I’ve tried before to steelman it and failed because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down. Tailoring arguments to every single person’s interpretation gets tiring after a while. But if you can provide an explanation or link to what you believe then I’d read and try to steelman it to see if I understand your position correctly.
Here, though, I’m arguing on a more meta level—even assuming that it comprised a coherent set of beliefs, and assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly go about providing a truly rational justification that libertarianism applied to a large mass of complicated human beings would result in the desired outcome? This also applies to capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. Essentially anything other than pure utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism requires a lot of fleshing out before you get to anything resembling a working procedure for governing people.
because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down.
That’s not an argument against libertarianism, that’s an argument that people with a fairly diverse set of views call themselves libertarians. I think that happens to be true.
On a sufficiently high level of abstraction I’d probably say that the two main features of libertarianism are (1) an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom; and (2) a far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis. Point (1) directly leads to a strong suspicion of power structures such as the state.
assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly go about providing a truly rational justification that libertarianism applied to a large mass of complicated human beings would result in the desired outcome?
I don’t quite understand the question. If you have a “well-defined utility function”, well, you just try to maximize it to the best of your ability. You seem to be thinking of a scenario where you’re a god-king who gets to arrange the society (and individual values) as he sees fit. That is obviously incompatible with libertarianism at a basic level. And then you are talking about capitalism and socialism as if they were “working procedure[s] for governing people”, but they are not. Economic systems are not power structures.
I don’t know what “an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom” means. Every single political philosophy claims that it is pro-freedom. Even totalitarian regimes claim to be pro-freedom. Without reference to specific policy positions, claiming to be ‘pro-freedom’ seems meaningless to me.
So that reduces your definition of libertarianism to ‘far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis’.
For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?
For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?
I’m not completely sure what you mean, but my guess is that I don’t agree with you.
In each possible situation, it’s useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it’s not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.
In each possible situation, it’s useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it’s not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.
Then who gets to decide who that authority is for every particular situation?
This is a predictable response from someone who’s skeptical of libertarian economics. Just as it’s natural to observe the order in the world and therefore assume that there must be a designer (God), it feels reasonable to the human mind to witness the structure inherent in society and thus expect that there must be in each instance a particular person who made a conscious decision to put the institution into place.
There are many facets to human society, so giving a comprehensive answer would require a book-length treatment. But to give an example, investors tend to have a large amount of power in many cases. Collectively they use their expertise in predicting future states in the economy in order to choose which companies are kept in the market and which are pushed out. Companies have internal power structures, where the final say could be an individual or a panel or individuals. Therefore, the “proximate final say” in this situation may be a certain person or group of people, where the “ultimate final say” may be based on the collective support or non-support of investors.
See here for how law and order could fit into a decentralized market system as well.
What you’re saying doesn’t sound to me like a disagreement that there must be some higher authority. It just sounds like you’re saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power. So then the question becomes: Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?
And just to make the discussion clearer, let’s make it even more specific and talk about the issue of disputes over ownership of objects or property.
The comparison to religion makes no sense. Unlike biological organisms, human governments are designed. For example, in the case of the US, the structure and function of the court system is very explicitly laid out in the US constitution, and it was carefully designed in a committee via months/years of debate.
It just sounds like you’re saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power.
That’s just one of the many possibilities.
Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?
Democracy inevitably becomes a grandiose popularity contest where the population votes based on social-signaling considerations which have little if nothing to do with putting into place an institution which will lead to sustainably benevolent results for the society. There are all sorts of oddities, such as systematic redistribution of resources from the productive members of the economy to the unproductive, shortsighted policy enactment because the real problems of society usually can’t be solved without initial pain which the politician would be blamed for, and so forth.
The comparison to religion makes no sense. Unlike biological organisms, human governments are designed. For example, in the case of the US, the structure and function of the court system is very explicitly laid out in the US constitution, and it was carefully designed in a committee via months/years of debate.
The court system is an absolute wreck, no matter how “carefully designed” the designers believe it to be.
Imagine a pre-industrial world with two villages on either side of a large forest. The people need to get back and forth between these villages every few days or weeks. The first person through his own self-interest simply looks for the easiest path, breaking several branches on his way. The next person does the same, probably going on a completely different route, not thinking anything of the previous person. After quite a few iterations of this, some of the people will end up going on routes that were previously made a bit easier by previous hikers. After tens of thousands of iterations of this, there will be convenient trails going through the woods in an efficient way, with all the obstacles neutralized.
If a foreigner chanced upon this creation, they would surely think to themselves, “What a great trail system! I’m glad the people of this area were kind enough to make a trail for all to use!” They would immediately jump to the idea that the trail, looking like it was created for a purpose, must have been designed by a committee of individuals or commissioned by a wise member of one of the villages. But no such thing happened; each person acted upon their own self-interest, and the byproduct was a trail system that looks like it was designed but really was an automatically emergent order.
Most of what works very well in society is like this, and most of what breaks in a disastrous way is an attempt to design systems where simply setting the initial conditions for an emergent order would have been a much better idea.
Investors simply try to buy low and sell high for their own self-interest. Many of them, even very successful ones, probably have little or no appreciation for how important the role of investors is in the emergent order of the economic system.
I’ve tried before to steelman it and failed because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down. Tailoring arguments to every single person’s interpretation gets tiring after a while. But if you can provide an explanation or link to what you believe then I’d read and try to steelman it to see if I understand your position correctly.
Here, though, I’m arguing on a more meta level—even assuming that it comprised a coherent set of beliefs, and assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly go about providing a truly rational justification that libertarianism applied to a large mass of complicated human beings would result in the desired outcome? This also applies to capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. Essentially anything other than pure utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism requires a lot of fleshing out before you get to anything resembling a working procedure for governing people.
That’s not an argument against libertarianism, that’s an argument that people with a fairly diverse set of views call themselves libertarians. I think that happens to be true.
On a sufficiently high level of abstraction I’d probably say that the two main features of libertarianism are (1) an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom; and (2) a far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis. Point (1) directly leads to a strong suspicion of power structures such as the state.
I don’t quite understand the question. If you have a “well-defined utility function”, well, you just try to maximize it to the best of your ability. You seem to be thinking of a scenario where you’re a god-king who gets to arrange the society (and individual values) as he sees fit. That is obviously incompatible with libertarianism at a basic level. And then you are talking about capitalism and socialism as if they were “working procedure[s] for governing people”, but they are not. Economic systems are not power structures.
I don’t know what “an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom” means. Every single political philosophy claims that it is pro-freedom. Even totalitarian regimes claim to be pro-freedom. Without reference to specific policy positions, claiming to be ‘pro-freedom’ seems meaningless to me.
So that reduces your definition of libertarianism to ‘far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis’.
For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?
I’m not completely sure what you mean, but my guess is that I don’t agree with you.
In each possible situation, it’s useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it’s not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.
Then who gets to decide who that authority is for every particular situation?
This is a predictable response from someone who’s skeptical of libertarian economics. Just as it’s natural to observe the order in the world and therefore assume that there must be a designer (God), it feels reasonable to the human mind to witness the structure inherent in society and thus expect that there must be in each instance a particular person who made a conscious decision to put the institution into place.
There are many facets to human society, so giving a comprehensive answer would require a book-length treatment. But to give an example, investors tend to have a large amount of power in many cases. Collectively they use their expertise in predicting future states in the economy in order to choose which companies are kept in the market and which are pushed out. Companies have internal power structures, where the final say could be an individual or a panel or individuals. Therefore, the “proximate final say” in this situation may be a certain person or group of people, where the “ultimate final say” may be based on the collective support or non-support of investors.
See here for how law and order could fit into a decentralized market system as well.
What you’re saying doesn’t sound to me like a disagreement that there must be some higher authority. It just sounds like you’re saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power. So then the question becomes: Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?
And just to make the discussion clearer, let’s make it even more specific and talk about the issue of disputes over ownership of objects or property.
The comparison to religion makes no sense. Unlike biological organisms, human governments are designed. For example, in the case of the US, the structure and function of the court system is very explicitly laid out in the US constitution, and it was carefully designed in a committee via months/years of debate.
That’s just one of the many possibilities.
Democracy inevitably becomes a grandiose popularity contest where the population votes based on social-signaling considerations which have little if nothing to do with putting into place an institution which will lead to sustainably benevolent results for the society. There are all sorts of oddities, such as systematic redistribution of resources from the productive members of the economy to the unproductive, shortsighted policy enactment because the real problems of society usually can’t be solved without initial pain which the politician would be blamed for, and so forth.
The court system is an absolute wreck, no matter how “carefully designed” the designers believe it to be.
Imagine a pre-industrial world with two villages on either side of a large forest. The people need to get back and forth between these villages every few days or weeks. The first person through his own self-interest simply looks for the easiest path, breaking several branches on his way. The next person does the same, probably going on a completely different route, not thinking anything of the previous person. After quite a few iterations of this, some of the people will end up going on routes that were previously made a bit easier by previous hikers. After tens of thousands of iterations of this, there will be convenient trails going through the woods in an efficient way, with all the obstacles neutralized.
If a foreigner chanced upon this creation, they would surely think to themselves, “What a great trail system! I’m glad the people of this area were kind enough to make a trail for all to use!” They would immediately jump to the idea that the trail, looking like it was created for a purpose, must have been designed by a committee of individuals or commissioned by a wise member of one of the villages. But no such thing happened; each person acted upon their own self-interest, and the byproduct was a trail system that looks like it was designed but really was an automatically emergent order.
Most of what works very well in society is like this, and most of what breaks in a disastrous way is an attempt to design systems where simply setting the initial conditions for an emergent order would have been a much better idea.
Investors simply try to buy low and sell high for their own self-interest. Many of them, even very successful ones, probably have little or no appreciation for how important the role of investors is in the emergent order of the economic system.
Libertarian freedom is usually cashed out in terms of a strong adherence to negative rights combined with a disdain for positive rights.
Can you be more specific?
You work hard to not understand me, so I’ll save you the effort. Tap.