Quote:
Originally Posted by BonnieDundee
Well I'll correct you by saying the American style of libertarianism. Anarcho-syndicalism for example does not suffer this dogmaticism.
The problem with American style libertarianism is it tries to great a doctrine that solves all human political and social problems by adherence to a few prinicples particularly their idea of property rights. It can only do this by being very simplistic and pretending their is something natural about it.
For instance they start with the idea of self-ownership and somehow end up with the idea that a sticky, rightwing version of lockean property rights are natural for all contexts and that adherence to these rules solves all human political issues. Although they tend to conveniently forget that corporate personhood and ownership and such are at odds with lockean property rights.
So you end up with the simplitistic and unrealistic dogma of always advising strict adherence to these dubious axioms.
Not that I don't like American style libertarians, I'm influenced, admire and read them as I do all libertarians, they are just some of the theoretically weakest libertarians and decentralists in my opinion. And they are because they aim for a few rules which can easily and coherently be used to solve all humans political, economic and social affairs and these simply don't exist.
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I think you've just created a huge straw man.
I have yet to come across a single libertarian that claims his position is a panacea and will create some kind of golden utopia.
As for Locke, in another thread you said that you were fed up of people making up the opinion of the dead for them. It seems you might be doing that just here. The Lockean proviso is extremely well defined in his Two Treatises on Government. As for Nozick's revision of it, it keeps true to the original proviso, whilst removing the problems (i.e. that someone could own the whole sea and that the first appropriation would in unjust). I don't see how this is a rightwing definition of the Lockean proviso since the conclusion that Locke wanted was exactly the same - just the way he got there was problematic.