My brain has this ethical æsthetic. Taking government money feels disgusting, filthy and impure, the same way I’d expect stealing things from an independent food cart vendor might, even though I’d only be taking what the system should give me anyway (I want the state to basically tax people for a reasonable UBI and not much else; if I use corporate welfare to get less money than the UBI I’d want to implement there logically should be no problem, but it’s still yucky).
Then there’s the fact that I’m poor (YGM) and thus don’t really have that much of a choice; I’d love to survive without getting in bed with the state but it’s not really a realistic option because the state also makes surviving artificially expensive by eg. limiting the housing supply and banning contracts with which I could borrow money from future-me with less risk of getting in inescapable debt if future-me doesn’t end up as wealthy as I’m expecting. And it’s also caused me a lot of psychological harm from being terminally dependent on a thoroughly abusive system for years, and in any just world it would owe me big reparations for that.
But I’m totally planning to make a big deal of calculating all the services I’ve received from the state and spitefully paying them back to the penny once I can afford it, just for the sake of a grand gesture, and then I’m going to whine massively about how they are still going to try to impose bullshit and mob rule on me.
Does the state limit the housing supply though? At least in Australia, zoning rules are typically set by local councils which represent existing land owners, who typically oppose development and get very upset when higher levels of government overrule them to allow high-rise buildings etc.
If anything a libertarian paradise might have less development if owners manage to impose binding contracts on each other that no higher power can overrule.
In Finland there are a lot of regulations that limit construction and rig the system to favor the rich (mandatory parking spaces, regulations requiring the mean apartment size to be artificially large etc.), and while I don’t want to do full libertarianism immediately (the people are just totally unable to handle it), except maybe somewhere for testing purposes, injecting a hefty dose of laissez-faire would help as the builders could build more of the highly desirable aka. profitable city apartments.
Also, in full libertarian paradise people dissatisfied with the existing cities could just build their own city, with blackjack and sex workers who are treated with dignity and respect, and impose contracts that building is not to be artificially restricted. The working class would probably follow pretty soon because it would be a cheap place to live in, and the end result would be basically what the SF YIMBYs are trying to get. But this is pretty “would the workers’ paradise give everyone one pony or two ponies” because nobody is expecting full libertarian paradise to ever exist on this planet. All I’m saying is that we should seriously try the opposite of the cronyist festering regulatory abominations sometimes.
If people would be happy going off and building their own city to bring down costs, they could more easily just go off from SF and buy property literally anywhere else.
Whatever is stopping that working would presumably also stop the “go off and build elsewhere” strategy too?You can perhaps get around building and zoning codes by building a new city in the desert, but you can’t just go build your own cities without obeying tax laws, immigration laws, drug laws, labor laws, banking and investment laws, etc.
It is, in fact, the case that states with less burdensome regulations (e.g. Texas) are growing faster than states without, but there are of course other compensating factors that make e.g. San Francisco more desirable for certain purposes.
If the greater desirability of San Francisco were caused by its greater level of government intervention, that would be one thing. But my actual belief is that it is desirable despite its greater level of government intervention. And therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to say: “I’d like to live in San Francisco for the climate, the culture, and the high number of technology jobs; however, I think the restrictions on development are unjust and inefficient.”
I agree with this- SF has particularly inefficient and stupid rules, and they should change. I just don’t think that “and if people don’t like it they can go buy elsewhere” would solve problems caused by hypothetical private SF-style city rules any better than it solves them for the present public ones.
Which is to say, it doesn’t do nothing, but if you view the current setup as unacceptable when induced by the state and “move elsewhere” unacceptable as an answer, then you probably shouldn’t regard “move elsewhere” to be an acceptable answer to the hypothetical of them occurring in a private system, either.
And I’m inclined to agree with argumate that this could happen and be messier, depending on how the incentives and optimisation for competition worked out, in the absence of any central entity that can do gods-eye view optimisation.
A saving grace is that localities are already really bad at cooperating and incentivised by property owners to compete for land value, so we’ve already gotten to see some of the things, like efforts to move homeless on, that we’d see under a private system where they were more explicitly competing, and can see at least some of what would happen.I agree that “if you don’t like, go somewhere else” is always a terrible answer, and I’m opposed to it when libertarians say it as well. If you don’t like how your workplace is run, the fact that you could or could not work somewhere else is irrelevant to whether the workplace could be run better, for the benefit of all involved.
Any form of bureaucracy is going to be inefficient, including private bureaucracies. The major point, though, is that they are incentivized to be somewhat better through competition. But the fact that they are not perfectly efficient is precisely why big corporations don’t, in a free market, form monopolies and take over everything: there is no difference between a “private” corporation owning the whole economy and a state socialist economy.
So the kernel of truth in the “if you don’t like your employer, work somewhere else” argument is that, while it’s a major inconvenience for your job to be so bad that you have to quit and find another one, it’s much less of an inconvenience than having to run past the sentries and escape over the Berlin Wall. Workplaces are dictatorships, but as David Friedman puts it, competitive dictatorships. The difference is that you have a many more options under a competitive system, and since you have those options, they all tend to be better.
Of course, it’s possible to think that all of your employment options are intolerable. The question is whether there is a practicable system that would give you better options. As Ludwig von Mises put it:
To advocate private ownership of the means of production is by no means to maintain that the capitalist social system, based on private property, is perfect. There is no such thing as earthly perfection. Even in the capitalist system something or other, many things, or even everything, may not be exactly to the liking of this or that individual. But it is the only possible social system. One may undertake to modify one or another of its features as long as in doing so one does not affect the essence and foundation of the whole social order, viz., private property. But by and large we must reconcile ourselves to this system because there simply cannot be any other.
In Nature too, much may exist that we do not like. But we cannot change the essential character of natural events. If, for example, someone thinks—and there are some who have maintained as much—that the way in which man ingests his food, digests it, and incorporates it into his body is disgusting, one cannot argue the point with him. One must say to him: There is only this way or starvation. There is no third way. The same is true of property: either-or—either private ownership of the means of production, or hunger and misery for everyone.
If there were no system better than contemporary welfare-regulatory state democracy, it would be quite proper to castigate people who complain about it: “You don’t have to like it, but this is the best possible system of social organization. Libertarianism would not bring about the conditions you seek; it would create conditions akin to those seen in Somalia. So if you desire civilized life, health, and happiness, you ought to prefer interventionism to laissez-faire.”
I do think left-libertarians can be somewhat naive, in that I do not think a libertarian society would bring about the consequences they claim to want. For instance, I think you’re entirely right that in a libertarian society, homeless people would not be allowed to lay around in the streets or parks of cities. Because they would be private property, and their owners would kick them out.
In general, though, I don’t think the central disagreement is about values. I think it’s about consequences. If socialism delivered all the good things that socialists say it will do, I would be for it. If laissez-faire delivered all the horrible things socialists say it will deliver, I would be against it. And I think the converse is true as well: I think virtually all socialists would find actual laissez-faire more to their liking than actual socialism.
Left-libertarianism may appear naive from an absolutist propertarian perspective, but it’s more coherent as liberty-maximization instead of property-maximization. In the nordic countries landowners’ rights to stop people from walking around in the forests are restricted, and this has probably increased total freedom even if it could not easily emerge from propertarianism (the first landowner to allow roaming might find everyone roaming on their lands and ruining them with erosion); similarly, imo, a culture of liberty should decide that nobody gets to build uncomfortable benches for the public just to send the homeless elsewhere, because if that shit is tolerated everyone gets uncomfortable benches and the number of homeless people doesn’t go down and everyone loses. Tight-assed conformists without alternatives are a problem, and mandating lawns everywhere is oppression.
(Also, N(involuntarily homeless) > 0 is already a failure of a society and a significant number of homeless people should not be the outcome.)
After all, property is “theft” the same way taxes are, and should therefore only be used where it’s actually consequentially justified instead of being treated as a morally absolute right. And I don’t pretend to have it all figured out, I’m just very intensely gesturing at the general direction of less horrible festering abominableness because “Somalia vs. Rapture” is not on the table; “a bit less bullshit vs. even more bullshit” is.
2 months ago · 89 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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xhxhxhx reblogged this from argumate and added:It might be hard to lobby the council governments of Australia. It’s a responsible country, after all. It’s a democratic...
- atumitum reblogged this from argumate and added:
In the libertarian paradise the idea is not to vote for what can and what may not be done, but to decide individually...
sexyy-emo-phanther liked this- argumate reblogged this from xhxhxhx and added:
@xhxhxhx bringing down the citation hammer :)Yes, councils are state bodies. But they often work at cross-purposes to...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:Left-libertarianism may appear naive from an absolutist propertarian perspective, but it’s more coherent as...
voximperatoris reblogged this from tentativelyassembled and added:I don’t think corporations have a tendency to grow or merge beyond the point where they reach an efficient size. But...
tentativelyassembled reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:Corporations seem to tend towards growing / merging, but I guess those have slightly different pressures than homeowners...
crazyeddieme reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:In my experience they exist, but in “less desirable” neighborhoods.A lot of this bullshit is a desperate effort to...
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wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:I mean, I might agree with this more if there was better competition among HOAs. I am not a homeowner, but I would...
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shlevy reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:So not getting into the core of this, but I want to point out that most people I know with (voluntary!) HSA/condo...
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skulkingscavenger said: I think at this point it would be helpful to try and define a general principle for distinguishing tasks that in practice should be performed at a collective level. zoning, roads, and military seem to be popular examples. I’m not as grounded in game theory as I probably should be, but on the face of it all of these are symptomatically susceptible to the free-rider problem. I don’t think the free-rider problem by itself should be considered a hard limit though.
collapsedsquid reblogged this from argumate and added:I personally go with this. Homeowners really want control over their neighborhood, and in the absence of government,...
anotherpersonhasclaimedthisus reblogged this from argumate and added:When did ya’all agree land could be “owned”?
- shuffling-blogs reblogged this from argumate and added:
I’m not so sure zoning itself doesn’t fall prey to as many flaws. In my city there are strict limits on minimum home...
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