No. Not in the least. Hoppe and other libertarians have given it very good defences. Hardly “inept”. You’re going to have to search harder.
I also do not think the legal system is a “weakness” of the theory. No, it’s only weakness is the tendency to conflate modern capitalism with a free market, at least amongst some libertarians; often even libertarians fail to realise the radical nature of their own theory. And its only point in need of development is expanding on how its underlying legal theory can handle problems like AGW, assuming they exist. Marketing the ideology is, at best, a technical problem and nothing to do with its contents.
I mean it in the wider sense of the term, meaning, extended family as opposed to households.
I don’t know how you think technology will replace the family, so you’re going to have to elaborate.
The thing is, the family has been the most prominent institution throughout civilization, up until the 20th Century. Now, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the once the state boomed the family began to decline, especially when you take into account the plethora of rules and agencies telling parents how to raise their children, the public education system, the state pension system, the state provided “charity” the state immigration laws and free state provision of “justice” amongst other things.
Now, these were all roles filled, or partly filled, by families before the state began to fill them (which the state obviously won, due to its ability to coerce and its superior resources). Where arbitration would otherwise be costly, heads of families provided this services for free on an informal basis, and this would occur when members of the same family had a dispute or members of different families had disputes. Before state charity, families would often provide welfare where private charity was inefficient, since private charity has no profit or loss system it cannot calculate.
I don’t think I even need to bring up the more obvious roles such as rearing children and supporting the elderly. Like it or not, the family performs an important role in the division of labour.
I don’t 100% agree with your wording, but the underlying idea is correct in my opinion. All too often when ‘Libertarians’ are seen and heard by the public, either by their own incompetence or some skillfull editing,they are presented as apologists for businesses acting badly, and looking with rose colored glasses on any action that turns a profit no matter how unethical or immoral, or just downright distasteful that action is to the general public. It is this more than anything else I feel that allows the left to skillfully lump Libertarians in with neo con right wingers as big government big business partnership types.
Another issue is rose colored glasses in general. A purely anarcho capitalist society, or even one just much more free than our current society in the US, would still be imperfect. It’s important to remember that the government is there for a reason; people want it and the security it promises on some level. Now yes, we know the government is detrimental to security and well being. However to a person who isn’t a good saver, or to a person who has lost a job or two and nto appreciated the way their living was ‘creatively destroyed’, or to a person whose son or daughter suffers from a rare disease and who doesn’t want to be told to wait until enough capital accumulates so ‘the market’ can be bothered to pay attention and come up with a treatment or cure, to these people the promise of the free market is more of a threat and/or a sentence to a life they don’t want. And not everyone who turns to the government is some evil statist. Whenever you position the government as evil, you are essentially calling all those who are dependent on it evil as well. Now they may have been made dependent over time, they may indeed be evil and want to live off taxes, or they may rightly or wrongly simply see no free market alternative to satisfying their wants. Understanding and having the appropriate respect for the opposing view where warranted is necessary.
Third is a matter of definitions. As long as people are successfully lead to believe that the various forms of socialism, fascism, mercantilism, corporatism, etc., currently dominating the world are in fact capitalism, we’ll never get anywhere. Thanks in large part I believe to their default control of the educational system, socialists have convinced people that even the most heavily regulated markets are in fact ‘free’, and thus any problems that develop are the fault of the ‘free’ market. As long as the definitions of the words we use are so distorted amongst us there can be no meaningful communication. We either have to teach the proper definitions and get them into common use, or use different words. Because as long as the general public and pundits speak of markets like health care in terms of how free they are, we’re lost. I remember a particular recent incident of this where Bill Maher was interviewing Ron Paul and Maher blamed the financial crisis on ‘capitalism’. Now of course Paul stated bluntly that the Fed was the root cause and wasn’t capitalist, but you could tell it wasn’t enough to get through to Maher or his audience. Granted, it’s a tough room for that argument., but as long as people are acting and thinking under the dellusion that a central bank fixing the prices of capital below where the market would set them is in fact an aspect of free market capitalism, no matter how contradictory we know that to be, the debate is lost because we’re arguing for something completely different than what they think we are.
Yeah, and so was slavery. In both cases they exist because its easier to exploit others than to create your own wealth. Does this make it right?
You must understand that whenever you say ‘the free market’ you should be able to substitute in the word ‘freedom.’ If someone does not think that the free market will provide something for them, they are effectively saying that freedom cannot provide something for them, and therefore they must be allowed to control others. Freedom is often scary to the disadvantaged or, dare I say, lazy. That does not give them the right to take my money at gunpoint, even if done through the government for legitimate-sounding reasons. Now I have to break out that Ayn Rand quote.
“Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.”
Again, he asked “Can you articulate to the working class…” If it were this easy, then the world would be libertarian. I think he makes an excellent point. The masses ARE our intellectual enemy. Obama has a 67% approval rating! Only 20% of Americans identify with the Republican party, which is supposed to be the small government party.
It’s very simple really. Think about how and why the family is relevant. Think about what needs, circumstances and characteristics may have caused family to gain prominence, and then ask yourself if those things are static, or if they can change.
It has, but it won’t always. Nothing is a constant. Not even our cellular biology.
When they finally get genetics down to where you can order your child’s characteristics, that is going to change a lot. When babies start being synthesized independent of their parents, that is also going to drastically change things.
I’m not saying I hope for or anticipate those futures but they are coming.
I’d like to think there’s a “silent majority” of Anglo-Saxon yeomanry out there that will rise up and throw off the shackles but I’m not holding my breath. I would dearly love to be proven wrong.
The only way for the common man to see liberty in his best interest, is education. This means working to increase the aggregate level of knowledge and understanding in a society. I don’t see the poor or lower classes, or even particular races as incapable of embracing libertarianism. It’s not a given, but it is possible to achieve.
Ultimately we’re all guilty of the same class war perception as marxists are. We’d rather characterize people by their social, ethnic, religious groups instead of seeing them as individuals.
Philosophy in general. Most of it comes from a few parochial crackpots; and the larger world of philosophy and political theory is pretty much a mystery to much of the ‘libertarian’ crowd.
Honestly, I think libertarians have only three cards: Economics, political science and revisionist history. Even so, they bias the Hell out of it. Partly because they don’t understand general philosophy or other political ideologies.
It is the NAP that is poorly defended because libertarians commonly think they can “prove” it as a universal rule. They can not. The NAP is an axiom. It is taken for granted to be a moral rule.
The principle of homesteading boils down to the NAP anyway. It should not be treated separately.
Generally speaking: They don’t understand liberalism or their relationship to/within liberalism. They don’t understand Marx, or Marxism, or socialism generally. They have no idea what the reactionary nationalist movements were all about, lumping them in as ‘leftists’ because they’re opposed to bankers - even though the entire banking industry was controlled by banksters at the time.
They are basically unfamiliar with social theory outside of their box, and when they encounter it they tend to misunderstand and straw-man it ten ways from sunday.
Example: There are almost no liberal utilitarians. They’re consequentialists. So stop critiquing welfare with anti-utilitarian arguments.
I really don’t know. It seems it’s easy for some people to lump all the ‘poor’ in one category. If you make less than 50K you’re lazy, hate the ‘natural elites’, live on foodstamps and worship democracy. Oh and there’s a reason for that, you’ve a low IQ…
Another very funny thing is conflating moral choice with intelligence, meaning : low IQ people are natural criminals. It’s even funnier when it is done by “intellectuals” who insist on the importance of a religious background…