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Wish I hadn't seen the libertarian critique. It was bad like most critiques of libertarianism are bad. Scott still holds the record for the only good critique I've ever read.
Every other critique makes it sound like libertarianism is a group of scolds that just want to take away the toy that everyone calls government.
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
Libertarianism poses a simple question for any would be government bans: is the thing you are trying to ban worth killing and imprisoning people to reduce that thing?
For many libertarians there are things that definitely meet that criteria. Murder, kidnapping, serious bodily assault, etc.
They phrase it in the post as "who are you to ban that thing, why should we listen to you?" But really it is "who are you to say we get to kill people just because you think something is bad?"
There are a lot of things that are bad but less bad than killing and kidnapping people. And it sometimes feels like everyone is just playing signalling games when they say the government should ban something but can't affirmatively answer "yes it is worth killing people and imprisoning them in order to ban this thing" Meanwhile it feels like libertarians are one of the few groups acknowledging the on the ground enforcement costs of government actions.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
This is not true. Private citizens can be reasoned and negotiated with. Sovereign rule is absolute. Especially in the context of the administrative state.
The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.
You may argue that the lives of private citizens would bear similar relationships of total violence as they do with the State in the state of nature, but this is an argument against anarchism, not against libertarianism.
Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.
There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"
Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.
Parental relationships are indeed similar in nature to that of a sovereign to his subjects. Is is common the words are the same even.
What you seem to be denying is that civilization allows us other types of relationships. But it does.
Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.
Libertarians, Classical Liberals and other legalists seek to extend the domain of this boon granted by civilization to the largest possible extent.
This is not fundamentally opposed to the base idea that this ability is grounded by violence, either in individual self defense or through the means of sovereign enforcement of law. This connection is in fact one of the core components of the philosophy since the beginning.
One in fact so characteristic the derisive name the fascist gave it as the "night watchman state" stuck as a self description of minarchism.
I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:
But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?
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I'll think about this. My sense is that the base relationship is what matters. The base social relationship is talking. The base family relationship is love/nurture. The base relationship with the state seems to be an imbalanced power dynamic in favor of the state.
Possibly so, but then I think the source of the matter does not begin (or end) with a proposition that it seems somewhat unique to government that rules are enforced by violence/kidnapping. I think something else has to be doing the work.
EDIT: I meant to also mention that it's not just child/parent relations. It's genuinely all rules ever. You're playing a board game, and you want to make a 'house rule'? Well, what if someone just refuses to play by it? Escalate? Eventually kick them out of your house? ...we start running into the 'exile' problem again, supposing they become maximally-oppositional. I don't think most people would start off saying, "You should consider whether or not it's worth using violence/kidnapping to enforce a house rule for a board game," even if that is a conceivable end state in the maximally-oppositional case.
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It's the same picture. The government won't give up until it has won.
If only I had three further paragraphs.
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I'm sorry, this is where I break with libertarians. What exactly do you think gives courts and contracts their teeth? Violence and kidnapping. Or sovereignty, as it is more commonly known. A monopoly on violence.
Suppose me and a few hundred thousand people came together and formed a corporation with salaried employees with the duties of ruling over contractual disputes, dealing with petty crime, and all issues related to security, and everyone involved agreed to defer to this body in binding arbitration and forgo their right to banditry and warlordism.
That corporation is a state. Congratulations, you've recreated statism with extra steps.
Libertarians aren't prophets in the wilderness screaming about the injustice of collective violence. Yes, it is worth killing people and imprisoning people over. People for thousands of years have valued law and order over the Hobbsian war of all against all and people are greatly relieved to have left the tribal experience of feuds and wergild.
I specifically said that sometimes libertarians agree it is fine to use violence. Its just that they want a high threshold for deciding when to deploy state violence or collective violence. Your point about corporations turning into states is more relevant to anarchist strains of thought.
They are specifically willing to deploy that violence:
Point 1 puts them in disagreement with various anarchist strains of thought. Point 2 puts them in disagreement with various modern progressive strains of thought and most marxist/socialist strains. And point 3 puts them in disagreement with just about everyone.
Point 3 is simultaneously why most people dislike libertarian thought, and why most critiques of them suck. Its all just special pleading by each specific author on why their specific social project deserves an exception. "Yes, it is good when libertarians want to oppose the social projects of people I hate, but the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse". The pattern becomes obvious after reading the same type of critique a few times, but I've had the misfortune of reading the same damn thing over a hundred times.
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.
Oh, I'm aware that what I want is essentially imperialism.
I've struggled with how to think about this.
I think that America's individualism and liberalism are highly unnatural and bad fits for human nature. That's why we had to have the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in human history, brainwash most of the nation for 13 years via school and media, cultivate a culture of ripping families apart through an expectation of moving out of your parents' house, and impose a taboo on cousin marriage to make it all work.
This is my difficulty. Once we've done all that. Once we've inculcated individualism and little L "liberalism" in the population, then it seems like you can have a form of federalism (AKA imperialism) that is compatible with a form of libertarianism (AKA doing what you want outside of what you're being forced to do via imperialism.)
But I do understand that the basic counter argument is that maybe we shouldn't strip people of the non-liberal parts of their cultures. Maybe we shouldn't impose an incest taboo, encourage the degraded form of the extended family we call "the nuclear family", and do all the other things that make the form of life we have in America possible.
I genuinely don't have a good answer for this. Individualism and little-L liberalism are the only way of life I know. I'm the child of two parents who both moved to different states than my grandparents, and I now live in a different city than my parents.
I've never known a collectivist society. I've never known a tightly knit small town community. I'm mostly happy, and a foolish part of me honestly believes we're a few reforms away from making this bizarre system of ours work with the 2 million year old hardware humankind is running on. But maybe the neo-reactionary and post-liberal right are correct, and it was all a doomed experiment from the start.
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How is this problem solved through democracy?
After my reading on Renaissance humanism, I don't really think of the thing that makes our society work (to the extent that it does) as a "democracy", but as an attempt at an Aristotlean "politeia" or constitutional republic.
Many parts of this are tangled up in a system that also sells itself on everyone having a voice (the modern meaning of "democracy"), but I think the lynchpins that make things work are the fact that we brainwash most of the populace for 13 years via public schools and the media, and that we received the individualist-trending practices of Christian Europe (nuclear family, incest taboo, etc.)
It also doesn't hurt that we're the wealthiest, most technologically advanced and highest state capacity nation in history. Even if parts of your system rely on sanding off the rough edges of human nature, where you fail to do that, it is a nice consolation prize to have a system where almost no one is starving, dying of thirst, etc. People don't want to rebel against rulers that keep them materially comfortable, even if they can feel the friction of the society rubbing against their human instincts.
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I think the problem of petty tyrants crosses systems.
Breaking down life into multiple areas:
Family, Social, Market, and Government.
Of these areas I think petty tyrants are weakest and least effective when wielding the market against their victims. The word Tyrant literally comes from someones name in Greece who was wielding a government against people.
The other answer which I know people hate is that markets are going to reflect reality. And when reality is ugly markets will look ugly. But punching a mirror doesn't fix the ugly face staring back at you.
I don't think markets are the end all be all of all problems. There are certain classes of problems that they solve extremely well. And plenty of problems that they do very little about.
I do think governments are generally terrible at solving most problems, and often make things worse They can certainly supercharge petty tyrants.
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I think it would be fair to say that Point 2 is smuggling in the idea that it is not a social project, but it appears to me that it is in fact a social project. Civilization is nothing if not a social project and so defending its key cornerstone must also be a social project, I would think. That would then make Point 3 contradictory, as libertarians would appear to be just as willing as anyone else to deploy violence for their social project.
Which would seem to indicate that this:
is a statement that applies just as well to libertarianism.
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
I guess I just don’t see a way in which property rights aren’t a social project.
Do you? If so, do you have the time to explain your point of view?
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I was more objecting to the provocative terminology that libertarians use: that taxation is theft, that bans are imprisonment and murder, that many straightforward and inoffensive things are in fact statist violence to the individual. It is no more convincing to me than the vegan framing of an industrial concentration camp of imprisoned bovine lifeforms is, in fact, a cattle pen. It is a stupid way to argue and no one is actually convinced by that sort of rhetoric.
The sacral force of the law has always held the connotation of life or death consequence: since Roman times it was thus. Not everyone follows laws because of moral duty: justice carries both the scales and the sword! It is so obvious that only libertarians feel smug about stating the obvious. Yes, the state has the power to enforce its directives with force. That is a good thing. If it did not, then it would not have the power to make anyone heed it. And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!
If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.
Only a libertarian would believe that without a state, men would follow laws. Thousands of years of history have taught us this, that ambitious men who break weak states soon place themselves above it, to rule like tyrants. Similarly as you have encountered hundreds of critiques of libertarianism, I have read just as much apologia for it and have emerged thoroughly unconvinced of its merit and totally dumbfounded by its complete unseriousness.
You say in the first paragraph that libertarians are wrong and reductive to call government enforcement a form of violence.
You say in the second paragraph that obviously government is violence and it always has been, and only an idiot would think otherwise.
So which is it?
If it is the second paragraph that is true I don't disagree with you. If it's the first paragraph I do disagree with you.
The people of a nation are made up of individuals. You are one such individual. Where do you personally draw the line? What social projects do you think are necessary enough to be enforced with violence? I can't speak with "the people of the nation" I can only speak with individuals.
This vagueness of thrusting off responsibility for calling for the violence is also familiar.
I said no such thing, you set up a false dichotomy. Vegans can call slaughterhouses concentration camps and although there are superficial similarities it is ultimately not a true comparison. The same is true for libertarianism, because collective action in the form of violence (either directly through force or indirectly through coercion) is a normal and trivial thing.
And in a postmodern, Foucaultian sense, I suppose this is tyranny and murder and kidnapping. In this case, I will take personal responsibility, as a individual, to assert my social project of throwing people who assert naive libertarianism into the wood chipper: as a collection of pederasts, drug addicts, and tax evaders who do nothing but redefine perfectly normal things and call it injustice.
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Four: Enforcing contracts, right?
What if some of the people saying this are right, though? That is, excluding the American frontier, which I think was historically unprecedented and will not be repeated, what if a stable society really does need a social code enforced by the state or an entity with equivalent power? I guess that would then pass your bar?
Contracts can pre-agree to enforcement methods. One of them is to just piggy back off of state enforcement and say that one party now owns stuff.
If a stable society needs some form of social enforcement that would pass my bar in the same way that property rights does. But I'm generally suspicious of such requests. Non government entities like religion have had more success and longevity enforcing such things through social means. After all violence is only one means for achieving social ends. You can try to convince people, pay them, or use negative social consequences. None of those things are what I'd consider "violence".
Fair enough. So in your proposed libertarian world, you would not automatically have the right to sue for breach of contract, damages, or debt? Unless these things turned out to be foundational.
I thought those things were more central to libertarian ideology.
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