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John Charity Spring posted:There are essays on Mises.org extolling the successes of Somalia after the collapse of the state and saying that it's now thriving compared to its state-led status in previous decades. I've always found this particular one funny, since the successful parts of Somalia are the ones that have been under a new state for the longest time, while the areas that have been outside a state's power for the longest time continue to be the worst off.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:53
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Nintendo Kid posted:I've always found this particular one funny, since the successful parts of Somalia are the ones that have been under a new state for the longest time, while the areas that have been outside a state's power for the longest time continue to be the worst off. I think if someone came to me introducing a hip new political/economic theory, and the shining star example they trot out is Somalia, I'd probably have an expression similar to  and slowly back away.
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Aug 23, 2014 01:06
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Fansy fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Aug 24, 2014 05:16
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I thought that was a sick parody at first. Couldn't watch it after about the third "don't pay taxes." Taking advantage of a charitable cause like that is pretty messed up.
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Aug 24, 2014 05:24
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Buried alive posted:Couldn't watch it after about the third "don't pay taxes." It worked for Irwin Schiff! 
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Aug 24, 2014 14:21
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xposted from images thread. (Just a reminder that there really is no such thing as "anarcho-capitalism", as the term contradicts itself on first principles. Thats all!)
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Aug 25, 2014 13:19
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I feel bad for not knowing any of those left-anarchists 
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Aug 25, 2014 13:30
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First Bass posted:I feel bad for not knowing any of those left-anarchists Its the only sort there is! (Well I guess you have post-left anarchism, which is pretty much confusing post-structuralists who've decided the left is capitals unwilling apprentice and the only way to finally smash capitalism is to abandon the left altogether and run around in the forest catching food with your mouth)
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Aug 25, 2014 13:43
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duck monster posted:xposted from images thread. Trotsky more authoritarian than Lenin? Debs a straight up centrist?
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Aug 25, 2014 15:16
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GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:Trotsky more authoritarian than Lenin? Debs a straight up centrist? And Hitler is just a hair's breadth more authoritarian than Reagan.
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Aug 25, 2014 17:18
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GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:Trotsky more authoritarian than Lenin? Debs a straight up centrist? Those graphs are always bullshit. 
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Aug 25, 2014 17:29
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I love how on that graph Jefferson, a literal slave owner, is less authoritarian than the current US President. As much as the NSA sucks I'm not sure it makes you more authoritarian than somebody who literally owned other human beings as personal property.
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Aug 25, 2014 20:37
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I'm not sure slavery has a lot to do with the scale of authoritarianism. I always saw it as a mass compulsion, like Jefferson knew what he was doing was wrong, but oh my I just ran the numbers on my nail factory staffed with nine-year-olds. Mmm Sally, that minx is being 15 in front of me again.
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Aug 25, 2014 21:01
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This graph is really stupid generally because "authoritarian" isn't a person, it's a political framework. Individual people can have certain effects on the frameworks they lead, but they're usually not a useful stand-in for them. Then again, this is usually promoted by libertarians, with which such subtlety and nuance is like pearls before MRA pigs.
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Aug 25, 2014 21:28
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Buried alive posted:I thought that was a sick parody at first. Couldn't watch it after about the third "don't pay taxes." Taking advantage of a charitable cause like that is pretty messed up. "Study Austrian Economics" - the surest way to fight against the established order! Love how the guy emphasises each word by throwing his body into a series of spasms - albeit not all movement is likely voluntary.
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Aug 25, 2014 23:26
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So I was watching a debate between Robert Reich, Mark Zandi vs. Art Laffer and Glen Hubbard, and goddamn, Art Laffer has to be one of the worst debaters I've ever seen. He spent the entire time making the most simplistic, childlike arguments for tax cuts (low tax rates = more revenue; low taxes = more job creators!, etc). The guy's supposed to be an economist, but I've seen Glenn Beck make more substantial defenses for SSE than this dude did. Considering this is the guy who arguably created the Republican Party of today when it comes to economics, you would think he'd do a little better job when it comes to bullshitting at the very least.
Mr Interweb fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 02:20
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Mr Interweb posted:So I was watching a debate between Robert Reich, Mark Zandi vs. Art Laffer and Glen Hubbard, and goddamn, Art Laffer has to be one of the worst debaters I've ever seen. He spent the entire time making the most simplistic, childlike arguments for tax cuts (low tax rates = more revenue; low taxes = more job creators!, etc). The guy's supposed to be an economist, but I've seen Glenn Beck make more substantial defenses for SSE than this dude did. Considering this is the guy who arguably created the Republican Party of today when it comes to economics, you would think he'd do a little better job when it comes to bullshitting at the very least. Why would you think that?
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Aug 26, 2014 02:36
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Why would you think that? Because even many dipshit right-wing radio hosts have provided a bit more effort into their arguments than Laffer did here.
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Aug 26, 2014 02:38
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Art Laffer, more like Art Laffo
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Aug 26, 2014 03:06
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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Mr Interweb posted:So I was watching a debate between Robert Reich, Mark Zandi vs. Art Laffer and Glen Hubbard, and goddamn, Art Laffer has to be one of the worst debaters I've ever seen. He spent the entire time making the most simplistic, childlike arguments for tax cuts (low tax rates = more revenue; low taxes = more job creators!, etc). The guy's supposed to be an economist, but I've seen Glenn Beck make more substantial defenses for SSE than this dude did. Considering this is the guy who arguably created the Republican Party of today when it comes to economics, you would think he'd do a little better job when it comes to bullshitting at the very least. I know the exact debate you're talking about, and yeah, sometimes you just want to punch him in the head for his bullshit arguments. I mean it isn't surprising considering he is the architect of the 'laffer curve' when used in modern political discussion. The man doesn't know a goddamned thing and its honestly painful to listen to him talk and talk despite being so utterly wrong. Edit: While I'm at it, I'll link both to the debate and to this wonderful PBS piece with Richard Epstien. Marvel as he drops some of the most absurd and disgusting turds: quote:PAUL SOLMAN: Don’t you have to pay people, workers enough so that there will be enough aggregate demand so that they can buy what other people are producing? quote:RICHARD EPSTEIN: It turns out functions that most people don’t understand, namely, how you maintain continuous liquidity in a complicated economy, is, in fact, such a difficult task that we pay people a great deal of money to become middlemen. Caros fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 03:19
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It's a lot easier to understand Libertarians once you realize that like most political people, they're cool as long as the rules don't apply to them. None of these guys ever think they'll be the schlub making 2 cents an hour. Oh no! They'll demand and bargain for more pay than that. They'll be living the good life that the "statist" society gives them, but with even more stuff because they won't have to pay taxes.
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Aug 26, 2014 03:48
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There was an LF thread where a goon went to see Art Laffer speak at his college. The speech was about what you'd think.
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Aug 26, 2014 07:20
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This:quote:RICHARD EPSTEIN: The question, of course, is how you get to aggregate demand. I want people to be able to take jobs at 2 cents an hour if that is what it takes so that a year from now they can take $12 an hour. illustrates the problem with Libertarian economics very clearly. He's correctly saying that you get more from a job than wages. And he's correctly saying that a low-wage job can lead to a high-wage job. So he's smugly confident that he has demonstrated that libertarian economics works. But what the hell is the person working that job supposed to eat for a year? Where will he live? How will he get to his 2-cent job? Epstein's answer about social skills and so forth doesn't really answer the question he was asked; you can't eat a network. You can't live in a recommendation. Connections can get you to work, if you're lucky, but every single day? It's always clear from the poo poo libertarians say that not only do they never expect to be poor, but they have literally no idea what it's like to be poor. They simply cannot imagine a situation where you're prioritizing bills based on what you need to make it to the next paycheck, and letting anything not directly involved with your day-to-day survival slide. 'You'll get a better job in a year' doesn't really help when you'll be homeless (at best) or dead (at worst) in a year. And speaking as someone who's both been that poor, and who's had 10 years of experience, recommendations, connections and network and who *still* spent two years trying to find a job in my field, only to give up and toss all that aside for a job outside my field because I needed to feed my kids... it's really goddamn hard to feel anything but seething hate for the smug, well-off fuckers who inevitably come up with this poo poo.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:05
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isildur posted:But what the hell is the person working that job supposed to eat for a year? Where will he live? dad quote:How will he get to his 2-cent job? dad
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Aug 26, 2014 21:08
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SedanChair posted:dad This is basically it, and was stated quite openly by Romney and his "they can just borrow money from their parents". Like isildur said, they literally have no concept of what it's like to not be upper middle class or rich, much less poor as dirt. It's completely outside of their reality to not have the security and privilege of being born to rich people. The sheer concept of the lifestyle and hardships of someone in abject poverty to them is the same as the concept of a person having a 9 or 10 digit net worth is to a starving third world child. It's completely uncomprehinsible. This is one of the places where libertarianism and anarcho-capitilism falls off the rails for me (and I used to be an an-cap, way back in the long long ago). It just automatically assumes that everyone in the society will be middle class, at worst. Which I guess is true, after awhile, since everyone below that line will have died of starvation. And when asked about it, it gets hand-waved away with remarks about "private charity" and no real explanations.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:34
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Clearly the rational libertarian arrangement for achieving full employment in this economy is share cropping. SedanChair posted:I'm not sure slavery has a lot to do with the scale of authoritarianism. I always saw it as a mass compulsion, like Jefferson knew what he was doing was wrong, but oh my I just ran the numbers on my nail factory staffed with nine-year-olds. Mmm Sally, that minx is being 15 in front of me again. I feel like this kind of hair splitting is the same thought process that can ultimately lead a guy like Hans Herman-Hoppe to conclude that feudalism is a freer system than representative democracy because the apparatus of coercion is privatized. Ultimately if you own salves then you're an authoritarian in my eyes. Quibbling about whether or not the government or the plantation owner is responsible for the coercion seems mostly inconsequential when it comes to evaluating how authoritarian a system is.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:56
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zamin posted:This is basically it, and was stated quite openly by Romney and his "they can just borrow money from their parents". Excuse me, the Romneys know what it's like to live in poverty Ann Romney posted:They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting. Oh also this: Ann Romney posted:“Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but here, rents were $400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent. Mitt saw that the Boston market was behind Chicago, LA and New York. We stayed there seven years and sold it for $90,000, so we not only stayed for free, we made money. As I said, Mitt’s very bright. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 22:04
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Helsing posted:Ultimately if you own salves then you're an authoritarian in my eyes. W-what if I have a skin condition? 
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Aug 27, 2014 00:34
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isildur posted:This: I wonder if there are many libertarians who advocate these policies while also advocating for a basic income funded by proper taxation of the rich?
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Aug 27, 2014 02:23
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BreakAtmo posted:I wonder if there are many libertarians who advocate these policies while also advocating for a basic income funded by proper taxation of the rich?
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Aug 27, 2014 02:35
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There are a number of minarchist libertarians who support some kind of a UBI, and not only on a Georgist basis. BHL had a bit of a compilation of discussions on the topic earlier this year: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/basic_income_roundup/
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Aug 27, 2014 02:45
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twodot posted:Georgists sort of advocate for this on the basis that natural resources equally belong to everyone, so people who want exclusive access should pay the community a fair price for that access. The result is a basic income funded by people who control capital in the form of natural resources, but you could get rich by some mean other than natural resources and avoid paying any tax. Also clearly the amount of money being collected is not directly related to the cost of living, so there's no immediate reason to believe such an income would be sufficient. In principle you could generalize this to anytime people want exclusive access to something (EM frequencies, currency, intellectual property), but I don't know how common it is for people to follow through that far. I think that Georgism should be re-looked at in the age of the interwebs, because as well as addressing the environmental impacts of industry (probably the single biggest problem in the world today), if we considered the internet infrastructure as well as the transportation infrastructure common goods, it would address most forms of making income. I'm kind of a Georgist, but mostly because it's the only system to really present a way to account for environmental impact. Edit: I can also pretty easily make a libertarian argument for universal health care.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:27
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Obdicut posted:I think that Georgism should be re-looked at in the age of the interwebs, because as well as addressing the environmental impacts of industry (probably the single biggest problem in the world today), if we considered the internet infrastructure as well as the transportation infrastructure common goods, it would address most forms of making income. Internet and transportation infrastructure aren't "free" though, like land. They need to be produced and maintained. As I understand it, the basic justification for the Georgist/geolibertarian land tax is that the users of land haven't really "earned" the right to property ownership by creating it. Land is different than capital in that it pre-existed humanity, and is therefore commonly owned. Internet infrastructure is totally different. Really the whole idea of "internet as a basic right" is one of the most egregious forms of "universal right" creep. Yes it's a very powerful tool, but so are any number of other forms of capital. It's also fairly cheap and the information is infinitely reproducible.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:51
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LogisticEarth posted:Internet and transportation infrastructure aren't "free" though, like land. They need to be produced and maintained. Land is also not free and needs to be maintained. From some(modern) Georgist perspectives, they are like land because they are shared by all but more use of them is made by some than others, and the usage of them by some crowds out the use of them by others. quote:As I understand it, the basic justification for the Georgist/geolibertarian land tax is that the users of land haven't really "earned" the right to property ownership by creating it. Land is different than capital in that it pre-existed humanity, and is therefore commonly owned. That is definitely part of the origin of it, but it was less about 'rights' and more about economic pragmatism. Georgism is nice because it mixes well with socialized utilities: to the extent that internet infrastructure can be viewed as a public utility, it works well with Georgism. However, Georgism has always been a fringe perspective on things and so actually making it reality would doubtless encounter a bunch of problematic issues. quote:Internet infrastructure is totally different. Really the whole idea of "internet as a basic right" is one of the most egregious forms of "universal right" creep. Yes it's a very powerful tool, but so are any number of other forms of capital. It's also fairly cheap and the information is infinitely reproducible. I'm sorry, I'm not talking about the internet as a basic right, so this part is confusing me a little bit.
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Aug 27, 2014 20:02
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I thought the Austrians didn't like Georgism or is it just that specific Austrians don't like it?
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Aug 27, 2014 21:19
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BrandorKP posted:I thought the Austrians didn't like Georgism or is it just that specific Austrians don't like it? Most Austrians hate Georgism except for those who think they've found a point of arbitrage inside it, or those who think the minimum income should be far, far below what's necessary to live on. I mean, you can technically be a "Georgist" but make the amount of rent collected from land tiny, and otherwise be a minarchist.
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Aug 27, 2014 21:36
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Obdicut posted:Land is also not free and needs to be maintained. From some(modern) Georgist perspectives, they are like land because they are shared by all but more use of them is made by some than others, and the usage of them by some crowds out the use of them by others. Land is free and doesn't need to be maintained. Farms need to be maintained. A lawn needs to be maintained. A conservation district needs to be maintained. Fallow land doesn't need to be maintained. It just exists. Land ownership is just about controlling access and use within a set of X, Y, and Z coordinates. quote:I'm sorry, I'm not talking about the internet as a basic right, so this part is confusing me a little bit. I got my signals crossed a bit because the whole point behind the Georgist land tax is that they believe people have the right to use all non-human-created resources, primarily land. The land tax is sort of a rent payment by the land user to the rest of society (e.g. the "owner"), for their right to exclude others and operate some venture on the parcel. By claiming that internet infrastructure, transportation, etc. should be collectively owned on Georgist terms, you're claiming that each individual has a right to use these resources, or at least extract a rent from them. BrandorKP posted:I thought the Austrians didn't like Georgism or is it just that specific Austrians don't like it? Technically Austrians don't have anything to say about the ethics of Georgism. For what it's worth, Hayek and Friedman, although the latter was Chicago-school, both had semi-favorable opinions of it. Friedman called the land tax "the least bad" form of taxation. Ultimately the main Austrian critique is that calculating the proper price of unimproved land, and the extrapolated tax, was very difficult if not impossible. Austro-libertarians find the philosophy immoral because they reject the idea that unimproved land is collectively owned by humanity. But in general, it's not that far from an-cap, and it sort of has a "single sin" of the land tax, as Georgism is usually anarchist or minarchistic otherwise.
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Aug 27, 2014 23:22
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LogisticEarth posted:Land is free and doesn't need to be maintained. Farms need to be maintained. A lawn needs to be maintained. A conservation district needs to be maintained. Fallow land doesn't need to be maintained. It just exists. Land ownership is just about controlling access and use within a set of X, Y, and Z coordinates. Okay. Georgism focuses, in addition to the immutability and pre-existence of land, the common value of it. That if someone is using a bit of land, someone else can't use that bit of land. This is something that applies to many other common utilities as well, which is why Georgism is associated with socialism. quote:I got my signals crossed a bit because the whole point behind the Georgist land tax is that they believe people have the right to use all non-human-created resources, primarily land. The land tax is sort of a rent payment by the land user to the rest of society (e.g. the "owner"), for their right to exclude others and operate some venture on the parcel. By claiming that internet infrastructure, transportation, etc. should be collectively owned on Georgist terms, you're claiming that each individual has a right to use these resources, or at least extract a rent from them. Well, not really. The Georgist idealism is more related to people only profiting from their own ventures and labor, not from exploitation of a common. There isn't a strong idea in Georgism that only land is a 'common'; from the beginning, Georgism has included things that were created by society in general. To the extent that we can view the internet as a common utility and resource, then it's completely in line with Georgist philosophy (which was based highly on a pragmatic interest) to use that as a taxable resource. Basically, I'm saying look at Georgism as more of a utilitarian philosophy, which it really is, rather than highly concerned with property rights, as most of the 'libertarian' philosophies are.
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Aug 28, 2014 00:07
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Obdicut posted:Okay. Georgism focuses, in addition to the immutability and pre-existence of land, the common value of it. That if someone is using a bit of land, someone else can't use that bit of land. This is something that applies to many other common utilities as well, which is why Georgism is associated with socialism. In retrospect I might be conflating some ideas of geolibertarianism, which is more rooted in property rights, with the the pragmatic features of Georgism. However, historically Georgism is heavily associated with the land tax as a single tax. If modern Georgists view things like transportation and telecommunications infrastructure as common property rather than created wealth, and still support private property otherwise, that really opens it up and sort of waters it down a bit as a separate school. In fact that strikes me as more practically compatible with social democrat/liberal governments than anything radical.
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Aug 28, 2014 00:58
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LogisticEarth posted:In retrospect I might be conflating some ideas of geolibertarianism, which is more rooted in property rights, with the the pragmatic features of Georgism. However, historically Georgism is heavily associated with the land tax as a single tax. If modern Georgists view things like transportation and telecommunications infrastructure as common property rather than created wealth, and still support private property otherwise, that really opens it up and sort of waters it down a bit as a separate school. In fact that strikes me as more practically compatible with social democrat/liberal governments than anything radical. Henry George himself was very much an Adam Smith type guy, he was really not very radical. He was pretty utilitarian.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:24
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