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If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism.
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An interesting if flawed criticism. Altruism and collectivism are themselves the result of selfish motives. For instance, people would not give of themselves to others or participate in families if they didn't stand to gain from the exchange.
People naturally gravitate towards participation in families in a free society because it offers a base social safety net. It's when artificial incentives (welfare) or great economic success becomes prevalent that familial systems begin to atrophy. Why have children when society will front the bill for you, and alternatively, why take care of one's parents when society is taking care of them?
The concept that Libertarians would decry the family because it limits freedom is inherently flawed, because participation in family is itself a consentual act.
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Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
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Another rediculous assertion. Good and Bad choices can only be determined within the context of their consequences. It's impossible for choices to be inherently good because their results can be observed to be bad, e.g. losing one's job to drug abuse.
It's hardly choice which is perceived as being inherently good, but the freedom to choose, and the ability to give consent.
This also begs the question of comparing lives in the first place. If one could live one's life playing tiddlywinks, be happy doing it, and not infringe on the rights of others doing it, what does it matter if one has lead a life that's not as "worthy" as Churchill or George Washington? It presumes that people are incapable of determining utility.
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Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
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A ridiculous criticism, considering that determining a factory's contribution to pollutants and their effects on the suing party are fairly easily determined. Things like "healthy cultures" are also naturally forming, and if cultural impacts are considered generally "unhealthy" then society or culture will gravitate towards trends that are generally considered "healthy."
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Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
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I fail to see how this hypothetically infringes on the liberties of the person who doesn't care for pornography. Are they not free to affect change on society by their own means?
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Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.
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If benefits are provided, it's inherently illogical not to take advantage of them. Not to mention that those benefits have already been payed for by one's involvement in society. One of the foundations of Libertarianism, in fact, is to seek positions where one does not need to rely on any of these artificial benefits.
It's also inherently impossible to collect from such benefits as Highways. The assertion of this argument seems to be that Libertarianism is bunk because we'd have to be hermits living in the arctic in order to avoid being hypocrites, a flawed criticism because people are inherently hypocritical. That doesn't make Libertarian criticisms or policies any more false.
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In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.
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If this was the case, then would it not mean that the alternative is ultimately false? The "reasonable alternative" provided doesn't necessarily ensure the freedom of society any more than libertarianism because it still provides the means by which to limit freedoms harmfully.
It sounds like what Locke is proposing is the preservation of freedom by maintaining a philosophical persistance, which doesn't make his position anymore legitimate than libertarianism, as libertarianism requires a philosophical consenus in order to establish itself.
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Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.)
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Queer, yes, but hardly a legitimate criticism considering the consent involved in giving oneself up to slavery.
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And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
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The problem with this criticism is that it presumes that libertarianism needs to account for these problems, when acting humans account for them naturally. If one is incapable of offering consent, then the determination of action naturally defaults to the next-of-kin. In the absence of kin, then it's sane individuals on-the-scene which have to make decisions according to the context.
It's true that children aren't capable of determining what is best for themselves, however that doesn't mean that decisions must be made for them to their detriment, such as truancy laws.
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Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen.
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Isn't there? Native Americans maintained societies in the absence of central authority, and established a "natural order" through communal interaction.
Since it is impossible not to interact with a community, communal order develops naturally within context. It's no mystery why European defection to native societies was such a problem during the colonial period.
Again, the presumtion being made here is that people are incapable of determining utility, when the entirety of history and human nature indicates otherwise.
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Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
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The counter-point to this assertion is fairly simple, considering that people are naturally conditioned by authority to presume that they can only be happy within the presence of authority, even when factors indicate that they aren't. If libertarianism is the natural state, yet the common state is artificial, does that not mean that it is being perpetuated artificially?
What fault is there in attempting to convince people that liberty is the right choice? "Seizing power" would also be a very un-libertarian thing to do, which would be why no libertarian movement has ever done so, even to our detriment.
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It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
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Leaving said society would be the "opt out."
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But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out.
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Which is itself a historical myth. "Wildcat banking" while present during America's Free Banking period has since been grossly overstated:
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http://www.fee.org/publications/the-...e.asp?aid=2046
Instability is often the fear of those who think that “free banking” laws in some parts of the antebellum United States led to irresponsible or “wildcat” banking. It turns out that “wildcat” banking is largely a myth. Although stories about crooked banking practices are entertaining—and for that reason have been repeated endlessly by textbooks—modern economic historians have found that there were in fact very few banks that fit any reasonable definition of”wildcat bank.” For example, of 141 banks formed under the “free banking” law in Illinois between 1851 and 1861, only one meets the criteria of lasting less than a year, being set up specifically to profit from note issue, and operating from a remote location.[2]...
...2. This statistic, from a study by Andrew J. Economopoulos, is cited by Kevin Dowd, “U. S. Banking in the ‘Free Banking’ Period,” in Dowd, ed., The Experience of Free Banking (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 218. Pioneering modern work on the U. S. experience with “free banking” laws, which is the source for the information in the next paragraph of the text, has been done by Hugh Rockoff and by Arthur J. Rolnick and Warren E. Weber.
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Wildcat banks almost always
had to be situated in remote locations, because the inaccessibility prevented the cashing of their promissory notes. Considering modern transportation and the free exchange of information, wildcat banks could only take advantage of the criminally gullible and wouldn't be able to last long in the face of fraud charges.
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A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.
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Japan also had built up its industrial base using money loaned from the United States through the Bretton-Woods system, and has since been able to grow through shrewd business practices which circumvent government obstacles, or do their best to perform within them.
Russia's economy had also come out from a previously socialist one. When everyone starts out dirt poor, it's going to take a while to build up into a powerhouse. Russia's economic failures are also likely due, in no small part, to its inability to enforce law, and prevent extortion and fraud.
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Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.
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An interesting statement, considering that America established its free society in the face of tyranny, and that Third-World tyranny arises due to the inability of the populace to oppose it, an ability which Americans possess in about 2/3rds of their closets.
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They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock.
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A statement which isn't based on any real empirical observation or record.
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Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint.
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Which is a lie. The difference, essentially, between do-as-you-please, and do-as-you-should. People are perfectly capable of restraining themselves within the context of the utility derived from that restraint. Libertarianism has never attacked this, in so far as I'm aware.
How ya doing, buddy?
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