Topic: Libertarians Are Sociopaths - page 5. (Read 11738 times)

Actually, Libertarians are more to the left, than even Democrats are.

Democrats and Republicans are much more alike to each other than either are to Libertarians.

They are in a symbiotic relationship, which depend on each other to maintain their power.

I am socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Definitely, _NOT_, a Republican.

-- Smoov

Not everything we know about capitalism is wrong.  Some aspects of it are, but not all of them.

Everything I use every day comes from capitalism.  From the food I eat to the computer I use to type this message.  I also own company shares whose dividends pay most of my bills.  Whithout capitalism I'd be totally helpless, poor and ignorant.   That's pretty much why I have "faith" in it, to answer your question.

Hey, what a crazy coincidence. You believe exactly what right-wing corporate media told you to believe without wavering on a single point. Way to think for yourself, buddy. I'm sure the sources of your information have no vested interest in making themselves out to be as virtuous as you say.

I'm not going to waste my time refuting a thousand words of bog-standard Fox News talking points, but you have a nice day in your bubble of delusion.

First off, wean yourself off the kool-ade...

People don't _deserve_ anything, but to be left alone without people interfering in how they live their lives.

What price do you put on that 'living wage'? How many hours? What should they do for that?

Suppose we keep raising the minimum wage? How does that help anything? You raise the wages, a company's operating expenses go up. As a result, the product/service's price needs to be adjusted to reflect the current operating expense. Add to that the constant inflation caused by money bring created out of thin air year after year.

This is a never ending cycle this way.

Dig deeper into what those operating expenses really are, and besides the raw material costs, energy costs, equipment costs, labor costs, and you find taxes.

You don't see them on a daily basis but they are there.

Every time taxes get raised or set upon the companies and the rich, disproportional to the general public, where do you think those tax revenues come from? Does the company just magically pull the extra taxes out of their >coughs< and send them to the government?

No. We pay for them. To a company, taxes are just another operating expense, and gets factored into the price of that packet of kool-ade you buy at the store.

More taxes, higher prices... higher prices, need more money to pay for them... so, you need higher wages to do so... so you get that raise in the minimum wage... which increases the operating expenses for the product... so the product's price gets adjusted to reflect the additional expense, leading to higher prices... higher prices, need more money to pay for them... so, you need higher wages to do so... so you get that raise in the minimum wage... which increases the operating expenses for the product... so the product's price gets adjusted to reflect the additional expense, leading to higher prices... oh look! one of the politicians just came up with "A Plan"... scary... but they need more money to administer this spiffy new Plan that we got along just fine without, so, more taxes... but, we have an election coming up in 4 years and they don't wanna lose their jobs by getting voted out of office, so, they sell this Plan by setting things up so they tax the corporations and the rich so we don't have to pay for it... and lets buy up more votes as a buffer by raising the poverty rate so more of the voters we want can pay less taxes, and thank us for it.

Taxes are what is killing us.

Big government is sucking the life out of our economy, and our country.

When we become adults, we get kicked out of the nest to succeed or fail on our own merits.

The government is not my keeper.

As for those CEO's you like to demonize... They worked hard for their money, experience, and position. Playboy figurehead CEO's don't last long and their companies die out.

I don't blame "the rich" one bit for holding onto their money. For one, it is THEIR money.

If I was in their position, facing the regulatory and taxation climate we're in now? With the only certainty, being that they are going to get mugged and bled even drier than they have been already? Hell yeah, I'd have a VERY hard time investing now too. I'd be a fool to even try.

You wanna keep looking at other cultures for their examples, here's a few. Look at Hong Kong... Dubai... perhaps even Singapore (not sure about the last one, but I think they fit with the other two).

Look into how they treat business interests there. Their tax burden, how much an investor has to go through to start a business and continue to do business there. Then look at the result in their economies.

Money moves a lot faster there, and taxes work best with lower rates, and faster moving money.

A dollar that stays clutched in your fist, in a business-hostile, heavy-tax, environment is worth zero.

A dollar that changes hands rapidly, in a business-friendly, light-tax, environment is worth thousands.

As for education... we have a few threats that insure our educational system will stay in decline.

No community involvement. (the current environment actually hinders this)

Unions. (as in most cases it seems, proficiency is irrelevant when it comes to employment. I always hated the union jobs I had. I was not allowed to earn more money than someone who was there longer than me, even tho I worked my ass off, and the person next to me gossiped more than her job. When you can't pay an employee according to their worth, or fire someone who isn't pulling their weight, or someone who is just plain incompetent? Because of a union? Then yeah... the union stops being the positive influence they were supposed to be.)

People who place more emphasis on ideology than reality. (if you're going to teach history, then teach history. not just the parts that further your ideology.)

Teaching to the lowest common denominator. (Schools are not made to make people feel good. They are made to challenge, and educate, and students will sink or swim on their own merits. I can't tell you how pissed off I was in high school english classes when the bulk of the class kept getting passed to the next grade when they could barely read, while I could read out loud fluently without hesitation, tested well, but would not get passed simply because I got fed up and would not do the daily 'make-work' anymore. When the #1 measure of what a child is learning, which are tests, count for so little, that straight A+'s on every single test and final exam, and absolutely zero make-work submitted, doesn't even let you pass with a D-? Then what possible value could the grade itself have in the first place.)

Education has a lot of problems,  but it isn't going to get fixed on the federal level. I'm not even sure it can be fixed on the state level.

Schools are a local issue, and the local communities are the ones who need to handle it, without interference from the nanny state, as they are the ones who are closest to the situation, and have the most at stake.

(btw, I am all for a voucher program, and let them give their voucher to whatever public or private school they wish to, with everything above that voucher amount, paid by the families themselves.)

-- Smoov

Yeah, yeah, No True Capitalist.  I feel like we've been here before.

Say, if everything we know now about capitalism is completely invalid because of government intervention, how is it that you have so much faith in something so untested? Or do you just go ahead and count all of the pluses as benefits of capitalism and decry every negative as government influence, no matter what the reality?

I'll also go ahead and repeat this question:

He wrote "economic freedom". You're talking about crony capitalism. There is a huge difference.

I know this because wealthy capitalists told me so while they were busy overthrowing democratically-elected socialist governments!

Capitalism doesn't reduce poverty. It only shifts the full weight of the burden onto the shoulders of those we deem undesirable.

I am not a cynical person.  But I am lucid enough to aknowledge the existence of poverty in this world, and still being able to sleep well.

And anyway, I believe economic freedom is the best way to reduce poverty.  Communism or socialism just spreads it.

I'm pretty sure that's the appropriate response to "heh, fuck it, who cares, let the poor die".

Hum... lots of anger in your speech.  And you say WE are sociopaths??


Except that I'll still have to pay for public schools via taxation.  I guess I'll be OK to do that, providing that public shchools are reserved to poor people, so they don't cost too much for the tax payer.

Minimum wage is about $1100 a month. Health insurance can easily cost over $700 a month. Kindly tell the poor how they should afford rent, food, insurance co-pays, medication, and utility bills on $400 a month. Or just keep blaming them for their own situation. One thing I find myself repeating that nobody ever seems to address: even if you blessed everyone with an awesome education and fantastic ambition, we still have tens of millions of service sector jobs that need to be done. Do the people working these jobs not deserve a living wage? Should they all live by the standards of the medieval poor just so a CEO's check can be that much fatter and your burger can be 5 cents cheaper? Is that your ideal world?

Adam Smith on relative poverty:

And we see right here in your own reply what he meant by that last sentence. Idiots will always assume the poor did something wrong to get that way, even if they were born into it and never had a chance. As true in the 1700s as it is today.




If we ever have a libertarian society, hopefully you'll be the first person killed by the desperate poor for half a loaf of bread. Fuck you.


Nobody's stopping you from going to a private school where no dirty poors will ever approach you.

An other thing:  if public education aims at providing education to the poor, why on earth is it proposed to everybody???

Does the State assume that every one is a poor thing that must be taken care of?

I can't afford to buy my own personal jet, much less the fuel to put in it, much less 1 single tire to put on the wheels of it.

Does the fact I can't afford those things, make me poor?

I don't think so...

Poor is about whether you can sustain yourself.

Buying x-boxes with a huge LED flat-screen to play it on, gold chains, 200 dollar sneakers, rims, 3000 dollar gaming rigs, full (or even basic) cable/internet service, android phones, etc etc etc and then whining about your home being a dump and not being able to make ends meet, does not make you poor.

Take a hard un-varnished look at a large proportion of the people we are told are supposed to be 'poor', and you'll find more often then not, their being 'poor' is a result of their own choices about where their spending priorities are.

Once we can get it through our heads to stop treating these self-made poor, as "The Poor", and focus on the impoverished, it is a much more manageable situation. The impoverished don't need as much as you think to raise themselves up to self-sustainability.

Even then... there are still some that remain impoverished, again, by their own choices. Sure, many just had some tough breaks and need a hand. We have plenty of charitable institutions that do just that, and ask nothing in return but your thanks. Government, on the other hand... as much as they love their red tape, they love their strings even more. This is how they maintain and increase their power over us.

Government, meddles. They get into our lives telling us how we are supposed to live, and what our priorities are supposed to be, to their own ends. They meddle, and they haven't the right.

There are necessary functions of what a government is supposed to be responsible for, but our (US) governments, on ALL levels, have been going way overboard for a long long time, and have great momentum now. More more more more more, and it won't stop, until we've voted in an authoritarian style system full bore, and still fool ourselves with the mantra "this is democracy"...

-- Smoov

And just how does that not prove my point?  As mentionned above, it's easy to find good people
willing to give free education.  Basically YOU guys.

Also, if I'm wrong and that nobody's willing to do it, so be it.  Poor people will have to pay,
just as they have to pay to eat, get dressed and find shelter.

Being poor means there are things you can't afford. By definition.  Libertarianism does not
have any pretention to eradicate poverty.  It might claim it's the best way to reduce it, but that's all.

And you think none of that stuff would exist without governments, why, exactly? And what about privately-owned companies that commit the same sorts of crimes? I'm sure the boogeymangovernment was behind that too, somehow.

Under current governments, big business routinely commits crimes with the aid of governments.  A corporation is a legal entity that could not exist without the support of governments.  That is what they were invented for.

And the "state so small" that I advocate for is the very kind of state that the US had at the federal level post civil war and pre-1913.  Discounting the civil war and the first and second central banks (which were both relatively short lived), that "state so small" was pretty close to the ideal that the framers had intended.  Far closer, anyway, than what it looks like today.  Bear in mind that the 'robber barons' of the early part of the last century held fortunes rooted in monopolies originally granted by the federal government such as the railroad barons and oil tycoons.

Started listening the the first one. Very interesting. Thanks for the link!

The one I heard was from the "Big Ideas" podcast series. It's Canadian broadcasting I think. It had a very similar theme.

I know you're not arguing for a stateless society, but rather a society with a state so small that it would be completely powerless. I see little effective difference. Even under current governments, big business routinely commits crimes without a second thought if they know that the punishment will be lacking or non-existant.

both of you are conflating libertarianism and anarchism.  A "libertopia" wouldn't be stateless, and damn well wouldn't be lacking in an organized collective defense force that is normally called and "army".  Rainingbitcoins, the vast majority of libertarians, myself included, do no make the argument that a stateless society could long exist, nor that any social ills external to government itself could be solved by such a stateless society in any sustainable way.  Please don't take the idealistic extreme positions of a few vocal fellow travelers as authoritative of the majority position.

The people with the money - big business. If you can "buy out" your competitors for the cost of a small mercenary army, that's a bargain. And hey, no pesky state to stop you.

"...and everyone lived happily ever after in the glaring power vacuum" isn't a phrase that ends too many fairy tales, but it apparently does yours.


Ah yes, things that are bad under current systems would obviously be better under your system because __________ .  I've given you a dozen really obvious reasons problems like that would be worse under a libertarian system, and so far the best defense to those you guys can muster seems to be "but charity could provide - I KNOW it could! Even though it clearly doesn't!".


I don't think you understand this concept: just because something is bad now, doesn't mean literally ANY other thing you can name must automatically be better. Some things are quite clearly worse. Sorry if this confuses you.