You are being myopic. If you wish to acknowledge the scope of the PCs agenda, then you need to acknowledge the history of economic ideas.

In his initial blogpost, Sukrit said:

[I]t’s not widely recognized that the Productivity Commission’s agenda of “microeconomic reform” and “deregulation” is a product of intellectual contributions by the libertarian greats — not by conservatives.

There’s a good reason for that: the PC utilises an analytical framework that draws strongly (though not solely) on the sub-discipline of public economics, and that encapsulates a broad conception of market failure informed by sociological, psychological and other research (not just by economic theory), the upshot being that it often advocates government intervention. As such, the PC is not limited by the intellectual constraints of Libertarian philosophy. Indeed, Libertarianism doesn’t even rate a mention in the Commission’s own 30 year history, published a few years ago, and I know of only one mention of Libertarianism in a PC report – on page 10.23 of its 1999 Gambling report – a report that recommended significant government intervention, not only to protect people from others but also to protect them from themselves!

Of course, it is true that, in many instances, the PC’s findings and recommendations would coincide with the views of Libertarians, but, equally, its recommendations would at other times coincide with the views of social democrats.

To be fair, the PC’s understanding of the extent of government failure might also have been informed by the jottings of great scholars past, who happenned to be Libertarian – although one suspects that its extensive inquiries into the “workings” of government programs would have provided more than enough evidence in that respect.

The key point, however, is that methinks Sukrit’s claim that the PC has a deregulation agenda that is the product of the Libertarian greats is a rather long bow.

But that moral aspect is what I was getting at: not the tactical use of voting within a system that exists, but your assertion that it would be OK to force freedom on people who didn’t want it if only you could get a “democratic” mandate for it from the rest. Your earlier comment wasn’t about the tactics, you raised that just now.

If we only talk tactics, there are deeper strategic problems. One is that people who play the game get captured, e.g. Democrats trying to keep the bastards honest make compromises that accumulate until they too become what they once opposed. Another is that trying the tactics and failing lends actually support to the system. Even among Libertarians, opinion is divided about using these tactics because of these issues. Me, I think the best bet is the one the Irish used in the long 19th century, of having a political arm participating in the system but then using parliamentary tricks to jam everything up (join and sabotage), with a separate wing working outside the system. In the Irish case, that meant violence, but it could equally well be doing things like what Kevin Carson calls “building the new within the shell of the old”. He has in mind building a new society to take over, I think more in terms of having it ready both to transmit the ideas and to have an alternative ready to move promptly as, when and if the old order either collapses or fades away. In any case, merely having a poltical wing to keep the bastards occupied runs less risk of capture and more realistic objectives than having a whole structure trying to do stuff.

But to clarify, I was trying to point out that you – or he, or they, or whoever – cannot “give” freedom but can only let people alone. For them to become free is not guaranteed, since unless they exercised their freedom appropriately, and had the resources for it, they would perish or just fall into someone else’s clutches. However, the sort of “giving” you were describing goes further and does worse, because it isn’t a negative withdrawal of constraints but a positive intervention – and that’s not freedom, ipso facto.

And if you don’t see that there is both fraud and force in your last sentence, you have already become one of those who sees no moral problem in doing things once there is a vote behind it – the idea that vote makes right.

Good point by the way.

I don’t think thats too much to ask.