I will be curious how you would respond to Scott Sumner. For me, thinking about the question of, "can you provide examples of large-scale failures of libertarian ideology" after having just finished _Slouching_ I answer that differently than I would have.
1) While libertarian ideology is, ostensibly, anti-fascist, the book would prompt th…
I will be curious how you would respond to Scott Sumner. For me, thinking about the question of, "can you provide examples of large-scale failures of libertarian ideology" after having just finished _Slouching_ I answer that differently than I would have.
1) While libertarian ideology is, ostensibly, anti-fascist, the book would prompt the question, "does libertarianism actually provide a defense against fascism or does that defense collapse against the force of people saying (a la Polanyi) that they want the state to recognize them as more than just participants in the market."
2) If you believe that the 20th C was more good than terrible, you need to consider that the good parts of the century required government to play its role properly (not just to get out of the way). For example, the project of coordinating the activity of 8bn people requires more than just a market, it requires international regulator regimes. I remember a conversation with a political scientist who said that part of what drives both extra-national bodies (like the EU), and the push towards national (rather than federal) politics in the US is that business benefits from having regulatory questions that can be answered at a broad level, rather than in a patchwork.
It's hard to imagine a government that contributed to regulatory regimes internationally while being libertarian at home (or, to turn that around, one failure of libertarianism would be to not attempt to improve the functioning of international bodies).
Somewhat related, I would read the history of WWI in _Slouching_ as an example of the failure of states with a weak sense of the role of government, but I'd have to think hard about how to defend that.
3) Before reading _Slouching_ my top-of-the-head answer to the problems of libertarian governance would be examples of the tragedy of the commons -- Global Warming; Acid Rain, overfishing, loss of biodiversity, etc . . .
Those don't appear to have caused mass death in the long 20th Century, but that's in significant part because we did not address them in a libertarian way.
To riff (perhaps too loosely) on my own comment) --
My mental model of libertarianism may be off; I don't spend much time reading libertarians, but my impression is that two strong general rules for libertarians are (1) when possible decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and, (2) a preference for organization that have a clear, well-defined mandate and scope, over organizations constructed around abstract principles.
Reading the chapters on WWI --> Great Depression --> WWII feels like a strong argument in favor of (1) decision-makers having a strong international awareness and (2) the efforts to build international bodies (like the UN) which exists to reflect and represent abstract principles rather than specific mandates.
Both of those are part of what Keynes argued (as represented in the book), and that's why, in this context it seems easy to say that Keynes may have been a conservative, but wasn't a libertarian (and that Scott Sumner is arguing for a very different perspective).
Re: "Reading the chapters on WWI --> Great Depression --> WWII feels like a strong argument in favor of (1) decision-makers having a strong international awareness and (2) the efforts to build international bodies…”
Yes. But you also need a coalition of all non chaos-monkey forces. China has really fallen down on that this year...
I will be curious how you would respond to Scott Sumner. For me, thinking about the question of, "can you provide examples of large-scale failures of libertarian ideology" after having just finished _Slouching_ I answer that differently than I would have.
1) While libertarian ideology is, ostensibly, anti-fascist, the book would prompt the question, "does libertarianism actually provide a defense against fascism or does that defense collapse against the force of people saying (a la Polanyi) that they want the state to recognize them as more than just participants in the market."
2) If you believe that the 20th C was more good than terrible, you need to consider that the good parts of the century required government to play its role properly (not just to get out of the way). For example, the project of coordinating the activity of 8bn people requires more than just a market, it requires international regulator regimes. I remember a conversation with a political scientist who said that part of what drives both extra-national bodies (like the EU), and the push towards national (rather than federal) politics in the US is that business benefits from having regulatory questions that can be answered at a broad level, rather than in a patchwork.
It's hard to imagine a government that contributed to regulatory regimes internationally while being libertarian at home (or, to turn that around, one failure of libertarianism would be to not attempt to improve the functioning of international bodies).
Somewhat related, I would read the history of WWI in _Slouching_ as an example of the failure of states with a weak sense of the role of government, but I'd have to think hard about how to defend that.
3) Before reading _Slouching_ my top-of-the-head answer to the problems of libertarian governance would be examples of the tragedy of the commons -- Global Warming; Acid Rain, overfishing, loss of biodiversity, etc . . .
Those don't appear to have caused mass death in the long 20th Century, but that's in significant part because we did not address them in a libertarian way.
To riff (perhaps too loosely) on my own comment) --
My mental model of libertarianism may be off; I don't spend much time reading libertarians, but my impression is that two strong general rules for libertarians are (1) when possible decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and, (2) a preference for organization that have a clear, well-defined mandate and scope, over organizations constructed around abstract principles.
Reading the chapters on WWI --> Great Depression --> WWII feels like a strong argument in favor of (1) decision-makers having a strong international awareness and (2) the efforts to build international bodies (like the UN) which exists to reflect and represent abstract principles rather than specific mandates.
Both of those are part of what Keynes argued (as represented in the book), and that's why, in this context it seems easy to say that Keynes may have been a conservative, but wasn't a libertarian (and that Scott Sumner is arguing for a very different perspective).
Re: "Reading the chapters on WWI --> Great Depression --> WWII feels like a strong argument in favor of (1) decision-makers having a strong international awareness and (2) the efforts to build international bodies…”
Yes. But you also need a coalition of all non chaos-monkey forces. China has really fallen down on that this year...