The philosophy of liberty explained

I don’t see how a sinking boat fits the analogy. The Chinese workers are not in a sinking boat. They’re just very poor, and the bucket-providers are offering an option. It’s not a great option, but the workers can decide for themselves which is better. If the capitalists in Taiwan are able to impose and maintain a parasitic relationship on their workers in the PRC, then there is a power relationship at play quite outside simple business.

Japan, Korea, Singapore did not succeed in spite of us only looking out for our own interests, but because they were able to build up their own. China’s huge and so it will take longer. Haiti’s failure is not because of external selfishness either. To keep the point narrow: One entity looking out for its own interests does not always lead to crippling another, as was said above. It can, if the more powerful entity thinks its interests are served by suppressing another, and there is no shortage of examples among everything from socialist states to banks, but it does not necessarily follow; and that we benefit from low wages there or there or there (the economics always shifting) is not a bad thing. It is part of the process of building up the 3rd World.

Ian,
Big evil corporations bringing factories to Southeast Asia has done more to lift people out of poverty than foreign aid ever could. Libertarianism isn’t about selfishness; it’s essentially about minimizing government force. Plenty of libertarians are generous with their money. Liberals are generous with other people’s money.

Government meddling in the financial industry (implicit guarantees of Fannie and Freddie, encouraging mortgage lenders to make risky loans, the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low, etc.) caused or at least greatly exacerbated the current financial shitstorm.

The Post Office loses billions every year. Many of our public schools are laughably bad. Our government decides we should fight stupid, wasteful wars. It imprisons people for smoking pot.

Let’s stop acting like the government is this benevolent force that wants what’s best for us. As the great HL Mencken said, “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

I’m not sure I agree with the first line (“If we always look out for number 1, everyone would be better off”) as having any basis in the video – which from a philosophical point of view is very close to right on target – and seems more an interpretation based on someone reading Atlas Shrugged, which I see from the comments several people are currently doing.

The video, I feel, gets the philosophy of liberty correct: you are responsible for your own life, no one else can tell you what to do, etc. It does not touch upon altrusim or community, but neither are those involved with liberty; bringing those elements into society makes it Socialist. In true liberty, it is the individual’s freedom that is most important. In socialism, it is that of the society at large; in communism, it is the world community. In America, we chose (in 1776) to go with liberty. Russia in 1917 chose communism. Sweden and many of the northern European countries have decided on socialism, though note that it is not the Marxist form of socialism for which the word often gets confused.

The arguments brought into the film’s discussion are taking elements that are not addressed in the film, because they are irrelevant to the concept of liberty as a governing philosophy and thus not mentioned in the film. The philosophy of liberty (conceptually now, not the film) does not account for the global economy or what it means to buy cheap goods made in China because neither of those have anything to do with the issue itself, which is basically the concept that a free society is comprised of different people, all of whom are entitled to control of their own lives: that’s it.

Is this philosophy lacking, as Helen Lindsay suggests? Perhaps, but at the time of the Declaration of Independence, the issue was not globalization or corporate crime; the issue was, does the government (in this case that of the British royalty) have the right to tell people what to do with their daily lives? The Americans’ answer was No, it does not, and sought to create a society in which free men would determine their own path. This was a radically different approach than that of any other major powers in the late 18th century, and so popular that France in 1789 decided that they too should take that path.

Injecting arguments about “looking out for number one” and “people in developing nations” is more or less missing the point of the video, which was simply to outline – quite concisely, I think – the basic tenets that have to do with what Liberty means. After all, the word appears on the coinage of some of the world’s largest nations (unsurprisingly, China and Russia do not use the word on their coins, whereas the United States does, and France did before the adoption of the Euro), and as we debate civil liberties in America after the invention of the War of Terror, this is indeed an important subject in the West.

It may seem useful to question whether liberty is relevant in a global economy or whether it applies to emerging nations, but it misses the entire point of the video.