Libertarians

[a_majoor]

Mythbusting markets:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/12/the-fable-of-market-meritocrac/singlepage

The Fable of Market Meritocracy
Markets don't reward smart people. They reward value.

Shikha Dalmia | February 12, 2010

It's a good thing that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is brimming with amour-propre because he certainly did not earn any amour from the business elite gathered in Davos last month. In a bombastic riposte—delivered, no doubt, in one of his fabulously expensive designer suits—he proclaimed that the recent financial meltdown had demonstrated that letting markets decide executive compensation was "morally indefensible." "There are remuneration packages that will no longer be tolerated because they bear no relationship to merit," he said.

But here's some news for Mr. Sarkozy: Markets don't reward merit; they reward value—two very different things. If Mr. Sarkozy does not appreciate the difference, it's not his fault actually. Most advocates of markets have failed to fully make this distinction, perpetuating a cult of market meritocracy—something that has hindered, not helped, the cause of free markets.

With the notable exception of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, market theoreticians have to a large extent employed the equivalent of the Great Man theory of history to explain what makes markets tick. According to this theory, the course of history is shaped not by the convergence of multiple, unpredictable events but by the intervention of great men. Likewise, in the conventional thinking about markets, economic progress depends not on the labors of infinite economic actors but on the select few, the brainiacs, who rise to the top and generate innovations from which ordinary mortals benefit through a kind of trickle-down effect.

English sociologist Michael Young noted in his influential 1958 fable, The Rise of the Meritocracy: "Civilization does not depend on the stolid mass, the homme moyen sensuel, but upon the creative minority, the innovator ... the brilliant few … the restless elite who have made mutation a social as well as a biological fact." Less elegantly, Ayn Rand evinced a "pyramid of ability" in capitalism under which "the man at the top contributes the most to all those below him." What's more, this Nietzsche of capitalism opined: "Man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of their brain."

What's good about markets in this line of thinking is that they identify the incandescent geniuses among us and catapult them to the top where their innate brilliance is harnessed to improve the lot of mankind. At once, then, markets yield economic progress and what Rand (and others) regard as justice—the biggest rewards to the best.

The only problem with this neat little formulation is that it is wrong at every level. For starters, the idea that value creation is a one-way street from the top to the bottom is not just offensive, but it ignores the principle of comparative advantage, a key breakthrough in market theory. Put simply, this principle holds that everyone benefits by exchanging goods and services with everyone else, regardless of anyone's inherent capabilities. It's in the interest of even the most annoying "all-rounder" (as we say in India), who is better than me at everything, to specialize in those tasks in which our gap is the biggest and trade with me for those in which our gap is smaller. Under the elaborate division of labor that ensues, both the less-endowed and the better-endowed contribute to each others well being.

But is it the case that this division of labor necessarily directs the biggest rewards to the most gifted by putting them at the highest end of the value chain? No.

The beauty of the market, Hayek brilliantly pointed out, is that it allows people to use knowledge of their particular circumstances to generate something valuable for others. And circumstances, he emphasized, are a matter of chance—not of gift. Furthermore, since no two people's circumstances are ever identical, every producer potentially has something—some information, some skill or some resource--that no one else does, giving him a unique market edge. "[T]he shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others," noted Hayek.

In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone's innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product's value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.

The idea that there is no god (or some secular version of him) meting out cosmic justice through the market's invisible hand is unsettling, even to market advocates, but it shouldn't be. It opens up the possibility of a defense of markets that is, as it were, more marketable.

Few would dispute that markets are fairer than the aristocratic order they replaced where privilege was a birthright, not something to be earned. But the view that the super-gifted or the super-smart deserve the biggest rewards doesn't seem a whole lot fairer given that these traits are arguably inherited, too. This conception, in fact, forces those who are less successful to internalize their failure—accept their second-class status as preordained—breeding alienation and resentment. Hard work or some quality of character would offer a more palatable basis for building a case for markets, except that all the lowlifes who routinely make it rich in markets offer too much evidence to the contrary.

Hayek's understanding of markets overcomes these problems by, first and foremost, democraticizing the concept of merit. If anything in your possession, no matter how trivial—some local knowledge, some quirky interest—can potentially be turned into something useful for others, then there is not any one formula for market success; there are a potentially infinite number. This means that success is possible for a far wider range of people in a market, making market societies inherently less hierarchical than more closed ones.

Take, for instance, India in its preliberalization days. Economic opportunities were exceedingly limited in its regulated and centrally planned economy. The most sought-after professions were engineering, medicine, accounting, and—hang on to your fountain pens!—civil service, because they offered a path to secure jobs in government-approved sectors. Competition for professional colleges was fierce. The lucky few who made it into elite institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology for engineering were regarded almost as a special breed. Even now, the unabashed elite-worshipping that IIT graduates command in India would make Zeus blush.

But free markets change all this. They close the talent-gap by allowing people to ferret out and market whatever they've got—even, regrettably, Paris Hilton. In America, for instance, there are opportunities galore for funny people—standup comedy, late-night talk shows, etc.—who may have no head for math or science. Their sense of humor is a prized commodity, a gateway to riches and fame, instead of social ridicule as it would have been in the India of yore.

But markets don't just expand and democratize the concept of merit; they render it moot. No longer does it matter what great qualities reside in you. What matters is if you can make them work for others. The concept of merit is replaced by that of value. Merit is intrinsic, concentrated, and atomistic; value is relational, decentralized, and social.

The need for embedding this Hayekian understanding of markets in the public consciousness cannot be overstated. And the first step in doing so might be purging the word "merit" from the vocabulary of markets and replacing it with "value." This would make it much easier to explain how no functioning industry, absent access to taxpayers' pockets, can afford forever to pay its executives obscene salaries beyond the value they are generating. At once, then, it would be possible to oppose both the recent government bailouts and government regulations such as Sarkozy-style caps on executive salaries.

More importantly, it would become possible to counter the popular perception—the source of so much hostility against markets—that there is some body of super-elites, masters of the universe, who can sit in their plush offices on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and reign supreme through their sheer brain power. If value, not brain power, is the engine that drives markets, then the market's inherent nature militates against elite control.

Markets are a fundamentally antielitist social force. If this is not generally recognized, it is not so much because of what the enemies of markets say to attack them--but what their friends have said to defend them. To rescue markets, then, one has to rescue them from their friends first. Mr. Sarkozy is not the main problem here.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting question:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/04/16/are-libertarians-anti-government/

Are Libertarians Anti-Government?

Posted by David Boaz

The term “anti-government” is getting tossed around a lot these days, and used rather indiscriminately to describe libertarians, libertarian-ish Tea Partiers, hate groups, and violent individuals (not to mention opponents of specific leaders and regimes in countries around the world). That’s a pretty wide spectrum, and journalists and politicians ought to be more careful with their language. In the meantime, I’m republishing here a Cato Policy Report editorial that I published in 1998:

————–

For the past several years, especially since the Oklahoma City bombing, the national media have focused a lot of attention on “anti-government” extremists. Libertarians, who are critical of a great deal that government does, have unfortunately but perhaps understandably been tossed into the “anti-government” camp by many journalists.

There are two problems with this identification. The first and most obvious is that many of the so-called anti-government groups are racist or violent or both, and being identified with them verges on libel.

The second and ultimately more important problem is that libertarians are not, in any serious sense, “anti-government.” It’s understandable that journalists might refer to people who often criticize both incumbent officeholders and government programs as “anti-government,” but the term is misleading.

A government is a set of institutions through which we adjudicate our disputes, defend our rights, and provide for certain common needs. It derives its authority, at some level and in some way, from the consent of the governed.

Libertarians want people to be able to live peacefully together in civil society. Cooperation is better than coercion. Peaceful coexistence and voluntary cooperation require an institution to protect us from outside threats, deter or punish criminals, and settle the disputes that will inevitably arise among neighbors—a government, in short. Thus, to criticize a wide range of the activities undertaken by federal and state governments—from Social Security to drug prohibition to out-of-control taxation—is not to be “anti-government.” It is simply to insist that what we want is a limited government that attends to its necessary and proper functions.

But if libertarians are not “anti-government,” then how do we describe the kind of government that libertarians support? One formulation found in the media is that “libertarians support weak government.” That has a certain appeal. But consider a prominent case of “weak government.” Numerous reports have told us recently about the weakness of the Russian government. Not only does it have trouble raising taxes and paying its still numerous employees, it has trouble deterring or punishing criminals. It is in fact too weak to carry out its legitimate functions. The Russian government is a failure on two counts: it is massive, clumsy, overextended, and virtually unconstrained in scope, yet too weak to perform its essential job. (Residents of many American cities may find that description a bit too close for comfort.)

Not “weak government,” then. How about “small government”? Lots of people, including many libertarians, like that phrase to describe libertarian views. And it has a certain plausibility. We rail against “big government,” so we must prefer small government, or “less government.” Of course, we wouldn’t want a government too small to deter military threats or apprehend criminals. And Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr., offers us this comparison: “a dictatorship in which the government provides no social security, health, welfare or pension programs of any kind” and “levies relatively low taxes that go almost entirely toward the support of large military and secret police forces that regularly kill or jail people for their political or religious views” or “a democracy with open elections and full freedom of speech and religion [which] levies higher taxes than the dictatorship to support an extensive welfare state.”

“The first country might technically have a ‘smaller government,’” Dionne writes, “but it undoubtedly is not a free society. The second country would have a ‘bigger government,’ but it is indeed a free society.”

Now there are several problems with this comparison, not least Dionne’s apparent view that high taxes don’t limit the freedom of those forced to pay them. But our concern here is the term “smaller government.” Measured as a percentage of GDP or by the number of employees, the second government may well be larger than the first. Measured by its power and control over individuals and society, however, the first government is doubtless larger. Thus, as long as the term is properly understood, it’s reasonable for libertarians to endorse “smaller government.” But Dionne’s criticism should remind us that the term may not be well understood.

So if we’re not anti-government, and not really for weak or small government, how should we describe the libertarian position? To answer that question, we need to go back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Libertarians generally support a government formed by the consent of the governed and designed to achieve certain limited purposes. Both the form of government and the limits on its powers should be specified in a constitution, and the challenge in any society is to keep government constrained and limited so that individuals can prosper and solve problems in a free and civil society.

Thus libertarians are not “anti-government.” Libertarians support limited, constitutional government—limited not just in size but, of far greater importance, in the scope of its powers.

 

[a_majoor]

The mathematical and philosophical foundation of why Libertarianism is the only "correct" means of forming governments. Mathematically since the number of interactions scale geometrically with each additional actor added to the system, and philosophically because it is impossible to overcome the local knowledge problem in any meaningful way; the premise that you can control the interactions in the marketplace or between people or understand the impact of proposed legislation is wrong, and thus all things which follow from these premises are also incorrect:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Progressives-can_t-get-past-the-Knowledge-Problem-89780997.html

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Contributor
April 4, 2010


"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can't possibly be smart enough to make them work.

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic's Megan McArdle wrote:

"What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It's earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings."So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.

They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there's plenty of evidence that Congress isn't a repository of rocket scientists. But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

There's good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.


Examiner Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, hosts InstaVision at PJTV.com and blogs at InstaPundit.com.

 

[a_majoor]

Why Libertarianism is becoming a social rather than a political movement; individuals have more education, experience and tools than ever to carry out their personal, social and economic goals:

http://theothermccain.com/2010/05/09/skepticism-and-independence-bad/

Skepticism and Independence: Bad!

Posted on | May 9, 2010 | 21 Comments

That’s the essential thrust of Mark Lilla’s lengthy essay in the New York Review of Books:

    [W]e need to see [the Tea Party movement] as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

Lilla cites an interesting example of what he means:

    A million and a half students in the United States are now being taught by their parents at home, nearly double the number a decade ago, and representing about fifteen students for every public school in the country.11 There is nothing remarkable about wanting to escape unsafe schools and incompetent teachers, or to make sure your children are raised within your religious tradition. What’s remarkable is American parents’ confidence that they can do better themselves.

Remarkable, perhaps, but not mistaken. What almost every beginning home-schooling parent quickly discovers — by accident — is how much that goes on in the modern public education system is simply wasted time. Mom at the kitchen table can generally accomplish more with three hours of direct instruction as a public elementary school does in an entire day.

What few critics (or even advocates) of home-schooling fail to grasp is the extent to which its popularity reflects the democratization of education. More Americans are college-educated than ever before. Why should a mother with an Ivy League MBA suppose that she is less capable of teaching her children arithmetic than a state-school graduate with a BS Ed.? (As a proud alumnus of Jacksonville State University, I don’t intend this as a put-down of state-school graduates.)

Studies indicate that home-schooling parents generally have higher-than-average levels of education, and might therefore presumably are qualified to judge the adequacy of the education provided by public schools. If these parents reject the public system as inferior to what they can provide their own children at home, why should Lilla presume them incompetent to make that decision?

Yet Lilla’s more general target is libertarianism:

    We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. . . .
    Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules . . .

An exaggeration, of course, but you sense the source of liberal Lilla’s frustration. What was the point of the Left’s “long march through the institutions” if, having captured those institutions, they can’t use them to tell everybody else what to do?

 

[CougarKing]

Related:

Campus Progress link

Libertarians: The Secret Strength of the Immigration Reform Movement
While the immigration debate takes place between the left and the right, the perspective of libertarians is often left out of the debate.
By Julissa Treviño
June 29, 2010


There are generally two well-known perspectives on the immigration issue: One is that the United States needs to reform federal immigration policy, and the other we should enforce current federal immigration policy. What’s rarely heard, or taken seriously, is a different perspective altogether that actually questions the most fundamental arguments behind immigration policy—a perspective that could change the way Americans and American politicians think about the issue.

More and more, immigration is becoming a major issue among libertarians, who believe in smaller government and more personal freedom. Traditionally, libertarians are more open to immigration than both conservatives and liberals, explains Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the libertarian research center the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. “Most libertarians are sympathetic toward immigration. They see human migration as a personal freedom. That’s in contrast to conservatives and Republicans."

Although progressives are open to reforming immigration law, some on the left have concerns about wage depression and the impact on labor unions, says Griswold. Beyond that, it seems to be a much broader philosophical argument about the power of the government.

“Libertarians are more inclined to ask the question, ‘Why should it be illegal?’ Conservatives are more likely to accept the term ‘illegal’ and to want to enforce it,” says Griswold. “What crime have these people committed other than trying to improve their human condition? Libertarians believe in rule of law, but they support laws that are consistent with individual liberty. Our immigration law doesn’t meet that standard.”

But there is a clear-cut conflict among libertarians about how to deal with immigration law. Many want open borders, but not until we can privatize education and health care. If there’s a division among libertarians, says Griswold, it’s usually caused by economic concerns—but not because they believe immigrants cause the biggest financial burden. Most committed libertarians are sympathetic toward immigration and would like to see opportunities for legal immigration expanded.

"A lot of people use immigration as a scapegoat for the welfare state and the drug wars," says Alexander Falkenstein, West Coast Director for Students for Liberty, a national libertarian student organization, "but there is a true divide between the violence and the individuals who are just coming to work."

For Falkenstein, the biggest conflict about immigration among libertarians is different—and one that can be applied to any other political ideology. Falkenstein, an Arizona State University senior, sees immigration as a much more personal issue because he experiences it on a daily basis.

For libertarians living in border states, the immigration debate has become even more complicated. When Falkenstein talks about immigration, he mentions two kinds of libertarians: “people who live among immigration and people who just have principles.”

“People [in the north] don’t understand the immigration debate as well as people living in border states,” says Falkenstein. “They do not understand that there is a difference between people who just want to work and people who are coming for drugs. Young libertarians not near the border do not understand that there is a true divide between the violence and the individuals who are just coming to work.”

While the consensus is that immigration is a federal issue, some libertarians do see states and local government as fit to create and enforce immigration policy. There are a growing number of libertarians who are opposed to immigration reform and want stronger enforcement. “One of the most bizarre developments in the past decade or so,” writes Donald Boudreaux, an economics university professor, in a 2007 Pittsburgh-Tribune Review article, “is the insistence by a small handful of people who parade under the banner ‘libertarian’ or ‘advocate of free markets’ that the state has both the right and the duty to limit immigration.”

With a greater number of states pushing for local immigration policies and movements like the Tea Party, the number of libertarians favoring stronger immigration enforcement could be a possibly.

But don’t expect a huge push for local immigration policy from the libertarian movement any time soon. A majority of libertarians take issue with the fact that everyone suffers with certain kinds of immigration laws, like Arizona’s SB 1070 or housing regulations that target undocumented immigrants like Farmers Branch, Texas’ Ordinance No. 2592 [PDF]. Such laws can create a your-papers-please policy which place unnecessary burdens on residents and citizens.

"SB 1070 has a lot of un-libertarian characteristics," says Wes Benedict, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee. "It’s too much intrusion on privacy. We’re taking away too many rights. It penalizes everyone when only a few people are breaking some law."

The problem with local immigration policy, says Falkenstein, as someone who lives in Arizona, is that there isn’t “any positive reform coming from the state or local level, it just seems to be a continuation of failed policy … Libertarians in Arizona think SB 1070 is an infringement on our rights, police officers demanding to see papers."

Ultimately, what libertarians think of SB 1070 may not matter much in the long run. “I do not know whether the law can withstand constitutional challenge,” writes Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Roger Koppel in ThinkMarkets, the blog of New York University’s Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes, about one of the most controversial immigration laws in the country. “Be it constitutional or not, however, no friend of liberty should support SB 1070.”

But with their support for the expansion of legal immigration and a clearly different stance than either the right or the left, libertarians could have an impact on the immigration debate. “I do think we’ll influence the debate," says Benedict, who doesn’t see immigration as the biggest libertarian issue this year. "A lot of Republicans respect the views of libertarians even though they don’t agree with us completely. And they won’t listen to Democrats. But when libertarians present facts on immigration, Republicans tend to listen."

Julissa Treviño is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

 

[a_majoor]

Besides the divide between people looking for work and human predators arriving to seek out new prey, many libertarians who favour stronger immigration controls are essentially trying to use one tool of the State to throttle the source of many other problems, problems which eventually increase calls for more State powers and expenditures and long term reductions in individual liberties.

Of course, this leads to other problems (many of which are counterproductive from a libertarian perspective, such as the mentioned enhancement of police powers to conduct arbitrary searches or document checks), but given the limited tool set, and the political climate where "elites" are willing to look the other way as torrents of illegal immigrents overwhelm State funded social services, force the closure of hospital emergency wards (which can no longer to afford the cost of providing service to people with no ability or willingness to pay) and  provide cover for legions of human predators, this is a calculation to provide short term relief for a long term problem.

 

[Kirkhill]

Libertarians aren't anarchists.

They don't deny the need for government.

One of the jobs of government is to secure borders.

Come if you will but come to be a Canadian, or American, or Brit, or Saudi for that matter (if you want to move there).

But don't come expecting to live the way you did at home.

 

[a_majoor]

More on the complexity problem. The scary part of the article is the predicted end result:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/its-so-complex/61053/

It's So ... ComplexAug 6 2010, 11:07 AM ET |  Comment

Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry has an essay question:

Tainter's story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex--agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive--each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output--but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter's thesis is that when society's elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The 'and them some' is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn't these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler - the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn't regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake--"nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response", to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

Please write an essay describing whether and how Tainter's thesis applies to welfare states undergoing demographic slide. You have four hours.

 

[a_majoor]

Libertarians have had a diffcult time trying to work with existing political parties/movements (mostly because, in the end, political parties are about capturing the power of the State to reward their friends and punish their enemies). There is an intreguing line in the article of "I do believe that libertarian ideas are better expressed in the *language* of liberalism rather than that of conservatism.", by which I believe the author means "classical liberalism" of free markets, property rights and the Rule of Law.

It is clear that current Libertarian parties are not capable of taking the field in any  effective manner to contest elections, but libertarianism is alive as a social movement (many people express disgust at the idea that they should be thralls of the Nanny State), and the TEA party is motivated by libertarian ideas (although we have to see how well they do in November before we can make any real judgement on their political activism).

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/what-use-is-a-libertarian/62086/

What Use Is a Libertarian?
Aug 25 2010, 9:37 PM ET |  Comment

The current issue of Reason features a symposium on the question, "Where do libertarians belong?" Not in partnership with today's Republican party, argues Brink Lindsey. The alliance of conservatives and libertarians has worked badly, he says, despite the tea party and its apparent fondness for libertarian themes.

Could the withered fusionist alliance of libertarians and conservatives channel today's popular disgust with statist excess into revitalized momentum for limited-government reform?

In a word, no. Without a doubt, libertarians should be happy that the Democrats' power grabs have met with such vociferous opposition. Anything that can stop this dash toward dirigisme, or at least slow it down, is a good thing. Seldom has there been a better time to stand athwart history and yell "Stop!" So we should rejoice that at least some conservatives haven't forgotten their signature move.

That, however, is about all the contemporary right is good for. It is capable of checking at least some of the left's excesses, and thank goodness for that. But a clear-eyed look at conservatism as a whole reveals a political movement with no realistic potential for advancing individual freedom. The contemporary right is so deeply under the sway of its most illiberal impulses that they now define what it means to be a conservative.

Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe push back in the symposium, and rather effectively. (I thought they also got the better of Lindsey in this live exchange.) The problem with Lindsey's position, for me at least, is not one of substance. Policy by policy, I agree with him much more often than I agree with either progressives or conservatives. My libertarian instincts are probably mushier than his, but we are in the same intellectual space. The issue is one of tactics and strategy -- and here I find his thinking confused.

He repudiates conservatism so passionately that you suppose he would prefer libertarians to fuse with liberals. And of course one recalls that in 2006 he famously proposed a "liberal-libertarian entente" in an article entitled "Liberaltarians". (He is currently working on a book with Will Wilkinson called "The Free-Market Progressive: How We Can Use Capitalist Acts Between Consenting Adults to Create Justice, Peace, and Prosperity".) Thus he appears to propose a new alliance. In the symposium he nonetheless writes:

Does [the failure of the libertarian-conservative alliance] mean I think that libertarians should ally with the left instead? No, that's equally unappealing. I do believe that libertarian ideas are better expressed in the *language* of liberalism rather than that of conservatism. But it's clear enough that for now and the foreseeable future, the left is no more viable a home for libertarians than is the right.

Equally unappealing? How am I to square that view with the liberaltarian project? The answer must have something to do with "expressing libertarian ideas in the language of liberalism", but I don't know what that means. (Your ideas are wrong but we like how you express them. Hmm.) I suppose what Lindsey means is simply, "Libertarian methods are often the best way to achieve righteous progressive goals" -- a position I agree with, but which has little or no chance of finding support among today's progressives.

Elsewhere in the symposium, Lindsey does get it exactly right, I think:

The blunt truth is that people with libertarian sympathies are politically homeless. The best thing we can do is face up to that fact and act accordingly.

Yes, which is why liberaltarianism is a dead end. Libertarians disagree with progressives about markets and with conservatives about "values", and that is really that. To the extent that they (we) serve any purpose at all, it is to challenge the two dominant strains of thinking, hoping to nudge each in the right direction. For now at least, I cannot see what purpose is served by worrying about which of these unappeasable opponents would make the better partner.

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting essay on the roots of libertarianism, although the concept really didn't have a name until the 20th century:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/book-review-the-next-american-civil-war/?singlepage=true

Book Review: The Next American Civil War
The pushback against the all-encompassing state has its roots deep in the American tradition.
September 29, 2010 - by Janet Levy

Patriotic Americans continue to unabashedly affirm their love of country, honor its historical defense and pursuit of freedom, and mourn its present day departure from the nation’s founding principles. This was evident at last month’s “Restore Honor” rally sponsored by Glenn Beck at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where American patriots gathered to demonstrate their commitment to preserving the American way of life, values, and traditions.

For their efforts, they suffered contemptuous sneers and were irresponsibly compared to terrorists by liberal elites and their media compatriots. Typical of leftists who, in the name of “tolerance,” officiously scorn America, acclaim their cut-above status as “citizens of the world,” and make common cause with jihadists and shariah law advocates. With a patina of moral superiority that sets them apart from the Judeo-Christian ethos-inspired masses, they have gone so far as to defy the sentiments of the overwhelming majority (71%) of their fellow countrymen who oppose a mosque at the gravesite of 3,000 American dead.

Liberal elites hold themselves above reproach as they mock America, pass judgment on loyal Americans, and disparage American foreign policy and history, while smugly embracing the loftier principles of transnationalism, world government, and secular humanism.

This deep divide between the liberal elite and American patriots and the revolt it has fostered is the basis for Lee Harris’ latest book, The Next American Civil War. With an in-depth historical and philosophical perspective found in his previous work, The Suicide of Reason, the author examines this critical juncture in American history and offers some back-to-basics advice on preserving our unprecedented spirit of liberty and exceptional national character.

Harris examines the antipathy that exists today between average Americans, “populist conservatives,” and the liberal elite. He argues that it stems from conservative mistrust of liberals for ostensibly unwise departures from well-worn traditions and for promotion of unnecessarily complex concepts that don’t conform to common sense and experience. The more educated, or perhaps more accurately, the more indoctrinated, liberal elitists fancy themselves enlightened apostles serving the interests of human progress. Their condescending attitudes assume that the benighted masses are gravely in need of their counsel and they use their supposed, superior knowledge and vantage point to amass and hold power. Populist opposition to an elite that is subverting tradition, denigrating America’s heritage, and engaging in unilateral decision-making contrary to popular American sentiment is at the crux of the current revolt.

In The Next American Civil War, Harris reminds the reader of the founding tradition of our government: to promote liberty and the general welfare. Populists view the traditional role of government as altruistic and beneficial, yet not unduly intrusive. The author attributes the initial move away from democracy in America to public education and an increased reliance on science and technology. Prior to the mid 19th century, he explains, Americans relied primarily on common sense and time-honored traditions to navigate their lives. Public education brought with it a move toward consensus building and adulation of brains and education as a superior route to success. In time, this shift away from tradition resulted in a sense of alienation between the average person and the power elite.

Harris cites colonial America to provide insight into our current dilemma and serve as a valuable source of inspiration to get us back on track. He describes the early colonists as “natural libertarians,” with their unique circumstances as creatures of the New World. The colonists had escaped the despotism and oppression of the Old World and came to America in search of liberty and control of their own destinies. They embraced the “cosmic script” of the Old Testament story of Exodus in which Jews escaped bondage and entered the Promised Land. The great challenges the colonists endured in the New World demanded independence and self-sufficiency. A seemingly endless frontier enabled them to fashion communities according to their needs and aspirations or move on to greener pastures when intrusive authorities usurped their freedom.

The author points out that the early Americans left behind sharp class distinctions in the Old World which held people in predetermined places in society and required deference to the rich as their “betters.” In the New World of the rugged individualist and self-made man, everyone was on equal footing. Everyone had the potential for upward mobility through the fruits of their own labor. Unlike those today who rely on government entitlements and carry a victim mentality, the settlers were fiercely independent and their communities egalitarian. They freely reached out to lend a hand to neighbors knowing their neighbors would reciprocate in times of need.  This “no strings attached” charitable cooperation within frontier communities contributed to preservation of individual freedom because assistance was freely given and the settlers were not dependent on government largess.

Harris recounts how during the 1760s and 1770s when the American Sons of Liberty felt their freedom was threatened by the British Empire, they engaged in active rebellion, including violence, sabotage, and other acts of lawlessness.  By comparison, today’s town hall protests and spirited Tea Party movement rallies look tame. Resentment of the Crown’s unrestrained power of taxation and control reached the breaking point with passage of the Stamp Tax Act by the British Parliament in 1765. The tumult that followed made collection of the tax impossible and marked the beginning of significant revolutionary activity in the colonies. The success of the Stamp Act protests proved critical in mobilizing the colonists. It demonstrated to them that extreme action and breaking the law were necessary in their pursuit to regain liberty. The revolt against the Stamp Tax Act spurred the momentum for the American Revolution, which led to a new era of freedom for Americans, removed from the yoke of the British Empire.

Next, the Founding Fathers, in devising the basis for our constitutional republic, analyzed aspects of government that had worked in the past  to determine what would most likely be workable for an emerging American nation. Their approach to maintaining order was experimental, relying heavily on traditions as well as innovative solutions to the unique circumstances of the country. Punishments or consequences were applied fairly and equally, fostering trust in the government and a sense of justice about the law of the land.

Harris also discusses the delicate balance between effective governance and liberty. He cautions that civilization comes at the price of liberty. Sufficient governmental controls are critical to protect and defend liberty, but too much government can crush the spirit of independence required for a flourishing free society. Harris urges that a healthy dose of skepticism and periodic rebellion by the electorate are required to preserve freedom and, thus, human dignity. He wisely intones, “Civilization can pose a threat to freedom but freedom can pose a threat to civilization.”

In other words, some order and stability is necessary to safeguard freedom as boundless freedom can induce chaos. The rule of law needs to be respected but not if it runs contrary to the higher value of basic human rights.

Harris recognizes the importance of the “natural libertarians” that make up the Tea Party movement; they are part of the essential struggle to maintain liberty. The ornery libertarian spirit that questions the power elite from a common sense viewpoint and examines the practicality, efficacy, and fairness of high-minded theories and policies is an essential ingredient to preserve freedom. Their orneriness emanates from a rebellion against being told what to do — a “don’t tread on me” credo. This is the very same “cognitive orneriness” and independent spirit in evidence at our nation’s founding and our rebellion against domination by a ruling class.

Harris sees the threat to liberty today as not emanating from Marxism, the essential focus of Tea Party activists, but from prosperous modern civilizations supported by cumbersome government bureaucracies, corporations, and media and from our failure to cherish freedom. He reasons that if we cared enough about freedom and less about material comforts, Marxist policies opposed by the majority of Americans would not be imposed upon us. The supremacy of the state as a vehicle to improve the lives of citizens has become a betrayal of American founding principles of individual liberty and traditions of self-sufficiency, hard work, and self-governance.

Harris proposes that a turnaround for future generations begins with our children. Rather than raise them with a sense of entitlement in which the struggle for their rights is paramount, we need to raise them with a sense of duty and responsibility.  They need to be taught self-control that is essential for preservation of freedom and to admire and emulate the heroes throughout our history who fought for freedom.

Our proud history is one of rowdy rugged individualists, not the well-bred, educated elite who have strayed from our founding principles. The power of the electorate to rise up against the tyranny of unlimited government rests in the people’s willingness to fight. In summary, Harris views the rebellion in evidence today as a healthy sign that will bring us full circle to the courageous and just use of civil unrest that was very much in evidence at our nation’s founding. Only by recapturing our revolutionary spirit and demanding control of our lives and destiny will we survive as a free and exceptional nation.

Janet Levy, MBA, MSW, is an activist, world traveler,and freelance journalist who has contributed to American Thinker, Full Disclosure Network, FrontPage Magazine, Family Security Matters and other publications. She blogs at www.womenagainstshariah.com

 

[a_majoor]

While Libertarians have not made many inroads as a political movement, I suspect the growth of libertarianism as a social movement is pretty upsetting to "progressives" and other statists. Now libertarians are coming under explicit attack:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/08/austan-powers/singlepage

What we can learn from watching the libertarians-for-Obama Great Economist Hope get caught doing the White House's dirty work in trashing libertarians against Obama

Matt Welch | October 8, 2010

The basic story, in case you haven't heard: On August 27, in a background briefing with reporters in which he expected to be described as a "senior administration official" and not "Austan Goolsbee," the White House's soon-to-be-appointed chair of the Council of Economic Advisers said this:

    So in this country, we have partnerships, S corps, we have LLCs—we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries, I think, is one, is a multibillion dollar business, and so that creates a narrower base because we got literally something like 50 percent of the business income in the U.S. is going to businesses that don't pay any corporate income tax.

Koch Industries, as you may recall, is the family business of Charles and David Koch, the two most influential donors to libertarian institutions in American history. The Kochs helped found the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among many other organizations, and have given money to the Reason Foundation over the years (David sits on our Board of Trustees). They were also instrumental in the initial development of the Libertarian Party, for which David ran as vice president in 1980, and have been big donors to more conservative and various nonpolitical causes as well. They are not being trashed for their libertarianism per se in the campaign season of 2010, but because (in the phrasing of the headline on Jane Mayer's influential August feature in The New Yorker), of their "covert operations" in "waging a war against Obama."

Goolsbee's comment drew enough attention from Koch lawyers and Republican senators that the Treasury Department's inspector general is looking into whether he or any other administration official dug improperly through the tax records of a private company. If he did then Goolsbee got at least one important fact wrong, since KI does indeed pay corporate taxes, according to reporting by multiple outlets. The White House's official reaction, in part:

    No senior administration officials have any access to anyone's tax returns—individual or business. The administration official was discussing the section of the [President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board]'s tax report that argued we should look at the rising importance of pass through entities that do not pay corporate income tax.

    This issue was raised repeatedly by outside experts that testified before the PERAB and Koch was cited to the PERAB as an example by outside commenters to the group. We assume it came up from publicly available information such as the Forbes magazine annual report listing Koch as one of the largest private companies in the nation or the fact that a high fraction of the largest companies within Koch Industries are listed on the Koch website as LLCs, LPs or other frequent pass-through entities. If this information is incorrect, we are happy to revise statements.

An "administration official" also told Politico:

    The officials statement was not based on any review of tax filings, and we will not use this example in the future.

Well, they won't use Koch-related organizations as an example of corporate tax-dodging, maybe, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the administration and its surrogates will continue slamming the Kochs for laying off American workers ("The question for the Kochs is instead of spending money on secret campaigns to fill the government with candidates that will enact their special interest agenda, why aren't they spending that money on saving those American jobs?"), maybe being part of a shadowy foreign plot ("You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation.[...]We've got to make sure that we don't have a corporate takeover of our democracy."), for "bankrolling" anti-mosque demonstrations and plotting a "billionaires' coup," and on and on. There is I think zero doubt that the administration began a coordinated PR campaign against the Kochs by early August at the least, and that Goolsbee was just (consciously or unconsciously) doing his part.

But wait, didn't Planet Libertarian have higher hopes for the jauntily named economist (who you can see in a 1999 Reason piece declaiming Internet taxes)? Why yes it did. In fact, the proximity of Goolsbee to Obama was frequently cited as a key reason why some self-identified libertarians were going to vote for the Democratic nominee in 2008. Here's a trip down memory lane:

Libertarians for Obama:

    Obama's chief economic adviser—a friend from the University of Chicago, where they both taught—sounds an awful lot like a libertarian (though I don't know if he accepts the label).

David Friedman:

    Perhaps I am too optimistic about Obama, but I do not think he is going to turn out to be an orthodox liberal. There is a group of intellectuals connected with the University of Chicago who have accepted a good deal of the Chicago school analysis but still want to think of themselves as leftists. They are, as I see it, trying to construct a new version of what "left" means. Examples would be Cass Sunstein and Austan [Goolsbee], both at Chicago, and Larry Lessig, who used to be there. [...]

    [Goolsbee], judging by webbed pieces of his I've read, is a pro-market economist who happens to be a Democrat, rather like Alfred Kahn, who gave us airline dereguation under Carter. He is also Obama's economic advisor. [...]

    Obama himself, while obviously constrained by the fact that he is trying to get nominated, has occasionally let things slip that suggest a more libertarian view than typical of liberal senators.

Daniel Koffler:

    Obama's preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton's (and Edwards's) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama's language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them.

    Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems. [...]

    Goolsbee and Obama's understanding of the free market as a useful means of promoting social justice, rather than an obstacle to it, contrasts most starkly with the rest of the Democratic field on issues of competition, free trade and financial liberalism. [...]

    If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism.

Steve Chapman:

    More important than what he advocates is what he doesn't. His chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, told me that Obama thinks "we shouldn't have a blanket policy of bailing out everyone." In formulating remedies, Goolsbee says, "you have to think how not to reward bad behavior."

Megan McArdle:

    Obama's sterling choice of highest-caliber economic advisors was one of my main reason for supporting him[.]

I bring up these examples not to throw stones—I, too, was impressed enough with Obama's economic advisers and campaign language that I pegged fiscal restraint and honesty as the only "glimmer of possibility" for his presidency, then watched as results turned out to be just about the opposite—but rather as a cautionary tale for all of us, from every political stripe, though perhaps independents and libertarians most of all.

When a presidential candidate (or other politician) assiduously campaigns as a post-ideological, data-driven pragmatist—as both Obama and John McCain did, though the latter more so in 2000 than in 2008—and then surrounds himself with an ideologically diverse set of advisers, basing your support for the pol on your fondness for one of the many faces in his crowd is a recipe for disappointment and even (in the case of Koffler above) delusion. Just because Paul Volcker sits on PERAB doesn't mean that the group will focus more on the necessity of fiscal pruning than on the economic magick of weatherizing homes.

A president's ideological instincts and political necessities, an administration's bureaucratic self-propagation, a Congress' economic beliefs, the political climate of the country—all of these things matter so, so much more than the academic writings of the one apparatchik you identify with most. Hell, you could be appointed to a senior position on the president's various economic teams tomorrow, and it just wouldn't matter. The Great Man theory rarely applies to underlings, and when it does it usually means the subordinate has executive authority over at least one key department, not to mention support from above and below.

Should we be surprised that Austan Goolsbee has joined in the White House's campaign against the Kochs? Not at all. Outraged or disappointed, if you wanna be. But save some of that disappointment, if it applies, to yourself, for ever believing that smarts, elbow-rubbing, and surface integrity were enough for a single person to avoid or even overcome the awful, awful business of both politics and governance. This is as true in 2010 as it will be in 2012 and every thereafter.

Literally from his first day in office, Obama has been rejecting the "false choice" between "whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." The results of such hollow post-ideological pragmatism have been as predictable as the president's political need, two years later, to identify as political enemy No. 1 the family that has donated the most money over the years to the limited-government cause. Left-libertarianism, it would appear, did not survive the collision with governing reality.

Matt Welch is Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.

 

[a_majoor]

More on what libertarianism actually is:

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/why-are-libertarians-so-danged-libertarian/

Why Are Libertarians So Danged Libertarian?
JAMES JOYNER  ·  TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2011  ·  34 COMMENTS

Balloon Juice‘s DougJ is angry that institutional libertarianism — and specifically “Reason magazine, Megan McArdle, and the CATO Institute” — isn’t more angry about corporate excess.  He challenges readers:  ”Go peruse Reason magazine and see if you can find a single article about corporate abuse of power.”

This strikes me as a strange criticism.  It’s like demanding to know why NARAL doesn’t spend more time advocating for the plight of stray cats or why PETA doesn’t seem to care about the homeless.

Libertarianism, by any definition, is concerned about intrusion on individual liberty by the government.  See, for example, the introductory paragraph for Wikipedia’s entry on Libertarianism.

Libertarianism is the advocacy of individual liberty, especially freedom of thought and action.[1] Philosopher Roderick T. Long defines libertarianism as “any political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power [either "total or merely substantial"] from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals”, whether “voluntary association” takes the form of the free market or of communal co-operatives.[2] David Boaz, libertarian writer and vice president of the Cato Institute, writes that, “Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others” and that, “Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property–rights that people have naturally, before governments are created.”[3]

Now, like Doug’s co-blogger Erik Kain, I’ve got libertarian instincts but am by no means a big-L libertarian.  There are times when I think government action is useful when the gang at Reason, CATO, and even the lovely and talented McMegan would beg to differ.  And I actually worry about, and from time to time write about, corporate power and its abuses.  But that’s not the agenda of big-L libertarians, let alone house organs for the movement.
In fairness to Doug, in an earlier post on the subject,  he more-or-less recognizes all of the above but implies that what’s really happening is that libertarians are just doing the bidding of their corporate overlords:

Philosophically, libertarianism is about the rights of the individual. But in its current incarnation, it is just as often about the rights of corporations.
This is why libertarianism has no relevance in modern American politics. There are undoubtedly places in the world where governments have absolute power and corporations have very little. But this isn’t one of them.

While Doug and I would doubtless differ where the lines are drawn,  we agree that there is a role for governmental intervention to protect individuals against corporations.  For example, even Adam Smith recognized the need for state action to guard against the tendency of businessmen to collude to fix prices.  And it’s rather obvious to anyone who studies the matter that a good deal of regulation of business is actually done at the behest of industry rather than the best interests of consumers.

But, again, libertarians see the state as the chief problem.  Regulations intended to help individuals  actually hurt them by constraining choice and yielding unintended consequences.    Minimum wage laws help ensure that, on aggregate, people can earn a “living wage.”  But, at the micro level, a job that pays $2 an hour is better than no job if you’re homeless.  Or a teenager trying to make some spending money.  Social Security has helped keep our oldest citizens out of poverty. But being forced to save for a retirement you may not live to see means less money to invest in your shorter term future.  Pick a government program intended to protect the little guy from Big Business and there’s a libertarian argument for why it’s done more harm than good.

Too often, big-L libertarianism and Institutional Libertarianism winds up being the equivalent of a political theory seminar, ignoring larger social realities.  In that sense, Doug’s right that it has little relevance in practical politics.  But, for reasons that Ross Douthat outlines, small-l libertarianism — and even the philosophizing of the Reasonoids — can be a useful counterpoint to the arguments of mainstream Progressive and Conservative thinking and help move the debate.
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[a_majoor]

So why are people like me attracted to Libertarian/libertarian philosophies? A possible answer:

http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/20/the-science-of-libertarian-mor

The Science of Libertarian Morality
A social psychology study explores the formation of the libertarian personality.

Ronald Bailey from the February 2011 issue

Libertarians are often cast as amoral calculating rationalists with an unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research upends that caricature. Libertarians are quite moral, the researchers argue—just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are.

The University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in the past probing the different moral attitudes of American liberals and conservatives. With time he realized that a significant proportion of Americans did not fit the simplistic left/right ideological dichotomy that dominates our social discourse. Instead of ignoring the outliers, Haidt and his colleagues chose to dig deeper.

The result: a fascinating new study, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology,” that is currently under review at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In probing libertarians’ moral thinking, Haidt and his colleagues—Ravi Iyer and Jesse Graham at the University of Southern California and Spassena Koleva and Peter Ditto at the University of California at Irvine—used the “largest dataset of psychological measures ever compiled on libertarians”: surveys of more than 10,000 self-identified libertarians gathered online at the website yourmorals.org.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the harm and fairness scales—that is, they gave those issues less weight when making moral judgments—and scored much higher on ingroup, authority, and purity.

In the new study, Haidt and his colleagues note that libertarians score low on all five of these moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” Haidt et al. write. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on harm and slightly above on fairness. These results suggest that libertarians are “likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

Another survey, the Schwartz Value Scale, measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on hedonism, self-direction, and stimulation than either liberals or conservatives, and they put less value than either on benevolence, conformity, security, and tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on power, but like conservatives they have less esteem for universalism. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.”

Haidt and his colleagues eventually recognized that their Moral Foundations Questionnaire was blinkered by liberal academic bias, failing to include a sixth moral foundation, liberty. They developed a liberty scale to probe this moral dimension. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that libertarians dramatically outscored liberals and conservatives when it came to putting a high value on both economic and lifestyle liberty. Haidt and his colleagues conclude, “Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.”

Next the researchers wondered, “Might libertarians generally be dispositionally more rational and less emotional?” On the standard inventory of personality, libertarians scored lower than conservatives and liberals on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Low scores on agreeableness indicate a lack of compassion and a proud, competitive, and skeptical nature. Like conservatives, libertarians are not generally neurotic, tending to be emotionally hardy. And like liberals, libertarians scored high on openness to new experiences, indicating that they have broad interests.

Libertarians scored lower than both liberals and (especially) conservatives on sensitivity to disgust. The authors suggest this tendency “could help explain why they disagree with conservatives on so many social issues, particularly those related to sexuality. Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of victimless offenses.”

Some of the more intriguing results involve the empathizer/systemizer scale. Empathizers identify with another person’s emotions, whereas systemizers are driven to understand the underlying rules that govern behavior in nature and society. Libertarians, unlike both liberals and conservatives, scored very high on systemizing. The authors note, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’ ”

The researchers also found that libertarians tend to be less flummoxed by various moral dilemmas, such as the famous “trolley problem.” In the trolley problem, five workmen will be killed by a runaway trolley unless you move a track switch which will divert the train but kill one workman—or, in another version, push a fat man off a bridge stopping the trolley. Typically, most people will choose to move the switch, but refuse to push the fat man. Why the difference? The utilitarian moral calculus is the same—save five by killing one. According to the researchers, libertarians are more likely to resolve moral dilemmas by applying this utilitarian calculus.

Taking various measures into account, the researchers report that libertarians “score high on individualism, low on collectivism, and low on all other traits that involved bonding with, loving, or feeling a sense of common identity with others.” Haidt and his fellow researchers suggest that people who are dispositionally low on disgust sensitivity and high on openness to experience will be drawn to classically liberal philosophers who argue for the superordinate value of individual liberty. But also being highly individualistic and low on empathy, they feel little attraction to modern liberals’ emphasis on altruism and coercive social welfare policies. Haidt and his colleagues then speculate that an intellectual feedback loop develops in which such people will find more and more of the libertarian narrative agreeable and begin identifying themselves as libertarian. From Haidt’s social intuitionist perspective, “this process is no different from the psychological comfort that liberals attain in moralizing their empathic responses or that social conservatives attain in moralizing their connection to their groups.”

I find Haidt’s account of the birth of libertarian morality fairly convincing. But as a social psychologist, Haidt fails to discuss what is probably the most important and intriguing fact about libertarian morality: It changed history by enabling at least a portion of humanity to escape our natural state of abject poverty. Libertarian morality, by rising above and rejecting primitive moralities embodied in the universalist collectivism of left-liberals and the tribalist collectivism of conservatives, made the rule of law, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and modern prosperity possible. Liberals and conservatives may love people more than do libertarians, but love of liberty is what leads to true moral and economic progress.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent.

 

[a_majoor]

Another person who just doen't understand the meaning of Libertarianism:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/07/fn-libertarians

F'n Libertarians
Radley Balko | February 7, 2011

The most improbable and hilarious sentence you'll read today:

I was in rush hour the other [sic] observing some self-centered dude blocking four lanes and snarling traffic for blocks to spare himself a minor inconvenience and it occurred to me that the logical result of our recent embrace of vulgar libertarianism is a total breakdown of social order.[/i]

A similar thing happened to me over the weekend. I twisted my ankle playing pick-up basketball. As I clenched my jaw in pain, I could only look up to the sky, shake my fist angrily, and curse the name Robert Nozick.

 

[a_majoor]

Libertarianism has evolved into a social movement, with people disintermediating via the internet, home schooling and other escapes from the State. Libertarians *could* organize and become a political force (the TEA party movement is one example of how it could be done) if they can overcome their "puritain" proclavities:

http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/7870-libertarian-purity

Libertarian Purity
Wed, 03/23/2011 - 12:15pm | posted by Tom Knighton

Libertarians are ineffective in politics.  There, I’ve said it.  Of course, I’m not exactly breaking new ground here either.  Everyone who follows politics knows that libertarians are ineffective.  After all, it’s the worst kept secret in politics.  The question is: why?

Yesterday, I saw a video where noted libertarian/classical liberal Virginia Postrel sat down with Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, for a chat.  In it, she mentions in passing that there are libertarians who spend a great deal of time looking for ideological purity and denouncing those that don’t share it.  The idea isn’t new, I’ve heard the criticism before, but it is accurate.

Every ideological stripe has those people.  There are people who argue that Obama isn’t a true progressive because of X, or that so-and-so isn’t a true conservative because of Y.  The difference isn’t in the existence of these people, but the percentages of these people.  Libertarians seem to have a higher percentage than most other groups, and this may be why we are so ineffective.

Ideological purity sounds fine and good, but it also pushes luke-warm libertarians away.  They find themselves in less friendly terrain, often the Republican Party (but not always) where their support is mustered on some issues and ignored on others.  They’re told by libertarians that they aren’t real libertarians, so eventually some believe them.

Most ideologies have a spectrum of beliefs that aren’t necessarily the beliefs of all members of that group.  There are pro-life Democrats, and pro-gay marriage Republicans.  There are anti-gun Republicans and pro-gun Democrats.  They function within their respective groups just fine, but libertarians?  For some, they require absolute obedience to the ideology.

It’s kind of funny though.  Libertarians almost universally don’t want government to think for us, but some libertarians have no problem thinking for society as a whole by labeling some as “not libertarian”.  They don’t want to look at the whole and realize that no two people are going to think about the same things.

Some will say I’m not a real libertarian because I’m fine with public roads.  Others will point to my acceptance of regulations in a few instances – namely in the case of a true market failure (not the crap often called a market failure to justify regulation) – as proof I’m not a real libertarian.  Fine.  Honestly, I don’t really care what these folks think of me.  However, they’re not doing their own any favorites either.

There are very few ideologically pure people of any stripe.  Instead, there are variations.  Shades of gray, if you will.  This is where the majority of people find themselves sitting.  Many of them actually share libertarianism’s overall goal of less government, more freedom to some extent or another.  However, they’re not necessarily comfortable with the ideologically pure’s ideas of switching off government almost completely.  It scares them, and people don’t support what scares them.

In truth, we need the “moderate” libertarians even more than the ideologically pure ones, especially when running for office.  The moderates can win elections where pure candidates are going to have a tough time.  Like it or not, we need people winning elections if there’s going to be a hope in hell of reclaiming this nation.  It’s all fine and good to sit on blogs and have great debates about what all libertarians could accomplish if only they could win.  It’s quite another to step up and start making damn sure it actually happens, and like it or not that means accepting people who aren’t as pure as you may like.

Let’s face it folks.  We are not going to take this country in a libertarian direction overnight.  We may never reach what some call Libertopia.  I’m fine with that.  However, we have got to start making some waves in American politics if we’re going to start moving in that direction.  We can’t do that if we expect every libertarian candidate to be 100% pure.  We need to accept that Joe and Jane American isn’t comfortable with that just yet, and let’s back those who actually want to move us in a direction that gives us more freedom even if that isn’t perfect freedom.  We can boot them out later if they decide we’re free enough and we don’t agree.

It’s the only way we’re going to accomplish a thing.

 

[a_majoor]

Reading and posting this morning, I came across two articles which really made the point of how Libertarianism is a social rather than a political movement. Japanese "hackers" rushed to work after the earthquake and started building infrastructure (power systems, communications systems, even solar powered lanterns) without waiting for or even referencing the government. An Israeli team of armature rocket scientists is preparing to send a probe to the moon in 2012, working in their spare time (this sounds like something Robert Heinlein would have written). These are rather extreme examples, but the fundamental point is people have access to resources and the ability to make use of them without any sort of government intermediation. Think about what is happening at much lower levels (communities self organizing around home schooling, local gardens, taking over plots of land that the local government is not weeding/mowing or any number of other things).

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/03/hackerspace-happenings-make-interviews-tokyos-akiba.html

http://blogs.forbes.com/danielfreedman/2011/03/30/israel-the-third-nation-on-the-moon/

 

[a_majoor]

Libertarian insurgency against the Obama Administration and their stooges; love it. (Keep this in mind in case of a Jack Layton coalition government):

http://stopshouting.blogspot.com/2011/04/ten-rules-for-liberty-guerillas.html

TEN RULES FOR LIBERTY GUERILLAS
The "post-it" Note campaign is going viral!

Facebook Campaign

Part of the charade employed by the existing Regime is to continue to make people believe that they are alone in their dissent and/or dissatisfaction with the ruling class. They need to isolate you and make you feel YOU are the outlier. A recent example is the derision lobbed at those who questioned Obama's background and credentials.

This has been written about extensively in various professional military training manuals. It has also been the subject of many papers, dissecting the evolution of an underground movement that overthrew an entrenched Regime, where to outsiders, the “sudden collapse” of an oppressive regime catches them by surprise, when in fact, it was predictable all along.

The reason for the “sudden collapse” is that the group knowledge finally reached a tipping point, where the “dissenters” realize that they are the MAJORITY, not the minority as the Regime would have them believe.

Sticky notes, as advocated at gas pumps and on stores shelves, represent what is known as “Counter propaganda”.


TEN RULES FOR LIBERTY GUERILLAS:

1. It is important to maintain a belief in final victory. Morale is everything.

2. Large numbers of [counter propaganda] appearing day after day, night after night, everywhere, will make the Regime nervous and raise the self-confidence of the population since such activities demonstrate the inefficiency of the existing Regime and the power and strength of the resistance movement.

3. Whenever practical, successful guerilla forces use non-electronic means to communicate.

4. It is a principle of political science that it is easier to persuade people to vote against something or someone than to persuade them to vote in favor of something.

5. Liberty guerillas form centers of resistance EVERYWHERE and they are always in action. Thus, when the Regime attempts to confront/solve one "media" crisis of anti-Regime opinion, another flares up. This serves to also drain the Regime's manpower and resources.

6. Always, always, ALWAYS be on the offensive.

7. Short, snappy slogans spread the message. Advertising/marketing gurus know that to gain traction, a slogan must be 7 words or less.

"BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE".

Turn the tables on the opposition: Palin's "Obama: WTF indeed" is classic.

8. Mix it up. Never be predictable. But always be lawful.

9. Undermine the Regime's morale and their propaganda by exposing their methods and by constant emphasis on the unjustness of their cause and effects on the population.
(Higher prices? Thanks, Obama).

10. Exploit the alternative media to communicate the ideas of the Liberty movement and resistance to the Regime. Be everywhere; be informed; make it known you are aware of the lies disseminated by the Regime and aren't falling for them.

THE MOMENTUM IS ON OUR SIDE. Do not be deterred!

Update:
A very special "Thank You" to Prof Jacobson @ Legal Insurrection for honoring me with a mention on his blog.
Getting linked by Legal Insurrection is like an Instalanche, but tastier, with cheese.
Legal Insurrection Likes "10 Rules"

 

[a_majoor]

Some people do understand what Libertarianism is about. It seems the idea of voluntary cooperation and the elimination of political middlemen has proceeded, libertarianism is more of a social movement than a political one.

http://volokh.com/2011/05/14/libertarianism-and-self

Libertarianism and Selfishness
Ilya Somin • May 14, 2011 2:16 pm

In a recent widely-cited Washington Post column, conservative commentator Michael Gerson claims that libertarians promote “a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness.” The accusation that libertarians are really advocates of selfishness is a very common one. Googling “libertarianism + selfishness” yields 1.9 million hits, the majority of which are attacks on libertarianism similar to Gerson’s.

In reality, however, libertarianism often requires unselfish behavior. Libertarians routinely condemn politicians who advocate statist policies in order to expand their power or ensure their reelection, bureaucrats who seek to increase the authority and funding of their agencies, businessmen who lobby for government subsidies and handouts, politically influential developers who use the power of eminent domain to acquire property that they covet, law enforcement officials who support the War on Drugs because it increases their funding, public employees unions who support big government in part because it increases their pay, and much other self-interested behavior. The fact that all of these groups are motivated, at least in part, by self-interest doesn’t prevent libertarians from denouncing them. That’s because libertarianism is a theory of the appropriate role of government in society, not a theory that judges the morality of human behavior based on whether or not people are acting out of self-interest.

To be sure, libertarianism does appeal to self-interest in the sense that libertarians believe that the vast majority of people would be better off in a libertarian society than under any realistically feasible alternative. In this, however, libertarianism is no different from most other ideologies. Advocates of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism also contend that their preferred policies would benefit the majority of society.

Obviously, some people may support libertarianism because they think it will promote their self-interest to do so. But that too does not differentiate it from many other ideologies. Plenty of people support liberalism or conservatism for similar reasons. Consider the aforementioned politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, drug warriors, and rent-seeking businessmen. Are all of them purely altruistic? Self-interested advocacy of government intervention is no less selfish than self-interested support for libertarianism.

Another common formulation of the “libertarianism is selfishness” argument is the claim that libertarians are narrow “individualists” who deny the importance of social cooperation. In reality, however, libertarian thinkers from John Locke to F.A. Hayek and beyond have repeatedly stressed the importance of voluntary social cooperation, which they argue is superior to state-mandated coercion. As Hayek (probably the most influential libertarian thinker of the last 100 years) put it:

[T]rue individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group . . . [and] believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations . . ndeed, its case rest largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration.

Perhaps Gerson and other critics mean to suggest not that libertarianism justifies any and all selfish behavior but merely that its supporters are disproportionately selfish people. Even if that is true, it says nothing about the validity of libertarianism. Selfish people can make good arguments and altruistic people can make bad ones. Lots of people endorsed communism and Nazism out of altruistic motivations, for example. Moreover, the fact that selfish people disproportionately believe in a given ideology does not prove that the ideology itself is just a justification for selfishness.

In reality, however, the available evidence does not support the view that libertarians are, on average, more selfish than advocates of other ideologies. For example, Arthur Brooks’ research shows that supporters of free markets donate a higher percentage of their income to charity, even after controlling for both income levels and a wide range of demographic background variables. Brooks’ study doesn’t differentiate libertarian advocates of free markets from conservative ones. However, accusations of libertarian selfishness (especially from the left) are usually directed primarily at their support for economic freedom rather than social liberties. If support for free markets isn’t correlated with selfishness, libertarianism probably isn’t either. More generally, research on voter behavior consistently finds that opposition to government intervention in the economy has little or no correlation with financial self-interest.

Some leftists claim that opposition to taxation or other forms of government intervention necessarily implies selfishness and indifference to the welfare of others. But that assumption simply ignores the possibility that anyone might sincerely believe that imposing tight limits on government power actually benefits the poor.

In sum, libertarianism cannot be equated with advocacy of selfishness because libertarians condemn a wide range of self-interested behavior and are well aware of the importance of social cooperation. They simply believe that cooperation should be voluntary rather than coerced by government. In addition, there is no good evidence showing that people attracted to libertarianism are disproportionately selfish relative to supporters of other ideologies. And even if the latter were true, it still would not prove either that libertarianism is reducible to selfishness or that its claims are wrong.

 

[a_majoor]

Perhaps more indications that Libertarianism has become a social rather than a political movement. The TEA party movement would be a leading indicator of a flow back from social movement to political movement (without necessarily supporting the Libertarian Party. The TEA party movement's model is to take over the machinery of existing parties and work on existing political structures. Instapundit reports the TEA party movement is busy contesting elections at city councils, shcool boards and every other election at every level of government...):

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/poll-finds-a-shift-toward-more-libertarian-views/

Poll Finds a Shift Toward More Libertarian Views
By NATE SILVER

Libertarianism has been touted as the wave of America’s political future for many years, generally with more enthusiasm than evidence. But there are some tangible signs that Americans’ attitudes are in fact moving in that direction.

Since 1993, CNN has regularly asked a pair of questions that touch on libertarian views of the economy and society:

Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your own view?

Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?
A libertarian, someone who believes that the government is best when it governs least, would typically choose the first view in the first question and the second view in the second.

In the polls, the responses to both questions had been fairly steady for many years. The economic question has showed little long-term trend, although tolerance for governmental intervention rose following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The social libertarian viewpoint — that government should not favor any particular set of values — has gained a couple of percentage points since the 1990s but not more than that.

But in CNN’s latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN’s poll.)

Whether people are as libertarian-minded in practice as they might believe themselves to be when they answer survey questions is another matter. Still, there have been visible shifts in public opinion on a number of issues, ranging from increasing tolerance for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization on the one hand, to the skepticism over stimulus packages and the health-care overhaul on the other hand, that can be interpreted as a move toward more libertarian views.

The Tea Party movement also has some lineage in libertarian thinking. Although polls suggest that many people who participate in the Tea Party movement have quite socially conservative views, the movement spends little time emphasizing those positions, as compared with economic issues.

 

[a_majoor]

Libertarianism seems to be flavour of the month. Here are some standard "talking points" progressives use to smear Libertarianism, and a strong debunking:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/21/some-factual-errors-in-the-lat

Some Factual Errors in the Latest Slate Attack on Libertarianism
Matt Welch | June 21, 2011

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait is unimpressed by my "rebuttal" to Stephen Metcalf's Slate essay about libertarians and the philosopher Robert Nozick. This is probably due to the fact that I didn't write one.

However, others have, and I want to make sure Chait has sufficient reading material before his next squash game with Jacob Weisberg. I recommend:

* Will Wilkinson, in The Economist, on Metcalf's claim that Ludvig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were "in with the nutters and the shills," because "between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor":

This attempt to marginalise two great thinkers is as lazy as it is dishonest. A little light googling is enough to establish the basic facts, but it seems Mr Metcalf could not be bothered.

[much evidence cited] [...]

If only a levee separated polite discourse from the sort of ax-grinding indifference to fairness and truth Mr Metcalf displays in his essay.

* Brad DeLong, on Metcalf's claim that John Maynard Keynes "scribble[d] in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom[...]: 'An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam'":

Keynes did not write this on the margin of any book. He did not write it by hand. He said it in print [...] in 1931 in the journal Economica--13:34 (November), pp. 387-97, "The Pure Theory of Money: A Reply to Dr. Hayek", and it was of Hayek's Prices and Production. It was about Hayek's business-cycle theory [...] and not about his moral philosophy[.]

* David Boaz, at Cato, on Metcalf's central thesis that Robert Nozick "disavow[ed] libertarianism":

Shortly before his death in 2002, young writer Julian Sanchez (now a Cato colleague) interviewed him and had this exchange:

JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you'd advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as "seriously inadequate." But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?
RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the "Core Principle of Ethics."

So Nozick did not "disavow" libertarianism.

* Conor Friedersdorf, in The Atlantic, on Metcalf's notion that libertarianism is equivalent to caring about nothing beyond "naked self-interest":

Let's devise an empirical test to see if this accurately characterizes the ideology. Over at Reason, America's leading libertarian magazine, I see that the story atop the Web site asks, "Why is the government doing so little to end sexual assault in prisons?" It's part of their July issue, dedicated to the criminal justice system, which it labels America's "national disgrace." On Reason's June cover is Sen. Rand Paul, who has recently tried to end America's war in Libya and to add civil liberties protections to the Patriot Act. The magazine's May cover story is about teachers' unions as an impediment to reform of public schools.

Over at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, recent cases have been fought on behalf of DC tour guides, Florida interior designers, Louisiana casket makers, Nashville limo drivers, and Utah hair braiders keen on practicing their chosen professions without having to obtain a professional license. I fail to see how IJ lawyers or their libertarian donors benefit personally from lowering barriers to entry for far flung, mostly working class clients.

Meanwhile at the Cato Institute, David Boaz is trying to end the war on drugs, my friend Julian Sanchez is paid to explain how the federal government is using its power in the war on terrorism to expand the surveillance state, and his colleague Gene Healy is a critic of executive overreach and editor of a 2004 book on the federal government's over-criminalization of American life. [...]

[Y]ou're just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves. Often they do so more consistently than some of the liberals who sneer at them.

(Copious links not included in the above excerpt for reasons of time.)

* E.D. Kain, in the League of Ordinary Gentleman (from which I harvested some of the above links):

I fear it represents a great deal of confirmation bias on the left. A lot of liberals who see all libertarians as less-lovable Ron Swansons nod along with Metcalf as he makes one clichéd assertion after another and the end result is a bunch of readers happily cheering a piece that makes no attempt at all to treat its subject with any sort of seriousness or grace. It affirms deeply held opinions and distrust, and helps cement the language barrier between liberals and libertarians in ultimately a very destructive and unfortunate way.