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Are you against tobacco and alcohol? If not, is it a cost-benefit situation with very specific numbers and math, or something unique to seatbelts? The right to not wear a seatbelt is a natural consequence of self-ownership.
I’m a utilitarian libertarian, not deontological. Seat belt laws are easily justified on a cost/benefit basis.
Restricting/taxing things with known severe downsides like alcohol and tobacco is also easily justified, though the details are much more complicated than mandating seat belts. Of late, I think broad legalization of digital sports gambling is a pretty bad idea.
Externalities and tradeoffs are real and ought to be addressed, in other words, and that sometimes necessitates government intervention and curtailing liberty.
Then you're not a libertarian. A deontological libertarian would not care if liberty lead to less utility, they'd still be for liberty. A utilitarian libertarian believes liberty does lead to more utility. You apparently do not believe this; at best you're just a plain utilitarian.
“A utilitarian libertarian believes liberty does lead to more utility.”
This is generally true, not absolutely true. It’s a testable claim, in fact.
I'm a rule utilitarian and I think I overlap with say Tyler Cowen or Scott Sumner on politics on at least 90% of what I read from them.
Some here seem to want to treat libertarianism as a religion with pure doctrine that cannot be disobeyed, instead of an approach that can deal with empirical reality, trade offs, and necessary compromise.
I thought it was generally accepted that “classic liberal” and “libertarian” were interchangeable terms, alongside the rarer “right neoliberal.”
It's not a testable claim, it's a definition. And it's right there in the name. Libertarianism is about liberty. If you're evaluating propositions based strictly on some form of utility that does not assign high utility to liberty itself, it's hard to be a libertarian. If your evaluation often results in non-liberty being chosen over liberty, it's ridiculous to call yourself one.
I do assign high utility to liberty.
But I am not an insane person so I do not afford it infinite utility, or pretend there aren’t issues where tradeoffs exist.
The testable claim is whether in any given case liberty does lead to utility.
Assuming by definition it does, or simply defining utility to be liberty, with no consideration of empirical reality, turns libertarianism into some kind of fanatical political religion along the same lines as Marxism, and it’s just a stupid way to go about political philosophy.
“Libertarianism is about liberty” well sure. What makes you seem uneducated is that you appear to have no awareness of the variety of thought around those concepts and competing movements and subgroups. For instance, there are civil libertarians who are all for personal freedom, just not where one’s labor and wallet are concerned.
One of the primary reasons the term “libertarian” exists is that in the US “liberal” evolved to mean “left liberal” and so another label was needed to mean “right liberal” or “classic liberal.” In Europe, I can identify as a liberal; in America I have to have a different label, whether classic liberal, right neoliberal, or state capacity libertarian.
The point was not “libertarian means anarcho-capitalism and anyone who ever says anything positive about even limited government is a totalitarian statist.”
Yes. And if you keep evaluating that claim and it keeps failing, and you choose "utility" over liberty each time, you're just not a libertarian by any reasonable meaning of the word. "Well I'd be for liberty if liberty led to utility, but it turns out following the instructions of Comrade Stalin (or Lee Kwan Yu) exactly results in the best utility" is NOT libertarianism, it's just plain old utilitarianism.
I'm aware. I'm also aware of a phenomenon where people will call themselves libertarian but then somehow have very anti-liberty policy preferences. I'm not sure why, it's not like "libertarian" is such a high-status name, but it's a thing.
I mean unironically if communism worked as well as it’s supposed to then I would be a communist. But both theory and practice ruin things.
You claim to be aware of the diversity of thought under the libertarian label and yet you continue to act as though there is one true libertarian doctrine, indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
https://www.libertarianism.org/what-is-a-libertarian
I’m not aware of the phenomenon you speak of; I’m aware of the opposite, where people say “classic liberal” and never “libertarian” to avoid the association with fanatics.
@The_Nybbler might be slightly too narrow on what it takes to be a libertarian but it really does seem quite strange to call yourself a libertarian and then endorse laws like seatbelt laws. I just call myself a normal liberal so I can go one way or the other but it's hard to take some who calls themselves a libertarian seriously when they take a case where all the relevant externalities are internalized, risk of injury due to not wearing a seat belt, and decide the state should have a say. It just feels like one of the most central cases of not being a libertarian.
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I think you’ve arrived at paternalistic classical conservatism, just by a scenic route.
No.
Libertarianism is not solely anarcho-capitalism.
“Classical conservatism” is opposed to “classical liberalism” on several key grounds, and I favor the latter. Many “conservatives” in the liberal tradition share a lot with libertarians, of course.
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Please do so -- what is the net cost to you of increased traffic fatalities? (in a libertarian society if possible, but I guess that's hard mode -- even in today's US I think you will have a tough time)
It’s higher than the net cost of seat belts and a compliance regime.
Having more severe injuries and deaths from auto accidents, that are preventable by seat belts, is so obviously a bad thing for any given individual and society at large due to increased medical spending and decreased tax revenue alone.
There are so many bad cases of government intervention and so it’s always a shame to see a clearly good one get opposed.
You are wrong about the medical spending -- in a libertarian society this would be a personal matter, and in the real world the medical savings from all the additional (mostly) young people who die in crashes rather than getting old and sick far outweighs the additional burden from those who might choose not to wear a seatbelt and incur somewhat more serious injuries than they otherwise would. Same goes for excessive tobacco and drinking.
The second claim is more interesting -- if you think that society has a right to maximize tax revenue from individual citizens, it sounds like government should be able to direct people's labour however it deems optimal, on utilitarian grounds? I'd probably argue against this on the basis of the track record of planned economies in general, but in any case it sounds diametrically opposed to any form of libertarianism (or even anarchism) that I'm familiar with?
I think he is wrong about net tax revenue as well. Something like 60% of Americans receive more in transfers than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes, i.e. they are a net drain on government revenue. Plus, I would wager that lower income people are more likely to not wear seatbelts (and drive less safe cars in general) which would skew this even further.
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Empirically, one does not maximize tax revenue by directing people’s labor. So doing that seems pretty dumb right there. (The great thing about consequentialism is that if something leads to bad consequences you always have the ability to stop doing that thing.)
“You don’t believe in absolute freedom so don’t you support centralized planning?” is not a reasonable understanding of a moderate libertarian position. Central banks can be good though. (I think that issue splits plenty of libertarians too.)
Moreover, the government should not be aiming to maximize tax revenue as a terminal goal. The US government ought to be adhering to its functions as outlined in the constitution; seat belts can fall under “promote the general welfare”.
Consider that most of the Founding Fathers qualify as quite libertarian in their philosophy and yet they certainly were not anarcho-capitalists in their policy.
In the real world, having people dead or crippled from causes where we can reduce the occurrence through low-cost government intervention is going to be bad for the budget, relative to the alternative.
In other words, having seat belts mandated leads to better consequences than the alternative. Making alcohol illegal does not. Clean air laws are generally good (though carbon taxes and such would be better) and occupational licensing is generally bad. Individual issues can be analyzed individually.
Which promotes the general welfare (as pertains to tax revenue; if you mean something else by those words I'll need you to say what exactly that is) more:
or
If you are not quantifying better consequences, I don't think you are making a utilitarian argument either -- 'conventional statist' is my impression, which is fine, popular even -- but I don't see what's libertarian about your philosophy? "You believe in liberty unless someone wants to make a law about it" seems about as good as "You don’t believe in absolute freedom so don’t you support centralized planning?".
My impression here is that you don’t distinguish between anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism and fail to understand how a constitutional system can allow tradeoffs between liberty and other values, using government intervention via a system of limited powers.
By your standards I may be a “conventional statist” when I’m more libertarian than at least 95% of the US population (and 99% globally).
Utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism. People not dying as much from car crashes from some cheap webbing and government enforcement is good mathematically in terms of spending and taxes, as well as just “good” in the sense of easily avoidable death is pretty bad all around.
I believe in liberty as a default and a terminal good, but not an absolute one never to be traded off against other issues. Plenty of libertarians are not anarchic-capitalists; I’m not describing some special set of beliefs unique to me.
Everyone (virtually) thinks this though -- people just differ on which issues they think are valid to trade off against. (usually things that they don't like anyways are deemed insignificant infringements on the freedoms of others who disagree, but that's not central)
I think you may need to provide your definition of libertarianism if you think (for example) that current-day USA is a reasonable instantiation (or at least not incompatible) -- IOW, 'if your libertarianism has brought you here, what good is it?'
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As I recall all of these things have been shown to if anything reduce total lifetime healthcare costs, as most of them tend to kill you relatively young (if at all) -- so before you have time to rack up a bunch of bills for long-term care and general age-related degeneration.
So I'm more curious about the actual nature of his utilitarian grounds than how he squares it with any sort of libertarianism.
Relevant Yes, Prime Minister clip
I suppose the question would be whether those kill or harm you quickly enough to significantly reduce your lifetime earnings. That seems doubtful with smoking and drinking, but it may very well be the case with drugs and not wearing seatbelts.
From a utilitarian standpoint, I suppose the law would ideally mandate seatbelt wearing for children and the gainfully employed, while forbidding seatbelt use for the chronically unemployed and retired.
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Now adjust for lost productivity and taxes due to disability and/or early death.
Had we more sensible healthcare policy the gap would be even bigger.
Please refer to my second point -- your argument appears to allow for unbounded government intervention into career/life decisions of any kind. Retirement, for instance, would seem to be right out -- much less FIRE or hobo-ism.
I'm not sure what to call this system, but it is very not-libertarian.
I gotta say it’s funny to basically be advocating for good old-fashioned American style government with a GMU Econ-pilled approach and be told it’s verging on totalitarianism.
Not at all, it's a very popular normie position -- but it's not libertarianism. The specific arguments you are making do seem unbounded in the direction of totalitarianism, which I think is because you are trying to somehow encompass the libertarian label for whatever reasons. I suggest just saying that you think you and/or the government knows best what the citizenry should do with their bodies, and has the right to rule accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
I suggest I know better than you about the range of ideas under the label of “libertarianism”.
My views on speech, guns, trade, and taxes put me pretty far from “popular” and “normie” in the US let alone globally, but it’s cute that you think you can extrapolate all that from my thinking seat belt laws are justified.
Define yours then -- as you say there are many. For the record I would not self-describe that way, although there's some intersection and I'm probably on average more likely to agree with a libertarian than not.
I’m a classical liberal or a right neoliberal or a state capacity libertarian. I’m not a deontological libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist, though like Scott I find David Friedman to be a very interesting thinker.
Rule utilitarianism and humanism are my underlying moral philosophies.
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