The whole book is worth reading, from start to finish, but chapters 7 - 12 on this topic (or at the very least chapter 10).
-Jon
Yes, except for that unpleasant genocide part.
Sounds like he’s confusing libertarianism with Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Libertarianism does not demand survival of the fittest; by contrast, a free society would probably be more compassionate by the corrupt warfare-welfare state (and, incidentally, better able to afford being compassionate).
Nobody has the right to determine what the surrounding culture should be like. That is narcissism if I have ever see it.
Haha, this joke of an essay fails remarkably.
You can’t even get past the title without recognizing the author clearly has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
He is refering to the false left / right paradigm…
There is no difference between the left & right wings… BOTH are collectivist.
Communism (international socialism) / Fascism (national socialism)…
Practically 4 letters difference… >.<
It is used by the state to box hole the alternatives / discussion…
“Locke makes a number of good points about the dangers of materialism and moral relativism, but he would do well to address these issues separately and realize the more diverse nature of “libertarianism” — not a school of thought or political party, but a broad-based and hopeful core of ideas. Perhaps then, in his concern for what he terms “the Marxism of the Right,” he would look around to see that the anti-ideology he describes was a social force of power, beauty, and strength long before Marx published his manifesto. It battled and outlasted his movement, and now, with its emphasis on the importance of human liberty regardless of race, culture, or creed, it is washing over yet another region in this — the slow awakening of a global spring.”
from
http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2005_05/coleman-marxism.html
Riposte
Marxism of the Right?
by John Coleman
“Libertarianism is not the “Marxism of the Right,” as a critic has recently charged. In fact, it’s not an ideology of any sort. Libertarians want people to run their own lives and society to run itself. By so limiting its scope, it makes itself compatible with many religions and philosophies.”
This is the kind of critique I would rather read here. It looks the good and bad in both sides. It does not automatically refute the first argument.
Ruben, the problem is that you are not an anarchist.
When I first came here, I wasn’t one either. And people treated me like an idiot. And I held idiotic views, so in hindsight, I can understand that. But at the time, it bothered me that people were hostile and ignorant to me and my views.
You also had the unfortunate circumstance of having that ghastly MVP tag on you. That’s like putting your son in a pink jumpsuit that says “Momma’s Boy” on the back and sending him to football practice. Whoever came up with that idea, bad idea.
I’d suggest that you spend a little more time reading and asking specific questions. Pleas for balance won’t go far, because none of us are about balance. We’re (for the most part) about naked, cold, hard truth.
This article isn’t bad because we say it is. It’s bad because the author presents a lot of strawmen, makes connections and conclusions that are incorrect, has done little research and has a collectivist viewpoint.
As usual I recommend Rothbard’s TEOL and Callahan’s Economics for Real People.
This appeal is worthless for one reason: All of these “objections” presented have already been addressed. Locke should know the basic libertarian positions on these issues, in fact, he probably does; he just doesn’t care to share them with his reader.
Do you honestly believe that any libertarian reads this and says, “Oh, Clean Air. Never thought about that one.” His whole article is contemptable. Its for an audience who is not familiar with libertarianism. Locke isn’t even trying to convert libertarians. He is presenting strawmen to convince other people to not be interesting in learning about libertarianism.
This is the prefect example. Locke presents some supposed hazard of human interaction, the fact that individuals can harm each other, and then expects this to prove the necessity of government. That’s called a non sequitur. Its also a strawman, in that it implies that libertarians do not oppose crime.
Its possible to object to crime without believing that government is a correct solution to it. In fact, libertarianism is founded on the idea that a correct understanding of criminally reveals governments to be universally criminal.
Government is not only not the best solution, it is a non solution. It increases the problem.
There’s a very simple objection to this: the market provides what people want. The entrepreneur who opens ‘Dildo Lawn Ornament City’ in the middle of Pleasant Valley will come to loss and, in another burst of entrepreneurship, take his DLOC franchise out of town or convert his store to sell what he thinks Pleasant Valley will actually buy, and repeat. If a DLOC opens in your town, does great business, and your nice traditional community is now offensive to you, it’s merely that you’ve learned that you never had a traditional community (at least in this respect) at all. You’re free to try and persuade your neighbors to cut it out, or to use some other pleasanter lawn ornaments, but nearly anything else you do (pass an ordnance, burn down DLOC, put a tariff wall between DLOC and your more immediate neighbors) is not defense of ‘traditional community’, but oppression of your actual community.
Aha! But - I am positing the existence of ‘universal rights and wrongs’. Ethics, if you like. Ethics are HARD. Its like the ‘shirking’ problem for employers. Is the employee ‘right’ to shirk? Libertarianism suggests the employee is going to get what the market feels is fair wage for shirking, namely, $0. Then that employee goes bankrupt or gets on government aid. What if a kick in the pants or a camera in the employees face ‘shook up’ the employee enough to cause him to change his ways before he got himself canned?
And again - what about the glutton, who eats himself into immobility? Should he truly be ‘free’ to make that choice, or is it the duty of compassionate society (using the leveraged collective effort we call government) to intervene and tell him “no more cookies”?
And again - what about the fetus? No, no, no - lets not get into that mess…lets say, just plain o’le MURDER. Are you suggesting that folks are ‘free’ to murder others, given that ‘the market’ (call it judicial process, or a mob lynching, or whatever) appropriates just consequences? I say no! I say, humans are not dependable enough to handle ‘total freedom’.
Now, let me save you some keystrokes. Don’t reply to me with ‘you moron - you totally misunderstand libertarianism’. I know these examples are extreme, and probably ARE misrepresenting libertarianism. I’m asking you, an intelligent person, to do me the AWESOME favor of “getting my gist”. Can you do that? Do that and THEN reply.
Thanks,
Mike
Why on earth should all moral obligations (assuming they exist) be enforceable by law? Should I be forced to keep a promise, by law? Morally I am obliged to. And no, no one violating the freedom of others is entitled to freedom.
-Jon
Anyone can tell him “no more cookies”. The person who points a gun at him and says “no more cookies or I’ll shoot you” is a criminal for the threat. The person who breaks into his house and steals all of his cookies is again a criminal for the theft. You might ask yourself why you spoke in support of threats of death and violence and theft but could only bring yourself to sugercoat these as a “leveraged collective effort” that “tell[s] him ‘no more cookies’”. If you really believe in your own position, why don’t you describe it honestly? You might also ask yourself if the “leveraged collective effort” you support doesn’t actually work out to heterogeneous law – that is, instead of there being a universal law that applies to everyone, there is a ‘private law’ under which it is wrong to threaten to murder people and a ‘public law’ under which public officials can do this.
Walter Block wins this debate with his extractionist position, elaborated in Abortion (mp3, 1:37’47").
Yes, of course he should. In a “compassionate society” his friends and family have every right to stop buying him cookies, persuade him to stop eating them or whatever they think will work but at the end of the day he, he owns his own body and if he wishes to carry on he should be faced with the consequences.
Well this is certainly interesting. If I were to go into a glutton’s home, beat him, tie him up, and feed him only healthy food for a year, you would call it a blatant violation of his rights, regardless of whether or not I made him healthy and was motivated by compassion. But if the state did it, it would be okay? What happened to ‘universal rights and wrongs’?
Three questions you might find edifying to ponder: are these ‘universal rights and wrongs’ true by state mandate, or are they independent of what anyone says? and in what situations, if any, is the state exempt from judgment when it goes against these ethical principles? and why only in these situations and not all others (or none at all as is the case with private citizens)?
Ask yourself this, Why do you have the right to force others to do what you want? If you can’t answer that on an individual basis then you can’t answer on a government basis.
You make the false assumption here that the libertarians are advocating that they have the perfect solution for everything. The Libertarian solution is simply that we should be allowed to figure out to deal with these things without one group imposing on everyone else.
Yes, you live on a planet with other people so there will be activities of others you disagree with. This is another shortcoming of how libertarianism is advocated. Many never address the issue of what happens when we disagree and there is no middle ground. All the issues relating to children and others that are dependent on the care of others are areas of weakness in the libertarian philosophy because so many libertarians are unwilling to address the issue of disagreement and accept that violence can be a reasonable dispute mechanism.
Ultimately, if you pursue your own thinking you will come to the conclusion that we should be constantly trying to reduce government until it reaches the optimal state of not existing at all.
That’s why humans need to be governed by…aliens I suppose ?
Are you saying that a collectivist viewpoint is “bad” as opposed to another kind of viewpoint that is “good”?
How do you know the amount of research performed by the author? Perhaps he actually reseached through several authoritative sources unknown to us.
The connections seem logically accurate, if you disagree with the conclusions perhaps you must take a look on the underlying assumptions. Are libertarian assumptions per se correct and assumptions from other ideologies per se incorrect?
I will forever be thankful to the insightful administrator who had the brilliant idea of putting the MVP tag on me during two weeks. I asked many times what does MVP mean. I am still hoping to have someone tell me what MVP means and why its appearance caused such a hysteria. It seems that nobody has had the courage yet to come up with an answer that only requires listing three words starting with M, V & P. I can only infer that the administrator who decided to put that tag on me read some of my earliest posts and concluded that I had the potential to add great value to this forum and placed that tag to encourage me to keep on writing without being afraid of being different from the mainstream mises.org user. The MVP issue underscored the prejudice and resentment I felt from some members not about me personally, but about an intruder from another country who was perceived to pollute this forum with non libertarian, socialist views. The issue helped people express their judgments about this intruder, sometimes without having taken the effort to get to know him better.
Am I supposed to be an anarchist in order to belong to this forum? I have noticed that recently people are respecting and analyzing my views. They can then agree or disagree, it would be rather boring and uneducating if everyone agreed to everything in a 100% groupthink fashion. I would then leave this forum immediately.
I read a lot. I may not have read some specific literature suggested here, but I have a wide humanistic reading background in artistic, scientific, literary and social subjects in my native language and in the two official languages of your country of origin. Some of the questions I have asked remain unanswered. I do not see a clear-cut opposition between naked, cold, hard truth and balance either.
I am very thankful for your friendship, Liberty Student. Naked, cold, hard truths are a lot easier to tell to friends than to enemies.
Rubén
Yes. I think it’s safe to say that a political philosophy that is objectively wrong can be called “bad”.
If he did, they were all wrong. He didn’t say a thing about libertarianism. He said a whole lot about something that he made up and called “libertarianism”, but which wasn’t libertarianism at all.
If he had written about libertarianism and not this strawman which he falsely calls “libertarianism”, maybe we’d be taking him seriously.
What sort of fool believes in something which he does not see as correct? I am a libertarian because I hold libertarianism to be true. There are fine points of theory on which I am not clear, or on which I disagree with other libertarians. Yet the core of the philosophy - the Non-Aggression Principle - I believe to be completely, objectively true.
No, despite what some people here seem to think, this forum is open to anyone and everyone. There are a few minarchists, perhaps a couple conservatives here, and I can think of three liberals. However, because market anarchy is the logical conclusion of Austrian Economics, most of the people on this Austrian Economics forum are market anarchists.
Why is that? There is profit in refining your beliefs through discussion with like-mined people. And just because everyone believes similar things doesn’t necessarily suggest group-think. Are mathematicians engaged in “groupthink” because they all understand that two plus two equals four? And besides, there is always disagreement, even among the like-minded. Even among market anarchists, a very specific and (frankly, very small) school of thought, there are anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists, Agorists, mutualists, syndicalists, and Objectivists, to name a few. Each of those groups disagrees on certain things amongst themselves.
So long as a forum allows people to dissent - as this one does - there will always be a healthy amount of disagreement, and with it will come education and intellectual growth. Don’t let the exclusivism of a few posters make you think otherwise. They don’t speak for everyone here, and they don’t make the rules.
McFall,
My only observation is that right and wrong are subjective opinions. How can they value judgments ever be objective?
Thank you for clearly expressing your views in the rest of your reply.
In that case, Hitler wasn’t actually so bad was he?
I don’t like to keep referring people to others to explain my positions, but the first few chapters of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty explain far better than I could why we believe that property rights and non-aggression are objectively right.
Nevertheless, I will try to sum up. It starts with the fact that ownership is a reality (all property is controlled by someone), and that only one sort of ownership is logically possible, and that is individual, self-ownership (for the logical defense of that conclusion, please see Rothbard). From this position of individual self-ownership, we can derive a fully consistent, rational ethic which may be applied to any situation, as Rothbard does in TEoL.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics shows how, in a broader sense, it is possible to come up with a system of objective rights-and-wrongs; a secular morality, so to speak, based in logic and reason. (That the “secular” morality of libertarianism happens to be, in my belief, compatible with Christianity is a subject for another thread.)
De nada.