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How not to argue against libertarianism

Whilst surfing the Internet I came upon a site purporting to show
What’s wrong with libertarianism. As I like to think I am always looking for a challenge, I though a little bit of fisking was in order given that most of what the site is critiquing is in fact libertarian influenced neo-conservatism, not actually ‘libertarianism’ at all. Also Zompist claims to argue on the basis of morality but in fact goes on to make an entirely utilitarian series of propositions.

When asked why not deregulate the economy, Zompist replied ‘We tried that and failed’… He then proceeds to actually make the libertarian case for us by arguing that in the supposedly unregulated past, the state would carry out ‘gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests’.

Of course one must have a significant interventionist state that owns gunboats and is structured in such a way to allow it to be manipulated by business in the first place… hardly an example of a ‘minimal state’ or perhaps Zompist thinks the Rockefeller family actually owned its own corporate logo’ed gunboats rather than the United States Navy.

Even more bizarrely Augusto Pinochet is held up as an example of an advocate of a minimal state! How does increasing the size of the security apparatus to impose the power of the state make a person an advocate of a minimal state? Duh. Zompist then goes on to ‘explain’ why unregulated capitalism does not work.

  • Poor people are generally ill-served by even basic-level businesses.

    • That is because they are poor and can support less businesses. Even if the state paid for the construction of a mall in every poor area, how would the shops there survive in any economic system? This is pre-economics 101 stuff.

  • People in the inner city pay more for food and pay surprisingly high rent.

    • The reduce the absurd amount of red tape to set up a business and allow competition for the money of poor people. I wonder if Zompist, who has probably never actually tried to run a business, has any idea how hard it is to get the myriad of planning permissions to set up new enterprises.

    • Also rents are pushed up by reducing the supply of rental properties and the best way to do that is to impose rent controls (which is tantamount to property rationing) and/or impose onerous super-contractual obligations on landlords to the point they simply take their properties off the market. This has been observed again and again around the world.

  • Banks happily take their money but won’t loan to them.

    • If the bank is not providing anything to a low income depositor (who costs the bank nearly as much as a high value depositor to administer), then why do low income depositors not just keep their money under a mattress? Obviously the ‘evil bank’ actually is providing some value to poor old Joe Ghetto after all.

    • Also no doubt if the banks would in fact lend to anyone, Zompist would be pointing at banks which had collapsed due to profligate lending to poor low income risks and saying “See? They need more regulation!” Loans are made upon the basis they are repaid… if you have a small income and few or no collateralizable assets, it would be absurd to expect people to lend you money. That Zompist cannot understand suggests a complete lack of understanding real economics.

  • The minimum wage isn’t enough to live on.

    • Then why have a minimum wage at all? Low wages are a symptom of a much wider malaise but in the simplistic world view of the left, there is never more than a single causal step.

  • Their employers don’t pay health benefits; and private health insurance is too expensive.

    • If charities had not been effectively ‘crowded out of the market’ by the state, this would not be such a big deal.

  • Highly polluted areas, the sort that cause nasty diseases, are concentrated in the poor parts of the city.

    • In the Soviet bloc, high levels of pollution were endemic. Perhaps Zompist thinks communist regime are insufficiently regulated too?

  • The entire near west side of Chicago, just east of where I live, doesn’t have a single movie theater.

    • So what? What gives people an inalienable right to a subsidied cinema at someone elses expense for God’s sake?! “Give us cinemas or give us death”?

  • Services the middle class takes for granted, like cashing their paychecks for free, are expensive for the poor.

    • But then banks actually make money on the accounts of middle class account holders. Why should some people expect to use a banks services when they provide little or negative return otherwise?

  • Since things like pollution and racial discrimination and food poisoning don’t affect direct costs, the market (efficient as it is in other ways) doesn’t address them.

    • Huh? If someone poisons you, then sue them for a few million. That sure as hell affects direct costs. Any libertarian who has a problem with that concept is as incoherent as Zompist.

     
  • Businesses will poison the environment, lie to consumers, sell unsafe goods, abuse workers, play games with financial statements, insider-trade, discriminate, form monopolies and cartels, profiteer, buy off politicians, and much more.

    • Ah, and government will not do all of these things? At least you can sue a company… try doing that to the state and then tell me which is harder. As for the fact it is possible to ‘buy off politicians’, I suppose union bosses would never do that sort of thing. Also, that is yet another splendidly libertarian point Zompist is making: the only way to prevent political corruption is to keep the level of power the political system has at its disposal to a minimum.

Later on Zompist claims the solutions are:

  • The rule of law. That means regulations, effective police, and fair courts. As Stephen Holmes said, “There is no rule of law until the Mafia needs lawyers.” Neal Stephenson makes the same point in Zodiac: in a liberal society, you can shame companies into obeying the law, because companies don’t like bad P.R. You don’t have that leverage with mafias.

    • Rule of law, sure, but that does not mean regulation. The rational libertarian position is in full agreement with the need for the rule of law but the trick it to prevent that turning into the rule of politics. The inability to see the difference is where the left come consistently unstuck.

     
  • Consumer trust. That means that abuse and fraud are persecuted, and you don’t have to get things done by paying bribes (a big reason most poor countries stay poor).

    • Zompist makes another splendidly libertarian position: paying bribes only makes sense if the people to whom the bribe is paid have enough power to make things to your liking. Zompist talks about ‘facts’ as if they are on his side and yet the notion that it is anything less than absurd utopianism to suggest politics can ever be free of corruption flies in the face of experience the world over. Only by sawing off the very levers of political power themselves, i.e. by reducing the size of the state, can the inevitable corruption that comes with political power be mitigated.

     
  • Responsive government and business. That means democracy, stockholder and union rights, and a free press. Personally, I think someday we’re going to discover that monarchy doesn’t work for business, either.

    • Government responsive to whom? Alas the reality is ALWAYS that it is responsive to whoever is best at manipulating the political system and can anyone but the most purblind communist really think that is really going to be ‘the common people’ (whatever that means)?

    • Business, however, is spectacularly more ‘responsive’ to the stimuli of the market. To be otherwise is to go bust if new entrants to the market are not prevented from competing for effectively for business.

     
  • Competition. Monopolies charge higher rates, stifle innovation, abuse dependent companies, and provide lousy service. (The robber barons of the 1800s were explicitly after monopolies, and they wanted them in order to raise profits.)

    • Yet again, thanks to Zompist for making our point for us. Harmful monopoly can only occur if the state can be used to lock in existing market players and exclude new entrants. Regulation designed to prevent monopolies actually do exactly the opposite!

     
  • A wide-based business pyramid– not just a few multinationals on top. Smaller companies are usually the engine of innovation and the biggest producers of new jobs.

    • All this is absolutely true! Vast bloated businesses occur when the regulations and of the state conspire to make establishment of local smaller businesses more expensive by imposing regulations and costs that are insignificant to big players but are business killers to poorly capitalised start-ups.

  • No barriers to social rising or business innovation (e.g. racism, monopolies, “licensing” whose only purpose is to protect existing business, unavailable loans or courts, bribes, mafias).

    • Correct… and that name of those ‘barriers to social rising or business innovation’ is REGULATION.

Oh, and in making his points, Zompist falls at the very first fence: Ayn Rand did NOT regard herself as a libertarian.

20 comments to How not to argue against libertarianism

  • Joe Clibbens

    That Ayn Rand regarded herself as a “capitalist” and not a libertarian seems rather besides the point. She was a libertarian, using any reasonable definition of the term, she just didn’t like the fact that people could come at libertarianism from a broad range of philosophical perspectives or even with no philosophical base whatsoever.

    No doubt Robert Fisk does not regard himself as an idiot, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use him as an example of one.

  • Can I add another response to “People in the inner city pay more for food and pay surprisingly high rent.” I want to focus on food costs.

    The first reason food costs more there is because it costs more to get the food to the inner cities, they being further from the farms. It costs to navigate delivery vans through narrow city streets. D’oh.

    The second reason is that crime is so bad in state-welfare-land that the shop owner must pay for guards, insurance, alarms, security grilles and high levels of shoplifting

    Every now and then a “community” activist gets outraged at this and pickets an inner city shop that charges more than an out-of-town outlet. Usually the shop caves in. The activist then takes his goons away to harass someone else. Then either the shop quietly puts the prices back up, or it doesn’t and goes bust. Now the inner city people have to take a bus to shop when before they could walk. Hooray for social justice! Other potential providers of services read the paper and decline to go in to that dump and get insulted for their pains.

  • *Not* a good critique of Libertarianism. Basically it was based on the idea that there is a symettry between communism and the free economy, which is, of course, nonsense.

    My own answer to this question can be found at Free Republic

    Although I agree with many libertarians about a great deal, I think too many believe you can base a free society on moral relativism. My post was an attempt to refute this idea.

  • Andrew Rettek

    Perry, don’t leave that site alone. I was exposed to it a year ago and there is much more there to be fisked.

    (I go whenever i doubt human stupidity).

  • I saw this linked from Walter In Denver, and was just astounded. I’m a libertarian, but I could do a better job of “refuting” libertarianism than this. I think the author of that website just shows that government run schools have failed to teach basic argumentation and logic.

    At the beginning, the arguments are basically “Republicans and libertarians are similar in some ways, and Republicans are bad. Therefore libertarians are bad.” I hope that even philosophy 101 students could grasp the fallacy in that one…

  • Russell Whitaker

    The author Mark Rosenfelder commits an immediate irony in opening his screed with a quote he attributes to Abraham Lincoln:


    “The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people.”

    Libertarian science fiction novelist L. Neil Smith was among the first on the scene in recent years to succinctly address the mythology of Lincoln, accurately characterized as “The American Lenin” (see also a followup by Neil on the same issue).

    Really, the guy embarrasses himself by quoting Lincoln as a moral authority.

  • blabla

    Peter,

    Although I agree with many libertarians about a great deal, I think too many believe you can base a free society on moral relativism.

    You have absolutely no clue about libertarianism if you think libertarians are moral relativists. One would think that a brief perusal of the front-page entries of Samizdata would make that abundantly clear. But alas, some people cannot see the difference between morality created by the free interactions of civil society and morality created by the business end of a gun.

  • Dave

    The original author writes: “Now, to dispose of one straw man….” It’s too bad he doesn’t turn away from his own straw man and give libertarianism an honest look. The irony of so many critiques of libertarianism is that they pretend to attack the philosophy on logical grounds, but their own arguments are typically riddled with fallacies themselves. Why oh why are there no honest, well-researched critiques whose authors at least realize what libertarianism stands for?

  • Russell: I like the link about Lincoln. I’ve often thought similar things (i.e. that Lincoln was essentially a war criminal who was a great opponent of freedom). Lincoln has been propagandized to the point where he’s beyond reproach. This makes talking about his prolonged assault on the constitution a faux pas in polite company.

    Peter: I think you’re somewhat confused about what moral relativism is. Conservatives have dilluted the term to the point where it is now used to mean “the view that the Bible is not the best moral system.” In reality, it means “the view that moral standards are grounded only in social custom.”

    I’ve never met a moral relativist libertarian. It’s antithetical to very notion of libertarianism–freedom is a moral absolute which goes beyond anyone’s “social custom.”

  • Aaron Armitage

    A note on cinemas in Chicago:

    The near west side isn’t the poorest part of town. The southside is. It also isn’t that big; if there aren’t any movie theaters there, the residents hardly have to do without.

  • blabla, I suggest you *read* the post I linked to. I made almost exactly that point: that true libertarians must believe in a moral society if they ever expect to get a small state. That doesn’t change the fact that many moral relativists do call themselves libertarians. Just read some of the Libertarian Alliance publications. I remember one saying the very idea that a certain moral code could be objectively better than another was “cultural imperialism”.

    Of course not all libertarians are moral relativists. The smart ones know better, which was the point of the post I linked to.

  • Actually, I did read your post. You seem to suggest that if everyone acted morally then there would be less need for laws governing things. So if no one used drugs, then we wouldn’t need drug laws. If no one used drugs, then no one would care about drug laws. However, drug laws are only an issue because people use drugs, and drug use is not immoral. If it were immoral, then drug laws would make sense. I’ve never heard of a libertarian being opposed to murder laws, for example.

    You also suggest that there is something morally wrong with wanting to have sex with children. I don’t think there is–morals are about actions, not thoughts. I have frequently wanted to steal things, or punch people, or yell at others for no good reason. Yet I’ve not done these things because I know that doing them is wrong. Was I wrong even to think them? In any case, the author of the Reason article was plainly not a moral relativist, since he felt that raping children was wrong for everybody in every society. He was simply someone who disagreed with your image of morality.

    Social conservatives do, in fact, advocate oppression. Perhaps not in the form of anti-homosexuality laws (though they are opposed to allowing gay marriage), but certainly in the form of drug laws.

    This Libertarian Alliance publication of which you speak does sound like moral relativism, but their views are opposed to libertarianism. How can you be a genuine advocate for freedom (a fundamental aspect of libertarianism), yet say that morality is culturally defined. It’s nonsensical, but you should have linked to this document, as opposed to a perfectly reasonable Reason article.

    Nowhere in your post do you actually point to even one instance of moral relativism among libertarians, hence my suggestion that you were confused about what that notion means.

  • Peter: oops, I thought you were referring to my post and not blaba’s. Anyway, my objections still stand.

  • molly

    Pesh, if that is the best the lefties can do, we have nothing to worry about!

  • Ah, you all agree among yourselves. That’s adorable; but are you able to make any points that make sense to an outsider? Let’s see…

    …[M]ost of what the site is critiquing is in fact libertarian
    influenced neo-conservatism, not actually ‘libertarianism’ at all.

    Sure, and the article itself explains why. In the U.S., you as a libertarian have two choices:

    1. Pursue a pure libertarian policy, opposing both major parties.
    2. Ally with the Republicans, at the cost of giving up the social side of your convictions.

    If you choose option 1, your ideology remains pure, and you join the Esperantists, spelling reformers, Trotskyites, Perotistas, alien abductees, and other harmless eccentrics.

    If you choose option 2, then you are responsible for your political choices; you cannot shrug off the statist policies of your allies.

    But either way… so what? Are the social portions of libertarianism at all relevant to this debate?

    Also Zompist claims to argue on the basis of morality but in fact goes on to make an entirely utilitarian series of propositions.

    Where do I “claim to argue on the basis of morality”?

    When asked why not deregulate the economy, Zompist replied ‘We tried that and failed’… He then proceeds to actually make the libertarian case for us by arguing that in the supposedly unregulated past, the state would carry out ‘gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests’.

    That covers about 1/8 of that particular list of complaints. I’ll grant you that without government gunboats, there will be no government gunboats. Are you really historically ignorant enough to think that there won’t be corporate gunboats?

    Even more bizarrely Augusto Pinochet is held up as an
    example of an advocate of a minimal state!

    No, I said he was the darling of “conservatives”. I don’t blame you for finding it hard to tell conservatives and libertarians apart, however.

    Pinochet is relevant because he notoriously followed the Chicago School’s pro-market policies. We should see whether that improved the lot of the people as a whole before deciding to adopt an even more radically pro-market ideology.

    You’re really in another bind here. If you deny that 1800s America or 1980s Chile were at all libertarian in the economic realm, then you’re reduced to pushing an untested utopia; sorry, I’m not buying. If you want support from history and economics, then we have to look at actual historical or economic systems that approach your ideal.

    (Poor people are generally ill-served by even basic-level businesses.)

    That is because they are poor and can support less businesses. Even if the state paid for the construction of a mall in every poor area, how would the shops there survive in any economic system? This is pre-economics 101 stuff.

    Nice juggling there: I’m showing that the market doesn’t serve the poor; you bring in some imaginary statist solution.

    (People in the inner city pay more for food and pay surprisingly high rent.)

    The reduce the absurd amount of red tape to set up a business and allow competition for the money of poor people. I wonder if Zompist, who has probably never actually tried to run a business, has any idea how hard it is to get the myriad of planning permissions to set up new enterprises.

    More juggling: unable to deal with the example at hand, you simply make up a deficiency in me and address that. Unfortunately for you, I have helped set up and run a business (a restaurant), and thus know what a load of crap you’re shovelling. Believe me, dealing with government agencies was about 1% of the headaches of running a business.

    There are clear examples of too much red tape; I’m in favor of fixing those. But you’ve made no case that this is the problem with food and housing in the inner city.

    (Banks happily take their money but won’t loan to them.)

    If the bank is not providing anything to a low income depositor (who costs the bank nearly as much as a high value depositor
    to administer), then why do low income depositors not just keep their money under a mattress?

    Often they do. You don’t know anything about what the poor do, do you?

    Also no doubt if the banks would in fact lend to anyone, Zompist would be pointing at banks which had collapsed due to
    profligate lending to poor low income risks and saying “See? They need more regulation!” Loans are made upon the basis they are repaid… if you have a small income and few or no collateralizable assets, it would be absurd to expect people to lend you money. That Zompist cannot understand suggests a
    complete lack of understanding real economics.

    You don’t know anything about banking, do you?

    I like bankers a lot better than libertarians; some of them, rather than speculating about things they know nothing about, go and find ways to make money and help poor areas. There are banks that lend only to Third World peasants; their default rates are much lower than the industry norm. There are banks in Chicago which have created accounts for poor immigrants, allowing them to send money back home cheaply, and which have invested in the Hispanic neighborhood; once crumbling, it’s now flourishing.

    (Their employers don’t pay health benefits; and private health insurance is too expensive.)

    If charities had not been effectively ‘crowded out of the market’ by the state, this would not be such a big deal.

    Oh good Lord in heaven, your answer to health care for the poor is charity? Thanks for proving my point (see “evocation of the sinless utopia”). In the real world, however, charity isn’t enough; that’s why the government got involved.

    (Highly polluted areas are concentrated in the poor parts of the city.)

    In the Soviet bloc, high levels of pollution were endemic. Perhaps Zompist thinks communist regime are insufficiently regulated
    too?

    Is there supposed to be a serious point here? Please don’t tell me it’s “If we have any amount of environmental regulation, we’ll be as bad as Communist Russia!!!”

    (The entire near west side of Chicago, just east of where I live, doesn’t have a single movie theater.)

    So what? What gives people an inalienable right to a subsidied cinema at someone elses expense for God’s sake?!

    More juggling; should I be impressed that you emphatically reject this imaginary notion?

    But the first question (“So what?”) is valid, though it shows that you haven’t understood the point of this section, which is that market forces alone will not work to the benefit of everyone– indeed, that businesses left to their own devices will exploit and abuse the poor (and the rest of us, to the extent they can get away with it).

    Now, if you’ve already decided that workers have no rights, then this won’t be a problem for you. But it’s a problem for me; I do demand that a social system benefit everyone, so it’s a concern to me if the poor are left out.

    That’s about half of your article; I’ve read the rest, but frankly it simply degenerates into preaching to the choir. It’s rather disappointing to find that your idea of a “severe critique” is to simply repeat bits and pieces of libertarian ideology, like this:

    Only by sawing off the very levers of political power
    themselves, i.e. by reducing the size of the state, can the inevitable corruption that comes with political power be mitigated.

    Really, if you think that sort of thing addresses anything, you don’t get out enough. Talk to a non-libertarian once in a while.

  • ristoril

    Russell – Why do you think a science fiction novelist is a good source of moral critique? Why are you so ready to dismiss a man that in his own time was regarded as a very able statesman, politician, and champion of the common man based on what someone who writes about fantasy worlds for a living says? When I’m looking for deep insights into the world, I don’t open up an Anne Rice novel.

    However, if you’re looking for proof that the market works, maybe you should read about the US cell phone industry. That, of course, wasn’t unbridled competition. The FCC put limits on the amount of the people’s airwaves the cell companies could play with, but it’s close.

    I found Zompist’s article to be very well written and thought out, and his arguments to be cogent. Every author indulges in fallacy from time to time, but his weren’t as glaring as many of the comments (and the original ‘critique’).

  • Zompist: Really, if you think that sort of thing addresses anything, you don’t get out enough. Talk to a non-libertarian once in a while.

    The whole reason you cannot possibly understand the very real differences between Republicans and libertarians in the USA is that you cannot imagine anything relevant happening outside the statist bipolar world of Republicans (statists) and Democrats (bigger statists). But millions of people do a very good job of avoiding the state, educating at home, paying in cash and setting up businesses using off shore holding companies: that is what we are trying to show people. You do not have to a big multinational to do avoid being in the power of people like you: which is to say people who would vote themselves the money of others.

    So to be a small-L libertarian is not to give a damn which republicrat wins some election. No, it is to make the process of democratically sanctified theft as irrelevant to your life as possible.

    ‘Workers’ do have rights… as individuals, not ‘workers’. They have the right to freely enter into contracts and therefore to be held to them, just like the people who employ them. They have the right not to be robbed by force by criminals of the private or public sector. Everyone has those rights unless they alienate them.

    Oh, I understand banking just fine, what with having been in finance for rather a long chunk of my career.

  • ristoril

    Characterizing the actions of the government (taxation) as “theft” and those who carry it out as “criminals” is a really poor practice. Even small-L libertarians believe there’s a place for government, and taxes must be levvied and collected to execute its function (mainly national defense and the enforcement of contracts and the protection of individual property). It really reflects poorly upon you that you have to resort to such defamation in order to get your point across.

  • ristoril: If all the state did was raise taxation for those functions, defense and some sort of legal system (i.e. the ‘night watchman state’) then a minarchist libertarian like me would indeed have little to complain about (obviously my anarcho-libertarian confreres disagree with me)… but as that is FAR from the case, I regard the majority of what is taken by the state via taxation as fundamentally illegitimate, therefore it is indeed theft. If the reason for which my money is taken, backed by force, is by its nature unjust, how can I see it in any other terms other than theft? And people who are a party to theft are criminals.