Chaz, I was going to let this pass, but no one else has responded effectively to it. So I guess I am going to have to.
Real Libertarians and Anarchists never actually exist in times of peace.
I know more about libertarians than anarchists, but I think you are wrong. My take on both is that they believe in something called "spontaneous ordering," the idea that, if left alone, human being will spontaneously form associations and societies for mutual benefit. This spontaneous ordering creates an extremely complex and interdependent system, layer after layer of complex social organization, all based on mutual consent.
A libertarian conception of justice would be procedurally- rather than outcome-oriented. That is to say, under the libertarian concept of "distributive justice" as coined by Robert Nozick, any outcome based on justice in acquisition and justice in transfer is just. This naturally leads to inequalities in wealth, which, for a libertarian, is fine. Any resulting distribution of wealth is perfectly just as long as these two principles, justice in acquisition and justice in transfer, are honored.
The market is simply the principles of spontaneous ordering, justice in acquisition and justice in transfer as applied to economic and trade relationships.
The state relies principally on coercion for its power. The state does not produce anything on its own, but takes wealth from some individuals and redistributes that wealth to others who have direct or indirect control over the state apparatus. In order to justify its interference with spontaneous ordering, the state usually invokes some sort of outcome-based concept of justice. That is, justice in acquisition and justice in transfer cannot be relied on to produce an outcome which the social consensus on which the state's authority rests, considers just. Therefore, the society (or, more accurately, that portion of the society that controls the state) uses the coercive mechanism of the state to transfer wealth from some members of society to others in order to create a just outcome.
In times of war or national emergency, the State finds it easier to invoke concepts of "national sacrifice" to justify intervention in, and reordering of, the social order created by spontaneous ordering. Hence, states, to expand their powers in wartime, and, even in peacetime, often use war-like metaphors to justify the expansion of their power. The United States is no exception. Look at the history of the twentieth century: war followed by depression, followed by another war, and then a long cold war interspersed with episodes of hot war. And throughout that entire time, the power of the federal government has expanded almost without interruption.
So, not only can true libertarians exist in times of peace, but peace is essential to the movement's long-term viability. That's why libertarians tend to take a limited view of what the United States' role in the world should be.
This is the territory where far right and far left meet in back of the barn, but only in times of war or social chaos.
Huh???
That's because these are essentially destructive philosophies, and have no need to actually pencil out all the details of making things work.
Again, I beg to differ, at least as to libertarianism. Libertarianism (again, as I understand the term) is not a "destructive philosophy." All it really says is that the source of order in society should come from the spontaneous ordering of civil society, not from the coercive arm of the state. If, by "destructive" you mean to say that a libertarian would seek to "destroy" state intervention in civil society, then you are correct; libertarianism is a "destructive philosophy." If you mean to say that libertarianism means to destroy social order generally, you are wrong.
And libertarians have quite a few ideas about how to "pencil out all the details of making things work." Go check out Cato Institute's web site, where you will find paper after paper addressing myriad issues and making a very large number of very specific proposals on how to make things work. You may not agree with them, but they are there.
Which is related to why wackos of all stripes feel no compunction about selling each other guns and ammo.
I don't know what the hell you are talking about here.
These two political points are closer by far than the Nazis and the Leninist communists, which are distinguished by the question of the rights of property, upon which they are diametrical opposites. In fact, now that the Chinese communist system has converted to a system that has business and property rights, technically it is Facism. However, this is because they have turned 180 degrees on the matter of private money and property. Yet not the issues of the police state, legal rights, or democracy.
I'm not sure how many Chinese would agree with your characterization of their system as fascism; to the extent they are removing state controls on civil society, I would certainly disagree.
But I definitely do agree that communism and fascism belong on the same side of the "Great Political Divide." Each of these systems advocates using the state to impose a type of outcome-oriented justice on civil society. So do socialists of all stripes, Christian rightists, and social democrats. Each of these philosophies would apply the power of the state to civil society to differing degrees to create a different social order that it considers just, but they all agree to a greater or lesser extent on the need to do so.
LF Capitalism is a slightly different case, in that it has never existed, time of war or not. Certainly there has been trade between parties in circumstances where no government protected the rights of the parties, but none of that has ever been large enough in scale of money or time to be dignified with the appellation of Capitalism. I guess you could say that the Caribbean pirates were as close as you could get. They weren't particularly productive net-net as far as the rest of us were affected, but they did do business without any nasty government interference and their bottom lines were great when they lived long enough to spend the money :-).
I don't know what "LF Capitalism" is, so I'll st limit my comments to saying that I think a libertarian would agree that there is a need for some power, usually the state, to protect personal and property rights, ensure the common defense, and enforce contracts. Since the Caribbean Pirates didn't have any of these things, I would not consider them a good example. ;)
Capitalism requires the state. This is to protect property rights, to keep the cost of each company having it's own standing army to enforce contracts, protecting merchandise and so on from overwhelming the businesses, . . .
Agreed; see above.
. . . to provide a common currency, trustworthy banks, roads, etc ad nauseum. In fact normally individual taxpayers subsidise business. A perfect example is the highway system, crucial to most modern business, to which trucking companies contribute less than 25% of costs toward building the road and repairing the damage caused by trucks. Another is the common occurance of the US military being brought in to defend US business interests, an expensive proposition.
I think a true-blue libertarian would find that these are not legitimate functions of the state. OK, so more pragmatic person would want the state to issue the currency back banks and build highways. But a true-blue, "extreme" libertarian would not. After all, governments debauch the currency and use political favoritism to manipulate the banking system and the allocation of highway construction and repair contracts. ;)
As for using the U.S. military to defend business interests abroad, as in the Middle East every time there is a threat to the oil supply, even I agree that is wrong.
In fact the modern democratic state was invented primarily to protect the merchant class and property from the nobility as much as to elevate the masses. More, in fact.
Yes, but much of modern history is a study in the expansion of the civil and property rights originally enjoyed only by the privileged to encompass all men and women. I think, as to what a libertarian would consider legitimate rights, a libertarian would consider this process to be a positive.
Now I know that some people on this thread think they are Libertarians. But by their deeds...
I agree that, were they to learn more about libertarianism and carefully to examine their own beliefs, many people in our society who call themselves libertarian would discover that in practice they are not. Once they make that discovery, they can do one of two things: change the label they apply to themselves or change their beliefs.
They call ambulances, want police protection, want the army to defend the borders, drive on the roads (usually in some giant gas hog), drink the water, want the loonies off the street, and in fact 105% if the stuff everyone else wants.
They just make the leap to having a free lunch from there, in two jumps:
1. They don't want to pay for all that, believing that if it is expensive they must be getting cheated, and that that is so unusual in life that they are thus freed from any responsibility.
Again, I really think you either do not understand libertarianism or are misrepresenting it. They do want to pay for the things they use; they just want to d it in a voluntary transaction at a mutually agreeable price, and not be coerced by the state to pay the price dictated by the state according to some ruler's or bureaucrat's concept of justice.
As for the "freed from any responsibility" line, I really do not know what you are referring to.
2. They don't want to personally be restricted in their action in any way, whatever they want done to their neighbors.
Again, I don't know what you are talking about. Libertarians are classical liberals. Along with John Stuart Mill, they believe the rights of one person end when they interfere with the equal rights of others. Now, we may quibble over what "rights" are entitled to protection, a question to which libertarianism, in my view, does not provide a satisfactory answer (and I'm sure most libertarians would disagree with me), but this is very different from "[t]hey don't want to personally be restricted in their action in any way."
This is of course the essence of modern American conservatism, and Libertarians in practice are therefore just conservatives. Neither group would ever step out of their way to help anyone else acquire any power or freedom or other valuables, and so neither will either ever be anything but a minor periodic footdragging blip in history.
I agree that libertarians are, in a certain sense, "conservatives," but not in the sense you are talking about.
While a lot of libertarian positions on issues fall on the conservative side of the traditional American political spectrum, many do not. Ask a libertarian what he or she things about abortion rights, or homosexual marriages, or the right to use marijuana. Ask a libertarian what he or she thinks about American involvement in Vietnam, or Bosnia or the Middle East, or about what to do about the military-industrial/national security state.
Libertarians are conservative in the sense that they are cautious about using state power to interfere in the workings of civil society. The system of social and economic relationships created by spontaneous ordering is an extremely complex and delicate one. Using the blunderbus of state intervention to obtain some desired outcome may or may not achieve the desired outcome, but it will also have very serious and probably unforeseen consequences on other parts of the spontaneous social order. Therefore, state intervention (beyond protecting personal and property rights and enforcing contracts) in the economy and other parts of civil society is to be minimized if not prohibited altogether.
As for these philosophies being a "blip" in history, a libertarian would argue that they are the wave of the future. The reason is that civil society is too complex for the State to regulate effectively. The state interventions advocated by Soviet communism and European fascism have already been discredited. A libertarian would argue that the same thing will eventually happen to less extreme forms of state-interventionism, such as social democracy and attempts by religious groups to use the state to impose their own moral codes on civil society, and that this process of discreditation will be the ideological struggle of the twenty-first century.
As my comments on this thread make clear, I do not agree with every aspect of libertarian thought. I am not, for example, so convinced that social democracy will be relegated to the dustbin of history along with fascism and communism, at least not in my lifetime. I also question some of its fundamental philosophical assumptions and tenants.
But, properly understood, it's still a damn powerful political philosophy. |
