Key quote "Compared to the left in general, the distinctive feature of liberaltarianism is scepticism about the effectiveness and beneficence of state action. The break with the Cato version of libertarianism, from which much of the Niskanen Center group has moved, is sharper, including acceptance of the need for income redistribution and action in climate change. "
Right - I think there was a positive impact from "small l" libertarian thinking (e.g. "what if we just let people choose for themselves here?") but the "capital L" Libertarian movement kept trying to take it to weird purified extremes... It's one thing to support personal liberty, but you lose everybody when you start talking about removing all bank regulation and closing the FDA. Not that those agencies have never made mistakes, but they were obviously created in response to actual problems of a zero regulation world, and the die-hard Libertarians refused to accept that compromise.
The libertarian argument against those things is not that no improvement was needed, but that they were the wrong way to improve things.
For example, Noah says "a massive financial crisis that most believed had been precipitated by financial deregulation". Sure, people who read the New York Times and the Guardian may believe this. People who looked at it a bit closer saw that banks were being strongly incentivized or pushed by government regulations into giving away mortgages even when it wasn't smart to do so. Finance is so heavily regulated in so many different ways that "deregulation" usually just means altering the pressures placed upon these institutions via the differing set of remaining regulations.
The biggest issue with making finance libertarian though is the inability of governments (society) to give up on funding the state via money printing. For as long as governments demand cheap credit from the banking sector there will be fractional reserve accounts, and that in turn means they'll have to bail banks out from time to time, and that in turn justifies enormous levels of micromanagement and regulation. The fix is straightforward enough: pass ONE rule that says all bank accounts must be full reserve (implying zero interest rates). Arguably it doesn't even need a new rule, you could just reinterpret the rules against theft or something. People who want ROI will take their funds and put them into investment accounts that explicitly surface risk and liquidity constraints, and if some of those people lose their investments, well, they knew that was possible so they get no bailouts.
That would pretty quickly stabilize the financial sector because now banks know there's no implicit guarantee of a bailout, and if the bank tanks for some other reason the deposits are all still there so can just be transferred to another bank as part of the wind-down procedure.
As for the FDA, we manage with private sector quality control organizations in other areas of life and health regulators all failed as hard as they could during COVID - an outcome predicted by libertarians - so privatizing the assessment of food and drug quality doesn't seem like a big step. Food quality at anything beyond "will it kill me" is already handled by the private sector anyway.
We tried something a lot like this in the 19th century. What actually happens is that people sign papers saying "I agree that I'll lose my shirt if the bank goes bust" in exchange for a positive interest rate, then end up losing their shirt when a bank goes bust, which causes a bunch of other people to lose their shirt when the first set of people can't pay their bills, and we have another Great Depression. No thank you.
I know you're sincere and I'm not trying to tease, but this IS kind of what I was talking about...
Like, freedom-loving people who just think weed should be legal & there's probably excessive occupational licensing & maybe it's ok if people put ADUs on their own land - well they don't need the baggage of the full Libertarian ideology at this point.
I'm not sure what point you're responding to. I didn't make any claims about what pot smokers need, or even what's politically popular. Just trying to explain the reasoning.
BTW, I reject the claim that libertarianism is an ideology. Libertarianism is the absence of ideology. As in: if you start from blank and have a state that has no ideas or desires to change the world, then what you end up with is libertarianism. The very basics get organized because nobody wants to be killed by a neighboring tribe or their neighbor, but after that it just sits around not doing much.
Where ideology enters the picture is when someone says, you know, if only I were in charge then we could really make everything so much better.
Agreeing with Miles, no one is interested in debates about free banking, private money etc any more. For those with a taste for this kind of thing, MMT is the new bright and shiny object, or was until very recently. Or Bitcoin, I guess.
I'm somewhat curious by your passionate objection to full reserve banking. Well, only up to the point where I realize the answer is going to be fairly predictable.
What did you think about the Fed rejecting Caitlin Long's attempt to establish a 108% reserve bank, on the (c'mon, hilarious) reasoning that it would be unsound?
If you require full reserve banking, there are still going to be people looking to borrow short and lend long; they just won't call themselves banks. (Some might call themselves money market funds.) The 2008 crash involved a run on "shadow banking" of exactly this kind.
MMFs are fine. The problem with banking is that you pretty much have to use a bank, because there's no way to do basics like process payroll or receive a salary without them. The failure of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies means that banks still control electronic storage and transmission of money. Those are essentials like roads or water, so forcibly connecting them to investment and lending will inevitably lead to the moral hazard. Solution: don't do that. Expose the liquidity risks in funds, let people take their chances and also give people a way to hold and transmit money without taking those same risks.
The Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve, which took an activist (read: stupid) monetary policy designed to devalue the dollar. The right monetary policy is no monetary policy, of course. This devaluation created the boom of the roaring 20's. But it was just inflation driving the asset classes higher, and it ended in a predictable bust. Yes, it was predictable, sorry Keynes and Fisher, but smarter economists saw it coming. Well, only one of those two men - Fisher and Keynes - was even an economist. The other was likely a pedophile, an anti-Semite, a supporter of Nazism, and homophobic, but he was definitely not an economist. Too bad, politicians decided they liked the ideas of the not-an-economist guy instead of economists that predicted the 1929 crash, such as Ludwig Von Mises. Could be that Keynes supported an active government role in fixing the problem they created. Could be....
Okay, we'll have another Long Depression (1873-1896), if you want to get pendantic about it. :P
(I don't know how much responsibility the Federal Reserve actually bears, but conventional wisdom agrees that they certainly managed to screw up the response to the financial crisis in 1929.)
Sure. Because the Long Depression isn't a real thing. In fact, this is perhaps the greatest period of sustained growth in American history. Economists - of the Keynes type, so not real economists - erroneously called it a depression because prices kept falling. But, prices were falling due to productivity increases and sound, hard money. That's a good thing. In pretty much every economic category, this period is one of significant, sustained increases. This is the time of human flourishing. That economic historians are so wrong headed on this one should remove them from any serious considerations on all other matters.
I definitely found an ideological home in "liberaltarianism" and spent my share of time reading Niskanen, Bleeding Heart Libertarians,.etc. It has a good utopian vision that tends to support data over emotional appeals.
Of course, that just makes me a liberal who is perpetually irritated by group and coalitional dynamics.
Libertarianism is an excellent critique but a terrible governing philosophy. A bit like Marxism, ironically. We need it around to Red Team our policies.
Having been both a Commie and a radical libertarian in the course of my youth, I concur completely.
Fundamentally, if your solution to every problem is the same (whether "more government" or "more markets" or "more equity"), you're parroting an ideology in lieu of thinking. Real world problems are diverse; they don't all have 1 solution.
Libertarian critique isn't built on fundamentally flawed concepts like the labor theory of value and doesn't make failed prophecies like "late stage capitalism."
Even when I was a Libertarian (I'm recovered), the "liberty of local bullies" argument always made sense to some part of my brain. Politics and freedom is a cascade of power levels, of many types, and hopeful tyrants come in all forms, shapes, and sizes. Hell, just look at your typical charismatic evangelical church, or your local multimillionaire coal company tyrant owner.
A reasonably-efficient hierarchy of power has always been the go-to solution in the past, and I really see no alternative to that. Except, hopefully, throwing a well-programmed AI into the mix as a stopgap to corruption. There MUST be a reasonably-powerful State at the top of the power heap, to keep the lessor tyrants in line.
I feel like the overly-intrusive HOA is the modern canonical example of local bullies. And it's a great example because HOAs are exactly what libertarians think are good- they exist purely as contractual obligations between homeowners, not created by the government. The government's only role is to enforce the contracts that HOA members have agreed too.
And then some retired busybodies with all the time in the world take over the HOA board and suddenly they are issuing fines because they don't like the species of shrub you planted in front of your house, or they decide to ban backyard swing sets.
> And then some retired busybodies with all the time in the world take over the HOA board
Actually, H.O.A. boards are often controlled by the H.O.A. management companies and H.O.A. attorneys, with the board members being figureheads. A "deep state", if you will. It's an entire $100-billion-per-year industry.
That's the argument of the new-Right today. Having lost media, K-12, academia, NGOs, tech companies, and corporate boards, conservatives must eschew their libertarian tendencies and use government (the only institution they can gain control over via the ballot box) to bully some of those other lesser bullies.
That's why so many of us are looking at Victor Orban. It's not to import specific Hungarian policies, and certainly not Eastern European corruption. It's because he alone has demonstrated how to use the control of the state to 1) defend common moral standards, 2) facilitate Burke-style platoons, and 3) open space for real non-partisan (or at least bi-partisan) civil society.
For conservatives in the US, some form of this is the only way forward. The Left no longer has any interest in a contest of ideas fought in a broadly liberal and tolerant intellectual space.
Oh, no. I wasn't assuming that, Steve, as most people here aren't particularly conservative. My point is only that the bullying problem is recognized by parts of both the Left (where you are) and the Right (where I am), but in neither group are we a majority.
The old school left (eg: Bernie circa 2016) feared corporate as much as government power. That group has been displaced by the educated and wealthy new-Left, who are perfectly happy to wield both in the service of their definition of "good". The old school right had a strong definition of "good" but often dithered about enforcing it out of a fear of government overreach (the shadow of McCarthy was long in that way.) A new-right of quasi-Burkean nationalists (think Hawley or Vance) is taking shape now, but doesn't yet have hold of institutional political power. In many ways we are now the polar opposite of 60 years ago.
I wish I believed there was an opportunity for a broadly liberal political center that feared concentrated power in all its forms and wasn't afraid to use one form to fight another, but I think such a center relies on a pre-liberal moral consensus that no longer exists in America. I just hope I'm wrong about that.
Would that this were true, Mike. Alas NGO and bureaucratic power is wielded in many ways to circumvent precisely the sort of "contest of ideas" that hopefully you and I would both welcome. Shakespeare was right that the pen is mightier than the sword, just not the way he intended.
As a long-time online forums user (and thus very exposed to libertarians), my read of the whole movement and its fate is basically:
- outside of online circles "actual" libertarianism is vanishingly rare (everyone's seen this chart: https://www.storybench.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/polcompass.png - and even if the axes might be out of whack a bit, online libertarians have always still felt like that one dot in the lower right corner, walling themselves off with moats and everything and screaming STATISTS!!! at anyone else);
- what "libertarian", in an American context, basically meant for many or most in the early 2000s was that you were a Republican but also an atheist or at least heavily secular; since there's now more ideologies that are Republican but also atheist/secular (you can easily be a nationalist, an "anti-woke" type etc. without any commitment to religion), people with that mindset now identify with labels other than "libertarian".
I think it was also heavily influenced by South Park and Ralph Nader. Libertarianism for a while really just meant you (1) watched the show, (2) voter for Nader as a protest to the two-party system, and (3) wanted legal weed. It was sociopolitical posturing - a way to make oneself look like a cool conscientious objector without having to actually understand a whole lot about politics.
I don’t know any libertarians who vote or even support Ralph Nader who is a big government regulation anti-corporate leftist. It’s funny how the majority of people who criticize libertarians have no idea what they even are.
"I don’t know any libertarians who..." Another argument from ignorance.
Most libertarians have little idea of the diversity of people calling themselves libertarian (like you) and think they know the one, true libertarianism.
Harry Browne was the Libertarian candidate in 2000 and Michael Badnarik in 2004. Ralph Nader campaigned on universal healthcare, free college, high regulations and taxes on corporations and restricting campaign financing more than weed. And the only thing in common with the libertarian candidates was the weed. So the people you know who voted for him and calling themselves libertarian obviously partook too much.
Indeed. To be clear, I am not saying it made sense, I’m just saying it shows that libertarianism’s brief popularity was more of an affectation than anything else.
I really think you should use MEDIAN there instead of mean. Then you see even median White wealth is below $200k.
$1M+ in wealth is still a decently high bar, though it's true it catches a lot of older people with large retirement accounts. Anyhow this is the whole point of "The Millionaire Next Door" - that actual millionaires are not that rare and aren't living particularly splashy lifestyles.
BUT, it's still not "middle class", and the way "middle class" gets thrown around in US discussions is pretty sloppy (no offense). Let's at least say "upper middle class" for these people, though.
The political problem with State Capacity Libertarianism is that it's exactly the opposite of what the Republican Party wants.
Instead of voting to cut tax rates, they vote to spend less on IRS enforcement because it "saves money". Instead of putting regulations through cost-benefit analysis, they want an up-or-down vote in Congress (lol) before any new regulation can take effect:
The explicit aim in both cases is to smash up state capacity so the government *can't* decide which taxes or regulations are worthwhile. How do you deal with people like that?
It’s also unhelpful that destroying state capacity has been part of the Republican project since at least the 90s, which is part of why things are so bad now. Not the whole reason, but it’s a factor.
The Republican Party is increasingly for state capacity especially for defense (only thing getting an increase in the debt limit bill) and has never been libertarian, only one elected Republican, Justin Amash, had any libertarian ideas and he was ousted by the combined efforts of the two main parties.
I think their reasoning is that the sort of people who work for the civil service and would be doing the cost/benefit analysis, would be the sort of people who consider the costs to always be trivial and the benefits to always be huge (including of course, benefits for themselves). If you believe that then it makes sense to require Congress to do its own decisions. Actually that's how it works in most parts of the world. Allowing agencies to invent new laws on its own to the scale they do in the USA is rather unusual.
In general you have a point about the Republican Party not being terribly interested in improving state capacity, but your particular example suggests you may have also lost the plot. The IRS does not need more money to institute a rule that takes the value of law abiding citizens’ time into account in the cost/benefit analysis of audit decisions. Regulators tend to end up captured by the incumbent businesses in an industry and tax preparation is no exception. You better believe the IRS does its job of being terrible to deal with for law abiding citizens and we paid TurboTax for audit protection!
If the Republicans wanted the IRS to take less of law-abiding people's time they'd order it to prepare everyone's tax returns automatically. Instead it's been made illegal for the IRS to provide for free what TurboTax makes you pay for.
Making the process of tax payment as much of a hassle as possible is a feature, not a bug, because it makes voters hostile to taxation in general. That serves the interests of very wealthy people, who have accountants do their taxes anyway and are glad to put up with a little hassle in exchange for lower rates.
Devil is in the details, even Turbo Tax struggles to import data correctly even when they have a relationship with a company, but we are agreed that the Republicans are not trying to increase IRS capacity. Where I was disagreeing was the suggestion that a lack of funding is the problem with the IRS. The Democrats don’t want a competent IRS either, they just want it to collect more in taxes.
Can we also discuss social libertarianism? Can we get rid of government laws and regulations that control what consenting adults can do in the privacy of their own bedroom, and against government laws and regulations that give governments control over women's bodies?! Can we allow LGBTQIA+ to live the lives they want to live without government interference? But keep in place laws against discrimination?
I would call that privacy rights, not social libertarianism. Moving the Overton Window to where libertarianism is accepted rather than recognized as manipulation by plutocrats is a major goal of plutocratic public relations.
If it stayed in their bedrooms likely no one would care. People get mad when it invades women's sports teams and Sesame Street.
Also, "oppressed" groups don't generally have an entire month when they are celebrated by every institution in their society, with their flags flown from the highest pinnacles of power. Really "oppressed" people (Russian kulaks, German Jews, Rwandan Tutsis) tend to try not to be noticed.
Just to reply to your 3 points at the top of the post.
1. The places that have the best benches/bathrooms/bins are private venues (think malls, or Disneyland). This is an argument against public property not for it. Economically speaking, to the extent there are transaction costs, the market will tend to internalize them, and is generally doing it quite well.
2. Defence is indeed a hard problem. That's why libertarians usually suggest to start with lower hanging fruit.
3. Empowering the bigger bully only works as long as he's on your side. You might wake up and discover the bigger bully doesn't like you today, or even worse is colluding with the smaller bully against you.
1. Private venues also frequently have crappy bathrooms: think gas stations, for example. The question is how upscale they want to appear. Plenty of fine bathrooms in government buildings. Nor is your idea true outside of the US, where public bathrooms are often excellent.
2. Libertarians generally move on from defense because their ideologies conflict with it so badly. If you are opposed to taxation, how can you fund defense? If you believe in capitalism, public goods such as defense will be under produced. Etc.
3. Keeping the bigger bully on your side is the purpose of our idea of democratic government. It's the only check on the actions of bullies. This is a basic issue that most libertarians don't get, in my experience.
With all our Southern illegal immigrants, how soon before we import the Mexican custom of having someone at the door to charge for toilet paper? Libertarians would call that a triumph of the market. I call it crappy. (And not in a metaphorical sense.)
Here in Ecuador, they must have bathrooms and cannot charge for them. But the quality is quite nice. Your "ergo" doesn't follow from any chain of logic and doesn't match many other real world situations.
How does his ergo “not follow from any chain of logic”? It seems pretty clear that, if you expect that maintaining a service costs money, that service will be nicer if those costs are offset by some sort of associated revenue stream. That’s at least a very clear step in the chain of logic suggested by economic analysis.
1. Sure there are nice bathrooms in government buildings, paid for with tax payers money, used mostly by government employees.
In any case, the original point was about transaction costs, and the ability of markets to internalize those costs.
2. Plenty of libertarians talk about the military industrial complex. It seems that "defence" (more accuratly: national aggression) is way over produced right now.
It is true that national defence is a public good, and those those get under produced in a free market.
But the real comparison is not free market vs. ideal omniscient government, rather it's real-life markets vs real-life governments.
It's possible (and I think likely) that although defence in a free market is underproduced, free markets are still better than the alternative.
3. It's not the only check. An alternative is a decentralization. Call it bully competition. Another alternative is self defence.
The libertarian argument is that the democratic mechanism is not an effective one. That it gives rise to a big bully who's incentives only partially corralate with the victim's. The fact that you have a vote (one out of hundreds of millions) in deciding who to bully is not of great help.
Public choice theory makes a convincing case for that claim.
1. "Paid for with taxpayer money" is nothing but a libertarian dog whistle. And of course there are plenty of government buildings that have high traffic besides employees. Nor have you demonstrated that transaction costs are an issue here.
2. There is no such thing as a free market. Either you mean a theoretical model used by economists or actually existing markets which differ from the model a great deal. Libertarians have no free market theory of defense: not how it will be paid for nor how much to spend.
3. Public choice theory's criticism of democracy is worthless, because they have no alternative solution that is plausibly better. We are already decentralized: there is the anarchy of nations and there is the multi-level government system that we use in the USA, in case you were not aware. Self defense is what we have already: but we also have aggressive action. Some pre-emptive, some not.
Libertarianism just doesn't provide any solutions.
1. Noah objection was on grounds of transaction costs. I pointed out that the market has tools to internalize those costs, so it's not necessarily an issue. The point about tax payers money was to explain that the fact that the bathrooms are nice does not mean it's good use of money because (unlike in a mall) those who pay are only partly those who use them.
2. There is more or less government. The less government the freer the market. You're making a false claim. Some libertarians suggested how markets can provide defence: insurance, entrepreneurs internalizing defense externalities (e.g. private cities), charity (monetary or by volunteers).
I said it's a real problem. No libertarian calls to abolish all government tomorrow.
You conveniently ignore the issue of overproduction of "security" - over the last twenty years Americans lost trillions of dollars, while millions of people in the middle east got their lives completely destroyed. This is a pattern in attacks on libertarianism: point out a hypothetical problems with markets, while ignoring real problems with the current set of political institutions.
3. The alternative is a market. Perfectly capable of providing any known good or service (externalities, positive or negative, notwithstanding).
The decentralization of nations is indeed a positive thing, and puts some small competitive pressure on governments. Unfortunately, many nations are too big, and barriers to immigration are too high.
From what I've observed, "free markets" only work in places that have rules (whether it be financial or otherwise) - otherwise, they degrade into something else very easily (oligopoly, etc). The old notion of what a basketball game would be without court boundaries and without referees - might be something, but it wouldn't be basketball for long
The largest libertarian movement these days are the people who favor abortion rights. It's pretty easy to criticize the mouth breathing legislators from a libertarian perspective. Most people are situationally libertarian. Too bad they can't see past their own noses. Fear of others' liberty runs rampant.
Favoring abortion rights does not make you libertarian. For example, you could easily be communist and want abortion rights. Every political position has preferred rights. And if you ask self-proclaimed libertarians, they are split on the issue.
The abortion rights groups are rightly using the very same logic as any garden variety traditional libertarian uses for their favored social issues. I can't think of any persuasive libertarian arguments that would support the most restrictive legislation that has now been passed by several states. As I said, most US people have situational libertarian positions. I would like everyone to be more consistently libertarian as the scope of our modern government is nuts.
Abortion rights are orthogonal to libertarianism because libertarianism isn't the same thing as anarchism. The usual phrasing is that the state should monopolize violence and enforce non-aggression. Whether abortion is violence against another human depends on how you define the start of human life, and that's to do with maybe medicine, maybe religion, but it's not decided a priori by any of the ideas in libertarianism.
BillD said that the abortion-rights people are using libertarian *logic*, namely "my body my choice". A popular libertarian bumper-sticker once read "I'm pro-choice on EVERYTHING!"
That they approach the issue with one libertarian principle does not mean that all libertarians agree with their conclusion.
The problem is that those same libertarian arguments that can justify abortion: "mom owns her body", "baby has no right to a claim on Mom's time", "personal autonomy is paramount", "no one can force another person to do something against their will"... all those same ideas can justify infanticide too. And allowing the disabled and elderly to die. And denying ER medical care to those unable to pay.
Perhaps that's why those arguments are not particularly convincing to many people, on abortion or many other issues.
If a position (or argument) overlaps with that held by some libertarians, that does not make it a libertarian position. As in my example of the communist above, which you ignore. But I'm sure you want to claim mom and apple pie as libertarian positions too.
But a big difference is why philosophically libertarians might hold similar positions. Most libertarians believe in natural rights (which are imaginary), and base their arguments on those. Sensible people know what they want, and desire that enforced rights be created to serve those wants.
"I can't think of any persuasive libertarian arguments that..." A classic argument from ignorance. There are libertarians who claim the fetus has rights, a prime example of natural rights handwaving.
"My body" is hardly distinctive to libertarianism: it was present in liberalism centuries before libertarianism. Yet another example of claiming mom and apple pie for libertarianism.
Really, that colonialist practice of planting the libertarian flag on ancient ideas and claiming it for libertarianism is rather comical. Try claiming "we had it first" and get laughed it. But it's all part of the public relations strategy to make libertarianism seem omnipresent.
Why are you for 'plastic straws' for heaven's sake?! There are many regulations we could do without, but I would have thought lifting a ban on plastic straws would not be near the top of the list. We have lips. We don't need straws to pollute our waterways and oceans with more plastic!
You're right that we don't need more plastic in the oceans, but plastic straw bans are a form of "regulatory theater" - i.e. "we've banned plastic straws, so we're doing something" while loading up their groceries in plastic bags full of plastic wrapped products.
One can argue that marginal bans like that do more harm than good for any meaningful results oriented action.
Thanks for the link. It is a good article, but I couldn't help but notice a certain defensiveness in it. Personally, I've noticed several friends who are unhappy (my community bans plastic straws) about it. I haven't used a straw in year and welcome the ban, but I believe reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of it.
Disagreeing is what life is :) But what makes us so successful as a species is that we excel at collaboration... though it may not seem so if we just look at politics! This means accepting what the 'majority' agrees. If we disagree, we can still agitate for change (while continuing to comply with the current rule). The big difficulty at the moment is that 'representative democracy' is not really representative :(
The whole plastic straw panic was based on environmental alarmists amplifying a false statistic created by a 9 year old’s school report. There is very little harm from plastic straws which are disposed in landfills and don’t end up in the ocean or other natural habitats.
Free plastic items (bags, straws, etc...) was one of the things that made me call my libertarianism into question. Having a market for something is impossible when the price is zero. And yet there is no question that such free plastic items do create real costs.
Are there libertarian friendly answers to this? Sure. But sometimes, the most efficient answer is for a society to make a democratic and collective decision that it doesn't want to allow certain things and be done with it.
Yes, there are many 'markets' that do not account for the costs. There is a market for adults (as slaves), and children (as sex objects), and many goods where the production creates 'bads' that do not go into the price.
I'm confused what you're trying to say on AI regulation.
When the first nuclear scientists tried to keep fission knowledge restricted, their main purpose wasn't to "reassure legislators," right? It was to keep Nazis from getting the atom bomb.
When research biologists have called for restrictions on gain-of-function research, their main hope hasn't been to "reassure legislators," surely? It's to prevent a possible lab-leaked supervirus pandemic.
When research scientists like Hinton and Bengio signed a "risk of extinction" statement this week alongside CEOs like Altman and Hassabis, that doesn't look like a good strategy for "reassuring legislators", does it?
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't find "risk of extinction" very reassuring to hear from a CEO about his new products.
Yet I'm grimly sure you're right to warn of pro-corporate or just plain stupid aspects in the details.
Nuclear power regulation, today, is a perfect example of over-regulation making a climate-saving technology useless. The US price of insulin, today, is a horrifying example of safety regulations being hijacked into a company's profits. Given the EU cookie regulations, I'm quite ready to be disgusted with whatever the first AI regulations attempted in the United States are.
And for that reason, I'm sure Altman very much wants to be "in the room where it happens" when any AI rules are drawn up.
Still, if what you really mean is there's no actual basis for concern with AI, that safety discussion remains wholly premature, how much more expert consensus do you suggest we wait for?
If you think we don't need to listen to Hinton and Bengio and the other AI researchers, I wonder how we should think of those first nuclear scientists, trying to keep Nazis from the A-bomb.
Those scientists had never actually seen a nuclear explosion nor assembled a critical mass, yet they brazenly declared their research dangerous and world-changing.
The later nuclear regulations have been bad. But as to nuclear bombs' danger, the early scientists were absolutely right.
Noah mentions the answer right there: Increased State Capacity. No more cronyism. Let the government do it’s own job, let private do theirs. Enough of this two man robbery from the regular joe.
A large number of self-proclaimed "libertarians" turned out to be quite illiberal & reactionary. Including, but not limited to, the Sovereign Citizen movement which made its presence felt during the COVID pandemic.
Closer to where I live, there was a bi-partisan deal a couple of years ago to relax zoning regulations to allow 3-storey homes to be built with far less red tape...
... only for one of the parties to back out of the deal. That party has long claimed to be the party of free enterprise (like the GOP), while the "big government party" (like the Dems) remains committed.
Writing from close to where you live (assuming your name refers to the town, not the vegetable), i was disgusted by that action. My vote will go to truly libertarian party, which is currently polling better than ever. Libertarians may be an endangered species in the US, but it’s alive and well in New Zealand
All of your points about the costs and benefits of regulation seem right to me but would any pragmatic non-ideological citizen ever disagree with the proposition that regulations need to be calibrated to the issue at hand? ‘Over regulation’ and ‘under regulation’ have been used as political cudgels and rallying cries for as long as I can remember. Rather than a new ideology maybe what we need is a stronger ethic of pragmatism, ideological aversion and an acceptance of complexity.
How I dream of a political immune system that would immediately kick bombastic, over-simplifying pro- or anti-regulation pols to the curb with a hearty dose of eye rolls and smirks. We will have finally grown up.
Libertarian thought is so ingrained in our political discourse that we fail to take notice of it. I'd say that libertarian thought in the Republican mainstream became ascendant with the election of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House in 1995. As an example, I'd point to how Gingrich abolished the independent Office of Technology Assessment, which was intended to provide Congress with assessments of new and emerging technologies. Gingrich believed that it was not the role of government to pick winners-or-losers or to pro-actively shape societal outcomes as technology is adopted. Eliminating the OTA sent the signal that the United States was to have no effective industrial policy. Gingrich also dramatically reduced the size of committee professional staff. The result of both actions is to give outside influence to lobbyists and think tanks, and reduces the impartiality of government.
It is part and parcel of the war on expertise throughout the Republican Party, which has consequences in how government programs are received and accepted. When one hears "common sense" solutions from a Republican politician, it is essentially dismissing evidence-based policy actions. The effect is readily seen in the poor Republican adoption of COVID vaccines, preventative wearing of masks, and the acceptance of quack medicines like ivermectin.
I would take issue with the assertion that NEPA is a good example for deregulation. It is actually an example where better regulation is required. The NEPA statutes provide insufficient guidance as to what is sufficiency to pass environmental review. As a consequence, the environmental studies become more extensive than what really is required. And without clear regulatory guidance, legal challenges can be brought forward on any point of contention which then are adjudicated in regular courts which have no particular expertise on the topic. The unfortunate situation is that with libertarian ideology permeating the Republican Party along with hyper-partisanship that such reforms only being brought forward by Democrats. Under libertarian thought, the Republican Party has become incapable of solving difficult legislative issues.
We've had 40 years of Libertarian policy success, and in every case the result is the opposite of what Libertarians swore would happen.
Most Americans hate being fooled.
The Libertarian ideal in which every person is their own expert in every aspect of finance, law, and medicine is falsified by the truth that Libertarian winners hire experts in all those fields, and leave the Libertarian losers to fend for themselves against the winners' hired guns.
Elon's Twitter foray demonstrates that the winners are not manifestly smarter, more careful, or better than the losers. "Meritocracy" turns out to be the Libertarian version of the Divine Right of Kings. The smartest and hardest working in Silicon Valley are not its CEOs.
The Libertarian lie has been exposed, there's nothing to mourn about its passing.
Libertarian policy is to reduce taxes for everyone, not the wealthy. The unlibertarian Trump tax cuts gave deductions for business pass throughs benefiting mostly real estate investors. I have high income but that tax cut increased my taxes. I guess you can’t name a libertarian policy success either.
It is the wealthy who fund the sham of libertarianism, and their principle is that ANY tax cut is a benefit: you don't have to reduce for everyone at the same time. They're still promoting what is essentially trickle down theory.
Gary Johnson is the only "Big L" Libertarian I can think of who has achieved real national recognition, and his claim to fame was demanding legislatures remove at least one outdated regulation before he would sign a new bill into law.
Liberaltarianism kept all the good stuff from old-style libertarianism and is now an important element of liberal (US meaning) thinking.
https://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/13/whats-left-of-libertarianism-2/
Key quote "Compared to the left in general, the distinctive feature of liberaltarianism is scepticism about the effectiveness and beneficence of state action. The break with the Cato version of libertarianism, from which much of the Niskanen Center group has moved, is sharper, including acceptance of the need for income redistribution and action in climate change. "
Right - I think there was a positive impact from "small l" libertarian thinking (e.g. "what if we just let people choose for themselves here?") but the "capital L" Libertarian movement kept trying to take it to weird purified extremes... It's one thing to support personal liberty, but you lose everybody when you start talking about removing all bank regulation and closing the FDA. Not that those agencies have never made mistakes, but they were obviously created in response to actual problems of a zero regulation world, and the die-hard Libertarians refused to accept that compromise.
The libertarian argument against those things is not that no improvement was needed, but that they were the wrong way to improve things.
For example, Noah says "a massive financial crisis that most believed had been precipitated by financial deregulation". Sure, people who read the New York Times and the Guardian may believe this. People who looked at it a bit closer saw that banks were being strongly incentivized or pushed by government regulations into giving away mortgages even when it wasn't smart to do so. Finance is so heavily regulated in so many different ways that "deregulation" usually just means altering the pressures placed upon these institutions via the differing set of remaining regulations.
The biggest issue with making finance libertarian though is the inability of governments (society) to give up on funding the state via money printing. For as long as governments demand cheap credit from the banking sector there will be fractional reserve accounts, and that in turn means they'll have to bail banks out from time to time, and that in turn justifies enormous levels of micromanagement and regulation. The fix is straightforward enough: pass ONE rule that says all bank accounts must be full reserve (implying zero interest rates). Arguably it doesn't even need a new rule, you could just reinterpret the rules against theft or something. People who want ROI will take their funds and put them into investment accounts that explicitly surface risk and liquidity constraints, and if some of those people lose their investments, well, they knew that was possible so they get no bailouts.
That would pretty quickly stabilize the financial sector because now banks know there's no implicit guarantee of a bailout, and if the bank tanks for some other reason the deposits are all still there so can just be transferred to another bank as part of the wind-down procedure.
As for the FDA, we manage with private sector quality control organizations in other areas of life and health regulators all failed as hard as they could during COVID - an outcome predicted by libertarians - so privatizing the assessment of food and drug quality doesn't seem like a big step. Food quality at anything beyond "will it kill me" is already handled by the private sector anyway.
We tried something a lot like this in the 19th century. What actually happens is that people sign papers saying "I agree that I'll lose my shirt if the bank goes bust" in exchange for a positive interest rate, then end up losing their shirt when a bank goes bust, which causes a bunch of other people to lose their shirt when the first set of people can't pay their bills, and we have another Great Depression. No thank you.
We've never tried anything like what I just proposed, because the 19th century didn't have full reserve banking.
I know you're sincere and I'm not trying to tease, but this IS kind of what I was talking about...
Like, freedom-loving people who just think weed should be legal & there's probably excessive occupational licensing & maybe it's ok if people put ADUs on their own land - well they don't need the baggage of the full Libertarian ideology at this point.
I'm not sure what point you're responding to. I didn't make any claims about what pot smokers need, or even what's politically popular. Just trying to explain the reasoning.
BTW, I reject the claim that libertarianism is an ideology. Libertarianism is the absence of ideology. As in: if you start from blank and have a state that has no ideas or desires to change the world, then what you end up with is libertarianism. The very basics get organized because nobody wants to be killed by a neighboring tribe or their neighbor, but after that it just sits around not doing much.
Where ideology enters the picture is when someone says, you know, if only I were in charge then we could really make everything so much better.
Agreeing with Miles, no one is interested in debates about free banking, private money etc any more. For those with a taste for this kind of thing, MMT is the new bright and shiny object, or was until very recently. Or Bitcoin, I guess.
I'm somewhat curious by your passionate objection to full reserve banking. Well, only up to the point where I realize the answer is going to be fairly predictable.
What did you think about the Fed rejecting Caitlin Long's attempt to establish a 108% reserve bank, on the (c'mon, hilarious) reasoning that it would be unsound?
If you require full reserve banking, there are still going to be people looking to borrow short and lend long; they just won't call themselves banks. (Some might call themselves money market funds.) The 2008 crash involved a run on "shadow banking" of exactly this kind.
MMFs are fine. The problem with banking is that you pretty much have to use a bank, because there's no way to do basics like process payroll or receive a salary without them. The failure of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies means that banks still control electronic storage and transmission of money. Those are essentials like roads or water, so forcibly connecting them to investment and lending will inevitably lead to the moral hazard. Solution: don't do that. Expose the liquidity risks in funds, let people take their chances and also give people a way to hold and transmit money without taking those same risks.
The Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve, which took an activist (read: stupid) monetary policy designed to devalue the dollar. The right monetary policy is no monetary policy, of course. This devaluation created the boom of the roaring 20's. But it was just inflation driving the asset classes higher, and it ended in a predictable bust. Yes, it was predictable, sorry Keynes and Fisher, but smarter economists saw it coming. Well, only one of those two men - Fisher and Keynes - was even an economist. The other was likely a pedophile, an anti-Semite, a supporter of Nazism, and homophobic, but he was definitely not an economist. Too bad, politicians decided they liked the ideas of the not-an-economist guy instead of economists that predicted the 1929 crash, such as Ludwig Von Mises. Could be that Keynes supported an active government role in fixing the problem they created. Could be....
Okay, we'll have another Long Depression (1873-1896), if you want to get pendantic about it. :P
(I don't know how much responsibility the Federal Reserve actually bears, but conventional wisdom agrees that they certainly managed to screw up the response to the financial crisis in 1929.)
Sure. Because the Long Depression isn't a real thing. In fact, this is perhaps the greatest period of sustained growth in American history. Economists - of the Keynes type, so not real economists - erroneously called it a depression because prices kept falling. But, prices were falling due to productivity increases and sound, hard money. That's a good thing. In pretty much every economic category, this period is one of significant, sustained increases. This is the time of human flourishing. That economic historians are so wrong headed on this one should remove them from any serious considerations on all other matters.
I definitely found an ideological home in "liberaltarianism" and spent my share of time reading Niskanen, Bleeding Heart Libertarians,.etc. It has a good utopian vision that tends to support data over emotional appeals.
Of course, that just makes me a liberal who is perpetually irritated by group and coalitional dynamics.
Libertarianism is an excellent critique but a terrible governing philosophy. A bit like Marxism, ironically. We need it around to Red Team our policies.
Having been both a Commie and a radical libertarian in the course of my youth, I concur completely.
Fundamentally, if your solution to every problem is the same (whether "more government" or "more markets" or "more equity"), you're parroting an ideology in lieu of thinking. Real world problems are diverse; they don't all have 1 solution.
True Libertarianism has never been tried.
Neither has true Marxism.
Both Libertarianism and Marxism suffer from ideological straightjacketing.
Citation needed.
Libertarian critique isn't built on fundamentally flawed concepts like the labor theory of value and doesn't make failed prophecies like "late stage capitalism."
Even when I was a Libertarian (I'm recovered), the "liberty of local bullies" argument always made sense to some part of my brain. Politics and freedom is a cascade of power levels, of many types, and hopeful tyrants come in all forms, shapes, and sizes. Hell, just look at your typical charismatic evangelical church, or your local multimillionaire coal company tyrant owner.
A reasonably-efficient hierarchy of power has always been the go-to solution in the past, and I really see no alternative to that. Except, hopefully, throwing a well-programmed AI into the mix as a stopgap to corruption. There MUST be a reasonably-powerful State at the top of the power heap, to keep the lessor tyrants in line.
I feel like the overly-intrusive HOA is the modern canonical example of local bullies. And it's a great example because HOAs are exactly what libertarians think are good- they exist purely as contractual obligations between homeowners, not created by the government. The government's only role is to enforce the contracts that HOA members have agreed too.
And then some retired busybodies with all the time in the world take over the HOA board and suddenly they are issuing fines because they don't like the species of shrub you planted in front of your house, or they decide to ban backyard swing sets.
> And then some retired busybodies with all the time in the world take over the HOA board
Actually, H.O.A. boards are often controlled by the H.O.A. management companies and H.O.A. attorneys, with the board members being figureheads. A "deep state", if you will. It's an entire $100-billion-per-year industry.
That's the argument of the new-Right today. Having lost media, K-12, academia, NGOs, tech companies, and corporate boards, conservatives must eschew their libertarian tendencies and use government (the only institution they can gain control over via the ballot box) to bully some of those other lesser bullies.
That's why so many of us are looking at Victor Orban. It's not to import specific Hungarian policies, and certainly not Eastern European corruption. It's because he alone has demonstrated how to use the control of the state to 1) defend common moral standards, 2) facilitate Burke-style platoons, and 3) open space for real non-partisan (or at least bi-partisan) civil society.
For conservatives in the US, some form of this is the only way forward. The Left no longer has any interest in a contest of ideas fought in a broadly liberal and tolerant intellectual space.
Hm. Did you actually think I was coming from a conservative direction on this?
Oh, no. I wasn't assuming that, Steve, as most people here aren't particularly conservative. My point is only that the bullying problem is recognized by parts of both the Left (where you are) and the Right (where I am), but in neither group are we a majority.
The old school left (eg: Bernie circa 2016) feared corporate as much as government power. That group has been displaced by the educated and wealthy new-Left, who are perfectly happy to wield both in the service of their definition of "good". The old school right had a strong definition of "good" but often dithered about enforcing it out of a fear of government overreach (the shadow of McCarthy was long in that way.) A new-right of quasi-Burkean nationalists (think Hawley or Vance) is taking shape now, but doesn't yet have hold of institutional political power. In many ways we are now the polar opposite of 60 years ago.
I wish I believed there was an opportunity for a broadly liberal political center that feared concentrated power in all its forms and wasn't afraid to use one form to fight another, but I think such a center relies on a pre-liberal moral consensus that no longer exists in America. I just hope I'm wrong about that.
{Sniff} Oh, l@@k, smells like propaganda.
"they can only influence people by persuasion"
Would that this were true, Mike. Alas NGO and bureaucratic power is wielded in many ways to circumvent precisely the sort of "contest of ideas" that hopefully you and I would both welcome. Shakespeare was right that the pen is mightier than the sword, just not the way he intended.
Lessor tyrant is a great Freudian slip - all landlords are tyrants!
What would be a realistic, workable alternative?
As a long-time online forums user (and thus very exposed to libertarians), my read of the whole movement and its fate is basically:
- outside of online circles "actual" libertarianism is vanishingly rare (everyone's seen this chart: https://www.storybench.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/polcompass.png - and even if the axes might be out of whack a bit, online libertarians have always still felt like that one dot in the lower right corner, walling themselves off with moats and everything and screaming STATISTS!!! at anyone else);
- what "libertarian", in an American context, basically meant for many or most in the early 2000s was that you were a Republican but also an atheist or at least heavily secular; since there's now more ideologies that are Republican but also atheist/secular (you can easily be a nationalist, an "anti-woke" type etc. without any commitment to religion), people with that mindset now identify with labels other than "libertarian".
I think it was also heavily influenced by South Park and Ralph Nader. Libertarianism for a while really just meant you (1) watched the show, (2) voter for Nader as a protest to the two-party system, and (3) wanted legal weed. It was sociopolitical posturing - a way to make oneself look like a cool conscientious objector without having to actually understand a whole lot about politics.
I don’t know any libertarians who vote or even support Ralph Nader who is a big government regulation anti-corporate leftist. It’s funny how the majority of people who criticize libertarians have no idea what they even are.
"I don’t know any libertarians who..." Another argument from ignorance.
Most libertarians have little idea of the diversity of people calling themselves libertarian (like you) and think they know the one, true libertarianism.
Also the "No True Scotsman" argument.
Most of the libertarians I knew in the early 2000s voted for him because of weed.
Harry Browne was the Libertarian candidate in 2000 and Michael Badnarik in 2004. Ralph Nader campaigned on universal healthcare, free college, high regulations and taxes on corporations and restricting campaign financing more than weed. And the only thing in common with the libertarian candidates was the weed. So the people you know who voted for him and calling themselves libertarian obviously partook too much.
Indeed. To be clear, I am not saying it made sense, I’m just saying it shows that libertarianism’s brief popularity was more of an affectation than anything else.
Haven't we already noticed that it is always the millionaires and the billionaires who support libertarianism?
Executive summary: Libertarianism is *naked* capitalism in sheep's clothes.
The libertarian party got around 2 million votes in 2020. How many of those people are millionaires?
According to Credit Suisse (RIP) there are about 22 millionaires in the US.
This seems plausible to me, given housing prices and stock market growth. Many would be living what look like middle-class lives in NYC, LA, and SF.
So if ten percent of them voted for the Libertarian Party, there's your vote count and more.
https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html
The libertarian vote in California and new York is among the lowest in the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state
So those voters are mostly from lower wealth states. It's implausible a large percentage of them is wealthy.
Or it could be that a good chunk of the “wealthy” people in X state voted for the Libertarian candidate.
Every state has millionaires.
I really think you should use MEDIAN there instead of mean. Then you see even median White wealth is below $200k.
$1M+ in wealth is still a decently high bar, though it's true it catches a lot of older people with large retirement accounts. Anyhow this is the whole point of "The Millionaire Next Door" - that actual millionaires are not that rare and aren't living particularly splashy lifestyles.
BUT, it's still not "middle class", and the way "middle class" gets thrown around in US discussions is pretty sloppy (no offense). Let's at least say "upper middle class" for these people, though.
You can fool some of the people all of the time.
Maybe they support it because they understand how they themselves became wealthy and think that should be more common?
I find it offensive that people take this sort of demagoging as some sort of clever gotcha moment. Do better.
The political problem with State Capacity Libertarianism is that it's exactly the opposite of what the Republican Party wants.
Instead of voting to cut tax rates, they vote to spend less on IRS enforcement because it "saves money". Instead of putting regulations through cost-benefit analysis, they want an up-or-down vote in Congress (lol) before any new regulation can take effect:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/upshot/republican-bill-government-regulations.html
The explicit aim in both cases is to smash up state capacity so the government *can't* decide which taxes or regulations are worthwhile. How do you deal with people like that?
It’s also unhelpful that destroying state capacity has been part of the Republican project since at least the 90s, which is part of why things are so bad now. Not the whole reason, but it’s a factor.
See also: abolishing the Iraqi Army.
Totally different situation except actually, not
The Republican Party is increasingly for state capacity especially for defense (only thing getting an increase in the debt limit bill) and has never been libertarian, only one elected Republican, Justin Amash, had any libertarian ideas and he was ousted by the combined efforts of the two main parties.
I think their reasoning is that the sort of people who work for the civil service and would be doing the cost/benefit analysis, would be the sort of people who consider the costs to always be trivial and the benefits to always be huge (including of course, benefits for themselves). If you believe that then it makes sense to require Congress to do its own decisions. Actually that's how it works in most parts of the world. Allowing agencies to invent new laws on its own to the scale they do in the USA is rather unusual.
In general you have a point about the Republican Party not being terribly interested in improving state capacity, but your particular example suggests you may have also lost the plot. The IRS does not need more money to institute a rule that takes the value of law abiding citizens’ time into account in the cost/benefit analysis of audit decisions. Regulators tend to end up captured by the incumbent businesses in an industry and tax preparation is no exception. You better believe the IRS does its job of being terrible to deal with for law abiding citizens and we paid TurboTax for audit protection!
If the Republicans wanted the IRS to take less of law-abiding people's time they'd order it to prepare everyone's tax returns automatically. Instead it's been made illegal for the IRS to provide for free what TurboTax makes you pay for.
Making the process of tax payment as much of a hassle as possible is a feature, not a bug, because it makes voters hostile to taxation in general. That serves the interests of very wealthy people, who have accountants do their taxes anyway and are glad to put up with a little hassle in exchange for lower rates.
Devil is in the details, even Turbo Tax struggles to import data correctly even when they have a relationship with a company, but we are agreed that the Republicans are not trying to increase IRS capacity. Where I was disagreeing was the suggestion that a lack of funding is the problem with the IRS. The Democrats don’t want a competent IRS either, they just want it to collect more in taxes.
Nice article, point well taken.
Can we also discuss social libertarianism? Can we get rid of government laws and regulations that control what consenting adults can do in the privacy of their own bedroom, and against government laws and regulations that give governments control over women's bodies?! Can we allow LGBTQIA+ to live the lives they want to live without government interference? But keep in place laws against discrimination?
I would call that privacy rights, not social libertarianism. Moving the Overton Window to where libertarianism is accepted rather than recognized as manipulation by plutocrats is a major goal of plutocratic public relations.
If it stayed in their bedrooms likely no one would care. People get mad when it invades women's sports teams and Sesame Street.
Also, "oppressed" groups don't generally have an entire month when they are celebrated by every institution in their society, with their flags flown from the highest pinnacles of power. Really "oppressed" people (Russian kulaks, German Jews, Rwandan Tutsis) tend to try not to be noticed.
On a side note: what the heck is the "+" anyway?
Just to reply to your 3 points at the top of the post.
1. The places that have the best benches/bathrooms/bins are private venues (think malls, or Disneyland). This is an argument against public property not for it. Economically speaking, to the extent there are transaction costs, the market will tend to internalize them, and is generally doing it quite well.
2. Defence is indeed a hard problem. That's why libertarians usually suggest to start with lower hanging fruit.
3. Empowering the bigger bully only works as long as he's on your side. You might wake up and discover the bigger bully doesn't like you today, or even worse is colluding with the smaller bully against you.
1. Private venues also frequently have crappy bathrooms: think gas stations, for example. The question is how upscale they want to appear. Plenty of fine bathrooms in government buildings. Nor is your idea true outside of the US, where public bathrooms are often excellent.
2. Libertarians generally move on from defense because their ideologies conflict with it so badly. If you are opposed to taxation, how can you fund defense? If you believe in capitalism, public goods such as defense will be under produced. Etc.
3. Keeping the bigger bully on your side is the purpose of our idea of democratic government. It's the only check on the actions of bullies. This is a basic issue that most libertarians don't get, in my experience.
Gas stations are generally forbidden by law from charging for bathrooms — ergo, you get crappy ones.
With all our Southern illegal immigrants, how soon before we import the Mexican custom of having someone at the door to charge for toilet paper? Libertarians would call that a triumph of the market. I call it crappy. (And not in a metaphorical sense.)
Here in Ecuador, they must have bathrooms and cannot charge for them. But the quality is quite nice. Your "ergo" doesn't follow from any chain of logic and doesn't match many other real world situations.
How does his ergo “not follow from any chain of logic”? It seems pretty clear that, if you expect that maintaining a service costs money, that service will be nicer if those costs are offset by some sort of associated revenue stream. That’s at least a very clear step in the chain of logic suggested by economic analysis.
Because there is a hidden false premise that charging for bathrooms directly is the only way to have nice bathrooms.
1. Sure there are nice bathrooms in government buildings, paid for with tax payers money, used mostly by government employees.
In any case, the original point was about transaction costs, and the ability of markets to internalize those costs.
2. Plenty of libertarians talk about the military industrial complex. It seems that "defence" (more accuratly: national aggression) is way over produced right now.
It is true that national defence is a public good, and those those get under produced in a free market.
But the real comparison is not free market vs. ideal omniscient government, rather it's real-life markets vs real-life governments.
It's possible (and I think likely) that although defence in a free market is underproduced, free markets are still better than the alternative.
3. It's not the only check. An alternative is a decentralization. Call it bully competition. Another alternative is self defence.
The libertarian argument is that the democratic mechanism is not an effective one. That it gives rise to a big bully who's incentives only partially corralate with the victim's. The fact that you have a vote (one out of hundreds of millions) in deciding who to bully is not of great help.
Public choice theory makes a convincing case for that claim.
1. "Paid for with taxpayer money" is nothing but a libertarian dog whistle. And of course there are plenty of government buildings that have high traffic besides employees. Nor have you demonstrated that transaction costs are an issue here.
2. There is no such thing as a free market. Either you mean a theoretical model used by economists or actually existing markets which differ from the model a great deal. Libertarians have no free market theory of defense: not how it will be paid for nor how much to spend.
3. Public choice theory's criticism of democracy is worthless, because they have no alternative solution that is plausibly better. We are already decentralized: there is the anarchy of nations and there is the multi-level government system that we use in the USA, in case you were not aware. Self defense is what we have already: but we also have aggressive action. Some pre-emptive, some not.
Libertarianism just doesn't provide any solutions.
1. Noah objection was on grounds of transaction costs. I pointed out that the market has tools to internalize those costs, so it's not necessarily an issue. The point about tax payers money was to explain that the fact that the bathrooms are nice does not mean it's good use of money because (unlike in a mall) those who pay are only partly those who use them.
2. There is more or less government. The less government the freer the market. You're making a false claim. Some libertarians suggested how markets can provide defence: insurance, entrepreneurs internalizing defense externalities (e.g. private cities), charity (monetary or by volunteers).
I said it's a real problem. No libertarian calls to abolish all government tomorrow.
You conveniently ignore the issue of overproduction of "security" - over the last twenty years Americans lost trillions of dollars, while millions of people in the middle east got their lives completely destroyed. This is a pattern in attacks on libertarianism: point out a hypothetical problems with markets, while ignoring real problems with the current set of political institutions.
3. The alternative is a market. Perfectly capable of providing any known good or service (externalities, positive or negative, notwithstanding).
The decentralization of nations is indeed a positive thing, and puts some small competitive pressure on governments. Unfortunately, many nations are too big, and barriers to immigration are too high.
From what I've observed, "free markets" only work in places that have rules (whether it be financial or otherwise) - otherwise, they degrade into something else very easily (oligopoly, etc). The old notion of what a basketball game would be without court boundaries and without referees - might be something, but it wouldn't be basketball for long
What if you can’t afford the $150 ticket to enter Disneyland? Do you arrest the person who then defecates in the street?
You charge them one dollar for a private-public bathroom.
Or you charge them nothing in a shopping mall.
The largest libertarian movement these days are the people who favor abortion rights. It's pretty easy to criticize the mouth breathing legislators from a libertarian perspective. Most people are situationally libertarian. Too bad they can't see past their own noses. Fear of others' liberty runs rampant.
Favoring abortion rights does not make you libertarian. For example, you could easily be communist and want abortion rights. Every political position has preferred rights. And if you ask self-proclaimed libertarians, they are split on the issue.
The abortion rights groups are rightly using the very same logic as any garden variety traditional libertarian uses for their favored social issues. I can't think of any persuasive libertarian arguments that would support the most restrictive legislation that has now been passed by several states. As I said, most US people have situational libertarian positions. I would like everyone to be more consistently libertarian as the scope of our modern government is nuts.
Abortion rights are orthogonal to libertarianism because libertarianism isn't the same thing as anarchism. The usual phrasing is that the state should monopolize violence and enforce non-aggression. Whether abortion is violence against another human depends on how you define the start of human life, and that's to do with maybe medicine, maybe religion, but it's not decided a priori by any of the ideas in libertarianism.
I heartily agree.
BillD said that the abortion-rights people are using libertarian *logic*, namely "my body my choice". A popular libertarian bumper-sticker once read "I'm pro-choice on EVERYTHING!"
That they approach the issue with one libertarian principle does not mean that all libertarians agree with their conclusion.
The problem is that those same libertarian arguments that can justify abortion: "mom owns her body", "baby has no right to a claim on Mom's time", "personal autonomy is paramount", "no one can force another person to do something against their will"... all those same ideas can justify infanticide too. And allowing the disabled and elderly to die. And denying ER medical care to those unable to pay.
Perhaps that's why those arguments are not particularly convincing to many people, on abortion or many other issues.
If a position (or argument) overlaps with that held by some libertarians, that does not make it a libertarian position. As in my example of the communist above, which you ignore. But I'm sure you want to claim mom and apple pie as libertarian positions too.
But a big difference is why philosophically libertarians might hold similar positions. Most libertarians believe in natural rights (which are imaginary), and base their arguments on those. Sensible people know what they want, and desire that enforced rights be created to serve those wants.
"I can't think of any persuasive libertarian arguments that..." A classic argument from ignorance. There are libertarians who claim the fetus has rights, a prime example of natural rights handwaving.
"My body" is hardly distinctive to libertarianism: it was present in liberalism centuries before libertarianism. Yet another example of claiming mom and apple pie for libertarianism.
Really, that colonialist practice of planting the libertarian flag on ancient ideas and claiming it for libertarianism is rather comical. Try claiming "we had it first" and get laughed it. But it's all part of the public relations strategy to make libertarianism seem omnipresent.
Why are you for 'plastic straws' for heaven's sake?! There are many regulations we could do without, but I would have thought lifting a ban on plastic straws would not be near the top of the list. We have lips. We don't need straws to pollute our waterways and oceans with more plastic!
You're right that we don't need more plastic in the oceans, but plastic straw bans are a form of "regulatory theater" - i.e. "we've banned plastic straws, so we're doing something" while loading up their groceries in plastic bags full of plastic wrapped products.
One can argue that marginal bans like that do more harm than good for any meaningful results oriented action.
Straws are still unnecessary (for most people) and as this well reasoned article argues, it is a relatively easy start to get people out of the habit of using unnecessary plastic: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/pieces/plastic-straw-ban-movement-19072018/
Thanks for the link. It is a good article, but I couldn't help but notice a certain defensiveness in it. Personally, I've noticed several friends who are unhappy (my community bans plastic straws) about it. I haven't used a straw in year and welcome the ban, but I believe reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of it.
Disagreeing is what life is :) But what makes us so successful as a species is that we excel at collaboration... though it may not seem so if we just look at politics! This means accepting what the 'majority' agrees. If we disagree, we can still agitate for change (while continuing to comply with the current rule). The big difficulty at the moment is that 'representative democracy' is not really representative :(
The whole plastic straw panic was based on environmental alarmists amplifying a false statistic created by a 9 year old’s school report. There is very little harm from plastic straws which are disposed in landfills and don’t end up in the ocean or other natural habitats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-ban-fact-check-nyt.html
Plastic straws are a lifeline for people with certain disabilities.
Free plastic items (bags, straws, etc...) was one of the things that made me call my libertarianism into question. Having a market for something is impossible when the price is zero. And yet there is no question that such free plastic items do create real costs.
Are there libertarian friendly answers to this? Sure. But sometimes, the most efficient answer is for a society to make a democratic and collective decision that it doesn't want to allow certain things and be done with it.
Yes, there are many 'markets' that do not account for the costs. There is a market for adults (as slaves), and children (as sex objects), and many goods where the production creates 'bads' that do not go into the price.
I'm confused what you're trying to say on AI regulation.
When the first nuclear scientists tried to keep fission knowledge restricted, their main purpose wasn't to "reassure legislators," right? It was to keep Nazis from getting the atom bomb.
When research biologists have called for restrictions on gain-of-function research, their main hope hasn't been to "reassure legislators," surely? It's to prevent a possible lab-leaked supervirus pandemic.
When research scientists like Hinton and Bengio signed a "risk of extinction" statement this week alongside CEOs like Altman and Hassabis, that doesn't look like a good strategy for "reassuring legislators", does it?
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't find "risk of extinction" very reassuring to hear from a CEO about his new products.
Yet I'm grimly sure you're right to warn of pro-corporate or just plain stupid aspects in the details.
Nuclear power regulation, today, is a perfect example of over-regulation making a climate-saving technology useless. The US price of insulin, today, is a horrifying example of safety regulations being hijacked into a company's profits. Given the EU cookie regulations, I'm quite ready to be disgusted with whatever the first AI regulations attempted in the United States are.
And for that reason, I'm sure Altman very much wants to be "in the room where it happens" when any AI rules are drawn up.
Still, if what you really mean is there's no actual basis for concern with AI, that safety discussion remains wholly premature, how much more expert consensus do you suggest we wait for?
If you think we don't need to listen to Hinton and Bengio and the other AI researchers, I wonder how we should think of those first nuclear scientists, trying to keep Nazis from the A-bomb.
Those scientists had never actually seen a nuclear explosion nor assembled a critical mass, yet they brazenly declared their research dangerous and world-changing.
The later nuclear regulations have been bad. But as to nuclear bombs' danger, the early scientists were absolutely right.
Noah mentions the answer right there: Increased State Capacity. No more cronyism. Let the government do it’s own job, let private do theirs. Enough of this two man robbery from the regular joe.
A large number of self-proclaimed "libertarians" turned out to be quite illiberal & reactionary. Including, but not limited to, the Sovereign Citizen movement which made its presence felt during the COVID pandemic.
Closer to where I live, there was a bi-partisan deal a couple of years ago to relax zoning regulations to allow 3-storey homes to be built with far less red tape...
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/453824/housing-density-to-increase-across-new-zealand-under-rare-bipartisan-solution
... only for one of the parties to back out of the deal. That party has long claimed to be the party of free enterprise (like the GOP), while the "big government party" (like the Dems) remains committed.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/490887/national-s-backdown-on-bipartisan-housing-accord-a-massive-flip-flop-sepuloni
Writing from close to where you live (assuming your name refers to the town, not the vegetable), i was disgusted by that action. My vote will go to truly libertarian party, which is currently polling better than ever. Libertarians may be an endangered species in the US, but it’s alive and well in New Zealand
The vegetable, so it could apply anywhere in the country.
All of your points about the costs and benefits of regulation seem right to me but would any pragmatic non-ideological citizen ever disagree with the proposition that regulations need to be calibrated to the issue at hand? ‘Over regulation’ and ‘under regulation’ have been used as political cudgels and rallying cries for as long as I can remember. Rather than a new ideology maybe what we need is a stronger ethic of pragmatism, ideological aversion and an acceptance of complexity.
How I dream of a political immune system that would immediately kick bombastic, over-simplifying pro- or anti-regulation pols to the curb with a hearty dose of eye rolls and smirks. We will have finally grown up.
Libertarian thought is so ingrained in our political discourse that we fail to take notice of it. I'd say that libertarian thought in the Republican mainstream became ascendant with the election of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House in 1995. As an example, I'd point to how Gingrich abolished the independent Office of Technology Assessment, which was intended to provide Congress with assessments of new and emerging technologies. Gingrich believed that it was not the role of government to pick winners-or-losers or to pro-actively shape societal outcomes as technology is adopted. Eliminating the OTA sent the signal that the United States was to have no effective industrial policy. Gingrich also dramatically reduced the size of committee professional staff. The result of both actions is to give outside influence to lobbyists and think tanks, and reduces the impartiality of government.
It is part and parcel of the war on expertise throughout the Republican Party, which has consequences in how government programs are received and accepted. When one hears "common sense" solutions from a Republican politician, it is essentially dismissing evidence-based policy actions. The effect is readily seen in the poor Republican adoption of COVID vaccines, preventative wearing of masks, and the acceptance of quack medicines like ivermectin.
I would take issue with the assertion that NEPA is a good example for deregulation. It is actually an example where better regulation is required. The NEPA statutes provide insufficient guidance as to what is sufficiency to pass environmental review. As a consequence, the environmental studies become more extensive than what really is required. And without clear regulatory guidance, legal challenges can be brought forward on any point of contention which then are adjudicated in regular courts which have no particular expertise on the topic. The unfortunate situation is that with libertarian ideology permeating the Republican Party along with hyper-partisanship that such reforms only being brought forward by Democrats. Under libertarian thought, the Republican Party has become incapable of solving difficult legislative issues.
We've had 40 years of Libertarian policy success, and in every case the result is the opposite of what Libertarians swore would happen.
Most Americans hate being fooled.
The Libertarian ideal in which every person is their own expert in every aspect of finance, law, and medicine is falsified by the truth that Libertarian winners hire experts in all those fields, and leave the Libertarian losers to fend for themselves against the winners' hired guns.
Elon's Twitter foray demonstrates that the winners are not manifestly smarter, more careful, or better than the losers. "Meritocracy" turns out to be the Libertarian version of the Divine Right of Kings. The smartest and hardest working in Silicon Valley are not its CEOs.
The Libertarian lie has been exposed, there's nothing to mourn about its passing.
What libertarian policy success do you mean? Please name one.
I think he means success in getting libertarian policy installed. Such as reducing taxes on the wealthy.
Libertarian policy is to reduce taxes for everyone, not the wealthy. The unlibertarian Trump tax cuts gave deductions for business pass throughs benefiting mostly real estate investors. I have high income but that tax cut increased my taxes. I guess you can’t name a libertarian policy success either.
It is the wealthy who fund the sham of libertarianism, and their principle is that ANY tax cut is a benefit: you don't have to reduce for everyone at the same time. They're still promoting what is essentially trickle down theory.
Gary Johnson is the only "Big L" Libertarian I can think of who has achieved real national recognition, and his claim to fame was demanding legislatures remove at least one outdated regulation before he would sign a new bill into law.