Topic: Would like to hear objections to radical libertarianism (Read 868 times)

Libertarianism fails because in practice libertarians fail to account for the negative externality of childbirth.

There are a lot of realistic means, and we're actually starting to make first small steps towards liberty, even though the biggest part of the way is still ahead.

For example, there is a totally useless organization called UN.  It could finally do at least one useful thing: issue a Declaration of Human Rights v2.0 (or call it something like Declaration of Human Right to Sovereignty).  That declaration would affirm the right of any man or group of men of any number, to unilaterally declare secession of themselves and their property from their current jurisdiction in favor of their own newly created jurisdiction (I use "jurisdiction" instead of "government" here intentionally, for I believe some jurisdictions will become detached from any territories over time).  In short, A RIGHT TO SECEDE.

And that's all!  Nothing much else would really be needed for true freedom to blossom over time!  With jurisdictions starting to dramatically increase in number and decrease in power, and with a true inter-jurisdiction competition appearing (not that joke we have today with passports and visas and customs and all that immigration restrictions...), the inferior jurisdiction would disappear over time, an new and more efficient ways of human co-existence would be developed.

Actually, the process is already starting.  Governments today tend to split more often than merge.  Watch closely Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia, and others.  In my own country there are a lot of areas that may wich to secede if were allowed to: North Caucasian republics, Tatarstan, Siberia, the Far Eastern areas, Kaliningrad etc.  There is also Crimea keen to secede from our neighbors Ukraine.

And it will get more and more interesting soon...

History is new and biased.
Predicting continued oppression based on records of past oppression is like guessing next week's btc prices.

Won't those corruptible people quickly learn that anyone who gets into that position will get bullied out of it?


Won't the mafia types quickly learn that if they become bullies there will be other bullies secretly paid to come gunning for them?


How? Why can't the bully with the most lunch money just convince that kid that all other bullies but him are bad, too? Isn't that's what we're having happen to our government, where the biggest corporate bullies are buying the most candy for the retarded kids in the Senate, so they throw their weight around and bully other smaller businesses and citizens?

Because most people just want to be told what to do.  But they don't want someone who is successful telling them what to do.

To use your bully analogy, what if everyone on the school yard had a money system that made it impossible for the bully to collect his yearly gains? Or if enough of the people were so tired of the bully that they started using their untraceable money system to buy protection against the bully, or even worse, fund a private team of bullies to harass and bully that main bully in return? How long would that first big bully maintain power and want to keep bullying? As for the second team of bullies, they were hired to take out the first bully using this system, so they are aware that the same system can be used against them as well, so I would hope they would focus more on protection against other bullies, than just becoming bullies themselves.


What if, instead of focusing on taking out number 1 bully, and just having number 2 come in, we focused on making number 1 bully's job irrelevant and impossible to maintain? Simply by abstaining from doing whatever the bully wants, and abstaining from supporting him personally and financially? That was, it wouldn't be bully 1 that fades into obscurity, it would be his seat of power. At that point it won't matter who sits in it. And if everyone abstains from supporting seats of power, by not following their orders or refusing to fund them, then the power vacuum will be taken up by all the people as a whole, holding control over their own governance, as opposed to some individual bully.


What if the bully, with all his stolen lunch money, starts buying lots of candy for the kid with gigantism?

it relies on the assumption that most people will be good and make an effort to be cooperative. if 90% of people are reasonable and cooperative than they will generate more than enough wealth between them through the benefits of trade to afford insurance against damages caused by those who are not reasonable and cooperative. if however 90% of people are not reasonable and cooperative and only 10% are than this 10% will not be able to generate the requisite wealth to purchase insurance against the 90%. some where along the spectrum lies the point at which society is not evolved enough for libertarian anarchy, perhaps we are still on the wrong side of that division.

its not a very good argument but its the best one i know.

It will!

Once we're there, it will not only work but it will also be stable enough not to revert into tyrrany. Simply because once most of the people throughout the World are conscious about what liberty is, the majority of them will be most interested in playing fair. Yes, I believe that humans are naturally benevolent, it's only education (or rather, mis-education) that makes us "grow up" by getting us accustomed to violence and coercion. Once we are all liberated, however, we will take great care to remember the past centuries of serfdom, and we will make sure to educate our children well enough to never forget the past darkness, so that liberty persists.

But how do we get there? The answer is the same: education. Let all your friends read Rothbard, especially those of them who are smarter and more open-minded. Make sure you don't give up your children to the government schools, but homeschool them instead. Work hard for your money, be kind to people and live your life honestly, giving example to your children and neighbors. And try to un-brainwash as many people as possible. It's not always easy if the person was brought up in a spirit of coersion, but it's possible and it's actually much easier than to revert already free-thinking adult back into government dogmatism. We will prevail eventually, the only question is how soon. And education is the key.

I think the Internet will become (is already becoming) the major driving force of liberation through education. We can now access information we couldn't access before, and the only thing they can do is try to distract us, but that's futile.

Those of you who are lucky enough to live in USA have those strong traditions of liberty, capitalism and secession, so it will probably be much easier for you than for the less fortunate of us. You have Ron Paul, you have Free State Project, homeschooling and self-government traditions, and a significant percentage of population is already thinking free. Lead us ahead! On the other end of the globe, we have rich traditions of serfdom, where all free-thinking population was either killed or expelled by the red thugs, making our population coercion loving so much it hurts. Even after the fall of the USSR, essentially the same thugs still remain in charge, though disguised. And people love them. Oh, they love their idiotic TV propaganda that commands them to hate americans, gays and opposition (usually sinonyms), and to love censorship, conscription and the Strong Leader (that botox rat). In a country where "capitalism" is still almost like a swear word (yes, really), and where there are 10000 times more communists than libertarians, we still resist and fight back, we still manage to gain numbers, slowly but steadily. And I think essentially everywhere in the world the situation is the same: we may be still not strong enough, but we are growing, and we will eventually get our freedoms back.

Other than education, we can also weaken governments by engaging in shadow economy, how Konkin suggested in his Manifesto. Here again, the Internet is a game changer, with tools like VPN, Tor and I2P letting us reclaim our free speech, and cryptocurrencies letting us reclaim our free trade. And that's why we should use Bitcoin as much as possible, because every non-taxed transaction makes them poorer.

We will prevail!

If we can assume people never change, libertarianism is doomed to fail: "So it is, so it always must be."  If people believe in government now, as they almost always have in history, then we can assume that people will always continue to believe in government, and to fight against it is a futile practice.

If we can assume government force will always completely outweigh the force of the individual, it would take a monumental amount of time and energy for libertarianism to become a big enough thing for change to ever happen.  If we can assume people fall in and out of beliefs, we could say libertarianism is a passing fad which will shut up once government is improved, and then nothing would ever happen anyway, as we've seen from protesting in the past several decades.

If we can assume society requires government to function, libertarianism only serves to dismantle our modern civilization.  If we can assume people cannot function together without an all-powerful leader behind the wheel to tell us what to do and how to do it, then to remove government from modern society is to regress into the stone ages, where people killed each other without remorse for there was no law or entity to enact on that law to stop them.

If we can, again, assume people never change, even if the government was to be removed, people would form their own rogue governments and force anyone who isn't a part of that government to become a part of it.  Once these gangs amass enough power, they will then charge their "citizens" protection fees, or threaten to ostracise and ultimately, kill.  Thus, libertarianism is pointless, because we would only wind up back at square one, so why fight it?

There's always the classic:  "Who would build the roads?"  If there's no central force to plan the roads, nobody would build the roads, and then we wouldn't have hospitals and firefighters and there would be no police officers so there would be total chaos in the streets and since murder is legal (a funny way to say it but people still say it this way) you can just kill anyone at any time without any repercussion and then a culmination of the reasons mentioned above would occur because, because, well isn't it obvious all of this would happen?

And then there's people who are on government funding who will support the state just 'cos they like free money.  There's a shit load of them cropping up in America nowadays, anyhow.  And then you have the "patriots" who love their government more than their country, or assume a country and government are inseparable and therefore the same thing.

I guess it all boils down to fear of what we don't know.  Some people just can't stand change, even if it could be for the better.  There are always proponents and opponents of any given subject.  What matters is who has the most logical arguments, and when it comes to interpretation of people, there's no logic to be had; all one can do is observe and draw conclusions, and an observation is a very subjective thing.  After all, everyone knows someone who believes whole-heartedly in the existence of God; it's not because they fail to see the logic, but because they do actually perceive Him to be real.  To make an objective observation on the validity of God would mean there would be no religion, but not everyone does that, perhaps unwilling to or unable.  Not everyone can be cold in the face of emotion.

But when it comes to libertarianism, the best approach is to simply look at it objectively.  An objective view of government is essentially this: a mafia which collects protection fees and uses those fees to further and protect their own interests.  If you've ever said, "Well the way government spends on X is so stupid," it's not stupid, it's intentionally that way.  No man with so much power will let it slip so easily through his fingers.  If one can view government in such a way, the pieces fall into place, and one can see why libertarianism is always growing, especially in the light of recent events which make that objective view apparent.  At which point, one must ask themselves, "Then without the government, how would we survive?"  To which the answer is, "Without your parents, how would you survive?"  But many of us know how to survive without our parents; it is just an arm's length away from drawing the conclusion that people do have the ability to change, people do have the ability to think for themselves, people do have the capacity to care for others, and people do have the necessary tools and man power to continue life as it is without an expensive, oppressive overhead, with enough intelligent people who know how to make the roads and build the hospitals and know the best spots to do so, and how often, and know how to conduct business in such a manner which keeps their business profitable, as, if that people need roads and need hospitals and need security, they would be willing to pay for such items, for if this weren't true, then there's no logical reason why we should force them to, besides the belief that we (the government) know what's best for you (the citizen), even when you don't realize it.  But can't we agree that people are not born as stupid as they're trained to be?

In other words, proponents of libertarianism believe society can be comprised of intelligent beings, whereas opponents assume society is stupid and irresponsible and could never take care of themselves.  The proponent believes people can be adults on all matters; the opponent assumes people are children who need constant punishment to keep in line throughout their entire lives.  But whether or not it will or won't work is a question to the libertarian.  To the opponent, it's always a definitive "no, it won't."  I can think of no man who merely assumed his entire life what truths were right who was worth the words he'd regurgitated from another man's mouth.  At some point, you start to think on your own, or you don't, and repeat what you'd heard in school.  Free thought just happens to be the core logic behind libertarianism, which is even in its name:


As the point of libertarianism is achieve a state of liberty, then we can see it can only happen with the absence of the enemy of liberty, being controlled, being "governed", ergo, we must pursue either a stateless society or, as some libertarians like it, a society where the state is very limited in power (a view which I disagree with as we've already attempted this in America, with failed results.)  At which point, it's simply a matter of "how?"  Which is the hang-up; how do we do it?  And at the same time, it's such a liberating feeling, because it is no longer, "Well it's impossible so fuck trying anyway," but it's a measly yet refreshing "how?", for if there is ever a time when the answer is not "how?", then we're just cogs in a machine of something greater, at which point, I may as well not call myself a human being.  But it's hard to explain that to someone who would sooner be controlled than allow himself the freedom of thought.

TL;DR

Ultimately: I don't know if it'll work.  But I'll be damned if putting up with this shit we have today is better off than trying something different.  That's the point of libertarianism: acknowledging that we know nothing.  Which is why I can't take someone who says, "So it is, so it always must be" seriously, in regards to the state, for it assumes absolute knowledge on the matter.  We may as well call such men God.

Why is non-aggression considered radical?

I have a radical idea.   Instead of the clear fact that all humans are equal we will say that one group is in charge and all others must do as they say and if they refuse they will be put in a cage.  I know.  Sounds like a scary world doesn't it?   

Really, it's a society of people who don't believe in the state, or who universalise the non-aggression principal. The absence of a centralised coercive monopoly follows from that.

Of course it would work. :-)

Try to be original, logical, free from emotions

No centralized coercive monopoly on force, why won't it work?