Again, that’s silly. an 18th century community can’t build or support hi tech equipment.
Oh, please. The disaster you claim will happen wouldn’t be some instant thing; it would happen over many years. And if your little imaginary utopia were to totally isolate itself - assuming it could - what makes you think it could survive?
Who would naturally became your tyrants. There’d be no one to stop them after all. Of course, that’s assuming that your little cult doesn’t get taken over or killed off, which is more likely.
Alright, that’s enough. This tangent on the breakdown of society should continue in a separate thread, and this thread should continue without references to other posters being ignorant, paranoid, obtuse, stupid, and so on.
My apologies, both for the hi-jack and my snarkiness expressed in my exasperation with certain posters. I do think, however, and, I believe the OP agrees, that my contributions have been useful to him in understanding political philosophy and that he has, in fact, encouraged my digressions.
Start a new thread? Too old and too wise. The defense rests.
You’ll be fabricating your own microchips out in the the south 40, will you?
There is absolutely no way for a small, isolated community to build a “hi-tech” infrastructure" no matter how long you work at it. Without long-distance transport of resources, access to university-level technical expertise, and 100s of millions of dollars in capital, an isolated survivalist enclave will be hard-pressed to maintain a 19th century level of technology, let alone a 21st.
There’s a reason the Sears catalog was so popular with the early settlements in the American West. It was a reliable source of the hundreds of everyday items that the settlers could not make for themselves in their small towns and individual farms. Even something as basic as a kerosene lamp is the end result of a long mining and manufacturing chain that cannot be duplicated in a small isolated community.
If the civil order collapses, most people will quickly starve to death, and the survivors will eke out a brutal existence as subsistence farmers under the thumb of their local strongman.
With jrodefeld and Marley’s approval let me continue.
Let’s assume we can’t get the ranchers behind communalizing their water rights and open range, recently and predictably festooned with McCain/Palin posters.
Let’s assume that my little town has to make the best of it without the support of the County Cattle Kings.
Pop 2000, year round, 5000 during peak white water rafting, camping, hiking, rock climbing season. Cheap and not so cheap motels/restaurants, classy B&Bs, hot springs, spas. Within an hour of 3 decent ski areas. It’s a destination for the tourist dollars of our destiny.
How to use them as we collect them AND spend them wisely over the next 20 yrs?
I will suggest one possibility and then I promise to say no more unless PMed or someone picks up the ball and takes it to GQ in something like How To Prepare For Our Inevitable Shit Storm?
Prisons are big business in our state in general and just a mile south of my little town is a medium security detention center. Who knows how many inmates it takes to employ 20% of the town’s population?
These local slaves show up in town with unarmed drivers on occasion to shovel snow, rake leaves in the town park and pick up tourist trash wherever it happened to have been blown. Their barracks occupies the northern half of a (WAG) 1000 acres tract of perfect agricultural land.
I mentioned earlier, a community greenhouse and organic farming. I invite our local entrepreneurs (many outliers have second homes here) to invest in the Scum of Capitalism’s Reclamation Project. Give the inmates a state of the art greenhouse and a start on a multi-acre organic farm, a microcosm of the possible macro. Let the inmates supply our local outlets with strawberries, etc, for a year and then get out of jail, free. Suddenly, they are valued survival consultants.
I’d rather deal with folks like that an army of escaped convicts roaming the countryside with captured handguns after the Last Prison Food Riot.
Great thread. I never really gave libertarian beliefs a whole lot thought before but after reading the posts here and some of the links, I have become fascinated with how anyone rationalizes being a libertarian.
Basically, I agree with a lot of the posters here that people do suck, at least in a general sense, and that if everyone was left to our own devices we’ll take what we can and screw the rest. I know I would - but in essence that seems to be the whole point of being a libertarian so in a sense I think all humans are instinctively libertarians. As humans we have traits like envy, lust, greed and so on that are simply a part of what we are and always have been. These traits are actually good things to have if you live in a tribal society and you wish to propagate your offspring. But, we don’t live that way anymore – chiefly because we got agriculture leading to increased population leading to governments. As technology improved the people slowly got more educated leading to better governments, until we come full circle and some advocate for abolition of government and eventual return to tribal society.
People do suck, but there is hope. Individually we want what is best for ourselves. However, the whole point of good government is to collectively point people in the direction of what is best for everyone.
Slavery is an example of this. If the USA had always been libertarian right from the beginning do you think we’d still have slaves today? I’m guessing there would be. People did not ‘evolve’ to not needing slaves. Rather, slaves became less useful as technology improved and having educated workers using machines became much more productive than having slaves. This happened in the factory producing northern states first (even before the revolution) – and after awhile they forcibly spread their ‘ideals’ to the south. Who spread it – government. Who enforces it – government. You are further fooling yourself to think in areas, in the USA even, where government does not have an active presence there is not still slavery. For example, the sex trade enslaves prostitutes by threatening them with violence or additional withdrawals if they do not continue working for merely life’s basics. Ever hear of sweat shops? These things do exist, and would be far more widespread without government to keep it in check.
You really need to study human psychology and history to see how humans are just not altruistic enough to be trusted with much on a individual level. Guidelines that make awesome sense – such as don’t loan mortgages to people who are horrible with money – fall apart at an individual level because each of several people along a chain of action are only concerned about their little part and their personal benefit from it.
It is too bad people are not as good as you’d make them out to be – if they were I’d get in the first libertarian line there was. Although, as said above – communism would be worth checking out at that point too because both philosophies have the same failing.
Of course not, nor even maintain it. I’m merely suggesting that my “small, isolated community” make the best of the hi-tech offered now on the free market and hunker down for a pleasant drift into the last half of this century.
We got no strongmen here, just kids who are above average. Once again, I promise to say no more.
You don’t, because the government would squash them if they decided to play feudal lord. Remove the government and you’ll have strongmen. Again; we’ve seen what happens when governments collapse, and it doesn’t remotely resemble what you claim.
You try my soul. Yes, we’ve all what happens when Capitalism loses control of govts it has parasitized for centuries. Cuba and Vietnam are good examples. PLEASE understand, I’m not being sarcastic.
I don’t know why you put “Coming down hard on Insurance compaines” in quotes because I’ve never used that phrase. I don’t even care to be honest. They don’t need to be punished for being what they are. They operated within the law and I feel that it’s the law that needs to be changed. Just because I think that the law was wrong doesn’t mean I feel there should be a retroactive punishment, especially since private health care is the default standing. I just don’t feel it’s good enough anymore.
Okay so we need to get things done right now, but not involve the president in them. :dubious: Any ideas of how to accomplish that? Impeach him? Wait until his term ends and vote in a new candidate? I voted for him because I believed he would work towards goals that would benefit the US (and he wasn’t connected to Palin). While I don’t agree with him entirely I don’t see where he’s completely failed me so far.
Heh, “then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population,” eh? Incidentally, the normal claim for private health care is that it does the job more efficiently not that the poor don’t have a right to treatment. I appreciate your candor though. Just remember it’s hard to really enjoy life when the poor are dying of consumption on your doorstep.
This is exactly why Libertarianism doesn’t work. It expects people to pass up profit in the name of the public good. Something that has not happened. You have never commented on my posts about the 19th century and why it wasn’t a glorious capital eden for all.
Tea Party platform please?
As near as I can tell they have a lot of things they want, but absolutely no clue how to make this happen besides magic. Mostly they just like to shout at whomever they’ve been told is a bad person. We needn’t go into the astroturfing and Fox News led rallies.
So let me get the timeline straight. In the 1980’s under Reagan we deregulate banks. We get some econmic bubbles and the market stays afloat by hopping from one to the next. A lot of money is made by those who can see the next one coming. We run out of the next big thing and crash.
Canada meanwhile has had a very similar banking system except for the deregulation in the 80’s and later crash. They now have one of the most stable banking systems on the planet.
The answer is not to work to restoring regulation but to further deregulate?
You say this a lot, along with “Constitutionally mandated size and scope.”
When you say we are no longer following the US Constitution do you mean things like the Patriot Act and Gitmo? Violations of the 10th Amendment? Electing a Kenyan? Things you just don’t like? Is there a reason why no branch of government is doing anything about these Constitutional violations? Shouldn’t the Supreme Court have noticed? Congress? Specifics would really be helpful here.
And what is the Constitutionally mandated size and scope? If there is one, is there a reason to be following it or would be better off simply amending the Constitution to reflect that it was written more than 200 years ago?
No, you are just being ridiculous. Those aren’t collapsed governments. A collapsed government wouild be Somalia or some other failed state. Iraq soon after our conquest of it for example; Bush and his neocon friends tried to turn it into a libertarian paradise with such things as massive deregulation and deliberately withholding government efforts towards reconstruction. They thought that Iraq would be the beneficially of a huge boom as the free market fixed all its problems; instead of course the result was chaos, bloodshed and impoverishment. Which is the real result of attempting to put libertarian ideals into practice.
How would you like the government to take over your property through eminent domain and throw you out on the streets? I am sure you would be supporting property rights then. I am going to link the idea of property rights to the desire to protect the environment. Which land is the most polluted? Public land. Government owned property is in much worse shape than privately owned land. The reason is simple. I person who owns property cares about the value of that property and will make every effort to take care of that land. Therefore, for most purposes, I believe that nearly all land in the United States should be privately owned. If we establish the strict enforcing of private property laws, then anybody who pollutes another persons land, air or water will be subject to significant criminal prosecution. And, obviously, very few people will pollute their own land. This would clean up the environment in ways Cap and Trade or other corporate scams masquerading as altruistic environmental “solutions” could never do. I am not talking about Corporations, I am talking about the rights of regular people to use their own land without interference as long as they don’t hurt anybody else by their actions. This would obviously preclude pollution, making loud noises that disturb the peace, or other violations.
Here is a link illustrating why property rights are human rights:
Heres a radical idea: maybe government stepped in because powerful people wanted more power for themselves and desired to control other people through force. Also, a major driving force in government expansion is corporate lobbying, what you claim to be opposed to.
The idea that “my way” of a libertarian society has been tried for “literally” thousands of years is beyond laughable. No serious historian would take you seriously. The history of the world is tyrannical governments abusing the rights of its citizens. The notion of equal rights for all citizens, property rights, a restrained federal government with a balance of powers, and a constitution and bill of rights ensuring those freedoms is a very new concept in world history. The best examples of this philosophy of freedom are “some” periods of US history and isolated examples in other countries. It seems that rather than “progressing” forward in terms of our society and system of government, we have reverted back to a previous time when abusive government was the norm, people had no rights, and there were just dictators, powerful men calling the shots with little to no restrictions on their authority. We have “gone back” to an undesirable society that has failed throughout history. Truly, Libertarianism is the only truly Progressive and foward looking philosophy there is.
You characterize libertarians like this: “There would if anything be a reduction in charity, while the libertarians laughed and gloated at the dying. Libertarianism is about greed and selfishness, and a society based on greed and selfishness isn’t going to be charitable.” I find this particularly offensive given that many libertarians, including myself, are very generous and freely donate our time to help others who need it. I volunteer at my local YMCA and donate to several charities a year (although I don’t make much money yet). My family has always donated every Christmas to help give poorer kids gifts. I don’t consider myself in any way “greedy” or “selfish”.
But for arguments sake, lets forget libertarians and conservatives and independents. What if all the liberals and progressives such as yourself abandoned the use of government theft to accomplish humanitarian goals, and instead organized yourselves into grassroots activity designed to feed and clothe the poor, help those who suffer from drug addiction, and volunteered to mentor inner city children who lack positive role models? Think of what you could accomplish! The reason many liberals don’t do this is because they desire the cheap thrill of feeling really self important by supporting certain politicians who “claim” to want to help the poor, while not having to do any actual work to help those who need it. Not saying you are like this, but its something to think about.
Okay, but they are government actions, are they not? And they expanding the size and scope of government. Since your party won’t always be in power, don’t you think that there should be some absolute limits on what the Federal Government can take on? If you don’t think the Constitution covers it, what would be your limits?
Totally false. What exactly do you consider a “weak” government? A small constitutional government would be able to all of these things. Who would stop them? They write the laws, they run the court system, and control the military and police force. Even in a comparatively small government, they would be able to accomplish the few expressly delegated powers that it has. You know, if I said we would just shrink government to the size it was in 1965 or 1970, at the tail end of the “Progressive Era”, we would be cutting government by like 75%! If you believe that things got progressively worse since the Republicans have been in power (Reagan, Bush I, Republican Congress during Clinton Administration, Bush II), then rolling back government power to before they were elected shouldn’t bother you, right? I mean we both acknowledge that American has been on the wrong track for a while. The government expanded even more under Republicans than under Democrats (though Obama is outspending them all). Maybe you don’t want “too” small of a government, but how about smaller governement? Can we find some common ground in that we cannot afford the government we currently have?
Totally false. Nearly all problems we are facing are bipartisan in nature. Obama reauthorized the Patriot Act. All modern presidents have supported the Income tax. Both parties are responsible for our declining public education system. Literally everything I said is supported by both parties! You claim its all right wing behavior? Come on.
The end of justice, freedom and civilization in general? You are delusional if you believe that. Yeah libertarianism, which literal means one who believes in liberty, would mean the end of freedom. Do you even listen to yourself? And justice, meaning protecting the rights of one who has been the victim of fraud or force, is one of the primary functions of government in a libertarian society. I think you are not interested in the facts, rather continually spouting hyperbole and hysteria about how the apocalypse will happen if we had a libertarian society.
Do you support getting rid of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Why don’t we just tear down all monuments and reminders of the Founding Fathers and what they stood for. If you trash libertarianism, that is upholding individual liberty and equal justice for all, as an evil, crazy belief system you must also be intellectually honest and trash the founders and all they stood for. You must be for getting rid of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Well, I’m not necessarily against anything you are saying. You may very well be right about there being no hope of peaceful political change. In fact, you probably are right. Me personally, I am idealistic. I think obviously the idea of being king for a day is antithetical to the libertarian ideology, but it is a good intellectual exercise regardless. I would probably use my power to reduce the power of other authoritarian organizations, such as corporations, politicians, and repeal all federal drug laws, restore private property rights, end the federal reserve, shrink the size and scope of the CIA drastically, cut the military budget dramatically, bring all our troops home from around the world and establish a neutral, peaceful and diplomatic stance towards the rest of the world. Then I would voluntarily give up my power, but not before ensuring foolproof safeguards that nobody could ever have the same amount of power again.
I think that people misinterpret libertarianism to mean no government. I think there are very important roles for government in society. If nobody is allowed to harm anybody else or infringe on their liberty, what would happen? So government is supposed to prevent crimes of all sorts, keep the peace, maintain an adequate military for national defense, a have a court system to settle disputes and enforce contract laws.
People who disagree with this philosophy keep saying that it would result in anarchy, murder, slavery, rape, and all other kinds of things that are so contrary to liberty. Nobody is allowed to hurt anybody else in a libertarian society. This is what people are not getting.
By the way, we can and should have an evolving government that takes on new functions over time to cope with changing society. That is why the Constitution can be amended. The Constitution is the rulebook for the government, just as they provide the rulebook for civilized behavior. The constitution is a contract between the people and the government. If we are not expected to violate the law, neither should they. If our government amended the Constitution instead of ignoring it, we would still likely have a society that respected freedom. We can also repeal amendments that don’t work out well (like prohibition in the 20s).
No, slavery is absolutely opposed to all concepts of liberty. That should be obvious. You don’t think people have grown less bigoted and more tolerant over the last two hundred years? Think of the civil rights movement. The government accommodated the will of the people by changing the law to outlaw segregation. The point being, we only get government as good as the people it serves. There has never been a case of wise, enlightened despots ruling over ignorant subjects and forcing them to be civilized. Government has a role, but it should be one that respects individual rights. The rulers of any society have usually been arrogant, egotistical bastards.
I agree that there should be guidelines. That would be the Constitution. I don’t have absolute faith in people. But I have even less faith in people with huge amounts of power. Who says people in government aren’t just looking out for their own self interest? I think most are, doing and saying anything just to get reelected. I think there are more people with a conscience than you think. But the larger point is: if people aren’t altruistic enough, why would people with enormous power and the ability to spend other people’s money without consequence be any more altruistic?
False dilemma; you are trying to pretend that property rights either don’t exist, or that they override everything else including human life. There’s a huge middle ground there. I believe in property rights; I just don’t think they are some transcendent, all important good.
Considering that the government tends to end up having to take custody of and detoxify or just isolate land contaminated badly enough by private industry, of course. That doesn’t mean they are the ones who poisoned it.
Or they just dump garbage on it or otherwise contaminate it until it’s unlivable. History demonstrates you are wrong; before the government imposed regulations, private people and industry quite cheerfully despoiled the land, air and water much worse than now.
No; quite obviously from history many people without government restraint will reduce their land to a poisoned wasteland.
Nonsense, the powerful had more power over the poor not less when there was less government aid; and they had less than they do now when the government was more generous. When they can say “do what I say or starve to death”, they have pretty much absolute power. The whole point of the libertarian desire to eliminate government aid for the poor is to reduce them to slaves.
Well too bad, that it what libertarianism is.
A lot of corpses. Charity wouldn’t begin to be enough to do what needs to be done. And taxes aren’t theft.
But it would be so crippled that it wouldn’t matter. It would always be decades behind in law. And with your definition of taxes as theft, it would be minuscule. I doubt it would be able to support a police force, much less an army.
No, we need to raise taxes 9 especiually on the rich), increase civil rights protections, slash the military, beef up our infrastructure, strengthen the safety net. We need a stronger, not a weaker government; it just needs to be directed towards more constructive areas.
I said “right wing”, not “Republican”. Obama is right wing, as are most of the Democrats.
Which is a good thing. It should be increased, especially at the upper brackets.
And Communist governments called themselves People’s Republics; that didn’t make it true. Libertarianism is aimed at the elimination of freedom for most of the population. It is aimed at creating a form of neofeudalism, where the wealthy have absolute power and most of the population are serfs. Although if actually implemented, the more likely result is general collapse.
What I was trying to say about Cuba and Vietnam is that neither lapsed into chaos when our corporate proxies were finally driven out in '59 and '75 respectively. To the contrary, despite our shabby treatment of them, post engagement, they aren’t doing too badly. Most Americans would be better off with a Cuban style health care system here.
I don’t know why I put that phrase in quotation marks actually. But that is what many people are saying. Obama even keeps saying to Republicans who talk of repeal “We don’t want to put the Insurance companies in the drivers seat again”. Well, its too late for that. Don’t you see that Obama’s health “reform” isn’t really reform at all? I want different types of reform. How about removing corporate subsidies, breaking down barriers to competition against the insurance companies? Or allowing private health care options to exist? Stop regulating alternative medicine and health suplements out of business. There are many things that can and should be done. But this is not going to help.
Give more power to the Federal Reserve? Are you kidding me? Before any TRUE reform can be enacted we need to have a full audit of the Federal Reserve and expose all these insider deals with Goldman Sachs, what they are doing meeting with foreign central banks and determine the true state of our banking and financial system. Then we need indictments. Lots of them. Crimes have been committed and the Federal Reserve has been complicit in enabling these crimes to occur. The Federal Reserve got us in this mess. This is just a typical attempt to pretend to be “reforming” the system, but it is no reform. We are just giving the crooks more power to do further damage to our economy.
You are misunderstanding me. We should be pushing this administration to be pursuing real reform rather than the destructive agenda he is now on. In terms of where he has failed, I’ll lay it out for you. He reauthorized the Patriot Act, he is continuing destructive economic policies which will prolong the crisis and possibly destroy the dollar, he has increased troop levels in Afghanistan, he has sent unmanned drones to kill innocent people in Pakistan, we are now threatening Iran, and he has signed into law a health care bill that will give the insurance companies more power over our health care system, and he has stacked his economic recovery team with wall street insiders and cronies like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, who will sell out the american people to protect their banker friends.
Just a few things like that.
I am telling you flat out, more people will be suffering under the new health care bill than even now. Don’t tell me there won’t be rationing, or waiting lists. Its unavoidable. If something is free and people still can’t get it it doesn’t matter. And when the economic system collapses EVERYBODY will be screwed who thought that the government could provide them with health care and it wouldn’t cost anything. Meanwhile they are destroying all competition with the government programs. Given the state of our budget and the efficiency of government how can you claim all these people will be taken care of and given adequate treatment?
As far as not thinking health care is a right, nobody has a right to stuff. Because then you have to violate somebody else’s rights to steal money or resources. Why do you think healthcare cannot be delivered in a better way than through government?
Government doesn’t work because there is no incentive to spend money frugally and effectively. Enough people will be altruistic and generous with their money and help people who need it. The politicians will pad their own pockets, give some money to their corporate buddies and *maybe * some of it will actually end up in the hands of those who need it. It doesn’t work.
There is no Tea Party platform, and that is the point. There is no organizing principle. That is why it is wrong to think of them as “far right” or racist or whatever way the media categorizes these people. I just think it is right for people to be upset. And some are very well informed. Others are very ignorant. So its a mixed bag.
The Federal Reserve caused the collapse. There is no other reason. The inherent unsustainability of the monetary system caused the collapse. Things like Glass Steagle are mere sideshows.
Read a bit about the federal reserve and how it caused this crisis to see that regulations wouldn’t have prevented it. Easy money due to artificially low interest rates caused malinvestment that eventually has to be liquidated. It can’t be avoided.
Our government, including the Supreme Court, has ignored the Constitution for many decades now. We have activist judges and lawyers who bend over backwards to pretend that everything the federal government does is constitutional. It isn’t. I’m talking about a constitution that provides explicitly the functions of the Federal Government. The rest is left up to the states.
We should amend the constitution if we want. We should shrink government until it is constitutional and then, if we are unhappy with the system, slowly and deliberately change the constitution to authorize new functions by the federal government. The problem is, we stopped doing this about a hundred years ago and we just ignored the constitution. That is why our liberties have been under constant attack.
