When surfing the web I “accidently” ended up on the web site of America’s third party–the Libertarian Party. Established in 1971 as a radical alternative to the Republicrats parties it has become known as the Party of Principle. I’m not sure whether this is applicable anymore, not after the Libertarian Reform Caucus successfully repealed “most of the old platform” at the convention in Portland. But the slogan is still there.
Whether a result of the Caucus or not, the LP advertises its politics as Smaller Government… Fewer Taxes… More Freedom…. What? Smaller Government? Fewer Taxes? More Freedom?Imagine such a Libertarian Party in Sweden. I guess lowering taxes to 52% of GDP would then suffice to be considered a principled Libertarian. With this perspective the Swedish National Taxpayers Union is surely as radical as socialists claim they are. Their slogan saying people should “keep half” of their earnings after taxes goes a lot further than would the party of priniciple, Swedish version…
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Fewer taxes, smaller government, more freedom…
Sounds like a good thing to me. If you have a problem with that, it is obvious to me that you, Per Bylund, are simply one of those dirty statists!
It is obvious from the post that the problem with Smaller Government, Fewer Taxes, More Freedom is: It gives some appearance of legitimacy to government if only it were somewhat smaller, or to taxes if only they were somewhat fewer, and it blurs the basic thing about freedom: You either are free, or you’re not. There is no such thing as more freedom. It’s either freedom or slavery and neither government nor it’s taxes has even a bit of legitimacy.
On the other hand, a “libertarian party” is an oxymoron and the reform caucus has just shown what is obvious in Germany, where there always have been more than two parties: Even the best meaning altruistic libertarian anarchist will as soon as he is in power find rationalizations just why it is not yet time to abandon government. I guess not even Jesus himself could have resisted the temptation had given in to receiving power from the devil. Therfore he did the only alternative: become the most powerless being on earth and die as a free man.
To “TGGP”:
I do have a problem with libertarians not specifying how much smaller government, how many fewer taxes, or how much more freedom they want.
As I do stress in the blog post, such unspecified “libertarian” promises could very well mean a continuing welfare state society with taxes reaching well above 50% of GDP. I don’t find that very libertarian.
I also agree with Felix Benner – either you have freedom or you don’t. You cannot promise “more” freedom – only less slavery
A “libertarian” party that is organized internally as a democracy will become as corrupt as any other democracy.
A reconstructed party of freedom must be founded on private ownership of the party.
Felix Benner, thanks for the moronic statement:
“You either are free, or you’re not. There is no such thing as more freedom. It’s either freedom or slavery and neither government nor it’s taxes has even a bit of legitimacy.”
So there is NO difference between being a North Korean citizen and being a yeoman farmer in Jeffersonian America? Come on!
There is quite a difference in being property of the state and being ROBBED and regulated by the state.
Of course, you could make a claim that were are all income tax serfs, providing up to 39% of our annual “crop” to the landlord. But you don’t. You sir, are a great example of the reason why libertarians cannot cause change in government. We may change minds, but we have (so far) been ineffective.
I support little or no government as well. I say “little” because I’m not so sure Nozick and his theory of an ultraminimalist state have been completely disproven by Rothbard and others. In a nutshell, Nozick claimed that the state is a naturally-occuring entity; Private protection agencies and “insurance companies” form together and coalesce in geographic areas in order to provide “unity of natural law”. Once such an entity is the sole provider of protection (and related goods) in an area (i.e. a territorial monopoly), it is a state. This state then grows more and more until it is what we see today.
I sometimes wonder whether a system with built-in hedges against growth, through rigid decentralization like the Articles of Confederation provided, would ensure a small state (anarchy would spawn another state).
Hopefully there will be a backlash at the next convention. Maybe many of the more radical folks sat out on the last convention.
Nick,
Wouldn’t you say that it is a little nutty to say that any human institution is “naturally-occurring” (Hayekians be damned)?
As you stated in your post: “Once such an entity is the sole provider of protection (and related goods) in an area (i.e. a territorial monopoly), it is a state. This state then grows more and more until it is what we see today.” But what is natural about letting a protection service provider become an unconditional geographic monopoly (a state)? It seems that the people who make up the state (and/or benefit from it) either must impose it upon the rest of the people or “convince” them that this “state” thing is a good deal.
But, if we are to ever have “radically dentralized power”, then people must generally be opposed to centralized power in the first place — and herein lies the problem with this “naturally-occurring” idea. How in the world does a state (an unconditional – permanent – monopoly) ever form if people are generally opposed to centralized power? In other words, unless people are forced to live under a state or confused enough to accept a state, there seems that there is no reason why the state should ever form (hence, it wouldn’t “naturally occur”).
The Libertarian Party has the same fundamental flaw as all the other political parties: they advocate voting people into “office” and granting them a monopoly on violence. That’s supposed to mean more freedom?
Lew Rockwell writes on exactly this issue on today’s LRC.
States occur naturally because people are naturally statists.
I know somebody said this jokingly before, but for an economics site people here have scant appreciation for the margin. If there were “no difference” between the various degrees of state depredation people wouldn’t raft out of Cuba or climb over the Berlin wall. I don’t believe any of you actually mean what you say when you claim there is no difference. Given the option, you will always choose what you believe to be the lesser of two (or more) evils (isn’t that pretty much a law in Austrian economics?). Bullshit rhetoric for political purposes is one reason people are disgusted with the mainstream parties. If the libertarian party acted that way I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them.
Brent
I did not write that I believe in the theory of a naturally-occuring state. I merely threw Nozick into the discussion (who believed that). In his book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, Nizick lays out the argument on “what is natural about letting a protection service provider become an unconditional geographic monopoly (a state).” I thin Rothbard wrote a piece refuting Nozick’s claims and it’s somewhere on LvMI. He backs up his claim in detail in the book. Basically, Nozick claims that clients of a protection/insurance agency would want to be in the same prtection/insurance agency as everybody else.
As for radically decentralized power, it is not a question of “if we are ever to have it”, as you wrote. We HAD it. The Articles of Confederation, before being tossed out by the Hamiltonians and fellow mercantilists, provided such a framework. The Swiss Cantonal System BEFORE the Napoleonic Wars was also radically decentralized and very successful. Their system still exists, and it is one of the more decentralized states around, but is far more centralized now than it was then. Think about the swiss: wealthy, non-interventionist in foreign affairs, and each citizen is heavily armed (I believe each citizen is required to possess a rifle).
The question is, how do we get back to an Articles of Confederation or the Constitution before Chief Justice John Marshall granted the Federal Government powers it was never supposed to have.
Why don’t libertarians keep it simple if they want to get back to this point? Why don’t they just lobby to repeal the Constitution, and live under the Articles of Confederation Again? I’ll tell you why.
I think a lot of the LP are libertarian Centralists, who believe that local government can be more tyrannical than federal government.
In defence of Felix Benner, he is right. And you, Nick Bradley, are wrong. Incrementalism doesn’t sell ideas, and it is ideas that matter. Nozick is a perfect person to mention in your mean-spirited denunciation of poor Felix, because Nozick was as much as a sellout as the current LP.
Go rent V for Vendetta and afterwards ask yourself if the same crowd would’ve formed at parliament if V stated he was crusading for later curfew or enlarged butter quotas!
Happy Lee,
I’ll quote TGGP: “If there were “no difference” between the various degrees of state depredation people wouldn’t raft out of Cuba or climb over the Berlin wall. I don’t believe any of you actually mean what you say when you claim there is no difference.”
Felix wasn’t denouncing incrementalism, he was denying that there was a difference AT ALL between living in a place like North Korea and living in the US! It’s a prposterous claim. Not even Lew Rockwell or others will make such a claim.
I’ve seen “V”. The crowd was gathered to take down a hyperfascist state that was running the UK; kind of like the crowds in the Soviet Union in 1991. Kind of like the students at Tiennamen. You’re talking about revolution. In both real-life and fictional cases, revolutions happen when the government is truly tyrranical and despotic. The only exception I can think of is the American Revolution, a case in which the people threw out their rulers because they wanted complete liberty instead of partial liberty.
If, as you and Felix claim, we are all either slaves or we live in anarchy, we must have ALWAYS been slaves, everywhere, for all of history.
I’m not an incrementalist, but I do believe that to get from A to Z, you have to pass through at least one other point. don’t you?
Felix writes:
“There is no such thing as more freedom. It’s either freedom or slavery and neither government nor it’s taxes has even a bit of legitimacy.”
Then, by your reasoning [sic] everyone is a slave, since everyone is subject to taxes. (OK, tax resistors can qualify as runaway slaves.)
Might want to read up a bit on real slavery. The privately held slave trading companies of the 1700s performed far more acts of torture and brutality than the Bush Administration can even dream of. Those companies violated more natural rights on an annual basis than several Scandinavian welfares states put together.
There are degress of liberty, and degrees of evil. DUH!
“There are degress of liberty, and degrees of evil. DUH!”
In the context of individual freedom, “liberty” is a boolean condition; you are either free or you are not. You might be more accurate to say there are degrees of slavery.
If freedom is the opposite of slavery, to be less enslaved is to be more free. In real life there are very few boolean conditions.
I haven’t seen V for Vendetta and don’t intend to. The author is pretty much a standard leftist who wrote it when he was pissed off by Thatcher (the evil fascist that allowed him the freedom to write V for Vendetta) but even he has denounced the movie’s faux-anarchism. Anybody that uses such fictional nonsense as evidence for statements about the real world (the crowd was all wearing masks and it was so cool let’s have a revolution for the hell of it) deserved to be laughed at and dismissed. You remind me of the person who praised “The Deer Hunter” and what it taught him about Vietnam; when confronted by how bogus the movie was factually he responded “It might not be the literal truth, but it told the poetic truth” and when asked how he knew what the “poetic truth” about Vietnam was, responded that he learned it from the movie.
There certainly is a lot of fallacious attempts at logic here. The biggie being that because A is the opposite of B, and there are degrees of A, there must be degrees of B.
Wrong.
To take a simple example, we’ll work with death. The opposite of death is life. There are degrees of life – fully functioning, partially functioning, non-functioning but sustained by outside factors, specifically time limited (think bleeding uncontrollably), etc. Does that mean that there are degrees of death? No. One either is dead, or is not. Despite what the Princess Bride says, you can’t be “mostly dead.” You are either alive in some degree, or dead.
Freedom is the state of absence of restraints on liberty. One is either free, or in some degree of “not free.” To the extent one wants to equate “not free” to “slavery,” that will depend on how you define slavery.
That there are degrees of evil in no way changes lesser evil into good. A lesser evil is still evil – as in a choice between rape or death, most will choose rape as the lesser evil. The fact that there is a greater evil (murder) does not somehow transform the lesser evil (rape) into a good thing to be lauded, defended, or accepted.
Finally, the fallacy the LRC will run into most likely very soon is that you can qualify a candidate as more libertarian than another, when they both advocate middle positions. If say, to my cousin, environmental regulation is okay, but the war in Iraq is an absolute abomination that she doesn’t want to be forced to pay for, her evaluation of a candidate will be very different from the person who fervently believes in spreading democracy at the point of a gun, but thinks that economic regulations are an unjustified burden on his life. Which one is “more” libertarian? Well, as some very smart men have informed me – value is subjective. Good luck arguing with your socialist comrades over which values are objectively worth forcing others to pay for, and which ones aren’t…
quasibill,
Your death analogy doesn’t work completely. What about “Brain Dead” (like Felix’s comment)? What if you’re dead for a few minutes and come back to life? Were you “less dead” than somebody that’s been dead a long time? Yes. I don’t want to get into semantics here, but my point is that yes/no, one or zero outcomes don’t really exist outside the world of mathematics.
Let’s take your good-evil analogy. You state that there only degrees of negatives, such as evil, and there are no degrees of positives such as “good”. Do you really believe that?
“What about “Brain Dead”"
Still alive – a degree of alive.
dead for a few minutes? You’re not yet dead, your body vitals just meet some arbitrary definition for a short period. You are on time limited life.
So yes, it still works.
As for degrees of good, of course. The problem is that that judgment is absolutely subjective. That’s the problem with “middle road” strategies. You can’t say that what you’re sacrificing is less important than what you’re sticking to. As I demonstrate in the last point I made.
quasibill: Let’s imagine three candidates. A supports a set X of government interventions. B supports X & the invasion of Iraq. C supports X & the Kyoto protocol. Leaving aside the comparison of B vs. C, I think we can say that A is more libertarian than both of them.
If all life is just a series of chemical processes and the invididual is an illusion when in fact we are globs of cells that are continually dying off and being replaced, death might not be so clear cut. Abortion is a messy issue for a reason.
TGGP,
Okay, granted, A is “more” libertarian. When you see that highly contrived scenario in real life, I’ll agree. Problem is – I’ve never – not once – seen something that cut and dried.
As for death – yes, I guess you can dice up the definitions all sorts of ways – you can do that to any form of communication. But if you stick to accepted definitions, then no. And the question with abortion has nothing to do with “alive” or “dead” – it has to do with personhood. By the scientifically accepted definition (more like set of partially interchangeable factors), the partially fertilized egg is “alive” – the debate is whether it qualifies as a person, and not just a piece of organic detritus, like your blood.
quasibill,
On the abortion issue, what IS “personhood”? Can you define it? IS it arbitrary? From your (assumed) standpoint, the answer would be yes. But it doesn’t have to be. A logical breaking point from where the egg qualifies as a person and when it assumes personhood is simple:
When it is combined with somebody else’s DNA to form and entirely new strand; I am of course talking about at the point of conception.
I now this is WAAAY off track, but I just wanted to get it out there.
Nick,
That argument is fine, but just recognize that your somatic cells contain both strands, are alive, but (I hope) you don’t recognize them as separate persons. So there needs to be more than that. Further, if the fertilized egg doesn’t implant, as it often does not, naturally, it’s never going to be much more than a fertilized egg. Further, you are saying that fertility clinics, that store fertilized eggs for couples who have trouble conceiving, or suspect such trouble in the future, commit mass murder as a matter of routine.
Granted, I can’t say you’re wrong, because as you note, I see the line drawing as somewhat arbitrary – good faith arguments can be made for either side. That’s why its such a hard issue – the line can be drawn in several points in philosophically consistent ways. I’m not even sure where my personal opinion on it is, but my leaning is not to empower anyone or anything to second guess a doctor in a doctor/patient relationship, absent the death penalty for the third party who interferes and the death of the patient results.
Not to mention that there’s no appreciable difference between the fertilized egg of a human and the fertilized egg of a rat…
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