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Ironic that Libertarians are banning things in their own subreddit.
Not at all, there’s no such thing as a right wing libertarian. Just liberals who think their girlfriends shouldn’t need carseats.
That doesn’t cover the Republicans that want to be able to do drugs
Bayer, heroin… More like Banyear
Great read!
Ding ding ding! We have a winner. If Joseph Dejacqe were still alive. So called right wing libertarians would be the ones he was railing against.
Blame Grover Norquist for the absolute garbage right wing libertarian agenda now.
Nah, Grover is a nobody and not all that closely tied to the Liberals masquerading as libertarians. He was plenty up Republican asses as well. Milton Friedman and Murray rothbard share most of the blame. Along with the Koch brothers.
At least Rothbard realized as he was dying that the other conservatives were playing him for a chump.
And that’s always a good thing. I just wish they’d realize that before their mortality was before them and they had no chance to make amends. Lifetimes of damage are hard to un do.
Found it amusing when Rothbard came out pro-immigration restrictions and worked so hard to explain why it wasn’t racist when he did it.
My ideals are left lib, and I hope that social structure becomes feasible beyond small populations in the future. That said, leftism is centralized economics. And if you centralize that, you wind up with authoritarianism.
I hope trustless and decentralized protocols make up for the inefficiencies in the long run, we’re just starting to see technology catch up to make up for the inefficiencies of decentralized economics
That said, leftism is centralized economics.
<john cena> Are you sure about that? </john cena>
You should tell that to the Democratic Socialists, or the Social Democrats, or Marxists, or actual Libertarians, or anarchists, or communists. Literally I think the only group on the left. That is significantly centrally organized are Marxist Leninist. Every group on the right however depends on a central authority to make their economy fesable.
Either this is projection, or you don’t know what left is. Which if you are a fellow American is absolutely understandable. They did a lot to dumb us down and make us afraid to look to any groups that weren’t capitalist or fascist. To help us meet our needs. That red scare shit is still prevalent to this day. Though the Marxist Leninist did hand them the talking point on a platter post world war II. The rest of the left just got smeared with it unduly.
I said it’s feasible for smaller populations - but to be comparable to the size and strength of a world power AND have that sort of left wing economics how many examples can you provide that don’t end up needing authoritarianism?
By the way, I have nothing against the left or authoritarianism. Some geographic regions lead to power dynamics where authoritarianism is just a more sensible form of management since constraints on necessary resources make it easy for militant groups to seize control.
Everything is feasible in smaller populations. That’s why government should generally be smaller and more granular. It is also why businesses should be smaller still.
Just because insecure bullies make something impractical doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Nor does it mean that they are right.
Yes, (most) everything is feasible in smaller populations (not nuclear maintenance for example). But without technology, they’ve been isolated, uncoordinated, and easily bullied by those larger organized authoritarian bodies. There are billions of people, and narcissists make up about 1 in 5 of those billions of people. A smaller subset lack basic empathy, and an even smaller subset are intellectually competent. Multiply whatever that probability is by billions of people, and you have a guaranteed concern for every single government on the planet.
I agree with wanting smaller businesses as well. Capitalism isn’t bad (communism is state capitalism after all), but corporatism is the emerging problem from right libertarianism that most people conflate as problems with capitalism
My point being isn’t that I don’t like leftism, they are my ideals. I just don’t believe we live in an ideal world, so practically I follow a different set of beliefs. Thay said, I do think leftism is compatible with libertarianism in a way that it can compete in the global arena. And that starts off with solving how a decentralized governmental body “identifies” one and only one person to their “identity” (otherwise you get Sybil attacks)
Regardless of how you do decentralized economy you need a strong regulatory body to keep it that way. Otherwise you just end up right where we are now again.
Yes and Humanity has done it for thousands of years without a large centralized National body. Anarchism is not without an ability to regulate. What do you think anarchism is?
We also didn’t have a better way of doing math than an abacus for thousands of years. If Anarchy could regulate then we wouldn’t need all these laws about minimum wage, not using children as disposable machine tools, and not putting rat poison in their food products. Clearly there is some need for a body that can do that. And at that point, You’ve got a large centralized national body again because you’re going to need to vote for who you trust to do it, they’re going to need the physical capability to do it, there’s going to need to be taxes to keep it all going, and oh look. We have a national government again.
I don’t care what PCM told you.
PCM?
Hmmm and who controls the tech allowing this decentralized society?
No one, there are already plenty of protocols defined for distributed computing and are made open source. In a hypothetical lib left social network, If you want different networks, that’s fine, you just have to make your own protocol. It’s like how countries shouldn’t have borders, or how computing platforms shouldn’t lock you in or out of others (take apple/Mac OS as an example, versus Linux)
Then it’s up to individuals to verify the source code and choose to be a node operator. Not everyone needs to be a node operator, just enough on that the common skilled worker can partake should they need to
If you don’t like the “rules of governance” of whatever network you’re in, that’s fine, go to a different one you do like, or make your own with your own rules. If it’s actually a better system of “decentralized digital government”, you’ll attract people into your Network.
Consumer grade tech is more than capable of achieving this. You don’t need cpus with 2nm transistors (which are heavily gatekept by oligarchs), there’s plenty of open software and hardware protocols/designs to prove not only this concept works, but has been done before by now.
The only problem in the past was with solving the identity problem and preventing Sybil attacks, but that’s becoming less of a concern for other reasons (which I could elaborate further on)
That works for social media like Lemmy but what about tech for trading goods or keeping the lights on? What about the Internet infrastructure?
This a great idea to build off of and advocate for rights. But it’s as possible in reality as the classical liberal “state of nature”.
So, I emphasized trustless and decentralized in social organizations. “It just works for social media” isn’t exactly addressing what I was getting at. For example, Lemmy has a bot account problem. All that freedom makes it harder to prevent that problem.
But if you’re talking about how a government is a system of voting bodies that authorize some action given state (policy), and authority is delegated by some means - say, voting - then the botting problem of Lemmy is not just “something that doesn’t work”, it’s a critical failure which would enable fraud.
So, when I brought up Sybil attacks, I was trying to avoid a long winded digression including arguments from Microsoft on Decentralized ID. But the point being, it can be decentralized. Policy is action given state but action is delegated to people inevitably. But when you vote, would you rather trust a person to count those votes or a trustless automated system?
I’m talking about you said you want to use tech “to make up for the inefficiencies of decentralized economics”. It’s not about making open source software that works. That’s easy. The question is who controls the wires? We can already see where ISPs and countries can check everything passing through their system. What’s to prevent someone from gaining control of a critical mass of physical nodes and blocking traffic from anyone who doesn’t pay them a “fee”?
You’re talking about the software but you’re forgetting that it all runs on hardware somewhere in a windowless building. Even if you decentralize that, you’ve still got the problem of gatekeeping. How long before each node requires .1 pennies per packet? How good is long distance trade going to be when just making the offer costs a significant amount?
Libertarians: people too stupid to fully understand their own ideologies
Libertarianism is for the philosophically lazy,or people born into a super conservative family and can’t handle the cognitive dissonance caused by realizing that liberalism is the more Christian political ideology. Source: I’m from UT.
The crazy part is how much politics has evolved since Libertarianism was founded. Now it’s flooded with a bunch of right wing social agendas with the worst economic policies.
Grover Norquist should be who you link to now. He’s the guy who hates government so much he wanted one so small he could drown it in a bathtub. He’s also the reason their economic ideas are so embarrassingly bad the party never gets taken seriously.
He’s just an acolyte of Milton Friedman and Murray rothbard. Not all that special himself. But yes all the evolved “libertarians” evolved backwards.
Great point. Murray Rothbard made it, Grover Norquist marketed it, and the right couldn’t get enough. I blame Milton Friedman for a lot but he was just using Chicago School of Economics methodology so it was bound to be repeated by someone else. But Rothbard was instrumental in making it a hard right idea.
He was surely aware of the Mormons getting the snot kicked out of them by the Army right? If they couldn’t make a special rules enclave for their religion, what hope does an Anarchic commune state have? Some things are just better as thought exercises to apply rather than actual goals.
Such a mishmash of words that have no business together anarchic commune state?! What the hell even is that. That’s not at all what anarchists Etc advocate for. Anarchists further are not passivists. And anarchist can absolutely organize for their self-defense. There’s nothing ideologically stating they can’t. Though it is ideologically opposed to becoming a state in the terms of nation states.
Do you know what anarchism is beyond angsty teens and pejorative colloquialisms of Chaos?
It’s not about pacifism. The Mormons are my example expressly because they weren’t pacifist, and they got rolled by a national military. The point is that unless you’ve got some kind of world wide vibe going someone is always going to amass enough power to overcome whatever mutual aid defense you can setup. And you would in fact be creating a state.
States don’t have to be highly centralized bureaucracies. It’s literally just a term for a geographical area that works together under a specific governing regime. If you’re calling the banners for mutual defense then you’re fulfilling a key aspect of a state. A nation is a group of people. Nation State is a specific category of states that happens to cover most countries in the past 100 years. For example although the US is a nation state, anthropologists have identified 12 sub cultures that could be considered nations of their own, largely linked to major immigration waves.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, if you somehow get a world wide agreement to abolish centralized government, and tame the corporations, and then prevent the mega cities from becoming city states, how do you prevent Communes 1 through 10 deciding they want to band together and start forcing other communes to join them? That’s going to require the other communes to band together for defense, which is going to require pooling resources, which just recreates the international MIC at a smaller scale. The problem with anarchism of any kind is shitty people look at it and all they see is a power vacuum, and a comfortable life in power if they have the ambition to take it.
I completely concur, I had personal experience with this. In my case, rural Georgia.
Libertarians are ultra-edgy conservatives who realized that typical conservative talking points are far too easy to refute and find contradictions in, and that being a conservative makes you look bad. They’re people who are close to understanding the ways which authorities/the establishment work against the people, but are too brainwashed with conservative/anti-worker/bigoted propaganda to be able to adopt a more mature worldview – as long as they participate in/agree with culture war garbage like transphobia and anti-feminism/anti-SJW propoganda, they’ll never be able to “agree” with any sort of leftist ideology. Plus they’ve never actually had taxable income so they really buy into all the false information & propoganda about taxes.
The conservative -> conservative libertarian -> ancap -> social/environmental libertarian -> socialist pipeline is VERY real, and it’s usually 1:1 with middle school -> early high school -> high school -> new-fledged adult -> experienced adult, for suburban white kids growing up in a conservative area. The less you’re shielded from reality, the more you start to agree with leftist ideas (even hardcore brainwashed conservatives completely agree with leftism in practice as long as they don’t know it’s leftism).
They’re just conservatives who want to be able to smoke weed and fuck children.
Actually scratch that; conservatives already want to do the latter.
They already do the latter. They want to make it legal beyond child marriage.
Been banned from there. Basically only right-lib or ancap views are allowed there, left-lib (me) need not apply.
You think that’s bad? Heh Libertarianism is a leftist ideology. Not at all liberal. They HATE us.
Heh and all the down votes without rebuttal prove it. They know better. They still hate to admit it. But they know better.
Libertarianism (traditionally) is on the bottom of the vertical (authority) axis on a traditional political compass, if you want to use that. It is neither left nor right. It can be either. The people who have taken the name are on the right. They’re anarchy-capitalists who don’t want to be ruled by government but want to be ruled by capitalists. Anarchists, for example, are libertarian leftists, using the terms properly.
A libertarian is a Republican trying to sleep with a Democrat. All the bloody graphs in the word won’t change what people are.
The political Compass is a joke. It’s more accurate than just left or right. But libertarian isn’t a state that spans from left to right at the bottom. Libertarianism as it was designed is strictly a left ideology. Oriented about social Freedom Above All Else. Economic liberalism. Is an ideology predicated on complete economic freedom. Economic Liberals are not libertarians. Never have been. Never will be. They have diametrically opposed ideologies.
The problem with economic liberalism is that it puts the cart before the horse. You cannot have a free economy without a free society. Economic liberalism doesn’t care about Society in general. Just the free market. And they figure that magically a free Society will somehow follow. It never has but that’s the magical thinking involved.
Those downvotes are people’s way of telling you that your comment is so comically wrong it’s not even worth a rebuttal. I agree with them.
Please explain. None of you can explain how that is. You just pretend it is. You just redefined things to mean whatever you want ignoring their original meaning. I can point to actual facts and evidence. I can point to history. All you can do is claim something and not back it up. Do you honestly think Joseph Dejacque would be accepting or abide a group of delusioned liberal nuggets? Do you even know who he is?
For those actually curious. Joseph Dejacque is the man that coined the term Libertarianism and defined it. He fought against imperialists, mercantilist, and capitalist. He was literally active in the French Revolution in france. In the early 1800s. Fervently pro labor etc. For 100 years there were no “right wing” libertarians. But post red scare and the 1950s. A bunch of privileged economic liberals decided to redefine the ideology and it’s meaning from the ground up. To be the opposite of what it’s creator intended. And the easiest way to prove this is to ask a right-wing liberal about Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of the market. They literally fetishize him. The man and his ideology. Economic liberalism
“Libertarian” doesn’t mean the same thing today that it meant in 2001; it’s a far departure from what it meant in the 1800’s.
Who cares what right wing “libertarians” think words mean? You can’t steal and shit all over the meaning of a word from the group that made it.
Who cares what right wing “libertarians” think
Those of us that use the English language on a daily basis.
Your name is now Dipshit MCGee. You will be referred to as such by everyone at all times, or I’ll shit and piss myself while whining about linguistic positions I don’t actually understand.
We’ve all agreed, the ignorant dumbasses of the world, and if you don’t you don’t understand language.
Your name has been given to the guy you hate most in the world. He’s decided to spell it differently. Incorrectly. And, this is important:
He’s doing it just to piss you off, because he is literally just a spiteful, self centered moron.
You do know definitions and usage change over time, right? That’s like comparing an Eisenhower Republican to trump. There may be a few similarities, but overall they’re wildly different.
Yes we are well aware. Up Is Down black is white love is hate war is peace freedom is slavery.
No, definitions don’t generally change. Especially not to mean the opposite of how they we’re initially defined.
You’re confusing a party for an ideology. There is no “Republican” ideology. Especially since Trump took over. Ideologically, since at least the 1930s Republicans were pretty solidly fascist. At least in private. They’re just more open about it today.
But hey, we can still compare our non aggression principles. This is mine.
It’s a French classic!
Golly! Look at that. The Liberals were so confident that they were right. I mean if I’m so ridiculously wrong shouldn’t it be easy to prove me wrong? Kind of by definition even? Makes you wonder why they aren’t trying. I’m sure they will continue to pyrrhicly down vote regardless.
Yawn.
That’s a sad response. But I know it’s the best you had liberal.😄
leftist yawn
If liberals knew what words meant or weren’t innately self-centered, they’d be social democrats at worst.
True. I still hold out hope for them. I know it’s possible for people to overcome. Even if it is hard.
Yeah and if not a bicycle then a Libertarian should at least go with an EV.
Gasoline requires requires far away refineries supplied with crude oil that comes even further away. The government needs to maintain a large military to secure foreign oil to keep the global oil prices down because that’s the rate everyone has to pay in a capitalist system. Even then oilt prices are subject to regulation by OPEC, which is an international organization that we don’t have any say in.
Meanwhile an EV can be charged by a wind turbine in your home town or even a solar panel on your roof. I suppose the lithium for the battery comes for further away, but once you own that battery you own it. You aren’t dependent of oil coming from very far away every week. Sure you’ll eventually have to replace that battery, but it’s way less frequent than having to gas up. And if it came down to it you could probably produce a battery more locally without lithium if you’re willing to sacrifice range.
The fact is a libertarian utopia simply isn’t possible with a dependence on oil. Oil is the most international business in the world and requires the most support form the government to function. But with EVs it may be possible to have everything needed for a society to function within a small region. You need big government to get a reliable supply of oil, but with EVs and renewable energy, big government isn’t as necessary.
And yeah bicycles are even better than EV in terms of libertarian ideals.
The sentiment is nice, but you can replace all the issues with oil you stated with lithium and cobalt as well. The replacement is like once every 10 or 15 years, but it costs 20k for a battery.
If we can invent new, scalable chemistries that don’t rely on a scarce mineral that lives deep down in specific parts of the earth it wouldn’t be as easily translatable. But alas…not yet.
I’m a big phev proponent, and battery production is still better than oil production when comparing pollution, but there would be a lithium cartel just like OPEC if oil didn’t exist and it had been batteries powering cars since WWII.
Note that if doing a LFP battery, then you don’t have the Cobalt issue. Also, as I could most recently find, prices on LFP are such that currently it could be about $7,000 for a pack that can get over 200 miles in a typical EV. CATL claims they’ll have it under $4500 for that capacity battery pack by the end of this year. Analysts are suggesting that 2025 might see that battery pack go under $2800 or so. If that comes to pass, then it’s a slam dunk that an EV will incur less cost over a decade than the ICE maintenance and repairs, even ignoring gas vs. electricity costs.
The price has been coming rapidly down, after the shortages have subsided. Of course, whether the supply chain and pricing of the big automakers reflect this… well we have to see. However, Ford at least proclaimed they “managed” to save $8,000 cost per unit of mach-e, and most of that is likely just the battery pack getting thousands of dollars cheaper (they also redid the rear motor and other touches, but the bulk of that number is probably just battery cost reduction).
Yeah the problem with lfp is weight and density. I’m excited to see what the big battery company’s innovations are. Í believe it once it’s happening.
Too much vaporware and false promises
Gonna sneak in here and mention that the real trick to EVs is to make them smaller. It’s fucked up that we’re building EVs to make more efficient SUVs. It’s not hard to improve on the fuel economy of an SUV, and it really just kicks the can down the road. EV SUVs get like 93MPGe, and we really need smaller, more efficient cars that get in the 150-200 range.
Though many of those “SUVS” we would have used to call “wagons”, before SUV was ‘cool’. The battery weight (sadly worse with LFP) is the enemy, being most of the weight to carry.
So you can have yourself a Mini Cooper SE, with “only” 400 pounds more weight than the gas counterpart, but you only have 115 miles of range, and your MPGe is only 10 more than the typical ‘SUV’ electric.
The most problematic facets of traditional SUVs are (so far), not common in EVs:
- High center of gravity - Thanks to batteries, generally an EV SUV has a lower center of mass than even a lot of sedans
- Absurd nose limiting front visibilty. Thus far most EV SUVs have pretty car-like noses. To get those vaguely decent range figures, they can’t afford the stupidity of cosplaying as semi trucks like the ‘big ol SUVs’ like to do.
If hoping that smaller cars will pave the way to reduced kWh for good range, unfortunately the battery packs themselves are the biggest problem with weight. So you’d be really looking toward a breakthrough in energy density before you could have, say, a little Miata to toss around cheaply and lightly wear a cheaper battery with lower capacity and still get at least 100 miles of range.
it’s the libertarians… you should’ve said the bicycle lowers the age of consent or something.
[Hapless user] “Kids are allowed to use bicycles! Government requires you to be a late teen or adult to drive a car!”
[Libertarian mod] “Banned. It’s not that age of consent we want lowered!”
Woke mods can’t handle facts and logic
Whoever posted that doesn’t understand libertarians.
If there were no government regulations, they would have nothing to complain about and their lives would be ruined.
If there were no government regulations, they would have nothing to complain about
I promise you that if you put a libertarian into a place without government regulation, they will still insist that there is a secret government regulation responsible for their lives being shit.
Sadly, I think you’re probably right. I used to tell them to go to Rwanda if they wanted to live in a tax-free utopia, but Rwanda has taxation now what with it having a more or less functional government now.
You seem to confuse us with leftists. No, it’s not the patriarchy/white people keeping you down. We’re the first to tell you that you are responsible for your own success
Keep on assuming we just don’t understand, despite libertarians spewing their shit all over the Internet for decades at this point.
Yet people still call us Republicans who smoke weed.
If you’ve been spewing your shit all over the Internet for decades and people still think that, then either:
- Your outreach efforts don’t work
- You actually are, because that’s how you behave in practice no matter what you babble about when proselytizing
People still think bisexuals are gays in denial. People still think there are two genders. It’s hard to escape binary thinking
they will still insist that there is a secret government regulation responsible for their lives being shit.
We’re the first to tell you that you are responsible for your own success
The problem is being the last to admit that you are responsible for all your own fuckups.
To claim credit for your successes you need to also admit fault for your failures, it goes both ways
I’m dying right now. You must be going through life with horse-blinders on or something.
What’s your point? Libertarians are all about taking personal responsibility
Ron Paul can’t even take responsibility for racist newsletters.
Edit: will you respond with “he didn’t have time to edit them” (undermining the personal responsibility point), or “Ron Paul isn’t libertarian” (No True Libertarian). I await with baited breath.
Do you have a source on that? My experience with libertarians is “I do what I want, and if I cause problems for you, fuck you” not “I’m personally responsible for my actions and the effects they have on my surroundings”.
Also, you blindly missing the point, and then dodging it instead of admitting you missed the crux of the issue was just chef’s kiss perfect.
I would say that whoever posted that understands libertarians perfectly, and maybe libertarians don’t understand themselves and libertarianism
But that’s communism
Every Internet post about any political party is almost always about the wild caricatures people have in their head, because actually talking about politics IRL is a taboo because everyone is too damn scared and/or jaded to do anything but spout extreme bullshit online under an anonymous persona. All liberals are child-murduring blue-haired SJWs, all conservatives are rednecks bent on bringing back slavery and committing trans genocide, and all libertarians are secretly nazis or children who don’t get how the world works. The Internet says so.
I think you just probed my point for me.
You gotta wear a helmet though in some places, and depending on where you are you may have to do much more than that
Gotta keep one hand on the handlebars
Gotta have a light
CAN’T RIDE WITH TWO PEOPLE ON THE SAME SEAT
YOU HAVE TO USE FUCKING HAND SIGNALS I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA NOT JUST AMERICA BUT TEXAS FOR GOD’S SAKE
(Fun fact, I actually met someone who got deported after getting stopped by the cops, originally, for riding a bike at night without a light 🙁)
(Edit: Also… banning someone from the libertarian subreddit because they said something you feel like they shouldn’t be allowed to say, so you have to use your administrative controls to silence them, is frickin hilarious. Not that I am surprised.)
Tyranny!
Well, there is always the libertarian community at [email protected] to post it to instead.
And it does require subsidies… pavement isn’t just magically there.
bikes don’t need pavement, just good wheels
Good luck with that, I highly doubt most of you have ridden off road, having pavement %100 helps with efficiency.
I wonder if someday they’ll make a bike that rides on unpaved mountains. Probably not.
Haha what a crazy idea, what would you even call that? A bike for mountains? A mountain-style bike? Don’t be fatuous!
Equally ridiculous would be of you made one for roads with gravel. Some sort of…gravel-friendly bicycle.
Cool, good luck with that efficient ride. Tell you what go ride through the woods to get to the store and then let me know how much easier it is.
Ignorance is hilarious from you lot. You have street bikes and tires because… they’re more efficient that a mountain bike…but you do you.
have you considered strapping an electric moter on the mountain bike and comparing the human effort to a street bike?
Hmm, a 40-80ft wide road that needs to support thousands of pounds of cars, or 8ft of bike path that only needs to support a few hundred pounds of pedestrians/bikers.
I wonder which needs more of a budget.
If everyone is on a bike, 8ft isn’t enough…also now you’re going to have even bigger cities since most people will need to return to the city from living further out.
If everyone is on a bike, 8ft isn’t enough
This is silly for multiple reasons
-
Bike paths have significantly higher throughput than roads
-
This is not a mutually elusive choice, we can have multiple modes of transport
-
Rail transport & busses are more than capable of helping to reduce the load
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I never once said “everyone should be on a bike”
also now you’re going to have even bigger cities since most people will need to return to the city from living further out.
This just makes no sense. The ratio of transportation types has little effect on city density, zoning is way more of a factor. And in addition to that, car centric infrastructure takes up significantly more space than other modes. Reducing car dependence would actually free up space.
-
Subsidies and infrastructure are not the same thing though.
No but they’re closely related and often the same thing.
The whole concept of “economically productive downtowns subsidize white flight suburbs ability to exist” is because of infrastructure, but it’s basically a subsidy.
The first time I heard the phrase “become ungovernable”, I assumed it was about home gardening and biking and reducing consumer waste. Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was actually about perpetuating institutional inequality and “fuck you, got mine.”
It’s just another thing right libertarians stole from anarchists. I’m pretty sure Emma Goldman was the originator of the whole “become ungovernable” thing (could be totally wrong about that so take it with a bucket of salt) and she definitely meant it haha. Part of that is gardening and various other community building acts, but the other part is very “seize the means of production” and assassinating authority figures. Less “fuck you, got mine” and more “give everybody everything or die”
What do you mean? It’s still an anarchist thing.
Right-wing “libertarians” only know how to steal actual libertarian thought and shit all over it.
No ban on riding a bike? Apparently they never met MOM!
I won’t tell them to be consistent, because consistent liberterians are scary.
You don’t like getting into very detailed conversations about age of consent laws and child pornography?
I’m not sure how it’s related to bikes, but I did get into conversations about age of consent on lemmy few times. And it seemed that people I talked to didn’t grasp concept of different countries having different laws.
because consistent liberterians are scary.
Really you haven’t lived until someone corners you at a party and explains how the Non-aggression principle applies to this stuff. It is deeply confusing and worrisome.
What do laws have to do with morality?
very detailed conversations about age of consent laws
different countries having different laws.
Indeed, but nobody mentioned morality. Conversation was specifically about laws.
Downvotes show that many people calling libertarians bad words are unable to grasp such a simple difference.
Hey I didn’t call libertarians any bad words, I mean obviously bad words. I called them all Republicans trying to have sex with a Democrat. That’s it. I don’t even know if it’s any more of a lie than wearing makeup is. Since you know, everyone fucking knows the deal.
I called them all Republicans trying to have sex with a Democrat.
From the point of view of an actual libertarian Republicans and Democrats are much closer to each other than both are to libertarians.
But there’s a weird kind of people in the New World thinking that libertarian is just something between the two, yes. Probably someone initially mixed up libertarian and libertine, and then it went out of control.
actual libertarian
fact: all actual liberatarians live in Scotland. With the True Scotsmen.
Probably someone initially mixed up libertarian and libertine, and then it went out of control.
No one is paying you to talk that way. Just a fyi.
Consistent libertarians surprisingly get along well with unreformed Bolsheviks. They have a kinda similar picture of the universe, just mutually exclusive ways of dealing with it.
The libertarian-fascist pipeline is interesting to me. I can’t decide if they start out fascist but dream of a world where the rules don’t apply to them until they gradually get more honest or if they just have a very bad relationship with power so they can’t imagine a situation where they aren’t the one with the boot or the one being stomped on.
It happens another way usually - in libertarianism anything non-voluntary and any violence is bad. The ideal is a society with involuntary violent interactions being minimal.
First, just like with Bolsheviks, ends may justify the means (let’s build a totalitarian state which will fight capitalism, imperialism, conquer all the world and then make communism).
Second, and more often, different kinds of violence are not so different for a libertarian. As in - a normie might agree that they owe something by social contract that they hadn’t signed and can’t refuse. For a libertarian that’s bullshit, and the legal systems built by non-libertarians don’t allow them to argue their point - somebody else decides for them and says they are obligated to obey. (“Sovereign citizens” are basically libertarians who believe in proving a libertarian position through normie laws, which is nonsense, you can’t win by rules defined by your adversary.) So “if there’s going to be violence, then let it be our violence to our ends”.
From the libertarian point of view the world is fascist in general. So they (libertarians gone violent) are trying to change it to good, while playing by its rules. It’s sort of a revolutionary logic, which, again, is similar to that of Bolsheviks.
so they can’t imagine a situation where they aren’t the one with the boot or the one being stomped on
They can imagine that pretty well, but from their point of view they sort of already are expected to be stomped on in a non-libertarian world.
I hope I’ve explained it well.
Maybe they want to live in a world where someone will sell them a girlfriend that the government won’t make them put in a car seat.
Lolitarianism is full dog eats dog to an extent no government has ever tried. It promises to reduce every human relationship to transactional at best, brute force more likely. You aren’t going to call the police on abusive parents when you know the children will be homeless as a result. A crushing nightmare where property holders know that all that want to eat need to go through them.
What kinda fascist wouldn’t want that? Imagine the power they would hold, fully backed by the state.
Maybe they want to live in a world where someone will sell them a girlfriend that the government won’t make them put in a car seat.
Maybe I’m a green dinosaur.
It promises to reduce every human relationship to transactional at best, brute force more likely.
One should learn about libertarian ideologies from people practicing them, and not from their circlejerk partners.
It obviously doesn’t. It doesn’t specify anything except voluntarism and use of force being taboo, thus it allows even ancom if those ancoms don’t try to ancomify people who don’t want to join their communes.
brute force more likely.
Brute force is the least acceptable thing in libertarianism, everything else has smaller priority, so obviously not.
You aren’t going to call the police on abusive parents when you know the children will be homeless as a result.
They’ll be adopted or will live in an orphanage, of course, and not that.
A crushing nightmare where property holders know that all that want to eat need to go through them.
No. There’s nothing to make zoning laws in ancap and other similar regulations allowing the weird real estate market some countries have.
What kinda fascist wouldn’t want that? Imagine the power they would hold, fully backed by the state.
I dunno, I don’t see your visions because you didn’t share the stuff.
they hated him because he spoke the truth
I think that could also have been cross-posted into [email protected] as well.
A very similar post was on fuckcars, or something related, a few days ago.
I haven’t seen
Yeah, american libertarians call themselves the wrong thing. The more correct term I find would be anarcho-capitalist, which is just all around a completely non-viable economic and governance system.
Anarcho-capitalism is actually perfectly viable for a “functional” society. Goods will be made, and the people will be fed in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class.
It’s just not anarchism, and it’s not good. It’s just the capitalist class fully assuming the powers of state and production with none of the responsibilities to the people or any of those pesky human rights.
So, you know. Corporate Fascism.
But it would work. It has worked. American company towns weren’t far different from what the ancap dream ultimately is, and they were functional, as long as you don’t define functional as protecting human and worker rights and allowing for social mobility.
That’s fair enough I guess, I suppose I was defining functional as protecting various rights that technically aren’t necessary for an extant society. On the other hand, I very extremely doubt any of the self proclaimed libertarian anarcho-capitalists believe the actual end results of such a system are what would happen, nor would they want such a system to be the one they live under.
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Lol, next you’ll be telling me libertarianism only exists in any kind of numbers because the fossil fuel and meat lobbies want to pay less tax and abide by fewer regulations…
No, of course, they’ll still charge a levy for people using THIER stuff to make money for themselves. In fact, its their favourite part. They love that bit. They just don’t think it should apply to them.
In the same way an employee using their software/clients/computer/factory/property will be charged, a state will charge the owner for using their educated for force etc. etc. The only difference is the state-ness of one of the parties, even when companies can exist as a state.
However, they’ll act like you just asked to fuck their mum when the subject of paying taxes comes up. Then, theyll look you dead in the eye and claim its a moral issue, without a hint of shame.
States can do one too. I’m just saying, don’t fall for it. They either haven’t critically evaluated it properly or they think you’re an idiot.
Nobody forces you to buy from a private business. But from another business if you like. But there’s only one DMV in each state, it has a monopoly on licences.
Wonderful. Instead of a monopoly, I have the illusion of choice.
You have real choice. Don’t want Windows? Use Linux. Don’t want Reddit? Post on Lemmy.
Capitalism lets you use free software and contribute it to the people. Compare it to governments who are captured by corporations and just default to Windows in 90% of cases. The remaining 10% is Mac or Chromebook, which isn’t better
The biggest companies in the world used their influence to get installed in public schools and government jobs. Now most of us can’t use free software at work or for school
You’re most definitely forced to buy from private businesses, even if not generally from a specific one, because you’re born in a World were all Land has an owner (and “they ain’t making any more of it” ) and unless you’re gifted Land by your parents, you will have to pay somebody for Food since you can’t even grow your own food or build your own place to live without paying for somebody else’s Land.
Further, since Free Market Theory only works for Markets with low barriers to entry and hence high competition (so mainly for unimportant stuff like soap or teddy bears) for many if not for most things you will most definitely be constrained to buy from a single business or a handful of businesses operating as a cartel, especially in anything directly or indirectly affected by Land ownership, such as Food Retail.
Not all forms of coercion involve direct and hence obvious use of force - most of coercion in the Modern World is based on rules which indirectly limit your choices and if anybody tries to step out of those rules (which can be you trying to grow your own food in land you do not own or somebody else trying to sell you cheaper music whose copyright they do not have) THEN the use of force happens - you’re not directly forced to buy from a private business or one of a small group of private businesses, you’re indirectly forced to by rules making sure that in practice you don’t really have other viable choices.
Whilst I mostly mentioned Land because amongst the rules limiting individual and trade freedom Land Ownership is one of the oldest (all the way back to when Monarchs confiscated all the Land which before had common ownership) and with the widest impact (everything which requires something physical to be somewhere or to move, is dependent on access to Land), there are other rules such as Copyright or those rules regulating access to limited resources such as the radio spectrum (for example, mobile phone operator licenses) that similarly put access control in the hands of a few private entities and thus in practice force everybody else to go pay those private entities to get or access those things or anything that indirectly needs to have or access those things (this is how Food Retail market concentration relates to Land Ownership)
In practice there are a lot of what I call “taxes paid directly to the private sector”, caused by how the rules that limit access to scarce resources (or, even worse, resources made artificially scarce by certain rules, such as done by Copyright) place the access control or limited the access to only specific private entities, so most people’s “freedom” when it comes to those and related things is entirely “you can have if by paying these guys or you can not have it” which when it comes to life’s essentials (food, water, shelter, health) is not actually a choice.
Even before capitalism you had to pay for food. If not with money, it’s with time. That’s not a problem capitalism invented, it’s a problem it’s invented to solve.
My point is having choice in what you eat is good, the government should not be in charge in handing us a standard meal. My school cafeteria meals were very unhealthy, pizza, burger, tater tots, etc. I don’t know why they feed kids something more healthy
As I pointed out in my post, you can’t use your own work to get your own food if you don’t either own or rent Land.
So anybody not born to landed or wealthy parents (who give him the land or the means to get it) cannot directly trade their time for food, and has to trade time for doing something for somebody else (i.e. work) who does own Land and the means of production and gives him “trade tokens” (aka money) in return, which can be used to buy food.
At every one of those steps due to power imbalances and the rules themselves that person loses something for somebody else (their time and work produces way more value than the pay they get, their food is much more expensive to buy than the cost of growing it).
This person has no real freedom, only an artificiality limited set of choices.
All of this predates Capitalism (it goes way back to Feudalism) - Capitalism just entrenched it, making Money (specifically those who have lots of it) the top power instead of Kings and adjusting the Law so that it would be the tool of coercion for money as it was before for kings (see the two examples I gave in my previous post).
Capitalism was never meant to solve any problem other than how do you move power from kings to landowners and the trading bourgeoisie without the latter two’s infighting destroying the system - in Capitalism they seldom fight with violence.
If the powers of the state directly force you to give the money (I.e. taxes), the powers of the Moneyed force you go through a complex circuit to fullfill your basic needs, were at each step they take a slice of the product of your efforts, a disproportionately large one whenever they can sufficiently constrain your choices (for example, when a Market is dominated by a monopoly or cartel). Ultimatelly for you the result is the same: either way you have spent more of your time than you would otherwise have needed either to make up for paying taxes or to make up for all that was taken from the product of your work along the way and none of the two is your choice.
PS: I’m not saying the state should control food production, I’m just pointing out that you’re not Free in Capitalism and you have no choice but to lose part (often most) of the product of your work in ways other than tax and which, unlike taxes, will never be returned to you in another form (taxes get you things like schools, roads and security whilst giving a slice of the wealth you produce to a private party doesn’t return anything to you).
I happen to think that we need some Capitalism (though with lots of regulation, probably some minimum provision of human needs in the form of something like UBI and mostly subservient to the Democratic power of the vote) but let’s not hold wild delusions about it being a form of Freedom for anybody but the very wealthy or that being forced to unnecessarily lose part of your work at each step of the circuit you’re forced to run through to merely get food under Capitalism is any better than paying taxes to the state.
I agree that you’re not completely free in capitalism, but you’re not free in nature either. If a bear lives in the woods, you’re not free to go there. If you need to go to the woods to eat, you might be eaten by the bear.
But you do have to work more in capitalism than necessary to survive. But there’s no system that’s a lot more efficient that I know of
You’re less free in Capitalism than in nature: that’s my point.
But yeah, that system is a lot more efficient at producing wealth (in a broad sense of the word, rather than merelly money) than Anarchy or centraly controlled systems - Capitalism excels at short and mid-term resource allocation and production compared with the rest (though, long term that’s more dubious since by itself and left to its own devices it eventually collapse the whole system due to totally ignoring negative externalities such as Polution and having no broader strategical capability, so for example pure Capitalism will never invest in Education to raise all worker’s capabilities for using higher efficiency production methods and instead expects people to pay for their own education or learn on the job, which is far less efficient and even impossible at times).
Further, Capitalism is pretty bad at distributing the wealth produced, hence for the median individual it might actually be worse than centralised systems - just because a country’s GDP is going up doesn’t mean most people will benefit from it or even that most people aren’t seing their personal situation getting worse rather than better.
IMHO, Capitalism works as a Trade and Production resource allocation system but not as a Political system (which is how Neoliberals have tries to use it) and needs to be wrapped by and controlled by something else for the political decisions at a strategical society-wide levels. A metaphor is that of Capitalism as a car-engine: it’s a much better way of getting to places fast than a Fred Flinstone “feets running on the ground” method, but it makes no sense to have you car with a great engine run around without a driver - sure, the engine makes sure the car moves much faster than by other means, but without a drive it will just go fast in some random direction until it crashes.
In practice what we see is various mixes of Capitalism with something else (even bloody China has Capitalism nowadays) and hence different results for the median person depending on the mix. What we also see in many countries is, thanks to the dominance of Neoliberalism in the last 3 decades, a “Capitalism by itself” trend that is yielding worse results for the median person that the Capitalism + Something Else that predates that move to Capitalism used as a General Politicial (rather than merely Trade and Production) Decision Tool.
That’s why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We’re not anarchists
That’s why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We’re not anarchists
That’s why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We’re not anarchists
There are a few privately run dmvs in some states. But also a fun as it is to gripe about, I don’t want a profit motive at the DMV. I don’t want a profit motive just about everywhere.
Profit motive creates competition, which is healthy for markets. One entity in charge of something has no reason to improve since it has a monopoly on that service
Yes profit motive has done wonders for the health care industry, we spend more tax payer money than any other developed nation for much worse results. But hay, the 200 insurance companies competing for tax payer money and not consumer heathcare access is so good!!!
It’s not, I’m being sarcastic, privatization of public services and goods is fascism, and like all fascist ideas or It’s really only good at speed running the collapse of your economy, military, and govenment.
I didn’t buy healthcare because I live abroad. If I ever get seriously sick I can move to the States and the insurance can’t refuse my pre-existing condition. Thank you, government regulation for letting me skip insurance payments and only have travel insurance for accidents
