Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.

What a load of bullshit. First of all, libertarians have hardly "taken over" anything. If anything, the SV scene (as seen from the outside anyway) seems markedly less libertarian now than it did 15 years ago. Back when Slashdot was full of techno-libertarian types, cyberpunks and crypto-anarchists were spending gobs of time planning how to use technology to enable the stateless society, and rich libertarian leaning folks like John Gilmore were suing the government over the right to travel without showing ID... back then, the SV technologist scene felt very libertarian indeed. Now, if anything, it seems that the progressives have taken over. You still hear a little chatter about Internet freedom and the need for strong crypto, and there is the crypto-currency crowd who have actually gotten somewhere... but by and large, the rhetoric you hear out of SV seems to have skewed in a distinctively statist direction the past decade or two.

Heck, just go back through the archives here at HN and compare the talk back at the beginning, to the talk now... you can't help but be struck by the profound shift that's occurred. Now it's commonplace for people to criticize capitalism, denigrate the value of hard work (after all, all success is just "luck"), promote more active government involvement in markets, etc. Heck, I guess you'd almost be hard pressed to find a libertarian on here anymore... or maybe most of us just don't bother saying anything because we know we'll get shouted down (and/or downvoted to oblivion) by the statists.

Beyond that, the essence of libertarianism is absolutely to care about "right and wrong", as expressed by the Zero Aggression Principle. And libertarianism itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money. IOW, just because somebody is a Capitalist or is concerned with making money, doesn't automatically mean they are a "libertarian."

How statist are startup empires built around the idea of flouting regulations? How statist are Uber, AirBnB, and the other members of sharing economy?

Granted, perhaps you can label them crony capitalists or some other epithet instead, for using government failings to their advantage instead of trying to do away with government (though some, such as Travis Kalanick, are notoriously big Ayn Rand fans). But when the folk definition for "libertarian" these days usually rests on the side of "-capitalist", and not "anarcho" - more Koch brothers (and Peter Thiel), than Gary Johnson (and Richard Stallman). When people usually talk about civil liberties groups, and Pirate parties, and hacker collectives, they think anarchists. When people talk about "neoliberals", or objectivist billionaires, they think libertarians.

Have a problem with that? Take the label back. Work to fix the public perception.

Last I heard, Richard Stallman is closer to left-anarchism than nightwatchman-state-capitalism.

> And libertarianism itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money.

And yet... there aren't a lot of women or minorities in the libertarian movement, and despite your 'hippie' comment, most of the voices are from people with well-paying jobs.

Libertarianism doesn't mention money per se, but the effect of it is that people who already have money and network effects don't have to share their bounty.

Hell, I remember arguing with one libertarian who was crystal clear on property rights, and that property could never be taken away if you didn't sell it yourself; the government had no right to take land (yadda yadda, Zero Aggression Principle) and any land transfers after that are moot because it would have been taken by force.

Okay, says I, then give your property back to the Native American tribe it was taken from. The rhetoric then changed to 'oh, I could only give it to a person who could show that they owned the exact plot of land that I had'. What, the specific plot of land that is only described by the entity that violently took it? That communal ownership that was tribal lands meant that somehow you could claim individual ownership over it anyway?

This is what libertarianism means to me, and to a lot of what you deride as 'statists'. It's a lot of superficially nice-sounding rhetoric, which boils down to "I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

"I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

OTOH, I'd say it's closer to "I'm happy to share with others, as long as I do it on my own terms, without somebody threatening me into it, and furthermore, even if I don't 'share', I contribute to the overall good simply by participating as a productive member of the economy". Consider what Adam Smith had to say:

"But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old clothes which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging, as he has occasion."

Now that's not to say that there aren't Libertarians out there with a "fuck you, got mine" attitude. Then again, there are people with that attitude who aren't Libertarians as well.

What happens when 'my own terms' are heavily asymmetric in the speaker's own favour? How often would 'my own terms' be against the speaker's own favour?

We've also been through times when people "contributed to the overall good simply by participating as productive members of the economy". It was awful, and is why we have welfare programs these days. Private charity and/or trickle-down economics just do not cut the mustard, especially for individuals with chronic or ongoing problems.

> But though this principle ultimately provides [the beggar] with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for

If you define 'necessities of life' as merely 'keeps a heartbeat going', then that paragraph will probably make sense to you. Most people would also consider shelter against the cold, clothes that fit and are in good order, and regular food as being necessities, none of which are needed to keep a heartbeat.

The other thing is that people's own self-interest is rarely thought about in the long-term. It takes a lot of education to plan out far ahead, which is one of the reasons why the wealthy stay wealthy. People aren't the perfectly informed, perfectly rational actors that these kind of paragraphs (and libertarian ideology) suggest.

So, you talked to an idiot whoclaimed to represent a certain idea and ended up believing his claim?

Awesome, you've done both a No True Scotsman and a Strawman fallacy in just the one relatively short sentence.

No True Scotsman requires a non falsifiable hypothesis. And how exactly did I construct a strawman?

The problem I see is that many of the most prominent media libertarians are far from the "hippie libertarians" that still have the "anarcho" in their anarcho-capitalist philosophy.

Exhibit A I would point to is Lew Rockwell's blogging group, a prominent self-proclaimed "libertarian" and "anarcho-capitalist". Sure, they have a strong disdain for "The System" (items like "Wall Street", "the elite", police corruption, spy agencies) combined with the standard right-wing (they love "market forces", a bit ironic given the Wall Street hate; they hate any social redistribution, hate environmental regulations, etc.). Unfortunately, I think their true colors have shown recently, in that they have shown quite a bit of love for strong "macho" leaders like Putin and Trump.

In reality, I believe that this group is fascist-capitalist: they are right-wingers that don't like the messiness of democracy and laws and rules that much (unless said laws and rules benefit them, of course). No true philosophical libertarian would support strongmen leaders, for fairly obvious reasons. But just like the word "liberal" has been perverted in America (it's not classic liberalism any more!), "libertarian" has been perverted into this capitalist-at-all-cost strongmen personality in the public mind, because unfortunately too many of the loudest "libertarians" are.

As far as SV goes, you are right that (from a distance) it appears less libertarian than 15 years ago. It seems interesting that one of the biggest pushes for "basic income" comes from this crowd for instance. But I can also see why the shift happened.

HN has not become explicitly more statist or less libertarian. More to the point, it has become far far more pro-establishment as its posters have seen success. The fact that progressivism is the zeitgeist of the establishment is ancillary to migration of poor hackers into establishment social classes.

>What a load of bullshit

It isn't bullshit, just out of touch. That did happen. But it happened 20 years ago. Since then the leftists have taken over the way the libertarians did before. I can hardly fault people who have been away from the tech world for 20 years for basing their ideas on how things were 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com