If Libertarianism is so great, why has no country tried it?

[bronzeage]

nonsense! A libertarian congress would debate the quickest and most efficient way to screw the poor.

If one counts talk as something happening, I stand corrected.

Libertarianism would be great two hundred years ago. If one wanted to go live in the woods in order to learn to live deliberately, it's no problem. You won't be giving up electric service, running water, and flush toilets, because nobody else has any of that either.

Except for the slaughter of hostile native American's, there wasn't much the government had to offer, so living without government services and government intrusion into one's life wasn't such a loss.

Libertarians talk a good game, but never actually do anything.

 

[richard_daily]

If one counts talk as something happening, I stand corrected.

Libertarianism would be great two hundred years ago. If one wanted to go live in the woods in order to learn to live deliberately, it's no problem. You won't be giving up electric service, running water, and flush toilets, because nobody else has any of that either.

Except for the slaughter of hostile native American's, there wasn't much the government had to offer, so living without government services and government intrusion into one's life wasn't such a loss.

Libertarians talk a good game, but never actually do anything.

I also think that they'd quickly vote to give themselves a pay raise.

 

[BotanyBoy]

I also think that they'd quickly vote to give themselves a pay raise.

No doubt....but that's hardly a libertarian trait, it's an elected official trait.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

What about the Libertarian paradise of Somalia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QDv4sYwjO0

 

[BotanyBoy]

What about the Libertarian paradise of Somalia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QDv4sYwjO0

LMAO "I have cholera!"

 

[RobDownSouth]

If one counts talk as something happening, I stand corrected.

Libertarianism would be great two hundred years ago. If one wanted to go live in the woods in order to learn to live deliberately, it's no problem. You won't be giving up electric service, running water, and flush toilets, because nobody else has any of that either.

Except for the slaughter of hostile native American's, there wasn't much the government had to offer, so living without government services and government intrusion into one's life wasn't such a loss.

Libertarians talk a good game, but never actually do anything.

Thus endeth the sermon for today. Amen.

 

[KingOrfeo]

It falls into "the path not taken".

It has never been taken because it was never taken.

The thing is that the libertarian path isn't one way - you can always add social programs, but the welfare state path does not allow a reset without a revolution.

That makes no sense. You can always add social programs, you can always subtract social programs, and nobody's gonna mount a revolution to achieve the latter.

 

[dan_c00000]

I'll never understand libertarianism because Hobbes tore that idea apart back when he wrote Leviathan in 1651 and came to the conclusion that a strong centeral government was needed to prevent the war of all against all.

Even Hobbes recognized that the government needs to regulate some stuff (beyond keeping the peace). He also, gasp!, describes what is best called "public charity" to be paid for via taxes! It's a shame these right wing clowns haven't even caught up to the 17th century yet.

 

[KingOrfeo]

For perspective see

"Liberalism

The chief objective for liberalism is human freedom. In liberalism, freedom means the ability to do what one wills with one's own life and property. Liberals stand in opposition to government restrictions on private actions, and tend to be skeptical of authority. "

BAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA have you informed US liberals of this? B/c they don't know it.

*sigh* Read the piece again, for comprehension this time; it is (to start with, at least, as did history) using the word "liberal" in its classical and its contemporary-European sense -- equating to "libertarian" in the U.S., where "liberal" means something different, which the article also discusses.

Here's a good discussion of the meaning of "liberal" in the American context -- "Is It OK To Be Liberal Again, Instead of Progressive?" by Michael Lind, 2008. His point is that "progressives" should drop that label and start calling themselves "liberals" again -- revive that once-honorable name, instead of trying to distance themselves from the RW's demonization of it by rebranding. Reasons given:

1) It's futile -- the RW is going to bash the center-left based on its policies, whatever name it uses.

2) Neoliberals have tried to appropriate the name "progressive" for themselves, which makes it rather confusing.

3) Radical leftists -- socialists and Communists of various stripes -- have done the same.

4) There is also risk of confusion with the early 20th-Century Progressives, whose politics were substantially different from all of the above.

5) The word "progressive" is "too German," deriving as it does from Germany's bureaucratically-oriented 19th-Century Deustche Fortschrittspartei (the word Fortschritt means "progress), whereas liberalism proper is rooted in values and civil liberties, not state action.

6) The most interesting objection: The world "progressive" implies "progress," which is not necessarily a liberal value.

Unlike progressivism and conservatism, liberalism is not a name that implies a view that things are either getting better or getting worse. Liberalism is a theory of a social order based on individual civil liberties, private property, popular sovereignty and democratic republican government. Liberals believe that liberal society is the best kind, but they are not committed to believing in universal progress toward liberalism, much less universal progress in general. Many liberals have been skeptical about the idea of unlimited progress and have believed that a liberal society is difficult to establish and easily changed into a nonliberal society.

Because liberalism refers to a particular kind of social order, and does not depend on any implied relationship of the present to the past or future, liberals can be either progressive or conservative, depending on whether they seek to move toward a more liberal system or to maintain a liberal system that already exists. For that matter, liberals can be revolutionary, if creating or establishing a liberal society requires a violent revolution. Liberals can even be counterrevolutionary, if they are defending a liberal society from revolutionary radicals, including anti-liberal revolutionaries of the radical right like Timothy McVeigh or Muslim jihadists.

7) "Liberal" is, or could be once again, a badge of pride. It describes an American political tradition with an honorable history and great achievements to its credit.

Those, then, are six arguments in favor of using liberalism to describe the center-left. I've reserved the seventh for last. The word "liberal" is a badge of pride. What is more embarrassing in 2008, to be associated with self-described liberals like Roosevelt and Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan, or with conservatives like Reagan and George W. Bush and Tom DeLay? I much prefer the public philosophy of the mid-century liberals, for all their blunders and shortcomings, to that of the three movements in American history that have called themselves progressive: the moderate-to-conservative progressives of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 1990s; the deluded pro-Soviet progressives of the mid-20th century; and the Anglo-Protestant elite progressives of the 1900s, who admired Bismarck's Germany and wanted to keep out immigrants and sterilize the native poor.

All very good reasons, to be sure; very persuasive and cogently argued; but I object for the following two reasons:

1) The word "liberal" also is prone to ideological confusion. In the 19th Century it meant more or less what we call "libertarianism" today, which, at least in its modern incarnation, is also very, very different from what Lind considers "liberal" as described above.

2) In my judgment, in contemporary American political discourse, the word "progressive" actually means something, and not what Lind seems to think it does, and not what the Democratic Leadership Council stands for, either. Specifically, it means something well to the left of "liberal" (as Lind defines "liberal" above) and well to the right of "socialist." It is the political position of America's erstwhile NDP-inspired New Party, or the Working Families Party, or the Vermont Progressive Party -- any of which is easily distinguishable from even such a moderate socialist organization as the Democratic Socialists of America. Their politics is that of the social democrats of Europe. They don't envision wholesale expropriation of wealth or socialization of all means of production, but they do regard greater socioeconomic equality as an important end-in-itself, and they do regard movement in that direction as a form of "progress," and they do believe in the idea of "universal progress in general." The American Greens -- at least, the main body of them, the Green Party of the United States -- are a branch of American progressives. (There is also a smaller and distinctly far-leftist, Marxist-influenced party, the Greens/Green Party USA.) And progressivism so defined is an important political tendency, far more important in American politics today than socialism as such -- and, I think may become much more important in coming decades. The word "progressive" is worth preserving in American political discourse because it denotes that political tendency as no other term in current usage adequately does.

 

[BotanyBoy]

That makes no sense. You can always add social programs, you can always subtract social programs, and nobody's gonna mount a revolution to achieve the latter.

They have done it numerous times in the past. Hell that's how this country was born ya fuckin ninny.

*sigh*

That's about as far as I got with your long winded faggotry. TLDR

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Knock off the bullshit. Whatever you call it, it always means WHATS YOURS IS MINE AND DO WHAT I SAY.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I'll never understand libertarianism because Hobbes tore that idea apart back when he wrote Leviathan in 1651 and came to the conclusion that a strong centeral government was needed to prevent the war of all against all.

Libertarians draw more on Locke than Hobbes.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Knock off the bullshit. Whatever you call it, it always means WHATS YOURS IS MINE AND DO WHAT I SAY.

^^ KO summed up.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Blubbering socialist has nothing but sob stories and a bleeding heart as he get's fucking destroyed by a libertarian. (I think it's LJ)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIeLgzWDekI

 

[Henry_McCarty]

Michael Lind writes in Salon:

Tuesday, Jun 4, 2013 12:17 PM EDT

The question libertarians just can’t answer

If your approach is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?

By Michael Lind

Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?

It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling.

But this isn’t an adequate response. Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Other political philosophies pass the test, even if their exemplars flunk other tests. Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as examples of “really-existing socialism.” They argued that, while communist regimes fell short in the areas of democracy and civil rights, they proved that socialism can succeed in a large-scale modern industrial society.

While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.

Lacking any really-existing libertarian countries to which they can point, the free-market right is reduced to ranking countries according to “economic freedom.” Somewhat different lists are provided by the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

According to their similar global maps of economic freedom, the economically-free countries of the world are by and large the mature, well-established industrial democracies: the U.S. and Canada, the nations of western Europe and Japan. But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise. Indeed, the government share of GDP in these and similar OECD countries is around forty percent—nearly half the economy.

Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries. For example, in the latest ranking of economic liberty by the Heritage Foundation, the top five nations are Hong Kong (a city, not a country), Singapore (a city-state), Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland (small-population countries).

With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire. Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.

Australia and New Zealand depended for protection first on the British empire and now on the United States. Its fabled militias to the contrary, Switzerland might not have maintained its independence for long if Nazi Germany had won World War II.

These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade. Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S. (number 10 on the Heritage list of economic freedom) or even medium-sized countries like Germany (number 19) or Japan (number 24).

And then there is Mauritius.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. has less economic freedom than Mauritius, another small island country, this one off the southeast coast of Africa. At number 8, Mauritius is two rungs above the U.S., at number 10 in the global index of economic liberty.

The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?

How about education? According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010. For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent, compared to only 88.5 percent in economically-freer Mauritius.

Infant mortality? In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S. Maternal mortality in Mauritius is at 60 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 21 in the U.S. Economic liberty comes at a price in human survival, it would seem. Oh, well—at least Mauritius is economically free!

Even to admit such trade-offs—like higher infant mortality, in return for less government—would undermine the claim of libertarians that Americans and other citizens of advanced countries could enjoy the same quality of life, but at less cost, if most government agencies and programs were replaced by markets and for-profit firms. Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.

It’s a seductive vision—enjoying the same quality of life that today’s heavily-governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less regulation. The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced to return to the question with which we began: if libertarianism is not only appealing but plausible, why hasn’t any country in the world ever tried it?

Perhaps the problem is that "libertarianism" isn't so much a governance form, but more a political philosophy.

There are libertarian aspects to many governance systems over a wide range of political viewpoints.

Also, the definition of "libertarianism" is yet to be universally defined.

 

[Liar]

Scroll up.

Ok, bored now.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Perhaps the problem is that "libertarianism" isn't so much a governance form, but more a political philosophy.

There are libertarian aspects to many governance systems over a wide range of political viewpoints.

Also, the definition of "libertarianism" is yet to be universally defined.

None of that cuts any ice with movement Libertarians.

 

[KingOrfeo]

They have done it numerous times in the past. Hell that's how this country was born ya fuckin ninny.

Not to subtract social programs, it wasn't.

That's about as far as I got with your long winded faggotry.

Yes, I do recall the word "faggot" being used a great deal in Idiocracy.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Perhaps the problem is that "libertarianism" isn't so much a governance form, but more a political philosophy.

There are libertarian aspects to many governance systems over a wide range of political viewpoints.

Also, the definition of "libertarianism" is yet to be universally defined.

Very good points, all of them.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Not to subtract social programs, it wasn't.

HAHAHA Right....we didn't get bent out of shape b/c they were taxing us or anything....LMFAO. god damn you're stupid.

Yes, I do recall the word "faggot" being used a great deal in Idiocracy.

Because your shit's all retarded....

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/1627232000/h407287C6/

 

[KingOrfeo]

Because your shit's all retarded....

Generally, in the Idiocracy sense and in yours, "faggot" means "he is saying something I am too stupid to understand."

If you're a Ph.D. candidate, I'm the Emperor of China.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Generally, in the Idiocracy sense and in yours, "faggot" means "he is saying something I am too stupid to understand."

Call me stupid all day, doesn't make you any less of a left wing dick suck hack.

 

[CHNOPS]

Another fish-bait thread I can't find the motivation to scrol through, but I hope/assume that someone has pointed out that a country that "tried" it, wouldn't be Libertarian.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Seriously King, why the fuck don't you put Bot on ignore. He's pretty much Jen without the folksy charm. You could at least be kind enough not to quote the son of a bitch.

 

[KingOrfeo]

very true dude.
to comment to the OP:
people have been dominated by society from BIRTH. to think they need to be controlled, dominated, told what to do, how to live, what is acceptable, and what is not.

Well, that's pretty much any society, isn't it? It's true of primitive hunger-gatherers, and it's true of civilized people in every civilization in history, and it would still be true in a Libertopian society, only difference being government does not do quite so much of the telling-what-to-do -- but that still gets done and just as much, it's merely changed to a privatized function, as it were. De Tocqueville saw very clearly that the tyranny of public opinion can be far more oppressive and intrusive than the tyranny of the state.