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When Libertarians Attack Free Software
binarybits writes 'I've got a new article analyzing the unfortunate tendency of libertarian and free-market organizations to attack free software. The latest example is a policy analyst at the Heartland Institute who attacks network neutrality regulations by arguing that advocates have 'unwittingly bought into' the 'radical agenda' of the free software movement. I argue that in reality, the free market and free software are entirely compatible, and libertarians are shooting themselves in the foot by antagonizing the free software movement.'
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
So you can see that as the actual retail cost approaches zero, the positive effects of capitalism approach infinity! Unfortunately when the actual cost is zero, it's undefined and your interpretation may vary.
Basically I suggest open source software people instruct these complaining parties to donate a penny or fraction of a penny to once again make them look like the epitome of our capitalistic system at work. Anyone else (who isn't stupid) may continue to use it for free and -- at least in the case of open source software -- enjoy unparalleled benefits like being able to modify and redistribute the source let alone view it. Problem solved.
My work here is dung.
Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Liberarians tend to focus on "my freedom" more than on "your freedom".
no, I don't have a sig
A better op-ed on this very subject was published by libertarian think thank The Cato Institute over two years ago: http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/070622-tk.html
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I consider myself a libertarian and I'm a fan of FOSS simply because of the liberty and control it gives me over my computer and the software I use.
My opinion has nothing to do with the free market, but if anything, FOSS lowers the barrier of entry into the software market incredibly, allowing anyone with a computer with the opportunity to participate in the market.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.
That particular variety of Libertarian is more what people in the US think of, but they tend to really be more like republicans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Sort of like not all democrats want abortions and the destruction of the military, not all republicans want freedom and religious facism, and not all greens walk to work :)
Not all libertarians are facists, or communists, or free-market/anti-market - take your pick.
Most just want maximal individual freedoms with minimal government.
I'd say the F/OSS market is the BEST expression of Libertarian though, especially the Limited BSD/MIT style licenses. The GPL, well, that's another debate ;)
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal. Copyright is a government interference in the market, using force to set up temporary monopolies. If I understand libertarianism, that's a bad thing. So under the libertarian ideal, there would be no copyright, and so no GNU software.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It serves my own purposes. As a developer I am not interested in licensing and IP. That kind of crap is for big corporations. My interests lie in being a paid expert where I go from one company to another and get paid to integrate or fix their free software based products. For small indepedent businesspeople, free software is a major asset. We can share the non-competitive aspects of the software. Operating systems, webservers, etc are all commodities. The important bits are where they are configured and customized for a businesses' needs, rather than licensing the software itself.
Free software isn't socialism, it's the new capitalism. It's the small guy capitalism.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it just me, or is anyone else put off by people tooting their own horn by submitting their blog postings as stories? I mean, the guy seems to have something serious to say and seems readable, but geez, let someone else submit it to Slashdot, it doesn't look so much like self-serving aggrandizement or driving your page views up by slashdot effect...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
Why do the nation's librarians have such an axe to grind?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The doubt that I always had is: It is good to force you to be free? (GNU GPL)? or is it better to have the freedom to decide to be free or not ?(FreeBSD)?
Speaking as a registered libertarian, not everything in a capitalist system is done for profit (just ask the NRA or the EFF). And sometimes even innovation is done for innovation's sake.
Of course, that software is inherently "information" is what makes this work (avoiding the economic problem of scarcity). "Knowledge" doesn't cost anything to pass on. I think where those right(er) wing libertarians get their signals crossed. They assume that because we currently have an idea of "Intellectual Property" that it is in some way a fundamental freedom. Or that because we currently have corporations that can exist as entities they fundamentally are. These are just assumptions built into our system, not facts. I don't remember reading anything in Locke about intelectual property rights. And I don't see how giving software away for free is anti-capitalist.
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
Of course free software is fine from a libertarian perspective. Net nutrality, on the other hand, is a set of government rules imposed on ISPs. Libertarians believe that the government should only protect your property, and net nutrality does not do that.
The reason behind this is simple: Libertarians (or at least the "think tank" Establishment branch of them) equate freedom with being able to make as much money for yourself as you can, and do with that money whatever you please.
The problem with FOSS in their eyes is that it prevents the proprietary software companies from making as much money as they want.
They don't want a "free market" in the classical sense. To them "free market" means "free to be anti-competitive and free from government safety/environmental regulations."
They only care about making money for themselves, and to hell with everyone else.
A true free-market economy is as much of a pipe dream as a true Communist one. Greed and lust for power corrupt both of these ideologies before they ever get fully established.
I'll grant that many rank-and-file Libertarians do not think this way, but the most vocal part of the Libertarian movement sure seems to.
While "Libertarian", in principle, comes down to a fairly tight set of notions about state noninterference, there are in practice a large number of ostensible "libertarians" that are pretty much strictly anti-regulation and pro-(specific)business, rather than libertarian as such.
Anyone who is against the activities of a group of volunteers, doing as they wish with the fruits of their labor, and offering goods under their chosen terms(Yes Virginia, the GPL is simply a voluntary private contract, not some conspiracy to oppress you) just because there isn't enough money and market-rhetoric involved is a damn shoddy libertarian. Of course, anyone who argues against the environmental regulations that prevent people from unilaterally poisoning my person and property is also a damn shoddy libertarian, and we have masses of those.
While certain flavors of market capitalism(and potentially even limited liability corporations) can be libertarian arrangements, anybody who mistakes supporting those for being a libertarian is, as they say, Doin' it Wrong.
Net neutrality uses government regulations to enforce policy on a network which is privately owned and leased. It is a violation of the property rights of the network owner. This is unrelated to, and separate from, FOSS, in which the ownership is provided freely (which has some different meanings given the particular license/copyright). Two different issues philosophically, and poorly understood in TFA.
Seriously... the fact that asshats like Glenn Beck have appropriated the word "libertarian" to describe paranoid (and often racist) morons who don't want to pay taxes doesn't make them actual libertarians. I suspect that most of the "libertarians" this article refers to are also against gay marriage, immigration, and legalizing drugs, hate the ACLU, and support domestic spying and Guantanamo torture camps. This article is shit.
Any true libertarian recognizes that copyright is an artificial regulation produced by the government and therefore should be reduced to a minimum length (think 5-20 years or so), or abolished and the DMCA further reduces a free economy. If we have sane copyright, reduced patents (Again is government regulation of an economy), and less government involvement (so governments can't mandate closed standards) we essentially have the perfect system for free software. Propriatary software can still exist but it is checked by the fact that people can legally use it after a certain sane amount of time, little to no patents, the ability to decompile and redistribute modified sources would make it be a free economy for both authors of software and consumers. Think of it this way, we might have Windows 9X in the public domain by now, we can decompile it and use it as more or less of a backend for WINE to emulate Windows, while NT might not yet be in the public domain, a lot of legacy programs are still used, this would get us one step closer to a perfect Linux system.
Any libertarian who is against government intervention should be against copyright, and even though RMS might be against a state in which there is no or a very weak copyright, it is a plus for both free software and consumers.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Just because they call themselves libertarians on their website, doesn't actually make them libertarians.
threadeds blog
This just shows the utter hypocrisy of the libertarians. I've said all along that libertarians really want corporate feudalism, or at least they have been completely co-opted by corporate feudalists. Libertarians, in general, feel they are superior to everyone else. They also feel that it is a natural right for the elite to profit from the plebeians. When anything threatens their real agenda, they will set aside their supposed ideals to destroy it. Free software reduces the ability of the elite to profit off of the 'inferior people' of the world, and therefore it must be destroyed. Unions, even though they are a product of free association, also threaten libertarians ability to exploit others, and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.
The thing is, Libertarians always have such high levels of cognitive dissonance, they do not realize this is what they are doing. They firmly believe they are 'good' people, because being a 'good' person goes along with their image of themselves as vastly superior beings, so they will never look at all the ways their ideals and actions work to oppress the less fortunate. In their minds, they are helping the less fortunate by exploiting them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Individuals still act out of self-interest even when contributing their time & energies to FOSS. The payoff can be ego gratification, skill enhancement, position in the community, etc. In other words, self interest doesn't have to mean capitalistic self-interest only.
Developing talent/skill is in furtherance of capitalism:
"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason." -- Ayn Rand, from "Atlas shrugged"
Libertarianism in the tradition of Ann Rand is about promoting the value of competence by allowing the competent to benefit from their work. Regulations that prevent competition should be regarded as destructive and unnecessary. A libertarian viewpoint should generally be unfavorable towards anti-competitive collusion within an industry in addition to anti-competitive government regulation. I would argue that net neutrality seeks to prevent exactly that.
The developers of OSS are developing for their own enjoyment and advancement. They don't ask for special consideration or subsidies. They meet whiny neediness on the part of users with disdain (RTFM!) and usually come across as selfish and competent in the finest tradition of the Rand libertarian ideal. Net neutrality isn't an artificial way to restrict the success of corporate developers by preventing competition; it promotes competition by preventing anti-competitive dealings between the content creation and content distribution sides of the internet.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
A simple test that I ask big-L Libertarians to engage in before I will discuss anything political with them on the internet:
Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure. In order to be taken seriously, Be sure to account for how we would have moved beyond the walled-garden networks of the late 80's early 90's, cite ARPAnet, and reference current backbone peering economics, including the recent maneuvering by Google which prompted the whole network neutrality debate in the first place.
Nobody's passed it yet.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Isn't Eric S. Raymond - one of the early proponents of the Open Source movement - a Libertarian?
I consider myself a libertarian and from what I know of ESR, I would consider him a libertarian. (small l libertarian--not members or followers of the Libertarian party)
I think that FOSS is in agreement with libertarian principles in that I created the software and I will dispose of it in the matter I choose, as GPLed FOSS or sold as closed source. That is my freedom. (I have produced both a FOSS application that is somewhat well used in its niche and closed source, proprietary software, when appropriate.)
I don't think that there are many libertarians that agree with Stallman that software must be Free.
Actually, a lot of them focus on the freedoms of their imaginary future selves and on the vast fortunes they are surely going to amass. See Joe the Plumber. So they end up defending big corporations and rich people, even if those pollute and exploit. The free market rhetoric is just a facade to sound somewhat reasonable.
Libertarianism itself has valuable insights and should be taken seriously. It is spoiled by those who read Ayn Rand as teenagers and took up a professional career in corporate sponsored think tank libertarianism.
Hearland isn't really libertarian, it just says the sort of things its corporate sponsors like to hear.
For instance, they denied any negative effects of second-hand smoking, and are at the forefront of AGW denial.
But then again, it seems most people who call themselves libertarian do that.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
While I tend toward moderate libertarian ideals myself, this is a great example of why I always end up feeling alienated from the party itself. They always end up harping on legalizing hard drugs, having your own private tank, or some other extremist nonsense, and when they're not doing that they're pulling stuff like this that isn't even in line with their supposed values. There are some brilliant men in the party, but they usually end up taking a back seat to the louder-speaking loonies.
I thought libertarian and free-market organizations would have disbanded by now because of the bank deregulation and economic catastrophe. These opinions seem a bit dated and a bit out of touch today. But I guess there are all kinds of old fashioned ideologies still around like religions but do we really care about what they think of free software? So why do we care here?
If you look under the covers, every article quoted by the blog post presented talk about linux in terms of POLICY DECISIONS by GOVERNMENT ENTITIES.
When Munich went Linux, it made some open source folks realize that, if Linux had a hard road getting adoption by the likes of Dell and HP, then they could go the Apple route and be a government mandate (think schools)
And so people began lobbying to get laws passed mandating the use of open-source tools by various government bodies.
For example, in one of the articles (Open Source Socialism by Sonia Arrison) Lee quotes:
This is the primary concern of the libertarians - that choice is not mandated by legislative fiat. We should let the experts employed by the states decide what they'll run.
I expect most folks reading Slashdot would feel the same way, in their own job.
Libertarians are generally against government intervention and manipulation of the free market economy. What could be more manipulative than the coercive force of the federal government, providing government-sanctioned monopolies in the forms of patents and copyrights to rent-seeking entrenched industries? Those monopolies arbitrarily increase the costs of goods and services to individuals and other businesses, and they also have the strong potential of interfering with our constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech. Assuming they support "intellectual property" at all, most libertarians would require very high standards of proof of innovativeness before passing out such power, and would limit their scope and duration to the bare minimum "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as stated in our Constitution.
I am not a big fan of either movement, but the more you look at the movements the more they have in common. Frankly I think both movements have tapped into, but not fully understood, the idea of our time, Freedom is more important than Communism or Capitalism. In other words, if you are actually free, then you are free to sell stuff or join a commune or what ever you think appropriate. Maybe we aren't the first generation to realize this, but still an important break through in light of our recent history (think about the rhetoric of the Cold War).
I suspect that is also why you get people appearing to switch from ultra left wing to ultra right wing or vice versa. They are changing their implementation, but not what they are all about.
I think political parties should protect their brands better. They should demand that anyone professing at least understands the basic tenets of that philosophy.
Nullius in verba
Except how are any 'tube' providers going to get a pipe to your house? The government lets them use 'their' right of way.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
The government has a horrible track record against monopolies. The Sherman Anti-Trust act was used to great effect against the unions, though. They let a merger like AOL-Time Warner, but break up Santa Fe and Burlington Northern, BUT then let Denver and Rio Grande grab up BN. There seems to be no set rule as to what exactly constitutes a monopoly, except for Whomever has the biggest lobby group wins.
Not by any consistent or sane definition of the term.
Like all political labels the term is abused (as is the term free market - most 'free market' advocates don't advocate anything close to it).
The most commonly accepted definition of libertarianism is political thought founded upon the Non Aggression Principle - that is, it is immoral to initiate aggression against another.
On those grounds, consistent libertarian thought opposes patents and copyright as arbitrarily enforced by an aggressive state. Free software on the other hand is a great example of decentralised, voluntary organisation - the very essence of any libertarian society.
That's not to say that there could not be software licenses - that's possible, but they'd probably be unenforceable.
For some more consistent libertarians who embrace open source/free software and apply it in their own work, try c4ss.org.
GNU software, free software, open source software is largely being developed by commercial and private entities, free from government interference, and usually with clear commercial and financial objectives.
Anybody who objects to that is an enemy of the free market, and most certainly not a libertarian.
He is attacking the belief by some that in a perfect world all software should be free. The fact is that while there should be freedom to provide and use free software, and there should also be freedom to make profit by selling software. Anything that encroaches on either freedom is against Libertarian principles.
As many posts have mentioned, the argument has little to do with the scholarly sense of the work Libertarian.
The battle is on assuming any rules are created supporting the broadest sense of the phrase Network Neutrality.
The content by the Heartland Institute is used as propaganda that parties with a vested interest in market-driven network access. Telcos and media conglomerates are only two such interested parties. Crap like this will be used to justify privatizing the whole thing.
Finally, some subtler ideas that may be of interest to some.
1. When there is no economic motive, market mechanisms do not apply. It is not economic activity. So, any interested parties that abhor the absence of economic motives will react with irrational hostility. (ex. Heartland Institute)
2. People focused on maintaining a social hierarchy want to maintain or improve their social standing by using non-neutral network access as a status symbol. A vaguely related American example would be these people typically will consume iPhone-everything simply because it's one of the most expensive ways to communicate wirelessly not because they use all of the features. They typically react with indifference or hostility to things that provide no external affirmation of their social status.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Everybody wants to wrap themselves in the flag of the free market, and claim that their view is the definition of free market. Let me take a quick moment to define a few terms:
Free Market: Objective is to maximize the efficiency of allocation of resources by maximizing the ability of people to make rational, informed, free decisions on how to transact liquid wealth.
Laissez Faire: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by minimizing government involvement in corporate decision making (typically except those decisions regarding contracts, copyright, trademark, patents, and trade dress).
Libertarian: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by minimizing government involvement in all decision making (typically except those decisions regarding contracts, copyright, trademark, patents, and trade dress).
Capitalism: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by maximizing return on capital.
The proponents of each of the latter three beliefs above profess that their belief system is synonymous with the free market. However, since they are all explicitly maximizing or minimizing different things than what the free market maximizes, it is not by definition that they are synonymous. Hence their hypothesis of synonymity is subject to analysis and disproof -- even if you fully accept the primacy of the free market.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The Drudge Report today has a picture of Julius Caeser with the headline "Julius at FCC wants to regulate Internet". If you hurry you may catch it before the headline changes http://www.drudgereport.com/ This headline has personally angered me more than any other I can remember. I have been talking with people online and off for the last few years about this issue with great spirit. I have convinced others of my point of view using reason and civil discussion. At length, I have spent time and energy to do this. Now, as the issue heads to it's legislative climax, we finally get a headline about it on one of the most viewed, mainstream news sites in the world (I give it mainstream status due to it's popularity). Up to this point, the issue has been absent from any mass-market coverage. So, that finally happens, and the gateway to this information is labelled with the banter of a political shill who has seized the opportunity to spread propaganda that is aimed squarely at those who would react to such stupidity in the most blind and uninformed manner. Unfortunately, I am not surprised. I can only hope that if the principles of net-neutrality are not adopted, that one day someone decides that Drudge's traffic is "undesirable", or perhaps he is taking in too much revenue, and that physical access to his POV is hampered. Then he may think twice before throwing mindless, blanket ideology over every idea that concerns him.
The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal.
The GPL exists to fix a problem with Copyright law: If you release a work in the public domain, somebody can make a modified version, copyright THAT, and enforce it against YOU. They can also create a compilation of a number of public domain works and copyright the compilation.
This means, for instance, that some commercial entity could fix a bug in or add a feature to your public-domain software product and you couldn't make the equivalent fix or add the equivalent feature. Or they could construct a distribution (ala Red Had or Debian) and copyright it, and no equivalent could be made - first Linux distribution gets a monopoly on Linux distributions.
GPL and most other FOSS licenses head this off by maintaining the copyright and using the licensing terms on the underlying work to deny adding such restrictions to derived works and compilations.
But without copyright the restrictions couldn't be added. Sure, something like the GPL would be unenforceable. But if someone were to release a bug fix or upgrade, anyone could reverse-engineer it and include the fix/upgrade in another version of the public-domain work. If someone made a compilation, anyone else could make a similar or identical compilation. Or they could just copy the fixed/upgraded version or compilation. So the GPL's purpose - allowing software set free to STAY free - would be realized and the GPL would be unnecessary.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At first, I thought this story was a dupe of the one about irrational decisions.
Aside from the fact that you need to learn to spell "neutral"...
Does this mean libertarians believe you are free to use your "property" to regulate access to public resources?
What, in the mind of the libertarian, did you do to deserve such power?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Neo libertarian would be a more apt description, as they aren't really in favor of individual liberty, but in diluting the powers of governments in order to maximize the power and profits of the multi nationals. A task at which they have largely achieved.
.. :)
.. advocate a combination of collective activist user behavior and government mandates to break "Big Media's" grip on information and culture by creating an information commons to unleash citizens' bottom-up creative and innovative potential. And they oppose "Big Software," such as Microsoft, believing there should be no proprietary ownership of software and that users should instead be free to use, copy, change, or redistribute any software code as they see fit.'
.. An underlying premise of neutralnomics is the Marxist notion that capitalism'
.. [who] is also chairman of Netcompetition.org, an e-forum on Net Neutrality funded by broadband telecom, cable, and wireless companies'
As in usual in these cases when they talk about 'Net Neutrality' they mean the exact opposite. Mainly to do with installing toal roads on the InterTUBES. Once it gets to Washington the 'Net Neutrality' bill won't actually keep the net neutral, similar to how the 'Can-spam' act didn't, can spam that it. It actually made it legal, and illegal to try and stop it.
'Advocates of "network neutrality" have the federal government's ear and seem closer than at times past to achieving their goal of greater government control over the Internet '
Instead of where it rightly belongs, in the hands of a few unaccountable mega-corporations. I wonder just who is really financing Heartland
some more quotes:
'Neutralists
This is merely a pretext to discredit the 'Neutralists' by associating them with open source 'activists' using a total distortion of what Open Source is really about.
'Neutralists view the economics of information technology through their unique prism, which results in a set of beliefs that Cleland calls "neutralnomics."
Ahh, the ole Open Source is communist fud.
'The conventional view of broadband is that ISPs should be free to divert from the flat-rate billing structure most customers experience, and experiment instead with variable pricing, usage-based pricing, or even caps on broadband use in order to tailor services and products to the wants of potential consumers. The drive to make greater profits propels the search for new and better products, and the presence of competition gives consumers choices at reasonable prices. This is the fee structure employed even by public utilities such as electricity and water, where it is generally seen as being efficient as well as fair.'
No that's not accurate. What the telecoms want to do is restrict customers from using third party services and then bump up the price for their own offerings. In other words create a monopoly. Not only will this stifle competition but make it almost impossible for any new player to enter the market. Certainly things like Apachie would never take off as the incumbents would disconnect them for violating intellectual property laws. Would the net be safe in the hands of a few mega-corporations.
'Stallman has little use for the Founding Fathers' idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty'
Does anyone have a link to the original text where the 'Founding Fathers' refer to 'intellectual property rights'
'Municipal WiFi mesh networks have consistently proven to be more technically and operationally difficult to operate than government officials have thought'
This is bullshit, most anywhere a city council tried to implement wireless, the telecoms have tried to use the courts to get it shut down. Purely in the interests of 'competition'
'The author thanks Scott Cleland
Sure, GNU GPL forces you to be free if you want to improve a software. While FreeBSD code doesn't force you.
I argue that all you people with ridiculously consuming agendas, on whatever side, are just engaging in mental masturbation by coming up with various amusing ways to bend things so they fit your world view. I know slashdot sometimes has trouble finding decent tech news, but if you just stick pure opinon up as news then you're on the horrible path to kuro5hin.
I'm not a business person, and I'm not an economist, nor a politician.
I believe in the 'free market', but for completely different reasons than stated above. I think the 'free' in free market is the same free as in 'Free Software' - that is, it is about individual and corporate private Freedom/Liberty to make their own decisions, (relatively) free of government interference. I personally don't really care about 'maximizing the efficiency of allocation of resources' (though that might be a desireable side-effect), but I'm pretty strongly pro-free-market, because I am pro-Freedom.
That doesn't mean I don't think there is a place for regulations from the government, but the regulatory role of the government, in my personal philosophy, is more of a policing roll - it shouldn't so much be about telling businesses how to run their business (though there are, I think, some reasonable exceptions), but should be about such things as maintaining honesty (things like truth-in-advertising laws, warranty laws,insider trading laws, etc, to keep people from getting ripped off by con-men, which I think most people, even the staunchest capitalists/libertarians, can generally agree are necessary), protecting human safety (things like OSHA) and preventing gross exploitation of people (minimum wage, etc), protecting the environment/public resources.
I also, though, think that there is also a place for more extensive/invasive regulations when it comes to business products/services, which necessarily, have either a true monopoly, or are necessarily limited to only 2 or 3 competitors per market. So, I am pro-network-neutrality, because there is no real free market (from my earlier definition of what I consider a free market, it follows that a market is only free if anyone can get into a business, if they see an opportunity, so long as they have sufficient investment capital, with no artificial/government limitations on entry into that business) in things like to-the-premises ISPs - only 2 or 3 companies can run cables to homes/businesses (so there is, basically, a monopoly on infrastructure - even if I have a lot of money to invest in infrastructure, I probably would NOT BE ALLOWED, legally, to run cables to your home or business), and for Wireless Internet, again, there's only enough spectrum for a small handful of operators per market (I think it might be slightly easier to get into the Wireless ISP business than the cabled ISP business, but still, there are effectively monopolies on the spectrum).
So, I think that it is appropriate for the government to have a larger regulatory role in industries in which a truly free market does not and cannot exist.
So, what does that make me?
They get the authority to do so from their ability to do so. That's what the concept of property is all about (after all, you can hardly call something property if you have no authority over it). Either these companies own their Internet infrastructure or they don't. The net neutrality people are essentially saying that they don't.
Libertarians aren't opposed to free software - they're opposed to the ideology at one (vocal) end of the FOSS spectrum, like that of Stallman. Part of libertarianism is choosing whether to make your software FOSS or not.
In some sense, the BSD license represents Libertarian ideals, while the GPL does not since it doesn't allow you to choose whether to release source code.
I am a libertarian, and I do not believe in net neutrality regulation. However I see nothing wrong with FOSS. The attempt to put them together as one is simply a red herring
If someone wants to make a more accurate analogy, it would be the government making a law that says that FOSS developers can not restrict commercial uses or distribution of the software they write.
I've observed that most "Libertarian" or "libertarian" organizations are no more than corporate shills.
If you review their positions it becomes obvious.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'd like to point out that Libertarians do not all have the same beliefs. We tend not to blindly adhere to every plank of some party platform.
This particular libertarian thinks that if you create a product, you have the right to charge whatever you want for it, including nothing. I personally don't see how a free market proponent can argue differently. Sometimes it takes a free or extremely cheap product to bust up a monopoly, when legal and market maneuvers continue to force a price that the product is no longer worth. I think any real Libertarian would argue against government intervention, but there's something extremely satisfying in watching regular people successfully compete against software giants in their spare time. I would argue strongly that this is how the free market is supposed to work. If you're trying to charge a high price for something that another person is giving away for free, chances are there's something wrong with your business model.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"The GPL has a place in some shared infrastructure, but the newest rev (gplv3) was a complete failure. It tried to dictate what developers could do with their own creations"
Where does it say that. The main difference is that it prevents other developers suing you are the end users for patent violations and prevents the 'tivoization' of the code when used in embedded devices. Similarly to GPL 2, those that modify the code but don't redistribute it are under no obligation to distribute their own code.
'No surprise that the GPLv3 was rejected by the marketplace'
According to BlackDuckSoftware up to 12059 projects were released under GPL 3. How do you spin this into 'rejected by the market place'.
Something that I've noticed recently is a trend towards virulently anti-capitalist comments in Slashdot. And I'm not talking just the generic "rich people suck" comments that have permeated mankind since the beginning of time. It really hit me hard when I saw a post declaring that tariffs were awesome and every country should close their economies off from each other rated +5 insightful. I assume that a combination of the recession and outsourcing of IT and CS jobs, previously secure from foreign competition, has alot to do with it.
I value politeness. If you extend it to me, I'll extend it to you.
[Argument that pushing FOSS mandates for government operations is an interference in the free market - consisting of government purchasing agents "expertly" and "freely" choosing proprietary software.]
I was under the impression that the pushing of FOSS in government was about several other things:
1) Keeping public documents and channels of required communications with government in freely readable formats, rather than locked up in proprietary formats that require those governed to purchase compatible software and/or agree to licensing terms in order to communicate.
2) Keeping the details of the operation of government open and auditable, rather than exposing it to malware inside of black-box software products.
3) Cost containment - imposed on the government by its citizens, who are the primary payers of the taxes that pay for the government's IT operation.
1) and 2) are clearly "open information" issues, where it's obvious which choice is "open". Only 3) even touches on either "free market" or "choice in software" ideals that you claim are being violated. And given that governments (in republics at least) are supposed to be agencies of their citizens, this decision is properly the right of those citizens if they chose to issue such policy directives to their hired agents rather than relying solely on the agents' judgement.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's telling that the first line of the Wiki is "Libertarianism is a term adopted by a broad spectrum of political philosophies". The first line of the second paragraph is "All forms of libertarianism support strong personal rights to life and liberty, but do not agree on the subject of property".
So how can we have a discussion which is fundamentally about questioning the libertarian stance on property when there isn't one?
To me libertarianism derives from liberty and hence the fundamental rule is everybody should be free to do as they please, provided that does not encroach on the equal rights of others, at which point a fair and just balance must be struck. (If you "get it" you'll realise everything past the first comma is redundant.) For what it's worth I certainly do not agree with the elimination of the state because a) the state (or at least judiciary) is necessary to arbitrate and enforce "a fair and just balance" b) there are major practical considerations such as markets not being perfect.
To relate to the OP, I have a suspicion my take fundamentally agrees to that of the author but the article loses itself in the detail while fundamentally the debate is about principle. Talk of a "bottom-up, participatory structure" and so on is not relevant. The question is, does free software impinge on the rights of others? My answer is of course not. It may be difficult for paid-software to compete, but nobody has a right to do well in the market place, they only have the right to try.
One important point to remember about these big DC "think" tanks is that they do work for hire. They are also a social/psychologist mix of the people on the boards, the management and the worker bees. Sure they have "brands," be that liberal, pro-business, liberal, globalization, etc. They are all part of the DC machine just like lobbying firms, law firms, trade groups, etc. A fascinating example is the US Chamber Of Commerce. The chamber is an old brand that styles its self as the spokesperson for business They have been fighting against climate legislation tooth and nail. A number of its members see climate legislation in their business and social interest. This has resulted in some of the largest members leaving the Chamber, including Nike and the largest electrical companies in the county. Turn out the the director has close ties (http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/are_chamber_of_commerce_presid.html) to the rail and coal industries (20% of rail's business comes from hauling coal). It would be interesting to see ho much money is moving from coal and rail into the Chamber. If you were to look at Heartland I expect you will see similar ties or funding. Follow the money. Another interesting hired gun shop is the schizophrenic Discovery Institute in Seattle. It has been doing a bunch of anti-evolution work and on Microsoft's dime having a big conference on the Microsoft campus today pushing public transport as a cure fog climate change. Maybe someday Discovery will rationalize their brand, but until then they seem to be willing to push anything.
A monopoly can not exist with out the government getting involved. "IP" or Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks, etc are a form of a (supposed) limited grant of monopoly power over a particular idea. If we equate less government with getting rid of "IP", then there would be no monopolies because Corporations wouldn't have the Government around to act as their police.
Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
Contracts are a fundamental part of capitalism and any free economic system, in that they allow private parties to set the terms and conditions of their interaction with each other.
There is no reason a contract between and employer and an employees' association setting wages and working conditions should be treated as any worse than any similar contract.
Unless, that is, you are philosophically opposed to contracts that grant employees more power than they would have as individuals, not associated in a union
I find it contradictory that libertarians who supposedly value the foundations of a free economy are so eager to allow collective bargaining contracts to be arbitrarily voided by the employer
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I consider myself a libertarian and from what I know of ESR, I would consider him a libertarian.
He's actually an anarchist.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Sometimes I'm pretty sure people like this are just grasping for rationalisation of their buyer's remorse. They paid 300 dollars for their godawful, bug-ridden, virus-prone, piece of trash Windows OS, but they can't admit to themselves that they made a poor purchasing decision. They then construct elaborate, if inane, theories and explanations about how the only things worth anything must have a pricetag, and there's no way that dirty liberal down the street has something better that he got for free.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Heartland.org is running (according to Netcraft): Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft-IIS/6.0.
Take their position against free software and net neutrality with a grain of salt...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Big L Libertarians are mostly just a bunch of conservative Republican douchebags who jumped ship when their party was taken over and basically destroyed from within by Neocon wingnuts.
I remember, back in 1993, explaining Open Source to a neutral third party in the presence of a self-proclaimed Libertarian (not sure if he used a capital L ... writing had not yet been invented then, y'know). He heard me out, then launched into a diatribe about how Richard Stallman was a Bad Guy because, among other reasons, he was charging absurdly high prices for ports of GNU to certain hardware platforms.
When a Libertarian denies that a business has the right to charge any price it chooses for a product or service (and go out of business if nobody feels like paying that price, or make vast profits if enough people do feel like paying it), please give me some Socialists.
The mistake is believing that Libertarians and those who proclaim themselves to be libertarians are, indeed, in favor of liberty. By their actions you shall know them.
This isn't unusual. The Communists weren't communists. NONE! NONE! None of them! They weren't all totalitarians (one of the opposites of communist), but most of them were. Others were anarchists, a couple were socialists, a few were a weird kind of royalist. Etc. Most royalists, however, actually ARE royalists. I think the problem is that people have a built in desire for a king...and a social group of 20-100 people. (At that size a king provides a cheap, effective, government, provided that you have an effective means of recall. Which such groups did. Murder wasn't uncommon, and the king didn't have THAT much power. If people disagreed with him too often, he stopped being king.)
Libertarians don't expose kingship, but what they DO espouse doesn't work any more than communism does in a large diverse society. If you examine FOSS groups you'll find them filled with Dictators and Gods and other titles of ultimate authority. Guido is BDFL: Benevolent Dictator for Life. He's not the only one. But his only power is that he rules those who wish to be ruled by his absolute dictates. So he's got to be very careful about how he exerts his authority. Linus famously called it "herding cats".
FOSS is a workable form of libertarianism. It doesn't come with the traditional dogmas, though. Just a few software licenses, and a lot of rules of thumb for what works in an organization where the only authority is that which is freely given. Traditional libertarians often find this quite unpalatable. They prefer their Libertarianism to be a religion, with a hierarchical structure and rules passed down by a centralized authority. Them. But they don't want to earn the position. Some would be quite willing to buy it, but that's not the same thing. (Note that FOSS isn't directly dependent on government issued money. The individual developers are, but that's a different matter. In the FOSS communities status and wealth are nearly independent variables.)
It's also worth noting that the FOSS form of organization doesn't work in projects that have large up front costs. (Small costs distributed over a wide area and long period of time does work, however.) So the FOSS form of organization isn't a form of government, and can't, at our current level of technology, be successfully made into one.
OTOH, quite a large proportion of FOSS proponents are young males. Such folk are traditionally given to causes. Many FOSS proponents are also libertarians in politics. That this doesn't necessarily work in areas with large capital costs tends to get lost on them until they're a bit older. Unfortunately, the US government has proven itself an enemy of liberty recently, so there's a good argument that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are worthy of trust. The US government seems clearly headed towards some form of totalitarianism, and that's extremely bad. But this doesn't mean that Libertarianism as currently defined would be a workable answer.
But "workable" isn't what Libertarianism is about. So of course they object to libertarianism whose main goal is "workable liberty".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Um, OP is a libertarian. And nowhere did I generalize to all libertarians.
The Drudge Report today has a picture of Julius Caeser with the headline "Julius at FCC wants to regulate Internet".
While I agree with much of what you are saying, some such reactions are to be expected.
Up to now the government has kept its hands almost entirely off the Internet (and virtually all moves to regulate it have been aborted). Now the FCC proposes to issue regulations on the details of packet forwarding. This is a major change.
There is considerable question as to whether "naive network neutrality" regulations might destroy the differentiated service features necessary for streaming media and large file transfers to "play well together" in a common forwarding architecture. The details of this has, so far, been driven by (sometimes monopolistic) market players innovating. Regulations will pour metaphorical concrete into the solution space, limiting the innovations to the set of solutions the regulators permit. We've seen how that stunted the telephone industry. The potential for damage to the Internet is far greater.
So of course there is opposition to solving problem that is basically cartel-forming and false-advertising with detailed regulation of the market. Followed, very likely, by stagnation of market growth and deployment of new services, degradation of price/performance ratio, ongoing increases in regulatory tweaks to try to fix the regulatory problem, and finally "regulatory capture" where the regulated take over the regulatory boards.
One of my favorite fake-Confuscisms applies here: "Virgin like bubble. One prick, all gone!"
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How is it a hit piece on libertarians?
This thread really demonstrates how narrowly most /.'ers view libertarianism, which isn't surprising considering the recent antics of the national LP like nominating that fraud Bob Barr and the ridiculous wikipedia article. As a voluntaryist/anarchist/"little l" libertarian, I'd like to point out that the philosophy of individual liberty requires as an absolute, the respect of everyone else's liberty first and foremost, provided they are not harming anyone or anyone's property (generally speaking. discussions on property rights abound. libertarians would never oppose voluntary communes, etc. as long as violence is not used to force others to participate). This boils down to the non-aggression principle. Because of this ultimately respectfully pacifist ethos, most libertarians do not actively seek to suppress fringe speech or otherwise interfere with the nonviolent activities of other individuals. This does not mean that they agree with said (often crazy) speech. For instance, I've never even heard of the Heartland Institute, nor any of the other allegedly-libertarian organizations or individuals referenced in TFA for attacking free software. Free software is incredibly libertarian, though telling me how I can or cannot prioritize traffic on my network is not. My customers are not forced to remain so.
People interested in individual liberty should check out The Free State Project and Reason Magazine. For fun, check out Free Talk Live, a liberty-oriented radio show that takes calls on absolutely any subject and reports regularly on the FSP.
But no one forces you to even use said software. Does Microsoft force you to buy IIS? Only if you want to use it.
(I'd have used Windows or Office as an example, but many are in fact forced to buy those particular packages.)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
After reading through a number of comments i'm surprised that it seems that no one here has read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. There is a third option other than the Market Economy (capitalism) and the Command Economy (Socialism); the gift economy. Raymond makes a pretty decent case as to why Free Software neither socialism or capitalism. Which is great because it frees us from this stupid dicatomy which, lets face it, is really just an excuse to say that "my economic model is better than yours, and Free Software proves it."
Don't call yourself a libertarian. Call yourself an anarchist and I will have a lot more respect for you. Heck, call yourself free market anarchist if that's what you are.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
When these networks accept government subsities, they should be governed by a policy of net neutrality. The problem exists beacuse government should not subsidize these networks. Without subsidies, these are private entities that provide a service on their own terms. Therefore, there ought not be any forcing of net neutrality upon them. Libertarians should qualify their statements based on existing facts. In the current situation, there should be net neutrality. But if the situation wasn't screwed up, there should be no interference between two lawful parties exchanging money for service that doesn't have any negative externalities.
Free Software - individuals freely choosing to give up traditional royalty-based copyrights. Libertarian-OK.
Government Mandate of Free Software for Government - a cost/benefit decision for taxpayers Libertarian-maybe-OK.
Net Neutrality - government mandating contract terms between ISPs and users, and possibly a slippery scope for greater Internet regulation. Libertarian-not-OK.
While this may be the opinion of the small group of libertarians who did this study, I know for a fact that many proponents of the Austrian School of Economics would not agree. The Austrian school forms a basis for libertarian philosophy. There are several Austrians who argue against IP altogether, so I see this as a misrepresentation of the platform. Look up Stephan Kinsella for instance.
Which given all the government subsidies and monopoly rights the "owners" were given initially would seem to be a reasonable claim from the net neutrality people.
The word "Libertarian" is a cop out. The Federal government went after anarchists with force and propaganda in the early part of last century, and made everyone believe that anarchists were all bomb throwing mad-men bent on destroying society.
We aren't.
The reason I give libertarians a hard time is because I am a social anarchist and they are individualist anarchists. Social anarchists think individualist anarchists are selfish, and want to externalize as much of the cost of running a functional society as they can. They, in turn, think we aren't really anarchists at all, we're socialists in disguise.
"People's Party of Judea? Pfft, splitters."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Political and economic liberalism have emerged as massive public movement(s) during the course of the 18th century. Ever since, the anti-liberals have been hard at work and libertarianism is just one late inventions of the right to confuse minds by turning liberalism into its opposite. To convince yourself of this, just look at any libertarian website: on any issue, the right agenda is advanced and the left one attacked or derided.
Either these companies own their Internet infrastructure or they don't. The net neutrality people are essentially saying that they don't.
No, they are saying that when private parties have the power to prevent or limit access to public resources, then that is undue power, and therefore it is a power in need of regulation. Property conveys privilege, which is fine, but it should never convey undue power over others. That is why we give the government power to regulate commerce. Once you place your property into a commercial venture, you are subject to that power. That has never meant that it is no longer your property. Now in this context, it suddenly does?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Adam Smith said it best:
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
* V.i.b.12 (Part II)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Don't confuse an anti-communitarian, statist organization such as the Heartland Institute with actual libertarianism.
Libertarians are big on the "my stuff" thing. If they criticise other people for doing with "their stuff" (in this case: software they wrote) whatever the hell they want, they're not really libertarians.
I'd argue that the free market has been destroyed, if it ever existed in modern history. Some might suggest that citizens, corporations and governments have to (re)establish the free market, or at least create the conditions to foster its self-development. It's a bit like the argument that there was no peace in Korea, or the middle east, so military intervention is required to MAKE peace before peace-keepers can keep any peace and re-establish civility. Obviously these "thin liberals" do not believe in that argument (not saying they're wrong but I don't always agree--read on for my opinion). They are focusing on the "means"--whatever you do should be as little as possible from a regulatory standpoint. "Deep liberals" (the classical type, or modern Libertarians perhaps) might take a more situational approach, and would also focus on "ends" over means...ie. what are the end results of a particular policy? Might deregulation/hands-off policy redult in the entrenchmnet of a monopoly or interfere with individual liberties? Many libertarians seem lost in that they fixate on preference of private corporate interest over government control. Libertarians were supposed to believe in INDIVIDUAL rights--tilting the table in either government OR private industry's favour at the expense of personal liberty should be discouraged.
and endless bailouts for politically favored constituencies, such as the AFL-CIO, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, "green" rent-seekers...
This certainly isn't free-market to be sure...I'd describe it as "Capitalist fascism", similar to what Mussolini espoused. Seems ironic that Obama's critics complain about his socialist leanings when thus far strictly from an economic standpoint his administration is almost TEXTBOOK CAPTIALIST FACISM. You have a government that has established review panels of appointed experts to evaluate the health of your banks and decide how much government capital they can use to do business and even how much they can (over)pay their executives. The government has invested heavily in two auto companies (not to ultimately socialise them as they intend to divest themselves of their interest, but rather to control the recovery of the industry). Obama is said to appoint a "czar" of this-or-that to "oversee" various aspects of the market. There is this policy to direct private enterprise to "buy American" in return for being seleted to work on public works projects and so on. The economic policy of the current US administration would've been heartily supported by Mussolini or Hitler.
PLEASE do not take offense at the comparison of Obama's economic record to that of notorious totalitarian monsters, though I know it would be the natural reaction. Obama obviously has much more noble intentions and hasn't given the slightest indication he believes in the more insidious aspects of WWII era facism like eugenics, genocide and so on. The comparison is strictly based on MACRO-ECONOMIC POLICY.
At any rate, on the subject of Free software it is completely couter to libertarianism to do anything less than whole-heartedly support the idea. Ultimately, trhe creator of a work should be allowed to confer whatever rights he wants to the end user. If the argument is made that Free software threatens the software market and policy should curtail its use IS NOT A LIBERTARIAN AT ALL--they may be "Capitalist" but they are suggesting that individuals should be discouraged form excercising their freedoms in the name of maintaining a market. THAT IS WRONG. If an idea/concept/grassroots movement manages to make an industry obsolete such that it dies IT SHOULD BE LEFT TO DIE. Typewriter manufacturing is now a small cottage industry because the product is obsolete, and those who made them either went extinct or changed their business.to something relevant. Governments didn't give bilions Remington or to IBM to keep typewriter factories open, and they didn't establish government panels to decide on what these factories would build or try
"Anarchists", by definition (an + arch), believe in NO government. That's a long way from either traditional conservatives, or even the most radical libertarians (or Libertarians), who believe that a government is needed to, at the very least, provide for a common defense (military), and also a police force.
If you don't believe in no government, then you're not an anarchist.
Wrong. Look up the word 'archon.' It means 'ruler' not 'government.' In Greek, "No Government" would be anocracy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From "Wealth of Nations"
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
* V.i.b.12 (Part II)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You have that saying backwards.
"As the high approaches infinity the money approaches zero"
That's how it's really working now.
Tell that to the children whose parents put their personal happiness above raising them and providing for them. By sustainable liberty I mean recognizing that you have to limit your own liberty and accept your responsibilities toward other. People who live without consideration for others deserve whatever tyranny and harm comes their way.
How about the black market and drugs? A "Free" market in the drug trade becomes rapidly overcome by an oligarchy of competing organized criminal interests who, when not taking on each other, will do their best to prevent or co-op upstarts in the name of reducing competition.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
When socialism can defeat capitalism in the free market it deserves to win.
So, you want socialism to defeat capitalism on capitalism's terms?
Libertarians are more about individuals' freedoms.
The GPL is about software itself being free: free from others making it closed sourced.
The BSD-type of license make the wielder of the software free to do what they want with the software - even make it closed sourced (as long as there is accreditation of origin).
So, it's not surprising when a Libertarian criticizes 'free software' - assuming that software is not released under a BSD-type of license.
the story on Slashdot immediately preceding this one is The Science of Irrational Decisions?
Stallmanite "Free Software," = Collectivism/Communism. The individual gives up something (the ability to do what they like with software in downstream terms) in order for the collective as a whole to benefit. (At least, this is the theory)
Libertarianism/non-copyleft licenses = The individual is considered important as well. Non-copyleft FOSS licenses do not attempt to dictate any element of downstream use.
Stallman would try and tell you that copyleft is necessary to preserve FOSS' very continued existence, however that assertion is conclusively proven false by the number of successful BSD/non-copyleft projects in existence. If the GPL were necessary to hold off the evil, ravening corporations who were supposedly eternally waiting to pounce, and rend every FOSS project in e
Just yesterday, Bruce Perens implied to me that the GPL is necessary to render FOSS more *popular*, and thus increase its' uptake; but that is a very different thing from saying that copyleft is needed for FOSS to continue to legally survive AT ALL.
More that I think that the one good thing about capitalism is that it works so well. If it gets beaten in some special circumstances (like the production of non-rivalrous goods) then I'm not going to be shedding any tears despite the fact that I might call myself a Libertarian. Free markets, on the other hand, _are_ something I'd attach moral significance to.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
Whether you are a Libertarian or not is rather irrelevant to your argument. I know a lot of Libertarians myself, having been involved with the party for over 10 years.
But I dare say phrases such as "the unfortunate tendency of libertarian and free-market organizations to attack free software." is generalizing rather broadly, when only a single example is actually given. That single example is directly contrary to the attitudes of most Libertarians I know. Are there other examples? Is there actually such a "tendency"? I rather doubt it.
As it happens, I do agree with the article, in that Libertarians should not have any objection to FOSS and the like. But then, so would, I am sure, most of my fellow Libertarians.
I'm not completely opposed to Capitalism; but then again, I bothered to read von Mises, and to a lesser extent Rand and Adam Smith, so I know what the word actually means.
Capitalism was a system that was designed, broadly speaking, to do two things.
a) Regulate material scarcity in such a way, that there was an at least workable means of deciding who received scarce resources. This, of course, was a long way less than perfect in practice.
b) Provide incentives for individuals to create new niches/markets/potential areas/commodities of desire for those who might be willing to buy them. Same again; when the profit motive is the only motive, there are serious problems.
The reason why neither of the above objectives are being met in contemporary society, is because true Capitalism is not the system that is being practiced. I'm also not talking about antitrust law when I say that, either; I'm talking about the corporations themselves.
The RIAA are a good example; they don't want to try and create a viable new form of media distribution from the Internet, which they could then still use to make money. They're more willing to attempt to use the law to force the consumer to continue using an obsolete distribution system, which the consumer is no longer served by.
Von Mises would have advocated a scenario where the RIAA/MPAA's member corporations go out of business; not because of the legal system doing anything, but because in a more genuinely capitalist system, other companies would have developed that were more genuinely in touch with the consumer's needs.
That actually happened in the case of Napster/Grokster etc, but the RIAA et, al. were able to use the legal system to preserve their older oligopoly. If they hadn't been able to bludgeon the legal system into forcing companies like Grokster out of business, they would have gone out of business themselves, and Grokster would have replaced them, because it was more adequately meeting consumer need.
The presiding judge in the above case(s) should have been able to see what was happening. He or she should have realised that an old, obsolete oligopoly, which was unable to compete on merit, was attempting to use the law on its' own in order to preserve its' existence. Had he/she realised that, he/she might not have been so willing to rule in the RIAA's favour. (Unless, of course, he was being bribed, which is also a problem)
This, again, is also the reason why you have companies like Comcast and Verizon wanting to destroy net neutrality; the entire purpose behind that is to create artificial scarcity. In a truly natural, non-legally strangled environment, network bandwidth would be almost as plentiful as the air we breathe. The reason why corporations don't want that, is because if a given commodity is not scarce, they can't foresee ways in which they can make money from it.
Abuse of the legal system props up companies which, if Capitalism was truly allowed to run its' course, would die, due to failure to evolve to meet changing market/consumer need. In the case of the bandwidth question, Comcast and Verizon etc either would starve to death, or a scenario would develop where instead of selling bandwidth, they would be forced to move into the niche of say, Cisco, (in terms of network hardware) or even create their own niche with forms of network/telecoms hardware which nobody knows about yet.
Companies don't need to innovate, because they're able to use the legal system to survive when they should die. If they weren't able to do that, non-innovators would starve to death.
Libertarian thought is not incompatible with open source, in fact it is incompatible with closed source, since libertarian thought is primarily concerned with protecting people's rights. The problem comes with those who have not analyzed the subject deeply and jump to the conclusion that the rights that need protecting are not the consumers but the purveyors of software. In the case of software this is deeply incorrect, open source software is, defensibly, the only really open market for software, any other version admits of using tricks to lock people into compartmentalized monopolies, which are anathema to libertarian thought.
You are forced if you are a developer. I was not talking from the user side. If you want to improve any GNU GPL software you are forced to be free, and also free the source code. In FreeBSD licence not.
Nice and all, except for one thing: you, the private individual, have become a government by regulating how to use the service provided by you because of the power relationship involved. And to top it off, your type of government is feudal manorialism or hydraulic imperialism - why, again, should anyone have that power?
...where you showed yourself to be an idiot.
No, you're not a Jeffersonian. Read his damned writings, you ignoramus.
Seems to me that all of these "institutes" or "think tanks" or "analysts groups" or whatever; are just paid corporate shills. In spite of what they may call themselves, they are in no way objective, neutral, conservative, libertarian, or anything else. They say whatever their corporate sponsors tell them to say, their "studies" prove whatever their corporate sponsors want them to "prove."
I consider myself to be fairly familiar with libertarian thought, and I see no reason that free software would be a problem with any real libertarian.
Furthermore, what major proprietary software company does not give away tons of free software? Microsoft gives away an "express" (i.e. free) version of practically everything.
What is a public resource?
Ever since Obama won the presidency it seems like libertarians have been attacked from every angle. I'm not sure if it is because the republican party is fragmenting, or if because FoxNews decided we were too much of a nuisance and wanted to sabotage them with Glen Beck and the Tea Parties. Libertarianism is an extreme solution to an extreme problem, one of a government out of control. Anyone who doubts this, move to California. I'm probably breaking coincidental three laws just sitting here typing on slashdot. There seems to be a lot of attention on libertarianism lately, even though I don't believe they've ever been polled nationally higher than 1%. I just don't want to subsidize large corporations with bailouts, I want to be able to start a business with little hassle (I'm not against regulations, but try setting up a small business in California, the regulations are ridiculous), I don't believe anyone has the right to tell me what I put into my body, I don't believe anyone has the right to tell me who I am allowed to marry (as consenting adults), I don't want my money to fund unnecessary wars, and I believe I have the right to be secure and safe (and recognize the police has no obligation to do so). Apparently less than 2% of the population agrees with me though. I don't give a shit about libertarian economics. Any reasonable person recognizes that a mixed market is necessary. The problem is everyone wants to control everyone else, and some are getting away with it.
There were restrictions and stipulations put on them at that time. These are new regulations, which would be added after the fact. That is unfair.
Stop getting your definition of libertarian from Glenn Beck. Those people aren't libertarians, they're just Republicans who don't want to pay taxes.
What an incredibly silly statement. First, all Republicans support taxes at the lowest possible levels. It's the only common denominator about Republicans today. You won't get Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe to agree on much, but you will see that they agree on taxes.
Second, please point out a Libertarian that wants higher tax rates. You wont find any, because they wouldn't be Libertarian. Money is property, and Libertarians hold property rights very, very high. They're certainly not for giving more of it to the government.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
In our society we trade power for assurances of safety and security. The safety and security is a lie, but we are content buying into the fantasy. So, that's why we trade in our power (after all each individual is not very powerful anyway). I hope that you don't have an idea that some particular system of government is exempt from this truth. All governments are the same. You are just as well off trading your power to a corporation as you are to a king or a democracy. I say don't trade your power in for a lie, but all my friends tell me I'm crazy.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
Very often the case. But is it necessarily the case?
Remember, the subset of libertarians that are completely opposed to any regulation of any kind at all ever is an extremely small set, the anarcho-libertarians. Almost all libertarians support some regulation.
Is it possible to use regulations of the sort that most libertarians could support to combat racism, sexism, or other prejudices?
I don't intend to provide the answer here (because I don't have time to write a master's thesis right now). But I don't think it has to be impossible.
The angle I'd probably start from is, a lot of times, such prejudices (if actually expressed as behavior) can be regarded as fraud. If you advertise a job with one set of requirements, and then fill it by another set of requirements that you never mentioned, you are doing something fraudulent. And punishment of outright fraud is something that even a lot of fairly extreme libertarians and capitalists (and heck, even Objectivists!) can enthusiastically support.
(Yeah, I know that's just the kernel of the seed of the beginnings of the argument. I know a lot more reasoning than that would be required to make it.)
Do you honestly require a definition?
If you care to try to rebut my statement, go ahead. But don't ask disingenuous questions. I'm here to express and exchange opinions, not to waste my time wrangling over definitions.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Yes, I honestly do. Here's what Google says:
public resource - the idea that the people of the U.S. "own" the fish in U.S. waters. The government manages these resources for the greatest public benefit. Fishermen do not "own" the fish until they catch them.
In this case they are saying that the fish are a public resource until they are caught, then the fishermen own them.
If that's the case, I don't think you can make the argument that the internet is a public resource, since the contents of websites on the internet are owned by the people who created them, or to whomever they've sold the rights under copyright.
Even in the absence of copyright law, I don't see how a lack of private ownership of content accessible by the internet would mean that ISPs should be required to provide all content with the same priority.
What needs to be understood is that a large number of people calling themselves libertarians are more accurately described as capitalists: They support both the free-market and anti--free-market aspects of capitalism, but since capitalism likes to frame itself as all about the "free market," they think they're libertarians. (Ayn Rand is largely to blaim for the conflation of these two terms; in the nineteenth century capitalism described what we'd call corporatism (or perhaps "economic fascism") today.
Free software is obviously 100% compatible with libertarianism, but it's a threat to capitalism. Free software is just another choice people can make, and libertarianism is, at its core, about holding a person's right to choose as inviolable.
That said, "network neutrality"---restrictions placed on how bandwidth providers can charge, and what for---is nothing more than protectionist government regulation, and not compatible with a free market or libertarianism. It restricts bandwidth providers' right to choose how to run their networks (their private property) however they want, and it's thus a restriction on the free market. Just because it protects consumers instead of producers (e.g., like "intellectual property laws" do) doesn't make it a good thing, and doesn't make it a non-restriction.
Liberty in your lifetime
The market has proven itself wholly incapable of regulating itself. What now?
Not even most Libertarians want an economy with no government oversight at all. Even during the Laissez Faire days of the gilded age, there was government authority. So this stupid notion that the current crises erupted from lack of regulation is pure BS. Some regulations were changed and pared back in the late 90's. But the financial sector remained, by far, the most heavily regulated sector of the economy.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but of corruption. And that corruption started not with private companies and individuals, but with your beloved government, who decided that banks should be punished for refusing to make housing loans to people that lacked things like a job and a credit history. It just wasn't fair after all. I mean, how racist to deny a home loan to someone that didn't have a way to pay it back, eh?
Free markets have the virtue of being self-correcting (if allowed to, that is... hello, "stimulus" pork). Governments... eh, not always so. The irony is that the conservatives... the mean people that believe in markets... actually tried to fix the housing bubble problem by reigning in Fannie and Freddie, who were giving out mortgages like candy, and then bundling them to so others could sell them as "AAA" securities.
Oh, how tunes change when fortunes change, as the good congressman Barney Frank was trying to kill regulation and oversight of Fannie and Freddie:
After the gravy train stopped:
You want to know what the markets have proven? The market have proven that, when governments and politicians manipulate it for their own power, markets will crash.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Copyright is not property, and it is not a right. So no, libertarians are not pro-restrictive copyright.
Bunk. Copyright has been a form of property since before the United States came into existence. You may not like it, but that doesn't change the facts. Its legally recognized as such. How long a copyright should be is another argument, but to argue that copyright isn't property is silly on the merits.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The reason that libertarianism is under attack is because it's become a haven for all manner of ultra-right, corporatist, and anarchist radicals who've already drowned out any real intellect the libertarian philosophy harbored. These people aren't just genuinely unlikable in general (unless you're willing to acquiesce to their beliefs) and they aren't just angry and dumb, they have genuinely dangerous ideas which, if implemented, would make the past thirty years of thinly veiled corporatism look like a cakewalk. You'd be right if you said that isn't libertarianism, but then, what is? Your philosophy suffers the same 'ism' disease every other ill defined but marketable sounding philosophy has: it has a sexy name, so it means whatever the people abusing the term want it to mean.
Libertarianism is a victim of its own marketability (but not of its substance), and just like liberalism and conservatism, the meaning is completely arbitrary. It's become a blanket term recently for disenfranchised conservatives, who incidentally have hijacked the movement for the time being. If you want libertarians to be treated with respect and if you want the world to acknowledge that you actually have a philosophy that might be, you know, grounded in reality, either take control of your message or get a new name.
"Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism."
Try as you might, you'll never separate liberalism from socialism.
Even if a liberal isn't personally socialist, they see things like property rights and individual achievement (and the lack of government power thereof) as unfairness, so at the very least a liberal world view enables socialism.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
Do you know anything about free market economic theory? The Austrian school? Von Mises?
A central tennent of their ideas was that economies were driven more by human needs, wants, and psychology, than by calculations and economic theories. Guys like Mises and Milton Friedman had such a hard time being heard at first precisely because they de-emphasized things like mathematical theories. An Invisible Hand, after all, is hard to quantify, is it not?
Your Reagan quote in particular is telling, as it was directed at left-leaning economists of the 70's that just couldn't understand how stagflation could exist. After all, Keynesian theory stated that the very concept was impossible. Their models said so.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You are forced if you are a developer OF GPL SOFTWARE.
Who forced you to improve GNU GPL software?
And, in any case, YES "forcing" you to respect the freedoms of others is a good thing. Since this only occurs if you deliberately decide to use software which ensures freedom of users, you have no complaint.
The enemies of Democracy are
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Try as you might, you'll never separate liberalism from racism.
Even if a liberal isn't personally a racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government treating people differently based solely on the color of their skin, so at the very least a liberal world view enables racism.
Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
And to ensure the "-1 Flamebait"...
Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Americans, particularly the poor and exploited, have been carefully taught by their exploiters to fear the word socialism without realizing that it actually would be in their best interests to support it. The Europeans are not so badly duped, probably because their enforced class structure of centuries meant they didn't trust anything the upper classes said. You can still sucker a poor American into voting against his own interests and in the interests of the ruling classes by persuading him that he can belong to the ruling classes someday if he'll just suffer a little longer. It's a lie, of course. Kinda like Christianity, really. You'll get to Heaven later as long as you do what we say now.
Libertarians are the only people more deluded than the Communists. At least the Communists could make their system work by force of arms; libertarians don't have that option.
I piss off bigots.
That's the crux of this discussion.
Libertarians should strive for MINIMAL regulation, in the interest of providing Fair Competition in a Free Marketplace.
Over-regulation, OTOH, is even worse than none at all, because it gives arbitrary control to some regulatory body which probably doesn't deserve it.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I'm having trouble coming up with the name of a GNU project that is an effective monopoly like Windows where you would be forced to develop on it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Which philosophy of government is it that eliminates racism?
Then explain to us - which government regulation created the Micro$oft monopoly?
The barriers to entry that they hide behind were certainly not created by the government, most are the result of exclusive contracts - with many hidden from the public (and the market, and even the _courts_) by NDAs.
Do you believe that contracts should not be enforced by government?
I personally would entertain the argument that NDAs are evil, and might be a good thing to outlaw, but I'm sure someone can come up with an example of a situation where they're essential.
I do not believe that ALL monopoly is the government's fault, though of course one certainly may be caused by regulatory action.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
communism believes human altruism trumps all, selfishness can only result in wrong, and so selfishness must be stamped out. they imagine the future to be an egalitarian community of equally deserving middle class peers, achieved via the state deciding what is best for all. the result is a group of poor people lorded over by an autocrat who is the state, since decision making must reside somewhere if everyone else relinquishes it
libertarianism believes human selfishness trumps all, altruism can only result in wrong, and altruism must be stamped out. they imagine the future to be a balanced federation of equally successful middle class peers, achieved via the natural self-correcting effects of the market. the result is a group of poor people lorded over by a monopolist who takes advantage of the natural imperfections in the market better than anyone else
both libertarianism and communism are equally flawed ideologies destined for the dustbin of history. both had their heydey in the last century and today are really nothing more than philosophical anachronisms no one serious should consider for very long. regard them with the same bemused interest as any other bizarre curiosity of belief from mankind's past
the truth is that human nature is a paradoxical mix of altruistic and selfish impulses. therefore, any valid political philosophy which claims to be able to lead men must reflect this mix as well. any political philosophy which ignores man's essential altruism or ignores man's essential selfishness cannot lead men for very long, we grow disillusioned when we see the fruits of folly
the market fundamentalism of libertarianism or agrarian fundamentalism of communism are, like any other form of fundamentalism, simplistic overstatings of human nature, and always result in tragedy and suffering
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
hello again
according to liddell and scott's greek lexicon, ho archos means leader, chief, or commander. it can evidently also mean rectum, which i didn't before now. i am both an anarchist and a fifth semester ancient greek student, if that convinces you of whatever of expertise i have
anarchists make a distinction between governments that rule the people and governing bodies with no real means and no desire to force compliance with their judgments. the united states congress for instance makes laws (typically without the support of the people they claim to represent) and if someone chooses not to comply with that law, that person will be made to comply by the police and by the courts. the ietf on the other hand is a relatively democratic* organization that makes judgments but has no way to enforce them nor does it want to enforce them. one can choose to follow an ietf standard or to make up one's own way of doing things with no consequences
how best to provide a military and police force in an anarchist society, as far as i'm aware, is still up for debate. in the past, anarchist militaries have elected their officers, with squads choosing their squad leader from their own ranks and being able to recall that elected leader and choose another at any time. it's a meritocracy basically. where social hierarchies must exist, that's pretty much how it works
* or so i'm assuming, i don't know much about the ietf's internal structure
This sounds pretty insane. Not being able to force compliance is fine for a standards body, or a civic organization, or any other organization of members who freely join and can quit any time. The organization only needs the ability to kick out members who aren't following the rules.
However, a police force is an absolute necessity in any society. How else are you going to stop riots, catch murderers and rapists, etc.? I suppose you could just not bother with that stuff, but then you're going to have chaos because people will simply turn vigilante and go kill anyone they think is a criminal (and other people will kill people they simply don't like for whatever reason, since they don't have to worry much about anyone gathering evidence and linking them to the crime, since regular people don't exactly have DNA testing ability). I have my complaints about the police in this country, but I don't know anyone who would rather not have any police at all. There's one country which does operate this way though: Somalia. Perhaps you might like to visit there.
The Heartland Institute uses libertarian concepts, but from its start has been a front for wealthy conservative industrialists(1). As TFA describes the HI's report, it's the kind of libertarianism that is only concerned with limiting the power of the state, and is mute over injustices perpetrated by parties other than the state(2).
Mr. Bee is correct to note that although Stallman, et al, are not libertarians, the F/OSS community is in substance a real-life expression of a libertarian ideal. Market competition is a destroyer of marketable value, down to the logical zero. Profit arises from something monopolized, be it an idea, a process, or a thing... like the only gas station for the next 100 miles. F/OSS theoretically zeros out the marketability of software, but unlocks other kinds of value for the consumer.
Getting back to the HI report, Mr. Moglen claims not to like network neutrality based on the language of F/OSS evangelists. The fact is, his paymasters in telecom - in a federal move to make telecom competitive - did compete for a time, until they decided they'd rather enjoy the monopolist's profit by merging, than continue to the nirvana of its creative destruction.
Luke, help me take this mask off
well that's why it's an open debate. in my opinion the police should operate much the way they do now but be way less aggressive with suspects. the goal of anarchism is to give everyone the freedom to do anything but infringe upon another's rights. i think the current system is capable of that with some tweaking. a system based upon the current police and courts would be fine with me
it's what to do with people who have infringed on someone else's rights where it gets tricky. do you punish them? reform them? how do you make someone reform? is that even ethical? how can you be sure someone has reformed? do you exile them? do you otherwise separate them from the rest of society? these decisions would be made by a direct democracy of course
it's a tough problem though. i have no idea. but it's not like any other society has solved the problem adequately either
You seem to paint libertarian as pirates who sit around saying "Mwaha ha ha how I subjugate the masses today?". I'm libertianianish so I'll address some of your claims.
As for the right to profit off the "plebeians"; absolutely this is great. Everyone has the chance to make money on anyone else and can only do so by offering some sort of value. Can open source software exist in compliment to this? Absolutely it can. One of the greatest merits of a free market is the ability to put money into anything that produces value for you. So if an open source projects means something to the people then they can take their earned money and buy the value of having an open source project.
As for labor unions in theory are great, but in application are terrible creators of inefficiency. In efforts to secure power for particular groups they create inefficient mandates restricting who can perform what work, subsidies for certain workers when no work is done, and then abuse union dues for unessential administration costs. And then there's the corruption angle to worry about. So all in all a good idea, but it seems to get out of hand almost symmetrically to the problems of corporatism you seem to have.
As for the name calling and insinuations that libertarian don't care about the world this is completely false. Simply the idea is this: Take care of yourself first then use your power to shape the world you want to live in. Never give anything to anyone because public opinion whines for it, but rather because whatever you want to put your money into gives you value. I donate to charities, but I do so because I personally want particular problems solved.
At anytime any "plebeian" can with enough innovation and merit rise from the bottom of society. Any skill is accessible for learning. I've seen it done. All methods of business are available to be learned to. So I do not offer my pity to the masses, but rather my merit.
Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
You could insert anything that is fashionable at the moment in the place of racism. Example 1: Even if a libertarian isn't personally a terrorist, they see things like warrantless wiretapping and the patriot act as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables terrorism. Anyone else want to play?
That's interesting. I posit that telling people they need stupid things that they don't need, and that are in fact useless, just so you can keep your company's incoming going, is neither reducing costs, not raising quality of service.
Why would a movement whose whole ideal is non-interference with personal choice, be bothered to attack anything ? If I want to use free software, it's my business. You can't be a true libertarian and forcibly restrict other peoples choices. My using free software places no obligation on anybody else, so really I'm more of a libertarian in that respect than the libertarians ! They seem to believe you can only be free if you agree to pay for it. Freedom surely means not having to pay if you don't want to - at least that's the argument when it comes to healthcare and other aspects of government.
This whole article is flamebait.
We need both (implicitly or indirectly) to build and sustain a Great Nation.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Yeah, ESR and a few others aside....
On the one hand, the old cartoon....
And on the hard side: of course they do. All of them are *sure* that if they work hard enough, they'll be RICH!!! The reality is, of course, that overwhelmingly, they're either millionaires now, or they're suckers.
They claim to believe, religiously, in the so-called "free market" (as if some such ever existed), in exactly the same way that funnymentalist Christians claim to believe in the message of Jesus... but neither actually follows the implications of that belief.
When have you seen libertarians attack megacorps and cartels... like Boeing/LockMart/NorthGrum, or WalMart? Actually, the latter's an excellent example: they say they believe in freedom of association, but hate unions, and say we don't need them, then add that "government is not the answer"... but when asked who else can protect us against Big Uncle - the corporations that are *far* more invasive in our daily lives than any government outside of Nazi Germany or Ceauescu's Romania.
Then claim that we all have "leverage" with the companies we work for (tell that to WalMart employees).
Finally, I used to argue with a Libertarian (member of the party) in the early nineties, and one day stopped him in his tracks. I asked him how we get from here and now to his utopia: do we take everything away from everyone, and divvy it up equally, like the beginning of Monopoly (tm), or do we start from where we are, with you and me with zip, and Bill Gates and the Waltons with billions and billions?
He said they were still discussing that down at the "club". I still haven't heard an answer.
mark
Just as any real libertartian would not feel you or I have any business telling another whether they should work on fixing a friend's roof for free (even though a commercial entity loses business), a real libertarian wouldn't deny the right of anyone to create and support software that they give away. Nor would they try to argue the creator cannot set the terms under which they give it away.
absolutely.
But if US history has taught us anything it's that prejudice thrives in the absence of governmental regulation. The restaurateur may be a dick, but if he refuses to hire black waters, the blacks in the community have a reduced ability to succeed which feeds a downward spiral.
race awareness isn't racism.
There may not be one, but not eliminating racism is different from enabling it.
Any political philosophy can be said to enable any activity that it views as outside the purview of governmental regulation. Libertarianism is most susceptible to this criticism because it views government's role to be extraordinarily narrow.
If you could argue that libertarians do not consider government to have a role in regulating criminal violence, then you could say that libertarians enabled terrorism. I personally don't consider libertarianism to go that far.
Now, just because a political philosophy argues that there should be constraints on the government when it regulates an activity does not mean it is abdicating it's regulatory responsibility, therefore it is not enabling the action.
Libertarians and liberals alike believe in due process and the right of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. That is they limit the government's regulatory authority, but they do not enable terrorism, by declaring that the government will not - under any circumstances - engage in criminal investigation.
Certainly food for thought, but consider we're not too far removed from restaurants hanging shingles reading: "Whites Only."
You have a hard time making the case that it's fraud when the conditions are advertised. Whether the social conditions of today would prevent us from backsliding is an open question, but one I'd rather not test.
You can argue that any political philosophy that knowingly fails to prevent something bad is enabling it. That applies to all of the constitutional protections in the US. My point was that your argument merely makes a tenuous link between libertarianism and racism, implying that this is grounds to dismiss the entire model. No working political system has ever fit entirely into any of the pigeonholes we like to discuss. A much more libertarian version of the US would be possible, while still providing some protections against discrimination. Much more liberal systems exist that provide virtually no protection like our fair housing act. See Germany and France for examples. The average "libertarian" in the US wants to get rid of most of the alphabet soup (ATF, DEA especially), lower taxes, and work toward a balanced budget and a currency that is at least partially commodity backed. Most of them come out a little more extreme than that, because it's hard to be heard otherwise. They are not, however, a bunch of backward racists, potheads, or anything else that they have been made out to be over the years.
Fair enough.
The problem I have with libertarianism is that it, by and large, is an extremist philosophy. You very rarely hear about how the US could stand to be a little more libertarian - except from civil libertarians. This extremism permeates the movement from the teabagging, race bating bottom that blithely quotes Thomas Jefferson regarding the tree of liberty all the way to the top's downright radical view that we should End the Fed.
If I'm understanding you correctly what you really what is the Goldwater/Rockefeller era republican party - and while my politics don't swing that way, it's not a desire I can begrudge anyone for holding.
Hm, sure sounds like government control to me, albeit at a more basic, primal state -- the warlords *are* the government. Perhaps you mean something more like "free of control by any internationally / diplomatically recognized governing entity"?
Not razzing here, just pointing out that groups of armed people making the rules is pretty much the standard definition of a "government". There are refined governments, with things like bureaucracies and forms to fill out, and the more basic, no-frills models, where men with weapons tell you straight up what you can and cannot do, sometimes without bothering with niceties such as words.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Individual power is not a myth. I could go out by myself and live off the land for a period of time, as many others have done in the past. Of course, I would lose all the synergistic benefit of working in a group and I'd probably die after I broke a leg or contracted some ailment with no one to care for me. The thing that bothers people is that the have so little power, and they live at the mercy of their peers in times of need, and they need to trust their peers if they want to work together for mutual benefit. They don't want to accept this so they look to "leaders" and mystics and scam-artists to make their power go farther and issue guarantees and security to them. That's where the lie comes in, you've got what you've got and it's all you're going to get.
Seriously?! Where do you expect me to look, given the poster was unwilling to tell me what he meant?
It's not reasonable call the internet public resource when most of the burden of producing, storing, and distributing the information falls on the private sector. With the library, at least the last two things are done by the public library, and the library does pay the publisher to buy the books so they take part in funding the production of the book as well. Moreover, there is not "book neutrality" legislation for libraries to tell them what books they need to carry.
Sorry, that was me...I wasn't logged in at the time. And I still feel your question was disingenuous. I'm using standard English and don't feel I should have to provide definitions for common terms.
I brought up public libraries to illustrate why your fish analogy doesn't work. You are saying websites are analogous to fish in a stream. I'm saying they are analogous to books in a library. Nobody owns the Internet. It is like a public library.
The Internet as a whole forms a commons. Nobody is forced to connect their network to the commons, but most do because there is a mutual benefit. Much of that benefit would be lost if private parties (ISPs) are allowed unreasonable control over access, giving preferential treatment to some content providers over others.
Even if you want to go the route of insisting that the sites on the Internet don't constitute a public resource because they are privately owned, I have to point out that nearly every website I visit is *not* owned by my ISP. Ownership of a portion of the pipes doesn't give them a legal right to control access to other portions of the pipes. The signs held by protesters in a public park are owned by them and not by the public; does that mean someone who owns land between me and that venue should be allowed to make if difficult for me to get to that park? Or to use a car analogy, just because you own your car, are you entitled to park it so as to block my driveway? That is why I'm not satisfied with your original answer that "They get the authority to do so from their ability to do so. That's what the concept of property is all about".
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
just because you own your car, are you entitled to park it so as to block my driveway?
The city owns the road in front of my driveway, so I can call them and complain about it. The ISP has installed infrastructure at their own expense, they own it. I'm not saying they should be assholes about it, but the whole point of owning property is that the owner gets to decide how to use it. Net neutrality restricts those property rights. It also seems to be unnecessary since it is not meant to solve any existing problems, but rather speculative future problems. I don't see why there should be new regulations on ISPs if no present need exists.
In any case, since net neutrality means adding new restrictions on property rights and gives the government more authority, and it does so needlessly (at present), it clearly contradicts libertarian ideals.
If the road were owned by a private company (and that is sometimes the case, for example in gated communities or condominium developments), it wouldn't matter. You'd still not be entitled to block my driveway.
We limit what you are allowed to do with a car or with a gun, even though you may own such things.
We also require easements for things like public access to beaches when private property stands between a road and the public part of the beach. These are well-established legal traditions in many states and countries (IIRC it goes back to the Romans). I believe it's codified in both Oregon and California, and I would guess other states as well. In my view, the goal of network neutrality is not very different from a public easement.
A big problem with your "They get the authority to do so from their ability to do so" is that the government has the ability to regulate commerce, therefore by your own argument they have the very authority you want to deny. They have the authority, but it comes from the Constitution (in the US, at least), not from "because we can". If you want to change the fundamental legal structure of society (and get rid of all those pesky easements and laws against blocking driveways or shooting people), you'll need something stronger to go on.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
You are are restricted with what you can do with your private property in so far as it might cause injury to someone else or their property. This kind of comparison is not apt for ISPs because a business relationship exists between the ISP and the their customer which either party may voluntarily terminate at any time.
In all your examples, people are doing something anti-social that causes harm to another. What are ISPs going to do that warrants the formation of a new set of regulatory rules? Why not wait for them to start doing those things before we make new regulations?
You are are restricted with what you can do with your private property in so far as it might cause injury to someone else or their property. This kind of comparison is not apt for ISPs because a business relationship exists between the ISP and the their customer which either party may voluntarily terminate at any time.
Sorry, I have to call bullshit. "Because a business relationship exists" does not excuse bad behavior. Any provision in a contract that allows illegal behavior by one of the parties is void. So if the government lays down the law requiring net neutrality, I get protection that my contract alone doesn't provide, and that is a good thing. Also, my ISP does not have a business relationship with the sites I visit, so even if you wanted to use the business relationship as an excuse for discriminating against their packets, you couldn't. You seem to think the customer will be the only victim.
In all your examples, people are doing something anti-social that causes harm to another.
Any non-neutral behavior by an ISP is an act of aggression. No better than someone blocking my driveway.
What are ISPs going to do that warrants the formation of a new set of regulatory rules? Why not wait for them to start doing those things before we make new regulations?
Some such as Comcast are certainly testing the waters. The party previously in power in the US has signaled that non-neutrality is OK, a dangerous position. It will be good to define the boundaries now, rather than wait for an experimentation phase to settle out. Otherwise, we'll have the results of that old adage, "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission".
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Isn't experimentation an important part of innovation?
We don't need this particular "innovation". The value of the Internet is enhanced by its openness.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I guess I'd rather take the wait and see approach, who knows what will happen? You can always add the regulations later if you need to.
It is amazing to me that somebody marked this as "Troll". Seems to me it is a reasoned argument against lumping all Libertarians, no matter how radical, into one category, while citing only a single example to support his case.