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Can you empathize as to why somebody might be a socialist?
Considering that there are an awful lot of libertarians who seem to think anybody of a different mindset is a socialist, I guess the question to libertarians should be care they able to empathize with those who have a different political mindset then their own?
I’m sorry to say that there are libertarians who slap somebody down as a socialist or statist without really trying to understand as to why that somebody might not be a libertarian.
As long as someone is honest, I treat them with respect. It doesn't matter to me what their politics are. A lot of my fellow zero government libertarians act as though they never held a statist belief in their life. That they were always pure. I always try to think what political beliefs I would hold now if the libertarians I had first been exposed to had been the intolerant types that you are referring to.
And yes, I can empathize. Many of the honest socialist types out their agree with libertarians on the problem. What we disagree on is the solution. I used to hold some of their beliefs. I would be hypocritical of me to not show any empathy.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it
Learned Hand
In the past men created witches: now they create mental patients.
Thomas Szasz
Relinquish liberty for the purposes of defense in an emergency?
Why? It would seem that in an emergency, of all times, one needs
his greatest strength. So if liberty is strength and slavery is weakness,
liberty is a necessity rather than a luxury, and we can ill afford
to be without it—least of all during an emergency.
F.A. Harper
In my original post I should of also asked how often libertarians debated with those who aren’t libertarian, because I do get the impression that libertarians only want correspond with in the libertarian circles. I get why that might be but I’m not sure building libertarian ghettos is a wise idea as it can foster blinkered thinking. There have been times when I’ve been faced with the prejudice & oppressive nature of man I’ve literally wanted to opt of society by ending it all. What has prevented me from topping myself in those incidents is that there might not be many libertarian minded folk but there are a good number of folk who are well meaning.
I’ve a friend Sue (who Gard has met) & she’s a Quaker so therefore a pacifist, but she supports drug prohibition. I know there would be libertarians who’d get on her case for being a pacifist & yet supports government force. I don’t agree with drug prohibition but I accept others think different on that issue but they might agree with me on say Gay Marriage. Sue does happen to agree with me on Gay marriage & other human rights issues.
Many of the honest socialist types out their agree with libertarians on the problem. What we disagree on is the solution.
This an excellent observation & one I’ve encountered myself.
Not so long ago I was having a conversation with a friend on mine who is a hardened socialist. I explained to him that libertarians detest corporatism & that libertarians tend to favour a free market driven by independent traders. It turned out that we both in fact wanted the same thing but disagreed with the solution (in fact I discussed this very conversation in the first podcast Gard I recorded), he obviously believed in more government where as I believed in less government. That same friend of mine likes to remind me I use to be a socialist & he also has a theory that our base politics comes from the emotion & trauma of our upbringing.
This is kind of personal but the reason I became a socialist when I was a teenager was due to my family dumping me on the state. I know around these parts people would applaud my family for being tax exiles but to me they were hypercritics for being tax exiles. They seemed to think it was okay to dump me on the state & expected others to pay for my care. By the time I was in my early teens I sussed out that my family expected others to care for me 7 expected others to pay for it & well I wanted to make them pay for it as well as make all wealthy people pay for not loving the unfortunate. I later realised that the welfare system in this country that made it easy for my family to dump me on the state & if there wasn’t the size of welfare state there is then they might not of been able to, they might of in fact learnt to love me. Some say that might be of happened if there was no welfare state or government & in fact I should be grateful there is a welfare state & government. Even my family have had the cheek to say to me that at least they dumped me on the British state & not the South African state.
Thanks to the actions of my family all I’ve ever known is state care & never true vulnerary compassion.
I can't remember which interview, but I remember Walter Block talking about how socialism is appealing to people because it is very evident in our lives and has been the way people lived for thousands of years before civilization. The family is a socialist organization, as was the clan. People see how socialism works, and our morals tend to favor the actions associated with socialism.
The problem, as he noted, is that socialism doesn't translate into a modern industrial society. So people have a congitivie dissonance. They want explicit cooperation and are not able to understand the power of implicit cooperation. They do not see the unseen.
There's a really interesting article on the infoshop FAQ re: free-market anarchism being in its root form (ie. if you're to consider JP Proudhon's theories to be the root of such thinking) a socialist construct. The article suggests that an ignorance on the right of what socialism means is problematic. I think, at the very least, this article shows just how labels such as 'left' and 'right' confuse and divide needlessly.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
'Many, particularly on the "libertarian"-right, would dismiss claims that the Individualist Anarchists were socialists. By their support of the "free market" the Individualist Anarchists, they would claim, show themselves as really supporters of capitalism. Most, if not all, anarchists would reject this claim. Why is this the case?
This because such claims show an amazing ignorance of socialist ideas and history. The socialist movement has had a many schools, many of which, but not all, opposed the market and private property. Given that the right "libertarians" who make such claims are usually not well informed of the ideas they oppose (i.e. of socialism, particularly libertarian socialism) it is unsurprising they claim that the Individualist Anarchists are not socialists (of course the fact that many Individualist Anarchists argued they were socialists is ignored). Coming from a different tradition, it is unsurprising they are not aware of the fact that socialism is not monolithic. Hence we discover right-"libertarian" guru von Mises claiming that the "essence of socialism is the entire elimination of the market." [Human Action, p. 702] This would have come as something of a surprise to, say, Proudhon, who argued that "[t]o suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself." [The General Idea of the Revolution, p. 50] Similarly, it would have surprised Tucker, who called himself a socialist while supporting a freer market than von Mises ever dreamt of. As Tucker put it:
"Liberty has always insisted that Individualism and Socialism are not antithetical terms; that, on the contrary, the most perfect Socialism is possible only on condition of the most perfect Individualism; and that Socialism includes, not only Collectivism and Communism, but also that school of Individualist Anarchism which conceives liberty as a means of destroying usury and the exploitation of labour." [Liberty, no. 129, p. 2]'
Read more:
http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionG1#secg11