So, which arguments basically disprove libertarianism? Those of renowned thinkers whose flawed nature you admit to, or those specifically brought up against the case for liberty? If you are referring to the latter, please provide the strongest example known to you.
It’s true that every political system requires faith in its institutions in order to survive.
Nevertheless, the great difference between various stripes of statism and libertarianism is that statism postulates a preemptive need to create a class of above-the-law aggressors required to maintain law and order / create social justice / what have you while banning the same behavior for regular citizens. Libertarianism, on the other hand, does not require anyone to break in law in order to enforce it. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really convinced by a system that puts forth a conflicting and contradictory perception of human nature in order to justify its own existence.
Your argument basically boils down to externalities. In the asteroid example, I’m incentivized to let others pay to save our collective ass and keep my own funds to myself. There are other examples of this sort: AGW, military invasions or early warning systems for natural disasters.
Let’s take your asteroid. Maybe there are two conflicting views among scientists: some say it’s going to detonate in the Siberian tundra and not going to harm anyone, others say it’s going to hit a major city. On what grounds do you force someone who believes in the former hypothesis to pay for asteroid destruction? Even if the latter case were certain, on what grounds do you force someone to protect a city he may not be interested in? If this sounds harsh, where do you draw the line between a) who needs to pay for it and who needn’t (e.g., only Americans if it’s a city in America or everyone on the planet?) and b) which kind of protection needs to be financed and which needn’t (e.g., doesn’t this justify global universal health care or global socialized dam construction?)?
I don’t want this to come across as selfish. I’d sure like to help a city in danger of asteroid destruction if I could. But I don’t claim the prerogative to make that decision for others, and I don’t see how anyone could acquire it.
Perhaps. Would you expect the outcomes to be different when random picks from the human population are thrown in the same situation?
Taxation (as we know it) probably not, but submission to coercion probably yes. Justice is whatever the gang leader says and his minions enforce so not much room for your input or interpretation. Finally, analogous <> equal.
Or, to go further, do “gangs” spring up in low-security prisons? Schools? Kindergartens? Sports teams? Tourist groups? Extended families? The fact that gangs do spring up in maximum security prisons is to be attributed, perhaps, to the fact that such gangs have an economic purpose outside of prison: continue trafficking.
No, the anti-state (anarchist) position is of course characterized by the belief that anarchy will work. To assume that “seeing what happens in anarchy” is not enough, or that it will result in Statism, is to cut the ground from underneath the anti-state position.
But the point was made in the OP that basically that’s as good as it gets. You cannot impose your preferred system without some kind of minarchy. The RESET button may seem an absurd option, but that’s the best we can do. In any case, it’s not really pushing the RESET button, because that itself would take force. It’s about educating people, and most everything the LvMI already does except for the objective ethical programs and other speculation that seems unwarranted to me and I think maybe you (correct me if I’m wrong).
It seems to me that to take the attitude of relativism is to cut the ground from underneath the anti-state position. And a culture of anti-authoritarianism is the ground underneath the anti-state position, which is to say that anti-statism is just a conclusion and consequence of something else rather than an end in and of itself. Political conditions arise out of culture, not vice versa.
The idea of simply pressing the state collapse button and then being a shrugger about consequences from that point onwards is self-defeating. On the other hand, the idea of real-world preconditions for a sustainably free society is just realism. Yes, anarchy will work, but state collapse by itself and literally whatever “emerges” afterwards irrespective of norms isn’t anarchy - it’s anomie.
I completely agree, in the sense that the attributes of the units of a spontaneous order necessarily bound the conditions of the order that develops. If you live in a society chock to the brim with thieves, murderers and rapists, the spontaneous order will not be as nice as the one that develops from a society of mostly nice folks.
This suggests that states may be inevitable once the average character of each person in the society is below a certain threshold. See the post in my sig for a full explanation of this position.
Normativity itself isn’t necessarily imposition. This is a fallacy that I see popping up over and over again - the conflation of the idea of normative preconditions for the realizability of a goal and top-down imposition or central planning. If I say that you won’t achieve X without Y, that X emerges out of Y, and proceed to advocate Y, it doesn’t follow that I’m proposing a top-down plan. The whole point is that the end in question can only be realized as a bottom-up consequence of normative preconditions. Freedom doesn’t occur in a normative and cultural vacuum. A completely ungrounded anti-statism, with no larger context and sprinkled with normative relativism, is not “the best we can do”, let alone a realistic concept of freedom.
Separate point from what I wrote above, but yes, not only would I expect the situation to be different with a random selection of people, I also think the presence of prison guards and the uniquely sucky situation of being incarcerated and under watched guard also obscure how many parallels can be drawn between prison life and an actual society.
Among many fundamental differences that could make the comparison less useful, in actual society there are long-held traditions (common law, customs, etc.) that evolved to keep society working. Even I don’t think a spontaneous order would be all sunshine and rainbows from the get-go if you just took a bunch of random people and put them together in a highly adverse and unfamiliar situation with no common law history to refer to (except that this has already been tried and worked out remarkably well: see The Not So Wild, Wild West). I still think, however, that it would be better if no centralized power emerged.
Here’s another way to think about it: The State developed when human beings were in worse conditions, less educated, less economically interconnected, less informationally interconnected (the Internet), less technologically advanced (personal firearms!), and everything I mention in the article linked in my sig.
My main point is that States did develop spontaneously in the past, but we could be living in a society where a spontaneous anarchic order could now be feasible for exactly those reasons. It might be merely the inertia of Statism that is keeping us in this condition. And if not, minarchy would be the best solution - a possibility that I concede but give a less than 1% probability. The big three things that changed back in the heyday of state formation might be guns, the marginal revolution, and the Internet. (Someone with more historical knowledge can probably make the case better than I can.)