15 ms·

This reminds me of one of my favorite books from the past couple years, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. It’s a fascinating deep dive into an attempt to create

This reminds me of one of my favorite books from the past couple years, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. It’s a fascinating deep dive into an attempt to create a sort of libertarian utopia in a small town called Grafton, New Hampshire. The speed at which they arrive at “we need government services” after they eviscerate government services is… unsurprising. 10/10 I highly recommend it for anyone that’s interested in real-life examples of libertarianism as applied to real populations in the real world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358538-a-libertarian-walks-into-a-bear https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358538-a-libertarian-w...

wnevets 4y ago
A more recent example is the water crisis taking place in Cochise county. https://grist.org/regulation/arizona-groundwater-cochise-county-riverview/ https://grist.org/regulation/arizona-groundwater-cochise-cou...
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  > Kingman, where a Saudi-backed company grows alfalfa for export back to the Middle East
  - wnevets 4y ago
    The free market is amazing isn't it?
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I'm probably wrong more often than I'm right when it comes to politics on average. But libertarianism has been obviously illogical to me since I was about 15, half my lifetime ago. Since then I've spoken to some very intelligent libertarians at length and... nope, it still doesn't make any sense. It makes less sense than ever, in fact. At least when I was 15 I just thought they must be stupid, but no, not necessarily. Now my operating theory is that it's similar to how some people become completely engrossed in a fictional universe and wish it was the real world.
- bigtex88 4y ago
  That's because it is illogical. “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." Libertarians are stuck in a pubescent state-of-mind and are wholly incapable of viewing the real world as it is. Hence their absolutely insane "political leanings".
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Who's that quote from? It's funny you should use that one, I happen to be an avid Tolkien nerd, starting around that age :D Bit of a tangent, but it continues to amaze how relevant Tolkien continues to be to this day considering he started developing his legendarium almost a century ago now. Gender issues, sexism, addiction, free will, the allure of power and wealth, all explored in an amazingly prescient way that still stands up to scrutiny today.
    - JabavuAdams 4y ago
      It hasn't aged well in some other ways. I was a die-hard Tolkien fan from an early age -- I think I read LotR at around age 10 or so. But ... it's kind of hard to read to your beautiful brown daughter when you constantly have to stop and do teaching moments because Tolkien goes on and on about how fair and beautiful all the good guys are, and how swarthy etc. the nasty Southrons are.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        True, it hasn't held up in that sense. Although diving deeper into the legendarium, there is the fact that the southrons and easterlings were corrupted by Sauron to worship him as a god. So you could choose to view those descriptions as consequences of that rather than perceived racial or cultural inferiority. And indeed the "fair and beautiful" Numenoreans were at one point corrupted by Sauron in very much the same way. But yeah, you definitely have to give Tolkien a lot of help on this one, and it's not terribly helpful in the context of reading to your children :/
fidgewidge 4y ago
This book isn't about libertarians. It's about anarchists. "Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government ... They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity." Nobody who knows anything about libertarians and is trying to accurately represent it would write that, because the whole reason it exists as an independent thing from anarchism is that libertarians do not want to eliminate the government. They have very clear ideas about what exactly the government should do and that role is much less expansive than in a socialist country or even in America of today, but it's not literally nothing and it certainly doesn't involve living in tents. That's much closer to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in behaviour than libertarians.
- tracker1 4y ago
  I think that government should exist to implicitly ensure essential infrastructure. What is essential is up for debate, but generally can include, common defense, upholding contract law and enabling transportation, trade and commerce. In this day and age, I think internet, telephone and radio communications would be included as well. Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well. I'm a bit more pragmatic in terms of a from where we are standpoint in that I think there are less intrusive solutions to many problems than full regulation or more government. I think the crux is starting by holding those that are responsible for these things (corporate or banking execs and boards) liable for their decisions and actions, which doesn't happen currently, and most Libertarians I know would celebrate.
  - colinsane 4y ago
    > Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well. of the anarchists i’ve met i have yet to hear any accept the label of “Libertarian”. most of the handful i know used to be Libertarian but then passed through that into anarchism as they chased some ideal of rights/freedoms that turned out to be incompatible with the Libertarian views toward property rights.
karaterobot 4y ago
I know a few libertarians, and I've never heard any of them say "we don't need government services". I think that's the straw man version of libertarianism, the one that's easiest to dismiss. It's always a question of which services are best provided by the government, and which are best provided by private entities, or partnership of the two. Different libertarians arrive at different definitions of "state capacity". I really don't think of that philosophically as being quite as simple as it's portrayed a lot of the time. In fact, I'd say it's harder to predict what a libertarian believes, since that group has more than its share of contrarians.
DrThunder 4y ago
This is the same reason communism doesn't work. "Oh the people will control everything!" Except humans always give someone power... and that power will want more power if you allow it, until you end up in a terrible spot. The trick is to not let any one big group have too much power. It is not possible to create a society without groups taking charge and without those groups vying for power. One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the people they supposedly serve.
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  > One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the people they supposedly serve. How many of those services were purposely broken by libertarians, so that they could be targeted for privatization? I've worked in government, and have yet to see a service run more efficiently or cheaper after it's been privatized. The quality of the service is almost universally worse. When something is privatized, it's usually given a monopoly via bid. Now you just have a different set of people, with less experience, running the same service, with a percentage of the cost of running the service being siphoned off. There's also an incentive to provide less of the service, or run the service at a worse quality to maximize profit. The government has the option of running the service at a loss, but a private entity does not, further reducing the service quality level, often at the times you need it the most. When I worked in government, we had a software platform that was privatized. Every few years the contract to run the platform was put up for bid. To improve the likelihood of winning the bid, the vendor made the code purposely incomprehensible, wrote the minimum amount of documentation required, and kept most of the system maintenance manual. They most likely had in-house automation for most of the manual tasks, but that wasn't included with the contract. This also kept the bid price extremely high. When the contracts did switch hands, you'd end up with major operations issues after switchover, and numerous downtime events (this also made it harder for them to win the bid next time). Eventually it was considerably more expensive to contract out, but nothing is ever brought back from privatization.
  - DrThunder 4y ago
refurb 4y ago
Libertarianism isn't "no government". Sounds like a strawman?
- ETH_start 4y ago
  The anti-libertarian arguments generally consist of these strawman caricatures, to avoid dealing with pretty much unassailable mainstream libertarian criticisms of major contemporary government policies, like socializing deposit losses with taxpayer-funded FDIC insurance, guaranteeing $1.5 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities every year through the GSEs, and bailing out banks that engage in high-risk lending practices.
  - pas 4y ago
    The boring non-libertarian (political realist, non-radical) arguments about those are that doing the bailout is still better than the other possibilities. Also note that the bailouts tend to have positive financial returns to the government (because they get a lot of financial instruments at a very low cost, and then either sell them when they turn a profit or hold them to maturity, which again tend to be profitable because of low inflation in general). Would it be better to change the current system so that the bailouts were unnecessary? Yes. And depending on the ideology of who you ask you get different wishlists.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      Doing the bailout prevented the financial sector from being restructured through bankruptcy and market share reallocation. Systemically, it seems extremely implausible that preventing the normal function of the market, which incites good behavior and allocates capital to the best stewards of it, could ever be the right call.
      - pas 4y ago
        The too big to fail financial market is already in a pathological state, it's too small, not enough competition, etc. Yes, just brushing things under the carpet is bad, but whatever restructuring would have happened in that chaos would not have been an improvement. It's unfortunately very much politics. For example see how the FASB tried to eliminate HTM accounting, but had to back down (and that chair resigned). Yet! If the market already doesn't give enough shit to check the stuff in parentheses in a report for a 200B bank, then I suspect it's more of a theater than we like to admit. https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2023/03/13/the-svb-collapse-fasb-should-eliminate-hide-til-maturity-accounting/ https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2023/03/13/th...

wnevets 4y ago

A more recent example is the water crisis taking place in Cochise county. https://grist.org/regulation/arizona-groundwater-cochise-county-riverview/ https://grist.org/regulation/arizona-groundwater-cochise-cou...

everybodyknows 4y ago
> Kingman, where a Saudi-backed company grows alfalfa for export back to the Middle East
- wnevets 4y ago
  The free market is amazing isn't it?

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I'm probably wrong more often than I'm right when it comes to politics on average. But libertarianism has been obviously illogical to me since I was about 15, half my lifetime ago. Since then I've spoken to some very intelligent libertarians at length and... nope, it still doesn't make any sense. It makes less sense than ever, in fact. At least when I was 15 I just thought they must be stupid, but no, not necessarily. Now my operating theory is that it's similar to how some people become completely engrossed in a fictional universe and wish it was the real world.

bigtex88 4y ago
That's because it is illogical. “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." Libertarians are stuck in a pubescent state-of-mind and are wholly incapable of viewing the real world as it is. Hence their absolutely insane "political leanings".
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Who's that quote from? It's funny you should use that one, I happen to be an avid Tolkien nerd, starting around that age :D Bit of a tangent, but it continues to amaze how relevant Tolkien continues to be to this day considering he started developing his legendarium almost a century ago now. Gender issues, sexism, addiction, free will, the allure of power and wealth, all explored in an amazingly prescient way that still stands up to scrutiny today.
  - JabavuAdams 4y ago
    It hasn't aged well in some other ways. I was a die-hard Tolkien fan from an early age -- I think I read LotR at around age 10 or so. But ... it's kind of hard to read to your beautiful brown daughter when you constantly have to stop and do teaching moments because Tolkien goes on and on about how fair and beautiful all the good guys are, and how swarthy etc. the nasty Southrons are.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      True, it hasn't held up in that sense. Although diving deeper into the legendarium, there is the fact that the southrons and easterlings were corrupted by Sauron to worship him as a god. So you could choose to view those descriptions as consequences of that rather than perceived racial or cultural inferiority. And indeed the "fair and beautiful" Numenoreans were at one point corrupted by Sauron in very much the same way. But yeah, you definitely have to give Tolkien a lot of help on this one, and it's not terribly helpful in the context of reading to your children :/

fidgewidge 4y ago

This book isn't about libertarians. It's about anarchists. "Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government ... They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity." Nobody who knows anything about libertarians and is trying to accurately represent it would write that, because the whole reason it exists as an independent thing from anarchism is that libertarians do not want to eliminate the government. They have very clear ideas about what exactly the government should do and that role is much less expansive than in a socialist country or even in America of today, but it's not literally nothing and it certainly doesn't involve living in tents. That's much closer to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in behaviour than libertarians.

tracker1 4y ago
I think that government should exist to implicitly ensure essential infrastructure. What is essential is up for debate, but generally can include, common defense, upholding contract law and enabling transportation, trade and commerce. In this day and age, I think internet, telephone and radio communications would be included as well. Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well. I'm a bit more pragmatic in terms of a from where we are standpoint in that I think there are less intrusive solutions to many problems than full regulation or more government. I think the crux is starting by holding those that are responsible for these things (corporate or banking execs and boards) liable for their decisions and actions, which doesn't happen currently, and most Libertarians I know would celebrate.
- colinsane 4y ago
  > Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well. of the anarchists i’ve met i have yet to hear any accept the label of “Libertarian”. most of the handful i know used to be Libertarian but then passed through that into anarchism as they chased some ideal of rights/freedoms that turned out to be incompatible with the Libertarian views toward property rights.

karaterobot 4y ago

I know a few libertarians, and I've never heard any of them say "we don't need government services". I think that's the straw man version of libertarianism, the one that's easiest to dismiss. It's always a question of which services are best provided by the government, and which are best provided by private entities, or partnership of the two. Different libertarians arrive at different definitions of "state capacity". I really don't think of that philosophically as being quite as simple as it's portrayed a lot of the time. In fact, I'd say it's harder to predict what a libertarian believes, since that group has more than its share of contrarians.

DrThunder 4y ago

This is the same reason communism doesn't work. "Oh the people will control everything!" Except humans always give someone power... and that power will want more power if you allow it, until you end up in a terrible spot. The trick is to not let any one big group have too much power. It is not possible to create a society without groups taking charge and without those groups vying for power. One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the people they supposedly serve.

ryan_lane 4y ago
> One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the people they supposedly serve. How many of those services were purposely broken by libertarians, so that they could be targeted for privatization? I've worked in government, and have yet to see a service run more efficiently or cheaper after it's been privatized. The quality of the service is almost universally worse. When something is privatized, it's usually given a monopoly via bid. Now you just have a different set of people, with less experience, running the same service, with a percentage of the cost of running the service being siphoned off. There's also an incentive to provide less of the service, or run the service at a worse quality to maximize profit. The government has the option of running the service at a loss, but a private entity does not, further reducing the service quality level, often at the times you need it the most. When I worked in government, we had a software platform that was privatized. Every few years the contract to run the platform was put up for bid. To improve the likelihood of winning the bid, the vendor made the code purposely incomprehensible, wrote the minimum amount of documentation required, and kept most of the system maintenance manual. They most likely had in-house automation for most of the manual tasks, but that wasn't included with the contract. This also kept the bid price extremely high. When the contracts did switch hands, you'd end up with major operations issues after switchover, and numerous downtime events (this also made it harder for them to win the bid next time). Eventually it was considerably more expensive to contract out, but nothing is ever brought back from privatization.
- DrThunder 4y ago

refurb 4y ago

Libertarianism isn't "no government". Sounds like a strawman?

ETH_start 4y ago
The anti-libertarian arguments generally consist of these strawman caricatures, to avoid dealing with pretty much unassailable mainstream libertarian criticisms of major contemporary government policies, like socializing deposit losses with taxpayer-funded FDIC insurance, guaranteeing $1.5 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities every year through the GSEs, and bailing out banks that engage in high-risk lending practices.
- pas 4y ago
  The boring non-libertarian (political realist, non-radical) arguments about those are that doing the bailout is still better than the other possibilities. Also note that the bailouts tend to have positive financial returns to the government (because they get a lot of financial instruments at a very low cost, and then either sell them when they turn a profit or hold them to maturity, which again tend to be profitable because of low inflation in general). Would it be better to change the current system so that the bailouts were unnecessary? Yes. And depending on the ideology of who you ask you get different wishlists.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    Doing the bailout prevented the financial sector from being restructured through bankruptcy and market share reallocation. Systemically, it seems extremely implausible that preventing the normal function of the market, which incites good behavior and allocates capital to the best stewards of it, could ever be the right call.
    - pas 4y ago
      The too big to fail financial market is already in a pathological state, it's too small, not enough competition, etc. Yes, just brushing things under the carpet is bad, but whatever restructuring would have happened in that chaos would not have been an improvement. It's unfortunately very much politics. For example see how the FASB tried to eliminate HTM accounting, but had to back down (and that chair resigned). Yet! If the market already doesn't give enough shit to check the stuff in parentheses in a report for a 200B bank, then I suspect it's more of a theater than we like to admit. https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2023/03/13/the-svb-collapse-fasb-should-eliminate-hide-til-maturity-accounting/ https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/marketintegrity/2023/03/13/th...