Quote of the day: "The Liberty of Local Bullies."

[elfs]

The freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers .. The founders of libertarianism ... failed to extend the principle [of liberty] to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.

Noah, The liberty of local bullies

Comments

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

"The founders of libertarianism ... failed to extend the principle [of liberty] to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion."

This has always struck me as a particular blind spot when it comes to Libertarianism, particularly Anarcho-Capitalist Libertarianism: If I need food more than an employer needs my services, they are in a position to coerce me... and likewise with the owner of shelter, or the provider of health care.

Now, given a post-Scarcity economy, I could see Libertarianism having a chance of working, as then relationships could truly be non-coercive.

Post scarcity of what?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Because if you're talking post-scarcity-of-everything, you're talking the communist ideal of "to each according to their needs" (or even wants)... ...and that doesn't work particularly well.

Neither does libertarianism, of course.

Re: Post scarcity of what?

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about a Post-scarcity economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity).

From the wiki:

Post scarcity (also styled post-scarcity or postscarcity, and also known as Resource-Based Economy) is a hypothetical form of economy or society, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.

Yes...

[shunra.livejournal.com]

...and in what way does that differ from "to each according to their needs"?

Re: Yes...

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Again, from wiki:

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)" is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.[1] In German, "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!". The phrase summarizes the principles that, in a communist society, every person should contribute to society to the best of his or her ability and consume from society in proportion to his or her needs. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.

The slogan is associated with Karl Marx, Communism, and what he saw as the Communist ideal for an economy. When this has been tried, it was with a command economy run by corruptible people with limited access to to the information needed to run an economy... so, as one might expect, it didn't work particularly well.

A post-Scarcity economy relies on advanced technology to take the need for human labor out of the process or resource collection & processing. There is no "Central Committee", no actual need to ration resources.

It's apples & aardvarks to compare a Communist economy using present technology to a post-Scarcity economy supported by the level of technology one would need to make a post-Scarcity economy work in the first place.

I'm not at all sure I understand what it is you are objecting to. Could you elaborate?

Re: Yes...

[blaisepascal]

In a free-market/mercantile economy, you get what you can pay for. If you want it and can afford it, you get it. If you need something and can't afford it, you either die or you didn't really need it, did you?

In an (ideal) Communist economy, you get what you need. If you don't need something, it's hard to get.

In a post-scarcity economy, you get what you want. If you need something, it's readily available. If you want something more than that, no problem, you get that as well.

A post-scarcity economy assumes that the marginal cost of any item is pretty close to 0. You want a new car every day? The fabber will make one for you, lickety split. You want a tasty meal? One replicated perfectly cooked turkey coming right up. The hot new smartphone came out today? Here's yours, if you want it.

Marx never bothered to look at the post-scarcity situation. Few economists do. After all, economics is largely the study of resource allocation (except the parts about incentives). When resources are limited, people's wants can't be satisfied, so how do you ration that? Marx's rallying cry suggested that people's needs should be met first.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Libertarians already had their day - in 19th century America. It was because of that era - and the utter disaster with respect to the social ills it experienced - that America has much of the vast plethora of legal restrictions that it has today. If you look at the violent suppression of organized labour at the time, the problems associated with unrestricted gambling, pharmaceuticals (ie. snake oil "cures") and liquor sales, as well as the actions of "neighbourhood associations", one doesn't have to imagine what kind of bad behaviour corporations and individuals would get up to in a Libertarian society, you'd only have to read your history.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

So apparently now we have unrestricted gambling (thanks, Jake Abramoff), pharmaceuticals gone wild (I've made much noise about the rise in opiates being marketed as long term pain killers: production limits were lifted, manufacturing skyrocketed, so did sales - so did addiction rates, so did deaths due to prescription medicine. In the US in 2008, there were about 27,000 such accidental deaths); profiteering off liquor - see the recent change to Washington state law; neighborhood associations? See Blackwater or Xe or whatever it is being clled right now.

Unfortunately, the failures of a libertarian-wannabe society can be read in the pages of (some) newspapers. Not the ones bought up by people who want to be the bullies (Italy?), the other ones.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Not *quite*.

Even in say, Texas, where you can buy guns and liquor at the drive-thru, you still have to be over a certain age to buy alcohol.

Likewise, you don't see any pharmacies offering blackjack-while-u-wait for your prescription to be filled, like back in the day in Colorado. And generally speaking, you can't put codeine in soda pop to "keep 'em coming back for more".

So while the laws on these things might be a tad lax, they still exist. My point is that the libertarians want them *gone*, and that experiment has already been tried.