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jrodefeld posted:Okay, so you support the entire War on Drugs, right? Consumers need to be protected from themselves, don't they? Wow It's amazing how you can take something like "we should protect consumers from the con men that want to rob them" and spin it around into "we should lock people up for smoking pot". That's an absurd leap in logic. jrodefeld posted:What you are suggesting is that if two or more individuals come to a mutually agreeable transaction on the market that you disapprove of, you think it is justified to kidnap one or more of them and throw them in a cage. If one of these individuals promised the other to cure his illnesses with magic, then yes, I think that the con man should be thrown in a cage so that he can't steal money from more people. And you think so, too, except that your preferred cage would be the man's own home. He wouldn't be able to leave or do business with anyone and would definitely die, by your own explanation of your ideal world, but you're going to claim to have the moral high ground anyway despite supporting what is effectively the death penalty for any minor offense. You support putting people in cages for all sorts of reasons, you just call it something else and then erroneously claim that it was all voluntary. jrodefeld posted:It is a gross fallacy to think that in the complex world of medicine and health care that any group of individuals, even if motivated by pure intentions, is capable of accurately determining which drug or treatment is efficacious and which is not is absurd on the face of it. Such an institution would doubtless be subject to external pressure by established interests whose profits would be threatened by newcomers into the market. Corruption would abound. 1) We successfully do this all the time, I know that you're not a scientist but it is possible (with science) to accurately determine which drug or treatment is efficacious and which is not. The process for doing this is far from perfect, but with enough testing we can say with some pretty good certainty what the effects and side effects of various drugs are and whether treatments are effective, ineffective, or pointless. 2) Despite being subject to corrupting influences, we still manage to do a pretty decent job of keeping bad poo poo off of the market. See thalidomide, a real-world example of the FDA keeping a drug with seriously bad side effects and almost no positive benefit off of the market. This has been brought up to you like a dozen times and I don't think that you've ever acknowledged it. quote:What a civilized person would do, if they were truly concerned, would be to advise people of which products and services were worthwhile and which were not but never to forcefully prevent a voluntary transaction from taking place. If you want to get high on cocaine, no problem; go to Peru and you can totally do that. You just can't do it on US soil. It's all voluntary, you agree to follow the social contract so long as you voluntarily remain here. If you decide to break the social contract then you face a punishment that society deems suitable. If you want to sell snake oil to people while claiming that it's a panacea, no problem, you just can't do it here (well, you can if you call it a dietary supplement instead of a medicine). If you go away, you can go ahead and do that. If you stay here and do it anyway, then you voluntarily accept the potential repercussions. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 09:38
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jrod if someone sold me cancer medicine that turned out to be Zima, I would 100% want to go on a rampage and kill them and anyone who worked with them. Would it be aggression if I did that? Didn't they aggress against me first, basically trying to kill me for my money, so wouldn't I be within my rights to
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Feb 2, 2016 09:48
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jrodefeld posted:Again, you all are mixing up different things. If someone sells you something that they claim is cancer medicine, but turns out to be nothing of the sort, then they have committed fraud. Knowing deception in a supposedly "voluntary" transaction would be illegal in a libertarian society. The person who sold you the "medicine" has stolen your money because you never would have parted with it if you knew the truth about the product that was sold. What if someone sells something that they believe is cancer medicine, but it's actually just Zima? What if I think that forcing bleach into an autistic kid's butthole will cure their autism. Maybe I market it as something goofy-sounding, like Miracle Mineral Supplement, and then I instruct desperate parents on how it will cure their child's autism. I have no reason to believe that it works, but I believe that it does and I'm happy to sell this poo poo to people who are just as gullible as I am 1) Who's going to stop me? Certainly the parents won't, since the kind of person who would actually buy and use my magic potion on their child is gullible enough to keep on believing that everything's fine even while their child is crying and thrashing around from having bleach forced into their rear end in a top hat. 2) Even if someone decides that I'm a fraudster, how the gently caress are they going to prove that I defrauded them? I believe that it works so we're just two adults engaging in a voluntary transaction, right? The tragic thing is that this is not an absurd hypothetical, Miracle Mineral Supplement is a real thing being sold by real people to real, real gullible parents as an autism cure. Obviously it doesn't work. In your ideal world, people selling this poo poo to each other wouldn't face repurcussions, since they're just engaging in voluntary interactions with each other. jrodefeld posted:In all seriousness, can't you see the potential problem with this? Don't you think that a political institution that has the power to ban medical treatments and drugs would be pressured to keep out good and effective medicine from the market if they would undermine the profits of the most politically well-connected medical and drug companies? Don't you have any concern for the millions of people who have died from diseases because the FDA wouldn't allow them to access medical treatments that are widely available in other countries? I could see this problem occurring if 1) the FDA had worldwide jurisdiction and 2) the FDA controlled all drug-related information. But in reality, the FDA doesn't actually have that kind of power. In reality, researchers have enormous incentives (prestigious and economic) to publicize amazing new medical treatments, especially if they're effective. Why do you suppose that it's always the people who refuse to subject their treatments to scientific review who complain the loudest about FDA regulation? Here you are claiming that the FDA prohibits the sale of drugs that would have saved millions of lives. Can you cite, specifically, these drugs? I bet that you can't. That's a totally bullshit claim. I'm willing to admit that there is some number of lives lost due to experimental treatments having to go through a scientific gauntlet, but the fact that you immediately jumped to "millions of lives lost" instantly tells me that you don't know what you're talking about and that you're just pulling numbers out of your rear end. It also tells me that you haven't weighed the lives lost against the lives saved by requiring drugs to be proven safe before they're widely marketed and sold. quote:If you are dying with cancer or some other horrible disease, what moral justification is there for preventing them from trying cutting edge, but yet experimental treatments? No one stops you from trying such treatments. The FDA only prevents you from marketing and selling unapproved treatments. You're free to treat yourself in whatever way you want, the FDA won't stop you. This just makes it seem like you don't know what the FDA actually does. quote:It takes a long time sometimes for new treatments to become widely acknowledged as effective medicine, especially if they are radically different from the prevailing orthodoxy. For example, in cancer treatment today, Chemotherapy is a mainstay of treatment. It is very expensive (ask Caros) and the providers can make a lot of money by selling it. Newer treatments that are in their early stages of development will do away with most, if not all, of radiation therapy towards a more targeted approach. There are three big problems with your hypothesis 1) You're assuming that the people selling the current cancer drugs are not developing new cancer drugs, and that they wouldn't benefit from the sale of such drugs. You've made an incorrect assumption. 2) You're assuming, again, that the FDA controls whether or not information about new treatments or drugs gets published. They don't. They only restrict the sale of drugs. Publishing is something else entirely that the FDA has no control over. 3) If a publicly-funded organization like the FDA is going to be pressured by big drug manufacturers to not approve new treatments, then what do you think is going to happen if drugs are rated by privately-funded organizations? The pressure will be the same, but without public money there will be way more incentive to follow the edicts of drug manufacturers. It doesn't matter if you have a dozen or a hundred rating agencies, ultimately a few will rise to the top as the most popular and these agencies will wind up getting corrupted by monied interests because they won't be able to exist otherwise. That's how the real world works and shoving your fingers in your ears and shouting "FREE MARKET" over and over doesn't change that. The best way to reduce the corrupting influence of monied interests is to create publicly funded organizations that aren't beholden to them.
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Feb 3, 2016 09:04
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Switzerland is a place where everyone is conscripted into military service with mandatory retraining periods throughout your adult life, healh insurance is mandatory for everyone, and Muslim people aren't allowed to build mosques. Truly this is a glorious libertarian paradise
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Feb 3, 2016 20:04
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Jrod, what's your favorite Sci-Fi series, how do you feel about Firefly, and which series was better: Buffy or Angel?
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Feb 4, 2016 05:41
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jrodefeld posted:Like I said, though, I'm happy to reply to your argument if you'd kindly tell me what the hell you are talking about. He appears to be talking about healthcare, so probably he was responding to the last post that you made about healthcare. But ignoring that for a second, I made several respectful replies to you with direct quotes. If you don't understand what this other guy is talking about because he didn't bother quoting you, then why not reply to my posts instead? Nothing that I've written was an overreaction or insulting, and I was careful to quote you along the way so as to minimize confusion. Here, I'm going to copy-paste my last post to you. It was a completely genuine, not insulting response that was served without any outrage and to which you didn't respond at all. jrodefeld posted:Again, you all are mixing up different things. If someone sells you something that they claim is cancer medicine, but turns out to be nothing of the sort, then they have committed fraud. Knowing deception in a supposedly "voluntary" transaction would be illegal in a libertarian society. The person who sold you the "medicine" has stolen your money because you never would have parted with it if you knew the truth about the product that was sold. What if someone sells something that they believe is cancer medicine, but it's actually just Zima? What if I think that forcing bleach into an autistic kid's butthole will cure their autism. Maybe I market it as something goofy-sounding, like Miracle Mineral Supplement, and then I instruct desperate parents on how it will cure their child's autism. I have no reason to believe that it works, but I believe that it does and I'm happy to sell this poo poo to people who are just as gullible as I am 1) Who's going to stop me? Certainly the parents won't, since the kind of person who would actually buy and use my magic potion on their child is gullible enough to keep on believing that everything's fine even while their child is crying and thrashing around from having bleach forced into their rear end in a top hat. 2) Even if someone decides that I'm a fraudster, how the gently caress are they going to prove that I defrauded them? I believe that it works so we're just two adults engaging in a voluntary transaction, right? The tragic thing is that this is not an absurd hypothetical, Miracle Mineral Supplement is a real thing being sold by real people to real, real gullible parents as an autism cure. Obviously it doesn't work. In your ideal world, people selling this poo poo to each other wouldn't face repercussions, since they're just engaging in voluntary interactions with each other. jrodefeld posted:In all seriousness, can't you see the potential problem with this? Don't you think that a political institution that has the power to ban medical treatments and drugs would be pressured to keep out good and effective medicine from the market if they would undermine the profits of the most politically well-connected medical and drug companies? Don't you have any concern for the millions of people who have died from diseases because the FDA wouldn't allow them to access medical treatments that are widely available in other countries? I could see this problem occurring if 1) the FDA had worldwide jurisdiction and 2) the FDA controlled all drug-related information. But in reality, the FDA doesn't actually have that kind of power. In reality, researchers have enormous incentives (prestigious and economic) to publicize amazing new medical treatments, especially if they're effective. Why do you suppose that it's always the people who refuse to subject their treatments to scientific review who complain the loudest about FDA regulation? Here you are claiming that the FDA prohibits the sale of drugs that would have saved millions of lives. Can you cite, specifically, these drugs? I bet that you can't. That's a totally bullshit claim. I'm willing to admit that there is some number of lives lost due to experimental treatments having to go through a scientific gauntlet, but the fact that you immediately jumped to "millions of lives lost" instantly tells me that you don't know what you're talking about and that you're just pulling numbers out of your rear end. It also tells me that you haven't weighed the lives lost against the lives saved by requiring drugs to be proven safe before they're widely marketed and sold. quote:If you are dying with cancer or some other horrible disease, what moral justification is there for preventing them from trying cutting edge, but yet experimental treatments? No one stops you from trying such treatments. The FDA only prevents you from marketing and selling unapproved treatments. You're free to treat yourself in whatever way you want, the FDA won't stop you. This just makes it seem like you don't know what the FDA actually does. quote:It takes a long time sometimes for new treatments to become widely acknowledged as effective medicine, especially if they are radically different from the prevailing orthodoxy. For example, in cancer treatment today, Chemotherapy is a mainstay of treatment. It is very expensive (ask Caros) and the providers can make a lot of money by selling it. Newer treatments that are in their early stages of development will do away with most, if not all, of radiation therapy towards a more targeted approach. There are three big problems with your hypothesis 1) You're assuming that the people selling the current cancer drugs are not developing new cancer drugs, and that they wouldn't benefit from the sale of such drugs. You've made an incorrect assumption. 2) You're assuming, again, that the FDA controls whether or not information about new treatments or drugs gets published. They don't. They only restrict the sale of drugs. Publishing proof of a drug's effectiveness is something else entirely that the FDA has no control over. If a new drug was scientifically proven to be an effective, superior alternative and the FDA was rejecting it for "nah we don't wanna" reasons, there would be widespread outrage and a bunch of dudes would get fired by politicians seeking political points. 3) If a publicly-funded organization like the FDA is going to be pressured by big drug manufacturers to not approve new treatments, then what do you think is going to happen if drugs are rated by privately-funded organizations? The pressure will be the same, but without public money there will be way more incentive to follow the edicts of drug manufacturers. It doesn't matter if you have a dozen or a hundred rating agencies, ultimately a few will rise to the top as the most popular and these agencies will wind up getting corrupted by monied interests because they won't be able to exist otherwise. That's how the real world works and shoving your fingers in your ears and shouting "FREE MARKET" over and over doesn't change that. The best way to reduce the corrupting influence of monied interests is to create publicly funded organizations that aren't beholden to them. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:02
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jrodefeld posted:Approximately 4% of the US domestic working force earns the current minimum wage. I don't at all mean to demean this group of people because I want everyone, including those with the least working experience and productivity to have the maximum opportunity to move up to a comfortable middle class existence. But I can't help them by destroying the first rung on the ladder. That hurts the most vulnerable people disproportionately. It's always hilarious when anti-minwage people bring this up because you guys always do this in a way that is mathematically incorrect. If you increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15, then you need to include everyone who makes less than $15 as being helped by the minimum wage increase, not just the people who are currently making the minimum wage. You also have to include all of the people who are dependents of people making an income less than the new proposed minimum wage. Somehow these points always fly over the heads of everyone trying to make the "it won't help that many people" argument, and then when these points are brought up they just move on to some other fallacy. quote:Earning a very low wage is obviously not desirable, but if it allows you to become more productive, demonstrate traits that employers will find valuable such as reliability, honesty, hard work and so forth you have a viable path to earning higher and higher incomes and moving up towards a more and more comfortable standard of living. A person's wage is often unrelated to their productivity, reliability, honesty, etc. quote:Listen, we can't sit here and magically wish that people who have very few marketable skills and very low productivity earn a middle class salary. Both the libertarians and the left progressives want to eliminate poverty and allow people to move up and out of dire straights toward a comfortable standard of living where their basic needs are fulfilled. You have no evidence to back up your assertion that people who make a low wage are unproductive. Unskilled is not the same as unproductive. But hey, you know what? Left progressives don't actually want a minimum wage. Left progressives want a mincome. You can pay workers whatever you feel they're worth, but people making less than a subsistence income (either because they're unproductive, or unskilled, or disabled or old or whatever) should receive an additional income so that they can at least continue to survive. quote:WIth central planning, resources inevitably are mismanaged and misallocated and we might have far too much investment in, say, housing (sound familiar?) than would be indicated through laissez-faire market signals, interest rates and the price mechanism. There are countless examples of the market mismanaging and misallocating resources. The free market is essentially a chaotic system, and assuming that a chaotic system will result in an optimal solution by default is laughable. quote:And what the hell is "suitable to sustain a minimal standard of living"? This varies State by State. It varies by age group. It varies between single and married people. It varies based on if you have children and how many children you have. The idea you can determine what a minimum "living wage" is for all of society is absolutely ludicrous. That's true, it does vary, but it's something that we can accurately estimate and we can supplement incomes accordingly. That would be ideal quote:If you raise the minimum wage, you are literally dooming these people to a life of welfare dependency, frequent substance abuse problems, crime and even imprisonment. lol it's a little absurd and more than a little insulting to assume that someone who is unemployed is also prone to frequent substance abuse problems and crime
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Feb 5, 2016 10:14
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:I don't know why you guys bother we've gone over every single point he's made multiple times before and he never, ever acknowledges facts that contradict his suppositions Let me turn it around on you: your kind of post shows up every time jrod comes around, you've probably even written at least one of them. Do you expect the responses to it to have changed at all? Why did you bother?
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Feb 6, 2016 04:44
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jrodefeld posted:The difference between socialism and laissez-faire is that in a free society, you can construct a community that voluntarily lives in accordance with socialist values and I have absolutely no moral problem with that. You will be tolerated and, provided you don't use aggression against other people, your rights will be respected. That's a bald-faced lie. You absolutely have a problem with people who want to live in a socialist society. You constantly whine about these individuals and how their societies are inferior. Your entire posting history on SA wouldn't exist if you were accepting of societies that don't fully embrace your laissez-faire bullshit. Remember, you're free to leave society whenever you wish; no one is going to stop you. Go ahead and move to Sealand, you dipshit
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Feb 6, 2016 08:45
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What an absurd hypothetical; surely airplane manufacturers don't need men with guns telling them to make airplanes safer, they're obviously doing this of their own free will and at their own expense anyway. Clearly a free market would create even safer airplanes, and they'd be even cheaper! Proof, you ask? Deontological ethics is a sufficient explanation, now excuse me while I huff my own farts
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Feb 7, 2016 07:56
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jrodefeld posted:We absolutely, positively have a moral obligation to our fellow man. And this obligation can be carried out through voluntary cooperation in a free society and does NOT require State aggression. Most libertarians, whether you agree or not, believe that if you care about your fellow man and his or her well-being, you should reject Statism and favor peaceful assistance and mutual aid to our neighbor. I'm not disputing that a hypothetical society could care for everyone in the absence of taxation. That's a distinct possibility, if you had like a society made of altruistic robots or if you had a society of people who were genetically engineered to have an overwhelming desire to help each other. The problem is that in reality (that place where we all live) people often suffer needlessly despite the ability of their neighbors to help. Mutual aid is not sufficient to cover the basic necessities of all of our neighbors, and it never really was even when mutual aid societies were massively popular. So your post begs the question, in your stateless society, what happens to the people who aren't sufficiently helped by their neighbors? Your "moral obligation to our fellow man" line also rings hollow, because you clearly believe that this moral obligation should be cast aside in order to protect an individuals property rights. Childish hypothetical: if a billionaire refuses to feed a starving man, I have absolutely no qualms with taking from the billionaire in order to feed the starving man. If you believe that we have a moral obligation to our fellow man, then you would agree that this is a just outcome; a moral cause has been served, and the only suffering caused was upon a person who did an immoral thing by ignoring their obligations, and the suffering was immaterial and possibly even unnoticed. If you agree with this, then you agree that some amount of taxation serving those in need is moral.
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Feb 12, 2016 10:05
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:This is the best self-own yet. Is this going to turn into that example where jrod is all "well it's immoral to accept a job working for the state, but if offered one I would definitely accept"
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Feb 12, 2016 20:13
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Jrod why do you keep implying that you're being kept in the US against your will? You can leave whenever you want. Your mom doesn't keep you chained in the basement... does she?
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Feb 12, 2016 20:21
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I mean it kind of makes sense, he's just down there with a laptop, constantly mumbling about the Fed, surrounded by the discarded husks of various melons.
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Feb 12, 2016 20:36
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Mr. Belding posted:Libertarians are notoriously bad at understanding their opponents arguments well enough to empathize with them. In their defense, the opponents of libertarians tend to skip past arguing and go immediately to mockery. I think most libertarians genuinely believe that government is just getting in the way and that if we just get government out of the way, then everything will sort itself out. The fact that there is genuinely zero evidence that this is true and that places with small or ineffective governments tend to be not very pleasant places to live should be enough to convince these people that maybe their case isn't ironclad. And while it think it's still possible to justify a belief in libertarianism in the face of all of this historical evidence I have rarely seen a libertarian even attempt to articulate that justification. This is a great post and I'd like to add that it's also related to why so many conspiracy theorists are also libertarians. Their ideas require either no evidence or the shakiest evidence imaginable, and any counterarguments cannot ever satisfy their minimum burden of proof.
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Feb 13, 2016 20:28
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't think this thread is going places. How about a page of closing statements followed by closure? I DO NOT CONSENT TO THIS FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE NAP, PER ADMIRALTY LAW YOU MUST YIELD YOUR AUTHORITY Realtalk now, I concur that jrod should never be permabanned, he's harmless and brings entertainment to a small group of people in D&D. Close the thread if you must, but I'm not sure what purpose that will serve
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Feb 14, 2016 06:36
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SedanChair posted:L'etat, c'est l'amour. your post is a violation of my property rights, per the contract that you nonverbally agreed to when you posted in this thread you now owe me 100k bitcoins and a sloppy blowjob
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Feb 14, 2016 21:14
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Stinky Wizzleteats posted:I have to say that before the Jrod saga began here I thought of Libertarians as goofy fat stage magicians and republicans who weren't so hosed up about gay people (and who could maybe be worked with, which I do still think about some), but now I'm pretty confident those people are just rubes and real-deal libertarianism at the think-tank level Jrod lifts from are closer to the madness of dark enlightenment people. I normally shy away from paid shill accusations, since that's usually the fodder of dimwits, but in this case I think it's an acceptable question. Normally that sort of poo poo is supposed to be an attack on one's credibility, but Jrod already demolished that a long time ago and doesn't actually defend his arguments, so whatever Personally I think that jrod is just a true believer, and days when he comes and posts here are days when he forgets to take his meds
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Feb 15, 2016 00:33
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Tesseraction posted:It genuinely saddens me that a fantastically informative but comedy gold thread is going to be closed. The other Libertarianism thread still provides that, it kind of experienced a lull once this one popped up but there's no reason that you can't find more of the same information and comedy there
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Feb 15, 2016 01:59
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Nessus posted:I think the long and the short of its appeal other than magical thinking is "we will legalize weed!" If and when the reefer becomes widely legal I expect they will either contract greatly or just become openly the racist party. That's its appeal to younger, more liberally-minded libertarians. Plenty of older libertarians who would happily craft a DRO region that bans pot (if you don't like it then you can just leave and live somewhere else, so it's still freedom)
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Feb 15, 2016 04:13
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jrodefeld posted:I've explained this to you many times over the course of this thread, but I'll try once again. No one cares whether people could be taken care of in your society. The question is will they be taken care of? And by they, I mean people who aren't able to get assistance from their neighbors or mutual aid societies; these people are just hosed in your society, and you probably see this as a tragic but acceptable sacrifice to not have to pay taxes. Everyone could be taken care of in the society we have now, but they aren't because a lot of people are lovely, and those same lovely people will support the poor even less if you're unable to derive tax income from them and if you don't create benefits for them doing so; remember that charitable giving is a tax deduction. Moving to a no-tax society basically demolishes the amount of wealth that goes towards charity quote:To create the wealth in society that would be needed to generate a comfortable living standard for the maximum number of people, as history has taught us, you need to embrace a free market economy, private property rights, and keep the State restrained to the adjudication of disputes and the defense of individual rights. Why are you resorting to this utilitarian argument? Sometime ago you were ranting about how dangerous it is to rely on utilitarian arguments. We already have enough wealth in society to generate a comfortable living standard for everyone. Resource scarcity is not the issue here; there is enough food production worldwide that no one needs to go hungry. The issue is those with plentiful access to resources not providing to those without, and also delivering these resources to those in need. You can't relieve hoarding by eliminating laws and taxation. quote:I've cited studies that rank the countries of the world in accordance with their adherence to economic liberty as defined by libertarians to bolster this position. There are many such studies that have been done by libertarian and free market institutions. Instead of understanding the larger point, all you replied with was "why are the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on the list?", "This just proves libertarians are really racists." You trotted out that list as evidence that engaging in laissez-faire capitalism "generates greater general prosperity". The counter to your list was that Qatar and UAE are slave states, meaning that a significant fraction of their populations have no economic freedom at all. "Greater general prosperity" is a poor metric, but slaves have absolutely no prosperity whatsoever, so that destroys your argument right there. Going back to the list, measuring "economic freedom" without consideration for an enormous slave population means that whoever made that list used half-baked metrics or is a disingenuous idiot, but probably both. Everyone (except you apparently) already knows that the Cato Institute is full of mouth-breathing morons who present arguments with the same intellectual rigor as a grade school book report, your list was just demonstrating that, so people grabbed the easy fruit by pointing this out, and because it's fun to talk about how libertarians have consistently huge hilarious blind spots when it comes to slavery People were explaining why you shouldn't have used that list in your argument, or even posted it at all. That list represents the failure of mainstream libertarian institutions to maintain a minimum level of intelligence necessary to be taken seriously in political discussions. That's why you felt like you were getting slammed on it. You tried to present this list as authoritative (in fact, you're doing that in this very post by calling it a "study") when others in the thread showed that the list is based on a flimsy stack of lovely ideas that are either easily disproven or that fail to take into account some pretty obvious concepts. quote:Even places like Sweden which have State-funded social programs so loved by the left are only able to finance them due to decades of relatively laissez-faire, free market policies which produced such a level of prosperity that their economies don't crumble under their weight. This is complete bullshit and was already disproven by several posters in several different ways. The fact that you didn't achknowledge these slam-dunk arguments against your bullshit doesn't make your assertions any more true than before. quote:It reminds me of the Progressives who argue that the general prosperity and healthy middle class that we observed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States is attributable entirely to the GI bill and the high marginal tax rates imposed on the wealthy, somehow ignoring the century of relative laissez-faire economic freedom which permitted such a massive creation of prosperity, capital accumulation and physical productivity. THAT is the source of the vibrant middle class and the living standards we enjoy. The State interventions and programs piled onto this productive base only hinder the rising living standards and economic opportunities that would help out the poor and vulnerable. Counterpoint: actual history instead of your revisionist bullshit quote:I'd hope you'd agree with me that a good job with a good wage is more valuable to a poor person than being dependent on a State hand-out. I agree with this, and I think that the solution is to create more state-funded jobs and grants, plus a mincome so that people can go out and be entrepreneurs without having to risk literally everything (instead they'd be risking only some amount of additional potential prosperity). But that doesn't mean that we should eliminate or reduce the effectiveness of the social safety net. In practice, most people are supported by government assistance for only a short time before getting on their feet; no one wants to accept the hand-out, but if they must due to circumstances beyond their control then they must. This is better than the alternative: no safety yet, let the poor get hosed in order to eek out a tiny bit more wealth for people who already have obscene amounts of it. quote:I also don't believe that people are as helpless without daddy government as you seem to think. Free people, communities, charity, mutual aid societies, entrepreneurs and churches will be able to assist the few remaining poor people in a free society as well as any system could ever help them. That's just a pointless strawman argument. Government programs are a form of public insurance to which everyone is subscribed. Those programs are there in case you need them. In some cases, yes, there will be people who need these programs in perpetuity: they should have access. No one is claiming that the people on government assistance today will need the same dollar-for-dollar assistance tomorrow; many of them will get back on their feet. But since this is a nationwide insurance program, those who no longer require assistance will be replaced by new people needing help. quote:To think that only the State is capable to helping people is to someone assume that the motives of people in politics are somehow much more pure and altruistic than people in the private sector. You'd have to assume that perverse incentives don't exist in politics and social welfare programs are really designed to ultimately help uplift people rather than buying off people with bribes in exchange for votes. I'd really suggest you check out a field of study called "Public Choice Economics" which evaluates the motivations of public officials through an economic lens. That's a bunch of poorly thought-out nonsense. If social welfare exists to buy votes, then are politicians trying to kill their careers when they attempt to cut or eliminate social welfare? That's idiotic and flies in the face of countless real-world examples of exactly the opposite happening. quote:What you are falling victim to is the inevitable inertia of tradition. We've been taught for several generations that the only way to help out with social problems, take care of the elderly, provide medical care to people and help the poor is through government policy and democratic elections. Public schools inculcate these ideas in peoples heads and we lose the ability to imagine innovative alternatives. We assume they don't exist. Wrong; inertia of tradition is to go back to the feudal-style laissez-faire economics that all libertarians profess to crave. We've been taught by the historical record that mutual aid societies and neighbors-helping-neighbors is rarely sufficient to help everyone in need, especially when times get hard and that laissez-faire economics tends to create a lot of needless suffering. Public schools don't teach dick about modern social welfare, and you'd know that if you ever actually got your HS diploma you illiterate oaf.
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Feb 16, 2016 04:09
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jrodefeld posted:I have to single out this post because of how un-self aware it is.  quote:In 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed and libertarians were vindicated. No they loving weren't, maybe crack a history book or even read some primary sources sometime instead of accepting all of your history lessons from mises.org exclusively quote:Actual Marxists and radical socialists became discredited among the mainstream, as people generally understood that their views had been discredited. That happened long before the fall of the Soviet Union, primarily as a result of US propaganda, but also because Stalin was a pretty brutal guy and welp anyone who isn't a total capitalist must also be Stalin. Were you home schooled? Serious question because only someone who was home schooled or who just didn't go to school at all could possibly be this ignorant of history. Literally every post that you make more than a few sentences long has at least one major historical inaccuracy in it, sometimes several. I assume all of these events you'd simply never heard of until you read about the revised version of them on mises.org quote:And proponents of the free market did a victory lap of sorts. Bill Clinton claimed "The Era of Big Government is Over" and everyone at least tacitly acknowledged the superiority of the free economy over central planning. You can only claim that as a libertarian victory if you completely misrepresent what libertarianism stands for and if you have literally no awareness of what was happening at that time. The 1980s-1990s were not a point of unbridled laissez-faire libertarian capitalism you loving dimwit. quote:So, according to people who have studied the issue, the nations which adhere closest to the libertarian ideal of economic liberty are also the most prosperous. Explain again how there is zero evidence of libertarian ideas leading to better outcomes? Yes, I recognize these countries are not perfectly libertarian, many have social welfare states of one form or another, but they are MORE libertarian than the others. As I've explained previously, the extent of economic liberty is what generates the prosperity that generates high living standards and allows the poor to be taken care of. You're using The Heritage Foundation, world-famous for their failure to satisfy even a minimum threshold of intellectual honesty. You're acting as though this is some loving group of scientists when it's really a bunch of talking heads who try to mold the data to fit a conclusion. loving Canada has universal healthcare and pretty strict regulation you dumbfuck, anyone who ranks these countries as more "economically free" than the US is a real grasping-at-straws dipshit. Out of morbid curiosity, just to see how profoundly stupid The Heritage Foundation's scholars could be, I decided to look into The Heritage Foundation's 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. How is economic freedom measured? They say: The Heritage Foundation posted:Q.3. How do you measure economic freedom? They expound on this at length, but basically they rank countries based on some number of subjective criteria. Coincidentally, the Heritage Foundation gave Qatar a 99.7 on "Fiscal Freedom". These scores are out of 100, so the Heritage Foundation has reported that Qatar has PERFECT "Fiscal Freedom" despite being a slave state. They gave UAE a 95.0. They gave the United States a 65.6. Why is the US ranked so much lower on "Fiscal Freedom" than actual real-life slave states? Interestingly, they've written a blurb for every category for every country, so we can actually interrogate their explanation as to why Qatar has nearly a perfect Fiscal Freedom score. Unfortunately, the situation here really is what everyone accused the Cato Institute of doing earlier: their "Fiscal Freedom" score is literally just based on the tax rate and nothing else, so no consideration for whether or not a sizable portion of the population are actually slaves: The Heritage Foundation explains Qatar's Fiscal Freedom ranking posted:There is no income tax or domestic corporate tax. Foreign corporations operating in Qatar are subject to a flat 10 percent corporate tax rate. Aside from customs duties, there are no other major taxes. The tax burden equals 5.2 percent of GDP, and government spending amounts to 31.4 percent of GDP. Jrod I know that you're going to complain that I'm nitpicking, but this serves to bring up a very important point that I think you need to consider: The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation are staffed by a bunch of dumbfucks and you shouldn't take anything that they say as being accurate or informative. These are the kinds of people who see slavery and say "ah yes, but those slaves don't have to pay income taxes, so they're more free than me". These people are dipshits and if you keep referring to their rankings then you're a dipshit, too
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Feb 16, 2016 08:09
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Like I'm sure that Qatar is real loving great if you're a slaveowner but holy gently caress how do you rank an entire country on the basis of the experience of its 1%? No surprise that this is what The Heritage Foundation is doing, but gently caress
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Feb 16, 2016 08:11
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VitalSigns posted:Okay Switzerland has mandatory health insurance, not UHC. But many of their health insurance plans are actually run by the government (public options), private plans are regulated as all-hell, and everything's subsidized as gently caress for citizens who don't make tons and tons of money, so it's basically less efficient UHC designed to gently caress over immigrants. Why does it gently caress over immigrants, you ask? The Swiss only provide healthcare subsidies and public options to citizens, everyone else has to get a more expensive private plan. Citizenship takes a very long time unless you basically have a Swiss parent, and it's also notoriously difficult for minorities to become citizens. There are three paths to Swiss citizenship: 1) Mother is Swiss 2) Father is Swiss, but this only counts if he's married to your mother, I guess this is to prevent a bunch of "thin-blooded" bastard children from applying for citizenship 3) "Regular nationalization", by which the country has to be your sole residence for 12 years, you have to not have a criminal record, you must satisfy whatever additional requirements are required by the canton where you're applying (which can be literally anything), and then you have to be voted in by your neighbors, like you're running for loving office. That last step is a real trick if you have unpopular beliefs (Muslim) or if your skin is too dark. And this isn't hyperbole, these are real, documented issues that some people in Switzerland are trying to fix (mostly through public awareness, "hey stop voting against the black guy just because he's black you racist fucks"). Note how this is basically a libertarian wet dream
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Feb 16, 2016 08:36
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TLM3101 posted:As has been pointed out already, but it bears repeating, all of those countries have social welfare states in one form or another. So, perhaps, jrode, just perhaps it's not that they're more Libertarian that is the reason why they're doing so well, but the fact that they are social welfare states? If a social welfare state with free healthcare, education, public housing and the like is Socialist and thus evil, why is it, then, that the US which has only a vestigial welfare system at best is not top of the list? But The Heritage Foundation said that they're more economically free, and libertarianism represents economic freedom, so surely a place like Canada isn't actually a social democracy with a strong safety net?!
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Feb 16, 2016 08:38
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Trent posted:clipped because the rest is unimportant. Some libertarian fuckwit is going to say "but people starve in today's society too". But what we're really talking about are utopian ideals. Libertarian utopia includes people up getting poisoned and starving to death because that's the free market bitch, poo poo happens. Everyone else would think that any utopia that has these issues isn't really a utopia at all, or is possibly the worst possible utopia imaginable
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Feb 16, 2016 10:14
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Bryter posted:I don't know what he thinks the objections to the inclusion of Qatar and the UAE on a list of "free" states were based on if not "the substance of the ranking". In The Heritage Foundation's version of the economic freedom list that jrod more recently posted, they gave Qatar a 99.7 / 100 on the "Financial Freedom" subcategory. "This slave state has perfect financial freedom". I have trouble getting over how intellectually bankrupt a person would have to be in order to do that. They gave the US a score in the mid-60s (because we have higher taxes, which is even more slavery than actual slavery)
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Feb 16, 2016 20:14
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Rhjamiz posted:I am so confused, Norway scores higher on almost everything except LIMITED GOVERNMENT and some Regulatory bits. How the hell does this translate to the rankings? The overall score is just an average of the subscores. I am sure that someone at the Heritage Foundation doing the tabulations thought that some of the categories should be weighted higher than others, but they couldn't figure out how to do that in Excel and their grandson refused to help so they gave up
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Feb 16, 2016 22:48
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Nessus posted:All this "make everyone learn how to code" stuff for the children is probably meant to break position #2 down to "cube drone," too, in a few years. You make it sound like this is a deliberate decision with a deliberate outcome, which is a conspiracy theorist level of stupid and weird. In reality I think it's just because coding skills are useful in a crazy number of jobs, even if you're not a code monkey in a cubicle.
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Feb 18, 2016 08:27
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Nessus posted:I don't think it's some grand paranoid conspiracy but I would really be shocked if part of the calculation for "let's push computer programming skills to be widely available" is not "this will make it cheaper and easier to get people with those skills in the future." "I don't think it's a paranoid conspiracy, I think it's *describes a paranoid conspiracy*" I mean sure, most modern nations push for more STEM majors for a variety of reasons, and I'm sure there are many employers who would be happy to have access to cheaper computer engineers. But the idea that computer science courses in K-12 are just the result of a bunch of people at the top trying to drive down the cost of hiring more code monkeys (or cube drones) is just absurd. STEM professionals have been suggesting for years that computer science should be offered in public schools. It's important to many fields and also provides access to basic logic exercise, so it's a rare case of coursework conveying useful skills in both the practical and the personal senses. People are celebrating the widespread introduction of coding into the curricula as a move in the right direction, a necessary evolutionary step in order to maintain some minimum level of relevancy in education. Your interpretation of these events just seems kind of ignorant, and maybe even a little tone deaf. There have also been huge leaps in robotics education at K-12 schools recently. Is that due to some guys getting together and deciding that they want to make it cheaper and easier to hire people with basic robotics skills in the future? When Driver's Ed became commonly offered at high schools, was that some guys coming together and deciding that they wanted to be able to hire cheaper delivery drivers? quote:Like, basic emotional literacy is also really important but there's nobody running emotional literacy bootcamps or saying "We will make every child able to do an HourOfEmotionalLiteracy." e: Or if they are it's not on the TV And what if there were? Would that be evidence of someone saying "we want to make it cheaper and easier to hire people with emotional literacy in the future"? That seems to be your argument. Also, why are you using a loaded term like "bootcamp" to describe what is basically just another K-12 course? If a student takes something like British Literature in high school then is that "Brit Lit Boot Camp"? QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Feb 18, 2016 |
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Feb 18, 2016 11:34
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:That's why I think it's kind of dumb to scream "STEM!! STEM!! STEM!!" at people because, in the long term, people who don't really have the mathematical/technical aptitudes or - more importantly - the passion to excel in engineering or programming would be really disserviced to force their round peg into a square hole I'm not aware of this actually happening in a consistent, systemic way. There might be parents who are doing this, but the college education system doesn't force anyone to go into STEM. There's the college debt motive, but that's only true in the US, and I think it's likely to go away in our lifetimes. STEM course failure rates are also high enough to preclude the idea that we're pushing people into STEM careers for which they don't have the aptitude. Nessus posted:Mostly, my objections are when it's either portrayed as the one important thing to teach in school Uhh, we're talking about computer science still, right? Where is this happening? Nessus posted:, or is valorized at the severe expense of other important elements of teaching small children. Programming is not somehow bad, but ideally it should not be at the expense of other subjects, or should be integrated with them (robotics could be a great way to do multi-disciplinary teaching, for instance). I agree with that. quote:You say "relevancy," too, which is its own set of value judgments. However, the argument of "why, exactly, do we have schools, and what are they supposed to be doing" is probably not one for the Jrode mock thread. "Relevancy" in the sense that school curricula should evolve like how the rest of society evolves. Schools in 1950 were teaching students how to use a card catalog, and it would be pretty silly if that was still in the curriculum today. Switching out entire courses does become a value judgment, but offering a course that conveys useful skills and gives the student some experience with basic logic (something sorely lacking in most K-12 educations) is practically a no-brainer. The question of whether or not it should be a mandatory course and whether or not it should knock other mandatory courses off of the list is out of scope
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Feb 18, 2016 20:15
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GunnerJ posted:Saying that this is all it boils down to is too simplistic but it's really not implausible that this is a part of it. Employers in all fields will collaborate to drive down the cost of labor. This is a fact that doesn't require believing in "conspiracy theories." Conspiracies are possible, but this kind of action can be completely out in the open, it can be bound up in other sincere motives, it just can be emergent from facts of hiring. The tech sector is absolutely not immune to this. A few years ago several tech companies were hit with an anti-trust suit because they agreed not to try to poach each other's workers. The possibility of tech workers leaving one company for another is part of what keeps their salaries high, so the motive for it was pretty obvious. When they explained their actions, the managers/execs in charge of the decision plainly explained it in terms of the security this would provide them to innovate cost-effective solutions for customers. Yes yes, we all agree that employers want cheaper STEM workers and that promoting STEM education leads to more + cheaper STEM workers. That's not being disputed. The question is whether offering computer science in the K-12 curriculum is a direct result of employers wanting cheaper STEM workers, or whether it's a combination of factors. I'd argue that it's the latter, and anyone taking a conspiratorial tone in order to suggest the crass option is just being silly. It's equivalent to arguing that classes offering basic home gardening instruction are just the result of Monsanto wanting cheaper field hands, that basic personal accounting instruction is just the result of Big Banks wanting cheaper accountants, or that history instruction is the result of universities deciding that they want to drive down the salaries of History professors. While it's definitely true that these groups want these things, it's ludicrous to suggest that they are the only groups wanting these courses to be offered, and it's laughable to suggest that changes in K-12 instruction are coming directly from these groups. It's basically an accusation of there being an Education Illuminati QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Feb 18, 2016 |
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Feb 18, 2016 20:24
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GunnerJ posted:I kinda feel like you're reading a whole lot into, and in the process distorting, some casual speculation about a moral hazard/conflict of interest. When Nessus clarified the point to: On rereading, I realize that Nessus was talking about employers pushing for more STEM education as opposed to educators. Employers using "cheaper labor in the future" as their own motivation makes sense. In the context of the original post, I assumed he meant that educators were using "cheaper labor in the future" as a motivator, which seemed paranoid and delusional. Influence of education by industry is apparent across many fields, and part of that influence is due to a desire to reduce labor costs, I agree. My contention was only with the idea that educators are colluding directly with industry to suppress wages, which I realize now may not have been the intention of Nessus' post and was probably just the result of me being too sensitive to conspiracy theorist cues.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:11
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Increase corporate taxes, institute a mincome, and abolish the minimum wage. McDonalds replacing its entire staff with robots wouldn't matter at that point.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:17
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Oh, wow. These guys made a second video that was mostly them talking about the shitshow that is bitcoin, which was somewhat more interesting because there's so much weird content there but also some incorrect things were said, too
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Feb 19, 2016 07:21
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is there a transcript? Because there's no way I'm spending hours listening to either of them, I'm not really a radio person. Try creating a smart contract on the blockchain, if you offer enough of a bounty then there's probably some plucky appliance out there that will accept your bitcoins and create a transcript of the chat.
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Feb 19, 2016 07:50
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:52 |
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 I have hereby DOCKED my person at this point of the thread, ergo all further posts in this thread belong to me as well as my fictitious corporate entity. If you attempt to post in this thread then you are violating the NAP, and the only form of acceptable compensation for this flagrant violation of my property rights will be the payment of a sum of 10,000 bitcoins sent to me directly. My wallet address is 1HitLerDiDNothingWrongggggghJew 
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Feb 22, 2016 02:13
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