tbp posted:

It seems to be a lot of rhetoric and memes rather than discussion around here.

tbp posted:

Heh

tbp posted:

This is not the case.

tbp posted:

tbp posted:

Both are ridiculous and not suited to the real world.

tbp posted:

I don't see a lot of contradiction there to be honest.

tbp posted:

Yes

tbp posted:

No

danieljmitchell posted:

And what matters most of all is the long-run impact. You can rape and pillage upper-income taxpayers in the short run

Buried alive posted:

I thought that was a sick parody at first. Couldn't watch it after about the third "don't pay taxes." Taking advantage of a charitable cause like that is pretty messed up.

Political Whores posted:

He wouldn't be the first person to use verbosity as a substitute for truth.

SedanChair posted:

Walter Block is a psycho holy poo poo. I mean I already knew he was but what is this.

quote:

The latest data comes from a survey of 2,316 U.S. adults by a researcher who works at the universities of Yale and Harvard. While questions about human-caused climate change divided along political lines--with liberals believing it is happening and conservatives denying it--there was no such correlation with anti-vaccine views. The vast majority of people believe the benefits of childhood vaccinations outweigh the risks, regardless of their politics. And the survey found anti-vaccine views are more common among Republicans.

Although the data clashes with some peoples' perception of the typical vaccine skeptic, it chimes with previous surveys. In 2009 the Pew Research Center found almost 50% more Democrats than Republicans said they would take the swine flu vaccine. More detailed data emerged last year from a Public Policy Polling survey of 1,247 U.S. voters. PPP found 12% of people who described themselves as very liberal believe vaccines cause autism, compared with 22% of hardline conservatives.

Rhjamiz posted:

Apparently Kevin Sorbo is not only a hardcore religious conservative, he's also an AnCap/Libertarian. As are Tuvok and Ensign Kim;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT2kVRKSyU8

quote:

There’s a lot of American cowboy culture in Honduras, but along with silly hats, Honduras has also taken one of our other worst ideas—libertarian politics. By the time I’d made it to San Pedro Sula, I’d seen much of the countryside and culture. It’s a wonderful place, filled with music, great coffee, fabulous cigars and generous people, but it’s also a libertarian experiment coming apart.

quote:

In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras.

quote:

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

quote:

For our last meal in San Pedro Sula, my family walked a couple blocks from our fortress-like bed and breakfast to a pizza restaurant. It was the middle of the day and we were the only customers. We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist. Welcome to an Ayn Rand’s libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard.

quote:

Honduras has problems but people should go visit anyway and soon. The dangers are fleeting, and there are coffee plantations to tour, ruins to see, cigars to smoke and fish to catch. The people need your tourism dollars. As a bonus, it’s important for Americans to see the outcome when the bad ideas of teenage boys and a bad Russian writer are put into practice.

jrodefeld posted:

How many of you have ever run a business where you have had to pay employees a wage?

quote:

The most dangerous thing you can do on the Internet is to send your banking information to a mysterious Nigerian prince. The second most dangerous thing you can do is to write even the most tepid criticism of libertarians.

quote:

But there were comments that went too far, such as those that addressed my parenting skills or that examined my decade-old divorce. I was unprepared for the fire hose of rage and invective. In fact, it’s hard to overstate just how furious—and proud of it—this segment of America seems.

quote:

Every badly written blog and hysterical, spittle-flecked Internet video only further proves the point that these people have serious problems.

quote:

The biggest criticism I’ve heard while writing various pieces is that I was “never really a libertarian.”

quote:

I know that I do things that piss off libertarians, because I would have been infuriated by my own observations just a few short years ago. Most of all, I employ the shorthand of using “conservative,” “libertarian” and “Tea Party” interchangeably. Some libertarians think this is unfair to “pure” libertarians, but in reality the lines between these groups have grown fuzzy to nonexistent.

quote:

After my Honduras article, Tom Woods, noted libertarian “thinker,” called me out on Twitter. I called him a “hate-monger” and blocked him. I regretted it immediately. I didn’t know him well enough to sling that insult, so I apologized. A few days later, I read up on his work, and found out that my apology was the real mistake.

Ravenfood posted:

"Living paycheck to paycheck" can be technically true and still disingenuous as all hell if their expenses grow as their income does, ie, if they chose not to save and instead spend it on a live-in nanny or whatever.

QuarkJets posted:

This is literally just a copy-paste of a mises.org article with a "Good morning sir, have you heard the goods news?" opener thrown in. In case anyone was wondering.

Literally The Worst posted:

Ughhhh just because something is against the rules does not mean it's illegal. Stop using words incorrectly reddit.

Bel Shazar posted:

1, 4, and 5 seem to be pretty good ideas.

jrodefeld posted:

You could acknowledge it anyway. "Good job, jrodefeld. Those are several really important reforms that certainly would help society and improve human flourishing."

quote:

Even when I say things you agree with, you gloss over it entirely and resume hurling insults.

BUG JUG posted:

ftfy

jrodefeld posted:

Obama's Solyndra experiment and the like.

quote:

The U.S. expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from the federal program that funded flops including Solyndra LLC, bolstering President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.

quote:

“People make a big deal about Solyndra and everything, but there’s a lot of VC capital that got torched right alongside the DOE capital,” Michael Morosi, an analyst at Brentwood, Tennessee-based Jetstream Capital LLC, which invests in renewable energy, said in an interview. “A positive return over 20 years in cleantech? That’s not a bad outcome.”

quote:

“When these project developers took their projects to conventional financing sources, those lenders said, ‘Sorry, there’s too much risk here,’” Davidson said in a phone interview. “That’s the gap that we’ve filled.”

quote:

Considering the whole portfolio of projects, a $5 billion return to taxpayers exceeds profits from many venture capital and private equity investments in clean energy, Morosi said.

jrodefeld posted:

Another "continuum problem" that neither libertarians, nor anyone else, has a perfect answer to is what should the age of consent be for having sex with an adult? Should a girl be able to make that decision at 16? 18? 14? What about 15 and 253 days? There is absolutely no single correct answer to this problem. Some States say the age ought to be 16. Others say the age should be 18. We know for certain that a girl aged 11 is not capable of giving consent to sex with an adult but we know that a woman of 25 is. Somewhere in the middle is the correct age and the law will always be imperfect and imprecise.

Crain posted:

How about a light hearted break from Jrod's latest dump:

I’m the President of the Liberland Settlement Association. We're the first settlers of Europe's newest nation, Liberland. AMA!

Punctuation from source posted:

Darryl is the Owner/Managing Editor of Free Press Publications, a business he started in June, 2009 with the purpose of ensuring a FREE PRESS for the FREEDOM MOVEMENT. Since then FPP has republished several libertarian/anarch classics as well as new books, both fiction and non-fiction, many of which have won awards and other recognition.

QuarkJets posted:

That'd be an apt comparison if that advertisement was about a product called Arizona Salsa

Caros posted:

So it turns out that 'Darryl' was an enormous baby who only managed about twenty minutes on the phone before turning into an enormous baby screaming about freedom and hanging up the phone.

I'd say it astonishes me that this man thought he could be president but mental disease is a hell of a thing I guess.