After a while the regular libertarians look to confront the plant owner about the waste and dumping asking for a cleanup and compensation for the damage to people and property.
Well hearing that people are upset, the plant owner has a town hall with the folk, they get rowdy and emotional. The plant owner get's defensive and thinks about the possibility of a down quarter for his victimized chemical plant. Everyone leaves a bit upset. Some more than others.
Later that night the plant owner sits in his home and reads about a new libertarian utopia that's started. They go to bed that night with a plan to pack up leave this ungrateful town.
A month later the plant over leaves with most of the towns job, the PFAS stays and everyone else is too sick or poor paying for someones sickness to be able to be a libertarian anymore.
Ta-da, the aristocrats.
It's a lot like cryptocurrency and DAO schemes: it turns out to be really really hard to get people to accept that a bug in the law means a bad outcome for them, and nobody writes non-trivial bug-free code.
That's disingenuous. There is plenty of libertarian literature on negative externalities. Milton Friedman, notably, was happy to use taxes and regulations to protect the environment.
The reasoning is simple: by polluting my land / poisoning me with PFAS, you have violated the NAP. This kind of pollution is illegal in "Libertopia".
The same can be said about your arbitrary argument. Why are the fine schedules set to $X today instead of $X+1? Why do we get drivers licenses at 16 instead of 17? Do you oppose Obamacare because it has such an arbitrary income limit?
Everything about the specific implementation of laws is arbitrary. The important thing is that it is reasonable, and on solid moral ground. A libertarian government would scale the fines / punishment / taxes in accordance with how grevious the crime was.
I am exactly not expecting unanimous consensus, which is why statements like "this kind of pollution is illegal in Libertopia [because of NAP]" seem dubious to me.
The generally(this might be too strong a word to use with Libertarians) accepted interpretation of the NAP is that as long as I do not initiate violence against someone, my behavior is acceptable, and that violence is only acceptable against someone if they break the NAP first.
This breaks down in Libertarian communities as they cannot agree on common deductions of things like what counts as “someone”, what counts as “violence”, whether you have rights to the land if you’re not using it(Georgists/homesteaders), or if indirect damages like pollution are a violation of the NAP.
The idea that a libertarian community would let someone dump toxins into their neighborhood and leave without cleaning it up or compensating the hurt is completely plausible. Half of the community would not believe he directly caused the cancer unless he injected it into you, and you should have been more careful about what water you drink, and the other half’s only recourse would be to fight the first half.
You might be interested in this review of an another book on a related topic:
>The Town That Went Feral
>When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
>... This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...
I find Libertarianism a good starting-off point, or default, for thinking about govt. In general, freedom is a good in itself.
The problem I've found is that, if given actual free reign, any libertarian state would soon end up re-inventing something like what we have now, or degenerate into authoritarianism.
It sounds lovely to have no hard laws & regulations, with conflicts resolved by the courts. Hell, I've had lots of race training and won sportscar racing championships, and having to conform with the rules of the guys with the blue lights is really annoying. Same for factories having to comply with pollution regs.
The problem is that without standards, everyone has a right of action. So instead of a known framework - I can go 65mph, or the factory can emit only X tons of pollutant-Y per 1000 tons of exhaust, anyone can take action. I might drive past someone at a very reasonable speed, but startle them, and now they're charging me in court. I might live 1000 miles downwind and not like that polluter, so I get some measuring devices and find the scintilla of pollutant they're dropping on my land. Soon, everyone would want some actual standards to meet so it isn't always chaos (aside from the massive court & enforcement system).
The other key concept is that the "Free Market" literally does not exist. Every market has rules, regulations, and constraints. Those constraints may not be enforced by a specific government entity, but a market cannot persist past one deal without them. Any completely "free market" would allow anything, including false advertising, products containing poisons, and murder-for-hire services. Taken to the logical conclusion, your greatest advantage in a totally free market is to either kill your vendor and take his goods or kill your customer and take their money, but that never even lasts past one deal. All things in every sustained market are regulated to one degree or another, even in completely extra-legal markets. The only question is how much are they regulated and by what entities.
History has pretty much demonstrated that governance is required for any kind of even slightly complex society. This is ALWAYS annoying and imperfect. The question is only how to make it least imperfect. Libertarianism seems to have good answers, but when actually examined even a bit, it fails.
Given that attempts to build socialist utopias have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, I'm pretty sure "fail fast" is a feature rather than a bug.
I know this is a generalisation; I know that the UK (my home) has engaged in some shady horror abroad and I agree that should factor in to this conversation. But I also feel that the dreadful “communist” experiences you’re alluding to are outliers from the conversation, are dictatorships and oligarchies, and not genuine attempts at socialist utopia.
...
>not genuine attempts at socialist utopia.
"Unsuccessful" attempts would seem to be a more accurate phrasing than "not genuine".
While I do think you have an interesting point, it could perhaps be the rigid uniformity and anti-individualism which is intrinsic to hard core socialism that has helped lead to those horrid dictatorships we've seen in the past 100 years
I have not studied the roots of "hard core socialism" deeply enough to understand where this uniformity comes from. Taking a vary casual glance at Marx, it doesn't seem to be there. He seemed to be arguing for collective ownership and an eventual slide towards "cooperative anarchy" - a conscious balance or dialog between collective and individual desire. It's really hard for me to see where the rigid conformity came from. In other venues, we see rigid conformity tied to hierarchy (military, strict schools).. all venues that tend to have figurehead leaders, and disempowered individuals rather than collective empowerment.
>It's really hard for me to see where the rigid conformity came from.
Perhaps its from the concept of "equality of outcome", everyone is treated the same no matter what they do.
>In other venues, we see rigid conformity tied to hierarchy (military, strict schools).. all venues that tend to have figurehead leaders, and disempowered individuals rather than collective empowerment.
It's an interesting correlation, but within those organizations there does at least seem to be some elememts of meritocracy involved. Although, Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. were all military based dictatorships who preached (though perhaps poorly practiced, or misinterpreted) Marxist ideas.
I think meritocracy can be a by-word for negative discrimination, for enforcing conformity and disempowerment. "They must stay a developer because they're good at it; they must remain a welder because they're fast".. few can change to explore whether they're a good or crap manager or artist without serious negative QoL impacts/risks. Meritocracy is hierarchy's whip.
I think the preach/practice dichotomy is worthy of deeper unpacking. In my limited experience, practicing collective ownership is hard and takes skills, willpower and expectations we're not readily taught (because most of us grow up through multiple hierarchies).
Thanks for the podcast link. Bookmarked.
Perhaps. I understand the direction you're thinking. We have two or three significant instances of that happening.
My suspicion is that it doesn't come from socialism, but from botched revolution. "The people" organised themselves into militia to prosecute a revolution. The militia benefitted from hierarchical leadership, as is the way with military process. As soon as power was taken from the previous despot, an opportunistic military leader leaped at the chance to replace the despot with themselves rather than truly ceding ownership to "the people". Maybe because the revolutionary leadership had been successful, "the people" accepted the revolutionary leaders should also be the "peacetime" leaders (plus the leaders had the military, so it's hard to argue against them). Hierarchy continued, just with a new face.
A willingness to imprison entire populations and shoot anyone who won't cooperate will extend an experiment's lifespan significantly.
Examples:
https://listverse.com/2017/09/14/10-tragic-times-the-us-gove...
I’ll grant you that’s still several decades of utopian capitalism before it collapsed which is significantly better than what people might assume if they are only familiar with recent experiments like grafton nh
I guess a bit more than a subjective comment on HN.
Neither the US nor the UK are libertarian societies. Both have substantial safety nets and large governments that work (mostly) for the common weal.
Yes, during the 20th century, western economies did vastly better than, say, North Korea or the Soviet Union, but China in the 21st century is the odd data point. They are neither fish nor fowl, not communist, not really capitalist, certainly centrally controlled in some aspects and bizarrely wild west in others.
Can you elaborate on why you believe this? I don't see any way that the US and the UK are Libertarian, unless the definition of that word is stretched massively.
I suspect at least in the communist ideology, there is lot of emphasis on cooperation and collective agreement. While in the libertarian ideology, there is no way to resolve conflict, aside from - just avoid each other. That is obviously insufficient.