Two red flags about this community...

Economics Political Theory
1

I’m often confused about people who call themselves libertarians. In most cases, they are socialists (or self-proclaimed moderates) who merely want to legalize drugs… (these are the same types I often run into who 3 months ago supported Ron Paul, but have now switched to Barak Obama) Obviously, these two candidates are polar opposites on everything except that they both believe isolationism is viable and practical policy for the USA.

In addition, I frequently see libertarians in the company of the 9/11 Truth movement. There is even a very vocal part of Ron Paul’s constituency that believes in this nonsense.

So I read in the FAQ that the label of libertarian is not completely accurate to you LV Mises folks… yet…

…I saw a bit of 9/11 Truth garbage on the forum from some of the members.

So that’s the first red flag.

The second red flag has to do with isolationism.

I’ve been reading a lot of Ayn Rand recently and she is viciously anti-war except in cases of national defense, which I believe is the same position as Mises.

I am a generally pro-war person, because it seems to me that a volunteer force over-throwing potentially threatening states is in everyone’s best interest, except those being overthrown.

Statism because of it’s fallacious design, must constantly be preparing for, or executing war… at least this is how I’ve come to understand it. So long as statism exists in the world, can we not assume that their goal would be to acquire the resources of free societies? In fact, the only way a country such as N. Korea can be contained is to have a superior military force right? Had N. Korea been the most powerful military force on the globe, their people would not starve as they would have seized upon China’s food supplies for example.

History supports my claims. In the 20th century, isolationism failed every time it was tried. For America in WWII, Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked attack. Same thing with 9/11. There are countless other examples of countries who suffered unprovoked attacks.

One of the stated purposes of government by ya’ll Mises folks is that the government exists in part to maintain a monopoly of the use of force… why should that not be extended to monopolize the use of force over the entire globe?

Monopolizing the use of force in a global sense does two things. 1) It defeats communists/statist regimes/etc by a “slow bleed” strategy. (see the USSR) 2) Those countries who do attempt to use force (or even the threat of force) gives us the excuse to dispose of those regimes… at which point we can free the society, open those markets, etc, which is good for everybody.

So there are my basic arguments against the anti-war nature of Mises/Rand/and ya’ll folks.

The one thing that is absent from this that you all can help answer for me are the economic implications of such huge military spending… I saw somewhere on this site that it hurts the economy in a lot of ways. How is that?

REcap:

red flag one: Are there any ‘real’ libertarians / the company ya’ll keep… 9/11 truthers??

red flag two: Anti-war position, even with a voluntary force.

oh… and I’m going to add one more red flag…

red flag three: I saw in the FAQ that a persons #1 right was to property… shouldn’t his #1 right be to his life???

==========

Thanks guys!

-S

2

Just one point here about Pearl Harbor as an unprovoked attack. It certainly was provoked. The New Dealers War is a good place to begin, reviewed by David Gordon here. There is no longer any dispute about the reality that FDR had been pushing for war for the years leading up to that attack.

3

“I’m often confused about people who call themselves libertarians.”

That certainly seems to be the case.

Libertarians believe, simply, that the use of violence is only acceptable in direct defense of your life, liberty, property. That is (I believe) the essence of libertarianism. Anyone who advocates the use of unprovoked coercion by any individual, group or government (be it taxation, murder, laws against drugs etc) can not call themselves libertarian.

Given that, let’s get to your “red flags”:

  1. Some people believe that the attacks in NY were at least in part orchestrated by the US Government - you refer to them as “truthers”. This is merely a point of view held by some on an event in history. How precisely does this make them un-libertarian?

  2. Neither Paul nor Obama could be considered ‘isolationist’. Do you even know what that word means? I think you’re looking for ‘non-interventionist’ - there is a big difference. As said in the post above me, Pearl Harbour was not unprovoked and neither were the attacks in NY. The USA has been interfering in the Middle-East for decades - if you keep poking the bee’s nest eventually you’ll get stung.

  3. Are your body and consciousness not your property?

4

You might want to check out The Myth of National Defense on that. Also, The Costs of War (Review).

What do you mean by ‘real’ libertarians?

That’s not exactly what it says…

A lot of people here think of property rights as being fundamental. That comes from the collective influence of Locke, Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe. I think they’re wrong. There is a sense in which it is true that all rights are property rights, because all rights require private property for their protection and expression, but the right to property is not the most fundamental. I disagree with Rand too. The right to life is not the most fundamental either. Rand seems to think that the right to life is the most fundamental because life is the standard of value. This approaches rights from the wrong direction. I argue in this working draft of one of my dissertation chapters that the right to liberty is the most fundamenal right (of which all the others are its consequences and corollaries), and I’m here following Rand-influenced Aristotelian libertarians Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl. All rights are essentially liberty rights.

5

As Hoppe discusses in his Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis, empires that initially spread “freedom” in other countries will become increasingly overbearing and oppressive as their domain increases. Over time, they will become stagnant. I have no doubt this is especially true of “democratic” empires. So far from spreading liberty, empires eventually crush it, unless they collapse first. In addition to this, a global monopolist on force faces all the problems monopolies will face, as well as the calculation problem.

BTW I’m not sure what you mean by “real” libertarians or “9/11 truth” types. I’m a Hoppean market anarchist, which is about as close to a “real” libertarian as one can get, and I have no real opinion on 9/11 because frankly I’m indifferent.

6

Does “liberty” mean something to you other than the right not to be aggressed against? As you say, to Rothbard “all rights are property rights,” in that aggression is trespassing against another’s body. I formulate it somewhat oppositely: in that all property rights violations are aggression, I’d make freedom from aggression the primary right, and property rights a corrolary. However, I regard my version as logically equivalent to Rothbard’s.

However you slice it, I wouldn’t defend a “right to life,” because there’s no way to define it coherently. Rand already illustrated my point by arguing effectively that in a survival situation her morality ceases to operate. If there are two of us and one parachute, ALL rules go out the window. In particular, it becomes “moral” for each of us to try and kill the other. A more metaphysical objection is that it’s meaningless. A “right not to be murdered” makes sense, because it’s perfectly possible to go through life neither murdering nor being murdered. But a “right to live” makes no sense, because everyone dies. To the extent that someone has a coherent notion of a “right to life,” I suspect he really means a “right not to be murdered.” However, phrasing it that way invites the confusion whereby welfare, say, or socialized medicine, appear moral.

–Len.

7

No. That’s what the right to liberty means - that others have the negative obligation to refrain from the threat or use of initiatory physical force against me.

That sounds kind of like mine. I’m not sure it is logically equivalent to Rothbard’s though. At a certain level, say of functionality, they may be equivalent. It is at the level of derivation and explanation that the differences become clearest. If you start with self-ownership, rather than it being a conclusion, which I think is a mistake, then it seems to me you’re making property rights fundamental and liberty the corollary.

I think the right to life, which is a traditional right in classica liberalism, makes more sense as a corollary of the more fundamental right to liberty. It means the right not to be murdered. But I think it also captures other things: property in oneself, one life is one’s own (an end in itself and not a mere means to the ends of others), etc.

The big three of liberalism/libertarianism are the rights to life, liberty and property. Self-ownership derives from these three.

8

I forgot that Hoppe’s Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis covers that. I’ll have to reread it and integrate some of the insights into my paper on Rome when I get the chance:

“Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization.”

9

Well, perhaps you should do your research before you post anything. I can’t say what Obama believes because I work very hard to NOT listen to anything a socialist would say. As for Ron Paul he isn’t calling for isolationism. He is calling for non-intervention. Maybe you should look those two words up so you know what they mean before you start criticizing.

How does that make someone un-libertarian? The cases of state-sponsored terrorism are so vast that any search on the subject will yield hundreds of examples. Why do people believe that other governments will commit acts of terror against their citizens to achieve a particular goal but the United States is somehow immune to this? Please, show me examples of the great Moral Authority that the United States has displayed over the years because I can show you hundreds of examples of how the United States has made this world a far less wonderful place to live and has directly or indirectly caused the deaths of millions of people. Odd that some of our closest allies are ruthless dictators while our government tells us over and over again that we are “spreading democracy” to the world.

If the Mises Institute isn’t libertarian then there is something wrong. Or maybe you don’t know what libertarianism is. Again, someone holding a particular view about 9/11 doesn’t make them un-libertarian.

I probably shouldn’t say this but you’re an idiot. You don’t even understand the meaning of the word “isolationist.” North Korea is isolationist. The United States is an interventionist. Ayn Rand and Mises were non-interventionist.

You cannot use force against anyone unless it is for self-defense. All of your examples, North Korea, communism, defeating a “statist” government (which you don’t even seem to understand that word because you are a statist). The United States has used its military force for the past 60+ years to “fight communism” and “terror” but all that has accomplished to create more socialist nations and create more “terrorist.” Communism is an ideology and you cannot kill an ideology with a bullet. The more “communist” you kill the more you create because it confirms that belief system for other people. The “evil capitalist” kills people because he knows communism is the better way of life. Wrong! Global empires kill communist to bring them under their system of fascism. The only way to combat an ideology is by showing your particular ideological stance to be the correct one. So far, we haven’t done a good job of that because we don’t have a libertarian free market economy and government. We have an oppressive fascist state that uses a controlled economy bent on world domination to send troops overseas to initiate immoral force against other nations who haven’t done anything to use.

Vietnam is a great example of how wrong you are. China is as well. Let’s stick to Vietnam though. We sent millions of our young people to Vietnam to “fight communism” and 58,000 dead boys and millions of dead Vietnamese later we still have a communist nation. But here we are over thirty years later and Vietnam is turning into one of Southeast Asia’s premier examples of how capitalism can work. Yes, they are still a communist nation but the communist are losing their grip over that country. The young people want to be western. They want to be capitalist. A lot of Vietnamese who can afford it come to the United States to attend university. Even our screwed up version of capitalism is starting to defeat communism in that country.

It’s the same thing with the “terrorist.” We create terrorist because of the many vile things we have done to other countries. In many way’s we are just getting paid back for the things we did to others. The “Islamofascist” that Bush and Co. talk about cannot be defeated with guns and bullets. Every time you kill one two more are going to join because we just prove their point: We are a bad country. End of story. The way to deal with “terrorist” is to just leave them alone and trade with them. Do you honestly think Iran would be so hostile to us if we were their biggest trading partner? Do you really think “Osama bin Laden” would have “attacked” America on 9/11 if we did have troops stationed in their holy lands, placed sanctions on Islamic nations that killed hundreds of thousands of people (mostly children) or overthrew their governments? We give terrorist ammunition by intervening in their daily lives. Leave them alone and they will leave you alone. Just trade with everyone and be their friend.

North Korea makes a lot of noise because they are broke and the people are starving. Kim Jong Ill just wants money.

I can think of better ways $535 billion could be spent. Can’t you?

10

The biggest “red flag” I’ve seen on these forums is how dogmatic they can be. IMO Austrian economics doesn’t have all the answers, and in fact probably doesn’t even have most of them because of the simple fact that there are simply far greater numbers of non-Austrians doing good work out there. Not that I’m any authority (I’m not an economist in any sense), its just my opinion.

The Japanese were commiting heinous crimes… I don’t think FDR should have done what he did, but I don’t think the iron and oil embargoes were really acts of aggression towards the Japanese. The horrible things they were doing with those resources would have been impossible for me to ignore.

11

Hah, I missed that last statement picked up by KingMonkey. Shouldn’t it be obvious to everyone by now how wasteful military spending truly is?

Grant, insofar as theoretical explanations go, I have yet to see any other school of economics that can top the Austrian School. Most of them, in fact, could benefit immensely by incorporating its theories as the bases of their empirical work. I’m sorry to say this, but I do not see how the main competing schools have much to offer in the way of economics, at all, except insofar as they move closer to Austrianism. The only exception I am willing to make is public choice economics, which is already closely affiliated with Austrianism… The only problem I have with the Austrian School is the aversion on part of some of its economists to carry out empirical works, as works of economic history at any rate (they aren’t works of pure economics, no matter what positivists/Popperians may think.) I don’t see why that is, given that they have the right methodological approach already (by this I mean the Misesian-Rothbardian one), and so as long as they know what they’re doing, they have little reason to shun such work. At any rate, this aversion (which characterized none of the leaders of the school) seems to be on the way out.

12

I think the Internet is going to go a long way in helping people find out a prime alternative (the Austrian school) to economics as the proveribal hits the fan and the depression sets in. Thus far, I’m still learning, but I have to admit, there is little with the Austrian school I can argue with. The only thing that get’s daunting is trying to read discussions when I haven’t read nearly as much books as those involved, lol…

13

Well Inquisitor, I probably haven’t read nearly as many published papers as you have, but most of the ones that have impressed me the most haven’t seemed terribly ‘Austrian’ to me. However, thinking about it more, many or most were written by Austrians and used other techniques such as game theory, so maybe I worded my criticism poorly.

I think Keynes was probably right that prices tend to fall more slowly than is optimal in an imaginary world of perfect coordination between firms, although I obviously don’t suffer from the same nirvana fallacy with regards to government “fixing” it. However, many people on these forums seem to beat up straw Keynes dolls, saying that he believed prosperity could come from printing money. Of course he only felt printing money would solve what was essentially a coordination problem, not bring prosperity in and of itself.

I also think much of what I’ve read on mises.org concerning public goods is in denial of the coordination problems involved in large-scale externalities voluntarily. Of course, successfully dealing with externalities involuntarily (i.e., with governments) is probably even harder, but we’ve got a lot more “capital” invested in the later approach at the moment. I’m hoping its a malinvestment, and that the statist bubble will pop once everyone else realizes it.

It also seems to me that many Austrians (especially at LvMI) place too much emphasis on ABCT in business cycles, when there are probably other contributing causes (I’d argue the regulatory environment played a role in the recent housing boom, along with the Fed, and that part of the dot-com boom was irrational exuberance). I especially liked a paper modeling neokeynesian menu costs as malinvestments in the Austrian sense.

The ‘school’ I’m most impressed with is mechanism design (and yes, I know its more of an area of study), because it seems like it can offer actual solutions to some of the problems which arise in markets. To me it sounds like it has the most potential to actually DO something outside of academia. As the guy who founded it said, “what economists should be able to do is to figure out a system that works without shooting people”. Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff, but it seems like Austrians spend a lot of time critiquing government failure and a lot less time trying to figure out how to make voluntary exchanges work better than they currently do.

14

Well given that the Austrian School’s main focus is pure economic theory, I don’t find that all too surprising.Then again, I don’t think many of the things you mentioned are fundamentally incompatible with it (e.g. game theory.) As for mechanism design, apparently it has the possibility of being complementary to Austrian analysis. Austrians tend, as a rule, to focus on the pure theory of economics, and as such you have to look out more carefully for those who expand the school’s influence into other areas. If you’re into economics, it’s an opportunity for you perhaps to show how these ideas might be reconciled with Austrianism, now that they are still new (or at least somewhat foreign to most Austrians.) The only thing that annoys me by some of the more “innovative” Austrians is that they tend to be horribly ignorant on the school’s methodology, hence understate their affiliation with the school at times (Skousen is a wonderful example of this.) There seems to be this apparent tension between Hayekian-Kirznerian (the sort you seem to favour) and Misesian-Rothbardian Austrians, and at best I find this misguided, on both sides. So I guess I’ll agree with you that the dogmatism bothers me, but again on both sides. What interests me most is to see a fusion of public choice on the one hand and Austrianism on the other.

I generally like the Austrian school’s negative case against public goods, especially by Hoppe and Block, but I agree that so-called GMU Austrians tend to address the problem better from a positive aspect.

15

Spending $2 trillion on two failed wars hurts the same way flushing $2 trillion down the toilet hurts. Is it really that hard to understand?

I would rather have spent $2 trillion on computers and education, for example. Then we’d have lots of really fast computers, instead of devices that have already self-destructed. And we’d have really smart math students - maybe almost as smart as other nations’ - instead of having 4000 dead soldiers and tens of thousands of wounded, dismembered or psychologically crippled soldiers. Of course, that’s just my opinion. Only a free market could have decided best how to allocate the money we’ve wasted.

16

I like how they crushed the idea that all externalities necissarily represent some sort of ineffecency. Public goods and bads are of course subjective and arbitrary, so we cannot say “X should be subsidized and Y should be taxed” without some sort of ethical theory. What if the desired “public good” of America is the destruction of a peaceful nation? Should we subsidized that? But then they seem to go and suggest that, because of this, there is no issue with providing public goods. I think thats false, and that there are coordination problems to be overcome from the perspective of the entrepreneur who wishes to provide the good at a cost.

A fusion of public choice and Austrianism sounds interesting. The former focus on incentives, while the later information, but the needed information are the incentives… Somehow that seems to me like it ties together… Maybe with Hayek’s point that the only way to take advantage of society’s knowledge is to have a system where individuals do ‘desirable’ things without being told what to do? I suppose in that case, incentives must be aligned with information? But thats rather off-topic…

17

9/11 was not an unprovoked attack. It was a very foreseeable outcome of our intervention in the Middle East combined with an illogical and indiscriminate immigration policy.

“Monopolizing the use of force in a global sense,” what the hell is this? I can’t think of a more nightmarish scenario: social democracy with a global tax base and nowhere to hide. First on the hit list will be nations that actually honor banking agreements and don’t tax enough. Supposed threats like North Korea will be the happy recipients of the monopoly’s foreign aid, occassionally paraded about as the terrible threat justifying your multi-trillion dollar global freedom army.

Nice attempt at parodying Michael Ledeen. Wait a minute…I bet you are Michael Ledeen. The holes in logic, the incomplete reasoning, the Trotskyite methodology, it’s all there.

18

History supports my claims. In the 20th century, isolationism failed every time it was tried. For America in WWII, Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked attack. Same thing with 9/11. There are countless other examples of countries who suffered unprovoked attacks.

Interestingly, those examples support neither the claim that ‘isolationism’ failed nor the claim that countries randomly get unprovoked attacks all the time. WWII came at the tail end of thirty or more years of McKinley style warmongering–one might even credibly claim that it extends back nearly a century to the Mexican-American war (which, by the way, was an unprovoked war of aggression… on the part of the US, that is!). In fact, it seems to me wholly plausible that WWII was an indirect result of US warring abroad, for there would probably have been no Nazi Germany without the treaty of versailles, and there probably would have been no treaty of versailles without US intervention in WWI.

As for 9/11, do you really think that north americans would be in the sights of islamic terrorists if the US government didn’t have hundreds of bases around the globe, or if it weren’t subsidizing Israel with billions of dollars, or if it weren’t helping to prop up backwards dictatorships like Saudi Arabia? The US hasn’t been isolationistic for hundreds of years–the last twenty are hardly some golden age of free trade and low military spending.

One of the stated purposes of government by ya’ll Mises folks is that the government exists in part to maintain a monopoly of the use of force… why should that not be extended to monopolize the use of force over the entire globe?

haha, yes you’ve spotted an interesting contradiction in the minarchist-misesian point of view. We need the government to have a monopoly on force, but a global government is to be feared. Most people here are anarcho-capitalists, though, so I don’t think this particular criticism applies here.

Are there any ‘real’ libertarians / the company ya’ll keep… 9/11 truthers??

I think others have more than adequately addressed the idea that 9/11 truthiness and libertarianism are mutually exclusive. They’re not. Ironically, however, a concern for the truth and 9/11 “truth” are.

red flag two: Anti-war position, even with a voluntary force. Well, first of all murder is still murder, even if all of the murderers are doing the murdering by choice. War these days cannot help BUT be murder, given the nature of the weapons in use today and the urban setting of most battlegrounds. The only way violence can be justified against dictatorial governments is if the violence affects no one who either is not part of the system or who has not consented to being in the way of the bullets and bombs. That requires carefully aimed sniper rifles, not the dropping of thousands of bombs onto the homes of millions of people.

Second, even with an all “volunteer” force–“volunteer” in quotes because the half-children who make up most of the military cannot possibly understand the purpose or the moral nature of what they do–the financing of a military and a war still requires taxation, which can only be understood as a form of theft. In other words, even an all “volunteer” force must still be set up, financed, maintained, equipped, and most importantly USED in a completely coercive manner.

So, what exactly do these “red flags” signify, anyway? Is the Mises institute a cult? A purveyor of pseudoscience? Usually, the term “red flag” is used to mean that the flags are indicative of something more major nearby, but it’s not clear what exactly this is supposed to be in this case.

19

I more or less agree, actually. The embargoes were acts of aggression against the owners of the iron and oil. To the extent the embargo even did anything at all, it forced people not to sell their property to Japanese people, even though they wanted to. And I think you realize that: we avoid confronting the immorality of the embargo by speaking as if the oil and iron belonged to FDR. At the time, people asked whether “we” should sell “our” oil to “them,” again putting things in terms of free association and property rights. That actually speaks well of the morals of the average citizen: he apparently would feel guilty if he put things in terms of coercing the actual owners of those goods, so he salves his conscience by putting himself in the owner’s place and calling them “our” goods.

Nevertheless, the embargo was an immoral act of aggression against the property owners.

–Len.

20

Why not on the would-be buyers as well?