Reading some of the drivel on the LC comments thread, I see that the Flying Rodent mischaracterises libertarianism in an all too predictable manner and asks in a loaded manner what our priorities are:
I’m just asking, are these your priorities?
1) I don’t want to pay taxes.
2) And fuck you.…
…
…
6) Oh yes, and civil liberties.
7) And that’s it.
Sigh… This is what I mean when I talk about the arse dribble that characterises debate at LC. However, I’ll answer the question. Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that libertarians, like other political groups, come in an a range of shades – I consider myself a classical liberal and am flexible about some issues that incense others of a libertarian persuasion (health and safety springs to mind…).
What I want is for the state to concentrate on those things that it is necessary for the state to do; not mess about with social engineering, fake charities and building unwieldy technological solutions to problems that largely exist within the fevered imaginations of the control freaks in Westminster. So, “I don’t want to pay taxes” is inaccurate (I’m being polite here). Sure, none of us likes paying tax, but anyone with a grain of intelligence recognises that it is a necessary evil. We need a standing army, we need to have a foreign policy and the associated costs and, frankly, I have no problem with the concept of universally funded health-care and education. These things have to be paid for. I do object, vigorously, to my taxes being wasted on surveillance technology, quangos and fake charities.
Having removed the number one item on the list as being bollocks and ignoring the risible number two as being, er risible bollocks, civil liberties would then be at the top of my list. I want an effective state that is lean and efficient, meaning that actually we wouldn’t need to pay as much tax – it’s the waste that really pisses me off.
Adequate defence is pretty high on my list – and that doesn’t mean messing about invading other countries.
A justice system that returns to Peelian principles and the rule of law; such niceties as presumption of innocence, sufficient burden of proof, the removal of such nonsensities as ASBOs.
The repeal of all those petty little laws that criminalise ordinary people going about their business and empower the jobsworths who enforce them. The first to go must be the civil contingencies act, rapidly followed by the identity cards act – indeed, a great repeal act is in order – and start again. But, given that our only valid opposition to the scourge of New Labour is a Tory party that likewise thinks that slavery is a jolly good idea, I have little faith that this will happen.
There is an underlying assumption that libertarians object to regulation. This is inaccurate. What we tend to object to is excessive and unnecessary regulation. There is a subtle difference there. For example, I am in favour of consumer protection legislation as it gives the consumer a fall back should things go wrong. I share other libertarians’ objections to monopolies – I do not trust the state to do anything effective though…
All of this brings me to something that A&E Charge Nurse asked:
A question to the Libertarians.
Who SHOULD be installed at No:10 ?
I don’t know. None of the current contenders, but who? I really have no answer – and ain’t that the rub? It’s broke, but I’ve no real idea how to, or who should, fix it.
Why not just repeal every law since 1 May 1997 and simply start again?
Who should be installed at No 10? Is that really such a hard question? Devil’s Kitchen of course. Wat Tyler should be next door at No 11. I should be Lord Chancellor (enough of those silly NuLab job titles). Rachel from North London should be Home Secretary. You should have Tom Watson’s (just about) current job and Iain Dale should have McBride’s old one. I would have given that last one to Guido, by the way, but he’s “anti-politics” don’t you know – and Irish to boot. Besides, we would need him on the outside to keep us all in line. I could go on, but maybe you have your own ideas. I have already chosen my wallpaper.
Don’t be insulted by not being given a more senior post, btw. Being DK’s spin doctor would be the most joyfully challenging job in world politics! It’s such a wonderful thought that I almost nominated myself for it.
I’m speechless.
Perhaps Old Holborn could fill the John Prescott-type role?
LR: have you read The Plan, the Carswell/Hannan book? Get your grubby mitts on it if you haven’t already.
Hannan for PM!
I haven’t yet. I’m returning to the UK later this week, so it might make interesting reading when I’m stuck in hotel rooms.
consider myself a classical liberal
That makes me a bit nervous .Clegg has been trying to get those clothes out of the cellar but meanwhile he plots to replace directly accountable democracy with a stitch up PR deal lied over Lisbon and is in charge of Party entirely dependent on Public Sector parasite votes ( more even than New Labour ). Bottom line its still Labour lite.
By mixing and matching positive and negative freedoms its possible to claim to be a Libertarian and be almost anything as Illiberal Conspiracy prove (I am Liberally banned from there by the way ..typically enough)
The other problem with the classical Liberal idea is that it by its veneration of the intellect over every other sense it tends to the authoritarian as , Liberal prove daily up and down the country by applying their “Rationalism” and denying loyalty or tradition have any value .
It is quite clear who the choice at the next election should be the Conservative Party who are the least committed to an ever expanding state and ever remoter authority .
So long rider , shoulders back shape up and start pulling for the team , this is no time for decadent fops lolling around on the sidelines . Brown must be beaten .Its time to spit out the elegant cigarette holder , shake off the silken gown and get your hands dirty .
Well, you get the prize for the comment that made me laugh out loud… 😀
By classical liberal, I most certainly don’t mean libdem, I mean liberal as in the dictionary. I did vote for them once, back in the early eighties. Will that count against me?
Yeah, the Flying Rodent post is pretty frustrating. My initial response would be to say “Perhaps we are not getting the message across very well, and need to keep working at it” – but I think that Flying Rodent simply doesn’t want to know.
It annoys me personally, because I have NEVER been a “lower taxes person”. When the people on the right wing of the Tory party have talked about the need for lower taxes, it has always left me cold. I have always been militantly opposed to tax evasion. I refuse to deal with trademen who insist on working on a “cash-only” basis.
But while I am not a low tax person, I get angry at seeing the frivolous ways that officials spend tax-payers money. I’m not rich. My salary is about £29,000 a year. I don’t have money to waste – which is one reason why I hate to see central and local government spending my money on complete garbage.
There’s a massive pompous self-righteousness combined with patronising “I know best” arrogance about the bloke – frustrating not because of what he believes and wants to say, but because his attacks are invariably carefully constructed strawmen, like the one above.
On the matter of tax – if the government concentrated on its core objectives and cut down on waste, then lower taxes would be the result. The idea that lower taxes = reduced services is false. We do pay more than is necessary, simply because the bastards are so profligate. We should not, for example, be funding charities with tax pounds, we should not be funding think tanks for another. So, why don’t they stop doing this and give us our money back – then, if we want to give to charity, we can do it directly, to the charity of our choice.
With you entirely on evasion.
Right, apologies for the delay, but I think one lengthy internet ding-dong at a time is quite enough.
First thing’s first – I’m aware that libertarianism, like most other political ideologies, comes in a variety of forms, and can be both left and right wing. The comment you quote was intended as a gag, but is I think closer to reality than you might think of many people who self-identify as libertarians, and is entirely true of the faux-libertarianism we see chained to the Republican Party in the US.
I’m not going to mount a sterling defence of a joke, but I’d ask that you look at the context it was made in –
– I raised several examples of historical libertarians who, when given the opportunity to put their theories into practice, almost always wound up siding with the super-wealthy against 99% of the population.
– In response, I was given defences of tax avoidance by the wealthy, an option not open to 99% of the population.
This suggests to me that the libertarian bloggers who responded genuinely cannot see the irony. That’s worth pointing out quite sharply, especially since one of them was Devil’s Kitchen. Isn’t he one of UK blogland’s most high-profile libertarians?
You may think describing that’s unfair to your politics – well, that’s the internet for you. Life isn’t long enough to cover everyone, and libertarians are known for being every bit as fractious in their beliefs as Marxists in theirs. I consider myself to be on the left, but I barely agree with stuff I wrote this time last year, and I continually find writers trying to bracket my politics with everyone from Pol Pot to Sheryl Crow.
Now, your politics outlined above strike me as perfectly reasonable, but I’m sure you wouldn’t hold yourself up as an exemplar. For every one of you online, there are several thousand “libertarians” of precisely the type I describe – the difference is one between the ideology, and the behaviour of angry bullshitters who claim to follow it.
Does this make more sense?
(Apologies for the length there, I’m basically rehashing the entire comments thread at LC)
That all sounds fair enough. I suspect the examples you cite were failures for much the same reason as other ideologies fail – people. People will distort and warp an ideology to suit their own ends. You used the word “faux” when referring to the US republicans – agreed. Faux is certainly the case. Therefore they are not libertarians. I have to say, I shy away from the term myself, regarding as I pointed out myself as a liberal in the pure, dictionary sense.
You will find, beneath the bluster, hyperbole and sweariness, DK’s position is not so very far removed from mine – although we do disagree on some issues.
On the matter of tax, I feel that Obnoxio put to you some valid points and you didn’t really give him the response that he deserved. The tax system we have unfairly penalises the lowest paid. It needs an overhaul. Simply hitting the wealthiest harder is counter productive as they take their wealth elsewhere. Evasion is inevitable when taxes become excessive. Others will simply avoid working so hard so as to avoid those higher taxes. Take me, for example. I worked too hard last year. So, I’ve hit the upper tax bracket. I am not wealthy by any means, so I’ll be making damned sure that I don’t do it again. Who benefits from that? Now, if I was taxed in France, much less of my upper earnings would be in that upper bracket – because, despite being a high tax economy, they have a broader range of bands. It’s fairer.
I would also add that people pointed out examples of the kind of society we would like to see that has worked. Switzerland was mentioned. I live in France – hardly what you would call a libertarian society, but much closer than the UK has become. The commune system is effective local democracy in action. I have a problem, I see the mayor. He lives next door after all. Directly elected and directly accountable.
Beneath the bluster about piano wire and lamp posts is a genuine frustration at the lack of accountability in Westminster. We get an opportunity to elect our dictators every few years. There is no way of removing them if we are dissatisfied in the interim and if they decide to ignore manifesto promises or go to war against our wishes, there is nothing we can do about it.
In the meantime we are seeing greater snooping and unreasonable powers handed out to local officials to interfere in our lives and make them a misery. Is it any wonder we feel like stringing the bastards up? You said over at LC that our parliamentary democracy has evolved to be a stable system. It has. The problem, unfortunately, is that it has been usurped by a political class that looks after its own at the expense of the electorate.
I suspect the examples you cite were failures for much the same reason as other ideologies fail – people.
This is a good point, and one I’d like to see raised more often. Any system is only as good as the people who work within it, and humans are inherently fallible.
That said, it lets ideology off the hook too easily. Nobody assumes that the Soviet Union produced inhuman psychos in its political class because they were mere humans – they recognise that the ideology of the Bolsheviks was fundamentally fucked up and very likely to produce inhuman psychos. The same logic surely applies everywhere throughout history, because if there was a single “magic bullet” ideology for running the perfect society, we’d have adopted it by now.
I feel that Obnoxio put to you some valid points and you didn’t really give him the response that he deserved.
This is true, and I didn’t give a serious response for a couple of reasons –
1) Because I’d already pointed out the irony of the sudden taxation gambits out of nowhere, and didn’t think the populist Do you want to tax the poor more, bastard angle cut much more ice than the previous When you tax the rich, you’re only hurting yourself offerings;
2) Because I’ve seen enough of this internet argy-bargy to be well used to people trying to keep discussion on territory where they feel secure, and
3) I’ve seen enough of Obnoxio in action before to know that an extended, personalised tirade on the evils of statism is only ever one comment away.
(BTW, don’t you think it’s a bit odd that, since you took issue with my saying I want to pay less taxes is Rule One, Rule Two and Rule Three of Libertarian Fight Club, your response included a passage bemoaning the level of tax you pay?
I’m not saying it’s a non-issue – it’s very relevant to everyone’s lives – and I’m not telling you what to write or care about. I’m just saying that, if you’re going to tell me I’ve misrepresented your ideology then you’ve got a funny way of going about it).
Is it any wonder we feel like stringing the bastards up?
Trust me on this – anti-war liberals are the lapsed catholics of the Labour movement, so you’ll get little argument on their uselessness or authoritarian tendencies. OTOH…
You said over at LC that our parliamentary democracy has evolved to be a stable system. It has. The problem, unfortunately, is that it has been usurped by a political class that looks after its own at the expense of the electorate.
My point wasn’t I love everything about our parliamentary system. I noted that British democracy, whatever its flaws, has delivered a functional society – you don’t need to bribe the council or the cops for goods and services, nor do you have to pay protection to gangsters. If you phone an ambulance, 9 times out of 10 it will be at your house quickly. You can send your children to school without fear they’ll be kidnapped, and journalists can write stories without worrying whether they’ll be shot in the head for their trouble.
The present warts-and-all system works, and those who boldly assert that we should chuck out that system in exchange for theoretical jam and honey tomorrow – which includes lots and lots of right-wing libertarian bloggers and fringe lefties in the UK – would do well to note that it’s easier to criticise and curse than it is to build a new society from the ground up.
I’m well aware of how trite and condescending that sounds, but I get the feeling that a lot of people all over the political spectrum loose sight of that too readily.
I’d go along with much of that, but as I’m maniacally busy at the moment preparing to return to the UK, I’ll pick you up on one small point and leave the rest for later.
No, I don’t think it’s odd at all – your original statement was “I don’t want to pay taxes”. That is a clear misrepresentation – even if it was a gag.
I used my situation as an example of how ordinary people are unfairly penalised under the system. The bands go from 22% to 40% at around £34k. These days, that’s not a high income – particularly when you are the sole breadwinner. I made a comparison with another country that grades its tax structure more fairly. Tax is but a small part of the overall dissatisfaction I have with UK politics, but as we are on the subject; it unfairly penalises the low to middle income bracket – the sheer waste that follows is salt in the wound. What I have not said, nor intimated is that we shouldn’t pay tax, which was the statement in your quoted gag.
I might get some time over the weekend to come back to some more of this.
At the risk of not adding much to the debate, thanks to you two for half an hour’s interesting reading. I think this kind of informed, articulate and intelligent debate is the thing that’s really scaring some of the politicians and journos, but only the ones who aren’t up to it.
Urko, thanks for that. Interestingly, the debate here has been rather more civilised than at LC, I feel. I’ll be responding to FR’s points in more detail over the weekend. It will probably make a post of its own, because I believe that they require a detailed response. I’m on the road all day today.
I’ve responded in more detail here.