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

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

«‹›2 »

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

im gay posted:

What is the libertarian answer to environmental issues such as climate change that require international responses?

I believe they feel that the market will present a solution to such problems if we just get out of the way and cut back on regulations.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 02:24

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Gen. Ripper posted:

Aren't "freemen on the land" the British side of the sovereign citizen bullshit?

Nope, they're American - though people in other nations use American arguments! Which was really great when some judge in Canada pointed out to the guy, "You realize this isn't the US, right?"

I'm told there's a German variant where they say that the last legitimate supreme leader of Germany was Karl Doenitz, and since the U-Boat Commander didn't pass the baton off, they don't have to pay speeding tickets.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 03:14

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

SedanChair posted:

Use your words. Quoting somebody else without comment reinforces my impression that you don't have any fully formed ideas of your own.

I think the relevant words were "Hey, can I be rendered immune to probation so I can see if I can top the ignored-list chart" :v:

# ¿ May 23, 2014 21:55

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Unlearning posted:

Well, yeah - that's his point: the NAP never does any argumentative work at any time. It always rests on an implicit theory of distributive justice.

Maybe I'm misreading, but to me this just seems like an argument for socialist-style possession over property: people have a right to own something if they are using it, rather than just by legal fiat - as is the case now. I mean, how can you justify unused stocks of food and massive fortunes while others starve under a use-rights ethic?

"It would be far more wicked, in the long run, to encourage their dependence on this doled-out grain/cash. We must not encourage dependence! Better to die than to be dependent."

This isn't even a novel argument, that's literally been the argument against famine relief efforts until relatively recently.

# ¿ May 25, 2014 17:42

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

SedanChair posted:

I would say "well that's just Hoppe" but for some reason libertarians never really come around to denouncing him as full-throatedly as they do, say, social democrats. It's more like "ha ha, oh Hans!" Kind of alarming, really.

I think it's understandable, if regrettable, that they don't put as much heat on the people in their tent as outside, but the sort of freedom where I am kept under watch to not be advancing things like "homosexuality," "nature environment worship," etc. doesn't seem like it's actually very free. It seems like feudalism without the charms. Obviously a lot of the libertarian dream is sort of aiming back towards that period, but it's rare to see it stated so... explicitly.

# ¿ May 29, 2014 20:27

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Jerry Manderbilt posted:

If it is, there's some sweet irony about the third one being funded by a kickstarter.

Atlas Shrugged? More like The Audience Shrugged.

More like Atlas Sucked

I imagine for a lot of the actors it's just a job. Maybe they enjoyed the book but aren't assholes? I know the guy who played Quark (who was also a president of the actor's union for a while) was involved.

I think the third film has a major problem that they are required to include, without abridgement, that humdinger of a speech from the end of the book.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2014 17:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Buried alive posted:

What are the technical details on how it sank? If they managed to set sail in the first place it seems like it has to be more complex than, 'lol, concrete boat.'

Concrete ships have been built before, but I imagine they did a shoddy job and it cracked. And unlike steel or wood you can't just go bung up a hole like that.

There's a reason that most of the concrete ships I've heard of have been for river traffic.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2014 19:25

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mister Bates posted:

Yep, they were 'invaded' by Tonga. The original reef had been considered Tongan territory and the surrounding waters were economically important to the country's fishing industry, and they quickly got irritated at the hundred or so random white people squatting on a mound of sand in the middle of prime fishing territory, trying to claim it as territorial waters and demanding that the Tongan fishermen pay them for the right to fish there. The people on the island talked big about fighting to the death to defend their homestead against the evil and oppressive Tongan government. The Tongans then sent about twenty unarmed soldiers in dress uniform backed by a military band, and the libertarians all packed up and went home, grumbling about the evils of state coercion.

So is the theory with "homesteading" that you can just build a house on any land that isn't being actively cultivated and now magically it's yours because you settled it? I remember people being all "bar bar we should homestead people on the federal lands in the West," never mind that - even leaving aside the question of national monuments, ecology, etc - there's no loving water there, as if it was some magical solution, that if you just give someone a scrap of godforsaken land they will become a stout yeoman farmer growing crops and making a living. It's like if British policy included regular proposals for the establishment of new monasteries.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2014 20:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mister Bates posted:

Yeah, that was pretty much their entire reasoning. They figured that since the land was technically new, nobody owned it, and they could just put a house down on it and say 'this land is now legally mine because I say so.' They didn't think it through much further than that - it was, again, literally a pile of loving sand in the middle of the South Pacific, with absolutely no vegetation or wildlife or soil or fresh water or...loving anything. And then around a hundred well-off American suburbanites with no understanding of how to survive in a wilderness environment of any kind plopped themselves down on what amounted to a patch of unlivable wasteland. The plan, as far as I can tell, was basically to support the anarcho-capitalist utopia by charging fishermen to fish in the surrounding water and then use the resulting money to import the necessities of life.

And presumably they would have attacked those fishermen to keep them away? Sounds like pirates to me.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2014 22:43

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Typical Pubbie posted:

This is probably less feasible than trying to build a commune on a sandbar in the south pacific. A land-based libertarian city-state would have to deal with problems like maintaining its borders against the political and military machinations of its competitors (including the supposedly benevolent host country), in addition to silly statist problems like immigration, free riders, water rights, the business cycle, etc. etc.

Why go to all that trouble when you can just buy the political process right here at home?

These projects are typically for people who have not been able to make it big under the currently rigged system, but have merely made it "OK."

# ¿ Jun 9, 2014 07:45

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I will contribute Ten Reasons Not To Abolish Slavery

Of course, this is sort of meta-ironic humor. The best one:

quote:

Without slavery the former slaves would run amuck, stealing, raping, killing, and generally causing mayhem. Preservation of social order therefore rules out the abolition of slavery. Southerners lived in dread of slave uprisings. Northerners in the mid-19th century found the situation in their own region already sufficiently intolerable, owing to the massive influx of drunken, brawling Irishmen into the country in the 1840s and 1850s. Throwing free blacks, whom the Irish generally disliked, into the mix would well-nigh guarantee social chaos.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 01:00

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

GunnerJ posted:

I don't suppose it matters that abolitionists wanted slaves to live as free citizens of a government that existed to (among other things) suppress crime? I guess you could say that we will enjoy superior protection provided by a DRO once emancipated from State control, but then what happens when someone makes the same argument against DROs with the State as its ironic foil?

A fair number of them were probably vaguely expecting the slaves would, in the main, prefer to resettle overseas and were willing to fund that venture, which is why we have Liberia. Obviously, as someone at the time said, "this is a drat humbug, but it will take with the people."

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 05:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:

Second option: Much more commonly, real life is ignored and the historical implications of loosened regulations are never, ever acknowledged.

In the other thread, Jrode specifically and explicitly said you can't use historical evidence as a point against his economic conclusions, only as a point in their favor. He did not actually say "praexology," though, probably because we know that word.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 06:05

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah it seems like the sensible thing to do with the military is to gradually draw things down and in the meantime stop pissing away so much money. We could probably still straddle the Earth like gods on two-thirds of our present budget and free up that cash to do things like fix the drat roads.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2016 05:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ratoslov posted:

That's another thing about Libertarians. Government-created roads pre-dates Capitalism, Socialism, and loving writing. It is the literal life-line of civilization. Why, then, do Libertarians argue it's somehow a bad thing?

Libertarians have gone on record (well, on post) as saying that they would prefer an extinction-level asteroid impact to the cruel harm of unconstitutional taxation.

http://volokh.com/2011/02/15/asteroid-defense-and-libertarianism/ posted:

...I think there�s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress�s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it�s O.K. to violate people�s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people�s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it�s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone�s rights; if that�s so, then I�m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2016 09:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

It didn't kill PEOPLE, it killed poors.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2016 08:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

QuarkJets posted:

PSA: it is immoral for the government to deny my right to eat the still-living flesh of crying babies, they signed the contract so they know what they were getting into

I thought the libertarian line was that you aren't allowed to kill or eat or torture a baby because that's aggression, but you can't be held accountable for letting the child die through neglect.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2016 22:26

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the reasons food stamps is such a successful program is because of that; the socialism is "everybody that can't afford enough food gets free money to buy food with." The capitalism part is that these people can spend that how they please rather than creating a huge bureaucracy that tries to decide who gets what. "Hey brah, sorry you can't feed your family, have some fuud buxx. Go buy just like...whatever."

So would you say things like Wisconsin instituting ever more tight restrictions on what you can buy with Uncle Sam's food funbucks are making things more like a Stalinist hellscape, not less?

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 22:50

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

...I'm confused, when did Jesus say gently caress the poor?

It doesn't have anything to do with some Jew carpenter's sayings, it has to do with the fact that WE are CHRISTIAN, and that means since WE are that, THAT is good. Get it? You'd better, OR ELSE...

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 05:45

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

It also doesn't help that "work ethic" seems to be synonymous with "if you aren't producing dollar income for someone else you're an awful leech." As opposed to "Do something with yourself, for chrissakes."

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 06:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DeusExMachinima posted:

Your example is questionably in service to your argument. There's plenty of super-high end and luxurious private healthcare forming in countries with assistance programs that reduce or remove cost for the poors. From true universal HC like Britain's NHS to Switzerland's superior implementation of, basically, Medicaid. About the only thing that'd eliminate your Koch example from the face of the earth would be full communism/literally erasing all classes. Good luck.

I imagine the critique here is more that this is held up as a vaunted example of how rich people are great, so if we just finish tearing down the social safety net, the rich (now richer) will do all of these things and the problems will be solved.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 20:53

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Cingulate posted:

Literally everyone is wrong though.

Depending on how you mean this, either some people are... heh... LESS wrong than others, and we are thus becoming less wronger over time, hopefully, OR human commnication is a black and meaningless gulf in which we howl ultimately empty phrases at each other to gussy up what is, at best, elementary ape behavior, and at worst, simple nihilism.

I think you can support both theories, frankly

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 19:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Stinky_Pete posted:

What is "is?"

To scoot back on topic, I actually do gather there is a strain in libertarianism which rejects many modern scientific findings, not on the grounds of "well I think the medical establishment is exaggerating and raw milk is actually fine/colloidial silver actually helps me with my hypochondriosis," but on the grounds of "A = A, therefore quantum mechanics is inherently impossible." Which is where of course the whole praexology thing comes in, and I even remember in that last jrode thread, how he actually said you can't disprove Austrian economic theories with mere evidence, but you CAN reinforce or, perhaps, at MOST, slightly modify them -- introduce an epicycle or two -- all that you want.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 00:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

VitalSigns posted:

Ayn Rand rejected quantum mechanics for exactly that reason. Also psychology, neurology, and evolution. Also biology and statistics, like any medical evidence that showed something she enjoys like smoking is harmful. Basically anything that implied humans are anything less than perfectly rational calculating machines was right out.

Apparently someone went to an Objectivist meeting and was asked "why don't you smoke?" "Well, I'm actually allergic, so I'd rather not."

They seemed to recognize the wisdom in this and the rationality too, but it troubled them nonetheless.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 03:05

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mornacale posted:

Trying to compare the human cost of socialist vs capitalist economies through history is definitely not going to come out looking good for the capitalists.

I believe the usual dodge here is that the government didn't do it directly in the capitalist sections, and also that a lot of the real awful horrors (though by no means all) had settled out into a relative steady state, where there were merely grinding oppressions as opposed to mass slaughters and dispossessions, by the time explicitly socialist/revolutionary states started getting going.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 01:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Cingulate posted:

And neither Mao nor the Empire let people starve because they wanted them gone, it was economic incompetence in either case.

Yet somehow this exculpates the capitalists and condemns the socialists in the same breath.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 02:25

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Cingulate posted:

That would even be a bit closer to my original point, and to the thread topic: that while socialism has readily proved to make a great inspiration for terror on an unbelievable scale, libertarianism has so far not dishonored itself in this manner.

The economic theories that the British cited to justify letting the Irish starve in the Famine were in essence the same economic theories advanced by libertarians. Now granted there are and were more Chinese than Irishmen, but I would call that a signal dishonor.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 02:52

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Cingulate posted:

You're making it too hard on yourself here. By that mode of reasoning, communism is innocent, because no (large) communist regime ever existed (Stalinism was not communism, but autocratic dictatorship etc).

The point I am making, however, is that while the Capital has been the inspiration for a great many genocides, Road to Serfdom has not, Anarchy, Utopia and the State has not, and in fact, neither has Atlas Shrugged. Granted, neither has the Lord of the Rings, so it's debatable how far that point will get anyone. But still: conceding that neither a libertarian, nor a communist regime ever existed, libertarian books have not inspired genocides, but Marxism has. So what I am talking about is: when people set out on the road to their personal utopia, one kind of utopia somehow guides one into gulags, one into a Starbucks, and one into a really really bad science fiction book.

Well I'm glad you could take a break in your efforts to excuse the historical death tolls of capitalism to give me some argumentation advice, buddy!

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 03:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

GunnerJ posted:

An alternate possible conclusion is that libertarians need to stop trying to hide or obfuscate the racist implications of their ideas and make them central.

I actually don't think that's going to work out, because the more or less pure form of what we can call racial resentment - which is what Trump is doing - is getting a plurality of the Republican primary audience.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 20:50

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

paragon1 posted:

And if the Irish don't do it for you then surely what was done to the Native Americans does? Surely!

That's an extended series of slaughters and forced relocations that was pretty explicitly capitalist pretty much all of the time.

Its primary justification is even that the Indians weren't "using the land right." Presumably if they had been farming it like white men - oh wait, the Cherokee (I think) did in fact basically settle down and mostly adopt European style property rights and farming, if with some of their cultural traits remaining in place, and they were STILL kicked off their land because white people wanted to take their property. In fact, the governmental intervention in the free market is probably why they were able to undertake the Trail of Tears, rather than just being massacred.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2016 04:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I mean, this does explain a lot of their fear of any kind of minority rights, probably out of an expectation that the minorities would in fact rise up and crush them for the evils they have done. You could try to resolve or de-escalate matters, of course, but that requires effort and might interfere with the full enjoyment and pleasure of Property.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2016 10:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

So under these libertarian theories, if General Zod showed up he'd just get the whole planet fair and square, right? Or would the planet be considered Superman's property by right of first arrival? I ask because even the whitest of Aryans would be as nothing compared to the power of a Kryptonian underneath the light of a yellow sun.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2016 23:49

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Cingulate posted:

Because IMO western civilization is much better than a lot of people give it credit for. Or alternatively, almost every other way of being is much worse than a lot of people give them credit for.

Do those ways of being include "being dead," by any chance, because that's an option that Western civilization has historically been glad to extend.

Now you can certainly make a case that what you could call the liberal democratic consensus does seem to be, broadly speaking, the best method of social organization we've got thus far. This doesn't mean we'll never come up with another better, nor that there aren't spaces within that which we could move towards. What is galling too is when a mere motion towards social democratic ideas is treated as some inevitable dive towards Pol Pot, while of course any criticism of capitalism needs an exculpatory apology. Hardly fair play there.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2016 01:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Curvature of Earth posted:

Technically speaking, wouldn't full socialism be achieved just by reincorporating all businesses to be employee-owned? The workers would own the means of production, in a very literal sense.

This would probably constitute a rather major expropriation from the capital class, which makes the idea somewhat questionable, but there's no reason why you couldn't have a socialist economy with what we would recognize as companies and firms providing similar goods and services, just from employee-owned factories and plants rather than the current model.

e: Like, as opposed to the whole "Federal Department of Lunch, massive breadlines everywhere." If there's a robust social safety net you wouldn't even need the government being involved in such things, though you would probably want to nationalize utilities and similar bare essentials. If you and your buddy's shoe factory fails, well, that sucks buddy, fall back into the safety net and get on with your lives.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Apr 10, 2016

# ¿ Apr 10, 2016 06:15

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Hey Cingulate, you're aware that Galt's Gulch is an entirely fictional example, right? Like even the guys who tried to set one up in Chile appear to have foundered on the grounds of "We're incompetent and possibly out to steal money"?

So if we're going to introduce Galt's Gulch as some kind of proof of anything, I would like to enter the United Federation of Planets as an argument for socialism.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2016 20:25

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

VitalSigns posted:

I don't know, 2a is pretty interesting to me? Let's do a thought experiment.

I'm the only survivor of a shipwreck, and I swim to an uninhabited island (state D1) which luckily enough is a verdant tropical paradise. I collect coconuts, I fish on the shore, I use wood and fire to build myself a shelter and fashion tools. The island is large enough to support a few dozen individuals, but not so large that I haven't in some way mixed my time and labor with every piece of it, so I claim ownership of it (state D2).

Then another ship wrecks off the coast and a survivor swims ashore.
"Go away" I say "this island is private property."
"I have nowhere to go," he replies, "can't I live here with you, this place has such plenty that I can eat my fill every day and you'll never even notice."
"No," I say, holding aloft my copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (the one prized possession which I managed to save during my escape from the wreck so many years ago), "I have properly applied the rules of acquisition herein, and this entire island belongs to me. By trespassing you are committing an unjust conversion of property, be gone or I'll stab you with this pointy spear."
"But I'll die out there! You can't send me out to die, you just can't!" he wails.
"You are proposing a violation of liberty in order to conform the world to a patterned principle that you prefer (namely, that you shouldn't have to resign yourself to drowning in the open sea just because I'm being a butt). But we've already proven that beginning from a justly-reached state, free decisions on both our parts can create a state that violates your cherished patterned principle, what you propose will require unending cycles of interference with liberty, ie a state of partial slavery. This I cannot permit, so get swimming."

(a) Is this situation just?
(b) Say the new arrival has a firearm, and he threatens to shoot me if I attempt to interfere with him coming ashore. He assures me that he will not interfere with my ability to support myself on the island because again there is such plenty that we can both have our fill. Are his actions unjust?

If he has a gun, it comes down to which of you is white. If you're both white, you need to compare who's more of a WASP. If you're both WASPs, father's income bracket. If THAT'S the same, he probably shoots you and takes your island.

e: I mean he'd shoot you either way, but if you're white and he isn't, that's savage piracy which should get him killed by the navy. If he's white and you're not, he has the right of discovery. If you're both not white, the island belongs to Great Britain.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2016 09:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

TLM3101 posted:

I don't know Sweden's political history nearly as well as I should, but there was a lot of ideological crossovers between the Labor-movements in the Scandinavian countries, so Norway, Sweden and Denmark did all influence each other. Part of it, I think - and I'm just speculating here - is that we weren't really a 'vital' part of the cold war, and only peripheral players internationally. Until the 1970s, we were honestly considered either kind of backwards, or as fairly hilly, remote countries that weren't of all that great importance except as speedbumps for the USSR in the event of WW3. We all had industry that was reasonably competitive, but nothing spectacular, and Sweden and Denmark were considered the 'big' Scandinavian countries.

Then Norway found oil in the 70s and that changed a bit. The interesting thing to note is that the government immediately nationalised the oil reserves and set up a state-owned company to exploit them, and temporarily leased instead of selling drilling-rights to the big international oil-companies ( whereas Denmark did sell, to the everlasting annoyance of the Danes afterwards ), and then decided to stick as much of that money in the bank as we possibly could. Currently, all that oil-money is in a sovereign wealth fund which is supposed to pay for the impending pension-crunch that's coming as our boomers hit retirement age en masse.

Which, again, is wholly in line with socialist thinking.

Whether this astounding influx of wealth has made us better as people or as a country is... debatable, though.

Don't you guys have titanic reserves of Thorium? You should get on that technology ASAP and rule the world as Viking gods again. Once you're the power magnates you can resume sacking cathedrals and monasteries.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2016 02:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

jfc, they call us Stalins not Hitlers. Hitler was a good guy by their standards because at least Hitler something something and Stalin was worse with no redeeming qualities. UNLIKE HITLER!

(I am not a Stalinist, just saying our horrible rear end in a top hat was slightly better than their horrible rear end in a top hat)

Don't forget working in a slur on Abraham Lincoln, the American Lenin, who singlehandedly destroyed freedom.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 19:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

You could have proposed that the government compensate the slave-holding classes for their lost "property" in some manner (which I believe did happen on a limited basis in the pro-Union border states) which I think was tried with some success in Brazil around that time frame. But you're still interfering with the sacred right of Property, and you're also probably going to have to have TAXES to pay for this.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2016 16:50

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Dr. Stab posted:

Somehow, I think these are the sorts of taxes that libertarians would be okay with.

Why? It's a tax. Taking my money to buy out someone's property?

I mean, if you're saying "some" libertarian individuals or people who are sticking to the dictionary definition... sure. If you mean the actual semi organized movement, I imagine they wouldn't give a poo poo, or would call for private charity to do it, because taxes.

Now I do agree with the sentiment that the slaves were never property even if they were treated as such, but I could see an argument that essentially buying out the South would've been morally preferable to a major war. The knock-on effects, however, would have been bad (the plantation owners would now have a shitload of money and would probably have instituted some form of tenement farming, technically "free" but with the same broad effects as the post-Reconstruction South did).

# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 11:26

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

«‹›2 »