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How could you not resist the urge to bilk people when you get the opportunity if you've worshipped the concept on an altar? How can you cultivate a following of the fragile youth if you've determined yourself honor-bound to attack the weak? It's a paradox that seems like you'd need some kind of religious dedication to jump out of.
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Aug 15, 2019 17:58
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I feel like libertarianism and anarchism are the same side of two different coins.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:35
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I don't know much about Alan Greenspan's views and impact on the world, but I do know that he really wanted to gently caress Ayn Rand but never got to.
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Aug 24, 2019 01:22
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Most attempts at establishing a massive new world order tend to decay from overlooked aspects of human nature. Societies built around looking after the group as a whole tend to suffer from individuals either going their own way at the lower levels, disempowering the whole, or being subverted by the upper levels turning into a system for the empowerment of the elite in charge. That's how commonly-elected tribal leaders wind up becoming eternal monarchs and big states turn into kleptocracies. Societies with more distributed power among individuals suffer from the inherent tendency of humans to band together in groups for greater strength against other humans, so people form their own groups within the system that further concentrate power, ruining the equilibrium. You can really see that happening with free markets agglomerating into only a few big players or democracies and republics being subverted by rigid party/faction/family systems that seek to shut out all smaller players. Attempts at removing any overarching structure wrangling individuals are even more open to this, because people have a tendency to just fill that vacuum. Less ideological attempts wind up being taken over, more ideological attempts either wind up in the sway of a charismatic leader or fall apart when the ideology fades.
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Aug 28, 2019 21:55
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From their perspective, a liberal is anyone on the other side of the aisle who opposes them, and that basically suits their purposes. Language being the fluid thing it is, there's really nothing you can do to stop them.Golbez posted:One of the big things that got me out of libertarianism was realizing that they can and will redefine any word to fit their philosophy. I've only seen this sort of thing on SA with hardline communists demanding that people stick to their specific definitions as defined in whatever archaic document that they've chosen to define their entire worldview, while conveniently moving goalposts so that they don't have to confront contradictions. So at least that totally insufferable quirk isn't specific to a certain flavor of ideology.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:57
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Flood insurance has one of the weirdest deals. Legally require people in flood zones buy insurance, but insurers don't want to provide insurance for that high of a risk, so the federal government goes around and heavily subsidizes the insurers, to the point that the federal government basically foots the bill for insurance payouts. So essentially the government is paying out billions to keep rebuilding houses that constantly flood and essentially keeping people trapped in disaster-prone housing, while parasitic third parties just leech money out of the house owners that doesn't go to paying any damages.
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Sep 8, 2019 07:51
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It sure seems like an obvious solution to a lot of problems. So many of the issues with employee-business relations come from the total imbalance of power, and in the last couple hundred years there's been all this development of political power structures towards more fairness. Plug those political developments into corporate power structures. Of course, that brings up new issues, like how should companies deal with employees switching companies, or how to bring new or seasonal hires into the system. Or what if after a company institutes some kind of democratization, they suddenly get really prone to doing the ol' grift where all the new employees are made freelancers without rights in the system. I don't think it's a coincidence that all these citizenship-based democracies around the world have gotten all squirrely about immigrants that could threaten the current balance of power, imagine if that happens with companies. And as for the implementation by just making all the employees shareholders, that sounds like a neat idea. I've only heard of one company that actually did that, a free-love cult turned knife manufacturer, but it's possible in theory. Biggest problem is that most companies in general are not headed anywhere near in that direction. There's an increasing reliance on venture capital rather than actual profits, I don't think investors would like not getting a slice of stock for their trouble. Even to the employees themselves it might be a tough sell, since the only way you could maintain employee ownership is by not allowing them to sell their stock, so that's depriving them of a lot of the "value" of the stock. I don't think I've ever heard people get interested in the dividends of their stock rather than potential gains from reselling. It feels like a dumb reason to stymie the process, but the world is dumb. It's worth thinking about the intricacies of corporate structure, since so much of the world is wrapped up in them these days. If you can affect corporate structures, you can affect the world. Just don't mess up or you may end up doing something like that Clinton policy to make companies link executive pay to corporate performance that accidentally made CEO pay skyrocket.
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Nov 12, 2019 05:23
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In simplest terms, I think the raw reason why an "unfettered" free market doesn't work is because the participants usually don't value the freedom of the market themselves. For those who have already had success in gaining more wealth and power than others, they have a rational self interest in using what power they have to circumvent many aspects of the free market and reduce competition, provide safety nets for themselves while removing them from others, and blocking information that could be detrimental to their position. People talk a lot about upward mobility as an issue, but lack of downward mobility is also a symptom of unfree, unfair markets, because then the wealthy are playing by different rules. There is no "market solution" to preventing the agglomeration of wealth, because without outside intervention, those with more wealth will have more ability to circumvent the market than those without, and even other advantages like innovation, luck, and teamwork can be steadily ground down, assuming the wealthy don't run into some kind of horrible catastrophe (from which they often can recover faster) or wind up getting stuck doing something spectacularly stupid. And if you get further, there's things that can't be free markets, and the basic fact that while free markets can optimize things, what they're optimizing might not be what society at large really needs. Fossil fuel companies are incapable of solving climate change, paperclip manufacturers will never of their own accord improve labor conditions, entertainment industries are constantly ensnared in weird messes where they reduce the enjoyability or distribution of their product while they're trying to maximize profit. Which at the very least means that free markets need to be regulated, pruned, and calibrated regularly by some higher power if they're to be useful and not just tools of the establishment to maintain the current order. Solutions that involve circumventing market economics and property entirely get weird, abstract, and philosophical, so it's hard for me to say very much about them. That's the basics of why free markets cannot work on their own and are not the panacea for all the world's problems despite being able to make some improvements. I think a lot of people work backwards from wanting a state of no government towards trying to make the free market into one big miracle that it's just not.
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Nov 14, 2019 17:52
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I think the standard libertarian stance is that if you get exploited, it's your fault for being so exploitable and if you were smart that wouldn't've happened.Zanzibar Ham posted:They know it, they're just so supremely confident they'll be the only ones to slam the 'betray' button. Then you have a group of libertarians pressing the button nonstop while complaining about everyone else doing the same. Nah, it's even weirder, because in theory the prisoner's dilemma should be the biggest force preventing a group of equal individuals from becoming unequal through some of them joining forces to gang up on another, but cooperation screws up the calculations of the "ideal" libertarian state. VitalSigns posted:I'm not really sure why we should care that our voting system doesn't have monotonicity really, especially when the current system is not only non-monotonic itself but also elects the candidate most hated by the majority of the electorate constantly In the short term it doesn't matter, since any change is an improvement. In the long term, (or in the places that already have one of these fancy alternative voting systems) any imperfect voting system will gradually build up inequities along the weird edge cases. So ideally you'd have all these almost-perfect voting systems on a random rotation so no power can get too entrenched along a less-fair basis.
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Nov 28, 2019 17:20
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divabot posted:* does not apply if it's the libertarian being boycotted because they earned a bad reputation - that's SJW fascism That's redundant, because boycotts only really work with mass coordination which goes against libertarian rules.
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Nov 28, 2019 22:19
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asdf32 posted:Most people can get behind various policies to help those with debt but aggressive debt forgiveness is unfair in a fundamental way (a moral judgement other than 'screw the capitalists' is unpopular I know) and will be poor divisive policy. Student loans already break many of the rules of debt by being fundamentally inescapable. There's no purpose to guaranteeing that the debt will be maintained forever aside from assuring the financial security for lenders (or rather, the new owners of the debt after the loans are sold off as their own financial commodity). Loans are fundamentally gambles, and if they can't be defaulted on, they become a form of slavery. Functionally, there have already been federal programs created to forgive debt student loans after long periods of time and fairly arcane requirements, but through a combination of legal ambiguity in trying to keep debt forgiveness circumstantial and intentionally fraudulent management by the current administration, nothing has come out of it. If something is going to be done about this debt that has gone out of control, it's going to have to be direct. No fooling around with trying to maintain the integrity of a predatory industry. Debt forgiveness has all the economic benefits of tax breaks but without defunding important programs.
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Dec 8, 2019 19:51
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There was a phase in American history when a lot of big roads were created privately and then charged tolls, but that only really works if there's "free" land out there that you can just claim. It'd be impossible to privately make some major infrastructure in a city when you have to buy up all the land involved in the process. Also it's underscored by all those private roads having gone out of business over time and defaulting over to the government because toll roads aren't very practical to run and maintain for a profit. It's much more convenient to get the money for road maintenance from something like a gas tax anyways. I think technically things like housing developments also count as privately making roads, but it's not like the company making those roads is gonna come back and do any maintenance after selling off all the houses. There's also weird edge cases, but nothing a sane man could really hang an entire world philosophy on.
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Dec 22, 2019 00:42
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Alhazred posted:I just think it was funny that the article says that in the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck he earns his fortune fair and square while in the comics not only does Scrooge burn down an african village, Don Rosa explicitly make it clear that his fortune alienated him from his family and made him sad and lonely. That was also the big thing in Scrooge's past that he faced consequences for, being pursued across the earth for all time by a zombie. Although the zombie wasn't very good at that. Also worth noting that Scrooge McDuck was born in a christmas story.  While that could fit in with just being a greedy rich bastard obsessed with money, the rest of the story was about him being bitter that there were no brave men in the world and pulling pranks on Donald to see if he was a coward (which Donald passed by accident). http://duckcomicsrevue.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-on-bear-mountain.html The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck can read as a nice little libertarian story of wealth being awarded to the best of men, but also throughout the whole of it, constantly people are lying and cheating and disasters leave him destitute in between adventures, even contracts get skewed around, so it shows all the perils of living in an unregulated world, just like how the normal comics constantly make jokes about how cruel Scrooge is with his cheapness and exploitation. Although that only really contradicts libertarian ideology if it's philosophically consistent and doesn't regularly ignore suffering for its own convenience, so... Also Scrooge only gets started from being able to freely immigrate to America and then gets his first job from a family member.
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Dec 30, 2019 08:43
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Dirk the Average posted:I'm in med device R&D, and this is literally never a question we ask. The only questions are of the efficacy of the product and how quickly we can get to market. I've never worked in pharma, but i would be shocked if the R&D folks over there thought along different lines. You'll note that it's not a pharmaceutical or medical device company asking the question, it's an investment bank. And it doesn't matter how many well-meaning people are involved at the backend of the medical industry, if the actual point where doctors and treatments meet patients has to be justified from a free-market profit perspective, those questions will be asked. And the answer is no, it's not an effective profit model, and it continues to become less effective as the income gap widens and the economy decays and there's less money to extort. I think they're hitting the point where they're finding that some people can just tank massive cost increases, and the others couldn't pay costs as they are now, which is why there's all these individual products having their costs spike as the companies try feeling out how much they can get away with. That's just the official list price too, since the bulk of their business they do with insurance companies that they inevitable cut deals with, so you'll see massive discounts on the massive markups, and the whole industry is a mess. Potentially there's some confluence of circumstances that could align profitability with effectiveness of treatment, but there's absolutely nothing linking them together.
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Jan 4, 2020 06:30
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Gotta post this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0vpzpjKVsw People go really weird in the head when they're allowed to be on their own for too long, but still have a social instinct to fulfill. It's basically Plato's cave of relationships.
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Jan 7, 2020 05:15
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The New Hamshire Libertarian Party has chosen its candidate. Thread, your comment?
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Feb 7, 2020 22:29
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Wait, so are we talkin' underage whales here?
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Feb 8, 2020 05:21
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Amazon also makes a lot of its money off of government contracts because they know that the easiest way to make money in an allegedly free market system is to avoid the uncertainty of a free market. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/checking-amazon-s-wish-list-stacy-mitchell-podcast-transcript-ncna961391 Uber's big plan for dealing with competition it's already tried, they're going to try getting the government to declare other unregulated taxi companies illegal, like when they tried to get the government to crack down on Lyft for breaking the same laws that Uber was breaking. And in broader terms, even without the assumed eventual price hike when the investor money theoretically stops coming in (because it's not like there are unfathomably rich people who could indefinitely fund an institution for their own alternative purposes, right? Right?) businesses that use venture capital to run without a profit make it almost impossible for others to enter into the market without finding some wealthy patrons to take pity on them, which means even more concentration of power in the market. From a consumer perspective, it stifles choice from stifling innovation, from a worker standpoint it keeps wages down by restricting the amount of potential employers and restricts upward mobility, since there's no splitting off to start your own business. And then that circles back so with a shrinking middle class, there's less of a market for innovation anyways, so everything stagnates. It's a whole mess to follow, but that's how the system works. Without a free market, there's no mobility within the system, just an increasing power disparity between the haves and have nots. This is why for decades there was actual antitrust legislation that would force a grocery store chain to break up if it just had 15% control over a city.
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Feb 13, 2020 06:42
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Thomas Midgley also suffered horribly from lead poisoning as a result of creating and working with leaded gasoline, and he had to take vacations out to medical facilities to try curing his lead poisoning. He actually came back from one of those vacations to testify in court that leaded gasoline was perfectly fine and not hazardous by pouring it all over his hands and inhaling its fumes, and then going back to continue treatment for lead poisoning. A real piece of work. Then later for totally unrelated reasons, he contracted polio and devised a method of ropes and pulleys to help himself get out of bed and accidentally strangled himself, and THAT's what lands him on lists of inventors killed by their own inventions. CFCs are actually a pretty good example of people seeing a problem and then stopping it before something bad happened. We stopped using them and now the hole in the ozone is sealing back up and everything's fine. Only problem is people get the wrong impression from averted disasters like with Y2K and disbelieve that the danger was even there in the first place.
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Feb 29, 2020 16:10
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The reason you know this is wrong isn't because obviously Coronavirus is a virus and not a syndrome from high-speed wi-fi, but because if it was the result of a corporate project making a public good like the air into a health hazard, then a real libertarian would defend their right to do so to the death, at best suggesting that the affected people should privately boycott the business until they change their practices of their own accord.
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Mar 2, 2020 06:32
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Man, this thread really explodes all at once. I'm not fully following the thread of the conversation, but this jumped out as a thing that I needed to stop.polymathy posted:Let me ask you this. If you are a worker at a business that is currently unprofitable, are you being exploited? This is a massive misunderstanding of what "profit" is. The current trend of "unprofitable" massive tech companies is an artificial thing that exists because of the wild and crazy nature of the speculation market. "Unprofitable" does not mean no money coming in, and it doesn't even mean a deficit of funds compared to intake of money. It means that the business is spending money that has come from "outside" of its standard business model. For small businesses this used to mean bank loans, but these days, it's just raw venture capital money being donated to help the business gain an advantage on its competition that it wouldn't be able to if the business had to actually rely on the free market. It's also important to understand that the "business expenses" taken into account from the profitability equation includes the salary that the CEO has chosen to pay themself, which has very little, if any accountability. There is very little relation between CEO performance and pay. In unsuccessful times, it is the workers who will be cut before CEO or executive salaries.
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Mar 10, 2020 02:18
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To be fair, it's actually comparatively rare (at least, much rarer than it used to be) for people to directly inherit their company from their parents. Usually most CEOs are chosen by a process that also involves a lot of privilege, but usually in a form that at least ensures a basic amount of human functionality, and having gone through a massive game of plinko with their lives provides much more of an illusion of having earned their position. God only knows what the pattern is with majority shareholders though. Most of the absurdly wealthy try their best to keep their heads down. Only time will tell what will happen when the current crop of billionaire heads of companies start retiring and dying and whether their children will directly inherit or if there'll be more shuffling throughout the upper classes. There's a temptation to draw a straight line between the 19th century industrialists and now, but it's easy to forget that there has been a massive compression of industries through corporate agglomeration just in the last 30 years that has concentrated more wealth into fewer individuals than America has seen in a very long time. And of course, it's worth reiterating that the influence of wealthy industrialists wasn't curbed by any mere market shifts, it was through fierce governmental action. JD Rockefeller was hit by a mass of antitrust acts and lawsuits to break up his empire.
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Mar 10, 2020 07:22
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I don't see how you advocate people working together but then draw the line at some kind of accountable governmental authority managing that cooperation. It's sort of the same question of "what the difference is between governmental authority and corporate or landlord authority?" Is the one that's got some kind of democratization around it to make it actually accountable to the people being ruled the bad one? Like if you single out the gubberment as the singular bad authority and cut that one back, you leave people to be forced into inhumane circumstances. Landlords jacking people's rent up and evicting without notice, employers firing and blacklisting employees who dare to step out of line. Panfilo posted:Start your own business and be your own boss? That used to be a more popular strategy for advancement. In fact, the whole boss/employee relationship in many cases can be seen as being derived from the old master/apprentice relationship, where at some point the apprentice used to go free and become an independent master, but the shrinking of the market and increasing anticompetitive practices makes it much harder for people to break free to start out on their own, especially if they want to use their skills and knowledge from their job in their new business.
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Mar 10, 2020 17:57
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polymathy posted:My point is that we know, by definition, that government "owned" land can never be legitimate since it had to be stolen. However, private land can be legitimately acquired through homesteading or peaceful trade. This just keeps being crazy, because privately owned land and publicly owned land come from the same drat place with the same drat method of arbitrarily declaring dominion over X amount of space and exerting the claim by using force upon those who would dare disagree. There is no extra legitimacy to whatever random circumstances that lets people inherit land based upon the accident of their birth. Inheritance of land ownership is literally the basis upon which all class was built, feudalism was founded upon it. And of course, if you want a demonstration as to how the essentially random distribution of land ownership steadily empowers those who lucked out into having better property over those who have worse property until those with more can acquire more as those with less are driven into debt, go play Monopoly, a game designed to demonstrate that principle (before being stolen and copyrighted by Parker Brothers). You don't choose what properties you get, and after a while everything just turns into a death march to finally reach the winner and the whole process sucks. There's also the whole thing where declaring the legitimacy of private property over communally owned land was one one of the key ways that hacendados destroyed villages in Mexico, because united communities can resist but divided ones can be more easily taken over. It's the imposition of one way of life over another, it's the heart of imperialism.
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Mar 10, 2020 19:02
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I just want to write down that Libertarians are murdering people dead and trying to ruin the lives of any survivors, and I hate them. Their ideology is also largely responsible for destroying programs that could've put the country in a better position for dealing with the crisis beforehand.
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May 1, 2020 02:16
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https://twitter.com/lib_crusher/status/1264361015149563904
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May 26, 2020 18:30
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They're already being extremely lazy by arguing against political philosophies that are so far out of power that they're barely visible on national politics, why would they put any real effort into understanding the philosophy they're arguing against? Like if all they're interested in is circling their wagons to defend against potential changes and ignoring the active structural problems with the world they're in, that's not even a political philosophy, it's just a series of elaborate excuses,
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Jun 14, 2020 20:05
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Yeah, seasteading is about the fantasy of being dictator over your little private facility, but these chaz jerks are in a big group coexisting together and just letting people come and go freely and not claiming private ownership over any of the land or buildings. In the ideal libertarian world, you'd be threatening to shoot anybody stepping foot on your property.
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Jun 15, 2020 03:33
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Most popular libertarianism seems to have been developed around promoting the rights of landowners and businesses over any central authority, which was also a big part of how feudalism developed, so it's natural for there to be parallels. In that analogy, corporations are the feudal lords who maintain ownership over their serfs in return for providing them with some form of protection, just like how modern workers are theoretically bound to their employer for pay, although the main difference is that there's still much more freedom for workers to swap employers and go independent (a freedom that is steadily shrinking as income mobility shrinks and industries are reduced to a few businesses building up a cartel against workers). Libertarianism also tries to trace its roots to the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who romanticized independent farmers, which was a much more obscure class under feudalism (although the term he used, "yeoman" originally meant something weirder and specific, it was still a thing). In theory, the independents were protected by the same laws that maintained feudal lords' place in the system, just as how supposedly enforcing absolute rule for corporations is somehow supposed to be an expression of individual freedom. The fact that small landowners tend to have a much harder time going up against larger landowners in front of the law tends to be ignored, just like how corporations can often stomp all over humans in court. But of course, if you dig even deeper, feudalism evolved from ancient roman property laws through a combination of reforms attempting to maintain economic order and the military threat of invasions and raids during the decay of the empire when it couldn't protect the citizens within its borders, not just from outsiders, but from other wealthier landowners within the system attacking to take another's wealth, so it's more like convergent evolution, where the modern philosophy around trying to maintain the private property and power of the wealthy is just following all the same pattern as the ancient philosophy that tried to maintain private property and the power of the wealthy. Maybe America could develop into "proper" feudalism after like a century of everything going wrong (or right if you believe in individuals over society), but we're still a little way off for now.
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Jun 15, 2020 20:20
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I remember Ron Paul having a lot of charisma, although it's not hard to seem like the best one on stage during the republican primaries. It was weird that his tagline was R[backwards love]UTION. Like what the hell is that supposed to mean.
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Jun 18, 2020 06:10
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Ah yes, establishing a new social order through the use of top-down laws to revoke the ownership of private property is a very libertarian thing. And a picture of the most small-government moment of desegregation, when the federal government sent the army to counter the local government that was resisting segregation. Libertarians are always asking for more of that.
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Jun 21, 2020 21:18
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For the record, larger individual companies typically results in less overall jobs, because that's one of the biggest economies of scale: Administrative and executive staff can be much, much smaller relative to the total size of the workforce in a larger company than a smaller company. After corporate mergers, there's typically lots of layoffs to get rid of redundant staff (as well as the reduction in need to compete after eliminating a competitor so less pay rises or gambles on innovation). I don't think the size of an individual corporation typically has an effect on the size of the market or the size of an overall industry, and since antitrust protections are mostly dead, there are plenty of people out there who know that and are just trying to gain enough of a marketshare to be able to assert control over their industry rather than risk competition.
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Jun 22, 2020 01:21
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France tried to introduce laws as to how you could treat slaves in Haiti, although in practice slaves only know as much about the rules as you tell them and it's basically impossible to enforce those laws on owners unless the slaveowners turned themselves in. A whole lot like how a lot of modern labor regulations can't be enforced without united worker action. This did lead to some of the earlier waves of slave rebellions in the Haitian revolution being crown loyalists, because the laws as to the rights of slaves came from the king's administration.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:15
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This belongs here https://twitter.com/TheEpicDept/status/1288820355960799233 Which is probably more being anti-police because he is a literal terrorist than it is being pro-black, but it's a little fun to see.
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Jul 31, 2020 05:36
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There's a complicated sadism where they need to know that there is suffering in order to justify what they do to keep themselves as far up as they are. It's important that the levels beneath them be as terrible as possible. Of course, the less philosophical perspective is the bullshit math of so-called "fiscal conservatism", where any governmental expenditures must be infinitely reduced, because in theory that means the theoretical tax burden can be reduced. No you can't actually go through the numbers to see what costs the most, what expenditures actually reduce the overall financial burden on the government, and whether tax revenue even actually covers the government's budget. Obviously it's the social programs creating a better society that are just pissing away huge amounts of money, and the military and corporate subsidies are nothing. No you CAN'T show me your detailed charts and graphs OR your elegant infographic on how your social program can easily be paid for and increases the overall prosperity, STOP POSTING THAT. I'll stick to my goddamn fictional math with no real numbers. Laffer curve. Also something about how the more desperate workers are, the less power labor has.
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Aug 24, 2020 06:04
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There are crazy market fluctuations that can happen from moving giant piles of money around at once, and it can be difficult to manage, but that is on the far end of the spectrum from where we are now, and using that remote unlikely case as a reason for fighting change is a pointless slippery slope argument. It's like how the laffer curve is absolute bullshit because it hypothesizes a scenario that can never happen. The biggest obstacle to accessing that money, aside from just the political power of the rich to cheat their way out of paying taxes, is the fact that there is a vast worldwide money laundering system enabling people to make their money essentially untraceable. OwlFancier posted:Turns out that people left to their own devices don't actually just maintain a barely livable situation constantly on the brink of collapse, and are in fact capable of working cooperatively to ensure the best outcome for many. You've described government. That's the foundation of what government is. There may have been arguments using the tragedy of the commons as a justification for privatization, but it's used much more these days as a reason why the government needs to exert its control over publicly accessed resources rather than let individual actors gently caress it up. Often it's used to describe environmental matters, like the atmosphere, climate, california's ever-shrinking water reservoirs, biodiversity, and forests, but it can also be applied to things like urban planning or the housing market if you try. Ghosty posted:I’d more say that libertarianism is the political ideology of accepting the limits of human rationality. I’d love to agree that socialism is the better system - but without worldwide simultaneous enforcement it just cannot happen. Given capitalism (socialists may call it “greed”) is the default state of rational humans, libertarianism is the ideology that gives them the most freedom. This is a nonsensical statement based on wild suppositions. But personally I feel like the whole ideological "all or nothing" concept is the biggest flaw, because there's no such thing as a 100% socialist state with no individual freedoms, nor is there any such thing as a 100% non-socialist state with no governmental controls or taxation or collective cooperation. What we're currently headed towards with shrinking the federal government and allowing the wealthy to run wild and unchecked is a form of feudalism where every rich man can be his own little overlord.
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Aug 25, 2020 02:33
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Personally I've always felt that the overall definition of capitalism as a system was more of abstract rationalization of a bunch of happenstance than anything actually meaningful and identifiable as an entity on its own. A lot of definitions imply either everything's capitalist or nothing truly is. Most attempts to rationalize captialism as a thing to be championed wind up somehow hypocritical. The benefits of free markets in certain situations are often a centerpiece, but the tendency of large unregulated corporations to remove the freedom from markets is never addressed. OwlFancier posted:I've described what could constitute the foundation of a government, but I would take issue with working backwards and saying that all governments are therefore that, especially existing ones. You haven't described that being different from what the fundamental principle of government is though, you've just commented on many governments being somehow inoptimal. You can't control large complex resources without some kind of dedicated agency to do so.
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Aug 25, 2020 03:04
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This thread moves drat fast when it gets a true believer to pick on. poo poo. So people were talking about Bezos and Amazon, and there's things about how Amazon, like many other big businesses, gets a lot of government money because if you can connive your way to some of that, you'll have an edge over all the schlubs who have to survive the free market. But most importantly, I need to say this because a lot of people don't realize it: Making zero or negative profits for years as a big business are not representative of a personal risk, they are the result of anticompetitive business practices that are even more anti-free market than government interference. IE; If you can swing negative profits indefinitely, you're not a real business competing with other businesses on the free market, you're getting money from somewhere else to sustain your business and suppressing the ability of other people to enter into your field to try developing a better service because they actually have to be profitable to sustain itself. It essentially makes whether a business lives or dies the result of backroom dealings between aristocratic or oligarchic wealthy investors instead of the result of whether people like to use their service or products. And Amazon is guilty of very many anticompetitive practices, which is how it bloated out into controlling almost half of internet commerce when its website is trash. It mistreats sellers, pushing their prices down, demanding larger shares of the profit, and even just undercutting them and creating their own new product to destroy sellers all together, it's been bad for most authors, it dodges huge amount of tax money, and suppresses wages.
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Aug 25, 2020 20:00
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Honestly my only worry about UBI is that if you do it without trying to tackle issues of affordability from other angles, it may just lead to price inflation so that the standard of living on the bottom rung stays about the same. Although pretty much any long-term solution needs some kind of long-term management instead of just doing it once and expecting that to be a panacea forever.
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Aug 26, 2020 16:55
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 18:25 |
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I don't think most libertarians go that far. They just stick with "it's my money, and I should be the one deciding whether it circulates or not." The government are just some jerk bastards taking your stuff as opposed to the coporate jerk bastards who you're only obligated to give your stuff to because they have control over goods and services that you need and theoretically at one point the corporate bastards worked for a living to provide those goods and services that they now outsource to underpaid schlubs without any hope. It's the same reason why they're extremely pissy about inflation possibly removing value from the money that they would like to be able to just hide inside a mattress. gently caress the overall health of the economy. That would mean caring more about other people.
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Aug 26, 2020 19:02
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