The idealism of libertarianism

[mindstalk]

Aaargh. Libertarianism is not about robber barons, people. It's not about selfishness or low taxes. Yes, robber barons may find it useful to espouse libertarian ideals, just as control freaks may find it useful to espouse communist ones. Yes, some people who hate taxes or are selfish bastards may be drawn to libertarianism for narrow reasons. But that's not the core, any more than becoming aparatchniks was what drew lots of people to communism. I've *been* a libertarian, stopping, ironically, only when I started having income worth taxing, I hung out with lots of libertarians in a community on the net for years, and with a few in person, so I claim superior knowledge to anyone who's only had random arguments and not actually been inside, or close to an insider.

Libertarianism, at least at its core and best, and why judge it by less if you don't do that normally? is as much a burning idealism as communism. When you join the Libertarian Party you sign the Non-Coercion Principle, forswearing the initiation of force, or forswearing fraud, and force except in self-defense. A not stellar but classic libertarian science fiction series had an alternate history splitting on a Declaration of Independence which talked about the "unanimous consent of the governed" (the real one lacks 'unanimous'.) Just as it is morally obvious to a communist that people in need should be helped or that goods should be distributed fairly (meaning evenly, to the communist), and obvious to an anarchist that property and capital should be made available to those who can use it, not sequestered in "ownership", it is morally obvious to a libertarian that people should not initiate force against each other (and that this is fair). Not having taxes flows from that (taxes are, ultimately, collected by force) but it's not the point. The point is that people shouldn't be forced, should be left alone if they wish to be, should be free to associate as they choose and to make voluntary contracts. The point is that voluntary association and exchange should be the basis of society, not force.

You can say the idea is impractical; you can argue the ideas are incoherent when looked at critically, but it's no more all about avoiding taxes or social Darwinism than gaming is all about fat smelly cat-piss men or killing imaginary people and taking their imaginary stuff.

Comments

Non-Coercion Principle

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're still at it. (https://www.lp.org/members/newmember.shtml) "To validate my membership, I certify that I do not advocate the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals."

So, channeling my teenage self, the challenge would be: if you disagree with this, then where? What justifies initiating force for you? What political or social goals are you willing to kill someone over? Are you willing to force someone to work at gunpoint, or to storm someone's granary and risk being killed because they aren't contributing to the public library or school, or because someone else is starving? Because that really is what it boils down to, no hyperbole.

It can help if you sweep many social goals together, so that you're storming someone's granary for not contributing fairly to the general welfare, but I don't think you can honestly invoke that without also considering what the general contributions are actually spent on. Defense and feeding the starving, defensible; expensive monuments to leaders, not so much.

I basically stopped being libertarian when I accepted that yes, something are worth collectively mugging people for, or that forcing everyone to put 1/3 of their labor toward useful social goals isn't unfair, and that a shared environment means unitary or dyadic actions which don't affect others aren't always possible, and thus collective decisions must sometimes be made. But I can still feel that tug and appeal of "Don't force people."

Re: Non-Coercion Principle

[pompe.livejournal.com]

There's always force. Many libertarians for some reason focus on the force of the state, but not the force of our social conditioning, the force of blood bonds, the force of religion, the force of tradition, the force of dependence, the force of fear, the force of desperation... ...but it may be a cultural issue what we consider to be the worst offenders to individual liberty. But it isn't always so neat the alternative forces, say, wealth, religion and families are more enlightened than the state is.

Re: Non-Coercion Principle

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Glib response: most of those other forces don't kill you outright.

Not so glib: see other response, about how I'm just trying to show that a reasonable and good person can be libertarian, at least as much as reasonable and good people can be other things like socialist.

Re: Non-Coercion Principle

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Unless your nation practices killing citizens, chances are considerably higher your family will kill you than your local state representative. Especially if you happen to be female or a child.

But to the point. I do not doubt a person can be "good" and be a libertarian. If a libertarian or any other follower of an extremist ideology, be that radical environmentalism, communism or ultranationalism, can truly be "reasonable" to the commonly accepted and yet very vague sense of what is perceived to be reasonable would be, I'm not so sure.

I mean, I did military service with a fascist. National socialist probably would be even more accurate. I liked and respected him as a person and a friend, ans still do, but there's no way I can think of his political beliefs as "reasonable". I can understand them, and I can understand why he believed in them, but that doesn't make them reasonable. Another of my friends was and is hard-core Christian, baptist. I can understand and respect his beliefs too. But they aren't reasonable, because it isn't based upon a reasonable, rational, pragmatic assessment of how the world works and how people work.

Re: Non-Coercion Principle

[heron61.livejournal.com]

When unemployment is very high and there is little or no social safety net, the force of saying to an employee do x unreasonable deed or accept y unreasonable working condition or be fired is essentially the same as saying do x unreasonable deed or accept y unreasonable working condition or I will harm you (by firing you and causing you to possibly starve). So, while right-libertarians happily say that governments "forcing" people to pay taxes is wrong, most have see absolutely nothing wrong with the above scenario.

I find that level of hypocrisy to be sufficiently high that I feel no need to give further thought to libertarian ideology. For me, it's deeply and essentially hypocritical, and comes down to its origins as an anarchist philosophy.

In more standard (ie left) anarchy, the essentially point is not forcing people to do things, which means not forcing them with either guns or false choices like "work in my unsafe mine or starve". Libertarianism kept the part about not forcing people with guns, but abandoned the left-anarchist dedication to collectivism and interdependence. Traditional anarchists distrust governments and large businesses equally and combine this with a more general distrust of capitalism, because it is a system based on economic force - I deeply understand and sympathize with that sort of distrust, but do not share it. Right-libertarians distrust governments but have utterly abandoned their distrust of large business or capitalism, and so their alleged rejection of force is to me nothing more than a decision to be intellectually dishonest by claiming they reject all force because they merely reject to most obvious sort.

I basically stopped being libertarian when I accepted that yes, something are worth collectively mugging people for, or that forcing everyone to put 1/3 of their labor toward useful social goals isn't unfair, and that a shared environment means unitary or dyadic actions which don't affect others aren't always possible, and thus collective decisions must sometimes be made. But I can still feel that tug and appeal of "Don't force people."

For me, that's why my very brief flirtation with anarchism ended. However, I simply do not see right-libertarianism as an ideology that rejects force.