The voter potential is small. The organization is non-existent. The chances of de-socializing–to use your phrase–American society aren’t substantially greater than in European society, despite substantial differences in our respective social regimes. The objections to government programs like social security have very little to do with those programs per se and far more to do with a deep conviction that centralizing information about citizens inevitably leads to tyranny and abuse. If I could remain anonymous; if the government was denied to ability to access every bit of information about my life and its conduct by entering a 9-digit reference number, would I give up a pittance of a retirement stipend? Sure.
The issues around government subsidy of healthcare are related to issues of infrastructure and issues of equality of opportunity. John Rawls, and all. You’ll find libertarians divided on those questions.
Many libertarians are localists at heart. I certainly am. I’m not certain that minarchical governance is possible in a continental empire. So not only am I willing to chuck medicare, I wonder if the government and nation that provide it oughtn’t devolve as well. Dissolution, anyone?

Posted by: IOZ | Oct 17 2007 18:47 utc | 3

You do deserve a serious answer, but here my private, very unreasonable one, which I made up for myself, because I never, ever could understand libertarians and I have come to distrust them all.
A good US libertarian is one, who wants all the freedoms for everybody to do all the damn, darn stuff that they wants to do, be it on the fundamentalist left or the fundamentalist right. The real cool libertarian oscillates, on odd days his support goes to the extreme left and on straight days to the extreme right. As long as a libertarian is up high on the ladder of anti-authoritarianism, everything is fine by him… sez he.
They claim to be that passionately anti-authoritarian that they can’t help but impose their views on you with the consistency and god-like inevitability of the world turning around its axis.
And yes, they rather would die than do anything that can be considered essential for the “Common Good” of a society, if it means they have to give up any of their cherished freedoms. Anything that demands social solidarity and compassion for social justice is definitely out of the question and unacceptable for them.
As for voter potential? I think they package their non-ideologies neatly wrapped up in a layer of phony intellectualism and sold with some populist sound bites, especially in the think tank and consultant and university talking head circles.
I am sure a substantial number of libertarians hide behind the “Bushes” or wear the “intellectual bow-tie with big brother glasses” or the other outfit, the ponytail of the real rugged individualist cowboy geek, who happened to be a “down to the iron” programming geek way before the other crowd discovered the ‘puter.
Lots of the running around at the Ivy Leagues playing “the intellect without a heart”-role of a rambo superman.
Ok, sorry for that, I shouldn’t soil your blog with my crap. Lately I have lost my willingness to behave reasonably. You know that’s all Congress’ fault, of course.
Finally someone who mentioned Bismark’s social reforms. I wished more people could throw them in American’s faces from time to time.

Posted by: mimi | Oct 17 2007 20:08 utc | 5

Woah, the anti-libertarian stance is pretty strong here, and yet people somehow misconstruct both Paul’s position and the position of libertarians in general.
Libertarianism != anarchy.
Libertarianism != no government.
Libertarianism != no laws.
Libertarianism != no justice.
Libertarianism is about smaller government. It’s about believing that not all problems can only be solved by a monopoly. It’s also about freedom to chose and freedom of associations.
Paul’s position on (let’s say) Social Security isn’t that SS is bad therefore it should be abolished. It’s that SS isn’t explicitly allowed under the United States Constitution, and is therefore illegal and should be phased out.
This is the same argument he uses against most other federal departments and institutions.
Please keep in mind that none of this stops individual states from providing SS, education (which they already do), health care (which some already do), etc. Individual states can still decide to provide all these services if they are so inclined.
If the European Parliament decided that all europeans should pay an extra 15% income tax to fund $random_program, ignoring any national boundaries and forcing it all member states, wouldn’t some double-digit% europeans be against it? Is that libertarianism? Anarchy?
No: It’s having less government, less bureaucracy, and more national (state) determination.
If some institution is clearly superior to others, other nations would work towards adopting them on their own. There is no need the have the EU force it down on everyone.

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 17 2007 21:04 utc | 7

“No party in Europe can win a double digit percentage by campaigning, for example, to abolish social security. While there are various neo-lib parties here, none of these argues to cut away major state functions.”
Bernard I hate to be a wet blanket, but I need to say don’t be too sure of that. Most people in NZ felt that way after a century of welfarism, and yet 15 years ago they ended up with economic libertarianism even though they didn’t vote for it. Hence the introduction of MMP in a voter backlash. The damage was done by then.
It’s kind of hard to explain how it works but basically a little of the cash sloshing around from dismantling the state can do wonders for buying votes. The social changes become too big to manage an easy change back and you’ll find that there will be enough young people who had been struggling to find work that will leap at the chance of some instant gratification and bugger the long term consequences.
Workers regained the right to organise but only in a very limited way, meanwhile industrial accidents and deaths sky rocketed. I could write pages of horror stories about the way that the withdrawal of the state from the micro economy has dis empowered ordinary citizens while advantanging the already powerful but most will have heard similar horror stories from amerika or england and it is just too fucking depressing.
The current mob of centre left ‘pols’ backed away from major economic regulation very early on in their reign partly because the macro economy is now so exposed to outside influence, now it has no protection, that any moves towards re-regulation caused spiteful short sells and the like on foreign markets. There was no profit seeking economic rationale behind many of the market fluctuations just ideology, which caused corporations and other economic entities to act against the interests of their investors. “hey isn’t that illegal or something?” It certainly flies in the face of what economic libertarians preach, but of course what they practise is rather different.
Anyway the current mob after getting pissed at being thwarted at regulating the economy got heavily into regulating individual behaviour. This is a trap many so-called leftist parties can fall into. Now everybody hates em. Undoubtedly workers will once again lose their right to organise effectively after the next election.
r’giap is living in the first mainland European country in the firing line but Germany will follow as short term economic opportunity lures frustrated young people from Germany into France when all the fire sale cash bribes slosh around the French economy.
The price is economic sovereignty and since France’s new prez has already forfeited political sovereignty to amerika why worry about the economic stuff.
The pact is Faustian and I’m certain Sarkozy has signed it long before he was a candidate, next he will sign up those pols he hasn’t already but which he needs.
Sarkozy will have been settling a few details on his amerikan trip. The strategy will be complex and at least part of it will be to make Germany increasingly isolated in the EU.
Just a quick ps about the anonymous and fallacious argument in the post above. No one made any of those claims about libertarianism which the post alleges.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 17 2007 21:09 utc | 9

libertarianism, is in brief, a substandar form of nietzsche’s philosophy – it is in essence – right wing anarchism. the absence, the complete absence of social good within its platform(s) signal a contempt for the people (herd)
what it has meant in practice is a couple of fatboys in hotels in dallas trying to reconfigure the world to their interests or a couple of wildboys holing up on their farms packing every armnament made by men recongifuring their humanity
ayn rand is the libertarian’s shirley temple & morton friedman, their go if the forget his jewishness
as a political philosophy – the great depression was its midwife – exalting an every man for himself ethic & morality
in this world, in the world we are living in – libertarianism like its sister, nihilism are simply the luxurious thought of thos who don’t want to understand consequences

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 17 2007 21:34 utc | 11

A very brief note: anything that talks about taking power away from the Federal government and placing it with individual states tends to be another way of saying, ‘let those damn (minorities/women/homosexuals) do what they want OVER THERE in that state, but keep them away from here’. Or in other words, libertarianism as I’ve seen it in the U.S. is one more bunch of scared, threatened white guys feeling like everything they work for is used up by (pick any of the above).

Posted by: mats | Oct 17 2007 23:53 utc | 13

The libertarians I use to hang out with would often invoke “the power of the free market” to make everything fair.
uh….right.

Posted by: catlady | Oct 18 2007 0:55 utc | 15

I would say that ideology is what you make up to denote how your tribe is a different (and better) group from that other tribe. That reenforces the feeling of tribal righteousness that is the basic mover in politics.
What this group identity is has been described in a number of posts on this thread. Strong, independent, rational, masculine, oppressed, rightwing.
From what I have gathered, this particular ideology is only big in USA, it lacks following in other parts of the world. In USA it is small in numbers but gets significant press coverage thanks to a number of well-financed institutions, most prominent is the CATO institute. These are in turn financed by a handful very wealthy backers.
My conclusion is that libertarianism is an outlet where white men who – though privileged by position – fail to make the system work for them can blame the government (and indirectly the sissys, women and non-white), in a way that demands tax cuts and less regulations. Thus they vote republican as the lesser of two evils, in effect supporting the superrich in getting even more money and power. And it is more or less deliberately set up to be that way. Though libertarianism with its wild west creeds lack groups that share their particular ideology outside USA, there are similar group identeties that can ensure poor powerless white men a feeling of superiority as long as they line up with the powerful rich white men.
Interestingly enough, if the Free State Project eventually succeeds in moving enough libertarians to New Hampshire, changing the politics of New Hampshire to one libertarian party and which ever of the oldies that survive, I think we are dealing with the law of unintended consequences. Just because you can create a group does not mean you can control it. Once the group exist it might start acting by itself and might not be content with playing its given role as support cast.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 18 2007 1:54 utc | 17

18: that was weird.
Tried to say to ASKOD that, although libertarianism is not much in evidence in Europe now, one shouldn’t forget Maggie Thatcher’s infatuation with Friedrich Hayek.

Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 18 2007 3:27 utc | 19

I need more coffee and an editor, apparently. Strike “joining” or “chiming” from the first sentence; You choose which. Strike “failure on our part to choose” from that last sentence and replace with “Choosing”. Close cover before striking. Wash, rinse, repeat. Anybody needs me, I’ll be in my office.
Dammit.

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 18 2007 5:03 utc | 21

I think libertarianism is the hippie utopian equivalent of the wingnut class. Pipe dream idealism, not necessarily all bad, but idealism nonetheless. Probably more of an attempt to develop a pristine ideological anti-statist model for conservatism that doesn’t stink of elitism. Like DiD#6 post, the supposed meritocracy really only flows one way on a crooked playing field when free individuals are free to stack the deck however they please. I find this rarefied exceptionalism non-serious as anything other than a tool for criticism, first because there are no working governmental examples of it in the entire human history of such things, and secondly, because human history is decidedly and innately social (not individualist) in nature.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 18 2007 7:10 utc | 23

For most US libertarians, the answer is that libertarians are republicans with pretensions to cool.

Posted by: citizen k | Oct 18 2007 10:25 utc | 25

Thanks to all for a remarkably civil exchange of widely divergent views.
I find myself on the same wavelength as Rick in 22 and Monolycus in 20, and thank IOZ and Anonymous at #7 for putting the non-monolithic character
of Libertarian thought in evidence. Those who discussed the perceived deficiencies of the movement with regard to social committment have certainly raised valid warnings too. I can’t resist asking Tangerine
if (s)he ran the red light because convinced by the anarchist trend in
the hitchhikers reasoning, or from simple absentmindedness.
As to the Ron Paul campaign, its flaws have been well limned here. Nevertheless, I find myself preferring a candidate who puts his crackpot theories right out there in the open to one who is much too shrewd to reveal her cards but is very likely pursuing an (even more crackpot) hidden agenda, to wit, that of continuing on the present imperial path albeit with “better management and strategic cutting of losses”. The growth of the current military-security-intelligence hydra in the U.S. has been in progress for over 100 years. Even under the best of circumstances, walking it back to acceptable proportions is going to take decades. But since, as Rick so aptly phrased it “the house is on fire”, it’s time to try to initiate a drastic change of direction and only
Paul, Kucinich, and Gravel seem capable or desirous of doing so. Unlike
the latter two, Paul, by virtue of his singular status as the unique antiwar Republican candidate, may have a chance of actually making headway as the primary season advances. Should he do so, I suspect we will see panic, not pleasure, from the elite media which have so far tried to minimize the depth and breadth of his support.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 18 2007 11:02 utc | 27

@ VS:
I have to admit that Kucinich is the only candidate whose platform contains anything recognizable from a European perspective. I wonder if there’s a market for bumper stickers like “The Nanny State Rules,” or “More Please, Nanny!”
Agreed that Paul would at least try to withdraw the tentacles of the US from the rest of the world. But all this talk of unilateralism and non-membership of the UN, etcetera, would only work if isolationism is completely untinged by exceptionalism, and the exceptionalist gene is far too dominant in current US culture for that ever to be true, IMO. Seems to me as well that an isolationalist, libertarian USA would self-destruct quite quickly, somewhat along the lines of Norse Greenland as described in Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Self-interest, ideological blinkers and no safety net for the poor – wouldn’t take long.

Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 18 2007 14:09 utc | 29

from my experience most people are happy to be associated with their place of birth. Most also believe their way of living is the best in the world. Not sure if that is exceptionalism.
what I understand when I hear of US exceptionalism is the certainty that everyone else wants to be like us, that they envy (or hate) our freedoms, and that our way is the absolute best way. These beliefs are usually held by someone who has never ventured outside the state and has never heard a foreign language, much less understands one.
being that the US is the most powerful country on earth and everyone knows it whether they are US citizens or not, it changes the way everything is seen. the rest of the world is not so bellicose, not so ready for physical acts, they know they have to be discrete..not loud and boisterous and be clever instead of forceful.
would those countries and their citizens feel exceptional if they were the big dog on the block? I am fairly certain they would, but they aren’t and I don’t think they do now.

Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 18 2007 16:03 utc | 31

@citizen k – This exceptionalism is particularly prevalent in European leftists who seem to believe imperialism is a US invention and Europe is just a peaceful realm
Could you introduce me to that “European leftist”. Seems to be an interestingly deranged dude – never met one like him/her.

Posted by: b | Oct 18 2007 16:47 utc | 33

#30,#33,
There are 2 ways to view exceptionalism, sort of symptom, and disease like. dan of steele talks about the symptom “redneck” part. But its the root cause part that is so important to Libertarianism, its the part that says WE DON”T NEED SOCIALISM IN AMERICA, WE HAVE FOUND A BETTER WAY, which of course are grounded the essentially libertarian ideas of “lazy fair” economics, “heroic” individualism, “equal justice for all” judicial, and a climate of all round general meritocracy that produced “POOF!” the special and unique “American Way” that makes us SPECIAL. In which case it would be impossible to have a European variant.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 18 2007 19:14 utc | 35

Woah, the anti-libertarian stance is pretty strong here, and yet people somehow misconstruct both Paul’s position and the position of libertarians in general.
Libertarianism != anarchy.
Libertarianism != no government.
Libertarianism != no laws.
Libertarianism != no justice.
Libertarianism is about smaller government. It’s about believing that not all problems can only be solved by a monopoly. It’s also about freedom to chose and freedom of associations.
Paul’s position on (let’s say) Social Security isn’t that SS is bad therefore it should be abolished. It’s that SS isn’t explicitly allowed under the United States Constitution, and is therefore illegal and should be phased out.
This is the same argument he uses against most other federal departments and institutions.
Please keep in mind that none of this stops individual states from providing SS, education (which they already do), health care (which some already do), etc. Individual states can still decide to provide all these services if they are so inclined.
If the European Parliament decided that all europeans should pay an extra 15% income tax to fund $random_program, ignoring any national boundaries and forcing it all member states, wouldn’t some double-digit% europeans be against it? Is that libertarianism? Anarchy?
No: It’s having less government, less bureaucracy, and more national (state) determination.
If some institution is clearly superior to others, other nations would work towards adopting them on their own. There is no need the have the EU force it down on everyone.

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 18 2007 20:04 utc | 37

@Tantalus: all this talk of unilateralism and non-membership of the UN, etcetera, would only work if isolationism is completely untinged by exceptionalism, and the exceptionalist gene is far too dominant in current US culture for that ever to be true, IMO. Seems to me as well that an isolationalist, libertarian USA would self-destruct quite quickly, somewhat along the lines of Norse Greenland as described in Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Self-interest, ideological blinkers and no safety net for the poor – wouldn’t take long.
I completely agree with you here. But being European myself I have no objections to Americans trying to do something different in their own country as long as they do not force it upon the rest of us.
I know what you mean about a sticker with “More Nanny state, please!” but since Americans never had a normal civilized state helping and protecting the weak and poor I am not surprised by their reaction to hate their state. Heck, I hate it too. And it may well be that in the USA no state or, at least, much less state would be better than the current evil bureaucratic behemoth by the millionaires and for the millionaires…

Posted by: vineyardsaker | Oct 18 2007 21:28 utc | 39

Marek Bage #40,
Hey, guilt by involuntary, unknown and undesired association …now we’re getting somewhere! Such deficient associative logic is something I associate with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and others who spew hate and spin in the U.S. media.
Marek, I fear for any innocent man or woman who would be so unfortunate to have yourself as a juror.

Posted by: Rick | Oct 19 2007 4:50 utc | 41

Actually Monolycus, last time I looked, at the Aryan Nation website, they DO support support radicalized Islamic terrorists and OBL, although they said nothing about eating Christian babies – seeing that they consider themselves Christian. While I doubt Ron Paul would want the above association – there is something to the attraction of these crazies. I would assume a Ron Paul administration would offer no resistance to such groups or might even endorse them, like Woodrow Wilson did for the KKK, when he praised “Birth Of A Nation”, thereby fueling the resurgence of that group.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 19 2007 7:27 utc | 43

Wiki lists the main issues of the KKK:
white supremacy (good old boys)
anti-catholicism (pro-protestant)
anti-semitism (hollywood/bad news media)
racism (welfare queens/slakers)
homophobia (gay marriage)
nativism (anti immigration)
Without explicitly saying so, all the above are hot button issues the republicans exploit for political ends.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 19 2007 7:58 utc | 45

Just to be clear, I’m not saying Ron Paul is a KKK wannabe, probably far from it. And I’m not saying religion is the root of all evil. But I am saying that culturally speaking, the republicans do indeed look to exploit and transfer the templates of certain (usually the worst of) Christian ideologies onto a general political framework in an attempt to exploit a fear of the “other” by highlighting exceptionalism as a kind of national identity. This results in a general implicit racism nationally and an imperial instinct internationally. A kind of Yang in american politics unresolved going back to the civil war. Republicanism is the handmaiden of such a construct and Ron Paul, as refreshing as he might seem – in his isolationism and anti religious viewpoints (which he should hold as a real libertarian) is still beholden to the overall republican agenda, albeit in rarefied form.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 19 2007 8:32 utc | 47

In interactions I have had with self proclaimed libertarians they have always been avowedly anti-racist, however considering that the only response to the marginalisation of entire cultures within amerika, has been so called affirmative action which libertarians vehemently oppose, I can see how it is that their position could be misinterpreted as racist.
In fact it is that anti-racist stance of libertarianism which makes it the only intellectually appealing winger philosophy. However the contradictions about support for capital monopoly while banning people power make it ethically dubious.
When they first came to power in NZ in the early 90’s they did some really good stuff along with their awful anti-human stuff. For example they completely abolished all censorship.
That lasted about two years until the backlash occurred. Naturally a few assholes wrecked it for everyone else. Objects like real snuff videos and torture videos began to turn up, only in small quantities cause the demand for stuff like that is pleasingly small. However no society is prepared to countenance having members profiting from that type of misery, so limited censorship controls were brought back in and like all bureaucracies the censor’s office took on a life of its own and the empire was reconstructed.
I do enjoy my periodic debates with the censor. He is a very politically correct gay man who rightly cracks down on violence not sex, but he has no sense of humour and doesn’t understand the degree of satire and self parody in some of the video games he has restricted or banned.
And he’s not above banning ‘cult’ games which have a small potential sales while letting through much worse big sellers such as a couple in the Grand Theft Auto series that rewarded violence towards women
Any ban on ‘big games’would have caused his decision to be taken to the high court where his decision may have been overturned. So instead he picked a game that few people would play that was really amusing in an ironic way, yet totally unrealistic, a caricature. That gave him the ability to tell concerned mothers against video games or whatever that his office had been actively policing games and had actually banned one, without pissing off more than a half dozen people, one of whom was me.
It is that politically influenced decision making which pisses people off and can attract them to libertarian philosophies.
One of the other things the libertarians did was abolish the idea of sole agencies for a product. I don’t know how many amerikans are aware that many corporations have a wide range of prices around the world for the same article.
Price stopped being a function of the cost of inputs a long time ago and became a function of demand.
M$ had a huge variation in prices around the world for Win 98 and they got really pissed off when entrepreneurial types would fly off to a third world country and buy a few thousand copies of their program at a third of the NZ retail price (these were legit not pirated) bring them into NZ and undercut M$ wholesale prices. Gates did a big lobby job on the Labour Govt when it was first elected claiming that this ‘loophole’ was encouraging piracy. Clinton had tried to heavy the previous govt about the same issue and failed.
In the end the monopoly got it’s way which was the day I decided that any residual sympathy I may have for the centre left had gone.
Why are state resources wasted on assisting a private enerprise by policing copyright laws? It is up to industry to invoice and collect their own charges.
Parallel importing as it’s called still remains on some goods eg clothing such as Levis jeans. Before parallel importing, ‘good’ levis cost around $NZ150 which was about $90 US, yet careful shopping round in the US would get them for a quarter of that. So when the legislation protecting sole agency was abolished, many stores brought in stuff themselves rather than buying it of Levis Corp.
Levis Corp got really shitty and threatened the outlets in the states which were passing the jeans onto the kiwi merchants (Levis don’t sell to buyers outside amerika themselves and always refer buyers back to the Levis office in their own country).
However the retail price of Levis here dropped from between $140 – 150 NZD to $80 – 100 NZD, which gives an indication of the rip that had been happening previously.
Capitalism is a foul, rapacious beast and it became clear that although the libertarians could be ideologically staunch sometimes, when it came down to it, the rich were favoured ahead of ordinary citizens despite protestations to the contrary.
The libertarian govt introduced an employment contracts act to get away from the centralised wage fixing model NZ had had for nearly a century. Basically each employee had an individual relationship with his/her employer, in which there were very few compulsory conditions of service.
Most of the Occupational Health and Safety Act was tossed out which led to the increased rate of work injury and death I mentioned in another post, and statutory public holidays and the like were abolished along with penalties and allowances. Every contract was meant to be ‘negotiated’ from scratch. Of course that wasn’t how it played out since workers had to to this negotiating once every few years when they changed jobs but employers did it most days of the week, so the employers quickly adopted a ‘standard’ that pushed wages backwards in many sectors for the first half of the 90’s.
However as a sop to the humans who they had conned to win power they stressed that the deal was a real contract. Workers couldn’t withdraw their labour – ie go on strike, and employers couldn’t sack a worker just because they didn’t like the look of him or her.
The bosses has been celebrating the big win from the destruction of organised labour but this ‘losing the right of dismissal’ really stuck in their craw. They tried to argue it was a basic freedom to sack anyone they wished, but the government was really leery about that lest someone argue that deciding not to work (ie to go on strike) was also a ‘basic freedom’.
The heart of the problem was the chief justice of the Industrial relations Court they had set up to oversee and resolve employment contract disputes. He was a stickler for the law and if someone was unjustifiably dismissed they would award damages including court costs.
In no time at all lawyers were taking cases on spec which doesn’t usually happen in criminal or most other civil disputes in NZ. The Law Society had previously really frowned upon it, but they must have been overwhelmed by the spirit of no regulation because they agreed it was permissible for lawyers to take on an employment case on a success based recompense ie a percentage of the ‘winnings’.
I suspect the economic libertarians hadn’t thought this through and imagined that no sacked worker could afford to hire a lawyer to get justice.
There were some massive payouts based around loss of potential earnings – in some instances where the employee had been of lobgstanding, payouts were calculated over a lot of years.
Then we saw the real colour of the libertarians coat, the true cut of their jib. They eventually amended the employment contracts act to limit the circumstances where a payout could occur while severely restricting the maximum duration of the term of lost remuneration down to a handful of months.
So much for laissez faire or letting the market decide. If ‘the market’ doesn’t favour capital – libertarians will move the goalposts until it does.
It became apparent this loose philosophy is only half formed, and can’t be equitably applied to all circumstances, yet still give a result that satisfies the average supporter of libertarian politicians.
If the right reckons that Utopian socialism is impractical and doesn’t take sufficient account of human nature, the left can make the same point about libertarian philosophy and it’s inability to work practically in a way that doesn’t disrupt the society it isn’t regulating.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 19 2007 9:49 utc | 49

Vineyard posted: he seems to be an old-school hardline conservative pure and simple
was my perception also. I will investigate. Further. Hmm. I’m a bit surprised at the strong anti feeling here.
Heh, well I ran the bright orange tinged with red in a safe spot, I was a bit distracted, because there is this Swiss Heidi turned Black Block (far left + libertarian + anarchist + gothic tinges, and quite violent), which I only understood later, too sweet the miss, you expect conversation about boots or rock concerts or maybe lamely the weather, but no, right off she eyeballs me and figures I’m receptive and starts tooting Ron Paul’s horn. It surprised me no end.
Too funny really when you think the Black Block with some others recently rioted in Lausanne and in Berne – we are having riots all over the place here now – against Blocher (Federal Councillor and Spiritual Head of the People’s Party, the one who is responsible for those xenophobic posters that are all over the international press) who espouses positions very similar to Paul’s on some points. Well I said too funny, but it is comprehensible, because what Blocher vs. Paul are trying to do is not at all the same, the contexts and tactics are different, and Paul is anti gov but Blocher is in the gov (etc.)

Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 19 2007 13:53 utc | 51

At risk of being repetitious (;-), thanks again to all for continuation of this interesting thread. I have particularly enjoyed
Debs and Ted’s posts. I hadn’t realized that there was had been a libertarian government in NZ, and find the chronicle very interesting. I also think that it is reasonable to insist on the distinction between the Paul campaign and pure libertarian philosophy, each having its interest, but the former being of more immediate significance. It seems that like many other political philosophies, libertarianism (and even liberalism) runs into problems in passing from theory to practice (thanks Debs here). Most rigorous thinkers disdain eclecticism, but it seems to be a humane solution to governance: knowing how to choose the “right” general principle that should be operative in a particular political situation seems to be the art of governance, not reducible to handy-dandy all purpose schemata, but always threatened by selfish interests.

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 20 2007 8:50 utc | 53

Tangerine,
you think that is odd?
We still have LaRouchians running putting up posters here. Still have not been able to figure out what they want.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 20 2007 13:55 utc | 55

@Debs #52
Debs, considering your last point, you fail to take into account the rights of those individual workers you refer to as ‘scabs’ (is that a pejorative term? I don’t know). How would a perfectly ordinary individual willing to work feel if she is threatened and/or beaten by a union just because she is willing to work for less money than the union likes? Doesn’t this sound inherently anti-worker and anti-labor to you? Or is it only organized labor that is good and all other individuals willing to work on their own terms and to hell with union hacks – bad? Historically the complex organized labor-capitalist employer relationship has, as you correctly point out, revolved around who can ally themselves with the state. This is, needless to say, not a classical liberal position or dilemma. The classical liberal position is not and a priori cannot be that capital is better than labor, simply because classical liberalism does not make the distinction between capital and labor – Marxism does. Classical liberalism sees only individuals having rights.
If you, Debs, employ 100 people to produce ceramic vases, you negotiate with each and every one of them a contract stipulating a salary, work time etc. What the contract stipulates and what it does not is entirely up to you and the other party. So far so good. If 80 of your workers decide to form a union and elect a union official who will represent them in their contractual dealings with you, that is also alright. Individuals certainly have the right to make this kind of choice as long as it comes out of their own free will. Let’s say that the union, now representing 80% of your workers, wants to renegotiate a new contract stipulating higher salaries. Now you, as owner and employer, have to calculate and decide based of different variables whether you can agree with that or not. If you decide to agree – everything is fine, the entire exchange has been by mutual consent. If you decide to disagree however, you may have to end up declaring the contract void and looking for other 80 workers who will be willing to work on the conditions of the previous contract. Let’s say that at this stage the union decides to force your hand and occupy your company – this would be a direct violation of your rights of property. Alternatively the union might go out of the terrain of your property and try to intimidate, physically attack and scare away any new potential workers willing to form contractual obligations with you according to the old terms – this will be a direct of violation of a number of these workers’ rights. If, to compound the problem, you decide to call the mayor (or the union decides to call other unions) and unleash more force – an even greater number of rights would be broken. This, more or less, would be the classical liberal position on the issue. As you pointed out, historically the state has been brought in to enforce one of the sides of these contractual disputes. This however has, in the long term, resulted with the perversion of both contracts and individual rights, by displacing the power and decision potential to the state. As a result the state is now an indispensable part of every contract between supposedly free individuals, and, what is even worse, this power is there for the taking by those who have the most resources to dedicate for this goal.
Thus by thinking we are doing good, we are, in the long term, only empowering people like the neocons and Giuliani in their quest for total power.
@Tantalus #50
The Salamanca school is truly fascinating, and the references given in the wiki article are a good place to start. Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis has also a very interesting discussion on the philosophical roots of their reasoning, based as it was in Aquinas and Aristotle yet founded on a complete reinterpretation of the concept of natural rights. Also, if I am not wrong it was Molina who applied what can really be called a proto-actor network theory approach to studying the behavior of individual actors in the Amsterdam bourse.
Cheers

Posted by: ted | Oct 21 2007 4:33 utc | 57

Debs, precisely – the entire issue is predicated on the ability to ‘enlarge the dispute in other ways’. In other words – to bring third parties into an otherwise two-party contract without the consent of the other side of the contract. Once you do that – and as you mention that is the only remaining tactic of unions – you break the sanctity of contracts, and from this point onwards the side that manages to bring in the biggest player to the table wins. Needless to say that ends with bringing in the government, which always results with a bigger state and less freedoms. My point throughout has been that this cannot be allowed to happen if you value your individual rights and freedoms. That is why classical liberals would say that the unions are in the wrong in my example; not because of the imaginary break line between labour and capital that Marxist demagoguery wishes to see, but because the unions repeatedly break the individual rights, either of other workers, or of their employers, or of other parties, and then end up bringing in the government and thus constantly ceding power away from the individual workers they were trying to protect.
Going back to your example of enlarging the dispute in other ways: so the union in your company has decided not to attack your property, and not to infringe on the rights on non-union workers, but instead to ask the unions in companies X,Y,Z (not in any way parties to the original contractual dispute) to start breaking their own contractual obligations. In other words, the union in company X suddenly breakes the contract not because the other side of the contract has done anything to infringe it but out of solidarity with the union in your company. Fine, but it is still a breach of contract. What is more, instead of the initial problem between two parties, now we have a problem between 4 parties, which, judging by your logic, will expand in a progression until …when? When is it ok for unions to stop breaking contracts and the rights of other, non-union workers, not to mention the employers with whom those contracts were signed in the first place? Of course, and this is the real irony, after a century old history one can observe that what union struggle really managed to achieve is the complete merger between corporatism and its protector – the state, resulting in a massive degradation of individual freedoms.
What I have been trying to point out to you is that classical liberalism is not an ideology per se, but a tool set for approaching social problems – it sees only individual human rights that need to be protected. No matter how much vitriol is poured on liberalism due to demagoguery, ill will (such as identifying it with so called neo-liberalism) or ignorance, its foundations are sound as the Salamanca school* demonstrated.
*Speaking of the foundations of classical liberalism, I would have expected someone on this blog to raise the classical Marxist theory of value. It would have been very interesting to point out how Marx’s theory of value is the carbon copy of the theory of value of the Medieval catholic church, against which the Salamanca school and the humanists rebelled.

Posted by: ted | Oct 21 2007 10:46 utc | 59

@ASKOD thanks for pointing out what I had intended to next time I stopped by. It pretty much QED’s the entire point I was trying to make, that classic libertarians won’t see the employer’s efforts to avoid the contract by bringing in other workers as a problem but will see workers attempts to counter that by bringing in other comrades as a problem.
When the original contracts were brokered here; ‘boilerplated out’ – as well as including clauses agreeing to keep third parties out, the contracts included provisions to prevent solidarity between workplaces.
The contracts ran their term and because their term differed according to the anniversary of the workers’ date of commencement, they had all expired after 2-3 years. Employers mostly didn’t bother to renew, hoping I suppose to let sleeping dogs lie.
The workers were no longer bound by the terms of the contract so in many places the workers called in a union to act as their bargaining agent.
The employer resisted, workers took action, the employer would eventually agree to negotiate with a union, and the union also began negotiating to demolish the restrictive clauses. As a result of a bargaining agreement, usually to offset further pay increases, the employers would remove various restrictive, onerous and frequently unreasonable clauses until the contract no longer gave all power to the employer.
Then when workplaces were able to go out in solidarity with comrades who had been scabbed out a of a job, so the employers representatives lobbied government to change the law to prohibit ‘secondary boycotts’. They went outside the agreed contract and called in the state to intervene.
This is why I will always be convinced that libertarian philosophy is one of convenience rather than an absolute ideal to be upheld in all circumstances.
Libertarianism, classical marxism, and whatever other philosophic ism, anyone can think up are just artificial constructs, usually designed by people with insufficient practical knowledge of the social issues they are attempting to confront.
They fail to understand that rigid rules and definitions will always break when the correct lever is applied. That lever is mostly found by a form of ju jitsu where the ideals and rules of the oppressor are used to create contradiction.
The real problem is that just as libertarianism is a construct, so is their view of the state as a malevolent entity, interested only in oppressing the individual.
The state is meant to be representative of the collective will of the people who live within a particular society. The best way to fix problems caused by an oppressive state isn’t to try and abolish the state, if only because that is impossible.
Take the hypothetical we have been discussing where the collective will of capitalists altered and reduced the state’s power to represent the will of working people and exert control over capitalists.
Those working people created another entity to represent their collective will, the labour union and the cycle continues.
The other issue very fixed in the minds of a lot of libertarians is the notion that property ownership is an absolute right. This is a very western notion and causes un-neccesary conflict, especially when people have become so indoctrinated about the primacy of ownership rights they hold them in higher regard than another individual’s right to life. eg shooting trespassers and the like.
The most insidious part of the corporation friendly pro-globalist standardisation of laws around the world has been the increased emphasis that has been put on property law. There is no longer any allowance for the notion that an enterprise can have many stakeholders who also have rights to determine outcomes for an enterprise.
The eventual result of that will be for stakeholders to develop other ways to express their collective will.
And that is why we must all be careful to see the ‘anti-terra’ legislation such as amerika’s Patriot Act for exactly what it is, a pre-emptive strike upon the rights of ordinary individuals to express their will in ways to replace the powers that pro-corporate governments abolished.
Those powers had once been the method that groups of individuals used to have their views represented by government.
Just because those powers have abolished, it doesn’t mean that the views of ordinary people have been abolished too, they haven’t, and they will surface in many other ways as people insist that they be heard, and that their will be represented by some other entity if the state is no longer prepared to act on their behalf.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 22 2007 0:41 utc | 61

thanks to all for lots of information about libertarianism. I had heard of it, but didn’t know much about it. This explains many of Penn & Teller’s shows. Particularly the one about etiquette.
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of finer clay than the rest of mankind?
From what I’ve seen, the rest of mankind (the larger, uninformed and politically apathetic chunk of it anyway) believes “the legislators and their appointed agents” are much, much finer clay.
The people that gain those lofty positions couldn’t and wouldn’t be there if they weren’t so fine, is their faithful logical mantra.

Posted by: jcairo | Oct 22 2007 15:42 utc | 63