Libertarianism and natural disasters

[Beerina]

On the other hand, there's a reason why Ayn Rand had to use fiction to express her philosophy: there are no real-world situations in which it works.

...he says, typing on a machine created by capitalists into a network that's had trillions pumped into it by capitalists, turning it from a quaint little thing on life support into an ungodly high-speed, massive tool. Comcast, or maybe AT&T is now running ads to abandon your old, slow T1 and equivalent lines to your house, which has been the gold standard of individual delivery for 20+ years.

According to this line of thought, we shouldn't buy insurance in "daily life" because we only need it in an emergency.

I don't follow this. She said you don't base every day rules on emergency situations, not that it wasn't wise to buy (catastrophic) insurance.

But in any case, government is extremely useful in all sorts of "daily life" issues.

For instance, I'm glad that I can pay a pittance of tax to have inspectors make sure restaurants are clean. There's no way I (and every other patron) could do that on my own.

Don't go to restaurants that make people sick. Note restaurants have failures, anyway.

In any case, the OP is asking specifically about the risks of overly decentralized government (or no government) in case of national emergency.

One does not have to believe that daily life should be lived as if we actually were in a state of emergency in order for that question to be seriously considered, because national emergencies do arise from time to time, and when they do, they're real bears.

Most certainly. However, this post is in the rhetorical context of showing Libertarianism as "invalid" by bringing up what is supposedly the reduction ad absurdum of what would happen in an emergency situation, "and therefore" it's false and inapplicable to every day life, which is a crock.

 

[hgc]

Don't go to restaurants that make people sick. Note restaurants have failures, anyway.

So, you're seriously advocating that government not inspect restaurants, and not have the power to shut them down when they violate health standards?

This is why libertarianism (of this extreme) is incompatible with human desires. The reason for civilized society is the structure of security, stability and predictability it provides in our lives. People want to eat out without getting sick. They want that predictability of the stability of their gastric health. The abstract concept of "individual liberty" that would allow a restauranteur to operate in a way likely to sicken customers, with no prior restraint, is of little interest.

 

[SezMe]

Don't go to restaurants that make people sick. Note restaurants have failures, anyway.

I assume you follow your own suggestions. So how do you know if a local restaurant some friends invited you to meet them at is safe? Call the neighbors? Put a notice in Craigs List? Read last Sunday's obits? Start a thread on the JREF forums? Just how, practically speaking, would you put your own advice into practice?

 

[WildCat]

Are there libertarians out there who think the govenment has no role to play in natural disasters?

 

[Piggy]

...he says, typing on a machine created by capitalists into a network that's had trillions pumped into it by capitalists, turning it from a quaint little thing on life support into an ungodly high-speed, massive tool. Comcast, or maybe AT&T is now running ads to abandon your old, slow T1 and equivalent lines to your house, which has been the gold standard of individual delivery for 20+ years.

True, but Rand did not propote capitalism, she promoted objectivism, which is pure fantasy.

The reason I have all of these things at my disposal, and so many others do too, is because of a pretty good balance between free-market capitalism and centralized government with regulatory authority and the responsibility for taking on certain important functions which the private sector is not particularly good at handling.

That said, we just had a rampant free market, rife with abuse because it was given too much leash, drive us into a global recession, and we seem to be unable to curb climate change because we have no centralized authority able to address a problem like that.

 

[Piggy]

Don't go to restaurants that make people sick.

I cannot imagine a more inefficient system (regardless of the moral implications, which are pretty clear here).

 

[Piggy]

Most certainly. However, this post is in the rhetorical context of showing Libertarianism as "invalid" by bringing up what is supposedly the reduction ad absurdum of what would happen in an emergency situation, "and therefore" it's false and inapplicable to every day life, which is a crock.

No, it doesn't.

What it does is to demonstrate that libertarianism, if followed, would leave us vulnerable to rare-but-devastating problems that it has no means of addressing.

Of course, it would also lead to a host of short-term problems, but that's another argument.

 

[Cleon]

Are there libertarians out there who think the govenment has no role to play in natural disasters?

Given the hyper-minimal state that libertarians want to keep the size and budget of government, I question whether the government would be able to do anything.

 

[Chaos]

Given the hyper-minimal state that libertarians want to keep the size and budget of government, I question whether the government would be able to do anything.

...including upholding that "non-initiation of force and fraud" that libertarians pay lip-service to.

 

[Piggy]

...including upholding that "non-initiation of force and fraud" that libertarians pay lip-service to.

No no no, it's the Invisible Hand of the Market that upholds that.

You know, like it stopped Enron from bilking its customers and driving itself out of business, and how it stopped that processor in Georgia from having such bad maintenance that it blew itself up or that other one from sickening people all over the country and having to pay ungodly fines, and how it stopped Wall Street from creating a shadow market in risky default swaps which turned the mortgage crisis into a global recession that dragged down many of the firms themselves.

Works wonders, that Invisible Hand.

 

[stevea]

I don't it interesting that every time libertarianism appears on this forum it's subjected to so much cartoonish mischaracterization and unevidenced maligning remarks. Conflating a Jeffersonian libertarianism with posse comitatus gun-nuts or imagining that some weak analogy with evolution has any more explanatory power than any other weak analogy isn't part of a heathy discussion ((actually there is some reasonable analogy between market competition and competition as a factor in natural selection; neither excludes other factors beyond competition; neither can produce more that an approach to a local optima)).

The opponents of libertarianism here feel free to pick the most extreme examples and use this as a point of comparison. Are Boss Tweed and Jim Jones useful examples of Democrats ? Are the Italian Communist party and the Pol Pot regime in any way comparable ? Of course not, but many here feel free to make equally inane points against libertarianism. Yes there is an anarchism/libertarian notion but it's not common nor IMO well expressed in any serious movement.

So is anyone interested in setting aside the cartoonish mischaracterizations, and the name-calling and talking seriously about the topic ?

Libertarianism is a descendant of classical liberalism which involves the ascendant rights of the individual and limited power of the constitutional state. It's also associates with classical liberal anti-mercantilist economics.

It is argued that libertarianism and modern liberal/progressivism both 'evolved', quite differently, from classical liberalism due to limitations of it's economic model, that it didn't address periodic recessions and depressions and the associated unemployment, and didn't address the problem of monopolies.

Liberal-progressivism adapted to periodic depressions and unemployment with statist solutions - new deal, Keynesian stimulus plans. It seems to have largely abandoned any pretense of supporting individual rights and restricting the power of the state. Although it appears that classical liberalism and progressivism are almost totally desperate, it is argued that classical libs and libertarians see the free market as the means to human "fulfillment" while progressives see the state as an essential component in this "fulfillment" concept. I won't make that argument but it is an interesting view.

So libertarians are not generally anarchists. They generally recognize the necessity of a central government for self-defense among others. They are not generally opposed taxes for the support of their view of the legitimate costs of government.

If you examine the space programs - they are heavily tied to defense/offense programs. So there is no reason to think that a modern advanced libertarian state wouldn't develop at least orbital observation and weapons methods. Of course (in the cloudy realm of alternative history) if there was no US/Soviet political antagonism then the state of space programs and nuclear weapons might be generally far more primitive. Given hat there might be some central government defense program capability to "handle" an asteroid hit, we could expect that defense from sucha natural disaster poses no new problem to a libertarian state than does military defense. I could argue the military/defense/offense/bioweapons issue as a segue to developing defense to flu pandemic defense. OTOH all the current flu vaccines are produced by private companies and I feel it's likely that any improvement will come from the private sector.

Both of these are unsatisfying arguments since we don't have any clear examples of "libertarian" states, so no clear idea how these would be resolved in practice. If one existed it would either need to solve many problems by adaption or else fail. In early USA history (something close to a classical liberal state) the government had provisions for common defense and developed a means of supporting a military (slowly). Several decades in, they used government funds to drain swamps around the capital as a means of disease control.

Frankly it's not clear that there is currently any useful approach to an astroid hit or flu pandemic. It's another "cartoon reality" to presume we could deflect an asteroid. It's quiet unlikely that we can, with current technology, predict a flu pandemic and create a useful amount of effective vaccine in time. Let's ask another question pair - what would the government of Poland, Mongolia or Chile do about an asteroid strike or a flu pandemic ? These questions presume that the libertarian state is some superpower in the self-imposed role of worlds policeman, worlds doctor and worlds asteroid defense force. Unlikely that would ever be the case.

Also it's not a requirement that you participate in rfee markets. You are welcome to start your own self-sufficient utopian enclave. It's been done before.

That's rich. It starts with a one-size-fits-all proscription for societal organization, describes it as the best way to do anything, then describes big government as one-size-fits-all.

Pot, kettle, etc.

A prescription for the free-market is not one-size-fits-all; that contention is ridiculous. It's a suggestion that we allow anyone willing to compete to propose a potential solution, and that we allow the consumer to select the solution that they find best as a voluntary choice. The competition and transactions are restricted by the same civil tort law that has been refined over the past 4 centuries and the same criminal property law that exists widely. This is completely different from a government solution where the same provisions apply to all and the cost is mandated by force.

I assume you follow your own suggestions. So how do you know if a local restaurant some friends invited you to meet them at is safe? Call the neighbors? Put a notice in Craigs List? Read last Sunday's obits? Start a thread on the JREF forums? Just how, practically speaking, would you put your own advice into practice?

This is an interesting case. Years ago in grad shool a friend returned to India for the summer break and contract some rather severe food poisoning (lost a semester) by eating at what he called a "disreputable" restaurant. Now India in the 1980s wasn't lacking social structure or laws - so what is wrong with the system ? Is government regulation any more or less effective that self-regulation/private-regulation.

First, transparency and meeting of the minds is a traditional part of contact law. When you order meal a reasonable person has an expectation that the meal is fit for general human consumption. If you get sick you can and should sue the H*** out of the vendor. This is a first line of defense against the bad food, but just like word-of-mouth it's ex post facto and doesn't prevent the first instance.

So what is needed is some standards of operation. If the food is processed according to some reasonable safety standard it doesn't assure safety, but it gives reasonable expectation. Personally I don't think it makes a great deal of difference if the standard comes from the PA Dept of Agriculture, the county heath service or the Restaurant Assoc of America or Zaggat's guide. In none of these cases is there a "regulator" on-site 24x7 overseeing all the processing steps. The scheme is always dependent on self-control, self-imposed adherence, and fear of losing the accreditation. Frankly if anyone was serious about this topic - we would consider the technology that permits untamperable recording of fridge temps and food ingredient age etc, and make this part of a graded standard. Any food vendor could then make claims about these features. So why doesn't either competition OR regulation make this sort of transparency available ? Both seem to fail regularly in increasing the "bar" as technology improves. It's not (in the short run) in the interest of either ergulators or restaurants to increase their standards, and standards organizations (public or private) tend to be accessible in terms of cozy relationships or political contributions and outright graft.

I don't think a libertarian states lack of regulation would improve this situation, but perhaos it wouldn't be any worse.

 

[jfeheley]

I don't think a libertarian states lack of regulation would improve this situation, but perhaps it wouldn't be any worse.

Your post is well stated.

The libertarian state would not have a lack of regulation. An entrepreneur, perhaps someone who knew the restaurant business and perhaps a friend who was a biologist, would recognize that people have no way of knowing which is a clean healthy restaurant. There is a need for this. They would form a company called Restaurant Reports (similar to Consumer Reports). Restaurant Reports would have high standards and unannounced inspections. Restaurants that realized proper health practices would be good for business would gladly pay a fee to Restaurant Reports Inc. to be on their list as a clean health conscious restaurant. Restaurant Reports understands they better have reliable standards or they will lose their investment.

This would be the case for many other needs people desire. The competition of the free market would maintain a better value than having a centralized government do it with no competition as in the USPS.

Jerry

 

[SezMe]

This is an interesting case. Years ago in grad shool a friend returned to India for the summer break and contract some rather severe food poisoning (lost a semester) by eating at what he called a "disreputable" restaurant. Now India in the 1980s wasn't lacking social structure or laws - so what is wrong with the system ? Is government regulation any more or less effective that self-regulation/private-regulation.

I don't know but certainly the examples Piggy cited plus numerous others suggest self-regulation has serious problems. Your example merely shows that a regulatory system is imperfect as well.

 

[SezMe]

... The competition and transactions are restricted by the same civil tort law that has been refined over the past 4 centuries and the same criminal property law that exists widely.

...

If you get sick you can and should sue the H*** out of the vendor.

Your ideas seem to rely quite heavily on the court system to adjudicate issues of contention. Which leads to some questions. First, how is the judicial system to be regulated? Or, to avoid the nasty connotation that word carries, overseen to insure that justice is, in fact, served. Secondly, there is the time delay problem. In your example, suppose you do sue a restaurant. The case could take years (or even decades) to wend its way through the system. In the meantime, what is the correcting force? Another example is the legal fallout from the Exxon Valdez disaster. That case took over two decades to resolve with some of the plaintiffs dead by the time of the final reckoning.

Finally, there is the problem of buying justice. OJ showed, if anything else, that money can buy a patently bad result. Or consider the Massey coal mine case in which that company simply bought a state supreme court justice and got the result it wanted. Or suppose the restaurant you want to sue for a bad meal is McDonalds. Do you really have a shot at justice fighting such deep pockets?

In short, relying on the tort system appears to be far from a panacea.

There, hopefully that's the kind of reasonable discussion you're looking for.

 

[Delscottio]

To take the restaurant scenario further what would happen if someone was killed and the management knew the food was unsafe i.e it was a criminal act, who would arrest the managers?

Obviously financial penalties wouldn't do but whenever this subject comes up there never seems to be a reasonable explanation of dealing with criminal acts.

 

[lomiller]

Comcast, or maybe AT&T is now running ads to abandon your old, slow T1 and equivalent lines to your house, which has been the gold standard of individual delivery for 20+ years.

And what happened 20 years ago? That's right, government "intervened" to change how private networks interacted with each other with the deliberate intention of replacing the lose assortment of Universities connected by random T1 lines with the internet backbone as we know it today. Oh and they funded the creation of the Mosaic web browser too.

 

[lomiller]

The libertarian state would not have a lack of regulation. An entrepreneur, perhaps someone who knew the restaurant business and perhaps a friend who was a biologist, would recognize that people have no way of knowing which is a clean healthy restaurant. There is a need for this. They would form a company called Restaurant Reports (similar to Consumer Reports). Restaurant Reports would have high standards and unannounced inspections. Restaurants that realized proper health practices would be good for business would gladly pay a fee to Restaurant Reports Inc. to be on their list as a clean health conscious restaurant. Restaurant Reports understands they better have reliable standards or they will lose their investment.

The another entrepreneur starts a publication called restaurant inspector. They charge half the price and always give good marks unless you refuse to pay. Since the consumers themselves have no way to know which is actually reliable they assume they are about the same so restaurants all pay the reduced price the real company goes out of business.

 

[Piggy]

The libertarian state would not have a lack of regulation. An entrepreneur, perhaps someone who knew the restaurant business and perhaps a friend who was a biologist, would recognize that people have no way of knowing which is a clean healthy restaurant. There is a need for this. They would form a company called Restaurant Reports (similar to Consumer Reports). Restaurant Reports would have high standards and unannounced inspections. Restaurants that realized proper health practices would be good for business would gladly pay a fee to Restaurant Reports Inc. to be on their list as a clean health conscious restaurant. Restaurant Reports understands they better have reliable standards or they will lose their investment.

For public health, this is not sufficient.

How many people consult CR?

And if someone makes the not-best decision about which vacuum cleaner to buy, there's not a large public impact.

But if restaurants are not inspected, and people are forced to do their own research using private for-profit companies, the vast majority won't bother because, to borrow a phrase from Jon Stewart, they've got **** to do.

There is a definite public good to be gained from the highly efficient system of having everyone chip in a few cents to support a single entity that inspects all restaurants according to the same standard, and has no conflicts of interest such as wanting to outsell other ratings agencies or attract advertising or whatever.

Regulation of the market is necessary, protection of public health and welfare is necessary, and private enterprise is not as well equipped as government to handle these tasks.

 

[pipelineaudio]

I cannot imagine a more inefficient system (regardless of the moral implications, which are pretty clear here).

This is the system that exists now. You pay the inspector, the restaurant passes. If you want to know if the restaurant is safe, it takes exposure or media to spread the word.

How many times have you heard of restaurants being shut down without first making someone sick, or having an angry ex employee sick the news on them first?

 

[lomiller]

What it does is to demonstrate that libertarianism, if followed, would leave us vulnerable to rare-but-devastating problems that it has no means of addressing.

It's worth noting that many of these things are only rare because they are actively regulated and were commonplace before that.