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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

Here's what "economic liberty" apparently means:

    size of government: expenditures, taxes, and enterprises
    legal structure and security of property rights
    access to sound money
    freedom to trade internationally; and
    regulation of credit, labor, and business

And, reading further, buying into this means you agree that a large "size of government" is inherently bad, that "inflation is a a monetary phenomenon," and that all regulations reduce freedom.

This is of course a libertarian point of view. Personally, I have found that Obamacare subsidies have given me the freedom to start a business without putting my family at risk, that inflation can be rooted in technological supply-side or demand-side shocks, and that regulations like nutritional information requirements make me more free by giving me more information.

With this understanding, the USA is more "economically free" than at any point in my lifetime.

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The colloquial "freedom" you refer to is subjective and can be used to mean anything. Robbing a bank would give me the freedom to start a business without putting my family at risk. Going to jail would make me more free by not having to worry about food. Microsoft Windows gives me more freedom to get my work done because Linux has poor support for Word documents.

Freedom or liberty has to be defined negatively (e.g. absence of constraints) and precisely to have any objective meaning at all.

“Economic freedom” per the Kochs and their network of libertarian think tanks means your freedom as an industrialist to bring government soldiers in to help you forcibly suppress worker strikes. It means your freedom to dump whatever you want into the local river, without pesky interference from the EPA. It means your freedom to create propaganda venues masquerading as news with no accountability. It means the freedom to force all dispute resolution out of a publicly accountable court system into private arbitration. It means your freedom to funnel money secretly to university-affiliated “scientists” to publish bogus studies casting doubt on climate change or the harmful effects of particular products. It means the freedom to secretly donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, and make sure the law supports your hiring politicians and government officials at high salaries after they leave public office. Etc.

The “robber barons” are their heroes and their dream is a return to the Gilded Age.

Labeling this “freedom” is a pretty cute bit of rhetorical gymnastics.

I've never heard of any libertarians that were against "worker strikes", that would be very much against the core tenets. I also don't see any evidence that libertarians are industrialists. The only statistics I found showed that libertarians were about as rich as democrats on average, or a bit less. Anyways, HN is not the place for political debates so I'm out!

We’re not talking about random people who consider themselves “libertarians”, who are mostly fine people albeit rather naïve in my opinion. We’re talking about “libertarian think tanks” and university-affiliated “libertarian institutes”, which are predominantly funded by billionaire industrialists.

Jane Mayer’s recent work is recommended reading on this subject: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385535597

Or if you want something shorter, from a few years ago, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operatio...

Such nonsense.

You may want to study property rights (protection from pollution) and freedom of speech (publishing studies).

I don't know about the Koch bros, but libertarians are the most anti-corporate people you can find, precisely because government and corporations collude to destroy individual rights and freedom.

You may want to stop reading your lefty media if you are to retain any intellectual capacity.

The Koch brothers strategically encourage libertarianism to help them repeal only the regulations they want repealed.

They'll push for repealing environmental protection laws, but not for the tort laws that reduce their liability for polluting. They'll push for repealing regulations that are advantageous for unions, but not "Right to Work" laws that prevent unions and businesses from forming contracts requiring all laborers to be part of the union.

Calling names and personal attacks aren't allowed in HN comments and will get your account banned eventually. Please don't do those things. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

Freedom is a term inherently defined by a political philosophy. In fact it has been said that definition of freedom is the fundamental difference between different ideologies.

For example, you might define property rights as the negative freedom to do what you want with your property (property as defined by government, btw. e.g. humans are mostly not allowed to be property anymore. Or, the groundwater below your land might or might not be your property in your jurisdiction.). Alternatively, you could define property rights as the positive freedom of being able to peacefully enjoy your property, which could require the government to protect your property in various ways such as defending you against illegitimate claimants to the property.

Anarchy provides a form of theoretical freedom, but neglects practical freedom. If you remove the governments monopoly on force, you don't eliminate force.

I happen to think that, in aggregate, the current system of the government forcibly removing some property from everyone to provide a system in which the remainder of the property is protected under the rule of law preserves a larger fraction of property rights than a more theoretically pure system free from such coercion would be.

I may be wrong about this, or I may be right, but I think it is hard to prove either way, as we do not have a sufficient understanding of social dynamics to argue from simulation or first-principles, and empirical data have too many confounding variables.

Right. Here's the actual study, about 3 blogs down.[1] This has the breakdown by nation and the categories listed above. The study points out that the "economic liberty" numbers are converging for the successful countries.

[1] http://www.freetheworld.com/2016/economic-freedom-of-the-wor...

So Hong Kong, Georgia, Mauritius, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Lithuania are all more free than the US? A strange conclusion.

>Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force...

So we'll be giving north American back to the Indians? Or do we consider any slow-down of that North Dakota pipeline a gross violation of freedom of the innocent oil industry?

In the UAE you're free to own and exploit slaves, a right which hasn't been present in these United States since the Tyrant L.nc.ln. spits on five fiat dollar federal reserve note

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