Liberty in the Long Run

It’s useful at the margin, but for radical change, it’s a long shot even in the long-run.

(okay, perhaps that was excessively snide… but it seems like an accurate assessment)

Religions and conquering nations have understood this for a LONG time. I would go so far as to say that if you belong to any self-aware group that has a future time orientation, then strategic fertility is already in your repertoire.

Because of the strong economics strand that runs through libertarianism, I’ll take future time orientation as a given. But I’m somewhat doubtful that libertarians self-aware as a group (i.e., to they self-consciously identify themselves primarily as belonging to the group of libertarians) due to strong individualism.

Also see Idiocracy for the flip-side.

Another possibility is a new invention that makes it impossible to collect taxes.

Let me make the obvious joke: Bryan, have you ever checked out the male/female ratio at a libertarian event? Are you suggesting cloning?

A radical extension of #2 is to pool resources with like-minded individuals to buy up media companies and spread your radical libertarian ideology through propogranda, a la Rupert Murdoch. The trick is in starting from a popular (read: profitable) perspective with a wide enough base of readers/listeners/viewers and then gradually progressing towards more radical libertarian ideals. If you do it slow enough then it will be more likely that your ideas will be well received and less likely to lose your customers.

Propoganda may have been a more effective medium of the past when information was less available, only through newspapers, radios, and magazines. But if information is more easily obtained now, then it will make your effort less expensive. Blogs and social media, with sufficient viewership, can aid in increasing the speed of the distribution of ideas.

This is the tactic espoused by the Roman Catholic Church so you really aren’t the first to mention such an idea. There is much to be said for the idea but it has some obvious flaws.

There is a relationship among cultures with great needs they desire to be filled by government that already have high birth rates. Do you think you could out-fertilize those populations?

Obviously higher populations would require more services and there would be an outcry for greater government. I think that would be counter-productive – no pun intended.

On the other hand the practice would bring a lot of smiles to the faces of the population and that can never be a bad outcome. Since I left New Hampshire many years ago and I don’t own a ship, let me know where to sign up for this new solution.

Damn, now I need healthcare…

“The upshot is that if libertarians can get and keep their birth rates well above average, liberty will actually be popular in a century or two.”

Wouldn’t this also be an argument against open borders, a view many libertarian’s have? There are tens of thousands of new people coming here every year illegally that come from a country without a tradition of liberty that out number or at least off set the amount of children from libertarian parents. The Heritage Foundation 2010 ranking of economic freedom put Mexico at 41 just ahead of Kuwait. While there are short term economic benefits of getting your yard mowed cheaply or getting your fruit picked at low cost, there are also long term economic costs associated with having lots of people at the ballot box who are not so enamored with liberty and would rather vote themselves benefits paid for by the US Treasury. Illegal immigration might have short term economic benefits (although there are certainly short term economic costs as well) but aren’t we inviting tyranny in the long run.

#7. Government itself is privately owned. Shopping malls, homeowners’ associations, and apartment complexes are small-scale examples of privately owned governments. The worse the governance in other areas, the more the privately-owned governments thrive.

So you have to outpace world population growth, 1.17% / year. Very doable, but compare this to persuasion. If every libertarian converts someone once in 85 years, that beats population growth. Persuasion seems very ineffective, but on a Darwinian scale it’s actually extremely powerful. If you manage to convince someone once in 10 year, that’s a 10% / year growth rate, dwarfing population growth.

Strategic secession.

There’s always somebody up for secession, anywhere. Which means your movement gets to draw resources from Alaskans, Okinawans, Basques. As you note in ‘Myth of RV,’ in-group rhetoric is tastier to the masses than didactic libertarianism any day of the week.

So step 1 is coordinate various local movements into a Secession Internationale.

Step 2 is achieve, once the ball gets rolling, hundreds of thousands of teensy microstates.

This reduces the required scale of the Free State project. So now it’s about, say, 35 families moving to The Republic of Northwest Peoria.

Coup

Edward Luttwak has some convincing arguments about why this can’t happen in the contemporary United States, but coups can, have, and will occur in other times and places.

Note that a coup is very different from a violent revolution in that it is not a mass movement, but a very limited application of force. A coup must lead to some abuse of freedom, given that violence is almost always involved, but there’s no reason you must assume that it will lead to a massive one, even in the short term. Of course, a coup is only libertarian if those holding it are. I have no idea how common that is in practice, but I would guess “not very.”

Suppose you accept that radical libertarianism would be a big improvement over the status quo, and stable once established.

Suppose you don’t. Then what?

Persuasion.  It’s useful at the margin, but for radical change, it’s a long shot even in the long-run.

I tend to take the view that anything that’s good essentially sells itself. Like most left-of-center types, I’ve become accustomed to being lectured endlessly about ‘evolutionary not revolutionary change’ and ‘why can’t you just be pragmatic.’ Perhaps the rightist version of libertarianism should also bide its time and wait its turn. And settle for incremental change.

Infilitration.  Critique: See persuasion.

The fact that the word libertarian used to mean, among other things, anticapitalist, is a textbook example of infiltration.

Coordinated movement to change the median voter – e.g. the Free State Project.  Might work, but the private cost of moving to New Hampshire is very high for most people.  I’ll bet that most people who promise to come once the group reaches its threshold (20,000) don’t actually move within 3 years.

So what? Your ideology equates human rights with property rights, so there’s nothing in it for the non-affluent anyway. Filtering out the riff-raff and looooozers should logically appeal to ‘libertarians.’

Strategic fertility.  Standard twin methods find that political philosophy and issue views (though not party labels) are at least moderately heritable.  But wait, there’s more: Since there’s strong assortative mating for political agreement, standard methods seriously understate the heritability of politics.   The upshot is that if libertarians can get and keep their birth rates well above average, liberty will actually be popular in a century or two.  And even if this plan to free the world fails, it will still create a bunch of awesome people.

Natal nationalism again rears its ugly head. Sounds like the children of ‘libertarians’ would be a means to an end. I thought one of the doctrines of ‘libertarianism’ was the individual being an end in themself. Would you disown a child for becoming a filthy collectivist like me?

“How do we get from here to there?” If *we* included all American citizens, and we all embraced libertarianism, there would be no problem: we would institute a libertarian system by voting within the existing democratic framework. In practice, *we* are a very small minority, and the answer to your question is: “We don’t.”

The only good solution that I see is AN OPT OUT PROVISION.

We need to slowly evolve the ability to opt out of the most misguided regulations and rules. It could start (for example) with an opt out for higher taxes on social security (same taxes at lower benefits), then opt out of the worst aspects of medicare or health “reform.” Then perhaps the ability to opt out of restrictions to public school union monopolies.

Once something like this started, people would begin self selecting toward a more libertarian, pragmatic future. The ponzi schemes would collapse before they had a chance to grow. The system’s dynamic would change from Mancur Olson’s nightmare to Hayek’s dream.

What we need isn’t a revolution or breeding program, but a wedge issue that establishes a small precedent for opt out. Then we need to slowly and rationally extend the ability to opt out until a new system eventually evolves. The path of the process will differ by state and country. Mistakes will be made. Breakthroughs will be found and copied.

We need a personal opt out!

Roger

Honestly Bryan, how could you not mention agorism in this post?

Among the other long-shots, what about a constitutional amendment that limits the federal government to running nothing but:

1) The military;
2) The criminal and civil justice system;
3) A federal flat tax < 10% of taxable income; 4) A budget surplus; No more federal government borrowing permitted. It would require passing by a super majority of states. Of course its a long-shot - but what else is there?

almost no one wants to take to the high seas

I don’t know if this is true. We have accumulated 150 paying members and 1700 people on our mailing list in just 2 years. Our website has hundreds of people whose profile says “ready to move now”. Of course, these people are viewing things in far mode, and in near mode I think most of those people would not actually move. But “almost no one” is, I think, an exaggeration.

One thing to remember is that you have an established community, family, and local ties. Young people are *much* more willing to move, on average.

Another thing to keep in mind is that because of this exact problem, we have strategies focused on minimizing cost at the beginning. ie initially locate 12 miles from a city, encourage people to come as tourists, buy timeshares, or try it out for a few months, rather than counting on people to commit to full-time life in a place they’ve never been.

0) gorw the government so big it fails. Let freedom rain.