Why The Libertarian State Would Probably Fail.

[Arcipelago]

I believe libertarian countries don't exist today because they contradict with the ideas of a modern state. But, no country ever has been pure capitalist, pure socialist, pure conservative, pure liberal, pure statist, and so on. Every country on earth is a mix of views because it's people and leaders have a mix of views. Also we should point out in general how many people work and live outside of government control in the black market. (20% of the economy and 1/3 of the population) So I guess that's an example of a modern libertarian or anarcho-capitalist "state".

[Arkolon]

Libertarianism is rooted in what is on today's scale the far-left. Chomsky, for one, is a very important libertarian who is not a capitalist. Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin - although I never met them - were libertarians. Libertarianism is a philosophy that sees liberty as an end rather than a means to another end. Pinning it down to just one form because that's the way you heard it on TV when some American third party displayed an advert isn't how libertarianism should be defined.

I agree, but if we are talking about the US, my definition stands.

Chomsky is an American libertarian.

In any case, usage of the term 'libertarian' in the OP is fundamentally flawed and this seems to be impeding the OP's chances to get their point across. What is it, OP: monetarism, supply-side economics, anarchism, minarchism, any issues with libertarian ethics or philosophy in particular?

[Europe and Oceania]

Libertarianism is rooted in what is on today's scale the far-left. Chomsky, for one, is a very important libertarian who is not a capitalist. Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin - although I never met them - were libertarians. Libertarianism is a philosophy that sees liberty as an end rather than a means to another end. Pinning it down to just one form because that's the way you heard it on TV when some American third party displayed an advert isn't how libertarianism should be defined.

I agree, but if we are talking about the US, my definition stands.

Yes, we are.

This thread is mainly aiming at U.S. Non-Socialist Libertarians.

[Nedvia]

Libertarians are just anarchists, with jobs.

[Europe and Oceania]

Libertarians are just anarchists, with jobs.

Yes.

[Dushan]

I agree, but if we are talking about the US, my definition stands.

Yes, we are.

This thread is mainly aiming at U.S. Non-Socialist Libertarians.

Oh that explains a few things. I am not even from the U.S. and not a mainstream US libertarian either.

[Valaran]

Chomsky is an American libertarian.

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

[PaNTuXIa]

Chomsky is an American libertarian.

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

That "weird thing" is called Anarcho-Communism. Though he seems to fall a bit between libertarian socialism and the latter.

[Arkolon]

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

That "weird thing" is called Anarcho-Communism. Though he seems to fall a bit between libertarian socialism and the latter.

Chomsky is an American libertarian.

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

He seems to see liberty as a desirable end and not a means to any other end. That grants him the label of 'libertarian' since, well, that's the dictionary definition of a libertarian.

[PaNTuXIa]

That "weird thing" is called Anarcho-Communism. Though he seems to fall a bit between libertarian socialism and the latter.

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

He seems to see liberty as a desirable end and not a means to any other end. That grants him the label of 'libertarian' since, well, that's the dictionary definition of a libertarian.

Do you consider yourself an Anarchist?

[Arkolon]

He seems to see liberty as a desirable end and not a means to any other end. That grants him the label of 'libertarian' since, well, that's the dictionary definition of a libertarian.

Do you consider yourself an Anarchist?

No, why?

[PaNTuXIa]

Do you consider yourself an Anarchist?

No, why?

Just curious. Your national motto seemed to suggest it.

[Conscentia]

No, why?

Just curious. Your national motto seemed to suggest it.

Arkolon's motto is a reference to a book title. (And seems to imply that the country of Arkolon is a utopia.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia

[Arkolon]

No, why?

Just curious. Your national motto seemed to suggest it.

It's a play on the title of Robert Nozick's most famous book. I used to consider myself a libertarian, and that motto's a relic of the past.

[PaNTuXIa]

Just curious. Your national motto seemed to suggest it.

Arkolon's motto is a reference to a book title. (And seems to imply that the country of Arkolon is a utopia.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia

Ah yes, how did I not recognize it.

[PaNTuXIa]

Still nursing that hate-boner for Libertarians, are you?

Considering how deeply rooted libertarian ideas are in northern New England, and how those states compare to the rest of the US, I don't think libertarianism has a bad track record.

Sorry, but your ideology and the majority of the ideology in NS forums would most likely fail when put into full practice.
(Libertarianism)

Since when were the majority of NSers libertarians?

[Freefall11111]

Libertarian states don't exist because they're incapable of correcting market failures. If they're capable of correcting market failures, they're no longer libertarian states.

[USS Monitor]

Not inherently. Only when they are implemented badly.

The ones that believe in both abolishment of the welfare state and minimum wage wouldn't turn out so well.

If you just abolish the minimum wage and all welfare programs in one fell swoop, then yes, that would go badly.

[USS Monitor]

No, it is not. There are left-libertarians, which includes libertarian socialists.

Yes but that's not mainstream Libertariansim in the U.S.

Libertarianism in the United States is a movement promoting individual liberty and minimized government. Although the word libertarian continues to be widely used to refer to socialists internationally, its meaning in the United States has deviated from its political origins. The Libertarian Party asserts the following to be core beliefs of libertarianism:

“Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.”"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertari ... ted_States

Libertarian Party platform and small-l libertarianism are not the same thing. Most libertarians in the US are perfectly clear on this, even if you aren't.

Regardless of whether you are referring to the party or the broader movement, libertarianism is a movement promoting individual liberty and minimized government. That part is true for all libertarians. But there are different perspectives on what actually gives people the most individual liberty.

The policies advocated by the LP are just one interpretation.

[Europe and Oceania]

The ones that believe in both abolishment of the welfare state and minimum wage wouldn't turn out so well.

If you just abolish the minimum wage and all welfare programs in one fell swoop, then yes, that would go badly.

"Welfare and the Minimum Wage: What to expect in America if Libertarian Policies are Implemented

The poor- both the recipients of cash from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as well as low-wage workers- are already in a difficult position. The lives of the working poor are marked by fragility, where one disaster- a brief layoff or a sick child- will place the family into dire circumstances. In the next few paragraphs, we will examine the effects of libertarian policies on the already precarious state of the poor.

The repeal of welfare programs is called for by most right-libertarians: The Libertarian Party, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and the Mises Institute are all in favor of getting rid of welfare. Some, like Robert Nozick, even state that compulsory taxation for welfare purposes is equivalent to forced labor. This includes the payments most commonly associated with welfare- the Temporary Aid for Needy Families- as well as programs like food stamps and subsidized housing. Libertarians tend to argue for this repeal based on two claims- the first being that such a redistribution of wealth infringes on the liberty of those being taxed, and that second being that the poor will actually be better off if welfare were abolished. As we are examining specifically whether libertarian ideas really aid in fighting poverty, we will focus on the second reason.

The usual implication behind the speech of libertarians calling for the repeal of welfare is that those taken off welfare will now find jobs to support themselves. This idea is usually bundled with calls for the repeal of a minimum wage. As the interactions of these two policy changes feed off each other, we shall examine them together.

Most workers earning the minimum wage, or wages very close to it, are in jobs which are considered unskilled or minimally skilled employment. The classic example of this is the "McJob," the stereotypical burger-flipping fast food employment. Similarly, most welfare recipients have few marketable skills, and very few have college degrees. Many do not even have high school diplomas or GEDs. The repeal of welfare would force current welfare recipients to find jobs with extreme urgency- after all, if the "safety net" of welfare disappeared, then the lack of a job means that one would have trouble feeding one's self, making the search far more urgent. As most of these workers are unskilled, minimally skilled, or lack the proper credentials(i.e. a high school diploma, GED, or often a college degree) for better jobs, this will inject a massive increase of comparatively low-skilled laborers into the market. These workers will compete for the jobs which require few skills or credentials- in other words, low-wage jobs. Combined with the lack of a minimum wage, a labor glut will cause wages to plummet even further as employers have their pick of workers and a high unemployment rate discourages workers from leaving a low-wage job to find a better one. As the earnings from a full-time minimum wage job fail to cover the full cost of living for a single adult- much less a family- David Friedman's call for repeal of welfare as well as the minimum wage would make a family even worse off than they are currently, as they will lack both welfare benefits and the wage they earn will be lower. It is quite probable this would lead to families where both parents are employed yet the family is homeless and often hungry. Even if the repeal of welfare was phased in over a few years, it is unlikely that enough jobs could be created to keep unemployment levels down- for example, in New York City in 1998, there were 810,000 people on welfare. Given that New York City's labor market already could not absorb all of the job-seekers, it would not be able to absorb a few hundred thousand more workers even if those workers entered over a span of years rather than all at once.

Additionally, the repeal of welfare deprives many who are in the labor force of a desperately needed resource- inexpensive(and sometimes free) child care. The working poor often can retain their full-time job, and sometimes a full-time plus an additional part-time or full-time job, because of this availability of child care. In some families, it takes a combination of welfare, off-the-books child care by the person receiving welfare, and the money from a low-wage job by the adult not receiving welfare to get by financially. Additionally, if libertarians remove existing government-subsidized child care programs, this problem becomes even worse. Though the most immediate problem is the juggling of work and child care by the working poor, perhaps an even uglier problem is that if the child of a working-poor, single mother is given low-quality care will almost certainly be at a greater risk of illness, injury, or retarded development. Even if one argues that people should not be having children if they are unable to support the child, such theoretical arguments not only ignore the real-world situation but also dismiss the plight of the child. If a libertarian states that he does not care if a semi-permanent underclass is created, and that it's just their own bad luck if a child is born in a slum and has virtually no chance of ever getting out, I will admit that this argument will not persuade them. But for everyone else, this scenario should be deeply disturbing.

Even when one obtains a job, there is no guarantee that hard work will lead to eventual promotion and a more prosperous lifestyle. Often, the number of slots open for, say, a fast food managerial position is dwarfed by the number of aspirants. Not many make it to the swing manager position which pays roughly $6 an hour, and from that pool, there will be eight to ten swing managers competing for the pair of available general manager positions. Even if one makes it into the swing manager position, the additional pay may be illusory. Managers are often asked to put in voluntary unpaid overtime. Were minimum-wage laws repealed, the increases in wages for managers are likely to be similarly depressed, making the escape out of poverty even more difficult- as if the game of musical chairs between worthy applicants competing for those managerial slots was not already difficult enough. Additionally, the pay is low enough that the worker often cannot afford the basic costs of higher education, further reducing the chances of moving out of poverty.

The analysis of libertarian economic policies show that the policies will neither help the poor get out of poverty, nor increase the amount of liberty they possess by reducing coercion. Clearly, the libertarian arguments based on moral grounds fails with respect to the econometric analysis.

Chile: Unemployment, Unpaid Overtime, Increased Poverty, and the Degrading of the Minimum Wage

During Pinochet's regime in Chile, the lack of an hourly minimum wage led to expectations that employees work long hours of unpaid overtime. When an employee complains about unpaid overtime, he could simply be fired since high unemployment ensures that there will be no shortage of volunteers to take his place. This effective degrading of the hourly minimum wage was an effect of the free market reaching a balance between employment and wages in the absence of regulation; a regular practice of Chile's construction projects was the weekly queuing up of workers to underbid each other for the week's work. Even when the Chilean economy recovered, wages remained low as profits simply went into the pockets of employers. Indeed, the rapid growth years of 1986-1989 resulted in no increases in real wages, despite a study that estimated that the minimum wage could be increased by 50 percent without increasing unemployment significantly. Not surprisingly, the poor remained poor, and the percentage of families in poverty increased. Real wages in 1989 were only 90.8% of what they had been in 1970. The real minimum wage dropped 40% from 1981 to 1988. As Lois Oppenheim writes, "Does freedom of choice really exist when only a small group has the resources to exercise choice?"). The utter lack of ability to exercise a choice is not functionally better than not having that choice at all- and the libertarian policy, rather than increasing the freedom of the poor, drastically reduced it. The historical record of Chile shows that the poor became further impoverished, impeding their upward mobility and reducing their liberty, thereby making the libertarian argument based on moral grounds a failure.

Public/Subsidized Housing

The repeal of funding for public housing would also have adverse effects on the poor. Many low-wage employees can only find affordable housing via public housing Though free- market advocates expect that private contractors could do more to provide decent inexpensive housing than the government, Chile provides an alarming counterexample. From 1974 until the end of Pinochet's reign, the private sector not only failed to shrink the housing deficit which existed in 1974, it actually fell behind as population grew. The houses of the poblaciones, or shantytowns, often contained three to five families. As Collins writes, "The percentage of Chileans without adequate housing increased from 27 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 1988, even though according to neo-liberal social dogma the private construction industry combined with supplemental vouchers for low-income households would solve the housing problem.". Imagine how much worse the problem would be if the limited government support of the vouchers did not exist.

Answers to Common Libertarian Rebuttals

One common argument from libertarians is that the repeal of the minimum wage and labor regulations would lead to the creation of more jobs to fight poverty. So what happened in Chile as regulations and wage laws were repealed or loosened? Unemployment, which averaged around 6 percent in the 1960s and dropped to around 5 percent in 1973 before Pinochet took over, averaged 20 percent from 1974 to 1987, peaked at 35 percent in 1982, and even when official unemployment numbers dropped, it was because working one day a week was enough to be considered not unemployed. It also spawned other problems for the now unemployed or underemployed, such as alcoholism and depression. What are a few of the results that we can expect in the United States? Aside from the previously mentioned study by Linder and Nygaard which suggests that workers will once again be urinating in their pants as bathroom breaks are repealed, the repeal of pesticide exposure laws will likely increase the rate of poisoning in farm workers(70). Additionally, any business failure will lead to the possibility of mass layoffs coupled with the absence of significant governmental help to those laid off.

A common libertarian objection to charges that the repeal of welfare would hurt the poor is that the rich will donate more money to private charities, which in turn would be more efficient than the government. The combination of private charity, churches, communities, and family would be able to "bridge the gap" for those who do not earn enough to support themselves. Clearly, this did not happen in Chile as governmental spending on the poor dropped even as the rich got richer. Malnourishment increased, and the number of families which could not afford a basic "basket" of necessary goods doubled in the twenty years leading up to 1989. By that point, fewer than half the families in Santiago could afford that basic basket.

The governmental welfare state also provides services that private markets would not do or would do in a less efficient manner. As Nicholas Barr points out in his definitive text _The Economics of the Welfare State_, private markets are efficient only if the "standard assumptions" of perfect information, complete markets, perfect competition, and no market failures hold. One major example of this type of service is health care. The efficiency problems of health care arise largely due to the lack of perfect information; for example, the vast majority of people are unable to make independent judgements as to the quality of the health care they would be paying for in a fully unregulated market, as well as being unable to judge the "value" of the health care they would be purchasing with a certain amount of money. In particular, a service or commodity in which the repercussions of mistaken choice are high tends to be less market efficient. Barr also notes that "Once a public good is produced, non-excludability makes it impossible to prevent people from using it, hence it is not possible to levy charges(this is the free-rider problem); in such cases the market may fail entirely." Furthermore, Barr shows that if the free-rider problem is nontrivial, private donations will lead to fewer benefits to the poor than the welfare state. During the Pinochet regime, Chile sharply reduced state contributions to health services, greatly increased privatization in health care, and removed regulations. This led to less preventive care which in turn led to a greater increase in health emergencies, deterioration in the quality of hospital equipment, hospital overcrowding, and the danger of medical quackery.

David Friedman further claims that though the poor may be harmed by the repeal of some government programs, they will benefit far more from the repeal of others that would go along with the repeal of the beneficial ones. His chief example is Social Security. However, the savings from not having to pay taxes for Social Security is far outweighed by the financial hit the poor will take from the repeal of TANF and the plummeting of wages in the libertarian job market. Additionally, a privatized pension market's efficiency is dependent on the standard assumptions of perfect information, perfect competition, and lack of market failure; at the same time, there must be no unanticipated inflation. When Chile largely privatized its Social Security, Chileans often operated from misinformation or outright lack of information. Inflation further degraded the benefits, and by 1987, Chilean labor economist Jaime Ruiz-Tagle estimated that only 22 percent of Chilean workers made a salary that might allow them to retire with more than minimum benefits".

Not to mention the fact they are heartless immoral douche bags for even supporting this.

Libertarians are worse than conservatives when it comes to morality.

[USS Monitor]

If you just abolish the minimum wage and all welfare programs in one fell swoop, then yes, that would go badly.

<

Not to mention the fact they are heartless immoral douche bags for even supporting this.

Libertarians are worse than conservatives when it comes to morality.

Libertarians believe teal deer should be legal.

[NERVUN]

Not to mention the fact they are heartless immoral douche bags for even supporting this.

*** One day ban for trolling. ***

[Harkback Union]

Chomsky is an American libertarian.

tbh, Chomsky is sorta his own weird thing.

Chomsky advocates for the same policies as the majority of the left did 100 years ago. Its not his own weir thing.

[Harkback Union]

Not to mention the fact they are heartless immoral douche bags for even supporting this.

*** One day ban for trolling. ***

How's that trolling?

[New Giliberafta]

*** One day ban for trolling. ***

How's that trolling?

He called a whole group of people with an ideology as "heartless", "immoral" , but most importantly "douchebag"