Caros posted:

Do you not?

That aside you guys have it all wrong. It was clearly a result of the Mercury poisoning jrodefeld got when he failed went to get his amalgam fillings out in time.

Muscle Tracer posted:

Yeah, and I guess my response is driving the same point—pretending anything about people is simple is rarely going to end well. Excellent.

I am genuinely curious about utility monsters though so please, people in this thread, inform me.

OwlFancier posted:

I mean like, what's the supposed reason why it would be good for all humanity rather than just because they want it. Obviously self interest is taken as a given but I've never really come across the reasoning from the horse's mouth as to why we need to replace the web of minor to moderate obligations we all live in with formal contracts and private murder cops to enforce them.
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YF19pilot posted:

stuff

Your Dunkle Sans posted:

...
So, given this evidence, why would removing regulations and the State suddenly result in a net boon for society? Why wouldn't said power brokers go "hey thanks!" then pillage society even harder with said checks against their destructive potential removed?

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Your Dunkle Sans posted:

I get where you're coming from here (tee hee), but taking this approach in good faith:

1.) Wouldn't it be more efficient for society to avoid falling into pitfalls in the first place via proper safeguards and checks against abuse versus letting people get maimed or killed and then learning from others' mistakes?

2.) Wouldn't powerful, established individuals and companies set up barriers to entry for a given gap (eg an old-school-Ford-esque company sell cars only in black and has a monopoly on the market; if you want a different color, gently caress off) to maximize profit/rent-seeking, thereby preventing enterprising individuals the chance to fill other niches in the market? This happens already today in monopoly/oligopoly-controlled markets, so what would stop this in Libertopia?

Wanamingo posted:

Seriously, this idea is stupid as hell.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Oh, you don't have to go back to 2006 to find a mises article praising Somali totally-not-warlordism.

theshim posted:

Yes they do.

paragon1 posted:

Jrod believes all states are inherently sinful immoral and cannot see the true light of God really be moral or free, yes. He's argued in the past that any bad outcomes in a stateless society would be preferable to what we have now because it would be ~more moral~. Praexology is a hell of a drug.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

From their perspective, all states are equally bad due to the immorality inherent within their involuntarist structures and all that poo poo.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

YF19pilot posted:

I'm probably missing a lot of information about Bitcoin's history, but it seems like it was just some dude's pet project run amok by people who have co-opted it for the reasons you mention. Unless all this lolbertarian crap was the original plan all along.

GunnerJ posted:

I think you might be thinking of argumentation ethics. But if that is praexology, it's dumber than I thought. All sorts of claims can be disproved without disproving their premises if the argument connecting premises to claims is flawed.

jrodefeld posted:

Where I sharply disagree is the baseless insinuation that the inability of the United States medical care system to adequately provide options for people like Caros’s friend implicates a rebuttal of libertarian ideology. This means one of two things. Either Caros never really understood libertarian ideology, or at least didn’t during the time when he identified as a libertarian, or the emotional trauma of losing a close friend was so great that a logical re-evaluation of his positions was not possible.

quote:

I’m not saying that there are no good reasons for abandoning libertarianism. However, the reasons that Caros has thus far provided as to his initial abandonment of the ideology are absurd. Even a cursory examination of the literature would reveal that libertarian thinkers have been harshly critical of the United States healthcare system for decades.

The United States has not had anything resembling a free market in medical care (with a few notable exceptions) for at least fifty to sixty years. Health care is one of the most heavily regulated and distorted markets in the US economy, with massive amounts of State expropriated and redistributed tax dollars flooding into subsidies, welfare programs, research projects, and crony capitalist coffers (pharmaceutical and insurance companies).

In fact, the healthcare system in the United States is actually far closer to the Canadian or UK healthcare systems than it is to a libertarian-proposed alternative.

quote:

If your friend had access to a free-market surgical center that provided procedures for cancer (tumor excision for one example) and the cost was less than $10,000 I feel fairly confident that she would have been able to get the money needed for such treatment even without access to insurance.

quote:

Let me tell you about Dr Josh Umbehr, who runs a concierge family practice in Wichita, Kansas. A while ago, he was interviewed by Tom Woods on his podcast but I’d had heard of him before that. His story is yet another concrete example of the unbelievable cost savings that can be seen when people are able to escape the bureaucratic bondage of insurance companies and State regulations to operate in a mostly free market. Here is a link to the Tom Woods Show episode where he is interviewed:

http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-481-how-capitalism-can-fix-health-care/

And here is the link to the website of Dr Umbehr:

http://atlas.md/wichita/
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These prices are not for a single visit, mind you. This is a monthly fee whereby a patient has unlimited access to the doctor no matter what type of medical condition they might have. So if you become very ill and need to see the doctor a bunch of times in one month, you are not charged anything extra for the visits or for routine procedures.

quote:

I already know what your response will be. Without actually reading this book or learning a bit about the history of such fraternal orders, you will nevertheless argue that such societies could never cover the needs of everyone in society and, thus, the welfare State is needed...

Wanamingo posted:

Jrod, is it true that you sell pirated blu rays?

Wanamingo posted:

Jrod, is it true that you sell pirated blu rays?

YF19pilot posted:

While we're being chummy and expressing our beliefs, I suppose I can post mine (while I'm cooking dinner).

I'm not really sure what I am, as I've only recently renounced my label of Conservative-Republican. What I believe, is in the manner of human rights, we should always err on the side of more freedom. Economically, I believe that the world has advanced enough in technology, automation, and abundance of resources that we should begin to seriously consider more socialist or re-distributive models. I think we should establish a "guaranteed minimum income" which every person of the age of majority should receive through a combination of wages, and if they don't earn enough, then the government should step in and fill in the gaps. I believe in free tuition to state colleges, and subsidized/federal loans to private ones, with repayment based on earnings and with multiple avenues for loan forgiveness. I think UHC would be a good thing. I don't think free tuition and UHC are encroachments on liberty and freedom. I'm for a strong military and strong international diplomatic ties, as we've made ourselves into "the big guy" and I don't think we can back away from that, but I think we can be more responsible with how we conduct ourselves. I'm against isolationist policies, or policies that would sever ties with our allies. I think I'm rambling but the only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is that I'm for the USA supporting an independent Taiwan.

RuanGacho posted:

Humorous in the same way that I find it likely Jrod doesn't have a federal tax liability and yet is so deeply concerned about it.

Thanks for the kind words goons, I'd like to think I'm saying something novel but I'm pretty sure everything sounds better in my head than it usually comes out.

jrodefeld posted:

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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.

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GunnerJ posted:

Yo, jrodski: once again, you set the tone for the conversation here. If you don't want to talk about how racist you are, don't talk about race or address people talking about your racist views! I guarantee you that you have no "good reputation" to defend against these attacks on your character, you are an object of contempt and amusement but as long as you keep coming back here, try doing something more interesting than perpetually owning yourself on racism. Instead, consider responding to this!

...I'm going to give up on you ever getting back to our discussion of Reconstruction (maybe mises.org does not have a handy set of instructions for its missionaries on this subject?) and take a different tack, now that you're thinking in big grandiose terms about the benefits of hypothetical political economies. While you were out, I outlined my expectations for a libertarian society:


It's honestly not a big mystery. I mean everyone asking these questions I think realizes deep down that they are rhetorical, because even Ayn goddamn Rand realized what "competition in the enforcement market" actually means. Well, I guess I can't say for sure how she imagined it because she just left it as a rhetorical question herself. I think it's more useful to answer the question and put the onus on anarcho-capitalists to refute it: nothing resembles this "DRO/covenant community/mutual aid/private charity/everything's insurance and binding arbitration" model more than archetypal feudalism.

Ultimately, the right of exit is a farce when there is no way to survive economically outside the DRO system and opting into a DRO means, in practice, moving into a physically located community which will have its own "covenant" proscribing your actions and which may even be nothing more than the company town of a business. Joining a covenant will probably require, in practice, obeying the regulations and abiding by the judgements of the DRO (signing up for "coverage") that the community contracted with for arbitration and security services. Like healthcare in the US, actually being able to afford the DRO's fees might be offset as a benefit of employment; no prize for guessing how the relationship between your employer and the DRO your employer provides you for justice would work out in any conflict between you and your boss. If mutual aid works in libertopia the way it worked in reality, then this adherence to community norms and DRO regulations will mirror qualification for mutual aid benefits: you have to meet the moral (and possibly ethnic/religious/cultural) requirements of whatever organization provides the aid. It's not hard to imagine aid organizations that operate more as charities being religious in nature and using the aid they provide to convert or at least enforce the adherence of their clients. Mutual aid/charitable organizations may align themselves with DROs, completing the "package."

You can already see these related structures merging together into things that resemble medieval monarchies. It will be quite possible for one DRO to obtain an effective territorial monopoly on force and operate as the head of a complex hierarchy of subordinate/franchise DROs and company town covenant communities, and with its practical authority morally bolstered by an interlocking relationship with mutual aid and charitable institutions. On no level will warfare be avoided in this system because, in practice, the complex web of contracts holding this all together and the competing, overlapping, and redundant forms of arbitration authority will provide as many pretexts for "aggressive repossession and recovery of damages" as needed, which can be worked out by the loser transferring ownership and authority of various enterprises to the winner. The outlines of three estates vaguely come into focus, but instead of "warriors, clerics, and peasants" it's security insurance, charity, and employees.

Reading Hoppe and Molyneux makes it clear that these are features, not bugs.

Nolanar posted:

...
You can see him try this with non-standard political language too, like when he tried to sell his insane interpretation of the Categorical Imperative.

YF19pilot posted:

The real tragedy of this thread is jrode's inability to actually respond. I know it's like twenty of us against one him, but there are some situations I'd really like to throw at a libertarian to see how they'd respond. For example, the horror of building code violations that is the apartment building that collapsed in Tainan (Taiwan) during the last earthquake we just had. How would a libertarian respond to this? Or would we never know because there'd be no regulations or investigators? How many more people would have died or still be trapped because of privatization of emergency services, and would those people saved now owe money to those services? Would the families of the recovered owe money for the retrieval of the deceased? Would there be any way to recover lost property or wealth, or would everyone be s.o.l.?

The only thing this thread had convinced me regarding property rights is that it should be an extension of human rights, not the other way around. Property rights should allow us to settle disputes in a fair and sane manner, but should always take a back seat when it comes in conflict with human rights.