#politics #SSC #libertarianism

Libertarianism

I try to respect all view points, but I have a hard time with libertarianism.

Note: When I refer to libertarianism here, I am referring to the right-wing, Ayn Rand / Ron Paul variety. I understand that there are left-libertarians who are fine with non-coercive governmental welfare programs. My beef is not with them.

I know more than one libertarian, and I'm thinking of one in particular who told me that she embraced the ideology upon receiving her first paycheck, and seeing how much went to taxes.

I asked if she'd feel differently if the taxes were invisible to her: the job advertised $15 an hour, her employer paid taxes, and she received $15 an hour, with the "theft" from her paycheck. I never received an answer.

I wish I could find a less hostile version of this meme.

The libertarian argument is that you agreed to one ("Entrepreneurship"), but not the other. You don't really have a choice of whether or not to agree to either of them. The only time someone is going to hire you for $X to do a job is if they get at LEAST $X+1 value out of that. Otherwise they're necessarily losing money.

Tax Restructures

I recognize that this is a bit of a departure from the topic of libertarianism, forgive me.

If you restructured income tax to be the employer's responsibility, and invisible to the employee, I think this viewpoint would die out in a generation. Call it a tax change in the interest of transparency.

I understand that it gets weird for people who work multiple jobs, or at multiple tax rates. Thing are already weird and hard for them! Raise taxes for people who work one single job making a ton of money and if you happen to undertax someone working three jobs because some percentage of their income would be in a higher bracket, then either A) boo hoo, suck it up and deal with it or B) reconcile it in April, the same as any other "weird" scenario.

The Bear

It's hard to talk about libertarianism online these days without stumbling across the bear.

A bunch of libertarians formed the "Free Town Project", a plot to take over a town and turn it into a government=less libertarian paradise.

They chose Grafton, NH and moved in in droves. They shwoed up to town meetings and took over: cut the fire department, the library, the schools. Hunting laws, landfill restrictions, everything went out the window.

And sometimes we get rid of barriers without knowing why they're there (see also #wisdom-of-the-ancients).

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the town quickly became overwhelmed by bears, attracted by the lassez-faire approach to garbage disposal.

Reddit posts

Anecdotally, I've heard (via a reddit post) of libertarians trying and failing to make a government-less society in Rio Verde, Arizona.

I've been watching it in action out here in AZ. There's a town outside incorporated land that does not have government oversight, and therefore, no taxes. Bootstrap libertarians all live over there. Well due to the ongoing, and massive, drought that's raging across the southwest, local cities no longer sell them water. So all these libertarians are stomping their feet about how it's unfair that they no longer have access to it.

To make the whole thing even funnier? Every time they create a group of people to figure out how to manage the water crisis, who are nominated, it gets dismantled because they realize that they just created a government. Shit is absolutely a blast to watch.
– u/Demons0fRazgriz

u/Corgi_Koala sarcastically weighs in downthread about creating worse versions of a government-like authority:

If you need protection, you just voluntarily pay money to a private police force. And neighborhoods could pool their money together to pay them and get better protection!

Basically most solutions involve voluntarily paying the equivalent for a tax anyways, just to a private entity.

Related, from u/Kandoras:

There was a little unincorporated community in Texas that tried to make a new city on those principles too. No local property taxes, no regulation, no public utilities.

They were amazed that Walmart kept refusing to open up a big box store in a community with no sewer or water system. Where the store would have to run on a private well and a septic tank.

They hired some kid fresh out of college with a public administration degree. He worked for years with the nearby big city (Houston I think), to get them to extend the water and sewer lines out to the new libertarian paradise. He finally managed to come up with a deal where the paradise wouldn't even have to pay the whole bill.

The city council shot it down because they'd have to raise taxes above 0 to pay for it. A couple years later the mayor has stepped down, replaced by his mother, who still believes they can convince businesses to relocate to their utopia.

Meanwhile the city is surviving by being a speed trap.

Roads and Services

If schools have to funded directly by the people, and not through taxes, there is no way to educate the poor.

The common argument against libertarianism is "who will build the roads?""

The common response is "There are public roads in disrepair right now!" or "Companies like Amazon and Walmart will build roads so they can deliver goods".

It seems more likely to me that Amazon would simply only deliver to drop boxes, or invest in drones to avoid roads entirely. Even the "best case" scenario (which libertarians admit) is that Amazon builds and maintains a road via taxes (or raising costs elsewhere to support the road), which is just like taxes with more steps!

Sure, if there's too big of a margin, someone else could attempt to take over (see also Uber's Bezzle), but the end result is that people who want the road to exist are still paying for the road, only now instead of a centralized government, there's a private entity with no accountability in charge.

This is all assuming an urban or suburban environment, forget entirely about rural and interstate roads!

To the libertarian's credit, the Indiana Toll road is a great example of a private toll road that works! But it's in a densely populated part of the country with a LOT of shipping. I want to see the same thing in a place like Montana to be more satisfied.

Non-Libertarian FAQ

Source

Trades can benefit trading parties, but harm people who weren't consulted (I sell my house to an amateur wasp farmer whose wasps sting the neighbors)

Coordination problems:

Let’s consider fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month.

Each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The most profitable solution to this problem is for Steve to declare himself King of the Lake and threaten to initiate force against anyone who doesn’t use a filter. This regulatory solution leads to greater total productivity for the thousand fish farms than a free market could.

The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake). I intentionally chose aquaculture for this example because privatization doesn’t work. Even after the entire lake has been divided into parcels and sold to private landowners (waterowners?) the problem remains, since waste will spread from one parcel to another regardless of property boundaries.

Boycotts

Don't work at scale
Hard to organize
Imagine a world where someone does something terrible to earn $10M, but their product is $50 cheaper than the competitor. In order for the seller to notice, you need 100,000 people to boycott, each willing to sacrifice $50 for a principle. That's a free market failure
So why NOT use child labor, as a business? Why have ethics?
See also: Coke commits terrible atrocities (Colombian death squads) and literally no one cares enough to boycott them.

Other arguments

People can't (and shouldn't have to) keep track of everything dangerous in the materials they consume.
Big list of mixed-truth comments about dangers of wood (e.g. "Commonly used US-manufactured wood products, including almost all plywood, contain formaldehyde, a compound known to cause cancer. This has been known in scientific circles for years, but was only officially reported a few months ago because of intense chemical industry lobbying to keep it secret. Formaldehyde-containing wood products are illegal in the EU and most other developed nations.")
Studies show that increasing government spending significantly improves social mobility. States with higher government spending have about 33% more social mobility than states with lower spending.
The entire section on taxes
- Taxes are low
  - Yes rich people pay more but that's because there are more of them and they have more money. No individual rich person is paying an outsized share; tax rates on the rich are at historic lows.
- Marginal taxes are fair
The government does good things!
- Moon landing
- Smallpox eradication
- Polio eradication
- Much much more