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First I would FINALLY get Atlas Shrugged out of development and into production, and would throw money at Angelina Jolie until she agreed to star as Dagney. That movie would do more to promote The Cause than a thousand new think tanks. (I would have final script approval, naturally, so they don't screw it up.)
Then I would pay Matt & Trey to produce a series of clever commercials promoting libertarian ideas, and bombard the airwaves with them.
Then to address the chick problem, I'd throw even more money at Angelina--I'm probably over budget here, but Bill G would come through with Round 2 of funding--- and have her do some commericals for Lifetime, which would plug libertarian ideas and promote my newly created website, which would boast an engineer-free comments section. (This is assumming Atlas Shrugged killed at the box office.)
Finally, I'd set up some monster fund to back female libertarian-ish political candidates, provide scholar ships and launch a 24 hour Margaret Thatcher channel, where her best speeches would be broadcast round the clock.
That should get the ball rolling.
On the other hand this post, like many of yours, reminds me why I am a confirmed Menckenian anarchist. I accept as a pragmatic fact the probable inevitability of a state, but that doesn't mean I have to think democracy is moral, decent, or otherwise a positive good. Persuasion in politics may be a necessity but it is a very disagreeable one indeed; it amounts to having to beg a mass of half-thinking mediocrities for things that you should in a just world be able to claim as a matter of right. And why bother doing such a nasty task when it is almost always more rewarding to spend the same time and effort improving your personal situation, economic and otherwise, so you can buy or sneak your way around the obstacles the state places in your path?
If libertarian ideas are to gain any traction, we absolutely must overcome the tendency of people to equate "the policy was democratically chosen" with "the policy is right." And when arguing with regular people, I find that tendency to be incredibly widespread. To overcome it, we need to show the chinks in the democratic armor. Public choice theory is one route of attack. Caplan's irrational voter concept is another. And yet another is the recognition -- which you clearly share -- that some policies are just wrong, democratic or not.
And you're probably thinking, "Glen, everything you've just said is bloody obvious." But it's not obvious, not to many members of the public whose opinion you're concerned about. So when you say things like, "You have agreed to politics, and there is no guarantee things are always going to your way," you're not helping. We're not just whining that things haven't gone our way -- we're establishing that democracy is highly imperfect, and that it systematically gets certain things wrong. That's wrong as in "failing to get the right answer."
I say all of this as a non-anarchist. I'm one of those minimal statists, as you know. But accepting the state as a necessary evil does not commit us to accepting its full legitimacy. The state is legitimate insofar as it helps us move toward, yes, right answers. I think it's most likely to do so when it's relatively democratic -- but also when it's limited by a constitution, by competition among jurisdictions, and so on. To get our fellow citizens on board with creating that kind of institutional structure, it's absolutely necessary to be critical of democracy.
I'm still not 100% sure about whether Will is saying that Thiel is wrong to be pessimistic about getting democratic libertarian results, or just that it's bad PR to say so, and even worse to mention that women are a particularly tough constituency.
I think he could have made the PR points without implying that democracy always yields legitimate results (or worse: the right answer) by definition.
Because those things are clearly less true than anything Thiel wrote.
Especially when you all but called "The frustration that resonable pluralism fails to generate consensus on the right answer" illiberal. That sounded like a disagreement with the conclusion.
And, people who expect good results from democracy without adequately considering what "good results" entail, or why rational individual voters can be expected to consistently vote for "bad results," are being unreasonable IMNSHO.
I hope we can convince enough of them to slow down the loss of liberty enough to give technology, and alternative social arrangements, a chance to advance far enough for us to avoid tyranny.
It seems like a race to me, so I'm all in favor of efforts both to retard the damage from democracies, and to accelerate the development of means of avoiding that damage.
Go Will! Go Patri!
To take up cvd's point above, it is fairly easy right now for politicians to engage in a particular sort of populist, nationalist discourse, in which there are few hard choices and lots of easy answers, in part because through a sort of Bayesian updating a voter cannot help but notice that every other country seems to go in for roughly the same sort of thing, so it can't really be that bad. So long as that is an easy line of discourse, we should expect it to keep winning elections. We aren't going to beat the public choice incentives in this sort of world.
To counter this irrational (but perhaps "rationally irrational") fondness for impractical populism and nationalism, libertarianism needs a similarly irrationally appealing notion. Of the ones that have been tried, it's hard to see any that have worked as systemically as the frontier. The notion of a frontier has a romance that the state seldom has managed to harness or even match.
A few hundred Ron Paul lunatics on a leaky barge with Friedman and Thiel could do more good for democracy than a hundred Catos. And if it actually works -- so much the better!
I also think that you are mixing up state democracy with practical democracy. I'd bet good money that a lot of those seasteads, if they ever happen, will take decisions democractically. Even with the option of exit, the stakes in most public decisions are low and democracy is a fairly low-energy alternative to other forms of politics. The question isn't whether people vote, it's whether those votes are taken with a knowledge that the losers have an alternative. And that's the other place that a frontier pays off even for those of us still in land-lubber democracies: It restores that discipline to democracy, and requires the majority to regard the minority as real, self-motivated human beings on whom they from time to time depend.
So while you can chalk me down as one of those democratophobic anarchist types, I have to say that democracy could get a lot less toxic if the seasteaders succeed.
Just in case this doesn't work out, I'd point out that Thiel and Friedman don't have to get a large number of people to leave the US to make their plans work. The US and other old democracies rely increasingly on fewer and fewer people to provide more and more of their revenue. If alternative countries could get just enough of these people to leave, the ability of current governments to maintain their financial viability would be severely limited.
A little competition goes a long way.
Case in point.
I took a lot of flak over at the Western Standard for presenting these same positions on libertarianism--albeit less eloquently (here, here).
My summation was that for libertarianism, the problem is ultimately a cultural problem, not a political one. Therefore, libertarians need to be in the culture war in a very serious way.
Libertarians grasp hopelessly at an agenda of radical political reform in the belief that their programme's benefits will be seen as self-evident; socially excluded groups will simply see the benefit of the Church of Property, and embrace libertarianism.
For this reason, I gravitate towards a cultural libertarianism that promotes libertarian ideals at a grassroots, cultural level. And in addition to that, reject the idea that social conservatism and libertarianism have common cause, or anything in common. Rather, promote the truth of the matter, which is that social conservatism shares more in common with socialism than with libertarianism.
First, I take it that the presumption against coercion implied that politics, in so far as it can, should track the (quite varied) reasons that reasonable persons have. The state should not coerce unless either (a) the coercive proposal in question has reasons in its favor that override the reasons to reject it or (b) it is selected by a publicly justified decision procedure from among an inconclusively justified set of reasonable proposals.
The problem is that democracy is usually committed to something close to majoritarian decision procedures, and it is hard to see how a state governed by as many democratic procedures as we have could possibly hope to track what is publicly justified. For this reason, Gerald Gaus argues that we should probably have lots of supermajoritarian views and wider jurisdictions for rights that cannot be trumped by democratic decision procedures.
Now this is not an anti-democratic view, but it's not pro-democratic either. It's more like a classical Madisonian/Hayekian/Buchananite republicanism embedded within a contractualist framework of political justification. What say you? Cool or not democratic enough? If not, why not?
Next, I'm interested in pushing things a bit further than Jerry is. I find it hard to see how monopoly governmental institutions could do a better job tracking public justification generally than overlapping jurisdictions and I think through mechanisms like those described by Dave in The Limits of Government, Roderick in his various writings, and other standard stuff may well work. If they will, then the presumption against coercion requires that we have 'liberal anarchist' institutions. And I think they could be republican institutions with some mild ability to coerce to provide some public goods and a safety net that compliments charity (if we discover that these forms of coercion are needed to achieve the publicly justified level of provision). I don't think all these institutions must be for-profit and in fact I think that might corrupt their character (Walzerian sphere reasons move me some).
I take it your worry will be that the polycentric model I presented (more liberal and democratic, less capitalistic) cannot adequately provide public goods and an adequate social safety net. I think the details will depend largely on public morality. So, is this - the liberal anarchist position - an anti-democratic position? Or does your conception of democracy - as a good thing - exclude the polycentric model?
(If you are having trouble imagining what I'm talking about, imagine voluntary membership in legal systems where that is a publicly accepted duty of exercising your democratic rights as a shareholder, the same for protection agencies. There would be private options, but the public options would set many of the relevant standards through modifying the spontaneous evolution of the common law with procedures that are publicly justified to all reasonable groups. These groups will differ, but they will have better reasons to handle the disagreement than to crush it (you can generate some such reasons, I'm sure). Further, I am inclined to think there should be some democratic governance of defense provision of at least many firms in the area, particularly the most authoritative, to maintain the connection between the use of violence and public morality. Again, this could be done through voluntary membership. Further, those that participate in defense and legal institutions could be committed by contract (again buttressed by public morality) to having a certain portion of their funds to a social safety net that is managed by a charity index management board, which is comprised of various charitable organizations, some of which have for profit orientations and some of which have public ones).
I'm attracted to the polycentric model as well, but I'm not sure how plausible I find it as an alternative to democratic states as opposed to as a model for weakening state sovereignty and making state jurisdictional boundaries more porous.
Yeah, I thought you wouldn't be with Jerry because when I think of democracy I think of analytic democratic theorists, which is messing me up. Check out:
Gaus, Gerald. The (Severe) Limits of Deliberative Democracy as the Basis for Political Choice. http://www.ppe-journal.org/Gaus/GausTheoria.pdf
It is related. And cool.
As I see it, there are three important breaking points where we tend to put importance. Two of them are used in modern political decision making in most states, and one is almost never achieved. These are plurality, absolute majority, and unanimity.
We elect on plurality and legislate on abs. majority currently both in the US and Canada, as well as most of the western world, though places with proportional representation have less-than-plurality standards for election, but usually a PM is on plurality basis. Unanimity just doesn't happen in a sufficiently large society.
I think though that raising the standard of legislation to something in the 60-70% range might have strongly beneficial effects. It's still democratic; the people's elected representatives, or the people themselves are making decisions, but 50%+1 seems like the most arbitrary of the three spots where we let decisions happen. This would probably be more effective in the form of a parliamentary multi-party system. We tend to get either simple majority by one party or near-unanimity when both agree. 2/3 would end up being closer to an important standard of agreement with 3+ parties.
If the rule is that a majority is needed then, by definition, 50%+1 works because 50%+1 is the smallest majority possible and is therefore not arbitrary. It was picked according to the principles that lead to approving government by the majority and the definition of majority.
100% is pretty clearly not arbitrary in that there is (theoretically) no coercion when one has 100%.
2/3, on the other hand, is pretty thoroughly arbitrary. There seems to be no reason to prefer 2/3 to 65% or 67%. Indeed, the only reason I can think of for rejecting a bare majority is to maintain the status quo, but that doesn't demand a particular number.
Maybe our government would be better run if we required 2/3 support of all laws, but I doubt there would be a noticeable effect.
Based on the history I've read and my experiences watching people the practical effect would most likely be less change in the laws. This would mean, for example, that in places with "blue" laws it would be harder to repeal them.
Given our complex system it could even result in something like oppression of the majority. An example, Prop 8 passed with 50 something %. IF California required, say, 66% to pass an amendment then it would have a legal system that is more just, but it would also involve the coercion of the majority of the people.
It doesn't matter if the statement is true. It doesn't matter if you are making a meta-argument that really really points out to libertarians that we are a collection of White-Males who have done a poor job at targeting women or minorities. The statement has more power then the truth and information you are trying to convey. Theil wields the truth here like a monkey wields a gun. It was no more tactful to throw away that piss of an argument here, then it would be for him to have walked into a church on Sunday and loudly read choice passages from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", or worse "God is not great".
Show some tact my fellow libertines.
Got that out of the way
There is so much in this post to decompress and it attacks on so many fronts, so I'm just going to pick one.
"Libertarianism does have public relations problems, and it’s not because most people are stupid or immoral". I believe the two voter theory explains why politics in the US sucks so bad. You have a minority of informed voters who dominate the consumption of information and politics, and a majority of voters who are uninformed and vote for a whole ton of reasons that don't make sense either in their own welfare or for the welfare of others.
Perhaps if they were informed they would vote exactly the same. I don't know. BUT, I do know that you yourself have advanced the argument of the myth of the rational voter in the past, especially confronting liberals about the possibility that people sometimes support policies that make their lives worse off. This is no different.
This is a very serious meta-politic argument that Libertarians have clamored for a solution for, and I think we should address it. Considering the whole of sea-steading is just a collection of meta arguments, it's ok to throw it out there.
"Most libertarians don’t want to move to man-made islands. Most don’t even want to help take over New Hampshire"
I'm willing to hop in the dingy later in life, once the technology is there, you could travel anywhere you want, have access to the internet, make your money fishing and living off the sea. It just has to get cheap enough to do, and the technology has to improve at it, and I'd have to have a way to earn a living. But if it gets there, sure I'd try it.
A non-trivial portion of the population if asked right now "Would you take a one way trip to colonize mars" would go. I'd do that too.
But I don't want to live in New Hampshire. I don't think I'm alone in either of these.
Am I in the majority of libertarians? No. But I also don't speak for them, and I don't pretend to. It's a political-philosophy about individuals for individuals. If most libertarians don't want to hop in a boat or go to Mars, that's fine by me.
----
On a completely different note, one of the interesting things about a sea-steading community is that it opens up the possibility of REAL democracy, as in universal voting on every issue. We have, or are pretty near, the technology to give voting pdas, that will allow any individual to submit new laws or statues, read current debate, and everyone to vote on them. I find this possibility exciting.
Also I think you're wrong about the minarchist-anarchist thing, but that would take a while to compose and I honestly don't think it matters.
Second, you seem to be equating "state" and "democracy" in this piece. Have you considered that there are alternate forms of representation in a free and equal state (e.g. futarchy)? How does that affect your stance on What Libertarians Should Actually Do?
http://books.google.com/books?id=R-jihjl6ITQC&p...
It's well-known why Thiel would want to pack his floating Libertopias with as many... salty seamen as possible. ;)
Sooner or later the problem of pluralism and moral disagreement will rear its head,
That's why the structures are modular and can be withdrawn, inspired by David Friedman's story of the war where nobody came.
I cannot see how anyone who accepts basic liberal assumptions about freedom and equality can see the establishment of equal political rights as anything but an unequivocal good
One of the reasons it is sometimes claimed that Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens is that they are exempt from the draft. Would it be an improvement if that exemption was removed? From a libertarian perspective, of course not! We'd have to accept that the draft was good in the first place, and following Lysander Spooner we don't think much of voting. In creating a system we may keep in mind reciprocity and widely applicable standards simply because deviation generally implies some inefficiency, but there is nothing for a libertarian to value in equality per se rather than liberty.
PS I liked the line about the socially retarded white guys. I think it was funny, but I also believe that ideology is based in individual psychology and that what we see as reational desions about what to believe is really preordained by our genes and upbringing. That isn't a bad thing. Socially retarded white guys need a party (in all senses of the word) more than most.
First, while you did not address it in name at all in your post, you also do a fantastic job of showing why "Galt's Gulch" in Atlas Shrugged, and the Objectivist movement in general, is based off a profoundly illiberal idea. Objectivism and other strands of Libertarianism seem to be stuck with the problem of "how do we get everyone to think the same way we do". Even the appeals to exit the system and run to Colorado seems to only last for as long as everyone who buys into the system is willing to. Part of the reason why I regarded so many of the Tea Parties as disingenuous is that despite claiming to be John Glats, they are still deeply invested in the political process!
I do at least appreciate the brutal honesty that Ayn Rand brought to the situation, the final chapters of Atlas Shrugged had one of the characters making grand edits to the constitution with a giant marker. That much democratic consensus in that process.
To Libertarians who argue that there needs to be something fundamentally undemocratic to make Libertarianism work, they may point to Singapore and Pre-'97 Hong Kong as proof in point. I don't know whether we should be encouraged or saddened by that though.
Liberal, as I understand it, means "with liberty; free" which is emphatically not the same thing as "everyone gets the same result". Galt's Gulch is inequitable for sure—that was the point of the "men of the mind" vs. everyone else—but claiming that it was illiberal because everyone else didn't agree doesn't seem to follow.
As far as activists in the political process today being disingenuous with respect to the Galt persona, I agree—Galt's reaction was precisely the opposite in that he went outside the system and indirectly strangled it; he didn't work for change within the system.
I am not a moral relativist, and I understand that not all ideas are equally valid and that there are quite a few ideas and opinions which are factually true and correct. However, the novel in practice, seems to be about having a few "elect" individuals understand this fact and disengage from a world as a result. I don't find that to be a valid program which can be transferred off the pages of a book, and when it does, it is largely just anti-social behavior, sometimes tinged with a strange sense of entitled elitism.
David Duke was unavailable?
I'm sure this is what Socrates was thinking right before he took a sip of hemlock. Thank goodness for democracy!
One can believe both that a) extending the franchise to women was on net, a good thing and b) the beliefs of female voters make it difficult to reduce the welfare state.
Does belief in b) mean that Thiel thinks women shouldn't have been extended the right to vote? Of course not. He's merely pointing out one of the reasons he believes government grew so much more this century than last, and why libertarians are likely to have a tough time in the future. His theory may be wrong, but to simply dismiss his argument because it's bad public relations seems counterproductive.
If women's voting patterns are a big factor in the growth of government, we should learn what those reasons are, and seek to address them.
If women's voting patterns aren't a big factor in the growth of government, or can't be easily changed, then we should devote our energies elsewhere.
But we have no basis to take either course of action without know first whether women voters have driven the growth of government. Thiel believes they have, and there's some evidence for that belief. For example:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/26787l31146...
Women’s suffrage was a major event in the history of democratization in Western Europe and elsewhere. Public choice theory predicts that the demand for publicly funded social spending is systematically higher where women have and use the right to vote. Using historical data from six Western European countries for the period 1869–1960, we provide evidence that social spending out of GDP increased by 0.6–1.2% in the short-run as a consequence of women’s suffrage, while the long-run effect is three to eight times larger. We also explore a number of other public finance implications of the gender gap
Is that a big enough effect (assuming the effect is real) to devote significant energies to correcting it? I don't know. I don't know how much female voting patterns compare to other sources of government growth. But I don't think it's "boneheaded" to point it out.
Furthermore, the comments about women and minority voting are good, because it exposes how deeply even libertarians have imbibed left-wing ideology. If you place equality above liberty, you are not a libertarian. If you are scared to talk about the truth openly, how can you possibly hope to advance libertarian ideas. Deal with reality and move forward, don't hide reality because its "bad" in a leftist dominated culture to admit that your ideas are unpopular with some demographic groups—especially since it was the other side that created the idea of racial groups and group identity in politics.
I'll spot you "identity politics"... but the idea of "racial groups" in American politics was established by property rights-loving Southerners a very long time ago, and without a whole hell of a lot of input from minority groups or leftists. And when laws restricted voting to the male group, it can hardly be said that the suffragettes created the idea of women having a group identity in politics.
I must say that I find your comment to be quite enlightening. "Women and minority voting" is certainly an issue of equality. But it's also an issue of liberty -- for women and minorities. Having other people vote on matters that affect your liberties, when you cannot, is not an arrangement that's conducive to individual liberty. We can argue all day about equality of outcomes, but if you don't support equality of liberty then I don't think "libertarian" is the proper word for your political ideology. "Royalist" would be closer to the mark.
Peter Thiel is also a highly effective rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg's magnum opus. If the purpose of libertarianism is to set up a benevolent dictator with limited powers and limited ability to interfere with the market, and a desire to maintain a bourgeois consensus rather than a messy, democratic heterodoxy, then we've pretty much defined libertarianism as 19th Century European Monarchism. Scale this philosophy up to an economically and philosophically diverse nation with a strong revolutionary labor movement, and you'd have to invent fascism to put down the revolution and maintain the consensus.
And this is, of course, precisely what happened.
Schools are a good example, too. Everyone should be free to go to school, and we should make available the funds to poor people who need the money to do so for at least elementary/secondary education, but they would be much freer to get a much better education if we let them choose where to spend their money in the marketplace on where to go to school.
There's an interesting debate going on right now where community colleges are trying to expand nationwide to offer 4 year degrees, and universities are lobbying (often successfully) to stop them. The universities don't want to face the lower priced competition of the community colleges, and many state legislatures are glad to pass laws banning community colleges from so competing. This would be the libertarian limit on regulation, where laws that restrict freedom go too far.
If that doesn't make you anti-social, I don't know what does.
haha you're a loser/nerd/virgin.
I seem to recall that the Rick Santelli rant was about losers, that the Obama cabinet has Stephen Chu (Nobel prize callibre nerd) and that virginity was a good thing.
Clearly I need to clear my in-tray more often than I do ....
Good luck! Many people love all government, all-the-time, in every orifice. They get off on the idea of kings, princes, and princesses, and like that big daddy Obama is there to make decisions for them and especially for all those other stupid people who don't know no better.
They love the state and their Hitlers, Stalins, and Maos.
You seem to freely admit that the Libertarian Party is not viable. I agree. The Democrats favor (in practice if not in stated terms) raising taxes. By process of elimination, this leaves the Republicans -- who you mock because they do not support the entire range of libertarian concepts. Some of which are well outside mainstream libertarianism.
The principled-yet-counterproductive practice of "screw this, I'm not voting" does not help change anything. Threatening to move to Canada like a Bush-hating leftard does not either. So what do you suggest, exactly?
My personal solution is to vote Republican, and nudge Republicans in the libertarian direction as best I can. If you think that's silly, well, I don't feel that your ideological blathering is accomplishing much, so I suppose we are even.
To quote Uncle Milton - to spend IS to tax. In their defense, the Democrats at least own up to both sides of that equality. They tax AND spend too much. But they're marginally more honest about it.
The Cheney/Rove GOP is dead. Finished. Buried. Done in by its own self-deception. For the reasons Will points out, I don't see a Libertarian alternative.
Seems to me that Champions of Liberty might be better spending their time reaching out to Democrats than Rush Limbaugh. Just saying. . .
Anarchy, as my friend is fond of saying, is the least stable form of government. In no time at all, it morphs into some other form of government, often a dictatorship.
Symbolically? maybe
"Outcome based"? a disaster
Unless,like will, you love collectivism for it's own sake.
Don't get me wrong, I am a Rand-leaning libertarian/skeptic at heart and always have been but I would like to know that I am being as honest as possible about my conclusions
David is/was the son of, all time all star economist and political theorist and one of the outstanding men of the 20th century, Milton Friedman. Making Patri his grandson, and Patri's son his great-grandson.
Neither David nor Patri hold a candle to Milton, but that is not much of a rap on them a none of the rest of us do either.
1Kgs.19
[4] But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree; and he asked that he might die, saying, "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers."
This is correct. Libertarians need to make the ideology less abstract. When we talk about social security privatization show that it has been implemented (in limited form) in Sweden and the UK. Postal privatization has been implemented in Europe. Flat taxes have been successfully implemented. School vouchers work in DC and school choice is found in Sweden. Trains have been privatized in Holland. Air traffic control privatization works in Canada. Drug decriminalization appears to be working in Portugal. Use concrete examples.
The flip side is to show the bankruptcy of the statist approach. Social Security is going bankrupt. Ditto for Medicare/aid. Public schools are a mess. The government heavily regulates the financial sector and yet we have massive failure and a bailout. Amtrak continues to lose money. Airlines and trucks benefited when those sectors were deregulated. Ethanol is a mess. Indeed, arguably the biggest public policy success of the last 20 years was the scaling back of welfare.
Where government encroaches failure tends to result. When a pro-freedom/market approach is used the result tends to be successful.
Show the real tangible benefits of freedom and the known costs of government. A
And yes, little of what I propose is pure libertarianism, but we have to start somewhere.
Yet, even as more and more people come to our side, government continues to grow, and at an accelerating rate.
Reagan, Gingrich, Bush and his Republican majority from 2000 - 2006 -- these folks were all elected by pandering to libertarian ideals. They didn't get us any closer to our goals; Bush in particular moved us quite a bit farther away.
Willkinson's strategy of convincing others of the value of freedom and limited government is fine and good, but the rest of us need to convince Willkinson and his converts of a truth that should already be so outrageously clear to us all: the incentives in our democracy will lead our representatives to grow the government, regardless of what the people vote for.
It will only be when a large group of Americans fully secede from Washington's control that we can begin to move towards freedom at large. The legitimate threat of secession is the greatest counter to the ugliest incentives in a democracy. Without it, we don't stand a chance.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/91/browne/browne...
I don't think that's stated often enough and I don't think Will has addressed that point.
Libertarians have a huge problem when all other parties say 'we are going to give you all these goodies' and libs say 'we are going to take away goodies you already have'.
There needs to be a better argument than 'no'. Call it the 'big-pie' argument. All these other parties want to limit the size of the economy and all the wonderful inventions and innovations it brings; they want you to have a little pie that they control. Libertarians want all those inventions and innovations; we want a big pie which the people control.
I don't know what the death rate among Mormons during their trek to Utah was, but I've heard enough to shudder (handcarts for ~1,000 miles?).
So simillar things would be doable now; a group of libertarians could probably go someplace with little government and get ahold of some land. They'd probably suffer quite a bit in the first few years, but....
So far, the government which seems to be winning that competition is the USA. After that, it'd probably be the EU.
There are a wide vast variety of alternatives to modern democracies other than pure anarcho-capitalism -- Wilkinson's false choice between just these two alternatives is a red herring.
For most people, that reason is rational ignorance. What's irrational is to treat that ignorance as if represented an intelligent opinion. I believe the RZA said it best, "March of the wooden soldiers / C-cypher punks couldn't hold us / A thousand men rushing in, not one ninja was sober".
WW has a fetish for voting that is beyond all rationality. Women's property laws were and are a far greater source of liberty for women than the almost useless right to vote.
Democracy is not the same thing as libertarianism, and at the margin it makes sense that the expansion of any one system may coincide with the contraction of the other. That said, Thiel argues that expanding democracy to include women coincided with the decline of the appeal of libertarian policies. Wilkinson rejects the idea that expanding democracy would cause the decline of libertarianism.
In the abstract, I see no reason to think that libertarianism would be less popular with a voting population of 100 million than with a voting population of 50 million. But when we look at things less abstractly, I think I see a pattern. And no, gender is not the explanatory variable; power is. There are two unstated dynamics at play here: Powerful people already vote, and libertarianism is a superior good.
1. Powerful people already vote. Ever since Magna Carta, we observe that the next group to gain the franchise is the next most powerful group that didn’t already have the franchise. That is, within any population, the franchise is skewed toward the powerful. The choice to expand access to the ballot is not merely a choice to add names to the voting rolls, therefore; it’s a choice to dilute the voting strength of the powerful.
2. Libertarianism is a superior good. I mean that in the economic sense – within broad limits, libertarianism becomes more appealing to people as they get richer. Poor immigrants have tended to embrace collectivist policies; as they have grown richer, they and their children have grown less attached to such policies. In the abstract, expanding the voting rolls should have no bearing on the relative appeal of libertarian policies to the voting public at large. But expanding the voting rolls in a manner that dilutes the voting strength of the rich WOULD reduce the appeal of libertarian policies to the voting public at large.
Bottom line: Wilkinson is right. There’s nothing necessarily inconsistent with expanding the franchise and libertarianism. The inconsistency is with POVERTY/WEAKNESS and libertarianism. To the extent that we can adopt policies that bolster the wealth and power of people of all demographics, then people of all demographics will be better positioned to appreciate what libertarianism has to offer.
But Thiel is also right. If your goal is to promote libertarianism through democratic means, you have a strategic interest in keeping the vote in the hands of the relatively rich and powerful. Consider international institutions. The World Bank and IMF tend to be controlled by affluent nations, and (in recent years) these institutions have tended to clamp down on the behavior of recipient nations, imposing structural reforms and promoting transparency. The UN is arguably a more “democratic” institution, but hasn’t seemed quite as interested in promoting such reforms.
We should admit that democracy is not a perfect ideal; it was merely the best effort to replace the previous "best practice" form of government, which was monarchy.
We should be extremely wary of "public choice" arguments for government to usurp goods and services which can be and have been provided by voluntary arrangements. The interests of the government are seldom coincident with the interests of the individual.