Libertarianism, as envisioned by the Koch brothers, is AMAZING when you're rich. You simply remove all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy, and re-create feudal Europe. What's not to love???
Because I have a hard time reconciling your strawman description with http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/13/koch-bros-t... as just one example. Or http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/08/15/clemenc... or http://cjonline.com/news/2015-10-15/forfeiture-reform-aligns... for that matter. Those are not rich people problems they're trying to address there... In fact, I would argue that in the area of criminal justice they are _precisely_ trying to do more to protect the poor from the wealthy.
Now I agree that on some issues they do want to remove government functions that I would prefer remained in place. But that's not the sum total of what they're doing, and while I disagree with them rather strongly on a lot of their views and preferred policies I agree with them quite strongly on some others. As does the ACLU, and our current president, for that matter.
Why should two voters have so much more influence than 310 million others? It's anti-democratic.
I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views - but I'm too busy to look it up myself right now.[0] Certainly the existence of a few things I agree with among their extensive activities wouldn't mean much.
[0] Wikipedia, which I wouldn't put much faith in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...
and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_Maze_of_Money.png
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/26/koch-...
Our political funding system is broken, I agree. So is our general electoral system: elections are _way_ too long, which makes them more expensive, of course.
> I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views
By no means am I saying that everything, or most of, or a large part of, what the Koch brothers do or think is good. I'm just saying that the claim that all their political activity is guided by the basic principle "let's see how much we can screw poor people" is a caricature, and not a terribly accurate one, and providing one simple counterexample.
I'm not asking you, or anyone else, to like them personally, the sum total of their activities, or any particular activities. All I'm asking for is that we don't jump from "these people are doing a bunch of stuff I disagree with" to "these people are pure evil, so anything they do must be evil, hence anything they are involved in is evil by association and must be fought against". Unfortunately, this last bit of reasoning is far too common in politics recently, all across the political spectrum. Just like the related "This organization is good, so whatever it does must be good" line of reasoning that seems to be so common... and usually indicates that the organization should be terminated before it does some serious harm. :(
Like the police, who, due to smart phones, are finally being held accountable for the brutality they've been getting away with for decades?
Or maybe you mean civil asset forfeiture, which the police use to steal money from people accused of criminal activity, with no effective mechanism for non-rich people to get it back?
Or maybe the current public school system, which encourages mediocrity and is remarkably ineffective for poor students?
Or maybe you mean the current welfare system, which has the long-term effect of keeping entire populations in destitute poverty even across generational lines?
Or maybe you mean gun control legislation intended to target black populations?
Or maybe you mean the PATRIOT act, which I'm sure has been very helpful in "protecting the poor" (and the rich! Great!) from the apparently ever-present and very serious threat of terrorism?
Because the Koch brothers and the Cato institute have done a great deal of work to improve all of these things.
> re-create feudal Europe
Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone, and they generally believe in government functions like a public police force (although typically a very reserved one compared to present day military-style police forces/SWAT/DEA/etc.).
Such a system wouldn't even be sustainable with current levels of technology. Guerrilla warfare is now too effective compared to the kind of military forces a feudal lord could muster up, and global food production is so high that feudal lords can no longer use food production as a metaphorical (or literal, I suppose) carrot.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."
Words have meaning, and they also evolve. You'll have a much easier time understanding others' meaning and communicating with them in kind if you recognize that in many contexts:
- Social democracy has largely been associated with the word socialism.
- Communism has largely been associated with the word socialism. (Side-note: this is the association you appear to be making; many communists would wholesale reject the notion of the state seizing the means of production, or for that matter the notion of the state as a legitimate institution.)
- Communism basically doesn't exist in the broader vocabulary, except as an historical marker for the Soviet Union, and a geopolitical classification of countries like China or Cuba; to the extent it can be associated with any word today, it's anarchism and only among self-identifying anarchists.
- Anarchism has always been aligned with communism except in terms of the question of the state.
- Big-L Libertarians are largely an ideological faction of the right-wing/Republicans.
- Democrats and Republicans occupy a narrow spectrum of corporatism (though that is increasingly expanding rightward).
- Small-l libertarians are more frequently associated with the word anarchism, which is resented by pretty much everyone who cares.
(Full disclosure since at least my clarity if not my characterization displays a bias: I am an anarchist, of the communist variety, and I tend to view social democracy as harm reduction.)
As an Anarcho-Capitalist, I must disagree with this assertion.
On the one hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what could also be called a classic liberal position (ala Adam Smith), which favors minimal government interference but recognizes the need for government structure for many things. (In which case, a decentralized government could be part of such a vision.)
On the other hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what also is called anarchism, which favors no government at all because reasons / The Man or something. I've also heard libertarian being used to describe what I would call fascist-capitalism (if you are the type of "libertarians" who also hates democracy, you possibly fall in this category).
The former I personally find naive, the later I find repulsive, and neither frankly has much to do with the Adam Smith position at all.
Yes there are factions of it just like other parties, but the core is that ideas are good if they don't infringe on other people's rights. Making a law which compels someone to provide a service to another is anti-liberty and most libertarians would not support it. Even then, many might support that measure at the local level because state rights is a big component and democracy is respected.
Anyway, what I like about libertarianism is that it provides a framework which is basically the Constitution at the core. Republicans and Democrats have no framework in how they go about things and we're in a big mess at many levels. There's been very little leadership and vision. If you look at what the two parties have done over the last few decades - they aren't that much different in practice and people are getting frustrated.
I don't think we need to accept the _entire_ agenda of the Koch brothers in order to appreciate that sometimes they're doing the right thing.
Consider the work of the Libertarian Party to, for example, free people to braid hair without requiring a year of training to get a license.
Or consider that big corporations love regulations as a way to put barriers in the way of competitors. That's the whole point of the economic idea of "rent seeking", and what public choice economists are talking about when they refer to "regulatory capture".
Or for another example, consider that the despite pandering by politicians, economists pretty consistently agree that the minimum wage causes unemployment - the only controversy is by how much. And the origins of the minimum wage came during Jim Crow, when it was first conceived as a way to price minorities out of the job market.
So it's silly to say that libertarian's opposition to government regulation is obfuscation to cover screwing the little guy.
Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government against everyone else via all sorts of lobbying and economical pressure. Regulation now, that is a good thing, which happens when credible issues are detected.
Drug prohibition is more law than regulation - there was no real issue with abuse of THC originally.
If the issue was, say, low quality or highly addictive drugs, which also damage life, then the proper regulation would be to apply correct scheduling.
THC and likely MDMA should probably barely make it to schedule III. (With additional control due to abuse.) There are known medical uses of those and proper guidelines for dosage. (Former is used for pain in cancer patients and more, latter an adjunct in psychotherapy and for recurrent migraines.) Reclassified alcohol would be on the order of schedule II and tobacco as schedule I, with pure nicotine in schedule III. On the other hand, something like GHB would remain in schedule I or less likely move to schedule II, as there are much better and safer hypnotics. Etc. and more.
Instead of public safety, someone made "potential to abuse" a priority, based on no or scant data, suppositions and politics. Random crisis handling, where no crisis is present.
Making these drugs correctly and usefully regulated should be the main aim of the DEA.
No. You do not understand the concept. Regulatory capture can happen even with the purest of intentions.
The problem is that for effective regulation, you need experts. Where are you going to get experts, if not people who have experience in the industry? The problem with this is not that they may try to corrupt the process, favoring their former employer or whatever (although that is also a potential problem, but that's outright corruption, not "regulatory capture").
The thing about people from the industry is that they have a set way of looking at things - they're going to have a hard time "thinking outside the box", and because of the very fact that they spent so much time gathering their expertise, they're going to have a world view in which that area is more important than it probably is to the rest of us. With people that are used to thinking about the system in a set way, and who think it's more important relatively than other things, the flavor of the output regulations is going to tend to be to reinforce the way the industry does things, you'll rarely get something that really pulls the industry out of problematic ruts.
From what I've read, the Navy actually recognizes this problem in their nuclear fleet, and so refuses to use nuclear experts from the power generation industry. Being the Navy, they can afford to train their own experts, but this obviously can't scale to every place in our lives where regulation shows its face.
A massive amount of publicly funded services would be cut. So if we take as a given the ability of these elites to capture the cost savings of that for themselves, you end up with the average worker receiving no more money (since it's been captured) yet receiving fewer services (since the public ones were cut).
All the leverage[0] is in the hands of the owners, not the workers.
[0] excluding leverage such as "there are more of us so we can outvote you" and "there are more of us so we could revolt" - the first is presumed to have not happened, for whatever reason, by the assumption of the existence of this libertarian state, and the second would be a violation of the property rights that USA-libertarians hold so central.
It looks like Reason.com argues that pay-for-service modern law is equivalent to debtors' prison, but I haven't heard of libertarians supporting the restoration of proper debtors' prison (where the state imprisons someone for failing to pay a debt to a non-state contracting party). Of course, there's no canonical list of libertarian principles, so I'm sure some do support that...
As for the Middle Ages, I'd still recommend the books I mentioned; they make a number of interesting references to village law, and the right of peasant farmers (both serfs, who owed labor service, and freemen, who owed rent) to self-regulate.
_A Farewell to Alms_ mentions that farmland in the Middle Ages returned 10% per annum at basically zero risk in England and relatively little on the Continent (the only risks being war and bad harvests); if libertarianism wants to return to that economic arrangement, perhaps with the US government selling bonds returning 10% adjusted for inflation, then perhaps it has a silver lining.