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How would Libertarianism work in an Irish context?
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OB makes a good point about the "What If" type question. One I would agree with, it is after all the Theory forum, so posing hypothetical situations is part of parcel of discussing a theory.
However
There are some posters who aren't really asking questions such as these to gain understanding or to have a debate. They are really using such questions as cheapo point scoring exercises. We have seen in other threads how Libertarian leaning discussions can work out well, when discussed properly. That will happen in this thread as well, if people have to leave the conversation for that to happen, then so be it.
Cheers
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It doesn't matter whether or not I destroy a work of art that I create. It arguably matters whether a great artist destroys one of his own works, but I would consider it an unacceptable intrusion on his private property rights to legislate against him destroying it. It certainly matters if the owner of an established work of art destroys it, but there's a pretty robust market mechanism in place to make it highly unlikely that he will do so. And then there's the question of ring forts, where it matters if they are destroyed, but they don't have a monetary value that lends itself to a market-based solution for their preservation.
What appears to be a dichotomy when viewed through the simplistic lens of an ideology starts to look more like a continuum when applied to a variety of real-world situations.
The only argument against a law preventing landowners from destroying ring forts is the circular one that there should be no laws limiting private property rights. Such a law has negligible impact on the owner of the property, as long as he obeys it.The ring fort had no monetary value to the farmer, who saw it as an unwanted nuisance, but it does have value to others, such as archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists whose research is supported by universities, societies, institutes, and the like. It also has potential value to the tourist industry as a local attraction. So, rather than relying on state preservation orders, why couldn't parties with an interest in preserving the ring fort just buy it outright and use it for their own purposes? The farmer presumably would be happy to sell off a small patch of land at greater than agricultural value (just as farmers were happy to sell off sites during the boom years). Moreover, farmers would be less likely to bulldoze these ring forts if they thought they might be worth something.
I don't have that kind of faith in market forces, I'm afraid.0 -
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oscarBravo wrote: »Well, no. You made a subtle but critical logical leap in the middle of that paragraph, which suggests that you're incapable of seeing any issue other than in terms of ownership. The state applies caveats on the use of property not because the state is asserting ownership of the property, but because of a social contract. I accept that you disagree with the idea of a social contract, but that doesn't mean that you get to reframe the discussion in terms of the only idea you do agree with, and dismiss it on that basis.
I guess an assumption I am making (open to correction) is that an individual's private property (if we apply the actual meaning of the term) is sovereign i.e. theirs alone if they aren't violating anyone else's property rights in doing so. If your private property rests on the state allowing you to keep it providing you pay taxes and use it according to their guidelines then the logical corollary is that you are only the nominal owner of said property. Ultimately then, it isn't the individual but the state who is sovereign over all private property. Which is of course fascism, all things considered.oscarBravo wrote: »How does that philosophy map to a hypothetical scenario where a farmer beats a horse to death? It's his property, after all.0 -
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It will however, assert its ownership over its property if you don't (a) pay taxes or (b) use the land according to their guidelines. I won't frame my arguments according to the 'social contract' because such a transparently ludicrous excuse for institutionalised robbery is hardly worth talking about, not to mention tautological in this debate.
I guess an assumption I am making (open to correction) is that an individual's private property (if we apply the actual meaning of the term) is sovereign i.e. theirs alone if they aren't violating anyone else's property rights in doing so.
The problem is that your definition of private property - i.e., property with which you can do absolutely anything you want with no restrictions whatsoever other than "an it harm none" - is the ideal you are espousing; whereas the social contract, despite being an abstract concept, is something that is widely accepted as existing, however much you'd rather it didn't.I don't accept that animals should be granted 'rights' -- however, if I were to learn of a farmer engaging in such a brutal act I would not support the initiation of aggression against him but I would definitely partake in publicising his cruelty with a view towards a complete boycott of his farm's produce. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine many people standing for such behaviour in their community.
Let's move the goalposts: your neighbour, who has a mid-level job in a large company (at which is very competent), is cruel and abusive towards his pets. He has every right to do so; they are his property, after all. What's an appropriate response to that behaviour?0 -
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1: Without base figures, we don't know what a 300% surge in private education is, thus we can't see if the number going to private schools is proportionate with those leaving public.
2: A wider issue here, is you can't say that when people have more money, they prefer private schools; not only do you need better stats to make that inference, but you need stats on disposable income for families with kids in public schools, to show that they don't have enough money to send kids to private schools.
Could easily be that they do have the money but choose public.
3: As you say, grinds are supplementary, which doesn't say anything about public schools, because grinds are often focused 1-to-1 learning, where as both public and private schools would have a class with many students per teacher; this means students could just as likely opt to take grinds if they were going to a private school.
You would need some stats, surveys or research to support the view that grinds are due to poor public school standards.Strangely, people don't doubt the ability of the free market to provide food, clothing, and often shelter. But they don't seem to accept that it can provide education, which I find to be a strange inconsistency.
Also, while people don't doubt the free market can provide food, clothing and shelter, people see how it fails to do that for some, and thus is the reason we have social welfare and council housing, to provide an alternative to homelessness for people who (temporarily or otherwise) can't provide for themselves, or who charity isn't forthcoming for.
Libertarian principals seem to advocate a society where charities take this role, but there does not seem to be evidence that charities could hope to have the economic means to do this for everyone, so it seems likely that many would slip through the net.Valmont wrote:I don't accept that animals should be granted 'rights' -- however, if I were to learn of a farmer engaging in such a brutal act I would not support the initiation of aggression against him but I would definitely partake in publicising his cruelty with a view towards a complete boycott of his farm's produce. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine many people standing for such behaviour in their community.0 -
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The false dichotomy stems from the idea that such qualifications extinguish property rights, which is Valmont's argument.But why base our argument on property bubble prices? We all know that land prices were anomalous during the bubble — indeed, they have fallen by more than half since 2007. We probably will not see another 2007 again in our lifetimes.But archeologists and preservationists tell us that despite this alleged state "protection," these historical sites are being destroyed at a relatively rapid rate. I wouldn't have much faith in the current legislative system either, frankly.
What's interesting to note from this discussion is that both our approaches are failing. Legislative protection of national monuments isn't working, presumably because not enough landowners are being prosecuted for destroying them and so the disincentive is mostly theoretical. On the other hand, there's nothing to stop a society such as you have posited from buying them - but it hasn't happened.Conversely, excessive government-mandated "preservation" can stifle healthy architectural development and renewal. Just because a building has been on a particular site for the past two hundred years, and has been deemed as "listed" by the state, should we really strive to keep it there for the next two or three millennia? What happens when our cities essentially become museums, and there is literally no space for new architecture, i.e., cultures of the future can't express themselves because of the weight of the past?
The Valmont argument is that if I buy a Georgian house in the middle of a terrace in Dublin's leafy suburbs, I should have an unfettered and unqualified right to demolish it and replace it with a steel-and-glass tower block, and that any qualification of that right is fascism. There doesn't seem to be any scope in that worldview for a reasonableness argument, and I am suspicious of worldviews that reject reasonableness.It's a trade-off that I wouldn't be willing to accept, personally. What if the government decided that Dublin would be a much more pleasant city if every man had to wear slacks and a shirt, and every woman a dress and heels? The result might be aesthetically preferable (no more tracksuits and goth attire) but could be achieved only by quashing individual preferences and having everyone submit to the will of the collective.
Similarly, I don't want to have to go to court because I've painted my house a color that falls outside the state-mandated scheme. The color of my house should be my own business and nobody else's.
I guess no individual resident of Skagen would be able to directly quantify the loss to them of having something intangible taken away from their town, and I guess in a world that's defined solely in terms of market value, that means that they wouldn't have lost anything at all.
I doubt you'd get many of the residents of Skagen to agree with that perspective, however.0 -
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oscarBravo wrote: »whereas the social contract, despite being an abstract concept, is something that is widely accepted as existing, however much you'd rather it didn't.oscarBravo wrote: »Hmm, so you would attempt to damage his business in response to him using his own property in a way that he wants to - but that doesn't constitute initiation of aggression against him. Interesting.oscarBravo wrote: »The Valmont argument is that if I buy a Georgian house in the middle of a terrace in Dublin's leafy suburbs, I should have an unfettered and unqualified right to demolish it and replace it with a steel-and-glass tower block, and that any qualification of that right is fascism.0
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This post had been deleted.Well, you surely have to acknowledge that the Danes are rather more zealous in their embrace of collectivism than we are here in Ireland.Go around Mayo telling people what color they have to paint their houses and I'm sure you'll get a fair percentage of rude and hostile responses.0
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Which, ultimately, is my point. If we were arguing about the two sides of an either-or absolutist dichotomy, then the choice would be one between either preserving all historical architecture in aspic, or allowing a complete free-for-all. But we're only discussing one of those extremes here: the one that says that there are no circumstances under which it is ever acceptable for anyone but the owner of property to have any input into the design of that property, because that would (apparently) be fascism.
(As an aside, I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall when Valmont tells the Danes that they are fascists, what with them having been occupied by Nazi Germany and all.)
Skagen has very little going for it other than fishing and tourism. The main tourist draw is nostalgia for a time when it was an artist colony (along with some beautiful scenery). The town optimises that tourist draw by preserving a sense of the past, and it works well. Other towns find different balancing points between preservation and progress - there's no compelling reason for Skagen to be a hub for architectural experimentation, and good reason for it to cling to its nostalgic vibe.
The private property fundamentalist will argue that what's good for the town as a whole is irrelevant to his particular wants and desires, and that nobody else in the town has any right to have any input into the visual impact that his property has on the town.
As strong as you believe the foundations of the philosophy to be, it's very hard to argue against the idea that its underpinning motive is selfishness.Well, this thread is about how libertarianism might work in the Irish context — and as I've said, we tend to be a bit more resistant than the Danes to having the government tell us what color we should paint our houses.
I'm not going to argue that every set of rules that is endorsed by a large group of people is objectively correct - I'm not a democratic fundamentalist either - but we are a gregarious species, and I'm naturally suspicious of philosophies that reject the very concept of society.0 -
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While there is a necessity to kill animals sometimes, when they pose a wide scale agricultural, economic or societal (health wise) threat, it should not be legal to do so in a cruel way, when there is a practical alternative.
Another example is livestock; it is allowed to breed and slaughter animals for economic/agricultural purposes, but to treat them cruelly is wrong and should be illegal (there's much debate over this when it comes to the living conditions of factory farmed animals).
At what point do you draw the line on animal cruelty in general? (clearly there are a lot of pretty big grey areas)0 -
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oscarBravo wrote: »Which, ultimately, is my point. If we were arguing about the two sides of an either-or absolutist dichotomy, then the choice would be one between either preserving all historical architecture in aspic, or allowing a complete free-for-all.
In practice neither would be absolute though. The market won't preserve 60,000 ring-forts but likely still preserve Bunratty Castle and in a system where the State claims all 60,000 ring-forts are to be protected, it will eventually have to make concessions.0 -
oscarBravo wrote: »I don't believe in blind adherence to a simplistic ideology precisely because I feel it is ill-equipped to deal with edge cases like this.oscarBravo wrote: »No - I'm arguing against an axiomatic and dogmatic statement that either the owner of something has an unqualified right to do with it as he will, or else he doesn't. That's a false dichotomy born of the need to beat the world into a simplistic ideological framework.oscarBravo wrote: »And I'm arguing for a qualified right to one's property. I don't think that owning a ring fort should give you the right to bulldoze it; I don't think that owning a Gandon-designed building in Dublin should give you the right to replace it with a concrete box; and I don't think that owning a horse should give you the right to mistreat it until it dies.oscarBravo wrote: »The Valmont argument is that if I buy a Georgian house in the middle of a terrace in Dublin's leafy suburbs, I should have an unfettered and unqualified right to demolish it and replace it with a steel-and-glass tower block, and that any qualification of that right is fascism....
(As an aside, I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall when Valmont tells the Danes that they are fascists, what with them having been occupied by Nazi Germany and all.)oscarBravo wrote: »...and I'm naturally suspicious of philosophies that reject the very concept of society.oscarBravo wrote: »That's a problem of lack of enforcement.0 -
Back to schooling, it is the nature of this thread that it has concurrent themes as the topic is large.There is no such thing as a "libertarian system of schooling".
Of course there is. It is one where the State doesn't get involved. If that means there are all kind of different schools, well all kinds of different schools could exist in the State sector, which doesn't mean there isn't a statist system of schooling.The fact that you think there is suggests two things to me: (1) that you don't know much about libertarianism
Do I need to? The thread is not for libertarians, and the political theory thread is not a libertarian forum. We are here to learn, which is why I am asking. Who knows, we may be convinced.and (2) that you're not genuinely interested in debating libertarianism. Nevertheless, I'll bite:
Asking questions about how the system works in a practical sense is a problem? Really? Some day the Libertarian party might just get out from hiding behind keyboard onto a hustings, or a public debate - you will be asked these very questions.- That depends on the business model of the school.
- As above.
- As above.
- As above.
- None insofar as the running of the school.
- I don't see why there would be no curriculum. Again, this depends on the school.
- I would imagine this would vary widely. It may depend on the type of school, the number of pupils, the location of the school, and countless other variables.
- That is quite impossible to predict.
- As with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Well that was great fun. (not)
None of these are reasonable answers, or miss the point. Question 1-4 ( questions on fees, equipment etc.) cannot be dismissed as "depends on the schools business model", unless we get some idea of how school models could exist without state funding, and low fees. What percentage would charge full fees? What percentage wouldn't charge full fees? Why wouldn't they ( Corporate or Church sponsorship, something else?). These are practical questions of an extremist ideology.
Question 5 is answered ( no State involvement).
Two major questions remained unanswered. Would there be a State curriculum ( 6), that was answered as "of course there would be a curriculum" which is to deliberately miss the point, as I meant a standardised one . In 6.1 I asked if every school had their own curriculum would that not allow that school to teach creationism, and that question remained unanswered. ( Of course it has to be allowed, the only organisation that can standardise it is the State, or council.)
The question about how many people could afford school ( either primary or secondary) was also impossible to predict, although I did suggest referring to the stats prior to 1970 when most people did not get secondary schooling, and the working classes needed scholarships. Primary schools - which have always been free - would fall into the fee paying category ( last answer), so presumably about 50% of the population would remain unschooled, barring massive transfers from Churches, or Charities. I doubt the voluntary sector has it in them.
However little is answered here we do learn something, because Soldie is not pretending, at least, that all, most, or even very many people should or will go to school in a libertarian Ireland. It's impossible to predict, but the present system we can predict that 100% of people get free access, whatever they do with it, and the libertarians are clearly not supporting that.0 -
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In practice neither would be absolute though. The market won't preserve 60,000 ring-forts but likely still preserve Bunratty Castle and in a system where the State claims all 60,000 ring-forts are to be protected, it will eventually have to make concessions.Yet I could equally accuse you of blind adherence to the ideology of the State (social contract?); which is as very real as the ideology behind libertarianism. However, this point is always swept under the carpet.
Even though you argue that exact position with the only difference being you favour the state over the individual.
I don't favour the state over the individual. I have explicitly - in as many words - in this very thread expressed support for private property rights. I have suggested that there is an argument for qualifying those rights under some circumstances. If your frame of reference only allows for the monochrome possibilities of unqualified property rights on the one had versus complete serfdom and slavery on the other, and you are literally mentally incapable of grasping the idea of a continuum between the two, then we quite simply don't share a common language, so if that's the case let me know and I can stop wasting time discussing this with you.Your need to have the state lord over ring forts and the colours people paint their houses is exactly an attempt to beat the world into a simplistic framework i.e. the simplistic framework of State either having the unqualified right to property or not having it.
Again, you seem to be begging the question and arguing from your conclusion that any qualification on the right to do anything whatsoever you want with your own property means that the State has the unqualified right to do anything whatsoever it wants with your property. I can't even begin to understand the logical processes required to arrive at that conclusion.I'm pointing out these contradictions because I think you should either criticise the ideology specific to libertarianism rather than attack it because it is ideological in nature. All political beliefs are based on philosophical assumptions concerning how men should act towards one another; necessarily, all political beliefs are ideological in nature i.e. how we should be doing things.
Your axioms are structured such that the concepts of a state and private property are mutually exclusive - if one exists, the other does not. You then frame your every argument around those axioms, no matter how contrived the resulting mental gymnastics. You appear completely incapable of relaxing your constraints in any way to accept the possibility that both a State and private property can exist simultaneously. Which is strange, because - presumably - you live in a state, and own property. How do you reconcile that contradiction?I have identified a key feature of fascistic governments and demonstrated it is alive and well in many western countries -- if you don't want to call those countries fascistic in nature you could stop mocking me and explain why you disagree.Reject your concept of society, yes, reject the fact that individuals are social creatures, no. One of the greatest conflations perpetrated by statists is assuming that because man needs society, man needs the state. Now, that is a leap of logic.0 -
oscarBravo wrote: »Well, I guess if we have Bunratty Castle we don't need ring forts, because they're exactly the same thing.
I never said they were, but I guess this makes for a smart one liner to divert away from the point.0 -
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Duggys Housemate wrote: »Two major questions remained unanswered. Would there be a State curriculum ( 6), that was answered as "of course there would be a curriculum" which is to deliberately miss the point, as I meant a standardised one . In 6.1 I asked if every school had their own curriculum would that not allow that school to teach creationism, and that question remained unanswered. ( Of course it has to be allowed, the only organisation that can standardise it is the State, or council.)0
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I'll be honest and admit that I can't be bothered formulating an argument against that point of view. It is - quite literally - an egregious perspective.Valmont is correct in observing that if one accepts that the state should have regulatory authority over everything from ancient monuments to the color of one's walls, it effectively reduces the "owner" to the status of a tenant in his or her own home.
Can you understand how the man on the Clapham Omnibus would dismiss that as a completely specious argument?Assuming that you don't want to come across as a proponent of overbearing state control over every conceivable aspect of property ownership, can you please tell us what aspect of property rights, in your mind, is "off limits" to the state.
I'm not a proponent of overbearing state control - and it's disingenuous of you to frame me thus, given that I always argue against extremism - but I accept that it's sometimes appropriate for individual rights to be tempered (not extinguished) where to do so is in the interest of the greater good. The alternative is to argue that no individual's rights can ever be tempered under any circumstances ever - including a serial killer's right to live freely wherever he wants.0 -
oscarBravo wrote: »By the same token, the imposition of a speed limit means I don't own my car, as my right to do with it as I see fit is qualified. Therefore it's not my property.
It's not the same token though. When I am on someone else's property they can set some rules, whether it be that I am required to meet a minimum dress code to enter a club, or agree to a speed limit to travel on a highway.0 -
If you're against harming people though surely knocking down a Georgian house on a Georgian Street will reduce the value of everyone else's house? Or does harming mean something else?
Destroying historic artifacts is also bad for all of society so is therefore harming it.0 -
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