Many of my investor buddies e-mail each other frequently during the day (yes, e-mail, not IM or tweet) and I am on the periphery of some of their discussions. One of them took note of the fact that the libertarians in this crowd had gone silent on the question of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and wanted to ask all libertarians: What is the proper libertarian response to the oil spill?
Reader input very much appreciated.
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The spill is a huge negative externality. BP should go out of business and its executives should be hanged in order to provide proper incentives for future business leaders.
These replies demonstrate that this site is increasingly non-liberatarian, and we are getting slowly pushed aside. Libertarianism is made up of people who weigh trade-offs differently than liberals. The factors in the oil spill (I believe) are:
1. we need oil (still)
2. It is a messy business
3. There is regulatory capture and asymmetric incentives.
To the extent laws were broken, regulation was side stepped, and regulators failed, there should be an accounting. I am certain there will be.
To the extent the system failed, there should be a slow down and reassessment.
As for the religious wailings of the corruption of capitalism, the satanism of consumption, and the primacy of goddess earth over humanity, I remain unpursuaded.
There is regulatory capture and asymmetric incentives.
I think pretty much everybody’s in agreement on that one.
The disagreement comes on what to do about it.
My solution is to fix governemnt.
The libertarian solution is to eliminate government.
I might add that the “eliminate government” crowd has had a near monopoly of political power in the United States for the last 30 years. And what has it brought us? The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and now the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.
Personally, I’m kind of like the monkey that tried to fuck the skunk: I’ve had about all this stinking son-of-a-bitch that I can stand.
Exactly how has the eliminate govt crowd been in control when govt spending (Fed, state, local) as a % of GDP has risen from ~7% at the turn of the (20th) century and ~35% in the last 20years to ~50% now? Likewise, the amount of paper necessary to print out regulations has likely risen even faster. The blind faith that Progressives hold in the virtue and efficiency of regulation is naivety bordering on willful ignorance.
Furthermore, Libertarians believe in a STRONG but LIMITED government to enforce laws and prosecute fraud. Eliminating or solving for externalities would fall under such a Libertarian mandate.
“..there should be an accounting. I am certain there will be.”
Wow, Bob, I envy your faith; so nice to have that blessed assurance. But demonstrably wrong. When have we had a real accounting of the crimes of the elite? Accountability is reserved for the unwashed; rarely if ever for aristocrats. Think Henry Kissinger (Chile, Vietnam), Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra), George Bush II (911, Iraq), Cheney (treason and torture) etc. Libertarianism is a scam for the wealthy and powerful.
I agree that the powerful are held less accountable. But that statement is true of societies with large state control, and societies with small state control. Libertarians are likely to agree that the powerful should be held accountable and that they are not. We just don’t want a certain class of the powerful to be given more power.
We are witnessing the overreach by the powerful on Wall street and the backlash. BP can be harmed in the wake of this backlash if they broke laws and abused regulatory capture the way Wall street does.
And yes, I am an optimist at heart.
So the libertarians have had their hands on the levers of power for the past 30 years, and the result is that the rich and powerful are less accountable now than they have been at any time during the entire history of the republic.
At some point, it seems that the libertarians would figure out that there naive, simplistic little solutions to very complex problems just don’t work.
In who’s universe is Bush or Obama a Libertarian? Government is the problem.
bob goodwin,
Yea right. And Greenspan wasn’t a libertarian either.
If you’re seriously saying Obama is a libertarian then, as many others have complained on this thread, the word really has lost all meaning.
Or George W. Bush, for that matter.
Andrew Bissell,
That’s right.
George Bush, Barak Obama, Greenspan, they all come right out of the FDR mold.
There’s absolutely no libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal influence there, and they were religious in making sure that influence didn’t infiltrate their cabinets or staffs.
I mean really, Andrew, who in the world do you think is buying the unmitigated bullshit you are peddling?
bob
Just because they dont put L next to their name when they run for office doesnt mean they havent been largely influenced (poisoned) by libertarian ideas. The Obama care package was set up to be mostly run through PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES! The only legitimate criticism as a libertarian is that health insurance is mandated. But I have even heard staunch libertarians concede that mandating things like car insurance is not antilibertarian. The question then becomes is health insurance different than car insurance? I think not in regards to the fact that when an uninsured person gets sick, the rest of us PAY FOR IT. How, unlibertarian is that! Although maybe you are suggesting not treating anyone in that situation. In that case you’d be consistent but an asshole.
To argue that the entire US power structure has not been largely influenced by libertarian ideas (they do SOUND so simple, neat and freedom inducing)
is stunningly disingenuous. Have we achieved full libertarianism? NO thank god because as has been better elucidated here than I am capable of, libertarianism in its purest form is a contradiction. Its FLAGSHIP IDEA, private property rights, depends on either a strong state or an individual spending the majority of their own time and effort defending it themselves. Wow, what an exisitence, perpetually patrolling my property lines!!
I long for the day when the me first crowd and all their poisonous ideas have been thrown on histories dustbin. They dont want civilization thats too “collectivist” for them.
As a libertarian I was against the health bill, but vomitously opposed to the bailouts. I now work in a medical device startup, so know first hand the corrosive impact that government has on innovation. I am not arguing that there aren’t serious abuses amongst health care providers that government means to control. But the imposition of government further into health care is not close to being the best option. The best case for the law is the increased coverage of the poor. I suspect we will not get the promised benefit, and will rather get further looting of public money.
“Bob Goodwin’s” response is an EXTREMELY selective reading of the situation.
– Yes, we need oil. No, we don’t need oil from the U.S. (We hold 3% of world reserves vs. Persian Gulf’s 65%; U.S. peaked 35 yrs ago; Even if we extracted all possible U.S. reserves, which of course would take many years to do, even then it’d only effect gas prices by 1 – 4 cents.) You may’ve heard, all of the easy to extract oil is gone, what is left will be more and more inaccessible and dangerous. “Bob” doesn’t take into account the extreme economic damage the destruction of now 2 bodies of water (Prince Will Sound and Gulf). Two bodies that will probably not comeback for many, many years, if ever (not to where is was before the spills). Natural resources also have a monetary value of billions, not counting non-monetary value, but defenders of dirty extraction never acknowledge it. (To NOT consider the economic value of environmental resources is utterly absurd.)
– To excuse the spill away as “a messy business,” again, this presumes environmental resources have no value worth protecting. Tell that to the ruined fishermen and tourist industries along the coast. The residents breathing the toxic fumes. If the cost of gas were to assume the cost of the damage done by spills (that happen daily, BTW, on some scale) all petroleum products would be entirely unaffordable. So, consider that the gas at your pump is heavily–extremely–subsidized. Not very Libertarian that, is it?
– Regulation has collapsed by design. It was not a failure of regulation so much as the complete destruction of regulation. Oil companies have been allowed to drill without any oversight at all, as was the case in the Gulf. You seem to arguing for “asymmetry” as if it’s inevitable. Asymmetry is the problem and it needs to be addressed or nothing will change. Ever. (Oil co.s have been lobbying WA for million $ a day, the public simply cannot compete against the wealthiest constituency in the world in a governmental system, incl our SCOTUS that encourages influence from the elites. Now THAT’S asymmetry!)
– “Libertarianism” as a concept is about as easy to define as “religion.” There are Libertarians extending from the far right to the far left. It’s a highly malleable concept. If it’s supposed to imply personal responsibility then allowing oil companies to create damage on a scale they can’t and won’t compensate is the opposite of a Libertarian position.
– Oil is a finite commodity. We all need to accept that. One day it will run out and if we maintain our present dependence the inevitable response will be catastrophic war on a scale the world hasn’t seen. We’ll probably run out of water first. Compared to that, the oil crisis will appear miniscule.
I second Mogden.
In a Libetarian sense, the spill never happened……..
It is others that make us, not we ourselves.
That’s my d$%mn oil! Everybody else keep their f&*kin’ mitts off of MY OIL!
And if you don’t gather it up and give it back to ME, I’m sending all of you a BILL!
It is the responsibility of the fishes to maintain a nest egg for black swan events such as this one.
black swan indeed, and oily.
1) I’m a libertarian which means I’m a Republican who smokes dope. Therefore: Blame the President.
2) I’m a libertarian which means as long as I don’t live in the red-neck Riviera, I don’t care.
@attempter,
Your penultimate paragraph was AWESOME. The rest was darn good, too.
Answering Yves’ question: like everything else, the proper libertarian response is that the spill is the government’s fault!
In “Moral Politics,” George Lakoff argued that modern liberals share a “nurturing parent” attitude, while modern conservatives share a “strict father” attitude.
Personally, I think conservatives (including the Mises.org libertarians) are actually children, not grownups. They insist on requiring something in their lives to take on a superhuman, godlike quality, and they blame that something when it fails to live up to expectations in order to shift blame from their own failings.
That something used to be women’s virtue: in spite of the fact that every man did his best to have “relations” with a woman out of wedlock, if the man actually succeeded, it was the woman’s fault and the man was blameless.
With the change of societal norms in the 1920s and 1930s, the government became target of impossible standards. Now, when the government gets debauched by a businessman pursing his own self interest, it is the government’s fault for not stopping the businessman, who we can’t punish because he was just pursuing his natural urges.
Demanding perfection of somebody else in order to excuse one’s own imperfection is very childish behavior, and libertarians are among the most petulant children I’ve come across.
That being said, libertarians are largely irrelevant to this discussion. They’re just the radical true believers of neo-liberalism (which is neither new nor liberal). While neo-liberal “thought” dominates both parties these days, there’s no way to argue that the liberetards are in charge.
Besides, casting blame is of no value. The real question is how to set policy in view of this tragedy? Neo-liberal doctrine faces a major challenge, and, as long as we don’t get distracted by beating on liberetards, it is an easy target. We need to focus on destroying the myths of the “free market” that Uncle Milty created to perpetuate a new form of feudalism while pretending to be a classical liberal.
I agree, the overt “libertarians” are just a particularly obnoxious tip of the whole neoliberal corporatist iceberg. (Although historically they had an outsize influence as ideologues and opinions leaders. So today anti-corporatists must replicate the plan and constitute the anti-Chicago.)
“We need to focus on destroying the myths of the “free market” that Uncle Milty created to perpetuate a new form of feudalism while pretending to be a classical liberal.”
Superb! This is the key point, as far as I’m concerned. We forget that Adam Smith wasn’t just opposed to “big gub’mint” like Sarah Palin, but rather was critical of the king’s government because the king was propped up by (and was propping up) a landed aristocracy that Smith found to be stifling trade and investment and, in modern terms, allocating resources unproductively.
The modern large-scale, government-coddled corporation is a legal “person” which contradicts, in almost every sense, what 18th-century Whigs thought a “citizen” should be. What these massive institutions really are doing is recreating a 21st-century aristocracy of corporate persons that is STIFLING entrepreneurship and personal independency (two things libertarians are supposed to like) as Adam Smith’s hated aristocracy never did. They are trying to construct a RENT economy based on property rights rather than a true capitalist economy based on making, selling, and buying things. They are, in effect, closing off the openness Smith tried so hard to wrest from the lords and barons of his time.
The other myth that needs to be destroyed, which is also very popular amongst the libertarians is the Self Made Man myth.
This myth has probably led to more destruction of our way of life the last 30 yrs than anything else, I contend. The ” I got mine now you work for yours” attitude has been taken to such an extreme, the proponents have lost all humility and sense of gratitude for what has been done by others.
Indeed: Horatio Alger’s pull yourself up by the bootstraps mythology has gotten a stranglehold on America.
I know it takes a village right? And this little ditty, “none of all are as good as all of us”. Go assume positions as cogs on societies gear and let the individuals do the higher order thinking.
Oh please.
Recognizing that maybe you are a part (an important part) of something grander is not a “cog” mentality. Its called having a little humility and recognizing the random nature of things. Most of us successful people are “lucky” to have been born to parents that lived in America and were white. Those are probably the two most important determinants of financial success in this world. Neither of which YOU had anything to do with.
I know, things are random. Your born white and American and somebody sticks a silver spoon in your mouth and lays out the red carpet. You cant succeed if you work hard and try, so lie around and blame someone else.
For someone who believes in “randomness” you sure sound deterministic.
SOUND deterministic??
Thats because you dont know what deterministic means. I never said anyones fate is predetermined by anything only that certain things beyond our control do affect the odds of different things happening. Its not even arguable that being white and American offers certain advantages. Are they overcomeable? Sure
But those of us who are white should not simply tell stories of our history which only highlight hard work and brilliance when the predominant factor was our whiteness. Note I’m also not suggesting we APOLOGIZE for being white, in fact we cant apologize for things we cant control either. We do need to apologize for hastening(mostly in the past but even today) to paint all other non successful non white people as lazy and shiftless as an excuse for our white power structure catering to whites. And AS A WHOLE we have done pretty well on those areas in this country but it didnt happen because our govt took a libertarain approach to dealing with womens and minority issues. No, they took an ACTIVIST role and made the power structure concede.
“What these massive institutions really are doing is recreating a 21st-century aristocracy of corporate persons that is STIFLING entrepreneurship and personal independency (two things libertarians are supposed to like) as Adam Smith’s hated aristocracy never did. They are trying to construct a RENT economy based on property rights rather than a true capitalist economy based on making, selling, and buying things.”
love that. Bears repeating.
This is the kind of thing that utterly defeats their lies, on many levels.
1. The oil, if it can be said to “belong” to anyone in the first place, belongs to the people, so on its face it was robbery to have anything other than a national oil industry, which might at most use private service companies as hired contractors only.
2. Undersea drilling is a monumental undertaking which could never find private funding with no massive government backing and backstops. Since by definition the project must either be corporatist or fully nationalized, again it’s clearly nothing but unproductive looting to allow anyone to extract a private rent.
A true libertarian, if any such existed, would say that if an economic project can’t be done without massive government “investment” and backstopping, it shouldn’t be done at all.
3. It was always a flat out lie when the likes of Milton Friedman flippantly said “tort law can handle all harms”. How could BP pay the infinite damages here even if it were willing to, the way the libertarians claimed it would be?
4. But of course rackets like this aren’t willing to pay for the destruction they cause, and they rig the system to absolve themselves of having to. Thus BP received every waiver imaginable, didn’t have to take out any insurance at all let alone the trillion dollar policy which should have been required. Meanwhile it’s apparently only subject to a $75 million liability cap, and as we speak the Democrats are allowing a bill to modestly raise this limit to be held up by Republican. That’s a perfect example of the rigged system the libertarians always lie and claim doesn’t exist.
There’s your Friedman tort safeguard in action, functioning exactly the way he always really meant when he told such lies, the way he always knew and intended it would function.
The fact is that economic libertarianism was never anything other than a stalking horse for the dictatorship of big corporations. The goal has always been to lift all responsibilities from the holders of concentrated wealth and property and remove all restrictions on their rapacity, aggression, and destruction, even while big government is maintained as a looting mechanism, to force the politically weak to be the initial cash cow and to take on the cost and the risk, and to aggressively uphold this property regime. (The lie that it’s possible to have large-scale concentrated property and wealth at all without a very big, aggressive government is intellectually identical to saying “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”)
The result is the kleptocracy we have today. The result is Bailout America.
Excellent work attempter! And Tao Jonesing too (aside from clicking the wrong reply button ;-)) Good observations on the childishness of expecting perfection from Them Out There. You might be interested in Charles Eisenstein’s thinking on transitioning from Mother Earth thinking (we always take from our mothers) to Lover Earth (we share with our lovers, and love them too).
Neoliberalism is dead in the water, to use an unfortunate and appropriate metaphor.’Freedom’ has just led to what, if things go very badly from here, could be an extinction level event. If things go ‘well’ we still have a crime against the ecosystem so appalling punishment is virtually beside the point. I’m thousands of miles away from this but it’s keeping me away at night. And almost as sickening as the crime itself are the justifications and casuistries employed to pass the blame around like some fetid turd. And Tony Hayward might lose his job. Oh how awful.
Obviously I hope they get this under control, and quickly. But I hope too this terrible event is the final impetus humanity needs to transition away from fossil fuels, and towards a new socioeconomic system capable of true sustainability. Getting some trust back into life might be nice too.
The demand for perfection is partially “sincere” childishness, but also a calculated plan. The “starve the beast” strategy is to demand government live up to all the things starry-eyed liberals allegedly claimed for it, while ensuring its complete failure by gutting it of funds, staff, resources. Then after the inevitable failure, claim it’s the failure of the idea itself.
And then we have the orphan defense, where at every level but especially from the bank flacks we see how, after the bank rackets engaged in a concerted strategy to corrupt legislators and buy deregulation from them, they now turn around and blame the very regulators they destroyed for their own crimes.
Maybe we can generate all the power we need by wearing those silly hats with the propellers on them and leave “Mother Earth” un-fouled.
Yea. And maybe we can create all the energy we need by capturing all the hot air given off by a bunch of arrogant, self-rightous, over-confident libertarians. These pompous know-it-alls have been in control of our government for the last 30 years, and what has it brought us: an earthly paradise for the rich, and elbows and assholes for everybody else.
Well any time now, the liberal philosopher king will come down from parts on high and show the rest of us slobs and slitherings how to run our own lives.
This fantastic person will be able to micromanage every eventuality and do it in a purely democratic fashion, making sure to get a overwhelming consensus before proceeding. No oil spills will happen, factories will produce pure air and the birds will sing. We’ll have green energy and plenty of it with NO cost or by-product and all those evil Republicans and Libertarians will be vanquished forever.
Occdude,
Well maybe it’s time to let the philosopher kings have a go at it. You scientist kings have had the king’s ear for the last 30 years, and look where that’s gotten us.
But really, have you ever heard of something called “skepticism?” In your little Manichean construct, your black and white worldview is like that of Luther and the Counter Reformation he was pitted against. As Cromwell later phrased it so superbly: “By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be mistaken.”
“It was always a flat out lie when the likes of Milton Friedman flippantly said “tort law can handle all harms”. How could BP pay the infinite damages here even if it were willing to, the way the libertarians claimed it would be?”
Actually, limited liability through corporate form is a government sponsored fiction designed to encourage economic risk taking. If limited liability could not be judicially (governmentally) enforced and individual shareholders and their assets were on the hook for the Deepwater Horizon damages, there would be enough resources to pay the damages (which are surely not infinite; my tap poured clean water just a minute ago). And of course, if shareholders knew that they were personally liable for damages from disasters like Deepwater Horizon, the cost of raising capital for such a venture might quickly become prohibitive. I think that is the true libertarian argument you were looking for, no?
As you note very ably, Milton Friedman was not a libertarian. He was as much a corporate socialist as Keynes. The true libertarian you describe only exists outside the corridors of power.
Libercontrarian,
Your argument is nonsense. It assumes that the threat of monumental personal loss is sufficient motivation to keep our masters of the universe from making bad decisions.
This is a half-truth, and half-truths form the heart and soul of libertarianism.
I had a poker buddy who was a pilot for a prominent independent oil firm in Midland, Texas. He took some of the muckety-mucks up to Hobbs, New Mexico one morning for a meeting. Bad weather set in, but that wasn’t enough to deter our masters of the universe from their plans. They thought they could fool mother nature.
They were wrong. The plane went down in a storm, and everyone aboard, including my friend, was killed.
People make bad decisions, even the masters of the universe.
And the notion that others don’t pay the price for the bad decisions of the masters of the universe is so nonsensical as to be laughable.
DownSouth: I am sorry that you lost your friend. The Masters of the Universe you describe were as much creatures of a society where reckless action has little to no consequence, where risk of loss is born by others, and where liability can be limited, as they were stupid. And, unfortunately, you cannot regulate human stupidity out of existence.
“[W]e must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy
A society where reckless action has little to no consequence?
You call losing your life “no consequence”?
These guys paid the ultimate price for their bad judgment.
It belies the entire libertarian assumption that the threat of losing money or property will prevent people from making bad judgments.
People make bad decisions, even the masters of the universe.
Everyone except the regulators, right?
Who ever said the regulators didn’t make mistakes?
I certainly didn’t.
But I did ask the question: Who paid the regulators to look the other way?
Lethal to the idologies of the libertarians is the fact that most people do have some sort of moral compass, and most judge crimes of commission more harshly than crimes of omission.
Beautiful illustration of Libertarian logic: Since regulators might make mistakes, might be imperfect, we better not have any. Got it.
You don’t understand the concept of limited liability with respect to corporate structure.
Corporate entities are/must be liable for their wrongs — without limitation (unless by statute). The shareholders/owners, on the other hand, are shielded from personal liability beyond their capital stake in the company.
Officers/employees can also have unlimited personal liability in many instances without benefit of the corporate form.
Hi Transor Z: No offense, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of the limited liability concept. And, for purposes of this discussion, so do you.
You see. We do not live in a libertarian society. In our society, government, by statute and by judicial doctrine, permits individual shareholders to be immune from liability for the acts of the corporations they own/invest in. They reap the profits from capital experiments like Deepwater Horizon through their investment without fear of suffering the full consequence of catastrophic loss if it, say, explodes and pours oil into a sensitive environment like the Gulf of Mexico. In our non-libertarian world, government ensures that they only lose their expected profit and, in the “worst case scenario” from the shareholders view, their entire investment.
If, in a libertarian world, the potential investor could lose everything down to her last shirt if a capital experiment like Deepwater Horizon exploded, it would almost certainly change the calculus of how the potential investor evaluated her opportunity cost associated with the investment.
I hope that response is satisfactory because, now, my evaluation of shifting opportunity costs has led me to decide that watching Fringe with my wife is a more valuable investment of my time than posting here anymore . . . at least for today.
I find the anti-lib comments here funny and typical of an ignorant and brainwashed populace. Libertarian thought has no problem with issues like this at all. You are correct that the corporation is a governmental creation to induce risk-taking. There are doctrines for piercing the corporate veil which would not need to be applied here because BP has sufficient capital to pay all claims. The issue of causation is a problem because it might not have been BP’s fault. That said, they are going to be jointly and severally liable for most of the damages in the event that Transocean’s self-insurance is not sufficient to pay the 5-10 billion in losses (or one quarter’s worth of federal subsidy to Freddie or Fannie).
The only issues here are 1) that government intervened in the free-market and created a 75 million dollar cap on negligence claims and 2) so-called “multi-national corporations” are very good at lobbying/bribing all-powerful goverments and avoiding competition on the market. Both are rent-seeking pure and simple and is an argument in favor of less government, not more.
The guy who said the damages are “infinite” makes zero valid points. His entire diatribe is a non-sequitur. The damages aren’t even sufficient to eat through of all of BP’s shareholder equity, not to mention whatever bondholder interest there is. If the government had a more efficient dispute resolution system then there would be no real concern about processing those claims, either. A private arbitration system would do much better than the tragedy of the commons that are the federal and state courts.
As far as who “owns” the oil, it really wouldn’t have mattered how it was initially distributed. It could be by lottery, it could be pro-rata to each person in all nations, etc. Barring government-created transactions costs, oil rights would end up in the hands of those persons or entities who valued them most highly – i.e., big corporations with enough capital and know-how to produce the oil at the lowest cost. I know that I would happily sell my 1/300 millionth interest because I have no ability to do anything with it.
It seems to me the most basic question is why is oil needed in the first place? The answer seems to be that it is the cheapest and most efficient fuel to help people live. If oil is desired then it has to be obtained. As “infinite” as the damages from this oil spill are, people would rather have them than 10 dollar gas (because, on the margin, a lot of people would starve and die).
Yet, one might point to the non-libertarian cap on damages and conclude that, but for government intervention that effectively relieved BP of its obligation to be non-negligent (and thereby placing the burden on the federal government, which, unsurprisingly completely and utterly failed in terms of planing and execution) that BP would have had significantly more incentive to take due care.
Freidman was absolutely right that common tort law is all that is necessary. I’ve yet to read one cogent and informed analysis on any subject that suggests this is not the case. I see a lot of emotional and angry non-sequiturs but that’s about it.
The best part of the EU meltdown and the subsequent US meltdown is that it will prove beyond doubt that the most efficient, highly-funded, and well-thought out government of any stripe is destined towards bankruptcy and failure. True, these are obvious conclusions to the non-emotional thinkers out there (i.e., libertarians) and is equally incomprehensible to the emotional and anecdote-influenced leftists out there.
Unfortunately, the stupid and hysterical outnumber the libertarians and that is what is holding humanity back.
jdd
This…..”It seems to me the most basic question is why is oil needed in the first place? The answer seems to be that it is the cheapest and most efficient fuel to help people live. If oil is desired then it has to be obtained. As “infinite” as the damages from this oil spill are, people would rather have them than 10 dollar gas (because, on the margin, a lot of people would starve and die)”
is bullshit. We’ve never paid the true cost of oil because of pure libertarian/conservative claptrap that has never considered environmental costs properly. We would have developed other ways of powering our existence years ago if we had not had oil companies writing energy policy and receiving enormous breaks and subsidies to keep oil “affordable”
Unfortunately, the stupid and hysterical outnumber the libertarians and that is what is holding humanity back.
How is it that, after waxing long about “freedom” and “liberty,” the libertarian screed always ends with an attack on democracy?
It’s like Hayek said to a Chilean reporter when he went down to Chile to show his support for the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet:
My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.
http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin11172006.html
“There are doctrines for piercing the corporate veil which would not need to be applied here because BP has sufficient capital to pay all claims.”
Twenty years after the Exxon-Valdez, Exxon walks away with barely a scratch, losing not even one fiscal quarter’s worth of profit and leaving a large number of bankrupted claimants who didn’t have the “Libertarian mettle” to fight the bastards. Do you really believe in justice for all? It’s nonsense.
And what are we to take away from the fact that Keynes supported the Soviet Union and once noted that his policies were best suited to a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany (pre death camps, of course)? Why, nothing at all!
The modern equivalent is Paul Krugman whining about how democratic opposition to his deficit spending policies means the country is “ungovernable.”
Andrew Bissell,
Could it be that Keynes’ philosophy was that of an academic and a skeptic, whereas that of Mises and Hayek was a weird combination of stoicism and an Epicureanism?
Keynes was, after all, on more than one occasion known to poke fun at life, such as when he wrote his boyfriend Lytton Strachey:
I want to manage a railway or organize a Trust or at least swindle the investing public. It is so easy and fascinating to master the principles of these things.
–quote from Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
And of course, if shareholders knew that they were personally liable for damages from disasters like Deepwater Horizon, the cost of raising capital for such a venture might quickly become prohibitive. I think that is the true libertarian argument you were looking for, no?
Yes indeed. If we were all true libertarians, there could be no such thing as offshore drilling. Which would be a benign state of affairs, as we’re seeing these days.
“The true libertarian you describe only exists outside the corridors of power.
Precisely, the true libertarian is a convenient political fiction
I hate to admit it but you seem to be right. I have looked in the mirror for my reflection for the last two days without success, chatted with friends and my wife about my past and my future, and, today, sought religious counseling in hopes of finding my eternal soul.
But it turns out that you are right. I am nothing more than a convenient political fiction. Now that I realize my existence is unreal, I will return to the netherworld of cyberspace from which I came, chastised by all who did defend this good blog without coherence, purpose or reason.
I’m melting . . . melting . . . melt . . . .
It was always a flat out lie when the likes of Milton Friedman flippantly said “tort law can handle all harms”. How could BP pay the infinite damages here even if it were willing to, the way the libertarians claimed it would be?
The Libertarian Way would have to be the courts.
We would need to expand our court system to handle the complaints.
Do we want to exchange regulation for law suits.
Alas, it is a nightmare of a choice.
But BP would be out of business.
Wow!
I copied this and saved to a file I have which saves all internet comments I like. I want you to know if I ever quote you you will get full credit!! ;-)
I’ll second that: full credit to Mr. Attempter for wicked, razor-sharp logic. Libertarianism has been eviscerated and disemboweled. Ayn Rand is petrified. He does Yves proud.
“3. It was always a flat out lie when the likes of Milton Friedman flippantly said “tort law can handle all harms”. How could BP pay the infinite damages here even if it were willing to, the way the libertarians claimed it would be?”
I suppose BP could not pay the infinite damages and therefore would be forced out of business. Seems like a fitting outcome to the worst environmental calamity in history. In the future other oil companies would certainly be more cautious about safety. I have to go with Milton on this one.
I’ve only read a small fraction of the comments here but so far I haven’t seen much clarity about the libertarian position.
I’ve only read a small fraction of the comments here but so far I haven’t seen much clarity about the libertarian position.
Exactly, because there is no coherent libertarian position for this context.
A truly freedom-loving libertarian would believe civilization should reach its highest level of economic and political organization which is compatible with freedom and lack of coercion and then sustain itself there. That would be a level far less centralized and with much smaller concentrations of wealth and power than what we have now.
But it’s utterly incoherent to want levels of organization larger and more concentrated and heirarchical than regional communities and economies and yet still blather about how one still wants “freedom” and “non-coercion”. On its face it’s obviously impossible to do that. How can a continent-wide government or multinational corporation not be extremely coercive? It’s existentially impossible.
So anyone who wants those things yet calls himself a “libertarian” is a liar.
“Exactly, because there is no coherent libertarian position for this context.”
There isn’t one, or you haven’t bothered to research and consider it?
“A truly freedom-loving libertarian would believe civilization should reach its highest level of economic and political organization which is compatible with freedom and lack of coercion and then sustain itself there. That would be a level far less centralized and with much smaller concentrations of wealth and power than what we have now”
Why would a libertarian believe this? Maybe the “highest level of economic and political organization” is achieved by totalitarianism. My impression of libertarians is that they would forgo Utopian levels of organization in favor of individual freedom and accept the costs of that. No system is perfect and a wise libertarian would understand about trade offs.
“But it’s utterly incoherent to want levels of organization larger and more concentrated and heirarchical than regional communities and economies and yet still blather about how one still wants “freedom” and “non-coercion”. On its face it’s obviously impossible to do that.”
Are claiming that libertarians promote larger and more concentrated government? If so, I can see the root of your confusion.
“How can a continent-wide government or multinational corporation not be extremely coercive? It’s existentially impossible.”
They could be limited in power by a set of basic laws, maybe something like a Constitution. If you harm any person or their property the courts award the injured party compensation. Seems straight forward to me. The problem is that the power of the courts and all government needs to be limited, thus the main goal of the Constitution is to limit government.
So anyone who wants those things yet calls himself a “libertarian” is a liar.
I’m not sure I would pigeonhole myself as a libertarian at this point, but I certainly don’t want those things. I may however still be a liar… I’m not saying either way.
“A truly freedom-loving libertarian would believe civilization should reach its highest level of economic and political organization which is compatible with freedom and lack of coercion and then sustain itself there. That would be a level far less centralized and with much smaller concentrations of wealth and power than what we have now”
Why would a libertarian believe this? Maybe the “highest level of economic and political organization” is achieved by totalitarianism.
You think totalitarianism is “compatible with freedom and lack of coercion”? (Since you quoted my whole sentence I’m assuming you read it.)
“But it’s utterly incoherent to want levels of organization larger and more concentrated and heirarchical than regional communities and economies and yet still blather about how one still wants “freedom” and “non-coercion”. On its face it’s obviously impossible to do that.”
Are claiming that libertarians promote larger and more concentrated government? If so, I can see the root of your confusion.
It looks like everyone on this thread who calls himself a “libertarian” wants e.g. deepwater drilling to exist, even though as I said there’s no way it can possibly be done by a loose coming together of volunteers. How do you do something like that without roping in untold numbers of people either without their fully knowledgeable consent or against their will, through using their tax dollars and exposing them to the risk, like for example from, um, something like an explosion and hemorrhage?
That was so well put! Thank you for writing.
Sad but true, all of it.
Not that it will change any minds….
Short answer: remove liability caps for clean ups
“If we’re really interested in preventing oil spills and bank failures, punishing to the fullest those who screw up would seem to be a very effective way of doing so. Why doing so isn’t in play in both cases might have something to do with the political pull of large banks and oil companies. Crony capitalism/corporatism strikes again.”
Full article here:
http://www.coordinationproblem.org/2010/05/oil-spills-incentives-and-the-economic-way-of-thinking.html
I don’t know if I qualify as a Libertarian. Maybe two positions I hold might get me there:
1 – A society which creates a massive Public Trough, and whose members’ activities largely consist of fighting over how can feast at that trough becomes an ugly society.
2 – If I smoke a joint I don’t want my door kicked in.
If that makes me Libertarian enough, here’s my reply:
Anyone involved in the extraction of oil MUST carry insurance, and re-insurance, that is massive enough to cover any and all possible damages that might result. The increased cost of production from this insurance is passed along in the price to the consumer.
And all sea creatures have the right to human representation in a court of law. While an oil-soaked egret may never be fully-individually compensated, awards for damages can be used for the benefit of the species as a whole.
Sound fair?
how = who in that first sentence above.
Post first, THEN light that joint…..
You never answered the issue however about the joint/door kicking in…my guess is that very soon the kicking in is going to be due to lack of sharing by your friends….legalization
Can there exist a libertarian political philosophy that has anything approaching a systematic collection of ideas, denoting an approval by a deciding body or leadership and still be libertarian? The withering away of the state, with communism as the social order, is this the ideal of libertarians? How much crap are we supposed to accept from pseudo intellectuals?
Libertarianism is an affliction of the human brain wherin the neurons in Layer IV of the neocortex appear to be unusually active, with the result that the limbic system comes to predominate over the frontal lobes, particularly the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. It commonly presents as a profound attenuation of the subject’s social perceptions with a correlated diminution of empathic response, frequently accompanied by delusions of persecution. It is typically contracted during the latter half of the second decade of life, and within this cohort can be virulently contagious. With appropriate psychological intervention and emotional support, symptoms can be somewhat relieved, though they often persevere into midlife and even into senility. Relapse is common. There is, at this time, no anticipated resolution to this deplorable condition.
Libertarian = Delusions of hypermasculinity or delusional hypermasculinity, or something along those lines. Let the gladiators duke it out, of course, to the death.
The oil gusher in the Gulf? Well, that’s unfortunate. But, hey, it has provided unique opportunity and incentive for America’s brightest minds to invent and patent new technologies in the oil spill field — an economic niche for an upstart entrepreneur, and that’s always a good thing.
Delusional hypermasculinity? And I always thought I was very sensitive.
But I can imagine the libertarian Gladiators lining up to battle with Gerry Butler’s 300 right now. Thoreau, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Spooner . . . all vicious brutes seeking blood and treasure at every opportunity . . . at anyone’s expense . . . at EVERYONE’S expense.
Once you’ve characterized opposing viewpoints as a form of mental illness, can re-education and “treatment” be very far behind? Will individual consent be any more necessary than it is in modern psychiatric practice?
Don’t take a joke very well, do you?
Liberalizsm is the mental illness caused by intellectual laziness. It is finding the mental constructs with the fewest internal contradictions. We shouldn’t kill to survive. All problems are caused by evil. We are all victims of the powerful.
Libertarianism is enormously self contradicting, but becomes periodically popular due to the gradual drift from pragmatism that is caused by shallow idealism.
bob goodwin,
Great!
So now the libertarians have gone from “Greed is good!” to “Cognitive dissonance is good!”
Pssst! For those of us paying attention, we knew all along what lay at the core of libertarian dogma. But at least now you’ve come out of the closet and are being honest about it. That’s actually an improvement over Obama, where we not have to put up with his LANieism, but his unbelievable hypocrisy as well.
Off the web, I forget where.
Paraphrasing here: Don’t bail out or help the creatures of the Gulf, they will only get fat and lazy, requiring endless welfare.
or
As alex back might say: don’t weashhh my stash whilst rolling a “J” at my house for…us.
Skippy…preemptive amends alex
“Anyone involved in the extraction of oil MUST carry insurance”
Wow, what a non-libertarian response. “MUST carry insurance”? What is this, Soviet Russia?
Here’s the correct answer:
– In a libertarian world, there would be no such thing as public property. Every foot of the beach, every square mile of the ocean shelf, every sea turtle, and every egret would belong to someone (be it a private resident, a fisherman, an underwater park, or a conservancy nonprofit.)
– The oil spill would trigger a group lawsuit from all parties whose property was contaminated by the spill.
– The extractor and the owner of the oil well would end up paying damages to everyone, possibly losing all their property in process.
– There would be no limits on tort.
– Furthermore, limited liability rules would not apply to non-contractual liabilities: shareholders and possibly executives of the company would be liable to pay for their damages with their own property, and end up with their wages garnished for thousands of years, in debt prison, maybe even in slavery if damages exceeded their capital and they had no insurance.
” There would be no limits on tort.
– Furthermore, limited liability rules would not apply to non-contractual liabilities: shareholders and possibly executives of the company would be liable to pay for their damages with their own property, and end up with their wages garnished for thousands of years, in debt prison, maybe even in slavery if damages exceeded their capital and they had no insurance.”
This is correct, except, of course the slavery bit. Not sure about the libertarian position on debtor prison or whether or not debts could be inherited. Also, creditors would also be personally liable. So this would pretty much put an end to deep water off shore drilling and nuclear energy. One thing is for sure, and this remains the saving grace of the libertarian perspective, if government took this on, with its immunity from tort actions, oil spills of significant magnitude would be routine. As testified to by the environmental catastrophe that was the Soviet Union. Which raises an interesting question: If it is certain that nationalization would lead to environmental catastrophe, how could it be that government regulation would not also since government regulation sets the standard for reasonable diligence and hence liability limits? Or maybe regulators would need to be held personally liable too. And compliance with regulation would not provide any basis for the limitation of liability. Indeed, personal liability could be extended to the legislators and government officials who permitted the drilling in the first place.
I’m not sure about debtor prison. Heritability of debts should not be necessary, as long as the tort law is written to ensure that all shareholders and executives end up in a poorhouse before a penny of debt needs to be inherited. The idea is that personal liability should act as a deterrent, and crafty lawyers shouldn’t be able to get around that by e.g. hiring terminally ill people as executives.
I don’t agree that it would put an end to off-shore drilling. It would spawn a new branch of insurance industry: well-capitalized companies and banks selling oil spill insurance and acting as regulators. Anyone who wants to engage in off-shore oil drilling would voluntarily buy a $10 billion policy from the likes of Lloyd’s, and comply with their regulations (because that would cut their premiums), or just set aside some money to pay for possible cleanups (current market cap of BP is $150 billion, they can afford that).
So instead of a government regulation regarding oil-drilling, you have to get a regulations about the physical health of company executives (or even their mental health). Not sure we have progressed a lot here !
Actually, the finance industry has “fit-and-proper” requirement for execs. It didn’t work so well
I’ve heard estimates of damages in the trillions in this case. Or take the case of Chernobyl. Seems like that is a multi-trillion dollar disaster extending in consequence over several centuries. Insuring against that possibility is prohibitive. And even extending unlimited personal liability to every shareholder, every creditor, every employee of the company and of all the companies doing business with (enabling) the offending company would not be satisfactory. So it seems clear that from a libertarian perspective there would be no off shore drilling or nuclear energy. What enables these industries is government regulation. So the focus of personal liability should be directed to government regulators, legislators, and probably even members of the judiciary.
Well I don’t know much about mexico but it seems they are always trying to send bad stuff our way.
I have said for years that there should be a wall or at least a fence to keep everything mexican out of the US. The liberals are going to try to tell you that you can’t do that, but in my america, we can do anything we set our mind too.
Sarah,
The Mexicans fleeing to the United States are fleeing the type of Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal (LANie) “paradise” that the libertarians celebrate.
Let me assure you, they are not the ones destroying America. They came to the United States to get away from a LANie-created hell, not to recreate it in their adopted land.
LANieism is a creation of the United States, of American “intellectuals,” imposed upon Latin America, and not the other way around.
You sound just like one of those ‘smart people’. Intellectual is too many letters for me, I had to cut and paste it.
Back home in Alaska, the longest word allowed is America, anything longer than that and you are wasting my time.
The Mexicans fleeing to the United States are fleeing the type of Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal (LANie) “paradise” that the libertarians celebrate
Yeah, by seeking to legalize all drugs libertarians were definitely hoping to create narco-terrorist states.
Yea right, as if the social anarchy and political irresponsibility created by the LANies didn’t have anything to do with it.
I feel dumber every time I read one of your posts.
Sarah,
I suggest you read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein.
I almost feel guilty… but I’m glad I shorted this stock.
The classic libertarian response would be allow everyone negatively and proximately affected to sue for damages.
http://mises.org/daily/4331
Excerpt:
How about reality? The incident is a tragedy for BP and all the subcontractors involved. It will probably wreck the company, a company that has long provided the fuel that runs our cars, runs our industries, and keeps alive the very body of modern life. The idea that BP should be hated and denounced is preposterous; there is every reason to express great sadness for what has happened.
It is not as if BP profits by oil leaks, or that anyone reveled in the chance to dump its precious oil all over the ocean. BP gains nothing from this. Its own CEO has worked for years to try to prevent precisely this kind of accident from occurring, and done so not out of the desire to comply with regulations, but just because it is good business practice.
In contrast to those who are weeping, we might ask who is happy about the disaster:
1. the environmentalists, with their fear mongering and hatred of modern life, and
2. the government, which treats every capitalist producer as a bird to be plucked.
The excerpt I quoted from “Feel Sorry for BP?” was written by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
The environmentalists might not be too happy because this means tons more coal burning in the near and intermediate term. Even the predatory government is not going to be too happy because this almost certainly means a second recession as global energy prices ratchet up. That means even more government pensions are at risk which will be the driver for all government policies over the next several decades.
Nobody’s “happy” about this spill: what I see from the environmentalists and government is anger.this Rockwell piece is all about spreading hatred for environmentalists and government, right?
K M Fowler,
Why does it not surprise me that this is the sort of mind-numbingly stupid claptrap now emanating from the Mises Institute?
Maybe now that naïve, simplistic old fool Mises, along with his equally benighted sidekick Hayek, will be seen for what they really were.
Let’s take a closer look at the narrative put forth in your comment. You would have us believe that BP is just “doing God’s work,” providing “the fuel that runs our cars, runs our industries, and keeps alive the very body of modern life.” For we all know that “the very body of modern life,” that is our “lifestyle,” as Bush put it, is modernism’s God, right?
Of course anyone who has taken the time to examine this construct knows it is a fiction. Our uncompromisable “lifestyle” is a creation of corporate propaganda—-advertising. The whole concept of a consumerist society needs to be reexamined.
If we debunk your first assumption—-that BP is diligently toiling away in its service to mankind—-then your second argument loses its force. For the truth is that BP should be “hated and denounced.” The whole narrative that BP was doing the modernist God’s work, but just made some mistakes along the way, falls apart.
The second paragraph is where logic really gets turned on its head. For the BP that was mankind’s humble servant in paragraph 1 somehow, as if by magic, gets transformed into that mythical construct of classical economics—-the rational egoist. “It is not as if BP profits by oil leaks,” we are told. This completely ignores the fact that BP does profit from cutting its costs to the bone, by drilling wells on-the-cheap. And if this leads to a catastrophic accident that causes irreparable damage, well, so be it. The bean-counters have done their risk analysis, and Social Darwinism has no place for such sensibilities as “the beauty of the earth” and “the fullness thereof.”
Of course the whole idea of the rational egoist is one of the greatest half-truths ever pushed on humankind. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it:
The false abstraction of “economic man” remains a permanent defect in all bourgeois-liberal ideology. It seems to know nothing of what Thomas Hobbes termed “the continual competition for honor and dignity” in human affairs. It understands neither the traditional ethnic and cultural loyalties which qualify a consistent economic rationalism; nor the deep and complex motives in the human psyche which express themselves in the desire for “power and glory.” All the conflicts in human society involving passions and ambitions, hatreds and loves, envies and ideals not recorded in the market place, are beyond the comprehension of the typical bourgeois ethos.
–Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama
Unfortunately, Obama is all hat and no cattle.
He dutifully repeats all the right words, and then does just the opposite.
“The American way of life is not negotiable.” (2001—Dick Cheney)
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, an oil services company—co-conspirator in what is likely to be the greatest environmental crime in world history.
Of course anyone who has taken the time to examine this construct knows it is a fiction. Our uncompromisable “lifestyle” is a creation of corporate propaganda—-advertising. The whole concept of a consumerist society needs to be reexamined.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe people actually like having cars to drive and planes to fly in? What forms of transportation do you use?
Did you type that post on a keyboard made of plastic?
Yea, they might like clean beaches, a job and a living wage too.
And while you’re at it, you might throw in a dash of democracy too, along with some justice and a little equality.
Of course 30 years of libertarian rule hasn’t yielded any of these things, that is for the majority Americans.
Really nice dissection. Thanks.
“The abstraction called the “ecosystem” — which never seems to include mankind or civilization — has done far less for us than the oil industry
– Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Umm Really Lew? Would that include the oxygen your brain seems to be so desperately deprived of?
“After the British Petroleum–hired oil rig exploded last week, the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the “ecosystem,” which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle….
… The abstraction called the “ecosystem” — which never seems to include mankind or civilization — has done far less for us than the oil industry, and the factories, planes, trains, and automobiles it fuels.”
Feel Sorry for BP? – Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. – Mises Daily http://mises.org/daily/4331#ixzz0o48SheCw
Wow! Thanks for the link KMF.
I’m not sure if you’re making a case for or against libertarianism by posting the Mises.org post but I know I am more convinced than ever that the poor gullible people who are taken in by the hacks at that super-hard right propaganda machine are either crazy or mentally challenged. Its a little hard to take any of it serious. The mises.org article you posted was just one facile argument after another. I mean its one thing to make an argument against regulation or question the science involved in global warming, but to resort to putting the word ecosystem inside of quotation marks and calling it “an abstraction”. Seriously? I can already see Sarah Palin on stage at the next Presidential debate, putting air quotes around the word ‘ecosystem’ and wielding it as a weapon against any opponent who expresses a modicum of concern for the environment the same way she mocked Miranda rights and community organizing at the last Republican national convention.
Say what you will KMF about Rand or Friedman, I could chock it up to one very large difference in opinion, but do you really believe British Petroleum has done more for mankind than the ecosystem?!
Sure gasoline for your Cadillac is nice but what about air, oxygen, fish, plankton, bees, grass, food crops, photosynthesis, LIFE itself? Do you think humans could inhabit the planet earth without this silly, do-nothing “ecosystem” thingy which your beloved Mises.org hack seems to believe is an inconvenient detail of life on earth that capitalism is expected to unfairly accommodate?
Have we all been punked? Mises.org or the Onion? I really can’t tell. Is libertarianism and Austrian/neo-classical economics all just one big sick joke? I’m on pins and needles? Just say ‘gotcha’ or ‘psyche’ already, you’re all kidding right???
While I am not a Libertarian (nor do I even play one on TV)but this oil spill brings us to the concept of Tragedy of the Commons; or of how to manage a public resource. In the famous essay by Garrit Hardin, he explains how each herder using a common field has on the one hand a long-term incentive to maintain the field but this must be balanced by the knowledge of the a short-term advantage each herder could get over the others by over exploiting it. In the end Hardin states that the commons will be destroyed if this situation is allowed to continue.
The Libertarian answer to the Tragedy of the Commons is to lose the commons. They would say that if everyone owns something then that really means no one owns it. So the fact that Gulf of Mexico is not somehow parcelled up and owned by individuals is the ultimate cause of the Horizon disaster from the Libertarian point of view. Had this area actually belonged to someone they would have been much more careful about exploiting it.
And if BP owned it all would they go out of their way to keep the ocean perty so long as there was oil to pump out of the ground? Not hardly. Profits first. Private ownership only works insofar as an owner gives a hoot about appearances.
I do love to read the libertarian positions on the Commons. They are delectable nonsense. Of course, it is impossible to parse ownership of certain resources to the degree they do so in their theories and their fantasies. Most people don’t even understand what they own when they “own” something as “simple” as a house. Is there a mortgage on title? Are there zoning restrictions? Can you run a business out of the house? Can you play loud music? Can your dog bark in your own backyard? Can you stop your neighbor’s dog from barking in your neighbor’s backyard?
Back to the commons…there has been quite a lot of good thinking and writing in the Common Pool Resource area in the last couple decades (well, some very bad thinking as well, but what can you do?).
I’m friends with a few environmental anthropologists, and the discussions we have are fascinating. The only sure way to know if someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about in this area is if they can describe their position on common resources in less than an hour.
I’ve been thinking along the similar lines. But to be honest I have not read that much Libertarian theory; I’ve had Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia sitting on by bookcase for several years now but I’ve never gotten around to actually reading it. That said I will take a shot at this but I’m sure I’ll be missing some important concepts that have already been hashed out elsewhere.
While many Libertarians concentrate on property rights, its seems the key to their ideology is property responsibilities. In other words the property owners must each and every day strike the correct balance between the exploitation and sustainability of their resources. But this is obviously not necessarily such an easy equilibrium to find. Also the larger the property held by one owner, the more difficult it would be to exploit it responsibly. If we search for the limits it seems clear that as all property tends towards being concentrated into fewer hand, then the constraint of responsibly reduces on these select few as the concentration towards them increases. A the end of the day, if you own everything what do you care if half of your realm is devastated? You can give yourself a Mulligan and still have the other half to play with.
So the ideal Libertarian world would be a society of ubiquitous property owners, each one responsible and able, all living in together in harmony. This is not so far from the ideal socialist world, a society of people living in equality but under a strong state. I stress the word ideal here since obviously these ideals will never be achieved. As an ideal there is no denying that has a certain appeal. But in reality the ideal egalitarian Libertarian world is in perpetual conflict with the ideal Capitalist world, which values concentration of capital into a few hands.
The bond between the libertarian and his property seems to me to be strongly analogous to the bond between an idealized husband and wife living in a state of nature. And by means of this analogy we can see some of the inherent weaknesses in the Libertarian perspective. Back in the day, way back before a state was able to provide any protection, if a woman were wandering about on her own in the wilderness, due to men’s superior physical strength (on average) and totally different reproductive strategies in the state of nature (long-term nurturing of a few offspring for women vs. many short-term “junk shots” for men), this woman would be very vulnerable to being exploited by any random guy who happened upon her. This potential for exploitation is not so different from the perspective a mordern day BP might take towards exploitable wealth it happens upon in the Gulf of Mexico.
But human survival depended upon finding a way to avoid that random men would just run around raping and killing the women around them. Marriage arose which institutionalized a sustainable relationship between the resource (women) and the exploiter (men). In its ideal form it is clear that the exploiter has a evolutionary self interest to treat his resource in a responsible and sustainable way. And who can deny that many successful relationships did arise from this institution?
But from this analogy we can clearly see some of the limits. At the extreme if one man had all the women (resources) then he would have next to no restraints on exploiting them. But as the resources tend towards being distributed more equally, one man for every woman, then the incentives towards responsible exploitation becomes higher.
But, assuming all the correct incentives are in place, is every person capable of finding the correct balance between exploitation and sustainability? The answer has to be no – not by a long shot. From the marriage analogy it is clear that against every evolutionary incentive, enough men will abuse or even kill their wives. And in the more nuanced case of deciding how many trees to fell, how many wells to drill, how many animals to allow to graze, while perhaps a certain percentage of property owners would strike the correct balance, there can be no question that there will be many other who fail, and fail miserably. If we take the example in a crowded city, will all property owners really be able to find the right balance between building affordable homes while at the same time avoiding the risk of catastrophic fire destroying the entire neighbourhood? Add to this the ideal of Libertarianism is for widespread ownership, which means a tendency towards diminished ability for each owner to compensate all the others for catastrophic damages and we see a sure recipe for disaster.
I can’t help but think that the Libertarian approach to the commons (there should be no resource that is not owned) is analogous to the Islamic approach to women (there should be no woman that is not “owned” by a man, whether it be husband, father, brother). While effective at a primitive level, say in a low density rural area, the Libertarian approach paradoxically places huge limits on the ability of a resource to actually be exploited. There is an argument to be made that the “Little House on the Prairie” world is superior to ours and the widespread implementation of Libertarian policies would insure that that is the only type of world that could exist. But that train left the station a century ago. In a modern complex society, the state must step in. The problem is that as you allude to, these interventions are extremely complicated, Add to this the current corporatist political realities in the US, and it is clear that these interventions have recently only tended to aid and abet the irresponsible exploitation of natural resources by powerful corporations. But the answer surely is for the people to use whatever leverage they can muster to force the state to carry out its duties correctly since the simple and pure Libertarian rural alternative would mean that the world’s population would need to be cut by 80% or so.
Niebuhr came to a similar conclusion:
The idea that men would not come in conflict with one another, if the opportunities were wide enough, was partly based upon the assumption that all human desires are determinate and all human ambitions ordinate. This assumption was shared by our Jeffersonians with the French enlightenment. ”Every man,” declared Tom Paine, “wishes to pursue his occupation and enjoy the fruits of his labors and the produce of his property in peace and safety and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished all objects for which governments ought to be established are accomplished.” The same idea underlies the Marxist conception of the difference between “an economy of scarcity” and an “economy of abundance.” In an economy of abundance there is presumably no cause for rivalry. Neither Jeffersonians nor Marxists had any understanding for the perennial conflicts of power and pride which may arise on every level of “abundance” since human desires grow with the means of their gratification.
One single note of realism runs through Jefferson’s idyllic picture of American innocency. That consists in his preference for an agricultural over an urban society. Jefferson was confident of the future virtue of America only in so far as it would continue as an agricultural nation. Fearing the social tensions and the subordination of man to man in a highly organized social structure, his ideal community consisted of independent freeholders, each tilling his own plot of ground and enjoying the fruits of his own labor. “Dependence begets subservience,” he wrote in extolling the life of the farmer. “It suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.”
There is a special irony in the contrast between the course of American history toward the development of large-scale industry and Jefferson’s belief that democracy was secure only in an agrarian economy. America has become what Jefferson most feared; but the moral consequences have not been as catastrophic as he anticipated. While democracy is tainted by more corruption in our great metropolitan areas than in the remainder of our political life, we have managed to achieve a tolerable justice in the collective relations of industry by balancing power against power and equilibrating the various competing social forces of society. The rise of the labor movement has been particularly important in achieving this result; for its organization of the power of the workers was necessary to produce the counter-weight to the great concentrations of economic power which justice requires. We have engaged in precisely those collective actions for the sake of justice which Jefferson regarded as wholly incompatible with justice.
–Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
Sorry, meant to add that incorporating the concept of time takes the analysis so far out of most human comprehension that it’s not even funny! What does sustainable use of a resource mean? Over a year? Over 1000 years? Over 1,000,000 years? Which generations get to decide at which time the exploitation occurs?
Also, why do I have to accept “ownership” decisions that were made prior to my birth? Just because society uses violence to protect those property rights? Is there any other reason? What if the one person owned and controlled everything? Do we all accept his or her decisions? Would the efficiency benefits be worth it for those who are the ‘losers’ of his or her decisions?
I don’t think the proverbial “tragedy of the commons” applies here. BP didn’t screw over the Gulf by pumping all of the oil out. This is not a overgrazing/over-pumping scenario. Yves already pointed out last week that clean-up and damages aside, BP profited (thanks to insurance) from the explosion and sinking of the Horizon oil drilling rig. Now if you could pretend for a moment that BP won’t be spending millions or billions on clean-up and uninsured damage settlements, the Horizon accident from a purely business standpoint is merely a small setback and a difficult PR event. If every fish in the ocean died yesterday and the entire ocean turned to blood BP could care less. It would not impact their business of oil extraction. If the entire ocean turned to oil tomorrow well then all the better. Just think of the profit margins if they could dispense with the high-tech drilling rigs and all of their highly paid support staff. Why BP could just hire all of the out of work Gulf coast fisherman to skim oil all day for pennies on the dollar! Think of the profits!
The proper Libertarian response is to blame Obama,
Pray to Jesus, and rant about taxes.
Superb!
libertarian response: it was high taxes on the oil company that caused the spill. If we didn’t regulate them they would do a better job of regulating themselves. Best option now is let the free market clean up the mess.
Given this could be a worse disaster than chernobyl, since it involves what is effectively an oil volcano. The volcano has a ‘oil chamber’ the size of the magma chamber under Yellow Stone park, and if even 50% of the content of that chamber were to leak out it would cause an extinction level event…
Given all that, I would have thought the Libertarian response is it is an national emergency, and so if BP can’t sort it out, then the government will have to.
But the government should extract the cost from BP.
Yves:
While I am not, in any sense, a libertarian scholar, or even part of the “movement” I can perhaps provide the answer you were looking for.
Libertarianism is based upon property rights. Property rights are based upon use. The idea of homesteading. If I or you are working a piece of land, live in a home, or maintaining a home for others to live in, it is ours. If we neglect our land, allow our house to fall into disrepair, then our claim to that property is moot.
We don’t live on the sea, we tend not to ascribe property rights to large portions of the sea. As Murray Rothbard and Walter Block point out, the fact that no one owns the sea or the valuables in it. Hence there is a tendency to over fish. If there were defined property rights, if whales were tagged, raised, followed and shepherded, they numbers would increase, since the represent an investment. One would not spear a mother whale while it watched over its child, since that would have a negative impact, let us say, on the future of the whale population. Since there is no investment, there is only plunder.
The pro-regulation assumption is, is that regulation would have prevented this catastrophe, or, at least would have forced BP to have at hand resources for containing the oil spill. But this is hardly the case. Most regulation — libertarians argue — benefits the larger players in a given industry and tend to punish smaller players. Think the recent health care bill, or the regulation, crafted during the Clinton years, revoking Glass-Stegall. Or even, in the face of the crisis, Congress’s upping the maximum insured deposit. Protecting the banks which might be subject to a run, etc., while placing the ultimate burden of insuring these deposits upon the taxpayer. This is how it works. (This is also not to say, that when Government contracts with third parties, they should not exercise. It is simply to say that they too often don’t.)
The assumption is that the U.S. Government can provide offshore licensing is due to the idea that a single entity — the US Government, has dominion over the entire US Coastline, (and some might say, over all resources within its boundaries.) In a libertarian reading, the Fishermen have dominion, since they homestead the seas. They would also have a greater incentive than the government to protect the coastline, and their livelihood from the consequences of an oil spill.
A better strategy, for the fisherman — but also for the government — rather than setting rules for BP (let us assume that Barak Obama, despite being the single largest recipient of BP largess, ever, and no doubt, in turn rewarding them with “green projects”, is in fact an honest player), would factor into its royalty, the cost of any cleanup for any offshore accident. This could take the form of a large deposit held in escrow, or merely a large payment which would defer the cost of a cleanup. Since no one would rent you a flat without some sort of guarantee, there is no reason believe that it is solely BP’s responsibility to police itself, when operating on the property of another.
Based upon the above, the failure was a government failure. Having presumed “ownership” of a resource, it did not take responsibility for the safeguarding of the resource. It failed to do so, not because BP acting in bad faith — this might be the case, but we should not assume that any actor will always act in good faith — but because it merely failed to act in the role of an owner. If the Government has the right to collect royalties for a portion of the ocean, then it has the responsibility to ensure that it is protected.
If it failed to do so, it is because the consequences of any hazard created by BP’s negligence would not effect the direct decision makers, who — like President Obama — may actually gain from the crisis, or at worst, feel no consequence whatsoever. (Heads will not role inside the Department of the Interior, or the EPA. No one will be held accountable or have their livelihood threatened.)
There is a mis-characterization of libertarianism as being in favor of large capitalist enterprises. For example, Goldman Sachs, BP or General Electric — all of whom benefit from their special relationship with governments around the world. Part of this mis-charecterization is from mistaking Ayn Rand as the spokesperson for the movement. It has much more to do with Emerson, and the ideals of sovereign and self reliant individuals, then the sort of weird, over industrialized smoke stack world envisioned by Ayn Rand as her utopia. (Libertarians do, in fact, believe that pollution of streams, land or air should be actionable in court. Part of the idea of ownership is the notion that one may sue those who prevents or impedes the use or enjoyment of one’s own property. It merely believes those harmed are those who should collect the damages, and make the actionable claims.)
What happened in the case of BP’s negligence is not a failure of capitalism. It is a failure of government to protect that over which it claims dominion. It is a demonstration of why governments — always corrupt — fail those they are presumed to protect, at the same time, reap rewards while others — namely, those who earn their livelihood, the fishermen and resort owners, from the sea (and the taxpayer) bear the cost. Had these individuals negotiated with BP, then it is they who would have reaped the reward of the royalties, for the cost of bearing the risk. (Those who would say that the taxpayer who reap the reward of the royalty, fail to take into consideration that given our current budget deficits, there is not benefit to the taxpayer. )
The fisherman and others are only innocent victims because the ability to act in their own self-interest has been abrogated by the Government, while the ability of large corporations — such as BP — are allowed that privilege. Ditto the recent bailout — where the citizen will pay the penalty, while the politicians and the banks which collude with them, reap the benefit.
Well done, ThatisScary !
I would add that the legal principle of precedent would come into play. The damage done by the Exxon Valdez and its cleanup cost would factor into the size of the escrow required by those at-risk.
You guys really expect the tort system to provide an effective deterrent? How are you going to enforce a decision?
Consider the Exxon-Valdez incident. The locals sued Exxon and won billions of dollars. Thirty years later they still have not collected.
That dope you smoke must be really really good.
“Libertarianism is based upon property rights. Property rights are based upon use. The idea of homesteading. If I or you are working a piece of land, live in a home, or maintaining a home for others to live in, it is ours.”
I utterly demolish the absurd homesteading argument offered by Rothbard here:
http://www.disequilibria.com/blog/
Read Property, Parts 1-3.
The homesteading and labor-mixing arguments offered by libertarians are objectively false, empirically untrue, and logically inconsistent. They are literally nothing more than flimsy attempts at post-hoc rationalization of a position libertarians have simply assumed to be true.
Exactly. As Jean Jacques demonstrated to Emile many moons ago, never waste your time planting your melons on somebody else’s farm.
The argument is valid but contains one big flaw. The government being charged with protecting the resource that it owns does not work. The system can be gamed. The govt is made up of a large number of individuals that are charged with protecting the resource. These individuals will have two separate interests, their own and the govt. Their own self interest will more likely come first. Therefore, they are vulnerable to influence, be it money, power or just survival. Libertarianism ends up being a zero sum game.
“Libertarianism ends up being a zero sum game.”
So true, reductionist objectivism. The writers of Star Trek Next Gen captured Libertarians well, in the Ferengi (sp) a decidedly unattractive species whose entire existence was devoted to profit. Any actions not consistent with acquistion were considered immoral in Ferengi culture.
Most die-hard Star Trek fans are actually embarrassed by the simplistic caricatures the writers made the Ferengi into in the early episodes of “The Next Generation.” They’re generally seen as representing the worst of the early season’s quasi-racist, ra-ra Federation mentality. So, perhaps it is telling you’ve chosen to resurrect that depiction here as your idea of libertarians.
At the risk of an absurd digression, there is an interesting episode of Deep Space Nine where Commander Sisko and Quark are stranded and begin debating the relative merits of their two cultures. Quark argues, quite capably, that the Ferengi are better their humans, as their history lacks the wars, concentration camps, and other collectivist evils so often visited upon people in the pursuit of “nobler” ideals than simple profit.
But this is hardly the case. Most regulation — libertarians argue — benefits the larger players in a given industry and tend to punish smaller players.
Indeed, this was why the left was allied with a lot of the deregulation movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Airline deregulation was led in part by Ted Kennedy and signed into law by Jimmy Carter, for instance.
I was kind of following along until this part, “The fisherman and others are only innocent victims because the ability to act in their own self-interest has been abrogated by the Government, while the ability of large corporations — such as BP — are allowed that privilege. ”
I’m trying to imagine real world fishermen going up against BP.
–“Drop everything, we better sue.”
–“What about protecting our boats — and doing the fishing and stuff?”
–“Get the lawyers on the phone, we have to pay them $500 and hour, but it will be worth it.”
–“Can’t we just wait a few years for a Class Action Suit, when things have had time to get sorted out? And then we get to see the lawyers get HUGE amounts of money out of BP which they will keep nearly all of. And the damage to our livelihoods will be permanent. But we will have had our Day In Court, we will!”
Right.
This is the simplest question ever.
The situation requires clearly defined property rights.
Who owns the rights to the fish? The land? The swamp ? etc. I can’t go so far as to say that it would never happen in a libertarian environment, but if property rights had been clearly defined, we would know exactly who was wronged and by how much, in dollars and cents.
Instead of clearly defined property rights, we’ll have all kinds of wackos making claims on how the spill has affected them and “mother earth.” Instead of those who were wronged getting compensated for their true material loss, we’ll have BP pay fees to the government and the fees will disappear into the sinkhole of government wast.
It’s a bit more complicated than that.
Big part of the problem with formulating a proper libertarian response is that, with regard to such spills, it’s possible and even likely that, in a libertarian unregulated world, underwater oil drilling, construction of nuclear reactors, etc. etc. will be attempted by tiny companies which simply don’t have enough resources to pay off everyone. Imagine if, instead of BP, this oil rig were owned by “Deepwater Horizon LLC” with $100,000 in the bank account. Does it matter who owns affected property, if there’s no money to pay them off? And why would those LLC’s worry about safety or bother to comply with any regulations, if, in the event of failure, they simply file for bankruptcy and start over?
As an answer to that question, see my comments above.
Ummmm, as noted by me and a few others, the LLC (limited liability company) is a government sponsored fiction found in statute. In a libertarian world, the government wouldn’t tell me that I can’t sue to take your money (because you own a statutory privilege) when you have injured me in the course of a venture from which you sought financial profit.
Overflowing jails prove deterrence alone does not work.
(No doubt, DownSouth and probably many others already made this point.)
wunsacon,
That’s a great observation. Crime and punishment are important concepts in a functioning society, but they can’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
Culture must also do its part. Shaming and opprobrium, as well as their opposites, esteem and respect, play an important role.
But when you have a libertarian-market ideology that insists everything has a price, that the only gauge of human worth is how much money one has, how is culture to play its role?
sdduuuude,
Your position has a profound flaw. Since everything must be owned by someone, who owns fire trucks or aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons? If we make exceptions and allow non-private ownership for those things, who decides the exceptions?
To ALL: Keep in mind, when evaluating the “Libertarian Response” there are two ways you can take that. First is – what is the response to the existing situation from a libertarian position.
Second is – how would a libertarian society handle this event if this happened in a society that was based on free-markets and clearly-defined property rights prior to the event.
I took the second approach. Thus Nameless’ example with an LLC does not compute. I take more of an issue, though, with the assumption that “underwater oil drilling, construction of nuclear reactors, etc. etc. will be attempted by tiny companies.” It is a groundless comment.
Lastly – and this is very important – Libertarian worlds are not “unregulated.” For liberty to exist, there must be regulations on the breach of other people’s liberties. Those on the extreme libertarian stance may disagree, but s free society needs a law enforcement and a public court system to enforce these breaches of rights. The difference is, the set of laws is very small and deals only with theives, breach of contract, and violent crime.
Also, as an aside, “free markets” don’t mean you are free to do whatever the hell you want. It means that you are free from other people infringing upon your rights to freedom and the property you have earned. 99% of the population doesn’t understand this – including most who posted here.
DownSouth – I often hear the “if every thing has a price then money is the only thing that matters.” This is a bullshit statement. Everything material has a price, but not everything. Just because property rights are clearly defined doesn’t mean you can’t be giving, caring, and generous and loved for being so. I don’t see how one limits the other.
Jeff65 – The position does not have a profound flaw. Your assumption that “we” would make a decision is the problem. People make their own decisions. Period. Who owns the fire truck? Whoever buys it. Can people, individually, choose to band together to buy a firetruck that is shared? Of course, as long as you clearly define the ownership rights. You can define property rights for group ownership, but “non-private ownership” is an impossibility in a free society.
DownSouth – I often hear the “if every thing has a price then money is the only thing that matters.” This is a bullshit statement. Everything material has a price, but not everything. Just because property rights are clearly defined doesn’t mean you can’t be giving, caring, and generous and loved for being so. I don’t see how one limits the other.
Thank you sdduuuude for the comment, because it broaches a subject that has only been touched upon lightly in this thread, and certainly is in need of a much more thorough airing. That subject is libertarianism’s openly declared war on morality.
As Amitai Etzioni observed in The Moral Dimension: “Neoclassical cost-benefit analysis of health, safety, and of public goods (such as environmental protection) run into severe difficulties. The root cause of many of these is the absence of markets for the items involved because it is considered immoral to trade in them.”
Michael McPherson in Limits on Self Seeking: The Rule of Morality in Economic Life puts it this way: “In the usual neoclassical formulation, a person is simply a bundle of preferences, and his moral ideals, if they enter the analysis at all, enter simply as some among his preferences—-his taste for honesty being on a par with his taste for peanut butter.”
And Robert E. Goodwin in “Two Kinds of Compensation” takes the analysis one step farther. Since loss of human life or limb, for instance, is often compensated after the fact by courts or a settlement process—-for example, in 1984 life was valued at $3.5 million at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—-once price has been put on lives and other items that are not typically bought or sold, neoclassical economists model them as if they were traded and attempt to predict behavior on the basis of these imputed values. The results are often quite dubious. As Goodwin goes on to point out, neoclassical economists tend to presume that if we can compensate people we can do “anything” to them. And if we look back over the comments by libertarians in this thread, Goodwin’s observation certainly seems to hold true.
If we take a closer look at the war on morality being waged by the Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal constellation, it is a four-pronged offense. Etzioni points out that moral acts are those that meet four criteria: moral acts reflect an imperative, a generalization, and a symmetry when applied to others, and are motivated intrinsically. All four criteria are under a full frontal assault by the libertarians, as this thread more than amply demonstrates.
The imperative quality of moral acts if reflected in that persons who act morally sense that they “must” behave in the prescribed way, that they are in fact obligated, duty bound. The notion of an imperative is supported by the observations that people set aside certain realms as commanding a special, compelling status. Durkheim points to the fact that people treat certain acts and considerations as “sacred,” which need not mean religious.
One characteristic of these “sacred” moral principles, Goodwin suggests in “Making Moral Incentives Pay,” is that in the areas of behavior to which they apply, they repudiate the instrumental rationality which includes considerations of costs and benefits. A person feels obligated to save a life, or to save the environment, without engaging in such calculations. And of course as one can see by looking back over this thread, libertarians hold “sacred” moral principles, that is other than cost-benefit evaluations, in open contempt and ridicule.
Individuals who act morally are able to generalize their behavior. Statements such as “because I want it” or “I need it badly” do not meet this criterion because no generalization is entailed. “Do unto others as you wish others to do unto you” is a prime example of a generalized rule. Since libertarianism is a celebration of greed and selfish personal gratification, this criterion also falls to the wayside.
Symmetry is required in that there must be a willingness to accord other comparable people, under comparable circumstances, the same standing or right. Otherwise, the moral dictum is rendered arbitrary. Such an arbitrary rule would state, “this rule applies to Jane but not to Jim although there is no relevant difference between them.” Racist ideologies, although they are compelling (to their believers) and possibly generalize, fail to qualify as moral by this test. And as Reinhold Niebuhr points out in his quote I cited back up the thread, laissez faire fails on this basis as well, as it invariably imposes a double standard. But just like the racists, the libertarians nevertheless find their laissez faire ideology compelling.
Finally, moral acts affirm or express a commitment, rather than involve the consumption of a good or service. Therefore they are intrinsically motivated and not subject to means-end analysis. But any questioning of the consumerist mandate, as again is amply demonstrated by looking back over this thread, is met by a hail of ridicule and derision by the libertarians.
So sdduuuude, let me just conclude by saying that I don’t find it at all surprising that you, as a died-in-the-wool libertarian, found my statement to be “bullshit.” Quite the opposite, your response is quite typical of what I have come to expect from libertarians.
sdduuuude,
So, it’s OK in your world for private persons to own nuclear weapons? By own, I mean free to use however the person(s) want, subject only consequences after harm has been committed. This appears to be a profound flaw.
Again – someone takes the extreme view of a libertarian idea, twists it a bit and says “here is a flaw.”
You must have liked the “fire truck” answer because you didn’t mention it.
The answer is “sort of” but in reality, this is another case where regulation is necessary because you are putting others at risk, which is a violation of rights.
I have no issues with laws that require people engaging in potentially dangerous activities to be insured, to inform anyone around them that they are doing so, and to be subject to the approval of those around them who may get hurt. Also OK punishing them for.
Certainly local housing communities could draft a “no building nukes in your garage” policy for the neighborhood, and getting it signed by everyone. Wouldn’t be that difficult. Just be careful of the guys who won’t sign it !
Also note that such laws don’t necessarily guarantee that people don’t own nukes, now do they? If someone feels the need to build a nuke, do you think a law is going to change their mind?
Imagine the following quote from a private citizen:
“I WAS gonna build a nuke, but apparently it’s against the law, so I guess I’ll go play baseball instead.”
This is completely intellectually dishonest. Go read Stilger, Friedman, anyone who is considered to be an authoritative libertarian. Yves also cited a study in her book in which some economists surveyed AEA members on libertarian views.
Libertarians believe ONLY in the bare minimum state: defense, courts,maybe police, and a minimal tax apparatus. Requiring people to be insured is coercion, which libertarians vehemently oppose.
So you are just trying to redefine the concept to get around the problem posed by the oil spill. Sorry, it doesn’t wash. Regulation and restriction on private action goes 180 degrees against libertarian beliefs.
One of the possible responses is : known tradition of death penalty for high executives highest failures and unlimited financial responsabily for owners, juste like in China.
Death penalty is effective, but 100% non-libertarian.
Is the death penalty effective?
To take the classic example, the entire libertarian formula boils down to doing nothing—-having no regulations—-to prevent drunks from driving.
Drunk drivers cause irreparable damage, loss of health and life that it is impossible to put a monetary or market value on.
And drunk drivers run the risk of inflicting these damages upon themselves. But has that ever stopped drunk drivers from driving?
The entire libertarian premise is based on a fiction.
You have to have laws and regulations to regulate risky human behavior. The time to prevent the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was before it happened. Now it is too late.
Even in the Libertarian fantasy, shareowner don’t give their money to drunk drivers –unless incitated otherwise by the financial system of course.
It’s funny that you keep bringing up this drunk driving example as some sort of absurd case when post-facto punishment is the chief deterrent used for that crime. Could more be done? Could we install a cop at the exit to every bar and have him administer breathalyzer tests? I suppose, but I think it’s telling that most communities don’t see fit to resort to such solutions.
(I guess you will probably say that the libertarian prescription is to remove the highway patrol from the roads entirely. Then again, I have personally seen the head of the Ayn Rand Institute advocate the existence of a regulatory body like the SEC to ensure there is no fraud in the financial system …)
As we’ve seen many times, entrusting regulators to keep things in line often amounts to handing the keys to a different drunk.
It’s funny that you keep bringing up this drunk driving example as some sort of absurd case when post-facto punishment is the chief deterrent used for that crime.
So let me get this straight. The way it works in America is we don’t arrest and punish drunk drivers until after they go plowing into a crowd of innocent people? You truly have fallen under some strange libertarian curse.
… I have personally seen the head of the Ayn Rand Institute…
Ayn Rand Institute? You gotta be joking. That’s a bigger ball of laughs than the Mises Insitute. Their meetings must be one big jolly orgy of onanism.
So let me get this straight. The way it works in America is we don’t arrest and punish drunk drivers until after they go plowing into a crowd of innocent people?
Guess you missed the part where I mentioned the highway patrol. I wasn’t referring to Cuba’s.
Andrew Bissell,
You really don’t get it, do you? The effect of that strange libertarian curse upon you must be complete.
Are you really blind to the fact that the libertarian prescription is not to police the banks until after they cause the meltdown of the global economy, or the oil companies until after they cause a major ecological disaster?
I must say, you really are a true beleiver.
Murray Rothbard, March 1991:
Many free-market advocates wonder: why is it that I am a champion of free markets, privatization, and deregulation everywhere else, but not in the banking system? The answer should now be clear: Banking is not a legitimate industry, providing legitimate service, so long as it continues to be a system of fractional-reserve banking: that is, the fraudulent making of contracts that it is impossible to honor.
http://mises.org/econsense/ch78.asp
Andrew Bissell,
Rothbard?
Please! You’ve got to be kidding, right?
Are you talking the same Rothbard that completely rewrote the history of the 1920s and the Great Depression in order to erase the role laissez faire played in causing the depresson?
This little magic trick of revising history to make it conform to ones ideology is another hallmark of libertarianism.
“To take the classic example, the entire libertarian formula boils down to doing nothing—-having no regulations—-to prevent drunks from driving.”
Clearly, you have no clue what the entire libertarian formula boils down to.
The formula is not “having no regulations.”
The formula is “protecting people’s rights”
Getting injured by another driver acting irresponsibly is a clear violation of people’s rights. In a libertarian society, whoever owns the roads makes the laws for driving on those roads. Driving on the road requires a contract between driver and road owner. If the contract says “anyone caught drinking and driving will have to pay a fine” then that’s the deal. If it says “anyone drinking and driving who is involved in an accident may never drive on this road again” Then that’s the deal. If the contract says “anyone can drink anything while driving on this road.” Then that’s the deal. Not “unregulated.” Just private decisions.
sdduuuude,
Let me assure you that I have a very clear understanding of what “the entire libertarian formula boils down to.”
Let me sum it up for you. It’s really not difficult at all. In the libertarian’s little black and white universe, it boils down to a series of simplistic dichotomies:
1) Government is bad—-private enterprise is good
2) Regulation is bad—-laissez faire is good
3) Collective action on the part of workers is bad (and warrants suppression with the long arm of the government)—-collective action on the part of industry is good
4) Greed is good—-morality is bad
5) Cognitive dissonance is good—-cognitive harmony is bad
It was a sad day for America when Ronald Reagan ushered in the Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal revolution 30 years ago. The people of the United States went on a prolonged mental holiday when they opted for Reagan’s “get-the-government-off-our-back” ideology. But I believe the American people will come to their senses. They are not as blind, after all, to the devastating consequences of libertarianism as you and the other true believers are. Pragmatism, common sense and a reverence for justice and fairness have been the touchstones of the American ethos, and I believe with time they will eventually reassert themselves over libertarian dogma.
Privately owned roads? Is that supposed to work?
I guess I really haven’t been paying attention, but I’m imagining a really weird system of roads of varying quality, that may or may not make a lot of sense when looked at as a “system” and where you have to pay a lot of tolls.
Ancient Rome realized that CIVILIZATION is achieved when you have a government that provides infrastructure and public works.
Back to the caves!
You’re right, Nameless : true libertarian attitude should be to let those who’ll loose all kill the culprits –and relatives, and innocent bystanders wandering nearby themselves : Which is also effective.
But I supposed we were talking about an institutional response : an oxymoron for real libertarians : therefore, my answer has been adapted for all those trusting institutions to do what has to be done before something else does it.
Simple. BP pays all costs. Liability Caps and Industry Clean up Funds only create an incentive for companies to take risks with the environment who know that others will pay for their mistakes.
I assume your comment is tongue in cheek. Simple indeed! BP can ‘simply’ restore all coral reefs to pre-spill conditions, set up hatcheries for shrimp and all other species threatened with extinction, compensate affected communities for loss of tourism, while sending all Gulf Coast vacationers to the French Riviera, make whole all affected fishermen (sic) for decades, etc.
It’s a fantasay to believe, even if all shareholders were wiped out, the corporation liquidated, and its officers sent to debtors’ work prison, that BP could ever fully remedy this disaster. This starkly reveals another fallacy of the Libertarian cult creed.
Not Tongue in cheek. The cost to develop an under-water well, needs to include cost of clean-up. The fact that things went this badly means the development was not economic. Perhaps it is too soon to develop deep underwater sites. The industry needs to show they can explore and develop sites and can respond to mis-haps both from a technology and a financial resource position.
Libertarians largely believe that externalities do not exist, so it’s not surprising they have no answer to this one.
Libertarians also believe that all of morality can be boiled down to the enforcement of property rights and contracts, but are unwilling and unable to go any deeper than that (as evidenced by the NONSENSE posted about Rothbard and homesteading above) because to do so would demonstrate their entire philosophy to be constructed upon a foundation of sand.
and the sands are continually shifting.
Rue the Day – One very ineffective method of arguing is to make an incorrect statement about what someone else believes, then proceed to bash it.
I’m so tired of people saying what libertarians believe. Here are some examples:
1) It is a utopian society.
2) There should be no regulations.
3) The “free market” is a market where everyone is free to do whatever they want.
Let’s add
“There are no externalities.”
Of course there are externalities, but we can’t run to the government when they arise.
“Libertarians also believe that all of morality can be boiled down to the enforcement of property rights and contracts”
Wrong again. We believe that LAW, not MORALITY boils down to this. Ethics and law are not the same thing. In a libertarian society, many legal actions may be considered immoral by many of the citizens. Though, most illegal actions would be considered immoral by most.
“Libertarians also believe that all of morality can be boiled down to the enforcement of property rights and contracts”
Wrong again. We believe that LAW, not MORALITY boils down to this.
It always amazes me how poorly the libertarians have thought through their arguments.
If we make the substitution sdduuuude insists upon, we end up with this:
Libertarians also believe that all of law can be boiled down to the enforcement of property rights and contracts.
How sdduuuuude can make this assertion, and keep a straight face, is beyond comprehension. He, like all libertarian true believers, is totally oblivious to the element of coercion inherent in “the enforcement of property rights and contracts.”
So what sdduuuuuude ends up giving us is the perfect example of what Andrew Bacevich speaks of in The New American Militarism:
Determined to preserve their freedom and their experiment in popular self-government, Americans knew instinctively that militarism was perhaps the foremost threat to their prospect of doing so. Military power was poison—-one not without its occasional utility, but a poison all the same and never to be regarded otherwise.
In our time, oblivious to the potential consequences, we have lost sight of that truth. We have chosen to marry the means of the Old World with the ends of the New, relying on force and the threat of force to spread the American Way of Life, or, as the writer Max Boot has with unusual candor observed, “imposing the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees, at gunpoint if needed.”
The practice of the libertarians of always trundling out “the law” as a rationale for their ideologies is replete with other cognitive inconsistencies.
To begin with, if libertarians use “the law” as an absolute, inviolate standard, then how do they rebut the criticism of the sort made by Martin Luther King, Jr.? “We must never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’” King wrote in Love, Law and Civil Disobedience. “It was illegal to aid and comfort a Jew, in the days of Hitler’s Germany.”
The coercive aspects of democracy, however, are certainly not lost on libertarians. In a functioning democracy, the majority invariably ends up having the final say. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted in Moral Man & Immoral Society:
All social co-operation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion. While no state can maintain its unity purely by coercion neither can it preserve itself without coercion. Where the factor of mutual consent is strongly developed, and where standardized and approximately fair methods of adjudicating and resolving conflicting interests within an organized group have been established, the coercive factor in social life is frequently covert, and becomes apparent only in moments of crisis and in the group’s policy toward recalcitrant individuals…. The democratic method of resolving social conflict, which some romanticists hail as a triumph of the ethical over the coercive factor, is really much more coercive than at first seems apparent. The majority has its way, not because the minority believes that the majority is right (few minorities are willing to grant the majority the moral prestige of such a concession), but because the votes of the majority are a symbol of its social strength.
When libertarians come up on the short end of the stick in the courtroom of public opinion or the ballot box, they never hesitate to mount an attack on democracy. A prominent example of this was when Hayek and Friedman traipsed down to Chile to show their support for the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. If we discard democracy as the process of promulgating law and public policy, then libertarians have demonstrated quite clearly what they prefer in its stead.
The kneejerk anti-democratic reaction—-the iron fist is barely disguised by all the flowery rhetoric about “liberty” and “freedom”—-is another glaring example of the cognitive dissonance which lies at the heart of libertarian dogma.
As you are no doubt aware, ‘libertarian’ is an abstract concept and means many things to many different people, frequently totally contradictory meanings.
While I consider myself a libertarian on some issues, others may disagree; so what do you mean by ‘libertarian’, before I waste my time with a response, that you were not remotely interested in, cause it does not fit your definition for ‘libertarian’.
Religion is great, isn’t it.
But thank you for wasting your time writing this missive about not wasting your time writing.
No reply nessesary.
That minarchist Libertarians admit that *some* government must exist to protect private property. They believe, however, that the government can in some sense remain “neutral” and adjudicate property disputes “fairly”.
Lenin, in /The State and Revolution/, argued that the government *cannot* place itself “outside” of society, and remain neutral in any substantive, fundamental sense. Lenin is correct for two reasons.
First, a government is composed of human beings, with all the same psychological motivations as everyone else, and subject to all the same social, political and economic forces as anyone else. Since the individuals are the same, there is no reason to expect different emergent behavior from their interaction.
Second, the closest we can get to an “objective” definition of property is that which an individual physically owns and controls. Any definition of property more abstract and complicated (i.e. any definition permitting any sort of absentee ownership) must therefore be socially constructed. Social constructions are not *based on* principles. Social constructions are fundamentally based on the interaction of individual self-interest, and principles *emerge from* social constructions. The principles underlying what does constitutes property, and its legitimate (socially and legally permissible) use necessarily emerges from property owners’ conflicts of rational self-interest.
Hypotheticals and counterfactuals cannot of course be known with the same confidence that we know actual factual truth about the world. Still, there seems good reason to believe that a minarchist Libertarian government would by necessity adopt an attitude towards property and its use that considered the gulf spill to be an “act of God” or some other construction that held BP without liability.
(Neither right nor left anarchists have to account for the oil spill. In a truly right anarchist world, we would never achieve the level of organization necessary to even begin drilling in such an inaccessible spot. In the truly left anarchist world, we would ride magic unicorns powered by rainbows and we wouldn’t need to drill for oil.)
I really like your point #2. I’ve never really thought about the boundaries of what property ‘is’.
I don’t nessesarily agree on your claim about counterfactuals – ref. Karl Popper.
Your statement at the end about not assembling the resources to drill the well is the kind of statement that drives libertarians nuts… because it’s true.
Libertarians will tell you with a straight face that the space program was a waste of money. Mention global communications and weather satellites, and there will be something negative said about them. The government has been trying to literally give away various aspects of the space program to private enterprise, but nobody wants it without massive subsidies.
It was the same with the railroads, despite what Ayn Rand writes in her fiction.
Drug R&D.
Panama canal.
Highways.
Etc.
Obama has let the cat out of the bag —calling our affair with Big Oil COZY.
The best exit strategy for BP
Smart money would never take over Control of the runaway blowout from BP. They are hucksters and they have been playing the USA as a fool since this began.
BP has sought to get all in the game by putting them in the COMMAND CENTER of just knowing what they wanted to preach and teach.
BP CEO is set to depart any day. He may be the fall guy WHO KNOWS.
I know this as well as any, without the Rule of Law exercised on our part slamming them hard, with indictments, arrest, so on and then grabbing all the billions we can, we are UP the CREEK WITHOUT A PADDLE.
BP will play us out like EXXON did for years in COURT. Then walk away someday clear with little cash gone and then go again. The lawyers that practice the deceitful SEE SAW YAW of the LAW work for the DEVIL most of the time but sometimes they work for morose morons like BP as well.
MY TAKE
Dwight Baker
Dbaker007@stx.rr.com
Wow! I was reading your post, thinking this guy is a nut, but everything you said was true.
Now I have a vested interest: are you a nut?
BP must Tame Nature
By Dwight Baker
May 13, 2010
Dbaker007@stx.rr.com
Eagles Eye View Aiming at Issues for We the People Advocates
Good intentions from around the world have poured into BP with ideas of things they should do to contain and control the oil and gas coming from the Deep Horizon.
The facts needed to problem solve have been denied us. Yet the many politically correct words designed by the media mind control masters have been flooded in on us like giant tsunamis. The many of us that served oil and gas for years ‘but now out of the loop’ could have been more responsive if only the ‘Bare Facts good or bad had been published’
Now, besides the truth not being published ‘As should have been done’ but for me seeing between the lines of the rhetoric and some pictures presented I envisioned the cure many days ago and still hold to the basic premise that We the People must demand that BP Tame Nature.
Now the rest of MY sordid story of trying desperately to get an audience with BP, that did not bring about any thing other than MUM BOO JUMBO from them. I have finally decided to publish the CURE for all to see. But then, My wife asked,” Honey why should you be cheated out of your oil and gas intellect”? Who knows but that is just the way the oil and gas business does business.
BP Cameron Iron Works and many others like Halliburton keep a closed loop for political and financial reasons, and for them to pay some one outside that loop for good information is just not in their deck of cards.
Now the cure lies solely in BP finally getting hold of the raw facts that BP must Tame Nature that was disturbed and let loose in the Deep Horizon for one reason or another. And to that end ‘Who Cares?’ who was guilty and where the shame blame and faults of all those things solely rest. Courts will decide years from now but for the present BP must Tame Nature.
Now, for those who care to know the cure with words pictures and facts that put forth the premise as good doable and quick!
Contact me at dbaker007@stx.rr.com and the file will be sent.
Shit happens, get over it. The real damage here is the hysteria rampant in the press etc about the spill. BP and other assorted oil drillers, tens of thousands offshore rigs around the world, do an excellent job. Accidents happen, planes crash, head on collisions take place everyday. So stop with the bullshit about how it reflects some nefarious plot to despoil the earth or how carbon based energy is the devil’s brew. Everything you have in your life on the material plane was brought to you by carbon. So stop complaining.
“I’m a libertarian which means I’m a Republican who smokes dope.” LOL.
The proper Libertarian response?
“This is not my problem”.
But then again, I’m not an American.
The proper response is, “Shit happens, get over it.” The Libertarian creed. The real damage is the media blowing this all out of proportion. We don’t need no steenkeeng regulators; we don’t need no steenkeeng environment.
Sheesh!
“In a truly libertarian world, the oil spill never would have happened because a truly free market would have ensured total safety of all aspects of drilling operations. Nor would anything else that is bad happen in any economic sector. Even death would be cured, if only the government would get off the backs of doctors and research scientists. Neither death nor taxes is inevitable, contrary to the speculations of weaker and less imaginative minds. This is all obvious to anyone who truly understands the limits imposed by government on personal initiative.”
from “Government as the Anti-Christ”
Chapter 17 – Externalities and Evil
Libertarian Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sanity
Oh yeah, the OTHER proper libertarian response: start lecturing people about how they are idiots, and how their forebears did everything exactly wrong.
Hehe.
Listening to their logic was interesting for a while, but then you realize they are serious, and then it give you the creeps.
Libertarians are purveyors of half-truths. The fact that they get half the equation right gives their formulations just enough truth to make them verisimilar, and to give them some appeal. Their assessment of state socialism, where government controls private industry, is point on and their loathing of same is warranted.
However, libertarians’ intense hatred of government creates a blind spot, that is to state capitalism, state socialism’s ugly twin. State capitalism is where industry controls government, or in popular parlance I believe the term to be “state capture” or “regulatory capture.”
Because of this emotive blind spot, the libertarian universe gets reduced to two simplistic equations:
Government = bad
Industry = good
In this Manichean construct, the libertarian thus believes that if government—-that is the public realm—-would just go away, their earthly Shangri la can be achieved. They can withdraw from the public realm, behind the walls of their private fortress, and all will be secure.
However, the real world is not quite so simple. For there exist not only bad people in government, that is in the public realm, but bad people in industry as well, that is in the private realm.
Events like the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon reveal the innocence and naïveté of the libertarian illusion. Many people’s private fortresses are now under siege from a massive oil spill.
In order to preserve their illusion the libertarians have fallen back on two strategies. First, instead of blaming private industry for this massive oil spill, they blame nature. Thus this becomes “the perfect storm,” a combination of freak events that no human being could have foreseen. It’s kind of like Katrina. Shit happens.
Now there may be a bit of truth to this, but this line of argument is belied by the rather obvious role that private industry played in creating the oil spill, and the culture of greed, incompetence and ineptitude that have come to dominate private industry.
Second, instead of blaming private industry, the libertarian blames government. Again, there is some truth to this—-the government undoubtedly failed in its regulatory responsibility. But this line of argument is replete with cognitive dissonance. For the government’s crimes were crimes of omission, not commission. And the policeman on the beat may have accepted bribes to look the other way, but who paid the bribes? And the argument that government should have been more vigilant, when libertarians have advocated for decades the elimination or severe curtailment of government, falls apart at the seams due to its cognitive inconsistencies.
So the Deepwater Horizon disaster serves as a wakeup call that this idea of retracting into a private fortress is a utopian dream. There is no way to evade one’s civic responsibilities. The public realm, regardless of how messy and unpleasant, must be engaged. And if one refuses to engage the public realm, there are certainly others who will, and those others may not be very nice people.
Thats two Ive saved just from this one thread ;-)
I wont need any original thoughts on libertarians pretty soon. I can just quote attempter and DownSouth
You reeeeeeealy don’t get it. The basic objection to government is the fact that the government is funded through non-voluntary donations. i.e. they force people to pay taxes.
It isn’t that gov = bad and industry = good.
It is that
voluntary donations = good
and
being forced to donate = bad.
If it were true that in all cases that “government” was supported by “involuntary donations” and “industry” was supported by “voluntary donations, and that the two were independent, then your statement would be true. But it isn’t the case. As you point out, they are in bed together, and that really taints the positive aspects of industry.
By the way, if you aren’t a libertarian, why are you responding to this thread? It requestsed a libertarian response. Feel free to respond to the libertarian response, but don’t tell Yves what someone else’s response would be, eh ?
It sounds like your beef really isn’t with government, but with democracy. In a democracy, the majority, or their representatives, are the ones who vote in taxes.
Democracy certainly has its warts, but I nevertheless think it to be superior to the murdering dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that Hayek and Friedman so eagerly threw their support behind.
“You reeeeeeealy don’t get it. The basic objection to government is the fact that the government is funded through non-voluntary donations. i.e. they force people to pay taxes.”
OH GOD!! Now govt, which is supposed to protect your property rights, provide the means to settle disputes, negotiate international treaties and trade agreements, provide and maintain an interstate system, defend our interests militarily if necessary.. is now supposed to hope for VOLUNTARY DONATIONS!!?? Maybe they should hold bake sales once a week or have a golf tournament.
The govt provides the money to you which you pay taxes with in the first place. Without a currency area, a single legal tender we would have multiple currencies and no organized market system. How would gold be priced in “Sdduuuude Bucks” vs ‘Greg Bucks”. How many different prices would have to be placed on items, or would we all run around with conversion charts to enable to know which of the monies in our wallet we wanted to use?
Its completely shoot from the hip statements like this that display the utter lack of depth to many of the acolytes of libertarianism.
Good thing the govt provides that money or we’d all be broke, I guess …
BROKE?!
Technically yes.
But practically the govt would no longer be in power.
Organizations that act similarly to some current government organizations would be terrific, if they were supported by voluntary donations.
Such as voluntarily built roads and bridges, with a troll collecting taxes every 100ft.
Gulf Oil Spill: Same Old Arguments
“The environmentalists’ call to flatly reject expanded offshore drilling as unacceptably risky is ill-considered. The logical implication of the argument is that all offshore drilling ought to be prohibited, not just plans to expand drilling zones at the margin. The fact that few Americans are willing to shut down existing platforms suggests that, for the most part, we intuitively understand there are benefits to drilling that ought to enter into the conversation.
What are the benefits of expanded offshore drilling? If we accept the best (albeit speculative) estimates from the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service about how much oil and gas could be produced from offshore areas currently off-limits to industry, Oxford University economist Robert Hahn finds that the value of the oil and gas we could put into the market is probably about $1.3 trillion over the productive lifetime of those fields, once we subtract production costs. Hence, the central question is whether the cumulative environmental harms from drilling are likely to exceed $1.3 trillion. If that is an unlikely proposition (the minerals service estimates that the total costs of any spills, conventional air and water pollution and lost tourist and recreational dollars would be about $700 million), then we are better off opening up those fields.”
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11809
Try this on…
The idea that America can wean itself off foreign oil is a fallacy concocted for fools. There is only one price of oil, and that is spot price. There are no Made in America gas pumps, not do oils companies ever have sales on their products. There is only global supply, and that is it.
Now, given that there is a market to buy oil from, the more we keep in the ground now, and just buy on the market, then the better off we are for the future.
Government capture by big oil has resulted in liability caps that would not exist without government involvement. Hopefully, the severe negligence regarding the blow out preventer system will negate the $75M cap in this extreme case. However, the knowledge of capture (ownership) of an unconstitutionally strong central government that gets away with far more “governance” than the constitution allows is today trumping negligence risk consideration that would otherwise dictate. If the federal government had no involvement, the operators/owners would operate more safely because of knowledge of assured unlimited liability and exposure to criminal laws regarding damage to the environment or wildlife, which should only be within the domain of the states (many of which would need to be considered in the case of offshore drilling)
Libertarian Party says liability limits make oil spills worse
The New York Times has reported that federal law limits BP’s liability to $75 million, and Transocean’s liability to $65 million.
These kinds of artificial (government created) liability limits distort the markets, and basically create “moral hazard” by encouraging companies to act in riskier ways than they would otherwise. If BP’s well causes damage to property, then BP should be fully liable for all of the damage. It is BP’s reponsibility to “make whole” whoever gets damaged.
If Congress hadn’t limited BP’s liability, it’s likely that BP would have acted differently. Knowing that a spill could cost them billions, BP might have demanded additional safeguards for their well, or tested their safeguards more thoroughly. These choices would have been expensive, but they might have prevented the huge costs that the spill area is now facing.”
http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2010/05/lp-says-liability-limits-encourage-oil-spills/
simple questions: who asked for the limits? who buys the politicians?
I already beat you to this one. A couple of weeks ago, on mises.org, I asked if the government should get involved.
I just wanted to hear them say either no, or yes.
Like so many of the Libertarian immutable truths, they are built upon faulty reasoning.
Ask them how common defense doesn’t give rise to a state.
“The environment would benefit immensely from (1) the elimination of sovereign immunity coupled with (2) the privatization of “land and beast.” The (3)third and final step in the libertarian program to save the environment is the use of restitution both as a deterrent and a restorative.”
http://www.lp.org/issues/environment
As someone with Libertarian leanings, my understanding is that BP and/or Transocean did not follow the existing laws and regulations regarding oil drilling and emergency response requirements. Therefore, they are responsible for the disaster and should be 100% responsible for all costs related to the spill. It is likely that this disaster will bankrupt BP. So be it. Corporations, people, and governments must accept the consequences of their actions.
So K. Ackermann you are saying that the government was involved in a positive way is this whole debacle?
No, Ackermann. I will not try “this” on.
I think Lew does a pretty good job here: http://mises.org/daily/4331
What is the purpose of the original question?
Here is my interpretation: let’s take a case in which the existing mechanisms of the state have failed spectacularly and ask our favorite whipping-boys: “Well, what would you do now?” If they don’t have a magic answer, then everything they say is, by extension, discredited.
Let us note, first, that lack of regulation apparently was not the problem. Lack of enforcement was. Let us note also that the old USSR and modern China have lots of state control, but are among the most polluted places on earth. So a big, all-powerful state might be counterproductive.
To those who say: “let BP go bankrupt”, I ask in return: what if BP (and related parties) has insufficient assets to cover the costs? Does anyone here have an estimate which factors in hurricanes, the Gulf Stream, coastal property values, etc.? Can we even set an upper bound?
Clearly this well was a risky venture. Clearly, the potential costs were un-knowable at the outset (and still are, for that matter). Is there any logical answer other than “don’t go forward with this project”? I don’t see this kind of thinking from either big-state or small-state advocates. All commenters seem to assume that we somehow needed this petroleum and that a sea-based well at the limits of the technology was a risk worth taking.
If big government can have value, it would be to bow to the fact that some risks are not worth taking and to map out a strategy for using less oil rather than attempting to keep the oil party going a little longer.
In a libertarian world, the oceans would be privately owned.
BP would therefore have massively damaged someone else’s property.
They would have to make monetary amends through courts.
Why is this tough for people to understand?
By Libertarian, I suppose Yves means Conservative Libertarian, and not the Left-leaning Geolibertarian/Georgian strain.
And I have no idea what the hell is meant by “proper” and who the hell decides what is, in fact, “proper”.
With that stated, here goes nothin’….
A proper approach for Libertarians might be a reworking of the distinctions between the state and the individual.
A multi-national corporation, like BP, is far closer to being a state unto its own, than an “individual” legal entity (as it is currently treated). As such, Conservative Libertarians might consider BP to be just another arm of the government.
Thus, as a Conservative Libertarian, it’s time to stop worrying about whether the government is “restricting the freedoms” of what is really just another form of the state.
As such: Regulate the hell out of BP. Litigate the hell out of BP. It’s just another branch of the government, anyways. Let ’em eat their own…
The events of the past few years have shown that it’s time for Libertarians to evolve. These multi-national corporations, if left their own devices, will do just as much harm and damage to individual liberties as the government. It’s downright perverse (and intellectually dishonest) for Libertarians to defend Wall Street and Big Oil from the government. Wall Street and Big Oil ARE the government.
I realize there is the problem that eventually all this bureaucratic bullshit eventually ends up in the lap of the individual…and that making it prohibitively expensive for for Exxon to get oil will eventually hurt the individual trying to get oil into his car….
But this problem does not negate the fact that Libertarians must re-work their concept of “the State” and “the government” and the “individual”. And until Libertarians accomplish this conceptual renovation, they are acting as an unwitting accomplice in the degradation of individual liberty.
If there is any legitimacy to Libertarian precepts, then Libertarians need to stop being afraid of the tremendous vacuum they will face when they pit the government and the multi-national corporations on the same side of the ledger.
Thus, they’ll need to be strong and united in their opposition.
But therein lies a deep flaw: In order to legally preserve the individual, and combat the mighty front of the government-corporate alliance, the Libertarians need to join with other individuals… and rely on a group.
It’s a Libertarian Dilemma.
Libertarians need to respond to BP Tragedy with the courage to admit that the Libertarian philosophy has not evolved properly to account for the dominance the multi-national corporation. And they need to reconcile the fact that cohesion amongst both the Left Middle and Right Middle is needed.
They can do this by identifying more with the Middle Class than the Corporate Class. Libertarians need to make peace with the Middle-Class Left…not the Upper-Class Right.
But please…spare me the idle bullshit in these comments to the effect that an ignorant Libertarian is is a redundancy.
Libertarians are just a group of who don’t the imposition of a sign.
“Sign, Sign. Everywhere a fucking sign. Do this, don’t do that. Can’t you read the sign?”
There’s something in that Progressive/Libertarian anthem for both the Middle Left and the Middle Right.
We’ve just got to stop ignoring the signs of these times.
“A multi-national corporation, like BP, is far closer to being a state unto its own, than an “individual” legal entity (as it is currently treated). As such, Conservative Libertarians might consider BP to be just another arm of the government.
Thus, as a Conservative Libertarian, it’s time to stop worrying about whether the government is “restricting the freedoms” of what is really just another form of the state.”
Mega corporations shouldn’t be conceived as “another branch of the government,” as the corporatist fedgov seems to be treating them, but as competing governments.
From a citizen’s perspective, then, having alien governments buying out their representative government should be clearly against their civil rights.
Of course, contemporary “libertarians” tend to be fortunate enough to be more beholden to their portfolios, a thing they share in common with big government corporatist liberals (like Paul Krugman).
Which is why I have a hard time making “libertarian” ideology the big whipping boy, here, and think the problem lies more in class interests.
► It’s downright perverse (and intellectually dishonest) for Libertarians to defend Wall Street and Big Oil from the government.
But defending the rich and the powerful is what libertarianism has always been about, and with its inherent cognitive inconsistencies, and mindboggling hypocrisy, always will be about. That’s not by accident, but by design. It’s never been anything but a tool, and a quite effective one at that, of the ruling oligarchy. There are many examples of libertarianism’s built-in hypocrisy, but probably none stands out more than when Hayek and Friedman traipsed off to Chile to throw their support behind the murdering dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
There’s nothing new here, however. Hayek and Friedman were just two in a long line of “intellectuals” who used their considerable talents to perpetuate sophistries designed to lend moral and intellectual legitimacy to corporate hegemony. Reinhold Niebuhr explains:
Thus, for instance, a laissez faire economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political restraint upon economic activity. The history of the past hundred years is a refutation of the theory; but it is still maintained, or is dying a too lingering death, particularly in nations as politically incompetent as our own. Its survival is due to the ignorance of those who suffer injustice from the application of this theory to modern industrial life but fail to attribute their difficulties to the social anarchy and political irresponsibility which the theory sanctions. Their ignorance permits the beneficiaries of the present anarchic industrial system to make dishonest use of the waning prestige of laissez faire economics. The men of power in modern industry would not, of course, capitulate simply because the social philosophy by which they justify their policies had been discredited. When power is robbed of the shining armor of political, moral and philosophical theories, by which it defends itself, it will fight on without armor; but it will be more vulnerable, and the strength of its enemies is increased.
When economic power desires to be left alone it used the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon political freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace. A rational analysis of social facts easily punctures this pretension also. It proves that the police power of the state is usually used prematurely; before and effort has been made to eliminate the causes of discontent, and that it therefore tends to perpetuate injustice and the consequent social disaffections.
THREE noteworthy response in one thread!!
Bravo Yves. I think youve asked a very good question here!
“The events of the past few years have shown that it’s time for Libertarians to evolve.”
How true, Dan. Libertarian Anarchism as an economic and political system has been clearly shown to be an anachronism, damaging to net economic and social health.
Dan – interesting post. Couple of comments.
Overall, I continue to be dismayed at how so many twist libertarian concepts in so many ways.
“The events of the past few years have shown that it’s time for Libertarians to evolve. These multi-national corporations, if left their own devices, will do just as much harm and damage to individual liberties as the government.”
It is really your understanding of libertarians that needs to evolve. Somewhere somebody convinced you that libertarians think corporations can do anything they want and that just because they aren’t the government, they are good.
The key distinction is – how are they funded? Voluntarily or involuntarily ? Also – are they infringing up on the rights of others ? If they are funded voluntarily and not infriging upon the rights of others, then they are OK.
I don’t think any libertarians would defend multi-national corporations who infringe upon the rights of others (whether blessed by gov or not) and libertarians don’t want them “left to their own devices” when it comes to infringing upon the rights of others.
“But therein lies a deep flaw: In order to legally preserve the individual, and combat the mighty front of the government-corporate alliance, the Libertarians need to join with other individuals… and rely on a group.”
Relying on a group is not a problem, nor is joining with other individuals to form groups, as long as those organizations are funded voluntarily. Again – it seems that somewhere, someone convinced you libertarians don’t like groups. Just because we believe in individual decisions doesn’t mean it is impossible for many individuals to decide they want to form a group.
We don’t like groups that are funded involuntarily.
sduuuude! [You gotta have an exclamation point after that moniker.]
For some reason, these comments have devolved into an inane discussion of whether Libertarians suffer from a mental disease. [Imagine that! The Blog that’s too smart to sleep asks an interesting question, and what did we get? —Keep in mind, the answers we got, came from people who regularly opine on theoretical physics, quantitative modeling, medical diagnoses, climate science, etc., etc—
But I digress…]
Your points, however are well-taken.
But the issue (for me, anyways)remains: How does the Libertarian reconcile a disdain of regulation with the BP disaster?
One commenter made a reasonable point about Chernobyl occurring in a highly controlled environment. But the counter-point does not change the fact that it appears the BP tragedy could have and should have been mitigated if BP (and the others) had been held to a higher standard (via regulation).
The same goes for the mortgage crisis.
So…as a committed Libertarian, you bring up the point that it’s important to distinguish between voluntary vs involuntary funding? And that, of course, Libertarians are skeptical of involuntary funding.
Fair enough. But that distinction is so muddled and so antiquated…that neither of us has any idea as to how much we happen to be involuntarily funding GS, JPM, XOM or BP….
The aforementioned are so entrenched in our government, that there is nothing we could do about it, even if we wanted to. Each of these mega-corporations is an involuntary imposition— whether each gets a direct subsidy or an indirect subsidy via covert, backroom proxy.
[This very point about voluntary vs involuntary funding collapses on itself when the Libertarian opposes anti-trust regulation. Do you really believe that you haven’t involuntarily funded MSFT, GOOG, Big Oil or Big Pharma over the years? ]
I’ve no doubt that what I’ve written here doesn’t further support your claim that my thinking is a bid muddled and in need of evolution on these issues.
But please forgive me: I’m grasping at straws of nothingness in a nihilistic vacuum, here! Because while there is NO WAY I could support the Leftist notion that the “Ivy League Knows Best”….I can’t support the notion that because BP is on a stock exchange, it only answers to itself…or a tort lawyer.
I think Libertarians would do well to look past the fact that, yes, Naked Cap is an inhospitable place for the Libertarian…and that Yves’ question was calculated to bring out the venomous stupidity of her “Ivy Knows Best” acolytes.
But the fact remains: It is an important question. The only answer that makes sense to me is to lump the State and the Multi-National Corporation together and treat them the same. I know there are real problems with this categorical reductionism, and I look forward to some viable alternatives.
Until then….to hell with BP, GS, GE, FOX, Pelosi, Reed, Bernanke, Geithner, McConnell, McCain and the rest of them.
I see no difference in their contempt and disregard for all but their own.
Yay. It appears I have found a reasonable person. Glad to respond.
“Fair enough. But that distinction is so muddled and so antiquated…that neither of us has any idea as to how much we happen to be involuntarily funding GS, JPM, XOM or BP….”
Sure we do – others have pointed it out here. Basically when a Free Market nut like me says “involuntary funding” they mean “taxes.” Nobody really chooses to pay them and if you don’t, they come and take it. Like it or not / Believe it or not – that is the Libertarian basis of thought.
So, when the power of government is used to infringe upon others’ rights, we hit the roof and cry “foul.” Similarly, when it is used to protect people from paying retribution for mistakes they have made, we also cry foul. And, of course, when they make laws declaring that some groups may infringe upon the rights of others without penalty, that is bad, too.
The central with government as I see it in modern times is that governments have stopped regulating transactions and interaction as it relates to rights and have long since started attempting to regulate results. For example, regulating mortgage fraud is regulating the transaction. Regulating to an appropriate housing price level is regulating to a result.
Simlarly, regulating the oil business such that something like this never happens is regulating a result. Making sure that everyone in the oil business who is in a position to make a mess like this has the proper insurance and knows the possible downside of making this mistake is regulating to the transaction.
As others have pointed out – the limited liability is also a problem. It is a government-supported way of saying that some people who come after BP for retribution will not get it. That is unacceptable.
“But the fact remains: It is an important question. The only answer that makes sense to me is to lump the State and the Multi-National Corporation together and treat them the same. I know there are real problems with this categorical reductionism, and I look forward to some viable alternatives. ”
I don’t really disagree with this at all because the corps are enabled by the government in so many cases.
Again, my beef with most people’s understanding of “free markets’ is that they think we support industry at all costs in all situations. It just aint true, dude.
And yet, as far as possible solutions, all you presumably offer is that people stop paying taxes.
Just like XOM and GE.
You come into an argument, set up your own straw men, then offer no workable solution to the matter being discussed. You do offer very simplified history and your “beliefs” about the wrongs of the past. You also attempt to speak for all “libertarians”.
You’re not a dude, you’re a prophet.
Do Libertarians really expect the tort system to provide an effective deterrent? How do they expect to enforce a decision?
Consider the Exxon-Valdez incident. The locals sued Exxon and won billions of dollars. Thirty years later they still have not collected.
So — what do you do then? Wait for it — you sue them again. Yeah. That dope they smoke is so good that only lawyers can afford to buy it.
That’s an argument for an improved legal system.
For libertarianism to have any hope of working, the world would have to be made of a single country. If you have a variety of countries which are separate zones of extreme freedom, then what you will get is jurisdictions elsewhere (small ones, probably) offering investors extreme secrecy through the corporate form. Wealthy folk will then start using these secret corporations to invest in complete secrecy in projects – let’s say a risky oilfield – and shave their costs (undersea safety mechanisms, say) down to the minimum, thus boosting their profits. And they also can shift all the risk off onto everybody else – because the moment a blowout occurs, you realise that you have no idea who the investor really is, and no way of chasing them. liability is shaken off — there will be no lawsuit by “fishermen” and their friends who own that slice of beach in this libertarian numskull nirvana- and the profits to date will have all been salted away in another such place anyway.
Thus the zones of extreme freedom becomes zones of extreme freedom for the wealthiest (and most abusive) sections of our societies — and in the process, freedom becomes a kind of bondage for the weak.
Of course, such pockets of extreme freedom already actually exist – they are known as tax havens (more sophisticated analysts call them secrecy jurisdictions.) And if you explore this area, you will find that libertarians are the most ardent supporters of secrecy jurisdictions (take a look at the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, for example, if you aren’t familiar with this particular libertarian-offshore dynamic.) Of course, this is exactly what has been happening in the real world with the rise of offshore since the 1970s(ish – though rudimentary offshores existed long before). And if you believe all the guff about the G20 having solved or partly solved the tax haven problem, then I have a bridge to sell you.
If you want some fun looking at some of the more foolish idiocies and internal contradictions that spout from these offshore libertarians, then take a look at Brad deLong’s “Why Do I Have to Deal with People Like Dan Mitchell?” (Mitchell is the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and a leading cheerleader for tax havens.)
I love Naked Capitalism but I chide you for swallowing the facile traditional view of tax havens – which is to see them either as exotic oddities, or as locations that play a useful role in helping investment flow smoothly around the world, marred by a few rotten apples. Once you investigate them properly, and begin to understand that offshore is not only about tax but about financial regulation, and includes places like the City of London, then you start to see how dangerous the whole racket is. Please forgive me if I mischaracterise your worldview – but this is how your output strikes me.
Nick,
Your comment is truly odd, and strictly your own construction. One, this blog has been largely silent on tax havens. Two, it has been VERY LOUD on the costs of regulatory arb, and it has pointed out intermittently that there have been jurisdictional issues in pursuing losses resulting from some of the Bad Stuff that happened in the crisis (such as discovery regarding the meltdown of the Bear Stearns hedge funds, which IIRC were registered in the Caymans).
Of course, this reveals libertarianism as the shallow, destructive, selfish ideology it is.
I don’t know any of the details of the story, but I’ll take a shot.
BP should have to pay for all the damages the spill has caused. There is a legal system, people should sue them. Maybe BP will be liquidated, maybe they will make payments for many years, I don’t know the details. My guess is they have insurance for this sort of thing, and that that insurance company has a reinsurance company, etc. That would certainly make things easier.
Anyway, externalities aren’t that difficult. You simply internalize those costs by making the agents pay for the damages.
“My guess is they have insurance for this sort of thing, and that that insurance company has a reinsurance company, etc. That would certainly make things easier.”
I believe that BP is self-insured, but I haven’t gone through their financial statements.
“Why is this tough for people to understand?”
Why? Surely you jest. In the glibertarian paradise with “no government” it is inevitable that most human activity would devolve to bringing or defending tort actions enforced by a mysterious entity having a monopoly on force that is somehow not “a state”. Somehow this is not “tough” to understand! Simply amazing.
bp will be sued for damages and probably go out of business. the risk of lawsuits should be calculated into the cost of capital in projects like these.
What is the proper libertarian response to the oil spill?
Simple. The same as their response to everything: Insufferable smugness.
I was a libertarian for 50 years until the Wall Street fiasco. Now I wonder if I am not a socialist. Anyway, I teach students of petroleum prospecting. The lesson here is not the dirty gulf. The lesson is we are past the end of easy oil. The natural gas future isn’t pretty either.
“The lesson here is not the dirty gulf. The lesson is we are past the end of easy oil. The natural gas future isn’t pretty either.”
That’s the best insight I’ve read on this disaster so far.
It naturally leads to a second question, though: are these types of incidences going to become more commonplace going forward?
One overlooked story is the failure of regulation (“the MMS chicks”).
The ptpper libertarian response would be:
Drill, baby, drill!
Vinny
Neither libertarianism or socialism have anything to do with the spill.
The largest environmental disaster in the history of man-kind, Chernobyl, happened under socialism.
The oil companies involved will indeed foot the bill for all of this cleanup, and although it will dent their earnings, it is fully within their means (and the means of their insurers) to do it.
Matt Busigin,
Geez! Is that the best defense of state capitalism you can come up with? State socialism is no better than state capitalism, so we should just stick with state capitalism?
Talk about pitting wrong against wrong, error against error!
Remarkably, I’m still saying that the accident happened irrespective of the economic system. Socialists (USSR – Chernobyl), capitalists (US – Horizon), and everything in between (China – most of the country) all do awful things to the environment.
This is a heroic attempt at making a economic/political statement where none exists.
Let’s focus on what it really means: it’s an environmental disaster, and is reflective of life after easy oil.
Matt Busigin,
Un hun.
Your rationale sounds suspiciously like this to me:
They lived in a world that was not only harsh and cruel but that rationalized its cruelty under the guise of economic law. Necker, the French financier and statesman, said at the turn of the century, “Were it possible to discover a kind of food less agreeable than bread but having double its substance, people would be reduced to eating only once in two days.” Harsh as such a sentiment might have sounded, it did ring with a kind of logic. It was the world that was cruel, not the people in it. For the world was run by economic laws, and economic laws were nothing with which one could or should trifle; they were simply there, and to rail about whatever injustices might be tossed up as an unfortunate consequence of their working was as foolish as to lament the ebb and flow of the tides.
Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
So you feel that Chernyobl is somehow different from Deepwater Horizon? Why?
All I saw was what attempter wrote, so while there might be some things on there that actually make sense and are consistent with what libertarians believe, all I saw was the opposite.
Libertarians are in many ways far more environmentalist than statists (though certainly in other ways not). By drilling the oil, the oil company effectively makes it their own property. The accident and the spill spread the oil so that it affects others’ property. In a libertarian world, the fishers and shrimpers would likely have owned the water/coast areas. Their property would have been severely damaged. Other owners, such as those with beach-front property, also would have suffered. The oil company would have been responsible for somewhere along the lines of twice the value of the damage done. In a libertarian world, they could also obtain insurance, but I would guess that the insurance company would act similar to the regulators we have now. The value they could lose in the event of a loss would be much higher. If the oil companies couldn’t get insurance, I would doubt they would drill. Potential losses would be far too high.
Since the government caps damages in the real world and since it largely owns the property (water/coastal areas) where most of the damage is done, I would safely say that the punishment to the oil companies now will be substantially less than in a libertarian world.
It may seem illogical that the libertarian/Republican/conservative response for BP’s polluting the Gulf Coast is to blame the government, but it’s actually a viewpoint held my many important people.
The “failure of regulation” meme is a popular one, and gets trotted out for most corporate failures. However, I always think of a psychologist I once knew. He was in charge of the entrance interview for the inmates, and discovered the inmates always followed a set script.
First they’d deny they’d say, “It wasn’t me.” It was mistaken identity, corrupt cops, someone pinned it on them to get out of it, etc. This lasted for a while, until the evidence was brought in.
Next, they’d admit they were guilty, but then claim “Nobody was hurt.” It was people in nice homes who could afford the loss, it was covered by insurance, they victim got out of the hospital, etc. After a while, it was obvious this wouldn’t fly, since there were victim impact statements in the file.
Last, it was “If you didn’t want me to do it, you should have stopped me.” These were the scofflaws and the fuck ups who would return to prison again and again. And somehow they just couldn’t figure out this responsibility thing.
The Exxon Valdez crashed becuause its radar system was out of order and BP was too cheap to get it fixed. The “drunken captain” thing was part of the corporate fog of unreality woven to change the debate and minimize the event. The clean up happened mostly for the cameras.
The current disaster will, once again, probably come down to corporate cost-cutting with the technology caused and continued by management policy. And since Team Obama has invited the oil industry lobbyists to write the new regulations, according to McClatchy, we’ll stay in the “suits know best” mode for many years to come.
Yep. With the libertarians and their inseparable ideological siblings, the Austrian schoolers and the neoliberals, in charge, we definitely have a case of the inmates running the asylum.
Well, it appears 90% of posters here don’t even seem to know in general what a libertarian is, so your question appears to be in vain. Second, there are many different types of libertarians, so there are also many different solutions.
In my libertarian world, there would be no nebulous public ownership of anything. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, etc would have private ownership (perhaps by environmental groups seeking to protect them, perhaps others seeking to exploit them). Ownership gives a monetary value to all things environmental, putting a cost on their destruction.
Naturally, the cost of such a spill (if everything affected has a value) is large enough to bankrupt any company thinking of drilling in the ocean. The risk would be too great, and they wouldn’t do it. So in a libertarian world, there would have been no Deepwater Horizon in the first place.
But BP knows, with its cozy political relationships, that they can just pay enough to appear like they are cleaning it up, “come to terms” with a few of those directly affected and be done with it. They escape with the remaining equity value of their company.
The lack of private ownership of the means of production (in this case the sea) creates a problem of economic calculation.
There’s my answer.
Ownership gives a monetary value to all things….
Yep. That pretty much sums up the libertarian ideology.
Did it ever occur to you that not everything in life has a price, and that some people aren’t for sale?
A price, no. A value, yes.
Values don’t have to be monetary. They are, in fact, ordinal. They are preferences.
I consider myself an environmentalist. I readily exchange my time to walk to the grocery store instead of drive. I do the same in pre-sorting my rubbish. I do this because I feel like the exchange results in a non-monetary profit. At a certain point, I surely value the knowledge that a school of fish can remain healthy and vibrant more than I value a few hours of labour.
None of this requires actual prices.
The ownership argument is a complete canard. Once that oil was pumped up into the rig, who would own it? Obviously, it would have been BP, who would have sold it at a profit.
For all intents and purposes that oil is BP’s, despite the argument. They had every incentive to find it, drill it, and not let one drop get wasted in order to maximize their profits.
If that is not laissez-faire neo-liberalism, what is?
Matt Stiles,
I posted this above, but worth repeating: what about fire trucks, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons? Should these things all be privately owned?
“In my libertarian world, there would be no nebulous public ownership of anything. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, etc would have private ownership (perhaps by environmental groups seeking to protect them, perhaps others seeking to exploit them). Ownership gives a monetary value to all things environmental, putting a cost on their destruction.”
Let’s bring back slavery while we’re at it, and justify it on the grounds that only when people are owned as chattel can their needs truly be taken care of.
“Naturally, the cost of such a spill (if everything affected has a value) is large enough to bankrupt any company thinking of drilling in the ocean. The risk would be too great, and they wouldn’t do it. So in a libertarian world, there would have been no Deepwater Horizon in the first place.”
This more than anything else you posted demonstrates the sheer naivety and absurdity of libertarianism. We cannot know, a priori, the likelihood of an accident of this magnitude. We can know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, the profits that result from drilling. The decision in this case will ALWAYS be to drill. Once again, libertarianism comes to the OPPOSITE conclusion of what obtains in reality.
Yes, Libertarians leave out that one unknown quantity – Greed. I say unknown quantity because I am constantly amazed at how greedy people are. The supply is infinite.
“Let’s bring back slavery while we’re at it, and justify it on the grounds that only when people are owned as chattel can their needs truly be taken care of.”
Exactly.
Let’s let employers fully own their employees. The employers will invest in their workers, now that the levels of ownership are clearly defined.
Better yet, let’s make leveraged financial derivatives based on the productivity of each
slaveworker. We’ll trade them on an open market, and let the price of the derivative be the final determinant of each employee’s value. If the employee really sucks, your boss can just short you to zero, rather than having an awkward “pink slip” meeting. (But the last laugh is on him, b/c you did lousy work on purpose and shorted *yourself* to zero, & now can retire @ age 32 on the puts) Best part: no more HR dept needed! Fire ’em all! More cost savings!!!!b-b-b-but in an ideal libertarian world, there would be no workers — just owners. everyone works for themselves! yay!
“Let’s bring back slavery while we’re at it, and justify it on the grounds that only when people are owned as chattel can their needs truly be taken care of.”
Quite a jump to a conclusion from “everything has an owner” to “lets bring back slavery.” People aren’t property. THey are not owned. They make their own decisions. Trees are property. They are owned. They do not make their own decision. It can be difficult to see the difference, but I think you can do it.
The biggest problem with the libertarian philosoph is the conclusions to which people jump regarding what Libertarians believe.
I’m a Libertarian and I believe the response should be we hold those accountable for the spill accountable. Liberty is not a free for all, it comes with its dark sister responsibility. Secondly, what has been response by the actual people in charge? Finger wagging and recrimination. BP is losing 10’s of millions a day and thats just getting started, but they are the only ones (rightfully so) who are doing anything to stop it. You may not like the progress, but maybe you could protest by not buying oil or oil based products for a year (another Libertarian solution for those so inclined).
I don’t where we’d be right now if someone, somewhere didn’t do something risky, something that could have adverse consequences. Maybe we’d still be comfortably tucked away in a nice cave somewhere, while the pristine gulf of mexico remained untarnished by mans actions.
Life is messy. We’ve been exporting our mess to other countries for so long, that we’ve forgotten that. If you all want to be back to dwelling in trees, or have solar cells on every possible flat surface in the world, you’re going to need oil. Wind, solar and other “green tech” options are not going to keep us all in the standard of living we’ve become accustom.
So the Libertarian solution is fix the current problem, reimburse those affected and try to prevent further future calamities. It wouldn’t be to go into a fetal position and ban all off-shore drilling.
We need to be more secure in our ability to both take risk and deal with adverse affects, human progress depends on it.
Well said. I agree.
First there are two questions being addressed.
1. Given a preexisting libertarian utopia, how would a BP be able to extract offshore oil.
2. Given the practical realities of today, what should BPs responsibility be for the actual spill.
I will prattle and digress a lot but will attempt to answer both.
Since I tend to disagree with Rothbardian minimalism as much as regulation. Power corrupts, but there are evil people who if not collectively opposed will usurp power and violate rights – it becomes might makes right when individuals don’t defend the rights of 3rd parties – even 3rd parties whom they despise – that evildoers can form a band more powerful and overcome any individual. Rights have to become paramount and defended against every violation, not just when I’m violated, and not to be applied to people I like and be denied to people I dislike.
Also, there are such things as commons. Mises recognized this, mises.org tends not to. Even ordinary property right creates easements and rights of way. The idea is that you cannot improve or pollute just your part.
National oil companies? Who’s nation? Where does the boundary start and end? And aren’t they going to be staffed by corrupt bureaucrats?
Also BP apparently was responsible for having a safety system (some kind of rubber wall that could be erected to contain spills). Apparently they also had the same thing with the Exxon Valdez and in that case fired the highly trained (and compensated) locals and replaced them with something like walmart greeters. So there was no real containment response. Something like gutting the fire department and wondering why houses burn down with the damage spreading. They should be 100% liable and without limits. In effect they agreed to be the firehouse to respond to any emergency, and pocked the money and just left. This is fraud.
Corporations are artificial and exist only because the state creates them. They are a way to remove liability. I can’t say “but it was my corporation that was speeding and it just declared bankruptcy, so it can’t pay the ticket, but feel free to attach a black mark posthumously to the corporate driving record”. But that is exactly what corporations in all forms do. Heads, they pay huge dividends to the owners, tails, they go bankrupt leaving unpaid bills in (at?) their wake. Corporations could not exist in a truly libertarian world since they interact with third parties – buying or selling, but property rights can only attach to individuals. Same with responsibilities. Corporations are merely legal suicide bombers that if they need to can do unspeakably evil acts, then dissolve leaving those responsible free since they had “limited liability”. Even the IRS will pierce the veil. For all the protestation, they realize it is just a game.
The alternate form would be a partnership. How did the wall street firms behave as partnerships v.s. corporations?
Most firms on wall street and other big banks should have gone into bankruptcy or receivership, but in any case should have ceased to exist. But they didn’t. Private profits, socialized risks. Why does anyone expect BP to be any different?
They shouldn’t be any different, but that means they should be completely liable, and if their board members, CEO, or anyone in the chain is culpably negligent, they should also pay fines or even go to prison. But I would hold GS and C and their personnel to the same standard.
But to go back to the commons problem. Both natural resources and the oceans are commons. We want to be able to prudently exploit them as resources.
One model is open source software development. Linux, BSD, and other projects are a commons and they are doing well and comparable if not better than corporate or government efforts.
I don’t see how to easily apply it to something like offshore drilling since it is capital intensive and risky (you will get dry holes), but it should be thought about more.
Speaking for myself, the first thing is anyone wanting to drill should put up a bond in escrow proportional to the possible damage (insurance) and a different entity should handle safety, using money from that bond. If nothing happens over the life of the project, they get the bond back. If there is cleanup necessary or other damages, money comes out of escrow to cover it. The bond would have to be in cash to avoid CDO like problems (no, we have insurance with AIG and they can pay a trillion if we need them too).
There should be a fee paid to access the common in this way. It shouldn’t be punitive or discriminatory. Put up the bond, pay the fee to start, and a percentage of the take (watch for games where oil out of the well is $0.10 per barrel but $100 inside the refinery fence – we might need competitive bids). Other drillers in the same field would pay on the same basis.
To digress about another error from the mises.org libertarians – the first one to use a property in a specific way defines the rights – so if I want to leave a nature preserve, there is no way to claim that as a use. But any destructive use, especially when it creates nuisances for my neighbors locks in the right to be a nuisance. (The train with sparks that burns crops – they say first use, so the train should intentionally burn everything in a very wide path of destruction whether it needs to or not before crops are ever planted).
The fishermen and recreational boaters and oil drillers should coexist, not see who can destroy the other use first.
But to close the circle, I would assume there would be at least a minimal government. They would impose fees on externalities like pollution and reckless behavior, and use that to create public goods like parks and roads. But generally try to be referees, not players in the economy.
The railroads were like the iPad – a walled garden, (or as I prefer, a prison farm since there are guard towers and barbed wire in addition to the walls). But there is controlled access. The tracks only let specific trains on. They can’t change easily. Cargo or passengers can only enter and exit at certain points. The internet is like the highway system – a loose collection that you can go anywhere with only occasional and modest and often optional tolls. But note that railroads were built by government gamed corporations (eminent domain), where the internet as a whole is a commons. Government builds roads, but different levels build different sets, and they are only useful as a commons.
I think people prefer roads to railroads.
To drill, you would need a partnership or an organization more like NASA than the SEC. Or something like a research non-profit (though they would be profitable – but we might get far less expensive fuel).
The problem with commons and a “free market” is that good and bad aren’t really free, but diffuse. The entrepreneur has every incentive to create as many externalities as would aid his profit. If pollution damages a million people only a few pennies, there is no one who will attempt to collect. He has no incentive to preserve the commons, and if there is no one to act as owner, it can become the trash heap.
I already pointed out corporations were completely artificial, but it is possible to create something equivalent to “own” and act on behalf of the commons in question. That would allow drilling but require safety measures and strict and unlimited liability.
It would suffer from the same problems of regulatory capture (who runs the commons corp – those who would reject any development or those who would let any form of destructive exploitation, regardless of the mission statement)? I don’t know how to solve that, but I think it would be better than pure bureaucracy, or nothing.
And overall the problems with corporations have been that the gaming has been toward the next quarter, not the next decade. If there was a strong incentive to keep a corporation around and profitable for 10 years (say tax free dividends or something), the behavior would change. No private equity paying huge dividends and leaving a bankrupt shell. No toxic CDOs that will blow up in 9 months (after bonus season).
If both a commons corp and a resource corp had long term incentives, I think they would figure out a good compromise. There would be mistakes, but they would at least be aiming at the right target.
We reward rashness and the shortest term thinking lavishly over conservation and prudence. Why should we be surprised?
I don’t think that corporate liability is a concept outside of Libertarian beliefs, contrary to what some respondents appear to believe here. I don’t see a problem with recovering the damages from this spill.
If libertarians have to rely on someone else to give them a response to this terrible disaster, they are a sad and stupid bunch.
The worst thing about Libertarians and Conservatives is they have a world view and everything has to fit neatly into the box.
That’s why Libertarian Greenspan admitted before Congress after the financial collapse that his world view clouded his judgement and he was partially to blame for the worst recession in US history.
So libertarians, let me help you.
When you let wall street bankers or oil executives, whose sole goal is to make money, self regulate themselves you are going to end up with a big mess.
That’s because when greed sets in rational people lose control and will break any rule or cover up any fault.
Playing a friendly game of back yard basketball doesn’t require a referee. And You don’t even have to follow the rules.
But when it’s an important game, like the NBA finals, only a stupid libertarian would say “regulations and oversight aren’t needed. NBA players , when left to their own devices,will always play honestly and fairly, Get rid of the refs and get rid of the rulebook.”
This is tangential, but it’s a perspective that you might find comforting…
I have two horses of which one one I ride. He’s an oldish Tennessee Walker who knows his way home. I ride him to the store occasionally to get a pack of smokes or a soda pop, but mostly to walk him.
If oil stopped flowing tomorrow, I’d build a nice looking buggy for him. I’d paint it red, put a racing stripe down the side, and hang signs on the side that started out saying “This space for rent.”
It would be covered, and be provisioned with battery operated amenities such as a radio, lights, etc.
I would use this buggy to pick up produce from farms along the route I took to get to the place where I bought fuel cells and windmill parts to haul back.
With my profits, I’d hire a few people to build new and better buggies to sell/trade to people who wanted their own. They should be a big hit with teenagers, as getting anywhere would take a nice long time, and getting her home late has a built-in excuse because horses don’t talk.
With those profits, I’d loan my wife the money to open the ice cream stand she wants to open, and with all the new buggy traffic, sales should be brisk.
I’m not sure what everyone is doing with the windmills and fuel cells I’ve been hauling and selling, because I have no need for them. Living next to a river is plenty enough to heat and power my house, and charge all my conventional batteries.
I’d have to make the most of the window, and invest in the companies that are putting in that new thing called the smart grid.
Life as we know it coming to an end might be just what’s needed for life as we want it.
You get the idea.
I’ve forwarded this post to as many folks as possible, for the purpose of demonstrating what happens when the philosophy of Kumbaya, (Liberal, Socialist, Collectivist if you must) meets reality. The comments have provided me with what surely is unintended chuckles.
I love watching infants laugh. Send pictures!
You’re easily entertained.
Hailey Barber gave the Libertarian/oil company response: “Move along. Nothing to see here.”
This discussion clearly indicates “libertarian” has ceased to have any real meaning, except perhaps to exclude certain world views. It’s a label I would have chosen over any other, but clearly such labels create gross misunderstanding.
An essential element of the libertarian view is that one cannot fix everything. Shit happens. You can never right the injustice of a murder, all you can do is reduce such outcomes with strong punishment. BP should pay the price, which should make all oil companies more careful. It’s delusional to think such disasters can be prevented by regulation, which often leads to cozy relationships and bailouts since somehow govt is seen as the great solution to every problem.
If federal abdication were a good idea, then unregulated Baja California would live better than heavily regulated California. Libertarians might ask themselves why that’s not true.
http://nostradoofus.com/2005/06/17/benevolent-government-regulation/
The empirical record shows that a fundamental requirement of efficient capitalism is stable property rights. What are property rights? A limited monopoly enforced by government. Thus at least some government regulation is a necessary condition for capitalism.
Not that I propose California’s regulatory methods. Yeesh.
The point was that government exists to assign direct costs to externalities. When you don’t, the result is Baja.
If you don’t believe it, I encourage you to drive through the Parque Nacional, south of Ensenada on the main highway to Los Cabos, to look at the spray paint and oil slicks. This sad disaster was not caused by corruption, nor oppression of the Producers. It was caused by lack of efficient regulatory enforcement.
So, Norris, let me help you as you obviously need it. If we relied on your analysis, we truly would be a “sad and stupid bunch”. But, not only do we not need to rely on you, we understand who your description really applies to.
First, Greenspan was the government. You may not have noticed, but he set US interest rates. What he was really telling you was government regulation had clouded judgment, but guys like you think government regulation is the solution. No, it is not. Wall street bankers did not self regulate. If they had, they would have gone bankrupt. But, government regulators set the parameters (e.g. leverage) and protected all but Lehman from the consequences of their actions. In fact, as we speak, the government keeps the interest rates so low, the banks can get free money and deposit it, risk free, with the Fed for 3%. Is that your idea of regulation?
Your NBA referee analogy is spurious. It might have some validity if the NBA did not want the referees to avoid constant arguments about who fouled and did not foul, who was out of bounds and who was not, or any number of other rulings. For it to be valid, we would also have to allow the teams and players to contribute to the referees retirement plan.
No, lefties like you think that regulation is the answer to every question, but the regulation is always corrupt because the regulators are always captured by the regulated or some other interest group.
Glad I could help.
Yea, that’s right.
Monetary policy was the one and only cause of the GFC, just like blowout preventer failure was the one and only cause of the oil spill.
Funny how you’re quick to call out Greenspan’s monetary policy failures, but are in denial about the laissez faire absolutism that informed his regulatory failures.
Stop lying.
Greenspan wasn’t laissez faire. His whole job consisted of attempting to manipulate the economy for government planners.
The Federal Reserve’s policies have been repudiated by libertarians for decades. Foremost among critics of Greenspan was Ron Paul, the most well-known libertarian politician.
Greenspan wasn’t a libertarian?
And I suppose he wans’t an acolyte of Ayn Rand too.
You libertarians keep looking more and more like the Stalinists every day.
*sigh*
1) The Fed is not a part of the government.
2) The Fed does not set interest rates; even the Fed acknowledges this. Don’t you remember Greenspan’s blather and blame about the “savings glut” that kept interest rates artificially low, rather than monetary policy?
http://www.distressedvolatility.com/2010/04/greenspan-overseas-savings-glut-kept.html
3) Greenspan is one of the most (in)famous libertarians who has ever lived. His life’s work is a study in libertarianism, but you’re saying he wasn’t?
4) The NBA analogy is not spurious. Frankly, the reasons why should be self-evident.
5) “Lefties” don’t believe regulation is the answer to every solution. They/we also believe that gov’t corruption is a serious problem, but often originates outside of the gov’t. But the solution to captured officials is not to get rid of regulations, or add new laws with more loopholes. This should be common sense.
I would become a libertarian, but then who would take care of my mother-in-law? If she didn’t have social security and Medicare she would have to live with me and my family.
Libertarians will never win an election until they have a solution to taking care of the elderly.
And clearly, we must let the price of oil rise to reflect its true cost. Our military exists almost exclusively to secure access to middle east oil.
Libertarians can only live in the moment. Planning would require sacrifice and everyone has the right to be a pig.
“I would become a libertarian, but then who would take care of my mother-in-law?”
Why should I take care of her? Is that supposed to be a reason for me to agree with your political philosophy…FAIL
“Libertarians will never win an election”
Libertarians don’t win elections because they don’t lie to the mainly gullible public to win an election.
Pure liberterians could and never would win an election in a representative democracy because they have no coherent collective ideology & on asolutions on how to solve collective problems.
The only way that a pure libertarian society could function is if you stripped its citizens of some of their most important social and moral norms as they become indifferent to some of the horrendous things that occurred around them and to them on a fairly regular basis.
I would argue that the extensive spread of libertarianism the last 50 years in American society whether on the social front in the 1960s or on the economic front in the 1980s has had more societal ills than it solved & caused a general paralysis of our political system.
>>they have no coherent collective ideology & on solutions on how to solve collective problems.
That’s not true at all. Libertarians are not against collective solutions, they are against coerced collective solutions–where the individual loses his rights special interest groups BY LAW.
If people want to collectively work together for something, that’s ENCOURAGED by libertarians, as long as it’s not enforced at the end of a gun barrel, prison, or a tax penalty by the government.
Libertarianism is the most cooperative political ideology there is–it’s based on voluntary cooperation.
“The only way that a pure libertarian society could function is if you stripped its citizens ”
The opposite. That’s the only way a collectivist government can function.
“I would argue that the extensive spread of libertarianism the last 50 years in American society whether on the social front in the 1960s or on the economic front in the 1980s has had more societal ills than it solved & caused”
The last 50 years we’ve had a welfare state, which is becoming based more on collective welfare policies. That’s the opposite of Libertarian. Libertarians have been against the whole welfare state concept which is ruining our country.
The last 50 years we’ve had a welfare state, which is becoming based more on collective welfare policies. That’s the opposite of Libertarian. Libertarians have been against the whole welfare state concept which is ruining our country.
————————————
Exactly. The most damaging variety proving to be corporate welfare.
“Libertarianism is the most cooperative political ideology there is–it’s based on voluntary cooperation.”
This type of function only works on a very localized level with small groups of people (e.g., families, etc) who generally have some type of vested interest to work together. As you have more and more people who have less and less in common spread further apart, it breaks down on several levels. Name one large scale society in human civilization where liberalism has truly flourished in all spheres that was urbanized, industrialized, and specialized. It is like the Easter Bunny. It doesn’t exist.
“The last 50 years we’ve had a welfare state, which is becoming based more on collective welfare policies. That’s the opposite of Libertarian. Libertarians have been against the whole welfare state concept which is ruining our country.”
This is overly simplistic for several reasons and it is more than just 30 years. My general sense is that you support the common viewpoint among Liberterians that the that the ‘Golden Age’ of America was in the late 19th century/early 20th century prior to WWI & the passing of income tax.
Yet you would also disregard the relative substandard conditions that most Americans lived in at the time from immigrants in crowded cities in NYC, Boston, Philly, etc, the general miserable conditions of most Southern farmers who were sharecoppers/tennant farmers, or the various & overwhelming power of corporations in civil and gov’t affairs in local, state, and federal gov’t at the time.
Contrary to what most Liberterianisms push the late 19th century was far from a paradise for most Americans and most lived, worked, and died in relative poverty.
If you are suggesting that a libertarian stance would support corporate welfare, you are wrong. Another example showing that DownSouth’s assumption that libertarians believe “industry = good” is incorrect.
Chris – have a sense of humor and then think about the practicality of what I said about our mothers-in-law. Of course no one should take care of my mother-in-law, but we have created a system – like it or not – where society has agreed there is benefit to collective effort to take care of the elderly. To dismantle that would invite chaos.
I believe I can take care of my elders better than you can. I want no part of your system.
First, it creates an enormous moral hazard, encouraging people not to prepare for their latter years. Second, it encourages their youth not to care for their elders, destroying our sense of family.
Second, I believe that there are so many middle-men involved in getting the care from my wallet to my elders that it becomes twice as expensive. I’d rather save the money and do it myself.
Third, “I” did not consent to any such program. It was forced upon me under threat of imprisonment – not a legitimate or moral way of conducting any exchange.
Ah healthcare where the true nonsense of the ‘libertarian’ position generally shines through as we saw in the healthcare debate.
“First, it creates an enormous moral hazard, encouraging people not to prepare for their latter years. Second, it encourages their youth not to care for their elders, destroying our sense of family.”
We still live in a system that relies overwhelmingly on private care givers (mostly immediate family) to care for elder relatives at considerable personal time & cost. Unfortunately, we live in a system that requires frequent relocation to pursue educational and employment opportunities. The days of living in the same community for 50+ years and working for only 1-2 employers are largely gone.
“Second, I believe that there are so many middle-men involved in getting the care from my wallet to my elders that it becomes twice as expensive. I’d rather save the money and do it myself.”
Healthcare is definitely overpriced on a unit basis in the U.S. for several reasons but lets even assume that it was twice as expensive as otherwise needed. You still wouldn’t be able to likely afford a moderate hospitalization out-of-pocket for your elderly relative without exhausting most if not all of their retirement savings. Additionally, you would find it would be difficult to impossible to get health insurance for hospitalization because from an actuarial standpoint it just doesn’t make a sense for insurers to do so. The risks are just too great and the customer base would be too limited.
The almost certainty would be that if your elderly relative had a serious disease, they wouldn’t be able to afford care, and would die in short order. If you mother/father gets cancer at 68, their gone or you likely pony up at least $100k for care and likely much more.
I would also like to see how you would be able to care for an elderly relative that really had a number of limitations especially mental deficiencies. Worked in healthcare for long enough now and hear this same type of argument about “I will do it myself.” Only when these people have an elderly relative who breaks a hip or begins to enter the early stages of Alzheimer’s do they realize how physically, emotionally, and financially exhausting it is to care for this relative even on a part-time basis.
“Third, “I” did not consent to any such program. It was forced upon me under threat of imprisonment – not a legitimate or moral way of conducting any exchange.”
I have less of a problem with this argument but would the same people who opt out of a system scream bloody murder when they have no resources/help to deal with a personal tragedy or crisis? My bet is overwhelming yes.
[ … on collective insurance for the elderly … ]
«Third, “I” did not consent to any such program. It was forced upon me under threat of imprisonment – not a legitimate or moral way of conducting any exchange.»
This is the standard and revoltingly (and knowingly) dishonest lie that anti-libertarian propagandists use against libertarianism.
The USA government is a VOLUNTARY LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATION as you can TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and leave it.
Nobody forces you to enter or stay into the libertarian, voluntary bargain that is USA citizenship. Sure, if you take the benefits but refused to pay the dues of the associations, you got to jail because your would be STEALING THE PROPERTY of other member who pay their dues.
You don’t like the bargain that the libertarian USA government offers you? Then TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and leave the country and renounced your citizenship, which is a bargain of mutual advantage (to which you have so far agreed) between you and other usian libertarians.
A libertarian knows that there is FREE MARKET in voluntary associations, and that one can pick and choose the best bargain one wants, voluntarily, as long as one has the factual freedom of leaving the association.
While some governments are not libertarian and prevents physically their subjects from leaving, there are no jackbooted thugs at the border preventing you from leaving the USA (quite the opposite). Leaving may cost you money and opportunities, but there you are, TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY is not cost free.
No state offers you precisely the bargain that you want? tough on you buster, you have to take one of the bargains available in the FREE MARKET, one which is of mutual advantage to both you and the other members of some polity.
Membership of the USA government is like membership of a housing association; it is has costs, and it has rules, and it decides how to spend their membership dues in way that you may not consent to because you voted against them; but you can always leave, and if spending housing association money on senior citizen friendly pathways is not what you “consented” to, and they threaten you with suing, sell your house there and buy one where is a housing association that offers you a better bargain.
Blissex,
That is an astonishingly uninformed comment.
Please tell me how you give up US citizenship. You do it by establishing citizenship somewhere else. It is extraordinarily difficult, costly, and time consuming, and most countries will not let people in except in certain narrow categories. You seem to have missed the fact that there is very little legal international labor mobility (most is sponsored by Big Corps, and if you leave the employ of Big Corp, unless you have stayed long enough and gone through the hoops to get permanent residence, you have to leave your host country pretty pronto), precisely because most countries don’t want furriners taking jobs from the natives. Even getting permanent residence is hard, let alone citizenship (which in most countries, takes YEARS). The only semi-quick way is via marriage.
And the US is one of the few countries to tax citizens on their world wide income. It is extremely hard to dis-establish yourself as a US taxpayer even after getting foreign citizenship. Trust me on that one, I know people personally who have contended with that one.
So your “voluntary” argument is way off base.
«Please tell me how you give up US citizenship. You do it by establishing citizenship somewhere else. It is extraordinarily difficult, costly, and time consuming, and most countries will not let people in except in certain narrow categories.»
This simply means that changing residence and citizenship is expensive; but there are no jackbooted thugs that COERCE you to keep your residence and citizenship in the USA.
Exactly like for a housing association or another freely entered contract: you CAN LEAVE, even if it may be expensive because you have to sell your house at a loss, or pay an exit fee. But it is a VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE nonetheless.
Sure, every liberal moocher and looter would like to opt out of voluntary exchanges at no cost for themselves, stealing other people’s property to their own benefit.
But libertarians know that all moral bargains are voluntary exchanges between two parties, and whether entering them or existing them the consent of BOTH is required.
It would be convenient for socialist parasites to agree to the benefits of USA membership and then walk away when the costs come due, but that is a bleeding liberal, no-take-personal-responsibility attitude.
As long as you *may* take personal responsibility and leave the USA without coercion, according to the terms of the bargain you (or your parents on your behalf) voluntarily agreed to, any talk about lack of consent in the USA is just communist propaganda. Several USA citizens every year take personal responsibility and become Dubai, Monaco or Swiss citizens instead, choosing to buy a bargain that is better for them.
«You seem to have missed the fact that there is very little legal international labor mobility (most is sponsored by Big Corps, and if you leave the employ of Big Corp, unless you have stayed long enough and gone through the hoops to get permanent residence, you have to leave your host country pretty pronto), precisely because most countries don’t want furriners taking jobs from the natives. Even getting permanent residence is hard, let alone citizenship (which in most countries, takes YEARS). The only semi-quick way is via marriage.»
So what? if you feel you are underpaid as a greeter at Wal*mart at minimum wage, you can always apply to be Citigroup’s CEO, and even if you have pretty low chances of getting that, that you have low chances does not mean that you are COERCED to work at Wal*mart as a greeter, just that you are a loser.
There is a FREE MARKET in country memberships, and if you cannot afford to pay the market price for the one of your choice, tough on you. You cannot force on another country the one sided bargain of you becoming a member for free.
Indeed most countries have citizenship-for-fee (usually masquerading as an investment requirement) arrangements, and if you cannot afford to pay, then suck it up.
Libertarians do not believe that affordability is any part of liberty; just the absence of explicit coercion. Real *economic* freedom is for WINNERS who have produced enough to buy membership into the clubs of their choice.
The arguments that I see here is that looters should be able to renege on their bargain about USA membership for free (that is, stealing the investment of remaining USA members) and then get membership in a new country with all its benefits for free (that is, stealing the investment of existing members of the new country).
«And the US is one of the few countries to tax citizens on their world wide income. It is extremely hard to dis-establish yourself as a US taxpayer even after getting foreign citizenship. Trust me on that one, I know people personally who have contended with that one.»
That’s part of the voluntary exchange for USA membership. You don’t like those terms? Then you should have left sooner. What is immoral: in a voluntary exchange such as USA membership to renege unilaterally on the terms of a deal you have agreed to and benefited from.
It is grand form of welfare to be protected by the USA government, providing you with defence, police, courts, roads, insurance against sickness and unemployment, … while you build your fortune, and then to turn your back on it when it comes the times to pay your dues. The bargain is clear: you voluntarily get the benefits of citizenship, you pay the costs. No walking away for socialist looters.
Why should I take care of her? Is that supposed to be a reason for me to agree with your political philosophy…FAIL
That pretty much sums up the entire Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal creed.
Even the most primitive of societies devise ways of taking care of the young and the old, and even the free-riders, though these slackers are made to suffer opprobrium.
But this new cult thinks that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution can suddenly be made to disappear.
Good luck with that one.
«Even the most primitive of societies devise ways of taking care of the young and the old, and even the free-riders,»
First of all this is factually false: in many third world countries the producers and creative WINNERS will, as they walk around town, step over the bodies of the dying ill or starving children and elderly LOSERS, being annoyed at the extra effort required and the smells they have to suffer because of these inconsiderate, antisocial moochers and looters. Also cursing the oppressive socialism of the government that allows even those who produce and create nothing to occupy street space for free. If the streets were properly privatized, those exploitative parasites would not be able to afford dying on those streets where creative and producing heroes could afford to walk.
Secondarily. in a proper libertarian perspective, “even the most primitive of societies devise ways of taking care” of becoming socialist hellholes where the property of creative and producing WINNERS is stolen by the exploitative and parasitical LOSERS, but that does not make them right — it just makes them bad, immoral examples of failed social organizations, and that is why they are still primitive.
BTW I am not a libertarian.
No surprises here.
As the piece of ground the libertarians stand upon slowly gets eroded away, I expect their polemics to become progressively more shrill.
«As the piece of ground the libertarians stand upon slowly gets eroded away,»
Not anytime soon — libertarianism for all it being a minarchist dream unsuitable to a complex world, has the inestimable advantage of being a nice sounding figleaf for the older, retiring propertied middle classes, those who are invested in ever increasing capital gains for themselves, and ever lower wages for everybody else.
The owners of fat “private” Medicare accounts and of ever “increasingly valuable” stocks and real estate, those pleased with increasing immigration and offshoring delivering lower servant pay and lower product prices, those love libertarianism.
They are the haves, who are carrying water for the have-mores, foolishly, as they will be asset stripped by the latter, and then they will discover “libertarianism” works on their skin.
This is the wrong question to ask.
People need to ask themselves what is their response and then decide if they are libertarian or not?
I exposed myself to Rand’s oeuvre at a fairly advanced age, 17 or 18, so I missed the true message of individual *specialness*, the conviction that she was speaking to and for me personally.
If society were organized around hardcore libertarian principles, the spill would have occurred in a different context. All the oceans would be owned (bit of a problem for international trade there), and there’d be no silliness about licenses or regulations for drilling. All oil reservoirs lying under the property of multiple owners would be drained to the max as quickly as possible, because basic game theory shows that joining an agreement for collective restraint is a loser strategy. The only remedy would be tort law, but it would have high administrative overhead because class actions suits are obviously collectivist.
But the BP hearing would have been much more entertaining, because the CEO would be Howard Galt delivering a ringing denunciation of the weenie liberals.
None of that’s true.
Please get your head screwed on better.What are hardcore libertarian principles?
Most libertarians are minarchists who agree that some LIMITED government is necessary. They aren’t anarchists.
A good baseline for understanding most libertarians in the USA is a strict reading of the Constitution. That allows some federal government including federal national boundary considerations as well as state-level powers.
as I watched that footage of the oil leak, spewing gallons upon gallons of oil underwater…I couldn’t help but think of what the spewing of dollars by our government would look like, underground or not.
An example: the latest fannie / freddie earnings reports. Anyone care to cap that well for us? We know how to do it. Do any of the anti-Libertarians care to pitch in?
“I couldn’t help but think of what the spewing of dollars by our government would look like, underground or not.”
More than 50% goes towards things that will blow the legs off of little children:
http://photos.upi.com/slideshow/lbox/275d38842f05b59835c3115218ec9632/Mine-Stricken.jpg
But perhaps you don’t consider that to be wasteful?
Liberals always bring up the “little children”. “It’s for the children”, “it hurts children”. I assume you were talking about mines, which also protect our troops from enemy attacks and were in no way designed to “kill the little children of the world”.
Fortunately, they aren’t your children.
What about our troops who wouldn’t be getting killed by accident like what happens to unfortunate children but on purpose by the enemy unrestrained by mines?
I’m not debating whether we should dig up landmines after a war so as not to kill children.
The point is that if you want to know what the government spends most money on it’s clearly war, weapons, and the industry surrounding it. Unfortunately, millions of dead children and adults per year is “the price of liberty.”
Another wonderful way the goverment spends it’s money is to pay the bankers’ bonuses so they can afford these “awesome digs” http://www.businessinsider.com/dear-wall-street-nyc-real-estate-worthy-of-your-bonus-cash-2010-1/plaza-hotel-residences-5
Cronyism, military industrial complex and identity politics are antithetical to Libertarian ideals. Libertarians continuously come down on the side of non-interventionism. Something along the lines of the Swiss model and how many people are pissed at the Swiss?
I appreciated the Libertarians’ responses, but I’m not all that impressed with them. They all seem to have the common threads:
1) I’m too embarrassed to say I’m a libertarian, b/c Yves is partially right, so I’ll admit to being a libertarian-lite. (this is actually a good sign; maybe people are coming around)
2) The world refuses to neatly fit into our square hole. (Welcome to reality, guys. If you’re still waiting for the world to be perfect, you’re going to have to wait awhile)
3) Corporations are bad simply because they are a gov’t construct. (This must be a new meme from this crowd, as I’ve never heard this before. Grasping for straws has hit a new low. Property rights & enforcement are a gov’t construct too, but let’s not go there lest their heads explode by stating the obvious)
4) The Gulf of Mexico isn’t “owned” by anyone, so it will be polluted at will. (Though the argument isn’t about the ocean per se, the problem is BP’s management of the oil. As I said earlier, the oil is BP’s, and they have every intention to sell every drop for profit, rather than spill it all over the Atlantic. This isn’t the same situation as carbon in the collectively owned atmosphere.)
5) The gov’t has limited liability limits on the corporation, so they should be eliminated. (Though BP may not have the money to pay off the claims, and may need a bailout or other taxpayer assistance)
6) The “It’s not my problem/Sh*t happens” syndrome
7) It’s the government’s fault for not regulating. (But I thought gov’t interference was the problem?)
8) There’s a stunning lack of accountability vis-a-vis BP’s duties, or expecting more from them.
9) “I’m going to change the subject entirely, and talk about something completely out of left field.” (<–these straw man responses are usually the most amusing/entertaining)
“1) The Fed is not a part of the government.”
Technically it’s not, but the Fed was created by Federal law and is highly regulated by the Federal government and works closely with the Treasury Department in several areas.
The Federal Reserve Act (ch. 6, 38 Stat. 251, enacted December 23, 1913, 12 U.S.C. ch.3) is the act of Congress that created the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States of America, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a component of the Federal Reserve System, is charged under United States law with overseeing the nation’s open market operations.[1] It is the Federal Reserve committee that makes key decisions about interest rates and the growth of the United States money supply.[2] It is the principal organ of United States national monetary policy. The Federal Open Market Committee was formed by the Banking Act of 1933 (codified at 12 U.S.C. § 263), and did not include voting rights for the Board of Governors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
The president appoints the Board of Governors in the Federal Reserve system. Appointed by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate * Oversees System operations, makes regulatory decisions, and sets reserve requirements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
2) “The Fed does not set interest rates; even the Fed acknowledges this. Don’t you remember Greenspan’s blather and blame about the “savings glut” that kept interest rates artificially low, rather than monetary policy?”
The Fed does set interest rates.
Federal funds rate – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate
The Fed also engages in Open Market operations intended to affect the economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Federal_Open_Market_Committee_actions
“Savings glut” explanation is incorrect.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/09/global-savings-glut-exposed.html
“3) Greenspan is one of the most (in)famous libertarians who has ever lived. His life’s work is a study in libertarianism, but you’re saying he wasn’t?”
When he was younger he was a libertarian, but later changed in the 1970s when he got into government.
Greenspan
(1) First advised government agencies on state economic planning, then
(2) worked for the government directly under President Ford and then
(3) engaged in large scale economic planning at the Fed.
That’s probably what you are confused about.
“Greenspan was chairman and president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City, a 33-year stint interrupted only from 1974 to 1977 by his service as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford[citation needed. In the summer of 1968, Greenspan agreed to serve Richard Nixon as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign[….]”
He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy organization between 1982 and 1988.[11] He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty in 1984.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
Also note Greenspan has been repudiated for years by Libertarians, foremost among them the most visible libertarian politican, Ron Paul, who has a book titled: “End the Fed”.
OK, let’s try this again:
1) “1) The Fed is not a part of the government.”
The only part of the Fed that is part of the gov’t is the Board of Governors, and half of the FOMC members have nothing to do with Congress. The Fed consists of private banks, most of whom are harmless. The part of the Fed that is causing problems is the NYFED, which again, is not part of the gov’t.
2) The Fed does not set mortgage rates, credit card rates, student loan rates, auto loan rates, the 10-yr Treasury yield, LIBOR, etc. They set the Fed Funds, which always follows market T-bill rates:
http://www.howestreet.com/articles/index.php?article_id=4694
Yes, the savings glut is nonsense, but that’s not my point. The point is the Fed admits they don’t control interest rates, and it doesn’t negate my argument.
3) Working for the government does not mean Greenspan’s libertarian influence ended. Ron Paul, among others, is a blatant example of this. His entire career has been dedicated to the deregulation & liberalization of markets (you call this “planning” for some reason), and even he has said this line of thinking was “flawed.”
^^^ Case in point of #9 above, the random straw man argument from left field.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and protege of Ayan Rand,
describing the current financial crisis as a “once-in-a-century
credit tsunami” acknowledged Thursday that the crisis has exposed
flaws in his thinking and in the workings of the free-market system.
Greenspan told the House Oversight Committee that his belief that
banks would be more prudent in their lending practices because of the
need to protect their stockholders had been proven wrong by the
current crisis. He called this a “mistake” in his views and said he
had been shocked by that.
Greenspan said he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks in
operating in their self-interest would be sufficient to protect their
shareholders and the equity in their institutions.
Greenspan called this “a flaw in the model that I perceived is the
critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”
The head of the nation’s central bank for 18 1/2 years, Greenspan
said in his testimony to the committee that he and others who
believed lending institutions would do a good job of protecting their
shareholders are in a “state of shocked disbelief.”
Gee whiz Greenspan you think letting the banks leverage up 20-1 and keeping interest rates at 1 percent may have contributed to the situation?
The other part of Greenspan’s policies you will never see rehashed is his repeated bailing out of failing banks and injections of liquidity into a system attempting to dispose of bad debts. It was part and parcel of the Depression-era policy of socializing credit through vehicles like the Fed, FDIC, FHA, FHLB, etc. These institutions are still grossly misperceived as helping add to financial stability and so their role in creating moral hazard and fostering the GFC is downplayed or ignored altogether.
Andrew Bissell,
I don’t know of any respectable analysis of the GFC that doesn’t lay at least some of the blame for the crisis at the feet of the federal agencies you name.
But laying some blame is far different than laying all blame, which you and your radical right-wing bedfellows are want to do.
The truth is you are no different than the highly paid liars and bumsuckers from BP, Halliburton and Transocean that appeared before the senate and congressional committees. They’re all looking for villains, for that one thing they can heap all blame on, absolving themselves of any guilt. Unfortunately for yourself and for those high-paid corporate whores, the GFC nor the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon can be attributed to any one cause. The events leading up to those disasters were far more complex than that, the culmination of many separate failures, some small, others major, but all contributing to the catastrophe.
If you can find some villain, like the federal agencies you name, to heap all blame upon, then the role 30 years of libertarian, deregulatory insanity played in causing the GFC, and the blowout, all of a sudden disappears.
Why are we not also investigating Schlumberger, Weatherford, MI-SWACO, GE(Vetco Grey), Cameron, Transocean ect too? They all worked on the well that blew out.
Halliburton is a symbol for the know nothing Statists
Greenspan is not a libertarian by any reasonably accurate definition.
Can someone please define what a “Libertarian” is?
Throughout this post, people’s definition of the term changes to suit whatever is convenient for them.
Honestly, I don’t have a problem with that, but if that’s the argument, saying Greenspan isn’t a “real” Libertarian makes no sense if you guys can’t even define what a “real” Libertarian is.
It’s no longer a word anymore, it’s become a Rorschach test.
Yep. The libertarians are looking more and more like the Stalinists every day.
You see, individual party members are expendable, but the party, and its ideology, are not. The party’s monumental failures are thus heaped upon former members, who are then purged. Greenspan and Hoover are perfect examples.
In many ways it’s not unlike the medieval church. As Saint Vincent of Lerins wrote in his Commonitoria (memoranda, c. 430), the Church was “a faithful and ever watchful guardian of the dogmas which have been committed to her charge. In this secret deposit she changes nothing, she takes nothing from it, she adds nothing to it.”
Stalinists, the Khymer Rouge, Radical Islamists or any other ideological strain that demands absolute purity and allows no room for interpretation, adjustment, grey areas, uncertainty etc. are all the same: evil.,
Always and again the same. “Ahhh”, the libertarian acolyte proclaims, “but you see (insert person or failed policy here) was never pure enough, they allowed such and such heresy to take place which was outside the dogma of our religion!”
That was the gist of Uncle Milty’s crusade from the start. “No, no, no, capitalism failed not because of its inherent flaws but because of the government’s meddlesome interventions.” But every time it is the same. The point of deregulation is not to allow fair play or create a meritocracy but rather to create a wild and lawless frontier where the strong (extremely wealthy and huge corporations) can take what they want by force. It doesn’t matter if you’re Custer Battles in Iraq or Che Guavera. Why buy a forklift or build a business when you can just “liberate” one? But in the end the banks always fail, the cronies in the government bail out their cronies in the private sector (same people) and when the rich get too rich or the poor get too poor, a change is gonna come. Rinse, repeat.
Well, James, I don’t know of any Libertarians who consider it worthwhile to blow off the limbs of little children. Not sure why you would point this issue towards them.
Well, you asked what spewing U.S. government money looks like…
why spend any time at all debating the merits of a libertarian world, since the obvious conclusion is that one is never forthcoming? all just mental masturbation
…but the world is tending towards anarcho-capitalism.
Look at the Euro zone. They all thought they were one people.
The world is trending towards Libertarianism. If you take human existence from the time of serfs to now with emphasis on individual rights, its hard to deny. Its just moving way too slooooooow.
Sure, and debating which group of omnipotent, omniscient and impartial central planners is best for everybody is within the realm of rationality.
Such discourse so easily devolves into a pissing contest when the cognitive capabilities and motives of humans are not even agreed upon…
Yea the wonderful central planners who can both manufacture gum and tell you when and how to chew it.
I suck from my mother’s teet. I suck from the academies teet. I suck the the interviewer’s and from my references teet. When I am GIVEN my position and earn money, I become a Libertarian to claim all the money and glory for myself.
The oil spill…”wow, can I short BP and make some more dough…the carnage in the gulf is just an externality that I don’t have to absorb, though I hate it. Otherwise, business as usual, sucking teet and claiming all the money and glory for myself.”
Let’s look at the background of the problem here.
This accident did not happen under, and thus could not have been caused by, a libertarian system. The system of government leasing out “public” resources and land to large corporations who provide various levels of direct and indirect payments back to government agencies and officials, and pursuant to which the government stepped in and imposed liability caps to protect its corporate partners, is assuredly not libertarian. This is a system with many regulations that are poorly enforced or ignored, or which are irrelevant. How exactly did allowing the government to control the resources and regulate their extraction lead to a good result?
Well we have this issue of oil company liability being limited to $75 million. Instead they pay fees to a Government run Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund – this system very much distorts the incentives for the oil producers to avoid spills. We can only speculate if this spill would have happened if instead BP were fully liable for any oil spill.
Not saying that no regulation is the answer – just that it would be nice to start the discussion with “is there any existing regulation that actually made matters worse?”.
A 75 million cap on damages is not regulation. It regulatory mitigation or prophylaxis. The cap is the result of fierce lobbying on the part of the Oil industry and it stands as testament that they have no interest in being accountable for their actions or misdeeds. The 75 million cap is further proof we need more honest government and less politically influential corporations. The too-low cap of 75 mil is not evidence government meddling in business but rather a clear example of things being the other way around; business meddling in the affairs of governing.
As Go”del showed long ago, any logical attempt to be self-complete ends up self-inconsistent — as certainly does Libertarianism. Regulation, like preventive- vs. symptomatic-medicine, is the only route to prevent the corruption of greed. If BP had not been able, thru undue influence over Czar Salazar, to skip environmental limitation, the leap-too-far disaster would not have happened.
Prevention?
What is that?
That’s a word that doesn’t even exist in the libertarian vocabulary.
Building somewhat on the Dan Duncan analysis, what has me worried is our capacity to respond in a politically creative fashion to this corporate-government collusion/entanglement.
These huge public and private bureaucratic structures seem to have created, over a significant period of time, a “dependent” populace.
If many of these structures are now in some type of, perhaps, terminal crisis, assuming we have a vision of an alternative structure of power, do we have the determination and drive to implement it?
How is independece born out of dependence? Are there existing today the necessary cultural preconditions for exerting autonomous citizenship?
Libertarian response: You screw up, you fix it. In this case, that would probably require BP and all the other related entities having to sell huge portions of their businesses to pay for the clean up.
Of course, there’s a cap on liability, so these companies won’t have to do that. Think they might have been a bit more cautious if there was unlimited liability?
By that logic, there should be no violent crime because of 3 strikes laws. Imposing a penalty on an act does not preventing it from happening.
Justice and deterrents are two different things. Penalties are a form of justice. Blowout preventers are supposed to prevent oil spills, not penalties.
I have little to add about what the libertarian response should be, but I will share one of the best summaries of libertarianism ever to be written on a blog.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
-John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey
Classic.
I like the Dorthy Parker quote. Concerning Atlas Shrugged, Parker once quipped; “Its not a book to be set aside lightly, it should be hurled with great force.”
Or something like that…
If BP has damaged other people’s property or impaired their ability to make a living then they should be held responsible in a court of law. The idea that libertarians are against the rule of law is nonsense propagated by wishful thinkers – they are the only ones who consistently argue in favor of the rule of law.
Might these be the same libertarians who argue America’s high health care costs is primarily the fault of injury-malpractice lawyers and suggest that tort-reform (i.e. strict limits on judgments) is the only way to control cost inside of a market-based system?
“Libertarians” definitely have only a small intersection with (since we are using labels here) the group that currently has labeled itself as “conservatives” and are actually more akin to “corporatist” or “fascists.”
All of these labels are quite slippery, but I’d suggest “libertarian” is the least slippery of these labels.
The proper Libertarian reply is this: “When was the last time you saw a giant environmental catastrophe happen on private property?”
This truly is a silly, glib question. Mind numbingly ignorant in its arrogance. Again, the answers to (rhetorical?) questions like these should be self-evident, but recognizing the obvious doesn’t seem to be a common trait for Libs.
But since you asked, here are a few:
http://atlasobscura.com/place/picher
http://atlasobscura.com/place/nauru
http://atlasobscura.com/place/centralia
http://atlasobscura.com/place/chernobyls-ghost-cities
When I was looking for some rejoinders to libertarian arguments I came upon the posts by this blogger.
http://www.tonywoodlief.com/archives/cat_taunting_libertarians.html
“Anyone with experience in Libertarian circles has witnessed the following scene: during a dinner party someone raises a problem that the market doesn’t appear capable of solving. There is spirited argument about whether it is truly a market failure. Someone ventures that it must really be a consequence of government intervention. Someone else suggests that the market would provide a solution if it were truly unfettered. Eventually the person in the group with the strongest Libertarian credentials refers to some study of 16th-Century private health insurance among wheel-makers in Southern France to prove that the market could solve this problem, too. The relief, when the faith is restored by one of the priests, is palpable. I have never been a communist, but I imagine the Trotskyites have similar dinner parties.”
I must admit, this single question has produced a plethora of juicy material. I can’t thank you enough, Yves.
excellent comment, pr, I had forgotten about the Superfund sites, and I even had a full reading on them in RFK Jr’s book “Crimes against Nature”
Pick any Superfund site related to a mine on private land. While none are as catastrophic as the BP spill, they are on private land, and they are environmental problems.
BP and its insurers should be sued by every one damaged – everyone in the world.
After BP and its insurers are bankrupted, a punitive tax should be levied on every offshore oil producer until a sufficient pool of cash is raised to hire some brilliant person to stop the volcano of oil.
Libertarians arent anarchists. Generally speaking where the market fails government needs to step in.
BP , RIG and all the Oil/Gas Exploration Co’s involved should pay for ALL the damages to environment AS WELL as collateral damage to businesses and resorts that have been and WILL YET be effected by this uncontrolled Pandora’s box which they have opened . Resorts in the Fla. Keys are already loosing reservations for coming months . The Spill has entered the Gulf Loop Current as of 2 days ago . From there . to the Keys , through the Florida Straits , up along the East Coast ….
You figure it out ! The costs should likely put all these companies out of business . as they should be
Attached is a URL
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory hindcast/forecast based on West Florida Shelf ROMS
a joint effort of the Ocean Circulation Group and the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at College of Marine Science, University of South Florida
http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/Drifters/latest_roms.htm
First of all, I’d like to remember most readers that if we’re talking here about libertarian thinking, it’s only because we’ve been invited to.
Real libertarians consider any other opinions than their owns as therefore welcomed profit opportunities, and nothing else : that’s why most of the time real libertarians just don’t care about whatever whoever says about anything.
However, Obama is said to have recently expressed some understanding of most libertarian solutions : saying that governement is the only thing between many king of clueless people and their neighbours’s pitchforks.
Yves,
It is interesting to read the many spirited comments on this post. So far I’ve learned that libertarians are behind everything from Chernobyl to what appears to be references to mass murder. I’ve seen things that I say and do, things I do in my daily life while engineering solution to energy problems, efficiency problems, and social problems, all lumped together as the evil of all evils.
I’ve had enough of it.
This post and its comments makes me want to retire my services, much like that weirdo Ayn Rand’s book describes in excrutiating detail, when the actual problem solvers decide to retreat to their own hidden little place and let the reactionaries eat each other alive. You see, I donate my time to charities, pull over to help people on the side of the road, and invest in a highly ethical and educated manner by supporting well-thought efforts to provide sustainable energy and healthcare for the maximum number of people. I pay more than my fair share of taxes, even as I decry the absurd waste implicit in their confiscation from me. I go out of my way to leave a small footprint, both economically and environmentally, and yet somehow, by reading this comment thread, I’ve learned I’m the vilest of the vile, a specious creature who disdains care for all but myself.
I tell you, these venemous commenters putting words in my mouth and thoughts in my head do absolutely nothing but decrease my willingness to keep their lights on, their medical devices tested, and their neighborhoods safe. Yes I am that evil creature who works to reduce energy usage and volunteers time for local healthcare charities and neighborhood watches. I am that evil libertarian who actually walks what I talk.
What are the rest of these reactionary haters, who slime some of the most cogent comments with their own ad hominem slander, going to do when those of us who help keep the ball rolling decide to “take our cash to the sidelines”?
I’m not greedy, but slander me as a selfish destroyer enough times, and I simply won’t care to play anymore reindeer games.
Let me get this straight. You call Ayn Rand a “wierdo,” and then in the next breath you cast yourself in a fictional John Galt role?
You serve as the perfect metaphor for libertarianism—-surreal to the max, trapped in some fictional world but convinced it’s the real world.
For those unschooled in the intricacies of libertarian folklore, Galt is Rand’s protagonist in Atlas Shrugged who describes a strike he and others orchestrate as “stopping the motor of the world” by withdrawing the “minds” that drive society’s growth and productivity; with their strike these creative minds hope to demonstrate that the economy and society would collapse without the profit motive and the efforts of the rational and productive.
Briareus : Don’t let dumbos bring you down : just bet against them, win, and keep smiling or die doing ti if you’re wrong : in either case, peace is along the way
I do, and I do. I weathered waves of criticism for my financial decisions between 2000-2008, right into the mouth of the crisis. Like several other contrarian investors, I had a sense of what was coming (oh wait, that’s a lie because “no one could have foreseen this”, right?) Good thing too, my wealth has improved dramatically through the crisis thanks to prudent planning, and I was able to provide a few loans and gifts to people I know who needed them. You know, evil libertarian that I am. Helping people out without a government forcing me to. Evil I tell you, evil.
Well, I think now that the problem might be some underestimation of your own of the number of people economicaly incitated to comfort dumbos into their own opinions.
briareus
Please show me where it has been said in this comment thread that you’ve learned you are the ‘vilest of the vile and a specious creature who disdains care for all but yourself.’
And where you are referred to as an ‘evil libertarian …”
Show me.
Maybe libertarianism is a mental illness. It was obvious when John Birch Society proselytizers handed out extreme right wing pamphlets in the 1960s; less obvious now that libertarians have mastered the art of orwellian frank lutzian goebellarian propaganda while stealthily buying up mainstream media and the governing process itself.
The abuse of language by libertarian corporatists for propagandizing; terms such as ‘free markets’ lifted from traditional use as a term connoting international trading free of tariffs is criminal. Its use on public airwaves and print media is criminal.
There is no such thing as a ‘free market’ the way libertarians push its use. The term is being used by libertarians for indoctrination into their ideology.
There are only REAL markets. A real market is a buyer, a seller, and a price. Libertarian corporatists do not want real markets; particularly not ‘REAL’ competitive markets; they want DOMINATION. And that domination does not stop at markets. They want domination over persons.
“They want DOMINATIO”
There. Right there. It seems he was just called an evil libertarian and words put in his mouth, if I’m not mistaken.
Bingo. They don’t even see when they are doing it, because strawmen are all they see. I fully expect their sort of thinking to frame libertarians and other holders of gold as the problem, and nominate them for home invasion and confiscation. Not quite yet, but its coming. Already I can see the anger aimed at me from people who made bad decisions, lost their ass, and don’t want to admit their error. It’s so much easier to see me up in this time of crisis and go cross-eyed. It’s all the worse for them that I frequently told them what was coming and they denied it. It’s just so much easier to lash out at others than to look in the mirror and admit you’ve been suckered. This whole thread is showing me that my little isolated experience is actually shockingly widespread. I’ve seen a whole section of society demonized on this thread, and I find that reprehensible.
“I fully expect their sort of thinking to frame libertarians and other holders of gold as the problem, and nominate them for home invasion and confiscation. Not quite yet, but its coming. Already I can see the anger aimed at me from people who made bad decisions, lost their ass, and don’t want to admit their error. It’s so much easier to see me up in this time of crisis and go cross-eyed.”
You REALLY are paranoid arent you? Seek help please.
And heres some investment advice…. get the hell out of gold while you can. Its in bubble territory. You “saw” the housing bubble but you’ll miss the gold bubble if you’re not careful.
“It is interesting to read the many spirited comments on this post. So far I’ve learned that libertarians are behind everything from Chernobyl to what appears to be references to mass murder. I’ve seen things that I say and do, things I do in my daily life while engineering solution to energy problems, efficiency problems, and social problems, all lumped together as the evil of all evils.”
Sort of the same things I’ve seen “socialists” accused of. The fact is briareus your ideological brethren are equally prone to painting their ideological opponents with the same broad brush. Its kind of a human thing when we get into political discussions. If you dont want to see what people who dont agree with your ideology think of you…… dont read. To pout and threaten to quit because we simply cant appreciate how damn decent and right you are is ………………….. immature.
—————————————-
“I’ve had enough of it.”
Here’s the ultimate libertarian response; “Dont let the door hit your ass on the way out”
——————————-
“This post and its comments makes me want to retire my services, much like that weirdo Ayn Rand’s book describes in excrutiating detail, when the actual problem solvers decide to retreat to their own hidden little place and let the reactionaries eat each other alive.”
A little thin skinned for a libertarian arent you? Why dont you simply try and make your argument more persuasively? I can assure you you are not as inexpendable as you think. If you were to die tonight the world would go on quite well.(same applies to ME) US “pretend problem solvers” would somehow muddle through.
——————————————–
” You see, I donate my time to charities, pull over to help people on the side of the road, and invest in a highly ethical and educated manner by supporting well-thought efforts to provide sustainable energy and healthcare for the maximum number of people”
Great!! You are like the MAJORITY of Americans. Liberal, Conservative and Libertarian. I am sure the people you have helped honestly appreciate it.
If you solve sustainable energy problems I’m sure you’ll be well compensated, Even a collectivist like myself supports you being paid well for work well done.
—————————————————-
“I pay more than my fair share of taxes, even as I decry the absurd waste implicit in their confiscation from me.”
What you send in an EXTRA thousand to the IRS or something?? You probably pay your fair share. Whatever has been determined you should based on your pay and legal deductions. WE ALL decry absurd waste, we just have different definitions of waste.
——————————————–
“I go out of my way to leave a small footprint, both economically and environmentally, and yet somehow, by reading this comment thread, I’ve learned I’m the vilest of the vile, a specious creature who disdains care for all but myself”
Quit your whining. Its so un-libertarian!! Throw some barbs at the hated libs/pinkos/socialists and get on with your life, Jeeeeeeeezus H Christ
——————————————-
“I tell you, these venemous commenters putting words in my mouth and thoughts in my head do absolutely nothing but decrease my willingness to keep their lights on, their medical devices tested, and their neighborhoods safe”
You really care that much what someone else thinks of you????? Especially people on a message board?? YEAH maybe you can just start depriving people of energy and sabotaging medical devices so they harm people… THAT”LL TEACH “EM …….Maybe you need a psychiatrist.
———————————————-
“What are the rest of these reactionary haters, who slime some of the most cogent comments with their own ad hominem slander, going to do when those of us who help keep the ball rolling decide to “take our cash to the sidelines”?”
I Dunno?? What are we gonna do? Take your cash to the sidelines??
Look if all the big boys tried to sell their positions at once the value of those positions would plummet to ZERO!!!! So go ahead. All of you do it at the same time….. see what happens…… TO YOUR CASH!! It’ll disappear.
You cannot make a big sell move in the market…. YOU NEED A BUYER. You’d think a libertarian genius like you would understand that. Everyone “going GALT” would be a suicidal move not a homicidal move. In your efforts to punish us you would kill your own value. No your wealth is a product of all of us. Its ther because of the market we all make. Not in spite of it as you FOOLISHLY believe. It sucks doesnt it. Prisoner of your own wealth.
——————————————–
“I’m not greedy, but slander me as a selfish destroyer enough times, and I simply won’t care to play anymore reindeer games”
GROW THE FUCK UP!!!
Thanks, you make me feel like a hundred dollars.
And I am no prisoner of wealth. I give much of it away. But I work hard to make it in the first place. Why bother?
I have no need to punish anyone, but I don’t see much reason to continue working and investing in an honest and ethical manner and being made a sucker for it in Moral Hazard Nation.
Coming to Naked Capitalism and seeing how far its fallen into kneejerk slander is just sad.
Are you totally unaware of the selfish arrogance implicit in your diatribe?
You do no more than LOTS of people in this country (and lots of them are “socialists too!) . We are not simply a collection of individuals any more than a body is a collection of cells.
I’m sure if I worked next to you I would have a lot of good things to say about you as a worker and human and I will bet the same of myself to you. But you are not irreplaceable and the notion implied by the John Galt attitude is one of immature petulance. I dont know if thats your true nature but something in this thread brought it out in you and its UGLY.
Like it or not, those of us not inclined to the libertarian philosophy notice this trait in a lot of the acolytes to Randian thinking. In my view a society made up of you guys would be a cold,sterile business only world. In other words USA Inc.
I’m no Randian. I think she’s a bit of a quack. And she HATED libertarians. When I read her ponderous Atlas Shrugged (a book I chose not to finish), I got her point but was not moved by it. However, I am watching it come true in a litany of ways. I see it where I work, where I shop, where I volunteer, where I take leisure, etc. I see it in how I am gamed by regulations and corporate vendors alike, and even by an apparently increasingly corrupt and dishonest general public. I pay the price, again and again, for being honest. It’s true that it takes integrity not to give in to all that, but seriously, when it’s everywhere I turn–even being muscled around by the annointed kings of the marketdroids–at some point the rational response is: Why continue? I know my lifestyle is helpful to myself and those around me. A million of you detractors cannot convince me otherwise. Not with your ad hominem, not with your farcical stereotypes, not with your strawmen. (And no, that was not quite directed at You, Greg, because you didn’t do quite all of that.)
So go ahead and call it ugly. You’re calling it ugly that I am letting off steam while seeing people like myself being raked over the coals for something we didn’t commit and would never condone. That’s what’s ugly.
That I am not irreplaceable is irrelevant.
Yes I would agree, Rand was a BIT of a quack. I dont know about hating libertarians, seems the definition is quite conveniently nebulous.
How is her point becoming true? If your talking about the 20/80 rule, thats been pretty well determined to be a fairly constant phenomena across all cultures and political stripes. Something tells me even if everyone was a libertarian there’d be those working harder than others.
Get used to it and if you WANT to slack, do it if you can.
Rand seemed to believe there was something “superior” to the 20% (and I suspect this is something shared by many libertarians) and that if they left we’d all be doomed.
I posit that whatever void was left would be filled by someone else. We as a species do pretty well at doing what needs to be done. Maybe we really only need 20% of the people doing the “hard” stuff.
Gamed by regulators? Example please. I have found if you look into most regulations there is an underlying good reason for them. Are they enforced properly? Why not? Are the regulators provided inadequate for the task?
Libertarians never ask these questions because they ALWAYS default to NO REGULATIONS IS BETTER!
I actually share your frustration of working hard playing by rules I dont always understand and seemingly getting screwed. Welcome to the club.
I cant answer the why continue question for you. For myself its because I do get something out of it. In spite of its downside I have much to be thankful for and I am rewarded in many ways when I stop to really compare my situation with others.
I called it ugly because it was ugly ( my first response was rather ugly too but I have frustrations with the ME FIRST crowd as well) We are sometimes prone to ugliness, ALL of us, but lets not refrain from calling it ugly. THAT does no good.
Thanks, you make me feel like a hundred dollars.
And I am no prisoner of wealth. I give much of it away. But I work hard to make it in the first place. Why bother?
I have no need to punish anyone, but I don’t see much reason to continue working and investing in an honest and ethical manner and being made a sucker for it in Moral Hazard Nation.
Coming to Naked Capitalism comments and seeing how far its fallen into kneejerk slander is just sad.
they need to fix it, It’s that simple.
“Libertarian” encompasses quite a range, and can sometimes be a little out there. But, with 300+ responses, I expect many excellent points have been made.
So, here’s mine:
BP should be 100% financially responsible for the costs it imposes on other economic entities — individuals, businesses, states.
That sum may well exceed the total of all BP net assets.
In that case, the best outcome would be one in which all claimants got the most possible payout from BP’s liquidation or auction (new stock, etc.), after a fair tort trial.
Of course, the governmental oil spill fund already set up for years will pay out also. Together these two sums could conceivably in the worst scenarios leave claimants with less than 100 cents on the dollar.
In that worst case, I’d favor that appropriate taxes be imposed on such drilling to act as a stronger insurance than currently.
Libertarians do not like for economic entities to be able to impose externalities — hidden costs imposed on others, in effect a form of subtle theft.
In the Libertarian view, the cost of oil and gasoline at the pump should fully include the true complete costs, which include such externalities as pollution (this case is an extreme instance of a pervasive reality of air and water pollution), health costs due to toxins, defense costs for naval forces to protect oil shipping, and some part of well-structured road costs(which must also rely on weight).
In short, Libertarians want private businesses to pay their own way, without hidden subsidies taken from others’ pockets.
“In that case, the best outcome would be one in which all claimants got the most possible payout from BP’s liquidation or auction (new stock, etc.), after a fair tort trial.”
Why should the payout be limited to BP’s assets? Why not all assets of the owners of BP?
The limited liability of corporations is one of the most un-libertarian aspects of our financial system, yet I’ve almost never heard libertarians complain about it. Talk about the elephant in the living room. If I owned all of BP, but I also had other substantial assets, why should my liability be limited to BP’s assets just because it’s incorporated? And why should that liability be different just because BP’s ownership is joint?
Good question.
Libertarianism works great (in theory) for fender benders. Easily defined, quantifiable problems. It just doesn’t seem to scale well. How long will this oil slick be out there and how can it possibly be measured?
Oh, and yes, unlimited liability for all! Seems this is the first time I’ve heard that one — conveniently twists blame back on, surprise, government.
How come Dr. Paul isn’t screamingly anti- tort reform?
I don’t care for labels. “Libertarian” itself is becoming a label, and being drained of any meaning.
As “conservative” can now often cover something a lot like what used to be “fascist” or “crony capitalism”, “libertarian” can be used to mean opposite policies to what intellectual libertarians would generally agree on.
One thing I can say emphatically, is that libertarians I’ve discussed issues with agree widely that tort should *not* be limited.
Instead, Libertarians have consistently seen tort liability to be an excellent way to bring costs back to those that create the costs.
Representing libertarians as for tort limits is quite a perversion of the classic libertarian ideas. Such would be another instance of corporatists trying to cover themselves with camouflage.
I think it might possibly be worth emphasizing:
Actual Libertarian thinking: tort liability is good. Limiting tort is corruption.
So what if you have unlimited tort? If a company or individual does not have the ability to pay the damages, they cannot, and will not be paid. In many industries, it’s quite possible to cause more damage than you’r entire enterprise and personal wealth is worth.
If I’m drilling offshore and my company and personal wealth is worth $10M, and I take some shortcut that saves me a $1M, but has a 1% of causing $500B in damages, the math tells me to take the shortcut. The most I could lose is $10M since that’s all I have, whereas I have a 99% chance of making an extra $million.
Or a Trucker decides to put off getting new brakes, and ends up plowing into a school bus killing 10 kids. How’s he going to make up for that? In the libertarian world he’s not even required to carry insurance!
“In the libertarian world he’s not even required to carry insurance!”
That’s not quite what I think it would be like. Taking for sake of your argument, the premise of ‘the libertarian world’, I believe that in libertarian world, the owner of that roadway–a roadway shared by truckers AND schoolbuses–would have a powerful motive to insure that vehicles on that section of roadway are safe and in good repair. He or she might accomplish this in concert with other owners of connecting roads, perhaps using the sorts of technology we see over truck lanes today, perhaps paying a highway patrol-type organization to assist with incidents and inspections, and perhaps forming industry standards in the process (free of the political distortion). The owner would feel compelled to supply this level of safety assurance, because he/she might be concerned with being taken to court after such a tragic wreck, and would therefore take whatever measures he or she felt prudent to take to prevent the situation and hopefully prove that due diligence in open court. Would you want such a tragic wreck to happen in your yard? Of course not. [I don’t know you, but I believe you would probably do whatever it took to prevent such a thing happening on your property.]
Transport companies might likewise reason that they should conduct more safety checks, require the driver to post bond, or any number of things I can’t think of because I’m not a transportation company. I leave it to their best judgment, and the market participants’ reaction to it (customers, competitors).
Such levels of safety might be enforced by the client itself who pays to move cargo, for any number of reasons.
The libertarian world would then see these true costs input directly into the market price.
So while the driver might not be forced by mandate to pay an insurance company (nice racket for the insurance companies they have today, eh?), and he might be loathe to pay for upkeep on his truck brakes, he would be compelled to take prudent steps to insure he doesn’t kill a bunch of kids, lose everything, and go to prison for it. The same litany of considerations would likely apply to the school bus driver, school bus manufacturer, possibly even the school itself, and again to the roadway owner. It does not require honesty or altruism on the part of the driver. It does require that he understands that public expectation of his performance would severely work against him in open court if it were known that he had cut corners. Finally, he might even feel compelled to purchase insurance anyway!
People seem to think that the individual libertarian somehow denies a social world exists. Quite the contrary. The social contract, so to speak, is such that the libertarian wants the greatest liberty of economics and action for the greatest amount of people, while preserving those aspects of government which are best suited for social benefit at hopefully a minimum cost, the legal system of course being an implicit exponent.
I quite agree. I want the maximum liberty for everyone, but if someone harms another or their property or poisons their environment, I want the maximum penalty that can be assessed. Not just for justice in that particular case, but for other unethical operators to be put on notice what expectations and limits are expected of them by the people.
I don’t want a limit on their liability.
As for the particular instance of BP, it’s rather disgusting to learn that government had capped liability to 75 million dollars, for anyone causing an oil spill. And worse, drilling and blasting permits for the Deepwater Horizon site have been granted by this administration’s MMS without even following an honest permit procedure. This is nearly identical behavior to the Cheney years. So much for good governing.
I hear people say that the only way for libertarianism to work is if everyone is infallible. I think this is incorrect. Statism might fit that claim better; it requires everyone to be infallible, otherwise their agencies face inevitable capture.
As a last thought, I think Yves question (unintentionally) was rather prone to sparking a forest fire of flaming comments. Not that it shouldn’t be asked, but it is comparing a de facto market reality with an idealized theory. Why not ask crony-capitalism and captured-government what it’s response to the spill it caused is? Or, ask an idealized theory what it’s theoretical approach would be to a hypothetical environmental disaster. The question as phrased seems a bit like asking the hunter/gatherer what his response would be to fallow fields salted by a reckless farmer. The hunter/gatherer wouldn’t have much to say but “I wouldn’t have done this, this isn’t how I live.”
Thanks for answering the other question there.
Part of the political cost of having a name “Libertarian” is that you then have to knock down various strawmen competing parties put up against you.
I think I prefer to win over more of the existing parties to libertarian insights, which actually isn’t so hard to do.
I think it has to be said that there is a difference between libertarian with a big L versus a little l. “In short, there is libertarianism, the philosophy of governance, and there is Libertarianism, the creed. ”
http://www.tonywoodlief.com/archives/week_2002_11_10.html#000866
IMO, the reason this issue sparks so much discussion is people’s frustration with framing how this happened. We (well not me, but people like Yves)can explain in logical stepwise and horrified fashion what/how/why went wrong, but thus far the arguments have yet to provide us all with the aha moment. We’ve got the logic, but not the nuance down, the gut feeling, the emotional resonance that allows one paradigm to replace another.
Feudal attraction
Milton Friedman´s call for limited govt is still very much alive …
He wanted to abolish 10 of the 14 departments of the Federal govt…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_qwo2VIlU
(Listen at the 25 minute point of the video, he lays out the fundamental functions of govt…)
Milton Friedman wanted only
* Department of defense to protect the country,
* Department of the treasury to collect taxes,
* Department of justice and the police to oversee and enforce laws,
* Department of state for foreign diplomacy
His ideal government is quite similar to the governments that existed in feudalism…
Feudalism defined …
“Feudal governments provided a way to settle disputes. Aside from that and providing some military protection, they didn’t do much else. They didn’t provide schools, hospitals, fire protection, or other services that governments provide today.”
http://library.thinkquest.org/6105/knightsandchivalry.html
He was ultimately advocating a feudalistic economy… not because of his view of free markets, but because of how he viewed government´s role in society …
A REAL libertarian wouldn’t have to worry about this because it would never happen if the masses were educated in proper libertarianism. Then each person would act according their own logic best interests (which would include an accounting of all costs and benefits) with the perfect logical solution applied in each and ever case. I don’t understand why this isn’t understood. It’s those socialist that make everyone think illogically.
Spock out….
Forget mandatory libertarian education for libertarians : education, libertarian or not it doesn’t matter is just one’s own interest.
Religions of thought never seem to find consensus, be it, its authors or patron’s. Seems_not so sapiens_need for the I[s] to be at the fore front of all things, precursor of any thought, precludes any other construct.
“The more you surround yourself with smart people, the more opportunities tend to come to you.”
“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
These are precursors to our dilemma.
Skippy…me wonders what the load bearing capacity of this world is…for I[s] as compared to us[s]…
Small is beautiful.
Less is more.
Short is sweet.
This has to be one of the shortest (and sweetest) posts by Yves and it has generated more comments than I can remember.
Talk about leverage. Yves should work for Goldman.
Come to think of it, she did.
Aah, that’s nothin’. As it turns out, we all work for government Sachs.
Shouldn’t the question be – why, in our non-libertarian society did this problem happen ? Why are you requesting a libertarian response to a problem it did not create?
Another intellectually dishonest remark. Deregulation and other means of limiting or ending state interference in supposedly private matters is front and center of the libertarian agenda. We’ve had 30 years of efforts to weaken restrictions on corporations. Why do we have weak and compromised regulators? Because they’ve been bred to be that way for a generation and a half.
Your argument is like someone shooting his parents and then seeking sympathy for being an orphan. Doesn’t wash.
Libertarians have no agendas : lobbyists have.
btw, libertarians don’t care about whoever’s opinion on anyone’s matters.
Please call your senator about whatever wrong’s been done to you, take a seat, relax, and enjoy the definitively non-libertarian panorama.
Yet another person who incorrectly believes that libertarians are against all regulation.
It is an honest question, not a dishonest remark.
Do you mean an “honest” rhetorical question? Of course you think (i) that is the question to explore and (ii) the current world is decidedly non-libertarian.
Just to put it out there, I don’t want a libertarian world. Either everybody has to be a libertarian or the entire political system doesn’t work. Consider in Libertarianstan, an individual with money or connections to people responsible for enforcing property rights or better yet both. As a person with resources, what would my rational self interest dictate? Why to use my money and connections to secure even more money and to consolidate even more power for myself. In addition, I would find it in my best interest to use my influence to subvert the effective enforcement of other individuals’ property rights against me.
Without a strong, noble and moral majority to enforce everyone’s property rights quickly and efficiently, how would Libertarianstan not degenerate into either oligarchy or anarchy? I would not like that outcome, and I am pretty sure libertarians would agree. Further, I am very sure based upon human history such a paradise is beyond unrealistic.
So, I don’t want a libertarian world. I don’t believe enough of my fellow humans are mature enough to handle that much freedom. Look at what happens when we try to give people more freedom in the form of less regulation. Why the world has been blessed with the BP spill, one of the largest environmental catastrophes ever, and the Greatest Recession since the Great Depression.
This happened because the quasi-experiment with quasi-libertarianism for the last 8 years is a complete and utter failure. We tried to rely upon people’s better intentions and we got burned.
You’re missing the point : nobody *wants* a libertarian world. But whether we want it or not we’ll have it, since you and so many others believe that what they can want or not about things neither you and I understand matters.
Libertarianism is just understanding how little we understand things we want to design.
When government spending is 30+% of the GNP, it is decidedly a non-libertarian state.
“Just to put it out there, I don’t want a libertarian world.”
If you think we are currently in a libertarian world, then I don’t want one either.
“Either everybody has to be a libertarian or the entire political system doesn’t work.”
This really isn’t true. Within a libertarian society, it would be possible to form a privately held, voluntary organization that functions on socialist values, as long as everyone joined the organization voluntarily. This is because people are allowed to make their own decisions. However, it is not possible to form a libertarian organization within a socialist organization because they would be part of the socialist society by force, not choice.
“Consider in Libertarianstan, an individual with money or connections to people responsible for enforcing property rights or better yet both. As a person with resources, what would my rational self interest dictate? Why to use my money and connections to secure even more money and to consolidate even more power for myself.”
Consider this same individual in any society. This self interest to exert control on regulatory powers. It exists now and, frankly, in any society – socialism, democracy, dictatorship. Any of them. Always has. Always will. Most notably, it shows in our lobbying system. This is a non-issue when comparing libs to others.
“I don’t believe enough of my fellow humans are mature enough to handle that much freedom”
That doesn’t give you the right to take their freedom from them. I mean – are you really saying you think it is OK for you to dictate to people how to live their lives because you don’t believe they can do it on their own? “Arrogance” doesn’t begin to describe this attitude. I’m OK taking away people’s rights once they have violated others’ rights, or put others at risk, but I’m not OK doing that if I just bgelieve they can’t handle the freedom.
“Look at what happens when we try to give people more freedom in the form of less regulation.”
I agree. Most are surprised to hear that “free markets” need regulations. It is possible to have less regulation than a truly “free market” should have. Many think the “free market” is a market where everyone is free to do what they want. This is incorrect. A free market is a market where all participants are free from others infringing upon their personal and property rights.
BP should never have been allowed to be in a position to put so much at risk if they weren’t prepared to pay for the damage, and be fully insured against all possible liability. But they were, because ye olde gov. allowed it because they are trying to regulate to a financial end (cheap oil) rather than regulating rights violations.
Sadly to say. As the world becomes more interconnected and as the actions individuals and companies take are amplified by technology and are more powerful by orders of magnitude than ever before.(One terrorist can take out 100’s of people, one slip of the finger by a stock trader can decrease my savings by 10% in one day); We need more Government and Regulations rather than less as we consider the impact these actions could have on others.
No Government or less Government just will not cover it anymore. We are where we are now; the simpler days of the past are gone. Time to wake up and look around. Lets see, would I trust a major corporation with my health and well being over a government I elect. I’m not so sure.
I have been spending alot of my free time trying to understand the original definition of Liberty used by the founders, and it has nothing to do with libertarianism; rather it is the right to full representation in a functioning government, and the right to equal treatment under the laws of that government.
So the proper response of those who love liberty, vs. libertarians, should be to hold the individual humans who caused this catastrophe accountable under the laws of this country. Period. No more free rides for those who hide behind the facade of corporations. Jail, people.
Libertarian ideas (Ayn Rand ideas) rest on the idea that a person will act in there rational self interest. In BP’s case, an oil spill wasn’t in the rational self interest of the company, the management or the shareholders. These ideas are ideals, actually, that people will have the discipline to do what is rational. But, individuals don’t for curious reasons throughout history and that don’t need explanation here. Therefore, though ideally people should act in there rational self interest, because they lack the discipline to do so, there must be an entity responsible for overseeing and supervising human behavior. It is in BP’s best interest to do it on its own, but if its employees can’t, then the gov’t oversight is actually a benefit for BP and the environment. It would be hard to imagine the other oil companies have not rechecked procedures, etc. to make sure that they will not have a lapse of self interest.
Libertarians don’t know what rational is. Libertarians believe that given enough reasons to do it, man kills.
Ayn Rand never grew a single tomato by herself.
It is interesting that the word “Libertarian” is so convoluted. For sure, there is no clarity on what that means, which certainly gives rise to most of the heated discussion. When some people say we are currently in a libertarian state and others (me, for sure) say we aren’t, or if some say that Greenspan is a libertarian while others say he isn’t, then there really is no point arguing the Lib. response.
Just goes to show that the Libertarian party has a long hill to climb. Even with my strong belief in free markets, I’m really not a fan of the Libertarian party – just because it isn’t really clear what they are all about. Most here appear to think that they are all about government giving corporations unbridled freedoms, which is not something I believe in. So, either the Libs have gone off track or they have done a shitty job of marketing. Either way, I’m not a fan.
I’d just like a society where I’m not forced, against my will, to bail out stupid bankers who gave big loans to people who obviously can’t repay. In fact, I think everyone here would like that.
I’m also hoping I don’t have to bail out BP. I have a feeling I will.
Being stupid isn’t against the law but it certainly doesn’t merit an involuntary transfer of money from citizens to corporations, either.
They need to give BP a 30 day notice to cap it off or
the Military needs to set off explosion to cap it off
and close off the well. Then they need to soak up the
oil with grass and hay and absorb the oil and net it up
and dispose of it properly and send BP the bill.
All future oil platforms need inspectors and safety
implemented ASAP. Obama get on it.ASAP Our beaches and
marine life depends on you.
Most commenting here have done a good job confusing themselves, many times convolved. Fresh water is required, your pool is polluted.
Wasn’t he involved in some sort of a bizarre gun incident
UP-DATE Saturday, May 29, 2010
Folks,
The BP OIL DEBACLE has a cure. I have had a plan to do such in their face for about a month. Sent it to Investor Relations in England, they were the only ones that ever replied, the BP crews they have on staff in the USA are in my oil and gas terms short term’ers and loser’s. With hours of research my conclusions about the events that transpired before the blow-out then the flooding the Deep Horizon with water that made it sink all of those things STINK.
Now my job is not to assess the guilt shame and blame of the debacle my job is to TAME NATURE that BP un-leashed and at this time they have no clue what to do. Or do they?
The story that needs to be dug out looked at dissected then published is in the news today. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers are spending money right and left acquiring properties in the US. One of their drilling partners in the well that blew out may be a target for them to acquire. John D. Rockefeller said, “The best time to buy is when blood is running in the streets”.
Some who are real savvy in the stock market can easily if they will look for the pattern that is going on today. Enough said about that.
TAME NATURE
TO President Obama staff and workers on the
BP OIL DEBACLE BOONDOGGLE.
By Dwight Baker
May 28, 2010
Dbaker007@stx.rr.com
I am tired of swimming upstream to get my TAME NATURE way approved to be the way to bring a halt to the oil and gas coming from the Deep Horizon.
So to help things along so that you might get to see the plans of the how to do it some day in the future all you must do is remember TAME NATURE then google dbaker007@stx.rr.com then pick a site and read the how to do it.
I have high hopes that the TAME NATURE Plan will be adopted and implemented soon.
TAME NATURE is a good idea We the People have way to much too lose if not adopted soon and it is a much better — than the past and current plans that have not and is NOT SANE or SOUND AT ALL —-NOW my thoughts and ideas are worthy of payment, please advise when we can come to terms. Dwight Baker PO BOX 7065 Eagle Pass Texas, 78852 tel 830-773-1077 Retired Oil and Gas Engineer with USA PATENTS high-pressure gates valves. Banking Universal Commercial Code number E67344656 My genetic roots go back to J.D. Rockefeller.
Tort law fails miserably as a compensation mechanism. even if there were no corporations, and thus unlimited personal liability, there are enough examples to demonstrate that compensation after the fact almost NEVER compensates properly for loss.
For instance — how much money would it take for you to feel that the negligent death of your child or spouse was a fair trade? How about for the loss of your business? How much should you get compensated if BP’s oil spill depletes fish stocks and the price of fish rises? How much should I get compensated for the fact that the freedom for me travel to certain beaches has been trampled? ( I am poorer because my choices have been limited, where is my check? )
Further — even an individual with unlimited liability might not behave as we expect. For instance – I might well exchange complete destitution in an uncertain future if I can live high off the hog at your expense today.
I anticipate the libertarian argument as being that they aren’t against ‘all’ government regulation. But the end result is that there is a MASSIVE role for government in preventing individuals from impinging on other individuals. It is expensive, needs to be taken seriously and done effectively ( we are a long long way from this – it requires just as unrealistic a view of humanity as libertarianism ). After the fact compensation via courts is only an inferior mechanism ( even if justice were free and omniscient ) to regulation.
In the end – regulation and tort law reflect nothing more than an agreed upon ( by someone, anyway ) balancing of the risks and rewards of certain types of human behavior and activity trying to provide a reasonable ( though flawed by nature ) set of incentives for different types of behavior.
In my ideal world, the goals would be individual freedom and liberty, social justice and equality, compassion and cooperation and recognition of the shared interests of humanity. The best I could hope for is a system that incentivizes this behavior to the best of our limited ability.