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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

That thinking works in a perfect world with perfect information, 100% rational agents, and frictionless movement. It doesn't work for impoverished, illiterate, uneducated people with the weight of poverty, culture and a myriad of other practical considerations from food to roads to family preventing them from take the 100% rational actions that you expect them to take.

The problem with you libertarians is that everything you say works with spherical objects in a frictionless vacuum, so to speak. But the real world isn't such a place. Outside your idealistic worldview everything collapses.

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This is very similar to an argument that libertarians make about their opponents. As long as the government is made up of benevolent geniuses with perfect information about every individual citizen, then socialism is a great idea. In reality, individual preferences are unknowable, and government workers are fallible and have motivations of their own.

In reality, neither utopia is particularly achievable in the world as it currently is, but that doesn't mean that incremental steps in one direction or the other can't improve the situation.

I'd guess very few of libertarianism's opponents believe in socialist utopias, and what the article suggests is about as far from an incremental step and one can possibly get...

> I'd guess very few of libertarianism's opponents believe in socialist utopias

Just as most libertarians are not anarcho-capitalists. My point is that you don't need to believe in the utopia (in either direction) to believe that a smaller move would be positive.

> what the article suggests is about as far from an incremental step and one can possibly get...

In terms of total impact, drastically changing the rules in a region where no one currently lives could certainly be a smaller step than slightly changing the rules for millions of people, which is what most political arguments are about.

"The problem with you libertarians is that everything you say works with spherical objects in a frictionless vacuum, so to speak. But the real world isn't such a place. Outside your idealistic worldview everything collapses."

Remind me again how big the death-toll from government wars is?

Or perhaps simply how badly it is failing at taking care of the sick, the poor, and the needy in almost every single 1st world country?

You are right, outside of our idealistic view of the world, everything does collapse. I am watching it collapse right now, on the state's watch.

>"It doesn't work for impoverished, illiterate, uneducated people with the weight of poverty"

Luckily, those people have noble individuals such as yourself to tell them what to do, and fix their problems for them. Because you deem them unfit to do so for themselves.

>Or perhaps simply how badly it is failing at taking care of the sick, the poor, and the needy in almost every single 1st world country?

That's quite a bold claim to make. I'm afraid I can't quite see what you mean by that. What I can see is that the countries with the most regulation and state "babysitting", as you like to call it, are the ones best placed in any poverty, development, health or well-being index. I really don't see what you can possibly mean by "badly failing at taking care of the sick, the poor, and the needy in almost every single 1st world country".

I count it as failed if the government is spending money from the budget on unnecessary items while any social problem is still unresolved. That includes homelessness, poverty, health-care for the poor/needy/elderly, etc. Same goes for crime, road-fatalities, and a multitude of other things we expect of the government. These should be largely solved problems by now, especially with the technology available these days.

Either way, yes you are most likely statistically right. Spending on healthcare, poverty, and disabled individuals probably directly correlates with their well-being. You were presenting a case against a hypothetical ideal, and claiming it would not be able to fix social problems in a non-idealized setting. The counter-claim to that is that those very same things are not resolved in a society almost-exclusively run by state-governments, either. Whether 1st world or otherwise.

Ok. How does it fail in reality? Please be specific.

Precisely because of what I said: people aren't 100% rational beings with full information. People, especially in third world, war-torn, poverty-ravaged countries don't have the power to make the "best decision" in to a libertarian free-market approach as you suggest. Some things aren't solved by capitalistic competition.

Again, what bad decision will they make regarding charter cities due to being irrational? Why do you think that Hondurans will make choices so terrible w.r.t. charter cities that they should be forbidden from having that choice?

Similarly, because Hondurans are irrational, should they also be forbidden from entering Mexico and the US? Similarly, Brexit is good because Europeans and Brits might irrationally make the wrong choice on where to live?

Pointing out that people are irrational is not a magic argument against all policies that sound "too libertarian" to you. You still need to actually make an argument (presumably using irrationality as an underlying premise), which you haven't.

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