8 ms·

I challenge you to give me one very specific example of how something is not going to work in a libertarian world and I'm going right here right now to prove yo

by snitko 14y ago

I challenge you to give me one very specific example of how something is not going to work in a libertarian world and I'm going right here right now to prove you how it actually would work. (because, with all due respect, I think writing comments that basically say "it's not gonna work because it's puppies and rainbows" is not helping us find out the truth).

mbetter 14y ago
Ugh, I hate haggis.
mindslight 14y ago
Personal stewardship of nuclear weapons. Please don't "prove to me how it actually would work". Just think about it a while for yourself, and learn to accept that there's limits to the philosophy. Libertarianism is ultimately a heuristic, and you do it no favors by handwavingly claiming that you can prove desirable large scale behaviors based on a small set of axioms. Signed - a libertarian.
- saraid216 14y ago
  This has been what bugs me about gun rights people. The argument about personal safety is fine, but the people who want everyone to be armed in case the government decided to show its true colors or something? Um. You don't want a firearm. You want a tank.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    I dunno, there's some folks in Afghanistan and Iraq who did pretty good for themselves against our high-tech arsenal with just some old automatic rifles and homemade explosives. Vietnam, too.
    - a_bonobo 14y ago
      All of the insurgents in these conflicts have been armed by third parties. The Vietcong got weapons and supplies from China and Cambodia, the Afghani insurgents got weapons and supplies from the US to fight the Soviets (including explosives [1]), and the current Iraqi insurgents get money and supplies from extremists all over the place, mostly from the Emirates (afaik). All of these fighters did not build their own weapons and skills out of nothing. [1] "Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied secure communications gear and trained Pakistani instructors on how to use it. Experts on psychological warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at the firing site. " http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html
      - smacktoward 14y ago
        None of which is relevant to the original assertion, which was that defeating a modern army requires heavy armor (which we can use for discussion purposes as a proxy for the complete spectrum of modern, high-tech weapons) rather than small arms. The Chinese weren't funneling tanks to the Viet Cong, and the US wasn't funneling A-10s to the Afghan insurgents. It was small arms and man-portable weapons like mortars and MANPADs. And while those armies did eventually get arms supplies from abroad, in their early days they had to improvise. Viet Cong fighters early in that war, for instance, had to scrounge old French weapons or even homemade shotguns fashioned from galvanized pipe. The Iraqis' first IEDs were jerry-rigged artillery shells lifted from abandoned army depots. The foreign arms pipelines generally don't open up for a revolutionary army until it's proven it can fight and win at a small scale on its own.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    No, you want black markets and cryptography.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Turns out rifles and IED's are pretty effective. Tanks aren't worth shit in a guerrilla war.
  - pjzedalis 14y ago
    That's actually kind of a fallacy. Gun lovers don't want guns because they are scared of the Government. They want guns in case the Government fails. To protect them that is.
- c141charlie 14y ago
  This is a simple one, just watch Dr. Strangelove.
dstorrs 14y ago
Let me preface this by saying that I'm actually pretty much onboard with a lot of the Libertarian policies that I've heard. Like anything, of course, I think it can be taken too far. So, when you ask for a "very specific example", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind: - City governments have health inspectors that check local restaurants, and food-product companies to ensure they are using good ingredients, that the equipment is clean, etc. In a libertarian world (at least, certain versions of one) this practice would not exist. Now think what happens when a Monsanto executive realizes that paying the occasional legal suit is cheaper than keeping their packing plants clean and disease-free.
- snitko 14y ago
  When you tackle a certain problem and try to apply a libertarian framework to it, odds are you have to check if it's an implicit monopoly that you're dealing with and go from there. In your particular example you're dealing with a city government monopoly for health inspection. It's not free and is paid by citizens in the form of taxes. If there was no government and citizens believed it is in their interest to have such an inspection, surely you'd have at least one, but possibly two or more competing with each other and financed by consumers voluntarily. When you have a government, what you have is a monopoly which is, apart from all other evils of monopoly, much more vulnerable to corruption. If a government official is bribed and it is revealed, he may go to jail, but the agency itself stays in business. Which means it has almost no incentive whatsoever to prevent corruption among its employees. Finally, government doesn't really ask people if they need such an inspection after all and if yes, how thorough the inspectors should be: maybe businesses in this town are exceptionally honest, or maybe, on the other hand, they are exceptionally sloppy. So what you have with a government in place is a monopoly which business operations are based not on the actual demand for its services, but rather on some metrics that government officials came up with, which may or may not be useful.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    Libertarian belief system fails because it bases it's ideology around the idea of ownership. You explain the problem pretty well yourself when you say that we have to think in the framework of libertarianism. Thats like saying you will believe in Jesus once you let him into your heart.
astrodust 14y ago
Others have chimed in with similar explanations but it often revolves around the principal problem of how do you allow "freedom" without infringing on someone else's? For instance, if I want to drink radiation laced water, Libertarians would think I have the right. They'd also say I should have to pay for my own medical treatment resulting from that. Reasonable enough. However, if I drank radiation laced water because a chemical company was disposing of their waste in my backyard and I didn't know, Libertarians would tell you it's your fault for not having the proper testing equipment or paying a company to run these tests for you. The same thing shakes out for food. For employment. For air travel. For basically everything you do you're assumed to have done enough research to know the risks you're exposed to. Libertarianism also makes the enormous assumption that a safe option will always be available. Since there's zero protection from monopolies in a pure Libertarian society, they will naturally occur, and the results will be overwhelmingly negative for all but a handful of people, the proverbial 1% if that. Libertarianism also as much as endorses discrimination as it sees it as your absolute right to decide who you provide goods and services to. Idealists would have you believe that non-discriminatory companies will always out-perform their discriminatory counterparts, but history has proven the opposite. If people are racist, they will certainly pay a small premium for service that reflects their views. It's this every-man-for-himself approach to living that quickly degenerates into pure Darwinism where the one with the most money, who can easily afford to build a protective bubble around themselves, thrives and the others live miserable, dangerous lives. Basically a pure Libertarian approach has too many dangerous failure states for it to be taken seriously. There are arguments that can be made for a more or less libertarian approach to problems in society, but to go 100%, full-on is to miss the point.
- snitko 14y ago
  You're assuming it's only the government which is interested in providing me the information about services I use and the environment that I live in. An implicit monopoly of information. But I want to ask you this question: can you come up with at least one monopoly that existed naturally for a substantial period of time without any government support for it and without anyone being able to challenge it?
  - 14y ago
rayiner 14y ago
Explain how environmental protection works without regulation, taking into account negative externalities as well as transaction costs.
- yaks_hairbrush 14y ago
  Two ways: first, people do not currently value environmental protection. When the environment deteriorates to a certain point, people will be motivated to do environmental protection in the absence of regulation. Second, allow lawsuits for damage to property resulting from pollution. There could be a neat little lawsuit right now: NY and NJ residents vs. 5 biggest polluters in the world, on account of Sandy and the scientific evidence that Sandy was very much a result of AGW. (But then, it should be noted that lawsuits decided by courts is a governmental function.)
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Your explanation ignores both externalities and transaction costs, not to mention more subtle things like information asymmetries and cognitive overload. You can't just ignore the parts of economics that don't fit into your ideology.
    - yaks_hairbrush 14y ago
      > Your explanation ignores both externalities and transaction costs Well, handling property damages in court is deterring "tragedy of the commons" by making putting the commons-over-user at financial risk. > ... more subtle things like information asymmetries and cognitive overload. You pay someone to give you information. We do this now: our taxes fund the EPA and they give us information. > You can't just ignore the parts of economics that don't fit into your ideology. I'm not a libertarian. To the best of my understanding, there are some things that really should be done by the private sector and not by the government (airport security, for example). There are also things that really should be done by the government and not by the private sector (the trend of privatizing prisons disturbs me). You asked a question, though: how would a libertarian society's environment be protected. I offered up an option.
grannyg00se 14y ago
"I challenge you to give me one very specific example" I see your challenge went mostly unanswered. Unfortunate because I really would like to hear from the "Ron Paul is crazy" crowd since this is the first I've heard that such a crowd exists. Whenever I hear Ron Paul speaking he sounds very smart, educated on the topic at hand, and possessing of a much deeper insight than most.
tzs 14y ago
> I challenge you to give me one very specific example of how something is not going to work in a libertarian world and I'm going right here right now to prove you how it actually would work What do you mean by "libertarian world"? Libertarianism is a spectrum, so it's hard to give examples without knowing what specific kind of libertarian world we are discussing. For instance, there are some libertarians who say there should be NO government. Everything should be handled by markets and private property rights. To those libertarians, my example would be dealing with crime. For instance, suppose you come home and find that a crime has been committed against you--perhaps something of yours has been stolen, or a family member has been killed. You call a police company (one of many competing private police companies) and hire them to investigate the crime. As part of their investigation, they determine that they would like to talk to me, and that they believe important evidence is in my house. When they knock on my door and ask to search my house, I'm going to tell them to go away (and I'm going to back that request with force--both my own guns, and the guns of the private police force I have hired to keep trespassers off my land). Oops. With no government, who issues search warrants and provides the force to execute them? I've seen various attempts to resolve this problem, but none that would actually work, where by "work" I mean achieve the outcome that they are intended to achieve.
- snitko 14y ago
  Your example is the one that was cracked by David D. Friedman, I recommend you watch the part of his talk discussing the exact same case you mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXWFWIM8OCI#t=620s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXWFWIM8OCI#t=620s
  - tzs 14y ago
    I've seen that argument before. It fails, because I'll simply hire a private protection agency that does not have an agreement with your private protection agency to go to an arbitrator when the two agencies find themselves representing opposing clients.
    - snitko 14y ago

by snitko 14y ago

mbetter 14y ago

Ugh, I hate haggis.

mindslight 14y ago

Personal stewardship of nuclear weapons. Please don't "prove to me how it actually would work". Just think about it a while for yourself, and learn to accept that there's limits to the philosophy. Libertarianism is ultimately a heuristic, and you do it no favors by handwavingly claiming that you can prove desirable large scale behaviors based on a small set of axioms. Signed - a libertarian.

saraid216 14y ago
This has been what bugs me about gun rights people. The argument about personal safety is fine, but the people who want everyone to be armed in case the government decided to show its true colors or something? Um. You don't want a firearm. You want a tank.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  I dunno, there's some folks in Afghanistan and Iraq who did pretty good for themselves against our high-tech arsenal with just some old automatic rifles and homemade explosives. Vietnam, too.
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    All of the insurgents in these conflicts have been armed by third parties. The Vietcong got weapons and supplies from China and Cambodia, the Afghani insurgents got weapons and supplies from the US to fight the Soviets (including explosives [1]), and the current Iraqi insurgents get money and supplies from extremists all over the place, mostly from the Emirates (afaik). All of these fighters did not build their own weapons and skills out of nothing. [1] "Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied secure communications gear and trained Pakistani instructors on how to use it. Experts on psychological warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at the firing site. " http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/wtc/oblnus091401.html
    - smacktoward 14y ago
      None of which is relevant to the original assertion, which was that defeating a modern army requires heavy armor (which we can use for discussion purposes as a proxy for the complete spectrum of modern, high-tech weapons) rather than small arms. The Chinese weren't funneling tanks to the Viet Cong, and the US wasn't funneling A-10s to the Afghan insurgents. It was small arms and man-portable weapons like mortars and MANPADs. And while those armies did eventually get arms supplies from abroad, in their early days they had to improvise. Viet Cong fighters early in that war, for instance, had to scrounge old French weapons or even homemade shotguns fashioned from galvanized pipe. The Iraqis' first IEDs were jerry-rigged artillery shells lifted from abandoned army depots. The foreign arms pipelines generally don't open up for a revolutionary army until it's proven it can fight and win at a small scale on its own.
- scarmig 14y ago
  No, you want black markets and cryptography.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Turns out rifles and IED's are pretty effective. Tanks aren't worth shit in a guerrilla war.
- pjzedalis 14y ago
  That's actually kind of a fallacy. Gun lovers don't want guns because they are scared of the Government. They want guns in case the Government fails. To protect them that is.
c141charlie 14y ago
This is a simple one, just watch Dr. Strangelove.

dstorrs 14y ago

Let me preface this by saying that I'm actually pretty much onboard with a lot of the Libertarian policies that I've heard. Like anything, of course, I think it can be taken too far. So, when you ask for a "very specific example", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind: - City governments have health inspectors that check local restaurants, and food-product companies to ensure they are using good ingredients, that the equipment is clean, etc. In a libertarian world (at least, certain versions of one) this practice would not exist. Now think what happens when a Monsanto executive realizes that paying the occasional legal suit is cheaper than keeping their packing plants clean and disease-free.

snitko 14y ago
When you tackle a certain problem and try to apply a libertarian framework to it, odds are you have to check if it's an implicit monopoly that you're dealing with and go from there. In your particular example you're dealing with a city government monopoly for health inspection. It's not free and is paid by citizens in the form of taxes. If there was no government and citizens believed it is in their interest to have such an inspection, surely you'd have at least one, but possibly two or more competing with each other and financed by consumers voluntarily. When you have a government, what you have is a monopoly which is, apart from all other evils of monopoly, much more vulnerable to corruption. If a government official is bribed and it is revealed, he may go to jail, but the agency itself stays in business. Which means it has almost no incentive whatsoever to prevent corruption among its employees. Finally, government doesn't really ask people if they need such an inspection after all and if yes, how thorough the inspectors should be: maybe businesses in this town are exceptionally honest, or maybe, on the other hand, they are exceptionally sloppy. So what you have with a government in place is a monopoly which business operations are based not on the actual demand for its services, but rather on some metrics that government officials came up with, which may or may not be useful.
- ThomPete 14y ago
  Libertarian belief system fails because it bases it's ideology around the idea of ownership. You explain the problem pretty well yourself when you say that we have to think in the framework of libertarianism. Thats like saying you will believe in Jesus once you let him into your heart.

astrodust 14y ago

Others have chimed in with similar explanations but it often revolves around the principal problem of how do you allow "freedom" without infringing on someone else's? For instance, if I want to drink radiation laced water, Libertarians would think I have the right. They'd also say I should have to pay for my own medical treatment resulting from that. Reasonable enough. However, if I drank radiation laced water because a chemical company was disposing of their waste in my backyard and I didn't know, Libertarians would tell you it's your fault for not having the proper testing equipment or paying a company to run these tests for you. The same thing shakes out for food. For employment. For air travel. For basically everything you do you're assumed to have done enough research to know the risks you're exposed to. Libertarianism also makes the enormous assumption that a safe option will always be available. Since there's zero protection from monopolies in a pure Libertarian society, they will naturally occur, and the results will be overwhelmingly negative for all but a handful of people, the proverbial 1% if that. Libertarianism also as much as endorses discrimination as it sees it as your absolute right to decide who you provide goods and services to. Idealists would have you believe that non-discriminatory companies will always out-perform their discriminatory counterparts, but history has proven the opposite. If people are racist, they will certainly pay a small premium for service that reflects their views. It's this every-man-for-himself approach to living that quickly degenerates into pure Darwinism where the one with the most money, who can easily afford to build a protective bubble around themselves, thrives and the others live miserable, dangerous lives. Basically a pure Libertarian approach has too many dangerous failure states for it to be taken seriously. There are arguments that can be made for a more or less libertarian approach to problems in society, but to go 100%, full-on is to miss the point.

snitko 14y ago
You're assuming it's only the government which is interested in providing me the information about services I use and the environment that I live in. An implicit monopoly of information. But I want to ask you this question: can you come up with at least one monopoly that existed naturally for a substantial period of time without any government support for it and without anyone being able to challenge it?
- 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

Explain how environmental protection works without regulation, taking into account negative externalities as well as transaction costs.

yaks_hairbrush 14y ago
Two ways: first, people do not currently value environmental protection. When the environment deteriorates to a certain point, people will be motivated to do environmental protection in the absence of regulation. Second, allow lawsuits for damage to property resulting from pollution. There could be a neat little lawsuit right now: NY and NJ residents vs. 5 biggest polluters in the world, on account of Sandy and the scientific evidence that Sandy was very much a result of AGW. (But then, it should be noted that lawsuits decided by courts is a governmental function.)
- rayiner 14y ago
  Your explanation ignores both externalities and transaction costs, not to mention more subtle things like information asymmetries and cognitive overload. You can't just ignore the parts of economics that don't fit into your ideology.
  - yaks_hairbrush 14y ago
    > Your explanation ignores both externalities and transaction costs Well, handling property damages in court is deterring "tragedy of the commons" by making putting the commons-over-user at financial risk. > ... more subtle things like information asymmetries and cognitive overload. You pay someone to give you information. We do this now: our taxes fund the EPA and they give us information. > You can't just ignore the parts of economics that don't fit into your ideology. I'm not a libertarian. To the best of my understanding, there are some things that really should be done by the private sector and not by the government (airport security, for example). There are also things that really should be done by the government and not by the private sector (the trend of privatizing prisons disturbs me). You asked a question, though: how would a libertarian society's environment be protected. I offered up an option.

grannyg00se 14y ago

"I challenge you to give me one very specific example" I see your challenge went mostly unanswered. Unfortunate because I really would like to hear from the "Ron Paul is crazy" crowd since this is the first I've heard that such a crowd exists. Whenever I hear Ron Paul speaking he sounds very smart, educated on the topic at hand, and possessing of a much deeper insight than most.

tzs 14y ago

> I challenge you to give me one very specific example of how something is not going to work in a libertarian world and I'm going right here right now to prove you how it actually would work What do you mean by "libertarian world"? Libertarianism is a spectrum, so it's hard to give examples without knowing what specific kind of libertarian world we are discussing. For instance, there are some libertarians who say there should be NO government. Everything should be handled by markets and private property rights. To those libertarians, my example would be dealing with crime. For instance, suppose you come home and find that a crime has been committed against you--perhaps something of yours has been stolen, or a family member has been killed. You call a police company (one of many competing private police companies) and hire them to investigate the crime. As part of their investigation, they determine that they would like to talk to me, and that they believe important evidence is in my house. When they knock on my door and ask to search my house, I'm going to tell them to go away (and I'm going to back that request with force--both my own guns, and the guns of the private police force I have hired to keep trespassers off my land). Oops. With no government, who issues search warrants and provides the force to execute them? I've seen various attempts to resolve this problem, but none that would actually work, where by "work" I mean achieve the outcome that they are intended to achieve.

snitko 14y ago
Your example is the one that was cracked by David D. Friedman, I recommend you watch the part of his talk discussing the exact same case you mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXWFWIM8OCI#t=620s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXWFWIM8OCI#t=620s
- tzs 14y ago
  I've seen that argument before. It fails, because I'll simply hire a private protection agency that does not have an agreement with your private protection agency to go to an arbitrator when the two agencies find themselves representing opposing clients.
  - snitko 14y ago