Wednesday, April 29, 2015

How I went from an Active to Passive Libertarian (Repost)

Here is a repost from last year.

 

How I went from an Active to Passive Libertarian

When I first began accepting libertarian ideas, I was very excited. It provided this competent framework for looking at the world. It was always one step ahead of the other political parties, which my entire life I considered completely unpersuasive and typically juvenile. It twisted conventional wisdom in knots by looking at the whole picture, the costs and the benefits, and the counterfactuals which other people treated as 0s. The rights based arguments were lacking; they started with counter-intuitive rules out of nowhere, called them rights, and then applied them to get libertarianism. That’s no way to do philosophy. But the utilitarian arguments made a lot of sense. Why is government getting in the way of people conducting mutually beneficial trade? Sure people make mistakes, but isn’t government made up of people?

Naturally, I wanted to tell everyone. Surely they must not have heard these ideas, or they would be the ones telling me! I wanted to make sure I was on solid ground, so I sounded arguments where libertarians and mainstream economics overlap; free trade, minimum wage causes unemployment, economic growth improves working standards (not so much unions or legislation), drug companies kill people by restricting drugs that save lives. I didn’t change any minds. And I didn’t understand why arguments that I found so persuasive they didn’t find persuasive at all.

In hindsight I realize that there are good economic reasons to reject that these beliefs lead to libertarian conclusions. But nobody I talked to was familiar enough with economics to make them. The counter-arguments consisted of drawing upon impressions we’ve all had since we were six years old and expressing them. China is destroying American workers with cheap goods. Big business would pay cents on the dollar without minimum wage. Drug companies would carelessly kill their consumers for profit if we let them. Workers would fall into meat grinders and managers would shrug and say, “get back to work boys!”

Every problem society ever has can be solved with new laws. And the fact that we have laws against problems that don’t exist proves the case. This is the logic that was applied to pretty much every single social issue.

I’ve become more familiar with economics and more familiar with libertarianism since then. The more I learn, the more I find a mishmash of parts I think are correct and incorrect. Over time I’ve realized that the problem is not education, its dogma. Most libertarians aren’t any different. I give a clear cut case for market failure and it never sinks in. There’s always another objection, no matter how inane. It’s no different from talking to conservatives about trade with poor Chinese workers, or liberals about trade with poor African workers. Economists have been past this cynicism toward international trade for 200 years. But these lessons never sink into social consciousness.

Part of my own experiences may have been my own fault. Maybe I didn’t do a good job giving the economic textbook case. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked around about my worshipping of Ron Paul. It was my light-hearted way of drawing attention to the libertarian candidate. But people took it as me drinking the cool-aid.

So my libertarian themed Facebook posts tapered away. I’m not in the business of changing minds. I allow others to vent their political grief toward me without challenging them. I divorced society. We’re just not meant for each other. I continue to satisfy my intellectual curiosity without feeling the need to share with others. It’s just a better way to live life. If I come by someone who is earnestly seeking, I’ll try to help out. If I come by someone who knows more than I do, I try to learn from them. I’ve found this whole process internally satisfying. But as soon as it becomes external, it is exasperating and I’m skeptical that it does any good.

I would encourage others to take the same approach whether they’re libertarian or not. These other people around you, they are not trying to know the truth. They’re going to believe what they like no matter what you say.

To a large extent, I feel the same way. But I think that back then I gave too much credit to the idea that people just made up their ideologies. Instead ideologies are formed in order to associate with particular feelings. The real way to persuade people to join an ideology is not to expound on its truth, but to just be the kind of people other people want to be associated with.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Owen Anderson on Conceptual Idolatry over the last 200 Years

This from Owen Anderson.

In an important way, because David Hume failed to understand reason as the laws of thought and instead noticed that a given reasoning process may not represent reality we have been given 2+ centuries of skepticism about our ability to know with certainty (to Know).  I've even been told by analytic philosophers, repeating Hume, that if there are laws of thought they don't get us very much as far as knowledge is concerned.

This post is related to my last one in identifying why there is skepticism about our ability to use reason to know God.  We use reason to distinguish between God and non-God.  In failing to know God we are attributing to "non-God" (the creation) properties such as eternal existence that are only attributable to God.  This includes the claims that there is nothing eternal or that what is eternal is some aspect of the creation like the material world or the human self.  By using reason to distinguish between what is eternal and what is not eternal (without beginning and with beginning) we can use reason (as the laws of thought) to know God and avoid conceptual idolatry.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Vox on Rand Paul needs to make libertarians Hate Him

This from my favorite left-leaning blogging center Vox, is exactly right.

The libertarian movement in the United States is not used to supporting candidates who compromise their core beliefs. In fact, they see both the Democrats and Republicans as terribly corrupt — and some believe, as Gillespie seems to, that a libertarian who really stuck to his guns could win the presidency.

But that's almost certainly not true. Libertarians are a very small part of the American electorate. The Republican Party activists and operatives who play a critical role in deciding the primary nominee wouldn't go for someone who refused to give at least some sops to social conservatives and hawks. Paul needs to compromise at least somewhat, but at least some portion of his true base will get mad at him every time he does.

Rand Paul is officially running for the 1016 presidential election now.