I wish that were true, but it's not. Laws are not the only source of unfair leverage. Private enterprise can and does have lots of ways to rule (and screw) even honest people. e.g.:
Exactly, Rand was a master of telling half-truths. While the quote makes sense on the surface, she gently shuffles aside the many economic ways you can control an honest man (denying him food, resources, housing etc).
It's worth publicly observing that the only libertarian movements that I've seen which really attack not just governments but also government-like institutions, are bizarre anarcho-socialist libertarianisms.
I like to put this in concrete terms like so: we get crappy and overpriced food at the TU Delft because the University contracts with a catering service named Sodexo. It's become a point of ritual that our department saunters down to the canteen, orders a dreary meal, and then complains about it. This is the sort of problem which libertarians want to solve with more competition. That's a noble idea, but what competition, exactly? I don't have the freedom to start up a restaurant of my own nearby -- I would need the university's permission. The university is thus in some sense government-like: it owns territory, demands some sort of 'tax' in the form of tuition from the denizens of that territory, probably charges Sodexo certain 'property tax' analogues for operating there, and businesses cannot operate on their territory without their explicit consent. The Men With Guns that I've heard libertarians talk about are sort of there, but a step removed -- that is, if you did try to open up this restaurant you would probably receive a threat and ultimately the police could escort you away; just as might happen if you sit-in on courses without paying tuition and they catch you. The most major difference is that universities can expel you; usually criminals in a nation get imprisoned, not deported.
I guess what I'm saying is, It's not just "economic ways you can control an honest man", but there are potentially many ways to implement an authoritarian state inside a libertarian utopia -- and to me that just sounds like "there's something wrong here." It's like a security vulnerability in a political stance, or so.
I don't know; I don't have the answers. I was a libertarian once and then I got a bit too perplexed by this sort of thing.
I'm a fellow Sodexho hater, but sorry, your argument isn't compelling. While you might not like their food, you clearly find its "value" (taste, convenience, etc) superior to the alternatives (bringing lunch, taking a longer lunch, hanging jobs, etc). You don't have the right to open a competing restaurant inside a McDonalds either; that doesn't make them the Men With Guns.
Well, it's not about what you have the "right to open." If you start using that terminology then anti-libertarians will just start to say, "a government is sovereign and has all sorts of rights on their land, including a right to tax." Suddenly you start saying, "you don't have the right to not pay your taxes either; that doesn't make them the Men With Guns."
That's why I was very careful to say that the curiosity is that many libertarians are perfectly OK with "government-like institutions." The point is nothing to do with Sodexo or even my interpretation of its value -- the point is that what I can or can't do in response is controlled by a bureaucracy called the TU Delft. That's really my focus, not Sodexo itself.
The fact that I accept Sodexo over the alternatives thus has no bearing on this point that, if I wanted to open a competing business to Sodexo, I'd need to accept the authority of (and pay taxes to) an entrenched bureaucracy which most libertarians do not really have any ideological problems with -- the university -- and which would ultimately enforce its own policies with police action where necessary. To the extent that I have an "argument" (and I'd say that I probably don't; I'm probably just wasting time on Hacker News), you have not refuted any of its premises.
If your university sucks, switch to another. Or pursue starting up a new one.
I realize that you aren't saying that your university sucks, the point is that you can change it, it is subject to competition and cannot use possibly lethal force to compel you. My argument would be that with time, since the university is subjected to competition, it will get better or perish (or the whole industry gets "disrupted"). If you have an environment where things are subjected to competition, those government-like institutions will get better. Albeit slowly. Thus the opposition of the large government, since the large government will very effectively hinder hopes of such environment, at least in a libertarian opinion.
It's not that the government-like institutions aren't a problem, but the large government is the bigger problem.
A side note: It is my understanding that one of the aims of the seastanding stuff is to provide more competition between governments.
Another side note because maybe some don't know it: there are major differences in opinion inside groups of people who identify as libertarian in what is an acceptable scope of government, or if it should indeed exist at all (the extreme). Thus the "libertarian opinion" I used is a misnomer.
I guess in the pseudo-analogy (universities are government-like), there is also indeed a pseudo-analogy of the form, "if you don't like your government and its tax system, move somewhere else. Oh, you don't like any taxes? Well what did you expect -- that governance would be a free lunch?" -- and that "oh, you can change your government, it is subject to competition in a quite-unregulated market of international governance" and so on. The larger point is that there is an opposition to governments which isn't opposed more generally to government-like structures -- and that arguments which libertarians would support for government-like structures are ones they would confidently reject for governments. ("I shouldn't have to change governments!" becomes "I shouldn't have to change universities", or "I can't change the government, I'm not a senator" becomes "I can't change the university, I'm not a dean.")
It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size -- that there is no libertarian ideological opposition to big government, because it's the same things that they ideologically support at small scale, but there is just a pragmatic opposition to big government because it is big. So all of the stuff about Initiation of Force is at best inconsistently applied and at worst total crap.
Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand. More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of "governments shouldn't enforce real estate regulations or trademark laws, those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense, 'don't walk here or I'll hurt you', 'don't say this name without my permission or I'll hurt you'."
> "It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size"
No. Well yes, but it's confusing to say so, the point is in the location of the government in the "pyramid" if you will, it's the "top dog". If government is not such as to allow competition and is willing to enforce such position, and it's reach is far and wide, the rest of the environment is doomed. In such an environment, there will be no competition for government-like institutions, and they will suck forever and ever.
That is to say, there is no hope in those institutions getting better if you don't have the environment fixed first.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with those institutions existing, since in a competitive environment they do not have the force to compel you. They may fool you with fashion and fads and reality distortions, but fundamentally they can not compel you with force. And that force to compel is something the government has and doesuse, in fact it asserts a monopoly on using such force.
If some government-like institution has such a force, you can dig down and see that the force is actually granted to it by the government. (this follows from the government's assertion of monopoly on such force)
Since most current governments allow some kind of limited competition, things do usually get a little better very very very slowly, speed depending mostly on the amount of competition allowed. Obviously culture has an effect on how bad it will get if the government's power is great etc. etc.
> "Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand"
To me Ayn Rand is more like romance novels for libertarian leaning people. Her points are seductive but ultimately lack rigorous substance "in the real world", fun to read though (or watch the movies, or listen to, since there are some songs that have some quotes in the lyrics). So I don't really care if some argument would work on Ayn Rand or not. It is my understanding, from n = a small number, that similar positions are not rare. Very cautious attitude is also exercised towards other cult-ish stuff like stefbot.
> "More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of ... those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense"
To me, that has an anarcho-capitalist vibe, granted this is probably because of difference in social scenery. I do know that the anarcho-socialists have similar arguments, I'm mostly familiar only with Chomsky's. Btw. anarcho-capitalists are infuriating and interesting to talk to.
Wow that's a lot of text for a point that is so clear in my head. I hope it gives you a plausible explanation why some reject the government but not the government-like institutions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, "look one level down." You're very concerned with who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns. What the government, or a government-like institution, does that you don't like is not "have a monopoly on force" but rather "arbitrarily prevent competition." You say "If government is not such as to allow competition... the rest of the environment is doomed." That's just as true at the level of these government-like institutions. They control an environment and can certainly doom it.
I think your response earlier took the form "not so! there's an entire environment outside the university which does not necessarily suck!". But there's also an entire environment outside of your present government that does not necessarily suck. A modern state isn't much more than a bureaucracy tied to territory. (There is a pretense of independence from other institutions but in reality that can often be compromised by military actions, treaties, and sanctions.) To be fair, since World War II the countries of this world have gotten much more shy about letting people cross their borders, and it's much less like driving into the university quad and a bit more like requiring swipe-card access and ID to enter a university cleanroom. But let's not mistake rights exercised with rights possessed.
Actually, most of this way of thinking comes to me from stefbot. Stefan Molyneux is... well, let me put it this way: when he says something I agree with, I become much more skeptical of that thing: so I actually treat him as having a negative correlation with reliable knowledge. This happened most prominently when I started reading his tome on objective moral facts. I would like, on a good day, to believe in objective moral facts. This has been shaken by reading his work which attempts to prove them.
So, like, if you just listen to the very first Freedomain podcasts, he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, and all the while he seems to be perfectly happy about this embedding. I will confess that I had given up Objectivism many years before I first heard this podcast, and no longer considered myself a libertarian at this point, but this was the moment where I started being really skeptical of the libertarian promise. That is where I started to think about to what extent libertarians really oppose totalitarianism, if it can exist in government-like examples.
Maybe this phrasing of the problem goes too far, and it's only a suspicion: but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc."
The difference between the ancap and the ansoc, and the reason that I find the ansoc view really interesting, is that the ansoc feels free to say, "yeah, that's all total crap because the government can't own the land either." By saying that the government obtained its "rule" over the land by being a big bloody bully, and questioning that legitimacy, anarcho-socialism actually has something of a place to stand. But it's about as radical as the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and emptiness, and I'm not sure that such a powerful negation is a wise idea.
Indeed, maybe more weight should be given to opposing such institutions. Though I'm still not convinced that the government should not be fixed first, and indeed I think that it is required to do so to be able to fundamentally affect those govt-like institutions.
I think your policy with stefbot is very healthy.
> ".. who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns."
> "...but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc.""
This is a great observation, though I do not agree completely. I feel that this applies to ancap very much and the only argument I've heard that could be applied here has been "But it would result in better situation overall if the govt was successfully opposed, even if new ones arise", and that is not very convincing indeed if the resulting situation will fall back to suck (democracy by anarchy as I've heard it called). If someone here is ancap I'm very interested in their response to this.
The reason I do not agree is because there is no real way of you creating your own government/country to compete with the existing ones, for the land area is limited and the governments are asserting that monopoly on force you find non-vital on their respective areas (if they weren't asserting it, how would they exist, thus it is indeed vital by definition). I guess I'm saying that you don't have the right to claim ownership and assert it by force if it makes you immune to competition (also, I now realize, patents). This separates govt-like institutions from governments. Go ahead and pick it apart, please, I just pulled it out of my bag by following my own reasoning.
But indeed, because of discussions like this, my mind might be very different tomorrow.
> "... he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, ..."
Yeah this is something one has to be constantly aware of. And it's actually surprisingly easy to be aware if one has the luxury of having smart people care enough to listen to you, but very hard otherwise. The thing to be aware of is that many have their thoughts about the perfect government, but ultimately you would have to be a totalitarian dictator to actualize them. You forcing people to live in your ideal is fundamentally no better than others doing so. A realization I've seen linked to Voluntaryism, which I feel has similar emptiness you describe with ansoc, but I'm really not knowledgeable enough to say anything of actual value about it.
Following this forward, one ends up in the dilemma, if I oppose government power, how can I uphold belief that I have the right to decide for others? After all changing a government to minarchy would be forcing it's current inhabitants to live in it or move away, and some of them might be democrats who do not want that minarcy of yours. Can I really believe that I have the right to do this?
Either one has to appeal to reasonableness and practicality, and that is very very suspect, much like a big furry frightening monster offering candy, or one turns his/her thoughts on to ancap or ansoc or voluntaryism or something else, all of which have their own problems, some of which were very briefly touched in this discussion. And again we are back in thinking about our ideal world. Frak.
I wish that were true, but it's not. Laws are not the only source of unfair leverage. Private enterprise can and does have lots of ways to rule (and screw) even honest people. e.g.:
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2011/12/cosmo-and-me-part-3-how-w...