wateroverfire posted:

Except in the most contrived of cases this is not a thing that employers can do, though. Employers offer as much money as it takes to get acceptable people. That is pretty much the end of it at the low end of the wage distribution. There are too many employers with too many positions for them to be leveraging much of anything and a worker's risk of starvation or whatever is both 100% unknown to the potential employer and 100% out of his or her control.

quote:

I've not gone so far to argue the "taxation is theft" angle.

quote:

Having the government deprive you of property or freedom due to not paying taxes/fees is somehow an acceptable form of the same.

quote:

Not sure this is really worth going into to any length, since I doubt we will find any common ground on the idea that taxation is inherently universally legitimate and that the amount of personal property that the government can lay claim to is up to and including 100%. It's not.

quote:

Perhaps we can start with examples from the preset and throughout history of fees and taxation used as punitive and specifically anti-competitive measures and go from there.

quote:

The disagreement with the NAP is the application of it in interactions from the government to people and from the government to foreign entities. For example, I am not a fan of "limited kinetic actions" or "We tortured some folks."

asdf32 posted:

It's actually beyond that. Despite many people's dislike of an economic centric view they've still internalized a great deal of it. You see that right here where people arguing from the left can't themselves divorce someones moral worth from their economic value and use one to try and determine the other.

All societies need to calculate economic worth of people for the same reason a basketball team needs to evaluate basketball skills. And neither necessarily reflects on the moral worth of that person.

AlternateAccount posted:

Based on your wage logic, where the minumum wage is the only thing that keeps us all from being paid pennies, why aren't we ALL making the minimum wage, then? Minimum wage has literally zero bearing on what 95% of the country is paid.

quote:

I am more saying that "taxation is theft" is not really a useful way to discuss a plan for taxes and funding what government does exist. I think it's preferable to tie taxation to the service that those taxes provide, when possible. Excise taxes on gasoline, etc.

asdf32 posted:

Hang on, there is no "If" regarding the recognition that some people can't/won't produce economic output. You recognize this right? So me pointing it out means very little.

As for the rest of your questions you ask this as if society hasn't already answered it. Every single developed country has decided to provide significant amounts of assistance in a range of forms to ensure people don't literally die if they run out of money. Like 99.9% of people, I support this wholeheartedly.

AlternateAccount posted:

quote:

So what do you think would happen to the 82%+ of earners who are paid more than minimum wage if the law were repealed tomorrow?

quote:

So what do you think would happen to the 95%+ of earners who are paid more than minimum wage if the law were repealed tomorrow? And as for the shady science all around of minimum wage effects, you can find a study to basically say just about anything about how it will affect the economy.

quote:

Skipping any of the common argument that a higher minimum wage will decrease the available number of jobs(which is fairly universally believed, but considered a necessary evil,) do you think it will have an inflationary effect?

quote:

Tying taxation to services provided primarily benefits in keeping the cash where it's meant to go, offering some degree of compartmentalization.

quote:

As much as I hate the word used to justify anything, is it appropriate to say that taxation that more directly funds the government actions that create the utilized service is inherently more fair?

I don't particularly care if taxes are progressive or regressive, and I don't think trying to produce one outcome or another should be a consideration. Everyone's taxes are too high. It also returns to that idea that someone else having more doesn't inherently mean that you have less as a consequence.

quote:

I'd eliminate social security as anything regarding its current form. It's a transfer payment from young to old and is unsustainable. I'd also eliminate Medicare and federal welfare programs.

Now, all that said, I am not personally as vehemently opposed to the idea of some sort of safety net as a lot of the Pure Strain Libertarians, but I also don't think it should be anywhere near as gigantic as it is now. I'd argue that a lot of these federal programs specifically allow low-wage employers to keep their wages low.
Reducing/eliminating vast swaths of current bureaucracy and military spending would allow us to reduce the generalized tax burden for everyone, for a start.

President Kucinich posted:

Why is this a bad thing that needs to be abolished?

jrodefeld posted:

I've returned from hiatus. I can't locate my other thread so I'll start on this thread. Real life intruded and I don't have the luxury of posting on random internet forums as much as I might like. In any event, I actually like this forum. While I disagree with most of you, I genuinely find it to be especially well run and the discussions are substantive and interesting. And, evidenced by this thread, you all seem to having more than a passing familiarity with libertarian ideas.

quote:

With that said, I want to discuss the subject of a minimum wage (or even minimum basic income). From what I have read on this thread, most of you are in favor of a minimum wage and/or basic guaranteed income. I find that support for either belies an ignorance of basic economics. I'd love if you could prove me wrong however.

quote:

I favor an immediate abolition of all minimum wage laws. I don't understand how anyone could imagine that creating an artificial minimum legal wage rate could actually improve anyone's standard of living.A few points. In the first place, a worker will receive an income that is determined by the market. His marketable skills are valued based on the marginal productivity of his labor. If a worker can only provide $9 of value to an employer per hour, why on earth would that employer pay him $10 an hour? Businessmen are not running charities. The businessman is seeking profits which can only be done by satisfying consumer demands on the market. Therefore wages must be lower than the productivity of the labor. The marginal productivity of a laborer provides the upper limit of the wage rate that he or she can expect to receive.

Therefore it can be reliably predicted that an unskilled laborer whose marginal productivity is lower than the minimum wage, for example a teen only worth $6 an hour, will be rendered perpetually unemployed.

quote:

I can anticipate that some of you will argue that without a supposed floor for wage rates, the greedy businessmen will simply push wages as low as possible forcing workers to work for 50 cents an hour. The reason this won't happen is that competitive firms, in their competition with each other, will be in need of good workers. If an employer is paying his workers too little for their abilities (i.e. too much lower than the marginal productivity of their labor) then a competitor will bid them away from their current employer. Thus the wage rates for workers will inevitably rise towards the level of their marginal productivity but never exceeding it.

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It is an intellectual error to simply claim that all workers are worth, say, $10 an hour.

quote:

How could you possibly know that? Only a free market for wage labor can possibly determine the per hour value of labor services. What minimum wage laws amount to really is compulsory unemployment, period.

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In a free society without a State that erects barriers to economic activity, all economic actors will have far more options than they do today.

quote:

So it is furthermore wrong to assume that workers will have no recourse but to work for wages. On the contrary, each worker will have an ability to become an entrepreneur himself, risking his capital for the potential greater reward of future profits. It is a far riskier proposition than trading his labor for wages but without the regulatory barriers and bureaucratic red tape, the cost of entry into the market will be exponentially lower than it is today.

quote:

A third option would be for workers to organize together and form mutualist coops, where workers pool their resources and collectively own the means of production. This would be an intermediate step between being a wage laborer and an entrepreneur. The potential for return on investment would be greater than that of a wage laborer but less than that of an entrepreneur. However the risk to a personal capital would be far lower than an entrepreneur. It would be, in a very real sense, voluntary socialism or even voluntary Marxism.

quote:

Minimum wage laws are immoral, they hurt the least skilled and most vulnerable in society.

quote:

The only genuine way to sustainably raise the standard of living for workers is to improve their marginal productivity, thus allowing them to command a higher wage rate on the market. To this end, it is valuable to encourage young people to gain more work experience when they are younger, develop on the job training and skills that improve their value to employers. Improved skills expand ones economic opportunities.

quote:

I thought this would be a good topic to get back into this discussion. Where am I going wrong? How can you rationally defend minimum wage laws and/or mandatory basic minimum income in light of economic law and logic?

quote:

All of these economic relationships are valid provided no one uses aggression against any other peaceful person.

QuarkJets posted:

During your last visit your description of the ideal ancap society was an Orwellian hellscape. Come on.

quote:

Caging the Devils: The Stateless Society and Violent Crime

After Lew was kind enough to publish The Stateless Society, I received many emails asking the same question: how can violent criminals be dealt with in the absence of a centralized government?

This is a challenging question, which can be answered in three parts. The first is to examine how such criminals are dealt with at present; the second is to divide violent crimes into crimes of motive and crimes of passion, and the third is to show how a stateless society would deal with both categories of crime far better than any existing system.

Thus the first question is: how are violent criminals dealt with at present? The honest answer, to any unbiased observer is surely: they are encouraged.

A basic fact of life is that people respond to incentives. The better that crime pays, the more people will become criminals. Certain well-known habits — drugs, gambling, prostitution in particular — are non-violent in nature, but highly desired by certain segments of the population. If these non-violent behaviours are criminalized, the profit gained by providing these services rises. Illegality destroys all stabilizing social forces (contracts, open activity, knowledge sharing and mediation), and so violence becomes the norm for dispute resolution.

Furthermore, wherever a legal situation exists where most criminals make more money than the police, the police are simply bribed into compliance. Thus by increasing the profits of non-violent activities, the State ensures the corruption of the police and judicial system — thus making it both safer and more profitable to operate outside the law! It can take dozens of arrests to actually face trial — and many trials to gain convictions. Policemen now spend about a third of their time filling out paperwork — and 90% of their time chasing non-violent criminals. Entire sections of certain cities are run by gangs of thugs, and the jails are overflowing with harmless low-level peons sent to jail as make-work for the judicial system — thus constantly increasing law-enforcement budgets. Peaceful citizens are legally disarmed through gun control laws. In this manner, the modern State literally creates, protects and profits from violent criminals.

Thus the standard to compare the stateless society's response to violent crime is not some perfect world where thugs are effectively dealt with, but rather the current mess where violence is both encouraged and protected.

Before we turn to how a stateless society deals with crime, however, it is essential to remember that the stateless society automatically eliminates the greatest violence faced by almost all of us — the State that threatens us with guns if we don't hand over our money — and our lives, should it decide to declare war. Thus it cannot be said that the existing system is one which minimizes violence. Quite the contrary — the honest population is violently enslaved by the State, and the dishonest provided with cash incentives and protection.

State violence — in its many forms — has been growing in Western societies over the past fifty years, as regulation, tariffs and taxation have risen exponentially. National debts are an obvious form of intergenerational theft. Support of foreign governments also increases violence, since these governments use subsidies to buy arms and further terrorize their own populations. The arms market is also funded and controlled by governments. The list of State crimes can go on and on, but one last gulag is worth mentioning — all the millions of poor souls kidnapped and held hostage in prisons for non-violent u2018crimes'.

Since existing States terrorize, enslave and incarcerate literally billions of citizens, it is hard to understand how they can be seen as effectively working u2018against' violence in any form.

So, how does the stateless society deal with violence? First, it is important to differentiate the use of force into crimes of motive and crimes of passion. Crimes of motive are open to correction through changing incentives; any system which reduces the profits of property crimes — while increasing the profits of honest labor — will reduce these crimes. In the last part of this essay, we will see how the stateless society achieves this better than any other option.

Crimes of motive can be diminished by making crime a low-profit activity relative to working for a living. Crime entails labour, and if most people could make more money working honestly for the same amount of labour, there will be far fewer criminals.

Those who have read my explanation of dispute resolution organizations (DROs) know that stateless societies flourish through the creation of voluntary contracts between interested parties, and that all property is private. How does this affect violent crime?

Well, let's look at u2018break and enter'. If I own a house, I will probably take out insurance against theft. Obviously, my insurance company benefits most from preventing theft, and so will encourage me to get an alarm system and so on, just as occurs now.

This situation is more or less analogous to what happens now — with the not-inconsequential adjustment that, since DROs handle policing as well as restitution, their motive for preventing theft or rendering stolen property useless is higher than it is now. As such, much more investment in prevention would be worthwhile, such as creating 'voice activated' appliances which only work for their owners.

However, the stateless society goes much, much further in preventing crime — specifically, by identifying those who are going to become criminals. In this situation, the stateless society is far more effective than any State system.

In a stateless society, contracts with DROs are required to maintain any sort of economic life — without DRO representation, citizens are unable to get a job, hire employees, rent a car, buy a house or send their children to school. Any DRO will naturally ensure that its contracts include penalties for violent crimes — so if you steal a car, your DRO has the right to use force against you to get the car back — and probably retrieve financial penalties to boot.

How does this work in practice? Let's take a test case. Say that you wake up one morning and decide to become a thief. Well, the first thing you have to do is cancel your coverage with your DRO, so that your DRO cannot act against you when you steal. DROs would have clauses allowing you to cancel your coverage, just as insurance companies have now. Thus you would have to notify your DRO that you were dropping coverage. No problem, you're off their list.

However, DROs as a whole really need to keep track of people who have opted out of the entire DRO system, since those people have clearly signaled their intention to go rogue, to live off the grid, and commit crimes. Thus if you cancel your DRO insurance, your name goes into a database available to all DROs. If you sign up with another DRO, no problem, your name is taken out. However, if you do not sign up with any other DRO, red flags pop up all over the system.

What happens then? Remember — there is no public property in the stateless society. If you've gone rogue, where are you going to go? You can't take a bus — bus companies won't take rogues, because their DRO will require that they take only DRO-covered passengers, in case of injury or altercation. Want to fill up on gas? No luck, for the same reason. You can try hitchhiking, of course, which might work, but what happens when you get to your destination and try and rent a hotel room? No DRO card, no luck. Want to sleep in the park? Parks are privately owned, so keep moving. Getting hungry? No groceries, no restaurants — no food! What are you going to do?

Obviously, those without DRO representation are going to find it very hard to get around or find anything to eat. But let's go even further and imagine that, as a rogue, you are somehow able to survive long enough to start trying to steal from people's houses.

Well, the first thing that DROs are going to do is give a reward to anyone who spots you and reports your position (in fact, there will be companies which specialize in just this sort of service). As you walk down a street on your way to rob a house, someone sees you and calls you in. The DRO immediately notifies the street owner (remember, no public property!) who boots you off his street. Are you going to resist the street owner? His DRO will fully support his right to use force to protect his property or life.

So you have to get off the street. Where do you go? All the local street owners have been notified of your presence, and refuse you entrance. You can't go anywhere without trespassing. You are a pariah. No one will help you, or give you food, or shelter you — because if they do, their DRO will boot them or raise their rates, and their name will be entered into a database of people who help rogues. There is literally no place to turn.

So, really, what incentive is there to turn to a life of crime? Working for a living — and being protected by a DRO — pays really well. Going off the grid and becoming a rogue pits the entire weight of the combined DRO system against you — and, even if you do manage to survive their scrutiny and steal something, it has probably been voice-encoded or protected in some other manner against unauthorized re-use. But let's suppose that you somehow bypass all of that, and do manage to steal, where are you going to sell your stolen goods? You're not protected by a DRO, so who will buy from you, knowing they have no recourse if something goes wrong? And besides, anyone who interacts with you will get a substantial reward for reporting your location — and, if they deal with you, will be dropped from the DRO system.

Will there be underground markets? No — where would they operate? People need a place to live, cars to rent, clothes to buy, groceries to eat. No DRO means no participation in economic life.

Thus it is fair to say that any stateless society will do a far better job of protecting its citizens against crimes of motive — what, then, about crimes of passion?

Crimes of passion are harder to prevent — but also present far less of a threat to those outside of the circle in which they occur.

So, let's say a man kills his wife. They are both covered by DROs, of course, and their DRO contracts would include specific prohibitions against murder. Thus the man would be subject to all the sanctions involved in his contract — probably forced labour until a certain financial penalty was paid off, since DROs would be responsible for paying financial penalties to any next of kin.

Fine, you say, but what if either the man or woman was not covered by a DRO? Well, where would they live? No one would rent them an apartment. If they own their house free and clear, who would sell them food? Or gas? Who would employ them? What bank would accept their money? The penalties for opting out of the DRO system are almost infinite, and it is safe to say that it would be next to impossible to survive without a DRO.

But let's say that only the murderous husband — planning to kill his wife — opted out of his DRO system without telling her. Well, the first thing that his wife's DRO system would do is inform her of her husband's action — and the ill intent it may represent — and help relocate her if desired. If she decided against relocation, her DRO would promptly drop her, since by deciding to live in close proximity with a rogue man, she was exposing herself to an untenable amount of danger (and so the DRO to a high risk for financial loss!). Now both the husband and wife have chosen to live without DROs, in a state of nature, and thus face all the insurmountable problems of getting food, shelter, money and so on.

Now let's look at something slightly more complicated — stalking. A woman becomes obsessed with a man, and starts calling him at all hours and following him around. Perhaps boils a bunny or two. Well, if the man has bought insurance against stalking, his DRO leaps into action. It calls the woman's DRO, which says: stop stalking this man or we'll drop you. And how does her DRO know whether she has really given up her stalking? The man stops reporting it. And if there is a dispute, she just wears an ankle bracelet for a while to make sure. And remember — since there is no public property, she can be ordered off any property such as sidewalks, streets and parks.

(And if the man has not bought insurance against stalking, no problem — it will just be more expensive to buy with a 'pre-existing condition'!)

Although they may seem unfamiliar to you, DROs are not a new concept — they are as ancient as civilization itself, but have been shouldered aside by the constant escalation of State power over the last century or so. In the past, desired social behaviour was punished through ostracism, and risks ameliorated through voluntary 'friendly societies'. A man who left his wife and children — or a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock — was no longer welcome in decent society. DROs take these concepts one step further, by making all the information formerly known by the local community available to the world as whole, just as credit reports do. There are really no limits to the benefits that DROs can confer upon a free society — insurance could be created for such things as:

a man's wife giving birth to a child that is not his own
a daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock
fertility problems for a married couple
…and much more.

All of the above insurance policies would require DROs to take active steps to prevent such behaviours — the mind boggles at all the preventative steps that could be taken! The important thing to remember is that all such contracts are voluntary, and so do not violate the moral absolute of non-violence.

So in conclusion — how does the stateless society deal with violent criminals? Brilliantly! In a stateless society, there are fewer criminals, more prevention, greater sanctions — and instant forewarning of those aiming at a life of crime by their withdrawal from the DRO system. More incentives to work, fewer incentives for a life of crime, no place to hide for rogues, and general social rejection of those who decide to operate outside of the civilized worlds of contract, mutual protection and general security. And remember — States in the 20th century caused more than 170 million deaths — are we really that worried about hold-ups and jewelry thefts in the face of those kinds of numbers?

There is no system that will replace faulty men with perfect angels, but the stateless society, by rewarding goodness and punishing evil, will at least ensure that all devils are visible — instead of cloaking them in the current deadly fog of power, politics and propaganda.

jrodefeld posted:

The "free market" is basically like the bogey man to leftists. They've never actually seen one in real life, wouldn't recognize it if they had, but they are REAL sure it's super scary.

DeusExMachinima posted:

So do you guys want to work this out amongst yourselves or what?

QuarkJets posted:

The issue is that libertarians take on a bizarre definition of aggression, a definition that is always shifting to mean whatever is currently convenient. Can you define aggression for us, right now? If I walk onto my neighbor's property without his consent, is that aggression? If he shoots me for aggressively walking across his lawn, is that aggression? What if I was stealing his lawnmower and then he shoots me, is that aggression? What if I was taking back the lawnmower that he stole from me and then he shot me, is that aggression? Who is aggressing who in each scenario?

jrodefeld posted:

My point is that the punishment of so-called "victimless" crimes would be practically unsustainable when individuals would have to voluntarily pay for the incarceration and trial of individuals who just happen to be doing something that you don't personally approve of. I could possibly see some fundamentalist Christian group who really DID want to punish drug users, but the vast majority of people would not want to spend their own money to go after people who are minding their owner business.

It is very easy for people to say, in the abstract, that this or that voluntary activity should be "illegal". Ask people if heroin or prostitution should be illegal and the vast majority would say that they should. This is how democracy works. People think that someone else is paying the cost. If they had to pay directly to go after drug users who are minding their own business their attitude would change rather quickly. There may be a few fanatics who are so dedicated as to actually want to spend their own money to go after people who are not harming anybody, but the number would be vanishingly small.

In contrast, everyone has a desire for security for themselves and their property. Individuals who initiate force against people or steal their property are a threat at large and any victim would have a great incentive to get back what was taken from him, to have restitution for the crime. And society at large would want to see such a criminal punished for his action.

We are comparing contrasting systems so it is not enough for you to suppose that some possible miscarriage of justice could conceivably occur. You have to ask yourself whether such injustice is more or less likely to occur in a Stateless, privately and voluntarily financed justice system or a State monopolized, tax funded justice system.

quote:

People think that someone else is paying the cost. If they had to pay directly to provide food stamps their attitude would change rather quickly. There may be a few fanatics who are so dedicated as to actually want to spend their own money to feed the hungry, but the number would be vanishingly small.

Miltank posted:

If I sold heroin in the libertopia I would pay privcops to protect me and murder/arrest my competition. Then I could charge as much money as I want off of my hopelessly addicted clientele.

Who What Now posted:

I jack my cyberdeck into the nearest data-terminal and begin mining for bitcoins.

Typical Pubbie posted:

I'd like to thank the Free Market, Rothbard's name be praised, for giving us the best thread ever.

jrodefeld posted:

I intend to return to the minimum wage but regarding that particular article, I don't have any particular strong reactions one way or another. You have to understand first and foremost that libertarians are not central planners. Stefan Molyneux is just giving one possible solution to a few of societies problems in the absence of the State. Mr Molyneux, myself nor any other libertarian will have any power to force any particular vision of society on anyone else, apart from our moral admonition that the initiation of force is illegitimate and should be prohibited.

There are many significantly more qualified and accomplished libertarian theorists who have gone into the potential methods of private defense services and dispute resolution, from David Friedman to Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Robert Murphy and many others. But I reiterate, none have the ability or the desire to force any particular social order on anyone else. Merely they write about possibilities as a way of illustrating both the feasibility of anarchism as well as the economic incentives that will exist in such a Stateless order.

I think it's foolish to pick out a few articles and criticize me or other anarchists because of the theoretical musings of another libertarian theorist.

quote:

“If you don’t have a husband, if you chose the wrong guy, to keep the child is abusive, almost always."

quote:

“Women who choose the arseholes will loving end this race. They will loving end this human race if we don’t start holding them a-loving-countable…They’re the gatekeepers. Look, women who choose aresholes guarantee child abuse. Women who chose arseholes guarantee criminality, sociopathy, politicians; all the cold hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married arseholes.

And, I don’t know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing these arseholes. Your Dad was an arsehole because your mother chose him. Because it works on so many women. If ‘arsehole’ wasn’t a great reproductive strategy, it would have been gone long ago. Women keep that black bastard flame alive. They cup their hands around it, they protect it with their bodies. They keep the evil of the species going by continually choosing these guys. If being an arsehole didn’t get women there would be no arseholes left.

If women chose nice guys over arseholes we would have a glorious and peaceful world in one generation. Women determine the personality traits of the men because women choose who to have sex with, and who to have children with, and who to expose those children to. I get that you’re angry at your Dad, and you have every reason to be angry at your Dad. Your Dad is who he is fundamentally because your Mother was willing to gently caress him and have you; willing and eager to gently caress the monster. Stop loving monsters: we get a great world. Keep loving monsters: we get catastrophes. We get war.

We get nuclear weapons. We get national debts. We get incarcerations and prison guards and all the other florid arseholes who rule the world. Women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil. And then, you know what they say? “We’re victims!..Poor us!”. And some women are absolutely…but dear god in heaven…men will become whatever women want them to become, because women are the gatekeepers…So, I think that if you accept that women are central to the cycle of evil in the world, then you will be able to see how it really reproduces. Evil is of matriarchal lineage – in the present. I’m not talking about Mongol hoards and rapes and blah, blah blah. Evil passes through the Mother. It’s Jewish. It’s a Matriarch.”

quote:

Critisim: The Truth about Frozen

quote:

The Virus of Female Avoidance Responsibility

quote:

Trapping Men in Fallopian Tubes

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How to betray your husband

quote:

Withholding Sex as Infidelity

jrodefeld posted:

In the first place the libertarian definition of "aggression" is NOT always changing. It is in fact articulated quite clearly. Aggression is the act of initiating an act of invasion against the person or property of another without his or her permission. Pretty clear right?

quote:

We believe in self ownership in the individual. This means of course that each individual has the right to determine the use of his or her physical body with the caveat of course that your use of your body cannot violate the equal rights of anyone else. I would bet that you accept this in every aspect of your life.

quote:

We extend the principle of non aggression against the physical body of another to the just acquisition of property outside of ones body. If you homestead land by mixing your labor with it, or you trade something you have legitimately acquired with some other item that the seller has legitimately homesteaded or otherwise acquired, those items that you acquire become an extension of your self ownership.

quote:

Property rights are necessary because we live in a world of conflict. Conflict exists because we live in a world of scarcity. If every desired item existed in superabundance then there would be no need for any property rights outside of our physical bodies since everyone could have anything they wanted. In the real world we need an easy way to avoid conflict. The only way to do that in a world of scarcity is to have a clearly understood system where everyone understands who has jurisdiction and final decision making power over scarce resources. The easier and clearer understood are the property titles and rights to jurisdiction, the less conflict is likely to occur.

quote:

So just as it would be an act of aggression to invade the borders of a persons physical body (i.e. assault them, rape them, kill them), so too is it an act of aggression to steal or use the property of others without their permission. It is not the same severity of aggression but it still constitutes a rights violation because justly acquired property is an extension of a persons self ownership.

quote:

If you borrow someones lawnmower without permission you are committed a very minor act of aggression. Can the owner shoot you? No, that would be aggression. Legitimate defensive force must be proportional to the act of aggression otherwise it becomes aggression itself. So, no, unless the property owner fears for his life, he cannot legitimately just start killing people who are walking across his property. It has to be proportional.

I don't think this is really that confusing?

quote:

Right-Libertarians, “Anarcho”-Capitalists, and assorted propertarians very frequently cite the Non-Aggression principle or Zero Aggression principle (Commonly called NAP or ZAP) as a core tenet of their ideology. It is brought up as the building block of voluntaryism on which free markets can be built and proudly displayed to show how morally superior such a society would be compared to anything else which, by the absence of the NAP, is defined to have an involuntary aspect.

But what exactly is the NAP? The specific details might differ depending on the encompassing ideology, but the central point generally seems to be that no human should aggress over another human. This is meant to mean the initial use of coercive force as well as the threat of such.

Now, if left to this end, this is not a half-bad principle, basically saying that people shouldn’t attack or threaten to attack others. However at this stage, it is also pretty much unnecessary to be given an explicit existence as a “principle” as the generic principle of freedom already encompasses this (i.e. attacking another person would violate their freedom). Other moral theories, particularly the utilitarian variants already encompass such rules (with stipulation) as a natural consequence of their suggestions. In the end, this basic form of non-aggression ends up sounding like a shallow “Thou shalt not kill” which, while pretty clear, when strictly adhered to can lead to worse results (such as foregoing killing in self-defence) or requires a more advanced moral framework above it which clarifies when it is, in fact, acceptable to kill.

But propertarians do not generally leave it at just that but rather try to sneakily expand it by linking it with private property rights. You see, the NAP is frequently derived directly from the Self-Ownership “axiom” and thus the wrongly derived property rights are treated as an extension of the self. Therefore one can then treat violation of private property rights as an act of “initated force”, even though no actual violence or threat of violence has been perpetuated. This is turn is used as a cause to use actual violence or threat of violence on the violator of property rights.

It thus becomes that the NAP, when combined with Self-Ownership conveniently becomes an excuse for someone to initiate real, literal violence against someone else. The right to freedom or utilitarian moral rules reserve the right for people to defend themselves against aggression, that is, to take only as much action as needed to stop the aggression against their person. This is pretty self-evident when achieved, both to the one being attacked and to any observers (i.e. it’s obvious when two people have stopped exchanging blows and threats). When extended to private property however, things get far far more complex.

While it’s easy to understand that someone “aggresses” when they steal something from another person (which is why most other moral systems do not require a NAP to label theft as wrong), things get pretty murky when one goes beyond that. Do I “initiate force” when I use a productive machine without paying rent? How about if I pay only enough rent to cover the cost of the machine? Do I “initiate force” when I toil the unused land that is owned by someone else? How about when I trespass?

This is further complicated by the claims of the NAP proponents that the NAP does not excuse any and all acts of self-defence but is rather limited by the level of aggression. We’re informed that it does not in fact, grant the right of shooting trespassers. But this again does not really clarify the matter. Whereas in literal aggression, one is always aware of the level the initiator is using (threats, shoving, punching, lethal weapons etc) and can respond in kind, in this extended field of aggression you’re left to comparing apples with oranges. What is the correct response to someone trespassing your property? Trespassing on their property? Forcibly taking them out? Threatening to shoot them and then follow through if they don’t comply? The truth of the matter is that unlike literal aggression, you cannot discover how you can respond in kind intuitively.

Thus we see that unlike actual aggression where equal reaction can cancel the aggression (i.e. shoving can defend against shoving, punching can defend against punches etc), in “aggression” on property via the NAP, the self-defence enacted is and must always be different and stronger than the act of “aggression”. A trespasser cannot be removed by counter-trespassing. They must be forcibly removed and this is very likely to require (threats of) lethal force if they do not comply. This get even more complicated if that person does not accept the NAP and considers the literal acts of aggression against them as the initiation of force it is and defends in kind.

There is no solution to this issue. The NAP, as a moral rule is incapable of making any suggestions or providing any solutions as it does not say anything substantial other than the vacuous “Thou shalt not initiate violence”. Rather we are told that an extensive legal system will be required which will either interpret some kind of “natural law” or be somehow employ objective judges which make the perfect decisions. Something like the system of wealthy libertarian judges that Murray Rothbard proposed, which would follow some kind of “libertarian law”. In short, nothing more than a subjective legal system built around the principles that people like Rothbard prefer.

And all these issues occur before we even consider that extrapolating private property rights from the “axiom” of Self-Ownership is a non sequitur as it’s impossible to deride a particular set of ownership rights out of it (which is why you can see how much and how many libertarians disagree on what specific ownership rights to use). Due to this, a NAP that ideologically protects a particular set of ownership rights is nothing more than a subjective argument against the things a particular person does not like. That one does not like people trespassing on his property so he calls that “an initiation of force”. That other one does not consider trespassing to be such, but it’s certainly an “initiation of force” when workers don’t pay him rent for a factory’s costs he’s already recovered.

The NAP is shown to be pretty much a shallow principle. When limited to actual physical force, it’s superseded and made obsolete by moral systems which can explain when force is justified or not. When extended to concepts which are not immediately intuitive, its subjective nature quickly devolves it to shouting matches which can only be settled by a homogeneous system of courts and enforcement agencies. A de-facto state.

To me, when someone explains that according to the NAP, this or that is wrong, they mostly sound like “This or that is wrong, because I say so.”

jrodefeld posted:

It wouldn't matter because the act of aggression against a peaceful person would be a violation of the non aggression principle. I can totally disabuse you of your claim. In today's society, people assume that it is the State's "job" to look after the poor and provide healthcare to the elderly. They overwhelmingly support support the need to provide care and assistance to the needy. The reason this is clear is that politicians run on platforms that emphasize the supposed "charity" role of the State, to provide assistance to the poor, food stamps, healthcare to the elderly and education to the young. If this was not a genuine concern of the electorate, politicians wouldn't emphasize these issues as they do.

quote:

Even given that the State taxes people at high rates (usually 30-50% when all tax rates are combined) under the pretext of providing social services to those that need them, Americans still give more to charities than any other population on the face of the earth.

This article states that in 2013, we set a record for total charitable donations:

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/13/business/la-fi-mo-charitable-donations-record-2013-americans-20140113

quote:

The total given was $368.8 billion. Would not we expect this number to rise if people did not expect the State to supposedly provide all these benefits to people? The notion that people would not lift a finger to help the needy, the sick and the impoverished is contradicted by all the relevant data and statistics on charitable donations and volunteer work.

quote:

Medicaid = $297 Billion Dollars
Medicare = $491 Billion Dollars
Social Security = $730 Billion Dollars
Every other federal and state level social program = I don't loving know? A few hundred billion more?

quote:

-- Money for religious causes rose 8.6% in 2013 to $143.1 billion, up from $131.8 billion in 2012. Religious donations as a share of all giving fell from 36% to 35%.
-- Education causes grabbed the second biggest share at 16%, which was unchanged from 2012, but those numbers also rose by 15.7% to $68.2 billion, up from $58.9 billion.
-- Human needs/Disaster Services, now the third biggest and fastest growing category at 11% of all giving, was up 18.7% to $49.6 billion compared to $41.8 billion in 2012.
-- Health-related causes pulled in $32.3 billion, up 10.8%.

quote:

If you couple this demonstrated desire by the American people to help others with the natural and documented tendency for the free market economy to steadily reduce poverty and provide greater and greater levels of prosperity year after year, then your fear of what will become of the vulnerable without the State is shown to be wholly without merit.

quote:

It has been well documented that poverty statistics had dropped steadily and substantially every decade until the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson instituted his Great Society programs and "war on poverty". Poverty continued to decline at the exact same rate for another five years or so and it has stagnated ever since. How are we getting value for the trillions of dollars the US government is spending on "help" for the poor?

quote:

It doesn't take a genius to see clearly that politicians are bribing people for votes pure and simply. If you break someones legs and then give them a crutch to hobble around on, you haven't really helped them in the aggregate. Yes any transition away from government assistance would be tricky given the numbers that have become dependent but the historical record does NOT support the contention that an alternative market-based system would not benefit the poor and needy once established.

jrodefeld posted:

Let me respond in complete honesty and without being condescending. That is really tough. I haven't said this to anyone on this forum, but I have been suffering from some fairly serious medical problems myself. I'm only 29 yet I've had enough problems over the past decade that has limited my ability to work at times. Luckily I'm expected to make a recovery but you don't have to tell me how difficult it is to deal with poor health and the problems that can arise from just bad luck. I'm more fortunate than many and I make a lot of my money working online with my own business and on side projects. I also work part time in a "real" job so I'm getting by. But I'm not the sort that some of you might imagine, a privileged rich kid who never knew hardship. It is quite the contrary.

I honestly believe that the State has altered our society in such profound ways. One way is that we have been trained to look to politicians and social workers rather than our community for help when we get hurt or have problems. We live more isolated lives when in the past we would have lived in more tight-knit communities. I would suspect that newer, social-media using mutual aid societies would spring up where communities of people would work together in social clubs to provide aid and assistance to each other in times of hardship. Such "friendly societies" (as they were also known) existed throughout the late 19th century and into the early 20th. They were quite popular among the poorest of the poor, especially African Americans at a time when racial discrimination was practically an institution in the United States.

I believe that is a very good model of how to institute a community where people are genuinely taken care of when they suffer from poor luck. I have heard many stories of sick people using crowd-sourcing ventures like Kickstarter to raise money for needed medical procedures to great success. We have the tools to help one another like we never have before.

I just think it is very important to not be paralyzed with fear. That is the States greatest tool to keep the masses in line. You fear what would happen if you didn't have your unemployment, your disability, your foodstamps, whatever. It is really no way to live, to be reliant on an impersonal bureaucracy that sees you as a permanent voting block because you literally cannot survive without them.

That is, unfortunately, just how they like it. I could say a great deal about how the State has caused medical costs to soar when medical services would be far cheaper in a free market environment. But I'll leave that for another time. But I want to reiterate that I understand what you are going though. It is no fun at all. Don't lose your dignity, don't give in to fear.

We can create a world of mutual aid where communities and social clubs provide aid to the needy rather than some faceless bureaucracy.

jrodefeld posted:

I think this habit you have of picking out choice exerpts of writings from various libertarians and making me answer for the opinions of others is an immature debate tactic. Do you have any idea of the shear volume of material that Stefan Molyneux has written and recorded over the years? He has thousands and thousands of several hour long podcasts and call in shows speaking on every topic imaginable, both related to libertarianism and unrelated.

quote:

If I list him as an influence, am I honestly supposed to answer or agree with everything he ever said? Or if not, do you really think I should be wasting my time publicly vociferously denouncing every word another prominent libertarian writes that I disagree with so I can be super politically correct in front of my leftist friends?

quote:

I find Molyneux interesting. I agree with him on some things and I disagree on others. He has done a great amount of good overall getting people to think about philosophy and anarchy but I disagree with him on plenty of issues.

quote:

I don't believe for a second that he is a misogynist. He has criticized women in particular in recent years because he puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of raising children peacefully. He personally was abused as a child and he has done a lot of working on the value of not spanking your children and raising them in a responsible way. Since woman typically have the role of child rearing in society and they are the ones who disproportionately hit their children, he is critical of those that do. This doesn't mean that he "hates women". He has been extremely critical of men who beat their children and who don't support their families.

quote:

But he believes that society has given women a pass and not held them to account in their monumental role in shaping the next generation. Whether you agree or disagree, you have to understand the context.

quote:

Even IF Molyneux is a misogynist and cult leader and Hoppe is a racist, that still does nothing to disprove the validity of the non-aggression principle or libertarian theory. It is the ideas that I am concerned with. I follow a great number of libertarian thinkers, including but not limited to the following:

Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Ron Paul, Stefan Molyneux, Hans Hoppe, Gary Chartier, Tom Woods, Lysander Spooner, Frederic Bastiat, Murray Rothbard, Stephan Kinsella, Scott Horton, Albert Jay Knock, Robert Nozick, Benjamin Tucker, Robert Murphy, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman, Will Grigg.

quote:

"I'd also like to hear your opinion on whether you still believe that this orwellian hellscape is a fair example of your principles in action?"

quote:

I agree with all of these people on at least 50% of what they write and say. Do you honestly want me to waste my time publicly denouncing the views of those I disagree with just for your benefit? It serves no purpose to me. They all are serious thinkers who have contributed a great deal. If one of them makes a bad argument then I am not afraid to say so. As when Rothbard failed to extend the non aggression principle to children in The Ethics of Liberty. He was wrong in that case and I am not afraid to point that out.

quote:

On Marriage: That's their entire job, 'yes' or 'no' Put some false eyelashes on, push your tits up and say yes or no. That's their loving job, yes or no. And that's the foundation of just about everything that goes on in the world, is the woman saying yes or no.

That's all it is. Everytime I talk about women's responsibility for who they gently caress and who they have children with, women are all like (mocks whiny voice) 'it takes two to tango' yeah, well when I was shopping for a ring there weren't a lot of women in there.

Here! Here's a downpayment on your pussy!"

quote:

On Marriage again: Do you want to be this vagina parasite that inhales wallets up her cooch without even crouching? eeek, some sort of reverse vacuum cleaner that Hoovers coins out of penises? I mean that's not what you want, right? You don't want to be that! Like, we (men) don't know what it's like to get paid for having an organ.

I'm very much into the equality of the sexes, like I *listen* to women when they say we want to be equal, which means not being a hole-based parasite."

quote:

On wives and children: "Well if they chose a man who's not around, then they are still responsible for that choice... the woman is the gatekeeper, because the woman is the one who suffers a lot more of the pregnancy. Historically what would hapen prior to the welfare state is the woman who got pregnant outside of wedlock... would go on vacation.. give birth to the child, the child would be given up for adoption, which was in the best interest of the child, because children who are adopted into two parent households do just fine. They do just fine relative to everybody else.

Statistically, there's no difference. But, women who keep the children as single mothers harm those children. It's an incredibly selfish and destructive thing to do... if you don't have a husband, if you chose the wrong guy, to keep the child is abusive, almost always...

...You've already proven that you're irresponsible, can't choose the right guy, can't keep your legs closed, cant use birth control, of which there are 18 different kinds, so maybe parenthood isn't for you!

quote:

Stefan Molynuex about his mother:"Yes she is! That's why she's not loving DEAD now! The bond was strong enough that I didn't loving kill her, and that's my forgiveness."

jrodefeld posted:

What moral claim does anyone else have on my justly earned property? Whether or not a wealth transfer is popular or not has no bearing on the legitimacy of the transfer. And why on earth would you assume that the private sector who need to match the State dollar for dollar in replacing State monopolized social services with private alternatives?

quote:

Do you honestly have such a low opinion of our species that you think the only feasible way we have prevent our grandparents corpses from piling up on the streets is to point guns at everyone and steal their property, give it to an "elite" who are above the moral laws that govern mere mortals and permit them to redistribute it in politically motivated ways?

That is the best the human species has to offer to deal with taking care of the sick and elderly? Honestly?

quote:

Furthermore how can you prove that you are not falling for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? Sure people are doing better now than they were a century ago but how do you know that this progress is due to State actions? And, more importantly, how can you be sure that had the market worked in the absence of State intervention, high taxation and redistribution, that poverty rates wouldn't have continued to decline at a faster rate than under the Great Society and War on Poverty?

quote:

It is not as if poverty rates were stagnant for the first fifty to sixty years of the twentieth century and only started to shift once government intervened. It is a matter of historical record that the poverty rate fell substantially every single decade.

Here is the poverty rate since 1959:

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/images/2010/Sep/s17-pove-char-480.png

Here is a relevant link:

http://www.economicsjunkie.com/us-poverty-rate-how-the-great-society-programs-reversed-its-decline/

Since poverty rates were declining every single year before the Federal Government created their welfare programs, why would we not expect these numbers to continue to decline?

DarklyDreaming posted:

Since you have the stomach for wading through Molyneux I have to ask, didn't he try to make a sockpuppet account on one of his videos as a reasonably educated 21 year old woman who agreed with everything he said, but forgot to logout of his real account first? I seem to recall somebody in the MRA hate-o-sphere loving up that badly and I think it was him.

quote:

I love this. You totally kinda ruined frozen for me but i really enjoyed this a lot more than the actual movie. And you really got me thinking about a lot. Being an attractive young woman, I understand what is like to be seen as nothing more than a sex doll. I also know what it is like to use that to my "advantage" to "get over" the system. HELL I even know what it is to suffer mental illness, only to be told bu my parents to ignore it. HOWEVER, despite all of this I feel like I have learned more lessons from everything that has happened in my life. Thank you so much for posting this. Honestly I want to make a difference in the world, and I looked to people like you to sort of guide me in the right direction. THANKS SO MUCH.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Alright that's more reasonable, still doesn't make him any less hosed up.

wateroverfire posted:

Great post. A fascinating debate.

wateroverfire posted:

Uh huh. There are a shitload of posters in this thread, most of whom you agree with and would never call out, who would have to go down for dishonest closed-minded poo poo posting before I did.

CharlestheHammer posted:

You forgot the smug.

At least J seems sincere, for all his problems I don't doubt that he is trying to honestly say his opinions. Water just seems like he is trying to troll D&D, but he is terrible at it. Sedan could school him something fierce.

jrodefeld posted:

I thought this article by David Stockman is relevant to this discussion. He explains how the creation of the Fed and our foolhardy decision to get involved in World War 1 (fueled by fiat money creation) set the stage for a century of constant war and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The nihilism of David Stockman posted:

I was probably the only kid in my high school who knew who David Stockman was. I found the former Reagan budget director's memoir to be a fascinating window into the world of economic policy. So that makes it a bit ironic that he and I both have books coming out this week that have completely opposite takes on the most crucial questions of how the U.S. economy ought to work.

Stylistically, our books are very different: "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America" is a long, spittle-filled diatribe on how the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, FDR, and Richard Nixon ruined America. (Or so I gather — the book only came out today. But here are Stockman’s Sunday New York Times piece and an early review by Marcus Brauchli.) Mine is a reported narrative of the rise of central banking and the response of the leading central bankers to the 2007 to 2012 crisis.

Stockman and I seem to be direct antagonists on this fundamental question: Should government, in particular central banks, endeavor to corral the ups and downs of capitalism to try to steer their nation toward prosperity?

A recurring theme of Stockman’s work is that it is precisely these efforts that have sown the seeds for all that ails the economy. He writes in the Times: “As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests.”

There are some interesting arguments buried in his essay, and, I expect, the book. But pause for a minute to consider how fundamentally nihilistic Stockman’s view of the economy seems to be: that basically anything the state does to try to fix things is undermining some elegant capitalist order and will inevitably lead to chaos.

Consider one of the historical episodes that Stockman views as turning point on the United State’s road to perdition: the Roosevelt administration taking the dollar off the gold standard in 1933. The country was in a dire position at that time: a quarter of the population jobless, desolation rampant, the hopelessness fueling political extremism. A surprising number of people in the United States and Western Europe were starting to consider Communism a more attractive option, and in Germany this despair led directly to the rise of Nazism.

The consensus macroeconomic view, best established by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their “Monetary History of the United States,” is that the economic collapse was driven by a steep contraction in the money supply. Banks had been allowed to fail by the hundreds, contracting credit, and the commitment to the gold standard meant that the Federal Reserve was unable or unwilling to use other means to pump money into the economy to offset it. Prices were falling; while people were starving in the cities, grain sat in silos in farm country because prices had dropped so low. The gears of capitalism had stopped turning. The result was a catastrophe.

Stockman seems to think that the very practical step that the Roosevelt administration took to unshackle Americans from the gold standard was the beginning of an unmooring of capitalism, an unleashing of violent forces that have ruined our economy. But his alternative is . . . what? Forcing millions of Americans to endure grinding poverty because gold is good.

There is no perfect state-of-nature capitalism from which Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt led us astray. Capitalism can only exist in a framework — monetary and legal — set up by the government. Reasonable people can disagree over what that framework should look like, and how interventionist that government or its monetary authority should be. But just because the specific set of options (should monetary policy be aimed at stabilizing the business cycle or at keeping the price of the dollar fixed versus a shiny metal?) doesn’t mean that one set of choices is a natural and perfect arrangement and that deviating from that policy will inevitably bring chaos.

Is basing the value of currency on a yellow metal that people find in the ground really less arbitrary than having a group of sober-minded economists get in a room eight times a year and try to adjust the supply of money so that prices rise about 2 percent annually? I’d take the group of sober-minded economists every time! They at least have the potential to learn from the mistakes of the past — the hyperinflation of 1920s Germany, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the high inflation of the 1970s and, for the generation ahead, the failure to contain excessive growth in private-sector debt that triggered the housing and mortgage bubbles in the 2000s that popped so calamitously in 2008.

I view each of those historical economic crises as a learning experience for humankind, as we grope toward a better way to create an economy where people can fulfill their potential, earn an income and count on their savings being secure. The best we can ask of our public servants is for them to learn from that history. That’s why I’ve spent the last few years of my life trying to write it.

jrodefeld posted:

Stockman is NOT a proponent of "trickle down", supply side economics. He had a short stint as budget director for the Reagan Administration but he quickly became disillusioned and left them to their failures before Reagan's first term was up. Supply side economics is a short of Keynesian economic stimulus that is directed towards subsidizing the privileged rather than the poor. Stockman is far closer to Austrian economic, anti-Fed, and pro sound money.

quote:

David Stockman is quite well respected even among mainstream journals and publications. His latest book "The Great Deformation" is a tour de force of economic sanity and historical revisionism. It has been very well received by people inside the beltway and out.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

The Ludendorff Offensives: totally not a thing that happened, due to mutual exhaustion in 1917.

Stockman is such a loving hack.

quote:

America’s wholly unwarranted intervention in April 1917

Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much. Had Woodrow Wilson not misled America on a messianic crusade...

quote:

giving rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers and Keynesianism among the victors. Choose your poison.

AlternateAccount posted:

Holy poo poo, catching up on this thread is getting painful. I am just going to pull out the worst bullshit I saw:

Page 7: http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribution%202000%20to%202011.pdf

There's also data on the mean net worth by income. Your average social security age person/household has several whole integer multiples of the net worth of your sub-35ers.

quote:

Additionally,

The median income for units aged 65 or older is $24,857, but there are wide differences within the total group. Approximately 13% have an income of under $10,000, and roughly 23% have an income of $50,000 or more.

That information + the net worth information above would indicate that the vast majority of the elderly would not be immediately running out to buy cans of Fancy Feast.

SSA.gov, the exact source of your quote posted:

Social Security benefits are especially important in providing economic security to the elderly. In 2008, nearly 9 out of 10 aged units recieved Social Security benefits. Social Security provided at least half of the total income for the majority of beneficiary aged units in 2008. Without Social Security, the majority of the aged units would have been exposed to great economic insecurity.

SSA.gov posted:

Social Security is the major source of income for most of the elderly.

-Nine out of ten individuals age 65 and older receive Social Security benefits.
-Social Security benefits represent about 38% of the income of the elderly.
-Among elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 52% of married couples and 74% of unmarried persons receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security.
-Among elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 22% of married couples and about 47% of unmarried persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income.

quote:

If you want to work up something a bit more targeted to low-income elderly, maybe that's fine, but consider that at the moment it acts functionally as a transfer payment from working individuals who typically have a lower net worth and not necessarily substantially higher income to the elderly.

AlternateAccount posted:

The average social security recipient receives substantially more, as in six figures more, in payouts than payins.

Mr Interweb posted:

When did the U.S. start using paper currency?

Rhjamiz posted:

In some dystopian future, Libertopian States fight some kind of space battle to prevent the exploitation of near-Earth asteroids by filthy Statists, and the tanking of their precious gold market by a sudden massive influx of SPACE GOLD.

Mr Interweb posted:

Okay this is interesting. I admit, I had a rather different idea of what the gold standard folk were suggesting when they keep saying we need to go back to that. So are Jrode and people like him honestly suggesting that we start going back to a time when everyone carried gold coins and poo poo?

jrodefeld posted:

You are completely wrong about this. As a libertarian, I would support direct taxation at high rates over printing money. Every single time. When a government has the ability to monetize the debt, it is not clear to the average person what is happening. Rising prices don't occur right away (Or necessarily at all) and inflation doesn't affect everyone equally (It hits the rich far more). It impoverishes certain segments of society slowly and sneakily (The wealthy) while enriching other segments (The Poor, also not necessarily).

It allows an expansion of the State far beyond what anyone would tolerate if they actually had to directly pay taxes to fund the enterprise (Not really).

Short of ending the Federal Reserve and going back on the gold standard, it would be a great first step to pass a Constitutional amendment or law that would make it expressly illegal to monetize the debt or expand credit except in an emergency situation (Which would of course absolutely loving destroy the US economy). The effect of such a law (provided it could actually be enforced) would be to force the government to raise taxes on everyone to fund the current levels of spending (And constrain the ability to act in times of crisis. And also be stupid in light of historically low interest rates.). People would rebel and even previous supporters of expansive State power would favor a significant reduction in spending and the elimination of whole departments and programs (People would Rebel because their government would have done something increadibly retarded for no reason).

Once you get rid of the smokescreen of "free" money to paper over deficits, people actually come to grips with the genuine cost of these programs. The illusion is shattered and large scale efforts to push back against the State gain much more traction. (Read as: I think that no one 'really' wants medicare or social security, and if I could just wake up the sheeple.... etc)

StandardVC10 posted:

Having competing currencies would make lots of basic transactions a complete pain in the rear end.

DarklyDreaming posted:

But that was before industrialization so it wasn't real

Captain_Maclaine posted:

It's been my impression that, without meaning DarklyDreaming any insult (yet, at least), a lot of people conflate the 2nd Industrial Revolution in America (post-Civil War manufacturing leading into Gilded Age stuff) with all of it, and ignore the 1st altogether.

Mr Interweb posted:

Oh also since we were discussing it a page or two back, I don't get how right-wingers argue that FDR's policies somehow made the Depression worse. As time went on, he continually raised both taxes and spending. If the supply siders were correct, then with every tax and spending hike, the unemployment should have kept shooting up, yet the exact opposite happened. Just to reiterate, we had a 90%+ top tax rates with record spending by the time WWII came around. Doing those things should have plunged us into an economic black hole, the result of which would have made the Great Depression look like the Roaring 20s.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Another Great Depression fun fact: the gold standard made it harder to exit the Great Depression hence the mass exodus from the standard in the early 1930s.

The Mutato posted:

I am not a pacifist at all. I just don't believe an ancap society would simply break down into a warrish hellscape.