IS LIBERTARIANISM SUCH A TARGET? (because its immoral) (re: tyler cowen) —It i

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/why-is-libertarianism-such-a-target.htmlWHY IS LIBERTARIANISM SUCH A TARGET?

(because its immoral) (re: tyler cowen)

—It is possible to be a common sense centrist and an intellectual. The highbrow reasons for why moderate common sense positions are correct are particularly interesting to anybody with a strong desire to understand how the world really works.— Steve Sailer

I’ll echo Steve Sailer’s position a little more precisely. But, unfortunately, that requires a mildly impolitic presentation:

(a) while libertarianism (an economic preference) informs the nation’s christian conservatism (a normative preference), libertarianism is not informed by the conservatism. That’s the reason that libertarianism fails to expand its influence in the electorate: libertarianism outside of the classical liberal model is objectively immoral. That’s right: objectively immoral. And I’ll answer why, below.

(b) All three influential enlightenment movements sought to express group evolutionary strategies as universal strategies (i) the anglo empirical (Smith, Hume and eventually Darwin) – to create an aristocracy of everybody, (ii) the german obscurant rationalist ( Kant thru Heidegger) – to preserve hierarchy, and (iii) the jewish pseudoscientific: (Freud, Marx, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard) – to preserve authoritarianism and separatism. Unfortunately, all three of these movements have failed at developing a universal ethics with which to inform our politics.

(c) Politics is a moral not empirical means of decision making (Jonathan Haidt). Voting for representatives is a form of abstract aggregation. In such cases of comparing abstractions, People can do nothing else but vote their ancestral (and possibly genetic) morality. (Emmanuel Todd, David Hackett Fischer). They vote their evolutionary strategy. Monopoly decision making (majority rule) exacerbates conflict between peoples of disparate interests. And classical liberal libertarians (anglo american, empirical libertarians) have failed to produce an institutional solution that allows cooperation on means (a market) for the production of commons despite our various heterogeneous and necessary ends.

(d) Conservatives are unconsciously aware (and unable to articulate) (a) norms are the most expensive commons we create, and those high trust norms must be protected at all costs – they are our competitive advantage in this world, and the reason for our rapid ascent in both pre-history, ancient, and modern eras; (b) that policy must reflect the inter-temporal interests of families, while law must be constructed for individuals, because the family is the means of transmission of those norms for each class, and because disputes must be objectively decidable regardless of class.

For some reason it doesn’t occur to libertarians that the competitive advantage of western civilization lies in our unique ability to construct civil commons relatively free of privatization, and that we can do so because of our high trust society, and that our high trust society is possible because of all the people on this earth we generally tell the truth. And that truth telling is the most expensive commons one can produce.

People cannot vote for change that is not institutionally articulated. Asking people to ‘believe’ is for prophets and priests, not scientists. Justification is for rationalists. Scientists must construct operational definitions for us to test the truth of their propositions (that is the entire point of the Austrian method.) So until classical libertarians reform the current model, and provide an institutional solution that satisfies: the exclusion of the bottom from the benefits of production of the normative, institutional and physical commons (the left); the ability to dynamically restructure the patterns of sustainable specialization and trade, free of rents and frictions (libertarians); and the preservation of the high trust norms and the family that make the construction of our commons possible, by prohibiting their consumption and requiring universal production (the right); libertarianism will remain an immoral, selfish, utopian specialization, that advocates an obscurant form of free riding on both left and right’s the construction of the voluntary order of cooperation that we call capitalism.

Because profiting from the contributions of others (the cost of respecting property in both normative, institutional, physical commons, and in private hands, is free riding. And free riding is immoral. Because all objective moral rules are a prohibitions on free riding. And because cooperation is irrational in the presence of free riding. Thats why evolution gave us moral intuitions – despite our different self serving emphases on one part of the moral spectrum or another.

No corner of the political triangle is correct. Each simply senses some part of the reproductive division of labor: progressive=consumption, libertarian=production and conservative=saving: just as the market forms an information system, human moral differences constitute a division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor; and voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, exchange free of negative externality is the only test of the aggregate validity of our perceptions.

We (libertarians) aren’t right. But we’re the smart ones. And productivity is our specialization. So we must find an institutional solution for everyone – (consumptive, productive, and retentive) not one for just us as specialists. It’s not that others aren’t informed. It’s that we haven’t succeeded.

( That’s enough radicalism for one post. )

Cheers