Friday, March 31, 2017 7:18:46 AM
What America Would Look Like If Libertarians Got Their Way
What if you cut all benefits? What if all of public life were a giant competition? What libertarianism would look like in real life.
By RJ Eskow / AlterNet December 25, 2013
These four libertarian/conservative dystopias are offered, as Rod Serling used to say in "The Twilight Zone," "for your consideration."
The “Libertarian/Conservative”
I’ve qualified my previous writings on libertarianism with disclaimers explaining that I’m addressing a specific, popular subset of libertarian thought. But I’ve still run afoul of dozens of people who say, “I’m a libertarian and I don’t think those things.” I’ve still received comments like those from David Brin .. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/09/bringing-back-feudalism-is.html , who correctly notes that I’m not addressing libertarians like Friedrich Hayek in my criticism.
True. But Hayek ain’t in the saddle these days. Ayn Rand is leading the posse, to the extent any intellectual figure is. But I'll put my disclaimer upfront this time: I acknowledge that, as libertarian-friendly writer John Danaher .. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/danaher20131218 .. puts it, “’libertarianism’ has come to denote a broad, often fractious, group of political theories.”
I suppose it’s only fitting that a philosophy celebrating competing markets would, to a certain extent, be a set of competing markets itself.
But it seems even clearer that a “libertarian” in today’s political environment is almost always someone who ascribes to certain core philosophies: He abhors government, hates taxation, and is hostile to collective action on behalf of the less fortunate. Name any prominent modern libertarian—Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, Peter Thiel, Rand Paul—and they are likely to fit this description.
These figures represent a singular and increasingly dominant libertarian vision. To avoid future confusion, I'll give their brand of thought an admittedly imperfect name: “libertarian/conservative.” It is that vision, and their future, which I address here—and it's a frightening future.
1. What if you cut all benefits?
You’ve heard it from Sen. Rand Paul and other conservatives this winter: unemployment benefits increase unemployment. It’s an enormously destructive idea, though absurd on its face. It's like the argument that hospitals create sick people; after all, there are so many of them there.
We usually consider such thinking "primitive" in modern societies.
Yet that's exactly what libertarian/conservatives are arguing when they say that unemployment benefits increased or extend unemployment. There is no credible evidence to suggest that this is true. There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that unemployment is caused by other factors, including poor consumer demand and lack of business confidence.
Right now there are nearly three job seekers for every job opening. That means there are no jobs available for two out of the three. They will not “go out and find work” once their unemployment benefits stop. They will simply plunge into deeper economic misery. They will become like accident victims who are denied hospital care because it would “foster an attitude of dependency.”
But, as absurd and unkind as this thinking is, there’s something even more frightening about it: This kind of thinking never ends. If you believe that unemployment benefits cause unemployment, you’ll cut those benefits off. That could throw millions of people onto the welfare rolls. But if you believe that welfare causes dependency, you’ll cut those benefits off, too. That will leave people utterly dependent on programs like heating oil subsidies, food assistance, and even homeless shelters.
But if you believe that those programs create dependency, too....
It never stops: Close down the homeless shelters. Shut down the Salvation Army. Make it illegal to throw a starving person a coin or toss a blanket over them as they lay on the sidewalk. This logic only ends one way: in a hellish dystopia where the underclass is starving, homeless and dying in droves.
If that seems melodramatic, ask a libertarian/conservative this question: When will you know that your theory is wrong?
2. Nothing but competition.
This idea lies at the heart of libertarian and conservative thinking. The argument says that human beings excel when they are competing with one another for dominance. The free market is the best economic system in the world, we’re told, because private enterprises compete with one another for market share.
This is the thinking behind the movement to privatize government services. In fact, it’s the very same thinking which led the conservative American Enterprise Institute to design the set of policies the world now knows as “Obamacare.”
It’s also wrong. We saw that in the ignominious failure of libertarian Eddie Lambert, the Sears CEO who drove his company into the ground with the misguided notion that internal competition among his company’s departments would cause each of them to function more efficiently. That proved to be an enormously frustrating experience for customers, and ignominious failure for the corporation as a whole.
These ideas, along with a number of other misguided notions, have caused Sears stock to lose more than half its value .. http://www.businessinsider.com.au/lampert-hedge-fund-facing-redemptions-2013-12 . (Lynn Parramore has a good roundup of the Lambert fiasco here .. http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/ .) Eddie Lambert’s biggest mistake was believing that, in the words of Bloomberg BusinessWeek .. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles , “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly… they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
Wrong. It turns out that people who are motivated to act out of self-interest will do whatever it takes to enrich themselves, even if that means damaging the entire society—in this case, the Sears “society”—in the process. Sure, competition “works,” sometimes, for some things. But the Sears experiment showed us that it works best when there is a fabric which knits the competing parts together into something more than the sum of its parts.
We call that something a nation.
Eddie Lambert’s Sears is a nation in microcosm. When its common purpose was lost, the entire enterprise collapsed. Eddie Lambert taught us that that when people act solely out of self-interest, they act destructively toward others, and hurt themselves as well. Everybody loses.
Lambert wanted Sears to teach the nation a lesson, and it did. Selfishness is one of the roads to dystopia.
3. Free-enterprise zones.
The concept of the free-enterprise zone was first popularized by Republican Jack Kemp. Kemp, a football star-turned-House member and vice-presidential candidate (with Bob Dole in 1996), adopted the concept, also known as “urban enterprise zones,” as a campaign theme during his initial rise and a 1988 presidential campaign. It’s based on the belief that economically disadvantaged areas—inner cities or impoverished rural areas—would be revitalized if regulations, minimum wage requirements and tax levels were eased.
This concept is based on two separate but related theories. The first is that employers are likely to be attracted to these struggling areas by the lower cost of doing business there. But a deeper, less frequently articulated theory cuts even closer to theoretical libertarianism: that regulations and taxes are themselves economy-killers. Free-enterprise zones, it was thought, could therefore become laboratory experiments which would demonstrate how much better an economy functions without them.
It didn’t work out that way. A few of the zone’s tools, such as targeted tax breaks, have provided temporary relief in some instances. But overall the experiment has been a singular failure. As one roundup of research on zones put it: “Most of the more sophisticated studies show no increases in employment or per capita income.”
Instead, the one consistent finding across all studies appears to be this: zones typically made money for one or more corporations, but the promised social benefit in jobs and income never materialized.
That hasn’t killed the zone idea, or the many variations on its theme. Statewide initiatives, offered as tax breaks or other incentives, have been equally unsuccessful. The most spectacularly unsuccessful track record in this regard belongs to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has offered nearly $2 billion .. http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-new-jersey-tax-incentive-payoff.html .. in tax incentives to spur job growth. The result? Job growth in New Jersey lags behind most of the nation, while hundreds of millions in tax breaks went to giant casinos and to large corporations Prudential, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Verizon, and Panasonic.
The zone idea is truly dystopian in scope, and that’s the idea which refuses to die. The premise is this: The regions inhabited by low-income brown, black, or white citizens should become places where basic worker protections are nullified, and the financial obligations of the wealthy are relaxed even more than they are today.
If this idea is pursued, the zones will become Third World nations within nations in the North American landmass, de facto colonies which have been insourced for corporate convenience. They’ll belch out poisons in their unregulated mines, farms and factories; under-bid one another for jobs and underpay workers while placing them in increasingly unsafe conditions; drain revenue from local, state and federal government; and lower the overall standard of living.
4. The absolute rights of private ownership.
I turn again to Sen. Rand Paul on this issue, because he expresses these ideas clearly and directly (just as he does when I agree with him, on issues of civil liberties and drone warfare), although he has been known to recant somewhat afterwards.
Paul said that he opposed the Civil Rights Act .. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/howard-university-rand-paul-falsely-claims-he-didnt-oppose-civil-rights-actpaul-i-civil .. because, he said, "I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.”
Here’s the dystopian dimension of Sen. Paul’s argument: Governments exist to uphold the law and, at the federal level, to uphold the Constitution. The Civil Rights Law serves both purposes. If “private ownership” is a barrier against these governmental prerogatives, where does it end? If you can’t outlaw discrimination on private property, what can you outlaw: Fraud? Theft? Murder?
In Paul Randian libertarianism there is no limit to the deeds a business owner can commit inside the confines of his own business. Even if laws against theft and murder are upheld, that would almost certainly mean an end to all workplace safety laws, much less minimum wage laws. As with free-enterprise zones, workers (and anyone in the vicinity) could be subject to the dangers of a Bhopal or a Bangladesh clothing factory, and government would be powerless to stop it.
This time the mayhem wouldn’t be limited to some designated places on the map. The entire country would be placed at the legal, economic and environmental mercy of property holders. The nation would be divided into Owners and Others, with the Others given no ability to enforce societal values—even matters of national security—over the Owners.
The counter-argument will often be made that “it can be settled with the free market.” Sen. Paul made that argument himself, when he said he “would not go” to the Woolworth’s which refused to seat African Americans during the civil rights struggle. But people lack alternatives, in an economy increasingly dominated by a few corporations. And they’re unlikely to hear about most of these crimes and injustices, in an era where corporate media are also under “private ownership.”
The unaided needy. Selfishness run riot. A North America dotted with Third World colonies. And a blighted landscape where Others are subjugated to Owners.
RJ Eskow is a senior fellow with the Campaign for America's Future.
http://www.alternet.org/what-america-would-look-if-libertarians-got-their-way
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The question libertarians just can’t answer
Wednesday, Jun 5, 2013 06:17 AM +1000
If your approach is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
Michael Lind
(Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel)
Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?
It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling.
But this isn’t an adequate response. Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.
Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Other political philosophies pass the test, even if their exemplars flunk other tests. Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as examples of “really-existing socialism.” They argued that, while communist regimes fell short in the areas of democracy and civil rights, they proved that socialism can succeed in a large-scale modern industrial society.
While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
Lacking any really-existing libertarian countries to which they can point, the free-market right is reduced to ranking countries according to “economic freedom.” Somewhat different lists are provided by the Fraser Institute .. http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html .. in Canada and the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking .. in Washington, D.C.
According to their similar global maps of economic freedom, the economically-free countries of the world are by and large the mature, well-established industrial democracies: the U.S. and Canada, the nations of western Europe and Japan. But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise. Indeed, the government share of GDP in these and similar OECD countries is around forty percent—nearly half the economy.
Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries. For example, in the latest ranking of economic liberty by the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking , the top five nations are Hong Kong (a city, not a country), Singapore (a city-state), Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland (small-population countries).
With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire. Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.
Australia and New Zealand depended for protection first on the British empire and now on the United States. Its fabled militias to the contrary, Switzerland might not have maintained its independence for long if Nazi Germany had won World War II.
These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade. Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S. (number 10 on the Heritage list of economic freedom) or even medium-sized countries like Germany (number 19) or Japan (number 24).
And then there is Mauritius.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. has less economic freedom than Mauritius, another small island country, this one off the southeast coast of Africa. At number 8, Mauritius is two rungs above the U.S., at number 10 in the global index of economic liberty.
The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?
How about education? According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010. For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent, compared to only 88.5 percent in economically-freer Mauritius.
Infant mortality? In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S. Maternal mortality in Mauritius is at 60 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 21 in the U.S. Economic liberty comes at a price in human survival, it would seem. Oh, well—at least Mauritius is economically free!
Even to admit such trade-offs—like higher infant mortality, in return for less government—would undermine the claim of libertarians that Americans and other citizens of advanced countries could enjoy the same quality of life, but at less cost, if most government agencies and programs were replaced by markets and for-profit firms. Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.
It’s a seductive vision—enjoying the same quality of life that today’s heavily-governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less regulation. The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced to return to the question with which we began: if libertarianism is not only appealing but plausible, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the_question_libertarians_just_cant_answer/
This post specifically to your 2nd down,
Thom Hartmann Eviscerates Right-Libertarianism
maybe because that's as far as i've gone this time, which is most informative .. see also ..
Rand Paul: Drama Queen Or Secret Terrorist?
[...]
Libertarians are a people constantly in search of issues to be self-righteous about. This is the problem of a political movement about “freedom” peopled largely by white men with college
degrees and above-average incomes: there’s not a lot of freedom they don’t already have, and not a lot of situations where their civil rights are being potentially trampled. The TSA is a
wonderful thing for contemporary American libertarianism; it’s one of not many places where a upper middle class Linux engineer can actually stand off against an invasive government.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71317499
I was looking to see if something like American Libertarianism is (or American Libertarians are) different from any other Libertarians in
the world was on the board, because of a certainty i read a sentiment as that somewhere, yet can't find it on a Google search either.
Shrug. Can't get everything you wish for, eh. LOL.
What if you cut all benefits? What if all of public life were a giant competition? What libertarianism would look like in real life.
By RJ Eskow / AlterNet December 25, 2013
These four libertarian/conservative dystopias are offered, as Rod Serling used to say in "The Twilight Zone," "for your consideration."
The “Libertarian/Conservative”
I’ve qualified my previous writings on libertarianism with disclaimers explaining that I’m addressing a specific, popular subset of libertarian thought. But I’ve still run afoul of dozens of people who say, “I’m a libertarian and I don’t think those things.” I’ve still received comments like those from David Brin .. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/09/bringing-back-feudalism-is.html , who correctly notes that I’m not addressing libertarians like Friedrich Hayek in my criticism.
True. But Hayek ain’t in the saddle these days. Ayn Rand is leading the posse, to the extent any intellectual figure is. But I'll put my disclaimer upfront this time: I acknowledge that, as libertarian-friendly writer John Danaher .. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/danaher20131218 .. puts it, “’libertarianism’ has come to denote a broad, often fractious, group of political theories.”
I suppose it’s only fitting that a philosophy celebrating competing markets would, to a certain extent, be a set of competing markets itself.
But it seems even clearer that a “libertarian” in today’s political environment is almost always someone who ascribes to certain core philosophies: He abhors government, hates taxation, and is hostile to collective action on behalf of the less fortunate. Name any prominent modern libertarian—Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, Peter Thiel, Rand Paul—and they are likely to fit this description.
These figures represent a singular and increasingly dominant libertarian vision. To avoid future confusion, I'll give their brand of thought an admittedly imperfect name: “libertarian/conservative.” It is that vision, and their future, which I address here—and it's a frightening future.
1. What if you cut all benefits?
You’ve heard it from Sen. Rand Paul and other conservatives this winter: unemployment benefits increase unemployment. It’s an enormously destructive idea, though absurd on its face. It's like the argument that hospitals create sick people; after all, there are so many of them there.
We usually consider such thinking "primitive" in modern societies.
Yet that's exactly what libertarian/conservatives are arguing when they say that unemployment benefits increased or extend unemployment. There is no credible evidence to suggest that this is true. There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that unemployment is caused by other factors, including poor consumer demand and lack of business confidence.
Right now there are nearly three job seekers for every job opening. That means there are no jobs available for two out of the three. They will not “go out and find work” once their unemployment benefits stop. They will simply plunge into deeper economic misery. They will become like accident victims who are denied hospital care because it would “foster an attitude of dependency.”
But, as absurd and unkind as this thinking is, there’s something even more frightening about it: This kind of thinking never ends. If you believe that unemployment benefits cause unemployment, you’ll cut those benefits off. That could throw millions of people onto the welfare rolls. But if you believe that welfare causes dependency, you’ll cut those benefits off, too. That will leave people utterly dependent on programs like heating oil subsidies, food assistance, and even homeless shelters.
But if you believe that those programs create dependency, too....
It never stops: Close down the homeless shelters. Shut down the Salvation Army. Make it illegal to throw a starving person a coin or toss a blanket over them as they lay on the sidewalk. This logic only ends one way: in a hellish dystopia where the underclass is starving, homeless and dying in droves.
If that seems melodramatic, ask a libertarian/conservative this question: When will you know that your theory is wrong?
2. Nothing but competition.
This idea lies at the heart of libertarian and conservative thinking. The argument says that human beings excel when they are competing with one another for dominance. The free market is the best economic system in the world, we’re told, because private enterprises compete with one another for market share.
This is the thinking behind the movement to privatize government services. In fact, it’s the very same thinking which led the conservative American Enterprise Institute to design the set of policies the world now knows as “Obamacare.”
It’s also wrong. We saw that in the ignominious failure of libertarian Eddie Lambert, the Sears CEO who drove his company into the ground with the misguided notion that internal competition among his company’s departments would cause each of them to function more efficiently. That proved to be an enormously frustrating experience for customers, and ignominious failure for the corporation as a whole.
These ideas, along with a number of other misguided notions, have caused Sears stock to lose more than half its value .. http://www.businessinsider.com.au/lampert-hedge-fund-facing-redemptions-2013-12 . (Lynn Parramore has a good roundup of the Lambert fiasco here .. http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/ .) Eddie Lambert’s biggest mistake was believing that, in the words of Bloomberg BusinessWeek .. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles , “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly… they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
Wrong. It turns out that people who are motivated to act out of self-interest will do whatever it takes to enrich themselves, even if that means damaging the entire society—in this case, the Sears “society”—in the process. Sure, competition “works,” sometimes, for some things. But the Sears experiment showed us that it works best when there is a fabric which knits the competing parts together into something more than the sum of its parts.
We call that something a nation.
Eddie Lambert’s Sears is a nation in microcosm. When its common purpose was lost, the entire enterprise collapsed. Eddie Lambert taught us that that when people act solely out of self-interest, they act destructively toward others, and hurt themselves as well. Everybody loses.
Lambert wanted Sears to teach the nation a lesson, and it did. Selfishness is one of the roads to dystopia.
3. Free-enterprise zones.
The concept of the free-enterprise zone was first popularized by Republican Jack Kemp. Kemp, a football star-turned-House member and vice-presidential candidate (with Bob Dole in 1996), adopted the concept, also known as “urban enterprise zones,” as a campaign theme during his initial rise and a 1988 presidential campaign. It’s based on the belief that economically disadvantaged areas—inner cities or impoverished rural areas—would be revitalized if regulations, minimum wage requirements and tax levels were eased.
This concept is based on two separate but related theories. The first is that employers are likely to be attracted to these struggling areas by the lower cost of doing business there. But a deeper, less frequently articulated theory cuts even closer to theoretical libertarianism: that regulations and taxes are themselves economy-killers. Free-enterprise zones, it was thought, could therefore become laboratory experiments which would demonstrate how much better an economy functions without them.
It didn’t work out that way. A few of the zone’s tools, such as targeted tax breaks, have provided temporary relief in some instances. But overall the experiment has been a singular failure. As one roundup of research on zones put it: “Most of the more sophisticated studies show no increases in employment or per capita income.”
Instead, the one consistent finding across all studies appears to be this: zones typically made money for one or more corporations, but the promised social benefit in jobs and income never materialized.
That hasn’t killed the zone idea, or the many variations on its theme. Statewide initiatives, offered as tax breaks or other incentives, have been equally unsuccessful. The most spectacularly unsuccessful track record in this regard belongs to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has offered nearly $2 billion .. http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-new-jersey-tax-incentive-payoff.html .. in tax incentives to spur job growth. The result? Job growth in New Jersey lags behind most of the nation, while hundreds of millions in tax breaks went to giant casinos and to large corporations Prudential, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Verizon, and Panasonic.
The zone idea is truly dystopian in scope, and that’s the idea which refuses to die. The premise is this: The regions inhabited by low-income brown, black, or white citizens should become places where basic worker protections are nullified, and the financial obligations of the wealthy are relaxed even more than they are today.
If this idea is pursued, the zones will become Third World nations within nations in the North American landmass, de facto colonies which have been insourced for corporate convenience. They’ll belch out poisons in their unregulated mines, farms and factories; under-bid one another for jobs and underpay workers while placing them in increasingly unsafe conditions; drain revenue from local, state and federal government; and lower the overall standard of living.
4. The absolute rights of private ownership.
I turn again to Sen. Rand Paul on this issue, because he expresses these ideas clearly and directly (just as he does when I agree with him, on issues of civil liberties and drone warfare), although he has been known to recant somewhat afterwards.
Paul said that he opposed the Civil Rights Act .. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/howard-university-rand-paul-falsely-claims-he-didnt-oppose-civil-rights-actpaul-i-civil .. because, he said, "I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.”
Here’s the dystopian dimension of Sen. Paul’s argument: Governments exist to uphold the law and, at the federal level, to uphold the Constitution. The Civil Rights Law serves both purposes. If “private ownership” is a barrier against these governmental prerogatives, where does it end? If you can’t outlaw discrimination on private property, what can you outlaw: Fraud? Theft? Murder?
In Paul Randian libertarianism there is no limit to the deeds a business owner can commit inside the confines of his own business. Even if laws against theft and murder are upheld, that would almost certainly mean an end to all workplace safety laws, much less minimum wage laws. As with free-enterprise zones, workers (and anyone in the vicinity) could be subject to the dangers of a Bhopal or a Bangladesh clothing factory, and government would be powerless to stop it.
This time the mayhem wouldn’t be limited to some designated places on the map. The entire country would be placed at the legal, economic and environmental mercy of property holders. The nation would be divided into Owners and Others, with the Others given no ability to enforce societal values—even matters of national security—over the Owners.
The counter-argument will often be made that “it can be settled with the free market.” Sen. Paul made that argument himself, when he said he “would not go” to the Woolworth’s which refused to seat African Americans during the civil rights struggle. But people lack alternatives, in an economy increasingly dominated by a few corporations. And they’re unlikely to hear about most of these crimes and injustices, in an era where corporate media are also under “private ownership.”
The unaided needy. Selfishness run riot. A North America dotted with Third World colonies. And a blighted landscape where Others are subjugated to Owners.
RJ Eskow is a senior fellow with the Campaign for America's Future.
http://www.alternet.org/what-america-would-look-if-libertarians-got-their-way
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The question libertarians just can’t answer
Wednesday, Jun 5, 2013 06:17 AM +1000
If your approach is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
Michael Lind
(Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel)
Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?
It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling.
But this isn’t an adequate response. Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.
Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Other political philosophies pass the test, even if their exemplars flunk other tests. Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as examples of “really-existing socialism.” They argued that, while communist regimes fell short in the areas of democracy and civil rights, they proved that socialism can succeed in a large-scale modern industrial society.
While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
Lacking any really-existing libertarian countries to which they can point, the free-market right is reduced to ranking countries according to “economic freedom.” Somewhat different lists are provided by the Fraser Institute .. http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html .. in Canada and the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking .. in Washington, D.C.
According to their similar global maps of economic freedom, the economically-free countries of the world are by and large the mature, well-established industrial democracies: the U.S. and Canada, the nations of western Europe and Japan. But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise. Indeed, the government share of GDP in these and similar OECD countries is around forty percent—nearly half the economy.
Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries. For example, in the latest ranking of economic liberty by the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking , the top five nations are Hong Kong (a city, not a country), Singapore (a city-state), Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland (small-population countries).
With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire. Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.
Australia and New Zealand depended for protection first on the British empire and now on the United States. Its fabled militias to the contrary, Switzerland might not have maintained its independence for long if Nazi Germany had won World War II.
These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade. Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S. (number 10 on the Heritage list of economic freedom) or even medium-sized countries like Germany (number 19) or Japan (number 24).
And then there is Mauritius.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. has less economic freedom than Mauritius, another small island country, this one off the southeast coast of Africa. At number 8, Mauritius is two rungs above the U.S., at number 10 in the global index of economic liberty.
The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?
How about education? According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010. For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent, compared to only 88.5 percent in economically-freer Mauritius.
Infant mortality? In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S. Maternal mortality in Mauritius is at 60 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 21 in the U.S. Economic liberty comes at a price in human survival, it would seem. Oh, well—at least Mauritius is economically free!
Even to admit such trade-offs—like higher infant mortality, in return for less government—would undermine the claim of libertarians that Americans and other citizens of advanced countries could enjoy the same quality of life, but at less cost, if most government agencies and programs were replaced by markets and for-profit firms. Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.
It’s a seductive vision—enjoying the same quality of life that today’s heavily-governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less regulation. The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced to return to the question with which we began: if libertarianism is not only appealing but plausible, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the_question_libertarians_just_cant_answer/
This post specifically to your 2nd down,
Thom Hartmann Eviscerates Right-Libertarianism
maybe because that's as far as i've gone this time, which is most informative .. see also ..
Rand Paul: Drama Queen Or Secret Terrorist?
[...]
Libertarians are a people constantly in search of issues to be self-righteous about. This is the problem of a political movement about “freedom” peopled largely by white men with college
degrees and above-average incomes: there’s not a lot of freedom they don’t already have, and not a lot of situations where their civil rights are being potentially trampled. The TSA is a
wonderful thing for contemporary American libertarianism; it’s one of not many places where a upper middle class Linux engineer can actually stand off against an invasive government.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71317499
I was looking to see if something like American Libertarianism is (or American Libertarians are) different from any other Libertarians in
the world was on the board, because of a certainty i read a sentiment as that somewhere, yet can't find it on a Google search either.
Shrug. Can't get everything you wish for, eh. LOL.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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