You said that “everyone has seen what a canard that mantra is.” I was disagreeing with this. Take it or leave it.
Daniel
I love it when my argument is completely understood without me having to go to the trouble of typing it up! Thanks for your answers. I was indeed mistaken in my assumptions about what you would say.
You’re welcome. This thread seems to have petered out, but I see that you’ve joined the discussion about rights. I enjoyed reading your post there, and have commented on it. I think I’ll concentrate on that thread going forward. See you there.
…the hell?
By “proofing,” meant, well, proofing – checking for grammar errors and typos and coding mistakes and the like. I stand by everything I wrote, substance-wise, and I’m really not sure why you would think otherwise.
Heh. It isn’t a canard if it’s true.
thump thump
(The pizza was good, actually, if not up to New York standards.)
Tax accounting is actually a subset of accounting. My wife, a Big-4 CPA, for example does not do anything related to taxes – she audits the books of publicly-traded companies.
Accounting is, essentially, the act of measuring economic activity for a given enterprise. Sometimes that is done for tax purposes, sometimes for investors, sometimes for internal management purposes, sometimes for other reasons.
Indeed, Priniciples of Accounting 101 deals pretty much exclusively with the very basic aspects of double-entry financial accounting in accordance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) – the sort of accounting that yields those nice, glossy financial statements sent from, say, GE to its shareholders. Debits, credits, and assets = liabilities + equity are the order of the day. Tax accounting comes later in the curricula.
Libertaria would most certainly still need accountants. Business enterprises need to understand how they are doing, and accounting is the way in which they determine that. That’s true in virtually every economic and political system.
Indeed. Although you might see some convenient, ad-hoc redefinition of “coercion” to encompass such surveillance. Which is why all that “one law” stuff is silly and unworkable out in the real world.
“Hurriedly”? That post took a long time to compose, man. That’s part of why I declined to proof it – I had already spent a silly amount of time writing it up.
I think this statement is incorrect which might indicate why you are missing the point of Libertarianism.
I believe this refutes in broad terms your statement that Libertarians want a “one law” system.
Libertaria would have a government, just smaller and non-coercive.
Libertaria would have more than one law, just fewer laws based more on logic and scientific reasoning than religion and tradition.
Libertaria would have government oversight on the economy, with much less influence on the market, fewer regulatory laws, fewer taxation types(income, tarriffs, etc.) and less taxation in total(due to smaller government.)
Until you understand these things your arguments against Libertarianism fail to even pass go.
And until you understand that I was discussing one particuular permutation of a libertarian system with a person who proposes the “one law” system as both sensible and viable, your post will fail to even pass go.
(As I said several times in this thread, libertarianism is a fractious movement, which is why I focused on Lib’s particular vision of a libertarian world, as he as espoused in many threads for quite some time now.)
In fact, let me take you to task on each of your statements…
But Lib does not want a government, at least as commonly understood. Lib is not a minarchist. He wants to smash the state entirely, and replace it with wholly-voluntary entities that one can simply opt out of entirely.
Not in Lib’s utopian vision. Sure, there may be “laws,” but in Lib’s mind, all of those laws can be derived directly from his noncoercion principle. Effectively, it is a “one law” system.
Again, not in Lib’s vision. The notion that Lib would tolerate taxation (rather than a voluntary exchange of money for services) is particularly laughable to anyone who has engaged him on the topic in the past.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like libertarianism as a critique of modern government. I’m quite libertarian in my particular world-view, actually: I believe in a smaller state with fewer restrictions on free enterprise. What I oppose, vehemently, is re-inventing the world based on the view of radical utopians. That is true whether it is a communist system or a libertarian one such as that proposed by Lib.
There is a wide spectrum in Libertarian philosophy regarding the role of government and application of the non-coercion principle.
I apologise for assuming too much from that one sentence.
Actually, my experience has been that his misunderstandings are more profound than that. He attacks libertarianism not from principle, not from reason, but almost from the point of view of madness. The coy pretend inquiries, allegedly born of mere curiosity, that turn out to be ambushes for the purpose of creating agitation and argument. Denials that his questions have been answered when in fact they have been answered directly and repeatedly. Boss Hoggs scenarios that morph over time until they are practically unrecognizable from their initial states. The holding of different standards for himself than he holds for others, such as his refusal to acknowledge that the well documented failings of his own system matter, while what he perceives as failings in libertarianism doom it as a philosophy. His conflation of my personal preferences for a libertarian implementation with libertarian theory as a whole. His bizarre and inexplicable misrepresentations of my position — for example, “Lib does not want a government” — that he has made up out of the clear blue, or by completely lacking comprehension of simple statements. These are not the methods and effects of a reasonable man.
On this I completely agree. Indeed, there are libertarians having more modest reforms in mind that I am totally on board with.
Hi Lib, good to see you’re still participating. Tell you what: if my viewpoint is “madness,” let’s poll a random sample of SDMB’ers and see if they reach that same conclusion. Sure, sure, I know, logic and reason aren’t won by popularity contests, but we’ve got some smart folks over here, and I’d bet they can fairly evaluate whether your statement is in fact true or whether it’s bourne of your own emotional attachment to your stated worldview.
A refusal to answer – or, indeed, to even consider the question – is not an answer, Lib.
I don’t think my scenarios morphed much, if at all. I cited parallels to the real world to demonstrate that the statements I was making were reasonable, but those parallels did not change the facts of the hypothetical.
This hasn’t really arisen in this thread, but I’ve dealt with it in discussions with you in the past. Namely, the issue isn’t that the status quo is perfect – no, far from it, it has many flaws – but rather that your system would make things a lot worse.
Well, no, I don’t, actually, which is why I focus on your implementation. I actually don’t have much problem with libertarian theory writ large – indeed, as I’ve stated, it informs much of my own view of the world. I do have a problem with certain proffered implementations of libertarianism, of which your vision is one.
Perhaps you missed the qualifier “at least as [is] commonly understood” in my sentence. I know it must have been a simple mistake, and not a deliberate distortion, because that would, indeed, be quite unreasonable on your part.
I stand by my statement. Your vision of government isn’t really a traditional government, but a collection of services offered at a price by private enterprise, unbound from any kind of geograpic political unit. Indeed, your whole worldview is bound up in dislike for traditional government – that is, after all, what you seek to do away with.
As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing legally preventing you from paying someone with a suitcase full of money. There’s a reporting requirement on all transactions above $10,000. But so long as you file the paperwork, you’re in the clear.
My point exactly.