Ramblings about Libertarianism
Posted on 2008.12.23 at 12:47
If a political philosophy cannot be boiled down to achieving the greatest good for the greatest possible number of people (an imperative so staggeringly vague that it's not actually that restrictive to new ideas), I am not going to trust it. I don't care if a certain choice is correct according to Conservative or Libertarian (which, with its dogmatic worship of the "free market" has become an annoying mimicking little sister to Conservatism) values.
I care if it's going to hurt people. Libertarianism seems to me to be all about reversing ideologically-incorrect policies and plans regardless of why they were put into place and (still more disturbing) regardless of whether they work. I despise that. Be forewarned that this is one of those topics that has attracted much better and smoother analysis than mine; I'm basically just ranting here. If anybody wants to discuss this further I'll probably end up tracking down some of the highly-excellent comments on the subject that've already been written.
The big thing that Libertarianism seems to have going for it is that it's based on "freedom," and the idea that regulations can only restrict freedom (an assertion somewhere along the same lines as "natural selection can only subtract information," and with about as much thought behind it).
I used to think that I was a Libertarian (or at least a libertarian) because I wanted less government-enforced restriction on people's lifestyles. I didn't like the fact that states could put the rights of a minority to a majority vote and call it just. I didn't like that one group's moral standard could be enforced by a government on people who don't ascribe to it who aren't even hurting anybody by their difference.
Turns out these things make me liberal. A Libertarian, near as I can tell, supports the right of some entity to do these things that I hate, as long as it is not the government but a business.
Biggest megacorporation around doesn't want to hire Jews or blacks? Freedom of association means that they don't have to employ people they disapprove of, and even if it means that people get hurt... well, that's not enough reason to call a decision "bad" from a Libertarian perspective. This is why the Libertarian Party platform talks about reversing basically every civil rights regulation we've instituted in the last 45 years (and anyone who tries to reduce this down to the dastardly and immoral "affirmative action" is bullshitting you; don't let them).
Other things companies are allowed to do: sell dangerous products in the absence of government regulation. That's right, screw you Food and Drug Administration. We don't need you telling people not to sell products that haven't proven they're good but claiming they are. The free market will ensure that, after time and after lots of people have probably gotten sick or died, those dangerous products will fall out of vogue and the business will fail. After several instances of this in which many more people die, eventually companies will be pressured by the market to sell only what works. The free market will assure these things just like it did before we had the FDA. Which was... great, right? ...Right?
The cop-out on this is that businesses run on contracts. Everybody dealing with a business has agreed to deal with that business, and that means they've been given a chance to evaluate whether they approve or disapprove of it. Aside from the obvious point that this seems like a great excuse to sell your kids into slavery (since it's well-accepted that parents can contract on behalf of their children), let's dig just a tiny bit deeper. Why are contracts binding? Oh, right! Because if a party to a contract breaks the agreement, the other party can sue them and the government will enforce the agreement.
This is the kind of lack of critical thinking that I'm talking about. It's all about what's right in principle, with little to no attention paid to how things actually work and what would actually happen. Without a real government, there would be no one to enforce contracts (unless businesses would be allowed to enforce those contracts themselves, which creates about the same atmosphere of integrity and fairness that I'd expect from a mafia family's dealings).
"But Libertarians aren't anarchists," you say. "They still want to keep the government around. They just want to privatize most of its domestic functions." Lemme hit you with some political science now. I promise, I don't talk in crazy elevated academic language; you'll be able to understand this. So read it. Much of it is copy-pasted from a discussion I had a good while ago with![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
ijtihad_alkitab, so I guess everyone should read it but him, as he's already slogged through it once.
According to Max Weber (and he's kind of a big deal in social science, even if his conclusions are obviously not always perfect), government is built on "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force." This means that if only one group can arrest you, can imprison you, can participate in wars (either on your behalf or otherwise) then that group is very easy to call an authority. If the government is not the only group that can arrest, try, and imprison, if the government is not the only group that can make war.... what exactly makes it a government again? Where is its authority?
What's defined as "legitimate" use of force is obviously up for debate, and accounts for much of the diversity of government styles. What governments do have in common is some ability to enforce law in a way that only they can claim.
The government has police that can arrest you. That's the government using force. The government has prisons where they can detain you. That's the government using force. The government can also go to war, or press other nations in other ways to do things the way the US would like. That's the government using force. How, when, and to what extent the government uses these powers is both regulated by what our cultures perceives as legitimate, and it helps define what our culture perceives as legitimate.
Weber's argument is simple: if "the government" is not the only group that can do these things, then it is not "the government." It is a ruling power among many. In Yon Days of Olde this was called rule by warlord. Nowadays it's called market anarchism, I believe.
Now, here's the problem for me with using a free market approach to things that are not the market. Government is an institution that functions by having authority. If that authority is granted by the people, great. We've got elected officials, and that helps us determine how the government uses its authority, and that input from citizens is what--for many--gives the US government its legitimacy.
What Libertarianism proposes is close to not even being government in the first place. If competition is the only regulating force, and if competition improves every product type or service, applying that to things the government is doing erodes the classification of that entity as a government at all.
And for the record, competition does not improve everything; sometimes you need standards. With the Libertarian non-regulated model, ideally people would only buy what works and what did not work would simply fall out of use and eventually companies would only sell things that work. Ideally this free market plan would naturally weed out, say, the quacks from the genuine medical practitioners.
However, it's not the free market that does that, even now. It's federal regulatory bodies. This is why we have the FDA, for example. Flawed though the organization may be, I would much rather rely on federal oversight of drugs and supplements than hope the free market will (eventually) weed out what's ineffective or harmful. The FDA has authority over drug companies. They have power. To go back to Weber's theory, the FDA has power because it can exercise force with the legitimacy given to government. If the FDA were not the only agency regulating drugs and supplements, you'd have drug companies doing what children do when one parent says no: they go and ask the other parent, hoping to get a yes.
The government works that way as well. If you have multiple militaries, multiple law enforcement agencies, multiple avenues of oversight for drugs and supplements... then no one of them has the power necessary to do its job.
So let's get back to that "freedom" bit. Ignore the fact that the Libertarian party doesn't believe in civil rights protections, 'kay? We're talking about your only freedom (the only one you need, according to Libertarians) being the freedom to consent to a contract. Sounds great if you don't think too hard: I'd have the right to consent or deny any limitation of my personal freedom (though who'd be protecting these rights is seldom answered; I guess we should invoke "free market" somehow).
But no government can work that way. Otherwise the government could make a law and people could just say no. Sometimes, with some issues, this sounds pretty appealing. If I could simply personally veto the legal status of marijuana, I would. But that also means that someone else can personally veto more important laws, laws that might be protecting me from them. And in the end, because people can singularly opt out, laws cease to have meaning because there is no force behind them.
So what we're looking at, at least when we're talking about the ultimate dream that Libertarianism is trying to achieve, is damn near anarchy. I have the same problems with it that I have with anarchy, namely that in order for it to work... all humans involved must have previously reached some form of vast forward leap in the evolution of their benevolence and consciences, to the point where we don't need rules (or if we do, we certainly don't need to enforce them).
I care if it's going to hurt people. Libertarianism seems to me to be all about reversing ideologically-incorrect policies and plans regardless of why they were put into place and (still more disturbing) regardless of whether they work. I despise that. Be forewarned that this is one of those topics that has attracted much better and smoother analysis than mine; I'm basically just ranting here. If anybody wants to discuss this further I'll probably end up tracking down some of the highly-excellent comments on the subject that've already been written.
The big thing that Libertarianism seems to have going for it is that it's based on "freedom," and the idea that regulations can only restrict freedom (an assertion somewhere along the same lines as "natural selection can only subtract information," and with about as much thought behind it).
I used to think that I was a Libertarian (or at least a libertarian) because I wanted less government-enforced restriction on people's lifestyles. I didn't like the fact that states could put the rights of a minority to a majority vote and call it just. I didn't like that one group's moral standard could be enforced by a government on people who don't ascribe to it who aren't even hurting anybody by their difference.
Turns out these things make me liberal. A Libertarian, near as I can tell, supports the right of some entity to do these things that I hate, as long as it is not the government but a business.
Biggest megacorporation around doesn't want to hire Jews or blacks? Freedom of association means that they don't have to employ people they disapprove of, and even if it means that people get hurt... well, that's not enough reason to call a decision "bad" from a Libertarian perspective. This is why the Libertarian Party platform talks about reversing basically every civil rights regulation we've instituted in the last 45 years (and anyone who tries to reduce this down to the dastardly and immoral "affirmative action" is bullshitting you; don't let them).
Other things companies are allowed to do: sell dangerous products in the absence of government regulation. That's right, screw you Food and Drug Administration. We don't need you telling people not to sell products that haven't proven they're good but claiming they are. The free market will ensure that, after time and after lots of people have probably gotten sick or died, those dangerous products will fall out of vogue and the business will fail. After several instances of this in which many more people die, eventually companies will be pressured by the market to sell only what works. The free market will assure these things just like it did before we had the FDA. Which was... great, right? ...Right?
The cop-out on this is that businesses run on contracts. Everybody dealing with a business has agreed to deal with that business, and that means they've been given a chance to evaluate whether they approve or disapprove of it. Aside from the obvious point that this seems like a great excuse to sell your kids into slavery (since it's well-accepted that parents can contract on behalf of their children), let's dig just a tiny bit deeper. Why are contracts binding? Oh, right! Because if a party to a contract breaks the agreement, the other party can sue them and the government will enforce the agreement.
This is the kind of lack of critical thinking that I'm talking about. It's all about what's right in principle, with little to no attention paid to how things actually work and what would actually happen. Without a real government, there would be no one to enforce contracts (unless businesses would be allowed to enforce those contracts themselves, which creates about the same atmosphere of integrity and fairness that I'd expect from a mafia family's dealings).
"But Libertarians aren't anarchists," you say. "They still want to keep the government around. They just want to privatize most of its domestic functions." Lemme hit you with some political science now. I promise, I don't talk in crazy elevated academic language; you'll be able to understand this. So read it. Much of it is copy-pasted from a discussion I had a good while ago with
ijtihad_alkitab, so I guess everyone should read it but him, as he's already slogged through it once.According to Max Weber (and he's kind of a big deal in social science, even if his conclusions are obviously not always perfect), government is built on "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force." This means that if only one group can arrest you, can imprison you, can participate in wars (either on your behalf or otherwise) then that group is very easy to call an authority. If the government is not the only group that can arrest, try, and imprison, if the government is not the only group that can make war.... what exactly makes it a government again? Where is its authority?
What's defined as "legitimate" use of force is obviously up for debate, and accounts for much of the diversity of government styles. What governments do have in common is some ability to enforce law in a way that only they can claim.
The government has police that can arrest you. That's the government using force. The government has prisons where they can detain you. That's the government using force. The government can also go to war, or press other nations in other ways to do things the way the US would like. That's the government using force. How, when, and to what extent the government uses these powers is both regulated by what our cultures perceives as legitimate, and it helps define what our culture perceives as legitimate.
Weber's argument is simple: if "the government" is not the only group that can do these things, then it is not "the government." It is a ruling power among many. In Yon Days of Olde this was called rule by warlord. Nowadays it's called market anarchism, I believe.
Now, here's the problem for me with using a free market approach to things that are not the market. Government is an institution that functions by having authority. If that authority is granted by the people, great. We've got elected officials, and that helps us determine how the government uses its authority, and that input from citizens is what--for many--gives the US government its legitimacy.
What Libertarianism proposes is close to not even being government in the first place. If competition is the only regulating force, and if competition improves every product type or service, applying that to things the government is doing erodes the classification of that entity as a government at all.
And for the record, competition does not improve everything; sometimes you need standards. With the Libertarian non-regulated model, ideally people would only buy what works and what did not work would simply fall out of use and eventually companies would only sell things that work. Ideally this free market plan would naturally weed out, say, the quacks from the genuine medical practitioners.
However, it's not the free market that does that, even now. It's federal regulatory bodies. This is why we have the FDA, for example. Flawed though the organization may be, I would much rather rely on federal oversight of drugs and supplements than hope the free market will (eventually) weed out what's ineffective or harmful. The FDA has authority over drug companies. They have power. To go back to Weber's theory, the FDA has power because it can exercise force with the legitimacy given to government. If the FDA were not the only agency regulating drugs and supplements, you'd have drug companies doing what children do when one parent says no: they go and ask the other parent, hoping to get a yes.
The government works that way as well. If you have multiple militaries, multiple law enforcement agencies, multiple avenues of oversight for drugs and supplements... then no one of them has the power necessary to do its job.
So let's get back to that "freedom" bit. Ignore the fact that the Libertarian party doesn't believe in civil rights protections, 'kay? We're talking about your only freedom (the only one you need, according to Libertarians) being the freedom to consent to a contract. Sounds great if you don't think too hard: I'd have the right to consent or deny any limitation of my personal freedom (though who'd be protecting these rights is seldom answered; I guess we should invoke "free market" somehow).
But no government can work that way. Otherwise the government could make a law and people could just say no. Sometimes, with some issues, this sounds pretty appealing. If I could simply personally veto the legal status of marijuana, I would. But that also means that someone else can personally veto more important laws, laws that might be protecting me from them. And in the end, because people can singularly opt out, laws cease to have meaning because there is no force behind them.
So what we're looking at, at least when we're talking about the ultimate dream that Libertarianism is trying to achieve, is damn near anarchy. I have the same problems with it that I have with anarchy, namely that in order for it to work... all humans involved must have previously reached some form of vast forward leap in the evolution of their benevolence and consciences, to the point where we don't need rules (or if we do, we certainly don't need to enforce them).