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 "DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO WATER! IT WILL TAKE HOLD OF YOU, AND YOU WILL RESENT ITS ABSENCE"
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Oct 9, 2015 20:38
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Honestly this is the lynch pin on which everything else he says hangs:jrodefeld posted:My point is that the wealth enjoyed in such oft cited countries came into existence almost entirely due to lengthy periods of laissez-faire. No welfare States, only property rights and a market economy. People who fail to credit the market economy for the wealth generated in places like Sweden are the people I am concerned with. Since this statement is absolutely crucial to your argument I'm going to ask you to simply respond to the existence of some of the following things. More than anything I just genuinely curious whether you're unaware of these things or whether you actually have some kind of explanation. -Massive state funded military interventions to progressively expand America's geographical boundaries -Government enforced and regulated legal slavery -Government enforced patent protections to reward innovation -Extensive tariffs to promote American industry -Government laws forbidding the formation of unions or strikes -Massive public works projects such as The Erie Canal -Central Banking -Heny Clay's "American system" -Corporations as legal persons with all attendant rights -US Military aggressively expanding Available foreign markets and State military intervention and diplomatic intervention to keep foreign powers out of the Western hemisphere -Massice coercive military intervention to maintain the United States a single unified economic bloc -State colonization of foreign territory -Government restrictions on corporate monopolies or "Trusts" This was just a quick list pulled from the top of my head, I could easily go on. I honestly want to know how in God's name somebody like you fits this information into your worldview. If you have any concern whatsoever about actually convincing anyone else about anything then you need to address the huge historical contradiction at the centre of your entire analysis. The United States was absolutely not a "free" or exclusively "market based" economy in the 19th century and if anything the existence of slavery and the Indian Wars made it vastly less free than it is today by any standard. Why, it's almost as though economic development is an extremely complex and nuanced topic that can't be simplistically reduced to "more freedom of contract good, less freed of contract bad"! paragon1 posted:Jrod, if there is no government to enforce property rights, what's stopping me getting a few hundred like minded folks together to rob and murder our way to wealth? You would freely contract with a Dispute Resolution Organization or "DRO" who would protect you for a small fee.  If your DRO somehow inexplicably mutates into an actual government (obviously this would never happen) then you would use your entrepreneurial gumption to simply start your own competing DRO, or alternatively you would give them a bad review on the Libertopian equivalent of Yelp and this would discourage them from mistreating you again in the future since obviously the customer is Number 1.
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Oct 10, 2015 22:23
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Yeah but literally every bad thing that private property has ever lead to any time in history was due to the corrupting influence of the state. Everyone would be incalculably richer and freer and better protected if there was no state. Literally every single social and political problem any human ever conceived of anywhere just reduces to a question of applying the none aggression principle. This is a real philosophy and not a cultish system of magical thinking.
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Oct 10, 2015 22:48
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Instead of given him a wealth of responses to cherry pick from the thread really ought to settle on one particular example and try to force him to talk about it at length. I for one would love to see him actually forced to explain his beliefs about history but it doesn't really matter what the subject is. I'm genuinely curious whether there's some insane Libertarian scholar who came up with a history of the US where slavery, military conquest, public government works and protective tariffs were not central to American industrialization.
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Oct 11, 2015 20:52
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