So we want to remove most or all crutches and shed most or all shackles, depending on how, for lack of a better term, anarchistic we are. But which shackles and which crutches when? The "liberal" "libertarian" answer is: first take the crutches from those best able to bear their own weight, and remove the shackles from the weak before the strong. So: corporate welfare before Social Security before Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Drug prohibition before marginal income tax rates.
Monday, December 31, 2012
PoTD: Explaining Left-Libertarianism
Clark at Popehat is magnificent. HT: Blunt Object, with added commentary. And while you're at BluntObject's place, click through to Henley (from 4 years ago) too:
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36 comments:
Thanks for the hat-tip.
One thing I really like about Jim Henley's post, which rarely features in the rebuttals I get, is that it concerns itself with incremental (marginal, d/dt) changes rather than ultimate goals. As a heartless an-cap I'd like to see pallets of diacetylmorphine HCl on sale at Costco, but like even the squishiest liberaltarian I'm happy to start with decriminalizing pot -- and oh look, that's where we're starting.
I hadn't seen any of Henley, Clark, or Corn before (maybe I'd seen Henley). But it was really good, all of it...and yours as well.
The general principle from Henley's post sounds fine but there are 2 problems:
1. Some of these 'sequences' bear little scrutiny. Why must (reductions/flattenings in..?) marginal tax rates wait for drug prohibition repeal? What on earth does the one thing have to do with the other? Why not both, and now?
2. Even when a 'sequence' might make sense, they could have a tendency to lead into a quasi-equilibrium trap. I might agree in theory with 'corporate welfare before AFDC' but in political reality we might get the former but then balk at the latter. Knowing this, my incentive to agree to any such 'sequencing' deal is reduced.
The current 'cliff' negotiations are, in fact, an example of this: 'tax raises, in exchange for scheduled spending-cuts, um, later.' With the latter, of course, never destined to actually happen.
rwcg,
1. Both now sounds great. I think his article says that one often must focus, lest the effort be spread too widely to get anything at all.
If I get access an-cap button...I'm pressing it. In the absence of the an-cap button, or the night-watchman-state-button...one probably wants to prioritize.
2. This isn't that kind of deal. The fiscal cliff deal is: crap sandwich now...promised ice cream sometime never.
The option to kill the government actions that hurt the poor is a win all by itself. There is no crap sandwich in the calculation. We're suggesting that if your choice is cake now and ice cream tomorrow, or a small chance of both today...probably you should take the cake...and we'd even suggest that the cake is more important than the icecream, so even if they cheat, the end-state is a win. .
The left-libertarian claim is: if you get to kill one or the other...kill corporate welfare before you kill welfare to the needy.
If you are going to attack government actions, attack the government actions that hurt the poor first, and the ones that help the poor 2nd.
The left-libertarian model is:
Our current system bends the poor over a barrel and beats them with a cat-o-nine-tails, and then steals our money to pay for some neosporin.
The left-libertarian line is: Don't take away the neosporin FIRST. That's just heartless.
Let me suggest that perhaps in some of these cases the causality/'sequencing' is actually the other way around. For example, here's a story:
-'welfare for the needy' is put in place due to socialist ideology and the well-known dynamics of pandering democracy
-to pay for it, the government needs to tax wealth out of the economy and implement large inefficient transfer payments
-that harms the economy, and if unchecked would harm the economy so much that..[insert noticeably-bad economic outcome here]
-to undo some of that damage, and/or as a sop to reality, and/or for more pandering, the government implements 'tax breaks' or 'grants' or other corporate welfare.
The "left-libertarians" insist the causality is the other way around, so if we're going to 'focus on' undoing one 'first', it should be the corporate welfare. Now fine, I'm against corporate welfare all else equal. But if the corp. welfare was historically a corrective to the socialist welfare (and not the other way around), this doesn't work. The corporate welfare is 'needed' (to avoid the worst economic effects of socialism) and was the historical result of a political equilibrium that you then disturb/undo if you just remove the corporate welfare without removing an equal amount of (other) socialism.
And so undoing the corporate welfare 'first' (i.e., only) *is* a case of 'crap sandwich now' for ice cream later that (due to political realities) we're never realistically going to get. All it really becomes is another click on the leftward ratchet towards more socialism.
This is at least a *possibility*, no? Even if not in the corporate+AFDC example necessarily, but in other 'sequences' that a left-libertarian might insist on doing the 'left' thing 'first'. The point is that often that 'first' might be a bait and switch, and just mean: 'only'.
Aretae,
>>>The left-libertarian claim is: if you get to kill one or the other...kill corporate welfare before you kill welfare to the needy.
>>>If you are going to attack government actions, attack the government actions that hurt the poor first, and the ones that help the poor 2nd.
Didn't we have a lengthy exchange recently wherein you claimed that the WoP was designed by a white president to destroy poor black families? How can government action (welfare) be both a destroyer of worlds and something that helps poor people? If it doesn't help poor people, then why would you want to protect it over corporate welfare instead of phasing it out first?
Does limited liability count as "corporate welfare?"
RWCG,
In theory, ignoring the particular details of this case, one might be able to present that as a hypothesis. AFAICT, it's completely untenable.
I am aware of that story, and have historically been a little bit convinced by it. My current read on the history of governments makes that position. Governments "steal from the poor with a front-end loader, and give back in teaspoons".
And...I have never once seen a credible argument for corporate welfare. Yes, they all say: "we need this", and they're all stealing money from the rest of us by the bucketload.
Social Security, for instance, sold as a program for the poor, has a net effect of transferring money from poor folks to rich folks.
Medicare is a program for old people. Old people have a huge $ advantage over young people. 90% of Medicare is transfer of money from poor young people to in order to preserve assets for richer older people. Military spending? AFAICT, at least 1 in 2 $ spent is simply to make rich people at Boeing (and similar) richer.
That's the federal budget right there...almost all of it making poor people worse off, and rich people better.
Welfare for the rich has been going on as a function of government since government started. Indeed, it's not very hard to argue that the entire purpose of (any) government (from a cynical, realist libertarian POV) is to funnel money from the rest of the citizenry to the connected and powerful.
Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il still soaked the people as much as possible, and shared the loot with his allies.
Socialism is one minor feature of government action. Generating scarcity for their rich buddies is the primary job.
Also, high in my calculations is the graph reproduced here some time back suggesting that the preferences of the poor and middle class are completely un-represented by policy actions.
Meh,
1. In that conversation, I said that WoP was designed by LBJ AND that it destroyed black families AND I explicitly re-iterated that I made no claims about his intentions re: destroying the black family on purpose.
2. If you give an Irishman a bag of potatoes every day...it destroys his productivity, and incentive to work, and even his ability. If you then take away the daily potatoes, he's doubly screwed. No productivity, no incentive, no know-how, and no food too.
3. Limited liability is one of the areas where only crazy hyper-extremists like me consider it a corporate giveaway. I want to abolish the crap wholesale...in particular, limited liability for police, lawmakers, and corporations massively distorts decisions everywhere. It's among the primary methods by which corporations and government officials are made unaccountable.
If I was trying to help the poor by cutting governemnt, my top few (from memory) to kill: licensing laws, public schooling, drug laws, urban gun laws, anti-marriage poverty policies, marginal effective tax rates, anti-self-employment incentives, the separation of SS from normal taxes. Minimum wage is probably on there too. All those are things the government does that actively screws the poor.
I consider myself a center-wing, if extreme, libertarian, and I endorse Aretae's rough ordering there. We talk about tax-and-spend government, but often it's the perverse regulation that really smarts.
OTOH, regarding, what rwcg's been saying. In the context of the flat tax, a rejoinder is that "There's no such thing as a big simple tax." That is, any tax that pulls in modern state levels of revenue is inevitably going to get tweaked and modified, as everyone takes cover from its blinding glare.
You say "Socialism is one minor feature of government action." I'll fix that for you: omit the phrase "one minor feature of".
Here's perhaps a better example: Obamacare + the "doc fix". Admittedly I don't know the details of the "doc fix" but everyone seems to acknowledge - supporters or opponents of Obamacare alike - that it's basically a sop to economic realities, and that without it [something bad/intolerable, even to Obamacare supporters, vis-a-vis doctors] would happen. That bad thing, whatever it is, I suggest would hurt the middle class the most - wealthy would be fine, and the poor will still get more or less the same socialism - so the "doc fix" translates more or less as "don't kill the middle class as much as you otherwise would".
If I'm right, then 'if you can only eliminate 1, just take away the doc fix!' should not appeal to anyone who cares about the middle class. YMMV. But 'left' priorities don't give a rat's ass about the middle class, IMHO of course.
Now in this case the "doc fix", I suggest, essentially plays the role of corporate welfare. Note I'm not putting this forth as an 'argument for' corporate welfare. I hate the "doc fix" *and* I hate Obamacare. But the 'sequential' position saying to get rid of the former 'first' is equivalent to just a socialist position.
In the case of (actual) corporate welfare, you characterize it as 'stealing money from the rest of us'. I'm sure in some cases that is accurate. But a lot of corporate welfare, I assume, comes in the form of 'tax breaks'. Whether these or those tax breaks are good or bad (mostly bad, I'm sure), I think it's silly at best to call them 'stealing money from the rest of us'. What they are, is NOT stealing as much money from private companies and their owners - also the middle class, to a large extent! - as the gov't otherwise would.
Of course, to the 'left', there's no such thing as inviolable private property, hence 'stealing', in the first place - not really - since property is entirely a social-construct that is contingent on the whim of government, and therefore revocable, at any moment. So this disagreement really traces to one's views on private property. But we have had that conversation before.
Aretae,
>>>2. If you give an Irishman a bag of potatoes every day...it destroys his productivity, and incentive to work, and even his ability. If you then take away the daily potatoes, he's doubly screwed. No productivity, no incentive, no know-how, and no food too.
>>>If you are going to attack government actions, attack the government actions that hurt the poor first, and the ones that help the poor 2nd.
Maybe you should say: "and the ones that ARE DESIGNED to help the poor 2nd." But this doesn't fully fix the contradiction in your arguments. If giving a bag of grits to a black woman is what's destroying the black family, then you as a Left-libertarian should want to begin phasing that out first (even though not in one starvation-inducing step) instead of first addressing the much smaller problem of "corporate welfare."
Aretae,
>>>A shareholder in a limited company is not personally liable for any of the debts of the company, other than for the value of their investment in that company.
You want to end this practice? You view it as "corporate welfare?"
Meh,
1. It's a good point that one should attack the problems that are screwing the poor most first. You may have noticed that in my response you was to list the government programs that hurt folks the most. I specifically listed the major policies that break the poor family as top priorities to fix (including marriage-based welfare ... one of the specific ones I was referring to in my war-on-blacks post).
RWCG,
You say "Socialism is one minor feature of government action." I'll fix that for you: omit the phrase "one minor feature of".
The purpose of government is to steal from everyone else and give money / status to the people in power. Anything else it does is a side-issue.
Some governments choose socialism as a method for accumulating central power. Other governments choose crony capitalism. Others use nominal democracy. Still others use African Kleptocracy. Socialism is one possible means to the (necessarily) universal government goal of centralizing control, benefiting the connected at the expense of everyone else. Your vision is normally broader than this.
2. The medical system we have is completely screwed up. The central problem is health-insurance provided by companies, because of government incentivizing companies to dodge WWII wage controls. Single-payer would be a better system in most cases for most people than the crap we have now. I personally dislike it single-payer aggressively for it's eating of the future...but damn near everything is better than employer-provided health-insurance. The doc-fix is primarily a way to keep the completely broken system we have limping along...and funneling money to the insurance companies (I was working at Blue Cross of Illinois when we wrote...I mean consulted on...Obamacare)
3. There's left- priorities, and there's left-libertarian priorities as explained by Clark, Henley, me at times. They almost never line up.
4. Let me say it differently. Corporate welfare is booty delivered to the politically connected. If the government needs $90...and there's 10 of us, then we all get screwed to the tune of $9. If the government then pardons Bob, then the rest of us all get screwed to the tune of $10. And then it becomes much smarter to lobby the government for special treatment than to actually produce anything useful: Solyndra, GM, etc. I don't mind lower taxes almost universally...but I think the starve-the-gov. strategy has failed.
Alex,
Thanks for the Vote of Confidence.
Meh,
I think the business of allowing Ted Kennedy to set up a corporate shell such that he and his assets were protected from his killing a girl while drunk-driving is obscene.
I think that misbehaving cops who have uniform-based immunity from prosecution are atrocious.
I think politicians not being liable for the deadly rules they create is criminal.
I am for a case where if _you_ do something, _you_ are liable for what _you_ did...and in an unlimited sense.
I think the business of loaning money to an organization in exchange for some share of future profits is an entirely different question than whether leaders of a company ought be liable for their actions/decisions up through their personal money.
I think my larger point is that although the way you're explaining your 'left' priorities may sound good, indeed I understand the appeal of the argument, in practice following your precepts would do no more no less than to advance socialism, without any of the 'good' part.
So, the difference between your/Henley's left-advocacy, and whatever you consider mainstream left-advocacy, is academic. You're making an intelligent argument for their bait-and-switch ('don't do X until we do Y', where Y might plausibly be done but X never will be) - but it's still a bait-and-switch.
"... than whether leaders of a company ought be liable for their actions/decisions up through their personal money."
I might be missing something or revealing my ignorance: but does 'limited liability' really mean that leaders of a company can't be fined or indeed sued for their actions, whatever those may be?
I thought it meant something entirely different, i.e. vis-a-vis *shareholders* (not 'leaders of a company' necessarily).
rwcg,
Are any of my top-7 that I've suggested to Meh even on the leftists lists?
If I was trying to help the poor by cutting governemnt, my top few (from memory) to kill: licensing laws, public schooling, drug laws, urban gun laws, anti-marriage poverty policies, marginal effective tax rates, anti-self-employment incentives, the separation of SS from normal taxes. Minimum wage is probably on there too. All those are things the government does that actively screws the poor.
And as far as I can tell, not a single one of those things is on the leftists lists at all.
I'm advocating for libertarian positions to be started from the left- or poor-supporting or the remove actively putting the thumb down on the side of the scales that favors the rich first... rather than what the right libertarians seem to say which is: yeah...GM and Wall Street gets hundreds of billions of dollars of government money...let's cut welfare first?
I don't recognize any of what I'm saying (or Henley, or Clark) in what you're imputing.
Re: your #4,
Why on earth does the government 'need' $90? How is that a given? There is no such fixed sum that the government 'needs' per se. There are things it has decided/promised/dreamed to do, and (because of that) taxes it has decided it 'needs' to collect in order to do those things. But we need not take the latter as a given.
A large category of these things, and the associated 'needed' taxes, are planned without any consultation to reality. They are planned by motivated ideologues (socialist) in tandem with craven politicians buying votes (bread and circuses).
So here's a different story:
It's almost time to collect this $90 the government supposedly 'needs'. But it turns out that the Beautiful Plan they wanted to put in place relies on taxing Bob not $10, but $30. They figured Bob could absorb it since he's such a bigshot. Bob informs the government 'uh ok, but if you do that, I'll just go out of business. I mean, thanks but no thanks'.
Turns out, Bob is the dairy farmer of the group, and the government realizes belatedly, golly, if he goes out of business, no milk. For anyone. Hmm. Let's rethink.
So, they graciously 'rebate' Bob $20 of the $30 they had Planned to tax him for their Beautiful Scheme. In exchange, of course, for some political bribes from Bob.
It doesn't quite happen in this order, of course, because in the real world what happens is that Bob sees the Beautiful Plan coming down the pipeline and so he gets involved in the process and lobbies for the 'rebate' in advance. But the economic effect in my story is the same: Bob, a visible deep-pocket target, is threatened with $30 theft to pay for some scheme, then pays some (comparatively negligible) bribes to get that down to $10. Tell me again where in this process any money was 'stolen' from any of the other taxpayers?
In saying such a thing you are buying entirely into bogus left-wing logic, i.e. (a) the government axiomatically 'needs' a fixed pot of money because (b) they 'need' to do all the things they have promised to do and so therefore (c) any money not taken from Bob was necessarily 'stolen' from the other taxpayers because (d) the government will go and get it from them instead. This is pure undiluted college-dorm-room-freshman-year-lefty-nonsense economics.
Step (a) in particular is a lie. The government didn't 'need' to do the thing that cost $90 in the first place. But without that, your whole story falls apart. In reality it is these promises of all these Beautiful Plans that 'need' $90 which effect the thievery you're complaining about. But that thievery falls upon, mostly, the middle class, not the pauper class, which obviously wasn't being harnessed to pay for the scheme at all. And adopting a 'no undoing pauper-socialism unless/until you undo corporate-socialism' stance, which you are, will do absolutely nothing to undo that. Again, whether one is bothered by that fact depends on their views about the middle class and (relatedly) about private property, and YMMV.
I hadn't seen your list of 7, but it looks fine. I don't find much support for it in the Henley post, but that's ok.
I don't know why those things need to be done 'first'. Relatedly, I am not here advocating 'let's cut welfare first'.
I'm for both/and not either/or. I'm also for doing whatever is feasible. I don't necessarily have a set priority. But I do think that trying to establish a set priority like 'left first' would, in practice, amount to nothing more or less than 'left, only'.
There is a long tradition in politics of arguments of the form 'we shouldn't do X unless we do Y first' being put forth strategically by people who want Y-only and will never agree to X in a million years.
Example: We can't have a colorblind society unless we implement affirmative action as a corrective to the past first. Tell me, just when exactly will we get to the 'colorblind' part and discard affirmative action? 2100? 2300? 3000? Never, right?
This is the bait and switch I referred to. It creates a one-way ratchet toward socialism. Even if you gussy it up with the name 'left-libertarianism', it still leads leftward and not libertyward. Again, my point is that you are giving rhetorical support to that bait and switch and the resulting ratchet (whether that's your intent or not).
RWCG,
I disagree with none of the essence of what you said. The conversation would have been avoided if I'd said "the government plans to steal $90 from someone." which is how I actually think of it. Theft, pure and simple.
I think that the way that Bob and the government are in bed with one another is THE central problem of government...up to a point where I (who up until fairly recently held respectable right-libertarian anarchist positions) now considers socialism, to be a minor feature of government. Explicit transfers is chump change. Setting the rules of the game so it isn't fair...that's where the real money is. Socialism pales in comparison to the extent to which the government rigs the economic game in favor of the well-connected.
Very good then. The next step in the argument is to recognize that,
the fewer $90 'plans' a government attempts, the fewer times it 'needs' to steal those $90.
Who puts forth more 'plans', left or right? Who then is predominantly to blame for the stealing?
RWCG,
Can we frame the disagreement thusly, then:
The Crimson Reach believes that socialism/leftward creep is the primary governmental danger facing us...and that that is what needs defended against most strongly.
Aretae believes that socialism is small beans compared to general government crony-ism...and that an attack on socialism is blinding folks to the central dangers of rigging the economic game thoroughly in favor of the rich.
And the Affirmative Action point, I'm with you about 90%. My concern: Health/Height/ Intelligence effects from poverty/deprivation are known to persist for at least 2 generations beyond the one primarily impacted. Suppose the government actively did something to your grandfather that cost you 3 inches of height and 8 IQ points today. Are you due recompense? I think that's a hard question.
In the 50s, the U.S. government was actively doing things to black people to keep them poor. There is, in this, some argument for some recompense for folks who are direct descendents of American Blacks who suffered from Jim Crow style laws. For anyone else...it's ludicrous.
My assessment...the legally required racism of the '50s ought to have been repealed only. It was legally required because private enterprise wouldn't maintain the racism without coercion.
Affirmative action is a huge fail...not even being effective at helping minorities. It is, however, a good path to expanding government power.
RWCG,
Reagan and the Bush I outspent Carter and Clinton. Bush II is the worst ever. Except for Obama who is even worse.
I think that it's highly non-obvious. I think Citibank got both Bush and Obama to steal money from the rest of us. So did GM. Bush prefers to steal our money and give it to Haliburton, while Obama likes to give it to Solyndra.
TO blame for the stealing? Same people as always. Power-hungry bastards in government and their friends.
I believe that the politicians of the right have NO more interest in giving power, money, etc. back to the people than the politicians of the left. They just have better rhetoric.
I agree with your framing, with one amendment:
Socialism and 'cronyism' go hand in hand. There's no contradiction. Indeed part and parcel of my beef with 'socialism' is the cronyism it spawns at the top, among the commissars and the nomenklatura. So reducing socialism, i.e. concentrated 'collective' property and a disdain/disrespect for individuals' property rights, is a means of reducing cronyism, not an alternative to fighting same.
"Suppose the government actively did something to your grandfather that cost you 3 inches of height and 8 IQ points today. Are you due recompense? I think that's a hard question."
This illustrates my point perfectly. See, you do indeed outline a decent, compelling, at least somewhat persuasive case here for (some, limited) affirmative action. You offer intelligent, well-thought-out, morally-grounded compassionate rhetoric for a position like No Full-Colorblind Without A Bit Of A.A. First.
And then that argument is harnessed, borrowed, commandeered by people who simply want A.A. not 'first', and not for the rationale you've compassionately stated, but period, and for reasons of pure tribal power-politics.
And what is the result? Did we get a compassionate but limited A.A. No. Now we have A.A. written deeply into the fabric of much of our society. And we are never - NEVER - going to get rid of it. Never ever ever ever. Do you disagree? If so, please describe the circumstances you can envision under which A.A. is actually fully and completely done away with? When does this event take place, what year? Try to picture it. Because I can't.
Bait and switch. One-way ratchet. That way leads 'left'-libertarianism. It leads 'left', period.
rwcg,
I want to amend yours as well:
Socialism is (one of?) the major means used by the current US government to support it's central policy of cronyism. Other governments and other times use other means to support cronyism. The central issue is reducing government control over private property and people.
I hated the Citi and other bailouts under Bush as much as, indeed noticeably more than, anyone I know, but I guess I feel like what I'm being told here is that I can't/shouldn't oppose other stuff I hate (if it supposedly 'helps the poor') unless the aforementioned type of stuff I hate is totally eliminated.
Now, if I took that principle to heart, that would really suck!, so if the goal is just to get me to hate bailouts/corporate welfare *that much more*, then mission accomplished perhaps.
But I still cannot accept these 'no X until Y' principles. The reality, usually, is:
1. Y, the thing we're supposed to do 'first', is realistically never going to happen
2. The person saying this - probably - doesn't actually want X to happen ever, and is just using 'Y first' as a delay/misdirection tactic. (You are an exception, I trust. I'm less sure Henley is.)
The central issue is reducing government control over private property and people.
I agree with that! But 'left' (socialism) is government control over - or rather, violation/denial of - private property. So a libertarian who believes the above should want nothing to do with it. Hence my ongoing puzzlement...
rwcg,
and 50 year ago today, no person alive could have forseen a day when equally qualified blacks are chosen 9/10 over equally qualified whites to do jobs. In 50 years from now...I predict it will be even more different than in the last 50. Which direction? Who knows.
More things under heaven and earth, Horatio.
The problems are HARD problems, not easy problems. government will take as much control as it can get. Socialism is merely pretext. The ratchet is not left...the ratchet is pro-centralization, anti-freedom.
I argue that the regulatory state is a bigger problem than the taxing state...and that the anti-poor and pro-rich regulations are the most pernicious.
Ok. Simple then. Our disagreement may well be mostly semantic. Thanks for taking the time to hash it through.
I think the attention should be on
the leftish stuff first, because it's worse (not that it's not all bad).
I think in many cases, rolling back some programs would be a bad thing done in isolation...though I'd probably push any kill-the-program button you put in front of me, without much hesitation. I am a freed-markets left-libertarian anarchist, you know.
I think that libertarian PR is better managed by loudly opposing government action that massively benefits the rich and connected than by loudly opposing helping the poor.
And I think it's absolutely essential to break the connection in the public's mind between the system we have now which is crony fascism and the free markets that the libertarians are advocating for.
And I have no interest in "If only"
re: left-libertarianism
Fascism is a doctrine of the right.
Divine right of kings is a doctrine of the right.
Socialism is a doctrine of the left.
I hate them all equally.
Communists, however, deserve their own special hell.
It was when I concluded that the politics of the right was no more pro-freedom (my actual opinion) than the politics of the left and that the modern libertarian movement had an unholy attachment to the political right that I started calling myself a left-libertarian. Effectively as a reminder that there are no good guys. And once I remove the notion that the right is the good guys...I actually have a lot more natural sympathy with the leftist goals (when you talk to intelligent, thoughtful, really wants to make things better leftists) than with the rightist goals.
You cite how much things have changed in 50 years, but if you'll notice, the change has pretty much all been in one direction - 'progress', as defined by the left.
Significant counterexamples welcome, of course, but I don't see much reason for confidence in undoing the one-way ratchet. And especially not with smart eloquent people going all 'left-libertarian' on us! ;-)
I think that libertarian PR is better managed by loudly opposing government action that massively benefits the rich and connected than by loudly opposing helping the poor.
This may indeed be true if the goal is to get votes for a 'libertarian' party, and/or to get more libertarians liked by important and beautiful people.
Less so, I think, if the goal is to actually accomplish libertarian - as in, liberty-increasing - things. Because 'left'-libertarian rhetoric/PR-capital can and will simply be harnessed by leftists. Then you get the leftism 'first' and the libertarianism...never.
Fascism is a doctrine of the right.
Divine right of kings is a doctrine of the right.
Socialism is a doctrine of the left.
I hate them all equally.
Fascism is a type of socialism.
I'm coming around on divine right of kings, by comparison to the prevailing ideologies we have. Or ideology, I should say (=socialism).
..that I started calling myself a left-libertarian. Effectively as a reminder that there are no good guys. And once I remove the notion that the right is the good guys...I actually have a lot more natural sympathy with the leftist goals...
It's one thing to use the label as a rhetorical reminder of something. I can see that. The problem IMHO comes when a 'left'-libertarian starts taking the conflation seriously, and gets tempted to say things like 'that was a great Jim Henley post'...
There is a sense here of fooling oneself (regarding how your rhetoric would actually be used and what would actually result in practice) that I keep trying to convey and I'm not sure I'm succeeding.
It's dangerous to proceed directly from 'having sympathy with leftist goals' to actually embracing or at least supporting (or advocating not-opposing) the things actual leftist actually implement. There need not be any connection. Example: 'leftist goals' include that poor people have good and decent, fulfilling lives! Actual leftists implement this or that welfare scheme. But we can observe that the latter does not, in fact, aid the former.
Right?
Aretae,
>>>I think the business of loaning money to an organization in exchange for some share of future profits is an entirely different question than whether leaders of a company ought be liable for their actions/decisions up through their personal money.
I didn't know what you were talking about, because you're misusing "limited liability." Please Google the definition and use some other term to describe how cops are incarcerated less often for shooting people while they are at work or how the Kennedy's live via trusts.
Stockholders own property. They aren't lending money and don't have the same incentives as lenders. Lenders have no upside beyond receiving principal and interest. So, many stockholders want managers to take greater risks to increase possible upside, which can lead to more torts. You don't believe that stockholders should be liable for what is done in the interest of increasing their profits? All they should be able to lose is their investment?
How much more time do you want managers of businesses to spend in court? If Toyota sells a less safe car for $1000 cheaper (leading to an estimated 100 more deaths) in the interest of raising profits, do you want him executed?
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