Trying to Talk about Politics Re: The Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ

[Karl]

Not being a current libertarian, it is hard to translate all of life's
flows into market-based terms of political argument.  This seems to make it
hard to communicate with libertarians on politics, who appear to have the
same assumptions with regard to what is good as most people would, but
different conclusions.

> there may be other arguments for the State
that do not rely on political authority, namely consequentialist arguments

The term "consequentialist" appears to be used repeatedly without its
meaning introduced.

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/consequentialism

> Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges whether or not
something is right by what its consequences are. For instance, most people
would agree that lying is wrong. But if telling a lie would help save a
person’s life, consequentialism says it’s the right thing to do.

This is confusing to me because I see everyone as making consequentialist
decisions based on expected probabilities.  This seems to be the only way a
living being forms decisions.  Why give it a word?  People's moral
judgement and trust of you, how behaviors spread from you, how culture acts
if everyone adopts a behavior, and how you feel in the future, are other
forms of consequence.

It reads as if "consequentialism" is used to describe a focus on some clear
results, at the expense of results that people might find harder to
describe: or some results that somebody values, at the expense of some
results that they would like to ignore.

> Other libertarians have
sought to  provide a more consequentialist justification, by showing
how private property replaces the zero- (or negative-) sum
transactions of the commons with the positive-sum  transactions of a
market economy.

I don't know what is being described here.  Why would a commons ever have a
non-positive sum of anything?  What thing are we summing that this is
possible?

Okay, I websearched and found "tragedy of the commons" which is a claim
that shared resources exhaust if everybody takes from them.  _This never
continues because everybody who does it eventually dies_.  That is why
biological life has not breathed all the oxygen in the atmosphere away, or
eaten all the plants up, already.

If you are attacking a common resource, you are not going to succeed unless
you prevent everybody else from learning about the issue and acting on it.

Thoughts?  How is a market economy more "positive sum" than people
contributing to shared resources simply because they all need them?
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