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VitalSigns posted:No apparently the answer to providing for the hungry and destitute without stealing from property owners via taxes, is for the poor to literally break in and steal from the owners, at which point we'll all sit down and agree that the thief was justified because he was very poor and no one will press charges. I'm using a "life boat scenario" as a rhetorical device to explain the philosophy. In a free society, these sorts of situations would be staggeringly unlikely and rare. Life boat scenarios are brought up all the time as attacks against libertarianism by resorting to unusual and extreme circumstances. The idea is that if you postulate a situation so extreme and desperate that aggression or property rights violations are seen as tolerable, or even morally legitimate, then all the normal prohibitions against aggression during the other 99.9% of the time should be negotiable as well. It's a good try, but it doesn't work. People in extreme circumstances will resort to doing unethical things to survive. That doesn't mean those actions, in and of themselves, are laudable and morally good. But the extenuating circumstances make the actions less legally serious than they otherwise would be and courts would take such circumstances into account. But importantly, it is up to the property owner to demand restitution for any act of aggression against his or her property. If a store-owner doesn't even want to choose to pursue legal action for a one-time shop lifter, then there is no obligation that he do so. And it is nobody else's business if that is his choice. A compassionate and understanding store-owner might let it slide completely once he knows of the extenuating circumstances. But he has the legal right to seek restitution for the aggression. The broader question of "how to provide for the hungry" is a different question. In the first place, there will be far fewer hungry people in a free society as general prosperity is higher, and there is greater production of groceries and distribution for those goods. For those who still are under-nourished, food banks, soup kitchens, charities, mutual aid societies, and churches have a moral responsibility to help the needy. But the need can be expected to be less than it currently is.
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Feb 16, 2016 03:36
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Nessus posted:Perhaps this is more moral because it puts more power into the hand of the businessman? Since he can choose whether to prosecute, not prosecute, or execute the parasite with his on-site murder drones or a DRO targetted airstrike. I know you're being facetious, but as I've stated many times before, any response to an act of aggression must be proportional or the response becomes itself an act of illegitimate aggression. So clearly executing a shoplifter cannot be justified. The prerogative of the victim of theft is either to prosecute for restitution for the amount stolen or to not prosecute. That is it. The amount owned by the thief would be equal to the market value of the stolen goods plus a fee for the time and hassle of pursuing the restitution. That would seem to be in accordance with justice, wouldn't it?
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Feb 16, 2016 03:41
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Jrod, it would really benefit you to get information from sources beyond Mises.org. Simple research shows you to be completely out of your depth on basically every topic. I get information from other sources and I'm well aware of the conventional narrative. But you are making some errors here, the first of which is your assertion that the Great Depression was "the ultimate climax of the old laissez faire order". This is a rhetorical trick that is designed to make us forget that the Federal Reserve had been in existence for twenty years prior to this crisis intervening into the economy and expanding bank credit, especially in the "roaring" twenties. This is hardly an example of "laissez faire" and the Austrian explanation of the business cycle blames central banking and expansionary monetary policy for creating an artificial boom due to malinvestment which leads to an inevitable crash. This is what Ludwig von Mises blamed for the Great Depression, so to claim that we had a libertarian "laissez-faire" economy for the decade or two before the Great Depression is dishonest. So be clear that the Great Depression occurred under the Fed's watch and no economic crisis that occurred before the Fed was established could compare in either length or severity. Furthermore, your contention that economic crises before the fed were "far more frequent and far more severe" is misleading. In the first place, you conveniently choose to start counting after the Great Depression so as to implicate the free market as having caused the greatest economic crisis in US history. But remember that libertarians and Austrian economists blame primarily central banking and artificial credit expansion for causing the business cycle, so you ought to be looking at pre-Fed and post-Fed periods not pre and post Great Depression. Christina Romer, hardly a libertarian, found in her research that the numbers and dating used by the National Bureau of Economic Research exaggerated both the number and the length of economic downturns prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. Contrary to your contention that the economic crises were "far more severe" before the Fed, economist George Selgin stated that they were "three months shorter on average and no more severe". The average peak to bottom was 7.7 months before the Fed as opposed to 10.6 in the period after World War 2. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/WorkingPaper-2.pdf The economist Richard Timberlake said "As monetary histories confirm,...most of the monetary turbulence - bank panics and suspensions in the 19th century - resulted from excessive issues of the legal tender paper money, and they were abated by the working gold standards of the time." https://books.google.com/books?id=y...20time.&f=false Even many mainstream economists have been reconsidering the narrative that was commonplace a few decades ago about the economic volatility before the Fed. But, setting aside the issue of recessions for a moment, what about the value of the currency as a predictable store of value? During the entire period of the Gold Standard, through all the unprecedented economic growth, the value of the currency grew by 7%. This is a boon to savers who could accumulate dollars and simply put them away knowing that they will maintain or appreciate in value simply by saving them. Economic calculation could be made more predictably since the value of the currency was relatively stable. Even John Kenneth Galbraith, no libertarian or fan of gold, had it correct: “In the last [19th] century in the industrial countries there was much uncertainty as to whether a man could get money but very little as to what it would do for him once he had it. In this [20th] century the problem of getting money, though it remains considerable, has diminished. In its place has come a new uncertainty as to what money, however acquired and accumulated, will be worth. Once, to have an income reliably denominated in money was thought…to be very comfortable. Of late, to have a fixed income is to be thought liable to impoverishment that may not be slow. What has happened to money?” And the gold standard serves to create a limit on the expansion of the State, which is one reason why it is attractive to those who want a hard limit on the expansion of State power. I think it is important to note hear that there were many shortcomings to the classical gold standard that we had in the 19th century and virtually no libertarians want an exact copy of those policies. We seek a new, 21st century hard money, or even the de-nationalization of money as Hayek proposed. Mistakes were undoubtedly made in the implementation and adherence to the gold standard in the 19th century, and we want to improve upon what we had then. I've always wondered why there wasn't a popular left-wing "hard money" movement. Why wouldn't an independent, un-electable and audit-free group of private bankers having the power to expand the money supply at will and give low interest loans to private businesses and government not tend towards corruption and the enrichment of a privileged class at the expense of the middle class? This is in fact exactly what libertarians have been arguing. If you care for accountability in government whatsoever, there ought to be some limit to how much the money supply can be expanded on a whim. There is nothing special about gold inherently. It is simply a shiny metal and any other commodity or other mechanism which imposes discipline on monetary policy could suffice. Gold simply has a history of being chosen as money when people had the free choice of currency. It satisfies the requirements of money, being that it is divisible, durable, portable, scarce, etc. So I'll just ask this question because I am genuinely curious. Forgetting the historical gold standard, why don't the left support a mechanism which limits the expansion of the money supply in order to limit inflation and curtail the enrichment of the corporate class and the endless expansion of the State? This, to me, seems like a very Progressive cause since this is one of the biggest drivers of inequality and corporate privilege.
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Feb 16, 2016 05:08
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Literally The Worst posted:hi jrode remember this post Read your own posts aloud and you'll see why I generally ignore them. But I'll make an exception because you touched on something I'd wanted to talk about anyway. I worked jobs as a teenager. I had a paper route when I was 13. When I was 16 or so, I worked at McDonald's, hardly a cushy position. I worked at Taco Bell and I worked at Ralph's grocery stores. I worked at or slightly above minimum wage during those years. It didn't matter that much to me. I got a bit of money and saved some of it. I had some disposable income and got to hang out with my friends at work. I got a few pay raises but I never stayed at one job long enough to work my way up in any one establishment. But it is flatly untrue that there isn't a path upward in even retail companies. Every manager I ever talked to during those years started as a regular employee and worked their way up until they were making $30 an hour or whatever they made as manager. Now, nobody is claiming that managing a Taco Bell is the height of accomplishment, but management skills certainly translate to other occupations. To claim that these starter jobs are worthless because there is no upward mobility and other, higher paying employers don't care one bit about your early work history is flatly false. I got my first real, legitimate good job when I was 21 and still in college. Flipping burgers at McDonald's didn't translate "directly" skills-wise to what I was asked to do, but my references I believe proved the difference. The job was a computer engineer position, where I had to work with AutoCAD, do surveying and plot construction for a company that built buildings and managed construction in the town I lived in for a while. A bit of everything. The job paid $23 an hour, which is not bad for a 21 year old kid. I could pick my own hours, do the work on my own time. If I wanted to work 20 hours one week I could. If I wanted to work 40 the next and any time in between I could. No bosses looking over my shoulder, I got to chill in an air conditioned room listening to music and working on a computer, or take a company car around taking pictures and listening to music while I surveyed construction sites or took pictures. I needed some elementary computer skills, which I had just picked up on my own, no degree or certification required. It was a pretty sweet job at that time in my life and I was sad to have to let it go when I moved after a year or so. But I don't think for a minute that I would have gotten that job without the stellar references I had accumulated during my teenage years. There are all kinds of reasons why an employer will choose one applicant over another. All other things being equal, the person who at twenty one already has a work history of over half a dozen jobs and stellar recommendations has a substantial advantage over another person who is applying for his or her first job. Believe me, any idiot could have quickly gotten the skills necessary to do that $23 an hour job. You don't need a college degree or substantial technical training in order to get any decent paying job. I learned a lot of it on the job because they were willing to take a chance that I could do so. But I can guarantee one thing. If the minimum wage was $15 an hour when I was a teenager, I wouldn't have gotten any of those jobs. I wouldn't have had any money saved up by the time I was in my twenties, and I probably wouldn't have gotten that good job at 21. Kicking out the first rung on the economic ladder doesn't really help people who need a first job before they can get a better job.
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Feb 16, 2016 05:38
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Stinky_Pete posted:I'm new to the arguing with libertarians pastime here on SA. Has he explicitly said that white people are naturally better than other races by some metric of human quality? I'll bring you up to speed then. Of course I haven't said anything of the sort, and I've even gone out of my way to explain the libertarian justification for reparations for slavery, openly support the Black Lives Matter movement and call for criminal justice reform and I've acknowledged that racism persists and is an impediment to economic opportunity for some people. What I have stated is that the overemphasis on racism as being the explanatory factor in black progress or non-progress causes us to neglect other important factors that ought to be addressed. There are a lot of racist cops in the country, I recognize that. I don't condone it and remember that I don't support the State being involved in policing anything so how could I be indifferent to abuse doled out by State officials against citizens? The more fundamental problem is that we have all kinds of laws on the books that ought not to be crimes and these laws give police, whatever their motives, the excuse to accost black people and instigate aggression against them. How many times have we heard "we thought he might have drugs on him" being an excuse for harassing a person of color? If there were no laws against possession of drugs in the first place, police would have far less excuse for harassing minorities. As a libertarian, I have advocated for the immediate legalization of all drugs and the immediate freeing of all people, including of course the disproportionate number of black men, who are in prison for non-violent drug offenses. Immediately this would cut out the violence inherent in the drug trade, by bringing a black market out of the shadows. Families would be reunited, black men would not be tragically killed in gangs that are sustained by and enticing due to the money to be made selling drugs. Legitimate employment would again be more desirable. I'd also advocate for the immediate suspension of all occupational licensure requirements and regulations which prevent poor blacks and the poor more broadly from opening their own businesses. I'm sure that you recognize that a lot of these burdensome regulations are not put in place simply to keep the public safe. Oftentimes they are put in place by established industry to keep out competition by making the cost of doing business much higher. We have a situation where Federal regulators are cracking down on girls who want to braid hair. They didn't go to "hair-do school" and they don't have the proper certification! This is what Walter Williams has said in his documentary "The State Against Blacks". There are artificial barriers to black progress that are erected by the legal system. This problem is systemic and requires a multi-tiered approach. This is what libertarians have been saying for decades. So all this bullshit about me, or libertarians more broadly, being "white supremacists" is dishonest in the extreme. I think the program I have outlined above, if implemented, would do more for black progress than any other policy that has been tried since the Civil Rights Act, which to be clear libertarians support with the single exception of private businesses having the right under the law to choose to associate or disassociate with whoever they choose. The same precedent that permitted this generally good outcome in private property violations, is used to deprive black business owners of their property under eminent domain. That is a principled issue and has no bearing on any views on what people should do, or have the moral obligation to do. One last point I'll make about an issue that I consider to be very racist but that nobody talks about. Gun control. White liberals who generally live in safe neighborhoods want to limit access to the means of self defense. Firearms allow even the physically weak and vulnerable to protect themselves. And, since blacks tend to live in less safe neighborhoods, their need for self protection is greater than the rich white liberals who live in safe communities and actually can rely on police for protection, not to mention private security and body-guards. Talk about white privilege! Someone who agrees with me entirely is rapper Killer Mike, who is a staunch gun-rights advocate. I think Killer Mike is great. I've got both Watch the Throne albums and they are phenomenal. He's intelligent and respectful. I know he supports Bernie Sanders, but he has also made it clear that he doesn't agree with Bernie on this issue. I don't believe that we should support laws which make it more difficult for poor blacks to defend themselves and their property. If anything we should have gun control against the police, and strip them of their military-grade armor, tanks and weaponry. And I'll give a shout-out to Bernie Sanders and say that he is right that, if we must have State police existing at all which I dispute, the police ought to look like the communities they serve. There should be the same proportion of races in the police department and they should be accountable to the community not to Washington D.C. or some outside political force. I understand that I don't always emphasize the points that I ought to, and I sometimes assume people have a greater familiarity with the broader libertarian tradition than they really do, but the literature is literally replete with anti-racism writings and specific programs and proposals for addressing the plight of minorities, because they indeed are the victims of racist policies, police abuse, and incarceration and this deserves specific attention. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 16, 2016 06:19
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Mr. Belding posted:Libertarians are notoriously bad at understanding their opponents arguments well enough to empathize with them. In their defense, the opponents of libertarians tend to skip past arguing and go immediately to mockery. I think most libertarians genuinely believe that government is just getting in the way and that if we just get government out of the way, then everything will sort itself out. The fact that there is genuinely zero evidence that this is true and that places with small or ineffective governments tend to be not very pleasant places to live should be enough to convince these people that maybe their case isn't ironclad. And while it think it's still possible to justify a belief in libertarianism in the face of all of this historical evidence I have rarely seen a libertarian even attempt to articulate that justification. I have to single out this post because of how un-self aware it is. Are you aware that for a good portion of the twentieth century, "fashionable" academic and intellectual classes spoke openly in favor of Socialism (and I don't mean Sweden)? During the "Progressive Era" State Socialism, command and control economies and extreme central planning were considered not only a respectable view, but an incredible breakthrough for human understanding? Professional Leftists fell all over themselves to praise Marx and classical liberalism fell severely out of fashion. "Wage and Price Controls can work!", "The Bretton Woods Agreement will hold!", etc. Just as the Left saw socialism as a brave new insight for humanity, the Right who were really more proto-fascists and militarists drummed up all this fear about Communism taking over the world, so much so that we have to constantly build up our military and create a worldwide empire in order to prevent the Communists from taking over the planet. It was only the libertarians, remnants from the classical liberal tradition, who correctly observed the flaws in Socialist central planning and said that the Soviet Union was no threat. They would collapse because their system is non-viable. In 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed and libertarians were vindicated. Actual Marxists and radical socialists became discredited among the mainstream, as people generally understood that their views had been discredited. And proponents of the free market did a victory lap of sorts. Bill Clinton claimed "The Era of Big Government is Over" and everyone at least tacitly acknowledged the superiority of the free economy over central planning. This was the big question of the 20th century and the libertarians decisively won it, and you accuse us of being on the wrong side of history? I've already established that countries that have greater economic liberty tend to be more prosperous, with longer life expectancies, a larger middle class and higher living standards all around. Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand are three examples of nations that tend to adhere closer to economic liberty than other nations and they are among the most prosperous. Here is the new top 10 from the Heritage Institute. No UAE or Qatar in the top 10 so maybe you'll look at the substance of the ranking this time. 1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore 3. New Zealand 4. Switzerland 5. Australia 6. Canada 7. Chile 8. Ireland 9. Estonia 10. United Kingdom So, according to people who have studied the issue, the nations which adhere closest to the libertarian ideal of economic liberty are also the most prosperous. Explain again how there is zero evidence of libertarian ideas leading to better outcomes? Yes, I recognize these countries are not perfectly libertarian, many have social welfare states of one form or another, but they are MORE libertarian than the others. As I've explained previously, the extent of economic liberty is what generates the prosperity that generates high living standards and allows the poor to be taken care of.
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Feb 16, 2016 06:57
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