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A libertarian government worker would be more like a nuclear engineer who thinks nuclear energy plants are intrinsically dangerous. So dangerous that they shoul

by cairnsh 13y ago

A libertarian government worker would be more like a nuclear engineer who thinks nuclear energy plants are intrinsically dangerous. So dangerous that they should be avoided if at all possible.

icebraining 13y ago
That's still not hypocrite, because the power plant would be built anyway. Her/His action is not causing the power plant to happen, unless somehow s/he's the only nuclear engineer available.
- bane 13y ago
  No, performing actions that are different than your beliefs is literally the definition of hypocrisy. The fact that somebody else might take the actions anyways is irrelevant.
  - crazy1van 13y ago
    Working for the government does not grow the government. The government has decided to grow by hiring a new employee. Your action to take or reject the job doesn't change that. However, believing the government should be smaller and then voting for politicians who want to grow your sector of the government does seem hypocritical.
    - bane 13y ago
      > Working for the government does not grow the government. Working productively for the government, specifically when non-government alternatives exist, does. Let's say you work in transportation, should you work for the DoT or the company that owns all the toll roads in the region? Let's say you do a damn good job for the DoT and because of your work you drive the the cost per traveled mile per person (or whatever the applicable measure is) to a fraction of the same for the private toll roads. You've just justified that government is in fact better than the private sector. The local general assembly passes a law that the toll road should become public property and a forced takeover is instituted. Government is grown. But you could work for the toll road company, drive their costs down while expanding their owned network, demonstrate that private road ownership, a pay-for-what-you-use system is the best. It beats paying taxes on roads you won't even drive on! Private road companies start taking over all the roads and the DoT becomes nothing more than a small regulatory body. Government is shrunk. You have a choice, participate in government or not. If you believe the government cannot be effective, and you still take the government job, you become part of the problem and that's hypocrisy full stop. If you do a good job, you defeat your own argument. If you do a bad job, willfully (to try and prove government can't work) or not (just laziness and incompetence), then I question the need to retain you either way. The U.S. at least has such a large private sector, it dwarfs the public sector, that there's very little excuse in going government vs. finding a commercial job somewhere.
      - crazy1van 13y ago
        Interesting point. I see how that applies in your DoT / toll road example but that works because they are in a sense two competing entities. That's not the case with a big chunk of the government. For example, a highly productive patent office employee really doesn't do anything to justify the office's existence unlike your DoT worker example. In some ways, issuing a lot of patents might actually prove the patent office should not exist.
        bane 13y ago
        Well, to specifically look at your patent example. Patents are one of the few things most types of Constitutionally focused Libertarian movements explicitly allow (U.S.C. Article 1, Sec 8, Clause 8). But more generally, there are lots of things that only governments can do, that no free-market alternative can provide comparably, or can provide structure to where the non-government solution provides inefficient chaos. People often use government mandated standards as the example. "Drinking water must have no more than x parts per million of y" and then provides testing and enforcement of those standards to ensure some minimal level of safety. And if some act of God means local drinking water becomes undrinkable regardless of efforts to clean, the government also carries out public awareness and warning campaigns and offers remediation guidelines. Nothing stops private industry from providing better than those standards of water, but private industry generally doesn't. Given a set of minimal standards, private industry almost always targets those standards (but not better and of course there are exceptions). Now imagine what gets targeted when there are no standards and no enforcement of the standards? Is the water safe? or does it just not taste bad? I've been in countries where there was effectively no government oversight and the water tasted fine, but would land you in a hospital. And there are many cases where private industry gets caught not providing that minimal standard and enforcement actions occur. Or industry that has nothing to do with water provisioning ends up contaminating water so badly that people's tap water lights on fire or whatever. Industry self-regulation sometimes works, but just as often has been shown to not work well at all.
        icebraining 13y ago
        What does this have to do with the hypocrisy issue?
smsm42 13y ago
You are confusing libertarians and anarchists. Libertarian would be a nuclear engineer that thinks nuclear energy plants are dangerous, so they should be strictly controlled and confined within the strictest safety procedures, and while the usability of their nuclear reaction can be harnessed to perform some functions that are hard to achieve otherwise, the said nuclear reaction should be strictly confined to these functions and not to be allowed to be spread outside of them. Would you really want a nuclear engineer that thinks otherwise to be in charge of a nuclear plant near you? Maybe some type that his first solution to any problem is sprinkling some uranium on it and seeing if the radiation solves it? And when it doesn't work saying maybe it's because it's not radioactive enough, so we need more uranium there?

by cairnsh 13y ago

A libertarian government worker would be more like a nuclear engineer who thinks nuclear energy plants are intrinsically dangerous. So dangerous that they should be avoided if at all possible.

icebraining 13y ago

That's still not hypocrite, because the power plant would be built anyway. Her/His action is not causing the power plant to happen, unless somehow s/he's the only nuclear engineer available.

bane 13y ago
No, performing actions that are different than your beliefs is literally the definition of hypocrisy. The fact that somebody else might take the actions anyways is irrelevant.
- crazy1van 13y ago
  Working for the government does not grow the government. The government has decided to grow by hiring a new employee. Your action to take or reject the job doesn't change that. However, believing the government should be smaller and then voting for politicians who want to grow your sector of the government does seem hypocritical.
  - bane 13y ago
    > Working for the government does not grow the government. Working productively for the government, specifically when non-government alternatives exist, does. Let's say you work in transportation, should you work for the DoT or the company that owns all the toll roads in the region? Let's say you do a damn good job for the DoT and because of your work you drive the the cost per traveled mile per person (or whatever the applicable measure is) to a fraction of the same for the private toll roads. You've just justified that government is in fact better than the private sector. The local general assembly passes a law that the toll road should become public property and a forced takeover is instituted. Government is grown. But you could work for the toll road company, drive their costs down while expanding their owned network, demonstrate that private road ownership, a pay-for-what-you-use system is the best. It beats paying taxes on roads you won't even drive on! Private road companies start taking over all the roads and the DoT becomes nothing more than a small regulatory body. Government is shrunk. You have a choice, participate in government or not. If you believe the government cannot be effective, and you still take the government job, you become part of the problem and that's hypocrisy full stop. If you do a good job, you defeat your own argument. If you do a bad job, willfully (to try and prove government can't work) or not (just laziness and incompetence), then I question the need to retain you either way. The U.S. at least has such a large private sector, it dwarfs the public sector, that there's very little excuse in going government vs. finding a commercial job somewhere.
    - crazy1van 13y ago
      Interesting point. I see how that applies in your DoT / toll road example but that works because they are in a sense two competing entities. That's not the case with a big chunk of the government. For example, a highly productive patent office employee really doesn't do anything to justify the office's existence unlike your DoT worker example. In some ways, issuing a lot of patents might actually prove the patent office should not exist.
      - bane 13y ago
        Well, to specifically look at your patent example. Patents are one of the few things most types of Constitutionally focused Libertarian movements explicitly allow (U.S.C. Article 1, Sec 8, Clause 8). But more generally, there are lots of things that only governments can do, that no free-market alternative can provide comparably, or can provide structure to where the non-government solution provides inefficient chaos. People often use government mandated standards as the example. "Drinking water must have no more than x parts per million of y" and then provides testing and enforcement of those standards to ensure some minimal level of safety. And if some act of God means local drinking water becomes undrinkable regardless of efforts to clean, the government also carries out public awareness and warning campaigns and offers remediation guidelines. Nothing stops private industry from providing better than those standards of water, but private industry generally doesn't. Given a set of minimal standards, private industry almost always targets those standards (but not better and of course there are exceptions). Now imagine what gets targeted when there are no standards and no enforcement of the standards? Is the water safe? or does it just not taste bad? I've been in countries where there was effectively no government oversight and the water tasted fine, but would land you in a hospital. And there are many cases where private industry gets caught not providing that minimal standard and enforcement actions occur. Or industry that has nothing to do with water provisioning ends up contaminating water so badly that people's tap water lights on fire or whatever. Industry self-regulation sometimes works, but just as often has been shown to not work well at all.
        icebraining 13y ago
        What does this have to do with the hypocrisy issue?

smsm42 13y ago

You are confusing libertarians and anarchists. Libertarian would be a nuclear engineer that thinks nuclear energy plants are dangerous, so they should be strictly controlled and confined within the strictest safety procedures, and while the usability of their nuclear reaction can be harnessed to perform some functions that are hard to achieve otherwise, the said nuclear reaction should be strictly confined to these functions and not to be allowed to be spread outside of them. Would you really want a nuclear engineer that thinks otherwise to be in charge of a nuclear plant near you? Maybe some type that his first solution to any problem is sprinkling some uranium on it and seeing if the radiation solves it? And when it doesn't work saying maybe it's because it's not radioactive enough, so we need more uranium there?