You do a disservice both to xtisme and libertarians. Until recently, for instance, the Libertarian Party’s platform contained a plank calling for the repeal of union-gutting “right-to-work” laws, because the government shouldn’t interfere one way or another between private contracts.
Unfortunately you’re thinking of the modern incarnation of libertarians, which is has become a way for some people to say “I’m a conservative but want to be something cool.” Hence you get “libertarians” rallying around invading Iraq, calling for torture and domestic wiretapping without a warrant, and wanting to pass a right-to-life amendment.
Both. The repubs believed in no regulation with Greenspan,a devoted follower of Rand ,being the spokesman of the movement. There were many powerful who were dumb enough to believe the market is self correcting and will do good for all if just left alone. There are people on this board with that thin a grasp of economic reality. But that is a Libertarian position. Greenspan ,Rubin and many others openly stated that was true. It is too stupid to defend. it requires blind belief devoid of logic. Yes the architects of this fiscal disaster were Libertarians and proud of it. Some of them, Greenspan included, have admitted that were wrong. None on this board have though. When a poster says he is Libertarian, he drops in esteem automatically.
I’m not doing a disservice, I’m reporting what I found on the ground. A decade and more ago, it was difficult to actually find a self identified libertarian who’d go along with that plank.
It’s a nice plank and all, but those who agreed with it were rare, and nowadays as you say, there’s many faux-libertarians messing up the joint.
This is true. However, when people tell me that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” I take them at their word. Either their word is no good, they’re inept at framing the scope of their claim, or they’re radical enough to not be worth including in policy discussions.
There is little or none. In the real world, a “fiscal conservative” is just someone who lies about how he intends to save money, but will instead go on a spending spree if they get into power.
What you’re doing here is comparing a moderate conservative stance with a radical left “lib” stance. Not taht there is anything wrong with that; people do this all the time to bolster their arguments. It’s just that you should be aware that is what you’re doing.
To turn your example around on its head and use a moderate liberal and a radical right wing stance (such as Rand Rover provides:
Liberals want to “teach a man to fish” - they feel that giving someone a hand up is the right thing to do. The person can then become a more productive, contributing member of society. On the other hand, the right wing (ie the Rand Rovers) seem to think that is someone does not know how to fish, it’s their own damn fault. HE learned to fish on his own, without any help from society. Everyone should be like HIM. Even if everyone in the community would be better off if we taught a man to fish HE does not want to contribute a nickel to teaching him. Let someone else teach the lazy bugger.
Seriously, I just don’t know how to respond to this. I’m a fiscal conservative. I have been for years. I think we’d all be better off with smaller government, especially poor people. But if you’re positive that I would spend like a Democrat if elected to office, well then, maybe you know something about me that I don’t know.
OTOH, maybe what you say is true of a majority of Republican politicians who claim to be fiscal conservatives. But I’m not a politician.
Keeping a significant portion of the workforce so marginalized that they will work for anything is a keystone of our current version of capitalism. Thus, the US’s current system of not much safety net for jobless workers dovetails nicely with free-market capitalism. Companies get a cheap, basically on-call labor force bred through desperation, and the government saves money. Then you wonder why these people think you don’t like them.
EP, once again, you are taking the fact that fiscal conservatives don’t want the government to do something to mean that fiscal conservatives don’t want that thing done.
Please read the following ten times: Just because fiscal conservatives don’t want the government to do X does not mean that fiscal conservatives don’t want X to be done.
This is certainly fair. I admit to being frustrated when people claim that something should be done and the government shouldn’t do it, but they cannot specify a mechanism by which the thing can actually get done, aside from some vague free market handwaving. It’s really no different than a reflexive liberal tendency to let the government take care of everything regardless of the cost. The idea that “it needs to get done so someone should just pay for it” is no better on one political side than on another.
Call the proportion of GDP held by the top 1% of households g.
Call the proportion of net worth held by the top 1% of households w.
Call the proportion of tax paid by the top 1% of households t.
You’re saying that t has gone up considerably. But if g &/or w has also gone up considerably, why wouldn’t it?
Has the ratio t/g gone up or down? What about* t/w*?
Note examples in posts 45 & 72 of conservatives finding the “hand up” as distasteful as the “hand out.”
Why must it be equal benefit? How do you define equal? How equal is equal? Is social insurance unacceptable because someone doesn’t know if he’ll benefit more or less when he’s forced to pay for it? Is public funding of fire departments therefore unacceptable? Is public funding of roads an unfair subsidy of truckers?
You’re saying “maybe” & acting like it means “really,” aren’t you? Let me put this in terms you as an Objectivist can understand:
People are stupid. People are ignorant. The market, as aggregated self-interested decisions, is not always wise or always informed. Sometimes it’s the public scientist who is paid to study something that sees what’s really going on while the rest of us do not.
Seductive but misleading. FDR, Truman, & Eisenhower lifted up the poor so far they thought they were middle class. Their children voted for Reagan & Clinton, who told them they were middle class & should vote as middle class not as poor–against the policies that had raised them up. Now their children will again become poor.
The necessary thing is to be for the people. Not the rich, the poor, the middle, the unemployed, the employed, or what have you; but the people whatever at the moment they may be.
I’m not sure how connected they are, but the poverty rates were cut in half in the 60s during LBJ and the great society. They have stayed at around 12% ever since. However I don’t know how much was due to policy and how much was due to other factors.
Not only that, but social security was one of the greatest anti-poverty efforts ever created in the US. It reduces the poverty rate among the elderly from 47% down to 9%.
So w/o LBJ’s war on poverty and w/o social security, our poverty rates could be 30% or higher. Instead they are only about 14%.
Technically, no, it’s not distinctive to our current system. It’s a trait of capitalism historically. Since the New Deal in the USA & the rise of social democracy worldwide, we have had a capitalism that has to negotiate with the [del]victims[/del] labor force. It’s actually gotten better, within the borders of first world countries. The most terrifyingly exploited labor forces are in marginalized places where the people have little political power, often in third world countries or small, weak territories of first world powers.
What US regressives seem to be moving toward is a third world economy in the USA where even that social protection we have does not hold. This is “conservative” only in that “it’s the way it used to be in the old days.” The “old days” desired in this case don’t seem to be the 17th Century slave trade & Big Scary Capital, nor the days when one had to own land to vote in the USA. Yet somehow they seem to be the pre-New Deal USA, a USA with little of the Great Society, some kind of late 19th Century “robber baron” period–or something in between. What’s strange–considering the public that’s supporting conservatism–is that these “good old days” somehow aren’t the quasi-corporatist & outrageously wealthy social democracy of the 1950’s, because as rich & happy as America was then, the progressive taxes that funded it are “too high” now. :dubious:
If we’re not moving toward the “old days” of pre-New Deal laissez faire, what are we moving toward? An economy like that of Bangladesh?
Who does it then?
Is it OK to reward donations to private charities with tax code exemptions & deductions? Is it OK to raise marginal tax rates enough so those exemptions & deductions are meaningful in amount?
And its going to get done… how? By magic? By charities that people like you will not donate to? By the free market making a profit? You are living in a happy theoretical land, where things that are important for the common good (but don’t make a profit), will somehow “get done”. Somehow. You appear to be light on the details - the only thing you’re clear on is that as long as you don’t have to pay for a common good, then it’s all great.
There are many, many examples throughout history (eg. most of humankind’s past) and in countries today where the government does not do something that is for the common good and guess what? It did not get done in the past at all, and does not get done currently in some countries.
We’re DAMN lucky to live in countries where there is a system (governments) by which we can raise everyone up by the simple method of providing for the common good.
I know that I don’t trust someone who uses a line like “spends like a Democrat” after the Bush Administration’s spending spree to engage in any fiscal discipline whatsoever.I suspect that you’d spend money like water, all the while telling yourself that it didn’t count as waste because after all, it wasn’t being spent on poor people who might squander it on food and shelter. You’d think it was OK, because it was being spent on “important” people, or used to kill people.
Ever hear the phrases “natural rate of unemployment” and “labor discipline”? Yes, “the Man” DOES do that.
I live in a happy theoretical land because soon I will be a theorist. But unfortunately, most of the theory I know meditates on the unhappy truth that the things in everyone’s best interest don’t actually get done. I suggested one theory, the collective action problem, upthread. So the idea that stuff in everyone’s interest just gets done is not only a little too happy, it is also a little too atheoretical.
