Conservatism Liberalism Essay Research Paper What is

Conservatism, Liberalism Essay, Research Paper

What is libertarianism.

Libertarians want a win-win world of peace and plenty. And we believe that the only way to get it is through self-government… not others-government.

Self-government is the combination of personal responsibility and tolerance. Responsibility means you govern yourself. Tolerance means you don’t force your values on peaceful, honest people.

Today, however, others-government is giving us insecurity, conflict and poverty. Let’s revitalize our heritage of self-government to create a win-win world where everyone comes out ahead.

STRATEGIES FOR ARGUMENT

Many libertarian arguments are like fundamentalist arguments: they depend upon restricting your attention to a very narrow field so that you will not notice that they fail outside of that field. For example, fundamentalists like to restrict the argument to the bible. Libertarians like to restrict the argument to their notions of economics, justice, history, and rights and their misrepresentations of government and contracts. Widen the scope, and their questionable assumptions leap into view. Why should I accept that “right” as a given. Is that a fact around the world, not just in the US. Are there counter examples for that idea. Are libertarians serving their own class interest only. Is that economic argument complete, or are there other critical factors or strategies which have been omitted. When they make a historical argument, can we find current real-world counterexamples. If we adopt this libertarian policy, there will be benefits: but what will the disadvantages be. Are libertarians reinventing what we already have, only without safeguards.

There are some common counterarguments for which libertarians have excellent rebuttals. Arguments that government is the best or only way to do something may fail: there are many examples of many government functions being performed privately. Some of them are quite surprising. Arguments based on getting any services free from government will fail: all government services cost money that comes from somewhere. Arguments that we have a free market are patently untrue: there are many ways the market is modified.

There are a number of scientific, economic, political, and philosophical concepts which you may need to understand to debate some particular point. These include free market, public goods, externalities, tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma, adverse selection, market failure, mixed economy, evolution, catastrophe theory, game theory, etc. Please feel free to suggest other concepts for this list.

One way to bring about a large volume of argument is to cross-post to another political group with opposing ideas, such as alt.politics.radical-left. The results are quite amusing, though there is a lot more heat than light. Let’s not do this more often than is necessary to keep us aware that libertarianism is not universally accepted.

LIBERTARIAN EVANGELISTIC ARGUMENTS

Evangelists (those trying to persuade others to adopt their beliefs) generally have extensively studied which arguments have the greatest effect on the unprepared. Usually, these arguments are brief propositions that can be memorized easily and regurgitated in large numbers. These arguments, by the process of selection, tend not to have obvious refutations, and when confronted by a refutation, the commonest tactic is to recite another argument. This eliminates the need for actual understanding of the basis of arguments, and greatly speeds the rate at which evangelists can be trained.

Without preparation, even blatantly fallacious arguments may disturb or convince a targeted individual. Evangelists, who tend to be more interested in effect than in accuracy, don’t tend to point out that there are usually lots of valid counterarguments available, sometimes known for millennia.

If the target is not the person spoken to (it may be a group of onlookers, such as the lurkers in newsgroups or listeners on a radio show), we might expect that the “discussion” will focus on making the person spoken to seem wrong, ridiculous, uncomfortable, at a loss, etc.

Small wonder many people are not interested in entering “discussions” with evangelists! They’re likely to be out-prepared, swamped (or worse convinced) by specious arguments, and possibly used as a cat’s paw in the persuasion of listeners.

The arguments treated here are not strawman misrepresentations: they are all evangelistic arguments that have actually been made by libertarians. Many of them have been made frequently. Although they are often used evangelistically, we can’t presume that someone making them doesn’t understand their basis or cannot support their argument. And on the other hand, often other libertarians cringe when they hear these.

Most of these questions are phrased as assertions: that is simply a less clumsy shorthand for “How could I respond to a libertarian claiming X.”, where X is the assertion.

1. Libertarians are defenders of freedom and rights.

The foremost defenders of our freedoms and rights, which libertarians prefer you overlook, are our governments. National defense, police, courts, registries of deeds, public defenders, the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights, etc. all are government efforts that work towards defending freedoms

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