Stupid liberal idea of the day

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@42fish

Any reason you’re so darn certain the market would provide roads to farms? After all, historically the market didn’t provide electric service to farms:

“In the 1930s, the U.S. lagged significantly behind Europe in providing electricity to rural areas due to the unwillingness of power companies to serve farmsteads.”

"In 1934, less than 11% of US farms had electricity. (In Germany and France that same year, nearly 90% of farms had electricity.) "

But then, something did change:
“By 1942, nearly 50% of US farms had electricity, and by 1952 almost all US farms had electricity.”

So did the market (somewhat belatedly) provide? Not exactly. The Feds stepped in via the Rural Electrification Act to provide loans to farmers to create electrification cooperatives.

(Quotes from Wikipedia’s article on the Rural Utilities Service [Successor to the Rural Electrification Administration]: Rural Utilities Service - Wikipedia).

This, my friends, is known as a complete and utter verbal bitchslap. I’m gonna have to remember this one.

[drewtwo99]

So are people in this thread actually arguing that government working with private contractors to build roads, allowing them to bid and allow the free market to force optimal prices and quality roads is a stupid liberal idea of the day?

[gamerunknown]

@WillFarnaby

On one hand you call me liar. On the other you link to Mises where he backs up my claim.

Not even. I’m seriously beginning to doubt your reading comprehension though.

@vonMises

The effect is quite different when modern social policy “regulates” working time by restricting the working day to ten, nine, and eight hours a day, or, as in various categories of public officials, to six hours or even less. For this reduces the amount of work done and thus the yield of production.
The effect of such measures for the limitation of labour have been too obvious to be overlooked. This is why all efforts to extend the legal protection of labour in calling for a radical reconstruction of conditions of work have encountered strong resistance. Etatist writers generally talk as though the general shortening of working time, the gradual elimination of women’s and children’s labour, and the limitation of night work were to be ascribed exclusively to legislative intervention and the activity of trade unions.

@WillFarnaby

As an aside, I am saying capitalist road systems would be more efficient as capitalist railroads were more efficient in the US.

Hazlitt is fucking hilarious on this issue, as he attributes the collapse of rail to government intervention, neglecting to mention the competing Ashtarothian government roads and automobile industry.

@WillFarnaby

Economic progress and falling prices would eventually make it profitable to expand into more remote parts of the country.

Marginal utility and opportunity costs.

Oh and I like this:

@Chomsky

The most extreme types, like Murray Rothbard, are at least honest. They’d like to eliminate highway taxes because they force you to pay for a road you may never drive on. As an alternative, they suggest that if you and I want to get somewhere, we should build a road there and charge people tolls on it. Just try generalizing that. Such a society couldn’t survive, and even if it could, it would be so full of terror and hate that any human being would prefer to live in hell.

[rogerbox]

@Lobohan

The quoted post is the rhetorical equivalent of being hit by a linebacker with a 2x4. Will WillFarnaby show a molecule of class and honesty and admit he was completely wrong and just shouting prayers to the invisible hand?

I have my doubts.

It’s been two days, the answer is almost surely no. Not like he will re-evaluate his fetishization of the freemarket, though.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Lobohan

The quoted post is the rhetorical equivalent of being hit by a linebacker with a 2x4. Will WillFarnaby show a molecule of class and honesty and admit he was completely wrong and just shouting prayers to the invisible hand?

Expecting a concession from him is stupid liberal idea of the day.

[Lobohan]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Expecting a concession from him is stupid liberal idea of the day.

[shakes fist]

[Bookkeeper]

@WillFarnaby

I am well aware roads existed before capitalism. I am saying capitalism provided the prosperity needed for making American infrastructure what it is.

As an aside, I am saying capitalist road systems would be more efficient as capitalist railroads were more efficient in the US.

The Great Northern was the only privately funded, and successfully built, transcontinental railroad in United States history. No federal land grants were used during its construction, unlike every other transcontinental railroad built. It was one of the few transcontinental railroads to avoid receivership following the Panic of 1893.

This is true only if you treat the Great Northern as springing full-grown from the brow of James J. Hill and ignore the extensive land grants used by the GNR which had been given to the railways from which it was formed (as noted later in the same Wikipedia article you have quoted).

[Ludovic]

@Bookkeeper

This is true only if you treat the Great Northern as springing full-grown from the brow of James J. Hill and ignore the extensive land grants used by the GNR

So the GNR was the sweet child of his?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Ooh, well played.

[MaxTheVool]

Feels odd posting in this thread, and it’s entirely possible I got wooshed here, but… on last night’s Colbert Report, he interviewed (black) congresswoman Yvette Clarke from Brooklyn for Better Know a District, and asked her what she would say if she could go back to 1898 in a time machine, and (and here’s where it might all have been an elaborate joke, but it sure seemed like she was deadly serious) she said that she’d say “set me free!”, because she seemed to think that there was slavery, in Brooklyn, in 1898. Who would be enslaving her? “The Dutch”.

Watch it here

[Boyo_Jim]

@MaxTheVool

Feels odd posting in this thread, and it’s entirely possible I got wooshed here, but… on last night’s Colbert Report, he interviewed (black) congresswoman Yvette Clarke from Brooklyn for Better Know a District, and asked her what she would say if she could go back to 1898 in a time machine, and (and here’s where it might all have been an elaborate joke, but it sure seemed like she was deadly serious) she said that she’d say “set me free!”, because she seemed to think that there was slavery, in Brooklyn, in 1898. Who would be enslaving her? “The Dutch”.

Watch it here

Eh, wanting to be free if you’re enslaved isn’t exclusively a liberal idea. And thinking you’re enslaved if you’re not is pretty bi-partisanly stupid.

But, I have to concede that as a stupidity coming out of the mouth of a liberal, this is probably the right place for it.

[Jack_Batty]

@MaxTheVool

Watch it here

I was watching it last night and I cringed.

My first thought: Well, at least there will be fresh fodder for the Stupid Liberals thread.

[TonySinclair]

This woman is an underachiever. She should be the Republican nominee for veep.

[Strassia]

I haven’t seen it yet, although I will. But two things from ignorance. Why was the year 1898 given? New York passed its emancipation act in 1799 (ending slavery in 1827), so that could have been a simple mistake on both their parts (or Colbert intentionally leading her down the garden path). Second, 1898 was right in the middle of the nadir of American race relations and just two years after Plessy v. Fergeson. Being free wasn’t quite what it is now for blacks back then, even in New York.

Still, very possibly something stupid said by liberal. If this keeps up this thread will catch up the other one (relatively) shortly after the heat death of the universe.

[Shodan]

This woman is an underachiever. She should be the Republican nominee for veep.

Not until I see her birth certificate.

Regards,
Shodan

[elucidator]

Hello God? Yeah, its me, 'luc. Can the sarcasm, ok? I see the Sign, Shodan made a funny. So, now I believe…

Wait, its not the End Times, is it?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Shodan

Not until I see her birth certificate.

Regards,
Shodan

Credit where it’s due: that was funny.

[Strassia]

@Strassia

I haven’t seen it yet, although I will. But two things from ignorance. Why was the year 1898 given? New York passed its emancipation act in 1799 (ending slavery in 1827), so that could have been a simple mistake on both their parts (or Colbert intentionally leading her down the garden path). Second, 1898 was right in the middle of the nadir of American race relations and just two years after Plessy v. Fergeson. Being free wasn’t quite what it is now for blacks back then, even in New York.

Still, very possibly something stupid said by liberal. If this keeps up this thread will catch up the other one (relatively) shortly after the heat death of the universe.

Just saw the clip. Yeah, Colbert gave her every chance to get out of that. It wasn’t a setup, she is just ignorant of that portion of history.

[Gyrate]

@Strassia

I haven’t seen it yet, although I will. But two things from ignorance. Why was the year 1898 given? New York passed its emancipation act in 1799 (ending slavery in 1827), so that could have been a simple mistake on both their parts (or Colbert intentionally leading her down the garden path). Second, 1898 was right in the middle of the nadir of American race relations and just two years after Plessy v. Fergeson. Being free wasn’t quite what it is now for blacks back then, even in New York.

Still, very possibly something stupid said by liberal. If this keeps up this thread will catch up the other one (relatively) shortly after the heat death of the universe.

I can’t see the clip but I might have given her a little slack for hyperbole except…“The Dutch”? Really? Seriously, she said that? Wow.

[Strassia]

@Gyrate

I can’t see the clip but I might have given her a little slack for hyperbole except…“The Dutch”? Really? Seriously, she said that? Wow.

And it wasn’t hyperbole, which I would have given her slack for. For those that didn’t see it:

Colbert was asking her about the 1898 decision to make Brooklyn part of NYC and what she would say if she could go back in time to then. Her response was “Free me” and gave her multiple opportunities to elaborate or correct herself(“From what?” “Slavery.” “Slavery in Brooklyn in 1898?” Etc.) ending with the question of who would have enslaved her and her response of “The Dutch.”

So the best that can be said for this is she was ignorant of history.