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While many attempts to build a socialist utopias have failed, it looks like building a libertarian one is even harder, and they disintegrate extremely quickly.

by js8 4y ago

While many attempts to build a socialist utopias have failed, it looks like building a libertarian one is even harder, and they disintegrate extremely quickly. I find it amusing because - contrary to what is often claimed - utopian capitalism fails much faster than utopian communism. I suspect at least in the communist ideology, there is lot of emphasis on cooperation and collective agreement. While in the libertarian ideology, there is no way to resolve conflict, aside from - just avoid each other. That is obviously insufficient.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
[flagged]
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Neither are libertarian by a long stretch, and your measure of "better" is a bit fuzzy.
- tchalla 4y ago
  > How much more evidence do you need to see that more liberty is better than less? I guess a bit more than a subjective comment on HN.
- Cornelius267 4y ago
  "US and UK are libertarian" Can you elaborate on why you believe this? I don't see any way that the US and the UK are Libertarian, unless the definition of that word is stretched massively.
- lovich 4y ago
  Is this a troll account? Between the username and the blatant false statement about the UK being libertarian this seems like a downvote account from Reddit.
- ted_dunning 4y ago
  Your username is apt and seems to indicate that your comment is not in good faith. Neither the US nor the UK are libertarian societies. Both have substantial safety nets and large governments that work (mostly) for the common weal. Yes, during the 20th century, western economies did vastly better than, say, North Korea or the Soviet Union, but China in the 21st century is the odd data point. They are neither fish nor fowl, not communist, not really capitalist, certainly centrally controlled in some aspects and bizarrely wild west in others.
mmastrac 4y ago
Humans like to oversimplify systems to soundbites, so any time you end up with pure X it always fails. There's no stability in a system of pure X. It turns out to be complicated to get humans to live together in harmony and picking and choosing various parts of all the -isms is really the only way to do it.
gonzo41 4y ago
Yeah, the though experiment I play out always has a bunch of libertarians living together in a community in the frontier lands somewhere. One of the new settlers is an industrialist who brings their enterprising attitude and chemical plant with them during the move to this new exciting city. They graciously bring bootstrappy job opportunities for the locals around the new city to much applause. Anyway fast forward a few years and because disposing of PFAS chemicals is hard, they've just been dumping them in a local wetland to keep costs down and profits up. Lots of kids and many adults start finding it tough with all that cancer they need to pay for, but the local coffin maker is doing a great trade. After a while the regular libertarians look to confront the plant owner about the waste and dumping asking for a cleanup and compensation for the damage to people and property. Well hearing that people are upset, the plant owner has a town hall with the folk, they get rowdy and emotional. The plant owner get's defensive and thinks about the possibility of a down quarter for his victimized chemical plant. Everyone leaves a bit upset. Some more than others. Later that night the plant owner sits in his home and reads about a new libertarian utopia that's started. They go to bed that night with a plan to pack up leave this ungrateful town. A month later the plant over leaves with most of the towns job, the PFAS stays and everyone else is too sick or poor paying for someones sickness to be able to be a libertarian anymore. Ta-da, the aristocrats.
- progrus 4y ago
  Maybe that first community should have done a better job of regulating itself? All you’re really arguing for here is more engagement in local politics.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    In Libertopia, the only regulations are contract enforcements. It's a lot like cryptocurrency and DAO schemes: it turns out to be really really hard to get people to accept that a bug in the law means a bad outcome for them, and nobody writes non-trivial bug-free code.
    - dahfizz 4y ago
      > In Libertopia, the only regulations are contract enforcements. That's disingenuous. There is plenty of libertarian literature on negative externalities. Milton Friedman, notably, was happy to use taxes and regulations to protect the environment. The reasoning is simple: by polluting my land / poisoning me with PFAS, you have violated the NAP. This kind of pollution is illegal in "Libertopia".
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> While many attempts to build a socialist utopias have failed, it looks like building a libertarian one is even harder, and they disintegrate extremely quickly Given that attempts to build socialist utopias have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, I'm pretty sure "fail fast" is a feature rather than a bug.
- the_other 4y ago
  At what point would you say those “attempts to build socialist utopias” transition to “usurped by dictators”? As I see it, this happens early on in some significant cases. It seems to happen far back enough that I’m inclined to think we have seen very few attempts at socialist utopia, and they have mostly been successful and lacking in (local) deaths (UK, much of Europe since ww2). I know this is a generalisation; I know that the UK (my home) has engaged in some shady horror abroad and I agree that should factor in to this conversation. But I also feel that the dreadful “communist” experiences you’re alluding to are outliers from the conversation, are dictatorships and oligarchies, and not genuine attempts at socialist utopia.
  - ellopoppit 4y ago
    >At what point would you say those “attempts to build socialist utopias” transition to “usurped by dictators”? ... >not genuine attempts at socialist utopia. "Unsuccessful" attempts would seem to be a more accurate phrasing than "not genuine". While I do think you have an interesting point, it could perhaps be the rigid uniformity and anti-individualism which is intrinsic to hard core socialism that has helped lead to those horrid dictatorships we've seen in the past 100 years
    - the_other 4y ago
      Good points. I have not studied the roots of "hard core socialism" deeply enough to understand where this uniformity comes from. Taking a vary casual glance at Marx, it doesn't seem to be there. He seemed to be arguing for collective ownership and an eventual slide towards "cooperative anarchy" - a conscious balance or dialog between collective and individual desire. It's really hard for me to see where the rigid conformity came from. In other venues, we see rigid conformity tied to hierarchy (military, strict schools).. all venues that tend to have figurehead leaders, and disempowered individuals rather than collective empowerment.
jdminhbg 4y ago
> utopian capitalism fails much faster than utopian communism A willingness to imprison entire populations and shoot anyone who won't cooperate will extend an experiment's lifespan significantly.
- lovich 4y ago
  That is a critique that can be applied to America as well. There was a long time period where strikes were met with government violence until the labor force went back to work. Examples: https://listverse.com/2017/09/14/10-tragic-times-the-us-government-massacred-striking-workers/ https://listverse.com/2017/09/14/10-tragic-times-the-us-gove...
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    If America were an experiment in utopian capitalism, then OP's point that utopian communist experiments last longer would be wrong. But since America isn't an experiment in utopian capitalism, this is just totally irrelevant.
    - lovich 4y ago
      It was an experiment in utopian capitalism between the post civil war era and the the beginning of the Great Depression (which if you notice is when most of those worker crackdowns occurred). A feature of democracy that is separate from the economic system is that you can have peaceful revolutions which is what occurred when FDR gained power and implemented the socialist policies of The New Deal. I’ll grant you that’s still several decades of utopian capitalism before it collapsed which is significantly better than what people might assume if they are only familiar with recent experiments like grafton nh
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  It's not clear which system you are referring to!
  - jtode 4y ago
mikkergp 4y ago
There's been some interesting Podcasts on https://porcfest.com/ https://porcfest.com/ which is a libertarian festival each year. The one thing I remember is lots of competition/disagreement on currencies.
toss1 4y ago
Yup I find Libertarianism a good starting-off point, or default, for thinking about govt. In general, freedom is a good in itself. The problem I've found is that, if given actual free reign, any libertarian state would soon end up re-inventing something like what we have now, or degenerate into authoritarianism. It sounds lovely to have no hard laws & regulations, with conflicts resolved by the courts. Hell, I've had lots of race training and won sportscar racing championships, and having to conform with the rules of the guys with the blue lights is really annoying. Same for factories having to comply with pollution regs. The problem is that without standards, everyone has a right of action. So instead of a known framework - I can go 65mph, or the factory can emit only X tons of pollutant-Y per 1000 tons of exhaust, anyone can take action. I might drive past someone at a very reasonable speed, but startle them, and now they're charging me in court. I might live 1000 miles downwind and not like that polluter, so I get some measuring devices and find the scintilla of pollutant they're dropping on my land. Soon, everyone would want some actual standards to meet so it isn't always chaos (aside from the massive court & enforcement system). The other key concept is that the "Free Market" literally does not exist. Every market has rules, regulations, and constraints. Those constraints may not be enforced by a specific government entity, but a market cannot persist past one deal without them. Any completely "free market" would allow anything, including false advertising, products containing poisons, and murder-for-hire services. Taken to the logical conclusion, your greatest advantage in a totally free market is to either kill your vendor and take his goods or kill your customer and take their money, but that never even lasts past one deal. All things in every sustained market are regulated to one degree or another, even in completely extra-legal markets. The only question is how much are they regulated and by what entities. History has pretty much demonstrated that governance is required for any kind of even slightly complex society. This is ALWAYS annoying and imperfect. The question is only how to make it least imperfect. Libertarianism seems to have good answers, but when actually examined even a bit, it fails.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  It’s probably basically that thousands(more?) of years ago we all started at libertarianism and then you just start to resolve conflict after conflict and power struggle after power struggle until you get the mess we have now.
ishjoh 4y ago
I'm intrigued by this idea and would like to look through the historical record. Is there one or more societies you would consider utopian capitalism, and one or more you consider utopian communism that I could research?

by js8 4y ago

DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago

[flagged]

mmastrac 4y ago
Neither are libertarian by a long stretch, and your measure of "better" is a bit fuzzy.
tchalla 4y ago
> How much more evidence do you need to see that more liberty is better than less? I guess a bit more than a subjective comment on HN.
Cornelius267 4y ago
"US and UK are libertarian" Can you elaborate on why you believe this? I don't see any way that the US and the UK are Libertarian, unless the definition of that word is stretched massively.
lovich 4y ago
Is this a troll account? Between the username and the blatant false statement about the UK being libertarian this seems like a downvote account from Reddit.
ted_dunning 4y ago
Your username is apt and seems to indicate that your comment is not in good faith. Neither the US nor the UK are libertarian societies. Both have substantial safety nets and large governments that work (mostly) for the common weal. Yes, during the 20th century, western economies did vastly better than, say, North Korea or the Soviet Union, but China in the 21st century is the odd data point. They are neither fish nor fowl, not communist, not really capitalist, certainly centrally controlled in some aspects and bizarrely wild west in others.

mmastrac 4y ago

Humans like to oversimplify systems to soundbites, so any time you end up with pure X it always fails. There's no stability in a system of pure X. It turns out to be complicated to get humans to live together in harmony and picking and choosing various parts of all the -isms is really the only way to do it.

gonzo41 4y ago

Yeah, the though experiment I play out always has a bunch of libertarians living together in a community in the frontier lands somewhere. One of the new settlers is an industrialist who brings their enterprising attitude and chemical plant with them during the move to this new exciting city. They graciously bring bootstrappy job opportunities for the locals around the new city to much applause. Anyway fast forward a few years and because disposing of PFAS chemicals is hard, they've just been dumping them in a local wetland to keep costs down and profits up. Lots of kids and many adults start finding it tough with all that cancer they need to pay for, but the local coffin maker is doing a great trade. After a while the regular libertarians look to confront the plant owner about the waste and dumping asking for a cleanup and compensation for the damage to people and property. Well hearing that people are upset, the plant owner has a town hall with the folk, they get rowdy and emotional. The plant owner get's defensive and thinks about the possibility of a down quarter for his victimized chemical plant. Everyone leaves a bit upset. Some more than others. Later that night the plant owner sits in his home and reads about a new libertarian utopia that's started. They go to bed that night with a plan to pack up leave this ungrateful town. A month later the plant over leaves with most of the towns job, the PFAS stays and everyone else is too sick or poor paying for someones sickness to be able to be a libertarian anymore. Ta-da, the aristocrats.

progrus 4y ago
Maybe that first community should have done a better job of regulating itself? All you’re really arguing for here is more engagement in local politics.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  In Libertopia, the only regulations are contract enforcements. It's a lot like cryptocurrency and DAO schemes: it turns out to be really really hard to get people to accept that a bug in the law means a bad outcome for them, and nobody writes non-trivial bug-free code.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    > In Libertopia, the only regulations are contract enforcements. That's disingenuous. There is plenty of libertarian literature on negative externalities. Milton Friedman, notably, was happy to use taxes and regulations to protect the environment. The reasoning is simple: by polluting my land / poisoning me with PFAS, you have violated the NAP. This kind of pollution is illegal in "Libertopia".

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> While many attempts to build a socialist utopias have failed, it looks like building a libertarian one is even harder, and they disintegrate extremely quickly Given that attempts to build socialist utopias have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, I'm pretty sure "fail fast" is a feature rather than a bug.

the_other 4y ago
At what point would you say those “attempts to build socialist utopias” transition to “usurped by dictators”? As I see it, this happens early on in some significant cases. It seems to happen far back enough that I’m inclined to think we have seen very few attempts at socialist utopia, and they have mostly been successful and lacking in (local) deaths (UK, much of Europe since ww2). I know this is a generalisation; I know that the UK (my home) has engaged in some shady horror abroad and I agree that should factor in to this conversation. But I also feel that the dreadful “communist” experiences you’re alluding to are outliers from the conversation, are dictatorships and oligarchies, and not genuine attempts at socialist utopia.
- ellopoppit 4y ago
  >At what point would you say those “attempts to build socialist utopias” transition to “usurped by dictators”? ... >not genuine attempts at socialist utopia. "Unsuccessful" attempts would seem to be a more accurate phrasing than "not genuine". While I do think you have an interesting point, it could perhaps be the rigid uniformity and anti-individualism which is intrinsic to hard core socialism that has helped lead to those horrid dictatorships we've seen in the past 100 years
  - the_other 4y ago
    Good points. I have not studied the roots of "hard core socialism" deeply enough to understand where this uniformity comes from. Taking a vary casual glance at Marx, it doesn't seem to be there. He seemed to be arguing for collective ownership and an eventual slide towards "cooperative anarchy" - a conscious balance or dialog between collective and individual desire. It's really hard for me to see where the rigid conformity came from. In other venues, we see rigid conformity tied to hierarchy (military, strict schools).. all venues that tend to have figurehead leaders, and disempowered individuals rather than collective empowerment.

jdminhbg 4y ago

> utopian capitalism fails much faster than utopian communism A willingness to imprison entire populations and shoot anyone who won't cooperate will extend an experiment's lifespan significantly.

lovich 4y ago
That is a critique that can be applied to America as well. There was a long time period where strikes were met with government violence until the labor force went back to work. Examples: https://listverse.com/2017/09/14/10-tragic-times-the-us-government-massacred-striking-workers/ https://listverse.com/2017/09/14/10-tragic-times-the-us-gove...
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  If America were an experiment in utopian capitalism, then OP's point that utopian communist experiments last longer would be wrong. But since America isn't an experiment in utopian capitalism, this is just totally irrelevant.
  - lovich 4y ago
    It was an experiment in utopian capitalism between the post civil war era and the the beginning of the Great Depression (which if you notice is when most of those worker crackdowns occurred). A feature of democracy that is separate from the economic system is that you can have peaceful revolutions which is what occurred when FDR gained power and implemented the socialist policies of The New Deal. I’ll grant you that’s still several decades of utopian capitalism before it collapsed which is significantly better than what people might assume if they are only familiar with recent experiments like grafton nh
arrosenberg 4y ago
It's not clear which system you are referring to!
- jtode 4y ago

mikkergp 4y ago

There's been some interesting Podcasts on https://porcfest.com/ https://porcfest.com/ which is a libertarian festival each year. The one thing I remember is lots of competition/disagreement on currencies.

toss1 4y ago

Yup I find Libertarianism a good starting-off point, or default, for thinking about govt. In general, freedom is a good in itself. The problem I've found is that, if given actual free reign, any libertarian state would soon end up re-inventing something like what we have now, or degenerate into authoritarianism. It sounds lovely to have no hard laws & regulations, with conflicts resolved by the courts. Hell, I've had lots of race training and won sportscar racing championships, and having to conform with the rules of the guys with the blue lights is really annoying. Same for factories having to comply with pollution regs. The problem is that without standards, everyone has a right of action. So instead of a known framework - I can go 65mph, or the factory can emit only X tons of pollutant-Y per 1000 tons of exhaust, anyone can take action. I might drive past someone at a very reasonable speed, but startle them, and now they're charging me in court. I might live 1000 miles downwind and not like that polluter, so I get some measuring devices and find the scintilla of pollutant they're dropping on my land. Soon, everyone would want some actual standards to meet so it isn't always chaos (aside from the massive court & enforcement system). The other key concept is that the "Free Market" literally does not exist. Every market has rules, regulations, and constraints. Those constraints may not be enforced by a specific government entity, but a market cannot persist past one deal without them. Any completely "free market" would allow anything, including false advertising, products containing poisons, and murder-for-hire services. Taken to the logical conclusion, your greatest advantage in a totally free market is to either kill your vendor and take his goods or kill your customer and take their money, but that never even lasts past one deal. All things in every sustained market are regulated to one degree or another, even in completely extra-legal markets. The only question is how much are they regulated and by what entities. History has pretty much demonstrated that governance is required for any kind of even slightly complex society. This is ALWAYS annoying and imperfect. The question is only how to make it least imperfect. Libertarianism seems to have good answers, but when actually examined even a bit, it fails.

mikkergp 4y ago
It’s probably basically that thousands(more?) of years ago we all started at libertarianism and then you just start to resolve conflict after conflict and power struggle after power struggle until you get the mess we have now.

ishjoh 4y ago

I'm intrigued by this idea and would like to look through the historical record. Is there one or more societies you would consider utopian capitalism, and one or more you consider utopian communism that I could research?