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Debate Argument: Libertarianism | Debate.org

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My main argument will be an example.

Imagine there is a lake with 20 fish in it. There are 4 fishermen. They have two years to catch the fish in the lake. The first year the fish will be worth 1 dollar each, the second year it will be 2 dollars. What do you think will happen? The first year the lake will be untouched. The second year the four fishermen will try to catch as much fish as fast as they can, leaving the lake completely empty. The fisherman with the most starting money, the biggest boat and the most advanced equipment will catch 15 fish, leaving the remaining 5 to the lesser fishermen. The rich fisherman is now even richer, while the other 3 are left with nothing.

Now compare this with a new scenario. The same 4 fishermen but now each has his own little pond with 4 fish in it, belonging to them. There will be 4 fish left in the lake. The first year, when the fish are worth 1 dollar, one might grab a few, and the second year the fish might be gone. But after that, each fishermen has 4 fish of his own to sell. Each fisherman now has 8 dollars, one or more might have caught the remaining 4 so they have more. But now each fisherman has 8 dollars to buy food for his family.

The first scenario is libertarianism. The scenario where the government doesn't care about the economy. Here the fisherman with the most advanced equipment will take everything and the remaining three will starve. The second scenario is what you might call a socialist state, where the wealth is divided but there's still room for competition.

If you apply these scenarios to a larger scale you will see the huge differences. The first scenario would be the US of A. Notice how the differences in wealth are huge because of lack of government interference. The second scenario would be Holland for example. Where the government plays a role in the economy to make sure everybody gets a slice.

Compare these two scenarios yourself and decide which one you would like to live in as an average citizen.

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Debate Argument: Libertarianism | Debate.org

Libertarianism – Freedom Circle

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Articles Clint Eastwood announces: I'm a "libertarian", Libertarian Party News, 18 Feb 1997 Related Topics: Dave Barry, Clint Eastwood, Penn Jillette, John B. Larroquette, Russell Means, Dennis Miller, P.J. O'Rourke, Camille Paglia, John Stossel Libertarian Party press release based on Eastwood's response to a Playboy interview question: "How would you characterize yourself politically?"

"Eastwood joins a growing number of individuals in the entertainment industry who have identified themselves as libertarians. Included on that list are TV star John Laroquette, humorist Dave Barry, author P.J. O'Rourke, movie actor Russell Means, magician Jillette Penn, author Camille Paglia, TV reporter John Stossell, and comedian Dennis Miller."

"... I think we have to be happy with the term libertarian, while knowing that politics tends to taint all word usage issues. What is a libertarian? It is a person who believes in the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition."

"Raised as a Catholic, I could not reconcile the concept of ending tax-supported welfare with Christ's admonition to love our neighbors. In considering this dilemma, I suddenly became aware of a pivotal point: although refusing to help others might not be very loving, pointing guns at our neighbors to force them to help those in need was even less so."

"Who were the exploiters? All who lived forcibly off of the industrious classes. ... Thus political and economic history is the record of conflict between producers, no matter their station, and the parasitic political classes, both inside and outside the formal state. Or to use terms of a later subscriber to this view, John Bright, it was a clash between the tax-payers and tax-eaters."

"Left and Right did not refer merely to which side of the assembly one sat on or one's attitude toward the regime. ... The Left understood that historically the state was the most powerful engine of exploitation ... Libertarians also showed their Left colors by opposing imperialism, war, and the accompanying violations of civil liberties ..."

"... we must inquire whether libertarian concerns are really divisible into, on the one hand, a concern with duties (deontology), for example, respecting individual rights, and on the other, a concern with practical consequences. ... I'm hardly alone in my uneasiness with this separation of concerns into the moral and the practical. In my camp is no less a personage than Adam Smith."

"The libertarian insight expressed so succinctly by Randolph Bourne 'War is the health of the State' has never been more relevant, and war revisionism - that is, the revision of the 'official' (i.e. government-approved) version of events leading up to the war is essential in understanding both the methods and motives of our rulers."

"Libertarianism has a long and glorious tradition, not the least of which is the principled anti-imperialist legacy of Leonard Read, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and a long list of others. It is due to the durability of this tradition, which Doherty celebrates in his book, that libertarians have every reason to face the future with growing confidence."

"Thus, libertarianism is a commitment to eschew aggressive force; it is not a specific lifestyle because lifestyles result from the many peaceful choices people make after eschewing force. What a peaceful person chooses to do may be of great moral importance. ... Past the point of eschewing violence, however, his behavior is irrelevant to the question of libertarianism."

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Libertarianism - Freedom Circle

GOPs new fracking hypocrisy: What a Texas battle reveals about Republican dogma

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Amid last months Republican sweep of the 2014 midterm elections, there were some notable progressive victories. Marijuana decriminalization, gun control laws and minimum wage increases all passed on various states ballots. But perhaps the most inspiring initiative voters put into law was a ban on fracking in Denton, Texas. Unfortunately, Texas politicians, bureaucrats and business interests are pledging to fight, repeal and/or ignore it.

Texas Railroad Commission chairwoman Christi Craddick, who is responsible for oil and gas regulation which, in Texas, apparently means doing as little regulating as possible said, Its my job to give permits, not Dentons Were going to continue permitting up there because thats my job. Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the Texas General Land Office,wrote a lettersaying, While we applaud the citys efforts to promote the welfare of its citizens, we must make sure it is done in a manner consistent with existing state laws the Legislature has made regulation of underground mineral estates and the methods for producing them a matter of State agency regulation.

Residents of Denton made it clear, by a stern59-41 percent vote, that they do not want fracking in their town. Texas Republicans are telling them they have no right to such a declaration because the state that perennial foe of every right-wing principle is the only entity with a say-so in the matter.

Meanwhile,Texas is in perpetual conflict with the federal governmentover voting laws, healthcare and, particularly, environmental regulations. In 2013, former Texas attorney general and current Gov.-elect Greg Abbott boasted that hesued the Obama administration 25 timesfor perceived overreaches. Now, that cadre of state-hating Republicans is using Big Government to step on the little people of Denton. The hypocrisy might make you fall over backward, but the right-wing position all along has never been about individual freedom not unless that individual is trying to make a buck, anyway. Far from eroding the state, the Republican agenda is to build a very strong state that can be used to intervene in public policy on behalf of corporate interests.

With272 active wells in the cityand another 212 just outside the city limits, Denton residents ought to know as much as anyone about fracking. Yet another leading member of the Texas Railroad Commission, David Porter nominally a public servant and not a P.R. representative for the oil and gas industry suggests, Denton voters fell prey to scare tactics and mischaracterizations of the truth in passing the hydraulic fracturing ban. Such a dismissive attitude of a resounding victory at the ballot box is bad enough, but its downright silly in light of the overwhelmingpro-fracking propagandaDenton residents were subjected to. The main opponents of the ban, energy giants Chevron, Chesapeake Energy and XTO Energy (a subsidiary of Exxon), outspent the pro-ban group, Frack Free Denton, by almost 10-to-1 and still lost. Far from being the prey of scare tactics, Denton residents haveplenty of good reasonsto want fracking out of their town.

Fracking the process of shooting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals into the earth to jostle natural gas loose from shale formations is well known to cause a myriad of environmental problems, most notablyair and water pollution. Dentons air is tied with Houstons as themost polluted in Texas, making it among the most polluted in the nation and well exceeding the limits set forth by the Clean Air Act. Thehealth effectsof exposure to thebevy of chemicalsused in, and released into the environment as a result of, fracking are only just beginning to be documented. Fracking has even been implicated ina rise in earthquakeswhere heavy fracking takes place. Property values around fracking sites are known toplummet. And just to tie all those concerns together, under current regulatory standards, fracking is allowed a mere1,200 feet awayfrom residential areas and, in many cases, goes on even closer.

Commissioner Craddick defended frackers, saying, Most of them are active in their communities where theyre doing business and trying to give some dollars back. Its a weak enough statement on its own, but even that minimal claim is dubious. Craddick herself asserts (in fact, its a key component of her argument) that Denton residents dont own the minerals underneath their homes and town,so we know they arent getting any money directly from their extraction. Adam Briggle, a University of North Texas assistant professor specializing in bioethics and a leader in Frack Free Denton, argues thatfrackings contribution to Dentons local economy is minimal, if not actually detrimental: Royalties paid to the City of Denton account for less than 1 percent of the city budget. Taxes from wells amount to only about 0.5 percent of all city property tax revenues. The biggest beneficiaries from fracking in Denton are out-of-town companies and absentee mineral owners.

When conservatives rail against government, what theyre really opposed to is democracy, and their swiftness to use state power against democratic action in Denton exemplifies this. They hold up the free market, a nebulous, pseudo-religious construct, as the only legitimate arbiter of right and wrong. But the most important part of living in a free market is the freedom of people to shape that market. In theory, this is done through responsible consumer choices, but the market doesnt always provide alternatives. Our transportation and energy infrastructure makes it almost impossible for millions of Americans not to patronize certain industries, particularly the oil industry. If people cant use their spending power to tell the market they want something else, they ought to be able to send that message with their vote.

Market action isnt sufficient to enact the widespread infrastructural changes that are morally incumbent as environmental degradation and climate change worsen. Elected representatives arent going to do it; most of them arein bedwith thefossil fuel industry. And the fossil fuel industry isnt going to do it when it can rely on state Republicans in direct violation of the very free market principles theyre so fond of espousing to keep itheavily subsidizedand come to its aid with legislative intervention whenever its threatened. With the system so corrupt and gridlocked, direct democracy of the kind used in Denton is the only way to make a change.

The fracking ban doesnt come close to addressing all the planets environmental needs, but more issues like it coming under the scrutiny of public referendum will get us where we need to go a lot faster than the free market or state officials ever could. Residents in Denton came together to make a decision in their communitys best interest and exercised their right to self-governance. They scored an important, inspiring victory for the environment and for their town. We can only hope that the Big Government Republicans of Texas and the industry titans they serve dont take it away from them.

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GOPs new fracking hypocrisy: What a Texas battle reveals about Republican dogma

Volokh Conspiracy: Review of Damon Roots Overruled: The Long War for Control of the Supreme Court

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Damon Roots new book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court is an impressive account of the conflict over judicial review between conservatives and libertarians. Most books about the recent history of judicial review and constitutional theory focus on the opposition between conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans. By contrast, Root focuses primarily on the increasingly important faultline between libertarians and conservatives.

Libertarians and conservatives have cooperated on issues related to federalism, gun rights, and property rights. But they have also sharply disagreed on the role of judicial review in protecting the rights of gays and lesbians, limiting wartime executive power, and constraining police and prosecutors. As the leading writer on legal issues for Reason, the prominent libertarian publication, Root has covered many of these issues for years.

Root effectively traces libertarian-conservative disagreements over judicial review to their origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Progressives attacked nineteenth century natural rights-based jurisprudence for what they regarded as unjustified judicial activism in protecting both economic liberties and noneconomic ones. As he notes, many early Progressives opposed not only the Courts enforcement of economic freedoms in cases like Lochner v. New York, but also judicial efforts to protect free speech and enforce other noneconomic freedoms. For example, leading Progressive Justice Louis Brandeis praised the Courts notorious decision to uphold mandatory sterilization of the mentally ill in Buck v. Bell as an example of cases where judges should give state governments free reign to meet..modern conditions by regulations (though he gradually came to support judicial protection of some other civil liberties).

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, political liberals gradually shifted towards supporting strong judicial intervention to protect noneconomic rights, even as they repudiated similar protection for economic freedoms and property rights. But, ironically, the original Progressive defense of judicial nonintervention was taken up by post-New Deal conservatives, including such notable legal theorists as Judge Robert H. Bork.

Root explains how the persistence of this tradition of judicial restraint on the conservative right has led to clashes between conservatives and libertarians in recent years. Even in some cases where the two groups agree on the outcome, there are important divergences over preferred rationales. For example, libertarians and conservatives worked together to expand judicial protection for Second Amendment rights in District of Columbia v> Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). But, in the latter case, many conservatives opposed the libertarians efforts to revive judicial enforcement of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, fearing that this step would open the door to a new wave of judicial activism.

Roots book is probably the most thorough account of the libertarian-conservative debate over judicial review so far. The clash between the two may rise in importance, as libertarianism becomes a more important part of the political landscape. Younger Republicans are, on average, significantly more libertarian than their elders. The same is likely true of younger right of center elite lawyers and legal scholars. At the same time, it is unlikely that social conservatives will give up without a fight. Even as they fight over their differences, the two groups will also have to find some way to continue cooperating on the issues that unite them, especially since the legal left remains powerful and influential.

I do have two reservations about his otherwise excellent analysis. First, for some reason Root largely ignores the issue of same-sex marriage, which is one of the most important constitutional questions where libertarians and conservatives have differed in recent years. Though there are some exceptions in both camps, libertarian lawyers and legal scholars (including many here at the Volokh Conspiracy) have generally supported striking down laws banning same-sex marriage, while conservatives have forcefully opposed it. The issue is both important in and of itself, and an important indicator of the differences between the two camps.

Second, I think Root is too quick to characterize modern judicial conservatism as focused on judicial restraint. It is true that, since the 1960s and 70s, conservatives have devoted a great deal of time and effort to denouncing liberal judicial activism. But conservative judges such as William Rehnquist and Sandra Day OConnor have also long advocated stronger judicial enforcement of property rights and constitutional limits on federal power.

Root describes famed conservative legal theorist Robert Bork as a principled advocate of judicial minimalism. This was indeed an important element of Borks philosophy. But Bork was also a strong advocate of constitutional originalism, which sometimes requires aggressive judicial invalidation of legislation that goes against the original meaning of the Constitution. In his 1989 book The Tempting of America, Bork advocated judicial restraint, but also described New Deal-era decisions expanding congressional authority over the economy as judicial activism because they gave the federal government more power than it was entitled to under the original meaning.

Bork never seriously confronted the tension between his advocacy of originalism on the one hand, and his support for judicial deference to the democratic process on the other. For a long time, the same was true of many other judicial conservatives. Like Bork, they simultaneously advocated both originalism and judicial deference without giving much thought to possible contradictions between these commitments. The rise of libertarianism is one of several factors that have forced conservatives to devote greater thought to the issue in recent years.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Review of Damon Roots Overruled: The Long War for Control of the Supreme Court