And where exactly has unregulated capitalism brought economic stability and an end to exploitation, rather than much more of both? 

Yes, they'd allow any job to hire whoever they want...I'm not sure what your point is. Generally, that isn't really any different to any form of capitalism. The difference is wealthy, powerful elites would also be allowed to fire anybody who they want, to cut costs on safety as much as they want, and to pay as little as they want.

If you think competition to attract a workforce will fix things, you're wrong. Proletarians are more desperate to take any job they can get to avoid starvation (especially as Libertarians want to abolish a jobseekers allowance) so will take merely a subsistence wage if you abolish all the legalisation the workers have fought for the past 100+ years to protect them. Trade unionists fought for suffrage, right to organise, and then once they had been achieved they could use their influence to bring in legislation guaranteeing unemployment benefits, pensions, sick pay, legally required minimum wage, free education and healthcare etc.

Libertarians want to abolish all these; apart from, they claim, suffrage and the right to organise. But suffrage and the right to organise were what gave birth to the other things; despite the sophistry of neo-classical and austrian economists, simply looking at Pinochet's Chile, the effects of IMF policies on the developing world, or Capitalist Europe in the 19th Century and early 20th is evidence that unregulated market makes things worse for the workers; hence, if a Libertarian Party gets elected (very unlikely) or comes to power through a coup (far more likely) the reality of it's policies would instantly either see it getting kicked out and replaced with another party, or in the case of coming into power through a coup would face resistance from workers. In both cases, the Libertarian state either perishes or must abolish the right for people to organise outside of state channels and the right for anyone but the employers who benefit from this system to vote. Essentially, Libertarian ideology wants to regress Capitalism to an unreformed state and can only keep in power through a repressive state apparatus.

The same applies to Classical Liberalism.

Could you actually respond to my posts please? As a completely free market leads to oppression in the workplace, can you please explain how you will bring it about without abolishing democracy and the right to organise? As I've said, the opening demands of the socialist movement started with the demands for universal suffrage and the right to organise. These inevitably interfere with the free market, and to return to "pure" free market requires removing all the achievements of the workers movement in the last 150 years or so.

You're living in a dream world, people say communism can never work in practise but you Libertarian Fascists don't even attempt to imagine how you'd practically implement it without crushing democratic rights!

The spectrum is meaningless. It treats political systems as consumer choices and ignores the historical context of them; and "economic freedom" is a freedom that only applies to the powerful, and to the detriment of everyone else. Read the article. It's clear that free market policies make the powerful richer and the powerless poorer, just from looking at it in action. There is a reason why "Classical Liberalism" disappeared when universal suffrage and the right to organise came into being; tell me how you can bring about free market policies without illegalising trade unions and therefore the right to organise.

You can talk about a ideal society all you want, but the real world is more complicated and social engineering of dream societies isn't possible. New political systems come about if they satisfy the interests of some part of society; you can bet economic "freedom" will always be more important to the libertarian movement than social freedom, precisely because people have vested interests in it.

And stop dodging the question. Tell me in detail what you're actually advocating, and how you can feasibly envisage it coming about. I want a real debate here, saying "libertarianism isn't authoritarian because it's the opposite of authoritarianism!" is a useless circular argument. It's about as useful as saying 1=1.

The influence of Friedman is widespread, and the closest thing to influence Libertarianism will ever have.

More importantly, Libertarian ideology relies an awful lot on the invincibility of unregulated markets, which requires taking an awful lot from Friedman and Von Mises' economic theories.


Enough about how Libertarians see things; what is it they actually want to implement, this is the only important thing.

That's a load of crap, there's nobody who would disagree with that. The difference is different people say different things infringe on other's autonomy.

What matters is what you're actually advocating, not some vague and poorly defined piece of shit about your ideals. Libertarians need to be de-mystified, and stripped naked to reveal them for the authoritarians they really are.

Just a note: libertarians don't even support low taxation. Friedman actually advocated a flat tax; so for the vast majority of people, taxation would increase but for millionaires, billionaires, it would decrease to (for them) insignificant amounts.

That man truly was scum.

Just out of curiousity, how do you envisage a classic liberal society?

An unaccountable elite is the mark of a despotism. The powerful should always be held accountable to the mass of people, and if that's "collectivism" then I'm a borg.

Yeah, all my own writing.

Well are you going to debate what it says?

I'm a student at Manchester University in the UK.

A day as me would involve waking up at about 8.30, smoking a cigarette, having a shower then breakfast, then a day of lectures and seminars in Politics and Chinese Studies punctuated with, of course, cigarettes. Then I'll go to the library to do my days work, before returning to my halls of residence to drink beer or wine with my friends or go round to my girlfriends flat. Fairly typical student life really.

Please, please, please don’t be a libertarian.


There are 2 types of Libertarians. The “classical” type believes that the mass of people should not be dependant on or subject to the effects of a wealthy elite searching for profit at any cost, or the repressive state that betrays the people it claims to represent and acts only in the interests of the powerful. They believe industry should be democratised to serve the millions not the millionaires, and government should be heavily federalised rather than centralised and controlled by direct, rather than representative, democracy ensuring the government is controlled from the bottom up and is never separate to the people. Nowadays, the above people call themselves “Anarchists” or “Libertarian Socialists.” These guys are alright. I consider myself one.

However, there is another more recent kind of Libertarian that appropriated the name of the anarchists-probably because it sounds rebellious and appeals to the youth. (just look at the amount of people on facebook claiming to be libertarian without actually knowing what it is) These believe that:

-Only private schools can be allowed.
-Only private hospitals are allowed.
-Roads should be privatised, and their owner can charge people who use them as much as he likes.
-Unemployment benefits should be abolished.
-State pensions should be abolished.
-Employers should be allowed to legally discriminate on age, sex, or race as they please.
-Minimum wage should be abolished. Employers can pay as little as they like.
-Employers can fire workers for no reason.
-Legalisation of private mercenaries. (some believe mercenaries should replace the police and military)
-No council housing for the homeless.
-Businesses should not be legally obliged to protect the environment.
-Essential goods which are too expensive for some people to afford should not have their prices lowered by government subsidies.

You might wonder why anyone would possibly think this is a good thing, or anything to do with “freedom.” This is because Libertarians have a very perverted view on freedom; freedom is associated entirely with property, and you can do anything you want with your property providing you don’t do something with anyone else’s property; in their view, if someone has to work in a sweatshop or Dickensian workhouse it’s a mutually beneficial deal between the millionaire employer and the poverty stricken worker and perfectly sound. This ideology sees things purely from the perspective of a wealthy capitalist, and equates a free society only with the freedom of the capitalist; freedom to do what you like with your property is the only freedom, and being free to use healthcare, get an education, have housing and have a job doesn’t register on their view of freedom. They say paying taxes to fund education and healthcare is theft, but what about profit? Ultimately, profit comes from paying the workers less than the value they produce for you. Even if you don’t accept Marx’s Labour Theory of Value, you can see clearly that low wages=high profits and high wages=low profits. In the mind of the Libertarian, this is ok because the worker can choose to work for the capitalist and agrees on the conditions. In reality, the worker must choose between taking the job or starving to death so in practise this theory doesn’t really work. (neither do they mention the violence and coercion that was involved in creating a property-less working class open to exploitation)

Libertarians justify this with an unshakeable religious conviction in the powers of the free market as a natural force, a bit like the Qi of Chinese mythology or the Force in Star Wars, that binds society together in harmony and only disruptions in the mystical power of the market caused by things like legally required minimum wage or paying taxes to fund pensions and healthcare can possibly make anything go wrong in society. If only the government reduced its role to simply defending the property of the wealthy and stopped giving concessions to the poor, a truly free utopia would emerge.

Ha. Ha.

Libertarianism in Action.

I have 2 points to make in this section; first, their faith in the market is silly and secondly the only form a “libertarian” society can take is that of a totalitarian military dictatorship.

Pinochet’s Libertarian Despotism in Chile was brought into power through a coup plotted by commercial and political elites in the USA and in Chile who were concerned that Chile, which had recently elected a socialist as president, would become inhospitable for business interests. This coup also brought to power the sinister “Chicago Boys,” free market economists educated by Milton Friedman himself, the grand old man of Libertarianism who was also an advisor and admirer of Pinochet. Pinochet and the gang of Chicago Libertarians started their work by banning trade unions and rounding up dissidents in the Santiago Stadium, where bags were placed over their heads and floodlights shone upon them perpetually with periodical arbitrary executions, while 28,000 other dissidents were kidnapped and tortured with a further 3000 being executed. All this was necessary to terrorise the population into accepting Chile as a laboratory for Friedman to test out his economic theories, as no sane working man or woman would ever vote for a Libertarian party. With the populace too terrified to resist, they went on to remove the minimum wage, privatised the pension system, state industries and banks, and slashed taxes on income and profits.

So what was the effect? The quadrupling of foreign debt; epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis because no-one could afford healthcare; the poverty rate doubled; the GDP dropped to almost a quarter of the Latin American average; unemployment went from 4.3% to 22%; real wages declined by 40%; and those without adequate housing went from 27% to 40%. The only thing that prevented the economy from complete economic collapse was that Pinochet neglected to privatise the copper mines that Allende had previously nationalised and were virtually the only source of steady income.
So how do Libertarians respond to this? There are 2 responses. The first one claims that Pinochet did not privatise enough and taxes were not slashed enough. The second response disassociates itself with Pinochet, saying a dictatorship is incompatible with Libertarianism so it’s nothing to do with them.

Clearly, the first response isn’t worth dealing with and someone who insists that is clearly too deluded to bother arguing with. The second response however is more interesting to discuss; it’s obvious Libertarian claims that a truly free market would give workers higher wages is complete idiocy, so to keep back minimum wages and wage increases (that interfere with the market magic) making trade unions illegal is completely necessary. And to ensure wildcat strikes don’t take place instead, the right to organise is therefore necessarily removed.
Furthermore, Libertarian policies are so insane no-one would want them apart from corporate elites and their military friends who profit. Therefore, they can only ever be enforced by a state made up of an alliance between military and business, with no democracy involved. Not only that, but Libertarian ideology is inherently undemocratic. They believe that capitalists should not be obliged to act in a socially responsible way; any plans to make the rich and powerful act in a way that benefits society is a whole is denounced as “collectivism” and infringing on the individual rights on those poor, oppressed millionaire entrepreneurs. But isn’t democracy an inherently “collectivist” system? The individual must compromise with what the mass of people want, which is exactly what the Libertarians hate.

Their contempt for democracy is even seen in their tactics; Nigel Meek from the think-tank “Libertarian Alliance” discusses at http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn022.pdf the failure of Libertarians to perform well at elections and says;

“…the authors of Strategy and Purpose of the Libertarian Alliance surely had it right all those years ago: it will take a great deal of time, direct appeals to the ordinary electorate are wasteful, and we need to concentrate our efforts towards the key opinion-formers in areas such as the media, politics, industry, organised labour, academia, and the arts.”

Essentially, Libertarians know that they will never win substantial support from any sector of society other than the elite; their tactic is to win the support of the elites who are capable of bringing in a Libertarian society without having to win any elections.

And this is why Libertarianism is dangerous; it has a contempt for social responsibility, democracy, and freedom for anyone but the most privileged, but most dangerously it has powerful friends who could bring it into action. It is no more than an expression of the interests of wealthy capitalists who are interested only in increasing profit at any human cost and all notions of “individual freedom” is only a means of the capitalist morally justifying his position to himself.

Baldar, this isn't because socialised dentistry is crap; the reverse is true! The dentistry has been fine for years, and those "reforms" were a move towards privitising the service by cutting back on funding, so now you have to pay for the service because it's so underfunded. Of course, capitalists just love countries where people are extremely repressed so the Labour government is trying to take away our rights to free education, free healthcare and generally attacking our rights to keep capital from going to it's natural home, the repressed countries.

Yay for regression to Victorian era working conditions and welfare!