Quote of the day

Here’s a thought that might help freedom-loving men and women win office and gain influence over society’s future course: Perhaps our fellow citizens aren’t fools after all!

Isn’t that the central basis for the libertarian creed? The notion that educated free adults can be trusted with matches… not to mention their bank accounts and votes? If the masses are intrinsically stupid — sheep — then the paternalists are right and no future society of maximized freedom will ever be possible.

The fundamental premise of libertarianism is an assumption that people are basically rational and wise. Yet this flies right in the face of the most common libertarian lament — that those idiots out there keep electing statists and every resulting policy has been just plain awful.

One of these two deeply held beliefs is just gonna have to go!

-Sci-fi author David Brin, in a speech to Libertarian Party National Convention in Indianapolis on July 5, 2002 that I just came across. (part one if three is here) This is something we should all bear in mind, esp the more ranty bloggers out there…

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March 26, 2012

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9 responses to “Quote of the day”

Paul Marks

March 26, 2012 at 10:34 pm

It is rational for a person to study and think about choices in their own lives – where a choice can have a real effect.

But one vote (out of millions) is very unlikely to make a difference.

So the ignorant voter, may be a quite rational person.

Using up the time and effort in the study of political questions may simply not make rational sense for most people.

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James Rigby

March 26, 2012 at 11:20 pm

Most people, in my experience, are happy if they are just comfortable and feel safe. The state provides lots of nice comfortable things like a health service, and lots of police, and lots of rules to try to keep the bad guys on the straight and narrow. Libertarianism is a risk: What if you get ill, or lose your job, or have an accident, or need care in your old age? The last three generations have been so molly-coddled by the patrician state that they are willing to sacrifice their freedoms in exchange for the comfort blanket of the state. Only the bold and the brave can accept libertarianism.

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Rob Waller

March 27, 2012 at 8:26 am

As Simon suggests the electorate are incentivised to support the State. In this sense they are acting rationally.

The only thing we can hope for is that our economic arguments are right. That this Fiat powered merry go round can’t continue spinning forever…

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1. Paul Marks
  
  March 27, 2012 at 10:07 am
  
  Most people have no idea what the size or scope of goverment is – so they can hardly have approved (or “voted for”) something they do not about. And, as I have already stated, as one vote very rarely makes a difference individual voters have no incentive to learn about what is going on.
  
  In a shop if one chooses one type of bread over another the results are plain (when one eats the bread). Political “choice” is totally different (and vastly inferior).
  
  However, there is some hope. James Rigby is correct – most people want to feel happy and safe, and they do NOT feel so. Most people know that something is wrong (fundementally wrong) they just do not know what it is that is wrong.
  
  Rob Waller points out that the present system can not go on for much longer – and he is correct.
  
  It will go bankrupt.
  
  A bitter end (as there will be terrible suffering – and very soon), but still an end.
  
  A date?
  
  My guess is that it will start to fall apart in 2013.
  
  Yes as early as that.
  
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  1. James R
    
    March 27, 2012 at 10:54 am
    
    The only thing I can see that will create such a seismic shock is a series of euro defaults – with first Greece, then Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and finally France having to default. The Germans will have no choice as their people are still reeling from the inflation in the 1920s and so printing euros will not be an option.
    
    Whether it will cause chaos in the UK is unclear. We have the ability to quantatively ease (print money). If the inflationary pressures this causes are balanced out by the inevitable long term deflationary pressure caused by a decade-long depression, we might be able to ride the storm without too much short term hardship for the majority of people thereby averting a seismic shift.
    
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  2. Paul Marks
    
    March 27, 2012 at 11:10 am
    
    Germany is interesting.
    
    Well perhaps not all of Germany – but certainly Bavaria.
    
    All that have been there (I have NOT) tell me that there is something “different” about Bavaria, that Western culture is not dying (at least not dying so much) there.
    
    Still the crises (in the whole Western world) will be soon – so we will soon see.
    
    Now the Reds will win the election in Bavaria later this year and everything I have written above will be exposed as absurd optomism.
    
    After all B-W (next door) now has a “Green” Prime Minister (the one good thing I thought he would do is stop wasting tax money on the new railway that destroys a nice old wooded park – but, no….) who used to be a Communist activist.
    
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Richard Carey

March 27, 2012 at 11:10 am

“The fundamental premise of libertarianism is an assumption that people are basically rational and wise.”

This has never been a fundamental premise of libertarianism. A more likely premise is from Jefferson:

“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”

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1. Andy Janes
  
  March 27, 2012 at 9:36 pm
  
  Has been a while but I thought it goes back to Locke?
  
  Regardless the point of the quote was that we should be more postitive (‘Cheer Libertarianism as Brin puts it) rather than putting people off by ranting against the evils of government all the time, or calling them idoits for supporting it (which as Rob and Paul note is a rational response to the incentives apparently on offer)
  
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  1. Paul Marks
    
    March 28, 2012 at 9:43 am
    
    As Gough (Oriel College, Oxford) pointed out many decades ago…..
    
    John Locke suddenly switches (in his Two T.s on Government) from INDIVIDUAL consent, to MAJORITY consent (without announcing he is switching).
    
    It is a dodge – as John Locke produces no argument for the switch. And, as Gough points out, at the time (and even centuries before – for example in the Middle Ages) writers were perfectly well aware that individual consent and majority consent are totally different things. So Locke does not have the excuse of ignorance.
    
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