Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General libertarians = right wing anarchists

Actually, I did respond to that post, 2sins. I wrote:

"Thanks for the read, 2wins, but if you are going to continue to caricature political individualism as being a "lone cowboy slowly riding his horse into the sunset", rather than as a political relationship between the individual and the state, I don't think we are going to get very far. It is a myth about individualism that it some how rejects the idea of individuals engaging in interaction for their mutual benefit or even the benefit of a stranger."

I have gone out of my way to define the terms I have used, yet you and some others continue to substitute a different meaning for the same words without making clear that you are doing so. I can only bother so long with responding to such intentional (or so it is beginning to seem to me) ambiguities before I have to accept that futher response becomes meaningless.

I did go to the Loomis link and found it to be nothing more than a story about a couple of semi-Fabian types seeking to redo the whole Eden thingie. I wonder if this is from whom eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt got their whacky idea to get folks to go back to the country and homestead at the height of the industrial revolution.:-)

Anyway, if you are as well read on the subject as you say, and if Loomis and Borsodi are what you think represents libertarian thought, I have to conclude that some has badly mislead you.
Yours,
Issodhos

actually iss, you'll have to do better than that. you'll have to read their works to get a better understanding of who they were and what they were doing. you're not getting any where and if you don't know about ralph borsodi and the decentralist manifesto and the work they did i have to wonder about your credentials here. seems like you're just dancing around theories to have a little fun with people. if that's the case, ok, no biggy. we all do it. the internet is a great place for that. good luck with all that, iss.

As long as you are unwilling to even discuss the topic in good faith, don't worry about making a leap of faith, Schlack. I pointed out to you earlier in this thread that if a libertarian oriented society was to ever emerge, it would have to be through persuasion and at the ballot box. That is part of what I meant when I wrote, "within the current system of governance".

This is the what I wrote earlier:

"It is probably best not to twist my words, Schlack. It just makes your argument look quite disengeneous. Having lived in Europe and spent some of my early formative years there, I do not fault you for looking for a leader and a blue print. Unlike America, Europe does not have a tradition of individuals voluntarily self-organizing on a routine basis to deal with everyday things. In America individuals still volunteer for local projects, join volunteer organizations (e.g., fire departments and rescue squads, hospital assistents, charitable organizations) and do so without being instructed to do so by some "top-down" leader or authority figure.

There will be no blueprint nor will there be a "maximum leader" for directing 'The Plan'. A pillar of liberty is the voluntary human-directed action that develops once man's creativity is loosed. There will be many experiments, some of which will fail and others which will succeed. And yes, it will be a slow, incremental process because a system based on individual liberty born of natural Rights will require persuasion -- unlike the current system which is established and maintained at the point of a government bayonet.

One thing I am sure of is that America must remain relatively stable for such a transformation to successfully occur, because if America suffers a social or economic meltdown the result will be the emergence of a rightist or a leftist totalitarianism that will crush any divergent worldview.

As to how a libertarian influenced society would work? Getting there would have to be in small steps to give people the time needed to adjust (the transition alone could take several generations)and to do so within the constraints of the current system of governance.

"Roads" is not a very good example because most of the developed world already has all the primary roads in place it needs (indeed, America has more such road than it actually needs), but if developers want to build new 'communities' let them foot the bill for connector roads rather than continue to force 'the public' to subsidize such ventures. Maintenance of highway infrastructure would continue to be through user fees on fuel and/or with tolls (of course, this would mean that a portion of the money collected would no longer be fraudulently diverted to "public mass transit" schemes).

Some major milestones would be erecting a Constitutional wall of separation between commerce and state (and yes, that is a two-way separation), the rescinding of supracitizen status now held by government-created corporate legal entities, a decriminalizing of drug use and the release of all persons convicted under such laws, eliminating the Federal Reserve, establishing a free-market monetary system, et cetera. It's a start."

As I wrote earlier, I am not hear to teach, but if you wish, I will be happy to furnish you with a number of good links concerning libertarian thought.
Yours,
Issodhos

Maybe if we examined the historical record of a government such as Issodhos has proposed for our future, we could study it and understand it better. Is there such an example?

A people who voluntarily converge to solve issues held in common certainly sounds appealing. I see no evidence it is possible. It has not been in existence for at least several centuries and while I acknowledge that you admit it may take generations, I just don't see anything that would lead in that direction.

I say that with regret, for I am a longtime advocate of the value of voluntary action and the participation by everyone in their community.

yes and it was equally untrue when you first wrote it


CCPI

Volunteering Ireland


indeed Ireland does have a fine tradition of people joining together voluntarily to engage with issues, both local and lately international.

local people often create community groups. The Itish State has assisted this in the last 20 years or so by providing funding and training - through an indepependent training organisations. its been built into our partnership system.

Local Training Initiative


it seems you only have your preconceptions of europe, re-inforced from your reading. and which europe are you talking about? the eastern europe than lanuished under soviet control and had no chance to organise independently?

are you talking of britain which has a fine tradtion of church organisations that fulfil much the same functions?

self organisation is part of all societies when theyre not prevented.

sometimes this takes the form of pressure groups to infomr the govt of the day and pressurise them into putting resources (that would be beynd the reach of the local group) into place. let me get this straight, you have lumped all this in together as is if it spewed forth from some "leader".

talk about not discussing in good faith. Please do some more research before pontificating on that which you dont know. I had the repsect for the US to find out a good deal before i first posted here.

The links above reflect the reality on the ground, not some abstract theory. there are many organsiations, both formal and ad hoc, both many issue and single issue, neighbourhood based, regional and national. some from govt initiatives, some from local people. a messy human system built on

some intitated by local politicans with a particular interest - anti drugs groups from the 80s would be a perfect example.

a real local problem ignored by the state and our so called leaders. acted themselves and forced the government to act.

the reality is your preconcieved model turned on its head with a whole load of other messy bits too.



I see were back to the title of the thread, we got there in the End , Thanks Iss ;-)


who said anything about "maximum leader" or Overall "plan".

not that these are in themselves a bad thing. there are good plans and bad plans, there are good plans badly executed, and bad plans well exectuted.

some have been quite successful, some have been failures, some are the creation of huiman creativity using the tool of government and like any other human system, prone to corruption many influences both good and bad.

I have ploughed through many of the links you provided earlier, trying to get a handle on this whole stream of thought. i have found it to be long on theory, short on practicality.


great, im all for experimenting, im really in favour of small scale and local "democracy" type projects. i think thats the best way forward for people, but by itelef i think a system based only on that will fail. Also Human creativity is inspired as much by our boundaries as by our horizon. (just look at the creativity of tax evaders!!).


roads are a perfect example, new ones are always being built, new routes, and there are more places in the world than America.

the poiint about the roads and why i keep coming back to them is that roads will have to take a specific route (or selection of routes) depending on geography, effciency and the rest of the road system. there will always be competing ideas on where it should be built, not all will agree. land will have to be acquired for the building of a road, and this often means having to uproot people fom their homes and land. no amount of persuasion would work.

its a real world situation, where some people are going to be the losers and they would never agree to it, so in the end some form of coercion has been neccessary (e.g. compulsory purchase orders).

how then would this road fit into the wider road network? again another set of competing interests with winners and losers.

it would be nigh on impossible to route a road that satisfied everyone and didnt infringe upon somebodies rights. that will not change whether we have a libertarian society or not.




there is much to be lauded in such ideas, as ive said i wouldnt dismiss them, but i fail to see who any new system would be any less corrupt. No matter what system humans have had in place, they have always been corrupted by those with wealth and power. A libertairan system would be no different.

if the post i have placed here cannot stand then it is not worth including. thank you.

hmmm havent you been making a lot of "persuasion" as the means by which a libertarian society would come about.

yet you state youre not here to teach*. but you should be here to persuade.

So far, it has been a less than convincing job. doesnt bode well for the persuading that is neccessary.

* A certain professorial tone leads one to think otherwise but then again tone is quite hard to express and read in the written word without the appropriate tags (e.g. \Sarcasm), I'll put it down to projection on my part.

oh have been thinking about where ive actually heard of a society of which you speak. the closest i can think of are some of the anarchist agricultural communes in spain** during the spanish civil war, onyl lasted about a year, they were created mostly out of free choice (there was co-ercion of some - but rather limited). The collective farms (worked on by freely associating people of course) did quite well while they lasted , apparently much more productively than their soviet distant cousins.

**(i make no claim to complete knowledge of this but, at least at a superficial level, it appears to be an example of what Iss was talking about)



they refused to enter into govt and fell apart largely because others were better organised then them. A foretaste of what would happen to the less well organised, less able for collective action grouips/societies?

how would a libertarian society withstand the organisational strengths of other systems. - only by diluting its core principles. and there we have what i think is a central paradox of libertarian thought. To be strong enough to survive it must compromise itself.

I found a good resource (the author - by all accounts- is a genius):
It's pretty long and pedantic, superior in tone, cocksure, and full of crap. Aside from that, it does provide some useful insight into the thought process behind a certain line of reasoning.

SOURCE

Copyright © Theodore Kaczynski, text released to public domain in 1995.

Theodore Kaczynski, wasn't he the Uni-bomber? Google® says "yup"