3 ms·

Not in the slightest, but the besetting flaw of libertarians is the belief that history has nothing to teach them save what they desire to learn, and that the e

by aaronem 13y ago

Not in the slightest, but the besetting flaw of libertarians is the belief that history has nothing to teach them save what they desire to learn, and that the existence of government, in one form or another, throughout recorded human history, implies nothing whatsoever regarding the viability of their particular flavor of utopianism.

baddox 13y ago
Do you consider the history of government to be particularly positive? It doesn't seem that way to me.
- username223 13y ago
  You can take your pick of places to live without functioning governments. Most of them are probably uninhabited islands or starving regions in Africa, but it's up to you.
  - baddox 13y ago
    That doesn't answer my question. It's clear that essentially every society on Earth is organized by a government. I was asking if that has been a positive thing. Widespread does not imply positive.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing): 1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household. 2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis. (As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.) Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure. Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress). A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture. There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals? I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.
    - username223 13y ago
      If governed regions are worse, why aren't you living in one of the ungoverned ones? Where (roughly) do you live now, and where would you live if moving were free? Thanks to government, my landlord can't kick me out without due notice, big guys with weapons can't "protect" me for a fee, and I can travel for free wherever I want on well-maintained roads without paying arbitrary fees. If your point is that agriculture made most people worse off than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, I probably agree, but that choice is long past.
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        BTW, I am living in Indonesia now which is far less governed than the US. It is true that it is a one person one vote society for city/state/national elections but these are not actually where most of the real action happens. Neighborhood associations etc. are very much one household one vote (usually the man, but the votes are not secret, and usually the women end up having the real keys to the power there). In short, as far as how people actually live, it is far less governed and far more Aristotelian than the US is. A few observations: 1. The poor have better nutrition in most of Indonesia than in most of the US. They also have, due to fewer formal protections on squatting, more secure housing since the only reason to tear down squatters' homes is actually building something new. 2. Police corruption protects the poor. if you are driving a car and strike a motorcyclist, that's a much bigger deal than hitting another car. Similarly evicting squatters from one's land so you can build something else requires paying off the cops fairly heavily. 3. That is not to say the poor have it easy here. Access to clean drinking water that is long-term safe after boiling is not common. But hey, given West Virginia, I suppose it's hard to complain. 4. Self-employment is the norm. 70% of the population is self-employed. Also income inequality is significantly better than in the US. 5. Indonesian material culture, even for the poor, is relatively luxurious by American standards (aside from things like big screen tv's). There are a lot fewer mass-produced goods and a lot more hand-made things. There's also a hands-on labor culture here which is very, very different from the big machine automation culture of the US. 6. Actual traffic laws in practice amount to "drive safely" and instead of banning this practice or that practice (texting etc), the rule is that police corruption protects the victim. 7. Police corruption is not without limits. If a police officer accepts a bribe in an unacceptable area (allowing illegal logging, for example), the officer will be prosecuted and likely jailed. There's a very hard line between corruption that everyone expects and indeed relies on for the regulation of society and corruption that is unacceptable and prosecuted. But a big part of this is that Indonesia has a decentralized government to an extent that Americans would have trouble understanding. For example, metropolitan area of Jogjakarta is like a province or state, except that the treaty that brought the city into Indonesia specified that the Sultan would retain the hereditary position of Governor. So nobody gets to vote for the head of the executive branch of Jogjakarta DKI. Instead they have the Sultan who is well-loved by all there and has a very good reputation throughout Indonesia.
    - arg01 13y ago
      I think your question is overly broad, there were and are many types of government and they all had different effects. I don't think it's even simple to answer if one government is a positive or negative. Was the soviet union good? millions dead, censorship of other ideas, huge leaps forward in quality of life on some axis, killed more nazis than the allied forces, forced the usa to get to space -> which meant some of the technology people living in the ex-soviet union exists now, it's existence encouraged the granting of worker rights/higher pay through fear of similar upheaval.

by aaronem 13y ago

baddox 13y ago

Do you consider the history of government to be particularly positive? It doesn't seem that way to me.

username223 13y ago
You can take your pick of places to live without functioning governments. Most of them are probably uninhabited islands or starving regions in Africa, but it's up to you.
- baddox 13y ago
  That doesn't answer my question. It's clear that essentially every society on Earth is organized by a government. I was asking if that has been a positive thing. Widespread does not imply positive.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing): 1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household. 2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis. (As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.) Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure. Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress). A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture. There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals? I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.
  - username223 13y ago
    If governed regions are worse, why aren't you living in one of the ungoverned ones? Where (roughly) do you live now, and where would you live if moving were free? Thanks to government, my landlord can't kick me out without due notice, big guys with weapons can't "protect" me for a fee, and I can travel for free wherever I want on well-maintained roads without paying arbitrary fees. If your point is that agriculture made most people worse off than their hunter-gatherer predecessors, I probably agree, but that choice is long past.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      BTW, I am living in Indonesia now which is far less governed than the US. It is true that it is a one person one vote society for city/state/national elections but these are not actually where most of the real action happens. Neighborhood associations etc. are very much one household one vote (usually the man, but the votes are not secret, and usually the women end up having the real keys to the power there). In short, as far as how people actually live, it is far less governed and far more Aristotelian than the US is. A few observations: 1. The poor have better nutrition in most of Indonesia than in most of the US. They also have, due to fewer formal protections on squatting, more secure housing since the only reason to tear down squatters' homes is actually building something new. 2. Police corruption protects the poor. if you are driving a car and strike a motorcyclist, that's a much bigger deal than hitting another car. Similarly evicting squatters from one's land so you can build something else requires paying off the cops fairly heavily. 3. That is not to say the poor have it easy here. Access to clean drinking water that is long-term safe after boiling is not common. But hey, given West Virginia, I suppose it's hard to complain. 4. Self-employment is the norm. 70% of the population is self-employed. Also income inequality is significantly better than in the US. 5. Indonesian material culture, even for the poor, is relatively luxurious by American standards (aside from things like big screen tv's). There are a lot fewer mass-produced goods and a lot more hand-made things. There's also a hands-on labor culture here which is very, very different from the big machine automation culture of the US. 6. Actual traffic laws in practice amount to "drive safely" and instead of banning this practice or that practice (texting etc), the rule is that police corruption protects the victim. 7. Police corruption is not without limits. If a police officer accepts a bribe in an unacceptable area (allowing illegal logging, for example), the officer will be prosecuted and likely jailed. There's a very hard line between corruption that everyone expects and indeed relies on for the regulation of society and corruption that is unacceptable and prosecuted. But a big part of this is that Indonesia has a decentralized government to an extent that Americans would have trouble understanding. For example, metropolitan area of Jogjakarta is like a province or state, except that the treaty that brought the city into Indonesia specified that the Sultan would retain the hereditary position of Governor. So nobody gets to vote for the head of the executive branch of Jogjakarta DKI. Instead they have the Sultan who is well-loved by all there and has a very good reputation throughout Indonesia.
  - arg01 13y ago
    I think your question is overly broad, there were and are many types of government and they all had different effects. I don't think it's even simple to answer if one government is a positive or negative. Was the soviet union good? millions dead, censorship of other ideas, huge leaps forward in quality of life on some axis, killed more nazis than the allied forces, forced the usa to get to space -> which meant some of the technology people living in the ex-soviet union exists now, it's existence encouraged the granting of worker rights/higher pay through fear of similar upheaval.