No Exit: The Uncivil Folly of Libertarian Flight | Hacker News Reader

No Exit: The Uncivil Folly of Libertarian Flight

hedgehogreview.com

16 pointsrntn10 comments

That's a feature, not a bug. When things get bad; the "elite arsewholes" run away and hide; and real people then have the freedom of action necessary to correct the situation.

Then the elites come back and fork things over again.

The current list of "If the next election goes wrong, I'm leaving the country" announcements stretches how long? Bonus points for those who've made similar promises in the past.

It is not always the case, counterexamples suffice. The king and future queen in WWII. Now, the president of Ukraine, etc.

> PayPal cofounder and aspiring philosopher-mogul Peter Thiel, who has said that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible,” [...]

I like how Thiel tells on himself by clarifying that his definition of "freedom" strictly refers to freedom only for himself alone.

If you're interested in maximizing freedom, you inevitably face the problem of what to do when two freedoms contradict. How do you handle the fact that "the right to swing your fist as you please" and "the right to not get punched in the nose" are both legitimate freedoms?

There are two ways to resolve the conflict:

1. You identify classes of people where one person's freedom is subservient to another person's freedom. This is what Thiel and his so-called "libertarians" desire: a class-based society where the freedoms of the poor are strictly subservient to the freedoms of the rich.

2. You identify freedoms that are subservient to other freedoms, and enforce those freedoms equally. This means that everyone gains the right not to get punched in the nose, and everyone gains the right to swing their fist mostly as they please, but everyone also loses the right to swing their fist into someone else's nose. This is egalitarianism. And to an authoritarian like Thiel, the idea that he should be denied any right at all, even in principle, is anathema; he desires to rule.

Option 3 is to recognize that all societal freedoms exist within the construct of society. Limiting some of the rules of that society (as opposed to removing all of them) is often the focus of limited government types.

The Non-Aggression Principle[1] is generally accepted as rule #1 for a limited government or a maximally free society. I can't speak to the ideals or proposed solutions to this from the Hobbsian State of Nature types.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

> Option 3 is to recognize that all societal freedoms exist within the construct of society.

I consider this an axiom of any discussion about liberties, rather than as an option to be separately considered. The only point of talking about "liberties" or "freedoms" is in the context of there being more than one person, because otherwise the discussion is irrelevant as it would all amount to the same regardless.

So I suppose the real option 3 is as follows: kill every other human except for yourself.

I'm not sure how you can say you take the non-aggression principle as axiomatic while also asking:

> How do you handle the fact that "the right to swing your fist as you please" and "the right to not get punched in the nose" are both legitimate freedoms?

The answer is simple: individuals do not have the sanctioned freedom to strike others due to the NAP. This feels so plainly obvious to me that i'm worried i'm misunderstanding your position.

Nowhere have I said anything about the non-aggression principle. With regard to egalitarianism, the exercise of determining which freedoms are subservient to other freedoms is left to the members of the society. While I would suggest that something like the non-aggression principle is a good starting point for such a discussion, it is orthogonal to the idea of classism vs. egalitarianism as the two means of resolving the dilemma of contradictory freedoms.

“Oliver wanted not just lower taxes but no taxes, not just the loosening of corporate regulations but their abolition.”

I bet he wanted government regulation of property rights and bodily autonomy though.

His bodily autonomy, at least.

I suspect he's less certain about the autonomy of bodies with uteruses. Those rights are to be put up to a vote.

> Whether underground, on an island, or at one of Cole’s haven farms, they would constitute an unlikely community of CEOs, each driven, to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, to “move fast and break things” as they compete to run the show.

That could be interesting: strip a bunch of billionaires of their society-protected wealth and power structures, and then watch them compete amongst each other for dominance using only their innate strengths.

While they're trying to figure out Machiavellian alliances and backstabbings from scratch in an apocalypse, the winner for leadership might be the physical security mercenaries that they hired and treated like the help.

That reminds me of something I saw during dotcoms. I was visiting a big-name university campus, and within earshot was a table with a few students who seemed to be talking about forming a startup. I don't think I paid attention to them, but at one point, a woman at the table who sounded like a no-nonsense engineer seemed to address one in particular, something like, "So, what do you bring?" And some young guy (who I guessed was a business major undergrad), sounded alarmed and hurt, "I provide leadership..."

I think he implicitly imagined himself in a social class that in practice was often about collusions of the few to exploit the many, like a royal birthright. But so far he'd only gotten the "leadership" PR, not how you get that job and project the confidence that you merit it.

Surely there are CEOs who might lead in an apocalypse, because they are respected and trusted by everyone, and can organize and inspire. But that's not how society usually selects CEOs pre-apocalypse.

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