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Flyover Country #33: Admeyerin’ your Reasonable Libertarianism
See what we did there? It’s a play on words, regarding a man we all highly admire, this week’s guest: Tom Meyer. Tom sticks around for the whole show to discuss libertarianism, social conservatism, as well as his own personal climb up the ladder of influence at Ricochet.
Consider yourself invited! We’d be happy to have you.
Hey, I like my Thatcher badge, especially since it doesn’t mean anything except that I paid extra… Perhaps we could have banners that say “libertarian” or “SoCon” or “Liberal” (for the occasional self-described liberal that we get around here.
Oh, yes. I was agreeing that all law is backed by force, but saying the fallacy is in using that basic fact to invalidate any particular law. For instance, taxation is backed by force, but we agree to taxation – if we disagree with one particular manner in which our tax dollars are used, I do not think it is valid to say that the government uses force to collect my taxes and therefore cannot use it for XY or Z. Don’t get me wrong, I believe I characterized myself (in the podcast, and various other places) as essentially libertarian in my politics. I disagree with most government spending, but I don’t think I’d resort to that argument to support my position.
… I will admit that there are some holes in the theory.
Whoa. The Best Podcast On Ricochet thinks I know stuff. Talk about raising expectations.
Midge, I know what you mean about speaking vs. writing. I found my guest stint harrowing. But it was also exhilarating. You should give it a try!
Mike H: #12 “Talk about voting ourselves slavery and how much you’re willing to kill to stop jaywalking is much more unlikely to happen, or at least require much better and complete context to flesh out the idea beyond a soundbite.”
I think its time to get my cards on the table. I am a conservative in all three phases of American conservatism, and I am a walker. What is a walker? I walk several miles a day, 3.5 on a slow day, slightly over six on a fast day. In the process of walking, when I get to those red/yellow/green light things displaying red or showing a don’t walk display, I look both ways and if there is no reason to wait, I jaywalk.
Should I get a ticket for jaywalking, I’ll pay it. If I am abusing the red light, that is on me. There are good reasons for the traffic laws, including keeping my soul with my body.
If there is some form of slavery you really want to protest, lay it out. Using jaywalking as a euphemism for “voting ourselves slavery” has no heft.
That’s where I disagree with you, and I believe Midge takes this “in the mean time let’s work towards it” approach. No – I don’t think A/C is possible and I think that work towards it includes undermining of real and useful institutions I actually do want to keep.
I read all of your margin notes. You showed remarkable restraint using only two or three instances of profanity.
How did you get the marginal notes to display? (I know Maj told us, but I’m kinda bad with technology…)
Yeah, not to go into the breach again, but if they’re so similar then we’re not really talking about “no government” in A-C. Instead we’re talking about a method for choosing government and law enforcement which is unlikely and which disregards so much human nature. That, and even if we did manage to get it, I wouldn’t want it because it appears to be a worse deal: all the same shortcomings of our current system of government with less ability to influence it.
When you open the file in Adobe Acrobat (assuming you have a recently updated version of the viewer) you press the “Comments” button which is located next to “Fill and Sign.”
That will reveal the comments in context. You can jump to the precise location where I stickied the comment using that scroll bar as well.
Most of them were set to automatically display; for a few I had to hover over the note icon to see the hidden note.
You have no idea how deeply flattered I am by that. Did you read the book, though? Not for nothing, reading the book and refuting it are two sides of the same coin. I hope that my comments were lucid.
Keep in mind as well that my intended audience for the comments was my interlocutor on FB – not the Ricochetti, so I took liberties with language which I normally wouldn’t.
Or more ability to influence it. For example, in a greater selection of dispute-resolution venues, smaller bodies where your vote has more power… more exit rights, generally speaking…
iWe wrote a paper on how competing courts in medieval Europe helped spur the development of rights and so on. It’s not available electronically, but perhaps should be made available by someone who has access to a nice scanner.
According to the authors of “The Market for Liberty” the only “voting” which would go on in their society would consist of how people “vote” with their specie via business and insurance association. There is no “political process” to speak of because the notion of direct democracy is immoral mob rule and even representative government is inherently immoral because it represents “coercion” and is fraught with the peril that people might not follow constitutions designed to restrain government power and trampling of rights.
It’s all very esoteric and insulated from reality. I could see why it would appeal to a person in graduate school (which my friend who recommended it is.)
He included margin notes?? I need to go back to that post. Maybe Majestyk would like to come do a whole show just on that book.
I have a really good book “Liberalsim, The Classical Tradition” (actually, more of a pamphlet than a book) by Ludwig Von Mises; also have “Human Action,” but that is a tome. I am really surprised to see the LVM Institute going so far off the rails as you suggest. I’ve always generally supported it as an organization. I have a friend, now a PhD Econ professor, who attended one of their seminars in college. He remains pretty staunchly libertarian, I think, but his frustration with the libertarians was that they “just aren’t good economists” in his opinion. I think he meant mathematically. Russ Roberts has some fantastic guests on his show, and I’ve always felt that he was very good. But he is also quite reasonable. His interview with Piketty was excellent – though a bit hard to understand through the thick accent.
Within any type of firm, voting (with something other than cash) may be agreed upon as a reasonable method of dispute resolution. Certainly, mutual-aid organizations (when they exist(ed)) and businesses (board-member or shareholder votes) rely on non-cash voting without violating AC principles. Girl-Scout troops, musical consorts… many organizations are firms in the Coasian sense.
As far as I know, AC types have nothing against firms. I mean, it would be supremely weird if they did – one of the freedoms people have in the open market is the freedom to form firms.
I’m not saying you’re doing this, but I think sometimes when people say “reasonable” (like SoCons do for Tom), they mean “being sufficiently differential to my opinions.”
Which is not a wholly inappropriate use of the word, but it does somewhat humorously seem to assume one’s own opinions are inherently reasonable.
Mike H: #50 “I’m not saying you’re doing this, but I think sometimes when people say “reasonable” (like SoCons do for Tom), they mean “being sufficiently differential to my opinions.”
Which is not a wholly inappropriate use of the word, but it does somewhat humorously seem to assume one’s own opinions are inherently reasonable.”
It was only several decades ago that people thought of children as wonderful. We loved them. We could not imagine them being denied the gift of life. It was then a reasonable position, and still it.
However the times have changed and the law, being a teacher, has taught that children may not be wonderful and do not have the right to life. There are any number of pro-aborts at Ricochet who think that the right to life for the unborn is unreasonable. For them, life is not a gift – at least if it belongs to someone else.
There are a lot of people who are not “sufficiently deferential to my opinion” but it is not my opinion that has changed. All of the good reasons for children still exist but have been marginalized to make children and their right to life suspicious, or worse. One cannot have children interfering with whatever it is that “I” want at the moment.
I wrote this in this fashion and picked a particular topic. I don’t think this way about the beltway around a major city. That is unimportant. Specify what is important.
oh – no, I’m sorry. Yes, that is a stupid word to use. What I meant was that he is very generous with his guests. Russ will have people on who totally disagree with him, and he is amazingly charitable. He is a pleasure to listen to.
also – I don’t want people to be “sufficiently differential to my opinions.” If they agree with me, I’ll refer to them as “right,” not “reasonable.” ;) If they are willing to listen and engage, I’ll say they are reasonable, even if they don’t accept anything I say. Ultimately, my goal is to persuade or to be persuaded myself. I’ve changed my opinions a lot of times if someone else presents a better case. A reasonable person is one who addresses your arguments head on and either refutes them or admits that he cannot. An unreasonable person ignores your arguments and just restates what he already said, only louder.
This isn’t a matter of having gone off the rails, Ryan, this book was written in 1970 and is described in glowing terms of the LVMI’s website as a classic.
That’s not to say that every libertarian idea is balderdash – I consider myself to be a soft libertarian on many issues – but Von Mises himself was openly critical of Milton Friedman, calling him a “Monetarist” and denouncing him for insufficient purity.
My primary argument against that is that there is marketplace demand for governance. In light of such a demand the market brings forth that governance in the form of government. I think that orthodox Libertarians are merely being inconsistent when they claim on the one hand that they have no issue with the formation of firms but then draw the line at any notion of Government when it is instituted among men.
Their objections ring sort of hollow and tinny in my ears when they appeal to these vast deus ex machinas that they insist must self-organize in the form of vast, bureacratic, insurance firms and the like in their ideal society.
They may claim that these things are spontaneously ordered, but design is all over them.
I should add that one of the underlying characteristics that I find so jarring and grating in their writings is the constant invocation of what I’ll call “Personal Secession.” Libertarians always want the right to opt out of anything which they find to be objectionable, so long as people are willing to suffer the consequences of opting out. That works fine when you’re talking about “opting out” of your Gym Membership – not so well with National Defense.
I think for many orthodox libertarians, it would be inconsistent (depending on how orthodoxy is defined and how much confidence one needs in one’s beliefs to count as “orthodox”). For the less orthodox, perhaps less so.
I’m a strange type of Anarcho-capitalist in that I approach it from a completely different perspective than the way most people do it. I think “mainstream” Anarcho-capitalism and ultra-libertarian get the reasons incorrect. They oversimplify things and hitch their wagon to absolute axioms. Kind of like trying to create a geocentric model of the universe. You can get a lot of the answers right by observation, but you’re not discovering the best (correct) theory.
The problem I have with your statement is the “instituted among men.” It’s instituted by some men and imposed on others. Typically, imposing something on others in a “might makes right” fashion, even if you have good intentions, and even if you develop an ostensibly pragmatic way of dealing with dissent, is not typically seen as just.
I’m trying to be precise in my terminology. I have advertised many of my positions as being “soft libertarian” which I’m afraid is somewhat imprecise, but for the purposes of this discussion, I would say that Nick Gillespie, Bryan Caplan and their cohorts are “Orthodox Libertarians,” unless my judgment of the positions they advocate for is incorrect.
I think the issue that you have is that there is somehow an inability to opt out, correct? Obviously, with a firm, not all of the board members are going to agree all of the time; the easy response is that because of competition, dissenting members can simply opt out. Not so with federal government (or any place with a monopoly). In the podcast, I talked about how even at the lowest levels, government must still use force. If playing devil’s advocate to that point, I would say that at a low level, we increase the ability for members to opt out. In that sense, a local government is a lot like a firm. Hell, even if you want to opt out of the criminal law, you can always leave town, correct? So, if you think about it in that light, you may still have a government that more resembles a firm – even with taxation and disagreement and criminal law, etc… – but not be quite so coercive because this is a large country and no one government has a monopoly.
I’d say that Reason is orthodox, and PJ media is soft. To be honest, even though we fight about it a lot, here, Ricochet is also soft-libertarian, in my opinion. We only really fight on the fringes.