Libertarianism, In Theory and Practice

turgon

brianthebard wrote: »

People aren't allowed leave threads without your say so now?

Of course not. But seeming as you brought up debating styles, I felt it was imperative to mention that one of your debating styles once it becomes apparent you arent able to answer the questions put to you.

brianthebard wrote: »

Or ignore posts if they choose to?

If I was talking to someone and they walked off in between sentences I would consider it rude. The two of us specifically were discussing something specifically and once you couldnt answer you refused to reply.

If you cant answer questions put to you then it only highlights the lack of answers.

brianthebard wrote: »

Should I also have replied to every other poster on the electrician's strike thread?

If they each addressed you specifically with different conerns, and you were still posting there, then I would say yes.

brianthebard wrote: »

I would've thought a liberal such as yourself would allow me to choice of what posts I reply to without reproach.

I respect freedom of choice and manners in equal proportion.

GuanYin

turgon, if you have a problem with a poster, report the post and report the post ONLY.

Do not engage, criticize or back seat moderate on thread if you wish to complain about a poster.

Back on topic

/moderation

Akrasia

donegalfella wrote: »

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Anarcho capitalism is an oxymoron.
You should call yourself an anti state libertarian instead, and then that topic would fit in perfectly to this thread

turgon

Akrasia wrote: »

Anarcho capitalism is an oxymoron.

How so?

Akrasia

donegalfella wrote: »

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Wouldn't these shops be sued by the families of dead heroin addicts? (or if not the shops, the heroin producers)
Would shops have any responsibility to ensure that their wares are safe?
Could I manufacture my own 'anti brain cancer' drug in my bathtub and sell it in health shops?

Sorry, can you explain to me again how courts' interpretation of the law can be rectified by the legislature?

They change the laws

Libertarians would elect a legislature, which would be bound by an extremely restrictive constitution.

to protect property rights above all else?

And yet you refuse to acknowledge that homelessness, addiction, and inequality arise out of the very statist welfare system that you see as the solution. We are spending more on welfare than ever before, and yet violent crime is spiraling out of control.

And I'm sure you have the statistics to back that up.

There's no inconsistency at all. You don't have the right to freedom from coercion if you have initiated coercion against another person or his property.

How can someone initiate coercion against property?

Akrasia

turgon wrote: »

How so?

The word anarchism is derrived from the greek, an archos which translates as without rulers. Anarchists have traditionally been against to gods and masters, both political and economic. All forms of anarchism are anti capitalist, even the individualist anarchists who are in favour of some kinds of property ownership, only support ownership over the amount of property that one family needs to sustain itself (and are opposed to landlords, profits, interest and all the associated trappings of capitalism.

So called anarcho Capitalists are nothing other than extreme liberals who are not content to have any restriction of any kind on their own 'property rights' and have no interest in equality or democracy (and in fact have contempt for these ideas as they believe they 'impose' a 'will of the collective' onto their own rights to do whatever they like on their own property.

The only difference between libertarians and 'anarcho capitalists' is that libertarians accept that they need a coercive state to protect their property from the landless and from external invasion, and to mediate disputes between landowners, while so called anarcho capitalists believe that every institution and every square inch of this planet ought to be privately owned and run as a dictatorship by the owners, because it is only by being owned, that something can be put to its most 'efficient' use.

Soldie

Akrasia wrote: »

Could I manufacture my own 'anti brain cancer' drug in my bathtub and sell it in health shops?

Of course you could. I wouldn't expect anyone to buy it, though. Are these 'But what if...' questions going to end at some point?

Permabear

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Offalycool

Kama wrote: »

We have an argument on monopoly formation and concentration of ownership. If I'm not misrepresenting, the lib side concedes that concentration of ownership/monopolistic trending exists, but argues that it is not pathological, and leads to greater benefits.

We have an ongoing argument over the status and operations of a legal system in a libertarian or fully-privatized scenario; the anti-lib claim seems to be that distribution or allocation of freedom would be inequitable, due to transaction costs, differential ability to pay or absorb costs, etc.

And imo we have an argument over public goods provision, whether recompense for the appropriation of current goods (privatization of the public) or the ability of a libertarian economy to generate them ...
Relatedly to public goods provision and taxation, we have the foundational status of coercivity in relation to liberty. If any action which impedes on private property rights and the person without consent is necessarily coercive, what are the implications for democratic practice, given that unanimity constitutes an elusive goal for any (not rigged) democracy, and hence any action which 'aggresses' against any individual can be viewed as coercive, rather than consensual and contractual by virtue of acceptance of a democratic system.

More macro again, whither democracy for a true anarcho-capitalist? Given that the primary mode of democratic expression currently would be the State, what mechanisms are to replace this, if the 'withering away' were accomplished?

What other key issues do people think are interesting/relevant? Is there a particular one anyone would like to focus on?

Don't forget the argument I have made regarding the impossibility of a Libertarian society in the first place. :pac:

Soldie

Akrasia wrote: »

The word anarchism is derrived from the greek, an archos which translates as without rulers. Anarchists have traditionally been against to gods and masters, both political and economic.

Surely you'd agree that anarcho-socialism is an oxymoron then, too? Socialism and statism go hand-in-hand. Anarcho-socialists believe that people will live voluntarily in collective communes, despite the fact that the 20th century has shown that people will run, jump or swim out of communist countries, even with the state's best attempts at keeping them in.

Permabear

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ChocolateSauce

Soldie wrote: »

Of course you could. I wouldn't expect anyone to buy it, though. Are these 'But what if...' questions going to end at some point?

I would. There's multitudes of stuff out there that doesn't work but people market anyway to people who are either desperate, morons, simply uninformed, or all three. One area where I'm a strong supporter of government regulation is in making sure goods do what they claim to. I firmly believe that, particularly when making health claims, there should be science to back something up. The FDA does a wonderful job in the US.

Permabear

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Kama

Akrasia wrote:

All forms of anarchism are anti capitalist

Only if you declare that by fiat; all this really means, imho, is that you don't accept capitalist forms of anarchism as 'really anarchist'. Anarcho-capitalism is an established political tradition, as DF has pointed out; the problem is with the inclusivity or exclusivity of your definition of the word. DF has argued for a decentralized non-state system pretty consistently; replace the word oxymoron with paradox, and I'd be more likely to agree. Otherwise, essentially its disrespecting peoples right of intellectual self-determination, and just a bit cheeky, imho.

Donegalfella wrote:

A spate of mergers and acquisitions in certain sectors doesn't prove the Marxian thesis about the overall tendency of free markets toward monopolies[...]This is in no way consistent with the Marxian monopoly thesis[...]In reality, the media is freer, faster, and more varied than ever before

I'd make a (stale) distinction here between new and old media; making comparisons with 'media' as inclusive of all, through a period of massive technological advance and diversification, where news is asymptotically approaching the point of instantaneity, while we have increased consolidation in traditional media (as with print and O'Reilly here, or Berlusconi's scandal not making the news in Italy), and increased differentiation in new media (citizen journalism, and all the trends you outlined). So there's two quite different trends, in the one picture; a traditional model thats increasingly centralized or merged, and the more rhizomatic peer-to-peer networks of information transfer that are generally free. The reconfiguration crisis for newspapers, critically, is how to compete with a free product; an interesting one for the libertarian economic system, if information and technological advance are non-rival, non-exclusive goods.

Donegalfella wrote:

I don't imagine that this will pose such a problem as the socialists are making out.

You don't, others do. I think its probably a healthier move to assume concerns are legitimate, and attempt to assuage them, than to dismiss them as scaremongering. Will Wilkinson wrote this piece, and the end seems relevant for evangelizing libertarians...

Libertarianism does have public relations problems, and it’s not because most people are stupid or immoral. It’s because libertarians have done a terrible job countering the widespread suspicion that it’s a uselessly abstract ahistorical ideology for socially retarded adolescent white guys[...]If libertarians are going to shift the politics of the countries we live in, we’ve got to get it through our thick skulls that many people have considered libertarian ideas and have rejected them for all sorts of decent reasons. We’ve got to take those reasons, and those people, fully seriously and adequately address them. Otherwise, we should probably just accept that libertarianism is a niche creed for weird people and reconcile ourselves to impotent, self-righteous grousing. Or get serious about life on the sea.

My basic concern here remains, which is one emergent from experience of the legal system in capitalist countries; you might not be able to buy a legal judgment outright, but you sure can load the dice by judicious investment. In the eutopia of the Libertarian, I see absolutely no check to this, indeed a check would be fundamentally against the basic principles, which strikes me as a severely restrictive limit to liberty and freedom.

Donegalfella wrote:

In the absence of a state and publicly owned property, I don't see why an anarcho-capitalist world would need democracy. Most basically, "society," "the public," and even "the nation" would cease to exist. There would be individuals, families, communities, and other voluntary groupings that could organize their own decision-making processes. But there would be no need for state-wide majoritarian decisions.

Again, this, to me, appears to be a situation of considerably less liberty than the one in which I now inhabit, and I see no reason to decrease my liberty rather than increase or maintain it. Governments, for all their warts, seem to me to provide a host of necessary services, economic, political, and social, which the non-state system seems unlikely to provide, or explicitly repudiates, and reform of their function seems a more fertile path than advocating their euthanasia. Thank you, again, for answering plainly and directly.

Offalycool wrote:

Don't forget the argument I have made regarding the impossibility of a Libertarian society in the first place.

It's one I've argued, too. I reckon they want a free lunch, and the Universe tends not to provide. But I'm firmly committed to the concept that any system which people want to try should be given a fair shake, its one of those zany foundational ethical value things

Akrasia

Soldie wrote: »

Of course you could. I wouldn't expect anyone to buy it, though. Are these 'But what if...' questions going to end at some point?

People would buy it, that's the point. People buy bunk health products all the time, but in the current system, there are regulations that mean medications have to be tested for efficacy and safety.
If you want to sell your home made brain cancer drug you have to call it homeopathy and then you're limited to the hippy market. In libertarianism, what's to stop people making home made drugs and selling them as if they were tested scientifically verified cures for serious diseases?
I presume because the victims of the unsafe drugs could sue the shops or the manufacturers? So would the manufacturers and sellers of heroin also be liable to be sued by the junkies or their families?

I'm trying to figure out how this replacement to government regulation would work in a libertarian society where the courts are your only mechanism for protection and redress

Akrasia

donegalfella wrote: »

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Link please

In the absence of a state and publicly owned property, I don't see why an anarcho-capitalist world would need democracy. Most basically, "society," "the public," and even "the nation" would cease to exist. There would be individuals, families, communities, and other voluntary groupings that could organize their own decision-making processes. But there would be no need for state-wide majoritarian decisions.

so a tyrany of the wealthy would replace democracy.
Would the 'voluntary groupings' use democratic one man one vote structures? or would they use shareholder plutocratic voting where the 'voluntary group' can be dominated by one person if he/she has 51% controlling interest.

"Anarcho-capitalism," coined by Murray Rothbard in 1949, describes a distinct political philosophy—one that melds together the individualist anarchism of Lysander Spooner, the economic theories of the Austrian School, and the anti-interventionist principles of the so-called "Old Right" in the United States. I simply don't see the point in continuing to complain bitterly every time you hear this long-established term used in discussion.

China Calls itself 'the people's republic', the Congo calls itself "the democratic republic"
Just because you call yourself something doesn't make it a proper discription of what you are.

Permabear

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Akrasia

Soldie wrote: »

Surely you'd agree that anarcho-socialism is an oxymoron then, too? Socialism and statism go hand-in-hand.

no they don't, socialism means social ownership of the means of production. There can be state socialism, where the party holds ownership on behalf of the people, or libertarian socialism, where there is workers self management and ownership is directed from the bottom up.

Soldie

Akrasia wrote: »

People would buy it, that's the point. People buy bunk health products all the time, but in the current system, there are regulations that mean medications have to be tested for efficacy and safety.

Do you think that if all such regulations were revoked, drug companies would immediately cease their testing?

If you want to sell your home made brain cancer drug you have to call it homeopathy and then you're limited to the hippy market. In libertarianism, what's to stop people making home made drugs and selling them as if they were tested scientifically verified cures for serious diseases?
I presume because the victims of the unsafe drugs could sue the shops or the manufacturers? So would the manufacturers and sellers of heroin also be liable to be sued by the junkies or their families?

You're just making noise at this point. If someone sells a product that doesn't do what it says it does, then they're liable. Dairy companies don't print use-by dates and pasteurise their produce because thay have to, they do so because if they don't, then they'll be run into the ground by their competitors. Following from your logic I can go outside and pick some Dandelions to sell as an erectile dysfunction treatment, and the main implication of this is not that I'll be taken to court for false advertising or otherwise, but that some people might buy it, and we must protect people from themselves.

Soldie

Akrasia wrote: »

no they don't, socialism means social ownership of the means of production. There can be state socialism, where the party holds ownership on behalf of the people, or libertarian socialism, where there is workers self management and ownership is directed from the bottom up.

Unless you're starting from year zero, then it necessitates coercion.

Permabear

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Akrasia

donegalfella wrote: »

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I'd love to see what they considered to be the left wing issues on which the media were biased. Do gay marriage, opposition to torture, abortion, human rights count as left wing'? (because these are issues that the right libertarians would tend to agree with socialists on) Is there an ongoing campaign for the introduction of free universal healthcare in the U.S. corporate media? Is the 'war on terror' a left wing issue? (from what I've seen of the U.S. media, they are far far more gung ho about war in the U.S. media than in europe, even the international editions of their newspapers and news programs tend to edit out the more extremist views.

I would find it hard to believe that even the 'left wing' news organisations would be viewed as anything beyond centre right, by the standards of anyone from the European social democratic countries.

This is the point I was making, the dominance of the right wing corporate media in the U.S. has made it so that even the centre right of Europe would be considered left wing in America.

Under Dawkins' theory of the Meme, Ideas can survive and spread to be accepted much more easily if they are in a nurturing environment. Constant re-enforcement of a hegemony leads to acceptance of that hegemony

Permabear

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Akrasia

donegalfella wrote: »

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Just as I suspected, it is a study to measure "liberal bias" which is hardly the same as left wing except for in the homophobic war mongering, war on drugs loving conservative right of America

Permabear

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Kama

donegalfella wrote: »

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Bias is notoriously hard to measure, with an infinite regress of experimenter bias; I'm going to read the paper you linked, but I note ahead that it compares a scale for media outlets with members of congress, which would be equally consistent with members of Congress leaning to the Right. Not saying it does, just being mindful that liberal commentators have *always* warned of persistent conservative bias, and vice versa. There's an epic right-wing conspiracy, and an epic left-wing one; point here is that people who cooperate whom you disagree with = 'omg konspiracy!'.

The leftist establishment certainly does not want to cede control over the media, entertainment, and education

For an extended argument on this near-totipotent liberal conspiracy from a hard-libertarian angle, I'd recommend Unqualified Reservations, who makes DF's anti-democratic opinions seem positively tepid. Warning though, this is a blog whose espoused aim is to convert liberal maggots into conservative blowflies...it's not for the short of attention span, but a fascinating read nonetheless.

Under the current government-monopoly system, politicians are free to load the judiciary with ideologically friendly judges. Look at how the left is attempting to appoint the blatant ideologue Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in the United States, for example. Moreover, the public has no direct role in choosing or appointing those judges—they are approved by politicians, who are surrounded by lobbyists. You see no problems with such a system? And how do you feel about Akrasia's proposal that defendants in murder trials should not have access to professional counsel?

I see plenty of problems with it, its a messy, flawed system. I just find it easier to conceive of meliorist 'patches' (money out of politics, transparency, direct election of judges, etc) than a 'reboot' or OS-change. I also haven't ever been convinced that there are 'non-ideological' people out there, somewhere, and especially not in any political sphere, so 'she's ideological!', well, so is Scalia. I'm not a fan of Sotomayer, but appointing ideological Supereme Court appointments isn't a new development.

I'm also not in agreement with 'first thing we do, we'll kill all the lawyers' approach on the lack of professional counsel; I regard it as a commitment emergent from anti-hierarchical assumptions, where differentiation and specialization = oppressive bete noire of hierarchy. That being said, Campaign for Plain English and law should be hand-in-hand. The less interpretable a law is, the less legitimate it is imho; if I cannot reasonably comprehend a law, its binding status becomes questionable.

For the record, I don't believe that any judiciary will be absolutely fair and impartial all the time. However, the difference between my position and that of the socialists is that I'm not striving for utopian perfection; I want to see a system that works well, efficiently, and fairly.

Mmmhmm. I don't think a perfect society achievable, either, but they are useful as direction-indicators and a worthy goal, eutopia rather than outopia. So I don't mean it pejoratively; I regard the utopian urge as central to human progress, truth be told, and that much is lost when any will to improvement becomes characterized as 'outopian'. In your (admittedly unsketched) courts system, I can grant you efficiency, but I see no grounds to consider fairness, especially as the pursuit of 'fairness' has been something you've consistently railed against as a 'socialistic' aim'. On one hand we have ideological 'distortion', modulated through a political system, on the other we have financial 'distortion', through the economic system.

If one is already in a situation of maximal personal liberty, I don't see why democracy would be a compelling need. I'm not opposed to democracy—if people want to set up their own democracies at local or community levels, they are free to do so—but what would be the function of democracy in the absence of a state?

Well, for one, it assumes that liberty is the only value any human might wish to maximise; perhaps they wish to optimise liberty with security, or egality, or any other 'ity'. A maximal variable often can be inefficient, if we have any other concerns, and people do seem to. Secondly, it assumes that the value of 'liberty' is fully consensually shared; my liberty perfectly equates to your liberty perfectly equates to Alkrasias, etc. It clearly does not seem to, either in meaning or procedure. Either we plead that others are 'ignorant', which is the Marxist argument of 'false consciousness', and difficult to defend, or we accept this plurality and try and work with it. The second seems more respectful.

I'll assume a Marxist pose a second. Scenario: Libertopia has differential capital accumulation, giving rise to a class in society who consider themselves disenfranchised. They march onto your property, Gandhi-style, demanding a 'fair redistribution' of the economic surplus. In Libertopia, I can only assume they would be put down or ejected from the principality, as they are initiating or plotting to aggress against property. Such actions are fully legal and legitimate internally.

One of the key problemns for me with your Libertopia, is it assumes and presumes an end to all ideological divisions, political conflict, etc, in a Uber-Fukuyama 'End of History', a final settled state where 'everyone gets it', we all are baptized Libertarian, and there are no heretics. This, to judge by recorded human history, seems highly unlikely; Fukuyama ate his words, for instance. In the absence of 'everyone getting it', establishing or maintaining the society will require either fraud or force, and those born into its system of property relations possess the same potential complaint the Libertarian utters 'social contract? I didn't sign no social contract!'.

Either: there is a unanimous uniformity, a market-totalitarianism, where all agree that Property IS Liberty

Or: it's coercive imposition on those who believe differently, that Property IS Theft

I hear claims for how such minorities will be allowed do whatever they like, but in the absence of a force guaranteeing this, what basis is there? None.

And no, I don't believe that this system can be "reformed." I believe that it's inherently corrupt.

It wasn't so long ago that revolutionary anarchists had a very close eye kept on them by the security services

You say 'inherently'. Is this quality purely that it is a government, or where does this inherent corruption emanate from? Can a government be honest, or rather, honest-enough?

Permabear

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Kama

Sorry, but with its repeated reference to red pills, blue pills, and The Matrix, this reads like the meandering ramblings of a conspiracy theorist.

In a sense, it is. It's a reactionary-libertarian anti-democratic blog, and (from my understanding) remarkably close to your own, though his rhetoric is more indirect and seductive.

Given your connection of plain English with democracy and legitimacy, do you find it in any way ironic that it is the socialists on these threads who are more prone to write in a style that is jargonistic and obfuscatory?

I do, but I've found it a common feature of all academic discourses; the same holds in economics, its generally dominant in all social sciences because, frankly, if all you have is chalk and talk, you're going to need some shiny-ass hypnotizing words. People take you 'seriouser' if you speak in an acrolect, and intellectuals cartels generally tend to make their value appear higher by a tactic of making it hard to understand wtf they are on about, or such has been my xp. Course, you can confuse people with simple language too, there's no guarantees.

Disclosure: I'm an abstract-verbal guy myself, just a self-hating one.

Would you care to comment on how Marxist rhetoric itself tends to encode obviously elitist and hierarchical assumptions about literacy, education, class, and the like? Do you honestly think an average working-class individual would understand what is meant by "an indentured class disparity in purchasing power defined by capital relation"? Would a true socialist not feel obliged to find some "Plain English" alternative?

I think it does, actually. There was a joke about Marxism (iirc by a Gaullist) that it had 'retreated to the academy to find a quiet place to die' after the failure of world socialist revolution etc. So for all the revolutionary-emancipatory posturing, in the West anyway, much of Marxism seems to be an academic acrolect, and a descriptive analytic mode; the distinction between Marxists and Marxians being that the latter are domesticated, and do respectable academic work now. Otoh, this 'domestication' was also Marxian theory becoming academically respectable.

That being said, I often hear conflict theories of society being based on exploitation come out of peoples mouths who'd never dreamed of reading Das Kapital. But then that goes back longer than Marxism.

However, fior all its failings, it's a analysis that is strong precisely where the libertarian is weak, on power relations. The Libertopia, where everyone is 'free to do whatever they like', seems more than slightly blind to the zerosum, exclusionary nature of some of these freedoms; it has an account of negative freedoms from State interference, but little else, and absolutely no conception of social conflict, due to possessing an individualist ontology in which, a la Thatcher, there is no society. Deaths are frequently reported; of the State, of God, of the global economy, of society, but I have rarely seen them substantiated.

I have been clear that I support judicial equality, or what the French at a certain moment in their history called égalité. I don't support the Robin Hood model of "fairness" endorsed by Akrasia, wherein we steal from the rich and give to the poor until everybody is allegedly "equal."

I also mean egality, in the same sense; I can tolerate a level of inequality, but once it messes with the outcome of a supposedly-equal judicial system, imo we have a pathological result. Again, I see no possible safeguard, other than well-wishing-words, in Libertopia. Faith is required, that for some reason an egalitarian system will emerge. The left-anarchist has at least the excuse of a utopian view of human nature, of the perfectibility of man, and an ethic of solidarity; for the Libertarian, with the moral justification of selfishness as an ethic, and human imperfection as stance, what support has the principle of egality?

It's in statements such as this that you show a failure to grasp the central ideas of libertarian thought.

I grasp it, I just follow the root of liberty in a different direction. Yours requires exclusionary property relations as a precondition of political freedom, and identifies economic freedom as freedom to. I privilege political relations as having claims over economic relations; tax as a membership fee, redistribution as legitimate and systemically necessary, decommodification of goods, Basic Income, and envisions economic freedom as freedom from.

As I've argued, I consider your eutopia to be repressive and coercive on a libertarian basis, market-oriented collectivist-communitarianism.

I'm also arguing that in implementation terms, barring a collapse of the state system, telling people they 'won't need democracy' will be a hard sell.

In a libertarian society, nobody is telling anyone how they should live. Libertarianism gives people the freedom to decide for themselves.

We are all individuals? You know the line which comes next: 'I'm not'.

Firstly, you are 'telling people how to live'. You have a theory of politics (essentially that collective action that imposes on any other is wrong by coercivity) that either will be shared by all (and hence, stricto sensu, market totalitarianism), or that will be opposed by some on foundational grounds, which refuses outright your assumptions on legitimacy (force or fraud), or who (like me) see leeway in interpreting the word 'initiate'. You will be unable to allow them their 'freedom', as it conflicts with your own, and hence you will be justified in restricting theirs. Much as yours is 'restricted', for the 'greater good', in our normal societies. And the wheel turns again...

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to argue here. Everybody would be equal under the law and have equal rights, if that's what you're asking.

I don't see how. For one thing, guaranteeing this would be conceptually incoherent for an anarchist, unless we take that tack that law and rights themselves are abolished (and in the absence of a archos how are they not); then I grant that all are equal.

Secondly, we can reasonably assume that access to, and quality of, legal counsel will be distributed according to wealth/power, other things being equal. Therefore equality before the law would be a formal shell and mockery, if there could even be such a formality, which there can't, see earlier argument.

Eh? Seriously, where have I ever, ever proposed some kind of totalitarian system that would eliminate all political conflict and dissent? Where on Earth are you getting this impression? Under libertarianism, individualism, dissent, heresy, and genius would be celebrated.

...unless they suggested any of the moves which Libertopia can construe as 'initiating aggression', and express this (as people have, historically, in liberal societies) as a claim on the property rights of another. This is coercion, and coercion is not celebrated by Libertopia. It's also a form of politics, and redistributive politics are not permitted in Libertopia, or you assume they will evaporate. I lack this confidence. But I'm a geek, and so when I hear an idea I'd like to see a simulation, or a test-run. Move to New Hampshire?

No. The libertarian would tend to agree with Lord Acton's famous remark that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The corruption is inherent within mankind, which is why we can never trust an individual or group with coercive authority over others.

Then my problem is the same as with Akrasia; without some form of power, responsibility, hierarchy, you can't get off the ground. You an be a self-autonomous monad all you like, but to be a part of human society, inevitably, as to play any game, you have to accept some rules. If you don't, you can't play. Which, perversely, limits your freedom-by-interaction, though it may maximise your freedom in-and-of-yourself.

Offalycool

The thing that pisses me of about BS like Libertarianism is that it is such a waste of time. It's like the moron that dreamt it up was either a) a complete anti social jerk who convinced people that morality could be systematicly imposed on people from above, whilst at the same time everybody will be 'free'. Or b) "I'll just spin a load of bull that will paralyse people politicly, because they will have the excuse they need to sit at home and become politicly static, constantly blaming society for everything their not bothered to sort out themselves!" (not having a pop at you personally DF, but I do feel you and your ideological companions have really been suckered by this absolute bulls**t)

Edit: Not that I've never been suckered myself.

Kama

Eh, wouldn't put it that way, but yes I think it's a political philosophy that has definite intrinsic problems as a political movement.

Otoh, ideology isn't all about power and politics 'proper'; a lot of it is about framing debate and the bounds of acceptability. Enough DF's ring in/post/etc, and the political atmosphere moves gently that ways; I'm a big believer in political opinion as herd behaviour.

Course, I don't see much difference between what DF is saying and normal red-blooded Texas Republicanism: crush the Gov, tax is theft, etc. Yet when they got their man in for 8 years, he just made government bigger. So it's Ron Paul or the annihilation of the Republic, I guess...

b) "I'll just spin a load of bull that will paralyse people politicly, because they will have the excuse they need to sit at home and become politicly static, constantly blaming society for everything their not bothered to sort out themselves!"

Mind you, the same description quite neatly encapsulates the 'depressed hippy' school of lifestyle-leftism better...Rightists tend not to blame society, they blame individuals; blaming society is a left rhetoric, imo.