Libertarians: You fire fighter lovers sure are good at debate!

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GulMadred: Oct 20, 2005; I don't understand how you can be so mistaken.

jrodefeld posted:

Roosevelt negroes quote

You've been called out several times for poor research, misattribution, and improper citation. Please take that criticism to heart. Your interlocutors will find it easier to engage with you if they can see a controversial claim, click a hyperlink (which you've helpfully provided!), discover that your claim is well-founded, and then proceed to read the rest of your argument. By hiding your sources you invite doubt and disbelief.

The first part of your quote can be sourced easily and therefore ought to be. It was said to a group of senators who were concerned that the bill would alienate southern voters. The concluding sentence does not actually appear in the source material. It appears on page 33 of Ronald Kessler's Inside the White House and was uttered by Johnson while he was away from DC during a conversation with two governors.

It is not plausible to imagine that the entire quote was part of a single speech or conversation. Linking the two parts with ellipses is improper (by the standards of journalism or academic writing) and misleading to your readers.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:22

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# ? May 21, 2024 21:16

Karia: Mar 27, 2013; Self-portrait, Snake on a Plane
Oil painting, c. 1482-1484
Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1591)

jrodefeld posted:

Black teenagers will continue to languish at nearly 50% unemployment because of these laws. Naturally these kids are more likely to get involved in gangs and illegal work, ending up with criminal records, in jail or killed. That is the reality of the artificial economic restrictions to opportunity that you continually foist upon the most vulnerable in society.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. While I agree that Who What Now's tone is overly vitriolic, this idea is just... Jrodefeld, how many workers does a McDonalds need? If they could pay the people half as much, how many would they need? Here's a hint: the number would be the same (I don't have a clue what it is, though, I haven't been to a McDonalds in years.) Minimum wage jobs are pretty much solely inelastic. There are a certain number of positions to fill, and given basic abilities, anyone can fill those positions. Once they're filled, there's very little if any incremental profit in hiring more people. So, no. There aren't enough positions to fill, that's the problem.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:24

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

Literally The Worst posted:

Minimum wage jobs are actually worthless on your resume unless you're applying for more minimum wage jobs.

Citation: the only job I can get is mimium wage bullshit or slightly above, and even then those jobs are still awful in entirely different ways. I needed experience to apply for a housekeeping job this summer. To APPLY. you have literally no idea what you're talking about as usual.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:26

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

Let's have teenagers fill current minimum wage jobs at less than minimum wage, potentially putting their own parents out of work. Everybody* wins!

* just McDonalds shareholders really

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:27

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

I give Jrod exactly as much respect as he has earned, which is none at all.

E:

Literally The Worst posted:

Citation: the only job I can get is mimium wage bullshit or slightly above, and even then those jobs are still awful in entirely different ways. I needed experience to apply for a housekeeping job this summer. To APPLY. you have literally no idea what you're talking about as usual.

Just because they ask for previous experience does not mean having no experience automatically disqualifies you. I did interviews for candidates with no previous experience all the time when I was manager at a retail location.

Who What Now fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:28

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

-edit-

For fucks sake, awful app, twice in a row?

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:32

Karia: Mar 27, 2013; Self-portrait, Snake on a Plane
Oil painting, c. 1482-1484
Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1591)

Who What Now posted:

I give Jrod exactly as much respect as he has earned, which is none at all.

He hasn't earned it, agreed. But there's nothing to gain from rudeness. It just gives him more ammo to dismiss our arguments.

Besides, it's far more amusing to tear down everything he believes in and watch him blindly stumble into trying to use it again than it is to just call him an idiot and move on.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:36

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

Who What Now posted:

I give Jrod exactly as much respect as he has earned, which is none at all.

E:

Just because they ask for previous experience does not mean having no experience automatically disqualifies you. I did interviews for candidates with no previous experience all the time when I was manager at a retail location.

I mean they literally did not let me apply. I asked for an application and they said no. I had to bullshit about how much of my last retail job was selling in order to get the job I have now, and my job now is still awful.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:36

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Literally The Worst posted:

I mean they literally did not let me apply. I asked for an application and they said no. I had to bullshit about how much of my last retail job was selling in order to get the job I have now, and my job now is still awful.

That sounds like an issue with that one specific company, not something systemic.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:41

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

Who What Now posted:

That sounds like an issue with that one specific company, not something systemic.

My point is just that having minimum wage work isn't a guarantee of anything except that you had minimum wage work at some point and acting like its a valuable thing on your resume is dumb and I gave an extreme example that happened to me to illustrate this. Obviously that's not the norm but you get what I'm trying to say.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:43

jrodefeld: Sep 22, 2012; by Shine

Wolfsheim posted:

I should also remind anyone still willing to take jrode's minimum wage bait that the answer "Actually, eliminating minimum wage would just hurt unskilled laborers, an already incredibly vulnerable group that already owns close to 0% of wealth in this country" doesn't actually count because libertarians see those people as lazy parasites who don't want to bother finding a better job.

No, libertarians don't think that. That is an uninformed leftist stereotype of libertarians. Speaking for myself, I am concerned with the welfare of the poor.

Remember that those who have their wealth want the system to stay as it is. Capitalists who earn their money in the market tend to turn their focus on lobbying the State. They use the market then rail against the market. If you get to the top the only place to go it down. Businessmen don't want that so they form cartels and monopolize. And the only way to do this is through legislation and State privilege.

Those who should favor the free market the most are the poor and middle class. The unfettered market continually overturns the wealth of the rich because the poor have many competitive advantages over them. They are ambitious, have less expenses, can worker cheaper and more efficiently. The wealthy erect economic barriers to the poor, they speak to them condescendingly and paternalisticly. They sell the poor on the idea that they are victims and need to rely on welfare programs. What they really don't want is for the poor to undercut the rich and overturn their wealth through the market.

Libertarians don't look down on the poor. We see them as completely competent and capable of out-competing the very rich. What we don't want is barriers to economic activity that proponents of the State continually erect which limits the ability of the poor to gain economic independence and overturn the established wealth of the capitalists.

There is an old saying about the free market economy. "Rags to riches back to rags in three generations". It is an observable phenomenon that the privileged children of the rich don't have the same ambition and competence to achieve that their parents, who actually earned their wealth, had. There are certain values that you learn by growing up poor or middle class that you lose if you are raised wealthy. The children of privilege tend to squander much of the wealth of their parents without having all the skills to maintain and grow their wealth and within a few generations the family has fallen back down into the middle class or even lower.

On the other hand, if the capitalists pass legislation to keep out new competitors and protect their wealth, multiple generations of the "idle rich" can exist in perpetuity because they don't have to actually compete in the marketplace and satisfy consumers.

The free market should be the tool most valued by the poor and middle classes since it is the one most hated by oligarchs everywhere. You are not helping with your paternalistic condescension, rather you are making the situation worse.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:47

Cemetry Gator: Apr 3, 2007; Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

jrodefeld posted:

Sometimes my mind boggles at the lack of economic understanding. How does anyone earn more money at a job? Why aren't you still making the exact same wages as you did at your first job? The answer of course is that you learned skills and became more valuable as an employee. You built a resume so other people would be more interested in hiring you.

I don't even know where to begin. But you might want to watch out, because pots shouldn't call kettles black.

Here's the thing - my time spent as a cashier in a supermarket never enters into my current line of work. I don't think to myself "Man, all that time I spent pulling cans forward and organizing shelves really comes in handy with this difficult job."

quote:

Suppose you are 14 or 15 and you want some extra money over the summer. Most people are not going to hire a kid at a high wage rate when they could hire an adult. How do less productive and less desired workers compete for jobs? One way is to offer to work for less money. A fifteen year old kid could take a basic job for $5 or $6 an hour, build a resume and then earn more money. After four or five months, maybe less, they have demonstrated competence in doing a very basic job and they could be promoted to a hire paying position. Or if they quit that job they now have a resume and a reference for future employers, which makes their human capital more desirable to potential employers.

Do you have any experience with hiring minimum wage employees? Well, I do. See, the reason why 14 and 15 year olds have a hard time finding a job has nothing to do with their rate of pay. It has everything to do with the fact that the labor laws around people who are under 17 in most states are such a pain in the rear end to deal with that it's not really worth the hassle. See, they can't work more than a certain number of hours (varies by state, I think in mine, it was 4 or 5). They need breaks after a certain point. They're prohibited from doing a lot, even more than just what a minor can't do. They can't work past certain hours on school nights.

And then there's things that come with the age. They tend not to have their own transportation, so they rely on mom and dad to get them places. And dealing with 16 and 17 year-olds on that matter, that gets pretty flaky pretty quickly. Also, they tend to be pretty immature, and require a lot more supervision.

Add that all up, and it's just not worth hiring them. Even if I could get them for free, it would be such a massive pain in my rear end that I don't want to deal with that. So yes. It's not a lack of experience that factors into that. Most of the work is pretty menial. There's barely any training, and most of it is just "Do it this way and make sure it looks like this."

quote:

If you are a teenager living at home, virtually all of your money is disposable. Working part time for $6 an hour means that you can go out to a restaurant, see a movie, take a girl on a date, things like that. But the most important thing is to develop a resume and work history at an early age. This will be very beneficial at 22 or 23 when you need to get a real job to support yourself.

You don't think that someone who has already had six or seven years of work experience is not going to have the upper hand in comparison to someone who has never had a real job in their life?

Except that experience means nothing.

Have you ever hired someone, or applied for a job? I mean, when I got my first big-boy job, I didn't put the time I spent as a supermarket cashier on my resume. It's not helpful for the jobs that pay real money, and you go back to my post on the subject originally on why it's a bad idea in general!

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:48

Doktor Avalanche: Dec 30, 2008

jrodefeld posted:

Remember that those who have their wealth want the system to stay as it is.

That doesn't automatically make any other system better.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:49

Political Whores: Feb 13, 2012

Barbe Rouge posted:

That doesn't automatically make any other system better.

It's also a lie. Consider how much the welfare state has been assaulted by moneyed interests.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:51

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Political Whores posted:

Gee, it sure would have been embarrassing to all us progressives if anybody at all had held Lyndon Johnson up as a great thinker of the "left". Why, if I'd put up page after page of quotations from obvious and unrepentant racists like Johnson as a defense of my ideology, I might feel some sort of shame at the obviously terrible opinions I was tacitly (or explicitly) supporting.

Bigger issue is that when Caros quotes jrod's heroes saying racist things, he relies on primary and secondary sources like their published works or articles and quotes of them from Libertarian websites like mises.org and lewrockwell that would have no reason to fabricate them.

Meanwhile jrod takes his evidence from a book published by a political opponent of Johnson's providing an uncorroborated quote first mentioned 25 years after the man died and is no longer around to dispute it or defend himself. Classy.

For an ideology that's true a priori, Libertarians sure spend a lot of time lying.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 00:52

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

jrodefeld posted:

I could have a field day pulling up quotes from Progressive heroes from the 20th century who established all your favorite government programs, from the Federal Reserve to Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid, that were incredibly racist and supremacist. Then I could conclude that these programs were ALWAYS designed to hurt the poor minorities since their proponents were clearly overwhelmingly racist. We could both play this game but I think it would be unfair to both of us.

You could conclude that, if you knew nothing about history.

A lot of progressives in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and even the 60s were horrible racists. This is indisputable. That's why they did their best to write Social Security in such a way that it would exclude as many black people as possible by making occupations they tend to be represented in not eligible to participate.

Wiki posted:

Most women and minorities were excluded from the benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions reflected typical white male categories and patterns. Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. The act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently. These jobs were dominated by women and minorities. For example, women made up 90 percent of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service. Exclusions exempted nearly half of the working population. Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80 percent in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security. At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as �a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.�

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_the_United_States#Initial_opposition

Social Security (much like the more explicitly discriminatory social programs under South African apartheid) when first implemented had the specific aim of helping poor whites at the expense of other races, quite successfully in fact. So you're right that these programs were originally designed to hurt poor minorities, but not by tricking them "onto the welfare plantation" as conservatives like to put it, but by reserving the huge benefits of these programs for poor whites only.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 01:03

Cemetry Gator: Apr 3, 2007; Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

jrodefeld posted:

No, libertarians don't think that. That is an uninformed leftist stereotype of libertarians. Speaking for myself, I am concerned with the welfare of the poor.

Remember that those who have their wealth want the system to stay as it is. Capitalists who earn their money in the market tend to turn their focus on lobbying the State. They use the market then rail against the market. If you get to the top the only place to go it down. Businessmen don't want that so they form cartels and monopolize. And the only way to do this is through legislation and State privilege.

Can you defend that quote? I mean, we have the Koch brothers in the camp against you. Or Peter Theil for example - http://theweek.com/article/index/218393/libertarian-island-a-billionaires-utopia

Did you just make an assertion and expect us to treat it as fact. STOP loving DOING THIS. This is not how you argue. You don't make some broad baseless claim and then pretend that it has value.

Also, another question YOU have to answer is why this would change in a libertarian society. As has been stated before, money is power. The more money you have, the more resources you can acquire. What's to keep the rich from gaming the system in their favor.

quote:

Those who should favor the free market the most are the poor and middle class. The unfettered market continually overturns the wealth of the rich because the poor have many competitive advantages over them.

Oh really? And you can show this... how?

quote:

They are ambitious, have less expenses, can worker cheaper and more efficiently.

And you can show this... how? Are rich people unambitious? I mean, I guess that's why Mitt Romney didn't run for president. No ambition.

Here are some things that rich people have the poor and middle class people don't have and need - money. See, starting a business and running a business can be a significant investment, and for the first few years, people actually expect to lose money. In order to start new ventures, you need a lot more resources than the average person has access to.

quote:

[
The wealthy erect economic barriers to the poor, they speak to them condescendingly and paternalisticly. They sell the poor on the idea that they are victims and need to rely on welfare programs. What they really don't want is for the poor to undercut the rich and overturn their wealth through the market.

Citation needed. You need to show me how Welfare Systems are keeping me down.

quote:

Libertarians don't look down on the poor. We see them as completely competent and capable of out-competing the very rich. What we don't want is barriers to economic activity that proponents of the State continually erect which limits the ability of the poor to gain economic independence and overturn the established wealth of the capitalists.

Wait... aren't the capitalists champions of the free market? Well, with you, I never know what words actually mean. The problem is that there are some barriers to economic activity that don't require the state. Such as a need for capital to start a business.

Also, what barriers are you talking about specifically. I mean, there are bad laws, and those should be overturned.

quote:

There is an old saying about the free market economy. "Rags to riches back to rags in three generations". It is an observable phenomenon that the privileged children of the rich don't have the same ambition and competence to achieve that their parents, who actually earned their wealth, had.

I'll give you credit. You can find a lot of information about this on Google. I mean, your argument is weak, but at least using your quotation, I can find information that supports what you say. Good work here!

quote:

There are certain values that you learn by growing up poor or middle class that you lose if you are raised wealthy. The children of privilege tend to squander much of the wealth of their parents without having all the skills to maintain and grow their wealth and within a few generations the family has fallen back down into the middle class or even lower.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/25/luxury/family-wealth/ - Except it's not. According to this article, the biggest reason why wealth is squandered has more to do with a lack of management rather than ambition. While you will find examples of bad spending and a lack of ambition, it's just that managing wealth can be very complicated.

quote:

On the other hand, if the capitalists pass legislation to keep out new competitors and protect their wealth, multiple generations of the "idle rich" can exist in perpetuity because they don't have to actually compete in the marketplace and satisfy consumers.

The free market should be the tool most valued by the poor and middle classes since it is the one most hated by oligarchs everywhere. You are not helping with your paternalistic condescension, rather you are making the situation worse.

How many people will this really help out though? There's only room for so much competition in certain markets.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 01:42

QuarkJets: Sep 8, 2008

jrodefeld posted:

Sometimes my mind boggles at the lack of economic understanding. How does anyone earn more money at a job? Why aren't you still making the exact same wages as you did at your first job? The answer of course is that you learned skills and became more valuable as an employee. You built a resume so other people would be more interested in hiring you.

Suppose you are 14 or 15 and you want some extra money over the summer. Most people are not going to hire a kid at a high wage rate when they could hire an adult. How do less productive and less desired workers compete for jobs? One way is to offer to work for less money. A fifteen year old kid could take a basic job for $5 or $6 an hour, build a resume and then earn more money. After four or five months, maybe less, they have demonstrated competence in doing a very basic job and they could be promoted to a hire paying position. Or if they quit that job they now have a resume and a reference for future employers, which makes their human capital more desirable to potential employers.

If you are a teenager living at home, virtually all of your money is disposable. Working part time for $6 an hour means that you can go out to a restaurant, see a movie, take a girl on a date, things like that. But the most important thing is to develop a resume and work history at an early age. This will be very beneficial at 22 or 23 when you need to get a real job to support yourself.

You don't think that someone who has already had six or seven years of work experience is not going to have the upper hand in comparison to someone who has never had a real job in their life?

Okay so your argument is that teeangers build valuable work experience and a resume by starting out in low-skill jobs, and that leads to higher wages in the future. That's a coherent argument. I mean it's completely wrong, because "McDonalds burger flipper" or "Walmart greeter" on your resume only impresses employers who are aren't going to voluntarily pay at least what the minimum wage pays now, but it's at least a coherent argument even if it's completely wrong.

Meanwhile, the adults who rely on minimum wage employment are getting shafted by having the floor drop out from beneath them. So while you're trying to benefit the teenagers (although you fail to do this) that are already economically secure enough to be able to accept $1/hour flipping burgers, you're harming the adults that rely on minimum wage employment. In other words, you want to gently caress over the poor in order to serve the rich (or the children of the well-off in any case)

# ? Nov 17, 2014 01:55

Tacky-Ass Rococco: Sep 7, 2010; by R. Guyovich

jrodefeld posted:

In fact, Johnson uttered these words in 1963:

Dear jrod,

You defend Molyneux and HHH, and the best you can come up with is an unsourced/badly sourced claim about LBJ? Go copulate with your mother, you idiot.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 02:04

jrodefeld: Sep 22, 2012; by Shine

Cemetry Gator posted:

Can you defend that quote? I mean, we have the Koch brothers in the camp against you. Or Peter Theil for example - http://theweek.com/article/index/218393/libertarian-island-a-billionaires-utopia

Did you just make an assertion and expect us to treat it as fact. STOP loving DOING THIS. This is not how you argue. You don't make some broad baseless claim and then pretend that it has value.

Also, another question YOU have to answer is why this would change in a libertarian society. As has been stated before, money is power. The more money you have, the more resources you can acquire. What's to keep the rich from gaming the system in their favor.

Oh really? And you can show this... how?

And you can show this... how? Are rich people unambitious? I mean, I guess that's why Mitt Romney didn't run for president. No ambition.

Here are some things that rich people have the poor and middle class people don't have and need - money. See, starting a business and running a business can be a significant investment, and for the first few years, people actually expect to lose money. In order to start new ventures, you need a lot more resources than the average person has access to.

Citation needed. You need to show me how Welfare Systems are keeping me down.

Wait... aren't the capitalists champions of the free market? Well, with you, I never know what words actually mean. The problem is that there are some barriers to economic activity that don't require the state. Such as a need for capital to start a business.

Also, what barriers are you talking about specifically. I mean, there are bad laws, and those should be overturned.

I'll give you credit. You can find a lot of information about this on Google. I mean, your argument is weak, but at least using your quotation, I can find information that supports what you say. Good work here!

http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/25/luxury/family-wealth/ - Except it's not. According to this article, the biggest reason why wealth is squandered has more to do with a lack of management rather than ambition. While you will find examples of bad spending and a lack of ambition, it's just that managing wealth can be very complicated.

How many people will this really help out though? There's only room for so much competition in certain markets.

I'd really like to hear your reaction to this article which was written by Sheldon Richman, called "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal"

quote:

Ron Paul�s 2008 presidential campaign introduced many people to the word �libertarian.� Since Paul is a Republican and Republicans, like libertarians, use the rhetoric of free markets and private enterprise, people naturally assume that libertarians are some kind of quirky offshoot of the American right wing. To be sure, some libertarian positions fit uneasily with mainstream conservatism�complete drug decriminalization, legal same-sex marriage, and the critique of the national-security state alienate many on the right from libertarianism.

But the dominant strain of libertarianism still seems at home on that side of the political spectrum. Paeans to property rights and free enterprise�the mainstream libertarian conviction that the American capitalist system, despite government intervention, fundamentally embodies those values�appear to justify that conclusion.

But then one runs across passages like this: �Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable.� And this: �build worker solidarity. On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionization�but I�m not talking about the prevailing model of �business unions� � but real unions, the old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage.�

These passages�the first by independent scholar Kevin Carson, the second by Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick Long�read as though they come not from libertarians but from radical leftists, even Marxists. That conclusion would be only half wrong: these words were written by pro-free-market left-libertarians. (The preferred term for their economic ideal is �freed market,� coined by William Gillis.)

These authors�and a growing group of colleagues�see themselves as both libertarians and leftists. They are standard libertarians in that they believe in the moral legitimacy of private ownership and free exchange and oppose all government interference in personal and economic affairs�a groundless, pernicious dichotomy. Yet they are leftists in that they share traditional left-wing concerns, about exploitation and inequality for example, that are largely ignored, if not dismissed, by other libertarians. Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity vis-�-vis bosses, support poor people�s squatting on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be repealed before the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges may be exercised. They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate favoritism�supported by highway subsidies and eminent domain�view the fictive personhood of the limited-liability corporation with suspicion, and doubt that Third World sweatshops would be the �best alternative� in the absence of government manipulation.

Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral politics, having little confidence in strategies that work through the government. They prefer to develop alternative institutions and methods of working around the state. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left encourages the formation of local activist and mutual-aid organizations, while its website promotes kindred groups and posts articles elaborating its philosophy. The new Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) encourages left-libertarians to bring their analysis of current events to the general public through op-eds.

These laissez-faire left-libertarians are not to be confused with other varieties of left-wing libertarians, such as Noam Chomsky or Hillel Steiner, who each in his own way objects to individualistic appropriation of unowned natural resources and the economic inequality that freed markets can produce. The left-libertarians under consideration here have been called �market-oriented left-libertarians� or �market anarchists,� though not everyone in this camp is an anarchist.

There are historical grounds for placing pro-market libertarianism on the left. In the first half of the 19th century, the laissez-faire liberal economist Frederic Bastiat sat on the left side of the French National Assembly with other radical opponents of the ancien r�gime, including a variety of socialists. The right side was reserved for reactionary defenders of absolute monarchy and plutocracy. For a long time �left� signified radical, even revolutionary, opposition to political authority, fired by hope and optimism, while �right� signified sympathy for a status quo of privilege or a return to an authoritarian order. These terms applied even in the United States well into the 20th century and only began to change during the New Deal, which prompted regrettable alliances of convenience that carried over into the Cold War era and beyond.

At the risk of oversimplifying, there are two wellsprings of modern pro-market left-libertarianism: the theory of political economy formulated by Murray N. Rothbard and the philosophy known as �Mutualism� associated with the pro-market anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon�who sat with Bastiat on the left side of the assembly while arguing with him incessantly about economic theory�and the American individualist anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker.

Rothbard (1926-1995) was the leading theorist of radical Lockean libertarianism combined with Austrian economics, which demonstrates that free markets produce widespread prosperity, social cooperation, and economic coordination without monopoly, depression, or inflation�evils whose roots are to be found in government intervention. Rothbard, who called himself an �anarcho-capitalist,� first saw himself as a man of the �Old Right,� the loose collection of opponents of the New Deal and American Empire epitomized by Sen. Robert Taft, journalist John T. Flynn, and more radically, Albert Jay Nock. Yet Rothbard understood libertarianism�s left-wing roots.

In his 1965 classic and sweeping essay �Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,� Rothbard identified �liberalism��what is today called libertarianism�with the left as �the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity.� The other great ideology to emerge after the French revolution �was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order.�

When the New Left arose in the 1960s to oppose the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex, and bureaucratic centralization, Rothbard easily made common cause with it. �The Left has changed greatly, and it is incumbent upon everyone interested in ideology to understand the change� . [T]he change marks a striking and splendid infusion of libertarianism into the ranks of the Left,� he wrote in �Liberty and the New Left.� His left-radicalism was clear in his interest in decentralization and participatory democracy, pro-peasant land reform in the feudal Third World, �black power,� and worker �homesteading� of American corporations whose profits came mainly from government contracts.

But with the fading of New Left, Rothbard deemphasized these positions and moved strategically toward right-wing paleoconservatism. His left-libertarian colleague, the former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess (1923-1994), kept the torch burning. In Dear America Hess wrote, �On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty,� while the left �has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.�

Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) was the editor of Liberty, the leading publication of American individualist anarchism. As a Mutualist, Tucker rigorously embraced free markets and voluntary exchange void of all government privilege and regulation. Indeed, he called himself a �consistent Manchester man,� a reference to the economic philosophy of the English free-traders Richard Cobden and John Bright. Tucker disdained defenders of the American status quo who, while favoring free competition among workers for jobs, supported capitalist suppression of competition among employers through government�s �four monopolies�: land, the tariff, patents, and money.

�What causes the inequitable distribution of wealth?� Tucker asked in 1892. �It is not competition, but monopoly, that deprives labor of its product. � Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product.�

The Rothbardians and Mutualists have some disagreements over land ownership and theories of value, but their intellectual cross-pollination has brought the groups closer philosophically. What unites them, and distinguishes them from other market libertarians, is their embrace of traditional left-wing concerns, including the consequences of plutocratic corporate power for workers and other vulnerable groups. But left-libertarians differ from other leftists in identifying the culprit as the historical partnership between government and business�whether called the corporate state, state capitalism, or just plain capitalism�and in seeing the solution in radical laissez faire, the total separation of economy and state.

Thus behind the political-economic philosophy is a view of history that separates left-libertarians from both ordinary leftists and ordinary libertarians. The common varieties of both philosophies agree that essentially free markets reigned in England from the time of the Industrial Revolution, though they evaluate the outcome very differently. But left-libertarians are revisionists, insisting that the era of near laissez faire is a myth. Rather than a radical freeing of economic affairs, England saw the ruling elite rig the social system on behalf of propertied class interests. (Class analysis originated with French free-market economists predating Marx.)

Through enclosure, peasants were dispossessed of land they and their kin had worked for generations and were forcibly turned into rent-paying tenants or wage-earners in the new factories with their rights to organize and even to move restricted by laws of settlement, poor laws, combination laws, and more. In the American colonies and early republic, the system was similarly rigged through land grants and speculation (for and by railroads, for example), voting restrictions, tariffs, patents, and control of money and banking.

In other words, the twilight of feudalism and the dawn of capitalism did not find everyone poised at the starting line as equals�far from it. As the pro-market sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who developed the conquest theory of the state, wrote in his book The State, it was not superior talent, ambition, thrift, or even luck that separated the property-holding minority from the propertyless proletarian majority�but legal plunder, to borrow Bastiat�s famous phrase.

Here is something Marx got right. Indeed, Kevin Carson seconds Marx�s �eloquent passage�: �these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.�

This system of privilege and exploitation has had long-distorting effects that continue to afflict most people to this day, while benefiting the ruling elite; Carson calls it �the subsidy of history.� This is not to deny that living standards have generally risen in market-oriented mixed economies but rather to point out that living standards for average workers would be even higher�not to mention less debt-based�and wealth disparities less pronounced in a freed market.

The �free-market anti-capitalism� of left-libertarianism is no contradiction, nor is it a recent development. It permeated Tucker�s Liberty, and the identification of worker exploitation harked back at least to Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), a free-market radical who was one of the first to apply the term �capitalist� disparagingly to the beneficiaries of government favors bestowed on capital at the expense of labor. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, �socialism� did not exclusively mean collective or government ownership of the means or production but was an umbrella term for anyone who believed labor was cheated out of its natural product under historical capitalism.

Tucker sometimes called himself a socialist, but he denounced Marx as the representative of �the principle of authority which we live to combat.� He thought Proudhon the superior theorist and the real champion of freedom. �Marx would nationalize the productive and distributive forces; Proudhon would individualize and associate them.�

The term capitalism certainly suggests that capital is to be privileged over labor. As left-libertarian author Gary Chartier of La Sierra University writes, �[I]t makes sense for [left-libertarians] to name what they oppose �capitalism.� Doing so � ensures that advocates of freedom aren�t confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers�as well as ordinary people around the world who use �capitalism� as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives.�

In contrast to nonleft-libertarians, who seem uninterested in, if not hostile to, labor concerns per se, left-libertarians naturally sympathize with workers� efforts to improve their conditions. (Bastiat, like Tucker, supported worker associations.) However, there is little affinity for government-certified bureaucratic unions, which represent little more than a corporatist suppression of the pre-New Deal spontaneous and self-directed labor/mutual-aid movement, with its �unauthorized� sympathy strikes and boycotts. Before the New Deal Wagner Act, big business leaders like GE�s Gerard Swope had long supported labor legislation for this reason.

Moreover, left-libertarians tend to harbor a bias against wage employment and the often authoritarian corporate hierarchy to which it is subject. Workers today are handicapped by an array of regulations, taxes, intellectual-property laws, and business subsidies that on net impede entry to potential alternative employers and self-employment. As well, periodic economic crises set off by government borrowing and Federal Reserve management of money and banking threaten workers with unemployment, putting them further at the mercy of bosses.

Competition-inhibiting cartelization diminishes workers� bargaining power, enabling employers to deprive them of a portion of the income they would receive in a freed and fully competitive economy, where employers would have to compete for workers�rather than vice versa�and self-employment free of licensing requirements would offer an escape from wage employment altogether. Of course, self-employment has its risks and wouldn�t be for everyone, but it would be more attractive to more people if government did not make the cost of living, and hence the cost of decent subsistence, artificially high in myriad ways�from building codes and land-use restrictions to product standards, highway subsidies, and government-managed medicine.

In a freed market left-libertarians expect to see less wage employment and more worker-owned enterprises, co-ops, partnerships, and single proprietorships. The low-cost desktop revolution, Internet, and inexpensive machine tools make this more feasible than ever. There would be no socialization of costs through transportation subsidies to favor nationwide over regional and local commerce. A spirit of independence can be expected to prompt a move toward these alternatives for the simple reason that employment to some extent entails subjecting oneself to someone else�s arbitrary will and the chance of abrupt dismissal. Because of the competition from self-employment, what wage employment remained would most likely take place in less-hierarchical, more-humane firms that, lacking political favors, could not socialize diseconomies of scale as large corporations do today.

Left-libertarians, drawing on the work of New Left historians, also dissent from the conservative and standard libertarian view that the economic regulations of the Progressive Era and New Deal were imposed by social democrats on an unwilling freedom-loving business community. On the contrary, as Gabriel Kolko and others have shown, the corporate elite�the House of Morgan, for example�turned to government intervention when it realized in the waning 19th century that competition was too unruly to guarantee market share.

Thus left-libertarians see post-Civil War America not as a golden era of laissez faire but rather as a largely corrupt business-ruled outgrowth of the war, which featured the usual military contracting and speculation in government-securities. As in all wars, government gained power and well-connected businessmen gained taxpayer-financed fortunes and hence unfair advantage in the allegedly free market of the Gilded Age. �War is the health of the state,� leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wrote. Civil war too.

These conflicting historical views are well illustrated in the writings of the pro-capitalist novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and Roy A. Childs Jr. (1949-1992), a libertarian writer-editor with definite leftist leanings. In the 1960s Rand wrote an essay with the self-explanatory title �America�s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,� which Childs answered with �Big Business and the Rise of American Statism.� �To a large degree it has been and remains big businessmen who are the fountainheads of American statism,� Childs wrote.

One way to view the separation of left-libertarians from other market libertarians is this: the others look at the American economy and see an essentially free market coated with a thin layer of Progressive and New Deal intervention that need only to be scraped away to restore liberty. Left-libertarians see an economy that is corporatist to its core, although with limited competitive free enterprise. The programs constituting the welfare state are regarded as secondary and ameliorative, that is, intended to avert potentially dangerous social discontent by succoring�and controlling�the people harmed by the system.

Left-libertarians clash with regular libertarians most frequently when the latter display what Carson calls �vulgar libertarianism� and what Roderick Long calls �Right-conflationism.� This consists of judging American business in today�s statist environment as though it were taking place in the freed market. Thus while nonleft-libertarians theoretically recognize that big business enjoys monopolistic privileges, they also defend corporations when they come under attack from the left on grounds that if they were not serving consumers, the competitive market would punish them. �Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term �free market� in an equivocal sense,� Carson writes, �[T]hey seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they�re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.�

Signs of Right-conflationism can be seen in the common mainstream libertarian defensiveness at leftist criticism of income inequality, America�s corporate structure, high oil prices, or the healthcare system. If there�s no free market, why be defensive? You can usually make a nonleft-libertarian mad by comparing Western Europe favorably with the United States. To this, Carson writes, �[I]f you call yourself a libertarian, don�t try to kid anybody that the American system is less statist than the German one just because more of the welfare queens wear three-piece suits� . [I]f we�re choosing between equal levels of statism, of course I�ll take the one that weighs less heavily on my own neck.�

True to their heritage, left-libertarians champion other historically oppressed groups: the poor, women, people of color, gays, and immigrants, documented or not. Left-libertarians see the poor not as lazy opportunists but rather as victims of the state�s myriad barriers to self-help, mutual aid, and decent education. Left-libertarians of course oppose government oppression of women and minorities, but they wish to combat nonviolent forms of social oppression such as racism and sexism as well. Since these are not carried out by force, the measures used to oppose them also may not entail force or the state. Thus, sex and racial discrimination are to be fought through boycotts, publicity, and demonstrations, not violence or antidiscrimination laws. For left-libertarians, southern lunch-counter racism was better battled through peaceful sit-ins than with legislation in Washington, which merely ratified what direct action had been accomplishing without help from the white elite.

Why do left-libertarians qua libertarians care about nonviolent, nonstate oppression? Because libertarianism is premised on the dignity and self-ownership of the individual, which sexism and racism deny. Thus all forms of collectivist hierarchy undermine the libertarian attitude and hence the prospects for a free society.

In a word, left-libertarians favor equality. Not material equality�that can�t be had without oppression and the stifling of initiative. Not mere equality under the law�for the law might be oppressive. And not just equal freedom�for an equal amount of a little freedom is intolerable. They favor what Roderick Long, drawing on John Locke, calls equality in authority: �Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.�

Finally, like most ordinary libertarians, left-libertarians adamantly oppose war and the American empire. They embrace an essentially economic analysis of imperialism: privileged firms seek access to resources, foreign markets for surplus goods, and ways to impose intellectual-property laws on emerging industrial societies to keep foreign manufacturers from driving down prices through competition. (This is not to say there aren�t additional, political factors behind the drive for empire.)

These days left-libertarians feel vindicated. American foreign policy has embroiled the country in endless overt and covert wars, with their high cost in blood and treasure, in the resource-rich Middle East and Central Asia�with torture, indefinite detention, and surveillance among other assaults on domestic civil liberties thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the historical Washington-Wall Street alliance�in which recklessness with other people�s money, fostered by guarantees, bailouts, and Federal Reserve liquidity masquerades as deregulation�has brought yet another financial crisis with its heavy toll for average Americans, additional job insecurity, and magnified Wall Street influence.

Such nefariousness can only hasten the day when people discover the left-libertarian alternative. Is that expectation realistic? Perhaps. Many Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with their country. They feel their lives are controlled by large government and corporate bureaucracies that consume their wealth and treat them like subjects. Yet they have little taste for European-style social democracy, much less full-blown state socialism. Left-libertarianism may be what they�re looking for. As the Mutualist Carson writes, �Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom �petty bourgeois� is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.�

Carson believes ordinary citizens are coming to �distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system.� Let�s hope he�s right.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/libertarian-left/

It should be noted that the sort of "left libertarians" that Richman is referring to were not socialists. They DID believe in private property and the free market but their concerns and values were quite similar to those on the radical left today. Sheldon Richman has actually been quite critical of the term "capitalism" when it comes to describing the sort of market that individualist libertarians support. Capitalism really was coined by Karl Marx as a term with negative connotations. Capital is savings or land or resources. So referring to a free market as a "capitalist" system implies that the system works exclusively for the benefit of those with capital to the detriment of workers, unions, the poor, etc. The Free Market that laissez faire liberals and libertarians support is not like that at all. The proof is that "capitalists" (meaning people who have money and resources) tend to rail against the free market. They always want to create cartels, to monopolize and exclude rather than compete.

I usually give this article to my left liberal friends because it speaks to them in a language they appreciate about the virtues of the market economy. It furthermore describes a tradition where proponents of the market economy held similar values and concerns as do radical leftists. This has been lost since right-wingers have coopted the language of "free markets" and perverted its historical meaning.

I'd be interested in reactions to Richman's article.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 02:17

burnishedfume: Mar 8, 2011; You really are a louse...

Jack of Hearts posted:

Dear jrod,

You defend Molyneux and HHH, and the best you can come up with is an unsourced/badly sourced claim about LBJ? Go copulate with your mother, you idiot.

Hey now, don't forget his really out of context quote by Lincoln earlier, where it proved that Lincoln was a so racist he forced the CSA to declare independence and attack the USA!

# ? Nov 17, 2014 02:18

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

jrodefeld posted:

Remember that those who have their wealth want the system to stay as it is. Capitalists who earn their money in the market tend to turn their focus on lobbying the State. They use the market then rail against the market. If you get to the top the only place to go it down. Businessmen don't want that so they form cartels and monopolize. And the only way to do this is through legislation and State privilege.

You are so very close to coming to the right conclusion here that it hurts. Let me ask you this, what is there to stop Capitalist Entrepreneurs in a Stateless society from just working together to make a new State to protect themselves with?

# ? Nov 17, 2014 02:29

TLM3101: Sep 8, 2010

jrodefeld posted:

I'd really like to hear your reaction to this article which was written by Sheldon Richman, called "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal"

No. Use your own words to defend your ideas. Don't try to deflect by throwing something from a conservative/Libertarian webpage up as if that's an argument. You have been called on this repeatedly and your continued insistence on pulling this poo poo is only showing that you have not thought enough about your own stated position to defend it!

jrodefeld posted:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/libertarian-left/

It should be noted that the sort of "left libertarians" that Richman is referring to were not socialists. They DID believe in private property and the free market but their concerns and values were quite similar to those on the radical left today. Sheldon Richman has actually been quite critical of the term "capitalism" when it comes to describing the sort of market that individualist libertarians support. Capitalism really was coined by Karl Marx as a term with negative connotations. Capital is savings or land or resources. So referring to a free market as a "capitalist" system implies that the system works exclusively for the benefit of those with capital to the detriment of workers, unions, the poor, etc. The Free Market that laissez faire liberals and libertarians support is not like that at all. The proof is that "capitalists" (meaning people who have money and resources) tend to rail against the free market. They always want to create cartels, to monopolize and exclude rather than compete.

I usually give this article to my left liberal friends because it speaks to them in a language they appreciate about the virtues of the market economy. It furthermore describes a tradition where proponents of the market economy held similar values and concerns as do radical leftists. This has been lost since right-wingers have coopted the language of "free markets" and perverted its historical meaning.

I'd be interested in reactions to Richman's article.

Again: No, and stop trying to deflect. You're being pressed on a point, the proper response is not to throw up a wall of text in an effort to deflect from what you're being pressed on, it is to respond, in your own words, to the point being raised.

But, since we're apparently playing this game, how about you give me your reaction to this quote first? I mean, I know you don't actually read the thread, but I want to hear what you have to say about this in regards to your minimum wage bullshit:

Mr George Philips, MP Wooton posted:

Mr. Philips said, that the whole course of his experience induced him to believe, that this bill would in no degree improve the condition of the labourers. He contended, that those persons who were acquainted with the management of cotton-factories were much better able to judge of what regulations were fit to be adopted, than those who knew nothing about the practical effect of the existing laws.

The provisions of sir Robert Peel's act had been evaded in many respects: and it was now in the power of the workmen to ruin many individuals, by enforcing the penalties for children working beyond the hours limited by that act. He was satisfied that the condition of the people working in the factories was much better than that of persons who worked out of them. He had heard only that morning, that the weavers out of doors did not receive more than one-third of the wages paid to the persons in factories; and the latter were besides provided with more convenient and wholesome places to work in. It would be well to limit the hours of children's working, if it were possible; but that was not possible without limiting the labour of adults.

The only effect of the measures now attempted would be to deprive the children of work altogether. He was satisfied that no such number of hours as had been asserted were ever used for the employment of children. The evasions of the acts which had already taken place had happened, it was true, in the least respectable mills, where the owners were wholly regardless of public opinion. It was a great mistake to suppose that the labourers of Lancashire were under the domination of their masters, or that they had no will of their own. 647 The effect of this and similar acts of legislation would be to keep up a spirit of hostility between the masters and the men. They had already produced this effect. The hon. gentleman concluded by saying, that he thought this interference extremely unadvisable. The sale and purchase of labour by the workmen and their employers ought to be left wholly unrestricted. The best thing that could be done to effect this object would be to repeal all that had been enacted on this subject.

Again, this is not from Wikipedia, but directly from the record of the debate on the bill. I want you to respond to this because it's just about verbatim the same thing Libertarians are claiming today, and it was used directly as a justification to have children between ages 9 and 16 work 12 hour shifts.

TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:00

Muscle Tracer: Feb 23, 2007; Medals only weigh one down.

jrodefeld posted:

Do you understand that words actually having a meaning?

:infinitely_expanding_ironicat.gif:

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:03

Cemetry Gator: Apr 3, 2007; Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

jrodefeld posted:

I'd really like to hear your reaction to this article which was written by Sheldon Richman, called "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal"

No. Instead of engaging with me, you're going to dump a really long, and dry, article by some guy I never heard of and ask me to give my thoughts on the matter? It's laziness. It's an appeal to authority.

You should be able to take his ideas, condense them down to a few brief sentences. Then you can link to the article as an extra resource. But you got to give people a hook. And I mean it. This is a dry article that's hard for me to really read well because it's actually really incredibly boring.

Also, I'm not going to debate with Sheldon Richman. I want to hear you engage with my ideas. Especially since you haven't dealt with anything I've had to say on your ridiculous minimum wage proposal.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:11

Muscle Tracer: Feb 23, 2007; Medals only weigh one down.

Any minute now, Jrode is going to come in here and FINALLY explain how a rational actor can exist in a system with imperfect information and while stuck in an exceptionally emotional animal body. He'll tell us why, although no person in all of history has acted primarily in their own rational best interest, they'll suddenly start to do so once the government is banished. He'll explain why individuals will act in their own personal worse interests when it means the best interests of society as a whole, like charitable giving during economic recessions and the permanent death of Jim Crow. He'll explain how life-saving healthcare does in fact exhibit appreciable price elasticity, as opposed to being one of the most inelastic services ever conceived. He won't mention a word about racism because, as he's stated 15 or 20 times now, he doesn't actually care about it.

But best of all, he'll explain why a system devoid of police, devoid of criminal investigators, devoid of prisons and judges, will be better at deterring crime than (or even NEARLY as good as) the existing system that has all of those things.

I can just FEEL it, you guys!

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:11

Tacky-Ass Rococco: Sep 7, 2010; by R. Guyovich

Muscle Tracer posted:

:infinitely_expanding_ironicat.gif:

Somehow this didn't register with me on first read. For God's sake.

If an-cap philosophy is correct, we should ostracize jrod for his horrific bad faith. The fact that any of us still want to interact with him demonstrates its implausibility.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:14

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

TLM3101 posted:

you have not thought enough about your own stated position to defend it!

I still say that libertarianism might have some good ideas so long as you don't think about any of them for more than 30 seconds.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:20

TLM3101: Sep 8, 2010

Cemetry Gator posted:

Also, I'm not going to debate with Sheldon Richman. I want to hear you engage with my ideas. Especially since you haven't dealt with anything I've had to say on your ridiculous minimum wage proposal.

Quoting and bolding for emphasis.

This is why you get people yelling at you, JRode. This is why the tone in so many of the replies to you ( and I freely include my own in that assessment ) is borderline - if not outright - hostile. You ask, even demand, that we engage with your ideas, but when the time comes for you to respond, you have no responses of your own to bring to the table, you simply throw up an article and then go "These are my thoughts on the matter, explained by some guy you've never heard of". This is showing incredible bad faith, not to mention that it's extremely rude, evasive, and dishonest.

e:

spoon0042 posted:

I still say that libertarianism might have some good ideas so long as you don't think about any of them for more than 30 seconds.

All of which, presumably, were lifted from the early Anarchists/Syndicalists/Socialists, like JRode tried to claim Spooner for Libertarianism. God knows Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe [et. al] have contributed nothing of intellectual value. And yeah, I'm still loving incredulous that someone could miss the point of early Anarchist thought that hard, but here we are.

TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:23

Goon Danton: May 24, 2012; Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Seriously, we don't try to argue with you by dropping blocks of text from Rawls or Picketty. We engage with you directly, with arguments in our own words. Do us the courtesy of doing the same.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:41

Caros: May 14, 2008

jrodefeld posted:

At least you are acknowledging what you are doing. The problem I have with this hypersensitivity is that it makes serious debate on many different important issues virtually impossible. If we have to continually walk on egg shells trying to avoid inadvertently using "dog whistle" language that some may interpret as coded racism, then that means that we are simply not permitted to have an opinion on certain issues.

As a libertarian, I tend to focus on what people actually do, what their actions are in the real world, not what their private thoughts may or may not be. That is why I consider a libertarian racist to be the most benign sort of racist. Now before you react, let me clarify what I am saying. If you are a libertarian, that necessarily means that you accept the non aggression principle as central to your system of morality. Furthermore, libertarianism is concerned with the individual rather than any collective. Rights should belong to individuals not groups. Racism is a collectivist mindset that is contradictory to the libertarian worldview that necessarily views people as individuals to be judged by their character and the merits of their actions.

Left Progressivism has a LONG history of racism and supremacists attitudes, but I wouldn't imply that most progressives are racist because of the sordid history of the movement. If I were to pull up the quotes of everyone from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Lyndon Johnson, you would be quite shocked to hear the sort of racism they casually used and the people they surrounded themselves used. Johnson in particular was well known to have regularly used the n-word in casual conversation.

JRodefeld, if you don't want to talk about racism in the libertarian party, may I suggest that you stop talking about loving racism?

I mention this because the whole loving reason we are on this tangent about racist libertarians is because you went out of your way to address a handful of posts asking if you believed in the incredibly fringe historical revisionism espoused by men like Thomas DiLorenzo. In the process of doing so you called Abraham Lincoln a racist and a white supremacist which caused other posters to (rightly) dig into the fact that many of the people you support hold or directly associate with people who hold virulently racist views even in TTYOL 2014. That you are now attempting to turn this back on us and say "Well there are a lot of racists in the left progressive history" is astonishing.

Yes, there are plenty of people in the history of Left Progressivism who are not (by modern standards) especially progressive on the issue of race. As VitalSigns pointed out, Social Security was incredibly biased against African Americans when it was first introduced. FDR didn't issue invitations to black olympians following the 1936 Olympics and so forth.

The key word there is history. Left Progressives do not have a membership with substantial racist views in the modern age. I will undoubtably acknowledge that someone like FDR had many of the same faults of his times, I don't doubt that FDR probably wasn't very good on homosexual rights in 1939. The difference is that FDR has been dead for decades, while Hans Hermann Hoppe wrote an article extolling the virtue of the natural social elites as recently as September of this loving year.

The other difference, as has also been pointed out is that we acknowledge and reject those viewpoints. You refuse to even acknowledge the existence of the very obvious racial biases in the libertarian 'movement', which is why your demographics skew Ninety-Three percent white.

quote:

In fact, Johnson uttered these words in 1963:

No he didn't. This is the third time in five days you have used an apocryphal quote that you can't be bothered to take a few minutes to source. If you had bothered you'd have been shocked to find that Johnson almost certainly did not utter those words. Are you planning on admitting at any point that you are in error here?

quote:

By the same logic you are using to criticize libertarians (and noting that no notable libertarian has ever used such blatant racist language), I could easily say that the entire left progressive program is inextricably tied to racist attitudes and the only reason why they don't use such language today is that they are exploiting the black vote. I think this would be grossly unfair. I don't believe that most left liberals are racist at all and I think most people on the left have good motives. I think it would be reasonable for you to extend the same courtesy to libertarians and stop trying to create this narrative that libertarianism as an ideology is inextricably linked to racist attitudes.

I know what you are going for with this example, but it doesn't carry through. Ignoring the fact that the quote doesn't apply, modern progressives are actively engaged in attempting to improve the quality of life for minorities. We point to racist views of libertarians that are at best a handful of decades old in most cases, and use that to point out that libertarians hold racist views today. You point to a half century old example of a politician saying "We should try and get black voters" to say... what? That we're all racist but we're holding our noses to get black votes?

quote:

I could have a field day pulling up quotes from Progressive heroes from the 20th century who established all your favorite government programs, from the Federal Reserve to Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid, that were incredibly racist and supremacist. Then I could conclude that these programs were ALWAYS designed to hurt the poor minorities since their proponents were clearly overwhelmingly racist. We could both play this game but I think it would be unfair to both of us.

Can you have a field day pulling up quotes from modern day Progressives that are incredibly racist and supremacist? Because it may surprise you to learn that people tended to be more racist in the US in the early half of the twentieth century than they are today. This all changed around that whole 'civil rights' thing that happened in the 60's.

What you are trying to do here is equate the thinking of modern day libertarian racists, with turn of the century progressives. Do you not see how loving insane that is? You are implying that the racial views of libertarians are equivilent to those of people who lived in the 1930's, something I agree with but which certainly does not bolster your case.

quote:

Racism is a disease of the mind, a prejudice that has existed everywhere throughout history born of an ignorance of other cultures and a desire to view your own "group" as somehow better than others. People who hold such prejudices have infiltrated every political ideology from the farthest left to the most conservative right.

And before you give the excuse that your progressive heroes were just "products of their time" and thus their bigoted views can be excused and somehow separated from the progressive reforms they pushed, you don't extend such an excuse to Rothbard who was from that era, even though he never said anything close to what Johnson or the others said. Rothbard was in his 40s by the time the civil rights movement was at its peak, and his prolific writings show that he was very supportive of extending the same civil rights enjoyed by whites to blacks and he has consistently praised certain civil rights leaders, even though he was critical of King.

And by critical of King you mean that Murray Rothbard believed that we should give africans a state if not for the fact that he thought they would need tons of foreign aid because of how lazy and stupid they were. You know what else Murray Rothbard supported? loving Apartheid.

The rest of this I won't even address because you are basing this entire post on the idea that Johnson said overtly racist things that you cannot prove he ever said and almost certainly did not say.

quote:

But no, Rothbard is to be thoroughly dismissed because he is not as politically correct as you think he should be, because you suggest he uses "coded" language to speak to racists. So forget all his historical work and contributions to economic and political thought.

No, Murray Rothbard is to be thoroughyl dismissed because he wrote an opinion piece talking about how there would be a flourishing market in children. Or how he supported Apartheid. Or how he wrote an article supporting The Bell Curve, which is a book about how there are genetic differences in intellegence between whites and blacks:

Murray Rothbard posted:

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial. The idea of any sort of radical or "revolutionary" social change became unfashionable among intellectuals and social scientists. The political and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century have altered that perspective, and observers are now more willing to entertain the idea of sudden revolutionary change.

Well, one vital and recent social change has been not only truly revolutionary but has occurred at almost dizzying speed. Namely: Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability. What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars, was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s, and it has been taboo ever since. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.

Just so we are clear, the bell curve determined that blacks were genetically prone to be stupider than white people. Murray Rothbard believes that this determination is non-controversial and self-evident. That isn't an Anti-PC thing to say, it is simply being racist.

quote:

Can you understand how the belief in the use of force against the innocent is inextricably linked to nearly every instance of racial horror, from Apartheid to Jim Crow to the Holocaust? Bigoted private views, while unfortunate, lose all of their power if not backed up by the law, by aggressive force.

This is not true. Even in the absence of Jim Crowe laws people still wanted to segregate in the south. Johnson had to send in the national guard because people specifically wanted to ignore the law in favor of their racist beliefs.

quote:

Imagine Hitler as a libertarian as opposed to a National Socialist. Instead of rising to power democratically as head of the German government and using State violence to murder Jews and blacks, he just fought for the right to exclude these people from his property. He would still be a reprehensible human being but he would have no power over anyone else.

Would he be a benevolent ruler in this example too? Because this is a stupid loving example. :godwin:

quote:

The collectivism espoused by left progressives is much closer to the collectivism espoused by racists than you realize. People hold all manner of irrational prejudices, but if you accept an ideology that is focused on individual rights rather than group identities and on self ownership and the non aggression principle, these irrational prejudices that people have in their heads become relatively benign.

Yes, the idea that we should make sure that everyone is taken care of is way closer to "I hate black people" than your ideology espoused by people who literally want the right to exclude black people from society, or who lobby for and lament the loss of a state that permitted human slavery. Go on :allears:

quote:

I can fully accept the possibility of a racist being attracted to libertarianism simply because they want to right to disassociate themselves from blacks or Jews or gays and exclude them from their property. However, most racists are not happy with that. They want to use force against those they hate and thus they favor legally enforced segregation, laws against interracial marriage and things of that nature, which the libertarian naturally opposes.

I appreciate that you are being more honest about what you are doing, but I think that the role of an intellectual is to stimulate critical thinking. For Hoppe or Rothbard or Reisman or anyone else to purposefully avoid discussion of topics related to race or culture or anything like that would be doing a disservice to the reader.

Hoppe, Rothbard and Reisman aren't attempting to 'stimulate critical thinking' they are simply putting their own prejudices to paper about how black people are inferior to white people. I'm sorry if you have trouble believing or understanding this, but the fact that you either can't or won't admit to the fact that Stefan Molyneux is a massive Misogynist tells us that you simply lack the critical thinking skills to understand if someone is racist. I don't joke when I say that I could show you a video of Hoppe saying that he hates all niggers everywhere, and you would try and excuse his statements as not racism. You do not understand what racism is, so stop talking on the subject.

quote:

I said I wouldn't speak about this topic but I did it anyway. Hopefully this will be one of my final statements on the matter.

Then stop.

You set the pace for this conversation Jrodefeld, appart from Valhalla DRO talk you are the driving force regarding this thread. You wanted to talk healthcare, so we talked healthcare. You wanted to talk minimum wage, we talked minimum wage. You don't want to talk racism, then stop talking about racism in this thread. Do not expect to be able to post something like:

quote:

I have not sourced any "well known racists". I have not done that nor would I ever trust or admire a racist commentator, economist or historian. You are falling back on that old leftist trope of employing the term "racist" as a catch all smear to tarnish the reputations of those who disagree with you. It is a tired cliche at this point.

And expect that we won't call you out with dozens of examples.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 03:46

Tacky-Ass Rococco: Sep 7, 2010; by R. Guyovich

jrod, do you agree with The Bell Curve? Obviously, on a forum full of leftists, we'll lambast you for saying yes. But if a position is really correct you ought to defend it regardless of perception. So, yes or no?

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:11

Tacky-Ass Rococco: Sep 7, 2010; by R. Guyovich

Caros, inasmuch as he's unwilling to deal with most counter-arguments, and given the work you put into yours, you are our Lancelot.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:13

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

Jack of Hearts posted:

Caros, inasmuch as he's unwilling to deal with most counter-arguments, and given the work you put into yours, you are our Lancelot.

You know that old screenshot of Cefte shooting someone down basically sentence-for-sentence with a source for every rebuttal? That's what's going on here. It's dope.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:22

Wolfsheim: Dec 23, 2003; "Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."

jrodefeld posted:

Remember that those who have their wealth want the system to stay as it is. Capitalists who earn their money in the market tend to turn their focus on lobbying the State. They use the market then rail against the market. If you get to the top the only place to go it down. Businessmen don't want that so they form cartels and monopolize. And the only way to do this is through legislation and State privilege.

Having all the money probably helps. Without the State, what's to stop the guy who already owns the factory from burning down the businesses of any up-and-coming competitors? The police that no longer exist? The DROs that the poor person couldn't afford?

quote:

Those who should favor the free market the most are the poor and middle class. The unfettered market continually overturns the wealth of the rich because the poor have many competitive advantages over them. They are ambitious, have less expenses, can worker cheaper and more efficiently. The wealthy erect economic barriers to the poor, they speak to them condescendingly and paternalisticly. They sell the poor on the idea that they are victims and need to rely on welfare programs. What they really don't want is for the poor to undercut the rich and overturn their wealth through the market.

Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. You're assumption that without a State (and by extension, a minimum wage and a safety net) the poor's brilliant entrepreneurship will finally shine instead of the majority of them just taking that $3/hr job so their kids don't starve to death. Your inspirational speech doesn't count for much when history shows the results would be more people worse off and even more easily exploited.

quote:

There is an old saying about the free market economy. "Rags to riches back to rags in three generations". It is an observable phenomenon that the privileged children of the rich don't have the same ambition and competence to achieve that their parents, who actually earned their wealth, had. There are certain values that you learn by growing up poor or middle class that you lose if you are raised wealthy. The children of privilege tend to squander much of the wealth of their parents without having all the skills to maintain and grow their wealth and within a few generations the family has fallen back down into the middle class or even lower.

Actually, financial mobility is crazy stagnant. You're both underestimating how much wealth the already-rich have and for some reason assuming less laws means it would be harder for them to continue hoarding that wealth. I mean, they're already willing to break laws and make backroom deals with corrupt lawmakers now, why when you eliminate even those barriers will they begin to play nice?

Seriously, do you have an actual answer to these questions? They're not even 'lifeboat scenarios' at this point, these will be immediate and constant problems in any kind of stateless society and you have yet to give any kind of real solution to any of them. Do you have one?

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:24

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Even if LBJ were the most racist racist ever to racist, the Civil Rights Act was championed and made possible only by the unrelenting efforts of the Black Civil Rights Movement. Even if it could be proven that LBJ was a hypocrite who only did it to get black votes, that doesn't prove the CRA was bad for black people, because the reason it got black votes is because black people near-unanimously demanded it! All that would prove is that black leaders were able to strongarm a reluctant LBJ into passing it.

So what, was the CRA all the NAACP and Dr. Martin Luther King's evil plan to subjugate black people? I mean, I guess it was if we're using the logic LBJ was racist => the CRA is a racist plot => Martin Luther King and the NAACP hatched a racist anti-black plot. Like, do you ever take 5 minutes to think through the logical consequences of your arguments?

jrodefeld posted:

I'd really like to hear your reaction to this article which was written by Sheldon Richman, called "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal"

Oh wait, I guess you don't since we've already leaped on to something else.

Jrod: "I'm interested in your reactions to this article by a neocon blowhard"
Posters: "That argument is bad for reasons A, B, C, D, and also E."
Jrod: "This is getting bogged down, instead I'm interested in your reactions to this article by a Big-Bang-denying kook"

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:26

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

VitalSigns posted:

Jrod: "This is getting bogged down, instead I'm interested in your reactions to this article by a Big-Bang-denying kook"

That reminds me.

Which explains some things.

Also "hoodlums" *not racist*

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:40

Polygynous: Dec 13, 2006; welp

You see, children's small hands are suited to sorting coal, and they'll be learning skills to apply to future jobs with their crushed fingers and damaged lungs.

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:44

Political Whores: Feb 13, 2012

That Richman article is smarmy bullshit and any of your "leftist" friends who got taken in by it are either naive or uninterested in really changing the status quo.

E: Seriously, are you really going to sit there and use an article that talks about the "desktop revolution" as a great equalizing force in society and wealth distribution, in 2014?

Political Whores fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 04:44

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# ? May 21, 2024 21:16

Dmitri-9: Nov 30, 2004; There's something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck. I love Uncle Scrooge.

How do we end this teenage crime wave? Maybe let the black kids be janitors so they can learn janitor skills.

Juvenile Arrest Rates for Property Crime Index Offenses (ojjdp.gov)

Dmitri-9 fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Nov 17, 2014

# ? Nov 17, 2014 05:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Libertarians: You fire fighter lovers sure are good at debate!

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