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Nolanar posted:We've been over this, homie gives no fucks for Nozick. Anarchy State and Utopia endorses the existence of a state, however minimal, so JRod doesn't acknowledge him as part of the fold. No, that's not true. Nozick isn't my favorite but I don't disavow minarchists from the libertarian movement. I'm a big tent advocate, within reason. I would consider the act of selling out to the DC establishment or being heavily funded or influenced by the Koch brothers to be a more egregious sin than advocating a limited State or being a strict Constitutionalist. I supported Ron Paul for president in 2008 and 2012 even though he is not an anarchist. I support limiting coercion as much as possible. If you support the night watchman limited State, then let's work to roll back State authority until it resides within those limits. Then we might argue over whether to go further into anarchy or not. But those fights are not very practically relevant. They are interesting as a theoretical exercise, but we needn't excommunicate people from the movement because they believe in the minimal State. Nozick has done some good work and absolutely was a good libertarian, even with his deviations from what I consider to be the consistent case for liberty.
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Nov 20, 2015 08:28
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Caros posted:You guys have all the fun while I'm at work. Let's start with a written debate and see how it goes from there. A topic? Well, let's first figure out the logistics of how the debate would procede. There are a million relevant topics we could discuss related to libertarianism and I'm sure regardless of the formal topic we decide upon, numerous other issues will no doubt intrude. Would we debate on this forum? I'm thinking that we set up a specific thread where we agree that only you and I will post. Maybe we set up a second thread where others can comment on our ongoing debate. Perhaps a moderator would be willing to ban people who intrude onto our thread to keep the rules established. This is just a thought. I'd have to carve out enough time to dedicate to a debate as well but that shouldn't be too hard since I'll certainly have some free time this holiday season. There should be a reasonable time limit on the debate also. Since I have to sleep and will have some obligations during the day, something like a three day time limit seems reasonable to me. That way we can both say what we have to say but there is a finite limit. You play online role playing games so you'll probably appreciate this analogy. The reason I've never been able to get into those kinds of games is that I know there is always someone out there with less of a life than me who is willing to spend more time at the game, getting more experienced, more skilled and thus able to take advantage through sheer force of repetition and time invested. That is sometimes how I feel posting on these message boards. There are members on these forums who will end up spending a whole lot more time here than I am able to. In an open-ended debate, the poster who merely posts the most will feel as though they have won because the other person can't dedicate the same investment of time and therefore is not able to reply to each and ever post, read every link and source and so forth. So a hard time limit is a necessity to alleviate this problem. Anyway, I'm sure we'll talk more about this in the coming days.
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Nov 20, 2015 08:50
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Caros posted:If it makes you feel better just keep in mind that I just really like arguing. I was on the Canadian world high school debate team for three years running solely because I really like winning arguments, even though I was actually diametrically opposed to many of the things I argued in favor of (the death penalty for example). If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a little more about your personal story regarding libertarianism. From what I have ascertained from our past discussions you were once a dedicated libertarian who was familiar with all the common literature and arguments. The evolution in your thinking started when your friend became very ill and was unable to afford the treatment that could have cured her (my recollection is that your friend was female). From this undoubtedly traumatic event, you reassessed your position and rejected libertarianism. But this really doesn't account for the vitriol and hatred you have of libertarianism. At most, this event might make you reconsider a specific aspect of your beliefs, in particular that there is indeed a role for government policy in establishing some sort of social safety net that could have effectively helped your friend get the health treatment she needed. But this does nothing to undermine the many other libertarian arguments with which you are no doubt familiar. There must be more to the story. Have you ever had any traumatic real-life experiences with libertarians? A psychotic ex-girlfriend who happened to be a libertarian? An encounter with cultish Ayn Rand followers? I'm just trying to understand your transition from a person who was an informed libertarian to one who now holds a "particular loathing for libertarianism". It might be worth holding a particular loathing for Communism, but this hatred for an ideology that is based on opposing aggression seems excessive. If anything, your particular experience ought to give you a certain amount of sympathy for people who still hold these views, such as myself. If I was a leftist, which I was and probably still would be had I not been persuaded by Harry Browne's writings and Ron Paul's presidential campaign in 2007 and subsequently through reading many of the important books written on the subject, I would nonetheless still appreciate the work of certain libertarian authors and commentators. Do you have a contemporary libertarian author or commentator that you still admire or appreciate, even though you disagree on plenty of important issues? I would think that you would appreciate Scott Horton and his daily radio show or the people who run Antiwar.com since they are narrowly focused on opposing war and police brutality. They publish probably more leftist commentators than even libertarian ones. I would assume that you might still have an appreciation for left-libertarians like Roderick Long and Gary Chartier. Maybe you haven't been made aware of the breadth of contemporary libertarian thought? Anyway, I could easily list the leftist reporters and commentators that I most admire. I admire Glenn Greenwald, Ralph Nader and Jeremy Scahill to name only a couple. Though I have issues with their economics, Cornel West and Chris Hedges. The vitriol that many of you show towards libertarians is more than a little concerning. We are just individuals who are doing our best to discover a consistent moral and intellectual framework with which to establish civil society and allow human flourishing. If you stay within your own insulated bubble it becomes easy to demonize people who think different from you and forget our shared humanity.
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Nov 20, 2015 09:30
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DrProsek posted:Jrod, I want you to answer a simple question: what is the greater evil, property tax or slavery? Which one hurts a nation's economic freedom more? It's hard to believe this is even a serious question, but I'll answer nonetheless. Slavery is one of the most egregious violations of the non-aggression principle possible and is indeed a worse act than a property tax. Many, many times worse. However, both exist on a continuum and are not completely unrelated. There was a notable political theorist whose name escapes me at the moment. Nonetheless he posed the question "when does a slave cease being a slave?" Let's suppose a person owns a person and forces him to work in the cotton fields seven days a week and whips and beats him daily. Clearly the person is a slave. But let's suppose he stops beating him every day and only beats him on the weekends. Not only that, but he doesn't make him work seven days a week but only makes him work five days a week. Is he still a slave? Obviously he is. The problem with slavery is that the person being enslaved is being forced by threat of violence to associate with his or her "master" against his or her will. If the slave master reduces the slaves work output to only three days a week and gives the slave four days off, is he still a slave? The answer of course is yes. Now, suppose the slave master says "okay, you will not be forced to work on my plantation at all, but I will allow you to move out into the world and do what you wish. However, you will be forced through threat of violence to send me half of everything you earn as a tribute." While this is no doubt preferable to being forced to work in the cotton fields seven days a week and beaten every day, the real fundamental issue is being avoided. The fundamental issue which separates a slave from a non-slave is that a free person is one who has total self-ownership and whose associations with others are entirely voluntary. While every move towards being less of a slave is preferable, the fundamental issue is being avoided. That is why an income tax, while absolutely and unequivocally far less egregious than chattel slavery, is still a form of slavery because the recipient of this income tax is being forced against his or her will to pay a percentage of his or her income under threat of violence and kidnapping (throwing you in jail if you refuse). The only time when a person is completely free is if their self ownership is respected and there are no lawful, unwanted assaults permitted against them. I hope that is clear.
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Nov 20, 2015 09:46
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GunnerJ posted:Alternately, it's what anyone familiar with the words of Walter Block might say: And I don't think Walter Block makes a very persuasive case at all. But this has absolutely nothing to do with libertarian objection to slavery. Slavery is a historical phenomenon (which unfortunately persists to the present day in certain parts of the world) that all decent people oppose. Walter is describing a completely theoretical contractual sort of slavery that has never actually existed anywhere. So to cite Walter Block and then infer that libertarians are not sufficiently opposed to actual slavery, i.e. the sort that has actually historically occurred and continues to occur where people are kidnapped against their will, beaten and killed if they disobey is disingenuous in the extreme. For the record, I support Murray Rothbard's opinion that voluntary slavery is an impossibility. In "The Ethics of Liberty", Rothbard writes: quote:A man can alienate his labor service, but he cannot sell the capitalized future value of that service. In short, he cannot, in nature, sell himself into slavery and have this sale enforced—for this would mean that his future will over his own person was being surrendered in advance. In short, a man can naturally expend his labor currently for someone else’s benefit, but he cannot transfer himself, even if he wished, into another man’s permanent capital good. For he cannot rid himself of his own will, which may change in future years and repudiate the current arrangement. The concept of “voluntary slavery” is indeed a contradictory one, for so long as a laborer remains totally subservient to his master’s will voluntarily, he is not yet a slave since his submission is voluntary; whereas, if he later changed his mind and the master enforced his slavery by violence, the slavery would not then be voluntary. I really think that this attempt at claiming libertarianism is somehow not opposed to slavery or indifferent to the issue is incredibly dishonest. You are not arguing in good faith. Even Walter Block's theoretical future "voluntary" slavery system is not supported by almost any other libertarian and, more importantly, is completely distinct from any actually existing phenomenon.
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Nov 20, 2015 10:07
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Nolanar posted:
I am frankly astonished at the amount of time you all have spent focusing on this particular post and then inferring that it proves libertarians don't care about slavery. Caros was the only one that touched upon any actual substance regarding this claim, but even he didn't go into much substance. To be clear, we are speaking about immigrant workers who don't have enough rights vis a vis their employers (union leverage) which is being called "slavery". We are not, by and large, speaking about actual chattel slavery in which human beings are legally sold as physical property and cannot disassociate from their masters, correct? That is not to say that workers rights are not important, but you've got to have a pretty clear definition of what we're talking about when referring to a term like "slavery". And I am open to being educated on this topic because I admit to not knowing a great deal about the internal policies of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Also, how about you not "mock" anyone but instead try to have a good-faith discussion, okay? If you're only goal is to dig up the smallest detail to nitpick and criticize your opponent, it amounts to an admission that you are not debating in good faith. The single point I was trying to get across was that when we look at our un-libertarian world, the general trend is that those nations that have policies that are closer to laissez-faire libertarian free markets have greater prosperity, larger middle classes, less poverty, and higher general living standards. Hardly anyone has actually responded to this claim and this general trend. Instead all you want to talk about is the workers rights abuses of immigrant workers that you claim are occurring in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Okay, you've addressed two out of the two hundred or so nations of the world but this is a textbook example of missing the forest for the trees. You're so desperate to validate your view of libertarians as sociopaths who only want to prop up the very rich and stomp on the poor that you'll be as dishonest and disingenuous as needed to maintain that narrative.
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Nov 21, 2015 02:18
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"Here is a Cato freedom study that says what I want it to!"
"There are two slave states they rank as more free than the USA, and also Cato is a garbage organization for idiots."
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Caros posted:Walter Block is a racist Jrodefeld. And like many racists before him you should probably stop parroting him before people start verbally kicking you in the head and you run off like a baby. Walter Williams. Not Walter Block. Did you even read the post? Walter Williams is a black libertarian and economist who I have mentioned in passing before. It is patently absurd for you to criticize me for obsessing about race, when it was all of you who have been disingenuously lobbing the accusation that libertarians support slavery or at least are indifferent to it over the past half dozen pages. All I've been trying to talk about in this thread is why the principle of private property rights are important and how more generally laissez-faire nations enjoy greater average living standards than less libertarian nations. One thing that has been made abundantly clear though is that you all don't actually know the definition of the word "racist", which might be important for a group that lobs that particular accusation with such reckless abandon.
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Nov 21, 2015 03:05
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Hi y’all. Hope everyone had a good holiday season. Personally, I was quite busy and family obligations kept me away from things I otherwise would have been doing. The reason I sometimes post sporadically on here is that I have an active social and professional life and, as much as I might want to, posting on internet forums merely to satisfy my desire for intellectually stimulating debate simply has to be sacrificed when more pressing matters are at hand. With that said, let me reiterate my desire to have a written debate with one of you, one on one, where hopefully a more fully fleshed out discussion can take place. I have to find the time to dedicate to the exercise because I don’t want to short-change my positions. I can accept one poster at a time, with a clear topic and a defined time limit, which as I proposed, should be about three days. I think Caros had first dibs on a debate with me. In the meantime, however, I’d like to continue with a discussion I was having with Caros the last time I posted here. I was again pushing back against him for the narrative that he told whereby he abandoned libertarian ideas after the death of his friend due to her inability to pay for the healthcare that presumably would have cured the disease and allowed her to live a normal lifespan or at least many more years. This is a personal tragedy that I empathize with and I think that every well-meaning person wants a reasonable standard of medical care to be available to all people so premature deaths due to an inability to receive a medical intervention are either eliminated or reduced to the greatest possible degree. 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. 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. I want to now state my understanding of the situation with Caros’s friend, why I believe she was unable to acquire the needed healthcare services at an affordable price, and why I am convinced that she would have been far better off with an actual libertarian free-market medical care system. As I understand it, Caros’s friend was young and previously relatively healthy. I am assuming under forty years of age with decades left to live. For whatever reason, she didn’t have health insurance before becoming ill and, once she became ill, she could not find insurance due to her pre-existing condition. If I recall correctly, I believe that the illness was some form or variety of cancer. Now, with being unable to get insurance, she could not find any way to pay the exorbitant costs of the medical care that was needed to beat the illness. I am assuming that the intervention involved surgery and/or chemo and prescription drugs. I will also make the reasonable assumption that she would have been willing to pay every cent she had to purchase the surgery and/or drugs that had a good chance of curing the illness. Yet, even with all that, including the help of family and good friends like Caros, the cost for the treatment was simply insurmountable. Many tens of thousands of dollars? Even into six figures? Do I have the essentials of this story correct? If not, please correct me. Now, to my mind, your friend died due to the lack of a free market in medical care not because we don’t have total healthcare socialism. The problems with the American medical care system have to do with a century of State interventions, artificial price inflation, regulatory restrictions that reduce the number and variety of medical care services on the market, patent laws on pharmaceutical drugs coupled with prohibitions on the free importation of drugs manufactured in other countries, a systematic crackdown on mutual aid societies and charity hospitals and a near-elimination on price competition that is inevitable when you have a third party payer system such that patients and doctors don’t negotiate on price and most doctors don’t have to compete with other doctors on price to entice consumers. For you, Caros, to believe that this extent of State intervention and distortion in the healthcare sector of the economy constitutes an approximation of libertarian policies can only mean that you don’t know much of anything about libertarianism. You’ve demonstrated that you know the names of major libertarian thinkers and have shown some familiarity with their work, yet perhaps you’ve been too busy trying to “out the racists” and find ways to classify libertarians as bigots, sexists, homophobes, or whatever than in comprehending the economic arguments on their own merits. Let me run down a few reasons why your friend would have been much better off in a libertarian society than in either a fascistic corporatist State-distorted healthcare system like in the United States or in a left-socialist healthcare system like in Canada. The primary reason your friend died was that prices were too high. Had market forces brought prices down such that medical treatment options were available to people who are middle or lower income, then your friend likely would have been able to get the drugs, the surgery and she would still be with us today. When I mentioned a while ago that State intervention had caused artificial and excessive price inflation in medical care, astoundingly I was met with incredulity. Even this elementary economics point that even the most mainstream of economists and political commentators concede was met with push back. “No, it’s all technological advance that has caused the skyrocketing price inflation” was the common retort. Yet I heard only crickets when I point out the obvious fact that technological progress has occurred in every major sector of the economy, yet prices for ever better and more advanced goods and services stay stable or even come down, at least in the most free sectors of the US economy. I had an MRI and a blood panel done about a year ago. I have insurance fortunately, but do you know how much those two diagnostic tests cost? The MRI was about $8000 and the blood work was about $800. Do you honestly believe these are market prices? That if insurance and State third party payers were not available that the hospitals and laboratories that administer these tests would continue to charge an exorbitant price that would severely limit the number of potential customers? If you believe that, I’ve got some beach front property in North Dakota I’d like to sell you. This is actually not just an abstract and speculative discussion. We have actual examples of areas of medicine that are still relatively free market. Lasik eye surgery is one example. Prices continue to decline while the effectiveness of the procedure continues to advance and improve. You can now cure many kinds of vision problems for under $2000. Cosmetic surgery is another example. Technology has similarly advanced in cosmetic surgery yet prices have fallen which is in stark contrast to much of insurance-covered, State-regulated and subsidized healthcare. There are even areas in medicine where maverick doctors have found ways to get out from the burden of insurance and State regulations to deal in a purely free market. I’ve mentioned it before, but the Oklahoma Surgery Center is a very good example of how many common surgical procedures could be made available to people as affordable, out-of-pocket expenditures in a free market. The cost savings in comparison to third party payer based hospitals are dramatic. I encourage you to look at their website and look at the price for various surgical procedures. Here is the website and I encourage you to peruse the prices charged for various surgical procedures: http://surgerycenterok.com/ The prices offered for the range of surgical procedures varies between $1500 for very simple operations to about $10,000 for the most complicated vascular/heart surgeries. For roughly the same price as a new OLED flat screen television, a consumer could get a complete repair of a torn rotator cuff or an anterior cruciate ligament repair. The prices charged at other hospitals that rely primarily on insurance and/or State payments is many, many times higher. The cost savings are quite evident and prices have thus far come down to where a regular middle class family could simply pay for a needed procedure out of pocket, eschewing any third party payer bureaucracy. 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. Similarly, if there were no restrictions on the importation of cancer-treatment drugs, no monopoly patent grants to exclusive manufacture and sale by the US government and thus free price competition was available for drug and radiation treatments for various types of cancer treatments, then prices would similarly have fallen through the floor and been accessible to many more people in need. But it is not only surgical procedures that stand to see massive cost savings in a free market. 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/ Pay careful attention to the pricing system that is offered to patients. Here is an excerpt from that page: quote:Our Fees 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. The monthly cost for unlimited medical care is less than most monthly cell phone bills. Are you starting to understand the sort of cost savings that can be realized in a free market? Now, if you dismiss these two dramatic examples of libertarian success in delivering healthcare much cheaper and more effectively as I am sure you will attempt to do, you had better have a very persuasive argument as to why such successes are to be discounted rather than emulated. There are dozens of similar success stories of doctors and hospitals that find pockets of economic freedom in the United States and are somehow able to get out from under the boot of State coercion and bureaucratic excess and provide a path forward in solving our medical care crisis. I want to keep this particular post brief, but I could go on and on about the history of fraternal orders and mutual aid societies that were able to effectively provide healthcare services for the poor and working class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many doctors felt threatened by the mutual aid model of providing healthcare and lobbied the government to enact rules and regulations that would limit the ability of doctors to provide their services in such a way to the poor. By the mid 1920s, mutual aid societies were finding themselves unable to cope with ever increasing State regulatory burdens and other restrictions placed upon them by organized corporate medicine, who sought monopolistic privilege by lobbying the State. I recommend David Beito’s great book “From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967” http://www.amazon.com/From-Mutual-Aid-Welfare-State/dp/0807848417 Here is a summary of the book: quote:During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more Americans belonged to fraternal societies than to any other kind of voluntary association, with the possible exception of churches. Despite the stereotypical image of the lodge as the exclusive domain of white men, fraternalism cut across race, class, and gender lines to include women, African Americans, and immigrants. Exploring the history and impact of fraternal societies in the United States, David Beito uncovers the vital importance they had in the social and fiscal lives of millions of American families. 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. Leaving aside the obvious fact that such a counter-factual history is hard to prove (what would have happened if social welfare programs had not crowded out private charity efforts during the progressive era and instead the mutual aid model had been allowed to expand and proliferate as the economy grew?), the indisputable fact is that fraternal orders were very successful for those that had access to them and such mutual aid societies are no longer with us. If this model were allowed to exist in contemporary America by eliminating licensing requirements, regulations, and other State restrictions, mutual aid societies could again be available and would, at the very least, alleviate SOME of the problem by providing needed social services to those who still could not afford the drastically lower free market prices that would certainly exist as the examples of the Oklahoma Surgery Center and Dr Umbehr’s family practice prove. So Caros, I’d ask you to now, in light of the overwhelming evidence that the healthcare system in the United States over the past fifty years has nothing to do with any proposed libertarian solution, to either admit to making a gross error in thinking that it did when you rejecting your previous libertarian beliefs. Or you are free to elaborate on your reasons for rejecting it but the experience with losing your friend, as emotionally distressing as that no doubt was, provides absolutely no argument against libertarianism whatsoever. Your concession to this fact would mean we are at least making progress.
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Jan 17, 2016 19:38
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Who What Now posted:You know I had almost forgotten this side of you. I had almost put on the rose-colored glasses in my mind and saw you only as a clown to be laughed at. But here you come roaring back into our lives, all too willing to just poo poo all over the death of someone's friend. To use it as a loving nail in your pseudo-intellectual bat with which to beat someone over the head with like a loving uneducated barbarian. You little poo poo. You miserable loving pile of failed abortions. Thats you're idea of a thrilling intellectual debate? Using a person's tragic death as a rhetorical attack? You're a loving blight, a goddamn festering pus-filled boil on society's rear end. You give nothing of worth to humanity, and we would be a better world without you in it. You goddamn worthless waste of breath. I'm responding to Caros's posts where he brought up the point that the death of his friend was the primary reason he chose to abandon libertarianism. That doesn't make any sense to me so I am seeking a bit more clarification. Nothing in what I wrote was in the least bit belittling or un-empathetic to the personal tragedy of losing a loved one. It has certainly happened to me, though I am sure I was not as close to any of the relatives of mine who have passed as Caros was to his friend. Nevertheless, if someone were to mention to me a way that future deaths could be prevented and so others would not have to feel the same loss that I experienced, you can bet I'd be more than open to hearing about it. What makes a personal tragedy all the worse to my mind, is when we learn the wrong lesson from it. Given that Caros was the one that brought it up, and I have had a discussion with him about how we came to libertarianism and, in his case, abandoned it, I don't see any reason why mentioning this event should be off limits. Go ahead and point to anything I said that was belittling or un-empathetic about a personal loss and I'll certainly change my tone if that is appropriate. Furthermore, if Caros posts and tells me that the topic of his friend and her death is absolutely off limits for discussion, I'll promptly shut up about it and I won't mention it again. However, let me be a little firm with you for a minute. This is not a subject I take very lightly. There are many people who will go through similar tragedies of losing loved ones because of an inability to access needed drugs (not approved by the FDA or prohibitively expensive), not having insurance or inability to pay the inflated medical costs. To my mind, not learning the correct lessons about the medical care system has far-reaching ramifications for everyone. If Caros decided that his friend died because our healthcare system has something to do with libertarianism, and that the free market is to blame and all we need to do is adopt a socialist model of healthcare delivery, then I take great issue with this and I want to disabuse him of that notion. If the subject is too sensitive to touch upon, even in an indirect way, I can appreciate that but at the same time I also have a great deal of concern for all the people who stand to prematurely lose loved ones because we don't reform the medical care system in a wise manner. So many posts in response to anything I write are like a projectile vomit of vitriol and hate. This style of "debate" used to be considered a tacit admission of defeat. I understand getting frustrated once in a while but probably 90% of responses to anything I write constitute this sort of substance-less vitriol. Not a good look.
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Jan 17, 2016 22:20
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DrProsek posted:This is incorrect. We have "healthcare socialism" in other countries where people do not experience the issues that Caro's friend experienced in America. We have a proven way to eliminate these problems with no decrease in quality of care. We have no need to engage in your wet dreams with the hopes that they might incidentally achieve comparable results. I don't think that a free market libertarian healthcare system would achieve "comparable" results, I am quite convinced through demonstrated evidence as well as a modicum of economic literacy that a free market would provide demonstrably superior results in nearly every way to a State-run healthcare system. You seem to have rose-colored glasses about the general efficacy of actually existing single-payer healthcare systems. There is a demonstrated inefficiency and a shortage of care that necessitates rationing for many types of medical procedures. This is elementary economics. Making something "free" creates a huge spike in demand, overuse of medical resources and unintended consequences. Would Caros's friend have gotten the necessary treatment in Canada or Great Brittain? She would have probably gotten SOME treatment, as such systems are theoretically designed to ration care in favor of more urgent medical emergencies. Whether she would have pulled through and gotten efficacious medical treatment is another story and we cannot know that counter-factual. Why not apply your reasoning to any other sector of the economy? Why trust the market to properly price and distribute groceries? Certainly access to food is a more fundamental human need than even medical care? Because while lack of access to good healthcare might kill you in the long run, you might not survive more than a couple months without access to reasonable nutrition. We know this idea of State control and delivery of food is foolish not only due to economic theory, but through real world examples like the Soviet Union, where we saw bread lines and an inability to effectively calculate economically without a market price system for capital goods. What so many of you have tried to do is explain how healthcare is a type of good that is completely different from all other consumer goods and thus the rules of economics somehow don't apply to it. These excuses have been unpersuasive and reek of special pleading. Non-critical medical conditions can put you on a waiting list for treatment in Canada or the United Kingdom. Maybe you need a knee replacement, for example. Not getting it quickly won't kill you but you'll be in a lot of pain and your quality of life will greatly suffer. Nevertheless, people have had to wait sometimes a year, sometimes two or even more for such "elective" surgical procedures. Getting an MRI test might take you eight months to a year. In the United States, as screwed up as it is, most patients are able to get an MRI done within a month. I'm sure you'll make excuses for these problems by pointing out that long delays for treating non-life threatening medical conditions is a reasonable price to pay for ensuring that people with life threatening emergencies can get care. But the problem of course is that in a libertarian market economy, no such trade-off is necessary. Consumer price competition and entrepreneurial doctors and medical care providers will work to provide affordable care options for every person, both for electable procedures and for emergency medicine. So criticizing a place like the Oklahoma Surgery Center because you still have to pay SOME money for your procedures while under a universal healthcare system you'd get all your procedures for free, and free beats non-free everyday of the week, is so astounding economically ignorant it boggles the mind. You pay for it with very high levels of taxation. Income taxation, VAT taxes, sales taxes, import taxes. You pay for it with rationing of care, an artificial restriction of supply imposed by abandoning the market for central planning. Furthermore, it is not just about a blind price comparison. The payer is the one who wields control of the situation, and there are very few things as personal as medical care. By paying out of pocket and being able to freely shop around for doctors and procedures, medical care providers must try to cater to you. If insurance companies pay or the State pays, then the efforts of the medical providers are all aimed at lobbying the State for favorable regulations, and trying to raise prices as high as they can get away with. Needless to say, they can get away with charging much higher prices when big insurance corporations and governments are footing the bill instead of individual patients who have options. Just open up your eyes are recognize the problems that exist under State-run healthcare systems. In a blind comparison between the corrupt State-dominated healthcare we have access to in the US and the State-dominated healthcare available in Canada and Great Britain, you may have a few points in your favor. But that is not any comparison I am interested in making. I am in favor of a genuine free market in medicine, which would be a radical change from the status quo.
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Jan 17, 2016 23:06
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team overhead smash posted:Jrode, you still need to reply to my through and sourced post from 3 months ago that perfectly meets the criteria of the kind of post you say you want to respond to. I'll look back and respond to your earlier post that you mentioned. But if my post was so lacking in arguments, you did an even poorer job of rebutting the ones that I did offer. Did you really take my mention of Atlas MD as suggesting that for the monthly rate you'd get all the medical care you'd ever need and you'd never have to pay for anything else? I hardly think you could honestly have thought that. No, the monthly rate is for general doctor visits, diagnoses, some basic diagnostic tests, writing prescriptions, getting referrals to specialists, etc. You know, stuff that normal general doctors do. No, you don't get "unlimited surgery" in that monthly bill. But here is what you DO get: quote:As a member of AtlasMD, you’ll have access to the following: Look, even IF you have medical insurance, you can be expected to pay $20 to $30 just as a co-pay for every single visit. Without insurance, you could be paying $200 for a visit with a family doctor. I am merely comparing the savings that one medical care provider is able to achieve in the free market, to what most people are used to . House calls? Same day or next day service scheduling? EKG, Holter Monitor, Body Fat Analysis, Lesion Removal, Laceration repair, properly diagnosing illnesses, providing referrals to specialists (yes, I get that you'll have to pay separately if you have to see a specialist), and annual physicals don't constitute "actual medical care"? I had an untreated and mistreated medical condition for several years and I can tell you from experience that one of the most important things to have in order to save money and get the proper treatment for any health problem is to have a good primary doctor in your corner who is available and you can rely on. Even if you have to see a specialist, having a good referral and someone who can manage your medical records and streamline your care is vitally important. Even if you do need extensive lab workups and prescription drugs that Atlas MD doesn't provide in its monthly price, they make every effort to save you money by passing on the wholesale price so even this would be cheaper than most other places. How can you discount this example so hastily? Atlas MD provide literally everything that a normal internal medicine doctor provides and more, but at a substantially reduced price. Your last point was that this is not a system that could be emulated because there are way too many patients in the country and not enough doctors to cut back on their patients enough to provide this level of service. There are several points that I have to respond to this. First, State intervention, licensing requirements, regulations and barriers to entry have dramatically reduced the supply of doctors and medical providers that would otherwise be available. Remember that medical care is not some magical area of human interaction where the laws of economics somehow don't apply. Medical care is a universal need and there is a substantial profit to be made by serving that need on the market. Do you think Atlas MD are not making a profit? By eschewing insurance and State involvement as much as possible, they are able to reduce costs while still being profitable. Yes, they reduce their patients to 600 per doctor, as opposed to the 2000 per doctor that is the average. The supply of doctors would increase to serve the demand if this model proves profitable to the satisfaction of the patients being cared for. This statement is remarkable: "If this replaced the actual system, 90% of patients would be dropped and have no doctor available even if they could afford hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in payments." No one is suggesting that a concierge service replace should "replace" the current State-regulated healthcare system. Libertarians are not advocating a "system". We are simply advocating for the market. Consumers, through the market, will determine which delivery of medical services is the most efficacious through their purchasing habits. Concierge services of the sort offered by Atlas MD might be emulated to the degree that they stay popular and people like it. If such a model does not remain profitable throughout the economy, then other healthcare providers will adopt different models of healthcare delivery.
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Jan 18, 2016 00:01
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EvanSchenck posted:Benefit societies only function when the economic situation is relatively good. They were drastically reduced in consequence of the Great Depression, because they have no means of coping with a serious economic crisis. Subscriptions coming in must equal or exceed payments out, otherwise they are insolvent and must collapse. The severe depression drastically increased payouts to members in need of aid, and simultaneously drastically reduced the pool of money available to be paid in as subscriptions. Bankruptcy for most of the organizations followed as a mathematical inevitability. Government intervention was and is the only solution--first in the form of welfare to ameliorate the immediate conditions of misery in the population, second in the form of regulatory laws and structures to prevent another economic collapse before it happens. These approaches did not "crowd out" benefit societies, they collapsed and the state was obliged to replace them with a more robust system. I don't see where you have demonstrated that I have claimed that Beito has made any claims in his book that he hasn't. I'm glad you liked the book overall as it shows an open mind. All I've claimed is that if we were to popularize the mutual aid society method of providing charity and social welfare, it would be a significant and substantial contribution to replacing the State-run welfare system that would be phased out in a libertarian society. As I noted, prices for vital services such as healthcare would fall drastically, taxation would be non-existent and the economy would be much healthier overall so the number of people who would need such charitable services would doubtless fall far below the number currently reliant on government welfare.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:19
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). Along the way he's obliged to make some funny contortions. e.g. in describing how the Loyal Order of Moose weathered the Great Depression, he claims that the Order of Moose didn't reduce benefits payments during the Great Depression. This (p. 231) is in the same section that he notes membership fell by over 50% from 541,463 to 265,664 between 1930 and 1935. Think about that for about two seconds. The Moose may not have reduced the value of benefits in themselves but they did MASSIVELY reduce the number of people eligible to receive benefits by shedding members who were in arrears--by shedding, in fact, exactly those members who would be in a position to make benefits claims while retaining those who were still paying their dues and who had much less need to request aid! Beito presents this as a success. To me it seems more like the Order of the Moose survived the depression by triage, that is, they started out as an unusually large and well-funded fraternal order and then when things got tough they gradually purged needy members to avoid having to pay benefits.
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paragon1 posted:lol jrod thoroughly demonstrates a lack of understanding of demand elasticity and then accuses people of lack of economic literacy Nope, it's you who has misunderstood my views. I fully understand the reality of demand elasticity but that doesn't explain what you think it does vis a vis the healthcare economy. Yes, you are not going to demand more heart transplants if the price is lower nor will you likely demand fewer if they are higher, until that point where you absolutely cannot find a way to get the money needed for the surgery and resign yourself to death. But much of medicine is elective and demand is very elastic depending on the cost. If the cost is free, or at least hidden for you and outsourced to another third party, you will have the incentive to have routine check-ups more frequently, have excess and unnecessary diagnostic tests like x-rays and MRIs, see chiropractors or message therapists, and many other health treatments. People having nagging injuries, they have various health complaints and they can either suffer through it or do something about it. I have a relative who has a private practice and specializes in medical treatments that aren't usually covered by insurance companies. Most people will not pay out of pocket for any medical treatment, even if that treatment costs only $100 or so. To them, they can get "free" care if their insurance company pays or Medicare pays. There are plenty of people who would do all kinds of medical treatments if the price was lower but choose not to and suffer with a lingering condition. There are exotic, but very effective new treatments for chronic musculoskeletal pain, arthritis and soft tissue injuries such as platelet rich plasma, and soon, various treatments using stem cells. You don't think that peoples demand for such treatments are not elastic based on the price? Since we're trading insults over who actually lacks economic literacy, I have to also point out that many of you don't believe that having a primarily third party payer system drives up the cost of medical care higher than it would otherwise be in a free market. Similarly, I was met with great resistance when I noted that State subsidies and student loans for college have artificially inflated the cost of tuition. If that is not economic illiteracy, I don't know what is.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:49
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GunnerJ posted:Hey. Hey! You are arguing for instituting rationing in medical care. It's called "pricing" and it has the signature insane disadvantage of limiting access not on the basis of need but on the basis of one's ability to pay. In a sane and civilized society - that is, the opposite of the feudal hellscape you fantasize about - personal ability to pay is irrelevant and need is everything. That is why universal healthcare is superior. If you take this logic to its natural conclusion, you'd have to accept a total command-economy form of totalitarian socialist central planning. Everything in the market economy is limited to ones "ability to pay". If you can't afford a tv or a cell phone, you don't buy them. But who doesn't have access to a cell phone or a television in the United States. Literally no one. The tendency of the market is to provide affordable products and services to all socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, the profit and loss system provides incentives for entrepreneurs to enter under-served markets so the supply is generally sufficient to meet demand. On the other hand, in socialist economies, the lack of a profit and loss system means that resources are not allocated as effectively as they might otherwise be, and the demand generally greatly outpaces supply. Arguing that medical care must be provided by Marxist principles ("to each according to his need") rather than through the market simply because medical care is very important unlike "frivolous" consumer goods doesn't hold any water either. I would argue that it is much more important that the most vital of human needs be provided by the market. Think of all the urgent human needs that are effectively provided through the market economy all the time. Isn't food more urgent even than medical care? Why should the prospect of whether or not a person starves or is severely malnourished be determined by his "ability to pay" for a ham sandwich at the local corner deli? What if he doesn't have the $5 it costs for the sandwich? Should he just starve? Why don't we take the delivery of all food products out of the hands of private farmers, grocery stores, deli and restaurant owners and nationalize all food production? All farms and grocery stores should now be run by the State. Food will now be declared a "human right" that every person is entitled to regardless of his or her ability to pay. We can have government officials handing out a standardized, regimented supply of groceries to each citizen at your local "DMV for food". Wouldn't that be wonderful? I hope you realize the problem with this scenario. Predictably, the supply and variability of food products available would shrink, shortages in available food would soon come into being (see the bread lines in the Soviet Union) and you would NOT end up improving the nutrition of the citizens. Wouldn't you concede that access to a reasonable level of nutrition is AT LEAST as vital to human well-being as access to medical care? Just observing the world, we can see that the more capitalistic and free market oriented countries have the least problems with starvation and hunger. The nations foolish enough to object to a "for profit" food production and sale model have suffered starvation, malnutrition and other horrific consequences. But hey, at least you had the abstract "right" to bread in the Soviet Union regardless of your ability to pay! To take another example, would you agree that in today's economy, not having access to a cell phone and the internet puts you at a massive disadvantage compared to the rest of the population? You could therefore argue that having a smartphone and a computer connected to the internet is absolutely essential for a human being to compete. Yet, the free market with its limitation and rationing based on "ability to pay" has provided cell phones and computers to literally every single person in the United States. I don't think there is even a single person who could not get a cell phone or computer if he wanted one in the United States today. If the price becomes low enough and the supply vast enough, the barrier to entry falls so far that there is no meaningful rationing based on ability to pay. So if a medical procedure costs $500 or it cost $50,000, in either case there is technically "rationing based on ability to pay". Yet, the former price means that nearly everyone will be able to pay and the few that can't are far more likely to be able to get someone else to pay for them through charity. The latter would be hard for nearly everyone to find a way to pay. What is needed for cheap and affordable medical care is greater productivity of medical equipment, less cost overhead through State-imposed regulations and licensing requirements so that a greater abundance of medical goods are available on the market and the cost of producing them is less. This is the ONLY way the price can come down. Having the State pay for medical care doesn't create more supply of doctors and medical goods. The cost is still there and it is passed onto the consumers in one way or another. There is no "free" when it comes to the allocation of scarce resources. If we get to a place where medical goods, hospitals, MRI machines, X-ray machines, dentist offices, and so forth are available in greater and greater abundance, then the price will fall closer and closer to $0 without ever getting there obviously since scarcity can never be conquered entirely. It is my understanding that most of you are conceding that central planning in medical care necessitates arbitrary rationing based on edicts and guidelines from State officials. The trade-off in your mind is that forcing people who have non-life threatening medical conditions to wait longer for treatment or heaping a greater burden of the cost on the "rich", artificially limiting the supply of medical goods deemed "less urgent" is deemed fair as long as you can ensure that the poorer people who have a life-threatening condition are able to afford treatment regardless of their ability to pay. But consider the moral principle at work here. If I want something, some product or service, it is my responsibility to find a way to get it. The fact that I have a "need" doesn't mean I have the right to lay claim on other people's property. I must go out and purchase medical services, or health insurance, or whatever else on the market. Or I must ask (pay attention to the word "ASK" which implies voluntary interaction and not aggression) for charitable help if I have fallen on hard times and I cannot pay for something that I truly need. The problem in our contemporary economy is that decades of State intervention has artificially inflated healthcare prices such that all kinds of voluntary transactions on the market, where free human beings are quite capable of solving these social problems, are prohibited by threat of aggression by the State. This is not a natural state of affairs. So you are saying that even though a market economy would have vastly lower prices for most medical care services, there STILL would be a small percentage of people who cannot, for whatever reason, afford a treatment they might need. I want the most number of people possible to have access to the greatest abundance and quality of healthcare services. But that doesn't mean that those that don't have any money have the right to lay claim to others property as a so-called "right" that they are entitled to. They are entitled to work, keep what they earn, and negotiate with other market players for the goods and services they want. And they are entitled to ask for charity if they fall on hard times. But that is it. Playing the "compassion" card and claiming that I am the one who is uncaring because I don't fall for your socialism falls apart very quickly when we look at the actual history of central planning and it's long term effects on human poverty and well being.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:51
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QuarkJets posted:These are not the procedures that make medical care expensive. Do you understand that? You must not be arguing in good faith. How do you simply ignore the example of the Oklahoma Surgery Center and it's dramatic savings in comparison to hospitals that rely on third party payer systems? You have every disingenuous excuse to discount every example of free market success that I mention. We must compare apples to apples. If we look at Atlas MD and the services offered as a general practitioner and compare it to the cost of any other general family doctor in the United States, you will see that the cost savings are substantial. Let's suppose in one month you became quite ill and you had to see your doctor half a dozen times or something like that. You would have saved literally hundreds of dollars in comparison to another family doctor who relied on a third party payer system. We'd have to investigate just how much savings they are able to pass on to the patient in terms of prescription drugs and the like but that would only bolster the efficacy of the free market. Okay, I can concede that the REAL out-of-control medical costs don't happen to be in internal medicine family doctors, but that doesn't invalidate this point. Remember, comparing apples-to-apples. But back to the Oklahoma Surgery Center, you cannot honestly tell me that surgical procedures are not one of the most expensive treatments a person can receive. Have you looked through that website are perused their pricing for various procedures? The VAST majority of surgeries on offer are between $2000 and $8000. These prices are between five and ten times cheaper than what hospitals charge that rely on third party payers. The model of actually listing your prices and allowing consumers to shop around and compare the cost of surgeries is what will serve to profoundly drive down the cost. This is what the Oklahoma Surgery Center is seeking to prove and how can you argue that they haven't succeeded when you compare their prices with the norm? The reason I am started to feel like you all are being entirely disingenuous is that on the one hand you accuse libertarians of supporting entirely unrealistic or impossible ways of solving social problems in the absence of the State, yet when we go out and prove exactly how it can be done in the real world, you resort to special pleading to invalidate those empirical examples of the effectiveness of market solutions to social problems. So, please, tell me why the Oklahoma Surgery Center is not an example of libertarian success in reducing the out of control costs in medical care?
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Jan 18, 2016 20:17
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paragon1 posted:Except, no, they wouldn't, because they would collapse as soon as economic bad times arrive and they all loving collapse due to simple loving math, as the book you're quoting to make this dumbass argument explicitly shows. Nobody said they would "collapse as soon as economic bad times arrive". You are acting as if it is some revelation that people give less to charity when they have less money, which tends to occur in a depression. Yeah, no poo poo. This might as well be an argument against charity as a whole. But you have made a gigantic error in your thinking and I will now expose your faulty thinking. Most progressives have claimed over and over that the reason we created a Federal Reserve in 1913 was to "even out the business cycle" and prevent the exact sort of economic crises that occurred under their watch in the 1930s. When libertarians propose a return to the gold standard and the abolition of the Fed, we are told that we had far more economic recessions in the 19th century and suffering was great for average people due to all this economic volatility. This is literally the basis for the justification for the Fed's existence. But if what you said is true, that mutual aid societies "would collapse as soon as economic bad times arrive" and you also hold the common progressive view that without the Fed, the economy suffered from systemic and frequent economic "bad times" then how is it that fraternal orders and mutual aid societies survived and even thrived throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century? These are mutually contradictory views. Either you must concede that economic times were generally good in the 19th century because mutual aid societies were thriving in which case you should support ending the Federal Reserve and bringing back the gold standard or you'd have to admit that economic downturns don't necessarily hurt fraternal orders and their efficacy in which case you're argument here has no merit. The last refuge you could seek to salvage your argument would be to claim that the Great Depression was an even larger economic crisis than any we've seen before or since and that is the primary thing that killed off mutual aid societies. In the first place, the libertarian argument is that the Great Depression is demonstrably NOT a market phenomenon and instead was caused by Federal Reserve credit expansion, then exacerbated and lengthened by foolish and counterproductive government programs. But even if this were NOT the case, arguing against mutual aid societies because they don't do too well in a one-in-our-history scale economic depression is hardly any argument at all. Lots of things suffer in a massive economic depression that doesn't mean those same things are not efficacious during the other 98% of the time.
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Jan 18, 2016 20:42
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DrProsek posted:Jrod, I think it's not only justified, but an outright moral good to kill anyone involved in the slave trade. If someone firebombed the home of an auctioneer who organized auctions where slaves were bought and sold, I'd ask if the auctioneer lived alone, and if he did then I'd say that arsonist is a hero (and if not, I'd say they are a good person with some failings). If someone had kidnapped and hanged the entire crew of a slave galley during the days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, I'd say there were a hero. If someone had walked right up to George Washington and shot him in the face simply for the crime for owning a slave, I'd say that assassin is a national hero and we should have a holiday to celebrate that murder. This is a bizarre line of argument. I actually agree with it to a degree. Self defense against coercion is of course justified but proportionality must be kept in mind. If I react to a small degree of coercion in excess of proportionality then my response becomes not merely defense but aggression. I can't justifiably shoot you because you walked across my lawn and you shouldn't get twenty years in prison because you shop lifted a pack of gum. In regards to historical slavery, slaves had every moral right to kill their masters. And whites who were abolitionists had every moral right to provide support and to kill the slave "owners" on their behalf. Having the moral right to do something does not necessarily mean that it would be strategically wise for the abolitionist cause to do so. If by mounting an organized insurrection against slave owning whites sparked a war that ended up killing thousands of innocents, not to mention hundreds of black slaves, then doing so might be unwise and counterproductive. But you'd be justified in doing so. But on the other hand, considering anyone who happened to "profit" from slavery as deserving of instant death is morally dubious because it would have been literally impossible for anyone to participate in the economy in any capacity without indirectly profiting from slavery. Even the most ardent abolitionists have to feed their families and buy clothes to wear and so forth. Therefore they indirectly profit from slave labor. Does that mean anyone has the moral right to murder them simply for existing in a grossly immoral society? I don't think so. What about children? A child happens to be born into a family that owns slaves. They aren't responsible for what their parents have done. Do they deserve death? I would advocate that the abolitionists target the large scale plantation owners first. I would have advocated they send a clear and unequivocal message that says "holding these Africans in bondage is immoral. If you do not immediately start freeing them and letting them go, we will start a coordinated and ruthless campaign for assassinations and all of your lives are forfeit". They would have absolutely every moral right to do this. But the actual killing would have to be targeted and precise. It should be the deed holders for the slaves personally that should be killed and not anyone else. Otherwise it becomes a slippery slope whereby you could justify killing someone merely for "not doing enough to oppose slavery" which is morally problematic to say the least. People are born into horribly immoral societies and if a person has no completely ethically sound options available to him, he cannot be criticized for simply trying to exist in a mad world. I think you are engaged in a rhetorical trick of sorts, but I'll nevertheless answer your question. Since both chattel slavery and income taxation are slavery of some sort, though there is no doubt a massive chasm between the two, would I say that murder of an IRS worker is similarly justified as an abolitionist who killed a slave owner who refused to free his slaves? Let me put it another way to make it more concrete. Let's suppose you commit a "crime" that is really no crime at all. Suppose you have a bit of marijuana or cocaine in your home. The neighbors tip off the authorities and they send police to come arrest you and put you in jail. Now, I would argue that you have every moral right to resist. If the police officers just knock on your door to talk with you and try to persuade you to go peacefully with them, I don't think you should shoot them. But you have every right to resist the kidnapping (which is exactly what would be taking place). If you peacefully resist and the authorities don't relent and walk away peacefully but instead escalate until they try to physically put their hands on you, then you have every moral right to shoot them. They are in the process of kidnapping you and you haven't done anything wrong. If it was someone who wasn't wearing an official uniform and carrying a badge, there would be no question you had every right to resist up to an including shooting your kidnapper if they don't relent. Now, notice that I said you had the "moral right". In practicality, if an officer comes to your house to take you to jail for marijuana possession, I strongly suggest you DON'T kill the police officer even though you'd have the moral right to do so. Not only would it be bad for you because now you'd spend a lifetime sentence behind bars or get the death penalty but it wouldn't practically help you achieve a free society. But there should be no moral equivocating on the point that you would indeed be morally justified in doing so, just as you would if a group of neighbors comes into your house uninvited and tries to use force to kidnap you. See, I am the one who is being consistent in my application of moral rules for human conduct. You, I would suspect, would support the slave or any abolitionist killing the slave owners if they refuse to free the slaves immediately, but you wouldn't support the moral right of a person in the United States today to kill a police officer who is trying to kidnap you and enslave you behind bars for no good reason. Why the inconsistency? I grant that their is a large gap in the degree of the moral atrocity between enslaving a black person for life in the 19th century American South, and a police officer putting you in prison for six months for a non-crime (smoking or selling marijuana or other drugs). But the moral principle is precisely the same.
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Jan 18, 2016 21:23
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:poo poo I can't scrounge $0 together! I guess I should talk to you like I would a loving child because that is about the level of your economic literacy. Do you understand that governments can't conquer the reality of scarcity through official decree? The only things that actually cost zero dollars are those things that are available in superabundance and thus supply far outstrips human demand. For everything else, there is a price. Medical services have to be produced in a costly way which means that the price for a surgery cannot be "zero". In State welfare systems, you are only given the impression that something is free because the bureaucracy is so convoluted and complex that the actual cost is not immediately apparent. You ARE paying a price for healthcare services in Great Brittain and in Canada, the laws of economics demand that this be so.
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Jan 18, 2016 21:37
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Mr Interweb posted:drat, sorry to hear what happened to your friend, Caros. Insurance would still be available for people but it would actually function as real insurance. People have car insurance but it is only for unexpected events like accidents. You have to pay to replace your tires, get your oil changed, and most predictable repairs that take place over the life of a car. Healthcare would be much the same way in a libertarian society. The vast majority of healthcare would be paid out of pocket, with no third party involved. People will then have a limited insurance that covers catastrophic health care emergencies such as what happened to Caros's friend. According to Caros, she DID have insurance but it didn't cover very much of her treatment at all. This is obviously perverse. Insurance is entirely backwards. In a libertarian society, catastrophic insurance would exist exclusively to cover these sorts of unexpected and urgent medical emergencies. Some people buy house insurance in case of fire, with the understanding that should their house be destroyed, the insurance would pay them the value of the house so they could replace it. What do you think would happen if people would buy house insurance with that understanding, and then after it was destroyed, the insurance company decided they would only pay you 10% of the value of the house and you'd have to pay the rest? Then they would be operating like health insurance companies in the United States sometimes do, like what Caros's friend had to deal with. Insurance wouldn't have to do with employment in a libertarian society and could be purchased from out of state or even out of the country. There would be more competition and purchasing catastrophic health insurance would be very much like purchasing car insurance. Okay, but you'll no doubt retort that even with all that, some people simply won't purchase catastrophic health insurance and then something really serious happens and they simply can't afford the emergency medical treatment that would be required to save their lives in such a scenario. This no doubt could happen, but we cannot possibly insulate people from the potential consequences of their actions. Any of us could wind up in a situation where we need something that we can't afford on our own. If you choose not to buy house insurance and your home burns down, does somebody else owe you a new home? No, you took a risk. By assuming that risk, you accepted the fact that the unlikely could come about in which case you'd have lost a home without the immediate ability to replace it. But even saying that, in this scenario where a person chooses not to buy catastrophic health insurance and ends up with an emergency medical condition that he or she cannot pay for, then there is a role for private charity. The people who insist that private charity could NEVER be sufficient to cover the needs are really abdicating any responsibility they have towards their fellow man. People are more ingenious and innovative than you are giving them credit for. Confining ourselves to the United States (I am a US citizen after all), lets look at the percentage of people who routinely vote for Progressive policies, the left-wing of the Democratic Party or the Bernie supporters if you will. I'll even stipulate that many people are not caring and wouldn't think to help others. I don't believe this but I'll assume it for arguments sake. I would wager that there are about 70-80 million American adults who are committed left-wing voters who support Progressive values and want a State because they think it can provide social welfare to those that need it, level the playing field, regulate the big banks and corporations, etc. Let's suppose those 80 million Americans decided to eschew politics and focus on non-political ways of providing a social safety net for those that need it? You really don't think that that many dedicated people couldn't find ways to help fund necessary medical treatments for people like Caros's friend, who simply were unlucky and had an insurmountable obstacle in the way of getting the life saving medical care she needed? I strongly think that they could. Maybe the 19th century fraternal order system would not be viable in today's age. Or perhaps they would take the valuable aspects of those systems and modernize it in other ways. So why don't people do this already? A large part of the problem is that people have been indoctrinated into the erroneous belief that charity and social welfare are the job of government. Those of you who insist that private efforts will always be grossly insufficient have fallen into a self-defeating trap. I don't believe this is the case whatsoever. There is a role for a privately-funded social safety net, along with affordable catastrophic health insurance plans that can be purchased much like car insurance plans are purchased today, independent of employment and irrespective of State borders. Finally, most non-emergency medical treatments and procedures will be purchased out of pocket and you can expect the prices to fall when you introduce price competition and a working market without any third party interference. Does this answer your question?
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Jan 18, 2016 23:07
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YF19pilot posted:阿! jrodefeld 豬頭! 您好. 你好嗎? Never heard that expression? The joke is that there is no beachfront property in North Dakota, but if you are gullible enough to believe the poo poo you believe, then you might be gullible enough to think that there is. Another variation is "if you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you". I know it flew right over your head, but what am I here for other than to educate?
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Jan 18, 2016 23:12
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Mr Interweb posted:When I was growing up, I had a case of severe asthma. Would get constant attacks, and found myself going to the hospital quite frequently. We were also very poor, but thankfully I was able to get on medi-CAL (California's version of medicaid). I don't know if it's fair to say that I'd probably be dead without it, but I know we'd either be bankrupt, or I'd be suffering quite a bit more than I did. Both of which I'm sure would be fine with Jrod. To again quote the great Frederick Bastiat: “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” What would make you assume that because I don't support the State providing social welfare for the poor, that I don't support social welfare? And making the claim that you think I'd be "fine" with people needlessly dying is a ridiculous accusation and serves to purpose other than to stir the pot. We can debate issues without resorting to impugning the motives of our opposition.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:19
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Caros posted:Not actually my girlfriend, just a female friend I was very close to at the time despite the distance. Childhood friend. Yeah, I didn't think it would be in any way out of bounds for me to mention the death of your friend since you volunteered that information and you mentioned that it was the major catalyst that caused you to abandon libertarian thought, which makes it pretty relevant to the discussion we are having about the merits of libertarianism. Attacking me on this is just a cheap way for other posters to act indignant and oh-so offended. To be clear, I don't think I can argue the fact that your friend would have been able to receive some sort of treatment in Canada. I'll have to trust you, considering that you have looked into this specific fact a lot more than I have. But I do think this is a poor argument in comparing two systems by using a single anecdote. I could pull up anecdotes about people in Canada who had to come down here to get any sort of decent medical treatment, depending on the specific problem they were having. It doesn't prove very much.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:28
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spoon0042 posted:
Property rights are necessary because we live in a world of scarcity. Human needs are essentially infinite and the resources needed to satisfy those needs are scarce. Therefore, conflict is inevitable. Conflict arises when two or more people want to use a scarce resource for achieving different goals. Thus, rules dictating which person has the better claim to determine the use of which scarce resources become necessary. Property rights are what has emerged out of this observable reality of scarcity and the desire to reduce and resolve conflict so human civilization can be possible You should care about property rights if you care about human civilization and social welfare on any level whatsoever. The point of this particular thread is to highlight the fact that it is not some irrational fetish that libertarians have for property rights, but rather a desire to best deal with the reality of scarcity and try our best to solve the problem of scarcity in the interest of best satisfying our human needs. If we conquered scarcity (which will likely never be possible), the price of everything would drop to $0 and private property rights outside of our physical bodies would be meaningless and we'd live in essentially a garden of eden where all human wants can be simultaneously satisfied. Money and prices measure scarcity. The more scarce a good is, the higher its price generally speaking. The more abundant something is, the lower its price. So if you say that governments can magically decree that healthcare is now "free", what you are saying is that healthcare can become superabundant and post-scarce merely by official decree, because that is the only way anything ever truly becomes free. But to the contrary, since healthcare services must still be produced in a costly way, the true price to consumers is merely disguised and unnecessary inefficiencies and limitation on supply are introduced into the system. Thus healthcare actually becomes MORE expensive as national debts pile up and up, more taxes are levied on the consumer and the currency is ever devalued to monetize the debt. To conquer scarcity, we need the production side of the equation to become less costly and more efficient. The cheaper and more abundant a consumer good can be produced, the cheaper the price will be to the consumer. This is what we should be encouraging. Capital accumulation and reinvestment into improvements in capital equipment, new factories and manufacturing methods are the way in which prices are reduced. By taxing away profits from companies, States only retard this process and make consumer goods and services more expensive than they otherwise would be. Capital accumulation, commonly known as "savings", only occur when the saver has a legally recognized right to that property. Otherwise he wouldn't bother to save. The only rational system of property rights acquisition that exists is to show deference to the first owner of a scarce resource as having the better claim than a latter user unless or until he voluntarily parts with it through transaction, gift or abandonment. If the first user didn't have the right to use any scarce resources plucked out of nature, we would have all died out because we wouldn't have been able to act. In short, property rights are essential for dealing with the fact of scarcity and allowing for the accumulation of capital and the division of labor which is precisely the reason why humanity was able to rise above a subsistence level and produce modern civilization. So it's pretty loving important.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:59
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SedanChair posted:Because their surgeons have to be certified by THE STATE just like everybody else. This is no argument against what I was saying whatsoever! Yes, and the doctors had to drive on government roads to get to the hospital too. The State exists and we all have to deal with it. But in most respects, the people in charge of the Oklahoma Surgery Center have been able to eschew most third party involvement in their practice and market directly to consumers. They are the MOST free market oriented surgery center that I am aware of in the United States and the result of their efforts is tremendous cost savings over State and Insurance funded hospitals. Are you disputing this evident fact? We can have a separate argument over whether the State ought to be certified by the State, or whether a private institution could do the licensing but that is a separate issue.
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Jan 19, 2016 00:08
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QuarkJets posted:We, society, ask that you pay your taxes so that we can give medical care to everyone who needs it. There, that wasn't so hard. No "society" doesn't "ask" me to pay my taxes to give medical care to others. I don't understand why clear language is so hard for some of you to grasp. If I don't have the option of saying "no" without being forcefully thrown in a cage, you are not "asking" me anything. You are threatening me and using violence to fund your idea of social welfare. Even if ALL the taxes expropriated by the State went to social welfare for the poor it wouldn't justify the use of aggression in order to get the funding. The ends don't justify the means. But, considering that most of the tax revenue goes not towards social welfare services, but towards all kinds of moral enormities with no redeeming value, you have even less of a leg to stand on. My tax dollars go towards overthrowing and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade, to subsidizing Big Agriculture, Big Pharma and bailing out the banks on Wall Street. It goes towards drone bombing third world nations, inciting hatred and blowback which results in a rise in terrorism against us. It goes towards military industrial complex boondoggles like building unneeded and unused fighter jets, bombs and artillery. These State actions that I am forced to help fund are deeply offensive to me. Can I respectfully decline to participate in supporting these atrocities? Absolutely not. I can expect a gun in the ribs and a one way trip to a jail cell. So don't give me your loving bullshit about "society" "asking" me to help poor people get medical care. I, like most people I know, already give a portion of my earnings to charity so I have nothing to do with denying anyone access to medical care. What if my local soup kitchen or the Red Cross just happened to be murdering innocent people, occupying and overthrowing democratically elected regimes around the world, and kidnapping thousands of Americans during the hours they weren't providing food to the hungry and medical care to the sick? You'd probably say "you know what? This isn't a very good charity. I think I'll stop funding these guys and give my money to a group that is more morally consistent in their approach to charity." That is how I look at the State. If were I too concede that the State does provide good social welfare services to the poor, the very fact that they also commit these inexcusable atrocities would give me every incentive to find another charity to help the poor, one that doesn't commit such egregious acts. By supporting the State, especially the United States government, because you think it should provide welfare for the needed you are indirectly bolstering it's ability and legitimacy in committing war crimes and truly evil violations of human rights. This is what tends to happen when you think a moral good can come from an immoral principle.
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Jan 19, 2016 00:33
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Caros posted:I just realized that you probably didn't see this while you were being too handsome and cool jrodefeld. I know it is a bit belated but we made this for you. Merry Christmas! poo poo, I'm flattered you guys think that much about me when I'm not around. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
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Jan 19, 2016 01:06
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Caros posted:I was always a fan of the Proudhon rebuttal: I've read my share of Proudhon and, honestly, if you'd be willing to adopt a Proudhon-style of Anarchism then I'd consider us close enough ideologically to be considered allies on most issues. But sadly, I guess you'll just settle with using him as a proxy to bash Bastiat with which is a shame. It would be interested to note for the readers who are not exactly familiar with the work of Proudhon and Bastiat, that they BOTH were considered part of the "left" as they sat on the left side of the French legislature, were both anarchists and opposed the "old order" that the conservatives defended. They had a great many debates, particularly in the area of interest, but had much in common on a great number of issues. I've tried to explain the historical origins of anarchism and libertarianism as being more properly and historically aligned with the "left" as it was originally conceived than the right and reading more about Bastiat and Proudhon would serve to hammer home that point further. That Proudhon quote, while colorful and fun in its own right, doesn't refute poo poo. It is amusing however how articulate past generations of thinkers were when insulting each other. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from their example?
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Jan 19, 2016 01:18
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Etalommi posted:So you're down with a national bank that is funded by a high capital gains tax? With currency that is detached from the gold standard? I'm down with abolishing the State. That is my primary objective. The mutualist ideology is a cousin of sorts to classical liberalism, with sharp deviations and, to my mind, grave errors that took them off course. But Proudhon is a brilliant thinker and no one interested in anarchist thought can be said to be educated without having read their share of his writings. It is especially important to expose oneself to the 19th century classical liberal, anarchist and mutualist thinkers if you share the contemporary left's view that all this anti-government talk and the libertarian movement more specifically simply arose in the 1950s because some rich corporations bankrolled some think tanks and wanted an ideological cover to get State regulators off their backs. These ideas have their roots in the modern (in a relative sense) era during the 17th century European Enlightenment and the breadth and scope of the thought of important anti-State thinkers in the following centuries ought to be properly recognized. Whatever the failings of the modern-day libertarian movement (and there are many) it is the ideas espoused throughout the ages that ought to hold our focus.
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Jan 19, 2016 02:07
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SedanChair posted:Never mind, I forgot that jrod pretends to love Lysander Spooner as well, even though he literally was a card-carrying member of the First International I "pretend" to love Lysander Spooner?! He is one of the greatest American thinkers of the 19th century, at least on par with Bastiat and I'd maybe rank him a bit higher. As a mere sampling of his ideology, I'll quote the Wikipedia entry on him: quote:Spooner believed that it is beneficial if people are self-employed so that they could enjoy the full benefits of their labor rather than having to share them with an employer. He argued that various forms of government intervention in the free market made it difficult for people to start their own businesses. For one, he believed that laws against high interest rates, or "usury", prevented those with capital from extending credit because they could not be compensated for high risks of not being repaid: "If a man have not capital of his own, upon which to bestow his labor, it is necessary that he be allowed to obtain it on credit. And in order that he may be able to obtain it on credit, it is necessary that he be allowed to contract for such a rate of interest as will induce a man, having surplus capital, to loan it to him; for the capitalist cannot, consistently with natural law, be compelled to loan his capital against his will. All legislative restraints upon the rate of interest, are, therefore, nothing less than arbitrary and tyrannical restraints upon a man's natural capacity amid natural right to hire capital, upon which to bestow his labor...The effect of usury laws, then, is to give a monopoly of the right of borrowing money, to those few, who can offer the most approved security".[25] Yep. I agree with every word. What is confusing you is that his tone of many of his ideas strikes you as very much contemporary leftist. But this is not at all confusing to me. In fact, it is a gross error of the modern age that libertarian (classical liberal) ideas are somehow seen as a subset of the American Right. This is ahistorical and has a great deal to do with certain practical, but always uneasy, alliances made between libertarians and the Old Right in opposing FDR's New Deal. I've mentioned it before, but I highly recommend you read the Murray Rothbard essay "Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty". This is a short essay that can be read in a single sitting. There is also an audiobook version on Youtube that you could listen to. This essay is Rothbard at his best and he will untangle your mind and get you to understand that the modern concept of "left" and "right" are horribly confused and misguided. Then you should have no trouble seeing why Spooner is absolutely a libertarian and why we can regard people like Proudhon as, if not libertarian, but at least ideological allies against Statism. You would do well to read some articles by left-libertarian Sheldon Richman or left-libertarian Roderick Long and get a sense that individualist anarchists of the 19th century are almost certainly part of the libertarian tradition.
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Jan 19, 2016 02:21
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GunnerJ posted:Actually laughed out loud at him identifying his "allies on the left" according to who was sitting on the literal left side of the French legislature. Historical etymology is fun and all but haha wow. Jesus loving Christ. I am absolutely talking to children. Do you know that the political concepts of left and right originated from the French assembly based on the two opposing sides, one sitting on the left and the other on the right? It wasn't just a seating chart. The people sitting to the left had certain views and political priorities that were in sharp distinction with the conservative agenda of those that sat on the right. The fact that Proudhon and Bastiat both sat on the left meant that they had somewhat similar priorities and values. Let me enlighten you and please pay attention because this is really important. In a retrospective on Rothbard's great essay, left-libertarian Roderick Long wrote the following: quote:In "Left and Right," Rothbard makes the same identification: I am genuinely interested in hearing your reaction to this. And here is the page this excerpt was taken from: https://mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later#2 jrodefeld fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 02:31
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Caros posted:Jrodefeld I could be incredibly eloquent in calling you a goat loving piece of human excrement. I am a published author who has had a book on the goddamn nyt bestseller list. My decision to deride you with insults related to your failed blu-ray business, watermelon fornication and general annoyance should not be taken as a lack of eloquence but a lack of care. All right, a written debate is what I am willing to do with you at this point. What should the topic be about? Let's have a relatively narrowly defined topic (not that it will stay that way) so at least we having a decent starting place. I propose a three day time limit so we can both get our say in but if something comes up during the day we don't have to be stuck to our computers 24/7. Another rule I'd suggest is that we each have an opening OP where we lay out our position on an issue, then we simply go back and forth. If I make a post, then you respond ONE TIME asking a question or refuting whatever I have written. What I fear happening is that one of us ends up with more free time during those three days and then tries to win simply by posting more times than the other persona and accumulating more words on the thread. We both get an opening OP, then each of us gets roughly the same number of posts, and then maybe a closing post summing up our argument or we just end at the end of the three day time period. We could do it here on this forum if everyone would agree to the terms of the debate and we could somehow ensure that other posters don't interfere. Probably a second thread could be created where the other members could discuss the ongoing debate without directly interfering. What do you think?
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Jan 19, 2016 02:57
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Muscle Tracer posted:Sidenote: it's also OK to say this about anything, from "I wasn't aware that Qatar has slaves" to "I've never heard of elasticity of demand" to "This is a novel argument and I'd like to think about it for a few days before responding." Okay, fair enough. But I'm not plagiarizing anything. There was one time were I recited basically a historical list of dates and events that I had pasted from another source and forgotten to properly attribute. That was the only time I could be accused of plagiary. And I copped to the mistake and nothing like that has occurred since. Here is something that I'll admit to not knowing enough about to respond in a meaningful way and I'd like to learn more about. Several times people have mentioned David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Supposedly it is an authoritative take-down of the Austrian theory about the origin of money. I have been vaguely aware of this book as I've seen it mentioned before and I know that Robert Murphy had a little exchange with Graeber a few years back. I'd actually love to learn more about this particular discussion and what it means for libertarians and Austrian economists. If we discuss this particular topic, I will concede that I don't know much about it and I'll be willing to learn. I don't know everything after-all. My understanding is that general Austrian theory holds that money emerged out of a primitive barter economy due to the problem of double coincidence of wants, thus necessitating a universally accepted medium of exchange. Graeber's argument is that there is no historical evidence that any barter economy ever existed on any significant scale and, more commonly, debt was the first and oldest means of trade. Okay, but I'm not sure how much this actually proves. Debt is just as inefficient as barter in an economy of any scale and complexity and the need for a universal medium of exchange becomes necessary regardless. Just giving someone something based on the expectation that they will pay you back (replace the item taken) requires a level of trust that would be impossible in even a slightly large economy. I am genuinely asking because I haven't read Graeber's book. What is his argument as it relates to libertarianism and Austrian economics? What is the takeaway?
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Jan 19, 2016 03:15
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Caros posted:Of course it was. I'm sure you're aware, but Mises.org has an explicit mission to literally collect and distribute ALL the major historical libertarian, anarchist and classical liberal books, essays and articles that have ever been published. Criticizing me for using their site for libertarian sources is like criticizing someone for using the library. The "library" is not a person or even a small group of people. Similarly, the Mises Institute website has an online library of hundreds of different authors, both contemporary and modern, who hold often very different views and many issues while still being roughly in the liberty tradition. I am arguing for the libertarian position. So, shouldn't it be reasonable that I cite libertarians, anarchists and classical liberals in my defense of that position?
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Jan 19, 2016 03:20
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DrProsek posted:Also he supported notorious racists Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan for POTUS. Ron Paul is no racist you loving disingenuous lunatic. Nobody has ever produced a single shred of evidence apart from those early 90s Newsletters that were so obviously ghostwritten and contrary to the expressed views of Ron Paul throughout his entire political career. Now libertarian organizations, including Reason, Cato and unfortunately Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, courted the far right as potential allies in the early 1990s. Some of the fruits of this disastrous "partnership" are frankly embarrassing. But Ron Paul wasn't a part of that. He was retired from politics at the time. And all of these organizations have either explicitly or implicitly disavowed this "paleo" phase. Everybody knows that Murray Rothbard swung far-right at the beginning of the 1990s and that was embarrassing and tragic. I strongly believe that had he lived longer he would have abandoned this failed strategy and gone back to a more plum-line libertarianism or even made common cause with the left again as he did in the 1960s. Much of this can also be attributed to his very public and outspoken feud with the Koch brothers and their attempts to bankroll the major libertarian think tanks and bring them into the beltway as "respectable" not-nearly-as-radical institutions. Your using the contemporary left's most obscene tactic which is to use the term "racist" so broadly as to destroy a persons character without needing much evidence.
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Jan 19, 2016 03:37
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GunnerJ posted:This is a topic that I brought up at the same time that I linked to the chapter of the book you're referring to. If you had any actual "genuine interest" you could have read it yourself and then talked about what you read. All right, so you DON'T want to talk about it now that I'm open to it. Critics of libertarianism and Austrian economics in particular have certainly spoken about that book as if it has delivered a death-blow to Austrian economic theory, but I know to take such proclamations with a grain of salt.
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Jan 19, 2016 03:42
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Caros posted:The last time I went through your posts in the Libertarian thread fully half of all links you provided were links to Mises.org. By way of comparison I went through my own links and the links of two other posters and found that apart from wikipedia links there was almost no duplication of sources on the part of myself or others. That is to say, when you link something, you do so in an orthodox fashion. You pull your information primarily from a handful of sources that are completely separate from what I'm going to call 'the real world'. So you are going to discount any source I provide that is from a libertarian source? What, am I supposed to support my case for radical individualism by making appeals to communist sources? Take the information on its merits, don't attack the source. I'd really like you to actually respond to the substance of that post though. I think it is interesting that you simply ignore the aspects of the libertarian tradition that don't fit into your narrative of it being a white, racist, far-right movement opposed to so-called "progressive" values. That is why you don't believe me when I mention that Lysander Spooner, Frederick Bastiat, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon are indeed a part of the broad libertarian tradition to which I subscribe. Proudhon less so, i'll admit, but the mutualist anarchists are what I would consider cousins to the classical liberals in that they strongly believed that the State was a tool of oppression and the left-wing values they espoused were far better achieved through freedom. Similarly, you choose to ignore modern left-libertarians who carry on in this tradition such as Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman and Gary Chartier. So let me ask you to please respond with some substance to the Roderick Long article I linked to, even if it is from the dreaded Mises Institute website. If there was a single thing I want you all to understand, it is what is articulated in this article. https://mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later#2
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Jan 19, 2016 19:47
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Nessus posted:Jrode, did you know that most of Ron Paul's principled no votes against the machinery of cruellest statism were carefully planned to be symbolic protests, so that he could build his brand and work the rubes? In fact, did you know that most American right-wing political groups are inescapably intertwined with scams? How do you know any of that? People have accused Ron Paul of plenty of things over the years,. but being insincere is certainly not one of them. Ron Paul got into politics to speak out and educate the masses about libertarian ideas and leave a record in American political history that people can look back on. He never cared about passing legislation. Nobody of a sane mind actually thinks that Ron's political positions, whether right or wrong, were taken for any reason other than that is what he genuinely and truly believes. I don't know why you'd think I'd care about right-wing political groups or their scams, considering libertarianism and especially individualist anarchism, are NOT a part of the American right-wing.
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Jan 20, 2016 03:54
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VitalSigns posted:Luckily support for the slaveholding Confederacy can be reconciled with libertarian values with the magic words "I disagree with slavery in principle" and then you can support slavery in practice all you want! Suppose you kidnapped a person off the street and enslaved them in your apartment refusing to let them leave. Then I, an abolitionist, decide to bomb the entire apartment complex in retribution for your act of enslavement. Naturally, I'd be indiscriminately murdering a couple hundred people you had nothing to do with your pro-slavery actions. Thus the act could never be considered moral. On the other hand, if I were able to target you specifically and force you to release your prisoner or, if you refused, to kill you then that is a different matter and could be morally justified. The Civil War was problematic because the killing, property destruction and unintended consequences affected far more than just the unrepentant Southern slave-owners. In fact, hundreds of thousands of non-slave owners and many slaves themselves were killed due to this war. Lincoln's army raped women and burned down entire villages. The war crimes and atrocities committed by both sides were greater than any other war in our nations history. It also could not be rationally considered a "civil war" since one side wanted to leave the Union peacefully, albeit for some immoral reasons including their supposed "right" to maintain the institution of slavery but there were other reasons for the desire to secede. More correctly it should be called the war to prevent Southern secession. If Lincoln hadn't been ardently dedicated to maintaining the Union by any means necessary including waging aggressive war against his own country, the war would have been avoided. The fight against slavery could have and should have been waged a different way. What Lysander Spooner and a number of other historians have pointed out, was that Lincoln's motives were highly dubious. He cared not one whit about the slavery issue until it became strategically advantageous to him as a wartime tactic. A notorious bigot, Lincoln kept the dream alive to his dying day that the United States should relocate all blacks out of the country because he thought the two races could never coexist and the white race was inherently superior. Spooner had proposed very different means of abolishing slavery, one that was congruous with a consistent application of morality. The Union should have been allowed to dissolve and all fugutive slave laws should be immediately repealed. Thus any runaway slave that reaches a Northern state would be immediately free and there would be no way for the Southern plantation owner to re-capture him. Any attempt to do so would amount to an invasion of a foreign nation and the enemy combatant would be immediately shot. All the while, negotiations could begin to take place between the North and South and a re-formation of the Union could be possible if, and only if, the South would agree to a phasing out of the institution of slavery. In the meantime, abolitionists in both the North and South should both continue to maintain the underground railroad which would, as efficiently as possible, transport runaway slaves from the South to freedom in the North. Even more directly, private non-State militia movements should mount a form of domestic guerrilla warfare targeting and killing slave owners who refused to free their slaves. The cost of maintaining the institution of slavery would soon be far too much and negotiations for total emancipation would soon be possible. Simply saying that this view amounts to libertarians "not caring" whether the institution of slavery persisted for another ten or twenty years is disingenuous. Even though slavery was technically abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, blacks didn't achieve genuine freedom for another hundred years. Many historians have noted that the post Reconstruction conditions and treatment of blacks was made immeasurably worse due to the manner in which emancipation took place. It has been persuasively argued that had more peaceful methods of emancipation been successfully tried, blacks might have achieved a genuine equality far earlier in our history. Spooner pointed out that it is hypocritical to not allow freedom of association regarding the Union and it's participating states, but at the same time pose as the great opponents of slavery. Lincoln used conscription, itself a form of slavery, to man his army in the Civil War. This is hypocrisy. If we care at all about moral principles, justice and human rights, we need to apply these standards consistently. The very fact that Lysander Spooner was about as far from a "right-winger" as you could get, I think his words on this matter ought to be taken rather more seriously by the contemporary left.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:31
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Karia posted:Jrodefeld, I'm legitimately interested in what your opinion is on the standoff in Oregon. Was it wrong for the ranchers to light fires on federal land that they had contracted to use? Is the fact that they're infringing on the ability of others to enjoy the nature preserve wrong in any way? And, the most important question: have people committed aggression against them by mailing them dildos? I don't know all the details of this story but I'll tell you what I do know. In the first place, the ranchers at question here (a father and son) lit a controlled fire on their own property. Ranchers do this all the time. Supposedly there was a wild fire raging and by lighting a controlled fire in a particular way you can protect your property from being in danger. They never intentionally set fire to any federal lands. The fire got a little out of control and spread to the State-owned property. No major damage resulted from this fire and no property was hurt. Nobody brought any charges against these ranchers for a handful of years following the event. Then the Feds decide to prosecute them under a ridiculous domestic terrorism statute which requires a minimum sentence of ten years in prison or something like that. Now, the father is in his seventies and the son in his forties. The judge handling the case recognized what a gross miscarriage of justice it would be to put them away for that amount of time for what amounted to an inconsequential accident. The judge used all the discretion at his or her (don't recall the gender) disposal and reduced their sentence to five years or something like that. The ranchers served their time. They were then released to put their lives back together. Amazingly though, the Fed was not satisfied and wanted to put them BACK in jail for a number of additional years! The father I believe is in his late seventies at this point and this would mean that he would likely die in prison. For what? For setting a controlled fire on his own property to protect his family, which happened to spread onto federal land, even though no one was hurt? This is outrageous and is the source of the anger. They have every right to be angry. My main problem with this standoff is that the people doing the protesting are mostly not involved in this case at all. The protesters are not the father and soon who are being persecuted by a power-mad State or their immediate family. It is people like Bundy who are using this as an excuse to stir things up and be provocative. I don't favor an armed insurrection against the State. This is primarily for practical reasons. I don't have much sympathy in general for the right-wing militia types who don't have a consistent understanding of liberty any more than your typical left-winger. But I'm not discounting the fact that the ranchers in these Western states in general have been long subjected to unjust treatment by the Federal government and this case is particularly egregious.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:48
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Caros posted:Oh good. I was worried I was going to have to be productive tonight. Weight off my shoulders. I think that is a remarkably poor argument. The legal environment, State-educational system and political climate have conspired to heavily incentivize people to participate in a very specific type of medical system. It takes time to change peoples attitudes and expectations about how medical care can be delivered. People are already heavily taxed to pay for, among many other less justified things, State social welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If they have health insurance, they have to pay for premiums already so have every incentive to try to get their insurance to pay for coverage before trying to pay for something out of pocket. People don't usually have the option to just pick up a catestrophic health insurance plan that covers only rare and life threatening emergencies. People's money is taken without their consent to fund social welfare programs so why wouldn't they have every incentive to use those services first? This is the culture and political climate that we live in. These things take time to change. It doesn't matter how successful libertarians demonstrate free market delivery of healthcare to be, many people are simply not used to paying out of pocket for medical costs, even if those costs are relatively low. But notice how you move the goalposts. First, the argument is that the free market cannot deliver medical care effectively or cut costs to any considerable degree. When libertarians organize and prove that it is indeed possible and they create a successful and profitable business model by eschewing insurance, State welfare programs and unnecessary bureaucratic overhead, you then argue that these are the exception and why aren't there more of them if they are so successful? This model of healthcare delivery was actually fairly commonplace up until the middle of the twentieth century. Most healthcare was purchased out of pocket and insurance existed for catastrophic medical emergencies. Since then, the State has intervened to fund Medicare, Medicaid and various regulations, tax policies, crony corporatism and market distortions have incentivized people to not participate in the market and have your insurance pay for ALL medical services, life threatening or not. New ideas, even very effective and superior ideas, take time to catch on. This is even more true with the status quo is being propped up by State coercion.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:25
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