The Libertarian Internet

There’s a principle we keep getting reminded of lately: if the government wants to implement something beyond the proper role of government, not only will government fail to achieve the stated goals; it will likely do exactly opposite of the stated goal.

Today’s example is “Net Neutrality,” with the purpose of assuring a free and fair internet.

by A. F. Branco, November 17, 2014

The background for this relates to a rural Midwest area where only one internet provider, Comcast, was available. And they were slowing the speed at which downloads could occur for video streaming site Netflix.

If free enterprise were allowed to solve the problems, this would be solved in some combination of alternatives entering the marketplace, or costs going up for a service that takes up so much bandwidth, probably passed along to consumers. Then, if consumers weren’t satisfied, competition would lead to more alternatives, greater innovation, and lower prices. Especially in internet technology that has been the rule. In fact, that’s how the market handled this singular case.

But government sees an area where it has very little control, and therefore by definition would like more power, and offers “help” as a way to get it. Government will step in and make things more “fair”—so that the Comcast/Netflix difficulty never happens again. It will solve this tiny, localized, already-dealt-with problem by imposing restrictions, rules, and controls—maybe even a government kill switch for the entire internet—so we can feel assured, with government bureaucrats at the helm of the world’s communications network. Who thinks that sounds like a good solution? Raise your hands.

A few large companies, mainly related to cable communications, are in favor. So that they can block out competition and control the market. It’s not about better service for you.

While looking for the best way to explain why you should call your representative and express your extreme disapproval for the creation of a new “department of the internet,” I came across Stu Burguire’s entertaining and thorough version. Stu is an associate of Glenn Beck, and has his own TV show on TheBlaze.com on Saturdays. Blaze blogger Wilson summarized Stu’s points:

• Net neutrality will not help your internet experience.
• The government will not make the internet better.
• Companies won’t be ruining your internet experience anyway.
• The arguments in favor of net neutrality ignore the advancements in technology that would solve the supposed problems being addressed by net neutrality.
• There is no compelling reason for the government to get involved.
• The internet is absolutely not a human right.
• The truth about the Comcast/Netflix battle that is used as the evidence to support net neutrality, proves the exact opposite of what net neutrality supporters argue.
• But, other than that, net neutrality is awesome!

Except, don’t take that last one seriously; there very well could be even more non-awesome things about it.

Rather than my explaining further, I’ll send you to watch Stu’s 7 ½-minute video (unable to embed, but you can watch it here), and afterward I’ll add a few comments from the Spherical Model perspective.

OK, assuming you enjoyed that...

My favorite point is that this government, which couldn’t get one single website up and running is asking you to trust the elite government experts with control of the entire “interweb.” Do they have a sense of irony, or what?

The internet is a rather large microcosm for examining the world of the libertarian. This is what the country would be like with libertarian government. New technology. Stuff getting lower cost and more widely available all the time. Freedom to do business or say pretty much whatever you want. Freedom to connect with whoever you want, assuming willingness of the receiver. Things keep getting better, faster, and cheaper. Yay!

Of course there’s some bad along with the good. Pornography. Lies. Theft. Fraud. All things that are already illegal in the non-virtual world for good reason. Yet there they are. And sometimes we’re bombarded with them—images we don’t want to have to unsee. Not to mention pop-up ads interrupting our experience.

In other words, in the libertarian world there are some bad things sharing the same neighborhood with the good. And the libertarian doesn’t bring in officials; the libertarian pulls out his own shotgun, or shrugs it off with a live-and-let-live approach.

I’m not quite a libertarian. But then, the internet isn’t quite a lawless anarchy either.

Anything that is already illegal is also illegal on the internet, so you report it to the police (or whichever appropriate authority for your issue). Prosecutions happen all the time, but the prosecution of such crimes is somewhat below 100% successful response. (Also true for petty theft or home invasion.) But technology has already been developed in response to the market—people who don’t want the filth bombardment can use filters to keep certain sites or types of images from being allowed onto their devices. Same for pop-up ads—just adjust your settings. As for those emails from some guy in Nigeria needing money, or your good friends on a trip to Europe and suddenly in need of funds (even though you know they’re in town, plus they’re not close enough friends for you to be their emergency contact)—you block those as junk mail, and delete without opening any that get through.

If you’re defrauded in a purchase (and you’ve done due diligence by being careful who you’re dealing with and how they handle your personal and financial information), then you have some recourse through your credit card company, as well as the police.

We need constant vigilance. But we do a better job when it’s personal to us than a distant uninvolved bureaucrat would do.

The libertarian-like internet world can be understood on the Spherical Model. The freedom and level of interest are personal, where appropriate. And the free enterprise shows how prosperous such a world can be without some controlling authority limiting the market. The good is what you get in the northern hemisphere of the model (and arguably the western local control quadrant—although appropriate level is necessary for anywhere in the northern hemisphere). But the bad is what you get in the southern hemisphere, southwest quadrant.

Almost all of the bad has to do with civilization issues. Pornography is savage. Fraud is savage. Theft is savage. Anything else is a result of people choosing to do ugly harmful things, for money or just for fun.

I’m in favor of allowing everyone to limit the savagery in their lives. And better law enforcement would be appreciated. Live-and-let-live won’t do when drug deals are taking place in the schoolyard down the street (been there, seen that) or when the worst filth is aimed toward family members in my home.

In an optimistic civilized world, those wanting to protect themselves from pornography would so greatly eclipse the willing consumers that the market would cause that plague to disappear. Until that happens, though, we do need personal, constant vigilance—combined with better technology as more of us show the demand for protecting ourselves in our online world.

Of course we need government for legal protections—as we do now. What we absolutely do not need is another bureaucracy tasked with deciding who gets what service, at what cost, limiting innovation and progress. We don’t need some bureaucracy deciding what can and cannot be said—for example, on this website. Is it fair that I only express my own opinion instead of the opposing viewpoint? What if the government decides I’m not fair? Or decides I’m so wrong that such ideas should not be expressed?

The internet isn’t broken. Government’s offer to “fix” it is a thinly veiled grab for control over a thus-far free world.

Libertarians on the Sphere

I’ve noticed something of a name-calling rift recently between people who are really pretty close to agreement: general conservatives and libertarians. It seems more worthwhile to work on repair there than on the huge chasm between conservatives and tyrannists (liberals/progressives/statists).

Let’s start with definitions, because that might provide some stitches to the wound right there.

·        Conservatives believe in conserving and protecting the natural God-given rights, and believe the US Constitution, as written and understood at the time of the founding, is well-suited to provide those protections.

·        Conservatives believe the person best suited to deciding how wealth should be spent is the person who earned it. While there will be inevitable inequities and poor, free-choice charity is better than statist coercion to see to people’s needs. (I think this is also a pretty good statement of libertarian belief.)

·        Conservatives believe in supporting the values and institutions that have led to civilization in the past, and are necessary for civilization: a religious people (because God granted the rights we enjoy), who live basic rules of decency, such as the Ten Commandments, in order to live in harmony with others; and support of strong traditional families (married mother and father raising their own children) so that the necessary values of civilization will be passed from one generation to the next. 

·        Libertarians believe that all decisions about how a life should be lived should be decided by the individual, as long as the person’s behavior doesn’t interfere with or harm others.

I should be able to come up with more that this single principle for libertarianism, but, as often happens, it’s difficult from the outside. I am a conservative. While I enjoy conversations with libertarians and find a great deal of common ground, I don’t find their single principle philosophy sufficient.

A couple of days ago I read a long piece (linked at The Imaginative Conservative, by Nathan Schlueter, associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College) listing several basic libertarian statements, and then carefully debunking them from the conservative position. It is worth reading. Here are a few of the statements it deals with:

·        Only individuals exist; therefore there is no such thing as a “common good.”

·        The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

·        Virtue cannot be coerced; therefore government should not legislate morality.

·        The only alternative to libertarianism is totalitarianism.

I like the response to the question of the purpose of law, because all law identifies what society views as appropriate or not:

The law, both by prohibition and by silence, is a powerful signal of acceptable behavior, and thus a powerful influence on character. When the behavior in question involves moral norms that are consequential for the rest of society, it is a proper object of law.

You can’t have civilization, which requires strongly supporting the family, if you have no way of disapproving of sex for sale, for example. You can’t protect personal freedom if you have no way of disapproving of the sale of mind-altering addictive drugs, which result in loss of personal choice and lead to harm of the individual and often to a fair amount of collateral damage.

Back in May 2011 I wrote about why I’m not quite a libertarian. And I described it in relation to the Spherical Model. Libertarians often coincide with conservatives, because it is so often the case that the appropriate level of interest is the most local: individual and family. (Libertarians might or might not include family as qualifying in their philosophy.) So often the problems with government and society are caused by usurpation by an entity too far removed from the most local interest.

But it’s the assumption that the dichotomy is between libertarianism and totalitarianism that causes problems. It shows that libertarians, even when their behavior and outcome put them in the freedom zone, get there sort of accidentally. Like tyrannists, they can only visualize the southern hemisphere. They don’t even know that there’s a freedom zone up there in the northern hemisphere.

I haven’t shown this visually on the sphere before, so I’m giving that a try today with my whiteboard (where is a computer graphic designer when you need one?) The drawing is the basic Spherical Model. Southward is toward tyranny, controlled economy, and savagery; northward is toward freedom, free enterprise, and civilization. North is good; south is bad. But longitude depends on the appropriate level of interest. The range is from individual/family (most local) on the most westward side of the globe, moving (either left or right) to the other side of the sphere with world interests as the far eastward extreme (not visible on this diagram, because we can only see a hemisphere at a time). The range spreads out from individual/family, to community, to county or area, to state or province, to nation, to continent or region, to world.

In principle, according to the Spherical Model, the most local interest that can handle an issue should handle it. Since this often means individual and family, there’s a natural agreement with libertarians. Libertarians, philosophically (but not practically, if you actually talk it out) don’t believe in the value of any affiliation beyond the individual. So they don’t really value community, state, or national governments—even though they do concede that there needs to be law to protect people from those who would do them harm.

In the diagram, there’s a narrow range (in red) at or around the individual longitude line, going all the way from the north pole to the south. In the northern hemisphere, conservatives spend a lot of time in that same zone, pulling always more local, since there has been so much usurpation by less local entities. But for conservatives, the goal is to remain upward in the freedom/free-enterprise/civilization zone—whether or not that requires only family control, or whether the state or nation is the most appropriate placement (for border security, for example). While it’s hard to come up with interests beyond the purview of the nation, and even more unlikely to see the need for an international entity with power beyond suggestion, conservatives do embrace the entire freedom zone.

Libertarians, meanwhile, limit their vision to that long, narrow strip of the sphere, and only enjoy true freedom, prosperity, and civilization when they happen to coincide with conservatives on specific issues—often the economic issues. But it tends to be on the issues of civilization where the rift appears. They may be right that people can’t be coerced to be virtuous, but the law does serve the purpose of providing expectations, so even the naturally unvirtuous have an incentive to behave virtuously. Then the virtuous-by-choice are not forced to live in—and accept as normal—an uncivilized society.

The debate is valuable. Many conservatives don’t well articulate the principles of conservatism either, or even recognize the underlying philosophy. It strengthens us all to be able to talk through our views, and find the areas of agreement—and maybe persuade libertarian individuals to add conservative principles to their too-limited worldview. With a lot of well-meaning, thinking people who value freedom, we can gain strength together.

Why I'm Not Quite a Libertarian

If I were going to consider living in a government-free society, being who I am and still craving civilization, I would have to choose as cohabitants people who can govern themselves, people who choose to be good and honest, to work hard and be productive, to be kind and forgiving and respectful.

I wouldn’t choose people who claim to be seeking liberty by claiming a right to self-indulgence. So, while I have some libertarian leanings, especially in economics, I’m very much anti-libertine. Every time the libertarians insist on freedom to freely trade and use mind-altering drugs, mostly liberty-taking addictive drugs, I separate myself from them. Similarly when they announce their support of prostitution, which is about as close to slavery as we see in today’s society. You can’t get civilization going that route.

If I’m going to live in a neighborhood with no police and no judiciary, I want to know I’m with people who would never give me need for the police or judges. I want to know my neighbors keep their word and keep their contracts, or I’m not willing to give up some kind of enforcement mechanism for when they break faith with me.

Until I can somehow choose the perfect citizenry for such an experiment, I’m for limited government, but I’m not for no government.

Looking at it on the Spherical Model, it’s like this: Civilization, up in the northern hemisphere and especially above the 45^th parallel, requires certain behaviors that come from a spiritual perspective. The more the society voluntarily lives the requirements for civilization, the less government enforcement is needed. So, if we start by persuading people toward civilization, there is less chaos, so it’s easier to raise the political and economic spheres into their respective northern hemispheres. Government is limited to essential protections for life, liberty, and property. Markets are free from unnecessary imposed controls (anything beyond basic protection of property rights is arguably unnecessary).

If you work on political and economic spheres first (and there’s plenty to do—or rather undo—with those right now), you struggle against those who are worried about safety and/or economic chaos. So, work on the Civilization Sphere first, and the others are then more likely to follow.