I think it's about employers sharing goals more commonly associated with the state, not vice versa, I think. So things like the desire for moral policing.
Your "response" link just points to the BHL front page.
Hopefully, this will be a better experience than sifting through the dreariness of the Crooked Timber comments in search of good responses, which seem mostly to be people who post here and Jim Henley.
There are two posts after the Denmark vs. France post at BHL that are direct responses to the CT post. I do not vouch for their quality. Jessica Flanigan relies heavily on the provision of a Universal Basic Income to solve (or at least provide an out from) all the problems associated with workplace coercion.
Jessica Flanigan relies heavily on the provision of a Universal Basic Income to solve (or at least provide an out from) all the problems associated with workplace coercion.
I avoid anything connected to Crooked Timber and political theory like the plague, so I won't read this stuff, but is that really what the libertarians are arguing? Because I can't see any progressive saying that a (set reasonably high) universal basic income wouldn't be a good thing for helping with workplace coercion, and I also can't see any real world libertarian supporting a UBI, so all must be wankery.
5: Wankery abounds in the MR comments, as libertarians grasp at various government-based remedies to workplace coercion to defend their philosophy, remedies that they would normally oppose.
Next up, libertarians solve the root causes of male-female pay imbalance by establishing free communal creches. Then we move on to the perpetual bugbears of air and water pollution. Turns out punitive regulation with well-paid and therefore incorruptible enforcement agents is the only thing that makes sense.
really what the libertarians are arguing?
The BHL blog is the latest wave of the "liberaltarians" that want a relatively robust social insurance state and light regulatory/administrative state, which is why they love Denmark. They're generally ok with transfer payments.
You know, if robust social insurance combined with light regulation in other areas actually works, then go for it. But Denmark has one of the highest unionization rates in the world, so good luck getting from here to there without unions and resultant pressure on the state to enact a decent social insurance scheme. So if we now have pro-union, pro-social-insurance libertarians, I . . . am not sure why we should be calling them libertarians or caring about them at all.
Perhaps this is all rehearsed in the CT thread.
6, cont.: Much more popular responses, though are "What coercion?" and "Why not just have your choice of jobs?", with an honorable mention going to "Why not be independantly wealthy?".
Halford: there's a discussion of UBI in the "cold cold heart" post on CT.
I stand by my proposal that libertarians should be prohibited from posting their childish ideas on the publicly funded/developed internet until they have litigated a breach of contract suit to conclusion.
I'm sure somebody's said it at CT, but to me, the TLA, BHL means only this.
9: I . . . am not sure why we should be calling them libertarians
I'm not sure either; most other times I've seen emergent liberaltarians (e.g. E. D. Kain and apparently Will Wilkinson, and I haven't followed what went on with Henley), they've completed a transition to full-fledged liberal after a while, though there may be caveats, as there are for all of us.
But I haven't read the BHL site, and read very little of the CT threads or the back-and-forths precipitating them, so yeah, this is probably all covered.
Henley, like the honest man he is, no longer describes himself as a libertarian.
12 is brilliant, and probably wins the thread even at this stage. It would win the internets, but the US DoD might object to CC taking them over.
Wilkinson post at BHL on Why I'm not a Bleeding Heart Libertarian, but a liberal.
The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights.
13, 17: Thanks. I was getting confused.
The response posts at BHL are orders of magnitude better that the responses at Marginal Revolution, but they still seem to fundamentally miss the point. They're talking right past the CT post.
The response posts at BHL are orders of magnitude better that the responses at Marginal Revolution
This is praising them with faint damns indeed.
Of the libertarians responding to CT, the ones that aren't outright psychos seem to invariably end up with some variation on "In an imaginary world that doesn't exist, has never existed and almost certainly never will exist, the problems you raise wouldn't occur."
Of the libertarians responding to CT, the ones that aren't outright psychos seem to invariably end up with some variation on "In an imaginary world that doesn't exist, has never existed and almost certainly never will exist, the problems you raise wouldn't occur."
The sudden rise and fall of commenter "Data Tdhosufdosfidsfdiossg" or whatever it is is interesting. It seems to me that this person is a 16-year-old boy who has gotten in over his head.
The later BHL response post indeed misses many of my criticisms of the current order. First of all, it doesn't seem to account for globalization. Cargill can go and destroy rainforests or other ecosystems in favor of palm oil plantations without suffering materially, precisely because of distance, difference and deference. I can point to a National Geographic article about pygmy elephants on the verge of extinction, or even a website or video, but the people on the ground in Borneo have little or no hope of effectively getting their message out into the moral sphere without huge external inputs of wealth, energy and attention. Corporations have easy access to that sphere, however, because they can simply spend money on a greenwashing campaign, or have some villagers massacred, and chances are there will be few repercussions. Likewise, when the corporations export poverty and violence to Nigeria, it is precisely because of national boundaries, immigration law, religious, cultural and language barriers that we cannot count on any kind of symmetrical feedback. Finally, when you allow individuals and groups to accumulate large amounts of wealth and power over others, as nearly any libertarianish system I've ever heard of assumes, you automatically introduce a class/caste barrier above which people are largely insulated from any negative feedback from their decisions. E.g. take Microsoft away from Bill Gates and it really doesn't matter in terms of his standard of living or the amount of social approbation he receives.
Merely because Wal~Mart is only 20% as evil as it could legally be, hardly seems like much of a guarantee of liberty for anyone, anywhere, especially given that any social order which allows for it to keep accumulating power and wealth indefinitely is guaranteeing that the capacity to do evil will tend to increase, objectively and relative to other entities.
To a large degree, any conceivable "moral order" under capitalism is going to be very directly a creation of the capitalist elites.
23: That sounds interesting. Do I have to wade through all the CT libertarianism threads to find that, or would you be willing to help out with a link? Please, Ned. But only if you feel like it.
Further to 25: nevermind, I see it. Impatience is the bane of those cursed with 100 degree temperatures. That's my story, and I stick to it.
It has been suggested that Data is Henri Vieuxtemps is abb1.
It seems to me that this person is a 16-year-old boy who has gotten in over his head.
Should be right at home on the losing side in a discussion of libertarianism, then.
27: I vaguely recall some things about those commenters, but unfortunately don't follow CT enough to make sense of it. Good to know, though, should I begin to follow.
I see the current CT libertarianism thread is doing some handwringing about what drives people away.
Data could be Henri Vieuxtemps, but I don't see the resemblance with abb1.
"Profit at Walmart is a goal shared by the state?"
Not profit, necessarily, but in a capitalist system, a dependent class of workers is? Maybe that's also true of the "opposite" system of socialism, in which case, the point becomes less about economies and more about systems of power. Much easier, in our system, to do that with privately held power than with government.
The language here is from my adult capabilities, but the sentiment is directly descendant from my sixteen-year old self. IOW, fascists.
I was a libertarian, but then I gre up.
Also, I found the 'w' key on an iPad.
Contracting with non-profits means that you can avoid unions. Fire at will. Violate other labor laws. No due process protections.
34 refers to contracting for the provision of public services.
When I see substantial numbers of libertarians make implementation of a UGI their first economic policy priority, I'll listen to what else they have to say. 'Til then, this all looks like apologetics for policies that overwhelmingly favor the interests of the rich and powerful.
I have been amusing myself with a Bob Black-ian UGI -- "Okay, people, everyone gets an equal share of 10% of whatever the economy turns out to be." I can quite easily believe that actually voluntary labor would produce as much as the misery-maximizing system we have now, but I can also imagine the bad year in which no-one wanted to build a sewer for any money.
No, actually, I can't, pouring concrete is just too fun.
I imagine the labor costs for building a sewer would go up, but it'd still get built.
"In an imaginary world that doesn't exist, has never existed and almost certainly never will exist, the problems you raise wouldn't occur."
You could add "and whose existence I, as a libertarian, would oppose."
What happened to Data Tatatukhus, was he banned again? I don't see any of his comments on that CT thread.
Indeed, although I find the last sentence a little confusing. Profit at Walmart is a goal shared by the state?)
One example would be various forms of political incorrectness (like membership in the Communist party or KKK) which the goverrment can't ban directly but can penalize indirectly by encouraging adverse employment consequences.
Everyone's obviously free to ignore whoever they want, but the CT post was written as a response to the people at the BHL blog, who do in fact believe in a robust Basic Income. It's also not a completely outre part of libertarianism, as it was advocated by Hayek and Friedman, even if it has never been much emphasized outside of academia.
It may be that a view that advocates for a government that just cuts checks and doesn't attempt to provide services or regulate the market for the sake of provisioning public goods is still too stupid to engage with (I don't know what the BHL bloggers have to about environmental protection, for example). However, that is the view in question. It seems a little lame to both hold up the CT post as a devastating critique of a position and then ignore what the position has to say because the libertarians in one's Facebook feed wouldn't agree with it.
32: I was a libertarian, but then I gre[w] up.
Speaking of growing up, I don't if folks have been following the story of Jonathan Krohn, the kid who was a conservative Wunderkind at age 13 a few years aback but has since grown out of it and repudiated his prior positions (age 17 now, I think). Not really anything worth spending any time on but it did lead to Talking Points Memo dredging up this delicious photograph which is simultaneously the most pathetic and disturbing picture ever.
a robust Basic Income...was advocated by Hayek and Friedman, even if it has never been much emphasized outside of academia.
I did not know this. Thanks.
Is that true about Friedman? I was under the impression that he supported a negative income tax.
In any case, what was the nature of his support? My prejudices assure me he would only have offered it up to forestall welfare, the way the Heritage foundation tried to head off Clinton's healthcare proposals with the individual mandate.
Everyone's obviously free to ignore whoever they want, but the CT post was written as a response to the people at the BHL blog, who do in fact believe in a robust Basic Income.
Unless and until they respond to stories about government regulation of the workplace by saying "Boy, we should institute a UBI and then get rid of these regulations" instead of "Boy, we should get rid of these regulations", their commitment is less than impressive to me. It's not about whether they affirm, in a ritualistic way, the need for a UBI; it's about whether their actual advocacy respects the central place such a proposal would play in rendering the rest of their position morally decent.
