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Honestly, I think the poor had more rights (or at least had an easier time of having their rights honored) in the Middle Ages than they would under libertariani
by clock_tower 10y ago
Honestly, I think the poor had more rights (or at least had an easier time of having their rights honored) in the Middle Ages than they would under libertarianism. Look up _Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages_ or _A History of Private Life_ if you're curious.
- dnautics 10y agoNo, in the middle ages (and it's returning now) there were debtor's prisons, which libertarians are very strong opponents of. That in and of itself is huge.
- clock_tower 10y agoLooks like that's true; I hadn't come across the early history of debtors' prisons, and had always thought of them as an early-modern thing. It looks like Reason.com argues that pay-for-service modern law is equivalent to debtors' prison, but I haven't heard of libertarians supporting the restoration of proper debtors' prison (where the state imprisons someone for failing to pay a debt to a non-state contracting party). Of course, there's no canonical list of libertarian principles, so I'm sure some do support that... As for the Middle Ages, I'd still recommend the books I mentioned; they make a number of interesting references to village law, and the right of peasant farmers (both serfs, who owed labor service, and freemen, who owed rent) to self-regulate. _A Farewell to Alms_ mentions that farmland in the Middle Ages returned 10% per annum at basically zero risk in England and relatively little on the Continent (the only risks being war and bad harvests); if libertarianism wants to return to that economic arrangement, perhaps with the US government selling bonds returning 10% adjusted for inflation, then perhaps it has a silver lining.