From mhuben Tue Oct 21 16:06:09 1997
To: VIDEOCOM@am.pnu.com
Subject: Re:  Rebuttal of a Non-Libertarian FAQ
Cc: brian@carnell.com

    I notice on your web page linking to critiques of your FAQ, your link to my 
    critique of your FAQ is an old link. The correct URL is 
    http://www.carnell.com/nonlibertarian.html

Thanks a lot: I'll update that today.  I'm sorry I haven't replied earlier:
I got a whole new FAQ response (very long too) the same day and had to
attend to reading it, adding it to my page, and evaluating it.
    
    You might also want to peruse the current rebuttal as I trashed the old one 
    several months ago based on your criticisms and wrote a much shorter much 
    more specific critique of your claims, which I'm certain you will still 
    disagree with.
    
    Brian Carnell
    brian@carnell.com
    
Naturally, I disagree with much of what you claim.

Let's cover a few highlights:

2:  It's not a weakness to point out errors correctly, even ones that
libertarians point out to each other.

The rest of this section doesn't come across as having any more content than
mere accusation.

3:  You are SO right.  There is such a need, and it is pathetic.
It's interesting to me that more people write web pages to defend
against my criticisms than write actual descriptions of libertarianism.
It's a lot like creationism that way.

5:  You've started by rewriting my claim to mean something else.  Sorry,
that's bogus.

"Very hard" is a relative term.  Compared to access to libertarian literature
(which is available in specialty catalogs, and which is vehemently flung
at people both as pamphlets and newsgroup spam), it IS difficult to find.

My site and its links have been the results of hundreds of hours of searching
over a period of years.  Likewise the list of references, many of which came
to me from a retired university librarian who decided to help out.

And of course much of what you call criticism of libertarianism merely
overlaps some aspects of libertarianism: it does not directly criticize
libertarianism.

Once I asked A.P.L readers what criticisms of libertarianism THEY had read.
Only about three or four replied, and all told I got maybe 5 references
from them.  If I had asked them what they had read about libertarianism,
I would have gotten a vastly larger response.

As for academic writings, do you consider that "normal political discourse"?
I'd call that academic discourse, as opposed to the more normal lay (or popular)
discourse.

So, I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill.

6:  You are basing your argument on ONE definition of "utopian".  Get a
better dictionary.

7:  You impute a moral claim to my statement of fact.  I state the facts:
I don't make any moral claim afterwards.  And what's funny, is that after
you draw an implication from the facts, you defend that libertarians don't
have an obligation to be honest or straightforward.  With friends like you....

8:  Your example is pretty bad.  Most hospitals and universities ARE
secular.

Libertarianism has no track record.  There are a few issues where there has
been overlap between l'ism and the right or left, but their "influence"
has been a "me too" at best.

9:  It's not the job of a FAQ to present "all the arguments".  The job of
a FAQ is to bring many SIDES of the arguments together, to be a starting point
for exploration.  I do provide more than a slogan, and I do present another
alternative argument as well.

10: The purpose of the restaurant example was not analogy.  It was to
provide an example of contract without signature, thus defeating arguments
that contracts need to be signed.  Your extension of it is thus wrong.

You attribute to me a version of the "dead hand of the past" argument.
I'm not making it.  What I wrote is perfectly compatible with what I
consider a better model: contracts at will.

And at the end you as much as agree to social contract theory.

11:  If you wish to make an issue of the actions of the mafia and the
government, then you have even bigger problems.  

"The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that
embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the
history of freedom.  It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because
of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government
as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution."
Douglass North 

12:  Government does produce things people want.  Such as redistributive
social programs.  But the failure in YOUR analysis is that most of the
production by government is of goods with substantial public goods
components.  Privatizing such purchases would be very inefficient,
likely costing more than producing them publicly.  That's why Canada can
have universal health care comparable in quality to ours for considerably
less than our partial insurance of some of the employed.

"Public goods, quasipublic goods, and externalities are fairly common in
the real world. They are common enough that it is necessary to take proposals
for government intervention in the economy on a case-by-case basis. Government
action can never be ruled in or ruled out on principle. Only with attention to
detail and prudent judgment based on the facts of the case can we hope to
approach an optimal allocation of resources. That means the government will
always have a full agenda for reform -- and in some cases, as in deregulation,
that will mean undoing the actions of government in an earlier generation.
This is not evidence of failure but of an alert, active government aware of
changing circumstances." 
Paul Krugman, The American Prospect, November-December 1996

13:  What you have so carefully omitted from your argument is the word
"obligation".  Self-government is the pretense that there is no involuntary
obligation.  Yet every "right" creates involuntary obligations not to
trespass on that right for all others, so rights are no refuge from
obligation.  You can't avoid creating obligations for others by avoiding
violating their rights: you'd have to give up your own rights.

14:  You're great at finding further arguments that I didn't make elsewhere,
but here you can't?  The simple answer is that it's risky: that's what
"put your money where your mouth is" means -- assume the risk.  There, that
didn't require too many brain cells, now did it?

15:  You've made a variant of Pascal's Wager, complete with the same
"consider only the up side" fallacy.  Say the experiment is a failure?
Maybe Somalia can't get much worse, but we sure can.

I'm appalled that you're making such basic blunders in thinking about
these issues.

16:  Sorry, but your bullshit-o-meter is out of whack.  If it really was
the simple explanation that explained things best, pretty much everyone
would adopt it.  And rather rapidly, for something as practical as
political philosophy.

And the VERY NEXT SENTENCE (which you include) talks about showing how their
merits are lacking.

You remind me of the crew's response to Dick Deadeye in HMS Pinafore.
Even when he simply agrees with them wholeheartedly, they turn on him
for his "depraved utterances" and "revolutionary sentiments".

17:  Nonsense.  You've merely treated the sarcasm literally.

18:  It's equivocation on the part of the libertarians, using their own
special meaning rather than plain English.  That's what I explain.

And within that special meaning, there is no difference between the
libertarian viewpoint and that of almost any other group except for
which specific rights ought to be enforced.

19:  I'm hardly concerned with initial acquisition of property: it is so very
tiny as portion of our economic doings now that I feel it could be ignored.
What I am concerned with is the vast amount of property that has been
acquired, whatever its means.  I am denied the right to acquire that property
on the basis of ludicrous "prior claims".  I am denied the right to acquire
property by the same means with the same effort.

Perpetuation of the acquired property rights is the problem.  I think
something nearer a Georgist system would be better than a libertarian one.
And indeed, that's what we've got in property taxes.

If you support current distribution, then you support the initial force AND
you will use force to perpetuate that distribution.

20:  Rather pathetic.  First, there ARE libertarians who consider slavery
acceptible.  Those who think that contractual slavery would be OK, and those
(like David Friedman) who think that sometimes slavery is a better outcome
than the alternatives (usually death.)

Second, slave owners and traders were capitalists, and quite a few of them
strenuously objected to government interference in their business.  They
were the economic libertarians of their era.  It was LIBERALS who wanted to
extend rights to all.

Third, your kidnapping example doesn't make government responsible for you
UNLESS there is a social contract between you and the government.  And of
course, the kidnapper is the genuinely responsible person.  He could cease
his active restraint at any time.  To require the government to take positive
action without an agreement would be oppressive.

Fourth, most enforcement of slavery was private.  There was an enormous
private market for shackles, implements of torture, etc.  And the state
laws concerning slavery were of course driven by demand by entrepreneurs
to make slavery less risky and more profitable.

Fifth, you have not addressed my points.  I address them at slaveowners
and capitalists, not libertarians.  I have no doubt that present libertarians
wouldn't want to re-create slavery.  But slavery was not the fault of
government: it was the fault of capitalists.

21:  Last month, the authors of the quiz contaced me to get my input.
Our discussion pretty much confirmed my points.  I may eventually write a
FAQ about the quiz, discussing the issues.

For example, we did discuss changing the questions to target more precisely.
They did talk about changing how many would end up in the quadrants.



Summary: you still need to work on this.  Most of your argument misses mine
by arguing against something I didn't say.

Mike Huben      mhuben@world.std.com    http://world.std.com/~mhuben/

   For rebuttals to libertarian arguments, check out:
    Critiques of Libertarianism     http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
    Liberalism Resurgent            http://www.scruz.net/~kangaroo/tenets.htm

The key to understanding this, and to understanding Libertarianism itself,
is to realize that their concept of individual freedom is the "whopper" of
"right to have the State back up business". That's a wild definition of freedom. 
Seth Finkelstein