Susan Hogarth wrote: BH> I have to call bullshit on this canard that radicals habitually trot out. <BH
SH> Such language! <SH http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullshit Even if this slang hasn't reached North Carolina yet, I would hope you at least get Showtime there and thus can enjoy what may be the most libertarian show on American TV: Penn & Teller's Bullshit! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit%21> SH> I said the Republicans make timid promises of 'less government' - so that's not an exercise we need to duplicate. <SH You fail to address my list of 22 issues on which Republicans advocate increased or perpetuated government, and then hilariously warn us not to "duplicate" the example of the GOP's advocacy. I told you I wanted to cut the government share of GDP by over 80%, so it's just comical for you to say that this position is a "duplication" of the GOP's "timid promises of less government". I now challenge you for the third time to examine the Greatest Hits draft platform <http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html> , and tell us specifically what makes it a "timid promise of less government". It consists almost entirely of language from current and past LP platforms, and this forum is named "LPplatform-discuss". So are you here to discuss platform language, or not? SH> The point I was making with the Hayek quote was that I agree with his assessment of the lesson libertarians need to take from the socialist (political) successes of the twentieth century - that a bold vision is more attractive and compelling than tepid offers of more-of-the-same. <SH Did Hayek also advocate the ad nauseum repetition of obvious strawmen, such as you saying "tepid offers of more-of-the-same" after ignoring a detailed 22-point description of how the the GOP differs from even the most moderate Libertarian reformer? Your example fails you anyway. Here in America, the socialist political successes of the twentieth century were decidedly not based on radical rhetoric. Surely you are aware of Milton Friedman's analysis of the Socialist <http://holtz.org/Library/MarketLiberal/SocialistPlatform1928.htm> Party platform of 1928. The Socialist Party never won more than 6% of the popular vote, but Friedman famously called it the most influential party in early-twentieth-century America because almost all of their 1928 platform's economic planks became law in the subsequent decades. Compared to the standard dogma of Marxian socialism, there is nothing absolutist or utopian or particularly radical in the planks that Friedman quotes. Instead of calling for wealth redistribution or nationalizing all means of production, they just called for generic welfare statism and the nationalization of natural resources, transportation, and communication. SH> This is the same lesson we can learn from the women's suffrage movement, the emancipation movement, and even the temperance movement. <SH All of these were essentially binary issues, especially women's suffrage. Each of them required only a single operative sentence in the relevant constitutional amendment. (Is there a magic sentence you propose as a constitutional amendment to implement the LP's 61-plank 1097-sentence Atlanta platform?) The temperance movement is in fact a counter-example, since its overreach quickly and permanently discredited the movement. Emancipation is a dubious example, since it was accompanied by the most massive amount of state force-initiation in American history (the Civil War). A more relevant lesson comes from the partial counter-current against nanny-statism that has occurred since the late 1970s in America and across the Western World, consisting of deregulation, privatization (even of retirement savings in some countries), sounder currency, freer trade, lower marginal taxes, some market-oriented environmental regulation, and even some school choice. Of particular interest is the New Zealand government elected in 1984: http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2004/04/. LP-style radicalism play no discernable role in these happy developments. SH> I believe that if we could see the future, we would see that refraining from initiating force reduces the incidence of aggression. <SH BH> Ah, so your crystal ball only shows you the future when it confirms your beliefs. That's pretty convenient. :-) <BH SH> I make no claims to see the future. I spoke of my belief, which is based on reason. <SH Yes, your belief about the future, based on reasoning about the future. Interestingly, you may be the first documented case of a human who can make accurate judgments about the future while sincerely denying having any conscious insights about the future. The analogous malady for vision is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight, and is a favorite topic in the academic literature of epistemology. You could make some young epistemology grad student very famous if you volunteer to be his dissertation case study. :-) BH> My three-year-old similarly believes it's nonsensical that poking her with a needle can reduce the net amount of her pain. <BH SH> It's true that I do not choose to treat other my fellow citizens as three-year olds. <SH I'll say it a third time: we're not talking about making people do things for their own good, and so the child in the analogy of course represents more than one person -- viz., the citizenry. The point of the pain-fearer being a child in the analogy is not to invoke her status as a minor, but to make it believable that someone could be so naive as to not understand that a little intentional infliction of a bad thing (like pain or coercion) can prevent a lot more of that bad thing. I asked you point-blank to deny this hypothesis, but you ignored it. I even phrased my challenge another way, and hung a bell on it: "You apparently believe that an investment in force initiation could never lead to a net reduction in the overall incidence of force initiation. Do you have any actual arguments for this thesis?" Cat got your tongue? BH> Nope, the Trolley Problem is about hurting some people to save a lot of other people. <BH SH> I stand corrected. Also an abhorrent idea. <SH So if six innocents were tied to the tracks, and a runaway trolley was about to kill five of them, and you were the only person who could throw the switch so that the trolley kills only the sixth innocent, then you would NOT save the five? If this is really your position, then is there no number of savable innocents that would make you change your mind? I know you said you were "selfish" about not wanting to be an aggressor, but if find it hard to believe that anyone could seriously be so callous as to value having clean hands over the lives of so many innocent fellow human beings. Doug Kendall ("Libertarian News") wrote: DK> Debating anarchism vs. libertarianism is a waste of time, at this stage of the game. [...] If the LP fails to recognize and uphold these very simple concepts, we're going to have a BIG problem. <DK I would say: if the LP formally endorses the particular axioms of one faction -- whether moderate or radical -- in a way that is explicitly inconsistent with the principles of another significant faction, then the LP is going to continue to have a big problem. Luckily, we already have language in our SoP and current and past platforms that all significant factions should be able to agree on. Perhaps you could audit the Greatest Hits draft <http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html> platform to see whether it "fails to recognize and uphold [the] very simple concepts" that you say are the heart of libertarianism. Or, we could continue to amuse ourselves with dueling aphorisms while the clock to Denver ticks down....
