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Dec 26, 2021·edited Dec 26, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

I live in Vietnam which, in many respects, is way more libertarian than the US. I imagine most developing countries are similar: the lack of state capacity just gives things a fairly minarchist tinge.

My impression is that most libertarians generally hate it. I'm in Facebook group where foreigners (usually Americans) come for free legal advice and 95% of the posts are from people wishing the government would protect them from these "local bullies".

My landlord evicted me when I got pregnant. My neighbour has a dog that barks all the time. My job took my passport and won't give it back. My job didn't pay us. Banks don't have deposit insurance. Cancelled flights don't get reimbursed. Faulty table lamp started a house fire. Bars that refill alcohol bottles with cheaper knockoffs. Etc etc etc.

Landlords and employers cause TONS of issues. And the only recourse is to hire a lawyer and sue in court.

You can guess how rarely that actually happens.

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Hmmmm. This is one of the best articles I've ever read here, and there has been some fierce competition.

So, where to start?

Well, the first basic problem with people is we think in extremes and categories. Libertarianism looked at the Soviet union, rightly thought 'oh no', and went off in the completely opposite direction.

There are no such things as societies without hierarchies. There can only be democratic and undemocratic hierarchies, democratic or undemocratic power. In a country with only a notional government, everyone isn't living happily in tiny self-sustaining communities

The power vacuum is filled up with local bullies instead who in many cases are worse than governments because they are not responsible to you.

And I think it's insightful that there are two major roles they expect governments to play: protect property rights and protect people from violence.

That's basically insure our lives and insure our properties and we'll take care of the rest by ourselves.

Liberty is not the natural state of human affairs. It must be continuously managed. That, ironically enough, is the one thing that can't happen in libertarianism.

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How right! Today's words and yesterday's essay both point out that "Libertarianism" is the rationalized political philosophy of the wealthy, powerful, narcissistic, dominant, egotistical, and selfish 'empowerfulled' to justify and preserve their expectation of dominance.

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Libertarianism - Astrology for men.

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There was always something that nagged at me about the workability of libertarianism, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. Thank you for pointing it out so clearly!!

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Dec 26, 2021·edited Dec 26, 2021

Excellent article! I couldn't agree more. The liberty of local bullies is absolutely related to the rise in libertarian ideals and laissez-faire thinking. The function of government is not to deprive individuals of their liberty it is to protect it. Unfortunately today there is no government of the people for the people as the whole system of law and democratic representation has been corrupted by plutocrats and their minions/lobbyists.

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In my experience, libertarianism is not a single position, but rather a spectrum, ranging from Randists to classic liberals a la J S Mill. Most libertarians I know agree that government has a role that goes beyond protection of person and property. For example, Nozick acknowledges the existence of externalities and the need to compensate for them.

It then becomes a question of degree, rather than of absolutes. Yes, government must intervene -- but when and to what extent. The libertarian, as I understand the term, is one who favors minimum intervention to achieve the objectives. Progressives, on the other hand, often seem to think that government intervention is the default position, with the onus of justification on those who would leave the initiative to individuals.

The other important point is voluntary versus coercive collective action. Government, with its monopoly on (legitimate) violence, obviously has a lot more scope for coercive collective action, and it can extend that power to help self-constituted collective groups. Voluntary groupings, on the other hand, must work much harder to be responsive to their members and temper their excesses.

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Yes, and even worse are those who themselves bully and then enlist the big bully to help.

The obvious example is a coalition of gangsters and corrupt cops, which is a reality in some countries.

A less obvious one is the outreach from school boards to the DOJ asking that dissident parents be monitored on the grounds that they are "domestic terrorists."

When it comes to bullying, there's nothing better than getting the government on your side.

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I think you are weakmanning libertarianism a bit here. There is a large portion of the movement that does make the mistake you describe, and they tend to put themselves forward as the only "real" libertarians, but they're not.

The term of art for the intra-movement argument over this is "thin" vs "thick" libertarianism, where the "thin" ones take the position you criticize here that lack of government coercion suffices for liberty, and the "thick" ones say you also need cultural tolerance norms. Part of the "thick" argument is what you say here, that people's felt sense of liberty also depends on non governmental institutions tolerating a diversity of behavior, and part is that in practice intolerant cultures can't sustain protections against government coercion.

If you Google "thick vs thin libertarianism" you find arguments going back to the date of your original post and even earlier, so this isn't a particularly new dispute.

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A basic problem is that libertarians do not have an idea of what liberty really is: they instead say "these are the liberties we want, they are 'natural', and no others."

Freedom is complex in the real world: "A person (P) is free to do or be a thing (T), achieving a net value (V), using an ability (A), with a resource (R), despite externalities (E) to others (O), when interference (I) from others is not too high, because of reason (B)." Libertarians ignore most of that.

For more on the nature of freedom, see my paper: "Taking Freedom Seriously: A Pre-Legal Model of Freedom, Interferences, Rights and Duties." https://philpapers.org/rec/HUBTFS

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George Monbiot says more or less the same thing at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/24/dead-goldfish-licensed-waste-disposer-system-falling-apart:

"This is what you get from 40 years of deregulation. While good citizens are bound by ever more oppressive laws, “the market”, according to neoliberal theory, should be released from regulatory constraint. Deregulation is a euphemism for destroying the effective capacity of the state to protect us from chancers, conmen and criminals. Empowered to cut corners, fishy businesses outcompete responsible ones and we begin to shift towards an organised crime economy."

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Thank you for stating this obvious problem with Libertarian "freedom".

Libertarian is great for people with property (money, land) but what does it offer for everyone else?

Allowing business owners and managers to harass women employees - make sexual favors a condition of employment - may seem like freedom for some men but few women who would have to deal with it would call it being more "free".

Allowing business owners to put up "whites only", "no Jews", "no gays" signs may seem like freedom for some people but it is hardly "freedom" for those excluded.

Libertarians should really call themselves Propertytarians because without property what Liberty do they really offer? Without property all that is available is selling ones labor to someone with property but without any protections. No Free Speech rights (employers being free to fire you for anything you say), no religious rights, or labor protections. Property owners are "free" to collude and blacklist and skew the "free" market in their favor.

Constitutional rights are limited only to government (and often only federal government) while at the same time government scope is small and limited making Constitutional rights from a practical sense mostly non existent. Hardly the definition of Liberty.

This this problem with Libertarian ideology has existed since it was made up in the 1970's yet rarely mentioned by Libertarians. It is almost as if Libertarianism is simply about the wealthy wanting government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

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So, how do you "fix" libertarianism, then? Government as the bully to keep the local bullies in line? Disempower the bullies? *Dilute* the power of the bullies? Or *counteract* the power of the bullies?

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I don't think that "liberty" is the issue. The issue is democracy. Dream-minarchies require very little democracy: arguably none past the constitutional moment. A dream-miniarch would constitutionalize a few things: preventing "force and fraud," protecting property, and enforcing contracts. There would be no need to make subsequent decisions: no need for democracy.

Of course, this is wanking. Even this kind of state would need cops, judges, and jailers. And as we all know, cops and judges have plenty of discretion. And besides, who would name them?

But still, miniarchy is a beautiful dream, for those who don't think hard about liberty and hate democracy.

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Outstanding article!

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200,000 years of societal evolution by homo sapiens and we still struggle with a mechanism to deal with assholes.

Really not surprising that segregationists dealt repeated blows by the state would glom onto and expand a framework that identifies them as aggrieved minorites. A lot of us very online liberals identify as left-libertarian largely as a rejection of their choices of whose rights matter most.

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