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Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.
Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.
The first is that pretty much only (some) Anglos like libertarianism; the Swiss have their guns and direct democracy but they also call the police if you play music after 9pm or use the wrong recycling bin. Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards). You could limit citizenship to only descendants of some core population, but that in turn both eventually ends ‘democracy’ (certainly in the popular modern sense) and creates a huge resentful underclass prone to supporting upheaval, as happened in Liberia.
The second reason is that even without mass immigration libertarianism trends towards high degrees of inequality and thus creates a lot of ‘losers’ drawn to redistributive movements hostile to libertarian ideas. Unlike the capitalist welfare state and feudalism, both of which involve extensive patronage economies, libertarianism leaves the rich fundamentally exposed. The result is an unstable, high inequality, Latin American style political economy, in which rich libertarians routinely race off against socialists in both democratic competition and (low and high intensity) military conflicts that create huge instability and economic deadweight that stunts growth and productivity and often manifests itself as extreme corruption and high levels of violent crime.
“Libertarianism” / “classical liberalism” is a thought experiment, the outcome of which is rationally that the long-term best functioning societies typically involve elites that grant some receptivity to public opinion but do not chain themselves to it. Call it managed democracy, Venetian oligarchy, ‘Singapore style autocracy’ or whatever you want. (Democracy is political incelism etc etc). Even if it worked it would be a poor idea; one should consider the deeply tragic and deleterious effects of a lack of strong (compulsive) guidance on the underclass, as has been the case since the 1960s and which is the product of “social liberalism” ie social libertarianism.
The biggest issue with Libertarianism actually wielding power is that they cannot control the keys to power in a society. Any attempt by them to actually wield the keys to power leads to dilution of the ideals of the ideology itself, as by its very nature it is about minimising the cost of government and therefore the 'treasure' that anyone in power can use to bring others to their side. Conversely, the stronger and more powerful government already is, the greater the number of people that would be actively opposed to the ideology as they stand to lose considerable power and wealth in that kind of power transition.
Socialism has the Soviet problem along with being unable to counter the efficient market theory of economics; but Libertarianism has the Somalia social problems and 'freedom', also bears. The issue with an unregulated society in general is that it becomes extremely difficult to deal with bad actors of all types, a kind of societal distributed gish gallop, whereby what 'can be done in civil society' is overwhelmed by the outcomes already burnt into institutional memory like so many Chesterton's fences. We not remember lead laced tin cans, and snake oil salesmen, but I'm sure the FDA hasn't forgotten the reason for its existence.
Let’s not bring up the FDA as a good example when it’s a pretty clear case of failing the cost-benefit analysis test due to how much it impedes progress and raises costs.
Better to simply assign liability to punish and deter bad actors than erect a giant misaligned bureaucracy.
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One of Alex Nowrasteh's hobby horses is that we don't have a ton of evidence this is true, partially because it doesn't just matter how immigrants vote; it matters how the native population changes their own votes in response to immigration. America's government stayed unrecognizably small during our largest period of mass immigration in the 19th century. The period of 1921 to 1968 when America had its most restrictive immigration laws (and was 90%+ white and building a common national identity) also had the largest expansions of the government and the welfare state: the Great Society and the New Deal. After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down, whether because xenophobic people don't like welfare going to foreigners, or language barriers make unionization harder, or maybe they're not related at all - point is more government doesn't necessarily follow from more immigrants.
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
Unless the hope is that quasi-accidental effects like 'diversity reduces societal cohesion -> less unions form -> unions can't interfere with growth' outweigh this, I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
I've seen people try to track with data that various European groups have consistent attitudes on policy over time, but I feel like it's pretty hard to square with how things actually worked in practice. Those same ethnic groups that supported the New Deal democrat party also supported the Democrats when they were the extreme laissez faire, anti-interventionist party, while the WASP-dominant Republicans were much more pro-intervention. I think an easier explanation is just that immigrants probably cluster around the pro-immigration party. The bulk of Irish and German immigration happened in the mid nineteenth century, but it wasn't till the better part of a century later than they (and southern whites and many other native demographics) were sold on more statist policies, so it's hard to draw a straight line from their entry into America towards larger redistribution.
This was the OP's wager as well and it's not unreasonable. But I don't think it's a claim we see much demonstrated in our own long history of mass immigration. Also worth remembering that immigrants are not perfectly representative of their own countries. The kind of person who crosses an ocean or a desert to start life all over is gonna be a little unique.
You're right, I overstated his actual claim, which was that the rate of growth of spending as a percent of GDP slowed.
From the Civil War till WW1, the heyday of mass immigration, federal expenditures as a percent of GDP stay barely above 0% and even fell over time.
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The problem the anti-democracy crowd have is that Libertarianism is incompatible with any other alternative, too. It's always in the interest of those with power to limit the liberty of someone. This is why non-anarchist libertarians tend to like governments of 'limited and enumerated powers, with checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in one branch'.
This is why I don't consider myself officially a Libertarian despite some fairly strong leanings in that direction. A handful of monopolistic megacorp/cartels using economic power to suppress competition isn't that much different from a handful of government bureaucrats doing that same with laws. Better to have some regulations even if they restrict the markets as first-order effects as long as they result in more free markets on the second and higher orders. And also to solve obvious game-theoretic issues like externalities and coordination problems.
But my ideal government would probably take a Libertarian minimalist government as a template and then patch the bugs until you end up 10-20% of the way towards what we currently have.
Generally I agree with you here but I will say this bit has basically never actually happened in the US, though it is frequently claimed and used to justify regulations that do hurt competition:
Actual monopolies and cartels have long been illegal, so definitions have to shift to something approximating “big company regulators/politicians don’t like.” The consumer welfare standard is a pretty darn good one.
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
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Ah yes, I'm not really a fan of democracy. But arguably any form of government is the end of libertarianism. Dictatorships can obviously be bad for libertarianism, but also some of the best examples of libertarian experiments are from dictators peacefully surrendering power. Oligarchies can become stagnant and instead of choosing to support vibrant market competition can decide to crush it in order to maintain their own power.
Libertarianism is when power is not exercised through governments and force, or when it is at least minimally exercised. The alternative avenues of exercising power are through persuasion/ideas, wealth, and social pressures. The three modes of government dictatorship, oligarchy, and democracy all line up with one of these methods taken to an extreme. They usually use government and force to reach into the areas where they are not as strong. Athens (democracy) killed Socrates (persuasion), and voted themselves the (wealth) of other. Feudal systems (Oligarchy) demanded loyalty from a warrior class (persuasion), and cheap labor from a peasant class kept down by religion and their peers (social pressures).
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