Debating someone who claims to be libertarian but holds statist positions.

Miscellaneous General
1

I’m so frustrated right now.I’m debating someone who claims to be a Minarchist libertarian but holds statist positions.These types really bother me.You know the ones who claim to be libertarian without a clue what it means or who have never heard of any libertarian thinker and just think libertarianism means being a bit against something government wants to do while ignoring the principles of the matter.

So far they have said:-

  • The latest UK budget of government spending cuts and tax rises is libertarian.

  • “Libertarianism is not anarchy, an absence of laws, or a complete lack of society. There are 60 million people in this country. The idea that we can have hospitals, roads or schools without an element of taxation is unrealistic.The average income would not allow a person to save for their retirement, pay for schooling for their children and cover medical expenses (the US system of health has a high amount of taxpayer funding). Unfettered capitalism would lead to a reduction in the quality of life for the overwhelming majority as pay and work conditions were reduced to Chinese levels. Life expectancy would decrease as medical facilities were cut back etc etc”

  • “Giving everyone total freedom and no government is a wonderful aspiration, but it suggests your social circle is limited to highly educated thinkers and not the ordinary man. If we look at the numbers who try to avoid taxation, not as an intellectual pursuit of societal change, but because they don’t wish to contribute to society if they can avoid it, then we can see that we won’t get a society based on voluntary contibutions of well meaning intellectuals.”

  • “No one regulates currency? Can anyone print their own notes at will? Who decides what denomination notes should exist, how they are designed and what validity they have?”

  • "How on earth will a ‘customer’ decide a doctor’s certification is valid? By not popping his clogs? How can a ‘company’ offer certification. A company is a legal construct defined by government. If there is no government then anyone can establish a company and certify doctors. People who are unwell want to be treated under a system they trust, not shop around until they can find someone to gamble with their life. How will you run an A&E system?

    A modern hospital take years to plan, costs millions and requires up front money (or rather guarantees and loans). If the standards are random then, until the hospital is built and the customers decide to use it, someone is taking a hell of a gamble. Things are a lot more complex today than when the health systems in place were started"

  • “Original appropriation is okay if you have just nicked the land from an indigenous population, but 99%+ of all land in this country is owned by someone in line from the Crown. To introduce your system would require expropriating that land by force from those who hold it. There is no land in this country that has never before been used by someone and can therefore be grabbed for improvement. There is no way you can grab land for a hospital in this country without depriving a user of it.”

  • “Insurance schemes require regulation otherwise they are not going to function (they need a common currency). You demand proof of me, but show me a place where someone has set up these anarchic/pure libertarian schemes and succeeded. Private and voluntary is okay if everyone subscribes. Half the population of the USA cannot afford adequate private and voluntary health insurance and they have an accepted currency created by government and regulated by it.”

  • “With no government there is no way of administering law.”

  • “You try using airspace in an anarchic fashion with no governmental controls or laws and see how soon the whole system collapses and how many people die as a result. I’ve 2000 military flying hours under my belt and have lost several friends who failed to follow the rules in place at the time”

  • “Modern technology cannot be developed without proper laws on patents and copyrights. I’m not going to write a book or invent a life saving drug if you’re going to get the benefits, but not reward me. Nobody will invest in food production if they cannot protect what they have grown or produced.”

  • “Somalia is the most collapsed state in the world. There is no government in place. There are no taxes. People protect their crops with armed militias. They use piracy to get internationally accepted currency as they have no useable currency of their own. Rape and murder go unpunished by the courts as there are none. Women who are raped are killed by their families along with the perpetrators; no trials, no justice. The medical facilities are supplied by international aid groups. Masses of people have emigrated. Education is non-existent. Poverty and disease are endemic. Life expectancy is in decline. Nobody has a ‘statist’ mentality. Self-interest abounds. Shared self-interest is through a mediaeval clan system. Nobody can bring order from the chaos. Nothing of value is produced. There is no trade, there are no exports. What little people have in the way of modern technology comes from international aid or theft.”

I’ve responded to him on every major point here and he just keeps shifting focus.I reckon I have him on the backpedal .I’m just wondering what I can say to give my arguments extram Oomph.I’ve rolled out the typical arguments against the state what should I do to defeat superficial doubts about anarchy in his mind? any killer blow arguments?

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You should draw extensively from this piece. I can give you my views point by points but you mentioned you had already hit back most of these points.

Some positions that a statist should have to answer:

Don’t attack innocent people.

Don’t make anyone judge in their own case ← this really did it for me. Plauche has an article on persistent anarchy. Long has his “Anarchist Legal Order” on youtube. They’re both the same basically. I wish more people argued in Plauche’s vocabulary so I could call statists anarchists.

You can’t control government just because you write down its job on a piece of paper

Governments can’t calculate.

Governments do not spend their own money. Therefore, it doesn’t cost them much to funnel billions of dollars into their friend’s pockets. They are the institution most open to bribes.

Research a bunch of privately provided public goods. I like the voluntary city, from which you can find exerps on google, and “the private provision of public goods” by searching mises.org. How can he explain these?

3

I see into the future and Libertarian will simply mean anybody who opposes the total despotic State and thinks that some aspects of personal life can still be left to the individual.

4

There is a difference between Libertarian and libertarian. So just ask, if they are capital L or not :smiley:

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True Big L’s are the party Libertarians and small L are not but in anycase they all should still have principles.If he’s a Big L and he’s like this then I’m glad i left the UK libertarian party if they allow such moderates in.

6

You could try the secession approach. It worked well for me on a similar ‘small government’ type.

Or - since it sounds like he agrees with you about government being unethical, and his only problems are practical - you could point out this to him: The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Anarcho-Libertarianism.

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“Somalia is the most collapsed state in the world. There is no government in place. There are no taxes. People protect their crops with armed militias. They use piracy to get internationally accepted currency as they have no useable currency of their own. Rape and murder go unpunished by the courts as there are none. Women who are raped are killed by their families along with the perpetrators; no trials, no justice. The medical facilities are supplied by international aid groups. Masses of people have emigrated. Education is non-existent. Poverty and disease are endemic. Life expectancy is in decline. Nobody has a ‘statist’ mentality. Self-interest abounds. Shared self-interest is through a mediaeval clan system. Nobody can bring order from the chaos. Nothing of value is produced. There is no trade, there are no exports. What little people have in the way of modern technology comes from international aid or theft.”

You’ve got him on this. EVERYTHING he says in this paragraph is wrong, and provably so. Have him read this, or watch this lecture by Benjamin Powell.

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Well, I’m not sure if this is libertarian per se, but it is good economics. Everything else is pure garbage.

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@OP: Minarchism is statism.

It’s too little, too late.

Whooeee, that’s a lot of economic fallacies in one paragraph. For starters, even mainstream economists (including Keynesians!) do not try to argue that roads, schools, hospitals, etc. cannot be provided by the private market. So, your friend should take it up with the economists, even those who are avowed statists would disagree with him.

As for pay and work conditions going to pot, this is only true if employers are less in competition for employees than vice-versa. This can only be true if employers are cartelized. Econ 101 tells us that cartels in a free market are inherently unstable and that firms wishing to enforce a cartel must turn to the State for such services. Your friend has it completely backwards - it is the Chinese government that makes paying Chinese employees dirt wages possible. Western corporations move in, build a factory, get people off the streets at 25 cents an hour and kick back some percentage of the additional profits had on the cheap labor to the politicians who made it possible for the factory to be built. How is any of that an indictment of the free market!?!

Again, your friend has it backwards. Creating a dual-legal system with a special class of individuals empowered to break the rules that everyone else is required to live by assumes that those who are so empowered are super-human angels, not susceptible to the base pursuit of self-interest like the rest of us. A market of security under unitary law, however, makes no such presumptions. As Hoppe points out in his lectures and articles on national defense, there is nothing in a natural order society that presumes that men are good or less evil than they can possibly be. The theoretical problem of the production of security would be the same in a city filled with thieves, thugs, marauders and killers as it is in an ordinary neighborhood, only the cost of producing security would be a bit higher in the former than in the latter.

Mises’ regression theorem.

Apparently, society is incapable of forming reputation mechanisms in the absence of a State.

I work for a company that builds silicon fabs (Intel Corp) on a schedule of about one every other year. Price tag? $3 billion a pop. Show me a hospital that costs $3 billion. And they do this without even seeking outside funding in the form of bank loans or stock or corporate bonds. They have the capital and they drop it just like that. Don’t tell me the private sector can’t build hospitals because they’re “too complicated.”

The population is far more productive than the land-owning class. If everyone is required to play by the same rules (no special privileges for government employees and their masters in the aristocracy and royalty that is still very real), it will not be long before the landed class has to start selling off its land to the rising middle class in order maintain the standard of living to which it is accustomed. This is what started happening during the 19th century and the “labor” and other anti-capitalist movements of the 20th century can be interpreted to one extent or another as the pushback from the landed classes who wanted to neither give up their land nor accept a reduction in their standard of living.

Again, quite the opposite. The government is the antithesis of unitary law. With government, there can be no law.

Direct his attention to the book Against Intellectual Monopoly, it addresses this fallacy and then some.

That is true in Mogadishu where the UN (through the auspices of first Ethiopia and the AU) has been meddling again since 2006. Between 1993 and 2005, Somalia, including Mogadishu, was mostly peaceful and its prosperity began a rapid rise*.

Your friend seems to be heavily tripped up by the fallacy that poverty exists primarily as a result of a lack of charity and giving. This is based on a mistaken understanding of human nature. Systemic poverty is always the result of some corruption of the incentives naturally facing man spurring him to produce in order to improve his own condition. And even where there is a notable lack of charity, this is more readily explained by barriers to production than by a change in human nature. History is filled with innumerable examples of jaw-dropping charity in the most destitute circumstances. The natural human capacity for kindness and compassion is not altered by severity of circumstances. Production, on the other hand, is necessarily antecedent to charity. History is also filled with innumerable examples of artificial scarcity and barriers to production. Without something to give, giving is impossible. It is far more probable that a lack of charity is the result of barriers to production than to a change in human nature.

Clayton -

*Note that even after a rapid increase in propserity, Somalia was still very poor

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Somalia is still a poor African country, anarchic or not. The funny thing is it isn’t even as bad as some of its government-infested African neighbours. So much for that “argument”.

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Thanks for the great advice.Lots of good ideas so far I’m going to try to use them on him when he replies to my last post.

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Yeah i knew I had him on this.First he quoted mistruths and second Somalia is not An-cap as discussed before.

Oh yeah I forgot about that great lecture.

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Well it’s clearly not libertarian. Is it good economics? Why cut spending and increase taxes?doesn’t seem to make sense not that I’d favour it anyway.

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You want to eliminate deficits as much as possible because (a) it reduces the crowding-out effect and (b) it lessens the incentive to monetize debt (which sets off the business cycle). Lowering taxes is not always a good thing, contrary to popular “supply-side” mythology. The government borrows from the same loan market as everyone else. When they engage in deficit spending they necessarily take funds from the private sector, which would have otherwise been used for capital investment (which increases the productivity of labor and therefore real wages). In order to service that debt, they print, but in a very ingenious way. That is, the central bank buys back government debt and extinguishes it with newly created funds. These funds enter the banking system as reserves, which are continuously re-cycled (lowers the interest rate). This causes an inflationary boom, extinguishes government debt, lowers interest rates, and allows politicians to payoff their political allies (labor unions, special interests, ect).

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Aye if you lower taxes but pay for spending via borrowing or inflation its much worse. You get the Austrian Business Cycle…