jrodefeld posted:

Note to mods: You know who I am. I'm a libertarian who is staring his own thread, which is acceptable according to the rules, I assume? There are two reasons I want to start a specific thread rather than retread over the "other" libertarian thread and just post comments there. In the first place, I want this discussion to be more narrow in scope. And I want to say something at the beginning that everyone will have a chance to read. On Caros's thread, he specifically poisoned the well from the very beginning by writing an OP describing libertarianism and its adherents in an unflattering and, from my perspective, misleading way. By the time I first posted on that thread, there had already been something like two hundred pages of people making GBS threads on libertarianism before I had a chance to defend it. And since the thread was almost entirely directed at me in particular (it would not exist without my having posted here in the past), you can understand how I'd like to have a bit more discretion about the framing of the debate when I am outnumbered 30 to 1.

Sharkie posted:

Jrod how much do you cost? Not your labor, you.

Let me know, I won't be in the market forever.

Caros posted:

Egypt - Famously owned a shiton of slaves.
Assyrian/Persian - May or may not have abolished slavery under Cyrus the Great. Still had tons of debt slaves and almost certainly had a lot of 'servants'
Seleucid -Loved them some slaves.
Rome - You better believe these guys loved some slaves
Abbasids - "Conquests had brought enormous wealth and large numbers of slaves tot he muslim elite"
Mongols -

Arglebargle III posted:

Property is eft.

Cemetry Gator posted:

When you say I can do what I want to my own body as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else, what does that mean?

Let's take heroin, for example. Have you've seen what opioid addiction can do to a person. It's terrible. Their get skinny, short term memory is shot to hell, and they become a shell of themselves.

It really hurt me to see my friend turn that way.

Caros posted:

This pretty simply deals with the issue of why using something as simple as 'maximize happiness' can be problematic.

Caros posted:

Oh I don't think that is accurate, I just think it serves as a wonderful illustration as to why basing all of human existence off of a single concept is a bad idea, regardless of if that concept is self ownership or maximize happiness.

People are complicated and can't be explained so easily was my point.

The Mattybee posted:

Remember when Muscle Tracer called you out on not answering that question about healthcare and elasticity? Here, let me post it again for you, just in case at some point you forgot.

jrodefeld posted:

Let's get this straight though. I am not obligated to answer every single post on YOUR schedule. I've wasted far more time than I should on these forums. It's like you are unaware that unlike apparently some of you, I actually have a day job, family obligations and other hobbies. If I don't post here every loving week or every month, it doesn't make me a "coward" who had to concede defeat.

Gravel Gravy posted:

Wait so we aren't talking about Triple H?

Muscle Tracer posted:

paul levesque is a massive loving racist

Caros posted:

Politics in general is a touchy subject. Vaccination talk for example will bring me into a near blinding rage because I've seen my young niece hacking her lungs up in agony because she couldn't be vaccinated and other people were too irresponsible to keep up their end of the social contract. Its simply hard to get as consistently angry about things that don't matter, such as Batmans compared to things that do like lifesaving healthcare and the distribution thereof.

GunnerJ posted:

http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias

cheese posted:

Wrong, we live in a world of abundance where we have the technology to meet the reasonable needs of every human. We do not because humans are greedy creatures. Thanks for trying though.

VitalSigns posted:

This is your problem: you fundamentally misunderstand DROs if you think they're customer-service oriented entities that cater to individual yeoman farmers. DROs make the laws, and you accept whatever laws the DRO you can afford tells you to accept, because DRO coverage is mandatory and not having it is punishable by death (either quickly by criminal elements who take advantage or slowly by starvation and exposure because it's illegal to sell or trade with an uncovered person).

Here, take a minute and read this primer on DROs that jrod posted in an earlier incarnation of this thread. As you're reading it, keep in mind that it is an argument in favor of DROs and stateless law enforcement.


Let me reiterate: the above was posted by jrodefeld to convince us to adopt this system, and not an exercise in speculative fiction about how a horrific Shadowrun dystopia would function.

Disinterested posted:

In this situation it would be analagous to a legal proceedings with regard to the act of a slave in, say, the early-mid Roman empire or a Greek city state. The slave is represented by the master, and you handle the matter through financial compensation or through some pre-agreed schedule of punishments particular to that class. It's certainly the case that in the extreme libertarian analysis children are property of their parents: some libertarians Jrode likes, like Walter Block, have even argued for a limited moral and legal right to sell children in to prostitution or slavery.

Disinterested posted:

This is a pretty inane argument. If I negligently let my cow out of a field and it tramples your property, you will have a remedy against me in any moral or legal system of any kind, virtually. With a slave you could proceed against the master and the slave both, with different forms of punishment for each - that is the historic pattern.

VitalSigns posted:

human action posted:

The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic.

Disinterested posted:

...most people KNOW THAT TO have apple products and asthma IS IN THEIR BEST INTERESTS, BUT NOT TO pay taxes.

I KNOW.

Halloween Jack posted:

Is it actually possible to establish a currency system that protects itself? The Roman emperors had no trouble I can remember when they deemed it necessary to mint debased coins.

ProfessorCurly posted:

Just to reiterate the point about "naive libertarians/bitcoiners," let us not forget that someone invented a bitcoin ripoff and called it Ponzicoin that, not only gained rather frightening amounts of support, but generated a great deal of outrage when the founder just moonwalked away with the money.

Caros posted:

Pro-tip: It is okay to say "I don't want to engage in a verbal debate because I am bad at public speaking". People would respect you a lot more if you did that or came up with some other legitimate excuse that wasn't "I'm too cool and hip".

Soviet Commubot posted:

From a while back but I think this is a legitimately interesting questions. What could possibly justify apostasy?

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Do you suppose he's a sock puppet? I get a weird feeling Jrod just realized he can create sock puppets and is assuming he's a brilliant person who thought of it first.

Caros posted:

To my recollection I have mentioned that precisely once on this entire forum, and that was only in response to jrod being a fuckhead and trying to throw words at me as if I was some illiterate slob.

jrodefeld posted:

Are you familiar with Emmanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative? As an essential part of his formulation of just ethics is the principle that moral action must be an action that can be willed to be universal law. Universalizability thus became an essential component of any just ethical rule and, by extension, any just law.

From Wikipedia:


The existence of a State necessitates the rejection of Universalizability as the basis for just law. The existence and tolerance of a State in society requires the belief that some human beings be granted the right to seize the property of others yet those not in government do NOT have this right. To simplify this concept "I may steal but you may not". How can this be a sustainable and defensible standard for a just society?

Nolanar posted:

I keep wanting to give their ideology the benefit of the doubt. I just assumed JRod is well-meaning and that he didn't realize he's parroting white supremacist rhetoric; and then nope, he thinks Trayvon Martin deserved to die for having candy. I assume JRod is an outlier, picking the worst thinkers and making the worst arguments; and then the few other libertarians who have posted have been a dude with the quickest intro-to-meltdown turnaround I've ever seen, an avowed white nationalist, and a dude whose entire range of opinion appeared to be tone arguments. I occasionally check in on the repository of all libertarian knowledge to see if they have stronger arguments, and come up with pages and pages of them writing the past into their narrative like astrologers and inventing new economic indicators when the current ones don't say what they like.

It's just, I really want to have an honest discussion with them, but there are no honest libertarians to talk to. Shitposting is a fun consolation prize, but it's a consolation prize nonetheless.

Nolanar posted:

JRod veers all over the goddamned place on consequentialism.

jrodefeld posted:

however, I think I should be welcomed here as a libertarian contributor if only to enliven the discussion. It seems like some of you are just hoping I'll go away so you can have general ideological conformity. But what fun is that?

sudo rm -rf posted:

Muscle Tracer posted:

You do not understand "inelasticity." Let me give you a two-part example:

I like chewing gum, but I don't really NEED to chew gum. If the price of gum went up 500%, I'd probably chew 20% as much gum. Gum is what we'd call "highly elastic"

I absolutely need an MRI so that the doctor can figure out what's wrong with my brain and why I'm having these seizures. If the doctor says "3000 bucks," I'll get one MRI. If the doctor says "6000 bucks," I'm still going to get one MRI. If the doctor said "20 bucks," I would actually STILL only get one MRI. Because I need it—it's "highly inelastic"—and that's a whole different story. The only way I'm going to not get an MRI is if it's so incredibly expensive that I can't afford it.

That last price point, $20, is key, by the way—inelasticity goes both ways. Not only will I still get one MRI no matter what, but I will also not get any more than one no matter the price. That means that there's extremely little incentive for medical providers to reduce their costs. The only incentive to reduce price is if you're losing customers to competitors, but in most parts of the US there are no competitors, or one or two at most. If that sounds similar to Comcast and Time Warner's price gouging and unwillingness to enter the 21st century, that's because it is. There's very little competition in medicine for many reasons, but a large part of it is similar to ISPs: a huge amount of infrastructure is required, especially if you consider the training and expertise of the hospital's employees ("human resources" after all) as infrastructure. So, just like no plucky ISPs are popping up providing better services than Comcast, it's extremely unlikely that a competitor is going to pop up offering comparable services at competitive costs.

So, the capitalist hospital, like all other capitalist enterprises, has one goal when it comes to pricing: find the equilibrium point between supply and demand. Well, demand is almost infinite--it only starts to taper away when it becomes impossible for patients to afford. Doesn't it make logical sense that an enterprise in the business of maximizing its profits would do so by fixing the highest price that people are willing to pay? And if not, why not? There's little to no competition, the demand is inelastic. What is going to drive down the price of essential care?

jrodefeld posted:

My first response about healthcare is to note that healthcare inelasticity is not a new phenomenon. If you needed heart surgery in the 1950s or you would die you would pay whatever the cost was as long as you could gather the money, borrow the money or steal the money to pay. Yet healthcare costs were much lower throughout the history of the United States.

This chart is very relevant:

http://mises.org/sites/default/files/holly1.jpg

Normal inflation levels don't account for the exponential rise in healthcare costs that we have seen in recent decades. As the above chart makes clear, healthcare costs stayed at about the level of the Consumer Price Index from 1910 all the way until the late 1960s, when healthcare costs began to rise exponentially and outpace the general inflation rate of other consumer goods as tracked by the CPI.

The supply of medical care services is much lower than it otherwise would be do to medical lobbying and special privilege. We talk frequently about crony capitalism and unfortunately the medical care sector of the economy is riddled with the phenomenon. For a century entrenched medical care interests have lobbied for legislation that reduces potential competition through licensing requirements, monopoly privilege grants and subsidies. The AMA went after lodge doctors and others who provided low cost medical services to the lower classes because they were being undercut on price.

This has persisted. The supply has gone down while the demand has gone up, which naturally leads to higher costs. If the supply was increased and demand stayed the same, prices would be pushed downward.

Even if demand is inelastic, and remember that it is only inelastic for some medical care services (there are plenty of optional medical treatments, tests and doctors visits whose demand would surely change based on the price level), a greater supply of the service by competing suppliers would still push the price downward. What advantage would it be for ALL medical care providers to collude and raise prices for, say, heart surgery at the same time? You are still only going to choose one doctor or hospital to get the procedure done. And if all hospitals have colluded and are charging the same high price, you will make your decision on other factors than price. You will likely choose only that hospital that has the very best doctor.

But what of the hospitals with less experienced doctors? Or less state-of-the-art facilities and amenities? How are they going to attract customers? Naturally the only way they could differentiate themselves in the marketplace is to compete on price. The doctors may be less experienced but the price is also significantly lower. It only takes one to break a cartel by undercutting the price fixing scheme.

It doesn't matter how "inelastic" the demand for heart surgery may be, an individual hospital or healthcare provider on the market will still want you to choose THEM to perform the procedure not one of their competitors. So there will be an incentive to compete on prices. Providers will want to serve every market. Some clinics may choose very basic and simple offices and buildings to perform their procedures. This reduces overhead and allows them to offer procedures at a much lower price to, say, Stanford or the Mayo Clinic.

The fact remains that it wasn't inelasticity of demand that caused medical care costs to begin to drastically outpace the consumer price index over the last forty years. It was State involvement in medical care through a series of legislative actions and increasing Federal funding of medical care costs that artificially inflated costs, led to increased demand and increased regulations that artificially restricted supply.

Bryter posted:

That all capital, whether material or mental, being the result of collective labor, is, in consequence, collective property;