Transcript

Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Im Aaron Powell.

Matthew Feeney: Im Matthew Feeney.

Trevor Burrus: And Im Trevor Burrus.

Aaron Ross Powell: Joining us today is Brian Wilson. Hes co-founder of Combat & Classics, a program out of St. Johns that organizes free online seminars on classic text for active duty reserve and veteran U.S. military. Hes joining us today to discuss Platos Apology.

Brian, lets maybe kick things off by having you tell us a bit about Combat & Classics.

Brian Wilson: Sure. Combat & Classics is sponsored by St. Johns College. Its an outreach program through St. Johns. Im a graduate of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis and when I was kind of transitioning from student to alumnus, approached the dean of the college and just said, Hey, what can I do for you guys?

They just really wanted to get kind of more involvement with the military and we thought the best way to do that was just by what we do at St. Johns which is just Socratic dialogue and great books, just with the military audience.

Trevor Burrus: And does it come over pretty well? I mean are there any text that you tend to focus on mostly in that or is it pretty broad? Is it classic philosophy or plays or Greek and Roman or anything

Brian Wilson: Yeah. I mean the degree from St. Johns is liberal arts. So we study everything from Euclid to Newton to Aristophanes to Plato to basically the kind of classical liberal education. So we try to represent that as best we can with Combat & Classics. We do probably do a little bit more history and philosophy, a little bit more Thucydides, a little bit more Herodotus, a little bit more Plato.

But we try to get in a good amount of things that maybe somebody whos looking at the great books and is in the military has already started on but for instance, our April and our March and April seminars are both Macbeth. So we will be doing Shakespeare for those.

But our February upcoming seminar is on the Iliad. So we do kind of a marshal theme to a certain extent but its a broad swath of classical literature that we use.

Aaron Ross Powell: Well then I guess lets turn to our text. We chose today Platos Apology which is one that youve done seminars on.

Brian Wilson: Yeah.

Aaron Ross Powell: So give us some background on that.

Brian Wilson: So the Apology is Socrates on trial, right? He has apparently corrupted the youth. He is accused of being a heretic, of not believing in the gods and this is Socrates you would call lackluster defense of those charges, but also a robust defense of what it means to be an individual, to be able to stand up to the state and what is the consequences of that for both the individual and the state.

Trevor Burrus: Why would you call the defense lackluster?

Brian Wilson: I think that and Socrates admits those to a certain extent. Meletus, his accuser, has kind of made his case and Socrates is replying and thats the beginning of the dialogue is Socrates replying. He says like what Meletus has said is and the accusers at large which was not true, right? But it sways the jury, right? And it has obviously swayed the jury and he said, Im not going to do that. Im not going to play this game. Im just going to do what I do, which is seek truth, examine virtue and if you guys dont like that, all right. No big deal.

Hes willing to accept the consequences of that decision of being kind of true to himself rather than Im going to make a case to get myself out of punishment.

Trevor Burrus: Should we interpret this as a Ive never gotten a good handle on the theistic I guess kind of piety of the Greeks, of how much are they kind of like modern day Christians who if you dont believe in their gods because I always thought if you are if you believe in many gods, then you believe that you kind of accept other people who believe in those gods too and dont treat them as atheists as much.

So are these trumped up charges? Sort of like this impiety. Was it the worst thing in ancient Greece to believe in different gods than those gods in this corruption of should we interpret them as trumped up charges?

Brian Wilson: No, I think its pretty clear that they are trumped up. You know, whether or not Socrates was an actual theist or an atheist or what is kind of one of those things that and I know that Cato has talked about this in the pas as far as like how much of a deist was Thomas Jefferson and George Washington?

So its those kinds of things where its like only the people that only you know, you know, how much you buy into whatever religious creed you might or might not espouse. So there were certainly questions that Socrates raised that could make people uncomfortable, but theres no statement that I can think of in the entire kind of platonic canon where he comes out and says, I dont believe any of this stuff, right?

But its the questioning that certainly causes this accusation to get carried forward and certainly has swayed a decent amount of the jury.

Aaron Ross Powell: I mean its pretty clear hes not a straight-up atheist.

Brian Wilson: Yeah.

Aaron Ross Powell: Like he very obviously he defends himself along these lines by saying, look, I talk all the time and tell people all the time about

Trevor Burrus: Demigods.

Aaron Ross Powell: Demigods and demons and other things that assume

Trevor Burrus: Does he mean like Hercules? Is that what he its like the Hercules of

Brian Wilson: Yeah, and he talks about the demigods. He talks about the offspring of gods and man and I think you its very much a Rorschach test I think for the reader, right? If you want to read that as if youre an atheist reader approaching the text, then you can go, Oh, hes messing with these guys.

But if youre a theist reader, then you can go, No, hes trying to fit it into this theist doctrine thats part of the community and hes just trying to play by those rules. They may not believe him

Matthew Feeney: I mean its certainly the case at least towards the endI dont want to jump ahead too muchbut that he postulates after death are a couple of possibilities and one is that its just an eternal kind of sleep and the other is hey, Ive got to hang out with Homer and all these other guys. But he seems so at the beginning, theres this question when he speaks to the oracle and it seems like hard to believe someone not taking that seriously with some sort of theistic belief.

If you really dont believe that the oracle was the voice of a god, then hes walking around Athens, trying to see if he could find someone wiser than him. It seems a little pointless.

Trevor Burrus: One final question I want to ask before we open up a bag of worms here, but before we get fully into the text is, Is this a history?

Brian Wilson: I mean your guess is as good as mine on that. I think that I always liked Christopher Hitchens kind of description of Socrates versus Jesus. You know, its like its not important if youre looking at Socrates, whether or not he existed at all, right?

You can take his teachings and you can take whatever you want out of that, right? And its not important if he existed or didnt exist or if this is what he said or didnt say.

Trevor Burrus: But its a little different because in this one, I think one of two maybe of Platos dialogues, Plato is supposed to be there. So maybe he was taking notes. It kind of brings that spectrum a little bit more.

Aaron Ross Powell: But I think this is complicated by so we only have two accounts of Socrates defense. We have Plato and the Xenophon, who was another follower of Socrates. But then at the same time, theres this after Socrates death, it was kind of a thing for writers to write their own versions of his defense. It was like just fan fiction.

Trevor Burrus: Its also probably kind of like a Rorschach test. They all wrote it the way that they saw it.

Aaron Ross Powell: Yes. So I mean its a little bit different. We have almost no text. What we do know about Socrates largely comes from Plato and Xenophon and Plato very clearly drifts away from presenting anything that even is remotely historical or documentary in his later dialogues where we get to just these are Platos ideas and Socrates is a mouthpiece for them.

Theres the argument made that I think seems relatively persuasive to me that of the two apologies that we have, Platos and Xenophons, like Xenophon, well a smart guy, was not a genius on the level of Plato. So its less so Platos genius probably takes over a bit more in his presentation. But theyre I mean theyre similar enough although its the Xenophon, Socrates is not his speech is not the great work of literature that we read for today and is quite a bit more straightforward.

But the skeleton is relatively the same. So we could probably say I mean theres some level of accuracy there but we dont know. So I think largely when were talking about Socrates, were analyzing Socrates in the way that we would talk about Hamlet, right? We act as if we analyze him as a real person while recognizing too that he was a historical figure but what were really talking about is Platos presentation of him.

Trevor Burrus: So lets talk about that skeleton then. How does the dialogue open up?

Brian Wilson: Well, the dialogue, I mean it rolls right into the defense, right? And theres no which I find always find interesting is that theres not really a presentation of the accusers argument. It is just the defense and you have to kind of start with that question.

I mean there is a dialogue thats supposed to have happened right before the trial which is the Euthyphro, which I know Im pronouncing wrong because my Greek is pretty terrible. But they dont really talk much about Socrates trial, right? They talk about Euthyphros trial for manslaughter. So we open with this and Socrates immediately kind of goes for underwhelming. You know, he says, I do not know what effect my accusers had upon you. Hes speaking to the jury. But for my own part, I was almost carried away by them. Their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, scarcely a word of what they said was true.

Aaron Ross Powell: Its a wonderful line to read during a presidential election.

Brian Wilson: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus: Are we picturing him in an amphitheater type situation with like I picture this as a circle with the people sitting on benches around him while he was speaking to them. Is that a

Brian Wilson: I always think about it just like Perry Mason.

Matthew Feeney: This kind of juries I think were done I forget the name of the location but its quite close to the Acropolis and it would have been about for the time, about 500 people then hearing the accusation and the defense on the top of this rather small hill in Athens.

Brian Wilson: I think that the police procedural has just kind of tainted my visualization a little bit too much. Im visualizing Law and Order.

Aaron Ross Powell: And the setup just the setup of this trial and the way it functions is I think something we could talk about because its fairly interesting as a contrast to the way that we do things now.

Brian Wilson: Sure. I mean he has this jury of 500 people, right? And it seems obvious to me that theyve been fairly swayed by the accusers. What we usually do at St. Johns when were opening a seminar, when were talking about something like this, is that the tutor will just ask an opening question. From there, theres not really were trying to stick to the reading as much as possible. Obviously youre the host and youre the Cato Institute. So if we want to talk about the Iowa caucus, then go for it.

Trevor Burrus: Please no.

Brian Wilson: Probably not. But we just try to stick to the text as much as we can for our points and for our questions. So the question I would like to ask you is, What was Socrates mindset during this trial?

Matthew Feeney: So I think thats a great opening because if you think about the timeline here, hes already an old man. Seventy, which you can say pretty old now, let alone in ancient Greece.

Reading the defense, I got the impression that he might be just sort of resigned to the way this might end and the way it will end because hes an old man and the way hes addressing it, he discusses how death isnt particularly that bad and the important thing is to lead a good life and that you shouldnt calculate the chances of living or dying. You should think about doing the right thing versus the wrong thing and maybe if I die, I will be able to an eternal sleep or talk to people I admire and I can continue these conversations.

So part of me thinks his mindset might be well, I could be doomed but at least I can go out in a great rhetorical flourish and make these people look a little silly. I think he succeeds in doing that, especially with Meletus, that accuser.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, I agree with Matthew. I think also that I always read Socrates as so tongue-in-cheek the way he spoke to people that I kind of read the Apology as being kind of angry and his righteousness against the accusing this is who I think it is. A libertarian-ish text or something we can learn just political philosophy about a person standing against a power who has the righteous position which he discusses later on.

If you do think you have the righteous position thats the way Socrates does everything. Do you think he would never say it. He would be like hes like, What do you think? Socrates, do you have the righteous position? Hes like, I dont know, sir. Do you think I have the righteous position? Are cows righteous? He would never say it but you know he does think this. Now hes going to stand in front of the polis which is a much more community-oriented type of concept than the current state and then tell them basically like a on both their houses, all of you. So I see anger.

Aaron Ross Powell: Yeah, that was my reading more so than just resignation was the righteousness coming in because hes so he tells us this story of the oracle Adelphi saying that hes the wisest man alive and that he has basically built a career around trying to assess that because he like he doesnt think of himself as wise. But which of course I think he really does but he just likes to think hes not. Its because he recognizes his lack of wisdom that the oracle thinks hes the most wise.

But to kind of test this, he goes around asking people who are presumed to be wise and testing their wisdom and always finding it lacking. So he he has got this other part where he goes in about the training of the horses, right? Where he says you wouldnt when you want to break a horse, you call in an expert. You dont just have like everyone break the horse because thats not going to work and that seems to be a dig against this system.

So I read this as like a like look, Ive been going around showing all of you up and now youve done this dumb thing where youre putting me on trial and so its not just that Im kind of resigned to my fate and I dont really think that living over 70 would be all that awesome anyway and death isnt all isnt something to worry about. But also that Im going to prove like my last act will be proving that I was right all along by getting by showing the complete lack of wisdom of all of you and that seems to be because hes constantly provoking them. This isnt just like a lackluster defense. This is like come and get me, right?

So even when hes given like every opportunity and we get that in the follow-up dialogue, the credo where hes given the opportunity after he has been convicted to run away and hes just he doesnt take it. Like, in every step, he seems to want them to kill him even when I mean theyve declared him guilty and he offers up these basically absurd alternative sentences that he knows theyre going to reject. He just he seems angry and he seems like he wants to demonstrate the foolishness of the people of Athens.

Brian Wilson: Yeah, I mean he I like the idea of anger just because right at 28, he kind of has an external, internal dialogue and says but perhaps someone will say, Do you feel no compunction Socrates in having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty? I might fairly reply to him, Youre mistaken my friend if you think that a man whos worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death.

He gives the example of Achilles, right? Which we have this whole book of Homer about it and the first word of that is menace, right? Rage. Singham used the rage of Achilles. So he kind of brings it off and the whole presentation, I mean you can obviously if youre directing this, you can get a Mickey Rourke in there. You can kind of get somebody a little bit more relaxed.

But the rage is there, right? I mean its right in the dialogue when he brings up Achilles. But whats interesting to me is that he says right there, you know, the idea of even questioning that, right? The idea of thinking about that is but thats what Achilles did for half the book. So I feel like theres kind of a maybe a duality there of hes saying its wrong but he might also be implying that theres a certain bit of human nature in wanting to spare yourself. Do any of you feel like Socrates tries at any point to kind of at least give himself some breathing room in the dialogue to maybe convince the jury Im not as big a threat as you think I am?

Matthew Feeney: I think that he certainly does make fools of the accusers and make the charges sound ridiculous but I think as a as Aaron alluded to earlier, after the vote where hes found guilty, but not by a particularly large margin. And Socrates as well, Im glad that you didnt that I got some support here. But then goes on to propose that they give him a pension or that they you know, comparatively, a meager fine be imposed and he seems to he must have known that that would lose him what support he probably did have and then instead of a sort of sensible negotiation or proposal, hes sentenced to death and I think that thats quite telling.

Trevor Burrus: Well, I think that that interesting he does try to some extent but this at the beginning, he mentions Aristophanes The Clouds which kind of parodies Socrates. But he seems like a guy who believes the popular opinion is one thing about him. Like if you imagine a star today and everyone thinks that like theres some sort of rumor about someone and that theres really nothing he can do to change this, especially because I do think that he believes it.

Most people are stupid and so he says, Well, I get up there and I talk to a bunch of stupid people who have an idea about me because of this opinion thats in the clouds and other sort of just rumors about me. Im not going to convince them at all.

But I think he does try or really tries to make a case for the few people who might be willing to listen to him to some degree.

Aaron Ross Powell: Well, that was I mean teasing out this he defends himself but whether its an attempt to soften it as you ask or just to not I guess give in to what he sees as false charges, because he he could have just said, OK, youre right, and then throw himself on the mercy of the court or not really mounted much of a defense if he didnt care one way or another or but it seems like his defense is I guess what I had a difficult time figuring out is how much of the defense was like him trying to like I dont want to be punished. So Im going to try to defend myself versus I totally dont care what happens to me and in fact would like to be punished because it would prove me right.

But I cant stand by because he talks about how much what ultimately matters is not wealth. Its not prestige. Its the kind of person you are. Its your principles and so hes not going to hes going to defend his honor and his principles against these false charges but it doesnt matter what happens to him ultimately.

Trevor Burrus: Can we compare this to I mean it has been of course, but can we compare this to Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate in the sense of Jesus offering a defense against a crowd with a huge bias against him and saying nothing in response to their claims of his own type of disobedience of the Pharisees? I think its very similar except for Jesus was a little bit more taciturn.

Matthew Feeney: Yes. So I havent actually heard much about that comparison but I think what they both have in common is that that to a contemporary 21st century reader in Washington DC, its the thing that Socrates and Jesus do seem to have in common is that theyre being accused of whats effectively thought crime in the like you have the wrong kind of ideas and youre being too persuasive to people and all this other sort of stuff.

Trevor Burrus: But in our post-rationalization because they kind of both start movements these texts are at least written for the purpose of starting a movement. Both of these are just like, well, Im going to die and my death is going to be a lesson. I mean its a really big lesson for Jesus but its they just sort of resigned themselves to their fate and so we see a trial which again has a righteousness of standing against the power that is arrayed against you.

Matthew Feeney: Yeah, and it is the case that Socrates does say I think at the end something look, youre going to think yourself a little silly and I think he has been proven right.

Trevor Burrus: Well, theres a Pharisaic equality to the people who are accusing him. These three accusers who I think are just some sort of they represent classes, if I read that correctly.

Brian Wilson: Yeah. I mean I the way that I kind of tie this in more is I feel like that Plato I mean obviously this is an important part of the canon, right? Of the platonic canon, an important part of Socrates. I dont know if you need it. You need the Pontius Pilate story to have a serious impact on Christianity. I dont know if you need the Apology to make Socrates understood. But it is important. I would compare it more to something like Kafkas The Trial, something like Orwell, something like Eileen Changs Naked Earth where its youre against the state, right?

Socrates lays it out, right? He says very specifically around 31-C he basically says, he says, I dont mess with the state because I know whats going to happen, right? The last part of 31-C, The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone, right?

Hes trying to go out of his way to do this but the state doesnt care, right? The state just by questioning any aspect of its doctrine is going to get insulted, right?

Trevor Burrus: I like how he was bringing up how he makes no money. There are a lot of things that as a lawyer, there are a lot of things in the world where the state cant get you until youre making money off of it. They dont have any jurisdiction over you until youre making money off of it. So its like, hey, Im just doing this, my own private life. Private is private.

Brian Wilson: Yeah. The thing is that this is the only thing that the only two things that they could threaten, right? It was first saying you cant do this anymore, right? And it was important for him to be able to do it and in Athens and then the only other thing was his life, right?

So if he wants to take that kind of binary look and say, If this or that, it does show how necessary he sees exploring what is the virtuous life as a at least critical for him and I think that that example obviously shines through in a very robust way in what hes talking about.

You know, something that we talk about because weve done this seminar a couple of times with the military audience is around line 29. He says, The truth of the matter is this, gentlemen. This was right after the Achilles comparison. The truth of the matter is this, gentlemen. Where a man has once taken up a stand either because it seems best to him or an obedience to his orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or anything else before dishonor. This being so, it would be a shocking inconsistency on my part, gentlemen, if when the officers whom you chose to command me, assigned me at my position at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, I remained at my post like anyone else and faced death, and yet afterward, when God appointed me, as I supposed and believed, to the duty of leading the philosophical life, examining myself and others, I were then through fear of death or of any other danger to desert my post.

So, well, thats like super firey-uppey for like libertarians. You have to wonder how effective that is. How effective is that analogy to you as readers? How effective potentially is that for a military reader? I mean it certainly puts like a lot of military readers kind of on the horns of the dilemma is you know, there is this idea of death before dishonor.

You know, why is Socrates so set on either not teaching philosophy as more dishonorable than death?

Matthew Feeney: Well, I think it might strike us as maybe a little odd as readers now to hear that rhetoric, especially coming from someone who was a philosopher. But I think its important to remember that Socrates was also a soldier for a while and that one of the accusers is a general who fought the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War and that a lot of people in Athens at the time would have understood the role of the military and would probably have served. I think its some sort of appeal and of course saying, Im just like Achilles, is a clear everyone in ancient Greece would have known the reference clearly and who legends were very popular.

Of course Achilles had this living with dishonor is worse than death and that even if I know Im dead after I fight and kill Hector, thats worthwhile. He seems to view his own death I mean I think that Socrates arrogance is on display in a number of places. But my favorite example of that was when he says, Maybe if I die, my death will be like other people who died unjustly, and he cites Palamedes who was of course sent to get Odysseus, the great trickster, to come to Troy and Palamedes tricked the trickster because of Odysseus tried to pretend to be insane, was so insulting to the earth and Palamedes put Odysseus son Telemachus in front of the plough and tricked Odysseus because Odysseus wasnt going to cut his own son in half off the plough.

I just find that a really interesting that when he says, My death will be like other unjust deaths, and that is death of at least one particularly clever person is really quite telling. But no, I think going back to the original line of inquiry here that the military rhetoric is very deliberate and I think he must have known that it would have pulled on the heartstrings of a few of the people on the jury.

Trevor Burrus: Well, a lot of this tradition of death before dishonor or anyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to people standing against and saying, I will not forsake my principles for this thing thats standing against me that has none of these principles at all, it resonates with almost everyone. I mean movies, everything, is made after this and you could always sort of put a libertarian spin on this.

But I think its interesting that this is something I had noticed before that I dont have the exact locations unfortunately that you do for the official version. But he has done this before. Socrates talks about the Thirty, in like how he had done this before. He had stood against this the Thirty

Aaron Ross Powell: The tyrants.

Trevor Burrus: When the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent me and four others into the rotunda and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis as they wanted to put him to death. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes.

So we get this theres basically some sort of Stalinist despotism, just killing people left and right. And then I showed not in word only but in deed that if I may be allowed to use up an expression, I cared not a straw for death and that my great and only care was lest I should do an unrighteous or unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong and when we came out of the rotunda, the other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. And many will witness to my words.

Its kind of interesting that at some point Im not sure historically how long that was. He had the habit of this death before unrighteousness kind of thing.

Matthew Feeney: Yeah. The historical context here is interesting because this sort of this oligarch, this pro-Spartan set of tyrants were in charge effectively, in charge of Athens and

Trevor Burrus: Do you know what years?

Matthew Feeney: So this was 404 BC.

Read the original:

Socrates on Trial, Part 1: Apology | Libertarianism.org

This is not without reason. Libertarians talk a lot about auditing the Federal Reserve and returning U.S. currency to the gold standard. They rail against the war on drugs and many of them, including the party's front-runner, enjoy pot. But as the Libertarian Party gathers in Florida to select its nominee during an unprecedented year in politics, it has a chance to break out of the fringe.

Founded in 1971, the Libertarian Party offers an ideological and political alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties, in favor of reducing government involvement in all sectors, from the economy to social issues.

Although disagreement abounds on specific measures and the extent to which government should shrink, Libertarians almost universally advocate for slashing government benefits, reducing economic regulations and implementing radical reform -- if not the outright elimination -- of the Federal Reserve. On social matters, Libertarians generally take a liberal approach, favoring same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of most, or all, drugs. The party is deeply pro-gun rights and takes a skeptical stance on any military involvement in other countries.

Many of these ideas are rooted in principles espoused by Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged." Rand helped popularize the controversial Libertarian principle that "egoism" was preferable to altruism -- that one's self-interest trumped anything else so long as it did not mean hurting anyone else.

These ideas are old, and debates over core Libertarian principles abound. Rather than dig through the weeds, CNN reached out to several contemporary Libertarians -- all of whom will be key players in the national convention this weekend -- to get a better understanding of Libertarianism as it stands now.

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the party's 2012 presidential nominee and the frontrunner this cycle, said, "The more government does, the less freedom we enjoy. The Libertarian view is in favor of smaller government and greater individual liberty."

Austin Petersen, a hardcore party advocate and candidate for president, said Libertarianism "means being fiscally conservative and socially whatever you want provided you don't force it on anyone else."

He said people could live as they pleased. Whether that meant living by traditional values or taking hard drugs, Petersen said the government should not regulate anyone's lifestyle.

"You can live a socially conservative lifestyle, but it doesn't mean you want to legislate other people to have a socially conservative lifestyle," Petersen said.

Petersen has split with many socially liberal members of his party on abortion, which allows him to pitch himself social conservatives in a way other candidates cannot.

"I believe a fetus is a human child," Petersen said. "You cannot have liberty without sanctity of life."

Meanwhile, John McAfee, a cybersecurity expert who earned international notoriety years before his recent run for the Libertarian nomination, described libertarianism as an economic and social lifestyle of its own. He rolled off a list of principles he said defined his understanding of the party.

"Number one, our bodies and our minds belong to ourselves and not to the government or anyone else for that matter. Number two, we should not harm one another," McAfee recited.

"Number three, we should not take each other's stuff. We should not steal each other's property. Number four, we should keep our agreements."

Carla Howell, political director of the Libertarian National Committee, offered the party's own answer.

"We advocate for minimum government and maximum freedom," Howell said.

When it comes to policy, Howell cited party commitments to cutting taxes, ending the war on drugs and privatizing poorly performing government agencies. She took the TSA to task in particular, calling for its elimination. Howell also said the Libertarian Party advocates ending military interventions and foreign aid, which she said would promote peace and reduce spending.

"Bottom line," Howell said, "We need to make government much smaller than it is today."

Read the original here:

What is Libertarianism? - CNNPolitics.com

Transcript

Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Im Trevor Burrus.

Aaron Powell: And Im Aaron Powell.

Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Thomas C. Leonard, research scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and lecturer at Princeton Universitys Department of Economics. He is the author of the new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Welcome to Free Thoughts.

Thomas Leonard: Thanks. Nice to be with you.

Trevor Burrus: So Id like to start with the title which says a lot by itself. Why Illiberal Reformers?

Thomas Leonard: Well, everyone knows that the scholars and activists who dismantled laissez faire and built welfare state were reformers. They dont call it the progressive era for nothing. But its my claim that a central feature of that reform, central feature of erecting the regulatory state, a new kind of state, was the producing of liberties in the name of various conceptions of the greater good. Not just economic liberties, property rights, contract and so forth, thats sort of a well-known part of the transition from 19th century liberalism to 20th century liberalism, but also I maintain civil and personal liberties as well.

Trevor Burrus: And what time period, are we talking about just after the turn of the century or the turn of the 20th century or going back further than that?

Thomas Leonard: Well, the idea is the architecture, if you will, the blueprints were drawn up sort of in the last decade and a half of the 19th century and they gradually made their way into actual sort of legislation and institutions, government institutions in the first 2 decades of the 20th century. Sort ofto use the usual scholarly terms kind of late gilded age and then the progressive era.

Trevor Burrus: So, who are these people, these reformers? Are they politicians mostly or are they in some other walk of life?

Thomas Leonard: Eventually they are politicians, but the politicians have to be convinced first. So the convincers in the beginning are a group of intellectuals or if you like scholars. They are economists, sociologists, population scientists, social workers.

Trevor Burrus: Population scientists, are those basically Malthusians or?

Thomas Leonard: No. Today we call them demographers.

Trevor Burrus: We dont use that term anymore. We call them what today?

Thomas Leonard: No. No. Today, we would call them demographers.

Trevor Burrus: Oh, okay.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Its not quiteit doesnt have to sound that sinister. But one of the interesting things, Trevor, about social science in this kind ofin its very beginnings in the late 19th century is itsits only beginning to become an academic discipline which is part of the book story. And a lot of social science kind of social investigations, fact-finding, research reports, a lot of that is being done outside the academy in the immigrant settlement houses, to a lesser extent in government administrative agencies, in investigations funded by the brand-new foundations and eventually in this brand-new invention called the Think Tank.

Aaron Powell: Was this increasing influence by what these people are ultimately working is largely academic, so is this new for academics or academics this influential before this?

Thomas Leonard: No. It is new. Its a revolution in academia. If we could transport ourselves backwards in time to Princeton, say, in 1880, we wouldnt recognize the place. American colleges, you know, just after the Civil War were tiny institutions. They werent particularly scholarly. They were denominational. They were led by ministers. In Princetons case, they would have been finishing southern gentlemen and you wouldnt recognize it at all.

If, however, we could transport ourselves back to, say, 1920, just at the end of the progressive era, you would recognize everything about the place. The social sciences had been invented and installed. Theres the beginning of the physical sciences in academia and its no longer just the classics, theology and a little bit of philosophy and mathematics. Part of the story of the rise of reform is the story of this revolution in American higher ed which takes place between 1880 and 1900.

Trevor Burrus: In the book, you discussed how Germany figures into this to some degree, which I thought was kind of interesting because Germany also figured into reforming our public education below higher ed but Germany status in the intellectual world was very influential on Americans in particular.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, thats quite right. The German connection is crucial for understanding the first generation of economists and other reformers. In the 1870s and into the 1880s, if you wanted to study cutting-edge political economy, Germany was where you went and all of the founders of American economics and indeed most of the other sort of newly hatching social sciences did their graduate work in Bismarck in Germany. And its only sort of beginning in the 1890s that American higher end catches up but, boy, does it catch up quickly. Thats why we use the term revolution.

But the turn of the century, you know, the number of graduate students in the United States getting Ph.D.s is in the thousands. You know, sort of after the Civil War even as late as 1880, it would have just been a handdful.

Trevor Burrus: So what did these people start thinking aboutI mean these illiberal reformers, what did they get in their head partially from Germany, partially from other sources which we can talk about later? But in the sort of general overview when they looked at society, what did they sort of maybe not suddenly but at that moment, what did they decide they wanted to do with it?

Thomas Leonard: Well, another thing to understand is that most of them, in addition to sort of having this German model of how an economy works and also a German model of how an economy should be regulated, there were also evangelical protestants, most of them grew up in evangelical homes, most of them were sons and daughters of ministers or missionaries and they had, you know, this extraordinary zeal, this desire to set the world to rights. And they looked around them during the industrial revolution and they saw what really was extraordinary, unprecedented, economic and social change which we cannot gather under the banner of the industrial or at least the American industrial revolution.

And when they looked around them, they saw injustice. They saw low wages. There was a newly visible class of the poor in the cities. They saw inefficiency. They saw labor conflict. They saw uneducated men getting rich and this upending of the old social order in their view was not only inefficient, it was also un-Christian and immoral and it needed to be reformed, and they were sort ofits important to say unabashed about using evangelical terminology. They referred to this is the first generation of progressives. They referred to their project as bringing a kingdom of heaven to Earth.

Aaron Powell: Then how did theyso theyve got this project. Theyve identified these issues that they want to change. How did they go about turning that concern and the expertise that they thought they had into control of the reins of power or influence within government?

Thomas Leonard: Great question. It wasnt easy. They understood that they had a tall task in front of them. They had to persuade those in power that reform was needed and reform was justified. And it helped that 2 other students, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson went on too famous as politicians and so did other progressives at lower levels too. Part of the idea of academic economics in this sort of beginning stage was that you didnt just spend time in the library or do blackboard exercises. Your job was to go out and make the world a better place.

So, I think the best way to think about it was they, along with many other reformers, wrote for the newspapers, went on the lecture circuits, bent the air of politicians first at the state level and then later at the federal level and said its a new economic world. The old economic ideas, laissez faire as they called it, are not only is it immoral, its economically obsolete and we need to build a new relationship not unlike the model that Germany provided between the state and economic life. And very gradually it happened.

Trevor Burrus: They were talking about also the emergence of the administrative state comes into this too because then they can take over posts in government that are not necessarily elected where their expertise is supposed to be utilized.

Thomas Leonard: Thats exactly right. The crucial point is that we think about the progressive era as a huge expansion in the size and scope of government and indeed it is that. But the progressives didnt just want bigger government. They also wanted a new kind of government, which they saw as a better form, as a superior form of government. Famously the progressives werent just unhappy with economic life which was one thing, they were also unhappy with American political life and with American government which they saw and rightly so as corrupt and inefficient and not doing what it should be doing to improve society and economy. So they wanted to not only to expand state power but also to relocate it, to move government authority away from the courts which traditionally had held quite a bit of regulatory power and away from legislatures and into what they sometimes called a new fourth branch of government, the administrative state.

Trevor Burrus: And youre right, youre right in your book which I think this is a very succinct way of pointing it. Progressivism was first and foremost an attitude about the proper relationship of science and its bearer, the scientific expert, to the state and of the state to the economy and polity. And so these expertsI also want to think we should make clear, this was not a fringe group of intellectuals and academic professors. This waswould you say it was the mainstream or at least a kind of whos who of American intellectuals and all the great Ivy League institutions?

Thomas Leonard: Absolutely. Its the best and brightest if I can use an anachronistic phrase. Now, we have to be a little careful with Ivy League because the centers of academic reform are at places like Wisconsin and to some extent at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins and to some extent at Penn. But the old colonial colleges like Harvard and Yale were a little late to catch up. It took them a while to catch on to this new German model of graduate seminars and professors as experts and not merely instructors.

Trevor Burrus: So how did they conceptualize the average worker that needed their help? You have this great line in your book which I think says something about modern politics too. Progressives did not work in factories. They inspected them. Progressives did not drink in salons. They tried to shudder them. The bold women who chose to live among the immigrant poor and city slums called themselves settlers, not neighbors. Even when progressives idealized workers, they tended to patronize them. Romanticizing a brotherhood that they would never consider joining.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. I think its fair to say and its not exactly a revelation that the progressives were not working class, but neither were they, you know, part of the gentry class. They were middle class and from middle class backgrounds, as I say sons and daughters of ministers and missionaries. So, they were unhappy when they looked upward at the new plutocrats who were uneducated and in their view un-Christian and potentially corrupting of the republic, but they also didnt like what they saw when they looked downward at ordinary people particularly at immigrants. If you dont mind, I feel like I should circle back to this fourth branch idea

Trevor Burrus: Please.

Thomas Leonard: as a conception of the administrative state. I didnt finish my thought very well. I think that the way that the progressives thought about the fourth branch is very important because the administrative state is as everyone knows has done nothing but grow since its blueprinting and its sort of first construction in Woodrow Wilsons first term. I think the key thingsort of these two key components that make this a new kind of government in the progressive mind. The first is that the independent agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission and the Permanent Tariff Commission were designed to be independent of Congress and the president. That was by design.

They were supposed to be in some sense above politics. They served for 7 years. They had overlapping terms. Oftentimes, they would be balanced politically and the president could not remove one of these commissioners except for cause and neither could Congress impeach them. So they occupied a kind of a unique place, a new place did these bureaucrats.

The second thing that matters I think for understanding the administrative state is that administrative regulations have the full force of federal law, right? Regulations are laws no different than you know, Congress had passed one. Moreover, the fourth branch, the administrators are also responsible for executing regulations and third, of course, theyre responsible for adjudicating regulatory disputes. So theres this combination of statutory and adjudicatory and executive power all rolled up into one, which is why I think the progressives called it the fourth branch. And the growth of administrative government I think is a much better metric for thinking about the success, if you will, or the durability of the progressive vision than simply looking at something like government spending as a share of GDP.

Aaron Powell: Can we decouple at least for purposes of critique the ideology of the progressives from the methods? Because obviously they ended up once they had the power, ended up doing a lot of really lamentable or awful things with it. But the basic idea of having experts in charge of thingsI mean you can see a certain appeal to that especially as, you know, science advances, technology advances, our body of knowledge grows. We understand more about the economy and more about how societies function just like you would want, you know, experts in the medical sciences overseeing your health as opposed to just laymen. Is there anything just inherently wrong or dangerous about the idea of turning over more of government to experts distinct from just the particular ideas of this set of experts?

Thomas Leonard: I dont think so. I think the question is more a practical one of what we think experts should do whether theyre working in government or in the private sector. And the progressives had what you might call a heroic conception of expertise. They believed that they not only could be experts serve the public good but they could also identify the public good and thats what I mean by a heroic conception. Not only do we know how to get to a particular outcome, we know also what those outcomes should be.

Now theres nothing about expertise per se that requires that heroic vision which in retrospect looks both arrogant and nave. It makes good sense for the state to call upon expertise where expertise can be helpful. So I dont think its an indictment of the very idea of using science for the purposes of state. Its more about what sort of authority and we want experts to have. Going as we sort of move into the new deal era, which is another great growth spurt in the size of the state, we get a slightly less heroic vision of what experts do. Thereswell, after World War I, that sort of nave heroic view of expertise is simply outmoded.

Trevor Burrus: So they definitelytheyre pretty arrogant as you mentioned. They haveso Im going to ask you sort of a few things about the way that theyre looking at society and what they think that they can do with it and what theyre allowed to do with it. So, how did they view individual rights and as a core layer, I guess, how do they think of society as opposed to the individual in terms of the sort of methodology of their science or state craft or whatever you want tohowever you want to describe it?

Thomas Leonard: Thats a great question. I think one of the most dramatic changes that we see in sort of American liberal thinking and its transition from 19th century small government liberalism to 20th century liberalism of a more activist expert-guided state is a re-conception of what Dan Rogers calls the moral hole, the idea of a nation or a state or a social organism as an entity that is something greater than the individual people that make it up. And I think this fundamental change is one of the sort of key elements in this progressive inflection point in American history. Up until that point if youre willing to call an era a point, forgive me. Up until that moment, I think thats what we should say.

Trevor Burrus: I think thats good, yes.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, right. We would have said the United States are and after the progressive reconceptualization, its the United States is. Instead of a collection of states of federation, now the idea is that theres a nation. Woodrow Wilsons famous phrase at least famous in these precincts was Princeton in the nations service and this desire to identify a kind of moral hole, a nation, a state or a social organism. They gave it different names. I think the great impetus to the idea that it was okay to trespass on individual liberties as long as it promoted the interests of the nation or the state or the people or society or the social organism.

Trevor Burrus: So how doesand this is another big factor because its kind of interesting. We have awe talk about them as evangelicals and then progressives, which a lot of people might be surprised, the people who call themselves progressives now. But we also have them as evangelical but with Darwin and evolution having a huge influence on their thinking which also seems to not go with the way we align these things today. How did Darwin and evolution come in to their thinking and what did it make them start to conclude?

Thomas Leonard: Right. Well, remember the quote you had before about progressivism as being essentially a concept that refers to the relationship of science to government and of government to the economy. The science of the day or at least the science that most influencedthe economic reformers was Darwinism. And theres just no understanding progressive era reform without understanding the influence of Darwinism. It was in the progressive view what made these brand-new social sciences just barely established scientific. Thats one of the reasons we do history. Economics today doesnt have a whole lot to do with evolution or with Darwinism and has a lot to do with mathematics and statistical approaches. But at the turn of the century and until the end of the First World War, evolutionary thinking was at the heart of the science that underwrote economics and the other new social sciences, which were at least in the progressive view to guide the administrative state in its relationship to economy and polity.

Aaron Powell: What does Darwinian thinking look like in practice for the policy preferences of the progressives? I mean I see were not just talking about we need to breed out undesirable traits or something of that sort. How does the specifics of Darwin apply to their broader agenda?

Thomas Leonard: Well, Darwin does many things for the progressives. Darwin by himself is sort of a figure that they admire, sort of hes a disinterested man of science concerned only with the truth and uninterested in profit like, say, a greedy capitalist, uninterested in power like, say, a greedy politician. I mean Darwin is kind of a synecdoche if you like for the progressive conception of what a scientific expert does.

More than that, I think that, you know, the progressives andand by the way, many other intellectuals too, socialists and conservatives alike, were able to find whatever they needed in Darwin. Darwin was so influential in the gilded age and in the progressive era that everybody found something useful for their political and intellectual purposes during the gilded age and the progressive era.

Take competition, for example. If you were a so-called social Darwinist, you could say that competition was survival of the fittest, Herbert Spencers phrase that Darwin eventually borrowed himself and that, therefore, that those who succeeded in economic life were in some sense fitter. The progressives could use other evolutionary thinkers and say Wait a second, not so. Fitter doesnt necessarily mean better. Fitter just means better adapted to a particular environment. So competition would be an example of Darwinian thinking that was influential in the way that progressives thought about the way an economy works.

Trevor Burrus: But they werent particular. I mean they werent laissez faire and I know at one point you mentioned that theI think you said that it was either the American Economic Association or maybe sociology was started partially against William Graham Sumner. Was it sociology? William Graham Sumner was very influential on creating counter-movements to him and he is sort of a proto-libertarian or a libertarian figure who was laissez faire but they were absolutely not.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Thats quite right. Sumner is the bte noire of economic reformers. He was of a slightly earlier generation, the generation of 1840, and he was the avatar as you say of free markets and of small government and Sumner was the man ElyRichard T. Ely, sort of the standard bearer of progressive economics said that he organized the American Economic Association to oppose. Yeah, Sumner was in the end the only economist who is not asked to join the American Economic Association. So much was he sort of personally associated with laissez faire.

Trevor Burrus: Now, of course, they were accused and this is an important historical point because you mentioned the social Darwinism and I think I can almost hear your scare quotes through the line because that idea of Sumner and Herbert Spencer being Darwinists of a sort of wanted to let people die is a little bit overextended. Spencer definitely had some evolutionary ideas about society, but the social Darwinism doesnt only come in until the 50s if I understand correctly.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Social Darwinism is really an anachronism applied to the progressive era. I think we can safely, you know, ascribe the influence of that term to Richard Hofstadter who coined it in his dissertation which was published during the Second World War. It is true, of course, that you could find apologists for laissez faire or you could find people who said that, you know, economic success was not a matter of luck or a fraud or of coercion but was deserved, was justified.

There were lots of defenders of laissez faire on various grounds and Spencer and Sumner find they fit that description. But neither of them were particularly Darwinian. Spencer was a rival of Darwins. He thought his theory waswell, it was prior. He thought it was better and he coined the term evolution. And Sumner really wasnt much of a Darwinist at all if you look through his work, its only dauded with a few Darwinian references. I think what Hofstadter did, and he was such a graceful writer, is he coined a new term that sounded kind of unpleasant.

And if you look through the entire literature which Ive done, you will be hard-pressed to find a single person who identifies him or herself as a social Darwinist. You wont find a journal of social Darwinism. You wont find laboratories of social Darwinism. You wont find international societies for the promotion of social Darwinism.

Trevor Burrus: But ironically, eugenics, you will find all of those things.

Thomas Leonard: You will find all of those things.

Trevor Burrus: Actually, could you explain what eugenics is before we jump into the truly distasteful part of this episode?

Thomas Leonard: Well, eugenics is just in the progressive era what it meant, the period of my book, is the social control of human heredity. Its the idea that human heredity just like anything else guided by good science and overseen by socially-minded experts can improve human heredity just like it can improve government. It can make government good. It can make the economy more efficient and more just and so too can we do the same for human heredity.

Trevor Burrus: And eugenics wasI mean I think big is even an understatement of at least the first two decades of the 20th century and into the third and fourth decade but especially the first two decades.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, there was an extraordinary intellectual vogue for eugenics all over the world, not just in the United States. Eugenics, its very difficult viewed in retrospect that is viewed through the sort of crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany in the middle of the 20th century. Its very difficult to see how what is a term that is a dirty word could actually be regarded as sort of the height of high-mindedness and social concern. But it was, in fact, at the time.

And across American society, eugenics was popular. It was popular among the new experimental biologists that we now called geneticist. It was certainly popular among the new social scientists, the economists and others who were staffing the bureaus at the administrative state and sitting in chairs in the university. And it was popular among politicians too. There were many journals of eugenics. There were many eugenics societies. They had international and national conferences. Hundreds probably thousands of scholars were happy to call themselves eugenicists and to advocate for eugenic policies of various kinds. Theres a book published in I think around 1924 by Sam Holmes who was a Berkeley zoologist and theres like 6000 or 7000 titles on eugenics in the bibliography.

Aaron Powell: How did the eugenicists of the time think about what they were doing or think about the people that they were doing it to?

Trevor Burrus: Well, first we should ask what they were doing. We havent actually got to that.

Aaron Powell: But I mean in generallike the attitude towards the very notion of this because we can even setting aside the horrors of what Nazi Germany did from our modern perspective looking back at this with the debates that we have and the struggle we have to allow people to say define the family, the way that they choose and just the overwhelming significance in, you know, the scope of ones life and the way one lives in that decision to have children and become a parent. And eugenics, no matterI mean no matter the details of it is ultimately taking that choice away from someone or making that choice for them and it seems just profoundly dehumanizing and did they consciously or unconsciously was there a dehumanizing element to it? Did they think of the people that they were going to practice this on as somehow less and so, therefore, deserving of less autonomy? Or was there a distancing from that element of it?

Thomas Leonard: Well, its important to rememberthe answer to the question is yes. The professionals, if you will, in the eugenics movement sort of the professionals and the propagandists certainly saw immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, immigrants from Asia, African Americans, the mentally and physically disabled as inferiors as unfit. Theres just no question about it. But what we needone important caution here again is that there were very few people at the time proposing anything like hurting inferiors into death chambers.

Eugenic policies were much less extreme. So when we encounter it in the context of, say, economic reform, it comes up In immigration, for example. If you regard immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia as unfit, as threats to American racial integrity or as economic threats to American working mens wages, thats a eugenic argument. Youre saying that when you argue that they will sort of reduce American hereditary vigor, thats a eugenic argument. It doesnt have to involve something as ugly as, say, coercive sterilization or worse.

Theres many ways of which I think are, you know, strange to us in retrospect of thinking about the law, be it immigration reform or minimum wages or maximum hours as a device for keeping the inferior out of the labor force or out of the country altogether.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, lets goyeah, the last third of your book kind of goes with this. We have a chapter called Excluding the Unemployable. So can you talk a little bit about what that entailed?

Thomas Leonard: Sure. The unemployable is a kind of buzz phrase that I think was probably coined by Sidney and Beatrice Webb who were Fabian socialists, founders of the London School of Economics and whose work was widely read by American progressives and with whom American progressives had a very kind of fruitful trans-Atlantic interaction with. Its a misnomer, of course, because the unemployable refers to people who many of whom were actually employed. And the idea here is that a certain category of worker is willing to work for wages below what progressives regarded as a living wage or a fair wage and that these sorts of people who were often called feeble-minded when they were mentally disabled or defectives when they were physically disabled were doing the sort of transgressing in multiple ways.

The first thing was by accepting lower wages, they were undermining the deserving American working men or American really means Anglo-Saxon. The second thing is because they were willing to accept low wages, the American worker was unwilling to do so to accept these low wages and so instead opted to have smaller families. That argument went by the name of race suicide. The undercutting inferior worker because he was racially predisposed to accept or innately predisposed to accept lower wages meant that the Anglo-Saxon native, if you willscare quotes around nativehad fewer children and as a result the inferior strains were outbreeding the superior strains and the result was what Edward A. Ross called race suicide.

Trevor Burrus: Now that sounds like the movie Idiocracy. Have you ever seen this movie?

Thomas Leonard: Im not familiar with it.

Trevor Burrus: Oh, well. So, but I want to clarify something that might shock our listeners thatand you mentioned this briefly a little bit like for the economists, for members of the American Economic Association, at the time some of them thought of the minimum wage as valuable precisely because it unemployed these people. So whereas now were actually having this fight about whether or not the minimum wage unemploys anyone. It seems like there were a few doubts that it did unemploy people and the people it unemployed were the unemployable, unproductive workers who shouldnt be employed in the first place.

Thomas Leonard: Thats right. Theres a very long list of people who at one time or another just almost comically if it werent sad, long list of groups that were vilified as being inferior. As I say, physically disabled, mentally disabled coming from Asia or Southern Europe or Eastern Europe, African American, although the progressive werent terribly worried about the African Americans, at least outside the south until they started the great migration and became economic competitors in the factories as well. So, this very long list of inferiors creates a kind of regulatory problem which is how are we going to identify them and so you can, if you think for example that a Jew from Russia or an Italian from the mezzogiorno is inferior, how are you going to know that theyre Jewish or that theyre from Southern Italy. Their passport doesnt specify necessarily.

So one way, of course, is to take out your handbook, the dictionary of the races of America or another more clever way ultimately is to simply set a minimum wage so high that all unskilled labor will be unable to legally come to America because theyll be priced out.

Trevor Burrus: And that was also true ofit goes a little bit past your book but the migration of African Americans north had some influence on the federal minimum wage of the New Deal if I remember correctly.

Thomas Leonard: Yes, it did, and also Mexican immigrants as well. The idea of inferiors threatening Americans or Native Americans is a trope that recurs again and again and again, not just in the progressive era but also in the New Deal. And it is I suppose shocking and bizarre to see the minimum wage as hailed for its eugenic virtues. But one very convenient way of solving this problem of how do we identify the inferiors is to simply assume that theyre low-skilled and, therefore, unproductive and a binding minimum wage will ensure that the unproductive are kept out or if theyre already in the labor force, theyll be idled. And the deserving, that is to say the productive workers who were always assumed, of course, to be Anglo-Saxon will keep their jobs and get a raise. Its a very appealing notion.

And youre quite right that today, you know, most of the debate or a good part of the minimum wage debate concerns a question of how much unemployment you get for a given increase in the minimum. But theres no question that any disemployment from a higher minimum is a social cause thats undesirable. The progressive era was not seen as a social cause. It was not seen as a bug. It was seen as a desirable feature and this is why progressivism has made a virtue of it precisely because it did exclude so many folks who were regarded as deficientdeficient in their heredity, deficient in their politics, deficient in many other ways as well.

Aaron Powell: What struck me when you were running through the policies that they wanted so the minimum wage in order to exclude these people or the concerns about immigration is how many of them maybeI mean not in the motives behind them necessarily, not in the stated motives but in the specifics of the policies and some of the concerns look very much like what you hear today, you know. There seem to be conventional wisdom about the need to keep out unskilled immigrants. You hear stuff about, you know, theres too many of them in the population and that that will ultimately cause problems if they, you know, tip over into a majority or the existing minimum wage, but they dont seemthey dont have the what we think of as terrifically ugly motives behind them.

And so is therelike that historic change because it seems odd that if the motives and the desires and the attitudes have shifted, we would have seen the resulting policy shift. So how did thathow do we get that transition from, you know, keeping the desire for the policies of the progressive era but shifting our attitudes, our sense of virtue to something that would see the motives behind the policy of the progressive era as so repugnant?

Thomas Leonard: Well, I think that, you know, we teach freshmen in economics to make this fairly bright distinction between the so-called positive and the normative, right? So the positive question is what are the effects of the minimum wage on employment and what are the effects of the minimum wage on output prices and what are the effects of the minimum wage on the income distribution. And you can sort of think about these questions without sort of tipping over onto the normative side which isis it a good thing or a bad thing that a particular class of worker namely the very unskilled are likely to be harmed at all? So you canI think in a way its partly a parable about, you know, the capacity of sorting so-called scientific claims from so-called normative or ethical matters.

You know, my own view is one can be a supporter of the minimum wage, of course, without, you know, having repugnant views about the folks who are going to lose their job if we raise the minimum wage too high.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, of course. That

Thomas Leonard: Goes with I think that goes without saying.

Trevor Burrus: Well, thats an interesting question about what are the lessons

Thomas Leonard: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus: from this. But I wanted to ask you about one more thing before we kind of get to that question which is aboutbecause theres another one that we didnt touch on which might surprise people, which is excluding women. So we gotwe went therethere were some sterilization, which weve been talking about much but you mentioned excluding unemployable. We had about immigration and now we also have excluding women and people might be surprised to hear that progressives were actually interested in doing this.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. This is awell, all of these accounts are complex. The story of womens labor legislation is probably the most complex of all and thats partly because in the progressive era, most labor legislation was directed at women and at women only, not all but sort of the pillars of the welfare state which is to say minimum wages, maximum hours, mothers pensions which eventually evolved into AFTC and welfare. Those pillars werethose pillars that legislation was women and women only.

Now, there are different ways of thinking about it. I think that the thing to remember is that a lot of these legislation to set a wage floor to set a maximum number of hours to give women payments women with dependent children payments at home were enacted not so much to protect women from employment, the hazards of employment but rather to protect employment from women.

And when you look at the discourse, you do find a kind of protective paternalistic line where, for example, the famous Brandeis Brief which was used in so many Supreme Court cases in defensive labor legislation just sort of boldly asserts that women are the weaker sex and thats why women as women need to be protected from the hazards of market work. They didnt worry so much about the hazards of domestic work.

Trevor Burrus: And Brandeis was a champion ofI mean hes considered a champion of progressive era, but he did write this unbelievably sexist brief in Muller versus Oregon.

Thomas Leonard: Indeed he did and he collaborated with his sister-in-law, Josephine Goldmark, and its regarded as sort of not only the case but the brief itself is regarded as sort of a landmark in legal circles. So theres also a second class of argument which still lives on today, I might add, which is called the family wage and this is the idea that theres a kind of natural family structure wherein the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays at home and tends the hearth and raises the kids and that male workers are entitled to a wage sufficient to support a wife and other dependents, and that when women work for wages, they wrongly usurp the wages that rightly belong to the breadwinner. Thats another argument for regulating womens employment. Thats not really protecting women. Thats protecting men, of course.

And there were a whole host of arguments. Another argument was worried about womens sexual virtue that if women accepted, you know, low wages at the factory, theyll be tempted into prostitution. The euphemism of the day was the social vice and John Bates Clark pointed out that if 5 dollars a week tempts a factory girl into vice, then 0 dollars a week will do so more surely.

Trevor Burrus: Its really hard to decide when youre going through all this stuff and you include immigration and all these issues whether or not these people arewhen were talking about progressives, so thats the name we all call them now. But if were going to use modern term, are they liberals or are they conservative? I mean if the immigration thing looks conservative now and the protecting womens virtue and supporting the family looks conservative and the racism, you know, but the minimum wage wanting that. So there seemed to be a hodgepodge of something that doesnt really map to anything now.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, I think thats right. I think its a mistake. I mean one of the problems that we face looking backwards from today is that progressivism todaya progressive today is someone on the left, someone on the left wing of the democratic party and thats not what progressive meant in the progressive era. There certainly were plenty of folks on the left who were progressives but they were also right progressives too. Men like Theodore Roosevelt would be a canonical sort of right progressive. Roosevelt ran as you know on that progressive ticket in 1912 handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson in so doing.

Yeah, I thinkyeah, one of the, you know, the historiographic lessons of the book is be careful projecting contemporary categories backwards in time. You know, the original progressives, they defended human hierarchy. They were Darwinists. They either ignored or justified Jim Crow. They were moralists. They were evangelicals. They promoted the claims of the nation over individuals and they had this, of course, heroic conception of their own roles as experts. Thats very different from what 21st century progressives are about. The 21st century progressives couldnt be more different in some respects. Theyre not evangelicals. Theyre very secular. They emphasize racial equality and minority rights. Theyre nervous about nationalism but they donttheyre not imperialists like the progressives were. Theyre unhappy with too much Darwinism in their social science. So, in these respects contemporary progressives are very different from their namesakes.

Here is the original post:

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics ... - Libertarianism.org

Image via Wikipedia

These days , in the occasional university philosophy classroom, the differences between Robert Nozicks Anarchy, State, and Utopia (libertarianism) and John Rawls A Theory of Justice (social liberalism) are still discussed vigorously. In order to demonstrate a broad spectrum of possible political philosophies it is necessary to define the outer boundaries, these two treatises stand like sentries at opposite gatesof the polis

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Rawls presents an account of justice in the form of two principles: (1) liberty principle= peoples equal basic liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience (religion), and the right to vote should be maximized, and (2) difference principle= inequalities in social and economic goods are acceptable only if they promote the welfare of the least advantaged members of society. Rawls writes in the social contract tradition. He seeks to define equilibrium points that, when accumulated, form a civil system characterized by what he calls justice as fairness. To get there he deploys an argument whereby people in an original position (state of nature), make decisions (legislate laws) behind a veil of ignorance (of their place in the society rich or poor) using a reasoning technique he calls reflective equilibrium. It goes something like: behind the veil of ignorance, with no knowledge of their own places in civil society, Rawls posits that reasonable people will default to social and economic positions that maximize the prospects for the worst off feed and house the poor in case you happen to become one. Its much like the prisoners dilemma in game theory. By his own words Rawls = left-liberalism.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, libertarian response to Rawls which argues that only a minimal state devoted to the enforcement of contracts and protecting people against crimes like assault, robbery, fraud can be morally justified. Nozick suggests that the fundamental question of political philosophy is not how government should be organized but whether there should be any state at all, he is close to John Locke in that government is legitimate only to the degree that it promotes greater security for life, liberty, and property than would exist in a chaotic, pre-political state of nature. Nozick concludes, however, that the need for security justifies only a minimal, or night-watchman, state, since it cannot be demonstrated that citizens will attain any more security through extensive governmental intervention. (Nozick p.25-27)

the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection. (Nozick Preface p.ix)

Differences:

Similarities:

Some Practical Questions for Rawls:

Some Practical Questions for Nozick:

Read The Liberal Imagination of Frederick Douglass for an excellent discussion on the state of liberalism in America today.

Citations:

Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick. Basic Books. 1974

A Theory of Justice. John Rawls. Harvard University Press. 1971

Disclaimer: This is a forum for me to capture in digital type my understanding of various philosophies and philosophers. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the interpretations.

Like Loading...

View post:

Rawls and Nozick: Liberalism Vs Libertarianism

Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.

Il libertarianismo[1] (chiamato anche, impropriamente, libertarismo, termine che identifica una differente e pi ampia ideologia) un insieme di filosofie politiche tra loro correlate che considerano la libert come il pi alto fine politico.[2] Ci include la libert individuale[3], la libert politica e l'associazione volontaria. Le parole libertarianism e libertarism furono usate dalla seconda met del XX secolo da filosofi e politici anglosassoni che provenivano da differenti formazioni culturali (talvolta anche contrapposte): ossia quelle del liberalismo, socialismo, comunismo[4][5][6][7] e dell'anarchismo.

L'idea politica del libertarismo si rif al sistema economico capitalista e al diritto alla propriet privata, ma le sue numerose correnti divergono sul peso e sulla stessa figura dello Stato: gli anarco-capitalisti premono per una sua totale eliminazione, mentre i miniarchisti mirano a preservare un'autorit pubblica che svolga compiti basilari di difesa e ordine pubblico, o anche una ridotta assistenza sociale.[8]

In lingua inglese, i termini libertarism e libertarianism sono utilizzati come sinonimi nell'uso politico, per la precisione libertarism indica quasi invariabilmente il movimento collettivista, o left libertarianism, mentre libertarianism pu indicare sia il movimento anarchico che i partiti di stampo liberale.[senzafonte] Nella maggior parte delle altre lingue ad esempio neolatine si distingue tra libertarismo, un concetto ampio sinonimo di anarchia[9], che in quanto tale si identifica con l'anarchismo e il socialismo libertario, e libertarianismo, che trae le sue origini dal liberalismo classico[1], le cui correnti principali sono l'anarco-capitalismo e il miniarchismo.

I libertariani si definiscono di solito come liberali coerenti, rigorosi e nemici della coercizione, propugnando in modo radicale le tesi tipiche del liberalismo.[10]

Due sono i filoni pi diffusi del libertarianismo:

I miniarchisti prospettano uno Stato ridotto alla minima funzione di garante delle libert individuali, ovvero lo stato di diritto; questa corrente costituzionalista si rifa evidentemente ai pensatori originali del liberalismo, per esempio John Locke, e in tempi pi recenti a intellettuali del calibro di Friedrich Von Hayek e Robert Nozick. Per i sostenitori del miniarchismo lo Stato tenuto a intervenire in economia, in linea di massima, solo per garantire un corretto svolgimento del libero mercato, abbattendo i monopoli e gli oligopoli (qualora questi siano venuti in essere violando i diritti individuali) e costruendo le necessarie e ovvie infrastrutture.

Gli anarco-capitalisti giudicano le proposte del miniarchismo incoerenti dal punto di vista teorico e irrealizzabili sul piano concreto, proponendo invece l'abolizione dello Stato e la realizzazione di un sistema di privatopie, entit territoriali auto-organizzate nei limiti delle libert individuali in grado di fornire servizi di libero mercato, sviluppantesi secondo un sistema di adesione volontaria alle regole che ogni enclave stabilisce autonomamente. Il sistema delle privatopie esclude a priori l'esistenza di nazioni e soprattutto entit sovranazionali, ammettendo unicamente la diffusione di una capillare e interattiva rete di piccole comunit private. Il principale punto di riferimento intellettuale della corrente anarco-capitalista Murray Newton Rothbard.

All'interno di questa visione radicale, i libertariani anarcocapitalisti intendono privatizzare, o meglio porre su un mercato libero, quei settori come l'amministrazione della giustizia, la sicurezza e l'ordine pubblico che perfino i liberali classici considerano alla stregua di prerogative esclusive dello Stato; in questo senso va letta la loro idea di anarco-individualismo.

La filosofia politica ed economica contemporanea stenta a riconoscere la validit delle teorie libertariane, non tanto per l'opposizione alla gestione privatizzata e concorrenziale di settori fondamentali dello stato sociale come la giurisdizione, quanto per il fondato timore che in un assetto socio-economico cos definito, privo di qualsivoglia governo centrale, una congrega ristretta di individui molto potenti sia tentata di imporre coercitivamente la propria autorit al resto della comunit; in pratica, il sistema anarco-capitalista sarebbe non auspicabile perch tenderebbe a favorire, nel momento stesso in cui venisse implementato, quei pochissimi soggetti che gi dispongono di un notevole potere finanziario (multinazionali, banche d'investimento, lobby industriali etc.). Lo stato di diritto invece, essendo, quanto meno nelle sue forme pi avanzate, basato sul sistema democratico della decisione politica, tenderebbe invece a contrastare la concentrazione del potere nelle mani di esigui gruppi privilegiati, dal momento che, qualunque sia la politica economica di una comunit, la maggior parte degli individui di quella stessa comunit ha interesse a difendere le gi ristrette risorse e propriet di cui dispone a fronte della soverchiante ricchezza di pochi soggetti. Uno degli oppositori pi spietati dell'anarco-capitalismo Noam Chomsky, il quale, da socialista libertario come egli stesso si definito, ha affermato che le idee libertariane, qualora applicate al mondo reale della politica, produrrebbero "tali forme di tirannia e oppressione come se ne sono viste poche nella storia dell'umanit".

I libertariani, d'altro canto, rigettano totalmente le accuse che vengono loro rivolte indistintamente dagli altri schieramenti politici, sia conservatori che progressisti, argomentando che in tutta la storia della civilt umana, se proprio vi un colpevole di violazione dei diritti umani, questi soprattutto lo Stato. E infatti proprio il potere astratto e non vincolante dell'autorit statale stato il principale mezzo con cui piccoli gruppi di potere o addirittura singoli individui hanno potuto, in tutti i tempi e in tutti i luoghi, realizzare forme di governo tiranniche, soverchianti e contrarie alle pi elementari regole di pacifica convivenza civile, o reiterare arbitrariamente la violazione del diritto di autodeterminazione di ogni essere umano, tra cui, al netto dell'evidenza, vi sono gli interventi armati contro altre popolazioni, minoranze o addirittura nazioni, sistematicamente portate avanti in nome di uno specifico ordine sociale da raggiungere e da imporre a tutti, o in nome di una generica sicurezza e stabilit nazionale.

Laddove quindi i tradizionali sostenitori dello Stato, inclusi i liberali classici, vedono in questo un'alta e possibilmente equa autorit garante dei diritti individuali, senza il quale sarebbe impossibile contenere lo spirito egoistico umano, che in un contesto anarchico non avrebbe freni n argini per manifestarsi, invece i libertariani pongono maggior fiducia nello spirito filiale dell'umanit, rammentando che le stesse idee di libert e uguaglianza sono nate dal basso, ovvero sono sorte spontaneamente dalla creativit mentale dei singoli, e non certo imposte dall'alto per "decreto intellettuale" da una presunta autorit garante della ragione. Il libero mercato, dunque, essendo per l'appunto una manifestazione spontanea e originale dello spirito di cooperazione umano, da intendere come la volont organica e orizzontale di una comunit di individui di determinare, ognuno per s stesso, il corso della propria vita, vivrebbe per necessit di autoregolazione, che nella visione libertariana viene chiamata anche "propriet di se stessi" o principio di non aggressione.

Gli anarchici di tradizione socialista usano il termine libertario per descrivere se stessi e le loro idee sin dal 1857. "Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement sociale", fu ad esempio pubblicato a New York dal 1858 al 1861 dal rivoluzionario anarcocomunista Joseph Dejacque[11]. Nella seconda met del 1900, negli Stati Uniti d'America, fece ingresso l'accezione liberal-libertaria, in genere indicata come libertarianism, ma, a volte libertarism. Il termine libertarianism, specificamente, nel 1970 rientrer in Europa per le traduzioni dell'economista francese Henri Lepage, con l'intenzione d'evitare evidenti fraintendimenti.

Le parole libertarismo e libertario furono quindi usate dalla seconda met del XX secolo da filosofi e politici anglosassoni che provenivano da differenti contrapposte formazioni culturali, e quindi, principalmente in lingua inglese, tali termini attualmente indicano movimenti culturali e politici che pur definendosi in traduzione italiana libertari sono assolutamente in antitesi tra loro. Filosofi e politici definiti libertari sono quindi in diverse tradizioni culturali ossia quelle del liberalismo, socialismo, comunismo e anarchismo: quest'ultimo movimento politico-sociale ha poi adottato il termine libertarismo appunto per autodefinirsi[12].

Negli anni settanta del XX secolo nasce negli Usa un partito politico che raccoglie una lunga storia di antistatalismo di taglio liberale e che si autodefinisce libertarian, il Libertarian Party, quindi utilizzando il termine in senso proprio, senza rispettare n i crismi anarchici della tradizione socialista, n, dunque, quelli libertari intesi nel senso europeo del termine.

Il Partito Libertariano degli Stati Uniti d'America, (LP) dall'11 dicembre 1971, data della sua fondazione, costantemente cresciuto, venendo a ricadere, utilizzando un termine innumerario, tra i terzi partiti ovvero tra i partiti minori che distaccati di diversi ordini di grandezza dai primi due, sono comunque presenti seppure a livello di decimali di milione. (Constitution Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party). Per le presidenziali del 2004 si posizionato sui 0.2 milioni di cittadini affiliati (Democratic 72.00, Republican 55.00, Indipendent 42.00, Constitution 0.37, Green 0.31, Libertarian 0.20). Nelle elezioni del 2008 il candidato libertarian con 532995 voti, lo 0,40% di preferenze, si aggiudicato la quarta posizione.

Si caratterizza per il forte antistatalismo, la volont di escludere qualunque intervento statale in campo di Welfare State in particolare nel campo della salute pubblica (abolizione di ogni forma di assistenza sanitaria universale garantita), e l'abolizione di ogni forma di tassazione generalista (corrispondente all'IVA italiana).

Da alcuni decenni, questo termine usato soprattutto per definire, in senso pi ampio, quelle teorie che danno preminenza alla scelta individuale davanti alle pretese di qualunque potere politico.

Il movimento mostra sensibilit verso la protezione della propriet e della libert di mercato ed uso comune definire "libertarianism" (e spesso anche "propertarianism", per distinguerlo maggiormente dal libertarismo di matrice anarchica tradizionale e socialista) la corrente anarco-capitalista, cio la versione pi estrema del pensiero liberale, la quale ha trovato la propria espressione pi significativa in Murray N. Rothbard.

Tale "libertarianism" affonda le sue radici nella tradizione dell'individualismo americano professando l'idea di un mercato completamente sottratto ad ogni tutela statale, che lasci l'individuo padrone di s in ogni aspetto della vita dell'individuo, inclusi i servizi di protezione, la giustizia e il diritto. La maggioranza dei suoi teorici sono fautori del giusnaturalismo lockiano, ma esiste anche una variante utilitarista (David Friedman). In Europa i massimi esponenti di tale teoria politica sono Hans-Hermann Hoppe e Anthony de Jasay.

Esistono in seno al movimento libertariano americano ed europeo una variet[13][14][15][16][17] di tendenze:

I libertariani, sia europei che americani, giudicano contraddittoria con le premesse antistataliste la tradizionale avversione degli anarchici di tradizione socialista (es. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Chomsky, ecc.) ad ogni idea di un libero mercato basato sulla legittimit della propriet privata, sullo scambio volontario e su interazioni umane liberamente scelte.

A causa dei problemi semantici sopra evidenziati, l'uso dei termini "libertario/libertarismo" per indicare l'anarchismo classico, e dei termini "libertariano/libertarianismo" per indicare l'anarco-capitalismo, praticamente ovunque diffuso, tranne che nei paesi di lingua inglese. L'affinit dei due termini in ogni caso, rende frequente la necessit di disambiguazione.

Tra i movimenti che si rifanno alle ideologie libertariane ma che non viene da molti ritenuto propriamente libertarian si ritrova anche il movimento politico statunitense Libertarian National Socialist Green Party (LNSGP) della corrente nazional-libertariana verde, una organizzazione dalla dubbia reale esistenza[18] (non legata al Libertarian Party) che coltiva elementi di libertarianismo in un retroterra culturale e ideologico nazional-conservatore e ambientalista, improntando il suo programma alla difesa dell'identit nazionale e delle "esigenze ambientali", considerando comunque una degenerazione le tendenze di supremazia razziale tipiche del white power.

More:

Libertarianismo - Wikipedia

September 6, 2011 essays

Palmer takes on the misconceptions of individualism common to communitarian critics of liberty.

It has recently been asserted that libertarians, or classical liberals, actually think that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society. They ignore robust social scientific evidence about the ill effects of isolation, and, yet more shocking, they actively oppose the notion of shared values or the idea of the common good. I am quoting from the 1995 presidential address of Professor Amitai Etzioni to the American Sociological Association (American Sociological Review, February 1996). As a frequent talk show guest and as editor of the journal The Responsive Community,Etzioni has come to some public prominence as a publicist for a political movement known as communitarianism.

Etzioni is hardly alone in making such charges. They come from both left and right. From the left, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. argued in his book Why Americans Hate Politics that the growing popularity of the libertarian cause suggested that many Americans had even given up on the possibility of a common good, and in a recent essay in the Washington Post Magazine, that the libertarian emphasis on the freewheeling individual seems to assume that individuals come into the world as fully formed adults who should be held responsible for their actions from the moment of birth. From the right, the late Russell Kirk, in a vitriolic article titled Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries, claimed that the perennial libertarian, like Satan, can bear no authority, temporal or spiritual and that the libertarian does not venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or his country, or the immortal spark in his fellow men.

More politely, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and David Brooks of the Weekly Standard have excoriated libertarians for allegedly ignoring the value of community. Defending his proposal for more federal programs to rebuild community, Coats wrote that his bill is self-consciously conservative, not purely libertarian. It recognizes, not only individual rights, but the contribution of groups rebuilding the social and moral infrastructure of their neighborhoods. The implication is that individual rights are somehow incompatible with participation in groups or neighborhoods.

Such charges, which are coming with increasing frequency from those opposed to classical liberal ideals, are never substantiated by quotations from classical liberals; nor is any evidence offered that those who favor individual liberty and limited constitutional government actually think as charged by Etzioni and his echoes. Absurd charges often made and not rebutted can come to be accepted as truths, so it is imperative that Etzioni and other communitarian critics of individual liberty be called to account for their distortions.

Let us examine the straw man of atomistic individualism that Etzioni, Dionne, Kirk, and others have set up. The philosophical roots of the charge have been set forth by communitarian critics of classical liberal individualism, such as the philosopher Charles Taylor and the political scientist Michael Sandel. For example, Taylor claims that, because libertarians believe in individual rights and abstract principles of justice, they believe in the self-sufficiency of man alone, or, if you prefer, of the individual. That is an updated version of an old attack on classical liberal individualism, according to which classical liberals posited abstract individuals as the basis for their views about justice.

Those claims are nonsense. No one believes that there are actually abstract individuals, for all individuals are necessarily concrete. Nor are there any truly self-sufficient individuals, as any reader of The Wealth of Nations would realize. Rather, classical liberals and libertarians argue that the system of justice should abstract from the concrete characteristics of individuals. Thus, when an individual comes before a court, her height, color, wealth, social standing, and religion are normally irrelevant to questions of justice. That is what equality before the law means; it does not mean that no one actually has a particular height, skin color, or religious belief. Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing. And because that cooperation takes place among countless individuals unknown to each other, the rules governing that interaction are abstract in nature. Abstract rules, which establish in advance what we may expect of one another, make cooperation possible on a wide scale.

No reasonable person could possibly believe that individuals are fully formed outside societyin isolation, if you will. That would mean that no one could have had any parents, cousins, friends, personal heroes, or even neighbors. Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us. What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

Libertarianism is not at base a metaphysical theory about the primacy of the individual over the abstract, much less an absurd theory about abstract individuals. Nor is it an anomic rejection of traditions, as Kirk and some conservatives have charged. Rather, it is a political theory that emerged in response to the growth of unlimited state power; libertarianism draws its strength from a powerful fusion of a normative theory about the moral and political sources and limits of obligations and a positive theory explaining the sources of order. Each person has the right to be free, and free persons can produce order spontaneously, without a commanding power over them.

What of Dionnes patently absurd characterization of libertarianism: individuals come into the world as fully formed adults who should be held responsible for their actions from the moment of birth? Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded. Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves. But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe. Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person finds another unconscious and administers medical assistance or calls an ambulance.

What distinguishes libertarianism from other views of political morality is principally its theory of enforceable obligations. Some obligations, such as the obligation to write a thank-you note to ones host after a dinner party, are not normally enforceable by force. Others, such as the obligation not to punch a disagreeable critic in the nose or to pay for a pair of shoes before walking out of the store in them, are. Obligations may be universal or particular. Individuals, whoever and wherever they may be (i.e., in abstraction from particular circumstances), have an enforceable obligation to all other persons: not to harm them in their lives, liberties, health, or possessions. In John Lockes terms, Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. All individuals have the right that others not harm them in their enjoyment of those goods. The rights and the obligations are correlative and, being both universal and negative in character, are capable under normal circumstances of being enjoyed by all simultaneously. It is the universality of the human right not to be killed, injured, or robbed that is at the base of the libertarian view, and one need not posit an abstract individual to assert the universality of that right. It is his veneration, not his contempt, for the immortal spark in his fellow men that leads the libertarian to defend individual rights.

Those obligations are universal, but what about particular obligations? As I write this, I am sitting in a coffee house and have just ordered another coffee. I have freely undertaken the particular obligation to pay for the coffee: I have transferred a property right to a certain amount of my money to the owner of the coffee shop, and she has transferred the property right to the cup of coffee to me. Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others. Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated. Communitarians, on the other hand, argue that we all are born with many particular obligations, such as to give to this body of personscalled a state or, more nebulously, a nation, community, or folkso much money, so much obedience, or even ones life. And they argue that those particular obligations can be coercively enforced. In fact, according to communitarians such as Taylor and Sandel, I am actually constituted as a person, not only by the facts of my upbringing and my experiences, but by a set of very particular unchosen obligations.

To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice. Yet that is a mere assertion and cannot substitute for an argument that one is obligated to others; it is no justification for coercion. One might well ask, If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command? If one wants a coherent theory of obligations, there must be someone, whether an individual or a group, with the right to the fulfillment of the obligation. If I am constituted as a person by my obligation to obey, who is constituted as a person by the right to obedience? Such a theory of obligation may have been coherent in an age of God-kings, but it seems rather out of place in the modern world. To sum up, no reasonable person believes in the existence of abstract individuals, and the true dispute between libertarians and communitarians is not about individualism as such but about the source of particular obligations, whether imposed or freely assumed.

A theory of obligation focusing on individuals does not mean that there is no such thing as society or that we cannot speak meaningfully of groups. The fact that there are trees does not mean that we cannot speak of forests, after all. Society is not merely a collection of individuals, nor is it some bigger or better thing separate from them. Just as a building is not a pile of bricks but the bricks and the relationships among them, society is not a person, with his own rights, but many individuals and the complex set of relationships among them.

A moments reflection makes it clear that claims that libertarians reject shared values and the common good are incoherent. If libertarians share the value of liberty (at a minimum), then they cannot actively oppose the notion of shared values, and if libertarians believe that we will all be better off if we enjoy freedom, then they have not given up on the possibility of a common good, for a central part of their efforts is to assert what the common good is! In response to Kirks claim that libertarians reject tradition, let me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history. In addition, pure traditionalism is incoherent, for traditions may clash, and then one has no guide to right action. Generally, the statement that libertarians reject tradition is both tasteless and absurd. Libertarians follow religious traditions, family traditions, ethnic traditions, and social traditions such as courtesy and even respect for others, which is evidently not a tradition Kirk thought it necessary to maintain.

The libertarian case for individual liberty, which has been so distorted by communitarian critics, is simple and reasonable. It is obvious that different individuals require different things to live good, healthy, and virtuous lives. Despite their common nature, people are materially and numerically individuated, and we have needs that differ. So, how far does our common good extend?

Karl Marx, an early and especially brilliant and biting communitarian critic of libertarianism, asserted that civil society is based on a decomposition of man such that mans essence is no longer in community but in difference; under socialism, in contrast, man would realize his nature as a species being. Accordingly, socialists believe that collective provision of everything is appropriate; in a truly socialized state, we would all enjoy the same common good and conflict simply would not occur. Communitarians are typically much more cautious, but despite a lot of talk they rarely tell us much about what our common good might be. The communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, in his influential book After Virtue, insists for 219 pages that there is a good life for man that must be pursued in common and then rather lamely concludes that the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man.

A familiar claim is that providing retirement security through the state is an element of the common good, for it brings all of us together. But who is included in all of us? Actuarial data show that African-American males who have paid the same taxes into the Social Security system as have Caucasian males over their working lives stand to get back about half as much. Further, more black than white males will die before they receive a single penny, meaning all of their money has gone to benefit others and none of their investments are available to their families. In other words, they are being robbed for the benefit of nonblack retirees. Are African-American males part of the all of us who are enjoying a common good, or are they victims of the common good of others? (As readers of this magazine should know, all would be better off under a privatized system, which leads libertarians to assert the common good of freedom to choose among retirement systems.) All too often, claims about the common good serve as covers for quite selfish attempts to secure private goods; as the classical liberal Austrian novelist Robert Musil noted in his great work The Man without Qualities, Nowadays only criminals dare to harm others without philosophy.

Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good. They also understand the absolute necessity of cooperation for the attainment of ones ends; a solitary individual could never actually be self-sufficient, which is precisely why we must have rulesgoverning property and contracts, for exampleto make peaceful cooperation possible and we institute government to enforce those rules. The common good is a system of justice that allows all to live together in harmony and peace; a common good more extensive than that tends to be, not a common good for all of us, but a common good for some of us at the expense of others of us. (There is another sense, understood by every parent, to the term self-sufficiency. Parents normally desire that their children acquire the virtue of pulling their own weight and not subsisting as scroungers, layabouts, moochers, or parasites. That is a necessary condition of self-respect; Taylor and other critics of libertarianism often confuse the virtue of self-sufficiency with the impossible condition of never relying on or cooperating with others.)

The issue of the common good is related to the beliefs of communitarians regarding the personality or the separate existence of groups. Both are part and parcel of a fundamentally unscientific and irrational view of politics that tends to personalize institutions and groups, such as the state or nation or society. Instead of enriching political science and avoiding the alleged naivet of libertarian individualism, as communitarians claim, however, the personification thesis obscures matters and prevents us from asking the interesting questions with which scientific inquiry begins. No one ever put the matter quite as well as the classical liberal historian Parker T. Moon of Columbia University in his study of 19th-century European imperialism, Imperialism and World Politics:

Language often obscures truth. More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue. When one uses the simple monosyllable France one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a countrywhen for example we say France sent her troops to conquer Tuniswe impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors. How different it would be if we had no such word as France, and had to say insteadthirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory! Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis. This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the few? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey?

Group personification obscures, rather than illuminates, important political questions. Those questions, centering mostly around the explanation of complex political phenomena and moral responsibility, simply cannot be addressed within the confines of group personification, which drapes a cloak of mysticism around the actions of policymakers, thus allowing some to use philosophyand mystical philosophy, at thatto harm others.

Libertarians are separated from communitarians by differences on important issues, notably whether coercion is necessary to maintain community, solidarity, friendship, love, and the other things that make life worth living and that can be enjoyed only in common with others. Those differences cannot be swept away a priori; their resolution is not furthered by shameless distortion, absurd characterizations, or petty name-calling.

Myths of Individualism originally appeared in the September/October 1996 issue of Cato Policy Report.

Tom G. Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, director of the Institutes educational division, Cato University, Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and General Director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity.

Excerpt from:

Myths of Individualism | Libertarianism.org

Property, Rights, and Liberty

Libertarians tend to agree on a wide array of policies and principles. Nonetheless, it is not easy to find consensus on what libertarianism's defining characteristic is, or on what distinguishes it from other political theories and systems.

Various formulations abound. It is said that libertarianism is about individual rights, property rights, the free market, capitalism, justice, or the nonaggression principle. Not just any of these will do, however. Capitalism and the free market describe the catallactic conditions that arise or are permitted in a libertarian society, but do not encompass other aspects of libertarianism. And individual rights, justice, and aggression collapse into property rights. As Murray Rothbard explained, individual rights are property rights. And justice is just giving someone his due, which depends on what his rights are.

The nonaggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass aggression only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.

So capitalism and the free market are too narrow, and justice, individual rights, and aggression all boil down to, or are defined in terms of, property rights. What of property rights, then? Is this what differentiates libertarianism from other political philosophies that we favor property rights, and all others do not? Surely such a claim is untenable.

After all, a property right is simply the exclusive right to control a scarce resource. Property rights specify which persons own that is, have the right to control various scarce resources in a given region or jurisdiction. Yet everyone and every political theory advance some theory of property. None of the various forms of socialism deny property rights; each version will specify an owner for every scarce resource. If the state nationalizes an industry, it is asserting ownership of these means of production. If the state taxes you, it is implicitly asserting ownership of the funds taken. If my land is transferred to a private developer by eminent domain statutes, the developer is now the owner. If the law allows a recipient of racial discrimination to sue his employer for a sum of money, he is the owner of the money.

Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules: its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.

A system of property rights assigns a particular owner to every scarce resource. These resources obviously include natural resources such as land, fruits of trees, and so on. Objects found in nature are not the only scarce resources, however. Each human actor has, controls, and is identified and associated with a unique human body, which is also a scarce resource. Both human bodies and nonhuman, scarce resources are desired for use as means by actors in the pursuit of various goals.

Accordingly, any political theory or system must assign ownership rights in human bodies as well as in external things. Let us consider first the libertarian property assignment rules with respect to human bodies, and the corresponding notion of aggression as it pertains to bodies. Libertarians often vigorously assert the "nonaggression principle." As Ayn Rand said, "So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate do you hear me? No man may start the use of physical force against others." Or, as Rothbard put it:

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the "nonaggression axiom." "Aggression" is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.

In other words, libertarians maintain that the only way to violate rights is by initiating force that is, by committing aggression. (Libertarianism also holds that, while the initiation of force against another person's body is impermissible, force used in response to aggression such as defensive, restitutive, or retaliatory/punitive force is justified.)

Now in the case of the body, it is clear what aggression is: invading the borders of someone's body, commonly called battery, or, more generally, using the body of another without his or her consent. The very notion of interpersonal aggression presupposes property rights in bodies more particularly, that each person is, at least prima facie, the owner of his own body.

Nonlibertarian political philosophies have a different view. Each person has some limited rights in his own body, but not complete or exclusive rights. Society or the state, purporting to be society's agent has certain rights in each citizen's body, too. This partial slavery is implicit in state actions and laws such as taxation, conscription, and drug prohibitions.

The libertarian says that each person is the full owner of his body: he has the right to control his body, to decide whether or not he ingests narcotics, joins an army, and so on. Those various nonlibertarians who endorse any such state prohibitions, however, necessarily maintain that the state, or society, is at least a partial owner of the body of those subject to such laws or even a complete owner in the case of conscriptees or nonaggressor "criminals" incarcerated for life. Libertarians believe in self-ownership. Nonlibertarians statists of all stripes advocate some form of slavery.

Without property rights, there is always the possibility of conflict over contestable (scarce) resources. By assigning an owner to each resource, legal systems make possible conflict-free use of resources, by establishing visible boundaries that nonowners can avoid. Libertarianism does not endorse just any property assignment rule, however. It favors self-ownership over other-ownership (slavery).

The libertarian seeks property assignment rules because he values or accepts various grundnorms such as justice, peace, prosperity, cooperation, conflict-avoidance, and civilization. The libertarian view is that self-ownership is the only property assignment rule compatible with these grundorms; it is implied by them.

As Professor Hoppe has shown, the assignment of ownership to a given resource must not be random, arbitrary, particularistic, or biased, if it is actually to be a property norm that can serve the function of conflict-avoidance. Property title has to be assigned to one of competing claimants based on "the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the" resource claimed. In the case of one's own body, it is the unique relationship between a person and his body his direct and immediate control over his body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa that constitutes the objective link sufficient to give that person a claim to his body superior to typical third party claimants.

Moreover, any outsider who claims another's body cannot deny this objective link and its special status, since the outsider also necessarily presupposes this in his own case. This is so because, in seeking dominion over the other and in asserting ownership over the other's body, he has to presuppose his own ownership of his body. In so doing, the outsider demonstrates that he does place a certain significance on this link, even as (at the same time) he disregards the significance of the other's link to his own body.

Libertarianism recognizes that only the self-ownership rule is universalizable and compatible with the goals of peace, cooperation, and conflict-avoidance. We recognize that each person is prima facie the owner of his own body because, by virtue of his unique link to and connection with his own body his direct and immediate control over it he has a better claim to it than anyone else.

Libertarians apply similar reasoning in the case of other scarce resources namely, external objects in the world that, unlike bodies, were at one point unowned. In the case of bodies, the idea of aggression being impermissible immediately implies self-ownership. In the case of external objects, however, we must identify who the owner is before we can determine what constitutes aggression.

As in the case with bodies, humans need to be able to use external objects as means to achieve various ends. Because these things are scarce, there is also the potential for conflict. And, as in the case with bodies, libertarians favor assigning property rights so as to permit the peaceful, conflict-free, productive use of such resources. Thus, as in the case with bodies, property is assigned to the person with the best claim or link to a given scarce resource with the "best claim" standard based on the goals of permitting peaceful, conflict-free human interaction and use of resources.

Unlike human bodies, however, external objects are not parts of one's identity, are not directly controlled by one's will, and significantly they are initially unowned. Here, the libertarian realizes that the relevant objective link is appropriation the transformation or embordering of a previously unowned resource, Lockean homesteading, the first use or possession of the thing. Under this approach, the first (prior) user of a previously unowned thing has a prima facie better claim than a second (later) claimant, solely by virtue of his being earlier.

Why is appropriation the relevant link for determination of ownership? First, keep in mind that the question with respect to such scarce resources is: who is the resource's owner? Recall that ownership is the right to control, use, or possess, while possession is actual control "the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing." The question is not who has physical possession; it is who has ownership.

Thus, asking who is the owner of a resource presupposes a distinction between ownership and possession between the right to control, and actual control. And the answer has to take into account the nature of previously unowned things namely, that they must at some point become owned by a first owner.

The answer must also take into account the presupposed goals of those seeking this answer: rules that permit conflict-free use of resources. For this reason, the answer cannot be whoever has the resource or whoever is able to take it is its owner. To hold such a view is to adopt a might-makes-right system, where ownership collapses into possession for want of a distinction. Such a system, far from avoiding conflict, makes conflict inevitable.

Instead of a might-makes-right approach, from the insights noted above it is obvious that ownership presupposes the prior-later distinction: whoever any given system specifies as the owner of a resource, he has a better claim than latecomers. If he does not, then he is not an owner, but merely the current user or possessor. If he is supposed an owner on the might-makes-right principle, in which there is no such thing as ownership, it contradicts the presuppositions of the inquiry itself. If the first owner does not have a better claim than latecomers, then he is not an owner, but merely a possessor, and there is no such thing as ownership.

More generally, latecomers' claims are inferior to those of prior possessors or claimants, who either homesteaded the resource or who can trace their title back to the homesteader or earlier owner. The crucial importance of the prior-later distinction to libertarian theory is why Professor Hoppe repeatedly emphasizes it in his writing.

Thus, the libertarian position on property rights is that, in order to permit conflict-free, productive use of scarce resources, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. As noted above, however, the title assignment must not be random, arbitrary, or particularistic; instead, it has to be assigned based on "the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner" and the resource claimed. As can be seen from the considerations presented above, the link is the physical transformation or embordering of the original homesteader, or a chain of title traceable by contract back to him.

Not only libertarians are civilized. Most people give some weight to some of the above considerations. In their eyes, a person is the owner of his own body usually. A homesteader owns the resource he appropriates unless the state takes it from him "by operation of law." This is the principal distinction between libertarians and nonlibertarians: Libertarians are consistently opposed to aggression, defined in terms of invasion of property borders, where property rights are understood to be assigned on the basis of self-ownership in the case of bodies. And in the case of other things, rights are understood on the basis of prior possession or homesteading and contractual transfer of title.

This framework for rights is motivated by the libertarian's consistent and principled valuing of peaceful interaction and cooperation in short, of civilized behavior. A parallel to the Misesian view of human action may be illuminating here. According to Mises, human action is aimed at alleviating some felt uneasiness. Thus, means are employed, according to the actor's understanding of causal laws, to achieve various ends ultimately, the removal of uneasiness.

Civilized man feels uneasy at the prospect of violent struggles with others. On the one hand, he wants, for some practical reason, to control a given scarce resource and to use violence against another person, if necessary, to achieve this control. On the other hand, he also wants to avoid a wrongful use of force. Civilized man, for some reason, feels reluctance, uneasiness, at the prospect of violent interaction with his fellow man. Perhaps he has reluctance to violently clash with others over certain objects because he has empathy with them. Perhaps the instinct to cooperate is a result of social evolution. As Mises noted,

There are people whose only aim is to improve the condition of their own ego. There are other people with whom awareness of the troubles of their fellow men causes as much uneasiness as or even more uneasiness than their own wants.

Whatever the reason, because of this uneasiness, when there is the potential for violent conflict, the civilized man seeks justification for the forceful control of a scarce resource that he desires but which some other person opposes. Empathy or whatever spurs man to adopt the libertarian grundnorms gives rise to a certain form of uneasiness, which gives rise to ethical action.

Civilized man may be defined as he who seeks justification for the use of interpersonal violence. When the inevitable need to engage in violence arises for defense of life or property civilized man seeks justification. Naturally, since this justification-seeking is done by people who are inclined to reason and peace (justification is after all a peaceful activity that necessarily takes place during discourse), what they seek are rules that are fair, potentially acceptable to all, grounded in the nature of things, and universalizable, and which permit conflict-free use of resources.

Libertarian property rights principles emerge as the only candidate that satisfies these criteria. Thus, if civilized man is he who seeks justification for the use of violence, the libertarian is he who is serious about this endeavor. He has a deep, principled, innate opposition to violence, and an equally deep commitment to peace and cooperation.

For the foregoing reasons, libertarianism may be said to be the political philosophy that consistently favors social rules aimed at promoting peace, prosperity, and cooperation. It recognizes that the only rules that satisfy the civilized grundnorms are the self-ownership principle and the Lockean homesteading principle, applied as consistently as possible.

And as I have argued elsewhere, because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.

This article is adapted from a "What Libertarianism Is," in Jrg Guido Hlsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009). An abbreviated version of this article was incorporated into the author's speech "Intellectual Property and Libertarianism," presented at Mises University 2009 (July 30, 2009; audio).

Original post:

What Libertarianism Is | Mises Daily

November 3, 2011 essays

A guide to books on the history of liberty and libertarianism.

The history of libertarianism is more than a series of scholarly statements on philosophy, economics, and the social sciences. It is the history of courageous men and women struggling to bring freedom to the lives of those living without it. The works on this list give important context to the ideas found on the others.

A History of Libertarianism by David Boaz

This essay, reprinted from Libertarianism: A Primer, covers the sweep of libertarian and pre-libertarian history, from Lao Tzu in the sixth century B.C. to the latest developments of the 21st century. Because its available for free on Libertarianism.org, the essay also includes numerous links to more information about major thinkers and their works. For a general sense of the rich history of the movement for liberty, this is easily the best place to start.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyns Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the ideas that influenced the American Revolution had a profound influence on our understanding of the republics origin by exposing its deeply libertarian foundations. Bailyn studied the many political pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776 and identified patterns of language, argument, and references to figures such as the radical Whigs and Cato the Younger. Because these were notions which men often saw little need to explain because they were so obvious, their understanding was assumed by the Founders and thus not immediately obvious to modern readers. When the Revolution is reexamined with Bailyns findings in mind, theres no way to escape the conclusion that America was always steeped in libertarian principles.

Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty

The libertarian movement in America in the 20th century is the focus of this delightful history from Brian Dorhety. Radicals for Capitalism is more the story of the men and women who fought for freedom and limited government than it is an intellectual history of libertarian ideas. But it is an important story because it helps to place the contemporary debate about the place of libertarianism in American politics within the context of a major and long-lived social movement.

The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.

Ekirch traces the history of the liberal idea in the United States from the founding through World War II. He places the high point of true liberalism in the years immediately following the American Revolution, before the federal government began its long march of ever more centralized control over the country. And he shows how this shift has negatively impacted everything from global peace to the economy to individual autonomy.

Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade by Douglas A. Irwin

Ever since Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the case for free tradeboth its economic benefits and its moral footingseemed settled. Yet in the ensuing two centuries, many have attempted to restrict freedom of trade with claims about its deleterious effects. Irwins Against the Tide traces the intellectual history of free trade from the early mercantilists, through Smith and the neoclassical economists, and to the present. He shows how free trade has withstood theoretical assaults from protectionists of all stripesand how it remains the most effective means for bringing prosperity and peace to people throughout the world.

The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedoms Greatest Champions by Jim Powell

If Radicals for Capitalism is the tale of the men and women who fought for liberty in the 20th century, Jim Powells The Triumph of Liberty fills in the backstory. The book is an exhaustive collection of biographical articles on 65 major figures, from Marcus Tullius Cicero to Martin Luther King, Jr., summarizing their lives, thought, and impact. While not all of them were strictly libertarian, every one of the people Powell covers was instrumental in making the world a freer. For a grand sweep of libertys history through the lives of those who struggled in its name, theres no better source than The Triumph of Liberty.

How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr.

The central question that How the West Grew Rich addresses is precisely what its title implies. For thousands of years, human beings lived in unrelieved misery: hunger, famine, illiteracy, superstition, ignorance, pestilence and worse have been their lot. How did things change? How did a relatively few peoplethose in what we call the Westescape from grinding poverty into sustained economic growth and material well-being when most other societies remained trapped in an endless cycle of birth, hardship, and death? This fascinating book tells that story. The explanations that many historians have offeredclaiming that it was all due to science, or luck, or natural resources, or exploitations or imperialismare refuted at the outset, in the books opening chapter. Rosenberg and Birdzell are then free to provide an explanation that makes much more sense.

The State by Franz Oppenheimer

Much political philosophy begins with a social concept theory of the state. Mankind originally existed in a state of nature, and the state only arose when people came together and agreed to give up some of their liberties in exchange for protection of others. Oppenheimer rejects this rosy picture and replaces it with his much more realistic conquest theory, which finds the genesis of states in roving bands of marauders who eventually settled down and turned to taxation when they realized it was easier than perpetual raiding. The State also features Oppenheimers influential distinction between the two means by which man can set about fulfilling his needs: I propose in the following discussion to call ones own labor and the equivalent exchange of ones own labor for the labor of others, the economic means for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the political means.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskey

In Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey offers a different story of economic growth from the common one of capitalism and markets. The West grew rich, she argues, not simply because it embraced trade, but because its cultural ideas shifted, specifically in granting a sense of dignity to the bourgeoisie. It is that dignityand the rhetoric surrounding itthat sparked the Industrial Revolution and, in turn, lead to the modern world. Bourgeois Dignity traces the influence of these changing ideasand uses them to explain not just the rise of the West but also the recent, monumental growth of India and China. The book is the second in a four-volume series, The Bourgeois Era.

Aaron Ross Powell is a Cato Institute research fellow and founder and editor of Libertarianism.org, which presents introductory material as well as new scholarship related to libertarian philosophy, theory, and history. He is also co-host of Libertarianism.orgs popular podcast, Free Thoughts. His writing has appeared in Liberty and The Cato Journal. He earned a JD from the University of Denver.

See original here:

Libertarian History: A Reading List | Libertarianism.org

Libertarianism r en politisk ideologi som fresprkar frihet frn tvng och strvar efter att minimera staten och dess inflytande ver mnniskors liv. Libertarianer vill tillta maximal sjlvstndighet och valfrihet, med betoning p politisk frihet, frivilliga sammanslutningar samt det individuella omdmet.

Begreppet anvnds framfr allt i USA. I Sverige r begreppet nyliberalism vanligare, men inte entydigt samma sak.[1][2] Vanliga stndpunkter inom libertarianism r fresprkandet av en begrnsad stat, privat gandertt och en minimalt reglerad laissez faire-kapitalism.[3][4] ven om libertarianism i folkmun syftar p den ganderttsfokuserade klassiska liberalismen[5], s br ven en vxande klunga s kallade anarkokapitalister innefattas av definitionen.

Libertarianer fokuserar ofta, men inte uteslutande, p de moraliska och etiska aspekterna kring demokrati, staten och samhllet. Libertarianismen tar avstnd frn fenomen som rasism, imperialism och nutidens form av demokrati, dr en majoritet av befolkningen fr makt ver minoriteten. Libertarianer anser ofta att mnniskor tenderar att agera i goda syften av naturen, samt frblir kapabla att hjlpa de i nd utan tvng och hot om vld i form av skatt. De fresprkar drfr i olika mn att statliga funktioner tas bort eller erstts av icke-statliga initiativ, frn t.ex. privatpersoner, fretag och ideella freningar.[kllabehvs]

Det finns ocks en s kallad frihetlig socialistisk (engelska: "libertarian socialism") inriktning som vunnit mark frmst p olika hll i Europa, men som skiljer sig starkt frn den vriga libertarianismen eftersom den istllet r anti-kapitalistisk och i praktiken fresprkar majoritetens rtt att krva socialistiska regler.

I USA p 1900-talet brjade flera anhngare av individuell frihet, begrnsad statsmakt och fria marknader att kalla sig fr libertarianer eftersom de ansg att den moderna liberalismen blivit synonymt med statlig inblandning i personliga och ekonomiska angelgenheter. Libertarianismen hrleds ofta utifrn liberalismen och i vissa sammanhang r begreppet svrt att skilja frn klassisk liberalism. De konservativa som motsatte sig New Deal, militra interventioner samt var motstndare till kommunism har ocks haft inverkan p den libertarianska rrelsen.[6][7]

De flesta libertarianer fresprkar att statens uppgifter ska vara begrnsade till att omfatta polis, domstolar och ett nationellt frsvar.[4]Anarkokapitalister likt Murray Rothbard och David D. Friedman vill helt avskaffa staten. Peri Roberts och Peter Sutch, universitetslektorer i politisk teori vid Cardiff University, definierar libertarianism som ett "extremliberalt synstt som betonar vikten av absolut gandertt och hvdar att detta bara rttfrdigar en minimal stat".[3]

Individens frihet frn tvng oberoende av om tvnget utvas av andra individer eller staten r ett grundlggande vrde fr libertarianismen.[5] Ur libertarianismens syn p individuella rttigheter hrleder man den ekonomiska liberalismen, med frsvar av kapitalismen, liksom drog- och vapenliberalism och stllningstaganden som fri invandring och total yttrandefrihet. Libertarianismens syn p privat egendomsrtt gr att beskattning blir detsamma som stld och tvngsarbete.[4] Libertarianismen gr gllande att alla personer r absoluta gare av sina egna liv och br vara fria att gra vad de vill med sig sjlva eller sin egendom, frutsatt att det r frenligt med andra mnniskors frihet.

Inom filosofin kan libertarianer karakteriseras efter tv etiska synstt: konsekventionalister som stdjer frihet fr att det leder till goda konsekvenser, samt deontologer som anser att frihet r moraliskt rtt. ven kombinationer av dessa frekommer.[8] Libertarianer som inte utgr ifrn rttighetsetik anvnder det mer utilitaristiska argumentet att konsekvenserna av ekonomisk och personlig frihet ger ett bra samhlle. Dit hr Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman och Friedrich von Hayek.[9]

Filosofen Robert Nozicks verk Anarki, stat och utopi frn 1974 har setts som libertarianismens frmsta verk inom politisk filosofi.[4] Nozick utgr ifrn de individuella rttigheter som John Locke och klassiska liberaler frsvarade: rtten till liv, frihet och egendom. Dessa rttigheter r okrnkbara. Fr att inte statsmakten eller ngon annan person ska krnka individens rttigheter har minimalstaten till uppgift att vrna dessa mot vld, stld, bedrgeri, kontraktsbrott och liknande. Nozick avvisar vad han kallar "mnstrade" frdelningsprinciper, det vill sga principer som rttfrdigar omfrdelning utefter vissa ideal. Nozick var emot dessa rttviseteorier eftersom de utgr ifrn att resurser inte tillhr ngon och drfr kan frdelas utan vidare. Individens sjlvgarskap och gandertt gr att fremlens historia blir viktigt eftersom de r bundna till mnniskor som har rtt till dem. Alla verfringar, som genomfrs p frivillig basis, r enligt Nozick rttvisa och frenliga med individens frihet.[10]

I ett centralt kapitel, "Distributiv rttvisa", lgger han fram en tredelad rttviseuppfattning gllande detta. Den innebr att en frdelning r rttvis om den uppfyller villkoren om legitimt ursprungligt frvrv ("en person har en legitim gandertt till ett tidigare ogt freml om hans eller hennes gande av det inte frsmrar ngon annans situation") och legitima verfringar, dr "en person har en legitim gandertt till ett freml om ngon annan, som har legitim rtt till fremlet i frga, frivilligt ger det till den personen". Om dessa inte r uppfyllda trder principen om korrigering av orttvist frvrv i kraft. Dessa tre principer principen om legitimt ursprungligt frvrv, principen om legitima verfringar av tillgngar och principen om korrigering av orttvist frvrv utgr Nozicks teori om samhllelig frdelning.[10]

1971 bildades Libertarian Party i USA som har stllt upp i alla val till kongressen och presidentskapet sedan dess. De fresprkar starka civila friheter med principen att alla individer har rtt att vlja hur de vill leva, s lnge de inte med tvng inskrnker p andras rtt till den friheten. De fresprkar frihandel, minimalt reglerade laissez faire-marknader (fri marknad) samt r motstndare till statliga ingrepp i den privata egendomen.[11] Ed Clark som var libertariansk presidentkandidat 1980 fick drygt 920 000 rster. De har haft strre std i val till kongressen. I valet till representanthuset r 2000 fick partiet fler n 1,6 miljoner rster.[12] Den fre detta republikanska kongressledamoten Ron Paul som skte den republikanska nomineringen till presidentvalet 2008 och 2012 har tidigare varit partiets presidentkandidat.

Centralt fr libertarianismen r begreppet sjlvgarskap som innebr att man menar att varje individ har en absolut och okrnkbar rtt till den egna kroppen och drmed ven alla frmgor och produkter skapade av denna kropp eller frmga. Detta r gemensamt fr svl hger- som vnsterlibertarianism.[13]. Det har ftt till fljd att de flesta libertarianer fresprkar till exempel rtt till abort. En signifikant minoritet (inklusive frre presidentkandidaten Ron Paul [14]) menar dock att ven nnu ofdda barn omfattas av den libertarianska rtten till liv, och att frsvaret fr abort drfr strider mot ideologins moraliska principer.[15].

Den frsta registrerade anvndningen av termen i politisk skrift tillskrivs anarkokommunisten Joseph Djacque.[16] Individualanarkisten Benjamin Tucker nyttjade ocks termen fr sin syn p individuell frihet. Termen libertarianism anvndes av revolutionren och anarkisten Mikhail Bakunins anhngare fr att beskriva den egna versionen av antiauktoritr och antistatlig socialism, i kontrast mot Lenins mera auktoritra regim. Denna anvndning av begreppet r fortfarande mycket vanlig i stora delar av vrlden utanfr USA.[kllabehvs]

Libertarianer r delade i tv grupper. Den ena r minarkister, som fresprkar en nattvktarstat bunden av en konstitution eller annan lagstiftning, den andra r anarkokapitalister som anser att precis allting i samhllet ska sktas p frivillig basis, inklusive institutioner som rttssystem, polis och frsvar. Det vill sga utan att tvinga ngon att betala fr dessa samhllstjnster med beskattning.

Libertarianism r med andra ord ett smalare begrepp n nyliberalism i det att anhngaren som minst fresprkar nattvktarstat, men samtidigt bredare eftersom nyliberaler inte kan tnka sig att privatisera institutioner som har till uppgift att skydda medborgarens negativa rttigheter, svida dessa privata organisationer inte r kontrollerade av en stat. Till skillnad frn nyliberaler ser en libertarian inte ndvndigtvis kapitalism som ett idealiskt eller moraliskt system, det r frivilligheten som r det centrala.

Libertarianismen hrstammar ideologiskt ifrn klassisk liberalism, samt en del statskritiskt gods, tankar om den fria marknaden och individens suvernitet frn individualanarkismen.[17] De stter liberalismens krna, friheten, i centrum. Mnniskor fr grna dela in sig i grupper med olika system dr ngra lever kommunistiskt, ngra kapitalistiskt etc. Allt fr att maximera mnniskors frihet att vlja hur deras liv ska levas, det man betonar r frivilligheten. Libertarianer anser att om det finns behov av att bilda jurisdiktioner s kommer sdana att uppst spontant beroende p efterfrgan eller kollektiv frivillig organisering. Alla ska naturligtvis ha friheten att bli medlem i en sdan fr att f rttsskydd men d blir man givetvis skyldig att uppfylla de plikter som ingr i avtalet, till exempel att betala en avgift och flja de regler och lagar som rttsskyddet ska upprtthlla. Liknande samhllstjnster till exempel brandfrsvar eller polisbeskydd fr frivilligt kpas p marknaden, precis som vilken annan tjnst (kapitalism; hr grs ingen skillnad filosofiskt p allmnnyttan och andra tjnster), eller organiseras med exempelvis kooperationer dr man kanske mste st redo att hjlpa till vid brnder eller patrullera nromrden med eller utan vapen fr att frhindra eller ingripa vid brott (frivillig socialism).

Det finns ven en vnsterinriktning av libertarianismen. Den grundlggande skillnaden mellan hgerlibertarianism och vnsterlibertarianism ligger i synen p resten av vrlden, det vill sga allt som inte utgrs av ett sjlvgande subjekt. Medan hgerlibertarianer menar att vrlden frn brjan inte gdes av ngon, menar vnsterlibertarianer att vrlden ursprungligen gdes gemensamt. Detta innebr att hgerlibertarianerna menar att det r tilltet att tillskansa sig del av tillgngarna i vrlden, s lnge detta inte inkrktar p ngon annans rtt till sjlvgarskap. Vnsterlibertarianerna menar dock att varje krav p gandertt ver ngon del av de gemensamma tillgngarna krver kompensation till de andra i ngon form. Detta gr att vnsterlibertarianer kan acceptera en strre stat n hgerlibertarianer, eftersom man menar att statens funktioner ven kan innefatta rttvis omfrdelning av resurser.[13]

Excerpt from:

Libertarianism Wikipedia

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Libertarians

Libertarians, more commonly known as Lolbertarians, are ashamed of the fact that the vast majority of the world's politicians today are fat, ugly fugly vampires nurturing themselves by sucking the free spirit out of the back bones of ordinary citizens through methods of merging government power with corporate power, growing the police state at an alarming rate, and bailing out multibillionaire bankers and Wall Street investors who would otherwise fail in a free market society.

Libertarians therefore do not want to continue pretending that our politicians are democratically elected leaders. As such, many American libertarians are currently trying to flee the growing fascistic elements of their corporate-controlled government and reckless military-industrial-complex-turned-police-state by making a mass exodus to locations as far away from the political power centers as possible (sometimes even leaving America for obscure and remote parts of the world such as rural Iceland) where only the raccoons will hear their loud cries for liberty, because by now they realize that hiding from Big Brother is the only real option left.

The essence of libertarianism is that governments should stop controlling people's lives and should instead let individuals take care of themselves as if they were actually grown-up adults and not babies sucking off the teat of the nanny state, constantly whining about their inability to cope in the modern world. More-or-less intelligent people with free will should be capable of making their own decisions about what products to buy and what sorts of lifestyles are worth endorsing through the free support (or withdrawal) of their dollars. This is in direct opposition to the current practice of the IRS taking Americans' dollars through force to pay for bailouts of wealthy people, or to pay for endless overseas wars which Americans neither support nor know anything about since they are too busy playing Farmville or watching football on 72" LCD screens anyway.

Libertarians believe that if you are dumb enough to shop at Wal-mart and fat enough to eat at McDonald's, then that is obviously your problem and not theirs. Those kinds of people can go die of a heart attack in their stained lazy-boy chairs with barbecue grease dribbling down their triple chin as their illiterate mongoloid children run around barefoot without the benefit of tax-payer funded health care or public schools, because obviously these sorts of people should not be encouraged to have any more children. Some people call this view elitist, but Libertarians just call it the bitter truth of reality.

Libertarians despise the government because the trolls that run it abuse their power while for some strange reason believe that the people running corporations are all descendents of Ghandi. Well, actually no, they couldn't give a shit about Ghandi either, as he was obviously just another fame whore bent on "saving the world" and thus winning all the awards and accolades that go along with being The Great Philosopher of World Peace, and thus was no morally different than a CEO who happens to derive his/her personal reward in the form of money that is freely offered by consumers who obviously find merit in the product or service being offered. Be it world peace or Pepsi, consumers shape the world they want through the goods or services they demand. At some point it appears that people started to desire Pepsi more than World Peace, though this is obviously not the fault of Pepsi.

Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism are often confused by Brits who want to take cheap shots at the foundations of American political philosophy, and who are in denial about history and the happy fact that Americans won their little Revolutionary War and are, duh, winning! Or at least were winning up until the last few decades before the state grew too big and the masses became dumbed-down because state education does not encourage people to think for themselves and be strong willed, free thinking individuals who remember where their country came from in the first place. As such, Brits often partake in a bit of sadistic glee in watching our national downfall unfold.

Classical Liberalism started as people attempting to free themselves from authority, which at that time meant the British Monarchy. As soon as a new old authority came along in the form of corporations the Federal Reserve (see Rothschilds), Classical Liberals realized that Americans were now going to be wage slaves no matter what economic policies the federal government enacted. People against Authority later changed their name to Libertarians once the idea of big government authoritarianism somehow became synonymous with being "progressive". Why this happened, the classical liberals will probably never know. Later, capitalists Republicans realized that Libertarianism protects the rights of individuals to property ownership and the free market system, though they paid little attention to the civil liberties aspect of libertarianism which is actually far more fundamental to the philosophy than economics. Anti-Authoritarians have since tried to use the word Anarchist to escape the capitalists Republicans finally, but the capitalists Republicans still trying to be one step ahead tried to use Anarcho-Capitialism, though the Libertarians called them out on that move too, and dubbed the term "neo-cons". In 2024 Capitalists will call themselves Socialists. hopefully be extinct once and for all. Along with communists.

A libertarian in mating season

The typical "modern libertarian" is an anti-government, beer-drinking, crack-smoking, gun-toting, bomb-making, orgy-participating, porn-loving, South Park-watching, straight, male, American "don't fuck with me" motherfucker who lives with his mom and hates the state. Cheap sex, deadly flavors of the evil weed known as pot, and the latest and greatest style of handguns being available in every convenience store wouldn't concern a libertarian in the least. Libertarians are also known for opposing those evil commies, prudish Christians, and Arab types who seek to tyrannize the world with economic and personal repression based on dumb religious values and compassion paid for with other people's money. This includes, in the U.S.: the Democrats, Republicans, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and the Quakers, and in Canada: the Liberals, NDP, Greens, and Mounted Rangers

Libertarianism is believed to have started in early 1884 when founding fathers John Locke and Thomas Jefferson decided to spice up their liberal values in order to impress Ayn Rand with whom they both were in love. When Miss Rand chose to propose to L Ron Hubbard instead, the two gentlemen founded the libertarian principle Anything Goes, lost their marbles and tried to assassinate Mr. Hubbard, an attempt that failed when John Locke sneezed, being allergic to gun powder.

Libertarians oppose the Iraq War, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on War, and most other wars. Because, to quote Lysander Spooner, "War is the health of the state," and Libertarians are about having the state be atrophied and diseased whenever possible. Therefore, ironically, they support the War on the State - which, they assure us, will be launched "any day now."

Likewise, Libertarians oppose the war on kiddie porn. For one thing, kiddie porn studios are capitalistic, consistently turning handsome profits, which is what America is supposed to be about, Constitutionally at least; and they consistently employ nubile Americans over swarthy, chubby foreigners, so it is an America-first stance. Further, the war on kiddie porn is the stuff of victimless crimes, which Libertarians oppose at every turn. The kid already having been exploited, one more copy of a video is not going to do anyone any additional harm.

Indeed, the Libertarian Party website for a long time had a section devoted to choice kiddie porn. This was removed abruptly when the party's interest in "unlimited consumer choice" gave way to the obvious benefit of posturing about "filthy paedo scum who should be strung up with the commies," Republicans leading the way for Libertarians, as happens more than a little.

Indeed, Libertarians, who often wear shoes made by 5-year-old Siberian enslaved orphans, have scant grounds to complain about films being made around 14-year-old Danes whom their own government doesn't see fit to protect. Not that we would want it to.

1992 Libertarian Candidate for President

Contrary to popular belief, Libertarians don't support anything and are avid complainers. Mostly consisting of PO'ed Republicans, the party is often criticized by socialists/democrats/commies for support for the well-known evil capitalism and not putting in enough community service hours. Libertarians claim that capitalism is vilified wrongly, but no one listens. They scream and shout for full freedom to do as you will so long as it doesn't infringe on the ability for others to do as they please (it is important to note, getting ahead of smartass commies, that fucking up the economy and the environment and starving your workers does not count as infringement of anything!). This has prompted some badass positions such as the slogan "Your rights end where mine begin" and bringing back the "Don't tread on me" flag. In short, if you don't like capitalism and freedom, then move to China and be happy in squalor. In case you don't know, China is famous for strictly regulating and controlling private businesses, especially the production of toys and milk, and for maintaining ridiculously high wages for the workforce, especially for those spoiled 8-year-olds.

Other less popular views:

To honor the sacred Libertarian cause, industrial-metal pioneer Oscar Wilde and his partner in crime, the famous novelist Trent Reznor, wrote these immortal lyrics of protest, which have been set to a famously stirring melody.

When the Libertarians come to town Everything will turn upside down No one will wear a frown When the Libertarians come to town

The government will shrink to naught Your coffee will always be hot And it will be the cheapest you've ever bought When the Libertarians come to town

You won't have to pay income taxes No need to worry about downsizers' axes The best companies will send you faxes When the Libertarians come to town

The invisible Hand of Nature will keep Every business exec and veep On the straight and narrow, and we all will reap Peace and plenty when the Libertarians come to town

The free market will improve every school Child geniuses will become the rule Our learning will make every nation drool When the Libertarians come to town

When the Libertarians to Washington come The streets will clear of vandal and bum Pimps and pushers will get to run Safe and legal businesses for everyone When the Libertarians come to town

Send in the Libertarians... Send in the Libertarians... Won't someone, please, send in the Libertarians... Sob.

A libertarian protesting to support big business.

A Libertarian can be one of two people. The type of Republican you never see, named Fat-Cats, or the type of Democrats you don't want to see, named Politically Active Hippies. All forty-nine party members are difficult to find. There are very specific instructions in order to catch one.

"Gods of war I call You. My sword is by my side. I seek a life of honor, free from all false pride. I will crack the whip with a bold mighty hail. Cover me with death if I should ever fail.

Glory, Majesty, Unity! Hail! Hail! Hail!"

It is a well-known fact that since most Libertarians are engineers and IT guys, they rule the internet. However, in real life, their unkempt appearance and breath that smells of stale coffee and halitosis means that they usually are not taken seriously.

However, it is mainly their anarchistic anti-regulatory fault that you get so much spam.

There is a train of thought that tends to regard Libertarians as a bunch of self-centred. tax-avoiding Scrooges , but this is far from the case. In 2008, for example, the Libertarian funded "Give A Shit For The Starving Africans" foundation managed to raise 333,000,000 cubic tonnes of pot brownies which was duly shipped to the poorer areas. Reactions to this display of generosity were very positive, especially among Libertarians.

The rest is here:

Libertarianism - Uncyclopedia - Wikia

November 20, 2015 columns

Smith explains the significance, for Locke, of the increased productivity caused by labor, and the relationship between money and property.

In previous essays I discussed John Lockes claim that labor is the moral foundation of property rights. It must be understood that his labor theory of property differs from a labor theory of value in an economic sense. Although Locke posited labor as the moral foundation of property, he did not believe that the quantity of labor needed to produce a commodity ultimately determines its market price; on the contrary, the price of labor is determined by the relative scarcity of laborits supply relative to demand in a given market. As Karen Vaughn noted in John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist (Athlone Press, 1980): Obviously since Locke describes the value of labor as being determined by the market price, rather than showing price as being somehow determined by the quantity of labor which goes into a product, he was far from describing a labor theory of value in either a classical or a Marxian sense. (Vaughns book is a superb account of Lockes theory of economics. It corrects a number of common misconceptions about Locke, such as the erroneous claim that he was an orthodox mercantilist. Vaughn also argued that Lockes theory of capital is more closely related to the later Austrian school than to either the classical or neoclassical economists.)

When Locke argued that labor puts the difference of value on every thing, that it increases the intrinsic value of natural resources, he meant that labor vastly increases their usefulness to the Life of Man. Here Locke implicitly invoked a standard distinction in early economic thought, which goes back at least to Aristotle, between value in use and value in exchange. (See my discussion of that dichotomy, which generated the classical water-diamond paradox, here.) According to this misleading distinction, it is value in exchange, not value in use, that ultimately regulates market prices.

Land that has been cultivated by human labor will yield far more produce that is useful to human beings than will uncultivated land. (Locke gave a lowball estimate of ten times more productivity with cultivated land, but he speculated that the increase will actually be a hundred or even a thousand times greater.) This observation was an important part of Lockes explanation of why his proviso, according to which the private appropriation of land is justifiable only when there is enough, and as good left in common with others, is not in fact a serious problem for his labor theory of private property, most notably in land. For one thing, the amount of land that any individual can cultivate is quite limited.

The measure of Property, Nature has well set, by the Extent of Mens Labour, and the Conveniency of Life: No Mans Labour could subdue, or appropriate all: nor could his Enjoyment consume more than a small part; so that is was impossible for any Man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another, or to acquire to himself a Property, to the Prejudice of his Neighbour, who would still have room, for as good, and as large a Possession ( after the other had taken out his) as before it was appropriated. This measure did confine every Mans Possession, to a very moderate Proportion.

Locke believed that the worlds population in his day could easily double and still leave plenty of unowned (common) land for others to use or to appropriate as private property. But to focus entirely on the availability of unowned land is to overlook the enormous increase of productivity brought about by labor. The private cultivator of land, far from decreasing the amount of goods available to others, in fact increases those goods many times over. Land itself is of very little value, without labour. And he who applies his labor to land does not lessen but increase[s] the common stock of mankind. Locke maintained that land, like every other economic good, is valued only because of its usefulness, or utility, to man. Land is useful insofar as it enables us to sustain ourselves and to achieve our well-being. Thus the private owner and cultivator of land, by vastly increasing the amount of useful commodities that uncultivated land would otherwise yield, greatly improves the condition of mankind generally. Private property in land and other natural resources benefits everyone.

Next in line is Lockes discussion of money (precious metals) and how it counteracted his spoilage limitation (which I discussed in my last essay). The spoilage limitation does not limit the amount of property one may justly acquire; it merely prohibits claims of ownership to perishable goods that will spoil while in ones possession: the exceeding of the bounds of his just Property not lying in the largeness of his Possession, but in the perishing of any thing uselessly in it. One may therefore expand ones stock of private property by exchanging perishable goods that one cannot use for useful goods, for barter is a type of use. Or one may exchange perishable goods for durable goods that will not spoil, such as precious metals. Here is how Locke explained the matter.

Now of those good things which Nature hath provided in common, every one had a Rightto as much as he could use, and had a Property in all that he could affect with his Labour: all that his Industry could extend to, to alter from the State of Nature had put it in, was his. He that gathered a Hundred Bushels of Acorns or Apples, had thereby a Property in them; they were his Goods as soon as he gathered. He was only to look that he used them before they spoiled; else he took more than his share, and robbd others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of. And if he also bartered away Plums that would have rotted in a Week, for Nuts that would last good for his eating a whole Year, he did no injury; he wasted not the common Stock; destroyed no part of the portion of Goods that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hands. Again, if he would give his Nuts for a piece of Metal, pleased with its colour; or exchange his Sheep for Shells, or Wool for a sparkling Pebble or a Diamond, and keep those by him all his Life, he invaded not the Right of others, he might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased.

According to Locke, as precious metals were widely accepted as money, it became possible to accumulate potentially unlimited amounts of property without violating the spoilage limitation. This development was especially important to the ownership of land. Before the advent of money people were little inclined to expand their landed property, for there were only so many natural resources they could use for the benefit of themselves and their families. But things changed dramatically when excess land and its products could be sold for moneya durable form of wealth that does not violate the spoilage limitation. Money brought with it extensive commerce, and this commerce in turn, by increasing both the diversity and demand for commodities, greatly enhanced the wealth of nations.

In my last essay I suggested that Locke posited his two qualifications to property rights primarily for the purpose of demonstrating their inapplicability to his own labor theory of property. I shall now recapitulate his reasoning.

First, the proviso that property claims should leave enough for others to use is not a serious problem, because the amount of property that any individual can use and may claim by mixing his labor with it is very limited. Moreover, the private cultivator of land actually increases the amount of goods that others may use for their benefit.

Second, the spoilage limitation applies only to perishable goods. It does not apply to durable goods, such as precious metals, and it does not limit the amount of property one may own. Therefore, when the emergence of money made it possible to sell excess landi.e., land not needed to satisfy ones own wants, land on which crops might otherwise rotit also legitimated the ownership of land (and other resources) beyond that needed for personal use. Thus arose the accumulation of capital and Lockes opposition to a legal limits on interest ratesimportant elements in Lockes economic thinking that I cannot discuss here but which are explained in Karen Vaughns book, cited above.

One final note: It is clear that Locke believed that an economic system based on property rights did exist, and therefore could exist, in a state of nature, long before the emergence of governments, whose only justification was to render those rights more secure. And this entails a high degree of social order in Lockes anarchistic state of nature that was impossible in the state of nature described by Thomas Hobbesa perpetual war of every man against every man in which property rights and other civilizing institutions could not emerge. Lockes relatively optimistic view of the state of nature would later generate its own brand of anarchism. Given that society without government was not regarded as synonymous with social chaos in the Lockean tradition, and that government was deemed necessary only to remedy certain inconveniences in the state of nature in regard to the security of property rights already established, it became plausible to speculate on how those inconveniences might be dealt with satisfactorily in a competitive market system without a monopolistic government. What was unthinkable for Hobbes and other absolutists became thinkable in the treatment of John Locke.

George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American History for Cato Summer Seminars, and Executive Editor of Knowledge Products. Smith's fourth book, The System of Liberty, was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Read more here:

John Locke: Money and Private Property | Libertarianism.org

Survival Shield X-2: 2 Pack

Buy Two X-2 Get Ancient Defense Free

79.90

54.90

Leading the way into the next generation of super high quality nascent iodine, the new Infowars Life Survival Shield X-2 is now here.

http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/survival2.jpeg

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/survival-shield-x-2-2-pack.html?ims=lgdcw&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/survival-shield-x-2-2-pack.html?ims=lgdcw&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

Super Male Vitality

Limited Advanced Release

69.95

59.99

The all new and advanced Super Male Vitality formula uses the newest extraction technology with even more powerful concentrations of various herbs and extracts designed to be even stronger.

http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/supermale2.jpeg

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/super-male-vitality.html?ims=ogrik&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/super-male-vitality.html?ims=ogrik&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

Brain Force

34.95

29.95

Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life.

http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce2.jpeg

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=xgenk&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=xgenk&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

Secret 12 Vitamin B12

39.95

29.95

Discover The Benefits of Super Advanced Vitamin B-12 with The Infowars Life Secret 12 Proprietary Formula.

http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/b122.jpeg

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/secret-12-vitamin-b12.html?ims=fmabz&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/secret-12-vitamin-b12.html?ims=fmabz&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

Lung Cleanse

49.95

29.95

The Infowars Life Lung Cleanse is the result of ancient wisdom combined with herbal science reinterpreted in the light of modern day herbology.

http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/lung2.jpeg

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/lung-cleanse.html?ims=drwrp&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/lung-cleanse.html?ims=drwrp&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars&utm_medium=Magento&utm_content=Infowars+Placement

Continue reading here:

The Rise of Cultural Libertarianism Alex Jones' Infowars ...

This article uses content from the Wikipedia article on Libertarianism (edition) under the terms of the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy[1] that views respect for individual choice and individual liberty[2] as the foundation of the ideal society, and therefore seeks to minimize or abolish the coercive actions of the State as that is the entity that is generally identified as the most powerful coercive force in society.[3][4] Broadly speaking, libertarianism focuses on the rights of the individual to act in complete accordance with his or her own subjective values,[5] and argues that the coercive actions of the State are often (or even always) an impediment to the efficient realization of one's desires and values.[6][7] Libertarians also maintain that what is immoral for the individual must necessarily be immoral for all state agents, and that the state should not be above the natural law.[8][9] The extent to which government is necessary is evaluated by libertarian moral philosophers from a variety of perspectives.[10][11]

The term libertarian was originally used by late Enlightenment free-thinkers to refer to those who believed in free will, as opposed to determinism.[12] Libertarianism in this sense is still encountered in metaphysics in discussions of free will. The first recorded use of the term was in 1789, by William Belsham, son of a dissenting clergyman.[13]Murrary Rothbard identified mysterious Chinese philospher Lao-Tzu who lived in the sixth century BC as one of the first libertarian-minded philosphers and another philosopher Chuang-tzu as the first thinker to describe the benefits of "spontaneous order".[14]

The term libertarian was first popularized in France in the 1890s in order to counter and evade the anti-anarchist laws known as the lois sclrates.[citationneeded] According to anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the first use of the term libertarian communism was in November 1880, when a French anarchist congress employed it to more clearly identify its doctrines.[15] The French anarchist journalist Sbastien Faure, later founder and editor of the four-volume Anarchist Encyclopedia, started the weekly paper Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) in 1895.[16]

In the meantime, in the United States, libertarianism as a synonym for anarchism had begun to take hold. The anarchist communist geographer and social theorist Peter Kropotkin wrote in his seminal 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article Anarchism that:

Today, worldwide, anarchist communist, libertarian socialist, and other left-libertarian movements continue to describe themselves as libertarian, although their continued appropriation of the phrase is open to controversy, with right libertarians maintaining that left-libertarianism is internally inconsistent and should not be associated with modern libertarianism in any way. These "leftist" styles of libertarianism are opposed to most or all forms of private property.

Age of Enlightenment ideas of individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, peace, and reliance on the institutions of civil society and the free market for social order and economic prosperity were the basis of what became known as liberalism in the 19th century.[18] While it kept that meaning in most of the world, modern liberalism in the United States began to mean a more statist viewpoint. Over time, those who held to the earlier liberal views began to call themselves market liberals, classical liberals or libertarians.[19] While conservatism in Europe continued to mean conserving hierarchical class structures through state control of society and the economy, some conservatives in the United States began to refer to conserving traditions of liberty. This was especially true of the Old Right, who opposed The New Deal and U.S. military interventions in World War I and World War II.[20][21]

Later, the Austrian School of economics also had a powerful impact on both economic teaching and classical liberal and libertarian principles.[22][23] It influenced economists and political philosophers and theorists including Henry Hazlitt, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Israel Kirzner, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block and Richard M. Ebeling. The Austrian School was in turn influenced by Frederic Bastiat.[24][25]

Starting in the 1930s and continuing until today, a group of central European economists lead by Austrians Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek identified the collectivist underpinnings to the various new socialist and fascist doctrines of government power as being different brands of totalitarianism.

In the 1940s, Leonard Read began calling himself libertarian.[12] In 1955, Dean Russell wrote an article in the Foundation for Economic Education magazine pondering what to call those, such as himself, who subscribed to the classical liberal philosophy. He suggested: "Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian.""[26]

Ayn Rand's international best sellers The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and her books about her philosophy of objectivism influenced modern libertarianism.[27] For a number of years after the publication of her books, people promoting a libertarian philosophy continued to call it individualism.[28] Two other women also published influential pro-freedom books in 1943, Rose Wilder Lanes The Discovery of Freedom and Isabel Patersons The God of the Machine.[29]

According to libertarian publisher Robert W. Poole, Arizona United States Senator Barry Goldwater's message of individual liberty, economic freedom, and anti-communism also had a major impact on the libertarian movement, both with the publication of his book The Conscience of a Conservative and with his run for president in 1964.[30] Goldwater's speech writer, Karl Hess, became a leading libertarian writer and activist.[31]

The Cold War mentality of military interventionism, which had supplanted Old Right non-interventionism, was promoted by conservatives like William F. Buckley and accepted by many libertarians, with Murray Rothbard being a notable dissenter.[32] However, the Vietnam War split the uneasy alliance between growing numbers of self-identified libertarians, anarcho-libertarians, and more traditional conservatives who believed in limiting liberty to uphold moral virtues. Some libertarians joined the draft dodger, peace movements and Students for a Democratic Society. They began founding their own publications, like Murray Rothbard's The Libertarian Forum and organizations like the Radical Libertarian Alliance. The split was aggravated at the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention, when more than 300 libertarians organized to take control of the organization from conservatives. The burning of a draft card in protest to a conservative proposal against draft resistance sparked physical confrontations among convention attendees, a walkout by a large number of libertarians, the creation of new purely libertarian organizations like the Society for Individual Liberty, and efforts to recruit potential libertarians from conservative organizations.[33] The split was finalized in 1971 when conservative leader William F. Buckley, in a 1971 New York Times article, attempted to weed libertarians out of the freedom movement. He wrote: "The ideological licentiousness that rages through America today makes anarchy attractive to the simple-minded. Even to the ingeniously simple-minded."[29]

In 1971, David Nolan and a few friends formed the Libertarian Party.[34] Attracting former Democrats, Republicans and independents, it has run a presidential candidate every election year since 1972, including Ed Clark (1980), Ron Paul (1988), Harry Browne (1996 and 2000) and Bob Barr (2008). By 2006, polls showed that 15 percent of American voters identified themselves as libertarian.[35] Over the years, dozens of libertarian political parties have been formed worldwide. Educational organizations like the Center for Libertarian Studies and the Cato Institute were formed in the 1970s, and others have been created since then.[36]

Philosophical libertarianism gained a significant measure of recognition in academia with the publication of Harvard University professor Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. The book won a National Book Award in 1975.[37] According to libertarian essayist Roy Childs, "Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia single-handedly established the legitimacy of libertarianism as a political theory in the world of academia."[38]

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states "libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions." It notes that libertarianism is not a right-wing doctrine because of its opposition to laws restricting adult consensual sexual relationships and drug use, and its opposition to imposing religious views or practices and compulsory military service. However, it notes that there is a version known as left-libertarianism which also endorses full self-ownership, but "differs on unappropriated natural resources (land, air, water, etc.)." "Right-libertarianism" holds that such resources may be appropriated by individuals. "Left-libertarianism" holds that they belong to everyone and must be distributed in some egalitarian manner.[39]

Like many libertarians, Leonard Read rejected the concepts of "left" and "right" libertarianism, calling them "authoritarian."[40] Libertarian author and politician Harry Browne wrote: "We should never define Libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals or conservatives nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are Libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times. You can depend on us to treat government as the problem, not the solution."[41]

Isaiah Berlin's 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" described a difference between negative liberty which limits the power of the state to interfere and positive liberty in which a paternalistic state helps individuals achieve self-realization and self-determination. He believed these were rival and incompatible interpretations of liberty and held that demands for positive liberty lead to authoritarianism. This view has been adopted by many libertarians including Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.[42]

Libertarians contrast two ethical views: consequentialist libertarianism, which is the support for liberty because it leads to favorable consequences, such as prosperity or efficiency and deontological libertarianism (also known as "rights-theorist libertarianism," "natural rights libertarianism," or "libertarian moralism") which consider moral tenets to be the basis of libertarian philosophy.[43] Others combine a hybrid of consequentialist and deontologist thinking.[44]

Another view, contractarian libertarianism, holds that any legitimate authority of government derives not from the consent of the governed, but from contract or mutual agreement. Robert Nozick holds a variation on this view, as does Jan Narveson as outlined in his 1988 work The Libertarian Idea and his 2002 work Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice. Other advocates of contractarian libertarianism include the Nobel Laureate and founder of the public choice school of economics James M. Buchanan, Canadian philosopher David Gauthier and Hungarian-French philosopher Anthony de Jasay.[45][46][47]

The main differences among libertarians relate to the ideal amount of freedom and the means to that freedom.

Libertarian conservatism, also known as conservative libertarianism (and sometimes called right-libertarianism), describes certain political ideologies which attempt to meld libertarian and conservative ideas, often called "fusionism."[48][49] Anthony Gregory writes that right, or conservative, "libertarianism can refer to any number of varying and at times mutually exclusive political orientations" such as being "interested mainly in 'economic freedoms'"; following the "conservative lifestyle of right-libertarians"; seeking "others to embrace their own conservative lifestyle"; considering big business "as a great victim of the state"; favoring a "strong national defense"; and having "an Old Right opposition to empire."[50]

Conservatives hold that shared values, morals, standards, and traditions are necessary for social order while libertarians consider individual liberty as the highest value.[51] Laurence M. Vance writes: "Some libertarians consider libertarianism to be a lifestyle rather than a political philosophy... They apparently dont know the difference between libertarianism and libertinism."[52] However, Edward Feser emphasizes that libertarianism does not require individuals to reject traditional conservative values.[48]

Some libertarian conservatives in the United States (known as libertarian constitutionalists) believe that the way to limit government is to enforce the United States Constitution.[53]

Libertarianism's status is in dispute among those who style themselves Objectivists (Objectivism is the name philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand gave her philosophy). Though elements of Rand's philosophy have been adopted by libertarianism, Objectivists (including Rand herself) have condemned libertarianism as a threat to freedom and capitalism. In particular, it has been claimed that libertarians use Objectivist ideas "with the teeth pulled out of them".[54][55]

Conversely, some libertarians see Objectivists as dogmatic, unrealistic, and uncompromising (Objectivists do not see the last as a negative attribute). According to Reason editor Nick Gillespie in the magazine's March 2005 issue focusing on Objectivism's influence, Rand is "one of the most important figures in the libertarian movement... Rand remains one of the best-selling and most widely influential figures in American thought and culture" in general and in libertarianism in particular. Still, he confesses that he is embarrassed by his magazine's association with her ideas. In the same issue, Cathy Young says that "Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand's ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild." Though they reject what they see as Randian dogmas, libertarians like Young still believe that "Rand's message of reason and liberty... could be a rallying point" for libertarianism.

Objectivists reject the rigorous interpretation of the non-aggression principle which leads anarchist libertarians to reject the State. For Objectivists, a government limited to protection of its citizens' rights is absolutely necessary and moral or at least a "necessary evil". Objectivists are opposed to all anarchist currents and are suspicious of libertarians' lineage with individualist anarchism.[56]

Libertarian progressivism supports the civil libertarian aspect of freedom as well as supporting the kind of economic freedom that emphasizes removing corporate subsidies and other favoritism to special interests, and applying a responsible transition toward freedom - for example, some support a transition approach that includes certain trade restrictions on imports from countries that have very little freedom, and free trade with those countries would be phased in if they move toward more freedom. Libertarian progressives are sometimes libertarian Democrats.[57][58]

Minarchism is the belief that a state should exist but that its functions should be minimal because its sole purpose is protecting the rights of the people, including protecting people and their property from the criminal acts of others, as well as providing for national defense.[59]

Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing many theories and traditions, all opposed to government. Although anarchism is usually considered to be a left-wing ideology, it always has included individualists and, more recently, anarcho-capitalists who support pro-property and market-oriented economic structures. Anarchists may support anything from extreme individualism to complete collectivism.

Geolibertarianism is a political movement that strives to reconcile libertarianism and Georgism (or geoism).[60] Geolibertarians are advocates of geoism, which is the position that all land is a common asset to which all individuals have an equal right to access, and therefore if individuals claim the land as their property they must pay rent to the community for doing so. Rent need not be paid for the mere use of land, but only for the right to exclude others from that land, and for the protection of one's title by government. They simultaneously agree with the libertarian position that each individual has an exclusive right to the fruits of his or her labor as their private property, as opposed to this product being owned collectively by society or the community, and that "one's labor, wages, and the products of labor" should not be taxed. In agreement with traditional libertarians they advocate "full civil liberties, with no crimes unless there are victims who have been invaded."[60] Geolibertarians generally advocate distributing the land rent to the community via a land value tax, as proposed by Henry George and others before him. For this reason, they are often called "single taxers". Fred E. Foldvary coined the word "geo-libertarianism" in an article so titled in Land and Liberty, May/June 1981, pp. 53-55. In the case of geoanarchism, the voluntary form of geolibertarianism as described by Foldvary, rent would be collected by private associations with the opportunity to secede from a geocommunity (and not receive the geocommunity's services) if desired.

Left-libertarianism is usually regarded as doctrine that has an egalitarian view concerning natural resources, believing that it is not legitimate for someone to claim private ownership of resources to the detriment of others.[39][61][62] Most left libertarians support some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources.[62] Left libertarianism is defended by contemporary theorists such as Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, Michael Otsuka, and Noam Chomsky.[63] The term is sometimes used as a synonym for libertarian socialism or simply socialism.[64]

Some members of the U.S. libertarian movement, including the late Samuel Edward Konkin III[65] and Roderick T. Long,[66] employ a differing definition of left libertarianism. These individuals depart from other forms of libertarianism by advocating strong alliances with the Left on issues such as the anti-war movement,[67] and by supporting labor unions.[68][69] Some wish to revive voluntary cooperative ideas such as mutualism.[70]

In France, Libert chrie ("Cherished Liberty") is a pro-liberty think tank and activist association formed in 2003. Libert chrie gained significant publicity when it managed to draw 30,000 Parisians into the streets to demonstrate against government employees who were striking.[71][72]

In Germany, a "Libertre Plattform in der FDP" ("Liberty Caucus within the Free Democratic Party") was founded in 2005.

The Russian Libertarian Movement (Rossiyskoye Libertarianskoye Dvizhenie, RLD; 2003-2006) was a short-lived political party in the Russian Federation, formed by members of the Institute of Natiology (Moscow), a libertarian think-tank. After electoral failure and government failure, it disbanded.

The Libertarian Alliance was an early libertarian educational group. It was followed by British think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute. A British Libertarian Party was founded on January 1, 2008.

Well known libertarian organizations include the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The Libertarian Party of the United States is the world's first such party.

The activist Free State Project, formed in 2001, works to bring 20,000 libertarians to the state of New Hampshire to influence state policy. They had signed up 1,033 people by 2008. Similar, but less successful, projects include the Free West Alliance and Free State Wyoming. (There is also a European Free State Project.)

The Tea Party Movement is arguably a recent revival of mainstream libertarianism in the United States. Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul's increasing visibility and popularity with the electorate could also be signs of a revival of libertarianism in mainstream political consciousness in the United States.

Costa Rica's Movimiento Libertario ("Libertarian Movement") is libertarian party which holds roughly 10% of the seats in Costa Rica's national assembly (legislature). The Limn REAL Project seeks for autonomy in a province in Costa Rica.[73]

Libertarianism at Wikipedia

Read the rest here:

Libertarianism - Mises Wiki, the global repository of ...

Libertarianisme er en betegnelse for et bredt spektrum af politiske filosofier, som prioriterer individuel frihed hjt og forsger at minimere eller endog fjerne statsmagten. Filosofien fremfres oftest som en teori om retfrdighed, om end der ikke er noget forenet princip eller st af principper, som alle libertarianere kan forenes omkring. Libertarianismen har imidlertid strke rdder i isr liberalistisk og anarkistisk filosofi. Sledes er mange libertarianere enten tilhngere af en minarkistisk statsform eller et markedsanarki.

Libertarianismen er traditionelt blevet forsvaret enten p grundlag af konsekventialistiske principper eller som en rent naturretlig doktrin. Stttere af den frstnvnte tilgang betegner ofte sig selv som klassisk liberale, medens tilhngere af sidstnvnte slet og ret holder sig til "libertarianere".[Kilde mangler]

Termen "libertarianer" er meget udbredt i USA, hvor begrebet liberal er mere flertydigt end i visse andre dele af den vestlige verden. I Danmark er det sledes ikke unormalt for personer, som tilslutter sig denne gren af liberalismen, blot at kalde sig selv for liberale. En forgelse af tilgngeligheden af isr amerikansk litteratur om emnet synes dog at vidne om, at termen vinder strre indpas i dansk sprogbrug.[Kilde mangler]

Den frste registrerede brug af termen i en politisk sammenhng, var i 1857 i forbindelse med en oversttelse af det franske ord libertaire til libertarian p engelsk, af den franske anarko-kommunist Joseph Djacque[1]. Termen blev i 1890ernes Frankrig populr som et middel til at undg konsekvenserne af den anti-anarkistiske lovgivning (les lois sclrates).

P omtrent samme tid i USA, begyndte termen ligeledes at sl rod blandt anarkistiske kommunister, og politologen Peter Kropotkin skrev i sin artikel om anarkisme i Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911-udgave:

Det ville vre umuligt p denne plads til fulde at prsentere p den ene side de anarkistiske ideer i den moderne litteratur, og p den anden side den indflydelse, som de libertre ideer har haft, p nutidige forfatteres udvikling af anarkismen[2].

I dag beskriver anarkistiske kommunister, libertre socialister og venstre-libertarianere fortsat sig selv som libertarianere, der ganske vist er imod den private ejendomsret, men som samtidig vender sig imod statslig magtanvendelse for at afskaffe den.

Under Den Store Depression i frste halvdel af 1900-tallet havde en rkke konomer og filosoffer, heriblandt John Maynard Keynes og John Dewey, begyndt at overtage og omdefinere liberalismen. Igennem den skaldte socialliberalisme (ogs kaldet nyliberalisme, hvilket dog ikke m forveksles med det nutidige ord neoliberalisme) fremsatte de argumenter for, hvordan en konomisk krise kunne undgs eller formindskes, hvis blot statsmagten begyndte at intervenere i det konomiske liv. Denne konomiske opfattelse, kaldet keynesianisme, vandt indpas verden over og USA's prsident Franklin D. Roosevelt planlagde sin New Deal p grundlag af dens principper.

Da omfanget af konomer og filosoffer, som kaldte sig selv liberale, men samtidig stttede en strk statslig indblanding i det konomiske liv steg kraftigt i disse r, blev ordet "liberalisme" i stadig hjere grad sammenkdet med etatisme, eller endog socialisme; hvilket stadig er tilfldet i nutidens USA og Storbritannien.

De personer, som stadig fastholdt tiltroen til oplysningstidens idealer om personlig frihed og privat ejendomsret stod sledes i et dilemma, da verden omkring dem havde defineret deres filosofiske grundlag p ny. Nogle begyndte derfor at kalde sig "klassisk liberale", andre "konservative".

Striden om hvad man skulle kalde sit filosofiske grundlag frte til en strre leksikal debat under og efter Den Store Depression blandt isr amerikanske og strigske liberalister.

I denne debat var den strigske konom og jurist Ludwig von Mises aktiv i sine bestrbelser p, at udrydde hvad han opfattede som intellektuel og praktisk forvirring. Iflge von Mises var det ikke blot et ord der var p spil, men en betydningsfuld forskel imellem den forholdsvist uforstyrrede markedskonomi og en statsstyret planlgningskonomi.

I sin bog Liberalismus fra 1927 gjorde von Mises op med de skaldte moderne liberale som mente, at politik alene handlede om et ml, f.eks. konomisk lighed. Heroverfor fremsatte von Mises den pstand, at politik slet ikke handlede om et ml i sig selv, men om de midler, hvormed et ml skal opns. Socialister og liberalister kunne sledes meget vel have samme ml, f.eks. menneskelig lykke, men midlet til at opn dette var vidt forskelligt.

For at understrege denne forskel, begyndte Leonard Read, der i 1937 havde grundlagt den liberale uddannelsesinstitution Foundation for Economic Education, i 1940erne, at omtale sin filosofiske opfattelse som "libertariansk" fordi han mente, folk ville misfortolke "klassisk", i klassisk liberal, p en sdan mde, at de ville tro, der var tale om et antikt og utidssvarende filosofisk system[3]. I 1955 skrev Dean Russell en artikel, hvori han funderede over, hvad han skulle kalde sdan en som sig selv, der var tilhnger af den klassisk liberale filosofi. Han foreslog:

Lad os, som elsker frihed, tage patent p det gode navn "libertarianer".[4]

Visse fremtrdende personligheder indenfor den libertarianske verden fortsatte dog med at betegne sig selv som klassisk liberale. Blandt disse var netop Ludwig von Mises og Friedrich Hayek, der begge i deres intellektuelle arbejde havde identificeret socialismen og fascismens kollektivistiske grundlag, som vrende i familie med totalitarismen.

Ayn Rands internationale bestsellere The Fountainhead (1943) og Atlas Shrugged (1957), samt hendes bger om den objektivistiske filosofi, affdte en fornyet interesse i de libertarianske ideer om frihed og kapitalisme[5] .

I 1958 udgav den britiske akademiker Isaiah Berlin sin essay Two Concepts of Liberty hvori han opstillede to forskellige definitioner af frihed: Positiv og negativ frihed. Hvor klassiske liberale arbejde for at sikre frihed i en negativ forstand, det vil sige frihed fra tvang, forsgte den skaldt moderne liberalisme og socialismen at opn frihed i sin positive betydning, ved at sikre mennesker en frihed til at opn en mulighed.

J. S. Mill's Liberty, Spencer's Individual versus the State, Marc Guyau's Morality without Obligation or Sanction, and Fouille's La Morale, I'art et la religion, the works of Multatuli (E. Douwes Dekker), Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le Travail, the latest works of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known authors, are full of ideas which show how closely anarchism is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern thought in the same direction of enfranchisement of man from the bonds of the state as well as from those of capitalism.

Many of us call ourselves "liberals," And it is true that the word "liberal" once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward, subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian."

More:

Libertarianisme - Wikipedia, den frie encyklopdi

What is Libertarianism?

Libertarians see the individual as the basic, most essential element of society. The word roughly means believer in liberty. Libertarians believe that each individual owns his or her own life and property and has the right to make his own choices about how to live his life as long as he respects the rights of others to do the same.

Liberty is one of the central lessons of world history. Virtually all the progress the human race has enjoyed during the past few centuries is due to the increasing acceptance of free markets, civil liberties and self-ownership.

Libertarianism is thus the combination of liberty (the freedom to live your life in any peaceful way you choose), responsibility (the prohibition against the use of force against others, except in defense) and tolerance (honoring and respecting the peaceful choices of others).

Click here to view some definitions of libertarianism.

Libertarians are not left or right or a combination of the two. Libertarians believe that on every issue you have the right to decide for yourself whats best for you and to act on that belief, so long as you simply respect the right of other people to do the same.

How does this compare with the left and right? Todays liberals tend to value personal liberty, but want significant government control of the economy. Todays conservatives tend to favor economic freedom, but want to use the government to uphold traditional values. Libertarians, in contrast, support both personal and economic liberty.

Libertarianism is the only political movement that consistently advocates a high degree of both personal and economic liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

Modern libertarianism has multiple roots, but perhaps the most important one is the minimal-government republicanism of Americas founding revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. The core ideals of libertarianism that all men are created equal and are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can be seen in the Declaration of Independence and in the limited government established in the Constitution.

Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill are among the most famous of the 18th and 19th centuries classical liberals that developed theories on the invisible hand of free markets. More recently, libertarian philosophy has been explored and defined through Ayn Rands ethical egoism and the Austrian School of free-market economics.

Libertarians want to unleash the positive creative powers of the individual and to create a peaceful, prosperous world. Libertarians understand that static, monolithic bureaucracies generally serve to enrich the current elite structures, damages individuals with unintended consequences and fails to live up to their grand promises more often than not.

History has shown that tyrannical governments ultimately result in suffering and poverty. Libertarians want to empower individuals to take control over their own lives not simply because it is the moral thing to do, but additionally because it results in the most dynamic, prosperous, peaceful societies possible.

Libertarians use a caring, people-centered approach to politics. Politicians too frequently forget that their laws and regulations affect real human beings. Libertarians never lose sight of the fact that each individual is unique and has great potential. Libertarians want a system which encourages us all to discover the best within ourselves, and to make the most of it.

In dealing with political issues, libertarians ask, Is anyone violating anothers rights? If the answer is yes if someone is committing murder, rape, robbery, theft, fraud, arson, trespass, etc. then it is proper to call on the government. If no one is being harmed, the government should not get involved.

Libertarians want to replace as much government as they practically can with private, voluntary alternatives. Some libertarians are minarchists who favor stripping government of most of its accumulated power to meddle, leaving only structures like the police, courts and military to defend our rights and borders. Others are anarcho-capitalists who believe limited government is a contradiction and the free market can provide better law, order and security than any government monopoly.

Libertarians want to break the chains of poverty

As the level of government spending in this country has risen, so has poverty. Government bureaucracies have no incentive to lift people from dependency and every incentive to increase their budgets and power. Libertarians want to break the chains of poverty and help the disabled. By allowing people to keep what they earn, wealth goes directly into the private sector, businesses create more jobs and charitable giving increases.

The current system allows the rich to collude with the government to take your property through eminent domain and taxation. A strong government always becomes an instrument of privilege. The rich can exploit their resources to influence the government to squash competition and receive special favors. Regulations, permits, licensing, zoning and labor laws make it nearly impossible to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

Stronger property rights and a weaker government would weaken the elite and benefit minorities, small businesses and the poor.

National defense is one of the few legitimate roles of the government, but that defense should be limited to protecting Americans in America. A military force focused on defending America, rather than policing the globe, would reduce the manpower and resource needs that currently stretch and endanger our defense. A non-interventionist military would, over time, acquire fewer enemies and further reduce the need for a massive defense industry and budget.

Absolutely not. You dont have to believe that everyone will be good for freedom to work. Americas Founding Fathers understood that most people were guided by greed, ambition, and the pursuit of their own happiness. That is why they built structures with limited powers, checks and balances, and other limiting factors on the darker sides of human nature. If people are generally not good, the last thing you should want is a powerful government staffed by those evil folks.

Most people, most of the time, deal with each other on the libertarian premise of respect for the rights of others. The absolute majority of people do not steal, or cheat or murder others. A strong respect for property rights and civil liberties gives authority to limited government structures to punish those few who violate the law and provide restitution for those harmed.

The best way to act on liberty is to think about freedom and act on your thoughts. Read libertarian books and publications, and share them with your friends.

Start a libertarian student group. Identify and recruit new libertarians with Operation Politically Homeless. Give a speech or write a letter to the editor. Use the words libertarian and libertarianism in your daily life so more people are exposed to it.

Join a libertarian organization or campaign. Support them with your donations and time. Give to private charities. Run for office. Oppose government expansion at every opportunity. Start your own business, create wealth and support voluntary cooperation.

Join tens of thousands of readers by subscribing to our free biweekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. Each issue has information on libertarian ideas, the liberty movement, current events, useful resources, and the very best ways to help others understand and accept libertarianism.

Visit our Liberty Movement page and explore the various organizations that fight for libertarianism on a daily basis.

Take the Worlds Smallest Political Quiz. See where you fit on the new political map and how your beliefs compare to other political philosophies.

Contact us for more information about libertarianism and the best ways to advance it.

View post:

Libertarianism - The Advocates for Self-Government

(NOTE: You must read only those linked materials that are preceded by the capitalized word READ.) Overview of The Problem of Freedom

On the definition of freedom and suggested links: READ: http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/f9.htm#free

For those of you who believe that you are free and have a free will and can make free decisions, here are some interesting definitions and presentations of the basic issues

FREE WILL -Definition http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Definition: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06259a.htm

Human beings are free to choose amongst alternatives available and must be respected as such. This freedom is to be acknowledged and promoted. The believers in free will attempt to argue for their case against those that believe that all human actions are determined by previous events and the laws of the physical universe.

Below are several arguments in support of the Libertarian position.

The libertarians would ask that we consider the DATA of experience:

1. Experience of deliberation

a. I deliberate only about MY behavior

b. I deliberate only about future things

c. I cannot deliberate about what I shall do, if I already know what I am going to do.

d. I cannot deliberate unless I believe that it is "up to me."

2. Experience that it is "up to me" what to do.

They hold that there is no necessity governing human behavior. There is no causal or logical necessity. (Logical Necessity, e.g. principle of non-contradiction) (Causal necessity - physical law, e.g. gravity)

Suggested Reading: John Hospers, The Meaning of Freedom

http://www.vix.com/objectivism/Writing/TiborMachan/DefenseOfFreeWill.html

Richard Taylor is a modern American philosopher who has taught at the University of Rochester and at Hartwick College. Taylor proposes the following method for finding out whether or not determinism is true: We try to see whether it is consistent with certain data, that is, by seeing whether or not it squares with certain things that everyone knows, or believes himself to know, or with things everyone is at least more sure about than the answer to the question at issue. (Metaphysics, 4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992, p. 38)

The following is from http://www.citruscollege.com/ace/Call/PHIL106-1/notes/Taylor.asp 2001.

Taylors data

(1) I sometimes deliberate, with the view to making a decision; a decision, namely, to do this thing or that.

(2) Whether or not I deliberate about what to do, it is sometimes up to me what I do.

By deliberation Taylor means the experience of weighing something in ones mind, of trying out various options in ones mind. There are certain presuppositions of deliberation, namely,

(1) I can deliberate only about my own behavior and never about the behavior of another.

(2) I can deliberate only about future things, never about things past or present.

(3) I cant deliberate about what Im going to do if I already know what Im going to do.

(4) I cant deliberate about what to do, even though I may not know what Im going to do, unless I believe that it is up to me what Im going to do. (pp. 39-40)

These data are not consistent with the thesis of determinism. If determinism is true, then it is an illusion that I ever genuinely deliberate about anything or that anything is ever really up to me. If these data are true, then determinism is false. Taylor argues that it doesnt make any difference whether we are talking about a forthright, hard determinism, like that of Holbach, or a compatibilist, soft determinism, like that of Hume. According to soft determinism, an action is free just so long as it is caused by an internal state of the agent himself or herself. Against this, he proposes the counterexample of an ingenious physiologist who can induce in a subject any volition he pleases, so that, simply by pushing a button, he can cause the subject to have an internal state which the subject will experience as the desire to do a certain thing. If the subject then does that thing, unimpeded by any external obstacle, that action meets the criterion of being a free action, in accordance with the thesis of soft determinism. That is, the action is due to an internal state of the agent and is not opposed by any external factor. However, we see at once that this action is not free, because it was due to the subjects being in a certain internal state over which he or she had no control. Then Taylor points out that the supposition of the work of the ingenious physiologist isn't necessary to reach the same conclusion. As long as there is any cause of the internal state that was not under the control of the person whose internal state it is, the resulting action is not free.

There is a real choice that is not to be evaded, then, between accepting determinism and rejecting the data with which we began, on the one hand, or holding fast to our data and rejecting the thesis which is inconsistent with them. Taylor points out, however, that simply rejecting determinism and embracing the thesis of simple indeterminism, which says that some events are uncaused, brings us no closer to a theory explaining free actions that is consistent with our data. He asks the reader to imagine a case in which his or her right arm is free, according to this conception. That is, it just moves one way or another, without any cause whatever. Plainly, if the agent is not the cause for the arm movements, then those movements are not free, voluntary actions of the agent.

Accordingly, Taylor develops a theory of agency with the following elements:

(1) An action that is free must be caused by the agent who performs it, and it must be such that no other set of antecedent conditions was sufficient for the occurrence of just that action.

(2) An agent is a self or person, and not merely a collection of things or events, but a self-moving being. (pp. 51-52)

Taylor recognizes that this involves a metaphysical commitment to a special kind of causation, and he suggests that perhaps causation is not the best language to use to describe it. He proposes that we might want to say instead that an agent originates, initiates, or simply, performs an action. All other cases of causation we conceive of as a relation between events. One event or set of events is a sufficient, or necessary, or sufficient and necessary condition for the occurrence of another. However, an agent is not an event, and we certainly wouldnt say the mere existence of the agent is ever a sufficient condition for the occurrence of one of his or her free actions. Rather, it is only the free action of the agent that is the cause or the origination of the action. Since Taylor can offer no further explanation of how it that this occurs, he admits that it is possible that the data that this theory was developed to explain might be an illusion after all, and his essay ends on an inconclusive note.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Richard Taylor: A Contemporary Defense of Free Will

The idea of freedom operative in this view is one in which there is no obstacle or impediment that prevents behavior, no constraints, for it is constraints that force behavior. Freedom of the human agent is free activity that is unimpeded and unconstrained. So, there is the Theory of Agency in which there exist self-determining beings: free and rational. There exists the self or person, a substance and self-moving being. The libertarians believe that this theory is consistent with the data of human consciousness. But that DATA may be illusion!!

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Summary of Taylor's view by Omonia Vinieris (QCC, 2002)

In his work, A Contemporary Defense of Free Will, Taylor refutes the theories held by compatibilism (soft determinism) and simple indeterminism to illustrate their implausibility. He further goes on to affirm his theory of agency to articulate his libertarian standpoint.

Taylor clarifies the concept of deliberation as it is fundamentally the act of considering or assessing something in ones mind. According to Taylor, deliberation encompasses the following premises: One can deliberate solely about ones own conduct and by no means about that of another due to the simple fact that each person makes up ones own mind and never the mind of a different person. There is only deliberation of future actions and never of precedent ones because one can not deliberate about or consider an action that has already transpired. Deliberation is a conditional state that is unconfirmed because it entails the action before it takes place and therefore if one knows or confirms a future action, deliberation is invalid. Altogether, deliberation itself does not exist or ensue if one does not even believe that it is ever ones own consideration that accounts for ones decision to do anything because that is essentially the principle that deliberation embraces.

In his critique of soft determinism, Taylor explains primarily what line of reasoning it maintains and then pinpoints its incongruity to negate its veracity. Compatibilism is a position whose advocates renounce hard determinist thought. Hard determinist position asserts that we are not morally responsible for our own actions because we are not liable for anything we do. Yet, soft determinists say that freedom and determinism are compatible. Determinism is plausibly coherent with freedom as an agent is a carrier of volition and acts appropriately to his or her desires and wishes. On occasion it may be that ones actions are the product of ones deliberation or conditional forethought. Still, if compatibilism holds true it must simultaneously maintain the determinist idea that ones choices are preordained by prenatal events. If this is so, then how can it be possibly up to anyone to do anything?

Simple indeterminism is the denial of determinism. These indeterminists affirm that free agents are morally responsible for their actions which are tamed and controlled. If actions originate from noncausal events as indeterminists claim, then they are chaotic and untamed. Thus, Taylor considers it a contradiction to suggest that ones actions originate from uncaused events because neither is one really a free agent nor morally responsible for his or her actions. These actions are uncontrollable and irresponsible.

Taylors theory of agency proclaims that all events are caused, but unlike determinist theory, some changes or actions have beginnings. A free action is triggered by the agent itself. An agent, in this case, is described as a human, a self-moving body, capable of being the first cause of motion in a causal sequence. It is important that no series of foregoing conditions is adequate for the actual happening of the action, otherwise it would not be free. He further specifies that we should not speak of causation in terms of his free agency. The agent, rather, initiates an action through its performance. An agent, he asserts, is not a set of events that executes causation and therefore it is the free action of the agent that is the cause of the action that occurred.

In the case of an action that is free, it must be such that it is caused by the agent who performs it, but such that no antecedent conditions were sufficient for his performing just that action.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

The Freewill Problem:

Searles Solution to the Freewill Problem:

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

There are no greater defenders or representatives of the position that humans have free will than the existentialists.They may not offer strict philosophical proof but they do present some strong language in defense of freedom. The next section presents the existentialist view.

Read this article:

Libertarianism

libertarianism (moral philosophy)

In philosophy, libertarianism is a position which stands opposite of determinism. According to libertarianism, humans have free will and their actions are not determined by prior physical states. According to libertarians, human freedom is not possible if the universe is wholly deterministic - some amount of indeterminism in human choices and actions must exist, otherwise human freedom is an illusion.

A range of beliefs exists under the label "libertarianism." The most extreme viewpoint holds that human actions aren't determined by anything at all, not even by a person's character, beliefs, or values. Even some libertarians reject this position, arguing that without some strong connection to a person's character and values, it would be difficult to conclude that a person is responsible for their actions.

If indeterministic chance were the complete and sole explanation for all our actions, then we would be free but we would not be responsible - which, ironically, is exactly what libertarians typically fight against. According to them, if our decisions have been determined, then we cannot be held responsible for them - our actions are just the product of physical forces beyond our control.

This means that some amount of determinism must exist so that we can take responsibility and be responsible - especially when it comes to ethical and moral issues.

In moral philosophy, the concept of libertarianism refers to the idea that human free will is a necessary precondition of moral responsibility and, in fact, humans do have this free will. According to the standard libertarian position, human acts cannot be wholly determined by prior states or natural laws.

It is granted that such states and laws may have an influence upon human decisions, but nevertheless those decisions are, in principle, not predictable by reference to those states and laws. Thus, determinism (or at least "hard" determinism) is not true and humans have moral responsibility for their actions.

Traditionally, most forms of libertarianism have been promoted by theists who advocate mind/body dualism. Renee Descartes is a famous advocate of this position.

First, the existence of a non-physical mind means that the locus of decision-making is removed from the realm of physical causality and determinism. Second, they argue that the free will which the mind or spirit possessed is a gift from God. At the same time, though, these theists have also often believed that their god has sufficient knowledge of the future to know what everyone's "free will" decisions will be - so, somehow, human decisions are entirely free yet unalterable.

Non-religious and non-theistic advocates of libertarianism have offered different explanations for how free will and free choice can exist in the context of a physical, causal universe. One common explanation is that not all events are completely determined, or at least completely pre-determined. They are still caused, but causation and determinism are not the same thing. A particular event might, for example, only be statistically likely.

Such a situation is often referred to as "soft causality" and if the brain is a system which can be described in such a way, then brain states are not pre-determined. If the mind is simply the overall state of the brain when it is alive, then the mind is also not pre-determined and, therefore, some degree of free will exists because our choices, decisions, and actions are not pre-determined. There is no need for any god or soul to provide any explanations here.

A third position that is sometimes adopted is to claim that causality simply doesn't apply to human decisions. According to advocates of this position, our decisions may be influenced by "reasons" and "values" and "desires," but none of these things are causes of our actions or decisions. A reason or desire can only influence, not cause, which means that our actions are not determined.

Granted, our reasons and desires might themselves be caused and perhaps even determined, depending on what one thinks of the relationship between the physical brain and the mind, but the final decisions which we make have been removed from that problem. Once again, there is no need for any god or soul to explain anything here - it's a completely naturalistic explanation which does not necessarily exclude belief in any gods or disprove any gods, but gods just aren't relevant.

Also Known As: none

Alternate Spellings: none

Common Misspellings: none

Related Resources:

What are Ethics and Morality? Ethics is the formal study of moral standards and conduct. For this reason, the study of ethics is also often called "moral philosophy." What is good? What is evil? How should I behave - and why? How should I balance my needs against the needs of others?

What is Philosophy? What is philosophy? Is there any point in studying philosophy, or is it a useless subject? What are the different branches of philosophy - what's the difference between aestheitcs and ethics? What's the difference between metaphysics and epistemology?

View post:

libertarianism (moral philosophy) - About.com Agnosticism/Atheism

The political philosophy that...

1. ...says no one has the right to initate force against another. Period. Even if it's for their own good.

2. ...says government in a free society exists only to (A)protect its citizens from having force initated on them, and to (B)punish those who have initiated force on others.

3. ...IS NOT ANARCHISM, a belief that everything government provides, society can provide more effectively.

4. ...was derived from classical liberalism, the very philosophy that the United States was founded apon and roughly operated under up until the end of the 1800s.

5. ...is the most logical, humane, and ethical political system ever thought of.

For insight on the *practical* benefits of such a system, interested bodies should read "Healing Our World" by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, just to get started. (Freely available on the Net.)

"(Left-)Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult."

A political philosophy based on the Non-Aggression Principle, which holds that people should be allowed to live as they choose and make their own choices without interference from government or others, so long as those choices do not involve the initiation of force or fraud against others.

Libertarianism is the opposite of authoritarianism or statism, which is the idea that governments should largely control people, allocate their resources, and make decisions for them, allegedly for their own good or the good of society (in practice usually for the good of those running the government).

The main problem with this delusional notion of co-existence is that it runs afoul of an annoying immutable natural law - roughly translated as "nature abhors a vacuum" - that's understood and exploited by every drug pusher, credit card issuer, Las Vegas casino, and Madison Avenue marketer and even the bailout-happy U.S. Federal Reserve and which was summed up by Edmund Burke:

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves.

"Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

-or as John Adams said:

(The U.S.) constitution was made for a moral and religious people; it is wholly inadequate for any other.

"We favor the repeal of all laws creating 'crimes' without victims, such as the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes."

"The only legitimate use of force is in defense of individual rights life, liberty, and justly acquired property against aggression"

Noun. The belief that pursuing one's own self-interest, while shirking larger social responsibilities, is still somehow humanitarian.

Libertarianism is how the advantaged describe their neglect of the les-advantage: they're "protecting everyone's freedom" by respecting the impoverished's right to be poor.

Also known as Libertarian Capitalism, not to be confused with Libertarian Socialism, which can lay a true claim to the term.

How would you like to pay for air?

To put it bluntly, a political theory for people who don't have the balls to admit they are anarchists.

Random libertarian: No, I'm no anarchist. I just don't believe government should interfere with my live at all. That's all... honest...

Read more:

Urban Dictionary: libertarianism

"That perfect liberty they sigh for-- the liberty of making slaves of other people-- Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never thought of themselves, a year ago." -- Abraham Lincoln

Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money!"

This article has been rewritten, for two reasons. First, the original article had sidebars to address common objections. From several people's reactions, it seems that they never read these. They're now incorporated into the text.

Second, and more importantly, many people who call themselves libertarians didn't recognize themselves in the description. There are libertarians and libertarians, and sometimes different camps despise each other-- or don't seem to be aware of each other.

If you--

...then this page isn't really addressed to you. You're probably more of what I'd call a small-government conservative; and if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine.

On the other hand, you might want to stick around to see what your more fundamentalist colleagues are saying.

Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let's call her "Ayn Rand") sat down to create the Un-Communism. Thus:

Does this sound exaggerated? Let's listen to Murray Rothbard:

Or here's Lew Rockwell on Rothbard (emphasis mine):

Thomas DiLorenzo on worker activism: "[L]abor unions [pursue] policies which impede the very institutions of capitalism that are the cause of their own prosperity." Or Ludwig von Mises: "What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working." (Employer violence is apparently acceptable.) The Libertarian Party platform explains that workers have no right to protest drug tests, and supports the return of child labor.

On Nietzsche, as one of my correspondents puts it, some libertarians love Nietzsche; others have read him. (Though I would respond that some people idolize executives; others have worked for them.) Nonetheless, I think the Nietzschean atmosphere of burning rejection of conventional morality, exaltation of the will to power, and scorn for womanish Christian compassion for the masses, is part of the roots of libertarianism. It's unmistakable in Ayn Rand.

The more important point, however, is that the capitalist is the ber-villain for communists, and a glorious hero for libertarians; that property is "theft" for the communists, and a "natural right" for libertarians. These dovetail a little too closely for coincidence. It's natural enough, when a basic element of society is attacked as an evil, for its defenders to counter-attack by elevating it into a principle.

As we should have learned from the history of communism and fascism, however, contradiction is no guarantee of truth; it can lead one into an opposite error instead. And many who rejected communism nonetheless remained zealots. People who leave one ideological extreme usually end up at the other, either quickly (David Horowitz) or slowly (Mario Vargas Llosa). If you're the sort of person who likes absolutes, you want them even if all your other convictions change.

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.

Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:

Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.

The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.

Thanks to my essay on taxes, I routinely get mail featuring impassioned harangues which never once mention a real-world fact-- or which simply make up the statistics they want.

This sort of balls-out aggressivity probably wins points at parties, where no one is going to take down an almanac and check their figures; but to me it's a cardinal sin. If someone has an answer for everything, advocates changes which have never been tried, and presents dishonest evidence, he's a crackpot. If a man has no doubts, it's because his hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

Some people aren't much bothered by libertarianism's lack of real-world success. After all, they argue, if no one tried anything new, nothing would ever change.

In fact, I'm all for experimentation; that's how we learn. Create a libertarian state. But run it as a proper experiment. Start small-scale. Establish exactly how your claims will be tested: per capita income? median income? life expectancy? property value? surveys on happiness? Set up a control: e.g. begin with two communities as close as we can get them in size, initial wealth, resources, and culture, one following liberalism, one following libertarianism. Abide by the results-- no changing the goalposts if the liberals happen to "win".

I'm even willing to look at partial tests. If an ideology is really better than others at producing general prosperity, then following it partially should produce partially better results. Jonathan Kwitny suggested comparing a partly socialist system (e.g. Tanzania) to a partly capitalist one (e.g. Kenya). (Kenya looked a lot better.) If the tests are partial, of course, we'll want more of them; but human experience is pretty broad.

It's the libertarians, not me, who stand in the way of such accountability. If I point out examples of nations partially following libertarian views-- we'll get to this below-- I'm told that they don't count: only Pure Real Libertarianism Of My Own Camp can be tested.

Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology.

An untested political system unfortunately has great rhetorical appeal. Since we can't see it in action, we can't point out its obvious faults, while the ideologue can be caustic about everything that has actually been tried, and which has inevitably fallen short of perfection. Perhaps that's why Dave Barry and Trey Parker are libertarians. But I'd rather vote for a politician who's shown that his programs work in the real world than for a humorist, however amusing.

At this point some libertarian readers are pumping their hands in the air like a piston, anxious to explain that their ideal isn't Rothbard or von Mises or Hayek, but the Founding Fathers.

Nice try. Everybody wants the Founders on their side; but it was a different country back then-- 95% agricultural, low density, highly homogenous, primitive in technology-- and modern libertarianism simply doesn't apply. (The OED's citations of the word for the time are all theological.)

All American political movements have their roots in the 1700s-- indeed, in the winning side, since Loyalist opinion essentially disappeared. We are all-- liberals, conservatives, libertarians-- against the Georgian monarchy and for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can certainly find places where one Founder or another rants against government; you can find other places where one Founder or another rants against rebellion, anarchy, and the opponents of federalism. Sometimes the same Founder can be quoted on both sides. They were a mixed bunch, and lived long enough lives to encounter different situations.

The Constitution is above all a definition of a strengthened government, and the Federalist Papers are an extended argument for it. The Founders negotiated a balance between a government that was arbitrary and coercive (their experience as British colonial subjects) and one that was powerless and divided (the failed Articles of Confederation).

The Founders didn't anticipate the New Deal-- there was no need for them to-- but they were as quick to resort to the resources of the state as any modern liberal. Ben Franklin, for instance, played the Pennsylvania legislature like a violin-- using it to fund a hospital he wanted to establish, for instance. Obviously he had no qualms about using state power to do good social works.

It's also worth pointing out that the Founders' words were nobler than their deeds. Most were quite comfortable with slave-owning, for instance. No one worried about women's consent to be governed. Washington's own administration made it a crime to criticize the government. And as Robert Allen Rutland reminds us,

The process of giving life to our constitutional rights has largely been the work of liberals. On the greatest fight of all, to treat blacks as human beings, libertarians supported the other side.

Crackpots are usually harmless; how about the Libertarian Party?

In itself, I'm afraid, it's nothing but a footnote. It gets no more than 1% of the vote-- a showing that's been surpassed historically by the Anti-Masonic Party, the Greenbacks, the Prohibition Party, the Socialists, the Greens, and whatever John Anderson was. If that was all it was, I wouldn't bother to devote pages and rants to it. I'm all for the expression of pure eccentricity in politics; I like the Brits' Monster Raving Looney Party even better.

Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:

Maybe this use of their ideas is appalling to 'Real Libertarians'... well, it's an appalling world sometimes. Is it fair to communism that everyone thinks its Leninist manifestation is the only possible one? Do you think I'm happy to have national representatives like Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry?

At least some libertarians have understood the connection. Rothbard again, writing in 1994:

Can you smell the compromise here? Hold your nose and vote for the Repubs, boys. But then don't pretend to be uninvolved when the Republicans start making a mockery of limited government.

There's a deeper lesson here, and it's part of why I don't buy libertarian portraits of the future utopia. Movements out of power are always anti-authoritarian; it's no guarantee that they'll stay that way. Communists before 1917 promised the withering away of the state. Fascists out of power sounded something like socialists. The Republicans were big on term limits when they could be used to unseat Democrats; they say nothing about them today. If you don't think it can happen to you, you're not being honest about human nature and human history.

The Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There's the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).

I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.

The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats. Christian libertarians like Ron Paul want God in the public schools and are happy to have the government forbid abortion and gay marriage. I never saw the libertarians objecting to Bush Sr. mocking the protection of civil rights, or to Ken Starr's government inquiry into politicians' sex lives. On the Cato Institute's list of recent books, I count 1 of 19 dealing with an issue on which libertarians and liberals tend to agree, and that was on foreign policy (specifically, the Iraq war).

If this is changing, as Bush's never-ending "War on Terror" expands the powers of government, demonizes dissent, and enmeshes the country in military crusades and nation-building, as the Republicans push to remove the checks and balances that remain in our government system-- if libertarians come to realize that Republicans and not Democrats are the greater threat to liberty-- I'd be delighted.

But for that, you know, you have to vote against Bush. A belief in social liberties means little if you vote for a party that clearly intends to restrict them.

For the purposes of my critique, however, the social side of libertarianism is irrelevant. A libertarian and I might actually agree to legalize drugs, let people marry whoever they like, and repeal the Patriot Act. But this has nothing to do with whether robber baron capitalism is a good thing.

The libertarianism that has any effect in the world, then, has nothing to do with social liberty, and everything to do with removing all restrictions on business. So what's wrong with that?

Let's look at some cases that came within spitting distance of the libertarian ideal. Some libertarians won't like these, because they are not Spotless Instances of the Free Utopia; but as I've said, nothing is proved by science fiction. If complete economic freedom and absence of government is a cure-all, partial economic freedom and limited government should be a cure-some.

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.

The New Deal itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn't much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi's land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.

Don't think, by the way, that if governments don't provide gunboats, no one else will. Corporations will build their own military if necessary: the East Indies Company did; Leopold did in the Congo; management did when fighting with labor.

Or take Russia in the decade after the fall of Communism, as advised by free-market absolutists like Jeffrey Sachs. Russian GDP declined 50% in five years. The elite grabbed the assets they could and shuffled them out of Russia so fast that IMF loans couldn't compensate. In 1994 alone, 600 businessmen, journalists, and politicians were murdered by gangsters. Russia lacked a working road system, a banking system, anti-monopoly regulation, effective law enforcement, or any sort of safety net for the elderly and the jobless. Inflation reached 2250% in 1992. Central government authority effectively disappeared in many regions.

By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.

Today's Russia is moving back toward authoritarianism under Putin. Again, this should dismay libertarians: apparently, given a little freedom, many people will demand less. You'd better be careful about setting up that utopia; ten years further on it may be taken over by authoritarians.

Or consider the darling of many an '80s conservative: Pinochet's Chile, installed by Nixon, praised by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, George Bush, and Paul Johnson. In twenty years, foreign debt quadrupled, natural resources were wasted, universal health care was abandoned (leading to epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis), unions were outlawed, military spending rose (for what? who the hell is going to attack Chile?), social security was "privatized" (with predictable results: ever-increasing government bailouts) and the poverty rate doubled, from 20% to 41%. Chile's growth rate from 1974 to 1982 was 1.5%; the Latin American average was 4.3%.

Pinochet was a dicator, of course, which makes some libertarians feel that they have nothing to learn here. Somehow Chile's experience (say) privatizing social security can tell us nothing about privatizing social security here, because Pinochet was a dictator. Presumably if you set up a business in Chile, the laws of supply and demand and perhaps those of gravity wouldn't apply, because Pinochet was a dictator.

When it's convenient, libertarians even trumpet their association with Chile's "free market" policies; self-gov.org (originators of that cute quiz) includes a page celebrating Milton Friedman, self-proclaimed libertarian, who helped form and advise the group of University of Chicago professors and graduates who implemented Pinochet's policies. The Cato Institute even named a prize for "Advancing Liberty" after this benefactor of the Chilean dictatorship.

The newest testing ground for laissez-faire is present-day America, from Ronald Reagan on.

Remove the New Deal, and the pre-New Deal evils clamor to return. Reagan removed the right to strike; companies now fire strikers, outsource high-wage jobs and replace them with dead-end near-minimum-wage service jobs. Middle-class wages are stagnating-- or plummeting, if you consider that working hours are rising. Companies are rushing to reestablish child labor in the Third World.

Under liberalism, productivity increases benefited all classes-- poverty rates declined from over 30% to under 10% in the thirty years after World War II, while the economy more than quadrupled in size.

In the current libertarian climate, productivity gains only go to the already well-off. Here's the percentage of US national income received by certain percentiles of the population, as reported by the IRS:

This should put some perspective on libertarian whining about high taxes and how we're destroying incentives for the oppressed businessman. The wealthiest 1% of the population doubled their share of the pie in just 15 years. In 1973, CEOs earned 45 times the pay of an average employee (about twice the multipler in Japan); today it's 500 times.

Thirty years ago, managers accepted that they operated as much for their workers, consumers, and neighbors as for themselves. Some economists (notably Michael Jensen and William Meckling) decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were the stock owners-- and that management would be more accountable if they were given massive amounts of stock. Not surprisingly, CEOs managed to get the stock without the accountability-- they're obscenely well paid whether the company does well or it tanks-- and the obsession with stock price led to mass layoffs, short-term thinking, and the financial dishonesty at WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, HealthSouth, and elsewhere.

The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.

If you were part of the World War II generation, the reality was that you had access to subsidized education and housing, you lived better every year, and you were almost unimaginably better off than your parents.

We were a middle-class nation, perhaps the first nation in history where the majority of the people were comfortable. This infuriated the communists (this wasn't supposed to happen). The primeval libertarians who cranky about it as well, but the rich had little reason to complain-- they were better off than ever before, too.

Conservatives-- nurtured by libertarian ideas-- have managed to change all that. When productivity rises, the rich now keep the gains; the middle class barely stays where it is; the poor get poorer. We have a ways to go before we become a Third World country, but the model is clear. The goal is an impoverished majority, and a super-rich minority with no effective limitations on its power or earnings. We'll exchange the prosperity of 1950s America for that of 1980s Brazil.

Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. (One libertarian, for instance, reading my list of the evils of laissez-faire above, ignored everything but "gunboats". It's like Gary Larson's cartoon of "What dogs understand", with the dog's name replaced with "government".)

The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else.

It's a habit of mind that renders libertarianism unfalsifiable, and thus irrelevant to the world. Everything gets blamed on one institution; and because we have no real-world example where that agency is absent, the claims can't be tested.

Not being a libertarian doesn't mean loving the state; it means accepting complexity. The real world is a monstrously complicated place; there's not just one thing wrong with it, nor just one thing that can be changed to fix it. Things like prosperity and freedom don't have one cause; they're a balancing act.

Here's an alternative theory for you: original sin. People will mess things up, whether by stupidity or by active malice. There is no magical class of people (e.g. "government") who can be removed to produce utopia. Any institution is liable to failure, or active criminality. Put anyone in power-- whether it's communists or engineers or businessmen-- and they will abuse it.

Does this mean things are hopeless? Of course not; it just means that we have to let all institutions balance each other. Government, opposition parties, business, the media, unions, churches, universities, non-government organizations, all watch over each other. Power is distributed as widely as possible to prevent any one institution from monopolizing and abusing it. It's not always a pretty solution, and it can be frustratingly slow and inefficient, but it works better than any alternative I know of.

Markets are very good at some things, like deciding what to produce and distributing it. But unrestricted markets don't produce general prosperity, and lawless business can and will abuse its power. Examples can be multiplied ad nauseam: read some history-- or the newspaper.

Libertarian responses to such lists are beyond amazing.

Slavery is another example: though some hoped that the market would eventually make it unprofitable, it sure was taking its time, and neither the slave nor the abolitionist had any non-governmental leverage over the slaveowners.

(Libertarians usually claim to oppose slavery... but that's awfully easy to say on this side of Civil War and the civil rights movement. The slaveowners thought they were defending their sacred rights to property and self-government.)

And those are the better responses. Often enough the only response is explain how nothing bad can happen in the libertarian utopia. But libertarian dogma can't be buttressed by libertarian doctrine-- that's begging the question.

Or it's simply denied that these things are problems. One correspondent suggested that the poor shouldn't "complain" about not getting loans-- "I wouldn't make a loan if I didn't think I'd get paid back." This is not only hard-hearted but ignorant. Who says the poor are bad credit risks? It often takes prodding from community organizations, but banks can serve low-income areas well-- both making money and fostering home ownership. Institutions like the Grameen Bank have found that micro-loans work very well, and are profitable, in the poorest countries on Earth, such as Bangladesh.

A proven solution to most of these ills is liberalism. For fifty years liberals governed this country, generating unprecedented prosperity, and making this the first solidly middle-class nation.

If you want prosperity for the many-- and why should the many support any other goal?-- you need a balance between government and business. For this you need several things:

Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme-- and one of the most mischievous-- is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.

First, it's dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don't even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)

Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget-- 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can't swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not "your money"; it's a legitimate charge for necessary services.

Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.

Second, it leads directly to George Bush's financial irresponsibility. Would a libertarian urge his family or his software company or his gun club to spend twice what it takes in? When libertarians maintain that irresponsibility among the poor is such a bad thing, why is it OK in the government?

It's no excuse to claim that libertarians didn't want the government to increase spending, as Bush has done. As you judge others, so shall you be judged. Libertarians want to judge liberalism not by its goals (e.g. helping poor children) but by its alleged effects (e.g. teen pregnancy). The easiest things in the world for a politician to do are to lower taxes and raise spending. By attacking the very concept of taxation, libertarians help politicians-- and the public-- to indulge their worst impulses.

Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California-- largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.

Red state morality isn't just to be irresponsible with the money they pay as taxes; it's to be irresponsible with other people's money. It's protesting the concept of getting an allowance by stealing the other kids' money.

Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.

First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else-- love, humanity, justice.

(And let's not forget that lurid fascination with firepower-- seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government's president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell's site, and the Mises Institute.)

I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don't need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don't need a cheering section; they are-- by definition-- not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It's the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.

The libertarians reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's description of people who are so eager to attack a hated ideology that they will destroy their own furniture to make sticks to beat it with. James Craig Green again:

Here's a very different moral point of view: Jimmy Carter describing why he builds houses with Habitat for Humanity:

Is this "confused hysteria"? No, it's common human decency. It's sad when people have to twist themselves into knots to malign the human desire (and the Biblical command) to help one's neighbor.

Second, it's the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who's read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.

Third, and perhaps most common, it's the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I've observed in my overview of the 20th century, liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.

More:

What's wrong with libertarianism - Zompist.com

By Tom Head

Anarcho-Capitalism:

Anarcho-capitalists believe that governments monopolize services that would be better left to corporations, and should be abolished entirely in favor of a system in which corporations provide services we associate with the government. The popular sci-fi novel Jennifer Government describes a system that is very close to anarcho-capitalist.

Civil Libertarianism:

Civil libertarians believe that the government should not pass laws that restrict, oppress, or selectively fail to protect people in their day-to-day lives.

Their position can best be summed up by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement that "a man's right to swing his fist ends where my nose begins." In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union represents the interests of civil libertarians. Civil libertarians may or may not also be fiscal libertarians.

Classical Liberalism:

Classical liberals agree with the words of the Declaration of Independence: That all people have basic human rights, and that the sole legitimate function of government is to protect those rights. Most of the Founding Fathers, and most of the European philosophers who influenced them, were classical liberals.

Fiscal Libertarianism:

Fiscal libertarians (also referred to as laissez-faire capitalists) believe in free trade, low (or nonexistent) taxes, and minimal (or nonexistent) corporate regulation. Most traditional Republicans are moderate fiscal libertarians.

Geolibertarianism:

Geolibertarians (also called "one-taxers") are fiscal libertarians who believe that land can never be owned, but may be rented. They generally propose the abolition of all income and sales taxes in favor of a single land rental tax, with the revenue used to support collective interests (such as military defense) as determined through a democratic process.

Libertarian Socialism:

Libertarian socialists agree with anarcho-capitalists that government is a monopoly and should be abolished, but they believe that nations should be ruled instead by work-share cooperatives or labor unions instead of corporations. The philosopher Noam Chomsky is the best known American libertarian socialist.

Minarchism:

Like anarcho-capitalists and libertarian socialists, minarchists believe that most functions currently served by the government should be served by smaller, non-government groups--but they believe that a government is still needed to serve a few collective needs, such as military defense.

Neolibertarianism:

Neolibertarians are fiscal libertarians who support a strong military, and believe that the U.S. government should use that military to overthrow dangerous and oppressive regimes. It is their emphasis on military intervention that distinguishes them from paleolibertarians (see below), and gives them reason to make common cause with neoconservatives.

Objectivism:

The Objectivist movement was founded by the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982), author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, who incorporated fiscal libertarianism into a broader philosophy emphasizing rugged individualism and what she called "the virtue of selfishness."

Paleolibertarianism:

Paleolibertarians differ from neolibertarians (see above) in that they are isolationists who do not believe that the United States should become entangled in international affairs. They also tend to be suspicious of international coalitions such as the United Nations, liberal immigration policies, and other potential threats to cultural stability.

View original post here:

10 Different Types of Libertarianism