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[Epistemic status: I do not endorse all the positions outlined in this post, and I stated several more strongly than I normally would.]
[Unrelated donation request: Here is a GoFundMe for my friend Katie Cohen, a depressed rationalist single mother, and her daughter Andromeda. They are struggling and helping out would mean a lot. Come on, libertarians! Do that nonstate social support!]
As far as I am aware, “libertarian social justice warrior” is a niche very rarely filled. This is annoying to me, because a really good case can be made for the social justice libertarian.
Race
It’s not exactly a secret that one of the biggest problems black and Hispanic people have right now is the justice system. There’s a reason that Black Lives Matter– the largest anti-racist movement of the modern day– focuses unrelentingly on police violence. Their list of requests looks like a libertarian wish list: demilitarizing the police; ending civil forfeiture; mandatory body cameras and a legal right to record cops; stronger policies on the use of force; ending stop-and-frisk and racial profiling; ending the enforcement of ‘broken windows’ crimes like loitering and spitting.
But the most important part of criminal justice reform is ending the drug war. The Drug Policy Alliance has the stark statistics: Black people make up 13% of the US population and use drugs at comparable rates to people of other races; however, they are 31% of those arrested for drug law violations, and 40% of those incarcerated for drug violations. Similarly, Latinos are 17% of the US population and use drugs at comparable rates, but are 22% of those arrested and 20% of those incarcerated in state prison and 37% in federal prison for drug offenses. These convictions follow them for the rest of their life, making it harder to find a job and housing and to vote, trapping them in poverty and often leading people to turn to crime. All this for a crime that harms no one, picks no pocket and breaks no bone. It is not an exaggeration to say that decriminalizing drugs is probably the single best thing we could do for black people in the United States.
I deliberately left Latinos out of that last sentence, because they have an even lower-hanging intervention: immigration. Libertarians typically believe in few immigration restrictions and many support open borders. Undocumented immigrants– the majority of whom are Latino— often live lives of fear, worried that everything they’ve built– their homes, their families, their jobs, their communities– will be torn from them; in the case of people who immigrated as children, they return to a home they never saw. Of course, deportation itself leads to a host of human rights violations, perhaps even worse than the criminal justice system.
Immigration is not only good for people of color at home, but also for those abroad. Compared to people who stay in their home countries, immigrants are typically wealthier and happier– an effect which is disproportionately strong for the most vulnerable, who move from famine and epidemic to first-world poverty which, while terrible, rarely involves starvation. Immigration is a particular issue for those oppressed by their home countries, including LGBT people.
Libertarianism is also anti-colonialist. Libertarian foreign policy is perhaps the best way to put anti-colonialism into action. The United States has a long and exciting history of invading countries we don’t like, often defending dictatorships controlled by pro-US elites under the guise of ‘protecting democracy’. These interventions regularly involve the death of civilians and wind up destabilizing the countries we’re trying to help. The history of colonialism is the history of white people blundering into situations they don’t understand and fucking them up. In essence, the libertarian foreign policy is: if we can’t make things better, we sure as shit can keep from making them worse.
America is rooted in a tragic history of settler colonialism, ranging from violations of treaties to literal genocide. This has led to calls to decolonize the United States which, unfortunately, seem somewhat lacking in specifics. Some libertarians have proposed turning over government land to the Native Americans as a solution for downsizing the government while simultaneously protecting the environment. About a quarter of the United States is owned by the federal government. Now, I’m not saying that this is a complete solution for the decolonization of the United States. Obviously, more steps would need to be taken. But I have to say, as strategies for decolonization go, Native Americans owning a quarter of the country is a hell of a start.
Gender
I just wrote about how my feminism will be pro-sex-work or it will be bullshit. Libertarians have a history of being pro-sex-work. In fact, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine, is one of the few magazines not run by sex workers which consistently advocates for sex workers’ rights from a perspective of sex work being a job, rather than condescending and paternalistic nonsense about empowerment or objectification.
Speaking of sex work, let’s talk about marriage.
Historically, feminists have been pretty critical of marriage. Of course, it’s pretty obvious why first-wave feminists (who legally belonged to their husbands) and second-wave feminists (who legally could be raped by their husbands) would be skeptical of the marriage thing. But even today’s friendlier, gentler, more equal marriage is pretty damn harmful.
The institution of legal marriage presents one viewpoint about what a relationship should be. You can only have one most important person in your life: if you’re part of a committed triad, sucks to be you. It bundles the rights together: if you’d like your power of attorney to go to a different person than the person who gets your veterans’ benefits, again, sucks to be you. Marriage is legally defined as a sexual relationship: a marriage may be annulled if the spouses do not have sexual intercourse. This implies that, of course, your most important adult relationship is a sexual one (and is pretty damn rapey to boot). It elevates that kind of relationship over all others, through everything from tax benefits for married couples to explicit government marriage-promotion programs.
But marriage goes beyond the practical: there’s a reason that conservatives proposed a legally identical ‘civil union’ for gay people instead of ‘marriage’, and a reason that gay people refused. Marriage is not just legal, it’s symbolic. When gay marriage was legalized in the US, we didn’t say “tax benefits and easier immigration win!”; we said “love wins!”
And what a narrow vision of love it is– cohabiting, sexual, romantic, involving only two people. Furthermore, marriage is intimately tied to the extraction of labor from women by men via housework and childcare. Because of this, women have less leisure time and, in the event of divorce, less economic security– potentially keeping them in a bad relationship. (Fortunately, the trend is heading in the right direction. Hats off to you, feminist men who clean the toilet.) Marriage is presented as desirable for women in a way it’s not for men (guess who the target market for romantic comedies is); much beauty work and other burdensome performance of the female gender role is justified by attempting to catch a husband.
The libertarian solution? Get the government out of marriage. The majority of marriage-related rights and laws are unnecessary and unjust: there is no reason a married couple should pay fewer taxes than a single person. The rules that are necessary– for instance, about power of attorney or the division of property in the event of a breakup– can be decided via contract, and standard contracts can be available. While separating the government from marriage may not end the elevation of cohabiting sexual-romantic coupledom where the woman does more housework, it certainly seems like ending government promotion of it will help.
Class
Class? Really? Isn’t libertarianism all about exploiting the poor for the benefits of the rich?
Not so fast! First, many libertarians– including both Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman– support a guaranteed basic income: essentially, we replace the current welfare state with the government cutting everyone a check; the middle-class person’s taxes would increase so that they make about the same amount of money they were before, while poor people would get the full check. (There are a couple similar proposals– for instance, a ‘negative income tax’, where the government gives you money if your tax return shows you didn’t make very much– but they’re all broadly the same proposal with different implementations, and I’m calling them all GBI.)
First, the modern welfare state is condescending as hell to poor people. It starts with the application process, which seems to have been designed by Satan himself to be as time-consuming and humiliating as possible.Once you get aid, the government is very, very concerned about how you spend it. Consider food stamps. Why is it the government’s job to decide that you’re allowed to spend that money on crackers but not on dog food? It’s your fucking budget! It is tragic that people are put in the position of choosing between feeding their pets and going hungry, but the situation is hardly improved by the government saying “sorry, if you’re willing to go to bed hungry because of how much you love Fido, we have decided we’re not going to give you that option, because fuck you that’s why.” The American people are apparently under the impression that poor people are so stupid that left to their own devices they will purchase nothing but a thousand pounds of toilet paper and wind up starving to death surrounded by its decadent ultra-softness. And that’s not even getting into barbaric ideas like drug-testing welfare recipients. If someone decides of their own free will to spend money on some weed to put some joy into the grinding misery that all too many poor people experience, I see no reason we should gainsay them. And if someone is struggling with the disease of addiction, how is depriving them of the ability to pay rent supposed to help?
The government feels, very firmly, that poor people should work. Welfare in the United States is usually contingent on trying to find a job. Even many leftists campaign for raising the minimum wage, arguing that every worker should be paid enough money to live on. Here’s my radical idea: everyone should have enough money to live on regardless of whether they work a job or not.
Compare this with a small but reasonable GBI– perhaps $8,000 a year. If you decide that isn’t enough money for you to live on, then you can get a job. If your job turns out to be so ill-paid or degrading that you don’t want to work it anymore, you can quit, secure in the knowledge that you might have to tighten your belt but you won’t stave. And if you don’t want to work and you’re willing to deal with not being able to buy much, then you don’t have to. (Many feminists have noted the contradiction that ‘lazy welfare moms’ are often just women who want to spend time with their children– the exact women valorized when their husbands make $75,000 a year.) Again, this comes from a position of respect for poor people’s autonomy, not an insistence that the government knows better than the individual how to manage their own life.
Another advantage of GBI is that it avoids something called the “welfare trap“. Because many benefits programs are means-tested, earning more money can mean you actually have less money in your pocket. Now, you’ll often see people complaining about this like “lazy poor people! Don’t want to work!” I am not doing that, and if you see someone doing that you should ask them how much they’d work if they didn’t get a paycheck for any of it. People have tried to ameliorate the welfare trap, but it’s really hard when you have this complex patchwork of two dozen programs that all interact with each other in unforeseen ways. Because the GBI is so simple, it’s much easier to write the tax code so that if you work more you will always have more money.
But a GBI isn’t the only policy a libertarian social justice warrior should support.
Regulatory capture is when, instead of advancing the public interest, regulators advance the interest of special interest groups. A lot of regulatory capture happens when there’s a small group of people who would be benefited a lot by the law, and a much much larger group who would be harmed a little bit. None of the larger group is particularly motivated to learn about the issue, much less campaign for their interests– after all, it’s only a little harm– so the regulators cater to the smaller group, which is the one that actually gets out there and organizes.
Now, who has the time to write letters to their congresspeople and the money to donate to political campaigns? That’s right! Rich people!
And who has just finished a ten-hour day at work and if they donated it would mean they can’t buy their kids a winter coat? Right again! Poor people!
Consider African hair braiders. In Iowa, a person who braids hair without a cosmetology license can face up to a year in prison. (That’s right. Prison. For braiding hair.) So instead a hair braider has to spend thousands of dollars on attending cosmetology school, which does not offer any coursework on natural African hair, much less hair braiding. Since cosmetology schools require a high school diploma, this puts hair braiding out of the reach of the most marginalized people. Hairdressers aren’t rich in the grand scheme of things, but they have more money and political clout than the hair braiders do, which they’ve used to protect themselves from competition.
Anatole France wrote, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges [and] to beg in the streets.” Local governments in the United States have passed many laws which criminalize being poor or homeless: they ban sleeping in public, begging, feeding the hungry, or even sitting on the sidewalk. Somehow I just have this sense that if my white and freshly washed ass sits on the sidewalk, I am not going to be imprisoned. And I am genuinely uncertain how one manages to pass a law saying that it’s a crime to feed homeless people without realizing that you’re the bad guy here.
General Notes
Basically, the libertarian social justice warrior’s question is this: why should we trust the people who have been our biggest enemies for the past two hundred years?
Why do we trust affirmative action programs run by the organization that instituted Jim Crow, redlined black neighborhoods and even today murders black children? In the 1960s, the government de facto confined San Francisco trans women to the Tenderloin by arresting them for prostitution when they left (see Susan Stryker’s Trans History), and now we want these people to define what is and is not hate speech? Do you really, honestly think that the education system run by an organization with a history of slavery, genocide, and human rights abuses will ever tell the truth about that history? I guess that they could be good at enforcing non-discrimination ordinances: I mean, I’m not sure you can find any group of people that’s more expert in discrimination.
Like, honestly, I just want to grab a bunch of social justice people and shake them. What has the US government done that makes you think they will help you? Why do you look at these people and their two-hundred-year history of oppressing you and go “as soon as I vote in Bernie Sanders everything will be okay”? No! No, it won’t be okay! The government is horrible and hurts people and is sadly necessary and we should carefully limit it to make sure it hurts as few people as possible.
Give me the Black Panthers. At least the Black Panthers understood who the real enemy is.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And government? Government is the master’s fucking tool.
Thing of Things 
Yay! This is a post about me, pretty much! I love the visibility of seeing my political views AND my desires for social justice put together here in one post. You wonder why more SJWs aren’t libertarians, and I sit among libertarians and wonder why more of them aren’t SJWs.
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Short answer?
Because the SJW movement, on the whole, is opposed to libertarianism. It’s hard to make allies of a group of people who think you are “Republican Lite”, and who spends much of their effort fighting for exactly the things you’re fighting against (government interference).
I’d hazard a guess that libertarians, on average, agree with the SJWs on the problems with society (with a whole lot of wiggle-room there, because the group of people libertarians disagree most strongly with is libertarians). We just take issue with their solutions.
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Possibly a lot of SJW types think of libertarians as “Republican lite” because a lot of self-identified libertarians basically are “Republican lite.” Like those who call themselves libertarian but always vote Republican, and never Libertarian (who seem more numerous than those who actually vote Libertarian).
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I think leftist libertarianism tends to be called anarchism.
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Dunno about that. This doesn’t reject the temporal power of the state in general, doesn’t outright reject the police or the military, doesn’t reject taxes needed to establish GBI, and doesn’t have the class struggle angle that most anarchism has.
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I always assumed “libertarian” (or at least its more radical varieties) was pretty much synonymous with what we in Europe call “anarcho-liberal”, with the leftist variety called “anarcho-syndicalist”.
But the division seems to be rather academic to me since both groups advocate very similar policies (basically: do away with as much centralized power as possible, and decentralize the rest as much as possible). The most salient division seems to be what they predict will happen afterwards.
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There are minority rights driven anti government groups and philosophies. I’ve run across a few in real life.
You know all those anti government nuts who file frivolous legal briefs asserting that the flag in the courtroom has the wrong kind of tassels or whatever? There are separate versions of these guys for various minority sub communities, with their own all encompassing weird frameworks for viewing the world. I’m not close enough to them to write up a bestiary of the current landscape, since these groups shift and change pretty fast, but I think the black version of the Freemen groups are the Moorish something or other.
You can find them lurking around the edges of the consumer wing of the legal system, counseling people on imaginary ways to avoid paying debts.
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In theory libertarianism is pro immigration and anti-imperialist.
In practice, in the United States, libertarianism is heavily tied up with American exceptionalism, primarily because libertarians believe that the American constitution is a libertarian text. Most American libertarians are far more interested in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams than they are Hayek or Mises.
This means that most libertarians have a rosy view of the early period of American history and a dim view of the political and cultural values of the rest of the world. The former leads them to be relaxed about imperialism, the former to supporting heavy restrictions on immigration.
In practice most American libertarians are not led to libertarianism due to an attraction to an abstract set of philosophical principles. Appeals for them to change their views on the basis of these abstract principles are likely to fail.
This is why the “social justice libertarian” doesn’t exist – at least, not in the United States.
If we’re talking about libertarianism more broadly, it’s a different story, but this post seemed pretty much exclusively focused on the USA, so I’ve engaged with it in that spirit.
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Whatexactly do you mean by the claim that libertarians are “relaxed about imperalism” and often are “supporting havy restrictions on immigrations” ?
Here is the Libertarian Party Platform. https://www.lp.org/platform
I will post some hoice quotes from the platform. These quotes do not support “full 100% open borders” or “complete isolationaism and de-militariam” but they are far closer to those positions than the poitions of any mainstream politican in the USA (they are far more pacifist and “anti-imperialist” than Bernie Sanders for example).
I think you are just wrong bout what libertarains beleive.
“3.1 National Defense
We support the maintenance of a sufficient military to defend the United States against aggression. The United States should both avoid entangling alliances and abandon its attempts to act as policeman for the world. We oppose any form of compulsory national service.
…
3.3 International Affairs
American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world. Our foreign policy should emphasize defense against attack from abroad and enhance the likelihood of peace by avoiding foreign entanglements. We would end the current U.S. government policy of foreign intervention, including military and economic aid. We recognize the right of all people to resist tyranny and defend themselves and their rights. We condemn the use of force, and especially the use of terrorism, against the innocent, regardless of whether such acts are committed by governments or by political or revolutionary groups.
3.4 Free Trade and Migration
We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property. “
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The American Libertarian Party is not necessarily representative of Americans who identify as libertarians. I’ve met a lot of self-identified libertarians, but none of them are members of the Libertarian Party. OK, that’s anecdotal, but according to wikipedia, the libertarian party has roughly 400,000 members. If libertarianism as a philosophy was limited to those 400,000 people, we wouldn’t be discussing it.
I may be accused of shifting goalposts, but there was nothing in Ozy’s post to imply that by “libertarian” zhe meant “member of the Libertarian Party”, so once again, I engaged with it in that spirit.
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What is a better resource for determining the views of the average libertarian? Do you know of any comprehensive surveys of libertarians?
I do however think the Libertarian party platform is a reasonable reference. And I would stick to it unless you propose a better reference.
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Pew did a poll a couple of years ago and presented the results of the respondents who called themselves libertarian and correctly defined the term. The self-described libertarians were only mildly more libertarian than the general US population.
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We philosophical libertarians have an alliance of convenience with the constitutionalists for the moment. Both groups generally want to move in the same direction on most issues, although not necessarily for the same reasons. If we succeed at moving the country more in that direction, I think the philosophical libertarians, most of whom are anarchists or close to it, will part ways from the constitutionalists.
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That doesn’t sound like you’re talking about libertarians, but the cishetwhitemale hate amalgam that launched a thousand strawmen.
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Wow, that’s astoundingly uncharitable. How do you get from “most American libertarians are kind of conservative and care more about the constitution than abstract philosophical principles” to “strawman SJW hate amalgam”?
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To be specific, I was thinking of Ron Paul, and by extension his supporters.
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I’d be quite happy if the government got out of marriage. But two things:
(1) Why do you think the government (or the church, or whatever other organisation you want to point the finger at) got into marriage in the first place?
People got fucked over by false lovers or by being left pregnant and holding the baby and no support, and being human, they wanted Something Must Be Done. So we get the government deciding that marriage means X Y and Z. Think it’s disgraceful that a fourteen year old girl can be married off to a sixty year old man without her consent? Well, government gets involved there and says “Nope”. Cultural and social traditions mean that widowhood is so shitty, a bereaved woman is most virtuous when she kills herself to be with her husband? Government steps in and says “Nope” to that too.
Bill has a girlfriend in every port – unless Bill divorces Wanda (and makes sure alimony, property division and child support are in order), he can’t marry Susie, Jane and Sarah-Louise, even if it keeps them happy. You want to be able to marry Susie, Jane and Sarah-Louise in one batch? You agitate for the government to change the law.
(2) Which brings us on to “let’s leave it all up to contracts and the courts”. Where does law come from? There is statutory law – oh, there’s the government, whether at local, state or national level – and common law and customary law. That last is bound by local practice, so you might be regarded as married in Smallville and as a shameless hussy living in sin in Tinytown, probably not a satisfactory arrangement as witness the marriage equality push for having “our marriage which is legal in state X recognised in State Y” – they weren’t satisfied by leaving it up to local law to decide.
You want to make sure your triad or quartet is recognised as a legal unit whether or not you move fifty miles down the road to a different town? You want law on a national level, which means The Government gets dragged in.
Standard contracts are a great idea – if people were not fucking stupid. And when hurt feelings are involved, stupidity rages. From my work, I’ve seen people fucking their kid over when it came to applying for a student grant, because daddy was fighting with mommy and they took every opportunity to stab one another in the back. Didn’t matter they were long since separated and divorced; just because it pissed off mom, dad refused to sign the paperwork we needed stating he wasn’t paying support for the kid, which held her application up and left her in real need.
Leaving it all down to local courts means Jackie and Jill go to court to have Jackie on the birth cert as co-parent and Jill swearing Jackie is as much the baby’s mom as she, the birth mother, is. Then Jackie and Jill split up and Jill goes back to court to have Jackie’s name taken off because that bitch is not coming near Jill’s kid.
Yeah. Contracts and law courts. Everybody is going to be completely reasonable there and the government has no place (until there is abuse or neglect and then the demands for Something Must Be Done and Why Isn’t There A Law start).
I’m deeply cynical about human nature, but then again, working in local government education and social housing will do that for you 🙂
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I’ve always been a bit confused by the non-conservative version of the “get government out of marriage!” argument. I get it from conservatives- its a coded anti-gay argument. Ok, disreputable, but I get what they’re doing and saying. I don’t get it from everyone else though.
If you really, genuinely believe that there’s no point in having government involved in your long term relationships even to the minimal extent that “getting married” counts… go do that? Go write up some private contract, or just shake hands or whatever, and… have fun?
Sure, you’re going to have a lot of problems. Hospitals aren’t going to necessarily accept your assertion that you’re pretty much just as good as married, so good luck visiting loved ones. And divorce is going to be a nightmare for you. But… isn’t that what you’re asking for? Its not like abolishing governmental involvement in marriage law is going to make hospitals suddenly have some kind of weird omniscient capacity to figure out who should or should not have meaningful decision making powers over an incapacitated adult. You’re going to have that problem either way. Right now its “we’ll assume you should have decision making power if you’re the spouse,” but in your ideal future its more like “we just don’t want to get sued, honestly, that’s why we had the spouse rule, but since neutral and socially accepted rules for identifying spouses don’t exist now… bwuh?”
But those problems aren’t going to be fixed by privatizing marriage for all of society. So why not just privatize your own relationship, and be happy with the result?
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The thing you’re looking for is called a “durable power of attorney for health care” and it already exists.
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I am aware. But as I recall from the gay marriage debate, when they hit the pavement they are not generally considered equally effective to being legally married. This is in large part because it is generally easier to satisfy a hospitals request for evidence that you’re married to someone, than it is to satisfy a hospitals request for evidence that you have a durable power of attorney.
Though maybe cell phones will fix that. Dunno.
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It would probably become significantly easier to prove in the event that legal marriage stopped being a thing.
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“If you really, genuinely believe that there’s no point in having government involved in your long term relationships even to the minimal extent that “getting married” counts… go do that? Go write up some private contract, or just shake hands or whatever, and… have fun?”
I think you’ll find that that’s what most of the people who hold this position are doing.
What they don’t like is that the government is making a negative value judgement on their decision to do so, for no clear reason.
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> (1) Why do you think the government (or the church, or whatever other organisation you want to point the finger at) got into marriage in the first place? People got fucked over by false lovers or by being left pregnant and holding the baby and no support, and being human, they wanted Something Must Be Done
I would have expected it had something to do with administering men’s (specifically, fathers’ and husbands’) property claims over women.
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Other way around, mostly. Its remarkably easy to administer “women have no rights.” Doesn’t take a lot of governmental action. Most marriage law from ye olden days was about guaranteeing women some minimal amount of support should their husband decide to abandon them. Most marriage law NOW is about guaranteeing people (mostly women for historically contingent cultural reasons) some minimal amount of support and/or property distribution should their relationship dissolve or their spouse perish.
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It depends on how “olden” you go, I guess. The impression I get from the Bible is that ancient Jewish men could simply send their (now ex-)wives away, without providing any support.
Marriage seems designed to minimize disputes over inheritance. If you have a public ritual of marriage (and a sufficiently draconian punishment for wives’ infidelity — such as death), it’s easy to determine the set of eligible heirs and the senior heir, if needed.
Fun fact: Onan, the unfortunate fellow whose name “onanism” is based on, was killed by God not for stroking himself per se, but for intentionally failing to impregnate his deceased brother’s wife, in a custom which would produce a legal heir for his brother. Lineage is serious business.
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I was referring to common law traditions that still echo in our legal system. I don’t think we are all that influenced these days by Old Testament marriage norms describing a polygamous slave taking society.
As I understand, Old Testament divorce was mostly prohibited except in punitive, for-cause contexts (“uncleanliness,” having the wrong religion). The usual message is that men cannot send their wives away at all, with or without support.
The rules are different for slaves- those can be sent away freely and without support. The Old Testament is very particular about prohibiting the resale of sexually enslaved women.
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Yay, a new thing to send people when they ask me to describe my beliefs!
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Their list of requests looks like a libertarian wish list:
– …
– mandatory body cameras and … ;
– stronger policies on the use of force;
– ending stop-and-frisk and racial profiling;
– ending the enforcement of ‘broken windows’ crimes like loitering and spitting.
How are these Libertarian? I suppose I can kinda see body cams — access to information to make informed decisions? But “stronger politicies” seems pretty anti-libertarian, and I thought that the general libertarian view was “racial profiling if/when it works” (’cause arguments past that are arguments about systemic racial issues), and same with “broken windows” stuff.
But maybe I just don’t understand libertarian positions?
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“stronger policies” is absolutely libertarian when applied to the government.
Profiling treats people as collectives, not very libertarian. Depending on details of what decisions are being informed by profiling though libertarians may find it acceptable.
Stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing are authoritarian, libertarians hate them.
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Things like loitering, though, are not quite cut-and-dried. Can it be used as harassment? Yes. Do people (especially gangs of teenagers) get hassled with heavy-handed policing of that nature? Yes.
On the other hand, do suspicious types hang around waiting for a chance to see if they can commit an opportunistic crime or check out someplace for later burglary? Yes. Do you get drunk and aggressive people yelling outside someone’s door (often the house of an ex-partner) or hassling people going home in the post-pub closing hours? Yes. Telling them to go home or move on or else they’ll be arrested for loitering is one way of dealing peacefully with them (if the drunk guy takes a swing at a cop, that’s assault and that’s his own problem for escalating).
Small stuff does make a difference, good or bad.
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Libertarians are strongly anti-police and generally support a) larger restrictions on police powers, b) less police activity. “Stronger policies on the use of force” means cops get in trouble for hitting/killing people; if that’s not a libertarian position it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. Ending stop-and-frisk means cops don’t get to hassle people for no reason, libertarians like that. The same applies to broken windows policing.
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Libertarians are strongly opposed to coercion by force and violence. Given that it is necessary that a police organization do those things in order to protect the rights of people in general, significant effort should be made to minimize the misuse of violence.
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As I see it, those “stronger regulations” for cops basically mean that police has exactly the same rights and powers as any random joe. In fact, if you go whole-hog there is no police any more, just private law enforcement entirely composed of random joes.
Doing away with privileges is a very libertarian thing to do.
Stuff like body cameras is basically a compromise the libertarians offer instead of the radical position: If you absolutely insist on privileges, there has to be some way to hold you responsible if you abuse them.
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First off, nowadays single men do less housework than married men, and single women do more housework than single men. It seems really, really weird to claim that wives doing more housework than their husbands is an example of men oppressing women when she was doing more housework than he was before they moved in together and moving in with her increased his housework load. A far more likely explanation is that for whatever reason women just care about cleanliness and tidyness more than men do (case in point: I’m a man, and the apartment that I’m currently living in by myself looks like a hurricane blew threw it). Though I would be interested in seeing how these statistics shake out for gay and lesbian couples.
Second, even looking at traditional marriages from decades ago when married men actually did do less housework than single men, I have a very hard time seeing how the male breadwinner role wasn’t also tied to the extraction of labor from men by women. Or to be more precise, the structure was basically an exchange of different kinds of labor from each of them.
Third, I have a very hard time seeing how changing marriage to private contracts would change anything about this. Marriage law says absolutely nothing about who does more or less housework, and modifying the procedure and tax codes wouldn’t change cultural/socialization patterns.
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People have always had a go at “We don’t need a piece of paper to prove our commitment to one another” and “it’s none of the government’s business what we do in our private affairs”.
And then the love mist dissipates and they start wanting to divide the property or the cash or get back at that lousy bitch/bastard, and the courts get involved, and they very much want a piece of paper to prove that they are entitled to a pension or the estate or whatever.
I’m especially thinking of the original palimony case, where doubtless both parties beforehand had been all “We’re liberated sophisticated modern adults, we don’t need any outdated rituals or arrangements” before cohabiting, but when the relationship ended – yeah, then all the old ideas about duty to support and so on were dragged out (even if this case was decided that “you didn’t have a contract”).
If people would draw up and stick to contracts, it would be one thing – but then again, that is what modern civil marriages are: contracts with a lot of custom and practice behind them. Re-inventing the wheel doesn’t strike me as being a huge improvement.
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“And then the love mist dissipates and they start wanting to divide the property or the cash or get back at that lousy bitch/bastard, and the courts get involved, and they very much want a piece of paper to prove that they are entitled to a pension or the estate or whatever.”
Speak for yourself. I’ve dissolved three long-term cohabiting non-married relationships, and never once did I think ‘wow, I wish I was married, this would be much easier if I was’.
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I must say I did not expect to see a link to “magical minorities” stuff here. Topped with arguments supported by a movie and a pretty one-sided selection of real examples.
Can we stop with the “owners exploit in a sustainable way” arguments, pretty please ?
Also, notice that there is not a word about mining rights in that article from lp.org?
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Sorry, having not clicked *all* the links in the article, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about
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Sorry, the link on giving lands to American Indians.
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I hear this guy love this proposal, though.
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There’s an issue here which… okay, I’m from a part of the country which is more aware of this than most of the country (which treats the Southwestern attitude towards immigration as racism), but…
…Mexican immigration IS, at least in part, colonization. There are a bunch of people who come over here to work and integrate with society – and good on them, because they have a better work ethic than I do.
But there are also a lot of people who come over here for explicitly political purposes, and the Mexican government hasn’t exactly been subtle about some of its attempts to push people to immigrate here for those political purposes. It’s been labeled “Reconquista” by some people in favor of it. Which is to say, there is actually a concerted effort to take parts of the US that Mexico regards as rightfully its, via immigration and settlement and political processes.
And while I’m in favor of increased immigration, and am not seriously concerned about this process (our memeplex is more infectious than theirs, loosely speaking), I think there is reasonable room to disagree there, and a lot of people in the Southwest US are deeply concerned about this process with, I feel, fair reason.
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“which is to say, there is actually a concerted effort to take parts of the US that Mexico regards as rightfully its, via immigration and settlement and political processes.”
[citation needed]
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Google “Reconquista”.
Or, alternatively, go spend some time with illegal immigrants. Or listen to Mexican political speeches.
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I’ve tried to promote the idea of a liberal/libertarian alliance to oppose the war on drugs, and what I’ve gotten back is evidence of the long cultivation of hatred between the groups. I’m not sure whether there’s more revulsion between libertarians and social justice people, or it’s just that I’ve got more issues with social justice than I do with liberals.
There are liberals and libertarians who can work with each other on such issues, but I don’t think they’re typical members of their groups.
You’ve left out the pro-capitalist/anti-capitalist split. Even though it might not be relevant to most of the issues you’re bringing up (are privatized prisons proof that capitalism is evil or that government is evil?), it would be really hard for SJWs and libertarians to keep from sandpapering each other’s nerves.
One thing the (federal) government did was eliminate Jim Crow. And the federal government did a lot oppose lynching.
More generally, a great deal of the oppression of black people in the US has been contrary to libertarian principles– slavery, Jim Crow, lynching. While informal segregation is consistent with libertarianism, government encouragement of (non-black) home ownership is a program which isn’t libertarian, and neither is the government supplying loans to small farmers, a program which also happened to be racist.
However, I haven’t had the nerve to point out the government amplification of racism in a more typical SJW space and I probably won’t do it.
Possibly relevant: the federal government seems to be less racist in terms of who it employs than the private sector is.
Meanwhile, while it’s shifting, a noticeable fraction of libertarians seem to be right wingers of the less savory sort, all the way to being apologists for the Confederacy.
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A lot of historians with what one might think of as SJW-ish (at least, firmly leftist) perspectives write about how federal policies amplified the effects of racism. Hell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’s probably the most skilled and influential social justice-y writer in America discussed things like the role of the Federal Housing Administration in his “The Case for Reparations.”
Their problem generally isn’t the government programs themselves– they want them to have been extended more evenly.
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“As far as I am aware, “libertarian social justice warrior” is a niche very rarely filled. This is annoying to me, because a really good case can be made for the social justice libertarian.”
You might want to check out the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, whose tagline is “Free Markets and Social Justice.” http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/
It doesn’t fit in quite as well and is a bit artificial, but the “Liberaltarian” concept is related, too. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/liberaltarians http://timothyblee.com/2010/07/20/how-to-talk-liberaltarian/
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lmao
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/11/shouldnt-sweatshops-do-more/
bleedin’ heart, my ass
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I assume you’re aware of the folks over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. They are probably the most visible people who fill some of the niche you’re talking about, but I wonder if you’ve looked into the work of the people at the Center for a Stateless Society? They are much more radically leftist, feminist, pro worker empowerment, etc., but they also tend to be more radically libertarian. The main people involved are Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman, Gary Chartier, Charles Johnson, and Kevin Carson. Probably the best introductions are the short book Concience of an
anarchist, and the anthology Markets Not Capitalism, both available free online.
https://c4ss.org
Click to access CONSCIENCE%20spring%202012%20(5th%20printing).pdf
Click to access Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf
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Those people are anarchists, not libertarians.
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Hi, Ortvin.
While it’s certainly true that we at the Center are anarchists, many of us also have libertarian beliefs and interweave them into our work.
Many of us come from or participate in the broader American libertarian movement in various ways which has heavily influenced our writing. We’re not typically found at LP conventions by any means but we tend to be found on other fringe libertarian groups like the Association of Libertarian Feminists for example. But others may even be seen having a post or two on CATO, Roderick Long is a good example.
I understand that “libertarian” and “anarchist” are both contestable words though so I am happy to talk about that as well.
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Some good sources on this perspective:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/libertarian-left/
Click to access Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf
Click to access CONSCIENCE%20spring%202012%20(5th%20printing).pdf
https://c4ss.org
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Look what I found! http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/
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I suppose I am a “libertarian social justice warrior” and there’s a whole think tank that could be calling it, I suppose called the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS.org).
So if any of y’all have an interest in how this position (except without things like the UBI and more leaning towards anarchism overall obviously) then that’d be a great place to start!
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BHL and “liberaltarian” probably fit better with regards to what you’re trying to do here, to be fair.
I guess I’d say that C4SS is a more radicalized LSJW site, whereas BHL and liberaltarians tend to have their SJ concerns and libertarian concerns *moderate* the other, C4SS folks tend to use them to *radicalize* the other.
So instead of Hayek meets Rawls, think Rothbard meets David Graeber. 😛
(Can’t take credit for that analogy, my fellow left-libertarian Roderick Long came up with that or something much like it)
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As far as I am aware, “libertarian social justice warrior” is a niche very rarely filled.
The libdems aren’t all pro social justice libertarians, but a lot of us are. We look like a small party right now, because there was a huge backlash after we went into coalition with the Tories in the last government, but prior to that we were, well big enough that the Tories needed a coalition with us to be able to form a government – hardly niche.
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I think it’s pretty clear that Ozy was really only talking about the USA in this post – e.g. calling Black Lives Matter “the largest anti-racist movement of the modern day”, when what zhe really means is “the largest anti-racist movement in the USA in the modern day”
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Here’s part of the image that people have of American libertarianism and where it stands on social justice:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/libertarianism-and-the-workplace.html
i.e. it’s a class-based phenomenon and unreservedly on the side of the bosses in any conflict between them and the workers
(god, what a fucking piece of shit that man is)
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Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess (Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter, cool guy, wrote a v. interesting autobiography called Mostly on the Edge) were part of the New Left in the 70s. I believe Hess died sometime in the early nineties, and Rothbard was supporting Pat Buchanan and promoting an alliance with paleoconservativism by then.
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From what I’ve noticed, that niche is lacking because the various kinds of anarchism fit better with the social justice (and overlapping anti-capitalist) set of beliefs.
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“Consider food stamps. ”
Major strawman here. Isn’t it reasonable to assume food stamps have restrictions on what you can buy with them, because people might not necessarily make the best choices?
And you can argue that what they do with it is none the government’s business; but shouldn’t we try to fund charities (e.g. food stamps) that are _effective_ at improving people’s lives?
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Well, as an empirical manner, we do have some support for the idea that unrestricted cash donations done by GiveDierectly are pretty effective. Pseudo-currencies like food stamps also have higher overhead costs than regular money.
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(The GiveDierectly results may or may not be as applicable to first world welfare programs, though)
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I find it strange how many people insist that it’s not the government’s business what they do with money the government is giving them. It is very much the government’s business. It is also my business. If you get me to agree to a tax so you can feed poor people and then I find out that actually sometimes you’re just buying poor people drugs or TVs or dogs or other things they won’t die without, don’t be surprised when I try to enforce the original agreement.
In principal I support GBI, but I also have some concerns about where the country might go from there. It seems to me that if you have a livable GBI, particularly one based around “it’s none of our business what they do with their money,” then after that’s in place you *need* a cultural attitude towards the impoverished that’s more like the modern far right than anything else. If you’re going to insist that it’s none of my business what people do with their GBI, then don’t be surprised at my callous disregard for anyone who starves to death on the streets. Don’t be surprised when I blame them for their own death, and don’t go trying to extract some further moral ransom from me. No adding a food stamp system on top of a GBI. No taxing me for a public food bank when there’s already a GBI. No calling me a horrible monster for not caring that some poor person just died if I’m already supporting a GBI that could have saved her if she’d only bothered to just buy food with it. If her decision isn’t any of my business, then it’s also not my responsibility.
This is my concern with the GBI. It requires a more left-leaning attitude towards the poor to bring it in place, but then as soon as it’s around it requires a far-right attitude. So I’m worried that one day we’ll get a GBI, someone will starve to death while buying drugs with their GBI, and then the very people who put the GBI in place in order to avoid paternalistic control over what poor people can do with their money will push to bring back food stamps.
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And that is why we can’t have nice things 🙂
I agree that this is a pretty accurate prediction of things that will happen when we introduce GBI. Yet, “some idiots will whine about” is not a sane reason to ignore good policy decisions.
No matter what you do, there will always be people whining about it. The best you can hope for is that the people whining about it don’t have any good reasons to.
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You might like the website c4ss.org it’s a blog aggregator for a collective of mutualists. Libertarian in the older sense of the word than you mean it here, but very strongly anti government and pro social justice. And they speak the same language as Libertarian Party Libertarians, aside from a disagreement about the word capitalism.
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There are plenty of us libertarian SJWs! See the Center for a Stateless Society:
http://c4ss.org
and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left:
http://all-left.net
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What reason is there to believe that Native American owners will act any differently from non-Native American owners, and that they won’t sell it to non-Native Americans (to be clear, this is not a rhetorical question, I actually would like an answer) ? This just seems like a massive land grab and privatization primarily benefiting rich people at the expense of non-rich people and the environment, under a thin veneer of identity politics.
Many right-libertarians want to privatize roads. In a libertarian, privatized, free-market road system, then homeless people would be trespassers and road owners would be incentivized to evict them in order to maximize profits and property values. (And let’s face it, property values are the reason rich politicians are backing laws criminalizing being poor or homeless.)
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A lot of that government land is nature reserves, which cost money to maintain & protect. It seems to me that a best case scenario is neglect, with a worst case scenario being the active destruction of this nature.
Native Americans are not noble savages in harmony with nature, yadda, yadda. Besides, their old lifestyles are pretty much gone and they mostly don’t want to live those lifestyles anymore, even if they could.
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+1
If someone said “Turn over government land to the Coca-Cola corporation!”, then anyone would ask “Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?” If you don’t ask these obvious next questions when Mary Ruwart says “Turn over government land to Native Americans!”, then “Native Americans!” function for you as a semantic stopsign – and a fairly racist one.
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With the possible exception of ending civil forfeiture, none of these demands are mandated by right-libertarian principles. There is no reason to think the police of a minarchist night-watchman state or an anarcho-capitalist private police wouldn’t be militarized, would have body cameras, would allow recording cops, would have strong policies on the use of force, or wouldn’t use stop-and-frisk and racial profiling, if the state (in a minarchist night-watchman state) or the (rich, white) owners of roads and houses (in an anarcho-capitalist territory) demand it. In fact, loitering and splitting interfere with property (in this case, the roads), so ending the enforcement of them would be a violation of right-libertarian principles.
On the other hand, right-libertarian trade policy is perhaps the best way to put neo-colonialism into action, by protecting corporate control over the Third World’s natural resources and resulting destruction of their environment for the sake of the First World upper class’ profits, use of underpaid labor (sometimes outright slave labor) in authoritarian countries like China, and strengthen corporate monopolies over ideas (“intellectual property”).
The Black Panthers were Maoists, not right-libertarians. There are a lot of different reasons for disliking the state, and the enemy of your enemy is often not your friend either. In particular, leftists who dislike the state because it oppress marginalized people and right-libertarians who dislike the state because it put some restrictions on how much rich people are allowed to oppress poor people have nothing in common.
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Also, re anti-colonialist foreign policy, The libertarian right has a long history of supporting fascist dictatorships, from Ludwig von Mises’ position as an economic advisor to the fascist government of Austria to Hayek’s preference of fascism over social democracy and the Chicago Boys.
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