I'm So Embarrassed That I Ever Called Myself A "liberal."

[Kyle M]

Maybe I shouldn't call you an extremist libertarian. I should just say that while I agree with the spirit that runs through libertarianism, I cannot wholesale go with it in practice. I detest big government, because it takes away from the individual's capacity to better himself, and as extension, to better society. But if government is about individuals working towards a common good, and not about individuals living off the largesse of a community chest where parasites outnumber those who actually work, I am not against government. That is a lot to ask for, and I'm not even sure if such a government exists among the many countries that dot the planet. But I don't think there is any country that is libertarian in practice either. It would be nice if you could be the president of such a country. I'll be the press and I'll savor the reporting of how unlibertarian you have come to be as the president.

I understand where you're coming from I really do, but I want you to consider one possibility: that you don't know much about the libertarian philosophic tradition, and that you assume or connote things that aren't true about it, judging my statements from that incorrect perspective. Think about it.

By the way, government has never been about individuals working for the common good. Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard is illuminating on this subject. Or perhaps it's a semantic issue, and we would be better off using the term "the state," since government can mean voluntary, self-government. In a libertarian world, there would be government, in the sense that individuals would come together and decide on common rules for things. They would not, however, have the legal authority to go to other people who don't want to be in their covenant and violently force their rules on them. That is the only, and most important, difference between statism and libertarianism, or power and market as Rothbard put it, or the political vs. economic means of interaction as I believe Nozick put it.

 

[Queequeg]

This is the classic false dichotomy people end up with after growing up in state run schools. Government does not equal society, and opposing the institutionalized use of force does not oppose individuals cooperating. Wouldn't that be silly? I would like you to admit that you didn't realize this, read some literature, and we can move on from there.

Angie's list is an example of society working to ensure quality. The reason why this principle is not applied to other sectors is because the state monopolizes them. The only reason the post office, for example, can survive is because A) it can run permanent deficits and receive general funds from the government to make up for it and B) it's illegal to compete in first class mail. Restaurants would have their reputation to worry about, and if that wasn't enough of an incentive to make people feel comfortable, a service would arise to inspect restaurants for cleanliness. Not unlike the Zagat rating system, where private companies are allowed to act. Now you will probably say that can't work or that the companies would collude with the restaurants, but that is simply as assertion.

What we know on this issue are 2 things:
1) when the government doesn't legally prevent a service from being delivered, even road building, schooling (Pauline Dixon has a TED talk about low cost private schools popping up in the third world, if you think that wouldn't be affordable), and even pharmaceutical safety. I forget the name of it, but there is a private watchdog website of doctors that issues safety warnings and predicts when drugs are going to be taken off the market for safety concerns. Their record is spotless, and they have warned against every drug the FDA eventually targets and removes from the market. And that, mind you, is in a world where the FDA already exists and it's illegal to work around them in the sector. Imagine how many non-violent solutions would exist to these problems you conjure in your head if the state organizations were simply taken off the table.

2) there are several glaring examples of collusion between government so-called safety agencies or regulators and the industry actors they are meant to regulate, so if anything you should be admitting there is at least a possibility of reigning that in through competition. The public, once they know an agency is corrupt, could stop paying them. You might not realize this, but when the public realizes a government agency is corrupt, they still contribute to it through all of their taxed and fee'd activities.

This is a time for introspection, do you really think that libertarians don't understand cooperation is necessary, division of labor, etc? Division of labor, ironically, is an economic term that market proponents came up with. The only point of libertarianism is that social activity can be organized by a principle other than institutionalized violence.

Another introspection item, do you apply the same dismissive scrutiny you do to libertarianism, to it's opposite? In other words, are you arguing from the perspective that it can't possibly be correct, I "feel" that it's silly, and then rationalizing it with you half-baked straw man arguments? Or is this your true and honest fair assessment of the philosophy?

P.S. - that private website that predicted unsafe drugs is called "Worst Pills, Best Pills." Check out their track record, it is better than the FDA without having a violent coercive monopoly on regulating the industry. It's almost as if having to compete for consumers increases the quality of the thing offered them, whereas having a violent monopoly decreases that quality and changes the incentives! Worst Pills

You are the one pushing the false dichotomy that only the private sector can do anything right. It’s not either or, private or public, it’s both. Everything depends on context and the specific issue. In many cases private solutions are better but not in all.

Accusing others of what you are doing is the sure sign of a dishonest debater. You have consistently ignored arguments too hard to refute, cherry picked the few you could answer, and then argued against several strawmen and think you proved your point. It’s been a while since I have seen so many false analogies and errors in logic in such a short time.

Libertarians like you and especially of the Austrian flavor seem to be immune from learning anything from historical experience. Everything is based on Ivory Tower philosophizing regardless of the cold hard truth of reality. This country has already tried the private regulatory system you describe and it had led to less than stellar results; slave-like labor conditions, anti-competitive acts by large corporations, unsanitary cities, immoral institutionalized homes for the insane and for orphans, dangerous snake oil salesmen, and tainted food supplies to name a few. You may want to brush up on your history before you continue to recommend policies that have already been tried and have failed.

As for your Good Pills Bad Pills site, where do you think they get their data from? Without government funded research and especially FDA mandated reporting requirements that group wouldn’t be capable of much of anything. What impact do you think that they even have on prescription drug use as it is? I am sure most people have never heard of it. If the FDA isn't working correctly the answer is to fix it, not to dismantle it. That is more Libertarian black and white thinking.

 

[Queequeg]

What do you mean by "allow it?" Would you prevent children in Bangladesh from working, when I just explained to you what happened? Do you realize that American in 1790 was no richer than Bangladesh, and that's why children had to work in the early factories of the 19th century? And that as soon as the society could afford it, through capital accumulation increasing the productivity of the labor of men, child labor fell out of fashion? Same thing with work place safety, a society first has to be wealthy enough to afford these measures, all of the safety regulations in the world wouldn't change the working conditions for Bangladesh (I keep using it as a consistent example, cause I have read the stats on child prostitution and starvation after they were forced to stop "child labor"), or rather they would have no industry because their small amount of capital couldn't afford it.

I think you're asking the wrong question, you seem to be wondering why there is poverty or bad conditions in the work place. Poverty is the natural state. Imagine you are dropped, alone or with your family and friends, in the woods 2,000 years ago. You have no "greedy capitalists" to oppress you. No one to make your children work. Are you rich, or poor? You might want to ask yourself the question, why is there wealth?

P.S. - rereading your previous post, it's amazing you think child labor and pollution are excesses of capitalism. Did you copy and paste that directly or simply memorize it from someone else writing that on the internet? The Soviet Union polluted more than anyone else in that time, and in our society now the military (government) is the largest polluter. Child labor, as I have explained, is a natural state of existence in poverty. It's historically/sociologically ignorant in the extreme to labor under the delusion (I hope you children aren't laboring under this delusion) that capitalism invented child labor. Truly hilarious. Capitalism is the only system that ever got rid of child labor, through industry. Or are there children in pre-industrialized civilizations sitting around in leisure all day, or going to school, without having to "labor?"

This post is barely worth responding to as you have gotten so far afield from the original discussion and seem to be lost in your cherry picked rabbit hole of child labor. I will only say that it was Government regulation that put an end to child labor in this Country and others, not any Libertarian fantasy of individuals acting in common without force. In turn I would suggest that it is you who needs some introspection and hopefully can broaden your base of knowledge beyond Murray Rothbard. The Austrian School is a fringe ideology for a reason.

 

[Ideonaut]

I understand where you're coming from I really do, but I want you to consider one possibility: that you don't know much about the libertarian philosophic tradition, and that you assume or connote things that aren't true about it, judging my statements from that incorrect perspective. Think about it.

By the way, government has never been about individuals working for the common good. Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard is illuminating on this subject. Or perhaps it's a semantic issue, and we would be better off using the term "the state," since government can mean voluntary, self-government. In a libertarian world, there would be government, in the sense that individuals would come together and decide on common rules for things. They would not, however, have the legal authority to go to other people who don't want to be in their covenant and violently force their rules on them. That is the only, and most important, difference between statism and libertarianism, or power and market as Rothbard put it, or the political vs. economic means of interaction as I believe Nozick put it.

Instead of pulling BS out of the ideologosphere, where not much sun shines, one could look at the real world, identify societies that are most successful, see what policies and theories they use, and judge them good because they produce good results. I am a conservative mixed economy-ist based on observation. China has grown miracle-fashion like the world has never seen before --10% a year for over 30 years--on a diet of pragmatic socialism (central planning, about half government-owned enterprises, govt. ownership of banks and land) with a subordinated "free market" sector in some areas. The Chinese cat, a mixture of black and white, catches lots and lots of mice. The "statism" bad/ libertarianism good paradigm is not based on reality, but is pure ideology, and will not us anywhere. Ellen Brown's book The Public Bank Solution gives a good overview of historically super-successful economies and how they did it.

 

[Ideonaut]

Donald Trump says he wants to drain the swamp. He's full of s**t. The answer, for me, is to vote them ALL out, bring in new people, new president and one term of five or six years for everyone. No more career politicians, even good ones.

Well, you couldn't think Trump's completely full of s--t, because he has advocated just what you are advocating--term limits for Congress.

 

[Kyle M]

Instead of pulling BS out of the ideologosphere, where not much sun shines, one could look at the real world, identify societies that are most successful, see what policies and theories they use, and judge them good because they produce good results. I am a conservative mixed economy-ist based on observation. China has grown miracle-fashion like the world has never seen before --10% a year for over 30 years--on a diet of pragmatic socialism (central planning, about half government-owned enterprises, govt. ownership of banks and land) with a subordinated "free market" sector in some areas. The Chinese cat, a mixture of black and white, catches lots and lots of mice. The "statism" bad/ libertarianism good paradigm is not based on reality, but is pure ideology, and will not us anywhere. Ellen Brown's book The Public Bank Solution gives a good overview of historically super-successful economies and how they did it.

China's numbers are made up, check out Max Keiser on this. They have a shadow banking debt that is several times larger than their economy, ghost cities, etc.

 

[Kyle M]

This post is barely worth responding to as you have gotten so far afield from the original discussion and seem to be lost in your cherry picked rabbit hole of child labor. I will only say that it was Government regulation that put an end to child labor in this Country and others, not any Libertarian fantasy of individuals acting in common without force. In turn I would suggest that it is you who needs some introspection and hopefully can broaden your base of knowledge beyond Murray Rothbard. The Austrian School is a fringe ideology for a reason.

You're making a great argument for secessionism. Two people with such different ideologies and reactions to the same facts and events surely should not be forced to share political economy.

 

[Kyle M]

As for your Good Pills Bad Pills site, where do you think they get their data from? Without government funded research and especially FDA mandated reporting requirements that group wouldn’t be capable of much of anything. What impact do you think that they even have on prescription drug use as it is? I am sure most people have never heard of it. If the FDA isn't working correctly the answer is to fix it, not to dismantle it. That is more Libertarian black and white thinking.

The existence of the FDA crowds out competing safety services, as coercively financed public schools crowd out other options that would otherwise exist. Economics in one lesson, think of the unseen effects of policies, not just the seen ones. A road being built on taxes means that money not being spent on what it otherwise would be spent on.

 

[Queequeg]

You're making a great argument for secessionism. Two people with such different ideologies and reactions to the same facts and events surely should not be forced to share political economy.

More rational black and white thinking of an extremist. The sad thing is that you are being used and manipulated by the ruling elite and have no idea that it is happening. Judge Napolitano isn't on network TV to help free the masses from the hands of the ruling elite. He is there to further bind them. You need to lift your head above the ideology and see who is behind all of this BS. 32% of the younger generation now identifies itself as Libertarian. This is not a grass roots movement but is something that is being delivered from the top, just like feminism, environmentalism and any other ism that comes into vogue.
On culture, government, and social class
"The huge amount of money the CIA had from the Marshall Plan allowed them, starting around 1950, to shape the culture and political movements in the US, providing carrots to complement the FBI’s sticks. Their biggest achievement has probably been to obliterate coherent thinking about the meaning of “left” and “right” in politics." Ray Peat

 

[Queequeg]

The existence of the FDA crowds out competing safety services, as coercively financed public schools crowd out other options that would otherwise exist. Economics in one lesson, think of the unseen effects of policies, not just the seen ones. A road being built on taxes means that money not being spent on what it otherwise would be spent on.

Ah more cherry picking. Why don't you address the rest of my post instead of only the last paragraph.

 

[Kyle M]

More rational black and white thinking of an extremist. The sad thing is that you are being used and manipulated by the ruling elite and have no idea that it is happening. Judge Napolitano isn't on network TV to help free the masses from the hands of the ruling elite. He is there to further bind them. You need to lift your head above the ideology and see who is behind all of this BS. 32% of the younger generation now identifies itself as Libertarian. This is not a grass roots movement but is something that is being delivered from the top, just like feminism, environmentalism and any other ism that comes into vogue.
On culture, government, and social class
"The huge amount of money the CIA had from the Marshall Plan allowed them, starting around 1950, to shape the culture and political movements in the US, providing carrots to complement the FBI’s sticks. Their biggest achievement has probably been to obliterate coherent thinking about the meaning of “left” and “right” in politics." Ray Peat

This would make sense if libertarianism wasn't indeed a grass roots, philosophical movement. You have demonstrated time and again you don't know it's history and it's basic arguments in different realms of policy questions.

P.S. - if there's one thing the elite doesn't want, and always keeps out of public discourse, it's secessionist politics and jury nullification. The reasons are obvious. Judge Napolitano is an advocate of both, going to great lengths to educate the public about the history and legal precedents of nullification in fact. I wonder if you have time to learn about things like that in your busy schedule of repeating over and over that elites run the world. There's actually a libertarian historical field called "elite analysis," that's probably a conspiracy too. You are controlled opposition I guess.

 

[Kyle M]

Ah more cherry picking. Why don't you address the rest of my post instead of only the last paragraph.

You have yet to address any of my refutations to your points. Calling something "cherry picking" is a convenient way out, but don't think I'm falling for it, or anyone else. I think our arguments speak for themselves here, I am comfortable with a Pepsi challenge of people reading this thread and deciding for themselves who makes the better argument.

 

[Queequeg]

This would make sense if libertarianism wasn't indeed a grass roots, philosophical movement. You have demonstrated time and again you don't know it's history and it's basic arguments in different realms of policy questions.

P.S. - if there's one thing the elite doesn't want, and always keeps out of public discourse, it's secessionist politics and jury nullification. The reasons are obvious. Judge Napolitano is an advocate of both, going to great lengths to educate the public about the history and legal precedents of nullification in fact. I wonder if you have time to learn about things like that in your busy schedule of repeating over and over that elites run the world. There's actually a libertarian historical field called "elite analysis," that's probably a conspiracy too. You are controlled opposition I guess.

That is exactly how a low level Scientologist would respond if I tried to tell them about Lord Xenu.

 

[Queequeg]

You have yet to address any of my refutations to your points. Calling something "cherry picking" is a convenient way out, but don't think I'm falling for it, or anyone else. I think our arguments speak for themselves here, I am comfortable with a Pepsi challenge of people reading this thread and deciding for themselves who makes the better argument.

I am not so sure that people are really digging what your serving, unless "extremist Libertarian" and "BS out of the idologosphere" are positive comments in your world.

 

[Frankdee20]

I used to think I was "liberal" until I started seeing all of the captured video footage and screenshots of real liberals. Now I know what a real liberal is. I'm so embarrassed. Never again.

This isn't even about the election. Regardless of who the POTUS is, or whatever happens politically, I will never call myself a liberal again. I will try to avoid these people as much as possible. They are so cringey. They are so hateful. They are racists.

Hey liberals, I have news for you, just because I'm a heterosexual white male, that doesn't mean that I have anything to do with what "white" people who've long been dead did or did not to do other people 50-20,000 years ago. They want to blame everything on "straight white men" but they ignore history. Europeans/whites weren’t the only people to do bad things in history. Japan invaded China in 1937 in the Second Sino-Japanese War and millions died. Asian on Asian crime. And it had nothing to do with white people. Same with Pol Pot in Cambodia. He killed a million people. Same with the Rwandan genocide, Africans killing Africans. Native Americans killed each other long before any Pilgrims came. And many others. "Europeans" weren't the only people to do bad things. It's not a race thing, it's a human thing. But liberals want to make it about race. "Brown people", or "people of color", "POC" can do bad things too:

The Five Worst Leaders In Africa

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These "liberals" want to control everything you do. They want to control what Halloween costume you can or can't wear. This is a student at Yale. Yes, Yale, an Ivy League school, screaming at a school professor about someones Halloween costume.

They want to control how much sugar and/or salt you can eat (Mayor Bloomberg). They are crazy.

White privilege? The country is still about 70% white. By that logic, Chinese privilege exists in China because it's mostly Chinese people. What about Middle Eastern privilege? All those rich and spoiled Arabs and Persians? Also, if you've never been to the white ghettos of the country then you don't know what you're talking about. I know some really poor white people. The color of their skin hasn't benefited them in any way. They are still poor. Go to Warren, MI or Lynn, MA and many other places to see for yourself how privileged they are. And that's not even starting in the South.

If there were no successful "people of color," I would agree. But there are many. Will Smith was the highest paid actor at one point, Barack Obama became POTUS twice, there are many successful black/asian/hispanic/middle eastern engineers in Silicon Valley, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a successful astrophysicist. It's not about race but again, liberals are the real racists.

The truth is, no matter what your gender or race is, if you live in a Western country you are by default already more privileged than most of the world. Liberals hate America. Then why don't they move to North Korea or Saudi Arabia? See how much you'll like it there. Children in the Congo get their hands chopped off yet liberals hate America. Makes sense.

What about white neo-nazis you ask? They are bad people too. I put them in the same category as Black Lives Matter aka the klan with a tan. They are both the same ideology, just with different color skin. If they really cared about police brutality, then they would care about it for everyone. Non-blacks also get killed by the cops too.

Do I care if I see a black supremacist on the street holding up a fist? No, because he's free to be a black supremacist. If he assaults me or disturbs the peace when I'm trying to sleep, then we have a problem. But I don't care, he's free to protest all he wants. Just don't touch me or my stuff and we're good. And yes, these so called "liberals" are free to be crazy and do the things they do (except when they assault people) I just hope there's not too many of them where I live, that's all.

What liberals don't understand is that you can't "end racism" because people are free to be racists, even liberals themselves. I don't judge a person by their ethnicity/race. When I meet someone for the first time, I gage whether or not we will become friends based on our common interests and activities, not their race. But a liberal will hate me solely because I'm a white male.

Don't believe me? Look up the video "You're a f***ing white male!!!" by this guy:

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Liberalism is a mental disorder, a famous Nutritionist declared.