[ExI] General comment about all this quasi-libertarianism discussion

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 01:15:40PM -0500, Richard Loosemore wrote:

> You are still telling me that in your opinion libertarianism would work  
> (= unsupported speculation, = mere philosophizing), whereas I am asking  
> you to ante up and give me some objective evidence to back up this  
> claim, by pointing to some code (or equivalent scientific evidence) that  
> shows that human societies would not break down under those 
> circumstances.

In particular, are libertarian societies robust in the face of
foreign invasion
inequalities of wealth
environmental degradation
disease

I note that a favorite example, Iceland, was a remote island no one
would want to invade, which according to David Friedman himself stopped
being so libertarian after wealth differences became sufficiently
extreme.

And libertarianish economic policies are frequently correlated with
rising income inequality.  Not to mention pollution of air and public
water, and overharvesting of migratory wildlife.

Note that even if you don't think extreme income inquality is morally
problematic, there's the stability issue of people being able to
trivially afford weregild and get away with murder, or raising their own
armies.

-xx- Damien X-)