[quote]Sloth wrote:
When libertarians show such moral indifference to their own welfare-state alternatives, well, it doesn’t inspire faith.[/quote]
Maybe some people can’t afford to be charitable?
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Dustin, is this really what the libertarian response to the public would be?
“You libertarians say private charity would step up to fill the void left by a redacted welfare-state. However, when reading and listening to libertarian musings, you folks don’t really seem to care much for the idea of society holding charity up as major virtue. Honestly, it comes off as if your claims about what private charity can accomplish are nothing more than political cover. That, in fact, you’re indifferent to what private charity could actually accomplish, if not outright hostile to it cultivation within the culture.”
“Ahem, well, what if one can’t afford to be charitable?”[/quote]
A. Charity is a good thing.
B. I have no idea what the “libertarian response” would be, as there would be no “offical” response.
C. I’m not sure where you are going with this? If one can afford to give to charity, then do so. This is a simple concept.
As an aisde, there all sorts of charitable organizations and churches to help those in need. This is a non-issue.
[quote]Dustin wrote:
If you don’t want to be charitable, then don’t. Pretty simple.
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And this is exactly how not to build a charitable society. You don’t treat charity as if it were like choosing which side to part one’s hair to, left or right. “If you want to part it to the right, then do. If not, then don’t.” When libertarians show such moral indifference to their own welfare-state alternatives, well, it doesn’t inspire faith.[/quote]
Strangely enough, I actually agree with this. It is one of the remnants of the dreadful days of Randianism that libertarians show indifference to the poor and helpless. Libertarianism will never go anywhere if it is viewed (falsely) as a selfish, uncharitable doctrine.
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But if human beings were selfish and uncharitable that kind of libertarianism would be the only rational ideology.
If they are not, libertarianism must mean something else.
Either way, conservatives suffer from the liberal affliction of not being able to distinguish between what they deem to be a perfect world and what should be enforced at gunpoint by the state.
[quote]Dustin wrote:
As an aisde, there all sorts of charitable organizations and churches to help those in need. This is a non-issue. [/quote]
Time is short at the moment, but notice your mention of chruches? Churches, along with church related associations, are always mentioned as key parts of the libertarian solution to a welfareless state. Indeed, I don’t believe I’ve had this conversation with a libertarian who didn’t mention churches. So, how then can we dismiss ‘mysticism?’ I mean, if we assure the reluctant that the rough edges of capitalism are smoothed over by ‘mysticism and mystics’ aren’t we admitting to the social power of ‘mysticism’? Isn’t it being depended on to provide an answer to the question “what’ll happen to the needy?” Now, if something has that much weight in society, how can anyone advise to abandon it in their arguments?
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Economics refers to human action in the most general sense. It is impossible for humans to act without self interest.
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Yes but much of the study of economics tends to refer to it in a more financial manner. And most of the arguments made by libertarians rely upon financial motivation rather than a pure self-interest approach.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
As far as dying for what one “believes in” it must be completely economic in nature otherwise fighting over it would not solve the problem.
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Again this is only in the vague manner economics refers to human action. Of course this vague definition includes entire other fields such as psychology.
In the strict financial sense this is not true at all. Could you not fight for instance to end slavery. I wouldn’t call slavery strictly economic in nature. In fact I would argue that it is in part ideological.
Do you see what I mean? There are many areas of economics, in this vague use of the word, that an economist does not have the expertise to make a credible judgment. So while we can label it economics it doesn’t suggest an economist would have any idea about it, nor that they would be the expert opinion.
In fact on many social issues, economists seem incredibly naive.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
I’ll reiterate: some people are pretty good at thinking for themselves, upholding their own responsibilities, and not interfering with other people’s peaceful choices.
[/quote]
For the most part you are parroting a conservative position. The question really comes down to: Is society allowed to manage itself, and have social norms, through a state apparatus? Even if this requires a small level of force?
For instance if somebody is stalking you is it acceptable for the police to detain them and question them to make sure they are no threat? To the conservative this is acceptable. To the libertarian it is not as it is an initiation of force. In a libertarian world as long as the stalker is not on your private property they are well within their rights to follow you, menace you, take pictures of you etc. In fact given infra-red cameras etc they can even follow your movements within your own home. Completely a-ok in a libertarian view.
There are dozens, probably hundreds and thousands, of such social issues that are not handled to my satisfaction in a libertarian world.
The other main difference is conservatives believe in creating and maintaining social institutions that encourage people to look after themselves, and provide the support layer to be able to do so.
Libertarians on the other hand say there is nothing wrong with any act or attitude as long as it isn’t the initiation of force. To a libertarian it is fine if most men in society think women are whores and worthless. That such a libertarian society is better than a society that cherishes all people and women are treated fairly and equally BUT that also has a low level of taxation.
And that is where the conservatives and libertarians split. Conservatives want less government when it will help society at large. Libertarians want less government because it appeals to their ideological position.
[quote]Dustin wrote:
C. I’m not sure where you are going with this? If one can afford to give to charity, then do so. This is a simple concept.
[/quote]
If Libertarians do not hold it up as a guiding principle then charity is unlikely to fill the needs of the needy in a libertarian society. For instance I believe that if 90% of people became like orion or lift, private charity would not be enough to help the needy.
Because the people who are out in support of libertarianism don’t really care one way or another about private charity. If all the supporters were at their local soup kitchen helping out each weekend then it might be reasonable to believe that private charity would do well in their society. But it seems the libertarians around here want to leave the helping to others.
[quote]Dustin wrote:
As an aisde, there all sorts of charitable organizations and churches to help those in need. This is a non-issue. [/quote]
Now you are relying upon churches and the like. The problem is they are generally conservative institutions that are diametrically opposed to your libertarian principles. So as long as these institutions remain strong you are unlikely to have a libertarian culture and society.
In fact every charitable organization I can think of is filled with socialist humanists and/or with conservatives. Neither of which are your friends. Where are the charities run by libertarian minded people? Where is the push by these kinds of people to help out the needy and downtrodden?
While these charitable institutions remain strong there is no hope of a libertarian society. Simply because the people doing all the assisting are not libertarian minded folk (for the most part).
Do you donate your time or money to helping the needy? For the most part conservatives do and are willing to. I’ll even have to give it to the far left wackos that they try to help the needy. In my experience libertarians don’t.
If humans can act in no other way, but in their self interest, then aren’t we where we are because of self-interest? With that, why attack altruism if it doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t ungoverned self-interest recieve the blame?
The very committed atheists I know well are extremely into charity. I don’t know that many libertarians (we are pretty rare!) but I’ve always given about 10% of income. Done a bit of volunteering too.
phaethon: “in a libertarian world” is a phrase I have a problem with. There’s no particular reason why you should judge libertarians by the design of a utopia you’ve heard about somewhere. Utopias are usually pretty badly thought out. I haven’t got a clue what “a libertarian world” would look like, and it would probably not look like anybody’s pen-and-paper utopia, any more than people in the 1950’s were right about flying cars in the future. Like everybody else, libertarians are defined roughly by the policies they would endorse now.
As for social institutions: there are a lot of different kinds of social institutions, and not all the good ones are conservative; not all the good ones have even been invented yet! Socialist humanists are pretty good at charity, and they are my “friends” in that (sometimes literally my friends.) Churches are also pretty good at charity: we have to be honest about that. Statistically, religious people give more, even to non-religious charities. If we want a more secular society, and I do, somebody has got to come up with better ways to motivate generosity outside of religion. But that’s a hard problem in general, because without old-fashioned tight communities there’s less beneficial peer pressure (people don’t belong to the Elks anymore.) I don’t want to live in the 1950’s, but it’ll take creativity to replace that world in such a way that we stay both humane and independent. Liberals and socialists are pretty good at that, in fact, so I’d probably take them as role models – there are certain circles where it’s completely taboo not to have some kind of charitable activity, and you can hardly get a job or a date without it.
What on earth is human nature? It’s a phrase you use to summarize a set of ideas. If it means anything, then you (Thunderbolt, Katzenjammer) are making some testable predictions about human behavior. Would you mind saying what those are?[/quote]
Well, that’s right - since Human Nature doesn’t change, we can well expect it to be somewhat predictable. So what?
More to your question - Human Nature is a recognition that Humans are an insufferable, uneven mixture of Good and Evil. It is a recognition that Humans have great capacity for compassion, but also viciousness and savagery. Humans are capable of fantastic individual accomplishments, but are also capable of spectacular self-destruction.
This answer isn’t to simply rehash popular bromides, it’s to highlight a special point regarding libertarianism: libertarians adequately don’t plan for the Evil.
This is fine as far as it goes, and I wouldn’t consider it unique to libertarianism. The problem is defining what constitutes “peaceful”. Non-libertarians think individual actions can do violence to society as a whole (thus disrupting the “peace” beyond the individual level) whereas libertarians don’t see a “society” to hurt in the first place - i.e., even if a certain activity reduces the number and health of nuclear families in a society, for example, who cares, because a nuclear family is no better than anything else…?
The difference is putting stock in moral relativism - the libertarian does it, the rest of us don’t.
This misstates the issue - no one is suggesting we have a system designed to treat people as though they are completely incapable of personal independence (setting aside that libertarians don’t believe that anyway, see the market and the magic of interdependence). But, even more to the point, there are larger, more important virtues to protect than the virtues of letting people do whatever they want, whenever they want. No civilization expecting to last long can operate that way. And in so protecting, occasionally libertarian values must yield to higher ones.
Don’t misundertsand my case, though - this is not a call to stamp out individualism. As always, it is a balance between the individual and the community. That balancing act will always be in tension (and that is ok, that is healthy), but the idea that “there is no higher virtue than people being left alone to do whatever they want, whenever they want” is not only false, but it is cultural suicide.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
The very committed atheists I know well are extremely into charity. I don’t know that many libertarians (we are pretty rare!) but I’ve always given about 10% of income. Done a bit of volunteering too.
[/quote]
Sure I am a “committed” atheist and I donate. But in general it is less than religious people.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
phaethon: “in a libertarian world” is a phrase I have a problem with. There’s no particular reason why you should judge libertarians by the design of a utopia you’ve heard about somewhere. Utopias are usually pretty badly thought out.
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Because Libertarians in general are absolutists. At least that is the case in PWI. The libertarian crowd here is very gung ho. They are strongly rooted in ideology rather than practicality.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
Like everybody else, libertarians are defined roughly by the policies they would endorse now.
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And those are? From my understanding they are gunning for removal of the state.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
I don’t want to live in the 1950’s, but it’ll take creativity to replace that world in such a way that we stay both humane and independent. Liberals and socialists are pretty good at that, in fact, so I’d probably take them as role models
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You know AlisaV from reading all of your posts I wouldn’t place you as a libertarian. You are more of a moderate than anything.
I’ll ask a question that will quickly clarify where you stand: Is the state fundamentally evil? Is less state always better?
phaethon:
My answer is no. The state is made up of people, and not everything those people do is evil in my book; some of it is simply practical, like making sure the roads are paved or teaching schoolchildren. There are such things as good bureaucrats who are just trying to keep things working. They might not be doing things the most effective way all the time, but evil is the wrong word. Less state is not always better because the state has legitimate functions, like courts of law.
What policies?
Well, people who want the removal of the state are called anarchists. There are other libertarian positions. Here’s a sampler of libertarian issues I care about: ending the drug war, scaling back the military, establishing a consumer-based health care system, scaling back surveillance and online wiretapping, reducing government spending on entitlements and stimulus projects, maintaining Constitutional rights to a jury trial, reducing obstacles to competition like licensing, legalizing gay marriage, permitting handguns in all states and cities, reforming copyright law, and providing for much higher levels of legal immigration. If I could get all of that – and no more – I think I’d be living in a much better country. And that’s plenty ambitious enough, thank you very much. I don’t know, nor do I need to know, whether I want the State to be abolished – that’s too abstract for me.
A moderate? Maybe compared to some, but most of my “wish list” is too radical even to be proposed in Congress.
Thunderbolt, I am a moral relativist. Profoundly so. So that’s where we part ways.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
My answer is no. The state is made up of people, and not everything those people do is evil in my book; some of it is simply practical, like making sure the roads are paved or teaching schoolchildren. There are such things as good bureaucrats who are just trying to keep things working. They might not be doing things the most effective way all the time, but evil is the wrong word. Less state is not always better because the state has legitimate functions, like courts of law.
[/quote]
Hmmm sounds like a moderate…
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
ending the drug war, scaling back the military, establishing a consumer-based health care system, scaling back surveillance and online wiretapping, reducing government spending on entitlements and stimulus projects, maintaining Constitutional rights to a jury trial, reducing obstacles to competition like licensing, legalizing gay marriage, permitting handguns in all states and cities, reforming copyright law, and providing for much higher levels of legal immigration.
[/quote]
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
A moderate? Maybe compared to some, but most of my “wish list” is too radical even to be proposed in Congress.
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The only radical item I can find is your stance on immigration. I was wondering why you want much higher levels of legal immigration? As an attempt to solve the illegal situation or because more immigration is always better? If it is the former even this stance isn’t radical.
Conservatives would have trouble with: Gay marriage, and your stance on immigration. The rest would be welcome.
And this is one of the reasons libertarians are often linked with conservatives. Because at the end of the day the immediate policy changes are very similar. The problem is in the long run from the conservative point of view libertarianism is worse than rampant liberalism or fascism.
We’re always going to have a significant number of low-wage workers from Mexico and Central America here. The US needs the labor, and people in the other countries need the money. The fact is that it’s virtually impossible to get into the country legally as an unskilled worker with no American family; that’s why we have illegal immigration. I’m really sympathetic to people who come to this country for opportunity. The best ways to fight global poverty are trade and immigration, and the great thing is that trade and immigration make most of us better off at home too. The (somewhat unsavory) truth is that there actually is a place in our society for sub-minimum wage work with few safety regulations. Some people really need those jobs, and taking an “exploitative” job is their first step towards better things. And the rest of us rely on cheap labor. We need some kind of legal framework that accepts reality. I’d be fine with prosecuting illegal immigration if we had sane levels of legal immigration.
on conservatives:
really? they’d cut military spending? Nobody in gov’t seems willing to think about dealing with Medicare or Social Security. Conservatives are the architects of the drug war and nobody, left or right, dares breathe a word about it. Neither party seems particularly good about civil liberties these days (past two presidents have been pretty dramatic failures in that department.)
Ayn Rand is correct on charity, it is not a moral obligation. Yet I still give to charities, I donate to food drives and always give to the charity veterans of foreign wars(you know the buddy poppy).
This was the case before the emergence of the modern nanny state. America did not have scores of people dying in the gutters and streets because there was no safety net.
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I am surprised that sloth would not realize this. American’s are very charitable, the problem has been they have tried to use government to direct the charity.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
The best ways to fight global poverty are trade and immigration
[/quote]
An aside:
What makes you think immigration helps global poverty? If anything immigration is keeping the poor poor. There are two types of people who make radical, often positive, changes to society: Smart people, and hard working “blue collar” people. Western countries take all the smart people for their talent and take all the hard working “blue collar” people for their cheap labor. If the illegals couldn’t flock to the US then they just might fix Mexico.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
really? they’d cut military spending?
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Sure although not to the same levels the far left would.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
Nobody in gov’t seems willing to think about dealing with Medicare or Social Security. Conservatives are the architects of the drug war and nobody, left or right, dares breathe a word about it. Neither party seems particularly good about civil liberties these days (past two presidents have been pretty dramatic failures in that department.)[/quote]
But now you are talking about political parties instead of political ideologies. Not all republicans are conservative.
I know plenty of conservatives who are concerned about unfunded liabilities like Social Security. Likewise plenty who don’t agree with the war on drugs.
Thunderbolt, I am a moral relativist. Profoundly so. So that’s where we part ways.[/quote]
Well, I certainly appreciate your candor and no doubt you have been thoughtful in coming to that conclusion.
Of course, this is where we part ways, and this is my central critique of (most, not all) libertarianism.
If a Man uses his liberty to engage in freedom of thought, to devour immense amounts of knowledge, to master several fields of science, and ultimately invent a cure for cancer, he is morally indistinguishable from the same Man who uses his liberty to sit around, ravage himself with every drug known to mankind, worry his family, and ultimately die in a gutter.
Both used their liberty to some End - libertarians couldn’t care less which, so long as each Man was able to use liberty to get there.
In fact, that might be the libterarian bumper sticker slogan: “We don’t care where liberty takes us, as long as liberty is used to get there!”.
And, of course, this is where I (and conservatives) greatly differ.
[quote]AlisaV wrote:
The best ways to fight global poverty are trade and immigration
[/quote]
An aside:
What makes you think immigration helps global poverty? If anything immigration is keeping the poor poor.
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Immigrations makes people better off otherwise they would not do it. This is economics 101.
Using the descriptor “poor” does not mean anything. You have your own valuations of what poor means. I feel poorer every April 15 when the US gov’t steals my money from me.