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I know that Somalia as an example of a successful country and not an unsuccessful one has become popular among a certain subset of libertarians. (Probably not a

I know that Somalia as an example of a successful country and not an unsuccessful one has become popular among a certain subset of libertarians. (Probably not any large subset, just particularly vocal advocates like the Mises Institute.) But I have always found this odd, because classical libertarians tend to insist on the rights of the individual, and law in Somalia is based on the primacy of clans and extended families where the individual doesn’t count for much.

Robotbeat 9y ago
I suspect they're just sick of people responding to "government is the problem, not the solution!" with "okay, well how is Somalia doing, then?"
- nkrisc 9y ago
  People often get sick of being wrong.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Telling yourself that you're right in spite of overwhelming evidence is kind of the worst thing one can do when feeling tired of being wrong, though.
    - liberte82 9y ago
      Nah, you can just band together and install a leader who agrees with you, and attempt to change reality to conform to your view.
    - fao_ 9y ago
      The problem is when you and countless academics for the last 200 years, all the way up to modern day economists, can see the faults in capitalism (And mostly our government's policies of Austerity Beyond All Reason). But society is too entrenched in it to see any other possible system. It's like being in a metro system where the roof is falling in and the rails are rusting into nothing, but nobody has figured out how to, or is not willing to, stop things, let everyone out and spend a few days overhauling the cave system so that it works better and isn't killing people. Instead people are utterly content spend the majority of the time painting over the cracks and hoping it won't happen and... oops, yet another recession. "Housing market crash this time? Ah well. A lot of people in a first world country just died from lack of heating, preventable illness and homelessness... but I've got mine!" seems to be the dominant attitude because "what else can you do?". The sociopolitical writings of academics have enlightened me beyond use. For what use is enlightenment if one cannot use it, yet I do not seek to lose it, as that is unquestionably bad now.
      - brucephillips 9y ago
        What alternative do you propose?
moomin 9y ago
And clans... are states.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  It always confuses me how right libertarians can have such a huge blind spot for coercive power coming from anything that doesn't look exactly like a nation-state. If a private organization can exercise coercive power over me, is that somehow better than if a nation-state can exercise coercive power over me? I don't see how. If anything it is worse because at least a democratic nation-state has some level of accountability to me in the form of voting. A private organization has no accountability to me at all.
  - cjalmeida 9y ago
    One of the most accepted definitions of State is "the entity that has the monopoly of power in a given region" If a clan in Somalia, an indian chief, or a drug dealer in a ghetto has the actual power to punish, he's the State - not necessarily Government. By that logic, as people organize themselves and get larger, there will always be someone with State prerogatives.
  - jerf 9y ago
    It isn't limited to right libertarians, really. Technically you can probably trace this to the general idea of Westphalian sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty In general, people today have a hard time conceiving of sovereign polities of any kind that are not also nation-states, or depending on your definition of nation, simply "states", as entities that have defined geographical boundaries within which they have a monopoly on violence and legitimacy, and outside of which they have no power of violence and no legitimacy. This is of course an approximation for all the reasons that half-a-dozen people are rushing for the reply link even now, but my point is not that this model is rigidly followed, but that it is simply the default mental model pretty much everybody approaches the world with. It can help to see how rigidly we all tend to stick with this model to consider something radically different. Imagine a civilization consisting of 100 space stations, ranging in size from a little 20-person thing barely larger than the ISS to a massive million-person station, all in different orbits around different things. What is a "border"? What is "sovereignty" when you are not in an environment where you can (with enough effort) survive without other humans, or without very many other humans, and everyone is inextricably bound in life-or-death relationships, so there simply is no such thing as "self-sufficiency"? (Which I'd submit is a concept very important to sovereignty, even if it so basic to our Earth-thinking frame that we don't even consider it.) I personally think almost everybody has a blind spot here, thinking a very particular part of the phase space of possible governance is the only one. Even the perennial debates on HN and such are basically between "modern capitalism" and "socialism", two systems that in the grand scheme of things are very similar to each other and only argue about how much sovereignty the state has vs. its citizens, where if you are against one then you must be in favor of the other, as if they are the only two possible methods of governance conceivable. Even without going as crazy as hypothesizing a space-based civilization, history offers up quite a few alternatives to the modern conception. Some of them are hard to see, because we back-project our assumptions about nation-states on to history if we aren't very careful. But the early Roman empire had a much more complicated de facto structure, and Middle Ages Europe is quite difficult for a modern full of preconceived notions to properly understand, because we simply have no modern referent for the relationship that existed between the Church and the various other polities of the time.
dfps 9y ago
Good point. Minor counter-point: I'm not sure if libertarianism is the goal of Somalians. A certain degree of liberty -- a significant say in how they conduct their own lives and not having a government telling them what not to do as much as we are used to -- but I think they also see the value of a court to temper individual liberty in certain cases. A couple differences between their system and ours: the point where individual rights and social limitations meet is found where another individual suffers some grievance -- some of which, however, appear to be cultural and not material, although I'm not sure how small this segment is. Also, they seem to have some say in their courts, who administers justice for them, and how its administered.

Robotbeat 9y ago

I suspect they're just sick of people responding to "government is the problem, not the solution!" with "okay, well how is Somalia doing, then?"

nkrisc 9y ago
People often get sick of being wrong.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Telling yourself that you're right in spite of overwhelming evidence is kind of the worst thing one can do when feeling tired of being wrong, though.
  - liberte82 9y ago
    Nah, you can just band together and install a leader who agrees with you, and attempt to change reality to conform to your view.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    The problem is when you and countless academics for the last 200 years, all the way up to modern day economists, can see the faults in capitalism (And mostly our government's policies of Austerity Beyond All Reason). But society is too entrenched in it to see any other possible system. It's like being in a metro system where the roof is falling in and the rails are rusting into nothing, but nobody has figured out how to, or is not willing to, stop things, let everyone out and spend a few days overhauling the cave system so that it works better and isn't killing people. Instead people are utterly content spend the majority of the time painting over the cracks and hoping it won't happen and... oops, yet another recession. "Housing market crash this time? Ah well. A lot of people in a first world country just died from lack of heating, preventable illness and homelessness... but I've got mine!" seems to be the dominant attitude because "what else can you do?". The sociopolitical writings of academics have enlightened me beyond use. For what use is enlightenment if one cannot use it, yet I do not seek to lose it, as that is unquestionably bad now.
    - brucephillips 9y ago
      What alternative do you propose?

moomin 9y ago

And clans... are states.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
It always confuses me how right libertarians can have such a huge blind spot for coercive power coming from anything that doesn't look exactly like a nation-state. If a private organization can exercise coercive power over me, is that somehow better than if a nation-state can exercise coercive power over me? I don't see how. If anything it is worse because at least a democratic nation-state has some level of accountability to me in the form of voting. A private organization has no accountability to me at all.
- cjalmeida 9y ago
  One of the most accepted definitions of State is "the entity that has the monopoly of power in a given region" If a clan in Somalia, an indian chief, or a drug dealer in a ghetto has the actual power to punish, he's the State - not necessarily Government. By that logic, as people organize themselves and get larger, there will always be someone with State prerogatives.
- jerf 9y ago
  It isn't limited to right libertarians, really. Technically you can probably trace this to the general idea of Westphalian sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty In general, people today have a hard time conceiving of sovereign polities of any kind that are not also nation-states, or depending on your definition of nation, simply "states", as entities that have defined geographical boundaries within which they have a monopoly on violence and legitimacy, and outside of which they have no power of violence and no legitimacy. This is of course an approximation for all the reasons that half-a-dozen people are rushing for the reply link even now, but my point is not that this model is rigidly followed, but that it is simply the default mental model pretty much everybody approaches the world with. It can help to see how rigidly we all tend to stick with this model to consider something radically different. Imagine a civilization consisting of 100 space stations, ranging in size from a little 20-person thing barely larger than the ISS to a massive million-person station, all in different orbits around different things. What is a "border"? What is "sovereignty" when you are not in an environment where you can (with enough effort) survive without other humans, or without very many other humans, and everyone is inextricably bound in life-or-death relationships, so there simply is no such thing as "self-sufficiency"? (Which I'd submit is a concept very important to sovereignty, even if it so basic to our Earth-thinking frame that we don't even consider it.) I personally think almost everybody has a blind spot here, thinking a very particular part of the phase space of possible governance is the only one. Even the perennial debates on HN and such are basically between "modern capitalism" and "socialism", two systems that in the grand scheme of things are very similar to each other and only argue about how much sovereignty the state has vs. its citizens, where if you are against one then you must be in favor of the other, as if they are the only two possible methods of governance conceivable. Even without going as crazy as hypothesizing a space-based civilization, history offers up quite a few alternatives to the modern conception. Some of them are hard to see, because we back-project our assumptions about nation-states on to history if we aren't very careful. But the early Roman empire had a much more complicated de facto structure, and Middle Ages Europe is quite difficult for a modern full of preconceived notions to properly understand, because we simply have no modern referent for the relationship that existed between the Church and the various other polities of the time.

dfps 9y ago

Good point. Minor counter-point: I'm not sure if libertarianism is the goal of Somalians. A certain degree of liberty -- a significant say in how they conduct their own lives and not having a government telling them what not to do as much as we are used to -- but I think they also see the value of a court to temper individual liberty in certain cases. A couple differences between their system and ours: the point where individual rights and social limitations meet is found where another individual suffers some grievance -- some of which, however, appear to be cultural and not material, although I'm not sure how small this segment is. Also, they seem to have some say in their courts, who administers justice for them, and how its administered.