From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 12:08 AM To: Anton Sherwood Subject: RE: [ba-liberty] Drugs: not a topic to make Libertarianism grow. > > you tried to justify them with a principle whose logical > > end is anarchism. > > While simultaneously emphasizing incrementalism. That less legislation is ceteris paribus better than more legislation simply does not imply that any given law should be repealed -- unless you're an anarchist, in which case you drop the "ceteris paribus". > > Pointing out the implications of > > your position is hardly a straw man. > > What do you want me to do? Resolve the inconsistencies > in minarchism? "Less legislation is ceteris paribus better than more" is not inconsistent with keeping certain laws. > > > Would you say there are too few laws on the books now? > > > > No. > > So why is repealing a few such a bad idea? Obviously, because of the identified nature of those few laws. > Are you afraid that Congress, giddy with the childish joy of > knocking down five towers of blocks, will knock down all the rest Hardly. > If the five repeals proposed are too radical (I agree that some, if not > all, are startling to the uninitiated), why not propose more moderate > versions? I did: * Replace all social programs with a (Milton Friedman-style) negative income tax. * Internalize externalities by e.g. auctioning pollution rights. * Regulate currency and the money supply. * Regulate physical-network natural monopolies. * Ban anti-competitive artificial monopolies. > One might suspect that your imagination is trapped in Hayek's > tar-pit: Are you saying Hayek was an anarchist? > every intervention causes a distortion which brings calls for > further interventions It's simply not the case that any legislation at all makes intolerable levels of intervention inevitable. > > You used "Constitutional" before I used "Federal". > > In hindsight, I ought not to have capitalized Constitutional Right, because doing so refers to the federal Constitution. > it was partly shorthand for "in the spirit of limited government, > which is what minarchists - and Publius - say they stand for". Minarchists stand for limited government ceteris paribus -- and not for unlimited repeal of all legislation. > > Obvious ones are pricing in airlines, > > What, and the CAB was created to cure it? Let that be a lesson. You claimed collusion can't happen often enough to be a problem. I cited an example showing it can. QED. > > petroleum, etc. > > I trust you know that, by the time the govt thought of saving us from > Rockefeller's sinister clutches, Standard's share had dropped from (if > memory serves) 89% to around half. I doubt you could cite an economic historian who would claim that Standard Oil didn't cause market failures by its monopolistic tactics. > > > Did "current federal antitrust policy" result from the repeal of > > > laws which empowered a simple majority of steel producers to compel > > > their competitors to join a cartel? > > > > No. So? > > So I don't see the analogy you alleged between "current federal > antitrust policy" and what I suggested about labor unions. What alleged analogy? I simply said that antitrust policy should also be applied to labor markets -- because it currently isn't. > > > If a state can exist without legislation, then an > > > anti-legislationist need not be an anarchist. I believe it can > > > > [...definitions...] > > 'Sovereignty' means "supreme power", and doesn't count as such > > if persons are allowed to opt out of the sovereignty's rules > > -- or if the sovereignty has no rules. > > Agreed. Then what makes a state without laws a state? How is it different from a civics club or a standards body? > > one of the biggest problems with anarcho-capitalism is that > > its existence proofs are so wanting. > > Whereas minarchism ... ? Each of my five counter-proposals has far more prior applicable empirical validation than the corresponding LP planks. > "There is no precedent for anything until it is done for the first > time." It would be silly to suggest that all policy changes are created equal in their degree of prior applicable empirical validation. > > Seriously, do you think that 'libertarian' is a label that > > is better understood to mean anarcho-capitalist > > absolute anti-legislationism rather than market-oriented > > aggression-policing minarchism? > > I dunno, is `south' "better understood" to mean Antarctica rather than > Tierra del Fuego? Depends on the context. I told you the context: as a non-relative term. You quoted me doing so, below. And then you again spoke only to the relative case. How is that not disingenuous? > > I think your notion > > of "libertarian" as a relative term is just a rationalization > > for an obfuscating effort to hijack that label for > > anarcho-capitalism. > > What would it take to persuade you otherwise, e.g. that it's a > rationalization for associating with you statist coercive scum? For starters, you could stop implying that minarchism leads inevitably to Ted Kennedy and Joe Stalin, and you could stop implying that all laws are equally bad. > > If anarcho-capitalism is so wonderful, > > why call yourself "libertarian" > > You imply a contradiction. No, I merely imply that you have not disclosed why you don't seem to consider it important not to lump yourself together with us statist coercive scum whose policies lead inevitably to, or perhaps are indistinguishable from, Ted Kennedy and Joe Stalin. > > and associate with us statist coercive scum? > > Because every little bit of liberty helps. You seem to disagree. Keep imagining that, if that's what it takes for you to continue thinking you love liberty more than I. In my book I define liberty as volition in the absence of aggression, and I seek always to maximize it -- i.e. to minimize aggression. Anarchotarians, by contrast, seek merely to minimize the amount of coercion committed in their name. Such people do not deserve the label "libertarian". > you're not going to scare me away from > a sound policy by saying its logical end is anarchism. I didn't say anarchism is the logical end of the policy. I said that anarchism is the logical end of your justification of the policy. > What would you have me do? Defend the policy in a way that doesn't assume less legislation is always better than more. > Put on a minarchist hand-puppet? If you can't defend the five identified policies on non-anarchist grounds, then don't complain when I call your defense of them an anarchist one. > I'm an anarchist because > I don't know HOW to defend minarchism coherently! [..] > I could never get around the fact that the state `necessarily' forces > decent people to do things they'd quite reasonably prefer not to do, or > to pay for things that they reasonably consider wicked. I could not > reconcile the obvious wrongness of military conscription with the > obvious rightness of taxation. When I was reluctantly persuaded that > anarchism is not absurd, it was a great load off my conscience. Congratulations, you just became the poster child for my claim that anarchotarians care more about their own conscience being clean than about liberty being maximized. That's why you shouldn't be called libertarian, but rather decline2coercitarian, or coercionabstainarian, or forcenoninitiationist. > you say: "The best government is that which governs least (though not > less than necessary); to illustrate the point, here are five proposals > for more government." No, each of my proposals would mean less government than now -- but of course more government than anarchism. My proposals are more libertarian than roughly 95% of Congress would support, so instead of dismissing them as "kindler-gentler-statism", you should embrace them because "every little bit of liberty helps". Or have you changed your mind on this? > If you want more self-aware minarchists, what good is stealth > minarchism? In what sense am I advocating "stealth minarchism"? Like it or not, in the mainstream political lexicon, 'libertarian' means minarchist much more than it means anarchist. > If everything on the menu of Chez LP is already on offer at Heritage The Cato Institute is more libertarian than the Heritage Foundation, but neither is a political party, and neither ever appears on a ballot. > > My earlier demonstration of unequal susceptibility to such > > charges is good evidence that you're wrong. > > Continuing to play your silly game: "You demonstrated no such thing." My demonstration stands unrebutted on the issues of school choice and emissions trading, and I note that you did not even attempt to argue such susceptibility on the issues of monetary policy, agricultural subsidies, rent control, campaign finance, term limits, GMOs, genomics, and negative income tax. The distinction between these issues and "my drugs and my taxes" is blatantly obvious. > Show me a $10 trillion *minarchist* superpower, then. America is obviously far closer to my brand of libertarianism than it is to anarcho-capitalism, especially in the economically fundamental areas of monetary policy, natural monopoly infrastructure, externality regulation, and antitrust regulation. > > What's stopping gold or cigarettes or airline > > miles or Yahoo Points or any other private currency from > > spiraling into popularity right now? Are the feds > > having to stamp these out left and right, and I'm just > > somehow not hearing about it? > > "all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, > while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the > Forms to which they are accustomed." > > Particularly where network externalities are high. So why wouldn't one particular private anarcho-capitalist currency achieve similar runaway popularity due to network externalities, and why can't the dollar be managed as well as such a currency? Complaints about dollar mismanagement may have been reasonable twenty years ago, but under modern monetarism they're just marginalia for theoreticians and cranks. > > Which one? Hunter-gatherer societies are often quite violent, > > with nasty cycles of revenge and reprisal. > > Benson's pet example is the Kapauku of New Guinea. Read Jared Diamond's account of New Guinea hunter-gatherers in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and Michael Shermer's account of the Beautiful People Myth in _Borderlands of Science_. > And then there's Iceland, of course; an imperfect example And just how does this imperfect medieval example invalidate all the examples of twentieth-century protection rackets? > > what is your explanation for why the mafia has > > never behaved like nice friendly anarcho-capitalist > > defense agencies? > > Possible answers: secrecy compromises any incentive toward niceness How would this be any different under anarcho-capitalism (in which the statist police is simply replaced by the trade association of anarcho-capitalist defense agencies)? > crime is good for police budgets; the police are no > fonder of competition than the teachers' union. If the police can squelch competition, so can the stronger (networks of) anarcho-capitalist defense agencies. > [this gang] were targeted by the police and crushed. Why wouldn't anarcho-capitalist defense agencies do the same to their competitors? > If he's out driving, he can be shot. One can imagine a protection > racket of last resort (kinda like reinsurance, if ordinary policing is > funded by insurance companies) that inflicts such sanctions on the > egregiously irresponsible. Given all the murder, mayhem, and extortion visited by mafia racketeers, how do you explain that no mob boss ever died at the hands of such a civic-minded "protection racket of last resort"? > > Bzzzt. Gates (or better yet, Gotti) is not omnipotent, > > Didn't say it was an identical context, did I? But you *did* imply it was *relevant*. Omnipotence is obviously impossible, but being the most powerful person or group is practically inevitable -- for *some* person or group. And of course, you make no mention of the least powerful people, too poor even to be worth extorting "protection" contracts from. But why should you care, as long as the inevitable coercion of them is not done in your name? > > and both Gates and Gotti are far more deterred from > > casual murder under statism than they would be under > > anarcho-capitalism. > > So you say. I'd venture that it's intuitively obvious to anyone who isn't already an anarcho-capitalist. > I haven't heard that Gotti (or Stalin) murdered anybody > under anarchism. You still haven't grokked my point: *every* mob murder has been under effective anarchism. > So to protect us from Gates, "we" go out of our way to create Ted > Kennedy; Given the trends of the last twenty years, it would be historically illiterate to pretend that any legislation at all makes Ted Kennedy or Joe Stalin inevitable. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net