Libertarian base idea is freedom, as much as possible; redistribution is the opposite of freedom because you work, earn money and someone comes and takes it from you. Makes sense?
I suppose "all that much" is the key term. Is European style redistribution (aka a nice flat, utilities, TV and smartphone, clothing, health insurance, food and cash money to spend on whatever you please) not all that much?
It's not like we're wasting 90% of taxes on administrative overhead, so I'm not sure what could be improved there, without adding more "undue and costly burden" on those who work, unless you're suggesting taxing e.g. capital gains rather than income.
To your point on wasting tax money, have you seen the defense budget lately? Can fix those two issues and them some with some moderate cuts. Capital gains taxed the same as earned income would help too, but won't make enough to solve the big issues.
For sure. I didn't understand the comment I replied to to mean those who work though. That (including healthcare) is what you have in Europe if you don't work at all.
I wasn't saying that tax money is wasted, quite the opposite, I was saying that most of the money is not in overhead, that is, it's reaching its intended recipients. As for cutting the defense budget in the US, I'm torn. On the one hand: easy savings. On the other hand: a lot of the US' economic position in the world depends on being a/the super power. I don't know how much and how large the military edge has to be, so it may be possible to cut the spending by half and not lose a lot in economic advantages, but it may also be much closer coupled.
I assume that this refers to unemployment insurance, which is often provided for a limited time, and/or requires you to be actively looking for work. One of the issues with the European model of social insurance is precisely that those who are working at the low-end of the labor market are not included in this kind of redistribution. Enforced unionization and strict labor regulations are then used to make up for this, but that means losing flexibility precisely where it's most needed. You can witness the outcome in places like France, where the poorest and most vulnerable are locked out of the labor market altogether leading to huge society-wide issues.
> As for cutting the defense budget in the US, I'm torn.
You could cut a lot of the defense budget in the US if the US's allies started paying their fair share. Of course, paying for US allies' defense comes with foreign policy advantages for the US so perhaps this arrangement is also "fair" in a way.
I'm in Germany, unemployment insurance has a time limit, and does require you to look for work, but the benefits are based on your previous salaries, what I was referring to is general welfare. It does have a provision that requires you to look for work as well, but it's rather theoretical, and unless you're basically taking a dump on their desk and tell them to go shove it, you're not going to have your benefits cut. The largest constraint is that you need permission to go extended holidays.
I'm not suggesting it's a great long-term idea to incentivize not contributing to society, or that it's not costly for those paying for the party, I was originally just pointing out that we do a lot to redistribute "the fruits of labor", and that it does reach the intended recipients, as I wasn't sure how to understand your statement.
Yeah. Either that, or you could maybe, like, not have an empire and cut back on the military adventurism? But I see that may be a hard sell in a society in which all the mainstream media just frickin LOVE war. Really, there's nothing just like a nice little war! Or at least bombing a few poor people now and then. It just makes for the best reporting. Also, the military-industrial complex needs to feed. And they seem to be quite cozy with the media-industrial complex. So it's a win-win scenario really. Except for the poor people of course, both at home and abroad.
No, if you don't work you don't have healthcare, only emergency care that I think it's similar to the one in US. Also the quality and availability of healthcare in Europe is degrading fast, mostly because there is no free lunch and it is impossible to cover unlimited medical care for everyone, it would cost more than the entire GBP of each country.
No, really, you do. I'm speaking for Germany here, if you're unemployed and on long term welfare, the state pays for your health insurance (and it's at a subsidized rate), you have the exact same health insurance as any normal employee that is using the public health insurance (which is the super majority, only a few industries, the self-employed and high-salary employees can opt for private insurance instead).
Look at how hard it was for German to reform its social system in 90/00s for example. And German was one of the countries that actually achieved significant reforms while many others didn't.
They really haven't. Classical liberalism, while perhaps more popular than in the U.S., is still a niche political stance in Europe. The 1980s saw a wave in liberalization and deregulation, and that's when stuff like NIT or UBI reached its peak in popularity.
As an European, I have to ask what exactly does this refer to?
I think it's arguments like these (going back to conflict with socialists over such definitions) which lead to libertarians claiming they do not base their philosophy on "freedom" but rather "liberty". Which they more narrowly define as something like the freedom specifically from external force. Not the freedom to do whatever the hell you want no matter who it hurts etc.
Alternatively, one can see it as a way to distribute power to independent power structures (government, society, markets, ...) to prevent one structure dominating others. Each such structure is a threat to personal freedom, but with different manifestations and effects. And it is more manageable to have more smaller threats than less bigger ones.
"What we owe to others" is not settled by the question of freedom, and therefore it is perfectly logically consistent to be a libertarian proponent of redistribution.
Why is one "entitlement" and not the other?
In either case, there is no logical fallacy present. And the question is independent to the question of freedom which is secondary to the question of moral constraint.
Ie., establishing what is moral in our interactions with others (murder, theft, etc.) is prior to the question of freedom -- freedom is whatever remains to be maximised when moral constraints are in place.
The cause of "freedom" is therefore often rather a meaningless one. Everyone is pro-freedom except the "freedom to do what is immoral". And so the question is only ever really, "what is moral?"
Ie., what we owe to others, and what they owe us supersedes any particular political programme.
>> M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity."
I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first half." And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word "fraternity" from the word "voluntary." It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot. <<
Does "negative freedom" include "freedom from reprisals for murder" ?
Ie., in a society which maximises "negative freedom", is there no system of redress for murder?
I do not think a libertarian believe so. Rather they have a prior morality in which certain actions "deserve" a redress -- ie., you are owed punishment, or you owe a victim (of, say, theft) what you have stolen from them.
So everyone in this conversation both wishes to maximise negative and positive freedom. The only variable is the moral constraints we place on that maximum.
In the case of leftwing thought, one benefits from society in a way which creates obligations that are not fully "internalized" in market transactions. The positive externality of society is not accounted for: you owe something by being in society which, unpaid, would be theft.
Also, they are doing property damage to the victim's body. (Yes, I'm being a bit whimsical here, but this would technically be a valid charge in this case, as far as I can tell.)
From that point on out they are guilty of a crime for which they may be tried and punished. I don't see where the problem is, frankly.
So moral principles are prior to a discussion of freedom. The meaning of "negative freedom" isn't freedom as such. As in everyone can do anything (the Hobbesian state of nature).
Rather it is freedom after a choice of certain moral principles. The comment i'm responding to thinks that there's a logical contradiction between "freedom" and "redistribution" but there is none, because "freedom" has very little content.
It is always "freedom" after morality. And the diagreement therefore lies in "what we owe to each other", eg., here, you assert the non-aggression principle.
In a system of negative freedom contracts entail a duty to honor them, ie., are the source of obligations to others.
So a system of negative freedom is really just one where only you can obligate your future self to be duty bound to do something for someone else.
The libertarian still regards this as a duty, so it is a seemingly arbitrary one and contrary to "freedom as such".
The question "who decides what my duties are?" isnt even, in libertariaism, "only you". Because the duty to honor a contract is prior, ie., you are bound to it.
So the libertarian arbitrarily ringfenses a small number of principles to be prior to the question of freedom: NAP, contracts, etc.
The redistributionist can likewise ringfense some principles and claim to maximise freedom and hence to "morally superior outcomes".
As to the point of obligating your future self to honour any contract that you have agreed to, the point is that you yourself chose to enter said contract voluntarily. The strength of the whole philosophy is that it seeks to deal with potential sources of conflict by presenting a minimal set of clear-cut rules and leave the rest up to the participants. As you cannot choose to be a participant, because the mere fact of your existence forces you to be one, it simultaneously tries to maximise your freedom of choice from there on out.
Many words have been spilled about the "social contract" as legitimisation for the state. Yet how convincing do they really sound in the face of Spooner's pithy rejoinder that "I didn't sign any contract, so I'm not bound by your laws and regulations."?
BTW, I don't think you will have an easy time to argue that any other set of a priory rules does a better job of maximising freedom. The toughest critique of libertarianism that I know of rather seeks to dispense of a priory morality altogether in favour of a consequentialist point of view. Scott Alexander Potter has done so in his anti-libertarian FAQ, just in case you haven't already read it (not saying you didn't, just mentioning it).
My point here is just the contingency of the starting point: many do not regard "their word" as obligating. It's a rather magical sort of perspective: that "an oath", "binds", etc.
The reason we find promises of this kind even intuitively plausible is social: we immediately intuite that there is reputational damage associated with breaking a vow.
Libertarianism thus trades on social instincts in its set up, strangely prioritising just a few of them (aggression, vows, etc.).
This is disguised by a language of "freedom and reason", but really it's just a very old-fashioned communtarianism -- that as with most -- works in a near pre-social small-tribe environment, but fails to generalize.
When you cannot track people's reputation because you live in a civilization of millions/billions, "contracts" alone aren't a plausible to conduct business.
The "social contract" is not something "to be signed", but a recognition of the folly of "signing" (oath giving) in a society where no one hears your oaths.
To the people who keep calling for a stronger state to protect them from the evils of capitalism I say: You are being duped! Your chosen path to salvation is in truth the instrument by which you are enslaved!
I am much more optimistic that practical solutions may be found to deal with the problems of non-statist societal solutions than with any statist ones.
I'm convinced that as long as we have not achieved a state of post-scarcity - which may be never - any attempt to abolish property rights is doomed to bloody failure.
Lastly, any societal order that demands even the slightest obligation of active cooperation from any individual - be it at the behest of another individual, an oligarchy, or even a majority - must in time devolve into tyranny.
The only path to a solution that I can currently see would have to work along Georgist lines. When money can be raised from common inalienable property, that would enable redistribution without theft. The capitalist tragedy of negative externalities could be solved with a scheme of compensation for damages to a common property. (&c.p.p.) Such a kind of setup might be able to avoid all of the worst pitfalls, I believe.
But I'm sure you know better what they believe.
Well that's where you went wrong already. Surely most libertarians respect these guys, but that's about as far as you can take it. Some do love them, I suppose. To others they're thoroughly misguided in some of their conclusions, which are seen as much to statist-socialist in nature. See e.g. [1] for a libertarian critique of Hayek.
I'm not claiming that all of Hoppe's positions are typical for, or representative of all libertarianism. I just used him as a handy example that the assertion that "libertarians love F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman" is not a given, which is exactly the topic of the lecture I referred to.
As an aside, I'm sure the guys at the Mises Institute will be ecstatic to hear that you think their media presence is the best, even though all that sweet Koch money is going to Cato. I think I kind of agree. :)
Uh, no. The Friedman/Cato Institute folks are/were definitely libertarian and part of the right, and Murray Rothbard has a terrible reputation among them, as someone who was extremely ideological and had very little appreciation for sensible policy or even for good intellectual argument. I'm actually not too familiar with HH Hoppe, but it looks like he too has pretty fringe views. The LvMI does plenty of good work, especially in raising awareness and popularizing economic thinking broadly-construed, but Misesian libertarianism is fringe.
Why do I seem to keep getting objections to the simple statement that not all libertarians "love Hayek and Friedman"? I mean, really, it's not that great of a claim.
And lastly, call Rothbardianism fringe, but it's surely still libertarianism, right? Rothbard's been hugely influential on modern right-libertarianism as a whole, so why the insistence of erasing him from the picture?