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> This is the popular libertarian opinion and it is half thought out and wrong, like most libertarian opinions. I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always bo

> This is the popular libertarian opinion and it is half thought out and wrong, like most libertarian opinions. I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. > Would you buy stock from an insider? Yes, because I understand that corporate employees qualify as people too and need to pay bills now. But it's important to recognize patterns. If 3 out 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, it's probably just normal bill shuffling. If 3,000 out of 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, that probably means something far more significant. Let the market figure out what the patterns mean. > Now here is another hypothetical. IMO, any hypothetical you can come up with can be answered by pointing out that financial speculators perform a useful social service. By trying to buy low and sell high as soon as possible, speculators speed up price adjustments to their optimal point and make stock prices less volatile than they otherwise would be. This ultimately means that price discovery should happen faster and resources should flow quicker to wherever they'd be more useful. > Should we make bicycle theft legal because it is so hard to catch bike thieves? How about date rape? A bike thief or a rapist unambiguously violates the right to life, liberty, or property of another human being. Insider trading is different in that it's labeled as a crime where there's arguably no victim.

swatcoder 4y ago
> I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. If you care to unboggled, it’s because a lot of libertarianism’s consistency is owed to it reducing a lot of real-world scenarios to very simple models where a specific freedom’s primacy is preordained by the choice of model. For whatever that means to the libertarian, it leaves a lot of room for other people to see it as reductive — ignoring the difficulty of reconciling conflicting freedoms and often dismissive of higher-order freedoms. It’s a philosophy that’s been championed by some very smart, very committed thinkers, but it’s also one that’s very easy to exercise naively and very inviting to criticize on those grounds.
- myownpetard 4y ago
  Even when libertarian arguments are put forth in good faith it frequently falls victim to spherical cows reasoning. And too frequently libertarian arguments appeal to first principles reasoning in order to take an ahistorical view towards specific issues, especially if the person making the argument currently benefits from the historical context.
jlarocco 4y ago
> But it's important to recognize patterns. If 3 out 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, it's probably just normal bill shuffling. If 3,000 out of 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, that probably means something far more significant. Let the market figure out what the patterns mean. I'm not saying it's impossible, or doesn't happen, but IME it's incredibly unlikely that 3k of 5k employees would know about earnings before they were anounced to the public. Corporations just don't work that way. The C*Os and some of the finance team will know, but >95% of the employees will find out when the public finds out.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > The C*Os and some of the finance team will know, but >95% of the employees will find out when the public finds out. That 3,000 number was just a hypothetical, but I'd say that even knowing that 1 key insider bought some massive dollar value of calls leading up to earnings or sold a large number of shares before earnings is a valuable data point that provides better information to the public.
scott_w 4y ago
> I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. Because every time you need to apply such a reductive philosophy to reality, it falls apart. This would be fine if they adopted it as a purely personal lifestyle but they try to push it as a feasible form of government. They do this by mostly ignoring the real world complexity and real historical issues when aspects of their philosophy were actually applied. Examples? I’ve seen arguments police should be entirely privately funded, insider trading should be legal.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > I’ve seen arguments police should be entirely privately funded Not by an actual libertarian. Under actual libertarianism, using force against others is in the purview of government. I.e. the police are specially empowered to use force against people. This cannot be privately funded, because then you have private armies running around oppressing anyone their employer doesn't like. Next, please?
  - scott_w 4y ago
    You might want to tell this to “not true” libertarians like Eric Raymond, then.
JaimeThompson 4y ago
>how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. If you combine the libertarian idea that a property owner can fully control what happens to their property along with the idea that the right to contract is absolute what happens when the entity that owns the road in front of my home says I can no longer use it unless I shop only at his stores? A lot of libertarian ideas simply do not work when combined together due to human nature to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > If you combine the libertarian idea that a property owner can fully control what happens to their property along with the idea that the right to contract is absolute what happens when the entity that owns the road in front of my home says I can no longer use it unless I shop only at his stores? Of all of the hypothetical arguments against libertarianism you might have picked, this is one of the least questionable ones. If you buy a property today where property access might be a theoretical issue with no direct street access, the real estate agent, lawyer, or title clerk is already recommending/ensuring that explicit easement rights are added into the contract or the deal usually falls apart. Additionally, even if access isn't explicit in a contract, as far as I understand it, courts generally recognize a common-law right to access your property and have a number of doctrines available to ensure that nobody is just boxed in and trapped in a property with no recourse available to access it.
  - JaimeThompson 4y ago
    The courts of today don't follow libertarian principles which changes the outcome of my little what if. A decent amount of libertarian ideas run into issues like this where the assumption is that current non-libertarian systems will keep them in check but this sort of mixed system isn't what a large segment of libertarians appear to want.

swatcoder 4y ago

> I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. If you care to unboggled, it’s because a lot of libertarianism’s consistency is owed to it reducing a lot of real-world scenarios to very simple models where a specific freedom’s primacy is preordained by the choice of model. For whatever that means to the libertarian, it leaves a lot of room for other people to see it as reductive — ignoring the difficulty of reconciling conflicting freedoms and often dismissive of higher-order freedoms. It’s a philosophy that’s been championed by some very smart, very committed thinkers, but it’s also one that’s very easy to exercise naively and very inviting to criticize on those grounds.

myownpetard 4y ago
Even when libertarian arguments are put forth in good faith it frequently falls victim to spherical cows reasoning. And too frequently libertarian arguments appeal to first principles reasoning in order to take an ahistorical view towards specific issues, especially if the person making the argument currently benefits from the historical context.

jlarocco 4y ago

> But it's important to recognize patterns. If 3 out 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, it's probably just normal bill shuffling. If 3,000 out of 5,000 employees are selling their stock in the week before earnings, that probably means something far more significant. Let the market figure out what the patterns mean. I'm not saying it's impossible, or doesn't happen, but IME it's incredibly unlikely that 3k of 5k employees would know about earnings before they were anounced to the public. Corporations just don't work that way. The C*Os and some of the finance team will know, but >95% of the employees will find out when the public finds out.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> The C*Os and some of the finance team will know, but >95% of the employees will find out when the public finds out. That 3,000 number was just a hypothetical, but I'd say that even knowing that 1 key insider bought some massive dollar value of calls leading up to earnings or sold a large number of shares before earnings is a valuable data point that provides better information to the public.

scott_w 4y ago

> I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. Because every time you need to apply such a reductive philosophy to reality, it falls apart. This would be fine if they adopted it as a purely personal lifestyle but they try to push it as a feasible form of government. They do this by mostly ignoring the real world complexity and real historical issues when aspects of their philosophy were actually applied. Examples? I’ve seen arguments police should be entirely privately funded, insider trading should be legal.

WalterBright 4y ago
> I’ve seen arguments police should be entirely privately funded Not by an actual libertarian. Under actual libertarianism, using force against others is in the purview of government. I.e. the police are specially empowered to use force against people. This cannot be privately funded, because then you have private armies running around oppressing anyone their employer doesn't like. Next, please?
- scott_w 4y ago
  You might want to tell this to “not true” libertarians like Eric Raymond, then.

JaimeThompson 4y ago

>how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments. If you combine the libertarian idea that a property owner can fully control what happens to their property along with the idea that the right to contract is absolute what happens when the entity that owns the road in front of my home says I can no longer use it unless I shop only at his stores? A lot of libertarian ideas simply do not work when combined together due to human nature to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> If you combine the libertarian idea that a property owner can fully control what happens to their property along with the idea that the right to contract is absolute what happens when the entity that owns the road in front of my home says I can no longer use it unless I shop only at his stores? Of all of the hypothetical arguments against libertarianism you might have picked, this is one of the least questionable ones. If you buy a property today where property access might be a theoretical issue with no direct street access, the real estate agent, lawyer, or title clerk is already recommending/ensuring that explicit easement rights are added into the contract or the deal usually falls apart. Additionally, even if access isn't explicit in a contract, as far as I understand it, courts generally recognize a common-law right to access your property and have a number of doctrines available to ensure that nobody is just boxed in and trapped in a property with no recourse available to access it.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  The courts of today don't follow libertarian principles which changes the outcome of my little what if. A decent amount of libertarian ideas run into issues like this where the assumption is that current non-libertarian systems will keep them in check but this sort of mixed system isn't what a large segment of libertarians appear to want.