The tense of the tag this will get is wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

This is more of an "everything would be worse with libertarians":

[...] I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

Nicked from pecunium

Comments

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

I really hope this was spurred by that Onion article a few weeks ago.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It was.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

It was, but the libertarian in question is actually serious. As in seriously barking mad.

[avram]

This is actually pretty consistent with the way that most libertarians are fine with having a tax-supported standing army to protect us from enemy soldiers or terrorists, but not with protecting us from natural disasters (floods, disease, global warming).

Apparently it's only OK to protect us from intelligent threats -- those who could, theoretically, be argued into respecting out rights, and who, by refusing to listen to those arguments, are therefore violating our rights. Which implies that if a libertarian nation found itself facing the irrational undead horde of a necromancer, its army would be powerless to defend the populace without violating its national ethics.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Oh, so that's what really happened in Rapture.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

So the CDC is morally wrong?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

So I guess spacefaring aliens are unlikely to be libertarian. Evolution in action!

[halfassured.livejournal.com]

They tried making natural disasters a violation of human rights, but it didn't seem very effective. There is a federal arrest warrant for God, but he's gone into hiding.

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Yes, but Governor Walker has said he'll be checking carefully into the finances of all the monotheistic religions, to ensure they're not illegally supporting God with contributions.

Then he's taking a "sexy fun in the sun" holiday with the Koch brothers, for the full-on irony overload.

[jwgh]

"A reductio ad absurdum doesn’t work against someone who’s willing to be absurd" pretty much encapsulates my opinion of libertarianism.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Well said, I'll definitely remember that line.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I ran into this once myself, although not with libertarianism. I think.

Somebody on the internet was arguing that if God existed and had created the human race, then this was unethical on God's part because he had neglected to obtain humanity's prior permission to be created.

I attempted the reductio ad absurdum and suggested that, by this same reasoning, it is impossible to ethically have children, because you can't get the child's permission before having it.

He replied, "Exactly." Thus avoiding my reductio, and convincing me of the futility of continuing the conversation, in a single stroke.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

This has lead to my "most recent sentence begging to be diagrammed:"

Now if he wants to argue that he is not insane--that the claim that the claim that Immanuel Kant's claim that you have a moral duty not to lie to insane ax murderers about the whereabouts of their would-be victims is a reasonable claim is a reasonable claim is itself a reasonable claim--I would be happy to listen to him.

(from Brad DeLong's Higher Order Insanity from the Volokh Conspiracy)

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

...I don't think I want to know what that sentence means. D:

[halfassured.livejournal.com]

I keep getting bracket-matching errors on that sentence. Is that the point?

This is actually an interesting scenario to consider, proceeding upward through progressively higher layers of reference and seeing how it influences the plausibility of the statements involved. Since we're talking about what statements are "reasonable," it's assumed that we don't have deductive access to the truth-values of those statements at present. Thus we might assign an a priori probability to the likelihood that the statement is true and call it "reasonable" if the probability exceeds some threshold p. If we can calculate the probability of X being true exactly then the statement "X is reasonable" is guaranteed either true or false, so all higher-order reasonability statements are determined by the original.

On the other hand, if we don't know the truth-likelihood of the original statement then

I went to get a coffee and now I forget where I was going with this. I think the upshot was that you don't get any more slack by talking about higher-order reasonableness because all the available a priori information is incorporated into the initial probability?

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Not diagramming, exactly, but I think you can break it down by indentation:

Now if he wants to argue that he is not insane--
    that the claim
        that the claim
            that Immanuel Kant's claim
                that you have a moral duty not to lie to insane ax murderers about the whereabouts of their would-be victims
            is a reasonable claim
        is a reasonable claim
    is itself a reasonable claim
--I would be happy to listen to him.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Suffering is only real if it is caused by other people.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

No, more that suffering is irrelevant to a purist libertarian like Sasha Volokh, only rights-violations matter.

The fun bit is commenters calling Volokh out for not being pure enough, for granting taxation to fight crime and wars.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I wonder how this philosophical school can so desperately ignore the self-obvious fact that it is difficult to exercise one's liberties when one is dead.

-- Steve's at serious risk of neck injury from shaking his head so much these days.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

This may have something to do with the attraction to Libertarians of cryonics / uploading.

If you kill someone, you are sued (by the person's 'post mortem care company') and with that money the person is frozen.
If they are vapourised then you pay for restoration from a backup since, as we all know, continuity of consciousness is a snare and a delusion.
Therefore what we would think of as murder / vapourisation is reduced to a property rights issue.

Or something.

Thoughtless comment

[(Anonymous)]

Obviously the invisible hand of the market would catch any socialist space rocks in mid-air and hurl them back into space, just the same as any other problem is taken care of. You just have to believe.

Re: Thoughtless comment

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

The invisible hand of the market needs to deal out more dope-slaps on a regular basis.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

My Largely Mythological Husband almost had an apoplectic fit about this.

[t-guy.livejournal.com]

"I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). "

Ayn Rand disagrees, IIRR (Leave The Fat Cats Alone!, oops, sorry, Capitaliam: The Unknown Ideal, IIRR)

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I just had a vision of Ayn Rand on Youtube, under a blanket, weeping and sobbing hysterically: “Leave billionaires aloooooooooone!!”

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

As with other philosophies, the challenge is where to draw the squiggily line of 'not past this point.' I tend toward the libertarian viewpoint, and the thought that 'do we really need another program/tax'.

The biggest problem with reconciling a libertarian viewpoint is public works, as others have noted above. Once a certain population density has been reached, DIY water, sewer, power, fuel is impractical. On the flipside, monopolies tend toward abuse over time as well. Give a long enough time-frame, and someone (or a majority of board members) will be abusive to customers in the name of profit.
Governments tend toward monopolies, I should note, by way of consolidation of power.

Would that I could find a perfect solution. The best I can manage is using my personal philosophy not as a limit, but as a measure by which to judge the necessity and method of implementation of programs, laws, etc.

In the end, I find that the more one tries to implement a 'pure' system on a large group of humans, the worse it is; whether the extreme be anarchist-libertarianism or total communism. A muddle of compromise with checks, balances, and resets is the best I've seen so far.

[halfassured.livejournal.com]

That seems reasonable. Back when it was a starry-eyed ideal capitalism probably looked like it had these checks and balances inbuilt via the invisible hand, but it relied on some naive assumptions about things like people's capacity to act in their rational self-interest and the cost of entry into a market. I suppose it's always hard to look past the problems you have now, though: confronted with unjust monopolies perpetuated through government intervention, removing the government intervention probably seemed like the natural solution.