= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
conchis comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (210)
In what way is he "poisoning" the discourse? He didn't even use the term ideologue, and he explained in a later post why he thinks libertarianism is essentially deontological in nature. Accusing him of "making the discourse worse" only serves to itself worsen the discussion.
Quite frankly, in my experience with people arguing for libertarianism, it tends to be precisely what he describes--a lot of bottom-line faux-consequentialist arguments about why free market principles necessarily produce better results, combined with question-begging arguments that assume individual economic freedom as the value to be maximized.
As a concrete example, by almost any metric European-style socialized health care systems work empirically, objectively better. Given the high cost of trying untested systems and the general lack of predictive power demonstrated by current macroeconomics, I can't conceive of any coherent, consequentialist argument agaisnt the immediate utility of adopting such a system in the USA, yet most libertarians will argue until blue in the face that socialized health care is a terrible idea, in aparent defiance of reality.
EDIT: This comment was pretty promptly voted down to -2 for reasons not apparent to me. Any reasons other than disagreement?
Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.
To me, this speaks more to the extent of your motivation to find merit-worthy libertarian writing than to the merit of libertarian ideas. It so happens that an entire school of libertarian thought ("policy libertarianism") is dedicated to studying the specific consequences of government action. One interesting claim: "State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well."
If you're interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.
Really? Respectfully, it seems much more plausible, based on the tone of your post, that you're couching an appeal for your own preferred policy in hypothetical terms than that you're actually suffering from a failure of imagination.
FWIW, I generally find Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen more reasonable than those listed above. (Yes, I realize Will works for the Cato Institute; I find him more reasonable than his employers.) YMMV.
Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn't want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:
Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there's no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.