There is a hypocrisy in libertarianism à la Mises. When you read his hyper-logical texts (wich should be appealing to the HN crowd btw), he claims that we should remove any sort of ideology from our political and economical systems. Reason and logic only should govern our lives, and it is the duty of economics to aim at this goal.
Sure, sounds attractive !
But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different, it's not an ideology like marxism or catholicism. It's THE way. It is the only path to reason and logic and science, because when we reduce the role of the state, we reduce the part of ideology in society. Therefore it must be the less ideological system of all, the most logical, and thus the the right one.
Of course, liberatarians turn out to be just like any other political sensibility. They agree on broad things that makes them look like unite only because they are a tiny minority in the political landscape. But like any other sensibility, you reach a point in the debate where their own camp is split up in two and they will fight each other, etc. It wouldn't be the case if it wasn't an ideology, and they would all agree on core issues like the private/public fire stations, or even health wich should be considered like any other good for some, but not for some others (I can tell because I have some libertarians friends). The above comments about the protection from plagues are very interesting. It leads to the very interesting history of sewers.
Mises is the reflect of his century when we were too optimistic about science, we believed it would soon answer all the questions even in fields that looked like non-scientific, like human organization. It turned out science is indeed good for changing our lives in an indirect way, but unfortunatly not so good outside real scientific fields. It doesn't answer philosophical questions (if such a science existed, then it would be the right one to follow for organizing human societies).
You cite a single author as a representation of a vast political ideology and quickly drop in some fluff that guides the rest of your comment:
But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different...
Libertarianism is a slightly more detailed political idea than convervatism. It represents the desire for smaller government that only acts when necessary. Another core tenet is that you're free to do as you please until your actions infringe upon the rights of others.
>Another core tenet is that you're free to do as you please until your actions infringe upon the rights of others.
That's totally vacuous without defining those rights. A major one for most libertarians is property, but the distribution of property is based on historic things like taking lands from native populations. Who decides who owns what? How far back do we have to unwind things? Why should heredity determine what property you "start out" with? How does a Lockean ideal of "mixing your labor with the soil" to create "property" somehow mean that because some bean farmer on plot of land X farmed beans for 10 years there, him and his descendants now own all the oil under that land that was only discovered later, and not by them?
Sure, sounds attractive !
But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different, it's not an ideology like marxism or catholicism. It's THE way. It is the only path to reason and logic and science, because when we reduce the role of the state, we reduce the part of ideology in society. Therefore it must be the less ideological system of all, the most logical, and thus the the right one.
Of course, liberatarians turn out to be just like any other political sensibility. They agree on broad things that makes them look like unite only because they are a tiny minority in the political landscape. But like any other sensibility, you reach a point in the debate where their own camp is split up in two and they will fight each other, etc. It wouldn't be the case if it wasn't an ideology, and they would all agree on core issues like the private/public fire stations, or even health wich should be considered like any other good for some, but not for some others (I can tell because I have some libertarians friends). The above comments about the protection from plagues are very interesting. It leads to the very interesting history of sewers.
Mises is the reflect of his century when we were too optimistic about science, we believed it would soon answer all the questions even in fields that looked like non-scientific, like human organization. It turned out science is indeed good for changing our lives in an indirect way, but unfortunatly not so good outside real scientific fields. It doesn't answer philosophical questions (if such a science existed, then it would be the right one to follow for organizing human societies).