Interview with a Vamp-uh, Libertarian

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Hey glittersnatch- i think that this means that we end up controlling the oil supply

This is my favorite bit.

CNC: Murray Rothbard likes to call them "modal-libertarians" (MLs). As Rothbard says, "the ML is an adolescent rebel against everyone around him," who only hates government because it is something else to disrespect. MLs think that profanity, drug use... homosexuality... pedophilia... or any other conceivable perversity or abnormality... are perfectly normal and legitimate activities and lifestyles [206]. What these countercultural libertarians fail to realize... is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic rise in social "discrimination" and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the... life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. [208]

Left-libertarians and multi- or countercultural lifestyle experimentalists, even if they were not engaged in any crime, would once again have to pay a price for their behavior. If they continued with their behavior or lifestyle [in public], they would be barred from civilized society and live physically separate from it, in ghettos or on the fringes of society, and many positions or professions would be unattainable to them. [212]

God damn gays being allowed to hold well paying jobs!

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

[Freeky]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as reasonable as Nazism.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as less reasonable as than Nazism.

Fixed, maybe?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as less reasonable as than Nazism.

Fixed, maybe?

That seems about right.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as less reasonable as than Nazism.

Fixed, maybe?

That seems about right.

You know, Heil Koch and all that, may as well get it out in the open. This is how this shit happens. It's not like Socialist was placed after National by accident. Nope. Now we'll have a American Worker's National Libertarian Party. And above the gates it will say "Free Market Makes Free."

[Freeky]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as less reasonable as than Nazism.

Fixed, maybe?

That seems about right.

I was trying not to overstate it.

[CorbeauEtRenard]

There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order.

Ever notice how many Libertarians don't seem to be even vaguely familiar with what the word "libertarian" means?

Maybe we can figure out some way to harness their massive irony deposits for electricity. I mean, as far as I can tell it's a virtually limitless resource.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order.

Ever notice how many Libertarians don't seem to be even vaguely familiar with what the word "libertarian" means?

Maybe we can figure out some way to harness their massive irony deposits for electricity. I mean, as far as I can tell it's a virtually limitless resource.

[rong]

in the past, irony deposits have been harvested for ore.  which can be turned into magnets and used to generate electricity.

[Cain]

The rest of the series has been published, and the writer has put up a thoughtful afterword here http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-response-to-reader-comments.html

The word libertarian originally meant anarchist, or libertarian socialist, in the sense of someone who is wary of authority in general, whether coming from the state or from property rights arrangements. However, libertarian as used today more typically refers to right-libertarians like Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard. For a more complete discussion of the different uses of the word libertarian, Karl Widerquist has written a nice essay on the subject.

Widerquist points out that it "is perhaps poetically appropriate that property rights advocates have appropriated a term that was already being used by people who subscribe to the idea that property is theft, and that these property rights [advocates] now accuse anarchists of trying to steal [the term] from them."

Fairly or not, most people today think of right-libertarians when they hear the word libertarian, and so I will from now on use libertarian to mean right-libertarian. I have personally known many libertarians, and one is a good friend of mine. I became particularly interested in libertarianism when I started to realize how powerful such ideas have become in America today. One major political party is strongly influenced by think tanks like AEI and the Cato Institute, in which libertarian ideas are extremely prominent. Although members of the Tea Party do not fit a single stereotype, they do have a strong penchant for libertarian rhetoric.

Barack Obama frequently expresses his support for the "free market" and talks about the "burden" of taxes; Republican candidates feel no corresponding obligation to express verbally their support for "democracy," or for the existence of some taxation. If candidates of both parties now talk in ways that are conditioned by libertarian preferences, it is clear that libertarianism has made great strides.

During the series, one reader made a comment about the outlandishness of libertarian thought, to which reader Foppe appropriately replied, "That doesn't matter – the question is whether they influence policy."

What is Libertarianism?

The critics of libertarianism often describe it as a theory that privileges liberty, or freedom, over other values like equality, or social justice, or tradition. They often respond by agreeing that liberty is important, but that it is important to balance liberty with other essential commitments.

However, after reading a number of libertarian authors, such as Hayek, Friedman, and Nozick, it started to seem to me that libertarianism is not a theory of freedom at all. Reader Marat cited an example by libertarian Walter Block, in which a person is hanging for dear life to a flagpole protruding from the 15th floor of a high-rise. Block says that if the apartment owner demands that the person let go, and the flagpole hanger attempts instead to climb down into the balcony, then if "the occupant shoots him for trespassing... the answer is clear. The owner... is in the right, and the trespasser is in the wrong."

In my experience, libertarians often enjoy citing examples like this, in which the freedom of the flagpole hanger to survive is trumped by the right of the owner to maintain sovereignty over her apartment. Is is possible that libertarianism is a theory of sovereignty, and not a theory of freedom?

Libertarian Sovereignty

If libertarianism is a theory of sovereignty, it is natural to wonder whether libertarian sovereignty can be just as tyrannical as the kind of governments that libertarians dislike. If libertarianism defends the rights of corporations to govern themselves as they see fit, will some people end up signing contracts that effectively make them quasi-slaves? Many libertarians specify that no one will be allowed to sign a contract to make themselves a slave. However, what if people sign contracts that effectively make them into slaves without doing so explicitly? Then they could be slaves in a rights-respecting manner – would that be okay? If not, what is the alternative? Should the government be allowed to police every possible contractual arrangement and annul the ones that it thinks could lead to effective slavery?

John Holbo of the blog Crooked Timber made an argument along these lines, arguing that a certain form of libertarianism can become something close to feudalism.

On the other hand, Widerquist has written an interesting article (A Dilemma for Libertarianism) taking this observation in a slightly different direction. He points out that the same arguments that libertarians use to defend the sanctity of property rights can be used just as easily to defend the rights of governments to tax individuals and to regulate businesses – or the rights of a hereditary, unconstitutional monarch.

At this point it becomes to seem like libertarian ideas of sovereignty can justify many different possible societies. Some of these societies would not be considered very free by normal definitions of the word.

Reader Susan the other initially wondered if the series would help us understand how to balance freedom and equality. She later decided that in Code Name Cain's ideal world

There is no freedom and there is no equality? Hoppe-Libertarianism is so over the top it wipes dilemma off the plate. No worries at all about how to balance everyone's freedom with everyone's equality because emotional democracy is out of the question. CNC takes the instinct for freedom and crushes it forthwith. I was expected him to crush equality first.

More at the link.

The writer also admits in this afterword that CNC was in fact an invention of his, but one developed sincerely in attempting to grapple with the libertarianism of Hans-Herman Hoppe:

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is quite real. While one reader identified Code Name Cain as John Denson (adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute), it is my opinion that he is the fruit of my imagination. However, CNC was not intended to be satire in the normal sense of the word. Reader Chad, who has some familiarity with Hoppe's work, declared that even 'if this is an apocryphal interview, it's not satirical hyperbole.' StPaulite added, "the direct quotes in red are without fail more batshit than the rest of the text."

In fact, I found Hans-Hermann Hoppe's ideas fascinating, but it would have been quite difficult to construct a dialogue entirely from snippets of his book. Even if I had done that, there would still have been a risk of misrepresenting his thought. Code Name Cain was created so that I could try to fill in missing or uncertain details of a Hoppe-like philosophy in the most logical manner I could think of, without attributing these additions to Hoppe himself. Some fine points that a couple readers thought I personally invented were actually adapted (rather faithfully) from Hoppe's book: in particular, the graphs in part VI showing time-preference curves for different types of individuals (compare p. 8 of Hoppe's book).

In defense of readers that thought CNC was simply a satire, reader RanDomino cites Poe's law: "[...] it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism."

[Kai]

So, he came to the same conclusion that we did, that feudalism seems to be a distinct possibility of a society built on libertarianism.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was a really interesting take, I'm glad there are credible people out there writing about this.

[Reginald Ret]

Im starting to think that libertarianism is even less feasible than communism.

... and is as less reasonable as than Nazism.

Fixed, maybe?

That seems about right.

You know, Heil Koch and all that, may as well get it out in the open. This is how this shit happens. It's not like Socialist was placed after National by accident. Nope. Now we'll have a American Worker's National Libertarian Party. And above the gates it will say "Free Market Makes Free."

The security GLOs will not kill people, they will just expel them to the Sahara or polar regions. What happens then is up to the criminals.

[Cain]

So, he came to the same conclusion that we did, that feudalism seems to be a distinct possibility of a society built on libertarianism.

Widerquist's essay concerning that (link at the original article) is well worth reading.

If you take the right-libertarian position that past injustices do not matter, since they happened such a long time ago that they can never be properly redressed, then work from the position of a land-owning gentry having seized that land a couple of hundred years ago through right of conquest, then they can extract rent from their subjects with absolutely no problem, and violating that "contract" would be initiating aggression and violating the rights of the landowner.

In societies like Saudi Arabia, a country owned by a family (literally) or certain South East Asian monarchies, or perhaps even our very own modern societies (where the anarcho-mutualist Kevin Carson has suggested that the aristocracy were in essence the first venture capitalists, using illegally seized land from generations past to make themselves wealthy and invest in the industrial revolution, banking operations and so on), this obviously has the flaw of reifying certain existing economic arrangements which were highly inequal from the outset.   I don't know how Hoppe's GLO's would handle it, but for the minarchist side of the debate, it would allow the government to intervene under the clause of protecting contracts and property rights.

I believe only Nozick has really dealt with anything like this situation in any sort of depth from the American right-libertarian tradition (based on what I can remember from philosophy classes long ago).  There is a lot more on the left and mutualist side about that sort of thing, as you would expect.