Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Classical liberalism. The individual before the state, non-interventionist, free-market based society.
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#13789240
I was doing some browsing at Libertarian sites, and I must say a good degree of them are considerably more fascist and tyrannical than I had previously chided them as being.

CATO wrote:Democracy Is Not The Answer

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere,[2] and it poses major problems specifically for libertarians:

1) Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan, the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! Even Ron Paul, who was enormously popular by libertarian standards and ran during a time of enormous backlash against the establishment, never had the slightest chance of winning the nomination. His “strong” showing got him 1.6% of the delegates to the Republican Party’s national convention. There are simply not enough of us to win elections unless we somehow concentrate our efforts.

2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest candidates) who will not abuse their office can’t sell favors, thus have fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic disadvantage in an election.

Libertarians are a minority, and we underperform in elections, so winning electoral victories is a hopeless endeavor.

Emergent Behavior

Consider these three levels of political abstraction:

Policies: Specific sets of laws.
Institutions: An entire country and its legal and political systems.
Ecosystem: All nations and the environment in which they compete and evolve.

Folk activism treats policies and institutions as the result of specific human intent. But policies are in large part an emergent behavior of institutions, and institutions are an emergent behavior of the global political ecosystem.


Also, in a possibly related part of CATO thinking - Pinochet's ministers were great libertarians, and his regime worthy of emulation!
#13789288
The hilarious thing about glorifying the economic policies of Pinochet is that Chile has only had 3 depression the end of the Great Depression. And 2 happened under Pinochet. The third is the most recent depression, which in Chile was pretty much because of terrible economic policies outside of Chile.
#13789329
Democracy is dangerous because it grants the state a moral shroud to conceal it's evil nature. People believe because we have elections we have chosen our government and anything that our government does is our choice and thus beyond reproach. Of course the state like any other organization must be judged by universal moral standards. It is no more right for the state to steal than it is for me to steal. It is no more right for the state to murder than it is for me to murder. Democracy helps people forget this.
#13789421
Bryan Caplan wrote:Gilded Age


I don't know whether to laugh or cry. That somebody would romanticize the Gilded Age is hilarious - true. But that some guy would seriously use a term like, "Gilded Age," invented by Mark Twain to mock an appearance of thin plated gold over a lump of something worthless, as something to aspire to without knowing that he's perpetuating a name that is mocking his own views - is bad enough. That people rally behind such an argument makes me want to just nuke everything.
#13789453
Other than a celebration of put-downs, has anybody advanced an actual argument against libertarianism in general, or the views of the Cato Institute, Hans Hoppe or Bryan Caplan in particular?

Maybe I missed it.
#13789457
I'm almost feeling too lazy to make the feminist argument against Caplan, since everyone knows what I'm going to say about patriarchal-capitalism, and how their classical-radical liberalism is actually an aggressive retrenchment of a patriarchy that we haven't even got out of yet in the first place.

But I will anyway:

Caplan wants to run a society where all the rules of conduct were invented by males for males, to the point where the fact that we have ovaries is not taken into account by the state, but the fact that he has testicles, is. This is then branded hilariously as "non-intervention" when it actually involves setting up a whole social order that guarantees his privilege, using the state (the areas where the libertarianism-inspired state acts, and the areas where it chooses to not act, are key!).

Miraculously, if we try to take the state away from him and use it to make a different social order, then we are now "intervening", which is of course "bad".

I've got his number, Caplan just wants to have bitchez 'n hoes, and finds it fortunate that what he calls "non-intervention" and thus "good", happens to also be total retrenchment of the patriarchy. The liberty that he is arguing for, is the liberty to put women back in the birdcage and say, "What could I do? Material forces constrained me to constrain you!", it's just 'nature'.

However, we woke up, and we are doing things, and we will continue to do things, particularly because we know that if we don't - people such as Caplan will.

On the issue of material forces there's a cute quote:
Antonio Gramsci wrote:It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the ‘solidity of popular beliefs’ as a necessary element of a specific situation. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant.
#13789464
Rei wrote:Caplan wants to run a society where all the rules of conduct were invented by males for males

Any quote or specific Caplan position to support that claim?
#13789480
Eran wrote:Other than a celebration of put-downs, has anybody advanced an actual argument against libertarianism in general, or the views of the Cato Institute, Hans Hoppe or Bryan Caplan in particular?

Maybe I missed it.



Here's a quote from Hoppe who for eternity reveals himself in my eyes as being a five-star dick:

They-the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism-will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... n13635302/


Now, I understand why he has beef with people espousing all non-libertarian political ideologies, as they would constitute a direct threat to the system, that is somewhat consistent ("No freedom for enemies of freedom", altough I would point out that modern democracy is ussually more tolerant in this regard than the apparently liberty-loving Hans), but otherwise - FFS this sounds like taken straight from Der Stürmer.
In a Libertarian society people who are perceived as parasites or hedonists or whatever just won't get a free ride from anyone and that's it, why does he want to go further and remove them ? And how exactly are homosexuals dangerous to the Libertarian order ? Looks that there is a little more at play behind the scenes here.

If I was to advance a theory, I would say Hoppe is anti-goverment for the same reason that some American White Nationalists are - it's not because he really believes and values personal autonomy, but because he feels Western governments have sold out to things he doesn't like - multiculti, tolerance, women emancipation etc. He dreams of a homogenic utopia where people's behaviour is tightly controlled as well, just by mores instead of a goverment.


I almost feel sorry for him that of all the places in the world, with his kind of views, he has to make his living in Las Vegas :lol:
Last edited by Orestes on 31 Aug 2011 11:30, edited 1 time in total.
#13789572
Rei wrote:You did read the article in question, right? The whole article would be what I would quote.

I missed the link the first time around.
Now that I have read the article, I still fail to see any concrete argument against Caplan's (historical, and consequently contingent) views.

As I understand his argument, it is that women in 19th century America were freer than they are today. The crux of the argument is that the legal status of married women should be considered part of a voluntary choice made by the woman, and thus not a state-imposed limitation on freedom. While odd, the argument does seem to make sense.

But I am actually more sympathetic than that. Caplan makes the (common libertarian) mistake of only acknowledging government (or force initiation) as a barrier to freedom. But imagine a society in which social norms (but not the law) require that women stay and work at home. Employers, while legally free to employ women, tend not to. Universities similarly tend not to accept women, etc.

In a world like that, while women are technically "free", they are, in practice, less free than they are in our world. To the extent that that represents 19th century America, I find myself disagreeing with Caplan on this point.

The standard libertarian argument is that free-market Capitalism will tend to push people towards equality. With women out of the work-force, for example, a clever entrepreneur could under-price his competitors by hiring (cheaper) women. As a matter of practice, unjustified inequality rarely survives the selection process of the free market.

Orestes wrote:Here's a quote from Hoppe who for eternity reveals himself in my eyes as being a five-star dick:

Hoppe wrote:They-the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism-will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

This statement by Hoppe is pure speculation, and I generally disagree with it. I think there is a kernel of truth that certain lifestyles depend on government hand-outs for their current popularity. Single-motherhood comes to mind. But others items in the list (e.g. homosexuality) reflect Hoppe's personal prejudice.

I also strongly disagree with Hoppe on immigration (he is against, I am for) and fractional reserve banking (he is against, I am for).
#13789623
Other than a celebration of put-downs, has anybody advanced an actual argument against libertarianism in general, or the views of the Cato Institute, Hans Hoppe or Bryan Caplan in particular?

Maybe I missed it.


You missed the second reply.

The hilarious thing about glorifying the economic policies of Pinochet is that Chile has only had 3 depression the end of the Great Depression. And 2 happened under Pinochet. The third is the most recent depression, which in Chile was pretty much because of terrible economic policies outside of Chile.
#13789655
How is that an argument for anything?

Chile remains one of the wealthier countries in Latin America, thanks to the modicum of economic freedom introduced by Pinochet, economic freedom that neither obscures nor justifies Pinochet's many human right abuses.
#13789665
How is that an argument for anything?


If you're going to glorify someone for their economic prowess, you should probably try not glorifying the person who crashed his nations economy.

Chile remains one of the wealthier countries in Latin America, thanks to the modicum of economic freedom introduced by Pinochet, economic freedom that neither obscures nor justifies Pinochet's many human right abuses.


Except, you'd be more justified in thanking the years of market intervention prior to Pinochet. All Pinochet really did was fuck up a winning strategy.
#13789697
Quoting Wikipedia:
Wikipedia wrote:During the first quarter of 1973, Chile's economic problems became extremely serious. Inflation reached an annual rate of more than 120 percent, industrial output declined by almost 6 percent, and foreign-exchange reserves held by the Central Bank were barely above US$40 million. The black market by then covered a widening range of transactions in foreign exchange. The fiscal deficit continued to climb as a result of spiraling expenditures and of rapidly disappearing sources of taxation. For that year, the fiscal deficit ended up exceeding 23% of GDP.

The depth of the economic crisis seriously affected the middle class, and relations between the UP government and the political opposition became increasingly confrontational. On September 11, 1973, the UP regime came to a sudden and shocking end with a violent military coup and President Allende's death.


Doesn't sound like a "winning strategy" to me.

Having said that, though, I neither know nor care enough to defend Pinochet's policies. While they may have been more "free market" than his predecessors', I have no idea how truly free market it was. I'd be shocked if Pinochet didn't use government power to reward his cronies, for example.
#13789712
If anything, the Chilean experience shows that people will not vote for a libertarian regime. In fact, the Chilean people voted for a democratic regime with strong socialist policies, and then had a more or less free-market regime imposed on them by the US and a corrupt military.

Eran wrote:Doesn't sound like a "winning strategy" to me.


To build on what Lightman said, I believe Nixon's exact words when he ordered the CIA to destroy the Chilean economy were "I want to make the Chilean economy scream".

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