Heavens, no. With a stated “…by anyone.” Liberty is liberty. Doesn’t matter who takes it from you–if you don’t have it, you aren’t free.
I must again admit to some serious bogglement here. I think the average poster in this thread is better informed about the mechanics of Marxist theory than libertarian thought, despite the fact that said thought is the fundamental source of the freedoms our country was founded on.
Burn the heretic!
Juxtaposing quotes is fun.
Nozick isn’t a required topic in high school history. Marx and John Locke both are.
Heh, hoping you’d bite on that. By that standard, your libertarian theory isn’t very different, in foundation, from Marxist theory. Marxism simply takes a more macro view and says “look, most people are being coerced and oppressed by the bourgeoisie as a whole.”
Now I’m not a Marxist and I’m not a libertarian, but how do you reconcile the two? For most libertarians I talk to, the answer is “turn a blind eye to the non-governmental coercion and oppression that keep people in chains just the same.” I put it to you that, in your words, a large number of people in this country aren’t free. Their liberty is taken by the market system and the set up of our economy as a whole. They are most certainly not living lives free from coercion, as you put it. But any attempt at redistributing wealth, in any sense, is coercion of the people that wealth is being redistributed from, correct?
So what’s the solution? How would you guarantee that freedom for everybody?
Maybe at your high school.
You need to elaborate before I can begin to answer this. How exactly do you think a free market economy takes freedom away? I hold that in a free market transactions are voluntary and therefore, by definition, uncoerced. Marxism, by contrast, is nothing but coercion. You obviously have a different view, but I don’t understand it yet.
Ah, I could see yesterday this was shaping up into a nice old-school brawl over Libertarianism. Sadly I’m leaving on a trip to Italy today, but let me first throw some details into this argument that’s so far been about abstract definitions.
So last time I looked at the Libertarian Party website, they advocated dismantling the FDA, SEC, and pretty much every other governmental TLA. But realistically, the U.S. government is a gigantic whale and we can’t do much besides nibble at the fins. What kind of Libertarian nibbles should we make?
War on Drugs – expensive, ineffective, ignorant of economics, props up unsavory foreign elements, and tries to protect us from ourselves – all in all the worst aspects of a nanny state. Let’s legalize and regulate soft drugs, prescribe hard drugs to existing addicts.
Subsidies and trade barriers – gone. Hurting everyone a little bit to boost the profits of sugar conglomerates and keep small farmers viable is silly. We don’t prop up other 19th-century tradesmen like blacksmiths and coopers – why are farmers special?
Estimate the negative externalities of oil/coal/gas and tax them accordingly and let the market decide how they will be used or replaced.
Extreme libertarians may say “Let people starve or bleed to death if they’re dirt poor”, but I disagree – the U.S. can afford to feed the indigent and provide medical care to the poor (preferably in a market-based way like I described here).
As far as levelling the playing field between rich and poor, I think the U.S.'s most important step would be making the quality of schools consistently good. Probably requires more money but I think definitely requires busting the teachers unions so more accountability can be built into the system. The Economist just had an article about how Colorado teachers agreed to a new system where they get bonuses for meeting predefined goals. This is mostly a state-level issue, though.
Anyway, we can argue the details all day but it’s not like Libertarianism is synonymous with “95% of the people work for minimum wage for a permanent class of fat-cat industrialists”.
It’s also key to distinguish between the Libertarian Party and libertarians. Most “small-L” libertarians of my acquaintance, myself included, view the “large-L” party as the lunatic fringe of the movement. Their extremist views, the notorious Pledge and how it’s interpreted, and the general aura of wild-eyed fanaticism they project gives the philosophy a bad name and are a major reason why their membership remains miniscule. I refuse to join, as do a majority of the libs I know. Any political philosophy taken to its ultimate limits has severe problems.
From the party’s website, the LP’s pledge which is a condition for party membership reads thusly:
I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.
Could you enlighten me what’s so extremist about that? Or about any other of the viewpoints expressed on the LP website, for that matter? As far as I’ve read they sound straightforward and reasonable to me.
It’s how they apply them. Those who sign the pledge are told by the core membership that it means “end all taxes, now”, for example. What it seems to say–reform the system from within, be peacable and logical, don’t initiate force–is taken to extremes. The anarchists seem to be in charge of the Party, at least at the moment.
That’s an oversimplification. Libertarians differentiate between what you’re allowed to do and what you’re able to do, i.e. negative liberties and positive liberties. Libertarianism certainly makes no attempt to guarantee everyone the capability (“positive freedom”) to live however they want, only their right (“negative freedom”) to do so.
First, let me indicate that I’m not at all uninformed about the philosophies behind libertarianism.
Now to your question: this could be related to any number of issues, but I’ll choose one for you. Picture this nightmare scenario: you have a permanent and deadly-if-untreated medical condition, let’s just say no kidneys. Because this makes you expensive to treat, you are less profitable for insurance companies, so you can’t afford to pay for health insurance (and you sure as hell can’t afford the $10,000 a month that your medications and dialysis cost). The only job you can find that you’re qualified for that offers health insurance is extremely low-paying, but you take it, because you need the insurance above anything else. You’re going into credit card debt to buy groceries every month, because all of your paycheck goes to paying rent and utilities.
You’re trapped. You job doesn’t really pay enough for you to live on, but you’ll literally die if you quit. You don’t have the money to move to a different area, you don’t have the qualifications to get a better job, and you can’t get those qualifications because whenever you’re not working, you’re having all of the blood pumped out of your body and cleaned by a machine (in non-dialysis patient examples, this would be because they had to get a second low-paying job to keep up).
So what’s the way out? Capitalism is three walls of a prison. In this case, the fourth wall is a medical problem, but it could be all kinds of things.
I’ve added a title with an additional German name, for extra gravitas.
Thanks. We’ll see how much trouble that gets me in.
If you’re forced into a voluntary transaction you aren’t free to pursue an involuntary transaction. I’m coerced into voluntary transactions by law and my dominant morality.
Given the nature of your example and the emotionally freighted wording it contains, I suspect that I’m just going to be talking past you here, but, optimistic guy that I am, I’ll try anyway :-).
It is my opinion that capitalism is not “three walls of a prison.” Instead, it is the greatest prison-breaker humanity has yet devised. Capitalistic societies are not trapped in a zero-sum game of wealth redistribution where one person’s prosperity inevitably damages another’s livelihood. Instead, they are engines of wealth creation. Societies that implement this economic model see both mean and median incomes increase while life expectancies lengthen and overall quality of life improves. Western civilization led the charge here, but India, China, and other Pacific Rim nations provide examples of this transition in progress. Free markets by their very nature incentivize progress and provide opportunity. What they do not do is guarantee perfect lives for every single member of society, nor should they try.
In your dialysis example, you blame the free market for failing to meet this individual’s needs. Interestingly, you ignore that fact that without the free market those needs literally could not be met at all. I happened to work at the firm that discovered how to produce useful quantities of Epogen, the drug given to dialysis patients that enables them to replace the blood cells they lose in this horribly debilitating process. Epogen increases both life expectancy and quality of life for those with severe kidney disease. I can assure you that the (literally) millions of patients worldwide benefitting from its existence owe free market incentives for Epogen’s availability. The same holds true for dialysis machines. The “prison” you say capitalism puts this patient in did not exist prior to their commercialization. Patients with renal failure just died instead. I’d say the free market is helping them significantly.
But it’s not enough, I’m sure you say. Society (i.e., taxpayers) should provide for this person’s care. A rich society such as ours (but remember how it got that way) could indeed afford to do so, at the cost of creating yet another giant money-wasting bureaucracy that saps overall economic productivity. The libertarian perspective is that if this and similar programs did not exist, and each citizen got to keep most of the 31.6% of their income that currently goes to the government (based on this year’s Tax Freedom Day data), wealth creation would boom. GDP would rise, personal income would rise, charitable giving would rise, and so on. The person in the nightmare scenario you outline might well have had the resources to cope on their own. Even if they didn’t, community resources would be greater. They could call on family, friends, charities, faith-based organizations, and so on.
Does this mean I argue for the abolition of the entire safety net? No, not personally, but then I’m a moderate libertarian. The more radical exponents of the philosophy do, but every part of the political spectrum gets distateful at the extremes.
If you’re coerced by law, it ain’t voluntary. Your morality is also of your own choosing. This statement makes no sense at all.
Oh believe me, I understand the benefits of the free market. But it definitely cuts both ways. And my metaphoric prison doesn’t just house dialysis patients; it houses anyone with any serious medical condition, as well as poor people, minorities… most people, in fact.
But it’s not enough, I’m sure you say. Society (i.e., taxpayers) should provide for this person’s care. A rich society such as ours (but remember how it got that way) could indeed afford to do so, at the cost of creating yet another giant money-wasting bureaucracy that saps overall economic productivity. The libertarian perspective is that if this and similar programs did not exist, and each citizen got to keep most of the 31.6% of their income that currently goes to the government (based on this year’s Tax Freedom Day data), wealth creation would boom. GDP would rise, personal income would rise, charitable giving would rise, and so on. The person in the nightmare scenario you outline might well have had the resources to cope on their own. Even if they didn’t, community resources would be greater. They could call on family, friends, charities, faith-based organizations, and so on.
I don’t buy this one. For one thing, it’s not fair to use the average income tax as the amount that people would get to keep, because we’re talking about lower and lower-middle class people that are hurt the most, so the amount of money they’d save if there was no income tax is substantially less than that. Nobody is poor because they pay too much tax. Same goes for “community resources;” it’s silly to think that the community would step up and correct the bad situations that people are in because of capitalism, if only they didn’t have to pay income tax. Look, you can already see that people don’t do enough to correct for this as it is. What makes you think that with less taxes and less social programs, people would be willing to even do enough to maintain the status quo, let alone more?
These are claims that can be tested, not an ideological preference; and I don’t think there’s evidence supporting these.