Only if you refuse to learn about the platforms of the other parties and demand that we all bow down before the Fallacy of the Mean.
Yep-all political parties are exactly the same…as are all television shows.
And movies.
And ice cream flavors.
And pets.
And automobiles.
And people.
Now, can you explain why your assumption is any more valid than any of the others I just presented?
I remember when Libertarianism was very popular on the Dope. A lot of people defended it at every opportunity. And of course we can’t forget Libertarian and his libertopias.
Today, whenever anybody mentions “libertarianism” and “good ideas” in the same post, they are immediately swatted down by hordes.
Remember that whenever you get so cynical as to think that years of fighting ignorance will never make a difference. (That includes me, too often.)
Did we reduce ignorance or merely make it go bug somebody else on the 'net?
Either way is equally nice for us.
But we shouldn’t get too self-congratulatory for simply driving them off to be as ignorant as ever, just elsewhere. That might even be worse for society since they’ll have a more gullible audience wherever they went.
Assumption? I’m a centrist. All parties look silly to me, because all parties are silly.
I’ll grant that the Republican party is leaning more towards the religious angle than the economic, recently, but most of party politics comes down on money allocation, employment, taxes, etc. That’s the topic that keeps on giving, politically. None of the parties shies from it and largely that’s all they focus on.
And all of them take up an economic stance that’s not what the real economists are saying, just taking a few talking points from certain economists. And particularly when you add in the grain of salt that mainline economics is still a very flimsy affair, when the parties’ politics are the equivalent of tabloid science reporting, it’s pretty fair to say that none of the parties has an economic standing worth caring about.
I know a couple of people who are voting Libertarian because they are True Believers.
One is a small business owner who got all upset when Obama gave his “you didn’t build this” speech. He got all indignant on Facebook about his business, which he had built all by his lonesome. I didn’t bother to remind him that his business was dependent on volunteer labor and was subsidized by his and his wife’s full time jobs. That wouldn’t have gone over well.
The other person is my brother, who hasn’t held a steady job in about a decade, aside from helping out at his wife’s family’s business, and pretending to be a real estate agent. Now, true, the family did kind of get screwed over by Obamacare - or actually by their insurance company, who could have grandfathered in their previous policy but chose not to do so. Their kids qualify for Medicare, but that’s so horrible, you know. I didn’t bother to remind him that it’s my tax dollars that are paying for his kids’ Medicaid, and maybe if he had a job with benefits they wouldn’t need Medicaid. That wouldn’t have gone over well.
Common-sense about vaccination is counter to Libertarian religion. They can’t even grok the idea that we want them to vaccinate their kids because we’re worried about our kids. I guess Stupidopedia doesn’t have entries for contagion, herd immunity, immunosuppression, or too-young-to-be-vaccinated. The idea that a world based solely on Dog-eat-dog anarchy isn’t a perfect utopia is just too challenging for them.
SDMB has its very own Hyperlibertarian nut who opposes mandatory vaccination, was ignorant of the herd immunity arguments, and remains so despite patient explanation. When smallpox eradication was brought up as an example of useful government activity, he called that eradication “irrelevant.”
“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.” — Henri Poincaré.
You’re not being adult. You’re not even being a “centrist” (and what a moronic, content-free non-description that is) in any honest sense. You’re just being lazy and pretending that laziness is wisdom.
What, specifically, about it do you find flimsy?
So you want to cut corporate income tax out entirely, cut individual income tax out entirely and replace it with sales tax, want to get rid of hate crime laws, switch to private prisons in spite of the massive, documented problems with them, let schools teach nonsense like creationism, use state money to send kids to religious schools, abolish student loans, abolish the departments of education plus housing and urban development, remove federal support for renewable energy, keep the federal government from doing anything about climate change, remove any laws or policies requiring vaccinations, cut medicare/medicaid funding by 43%, cut military spending by 43% but cut number of bases by only 20%, no minimum wage, raise retirement age to 75, and get rid of net neutrality laws? (All from the link, not even looking at his other policy positions)
And even if you agree with all of that stuff, you don’t see why anyone else might think those kind of drastic, sweeping changes to systems that have been in place for decades might be considered a little less than sensible?
That’s longer to write than I have time to hunt of cites for, but fundamentally economics is a science without a control group and muddling through trying to make comparisons of countries with vastly different laws and cultures.
Until the last maybe decade, there hasn’t been sufficient processing power available for general use to develop and study any sort of model that doesn’t assume “spherical cows” like the Rational, Self-interested Actor, the instantaneous ability for labor markets to adapt. There has been a complete inability to model fear, misinformation, politicization, cultures, etc., and a similar inability to model hyperbolic discounting or any other cognitive biases.
The only way to build up an economic model that would really work would be to take psychological and sociological studies and build simple AI which replicate the results of those studies if put to the same test, and then dump those AIs into different economies and play with the laws, cultural norms, and information provided to the AIs. We’re at least a decade off from even approximating that sort of research, and two or three from being able to do it at a level that we’re starting to get some real answers.
Just picking this as one of the items you listed. I would eliminate it, yes. The Department of Education was created in 1979. Ten years prior, we put a man on the moon and achieved many other great things. It is not needed and a waste of resources… both people and money.
That’s a pretty useless exercise to pick half of an item in the list and say ‘oh yeah, I agree with that one thing’. The point was not ‘is there anything that Gary Johnson says that is appealing’, I was asking the OP if he really thinks all or most of the items in that list are not egregious. The general Libertarian attack on public schools is, overall, pretty egregious in the eyes of most people.
Yeah, I suspect they mostly spend their time on fantasy game boards now.
I don’t think the question is what a candidate believes in, it’s what the candidate can/would actually achieve.
Personally, I want a Clinton/Johnson race because it might move the Republican party away from the Fundamentalists.
But between the two of them, I think both would be good and bad in different ways. I’m pretty ambivalent between Clinton and Johnson. She would be good on the international front - a good Liberal warhawk - where Johnson might allow the US’s global position to shrink. Johnson would be good for (maybe) helping to break down the polarization of the parties and (as mentioned) pulling the Republican party out of the dark. From his stint in New Mexico, while it’s unclear what policy he would actually try to implement of his own, we can safely call him the master of the veto rod, and that’s just what would be needed to force both parties to start cooperating and dealing with one another and the White House again.
Do I think that he would actually be able to shut down the Fed? Not a chance. Only if he was able to make an argument that could past muster with experts. Otherwise it isn’t going to happen, and I doubt such an argument could be made today.
Could he shut down the Department of Education? No, but he might be able to shrink it. I certainly think that Common Core and “teaching to the test” hinder education and grading. But at the same time, it’s probably good to have some guidelines on what should be taught at what time, so that kids can move from state to state and largely pick up from where they were at.
Ultimately, it’s not a bad thing to review the state of things every once in a while, and in order to do that you need someone who has no sacred cows. If the Legislature was packed full of Libertarians, I might be worried that they’d jettison stuff without a proper discussion. But when it is just the President who is a Libertarian? Awesome. He’ll tell people to cut stuff and they’ll come back to him with arguments and data that he won’t be able to refute, and have to accept a shrinking down rather than a complete amputation.
Jefferson suggested revising the Constitution every 20 years so that it would stay up to date. That’s almost certainly a bad idea. But every few centuries, it probably doesn’t hurt to have someone come in and say, “Justify this or it’s getting cut.”
Your ideal is a President who is wrong about everything but will change his mind when the experts he’s been challenging for his entire career tell him he’s wrong?
Can you give some justification for how this is not the ultimate “point and laugh at the Libertarian” moment?
Indeed. Much better than the guy who’s smart enough that he is able to get bad things implemented in the few areas he’s wrong.
100% good results is better than 80% good results. That’s math!
That would depend on how much gets cut. If, after reviews, everything stays as it was and this happens over and over again, then yeah, he’d just be an idiot. Though, functionally, nothing bad has happened. 0% bad results is fine by me (and I don’t care one way or the other about preserving Johnson’s good name).
But I pretty well doubt that, that would be the case. I suspect that there would be major shrinkage and that what remained would be based on supportable data, and everyone would be looking at that, rather than at the fact that initially Johnson had asked to cut it all. His Governance in New Mexico was, after all, very popular. He did not leave the state in a cloud of ridicule.
And how can you not vote for data-driven Johnson shrinkage?
Finally, something that makes sense, though not in the way you expect. They would come together to impeach Mr Natural.
In our history we have had our Know-Nothings, currently represented by Trump, and people like Johnson who literally know nothing. At all. Nothing whatsoever. The man is an idiot. Just as Trump supporters are being tarred with the same brush with which he has gleefully painted himself, support for Johnson means support for his views. Which are moronic and completely impractical.
So…like the other parties?
To nowhere near the extent that Libertarian tenets are. I may find some Dem and, especially, Pub ideas wrongheaded, but I recognize the version of reality they come from. Like Ayn Rand, Lib ideas sound great when one is a sophomore in high school (ever wonder where “sophomoric” came from? A junior or senior reading the kid’s essay. What a difference a year can make), but are generally unworkable in the reality in which we are forced to reside.
And I have the unsettling feeling that most of Johnson’s supporters hear “legalize weed” and shut their brains off.
ETA: Your reply describes perfectly the simplistic and uninformed rap on Libs from earlier in this thread.