Here are some thoughts in reaction to the many interesting comments on my post on Peter Thiel.
1. Is libertarianism elitist?
I believe so. I think that most people value their own liberty, but they have a hard time extending this value to strangers who they do not entirely trust. It takes a lot of sophistication to appreciate enumerated powers, free speech, and the emergent order of market competition. Instead, I think that Fear Of Others’ Liberty is the norm. I believe that America’s Constitution was designed by elites, and as we gradually extended the franchise to include more FOOLs the Constitutional safeguards have been crushed under the weight of popular opinion.
2. Is libertarianism a white male ideology?
I don’t know whether there are racial differences, but I think I that empathizer-systemizer theory can explain statistical differences in male-female attitudes. To be libertarian, you have to look at the super-Dunbar world from the perspective of a systemizer rather than an empathizer, which means that libertarians are more likely to be found among males than among females.
3. Why are libertarians unwilling to sign up as conservatives or progressives?
Conservatives make concessions to FOOLs in order to get elected. Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions. Even worse, these concessions have for a long time included deficit spending and expansion of state power in the name of providing safety and security. Worst of all, conservatives long ago abandoned the doctrine of enumerated powers.
In practice, conservatives usually do not overturn progressive initiatives. Obamacare is the latest example.
Progressives propose government policies from an empathizer perspective. They will gladly toss away personal liberty in order to “help” people. Lockdowns are the latest example.
4. I think that many (most?) libertarians feel culturally in tune with college-educated progressives. I am an exception to that. I find that you can be smart and nice without a college degree, and you can be intellectually uninteresting and/or personally nasty with one.
My wife and most people in our social circle are not academics. On occasions where I have to spend a lot of time with a group of college professors, I am relieved when the gathering is over. When I was at Freddie Mac, I became bored with other economists, and I eventually gravitated toward people with experience in the mortgage business and/or information systems. When I started my Internet business, after about a year I found a partner who had only a high-school equivalency degree.
In business, I noticed that I did not like meetings attended primarily by males, nor did I like meetings attended primarily by females. At parties, when men congregate in one room and women congregate in another room, I find myself unable to engage in either conversation, and I usually end up talking to someone else who is feeling left out.
The bottom line is that I seem to get along ok with various types of people, without feeling especially sympatico with people in my field or with my level of education. Perhaps that leads me to be less inclined than other libertarians to side with progressives.
Random observations:
*Jonathan Haidt had a post on a psychology study of the Libertarian personality. It seems to match fairly well: https://righteousmind.com/largest-study-of-libertarian-psych/
*In a previous post, Dr Kling offered a critique of the Pew political typology which excludes libertarians. Pew does a lot of great and interesting work that would be much more useful if it didn’t force everyone into varieties of Democrats or Republicans.
*Yea for rediscovering enumerated powers. Somewhere there is probably a good Jonathan Macey quote on keeping the transactions costs of lobbying government for a benefit higher than private alternatives. The elites do seem to have crushed the USA constitution.
*Libertarians can theoretically be reconciled with populism even beyond the tolerance for non-elites evinced by Dr. Kling.
James M. Buchanan contributions to constitutional economics seems under appreciated. Per Wikipedia:
“According to Buchanan the ethic of constitutionalism is a key for constitutional order and “may be called the idealized Kantian world” where the individual “who is making the ordering, along with substantially all of his fellows, adopts the moral law as a general rule for behaviour”. Buchanan rejects “any organic conception of the state as superior in wisdom to the citizens of this state”. This philosophical position forms the basis of constitutional economics. Buchanan believed that every constitution is created for at least several generations of citizens. Therefore, it must be able to balance the interests of the state, society, and each individual.”
As Alan Peacock interpreted this:
“The basic concern of Buchanan is to deny that a libertarian position requires the making of ethical judgments of the kind made by social philosophers who ‘play God’. … It follows that liberalism is about determination of the ‘correct’ contractual procedures which will allow individuals to consent to intervention by government. “
Others have written about how Buchanan started from a fundamental concern with how people can live together without violating each other’s rights. This concern strikes me as the core of populism and what should be the central concern of the constitutional convention movement.
FOOL means?
Fear Of Others Liberty.
I don’t understand how libertarians reconcile near-term priorities placed on unlimited immigration and “no foreign tariffs” with the idea that only the elite would understand libertarianism. Kindling the flame of liberty requires protection from authoritarian winds that would snuff it out. Perhaps when the flame of liberty is burning brightly there will be a time when barriers can be relaxed.
There are always tensions between the implications of an ideological viewpoint and what it takes to be “in the game” of influencing power, that is, what it takes to get support from:
1. Enough voters to win elections (General Populism),
2. Enough very wealthy people to get sufficient donations to fund political campaigns and smart influencers (Money Elitism), and
3. Enough prestigious opinion-influencers to maintain a reputation for respectability and sophistication. (Status Elitism)
You also need a critical mass of prolific, impressive minds, but if you’ve got money and status, the supply takes care of itself, as if guided by an invisible hand. Since all of these things are in positive feedback, and the stakes are enormous, one faces a terrible bootstrap problem getting anything new off the ground. But also, if one of the legs of the stool fails, it won’t be providing its help to the others, and the whole thing will fall over.
Also, to the extent you got this going and have a stool of any importance at all, your opponents will be trying hard to kick the legs over: to steal your voters, to close the wallets of your donors by making them not want to associate with you, and to ruin your public reputation by calling you a bunch of stupid haters or cynical flacks.
So, for an adherent to the ideology, one faces the difficult choice of whether to compromise, and by how much. But it’s tricky, for several reasons, because not all compromises work for all three legs of the stool, and it’s like those old performers trying desperately to keeping three plates spinning on tall thin rods.
First, what one support group likes, another may hate. It is the complicated work of political professionals to try and cobble together a minimally effective coalition of these fissiparous groups, but there is not always a solution to this problem or a ‘ZOPA’ (zone of possible agreement), in which case one has little choice but to settle for being a rump movement.
Second, the political situation is dynamic and always changing, so the compromises also need to change, and there is usually little agreement about how or whether to respond to changes.
Relatedly, some of those changes are the need to respond to new tactics from those opponents trying to kick out your legs, in a perpetual evolutionary arms race. Just as in nature, if the opponent discovers a disruptive “killer app” for any of the legs of the stools, they can very quickly break entirely out of the equilibrium and drive your movement toward rapid extinction.
You could do a good analysis of the fortunes of libertarianism since WWII simply by following the history of those three legs, and also by keeping in mind that libertarianism is a peculiarly American phenomenon, because, as Hayek pointed out, it was also conservative, being the American tradition. But at for today, the question is about the state of those compromises for support groups mentioned above.
My view is that most libertarian public intellectuals have abandoned any effort to be popular, by moderating those positions which would have the highest “marginal rate of transformation” from compromises into voters. Pardon the pun, but this freedom from political challenges has been kind of ‘liberating’ for them. Without, “Libertarianism In One Country”, they are free to double-down on things like open borders, which is the freedom of the movement to commit suicide.
As for the money, that is hard to tell, though looking at the public actions and statements of the latest crop of younger billionaires leads me to believe there aren’t many more Kochs out there, and that they are outnumbered by progressives 100 to 1. That is enough to keep a few institutes and publications going, but not much else.
And as for respectability, when they aren’t giving awards to hatchet jobs like “Democracy in Chains”, the progressives have made any meaningful dissent from their program into heresy for which the penalty is social cancellation. The trouble is that so long as this is effective, an ideology is either condemned to being a radical fringe movement, or else it compromises so much that there is no point to affiliating with its few distinctions and it implodes, as with the Mainline Protestant Churches.
Similar things can be said for the mainstream GOP establishment, which is why the Republican Party will go the way of the Whigs. The Democrats will then split up into a bad wing and an even worse wing.
+1
Great Derbyshire link. At that time Derbyshire was certain that libertarians embraced capitalism. But can we be sure today?
Dr. Kling writes “I think that many (most?) libertarians feel culturally in tune with college-educated progressives.”
I was reminded of this reading Yoram Hazony at Quillette today. Hazony writes:
“Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this:
1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.
2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.
3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.
4. Return to #1 above and repeat.
Of course, not all liberals give in to the Marxists’ demands—and certainly not on every occasion. Nevertheless, the dance is real. As a generalized view of what happens over time, this picture is accurate, as we’ve seen throughout the democratic world over the last 70 years. Liberals progressively adopt the critical theories of the Marxists over time, whether the subject is God and religion, man and woman, honor and duty, family, nation, or anything else.”
https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
One might also observe that if many libertarian economists are not on China’s Thousand Talents payroll, they are leaving money on the table, because their writing certainly is indistinguishable from what would be ordered by Peking. Do Trump-bashing libertarians actually believe the Harris Administration is in their best interest?
It would be interesting to get a handle on how many libertarians are of the libertarian socialist school. I suspect many more than the of the school that imagines that the Founders were libertarians.
And it is amusing that so many putative libertarians prioritize open borders when relying upon closed religious and social groups to maintain their own identity and culture. Aside from sea steading which has gone nowhere, the only other attempt at a libertarian intentional community was Paulville, entry into which was limited to followers of Ron Paul. And looking at anarchist intentional democracy we find that many of those employ direct democracy.
Of course given that democracy has died in the USA and a new government will be installed based upon an electoral process that fails to meet even minimal international standards of legitimacy, cultural secession into intentional communities, cults, underground networks, dark webs, etc will be the path of resistance to our new Marxist overlords.
yes on old Derbyshire link, still VERY relevant and very anti-illegal immigration:
There is no contradiction between maximum liberty within a nation and maximum vigilance on the nation’s borders. Not only is there no contradiction between the two things, in fact, it may be that the second a precondition for the first.
Libertarian-ish societies very much depend on Rule of Law. Illegal immigrants are criminals and deserve no rewards – get in line with other legal immigrant wannabees. Who were unfairly born in some not-America country. No cosmic justice.
All of the Trump conservatives want to enforce the border laws. There is more of mix on increasing, decreasing, or keeping the current levels of legal immigration. I favor more; many favor less.
Arnold is … wrong? misguided? naive? deluded? very unlikely to get anyone elected? by saying:
Conservatives make concessions to FOOLs in order to get elected. Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions. Even worse, these concessions have for a long time included deficit spending and expansion of state power in the name of providing safety and security.
Rule of Law demands enforcement of current immigration laws; few voters are stupid enough to genuinely support totally Open Borders (tho their Brain Elephants might convince them they really do want it, as long as it’s not there.)
Tariffs on China, who is NOT fulfilling most of its WTO & “Free Trade” / managed trade commitments, seems “fair”. And far better than war. Cooperation means Tit for Tat — or else you’re an aggressor or a sucker. Trump claims to want Free Trade — after others’ stop their tariffs & non-tariff barriers to US exports.
I’m pretty sure US total imports are up under Trump; as well as an even bigger increase in US exports. (Not all Trump credit, blah blah – what’s the best one number metric to compare? Total imports; better than trade balance).
The “deficit spending leads to Hyper-Inflation” alarmism has been no more accurate than global warming alarmism. The Fed is printing money – where is it going? It’s Hyper Asset Inflation, so the rich houses go up faster in price; the rich stocks go up faster in price. Likely to end … sometime … a year or two after Japan’s economic problems become clear from their nat. debt of 220% of GNP .
Trump subsidizing (bailing out?) millions of working taxpayers with thousands or maybe just hundreds of tax cut dollars is far better than Bush-Obama bailing out hundreds of rich incompetent bankers with millions.
In 1980 I supported Ed Clark’s run for President vs Reagan vs Carter. I thought printing money would lead to booms & busts. It sort of has, but not so certainly and arguably there were other causes.
Far better to have tax cut based deficits with less taxes collected than similar deficits based on higher taxes and higher gov’t programs, like Solyndra.
It’s a mistake of voters to want more gov’t power for security. But that’s what voters vote for, and Freedom plus Democracy means they’ll at least get more gov’t. Like in Mn & Seattle.
I cannot but agree: “The “deficit spending leads to Hyper-Inflation” alarmism has been no more accurate than global warming alarmism. The Fed is printing money – where is it going? It’s Hyper Asset Inflation, so the rich houses go up faster in price; the rich stocks go up faster in price. Likely to end … sometime … a year or two after Japan’s economic problems become clear from their nat. debt of 220% of GNP .”
Reminds me of the old joke: A guy jumps off a thousand foot building. Nine hundred feet down, he’s asked, “How’s the trip?” and replies “Great so far.”
I would question whether libertarians skew more male than other kinds of unpopular or “extreme” political positions. It may be that men are more inclined to take such positions generally rather than being attracted by systematizing tendencies to libertarianism specifically.
The racial skew is likely a product of the historic rhetorical and coalitional affinity between US libertarians and US right-wingers, the latter having been traditionally most hostile to racial equality. In a world with less right-libertarian fusionism I think libertarianism would be less white.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense as Libertarianism has a greater proportion of white adherents than normal conservatism.
They do skew more, that is just a fact. There is no sense in denying it. But it’s not because of affiliation with “the right”.
There are plenty of (married) women on the right. There are plenty of married men at libertarian events, who leave their uninterested wives at home. This happens the other way around at an approximate rate of zero.
It’s not ‘the right’, and it’s probably only half the “empathizer” skew, which while obviously true, and which trying to demonstrate the truth of which will get you fired from Google, is not the whole story.
It’s because of the demographics of who usually benefits from state interventions. Non-whites and women benefit a lot. Allowing that to happen was a fatal strategic failure.
Libertarianism is good when it has the historical advantage of being able to function as a little-c constitutional theory of the right state regime and governance structure and the rules which should apply to everyone in the contest for power. That is, when it is transcending mere politics, and describing the narrowness of the space in which politics is allowed to operate and social disputes and conflicts managed and resolved, so long as these processes and mechanisms don’t exceed those constitutional constraints.
But libertarianism is not good as a political theory that is “in the arena” and in competition with other political philosophies proposing ‘mere’ law and ordinary politicies in a democracy, while operating under a different ideological canopy legitimizing much broader state power and authority. It is all strategy, and no tactics. If a strategy-dependent entity loses its strategic defense-in-depth, and has to fight on the tactical level, it is done for.
In this competition for winning hearts and minds, there is the problem of personal interests and with every potential system naturally producing winners and losers. The progressive position is flexible and evolves by means of expediency and an ideology-power feedback loop, but in general their political formula is to turn losers into vote bank clients by promising to use the power of the state and of their captured institutions of public influence to pay those people off in money, jobs, and status.
If there was a genuinely libertarian constitution such that this was recognized as abusive foul play and effectively prohibited, one wouldn’t have to worry about it. But the progressives rewrote the constitution and have been able to divide the population into those who are their clients and those who are left out.
That’s the problem. Libertarianism is an anti-Clientalist philosophy. When one party is successfully able to pursue a Clientalist strategy, it forces the entire political ecosystem into rival Clientalisms. Remember, there were republics in classical antiquity too. Most of them succumbed to the decline brought on by exactly this kind of political degeneration.
That means there are indeed lots of people who will be better off in the short term from more Democrat wins, and lots of people who will be made worse off, who would be better off in a more libertarian environment, with less progressive thumbs on the all the scales.
That’s why all non-progressive movements in America skew white and male. The libertarians *already* were skewing very male before this became a big issue, because of empathizers and empathizer suffrage. But when the progressives sucked all the female and non-white oxygen out of the room for all the non-progressives, and in comparison to the changing demographics of the population, the deviation became especially stark in the case of the libertarians.
Remember that thing about the most liberal group being single young college-educated women, and the most conservative being older white men without college? These guys are now pretty dominant in the “base” constituency of any non-progressive movement or party. Who shall win them as clients? Libertarians or the “Toward a New Conservatism” crowd ranging from Douthat and Salam, to Oren Cass, to the Antonites?
In Clientalism, the question always is, what are you going to pay your clients.
The Reform Conservatives propose paying them in subsidies like EITC and child tax credits, and maybe some free daycare and paid maternal leave. That turns out to be smallish beer, but worse, they don’t dare target it specifically to their actual deplorable clients, so most of the expenditure spills over into their opponents. Now, that is a little clever-sneaky because of the potential for strategic “electorate shaping”, that is, if you make it more affordable to form families, more people will, and when they get in families, they will become more conservative, so you will get more clients. Again, you aren’t getting a lot of bang for your buck, but more to the point, it does no good to “help” your clients if you are also helping your non-clients, because in politics, the point of the help if to make your clients better off not just in absolutes but in *relative* terms, that is better than the non-clients, so they can rise in the zero-sum game of status.
Oren Cass and Anton are going to pay these guys off in a lot more of the kind of jobs they like, higher-paying, medium-skilled, post-war economy union factory jobs making things. If China did not exist it would be necessary to invent it, but, as it happens, China does exist. If the tariffs aren’t working the answer is obviously more tariffs. These clients will apparently enjoy the satisfactions of their predecessors, and with their extra money will be able to attract mates and form happy, healthy leave-it-to-beaver families. Or something.
But that’s not going to work either, because the economy doesn’t work that way anymore, and making it work that way at anything near affordable levels would require regime change, not just winning a few elections, and not even taking over the GOP and converting it to this cause. True, stopping immigration will tighten up the labor supply and probably raise real wages for lower-skilled workers, and also reduce the supply of future similar losers, but there’s probably still too much water under the bridge in terms of technological change to make this work. But for the marginal guy who gets the marginal additional good job, the problem is the same as above, which is “non-client-spillover”. The factories we still have aren’t full of white guys anymore because the country isn’t full of them anymore. The hope is that a bunch of non-white workers will be, what, grateful? They will be able to see through the constant propaganda to understand the new GOP is on the side of their jobs? Maybe they will become leave-it-to-beaver dads and change their perspective on life? This is kind of absurd, to the point where I still think Anton was engaging in subtle gallows humor.
So, what about the libertarians? What can they possibly offer these guys? Well, it isn’t going to be redistributed subsidies from the state, that’s not very libertarian. And it isn’t going to be tariffs or restrictions on free trade in global markets. And, apparently, it isn’t even going to be lower immigration.
But there is one thing they can do, which is actually a very libertarian individualist thing to do, which is to call for, get this, ‘meritocracy’. That is, the immediate implementation of total colorblindness, gender-blindness, and every other kind of group blindness across every level of government, and for the termination any program or office given responsibility or authority to count up the number of heads of each kind. The state must also refuse to do business or grant money to any entity that doesn’t do likewise. Finally, the state must either get completely out of the business of prosecuting certain kinds of discrimination, or it must add “political affiliation” and “expression” to the list of protected categories.
This doesn’t cost a dime, and doesn’t spill over into non-clients.
But, despite being quite libertarian, this is never going to happen, and we all know why. Because the progressives would see this as a move in the great political status war equivalent to the Soviets putting nukes in Cuba, far, far beyond the red line, and rising to DEFCON-2 of imminent total warfare, unleashing wave after wave of ruinous cancellations in the politics of personal destruction.
YES on Clientalism:
When one party is successfully able to pursue a Clientalist strategy, it forces the entire political ecosystem into rival Clientalisms.
The NeverTrumpers, and maybe most Libers, want to continue to pretend our political ecosystem is not, already, down the rathole of Clientalisms.
And tribal politics, identities, make it easy for Dems to pander to various Clients.
I’ve already switched modes from fighting against this change – we’ve lost – to starting to create a voting block of normal Americans for marriage, fidelity, free speech, human rights. And ya, more EITC, more kid benefits for all kids and marriage benefits/ tax cuts for all marriages.
Part of the real power of meritocratic market capitalism is that good value products (combo of quality & price) results in success and allows more easy future success. The good producers get rewarded. The problem with gov’t programs to help the poor is that the bad individual decisions by poor people get rewarded, so there are more bad decisions.
Other market-oriented policy pundits are much more positive about the efforts of the Trump Administration:
John H Cochrane in 2019 praised the Trump Administration on health care: “All well and good, and a testament to lots of the good regulatory reform work going on under the radar screen in Washington. In some sense the headline chaos is quite useful. And my personal kudos to the market oriented health economists working on this effort”
David Henderson wrote an article praising “Trump’s Deregulatory Successes”.
Casey Mulligan praised the Trump Administration in 2020, “That [CEA] report, released in June, concluded that the past three years of deregulation is comparable to, and probably exceeds, any deregulatory episode in modern U.S. history.”
The Democrats have had a majority in the House, so Republicans are quite limited in their authority to make policy changes.
Kling is unreasonably uncharitable to the Trump Administration.
Not vetoed a single spending bill
Politicized the Fed to unprecedented level
Uses protectionist trade policies to pick domestic winners (and holds it over affected workers’ at speeches)
Refused to get behind a replace bill that was substantially different than the most problematic parts of Obamacare (with Republican majorities required in 1st two years of office)
It’s a broader view beyond the scope of regulation. The willingness to do anything by Executive Order is really troubling.
I don’t fear the liberty of other liberals; but the liberty of sociopaths and of political or religious fanatics is another matter.
Sorry to second post, but I have a second comment.
Most Kling libertarians support free market competition for thee, but government privilege for me. Particularly in regareds to a university system that enjoys enormous levels of government privilege. Both financial support, but also social status, prestige, and political authority.
Why should Americans be obligated to pay, both financially and in terms of cultural and political authority, for a higher ed system that gives many high status admission slots to complete foreigners? This isn’t at all ideologically reasonable, but seems to be the norm among Kling libertarians.
Someone like Tyler Cowen specifically advocates for increased lavish government funding and status privileges for universities. If some widget maker wanted tariff protections, these libertarians would howl bloody murder, but far more lavish government privilege and protection to academics is fully endorsed.
Thanks for bringing Tyler’s example. He is a hypocrite. I’m not surprised he’s, however. To different degrees all elitists are hypocrites. Like any elitist, Tyler assumes that he knows enough to judge others because he is good at developing theories of how things are and how things should be. His econ theory tells him that someone relying on barriers to entry into a competition to win it is bad because they do harm to potential competitors and consumers, but someone undertaking a new venture is good because it creates opportunities that may help others. He is a hypocrite because he wants to present universities as creators of opportunities to help others through R&D while the reality is that most universities just compete with other alternatives to educate young people. Indeed, Tyler has been evading the ongoing revolt in higher education (see, for example, https://www.city-journal.org/academia-systemic-racism ).
Everyone needs to form their own judgements of the world. We are judging others. Elites do this as well. None of these judgements are necessarily right or wrong, but I can’t fault others for forming their own judgements.
I’m sure everyone is hypocritical, not equally, but at some level. The non-elite and powerless are hypocritical but it doesn’t matter that much. It only matters when people wielding power are hypocritical.
I do find the specific hypocrisy glaring of academics praising open markets, open borders, and no government handouts to others but the opposite to themselves.
Thanks for the comment.
I wish libertarians would become more obsessed with eliminating property zoning, with promoting the rights of street vendors, and with radical reduction of US interventionism globally.
Endless obsession with what is called “free trade” strikes me as imbalanced.
I don’t get how “free trade” means zero tariffs on imported goods made in China but does not seem to include zero tariffs for trading my labor with a local business.
Libertarians are absolutely obsessed with eliminating property zoning. Can you think of a libertarian that doesn’t shut up about it for five seconds?
However, name me a libertarian that will forcefully advocate for freedom of association? Not a one.
And yet property zoning is the workaround for the fact that freedom of association was outlawed.
Arnold is oblivious to the importance of culture, and therefore indifferent to indiscriminate mass immigration. Given population trends in the world, what would be left of his libertarian values in a nation peopled in this way? He needs to read Samuel Huntington’s “Who Are We.”
“and as we gradually extended the franchise to include more FOOLs the Constitutional safeguards have been crushed under the weight of popular opinion.”
“Currently, these concessions include tariffs and immigration restrictions.”
More FOOLS having the franchise destroyed libertarianism. Therefore, we need to import billions of FOOLS and give them the franchise!
This all started over Peter Thiel, who basically said that welfare recipients (might as well read low IQ) and women getting the vote doomed libertarianism.
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Thucydides: Arnold is oblivious to the importance of culture, and therefore indifferent to indiscriminate mass immigration.
asdf: More FOOLS having the franchise destroyed libertarianism. Therefore, we need to import billions of FOOLS and give them the franchise!
This criticism seems so obviously correct that it leads me to infer an unstated premise (or goal) in his reasoning.
Arnold, if I can ask you a direct question: Do you advocate continued mass immigration in part because you share Bryan Caplan’s preference for a diverse electorate that has no ethnic or religious majority group?
Let’s just remember that in the world libertarians want to create, anyone that wants to like work for a tire company in Kansas gets subjected to this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfujqteXYAErQJC?format=jpg&name=medium
Muh Free Market!
But yeah, minorities will be voting for other peoples liberty real soon!
The poster points out that getting fired for wearing a red hat is something straight out of The Simpsons. Who would have known that progressives would be taking Monty Burns side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaIU7IP2SVQ
What are the two biggest opportunities libertarians had in the last 4 years?
1) The 2016 Election
What did they do?
We all know the farce that was the 2016 Libertarian nomination process. Even after nominating the “moderate mainstream candidate” they didn’t get many votes. If the election had been restricted to “elites” they would have done no better.
2) The Pandemic
In a time of UNPRECEDENTED statist overreach into every facet of life…libertarianism has offered no resistance. People like Tyler Cowen and other mainstream libertarians have gone all in on lockdown socialism/fascism. Only Arnold has offered a decent take. Raising the alarm in March and coming out against this nonsense as more data came in.
It’s not clear the entire pandemic is a nothing burger. Protect nursing homes and the rest takes care of itself. Mortality rates low. Herd immunity at 20%. Lots of people with immunity from previous coronaviruses. Why are the shutdowns getting even harsher? Has libertarian fought back against this? The single most liberty destroying even in my lifetime and libertarianism has accomplished nothing.
Who can not look on this and say “libertarianism, what is it good for?”
1,2, & 4: Libertarians are white, male, college educated elitists, often elite-wannabees.
3. Those that stay Liber seem part of their own Purity Police, enjoying a small or very small group who do agree, rather than a larger group who often disagree.
Both Conservatives and Libertarians have lost the US colleges, and most colleges refuse to hire any. This will have to change before there can be any significant Libertarian progress, but I see little progress on it.
Where is the call for “diversity in political thought”? Since getting rid of protected groups is really not on the table, joining as in need of protection at least makes Cons & Libs less unequal Clients.
Arnold;
Fear of others’ liberty is actually not a foolish proposition – and that’s the ultimate problem. If you perceive a record of wanting to hurt you, even when it doesn’t seem to serve their interests, then …
Trust is the only basis on which one can advance the liberties of another. The definition of trust is a wicked problem itself; most of the problems get wicked pretty quickly.
For what it’s worth, antifa also seems to be predominantly white and male.
I get the impression Antifa has a very large white female component. Remember the “Wall of Moms”.
BLM 2015 was a black persons movement with black people riots in black people cities (my own Baltimore was burned down by a sea of black faces).
BLM 2020 seems like a white women’s movement, even in the streets. When I google “black lives matter protest” the first image is mostly white women.
And definitely in the Human Resources departments are driven by white women.
The people who show up at these events are broken up into groups that, while they have some overlap and people who move in multiple circles, are still ‘sociologically distinct’.
A lot of people have made the observation that counter-march coalition of political authority, media coverage, and march-protesters at the Charlottesville incident in 2017 seemed to be doing trials runs of the kind of tactics we are seeing today, to include the cells of antifa folks who ‘showed up’ (or what is more like marshaled, mobilized, mustered?).
What you saw among the anti-marchers in Charlottesville was the kind of mix you might expect of the different groups in the college scene, (or alternatively, the different cliques in high school, or the different hang-out scenes at the mall) and with those different groups tending to stick together. There was a coterie of leftist college white women who were like a much younger “women’s march” and their orbiters and wokefisher entourage of men of similar class. They weren’t interested in violence, or even being aggressive or shouting at all. They wanted to “attend” the event, and be photogenic for “social justice social media”.
There was a more rambunctious and chaotic rabble of non-whites who were much more in-your-face and who very much wanted the whole event to be about them and their causes, and who seemed to get into shoving matches with the ordinary college-whites and the troublemakers.
The troublemakers in antifa cells are a different group entirely, and the real nature of their organization and movement is scandalously under-reported or, more likely, and as is typical these days, intentionally mis-reported. For example, antifa “HQ” makes sure everybody knows that firearms are a big no-no, because those won’t be given a pass. This is America and there are millions of private small arm sales *every month*, plausibly more than the rest of the world combined. There is no way that a completely disorganized and spontaneous collection of random individuals looking for a fight has *zero* people who brought guns with them, but antifa HQ manages to enforce compliance somehow.
They are also mostly white, but they are below the class that would succeed in college, and they look much less photogenic: lots of scrawny, chubby, scruffy, and generally unkempt-looking folks, halfway down the stoner-bum ladder, wearing quasi-uniforms and LARPing red guards (but knowing also that they have official authority and the megaphone on their side).
They are more disciplined and practiced than one might think, and they are definitely interested in confrontation, conflict, and property damage, e.g., carrying baseball bats and bashing in car windows, setting dumpsters on fire, spray painting security camera lenses and throwing amateurish Molotov cocktails.
One thing these comments prove are that Libertarians love words. I enjoyed every single one. Please keep up the good fight to preserve human freedom.
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle
A Libertarian Theme Song