalent by force of law, is bull excrement. I think a few pretty much identical to what Coyote is proposing countries in Europe are starting to find this all out. A few years of "diversity" in an open equivalent culture has shown that the kind gentle nice majority of the country can be run roughshod over by a small minority of outsider diversity groups. That those groups tend to dominate the other groups, despite being minorities, and do to this domination, those of the other groups being attacked end up joining the minority group in order to regain power lost in the relationship. Thus, a single bad person, allowed to run roughshod through a society will gain a follower, and they will gain two more followers, and more, until the good society that was there, becomes the extinct society that was.
The culture that is the United States of America is the culmination of 4000 years of human learning, some handed down thousands of years through oral, and then the literature of the last 2500 years. Those societies thrived and grew and left a lasting legacy because they kept their identity, learned from their lives, and applied that learning to their culture and embraced it, while keeping out and discarding failed cultural ideals. Our founding fathers were some of the most learned humanists the world had ever known, gaining knowledge from all the societies up til that time, and they debated many long decades over the meaning of those cultures. What allowed them to thrive, what caused them to fail. Diversity is the driving factor behind the failure of many of the great societies of history. Our nation is founded on diversity, but it is not what many claim that diversity to be. Our diversity is the diversity of the origins of the ideals that come together to create the overall homogenous culture we had until 60 to 70 years past. Since that homogeneity has been broken, our society has been steadily declining with the cultural decay.
Hi
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Source: Police cover letter
Best rgs
Peter
It's simple: if they recognize that authority figures are certainly going to be irrational in a certain area, they will try to limit authority in that area. Parents often live in denial about their teenage kids' sexuality, so liberals don't trust them to make good decisions about their daughters' pregnancies. (Neither do I when the relationship is already so bad the daughter will try to keep a pregnancy secret.) A good part of Congress and most state legislatures is either irrational about sex in general, or pandering to Bible-thumping nuts, so they don't want to allow them to legislate anything on the topic. (As for violence in movies and TV, judging by what their compatriots in Great Britain have done, many American liberals would be just fine with banning it, if they saw any way of doing that without enabling Bible-belt congressman and other flag-waving dolts to ban anything remotely sexual, critical of Christianity, or critical of American military policies.)
The only mystery is how they can miss the irrationality and corruption of legislative decision making in other areas.