[AdieuToLogic]

> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.

It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:

  If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are
  shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids,
  potable water, sewage services, fire departments,
  and police departments?

It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.

[slopinthebag]

What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...

[AdieuToLogic]

> What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them?

The latter I suppose.

I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.

[slopinthebag]

The short answer is that "shared resources" in a libertarian system is a bit of an oxymoron. It's a category error.

The long answer would probably be that access to these resources would be gated through pay-per-use, instead of a distributed taxation system. Of course for convenience you might end up with a structured way of purchasing a group of resources and it might even look like a roundabout way of taxation, although libertarians might argue that taxation is the roundabout way.

Or they might give a different answer, there are different schools of libertarianism!

* not a libertarian, but interested in niche political ideologies

[jayd16]

Who gets to gate natural resources? Why should I recognize any power to do so? Purchase from who? Am I not free from any authority that would coerce me to accept such a system?

What's described is basically just a regressive tax. It doesn't sound very libertarian to me.

[slopinthebag]

Good question. Property rights are absolutely fundamental to libertarianism, perhaps second to the concept of self-ownership. Coming from classical liberal philosophy (most notably John Locke), the principle of self-ownership asserts that you own yourself, your labor, and the physical manifestations of that labor. Locke believed the earth was given to humanity in common by nature, but it required cultivation and effort to be useful. By "mixing" their labor (time, sweat, and skills) with raw land or resources, an individual removes the item from the state of nature and attaches their labor to it, making it their private property. Writers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard expanded upon this idea (Rothbard even went as far as to ground all ethics in self-ownership and property rights).

I want to ask you since I'm curious, the state simply declared ownership over territory and resources (and in some cases used violence to uphold it), why should you recognise any power in the state's part to do so? Likely many of the same justifications can apply to individuals as well.

[amanaplanacanal]

I read quite a bit of libertarian philosophy when I was younger, and never heard a convincing explanation of how you get private ownership of land, let alone things like the atmosphere, rivers, groundwater, etc.

Or pollution, are small amounts ok, as long as nobody can prove they are damaged? What if damage takes a generation, or only appears if lots of people are doing it? Diluting away the crap from burning a little oil is easy, when the whole world is doing it everybody is hurt.

[rmunn]

Plus, the question of voluntary vs. involuntary comes in. Taxation is, in most forms, involuntary. Don't pay your taxes, eventually you'll either be arrested or the government will compel your bank to hand over what you were supposed to pay; either way you're not allowed to say "I don't plan to use public roads so I don't want to pay for them" or "I don't want my money going to support the military, I'm fine with the military not defending me if the country is ever attacked" or whatever. You have to pay the taxes, and your say in how they get spent is very indirect.

The libertarian ideal is voluntary payment for services. Don't want to pay for fire protection? You don't have to; the flip side of the bargain is that if you haven't chosen to pay for fire protection, the fire company is under no obligation to put your house out if it does catch on fire. The choice is yours, but you have to be wiling to accept the consequences of your choice as well.

Note that I have not studied the various flavors of libertarian philosophy, so some of them might well disagree with what I just said. But the voluntary/involuntary thing is pretty important to libertarians as far as I know, so it's definitely worth mentioning here.

[preg_match]

I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because:

1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and

2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets.

So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer.

Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.

[slopinthebag]

I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic.

If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.

[preg_match]

I largely agree, but the bigger picture is that free market hand-wavy economics is the status quo. I’m especially critical because, in the west, it’s just accepted as fact.

Yes there is reasoning behind specific implementations. But most people don’t know that reasoning. They apply hand-wavy reasoning to fit the status-quo. That, to me, is a problem: one which doesn’t exist in other economic theories by their nature. For alternative theories, it requires active effort and reading, because it’s alternative.

What that doesn’t mean is that alternative theories are just magically correct. But what it does mean is that the average person arguing those positions are simply better informed. I’ve mostly just learned to ignore people, both online and in person, when they use the term “free market”. Maybe that’s self-destructive, it probably is. But ultimately I get tired of arguing with people who don’t put in even the first-tier of reasoning into their positions. Never mind second or third order effects.

[walthamstow]

Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems.

Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.

[gmerc]

Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.

[lambdaone]

Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.

Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.

[slopinthebag]

Actually I don't think libertarians would argue that the problem is unsolved in both systems, they would argue that the problem itself is nonsensical. Most libertarians don't believe that non-excludable positive externalities are a problem, since it involves no harm to anyone and no violation of rights. They simply don't believe that because you indirectly provide a benefit to someone, you then have the right to coerce payment.

One could argue that there is an efficiency problem however - for example, take a bee keeper whoes bees benefit their neighbours. It could be argued that if there was some means to which the keeper could exclude those positive externalities, and there some level of payment at which the surrounding property owners would be indifferent between the excludable and the nonexcludable situation, there could be a Pareto-efficient gain. And since there is no reasonable way to exclude the benefits, it leads to the conclusion that the neighbours should be coerced into payment. Most libertarians reject this type of coercion prima facie.

[dinfinity]

> Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem?

This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad.

Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.

[walthamstow]

Your spidey sense is failing you, you're making assumptions you've got no ground for. I've voted for left of centre parties all my life. I was born in the NHS and I'll probably die there too.

[Xunjin]

Tbf I don't think he is implying you are certain political group/view/spectrum. He is just arguing your flip argument.