(Ideas from the Skepticrat Podcast - Response to a listener - Mark - who is a Libertarian & wrote to them)
When all the reasonable people you know disagree with you, you should back off and think about it, not "dig in."
It might be that they've already thought it through and still disagree with you.
Striving toward a L ideal is a reasonable goal in many cases; we should want as many freedoms of choice and guarantee of civil liberties as we can have.
But those don't get protected without taking away the freedom to choose, say, not serving Black people in restaurants. Telling someone to go start a "no whites allowed" restaurant is not a solution to that.
But if you talk to these ideologically committed Libertarians, they act like there can never be market forces in favor of discrimination. Either that, or worse, they just don't care that there are.
Well, you don't see a lot of L's coming from minority populations, or people who have missed meals in general.
So yes, it's very logical to consider L principles as PART of one's political philosophy. But taken as a full blown ideology, it's absolutely ridiculous.
It's like saying "I think No" is generally the correct answer. The logical extreme is an impossible fantasy.
So L ism should be treated like a "zoo" type of thing. It's okay to look at it, to think about it's significance in history, and even take pictures. But no touching.
When you're a kid, you want to get right up next to it. That's fine, I understand that. But when you grow up, it becomes a lot less compelling for most people.
I get the appeal of L ideology because I'm white, I'm college-educated, it would probably kick ass for ME.
And it does make sense when applied to say, theoretical microeconomics, and hypothetical universes with nothing but guns and butter. It's great for that.
But when you stop thinking of a single person trying to make money, or a single firm trying to make money,
and consider the principles of MACROeconomics, like monetary policy for example, it's clear that central organization of some sort is at least sometimes necessary, or maybe even always.
But when you're sitting in a dorm room shitfaced on micro brews and doing the "I've never been fucked in the ass by life" map, there aren't any starving old people on the ledger. You can set aside this data and plausibility shit in favor of well-armed utopianism and an irrational belief in the inherent goodness of The Free Market.
Okay, and that's fantastic for you - The Free Market. But... just a quick review: The free market still trades in human beings. Despite the fact that we have regulatory efforts to the contrary. (We TRIED to stop it!)
The free market is not very good. It can't, say, build an efficient road system. Or electricity grid. Or a water delivery system. Or create the Internet. The Free Market can't educate a society. It can't protect the environment. It can't put out fires very well. It can't protect against theft of property, or enforce contracts, or any of the stuff rich people need for being wealthy to matter, and for them to stay that way.
And the key here is, even a little bit of L'ism is the wrong direction in most situations. The reason the regulations and laws were there in the first place is because somebody found a loophole in the legal contract, and started fucking it. We don't add regulations because everything is just doing spiffy.
Yes. The market often sucks. Invisible hands caused the Depression. Yes. And real hands fixed it. The worst economic crashes in American history were immediately preceded by highly DEregulated banking sectors, and a speculative bubble. (hmmm) And they were immediately followed by a government coordinated solution that absolutely had to happen. (well.... maybe not "immediately"). Like "The New Deal." Or, more recently, when the government saved the entire banking sector from completely collapsing. Had the market been allowed to continue on its "natural path" of sometimes wildly volatile equilibria, that would have meant complete meltdown of US financial institutions. And therefore an INTERNATIONAL financial meltdown as well.
And all that would have been so much worse, if we had stuck with Lism completely in our government.
Which is why Lism arguments are so quick to retreat to the theoritical, to get out of the real world.
But as soon as you start layering in reality, all you have left is a snappy slogan.
What Snappy slogan? You mean, "Everyone do whatever they want, and it'll work out" - ? Why would you ever think that was a good idea?? (Micro brews and "not being fucked in the ass by life")
So Libertarians, they kind of want the world to operate like a perfectly fair game of monopoly, and they seem to think it actually does, in some cases. And everyone tries to win. And that's great. But in reality, every time someone loses, they starve to death. If the penalty for going bankrupt in Monopoly was dying in real life, there'd be a lot more collectivist sharing strategies going on in that game. (a lot of "just in cases")
And if one asshole started winning by too much, everyone would be very much justifiably ganging up on them, and forcing them to share.
Right. And it's worth pointing out that in order for this game to work at all, there have to be losers, right? So the penalty for losing has to be concilliatory enough so that the losers don't say, "Fuck this game!" and take the other guy's share. (and tip the board over eventually).
And most importantly, at the core of it, Lism, in its pure form, is blatantly self-contradictory. Society can't maximize their liberty units without making sure the resources are allocated somewhat equitably. Laissez-faire markets don't lead to that solution. That's two of the fundamental tenants of L'ism.: a) Maximum Liberty, and b) Lack of Market Interference.
And they directly conflict.
And the appeal is that sometimes our policy is just so shitty that doing nothing looks good in comparison. You know, if the choice is leeches or praying to Shaman, the Shaman may be the better choice, but that doesn't make his magic real.
