Libertarian Purity Test

[Luke Smith]

79.

I believe I was at 75 when I took this test about 6 months ago so I went up 4 points. It should be said however that I consider myself a conservative, not a libertarian.

[fatcat]

The last question seems pretty redundant.

Whether or not you call yourself anarcho capitalist (which i do) has nothing to do with whether you're actually libertarian or not.

Also theres a few other ambiguous questions, like should we legalize marijuana, which some people have a problem with the word legalize and prefer decriminalize.

[Luke Smith]

Also theres a few other ambiguous questions, like should we legalize marijuana, which some people have a problem with the word legalize and prefer decriminalize.

Legalizing and decriminalizing marijuana are two different things. Decriminalize means to lower the crime of possession from a misdemeanor, which goes on one's criminal record if convicted, to a violation, where a fine still has to be paid but there is no possibility of jail time and nothing goes on the criminal record upon conviction. Legalize means to completely make it legal, meaning no jail time, no fines, no nothing.

[Manuel_OKelly]

113

School vouchers? Increases cost of private school. No thanks.
Housing vouchers? Increases cost of private apartments. No thanks.

[Luke Smith]

113

School vouchers? Increases cost of private school. No thanks.
Housing vouchers? Increases cost of private apartments. No thanks.

Yeah, good point. I already said no on the school vouchers, but now I'm saying no on the housing vouchers too. But somehow I'm at 80 now instead of 78 so I must have answered yes to something else.

[dc0de]

157

Although I consider myself to be an anarcho-capitalist my only objection is to private ownership of land. I don't believe land can be owned, because there's nothing actually there TO own. if you claim to own some plot of land, you are just merely marking the corners making a 2 dimensional surface. There's nothing there, it's abstract and it's no better than the concept of intellectual property. How high and how deep does your plot of land go? who judges that.. how do we decide what's "fair". should an airplane at 30000 feet have to get your permission to fly over your house? What about a company digging tunnels for some communication infrastructure 100 feet down? do they need to get your permission? Even if those are determined, all you are doing is marking out a 3D piece of space, with nothing concrete there and no effort needed to "own" it.

You can own a house or building that goes on land, or you could own a fence that encircles some piece of land, with signs on it to people who cross the fence that they agree not take any resources from within the fenced area. But you can't own a definition of a 2D or 3D segment of space.

[anarchir]

159. I dont know where that 1 point went but I guess I'll have to do some thinking and research.

[Richard Garner]

I got 159. I suspect that vouchers for schools and housing may be an improvement over what we have now. I lost points for saying no to "should we sell off more government land?" Governments should not sell what they do not rightly own. Government land should be turned over to whomever is using and occupying it at that moment.

[Richard Garner]

I haven't finished the test yet.  I got to the question about government spending on higher education and went off on a rant in my head about how I couldn't get any grants because my dad had a 401k.  Uh, hello, that's not to pay for me, that's for him to retire!  And since the societal impact of me going to college is going to be far more beneficial than the societal impact of draining his 401k, it's a fucked up system.  That's all.

Just out of curiosity, how much does it cost to go to that school that you want to attend?  Lets assume that it costs $2000 per semester..  how hard would it be to put away $20 every day that you worked for school?  After 100 work days, you would have your money for a semester...  do that for 2 to 3 years, and you have your money for school...  No loans, no grants, nada...  It may be a little difficult, but it is not the end of the world... That's what i am trying to do...  I got 18 classes to go to finish (I have not been in school for almost 15 years, but have spent the past 6 months re-learning my stuff so that I can start next fall.)

Believe me...  It took me almost 7 years to pay off the loans I took from the first time around...  you don't want to start out after college with that kind of debt....

Anthony

Thinkl of it as a business loan: Most businesses start out in debt, but their owners think it is OK because they expect that by being in business they will be able to pay it off. Likewise, you get into debt accumulating human captal, but you expect that it will produce more than enough for you to be able to pay off that debt and earn a higher income for you.

[Richard Garner]

51 - medium core libertarian.

Yeah, so sue me.

I see some limited government as a necessary evil, but want them to just butt out my, yours, and everybody else's busines while reducing taxes as much as possible, and cutting spending to only the bare necessities.   A goverment that doesnt' feel the need to spy on it's citizens or maintain a global military empire far beyond what is strategically necessary to maintain peace. 

Legalized drugs, prostitution, gambling, and guns?  Have at it!  Just don't put anybody else in danger.

Private roads, private courts, private military, private police & fire fighters?  Now that's just moonbat crazy.

I don't fully agree with the absolute, dogmatic, anarchic Libertarians.  But I still appreciate them as a balance of ideas, because there's a lot of Socialists, Communists, and Facists tugging on the rope at the other side.

You should check out William Wollridge's Uncle Same, The Monopoly Man. He was writing quite some time ago, during the sixties, as an American having just returned from the studying in the UK. The UK at the time was dominated by a post war consensus that centred around the idea that "The New Britain must be PLANNED," with people proposing a "national plan to make the best use of our resources." So you can imagine what a stunner Wollridge's book was coming out at that time. It was inspired by a conversation he had with people at St Andrew's University, where he was studying. At that time the telephone services were all nationalised, and private telephones were still too expensive for many to have them. Instead people had to accumulate exact change for a call, find a local business that a) had a phone and b) was open beyond the hour of six or seven, attract the attention of an operator, wihich was hard either because manpower was down or operators couldn't be bothered to help, then one had to wait for a while for a connection to be established, and then, once the call had been recieved, because their were no more phones where you were calling too than where you were calling from, you had to wait for whomever answered the call to locate whomever the call was for. In the end Woolridge gave up using the phones. So one day, in the student bar, Woolridge asked why the phones were socialised. Why not denationalise them as a privately owned utility? The response, he says, was "positively condescending... it was inconcievable to operate it for any other than the public interest. Who ever had heard of a private telephone company?"

He found this attitude changed when he told his fellow students about the early history of the Bell telephone company. Sure, they still didn't like the idea of denationalised, private phone services, but they could no longer say the idea was inconcievable or that provision was invariable, because here was a historical example of something else.

Woolridge's book carries on in that vein. He does not provide any speculative work as to how private alternatives to even the most basic functions of government might be provided. Nor does he do much arguing in favour of, or against, private alternatives. His object is to say that somebody other than government doing these things is not inconcievable... because here they are: He provides historical cases of private provision of postal services, of courts and laws, or police protection, of schools for poor people, of roads, of coin minting and money issue. These things can concievably be done privately because they all have been done privately in the past.

[Richard Garner]

There already are private firefighters.

...and private roads and private arbitration.

There are twice as many private police in the UK as public ones.

[Richard Garner]

51 - medium core libertarian.

Yeah, so sue me.

I see some limited government as a necessary evil, but want them to just butt out my, yours, and everybody else's busines while reducing taxes as much as possible, and cutting spending to only the bare necessities.   A goverment that doesnt' feel the need to spy on it's citizens or maintain a global military empire far beyond what is strategically necessary to maintain peace. 

Legalized drugs, prostitution, gambling, and guns?  Have at it!  Just don't put anybody else in danger.

Private roads, private courts, private military, private police & fire fighters?  Now that's just moonbat crazy.

I don't fully agree with the absolute, dogmatic, anarchic Libertarians.  But I still appreciate them as a balance of ideas, because there's a lot of Socialists, Communists, and Facists tugging on the rope at the other side.

Join the medium-core libertarian club.  75 here.  All you people are crazy

I'd like to see your answers - I can't see how anybody could score that low and really be a libertarian!

[Richard Garner]

Private roads, private courts, private military, private police & fire fighters?  Now that's just moonbat crazy.

Why?  What can government, a group of people, voted for by people, do for people what other people cannot do for people?

Because when you make crime & war a private, for-profit, industry, you tend to see a lot more of it.   See Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial-Complex" for details.  The military is privatized enough as it is already, with huge money being made by defense contractors who hold a lot of sway over what the military does.  We wouldn't have anywhere near the Empire or wars we do now if there wasn't so much money to be made in it. 

This does not involve privatisation, it involves contracting out. It is still the government, raising taxes to pay for tanks and bombs. There is little private about it. What difference does it really make if the government doesn't gave to gather the people together to do this because somebody else has already gathered them together, as a "private firm" and the government just pays them?

And when you privatize police, they'll be even more incentivized to find crimes to punish than now, and an erosion of your liberties far beyond what we have now. 

Why would you choose to pay for a police force to punish "crimes" you have no interest in having punished? The police's incentives would be to punish the offesnes people are willing to pay for being punished, not just any offense they want. They have to get customers, after all, don't they?

You want legalized drugs?  It'll never happen, ever, with a privatized police force when there's money to be made kicking in your doors to steal your plants and put your ass in prison.

Why? Who is going to pay for that? And are they going to pay enough, considering that I will be paying my own police force to arrest anybody that tries to kick in my doors to steal my plants and put me in jail?

Private courts?  How does that work? The guy with the deepest pockets wins? This one seems awfully susceptible to corruption.  Like what we see in these third-world nations where there is little,

No, like what you see in the USA, where 75% of all business disputes are handled by private arbitration, where, if you get in a dispute with your employer, the chances are that it will go to arbitration before it goes to court, where, if the person you bought something from on ebay, fails to deliver, they issue will be settled by the arbiter you agreed to when you opened your ebay account, etc. etc. Private courts are already a part of everyday life. I can open my yellow pages and find dozens of arbiters and dispute resolution services right now.

if any, government to speak of, only bribery.
This is one area I don't want to mess with.  A jury of your peers should decide the law.  Not $$$.

If a private arbiter was suspected of being corrupt or open to bribes he would lose money. Why would anybody agree to take their disputes to an arbiter they knew may have taken bribes from the other party?

Other than the odd on-ramp or bridge, private roads, by and large, are an impossible dream anyway.

The first roads in the US were privately owned and built, and were competitive.

I think the best way to deal with that issue is to pay for the roads ONLY with fees collected from car owners when you register a car, or buy gas.

So I pay the same when I drive on a road that is hardly used at all as opposed to aroad with a high volume of traffic? I pay the same when I drive at non-peak times as when I drive at peak times? I pay for roads I never use at all?[/quote]

Non-car owners shouldn't be expected to pay for the roads, just like I don't want my tax dollars going to fund a public rail system I would
never use.

A lot of hard-core libertarians spout off against One-Size-Fits-All solutions, and Zero-Tolerance policies. 
But isn't a complete, anti-government mindset on every issue just another One-Size-Fits-All solution?
[/quote]

No. You want your government provided this and that? Fine. Gather up as many people as you can persuade to help you, and go about it. Just don't force it on anybody else. Don't force people who don't want it to pay for it, and don't attack them for trying alternatives. Think of anarchism as basically a big opt out system: Completely legalise the private provision of whatever it is you think government should provide, and let people opt out of paying for what government services they don't want, and let them contract for whatever alternatives they may want. That is all anarchists want, because in effect your "government" would then cease to be a government and become just another organisation competing amongst others for subscribers. The instant you recognise this it becomes obvious that anarchists have no intention of forcing their scheme on anybody who doesn't want it, just ensuring that no scheme is forced on those that don't want it, whilst opponents of anarchism are all in favour of forcing people to have what they don't want.

[Richard Garner]

That's the rub, I think.  We can imagine vouchers without strings, but will never get them.

The same can be said of privatization.

Libertarian "Privatize" = Ending state involvement
Statist "Privatize" = Sell it all at once for $1 to the buddy of a bureaucrat making the decision of who to sell it to.

I agree. That's why I put yes to privatising, but no to selling of government lands.

[Richard Garner]

i got 123. I don't think some of those questions were that great. Vouchers = bad. Privatize. Vigilante justice = bad (IMO). Judges making laws = bad also, too much power in one place.

You want to abolish the common law and all civil law and replace it entirely with statutary legislation?!

Also

Should all of the Federal Reserve's discretionary powers be eliminated and the monetary base frozen?

What does it mean to freeze the monetary base?

It means that the feceral reserve can issue zero new money.

plus the question

Are worker safety regulations too strict?

I said no, because most private businesses have stricter standards than the government and so they don't usually feel the effects of the government. Worker regulations I see as something the government does to pick on anyone that might challenge them. I guess their strict in that sense.

Interesting point. I have worked in shops that provide better "customer's rights" than retail standards suggest. For instance, under the law only the person who purchased a good can get a refund, even if they had a reciept (because the sale is a contract, so the actual buyer is the person who was the other partyof the contract.) But I don't know any company with a retail policy that would forbid a refund to anybody with a reciept simply because they weren't the buyer (that is why we have to watch for customers who pick up dropped reciepts).

Also to be a good libertarian I don't think you need to believe the courts need to be privatized. I am not an anarchist partially that reason. I think we need government courts to protect the minority from the majority. Private courts would follow the demands of the masses.

Why do you say "would"? Why don't you say "do"? Private dispute resolution is commonplace.