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...that is why I could never be a libertarian. People have repeatedly proved themselves unwilling or unable to live up to the libertarian ideal of behaving "ra

...that is why I could never be a libertarian. People have repeatedly proved themselves unwilling or unable to live up to the libertarian ideal of behaving "rationally."

amelius 5y ago
Even rational actors can ruin things deeply. E.g. government intervention is necessary to have network-neutrality.
fighterpilot 5y ago
There's nothing inherently inconsistent between right-libertarian values and a vaccine mandate. Libertarians believe that force should be applied to person A to protect person B from person A in certain circumstances. If person A wants to punch person B in the face, restricting person A by force is perfectly consistent with libertarian values. If person A threatens to infect person B with a deadly disease due to refusing a vaccine, then a vaccine mandate has some justification under the same ideals. The devil will be in the details (e.g., how deadly is the disease, etc). It's also why a carbon tax and many other measures are not inherently inconsistent with libertarian values on a first principles examination. But for some reason, libertarians in practice tend to dislike these policy proposals, even though they can follow in principle from the founding axioms. I attribute that to group-think and a general disbelief in the existence of negative externalities, not to a problem inherent in libertarianism.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  People are libertarian for different reasons. Some of them just hate government and look for an ideological framework to justify it. I would say that driving licenses are a similar case.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Except that you don't need a driving license to drive, only to do so on public roads. These mandates are similar, you can be as un-vaccinated as you like as long as you stay at home.
    - pharmakom 5y ago
      The similarity I’m drawing is that being out and about unvaccinated and driving without proper training both put others at risk, which violates NAP. Therefore both can (arguably) be mandated inside of a libertarian framework.
- Qub3d 5y ago
  Exactly! Not getting a vaccine violates the all-important "NAP". Of course most self-professed libertarians likely would think of a short rest and not aggression when they hear NAP, as its become a generic anti-government term rather than the nuanced political ideology it once was.
- kcplate 5y ago
  Wait…what? You think forcing a person to accept a substance into their body under force isn’t inconsistent with libertarian values? As a classical liberal, I can’t think of something more offensive to my values and I am a fully vaccinated person and wished everyone else was too. This is absolutely f’ing horrifying and will ultimately be used against everyone at some point in the future. The body is the absolute individual. Having maximum control over the individual is probably the most basal libertarian value there is. This is not some external restraint to prevent the commission of a crime. It’s not even punishment for a commission of a crime. It’s the mandated forcing of a substance internally into an individual’s body against their will with a sketchy societal benefit behind its justification. Sketchy because now with Delta there is apparently no scientific basis to believe that the vaccines eliminate the risk of spread of the virus but at this point it only seems to prevent serious illness. BTW, watch as the GOP uses this mandate to justify the individual state prohibition of abortion. They will be able to too, because this is going to pretty much kill the DNC’s ability to win anything for at least 8-10 years.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    We are not talking about forced vaccination. I'm referring to the workplace mandates where people are still free to not vaccinate if they wish, just as their employer is free under at-will employment to kick them out. But even if we consider literal forced vaccinations, I still don't see that as necessarily inconsistent with libertarianism, due to the reasons I outlined, specifically the non aggression principle. Suppose that a new disease emerged that had a mortality rate of Ebola and a transmissibility of COVID. Suppose we had a vaccine that was capable of stopping transmission. In such a rare and extreme set of circumstances, forced vaccination (not even mere mandates in workplaces) would be a must under the NAP. The right to choose not to vaccinate is effectively the same as the right to kill people with a disease that you may carry. Luckily COVID isn't as deadly as that, and the vaccines aren't as effective at preventing transmission, so we don't need to consider such measures. But in the right context, I very much see forced vaccinations as following from libertarian axioms. Just like you would see jailing a serial murderer and depriving them of their liberty to be justified under those same axioms. For the record, I'm one of the most anti-collectivist people you'll meet. I just pay significant credence to the reality of negative externalities. You can swing your fist all you want, but you can't punch my nose with that fist. In the same vein, you can't cough your deadly virus into my face and not expect to justly have force applied to you.
- osigurdson 5y ago
  I think it is less about the concern that others will be infected with severe disease and more about the potential cost and stress that the unvaccinated place on the healthcare system. The vaccine costs $20 per dose while COVID treatment in the hospital is $23K (in Canada - likely similar in the US). Perhaps a less draconian approach would be to allow the unvaccinated to purchase additional insurance to cover these costs in the scenario where hospitalization is required. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cihi-covid19-canada-hospital-cost-1.6168531 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cihi-covid19-canada-hospital-...
roenxi 5y ago
Behaving rationally isn't a particularly libertarian ideal. All political ideologies aspire to behave rationally. Nobody stands up and starts with "Lets approach this irrationally and ..."
- acdha 5y ago
  Where your comment went wrong was in conflating rational decisions made at the time the rules are made or enforced with routine rational choices made constantly by the population. It’s much easier to have a rule which says “always wash your hands when preparing food” than to have every single restaurant worker have to reason about the level of risk posed by what they’ve done since the last time they washed their hands. In particular, think about how many bad calls are made by people who believe they’re acting rationally but are acting on incomplete or bad information. Libertarianism involves a state as weak as possible so it critically depends on people to individually make good choices for a society to be an appealing place to live. You can sue your neighbor if he burns old tires upwind but you’re really hoping he’s smart enough not to because that’s tedious, slow, and risks retaliation. If you don’t have the equivalent of Social Security forcing people to save for retirement, you have to make your peace with having destitute old people on the streets, etc.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Libertarianism doesn't rely on all people making individually good choices. It relys on power being extremely spread out so the blast radius of bad choices is contained and the law of averages comes into play because the median person makes ok to good decisions. And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Note the rest of the sentence where I specified to be a desirable place to live. Outliers matter: if you live on a block with 10 houses, you care more about the one which is falling apart and full of rats than the ones which are mostly okay. > And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market. Can you provide examples of the baseline you’re using to say that other systems do worse? Successful implementations, not idealized imaginings.

...that is why I could never be a libertarian. People have repeatedly proved themselves unwilling or unable to live up to the libertarian ideal of behaving "rationally."

amelius 5y ago

Even rational actors can ruin things deeply. E.g. government intervention is necessary to have network-neutrality.

fighterpilot 5y ago

There's nothing inherently inconsistent between right-libertarian values and a vaccine mandate. Libertarians believe that force should be applied to person A to protect person B from person A in certain circumstances. If person A wants to punch person B in the face, restricting person A by force is perfectly consistent with libertarian values. If person A threatens to infect person B with a deadly disease due to refusing a vaccine, then a vaccine mandate has some justification under the same ideals. The devil will be in the details (e.g., how deadly is the disease, etc). It's also why a carbon tax and many other measures are not inherently inconsistent with libertarian values on a first principles examination. But for some reason, libertarians in practice tend to dislike these policy proposals, even though they can follow in principle from the founding axioms. I attribute that to group-think and a general disbelief in the existence of negative externalities, not to a problem inherent in libertarianism.

pharmakom 5y ago
People are libertarian for different reasons. Some of them just hate government and look for an ideological framework to justify it. I would say that driving licenses are a similar case.
- simonh 5y ago
  Except that you don't need a driving license to drive, only to do so on public roads. These mandates are similar, you can be as un-vaccinated as you like as long as you stay at home.
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    The similarity I’m drawing is that being out and about unvaccinated and driving without proper training both put others at risk, which violates NAP. Therefore both can (arguably) be mandated inside of a libertarian framework.
Qub3d 5y ago
Exactly! Not getting a vaccine violates the all-important "NAP". Of course most self-professed libertarians likely would think of a short rest and not aggression when they hear NAP, as its become a generic anti-government term rather than the nuanced political ideology it once was.
kcplate 5y ago
Wait…what? You think forcing a person to accept a substance into their body under force isn’t inconsistent with libertarian values? As a classical liberal, I can’t think of something more offensive to my values and I am a fully vaccinated person and wished everyone else was too. This is absolutely f’ing horrifying and will ultimately be used against everyone at some point in the future. The body is the absolute individual. Having maximum control over the individual is probably the most basal libertarian value there is. This is not some external restraint to prevent the commission of a crime. It’s not even punishment for a commission of a crime. It’s the mandated forcing of a substance internally into an individual’s body against their will with a sketchy societal benefit behind its justification. Sketchy because now with Delta there is apparently no scientific basis to believe that the vaccines eliminate the risk of spread of the virus but at this point it only seems to prevent serious illness. BTW, watch as the GOP uses this mandate to justify the individual state prohibition of abortion. They will be able to too, because this is going to pretty much kill the DNC’s ability to win anything for at least 8-10 years.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  We are not talking about forced vaccination. I'm referring to the workplace mandates where people are still free to not vaccinate if they wish, just as their employer is free under at-will employment to kick them out. But even if we consider literal forced vaccinations, I still don't see that as necessarily inconsistent with libertarianism, due to the reasons I outlined, specifically the non aggression principle. Suppose that a new disease emerged that had a mortality rate of Ebola and a transmissibility of COVID. Suppose we had a vaccine that was capable of stopping transmission. In such a rare and extreme set of circumstances, forced vaccination (not even mere mandates in workplaces) would be a must under the NAP. The right to choose not to vaccinate is effectively the same as the right to kill people with a disease that you may carry. Luckily COVID isn't as deadly as that, and the vaccines aren't as effective at preventing transmission, so we don't need to consider such measures. But in the right context, I very much see forced vaccinations as following from libertarian axioms. Just like you would see jailing a serial murderer and depriving them of their liberty to be justified under those same axioms. For the record, I'm one of the most anti-collectivist people you'll meet. I just pay significant credence to the reality of negative externalities. You can swing your fist all you want, but you can't punch my nose with that fist. In the same vein, you can't cough your deadly virus into my face and not expect to justly have force applied to you.
osigurdson 5y ago
I think it is less about the concern that others will be infected with severe disease and more about the potential cost and stress that the unvaccinated place on the healthcare system. The vaccine costs $20 per dose while COVID treatment in the hospital is $23K (in Canada - likely similar in the US). Perhaps a less draconian approach would be to allow the unvaccinated to purchase additional insurance to cover these costs in the scenario where hospitalization is required. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cihi-covid19-canada-hospital-cost-1.6168531 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cihi-covid19-canada-hospital-...

roenxi 5y ago

Behaving rationally isn't a particularly libertarian ideal. All political ideologies aspire to behave rationally. Nobody stands up and starts with "Lets approach this irrationally and ..."

acdha 5y ago
Where your comment went wrong was in conflating rational decisions made at the time the rules are made or enforced with routine rational choices made constantly by the population. It’s much easier to have a rule which says “always wash your hands when preparing food” than to have every single restaurant worker have to reason about the level of risk posed by what they’ve done since the last time they washed their hands. In particular, think about how many bad calls are made by people who believe they’re acting rationally but are acting on incomplete or bad information. Libertarianism involves a state as weak as possible so it critically depends on people to individually make good choices for a society to be an appealing place to live. You can sue your neighbor if he burns old tires upwind but you’re really hoping he’s smart enough not to because that’s tedious, slow, and risks retaliation. If you don’t have the equivalent of Social Security forcing people to save for retirement, you have to make your peace with having destitute old people on the streets, etc.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Libertarianism doesn't rely on all people making individually good choices. It relys on power being extremely spread out so the blast radius of bad choices is contained and the law of averages comes into play because the median person makes ok to good decisions. And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Note the rest of the sentence where I specified to be a desirable place to live. Outliers matter: if you live on a block with 10 houses, you care more about the one which is falling apart and full of rats than the ones which are mostly okay. > And people keep proposing systems that do worse than that and refusing to critically assess how their ideas work out in practice vs a free market. Can you provide examples of the baseline you’re using to say that other systems do worse? Successful implementations, not idealized imaginings.