/townhall/ - Townhall

'the very notion is hypocritical and inconsistent to where you can't believe in it without acting bonkers' was the first thing I thought when I read the premise of this thread.

>>10735
I genuinely can't understand why the idea is coherent enough to be worth talking about, myself, but apparently the possibility is real enough that the news-magazine wrote about it to oppose it. And I guess I wanted to bring it up here as well, based on my liking of the report.

>>10715
>What do you think are the odds that a libertarian dictatorship takes place either in the U.S. or another major nation?
Seems a bit contradictory.

>A government in which you have property rights (so, for example, a regular person is free to start a small business) but no social or political rights (so, for example, a regular person handing out flyers against the state will be put in either the hospital or the morgue by government thugs)?
How would that be 'libertarian'?

>>10736
The article seems to be more about enlightened despotism that about libertarianism.

>>10715
My perception is that libertarian is an umbrella term, although I usually associate it with a state that allows radical private property freedoms, and associated punishments for thieves and trespassers, and vandals, defined as broadly as possible.  I'm listening to a book Democracy in Chains [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/], which describes a right-wing philosophy whereby collectives of citizens ought not encroach on private property rights even when done through the state [eg. taxes for public education].  This sounds to me like a libertarian instance, and one that is explicitly anti-democratic, since democracy opens the possibility of the majority voting to tax wealth to pay for perceived public good.  If you are not to have democracy, you need something closer to autocracy -- ruled by an elite that property understands state power is only to be used to punish theft, trespass, vandalism, contract violation, (intellectual property enforcement -- depending on how that is viewed, don't know).  Obviously guarding against theft and vandalism by other nations empowers national defense.  I'm not sure if this must be a dictatorship exactly, but something on that end of the spectrum, yes.

It's not quite the answer you are looking for, as social and political rights would be perfect on your own property.  Although if I understand, someone with no property would have no rights.  Well, depending on how exactly your own body is viewed as your own private property, capable of sustaining vandalism and assault.  And there's traditionally been some other issues along the line of bodies as property.  But anyway.

Not sure if that's an answer or not.

>What do you think are the odds that a libertarian dictatorship takes place either in the U.S. or another major nation? A government in which you have property rights (so, for example, a regular person is free to start a small business) but no social or political rights (so, for example, a regular person handing out flyers against the state will be put in either the hospital or the morgue by government thugs)?

A very flat 0% chance anywhere I can think of, and that's without pointing out the oxymoron of a libertarian dictatorship.  Either of those concepts separately are also practiaclly impossible for anyone to achieve in the US, much less somehow both at once.

>>10779
I think you see what I would think of as a version of libertarian government, as the definitional libertarian government, and part of the definition is that the state is not to be an autocracy.

>>10779
An America with no social or political rights seems disturbingly possible to me in the future, especially given how the U.S. federal administration in a lot of fields has grown ever more totalitarian over the past two decades over different Presidents in an unbroken pro-government fashion. Imagine telling somebody in 1999, say, that it would considered truly normal among political circles for 24/7 spying of every single American citizen's e-mails, phone calls, and personal letters. They'd have called you a paranoid loon. And yet, boom, Patriot Act and more.

>>10786

There's plenty of aspects of the US government, like the Patriot Act, that are very pro-government, yes.  That's generally to be expected.  But it is a big leap from what we have now to having no social or political rights.  The OP mentions stuff about free speech and handing out anti-government fliers as things that might hypothetically be outlawed, but as it is almost no one would support that.  Nearly the entire country exercises its right to say the government sucks every single day.  I won't say there aren't any government thugs hospitalizing people, but it hasn't happened to anyone that actually holds any kind of influence, and for them to attempt that would only martyr their target and incite the group further.  It wasn't more than a year or so ago that there was a whole insurrection staged and they can barely even contain those guys, god forbid there was an actual cause for armed conflict.

To go back to the Patriot Act, people were pretty quick to allow it for two reasons.  The first is that the government's been spying on its own citizens since spying was feasible.  The second was sometimes there's legitimate threats within the country that are trying to make it worse, perhaps by turning it into a libertarian dictatorship or something.  The second is mostly trumped up nothingness that spooks people just long enough to pass stupid laws like the Patriot Act.  But the first is something we've gotten very used to for the sole reason that it's largely unnoticeable because the legal right to spy on your citizens doesn't make it easy to do.  I can barely read all of my emails, I can't even imagine the kind of manpower it would take to actually read every single email sent in or out of this country.  What I can imagine is what a colossal waste of time that would be.  God, even 90% of our phone calls these days are automated spam centers, and the other 10% sure isn't terrorist organization.  The only thing the Patriot Act actually did was let the state bring the spying it was already doing into court as evidence, where you're still subject to a jury of peers, at least hypothetically.

We are just so so far away from anything as fantastical what's being described, and honestly I expect us to move away from it rather than closer to it because stuff like the Patriot Act was a huge unpopular failure.

>>10787
I see what you're saying, but I'm thinking more about directions and patterns longer term than tyranny happening overnight.

What concerns me is that U.S. government power has been on a trajectory of ever greater expansion to the detriment of the real economy: with more debt, more deficits, and more regulations coming about. The U.S. is like an airplane flying in a straight line that will eventually hit a gigantic mountain. Yet seemingly nobody seems to care about these socio-economic trends who's actually in office.

To me, in contrast, personal liberty has been on a trajectory of ever greater decline: with everything from book banning due to the violation of "Christian family values" to campaigns to fire individuals from their jobs both inside of government positions and out due to said "Christian family values" being at risk with certain types of people having too many rights. Every single day brings additional news about the screws being tightened on individuals who happen to be Jewish, gay, disabled, transgender, Muslim, or otherwise "offensive" in some way by their very nature to the hardline Christian principles that the mainstream U.S. populace demands everybody obey. It's suffocating.

The pandemic has been especially scary because wholesale, state-heavy measures such as outright banning large public gatherings happened relatively quickly and without much in the way of factual support. Governments just saw the chance to stamp on freedoms and took it without question. Now, of course, I'm no denialist about the coronavirus. Certain state measures made perfect sense and still do, such as massive public investment in treatments that boost the immune systems of those coming down with the disease. Pro-vaccine efforts can be reasonable; I'm fully vaccinated myself. I'm more just scared about the paradigm shift, you know? A few experts say basically "Let's put social life into the freezer for a while", and without really thinking things through that had to happen? Maybe I'm overly paranoid? Not sure. I wish more evidence could be provided in terms of a lot of the heavy-handed measures, at least.

Hopefully, though, I do see a possible turnaround in the future. Yet I worry about the recent past. And present.