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conchis comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I don't know where you've been finding this argument but it's hardly representative of a good argument for libertarianism. I grew up in Europe (well, the UK, which is kind of Europe) with Labour voting parents and grandparents with fairly socialist views and considered myself a socialist into my early 20s. Weak arguments like these wouldn't have been enough to convert me to a generally libertarian worldview.
I had a similar caricature of the views of supporters of the free market (back when I didn't even know the term libertarian) but learning more about economics and being confronted with evidence of better outcomes in freer economies, together with learning that few serious economists (or libertarians) believe in perfectly efficient markets and learning about Public Choice Theory were key in changing my political views.
Key to the economic arguments for libertarianism is the idea that incentives matter and that the incentives facing actors in a free market tend to be far less perverse than those facing politicians or employees of state run monopolies.
The moral arguments stem largely from a view that personal freedom is a high moral value and that the evidentiary bar should be set very high for any demonstration of harm to justify restriction of individual freedoms. That tendency seems to be correlated with certain personality types according to some research and the crossover between libertarians and progressives/liberals on social issues seems to be as much a factor of personal values as of consequentialist reasoning.
And being fairly familiar with UK politics (less so with European politics in other countries) the idea that European politics pick policies based on 'what is estimated to work best' strikes me as pretty laughable.
Matt, I'd be interested to know how your broader views on the nature of morality (i.e. that it's essentially enlightened self-interest) feed in to your support for libertarianism.
More specifically, it seems as though this view would set a lower empirical bar than more altruistic views, and I guess I'm wondering to what extent you view the empirical arguments for libertarianism as sufficiently strong that you would still endorse something like it if you were a utilitarian or a prioritarian or an egalitarian instead.
My views on morality are certainly interconnected with my support for libertarianism. In the case of healthcare for example, my idea of what would constitute a good system may well differ from someone who takes a more utilitarian view of morality. For example, I think there may well be a place for some kind of government involvement in the control and treatment of infectious disease since there are externalities to consider if someone foregos treatment for cost reasons and a free at the point of delivery treatment service for infectious diseases is arguably a public good that would be undersupplied without government involvement. I don't however think that anyone has a fundamental right to healthcare and utilitarian arguments for healthcare reform that advocate a system based on a more 'equitable' allocation of healthcare resources are not going to carry much weight for me.
This does mean that I will tend to judge empirical evidence according to somewhat different standards than someone who takes a different view of morality. If someone is arguing for universal healthcare based on a particular set of moral premises, I am likely to point out evidence suggesting the reforms won't work even to achieve their stated goals rather than to try and argue with their premises. It's entirely possible that the evidence would suggest that the proposed reforms would achieve their goals and I would still not support the reforms however since I might not share those goals. There's an obvious risk that I will tend to view evidence selectively because of this but once you're aware of confirmation bias and make an effort to allow for it I'm not sure how much more you can do to protect yourself.
Many of the economic arguments for libertarianism stem from the fact that people don't act like pure altruists/utilitarians and instead act largely in their own self interest. I'd argue that if you start from utilitarian premises and try to devise policies to further those goals you are often going to find that the evidence indicates that the policies won't work because people respond to incentives according to their own self interest. Healthcare is full of examples of such problems - once people are insulated from the costs of their own treatment they will have a tendency to over-consume healthcare resources. In order to control costs rationing must be implemented by some kind of bureaucracy rather than by individual choice and the results are seldom optimal by any reasonable measure.