Political Matrix

[kishnevi]

Hey, but that's exactly what you've been doing all along: lumping legislature, executive and judiciary under the general term "government" and saying: "government does this", "government does that", "government sets up" etc. Now I'm really confused.

Let me try to illustrate why the three branches are a unit, and it's the overall scheme that should be called "government".
Legislature passes a law that makes doing x a crime.
Person y does x, and is in due course arrested by the police (that is, a part of the executive arm) who turn him over to
The judiciary, where he is tried and if found guilty sentenced, his sentence being served in a jail run by the executive arm or if on probation overseen by another agency of the executive.  Or the judiciary may engage in judicial review,  and declare the law in question to be unconstitutional (or whatever the European equivalent might be) and release y because, in effect, he should never have been arrested.

I suppose it is simply a matter of usage, or perhaps again the American experience, where all three arms of government find their basis in the same documents (state and Federal constitutions).    But let me pose a question to you: if the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, how can any of the three branches, operating by itself, without engaging in any activity which properly belongs to one of the other two branches, give such protection?

Yes I did infer that. Actually, I believe this is the main reason why libertarianism is so uncommon in Europe: one cannot reasonably adopt as valid and practical in the contemporary world a political philosophy which rests on the peculiar social and economical conditions of a country in the late 18-th century.

To which libertarianism would answer--the philosophy itself is applicable to all individuals in all places, because it draws on the fundamental aspects of being humans, not particular incarnations.

That's all fine, but my main objection is to the very idea of paying your way through a patchwork of private properties in order to go buying fresh fruits or fish in the market. Libertarianism notwithstanding, a city is not "an aggregate of individuals" who just happen to live in the same time and place. It is not a mere network of streets and homes. In Europe at least, it has public places such as large squares and parks, oftenly featuring public monuments such as statues, fountains, churches etc, where people can meet, walk, talk, have a drink, read a book or a newspaper or whatever else constitute a communal civilized life; these public spaces and the corresponding monuments are oftentimes centuries old and have been planned and build by, horribile dictu, the government of the time. Who's going to own them? Am I going to have to pay a tolll not only for walking around, say, Piazza della Signoria in Florence, but also for glancing at the statues therein? And how is the communal life to survive if each and every walk to one's favourite pub downtown results in a cumulated toll of much more than just the two beers one planned to have?

I suppose what we have on this point is a fundamental difference.  You view the main unit of humanity as a group of some sort--family, town, country--and individuals only as parts of that collective.  Libertarians insist that humanity is composed of individuals, and the relations of family, etc. are merely accidents in the Aristotelian sense,  and not substantial in any way.  When a group acts, it is simply the individuals composing that group acting in a concerted fashion, and acting in a concerted fashion is not a justification for no longer seeing them as individuals.

As to your concrete examples--you taxes pay (in part) for the upkeep of those streets;  why should it go to a political unit (the municipality) instead of to specific individuals.

Most worked out schemes usually think in terms of streets and public places being owned by cooperative or condo-style associations to which people would pay periodic dues or fees.  And if the owners of a street set a price that people set too high, they would find that either people would start using other streets that charged less, or raise their own prices.  Same as how the free market works with, f.e., bananas.

Of course I do. But think of it this way. No individual was ever asked, let alone gave consent, whether he agrees to (a) being born in a specific ethnicity, (b) being born in a soecific time and place, (c) being born in a specific family, (d) being raised in a specific language and (e) being educated (if at all) in a specific language, by a specific person teaching one or more specific branches of knowledge. Thus, long before an individual reaches the age of consent, he is subject to (1) a multitude of influences from factors which are both inescapable and completely outside his control, and (2) a multitude of interferences from a variety of individuals --- all these factors and individuals concurring to instill in him certain values and shape in his mind a certain worldview. In whatever he will do in his adult age he will always be influenced one or way or another by them and in this respect it can be argued that an individual's choices are never completely free from external influences and interferences. There is no such things as an absolute freedom, neither of choice nor of thought nor of action: freedom always operate within a certain context, i.e. within certain limits. (Mind you, I said nothing about innate inclinations, which no doubt play their part as well in the overall character of an individual)

To illustrate my point, let's take our personal cases: you were not born a libertarian more than I was born a christian-democrat. We did not invent these philosophies --- we discovered them, and chose to adhere to them, in specific times and places, after receiving a specific education and going through specific life experiences, which include social circumstances and a host of individuals, alive and dead. Perhaps had you been born a Romanian in 1972 and I an American in..., our thinking would have been inverted; and certainly had we both been born in Somalia we would have been none of the above.

You are taking it too deep here.  No libertarian denies the limiting effects of circumstances.   The fact that you and I can not without special mechanical equipment or a sudden indwelling of the Holy Spirit walk on water does not mean we are not free.  We merely can not walk on water.

When we speak of co-ercion, we mean the actions of other human beings.
To illustrate:
Suppose you want to purchase the complete recorded musical performances of some musician or other.   You might not be able to do so because not all the recordings are for sale in some form--the individuals who presently own them have no desire to sell or copy them for the use of others.   You might not be able to to do so because, while all the recordings are available for sale, you do not have enough money to buy them all.

Those constraints on your freedom to act are not co-ercion; they are simply circumstances.

But suppose the recordings are all for sale, and you have the necessary amount of money needed to purchase them, but you still can not buy them because some other person interferes in the matter, and without any legal right [which leaves out such cases as a wife who tells a husband that if he buys any more of those d==mned records she's divorcing him] forces you  to not make those purchases.   Perhaps the local legislature makes ownership of the recordings criminal, or a local gang of music lovers breaks in to the record shops and steals them---that's all coercion, and that's the sort of thing that libertarianism concerns itself with.

See my reply about freedom of choice. Have you ever chosen to be associated with the American and Jewish culture?
Well, being born a Spaniard, or a Jew, or a Romanian is indeed extremely coercive, since (a) you were not asked to give consent and (b) you can't escape it.

As above, that's not coercion in the libertarian sense.  Coercion is not what circumstance force you to do or keep you from doing;  Coercion is humans acting in a way that forces you to act in a manner different from what you would have otherwise done.

Although, as a highly personal matter, it can be said that I have, at certain points in my life, deliberately chosen to remain an citizen of the country in which I was born and a believer in the religion in which I was raised.   I suppose looking over your own life, you could say the same for yourself--especially with regard to religion.

That difference should be made clear by education. Think of it this way. A public library benefits not only its subscribers, but also those who will never read a book in their whole life, since they will be better off, including physically and propertywise secure, in a society where at least a critical mass of citizens is educated (including through books) about the value and importance of life, liberty and property, than in a society where, because a critical mass of citizens refuses to spend their money on a library that they will never use, such education is missing.

And suppose the citizens believe that the difference is not substantial enough to justify the cost of the library?  More generally, the line "because it's good for you" is valid when said from parent to underage child, but not acceptable for a government to its citizens.  It's up to the citizens to decide.

Well, certainly the surgery one needs for a heart condition and the techniques and instrumentary thereof, are technical matters to be decided by experts, regardless of the opinion of the one in question, right?

But there are matters in which experts are not needed, only common sense and practical wisdom such as everyone (hopefully) has, and he seems to want experts in those areas as well.

[kishnevi]

That's not even close to slavery, it's an imaginary contract whose clauses are self-contradictory. Can you point me to one single real instance of such a contract?

A person enlisting in the military might come close.  But we were speaking of a hypothetical situation in which an individual sells himself into slavery, and you were wondering how that would fit into the libertarian scheme of freely contracting individuals. 
I was giving you the standard libertarian answers.  My personal preference is that such a sale into slavery would be null and void from the beginning.

If this be the case, please explain me the difference between the group of individuals in contemporary Massachusetts and the group of individuals in contemporary Afghanistan.

One group lives in Massachusetts and the other lives in Afghanistan, but they remain each one of them human beings, and the commonality is far more important than the difference in circumstances.

[Florestan]

Let me try to illustrate why the three branches are a unit, and it's the overall scheme that should be called "government".
Legislature passes a law that makes doing x a crime.
Person y does x, and is in due course arrested by the police (that is, a part of the executive arm) who turn him over to
The judiciary, where he is tried and if found guilty sentenced, his sentence being served in a jail run by the executive arm or if on probation overseen by another agency of the executive.  Or the judiciary may engage in judicial review,  and declare the law in question to be unconstitutional (or whatever the European equivalent might be) and release y because, in effect, he should never have been arrested.

Valid point and I don't deny the fundamental unity of the three branches. But there are situations, not infrequently, when the unity crumbles and especially the executive and the legislature are in conflict.

I personally reserve the term "government" for the executive. If need be that the three branches are designated by a single term, I'd rather call them "the State".

But let me pose a question to you: if the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, how can any of the three branches, operating by itself, without engaging in any activity which properly belongs to one of the other two branches, give such protection?

Well, of course there must be cooperation and coordination between the three, otherwise the State machinery would come to a halt. However, at least since Montesquieu, the separation of powers has become a cornerstone of the rule of law and I hope that in US the executive doesn't trial anyone, the legislature doesn't arrest anyone and the judiciary doesn't make the laws by itself.

To which libertarianism would answer--the philosophy itself is applicable to all individuals in all places, because it draws on the fundamental aspects of being humans, not particular incarnations.

If this is so, then how come that applying libertarian principles in Switzerland yielded completely different results than the same principles applied in Spain? How come that most Latin American states have constitutions very similar to that of the US and yet they doesn't look anything like the US?

You view the main unit of humanity as a group of some sort--family, town, country--and individuals only as parts of that collective.

Not quite. Obviously the basic unit of humanity is the human person. But no human person, except extreme and oftentimes pathological cases, lives in a complete isolation from other human persons. Man is a social being. We are all part of different communities. Now, these communities can be voluntarily chosen or changed (for instance, one's circle of friends, the club one belongs to, the Church one attends or the neighborhood one lives in) while others are completely outside any control of the human person, such as the family, the native language and the country of birth.

Now, the important question of individual rights vs community's interests arise. It is here where we do part and I couldn't state my position better than in Kuehnelt-Leddihn's words:

"Freedom is not an end in itself but a condition to live and to act in. "As much freedom as possible, as much coercion as necessary." The common good marks the limits of freedom."

"At the same time one has to realize that the Common Good (which always encompasses personal freedom) cannot be rigidly outlined. A complete consent will always be rare and a certain arbitrariness will always mark its definition."

  Libertarians insist that humanity is composed of individuals, and the relations of family, etc. are merely accidents in the Aristotelian sense,  and not substantial in any way. 

Here the disagreement is complete indeed.

When a group acts, it is simply the individuals composing that group acting in a concerted fashion, and acting in a concerted fashion is not a justification for no longer seeing them as individuals.

I say it all depends on the group and the circumstances of the action. A family of father, mother and two kids of 5 and 7 is certainly a group composed of 4 individuals. Yet only 2 of them are capable of acting freely (within limits) and rationally (within limits). The other 2, while part of the common action of, say, going to Sicily for vacation, play no part in its design and execution. Their individuality, besides being not yet fully formed, is completely carried away by the group's action.

As to your concrete examples--you taxes pay (in part) for the upkeep of those streets;  why should it go to a political unit (the municipality) instead of to specific individuals.

Because maintaining a public space creates the social solidarity and the civic bonds which are prerequisite for a peaceful, civilized and fruitful coexistence, while turning that space into a mere patchwork of private properties destroys them.

Most worked out schemes usually think in terms of streets and public places being owned by cooperative or condo-style associations to which people would pay periodic dues or fees.

Do you know any city or town in the world which is managed this way?

And if the owners of a street set a price that people set too high, they would find that either people would start using other streets that charged less, or raise their own prices.  Same as how the free market works with, f.e., bananas.

Here we are again in complete disagreement. People and their spiritual needs are not commodities. I refer you again to the words of Roepke which sums up exactly my thinking:

Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the mlarket and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously.
As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.

But suppose the recordings are all for sale, and you have the necessary amount of money needed to purchase them, but you still can not buy them because some other person interferes in the matter, and without any legal right [which leaves out such cases as a wife who tells a husband that if he buys any more of those d==mned records she's divorcing him] forces you  to not make those purchases.   Perhaps the local legislature makes ownership of the recordings criminal, or a local gang of music lovers breaks in to the record shops and steals them---that's all coercion, and that's the sort of thing that libertarianism concerns itself with.As above, that's not coercion in the libertarian sense.  Coercion is not what circumstance force you to do or keep you from doing;  Coercion is humans acting in a way that forces you to act in a manner different from what you would have otherwise done.

I find it rather amusing (and beg your forbearance in this respect) that the examples you choose to illustrate your point are completely imaginary and bear only a very remote, if at all, resemblance to the real world. It only enforces my viewing libertarianism as a utopia.

Although, as a highly personal matter, it can be said that I have, at certain points in my life, deliberately chosen to remain an citizen of the country in which I was born and a believer in the religion in which I was raised.   I suppose looking over your own life, you could say the same for yourself--especially with regard to religion.

Yes of course. But had you (or I for that matter) been born in another country and raised in another religion, quite possibly our choices would have been different; quite possibly we would have never heard about the countries we were actually born in and the religions we were raised in, let alone choose them.

And suppose the citizens believe that the difference is not substantial enough to justify the cost of the library?

Then in Libertaria, where there are no taxes and no services supplied by the government, there will be no public library as well.

In the real world, OTOH, I am not aware of any citizens' protest against a public library being built in their town or city by the government with money from their taxes. Are you?

More generally, the line "because it's good for you" is valid when said from parent to underage child, but not acceptable for a government to its citizens.  It's up to the citizens to decide.

Are you implying that government, in whatever incarnation it may be, has no right to send doctors, nurses and other qualified personnel to contain an epidemy that broke out in a region? The government has no right to send firefighters in a neighborhood to fight a fire that broke out on a private property? The government has no right to undertake public works such as sewage pipelines, street lighting, power networks or street repair? Are you implying that in all these cases a popular vote is required?

But there are matters in which experts are not needed, only common sense and practical wisdom such as everyone (hopefully) has, and he seems to want experts in those areas as well.

Doesn't look like that to me. He explicitly states that "there must be areas free from government intervention, personal "kingdoms" designed and protected for the development and fulfillment of the personality; the State must have boundaries which it will not be permitted to transgress".

But admittedly these points are just a sketch. You'll find his more elaborate thoughts on this matter (and all others) in his books.

[Florestan]

A person enlisting in the military might come close.

Fair enough.

I was giving you the standard libertarian answers.  My personal preference is that such a sale into slavery would be null and void from the beginning.

Agreed, but this means that even property and association rights have their limits.

One group lives in Massachusetts and the other lives in Afghanistan, but they remain each one of them human beings, and the commonality is far more important than the difference in circumstances.

So it makes no difference if someone lives in Kabul or in Boston, right?