Why I Am a Left Libertarian

Many libertarians say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum has become meaningless and useless. But to the extent that this is true for them, this is only because they have allowed themselves to be befuddled by political fraud and, perhaps, by a weak background in political history. The spectrum is just as useful and meaningful as it always was, which is very. It is necessary only to clarify one’s thinking about the past century in American politics to see that this is so.
But let us begin at the beginning – with what the left/right spectrum meant when it was created during the French Revolution. Murray Rothbard has written that 18th Century “liberalism” was “the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other [party] was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.” And according to Will and Ariel Durant in their book The Age of Napoleon, it was in the French Legislative Assembly in the fall of 1791 that the terms Right and Left were first used in this political sense. As the Durants tell it, when the assembly convened, the “substantial minority dedicated to preserving the monarchy. . .occupied the right section of the hall, and thereby gave a name to conservatives everywhere.” The liberals, meanwhile, “sat at the left.” Some fifty-odd years later, after another French Revolution (the one that took place in 1848) had unseated the last French king, Louis Philippe, the same seating arrangement was revived for the newly elected legislative assembly of the Second Republic. As has often been noted, two of the newly elected legislators who sat together on the left side of that assembly in 1848 and 1849 were the free market economist and publicist for free trade Frederic Bastiat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man ever to publicly declare himself an anarchist.
This conception of the Left/Right political spectrum also guided the political understanding of the 20th Century libertarian activist and writer Karl Hess, who wrote forty years ago that on “the far right […] we find monarchy, absolute dictatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule,” while the Left “opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.” Just as the farthest right you can go is absolute dictatorship, Hess argued, so “[t]he farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism—the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization.”
Now, if we take this model of the Left/Right political spectrum and apply it to the politics of today, what follows from that? First, that all dictatorships, whether they are called communist or fascist, are on the Right. This is, of course, contrary to the doctrine set forth a few years ago in a ridiculous and unfortunately somewhat influential book called Liberal Fascism, in which the author, Jonah Goldberg, attempts to prove that fascist dictatorships like the one Adolf Hitler ran in Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s were and are Leftwing dictatorships, because they were socialist and socialism is a Leftist phenomenon). In fact, exactly the opposite is the truth of the matter. Fascism and socialism are the same thing, but they are both products of Rightwing thinking. Socialism has never really been on the Left. The original socialists, in the early part of the 19th Century, were advocates of the ideas of Henri Saint-Simon, a former monarchist and thoroughgoing conservative, a Rightwing defender of the ancien regime who had decided that the industrial revolution and the end of monarchy in France had to be taken into account by those who wanted a big government to run everyone’s lives as the kings of old had done. In effect, they transferred their allegiance from the king to a hoped-for technocracy, which could engineer the perfect society by applying “scientific” ideas to the job (but only if it had unlimited power to do so).
Two brief quotations from Ayn Rand seem relevant here. “Fascism and communism,” she wrote, “are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.” And, again Ayn Rand: “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” And fascism, socialism, and communism are, quite evidentally, all “forms of authoritarian rule,” to refer back to Karl Hess’s words. So all three belong on the Right side of the traditional Left/Right political spectrum. Adolf Hitler was a Rightwinger. So was Joseph Stalin.
And so are today’s self-proclaimed “progressives.” As Richard Ebeling pointed out recently, these “progressives” are, ideologically speaking, “the grandchildren” of Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Imperial Germany in the last two decades of the 19th Century. As Ebeling writes, “Bismarck persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm to initiate a series of government programs and controls to gain political support of the ‘working class’ population that became the basis and inspiration for the modern Welfare State around the world.” As Bismarck himself put it, “My idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare. . . .Life insurance, accident insurance, sickness insurance. . . should be carried out by the state.”
Sound familiar? It should. For this is the song that has long been sung by both Republicans and Democrats. These two parties, widely and absurdly believed to represent Right and Left, respectively, in American politics, are in fact no more different from each other than are Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They differ only on which Bismarckian welfare state programs should be given the most money and on how much any given Bismarckian welfare state program should have its budget increased in any particular year. That all Bismarckian welfare state programs should enjoy annual budget increases is taken for granted by both Republicans and Democrats. Today’s America is really governed by a single conservative party with two wings: the Republicans and the Democrats; if we choose to vote for a major party candidate at all, we have no real choice but to elect someone who wants to expand government and reduce individual liberty, that is to say, a conservative, a Rightwinger. “Statism” is a synonym for conservatism. Statism is the politics of the Right.
But if both Republicans and Democrats, both conservatives and modern “liberals,” as well as self-styled “progressives,” are on the Right, who is on the Left? The answer is: libertarians. Libertarians are almost the only true leftists left in this country. When I interviewed the longtime anarchocommunist Murray Bookchin for Reason magazine back in 1978, he made some comments on the Left/Right political spectrum that are well worth rehearsing today. “The American left today as I know it,” he told me, “is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It’s becoming the real right in the United States. We don’t have an appreciable American left any more in the United States.” Before our conversation was over, however, Bookchin acknowledged that there was, after all, an American Left worthy of mention. “People who resist authority,” he said, “[people] who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights – this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.”
Bookchin was convinced, he told me, that Marxism was “the most sinister. . .form of totalitarianism. . . .I don’t think,” he said, “that the Soviet Union and China are accidents, aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that Leninism comes out of Marx’s basic convictions.” Still, he said, “I believe in a libertarian communist society.” On the other hand, Bookchin added quickly. “I believe that any attempt on the part of a libertarian communist society to abridge the rights of a community – for example, to operate on the basis of a market economy – would be unforgivable, and I would oppose the practices of such a society as militantly as I think any reader of your publication would. If [a libertarian communist society] assumed any totalitarian forms, any authoritarian forms whatever, I would oppose that. And not only that: I would join your [free market] community in fighting it. . . .If socialism, which is what I call the authoritarian version of collectivism, were to emerge, I would join your community. I would migrate to your community and do everything I could to prevent the collectivists from abridging my right to function as I like. That should be made very clear.”
In other words, what Bookchin was calling for was voluntary communism.
Some libertarians are in the habit of saying, “We libertarians are neither Right nor Left; we are libertarians.” But no matter how emphatically they thump their chests while saying this, they’re wrong. They have allowed themselves to be deceived and misled by a political confidence game foisted on the American electorate beginning in the 1930s, when an opportunistic demagogue named Franklin Delano Roosevelt began passing off as the newest kind of “liberalism” a package of homilies and government programs that had traditionally been presented to the American public by the Republican Party, the party of big business, the party that was in favor of capitalism but opposed to the free market. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” consisted mainly of government programs introduced by his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, laced with a generous dose of the bribery of the electorate first popularized by Otto von Bismarck. Some will object that conservatives have historically been for individual liberty and free markets, but this view is uninformed and ahistorical. The Republicans who opposed the New Deal opposed it mostly because they weren’t running it themselves; they took their libertarian rhetoric from true liberals, the classical liberals who are labeled “the Old Right” today by the historically confused. These people, many of them publicists like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and Isabel Patterson, had joined the Republicans after being forced out of the Democratic party, apparently in the belief that only by doing so could they oppose FDR’s policies. The party adopted their rhetoric, but they employ it only to dupe that subset of the electorate that cares about such things; then, once in power, they do as FDR did, the precise opposite of what they claimed to believe in.
Many of the same libertarians who say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum is now meaningless and useless also say that, beginning in the 1930s (or, according to some, beginning around the turn of the 20th Century), the terms Left and Right changed their meaning. But in fact they did not. What happened is that popular usage of these terms changed, as more and more citizens with less and less education decided to follow the lead of confidence men in public office.
As it happens, while I was beginning work on this podcast episode a few days ago, I was reading the American philosopher Susanne Langer’s three-volume work, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, her swansong, an altogether remarkable discourse on problems in theoretical psychology and what you might call speculative anthropology. And in its pages, I ran across Langer’s remark that “popular usage. . .commonly confuses and degrades the real sense of words.” Yes, yes, I understand that popular usage ultimately determines the correct meanings of words. At the same time, however, there are numerous words whose popular usage is so confused and degraded that serious students and teachers of the disciplines in which those words need to be used have specified more precise meanings for them in their professional work. “Anarchy” is one of those words. “Capitalism” is another. “Selfishness” is a third. My advice to serious students of and writers on fields like political theory, economics, and ethics is to do just that – be precise with the meanings you attach to the words Right and Left as they apply to political theory. Follow the guidance of the traditional Left/Right political spectrum. Abjure the foolish attempts of people like Noah Goldberg to make sense of a modernized spectrum that puts Barack Obama and Rand Paul at opposite ends, with totalitarian communists and anarchists (who are nothing but fully consistent libertarians) to the left of Obama and with both Adolf Hitler and Gary Johnson to the right of Rand Paul. Clarify your thinking about this spectrum.
Just the other day, a libertarian wrote on Facebook that he couldn’t imagine what a Left libertarian would be since the left favors big government so the concept of a Left libertarian is a contradiction in terms. This is what the confusion and degradation that come with popular usage of ill-understood words leads to. Be clear in your own mind, at least, about what Left and Right actually refer to. Understand that we libertarians (along with those ancoms who favor a purely voluntary collectivist society) are the Left in the America of the early 21st Century. It is not the concept of a Left libertarian that is a contradiction in terms; it is the concept of a Right libertarian that is a contradiction in terms, that is logically incoherent, that is, in fact, laughable on its face.
Jeff Riggenbach on Liberty.me
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Account deleted August 6, 2015 , 5:11 am Vote2
How is right-libertarianism a contradiction? In its fullest expression, it would simply mean that each private property owner has an absolute dictatorship within the boundaries of his or her private property.
Jacob Long August 7, 2015 , 5:08 pm Vote3
To which I would reply is statism on a small scale. I know of no libertarian who believes they are justified in assaulting, molesting, robbing, raping, or killing people that happen to be within their property.
Dimitri Rastoropov August 20, 2015 , 10:43 am Vote1
Shouldn’t you be able to protect your property within the boundaries of the common law? Dictatorship sounds a bit over the top.
Martin Brock August 20, 2015 , 12:39 pm Vote0
The common law is common, because common people accept it. It’s not something you read in a book written by Blackstone centuries ago or derive from axioms asserted by Rothbard.
You protect your property by earning the respect of common people around you, by respecting the same standards that they respect, not by threatening to shoot these people. People around you may agree that you may use limited force to defend resources that they agree you govern exclusively, but that’s a far cry from being dictator over the resources. You may use this force to defend these resource only because the people around you agree that you may.
Clifton Knox August 22, 2015 , 7:18 am Vote0
Common law is not just ‘common’. Common law was created through decades and centuries of legal precedent when there was no legislature but for instance only a monarch. Common law is not determined by the common consensus but pure legal precedent created by rulers using natural law as its foundation. Essentially common law is natural law in practice.
Martin Brock August 22, 2015 , 3:28 pm Vote0
Gravity is a natural law. Rules governing the boundaries of a vassal’s fief are artificial rather than natural, precisely because they are the products of judges establishing precedents; however, no judge sets a precedent unilaterally, and legal precedents are not the common law because judges set them. They’re the law because common people respect them.
Clifton Knox August 26, 2015 , 1:26 am Vote0
Gravity is not natural law in the context of which we are discussing common law. Natural law is based upon the rational analysis in regard to ‘human nature’. Natural law in this context addresses both social and personal ethics and intuitive morality. While not all common law is the same as natural law, the majority of common law has its precedence in widely accepted judgments which are often based on natural law. The reason why the precedents are ‘commonly’ accepted is because the wider majority recognize such judgments as reasonable and sensible. Therefore we can look to natural law as the foundation of common law. However, common law was not the law because the ‘common people’ respected it, but because it was’commonly’ respected by all people whether they were nobility, common freeman, serf or otherwise.
Tom Painter August 7, 2015 , 12:21 am Vote7
I’m still not convinced that the left/right paradigm is particularity useful. There is so much baggage with those terms. How about propertarian vs non-propertarian?
Blue Square August 7, 2015 , 12:52 am Vote3
Wow!
I had a great conversation about this with @srichman a week or two ago, but this is a more thorough treatment.
Jim Porter August 7, 2015 , 1:14 am
I got to “the left/right spectrum was created during the French revolution” and I already have a question.
I thought the left/right came from English parliament pre american revolution. Wasn’t it wigs and torries (my spelling is probably wrong) where they were divided left/right during hearings?
Dawn Hoff August 10, 2015 , 7:54 pm Vote1
In Denmark the Classic Liberal Party (which is now in fact Conervative and no longer liberal), is call Venstre (litteraly Left) – which is very very confusing as they are the leaders of the right wing… Just as confusing as the fact that the Democrats in the US are called Liberals, when they are anything but.
Jim Porter August 7, 2015 , 1:18 am
I don’t know, the more I read into the article, the more I think maybe my conception of the left/right model is too modern and probably distorted
Massimo Mazzone August 7, 2015 , 4:48 am Vote1
You are absolutely right, Jeff, but Tom above is also right about the baggage of these words. If you try to explain to the average individual what you wrote in this article, you would need 5 hours, you might actually get luckier starting to recite straight away the Machinery of freedom.
Anyway, that period between the Illuminism and the rise of Positivism is really our golden age. It reminds me of what Yourcenar wrote in The memoirs of Hadrien: that short time when the gods were dead but God was yet unborn.
Jeff Peterson II August 7, 2015 , 6:19 pm Vote3
I’m not really sure why you still are one. I mean, you gave a long history lesson, appealed to some tradition, but gave no actual propositions.
Martin Brock August 9, 2015 , 1:18 am Vote3
Since he’s only discussing history and etymology here, why would you doubt that he’s still a libertarian? Because you prefer a different side of a room?
Jeff Peterson II August 13, 2015 , 8:51 am Vote0
You’re an idiot.
I never said I doubt he is a libertarian. I said “I’m still not really sure why you are one.” Now read the title of the article. Then put the two together.
I’m still not really sure why he is a left libertarian. Learn to comprehend, ffs.
Martin Brock August 13, 2015 , 11:14 am Vote3
The ad hominem adds nothing substantial to your reply and can only appeal to a choir. If you doubt that Jeff is a left libertarian, you doubt his own explicit association of himself with a pair of words in a sense that he defines at length, i.e. he is a left libertarian in the sense that Bastiat was one. What are you doubting exactly? Your ideological tribe’s right to “right” and “left”?
Blue Square August 7, 2015 , 8:22 pm
@jeffpetersonii I think @riggenbach means that all libertarians really are “left-libertarians.” You and me too!
Jeff Peterson II August 7, 2015 , 11:30 pm
@mikereid Yeah, no, I’m not. If we are all left-libertarians than the adjective is useless and we are just libertarians.
If he says that libertarianism is traditionally left which makes us leftists too, I call appeal to tradition fallacy, and I am not leftist.
Martin Brock August 9, 2015 , 1:11 am Vote0
Jeff is indisputably right on the history, and I somehow feel more “left” than “right” myself, but the noun is more important to me than the adjective. Libertarians have significant differences, and I enjoy discussing them, but “left” vs. “right” doesn’t describe these differences well. Is a right to life inalienable? Is a liberty right inalienable? Liberty from what? Can an individual have other, inalienable rights? Since property rights are alienable, what constraint on these rights does libertarianism rule out? Aren’t all property rights contractual and thus community standards? How does one obtain an alienable property right in the first place? Do you exclusively govern a resource because you say you do, or because Locke or Rothbard say so, or because other persons excluded from this governance agree that you do? These questions are interesting, but “left” and “right” don’t tell me much about how a person answers them.
Massimo Mazzone August 9, 2015 , 4:34 am Vote3
We cannot forget the elephant in the room, which is the huge actual historical tradition of left-anarchism. I do not know if in the US today when you use the word anarchism (not even left-anarchism) people usually think about us, but I can tell you that in Europe and Latin America, where I grew up, people think of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Makhno, the bombings and assassinations of the XIX and initial XX centuries and today Black bloc. A few weeks ago I was having dinner with an old friend of mine, a very erudite editor of an important publishing house in Italy, and she barely knew the name Rothbard, much less what he wrote. For her, Left, anarchism and by definition left-anarchism imply basic concepts like the refusal of the subjective theory of value, the anti-capitalism, the communal ownership of the means of production, positive rights, the acceptable initiation of violence in redistributing wealth. This is what I mean when I say that the word Left comes with such a huge baggage, especially when associated with the words anarchism and libertarianism. Just like Martin, I like to think of myself as “left”, and I fully understand the article of Jeff R. On the other hand, I can say that only in spaces like this, because if I did with even cultivated people who do not share our ideals, I would create an enormous confusion in the person I am talking too, because very, very few people have an idea of what we everyday take for granted among ourselves, at least outside the US. And, by the way, it is absolutely normal, in the course of the last two centuries tens of millions of people defined themselves as anarchists “in the other way”, and died, killed and participated as protagonists and in many cases almost winners of many of the most important political struggles of those two centuries.
Michael Reith August 9, 2015 , 5:19 am Vote3
Reminds me so much of the confusion over the word, “liberal”. What it once meant it no longer means. Now we have to tag on “classical” to distinguish it from modern forms. The left/right paradigm is truly a bunch of burdensome baggage.
Martin Brock August 9, 2015 , 6:37 am Vote3
Like Massimo, I encountered “anarchism” and adopted the label years before I heard of Rothbard or anarcho-capitalism. I read books on anarchism in the seventies that never mentioned Rothbard or his school of thought, and while some anarcho-capitalists these days accuse left-anarchists of “stealing their words”, the historical truth is much more nearly the opposite. That’s just a fact. No one owns these words, of course, but the historical precedents are clear enough.
Left anarchism has distasteful historical baggage, like violent “propaganda of the deed”, but I hear more “right libertarians” advocating violence, in defense of “property”, these days, including people at this web site. If “libertarianism” becomes associated with preppers armed to the teeth and shooting trespassers, or “leftist” politicians in some “right libertarian” revolution, the outcome won’t be any prettier.
Kroptkin’s economics is naive, but I wouldn’t say that he rejects the subjective theory of value, and I still say that “individual ownership” of capital is a misnomer. Property in productive means is fundamentally alienable. Property rights are contractual. Contracts involve more than one person. The idea that individual rights to capital, with hereditary title in perpetuity, can solve all economic problems is ahistorical nonsense. The theory is full of holes, but more importantly, its realization is not what most people want. The idea that “freedom” requires most people’s subjection to rules that they don’t accept is perverse.
People associating freely will hold all sorts of property in common and follow all sorts of rules. Liberty only requires that people follow rules of their choice, not that everyone follows “libertarian” rules enforced by self-appointed defenders of a particular formulation of “property”.
I’d like to see more friendly disagreement among libertarians, because civil debate clarifies ideas, but the rhetorical battle over semantic territory doesn’t interest me. The usage of words can change, and political labels are notoriously prone to Orwellian evolution. Get used to it. If common usage of “left” becomes too distasteful to me, I have no problem abandoning it, but “right” certainly doesn’t taste any better. If you want to know the “true left” (or “true right”), look at your hands, not a political treatise.
Marian Copilet August 10, 2015 , 12:39 pm Vote1
The author is either confused or is trying to confuse other people. One cannot be a Left Libertarian because Left and Libertarianism are opposing concepts. I see the Left, Right and Libertarianism as the tree legs of a tripod, or as three concepts, each opposed to the other two. One cannot belong in two opposing camps at the same time.
As for the statement “Socialism has never really been on the Left” I cannot find any polite words to describe it [edited].
Martin Brock August 10, 2015 , 12:51 pm Vote2
I’m not sure you read Riggenbachs’ article, and I’m sure you didn’t digest it. We’re discussing semantics here. Common usage of “left” in a political context has changed over the years, but the classical liberals were certainly on the “left” when the political sense of “left” and “right” emerged historically. That’s just an historical fact. I wouldn’t say, as Jeff does, that the original usage is the “true” sense of these words today, but your usage isn’t “true” either. The usage of a word is not true or false. It is common or uncommon.
Calling something “doll shit” or “poppycock” adds nothing substantial to the discussion and can only be an appeal to the emotions.
Marian Copilet August 10, 2015 , 1:16 pm Vote2
I did read it, twice. I agree with you about semantics, it’s all about what is “Left” and what is “Right”. I cannot see much sense in using the meaning of “Left” as it was a hundred years ago, so I can only refer to its current use. All my friends, acquaintances and colleagues who describe themselves as belonging to the “Left” are either Socialists or Progressive Liberals, with an indefatigable urge to use the power of the state to dictate how people ought to live their lives. Libertarians they ain’t.
As for the use of emotive language I can only apologize, I grew up under a communist dictatorship, I have a very deep understanding of the concept of “Left”, and the comment that I made was the mildest response I could post to the statement “Socialism has never really been on the Left”.
I did however take your comment on board and amended my post above.
Marian Copilet August 10, 2015 , 1:10 pm Vote0
Sorry, double post.
Youliy Ninov August 10, 2015 , 8:45 pm Vote2
I just checked in Wikipedia what the political spectrum means and noticed the following:
“According to the simplest left–right axis, communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, opposite fascism and conservatism on the right.”
It seems to me that the classification is based on the type of property rights, namely, more state or more private rights. However the state seems always to be there. No wonder the libertarians are sometimes classified as left and sometimes as right ones. They mostly do not fit within this classification in my opinion.
The correct classification would be not according to more or less private property rights but according to more or less government involvement in the economy. Just to make my view clearer: In fascism the property is private, but it is the government that controls it. So, it is not important who possesses a certain property on paper but who controls it.
Jay Ⓥansen August 12, 2015 , 7:44 am Vote2
As it was a dichotomous labeling born within the paradigm of statism, I cannot really see how referring to the left/right nonsense is anything other than attempting to solve the problem within the context of the problem. To be logically, philosophically, practically and linguistically congruent, AN-archy needs to be clearly defined as an A-political (not political) concept of social organization.
Also, theirs no such thing as “voluntary communism,” because there’s already a more factually accurate term for people explicitly agreeing to social norms governing usages of property: contract (and no, not the implied tacit “social contract”).
If we want to learn from the mistakes of history, rather than repeat them, let’s not ourselves get sucked into rehashing labels that were arbitrary in the first place. So Bastiat & Proudhon were sitting on the left (only from the one perspective, at that). Who cares? Why were they sitting in a legislative body at all? Especially when Proudhon declared himself an anarchist? I don’t blame them for not finding every successful approach, but I chalk that one up as incongruent and likely not worth anyone in the modern day repeating.
I still find the whole left/right distraction as just that: a distraction. There’s individuality, and dis-individuality. Morality; immorality. Consistency; inconsistency. I see the left/right false dichotomy as only ever living in the latter options.
I am simply an individual, espousing anarchic principles of interaction.
K.I.S.S.
Martin Brock August 12, 2015 , 1:57 pm Vote3
“Contract” is a fine word, but a contract governing the exchange or sharing of property is meaningless without pre-existing property rights. A voluntary community (or commune) does not suppose individuals with pre-existing, individual property rights to exchange or share. Rather, a community charter claims specified resources, like land, and further specifies rules governing individual ownership (if any) of these resources by community members.
Voluntary, individual property rights cannot exist at all outside of a voluntary community, because these rights require the consent of persons respecting them. If you unilaterally declare your individual property in a resource, according to some rule that you unilaterally declare, and force me to respect your declaration, then my respect for your property in this resource is not in any sense “voluntary”.
Proudhon eventually stopped call himself an anarchist and called himself a federalist instead, so he was aware of the contradiction in terms and was not guilty of it.
I agree that “left vs. right” is a distraction, but the history is just what Jeff says it is. Bastiat was certainly on the political “left” and might be amused to learn that he’s now revered almost exclusively by persons more identified with the political “right”.
Jay Ⓥansen August 18, 2015 , 12:57 pm Vote1
Ok, you want to make unilateralism and chicken and egg non-arguments:
“Voluntary” is meaningless if you are denying individualism in your first principles, so cut out claiming that communalist notions of any stripe give a crap about the idea of volunteering anything. ALL proofs of property rights come as a logical extension of the empirical fact of exclusive ownership of one’s self and one’s ability to act, and therefor any ability to volunteer or refuse any such thing as consent to a societal structure. If you’re claiming that no private property rights exist or will not be acknowledged then you are not, in the slightest, concerned with what is and is not voluntary and, instead, unilaterally presuppose your idea of how people must organize.
“Rights” are not a thing. A right is an internally consistent logical claim AGAINST other’s actions based upon logic and empirical facts. They do not require anyone’s consent to be rights, otherwise it would be a non-starter to even have the idea of being able to violate a right. The word “duh” is springing very strongly to mind, here. Once again, individual property rights is a logical argument stemming from the empirical fact that no one man can have a nerve impulse in his head that causes another man’s hand to move like it was connected to the first man’s body; from the empirical fact that YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENT ARGUMENT TO MINE, you prove that we are each exclusively acting in control of our individual and respective bodies, with respect to individual and (clearly) very DIFFERENT value systems, chosen by us, individually.
An even greater and far more egregious distraction than the “left vs. right” historical trivia game is the “communism is a valid logical argument” joke. If your organization of society is presupposed, it’s not and cannot be voluntary. The one and ONLY way in which one can show that something does not and cannot require voluntary consent is to show that it is a condition of physics, because the ONLY REASON any of it matters is because the results of all actions in nature are COMPLETELY NON-NEGOTIABLE.
You may choose to grasp a stick and apply upward force to it. You cannot choose that gravity will apply downward force to a degree that must be overcome to achieve lift, nor the resources this resistance of forces must cost to create and maintain. Likewise, you cannot choose the results of a loss of the price mechanism and the ability to plan for the allocation of resources which is a long proven impossibility in any system of attempted communal ownership.
No one’s claim to their own self and the extension of themselves by action into their property requires another’s consent to be valid, because it is non-negotiable empirical fact that only individual’s choose. It’s is only because of this fact that the subjects of rights, morality, organization or otherwise even exist to be utilized by individuals at all. Just because an individual alone has no need to invoke claims of exclusivity while alone does not mean he suddenly discovers that they were a logical fallacy upon the arrival of others. All he may discover is whether or not those others value rationally defined behaviors, or arbitrary and expedient ones they extend only to themselves.
Now, you may feel I’ve shown less friendliness in my post than you tried to show with your choice of neutral grammar, but while I do appreciate that small bit of courtesy, your utter lack of considerateness with basic internally consistent logic and flagrant abuse of rhetoric far-excede the balance of neutral grammar. Anyone who claims, in adjacent paragraphs, that both voluntary action exists, yet private property rights do not; that one’s declaring of the empirical fact of one’s responsibility for action is somehow an artificial and unilateral violation of another, yet claiming that somehow no one is capable of being in the moral right for using anything without others’ external approval is NOT…
I see nothing there to suggest you respect others nor reason nearly enough to have a right (<- see how it works, now?) to expect anyone to overlook your sophistry and dehumanizing arguments just because you didn't use inflammatory grammar. So, if you have anything to retort, and if my curtness offended you, I'd actually appreciate an impassioned-but-LOGICAL & EMPIRICAL argument from first principles over anymore artificially-vanilla-flavored sophist shit, thank you very much. Perhaps the first thing you could attempt to prove is why, if there are no such things as private property rights, you bother making any arguments as if there exist distinct entities other than yourself or why this should even be logically possible or necessary…
Martin Brock August 18, 2015 , 7:42 pm Vote0
Imposing a unilateral claim by force is hardly “voluntary”, and exploring the meaning of “voluntary” in the context of “property rights” is not a chicken and egg argument. Locke has an argument. Rothbard has a slightly different argument, and Kinsella differs slightly from Rothbard. Since they can’t all be right about your “non-negotiable rights”, you don’t seem to have many of these rights.
I haven’t denied individualism in my first principles. I accept self-ownership fundamentally without pretending to “prove” anything. Axiomatic principles are accepted, not proven.
I accept inalienable rights to life and liberty, where “liberty” specifically means the right to resign from an intentional community at will. Conventional property rights, involving land and other resources outside of a person’s body, are fundamentally alienable. Practically every libertarian agrees on this point. If the rights are alienable, then they are not unilateral claims. They exist only within the context of a community of persons agreeing contractually to respect them.
Property rights are accepted, subjectively, by free persons, not proven. What passes for “proof” in political theory is laughably ridiculous by the standards of a mathematical logician, even by the standards of a careful philosopher.
I’m claiming that standards of propriety generally, including private property rights, are community standards that can and will vary from one free community to the next, because an individual’s exclusive use of a resource exists only insofar other individuals respect the claim.
Contractual rights are choices of the contracting individuals, not products of logic applied to some axiomatic system. Of course, they require consent.
What you say about nerve impulses is trivial and completely irrelevant to conventional property rights. That a man’s nerve impulses affect only his own muscles has nothing to do with another man’s respect for his exclusive right to a resource outside of his body, like a parcel of land or an apple on a tree. Confusing one with the other is facile.
I haven’t said anything about “communism” or the validity of any nominally “communist” system. You write “your organization of society” with hardly a clue of any social organization that I advocate, even while you imagine yourself a master of rigorous logic.
The results of all action in nature are hardly non-negotiable. Free persons negotiating a contract are acting in nature.
Gravity doesn’t refute any argument of mine, and I haven’t denied any price mechanism in the context of a particular property system, so you aren’t addressing me at all.
Of course, a person’s claim to resources outside of himself requires the consent of others. Property rights are alienable. Practically everything you own, outside of your own body, is the product of countless agreements involving the consent of others.
Your friendliness is irrelevant. I have a graduate degree in mathematics with a 4.0 GPA, so your critique of my logic rings hollow. Far more qualified logicians than you have certified it by far more rigorous standards, without leaping to all sorts of baseless conclusions about the arguments I pose. This observation is neither friendly nor unfriendly. It’s a fact that I can easily document.
Jay Ⓥansen October 21, 2015 , 8:17 am Vote1
For all your flaunting of your credentials, you don’t actually seem to have been able to follow what I was actually saying, either. I would apologize for misunderstanding your use of “property rights” as being a distinct term from “self-ownership,” except you didn’t at all make such a foundational distinction clear in the first reply, so don’t expect me to ooh and aahh at your proclamations of logical prowess, either. I have no way of knowing that you have the degree or GPA you claim or that greater logicians than I have validated your arguments (which you’re determining how..?), but what I can also easily document is that your initial response (to only a small part of my initial comment) was barely even framed or defined before you made your own assertions. Your logical skills being whatever they might be, you might consider pondering on those of your communication ability. Familiar with libertarians and libertarianism as you claim to be, it might have crossed your mind that to many “property rights” is often a term used interchangeably with “self-ownership” because one derives so closely from the other. I agree they’re not the same, but such a strict logician should have taken pains to keep himself from appearing to completely equivocate between the two if his argument rests on such a distinction as did yours.
I suspect, at the core, we are actually agreeing very loudly on most points, but in very different linguistic styles. I’ve found that to be more common than not, if two people can stop long enough to see it.
So, please, tell me what it is you think you mean when you say “property rights CAN’T exist outside a voluntary community” where I would say “there’s no need of property rights outside a community/in isolation.” Do you think we are actually getting at the same thing at all, or not?
Martin Brock October 21, 2015 , 1:33 pm Vote0
If you don’t want someone citing his credentials, don’t dispute them before you know them. When you accuse people of “sophist shit” and the like, indignation at the rebuttal rings hollow.
I don’t say that greater logicians than you have validated anything I’ve written here. Highly experienced logicians, who vet other people’s logic for a living, have judged me unusually able to reason rigorously in highly abstract, mathematical terms, but they didn’t expect to judge me after only a few paragraphs in a web forum.
I can’t describe every detail of my libertarian ideal in every post, but I do refer to a “voluntary community”, not just any community, in the post to which you reply. “Voluntary” in this context suggests consent to a community’s standards and thus a right to exit. These individual rights are what “self-ownership” means to me, so I don’t completely equivocate between the two in the single post you’ve read, and I very often distinguish self-ownership from other ownership at liberty.me, in other posts in this thread in fact.
If we discuss the subject long enough, I suspect that we’ll find many areas of agreement. You’re the one suggesting (even shouting) a fundamental disagreement, not me. In my way of thinking, self-ownership is a fundamental and inalienable right. Ownership of things outside of oneself is alienable. Asserting universal standards governing the latter robs individuals of their agency.
What entitles John Locke or Murray Rothbard or Stephan Kinsella to tell me what standards of land ownership I will respect? Am I not free to respect Lockean standards or some variation on his theme or even some standard without a hint of Lockean propriety as long as no one forces me and others respecting the standards to respect them?
What entitles Locke or anyone else to declare, for everyone everywhere, that a free community exists only after individuals have claimed land and similar resources (by Lockean standards) and agreed, through bilateral contracts, to exchange or to share these resources? This thinking seems thoroughly backward to me.
Free people agree on standards of ownership before any community exists, and they need not consult Murray Rothbard first. Rothbard is not the Philosopher King of everyone everywhere.
If Christian monastics claim natural resources and mold these resources to their Christian ends, without ever declaring any individual an owner of anything, then as long as they force no one to submit to their standards and do not claim more than they use freely this way, their community is completely libertarian in my way of thinking.
Individual ownership of land and similar resources has nothing, necessarily to do with libertarian social organization. Individual ownership is a choice of free people, not a necessary prerequisite of individual freedom. Forcible collectivization is anti-liberty, but so is forcible individualization.
NC August 13, 2015 , 2:35 pm Vote0
Forgive my simplistic reasoning of the given subject but this is my reasoning of it as follows: in the past the left or liberals were rebelling against the status quo in order to break down the old tyrannical goverment systems of our past like monarchy and such. Rights in the past sought to preserve the old ways and therefore were are enemies back then because they essentially supported tyranny. However fast foward to today the sides have switched. The liberals of today seek to rebel against the Constitutional, liberty minded, capitalist status quo and there fore are our enemys where as the right of today seeks to preserver the original order of liberty and freedom and so they are more in line with us today. Point is at the times that the definitions were diffrent it was necessary because when it come down to it the root issues of the day are what decides what side your on. Liberalism was necessary in the age of kings. It is not necessary in the age of liberty else they move toward socialism. Conservatism was bad in the age of kings however it is necessary is the age of liberty which will keep us in our countrys original system of free Republic with libertarian roots. And so modern libertarians in america should lean right politically. Socially is a different issue based on personal preferences of course.
Joshua Connelly August 14, 2015 , 6:14 pm Vote0
Jeff, great insight. I noticed your second reference to Goldberg is “Noah” instead of Jonah though.
Jeff Peterson II August 15, 2015 , 3:51 pm
@restonthewind “If you doubt that Jeff is a left libertarian”
Ok, maybe you’re not an idiot. You just have a very difficult time reading, comprehending, and have a habit putting words into other people’s mouths. Where did I ever say the words “doubt”? Hint: never. I do indeed know he is one, I still don’t know wjy. If I went over why I was an anarcho-capitalist then I’d give propositions or describe conclusions that I arrived at which made me one, not just an appeal to tradition and give history lessons. If you were to read, for instance, Gary Chartiers “The Distinctiveness of Left Libertarianism” he gave propositions on the “philosophy”. I’m still perplexed as to why Riggenbach is one because he explained no positions.
Learn to read ffs
Martin Brock August 18, 2015 , 8:03 pm Vote0
Your words were “I’m not really sure why you still are one.” “Doubt” comes to my mind when I read “not really sure”, but you know your own words better than I, of course. The point remains. Jeff tells you exactly why he calls himself a “left libertarian”. He doesn’t intend here to develop a philosophy from first principles. As he says, Jeff identifies with “the left”, because Bastiat was on the left, and Jeff identifies with Bastiat. Bastiat’s words from the left are earlier than Gary Chartier’s. Chartier certainly doesn’t have the last word, and Jeff never mentions him. Are you putting words in Jeff’s mouth?
Dimitri Rastoropov August 20, 2015 , 7:56 pm Vote0
I’m not sure what relevance have historical meanings of words, apart from the academic pursuit of etymologies. Words shift meanings all the time and it’s best to accept that as a fact of life rather than try and cling to former meanings that somehow suit you better.
Martin Brock August 20, 2015 , 8:31 pm Vote0
I can agree that modern libertarians are neither “left” nor “right” in modern terms, but I would not agree that libertarians are or have ever been more “right” than “left” in any historical context. A faction of libertarians today identifies with “right” or associates “left” with its antithesis, but this faction is no evidence to the contrary, because they are still marginal. I’m not challenging their libertarian bona fides, but they are not as dominant in the movement as they believe themselves. They think they own the word “libertarian” and that others want to steal it from them, but in reality, they don’t own the movement any more than some small denomination of self-described “Christians” owns Christianity.
Jeff feels compelled to write this article because so many self-described libertarians today insist that libertarianism is on the right and that “left libertarian” is a contradiction in terms regardless of the indisputable history. Because Jeff Tucker has been associated with this faction (Rothbardians and the Mises Institute) in the past, many members of Liberty.me identify with “the right” similarly. Outside of this faction, I don’t actually see any drift of libertarianism toward “the right”. I’ve seen “the left” drift away from libertarianism, but I don’t see “the right” drifting toward it.
Marian Copilet August 20, 2015 , 8:38 pm Vote0
So you think, and write, that people on the Right are “self-described libertarians”. How condescending! As opposed to what, the true, genuine, honest, well-meaning, progressive libertarians on the left???
One can see how strongly you feel about “the Left” being superior to “the Right”, however, there is no correlation between the strength of one’s feelings and the validity of their argument.
Martin Brock August 20, 2015 , 9:18 pm Vote2
I’m also a self-described libertarian. I explicitly state that I’m not questioning anyone’s libertarian bona fides, and I don’t say anything about “progressives”. I don’t see how you read condescension into that.
Far from saying that “the Left” is superior to “the Right”, I explicitly state that modern libertarians belong in neither category in modern usage. I don’t feel strongly about “left” or “right” at all, and I routinely say so, but the history is what it is.
Jeff Peterson II August 26, 2015 , 7:52 am
@restonthewind Yep. You’re an idiot. I never said doubt. You did. And that would be you putting words I to my mouth. Since I know my own words better than you then you can pipe down about what you think I meant since you’re clearly just arguing a strawman.
I identify with Bastiat in numerous ways but that still doesn’t make me left libertarian, it just means I agree with him on certain things. It’s still just an appeal to tradition to me.
“Chartier certainly doesn’t have the last word, and Jeff never mentions him”
You have the worst comprehension. My point was Chartier at least states some left libertarian propositions in the article I mentioned, I never said anything about who came first chronologically. It was all just an appeal to history.
Martin Brock August 26, 2015 , 1:09 pm Vote0
I address the ad hominem above.
I address “doubt” above. If you say that “doubt” misrepresents “not really sure why”, then you have the last word on your own semantics.
We’re discussing Jeff’s reasons for calling himself a “left libertarian”. What you call yourself is up to you. Jeff’s reasoning in this article is historical. Your suggestion that someone must distinguish himself ideologically from other libertarians, rather than appeal to history, to justify the “left libertarian” label, because Gary Chartier does so, is your straw man argument. Jeff clearly disagrees with you.
Jeff Peterson II August 27, 2015 , 4:56 pm Vote0
“I address the ad hominem above.”
You are proving my claim, so pipe down, idiot. You are having a very hard time comprehending and continue to put words in my mouth, idiot. This to me is the act of an idiot, idiot.
“If you say that “doubt” misrepresents “not really sure why”, then you have the last word on your own semantics.”
If they are semantics, it is something you created. I made the distinction numerous times and explicitly that I know and acknowledge he is a libertarian, but I am still not sure why he is a left libertarian. Idiot.
“Jeff’s reasoning in this article is historical. ”
The error in this is that his definition makes other libertarians also left libertarians, yet by today’s standards many are not. I definitely am not. Left-libertarians have distinct differences on issues than ones like me when it comes to “social justice”, occupancy and use, unions, etc. If Jeff wants to invoke history as his reasoning to being a left lib then that puts many under the umbrella but at the same time it makes the “left” modifier distinction meaningless. If libertarianism is leftist as he argues, the “left” adjective is pointless.
“label, because Gary Chartier does so”
More proof of your idiocy. My point with Chartier (or even Massimino, or Byas, or Carson), is that he at least listed out positions left libertarians have that distinguish them from other libertarians. I’m going to assume you have not read his article or the numerous others by the other names I mentioned but all of the articles by them share that characteristic. Jeff made no claims and stated no propositions that showed what would distinguish him as a left libertarian. He invoked history is all. Fine, you’re a left libertarian because history but that encounters the same problems I mentioned above particularly since he says libertarians are leftists. If that’s the case then the modifier is pointless.
This was why I am confused as to why he is one. This shouldn’t have been so difficult to understand but you have to be combative like usual you idiot.
Martin Brock August 27, 2015 , 8:32 pm Vote1
I love you too, man.
Martin Brock August 26, 2015 , 2:37 pm
@cliftonwknox
I understand the context and concede your point; however, I don’t think much of “natural rights” theory or “natural law” in this context. I accept inalienable rights to life and liberty, but I don’t call these rights “natural”. They certainly are not natural. Natural creatures, human and otherwise, violate them routinely, more often than not; otherwise, we already live in a libertarian world, and we clearly do not.
If you threaten to shoot me for crossing some line without your consent, without a systematic defense of this force and without either obtaining my consent to your system or tolerating competing systems reasonably available to me, you may be behaving naturally, but you aren’t behaving like a libertarian.
Libertarian rights are products of the human intellect reflected in a libertarian tradition, so they are artifacts rather than products of nature, and people respect them only by willfully overcoming a natural impulse to violate them. Calling them “natural” suggests that we don’t need to justify them, that we can simply impose them by force, as though this forcible imposition is equivalent to a force of nature, like Gravity. I categorically reject this equivalence. It is statist thinking.
On the distinction between “common people accept” and “people commonly accept”, I also understand this point, but when I write “common people accept”, I am not distinguishing a class of people without statutory titles from other people with these titles. As a libertarian (and thus an egalitarian in this sense), I accept no such distinction. A titular nobility accepting common law recognizing its titles and associated privileges is part of the common (or frequently occurring) people respecting this law.
Something like a statutory nobility can exist in a free community, the abbot in a monastery for example, and I have no problem with it; however, an abbot’s office is not statutory (not imposed by a state) if membership in the monastery is voluntary, if monks join freely and may also leave freely and if the abbot himself is just another of these monks who joined freely and may leave freely.
Clifton Knox August 26, 2015 , 6:13 pm Vote0
Again in the context of what we are discussing I must maintain that references to animals are also out of context. Natural rights are as they apply to Human Beings. When I can discuss Plato, Aristotle, or legal precedent with an animal they can be a considered a part of this discussion. This does not mean that certain ethical concerns are not important in regard to animals. It just means those concerns must be solely a human concern and must be limited to how human beings treat animals and not how they treat each other in their natural environment. You cannot violate a right or have a right violated if you cannot even understand what a right is.
I agree with you in regard to the act of shooting someone without providing fore knowledge of property lines. However, common law allows for this, and is the application of natural law in practice in regard to property ownership, property easements, and other issues. Let us not make the mistake of believing that a land in which there is no state means that there will be no rules. Again, natural law is itself based upon common sense. If you believe that anarchy will bring about a world in which people will behave as if there is no rules then why would you want a stateless society? However, we must recognize that even in a stateless society there will be rules and judicial decisions. These will most assuredly be based upon intuitive morality and common sense, which is, in any system a form of natural law, Libertarian or otherwise.
The ‘libertarian tradition’ you mention is itself just another name for the belief in natural and intuitive morality which comes about in the majority of human beings through the application of human reason and common sense. To reject the idea that human beings are naturally rational creatures when considering morality indicates a Hobbesian view of the world which justifies the state.
Human beings did not develop the ability to follow their own whims as a form of civilization or a function of a government. They were born free, and as such were able to create, build, associate with peers, and transact in a free market outside of governance. It is the state which has developed through history and is subject to a continual refinement and application, and it is this state which impedes on all the activities that man may naturally partake in. Humans did not create the state so they could have property, but some believed by creating the state they could protect already existing property rights. However, rational men do not need the state to make intuitive decisions based on their inherent and intuitive morals and ethics.
In regard to my distinction on the statement ‘common people accept’. Historically, nobility and royalty made the first judicial decisions. It was not until later that magistrates and judicial appointments were used. As such, regardless of class, common law was accepted as being fair. The majority of common law concerns centered on property disagreements and liability.
These laws were created through traditional precedent and certain reasonable assumptions about morality and ethics. The term natural is used as one might use when it asked a question such as ‘Would you like to be rich?’, and you would reply ‘Naturally, that goes without saying!’. In other words the precedents were considered to be obviously the natural decision in any particular case, and therefore were commonly accepted by all classes of society. Again, historically it is commonly accepted because the people view the decisions as naturally reasonable. It has nothing to do whatsoever with physics, or animals in their primal settings.
Martin Brock August 26, 2015 , 10:58 pm Vote0
I refer to human beings as well as other animals, and again, I see nothing natural about the rights sometimes called “natural”. These rights are artifacts. I’m not diminishing them by calling them artifacts, but since I observe them nowhere outside of human society, I have a hard time calling them “natural”. “Natural” is commonly juxtaposed with “artificial”, and an artifact is a product of humanity.
I’m not making any sort of point about animal rights, but your point about Plato is precisely why I do not call these rights “natural”. They have no meaning at all outside of the sort of conversation you imagine, because they are products of the human intellect and thus artificial as opposed to natural.
I propose no Hobbesian justification of the state, but the state is a truce in Hobbes’ war of all against all. As a libertarian, I believe we can avoid this war and thus the necessity of a truce, but we won’t find the path away from Hobbesian Nature in nature.
Foreknowledge of property is not the issue. Consent to the system of property entitling a property holder to defend his property is the issue. In a land with no state (or a minimal, libertarian state), rules emerge from free association. People associate with one another because they will live by the same rules. People who will not live by particular rules segregate themselves from people who will live by these rules. Individual property rights are among the rules that some people will accept and others will reject, so these rights are not laws of nature but individual choices and thus products of the human intellect.
The state is also an artifact, but it’s not an artifact that I favor. At most, I advocate an extremely limited state, serving only to secure inalienable human rights.
States exist to defend monopolies and impose monopoly rents. Whether these monopolies are “property” is a matter of semantics, and people commonly use the word this way. The idea that “property” describes only the fruits of a man’s labor, as Locke essentially asserts, is not the common use of the word, and you’ll even find self-described libertarians, like Stephan Kinsella, rejecting this use. Lockean (and libertarian) “property” is idiosyncratic in reality.
I might like to live in Saddam Hussein’s castle and relieve myself on his golden toilet seats, and I might even call this impulse “natural”, but I wouldn’t call it “libertarian”. People naturally want to dominate others by force. Libertarians choose an unnatural path instead by accepting principles emerging from the human intellect and evident nowhere outside of human society.
Blue Square August 27, 2015 , 6:05 pm Vote3
For anybody who doesn’t know already, Sheldon Richman (a prominent left-libertarian) and Walter Block (who thinks left-libertarianism is a contradiction in terms) are talking about this issue LIVE tomorrow night:
https://liberty.me/live/lets-talk-left-libertarianism/
Massimo Mazzone August 29, 2015 , 7:07 am Vote1
I just finished watching the debate between Richman and Block, and I think I might have understood finally an actual distinctive characteristic in left libertarianism. After a boring half a hour, in which there was basically no disagreement at all, I started to be a bit puzzled by some assertions of Sheldon. First the reference to sweat-shops as kind of inevitably created by the state and crony capitalists that collude to take away from poor people other alternatives. Then the assertion that also advanced economies are completed dominated and distorted by the intervention of the State. Finally Sheldon’s insistence that there is a “good” libertarianism that is based in the long-term objective of improving society into a more “just” one.
It sounded to me that he knew what was right and wrong, and of course his position was the right one, the natural one. Being Sheldon a real libertarian, he accepted that a bigot and a racist can be a fellow libertarian, provided he follows the Nap. But at the same time, it reminded me of Orwell, kind of “all the libertarians are equal but some are more equal than others”.
I felt uneasy at this comparison of the personal values of people, as I did by his self-confidence about how the economy works everywhere and anytime. I felt a scent of Positivism in Sheldon reasoning. I preferred the agnosticism of Walter.
At least this was my personal interpretation. The only thing I am positively sure is that Walter needs a bigger office. 🙂
Martin Brock August 29, 2015 , 12:12 pm Vote1
Sheldon did not say that sweatshops are inevitably enabled by the state. He said that “sweatshops are good” is not a great selling point for libertarianism and assumes that poor working conditions inevitably are not enabled by a state, which is an incredibly ridiculous assumption. Why do libertarians want to claim that freer markets deliver poor working conditions? Our story should be the opposite, that freer markets deliver better working conditions. Sure, working conditions may be worse less developed areas (as Sheldon said), but freer markets improve these conditions faster.
Sheldon did not say that advanced economies are completely dominated and distorted by the intervention of the State, but they certainly are dominated by the State. Would you dispute that?
As Sheldon noted early in the debate, Walter was debating “thick vs. thin”. We didn’t get a good “left vs. right” debate, focusing on issues that historically have been categorized this way. Homophobia and racism are not “left vs. right” issues in a historical libertarian sense at all. They’re personal preferences and contemporary fads.
Sheldon made one solid point in this regard that Walter avoided. Self-ownership applies to every individual, regardless of race or sexual preference or whatever. Walter wanted to say that individuals have no right to be respected, but self-ownership is a right to be respected. It’s not a right to be liked, but it is a right to be respected. When I “respect your rights”, I am respecting you, no? I’m not obliged to bake you a cake, but I am obliged not spit in your cake, regardless of your race, because spitting in a black man’s cake, because he’s a black man, is immoral by libertarian standards, Sheldon is right to say that racism is to this extent anti-libertarian. The NAP protects the person, not the cake.
Massimo Mazzone August 29, 2015 , 5:38 pm Vote1
Thanks for the answer, Martin, I will watch the debate again, I might have misunderstood some parts.
Regarding the role of the state in the economy though, especially the US economy, I think we disagree, and it is for me an important point, because of all the (in my opinion) pessimistic talk about fascism or communism growing in America. Of course the issue depends on the exact meaning of “dominance”, but in my experience in most industries the state is not more than a nuisance, with which the animal spirits of capitalism learned to cope. Of course the entrepreneurs, being human, have a tendency of using the state if it gives them some advantage: Musk, for all his libertarian rhetoric, is an example. But the great majority of entrepreneurs, not having the option of becoming crony capitalists, have to use the free market to satisfy their clients. Most of Silicon Valley industries, but also more traditional industries like fast-moving consumer goods, retail, food and service, entertainment, are essentially free of meaningful state interventions. Even in industries heavily regulated, like oil and gas, private innovation circumvents the state, the shale revolution for example is a completely private innovation. In that archetype of a regulated industry, finance, peer-to-peer lending and investing in equities is starting to disrupt the traditional role of merchant banking. Even education, where private initiative has been crowded out by the State during the last 150 years, is becoming private again, at least in emerging markets, and soon, I believe, even in the US. Another important example is the globalization of the last 30 years and the incipient re-shoring or near-shoring of some manufacturing in the US. There are no conspiracies of the States in these macro-trends, it is good old comparative advantage, and in the latter case the changing economics of specific industries and categories (in business sense) due to technological advances in automatization. You might say that, for example, minimum wages still meddle with the economics of each industry and ventures, as taxes and fiat money and other regulations do, and in this sense the presence of the State is pervasive. True, but this pervasive presence in my opinion is hardly “dominating”, in most cases is not more than a nuisance, as I mentioned before. We are in the middle of the greatest disruptive innovation cycle in the history of the world, this could not be possible if actual free capitalism were “dominated” by the state.
Regarding the “respect”, again I think is a semantic issue. I think we agree that a bigot might be libertarian assuming he respects the rights of not being aggressed of say, a black person, but he can still think (and say to him) that he is a stupid and despicable individual. Is this respect? I guess it depends on definitions. And I do not understand the example of the cake. Of course a libertarian bigot cannot spite in the cake, it would be a break of contract (if he is the baker) or an aggression, I do not see how this has to do with the question of respect.
Martin Brock August 29, 2015 , 9:31 pm Vote4
The U.S. has one of the freest economies in the world. It’s not nearly as close to top of the list as it has been in the past, and it’s hardly Walter Block’s idea of an economy governed solely by the NAP either. No other economy on Earth is.
Yet as Sheldon noted, libertarians routinely discuss state interference in the economy in the U.S. and around the world. Should we stop complaining only when some “leftist” complains about a sweatshop? We can complain about the taxes the sweatshop owner pays, but we can’t complain about barriers to market entry limiting the options of sweatshop workers? Why apologize for the poor working conditions rather than advocating the expanded options available in a freer market? When did libertarians become knee-jerk apologists for capitalists in every dispute between capitalists and the laborers they employ? Are wage laborers the only rent seekers in the political process? Are they even the most influential? I hardly think so.
A bigot may think anything he likes about black people without violating an obligation that libertarian ethics imposes, but if he hates all black people or thinks that all black people stupid or whatever, then I have a hard time understanding why he’d respect their right to self-ownership. Libertarians respect every person’s self-ownership, because we do not assume, a priori, that some people don’t merit this respect. We believe that all people are born with inalienable rights and that all people are completely equal in this regard.
Massimo Mazzone August 30, 2015 , 7:36 am Vote0
I think we agree on the US economy, Martin.
Regarding the sweatshops, I do get annoyed by people attacking them. As you probably know, I live in Central America and “sweatshops” are much better than the default option for their employees, which is usually non-cash crops agriculture. What annoys me most is the condescending attitude toward the employees, “the poor people do not know they are exploited, thanks God we illuminated progressivists from rich countries know what is best for them”. And by the way, the sweatshop owners have nothing to do with causing the lack of alternative opportunities, at least where I live.
Regarding the barriers to entry to alternatives, I side very much with Rothbard in his discussion with Konkin. Few people have the skills or the inclination to work as free-lancers or entrepreneurs, especially in countries with a GDP pro-capita of 2000$ per year. At least in these countries, the great majority is and will be looking for a salaried employment for the foreseeable future. I do not see many statist barriers to entry to be an entrepreneur in Central America (with the exclusion of the dismal state of public schools). Regulations like minimal wages or even taxes do not apply here to small entrepreneurs (companies with less than 20 or 30 employees) they just ignore them and are ignored themselves by the local IRS. At most, they pay the occasional small bribe. I would actually state that there are more barriers to be a formal employee than there are to be a small entrepreneur.
I have a neutral view on unions. People have of course every right to associate, but I am against the statist protection of organized labor. I think that in labour relations most libertarians usually side with the employers just because in that specific area labour is much more protected by the state than the employers, and it has been generally so for 80-100 years. It is so much so that I believe that most people nowadays do not even conceive the “serrata” (I myself do not know the word in English, I am referring to the employers strike), a theme that is very present in the anarchist or socialist literature of XIX and early XX century.
Regarding the issue of “respect”, I concede your point that libertarianism is usually associated with a set of beliefs that do not include discrimination for race and gender. But there are a lot of bonafide libertarians that discriminate entire groups of people for other reasons, for example religious reasons (against gays, or divorcees, or people that had abortion, or even against religious people themselves, like Rand), or life-styles reasons (for example addicted or promiscuous people) and another bunch of different and often weird reasons. I do not agree with them (also because I myself fall in a roughly 70% of the discriminated categories I mention above, lol) but I, like Sheldon and you, would not say they are not libertarians provided they follow the NAP. Therefore, yes, I do believe there is a lot of discrimination among libertarians and this is perfectly fine in my view. Although, again, I concede your point that this discrimination is usually not a priori, as you rightly put.
Martin Brock August 30, 2015 , 2:20 am Vote3
Like Lucy, I found the debate between Sheldon and Walter unsatisfying. The two largely agreed on substance and differed on semantics, and each complained that the other argued with a straw man. I sympathized more with Sheldon, but I also disagreed with him on essential points, and I didn’t disagree with Walter as much as I felt that both avoided the debate I hoped to hear.
I would not call myself a “non-proviso Lockean” for example. I would call myself a “thin left libertarian” to use Sheldon’s moniker. I agree with Walter that voluntary collectivism is completely consistent with the NAP, but I would go further and say that voluntary collectivism is essential to the NAP. In fact, Walter’s libertarianism is too thick for me precisely because he assumes individual property rights, beyond self-ownership, that are not voluntary.
Like many individualist anarchists, Walter seems to assume Lockean propriety, based on homesteading, with hereditary title or title transfer exclusively through contract with an individual property owner, regardless of anyone’s consent. He defends these rights because they are “natural” rather than voluntary. Stephan Kinsella even rejects Locke’s labor principle, that a homesteader gains exclusive title to a natural resource only by adding value to the resource with his labor, insisting that first possession and hereditary title alone are sufficient.
I disagree. Individual property in a natural resource is legitimate only within a voluntary community in which members freely accept a particular formulation of individual property rights, be it the Lockean formulation or some variation formulated by Rothbard or Kinsella. Furthermore, a voluntary community need not respect any formulation of individual property rights.
An egalitarian, income sharing community holding most capital in common is every bit as libertarian as an individualist community in which members hold all resources within the community individually and seek to profit through specialization and trade. Furthermore, no individual must own any resource individually before these communities may exist. In libertarian terms, no individual can meaningfully own any resource, other than himself, before such a community exists. Individual property rights are community standards, reflecting the consensus of a community’s members; therefore, these rights cannot exist prior to such a community.
We can argue about which sort of community is most productive, but this argument has nothing essentially to do with libertarian principles. Libertarianism doesn’t require people to be optimally productive any more than it requires people to integrate racially or to celebrate gay relationships. Mises’ critique of socialist calculation seems valid to me, but it’s not a libertarian argument. No libertarian principle prevents any number of people from organizing resources through a hierarchical planning bureaucracy without market prices. That these people will be poorer is not a libertarian argument.
Individual property rights other than self ownership exist only within a voluntary community and only with the consent of community members. This idea seems to me an essential difference between “left” and “right” libertarians, but Sheldon didn’t emphasize the distinction. I wonder if Walter would have agreed that a libertarian must be a non-proviso Lockean if pressed on this point, but because Sheldon conceded the point from the outset, we didn’t hear it debated. Instead, we got a replay of the fashionable debate over “thick” vs. “thin” that has little to do with the historical debate between “left” and “right”.
Massimo Mazzone August 30, 2015 , 7:57 am Vote1
I myself have never been fully satisfied by the Lokean approach to natural resources. On the other hand, I often wonder why all the fuss about this issue from a practical perspective. As David Friedman rightly pointed out 40 years ago in The machinery of freedom, profit from land and yet to be mined resources account for less than 5% of GDP in developed countries, and I would add that there has been no meaningful homesteading for at least a century.
So, I think my question to you is: what about the fruit of one’s efforts and labor? Do you think that also these property rights are community standards? Do you not believe that there is a natural right of individual property in this case? I feel that your answer will be a no, and I would disagree on this.
Martin Brock August 30, 2015 , 12:52 pm Vote1
I don’t say that anyone must accept a Lockean formulation of property rights to be a proper libertarian, only that an individual has a right to join or to establish a community governing resources this way.
As a matter of personal preference, I’m more of a Lockean than Sheldon, because I accept the Lockean proviso; however, we need to be clear about what constitutes the fruit of a person’s labor. A patent royalty? A state employee’s salary or pension? Interest and principle on a state bond, even if purchased with the proceeds of selling genuine fruits of one’s labor? A dividend from a share of Lockheed-Martin or any other organ of the corporative state a hair’s breadth away from a state agency? These income streams are not fruits of anyone’s labor in my way of thinking, and I haven’t even described the tip of the iceberg. Pushing paper around all day in exchange for a share of the tax collector’s booty, or some other monopoly rent, is not earning the fruit of one’s labor.
In reality, many of us in the United States, myself included, earn much income that I would not call the fruit of the earner’s labor. The corporative state is so pervasive that it’s hard to say how much of any individual’s income is earned in a Lockean sense. Even someone growing spinach on an off-the-grid permaculture farm in the U.S. probably has subsidized solar panels.
That’s no rationalization of sweeping redistribution, but it is a fact. If all illiberal money streams dried up tomorrow, hardly anyone would be unaffected, and some very rich people would become very poor overnight. That’s what I call the libertarian redistribution of wealth. When libertarians say that we oppose redistribution of wealth, we’re using words in an incredibly idiosyncratic fashion, and that’s why so few rich people are libertarians.
Youliy Ninov September 1, 2015 , 11:41 am Vote0
Massimo,
Hope you do not mind if I answer the questions above.
“So, I think my question to you is: what about the fruit of one’s efforts and labor? Do you think that also these property rights are community standards? ”
Yes, they are community standards. The reason: all the people in the community have agreed with these standards or if there is somebody who does not like them then he at least tolerates them and thus has agreed to live under them. In such a community initiated violence does not exist.
“Do you not believe that there is a natural right of individual property in this case? :”
If one wishes to have rights one has to live in a society. Otherwise the word “rights” looses its meaning. So, rights, being them “natural” or whatever have no meaning outside a particular society. What rights would you have when you are stranded on an island alone?
So, if the society you have chosen to live in approves of the private property rights, then you would have them. If not, then you would not have these rights.
Rights are not god- or nature-given ones. They are created by the interaction between the humans. They however may be more conducive to the personal development (i.e. more private property rights) or less (i.e. less private property).
Martin Brock September 1, 2015 , 12:20 pm Vote1
I didn’t answer the questions directly, but you answer them well. I agree.
I do advocate a few inalienable rights, fundamentally, namely a right to life and a right to liberty, where “liberty” simply means a right to leave a community at will. I don’t call these rights “natural”, but they are axiomatic in the libertarian system that I accept. They are foundations of a political framework, like a right to vote, rather than natural or ethical rights.
“Axiomatic” means “taken for granted” or tautological, not “obviously true”. All free communities respect these rights, because that’s what “free community” means to me. The rights are not edicts of God or laws of Nature. A political system, existing in nature, can violate these rights or impose more restrictive rights, but I wouldn’t call this system “free” or “libertarian”.
Other rights that some libertarians call “natural”, like a right exclusively to govern fruits of one’s labor, are community standards. The political system that I advocate does not force anyone to surrender fruits of his labor, but it doesn’t guarantee anyone fruits of his labor either.
A person desiring a right exclusively to govern fruits of his labor (or natural resources or other things) may join or form a community respecting this right and then trade freely within this community and with persons in other communities, but no one has this right anywhere he finds himself in nature, and the right doesn’t emerge “naturally” either. The right hardly exists anywhere in fact. It’s only an abstraction that libertarians discuss. Such abstractions are not what I call “natural”.
I want all persons essentially to have a right to vote with their feet, to choose a community governed as they like within a diverse marketplace in which respect for a community’s standards is the price of membership. This federation of intentional communities should be as diverse as the people within it, so any sufficiently large group of people (say a hundred people) should be entitled to establish a community governed as they like, even if no one else on Earth wants to belong to their community, even if everyone else on Earth wants nothing to do with these people.
How people can be entitled to the natural resources necessary to establish such a community, in a world in which established states already claim practically every acre on Earth, is the distributist question, and I wish we could discuss it more in libertarian circles without the “redistribution” bogeyman rearing its head.
I sympathize with Lockean mythology, but it’s no more natural than Christian mythology. Both are artifacts, and neither is more obligatory than the other.
Youliy Ninov September 2, 2015 , 6:44 am Vote0
Thanks Martin,
I know you position very well!
The problem with these “natural” rights is the following:
What if some person or group of people do not want them? They just want another subset of rights (islamic ones for instance). What do we do? Force them to accept these “natural” rights? This would be against NAP. So, the only option is to let them be, “live and let live” approach. The fact that some rights are supposed to be “the best” in some way does not justifiy their imposition.
From another point of view: Libertarianism supports the right of the people to differentiate/discriminate. So, why am I not supposed to protest against the existense of a drug-dealer in my neighborhood? I am supposed to stay content and let him sell this poison? No, I just move away from this place and join a society where drugs are prohibited. In this way I am sure to live in an environment which conforms to my expectations. Drugs would be banned but no violence would be initiated even when all drug-dealers face death sentence in my new society. I have the right to request and perform the above. What argument can be drawn to force me to live along with drug-dealers?
Martin Brock September 2, 2015 , 11:30 am Vote0
If a community holds people against their will to impose rules upon them, then it’s not a “free” community as I use the word “free”. This community is outside of the libertarian federation. I’m not suggesting that free communities invade other communities to rescue captive individuals, but I can’t call these other communities “free”.
I am suggesting that each member of a free community has a right to his or her life life and a right to exit the community, and I expect a federation of free communities to reinforce these principles. In sense, the federation does force each member community to respect a few, inalienable rights of individuals. If individuals don’t have these rights, I don’t know what “liberty” means. The NAP applies to individuals, not to communities. Free communities exist only because free individuals choose to constitute them.
Yes. Moving from a community that prohibits your drug dealing is just what you should do, and furthermore, the community should allow you to move. The community’s other members should not overpower you to prevent you from moving; otherwise, the community is not meaningfully “free”. I advocate free communities, not independent communities. An independent community could be horribly tyrannical and oppressive toward many of its members.
Maybe free communities should not wage war on an oppressive community, but I would not say that libertarianism permits the oppressive community. The oppressive community is not libertarian. It is not a member of the federation of free communities that I imagine. To earn the adjective “free”, a community must at least respect individual, inalienable rights to life and liberty.
Individual rights to property subject to a community’s standards (like land within the community’s borders) are alienable rights; therefore, a free community may deprive a member of this property to punish violations of its standards, but this taking is the limit of a free community’s punishment of an individual no longer willing to remain a member.
Youliy Ninov September 2, 2015 , 6:27 pm Vote0
Martin,
Thanks for the explanation, but I did not intend to get into a discussion on the topic of alienable/inalienable rights, etc. We have already discussed it at lentgh. It is interesting if we could convince Massimo that rights are not nature-given, i.e. that people have and must have a choice what rights to use.
Lee Roesner October 21, 2015 , 12:10 pm
May I suggest an illustrative model instead that looks like this.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/422957/political%20spectrum.png
Feel free to plot all your “isms” anywhere on the chart, while never losing site if its relative meaning to nature’s natural state of being, and that is the free individual. You could even overlay quadrants to help organize “types” of isms.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/422957/political%20spectrum%202.png
The argument them becomes not left or right as if they are equal choices but how close or far to the center you are, or how close and far you are from your natural rights.
Nathan Keller August 26, 2016 , 7:01 pm Vote1
The Left and Right of political discourse is purely conventional. There is no etymology that derives libertarianism from the word Left. And besides, even from the beginning, socialists sat on the Left with Bastiat. If anything, nothing has changed since his time, accept that the socialists are in charge now rather than the monarchists. Bastiat didn’t have a liberty section to sit in, so he sat with the socialists because even in his time, liberty was a radical idea. Similarly, we now have no ‘side’ to sit on. Libertarians have always been unwanted on the anti-capitalist and anti-property rights Left. Proudhon was famous for saying “property is theft.”
The distinction should be either individual rights or collective rights. Either the individual has rights because she is part of a group that has rights, or a group has rights because it is comprised of individuals who have rights.
Martin Brock August 26, 2016 , 11:07 pm Vote1
“Libertarian” does not descend from “left” etymologically, but the words are related historically, i.e. people like Bastiat describing themselves as libertarian (or classically liberal) historically identified with “the left” rather than “the right”.
“Socialism” at the time did not imply productive means owned by a state and organized by a planning bureaucracy without money or prices. Both Tucker and Spooner identified with “socialism” but neither advocated such a powerful state, quite the opposite.
The left was the libertarian section, but a division of ideological factions into precisely two camps is arbitrary, of course.
Proudhon is still famous for saying it, and he is also famous for saying, “Property is freedom.” The word “property” means different things in different contexts, so these statements are not contradictory, and Proudhon drew attention to the divergent, seemingly contradictory usage of this single word in political discourse. Is a Treasury security property? Is a share of Lockheed-Martin property? Even Locke, Rothbard and Kinsella can’t agree on a definition.
I’m essentially a collectivist on property rights beyond self-ownership, i.e. all rights beyond self-ownership, including an individual’s property in a parcel of land for example, are contractual. Defining individual property rights this way permits greater individual liberty. If you want strictly Rothbardian property rights, find others agreeing with you, claim some resources collectively, and organize these resources as Rothbard describes. Your claim on these resources does not preclude other formulations of property in other communities consisting of free associates.
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Michael Arko July 13, 2018 , 11:58 pm Vote0
I finally got around to reading this. I agree with most of the points. I’ve just always drawn the picture exactly the other way, with statists to the left and anarchists to the right. Mathematically it is more correct. To the extent that liberty and tyranny are inverses, therefore as liberty increases, the State decreases, then you can plot the extent of liberty on the X-axis with the corresponding extent of the State as 1/X on the Y-axis. This is a hyperbola with asymptotes at X=0 liberty and Y=0 State; and thus with totalitarianism on the left and anarchism on the right.
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