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> or is he saying it because this conclusion is necessary in order to bolster the case for abolishing government? Milton Friedman was libertarian, but not anar

> or is he saying it because this conclusion is necessary in order to bolster the case for abolishing government? Milton Friedman was libertarian, but not anarchist, IIUC. You may have conflated him with his son, David D. Friedman, who wrote The Machinery of Freedom.

lisper 5y ago
> libertarian, but not anarchist That's splitting a pretty fine hair IMHO.
- mavhc 5y ago
  libertarians believe someone else should build the roads, anarchists hate roads
  - lisper 5y ago
    On that definition, neither David nor Milton is an anarchist.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Anarchists (left-libertarians) advocate people organize and build their own roads. Versus waiting for some far away unaccountable centralized state bureaucracy to do it. Bottom-up vs top-down.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      That's fair enough, although what about long distance roads? And what if people use the roads without paying? It's not a great commercial enterprise to build most roads, there's no way to have competition, so you'd probably need a large organisation. But then you'd have every user pay the same? Or make the more wealthy pay more? What if this monopoly turned a bit evil, we'd want some way to control who was running it, maybe if we were all members, and voted on who should run it perhaps?
      - specialist 5y ago
        Anything I can say is purely hypothetical. Because we have no left-libertarian societies to study. But I'd like to believe that people would make stuff for use by people. People need to move? Cool. What's a good strategy? Isn't necessarily cars and roads. We'd probably have better land use policy and mass transit to optimize for moving people around. Also, the engrained corporatist rhetoric is that every belief to the left of Grover Norquist is against capitalism, markets, competition, profits, and Freedom Markets™ in general. Nope. Not true. We love that stuff. Corporatists (monopolists) hate competition, free enterprise, and so forth. All the anti-left screeching is pure projection, kabuki for the news cameras.
        mavhc 5y ago
        Maybe we have none of them to study because they don't work, surely at some point in history someone tried it. Every society created a government, because it's useful. Mass transit is the epitome of large scale government intervention for the good of the people.

lisper 5y ago

> libertarian, but not anarchist That's splitting a pretty fine hair IMHO.

mavhc 5y ago
libertarians believe someone else should build the roads, anarchists hate roads
- lisper 5y ago
  On that definition, neither David nor Milton is an anarchist.
- specialist 5y ago
  Anarchists (left-libertarians) advocate people organize and build their own roads. Versus waiting for some far away unaccountable centralized state bureaucracy to do it. Bottom-up vs top-down.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    That's fair enough, although what about long distance roads? And what if people use the roads without paying? It's not a great commercial enterprise to build most roads, there's no way to have competition, so you'd probably need a large organisation. But then you'd have every user pay the same? Or make the more wealthy pay more? What if this monopoly turned a bit evil, we'd want some way to control who was running it, maybe if we were all members, and voted on who should run it perhaps?
    - specialist 5y ago
      Anything I can say is purely hypothetical. Because we have no left-libertarian societies to study. But I'd like to believe that people would make stuff for use by people. People need to move? Cool. What's a good strategy? Isn't necessarily cars and roads. We'd probably have better land use policy and mass transit to optimize for moving people around. Also, the engrained corporatist rhetoric is that every belief to the left of Grover Norquist is against capitalism, markets, competition, profits, and Freedom Markets™ in general. Nope. Not true. We love that stuff. Corporatists (monopolists) hate competition, free enterprise, and so forth. All the anti-left screeching is pure projection, kabuki for the news cameras.
      - mavhc 5y ago
        Maybe we have none of them to study because they don't work, surely at some point in history someone tried it. Every society created a government, because it's useful. Mass transit is the epitome of large scale government intervention for the good of the people.