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jrodefeld posted:This doesn't have to be some libertarian anarchist paradise, but the last half century has taught us (some of us at least) that liberal reforms of previously authoritarian nations have lead to drastic reductions in poverty and the creation of considerable wealth and middle classes. jrodefeld posted:This is absolutely true of the United States from the Industrial Revolution until the Progressive Era of the early to mid 20th century and it is also true of Sweden which had an incredibly laissez-faire free market economy during much of the same period of time and, even after their nominal shift leftward during the mid-20th century, the bulk of the socialist program so loved by leftist commentators is barely forty years old. Hmmm....
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Oct 12, 2015 00:02
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Helsing posted: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. For the bolded part at least: http://www.amazon.com/An-Empire-Wealth-American-Economic/dp/0060505125 The first page literally says that Europeans found a wilderness with no history in North America. Published in 2005.
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Oct 12, 2015 00:35
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jrodefeld posted:There is a division of labor in the economy, and successful businesses hire specific marketing research people to help the ownership make important decisions about the company. And VERY successful businesses are headed by CEOs who are often visionary and uniquely gifted in anticipating consumer demand. What if Steve Jobs decided to democratically survey each and every Apple employee and go with whatever the majority wanted when designing the iPhone? Yo: Who appoints those CEOs of successful businesses? I'm talking specifically about publicly traded corporations. If I own stocks in a company as part of a retirement portfolio, I may get ballots in the mail to vote on issues related to the company. I am entitled to do this as a shareholder even though I may not have any loving clue how that company works. Yet this is how corporations work. All this stuff about the endless paralyzing deliberation of democratic decision making, it already applies to corporations where shareholders have to make collective decisions about the company they collectively own, and a lot of shareholders may be way more ignorant about what goes on in the company they own than any janitor in the HQ building. (Hell, it applies internally, day to day management of privately owned and operated businesses often gets bogged down in meetings and deliberation between multiple managers and stakeholders; this is a digression though.) Somehow the shareholders collectively are often able to make decisions like "Hey this Steve Jobs guy has some pretty good ideas that have made us money, we should let him continue making decisions about product design." It's not clear to me why this would be so but the employees of Apple (or any other company) would not be able to discern that the really creative good ideas guy who was one of the company's founders maybe is good in a visionary leadership role for the company. They might not let him dictate all the working conditions and payroll in precisely the same way, though. Edit: In hindsight it's a little strange that a guy who thinks limited liability corporations and patents are illegitimate government force distortions of a free economy is upholding Steve loving Jobs. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Oct 12, 2015 |
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Oct 12, 2015 00:49
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jrodefeld posted:But let me ask this. Why is it that leftists seem to confine their redistributive goals to within the borders of existing States? Do they, indeed? I know a lot of leftists who conceive of social justice as also being an international project based on seeking to redress the structural injustice that is the legacy of colonialism. jrodefeld posted:I mis-typed that. I meant "the factories to the factory workers". If this sounds strange for a libertarian to be parroting Marxist sounding remedies, it ought not be if you think it through. It's actually not very strange at all. If you read between the lines of, say, Ayn Rand's historical narrative upon which he bases her ideology, you see that she is a materialist who views history as being about the way societies organize to meet their material needs, that it therefore progresses according to technological advances in how people do that, that the productive innovations of capitalism rent asunder the tyranny and mysticism of the feudal order, the the leaders of this movement are constantly seeking to innovate in pursuit of profit, that the world they made is mediated by market exchange, and that it has an oppressed class which is responsible for all the wealth of the world and an oppressor class that is parasitic to them. This is straight out of the Communist Manifesto. She simply disagrees about who the oppressors and oppressed really are. Granted, she earned her degree in Social Pedagogy in a Soviet university, so something was bound to rub off, but it's not just her. It's you. In your OP, you go on and on about how necessary the developments in productive technology provided by capitalism were to making socialism possible. This is stock-standard Marxist stage theory. The only difference (and the advantage of the Marxist view, IMO) is that you somehow think that because something was necessary for a particular social transformation, its conditions will always be necessary. But this is a view that denies the possibility of social change throughout history, and is therefore somewhat contradictory. They also, incidentally, have a stateless society as their goal. But they recognize that capitalism as we know it is impossible with states protecting the propertied classes' interests.
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Oct 12, 2015 13:18
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Self-ownership as the basis of all rights seems like a conflation error. What I mean by that is, you can say something like "I should have control over my body and how it moves and what it does and no one should interfere in that so long as I refrain from the same," which I'll call for the sake of brevity "self-direction," and with some qualification a lot of people would say that's a pretty OK basis for a lot of rights. But what then happens, implicitly or subconsciously, is the libertarian goes, "...just like property rights!" Because that is similar to property rights: if I own something as property I can generally do whatever I want with it and no one else can prevent me (with, again, similar caveats to the right of self-direction). So from there the libertarian doesn't so much conclude as simultaneously insinuate and assume that because both ownership of property and personal self-direction are based on the freedom to do with X what I wish, my right to self-direction of my body derives from standing in relation to myself as a proprietor. In jrod's mind, maybe self-ownership is something that has some degree of recognition because self-direction does, and he does not distinguish between different justifications for control over ourselves and our stuff. It's all the same. Edit: Thinking this over, there doesn't seem to be much basis for preferring "my right to own things derives from my right to own me" over "self-direction implies the right to own things I obtain by my self-direction." The major difference is that in the second case, your right to own things would be constrained by the degree to which your ownership or means of attaining ownership has the effect of stifling others' self-direction. Or in other words, property rights would not be absolute, but contingent. Hm. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Oct 12, 2015 |
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Oct 12, 2015 22:05
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Nessus posted:Wasn't one of the Ayn Rand heroes a pirate who sunk foreign aid shipments? Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters#Ragnar_Danneskj.C3.B6ld That "aid" was stolen at gunpoint from the captains of industry, he simply launders it into gold bars for its original owners. He is the real Robin Hood, see, because the Sheriff of Nottingham was the State, and... Google image search turns up some cool poo poo! 
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Oct 14, 2015 14:21
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There's a few things that are interesting about old Ragnar. One is that his introduction is a telling silence: Rand never spares the reader a gigantic treatise on every one of her heroes' perspectives, but Ragnar's is shuffled by awkwardly in a paragraph or two, with the implication that the other Gulchers are not really comfortable with his methods. The other time this happens is when Galt tries to talk about how family bonds can be reconciled with his radical individualist ideology, and just sorta mumbles something about a sort of contractual-like bond, then later has some lady say that she could only be a good mother in the Gulch for reasons. Libertarianism in general is horrible at dealing with the facts of human reproduction and the family, but Ragnar reflects how convoluted its supposedly clear line on violence is. The other is that Rand is insistent that the only things government-funded science is good for is inventing new weapons and methods of destruction. So it's kind of interesting to think about how a single former philosophy student (!) can take on the worlds' navies with one ship, given how his closest pal is apparently a super-genius scientist inventor.
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Oct 14, 2015 14:27
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CommieGIR posted:Apparently the Gulch is Area 51 and they have alien technology. I always loved how deus ex machina it was, pulling unbelievable technology and energy systems out of thin air and then proclaiming it a product of the genius of the objectivist movement. It's easy to forget sometimes that it's basically pulp scifi with free energy engines, cloaking devices, magic wonder-metals, and earthquake makers.
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Oct 14, 2015 14:40
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CommieGIR posted:A model, Ayn demanded that he be impotent for the rest of his life. Oh hey that reminded me: http://eviltwincomics.tumblr.com/post/72771087448/action-philosopher-ayn-rand-from-action
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Oct 14, 2015 15:39
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I guess I'm not a prominent enough poster to get an answer as to why shareholders are capable of making collective decisions that don't gently caress over their companies, but not employees. 
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Oct 15, 2015 21:17
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jrodefeld posted:Let's talk about something else for a bit. No, tell me why shareholder votes do not bog down the operation of publicly traded corporations in endless deliberation and lead inevitably to poor leadership and inefficient operations, but employee votes would.
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Oct 16, 2015 03:50
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jrod, did you ever play Sid Mier's Alpha Centauri? You might seriously enjoy this LP of it: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3695372
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Oct 16, 2015 13:09
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Libertarian stances on vaccination are telling and indicative of a lot of the problems with the ideology. I remember once a libertarian friend of a friend on Facebook was trying to, idk, court favor by saying "Hey guys, I totally don't agree with the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory, I believe the science is on the side of vaccination, but gosh I just don't think the government should force parents to vaccinate their children." Now, the "force" at issue was the idea that public schools should mandate vaccination as a condition of enrollment, so it seems like it's the perfect opportunity for the free market to step up and provide a private leper colony school. But even more bothersome to me is that this guy expected kudos for his reasonable disagreement, but so what? Who cares if you aren't against the science if in practice, you will support policies that kill children? Why should I be glad for your support for policies that kill children because they are based on an irrational fear of big government rather than an irrational fear of big pharma?
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Oct 16, 2015 17:29
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YF19pilot posted:Now it's time for me to vomit a huge page of words that will probably get torn apart by the sharks in this thread. Nah, I mean, speaking for myself, I disagree with some of this but it's not dumb bullshit and I like seeing another perspective on why libertarianism is garbage.
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Oct 17, 2015 16:11
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YF19pilot posted:It's the idea that a government that's too big will be rife with corruption, abuse, and will abuse it's citizens which it claims to protect and represent. Like a police force that's 90+% white cops in black cities. Outside of that, it's more the idea of administrative bloat. There's more than one office chair being warmed by the backside of someone who was put there either as a political favor, or a political favor being repaid, and this is wrong because that person will abuse their power. Well, the thing is, nobody seriously disagrees with this. Nobody says, "I'm in favor of a bloated government that's riddled with corruption." What people disagree about is how much a government has to do and what level of inefficiency is tolerable in pursuit of its goals.
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Oct 17, 2015 16:17
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quote:In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. It's funny because this is the point where you expect the author to suggest that "therefore, the purely free society is poo poo."
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Oct 19, 2015 03:39
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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? http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias
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Oct 19, 2015 04:39
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Nolanar posted:The thing I love about the "body as property" argument is that every single time he lays it out to a new person, the response is always the same: "sooo, can I sell myself then? That's pretty hosed up." The response we get is either "of course not, that would be silly," "sure, but you can take yourself back at any time, because that's how property works or something," or silence. Because the body as property isn't actually something libertarians care about. It's just an attempt to convince people that believing in human rights means you have to believe in Lockean property rights. Some aspects of Locke's theories and their historical context are pretty interesting given some of the most common arguments in this thread: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/ quote:Locke’s theory of property is similarly self-serving. It’s generally seen as a historical fiction, used to justify currently existing property rights, despite the fact that they cannot really have been acquired in the way that Locke suggests. As Hume objected, “there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.”
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Oct 19, 2015 14:03
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Muscle Tracer posted:is this because of snow crash? We live in the worst possible version of cyberpunk. Where's my loving skull gun.
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Oct 19, 2015 14:04
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Reztes posted:Related to this, kind of gives it away when he's calling it a "homestead principle," doesn't it? My (probably really lovely) quick research suggests the earliest reference to "homesteading" as a verb is the Homestead Act of 1862. Although "homestead" was in use prior to that as a name for a piece of land on which a family lived, it wasn't until this act, and the Canadian Dominion Lands Act a decade later that the word seemingly came into this use as claiming a parcel of virgin land for private improvement. I've never really thought about it before now, but yeah, the dominant mental image that comes to mind whenever someone says "homesteading" is some Little House on the Prairie poo poo.
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Oct 19, 2015 20:45
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theshim posted:No, but you see, the Little House on the Prairie was illegitimate homesteading because it was the State that was parceling out the territory, the same State that perpetrated such horrific actions as this: This reminds me, has anyone brought up the Probability Broach: http://www.bigheadpress.com/tpbtgn ?
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Oct 19, 2015 22:40
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ToxicSlurpee posted: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. Since Galt is such a champion for the sanctity of the contract, I can only assume that the 20th Century Auto Company (iirc) did not have the foresight to include a standard "employee cedes all copyright and patent right to employer for inventions made on the job" clause.
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Oct 21, 2015 00:03
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DrProsek posted:Wait if we have infinite electricity, wouldn't that mean that in Galt's world, he had eliminated scarcity in every form and gotten rid of the need for property rights and Libertarianism? In Jrod's OP he specifically said that Libertarianism was justified by scarcity, but if you have infinite energy then you've already violated the laws on conservation of mass and energy; you can make more energy without trading any mass, and thus have ended scarcity even if you didn't accept that we already don't have a scarcity problem but a distribution one. 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
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Oct 21, 2015 00:19
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TLM3101 posted:Just as a reminder: It has been six (6) days since JRodefeld held up literal slave-states as examples of countries with more economic freedom than the USA and thus something the USA should aspire to. "Economic freedom" being a euphemism for "employer freedom to gently caress over employees," the only surprising thing is that they weren't higher on the list.
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Oct 21, 2015 19:46
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QuarkJets posted:He'd be labeled as evil because 'COMMUNISM' but the propaganda machine wouldn't be nearly as effective without all of that blood. And if you don't need purges and poo poo to keep your government running and you don't wind up causing huge famines then more countries might have looked at communism as a viable solution, which would have further legitimized all socialist and communism-lite ideologies. Why didn't this happen in Europe, though? I think the problem was pre-existing.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:09
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VitalSigns posted:I still can't believe he actually came right out and admitted that. Lacking context, I think you'd have to inform people that it's part of an argument in favor of libertarianism.
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Oct 28, 2015 13:42
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Hey, now. At least some of these are modeled on insurance companies, which sounds much more enjoyable as a basis for social order.
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Oct 29, 2015 17:25
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Molyneaux starts tipping his hand when his example of stalking goes "a woman becomes obsessed with a man, and starts calling him at all hours," but the rapidity with which the mask completely drops after that is breathtaking. Triple-H wants Covenant Communities to kick out the blacks, Steve Freedomain wants DROs to control cheating psycho sluts. Also why do they capitalize the word "state" anyway?
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Oct 30, 2015 05:46
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Oh hey, by the way, remember that this is all "voluntary," well, for the meaning of voluntary that goes "any decision you make without anyone literally threatening to hurt you," i.e., the best meaning, i.e., the technical one. Leftists question whether employment contracts can really be called fully consensual given the alternatives available to workers for economic survival, but loopholes in the nature of contractual consent like this aren't bugs in libertarian ethics, they're features.
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Oct 30, 2015 06:17
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"There is no historical example of a modern capitalist firm assuming the functions of the state without the aid of the state. Of course there are also no historical examples of a modern capitalist firm existing without a state, but, details..."
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Oct 30, 2015 08:36
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Trent posted:Sort of. I've predicted Walmart will go this way for years now. They're already supplying their own banking and medical services to employees, and you can buy everything there. I imagine a soft start like an option to be paid in Walmart gift cards but get a fifteen percent bonus in pay if you do, and having Walmart apartments right next door where you can direct pay your rent out of your check. It's coming. They tried that exact gift card thing in Mexico but got shot down by the Supreme Court.
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Oct 31, 2015 13:33
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I was phoneposting before so here's a source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/05/mexico-walmex-idUSN0546591320080905quote:Mexico's Supreme Court ruled that the country's top retailer, Wal-Mart de Mexico, violated the constitution by paying workers in part with vouchers only redeemable in the chain's outlets, the court said on Friday. Gee, it's like there's reasons we don't do this stuff anymore! To be "fair and balanced" about it: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259532 quote:Mexico's Wal-Mart has been legally reprimanded for paying employees using a voluntary program. Despite only one individual employee filing the suit, the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that the retailer can no longer choose voucher redemption locations. Only one employee!! Voluntary!!!!
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Oct 31, 2015 17:58
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Thought this might be of interest given the discussion of private Dispute Resolution Organizations freely contracting with independent agents for protection services: Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justicequote:At Italian Colors, a small restaurant tucked in an Oakland, Calif., strip mall, crayons and butcher paper adorn the tables, and a giant bottle of wine signed by the regulars sits in the entryway.
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Oct 31, 2015 21:59
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TheRamblingSoul posted:Weren't the Dutch/British East India companies basically historical examples of this happening? One could point out that these were organizations chartered by governments for a national goal, but this would show ignorance of the reason why the governments in question chartered them.
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Nov 1, 2015 01:00
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Welcome to "starve the beast," mates!
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Nov 1, 2015 14:19
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In other words, racial diversity dividing working people might be a reason why it's a hard sell electorally, but it's not a reason why implementing it is inherently unfeasible.
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Nov 1, 2015 15:41
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VitalSigns posted:Mises was also a utilitarian and he thought ontological ethics are dumb made-up bullshit, not that Libertarians actually care about anything he wrote except the part where you don't have to pay any taxes for anything b-but what about "humans act"??
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Nov 2, 2015 18:14
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah that's how you make investigation, arrest, fines, prison time, executions, etc voluntary: you sign a contract that gives your DRO permission to do those things to you if you break the law. This is supposed to be a point of contrast with a social contract model, but it ends up being an example of how libertarianism is so strongly modeled on the premise of the independent autonomous actor as the basic unit of social analysis that it can't really deal with the fact that humans reproduce: it is not at all clear how or why children would be bound to any of the clauses of any DRO contract. Are they considered competent to make their own decisions in this regard? That's unlikely at best in their teens and preposterous in younger childhood. Do they simply inherit the DRO contract of their parents? If so, how does this actually differ from a social contract, and leaving your parents' DRO for another once you are old enough differ from immigrating to another nation-state? Never has the idea that "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction" been more true than in libertopia.
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Nov 3, 2015 15:19
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YF19pilot posted:This is a part that I have trouble understanding (the parent-child relation) as libertarians seem to contradict themselves over it. From what I can glean* it's the following: That whole line of argument starts from an insane and reality-defying premise: the self-sufficient autonomy of children as capable of meaningfully consenting to decisions on this scale. I'm not saying you're wrong, it's an example of the difficulty of a political philosophy that simply can't account for the possibility that actually existing humans are not always able to give meaningful consent in all situations where the direct threat of violence is not present. Honestly, though, it's a lot worse than that for their kids, or for their whole model of property. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 15:47
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Lord_Ventnor posted:I still don't know why I should care about property rights. Would be cool if a mod added "Because reasons." to the thread title.
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Nov 6, 2015 14:33
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