While I generally have a happy-go-lucky attitude toward life, I’m pessimistic about public policy.
So when I got an email asking me how I would reconcile the supposed superiority of libertarian principles with the absence of libertarian societies, I initially was tempted to assert that our principles are sound and then give reasons why I nonetheless expect freedom to continuously diminish.
- The eroding-social-capital answer: Statism is inevitable because governments lure people into dependency with handouts.
- The tyranny-of-the-majority answer: Statism is inevitable because people thinks it’s okay for 51 percent of the people to rape and pillage 49 percent of the people.
- The public-choice answer: Statism is inevitable because interest groups will manipulate the political process to obtain unearned wealth.
- The crony-capitalism answer: Statism is inevitable because big business can’t resist getting into bed with big government and corrupting the process of free enterprise.
There are probably other reasons, but I think you get the idea. No wonder I’ve been speculating about where people should move when America descends into Greek-style economic chaos.
But I want to be uncharacteristically optimistic and explain why libertarian principles are still very relevant and that the outlook is better than we think.
- First, we have some polling data showing that the American people are quite hostile (at least in theory) to big government.
- Second, global economic liberty has increased in recent decades according to Economic Freedom of the World, notwithstanding recent slippage in the United States and Western Europe.
- Third, non-economic liberties are much stronger today than in past years, as explained by my colleague David Boaz.
- Fourth, whether we’re looking at North Korea vs South Korea, Chile vs. Venezuela, or the U.S. vs. Europe, the world is a laboratory and the evidence gets stronger with each passing year that markets are better than statism.
So while I don’t expect that there will ever be a libertarian Nirvana, I also don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel and meekly accept the yoke of statism.
Ah the ceaseless struggle to evade the lessons of Atlas Shrugged!
Nobody, not even Dan, calls attention to the fact that most citizens elegible to vote abstain. Yet are coerced by the laws of half the minority plus one. Spoiler vote clout should be an inducement, but few know what it is.
[…] close with a personal observation that people sometimes challenge me to point out successful libertarian […]
[…] But why, then are we so unsuccessful in producing libertarian societies? […]
[…] we don’t have any pure laissez-faire societies, we libertarians have to admit that we still have a long way to go. But our views aren’t right or wrong based on whether […]
Probably because clueless simpletons don’t grasp the real benefits of libertarian leaning agendas. I am a leave me alone kind of guy. As in I mind my own business and other people mind their own business.
[…] And here’s my take on why there aren’t any pure libertarian […]
The reason that the Liberty Movement is just happening just now, and why there has never been a Libertarian Society, is that God just recently found out that he’s been blaming his own creation for getting created wrong, and it has taken all of this long time for him to figure out that he was wrong. It’s God’s own fault that there is all this pain and suffering, because the Mother of Everything, the Divine Will, the Magnetic Essence that holds open the space for Creation, knew how to do it properly but He rejected Her input.
Free Will is God’s Will.
Not only is God not supposed to be the boss of anything or anybody, but the very concept of boss-ness is alien to the Laws of Nature. Everyone is supposed to learn how to be their own boss, and leave everybody else alone to be theirs. Play, frolic, do whatever you want with whoever wants to play with you, but respect their boundaries.
Free Will is good, opposition to Free Will is evil.
You are NOT your brother’s keeper. Your brother is your brother’s keeper. But don’t be his murderer either.
Jesus, use GOOGLE folks, don’t make it up. Libertarianism in civics have three interlocking levels: Secular democracy, federalism therein, and Libertarian model community in those.
It’s happening. Democracy is spreading. Fedralism and local autonomy are catching on worldwide. People are forming Libertarian-based communities everywhere. Also, they just started model ones in 2005 or so to replace community projects which seem to being doing OK on their own..
Check this out:http://www.libertarianinternational.org/apps/blog/show/1307678-over-2000-lib-communities-blossom
Also: http://www.libertarianinternational.org/apps/blog/show/16536459-libertarian-democracy-op-update-14-countries-improve
[…] month ago, I answered a question about reconciling the absence of libertarian societies with the supposed superiority of libertarian […]
I have read some of his works- not the wholee book as it bored me and I did not agree with the theories he had developed while sitting staring at the sea or sitting with a bunch of navaho indians on a reservation. Instead, I would point you to the actual field work where modern day journalists and writers inserted themselves into primitive societies in Papua New Guinea. And, yes they did look to leaders- for power, and for shelter, but the underlying cause of leadership was power, and those who did not get in line were killed, and they drank their blood. Further, if they decided that yoru bride should be their bride- well, that was a problem you just had to live with. White men showing up with GUNS 9yes, the great equalizer) changed a lot of their power structurre, and within a generation, only those who had true talents were able to be leaders.
You obviously have not been exposed to Christopher Boehm’s book Hierarchy in the Forest or his more recent work, Moral Origins. In it he reviews every HG population ever studied. In general the idea of the hierarchy based upon brute, coercive strength and coercion is a myth. Leadership is based upon respect, not coercive force because of the simple dynamic that any coerced man can kill another with a single blow when not looking, and because nomads have exit rights to abandon coercive individuals.
Thomas Mayer expands on this theme here…
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=877
I’ve read my Hayek and my LOTF, but you need to read less into what I have written. Nowhere did I offer that they were not superstitious or that their lives were utopian. Nor have I suggested that warfare was not common between bands. It was. Read Mayer and Boehm and let me know what you think.
This is hogwash. The nomadic bands who inhabited the earth were not non-coercive. They lived by the rule of the powerful. He who had the most power made others do his bidding. The strong over the weak. They were subject to very odd forms of superstitious beliefs. For instance, it was not uncommon to eat those you defeated to “gain their power”, and put fear into others.
If you’d like to read more about this, there are several books you can find on Amazon dealing with the primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea. They even have accounts where people went to live with them, and learn of their culture. If you want to go back living like that, I’d also recommend you read Lord of the Flies, as these books are very reminiscent of that one. If that’s too much for you try Chaka Zulu. Or what other nomads would you like to idolize? American Indians? guilty again…you need to study history before making such broad statements.
These were not libertarian societies by a long shot. You would like to believe the tall tales written about these people, but they just weren’t so. There is nothing new on the face of the earth. Human nature overtakes every design of smart planning men. Read a little of Hayak’s work if you want to understand that a little better.
On the other hand…
It isn’t true that there have been no libertarian societies. Hunter gatherer bands dominated for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, and much has been written about how libertarian, voluntary and non coercive these bands were.
This all came crashing down with the advent of agriculture and the ability to exploit people that are tied to land and seasonal surplus. Of course, over the long haul, societies have become increasingly libertarian. I would agree with Mancur Olson that any given society atrophies and becomes sclerotic over time, but creative destruction and the birth of new societies can offset this.
The patten I see is one of jagged improvement. States leap to higher plain of non coercion, followed by a slow deterioration as rent seekers, incumbents and bureaucrats gum up the works until a new institutional arrangement arises from the ashes.
The answer seems obvious to me: incentive traps. David Friedman’s “The Machinery of Freedom” explains why it’s easy to add special taxes or loopholes to the legal system, and next to impossible to get rid of any of them. It’s similarly easy for governments to accumulate more and more power. (And for any country without much government to get turned into a haven for bad guys like the pirates of Somalia, until the rest of the world is willing to at least look the other way when some dictator conquers that country.)
Any successful project to create a libertarian country, whether by transforming an existing country or by some new-country scheme such as seasteading, is going to need to start as a well-organized private enterprise with a strong defense in place before it declares independence. The trick is to set up this armed organization without the country you’re doing it in finding out in time to put a stop to it.
Certainly if such a project succeeds, it will look to the rest of the world (or at least the statists and their captive media) like another Somalia or Afghanistan — not a place anyone except a young “Soldier of Fortune” type person would want to move to. The new country will have to last a while to lose that reputation, whether deserved or not. (And my guess is that it would be deserved — a country probably really needs the average citizen to be better armed than the government in order to remain free. This was certainly true in the newly formed US, and in Friedman’s favorite example, feudal Iceland.)
The biggest obstacle is that most people in the rich world today have the notion that man has, or should have, outgrown the need for violence, and that ordinary people should never have to learn to fight. Anyone who believes that is effectively a sheep. Perhaps we should hope that the next world war will compel a lot of those sheep to learn better. Or perhaps Patri and the rest of us dreamers should start doing our recruiting and organizing in poor countries.
@smapple “…I believe there are no libertarian societies, because in order to have some sort of GOVERNANCE of that society (to protect against man’s inherently sinful nature), we all must allow for some sort of GOVERNMENT…..”
You make two assumptions which I will now challenge…
1. man has an inherently sinful nature.
2. a government protects society against man’s inherently sinful nature.
1. Most people are not that sinful by nature. If we were then government would be able to be honest about its motives and actions instead of always pretending to be good and wholesome to win our support. But it’s true that some people are capable of great evil – absolutely!
2. In reality a government does not protect against man’s inherently sinful nature – it greatly amplifies man’s sinful nature. It gives the most evil psychopaths in society access to half the populations earnings each week and all the guns, tanks, clubs and cages they will ever desire. Imagine Hitler or Bush or Blair without a government. Imagine trying to fund a war without the benefit of taxation and government debt (deferred taxation).
Knock, knock…
“Hello, what do you want?”
“Ah hello, I was wondering, would you like to write me a cheque so I can by some weapons and invade Iraq and protect your from Saddam’s WMD’s”
“Do you have any evidence of Saddam’s WMD’s”
“Well, no but…”
“Go away then, before I call the police”
A government only *appears* to enforce rules outlawing immoral behaviour and violations of property rights. But in reality a government is merely enforcing its own exemption from those moral rules, such as its monopoly on the right to violate our property rights and initiate force against everyone at will.
When you create a monopoly on something you have to prevent other people from doing that thing – hence ‘monopoly’. And so by granting itself a monopoly on the legal right to act immorally (steal people’s earnings, start wars, torture, coerce, run a fake economy etc etc) a government ends up outlawing those things for everyone else… thus creating a monopoly on doing those things.
This makes it appear that a government is enforcing moral behaviour and property rights – and it is….. but only in a limited way and so that it can have a monopoly on violating those things, and thus benefit to the maximum. For example, if government allowed other groups to lawfully steal a proportion of our wages then we’d have less money left at the end of the week for the government to steal.
*** Creating and enforcing a monopoly on the legal right to break moral rules is NOT the same as enforcing moral rules ***
A law is not a rule. A law is just an opinion backed by violence. A rule is a condition which applies universally.
“No one is allowed to steal” can be a rule and a law.
“No one is allowed to steal except us” can be a law, but it cannot be a rule.
There are no rules in a statist society…. only rulers!
In a general sense a government is just another religion. A government exists only in as much as the masses believe it does. Government is just an idea. As with all religions statism is being threatened by technological advances. As we find ourselves able to bypass centralised control (not least with respect to communication/ information) we find ourselves increasingly questioning the ‘need’ for government at all.
If a technology came along which did to energy* what the internet has done for communication then a free society would become not just a possibility but an inevitability.
*a technology like this, for instance….LINK
One might argue that the US was a libertarian society right after conception. However, even limited government slowly accumulates power that it never gives back. This snowball effect of increased government finally reached a nexus at the beginning of the 1900s with the passage of the income tax amendment. While we get an occasional break from this trend, it’s only a short term slow down, not a reversal of the trend.
Government continues to grab, and never release, more power. We continue to lose our liberties. Government continues to believe that is can solve all of our issues, when in fact it does the opposite.
Zorba hits the nail on the head almost every time. The voter-lemmings are more to blame than anybody. While polls continually show that people oppose larger government, what they really mean is that they don’t want to pay for more government while they continue to get their hand-outs. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
Dan-
I believe there are no libertarian societies, because in order to have some sort of GOVERNANCE of that society (to protect against man’s inherently sinful nature), we all must allow for some sort of GOVERNMENT. That fact alone plants the seed that eventualy destroys any libertarian-leaning attempt at co-habitation. I would propose that America- the USA was the best attempt to keep the wolves at bay by creating a government-limiting document- the constitution. The creation of the bill of rights was, in my estimation a mistake, and many argued the same. With its development, those in power now had a way of limiting the rights of people rather than the reach of the government.
The reason is likely evolutional. And, as in evolution, optimism wins in the end, though the more populous and overwhelmingly more common dead branches are quickly forgotten.
Collectivism has served humanity well in the past. In a static, or nearly static world (5% growth in 100 years) the recipe for both personal and societal success is: “follow the wisdom of the past, don’t experiment, follow the crowd, nearly all changes from the current equilibrium point have been tried and lead to inferior result”. In mathematics, that might be referred to as being in a stable but local minimum.
But humanity, in modern times, finally broke free of the local minimum and the low gradient subspace. Today, growth constantly brings new data and knowledge every day. The most promising approach both at the personal and societal level is to synthesize this information in new ways and innovate. Humanity as a whole is very rapidly moving towards a better and better state. The decline of the western world voter lemmings, is a rather short lived phenomenon. But short lived in evolutional terms. It will still likely last most of the lifetimes for today’s western voter-lemmings.
This environment, where one is born in one environment and witnesses the state of humanity change during his/her lifetime was virtually non existent until about two or three centuries ago at most, and is really visible only in our times. Never before in human history has humanity experienced five percent annual growth trendlines — and accelerating!
But the mechanism of genetic evolution is slow to react. Tho, three hundred years are the blink of an eye in genetic timescale — though rapid evolution is possible under extreme natural selection pressure, which is what is happening in our times. But rapid still perhaps means centuries or millennia rather than the normal tens or hundredths of thousands of years. So human lemmings retain their once successful but today ensnaring genetic attribute: Mandatory Collectivism.
Just like genetics, cultures can evolve too, still slowly, but much much faster than genetic code, since culture can be passed down from generation to generation, bypassing the much higher inertia molecular evolution mechanism.
So high inertia and extreme genetic pressure are what humanity is going through. The pressure is extreme because today”s difference in modern extreme growth leads to extreme differences in outcome. A culture that grows at five percent, compared to one that grows at even two percent, achieves a 20x advantage over one hundred years. Regardless of the starting point, it dominates. It obliterates its competition.
But evolution, while unstoppable, consists of a few, or even just one, sucessfull branch and many many failed ones — sacrificed to the process of evolution. Very few western voter-lemming cultures will be on sucessful branches, though I speculate that it will still be the western world that spawns the new dominant branches. But the chances that it will be the US the one who does so are very slim. This is due to both the basic law of probabilities, and the very negative trendline the US is on, having fallen from the first few places in Economic freedom in the world to number eighteen — and falling. The prosperity of countries in this range cannot stay on top for long. The accumulated advantage of exceptional ism past, the momentum, will be short lived. When the doodo hits the fan, it is virtually impossible that Amaricans will regurgitate all the HopNChange they so enthusiastically embraced for years, plus all the latent Bush and 9/11 precipitated statism, and then some. Hopes that they will be slapped around and right the once most competent ship and spring ahead once again, are delusional. Economic declines precipitated by the lower effort-reward curves of HopNChange, overwhelmingly cause electorates to desperately react with further bad choices which compound an cement the decline. Witness Americans voting for Obama to correct their 9/11 instigated drive towards mandatory collectivism, and then react to low growth rates becoming permanent by ecting Obama one more time. I cringe at the European style leaders they will elect once low growth rates become the established trendline.
But the new breakaway jurisdictions of freedom have not decisively emerged yet. Evolution is fast at work.
Let me throw a speculative prediction. The world will start separating into a new Cold War, with statists on one side, personal freedom advocates on the other. I also speculate that the camps will start forming around the issue of collective management of the planet and the planet’s climate more specifically. A few successful jurisdictions will start breaking away from the mold and resist submission to global collective environmental management. I speculate that this will be the first telltale sign of the breakaway and the blocks forming. But there’s still likely a lot of pain and homogenization before the marginal benefit of breakaway is worth the risk and cost of retaliation.
A world on a five percent aggregate growth trendline, portends interesting times ahead, almost by definition. Keep your bags packed.
I suspect a big part of the reason is that the government has captured the education process. So many children have been taught to follow rather than how to think. When their elected representatives don’t produce the results they’ve been promised, then they don’t know what to think.
But with the upcoming revolution in online schooling, which the government is going to have difficulty in controlling, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Johnny can’t read – proving there’s serious government failure in the education system.
A couple other reasons –
1) what it takes to get a libertarian society off the ground & what it takes to sustain it are 2 diff things. There was a day, not too long ago, when California was one of the more libertarian states in the union. And, like TX now, the wealth created tends to pull in folks who later advocate redistribution
2) democracy ultimately reflects cultural priorities. For most of human history, “freedom” was a comparatively rare thing. King George’s England, for ex., was one of the most (comparatively) libertarian states in Europe and the “extremist” libertarians from there disproportionately populated the US. For a variety of reasons, people who emigrate to the US aren’t quite as seeking of ‘frontier life’ in exchange for greater hardship – to the contrary, the US Welfare state is now quite a good deal for 90% of humanity.
3) ‘folk economics’. Libertarianism & free market economics go hand in hand. However, the “folk economics” that people naturally have isn’t sympathetic to the free market (see Steven Pinker or Arnold Kling’s explanations of the phenomena). As a result, the less comparatively economically educated the populace becomes, the more likely they are to believe that govt can simultaneously redistribute the pie and make it grow
Dan I am watching Angel Gurria head of OCED on RTV Russian news outlet. You might want to watch it 15 min interview . Bill Eisele
Sent from my iPhone
Dan:
I’m afraid that the four possible answers you give to the question, “…Why Aren’t there any Libertarian Societies?” are quite accurate, and go right to the heart of the matter. Your answers also explain why the human race has never had such a society — save for the very brief moment right after the founding of our Constitutional Republic — nor will we ever have the free society we seek (sorry about that optimists).
The reason for this is found in a distinct common thread that runs throughout each one of your answers, which is: Immoral human beings will always desire, demand, or seek “something for nothing”. Human nature, being what it is, will always find those who are lazy, incompetent, ignorant, and yes, immoral, people who always seek freebies at the expense of someone else. A good first step in understanding the situation is to accurately name these societal thieves what they are: “parasites”. It matters not whether you call them by their other more common names, ie; central bankers, public servants, welfare recipients, or whatever. They all have a vested interest in maintaining the system, and they will never let go. Never. And as more people jump on the gravy train, the more the system will start grinding to a rather unpleasant halt. We’re not too far from the inevitable point, and until then, we will remain stuck in this perpetual depression we find ourselves today.
Pleasant dreams Grosse Point…
Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
Interesting. Frustrating. Yet, why not be hopeful?
I think the reason is because Libertarians are individualists and Statists are collectivists. Collectivists are by nature organized and have a natural advantage in taking control of collectivist institutions like education and Government. Individualists are by definition unorganized and incapable of retaining or gaining control of such things. It is inevitable that the collectivists win. The only question is which strain of collectivism dominates.