Anyone here lean Libertarian? If so, some questions for you...

[redqueen]

I saw this posted at a website and wanted to get some feedback from anyone who considers themselves Libertarianish.

Uncle Sam

Imagine if you will that libertarian principles have become generally accepted. Society is governed on the basis of mutually agreed upon contracts, it is universally agreed that force should only be used in response to force, theft is wrong, no one is morally obligated to help another, etc.

In this idyllic society lives a major landowner called Sam. Sam owns a lot of land and has a lot of different tenants, both residential and commercial.

On a day-to-day basis, Sam's tenants think of the property they occupy as belonging to them (just as I often speak of "my apartment" or "my office" although I am not the ultimate owner of either). However, on serious consideration it's clear that the ultimate owner is Sam. Sam allows his tenants some leeway to do what they want on his land, but he also has some rules that he imposes. Sam has it written into his contracts that he can evict tenants if he wants (sometimes paying them a sum of money in compensation).

Sam charges his tenants different amounts of rent according to his individual agreements with them. Some tenants he chooses to let stay free out of charity. Others he charges lots of rent because he knows they can pay. Sam likes to write into his contracts that if tenants are going to use Sam's land for some business activity, Sam gets a certain cut of the proceeds.

As I understand it, everything I have described is perfectly consistent with libertarian paradise. Libertarians would consider it hunky-dory even if Sam were remarkably capricious and arbitrary in his dealings with his tenants, and gave them very little consideration when deciding how to manage his property. It's his property, after all.

So why does it matter if Uncle Sam is a legal fiction rather than an actual person? Why is it that the current government's actions are morally unacceptable to libertarians, but they would be acceptable if the government were incarnated as a super-rich landlord?

There are three questions I want to ask of libertarians here.

1. Some claim that the United States is immoral because it taxes the income of its residents, and the residents can't move to a country where they're not taxed. But I don't think libertarians would consider a landlord immoral for charging his tenants whatever rent he chose, even if (or especially if) the tenants' other options were no better. It seems to me we can't have it both ways. Either the United States government is not immoral, or a landlord is immoral if he charges high rent when his tenants don't have the money to buy their own houses. Which is it?

2. Who's the bigger whiner---the man who complains that there are no governments he wants to live under, and he shouldn't have to go into hiding in the jungle either? Or the man who complains that there are no jobs he feels like taking, and he shouldn't have to go hungry either? Does one have a better case than the other? Maybe they're both whiners.

3. Let's say you go into suspended animation for 100 years and awake to find that in the future everyone is a good libertarian, but the two or three hundred richest people in the world own all the land, and as the landlords they make the rules. Effectively, they've replaced the world's governments. They're all libertarian, so you can freely move from landlord to landlord, but all the landlords do have rules and charge rent, and if you don't like any of the landlords, you're out of luck. Is this situation really any better than the world of governments you left? And isn't it possible that this situation could eventually arise in a libertarian society?


http://robotics.caltech.edu/~mason/ramblings/uncleSam.html

[Radical Activist]

1. Good way of putting it.

Someone in society always has the power. Libertarianism essentially takes away people's power to act collectively through the government and gives it to those individuals who have the greatest ability to enforce their will through wealth or force. It takes away one of the biggest weapons the people have to defend themselves from being total serfs to the small number of billionaires who are already close to running the world.

[redqueen]

2. Excellent point... without some governmental regulation,

the worst elements are given free reign until the plebeians rise up and overthrow them.

[SeekerofTruth]

5. I love that wording.. Someone in society always has the power

It's so true, but nobody ever expresses it that way.

The problem I have is how to balance the power, because there are times I think the government has way too much power (or corps and individuals have way too much power). I have my own theories and how to balance it, but that is off topic.

Sorry to the OP, but I don't have an answer to your question.

[Frederik]

11. well put

The problem with libertarianism in a nutshell.

[Dr Ron]

3. Not completely analogous

You do touch on a weakness of libertarianism--that conditions which might be otherwise objected to could be accepted if done by a private property owner.

However the situation isn't completely analogous as in your example Sam owns the land, while libertarians would argue that the United States does not own the land in this country.

If we had a situation in which a small number of people owned all the land we could definately have a situation where there is less freedom with land lords making the rules. I bet that hard core libertarians will argue that this is unlikely to occur. After all, how many of the super-rich get that way thanks to government assistance?

To complicate your situation further, what if Sam not only collects rent/taxes but has other restrictions on the actions of his tennants. In this case the tennants might not even have a say as to what the rules are, and no guarantees of due process if accused of violating those rules.

[redqueen]

6. Well it's not meant to be an exact analogy...

merely to request the reasoning as to why these kinds of restrictions would be more acceptable from a private property owner than the government.

[BurtWorm]

4. Those are excellent questions, but I think Libertarians would challenge

the notion that the government owns the property a priori. I've tried to get the most extreme form of libertarians, the "anarcho"-capitalists, to admit that property cannot be legitimate without a "controlling legal authority" otherwise known as government. They can't take it back that far. Their utopia begins now, with everyone owning what they own now and the only radical change being the dissolution of that "controlling legal authority."

[redqueen]

7. Well of course it doesn't.

However the parallels are still there to be explained or rationalized.

Sounds like rationalization may in fact be their only response.

[BurtWorm]

8. Rationalization AND denial.

Those are how they deal with challenges to their perfect little scenario. And also the snotty pretense that only they understand economics (when in fact what those fuckers "understand" is nothing but a fantasy of their own creation).

But I'm not bitter... ;)

[redqueen]

9. If you follow that link, the person who posted it has some

financial commentary as well. I found it interesting, anyway.

[BurtWorm]

10. Here's another interesting site

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

You could spend days here educating yourself about everything that's wrong with Libertarianism but didn't want to waste time arguing with Libertarians about to discover.