Daily Archives: 27 May 2014

What Libertarians, Conservatives and Progressives have right!

WHAT LIBERTARIANS HAVE RIGHT AND WRONG

WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT
1) Property + Voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, exchange, free of negative externality.
2) Contract + Common Law + Universal Standing
3) Competing Insurance Companies for the purpose of Regulation.
4) Economics: Voluntary organization of Production + Incentives + Competition

WHAT CONSERVATIVES HAVE RIGHT (AND WE HAVE WRONG)
1) Morality (‘Durkheimian Man’) requires many institutional means of coercion into respect for, and observation of, and enforcement of, property rights.
2) The Nuclear and Absolute Nuclear Family as the minimum organizational unit of any social order.

WHAT THE PROGRESSIVES HAVE RIGHT (AND WE HAVE WRONG)
1) Observance and enforcement of the property rights necessary for the voluntary organization of production, when one is not ABLE to participate in it, requires compensation for the effort of observance and enforcement. (Although they would never articulate it in this manner. The right of exclusion must be respected, but respecting it is a cost.)

Putting Violence back in Libertarianism

Asking people to forego parasitism (if they’re weak) or predation (if they’re strong) is asking them to bear a substantial opportunity cost. They will only do so if someone stands ready to impose a higher actual cost for choosing to engage in them.

This is what Curt Doolittle means when he says “liberty must be manufactured by violence.”

Libertarians love to sing liberty’s praises, and there is much to be said in its favor. But it does not follow from this that liberty is always in everyone’s best interests. There are many people who stand to lose more from liberty than they would stand to gain. (And not just because they misperceive the situation.) There are still more people for whom the uncertainty over what they would stand to gain or lose would make desiring liberty irrational.

The incentives that favor liberty do not exist by default, they must be proactively created. And in order for this to happen there must be people likely to benefit from liberty, strong people, capable people, wise people, intelligent people, responsible people, farsighted people; in short, aristocrats. And they must organize to impose liberty on the remainder by force, and in many cases, to their detriment, or to their enduring resentment.

If liberty is thus to be manufactured, the problem of free-riding must also be overcome by institutional forms that deny the benefits of liberty to those unwilling to participate in its manufacture, and that preserves the benefits for the exclusive enjoyment of those so willing.