Libertarianism-A-primer

By David Boaz

Great book. Changed the way I think.

• Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.
• all human relationships should be voluntary; the only thing that should be forbidden by law are those that involve hte inition fo force against those who have not use force themselves.
• Governments are needed to protect our rights and to protect us from others who may use force against us.
• When governments use force against people who have not violated the rights of others, the governments themselves become rights violators
• Surely in todays world the government need to do more than just that? SuhThe suprising answer is no. The more messy and modern the worls the better libertarianism works compared to a: monarchy, dictatorshop, and even welfarism (as we have in the postwar US).
• We are not a prosperous as we could be
• Westerns-style big government is going through a slow-motion version of communisms collapse.
• People who dont own property dont take care of it as well as owners; same for people who own buissnesses
• The most important political value is liberty, not democracy. There is a connection between liberty and democracy, but they are not identical eg: if we lived n a society where everyones spouse was chosen by majority vote of teh entire community, we'd live in a democracy but we wouldnt have much liberty.
• The most important institutions in human society – language, law, money, and markets – all developed spontaneously, with out central direction.
• In America today: Liberals usually want more government intervention in our economic lives and less intervention in personal decisions Conservatives usually want less government intervention in our economic lives and more intervention in personal decisions Libertarianism want less intervention in both
• Libertarianism is not about a getting a perfect socienty but a better an freer one.
• There have always been two political philosophies: liberty and power.
• The principles of freedom was discovered first in the west becuse of the unique conflict between church and state in middle-age Europe
• The Declaration of Independce is probably thefines peice of libertarian writing in history.
• "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" - Jefferson
• Government intervention in the marketplace tends to reduce wealth and overall standard of living.
• We have an infinite numebr of right contained in one natrual right to live you life as you choose (so long as you dont infringe on the equal rights of others) Treating rights as tangible claims that must be limited in number gets the whole concept wrong.
• equality of outcomes requires a political decision about measurement and allocation, a decision no society can make withough some group forcing its view on others. Producing equal outcomes would requres treating people unequally.
• an attempt to create equality of opportunity can be as dictatorial as equality of results.
• a property right is a human right to property
• Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyong to say whatever he likes. But the big neglected questions is where? Where does he have this right ? Not on a property where he is trespassing. He has this right on his own property or on that of someone who as a greed (eg: through a contract) to lem him on the premises.
• From each as he chooses, to each as he is chosen.
• Fundamental rights cannot conflict. Any claim of conflicting right must be a misinterpretation of fundamental rights.
• Life is full of trade-offs; better to let those trade off be made on a localized and decentralized basis than by a central authority
• To finance the Civil war, Congress aurthorized the issuing of inflationary paper money, which it declared to be "legal tender" meaning that it had to accepted in payment of debts, even if the lender had expected to be repaid in gold or silver.
• In the 1930s Congress started passing broad laws and leaving the details ov lawmaking up to administrative agencies. eg: Agriculture department / FDA / FTC / EPA and countless more. They now right the rules that have the force of law but were never passed by teh constitutional lawmaking authority. Worse still, these agencies then interpret and enfore their own rules.
• A government of delegated, enumerated and limited powers is the great American contribution to the development of liberty under law.
• Today when a new law is proposed many libertarians look to the Bill of rights to see whether the lass will violate any constitutional rights. But we should look first to the enumerated powers to see if the federal government has been granted the power to undertake the proposed action. Only if it has such a powe should we move on to ask whether it would violate any protected rights.
• Credit is not a right. Demanding it as a right undermines the system of trust. If reliable credit information is unavailable, interest rates will go up to cover the increased risk.
• When we shield people from the consequences of their actions, we get a society characterized not by thrift, sobriety, ect. but one indifferent to consquences.
• Markets are based on consent
• Price contains within it information about consumer demands and all the various factors that effect the costs of production. Instead of having to know all the details, one is presented with a simple number: the price.
• The real cost of anything is not the price in dollars; it is whatever could have been done instead with the resources used.
• Unlike government, which at best takes the will of the majority (and more often acts according to pressure from a small group) and imposes it on everyone, markets use prices to let buyers and sellers freely decide what they want to do with their money.
• High profits signal the need for more investment in making drugs and curing disease. The drug companies that were making the highest profits were filling the greatest gap between what consumers needed and what the market was hitherto producing. (JA: True if the government is not interfering with the free market)
• In the long run, in real terms, the only price that consistently seems to rise is the price of human labor.
• Every economist understands that rent controls produce shortages of rental housing.
• The primary consequence of the minimum wage law is not an increase in the incomes of the least skilled workers but a restriction of their employment opportunities.
• If you tax something you get less of it. Taxing the rewards of entrepreneurship means that we will get less entrepreneurship, less alertness to ways that resources could be shifted to serve consumers needs better.
• The very notion of a "balance of trade" is misguided. Trade has to balance.
• The benefit of trade is the import; the cost is the export.
• Gunnar Myrdal, (Nobel Prize in Economics) write that laborsaving machines should not be introduced in underdeveloped countries b/c they "decrease the demand for labor"
• One could argue that in every presidential election since 1969 (until 1994), the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from 1e9 to 1e13.
• Buchanan's "Public Choice" theory is that government doesnt just act. Some people in government act and they are subject to the same incentives as individuals in a market.
• The problem with democracy (and probably why libertarians have lost) is that benefits to corruption are concentrated and the costs are diffuse.
• Government doesnt have customers which can use its products or try a competitor instead, so its difficult to decide when government is doing a good job.
• The great leaps in federal spending, taxation, and regulation, have occurred during wartime – the Civil War then WWI and WWII.
• You can use libertarian principles to help address real-world problems that have been caused by excessive government.
• Capitalism has produced a standard of living that earlier generations literally could not have imagined.
• The libertarian argument is not that all government spending is worthless, but that people can purchase better goods at a better price through voluntary exchanges in the marketplace than they can expect a bureaucratic monopoly to provide.
• the basic libertarian tax policy is to reduce taxes, on everyone.
• Cutting the Budget:
  • End corporate welfare: businesses that need subsidies shouldnt exist
  • End farm welfare: Farmers should compete in the free market place
  • Privatize government programs and assets:
• The single biggest federal program – bigger than national defense – is Social Security Allowing people to put not some small fixed amount, but the entire amount of their Social Security taxes (or more) into tax-exempt retirement accounts. The potential payoff would be much better than Social security, and much more robust.
• During WWII the federal government imposed wage-and-price controls to conceal the massive inflation that it was creating by printing money. Companies came up with the idea of offering health insurance as an employee benefit not banned by the wage controls. After the war the benefit was so well established that Congress decided not to count it as part of taxable income.
• Using "health insurance" to pay for checkups and minor illnesses is like using automobile insurance to pay for gas and tune-ups.
• The war on poverty and affirmative action: treated blacks not as individuals but as members of a group. This has done little or nothing for poor and undereducated blacks, while causing resentment among white males, who fear they are losing college and job opportunities they deserve.
• If you're not convinced that private charity can replace government welfare, ask yourself: If you had won 100k and had to give it to charity would you just cut a check to the government? Or chose a private charity?
• The most important thing states could do to reduce crime is to legalize drugs. Current policies drive prices high and make drug dealing seem the most profitable and glamorour option for inner-city youth.
• Private schools do a much better job at educating students, but most parents find it difficult to pay once for public school and again for private school.
• We need to open up the 300 billion a year education industry and let the market process in.
• The way to avoid the tragedy of the commons is to privatize the commons.
• We lose the benefits of decentralization and experimentation when we impose one solution on the whole country. No one has all the answers so no ones answers should be imposed on the whole society
• The US can no more police and plan the whole world than it can plan an national economy.
• The claim of "market failure" is probably the most imnportant intellectual argument for state intervention in the market.
• When the government runs the provision of important goods we encounter many problems
  • Lack of real market signals
  • absences of incentives
  • decision-making dominated by special intrests and political influence

• It is usually assumed that government steps in to provide a service when the private sector fails to supply it. Even if that were true, why should people be taxed to supply a service that they werent willing to pay for?
• When a service is transfered from the market to the government, its provision is no longer directly responsive to the consumers, it begins to reflect the preferences of the providers not the customers. Reciepients of government services can influence them only through the cumbersome and indirect political process rather than the much more efficient process of choosing among competing providers.
• 40% of of big city public school teachers send their children to private schools.