What is Libertarianism?

[SimpleDon]

My Pfizer example is primarily an indictment of New London and only secondarily an indictment of Pfizer. Only government can apply punishment or withhold punishment. Business cannot apply punishment, so does not get similar disdain.

Kelo, et al. vs. New London was a case that tested the public use clause of the 5th amendment. It wasn't a case of outright theft as you characterized it. Pfizer already had the land for their facility, they didn't depend on the City of New London to steal the land or to otherwise obtain the land for them. The city used eminent domain to obtain property for additional speculative office and research buildings to be owned by the New London Development Corporation, a public entity, in hopes of taking advantage of any spill over effects of the Pfizer development. Most of the petitioners owned land that was intended to be a parking lot for a state park and a city owned marina, a clear public use.

But yes, the case did represent a ratcheting up of the erosion of the public use clause to strictly private use, the leasing of space in the public owned buildings for private for profit use. And as a result of the outrage over the Supreme Court decision the US Congress and 44 states enacted legislation against the practice. A reasonable reaction of democratic governments to a bad decision, even if the reaction was a bit overstated as yours was because of the confusion over the details of the case. Democracy is undeniably messy, but it works most of the time.

How does the libertarian government's judge apply the "no initiation of aggression" principle to resolve these competing claims?

Also, your post didn't address my second question, about the two separate definitions. Should I take the fact that you reiterated your "no initiation of aggression" principle to mean you're dropping your alternate definition, "maximizing rights"?

I hope you're not leading towards the perfection fallacy.

And my expanded explanation doesn't show that I'm dropping the other definition of maximizing rights, when I explicitly defined aggression as violation of rights.

You once again passed up the opportunity to demonstrate your thesis that your NAP can easily tell us what the proper libertarian position would be. Rather you say that we can't assume that the principle has to be perfect to be valid, "I hope you're not leading towards the perfection fallacy," a reasonable objection, as it is for the democratic process of government by the way.

But if the NAP doesn't help explain what property is in the pure libertarian society, what does define what property is? In our current, messy democracy it is the government that defines what property is and what property rights are. A system that you define as aggressive, which by the NAP should therefore be eliminated, but for which the NAP can't formulate a replacement. What does define property and what is it?

 

[SimpleDon]

...................
(Well, skepticabhp did say that we could fire one half of all of the police in the US if we legalized marijuana, if we legalized prostitution, and if we stopped regulating recreational boating. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assertion. And it would leave us still only tied with Germany as the worse police state in the world.)

You and your fucking srawmen.. Most of the police could be fired if all the unnecessary regulation and laws were eliminated. Those three were just three examples of myriad regulations and laws that are not needed. I'm sure even you can think of quite a few laws, rules, and regulations that you think are absurd. Eliminate the unnecessary and/or redundant government departments and most of the fucking bureaucrats that suck up the government budget could be fired and have to become productive citizens too.

You were the one who said that the US has twice as many police as the next worse police state because of these three regulations, not me. It is your ridiculous strawman, not mine. A strawman that you have now expanded to all of the unnamed useless laws and regulations, please name more, and inexplicably to having useless or redundant government departments, which I can't even imagine why you think that either would increase the number of police required.

I have been very consistent that it is not the laws that are not needed that cause our bloated number of police and the inefficiency of our policing, it is the number of police agencies, 17,000, resulting from the decentralization of policing that causes it. (Perhaps this is what you meant by useless and redundant government departments, the duplication of effort required if you decentralize government. In that case you agree with me.)

Once again, you can have widely decentralized government or you can have small government, but you can't have both at the same time.

Since you didn't understand it the other times that I said this I will explain it in painful detail. There is a need for government. You have accepted this. The more you distribute government away from the central government to state and local governments the more duplication and redundancies you have. The more inefficiencies you have. The more people you have trying to solve the problems that are common across the country. You really only need a central government and a level of local governments, towns and cities. The middle levels of state, regional and county governments are not needed and even worse they tend to be the least transparent levels of government. (How many people can name their state legislators from memory?)

We are told constantly that we should run government like a business. Go to your MBA management professor and tell him that you are reorganizing your company by beefing up and expanding your middle management and see what he says. And yet that is what we have been doing for more than thirty years to soothe over the people who are irrationally terrified of a strong central government. People like you. We have the exact same problem in educatin where 13,000 local school districts pretty much all face the . We waste a lot of money pretending that we have local control of the schools.

So, once again, you can have a widely distributed government or you can have a small government, you just can't have both at the same time.

Your ridiculous idea that you have presented as what you consider to the explanation for why we have twice as many police as any other country, that it is due to a large number of useless regulations assumes that we have much, much more of these useless regulations than any other country in the world. More than twice as many. You have to explain why you believe this. It is especially obvious crap considering that you have to name twice as many useless regulations to get to the level of policing that Germany has. I lived in Germany. They are the poster children for having regulations that cover everything.

Yes, I do know of some counterproductive regulations in the US. There are archaic laws that are still on the books. Like requiring a horse and rider waving a red flag 100 yards in front of an automobile to warn everyone that it is coming. But these are not any longer enforced, therefore not requiring any police to not enforce them. There are useless regulations intended to hamper otherwise legal endeavors, like abortion. There are counterproductive regulations such as the one stating that the sole purpose of a corporation is to make profits for the shareholders, if there is indeed such a regulation. Local zoning regulations are invariably written to increase property values and the costs of housing.

But no way do I believe that the the useless regulations in the US are so much greater than in any other country, more than twice as many, or even that useless regulations can cause the dramatic inefficiency in policing that we have in the US currently.

 

[skepticalbip]

You and your fucking srawmen.. Most of the police could be fired if all the unnecessary regulation and laws were eliminated. Those three were just three examples of myriad regulations and laws that are not needed. I'm sure even you can think of quite a few laws, rules, and regulations that you think are absurd. Eliminate the unnecessary and/or redundant government departments and most of the fucking bureaucrats that suck up the government budget could be fired and have to become productive citizens too.

You were the one who said that the US has twice as many police as the next worse police state because of these three regulations, not me...........................

Since you are starting with continuing your fucking strawman, I won't waste my time reading the rest or your nonsense. I was giving examples of unnecessary policing, not claiming that those three examples constituted the entirety of unnecessary laws and regulations and the reason for the number of police in the US.

 

[SimpleDon]

Yes, and also Locke was a proponent and an advancer of social contract theory, that each individual gives up a little bit of his individual freedom to the collective to guarantee their remaining rights. To Locke the collective is the government. Therefore the way to maximum personal freedom was through the proper form of the government.
.

If you agree with this then you seem to be agreeing with libertarianism's philosophy. That is what the designated, specified and limited powers granted to the government is about (see the Constitution). The people cede some of their individual freedoms to government for the greater good in the form of specified and limited powers. However, the people can't cede powers to the government that the people didn't have to begin with. This is bottom up government as opposed to the top down government assumed by our congress critters who assume that it is they who decide what freedoms they will grant to the people that they will be allowed to exercise.

ETA:
Or is it that you were arguing yet another of your fucking strawmen, the one where you imply that libertarians think that the government should have no power?

You are really going off the deep end. You take my factual description of Locke's philosophy and say that it is somehow an obscene strawman that I am presenting to trash libertarian philosophy. I have repeatedly said that I don't have any problems with libertarian philosophy, that it would be the same as opposing motherhood. That I believe the so-called libertarian philosophy is the same philosophy that this country was founded on and the same philosophy that we have been trying to put into practice for nearly two and half centuries, nearly seventy years of which libertarians have spent doing nothing but talking.

What we have been trying to do for more than two hundred posts is to get one of you libertarians to explain to us how you convert your philosophy into policies to govern the nation by. So far we have been told;

1. That all we need to know is the libertarian non-aggression principle.
2. That the libertarian non-aggression principle is not all that we need to know, we are crazy to think that.
3. That the reason that we have such an inefficient police force is because they have spend too much time policing marijuana, prostitution and boating.
4. That it is crazy to blame the inefficiencies in our policing just on three regulations.
5. That we are not libertarians because we believe in a government that should have unlimited power, because we are either democrats or republicans and that is what democrats and republicans believe.
6. That whenever we repeat back a libertarian's statement we are immediately accused of constructing a strawman.
7. That when ever we do as invited and try to deduce libertarian policies from their principles we are accused of constructing a strawman.
8. In truth we are usually just mocking you.
9. That if we just understood the Constitution, especially the part that limits the power of the government in the 10th amendment, we would all be libertarians.
10. Statements that prove a lack of understanding of the Constitution, much less the 10th amendment, which doesn't limit the powers of the government.
11. That the government can't tax because it is aggression against property.
12. That property rights are a bedrock principle of libertarianism that the government has to stay out of.
13. That so far no libertarian has explained who if not the government will what is property, i.e. IP, what are property rights, no, they aren't natural, and who will enforce property rights, loop back to the government?

And we haven't gotten to the really hard part, explaining libertarian economic policies, dependent entirely on the supposed existence of the self-regulating, self-organizing free market. An entity that has never existed anywhere in the world, and has never existed at any time in the known history of man.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

You can have democracy without liberty. Democracy is insufficient. 50%+1 can vote to deprive 50%-1 of all their rights, up to and including their lives.

So what is the libertarian proposal to replace democracy to improve the guarantee of more individual liberty?

What would be different in a pure libertarian society from what we have today to guarantee more individual liberty, the NAP and all of the other quite admirable libertarian principles?

This is what we have been asking for page after page with no response.

(Well, skepticabhp did say that we could fire one half of all of the police in the US if we legalized marijuana, if we legalized prostitution, and if we stopped regulating recreational boating. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assertion. And it would leave us still only tied with Germany as the worse police state in the world.)

I'm back. My father passed away so I was too busy to respond here.

Ok, what about democracy? What about it then? As I said before, democracy is a form, and we are concerned with the function. Function is our area of concern, democracy is a form.

All other things being equal we like democracy, but all other things are seldom equal. Instead democracy can become mob rule, and democracy can become the majority stripping the minority of their rights. Both of those are functions though, and we oppose those particular functions. Of course untermensch says that true democracies, where only true Scotsmen vote, never do that sort of thing.

I have no concern with replacing democracy with something else. It is a form and I care about function.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

So you believe that as society gets more complex that this isn't a reason for government to get more complex?

Actually, the more complex the society, the more simple the government has to be. It is the problem of trying to control complex systems.

You don't believe that government has to grow to protect our rights to life, liberty and property from ever more complex and sophisticated threats from both within our society and from outside of our society?

That you haven't awakened to the fact that currently these threats are lessened because the government has grown and adapted to the threats to our rights? A process that you want to stop.

That you don't seem to realize that government is not an entity, one that is always evil, but is a process whose nature is determined by the people who participate in the process?

So the solution to potential violations of our rights is to surrender all our rights.

And that the best way to prevent evil government is to get as many people involved in the process of government as possible?

And that the best way that we have found to do that is through the democracy of which you are so contemptuous?

Contemptuous of democracy? Didn't you see any of where I wrote that democracy is a form and I'm interested in function? I'm just pointing out that the form of democracy is not a guarantee of a function of protecting our rights, while there are dreamers who say that if we have a True Democracy populated by True Scotsmen then the majority would never vote to strip the minority of their rights.

 

[bilby]

Actually, the more complex the society, the more simple the government has to be. It is the problem of trying to control complex systems.

You don't believe that government has to grow to protect our rights to life, liberty and property from ever more complex and sophisticated threats from both within our society and from outside of our society?

That you haven't awakened to the fact that currently these threats are lessened because the government has grown and adapted to the threats to our rights? A process that you want to stop.

That you don't seem to realize that government is not an entity, one that is always evil, but is a process whose nature is determined by the people who participate in the process?

So the solution to potential violations of our rights is to surrender all our rights.

And that the best way to prevent evil government is to get as many people involved in the process of government as possible?

And that the best way that we have found to do that is through the democracy of which you are so contemptuous?

Contemptuous of democracy? Didn't you see any of where I wrote that democracy is a form and I'm interested in function? I'm just pointing out that the form of democracy is not a guarantee of a function of protecting our rights, while there are dreamers who say that if we have a True Democracy populated by True Scotsmen then the majority would never vote to strip the minority of their rights.

The problem is that rights don't exist in a vacuum. One man's right is another's oppression.

The alternatives to situations where the majority have the ability to oppress the minority all grant a minority the ability to oppress the majority.

If I want to listen to my own radio, in my own backyard, then my neighbors are oppressing me if they band together to stop me from doing so. But if I have the right to do that, then their right to peace and quiet is being trampled.

There is no solution that doesn't involve someone being made to abandon their rights.

If libertarianism says that nobody's rights may be taken from them, then libertarianism is incompatible with reality.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

So what is the libertarian proposal to replace democracy to improve the guarantee of more individual liberty?

What would be different in a pure libertarian society from what we have today to guarantee more individual liberty, the NAP and all of the other quite admirable libertarian principles?

This is what we have been asking for page after page with no response.

(Well, skepticabhp did say that we could fire one half of all of the police in the US if we legalized marijuana, if we legalized prostitution, and if we stopped regulating recreational boating. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assertion. And it would leave us still only tied with Germany as the worse police state in the world.)

I'm back. My father passed away so I was too busy to respond here.

Ok, what about democracy? What about it then? As I said before, democracy is a form, and we are concerned with the function. Function is our area of concern, democracy is a form.

All other things being equal we like democracy, but all other things are seldom equal. Instead democracy can become mob rule, and democracy can become the majority stripping the minority of their rights. Both of those are functions though, and we oppose those particular functions. Of course untermensch says that true democracies, where only true Scotsmen vote, never do that sort of thing.

I have no concern with replacing democracy with something else. It is a form and I care about function.

As an extreme simplification: the problem appears to be that Libertarians are greatly concerned with limiting the ability of the majority to oppress minorities, but they are unconcerned with curtailing the ability of a minority to oppress the majority.

 

[Eldarion Lathria]

I believe you mean American style Libertarianism. In my experience if you ask six different Libertarians what libertarianism is, you will get six different answers.

Eldarion Lathria

 

[AthenaAwakened]

So what is the libertarian proposal to replace democracy to improve the guarantee of more individual liberty?

What would be different in a pure libertarian society from what we have today to guarantee more individual liberty, the NAP and all of the other quite admirable libertarian principles?

This is what we have been asking for page after page with no response.

(Well, skepticabhp did say that we could fire one half of all of the police in the US if we legalized marijuana, if we legalized prostitution, and if we stopped regulating recreational boating. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assertion. And it would leave us still only tied with Germany as the worse police state in the world.)

I'm back. My father passed away so I was too busy to respond here.

Ok, what about democracy? What about it then? As I said before, democracy is a form, and we are concerned with the function. Function is our area of concern, democracy is a form.

All other things being equal we like democracy, but all other things are seldom equal. Instead democracy can become mob rule, and democracy can become the majority stripping the minority of their rights. Both of those are functions though, and we oppose those particular functions. Of course untermensch says that true democracies, where only true Scotsmen vote, never do that sort of thing.

I have no concern with replacing democracy with something else. It is a form and I care about function.

My condolences to you and your family.

 

[untermensche]

So what is the libertarian proposal to replace democracy to improve the guarantee of more individual liberty?

What would be different in a pure libertarian society from what we have today to guarantee more individual liberty, the NAP and all of the other quite admirable libertarian principles?

This is what we have been asking for page after page with no response.

(Well, skepticabhp did say that we could fire one half of all of the police in the US if we legalized marijuana, if we legalized prostitution, and if we stopped regulating recreational boating. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assertion. And it would leave us still only tied with Germany as the worse police state in the world.)

I'm back. My father passed away so I was too busy to respond here.

Ok, what about democracy? What about it then? As I said before, democracy is a form, and we are concerned with the function. Function is our area of concern, democracy is a form.

All other things being equal we like democracy, but all other things are seldom equal. Instead democracy can become mob rule, and democracy can become the majority stripping the minority of their rights. Both of those are functions though, and we oppose those particular functions. Of course untermensch says that true democracies, where only true Scotsmen vote, never do that sort of thing.

I have no concern with replacing democracy with something else. It is a form and I care about function.

I say true democracy is bottom up, not top down.

That may be hard for people living in top down democracies to understand.

Go to a place like Ecuador and you will better understand bottom up democracy.

 

[Bullmoose Too]

I learned recently that outside of the United States libertarianism is more of anarchist then a Laissez-faire capitalist ideology.

 

[bilby]

I learned recently that outside of the United States libertarianism is more of anarchist then a Laissez-faire capitalist ideology.

Yes; In most of the world, libertarianism means something along the lines of "Don't enact laws (or regulations) unless there is a very clear need for them, and repeal any existing needless law (or regulation)". Of course, what people consider to need regulating varies wildly.

Around here, a libertarian position would be something like "we should repeal the laws requiring a child-resistant fence around swimming pools", or "We should repeal the law that requires adult cyclists to wear a helmet".

The idea that rules about prices, wages, or even the location and timing of trade in certain items, are needless is not one that would cross most people's minds - it seems very odd to most non-Americans that one could defend the payment of unreasonably low wages on the basis of liberty.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

it seems very odd to most non-Americans that one could defend the payment of unreasonably low wages on the basis of liberty.

It seems pretty odd to many Americans too.

 

[Bomb#20]

it seems very odd to most non-Americans that one could defend the payment of unreasonably low wages on the basis of liberty.

It seems pretty odd to many Americans too.

True that. "Liberty" in common usage refers to three quite distinct things:

1. I get to do what I want.
2. You get to do what I want.
3. You get to do what you want.

Most people, American or otherwise, care very much about 1 and 2 but don't give a rat's ass about 3.

 

[Source]

All politicians operate somewhere along the political spectrum, ie, there are those on the left of the conservative party and those on the right of the conservative party, those on the left of the Labour party and those on the right.

None are held to a precise definition of conservativism or socialism and they frequently disagree. So it is with Libertarians (I'm not one by the way).

 

[untermensche]

It seems pretty odd to many Americans too.

True that. "Liberty" in common usage refers to three quite distinct things:

1. I get to do what I want.
2. You get to do what I want.
3. You get to do what you want.

Most people, American or otherwise, care very much about 1 and 2 but don't give a rat's ass about 3.

How many people really, with all their heart, WANT to be wage slaves?

Capitalism is about some getting what they want and most being forced through controlled deprivation to help the few get what they want.

 

[coloradoatheist]

True that. "Liberty" in common usage refers to three quite distinct things:

1. I get to do what I want.
2. You get to do what I want.
3. You get to do what you want.

Most people, American or otherwise, care very much about 1 and 2 but don't give a rat's ass about 3.

How many people really, with all their heart, WANT to be wage slaves?

Capitalism is about some getting what they want and most being forced through controlled deprivation to help the few get what they want.

The question is how many people want to work or compared to do they want to decide what type of work do they do?