Has libertarianism poisoned ideas on the left?

[Timsup2nothin]

No, that's your reasoning. You claim that people can be constantly informed enough to make adequate moral decisions even for trivial purchases. Having all information needed and making the right decisions from it are the definition of justice. Ergo, random mob, according to your own premise, is able to render justice.

If you (as it's obvious) are aware that a random mob is unable to magically possess information without spending a lot of time to dig it, then you basically admit your premise is wrong. Just like replacing police with vigilante mob also doesn't work.

The question that has to be asked is; since his premise was so blatantly wrong that there was really no point in disproving it, and we know that he will just keep restating it over and over and obfuscating, how long do we have to wait before we just start openly mocking him?

 

[Berzerker]

Village elders did...when the debt question revolved around who owed who a rabbit skin. As was previously said by @Estebonrober and everyone but libertarians understands; "we live in a post agrarian society that no longer works on simple barter systems and rough currency exchanges."

Many people still rely on village elders even with increasing complexity, other people developed courts to serve that function. Why does this mean courts and village elders dont resolve financial disputes?

What!?! All it takes to resolve questions of debt and repayment is a plaintiff, a defendant, and a village elder...just ask @Berzerker! There have been courts forever.

Looked like you're mocking the notion village elders and courts resolve questions of debt and repayment while calling other people ignorant.

The question that has to be asked is; since his premise was so blatantly wrong that there was really no point in disproving it, and we know that he will just keep restating it over and over and obfuscating, how long do we have to wait before we just start openly mocking him?

You haven't been openly mocking me? Usually you start mocking people when you announce there is no point to disproving a premise you cant disprove.

No, that's your reasoning. You claim that people can be constantly informed enough to make adequate moral decisions even for trivial purchases. Having all information needed and making the right decisions from it are the definition of justice. Ergo, random mob, according to your own premise, is able to render justice.

If you (as it's obvious) are aware that a random mob is unable to magically possess information and hardly draw from it the good decisions anyway, then you basically admit your premise is wrong. Just like replacing police with vigilante mob also doesn't work.

I didn't say people can be constantly informed, it takes time for complaints to accumulate and courts to resolve disputes resulting in a bad reputation for a business. But eventually enough customers will find out and shop elsewhere. How do you compare that to a lynching?

 

[Estebonrober]

Many people still rely on village elders even with increasing complexity, other people developed courts to serve that function. Why does this mean courts and village elders dont resolve financial disputes?



Looked like you're mocking the notion village elders and courts resolve questions of debt and repayment while calling other people ignorant.



You haven't been openly mocking me? Usually you start mocking people when you announce there is no point to disproving a premise you cant disprove.



I didn't say people can be constantly informed, it takes time for complaints to accumulate and courts to resolve disputes resulting in a bad reputation for a business. But eventually enough customers will find out and shop elsewhere. How do you compare that to a lynching?

So it’s all good that businesses spend generations manipulating and hurting the public while courts and law makers figure this out? Take pay day and title loans for example. Terrible terrible businesses with terrible practices. Study after study show they are a detriment both individually and communally. Yet republicans and libertarians will go to the May for these “predatory” lenders year after year.

Again libertarianism is a farce like communism. It’s a unicorn that cannot be found or attained because it denies the human condition in its fundamentally premises.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You haven't been openly mocking me?

Of course I have. What else are you good for?

 

[Berzerker]

So it’s all good that businesses spend generations manipulating and hurting the public while courts and law makers figure this out? Take pay day and title loans for example. Terrible terrible businesses with terrible practices. Study after study show they are a detriment both individually and communally. Yet republicans and libertarians will go to the May for these “predatory” lenders year after year.

Again libertarianism is a farce like communism. It’s a unicorn that cannot be found or attained because it denies the human condition in its fundamentally premises.

Start your own business to compete with payday, put 'em out of business by taking their customers.

Of course I have. What else are you good for?

Making you look foolish

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Making you look foolish

Yet another obviously ridiculous premise that only you believe.

 

[Berzerker]

You mean everyone else here thinks village elders and courts dont resolve matters of debt and repayment?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You mean everyone else here thinks village elders and courts dont resolve matters of debt and repayment?

Obviously nope. And once again only you don't understand what I mean. I assume that's intentional, though perhaps not. Do many people consider you to be singularly stupid and incapable of understanding simple things?

Just asking for clarification. As I said, I think it's intentional.

 

[Truthy]

Uh, no.

I noticed you diluted your claim of "libertarians are fascists" to "libertarians resemble fascists," so I'll interpret that as a step in the right direction. Ignore my request as you will, but I think you need to consider how these accusations are extremely uncharitable, aggressive, counter-productive, and toxic. Frankly, it brings the OT a few steps closer to typical internet comment sections.

There's a reason why I'm not a libertarian: they usually fail to see corporate governance as an issue and they show insufficient concern for discrimination or bad consequences by private actors. Libertarianism is very harmful in lots of cases. But their motivations and interests typically differ massively from what almost everyone takes fascism to mean. Most libertarians have a few major hobby horses:
- The drug war is bad. This has been a mainstay of American libertarianism for decades and they seem to have been ahead of the curve. Anytime I hear libertarians talk about the drug war, they emphatically point out its negative impacts on people of color, how it causes mass incarceration, how it enables police violence, how civil forfeiture is unjust, and so on.
- Immigration and immigrants are good. E.g., CATO arguing that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than citizens
- Well-meaning regulations can hurt low income people in unintended ways. They are actually right about this sometimes. E.g., there have been some negative effects of Seattle's minimum wage
- Well-meaning regulations are often socially suboptimal and entrench corporate power. For example, they quite often harp about drug approval overregulation being socially suboptimal
- Opposition to large government projects that they perceive as a waste of time and money and unjust eminent domain. I frequently see opposition to, say, rail investment as motivated by hatred of the disadvantaged. Libertarians don't quite see it that way.
- They are excessively enamored with and motivated by liberty and limited government and books like this not this. It's a tough sell that excessive individualism is comparable to fascism, even if tantamount to ignoring issues of corporate private government.

These are some of the hobby horses to which libertarians and their think tanks devote copious thought and effort. I think you're right to bring up the 20th century context of libertarianism. But I think your denunciations reflect a failure to consider another historical context: libertarianism as a backlash to the authoritarianism of the 20th century, including that of fascist governments. I agree that there are resemblances, but there are also huge differences. And flippantly calling people fascists needlessly turns up the heat and is a huge disservice to the quality of OT's discussion.

Your post is based on a completely incorrect framework of what "leftism" is. American liberalism insists on the basic validity of market institutions, and so is concerned with statist interventions to correct "market failures"

Eh, maybe I needed reread my post to make sure I was clearly distinguishing between American liberals and leftists. My intention wasn't to conflate the two, but I do think their predispositions toward statist ontologies (Marxist oppositions to the state, which are of a different variety than what I'm saying here, notwithstanding) is a commonality. Leftists may not frame interventions as a matter of "correcting market failures," but their prescriptions involve perhaps even more compressive representations and they have a track record of failing to appreciate the complexity of the problems they're trying to solve. Agricultural reforms are a good example. And to be clear, my goal isn't to say leftism is bad per se, nor am I trying to say libertarianism is good, but to point out a common limitation in leftist (and American liberal) habits of thinking as an answer to the OP. A second purpose is to point out a reason why libertarians are sometimes right: the world is complicated and states have some inherent limitations in their abilities to devise responses to issues. My attitude isn't that we shouldn't bother trying. But roughly speaking, as you go further to the left, you became less interested in the subtle complexities, necessities, and efficiencies of existing systems, environments, and institutions.

I assume you have very strong objections to the last sentence and I'll happily read them. Maybe one issue is and an apparent assumption that centrism is non-ideological or ontology-free. I think your comment about market ontology gets at that.

American liberalism is not leftism. As you say, you are unfamiliar with Marxist critiques of the state. Well, let me talk about those a bit. Marx argued that the state had been hijacked by the capitalist class (where before it had largely been controlled by the hereditary nobles, so what a lot of people forget is that Marx considered the seizure of power by the bourgeois in this context to be a progressive historical development), and that insofar as the state is enlisted in the process of capital accumulation it will increasingly regiment and repress the population. The anarchists in the 19th century also developed a strong critique of the state central to which was its violent/coercive function as the enforcer of private property.

The libertarian solution to the problems it sometimes correctly identifies, which can and often do dovetail with leftist critiques of the state-as-agent-of-capital, often involves handing direct power over governance to the capitalist class. At bottom this is why I am so bitterly opposed to American libertarianism. I believe they resemble fascists because their worldview is invariably fundamentally reactionary, and they invariably support authoritarian political forms that limit the ability of democratic majorities to reform property and labor relations.

I think what prompted this was that I was trying to imply that, even though I'm unfamiliar with Marxist critiques of the state, it was not of the "statist ontology = lossy compression, beware of bad policy" variety a la James Scott. I would have guessed they were roughly what you describe here. My point is mainly that varying predilections for statist ontologies provide an answer to the OP and also an important principle within libertarianism. But yes, another reason libertarians are skeptical of the state is the possibility for it to be hijacked in undemocratic ways. Yes, I appreciate the irony of them simultaneously believing this and supporting policies that allow government to be hijacked in undemocratic ways. I guess we're back to libertarianism vs fascism: I don't buy this is tantamount to fascism and find it needlessly inflammatory and corrosive to say it is. There are too many other differences in ideology, motivations, and interests.

To put it simply: American liberals do not support "interventions" because of statist ontology, they support it because of market ontology.

I suppose so, but the interventions themselves require a statist ontology where problems are simplified, unintended consequences are missed, and political considerations are elevated.

 

[Estebonrober]

Start your own business to compete with payday, put 'em out of business by taking their customers.

Yea should be a thing shouldn’t it, but it’s not and the status quo keeps gaining more power amongst politicians. It’s possible to make plenty of money not doing this, but it’s not done. So considering the facts on the ground even this small market is completely void of libertarian principles. No one has moved in on the market, the customers still act on it even when they know better, and the community loses as a whole. It doesn’t do anyone a service except the person capitalizing on the poor in their disparity.

 

[Lexicus]

I think you need to consider how these accusations are extremely uncharitable, aggressive, counter-productive, and toxic. Frankly, it brings the OT a few steps closer to typical internet comment sections.

To me this is a bit like saying "calling President Trump a liar and a racist degrades the quality of the discourse". To some degree I actually prefer the honesty of internet comment sections to the euphemistic "both sidesist" crap you hear in "respectable" places, so, uh, thanks.

And flippantly calling people fascists needlessly turns up the heat and is a huge disservice to the quality of OT's discussion.

I am not calling people fascists flippantly. I am doing so on the basis of long study of both fascism and American libertarians.

I suppose so, but the interventions themselves require a statist ontology where problems are simplified, unintended consequences are missed, and political considerations are elevated.

My response was sadly quite inadequate. The reality is that statist ontology and market ontology are essentially identical; or perhaps mirror-images of one another. The state and the market, contra Libertarian and liberal theology, are not in some sort of eternal trans-historical conflict but rather are symbiotically related, such that states bring markets into existence and then the market's continuous disruption and destruction of the organic forms of organization and human community provide the excuse for states to "step into the vacuum", so to speak. Bureaucratic rationalization and market rationality always come hand-in-hand.

 

[Ajidica]

You just got done complaining about paying for roads in cash strapped rural Minnesota because you dont use them. I dont think poor people in Kansas should have to send their money to poor people in Appalachia, our system of federalism created separate jurisdictions allowing for experimentation where the good eventually transcends the bad. That doesn't happen when the latter is subsidized by the former, the good is dragged down and the bad stays bad or gets worse. So no, user fees wont fund welfare systems in poor states in some situations.

I mean, I thought it was obvious I was poking fun at your frankly asinine idea that gas tax is a sort of 'user tax' for roads when it goes to support the maintenance of roads that have nothing to do with me. If that wasn't obvious, even thought I specifically said that I'm perfectly fine with spending in rural areas, I dunno.

The fact even Republicans in Kansas literally revolted against Brownback after he attempted a vague approximation of your proposal illustrates only the delusional or sociopathic can look at it and think it is a good idea.

 

[Berzerker]

I mean, I thought it was obvious I was poking fun at your frankly asinine idea that gas tax is a sort of 'user tax' for roads when it goes to support the maintenance of roads that have nothing to do with me. If that wasn't obvious, even thought I specifically said that I'm perfectly fine with spending in rural areas, I dunno.

The fact even Republicans in Kansas literally revolted against Brownback after he attempted a vague approximation of your proposal illustrates only the delusional or sociopathic can look at it and think it is a good idea.

Gas taxes are sociopathic? Brownback was raiding our gas taxes to pay for other things so thats not even close to a vague approximation of 'my proposal', quite the opposite... You complained about gas taxes being used to build roads in rural Minnesota, if you're fine with it why did you complain? Must have been in your head, no? You said those rural Minnesotans shouldn't be griping about taxes they pay being used for your area, so you weren't poking fun, you were venting about them.

Now why is it asinine to have a gas tax to pay for roads? Doesn't everyone have them now? We do... You're arguing thats asinine because your state politicians use your gas taxes to build roads you dont use. So what? That doesn't change the fact your politicians are using gas taxes to build roads you do use.

 

[Truthy]

To me this is a bit like saying "calling President Trump a liar and a racist degrades the quality of the discourse". To some degree I actually prefer the honesty of internet comment sections to the euphemistic "both sidesist" crap you hear in "respectable" places, so, uh, thanks.

Except calling Trump a liar and a racist is a straightforward matter of just looking at the things he says and believes. When we look at the things libertarians say and believe, it doesn't seem we arrive at any clear conclusion that they are fascists.

I am not calling people fascists flippantly. I am doing so on the basis of long study of both fascism and American libertarians.

Yet my descriptions of libertarianism in this thread and your descriptions of fascism here show striking differences.

- Strong in-group affinity: libertarians have a strong affinity for libertarians, that's true enough. But for, say, Americans or white people? Clearly a more complicated picture, as evidenced by the fact that many libertarians are strong supporters of immigration and strong believers that immigrants make everyone better off. I already gave an example of the CATO institute supporting this view. Of course there are racist libertarians, but in-group affinity and racism don't seem to be particularly salient descriptions of libertarians or libertarianism.

- Political authoritarianism: in terms of direct action by the state, this is a very poor descriptor of libertarians. I continue to maintain that an important historical context of libertarianism is in fact backlash to authoritarian regimes in the 20th century, including of course the fascist ones. Again, in recent decades a major hobby horse of libertarians has been staunch opposition to the expansion of police powers and expansion of state powers in the name of counter terrorism. I dunno about you, but fascist is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Edward Snowden.

- and distaste for parliamentary or other forms of democracy: There is a little bit going on here in terms of libertarian opposition to electorally popular welfare programs and apathy about corporate governance. But they maintain this is about maximizing utility for society and that many popular or well-intentioned policies are socially suboptimal. A related issue is their concern for bloated state programs. E.g., CA's stupid and expensive HSR plan. They are occasionally correct on these fronts. An issue is their naive belief in the powers of civil society and markets to fix things, but this is not tantamount to fascism by any stretch of the imagination. Also, look to how loads of libertarians support UBI as an alternative to the web of welfare policies we currently have. As it turns out, most of them don't actually want people to starve

- scapegoating of racial, ethnic or religious minorities: I have never seen libertarians do this. They are much more likely to see the state as a vehicle for enforcing the prejudices of an ethnic majority and oppose state power on those grounds. For example, they regularly point to the Holocaust as an example and say it wouldn't have happened in a libertarian world. I'm sure you have some nice theory about how capital caused the Holocaust, but don't convince me, convince the libertarians who just want to point out a weaker state apparatus with way better respect for individual rights would not have regulated Jewish life, confiscated Jewish property, or murdered millions of Jews. Another example: in the US context, many libertarians are of the view that the state has been extremely oppressive towards African Americans and this continues via mass incarceration and the drug war. I'll concede the picture libertarians paint is complicated by some degree of Social Darwinism underlying their ideology. But it seems their views lend themselves more to Social Darwinism within the white population, than between whites and people of color. Once again, I have a lot of criticisms of libertarians with respect to issues of racism and justice, but scapegoating minorities is not a prominent feature of libertarian ideology or rhetoric.

You say fascism is not a one size fits all model. Reading your denunciations, it seems like it almost is. Until I read your own description of fascism and then I'm not so sure.

My response was sadly quite inadequate. The reality is that statist ontology and market ontology are essentially identical; or perhaps mirror-images of one another. The state and the market, contra Libertarian and liberal theology, are not in some sort of eternal trans-historical conflict but rather are symbiotically related, such that states bring markets into existence and then the market's continuous disruption and destruction of the organic forms of organization and human community provide the excuse for states to "step into the vacuum", so to speak. Bureaucratic rationalization and market rationality always come hand-in-hand.

This is basically what I'm getting at. Here we have a fraught claim to knowledge about what is natural or organic. As I'm sure you know, these types of claims are inspired by Newtonianism and Darwinism. Yet they only have a scientific veneer. Leftists of the early 20th century, convinced of the certainty of their doctrines, used the state as a vehicle to accelerate the natural and inevitable trends of history. So two things are going on. One is a lack of epistemic modesty regarding social models and beliefs about how virtually everything works. The other is the bureaucratic ontology that gives people a point of view where they can simplify the subtle dynamics of economic networks, institutions, information processing and flow, social relations, justice, human psychology, even genetics. It's important to see that 19th and early 20th century intellectuals were not safely cordoned off from ballooning statist ontology. Rather, they were enamored with it. Their policies were made realizable by the idea that if the state could, say, mobilize the population to win World War I, the state could mobilize the population to bring about known, inevitable, and morally righteous transformations.

Market-oriented thinking and bureaucratic thinking may go hand in hand, but knowledgeable liberals seem to be much more cognizant of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. They openly acknowledge that things are complicated, hard to model, and monkeying around is fraught with challenges and unintended consequences. Libertarians are more utopian, but they still emphasize complexity and subtle efficiencies in ways that, say, socialists rarely, if ever, do. In fact, their epistemic modesty is a key element of their philosophy: they always point out that there's only so much the state can know and do and therefore it is often best to let the more spontaneous organization and information processing of markets just do their thing. Capital is an important part of all that, so let's definitely be careful there. Liberals, more generally, will maintain that we can't know exactly what's best or what will happen in the future, so we'll take a hands off approach, providing interventions, investments, and legal tools when we can identify them as necessary.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Start your own business to compete with payday, put 'em out of business by taking their customers.

Replace payday loan sharks with "child pornographers" and carefully rethink your suggestion.

 

[Berzerker]

children cant consent

every new business that drove an old one out for angering customers is comparable to child pornographers?

 

[Bugfatty300]

children cant consent

every new business that drove an old one out for angering customers is comparable to child pornographers?

They certainly can consent to sex and a lot of other stuff including being a child bride...depending on how religiously backwards a particular American state is. And don't even pretend that many libertarians don't defend this type of disgusting "social contract."

Whereas the practice of sexually exploiting children by the pornography industry is universally illegal in the USA because the federal government stepped in with laws and regulations a long time ago.

"Child pornographer" is perfectly interchangeable with laissez faire high-interest predatory cash lending. It's pretty much demonstrable that both are dangerous immoral unethical parasites on society. The only difference is that therw are a lot less libertarian revolutionaries willing to crawl out of the wood work to defend child abuse, but plenty to defend 'technically legal' mafioso racketeering.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

every new business that drove an old one out for angering customers is comparable to child pornographers?

That wasn't even implied, so it's no surprise that is the fake slant you are spinning.

The question is this:

If your objective is to drive the payday loan sharks out of business, are you going to open a roadside stand and sell turnips or a ranch and raise beef?

Both of which compete just as directly with child pornographers as they do with loan sharks. To drive a loan shark out of business through competition you need to be a better loan shark. Just like to drive a child pornographer out of business through competition it takes a better child pornographer. Not a turnip vendor.

Once again, I assume your failure to comprehend something fairly simple is intentional, but have to ask for clarification just in case...do people routinely say that you are exceptionally stupid? I wouldn't want to think you are being intentionally irksome if you have a genuine disability.

Moderator Action: stop the trolling, this one does earn you a vacation from this thread. ori
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Bugfatty300]

That wasn't even implied, so it's no surprise that is the fake slant you are spinning.

The question is this:

If your objective is to drive the payday loan sharks out of business, are you going to open a roadside stand and sell turnips or a ranch and raise beef?

Both of which compete just as directly with child pornographers as they do with loan sharks. To drive a loan shark out of business through competition you need to be a better loan shark. Just like to drive a child pornographer out of business through competition it takes a better child pornographer. Not a turnip vendor.

Once again, I assume your failure to comprehend something fairly simple is intentional, but have to ask for clarification just in case...do people routinely say that you are exceptionally stupid? I wouldn't want to think you are being intentionally irksome if you have a genuine disability.

If you don't like Lefty Rosenthal rigging games and busting kneecaps then just build a better casino across the street. What could go wrong with a little friendly competition?

 

[Berzerker]

They certainly can consent to sex and a lot of other stuff including being a child bride...depending on how religiously backwards a particular American state is. And don't even pretend that many libertarians don't defend this type of disgusting "social contract."

Whereas the practice of sexually exploiting children by the pornography industry is universally illegal in the USA because the federal government stepped in with laws and regulations a long time ago.

"Child pornographer" is perfectly interchangeable with laissez faire high-interest predatory cash lending. It's pretty much demonstrable that both are dangerous immoral unethical parasites on society. The only difference is that therw are a lot less libertarian revolutionaries willing to crawl out of the wood work to defend child abuse, but plenty to defend 'technically legal' mafioso racketeering.

Can children consent to child pornography? The government stepped in because they cant. Marriage between minors as defined by age of consent laws is still allowed in some (all?) states with the permission of the parent(s) and maybe a judge/administrator's approval. People can debate what the age of consent should be, but working adults can consent. Debate the issue, not 'analogies' you think are interchangeable. If Payday is mistreating people, others will see an opportunity to undercut them and the neighborhood will get more sources of loans.

If you don't like Lefty Rosenthal rigging games and busting kneecaps then just build a better casino across the street. What could go wrong with a little friendly competition?

Payday will take your customers...and then Bank of America will take theirs.

That wasn't even implied

You're right, he compared Payday to child pornographers (and I guess Payday's adult customers to children), not future competitors who put them out of business.

The question is this:

If your objective is to drive the payday loan sharks out of business, are you going to open a roadside stand and sell turnips or a ranch and raise beef?

Both of which compete just as directly with child pornographers as they do with loan sharks. To drive a loan shark out of business through competition you need to be a better loan shark. Just like to drive a child pornographer out of business through competition it takes a better child pornographer. Not a turnip vendor.

Once again, I assume your failure to comprehend something fairly simple is intentional, but have to ask for clarification just in case...do people routinely say that you are exceptionally stupid? I wouldn't want to think you are being intentionally irksome if you have a genuine disability.

So you agree with an analogy comparing adults to children? Which loan sharks did Payday drive out of business? Banks are starting to invade Payday's space. One can hope they wont be compared to child pornographers too.