From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 19:36:55 MDT
I didn't find "Triton" to be that enlightening about
liberty - or anything else. Check out the
International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL)
site. Laissez Faire Books is also a good source. One
of the really seminal books on how a libertarian
society could actually function is Morris and Linda
Tannehill's "The Market for Liberty." I read this
back in the late '60's, I guess, when it was new, and
it is still on target. It will answer a whole lot of
questions and make you think about things from very
different perspectives.
David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" also comes
highly recommended, but I personally neither like nor
trust Friedman, having met him many times. He always
comes accross as the ultimate Mensan snot - similar to
my take on Harlan Ellison (who he vaguely resembles) -
but without the redeeming humor or other human
qualities. (Every "discussion" an opportunity to
prove someone else WRONG!) I've been told that
Friedman has matured since I last encountered him, so
I give his book a tentative nod, as I believe it has
been revised.
I was also strongly influenced by Rothbard's "Power
and Market" in the late '60's, altho it doesn't do the
job of painting a picture of a libertarian utopia the
way that "The Market for Liberty" does. I think ISIL
has the Tannehill book. If not, probably Laissez
Faire. It has been reedited and reprinted since the
original.
One thing that the Tannehill's did was to focus on the
legal, fiduciary structural elements of a truly free
society. What would it take for people to live
peacefully without a monopoly state? One obvious
thing would be a natural brake on conflicts spiraling
out of control and ending up in Afgan feuds or wars.
The state provides this via a hierarchy with a fixed
top end - as in the Supreme Court. Disputes can only
be carried so far, right or wrong. This puts a stop
to these things in tribal societies that last for
generations. Even if the decisions were often as not
rolls of the dice, the ending of disputes itself is of
value.
The weakness of the general libertarian position comes
from the failure to invest the energy into carrying
the broad suggestions from people such as the
Tannehill's into a detailed, fully thought out set of
business plans, including transitional vehicles to get
from here to there. Additional problems have to do
with unresolved issues over original property claims,
externalities, emergencies, free riders, children's
rights,... But, the statists have not done any
better!
The libertarians got seduced mostly by politics, where
they had and have some intellectual influence to be
sure, forcing the other parties to at least deal with
issues that they might otherwise ignore. But
libertarians are never going to be voted into power -
not until they accomplish a lot of other things first
- by which time their first and last act will
doubtless be to disband the vestigal state.
You might look at some of my previous posts re the
idea of a social contract, something that I think is
probably essential to getting there, and eminently
doable and likely extremely profitable as well for
whoever gets the successful prototype off the ground.
In response to:
Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com) Tue Aug 20 2002 -
02:00:16 MDT
"... That is, I see a libertarian utopia as either
solitary (where we each
exist in different universes) or highly chaotic and
unstable (anything
goes). My reading of such is limited to S.R. Delaney's
_Triton_, and
that was many years ago. (Not to mention a struggle to
parse, with
seemingly quite a few paragraphs ending in four
closing parentheses. No
doubt this influenced my own stilted writing style).
Possibly some
Heinlein will count, but I recall mostly struggle
toward such, not
long-term issues where stability is paramounted. Maybe
libertarian
utopias can only exist on the frontier?
For long-term stability, it seems the only options are
an oppressive
capitalist (oppressive to the point of fascism) or a
'true' communist
utopia. In which case the latter may be preferred.
Perhaps extropianism
should embrace socialism as an indirect approach to
get people to flee
from the planet? "
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