Gyroscopic Investing

doodle wrote: Mt,

Thank you for the reference to the other thread. I will certainly look through it.

I am curious in your view how the libertarian philosophy address issues such as negative externalities and tragedy of the commons?

To me, these are some of the central flaws of the libertarian mantra elevating the individual above the collective.

As you know, you are identifying two of the economic problem that any system struggles with.

I don't know that there is good answer to how to best address these problems, simply because in the case of externalities it is hard to account for problems that are diffused and often not visible when the economic activity is occurring, and in the case of tragedy of the commons it is hard to systematically manage the orderly exploitation of a resource when the property rights (if any) are not clearly spelled out.

I don't know that it is a matter of libertarianism not providing a good solution to these market failures.  It may just be that these are sticky problems with no good solutions under any system.  As evidence for this broader view I would say look at the world's fisheries which seem to be depleting regardless of regulation and fossil fuel burning that creates the granddaddy of all negative externalities in the form of releasing the naturally sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, probably to the future detriment of us all.
 

At some point individual action spills over into the collective. For example, how does libertarianism address issues of air or water pollution? If you build a factory upstream from the river I drink water out of, who is to stop you from dumping toxic waste into river and poisoning my family if there weren't government regulation?

Speaking narrowly, if you have a court system that allows for the compensation for losses from the negligence and intentional torts of others, such a system should create an incentive structure that would prevent the scenarios you are describing.  In practice, I don't know if any modern system has had a lot of success in avoiding capture of the regulatory apparatus by the regulated industries (I would put financial institutions at the top of this list).

Speaking broadly, the human being is a flawed creature, and one of our most serious flaws is an inability to properly balance future needs against current ones.  This is a problem that may simply require a few million more years of evolution to address (assuming we make it that far).  The problem, of course, is it is a rare system that is more enlightened than the people who conceived it.  This is certainly true of any regulatory apparatus.

In addition libertarianism fails for me on the issue of tragedy of the commons. In other words, each individual pursuing his own best interest can lead everyone being worse off.

I believe you are touching upon a flaw in human nature, not in any particular economic or political system, though I certainly would expect to encounter regulations in a tragedy of the commons situation, whether I was a libertarian or not.

I would just say in general that the existence of exceptions does not necessarily invalidate a rule.  Sometimes you just have to put on your thinking cap and be pragmatic.

Until these issues are addresed by libertarians I don't see how it can be a viable philosophy for the modern world.

I think you will find that the statist ideology has as many flaws as libertarianism does, and in any case I would never advocate an all or nothing approach to something as complex as creating the rules by which a society is governed.

I am an attorney, so I am especially attuned to the ugliness of reality when you try to fit the vast range of real outcomes into a set of rigid rules.  It's a hard thing to do, especially in a complex world.  When, however, you have a tilt in your thinking toward the individual as the building block of society I believe that you get better outcomes, or at least more human ones.

When I hear the Laffer curve arguments I struggle to reconcile them with the examples of people I know who voluntarily choose not to work. Those people fall into two camps. One group were doing low paid work such that the welfare they get when not working is just as much as they were getting when working. The other group were doing work that was so well paid that they got enough money that they could afford to stop working and live off their savings. From what I can see if taxes were lower, then that second group would actually have stopped work even sooner and more people would join the second group.
I have to stress that I don't want a government that drives everyone to do pointless toil just for the hell of it. I'm just saying that I don't buy the argument that higher taxes necessarily cause people to work less.

Doodle, about the space program, I think if people want that then they should be free to make voluntary donations to pay for it. I personally think the moon mission was a moronic stunt but understand that lots of people loved it. I have somewhat tortured views about all of this as the same could be said for science which I love. The thing is that even in Stone Age times we only actually needed to spend a small part of each day to provide food and shelter. The rest of the time was spent doing cave paintings or whatever. Nowadays, some people do all of the food production etc so that others can do all of the Apollo mission type stuff. I'd be more comfortable with a system where everyone was paid a citizen's dividend. If someone wanted to be a "blue sky" scientist following their own curiosity, then they could do so living off the citizen's dividend receiving no preferential government support over and above anyone else. Everyone who did work that other people valued enough to choose to pay for would keep that pay on top of the citizen's dividend.
The biggest waste is that many many people are unemployed in an unhappy way. They are wasting their lives waiting for paid work- living in poverty. I think the log jams in our economic system that cause that are our biggest enemy. Medium Tex said that we will never know what might have come if the confiscated money used to fund the moon mission had been left with the private sector. Much as I hate the moon missions, I suspect that the consequence might just have been that more people would have been unemployed.

Stone (and MT),

You raise some interesting ideas such as the "citizens dividend". Again, all of these ideas express possible methods of structuring society, yet we will never be able to move forward until we have an underlying philosophy as to the purpose for all of our productive capacity and wealth. I shudder to think that the overwhelming majority of our human potential, curiosity, and ability will continue to be driven into absurd levels of material consumption that study after study have shown cause no increase in human happiness. It has been clearly established by psychologists that after a persons food, clothing and shelter needs are taken care of, increasing material consumption shows diminishing returns in happiness and overall sense of well being.

150 years ago we had to toil to provide the necessities of life. At that time around 70% of Americans were engaged in agricultural work to just feed the country. Since then we can feed the whole country with just 2-3% of the population. The question then becomes, if our productivity has increased so dramatically, why do we still continue to work so hard in jobs that seem so unsatisfying and inconsequential to so many? One factor to blame is the underlying tenet of constant exponential profit growth that our current economic environment imposes on us. Another factor is our genetics, as consuming and hoarding seem to relate to natural survival mechanisms. Today this structure and genetic code can actually be seen as detrimental to our progress and in some ways our happiness.  This is going to sound very controversial....but there are other parts of our genetics such as anger and violence or selfishness that also inhibit our progress as a species. The social structures and genetics that allowed us to thrive as hunter gathers on the savanna are in many ways are at odds with a globalized post industrial society.

Now, I am not advocating that we alter our genetic code to improve upon it (yet), but we can address the structural issues that impede our progress and create a healthier, more sustainable, less violent world.

When libertarians quote the "magic hand" and the idea that all individuals working in their selfish interest benefit society as a whole it strikes me as a gross oversimplification of our current reality. The libertarian idea is one without nuance. They seem to have half the truth regarding wealth production, distribution, and worker motivation but their argument seems to be an oversimplified picture of a very complex world.

When libertarians skirt the issue of externalities or tragedy of the commons by saying that centralized social planning hasn't functioned either, it is a bit of a cop out. They are not addressing two of the biggest economic issues facing our present economic system today. I have heard the idea of using a court system to assess damages to victims of negative externalities, but a court system must have an enforcement mechanism (government) and it must allow little individuals to take on big corporations. Overall, the feasibility of this solution to our problems is dubious. If these ideas cannot be solved under a libertarian system, then it is as if the car is missing a tire. It just won't drive.

I am not saying that we need to abandon the idea of individual freedoms and liberty all together by any means, but there are some very real collective issues that we face on this planet that can not be solved by the "magic hand" and more "greed is good" type thinking.

Doodle, to go all "tree hugging hippy shit", it is worth noting that the most long term stable societies have been ultra-low consumption hunter gathers who were motivated by a mystical reverence for the natural world. I kind of think they had a point. The only thing that has caused them to be wiped out is the civilized world's military capability. I also think it is worth noting that our society empowers those who strive for ever greater profits but that is not actually what most individual people seem to want. It is just what leads to power under our self-reinforcing system. In the UK we have a silly reality TV show called "I'm a celebrity get me out of here". It is amazing who the public votes to win. They are always easy-going, non-coercive,  cooperative, team player types. I'm struck by how divergent the public choices revealed by such TV shows are from how the real world is run. I think a citizens' dividend would put power in the hands of every average Joe to do with as they wished. I think the result might be a much saner world.

Stone,

Nothing calls into question the status quo and long held assumptions like a good crisis. I am making vast generalizations, but I am beginning to sense a bit of exhaustion on the part of the western populations for continued material consumption. Very few of my peers (25-30) are driven by material desires. Many are discovering the benefits of an unencumbered, simple lifestyle. They value quality of life over status symbols. They have started to see the downside of debt and have begun to question the economic beliefs of their parents.  Maybe a transition is already underway in the western world.

To me the next 100 years will be a time of incredible discovery and exploration. Humans have an inherent desire to question and learn and there are huge questions and discoveries to be made both on the big scale (universe) and the small (genetics, nanotechnology). I question how the profit motive fits into this age of discovery. Can private corporations herald the resources necessary to explore our universe? Can companies patent human genetic code?

There are some big philosophical questions that we need to answer as a species before we can begin this new century in earnest. As you said, we need a system that rewards cooperative, team players. We need cooperation on this planet to survive....not necessarily more competition. Unfortunately, our leaders are setting a pretty poor example for that.

doodle when you say "herald the resources necessary to explore our universe" it is important to remember that all that is, is people's time and effort. Heralding resources is just a case of getting other people to pay the living expenses of the scientists and the people in the science support industries (making equipment, purifying reagents etc). I find it  hard to justify  such sacrifice being made by people who are not interested in science (via taxation etc) unless such support was equally made to every single person whatever they did.
I also think that it is worth noting that there are seven billion people. I'm sure some people could make a monumental technological contribution whatever start in life they had. I'm just as certain that there are many many people who could contribute massively but who never will under our current set up with such unequal access to education and finance. I think  one of the biggest problems with concentration of wealth is that it leads so much potential human ingenuity to remain untapped.

The question that keeps going through my mind in reading the thoughtful posts above is "who decides?"

When it comes to my own life and the decisions that affect me I want the answer to the "who decides?" question to be me to the greatest extent possible.

For me, this is really more of a philosophical position than a political or economic one. 

As far as greed, overconsumption, etc. that part of the question isn't all that interesting to me.  I learned a long time ago that (for me) debt and consumerism usually just lead to regret and dissatisfaction.

I'm thinking more along the lines of what the fundamental nature of the relationship between the individual and the state should be.

Medium Tex,

I admit that the question of "who decides" is a complicated one. But in all aspects of life we abdicate decisions and put our faith in experts quite readily...whether they be legal, medical, or mechanical. Granted, these experts are expected to work in the best interest of the people they represent and should be held accountable. I admit that our current elected representatives are not working in the long term best interest of the country right now. Many of these people are not qualified to understand the ramifications of the decisions they make nor do their decisions always result for the long term benefit of the country at large.

Parents (who are far from experts) usually try to act in the best interest of their children. However, what would happen if everytime a parent tried to impose responsible constraints on their children for their best long term interest like eating vegetables, or doing their homework...the children would simply fire their parent and hire a new one. Not that I am comparing the electorate to children, but every time a reasonable politician emerges that tries to talk straight, he basically resigns his campaign to failure.

I know the state is a scary topic. Governments have caused some of the greatest abuses of the last 100 years. Does it help to view the relationship as one between the individual and the collective as opposed to between the individual and the state? Whatever ones philosophical leanings, as soon as one views a picture of our little earth floating through a vast universe I think it hits home pretty clearly that we are all on this "ship" together.

Governments and leaders emerge among men because there is an inherent need for structure and rules. The question is what form of this government leads to the greatest good. As much as I love the "idea" of the libertarian philosophy, until someone can give me a reasonable solution to negative externalities and tragedy of the commons issues, I don't see how libertarianism is the solution to our future on this planet.

doodle wrote: As much as I love the "idea" of the libertarian philosophy, until someone can give me a reasonable solution to negative externalities and tragedy of the commons issues, I don't see how libertarianism is the solution to our future on this planet.

A government that limited itself to only addressing negative externalities, tragedy of the commons issues, and common defense would by virtually any definition qualify as a libertarian government.  Your concerns are in fact a good summary of what separates a libertarian from an anarchist.  (I don't use "anarchist" in any pejorative sense, BTW, but simply to illustrate the differences.)

Frederic Bastiat provided an excellent summary of the role of law back in the early 1800s.  Few thinkers have even matched the insight that he had so long ago.  I do recommend taking the time to read his insightful and entertaining thoughts on these issues in "The Law": http://www.constitution.org/law/bastiat.htm

Man has both the "profit motive" (mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange) and the "plunder motive" (one-sided, coerced exchange.)  Government at its best serves to make the "plunder motive" unattractive and allow the "profit motive" to take hold naturally.

MT, excellent essay BTW.  Really good stuff.

I find the internal consistency of libertarianism to be flawed... even if they chose to acknowledge externalities, they still have to deal with the fact that they want the government to defend "their property."  Often, this isn't just a work of art someone created and traded to another individual for the chair he constructed, this is land, and resources from it.

The initial implications that land is private property are a bit fallacious.  Most private property came to be by the government "doling it out" to certain individuals they saw fit enough to manage it... not because these people somehow demonstrated natural ownership of it.

So I consider the deeding of land and all the trickle down implications of it (whose "property" is all the oil beneath the US?) to fall outside the realm of natural private property defense, and squarely within the realm of social engineering.  Deeding land helps prevent the abuse of land and the tragedy of commons, so societies can much more easily be built on them as a result.  Realize, I'm not claiming that government owns the land, but simply that to say it has the authority to assign or enforce or defend ownership to it is far outside the realm of simple acknowledging of property rights... ironic that land ownership, which isn't even all that legitimate in the first place, was the litmus test used in voting for so long.

This also isn't to say that our current land dispersal is wholly unfair or inappropriate.  Most of the initial beneficiaries of land ownership have long ago sold it for bonds/stocks.

Where I see a problem is that libertarians are telling those without any wealth that they have to work for it... they have to pay for their education, figure it out on their own, and rely not on "their" wealth to help them.  Well once you acknowledge that deeding of land is social engineering and not private property, then it's harder for a libertarian with a lot of wealth to sound reasonable when they say, "all government should do is defend property... and maybe some externality taxation" with a straight face.

If we're going to deed out "collective" wealth to some people (white settlers) and not others (slaves, non-"residents" of the land of the US), especially since they were the only ones allowed to vote for so long, then we've just dove into a huge vat of social engineering that benefits most people overall, but much moreso the wealthy.  These same wealthy are now telling us that the government can't do ANYTHING else to socially engineer a solid social safety net and middle class?  I don't think that's legitimate.

Don't think I'm some kind of Bolshevicks revolutionary who hates and disrespects private property, but simply that it's fundamentally flawed in some ways, and we should bring ourselves to acknowledging that.  Still, this doesn't give government a blank check to do what they want, of course.

doodle,

I assume we can all agree that there are VERY few true libertarians in control of any political entity anywhere in the world.  Even the Tea Party crowd is happy to bring federal spending back to their home districts, whether or not such spending makes any sense for the larger good.

Assuming that the premise above is basically correct, to what do you attribute the basic failure of the statist ideology to prevent all of the social/ecological/environmental/political problems we are facing today?

Do you believe (as some Keynesians do with respect to government spending) that the state simply hasn't been given enough power to solve the problems humanity is facing?

Is your solution to use coercive means to compel individualists to join in the collective cause?

Do you think that the Founding Fathers were misguided in their diligent efforts to limit the power of the government?

If the Founding Fathers were misguided in their designing government to have strictly limited powers, to what do you attribute the general success that the United States has enjoyed as a nation?

I'm not sure where your personal views about the way the world should work take us when extrapolated to the rest of us, some of whom may see things differently.

Normally, I am inclined to encourage people whose views differ from mine to go out and live according to whatever view of reality makes sense to them.  It always makes me a little uneasy, though, when someone starts talking about how we are going to change the world, solve all of humanity's problems, etc., but it's going to be necessary to harness the coercive power of the state to do these things.  I always wonder to myself why, if these collectivist proposals are so compelling, it is necessary to use the coercive power of the state to implement them?  If they are such good ideas, why does the entity implementing them need to carry guns?

Moda I think you made a crucial point about deeding land. The US was very unusual in that small parcels of land were given to each settler. I think that widespread wealth made a crucial difference compared to Latin America where a handful of settlers got huge estates. For me an ideal might be to somehow maintain such a widespread wealth distribution. I also find it hard to reconcile a positive return on capital after taxation as being compatible with libertarianism if it means that financial power is wrested from the rest of the population to the successful investor. To me libertarianism means people being able to get on with their lives without needing to serve either the state or an owning class.

stone,

I'm glad you appreciate my point, and I want to reiterate that I don't see land owners, wealthy people, etc as evil or anything like that or that we shouldn't deed out land.  I still want us to live in as free a society as possible without negative unintended consequences or heavy burdens on the poor & middle class.

I just find that deeding of land, even if it's attempted to be relatively even, is probalby going to result in some "distribution" flaws (ie, slaves that ARE property and can't OWN property being later thrown into a system as "free" individuals with NOTHING to call their own after having been abused, enslaved, etc).  I still think land should be deeded... DEFINITELY not just simply controlled by the government... but if we don't realize that a system built on deeding land is inherantly flawed in terms of whether it represents true-blue "private property," we're going to steer ourselves into inconsistent logic.

It comes down to this simple fact:  Land is not private property nor is it government property.  It was there before you were born and before our government was founded.  Deeding of land is, therefore, social engineering.

moda0306 wrote:
It comes down to this simple fact:  Land is not private property nor is it government property.  It was there before you were born and before our government was founded.  Deeding of land is, therefore, social engineering.

Moda, I am not sure I follow your argument here. In as much as land predates all governments, how would this argument not apply to ownership of anything (e.g., the gold in your wedding ring, or raw materials in everything else you own). Governments that do not respect property rights essentially guarantee a weak economy.

6 Iron,

Yes... and I've thought of that to some degree... short of ideas thought up that would be patentable, ANY form of property would, in some way, fall under that logic.

I left it out for simplicity's sake, since often most of the value held in tangible personal property is from someone's efforts, not the raw materials themselves.

Regardless, if anything, that proves even moreso that the idea of "private property" is flawed, and to defend such a system is a form of social engineering (not trying to imply this as a negative or that recognition of private property is a bad idea).

I agree that societies that have more consistent respect for private property prosper the most, often.  I think we need a solid system of private property, but we need to look at it for what it is.  An intersection of free enterprise and liberty with government-funded social engineering.  A very good one, if done with the right balance, IMO.

This is basically my rebuttal to libertarianism, not a diatribe on the ills of private property in all forms.  If you can disect private property to the point of realizing that it's just a very productive form of social engineering, then it's hard to build the rest of the libertarian argument on top of that, as usually they argue liberty/property first, and build their arguments from their, questioning the legitimacy of programs that support the middle class.

Moda raises one of the many complications underlying Libertarianism. In the past I readily drank the libertarian kool-aide. I spent many years reading Cato and Heritage Foundation articles, and many of the philosophers who these institutions draw from. Their logic on the surface seemed totally rational, but within the last few years I have realized that it is too simplistic in nature. It is a theory which functions in a controlled laboratory environment, but fails in the real world.

Lone Wolf linked an article from Bastiat which I read, but it again starts equating redistribution of wealth with plunder. This argument fails to address mans status as an individual in a social world.

I think Warren Buffet said once that he feels like he won the ovarian lottery. He was born to a good family, in a free country, during its richest epoch, at a time when his skills at allocating capital were highly prized. He mentions that if he were born a few millenia earlier he would have likely starved to death, being that he was not endowed with any physical strength or coordination. In other words, in a different time and place, he would have been at the bottom of the society, not at the top. The same could probably be said for Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. In a different set of circumstances, one of the wealthiest men in today's world would have depended on society's mercy for survival.

Finding a way to redistribute enormous wealth in a fair way that doesn't kill the incentive of individuals to work and innovate is absolutely essential in our world today. Currently in our country 90 percent of the wealth is held by 10 percent of the population. It could conceivably grow even worse if left unchecked. This creates conditions under which no man can live in peace. It creates conditions of violence and revolution. It creates economic stagnation and social decay. Libertarianism has no answer to the very real and dangerous circumstances which are present today.

I encourage everyone to skim through this paper which addresses some of the fundamental flaws with the libertarian philosophy:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html

doodle,

What would you say to someone who simply wished to live a life free from harrassment by the government or any other wealth redistributing entity?

Such a person would provide for his own needs through voluntary associations with others, sort of like they do in Amish communities.

How would such a person get along in a doodle-controlled world?

I assume he would be required to pay tribute to the doodle minions, but in what other ways would his freedom be restricted?

What are your views on the use of force to compel compliance with the social structure you are advocating?  If you consider the coercive use of force to be legitimate, does it have any upper boundaries?  I assume that capital punishment would be available in extreme cases of noncompliance.  I also assume that it wold periodically be necessary to take your country to war to help straighten out the thinking of other nations as well.

I'm interested in the mechanics of how your doodle-topia would function.

I don't think it is necessary to build an airtight case for libertarianism (which I'm not really trying to do anyway) to point out some pretty serious shortcomings in the world you are describing.

One of the basic problems (among many IMHO) is that bureaucracies are virtually never wise and they are frequently very stupid, and this is part of the reason that governments typically fail in large world-changing or human nature-changing efforts.

doodle wrote:
I encourage everyone to skim through this paper which addresses some of the fundamental flaws with the libertarian philosophy:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html

Doodle, you do a better job of making an argument than this gentleman does.

MT,

I think you are imagining my world as a place full of government jack booted thugs that fleece the rich as soon as they earn a red cent.

The problem with libertarianism is that it lacks nuance. It is all or nothing. It suggests that there is no middle ground between individual rights and social obligations. I suggest that this viewpoint is extremist.

There are plenty of places in Europe that I believe have found a healthier balance than we have between public and private.

Denmark is a great example. It has one of the most equal distributions of wealth of any country, a strong economy, a educated productive workforce, a great social safety net and some of the happiest people on the planet. Most libertarians however would be disgusted by The Danish system.

The way that you achieve this is by progressive taxation and high death taxes. In the past, America had much higher marginal tax rates and we still had a very innovative productive economy. CEOs werent compensated 100's of times more than the average worker, yet they still were motivated to build and run some of the worlds greatest companies. I would argue that the balance of wealth is presently out of whack in our country. This innevitably destroys social cohesion and eventually leads to revolutions if it is not addressed. That is the reality.....whether the libertarians like it our not.   

Fundamentally, I believe that everything on this planet exists In a state of symbiosis. In other words, we are all interdependent on each other and our environment. I believe that we should design our social and governmental structures starting from this fundamental truth, rather than the unnatural view of libertarians of isolated individualism.

doodle wrote: The problem with libertarianism is that it lacks nuance. It is all or nothing. It suggests that there is no middle ground between individual rights and social obligations. I suggest that this viewpoint is extremist.

That is a false characterization of libertarianism. The political philosophy of libertarianism is an entire spectrum, not one unified philosophy. For example, most libertarians are "minarchists," not "anarchists," meaning they believe in a certain minimal level of government for national defense, courts, and police. Those services require the collection of taxes, so certainly most libertarians believe in at least the "social obligation" to pay those taxes.

In the past, America had much higher marginal tax rates and we still had a very innovative productive economy. CEOs werent compensated 100's of times more than the average worker, yet they still were motivated to build and run some of the worlds greatest companies. I would argue that the balance of wealth is presently out of whack in our country. This innevitably destroys social cohesion and eventually leads to revolutions if it is not addressed. That is the reality.....whether the libertarians like it our not.

Certainly you have heard of winner-take-all effects, correct? How about fat-tailed probability distributions? Or power-law probability distributions? Zipf's Law? There are entire books and piles of academic articles written about various theories as to why these types of fat-tail effects are ubiquitous in the world, especially our modern world. And it's not just in economics and finance--it's just about everywhere, from the physical sciences to the social sciences to the arts.

One of the most cogent explanations right now, IMO, is that these fat-tail effects are becoming more prevalent due to the increase of connectivity and networking in our modern world: telecommunications, the Internet, globalization, social networking, etc. As networks becoming more highly interconnected, you start to see things like "supernodes" form that handle a disproportionately huge amount of the network's overall traffic and connections.

I suspect these network-related fat-tail effects can help explain the increase in winner-take-all effects such as we see in the distribution of wealth in various societies.

Fundamentally, I believe that everything on this planet exists In a state of symbiosis. In other words, we are all interdependent on each other and our environment. I believe that we should design our social and governmental structures starting from this fundamental truth, rather than the unnatural view of libertarians of isolated individualism.

That is another false characterization of libertarianism. "Isolationism" and "isolated individualism" are common terms used to dismiss libertarianism, but they couldn't be farther from the truth. Libertarianism leaves people free to associate with each other, and the greatest libertarian thinkers (including people like Ludwig von Mises) constantly pointed out how human association, trade, and economic interdependence are critical aspects of a healthy economy and society. I have never encountered a single libertarian who advocated that people isolate themselves from one another, because literally everyone agrees that it would obviously revert us back to a hunter-gatherer existence.

doodle,

In each of my posts I am posing numereous specific questions and you are not answering any of them.

Please take a look back and help me understand how your outlook addresses the specific matters I have raised.

For a moment let's put libertarianism aside.  I want to understand the strengths of your wordview, not the weaknesses of someone else's.

doodle wrote: I think you are imagining my world as a place full of government jack booted thugs that fleece the rich as soon as they earn a red cent.

The reality is a lot more complicated than that.  There are most certainly plenty of jack boots--that's how you know it's the government and not a free market entity (the difference being the use of coercion rather than persuasion as the primary instrument).

The complication starts when you begin to realize that many private sector entities have captured much of the governmental apparatus through a variety of means and the government in many cases is really only acting on the interests of a narrow band of economic interests within society.

I don't like this arrangement any more than I would like a purely socialist experiment based upon a straight ahead Robin Hood set of policies.

I'm not interested in a small and limited government so that the libertarians can run wild, or any other group within society can run wild.  Rather, because I know that as government expands into more and more areas of people's lives it rarely returns the sovereignty it has taken from the individual, I would rather keep that sovereignty in the first place and let the organization of society unfold from there.

It's really exactly the way the Founding Fathers intended it to be, I think.  They knew that there were all sorts of entities within society that could do harm, but none could do as much harm as a government that had no hard limits imposed on its power.

I totally agree that governments find it extremely hard to run things. Our european union fisheries policy is a tragic example of what can happen. We have vast amounts of the most valuable and overfished fish species being discarded dead back into the sea as some bizare quirk of our byzantine quota system.

I do think governments are needed for "plundering the rich" to redistribute. That does not need to involve the government organising anything other than the "plundering". I think one of the tragedies is that we feel that government should not take away unless they are providing a "service" in return by directing what goes on. I think the oposit should be true. The government needs to take way so as to keep everyone down to size but otherwise let the economy run its-self. I'd favor a dumb government approach where the government levied a flat asset tax and paid a flat citizen's dividend. To me the main problem with government plundering is that it is discretionary. If it were just flat and transparent then it would be so much better.
Medium Tex says that people need to be left alone free from government plundering. The problem is that wealth means a license to plunder. That is what return on capital is. The fact that I own shares and bonds that give a real rate of return means that I'm extracting rent from everyone else. That is fine so long as wealth is equally distributed so that we are all plundering the same amount from each other. The problem comes when distribution gets skewed. I guess the libitarian answer is that the skew will eventually be self corecting. The problem is that equilibrium might not be reached until almost everyone is in abject poverty and the handful who own every thing actually have less rent to extract than they would have had were they to have only owned a much smaller slice of a more prosperous economy. I guess you'd get more rent from owning 0.001% of Singapore than 10% of Haiti.
As far as the government needing to use coercion in order to tax- private owners also need to use coercion inorder to extract payment. I can't just fill up my car with fuel and not pay. Much of my payment goes to "return on capital" rather than compensating someone for working on my behalf.

Stone,

I agree with a lot of what you wrote.


MT,

I feel that one of the first problems that one faces when looking at this issue is that all of us are bringing an incredible bias towards the present system to the table. We are forced to imagine a different world from within the paradigm of private property and the exhalation of the individual over the social.

I think that if we were to reverse the status quo and attempt to explain to a Lakota Indian for example why he could no longer roam the plains after Buffalo because all the land should be parceled, fenced and sold off to individual owners, and  any buffalo on the plains belonged to those who owned the land, he would look at you like you were crazy.

We have to realize that we are approaching this argument from within a box that represents only one of many economic and social structures that have existed throughout history. The concept of private land ownership enforced by a government is a socially engineered concept and not some inalienable right given by God himself.

With that said, I will try to address your questions.

What would you say to someone who simply wished to live a life free from harrassment by the government or any other wealth redistributing entity?

Such a person would provide for his own needs through voluntary associations with others, sort of like they do in Amish communities.

How would such a person get along in a doodle-controlled world?

I assume he would be required to pay tribute to the doodle minions, but in what other ways would his freedom be restricted?

I guess the answer to this question depends on how the country is structured. One scenario might be to greatly decentralize government and return to a system where the majority of power rested in small local towns. This would of course result in less cohesion and equality throughout the different regions of the country, but it would place the burden of social safety nets on the immediate community and its governing structure instead of the central government.

In a small community however no individual can really live in isolation. There is generally tremendous social pressure placed on the wealthier individuals to come to the aide of the needy. In your Amish community example there is a great deal of social pressure to aide your neighbors and work cooperatively. Sure, there might not be a government forcing you to distribute your time and wealth to the community, but if you do not help, you will probably be shunned and insulted by the other community members, and maybe even excommunicated. Can you imagine an Amish person who routinely refused to participate in community barnraisings because it impinged on their individual freedoms? I don’t think that individual would last long in the community.

From my brother’s experiences in small Fijian villages, he said that the wealthiest members of the tribal communities were basically expected to redistribute their wealth within their community whenever a need arose. In return, these wealthier members received greater respect and honor among their neighbors. To horde your wealth when there was legitimate need would have resulted in a lot of scorn and social pressure.  

A small town community of close knit neighbors and relatives is a far cry from the scope of the problems that our country faces in our massive cities. Our modern society has led to a breakdown in many of the community social structures that in the past came to the aide of individuals in need. In addition, there is a growing trend for the wealthy to isolate themselves from their immediate communities. Many draw into their exclusive gated enclaves and lose touch with the lives of the average citizen. The social contract between rich and poor is thus broken.

In our present system, the only option that society has to address very legitimate social needs and maintain a somewhat equitable distribution of resources and thus a stable society, is to extract a greater amount of taxes from the wealthy through a progressive tax system. Unfortunately, the government has been cornered by the wealthier powers in this country, and over the last 40 years the government has chipped away at the tax burdens placed upon the wealthy, while at the same time the massive corporate structure (another government creation favored by anti government right wingers) has allowed greater amounts of wealth to be concentrated in the hands of very few.

My question to libertarians is when do they feel it is appropriate for government to temper the wealth disparities of a society when they become so great as to threaten social stability? And if so, by what means do they suggest that this be done and along what guidelines?

What are your views on the use of force to compel compliance with the social structure you are advocating?  

No different than the use of force that is already existent today to enforce private property and land rights and corporate rights which uphold the social and economic structure that libertarians are advocating. Again, the existence of private property and corporations also requires forced compliance to government laws.

According to Noam Chomsky the engineered structure that exists today has replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery. He argues that the perception of freedom under our current structure is more an illusion than a reality for the majority of people.  

If you consider the coercive use of force to be legitimate, does it have any upper boundaries?  I assume that capital punishment would be available in extreme cases of noncompliance.  I also assume that it would periodically be necessary to take your country to war to help straighten out the thinking of other nations as well.

I'm interested in the mechanics of how your doodle-topia would function.

I don't think it is necessary to build an airtight case for libertarianism (which I'm not really trying to do anyway) to point out some pretty serious shortcomings in the world you are describing.

One of the basic problems (among many IMHO) is that bureaucracies are virtually never wise and they are frequently very stupid, and this is part of the reason that governments typically fail in large world-changing or human nature-changing efforts.

I agree with your comments regarding bureaucracies, which is why I generally favor decentralizing many of the programs that our federal government has taken control of. Local governments are on the whole more accountable to their people and are often able to tailor solutions to better meet the needs of their communities. However, if we want to maintain a national equilibrium between states in terms of living standards, health care, and education then there must be some distribution of wealth between regions of our country undertaken by the federal government.

There is no easy answer to a lot of the questions that you ask, and while I agree with many of the tenets of libertarianism there are many which I find to be based on flawed assumptions with regards to mans nature. I believe that individuals do possess certain rights to life and liberty that no government should be able to take away. My central contention with the form of libertarianism that is most popular in our country is that I find it starts with an unnatural set of assumptions of man as an individual creature unto himself, instead of a social creature. It also fails to recognize the natural symbiotic  relationships between everything on this planet, and thus fails when in comes to addressing issues of negative externalities and tragedy of the commons.

George Soros remarked a few months ago in a conference at the CATO institute that his greatest fear today is that both sides of the political spectrum (the right and the left) have a hold of half of the truth, which they both proclaim to be the whole truth. Neither sides system will work by itself and to attempt to do so would have disastrous consequences. The reality he argues, is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

When I look at the disparity between rich and poor in this country and the fact that 90 percent of the wealth is owned by 10 percent of the people, I think we are a far cry away from the middle.