I think government is uh can be and it a Force for good and many of the problems we Face are what social 01:04:07 scientists would call common good or Collective action problems and actually require coordination from government to be addressed so there is a a political philosophy of 01:04:20 course that is increasingly strong in the United States the government is not good for anything

She was openly critical of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. “When Brown comes out, her point is ‘I don’t want to have to force someone to associate with me,’” Strain says. Today she would probably be considered a libertarian.

“Better dead than Red,” as people used to say when I was growing up in America’s heartland during the Cold War.[9] Apparently, it’s better to be dead than Green now. That argument is made in public with a straight face. It is not enough, then, to interpret climate denial (as well as vaccine denial, and even pandemic denial) as merely venal or ignorant, though much of it is that. This denial goes deeper and is more philosophically significant because it is rooted in a broken conception of individual freedom in a political morality whose time is passing, if not already past.

I'll make the libertarian argument here: Everybody has the right to mess up his or her own life.

Libertarianism is notionally grounded in the idea of self-determination and personal responsibility, but in practice, powerful libertarians routinely trade off (others') freedom for (their own) tax savings.

Measuring the health of an online community by librarian:libertarian ratio

As Wilson quips, “an unregulated organism is a dead organism.”

I’ve probably spent too much time standing around at receptions, drinking bad white wine to get me through yet another twenty-eight year old from the Cato Institute droning about how the completely new paradigm of data-ownership is going to ‘fix privacy’. (These guys are a menace. Even in Brussels!)

I know tech policy pretty well, and this absolute dumpster fire of a policy area isn’t just a cool new place to build a blockchain-based commons, but a hard-right haven of male libertarians asset-stripping the social democratic state to build global monopolies that re-run nineteenth century colonialism, but bigger.

Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.

In terms of flexibility of the labor market, Denmark stands out above both Spain and its Nordic neighbors. To begin with, firing costs in Denmark are very low. For instance, a white collar worker that was unfairly dismissed today would receive a compensation of maximum four months of salary after working for 10 years in the company. On the other hand, if the dismissal was considered to be fair, the employee would receive no compensation. In addition, there is no minimum wage established by law, and social contributions paid by employers on behalf of employees do not exceed 2% of the gross salary. In contrast, the severance pay that the same employee would receive in Spain would amount to between 13 or 21 months of salary (depending on whether the new or the old legislation is applied), a fair dismissal would result in around eight months of pay in compensation, the legal minimum wage is 756€ a month (although the cost for the company is substantially higher), and social contributions borne by the company account for one-fourth of the gross salary.

a techno-libertarianism that was contemptuous of most government attempts to regulate disruptive innovation.

radical libertarian ideology and monopolistic greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs helped to decimate the livelihood of musicians and is now undermining the communal idealism of the early internet.

But suppose on the way to Wal-Mart, you see a random mom-and-pop store that looks interesting. What do you know about its safety standards? Nothing.

Right, well of course people don’t look up product information now because the government regulates that for them. In a real libertarian society, they would be more proactive.

For a boss to fire a worker is at most a minor inconvenience; for a worker to lose a job is a disaster. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, a measure of the comparative stress level of different life events, puts being fired at 47 units, worse than the death of a close friend and nearly as bad as a jail term. Tellingly, “firing one of your employees” failed to make the scale.

Once the employee is hired, the boss may ask on a moment’s notice that she work a half hour longer or else she’s fired, and she may not dare to even complain. On the other hand, if she were to so much as ask to be allowed to start work thirty minutes later to get more sleep or else she’ll quit, she might well be laughed out of the company. A boss may, and very often does, yell at an employee who has made a minor mistake, telling her how stupid and worthless she is, but rarely could an employee get away with even politely mentioning the mistake of a boss, even if it is many times as unforgivable.

Let’s say Wanda’s Widgets has one million customers. Each customer pays it $100 per year, for a total income of $100 million. Each customer prefers Wanda to her competitor Wayland, who charges $150 for widgets of equal quality. Now let’s say Wanda’s Widgets does some unspeakably horrible act which makes it $10 million per year, but offends every one of its million customers.

The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake).

1.2: But aren’t there are libertarian ways to solve externalities that don’t involve the use of force?

Here’s the basic idea — slow & measured reform is often a web of unfortunate compromises, but its protection of the status quo generally preserves business regulation, at least at some level. Because this is unacceptable to business interests, business needs to create a crisis or scale up an existing crisis. It needs to make the status quo malfunction to the point where there is supposedly “nothing left to lose”. With the system reduced, supposedly, to rubble, economic interests can move in to “solve” the problem — if the public will only place its faith in them, and abandon their old public institutions and outdated business regulations.

Uber presented itself as a refreshing alternative to the over-bureaucratized world of urban transportation. But that’s a false choice. We can streamline sclerotic city regulators, upgrade taxi fleets and even provide users with fancy apps that make it easier to call a cab. The company’s binary presentation – us, or City Hall – frames the debate in artificial terms.

Uber claims that its driver rating system is a more efficient way to monitor drivers, but that’s an entirely unproven assumption. While taxi drivers have been known to misbehave, the worldwide litany of complaints against Uber drivers – for everything from dirty cars and spider bites to assault with a hammer, fondling and rape – suggest that Uber’s system may not work as well as old-fashioned regulation. It’s certainly not noticeably superior.

Even without surge pricing, Uber and its supporters are hiding its full costs. When middle-class workers are underpaid or deprived of benefits and full working rights, as Uber’s reportedly are, the entire middle-class economy suffers. Overall wages and benefits are suppressed for the majority, while the wealthy few are made even richer.

A “sharing economy,” by definition, is lateral in structure. It is a peer-to-peer economy. But Uber, as its name suggests, is hierarchical in structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining their level of earnings. And its pricing mechanisms impose unpredictable costs on its customers, extracting greater amounts whenever the data suggests customers can be compelled to pay them.This is a top-down economy, not a “shared” one.

“Anybody that made it through the ’90s and [aughts] without having their libertarianism taking a pretty good hit wasn’t paying attention,” he says in a recent telephone interview. “We deregulated every g--d--- thing, and it came back at us in this way that we may never recover.”

To conceive of libertarianism as only the NAP is incredibly shortsighted and oversimplified. That needs to be understood and it needs be excused because we have a whole raft of scholars in our community who tell us that the proper use of force is the full width and breath of what it means to be a libertarian. I say it is a whole lot more. For me, it includes, skepticisim of authority, questioning, reasoning, forgiveness, love, kindness, mutual aid, collective defense, voluntary cooperation, building and not destroying. It is about prosperity, about helping people. It is about ending the rule of violence and replacing it with the rule of reason. It’s about resolving disputes not with the executioner or the torturer but with cooperative mediation or voluntary arbitration. It’s about, not returning to a darker time but advancing to a more brilliant future where every life is valued, cultivated and brought to its maximum potential.