How Libertarian Are You?

Intended for constructive conversations. Exhibits of polarizing tribalism will be deleted.
7Wannabe5
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Moderate libertarian- "you may describe yourself as Classical Liberal, but..." or something like that. I think my score would have been lower if I wasn't in such a grouchy mood. My huggable Sesame Street Socialist side is temporarily shuttered.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by ThisDinosaur »

@scriptbunny
Governments are needed for regulations, yes. That's a primary function. But the 'basic needs' you listed (food, housing, healthcare) have to be produced by someone. Who will compel them to produce if they could get paid better doing something else? Or paid the same doing nothing at all?


That said, I think primary education is one of those things that should be government run. For both ideological and practical reasons. I think the free market would function more poorly when kids with 'potential' are wasted because of their parents' limited means.

But I'm open to any >90% libertarians who can convince me that an all-private-school system would work better.

Chad
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by Chad »

2% Though, I think I would rate low for almost all pure measures of any ideology, as I never believe anything is as black and white as these ideologies propose. I can think of some exception for every one of those questions.

Also, who is saying they want a nobility?

Salathor
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by Salathor »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 8:31 am
@scriptbunny
Governments are needed for regulations, yes. That's a primary function. But the 'basic needs' you listed (food, housing, healthcare) have to be produced by someone. Who will compel them to produce if they could get paid better doing something else? Or paid the same doing nothing at all?


That said, I think primary education is one of those things that should be government run. For both ideological and practical reasons. I think the free market would function more poorly when kids with 'potential' are wasted because of their parents' limited means.

But I'm open to any >90% libertarians who can convince me that an all-private-school system would work better.
This seems to be the confusion I receive when I discuss libertarianism with non-libertarians IRL, too. Libertarianism is always going to fail when the goalposts are set at "Can the free market deliver progressive-style equality-of-outcome?" The answer is surely no.

Libertarianism is about providing equality before the law. Some people will get less and some people will get more, whether that be due to good luck or lack thereof, hard work or lack thereof, or intelligence or lack thereof.

jacob
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by jacob »

I managed to get to question 10 or so before I started wondering whether the questions were about one's preferences for an ideal world or whether they also took into account inevitable higher-order consequences of the real world. I found myself answering "Sure, I'd like that ... but I'd like the resulting consequences even less" ... so what should my answer be?

In Utopia (the Thomas More original) from 500 years ago, there's a discussion about how property rights and sheep farming causes an increase in thieves and robbers and vice versa. Do I want to farm more sheep? Yes, but not at the cost of increased thievery. Dunno where I saw it but someone somewhere said that "I used to love Ayn Rand ... but then I grew up and learned how the real world actually works." That resonated with me and described me as well. It all sounds great in theory ... but in practice I realized there's not enough people "on the same page"(*) to make it work.

(*) Proficient and independent NT-types, mostly.

There's even a modern day example. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ica-215313 ... in which the city decided to switch off street lights in order to save money. Citizens were allowed to pay individually for their own street lights insofar they wanted the lights on outside their homes or whatever. The city saved $1.25M in electricity. Consequences? Copper thieves, realizing that they could work without fear of electrocution, dressed up as utility workers and ripped out the wires in broad daylight. Total cost to repair: $5M

I remember similar experiments in the early 1980s due to high energy costs (before Alaska and the North Sea) where governments decided to switch off street lights between 10pm or 5am or somesuch. It was quickly realized that the increased cost in crime and accidents were not worth it and the lights came back on again. My point with this is that a libertarian community who decides on a "free market" solution of no-street lights at all might eventually realize that the market was inefficient (misallocated resources) for this problem.

It's pretty easy for me to see similar "adaptive"-blowback from other measures as well.

Great in theory, not so great in practice. When designing Utopian societies, adaptive responses [because humans] tend to be ignored---especially amongst the more idealistic types. Methinks an ideal (ha!) society would operate more like an eco-system of different governing forms ... at all scales. The more diverse [in terms of systems] the better. The most well-run countries seem to have many different ideas and systems each thriving at some size of grouping, for some problems, etc. while the worst run countries seem to have few "ideas" guiding them.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by ThisDinosaur »

jacob wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 11:38 am
Methinks an ideal (ha!) society would operate more like an eco-system of different governing forms ... at all scales. The more diverse [in terms of systems] the better.
So, feudalism?

I think its best to consider markets and governments as parts of a spectrum of human group behavior. Theft and extortion are illegal, but tax collection is not? What's the difference? If a civilian paramilitary organization gets big enough or armed enough, it becomes the de facto government. So the mob of the better-armed majority determines whether or not they will collect taxes and enforce rules on the dissenting minority.

Thinking this way makes it much easier to parse that some problems are best solved by limiting government involvement, but many are not. Ideology is not reality. Thinking otherwise leads to cognitive dissonance.

jacob
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by jacob »

Feudalism?! How on Earth did you get that impression??

ThisDinosaur
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by ThisDinosaur »

That was supposed to say federalism. Still not the right word either way. Disregard that part.

jacob
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by jacob »

It's heading in the right direction.

What I mean is there are different optimal governing systems for different situations and scales.

For example, the family unit works better under socialism (=communism in European semantics); the distribution of surplus consumer goods works better under capitalism; national defense works better under authoritarianism; justice works better in a republic; very local government (<Dunbar number) works better under direct democracy; larger areas better under representative democracy; ... and so on.

To have a robust world-system, I think it's imperative that all such systems are allowed to thrive for the kind of problem solving they do best. This is what I mean by a diverse ecological system of "governing"-forms. From a general systems-perspective, I think there's a lot of problematic effects if one system takes over and becomes the dominant paradigm for all issues.

In case it wasn't clear ... I mean the word "governing"(*) in its most abstract [cybernetic] sense: a regulating control mechanism for the underlying [sub-]system.

(*) The mechanism with the two spinning balls that controls a steam engine is called a governor for example. The steam engine might be part of a railroad train. Various other parts of the train would have other kinds of governors for other parts. The brakes would be operated by a lever+human, for example.

classical_Liberal
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by classical_Liberal »

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Chad
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by Chad »

jacob wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 12:56 pm
To have a robust world-system, I think it's imperative that all such systems are allowed to thrive for the kind of problem solving they do best. This is what I mean by a diverse ecological system of "governing"-forms. From a general systems-perspective, I think there's a lot of problematic effects if one system takes over and becomes the dominant paradigm for all issues.
+1
This is why I dislike set ideologies, as they always drift towards the extreme. A prime example is Norquist's organization Americans for Tax Reform creating the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which makes politicians say they will never raise any tax ever. This is, of course, ridiculous over any extended time frame, which is at 29 years.

In reality, many policies should be changing consistently over multiple year time frames. For instance, economic policy should generally swing from moderate Keynesian to moderate Austrian depending on what is going on with the economy. Extremes either way should be a rarity. These would have probably been the Great Depression and Recession for slightly more extreme Keynesian policies and slightly more extreme Austrian policies should have occurred after WWII. This mostly occurred for the Depression and after WWII. Though, not after the Great Recession, which is why we are still talking about infrastructure and tax reform 7-8 years later.

Dimon expressing this frustration:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... arrassment

Salathor
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by Salathor »

I used to consider myself a pretty dyed-in-the-wool libertarian but have started pulling away on *some* fronts from that in recent years both because of practical AND emotional reasons.

When it comes to personal freedoms (guns, privacy, etc.), I'd still consider myself about as libertarian as they come. However, since having kids I've become so aghast at the idea of anyone's kid being hurt and not getting care that I'm leaning towards nationalized health care even though I still think it'd be more expensive and less efficient than a free market solution. Plus, the fact that ~40%+ of the population is already ON government healthcare, and a huge portion of the rest gets subsidized healthcare via the ACA, means that it's actually a much smaller change than it sounds.

IlliniDave
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by IlliniDave »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 8:31 am

But I'm open to any >90% libertarians who can convince me that an all-private-school system would work better.
The self-identified libertarians I know distinguish between federal control and state/local control. I believe most would be supportive of taxpayer-funded schools operated strictly on the state or local level without any federal interference. Maybe you could call them constitutional libertarians rather than pure libertarians.

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jennypenny
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by jennypenny »

Here is the original test ... http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/purity.cgi

BRUTE
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by BRUTE »

Chad wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 3:10 pm
...should...should...should...should...
that word.

brute believes the idea of "moderatism" or "balance" is a spook and meaningless at best. just like when humans claim the ideal human diet is "a balanced diet". it's so vacuous a concept that it escapes any real definition, all humans interpret what they want into it, and it's just generally a terrible non-idea.

enigmaT120
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by enigmaT120 »

26. I thought it would be higher.

slowtraveler
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by slowtraveler »

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BRUTE
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by BRUTE »

libertarian != liberal, especially in the People's Republic of California ;)

Salathor
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by Salathor »

I came out 67%, which is maybe a little higher than I expected, and I think it had to do with some of the questions covering too broad of a scope--I didn't feel "good" about maybe 5-6 of the questions and the answers I had to give.

@scriptbunny, I understand your question was one because you prefer liberal-progressive outcomes, but it comes off as an unfair question. Kind of like a libertarian saying "I'm open to a democrat to explain to me how their gun control regulations will open up free and unfettered gun ownership." The words of the question make sense, but it comes off as a non-sequitur.

As an aside, I don't know many libertarians (vs. anarcho-capitalists) who don't support some form of public schooling these days. I personally prefer a private/public/charter school system funded by school voucher systems, forcing public schools to compete rather than existing as a union-protected, state-employed government mouthpiece that has our childrens' ears for 9 hours a day, 250 days a year.

liberty
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Re: How Libertarian Are You?

Post by liberty »

I got 100% :)

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