[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Is libertarianism a faith position?

[Marc Geddes]

> > Subject: [extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Is libertarianism
> a faith position?
> 

You bet it is.  I'm embarassed to think that I ever
believed in that vile shit.  Libertarianism deserves
the same brown-bagging as Singularity Institute and co
for analogous reasons.

It fails for the same reason all cult ideologies fail:
the prescriptions and 'reasoning' are based on
assumptions that contradict empiricial reality.  The
economic 'models' are pure idealizations that bear
little or no resemblence to actual human nature.  


See my testimonial on Mike Huben's web-site:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/testimony.html

Read Huben's excellent set of quotes:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/quotes.html


Smart people believe wierd things because they are
skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for
nonsmart reasons. 
Michael Shermer, Scientific American: Smart People
Believe Weird Things Sept. 2002 

One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas
that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a
rule be simplified to the level of a child's
understanding if they are to arouse the masses to
historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the
minds of all children born in a certain decade and
hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a
deadly serious political ideology twenty years later. 
Sebastian Haffner, "Defying Hitler" pg. 17 

But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one
encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages,
and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace "street"
libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the
sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to
agitate for what they want by defending a refined
version of their doctrine when challenged
philosophically. We've seen Marxists pull that before.

Robert Locke, Marxism of the Right , The American
Conservative, 2005 

He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my
way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich
and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to
believe that no one should depend on society for help
when you yourself happen not to need such help. 
Isaac Asimov, "I. Asimov" pg. 308. 

Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the
innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to
facilitate communication within social groups of
various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file
sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented
investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business
and government sectors have adopted innovations
developed in Internet communities, and realised
significant productivity gains as a result. 
John Quiggan 

It seems strange to make a priori arguments about the
relative performance of governments and the markets in
health care when there is so much empirical evidence. 
John Quiggin 

The problem with conservative think-tank hacks, you
see, is that their ideas crumble upon contact with
things like statistics and arithmetic. 
Tapped (edited by Richard Just) 9/22/03 

In editing a journal that has received manuscripts
from virtually every libertarian scholar, famous and
unknown alike, I have long been struck by the
consistent juxtiposition of... libertarian
philosophical sentiments with weak empirical research,
leaps of logic, contempt for non-libertarian points of
view (of which the authors usually appear ignorant).
The polemical tone and deficient evidence, however,
and the tarnishing of often-good ideas by doctrinaire
rhetoric and low scholarly standards, are only the
least of it. The worst thing is not the waste of
effort that goes into producing propaganda barely
veiled by the robes of scholarship. The greater
tragedy is what libertarians could produce, but do
not. 
Jeffrey Friedman, "What's Wrong With Libertarianism" 

After all, there's a lot of experience with
privatization by governments at all levels -- state,
federal, and local; that record doesn't support
extravagant claims about improved efficiency.
Sometimes there are significant cost reductions, but
all too often the promised savings turn out to be a
mirage. In particular, it's common for private
contractors to bid low to get the business, then push
their prices up once the government work force has
been disbanded. Projections of a 20 or 30 percent cost
saving across the board are silly -- and one suspects
that the officials making those projections know that.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 11.19.02 

Moralistic or rights-based libertarianism has little
appeal to the general public, as R. W. Bradford says,
because it relies more on dogma and declarations than
on evidence, reasoning, and dialogue. It reaches
sweeping and detailed policy conclusions in a
suspiciously easy way, with scant attention to the
real world. Some of them, like Murray Rothbard's
conclusions about contracts, bankruptcy, extortion,
blackmail, and crime as private transactions between
perpetrators and victims, as well as the supposed
"heroism" of the scumbags defended in Walter Block's
notorious book (Defending The Undefendable, 1976), are
outlandish on their face. 
Leland B. Yeager, In Defense of Utility 

[L]et me just point out that middle-class America
didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has
been called the Great Compression of incomes that took
place during World War II, and sustained for a
generation by social norms that favored equality,
strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since
the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost
their power. Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government
policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the
expense of working families - and under the current
administration, that favoritism has become extreme and
relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to
bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost
every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our
march back to the robber baron era. It's not a pretty
picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so
hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the
public what's going on. 
Paul Krugman, Losing Our Country 

I find it interesting that libertarians never picked
up on the fact that when the British ran Hong Kong,
they decided not to live under that kind of system in
their own country. For some reason Western
libertarians want to admire these experiments in
laissez faire, anarcho-Somalianism and Hoppean
monarchy at arm's length, while they enjoy the
benefits of living in the developed democratic
countries where they nurture their strange grievances
against government. 
Mark Plus 

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible
one, take this as a sign that you have neither
understood the theory nor the problem which it was
intended to solve. 
Karl Popper 

The original Greek word "idiotes" referred to people
who might have had a high IQ, but were so
self-involved that they focused exclusively on their
own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about
public concerns and the common good. 
Jim Hightower, "Thieves in High Places" 












"Till shade is gone, till water is gone, into the shadow with teeth bared, screaming defiance with the last breath, to spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the last day”


	

	
		
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