Mr. Scott
Under the Amazing One's Wing
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That's the best you've got? Tantrum acknowledged.
My micro-rant against Libertarianism
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That's the best you've got? Tantrum acknowledged.
citizenzen
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I see human productivity as a bell curve. There are outliers that will never be able to measure up ... either by some physical or mental incapacity, or simply because they lack initiative. When you have a population that numbers into the millions, those outliers will comprise a sizable number of people.
My question for libertarians is what do you propose we do about those people?
As a liberal, I'm happy to see some of my taxes and national resources used to provide these people with an existence. Of course there is a balancing point between rewarding laziness and providing a minimal existence. I wish I was smart enough to know where that point lies. But I prefer to err on the side of providing for people, rather than casting them into the streets to fend for themselves.
How do libertarians see it? What is their solution for dealing with the poor and destitute?
My question for libertarians is what do you propose we do about those people?
As a liberal, I'm happy to see some of my taxes and national resources used to provide these people with an existence. Of course there is a balancing point between rewarding laziness and providing a minimal existence. I wish I was smart enough to know where that point lies. But I prefer to err on the side of providing for people, rather than casting them into the streets to fend for themselves.
How do libertarians see it? What is their solution for dealing with the poor and destitute?
davefoc
Philosopher
I think of myself as a moderate libertarian, both on social issues and economic issues. However, I think SG's idea that property rights is a complicated issue that libertarians oversimplify is correct.
Libertarians often ignore third party consequences of transactions because they don't fit well with their theories. I think they also overlook the reality that as population density increases the impact of what one does on the property that he "owns" become much more significant. The large building in a residential neighborhood that SG mentioned can impact its neighbors in many ways. It can block the sun from a neighbor, if it is used for a business it can attract traffic to an otherwise quiet neighborhood, it can generate noise and smells if its used as a manufacturing business, it can certainly be ugly and detract from the overall aesthetic appeal of the neighborhood, and if it is built improperly it can collapse and injure people in the neighborhood.
It seems pretty clear to me that laws are necessary to control these kind of things and those laws impinge on individual liberties something that a libertarian might not like. If the libertarian feels all that bad about those laws, at least in the US, he can go buy a chunk of isolated land for not that much money and for practical purposes do what he feels like because there's nobody around to care. But if he wants to live near other people there will be rules and just because he owns a piece of property in some sense doesn't mean that it gets to do whatever he wants with it or on it.
Kid Eager
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Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but I have trouble understanding the doctrinal aspects of libertarianism as indicated by libertarian posters (e.g. freedom=good, government=largest procurer of violence in your neighbourhood etc etc). Whilst it's great at advocating individual rights and freedoms, it doesn't appear to like the idea of individual or collective responsibilities.
davefoc
Philosopher
Speaking as someone who considers myself a moderate libertarian I think often times government policies in net are bad because the harm from the unintended consequences exceeds the benefits. When I put forth the notion that the US military expenditures had gone way beyond what was in the country's interest to my father who is a partisan Republican one of his arguments was that military spending created jobs. This is of course true. People that are building bombs have jobs and the government created them by buying bombs. But in net is it true? How many jobs were lost when the government generated revenues by taxing people who didn't spend the money as a result and thereby didn't create the jobs they would have if they had if they hadn't been taxed to make bombs. My guess is that probably more jobs were lost when the government taxed people to get the money to buy its bombs than were created when the government used the money to buy bombs.
In fact, I think the unintended consequences of a great deal of government interference in the marketplace are more damaging than the benefits the economy and the country gets from that government interference. Similarly it is possible to look at things like anti-drug laws and make a reasoned guess that the net effect of those laws is negative. A libertarian is somebody that has gotten caught up with the logic of this kind of reasoning and that chooses to ignore important problems with it in the extremes and he forms an opinion that all government intervention in the economy is bad. Maybe a driver for the opinion is an almost religious belief in the righteousness of individual liberty above other issues.
For what it is worth, I think a lot of time is spent bashing libertarians on this forum. As I think libertarians are wrong about a lot of stuff I'm not particularly uncomfortable with it, but I'm not quite sure what drives it. Not all libertarians believe exactly the same thing. In the time that I've been participating in this forum I've noticed only one person (shanek) that might qualify as a libertarian by everybody's definition. There are a lot of individuals that have views similar to mine on this forum that might be called moderate libertarians. And if the point of these threads is to bash even those people that is fine except before the bashing begins it would be better if the views of these people that they are being bashed for were defined. As it is, these kind of threads usually take on some sort of group think libertarians are bad motif without ever getting too specific on what it is about them that is bad.
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citizenzen
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Personally, i agree with you. While I'd love to engage in a conversation and achieve a better understanding about libertarian philosophy, other people are scaring them away.
Sometimes I can't tell if people come here to discuss, or whether they're just looking for someone to abuse.
Mr. Scott
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Imagine if the metal and labor used to make bombs was instead used to make bridges.
My counter is that in the long term, the bombs are waste. They produce nothing for the country that makes them. Unless the bombs are used, it's akin to paying people to run in squirrel cages. Compare that to government sponsored jobs to build infrastructure, for example, that make our society more efficient: Railroads that make commuting less expensive; Renewable energy; Roads and bridges that cut down on transportation costs; Preventing disasters and helping clean them up. Anything for the common good that individuals and corporations are too selfish to cooperate to provide.
Well thought out, these kinds of government jobs can snowball to make an ever more productive economy. E.g. Japan and Germany, forbidden from military buildup after WWII, thrashed the USA in consumer markets in the decades thereafter, while we spent billions on symbolic domino-theory wars, a-bombs, missile defense, etc.
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davefoc
Philosopher
Yes, an infrastructure project is probably more beneficial to a country than a project to build bombs to the citizens of a country assuming that the bombs weren't necessary for defense.
But there are significant downsides to infrastructure projects also. These are also often justified with the notion that they create jobs and they can if the infrastructure leads to greater productivity in the society. However they do not in net create jobs directly as is often assumed. The money that is required to build these infrastructure projects is taken from people who would have otherwise spent the money they lost on something that they wanted and that would probably have created more jobs than the infrastructure project that took place in lieu of their personal spending. Government financing of the infrastructure project reduces jobs because many times government spending is driven politically and workers are paid more than they would be if it wasn't a government project and there are more hands out in the process so many time political cronies get the contracts to build these infrastructure projects and cronies make more money than contractors competing for private compensation. So in net jobs are created but less jobs are created than were destroyed by the infrastructure project. This is not to say all infrastructure projects are bad. I think a lot of them are very worthwhile. But I think infrastructure projects should be justified by the benefits that they provide and not the employment that they created directly.
I think the country is facing a very serious problem right now. Eight years of Republican governance that radically raised borrowing and crony driven spending has been followed by two years of Democratic governance that believes driving up government spending to create short term spikes in jobs is beneficial. The governance of both parties is horribly flawed and unsustainable, IMHO. The economy of the US has been steadily declining for at least 10 years and there is no political leadership that seems likely that will turn this around.
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Mr. Scott
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Agreed re. the pork barrel. Only worthwhile projects need apply. I'm reminded of the "bridge to nowhere"
davefoc
Philosopher
I'm the kind of moderate libertarian that shares some of your views. I support some programs that are designed to transfer wealth. However a lot of the liberal agenda is about things that seem to be a good idea but may not be because of the unintended consequences.
At first glance it seems pretty easy to solve a lot of society's problems. Farmers aren't making enough money, easy just have the government raise the minimum price of food commodities and the farmers will make more money and everybody will be happy. Well not quite, the higher price causes more farmers to produce more crops which leads to a surplus. OK so the government will just buy up the surplus and store it right? Except then the government begins incurring massive storage costs. OK, let's just have the government dump the surplus in foreign countries, they'll be happy because they get cheap food right? Yes except that then causes their own sources of food production to become uneconomic and the country becomes a basket case dependent on foreign food. OK, then maybe the solution is to just pay the farmers to grow less food. All right except the people that are most in the position to profit are wealthy people with lots of land so now the government is paying rich people to drive the cost of food up for poor people. And yet this program started out with such good intentions.
Another example: the government thinks some workers aren't making enough money. It seems like there's an easy solution to that problem. Just pass some special interest union legislation so that some workers can force their wages well above market wages. Everybody's happy right? No harm done. Some workers are making more money and the companies they work for are making a little less profit. Nobody's going to shed a tear over that arrangement are they? Except over time if the company is to stay in business it needs to open up plants other places so that it isn't saddled with anti-competitive above market wages. Except somebody gets a bee in their bonnet that they don't like that and they aren't going to allow the company to just move to some place so they can pay less wages, so the company gradually becomes weaker from foreign competition and from competition within the US from places that pay lower wages and the company fails and the location where it manufactured its products is devastated because the jobs have been moving elsewhere. That of course is exactly what happened in Detroit, but the belief in special interest union legislation is so deeply rooted in the US that people won't acknowledge the problem. In fact, the government transferred billions of dollars to save the unions into Detroit. Of course, this kind of idea isn't remotely sustainable. The government doesn't have the resources to provide all the workers in the US with lots of free money but it does have enough resources to bail out the best politically connected of the workers and that's what it did in Detroit.
There are many other liberal ideas that sound good at first glance. Rent is too high? Simple just pass some laws that limit it. Workers need health insurance and that's expensive. Just pass a law that makes it so companies need to provide health insurance. What's wrong with that. It's not like having the companies pay for it out of their profits could have any unintended consequences? Except that to keep insurance costs down companies begin to discriminate against older workers and their higher health costs. Ah you say. we'll just pass another law to make it so companies don't discriminate against older workers. And then to enforce that law sort of we'll create a big bureaucracy, but it doesn't really work because it's very hard to figure out when a company is really discriminating against older workers.
At the root of the great liberal mythology about economics is the idea that companies are great stable entities with profits that can be endlessly mined without consequences so whatever particular thing that a liberal thinks would be nice can just be achieved by imposing a requirement for it on business. This is of course not true. And eventually the costs of these cool ideas begin to build up and business is weakened to point that its ability to function as a golden goose is destroyed. We are at that point in the US. The competitiveness of our businesses is in serious decline. We have been fooling ourselves for about ten years that what is being done is working. It's not. The opportunities for young people dwindle every year. The rate of genuine new business formation declines every year. Things are bad and they are getting worse and we are saddled with two political parties that are so caught up in trying to gain political advantage that neither party will act in the interest of the citizens of the US.
What's the social contract? Is it a document? Have you signed it? Has anyone ever seen it?
Who wrote the social contract? Where did it come from? When was it ratified?
Is it a metaphysical idea? What evidence is there that the social contract exists?
Who wrote the social contract? Where did it come from? When was it ratified?
Is it a metaphysical idea? What evidence is there that the social contract exists?
Mr. Scott
Under the Amazing One's Wing
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If you want to learn about it, you can read Social Contract Theory but I think you are just making the point that the whole idea does not deserve any respect and that you reserve the right to screw anyone you wish as long as you feel you can get away with it.
Am I reading you correctly?
It's a philosophy, a way to conduct yourself in society, and there's plenty of evidence society is better when people respect it. John Edwards, Sylvia Browne, Uri Gellar and their ilk are top tier violators of the social contract: Liars and con artists out to screw people for their advantage even if no specific laws are being broken. My outrage about these types is a big reason why I support the JREF, and I am sure it's a prime motivator for Randi himself.
The social contract is a very well established idea. It's about not being a selfish bastard, and cooperating and being nice, so that everyone is happier and you don't get shunned, even if there's no specific law involved. It's the implied agreement that "I'll be nice to you if you'll be nice to me," then everyone is nice, instead of everyone is out to screw each other. Life is just better for everyone if the social contract is upheld.
Point by point:
Q: What's the social contract? A: Implied agreement to be nice to each other and not try and screw each other at every opportunity.
Q: Is it a document? Have you signed it? Has anyone ever seen it? A: No.
Q: Who wrote the social contract? Where did it come from? When was it ratified? A: There's good evidence it arose naturally and this is supported by observation of animal behavior. It's not "ratified," it's understood.
Q: Is it a metaphysical idea? A: No.
Q: What evidence is there that the social contract exists? A: Nature.
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citizenzen
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Those programs were enacted largely in response to the Great Depression, when 25% Americans made their living off of agriculture, compared to less than 2% today. I could certainly see where the vastly changed conditions from then to today would warrant re-examination and revision of these programs ... as government has through the years.
When President Barack Obama formally unveiled his $4 trillion deficit reduction recommendations to the bipartisan “super committee”, it included a cut of $33 billion dollars in agricultural subsidies and programs.
It's interesting that the two examples you've provided had their origins in economic crises that the government was attempting to prevent from becoming full collapse. What would you rather do ... nothing at all? Are these practices sustainable? No. But they aren't intended to be.
No. It is, I suspect, a straw man argument. Please cite the liberal sources who you say have perpetuated these ideas. I'd love to see some examples.
And that's where you'd be wrong. It's the workers who've taken the brunt of the economic hit. Corporate profits are at an all-time high.
From the New York Times, November 23, 2010 ...
Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.
That hardly sounds like decline to me.
AlBell
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http://chronicle.com/article/The-Anatomy-of-Influence/129688/
It's been clear from the early 70's that people are not rational.
davefoc
Philosopher
I agree and when it is accompanied by something that looks sustainable in the overall economy I'll admit I was wrong. However, unemployment and underemployment remains high. The government continues to mortgage the future to compensate for spending in excess of what it takes in and a large college bubble seems to building where people graduating from college are not finding professional jobs.
I believe the US economy is not just struggling through a routine recession, it is encumbered with long term structural problems that become worse every year. As a resident and citizen of the US I would be quite happy to be wrong, especially for my daughters that are just beginning to make their independent way in the world, but also for my larger family and acquaintances that often struggle with long term unemployment.
Fortunately (I suppose) I'm one of the older crowd that now enjoys a greater wealth advantage over young folks coming along than at any time in history. I suppose it was a pretty good deal for us, we lived through a time when the government borrowed massive amounts of money to pretend that everything was OK and now we will sit back and let the next generation deal with it while we live on the income from our capital, pensions, and social security.
davefoc
Philosopher
Government programs designed to transfer wealth are of two types:
1. Programs that are funded by taxing people and redistributing the government revenues either directly to people or by funding services for them.
2. Programs that aim to redistribute wealth by imposing regulations on the participants in the marketplace.
I think the first kind are fine. I might not always agree with every program and I might be concerned a bit more than some about the unintended consequences of them but they are an honest straightforward way to move wealth from some of the most fortunate to the some of the least fortunate. There are even exceptions to this though. For instance the US drug plan was pretty clearly cooked up largely to enrich drug companies and secondarily to gain support from old people who were happy to get free and price subsidized drugs regardless of the crony driven nature of the program.
The second kind are often very problematic. They undoubtedly help some in the target group but is the net effect when the unintended consequences are taken into account beneficial to the country? My view is that in most cases they aren't. Yes, a lot of people make more money when the government chose to pass special interest union laws. But what has been the net effect of driving wages above market? One effect is that there is less money for other workers so that other workers make less money as they need to compete for a smaller pool of dollars to employ people. But the greatest problem as been the distortion in the labor marketplace that they cause. Companies become uncompetitive as their labor rules and compensation become outsized. This leads to collapse and transference of manufacturing to other states and to other countries. I don't expect to convince you of any of this, especially in a few paragraphs and I probably won't continue to participate in this thread. People that believe that pro union legislation is a good thing will probably believe it to the day they die even when confronted with the disastrous effects of the pro-union legislation they will rationalize some excuse about why it wasn't really the unions fault.
Other ideas that liberals often seem to like that are of what I called type two are efforts to interfere in the market by setting prices. Workers don't make enough, pass minimum wage laws, renters pay too much pass rent control laws, farmers don't make enough, set minimum farm commodity prices. Unbeknown to most of the people that favor these kind of things is that there are consequences that they don't anticipate from this kind of messing about with the free market and often time the harm of those consequences substantially outweigh the benefits.
As an aside, I really don't like my use of the word liberal above. I am, by the standards of my Republican partisan family members and some friends of mine, a liberal. It is an ambiguous term and I used it here to represent a self identified group of people that tend to favor some of the ideas that I disagreed with above.
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I want to add to what you are saying here.
Because of the evidence in biology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other fields of study, I would take it a step further and say that the Social Contract is more than just a well established idea, it is entirely an biological phenomenon with a lot of empirical evidence. As you know, we are hard-wired to trust each other, and the people who take advantage of others at the expense of other people and society in general are usually cut off (or we attempt to).
If you think about it, the same thing happens in your body; your cells cooperate with each other so that you live (their/your DNA is passed on). The principles in which cells evolved to cooperate and form multicellular organisms are the same principles in which animals cooperate.
In your body, when a cell becomes selfish and uses most of the resources for itself, we call it cancer.
Mr. Scott
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Yes! Also, in game theory, we have the prisoner's dilemma and its optimal strategy tit-for-tat, so there's even mathematical proof of the value of the social contract.
davefoc
Philosopher
I'm not sure if this was directed partially at me, but if so, it wasn't directed at the right guy. I agree with this kind of thinking and I think it is reasonable to tax people to pay for infrastructure and I think it's reasonable to tax people to fund programs that redistribute wealth like welfare or provide for the general good.
My arguments have been about how to accomplish this and why I think some government programs that appear to be helpful with respect to the goal of wealth redistribution are when all the consequences are taken into account in balance more harmful than good.
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