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Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

DeusExMachinima posted:

what's praxelogy

Libertarians kept running into a pesky problem called "logic", so they invented an alternative to it. Basically it boils down to "libertarianism=good, ergo all things good must be libertarian". It also states that empirical evidence is not sufficient to disprove praxeological axioms.

-EDIT-

That's what it means in practice, anyway. In theory it's the study of human action based on the axiom that humans make purposeful decisions, and that if given the same set of variables humans will always choose a certain predicted outcome or course of action. This allows you to make predictions on human behavior that is universal to all humans.

But I wasn't joking when it's asserted that empirical evidence is not sufficient to disprove praxeology. That's a real thing Libertarians claim.

Who What Now fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Oct 6, 2014

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Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




VitalSigns posted:

That's true, feudalism eliminates all coercion from society, because once all of England is the private property of one man (parceled out to vassals with easements requiring them to supply armies and obey the primary landowner's law of course), everyone who lives there is voluntarily agreeing to fight in Norman DRO's army and live under Norman DRO law, or they're perfectly free to leave and find unowned land somewhere to mix their labor with.

Ah kingship, I wonder how they feel about the implied divinity of kings. I'd imagine it never occurs to them.

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment that I'm alive, I pray for death!

BrandorKP posted:

Ah kingship, I wonder how they feel about the implied divinity of kings. I'd imagine it never occurs to them.

While I don't think she identifies as libertarian per se, "dark enlightenment" lunatic (redundant, I know) Justine Tunney has, among other things, praised the aristocracies of the past as being naturally superior ("having better code" to use her specific form of wank) and therefore naturally the US should be run by Silicon Valley autocrats generally and her boss Google CEO Eric Schmidt in particular.

DeusExMachinima posted:

what's praxelogy

Short answer: It's bullshit, that's what it is.
Longer answer: It's methodolody libertarians made up to get around the problem that their theories lead to poo poo whenever applied in the real world. Among other things, as Who What Now notes, it claims that drawing logical conclusions from a priori assumptions is the best way to model human behavior, and that when empirical evidence contradicts theory, that evidence should be ignored.

Draw as many conclusions are you wish from how Jrod constantly has asserted he's only concerned with internally-consistent logical arguments, and dismisses historical analysis as a waste of time.

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Draw as many conclusions are you wish from how Jrod constantly has asserted he's only concerned with internally-consistent logical arguments, and dismisses historical analysis as a waste of time.

Again, to be fair, he loves historical analysis... When (he thinks) it agrees with him. Although it's becoming increasingly obvious that Jrod doesn't actually read the articles he posts, or if he does he clearly doesn't actually understand them. That's almost certainly why posts them in their entirety; he is too lazy or too incompetent to suss out the relevant portions.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

You know how empiricism and later the scientific method completely destroyed the pure rationalism of the ancients in explaining the world and ushered in the greatest explosion of progress, understanding, and invention the world has ever seen?

Praxeology is for those who prefer to pretend none of that ever happened:

Ludwig von Mises posted:

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts.

Thus jrodefeld will assert that logically no one would do business with a vendor or employer that required them to give up the right to enter a class action lawsuit against them in favor of one-on-one binding arbitration with an authority selected and paid for by the business with a demonstrable track record of overwhelmingly favoring the business in its decisions. When confronted with evidence that this in fact happens all the time, jrodefeld will repeat his assertion that it is logically impossible and ignore the evidence presented because evidence is by definition irrelevant to economics and indeed all of human behavior.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




For the explicit definition from the horses mouth look for the book The Science of Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises. (Edit: A Koch book club all time favorite)

Or just go here:
http://www.praxeology.net/praxeo.htm

Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Oct 6, 2014

DeusExMachinima
Sep 2, 2012

:siren:This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!:siren:

Put this loser on ignore immediately!

Who What Now posted:

Libertarians kept running into a pesky problem called "logic", so they invented an alternative to it. Basically it boils down to "libertarianism=good, ergo all things good must be libertarian". It also states that empirical evidence is not sufficient to disprove praxeological axioms.

-EDIT-

That's what it means in practice, anyway. In theory it's the study of human action based on the axiom that humans make purposeful decisions, and that if given the same set of variables humans will always choose a certain predicted outcome or course of action. This allows you to make predictions on human behavior that is universal to all humans.

But I wasn't joking when it's asserted that empirical evidence is not sufficient to disprove praxeology. That's a real thing Libertarians claim.

Well that's horrifically enlightening. Maybe I'm not up on my Mises. I guess I feel apart from most other libertarians in this sense. For example if the fed can be audited in case of bad behavior, it doesn't seem immediately objectionable to me, so long as competing currencies are legal and inflation is kept to levels that don't cause damage to people trying to pay rent, etc. It's not much different than any other private currency at that point, and complaining about it if you voluntarily choose to participate in U.S. dollars because your apartment owner won't voluntarily accept Bitcoin funbux is pretty :ironicat:

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

DeusExMachinima posted:

alternative currencies

What possible advantage could alternative currencies ever possess that even come close to outweighing their massive downsides?

Caros
May 14, 2008

Who What Now posted:

What possible advantage could alternative currencies ever possess that even come close to outweighing their massive downsides?

Well the important fact is that competing currencies are absolutely legal currently, so long as they don't pretend to be USD (which generally just means don't call them 'dollars' of any sort).

The reason you don't see a massive influx of them is because no one wants to use competing currencies because they are loving stupid.

DeusExMachinima
Sep 2, 2012

:siren:This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!:siren:

Put this loser on ignore immediately!
I'm not saying it's smart to put all/a majority your dosh into bitcoins (I don't). I'm saying it should be an optional if you like being unsure if you'll be able to pay rent or be a millionaire next month, because it's your life.

ninja'd by Caros

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

DeusExMachinima posted:

Well that's horrifically enlightening. Maybe I'm not up on my Mises. I guess I feel apart from most other libertarians in this sense.

Well that's interesting. How do you deal with the complete failure of libertarian predictions in the real world without declaring evidence to be an enemy of the towering edifice of purely logical libertarian thought?

I'd be particularly interested to know how you think a system of private, competing criminal and contract laws wouldn't massively favor the wealthy if you are not going to take jrodefeld's out of completely ignoring the evidence that private arbitration already overwhelmingly favors the rich?

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




DeusExMachinima posted:

Maybe I'm not up on my Mises. I guess I feel apart from most other libertarians in this sense.

This is like a Catholic going: I like taking communion, but I'm not up on what this substance business is and I feel apart from most other Catholics in this sense.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

I'd say it's more like rejecting divine revelation entirely, but still somehow agreeing with the Catholics that it's necessary to light votive candles, take communion, and do all the other sacraments.

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

BrandorKP posted:

This is like a Catholic going: I like taking communion, but I'm not up on what this substance business is and I feel apart from most other Catholics in this sense.

If by "substance" you mean transubstantiation, then I know for a fact that my catholic wife and her entire family don't believe in it. I don't think I've ever met a catholic who does.

Caros posted:

Well the important fact is that competing currencies are absolutely legal currently, so long as they don't pretend to be USD (which generally just means don't call them 'dollars' of any sort).

The reason you don't see a massive influx of them is because no one wants to use competing currencies because they are loving stupid.

Oh, I don't think it should be illegal, I just saying that it's so monumentally stupid that I don't understand why anyone would do it.

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment that I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

Oh, I don't think it should be illegal, I just saying that it's so monumentally stupid that I don't understand why anyone would do it.

Something being monumentally and transparently stupid has rarely, if ever, impeded greedy idiots from trying to get rich quick. See also, any/all threads about bitcoins and other crypto-"currencies."

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Something being monumentally and transparently stupid has rarely, if ever, impeded greedy idiots from trying to get rich quick. See also, any/all threads about bitcoins and other crypto-"currencies."

Again, I know that people are idiots, I just don't know why they are idiots.

Buried alive
Jun 8, 2009

DeusExMachinima posted:

I'm not saying it's smart to put all/a majority your dosh into bitcoins (I don't). I'm saying it should be an optional if you like being unsure if you'll be able to pay rent or be a millionaire next month, because it's your life.

ninja'd by Caros

Bitcoins are a thing that's legal now, and you're free to start trading them if you want to now. It would be silly, because the vast majority of vendors around the world do not currently accept bitcoins, as is their voluntary right to refuse to do so. Basically if you want the choice to use whatever currency you like, all other entities have that same choice and that either leads to a cluster-gently caress where every vendor (or society) also has to spend some resources maintaining a currency-exchange service, or you get a sufficiently large group that can get away with refusing all other competing currencies (which they're allowed to do) and you wind up with an efficient currency owing to the lack of needing a bunch of currency-exchange services. Which is exactly what we have now on the level of Nations, and gets us back into the question of "So how is a sufficiently large DRO any different than a nation anyway?" Keep in mind you probably don't want to refer to the NAP, because that itself just reverts to a discussion over who actually owns what in the first place.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

Well, the nation-state also creates demand for its currency by refusing to accept any other payment to satisfy tax obligations, and by banning gold clauses and the like in contracts. Any vendor who chooses to accept something besides the local currency is still going to have a need for it to pay taxes.

Of course, there's no reason why a DRO wouldn't want to avail itself of the advantages of being able to control and manipulate currency, so it's reasonable to expect that DROs will issue their own scrip that they can demand payment in and pay damages with, and since DROs are the one service that is absolutely mandatory to buy in Libertopia (even a farmer, no matter how self-sufficient, can't adequately defend himself from the depredations of criminal individuals or DROs without protection), the largest DROs would obviously find it profitable to abuse their position to issue and manipulate currency.

Remember that compared to every other business, starting a new DRO once some are already established has uniquely insurmountable barriers to entry. If the existing DROs don't recognize yours (and what incentive would they have to do this), then how are you to convince potential customers to abandon their DRO and thus their ability to trade with everyone else in society? How could they get the protection they're paying you for if the other DROs don't recognize your decisions and will defend their subscribers against any attempt to enforce them? What would keep the largest DROs from harassing or beating your customers to show them you're powerless to defend them and that they'd better sign back up with them? Or just straight-up threatening to destroy you militarily unless you agree to a buy-out? The Libertarian could argue that it wouldn't be in the other DRO's interest to let small competitors be crushed, but it obviously would. In fact, this is the exact argument Libertarians use today that the largest players in every industry collude with each other to buy politicians to pass anti-competitive laws.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




Who What Now posted:

If by "substance" you mean transubstantiation, then I know for a fact that my catholic wife and her entire family don't believe in it. I don't think I've ever met a catholic who does.

Yeah I thought I should add something along the lines of "and that's really pretty common" and then didn't. American Catholics have had a lot of Protestantism rub off on them. The reason I picked communion for the comparison is the whole substance thing. Transubstantiation is alien as praxeology (and in the same way!) to most people. It's that it's looking back to Aristotle stuff again.

Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Oct 6, 2014

Fansy
Feb 26, 2013

I GAVE LOWTAX COOKIE MONEY TO CHANGE YOUR STUPID AVATAR GO FUCK YOURSELF DUDE
Grimey Drawer
.

Fansy fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Apr 12, 2020

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

BrandorKP posted:

Yeah I thought I should add something along the lines of "and that's really pretty common" and then didn't. American Catholics have had a lot of Protestantism rub off on them. The reason I picked communion for the comparison is the whole substance thing. Transubstantiation is alien as praxeology (and in the same way!) to most people. It's that it's looking back to Aristotle stuff again.

I don't think it's Protestants rubbing off on Catholics so much as it is that with a population that is generally better educated most followers realize that the idea of transubstantiation is pretty drat silly. But this isn't the right thread for this debate.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

I actually really want to know how I start my own DRO if I'm not satisfied with the choices available on the market (the Libertarian answer to "but what if all businesses in the industry share this abusive practice?"). My DRO is obviously going to cancel me if it finds out I intend to start competing with them (really, it would probably have a noncompete clause in its TOS and be immediately empowered to come after me for damages for attempting to start a competing company, but for the sake of argument we'll assume at least one existing DRO hasn't thought of this obvious strategy), so right off the bat I'm banned from all roads, stores, businesses, and property in the area because the existing DROs don't recognize me and everyone else's contracts require them not to do business with someone lacking DRO coverage because of the liability.

How do I get employees, when anyone I hire is going to break their own DRO contract by taking the job and be instant pariahs as well. I would not only have to already own farms, mines, factories, and some other means of production for everything necessary to modern life for myself and any employees, but I would also have to own the roads, rail lines, and/or waterways to and from these areas, and either enough land to house my employees or the roads to and from their houses as well (remember, all private road owners are barred by their DRO from letting me or any of my employees onto their roads unless and until their own DRO recognizes my company as a legitimate DRO.) And then just to get a customer I would also have to own all roads between his house, his workplace, and my headquarters, and own or produce anything he could conceivably want to buy before he could even consider signing a contract with me, and even then he would be unable to leave my domain without putting himself at impossible personal risk. I would essentially have to own or build an entirely self-sufficient microstate before I could ever even hint at my intention to start a DRO, because being discovered and blackballed by the existing DROs before I am ready is a death sentence.

And even if I do that, how do I enforce compensatory damages on behalf of my clients if the surrounding DROs don't recognize my authority? There's no way I can realistically force them to do it, or even have much of a chance at making them waste more of their money fighting me than they would making arbitration agreements with me, so it would be in their interest never to deal with me until I somehow became large and well-armed enough to constitute a creditable threat.

And these are just the issues in getting started, assuming that all other DROs adhere perfectly to the NAP. It doesn't even consider the issues I mentioned in my other post of larger DROs using outright violence against me or my clients to coerce my customers and employees into abandoning me and coerce me into selling out or giving up.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Oct 6, 2014

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
The parallel between praxeology and transubstantiation is a sound one. Most believers don't spend a lot of time on it, and may not take it literally, instead focusing on seemingly tangible things (cutting taxes/forgiveness of sins). But if you try to argue against it, you're a heretic.

DeusExMachinima says things a lot of "libertarians" say like "well I think the Fed should be more accountable" and so on. But that doesn't make you a libertarian, it just makes you a person who reads blogs or something.

Guavanaut
Nov 27, 2009

Looking At Them Tittys
1969 - 1998



Toilet Rascal

SedanChair posted:

The parallel between praxeology and transubstantiation is a sound one. Most believers don't spend a lot of time on it, and may not take it literally, instead focusing on seemingly tangible things (cutting taxes/forgiveness of sins). But if you try to argue against it, you're a heretic.
I think Catholics that argue against transubstantiation prefer to be called Episcopalians, not heretics. :haw:

I've always thought of the Austrian school more as offering precise and logical sounding explanations for things that do not work and never actually happen. I'm not sure what the best religious analogy for that is though.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




I'm fond of "idol"

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

The more I think about what it would take to start your own DRO, the more hilarious it is. You'd need a huge supply of capital, obviously. You'd need to start slowly buying up farms, shops, factories, land, resources through proxies and shell companies to keep your intentions a secret from the DROs. You'd have to buy up roads, rails, waterways, airports. You'd have to start recruiting and training your private police and army secretly, finding men with impeccable loyalty and organizing them into cells because a single traitor who reports identities to the DROs gets those men automatically barred from society. Any roads or other shipping routes you or your associates can't buy, you'd have to secretly negotiate with the owners to break their contract with their DRO and join you the moment your company is announced. All other customers and investors you line up beforehand would likewise have to be won over in absolute secrecy. Any leak of the identity or intentions of you or anyone involved in your plan before you're ready is a disaster, an immediate death sentence for those so compromised. Once all is in readiness, your microstate is self-sufficient and in posession or coalition with all necessary infrastructure, your army takes up prepared defensive positions and you declare your secession from your DROs, formation of your company, and contracts with your employees and customers all at once. You hope that our show of force is enough to deter an immediate counterattack from the DROs enforcing their noncompete agreements against a rogue bandit like yourself.

Congratulations! Your preparations were adequate and the DROs decided it was cheaper to agree to arbitration and accept payment of damages for all broken noncompete contracts rather than crush you. You wisely set aside enough to pay off these obligations on behalf of all of your customers and employees as agreed. Now expanding your market share gets even harder than before! Now that you're known to be running a nonrecognized DRO, anyone selling a road or business to you gets their own DRO coverage immediately cancelled, so to open up a new neighborhood of clients, you have to convince the owners of the local streets to completely come over to you and give up all revenue from anyone outside your DRO (as anyone from outside doing business with them would see their own coverage cancelled). Your expenses will also be high because you have no means of enforcing payment for damages to your clients caused by subscribers of any other DRO and will have to pay all such damages yourself, but other DROs will still be able to enforce damages against your clients. Good luck!

Oh and when does this embargo end? Why, it ends when you either acquire enough businesses or perhaps some other valuable resource or product that people start leaving their DROs and switching to you just to get access to your market and the other DROs are forced to recognize you by market pressure, or when you become well-armed enough to start enforcing your court decisions on oter DROs by presenting a credible threat of offensive capability (instead of merely the defensive capabilities you had to demonstrate to be allowed to exist in the first place). Hooray, the free market works. You're now providing a competitive alternative to the existing DROs and all you had to do was become rich as balls first and buy up essentially a small country in order to do it. The system works :911:

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Oct 6, 2014

Strawman
Feb 9, 2008

Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.


Guavanaut posted:

I think Catholics that argue against transubstantiation prefer to be called Episcopalians, not heretics. :haw:

I've always thought of the Austrian school more as offering precise and logical sounding explanations for things that do not work and never actually happen. I'm not sure what the best religious analogy for that is though.

Apologetics

DeusExMachinima
Sep 2, 2012

:siren:This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!:siren:

Put this loser on ignore immediately!

Who What Now posted:

I don't think it's Protestants rubbing off on Catholics so much as it is that with a population that is generally better educated most followers realize that the idea of transubstantiation is pretty drat silly. But this isn't the right thread for this debate.

Sarcasm doesn't translate well over the internet, as I have to learn repeatedly.

SedanChair posted:

no true libertarian

2legit story brah. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm libertarian. I'm not a Jrod anarchist because that doesn't exist, refusing to call DROs governments doesn't change what they're acting as (reminds me of Somali xeer and ancient Germanic weregeld). My priorities are just in a different place than Ayn Rand. If I had to trade something more than a negative tax/GMI, say single-payer healthcare, for brogressives never thinking the words "public safety" again, I'd do it in a heartbeat and retired happily to a private beach doing legal coke off of legal sex workers.

For an example of unacceptable statism that doesn't involve goldbuggery, consider mandatory breathalyzer tests for suspected drunk drivers. This clearly violates the 5th Amendment and the :words: bullshit lawyer-speak way of getting around it is "implied consent" when you got your license. Never mind that "implied consent" is a literal contradiction in how consent in supposed to work, and the "implied" part is just "agree to never exercise the Fifth and we won't violate the 14th by not giving you your license even though you passed the driving test." Thousands more would die if people couldn't be forced to breathalyze or lose their license for a year. Speaking as someone who's been in more than one accident due to others drunk driving, who has dead friends from it, tough poo poo. The 5A is a right, safety third.

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird
^^^Hail Hydra DRO!

Is Libertarian Communism where you have one massive corporation own absolutely everything, and have absolutely everyone own one and only one share? Or is that regular Communism?

Guavanaut
Nov 27, 2009

Looking At Them Tittys
1969 - 1998



Toilet Rascal

Rockopolis posted:

^^^Hail Hydra DRO!

Is Libertarian Communism where you have one massive corporation own absolutely everything, and have absolutely everyone own one and only one share? Or is that regular Communism?
Libertarian Communism is what was proposed by Kropotkin as a post-revolutionary alternative to State Socialism. In short the commune becomes the basic unit of society, automation in the form of steam engines reduces the labor load, communes trade tools and grain instead of money and luxuries, and homelessness and starvation are prevented by the principle of all belonging to all. The People (he says) will no longer permit resources to be hoarded by the capitalist class, nor land or property to be held for private gain in the form of renting or sharecropping.

Bakunin also talked about Libertarian Communism, again as an alternative to State Socialism, but mostly in terms of the negatives of the State, rather than in terms of any prescriptive utopia. He draws parallels to organized religion in God and the State, and argues that Marx's idea for State Socialism would simply replace the stick used by the oligarchy to beat the proletariat with an identical one named 'The People's Stick' which does the same thing, a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Instead he argues that the overall power of government, capital, and religion should be destroyed via an educated and self-organizing proletariat.

As a philosophy it's basically bottom-up communism, similar to anarcho-syndicalism. In the real world you have all forms of human tribalism and the skeletons of existing power structures to deal with.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

As the property owner of the road system, the government has the right to set any conditions it wants on the use of its property. If you don't like breathalyzer tests, you're free to restrict yourself to operating your motor vehicle on your own property. DeusExMachina sounds like a thieving moocher who doesn't respect the property rights of the owners of the roads, and instead wants to just be handed the product of another man's labor.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

DeusExMachinima posted:

2legit story brah.

Words can't express how legit it is; I can only present the gift of music to you, with your kind consideration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4XheP3bw3Y

I know you cousin. I know you. You believe in freedom. But you and I both know that freedom doesn't just come in the form of lower taxes. Admit it. poo poo you believe in basic income. Exactly no libertarians now living believe in that.

quote:

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm libertarian.

You are! You're a civil libertarian or a left libertarian. You might as well pick a different name for it though, because you have exactly squat in common with these right-wing anarchists from bible college.

quote:

I'm not a Jrod anarchist because that doesn't exist, refusing to call DROs governments doesn't change what they're acting as (reminds me of Somali xeer and ancient Germanic weregeld). My priorities are just in a different place than Ayn Rand.

My gosh let's hope so.

quote:

If I had to trade something more than a negative tax/GMI, say single-payer healthcare, for brogressives never thinking the words "public safety" again, I'd do it in a heartbeat and retired happily to a private beach doing legal coke off of legal sex workers.

For an example of unacceptable statism that doesn't involve goldbuggery, consider mandatory breathalyzer tests for suspected drunk drivers. This clearly violates the 5th Amendment and the :words: bullshit lawyer-speak way of getting around it is "implied consent" when you got your license. Never mind that "implied consent" is a literal contradiction in how consent in supposed to work, and the "implied" part is just "agree to never exercise the Fifth and we won't violate the 14th by not giving you your license even though you passed the driving test." Thousands more would die if people couldn't be forced to breathalyze or lose their license for a year. Speaking as someone who's been in more than one accident due to others drunk driving, who has dead friends from it, tough poo poo. The 5A is a right, safety third.

It's not like I don't agree with you, but fears of the "nanny state" need to be put in context. People criticize Orwellian or "statist" policies then use it as an excuse to cut basic services. The truth is that a giant bureaucratic state with low corruption is awesome, and civil liberties are supposed to guard against abuses. Unfortunately we are in the process both of privatizing the bureaucracy and defining civil liberties out of existence. That's awesome!

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

DeusExMachinima posted:

Sarcasm doesn't translate well over the internet, as I have to learn repeatedly.

Well drat. This is literally the first time I've ever been sarcastic without my full knowledge. I actually don't know how to proceed.

Polygynous
Dec 13, 2006
welp

congrats, you've put more thought into this than pretty much any libertarian


e: also gaddamn, isn't the first thing they tell you in high school driver's ed "driving is a privilege, not a right"? you're free to do donuts in your backyard all you want. have fun with that.

Polygynous fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 6, 2014

Rhjamiz
Oct 28, 2007

The 5th Amendment only protects you from self-incrimination based on what you say; it does not protect you from your own actions or physical evidence (the alcohol in your stupid blood).

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

DeusExMachinima posted:

Sarcasm doesn't translate well over the internet, as I have to learn repeatedly.


2legit story brah. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm libertarian. I'm not a Jrod anarchist because that doesn't exist, refusing to call DROs governments doesn't change what they're acting as (reminds me of Somali xeer and ancient Germanic weregeld). My priorities are just in a different place than Ayn Rand. If I had to trade something more than a negative tax/GMI, say single-payer healthcare, for brogressives never thinking the words "public safety" again, I'd do it in a heartbeat and retired happily to a private beach doing legal coke off of legal sex workers.

For an example of unacceptable statism that doesn't involve goldbuggery, consider mandatory breathalyzer tests for suspected drunk drivers. This clearly violates the 5th Amendment and the :words: bullshit lawyer-speak way of getting around it is "implied consent" when you got your license. Never mind that "implied consent" is a literal contradiction in how consent in supposed to work, and the "implied" part is just "agree to never exercise the Fifth and we won't violate the 14th by not giving you your license even though you passed the driving test." Thousands more would die if people couldn't be forced to breathalyze or lose their license for a year. Speaking as someone who's been in more than one accident due to others drunk driving, who has dead friends from it, tough poo poo. The 5A is a right, safety third.

Your example sucks. First of all, the consent is explicit, no rules lawyering required. The state owns the roads and distributes permits to use them. You sign a bunch of paperwork when you receive this permit, which is you giving your consent. You're totally free to drive on your compound's private road, as drunk as you want, so long as you don't go onto public roads

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
So we pool our money, make some roads, and all we ask for is following some basic rules and some wise-rear end goes "but what if I want to get drunk and kill people? That's not fair." I find that to be terribly coercive. My right to conceal how dangerous I am to others trumps your right to live, I bet you felt like a real political philosopher coming up with that one.

Polygynous
Dec 13, 2006
welp

Babylon Astronaut posted:

So we pool our money, make some roads, and all we ask for is following some basic rules and some wise-rear end goes "but what if I want to get drunk and kill people? That's not fair." I find that to be terribly coercive. My right to conceal how dangerous I am to others trumps your right to live, I bet you felt like a real political philosopher coming up with that one.

well no respectable DRO would cover someone who would put everyone else's life at risk so cavalierly furthermore *farts*


e: the government suspending licenses of repeat DUI offenders: bad. your DRO installing monitoring equipment in your car: good.

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
I mean, I was raised on Rush Limbaugh of all things so I just assumed you'd figure out that it might be you that is the rear end in a top hat somewhere before advocating luring babies into trucks to sell as sex toys and drunk driving might be good, not bad as long as you murder families because you couldn't piece together loving cab fare because you are a piece of poo poo lush who, if faced with the reality that you are responsible for your actions would put a gun in your mouth and raise the average IQ.

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VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

No but see, if we shrink back the government and sell off the roads to private companies, he'll be the one buying up those roads as a Captain of Industry, and no one will ever tell him what to do or how much is too much to drink ever again, not ever! Take that, dad!

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