I was really pleased when the Soviet Union went down—I thought people there would self-organize and things would get a lot better.
This didn’t happen.
I’m still more libertarian than anything else, but I’ve come to believe that libertarianism doesn’t include a sense of process. It’s a theory of static conditions, and doesn’t have enough about how people actually get to doing things.
The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it. Of course, neither did a bunch of other people who were much better paid and educated to understand such things, but I don’t find that entirely consoling.
This gets back to libertarianism and process, I think. Protections against fraud don’t just happen. They need to be maintained, whether by government or otherwise.
The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it.
That depends on what exactly you mean by “the economy” being fragile. Most of it is actually extremely resilient to all sorts of disasters and destructive policies; if it weren’t so, the modern civilization would have collapsed long ago. However, one critically unstable part is the present financial system, which is indeed an awful house of cards inherently prone to catastrophic collapses. Shocks such as the bursting of the housing bubble get their destructive potential exactly because their effect is amplified by the inherent instabilities of the financial system.
Sometimes I think the only kind of libertarianism that makes sense is what I’d call “tragic libertarianism.” There is no magic market fairy. Awful things are going to happen to people. Poverty, crime, illness, and war. The libertarian part is that our ability to alleviate suffering through the government is limited. The tragic part is that this is not good news.
There’s another tragic bit—some of what government does makes things worse. There’s no magic government fairy that guarantees good (or even non-horrible) results just because a government is doing something.
A couple of viewquakes at my end.
I was really pleased when the Soviet Union went down—I thought people there would self-organize and things would get a lot better.
This didn’t happen.
I’m still more libertarian than anything else, but I’ve come to believe that libertarianism doesn’t include a sense of process. It’s a theory of static conditions, and doesn’t have enough about how people actually get to doing things.
The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it. Of course, neither did a bunch of other people who were much better paid and educated to understand such things, but I don’t find that entirely consoling.
This gets back to libertarianism and process, I think. Protections against fraud don’t just happen. They need to be maintained, whether by government or otherwise.
NancyLebovitz:
That depends on what exactly you mean by “the economy” being fragile. Most of it is actually extremely resilient to all sorts of disasters and destructive policies; if it weren’t so, the modern civilization would have collapsed long ago. However, one critically unstable part is the present financial system, which is indeed an awful house of cards inherently prone to catastrophic collapses. Shocks such as the bursting of the housing bubble get their destructive potential exactly because their effect is amplified by the inherent instabilities of the financial system.
Moldbug’s article “Maturity Transformation Considered Harmful” is probably the best explanation of the root causes of this problem that I’ve seen.
Sometimes I think the only kind of libertarianism that makes sense is what I’d call “tragic libertarianism.” There is no magic market fairy. Awful things are going to happen to people. Poverty, crime, illness, and war. The libertarian part is that our ability to alleviate suffering through the government is limited. The tragic part is that this is not good news.
There’s another tragic bit—some of what government does makes things worse. There’s no magic government fairy that guarantees good (or even non-horrible) results just because a government is doing something.
Yes, exactly.