In the face of that, I would say that I agree more people should have front yard gardens, so the thrust of the conclusion seems ok. But also: 1) "Everyone" seems ok if we acknowledge it's hyperbole, but for sure not literally everyone. 2) Each sentence before the conclusion is a weird mix of stuff that is right and wrong, and the transitions make no sense, and put together as a whole it isn't any better. 3) So, if you are asking what I think of the argument, then the answer I am going to tell you "it's crap."
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"But what about the state dependencies part?", you ask. Which is good, because I still assert that is the much more interesting thing to discuss.
You claim that libertarianism is "at odds with reality" because human activity has path dependence and historicity. I would say that libertarianism is not at odds with that reality, it is at peace with it. Let's go with a concrete example - concrete for me, at least, because I dealt with directly for about 6 years.
- Around 150 years ago a bunch of young adult's great-great-great-great grandparents decided to move from more rural parts of Appliacia to Altoona Pennsylvania, because it was a thriving train town and they didn't want to "waste their lives" milking goats like their parents had (while others stayed and took over the goat farms).
- For 3 or 4 generations the families were solidly middle class laborers in the locomotive industry, and hardly anyone left Altoona (but some did).
- By the 1930's the train jobs had finally dried up for good, and the modest fortunes fell (unless key family members had shifted to other jobs already).
- Nevertheless, the families decided to stay in Altoona (except the ones that didn't).
- Let's say that your father ended up a trucker driver, bossed around by a guy with a Penn State business degree. In fact, every one of your father's friends didn't have a degree, and spent most of their lives in a job where they were bossed around by someone who had a degree and made at least double what the workers made. So your dad and all of his friends told you that for sure you were going to college, because that was the golden ticket.
- Most (most) of your friends were told the same thing, and most (most) who were told that did go to college.
- Of the friends that headed that advice, most (most) ended up at the glorious Penn State Altoona, because you grew up hearing what a great college it was, and you could save money by living at home while you go there (i.e., by historic accident, it is the close). And you and your friends picked a wide variety of degrees, influenced by all sorts of path dependencies. And, of course, you can graduate with good grades from Penn State Altoona without really learning much, so for the vast majority of students you can't even make an "education for education's sake" argument (although a small number in every graduating class did manage to get a good education).
- And when you graduated you found out that the local area generally doesn't have many jobs (something that would have been obvious at any time in your life had you chosen to look, but you didn't). Worse, even the few jobs that are around aren't paying top dollar for theater or psychology majors. And even for your two friends who picked business and engineering, respectively, while there are some prospects, they aren't nearly as glorious as your parents expected them to be, because unlike when your parents were kids, the area is now flooded with people who have 4-year college degrees.
- And now you and your parents are $120K in debt (because they co-signed), and you need to decide whether to leave the Altoona region, where you can draw upon the support that exists by the historicity of 7 generations of your extended family staying put, and which you have never been more than 50 miles from in your whole life, in order to gamble for a better job and life elsewhere, or whether to stay in Altoona and take a job you could have had straight out of high school and be in crippling debt for your entire "young adult" life.
- And 70% of the kids from your elementary school are in basically the same situation, which is 60% of the grandkids of the last prosperous generation of city residents, which is 40% of the great-great-great-great grand kids of those who moved to Altoona in the 1880s.
- And out of all the choices that exist across all people in the country, by the time you are in your 30s, only 0.001% of those choices are available to you.
- And a decent chunk of the constraints on your choices were predictable based on your great-great-great-great grandfather's decision to leave the goat farm for Altoona.
There is
nothing about any of the details in that example that is "at odds" with libertarianism. Because nothing about that is at odds with libertarianism, nothing about it is evidence that libertarianism is "false". We can only start to touch upon libertarianism when we try to figure out what to do about the bad situation those people find themselves in. Generally speaking, libertarianism is the position that the dilemma described is not a problem the government (particularly not the federal government) should be working to solve. It isn't kids starving to death because their families are destitute, it isn't fascism threatening to take over Europe, it is a large number of young adults finding themselves in a frustrating situation due to path-dependencies, historicity, and their own choices.
But we COULD try to fix it using federal intervention I suppose. What kind of policies could we have put in place to provide more options? If I was thinking about policies that had a serious chance of being effective, they would be things like this:
- We could have made your college free. That would relieve you of the crippling debt, but also make college attendance even easier such that even more people in the area who had a degree in hand would be doing jobs they didn't need degrees for (with the associated personal frustration, and the associated family strife because their truck-driver parents don't understand how that is possible). It also wouldn't fix the problem that most of your friends got through college not knowing much more than they did out of high school. But the lack of debt would be better, in some important sense, for you.
- We could federally mandate that colleges be more rigorous (by making more hard-core use of the existing college-accreditation system). If we did that, several of your currently "college educated" friends wouldn't have gotten in, and several of those who got in wouldn't have graduated, but also a greater number of your friends would have stepped up to the challenge and gained from the experience, at least education-wise. Their lack of job prospects would remain the same (unless they were willing to leave the area).
- We could have required an agreement that you would leave the area in pursuit of work, as a condition for college attendance.
- If the presence of family support is really as crucial as it seems, we could pass a rule that mandates that a minimum of 50% of each generation move away from the Altoona region, so your support network would be spread out more.
- We could do none of that and just go the Nick-Thompson route of randomizing babies at birth throughout the nation. Under that plan we would still have the same number of people facing the exact same constraints, but it would be the result of someone else's great-great-great-great grandfather's decision. I'm not sure how that helps anything, but several people on FRIAM seems to think it does.
- We could use federal funds to ensure that no industries fail, in which case Altoona could still have a thriving coal-locomotive-repair industry, providing the same jobs the great-great-great-great grandparents were happy to have.
- We could go the Soviet Russia route of guaranteeing all people (except the ruling oligarchs) get the same pay no matter what they do.
- We could also limit people's choices of degrees to things wise members of a federal committee deem useful, and then have a wise bureaucratic system that informs people which job they will be doing post-graduation, no matter where in the country the job is or who they would be working for. And we could design such a system to maximize the income-based opportunities available to people on average.
Are any of those the type of federal regulation you are thinking of? If not, what government-run programs would you suggest we implement in order to fix this very real predicament faced by a large number of 5th, 6th, and 7th generation Altoonans?
Out of all of those, I would be most in favor of stepping up the college accreditation rigour. Un-accredited colleges could still exist, but would have to make that reality clear in their promotional material, and they wouldn't be eligible for federally-backed student loans.
Eric C