[ExI] Strong libertarianism, societal good, & suffering (was: Cephalization, proles)

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 01:40:36PM -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:

> Libertarian apart from the slavery and the land theft.  Which latter you
> can't handwave away, because a lot of the "good outcomes for the poor"
> came from the "free" (stolen) land that was given away to homesteaders.
> Good land that hadn't seen much agricultural abuse yet, too.
> Approximately post-scarcity conditions make the details of economic
> systems somewhat less relevant.
> 
> A lot of other good outcomes (manufacturing jobs) came from having a big
> internal free trade zone under a strong central government (not
> anarchic) which meant only one big war, and from being somewhat
> democratic and not having aristocratic cruft.  Which is libertarian, but
> not distinctly libertarian vis a vis other setups like modern US
> liberalism.

Or in other words, for my last post of the night:

"libertarianism with free good land was good for some poor" does not
generalize to "libertarianism is good for the poor".

"libertarianism was better for the poor than war-torn quasi-feudal
aristocracies" does not generalize to "libertarian is better for the
poor than social democracy".

The 19th century lets us combine these: "libertarianism with free good
land [and various other geographic qualifiers] was better for the poor
than war-torn and land-starved quasi-feudal aristocracies" does not
generalize to "libertarianism is the bestest thing ever".


This all feels related to my observation that when Adam Smith attacked
government intervention in the economies, he was mostly talking about
monarchs using mercantilism and artificial monopolies to raise revenues
for war.  Not about universal-suffrage democracies using progressive
income taxation to fund univiersal pensions and health care, public
schools and transportation, and a side order of environmental and safety
regulation, especially as none of those things existed in 1776.

-xx- Damien X-)