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Libertarian philosophy [W:411]

Phil_Osophy

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So, it seems a lot of people on this forum are confused about what libertarianism is all about. A few even think its a conspiracy designed by the super rich to perserve the status quo. The status quo is not libertarian in any sense

There are several variations of libertarian philosophy, but almost all libertarians agree on a few basic principles

1) individual liberty- the most obvious principle. Libertarians believe that individual liberty should always come first before all else. Do as thou wilt, harm ye none. Do whatever the hell you want as long as you dont hurt anyone else.

2) free market capitalism- libertarians believe in true capitalism. We have come to the realization that we live on a little rock floating in space and the resources here are limited. With limited resources, the only way to fairly distribute them is via competition. Nothing else works. Free trade is the only way.

3) merit- libertarians believe that one should succeed or fail by his own merit. His hard work should bring him his rewards and he should have to suffer the consequences of his own mistakes. This is the only way to advance human society as we know it.

You have more liberal libertarians who believe the government isnt doing enough to guarantee our liberty. You have more conservative libertarians who think government is standing in the way. I tend to lean towards either side on different issues.

The main principle is individual liberty. With this liberty comes responsibility.

A poster said "libertarians dream of a world of mass unemployment where people have to beg mcdonalds for a job".
NO. We dream of a world where everyone pulls their own weight and utilizes their skills amd takes responsibility for their own failure. Independence, self reliance, responsibility.

I dream of a world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house, educates their own children.
 

Conveniently omitted from your dream world is what of the "unproductive" like the disabled (mentally or physically) and the elderly? It is easy to say that all will be so productive (and wise) as to care for themselves until age 99 but hardly likely for many. And that darned reality that some will just plain fail to be productive due to accident, illness or birth defect. The problem with freedom is that folks are also free to fail to be productive.
 

Yes. That is a problem. You are also free to help the elderly or the disabled. You are your own responsibility. If you wish to take on others, thats up to you.
 
A lot of people dont like to think about being on their own. Particularly liberals. They hate the thought of having to sustain themselves without aid from others.
 
This is funny, especially coming from the person who gave us this nugget. http://www.debatepolitics.com/us-constitution/178624-new-constitution.html#post1062562896. Excuse me if I don't take this seriously and I don't need an education from you on what libertarianism is.

Phil_Osophy said:
A lot of people dont like to think about being on their own. Particularly liberals. They hate the thought of having to sustain themselves without aid from others.
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Well you also have those that - I don't know .... can't. Children need aid from others to sustain themselves. :shrug:
 
There's a lot of modern day libertarians who like to pretend that there's no such thing as a social contract. "Build your own food house", "hunt your own food" whatevs. I notice that these people use manufactured guns, cars built in corporate factories, and clothing made out of Chinese sweatshops.

I consider myself a libertarian too but I don't wax poetic about the whole "rugged individualism" that many like to espouse. Especially not while posting on a Dell computer while living in a housing association while using electricity generated by a national power grid.
 
I dream of a world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house, educates their own children.
Click to expand...
You were either born in the wrong century or your dream is to be closed minded, anti social and live on a desert island.
Civilization is a collective of human endeavor for the advancement of the common good of all humanity.
Join in ...
It actually works.
 
Phil_Osophy said:
A lot of people dont like to think about being on their own. Particularly liberals. They hate the thought of having to sustain themselves without aid from others.
Click to expand...

You've posted what seems in my limited experience to be a fairly common usage of 'libertarian,' but it's also fairly narrow. In a broader (and hence ultimately less useful) sense, many/most anarchists, liberals and modern libertarians are all libertarian; they all emphasise individual liberty as the cornerstone of their political philosophies (rather than, for example, the objectives of the nation or state as an entity unto itself).
Libertarianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free")[1] is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.[2][3] This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty,[4][5] political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism.[6] Different schools of libertarianism disagree over whether the state should exist and, if so, to what extent.[7] While minarchists propose a state limited in scope to preventing aggression, theft, breach of contract and fraud, anarchists advocate its complete elimination as a political system.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13] While certain libertarian currents are supportive of laissez-faire capitalism and private property rights, such as in land and natural resources, others reject capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, instead advocating their common or cooperative ownership and management[14][15][16][17] (see libertarian socialism).

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, libertarianism is defined as the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things.[18] Libertarian philosopher Roderick Long defines libertarianism as "any political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals", whether "voluntary association" takes the form of the free market or of communal co-operatives.[19] The U.S. Libertarian Party promotes individual sovereignty and seeks an end to coercion, advocating a government that is limited to protecting individuals from the initiation of force.[20]

Your "world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house" is aesthetically appealing - though considering a lot of folk I've known, both on and offline, I really wouldn't like to see 'em educating their own children! - but as others have pointed out, with some six billion people living on 21st century earth it is little more than an idealistic fantasy. We've evolved for millions of years as social creatures, and it has been the developments in the bigger and more integrated societies which have progressed our species the most over the past 10,000; sometimes in competition, for sure, and often in co-operative and collective undertakings also.

Now, we are perhaps on the cusp of the technical and material ability to expand to other planets (edit: thanks largely to non-commercial, government space programmes, it's worth noting). But are we likely to achieve that goal if individuals are only ever competing with one another?

You say "With limited resources, the only way to fairly distribute them is via competition."
I'd say that with limited resources, the only way to fairly ration and use them is by global democratic consent.
 
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One thing you (and every libertarian leaves out), is the principle of absolute private property .... something which has always been a state institution and cannot exist wihtout the state.
 
Libertarian philosophy

The idea of people growing their own food, educating their children, etc sounds like a horrible idea.

The fact is we have specialization of labor precisely because it is more efficient. The assembly line replaced the guild craftsman for very good reasons. While this means that the world is a far less romantic place than the idealization as presented in the op, the truth is that his idea of a good world was out competed, which is ironic as hell, heh.

Also the op ignores the obvious dark side to such a world, a lot of people will be out competed as well and those people simply don't go away, they get desperate and you run quickly into a les miserables type situation where good people simply trying to survive are unable to. The truth is, we are interdependent as a species and that will never give way to a ideal. Like it or not.

We may as we'll accept this cold truth and do the best we can with it. The old ways are dying and probably will never come back. Move forward people ...
 
Phil_Osophy said:
So, it seems a lot of people on this forum are confused about what libertarianism is all about.
Click to expand...

Libertarianism (classical liberalism) is all about (1) the individual freedom of choice, and (2) understanding of inherent limitations of actionable knowledge in complex systems, such as economies and societies.
 
Phil_Osophy said:
Yes. That is a problem. You are also free to help the elderly or the disabled. You are your own responsibility. If you wish to take on others, thats up to you.
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And if he doesn't want to help the disabled, and they die.... Then that's just freedom?
 

(1) and (2) I am fine with, although I would not put it such words. "Fairness of distribution" does not depend on scarcity or abundance of resources.

(3) requires a lot of elaboration, however. "Succeed or fail" to what extent? The moral imperative of free individual choice is one thing, but there's also empathy - as important to our human integrity as sound moral judgment. No libertarian I know would be willing to allow an inept, "unproductive" neighbor to "fail" so dramatically that she would starve to death.
Also, what is the duration of time allowed for the "hard work" to bring its wonderful rewards? Clearly, a 10-year-old did not have enough; should she suffer from her parents' lack of competitive prowess?

Whenever possible, helping people who "fail" should be done through non-governmental channels, but when it is not enough, help still should be found.

Phil_Osophy said:
I dream of a world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house, educates their own children.
Click to expand...

....operates on his own brain...
 
Phil_Osophy said:
A lot of people dont like to think about being on their own. Particularly liberals. They hate the thought of having to sustain themselves without aid from others.
Click to expand...

Most "liberals" (American social democrats and socialists) I have met are sustaining themselves quite fine (discounting research grants from NIH and bank bailouts). They are roughly upper middle class, and the problem is not their own socioeconomic "failure", but a large part of their ideas, ranging from the unworkable to the immoral and destructive
 
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Buck Ewer said:
Civilization is a collective of human endeavor for the advancement of the common good of all humanity.
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The "common good of all humanity" is nonsense; in reality it will be always the "good" of dictators or tyrannical majorities. Civilization is a state of affairs when people are free to pursue each their own good, and know how to allow and enable each other to do that.
 
RGacky3 said:
One thing you (and every libertarian leaves out), is the principle of absolute private property .... something which has always been a state institution and cannot exist wihtout the state.
Click to expand...

First, the principle is not absolute - it is derivative. Second, why would libertarians consider something "existing without the state"? The state being there as the force preventing private and collective agents from making the free market un-free - isn't it one of the central tenets of libertarianism?
 

Few would dispute that there are those who need help to sustain themselves. The dispute is over whether it is a function of government to provide that help for those you deem worthy, or my choice to provide that help for those I deem worthy.
 
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For libertarians it is ... in other words you're right to your property is absolute, it cannot be undone by other factors, like social need, community need or whatever.
My point of saying that property is a state institution is that libertarians seam to ignore that, acting as if property is somehow part of nature, it isn't, its a social construct, a social contract LIKE GOVERNMENT, which can be undone.
 
Phil_Osophy said:
A lot of people dont like to think about being on their own. Particularly liberals. They hate the thought of having to sustain themselves without aid from others.
Click to expand...

If you get to decide what liberals believe, do I get to decide what you believe?

Because you hate peanut butter. I can't speak with such a person.
 
jimbo said:
Few would dispute that there are those who need help to sustain themselves. The dispute is over whether it is a function of government to provide that help for those you deem worthy, or my choice to provide that help for those I deem worthy.
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Read the post I quoted. He neglects those that may need help to sustain themselves. That is who I am quoting and why I am quoting it.
 
Phil_Osophy said:
I dream of a world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house, educates their own children.
Click to expand...

So you want society to move backwards and revert back to sustenance farming and an uneducated and disconnected society? That is more dystopian than anything.
 
RGacky3 said:
One thing you (and every libertarian leaves out), is the principle of absolute private property .... something which has always been a state institution and cannot exist wihtout the state.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean when you use the term state. I will assume you mean an institution with a territorial monopoly on decision-making power and the use of force. If that is what you mean by state, then I certainly disagree that such an institution is necessary for a society to have a governance and legal system that recognizes ownership of resources by individuals.
 
RGacky3 said:
For libertarians it is ... in other words you're right to your property is absolute, it cannot be undone by other factors, like social need, community need or whatever.
Click to expand...

An absolute right could not be deprived at all, even by due process. Property, liberty and even life can all be deprived by due process. Property is not absolute. It also can exist without the state, in that even in an anarchical state, people would possess things that they and others inherently regard as property. Even animals have things they regard as property/territory, and will defend it. We created government to organize and help protect these things we already regarded naturally as rights.

The closest thing we have to an absolute (i.e. sacrosanct) right is the right to reproduce. Under almost no circumstance do our laws provide for the restriction of reproductive rights.
 

You're new here, so I'll educate you some - the overwhelming majority of non-libertarians on DP have no idea what libertarianism is. In addition, some who self-identify as libertarians don't know what libertarianism is.

Trust me - we've been through this. If I had the patience, I'd pull up an old, huge thread that displays some of the more ignorant views toward libertarianism. Most of them think that anarcho-capitalists are libertarians. Some of them think that socialists are libertarians.

It'll make your head hurt.
 
And what us "big government" types realize is that preventing someone else from causing harm is a more involved process, because there's about a billion ways they can go about that. Us "big government" types believe the same thing as you do regarding personal freedom. We also believe you should be free as long as you don't hurt others. We just realize that hurting others is a vague concept open to much interpretation, so we don't pretend this is some sort of dichotomy between libertarianism and totalitarianism. Shades of grey, my friend. Shades of grey.

Us sane people realize that free trade works best under the right circumstances. What libertarians often forget, or use circular logic to delude themselves out of realizing, is that the free market isn't actually always going to be a free market. To me, libertarianism's economic ideas bank on taking Econ 101 and believing themselves to be experts on economics. That's like taking Physics 101 and believing oneself to be an engineer. The concepts aren't wrong. They're just not enough to accurately describe a very complex world.

Surely any libertarian would agree that choice and competition are two pillars of a functioning free market. Also helpful is that choice being an informed one. We don't need to be an engineer or mechanic to buy a car, but being at least reasonably informed about cars is important for the consumer base to make those choices. To make the ridiculous example, my free choice regarding the purchase of a Transseptal Guiding Sheath Kit is completely useless because I don't know what that is. (random medical device)

This all works out great when the product is televisions. I, the consumer, can make a decent choice regarding television quality and value, because I know what a television is and what it does. I can also look at the television and see its picture quality, features, etc, before making my decision. If Sony makes a crappy television, I can go with a Samsung. Better yet, I also have the option of getting a laptop, iPad, or tennis racket instead. They're all entertainment devices, I can choose a completely different line of entertainment products if I feel the value is better. I can even choose to purchase nothing at all.

But sometimes, these fundamental market forces are not present. Competition is problematic when it comes to, say, electricity. Due to some fundamental issues with physics, it is impossible for electric companies to "compete" without duplicating infrastructure. You can't have two power plants connected to the same power grid unless they're playing nice with each other. And duplicating that infrastructure is impractical, and sometimes impossible. If I'm Big Coal Plant Corp, I own the power lines that exist. I'm certainly not going to let Little Scrappy Startup use my lines, and since I own the land the lines are on, I don't have to let them build their lines at all. It's my land, they can't run power lines over it. So, what, they build around? What if I encircle a neighborhood? Even if that all gets resolved, there's still the problem of connecting the lines to the homes. These same problems come in to play with most utilities. How many different companies can you have digging up the roads in one neighborhood to install redundant water lines? How much more would that cost? There's a reason that utilities end up being a sort of regulated monopoly.

How about health care? You don't get to decide when you get sick, or how. And there's no alternative product, I can't substitute a hip replacement for chemotherapy. Even when there is more than one possible treatment, I'm not a doctor. I really have no qualification to decide what the best course is. And it can literally be life or death. If I need chemotherapy to save my life, the company making the drugs can charge whatever they want. It's not really a choice on my part, is it?



And it would really be wonderful if we lived in that magical land of unicorns and fairies where people succeed or fail entirely on their merit. But we live in reality land, where useless assholes sometimes get rich as hell and hardworking saints sometimes fail anyway.
Sometimes, the really wealthy only got where they are through winning the genetic lottery. They were born to the right wealthy parents with the right wealthy connections so got to go the right ivy league school, did a halfassed job, but because daddy knows the CEO of Delta Airlines he gets hired on to a six figure job right out of that school he never could have paid for on his own.
Then, sometimes you get a man who works 60 hours a week to put himself through college, gets a good degree, then gets a good job, and then gets hit by a damned truck and can't do that job anymore, or any job, for the rest of his life. The medical bills pile up, bankruptcy comes, the house gets taken, and that's that. Pretty hard to bootstrap yourself back into success when you can't even stand up and you're homeless.
Of course, the flipside does happen. Sometimes the useless asshole born to rich parents still ****s up every advantage they had and ends up on the streets. Because they're a useless asshole. And sometimes another useless asshole never has those advantages and fails, but fails because they're a useless asshole.


And it would be super nice if that were possible.

I dream of a world where everyone grows their own food, builds their own house, educates their own children.
Click to expand...

Then stop posting on the internet because in your world it would never have been invented. Do you even ****ing know how to grow food? You're not a libertarian at all. You're some sort of primitivist.
 
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