“One of the fundamental things about government is that once they have a taste for power, they never give it back”

I suppose then that you see the “government” as some phenomenon independent of the people who make it up? That the Rudd government and the Howard government are one in the same? (no, there’s not a lot of difference, but ultimately those who had power last year do not have it this year).

The internet is a fantastic tool that enables access to a wealth of information and other benefits. The Rudd Government wants to ensure the benefits of the internet are made available to all Australians. That said, the Government also wants to find ways to make a safer online environment, particularly for children, and is investigating the use of filters to block access to illegal content.

Rudd is happy to use exactly the same “liberty enabling” argument given above. Except that, individuals end up being told what to think (for their own good of course). Whether the blocked content is illegal or not, won’t be determined by any court, nor by any democratic process, nor can you go and check because the blacklist contents are secret. Buy hey, it’s all in the name of helping those who can’t help themselves. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

One of the fundamental things about government is that once they have a taste for power, they never give it back. All the wonderful gardens that will grow, the fruit we will eat, the love we can all share, all you have to do is let government make your decisions for you. Such a small sacrifice, for this generous reward, why would anyone hesitate?

None of the examples you give would seem to fit into that category Tel_, nor can I think of much reason to defend them.

This is one example of property rights gone too far. There is no shortage of creative material being generated so we don’t need more incentive for copyright owners, we certainly don’t need a whole new round of expensive lawsuits dragging the industry down right at the time when we are trying to build it up. It follows from what I was saying above, property rights are only worth having where they serve a clear economic purpose, and no more than that.

Anyone been to an airport recently to get scanned by the “liberty-enabling” Terahertz radiation? I guess I shouldn’t complain too much, at US airports they can enable your liberty even better, by taking a copy of any digital media you happen to be carrying (just for examination and evidence of course, copyright doesn’t apply in this case, for national security reasons).

At any rate, I think youd be hard pushed to find a government these days that doesnt pursue liberty-enabling policies as part of its platform, and Id say its been the norm in developed economies for at least the past century

In principle or practice?

The problem is that once you say, freedom from want, you then give an open-ended reason for a central power to make whatever decisions are necessary to do what they deem solves the want

And provided you have a functioning democracy, I don’t think most people see much of a problem with that. At any rate, I think you’d be hard pushed to find a government these days that doesn’t pursue “liberty-enabling” policies as part of its platform, and I’d say it’s been the norm in developed economies for at least the past century. We’ve seen what happens when you push that to extremes (communism), but outside that, it’s hard to see how any can claim that such policies have been an awful failure in the general case. In most cases, they work by making fairly minor restrictions of the liberties of the many in order to significantly improve life for a disadvantaged minority. And of course sometimes governments get it wrong and enact policies meant to help but that actually make things worse, but as private individuals trying to help one other we have that problem too, and it’s not an a priori reason to stop trying to help altogether.

However, getting back to the idea of freedom of association (including the freedom to be selective in one’s association), even if the Weyco employees were on contract, it would merely have slowed down the implementation of the anti-smoking policy because all contracts come up for renegotiation at some time or other. If you pass a rule to prevent people having overt policies of only hiring non-smokers (or what have you) then they will run covert policies instead. Then to break the covert policies you will need to implement your own “positive discrimination” rules, and ultimately quotas and everything else that goes with it.

You could make it illegal for an employer to search their employees or test them in any way (and also make it illegal for any contract to require such things). You would have my support on that one. Indeed a contract exists to serve a purpose, which is to ensure that people can trust one another enough to make productive deals and coordinate their economic activity. Contract law should be no stronger than required to achieve this purpose.

Most Libertarians don’t have any great religious attachment to the sanctity of contracts, nor to the sanctity of property — over and above the useful purpose that those institutions do serve (OK, some do, but usually the ones who haven’t thought things out carefully). If you get rid of contracts and property, then you rapidly get to a situation where the incentive to work is zero. If I make some object and someone else takes what I have made as quickly as I make it, they why bother to make another? If I pay someone to work for me and they take the pay and do no work, then I have no incentive to ever hire anyone else. Once property law and contract law are strong enough to provide reasonable incentive to work, that is as good as it gets in my books.

The idea of freedom is that people make their own decisions for their own lives, not that they get handed a bunch of stuff in exchange for having their decisions made by someone else.

As in the relationship of ‘contract feudalism‘?

Correct – surely a society with no government where we all individually protected our own possessions with personal firearms would be just as safe, cohesive and functional as one where we delegate the task of protecting our possessions to trained professionals, most of whom are under the control of a democratically-answerable government. No?

If you want to start looking at history, there are plenty of examples of centrally controlled professional police and para-military forces being used to inflict widespread violence against citizens. Admittedly, a democratically-answerable government improves the situation, but then again El-Salvador is supposedly democratic, they just keep wanting to run a Feudal system. Burma has a nice group of trained professionals keeping everything safe, cohesive and functional, sadly their government isn’t answerable to anyone. Could never happen here though? Maybe do a bit of research into how many people have said that and been wrong already.

Certainly to regard positive liberty as more important than negative liberty (a position I agree with, though I suspect he ignores the degree to which we tend to take negative liberty for granted) seems close to libertarian heresy!

The problem is that once you say, “freedom from want”, you then give an open-ended reason for a central power to make whatever decisions are necessary to do what they deem solves the “want”. The idea of freedom is that people make their own decisions for their own lives, not that they get handed a bunch of stuff in exchange for having their decisions made by someone else.

It might sound nice to say, “freedom from sickness” until the realisation that now the central power can claim control over diet, health, medicine, physical activity and every aspect of a person’s life… “but we have to tell them what to do, to ensure they are free”. That in a nutshell is why most Libertarians would prefer just the freedom to be left with minimal interference in their life and leave those “positive freedoms” to the socialists, who are welcome to enjoy them, I honestly don’t feel envious.

Having said that, there are some things (like mass immunization) where Libertarianism doesn’t work too well because the payoff to the individual doesn’t calculate out as good as the payoff to society as a whole. This is especially true around the critical mass point where the immunization program can make a disease die out within a population.

Correct – surely a society with no government where we all individually protected our own possessions with personal firearms would be just as safe, cohesive and functional as one where we delegate the task of protecting our possessions to trained professionals, most of whom are under the control of a democratically-answerable government. No?

BTW, why is it that I find myself agreeing with Tyler Cowen 95% of the time, but most others that label themselves ‘libertarian’ at best 5% of the time? Certainly to regard positive liberty as more important than negative liberty (a position I agree with, though I suspect he ignores the degree to which we tend to take negative liberty for granted) seems close to libertarian heresy!

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Instead, Libertarians advocate a

minimum

of coercion, in the balance between government coercion of individuals and individual coercion of each other.

Property rights are coercion, and thus a form of violence… and most Libertarians accept this. Non-libertarians also accept it but then pretend otherwise. As the example above demonstrates, if we are going to have property rights, then we must be willing to defend that property with violence. If it was your money in the bank, and someone robbed that bank, then you would expect to see the robber hunted down — whether justice is done by trained specialists or talented amatures doesn’t that change the basis of such action is violence, and broadly sanctioned violence at that. Please don’t pretend that the guy sitting on his porch with a shotgun is somehow a “bad guy” while the guards flanking an armoured car carrying side arms are somehow “good guys” because they do the same job in uniform.

The thing is, property rights serve a function, which is to facilitate productivity and to avoid the “Tradgedy of the Commons” that will occur when the person who has worked for something loses what they worked for and thus loses any incentive to do further work. We condone coercion where it is minimised and where it serves a clear and necessary function.

The institutes founder, Llewellyn Rockwell, once wrote that: “State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of ones own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.”

Indeed, do we write regulation to force Muslims to eat pork just like everyone else (because having special diet marks them as separate from others)? Do we ban Jews from wearing their traditional skull cap (because wearing peculiar clothing marks them as separate)? Do we ban feminism on the basis that feminists advocate female-only zones? Llewellyn Rockwell has a fair point that there are so many forms of segregation that people actively persue, that to attempt to regulate such behaviour is impossible for starters and could only be done by the most extreme forms of coercion.

Libertarian philosophy supports the protection of all minority groups (regardless of race, religion, or politics) in the form of some sort of fundamental bill of rights (whether that be a charter of human rights, or a constitutional bill). This protects people from direct coercion from either each other or the government. Beyond that, you can’t legislate to make people want to like each other or desire to associate with each other. Can you imagine if you were to try to buy a house and had to fill in all the neighbourhood quotas — we have this many couples, this many singles, this many whites, this many Chinese, but we do need to bring up the numbers of Catholics in this region so you will probably have to convert, hmmm better make sure your next baby is a girl.

I paid my income tax today
I never cared what Congress spent
But now I’ll watch over ev’ry cent
Examine ev’ry bill they pay
They’ll have to let me have my say
I wrote the Treasury to go slow
Careful, Mister Henry Junior, that’s my dough
I paid my income tax
Now you’ve got all the facts
I know you’ll pay your taxes too