Comments Elsewhere

Radgeek, since you’re willing to be here doing Left Libertarian 101 for us, I hope you won’t mind answering a couple of questions: Do you think there should be a government at all? And if so, how should that government be financed?

Amp, I’m an anarchist, so the answers are “No,” and “N/A.”

Minarchist libertarians do exist, usually either (a) favor some very low level of taxation and try to come up with an excuse for it, or else (b) favor various kinds of schemes for voluntary government funding (donations, lotteries, voluntary “contract fees,” etc.). I think that (a) simply means being inconsistent (because there aren’t any good excuses under consistent libertarian principles), and (b) solves one problem with governments but not others (it makes the funding non-coercive, but not the activities that are being funded; the governments imagined by minarchists still exercise a coercive monopoly over the legal authority to exercise defensive force). In principle there could be minarchist left libertarians (I guess the folks at Freedom Democrats qualify), but as it happens most of the other left libertarians I know (Roderick, Kevin Carson, MDM, et al.) happen to be anarchists too. I’m not entirely sure what the reasons for the disproportionate anarchist tilt is, although I suspect it has something to do with the Left’s greater historical willingness to turn its skepticism towards the cops, the military, and other supposed forces of Law & Order, which means knocking the last leg out from under the minarchist state.

Robert:

… Taxpayers, as part of doing their return, put down the departments they wish to fund with their taxes that year, on a percentage basis.

Well, that would be better than what we have, in that it gives people more power over how their money is used and would serve as a powerful roadblock to sustaining unpopular and expensive programs. I think that the standard moral objections would still apply: people have a moral right to refuse to have any of their money committed to any government project, if they want, because the government hasn’t got the right to take it. But if there were a realistic political proposal on the table for moving from our current system to one like this, which is less invasive and lets people choose less destructive uses for their money, then I’d support that as a provisional step along the way towards freedom. (I feel the same way about other reformist measures that give people more control over the gov’t, such as term limits, voter initiatives, etc.)