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Morton Haynice
Sep 9, 2008

doop doop
doop doop
doop doop
doop doop
If they really, truly believe in the Invisible Hand always arbitrating the best outcome, then it all circles back to "Just World" rationalizing. This is again strange to me, because systemic injustices are so apparent everywhere. It seems impossible to hold these beliefs without totally ignoring how stacked the economic deck really is. That is, unless you're one of those with the deck stacked in your favor.

It's just that the fraction of people who actually stand to benefit from the previously listed policy goals is so small I don't understand how they have any popular support at all.

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Jerry Manderbilt
May 31, 2012

No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

Morton Haynice posted:

If they really, truly believe in the Invisible Hand always arbitrating the best outcome, then it all circles back to "Just World" rationalizing. This is again strange to me, because systemic injustices are so apparent everywhere. It seems impossible to hold these beliefs without totally ignoring how stacked the economic deck really is. That is, unless you're one of those with the deck stacked in your favor.

It's just that the fraction of people who actually stand to benefit from the previously listed policy goals is so small I don't understand how they have any popular support at all.

I dunno if this answers your question, but it might help. In short, a lot of the popular support doesn't give a gently caress about whether or not they benefit from it; what's important is that they can sense that it fucks those they see as lower, or those coastal elites whom they hate, but whom the likes of the Kochs and Adelson can avoid being associated with.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

There's also a fairly common idea that by holding those beliefs you become one of the people who would benefit from them.

It's how oligarchical ideologies gain popular support all over, because a lot of their supporters, while very definitely not part of the elite, believe that they are part of the elite, or would be, if their beliefs were made law.

Maybe it's part of the dream of fortune and prosperity, it includes being a dick to everyone else, apparently working to raise the status of everyone just isn't the way to gain more status for yourself, because then people who don't deserve it might get something too.

It's weird but a lot of people would support mandatory removal of everyone's left leg if they thought it might hamstring the undeserving too.

Bob le Moche
Jul 10, 2011

I AM A HORRIBLE TANKIE MORON
WHO LONGS TO SUCK CHAVISTA COCK !

I SUGGEST YOU IGNORE ANY POSTS MADE BY THIS PERSON ABOUT VENEZUELA, POLITICS, OR ANYTHING ACTUALLY !


(This title paid for by money stolen from PDVSA)
Yeah there's no such thing as "systemic injustice" in the just-world right-wing ideology. If women get paid less it's because they deserve less, if black people go to prison more it's because they have ciminal tendencies, etc...

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Disinterested posted:

The problem comes with defining what is and isn't libertarianism, and what type of libertarianism we're talking about. In the US 'libertarian' has become a poisoned term that sometimes refers to libertarianism, but also can refer to non-evangelical firmly right wingers around the Republican party, some of whom still support strong statism in some areas. There's just a tremendous problem of definitions here.

I think it's a pretty coherent ideology though? Even if many self-identified libertarians don't really understand what it is they're signing up for, the corpus of Rothbard, Hayek, Nozick, and Mises is a definite, indentifiable thing, and yelling no true Scotsman / 'not all Libertarians' doesn't really work.

And if you're referring to anarcho-syndicalism, then yeah American 'libertarianism' is a completely different thing, but there are no anarcho-syndalists here anyways

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Morton Haynice posted:

If they really, truly believe in the Invisible Hand always arbitrating the best outcome, then it all circles back to "Just World" rationalizing. This is again strange to me, because systemic injustices are so apparent everywhere. It seems impossible to hold these beliefs without totally ignoring how stacked the economic deck really is. That is, unless you're one of those with the deck stacked in your favor.

It's just that the fraction of people who actually stand to benefit from the previously listed policy goals is so small I don't understand how they have any popular support at all.

Well, to be fair a lot of people wouldn't be harmed that much if at all, though they also wouldn't benefit. But yes, 95% of people on board with ancap libertarianism are either completely deluded or just evil

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

icantfindaname posted:

I think it's a pretty coherent ideology though? Even if many self-identified libertarians don't really understand what it is they're signing up for, the corpus of Rothbard, Hayek, Nozick, and Mises is a definite, indentifiable thing, and yelling no true Scotsman / 'not all Libertarians' doesn't really work.

And if you're referring to anarcho-syndicalism, then yeah American 'libertarianism' is a completely different thing, but there are no anarcho-syndalists here anyways

If I don't ask for some clarity I'm answering as if Ron Paul and the Koch brothers share an ideology, and arguing that they share one with someone like Milton Friedman, when that is demonstrably not the case.

No serious economist who proposes libertarian ideology calls for the abolition of the federal reserve; some of them wouldn't mind a computer, at best.

Rand is the cult god of lots of American libertarians like Alan Greenspan, though.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jan 5, 2015

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


I don't think the Koch bros are doctinaire anything, but the word 'libertarian' still has a fairly clear definition. Ayn Rand and Ron Paul lean more towards being mentally ill crazy people, but the Hayek/Mises/Rothbard ideology the Koch bros, Greenspan, Friedman, etc, point to and use as justification is real

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jan 5, 2015

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?
Basically, neo-liberalism. The tl;dr for the utopia for those people is pretty much maximum possible deregulation and lowest possible taxation.

Morton Haynice
Sep 9, 2008

doop doop
doop doop
doop doop
doop doop

Jerry Manderbilt posted:

I dunno if this answers your question, but it might help. In short, a lot of the popular support doesn't give a gently caress about whether or not they benefit from it; what's important is that they can sense that it fucks those they see as lower, or those coastal elites whom they hate, but whom the likes of the Kochs and Adelson can avoid being associated with.

Wow. This article makes me fundamentally sad. :smith:

I realize I'm guilty of "most folks are good at heart" thinking all the time. The prospect that what's actually fueling the conservative movement is simply spite, nothing more, is terrifying to comprehend. It makes all my hopes for a better world seem foolish. If the opposition is so vehemently hate-filled that logical arguments are irrelevant, how do you even proceed? If the Right is an enemy that can't be reasoned with, and can only be overpowered, what hope is there for progress?

Jerry Manderbilt
May 31, 2012

No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.
Someone here once posted something along these lines, which honestly helps make sense of a lot of these types:

quote:

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, so long as someone guarantees that the black, gay, Mexican, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”

That is Modern Conservatism 101. Most of those people are lower-middle class at best. They just don't want anyone they see as inferior have a chance at climbing the ladder because they want to feel superior to those untermenschen. They think that they could somehow make themselves into captains of industry, if only they could subjugate their "lessers".

As for the next part, I honestly couldn't tell you how to deal with them.

Bob le Moche
Jul 10, 2011

I AM A HORRIBLE TANKIE MORON
WHO LONGS TO SUCK CHAVISTA COCK !

I SUGGEST YOU IGNORE ANY POSTS MADE BY THIS PERSON ABOUT VENEZUELA, POLITICS, OR ANYTHING ACTUALLY !


(This title paid for by money stolen from PDVSA)
Conservatives simply have internalized the values of the society which produced them. I don't think they're the people that efforts to change society should be focused on.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Morton Haynice posted:

Wow. This article makes me fundamentally sad. :smith:

I realize I'm guilty of "most folks are good at heart" thinking all the time. The prospect that what's actually fueling the conservative movement is simply spite, nothing more, is terrifying to comprehend. It makes all my hopes for a better world seem foolish. If the opposition is so vehemently hate-filled that logical arguments are irrelevant, how do you even proceed? If the Right is an enemy that can't be reasoned with, and can only be overpowered, what hope is there for progress?

The more promising suggestions generally involve getting rid of all the humans and replacing them with something better. It's not a right vs left issue, it's present in probably every culture and person on the planet to some degree.

It's also important not to characterise it as people being hate filled, most of the people I know exhibit the idea to some degree, and they're perfectly nice people otherwise. People who believe that are as human and sweet as you or me, just with a particular problem directing their empathy sometimes.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Jan 5, 2015

Cognac McCarthy
Oct 5, 2008

It's a man's game, but boys will play

Morton Haynice posted:

This reasoning is baffling to me because it seems to ignore really basic givens w/r/t motivation and behavior. Why do they give so much benefit of the doubt to people who would only lose out by being honest?

Keep in mind libertarianism generally lacks a developed intellectual framework for explaining or resolving lots of things: racial prejudice, power imbalances between private individuals entities/etc. It could be that AnCap explains these things better (I doubt it), but the only distinction or conflict that matters to most libertarians is that between the public and private spheres. To a libertarian, a big company screwing over a customer in the current world and endangering his health is the result of the corporation being in bed with government, which allows the company to get away with it or incentivizes bad behavior or something. In their ideal world, customers would immediately recognize bad practices and take steps to find another company to do business with, and with no government to legitimately use force, customers would somehow have more bargaining power. This is because, to libertarians, corporations don't really have power without the State. The State has power.

It's easy to see why libertarians think this way: the US was essentially founded on this same ideology, whereby the government is the only force or source of power individuals need to worry about, and the Constitution doesn't really say much about keeping private individuals from screwing each other over (the Constitution doesn't even take a goddamn stance on enslaving human beings). I've never really heard a run-of-the-mill libertarian explain to me how libertarianism differs from classical liberalism, and I think the only real distinction is that libertarianism implies an industrial economy and society. It's essentially an 18th century ideology, based on 18th century philosophy and assumptions about "human nature", shoehorned into debates about problems facing the post-industrial US.*

It's also worth noting that libertarianism is at least present in the rhetoric of much of the US "left". Most Democrats have to pay a lot of lip service to some libertarian ideas just to get elected, and many more truly believe what they say. This is why you'll hear Democrats concede points about reducing government interference in business (though usually through simplified regulation rather than eliminating regulation, as harder libertarians want), and there are few areas in which Democrats will outright say "government can do this better than the private sphere". American political rhetoric is highly influenced by libertarianism because it's essentially the ideology of the Constitution and Founding Fathers.

*To be clearer, it seems that most libertarians' assumptions about human nature are that people are fundamentally rational, and that it's easy to identify what institutions "have" power - the State is this institution to them. As someone who spent a long time in school studying history, I don't like to make a lot of claims about what history "can teach us" broadly speaking, but if history teaches one thing I think it's that people are absolutely not rational. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just think that there's a tendency to put "rationality" on a pedestal as if it's easy to identify: you see this a lot, for example, with "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens assuming their perspective is the rational one because they are men of science, completely blind to their own cognitive biases.

Likewise, one of the first things you'll hear in an intro to economics college class is that "Economists assume that people are rational". Libertarians being who they are maybe just took some undergraduate econ courses and took it to heart? From what I understand the higher you go in studying economics the less these sort of fundamental assumptions or axioms apply, but I could be wrong about that. In any case, it's not hard to find successful people being totally irrational, even big businesses do it: look at the leaked Sony emails - these are enormously successful individuals who basically admit to one another that they're often fumbling through their work with little to no idea whether something will work and make them money or not.

The other big problem which I mentioned is the assumption that power simply "resides" in different government institutions. Aside from the fact that even non-libertarians can see that plenty of private entities "have" power over the lives of other private entities, the mechanics of how power operates has been the main focus of leftist political theorists, historians, and philosophers have spent the last ~35 years. The basic outline (which is supported by loads of compelling evidence) is that power doesn't really "reside" in any institutions, because power is not static and institutions themselves don't always control things like cultural beliefs and practices which themselves exert a lot of power. It's better to see power as a pattern of interaction, habits, and practices between people and institutions, a pattern from which it's basically impossible for anyone to fully escape. This approach to understanding power requires one to accept that people are rarely if ever "free" even in the absence of the State, and that eliminating the State won't reduce the "amount of power" to which people are subjected, because you can't just remove a "source" of power from society.

Again, it could be that AnCaps have much better intellectual and philosophical frameworks for explaining all of these things, but to your average American libertarian there are a lot of very specific assumptions about the world, and it's no wonder they hold these views since they're deeply ingrained in American history and politics.

Cognac McCarthy fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Jan 5, 2015

Morton Haynice
Sep 9, 2008

doop doop
doop doop
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That was an incredibly interesting, helpful answer and I want to thank you for taking the time to type it all out.

Cognac McCarthy posted:

It's essentially an 18th century ideology, based on 18th century philosophy and assumptions about "human nature", shoehorned into debates about problems facing the post-industrial US.
This both concisely sums up the problem, and provides an explanation at the same time.

Cognac McCarthy posted:

It's better to see power as a pattern of interaction, habits, and practices between people and institutions, a pattern from which it's basically impossible for anyone to fully escape. This approach to understanding power requires one to accept that people are rarely if ever "free" even in the absence of the State, and that eliminating the State won't reduce the "amount of power" to which people are subjected, because you can't just remove a "source" of power from society.
And this really highlights just how hollow their rhetoric is. In the end, the Libertarian Revolution wouldn't even accomplish its own goals.

Morton Haynice fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Jan 5, 2015

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cognac McCarthy posted:

It's easy to see why libertarians think this way: the US was essentially founded on this same ideology, whereby the government is the only force or source of power individuals need to worry about, and the Constitution doesn't really say much about keeping private individuals from screwing each other over (the Constitution doesn't even take a goddamn stance on enslaving human beings).

That is not necessarily correct, or at least it leaves something out. A principal concern of all liberal revolutions and of most proponents of broader emancipation has always been a concern about majoritarianism. In this context, the minimisation of the power of the state is a very real force designed to protect individuals from the use of the apparatus of the state by coercive factions who seek to impose their own moral values. The first amendment, for example, is absolutely intended to be seen in this context. If you think about this historically, this tendency makes perfect sense, since one of the principal forms of coercion in Europe in the preceding two centuries stemmed from moralising states imposing confessional demands.

Modern Libertarian politicians seem much more concerned in an idea of a state as a being with a mind of its own, rather than as constituted by private individuals. This is probably something to do with the fact that many Libertarians have a garbled conception of liberty.

quote:

I've never really heard a run-of-the-mill libertarian explain to me how libertarianism differs from classical liberalism, and I think the only real distinction is that libertarianism implies an industrial economy and society.

I think you must mean capitalist and not industrial in this sentence. I don't think libertarianism is post-industrial at all. If anything, libertarianism is characterised by extremely pre-industrial conceptions, and utilises extremely old-fashioned vocabulary to characterise itself. If anything, you have it opposite. The classical liberal tradition absorbed industrialisation much better (e.g. J.S. Mill).

quote:

It's essentially an 18th century ideology, based on 18th century philosophy and assumptions about "human nature", shoehorned into debates about problems facing the post-industrial US.*

Except some forms of liberalism are more apt to deal with social problems. On balance, the libertarian ideal is much more radical than a return to, for example, 1870's British society, even in respect to economics, but especially politically.

quote:

It's also worth noting that libertarianism is at least present in the rhetoric of much of the US "left". Most Democrats have to pay a lot of lip service to some libertarian ideas just to get elected, and many more truly believe what they say. This is why you'll hear Democrats concede points about reducing government interference in business (though usually through simplified regulation rather than eliminating regulation, as harder libertarians want), and there are few areas in which Democrats will outright say "government can do this better than the private sphere". American political rhetoric is highly influenced by libertarianism because it's essentially the ideology of the Constitution and Founding Fathers.

I think your final sentence is correct, but not absolutely. Libertarians talk in the same terms, on occasion, as American constitutionalists, but they don't necessarily conceive the world in the same way. Not all anti-statism is libertarianism either - I don't think when democrats say that they're not in favour of the interference of the state in business they're paying any kind of lip service to libertarianism. That's dumb. Not all arguments that the state is a sub-optimal economic actor are libertarian by definition, in the US or otherwise.

quote:

To be clearer, it seems that most libertarians' assumptions about human nature are that people are fundamentally rational, and that it's easy to identify what institutions "have" power - the State is this institution to them.

Yes and no. I think in libertarianism there is tremendous fear of others, particularly groups of others, as I referenced earlier. I also think perhaps you're making mistakes here. Some libertarians feel very strongly that there is such thing as human nature, and that it's Hobbesian - that in a state of nature we are engaged in bellum omnium contra omnes. These libertarians often think people should be left to agitate against eachother in peace, so that the deserving reign supreme.

Others would dispute the idea of a universal human nature at all, which is why they would rather not see choices that relate to them made by others - they would rather have freedom to choose for themselves in every particular, because nobody else is as qualified to do so as they themselves.

Either of these is reconcilable with classical liberalism, of course.

quote:

As someone who spent a long time in school studying history, I don't like to make a lot of claims about what history "can teach us" broadly speaking, but if history teaches one thing I think it's that people are absolutely not rational. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just think that there's a tendency to put "rationality" on a pedestal as if it's easy to identify: you see this a lot, for example, with "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens assuming their perspective is the rational one because they are men of science, completely blind to their own cognitive biases.

I don't want to get bogged down in this, but: I think that's a mischaracterisation. Firstly, Hitchens =/= a man of science - he was always a polemicist and journalist, and he studied PPE. Secondly, I don't think they necessarily emphasise the rationality of individuals at all - in fact, they consistently emphasise the irrationality of human individuals partly as a basis for religious thought. I think they're emphasising reason qua scientific method, with is another thing entirely. And yes, quite clearly they have cognitive biases of their own, but I don't think it's as it concerns reason.

quote:

Likewise, one of the first things you'll hear in an intro to economics college class is that "Economists assume that people are rational". Libertarians being who they are maybe just took some undergraduate econ courses and took it to heart? From what I understand the higher you go in studying economics the less these sort of fundamental assumptions or axioms apply, but I could be wrong about that.

That's true, but it's an area under study. Market inefficiencies, irrationality, decisions made with incomplete information are big problems. And, unsurprisingly, it's a lot harder to model. Irrational behaviour is extensively studied in some areas (for example, in relation to economic crises).

quote:

The other big problem which I mentioned is the assumption that power simply "resides" in different government institutions. Aside from the fact that even non-libertarians can see that plenty of private entities "have" power over the lives of other private entities, the mechanics of how power operates has been the main focus of leftist political theorists, historians, and philosophers have spent the last ~35 years. The basic outline (which is supported by loads of compelling evidence) is that power doesn't really "reside" in any institutions, because power is not static and institutions themselves don't always control things like cultural beliefs and practices which themselves exert a lot of power. It's better to see power as a pattern of interaction, habits, and practices between people and institutions, a pattern from which it's basically impossible for anyone to fully escape. This approach to understanding power requires one to accept that people are rarely if ever "free" even in the absence of the State, and that eliminating the State won't reduce the "amount of power" to which people are subjected, because you can't just remove a "source" of power from society.

I think this is all very true, although I think some right-libertarians acknowledge all of this but think the interference of the state will ultimately be worse. They can be effective salesmen of this ideology because sometimes they seem to be emphasising the rights of individuals, while more traditional Republicans seem to be advocating the rights of business. Of course, ultimately they're tugging on the same rope.

I think what we're talking about with right-libertarianism in the US is mostly a radicalised and disfigured form of the classical liberal tradition. For example, most classical liberals do not maintain that individuals have a right to opt-out of political society, are not in favour of the destruction of central banks, etc.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Jan 5, 2015

E-Tank
Aug 4, 2011
I googled for something discussing how the rich pay proportionally less taxes than pretty much any other class, and I'm coming up with a bunch of lovely websites saying that rich people should be tax free. What's some good sources to prove the rich basically stick the middle and poor class with the bill for everything?

twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

E-Tank posted:

I googled for something discussing how the rich pay proportionally less taxes than pretty much any other class, and I'm coming up with a bunch of lovely websites saying that rich people should be tax free. What's some good sources to prove the rich basically stick the middle and poor class with the bill for everything?
Here's a thorough break down of the top 400 tax returns in 1992-2010:
http://www.irs.gov/file_source/pub/irs-soi/10intop400.pdf
It shows a pretty steady downward slide in average taxes paid from nearly 30% in 1995 to 18% in 2010. From here:
http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-Top-400-Individual-Income-Tax-Returns-with-the-Largest-Adjusted-Gross-Incomes
Also note that 37 of the top 400 paid 0 to 10%.

You can also look up Buffet's letter on the matter.

eviltastic
Feb 8, 2004

Fan of Britches

E-Tank posted:

I googled for something discussing how the rich pay proportionally less taxes than pretty much any other class, and I'm coming up with a bunch of lovely websites saying that rich people should be tax free. What's some good sources to prove the rich basically stick the middle and poor class with the bill for everything?

If you're looking at them as a class, that's not accurate.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/currentdistribution.cfm
http://taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3806

Of course, that's dealing with income. If you compare share of tax burden to share of wealth, I recall it being pretty different.

Cognac McCarthy
Oct 5, 2008

It's a man's game, but boys will play


This is a good post, thanks for clarifying that I wasn't distinguishing between the philosophies of libertarianism/classical liberalism. I guess I fail to see what the distinction is in concrete terms, exactly? At what point do libertarians break with classical liberals? Aren't they both fundamentally about limited government interference in private industry, and aren't they both rooted in 18th century Enlightenment thought?

Also you're right that not all anti-statism is necessarily libertarianism, but I guess I'm conflating libertarianism and classical liberalism.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cognac McCarthy posted:

This is a good post, thanks for clarifying that I wasn't distinguishing between the philosophies of libertarianism/classical liberalism. I guess I fail to see what the distinction is in concrete terms, exactly? At what point do libertarians break with classical liberals? Aren't they both fundamentally about limited government interference in private industry, and aren't they both rooted in 18th century Enlightenment thought?

Also you're right that not all anti-statism is necessarily libertarianism, but I guess I'm conflating libertarianism and classical liberalism.

I think I tried to hit upon it at the end by saying that the libertarianism takes a lot of the ideas of classical liberalism and then drives them to their most extreme conclusions. At some times a lot of classical liberal philosophers like JS Mill considered the possibility that people should, for example, be able to opt out of their polities if they so wished. As you can imagine, this came up a lot during the American Civil War. Mostly they concluded that it would be practically unworkable and produce absurd results, though many were tempted by it.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I don't think Libertarianism has been discussed fairly here. I mostly saw a discussion of libertarians, not Libertarianism. Surely, you can say some damning things about actual libertarians, but that doesn't discredit, or even touch, the political philosophy. I'm saying this as somebody who likes taxes and the great project of the civil society, and thinks Libertarianism in principle is wrong, and contemporary Libertarianism seems to be a weird way to pronounce "I despise poor people, especially dark-skinned ones".

So I'm far from an expert on this, but from what I can tell, the prime example of an elaboration of the Libertarian idea is given by Nozick. As far as I understand him, he argues that Liberty - freedom concerning one's own choices, actions, and belongings - as the guiding principle leads to a very light state. This is because coercion must be minimised. Everything should be built on consent. And this entails that the just state is one that does nothing but uphold just this principle - that coercion should be minimised, and only consenting transactions performed. So, a state that consists of basically a police, a defence force, and possibly some law institutions. In contrast, any other state would be less just, unjust, because it entails more coercion.
Specifically, a state that includes the redistribution of wealth entails more coercion. That state being more equal does not legitimise it, as, basically, the citizen's individual choice to pile their money on whatever guy they favour must be respected, and is more important than their welfare.

I can't really defend this, nor do I feel particularly sympathetic to it, but that's about what I understand of it, and I think it does present an important challenge to alternative theories.
If my explanation sucks too hard, there are some accessible explanations of Nozick's ideas as part of Yale's free lectures series on Youtube.

Related: what's up with this terrible fear of "redistribution of wealth"? For all I can tell, US society already includes massive redistribution of wealth (not necessarily from the rich to the poor ...). During the last election campaigns, it seemed as if the phrase was used in a way as if it was something that's not being done in the US right now, and as if it would be a radical change to start doing it in the US.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?
The person asking the question asked specifically about people who call themselves Libertarians in contemporary American politics. The distinctions are made fairly clear from the beginning.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

Cingulate posted:

I don't think Libertarianism has been discussed fairly here. I mostly saw a discussion of libertarians, not Libertarianism. Surely, you can say some damning things about actual libertarians, but that doesn't discredit, or even touch, the political philosophy. I'm saying this as somebody who likes taxes and the great project of the civil society, and thinks Libertarianism in principle is wrong, and contemporary Libertarianism seems to be a weird way to pronounce "I despise poor people, especially dark-skinned ones".

So I'm far from an expert on this, but from what I can tell, the prime example of an elaboration of the Libertarian idea is given by Nozick. As far as I understand him, he argues that Liberty - freedom concerning one's own choices, actions, and belongings - as the guiding principle leads to a very light state. This is because coercion must be minimised. Everything should be built on consent. And this entails that the just state is one that does nothing but uphold just this principle - that coercion should be minimised, and only consenting transactions performed. So, a state that consists of basically a police, a defence force, and possibly some law institutions. In contrast, any other state would be less just, unjust, because it entails more coercion.
Specifically, a state that includes the redistribution of wealth entails more coercion. That state being more equal does not legitimise it, as, basically, the citizen's individual choice to pile their money on whatever guy they favour must be respected, and is more important than their welfare.

I can't really defend this, nor do I feel particularly sympathetic to it, but that's about what I understand of it, and I think it does present an important challenge to alternative theories.
If my explanation sucks too hard, there are some accessible explanations of Nozick's ideas as part of Yale's free lectures series on Youtube.

Related: what's up with this terrible fear of "redistribution of wealth"? For all I can tell, US society already includes massive redistribution of wealth (not necessarily from the rich to the poor ...). During the last election campaigns, it seemed as if the phrase was used in a way as if it was something that's not being done in the US right now, and as if it would be a radical change to start doing it in the US.

Yeah I was going to jump in and mention something about this - the "hardest-core" / "pure-strain" libertarians I've met define the philosophy as the elimination of coercion above all else. Some of them go so far as to recognize that the world you'd wind up with would suck for most people but that's okay because we "eliminated coercion" and that should be the highest fundamental goal if we're to consider ourselves a truly 100% free society. I've always found this core argument more interesting (if flawed) than the usual "government bad markets good" you wind up with in modern American Ron Paul-style libertarianism.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Which I really don't understand because even if you did somehow eliminate people telling each other what to do, you still have humans being very much coerced by their basic needs and the limitations of being human.

People who ascribe political liberty the ultimate priority presumably haven't ever had to deal with any other form of hardship.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
The neat thing about Libertarianism is that frequently, once their philosophy butts heads with reality, they can swing around to the full blown Socialism.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

The neat thing about Libertarianism is that frequently, once their philosophy butts heads with reality, they can swing around to the full blown Socialism.

This is sometimes helped by the prediction in Marx & Engels that in an socialist society, there will be a withering away of the state.

The reason libertarians are like they are is that they have an extremely negative and strict conception of liberty as merely an absence of inference and nothing else, typically speaking. Whereas the European philosophical tradition that underlies socialism conceives of human freedom as consisting of positive acts and self-actualisation, a lot of the anglophone tradition does not. They will simply say: 'I want freedom for what I want it for.'.

Schenck v. U.S.
Sep 8, 2010

Cingulate posted:

Related: what's up with this terrible fear of "redistribution of wealth"? For all I can tell, US society already includes massive redistribution of wealth (not necessarily from the rich to the poor ...). During the last election campaigns, it seemed as if the phrase was used in a way as if it was something that's not being done in the US right now, and as if it would be a radical change to start doing it in the US.

In American politics the phrase is understood to mean the confiscation of wealth and its allocation to the undeserving poor, with the listener allowed to fill in the blank as to who that is. Generally speaking, racial minorities. If you told most people that the current economic system was redistributive because real wages have been stagnant since the Reagan administration while per-worker productivity has more than doubled, you would be correct but people wouldn't believe you. Even among people who think it's a bad thing, it's usually seen as something that just happens passively due to economic principles, rather than as the outcome of the government taking a policy position favorable to capital rather than labor.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
I actually just read a nice article on Nozick where it is argued that he wrote his defence of Liberty precisely from a position of massively profiting from massive redistribution of wealth - the post-war government funnelling the money of the rich capitalists into the academic system - and that he steered away from it, and towards democracy, once the well ran dry.

The author also gives a much more passionate and better account of Nozick's attack on all but the most minimal state than I could.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?
I think Libertarianism, and most obviously objectivism, are to a large degree inspired by vanity; the belief that one is definitely not one of life's victims, or wouldn't be in a free-for-all world.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
That's a point made in the article. Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain article is about an artiste, a man of human capital, not capital, for a reason - that those rich in human capital, such as the academic elites, can best identify with him.

Leaving, as should always be done, aside Ayn Rand poo poo, I'm not fully convinced. I've heard at least once passionate defence of liberty (by a German liberal) that seemed entirely genuine to me; that since it is hard to justify any specific coercion, we should minimise all coercion, and leave freedom as the primary good.

But either way, the motivations of the speaker do not inherently discredit the argument.

Bob le Moche
Jul 10, 2011

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WHO LONGS TO SUCK CHAVISTA COCK !

I SUGGEST YOU IGNORE ANY POSTS MADE BY THIS PERSON ABOUT VENEZUELA, POLITICS, OR ANYTHING ACTUALLY !


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The whole facade that American-style libertarianism cares about the "no coercion" stuff falls apart instantly once you ask them how private property will be enforced.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

Bob le Moche posted:

The whole facade that American-style libertarianism cares about the "no coercion" stuff falls apart instantly once you ask them how private property will be enforced.

American-style libertarianism falls apart when you press people on how anything would work in the real world. It's an entirely theoretical ideology. Especially the ancaps.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

That's a point made in the article. Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain article is about an artiste, a man of human capital, not capital, for a reason - that those rich in human capital, such as the academic elites, can best identify with him.

Leaving, as should always be done, aside Ayn Rand poo poo, I'm not fully convinced. I've heard at least once passionate defence of liberty (by a German liberal) that seemed entirely genuine to me; that since it is hard to justify any specific coercion, we should minimise all coercion, and leave freedom as the primary good.

But either way, the motivations of the speaker do not inherently discredit the argument.

Freedom how constituted? The article separates freedom and justice; it also describes only one form of interference, narrowly defined. Why are we taking these concepts for granted? Freedom might also be constituted in seeing one's will embodied in the state, or else as absence from a broader form of interference, or might consist in the ability to self-actualise.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
As far as I understand Nozick, though correct me if I got it wrong, what justice is is the question, and freedom is part of the premise. Contra Rawls, he comes to the conclusion that maximal liberty, that maximal freedom from coercion, is the definition of justice.

I personally tend towards Rawls, but the interesting thing is that in practice, they can both be seen to result in rather similar systems - basically, the western democratic nations. You could argue that much less coercion than in the west would be insufficient to guarantee what Nozick thinks MUST be granted (enforcing contracts, especially those of transactions, e.g. private property etc), but also that the west is, out of all the cultures, one of the closest to what you might wish for under the veil of ignorance. The western social democrat/US liberal might wish for somewhat higher taxes and more welfare, but not authoritarian enforcement of equality; and the moderate libertarian/european liberal might wish for somewhat lower taxes and fewer regulations, but not total anarchy and brutal rulership of the powerful.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

As far as I understand Nozick, though correct me if I got it wrong, what justice is is the question, and freedom is part of the premise. Contra Rawls, he comes to the conclusion that maximal liberty, that maximal freedom from coercion, is the definition of justice.

I personally tend towards Rawls, but the interesting thing is that in practice, they can both be seen to result in rather similar systems - basically, the western democratic nations. You could argue that much less coercion than in the west would be insufficient to guarantee what Nozick thinks MUST be granted (enforcing contracts, especially those of transactions, e.g. private property etc), but also that the west is, out of all the cultures, one of the closest to what you might wish for under the veil of ignorance. The western social democrat/US liberal might wish for somewhat higher taxes and more welfare, but not authoritarian enforcement of equality; and the moderate libertarian/european liberal might wish for somewhat lower taxes and fewer regulations, but not total anarchy and brutal rulership of the powerful.

You have only circled the question. Not all people agree that freedom consists merely in not being interfered with and not all people are using the same definition for 'interference'. For example, Locke believes that persuasion is a form of interference, whereas Hobbes does not. This is the sort of thing I'm getting at, you're using the word 'freedom' uncritically.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
You're switching from a singular, specific you to a generic you here. I'm not defending the libertarian position, I'm merely trying to present it. Since neither of us seems to be much of a fan of it, I'm not sure it's especially meaningful for us two to argue about it, right?

And of course, if you don't accept Nozick's premises, the logic is not persuasive.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Cingulate posted:

Leaving, as should always be done, aside Ayn Rand poo poo, I'm not fully convinced. I've heard at least once passionate defence of liberty (by a German liberal) that seemed entirely genuine to me; that since it is hard to justify any specific coercion, we should minimise all coercion, and leave freedom as the primary good.

The reasoned judgement in that situations would be to understand that you cannot eradicate coercion, because humans coerce each other all the time, our entire society is founded on the human instinct as a pack animal and the idea of people being in charge and holding onto that power by force.

We sometimes get slightly less barbaric systems whereby we have the option to perhaps ensure the person in charge is a good person to have in charge, but you can't get rid of the human tendency towards hierarchy.

What you can do however is try to create and maintain a system which is less arbitrary and destructive than 'whoever has the biggest stick gets to tell everyone else what to do' which is what libertarians propose.

Arguing that coercion is bad so we should get rid of governments is like arguing that murder is bad so we should get rid of knives. It's not going to stop people murdering each other.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

You're switching from a singular, specific you to a generic you here. I'm not defending the libertarian position, I'm merely trying to present it. Since neither of us seems to be much of a fan of it, I'm not sure it's especially meaningful for us two to argue about it, right?

And of course, if you don't accept Nozick's premises, the logic is not persuasive.

I just mean to say, that is the problem with that line of reasoning, putting aside the argument in the article about the intrinsically social nature of economic activity.

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Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

OwlFancier posted:

... you cannot eradicate coercion ... coercion is bad so we should get rid of governments
But you're not actually engaging the actual argument, not even in how I tried to elaborate it.

To the libertarian, you cannot eliminate coercion, but you should minimise it. Thus, the government must exist (he's not an anarchist), but it should be minimised - basically to where it can enforce upholding consensual contracts. That's not a watertight position, but you can't as easily dismiss it.

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