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Libertarians and the left

billydkid

Illuminator
billydkid
Joined
Aug 27, 2002
Messages
4,917
If you think you can, try reading this with an open mind and try absorbing the actual words and what they actually mean without applying your interpretation. If you walk away from this still convinced that you walk in the light and people like me are from the dark side, well, I give up. You win. Congratulations. Enjoy your amazing victory.

http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory217.html
 
I just read the whole thing (which took some effort), and my political stance as a leftist remains entirely unchanged.

Plenty of bold assertions about the market being the best, about the government being the enemy of the little guy etc. Lots of rambling. Lots of generalisations.

I'd like to see this substantiated -
"Everyone who votes for Barack Obama, a man with the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands..."

Anyone got numbers showing that there have been thousands of civilian deaths by american hands in afghanistan and libya? Seems unlikely to me.
 
billydkid said:
If you think you can, try reading this with an open mind and try absorbing the actual words and what they actually mean without applying your interpretation. If you walk away from this still convinced that you walk in the light and people like me are from the dark side, well, I give up. You win. Congratulations. Enjoy your amazing victory.

http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory217.html
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Man that was a tough slog, but I read it.

Thanks for admitting defeat.
 
Interesting article. It shows that biased, hate-filled partisan screeds, full to the brim with strawmen, are not limited to conservatives or liberals.
 
billydkid said:
If you think you can, try reading this with an open mind and try absorbing the actual words and what they actually mean without applying your interpretation. If you walk away from this still convinced that you walk in the light and people like me are from the dark side, well, I give up. You win. Congratulations. Enjoy your amazing victory.

http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory217.html
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I've read it, and I still believe that freedom can be enhanced by the state not diminished. Libertarians object to 'Big Government', but don't object to 'Big Management'. At least the former is accountable to all, unlike the latter.
 
Yeah, I've not even finished and I can tell this guy should be safely medicated somewhere.

I mean christ almighty:

he government grows bigger every day and every year, no matter how you measure it. There are more laws, more police, and more prisoners than ever.
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Oh noes! More Police1!1111!!
 
BobTheCoward said:
Massive growth of the police force, a cop on every corner, doesnt terrify you? It worries the crap out of me.
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Is there really a cop on every corner? It's odd, because a lot of the time there doesn't seem to be enough police to deal with the crime there is, at least in the UK.

I'm curious though, why does the idea of more police scare you? I'm not concerned about the police suddenly being used to pacify the populous and enslave them to the whims of the government. We still have free and fair elections, we still have an at least somewhat proportional say in what goes on and Westernised nations aren't on the brink of collapsing into anarchy from which a police-led dictatorship could rise, so...no it doesn't bother me that more police are being hired, no. Why does it bother you?
 
I Am The Scum said:
It's almost like the population is increasing. Weird!
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The author does have a point with the police state, when you remember that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

But then, the US is also way to the right of every other industrialized country, so I don't see how he can blame that on leftists.

The article was difficult to get through. So much time attacking the stereotypes of 'leftists' and other strawmen, and often his arguments don't jive with reality.

But then, he does have a point about Obama. He is more of a 'Bush Lite' than anything else.
 
I didn't see anything of substance in that post, just the usual glibertarian whining. There was also the typical hysterical idiocy:

We libertarians think police have way too much power and flirt with the idea of doing away with them altogether. The conservatives and liberals all want to keep Medicare, Social Security, and public schools intact, if tweaked around the edges. We see these programs for what they are: the parasitic class’s authoritarian and regressive programs to control the youth and foment intergenerational conflict.
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Set aside the factual misrepresentation of the Conservative position on these issues (as evinced by the Ryan budget and the endless fear-mongering over Social Security joined with the push for privatization), the closing description of those programs is why no one takes libertarians seriously. Their world is such a retarded fantasy that it's hard to have a conversation. Do they realize what would happen to the elderly in this country if SS and Medicare were ended?

I actually agree with some of this article's criticisms of Obama, shown in this passage:

He shoveled money toward corporate America, banks and car manufacturers. He championed the bailouts of the same Wall Street firms his very partisans blamed for the financial collapse. He picked the CEO of General Electric to oversee the unemployment problem. He appointed corporate state regulars for every major role in financial central planning...

...He invoked the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined, tortured a whistleblower, and claimed the right to unilaterally kill any U.S. citizen on Earth without even a nod from Congress or a shrug from the courts.
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But, of course, the article is relying on the fallacious notion that criticism of Obama must necessarily lead to the correctness of libertarian ideology. It doesn't. Obama has failed exactly to the degree he moved to the right: stimulus was too small, financial reforms weren't strong enough, didn't end the wars quick enough, didn't stop the Bush detention abuses...etc.

I don't have any idea why that article would change my impression of libertarianism one bit.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
Is there really a cop on every corner? It's odd, because a lot of the time there doesn't seem to be enough police to deal with the crime there is, at least in the UK.

I'm curious though, why does the idea of more police scare you? I'm not concerned about the police suddenly being used to pacify the populous and enslave them to the whims of the government. We still have free and fair elections, we still have an at least somewhat proportional say in what goes on and Westernised nations aren't on the brink of collapsing into anarchy from which a police-led dictatorship could rise, so...no it doesn't bother me that more police are being hired, no. Why does it bother you?
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It troubles me because it seems that the police, military, and support staff for both, become a kind of jobs program, kept going just for the sake of keeping men and women trained to perform in direct, often violent ways, employed.

Right now, the unemployment rate in the U.S. exceeds %9.
Although I am in favor of ending the "war on drugs", I worry about what the unemployment would be like if thousands of police, DEA agents, prosecutors, prison guards, bullet-proof vest makers, drug sniffing dog trainers, etc....etc.....etc....were to find their jobs eliminated.

Compound that with ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bring home lots of soldiers, drivers, cooks, mechanics, etc...etc....etc...

Probably a topic for another thread, but could we even hope to absorb all those people into a society that no longer has a "need" for their services?

If I remember my high school history lessons; didn't the Romans find out it is a bad idea to have a lot of unemployed soldiers/paramilitary personnel roaming the streets?
 
Imo this article simply re-enforces all the reasons libertarianism fails.

To start off with, it’s an extreme position of ideological purity. You can see this in defining “everyone left of me” as “leftist” when in fact there are almost no real leftists in the US. In reality what they object to are moderates and centrists. This forces them to reject well understood principles simply because those principles require pragmatism which conflicts with their ideologically pure view of the world. Typically this centers on a few areas:

Externalities.

The short version of externalities is that when two people engage in a business transaction where part of the costs fall on a third person. Mainstream economists are pretty clear that this type of transaction will undermine the function of a free market. Libertarians typically either ignore the existence of externalities or reject the view mainstream economists who say they distort a market.
Either way they refuse to acknowledge externalities because it forces them to accept there must be government regulation to prevent this from occurring and this contradicts their ideologically pure view of the world


Monopolies

Like externalities mainstream economists agree that monopolies are bad and distort a market so that it no longer functions as a free market. Again like externalities they either avoid the subject or reject the mainstream view because it would force them to accept that regulation is necessary to maintain a functioning free market when their ideologically pure view says this shouldn’t be needed.

Results

Generally Libertarians hold as an absolute that competitive free markets result in the best overall results. Game theory, however tells us such an apriori assumption is faulty, the classic example being the prisoners dilemma where the best solution for both prisoners to cooperate but individually the best decision is to betray. Some strategies like tit-for-tat do better but having a trusted third party punish those who betray (IOW regulation) works better than any solution without such a third party. Of course in a real economy you may not want certain people to work together because of monopolies so in some cases where tit-for-tat works well you may not want it to.

A example of this is the free rider problem in US health insurance. It’s best for everyone in a risk pool to buy insurance and keep it paid up, but on an individual basis it’s best to only buy the policy when you find out you need it. This of course passes on considerable costs to those who do pay, so they have an even greater incentive not to contribute. As more and more people opt out, the money available for health care everyone drops and everyone suffers. Libertarians generally deny or refuse to accept the possibility because, once again, it contradicts their ideologically pure view that forbids pragmatic practical approaches to real problems.

Government vs Freedom

For the most part libertarians refuse to accept that anyone other than government reduces people’s individual freedom. While it’s true government does restrict the actions people can take it simply doesn’t follow that this is reducing freedom overall. Today’s democracies arose from the need to restrict the control small handfuls of wealthy individuals could exercise on the people around them. Yes, this absolutely restricts the “freedom” of those individuals, but it also makes everyone else more free.
We therefore see libertarians denying the very real case where “freedom” really means “freedom to oppress others” and simply hand wave it always with the suggestion it wouldn’t happen.


It is, of course, quite possible to hold a great many libertarian views without falling into any of these traps, but then you are pretty much describing a classic liberal whom self styled libertarians typically deride as “leftists”. The end result is Libertarians go through extensive mental gymnastics and outright denial when these issues arise because it would force them to reject ideologically pure Libertarianism and become a hated “leftist” liberal.
 
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Distracted1 said:
It troubles me because it seems that the police, military, and support staff for both, become a kind of jobs program, kept going just for the sake of keeping men and women trained to perform in direct, often violent ways, employed.

Right now, the unemployment rate in the U.S. exceeds %9.
Although I am in favor of ending the "war on drugs", I worry about what the unemployment would be like if thousands of police, DEA agents, prosecutors, prison guards, bullet-proof vest makers, drug sniffing dog trainers, etc....etc.....etc....were to find their jobs eliminated.

Compound that with ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bring home lots of soldiers, drivers, cooks, mechanics, etc...etc....etc...

Probably a topic for another thread, but could we even hope to absorb all those people into a society that no longer has a "need" for their services?

If I remember my high school history lessons; didn't the Romans find out it is a bad idea to have a lot of unemployed soldiers/paramilitary personnel roaming the streets?
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They aren't disbanding or shrinking the armed forces as far as I know. So those that are in the regular services will stay there unless their enlistments are up and they don't re-up. Those in the reserves/National Guard will go back to their civilian jobs. (Which are supposed to still be there but that's another thread.) This is not like the end of WWII where the country was flooded with millions of GI's looking for civilian jobs. So I don't think the ending of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is going to require any large absorption into the civilian workforce.
 
Spindrift said:
They aren't disbanding or shrinking the armed forces as far as I know. So those that are in the regular services will stay there unless their enlistments are up and they don't re-up. Those in the reserves/National Guard will go back to their civilian jobs. (Which are supposed to still be there but that's another thread.) This is not like the end of WWII where the country was flooded with millions of GI's looking for civilian jobs. So I don't think the ending of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is going to require any large absorption into the civilian workforce.
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Initially, I was addressing a surge in the number of law-enforcement positions. Perhaps it is a stretch to suggest that the number of people put out of work by returning reservists will create noticeable increased strain on the unemployment rolls, however, cuts in military personnel over the long term is a policy in favor wit "libertarians" and "leftists" (as well as many who are neither- including me).
Don't you agree that such a scaling-back is largely politically impossible because the military has been used as (among other things) a jobs-program?

Further, is it not a concern that law-enforcement personnel would be left looking for ways to earn a living should the "war on drugs" jobs program be shut down? What about the drug offenders themselves- who is going to hire them once they stop being useful instruments of job-security for those who work in the incarceration industry?

Although I advocate ending the current prohibitions, the economic effects give me pause.
 
I found the article useful -- because I linked to a piece in SLATE that discusses the philosopher and former hard-core libertarian Robert Nozick: http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/

It gets some things wrong. "Separatness of persons" comes from Rawls and Nozick still regarded himself as a libertarian in the end, though the people at Lew Rockwell denounced him as a late-convert to communitarian-socialism.

This part's pretty good at explaining how frustrating it can be dealing with libertarians:
It's no wonder that in the aftermath of the housing bust, with the glue showing signs of decay—with Madoff and "Government Sachs" displacing Jobs and Buffett in the headlines—"liberty" made its comeback. When the facts go against you, resort to "values." When values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother of all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the other beat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.
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We had an infamous poster here named Shane-something. Lived on the forum. Someone once created a thread asking if our resident libertarians were fundamentally compelled by natural rights/morality/Kantianism or something approximating to utilitarianism/consequentialism. He replied "both."
 
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lomiller said:
To start off with, it’s an extreme position of ideological purity. You can see this in defining “everyone left of me” as “leftist” when in fact there are almost no real leftists in the US. In reality what they object to are moderates and centrists.
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It seems to me that you are here playing exactly the semantic game you are accusing others of playing.

You define yourself as a “centrist” and a “moderate”, and anyone to the right of you as a rightist. There's no one very much farther to the left of you, hence your claim that “in fact there are almost no real leftists in the US.” There are, in fact, extreme leftists in the U.S.; you just don't see it because you are it, and you've deluded yourself into thinking that your position is “centrist”.
 
lomiller said:
Monopolies

Like externalities mainstream economists agree that monopolies are bad and distort a market so that it no longer functions as a free market. Again like externalities they either avoid the subject or reject the mainstream view because it would force them to accept that regulation is necessary to maintain a functioning free market when their ideologically pure view says this shouldn’t be needed.
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As usual, I enjoyed your post.

I've noticed that quite a few libertarians (including several on this board) enjoy touting the internal consistency and logical structure of their position to be an advantageous. This approach was, however, shown to be inadequate roughly around 1500. That's the pre-Galileo approach, the Greek-Aristotelian notion that internal coherence is sufficient to make a position worthy of adopting.

Certainly that's a massive advancement in the history of science and thought, in general. It's better than the "let's just make **** up" approach, but logical coherence is a necessary, not sufficient quality of a good theory. We've learned that empirical verification is really the most important step. Without testing these hypotheses we arrive at perfectly logical, insane notions, like phlogiston.

What frustrates me most about libertarians is that we've had periods in which their theories of economics were tested. We have ample data to, for example, study the difference between the early 20th century approaches to monopolies taken by the US and England, respectively. England operated on the laissez-faire model touted by libertarians while the US, led by Roosevelt, aggressively busted trusts and monopolies. The English economy dwarfed our own at that point, yet almost all important innovations emerged from America. In England, a handful of gigantic companies dominated the economy and crushed competition, thereby stunting innovation.

As you point out, because libertarians believe that ONLY government can infringe on freedom, they seem to be making the claim that the English approach was the preferred. The fact that large English companies inhibited the free enterprise of smaller companies is ignored or just waved away. We can argue about which approach is more coherent on conceptual grounds and hash out the essence of true "freedom," but the nice thing about the scientific method is that it's much easier to just look at the results. These experiments have been run, we have the data, it shouldn't be this difficult.

It just doesn't matter if jargon is logically consistent or an idea is simple and rationally appealing. All we need concern ourselves with is the stuff that works.
 
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Anytime a libertarian uses the word 'parasite' it harkens my mind to Ayn Rand and I cease taking them seriously.
 
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