In hopes of starting a different style of debate than the endless liberal vs. conservative, I'd be interested in hearing what any libertarians have to say about their positions. I'm basically a progressive Democrat although I differ on a few issues typical to the platform. I agree 100% with the Libertarian idea that the government should stay the hell out of people's bedrooms and keep a firm wall between church and state. When it comes to the whole social/economic/foreign policy package, however, I find the Libertarian platform results in some ludicrous extremes. Obviously not everyone who calls themselves a Libertarian agrees with the whole package and applies the philosophy wholesale, but here are some positions I've heard die-hard Libertarians advocating that I find particularly wrong-headed. 1) All public education should be abolished 2) Water and sewage systems should be privatized (this happened in Atlanta and it was a total disaster) 3) Driver's licenses are bad If you think of yourself as a libertarian, do you have any sympathies with above positions? If so, could you defend them? Also, where do Libertarians come from? I've heard a joke that Libertarians are just Republicans who start smoking pot. On the other hand, I'm sure some Libertarians started off as Republicans OR Democrats who became disenchanted with a lot of the corruption and pork-barrel stuff that goes on in the major parties.
Correct on the former and incorrect on the latter. There are impractical positions taken in all "isms." For a "progressive Democrat", for instance, I could point to Das Kapital and demand you defend it.
Are you saying Libertarians DON'T agree there should be a wall between church and state? I could understand how that might interfere with the Libertarian principle of local self-regulation, but wouldn't it contradict the Libertarian principles of individual rights if the state advocates principles of any one religion instead of another, or some of your tax dollars ended up going to a religion you disagreed with? I don't think Das Kapital qualifies as an extreme of being a progressive democrat. Karl Marx advocated the eventual withering away of the state, so in that sense he's more of a libertarian But seriously, most other people who share my opinions absolutely do not believe that capitalism is evil, simply that it is a powerful but impartial force that needs to be encouraged but properly regulated. Once you start to make value judgments on capitalism as a force, either for good or for evil, that's when I see people moving to extremes (in the economic realm that is).
Government shouldn't have the power over our lives that would make religious beliefs a factor to consider. For libertarians this should be a non-issue. Why do you want that wall? What powers would you give to government that would make religious or other beliefs a problem?
I see your point that if you remove state funding from almost everything, separation of church and state would not be as big of an issue. However, the biggest area where this would still come into play would be law enforcement. Let's say that the Scientologists strengthen their base in Clearwater, Florida by moving there in massive numbers. Everyone who lives there must kneel in front of massive golden statues of L. Ron Hubbard, and otherwise they will get no services from the city and will not be hired at any local businesses. Under Libertarian principles, should non-Scientologists just move away, or would they have rights supported by law enforcement?
This gets tricky. The standard line is that the extreme of libertarianism is anarchocapitalism. Why anyone would imagine that anarchy would be capitalist, socialist or anything in particular is beyond me but this is what is believed. If the situation is that of anarchy then your example would have no meaning. I'd say that most people calling themselves libertarian believe in a small state including a law enforcement establishment with little to do. In that circumstance I tell the Scientologist to eff off. If he attempts to do violence to me then I defend myself and in a libertarian society I would have, at my will, the means to defend myself. If there were a need for the law enforcement people to get involved then their job would be to prevent coercion. Since the coercion would be on the part of the Scientologists it would be they who would be restrained. One thing about "rights." Most libertarians would suscribe not to positive (delineated) rights but to negative (implied) rights. That is, you have the right to do as you please other than at the expense of other people. I hope that helps to explain the thing short of writing a book.
I think it might be even trickier than that, since the Scientologists aren't coercing anyone; they're denying them services that the Scientologists themselves own. In that case you have a de facto church control of (limited) government. Under a moderate Libertarian system (not the extreme of anarchocapitalism you mentioned) I don't see any way of preventing that because there is no coercion involved, only denial. I would guess that you did not vote for Badnarik since he seems like the total definition of an extremist libertarian (what with his thing against driver's licenses). I have to say, I could definitely see myself voting for a moderate Libertarian as long as they had pragmatic solutions to local issues. But does the Libertarian national party always run the extremists?
You said nothing about the Scientologists "owning" services. You said they had sufficient numbers to work their will on others. That is known as government. As with many in the LP, I think Badnarik a fool. He has, IMO, no sense of priorities or of the practical reality of having to begin with the world as it exists.
Initially the Libertarian Party was begun by a number of "Goldwater Republicans." Over the years a number of Democrats joined. Republicans joined because of the economic policies of the Party and former Democrats joined because of the personal freedom policies of the Party. The Party today is comprised of the "purists" and the "pragmatists." The "purists" are almost anarchists and the "pragmatists" are, well, the name speaks for itself. A number of Libertarians returned to the GOP and formed the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee, a libertarian think tank. Today the LP is too obsessed with legalizing all drugs, abortion rights, and gun rights to have any chance of real growth and winning major elections. The last time the Party had a sensible platform that was comprehensive, and a candidate that was authentic, articulate, and intelligent was in 1980 with Ed Clark.
The apostate libertarian speaks. And I find another excuse to link to the Nolan Chart. I don't know that David Nolan would have fit your description of the LP founders. And then there was Murray Rothbard...well, ya know.
Agreed. If I err then I apologize to his ghost but he lost me when he went hairy-chested in his "anti-ism." For instance, and IIRC, he went beyond countering radical environmentalism to take some rape-the-land-for-capitalism stance. Bizarre. Unfortunately, the laissez-faire of libertarianism attracts every oddball in the land. They lay claim to the movement and drive out the pragmatists.
Jimmy, Are you familiar with Doug Newman? If not then you might find his site interesting. I'm not at all religious but I once exchanged some email with him and he seemed a most pleasant fellow.
No I was not. Thanks for the great site. I am familiar with Fred Newman who is hardly a libertarian although about as bizarre as many in the LP.
I am a lifelong libertarian and once co-rewrote the Libertartian Party platform of Minnesota. I wish you had asked hard questions instead of easy ones. Where do libertarians come from? Consult the Old Whig tradition of Trenchard and Gordon (c. 1740s) for its origins. This work was enormously influential to thje US framers and founders like Thomas Paine. In fact, the latter's Common Sense is an excellent example and introdcution to the radical skepticism of libertarian thought. David Boaz' Libertarianism: A Primer (1998) is even available in a n affordable audio edition (for first time buyers) http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/amazonProduct.jsp?amazonCategory=product&productID=BK_BLAK_000492&source_code=WSAZS01001102000&scic=230 and his edited work, http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/amazonProduct.jsp?amazonCategory=product&productID=BK_BLAK_000492&source_code=WSAZS01001102000&scic=230 traces its history in greater depth. In brief, libertarianism is the optimistic side of American conservatism (not to be confused with the Eruopean form, where libertarians are more properly called "neo-liberals"), consistently believing in free minds and free markets. Now, as to your questions. They all stem from the doubtful achievements of the Progressive Era - the notion thqat experts know better than you or I do and therefore ought to be empowered to lord over us! Consider history and contemporary counter-examples. Universal literacy in Massechusettes (c. 1850s) for the young long preceeded state sponsored education; it was done privately. Even the state has trouble guaranteeing this result today, now that the US spends more per capita than any other country, but only achieves midling results (if that), internationally. And given New Left historians findings, like Joel SPring, that state education results in state indoctrination - is it any wonder that libertarians would regard separation of education and state as even more fundamental than church and state? Concerning privatizing water, England has a privatized water supply. Although I know nothing - yet - about Atlanta's example, keep in mind the following lesson: economics textbooks (eg Paul Samuelson's) used to cite the existence of lighthouses in the provision of safe travel on the seas as a paradigmatic example of a "public good" - ie, goods that lack excludability and thus lack any private incentive to provide them (ie, there's no way to capture private profit).... Until historical research showed that the first lighthouses - indeed the first networks of lighthouses - were indeed created and funded privately! See "The Voluntary City" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0472088378/qid=1104042529/sr=12-1/102-6630257-5213766?v=glance&s=books Today, the notion of "public goods" in economics is much debated. Far from being a discrete or definite category, it's better thought of as a continuum. The defining historical event of our time bearing on this issue is the fall of communism: just like the US Post Office, which makes its profit on the monopoly of first class mail - itself a congressional grant of monopoly that was a product of mid-ninteenth century private competition (the American Postal Company owned by constitutional scholar Lysander Spooner) - open market entry and knowlege systems generating feedback (accounting profit and loss, bankruptcy) may be all that's necessary to ensure not only the public good, but civil liberties! The ultimate public good which government provides is defense - national security (not to mention justice - another topic for another day). This debate (well, justice too) first swelled to prominant academic debate after Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" was published (1976?). The other side was carried by anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard (tho Nozick was a libertarian, too, and remained so until his death). The result? Success is a practical matter; business people, economists, and consumers are best a weighing successful outcomes. That's why failure and conveying failure of any activity is so important for in any free, open society - and why the Soviet Union failed: knowledge of success or failure could not be conveyed accurately without private property and therefore market prices. The corollary is that any state protected activity insulated from failure like public schools is likely to be hugely wastful and ineffiecient. For example, Harvard economist Carolyn Hoxby found that people vote with their feet - they shop for the best school districts for their children, provided they can move. (Therefore, Milton Friedman's productive piecemeal reform is to advocate returning to the [roughly] hundred times more school districts that existed 50 years ago: this is the single best way to save and improve US public education - small is beautiful! - because it endows people with choice to bypass bad education systems.) Per pupil state allocations are thereby reduced - and failure is conveyed to educrats. The ultimate result? Education is improved and consumers are happier. In several decades, many once sacred cows have been slayed that it's hard to know - a priori - what the real limits of freedom from the state are. As Nozick famously put it, libertarians are for "the legalization of capitalistic acts between consenting adults." -Orson PS re driver's licensing, 2004 LP prez candidate Michael Badnarik raised this issue. My thinking is sympathetic to the suspicion - why give the state more power to intrude than it needs? - but even if all streets were privately owned (there still are some in St. Louis - and they are better than the public ones!) - would not assurance of basic competancy also be a practical necessity? Yes. Libertarians also are rightly described as political fundamentalists: "That government which governs best, governs least," as Thoreau said. Only by reducing the centralized monopoly of retributive power (the modern definition of the state) to the asbolute minimum can this be discovered! Thus, Minnesota govorner Jesse Ventura's alarm at discovering that libertarian's were anarchists was only a surprise to those who have not thought through the place and necessity of thinking politics through completely. Duh! SO driver's licenses are bad if they are a tool of state intrusion on the people's liberties - but not if they merely assure basic needed competencies. Like the economist says, it depends! Such debates about "fundamentals" of power are precisely what libertarians believe a good society engages in (eg see science fiction writer L. Neil Smith's "Probability Broach").
