Mmm…democracy’s foibles could perhaps be addressed by severely limiting the power of rulers (not by entrusting epistocrats). I haven’t read Brock’s work (I will), but it seems to me that public power and private power are different in nature, for well-known reasons (externalities, incentives, etc.) that tend to make public power much more dangerous to liberty.
I agree with your general point. But the situation is complicated by the dynamic nature of politics and power. Limits don't always stay limiting, and private power doesn't always stay private. This means that devolving state power to private hands runs the risk that that power will be utilized to seize control of public institutions. The seems to be precisely what happened in the case of the Russian oligarchs after the fall of communism. And it strikes me as a not unreasonable worry to have about our present trajectory in America.
I agree. I rescue here Kant’s insight: the state must be an impartial arbiter in adjudicating and delimiting the citizens’ spheres of freedom, and little else. But this public function, limited as it is, must never yield to private wills, which is perhaps what happened in the case of Russia.
Even in a community made up entirely of people of good faith, you would want democracy as a conflict-resolution system. Communities have conflicts, because problems can be hard to solve, and because different values can come into conflict with each other. Democracy lets people try collective solutions with the assurance that if a solution doesn't work, it can be discarded in favour of a different solution later on.
A community consisting solely of good-faith libertarians would still have conflicts that would call for democratic resolution. As you've discussed in the past, private property and nonaggression are in tension with one another, and neither could reasonably be treated as an absolute value. An absolute commitment to nonaggression would make private property in physical goods impossible. An absolute commitment to private property would eliminate nonaggression as a libertarian value. Then there are hard problems, like what to do about negative externalities.
In my (outsider's) view, a lot of libertarian hostility to democracy comes from the dogmatic absolutism that is common in the community. People who think that you can derive the principles of ethics, politics and economics from a handful of axioms will usually fail to respect the validity of opposing viewpoints, and will tend not to see the value of a system of collective problem-solving and conflict-resolution that requires costly deliberation, moderation, humility and restraint.
Hi Professor, aren’t libertarians who oppose democracy in a bit of a catch-22 since the systems they propose (Hasnas’ version of common law anarchy, for instance) are purely theoretical and will remain theoretical because democracy is the dominant system. That is, we will never be able to experiment to see if the systems libertarians propose will actually be more efficient or just (depending on which metric we want to use) than democracy since democracy does well enough. And perhaps it might even be argued that that’s all democracy does: well enough to lull its citizenry into an inertia to radical reform
Mmm…democracy’s foibles could perhaps be addressed by severely limiting the power of rulers (not by entrusting epistocrats). I haven’t read Brock’s work (I will), but it seems to me that public power and private power are different in nature, for well-known reasons (externalities, incentives, etc.) that tend to make public power much more dangerous to liberty.
I agree with your general point. But the situation is complicated by the dynamic nature of politics and power. Limits don't always stay limiting, and private power doesn't always stay private. This means that devolving state power to private hands runs the risk that that power will be utilized to seize control of public institutions. The seems to be precisely what happened in the case of the Russian oligarchs after the fall of communism. And it strikes me as a not unreasonable worry to have about our present trajectory in America.
I agree. I rescue here Kant’s insight: the state must be an impartial arbiter in adjudicating and delimiting the citizens’ spheres of freedom, and little else. But this public function, limited as it is, must never yield to private wills, which is perhaps what happened in the case of Russia.
Even in a community made up entirely of people of good faith, you would want democracy as a conflict-resolution system. Communities have conflicts, because problems can be hard to solve, and because different values can come into conflict with each other. Democracy lets people try collective solutions with the assurance that if a solution doesn't work, it can be discarded in favour of a different solution later on.
A community consisting solely of good-faith libertarians would still have conflicts that would call for democratic resolution. As you've discussed in the past, private property and nonaggression are in tension with one another, and neither could reasonably be treated as an absolute value. An absolute commitment to nonaggression would make private property in physical goods impossible. An absolute commitment to private property would eliminate nonaggression as a libertarian value. Then there are hard problems, like what to do about negative externalities.
In my (outsider's) view, a lot of libertarian hostility to democracy comes from the dogmatic absolutism that is common in the community. People who think that you can derive the principles of ethics, politics and economics from a handful of axioms will usually fail to respect the validity of opposing viewpoints, and will tend not to see the value of a system of collective problem-solving and conflict-resolution that requires costly deliberation, moderation, humility and restraint.
Hi Professor, aren’t libertarians who oppose democracy in a bit of a catch-22 since the systems they propose (Hasnas’ version of common law anarchy, for instance) are purely theoretical and will remain theoretical because democracy is the dominant system. That is, we will never be able to experiment to see if the systems libertarians propose will actually be more efficient or just (depending on which metric we want to use) than democracy since democracy does well enough. And perhaps it might even be argued that that’s all democracy does: well enough to lull its citizenry into an inertia to radical reform