How would Libertarianism work in an Irish context?

Libertarianism (as we know it in the current political landscape) has labelled itself as freedom loving. In fact that's the big selling point it's fair to say.
That's great! Sure we all love freedom.

But this idea of freedom quickly comes off the rails when the simple concept (fleshed out in the last few pages) is acknowledged:
Some people's freedoms will inevitably intrude on other people's freedoms.

There is no point in pretending that state 'intrusions' in the form of planning laws, regulation, taxation etc is the principal tool that curtails freedoms, while ignoring that fact that libertarianesque, unfettered unregulated fundamentalism has been and would be very efficient at curtailing freedoms.

Heh, I see the thread has been godwinned; fascism is a very specific thing, and is not applicable to Ireland's past, or to states in general, unless you want to make an entirely emotional and farcical argument, linking past Ireland and state regulations to Nazism.

Here is a detailed description of Fascism; note how it is entirely not applicable to Ireland at any stage in history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

The black and white caricature, you're either for 'Total Individual Freedom' or 'Fascistic Totalitarianism', is really silly; there is not even the slightest leeway for a compromise in these views, no grey area whatsoever.

Permabear wrote:

Nobody is trying to argue that the world would be a better place if animals were mistreated. It's a nice sleight-of-hand to suggest that libertarians, because they argue against government intervention, are arguing for animal cruelty — but it's also fallacious logic.

Generally, the statist position involves a reflexive leap from "X is an undesirable thing" to "We need more government regulation to prevent X from happening!" Thus, more government and more regulation are always posited as the solutions. A libertarian is more inclined to ask (a) Does government regulation actually prevent X from happening? (b) What negative consequences, or what violations of liberties, can arise from said government regulation? (c) Are there alternative ways to accomplish the desired goal without resorting to government intervention?

I'm sure that libertarians would happily support animal welfare charities such as the RSPCA. They might also argue that the real answer to animal cruelty is education, backed up by public opprobrium, boycotts, and the like. But if the reflexive response to every problem is "We need regulation!" then all we ever get is more government, and damn the consequences.

This underlines the lack of realism in Libertarian views when they are inflexible. You do not support animal cruelty, I'd say you abhor it; you do support a system where people can justify doing it "ah sure it's not illegal, mind your own business", and it is quite obvious that anyone sadistic or screwed up enough to do it can get away with it easily in such a system.

I don't think Libertarian supporters should be free from judgement for the effects of their system. It is wrong to judge saying they support a specific negative outcome (in this case saying that would be factually false), but it is not wrong to judge because they advocate a system with such knowingly messed up outcomes, which they know their proposed solutions fail to address adequately.

If there was acknowledgment of a problem here, that would be different and it might be wrong to criticize/judge, but there isn't any (and in most discussions, acknowledgments of any problems are not forthcoming).

Permabear wrote:

People didn't build houses higgledy-piggledy all over Ireland because planning regulations were lax; they built them because the reckless actions of international central bankers left the Western world awash in cheap credit.

You put all the blame on government here basically, but what is to stop cheap credit occurring in an unregulated banking system? Foreign investment in banks, would easily provide the money for cheap credit, and it would be the unregulated markets which would (and did) run away with that and inflate it into a massive bubble.

Sorry but, the idea that only a government can provide cheap credit is silly; government has the easiest method with which to create cheap credit, but all you need to generate cheap credit is to have a large enough amount of money incoming and being invested in banks.


Out of interest, should central banks in a Libertarian system, have regulatory control over bank interest rates? Would they be responsible for money creation as well? (i.e. would there even be a central bank)

Permabear wrote:

The standard response here is: "Okay, we admit that the government might have made a couple of mistakes here and there (sorry about that, lads, remind us never to vote FF again), but the current system is still better than an unregulated free market." Statements of that nature are assumed to stand as unquestioned gospel, and anyone who challenges them is dismissed as an "extremist." But it's legitimate to wonder whether those who excuse and condone government, no matter what the outcomes of a government-dominated society, are suffering from some large-scale version of Stockholm Syndrome.

"Okay, we admit that the government might have made a couple of mistakes here and there...the current system is still better than an unregulated free market."
Lets take the opposite of that (minus acknowledgment of the market leading to damage though, because that is never acknowledged):
"an unregulated free market is still better than the current system."

We had a very highly unregulated free market for the past 30 years, and that played a central role in turning cheap credit into a massively inflated market bubble.

Lets remember what cheap credit actually is for a moment: It is a loan with a very low interest rate, making it cheap (interest-wise) to go into debt to get that money.
What did the banks do? They loaned people very large amounts of money, at low interest rates, without checking the people could pay the money back i.e. without adequately checking the risks involved, and not knowing they would get the money back. Failure of regulation.

How would this not happen in an unregulated economy? You point to government as the only possible source of the amounts of money required to lead to such wide scale loans, but that is entirely false; a lot of the housing boom in the US was from foreign investment.

Permabear wrote:

I've never seen anyone argue in detail why our system of corrupt cronyism and corporatism, no matter how demonstrably awful its outcomes (a collapsed economy for the second time in a generation, 430,000 people out of work, a national debt heading for 125 percent of GDP), is still better than a libertarian alternative. It's simply assumed that it is.

The burden of proof is on you to show how a Libertarian system (which by the way is racking up an enormous number of problems, which Libertarian supporters can't seem to answer and ignore questions about), is better than what we have now.

Most arguments seem to reduce to "the state is bad because of 'x', therefore Libertarianism is automatically better", but so far the grand majority of things you have failed to explain how they would realistically work better in a Libertarian system.

A lot of things actually, haven't even been tested in comparable conditions yet (such as wholesale adoption of private education in a country), yet you say it will work in the absence of evidence, you just say "but the state is bad so this is automatically better".
There is no room in your arguments, for "'x' might work", you always seem to argue "'x' will work" and in the complete absence of evidence; that is based entirely on faith, because even your theoretical solutions have a myriad of unresolved arguments against them.

It seems also, that the very idea of testing things before implementing them wholesale is rejected as well (so is any idea of trying to build ideas empirically), which is really total madness in that we have no idea what kind of unforeseen consequences there are to even half of the ideas proposed (actually no, there are plenty ideas of bad consequences that may arise).

Not at any time have people payed even lip-service to the idea that untried plans should be tested or supported empirically before implemented wholesale; that is by definition only a 'faith' that something will work.

Valmont wrote: »

I think there are some interesting discussions there Kyussbishop, but you would probably need four or five threads to give the issues proper attention!

Agreed; it is hard to stop things diverging on several tangents at once in these threads, but the alternative is to leave some arguments unanswered.

SupaNova wrote: »

You can't stick to one topic per post, never-mind one topic per thread.

It's a good argument for letting threads to diverge into some cursory tangents in my opinion (otherwise we'd have to ban people making arguments, that have to go uncontested, as replying to them is off topic)

Ireland was never fascist though; here is the description of Fascism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

This country has never met the conditions of that.

Sympathy (as bad as it is) does not mean equivalence.

Fascism promotes political violence and war, as forms of direct action that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality. Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violence against opponents or to overthrow a political system. Fascism opposes multiple ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, and two major forms of socialism—communism and social democracy. Fascism claims to represent a synthesis of cohesive ideas previously divided between traditional political ideologies. To achieve its goals, the fascist state purges forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration.

That is cherry picking, Ireland has not met nearly enough conditions in the past to be labelled fascist.

I've split the animal cruelty thing into a separate thread by the way:
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056619645

Can also cover property rights in general if people like.

Meeting the definition on Wikipedia, or even in the dictionary would suffice:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fascism

1. a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
2. the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.

Ireland never fit 1 there, and Wikipedia says it never fit 2 either.

There were certainly fascistic tendencies in Ireland at the time, but the state itself definitely was not fascist, which is clear as much from the definition thereof; in any case, treading widely off topic

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Ireland wasn't big, or small f Fascist. It was not uniquely nationalist at the time, and had no racist laws on the books. The umberto Eco quote could be used to describe American patriotism as fascistic. The left tends to do that a lot.

It's actually not off-topic — because the persistence of this (small-f) fascist mentality explains much of the hostility toward libertarianism (and liberalism more generally) that has persisted in Ireland through the decades. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that the Irish government finally began to embrace economic liberalism and free trade, and it was well into the 1990s before we saw any significant degree of cultural pluralism. For its part, the IRA spent decades trying to bring about by "political violence and war" an "organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood," to quote your Wikipedia article. Unionists in the North are hated not so much because they occupy "our" land, but because the idea of a group with its own separate loyalties and traditions interferes unacceptably with the ideal of a single people sharing a single national identity.

Most of this is factually incorrect - the policy of economic openness started in the 60's under Lemass. And Ireland opened up to Europe in 1973. The rest, welll liberalism is not the same as economic libertarianism, if all you economic libertarians were just social libertarian/ liberal then this thread would be redundant..

It goes without saying that libertarians strenuously oppose the idea that individual and cultural identity should be imposed from on high by a powerful central state. Rather than idealizing the notion of "one people" sharing "one identity," libertarians embrace a radical pluralism that sees many people sharing many identities, but living in peace and mutual tolerance — because libertarians also eschew the war and violence that are central to fascism and to Irish terrorism.

These are liberal arguments and could be embraced by the SWP, or an Irish Times editorial before they go onto decrying commercialism. This thread is about what makes economic libertarianism unique and how the present day Ireland would work as an economic Libertarian state.

In Ireland, the natural antagonists of libertarians are not socialists but Irish republicans. For that reason, I'm surprised that the two groups cross swords so infrequently in these forums.

The natural antagonists of libertarians are all non-extremists who are not Libertarians.

You want to pick some nastys and big yourself up as an anti- nationalist, or anti-fascist. You could be both and a social democrat. But the questions this thread should be dealing with, without these deliberate diversions, is how the economic system of libertarianism would work for healthcare, universal schooling, pensions, social welfare, infrastructure, public transport, policing, and even the law. Rattling on about 30's ( bad), Compulsory Irish (badder), FF (badder again), IRA ( baddest) is diversionary, and I think deliberately so. Let's keep on the proposed system, and how that works, not the old and it doesn't, or didn't.

Since the OP can cover just about any aspect of Libertarianism (but in an Irish context), I wonder again what would be the configuration of the central bank in a Libertarian system.

Would there be a central bank?
Would the central bank have a monopoly on money creation? (or would banks be able to issue their own currency)
Would the central bank have regulatory power to set interest rates? (if not, would banks be entirely free to set their own rates?)
Would the central bank have regulatory power to mandate a minimum reserve rate for banks?
Would the central bank have regulatory power to audit banks? (i.e. full access to bank business records)


The more I read up on the economics behind all of this, the more I see the configuration of the central bank as one of the most critical aspects of determining how well a Libertarian system would work.

If banks use their own currency what is to stop cheap credit and massive inflation?

How also, could people be confident in any currency when it is at the whim of any bank?

Would this system not lead to even worse problems than the current system, due to complete deregulation, and even easier cheap credit, and nothing to stop any currency being inflated like crazy?

Couldn't the above system, due to the above problems, lead to massive property booms just like we had here, but even more easily due to no regulation and no check on cheap credit?

Has this kind of a system also not been tried for over a century? In todays world (with computers and the current massive upheavals they have introduced to banking), won't such a system be completely experimental and unverified? (again, needing evidence of some kind to prove it will work)


Most of what I read on economics at the moment is being gradually gleaned from a bunch of sources, including Wikipedia on the basics of much of economics (usually as a reference as I read other stuff), I'm also reading 'Debunking Economics' by Steve Keen (focuses on neoclassical economics and its faults, plus the current crisis and its causes).

Also, I read these blogs regularly (the first for a while now, the next two only recently):
www.nakedcapitalism.com (highly recommend; not all writers are brilliant, but it's very good overall)
www.zerohedge.com (not sure how good overall yet; has had some good articles)
www.debtdeflation.com/blogs (Steve Keens blog; not sure how good yet)
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis (really good blog, occasional great insights into economic history; documentaries are great too)

I also gleaned a thing or two from Glenn Greenwalds book 'With Liberty and Justice for Some', but that is mostly US politics (he is a very good writer in general, and also has an excellent blog, but again US politics).

Why would banks use the gold standard if they weren't forced to?

How could you trust banks to maintain the gold standard without physically trading gold as currency? (which there may not be enough gold for) If you use notes your money is vulnerable to the bank changing their system.

What are they going to do when an inevitable economic downturn comes and they don't have the fiscal control fiat money provides? (the gold standard is widely regarded as worsening the 1930's depression)

Isn't the foundation of any system based on gold at the mercy of untapped gold resources? (which could cause massive inflation and uncertainty)

Doesn't the gold reserve give countries with vast untapped reserves of gold an enormous and unjust economic advantage? (to be any use, the value of gold would likely inflate far higher than now)

Doesn't the gold standard put a top-end cap on worldwide economic growth, if no more gold can be produced?


Another blog I forgot in previous post:
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis (really good blog, occasional great insights into economic history; documentaries are great too)

KyussBishop wrote: »

Has this kind of a system also not been tried for over a century? In todays world (with computers and the current massive upheavals they have introduced to banking), won't such a system be completely experimental and unverified? (again, needing evidence of some kind to prove it will work)

You seem to be under a complete misapprehension of how things can and do happen in the real world. You seem to be under the impression that the current state of affairs is the outcome of careful deliberation based on scientific and empirical research.

Taking an Irish example, were things like the Exceptional Needs Payments and massive increases in welfare spending rolled out on the basis of careful analysis, experiment and proof, or merely as populist vote winning policy to hold onto power?

Monetary history has countless examples of drastic change without any precedent. Modern monetary history is more a series of botched jobs(Bretton Woods 1944 to name one), and is an experiment in itself, the latest experiment being the Euro.

KyussBishop wrote: »

They are not answered elsewhere, they are pretty specific questions; pointing me to a book or some authors is just another way of fobbing off my questions, it's lazy and is not a discussion.

Those specific questions are answered elsewhere, you just haven't looked. In this case I have no interest in discussing things that are easily found elsewhere and I'm fine with being called lazy for that.

I understand your point, just a little tapped out at the moment. In other threads, I have been very obliging when hit with walls of links to studies and statistics to actually go and read them, often when posters obviously had not done so themselves. If others want to answer misconceptions of the gold standard 101, ok, but I'm just too tired.