Comments Elsewhere

Punditus Maximus:

That’s not a ton of movement away from President George W. Bush toward the Libertarian Party there.

As if the only options of which libertarians might partake were (1) voting for the Republican presidential candidate or (2) voting for the Libertarian Party candidate. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader; in 2004, I voted for John Kerry, and in 2008, because I had given up on both third-partyism and lesser-evilism and, in fact, electoral politics as a whole, I voted for nobody at all. In fact, many libertarians reject electoral politics and don’t vote. None of this, by the way, has to do with insisting that I am (or that other non-GOP-voting libertarians are) the One True Libertarian; it has to do with the fact that you made a blanket statement about libertarian political behavior which actually has nothing to do with the political behavior of many actually-existing libertarians. If you want to sit around and complain about so-called libertarian GOP voters, feel free to do so — I do so all the time, and, hell, I also complain about most so-called libertarian LP voters. But don’t pretend as if this is a meaningful indictment of libertarianism as a philosophy, or the libertarian movement as a whole.

Apparently, once Bush was off the ballot, the Republican Party became significantly less attractive to libertarians.

Actually third party vote totals are affected by a lot of different things, including the fact that absolute number of votes for all parties tends to rise from one election to the next (since the total voting population is constantly growing). It’s also dramatically affected by the peculiarities of the candidate in any given year (Badnarik was a much less competent campaigner than either Browne or Barr), by how many other prominent third party candidates are in the race, by how close the general election is likely to be (slam-dunk elections tend to favor third party candidates, since fewer people are worried about trying to tilt the outcome for their less-hated big party candidate), etc. In percentage terms, Barr’s miserable failure in 2008 was about equivalent to Harry Browne’s miserable failure in 1996; the difference in the interim had little to do with some special fondness for George W. Bush and his “compassionate conservatism” or bomb-the-world antics, and a lot to do with a bunch of minor factors that can have little effects that seem large only because we are dealing with such a small number of voters to begin with.

Punditus Maximus:

There will never be a free market, ever, since one basic assumption of a free market is of participants each with an infinite quantity of information and infinite computation time. Said persons are also perfectly aware of future events (or their probabilities) and are never at any time liquidity constrained. Seriously, the economic models of free markets require this. . . .

No, they don’t. You seem to be confusing the neoclassical general-equilibrium analysis (especially modeling of markets under the ideal conditions of so-called “perfect competition) with free market economics. But these are two separate topics: freed-market economics per se are not the same thing as perfect competition or general equilibrium modeling. Some free market economists make use of the neoclassical modeling; but many, notably those associated with the “Austrian School” in economics, do not, and in fact specifically criticize that kind of idealized reasoning about competitive markets as some sort of frictionless plane. For a broad overview, you might read over the essays in the Austrian School section of David Prychitko’s Why Economists Disagree. In fact, if you look at Mises’ and Hayek’s work on the role of price as a decentralized information network, or Israel Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship, you’ll find that Austrian economists (typically among the most radical of free-marketeers) generally think that the facts of imperfect information, limited time, and uncertain futures are central to the case for economic freedom (because knowledge problems are inherent in any form of resource allocation, and because the decentralized, trial-and-error processes of the market provide a way to move ahead in spite of uncertainty and ignorance, in ways that centralized bureaucratic planning, which depends on an unrealistic faith in the capacity to discover and aggregate information about people’s wants and needs, cannot).

Libertarians are people who believe that these assumptions could under some circumstances be valid.

If your notion of libertarianism is such that Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard wouldn’t count as a libertarian, then your notion of libertarianism probably needs to be revised.

Gracchus:

No, she’s offering insights into what attracts misogynists and her patented NiceGuys® . . . to the prevalent mainstream form of economics-focused libertarianism.

Just so we’re clear, besides being a radical feminist I have also been corresponding with Amanda since she was at Mouse Words. You don’t need to spell out basic terminology for me.

That said, I do not think it’s at all obvious that a statement like this:

Even libertarianism doesn’t really function without anxious masculinity to fuel it, and Ayn Rand knew it and used phallic fantasies to lure in her followers.

is in fact a statement about libertarianism as publicly perceived rather than a statement about libertarianism as internally understood. If it is, then, again, it seems to me that there’s a basic problem in trying to figure out what “fuels” libertarianism based on public perception and that insiders’ understandings of the movement are, in fact, more useful than “public perception” in figuring that out. You, of course, have been clear that you’re talking about “prominent” libertarians throughout; but “prominent” is not a univocal term.

If you want to say that there are lots of self-identified libertarians with a superficial understanding of libertarianism, and those people are often exclusively concerned with a specific range of economic issues, to the exclusion of other important social and cultural issues, then I’d agree with you. I complain about and argue with them all the time. This certainly justifies a claim about “libertarians I see on the TV” or “libertarians I deal with in my blog comments.” But it doesn’t justify a claim about libertarianism, which like any movement has more and less peripheral figures, and which like any philosophy has more and less consistent and well-informed advocates. As for whether it justifies a claim about prominent libertarians, the “prominence” of those people is not necessarily prominence within the particular community you’re trying to address; and it’s often the case that the intellectual or social structure of non-“mainstream” movements are not very well understood by trying to glean something based on the figures who are most prominent among people outside the movement, because the reasons for their prominence (and for the prominence of the specific things about them that are prominent outside the movement) typically has little to do with what “fuels” the movement, and a lot to do with what fuels the institutions which are choosing who to report on and who to engage with.

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstre am.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Gracchus:

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstream.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Me:

trying to deal with the bizarre notions that people concoct about the motives, goals, and intellectual structure of feminism based on “public perception”

Gracchus:

And yet this is where newcomers to a movement arrive from.

Well, no, not necessarily; I arrived at ideological feminism from conversation with friends of mine who were themselves feminists, not from newspapers or A-list blogs. But in any case, where “newcomers to a movement arrive from,” while interesting, is not necessarily more interesting than where they end up after they have kicked around the movement for a while and thought more deeply about the things that they believe.

Public perception counts, and so do those incumbent insiders who define and dominate that perception

Counts for what, specifically? What’s the specific problem you think that libertarians need to solve by fixing “public perception” and by (somehow or another) changing out the “incumbent insiders” who happen to be prominent in media outlets and other institutions that operate according to criteria that are largely outside of our control.

BlackBloc:

Their problem is one of praxis, where they naively think that the projects they’re shooting for will *remove* state interference instead of *changing its nature*, and that by removing the state they will somehow eradicate large capital accumulation. The likely outcome of their projects, if they were to miraculously pass a ballot to eliminate all forms of state interference in the economy . . .

BlackBloc, I agree with you about this, more or less entirely. That’s part of the reason why, besides being an anarchist, I am specifically an agorist, and why I advocate means of social change other than electoral politics. But what makes you think that libertarians as a group are committed to electoral politics as a means of change? Certainly the Libertarian Party is, but not all libertarians are involved with the Libertarian Party, and historically many prominent American libertarians have been specifically opposed to electoral strategies for checking, rolling back, or abolishing the State. (I actually disagree with a lot of the non-electoral strategies that have been proposed by folks like Nock, Chodorov, Read, LeFevre, et al. — but for reasons quite other than thinking that they are naively putting their trust in electoral politics.)

Hector B.

So true. Whenever I question the value of the free market system, a libertarian will point out that we have never truly had a free market system in recorded history.

Well, but we haven’t, have we?

Whether or not that’s an appropriate response depends of course on the argument that it’s made in response to. If you’re trying to use historical, empirical examples to question the value of a free market system, then surely it does matter how far, and in what aspects, the examples you’re citing actually are empirical examples of a free market, n’est-ce pas?