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Has libertarianism ever been tried in the real world?

leftysergeant said:
Bull flops. The only reason it would be in anybody's legitimate interest to employ children would be that there is more work to be done than there are people to do the work.
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While they may be outliers, I believe there were industries that employed children because children were a better fit for the job than adults.
 
Ziggurat said:
Indeed, it is not, because production is not a fixed quantity. But tell me: what do you think the effect of preventing work is on production?
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Non-market intervention doesn't all prevent work. Some of it facilitates work (trade) that adds value by itself but which would not occur in the absence of the intervention. You must know this already.
 
Francesca R said:
Non-market intervention doesn't all prevent work. Some of it facilitates work (trade) that adds value by itself but which would not occur in the absence of the intervention. You must know this already.
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[sarcasm] No! You must have no clue how businesses and the economy works to even suggest such a thing![/sarcasm]
 
EGarrett said:
Corporations don't have the power to enact force on the population, the government does. If a corporation goes corrupt and starts doing dastardly things like making phony products and so on, they'll be punished by the government and also will lose their customers and go out of business. If the government goes corrupt and starts doing dastardly things...we're in deep trouble.
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Unfarmiliar with the idea of a Bannana Republic I see. The libertarians dream, all the privately owned infarstructure, no labor laws the works. The ideal society really.
 
Ziggurat said:
Libertarians oppose such laws because they don't think they do serve the greater good. Do you really think that if child labor laws were repealed in the US, we'd see factories staffed by children popping up? Do you think that no other factors stand in the way of such an outcome besides child labor laws?
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So such laws were needed but because we might no longer need them they were always wrong?
 
Ziggurat said:
It's arguably been tried in lots of places but never achieved. But it doesn't matter: attempts to get to communism, pure or not, always result in not only failure, but massive death as well.
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And why don't you apply the same logic to the reason why we have all these labor laws and such? Because we tried it with out them, and unlike the utopia that it is supposted to have been it really really sucked.
 
EGarrett said:
Well, as I understand it...libertarians have their own ideas about how the problems created by child labor would be minimized or stopped.
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Of course, they think that the free market will solve it like it solves everything else.
 
Ziggurat said:
Since almost nobody (and certainly not libertarians) thinks that now, I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. If your only point is that "property rights" doesn't fully specify what we're talking about, then you would be quite correct. Beyond that, I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.
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You brought up the idea that some property was naturally scarce and some artificially so. So yes, I'd agree that the definition of property isn't something that goes without saying. I think anything that isn't anarchy is a form of artificial scarcity. (Otherwise, it's just determined by who's strongest.)

My overall point is that Libertarianism portrays itself as some sort of natural system when it is not. For the most part a truly hands-off market driven system would be as unthinkable as actual anarchy.

So what determines the degree of government intervention that is allowed in Libertarianism?

What about it? Nothing about libertarianism categorically prevents governments from owning property.
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But doesn't public property get at the issue of "natural" vs. artificial scarcity?
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GreNME said:
All too often, once the governance angle of the Libertarian philosophy is pinned down (or cornered), "the market" begins popping up as if it were an answer to many of society's problems, usually with the implication that government intervention has slowed down progress socially as well as economically.
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Well said.

I think there's plenty of evidence that what's good for business (or markets) isn't always socially good. And the invisible hand of the market isn't going to resolve many of the problems we face.
 
ponderingturtle said:
And why don't you apply the same logic to the reason why we have all these labor laws and such?
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You have no actual basis upon which to conclude I do not.

Because we tried it with out them, and unlike the utopia that it is supposted to have been it really really sucked.
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As if the only difference between then and now was laws. Sorry, but there's a rather obvious and gaping hole in your logic right there.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
You brought up the idea that some property was naturally scarce and some artificially so.
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All physical property is naturally scarce. Intellectual property is not.

So what determines the degree of government intervention that is allowed in Libertarianism?
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Ask a libertarian. I'm not actually one.

But doesn't public property get at the issue of "natural" vs. artificial scarcity?
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No. Why would you think that? Public property is pretty much always physical property, which is always scarce. Perhaps you misunderstand my use of the term. In this context, "scarce" doesn't mean that there is very little of it, it means that there is a limited amount of it, whether that limit is large or small.
 
Ziggurat said:
All physical property is naturally scarce.
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Unless it's salt water. ;)
Intellectual property is not.
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Good ideas are in short supply. (Good includes the characteristic of implementable, in this usage.)

I don't think that every brain fart deserves the title "intellectual property" any more than George Carlin thinks every ejaculation deserves a name. :cool:

DR
 
Darth Rotor said:
Good ideas are in short supply.
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Depends on what you mean by that. It may be hard to make a new good idea, but once a good idea has been created, it can be reproduced without limit. Therefore it is not scarce, except artificially.
 
Darth Rotor said:
What Libertarians do this? :confused:.0
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What libertarian's don't oppose labor laws and other regulations that "interfere" with the free market?

Why would child labor not be one of them? They just want a government that maintains roads, law enforcement and the military, right?

If you can make a case for child labor laws under Libertarianism, I suppose you can make a case for, well, virtually all of the other regulations, too.
 
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