A humanitarian and a mind-reader… (Sniffs, dabs eyes)

And who do you think is better placed to spend their money on people in their own community, people who live there or people who see a faceless mass on some form-filling government program?

Your lack of faith in humanity is ironic, since you are using the “uncaring” attitude of libertarians to the poor as some sort of justification for not allowing libertarianism. Libertarians are not uncaring. We just believe in highly localised caring: start with your family, then your neighbours, then the rest of your community. You believe in soulless, mass government programs that treat everyone as a statistic, that rob people of their compassion and humanity.

Yet somehow, libertarians are the uncaring bad guys.

PS I hope the Flying Rodent’s sarcastic comment doesn’t get defaced by the free-speechers.

Which is, you know, ironic.

Oh, oh, I know this one! I’ll join in at the chorus!

Who’s first against the wall this time, comrade? Please, please let it be the intellectuals, it’s always more fun when it’s the intellectuals!

Open your eyes rodent.

It is not libertarians who will convince the British people that freedom has relevance to their lives. It is the statist politicians and police who seem determined to progress the Orwellian nightmare at an ever faster pace.

Open your ears, rodent.

People are beginning to awake and rattle their chains.

This is indeed the central philosophical point of libertarianism. OTOH, I’ve gone to great lengths to point out that 99.9% of Britain’s people are not libertarians, don’t want to be libertarians and almost certainly will never be libertarians.

Ergo, libertarian philosophy is and will continue to be irrelevant to British people’s lives unless you can somehow convince them it’s in their interests to adopt it – I think they are significantly more likely to adopt hardline Rastafarianism, myself.

That means that, no matter how despicable you find this government or the next, their actions are not some epic affront to libertarianism, because Britain is not a libertarian country. It’s arrived in the position it has done because of the way the population have voted at successive elections, and although neither you nor I are happy with the way the country is run, we’re just going to have to suck it up like good little democrats.

BTW, Not one government in existence has voluntarily devolved power? I may be misunderstanding you, but I’ve sat in the Scottish Parliament, and I don’t recall the Scots storming Downing Street to get it. Additionally, just last year the SNP administration removed ring-fencing on council spending and devolved budgetary control to the regions, all of it without heads on sticks. Does that count as voluntary devolution?

@Nick – I don’t mean to be rude here, but can you chunk down the gospels of the libertarian prophets into a more digestible form? Say, a comment or so.

Ah, more smoke being blown up Devils Kitchen’s arsehole.

Libertarianism: like a Personality Cult, but with less personality and more privately-educated fully-grown men repeatedly shouting ‘cunt’ at anyone who dares disagree with them.

[145] Thom – how can fathom a person’s ‘entire belief structure’ from a few throwaway lines on a blog, you must be a clever lad ?

Mea culpa; I should not deem to know what you believe, having read your comments elsewhere for many years.

From what I can fathom you seem to be saying it doesn’t matter who the PM is ?

I’m saying it shouldn’t matter – they would have very little power to do anything more than represent the views of the people who vote for them, not crush them under some massive ideological crusade.

A further plank of your argument seems to be that a fair and civilised society will mysteriously emerge through the will of the people.

Actually my arguement is that fair and civilised societies emerged without the need for colossal government structures; the separation of powers in this country is also what allowed it to grow into the empire that ruled a huge proportion of this rock for a long time and raise the life chances of millions in the process.

I hope these aren’t the same people that turn up in A&E every night throwing up on anything within their immediate vacinity.
Or, the people running the firms bidding for the lowest tender to provide ‘care’ (sic) for our oldies.

I’m trying to say that their ilk tends not to write themselves out of the history books or, worse, become infamous; I live on an ex-council estate adjacent to a fully functioning one – it is rife with the sort you are referring to – resplendant with burnt out cars, old sofas in the streets and BNP/Combat 18 support posters. The carpet baggers sucking at the NHS-teet will not escape justice, my only hope is that it comes sooner and that can only happen if the choice is put back into the individual hands of the stakeholders.

The easy part is knocking Broo’n & Co, any numpty can do that – what I am less clear about is a meaningful alternative.
The Libertarian alternatives I have heard so far are supping with the local burgomeister, or leaving it to the mysterious will of the people.

I’m sorry but have you even read LPUK’s manifesto? Or spent the £10 needed for a copy of The Plan? The Plan goes so far as discussing 30 acts of parliament that would alter this country for the good and does so in a positive and evidenced manner.

Neil,

You first.

Rodent,

Perhaps this is getting OT so I will finish with the following from a cleverer chap than I from his fisking of this debate:

…The central philosophical point of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle: it is illegal to initiate force or fraud against another person’s life, liberty or property…

The governments sole duty should be the enforcement of this principle; this includes protecting against your robber barons, the inconsistencies of the law as exemplified in Saipan or the misdirected idiocies of free-marketeers in the soviet union (they should’ve been telling them to devolve power; something which not one government in existence has ever done without it being wrested from them).

In my view control over ones life is a fundamental human right – you should be allowed to prosper under your own steam and by the work of your hands and those who voluntarily help you, either through plain altruism or from mutual benefit – thats the wonder of the free market.

If you want to live in a socialist utopia be my guest, with welfare, healthcare and education for all then be my guest – just dont expect me to pay for something I know doesn’t work. You find enough people, buy enough land and leave me the hell enough alone.

You don’t really need a truly free market in anything to get over this crisis, you just need some sort of market in currency, rather than the state monopolies we have not. http://www.asiaing.com/choice-in-currency-a-way-to-stop-inflation-by-f.a.-hayek-1976.html

We can offer solutions with historical evidence as well as rhetoric.

More generally, libertarianism emerges from the historical evidence of what has allowed people to foster a wealthy, prosperous and less violent society than what has come before. And that is essentially an institutional understanding of government with strong checks and balances and complete opposition to the use of arbitrary law. The best summary I have so far come across is actually provided by this guy in this very entertaining lecture:

http://oxlib.blogspot.com/2008/12/tom-palmers-talk.html

I mean, don’t get me wrong, they might be right. It’s just that on the whole they sound about as convincing as Ratzinger’s recent hilarious “condoms cause aids” stand up routine. How long before the trons are going to start arguing that stepping over a baby drowning in a puddle is really in its best long term interests? Or that altruism causes cancer?

Rather than shitting out these unconvincing hatchet jobs wouldn’t the trons time be better spent on rethinking their particular conception of liberty? At least so that it entails something more than a billionaire driving his Audi S5 over the skulls of the proletariat to his heart’s content for ever at any rate.

From what I can fathom you seem to be saying it doesn’t matter who the PM is ?

A further plank of your argument seems to be that a fair and civilised society will mysteriously emerge through the will of the people.

I hope these aren’t the same people that turn up in A&E every night throwing up on anything within their immediate vacinity.
Or, the people running the firms bidding for the lowest tender to provide ‘care’ (sic) for our oldies.

The easy part is knocking Broo’n & Co, any numpty can do that – what I am less clear about is a meaningful alternative.
The Libertarian alternatives I have heard so far are supping with the local burgomeister, or leaving it to the mysterious will of the people.

Well, isn’t this all going a bit OT?

If you insist on a response, I’d say that a) God probably doesn’t exist and that b) rights mean nothing unless there is a mechanism for their protection or enforcement – whether that’s an impartial judicial system or a local bruiser with a big stick who deters your neighbour from wiping out your family and ripping off your stuff, it amounts to the same. Without law, rights are just some bloke bumping his gums until the Visigoths arrive.

I chose not to engage on your Saipan point because I do not know enough about it…

Allow me to stop you there – I raise Saipan, post-Soviet Russia and robber baron era America not because they are perfect, crystalline examples of libertarian philosophy in action, or because they are worse than China. I mention them because they are examples of occasions when libertarians or their forebears were allowed to put many libertarian theories into practice. If libertarian principles are so sound, then you would expect some libertarianism to have some positive effect. AFAICS, this has not been the case.

You may feel hard done to by this – if so, I’d note that the variations on ZOMFG teh NHS is killing THOUSANDS OF INNOCENTZ/ State education breeds STOOPID kids/ Benefits totally make teenagers get pregnantz etc. I see on libertarian blogs are not very valid either. If the British political system is to be held responsible for its failures, then there should be no problem examining failures in states where libertarians – pseudo, Republican or plain criminal – have been allowed to apply their ideology.

And again, this needs to be stressed until you take the point – revolutionary rhetoric about Taking the power back, Doodz! is all well and good, but history is emphatic about what happens when you smash an existing power structure with only ideology as a backup. It opens the door for extremists, criminals, mafias, wealthy oligarchies and dictators – outside of the American Revolution, I can see few examples of the revolutionaries’ vision being matched by the results, and even that is questionable.

British parliamentary democracy in its current form has a long, long history of qualified success – modern libertarianism in the broad sense, insofar as it has a history, is a cavalcade of free trade zone fuckups and mafia states, and its rhetoric is ripe for seizure by frauds for their own ends. (See also, the Republicans, below)

The form of libertarianism you describe appears to have a success rate of zero-for-zero, which is comparable to the successes of political Scientology, Monster Raving Loonyism and Natural Law – for a bunch of guys running such a vanishingly unpopular operation, you’re pretty quick to get the waggy-finger out, aren’t you?

I would hardly refer to Republican lobbyists as being “libertarian”; they’ll only stretch it as far as they need to gain an advantage against labour laws in their own country

Yes indeedy – this is why your brand of fantasy politics is so toxic. As I’ve noted, libertarians can’t get a candidate elected to the PTA, let alone congress or parliament. The real-world effect of your politics, then, is to hand people like the Republicans a readymade, tacked-on political philosophy for the justification and glorification of greed, union-busting and corporate malfeasance. The fact that you believe they’re not “real” libertarians as irrelevant as the Marxists’ cry that the Soviet Union wasn’t “real” socialism. They’re yours every bit as much as Chairman Mao is mine.

LPUK was only started in 2008, making Muffchump’s campaigning for 5 years a tetch overzealous dontcha think?

You’re picking nits in a joke? For real?

…bastardising the free market to suit the needs of government will always lead to destruction – we can see the results all around us now (Links to post arguing that banking crisis was caused by government, not bankers)

I demand that you take this Capitalism-Blameless-For-Crisis-Of-Capitalism theory to the people and explain that the truly free market – which even the looniest right winger admits is totally impossible – is the only measure that can save us.

Don’t hold back – just lay it all on a plate for them, and let them make up their own minds. I’ll see you after the next election, but don’t go putting your life savings into electoral deposits now.

Ah so by extension you paste all libertarians with the xenophobic ultra-conservative brush? Ah… We must be the children of such schooling? In that case considering the fate of UKIP you have nothing to fear from us. Still lets see what the public will say at the next general election eh?

Personally I think the reason you engage with us, despite our many quirks and derangements, is because you fear that deep down an LPUK government would firstly remove the looters from government, and that many on this blog make their living that way.

That was fun!

I’m putting this on my personal blog favourites since I got my new computer – debate is so rich here its fattening!

A question to the Libertarians.

Incidentally I do share your concern about muzzling dissident voices – I think that sort of thing ultimately leads to the kind of central control and sham consultation processes so loved by NuLabour.

I really do sometimes wonder at the language of the left – “installed”? Seems apt to your entire belief structure that maybe your asking the wrong questions, sometimes because your just confused, other times because your downright disingenuous.

Anyway a more important question: Should it matter who is in number 10?

In a truly libertarian society the PM would actually have very little to do – he would enforce the few laws that existed, liaise with visiting heads of other countries and be the steward of every individual’s rights, be their champion – it wouldn’t matter what his personal beliefs were or how he put them into practice because of than exemplifying them they would have little impact on anyone else.

What libertarianism is really about is about giving the power of governance back to the people who are most at its mercy, whether because you believe its the right and just thing to do (as in natural-rights libertarianism) or because it will result in the best possible results (DK’s consequentialism) or both (mine). Government could be a tangible entity that normal every day people are able to get their hands on – whether that means the ability to pick how their childs education is carried out, or how their local council funds policing and social care, or even how their healthcare system should function; for the benefit of targets or for the benefit of the people they serve (when you think about it we can all agree that deep down the thing that most irks us about NuLabour’s target culture is that they most certainly view us all as numbers, statistics and putty for their mad mad schemes.

ITYF the Muffchumps of this world used to campaign for UKIP, until they noticed people were stifling a giggle every time it was mentioned.