If you ignore all the stuff about the Hobby Lobby ruling, this is probably the nuttiest thing you’ll read today.
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The case for libertarian populism. There are a lot of good ideas there.
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51 thoughts on “Libertarians Are The New Communists”
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The usual nonsense, debunked a hundred times already.
Can someone give me an idea of how much more expensive it is to choose your own health insurer in the US? As opposed to letting your employer decide. I’ve heard numerous Americans say there’s tax benefits to going with whatever your employer chooses but considering the Obamacare burden, I wonder if that’s a wash with actually making your own decisions.
That would have been a more useful question prior to ObamaCare.
It depends on the risk pool. If you’re a large high-tech company, your workforce is likely to be young and you’ve got a big enough pool to self-insure, so costs are very low. If you’re a smaller company, you’re likely to be grouped with other companies into a risk pool that’s more diverse and therefore has higher average costs. But full-time workers are still more likely to be healthy than part-time, self-employed, or unemployed.
With ACA, group insurance has a bigger advantage than individual insurance, because community rating doesn’t apply to group insurance (the group is the community, and therefore gets to self-select, unlike the individual pools).
I can live with community rating, but if you’re going to force it onto the individual markets then you ought to force it on to everybody by doing away with the group markets. And, since we’re apparently unwilling to do that, rather than producing this hideous clanking abortion in the individual markets with this rube goldberg subsidy system that guarantees that the people we’re really screwing are the parts of the middle class who are forced to get individual insurance (i.e., the small-biz entrepreneurs), we’d probably do better with properly subsidized risk pools for the sick people.
Not holding my breath, though.
Unfortunately, there is no one thing that can be called “libertarianism.” It is a hodgepodge of incompatible ideological positions (from rational free market theory to the bizarre idea that the Middle East is unstable because Israel threatens Iran [!]). Anyone can take pot shots at any of the positions with impunity, because they are right to do so. Until and unless libertarians come up with a non-contradictory set of core values, these attacks will be be unanswerable because they contain just enough truth. Libertarians should adopt a scope of convictions that is internally self-consistent.
Why should they be held to a higher standard than leftists?
If we of the libertarian-ish persuasion don’t come up with a working definition, the liberals are working feverishly to come up with one for us, and it won’t be to our advantage. There is a concerted effort to make “libertarian” a synonym for “individualist” and “selfish”, even though nothing could be further from the truth. The Bloomberg drivel is merely a high-profile example of the kind of piece that’s showing up all over the place. These guys are really panicked, because a genuine libertarian coalition can draw not only from the GOP but also from vast chunks of independents and even centrist Democrats. They’re going to do everything they can to define the problem away. It’s our responsibility to ensure that they fail.
Battle-space prep due to the rise of Rand Paul and Fox Business channel.
There is a tiny bit of truth to that, in a way. There are some extremely hard-core libertarians who take an extraordinarily cavalier attitude towards the full implications of rampant true anarchy, just as hard-core communists did, to the peril of the world, with regards to the natural evolution of communistic revolutions. If those people truly got their way it would lead to some very bad times, on the scale of the badness of communism in the 20th century.
However, those people are truly a tiny niche of libertarianism, and they are far, far removed from the means of realizing their fantasies anywhere in the world. As such, comparing them to communists is like comparing the religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with the Catholic Church. And pretending that libertarianism as a general movement is just as bad as communism is, well, fundamentally as intellectually dishonest as comparing the Shriners to Al Qaeda.
And unlike communism, libertarianism has never even been attempted, except in the founding documents, when it was quickly perverted.
Right. And there’s a much more obvious and explicit cognitive dissonance if it would ever come to a violent libertarian revolution imposing on everyone the mandate of living without rule. There’s a fairly straightforward and hard to circumvent short-circuit process which prevents whack-job pure anarchy naive utopian libertarianism from being forced on the world. Communism does not have that mechanism, it is implicitly totalitarian and statist, it’s just assumed that it would naturally evolve to be voluntarily totalitarian and statist through some as yet unseen magical process.
Sorry, what?
The USA was founded on “let’s force people to be free”. It was even widely acknowledged that regular and bloody revolution was required to keep doing it. The pity is that free and prosperous people quickly forget about tyranny and let it fester until it can’t be extinguished as easily again.
There is a difference between forcing people to be free and interdicting those who would initiate force against free people. The perpetrators of the Revolution, admittedly a minority of the population, only wanted the British to go away.
As to how we were founded, it was something of an accident. The British basically set us up, gave us only the very rudiments of a government, left private companies to bring the wealth back to England, and pretty much ignored us until the French and Indian Wars. Left without authority or representation, we simply developed a culture that relied on free cooperation and a little bit of Common Law. So, when the founders were creating their new country, they were not inventing a free society out of whole cloth, they were simply codifying the world they had grown up in. It wasn’t an experiment – they knew it would work. Unfortunately, bereft of England’s benign neglect, local tyrants moved in and screwed the pooch, mores the pity.
Pursuit of liberty and pursuit of libertarianism are not the same thing, especially when the relevant context here is pure, anarcho-libertarianism. The American Revolution was about self-rule for American colonies, establishment of a functional and egalitarian rule of law and a representative government as a way to protect individual liberty, prosperity, etc. That’s almost as far from anarcho-libertarianism as you can get, notwithstanding outright tyranny and totalitarianism.
There are many ways to attempt to protect and expand individual liberty. One possibility is a benign monarchy, which has even proven effective on some occasions. A more common mechanism is representative democracy with strongly enshrined legal protections of individual liberty, which has a higher success rate. Another is the idea of pure libertarianism, the complete absence of state power. Only the last is a serious candidate for potentially being as problematic as communism, and the idea of a highly organized violent revolution organized along those principles is ridiculous. What would they do? Go around knocking on doors asking people to voluntarily join in? If they didn’t do it that way then they’d be completely abandoning their principles. In that way excessive belief in anarcho-libertarianism tends to have a natural roadblock towards being forced on people without their consent.
P.S. Additionally, in the moment that people were forced into a condition of perfect anarcho-libertarianism without prior consent they could, of course, simply adopt whatever laws they chose for themselves. As a consequence of that simple fact only the true believers of pure anarcho-libertarianism are actually vulnerable to its major shortcomings. Which is lightyears different from the situation with hardline communism.
When communist regimes fail, the true believers always claim it’s because the type of communism attempted wasn’t extreme enough. I’d guess that the response to libertarian failures (not that there have been any), would be the opposite, and would tend toward moderation.
Boy, Rand Paul must really be scaring the shit out of the state shtuppers if he’s attracting these kind of trolls…
As far as definition of libertarianism, IMHO a good place to start is Charles Murray’s What It Means To Be A Libertarian. Available on Kindle.
Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. — Lazarus Long
Mathematics is also “extremist”. Completely logic. The only protection against “extremism” is that a few poltical middlemen take everybodies money by force.
I’m European and I can tell you that you in the US are happy to have the word “libertarianism” at all being mentioned in any mass media. In Europe no mass media and no school ever even mention the concept of freedom. People don’t dislike it, they just never thunk the thought.
For me, a significant perhaps insurmountable problem is that there’s a significant fraction of humanity who will take security, power, and/or a piece of the action over a free society. IMHO, if people with these priorities and making these choices comprise enough of the population of your society, you can’t have a libertarian society.
Just because nobody’s yelled at me today, I’ll assert that a more libertarian state and a decent welfare state are not incompatible. You certainly wouldn’t be able to reduce taxes very much, but we already spend 65% of federal outlays on entitlements. The real problem with those entitlements is that they’re all about control. We want our various classes of welfare clients to conform to rigid government specifications: You can buy this product, but not that. You can live in this kind of household, but not that kind of household. You can be single with kids, but not married with kids, or not single and childless. You can have a menial job, but you can’t aspire to any kind of upward mobility.
If you replaced all of those entitlements with some kind of guaranteed income/negative income tax program, you’d have most if not all of the money you needed to implement the program, better incentives for people to transition out of poverty, and a much freer (i.e., libertarian) system.
I’m not gonna yell at you, I’m going to agree. If you eliminate all (that is, ALL) federal taxes and replace with a single federal sales tax – say, 16%, a number I just pulled from the air – and eliminate all (that is, ALL) federal individual subsidies (welfare, SS, EBT etc), replacing that with an equal $400 (another random number) per month per citizen subsidy.
Such a plan would simplify the tax code (by eliminating it), cut down on bureaucratic overhead and red tape (by eliminating entire departments), would provide a hand up for those who truly need it without penalizing them for improving their lot in life, would reduce government dependence, would encourage savings and investment, would tax everyone equally and fairly, and would benefit everyone equally and fairly.
No, I still bet I can get you to yell at me.
First of all, $400 a month is $4800 a year, which isn’t enough to live on even if you’re single. Even a family of 4 (assuming the kids get the payment, too) would be getting less than $20K. For the truly unemployed and/or unemployable, that’s not going to cut it. (BTW, the reason I’ve finally accepted the need for welfare is because automation is going to give us sky-high structural unemployment, and I’m not quite hard-hearted enough to let people starve because they’re not smarter than a robot.)
Second, if you make this a universal stipend, you’re wasting huge amounts of money giving it to people who don’t need it. My favorite mincome scheme is something that gives each household something survivable, then takes away one dollar of support for every two dollars earned. (Fraud is a big, difficult issue. I think you could fix a lot of it by requiring the use of monitored bank accounts and auto-deposit by any employers if you want the money, but that still leaves cash as a problem…) By giving fewer people more money, you make the system viable without having all the traps that kick in if you make more than about $25K.
I keep going back and forth about whether you give people enough money to spend on health insurance and nuke Medicare/aid, or whether you need to have a separate entitlement. The former is simpler and freer, but insurance costs are dependent on age, which makes things complicated.
Finally, progressive income tax just isn’t going away, nor should it. Sales taxes or VATs aren’t a lot simpler than income tax, and they’re horribly regressive unless you implement some kind of refund for the first x dollars, which makes it even more complicated…
“they’re horribly regressive unless you implement some kind of refund for the first x dollars, which makes it even more complicated…”
Not really. $4800 per citizen goes a long way, particularly if there is no other federal tax burden. And as I mentioned above, the $400 per month stipend and 16% rate were just numbers I pulled out of
my assthe air; the exact values would be the subject of much debate and would likely change over the years as circumstances warrant.Applying that stipend to the poorest of Americans can make a huge difference, particularly if they know they won’t lose that stipend if they get a job or a better job. The potential for fraud and abuse is limited to having a fake SSN, rather than criminalizing people on welfare who take up work under the table.
It would bring much of the underground economy into the open. Drug dealers won’t be collecting such a sales tax, but when they buy bling they’d be paying that tax.
And yeah, rich people would get a subsidy they don’t need and probably wouldn’t even notice. And the rich would still pay a big share of taxes; John Kerry would have paid 16% of the sticker price of his yacht, for instance.
If you’re sitting on a pile of money, such a system doesn’t penalize investment, but encourages it as every successful business is collecting that 16% for Uncle Sam.
Interesting. It also could benefit the economy by returning several hundred thousand federal employees from sapping wealth from our economy to producing wealth.
About the only thing the article gets “wrong” is not noting that communism is a response to libertarianism. Marx was writing his books during the Gilded Age, the one period we tried libertarian government.
You don’t ever actually think before you post, do you?
The vast majority of Marx’s work occurred from the 1840s through 1860s. Before the “Gilded Age.”
England, as birthplace of the Industrial Revolution (which brought us libertarianism) was ahead of the US in the implementation and abuses of libertarianism. Marx was based in London from 1849.
The Gilded Age in the US was the culmination of practices started in England going back to the Enclosure Movement (the first Act of which was dated 1604).
You’re preposterously redefining the Gilded Age.
Generating excuses, moving goalposts, and making shit up. It must be hard work being the Gerrib of the internet.
I notice he didn’t touch the IRS missing emails thing with a ten foot pole. So, he’s got his limits.
First, “The Gilded Age” is a specific term related to a specific part of American history. You don’t get to redefine it to meet your rhetorical needs.
Second, while Marx was based in London in 1849, he wrote (with Engels) the material that became The Communist Manifesto (which was first published in 1848) while he was living in France and Belgium. Again, history can not really be bent so you can make a point.
You appear to be arguing that the classist, imperialist, mercantalist, protectionist economy of early 19th century Britain, under a monarchical/aristocratic government should somehow get sorted under the dewey decimal code for “libertarianism”.
This is a practical joke right?
What’s your beef with the Gilded Age? It was a time of remarkable social and economic change. We adapted to an industrial society.
Rockefeller, for example, halved the price of kerosene. What an evil man.
Communism was hardly new. Oppression and total control by a small in-group was the norm for much of humanity’s tragic history.
This draws attention to the fact that most intellectualism is just a cargo cult activity. Systems are identified based on taking on very specific names or exhibiting certain traditional superficial characteristics. For example, there are at least half a dozen monarchical nations in existence right now, but they are not labelled as such because they do not call themselves monarchies and they do not have a heritage dating back to a classical era of traditional aristocratic monarchy. Now look at, say, just Soviet communism. It holds innumerable points of comparison with aristocratic systems of rule and, I would say, holds a strong fundamental familial relationship with such systems. But you won’t see it labeled as such.
Nor is there a serious attempt in any part of academia to analyze the characteristics and similarities of different types of systems of rule, especially totalitarian systems. It would seem as though each type of totalitarian system is uniquely different from one another, but that is very much counterfactual. A big reason behind that reluctance is the widespread popularity of socialist ideas within the intelligentsia and in academia. Digging too deeply into such things risks discovering secrets that such folks can’t cope with. So instead we get the “right-wing” / “left-wing” bullshit, which is not only inaccurate but also so massively infantile in its sophistication you would expect it to be the product of a 7th grade science fair project.
“Koch domestic policy would obliterate environmental standards for clean air and water”. Permit me to doubt it. I will consider the authors as clueless for such an unlikely statement until they can justify it.
Why do people have so much trouble distinguishing between, There are legitimate functions for the federal government, and, Any attempt to limit the growth of the federal government is anarchy. They don’t seem identical to anyone with a brain, and yet people constantly bring the first as a proof to the second.
One of the authors of the post is a ex-Clinton speech writer and ‘domestic policy advisor’. I am shocked, just shocked, that such a man could possibly be opposed to reducing the size and power of government.
“Any attempt to limit the growth of the federal government is anarchy.”
Ya, that is intentional. Meanwhile actual Anarchists are used as shock troops by the Democrat’s activist class. Could we talk about the Democrat party and their Anarchists? No, just accuse other people of being like this Democrat sub-group but not actually look at the groups that make being called Anarchist an insult? Ok then…
Admiral Gerrib has been absent for a while, but I see his thoughts are still up to their old level.
I, for one, am proud to be an extremist. If you tried to poke me in the eyes 100 times, I would resist you all 100 times. You might gang up on me with some of your coercion-addicted pals and hold me down and force me to submit to an eye-poking, but I would never concede your right to poke me in the eyes, for any reason–not to help the poor, not to help the rich, not to help Labot, not to help Capital, not for “the Common Good” or the “good of society” or because whatever supernatural being you believe in tells you should poke me in the eyes.
A “moderate” would allow you to poke him in the eyes about half the time, I guess–if it were for a good cause.
Individual liberty over statist eyepoking?… Bilwick, you really are an extremist. They’ll come up with a modified red button just to give you eye pokings.
Sadly, I think the evidence points to libertarianism not fitting that well with Human nature, in any society individuals will have a range of ideological positions, and the nature of democracy is going to push centrists into power.
Taking Heinlein’s TMIAHM as an example, what does the epilogue tell us about the nature of the policies adopted by the Loonies once they gained independence and democracy?
Maybe there’s a form of government that’ll somehow maintain a social structure that can retain Libertarian policies while practicing the popular vote, if it’s possible I haven’t see it.
If there’s a widespread distrust of centralized government, any would-be-king is going to have a hard time setting up his throne. The problem – that central government is tolerated by those who oppose it and welcomed by many many more – is something to be solved one person at a time, not something inherent to our natures.
People will vote for government policies that serve their own kids and their own self interest, if you have a country in which wages are determined by the market system you’re going to have some people on high incomes, and some on low incomes.
How are you going to convince those on lower incomes not to vote for politicians proposing to “redistribute” wealth to “those more in need”?
Hell, if I’m struggling to feed and cloth my family, I know which way I’ll vote, principles be damned, the family comes first.
I think lets all vote libertarian is a fight that can never be won under any existing electoral system.
TMIAHM:
But Prof underrated yammerheads. They never adopted any of his ideas. Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn’t forbidden. Prof got fascinated by possibilities for shaping future that lay in a big, smart computer-and lost track of things closer to home.
“CUTTING TAXES FOR THE RICH ISN’T ENOUGH”
Ugh, hey Libertarians, how about you don’t just fall for Democrat propaganda hook, line, and sinker? You want to be the intellectual party? Then don’t propagate nonsense like “Bush tax cuts for the rich”.
Competential ,
” In Europe no mass media and no school ever even mention the concept of freedom. People don’t dislike it, they just never thunk the thought.”.
They are just like Australians then and that Euroserf here a few months ago who was happy with his government guaranteed, meager lot.
Libertarianism may not fit well with human nature but we need a philosophy which opposes the ultimate end state of “everything is forbidden unless compulsory”, which is where we are headed.
I’ll make a quick comment. Ralph Nader has written an interesting new book titled Unstoppable. It is about the the coming left-right coalition to stop corporate tyranny. Last Friday, June 27th, he gave a talk at the Cato Institute. It was followed up by comments from some libertarian oriented conservatives. One was Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner. It was a most interesting session. Nader’s book has some very interesting points. I think some people here would find the book interesting and at least some of the ideas expressed agreeable.
“corporate tyranny”? How can a corporation be tyrannical without government cooperation?
More government power in the name of restricting corporations just means more government power for sale by corrupt officials to the highest bidder.
That’s the part that Nader (and his kind) don’t understand. They see things in a government = good, business = bad kind of way. It never occurs to them that the power corrupts thing works no matter where the power comes from.
While I’m sure there are some very idealistic people who choose careers in public service for all the right reasons, the power to control lots of lives, benefit your friends, and punish your enemies is likely to get to even the best of us. In fact, the process probably gets easier if you are idealistic, because you can always tell yourself you are doing it for all the right reasons.
If there’s a widespread distrust of centralized government…
Most Germans in the 30s were good decent people, yet it happened.