Should-Read: John Holbo was surely not the first or the only but is undoubtedly the wittiest person to point out that, from a certain point of view, feudalism is libertarianism: no over mighty states, only voluntary contracts everywhere. The late-Roman peasant voluntarily ensuring himself, his family, and his descendants to the local big man in the hope of getting protection from the marauding Huns is perfectly free, in a sense. They have entered into contracts that both sides find mutually advantageous. They are not oppressed by any over-mighty state: John Holbo (2010): Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership: "Jacob Levy has earnestly maintained in comments that it is unfair to judge libertarianism by the standard of Bryan Caplan’s attempts to turn the Gilded Age into a Golden Age of ladyfreedom...
...What is Caplan really? I dunno.... Tthe thick/thin libertarian distinction, even though it can be fuzzy, in practice, marks out two fundamentally distinct kinds of political philosophy, based on totally different principles. This gets disguised because there is considerable overlapping consensus at higher levels; and the thin side, in particular, tends to be systematically confused about where it is coming from....
Just as the question of who owns which house or car is hardly essential to the general idea of private property ownership, so the question of who owns which person ought to be separable from the general idea of libertarianism... that there are no rights but property rights.... The response to this would surely run, rather angrily, as follows. Narveson: “The idea of libertarianism is to maximize individual freedom by accounting each person’s person as that person’s own property”....
That’s a very funny sentence.... Compare....
The idea is to maximize individual freedom by a punch on the nose.
Ok, a bit more seriously:
The idea is to maximize individual freedom by providing a guaranteed minimum income and generous social welfare programs from cradle to crave.
And a bit more simply:
The idea is to maximize individual freedom....
To maximize freedom by punching noses, I guess you would study the ways of the Batman, or something. What is far from obvious, obviously, is that... equates to maximizing individual freedom. Period. And the same goes for maximizing individual freedom by accounting everyone their own property....
To review.... If everyone is a perfect slave, infringements of liberty are reduced to zero, by definition. OK, fine. [But] we mean the ordinary sort of freedom. The sort we actually want. Fine, but now why stop at giving people themselves, and nothing else? This might get us only to Jim Crow, or to the lot of women in the 19th Century.... If the goal really is to optimize the supply of liberty, and make sure everyone has essential access to that basically equal supply... that you actually will do this just by giving everyone self-ownership, and letting the market take it’s course, is empirically implausible.... It just isn’t that hard to end Jim Crow without accidentally enslaving the white people, as an unintended consequence. So if ‘society is playing the tyrant’, in Mills’ sense, and you–a libertarian–don’t feel obliged to do anything about it, you are giving up on the ideal of freedom, except in this highly technical sense that really doesn’t have much appeal...
