How I Outgrew Libertarianism

1. Understanding that there isn't always one noun to describe the particular mix of beliefs that work for you.

2. Understanding that a belief system isn't always the same as the dominant group that is claiming that belief system for themselves at a given point in time (say "the" libertarian party)

3. Understanding that written statements of principle are always approximations to reality. Reality always has complications and exceptions.

4. Rule: there are always exceptions. There are no exceptions to that rule.

5. Competition tends to war as rules tend to zero.

6. Be ready to change your mind when confronted with new data.

7. NEVER identify yourself with your beliefs. If you do, an attack on your beliefs become an attack on you. Then you'll never see things straight.

As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you. And it certainly isn't good for our hapless readers who have to read through all the angry comments your blog post inspired.

Criticizing political ideologies isn't very productive (especially when its party has never won a seat in congress), but if you're going to do it, please follow this example: http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html.

The author addresses specific issues and injects a bit of humor into his responses. He uses statistics and facts instead of anecdotes. Most importantly, he doesn't strawman or condescend. That's the sort of writing that convinces people. The submitted post will most likely just annoy any libertarians who read it.

Very well put. I think it applies to pretty much all neo-conservatives. Conservatism is about being rich and wanting stability to remain rich. Neo-conservatism is about wanting to be rich and stay rich because you never knew any other aspiration than wealth. (Funnily enough, this applies to both people born into wealth and poverty, with the first often selling this aspiration to the second, to their distinct disadvantage.)

Similarly, Libertarians argue that everything will work out since it's all a level playing field from their perspective and everybody would have a good life if they just put effort in. They just never knew any other starting point to aspire from than their own.

There's so much that libertarians ignore that you can point out, criticize, even mock but their answer to "No lifelines, no backup plans, no connections" is well known and straight-forward. It's "charity" and it is far from obvious that this is somehow a worse plan than "massive bureaucracy to administer welfare funded by confiscating 40% of people's incomes."

If every system is corruptible then this argument cannot be really used against any system in particular. We know democratic institutions are sometimes captured, officials are bribed, public funds awarded to friends and family... but democratic governments limp along. They do better than many alternatives. Pure libertarian government may be utopian or theoretical, that does not mean that moving in its direction wouldn't make governance better.

If this was all that took to convince you to move away from libertarianism then either you were never one, or you're rationalizing a change made for other reasons.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/3F501i3.jpg

Similarly, I think only the middle-class or wealthy can afford to be libertarians. Take, for example, the case of firefighters letting a house burn over an unpaid fee: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/12/07/9272989-firefight... . This is the world libertarians envision, and I'd wager most of them respond to news like this with "It's only $75 per year! That's not much at all..."

But what if it is?

Myself, I'm the guy who dropped out of school to support myself, no family support to fall back on (in fact, I support them now) and I've managed to overcome that and make a success of my life. I started out believing in socialism and my own successes lead me to Libertarianism. The article surprised me, because I also outgrew Libtertarianism, because I know that even though I made most of my luck I am still more fortunate than many others. I believe that with the productivity gains we've made in society, unnecessary toil and suffering should be limited. However, when it comes to how to share around this wealth, I'll still tilt over to the Libertarian side. I don't see it as some kind of utopian system, I see it as a direction. You can go in the direction of more centralised control and power to try to impose fairness, or you can go in the direction of less concentrated power and decentralise it more.

Libertarians (at least those I affiliate with) are not heartless people, but hold a general subversive attitude to government overreach. It has little to do with not helping the poor, but rather not let the government do it by means of force, and do it on a more personal, voluntary, connected, human level. And avoiding the mistakes of crony governments so that there are less poor people in the first place.

Coming from France where I grew up, you would be very surprised by the level of resentment instilled in the fabrics of the French society by socialism. People being tired of giving most of their earnings in taxes have little willingness to help people around them on a personal level.

It reminds me of an article I read (can't find it anymore) about how Silicon Valley was not the Libertarian land it was painted because Silicon Valley companies were much more generous in sharing their success with employees through stock options. Well, again it was a misguided attribution, being generous has nothing non-Libertarian in it. At the contrary, low involvement of government restrictions and taxation in US companies in general (not that it is the lowest in CA), does allow these kind of thing to come about privately. It's unheard of in Europe.

Traditionally, I've leaned toward bleeding heart liberal with a strong emphasis on civil liberties, but having seen what our government has done with its power over the past decade+, I'm starting to place much more faith in the promise of small communities and local markets than in big government and corporate cronyism.

Nothing more than a personal anecdote, but that's all I'm responding to.

The basic goal of trying to maximize individual liberty is certainly sound. But we have to remember that as a species we evolved as groups, not just as individuals. The evolutionary fitness of a group is in part a function of how well its members act as though they're all in the same boat, as opposed to every man for himself. (As just one example, a basketball team that works together will usually beat a squad of prima donna ball-hogs. See Robert Wright's book Non-Zero for more details in a popularized format.)

In addition, we humans are inherently flawed -- to one degree or another:

+ We cling to easy answers, even when they're wrong.

+ We seek immediate gratification, ignoring the long-term downside.

+ We want to be free to do whatever we want and for "someone else" to clean up any resulting mess. (Think of the teen-aged boy who just drops his clothes on the floor, knowing that later his mother will pick them up. Or the banker that writes "liar loans" knowing the government will bail them out. Or the business that pours its waste into the local sewer system by night.)

So we humans still need some regulation, with an eye toward the longer term.

In the end I believe that Libertarianism to be the best and most consistent of the political philosophies out there. Unfortunately none of them work fully as theorized in today's day and age, and none of them are being faithfully represented by their advocates. So in the end we have to make compromises.

For me one turning point was realizing that the Ayn Rand fanatics are the worst co-workers, and that there is something to be said for not all being in this strictly for itself. The game theory ideas of co-operation also convinced me of the importance of collectivism on some things.

By way of analogy, so you're in your classically inefficient violently useless modern political nation state and suddenly by some abject miracle, you are granted political power. Fix everything whilst sticking to both authoritarian political guidelines necessary to actually qualify as a government, and the general idea of eradicating authoritarianism due to its inefficiency which got you there in the first place.

Although I can totally sympathise with the thinking of classically political libertarians, I think they simply don't follow the observations they make on the nature of the efficiency of force initiating political institutions and free markets through to their logical conclusions.

That said, there's another kind of libertarianism too which is the kind that can be directly contrasted with the authoritarianism of modern classical political actors and their bloated nation states. I'm all for that kind of libertarianism, and I think it should be acknowledged by people that aren't that to the extent that they are not libertarian in this sense, they are actually authoritarians and accept all of the uncomfortable inferences that implies about them and their positions.

So, this article should be named "how I outgrew self-proclaimed libertarians".

All the current systems has one property in common - a build-in reliance on someone within the system to be honest and nice to others. Would it be honest ruler, honest politician or judge or honest voter. The difference between the systems is that they have different degrees of reliance on honesty and that reliance put in different layers. If there were a proof that it is possible in certain conditions to shift the reliance of honesty away from people to say P != NP, that would make the system bullet-proof. I would call it a pure system. That would also mean that there is more than one pure system possible, in fact infinite amount. We can already see that things like currency can be made and sustained without governance, I want to believe same will one day be possible with government itself.

1) your too intelligent

2) you thought something through

3) you brazenly said that you were wrong

For that, I salute you.