From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 9:37 AM To: Anton Sherwood; ba-liberty@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [ba-liberty] Drugs: not a topic to make Libertarianism grow. > From: anton [mailto:anton]On Behalf Of Anton Sherwood > > Unlike some, I am willing to use "libertarian" and "statist" > as relative terms. Repealing legislation is generally libertarian; > enacting more is generally statist. And repealing all legislation is generally anarchist. > "Let the East and West Coasts > represent totalitarianism and anarchy respectively. We're in Chicago. > You want to go to Denver. There are trains leaving now for San > Francisco, Boston and Miami. [..]" No, the train is leaving for Denver, and the tracks to San Francisco don't even exist. :-) > > You've fallen victim to the inside-the-box idea that "government" > > means "federal government". . . . > > Well, you did say "Federal constitutional jurisprudence" Because you referred to the federal constitution. > - and most of your proposals seemed Federal in scope. That's inside-the-box thinking. > Okay, bringing up the > Constitution was just a cheap crack, which I regret. > > > > artificial monopolies cannot survive without government support > > > > Almost all economists would agree that situations can arise > > -- without government support -- in which economies of scale and > > collusion among competitors can create stable monopolistic > > barriers to entry. > > Isn't that the definition of a natural monopoly? No, collusion isn't natural. A natural monopoly is only those industries with high fixed cost and continuously declining average costs for any producer, and consist (as far as I can tell) exclusively of continuous physical networks that need to reach almost every piece of property in a region, such as roads and distribution networks (but not sources or sinks) for water, electricity, natural gas, sewage, and wired telecommunications. > I certainly don't think it can happen > often enough to justify anything like the existing > Antitrust apparatus. Can you give examples of prevented benign combinations that are anywhere near as powerful as the examples of non-benign combinations from a century ago? And is there any reason to think we couldn't ban non-benign combinations without also banning benign ones? > > I mean a policy closer to current federal antitrust policy > > than to anarchy, but applied to labor markets (i.e. unions) too. > > Repeal the legislation that enables a simple majority of an > arbitrary set of workers to impose a union on the rest. Precisely. > > > > If you think less legislation is always better than more, > > > > then you're an anarchist. > > > > > > I disagree: a common-law state needs little if any legislation > > > beyond organizing itself. > > > > That a) is vague, and b) doesn't rebut my point. > > Maybe if I had never smoked pot I could see how my claim > (if true) would not rebut your premise. I described a test for whether one is an anarchist, and you "disagreed" without contradicting my point. > > why not advocate > > that the party change its name from Libertarian to Anarchist? > > See above remarks on relativity. Since you've now said you're not a Libertarian, the question is moot. > > > Let others put up kinder-gentler-statist proposals, > > > there's no shortage. > > > > You can't deny there's a distinct shortage of serious minarchism > > in America. > > Indeed not. I deny a serious shortage of minarchist *proposals*, > let alone compassionate-statist proposals. The relevant metric is the amount of serious minarchism, and not some facile census that would give equal weight to the LP national platform and e.g. our ramblings on this list. :-) > LP adoption of most such proposals will not make them > significantly more visible than they already are. We LP members would tend to disagree, especially those of us who (for example) have never seen any other liberty-oriented party covered on C-SPAN. > I deny that the planks to which you objected are anarchist. I said they are "near-anarchist". Aside possibly from vague references to "courts", I'm not sure what if anything in the LP platform differentiates its notion of the state from a civics club. > > To the extent that it's hijacked by anarchists and > > the selfish ("my drugs and my taxes"), even the LP doesn't > > count as serious minarchism. > > Of course by "the selfish" you mean "those who bring up > issues that, no matter how well they argue otherwise, > some will insist on painting as purely selfish". I should have said "the apparently selfish". I note that you did not respond to my earlier point that It's ludicrous to claim that all market-oriented policy proposals are equally subject to charges that the policy's supporter is merely self-interested. > Natural monopolies: "... We rarely consider such `industries' > as the restaurant and bar business, domestic service, or > the manufacture of textiles and apparel Friedman is not so incompetent an economist that he would call these "natural monopolies". :-) > "the belief that competition > inevitably tends to produce monopoly is widespread." That (obviously false) belief does not have to be true for artificial monopolies to nevertheless be a legislation-worthy problem. > Currency: The world already partially enjoys a sort of anarchy: in > countries whose governments issue unreliable currency, people use > sounder currency instead. You can't use the existence of the dollar to argue against the existence of the dollar. > To see how anarchist currency might work, read up on > 18th century "free banking" in Scotland and > Massachusetts. I'd insist on a working example from *21st* century Scotland or Massachusetts before removing one of the foundations of the ten trillion dollar American economy. > Courts and policing: I've started reading Friedman on this topic, but I see no hint of a counterargument to the ideas that anarchotopian protection rackets would be significantly different from real-life protection rackets, or that Bill Gates would ever be accountable to anyone he runs over with his car. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net