Bingo. The oh-so-wonderful "private sector" drives our World Economy off a cliff, creates ecological disasters that might NEVER be overcome, SCREAMS to be bailed out by us when PROVED to be absolutely WRONG and then thumbs their nose at us and STEALS even more...
... the "private sector" and the teabaggers... proven losers.
This is why I can't take libertarians seriously. They live in some sort of Bizarro World where if the government were not involved then things would be perfect and we'd all be holding hands and singing about peace love and understanding.
There is no such thing as "mainstream American Libertarians."
There is no such thing as "mainstream American Libertarians."
Actually there are. Every American who lives their day to day life by the maxims of "minding their own business" and "taking care of their own", who doesn't go out of their way to tell their neighbor what to do or how to live, is a libertarian at heart... most of them just haven't realized it yet.
And the mainstream criticism against libertarians follows: Minding to your own business precludes the notion that you are selfish and cannot be trusted to voluntarily contribute to the worse off in society. It's unfortunate but it's true that such a stigma has arisen out of a relatively harmless philosophy( that I somewhat identify with)
And the mainstream criticism against libertarians follows: Minding to your own business precludes the notion that you are selfish and cannot be trusted to voluntarily contribute to the worse off in society. It's unfortunate but it's true that such a stigma has arisen out of a relatively harmless philosophy( that I somewhat identify with)
Excerpted from “The lesson of Rand Paul: libertarianism is juvenile” BY GABRIEL WINANT, Salon, FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2010 08:30 ET
[SIZE="+2"]I[/SIZE]t's time to stop taking libertarianism seriously.
Ironically, the best way into this point comes from another brilliant libertarian, legal scholar Richard Epstein. Says Epstein, "To be against Title II in 1964 would be to be brain-dead to the underlying realities of how this world works."
There’s the key -- "the underlying realities of how the world works." Because never, and I mean never, has there been capitalist enterprise that wasn't ultimately underwritten by the state. This is true at an obvious level that even most libertarians would concede (though maybe not some of the Austrian economists whom Rand Paul adores): for the system to work, you need some kind of bare bones apparatus for enforcing contracts and protecting property. But it's also true in a more profound, historical sense. To summarize very briefly a long and complicated process, we got capitalism in the first place through a long process of flirtation between governments on the one hand, and bankers and merchants on the other, culminating in the Industrial Revolution. What libertarians revere as an eternal, holy truth is in fact, in the grand scheme of human history, quite young. And if they'd just stop worshiping for a minute, they'd notice the parents hovering in the background.
Libertarians like Paul are walking around with the idea that the world could just snap back to a naturally-occurring benign order if the government stopped interfering. As Paul implied, good people wouldn't shop at the racist stores, so there wouldn't be any.
This is the belief system of people who have been the unwitting recipients of massive government backing for their entire lives. To borrow a phrase, they were born on third base, and think they hit a triple. We could fill a library with the details of the state underwriting enjoyed by American business -- hell, we could fill a fair chunk of the Internet, if we weren't using it all on Rand Paul already.
No. The mainstream criticism against libertarianism is that it is wrong about history, humanity, governance, capitalism, reality, everything. Its a beautiful picture that libertarianism paints, problem is it's a fantasy landscape.
Rand Paul's contention that segregated lunch counters would have gone away without Title II has provoked some excellent new critiques of his belief system. I commend this one:
Polanyi makes the distinction between markets as an auxiliary tool for ease of exchange of goods and Market Societies. Market Societies are those where markets are the paramount institution for the exchange of goods through price mechanisms. Polanyi argues that there are three general types of economic systems that existed before the rise of a society based on a free market economy: Redistributive, Reciprocity and Householding.
Redistributive: Trade and production is focused to a central entity such as a tribal leader or feudal lord and then redistributed to members of their society.
Reciprocity: The exchange of goods is based on reciprocal exchanges between social entities. On a macro level this would include the production of goods to gift to other groups.
Householding: Economies where production is centered around individual household production. Family units produce food, textile goods, and tools for their own consumption.
These three forms were not mutually exclusive nor were they mutually exclusive of markets for the exchange of goods. The main distinction is that these three forms of economic organization were based around the social aspects of the society they operated in and were explicitly tied to those social relationships. Polanyi argued that these economic forms depended on the social principles of Centricity and Symmetry. Markets existed as an axillary avenue for the exchange of goods that were otherwise not obtainable. They relied on the social Principles of Centricity and Symmetry.
He ended his work with a prediction of a socialist society, noting, "after a century of blind 'improvement', man is restoring his 'habitation.'"[2]
You missed the point. Modern capitalism is the product of a long running collusion of private interests and public interests. Libertarianism's determination to promote the role of the former and demote the role of the latter is based on a dangerous misreading of history and “the underlying realities of how the world works.”
It's dangerous when we consider the consequences of a financial system melt
down.
It's dangerous when we consider the mass contamination of the Gulf of Mexico with raw oil, to name just a couple of recent news items.
I think nearly everyone has some libertarian ideals however the problem with full on libertarians is they are all or nothing.They complain no one will join their club but if anyone argues against one tiny point they will kick them out of it.
Libertarians are, if nothing else, consistent.
Conservatives hate government involvement in the economy but love to have the government stick its nose in our "moral" lives (abortion, prayer in schools, gay rights, etc.)
Liberals hate government involvement in our moral lives but love to have the government oversee and manage the economy.
Libertarians hate government involvement.
Libertarians are, if nothing else, consistent.
Conservatives hate government involvement in the economy but love to have the government stick its nose in our "moral" lives (abortion, prayer in schools, gay rights, etc.)
Liberals hate government involvement in our moral lives but love to have the government oversee and manage the economy.
Libertarians hate UNWARRANTED government involvement.
You missed the point. Modern capitalism is the product of a long running collusion of private interests and public interests. Libertarianism's determination to promote the role of the former and demote the role of the latter is based on a dangerous misreading of history and “the underlying realities of how the world works.” It's dangerous when we consider the consequences of a financial system melt down. It's dangerous when we consider the mass contamination of the Gulf of Mexico with raw oil, to name just a couple of recent news items.
Ah. So our current mess is the result of gov't collusion with private industry, and your solution is more government.
Don't think so.
Also, don't confuse corporatism with capitalism. I'm not overly fond of big corporations; most of them couldn't exist in their bloated forms without that gov't collusion you speak of... and what I want to do is remove the gov't collusion and make the market more-free, with only that amount of regulation that is necessary.
I don't think libertarian policies could ever work. A libertarian limited government philosophy is compatible to communism. Both are very good in theory but very unpractical. People are not moral enough to be given more liberty in their lives. Plus we need a strong government.
See everything right there? Nothing proved. We need a strong government? Not proved. Libertarianism is unpractical? Not proved. People are not moral enough to be given more liberty? Not proved.
You have a lot to show before you throw around those kinds of claims.
Of course libertarian policies are going to work - for the rich and powerful who don't like someone forcing them to act like decent human beings when they prove unwilling to do it themselves.
Libertarian policies are going to be an absolute disaster to everyone else who will experience a harsher society, fewer protections and more inequalities. All those "evil" government regulations were put in place for a reason. Product safety standards were put in place because the markets was unable to provide safe products by itself, environmental standards were introduced because the private sector did not care a bit about acting responsibly towards non-economic goods like biodiversity or clean air, workplace safety standards were introduced because people got maimed and killed by the private sector's reckless behaviour. Market forces and tort law proved itself ineffective and useless in preventing these things, thus there was a need for government regulation.
How can one think that things will not return to their prior state if all these regulations are abandoned? Just like Soviet-style communism, the success of libertarianism is dependent upon a new and more moral race of men to replace the current, a thing that will never happen; homo libertaricus is as much a fantasy creation as homo sovieticus.
Having a strong central government is a good thing. Without it we wouldn't have things like the FDA, EPA, welfare, NASA, and other government agencies that benefit us.
I strongly contest the goodness of those programs.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?