I’ve not followed the whole debate but just clicked to read this last post.
Let me see if I got this straight. The Europeans tax gasoline to compensate for “externalities” like CO2 emissions, and OP blames that on Europe’s failure to embrace capitalism? But Americans pay more for healthcare because of a lack of competition compared with Europe’s single-payer health systems?
:smack: Perhaps Mods should move this thread from Great Debates to the Comedy Room.
Why is utilitarianism always important to these people only when it comes to capitalism? And the global scale negative externalities are never addressed, it’s just “we’ve got the niftiest gadgets of any possible timeline!”
The GOP economic platform has been failing for decades and we are the guinea pigs. Are you just going to whistle and hope we don’t notice?
I beg to differ. The economy was in great shape in much of the 1990s, early to mid 2000s, and most of the 2010s. If you were an average American in 2018-2019, life was fucking amazing compared to pretty much almost any moment in history and almost any place in the world.
Do we have some problems? Yes, but far from “failing”. They’re just things that we have to slowly improve over time, and there are many different approaches. You don’t have to go Bernie to do that. There are a lot of free-market and capitalistic solutions to those problems as well.
Healthcare and higher education need some improvement, but that’s not nearly enough to say that the entire GOP economic platform is a failure. And every country has its problems. Being First World doesn’t make you immune to problems like this.
And like I mentioned earlier, you make a lot less and pay a lot more for everyday foods in a lot of Nordic countries as well as Canada. Groceries, housing, almost everything. Purchasing power goes way down. There are a lot of Europeans that immigrate to America but not vice versa. It’s for a reason. We have less safety net here, but more potential for prosperity too.
Also, I was responding to someone that said that only the “elites” would support a libertarian-leaning (note: not 100% libertarian) platform. But that doesn’t make sense. Much of the GOP and working class in the trades votes for GOP in favor of their economic policy. And many everyday people are in favor of liberating on social issues.
Why would so many “everyday” people support the GOP, but not an economically GOP and socially Democrat with pro-2A and less hawkish platform? It leaves the “worst” of both worlds out of the parties for many people. Why is that adjustment suddenly only for the “elites”?
Exapno Mapcase
Libertarianism is sociopathy. Democracy is caring about others and using the government to ensure that everyone is ensured a measure of safety and decency. That is not the mission of capitalism, which since the days of Michael Jensen and Milton Friedman, is concerned solely with maximizing stock prices. The purpose of government is to counter unfettered capitalism. That’s laughable today; industry has captured all the regulatory bodies and Congress continues to pass legislation undermining enforcing regulation. Thousands of reports of unsafe working conditions emerge at all levels every year. Libertarian is fundamentally antithetical to democracy at this most basic level.
As for decency, the sentence “Private organizations and charities can do a more efficient job of helping people in need anyway than the government can.” could only be written by someone wholly detached from reality. There is never not a time when the Venn diagram of libertarians and reality is anything but two circles.
That’s almost certainly because virtually all who identify as libertarian are white, and most are male and young. They sit on their pinnacle of privilege and refuse all attempts to acknowledge that huge segments of society do not have their automatic privilege. I’m sure that most are secretly terrified that their privilege will be taken away if real democracy is ever let loose in this country.
Libertarians has no plans, no ideals, no means of dealing with crises, no intention of improving life for anyone. The invisible hand will do it all. Well, there is a real invisible enemy called global climate change that is the result of lack of regulation and lack of caring about tomorrow. Only a concerted effort by governments can begin to tackle it. No hope is left for beating it, only the slightest mitigation is now possible for a planet-wide scourge that you will be living with every moment for the rest of your life. And your philosophy explicitly states that you will do nothing about it.
Libertarians are just tea partiers with a vocabulary. They will be overwhelmed by multiracial and multicultural tomorrow. Heard much about the Tea Party lately? The rest of us will take much glee at watching your numbers dwindle.
Mostly because they think that the only reason that they are not a millionaire is because the system is holding them back.
Because everyday people don’t really understand macro economics, but they do understand social issues. They can’t tell whether a tax policy will affect them, or what that effect will be, but they know they can tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They don’t know what the federal deficit means in terms of how it affects the US’s credit and economic power, but they do know that it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. They could not tell you how foreign trade affects both their purchasing power and the value of their labor, but they do know that they want to keep their guns.
Meanwhile, there is a report from the Federal Reserve that said a large percentage of people would have trouble covering an unexpected $400 expense.
Couldn’t they just sell all of the expensive luxuries that the Heritage foundation found that they were hoarding? Surely a microwave, dvd player, several-year-old desktop, and a sega genesis could cover that with no problem! (Note: sarcasm included).
Then why does 2 months of unemployment put so many people on the verge of homelessness? The stock market has done great; people on the lower end of the economic scale, not so much.
THis is a non sequiter. Republicans have not been good stewards when they have been in charge. You want trickle down? it never worked and it’s becoming more and more visible.
Fiscal conservatism is not real and never has been. It has always been a deceptive way to oppose certain aspects of social liberalism. The more fiscally conservative you are, the less socially liberal you are.
This brilliant line cannot be repeated too often.
Thirty years ago or so I called myself a libertarian. I don’t call myself that anymore — My ideas haven’t changed much but the tag ‘libertarian’ has been usurped by idiots and hypocrites.
As a specific example, Clean Air Acts were passed in the 1990’s by a coalition of environmentalists and libertarians. Real libertarians understand that to make “the invisible hand of the market” work properly, external costs need to be afforded. (In addition to creating proper incentives, taxes can help fund government.)
Yet today’s libertarians denounce Clean Air Acts and their relatives, carbon taxes and so on. Some of these libertarians understand economics well enough to realize they’re contradicting their own principles, but justify their refusals to regulate polluters, etc. with memes like “gummint workers are all lazy and corrupt,” “that’s mah money, not the gummint’s” and so on. Cite? SDMB’s self-appointed Libertarian mentor, initials SS.
Pretty accurate. It’s a pleasure to read someone even more cynical than I!
This is a pons asinorum, in that if you don’t understand why it’s mostly meaningless you really don’t “get” economics at a deep level.
Let’s take a few more:
Says the people who’d whine and stamp their little feet until their faces turned red were more cities to implement workable zero-fare public transit.
I know, I know, it’s impossible, which is why my hometown has been doing it for years.
They can at least try to avoid being out-of-touch. They can at least attempt to live in the real world. If they got out of their ivory towers for a few days, they might realize that you can’t get a job without certain things, especially the kinds of jobs the “poor” people are going for. No, walking in, demanding to see “The Boss”, and impressing him with your Moxie And Vigor isn’t going to work, and attempting to force the issue will just get you jailed. I’m aware they live in the land of “alternative facts” but they could at least make an effort to know what’s going on.
The rest of it… the whole rest of it… is them complaining that Capitalism works. They’re apparently pissed the fuck off that Those People can afford mass-produced consumer goods, when one of the main selling points of Capitalism is that it incentivizes companies to compete in an economic system where prices are driven down through competition such that precisely those kinds of goods are made inexpensive enough the great masses of people can afford them.
It’s actually hilarious. I took these views over to another interest forum that is more right-leaning and I basically got called just another libtard that wants to allow the cultural fabric of America to deteriorate by allowing kids to go tranny and “chemical castration”. Some actually stopped reading the second they saw that I was personally okay with open borders. So I get criticized for my social views there, but almost nothing on fiscal.
Here’s on the other hand, what I’m assuming is a more left-wing forum, almost no one bats an eye on the social stuff, but everyone treats me like a privileged young man with loaded parents that wants the poor to get fucked.
Welcome to the elusive position known as being moderate or third party.
Because your economic views are utterly simplistic and mostly incorrect.
Economics is a science. We know things about economics. Ditto history. You’re wading in with all the subtlety of a stoned moose and spraying your ignorance around. Well, guess what: Science isn’t a democracy, so ignorance doesn’t get a vote. You think charities can replace welfare and you’re wrong. You don’t get to debate me on this because you are factually incorrect. The existence of the modern welfare state, created by Otto von Bismarck, a Conservative the likes of which you have never in your entire existence heard of let alone experienced, proves that the government has to step in and do certain things or people starve.
You think free-market healthcare is feasible. More than 200 economists endorse Medicare For All on an economic basis and, yes, economists are an authority when it comes to economics.
You have nothing. You’re doing the equivalent of walking up to a geologist and claiming you don’t believe in igneous rocks and think sandstone is morally suspect. You’re too lazy to realize the amount of work you need to do to understand economics.
Easy explanation. Fiscal conservatism isn’t a sincerely held position. It’s a fig leaf for other socially hateful things. Those are the things that righties truly care about.
You’ve displayed an ignorance of economics in general, as well as some hostility/indifference to the poor. You cannot compensate for this by transferring credits for being more progressive on different issues.
The US government was formed to “promote the general welfare”. That is, if you can trust the constitution for its stated purpose.