logic for politics: RAND PAUL:EMINENTLY LOGICAL, CHALLENGED BY THE FACTS

David Braybrooke 

Most people, one may expect, talk politics without being conscious of being logical (when they are) or illogical (when they are not logical). If our current politics are any guide, moreover, they are not prepared to deal with thinking in which logic thrusts to the fore -- as it does in the public position expressed by Rand Paul. In this position, libertarian principles drive straightforwardly to logical conclusions that challenge conventional opinions about the tasks of government. The logic is fine, however; and there are no grounds for suggesting, as one TV pundit did, that Paul is lacking in a sense of morality. On the contrary, he has clear moral convictions perfectly consistent with his principles. What opens him to attack, as discussants should keep steadily in mind, is not anything wrong with the logic of his principles or the logical use that he makes of them. What is wrong with his views is the radical lack of fit between the principles and the populous industrial society to which Paul seeks to apply them. They might suit a society composed of independent subsistence farmers, hunters, and fishermen, in which self-reliance could figure as a principal virtue. They do not suit at all a society in which almost everybody is an employee and lacks the means for an independent livelihood. Unfortunately, it is not just Paul's views that are lacking in this respect. The received conception of "American values" does not take the distinction between one society (now mythical) and the other into account.

This has been my key contention with Jason Pye, a local right-libertarian.  The theoretical Ayn Rand world of "free markets" doesn't, and can't, even possibly exist in our modern industrial economy of rent seeking corporations and regulatory capture...

 

When you look back to people like Adam Smith (Jason often turns to Thomas Jefferson...or other old school libertarians aka classical liberals, like John Locke) you have to remember these people are precapitalist.  They didn't even conceive a world based around corporate industrial competition... so any accurate reflection of their principles has to be adjusted accordingly if you want to retain the key libertarian aspects (which I think one should do as their distrust of the state, church, and authoritarian control of human decision making is accurate and insightful).

 

Here is a run down of the right/left libertarian divide via the Standford Encyclopedia of philosophy...

Libertarianism is often thought of as “right-wing” doctrine. This, however, is mistaken for at least two reasons. First, on social—rather than economic—issues, libertarianism tends to be “left-wing”. It opposes laws that restrict consensual and private sexual relationships between adults (e.g., gay sex, extra-marital sex, and deviant sex), laws that restrict drug use, laws that impose religious views or practices on individuals, and compulsory military service. Second, in addition to the better-known version of libertarianism—right-libertarianism—there is also a version known as “left-libertarianism”. Both endorse full self-ownership, but they differ with respect to the powers agents have to appropriate unowned natural resources (land, air, water, minerals, etc.). Right-libertarianism holds that typically such resources may be appropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes her labor with them, or merely claims them—without the consent of others, and with little or no payment to them. Left-libertarianism, by contrast, holds that unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner. It can, for example, require those who claim rights over natural resources to make a payment to others for the value of those rights. This can provide the basis for a kind of egalitarian redistribution.

In an Ivory Tower utopia you can make a case for Ayn Randian right-libertarianism (I can even draw you neat supply and demand curves to show you the argument).  But in the real world its unimplementable and leads to terrible real world outcomes for human beings--if concern for individual liberty is of the utmost importance...