> This is wonderfully ideological. I'm surprised people still believe this stuff.
Since I tend to skew this way, I'd like to see you lay out what some of the ideological assumptions are. Free market views are pretty well backed by economics, and plenty of nations have tried to implement alternative ideas and crashed pretty hard.
> The last 40 years or more should have been enough time to see that humans are not just machine-like self-interested information processors that respond to the market, they do behave altruistically and will co-operate when the purpose is worth it.
This is all true. The other side of that coin that frustrates the Progressive vision is that politicians and other government agents are not just altruistic beings who cooperate, according to public choice theory, they have a significant aspect of being self-interested information processors, to use your terms.
> It's this naive insistence that the market and holders of capital, if left alone, will direct humanity in the right direction...
I'm not sure who is insisting that. I think you have an underlying assumption that the state must provide for the totality of its citizens existence, so you assume that if the government isn't doing this, people must believe that corporations would take over that role.
Free market and small government advocates reject that entirely and believe that social structures can be built from the bottom up. Individualists don't think there needs to be a larger direction for humanity because your individual endeavors have intrinsic value.
Markets have existed for thousands of years, no 'social structures' were built from the bottom up. It did not lead to any civilization then. On the contrary unchecked capitalism directly led to genocide, plunder, slavery, exploitation, segregation and worse.
What we today understand as civilized society, democracy and rule of law took centuries of work by progressives and government.
Decades of propaganda by libertarians has set up an artificial divide between government and people. See 'Democracy in Chains' by Nancy Maclean.
The government is you in a democracy, it's there to protect your and everyone else's interests, that what democracy and rule of law means. It's what guarantees a somewhat civilized society. It is not this simplistic 'majority can do what they want' illiteracy spread by market fundamentalists.
It appears some people become rich and increasingly alienated from people, society and government and begin to believe they don't need government. This is the kind of hubris that leads to tyranny and quasi feudalism, which is of course what they want.
It seems like you're conflating government with social organization. Think about how a society could have social organizations like welfare, social security, medical treatment, mental health care, and all the other wonderful aspects of an organized society without combining that with the use of force to make people contribute to specific organizations or ways of living.
That's what Libertarianism is in my mind. It's not about reducing the scope of social organization, it's about divorcing that social organization from government and minimizing the responsibilities of government. When government gets large enough it A) ceases to act in the best interests of its citizens and B) starts to legitimize the use of force against its citizens. Take a look at how our police forces are militarizing and our elected representatives are ignoring us for a pretty concrete example.
The nice thing about small decentralized government is that even when it ceases to be of and for the people it can be taken down relatively quickly and painlessly.
The problem with the Libertarian approach is that it's genuinely hard to get people to agree with each other about whether a social endeavor is worth their time, and in the mean time real people are affected by whatever the societal ill is. That's something that we have to be willing to accept if we want to reduce the scope of government. We also have to be willing to accept that there are different ways of living that we might not agree with. And we have to be willing to help people who want to be in our society to join our society.
The real problem is that no matter what our society looks like, it's hard to get people to look past their knee-jerk reactions and try to be tolerant and understanding of others' ignorance. And that cuts both ways.
Since I tend to skew this way, I'd like to see you lay out what some of the ideological assumptions are. Free market views are pretty well backed by economics, and plenty of nations have tried to implement alternative ideas and crashed pretty hard.
> The last 40 years or more should have been enough time to see that humans are not just machine-like self-interested information processors that respond to the market, they do behave altruistically and will co-operate when the purpose is worth it.
This is all true. The other side of that coin that frustrates the Progressive vision is that politicians and other government agents are not just altruistic beings who cooperate, according to public choice theory, they have a significant aspect of being self-interested information processors, to use your terms.
> It's this naive insistence that the market and holders of capital, if left alone, will direct humanity in the right direction...
I'm not sure who is insisting that. I think you have an underlying assumption that the state must provide for the totality of its citizens existence, so you assume that if the government isn't doing this, people must believe that corporations would take over that role.
Free market and small government advocates reject that entirely and believe that social structures can be built from the bottom up. Individualists don't think there needs to be a larger direction for humanity because your individual endeavors have intrinsic value.