jrodefeld posted:

What do you mean by "economic coercion"? Let's not play loose with words and definitions now. "Coercion" actually has a definition. Suppose I go up to you and say "hey, I've got a job offer for you. It pays $6 an hour. Will you accept it?"

Explain how this is coercion. I don't think you'd ever accept this offer because you, if you are employed, are probably making much more per hour than the $6 I'd offered you so you'd never seriously consider my offer.

[...]

There are jobs that are not hiring at present. Abolishing the minimum wage would allow you to make a lowball offer to a potential employer. You could say "I know you are not hiring at present, but I want a chance to prove my worth for a six week stint. I just ask $5 an hour compensation and after the six weeks is up, if I have proven my value, I'd like to apply as a full time worker making the market wage for this type of work."

[...]

You are not permitted to do this under today's law. How could these voluntary choices ever be considered "coercion"? This would require a perversion of language. Coercion is almost a synonym for "aggression" and voluntary economic contracts cannot, by definition, be aggression.

JVNO posted:

We really need, like, an elected speaker for the thread to force JRode to stay on topic for more than one post at a time. Anytime there seems to be cracks in his confidence, he just races along to some other superficial post until we've all forgotten how lovely he did defending the more substantive issues. Then he just loops back around and repeats the same garbage.

Seriously, we need a discussion moderator or a speaker because he will never, ever stay on topic otherwise.

TLM3101 posted:

You know what? Jrod's managed to change my mind on an issue. After that loving stunning statement about the mentally and physically disabled, I am become a born-again fan of the second amendment, because god drat it, with people like jorde on the loose, I am feeling a powerful urge to be armed and at least go down fighting before the inevitable march to the ovens begin.

Seriously, this is the first time I've actually been both livid and loving terrified by what his outlook on life would mean for the rest of us if some dread cosmic alignment of stars should actually give him and his ilk a chance to put their nuttery into practice. Titfucking Christ!

TLM3101 posted:

I should probably explain my rather... visceral reaction. I have two nieces, the eldest of which is... differently abled, shall we say. Thankfully, not very severely, but enough that she's going to have difficulty managing on her own as she grows up. Now, my nieces are the only children I can actually stand for any length of time, and the eldest's specific disability make her very social, very outgoing, and overall a bundle of pure joy and delight. There are, however, expenses associated with her condition. Medicines, a need for special education, and she will most likely never be a 'fully productive member of society'.

And jrode, the smug, condescending, parasitic, worthless shitstain, has the loving gall to say that if she's not productive enough, if she doesn't fit his arbitrary definition of 'useful'? There's no real obligation for anyone to care about her. So yeah. That kind of brought it home in a very intimate fashion just how nakedly, unabashedly evil his outlook on life is.

Hence why I blew up like that and why that hit me so hard. I'm only human, and he suddenly made it about family in the clearest way possible. And while I realize that he'll never actually have a chance to actually put his vile, twisted excuse for an ideology into practice, seeing it put so bluntly and utterly callously? That got to me.

jrodefeld posted:

Let me cite another common "lifeboat" scenario that is thrown against the libertarian position. If a poor person is starving and steals a loaf of bread from a store, is he or she committing an act of unjustified aggression?

For the libertarian, the store-owner would have the right to sue for restitution. If a store-owner was so petty as to make a Federal case about a starving person stealing a $3 loaf of bread to keep from starving, there are all sorts of social pressures that come to bear even where the law doesn't tread.

Even if we recognize the legal right of people to behave in ways that we might find morally objectionable, that hardly means we need to remain silent on the issue. Decent behavior is encouraged through ostracism, social pressure, persuasion and, for some people, religious, ethical and spiritual teachings.

JVNO posted:

Man if our high schools could somehow do a crash course in Bayesian statistics people would realize how ridiculous it is to racially profile. There are so many features that would have far greater specificity than racial profiling.

Stinky_Pete posted:

I'm new to the arguing with libertarians pastime here on SA. Has he explicitly said that white people are naturally better than other races by some metric of human quality?

Because I'd still call it covert if he's just acting like history started yesterday and every black person's achievement in life has nothing to do with slavery, sharecropping, police brutality, redlining, lead poisoning, or people like jrod who are unaware of their cognitive biases and think that they're perfectly rational and objective when they reject Jamal's application in favor of Steve's?

fade5 posted:

In addition to the above posts, there's this:

We mocked Jrod for at least two pages over the bolded part.

Doc Hawkins posted:

He is not good at faking empathy, which makes me wonder why he thinks he can proselytize to leftists.

How to Gain Converts Left, Right and Center posted:

It is called “political cross-dressing.” “Cross-dressing,” of course, refers to the adoption of the dress and behavior of members of the opposite sex. For the libertarian, political cross-dressing means using right-wing words, evidence, and arguments to support civil liberties, and left-wing terms and reasons to support the free market. Because statism is unjust and inefficient, evil and impractical, libertarians can present moral and utilitarian cases against it in all spheres

GunnerJ posted:

We're all chums based on where we would have sat in the French legislature over like 150 years ago.

Doc Hawkins posted:

Kant believed it was immoral to not tell murderers where they could find their intended victims.

There are many things which make jrod's calling upon his authority preposterous.

Who What Now posted:

I wanna read that masturbation quote.

Immanuel Kant, wise philosopher posted:

But it is not so easy to produce a rational proof that unnatural, and even merely unpurposive, use of one's sexual attribute is inadmissible as being a violation of duty to oneself (and indeed, as far as its unnatural use is concerned, a violation in the highest degree). The ground of proof is, indeed, that by it a man surrenders his personality (throwing it away), since he uses himself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse. But this does not explain the high degree of violation of the humanity in one's own person by such a vice in its unnaturalness, which seems in terms of its form (the disposition it involves) to exceed even murdering oneself. It consists, then, in this: That a man who defiantly casts off life as a burden is at least not making a feeble surrender to animal impulse in throwing himself away.

Your Dunkle Sans posted:

Did he buy that avatar himself or did someone buy that for him? I can't remember.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Nolanar I changed your avatar to enrage Jrod luv yew

VitalSigns posted:

In the spirit of this thread I'm repudiating the statist tyranny of intellectual property rights and plagiarizing my closing statement.

Who What Now posted:

If this thread is closed then Jrod will have plagiarize a new mises.org article to write a new magnum opus totally on his own, and that'll at least give us new material to rip apart like the starving pack of wolves we are.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

jrodefeld, are you really going to present a wall of bald assertions as your closing argument for this thread?

jrodefeld posted:

No, you're misunderstanding what I was saying. I'm not saying it would be "moral" to stealing the property of another if you are in a desperate situation. What I am saying is that it would be understandable that a person in an extreme and unusual situation will not be in a position to carefully consider the moral implications of his or her actions. If a starving person stole a loaf of bread from a baker, then just restitution would require that he pay the baker back when he is in a position to do so. In fact, most decent people would gladly provide a starving person with a loaf of bread with an agreement to be payed back later. What I am saying to you is that social pressure and ostracism can compel moral behavior even when the arguably immoral act is not against the law. It would be entirely legal for a storeowner to refuse to give a loaf of bread to a starving man, but it would be considered moral for the store-owner to work out some arrangement by which the starving man could get the food he needs. Maybe he'd be asked to pay the cost later, or work a half hour to pay off the cost or he could simply give the man the food for free. These would be considered virtuous acts worthy of praise. But he is not legally obligated to do so.

Have you heard the expression "hard cases make bad laws?" No matter what legal or social system you have, there will always be extreme and unusual cases where a clear, correct and consistent principle is difficult to determine. The Courts have a role in trying their best to do justice in conflicts involving difficult circumstances. The fact of a man literally starving would certainly be a mitigating circumstance in a case of shop lifting and the punishment should naturally be lighter than a person who just shop lifts for the fun of it.

Ron Paul Atreides posted:

was it this thread that got him or did we lose containment? I'm phone posting so I can't check records

Ron Paul Atreides posted:

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".

"But there are slaves in those countries dude" is just about the most substantial objection to "here are countries I think are free" I can think of.

Halloween Jack posted:

Ask all the people who majored in accounting from 2002-2007, when the collapse of Arthur Andersen supposedly meant a whole new level of scrutiny applied to big firms and thus a whole bunch of accounting jobs.

Radish posted:

Or all the people with recent law degrees.

Halloween Jack posted:

I've often encountered this libertarian streak in gamers who complain loudly at any attempt to make a games more inclusive. They define "censorship" as "any opposition to my opinions being treated as fact" and the best "free market" solution is one that gives them everything they want, crafted to their personal tastes, for free. It's a remarkably selfish and childish viewpoint, even by libertarian standards.

I think that libertarianism is the symptom and not the cause, here. The cause is that they're immature, and possibly alienated and poorly adjusted to adulthood to boot.

Halloween Jack posted:

By the by, is there a formal name for the tactic where you drop a link to an essay or an entire book and say "read this and then get back to me or else you concede the debate?" He used to love that one. I don't feel obliged to read the entirety of mises.org since he obviously doesn't read much of what he posts.