Conservative Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they moved in with people who had built defensive walls. They paid the owner of the wall for its protection.
Liberal Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they hired professional warriors to protect them while professional builders constructed a defensive wall.
Libertarian Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they bribed one set of raiders to defend them from all the rest. The hired raiders built a defensive wall to ease their task.
Posted by P6 at January 24, 2004 06:14 PM
Trackback URL: http://www.niggerati.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/104
Comments
THE SOCIALIST LENS
Hey...those rich bastards over there are building a wall...let's raid them :o)
Posted by mark safranski at January 24, 2004 08:56 PMOut of curiousity, why are libertarians so obsessed with socialists? The number of actual socialists in the U.S. is extremely small.
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at January 25, 2004 12:05 AMTo me, libertarian and socialist are thesis and antithesis.
Well, they both oversimplify to the point of inaccuracy…
Posted by P6 at January 25, 2004 12:51 AMOut of curiousity, why are libertarians so obsessed with socialists? The number of actual socialists in the U.S. is extremely small.
Same reason those guys at the North Pole are always complaining about Southerners.
Posted by James R MacLean at January 25, 2004 04:04 AMP6 and James, yes I get your point, but the amount of attention given by libertarians to socialists seems completely out of proportion to the role (if any) that socialists play in U.S. politics. It seems out of touch with reality.
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at January 25, 2004 11:30 AMSeriously, having grown up around people who regarded themselves as libertarians (and who fortunately never read anything I post), I can emphatically say that it's not unusual to hear them refer to, say, Eisenhower or FDR as "socialist." I see it/hear it so often it's not even bizarre to me anymore.
Ludwig von Mises was once asked if he admired any left-wing economists. He thought a moment and replied, "Friedrich von Hayek." I heard this story at a libertarian seminar at Stanford University which I crashed in July 1991 (I was sent by my libertarian boss to "cover" it).
Posted by James R MacLean at January 25, 2004 05:18 PMFDR, yeah, socialist. Ike is a much harder call.
We are obsessed with socialists because they are the exact opposite of libertarians. All the things that libertarians fight for break down to property rights (even life breaks down to ownership of yourself.) Socialism seeks the abolishment of all property rights -- including ownership of yourself.
The basic tenants of socialism -- progressive income tax, decay of property rights, government education of children, burdensome regulation, gradual nationalization of infrastructure -- are all realities of the last 70 years of so of America. We certainly haven't embraced it as fully as Europe and Asia (and Africa to the extent that they can afford) but it is a force that libertarians see as a danger.
Posted by Phelps at January 26, 2004 01:26 PMWe are obsessed with socialists because they are the exact opposite of libertarians.
"Socialism" is actually a very vague word. In Argentina before military rule, the Socialist Party favored free trade and laissez-faire development policy. Am I just introducing the rare libertarian platypus? No, as it happens the main tradition in socialism was anarcho-syndicalism, which favored a general abolition of all forms of syndicalism. Only after generations of violent repression of the labor movement did a significant share of socialist tendencies favor any sort repressive regime.
Nor is this an idle effort to waste your time. Phelps here endorses the notion that FDR was a "socialist." He also defines socialism to include "decay of property rights--including ownership of yourself." I am quite glad that he has included FDR as a datum for comparison, because otherwise I could start rattling off examples of repressive states where property rights were not only sacrosanct, but used as a justification for repression of political rights.
I think before we start referring to FDR as a "socialist," in the perjorative sense of "one who seeks to bring about the decay of property rights," we should contemplate what FDR was obligated to do. FDR succeeded Herbert Hoover (s.1929-1933), a man much reviled in his time for having sat on his hands for four years while the world economy imploded. Well, Hoover made the familar arguments about the sanctity of private property and the importance of indiidual initiative. As unemployment in some major cities hit 2/3rds (e.g., Cleveland), he insisted that distributing emergency aid would destroy the dignity of those who received it; recipients would lose gumption and self-regard.
Nor was Hoover some sort of monster--remember, after Belgium was devastated in WW1 by the German invasion, and famine there became endemic, Hoover coordinated the biggest relief effort seen at that time. Hoover, by the standards of previous American administrations, was quite proactive. He tried desperately to shore up prices, and formed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC; based on the WW1-era War FC) to implement a policy of wage and price controls (rather like Nixon; but Hoover was addressing deflation).
The link, incidently, is to a paper by Walker F Todd, posted at a radical libertarian site (although WFT himself works for the Federal Reserve as a historian; he has no affiliation with "Wealth 4 Freedom.")
Now, the reason I bring this up is that Roosevelt attempted to palliate the situation as much as possible without resorting to direct controls on wages and prices. To verify this, sorry, but I have to refer you to The World in Depression by Kindelberger. The article linked above explains how Hoover attemped to address the situation and why he adopted the strategies he did. You will shortly see, I hope, that Hoover was very far indeed from being a pushover for any socialist program, and yet in order to preserve capitalism he became convinced of the need to implement cartels and wartime methods of price controls. FDR, in contrast, sought less direct methods.
Be advised that no other sovereign nation was a anti-interventionist in deed than the USA. Observe, if you please, that the Great Depression lasted longer than it did in other countries. Finally, observe the tendency in other nations, where intervntion did not favor labor, but rather, favored property and business enterprise, to adopt fascist measures. Then tell me if you still believe socialists and libertarians are such polar opposites.
(At the risk of being peremptory, the fact that the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or NSDAP, had "socialist" and "worker" in its name had nothing whatever to do with its policies. The like may not be truthfully said of the Argentine Socialist Party, which was anarcho-syndicalist. In the German Reichstag elections of the late '20's, when the SDP and other parties could stand freely, the industrialists like Hjalmar Schacht flocked to the NSDAP and the [Roman Catholic] Zentrum Parties).
Posted by James R MacLean at January 26, 2004 09:12 PMWow. That was a lot of words to have said nothing.
FDR instituted the Social Security system, the TVA, and the National Labor Relations Act (just off the top of my head.) Saying that Hoover was more of a socialist says nothing about FDR.
You seem to want to paint libertarianism as being a brother to socialism in light of fascism. In fact, I think that it is telling that the fascist Nazi regime does have the word "Socialist" in its name. From the view of property rights, there is very little difference between socialism and fascism. Socialism seeks to nationalize, taking the property rights for the state. Fascism seeks to regulate, taking the property rights for the state and then renting them back to the people. Not much difference, to me.
Posted by Phelps at January 27, 2004 01:35 PMSocialism seeks to nationalize, taking the property rights for the state. Fascism seeks to regulate, taking the property rights for the state and then renting them back to the people. Not much difference, to me
Obviously you've never lived under either. I'm not contemptuous of property rights, but equating the demotion of property rights with fascism is, in my opinion, hallucinogenic.
In fact, I think that it is telling that the fascist Nazi regime does have the word "Socialist" in its name.
No wonder you think I said nothing. That's clearly what history means to you.
Posted by James R MacLean at January 27, 2004 07:05 PMFunny, I had always thought that socialism had something to do with government ownership of the means of production. Stupid me.
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at January 28, 2004 02:55 AM