What does this have to do with me and what I think would be awesome?
I was answering Chronos’ question:
“let’s hear some examples of contexts where the government is over-intrusive, which would not be the case in a libertarian society, and I’ll argue for how those laws are just enforcing people’s rights to not be oppressed.”
I presented Blue Laws, and you brought up drunk driving, here we are.
Do you agree that there are laws that are over-intrusive?
I was giving examples of overly intrusive laws. Setting an age limit for the purchase of a product seems pretty intrusive, don’t you? Do we need the government telling people they’re not old enough to buy something?
Simple, those that don’t want to drink don’t. Those that do want to drink do. Prudes and busy bodies can stay out of my business. If a business doesn’t want to serve alcohol it doesn’t have to. If it wants to it can without having to pay the government $5000 a year.
See post 74. If people have children they can go to legal zoom and get a form. Doesn’t require the government. Because when you involve the government you get certain people pushing their own morality (ie Sharia law).
Why can’t to men or two women get married? Why is the government involved? Seems pretty intrusive to me.
Yup. Busybodies love to be involved in any way they can, government makes it easier.
Translation: “fuck the orphans I’ve got mine”. Let children suffer and die, for your tax cut.
Are you really this completely short sighted, how about generational debt too? Charge kids for their parents loans. Basically you’re attacking innocents for what you perceive as crimes that they had no control over.
I had the gull to be born into a poor family. Did I as child deserve to starve?
Medicaid paid for corrective eye surgery when I was 7. Do 7 year olds deserve blindness for dastardly growing up in a poor family?
How about my appendectomy? I should have done without, a painful death would have taught me to choose my parents better!
We need orphanages because we’re not complete evil pieces of shit. We need state funded orphanages to make sure we have orphanages.
Since you attack orphanages in your defense of libertaria, why shouldn’t I conclude your idea of libertaria is a place for only the evil, and the ignorant?
I read more than you think, I read what you said, but what also what you didn’t say. You went on and on about how awful the dead parents of orphans are, but not one word why the orphans themselves deserve to be left to the streets, except via your perception of their parent’s selfishness. Very telling.
In Liberteria no one ever has unexpected health problems that come with bankrupting high medical bills, yea?
How about my family? What should have happened to me in your ideal society when my appendix was going to burst and my mother didn’t have enough for medical care?
Surely I deserved painful death to punish my mother’s selfishness, yes?
So you are attacking me for what I didn’t say? That’s an interesting new twist. Is there something I actually said that you’d like to discuss? If not, please allow what I don’t say to provide the rebuttal to the things you didn’t say.
So you’ve just answered your own question: “why do we need orphanages?” For starters. We need them because children shouldn’t suffer and die in poverty.
The question then comes down to the best way to fund and maintain orphanages, and other programs for children in bad situations.
No, that’s the answer to “what do orphanages do?” We know what orphanages do, the question I asked is why are there so many children left without parents?
Personally, I’d never allow a child I know end up in a state funded service. I would very happily take them in.
Yes it does, what do you suggest? And do you see any potential for fraud etc?
Another standard libertarian No-True-Scotsman excuse. No market is ever free enough, there’s never low enough taxes or few enough regulations. Nothing is ever “real” libertarianism, so they can handwave away every disaster that happens whenever anyone tries any of their ideas. The comparison to communism is very apt; all the failures were due to the USSR or China or wherever not being “real” communism, not because communism is flawed.
Which brings up another feature of libertarianism: Egomania. Massive overconfidence. The libertarian thinks that he doesn’t need the government, he doesn’t need the help or protection of the government because he’s just that much superior to all those subhuman vermin who do need the government.
No, that’s just what YOU think. A libertarian system requires government protection, while trying to avoid government intrusion.
For example, I’d like to distill my own alcohol and sell it to 20 year olds on Sundays. Currently busybodies use the government to prevent me from doing that.
But if I did have such a venture, I would need the government to provide rule of law so warlords don’t rob me.
I could then use my profits to start an orphanage, but right now I’m not allowed.
Government exists to serve needs. And homeless children dying in the streets is a need.
You think that the private sector will step up to take care of children? What if they don’t? Are you okay with government stepping in when it becomes obvious that thousands of children die every winter?
Your idea that things will work out isn’t a compelling argument. It’s a declaration of faith.
Nope. It’s a statement of fact. If it’s not, it should be easy for you to point to a country that tried to implement a libertarian government. Name one.
The only “protection” a libertarian system offers is protecting the powerful from their victims.
Because you’d likely end up poisoning them since you wouldn’t know what the hell you were doing.
But being a libertarian, you probably wouldn’t, or would use it as some sort of child labor camp or worse. And even if you were the exception among libertarians and didn’t, there would still be the majority of orphans who would be left to suffer and starve in the cold while the libertarians sneered in contempt at them.
I don’t, which is why I oppose the ideological psychopathy known as libertarianism.
No, it wasn’t. But even if it were, being “economically” libertarian without being socially libertarian is a non starter. When half the population can’t vote or own property, and minorities are routinely discriminated against with the force of law, you don’t have freedom. Libertarianism without freedom is like socialism with private ownership of the means of production. It violates the very definition of the thing.
But I think you just invented another chapter for your book!
Okay, let’s look at those two statements:
"Government exists to serve needs. "
“And homeless children dying in the streets is a need.”
Starting with the first, work your way through the process of how a government goes about serving needs. Assuming a democracy, a majority need to recognize the need. So right off the bat it is entirely possible that in any other system not enough people give a shit about “the need” to address it.
Then you have to consider how the government goes about providing that need. Is it something the government can do?
Lastly, how does the government get the funds?
So we take the generic orphanage and concede that that yes a majority want to keep kids from dying in the street.
Do you consider “raising children” a task the government seems particularly good at? Do they have a particularly good track record of it?
Now, when it comes to funding, if we already know that the majority are in favour of orphanages, we can presume that they’d also be in favour of funding the orphanage.
So, why not let those that recognize the need address it and fund it? Why does it need to be the government? If the majority of society recognizes the need, and are willing to fund it, government is simply in the way.
Human society has had to deal with orphans for a pretty long time, do you think this is some how a new and sudden problem?
It’s not a new problem. However, we don’t live in hunter-gatherer tribes any more.
Could you please answer my question? If private individuals don’t step up to help children, how many have to die in the streets before you think it’s something the government should do something about?
Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that the US during “The Gilded Age” was a Libertarian experiment. Relative to the rest of the world, it would appear to have been a pretty successful experiment. Let’s remember that it was during this time that millions of people flooded the shores of the US to free themselves from the less libertarian societies in Europe and Asia.
And what was going on in government? Hardly of the “libertarian” stripe: