90% is a majority -- just not a simple majority. The U.N. Security Council requires unanimity -- 100% -- in order to pass a resolution. Most corporate bylaws require a super-majority of 66/75% in order to authorize new shares and dilute existing shareholders. It requires 60% to break a filibuster in the Senate. It requires 66% of both houses and 75% of the states to amend the Constitution.

All of these are majorities -- and all are democratic or quasi-democratic. The thing they have in common is that they impose higher requirements because of the perceived importance and impact of change. In other words, you have to convince more people that an action to be taken is right and just and won’t harm them.

Libertarianism treats natural human rights as important enough to not be diluted via a simple majority and to require the consent of as large a proportion as possible to avoid the danger of having one’s neighbors relinquish one’s rights for them.

I don’t see that libertarianism and anarchy are even close.

Anarchy repudiates government and law in all form. Historically, most anarchist strains have been communist -- and not only repudiate government, but also private property.

Libertarianism respects the power of the state and recognizes that it is necessity -- and, in fact, good. However, it recognizes the power of the state for what it is -- and the tendency among humans to want to control each other by force.

Corporations are not a libertarian construct… As I wrote in an earlier treatment elsewhere about the history and conception of corporations:

It was well recognized even at the time that limited liability companies were basically a cost externalization machine – particularly when it came to mining, logging, railroading and industrial production. Limited liability companies also functioned as both wealth creation and wealth concentration machines.

The view was at the time that the immediate gains in standards of living across all sectors of society were worth the price imposed on society at a later date, and were worth the concentration of wealth, partially condoned by the state, because then, at least, citizens of all classes would have the jobs and wealth to be taxed in order to mitigate those future costs.

The libertarian argument is that the entire notion of a limited liability company is in and of itself a distortion of the free market. It separates owners from managers and morality from money and creates perverse incentives for managers to externalize as many costs as possible, while concentrating as much wealth as possible.

…

However, the wealth creation capability of the limited liability company is staggering, and the improvements to the standards of living of all people where these entities are allowed to participate in free markets cannot be argued.

As a purist, I think the notion of the limited liability company is distasteful and prone to great risk for society.

As a pragmatist, I recognize the need for laws to mitigate the cost externalization capabilities of these companies to at least keep a reasonable check on the perverse incentives created for them.

…

The central problem I have with the liberal argument is that there is no distinction made between those companies that are cost externalizes (banks, auto companies, mining firms, loggers, drugs, consumer products, etc.) versus those companies that are innovators and wealth creators without being cost externalizes.

So, no, I do not advocate a system that leads to the empowerment of corporations and wealthy. I advocate a system where money is irrelevant to political power (which is not what we have now, I don’t think you’d disagree).

The only way the empowerment of the wealthy that you suggest could happen with a 90% majority is if 90% of people were wealthy… and then, what the heck is anyone complaining about anyway?

Progressive income tax, unionization, minimum wage and social security have been treated elsewhere at great length… but if you cling to all of these things so strongly at the face value of the rhetoric used to support them, and won’t consider the possibility that all of these things are potentially irrational and might actually hurt us all, then there’s really nothing to discuss further.

I am unsure of where your trust in government comes from. If anything, the current economic collapse should convince you that maybe it is misplaced.

Unless, of course, you actually believe the rhetoric that it was greedy banks to blame -- as opposed to the government that created the conditions (more like encouragement and endorsement) where such greed could flourish (and then failing completely to recognize and correct the mistakes).

The government is still telling the banks to lend more, and citizens to borrow more. Does that really strike you as sound advice?

P.J. O’Rourke was only half joking
when he wrote, years ago, that
“Republicans are the party that says
government doesn’t work, and then they
get elected and prove it.

the best quote from that article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640443679876503.html

Josh, I missed it earlier but you violated two of our Guidelines in one sentence in your comment #12 above where you wrote: “If the cynical libertarians ruled the world than Nathan Kuhlman would be quite the asset.”

Duane…As I see it, libertarianism and anarchy are right next to each other on the political continuum. In fact some anarchist philosophy is taken quite seriously, if not revered, by some leading libertarian thinkers. Please see the heading “Anarchism” in the Cato Institutes Encyclopedia of Liberatarism.

You revile the ‘force’of government, but what of the ‘force’ of corporations (and I might add, wealth)? Has it not historically worked to diminish the rights of working people and average citizens? And you advocate a system that would certainly lead to the empowerment of corporations and the wealthy. So…we will need 90% approval to enact a progressive income tax, or rights to organize, or minimum wage, or social security??? Fat Chance!

God help us all.

is my hope. Maybe we can have coffee sometime and expound upon it further. Until then, please buckle up, if only for self preservation.

I don’t see that the 48% of dissenters in the past presidential election are in any way holding the 52% hostage.

I think you’ve got it the wrong way around.

It is not a democracy when 90% of the people could be held hostage by 10%.

Somalia is an example of anarchy -- not of libertarianism -- the two are incompatible.

Here’s something I’ve written as part of a book I am writing:

Libertarianism is life affirming.
Its fundamental premise is that all
people are of equal value, that all
people have equal choice to seek what
is best for themselves. The
libertarian belief is that the only
legitimate purpose of government is to
affirm that choice, to protect it -
from both internal and external
threat, and to provide the means of
justice so that when that choice is
encroached upon by any other person or
group of persons, the appropriate
recompense will be made.

In other words, the purpose of
government is to intervene, and except
in cases of exigent threat, to
intervene only retrospectively, when
some transgression against liberty has
occurred -- and reason can be applied
in the measured application of force
for the purpose of providing justice
to the harmed.

The “greater good” in libertarian
terms is the balance struck between
things that can be agreed to be of
universal good and the confiscation of
value from the citizens by threat of
force in order to provide that good.

A libertarian democracy would require
a majority closer to 90% in order to
pass any law. There could be no
lesser valid corroboration of the
universal will of the people.

The statists would argue “well, then,
no laws would be passed”. The
libertarian would respond, “That is
the point”. Every law that is passed
and carried out by force either
restricts or prohibits some choice by,
compels some action of, or confiscates
value (and therefore choices) from the
governed. Therefore, all laws are by
definition, infringements on the
natural freedom of humans, and should
only be allowed to exist insofar as
threatens some equal or worse
universally perceived evil were the
law to not be made.

That doesn’t sound very much like Somalia to me.

“All right -- but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

The post office is actually only half-way decent because -- in some twisted mistake of actual reason -- private competitors have been allowed to exist. But they are by no means efficient.

The FDA is woefully underfunded at present, but still performs reasonably well.

Anyway…how about this

link text

You did experience force and violence, because the cost at which government can deliver the service is significantly higher than that at which the private sector could deliver the same service.

Those funds, which you might have used to purchase a meal for your family, have been expropriated (at the threat of force) and paid into waste.

In addition… public schools have been an abject failure by any empirical standard.

The FDA has also been an abject failure -- both failing to detect poisoned food supply -- while at the same time keeping well-tested, life saving drugs off the market at the behest of politicians who are paid by drug companies to quell competition.

I would imagine that our food supply would be much safer were the food suppliers subject to civil liability instead of being exempted from it by meeting arbitrarily set “minimum safety standards”.

I don’t know how anyone can argue for more regulation or more government given the demonstrated failures…

Just look at the SEC (Madhoff, Ping, Sanford). How about Freddie and Fannie and the Federal Reserve Bank -- who in a combination of their efforts erased 60% of the world’s wealth.

There are 89,000 government agencies -- all with similar failures.

Let that number sink in for a bit: 89,000.

I have to question the sanity of anyone who thinks we need more.

There are legitimate purposes for government… but about the only things I actually agree with in your examples are the public parks and roads.

I agree with the boiling frog -- at least for the last 150 years -- except that now it is blatant and corrupt.

There has not been a (federal) law that has been passed since the new administration has come to power that is not an outrage to human liberty and self-governance -- abhorrent to a free society -- and intended to do nothing more than forward an ideological agenda that ends with dictatorship and tyranny -- where it is no longer contracts and laws that govern us, but contacts and relationships.

Laws are no longer laws -- but rather are political payoffs that entrench constituencies into dependency on what become their wilfully adopted masters. They not only alienate massive segments of the population from any benefit, but impose harsh consequences, and then require them to pay for their own subjugation.

Laws that have dramatic and potentially devastating impact are passed that are not even read by lawmakers -- let alone understood.

If that isn’t the government making war against its people, then I don’t know what is.

I think that balance that you idealize is gone forever -- and people are drunkenly, willfully, gleefully running towards slavery to the state.

It is simply the implementation of a new feudal system, except that instead of lords, kings and the church, we now have banks, “czars” and the ideal of “social justice” -- where anyone who objects to being enslaved is marked as being full of “hate”.

It is Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Kafka’s The Trial and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged all coming to pass at the same moment in history.

God help us all.

Same with public schools.

Same with public parks, national, state and local.

Same with laws promoting safe food and drugs.

Same with roads…city,township, county, state and interstate. (In fact I think I have read that opinion in this thread. A good trick…use libertarian philosphy to oppose taxes to improve roads and then use their condition to prove that government can’t maintain them).