Hmm, this is my first time posting here, and while I’m definitely a capitalist I’m fairly turned off by Libertarianism. I’m actually finding the more I read and have debates about it, the more I dislike it … But I figured I might be able to contribute to the conversation by listing some of the reasons I don’t like libertarianism.
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Arguments like "that criticism doesn’t apply because there’s a sect of Libertarianism that says X!” This is incredibly annoying, and actually makes libertarianism look weaker in my eyes. I’m aware that there is a diversity of views, but making a claim then trying to dodge the rebuttal by throwing up this Red Herring doesn’t help your case, it just makes you look wishy-washy. Unless you are saying something like "your point has merit; maybe I should consider modifying my views to match sect X of Libertarianism that tries to accommodate your concern,” I don’t care. I’ve heard this often enough that I just start tuning out when I hear it.
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Not admitting to past failures or to the successes of other systems. I don’t want to talk to someone who dismisses Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” as socialist propaganda without actually bothering to read it or check its sources, or keeps dodging around the fact that per capita Canadians pay just over half as much on healthcare as Americans, yet are on average healthier (if you leave out Americans with no health insurance then both countries are approximately as healthy apparently, but Americans are still paying twice as much for the same product). (Source: OECD Health Data 2006)
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Plutocratic bias. I commonly see contempt among libertarians for the poor, outright hostility towards unions, and praise and advocacy for corporations and the wealthy. I find the fact that some people don’t see why this would bother people mind-boggling. I know not every libertarian is like this, but enough are to make the philosophy a tough sell. The bias also leads to libertarians arguing for policies that, as far as I can tell, are the complete opposite from what would actually be needed to create a libertarian society.
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Refusal to accept that altruism is just as fundamental a drive as libido. Just like some people have greater sex drives, some people have a greater ‘altruism drive’. There are clear evolutionary advantages to being altruistic; given my audience, I’m not sure if I really need to go into it. Anyways, expecting people to be perfectly selfish and inquisitive is just as much a mistake as communism’s expectation that people be perfectly altruistic and accepting.
The reason I bring this up is that it’s important to realize that for some people, like me, the Social Darwinist leanings of libertarianism are repulsive. There is no faster way to turn me off then dismissing the needs of others as unimportant, saying that people are suffering because they aren’t ‘motivated’ enough to deal with their problems, or that maybe the stupid should just die if they can’t cut it. This IS me being selfish, as I find trying to not be a bleeding heart unnatural and a bit painful. My altruistic drive is just too strong for me to easily ignore, even if I am aware that not everyone can be helped.
- Dismissing the danger of altruism; saying that rational greed will always triumph. If that were true, there would be a lot fewer wars. Being a soldier is a very altruistic decision. Recruitment advertising is basically designed to inflame people’s altruistic lust if you think about it - ‘teamwork’, ‘part of something bigger’, ‘serving your country’. I mean, how much would I have to pay you for you to agree to have, say, a 5% chance of dying, a 30% chance of being seriously injured, and a 50% chance of suffering severe mental trauma (i.e. stuff like PTSD, not just a bad experience)? Probably more then a soldier is paid (in mercenary contractors are paid between 2 to 5 times as much if I recall correctly, and usually aren’t put in the worst situations).
Now, I’ve heard some people go big whoop, lust can make humans do stupid things, so what? If you read up on the evolutionary logic of altruism, it’s not being a sucker that wins, it’s tit-for-tat. In other words, if someone takes advantage your generosity, find a way to punish them so that the cost of defecting is greater then the benefit. In the extreme this creates ‘scorpion players’, or individuals start valuing the chance to hurt another, in this case the defector, as much as possible over their own well being, for example suicide bombers.
Unions are a less extreme example, where a company tries to get too much productivity out of its workers at the cost of their well-being, and so the workers assemble into an entity with enough power to retaliate. While this may reduce the total pay off available to the company and the worker, it assures that the worker doesn’t get the sucker’s payoff which would be even less. Of course, unions may get corrupt and greedy after creation, and some unions may get formed for exploitative reasons, but the core logic of them in general is altruistic retaliation.
- Calling altruism evil or stupid. This is contradictory for all kinds of reasons, but also beside the point. Altruism is just as fundamental a drive as greed; a libertarian arguing that humans should stop being altruistic is really just like a communist arguing that people should stop being greedy. It’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how nice a political theory is, if it cannot work with human nature then it isn’t going to work.
