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What's wrong with libertarianism
- Thread starter FoneBone
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Always-honest
Banned
Slavik81 said:
ha, ha, yeah, that was kinda harsh.. a quick google and you're up to date.
Karakand said:
He compares Libertarianism to Fascism which is incorrect. Fascism is often used incorrectly as a placeholder for a far right pro-business government, but the Fascism of Hitler and Mussolini (which originated Fascism as a political movement) is extreme Nationalism and the command economy. In that sense Fascism and Communism are mere twins and not polar opposites as it was often portrayed.
Fascists despise the free market. Hitler mocked Americans with their refrigerators and low quality of their culture. He famously said:
Though one has to wonder, as a tangential point, how such a cultured society-- many in the Waffen SS had Phds --could descend into such barbarity.
OuterWorldVoice said:
What an amazing hypthesis! You truly are the Kwisatz Haderach!
Fine, you want to know the problem I have with GAF's disdain for Libertarianism?
I don't consider myself libertarian. I don't consider myself anything, but one thing that irks me about more people of more "mainstream" political persuasions is that they take a few elements of any political ideology that's not in line with neoliberalism or neoconservatism and act as if the entire school of thought can be discounted on the basis of a handful of flaws. Fact of the matter is that the mainstream political ideologies are glass houses, with just as many flaws when their ideas are put into practice.
It's a borderline strawman, IMO.
I've never met a free-thinking Democrat or a Republican that agrees with their party's platform 100%, but it's as if you self-identify as a Libertarian, Objectivist, etc you simply must buy into the party line without objection.
TomServo said:
Almost every single democrat and republican believes some elements of Libertarian philosophy are desirable, necessary or workable. I was simply maintaining that writ large, the philosophy entire is totally nonfunctional. You can't say the same for the two other flavors being discussed, since for better or worse, they've both functioned for about a 100 years in this country.
And until a successful Libertarian state emerges, my assumption will be safe. When Libertopia opens its doors for business, I will book a vacation there and check it out.
Karakand said:
Facists despise the free market, and its not a theory. Nazi germany was run top down as a command economy, with 4 year plans modeled after Stalin's 5 year plans.
In fact, Stalin saw Hitler as his protoge and was supposedly the only person who he trusted unconditionally.
Communism has bad PR in this day and age, though. Mussolini, trains on time, yadda yadda yadda. Hard to expect many people to leap into its arms, especially in a post USSR world.Hitokage said:Karakand: Don't equate fascism with authoritarianism. After all, failed capitalist societies can become communist too.
I don't see that. I think his argument is when it comes to a choice between social liberty and fiscal conservatism, libertarians choose the latter pretty much all the time.Gildor said:
Like for example, if there was a choice between allowing gay marriage or dismantling FEMA the contention is that Libertarians would dismantle FEMA in a heartbeat.
GoutPatrol
Forgotten in his cell
reilo said:
Isn't that what most sane people think anyway?
Karakand said:
Communism's problem isn't PR, it was unlucky enough to have been tried out and proved to be an abject failure.
Had the Bolshevik revolution been aborted, the economic system might still have been given the benefit of the doubt of being workable and politics today would be quite different.
Instigator
Banned
Hitokage said:
They don't forget it, not the ones on GAF anyway. they advocate this type of action was totally unnecessary. They blame overregulation and government interference caused/aggravated the Great Depression and the only way to get out of the hole was to let the market sort itself out. Do absolutely nothing, in other words.
We've already had this discussion on the very subject in a specific thread dedicated solely to libertarians:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=159294
Classic Jaydubya.
OuterWorldVoice said:
Entirely nonfunctional? Early America was more libertarian than anything else. Our foundations are based on personal liberty, and that foundation has been slowly eroded by a number of progressive and neoconservative policies. As it stands now, modern liberalism and neoconservativism can only exist by borrowing heavily against the future of our country.
Arrowgigantic
Member
This is something I see a lot of libertarians say, and it betrays a certain naivete about what capitalism actually is. The free market is basically a nuclear chain reaction. It converts work into wealth, and then converts wealth into even more wealth. But just like it's a bad idea to just toss a pile of fuel rods into some water, there also has to be some stewardship to rein in the market, or it just goes wild.Synth_floyd said:
This has been proven time and time again. Any time the market is allowed to do something bad for the overall health of the economy, it will, because someone is going to profit from it. End of story. That's not equal opportunity, that's the exploiter and the exploited.
I suppose there is a difference between forgetting and ignoring, but again, they're only looking at it from a strictly economical perspective while ignoring the real social consequences of those situations. A positive resolution could only have been achieved if there were no humans around...Instigator said:
...or they abandoned market absolutism.
Arrowgigantic
Member
And it was dysfunctional. If you really think the 19th century was so great for the average person you have a very limited view of the times.TomServo said:
Hitokage said:
That's all you can come up with? And then you follow with...
Hitokage said:
Neoconservative policies that promote corporate welfare and neocolonialism ($1 trillion in Iraq on top of the cost of maintaining a troop presence in 140 countries) don't have anything to do with the trillions of dollars of debt we're building up?
Modern liberal policies that attempt redistribution of wealth (while typically reducing overall tax revenue) and transistion of services from the private sector to public services (we're talking $40 trillion in unfunded liability from SS / Medicare) don't have anything to do with the trillions of dollars of debt we're building up?
It follows that the success of the two mainstream political philosphies is dependent on nonsustainable fiscal policy.
Synth_floyd
Banned
reilo said:
Yes they do. The Federal Reserve expanded the money supply too much after World War 1, creating a massive bubble and when it popped, the Great Depression happened. That was one major factor in the depression, according to the Austrian school of economics which many libertarians adhere to.
Government does not have a monopoly on the ability to restrict liberty.
You talk as if debt is an inherent problem with liberal policies, but we've run surpluses with them, and social security NOW is running a surplus. The problem with SS's budget is long-term, and can be corrected with adjustments.TomServo said:
Regardless, how does all of this represent a naive view of history?
Hitokage said:
Government should be in the business of protecting liberty, not restricting it.
The recent Clinton surpluses were a surprise, even to people within the administration. They anticipated a fall in tax revenue when rolling out the policy, and it was only due to the increase in payroll tax and capital gains tax revenue from the .com bubble that we ran any real or projected surpluses.
Social Security will pay out more than it receives within a decade. You'll hear that the program is solvent through 2040 because of the "trust fund", but that trust fund is nothing but special-issue, non-marketable bonds - in non-government speak that's called an IOU. There's nothing of real value there. The money has to come from the general fund back into the the SS fund so that it can be paid out to beneficiaries. Think our deficits are bad now? Wait until we get to fund the shortfall in SS payments every year on top of all of our current spending.
What adjustments are going to fix problem that, when combined with the Medicare (the other major entitlement program) amount to a $125K of unfunded liability for evey man, woman, and child alive in the US at this moment?
Hitokage said:
Because throughout history there have been a number of formerly powerful nations whose demise was ultimately caused by unsustainable levels of spending.
EDIT: Signing off for the night. Nice talking w/ you.
I'd like to hear a Libertarian comment on the example of the Irish potato famine I mentioned earlier.
The quick and dirty (and simplified) story:
Ireland in 1840 is overpopulated (Ireland is part of Britain at this point btw). The only crop that can provide enough nutrition efficiently enough to support the whole population is the potato. Other crops are grown like grain, but overwhelmingly this grain goes to a relatively small number of landlords (who own 90% of the land) as rent. These landlords sell this grain at a profit to the growing industrial cities of Britain. (Ireland has little to no industry)
The potato crop is wiped out by a fungus for 6 straight years. Grain continues to be grown, but Irish farmers need to give it to the landlord to pay their rent, or they lose their land, and any hope of survival if/when the potato crop comes back. Irish landlords continue to ship this grain to Britain at a profit throughout the famine.
The British government, which believes that the free market is sacred, does not think that it is right to force landowners to sell their grain at discounted prices to the starving farmers. Nor do they think they can step in and stop evictions or force landlords to lower rents. They think that private charity should handle the situation. Millions of pounds of grain leave Ireland for England. Meanwhile in Ireland one million people die of starvation and another one million leave the country until the potato crop recovers. So, according to Libertarianism, did the British government do the right thing?
The quick and dirty (and simplified) story:
Ireland in 1840 is overpopulated (Ireland is part of Britain at this point btw). The only crop that can provide enough nutrition efficiently enough to support the whole population is the potato. Other crops are grown like grain, but overwhelmingly this grain goes to a relatively small number of landlords (who own 90% of the land) as rent. These landlords sell this grain at a profit to the growing industrial cities of Britain. (Ireland has little to no industry)
The potato crop is wiped out by a fungus for 6 straight years. Grain continues to be grown, but Irish farmers need to give it to the landlord to pay their rent, or they lose their land, and any hope of survival if/when the potato crop comes back. Irish landlords continue to ship this grain to Britain at a profit throughout the famine.
The British government, which believes that the free market is sacred, does not think that it is right to force landowners to sell their grain at discounted prices to the starving farmers. Nor do they think they can step in and stop evictions or force landlords to lower rents. They think that private charity should handle the situation. Millions of pounds of grain leave Ireland for England. Meanwhile in Ireland one million people die of starvation and another one million leave the country until the potato crop recovers. So, according to Libertarianism, did the British government do the right thing?
Freshmaker
I am Korean.
The British government deliberately did nothing in hopes that it would kill off the problem. They weren't really worshiping the free market.aceface said:
ToyMachine228
Member
Conceptually it's great. Except in 2008 it doesn't work. The world's changed. You just can't have a world free market.
S-Wind said:
Not a Libertarian myself, but this is more or less the correct answer. They'd argue that the government has no business in charity, so if there's a deficiency in private charity, too bad, so sad. Those potato farmers negatively affected need to do "better" in whatever it is they do, grow better, harvest better, get a second job to get money better, get a better job. They also will say that it's unlikely that there's really anything preventing them from doing better but a lack of personal drive or bad choices they made that they now need to take responsibility for. In the "unlikely" case that the potato farmers "can't" do anything about it because of some sort of discrimination, that's the right of the discriminators, and to disallow them from discriminating, even in the case where someone is fully qualified otherwise, is a violation of the discriminator's liberty. If the potato farmer dies as a result, sucks to be him.
Synth_floyd
Banned
Free markets require free societies. That's what a libertarian would say.
Freshmaker
I am Korean.
I'm not a Libertarian, so I don't see why I would. :lolS-Wind said:
Synth_floyd said:
Yeah I figured that would probably be it. The question gets wrapped up in politics because at that point in British history, only people who earned a certain amount of land could vote. The result is that none of the poor farmers who were starving had any say in politics, while all the landowners did.
Hitokage said:
I could sworn I heard on the radio that it went into the red this year, but I think I got confused with the first baby boomer drawing a SS benefit this year (or maybe even last, this one's flying by for me).
FLEABttn said:
There's more to the politics of the Irish Potato Famine to make it a solid example, but you can look at the housing bubble for a recent example of failures in a "free" market.
Bundled mortgage-backed securities ended up being a bad idea, and instead of the people that bought into the bad idea being removed from the market through financial failure they're bailed out by the Federal Reserve (who created billions of new dollars to prop up demand for those notes by purchasing them when no one else wanted them) and allowed to treat us to their next bad idea. Chances are a number of them were in on the previous bubble (.com) and maybe even the S&L crisis.
By not allowing failure, our government is imposing a dangerous limitation on the free market. In the short term it feels good, but as long as the government mitigates the risk of failure by providing a safety net for risky investment we're going to continue the boom / bust cycle we've been in for decades.
Bundled mortgage backed-securities wasn't the problem. The problem was giving huge long term high interest loans to people who very obviously could not afford them and started defaulting.
Mortgage-based securities just ensured that the problem spread far beyond the housing market but the problem was the bad loans themselves.
Edit: But that's a complete tangent and is ignoring the actual question of how libertarianism would have handled the Irish situation in which landowners owned the land and shipped their property (grain) for profit outside the country while farmers starved to death. The landowners were doing nothing wrong at all under a Libertarian view. It's their Property!!
The farmers inability to vote doesn't matter as the farmers voting for a government looting of the landowners grain would be completely not Libertarian.
Deku said:
Finally some sense in this debate.
A large scale economy without regulation always results in a clumping of wealth, resources and power. And a large scale government without restrictions always results in corruption, and, clumping of power. It's been proven over and over.
Azih said:
I'll concede that point, primarily because it doesn't change the primary point I was trying to make - no one was afraid of issuing loans to people who would likely default, or afraid of investing in securities that had those loans blended with lower risk loans, mainly because there's a prevailing expectation that if a major part of any market goes into dire straits that the Fed will step in and bail them out. It's exactly what happened in this case.
Until we have a truly free market that stays out of the way of businesses failing when they make poor choices you'll have people that exploit the expected bailouts, and we'll stay in a boom / bust economic cycle.
I think no one was afraid of issuing loans to people who would likely default, or afraid of investing in securities that had those loans blended with lower risk loans because it pumped up the balance sheet in the short term justifying crazy money at bonus time and that's all anybody cared about since that 'wealth' is then completely divorced from the consequences of the short sighted decisions that created it. I'm sure all that personal cash was flipped to money market and bonds as soon as the rest of the market started tanking.TomServo said:
Now any discussion in which we are guessing at the motivations of people is doomed to fail as we're both talking out of our ass so let's leave that aside. I don't see how you can make the case that the boom/bust cycle is tied to federal bailouts. The dot com bubble boomed and then popped with a pretty horrific bust in the early part of the decade. In contradiction of your theory there were no federal bailouts there (the IT sector doesn't play the lobbying game well at all), but that has nothing to do with irrational exuberance by over exited speculators (pets.com! guaranteed money!) followed by the harsh slap of reality (1.website 2.??? 3. Profit does not tend to lead to profit) which was the cause of that boom and bust.
But this is again an aside to the actual question of how libertarianism would have handled the Irish situation in which landowners owned the land and shipped their property (grain) for profit outside the country while farmers starved to death. The landowners were doing nothing wrong at all under a Libertarian view. It's their Property!!
adamsappel
Member
Did you mean "Libertine"? :lol
~Devil Trigger~
In favor of setting Muslim women on fire
too selfish
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