Libertarian Purity test

the funniest question is acctually the one right after that one

Should the law itself be privatized?
Yes
No

It's quite hard for a Brit to answer this test. See, we've already seen what happens when you start privatising stuff like the Post Office and government schools...

The funny thing is that I nolonger think those two questions are funny: I'm comfortably within the "hardcore" range. I lose hardcore points on the silly "moral" questions (e.g. "Is all government inherently evil?"), but I'm pretty much up for gradually selling off the whole state in small pieces. In my case it was right, I really did get more extreme with time.

Matt McIntosh

but is the law is privatized than it is no longer a democracy just a dictatorship run by a corparation. And it would be a single company with no competion as there would be no antitrust legeslation since the law was be privized

Did they say something about "purity of our natural fluids?"

I highly recommend a Neal Stephenson novel 'Snow Crash' as a real hoot vis a vis a future where EVERYTHING is privatized. I love that book, and would have sent it to W if I knew he could read.

23. When I was younger, I was of the opinion that all government was inherently evil. I've moderated those views significantly. I recognize that various non-government collectivist organizations such as corporations will step right in, and in a less accountable way, to interfere in my life. Additionally, I recognize that the fact of market dominance should not be a club with which a company kills off any upstart competition. Privatised police? Privatised law? Wooly-headed utopianism of the same calibre as the communists.

I scored 48, just short of Medium-Core Libertarian - I believe in minimum government and public institutions, not none!

I scored a 32 and I only answered yes to the personal responsibility issues, military and immigration stuff. Libertarianism would be alright without the unhealthy obsession with paying taxes!

Libertarianism would be alright without the unhealthy obsession with paying taxes!

thatz called liberalism :)

VJB,

I'm just about half way through Snow Crash right now - damn good read so far!

thatz called liberalism :)

Isn't a social liberal ultimately a libertarian who cares about facts?

Isn't a social liberal ultimately a libertarian who cares about facts?

i think the liberal idea that they are hard-headed and fact based is pretty strange. after all, the no child left behind fantasy that bush pushed forward is predicated on the liberal idea that given appropriate inputs everyone can succeed (teachers know this isn't true [the ones i know], but liberals couldn't call bush's bluff because of their long history of being the compassionate ones).

Razib, I expect better from you. You are using the modern mish-mash (re)definition of the term "liberal" to mean pretty much any left-of-center idea. "[G]iven appropriate inputs everyone can succeed" is not a liberal idea. That everyone should be equal before the law is. The ACLU is liberal. ACORN is not. Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. FDR was not.

craig, word's are the meanings people give them. in germany 'liberal' means something different in the USA. i accept reality as it is on the ground.

after all, the no child left behind fantasy that bush pushed forward is predicated on the liberal idea that given appropriate inputs everyone can succeed (teachers know this isn't true [the ones i know], but liberals couldn't call bush's bluff because of their long history of being the compassionate ones).

That's not the liberal idea. The liberal idea is that the current system is set up in a way that prevents some people from succeeding even though they're sufficiently intelligent. For example, the heritability of IQ increases with socioeconomic status; in other words, although IQ is normally highly heritable, in fact more heritable than it's thought to be, poor people suffer from a variety of environmental problems reducing their intelligence. The idea of liberalism in this regard is based on removing these environmental problems.

Obviously there's a lot more to social liberalism (for example, a big part of modern social liberalism is that growth-mediated aid doesn't work), but that's how social liberalism applies to education. Of course not all liberals agree with my description - political liberals range from supporting traditional modes of education to strong egalitarians - but then again, liberalism doesn't have a dogmatic position on the issue the way it does on, say, single-sex marriage.

Remember that Lewontin's not a liberal, and that politically he loves nothing more than to attack liberalism for being an ideology of single causes that says not all people are the same.

Robert,

I count four distinct false assumptions expressed in two short sentences -- that's quite impressive. This isn't really the place for me to expound on the subject, but briefly:

1) Democracy is not inherently valuable.
2) Its absence is not isomorphic with dictatorship.
3) Firms on a market tend toward the optimal size necessary to overcome transaction costs. For reasons that should become clear if you think about it a bit, it's likely that this optimal size is actually smaller than the size of most current nations/states for firms in the business of supplying law and/or enforcement. If monopoly is your concern, you ought to be more concerned about the one we currently have.
4) A world without antritrust legislation wouldn't look very different from a world without it.

Craig,

"Privatised police? Privatised law? Wooly-headed utopianism of the same calibre as the communists."

I'm not stupid enough to think I can change your mind in the space of a blog comment, but I'd like you to think about the assumptions that underlie that dismissal. The first thing to get straight on is that states are just really big, special kinds of firms. Once you realign your conceptions that way, can you justify the argument that having one big firm is better than having many competing smaller ones?

The second thing is that the word "privatized" is being used here in the economist's sense: made such that the benefits and costs are internalized by individuals who choose to assume them. It'd be hard for anyone to argue that this isn't a good goal on its face, so the question is to what extent it's possible to achieve this in law and enforcement. I don't see any particularly large difficulties inherent in this (in fact I think the biggest one is just how alien the idea is to people); certainly nothing even remotely on par with the devastating difficulties inherent in communism.

word's are the meanings people give them. in germany 'liberal' means something different in the USA. i accept reality as it is on the ground.

Indeed, in all of the non-Anglo world, "libertarian" means left anarchist, not right anarchist.

Razib,

Regarding your use of "liberal," if you are going from common usage, then you really can't accuse a self-professed "liberal" of ignoring "hard-facts" based solely on that self-identification any more than you can accuse a self-professed "conservative" of inconsistancy (or even self-professed "libertarians".) Why? These words are currently used to mean a number of distinct things by different people -- and often gratuitously so by their political opponents. Tax-and-spend? Anyone who doesn't believe in the abolition of taxation is a liberal? I don't think so. And your example, that "given the right inputs, anyone can succeed" is something that almost every self-professed liberal that I know would reject.

Matt,

Thanks for your comment. I suppose it's my cynicism that leads me to believe that privatised law and law-enforcement would at best end up as indistinguishable from public law and law-enforcement. And it is my further cynicism that leads me to believe that the likely outcome would be a reduction in individual liberty (in practice) and prosperity.

Living in one of the most socialist counties of the Commonwealth of Virginia, we have a great public library. Is there book that you would recommend that makes a more detailed case for privitising law?

My ideal Libertarian - as I use the term in the US - is Michael Bloomberg, and he even self described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal recently - that's how I would describe myself too.

If Bloomberg were to run for President tomorrow, I'd join his election campaign immediately.

Democracy is not inherently valuable.

Not any more than evolution is inherently true.

A world without antritrust legislation wouldn't look very different from a world without it.

Indeed, the United States of 1990 looked exactly like the United States of 1890.

I don't know where I stand, being hostile to libertarianism as well as to government & politicians. Maybe I'm confused.

Craig,

The canonical tome is David D. Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, though it touches on a wide range of subjects. If you just want the beef on this particular subject, a chapter from MoF is webbed here and a slightly more scholarly article on the subject here. Straight up, DDF is the guy who convinced me that radical capitalism was worthy of serious consideration. His arguments aren't conclusive, but they're provocative.

If you can find it, Bruce Benson's The Enterprise of Law (which I have not read) is supposedly pretty interesting on this subject as well.

Alon,

Be serious. I shouldn't need to draw you a picture to illustrate how democracies can be oppressive, and it doesn't take a genius to comprehend that my (4) was a conjecture that anti-trust legislation has really had little impact upon the world (though what little impact it's had has probably been negative, but that's a different argument). I challenge you to make a compelling argument in the other direction, but I'm not interested in having a wiseass-off with you or anyone else.

I shouldn't need to draw you a picture to illustrate how democracies can be oppressive

Sure they can be; it's just that in practice they're less oppressive than other systems of government. Talking about "inherently" in this context makes about as much sense as trying to argue philosophically whether evolution happened.

As for antitrust legislation, you can take a quick look at "before" and "after" (granted, the difference isn't just in antitrust legislation but also in a host of other regulations, but still). Or you can look at trust-formation in action to see how trusts hurt the consumer and the free market.

bloomberg is a gun grabber.

I scored a 109, was honestly surprised it was that high, since i think a lot of libertarians are utopian children.

markets work when the assumptions market theory makes are satisfied. they are not always satisified. ergo, the market will fial to work in those situations.

Depending on the time of the year, I vary between the 50s and 70s on this test.

craig, word's are the meanings people give them. in germany 'liberal' means something different in the USA. i accept reality as it is on the ground. - Razib

Indeed, in all of the non-Anglo world, "libertarian" means left anarchist, not right anarchist. - Agnostic

In Europe, what is called a "liberal" in the US is called a "social democrat" or "socialist." What is called a "liberal" in Europe would be called a moderate "conservative" or "libertarian" in the US.

I score "hardcore".

Where I disagree most, is on the last set of questions.

I do not believe that private courts, private police, private law, etc. would work. It would turn into gangsterism (some call it "anarchy", but I don't think that's a good word because anarchy can be peaceful, and a private system of justice does not necessarily lead to constant chaos or violence -- it can stabilize into monarchies and dictatorships).

If the matter involves adjudicating or addressing coercion in some way, then totally private solutions are not acceptable.

That's like saying every person or collective has the right to be a judge, jury, and executioner.

If the parties are voluntary, and no-one can coerce another (e.g. roads, post offices), then it deserves to be privatized.

If the government itself is doing the coercing, then the office of government doing the coercing (e.g. public schools, Pentagon), needs to be abolished entirely.

But to settle disputes between private parties, or to correct coercions, we should agree to a public system of law.

Private courts are okay if both parties agree to it, but what if one of them backs out of a private court decision? Is the other side allowed to kill them? Take their property?

Government's sole purpose should be to stop and remedy coercion.