Libertarian Party

Here I think we may have hit on a fundamental difference. Libertarians, it seems, tend to think of "efficiency" as a social good. Their objection to government regulations, for instance, often centers on the inefficiencies of the present system.

In particular, it is not very good at protecting interests that are not economic interests.

Thomas wrote:

In the case of highways, I concede there might be a big enough problem with monopoly power to render competition ineffective. I haven't looked into this issue deeply enough to give you a good answer on that. About the regulation of pharmaceuticals, there is a body of scholarly work, most prominently by the University of Chicago's Sam Peltzman. Based on admittedly indirect evidence, it finds that it has decreased people's access to effective pharmaceuticals, by greatly increasing the cost of developing them. If Peltzman is right -- I am too much of an armchair economist to be sure he is -- the actual net effect of the legislation was the opposite of the intended one.

Assuming that the legislation was intended to promote efficiency.

Thomas wrote:

I take your point; it weakens mine, but doesn't refute it entirely. For example, before the civil war, black slaves could purchase their liberty. That sounds like the transfer of an "inalienable" right to me. The moral philosophy about what rights are "inalienable" wasn't too different then from what it is now.

A slave buying his freedom isn't an example of a transfer of an inalienable right. After all, the slave is property, and property is always transferable. A better example would be someone selling himself into slavery -- thus transferring the previously inalienable right to liberty. Would that be permissible in a libertarian society?

Thomas wrote:

Answer #3: In a libertarian society, government would have much, much less pork to hand out. So the votes wouldn't nearly be worth as much to potential buyers as they are today. Moreover, every sold vote would do much less social damage that it does today. I expect the combination of the two dominates any adverse effects from making votes easier to sell. But I admit I have no solid proof for this expectation.

What if I were a judge. Could I sell my decision in a court case to the highest bidder?

Thomas wrote:

One possible scenario would be that your neighborhood is a propietary community. You and your neighbors would call the proprietor and point out to him that if this slaughterhouse is built, he loses your business to people who'd be willing to pay much less rent than you do. This isn't technically a right, but it gives the proprietor an incentive not to have the slaughterhouse built. In fact, the proprietor has an incentive to attract your business by preempting this situation in the first place. One way to preempt it is to put it in the contract with the inhabitants

And if the owner of the proprietary community is also the person who wants to build the slaughterhouse...?

Thomas wrote:

(Aside: I'm not sure what you call the payments proprietary community owners are getting. Taxes? Rent? My English fails me here.)

I imagine it would be called "rent."

Let's say, for instance, that each parcel of land in a particular area has both a right to be the site of a slaughterhouse and also the right to be free of neighboring slaughterhouses. Mr. Butcher decides that, on his property, he will build a slaughterhouse, which he is certainly entitled to do. His neighbors, however, refuse to sell their rights to be free of a slaughterhouse, while Mr. Butcher refuses to sell his right to build a slaughterhouse. Who wins?

Thomas wrote:

As you know, "I own this real estate" is really shorthand for "I own a bundle of rights with regard to this real estate". Serious libertarians argue that the bundle could be adapted to solve your slaughterhouse problem.

Are you sure? My slaughterhouse problem can get devilishly complicated.

So yes, I think you are correct that the libertarian viewpoint does not suffer inefficiency lightly, but I think that is a fundamental strength of the libertarian philosophy, where you seem to see it as a flaw.

I didn't ask you for a hypothetical, I asked you for an actual, specific liberty advocated by the Libertarian party that you believe would make others "less free". It's a fairly simple, straightforward request. I'm simply trying to get a better understanding of what you mean by "make others less free".

Could you give me an example of what you would call a non-economic interest? I suspect that what you call 'economic' is what I call 'pecuniary', but maybe it's best if you just tell me yourself.

Assuming that the legislation was intended to give people effective drugs that are unlikely to kill them, which may or may not be the same as your definition of "efficiency".

As a matter of principle, the question you ask poses a paradox. I don't think libertarians could answer either "yes" or "no" without becoming inonsistent about their libertarianism. As a matter of practice, nobody will want to do that, because once you've given up your self-ownership, you can't collect the payment.

Even if you get around this, perhaps by paying in advance, I doubt that allowing the sale of self-ownership would create more indentured servants than, say, the draft did -- and still does in many democratic countries, where it is commonly viewed as fairly unproblematic. The reason I think so is that while indentured servitude is cheap in wages, it's probably quite expensive if you account for the cost of making your unmotivated servants work.

Remember that I'm firmly in devil's advocate mode now, defending a much more extreme libertarianism than I actually hold. This said, yes, you can sell your decision to the highest bidder. But people will notice, and they will stop hiring you as a judge.

He will have to decide whether his gain from operating the slaughterhouse is likely to earn him more than the inhabitants' willingness to pay rent to him, which he is losing. In practice, I expect that the slaughterhouse be built more or less in the same place as it would be under a competent and responsible elected mayor.

There will be no trial to begin with; instead there will be an auction -- not necessarily under this name. The butcher will bid up the price of the right to freedom from slaughterhouses. The neighbors will bid up the price of the right to build a slaughterhouse. There will always be some price at which one side will stop refusing, and sell.

Property rights can handle a lot of complexity. For example, I hear that the old Egyptian property rights in land near the Nile had to handle extreme complexity, because the bed of the Nile changed significantly with every flood. This leads to extremely tricky questions about what exactly remains persistant about your claim over the years. Apparently Egyptians could handle it. But that's another story.

Speaking (er, writing) for myself, I can tell you that you are probably dead on here, but it is misleading of you to suggest (as you seem to do) that efficiency itself is the goal. The goal is greater liberty and greater prosperity for all.

Now, of course, we've already discussed the possibility of selling this right, but the fact that one can put a price on a right doesn't necessarily make it an "economic" right (although, as I mentioned in my previous post, some people would say exactly that).

Thomas wrote:

Assuming that the legislation was intended to give people effective drugs that are unlikely to kill them, which may or may not be the same as your definition of "efficiency".

No, that's not the same thing.

Certainly, it is not unheard of for a person to sacrifice his life for the benefit of his loved ones: why would it be inconceivable for a person to sacrifice his freedom for the same reason?

No doubt, but the question wasn't whether it [selling yourself into slavery, T.] would be a widespread practice, but whether it would be permissible at all.

Thomas wrote:

Remember that I'm firmly in devil's advocate mode now, defending a much more extreme libertarianism than I actually hold. This said, yes, you can sell your decision to the highest bidder. But people will notice, and they will stop hiring you as a judge.

Only if the vote-selling were an open transaction. If it were a private sale, not disclosed to the public, there would, at most, be only a vague suspicion that the judge had sold out.

Thomas wrote:

He will have to decide whether his gain from operating the slaughterhouse is likely to earn him more than the inhabitants' willingness to pay rent to him, which he is losing. In practice, I expect that the slaughterhouse be built more or less in the same place as it would be under a competent and responsible elected mayor.

Why would you expect that? It would seem to me that entirely different considerations would factor into the two decisions.

Result: there is no auction. Neither side is willing to pay the other's reserve price.

But whereas there is always a government in a representative democracy at hand, there is not always a third-party broker in a libertarian society who is readily available.

I would only note that the ancient Egyptians were definitely not libertarians.

Okay. In this case I don't understand why you think one should treat two tradeable rights fundamentally differently, just because one is economic under your definition and the other is not.

I don't understand your nomenclature then. What, under your definition, would be the efficient solution, if it's not access to drugs which are likely to help and unlikely to hurt?

It's not inconceivable at all, and many people do it. It's called "marriage".

Based on accounts by people who work with private arbitration agencies, but not for them, I doubt this would be a significant factor. These agencies go out of their way to create a reputation for fairness and impartiality. Their business depends on this reputation. Even in the extreme case of anarcho-capitalism, where courts would be private arbitration agencies, their incentives are still basically the same.

I disagree. The tradeoffs involved on the ground level -- the butchers benefit from slaughtering cows vs. the neighbors' benefit from the absence of slaughterhouses -- is identical in both cases. The optimal solution -- clustering of disgusting businesses in one part of town, residential areas in other parts of town -- is fundamentally the same as a result. The mechanism of finding the optimum may be different, but given reasonable efficiency, it makes no difference to the outcome.

Only because you have assumed the property rights to be ill-defined.

Societies with dysfunctional property rights will always get into trouble, libertarian or not. So I don't think your example tells us much about libertarianism. (Yes, I should have caught this in my last response.) Under better designed property rights -- either all estates come with a tradeable right to build a slaughterhouse, or all estates come with a tradeable right to freedom from slaughterhouses -- your problem doesn't occur. There will be some initial allocation of rights, and if there is no price at which parties volunteer to change the allocation, the initial allocation remains.

If people prefer the availability of such a broker, they will hire them -- possibly indirectly, by moving into proprietary communities with good arbitration services.

Scrat wrote:

So yes, I think you are correct that the libertarian viewpoint does not suffer inefficiency lightly, but I think that is a fundamental strength of the libertarian philosophy, where you seem to see it as a flaw.

Well said, Scrat!

Scrat wrote:

I didn't ask you for a hypothetical, I asked you for an actual, specific liberty advocated by the Libertarian party that you believe would make others "less free". It's a fairly simple, straightforward request. I'm simply trying to get a better understanding of what you mean by "make others less free".

And I gave you one.

The point was quite a simple one, all freedoms come at the expense of another freedom.

In fact, you didn't, and actually explained why you weren't going to--which is fine.

Let's consider freedom in its simplest sense: the freedom to come and go as one chooses. Does my freedom to decide where I will go and when come at the expense of another freedom? If so, which freedom, and from whom has it been taken?

Scrat wrote:

In fact, you didn't, and actually explained why you weren't going to--which is fine.

Incorrect. I said I'd give you an intentionally specific (though silly) one and I did:

I gave you a specific one for the Libertarian party. You choose instead to just keep repeating that I didn't, which is fine with me.

Can you cite a specific individual liberty advocated by (for simplicity's sake) the Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org/) that you believe, once secured, would make others "less free"?

I wish for the freedom from fear that libertaian ideology (which I consider naive) will substitute current government.

I always wonder about people who trust the government to do a just and fair job, in any situation.