I think you mean hokey-pokey, none of what you’re talking about has any relevance to this discussion.
Sorry, don’t think you’d turn a profit. Armies are ridiculous money dumps.
So you’re saying that liberals denounce libertarians in order to further the liberal agenda of opposing gay marriage and enforcing religious based blue laws?
Yeah, nothing incoherent about your political beliefs.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
So you’re saying that liberals denounce libertarians in order to further the liberal agenda of opposing gay marriage and enforcing religious based blue laws?
[/QUOTE]
Well, based on the responses in this and other threads on this topic I’d say that liberals denounce libertarianism because they think it equates to anarchy and corporations becoming nation states with unlimited power. This seems equivalent to conservatives who denounce socialism become it leads to atheistic pogroms against religion and gulags…or something.
-XT
But if he had said that liberals were denouncing libertarians by saying “If we let corporations do whatever they want and let everyone buy guns, everyone will get food poisoning and die!” he’d at least be arguing the right stereotypes. Why would anyone think liberals would be upset about gays getting married and stores selling alcohol on Sundays? It’s a pretty embarassing post from someone who’s accusing other people of not thinking about what they’re saying.
So the FDA? Illegitimate?
No, it’s the equivalent of people denouncing Communism because it leads to pogroms against religion and gulags.
They’re not making anything up.
Libertariansism has been coopted by people who end up defining it almost exactly as has been described. There are people who will put whatever label they can on the “I don’t want to pay taxes” ideology.
Generally speaking, my libertarian friends believe that government should be limited to providing “public goods” maintaining the rule of law, protecting property rights and preventing violence and coercion. Other than that, the market will pretty much work everything out.
They don’t want small government because they want lower taxes, they will pay whatever it costs to maintain rule of law, defend our country and protect individual and property rights. They believe in progressive taxation where poor Jim pays a lower tax rate than rich John but they don’t think that rich John should pay more in taxes so that poor Jim can live better than he earns (this is where the “taxes is theft” notion comes into their philosophy).
Of course they are stupendously wrong but I think their naive little hearts are in the right place and in some ways we would improve society by injecting a bit more libertarianism into our policy.
The problem is taht there are a lot of people who are not acting in good faith who use libertariansim as an excuse to jsutify all sorts of inequities.
Wait, so what you’re saying is that allowing same sex marriage, eliminating religious based laws, decriminalizing most drugs, are liberal beliefs?
I’m confused because those are all Libertarian beliefs. And what we have are a dozen or so threads in which a handful of liberals bash Libertarianism as the worst evil known to man. I’ve seen no qualifiers, just flat out rejection of anything Libertarian. Which would lead me to conclude that those bashing libertarianism are also against allowing same sex marriage, letting blacks own property, and giving women the right to vote.
At some point, those handful of liberals are going to realize that when you give the government power over marriage, you also give the government power to ban same sex marriage. Having government regulating alcohol means they can also ban sales on Sundays, before 11am, after 2pm, to people under 21, to blacks, women, people with red hair.
Having the FDA, USDA, and health department seems like a good idea in theory, that while it means a reduction in cases of food poisoning, it also means you aren’t allowed to buy raw milk cheese, and should consider yourself lucky you’re allowed to buy sushi.
Eventually, it’s going to click that the “libertarian philosophy” actually lines up more with liberals than with conservatives. And some day they’ll realize that transferring freedom for a bit of security isn’t always a good idea.
Maybe, just maybe, some day, this will all sink in.
Right now, the term libertarian is a short hand for unthinking liberals to attack unthinking conservatives, the result being this putrid mess of a thread in which the same liberal doper explains how libertarianism means anarchy, no government, no laws, and no regulations.
Then you aren’t reading carefully enough.
In what way is buying sushi different than buying raw fish?
I think it depends on what you think freedom means. When people equate freedom to smoke pot with the freedom to not pay income taxes, they lose me.
If libertarians would stop showing up to defend the inthinking conservatives, we wouldn’t have this problem. How about you start potinging out taht these guys aren’t actually libertarians and you throw them out of your parties.
The fact that you are somehow unaware of something so stunningly obvious would have lead me to conclude that you have virtually no knowledge of political issues. Would have, that is, if I hadn’t already arrived at that conclusion on the basis of your previous posts.
Nobody, outside of your imagination, has issued the blanket denunciation of every position claimed by libertarians. How could they? Libertarians claim everything.
The reality is that there is much in libertarianism that is good and original. But as the cliche goes, the parts that are good aren’t original and the parts that are original aren’t good.
Part of the problem is that there are two different types of libertarians.
There are libertarians on the (broadly) political left ranging from anarchists to very minimalist in their tolerance of government.
I’m more or less one of those types of libertarians.
Then there are the libertarians on the (broadly) political right who are all in favour of repression as long as it doesn’t affect them, anyone they’re likely to know or affect their profits.
The question of how to organise government on a libertarian basis that was more than just an excuse to hate poor people is one that I and especially my hubby have given a lot of thought to over the years.
One of the few anaarchist thinkers who’s tackled the problem is Malatesta.
It’s a hugs subject and I’ll come back to it.
Private armies is definitely a no-no.
I’m a firm supporter of the right to bear arms but I certainly don’t support the wacky backwoods militia types.
I’m going to think about your excellent post and try and post a more detailed reply tomorrow.
Wow, you did a great job displaying your knowledge of political issues. I had no idea libertarians claim everything, sure makes this discussion, and the dozen other identical threads, rather pointless don’t you think?
So to answer the OP: Libertarians claim everything.
Since you asked:
The various health departments including the FDA, USDA, CDC, and state organizations have no idea how to deal with sushi.
Technically, government regulations state that fish must be cooked to 145F, because raw and under-cooked fish is considered potentially dangerous, the same way raw beef, pork, poultry and sprouts are.
And yet, people want to eat raw fish, going against what the government thinks is good for us. But who are we to disagree with government regulations?
For a while there the rule was that fish served for sushi had have been frozen, but that stopped a few years ago.
Now the solution is to put a disclaimer on the menu saying, "eating raw or under-cooked meat is potentially dangerous.
If left up to the government, serving raw fish wouldn’t be allowed, any more than serving raw chicken.
There is also no justifiable reason to ban the sale of raw milk cheese. That specific bit of regulation was put into place after a factory selling Mexican style queso fresco made people sick. Lots of other western countries have no problem eating it.
The goal of preventing food poisoning is great in terms of security. Means we can blindly go into any [licensed] restaurant and blindly order off the menu and blindly gobble it down. But it also means there is a loss of freedom in what we are allowed to eat.
Did you know that fresh orange juice is considered potentially dangerous? Did you know one of the bigger food poisoning outbreaks recently was from watermelon?
Most of the issues could be cleared up if we required food be irradiated. Feel free to look up people’s reaction to that proposal.
And the real clincher is that 40% of food poisoning occurs in the home. We go through all this trouble to stop food poisoning, but then fall short actually taking it seriously.
They lose most people. But note that “income taxes” aren’t the only way for government to collect revenue.
How exactly would I go about doing that? Are the Dems about to toss out every idiot that says something stupid?
There are a lot of cafeteria libertarians that want to pick and choose the parts they like. Just as there are cafeteria liberals and conservatives who also lack the strength of their convictions.
For some reason, if a person wants lower taxes they get called libertarian and end up in a pit thread. If someone wants legalized SSM they get called a progressive and become a hero. Both are the same philosophy, ie less government involvement in their lives.
Not at all. Libertarians claim everything and the rest of us refute their claims.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Not at all. Libertarians claim everything and the rest of us refute their claims.
[/QUOTE]
The refutations seem notably short on cites and long on what looks like uninformed speculation, to me at least. I’ve asked Der for cites to backup his own conjecture but I haven’t seen any as yet. Do you have some?
-XT
I realize this is Great Debates, but you said that with such gusto that you’ve got me curious. Who are these libertarians “claim[ing] everything?”
How does someone go about “claim[ing] everything?”
So far, all I’ve seen are anti-libertarians refuting claims no one made.
Would still like a cite if it’s not too much trouble.
I was hoping to forstall the definition-of-libertarianism argument that this thread has derailed to. But I should have remembered Der Trihs’s posts in various gun threads, in which he has laid out his basically Hobbesian view of society: that government is the only thing keeping us safe from the savages. Evidently the only thing that he has an even lower opinion of than the hoi polli are the corporations and the pols they buy.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I was hoping to forstall the definition-of-libertarianism argument that this thread has derailed to. But I should have remembered Der Trihs’s posts in various gun threads, in which he has laid out his basically Hobbesian view of society: that government is the only thing keeping us safe from the savages. Evidently the only thing that he has an even lower opinion of than the hoi polli are the corporations and the pols they buy.
[/QUOTE]
Not really Der’s fault…he simply has a different definition of what libertarianism and libertarians are than most people. Unfortunately, even among libertarians the definition is going to vary, and the term libertarianism is going to mean different things to different people. And since no one has ever actually implemented anything like libertarianism in a society we can only guess at what it would really mean, and how it would be implemented…assuming it ever could be. My guess is that like any political philosophy, it would never be implemented in a pure form (even if there WAS a ‘pure form’ that libertarians could actually agree on), so it would only be aspects of it that would be put into practice.
I can tell you one thing…it wouldn’t be Der’s corporate totalitarianism, as that is pretty much anathema to just about every stripe of libertarians I know. It wouldn’t be chaos or anarchy either. Nor would it be a world without limits that anyone could do anything they wanted any time they wanted. Myself, I think it would look a little like Europe and a little like the US in that I imagine a practical implementation of libertarianism would have fewer ‘sin’ type laws and more freedom for adults to decide for themselves what they should or shouldn’t do (unlike in the US today and even unlike in parts of Europe), but less government and regimentation than the Europeans have (and more like the US has today). But it wouldn’t actually look all that much different than either looks today…it certainly wouldn’t be an alien sci-fi world of corporate nation states battling it out for supremacy while the peasantry is forced to work as slave labor.
-XT