A Tale From Our Libertarian Present
by Mike Kimel
A Tale From Our Libertarian Present
I’ve been getting a lot of calls on my cell phone from telemarketers lately. So has my wife. Our numbers on the do not call registry, but just to be safe, we registered them again. I’ve had random conversations with people about this, and found that some people are having similar experiences – lots of calls from telemarketers – while others aren’t getting any at all. Very odd, but it seems the do not call registry is becoming useless. This morning I got one such call at 1:40 AM.
To me, this gives us a clue as to what a libertarian society might look like. Because it doesn’t matter how many laws and rules and regulations a society has, if they aren’t enforced, they don’t matter. And it seems that the do not call registry is, for practical purposes, no longer enforced.
So what does that mean? Well, my cell phone number, like my home, and my internet access, is my property. I pay for it. I pay for that property because I want to be able to use it in certain ways. I like to be able to pick up my cell phone and reach family, friends, and business associates. I like to be able to be reached by family, friends, and business associates. I do not pay for these services to get calls from telemarketers at 1:40 in the morning.
But there are others who want to use the property they pay for in ways that affect me. They want to have a dialing machine call me up at 1 in the morning, just on the one in a million chance that I might buy whatever they’re trying to peddle. And why not? The cost to them is infinitesimal. Which means I not only have to pay a price for my property, but I also have to pay an additional price to keep other people from using my property.
That’s already true with e-mail. We all have a spam folder. But there’s a cost to that spam folder – false positives. Every so often you find out that you didn’t get a message you needed to get. I just discovered that I was supposed to confirm a speaking engagement for a conference… and that notice ended up in my spam file somehow. That provides no cost to people producing spam, but their use of my property, their placing things I do not want in my e-mail account, costs me money.
This issue of other people using one’s property rights has long existed with physical property. If you’re neighbor doesn’t wish to keep the music or odor or pollution he produces on his property, which is usually the case, he exports onto other people’s property. Causing an earthquake on someone else’s property is not an issue of bargaining over conflicting property rights, its taking someone else’s property rights away. Ditto placing toxic fumes on other people’s land. Because the party producing those fumes only has the right to place those fumes on its own property, not to someone else’s. If the music one neighbor produces crosses the boundary onto property someone else is paying for, the producer of that music is trespassing.
Sure, to some degree, everyone produces externalities, but the question is, how big can the externalities be before they must be regulated? As laws cease to be enforced, the government’s footprint diminishes and we move closer and closer to a libertarian society. And the sad truth is, what libertarians haven’t thought through and realized is that such a society is one where individuals have to spend a lot of resources keeping other people from taking their property. And its a society where we are all poorer. All of us, even the captains of industry. How much work would Howard Roark do, how productive would Dagny Taggart be, how much use for life would John Galt himself have if their respective neighbors decided to build a nuclear reactor and dispense with any effort to contain the radiation from crossing property lines?
PS. The call came from this number: 972-280-7286
(Dan here…minor grammatical corrections made for flow.)
Doing a quick Google on the number suggests that it’s owned by a company that provides telephone services to correctional institutions – several reports of calls from different prisons in different states, all on the same caller ID number.
bob,
I googled it too and found the same thing, but I’m not sure that’s true. The phone call was a recorded voice telling me something about lowering the interest rate on my mortgage or something along those lines. I let it go to the voice mail when I didn’t recognize the number. Regardless of whether its a prisoner scamming (and I suspect that’s not all that likely – I imagine prisoners can’t make phone calls in the middle of the night) or a phone dialing machine on the fritz, that is not the reason I choose to pay Verizon for phone service.
If this post were made 3 years ago, you could have just blamed the Bush Administration for either being incompetent or being in the pocket of Business. And you’d probably be right.
But now, it’s not government incompetence or malfeasance that’s the problem – the problem is of course, libertarians.
Kolohe,
I didn’t say the problem is libertarians. This post has two points:
1. Despite propestations by libertarians, if the government fails to enforce property rights, either due to a lack of laws doing so or due to a blatant disregard for those laws, leads to the same outcomes as one would see in a libertarian state.
2. The libertarian outcome is not what libertarians think it is.
Certainly, in the example which led off the post, the entity not enforcing the law pertaining to the Do Not Call Registry is, to the best of my knowledge, the Obama Administration. I do not recall ever stating anything that would indicate I believe the Obama Administration is run by libertarians or along a libertarian philosophy.
On the other point, I’m pretty sure I can make similar statements about how the outcomes in a communist regime wouldn’t be what communists expect it to be as well, I might add.
“Well, my cell phone number, like my home, and my internet access, is my property.”
Don’t you get it? You don’t own what you buy anymore. All you get is limited rights of use. In the ownership society, it’s society that ends up getting owned.
OYODS! Occupy Your Own Damn Street!
Good grief. Rules enforcement does NOT have to be conflated with the state. Government, even, doesn’t have to be conflated with the state. Libertarians are simply saying that overwhelming-force-protected monopolies are inherently inefficient and/or rights-trampling. Easy as that.
Given imperfect reality, one will always have to spend a lot of resources to defend one’s life and rights. The question is whether you want to pay the price via taxation/inflation to an entity which suffers little if you’re continually provided poor service, or via clear fees to an entity which will eventually be replaced if you’re continually provided poor service.
Unchecked telemarketing calls can even be considered a state-driven externality, since “private” telecom providers that could be providing more rigorous technical mechanisms to stop these nuisances can always blame-shift to the state.
I don’t think I understand. Since libertarianism defends the protection of property rights through the government, and your phone number is your property, how in the world would you come up with the conclusions that government not defending your property is a move toward a libertarian society?
The other thing I would say is that you underestimate the amount of resources the government uses to solve these problems, and how much resources the government will inevitably use to solve things that aren’t problems at all (e.g. war with Iraq)
EliWilliam,
Consider another example in the post – your neighbor chooses to listen to music on his property, which is something we all think he should be able to do, be it at 3 AM or any other time.
But what happens when your neighbor decides not to contain that music on his property? Most libertarians I have spoken with seem to feel that the right to play the music when and how the person chooses, without regard for whether it crosses onto someone else’s property, is something that should be the choice of the person who wants to listen to the music. But doing so means that person is now making usage choices regarding someone else’s property, namely the property of those on whom the music is being exported. (Ditto pollution – I have yet to find a self-professed libertarian who is in favor of enforcing clean air standards, which means I have yet to find a libertarian who doesn’t feel that if someone places pollution on your property, tough luck.)
poppies,
OK. I’ll bite. Say your neighbor plays loud music at 3AM, keeping you up and making it impossible for to function at your job. Tell me, which entity can be described as you did with these words: “ an entity which will eventually be replaced if you’re continually provided poor service”?
And your last sentence is very odd. Anyone can blame anything for anything. But why should keeping spam phone calls be my responsibility, or even Verizon’s and not of the party making phone calls that are not wanted? Isn’t this blaming the victim? (Note- I am all for free speech. I just think those I don’t want to talk to shouldn’t have the right to speak in my living room, particularly not at 1:40 AM. They can feel free to speak in their own living room at that time or any other, or the living rooms of people who do want to hear from them.)
While you may not be able to find a libertarian who do not support some particular government solution to pollution, they usually do support some kind of government solution. Tort law, for example, is usually supported by libertarians that I talk to. The libertarian lord and savior, Ron Paul, supports the use of tort law in cases of both sound and physical pollution. Lots of libertarians, though I think not Ron Paul, but myself, think a moderately high carbon tax would be a good idea.
Maybe I’m talking to one small group of libertarians, and your talking to another larger group. But that just means libertarians today do not hold libertarianism as consistently as they should. But that’s a disagreement with the application of libertarianism, not the philosophy in basic. The philosophy as a whole has always been about property rights, and the public sector is a perfectly appropriate means to accomplish that. Mises thought so. Bastiat thought so. And the libertarian lord and savior for president 2012 thinks so.
EliWilliam,
We get into the “no true Scotsman” problem. Essentially, what you describe is correct – protection of property rights requires government, and somebody’s rights are necesarilly curtailed every time sometime wants to do anything. Either the person who wants to do X is prevented from doing so, or someone else has to deal with the consequences. In the real world, though, what seems (to me at least) to be used as the definitiion of libertarians in the public sphere is simply opposition to government: smaller, less intrusive is better.
Ron Paul is an exception. And if I may play the “no true Scotsman” too, it seems to me Ron Paul isn’t really a libertarian. He’s a “states’ rights” guy which is a different thing. From what I can tell, he seems to believe that curtailments on personal freedom on a number of social issues (say, abortions or differential treatments of individuals based on their race) are OK provided they’re done at the state or local level. I think that applies to economic issues as well, but I cannot offhand think of examples right now.
Yeah, I guess, if you define libertarian as simple opposition to government, and I define libertarian as believing that government should protect property, then its merely a semantic dispute. But my somewhat informed guess is that most libertarians would agree with the statement that government should protect property rights. But maybe I’m wrong.
I tend to think that Ron Paul is most fundamentally a constitutionalist, which as he interprets the constitution, manifests itself in being a States Rights guy. However, if he were governor of a state, or to rewrite the constitution, my supposition is that gay marriage, marijuana, polygamy, and most other social issues (with the one big exception of abortion) would be legal even though he doesn’t condone the behavior.
Mike, thanks for engaging what I have to imagine you see as an outlandish argument, I appreciate your taking a bite at least. I never claimed such an entity currently exists. This type of discussion is akin to describing the concept of a modern police force before such a thing existed. I was describing a rules-enforcement entity subject to a pricing mechanism. You can see a paper on such an entity at http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-12.pdf
Regarding the last sentence, anyone can indeed blame anything for anything. I think unchecked telemarketers are ultimately blameworthy in the example given, but as long as there’s no costly impediment to their efforts they’ll certainly keep trying. Accordingly, the question must be asked, why don’t telecoms simply allow customers to log complaints about a particular number-identified customer until that customer is blacklisted from phone services? I would think the existence of the Do Not Call Registry would be strongly explanatory.
poppies: “Libertarians are simply saying that overwhelming-force-protected monopolies are inherently inefficient and/or rights-trampling. Easy as that.”
Then why do so many libertarians support big business? The greatest threat to liberty today comes from corporations, not gov’ts. Why don’t you hear libertarians talking about that?
Min, you and I are talking to very different libertarians, that’s practically all I hear about from them. There are certainly “no true scotsman” issues here, as noted by Mike below, but if someone self-identifies as libertarian and also unconditionally supports state-entangled businesses, I think that person is chipping away at the purpose of having “libertarian” as a term within political dialog.
Thanks for the article.
In general, pro-Libertarians advocate voluntary public programs, not no programs, a very different thing. Rights conflicts in common and in principle current law –and more consistently in the Libertarian approach –are not mediated by the government but juries, a private entity selected by litigants. In the case cited most people have 2 lines, one public, one unlisted; in current law the general assumption is the presence of a phone line is an invitation to solicitors unless otherwise posted.
For info on people using voluntary Libertarian tools on various issues, please see http://http://www.Libertarian-International.org , the non-partisan Libertarian International Organization …
EliWilliam,
If you go to the Libertarian party’s web page right now, you’ll find this motto right under the party name: Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom. With all due respect, the libertarian party seems to define itself as being in favor of minimal government.
poppies,
“Accordingly, the question must be asked, why don’t telecoms simply allow customers to log complaints about a particular number-identified customer until that customer is blacklisted from phone services?”
Actually, an interesting quasi-libertarian parallel already exists. The rules and regulations imposed by the government on e-mail service are much less extensive than those imposed on phone service, and people seeking e-mail service. Additionally, it is easier to send e-mail across boundaries than it is to send a phone call.
So what is the result? The result is that there is an awful lot of spam. ISPers are loathe to go after spammers and will do so only under duress. After all, Joe Blow’s ISP, or its Nigerian equivalent, gets paid by the spammer but not by me. So even if they know full well that a customer is a spammer, they often have no incentive to do anything at all. The result… well, check your spam box.
When the phone rings at 1:40 AM, just try to think of it as the sound of freedom.
Yeah, they do seem to define themselves that way. Minimal doesn’t preclude the protection of property, however. “How minimal?” you might ask the Libertarian party. They seem to answer it on their platform page:
“Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property.”
Arguing that your phone number is your property, and therefore should be protected by government, is a claim that is still inside the libertarian sphere. I guess your post makes more sense to me if I interpret “libertarians” to mean “some libertarians”.
By the way, Ron Paul ran for president with the Libertarian party in 1988, didn’t he? Weird, him not being a libertarian and all 🙂
This could go on forever. I guess the best definition of libertarian to be within some imprecise margin of distain for governmental intrution.
Thank you for making me think. I love your posts.
Libertarian,
Thanks for the comment. I’ve had a few posts on Libertarian philosophy, but I don’t claim to be an expert.
I like the libertarian philosophy in principle, but I don’t think its workable. In the end, the idea that mediation can be accomplished without government coercion is hard for me to fathom. At the very least, you have a problem that some percentage (two percent? five percent?) of the population consists of psychopaths. Some other percentage have mental instability which makes their grip on reality tenuous at best. Then you have fanatics. And don’t forget the crooks of various stripes. How do you plan to get members of those groups to cooperate with your voluntary mediation approach.
Caller ID has been basically rendered useless by unscrupulous SIP (voice over IP) providers who, for a fee, will allow you to use any caller ID you feel like using. And the phone companies continue to peer with these SIP providers because, duh, it’s *profitable* since they get an interchange fee every time a call gets originated at one of these SIP providers.
The magic free market fairy isn’t going to cure this. The magical free market *loves* this — more profit! Which is why the magic free market fairy is more like a hairy transvestite with hairy legs and a beard than a pretty lady with wings. Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Telecom Penguin
The core critique that anarchists have about Libertarians is that anarcho-capitalists — Libertarians — ignore the most central problem of anarchy theory: The problem of power. That is, the private courts that you mention *ALREADY EXIST*. They’re called ARBITRATION courts, and are private courts that operate by agreement of the two parties involved in a dispute. Well, how well does that work? Nobody knew until recently, because these courts keep their proceedings secret, until one Internet governance body said that arbitration proceedings dealing with domain names had to be open. At that point we found that 98% of the time, arbitration courts *side with the most frequent plaintiffr*. Because the arbitration panel gets paid only if *both* parties agree to arbitration, and *the most frequent plaintiff* won’t agree to appear before that arbitration panel again if that arbitration panel rules against it, which will deprive the arbitration panel of all the money that the most frequent plaintiff would otherwise gift them with for the privilege of hearing their cases.
In short, it turns out that in arbitration proceedings between you, an individual, and some big mega-corporation that participates in thousands of arbitration proceedings per year, *you lose* in Libertopia. Because that’s where the profit is for the private court — in siding for the bigger guy.
It’s called *power*, economic power, and anarchists are rightly dismissive of anarcho-capitalism (“libertarianism”) because of libertarian’s utter disregard for that central problem of not only anarchy theory, but civilization itself.
Disclaimer: I am not an anarchist, though I read anarchist (and Marxist, and Libertarian and etc.) theory for kicks. I am a Democrat, in the old sense of the word (i.e., someone who believes that democracy and majority rule are the only realistic way to handle things because minority rule is tyranny and any other path leads to the minority dictating to the majority).
The result of libertarian policies would be a collection of feudal states, where all incidents, that is rights, of property are possessed by the owner, effectively lord, of the domain. All property would be owned by a few, because this is the natural result of unfettered market processes. Their property would be secured by only so much force as they themselves would be able to marshal, Most people would be propertyless and inserfed, living at the pleasure of their master.
All control, ownership, would be localized, because only the resources of the nation-state, or something like it, is capable of bearing the cost of projecting force over a distance. The ability to transport over land, and even sea, would deteriorate.
Force is the ultimate arbitrer. Many libertarians imagine it can be held by individuals. In any given territory, it is either a monopoly, or that territory is in a state of war. Libertarians who imagine that it can be otherwise are living in a fool’s paradise.
poppies,
Let me try an analogy. Say we were talking about communists. I could describe a communist outcome: eventually those who under systems might be motivated to work will have no motivation to do much and things grind to a halt.
That isn’t something someone who calls him/herself a communist desires. That isn’t in the platform of any communist party. But that is the logical outcome of a truly communist system. (Note – I am using a “true” communist system as opposed to, say, what was used in the USSR in the past or North Korea today, just as in this post I tried to extrapolate how a “true” libertarian system would evolve.)
EliWilliam,
You’re welcome. I should note… I’m slightly left of center (as per the masthead) in general, but its not because I care one whit for the government or like government. I don’t think anyone’s goal is big government. Government is a means to an end – ideally making us all better off, and its got all the inefficiences of any other human institution. In some places and times its awful. In some places and times it can be rather good. We are fortunate to live in a system where we can still institute changes and influence outcomes.
greg,
And it doesn’t take long before the “company” in the “company town” is the government for any and all effective purposes.
Yes. With the “company store,” and it’s sixteen tons all over again.
@ poppies
I do not like how the Greens in the U. S. are socialistic. I do not like how the Libertarians suck up to big business.
Mike Kimel: “I could describe a communist outcome: eventually those who under systems might be motivated to work will have no motivation to do much and things grind to a halt.”
Is that what happened in the early Christian Church?
“When the phone rings at 1:40 AM, just try to think of it as the sound of freedom.”
Does Hillary Clinton answer the phone at 1:40 a. m.? 😉
I grew up in a college town of 36,000, which in addition hosts about 14,000 postsecondary students every year and has structured its laws to deal with the predictable results of having almost half of its population (local kids and college kids together) between 16 and 28, the age when humans are learning to be mature independent adults.* There are lots of rentals, and this could cause big problems if not for a rental bylaw which says that if tenants are seriously disruptive, the city can evict them instantly AND forbid the landlord to re-rent that property for a space of time — three months is average, I think.
Sounds draconian, but in the situation is there an alternative that doesn’t weigh heavily on the non-disruptive? Landlords can’t be hanging around like stalkers trying to prove misbehaviour and then spend months getting an eviction order. Neighbours can’t be on the hook for extra sedatives just so they can sleep at night. The other students trying to study near (or in) a party house get dinged too. In this case the externalities are huge, and a way of preventing them before they arise isn’t evident — by definition the new students won’t have a track record as renters, so they can’t even be filtered out.
What prevents over-regulation? The town and the landlords benefit from hosting students, it might be one of the largest industries in the county. But without the ability to stop trouble instantly, both the college and the landlords would lose a lot of their income, and spend time and money doing the hard way which the bylaw does the easy way.
Noni
* A fine program aired last night, about the brain function of teens. You can see it here: http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/surviving-the-teenage-brain.html#
Your example is a great example of democracy in action. In a democracy, the notion of the majority regularly choosing to impose draconian laws that punish the majority or even a significant minority is ridiculous because these laws would cost them too much money and cause them pain or would be morally abhorrent to the majority. Which is why the Libertarian criticism of democracy as “tyranny by the majority” is so much nonsense. If that were true, then black people would still be slaves, because they are a significant but still relatively small minority of the population (approximately 15%) so what’s to stop the majority from enslaving them? Other than, err, the fact that the majority of the population is *not* evil and sees slavery as morally abhorrent, you say?
The Libertarian argument appears to be that the majority is evil. But if the majority of people in your country are evil, then government is the *least* of your problems… luckily the majority of people just want to live their lives in peace, and are *not* evil except perhaps via omission (i.e., failing to do right, rather than actively trying to do wrong).
Min,
To avoid getting us both in deep water, I think I’ll simply state that there don’t see many Christian denominations these days suggesting an Acts of the Apostles type communal lifestyle.
BadTux,
“The Libertarian argument appears to be that the majority is evil.”
But on the flipside, the Libertarian argument is that people should be trusted to engage in their activities as they aren’t going to deliberately do anything evil. Perhaps that’s the contradiction that causes the failure.
Mike,
Yes, your phone number is your property. And, as other commenters have mentioned, libertarianism includes the protection of property rights, so the point you raise here is actually not a problem with libertarianism. Your problem is with a non-libertarian government that spends lots of money on enforcing plenty of laws but somehow neglects to protect your property rights.
To be fair, a libertarian world would have multiple differences from the status quo and it’s likely that there are some things about a libertarian world that you’d find undesirable compared to the status quo. But this says nothing about whether libertarianism is generally preferable to the status quo.
One aspect of a libertarian world should definitely appeal to you: In this post, you observe a problem arising in a mixed economy with an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies and mistakenly conclude that this is indicative of how libertarianism would look. In a libertarian world, if things went wrong, you could correctly blame it on libertarianism some of the time.