A Modest Proposal

Economics Political Theory
81

That’s actually a very good point, Juan. I think I’ll bring it up to the web director. Considering that Molinari can represent more of a Voluntaryist variety is good enough reason for me to add him to the photo.

As for Molyneux, what more can be said than that he’s a narcissist willing to take the ideas of others and brand it with his own name to gain web-traffic and donations to his site. I come to expect it, like I’ve come to expect him branding free market anarchism, “freedomain anarchism.”

No joke… He calls it that.

82

A quick look at wikipedia seems to show that George was no libertarian at all, let alone an anarchist. He opposed immigration, wanted to tax land owners , and, get this, “ran for mayor of New York City on the ticket of the United Labor Party”. Also “George advocated taxation, regulation or state ownership of natural monopolies. He supported a state run telegraph service and municipal contol of water supplies”.

Funny. So George gets his picture on the front page of a libertarian website, but Spencer doesn’t.

83

I think Henry George just represents the general flare of Geo-Anarchism. Like Mises and many Misesians, many followers of Henry George pick his most important issue and apply it to something he had not thought about calling it Geo-Anarchism.

I’ve long been an opponent of George being included on the site, however, and I won’t fight with you there. I will mention it to the webmaster as well, but I think it’s more or less an appeasement to Geo-Anarchists.

84

I’d think George gets in for his work on the concept of dispossession, which is central to left-libertarian thought. Just because someone wasn’t a libertarian doesn’t mean they weren’t important to the libertarian movement. For another example, I’d cite G.A. Cohen as one of the most important figures in libertarian thought even though he was a socialist philosopher.

85

Niccolo,

It’s not that I think the website should be changed one way or antother. Rather I’m wondering about the meaning of ‘left-libertarianism’…

As BrainPolice points out libertarianism is the opposite of conservatism, so libertarianism has nothing to do with the ‘right’. But libertarianism is just as opposed to socialism - and libertarians know that socialism is actually a recycled form of conservatism.

The term ‘left’ has been a synonym for socialism for a hundred years perhaps, or more. And that’s the usage not only in English, but in many western languages. So…left-libertarianism strikes me as somehow contradictory…

Also, positions like Danny’s “Back to the Drawing Board”, wich seem to suggest that libertarianism need to be ‘redesigned’, sound a bit…odd.

86

I had a huge post typed up, but the reply-form glitched out, the form lost focus, and I hit backspace, which caused the browser to go back. Damn it. I’ll just summarize, which is probably better anyways:

Don’t allow leftists to play games with definitions! The leftist-libertarians on this board will try to redefine “left-wing” back to its original defition (Third Estate, limited government, free-markets, laissez-faire reforms etc.). Fine! We non-leftists can’t stop them from using their own personal definitions; they can use whatever words they want to describe any thing they want.

Here is where the “game” comes in. They have the audacity to insult our intelligence and use their personal definition of “left-wing” (remember, the original definition, which is no longer valid) to prove that modern left-wingers are more libertarian than modern right-wingers! They will say that libertarianism is “inherently leftist” (again, using the original, no longer valid definition), and use that to insist that we should prefer and side with modern leftists over modern rightists.

Leftists-libertarians clearly prefer modern left-wingers to modern right-wingers; they know that won’t fly with libertarians, and that’s why they play with definitions.

87

This is false. The “left-wingers” that we support and defend is the anarchist movement as such. Not social democrats or state-socialists. Unfortunately, people such as yourself always conflate “left-wing” as a whole with state-socialism. I never asserted that state-socialists are more libertarian than modern right-wingers. I merely deny that right-wingers are more libertarian than most “leftists”, and I do proclaim that actual “left-wing” radicals (not your typical modern “liberal”) are far more libertarian than your average conservative. Your average conservative is fundamentally opposed to libertarianism.

Once again, noone is encouraging you to side with modern liberals. That’s not who we refer to when we speak positively of “the left”. Unfortunately, the term “left” seems to represent nothing but modern liberals to you.

This is false. I prefer the anarchist “left” to both. I merely realize that the modern “right” are a bunch of statists, no better than the modern “left”. That’s part of what I’ve been driving at all along.

88

In short, the meaning of “left-libertarianism” is: “I’m not one of those vulgar libertarians and paleolibertarians who function as apologists for currently existing state-capitalism in the name of the free market, ally with white nationalists and monarchists, and think that conservatives are our natural allies. Instead, I’d like to stay true to the roots of libertarianism, which places me in an alliance with mutualists, individualist anarchists and voluntary socialists in general. Furthermore, I reject the notion that reformism is the proper strategy for radicals to persue and instead prefer direct action, which is perfectly in line with anarchist tradition”. In a certain sense, left-libertarians are the traditionalists of the movement. We see the libertarian’s attachment to conservatism as a more modern deviation that should be countered.

Libertarianism in large part actually grew out of the socialist movement. Socialism as a whole is not a package deal that requires one to be a statist. There is voluntaryist socialism, and libertarians cannot oppose voluntary socialism in principle. The libertarian, in order to be consistant with the NAP, must support the liberty of people to freely associate into “socialism” just as much as “capitalism” or anything else. I used to consider “libertarian socialism” a contradiction in terms until I looked deeper into the history and philosophy of anarchism, at which point I realized that the debate between the “social” and “market” oriented libertarians is largely semantic. Socialistic forms of organization are possible in an anarchic society and the bulk of anarchic ideas have been socialistic. However this does not mean, as the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists tend to disingenously argue, that one must be a socialist to be an anarchist.

Well Danny does seem to have something of a moderate perspective. I’m not sure if he’s a self-proclaimed anarchist. I don’t exactly agree with his approach. I’ll allow him to defend himself though since he knows himself far better than I do.

89

That sounds in agreement with libertarianism ‘proper’…

I agree with that as well.

Well, I have nothing against voluntarists, but I’m not convinced that people who reject political economy are ‘my’ natural allies.

Hmmm. I don’t think so. I think that the case is just the opposite. Socialism is an attempt to hijack classical liberalism using part of the philosophical tools of classical liberalism.

Right. But voluntary socialism is not libertarianism. It is not incompatible with it, but it’s not the same thing.

Of course we can’t.

Okay. Sorry about my cheap source, aka wikipedia…

"Towards the end of his life, Proudhon modified some of his earlier views. In “The Principle of Federation” (1863) he modified his earlier anti-state position, arguing for the “the balancing of authority by liberty” and put forward a decentralised “theory of federal government.” "

90

Brainpolice, no one has ever said that right-wingers are anarchists! In any event, in a later post, you did something eerily similar to what I had just pointed out that you do: you said that libertarian-socialists are libertarians.

No freaking way. Yes, your stated definition of libertarian-socialism is certainly libertarian. In fact, your stated definition of a “libertarian-socialist” is simply an anarcho-capitalist who likes the idea of living in communes.

In reality, self-described libertarian-socialists and libertarian-socialist organizations are as statist, leftist, and anti-individualist as any other brand of leftist.

Why do want so badly to ally with these people? If they were what you claimed, they would be allying with us instead of writing long papers about the evils and inconstistencies of anarcho-capitalism.

edit: apparently, i can’t type while doing anything else

91

Consistant ones are. They are the ones who originated the term to begin with. A libertarian-dash-anything is a libertarian. Minarchists and anarcho-capitalists are not the only libertarians. Anyone who is consistant with voluntaryism is a libertarian regaurdless of wether they are a primitivist, socialist, capitalist, feminist, racist, or what have you. Insert personal preferance here.

Not exactly. I’m merely stating that libertarian socialism would be a possible option in a free market. Unfortunately, in my experience debating with many of them, most of them don’t realize this. Unfortunately, many anarcho-capitalists apparently don’t realize this either.

All of them? Or some of them? The claim that all libertarian socialists are statists is far too sweeping. If you choose to ignore the existance of genuinely voluntary socialists altogether then you are simply being willfully ignorant and you’d have to dismiss people like Benjamin Tucker as statists.

Which people specifically? Don’t lump them all together into a package deal. The mutualists and individualist anarchists? Because they are the closest thing to market anarchism out of all other political philosophies. Much closer to it than any kind of contemporary conservatism. Anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists? I have bad luck with them, as most of them are either statists in disguise or ridiculously intolerant towards market and individualist anarchism.

Anyone who is a consistant voluntaryist is an ally, regaurdless of their personal preferances. A lot of the bickering between libertarian socialists and market anarchists is based on little more than semantics and personal preferances while they actually advocate practically the same thing. I try to maintain that there is a middle ground of sorts, a sort of anarchism without adjectives approach that resolves the conflict quite well.

92

I agree completely.

I agree completely, aside from your “not exactly” comment. What is different?

Most of them. When you make sweeping remarks like “libertarian-socialism is libertarianism”, shouldn’t you be the one to qualify? I shouldn’t be the one qualifying when I’m talking about a majority (just type in “libertarian socialism” into google or look at the Wikipedia page).

I think that anyone who wants to shrink parts of government is an ally, even if they are still in favor of some level of taxation, is an ally in my book (until of course, we get to the point where they no longer want to shrink anything). People who chant things like, “Public health, not private wealth!” are not allies, though!

93

Let me confuse the issue a bit more =]

“Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.”

William Graham Sumner

94

That’s the pomposity of you people. You define everything in terms of your own ideology.

95

[unnecessary]

96

That quote is taken dangerously out of context, but would you mind telling me what I should have said?

97

Haha I’m not sure how my “approach” got dragged into this discussion on a wholesale basis…but I guess I’ll just say this:

I agree with the people who say that the concept of self-ownership doesn’t entail anything about world-ownership, and also with the people who say that rights don’t represent absolute boundaries because there are instances in which we could infringe them without acting wrongly. If libertarianism requires me to renounce those positions, then I’m not a libertarian, and I think that libertarianism would need to be “redesigned” in order to be coherent and plausible.

But if the core idea of libertarianism is that people deserve respect as individuals, then the seemingly problematic aspects of some libertarians’ views are shown to be artifacts of those particular views, and not entailments of the general principle. One can believe that individuals deserve respect without holding any particular position on appropriation and without thinking that rights can never be justly infringed. So my project is to try to understand what libertarianism should say about rights and about appropriation. I’m actually pretty happy with my current understanding of the former issue, which was discussed on my blog, and which Niccolo and I had a really great conversation about on Polycentric Order. As you all undoubtedly are aware, I haven’t really resolved the issue of appropriation. I’m really not sure what to say except that I don’t like the Rothbardian homesteading view, and I think we clearly need something else.

As for whether I’m an anarchist, I suppose I am in the sense that I don’t believe in the idea of sovereignty, and I think that “government”-like entities should be subject to all the same standards of justice which apply to individuals. But I don’t think that a society which treated governments like that would really be recognizeable as anarchy, because I think that governments fill a really important place in the social division of labor, and that I would be much happier if there were some governing body which could take care of certain things so I wouldn’t have to deal with them, in the same way that I’m happy to have other people decide what recipe to use in making the bread I buy at the store. And I’d also be happier if certain kinds of things could be imposed on me if enough of the other members of my community wanted them badly enough, with the understanding that I’d have that same kind of right to impose things on them, in order to avoid the pitfalls associated with public goods problems, externalities, and free rider problems. I’d imagine I’d be happiest in a community which would provide certain services for the poor, fire and police departments, roads, and courts to all of its members based on a system of taxation (membership dues, really), and not based on individual contracts with private owners for everything (that is, I don’t want to be a customer of my police department, I want to be a part-owner of my police department!). So as the saying goes, I’d probably put myself right back into chains.

That being said, I do think that my decision to live that way should be a decision that I get to make. If others don’t want a government-like entity to fill certain roles in their society, then that should be their right. And just as I think their society would probably suck, and I wouldn’t want to live in it, they shouldn’t be forced to live in my society either. As individuals, we should be able to live life according to our own conception of how things should be done. At the end of the day, I actually think Marx put it really well when he said, “It is…in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.”

Hopefully that makes sense to someone.

98

Wouldn’t it be more apposite to describe yourself as something of a mutualist then? Personally, upon discovering Aristotelian liberalism, and reading The Market for Liberty, I am past minarchism and have come to embrace market anarchism.

-Jon

99

Danny, would you be opposed to keeping the government in place but removing the ability for the individuals in government to coerce? In other words: keep the fire departments, keep the courts, etc., but remove the wage and price controls, and make it all voluntarily funded.

edit: can’t type

100

Spot on. Liberals want to coerce their countrymen; conservatives want to coerce foreigners; moderates “compromise” by coercing everyone.

–Len.