I know only a few places on Earth where it would have any chance of working. Such as the US, maybe UK but from Latin America to Eastern Europe, far too often criminal plunder was covered up with free-market adages. Like “I sell this state-owned thing to my friend for peanuts because private ownership is more efficient.”
The point is, ideas, one of the many angles to evaluate ideologies from is how easily they are misused as lip-service cover-up for something nasty. Marxism was misused into Leninism, Keynesianism into “spend in bad times… and not save in good times because fuck it: votes”, and Libertarianism into neoliberal plunder.
This makes it not worse than the others, but not perfect either. I would basically use it as part of my political-philosophy toolset but not the whole of it.
Another thing Libertarians don’t really understand even in US-based circumstances is that if I own the things I need to work with or live with, then private property gives me freedom and independence. But if other people own the things you need to work with, then private property is a burden, not a freedom for you.
Libertarianism works best with a fairly egalitarian distribution of property—not income, not income redistribution, but property, as in: frontier homesteader farms and suchlike. It is the legacy of frontier equality that made Libertarianism popular in the US, Hayek and Mises come from an Austrian tradition that had much more a small-business focus and thus more equal property ownership than the Mittelstand focus of Prussia-Germany and so on. (May Weber hated small business: he considered shopkeepers lazy and spoke out against the Austrianization of Germany, as in, against small business opposed to middle and big. Needless to say he was anything but Libertarian.) In Europe Switzerland is the closest to Libertarianism and precisely because they have/had such a broad property-owning middle-class, every second Swiss person seems to have inherited 1⁄4 of a dairy farm or something. This is why The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is the best Libertarian utopia: because it is about frontier with egalitarian property ownership, nobody is proletarian who must work for The Man for wages forever because he never has a chance to homstead a farm.
In all circumstances, Libertarianism works best with a heavy dose of Distributism i.e. small-business economy, entrepreneurial and not corporate capitalism. Family farms, mom and pop shops and so on. Basically the US would have to find a way to re-create the frontier. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, misusing Libertarianism for neoliberal plunder could be avoided similar ways: never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever sell, privatize a big chunk of state-owned property to one person or corporation! ALWAYS spread it around, for example if you want to privatize a state-owned utility company make 1000 shares and distribute it via lottery.
Libertarians?
I know only a few places on Earth where it would have any chance of working. Such as the US, maybe UK but from Latin America to Eastern Europe, far too often criminal plunder was covered up with free-market adages. Like “I sell this state-owned thing to my friend for peanuts because private ownership is more efficient.”
The point is, ideas, one of the many angles to evaluate ideologies from is how easily they are misused as lip-service cover-up for something nasty. Marxism was misused into Leninism, Keynesianism into “spend in bad times… and not save in good times because fuck it: votes”, and Libertarianism into neoliberal plunder.
This makes it not worse than the others, but not perfect either. I would basically use it as part of my political-philosophy toolset but not the whole of it.
Another thing Libertarians don’t really understand even in US-based circumstances is that if I own the things I need to work with or live with, then private property gives me freedom and independence. But if other people own the things you need to work with, then private property is a burden, not a freedom for you.
Libertarianism works best with a fairly egalitarian distribution of property—not income, not income redistribution, but property, as in: frontier homesteader farms and suchlike. It is the legacy of frontier equality that made Libertarianism popular in the US, Hayek and Mises come from an Austrian tradition that had much more a small-business focus and thus more equal property ownership than the Mittelstand focus of Prussia-Germany and so on. (May Weber hated small business: he considered shopkeepers lazy and spoke out against the Austrianization of Germany, as in, against small business opposed to middle and big. Needless to say he was anything but Libertarian.) In Europe Switzerland is the closest to Libertarianism and precisely because they have/had such a broad property-owning middle-class, every second Swiss person seems to have inherited 1⁄4 of a dairy farm or something. This is why The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is the best Libertarian utopia: because it is about frontier with egalitarian property ownership, nobody is proletarian who must work for The Man for wages forever because he never has a chance to homstead a farm.
In all circumstances, Libertarianism works best with a heavy dose of Distributism i.e. small-business economy, entrepreneurial and not corporate capitalism. Family farms, mom and pop shops and so on. Basically the US would have to find a way to re-create the frontier. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, misusing Libertarianism for neoliberal plunder could be avoided similar ways: never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever sell, privatize a big chunk of state-owned property to one person or corporation! ALWAYS spread it around, for example if you want to privatize a state-owned utility company make 1000 shares and distribute it via lottery.
Libertarian-Distributism is something I could get behind. More info: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/the-economics-of-distributism-iv-property-and-the-just-wage/ (best part of a five-part series)