Conservative vs Libertarian... Round One... DEBATE!

[GoldRanger]

I can still judge it.

So go ahead and judge it. As long as you don't try to regulate it you're free to judge it to your heart's content. Just don't get all offended on me if I judge your dumb-ass religion.

 

[GoldRanger]

Snip unhinged rant

I'm not even a libertarian and oppose unrestricted immigration or open borders.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

Reposted from my aborted essay thread:

Libertarians are heinously flawed. They can't imagine that society is any more complex than an Excel spreadsheet, or that it functions like an organism rather than a mathematical model. All they have to do, they think, is plug in the numbers and voila—it turns out that open borders and individualized morality maximize the efficiency of the market, so end of story.

Of course they neglect the fact that efficiency comes at the cost of rigor—as a friend of mine mentioned, there is a reason why we have two lungs and two kidneys, despite the fact that it would be more "efficient" from an energy standpoint to simply do with one of each. There must be a certain amount of redundancy and "slack" in any system (i.e. programmed inefficiency) to buffer any radical contingencies which may occur. That is why traditional societies may appear inefficient and oppressive to the libertarian, but are in fact highly stable, while over-efficient systems like our own managerial state are fragile and highly vulnerable to changing variables.

Libertarianism is an impossible ideology because it's predicated on the idea that humans are rational. To the contrary, humans are confusing mixtures of biases, emotions, prejudices, experiences, and reason comes in distantly behind all of these. It's also based on the falsehood of individualism, as opposed to the reality of personhood (shorthand: persons are defined by their context—origin, environment, relationship to other persons, etc.). The wholesale embrace of the Enlightenment heresy of "individualism" is why we suffer the terrible things we do, because if the individual is an atomic unit free to define every aspect of his/her existence, then all things which constrain that "freedom"—gender, race, family, nation (socio-ethnic tribe)—are evils which must be destroyed and overcome. Hence leftism, etc.

If you're a libertarian wondering why I'm opposed to free-market capitalism, you should probably look around you at the way businesses in a free market operate, the causes they endorse, and the morality they promote. Do the virtues of your culture come from the scramble for personal gain? This is the "greed is good" philosophy that many conservatives are programmed with.

It takes a long time for conservatives to break through the programming, even as the free market they revere seeks to send their jobs overseas and flood them with aliens at home, even as it mistreats employees and fires them for complaining, even as it breaks the law and then uses the courts to safeguard its profits, even as it privatizes profits and socializes losses, even as it predates on those with little money and then lectures them about "individual responsibility." If you can look at the morass of business ethics today, the steady procession of abuses and degradations, the nihilistic grasping for wealth at nearly any cost, and see a system that needs more freedom to work as it does, then you have yet to wake up.

Libertarians also fail to correctly grasp the correct hierarchy of political needs. They see it as freedom first, followed by rule of law, followed by social order, followed by peace, when the actual hierarchy is the opposite: first peace, then order, then law and then freedom. Thinking that freedom is the foundational prerequisite, they spend and diminish the stored capital of the others in its favor, figuring it will all work out when they get an invisible handjob from the ghost of Adam Smith. All they accomplish thereby is the destruction of all four. 1990s Mogadishu had a surplus of freedom, and not much else. Libertarians think freedom begets prosperity and a kind of magic order, whereas in reality freedom is the precious byproduct of centuries of order and peace. Without the constraints of that order—in other words, in a libertarian utopia—freedom will inevitably demolish the mechanisms of order and thus destroy itself. Jonathan Haidt mentions this dynamic in his talks about morality, referring to Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.

What defenders of libertarianism have not addressed is the dynamic by which liberty (hedonism, license, "do what thou wilt") leads to social decay because men are not naturally wise, nor are they wise as a mob.

More importantly, if the Republican Party represents the liberal zeitgeist of the past, while the Democrats embody the liberal zeitgeist of the present, libertarians are the vanguard of the ghost of liberalism future. They're the specter of Democratic Party of 2032 haunting the Internet today. There is no future in a conservative politics that panders to them. They will corrupt any such attempt.

Just what a truly libertarian social order would look like is a moot question, because every government of any significance on Earth is in the hands of technocratic managerialists, who do not have a libertarian bone in their body. While it is generally preferred by managerialists that socially liberal policies prevail (this is a useful way of controlling people and an all-purpose screen for whatever extra-constitutional things they want to do—as well as a sign of their own severe decadence), but to characterize them as libertarian is to mistake what libertarianism is. (Talking about the US Constitution is not heading in the right direction either.) Among other things, managerialists do not favor a diminished role for the state, and have no intention of reducing their control over their economies (which in any event isn't feasible in a complex, globalized system). If they decide to let you smoke pot or visit prostitutes, it won't mean they're libertarian, it will mean they consider pot and whoring to be excellent forms of soma. They'll still be eager to disarm and disenfranchise you in countless ways.

Am I misrepresenting libertarian political thought? Unfortunately, the Internet, where libertarians are extremely well-represented, does not support that case, to put it mildly.

Dismissing me as a fascist or anti-capitalist won't work here, either. I see the market as an end to general happiness and not an end to itself. I recognize that interventions frequently do more harm than good. In this I'm closer to a libertarian than a socialist, but I'm very skeptical about ideologies that try to skirt around human nature.

Humans exhibit the whole range of social behaviors: group cooperation, group competitiveness, individual cooperation, and individual competitiveness. Ideologies that ignore this by starting with a few presuppositions and working out a body of law as though humans were the merest of mathematical constructs are doomed to failure if carried to their logical conclusions. I believe that humans and societies are neural networks that, in complex ways, balance multiple competing interests in making decisions rather than simple variables that are easily explained and managed by rudimentary, if politically satisfying, axioms. I believe that as the sociobiological revolution unfolds, as it impacts sociology and economics as it has started to impact psychology, there is going to be less and less ground for ideological purists of any stripe to stand upon.

 

[Cherico]

My point of view is this.

Both of us Conserviatives and Libertarians will be shot along the same wall if the socialists win, so its in our interests to work together even if we disagree on a lot of things.

 

[S'task]

I'm going back to the quote that apparently started this thread:

The reason whoring is traditionally seen as immoral is because intimacy with another human being is one of the most important facets of our nature. It's not something to be exchanged for something as base as money.

So firstly, speaking as a longstanding principled Conservative and especially social conservative, this viewpoint is inherently wrong.

The primary reason for seeing prostitution as being morally wrong ties back to the damage prostitution causes to a society in two main areas. The first should be fairly obvious: the spread of disease. Before germ theory and even now, when STDs are still mostly incurable, prostitution serves as a dangerous vector for the spread of disease in society that is entirely preventable. The fact that prostitution is pursued simply for self pleasure (on the part of the customer) yet can lead to those dangers is a large part of why it is considered immoral.

In addition to this, due to how human pair bonding works, and the monogamous nature of most human societies, prostitution can have seriously damaging effects on the pair bond of a human couple. Again, this is on the part of the customer mainly.

As an additional problem that prostitution can cause is an increase in out of wedlock births to low economic status women. As is well known, children of single mothers have statistically worse results and significantly greater behavioral problems than those born to a married couple. A society generally should want to discourage out of wedlock births.

And finally, one can make an argument that prostitution damages marriage as an institution, diminishing it's value while also potentially damaging existing ones. Despite what libertarians believe, individuals are not the core unit of societies, married couples are and while married couples are made up of individuals, individuals alone do not build effective or long lasting societies, as our own society has slowly shown since the sexual revolution.

Now, the focus on demonizing the prostitute can very well be overblown, after all, much of the potential damage prostitution can cause is contingent on people seeking their services. However, we do not simply treat those who provide goods or services that cause damage to others or society as neutral parties either. A hitman isn't free from punishment or moral culpability simply because someone else hired them. All these factors together are why most societies held prostitution in, at best, low esteem to being outright illegal.

Look, there's a simple fact: if all humans held to basic Christian sexual morality (no sex outside of marriage), STDs would not be a thing. A huge amount of damage has been caused by the spread of STDs due to people ignoring that simple ideal. It's understandable why it happens, but to pretend that sexual license, even with payment, is somehow morally just or even superior to that basic idea is laughable.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

My point of view is this.

Both of us Conserviatives and Libertarians will be shot along the same wall if the socialists win, so its in our interests to work together even if we disagree on a lot of things.

Please. The left is more than happy to compromise with libertarians because they understand that they're no threat. Like I said, they're more than happy to legalize whatever hedonism libertarians want, because they understand that those things will make excellent soma. Libertarians have far more in common with leftists than they do with conservatives, who at least in theory are rooted in some form of traditional culture and morals/teleology.

That's the thing about materialists: they're easily bought.

 

[GoldRanger]

The idea that the Christian ideal of abstinence is sustainable in anything resembling a free society is as rational as the idea that workers will happily and productively work for the same reward as people who don't work at all, i.e. the Communist ideal. Hey, technically if everyone adhered to this "simple principles" class struggles and exploitation wouldn't be a thing! Yippie!

Now back here in reality, both are completely unfeasible since they go against basic human nature and will only ever be possible on a large scale by authoritarian oppression.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

The idea that the Christian ideal of abstinence is sustainable in anything resembling a free society is as rational as the idea that workers will happily and productively work for the same reward as people who don't work at all, i.e. the Communist ideal. Hey, technically if everyone adhered to this "simple principles" class struggles and exploitation wouldn't be a thing! Yippie!

Now back here in reality, both are completely unfeasible since they go against basic human nature and will only ever be possible on a large scale by authoritarian oppression.

Not quite the end of story, I'm afraid. What's your definition of "completely unfeasible?" If your standard is "100% successful 100% of the time" then you're right, enforced abstinence does not work ever. If your standard is not that stringent, then you're plainly wrong. Prohibitions on antisocial behavior clearly do work in at least some cases. The number of people in this country who would like to obtain a fully automatic weapon and have the means to do so if such weapons were not highly restricted by federal law and the ATF registration process is clearly far greater than the number of people who actually have automatic weapons (for better or for worse).

The purpose of the social prohibitions on anything is not to eliminate it entirely, since that's impossible. Rather, it is to impose a high enough cost on it that the vast majority of people won't pursue it. That reduces the scale of the problem for society at large, so long as the cost is set high enough in proportion to the attraction.

In that sense, prohibition works very well and we use for lots of things that degrade the social order and shared values. The failures arise in one of two cases:

1) the penalties are not set high enough or are not consistently applied to everyone involved, or,

2) we're attempting to prohibit something that a plurality or majority of society wants.

The failure of alcohol prohibition was mostly due the 2), with a bit of 1). The drug war is failing because of the 1), not the 2). The solution is not to release the strictures of the prohibition, but to reset the penalties to an appropriately severe level and apply them consistently. Singapore doesn't have a big problem with drugs because they put dealers to death and treat users very harshly. They have a prohibition system that works. Not only that, but it's stable and low cost, because the vast majority of people, even those most likely to offend, are unlikely to take the risk by testing it.

Traditional societies do something similar regarding sexual morality, and usually it doesn't even require state intervention. Win-win, right?

 

[Deleted member 88]

Imagine thinking that willingness to fuck and be fucked by random strangers is worthy of respect, rather than being a symptom of undiagnosed mental illness or past abuse.

Why do you want the state to become an enabler for abused teens instead of giving them mental health support?

Okay this probably isn't going to make you happy-but I'm of the opinion prostitution should not be banned, but strictly regulated.

It serves a social purpose. That is getting men(especially young, unmarried men)'s rocks off.

The Catholic Church in the medieval ages felt that prostitution would channel the male sexual urge, in a way that prevented greater immorality.

Make prostitution legal, strictly, regulated, and treat prostitutes as doing a dirty but necessary social function. Like gutter cleaners.

Legalized prostitution would clamp down on "bro culture" where getting laid is the height of a man's worth. As if any man can spend a few hours in a brothel-he doesn't feel inferior for not being a Casanova or sex stud or whatever.

The Catholic Church and the ancient romans-understood just how powerful male sexual desires are, and why marriage does not contain all of them-in scale or volume.

Ideally it wouldn't exist. But prostitution in my view if handled properly serves a social function. It would also discourage promiscuous behavior among women-especially if prostitutes are treated like gutter plumbers and other menial workers. Women who are promiscuous, nymphomaniacs, or the like would be shamed, and if they could not live monogamously-would be strongly pressured(or if necessary outright forced) into becoming prostitutes. At least then their behavior would serve a social purpose.

Prostitution should not be glamorized and neither should prostitutes. It should be treated as a necessary evil. A valve for the male sex drive and an opportunity for women of loose character.

Of course-neither Medieval Catholic attitudes or the attitudes of antiquity were libertarian, in fact they regulated brothels quite strongly.

In general its my view that human nature includes the irresistable temptation to vice-which is why brothels, taverns, and the like exist-they serve a social purpose of satisfying vice but should be socially segregated and separated from the center of social morality and treated as the pressure valves they are.

Society should treat vice outlets as necessary products of human weakness and failure to meet a perfect standard. It should not treat them as something to glorify, promote, or encourage, especially with the rhetoric of "freedom."

Repressing vice outlets entirely just means they manifest in less controllable and regulated ways and situations.

TLDR: Moral and socially conservative societies benefit from providing vice outlets, as it clamps down on and disincentivizes worse behavior if socially sanctioned options(within tight restrictions) are available.

 

[Captain X]

Look, there's a simple fact: if all humans held to basic Christian sexual morality (no sex outside of marriage), STDs would not be a thing. A huge amount of damage has been caused by the spread of STDs due to people ignoring that simple ideal. It's understandable why it happens, but to pretend that sexual license, even with payment, is somehow morally just or even superior to that basic idea is laughable.

Your STD concern could easily be mitigated by regulation, a lot more than just trying to ban it can ever hope to accomplish. And as someone who is not Christian, the other aspects of your argument do not bother or concern me. Not everyone is going to get married, not everyone wants to get married and have kids, and that's fine. And your comparison of prostitutes to hitmen is laughable at best, even if you think you're somehow making an argument against demonizing prostitutes.

Please. The left is more than happy to compromise with libertarians because they understand that they're no threat.

Only in whatever fantasy world you live in. They consider us a threat because we are very individualist and want an egalitarian meritocracy, whereas they are ridiculously collectivist (something you are guilty of yourself, incidentally), and wish to define and separate people based on attributes they have no control over, with some groups being more privileged than others based on what attributes they have (the whole oppression pyramid thing).

Like I said, they're more than happy to legalize whatever hedonism libertarians want, because they understand that those things will make excellent soma. Libertarians have far more in common with leftists than they do with conservatives, who at least in theory are rooted in some form of traditional culture and morals/teleology.

We have morals - they are simply not based in religion as yours are. The thing we have in common with conservatives is that we actually do believe in the things conservatives claim to believe in when it comes to individual rights, personal responsibility, and small government.

 

[Deleted member]

Like @Lord Invictus I regard myself as a member of the traditional right who fully supports prostitution—in almost all traditional societies it was a legal, if sharply circumscribed, as a safety valve under the principle of minimising harm and social disruption, and in many religions outside of the Abrahamic traditions it was a sacred act of worship of the Almighty. It is inherently less demeaning and destructive to the moral order of society than porn and would be much better for society than legal porn. So let’s stop assuming there’s only two viewpoints on this issue. Banning porn and legalising prostitution is a morally defensible if admittedly rare position, as well.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

Only in whatever fantasy world you live in. They consider us a threat because we are very individualist and want an egalitarian meritocracy, whereas they are ridiculously collectivist (something you are guilty of yourself, incidentally), and wish to define and separate people based on attributes they have no control over, with some groups being more privileged than others based on what attributes they have (the whole oppression pyramid thing).

What a joke. Libertarian ideology, like other branches of Leftism, is fundamentally disconnected from humanity, possibly even moreso. Whereas at least Leftists feel some solidarity towards the wretched of the earth (at the expense of their fellow countrymen, granted), libertarians see everything through their ideology, supporting all manner of harmful projects, from globalization, mass immigration, and sexual libertinism, as long as individuals are free to debase and destroy themselves and the economy keeps growing. For them, valuing ones ethnic group, religious and cultural traditions are irrational, and only acceptable if voluntary—forgetting that our particular placement in a nation, family and time is completely outside of human control.

The fact that Right-Liberalism, with it's focus on industrialism, individualism, profit and progress has become synonymous with Conservatism, which when functional, is really about kith and kin, soil and soul, demonstrates the degree to which the Right has been led astray by the Enlightenment ideologies of liberte and egalite.

We have morals - they are simply not based in religion

That's just a fancy way of saying "my morals are arbitrary."

 

[GoldRanger]

That's just a fancy way of saying "my morals are arbitrary."

All morals are, to a degree, arbitrary (aside from common sense ones that are necessary for any society to function, such as "murder and theft are bad"). The difference is that yours are based on a popular fantasy novel.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

All morals are, to a degree, arbitrary (aside from common sense ones that are necessary for any society to function, such as "murder and theft are bad"). The difference is that yours are based on a popular fantasy novel.

Nope, it's all based on logic. An omniscient being is one which knows the correct answer to all logically valid inquiries. Therefore, an omniscient being is by definition incapable of being incorrect.

So... why are some morals "common sense," and others not? What materialistic grounds do you have for saying that anything is just bad, full stop?

 

[GoldRanger]

Nope, it's all based on logic. An omniscient being is one which knows the correct answer to all logically valid inquiries. Therefore, an omniscient being is by definition incapable of being incorrect.

So... why are some morals "common sense," and others not? What materialistic grounds do you have for saying that anything is just bad, full stop?

A society can't function on a very basic level if murder is permissible to all. Ergo, any society that lasts for any serious length of time must have prohibited murder.

You, on the other hand, are basing your morals on a fantasy novel and are deluded into believing an "omniscient being" is dictating them to you from on high. That's... A rather more shaky ground to base your morals on.

 

[S'task]

Your STD concern could easily be mitigated by regulation, a lot more than just trying to ban it can ever hope to accomplish. And as someone who is not Christian, the other aspects of your argument do not bother or concern me. Not everyone is going to get married, not everyone wants to get married and have kids, and that's fine. And your comparison of prostitutes to hitmen is laughable at best, even if you think you're somehow making an argument against demonizing prostitutes.

You need to go reread the opening of my post if you think I was making an argument against prostitution. I wasn't. I was explaining why there was a historical moral proscription against prostitution. That historical proscription was founded on those different ideals, and I would note that none of the ideals I outlined that lead to prostitution being looked down on are unique aspects of Christian morality and in fact are core aspects of all premodern social systems that underpin longstanding societies, from European Christian morality, to Middle Eastern Islamic morality, to Chinese Confucian Morality.

As the moral proscriptions against prostitution predate Germ Theory by thousands of years, no amount of "regulation" in those times could have made it safe, since they did not know anything more than that prostitutes were a major vector of specific types of diseases that were uncurable and nasty.

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

A society can't function on a very basic level if murder is permissible to all. Ergo, any society that lasts for any serious length of time must have prohibited murder.

What materialistic reason do you have for saying that a functional society is preferable to a dysfunctional society? You're not a society, you're just a person.

And I'm not under any delusion that God is speaking to me. I'm just repeating what 2,000+ years of scholarship by people far more spiritually advanced than myself have said about morality. I'll take their word over that of some glibertarian who thinks he's had some great insight after working it all out in his own head.

 

[GoldRanger]

What materialistic reason do you have for saying that a functional society is preferable to a dysfunctional society? You're not a society, you're just a person.

I logically observe that either all or the vast majority of people want to maximize happiness either for themselves or for others they care about, as this is human nature. I deduce that an individual in a functional society would have a better chance to pursue or even achieve some form of happiness than as an individual completely segregated from fellow human beings. Moreover complete segregation from human beings is also opposed to basic (genetic) human nature, further enhancing my point.

Now what basis do you have to claim that an arbitrary fantasy novel, particularly the specific novel that you're championing in a sea of fantasy novels, would be a better behavioral guide than observation, experimentation, logical deduction?

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

I logically observe that either all or the vast majority of people want to maximize happiness either for themselves or for others they care about, as this is human nature. I deduce that an individual in a functional society would have a better chance to pursue or even achieve some form of happiness than as an individual completely segregated from fellow human beings. Moreover complete segregation from human beings is also opposed to basic (genetic) human nature, further enhancing my point.

What materialistic basis do you have for leaping from is to ought? You've said that this is all part of human nature, and that's true. But by what standard are you concluding that this facet of human nature should be indulged? Surely the mere fact that people feel a certain way is not by itself evidence that we should act on it—after all, violence and murder are also a deeply-ingrained facet of human nature. Why ought we follow one urge and ought not follow the other? By what standard are you judging that, as an atheist?

 

[Abhorsen]

The major argument for conservatives adopting libertarian beliefs in regards to government (not in regards to morality) is a practical one. The conservatives have lost and surrendered nearly every cultural battle except abortion and guns, and even then, conservatives are in a holding pattern. Every major institution that isn't explicitly conservative or libertarian is at least implicitly liberal. If you start advocating for a bigger government, you are just handing tools to the leftists of the future to oppress you with, in hopes that they might be usable now. There is one good defense, and that is removing the government's power to oppress you.