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Nessus posted:This one always kills me (and it may yet literally kill me later in life!) because it seems to suggest that SOMEHOW there would be some inherent virtue, to the worker, to work at these wages. And that there would be this sudden flood of such jobs opening up. A common assumption is that the higher you make the minimum wage the more you eliminate jobs. So reducing the minimum wage will by default employ more people as jobs would be created that otherwise would not because it is not profitable to pay people the current minimum wage to do certain things. Because there are more jobs there are more people buying things which will no doubt stimulate the economy and drive all wages up overall. Supposedly it will create a feedback loop that will usher in a magical era of prosperity for everybody. This works if you ignore, you know, all the reasons and history that led to the existence of a minimum wage in the first place.
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Oct 10, 2015 02:39
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Hey jrod I want to tell you something. You might want to sit down for it; this will be a massive revelation. You outed yourself as a complete dumbass when you spoke of Africa as one singular, monolithic entity whose problems can all be solved very simply. Go look at a map. Africa is loving enormous. It has over 50 nations and a poo poo load of cultural, ethnic, and religious groups, many of which absolutely loathe each other. It's also a diverse continent from a terrain standpoint. It runs the entire breadth from wet jungles to blasted, dry wasteland. Which is really the other point...whether you like it or not some people are born into a situation where it is literally impossible to expand the economy. This is very, very common in Africa; how do you farm where it never rains and the water is 200 feet down? How does a nation produce anything if it has no mineral wealth? How do people who can't even afford food mix their labor with anything to create wealth? What do you do if your inviolable property rights means that one family owns the entire country's land and won't let anybody else use it? Worse yet, what do you do if the only land available is literally useless?
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Oct 11, 2015 11:21
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VitalSigns posted:He won't answer those points that the US and Britain did not become developed industrial powers using laissez-faire. Hell he never even answered your healthcare posts from last year Caros. He has a long history of completely ignoring any and every post that actually disproves him or shows that his arguments are idiotic. He seriously sounds like a cult leader and I've pointed out he is engaging in some serious magical thinking. His arguments are full of fallacies and based on nonsense but if you point it out he either ignores you or goes "well if you were smart you'd realize it's obvious that..." Yes it's obvious, despite an entire human history's worth of evidence, that laws are stupid and bad and must all go away.
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Oct 12, 2015 06:26
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jrodefeld posted:You skirt the issue of taking a stand on which rules are best for society by stating that since all property rights are arbitrary, you know "whatever society democratically decides" should rule the day. "Majority rules is sometimes wrong so obviously majority rules is completely useless and always wrong." Seriously, guy? You're also forgetting the other half of that "majority rules with minority rights." 51% of the population of a democratic nation can't just one day decide to vote to murder the other 49% because that violates the 49%'s rights. I didn't even read the rest of your bullshit after reading that. You can't start with a pile of vomit like that and expect the reader to take anything else seriously. That's why literally every democratic society that has ever existed and for that matter even most monarchic or totalitarian ones have had restrictions on what the people in power can do. It is exceedingly rare historically for any group at all to have absolute, complete, and total power over others. Even in cases of literal slavery there were often still things you weren't allowed to do to slaves. The reason property rights conflicts with human rights is that people these days are using the land to literally enslave other classes. Look at the poor in America. Land ownership is exceedingly rare. The poor often rent and literally can't afford to buy land, start businesses, or anything of the sort. Given how lovely our social safety net is and how awful America as at caring for its unfortunates they have no choice but to sell their time to survive. To the people who own all the land. And want to treat them like slaves. By paying them as little as possible no matter how much they're worth. But you're arguing that it's wrong to take money away from those that are exploiting the poorest among us for profit because  MEN WITH GUNS are taking away something somebody earned or made themselves.A loving billionaire CEO running a company that hires people for starvation wages and outsources as much work as possible to places where literal children are being paid $1 a day is not earning anything. He is engaging in slavery. Seriously, read about poo poo like the electronics industry or chocolate. Those industries often rely on child labor or literal goddamned slavery.
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Oct 12, 2015 21:34
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Buried alive posted:It's striving for a (maybe somewhat loose) reductio ad absurdem. The thought is basically this. Utilitarianism itself even acknowledges that it's more of a philosophical set of guidelines that one can use to understand morality rather than a set of hard and fast rules. Morality in general has a lot of grey areas, edge cases, and hard choices. If literally murdering somebody would make the rest of the world happier is it acceptable to do it? Perhaps it's a bit cliche but if you knew WW2 was happening and assassinating Hitler before he did Hitlery things would it be OK? In retrospect yeah murdering Hitler before he came to power would probably have been a good thing but how would you justify that when he was a common soldier? We're talking pre-political career Hitler. Which is why utilitarianism doesn't say it's automatically right to harvest the organs of a healthy, living person if it would save the lives of 15 other people. While 15 living, healthy people would have greater utility than 1 living person it's hard to morally justify the action. Granted you can also argue counter to that that everybody knowing that they won't be harvested for organs while healthy and alive has the greater utility. I'm pretty happy knowing that my organs won't be harvested until after I'm dead and no longer using them. Really, at that point I won't care. gently caress, eat them or turn them into soccer balls or something, I don't give a poo poo, I'll be dead.
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Oct 13, 2015 06:17
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It's also worth noting that the guy kept drilling her far longer than he wanted to. Like he just didn't want to anymore but kept doing it because he knew what would happen. When he finally did quit she destroyed everything they had built together, ended his career, and deliberately turned him into a nobody. I could be wrong but that isn't something that a person endeavoring to create a rational, just society should be doing. She was literally holding his career hostage for sex and ended it when he turned off the sex faucet. She also made her husband wear a bell so she could hear him coming if he was writing.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:27
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Hey jrod you've ignored literally every post I've made directed at you and have never once answered one of my questions. Care to explain why?
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Oct 16, 2015 14:46
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DarklyDreaming posted:The Libertarian go-to answer to this is that European settlers ~mixed their labor with the land~ which makes their right to it more special because factories got built on it or some poo poo. It is an effectively meaningless distinction that only serves to benefit those currently sitting on the land. The libertarian view seems to be that the land should go to whoever can use it for the most. As in whoever makes it the most productive deserves it.
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Oct 16, 2015 22:39
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OwlFancier posted:Also they define what productive means. Most of the time it seems to be "be white."
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Oct 16, 2015 23:06
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Astrofig posted:oh hey are you lot those crazy fucks who want to start a colony with no laws on a cargo ship or some poo poo? Sealand or whateverthefuck? The gently caress's the deal with that? It's called "seasteading." There was also talk about parking a ship in international waters near San Francisco in order to attract all the hot young coding talent to economically take over the world. By creating a new nation, making them all citizens of it, and refusing to pay U.S. taxes while still working the U.S. Because the U.S. government would very obviously be totally, completely OK with that in every possible way and by no means squash it.
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Oct 19, 2015 08:23
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:there's also quite a few white working class boys who come to the conclusion that it's the big bad gubmint keeping them down from realizing their place as ubermenschen The most lolbertarian people I've ever met are absolutely always fat, middle-aged white guys that had their lives literally handed to them for free that think they're being held back by the system and they succeeded, why can't others? While, of course, failing to realize how much of a massive leg up having parents wealthy enough to pay for your college then connected enough to get you your first job really is. Free college and nepotism are enormous privileges not everybody gets access to but you just can't tell that to these guys. It's always "I got where I am through hardwork and gumption!" Except that they're also mediocre workers at best and squeaked through college with a mediocre GPA. They just can't handle the idea that they aren't John Galt.
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Oct 20, 2015 14:34
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QuarkJets posted:Wasn't John Galt like the ultimate "ideas guy" though? He basically asks a bunch of people to strike against society and then rubes them into creating Galt's Gulch. The only thing that he actually creates is a magic infinite energy machine, which he probably didn't even build himself (he had the resources of a former employer at his disposal) Not only that but he literally created it on the job. Like he was being paid to do a thing but refused to do said thing and made his engine instead. It was basically the only thing he ever did but because it was a literal infinite energy machine (that mysteriously only John Galt was actually smart enough to figure out) he could just do whatever after that. He was really a heavy duty Mary Sue character. So super duper smart that he could violate the laws of physics at will but also super duper charming and able to convince all the smart people to gently caress off and follow him without question. Oh, he was also super duper sneaky to the point where nobody could find him if he didn't want to be found and just so drat awesome he single-handedly pulled off his grand scheme and convinced the world not to literally murder him with a really really awesome speech. I mean seriously, what he was doing would not go over very well in the real world.
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Oct 20, 2015 23:27
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GunnerJ posted:IIRC the device works by "drawing static electricity from the atmosphere" or some poo poo. So I think libertarians already have a position in this: https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-property-economics-history-and-future-wireless-technology If memory serves it was not explicitly an infinite energy engine but effectively was. It was an engine that ran off of "static energy." It was effectively an infinite energy device because it basically ran off of no input. It gets referred to as a "literally magic infinite energy engine" because it just kind of sucked energy out of its surroundings and then behaved better than an internal combustion engine. Which is, to anybody who actually knows anything about physics, loving absurd.
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Oct 21, 2015 02:25
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YF19pilot posted:Also, I would argue there was polarization of the parties before hand, it just wasn't as pronounced, or even a topic discussed or studied. Ideologically speaking, the Democrat and Republican parties have never been too far off from each other. But there are many issues that have always seen the two parties as polar opposites. Abolition, Civil Rights, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, Isolationism (iirc, the Republicans were historically deep Isolationists up until WWII, whereas the Democrats were more limited in their isolationism, they wanted to do business with Europe, but stay out of their affairs -- the 1940 presidential election was painted as two very polar opposites, the Republicans who wanted to cut off all support to Europe, because this would lead to war; and the Roosevelt Democrats who wanted to keep helping England, and thought they could do so without going to war, although FDR was secretly committed to the idea that the US would go to war, just not when.) This is some...not exactly historically accurate thinking. The reason the politicians on both sides were pretty isolationist and publicly anti-war was because the American people were incredibly isolationist at the time. Until Pearl Harbor happened the American view was "meh, whatever let Europe sort that poo poo out. Not our problem." Behind the scenes those in power in America knew full well that WW2 was eventually going to become our problem one way or another so they did whatever they could get away with. Helping England was just one thing but behind the scenes they were also forcing the military budget upwards and prepping for a fight. Publicly they were saying "we won't go to war, ever, end of story." But really, political powers knew America was going to get drug into it whether it liked it or not. I think a lot of it was sold as jobs "well hey we're just selling poo poo to England and you're getting paid to make said poo poo so it's cool." That and more military means more soldiers which means more people being paid. The American people generally thought we could stay out of it by just staying neutral. Then Pearl Harbor happened and overnight the public's view switched. Part of the reason America mobilized so drat fast after Pearl Harbor is that we were ready for a fight. What politicians were saying and what politicians were doing were quite different.
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Oct 21, 2015 03:28
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Who What Now posted:Libertarianism: blacks, Jews, Muslims, Irish, women need not apply (not racist/sexist for realsies) Libtarianism: justice is now a commodity. I hope you can afford it.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:23
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Serrath posted:Well to add to this, I know there probably isn't a satisfactory answer because the philosophy in general seems poorly thought out but how does libertarian philosophy deal with mentally incompetent adults? People with profound autism, mental retardation, schizophrenia or even transient conditions; severe depressive disorders can present with psychotic features, can you honestly argue that someone with bipolar in the manic phase of their condition can give meaningful consent sufficient to participate in this sort of system? The answer to that gets...strange. OK, humans are, in fact, fundamentally logical creatures in that we do what we think is best at the moment given the information we have. Emotions color that information. If I am scared "get the gently caress away" is probably the most logical conclusion. It may not seem logical to others but to me it is. Think about phobias. For a very long time I struggled with a fear of heights. Elevators bothered me so much I'd just flat out refuse to get on them. Emotions are really factual information. "I am afraid of *thing*" is a factual statement if I am, in fact, afraid of *thing* and will act accordingly. Most people are not afraid of elevators so my behavior seemed illogical. However, it was logical because I was avoiding the unpleasant feeling of being on an elevator. We avoid things we fear. Avoiding or being wary of things we're afraid of is of course logical. What was not logical was the fear of elevators. I had no reason to fear elevators but I did. Eventually I got over it and can ride them fine now (I still prefer to use the stairs because doing something like taking an elevator up a single floor makes me feel like a lazy rear end on account of the fact that I am still capable of walking up stairs). So if a commercial comes on preaching the virtues of an amazing new product I may very well think "wow that thing is good! I should get some of that thing." Once again it's a logical decision; "this is good" is the information. "I should buy good things I can afford" is too. However, that information may be wrong. Said thing may, in fact, be a hideous lie. That's why false advertising is, you know, slightly illegal but also why so many businesses just love spreading misinformation about their products around. Tobacco is one that comes to mind. Also in the case of tobacco the unpleasant feeling of shaking the addiction combined with the pleasure of smoking will often override the possibility of cancer in the future. Humans are also extremely habitual. Ceasing the habit of smoking takes like a month. Of course this is why the shenanigans the tobacco companies got up to is so horrible. They make smoking sound so good, be so addicting, and also so pleasurable that "you have a high chance of developing lung cancer and dying oh and also you won't be able to breathe at all when you're 55" is the lesser evil in the mind of a smoker. Yes, I used to smoke, why do you ask? The major assumption libertarians get insanely wrong is based on the information side not the logic side. One of the reasons emotional information scores so highly in decision making is that we know what we're feeling extremely quickly. It's the information we probably get first and we react to certain emotions really, really quickly. Fear is the biggest one. If we're confronted with something big and scary that wants to hurt us we need to decide what to do right loving now. There isn't time to consider all of the options so we ignore most of the information available. In basically no situation ever can we ever process, or even get access to, all of the information that would affect it. Nor will we react to it void of emotions. If I'm hungry at lunchtime I want some lunch. I probably have several options but if I'm in a hurry I'm grabbing the first thing I can find without researching the price. I may get ripped off in that situation. A purely logical thing would be to carefully consider how long it would take me to get to a further away place where I can get more calories for the same price or what the benefit of waiting an hour would be, if I can. The place also probably has enough options that I could deliberate on them for 20 minutes at the least. But I'm hungry now and I need to be somewhere in 30 minutes so I'm going to buy the first thing that looks good, scarf it down, and be on my way. That's where libertarians primarily fail. They operate under the assumption that everybody has perfect, equal access to perfect information which is, of course, literally impossible and only complicated by the fact that marketing exists. The job of marketing is literally to make things more appealing than they actually are which is once again why consumer protection and false advertising laws exist. I cannot, for example, advertise a vehicle that teleports that I'll sell for $500 each if I do not, in fact, have such a thing and will not have such a thing. If I just take the money and laugh then never deliver that's, you know, a slight problem. The libertarian view is that if somebody gets taken advantage of it's their own fault but I'm sure we've all been ripped off at least once in our lives. What seems like a good deal may later turn out to be a lemon. Entire industries are based on making cheap garbage that looks nice. In the case of the mentally challenged libertarians fall back on "charity" but even in that case the human is acting logically. However, they are failing to understand certain pieces of information and are operating on far simpler logical rules. People like schizophrenics are once again getting bad information. If the lamp tells a schizophrenic to murder a priest and they think "you know the lamp knows what it's talking about, Imma go kill a priest" then what you have is the pile of information labelled "things that are a good idea" suddenly contains "murder a priest." For most of us that gets filed under "things that are a bad idea" so we don't do it. How does a DRO deal with that? Badly, most likely. That'd be a prime example of "insanity" being a perfectly viable plea and is also why laws allowing for forced institutionalization exist in the first place but then it gets back to "OK, we have a person who is literally incapable of functioning. What do we do with them?" Libertarians will say "well charity, of course!" but if said schizophrenic does, in fact, murder a priest and the DRO decides to take money from him...uh...then what? How do you collect damages from somebody who may very well have no resources and also can't work? Charity has shown time and time again that it is insufficient. More importantly "information" is something that humans suck at. Neuroscience and psychology has shown pretty strongly that memory is fuzzy. We forget things and fail to remember things accurately. How we feel in a moment affects what we remember and how we remember it. What you tell me isn't going to be exactly what I remember. Hell, you might have outright lied and I believed you, which is going to gently caress up how I act if I recall that. The information is bad but I'm going to act as if it wasn't. Which is why information is the biggest failure of libertarianism and why this idea of "deregulate everything" is utter bullshit. We saw it in the work economy coming crashing down because of the fuckery of the financial sector. Then they blamed people taking bad loans, as if it was their fault the bank was saying "nah, everything is OK, you can afford this." Far as everybody knew "banks won't loan you money you can't afford" was filed under "sacred facts that are always true" but regulations exist to prevent certain classes of person from performing extreme economic fuckery because suddenly the potential losses from getting caught far outweigh the potential gains. In that case the most rational thing to do is put such regulations into place and saying "hey you fucks if you do *bad thing* we will destroy you. Don't even try." But then libertarians start screeching TYRANNY!!!! and argue in favor of a system where misinformation is a perfectly cool thing to spread. ... OK sorry that got way longer than I had wanted.
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Nov 6, 2015 07:53
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Halloween Jack posted:Correct me if I misunderstand praxeology, but what I don't get about libertarianism is their apparent assumption that people will be rational actors, coupled with a philosophy that actually rejects empiricism and says welp, you can't study patterns of behaviour because "humans act!" See, the information you have is "there is a bucket of calories nearby" on top of "I have things that need to be finished" mixed with "I cannot finish these things if I go somewhere else to acquire calories." That combination can override "eating this entire bucket of candy is a terrible idea." Which is also one of the things libertarianism gets extremely wrong. Humans think short term. We are very, very bad at long term planning. We can kind of sort of do it but that's a perfect example of where long term planning fails. Most of us plan to eat healthy but, well, sometimes stuff like that happens and by sometimes I mean all the goddamned time. It just breaks down even harder when you get into the monumentally complex poo poo that needs to happen to make any society function. This is part of why governments end up in place in the first place. Most of us are too busy to sit down and figure out a legal system. Those drat things are complex so we invented the idea that there would be people whose job is to sit down all day and figure that stuff out. It isn't perfect by any means but legal systems, regulations, and laws exist for a reason. Libertarianism takes the view of "it isn't perfect, burn it down." Anyway, that's why I say that libertarians get the information part hosed up. The assumption of praxeology is that everybody has perfect access to perfectly accurate information and will act purely logically with no emotional input. The reason praxeology and libertarian philosophy fall apart is because that is loving absurd. In a purely theoretical world where we all have perfect access to perfect, unfiltered information and infinite time to peruse it libertarianism would work just fine. The thing is...well...we live here and not there. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 19:22
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Ravenfood posted:Its definitely one of those "imagine a perfect vacuum inhabited by perfect spheres..." situations. Yeah, libertarianism would probably work under certain conditions, but those conditions are pretty clearly not feasible given our current understanding of humanity. Its like that dude who shat up the RWM thread trying to tell everyone about his great idea to stop racism forever: "what if...nobody was racist??" I mean, that'd be swell, but... Except that "perfect vacuum inhabited by perfect spheres" can be a close enough model to real world things that it's actually kind of useful. There are a ton of things you can treat mathematically as a sphere and get the calculations close enough. Cows, for example. Libertarian theories? Yeah, not so much. This is more like "perfect vacuum inhabited by perfect spheres that are whatever diameter I need them to be at any given moment to make the numbers come out how I want them." Which is, of course, why current libertarianism and current right wing ideals are insane. They're deciding on a solution and working backwards from there. Instead of gathering data then figuring out what it means they're gathering data after the fact then either massaging it to support their conclusion or just outright fabricating whatever they need. It would be like an experiment coming out wrong and the libertarian saying "well you picked the wrong perfect vacuum and I actually meant cubes."
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Nov 6, 2015 19:58
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Halloween Jack posted:Edit: Serious question, though: What is the libertarian definition of the state, since apparently having a monopoly of force throughout a geographical area doesn't count? It depends on the libertarian but mostly "state" refers to "the laws I personally don't like."
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Nov 9, 2015 20:40
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Cantorsdust posted:Google Ron Paul is a huge racist. Who the hell is Google Ron Paul? I thought there was only one Ron Paul. Did he have more children then we thought? Is this some weird bastard child that is going to claim legitimacy in 20 years and accuse Rand Paul of being an imposter?
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Nov 10, 2015 18:47
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paragon1 posted:The Emperors actually had a whole bunch of huge fuckin' problems with currency that slowly built up over time, despite several reforms of the mint system and attempts to reverse debasement and what have you. Unfortunately no one had really figured out that monetary inflation is a thing yet so there was only so much they could do. Eventually one of the Eastern emperors, I forget which one, just said "gently caress it we'll start new coinage with gold now and never debase it." And that worked well for a while so long as you weren't poor. Though really you could say that about most of human history. The other issue is that counterfeiting was rampant through much of history. One of the reasons that metal currencies got debased was that people kept coming up with coins that looked really similar but were made of cheaper metals. The whole point of a coin is that it's an easier way to move precious metals. When a gold standard exists you'd have people trading quantities of gold so it could be coins, bars, chunks, jewelry, whatever. This is why merchants had scales. Of course poor folks got dicked over by not owning scales; trick scales existed and merchants would be like "well it's 5 coins for that" when really the actual weight of the gold it was worth was 3 coins. Then, of course, greedy people who had enough power and influence to control or have access to a mint would make slightly less pure metal coins and be all like "yup, totally silver!" Similar things happened with other metals, too. This is why things like trifle pewter existed. Cut that poo poo with lead; lead is cheap. The other massive issue with metal coinage was gold shaving. Since not everybody could have access to scales like the merchants had people would just trade in numbers of coins but raw metals still had value. So the wealthy would hire people to take all their coins, shave off little bits of them, then go spend them on things. They'd still have 10,000 coins but would increase their wealth by a certain quantity of gold which could be melted down and sold or just minted into more coins.
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Nov 12, 2015 13:13
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Vorpal Cat posted:Lets not even get started on the fun time that accrue when you accidentally discover a whole new continent full of gold and silver and suddenly have your available currency increasing far far faster then your underling economy. That or all the fun effects of mercantilism or my personal favorite; obscenely wealthy people hoarding gold to increase its value then using it to buy lots of land only to flood the market with gold to debase everybody else's wealth. Then hey gently caress you they own all the land you'll pay them to work on it or starve to death.
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Nov 12, 2015 14:41
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Nessus posted:I believe this is considered a feature, not a bug. The right wing of America knows that it's losing so it's cashing out. Right now it's a gigantic scam. It's a racket. Have you ever noticed how every Republican presidential candidate just happens to release a book around campaign time? Even people that have zero hope of actually making it suddenly have a book chock full of wisdom on how to fix America. Then you have Palin's TV channel and people like Glenn Beck harping on gold all day, ever day. Every Republican policy boils down to "rich get money, poor get hosed" in some way or another. I'm pretty sure they know this election is lost and America is seeing what they've been up to so they're just milking it for all its worth while they can.
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Nov 13, 2015 05:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Doesn't every candidate from every party do that? What's a lot more telling is the campaign and convention industry built up around the Tea Party. At the moment I can't find the articles I read, about conservative campaign organizers and others of their ilk, living the high life on money donated by rank-and-file Tea Partiers, and doing it all with a nod and a wink to the fact that they know the movement is meaningless. The big difference though is that Republican candidates who don't have the slightest prayer have been hanging on as long as possible to keep themselves in the spotlight. It's why the party is such a clown car. Compare that to the Democrats who will have their hopefuls but not 15 candidates all tripping over each other to say the most ridiculous thing. Notice that the Republican party was reluctant to put a stopper on the number of candidates but finally actually had to. There's more of them every year and you have people like Ron Paul who was never going to be president, ever, cropping up in every drat election. If you look at it once it becomes apparent that a Democratic candidate is hopeless they'll bow out and cheer on whoever the candidate turns out to be from the sidelines. For the GOP they've had to start throwing people out.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:17
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I can't wait Let's just say there are reasons that goons posting in D&D act like Jesus came back every time JRod chooses to post here again.
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Nov 17, 2015 02:53
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EndOfTheWorld posted:There are a lot of folks in debt in this country and they should be allowed to choose to sell their daughters to the banks that hold their debts but BIG GOVERNMENT keeps getting in the way of the market. Well the Bible says selling your daughters is OK so it must be. I can't wait for Libertopia so I can be a multibillionaire, buy dozens of daughters, and force them to marry me. BECAUSE FREEDOM!!!
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Nov 18, 2015 16:39
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Halloween Jack posted:My best guess is that the Cato Institute defines "economic freedom" here as "big corporations are unopposed except by each other." As opposed to, say, some utopia where the technocratic innovator and the Jeffersonian citizen farmer work hand-in-hand. There was an actual explanation for the metrics they used and most of them were "we made poo poo up" when summarized. One of them was literally how low corporate taxes were. I think there was also another tied to how low income taxes were. Another profoundly stupid one was based on a lack of economic laws. They sincerely, genuinely believe that all regulations are bad and less regulation = more freedom. Completely ignoring that certain regulations (well, most of them really) were put in place to prevent the rich from practicing economic fuckery to deliberately screw over everybody else. They treat "freedom" as a thing you're supposed to buy, basically. I, as a poor man, do not have access to the same resources and avenues to profit as a rich man. Ergo, I am less economically free. I do not have parents I can borrow $1,000,000 from to start a business so I have more restrictions put on what I can and can't do than a person born into wealth. I just can't afford to make risky investments or take the potential risks in starting a business. I don't have much of a choice but to sell my time to somebody wealthier than I who will take part of my productivity and keep it for himself. But we need to make slavery legal, abolish minimum wage, return to pay in company scrip, and let the rich do whatever they want BECAUSE FREEDOM.
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Nov 18, 2015 20:08
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And at this point Jrod will disappear into the ether until the day he randomly decides to come reward us with is presence by telling us how smart and handsome he is once again. I'd talk to Jrod and ask him questions and debate him but he has literally never responded to a single one of my posts. Ever.
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Nov 19, 2015 20:36
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Captain_Maclaine posted:He actually finally denied being a watermelon fucker during his last bout of posting! I'm just going to assume that he's lying until he provides actual, genuine proof that he is not, in fact, a watermelon fucker.
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Nov 19, 2015 20:52
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jrodefeld posted:You're right. That is one reason why I would like to find some way to have a written debate with a few of you so the clutter and unwieldyness of these posts don't make communication difficult or impossible. I also don't have the time I'd like to spend debating these issues so when normal life intrudes, you think I am ducking out and avoiding tough questions. I'd much rather stick to a single issue at a time, hash that out for a reasonable length of time and then move on to another issue. Another problem is that everyone wants to have the last word and whoever gets the last word thinks that they "won" because the other person didn't respond. At a certain point, I will have said what I have to say on a topic and you all will have said what you have to say and we just have to leave it at that for the moment. Well you do tend to ignore, dodge, or handwave away the hardest questions. I've asked you some nasty ones and I myself was a libertarian when I was younger and stupider. I changed but so did libertarianism. Now libertarians are firmly in the territory of "far right Republicans but worse." The biggest challenge I repeatedly posed to you, that you ignored literally every time, is based on my own circumstances of birth. I was born to non-wealthy folks who divorced young. I spent much of my life up until now living in poverty. Most of it, really; nobody would hire me that payed much and it was only through a stroke of stupid luck that I was able to begin college. Now, I did not have parents that owned land. My parents would not or could not help me pay for school. I have issues that make me unfit for the military. Continuing, and finishing, college was made possible for me only because of the actions of the federal U.S. government. I have a mental illness that was untreated for years and only got treated because of state funding. If I were born rich those obstacles would not have been put in front of me. If I had parents that could afford to get me into college and get mental help my life would have been very different. As it stands, once again because of my situation, I do not have the resources to start a business. I have no choice but to sell my time to somebody else. If my parents were rich I would have far more resources at my disposal; I probably would have gone to a better private school and a better college. I would not have had to work through part of college and more importantly would have had access to better stuff to learn on. Tutors, better tools, etc. Put simply, I started at a disadvantage that was somewhat alleviated due to government action. I was actually given an opportunity I would never have otherwise had due to an accident of birth. How would a libertarian government deal with people like me? And don't just handwave it away by saying "well, charity." How would that work? You talk about MEN WITH GUNS holding guns to peoples' heads to make them pay taxes to give opportunities to people like me as if that were wrong but the other side of it was that people were withholding the things I needed to survive (as in, money to buy food and shelter with) unless I was willing to labor to make others wealthier. Once again I had no choice but to sell my time to others and that was often at a severe disadvantage. I would work hours off the clock or be at risk of losing my job.How does libertarianism answer the problem of men with money telling men without money that they must make the men with money richer or be starved to death? I'll give you a hint: it loving doesn't.
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Nov 20, 2015 03:28
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So Jrod, just answer me this question: Are you going to continue to ignore my posts? Ignoring posts like my last one are the reason why people accuse you of being an imbecile that is bad at arguing. What you're failing to realize is that people like me are the ones you need to convince as we have a lot to lose as a class. In fact the stuff in the post I made is exactly why I quit being a libertarian and ex-libertarians are people you should not be ignoring as we're the ones that are going to come out most strongly against your precious movement. Largely because we've been inside and saw how much of a poo poo fest it is.
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Nov 20, 2015 05:00
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StandardVC10 posted:It's amazing how well Ron Paul conned these people, really. If you look at Ron Paul's voting records he's one of the most right-leaning people in Congress, ever. Libertarians are supposedly socially liberal but their adoration for Ron Paul speaks volumes to the contrary.
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Nov 28, 2015 06:04
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paragon1 posted:Well, there's the third option which is to go "DUIs are aggression by the state, the destruction wrought by drunk driving is the part of the price we pay for a free society.", but most libertarians have an interest in not appearing quite that callous. You're giving them too much credit. I've heard literally that argument. You have no idea how far down that rabbit hole goes. I ended up in an argument a while back with a guy over the whole "privatize literally everything" angle that got into fire departments. He said it was reasonable to pay for fire insurance and if you don't pay then if your house catches fire the fire department doesn't try to put it out they just watch it burn and keep it from burning down anything nearby that actually is paid up. Which is insane on a lot of levels; especially considering that fire departments do far more than just put out fires. They also prevent them. Plus, well, there are some very strong historical arguments against private fire services. If you pay a fire department based on how many fires they put out you suddenly give them an incentive to run around starting fires. Then we get into the corrupt fire people in Rome that would just stand there and watch something burn unless you agreed to fire sale it (hence the term, I guess?). Only then would they save it and act like they were doing you a favor for letting you keep the pittance they paid for it. The same guy also said that fire fighters that sat around not fighting fires that day don't deserve to get paid because apparently being on call is a terrible thing? Last I checked that's kind of the point of having a few guys sitting around waiting for poo poo to go down. You pay them to be there right goddamned now the instant something goes wrong. If they're busy with other stuff they kind of can't do that. If that means sometimes they get to sit around and play cards in the fire station the entire day because nothing is going wrong then fine. Whatever.
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Nov 28, 2015 07:12
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TLM3101 posted:Didn't JRode, in fact, use just that argument at one point in the other thread? Or am I getting my Libertarians mixed up? To be honest I think he's made both sides of that argument. Recklessly endangering people for no good reason violates NAP if you can prove it but at the same time I think he's also said the world is a dangerous place so nobody should expect safety. Pretty sure the safety one was also regarding firearms. Like the world is dangerous so it's a waste of time to try making it less dangerous? I guess?
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Nov 28, 2015 11:40
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Caros posted:How to deal with your libertarian family member for thanksgiving: Send him to his room. I met one once. ... Once.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:39
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That was actually entertaining and informative. I also didn't expect a shoutout but I think it's important that I mention one very important thing for listeners. JRode has never once replied to anything I've posted. Ever. I've engaged him and refuted his arguments and he just ignores it. Every now and again I figure "maybe he'll reply this time!" and he just doesn't. edit: If you do this again let me know, I'd love to participate. I just couldn't this time. Glad it went well. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 10:26
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GunnerJ posted:Sometimes I think it might be a major improvement for the thread if someone just played the role of jrod, or hell just devil's advocates libertarianism. Chances are good whoever stepped up would make a better case for it (or at least a more concise case). That wouldn't be much fun for the person doing it. That and they'd have to quit interacting with SomethingAwful entirely and just vomit out long, meandering walls of text that were effectively meaningless. I don't know if I should be impressed or horrified that there is somebody in the world that can say absolutely nothing in 20 paragraphs other than "read this Mises article and it will make you believe what I do which is the right thing to believe."
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Dec 12, 2015 12:54
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GunnerJ posted:They could just plagiarize them. Which is also a part of the jrod experience, isn't it? Now that I think about it it's likely that jrode can never be truly recreated. Somebody posting such things as jrode would actually understand what they were plagiarizing.
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Dec 12, 2015 12:59
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About the closest I can get to justifying libertarianism is explaining whey I quit being a libertarian and started being a socialist. Part of that was hanging around libertarians and realizing the party was becoming increasingly "Republicans but worse."
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Dec 12, 2015 13:08
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paragon1 posted:I want to do another one and for it to be about bitcoin and other libertarian related currency nonsense. How does evening of the 19th sound to people? I'm down.
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Dec 12, 2015 23:26
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