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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30975 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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The issue is the real world has commons. Things like providing schools which I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

  1. School is not the commons. Schooling is a private good, and will obtain optimal distribution on its own.
  2. No I don't think that. Or the closest I get to thinking that is 'it would be nice, but in a world without infinite resources no need to force it'.
  3. Since I wouldn't force it, I'd like to be in a society rich enough to engage in charity for those cases, but its not a deal breaker. There could easily be other things that matter more.

There isn’t a strong libertarian argument against open borders. Which would then make Democracy incompatible with unlimited immigration. The voter base would change and you would be voted out. So I guess you need a dictator to maintain your politics.

Democracy isn't compatible with libertarianism in the first place, so there is no need to preserve it. If there was a form of democracy that was a fit with libertarianism, it would probably look closer to corporate shareholder voting.

Or say a community of libertarians have good well supported and agreed to schools. The current way to keep the poors out is to ban property density. But that isn’t very libertarian. If you let people do whatever they want with their property than one person sells to a developer who builds low-income housing. And the commons you did agree with is suddenly underfunded. I think libertarian is good within boundaries. But it easily falls apart without something above it enforcing something for the commons.

I didn't realize you were building up to a "trap", I genuinely disagreed with the previous stuff. Land ownership and property ownership agreements would probably happen a lot more often without zoning as a crutch. If there is an actual commons problem there are typically two ways to solve it:

  1. One person/entity is given entire ownership of the commons. They then suffer the destruction of the commons, so have reasons to preserve it.
  2. Complex systems of social governance arise to protect the commons. Elinor Ostrom won an economic nobel prize for her work on this.

One person/entity is given entire ownership of the commons. They then suffer the destruction of the commons, so have reasons to preserve it.

A post about libertarian philosophy was the last place I expected to see an endorsement of feudalism. This proposal is essentially just repainting manorialism.

Is this argument basically "feudalism was bad, thus anything associated with it is also bad"?

It isn't even an argument, just me expressing my surprise that someone claiming to be libertarian would be down with feudalism. "I've got all the liberty I want? Fine, I'm starting a new monarchy with me at the head." is the kind of statement that libertarians I've interacted with have tended to violently reject. I'm honestly not sure you'd even be able to call yourself a libertarian here if you accept that position - you'd just be a monarchist with extra steps.

Have these libertarians never been confronted with how they'd handle the commons? I feel like "have clear property rights" is a very libertarian answer.

And ownership of the commons doesn't require feudalism? That requires at least some explanation rather than a throwaway comment. The textbook example given is usually a lake where multiple farmers/fishers/something are using the lake and also polluting the lake. They can't get to a solution because its not individually beneficial to solve the pollution, but it is beneficial if they all do it.

You don't have to have someone own all the farmers to get to a solution in this scenario, you just have to have someone own the lake.

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