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Murray Rothbard is an amazing troll. I cited the whole David Duke thing in my Rothbard is an insane racist and probably the world's foremost Jewish, holocaust denier.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:50
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Which of the libertarians we discuss in this thread—Rothbard, Reason et al—are the ones who were as hard as they could be on America post-1964 while going "oh take it easy on apartheid South Africa, they're doing the best they can!"
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Jan 9, 2015 18:21
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:Which of the libertarians we discuss in this thread—Rothbard, Reason et al—are the ones who were as hard as they could be on America post-1964 while going "oh take it easy on apartheid South Africa, they're doing the best they can!" Yes? Rothbard ran an article where he talked about how we shouldn't cut trade to South Africa apartheid because something something free market makes everything better. Reason likewise ran two issues in the 70's (I believe) detailing why aparthied wasn't so bad and also the holocaust didn't happen.
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Jan 9, 2015 18:29
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Rothbard also wrote that if the descendants of former slaves were given a country of their own it would either require massive aid from the US or it would fail because of the racial weakness of blacks. He believed that free competition would look like systemic racism because either way, the lesser races would be worse off.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:05
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Rothbard also wrote that if the descendants of former slaves were given a country of their own it would either require massive aid from the US or it would fail because of the racial weakness of blacks. He believed that free competition would look like systemic racism because either way, the lesser races would be worse off. He was also amazed that Malcolm X sounded nearly as intelligent as a white man, which he considered the lone exception to the liberal myth about the equal fitness of the races. I am not making that up. Murray Rothbard posted:In the last analysis, then, it is not Malcolm’s ideas, militant or not, nationalist or not, that continue to fascinate, and to attract followers. Not at all. On the contrary, it was Malcolm as a person who was the great attraction when alive and still is, thirty years after his death. For Malcolm was indeed unique among black leadership, past and present. He did no shuckin’ and jivin’, he was not a clown like “the Rev.” Al Sharpton, he was not moronic like Ben Hooks or Thurgood Marshall, he did not simply threaten Whitey in a loutish manner like the Black Panthers, he was not a fraudulent intellectual with a rococo Black Baptist minister style, like “Dr.” King. He stood out like a noble eagle among his confreres. He carried himself with great pride and dignity; his speaking style was incisive and sparkled with intelligence and sardonic wit. In short, his attraction for blacks was and is that he acted white. It is a ridiculous liberal cliche that blacks are just like whites but with a different skin color; but in Malcolm’s case, regardless of his formal ideology, it really seemed to be true.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:09
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There are a fair number of people in the thread who admit to having had a "libertarian phase" when they were younger. Why is this? When I was 14 I had all of the personality traits that are common among libertarians (believing oneself to be an ubermensch basically) but I still wanted high taxes and a strong social safety net for everyone else despite my own self-assured future success. So I'm wondering, is there something that maybe triggers well-to-do middle/upper class white males to start thinking "gently caress the poor"?
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Jan 9, 2015 19:36
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QuarkJets posted:There are a fair number of people in the thread who admit to having had a "libertarian phase" when they were younger. Why is this? When I was 14 I had all of the personality traits that are common among libertarians (believing oneself to be an ubermensch basically) but I still wanted high taxes and a strong social safety net for everyone else despite my own self-assured future success. So I'm wondering, is there something that maybe triggers well-to-do middle/upper class white males to start thinking "gently caress the poor"? Oh I wasn't close to well-to-do. White male yeah, but I was (and still am  ) the poor I advocated loving. I just didn't care I was doing that - I started from the principle that everyone is a self-contained and separate individual, and from there the only way forward I could see was libertarianism. In fact what I considered ideal was a parallel dimension for every single sapient being in existence because I saw all interaction that wasn't 100% voluntary in any way as morally repugnant. I thought that although we couldn't get to the ideal, things would be better without the state, at least. I did think it would overall help people, but I wasn't too concerned with those who would lose out - not because of typical libertarian stuff like denying anymore might suffer, or to blame them for it themselves, but because I thought the moral imperative of non-coerced interaction was more important. The flaws in this thinking are blazingly obvious to me now.When I stopped being a stupid loving teenager I realized that until we actually do create seven billion alternate Earths, we are all stuck on the same planet and have to work together one way or another. Once I accepted that non-coercive interaction in the way I envisioned it was impossible, it didn't take long for everything else to come crashing down and for me to realize I was a god drat idiot. Nowadays I possess such traits as empathy and sanity and have experience with needing healthcare and all that, but I do still adhere to the social side of libertarianism somewhat, i.e. that people should be left alone in their private lives as long as they leave everyone else alone.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:58
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QuarkJets posted:There are a fair number of people in the thread who admit to having had a "libertarian phase" when they were younger. Why is this? When I was 14 I had all of the personality traits that are common among libertarians (believing oneself to be an ubermensch basically) but I still wanted high taxes and a strong social safety net for everyone else despite my own self-assured future success. So I'm wondering, is there something that maybe triggers well-to-do middle/upper class white males to start thinking "gently caress the poor"? A lot of the people who were libertarians at 15 were also from poor families, they just were deluded enough to think it was TAXES and REGULATIONS keeping their family down.
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Jan 9, 2015 20:04
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QuarkJets posted:There are a fair number of people in the thread who admit to having had a "libertarian phase" when they were younger. Why is this? When I was 14 I had all of the personality traits that are common among libertarians (believing oneself to be an ubermensch basically) but I still wanted high taxes and a strong social safety net for everyone else despite my own self-assured future success. So I'm wondering, is there something that maybe triggers well-to-do middle/upper class white males to start thinking "gently caress the poor"? This is something I've been thinking about, since I notice a lot of things that would have appealed to teenage-me when I'm looking at mises.org. Here's a brief list of what I've seen.
Once you have an ideology assuring you that you are smarter than everyone else, those teachers are trying to hold you back because they're jealous of your abilities, and that the State is the only thing that will hold you back from achieving all of your adolescent power fantasies, it's really easy to see how a teenage boy would get really invested in it.
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Jan 9, 2015 20:06
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Nintendo Kid posted:A lot of the people who were libertarians at 15 were also from poor families, they just were deluded enough to think it was TAXES and REGULATIONS keeping their family down. Basically this. I thought the inner workings of society could be reduced to a series of logical deductions, and this was one of them. I was a white bootstraps poster boy and bought into my own just world fallacy as I believed my inherent superiority should rocket me to the top rungs of society. It was my curiosity in the areas of psychology and sociology that led me to start rejecting my former assumptions, as well as getting the gently caress out of small town Mississippi and observing from an outside perspective.
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Jan 9, 2015 20:08
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I'm from an upper-middle-class family with a software engineer at the head just north of Silicon Valley. I never really had a libertarian phase; I was somewhat Republican-leaning before 2006, but after that I slowly started moving to the left and was pretty pro-Obama in 2007-2008. I was one of those idiots who was like "YEAH RON PAUL" thinking he and libertarianism wasn't THAT bad—The Good Ones in the GOP, if you may, and "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" still sounded fine to me when I was 14. I slowly came to see him as being loving awful—though when a lot of my other well-off friends from high school were falling head over heels for him c. fall of 2011, it was hard for me to really explain why he was bad, aside from saying his "end the fed" poo poo sounded like nonsense or that he was racist as all hell. I mean, if you said he was racist, some of them would say "oh sure he's racist, but so is the whole GOP so I'm not holding it against him  "It wasn't until I first started posting in D&D that I really was aware of how bad he was, not to mention the gamut of nutters like Rothbard and Triple H. So thanks, guys 
Jerry Manderbilt fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 20:14
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VitalSigns posted:Murray Rothbard What. That's one of the most insane things I've ever read, and I spend hours every week reading the Debate Disco!
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Jan 9, 2015 23:10
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Oh please. The baby market is way worse.Murray 'Free Market Baby Ca$h' Rothbard posted:the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.[4] The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.[5] (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)?[6] The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such “neglect” down to a minimum.)
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Jan 10, 2015 00:53
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Oh please. The baby market is way worse. Its not the baby market that is the really hosed up part in my opinion. I mean yeah selling children is hosed up beyond all measure, but like staring at a light bulb next to the sun, its evil is simply drowned out in the fact that Murray Rothbard believes parents should not be legally required to feed, clothe or otherwise do anything for their children. Murray Rothbard believes that there should be no law against letting a baby starve to death, though of course he thinks it is morally a more complicated question. News flash for libertarians out there, the man who is arguably the founder of Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't necessarily think parents are morally wrong to let their children starve.
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Jan 10, 2015 01:47
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Oh absolutely. The circumstances that necessitate a baby market are the main reason it is terrifying. Otherwise, it's a weird way to describe adoption.
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Jan 10, 2015 01:55
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Caros posted:Its not the baby market that is the really hosed up part in my opinion. I mean yeah selling children is hosed up beyond all measure, but like staring at a light bulb next to the sun, its evil is simply drowned out in the fact that Murray Rothbard believes parents should not be legally required to feed, clothe or otherwise do anything for their children. Murray Rothbard believes that there should be no law against letting a baby starve to death, though of course he thinks it is morally a more complicated question. Really what's the difference between letting the child starve and throwing it into a canyon? Either way the baby is dead and at least the canyon death is quick.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:06
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Who What Now posted:Really what's the difference between letting the child starve and throwing it into a canyon? Either way the baby is dead and at least the canyon death is quick. One way is self defence and the other is throwing a baby into a huge loving pit. Because let's be clear, the state mandating you to feed your child rather than let it slowly starve to death is aggression. That infant is stealing from you unless you agree to a voluntary contract with it.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:22
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I grew up really poor but I still went through a libertarian stage, which looking back I think came largely from Just World theory but also because I was a teenager in rural Michigan during the height of the militia movement so I was exposed early and often to antigovernment ideas and other dumb things we associate with libertarians today like the gold standard. Of course, I'd never heard the term "libertarian" at the time because we didn't have Internet at home but I absolutely would have identified as one.
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Jan 10, 2015 02:22
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Okay that's really weird, it seems like all of the people in this thread who grew up well-to-do had a socialism or communism phase whereas all of the people who grew up poor had a libertarianism phase.
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Jan 10, 2015 09:06
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QuarkJets posted:Okay that's really weird, it seems like all of the people in this thread who grew up well-to-do had a socialism or communism phase whereas all of the people who grew up poor had a libertarianism phase. A lot of american society is designed to keep the poor thinking against their interests, whereas if you're rich enough to have got a not-poo poo education and a stable life where you've got time to think about stuff, you're better equipped. In more civilized countries you'll find way more leftist working class people, to the point that the idea of class conflict is so heavily ingrained several generations of family will vote for an apple in a hat so long as it was red. McCarthy solidly stuck a knife in that in the US.
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Jan 10, 2015 09:36
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HorseLord posted:A lot of american society is designed to keep the poor thinking against their interests, whereas if you're rich enough to have got a not-poo poo education and a stable life where you've got time to think about stuff, you're better equipped. [Very long list of citations needed]. I know this is a popular and easy thing to say, but it's a real task to prove. I agree that poor people don't agitate very effectively in their own interests and that a lot of that stems from lovely education etc. but neglect and indifference are much easier to prove than design. Then again, you might not have meant 'designed' like that. quote:In more civilized countries you'll find way more leftist working class people, to the point that the idea of class conflict is so heavily ingrained several generations of family will vote for an apple in a hat so long as it was red. McCarthy solidly stuck a knife in that in the US. This is kind of a misconception. To simplify too much: a lot of leftist parties in Europe are coalitions between a middle class leftist base and a working class leftist base. The middle class leftist base is often the one agitating more for greater social freedom, while the left-working class base is often agitating for more progressive economics. In the UK, for example, the working class base of support for the Labour party (not that left-wing of a party anymore, to be fair) is fairly socially conservative. This is partly why populist right-wing parties in Europe can suck up voters they seemingly should not be able to, from left-wing parties, and why even leftist parties in lots of European countries have started to make populist noises about immigration and so on. QuarkJets posted:Okay that's really weird, it seems like all of the people in this thread who grew up well-to-do had a socialism or communism phase whereas all of the people who grew up poor had a libertarianism phase. A lot of people I know have done both. In the case of my friends, I think a lot of it is to do with being able to cultivate some air of intellectual superiority, or some sense that you're one of the few people who 'really gets it'. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Jan 10, 2015 |
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Jan 10, 2015 11:26
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The argument that is sometimes made, and it's actually a legitimate one, is that a lot of those companies are riding on government corruption. GM effectively has a negative tax rate. Comcast will often sign contracts with local areas setting themselves up as literally the only company you can get TV and internet from. Actually that company is notoriously lovely for being anti-competition. In these cases the lolbertarians are right in that these companies should not get as much government help as they do and, if that help wasn't there, somebody would be less lovely and get the business. One major problem with America is that crony capitalism is rampant and the government has picked winners in certain markets. You literally can't compete with certain companies. It is impossible. I get the argument but how would it be any different in a world without crony capitalism/corporatism? A person living in a city that's entirely provided cable by Comcast would be just as out of luck as a person in a similar situation right now. QuarkJets posted:Okay that's really weird, it seems like all of the people in this thread who grew up well-to-do had a socialism or communism phase whereas all of the people who grew up poor had a libertarianism phase. This is accurate for myself as well. Though I should say my flirtation with libertarianism was very brief. So brief that I can't even remember when I started and when it ended.
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Jan 10, 2015 12:19
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Disinterested posted:[Very long list of citations needed]. I know this is a popular and easy thing to say, but it's a real task to prove. I agree that poor people don't agitate very effectively in their own interests and that a lot of that stems from lovely education etc. but neglect and indifference are much easier to prove than design. A partial list of groups with a vested interest in keeping the poor from recognizing and acting in their interests in one or more ways: both major political parties; the news media; huge industries like defense, fossil fuels, and banking; the police/military; mainstream White Evangelical Christianity; every large employer of any type; and of course the rich in general. All of these groups actively propagandize and lobby against the interests of the majority of Americans. They are often more than happy to work together, for instance the military-industrial complex is lionized by the media, then sent to open up markets for industry and serve as a PR arm for politicians. Similarly, anyone who benefits from sexism, racism, etc has a vested interest in keeping one or more minorities from asserting themselves. Do representatives of every single one of these groups meet monthly to plan out their strategy for oppressing America? No, of course not. But we know that half the regulators in Washington came from industry, and half the lobbyists came from government; we know that the rich congregate in insular communities; we can see groups like the Chamber of Commerce or the Southern Baptist Convention. It's well known that these groups have from time to time made long-term investments, like think tanks and university economics departments, with the intent of fabricating "evidence" for future propaganda. (Hell, you've got business organizations like ALEC straight up writing legislation at this point.) All this is not to say that every single meme in our culture is a product of these forces, but there is absolutely an organized effort.
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Jan 10, 2015 12:53
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A lot of the people involved in these things really do believe that what they're selling is good for poor people, though. It's always the mistake that people like Chomsky make that they think that people who advocate imperialism or whatever are doing it cynically, not really believing their ideology that it is really for the benefit of the oppressed, and that demonstrating a self-interest is a form of proof in itself that these people are cynical. Large numbers of the groups you are talking about - probably a majority - have a functioning ideology that insulates them from the fact that what they are doing is oppressive or whatever. Not everything is conspiracy-lite, that's not the way ideology functions. More often than not the drive to make an ideology that benefits your interests is at least partly sub-conscious.
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Jan 10, 2015 12:58
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QuarkJets posted:Okay that's really weird, it seems like all of the people in this thread who grew up well-to-do had a socialism or communism phase whereas all of the people who grew up poor had a libertarianism phase. I don't fit that mold. I grew up solidly working class and had a socialist phase instead. Disinterested posted:A lot of the people involved in these things really do believe that what they're selling is good for poor people, though. It's always the mistake that people like Chomsky make that they think that people who advocate imperialism or whatever are doing it cynically, not really believing their ideology that it is really for the benefit of the oppressed, and that demonstrating a self-interest is a form of proof in itself that these people are cynical. That's how I see it. It doesn't take a central plan to make oppression happen. The natural human tendency to think of yourself as a good person, to base your worldview on what you see in your life rather than what people you don't know are going through, and to help out your friends who are in a similar social status, that's really all it takes.
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Jan 10, 2015 13:12
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Disinterested posted:A lot of the people involved in these things really do believe that what they're selling is good for poor people, though. It's always the mistake that people like Chomsky make that they think that people who advocate imperialism or whatever are doing it cynically, not really believing their ideology that it is really for the benefit of the oppressed, and that demonstrating a self-interest is a form of proof in itself that these people are cynical. That is fundamentally compatible with what he said; just because something is systemic, coordinated and intentional does not mean the executors are conscious or cartoonish villains.
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Jan 10, 2015 14:03
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archangelwar posted:That is fundamentally compatible with what he said; just because something is systemic, coordinated and intentional does not mean the executors are conscious or cartoonish villains. It is a strong implication in what he is saying that he regards the whole thing as being more consciously intended by the agents than I do, and transacted on a more openly selfish basis. Cartoon villains don't have to come in to the equation - and, of course, there are hucksters and cynical people doing this kind of evil poo poo out there. But yeah, it's a mixed bag.
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Jan 10, 2015 14:22
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Disinterested posted:It is a strong implication in what he is saying that he regards the whole thing as being more consciously intended by the agents than I do, If you look at social studies education in junior high and high school, which is so to speak the sharp end of indoctrination in this country, it's trivial to identify a strong status quo bias. And it is conscious, in some places more obviously than others. Here I'm thinking of states like where the instruction is blatantly slanted to push a specific narrative, such as Arizona banning Mexican-American studies or Texas adopting openly neo-Confederate textbooks. Even discounting the extreme examples and just focuses on the general thrust of instruction towards bland centrist conservatism, you could make the argument that promoting the status quo is training low-income kids to oppose their own interests--because the status quo sucks for them. But like you say, it's not selfish. The objective of public education is to help students become productive and employable citizens, which is in their individual best interests. Whether it's in their collective best interests to shore up the status quo is another argument altogether.
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Jan 10, 2015 16:20
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EvanSchenck posted:If you look at social studies education in junior high and high school, which is so to speak the sharp end of indoctrination in this country, it's trivial to identify a strong status quo bias. And it is conscious, in some places more obviously than others. Here I'm thinking of states like where the instruction is blatantly slanted to push a specific narrative, such as Arizona banning Mexican-American studies or Texas adopting openly neo-Confederate textbooks. Even discounting the extreme examples and just focuses on the general thrust of instruction towards bland centrist conservatism, you could make the argument that promoting the status quo is training low-income kids to oppose their own interests--because the status quo sucks for them. But like you say, it's not selfish. The objective of public education is to help students become productive and employable citizens, which is in their individual best interests. Whether it's in their collective best interests to shore up the status quo is another argument altogether. You're right that education is a good example, even if some of it is a merely local initiative. There are some interesting examples of this to do with the cold war and depictions of communism, and some of the stranger things the CIA wound up spending money on (educational initiatives, academic journals, art exhibitions etc).
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Jan 10, 2015 16:22
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EvanSchenck posted:If you look at social studies education in junior high and high school, which is so to speak the sharp end of indoctrination in this country, it's trivial to identify a strong status quo bias. And it is conscious, in some places more obviously than others. Here I'm thinking of states like where the instruction is blatantly slanted to push a specific narrative, such as Arizona banning Mexican-American studies or Texas adopting openly neo-Confederate textbooks. Even discounting the extreme examples and just focuses on the general thrust of instruction towards bland centrist conservatism, you could make the argument that promoting the status quo is training low-income kids to oppose their own interests--because the status quo sucks for them. But like you say, it's not selfish. The objective of public education is to help students become productive and employable citizens, which is in their individual best interests. Whether it's in their collective best interests to shore up the status quo is another argument altogether. Education can actually end up being dramatically different between the economic classes. Schools in poor areas tend to be of the "sit down, shut up" variety with lovely funding, a lack of equipment, and a heavier focus on doing what you're told. Gifted programs are sometimes flat lie where wealthy children get in while the poor are kept out regardless of intelligence. Private schools tend to not only have more resources available but also have a dramatically different style of education. A working-class education is basically "sit down, do what you're told, memorize all this poo poo, never question anything."
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Jan 10, 2015 17:09
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Disinterested posted:It is a strong implication in what he is saying that he regards the whole thing as being more consciously intended by the agents than I do, and transacted on a more openly selfish basis. Cartoon villains don't have to come in to the equation - and, of course, there are hucksters and cynical people doing this kind of evil poo poo out there. I am saying that there is a concerted effort to advocate for ideas that are harmful, regardless of whether the ruling class is aware of what they're pushing. It's the same as how the Southern Strategy is racist, even if some supporters no longer hear the dog whistle. Also, I'm not terribly enthusiastic about giving people a pass for ignorance. We are talking, in general, about a group with more access to education, research, and communication than essentially anyone else in the history of human life. If someone is still pushing ideas like "poor people have it easy", the line between willful ignorance and maliciousness is pretty thin.
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Jan 10, 2015 22:11
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Mornacale posted:I am saying that there is a concerted effort to advocate for ideas that are harmful, regardless of whether the ruling class is aware of what they're pushing. It's the same as how the Southern Strategy is racist, even if some supporters no longer hear the dog whistle. I sometimes forget how bad the rhetoric towards poor people can be in the US, in a way that is simply not possible electorally in a lot of Europe. It is amazing to me that dialogue is always about the 'squeezed middle class', as if there isn't a much worse off wrung of hardworking people underneath them. I'm not necessarily talking about giving people a pass for ignorance, but I think there are a lot of people in the world, including a lot of left wing people, that advocate arguments, policies etc. that are bad for the poor, and I think the question has to be more about (a) how rational relatively speaking, and in their context their arguments are; and (b) how genuinely they believe their views and policies could help others, and, by extension (c) how cynical they are being. If the test is just the end result of what a broad range of people advocate, not including the why and how, you're being a bit of a blunt instrument.
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Jan 10, 2015 22:28
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Disinterested posted:I sometimes forget how bad the rhetoric towards poor people can be in the US, in a way that is simply not possible electorally in a lot of Europe. It is amazing to me that dialogue is always about the 'squeezed middle class', as if there isn't a much worse off wrung of hardworking people underneath them. I agree that the moral culpability of advocacy of anti-poor ideas shifts based on a number of factors, but regardless there is clearly an organized effort to push them, so I also agree with the claim that a lot of society is "designed to keep the poor thinking against their interests" that generated this conversation.
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Jan 11, 2015 00:30
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Disinterested posted:A lot of the people involved in these things really do believe that what they're selling is good for poor people, though. It's always the mistake that people like Chomsky make that they think that people who advocate imperialism or whatever are doing it cynically, not really believing their ideology that it is really for the benefit of the oppressed, and that demonstrating a self-interest is a form of proof in itself that these people are cynical. I'm not terribly sure how you got that impression from Chomsky's writings. Chomsky essentially agrees with you when describing the structure of the modern corporation, coming to the conclusion that it will naturally filter in the sort of people who really believe they're doing good for the world/offering the best goods at the best prices/anything else. He mostly reserves that kind of cynicism for government planners. It's pretty hard to assert that there's a functioning, allegedly benevolent ideology behind evading congressional sanctions in order to fund terrorist groups who routinely massacre third world peasants.
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Jan 11, 2015 14:04
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Heavy neutrino posted:He mostly reserves that kind of cynicism for government planners. It's pretty hard to assert that there's a functioning, allegedly benevolent ideology behind evading congressional sanctions in order to fund terrorist groups who routinely massacre third world peasants. I am mostly talking about government. He makes these mistakes all the time in the context of historical imperialism, in particular 19th century imperialism. And it wouldn't be hard to find Cold Warriors who really thought that poo poo really was for the best in the best of all possible worlds (but equally, easy to find people like Kissinger who really were legit cold-blooded). I think I don't disagree with any of you too much, I just think I see the phenomenon that you are all describing as a bit more incoherent and disorganised. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 14:06
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Err, pre-WW2 imperial planners in general certainly had functioning ideologies, but they typically involved pure racism and an ethnically differentiated value for human lives. I'm not sure where the error of cynicism occurs in describing this as morally degenerate.
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Jan 11, 2015 14:13
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Heavy neutrino posted:Err, pre-WW2 imperial planners in general certainly had functioning ideologies, but they typically involved pure racism and an ethnically differentiated value for human lives. I'm not sure where the error of cynicism occurs in describing this as morally degenerate. I didn't say it wasn't morally degenerate (it is), but Chomsky sometimes asserts that racism was merely a pretext - the materialist cause being genuine. That is demonstrably in some cases untrue (and could certainly be said to be truer of early and late British colonialism). Racism as a justification also wasn't universal - there was also a utilitarian non-racialist imperialist intellectual tradition in Britain; and a very firmly anti-racist Christian imperialist tradition, amongst others. It's not a defence of imperialism to try to understand the different ways in which it functions. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Jan 11, 2015 14:19
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 This Week in Mises.org! What True Health Care Reform Would Look Like posted:Many Americans are so fed up with the American healthcare system, that what seems too many to be the most sensible thing to do is to follow the European model and nationalize the entire industry. With a quick glance at some snapshot statistics, it doesn’t seem to be a crazy idea. After all, according to the WHO (World Health Organization), the United States ranks only no. 37 in quality of healthcare worldwide. Look a little closer though, and one will find that this data does not tell the whole, unbiased story. It turns out that the WHO uses “fairness” as one of its criteria for evaluating nation’s healthcare systems. In fact, a number of the criteria used by the WHO are not that relevant to healthcare itself, such as how much patients pay out of pocket for healthcare. Factoring all criteria together, the US ranks no. 37, however even the WHO ranked the US as no. 1 worldwide in “responsiveness to patients’ needs in choice of provider, dignity, autonomy, timely care, and confidentiality.” Anyone who's read JRod's posts on the subject will find all of this suspiciously familiar. Our favorite poster never addressed how inelastic demand works with this model, or why I would want infinite spinal taps if they were free, and coincidentally the article doesn't either! Is The Fourteenth Amendment Good? posted:If the federal government were the only or the best mechanism for reducing the type of discrimination and rights violations prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment would be welcome and warranted. But it is not the only conceivable corrective, and besides, isn't it counterintuitive for libertarians to applaud and champion an increase in both the scope and degree of federal power, even if that power has, on some occasions, brought about admirable results? This whole article is great. Libertarians really really love kicking around minorities, even if they toss in a tiny disclaimer about how "sure miscegenation laws and segregation were bad, but what about the poor confederate states and whites-only lunch counters?" Voluntary Exchange vs. Government Mandates posted:The basic unit of all economic activity is the uncoerced, free exchange of one economic good for another. Moreover, the decision to engage in exchange is based upon the ordinally ranked subjective preferences of each party to the exchange. [Jesus Christ, is this whole article going to be like this?] To achieve maximum satisfaction from the exchange, each party must have full ownership and control of the good that he wishes to exchange and may dispose of his property without interference from a third party, such as government. Nope, sorry, I'm tapping out. This whole thing is just an unending parade of cardinal subjective ordinal preference orders and therefore that unrelated thing I don't like is wrong because I assert it to be so. The upshot is that private exchange can only ever concern the people doing the exchange (because I say so) so therefore any government interference into the market is bad (because I say so). How Embargoes Destroy Freedom posted:[The debate over ending the Cuban embargo] is all very interesting from an international relations perspective, and there is no doubt that the Cuban regime is a brutal regime. On the other hand, why does the brutality of the Cuban regime make it alright for the US regime to jail and persecute private American citizens who attempt to trade with people in Cuba? Libertarians have a long history of disliking embargoes. Also, a poorly-thought-out embargo was apparently the single greatest crime of the early 19th century. Not excerpted: a boring article on Zimbabwe's hyperinflation (which somehow restrains itself from warning of the same thing happening to the USA any day now), and an article on the music industry that is actually fairly unobjectionable. I mean, there isn't much call to regulate the music industry particularly, since there isn't really a natural monopoly or risk of externalized costs. There were no small midwestern towns obliterated by the Great Jazz Spill of 1973.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:39
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reparations
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Well, he's right. Eliminating medical licensing requirements WOULD do a lot to lower costs.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:45
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It would just kill a bunch of people. A small price to pay really.
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Jan 11, 2015 20:51
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