Yep, they want government regulations setting the price at which gold is bought and sold. Which is pretty near complete control over that entire industry. How precisely this would be better than the price of gold being set by the free market, especially in the context of a philosophy where the free market is regarded as sacred, is never explained.
Is it because they want our money to go back on the gold standard rather than being fiat currency?
I’d find it odd if my Chicago Alderman was at a dinner with a head of state as powerful as Putin. But, at least he holds some political power. Jill Stein had no political power, in most years she’s just a minor footnote for getting arrested when attempting to crash the presidential debates.
Yes, there are libertarians who want to go on the gold standard. I think it’s based in a philosophical objection to central banks being able to simply print money.
And some probably think they can game the transition somehow, which is both arrogant and silly.
OK, I disagree with your analysis about nationalization, but that is definitely a hijack so I’m going to drop it. To be clear, though, I’m well aware of the Libertarians desire to return to the gold standard.
Gold standard money is fiat currency, in that the government sets the exchange rate between gold and money by… you guessed it… fiat, as opposed to how it works now, where the price of gold floats and is determined by actual market activity, not fiat.
Saying this around someone who believes in the gold standard will result in them either pointing at you while making an unearthly noise a la the pod people in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or a long-winded rant centered on their complete lack of understanding of basic economics.
They’re not asking her to. They asked her to turn over communications with “Russian persons”. She’s interpreting that to mean “all people of Russian descent” rather than “Russian citizens”.
This is as succinct a description of Libertarianism as you are ever going to find.
Eh. This whole thing is pretty vague, and if they wanted info about “Russian citizens”, they should have used the term “Russian citizens”. And even if they did use that term, I see no reason why she should comply with that request. There is no law against talking to Russian citizens, and refusing to disclose that information does not make her “scum”. And calling her that does not add to reasoned debate. It’s what is generally called poisoning the well.
I’m not seeing anything remotely like a smoking gun here.
I’d prefer to keep Jill Stein marginalized as a clueless multi-millionaire pseudo-progressive who fans distrust of vaccines, GMOs and “corporate comedians” because, you know, capitalism be Evil.
Not to mention hypocritical. The glibertarian ethos is allegedly based on the Austrian/Chicago school of an unregulated market, which apparently has some sort of transcendent quality that will serve to correct all our problems. If the market is so like a deity, gaming the system seems like a very shortsighted application of glibertarianism.
That’s really, really good.
Libertarians don’t claim to be able to correct all of our problems. In fact, Libertarians will tell you that some problems are simply not for the government to “correct” in the first place. There are lots of things wrong with Libertarianism. There is no need to prove how bad it is by putting up straw man arguments.
Recall that Ralph Nader has always insisted that Gore would have been just as bad as W. I think these a-holes just could not live with themselves otherwise.
Exactly. The choice to run third-party in a Presidential election–where you are automatically a spoiler*–bespeaks a certain egotism to begin with. And egotistical people tend to prefer not to take responsibility for their actions.
*I’m all for third-party runs at the local level–it’s perfectly honorable to try to build up enthusiasm for a third party by putting in the hard work of moving up the ranks from local to state, etc. But Presidential runs are inherently ‘look at me, I’m important!’ douchebaggery.
Let’s keep in mind that Jill Stein never said what the OP is claiming she “insisted”. Without seeing the quote he’s talking about, I’m guessing he is taking one snippet out of context from this interview on CSPAN (listen starting at 37:15).
Thank you.
There’s Libertarians and then there’s Libertarians. You don’t need to go too far to find people who claim that The Free Market Cures All, and they’re precisely the kind of people who get really excited about Libertarianism and form the most active core of the Libertarian Party.
There’s a well-known phenomenon in psychology called the Narcissism of Small Differences. That’s when members of two very similar groups see those groups as more different than they really are by focusing in on the relatively minor differences those groups have.
Well, it has a converse, which I call Blindness to Distant Differences. That’s when people think all groups distant from themselves, either through geography, time, ideology, or a combination, are all the same, even if there are great honking differences between, say, the Seleucids and the Ottomans, and grouping them all into “Really Old Dead Turks” is going a bit too far in the lumping direction.
Well, if you’re completely Out There on the political spectrum, the Republicans and the Democrats look exactly the same to you. You begin to be unable to to tell the difference between Trump and Obama, just because you group both of them into “Fascist Pigdogs” or “Godless Liberal Satanists” or whatever your preferred terminology is for people who aren’t on the One True Path of Purity and Salvation like you are. Similarly, most mainstream Democrats would be hard-pressed to know or care about the essential differences between a Maoist and a Fourth International Trotskyist and a Stalinist.
The difference, of course, is that, while the distinction between the Third and Fourth International is now of primarily academic and message-board interest, the distinction between Democratic and Republican policies makes a profound impact on the world as a whole.
Liks I said, in the context of speaking about Johnson, it’s full on ignorant. Maybe sub out “ambitious” for “good” it’s not stupid, while obvious.
Well that better not be what he’s talking about because that was from before the election.
From the transcript, starting at around 35:36
(Sorry, it was all in caps I think it was taken directly from the auto-caption)
And around 38:30