Peter Thiel on the future of Libertarianism, politics, and technology | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel on the future of Libertarianism, politics, and technology

cato-unbound.org

37 pointssama53 comments

I'm sorry, but this paragraph:

"Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

is just terrible. "[T]he extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

Even the most generous interpretation of that sentence is very illiberal. Well, if they don't agree with us and we're right, maybe they just shouldn't be allowed vote. They obviously don't know what's best for themselves, those women and welfare beneficiaries. Really?

And also is the 1920s really the decade we want to hold up as the last great decade in America?

The whole article swings violently between utopianism and nihilism. I find it very depressing.

Women's suffrage is generally acknowledged to have resulted in the passage of Prohibition, and Prohibition is generally acknowledged to be a mistake. Why couldn't other mistakes have their roots in suffrage?

That doesn't mean that suffrage was itself a mistake or should be repealed, just that there could be bad effects as well as good. I'm generally libertarian, and regard the extension of the welfare state as bad, but I'd regard the political inequality of half the populace as far worse.

The contrapositive of his statement is: IF you believe in capitalist democracy THEN you cannot have universal suffrage.

Since he believes in capitalist democracy, presumably he also believes you cannot have universal suffrage.

Actually, he's more explicit than that. He doesn't believe you can have democracy at all if you're a capitalist: "I no longer believe that freedom [read: capitalism] and democracy are compatible."

So, sounds like that's exactly what he's saying.

In this paragraph, he's observing, not judging or making recommendations. Welfare beneficiaries and women do not, empirically, tend to vote for Thiel's preferred policies.

He might believe these groups are voting against their own long-term interests, but he's not making that case here, in a piece specifically aimed at those who already agree with him on a preferred (much lower) level of government economic control.

His piece doesn't advocate disenfranchising anyone -- as you imply -- nor does he call the 1920s America's "last great decade" -- just the last one where he could be "genuinely optimistic about politics". America's politics is neither the totality nor the pinnacle of its expression as a place/society/ideal, as his audience of cynics about state power understand.

(Though, as the decade of constitutional prohibition of alcohol, it seems an odd political high-point for Thiel. I think its main attraction for him is that at least it wasn't the 'New Deal' and massive government economic intervention ever since.)

>> "[T]he extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

Seems like so many people have been pissed about this line. It seems obvious that he didn't mean "women should not have the right to vote" though... just that it makes libertarian ideals harder to achieve, because women tend to favor more government.

Hence his main argument: The US majority will probably never be libertarian, so libertarians must try to go beyond politics if they ever want to achieve their goals.

He didn't say the "US majority," though, he said "women."

So, what place do women have in his ideal, libertarian state?

I think that's a relevant question.

For example, presuming women are disinclined to vote for libertarians, how do you reconcile the "democracy" in "capitalist democracy" and "universal suffrage?" Is he saying if we have universal suffrage then we have to pick one: capitalism or democracy?

That seems to be the implication of his statement.

I can't speak for him, but my guess is that his ideal libertarian state would be non-democratic, opt-in only, or both.

Don't ask me how he plans to achieve it...

Yes, I guess anarcho-capitalism is a system which fits his line of thinking.

A sad yet realistic summary of representative democracy.

Also his cyberspace and seasteading ideas are far too optimistic. High tax governments are currently going after tax heavens, even as old and diplomatic strong ones as Switzerland. What changes does your sea outpost have against the world?

But he's missed out on two important things. First democracies tend to follow a long term cycle of government boom and bust. See Sweden and Great Britain. The general patter is the government grows until it's too big to be effective and then it collapses.

The other example is direct democracy like Switzerland, that's also worth examining.

The direct democracy is something I've toying around with. The Republic arose because it was not feasible to have thousands of people vote on every decision a government needed to make, obviously. However as technology advances there is a very real possibility that we'll see more direct democracies arise as technology simplifies those voting procedures (assuming we ever reach a satisfactory security level on digital voting.)

I don't see what's so beneficial about direct democracy. Sure, it whets our 21st century egalitarian appetite. However, while populist sentiment is sometimes correct and sometimes disastrous, it is never created by any sort of rational decision-making process.

I have a hard time thinking of reasons why direct democracy is an optimal government structure.

I have an easy time thinking of examples of why direct democracy is an optimal government structure. Switzerland. It has a long history of direct democracy, compare how it has been governed with how the other democracies have been governed.

There's no need to get all abstract when there are real world examples.

It's also a federalist system with unique geography and a smaller population than New York City. Their example might not be portable.

It's worth thinking of different alternatives, rather than generalizing from a sample size of one.

Hong Kong and Singapore are also good examples of well-run states that are completely different. Hong Kong has the same population as Switzerland.

That's a good point, all of those places are tiny places. Still, I'd like to think that Switzerland can be scaled up. As well functioning as Singapore is, I don't want to see that scaled up.

In any democracy, direct or representative, the majority has the power to take from the minority. If there's something the majority wants that the minority has, they can just vote it away from them. Conversely, if there's something the minority has, but wants to keep from the majority, again, they just vote to keep it from them. It's an inherently unequal, unsustainable and unfair system. I don't see how either form of it is optimal, ever.

At least in the United States that isn't true. In the U.S. the republic was constructed as a way for the well educated to trump the masses if need be. That's the original reason for the Electoral College and that's why the U.S. Senate was originally filled with people appointed by state governments.

I'm not saying our Government wasn't built around a populist ideal and in the end I think the Framers trusted the public to appoint worthwhile people. But the republic our system is based around was created specifically to shield government against the knee jerk reactions of the masses

The strongest point in favor of seasteading is that, if successful, it will allow people to experiment with many forms of government, including variants of democracy. Currently, the government industry has an extremely high barrier to entry, which has resulted in stagnation and inefficiency.

(replying to this thread because the parent was killed)

I object to this submission being killed. I understand the desire to keep HN 'pure,' but Peter Thiel is interesting to hackers and founders in the same way that a PG essay is interesting even if it is not a direct dissertation on Lisp or startups.

I agree with a lot of what he says, but not with his extremely pessimistic conclusion. It's not time to just give up on all existing countries!

Separate issue: Karl Popper (a friend of freedom) argued that democracy is good because it allows for non-violent changes in Government. I think Thiel should be careful in attacking democracy itself: what non-violent alternatives are there? Suppose we form a libertarian sea steading or outer space colony. What system of Government does Thiel imagine libertarians would use if not democracy?

They could use overlapping corporate jurisdictions. If you don't like how things are being run, you pay someone else to enforce your contracts. You might have different service providers for, say, IP versus personal safety versus family law. And since they'd compete, it would allow people to coexist with wildly different legal regimes. You could have a drug-prohibiting regime (or even one that fines you for alcohol consumption) -- but your neighbors might not.

Few would sign up for a regime that prevented only their use of drugs. One would either sign up for a regime that didn't care about drugs, or one that punished others for using drugs, as a moral crusade.

A regime that punished people outside of its jurisdiction would not last very long. It would be the equivalent to what a war is today.

I suspect that people would join such a regime for religious reasons. If you're the only member of your congregation who chooses not to be punished for having a beer, not having a kid, flipping a light switch on the Sabbath, etc., your peers may take note and decide you're not really serious.

Well, more equivalent to crime, but yeah. What I was implying is that it costs money to punish drug use, so jurisdictions would tend to ignore it unless explicitly requested.

Churches would probably become jurisdictions, rendering that kind of mismatch moot. And hey, if some people require that much institutional pressure to avoid addictive traps, I'm certainly not one to argue (as long as it's not forced onto others).

Walk me through the mechanics of a hypothetical market for IP law service providers.

Who sells what to whom?

The imaginary property industry would look pretty much like it does now, but the content cartels would be hiring goons with bats instead of goons with law degrees.

There are a couple possibilities. One is a legal regime that separates copy-rights from use-rights. One would be a system for letting people selectively share trade secrets without risking someone else making the same product.

Essentially, they would enforce voluntary constriants on future actions, when those actions are made possibly by access to information known by another party. This amounts to a property right, though like our current property rights regime, it is relying on a legal fiction as a useful abstraction.

I don't think starting a new country with a new, untested system, which people don't know a lot about, will work well. I often advocate for anarcho-capitalism, but only as the result of an existing system being changed one step at a time. This gives time for any bugs/kinks to be worked out at each step, and for people to gain a better understanding of what it means.

Do you see the current system's bugs being worked out any time soon?

Not really. We work out a few, here and there. But if people don't know how to improve on our system, why would a new system make them smarter? I think living at sea won't suddenly make people good at fixing bugs.

Maybe your plan is only to let the smart people join you, and hope they will all agree? I think that sort of plan is hopeless, both in figuring out who are the smart people, and then in getting them to agree. Intelligent libertarians disagree about large stuff all the time.

I'd say for every bug we work out we create about 100 new bugs that lead further away from freedom. Starting over is sometimes exactly what a "legacy" system needs to get better.

Intelligent libertarians disagree all the time, the difference is they don't resort to violence or coercion to force their views on others. It's the whole point of creating a truly free society like the Seasteading movement is trying to do.

So, what do you think of the French Revolution?

I don't see the parallel. The violent overthrow of a monarchy vs. a bunch of argumentative sea-steading libertarians?

You are advocating a "clear out the cobwebs and start from scratch" utopian vision, and arguing that gradual improvement does not work (which implies that existing institutions ought to be destroyed since they are somewhat coercive and reform is impossible. This implies violence). That's what the French Revolution was about, too.

The difference is that seasteading makes the current system unsustainable; it doesn't storm Alcatraz and spread stories about Michelle Obama saying "Let them eat Arugula!" If the French revolutionaries had simply left, and created a French-speaking country that ran itself more effectively than Monarchist France, it would be comparable.

But seasteading also (theoretically) uses new technology, which makes starting a country radically cheaper the way Moore's law and open-source software make starting a company so much cheaper.

There is a philosophical issue here about gradual progress vs revolutionary/utopian change. Do you have any thoughts on this issue?

The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and others had thoughts on this issue which are relevant.

Whether you want sea steading to have philosophical relevance or not, it does. Which side of this particular debate do you think it is on and why? Do you see that as a problem or a merit?

I don't know what Popper or Burke have said about starting from scratch vs. evolving the existing, (I'd be interested in reading it if you've got a reference) but the French revolutionaries seem to be a bad comparison. The whole reason for sea steading is that libertarians aren't willing set up fortifications and overthrow the government of New Hampshire. Non-violence is a key philosophical difference.

What Thiel is saying is that the chance evolving the current system into something even vaguely libertarian falls somewhere between extremely unlikely and absolutely impossible at this point. Maybe there's room for arguing that evolving the government is possible, but the natural course is growth. There are few (I can't think of any) historical examples of government moving in the other direction.

If evolving the current system is ruled out, then considering something as revolutionary as starting from scratch like the seasteaders, while maybe less than optimal, doesn't seem so far-fetched either philosophically or morally.

Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (long out of copyright, you can google for the full text)

I am not trying to compare sea steading to storming the Bastille. I'm trying to point out that your ideology has a lot in common with theirs. You seem to agree with me that the French Revolution was bad. Great. But that does not remove your commonality. I urge you to take your similarity to them as a danger sign, and to learn more about it, and to get a clear idea of where you think they were right and wrong, and how you will do differently. A plan like "Well, I just won't use violence" is not good enough. Many people involved in the revolution did not want or intend violence. It happened anyway. Why? Because utopianism leads to violence, and because our society has knowledge and institutions that prevent violence which should not be destroyed or abandoned.

I also think you should consider carefully what is preventing reform in the US. It is not democracy, which Thiel seems to think is his enemy. It is not the Government. If enough people want change, they can get it. (In fact they just voted in a President promising change.) The real problem is people with bad ideas, isn't it? If only most people had better ideas, change would come quickly.

The only reliable way to deal with bad ideas is to learn how to persuade people of good ideas, not to start over and try to exclude everyone you judge to have bad ideas. (And what happens if some of your kids have ideas you consider bad? Or some existing members of the society change their mind? You will need persuasion.) Attempting persuasion has the added bonus that sometimes you will find out you were mistaken, not the other guy, and change your mind.

Another alternative is tiny, Singapore/Dubai-type states, which accomplish the same thing, but by having very low costs of physically moving somewhere.

>"What system of Government does Thiel imagine libertarians would use if not democracy?"

Perhaps neocameralism?

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/against...

But seriously, I expect that many seasteads will attempt some form of democracy. Markets are beneficial because they allow producers and consumers the freedom to innovate, but the outcome of their decisions is impossible to predict in advance.

I have some major reservations about whether a mercantilist state would have any respect for human rights.

I think the optimal solution would be a world where there are many smaller countries with different forms of government to choose from and moving from one country to another is much simpler than it is now. A United States with less centralized power would achieve many of the same benefits.

H.L. Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

What about Chile? We have a real democracy, when we bailed out the banks in 1982 the bank boards got thrown out on the street and the taxpayers got all the shares and made a profit, and there is still rule of law. Entrepreneurs effectively pay no taxes. We have a democracy and have our shit together.

He's not arguing for "real democracy" -- he's arguing against democracy altogether. He believes that capitalism and democracy are mutually incompatible.

Maybe Chile is a counterexample, I don't know, but I don't think he's looking to salvage democracy. He's looking to jettison it.

A must-read for would-be seasteaders:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/

"Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it."

See: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/05/cato-institute-crashed...

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