>So far, the only downsides to cannabis legalization have been prison guard layoffs, and the extra burden on politicians that have to figure out how to spend all the money from dope sales taxes.
So the obvious solution is to use the dope sales taxes to fund employing the former prison guards in public works projects ?
rightwingers rapidly assemble around the opposite - even for ideas they originally proposed.
Mmm... *grabs popcorn*, I am looking forward to watching the republicans become pro-cancer. I can't imagine what the arguments will look like but I bet they'll include the phrase "will of God" at least 50 times.
Now try reading the wiki page for libertarian socialism. Where andalusia is specifically listed as an example. You are failing to understand the concept. Anarcho socialism has been around for centuries and dates back to philosophers like Proudhom. In fact the original meaning of 'libertarian' is anarcho-socialist. Its a French word that was coined to get around the Napoleonic ban on anarchist propaganda. Among the most notable anarcho-socialists living today is Noam Chomsky. Try reading his works. You dont have to agree with the idea but you ought to at least understand it before you decide. Or read the wiki page on participatory politics and participatory economics for a popular contemporary proposal on how an anarcho socialist society can be structured from Harvard.
People who spend their lives studying political and economic philosophy see no contradiction in the idea... but you do ? So either you are privy to some fact that has escaped every major philodopher for 500 years or you are wrong. Guess which one is more likely. Or to put it otherwise. If you publish a paper proving anarcho socialism a logical contradiction without relying on the false definition of socialism you quoted before (because that would get you mocked) you would receive a dozen honorary phds in philosophy from the world's greatest universities for doing something even a rabid capitalist philosopher like John Locke could never achieve. It would be philosphy's greatest breakthrough in 500 years. I wish you luck but I will not be holding my breath.
>You can't be socialist and anarchist. Yes you can, and many socialists would argue you cannot be a true socialist and NOT be anarchist.
>The definition of socialism is state ownership of the means of production. No it isn't. Who told you that ? The definition of socialism is WORKER ownership of the means of production. There is NOTHING in there about a "state". The idea of the state as a proxy for workers was introduced by Bolshevism but all the other forms roundly reject that. Worker-owned co-ops are socialist businesses. A country becomes socialist when the majority of workers own the businesses they work in. Argentina is technically the most socialist country in the world today since worker-owned coops are now by far the largest form of employment there (and the absolutely backbone of the economy contributing well over 80% of total GDP). Many anarchists reject the idea off a boss/worker relationship as being an unacceptable power-relationship - and find only socialist businesses compatible with anarchism. Many such socialists believe the idea of a government or state is an unacceptable power relationship and believe they should have a say in every vote they are expected to live under, just as they should have an equal say in every company decision that affects their livelilhood and an equal share in the profits they helped create.
>What you are talking about is a social anarchy. It's had many names, anarcho-socialism, social anarchy, libertarian-socialism, left-libertarianism, anarcho-syndicalism, participatory politics and participatory economics are all essentially the same set of ideas. They have very minor differences in how they propose to handle specific aspects of implementation but the key features of all of them are exactly the same.
There is nothing about illegal immigration that makes disease spreading more likely than legal immigration - at least from the same countries. But the risk of new diseases are not going to be contained or reduced, it's simply beyond our abilities to ever do that. When we encounter a new disease, it's going to kill some people before anybody can develop immunity, let alone vaccines - it's just the nature of reality, you cannot plan for the unpredictable.
But we sure as hell don't need to be dying from old diseases which we have the technology to entirely eradicate.
Very true, but I didn't expect him to be able to understand the ideas to that level. The kind of people who see the world in stark binaries tend to be oblivious to the idea that there can ever be more than just two ideas in the world about anything - let alone things that exist in between without being at the extremes of either and that those in-betweens are frequently better than what's on the fringes.
You identified correctly one of the biggest problems today and failed to consider the cure. You cant reduce the impact of money on politics by reducing the size of government and that never happens anyway. The GOP may say they want to but all they actually do is defund good and useful programs to give more money to bad programs that benefit rich donors. The cure is to remove the legal right to bribe politicians. Get over the idea that political spending is free speech. Its the opposite. It undermines free political speech to complete irrelevance.
Look at most functional democracies and you find that giving money to a politician for any purpose, ever is flat out illegal. Every candidate gets a fixed (equal) sum from public money to spend on campaigning and spending any more is a jailtime crime and paid-for political advertising is flat out illegal. Then an election is a contest of ideas on a level playing field.
Imagine walking into a government office and demanding some records file under a freedom of information act, without filling in a form or even having to give your name and a guarantee that if they dont hand it over in less than one hour the office head has to be fired by law. Thats how it is in several European countries. But Europe constrains money in politics and regulates industry properly (including a requirement that 50% of a company board must be non shareholding, non-exective employees so the people whose livelihoods depend on board decisions get a serious say in those decisions). Where a company is not legalky or economically deemed a profit maximising entity but a community working for collective gain by all involved.
Government can be accountable to all. Corporations never are. Even the things you describe are not real. Its easy to avoid customers punishing bad behaviour: just do the bad behaviour somewhere other than where you sell. Nobody would buy chocolate in America if it was American kids being kidnapped and enslaved by cocoa farms. But do it in Africa and 70% of all chocolate can be picked by kidnapped child slaves and Americans will keep buying. You get a scandal ? Spend a few hundred thousand on a PR campaigning about cleaning up your act and wait for people to forget. Never actually do anythi g better. Just ask Nestle, beacon and Hershey. They all had a major scandal when the slavery thing became news in 2000. 16 years later its only gotten worse. Chocolate still sells... well like chocolate.
>Make the pay a million a year (cheap in the government scheme of things) so it's not like jury duty.
Or, if you must have dedicated politicians and elections - make the pay minimum wage (and add a clause that minimum wages only apply to congressmen after 5 years so they can just jack that up to enrich themselves), make all campaign contributions flat out illegal and all paid-for advertising as well - everybody running gets a flat fee from public funds and must campaign with that and only that and make it utterly illegal for any office holder to accept any money from anybody except a registered bank and even then only at the standard market interest rate. Basically - make running the country a job you will do living in barely above poverty conditions - make it something no elite has any interest in doing, a job you would only do if you were truly passionate about serving others.
Working in congress SHOULD be like volunteering at the local soup kitchen.
It was science that got the death-rate this low and life expectancy this high. For years we've warned that the anti-science movement risks undoing those gains. The anti-science movement has only grown stronger over this time. Surely we should consider the possibility that this is that prediction coming true. That the blame for this belongs with the anti-vaxers and the homepaths and if so - perhaps that other rabid anti-science group so prevalent here on slashdot who think that cause and effect somehow doesn't apply to the climate should heed the warning...
Oh they did... but since they were the people who benefited from it they did everything in their power to ensure it remained that way. Nobody wants competition for his job - especially not from somebody more competent than himself, so Citizens United was the best thing to ever happen to a politician.
The thing about making absolute statements is that it only takes a single counter-example to absolutely disprove them. So here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... But it's not Andalusia of today that is interesting, it's Andalusia as it existed between 1920 and 1939. Andalusia the land of plenty while the rest of the world were living in the great depression. Absolutely socialist and completely anarchist - had no government whatsoever (let alone a totalitarian one). Orwell fought on their side in the Spanish civil war - he called Andalusia the closest thing to a Utopian society that has ever existed. A society that had no poverty, starvation or suffering at all - and more personal liberty than any other in history before or since.
That pissed off everybody else - nobody liked to see people governing themselves, without poverty or hunger, in a functioning industrial society. Other country's citizens may get ideas... so they faced a two-front war. Capitalist and communists (they may despise each other but not nearly as much as they despised anarcho-soialists. The Capitalists hated both the anarchism and the socialism and the communists REALLY hated the idea of a working socialism without an autocratic state) actually formed an alliance to wipe Andalusia off the map and after almost 2 decades they finally overwhelmed them. But economically, politically and socially it was an astoundingly successful society. Democracy's greatest success. Unfortunately nobody can stand forever against a sustained war on two fronts by extremely powerful forces, even so it took two decades to defeat them.
I never said government was good. It is not. Its just better to face an evil accountable to me than one accountable to shareholders. And I didnt say every need. Just the need to care for the needy. You may want to work on those reading comprehension skills...
I don't believe ANYTHING said by ANY member of the Chicago or Austrian schools of economics and neither should you - they are all pseudo-scientific cultists. Real economics is based on empirical data. The only two schools of economics that reject empiricism is to economics very much as astrology is to astronomy and should be treated with the same (absolute lack of) respect that astrologers get.
You will not impress me with Friedman because as a rational and sceptical minded person I consider him a charlatan akin to Deepak Chopra. Chopra is also highly regarded that says nothing.
It is interesting however that while I cited empirical studies of what actually HAPPENED in economies after large scale immigration - you had nothing better than an appeal to authority in rebuttal and your chosen authority wasn't even a trustworthy or authoritive one.
The only studies worthy of consideration are those based on empirical analysis of actual economic data from countries where large scale immigration happened. Those all agree that the immigration has always led to growth in employment rates for the economy as a whole that exceeds the number of jobs taken by immigrants - in other words, that for every job an immigrant takes, more are created for natives. So yeah, I utterly disregard Friedman because his theories are not empirally testable and, indeed, has failed to hold up to empirical testing.
As it happens perhaps the single most scientific experiment in the history of economics was about a Friedman theory. Friedman believed that squatters could be lifted entirely out of poverty if they were simply given the titles to the land they squatted on. This theory is still very popular among libertarian-types. But it has been tested. In Argentina one group of squatters petitioned the government for title, and got it. But it only happened for one block, the next block over (literally across the street from them) did not get title. That was more than 20 years ago. So what happened in the 20 years since one group of squatters became legal owners of the land and the other group did not ? Well none of Friedman's predictions came true - nada. You can't blame different economic conditions or any other factors - all other things were equal since these two groups are in the same city, right next to each other and were under the same laws and economic events. Today - the group with title still lives in exactly the same shacks as their neighbours. Almost nobody built a proper house. Hardly any of those patches of land has ever been sold. And less than 0.001% of them has ever gotten a bond against that land. Friedman predicted they would use that land as an asset to get bonds to start businesses, or sell the land to buy themselves better educations - none of this happened. It didn't happen because it turns out: 1) Nobody wants to BUY a patch of land where your neighbours are squatters living in shacks. 2) Getting a bond requires more than security, banks also want to know you can pay the instalments - and low income people can't afford the bonds. 3) Improving your land requires more than owning it, you also need capital or at least access to credit, the former wasn't there in the first place (or they wouldn't be squatting) and the latter wasn't available because of 2.
In short - Friedman's theories fall apart in the real world because he did not subject them to science's reality check known a empirical testing.
I did not define anarchism as big government. I defined it as 'a synonym for direct democracy'. I described this as being, in practise, the biggest government you can possibly have because all ctizens are part of the government. These are entirely compatible things to say.
And the trouble with your beliefs is that the need outweighs the capacity of people to meet individually (and that need grows massively bigger the less you regulate markets as the poor and the needy are a consequence of bad behaviour in the market). The only way the need can ever or has ever been met is by ensuring all of society contributes. It has benefits to everybody to meet that need. Maintaining a social safety net is kike maintaining roads. Everybody benefits from having it and we all venefit the most if individuals do not have exclusive control of it. And there is the issue of trust. When somebody raises a million for charity most often the charity gets less than 5%. Private citizens can lie, abscond, misrepresent and commit fraud because their finances are private. Government in a free country on the other hand is accountable to the public and is budgets are public record. If it spends less tgan allocated we can easily know and complain. It cant hide costs in fine print to take what we gave to the needy and keep it. This is why charity fraud is common but fraud by welfare departments is exceedingly rare.
Its funny though how libertarians never oppose the most common theft by government of them all. The obe known as privatization. Where that which we all paid to build is given to a private owner who now charges us to use what we invested to have for free. Or worse privatising formerly public natural resources. Depriving the entire populace of their former free access to this common resource is theft of the grandest order. Libertarians claim this prevents a tragedy of the commons. It does no such thing. It is a tragedy of the commons - it just has red tape added.
Nothing in libertarianism holds up to critical examination under empirical facts because it fails to understand a core aspect of humanity. All people are exactly as evil as they can afford to be. And the richer you are the more devastating your evils become. The worst thing I could probably do is kill somebody. It takes a corporation to talk politicians into needless wars that kill millions. I would almost certainly be caught if I did that. The corporation would get away scott free. I could steal some money and maybe get lucky and not get caught. Only a giant bank can steal trillions from the world and cause a major recession and not only face no legal penalties but get paid a bailout. Libertarianism fundanentally fails to understand how wealth magnifies capacity. I can give some money to the needy. Maybe feed one or put one poor kid through school. The Gates foundation have done billions of times more good than I ever could. Their capacity to do good is magnified by their vast financial resources. The capacity for evil is magnified in the same way. But while humans do both good or evil corporations can only ever do evil. They are fundamentalky designed by law to preclude the capacity to ever do sincere good.
Thats the common speech definition. The philosophy of anarchism is a synonym for direct democracy. When Plato said democracy was anarchist he was not demeaning it as most people think. He was just describing it accurately. In an anarchst state you have an all encompassingly large government. What you do not have is authority or unequal power.
The common definition is held only by those who think authority is a prequisite for order and its absense lead to chaos. You are debating philosophies with such ignorance you cannot tell a term of art from a common meaning in context. Most dictionaries by the way define libertarianism as 'an anarchist form of socialism' because thats what it means everywhere outside the US and has meant fir 500 years. The American movement which coopted the name to mean almost the exact opposite is barely 40 years old. Yet I can tell which meaning is being discussed from context. Basically you come across as a mom's basement libertarian whose belief in it is based entirely on teenaged narcicism coupled with ignorance. Most libertarians are exactly that. No judgement. 18 years ago when I was a teenager I was a libertarian too. I thought John Galt was a hero. The government is always evil. Social safety netts were theft. The rich were noble and the market was always best. Then I llived in the real world. I saw firsthand what the market does when it goes wrong. Saw first hand the unmitigated death, destruction and suffering an unrestrained market rains upon the innocent. Studied philosophy and learned about how to think critically and found libertarianism utterly unable to stand up to critical analysis when subjected to actual empirical thought. Real life, a conscience and learning the capacity for empathy made me a leftist. So I must extend you the benefit of the doubt that in time, if you see and experience enough you too will outgrow the horror that lives in your mind and pretends to he rational and objective while never even approaching either. Only that which is backed by empirical science can ever be rational or objective.
First I assume nothing at all. I based my post on the overwhelming evidence of every study on the subject that has ever been done. I stated a scientific fact.
Secondly the spiral problem, besides not being a problem, does not exist. Immigration is negative. And the biggest negative is Mexico. Few people come to the US from Mexico. Many leave tge US to go to Mexico. The number of immigrants is declining all by itself not growing as you claim. Again this is a proven fact.
You cant have that. Its impossible. Strong and small cannot coexist. Small inevitably means weak. And you misunderstand anarchism. Anarchism wants the biggest government possible. A government everybody is an equal part off. Where every citizen can vote on every law.
Complete strawman. Nowhere did I say 'a right to control'. I said 'a stake in the decision'. Thats a massively different thing which completely and utterly invalidates your response.
No the government does not get an automatic right to control healthcare. Though the international empirical facts prove incontrovertibly that giving them a duty to do so is by far the best way for healthcare to work it is not a right.
But they do get a stake. So they can establish regulations aroumd medical testing standards to protect the public from snake oil for example. Before the FDA 99% of what was sold as medicine in the USA was either snake oil or cocaine or opium. Real medicine was barely available and impossible to distinguish. You think homeopathy is bad ? Its a picnic nect to what Americans got as medicine less than a century ago. Homeopathy only does nothing. That shit was dangerous and highly adfictive drugs sold with no warnings or disclosure about the risks. Welcome to how every industry looks in the libertarian paradise. All tge real products go out of business very quickly when nobody stops people from competing by selling hot air.
In most sane jurisdictions thats not allowed. Im a landlord and there are definite restrictions around this I have to comply with. Cannot alter the lease agreement before it is up without tennants consent. Cannot evict anybody without a court order (so a judge can check fair play) cant market the property for sale until the last 2 months of the lease. And as a landlord I call these things the restrictions of a sane system. As a decent human being I would never do any less anyway but it evens the playing field by forcing the evil types to do what a decent human being would never consider not doing. Keeping evil people from getting higher profit margines by acting evil to those less well off is something many here would call an intrusion on liberty. Maybe but I for obe consider it a justified and valid one since liberty should not be restricted to those rich enough to own multiple properties.
The post you replied to was filtered for me before. I only saw it now but at the time I replied it looked like you were replying to somebody else entirely which quite warped the context.
Slashdot Mirror
The right would find a way to make pro-cancer sound like "freedom"... who would have thought.
>So far, the only downsides to cannabis legalization have been prison guard layoffs, and the extra burden on politicians that have to figure out how to spend all the money from dope sales taxes.
So the obvious solution is to use the dope sales taxes to fund employing the former prison guards in public works projects ?
rightwingers rapidly assemble around the opposite - even for ideas they originally proposed.
Mmm... *grabs popcorn*, I am looking forward to watching the republicans become pro-cancer. I can't imagine what the arguments will look like but I bet they'll include the phrase "will of God" at least 50 times.
Now try reading the wiki page for libertarian socialism. Where andalusia is specifically listed as an example. You are failing to understand the concept. Anarcho socialism has been around for centuries and dates back to philosophers like Proudhom. In fact the original meaning of 'libertarian' is anarcho-socialist. Its a French word that was coined to get around the Napoleonic ban on anarchist propaganda.
Among the most notable anarcho-socialists living today is Noam Chomsky. Try reading his works. You dont have to agree with the idea but you ought to at least understand it before you decide.
Or read the wiki page on participatory politics and participatory economics for a popular contemporary proposal on how an anarcho socialist society can be structured from Harvard.
People who spend their lives studying political and economic philosophy see no contradiction in the idea... but you do ? So either you are privy to some fact that has escaped every major philodopher for 500 years or you are wrong. Guess which one is more likely.
Or to put it otherwise. If you publish a paper proving anarcho socialism a logical contradiction without relying on the false definition of socialism you quoted before (because that would get you mocked) you would receive a dozen honorary phds in philosophy from the world's greatest universities for doing something even a rabid capitalist philosopher like John Locke could never achieve. It would be philosphy's greatest breakthrough in 500 years. I wish you luck but I will not be holding my breath.
>You can't be socialist and anarchist.
Yes you can, and many socialists would argue you cannot be a true socialist and NOT be anarchist.
>The definition of socialism is state ownership of the means of production.
No it isn't. Who told you that ? The definition of socialism is WORKER ownership of the means of production. There is NOTHING in there about a "state". The idea of the state as a proxy for workers was introduced by Bolshevism but all the other forms roundly reject that. Worker-owned co-ops are socialist businesses. A country becomes socialist when the majority of workers own the businesses they work in. Argentina is technically the most socialist country in the world today since worker-owned coops are now by far the largest form of employment there (and the absolutely backbone of the economy contributing well over 80% of total GDP). Many anarchists reject the idea off a boss/worker relationship as being an unacceptable power-relationship - and find only socialist businesses compatible with anarchism. Many such socialists believe the idea of a government or state is an unacceptable power relationship and believe they should have a say in every vote they are expected to live under, just as they should have an equal say in every company decision that affects their livelilhood and an equal share in the profits they helped create.
>What you are talking about is a social anarchy.
It's had many names, anarcho-socialism, social anarchy, libertarian-socialism, left-libertarianism, anarcho-syndicalism, participatory politics and participatory economics are all essentially the same set of ideas. They have very minor differences in how they propose to handle specific aspects of implementation but the key features of all of them are exactly the same.
There is nothing about illegal immigration that makes disease spreading more likely than legal immigration - at least from the same countries. But the risk of new diseases are not going to be contained or reduced, it's simply beyond our abilities to ever do that. When we encounter a new disease, it's going to kill some people before anybody can develop immunity, let alone vaccines - it's just the nature of reality, you cannot plan for the unpredictable.
But we sure as hell don't need to be dying from old diseases which we have the technology to entirely eradicate.
Very true, but I didn't expect him to be able to understand the ideas to that level. The kind of people who see the world in stark binaries tend to be oblivious to the idea that there can ever be more than just two ideas in the world about anything - let alone things that exist in between without being at the extremes of either and that those in-betweens are frequently better than what's on the fringes.
You identified correctly one of the biggest problems today and failed to consider the cure. You cant reduce the impact of money on politics by reducing the size of government and that never happens anyway. The GOP may say they want to but all they actually do is defund good and useful programs to give more money to bad programs that benefit rich donors. The cure is to remove the legal right to bribe politicians. Get over the idea that political spending is free speech. Its the opposite. It undermines free political speech to complete irrelevance.
Look at most functional democracies and you find that giving money to a politician for any purpose, ever is flat out illegal. Every candidate gets a fixed (equal) sum from public money to spend on campaigning and spending any more is a jailtime crime and paid-for political advertising is flat out illegal. Then an election is a contest of ideas on a level playing field.
Imagine walking into a government office and demanding some records file under a freedom of information act, without filling in a form or even having to give your name and a guarantee that if they dont hand it over in less than one hour the office head has to be fired by law.
Thats how it is in several European countries. But Europe constrains money in politics and regulates industry properly (including a requirement that 50% of a company board must be non shareholding, non-exective employees so the people whose livelihoods depend on board decisions get a serious say in those decisions). Where a company is not legalky or economically deemed a profit maximising entity but a community working for collective gain by all involved.
Government can be accountable to all. Corporations never are. Even the things you describe are not real. Its easy to avoid customers punishing bad behaviour: just do the bad behaviour somewhere other than where you sell. ... well like chocolate.
Nobody would buy chocolate in America if it was American kids being kidnapped and enslaved by cocoa farms. But do it in Africa and 70% of all chocolate can be picked by kidnapped child slaves and Americans will keep buying. You get a scandal ? Spend a few hundred thousand on a PR campaigning about cleaning up your act and wait for people to forget. Never actually do anythi g better. Just ask Nestle, beacon and Hershey. They all had a major scandal when the slavery thing became news in 2000. 16 years later its only gotten worse. Chocolate still sells
>Make the pay a million a year (cheap in the government scheme of things) so it's not like jury duty.
Or, if you must have dedicated politicians and elections - make the pay minimum wage (and add a clause that minimum wages only apply to congressmen after 5 years so they can just jack that up to enrich themselves), make all campaign contributions flat out illegal and all paid-for advertising as well - everybody running gets a flat fee from public funds and must campaign with that and only that and make it utterly illegal for any office holder to accept any money from anybody except a registered bank and even then only at the standard market interest rate.
Basically - make running the country a job you will do living in barely above poverty conditions - make it something no elite has any interest in doing, a job you would only do if you were truly passionate about serving others.
Working in congress SHOULD be like volunteering at the local soup kitchen.
It was science that got the death-rate this low and life expectancy this high. For years we've warned that the anti-science movement risks undoing those gains. The anti-science movement has only grown stronger over this time. Surely we should consider the possibility that this is that prediction coming true. That the blame for this belongs with the anti-vaxers and the homepaths and if so - perhaps that other rabid anti-science group so prevalent here on slashdot who think that cause and effect somehow doesn't apply to the climate should heed the warning...
Oh they did... but since they were the people who benefited from it they did everything in their power to ensure it remained that way. Nobody wants competition for his job - especially not from somebody more competent than himself, so Citizens United was the best thing to ever happen to a politician.
The thing about making absolute statements is that it only takes a single counter-example to absolutely disprove them. So here you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But it's not Andalusia of today that is interesting, it's Andalusia as it existed between 1920 and 1939. Andalusia the land of plenty while the rest of the world were living in the great depression. Absolutely socialist and completely anarchist - had no government whatsoever (let alone a totalitarian one). Orwell fought on their side in the Spanish civil war - he called Andalusia the closest thing to a Utopian society that has ever existed. A society that had no poverty, starvation or suffering at all - and more personal liberty than any other in history before or since.
That pissed off everybody else - nobody liked to see people governing themselves, without poverty or hunger, in a functioning industrial society. Other country's citizens may get ideas... so they faced a two-front war. Capitalist and communists (they may despise each other but not nearly as much as they despised anarcho-soialists. The Capitalists hated both the anarchism and the socialism and the communists REALLY hated the idea of a working socialism without an autocratic state) actually formed an alliance to wipe Andalusia off the map and after almost 2 decades they finally overwhelmed them.
But economically, politically and socially it was an astoundingly successful society. Democracy's greatest success. Unfortunately nobody can stand forever against a sustained war on two fronts by extremely powerful forces, even so it took two decades to defeat them.
Surely the Trump of the Shire must be Sackville-Baggins !
I said sincere good. It's not sincere when you're doing it for the PR.
I never said government was good. It is not. Its just better to face an evil accountable to me than one accountable to shareholders. And I didnt say every need. Just the need to care for the needy. You may want to work on those reading comprehension skills...
Slashdot is late on something ? Surely not. That never happens...
I would say "all of the above".
I don't believe ANYTHING said by ANY member of the Chicago or Austrian schools of economics and neither should you - they are all pseudo-scientific cultists. Real economics is based on empirical data. The only two schools of economics that reject empiricism is to economics very much as astrology is to astronomy and should be treated with the same (absolute lack of) respect that astrologers get.
You will not impress me with Friedman because as a rational and sceptical minded person I consider him a charlatan akin to Deepak Chopra. Chopra is also highly regarded that says nothing.
It is interesting however that while I cited empirical studies of what actually HAPPENED in economies after large scale immigration - you had nothing better than an appeal to authority in rebuttal and your chosen authority wasn't even a trustworthy or authoritive one.
The only studies worthy of consideration are those based on empirical analysis of actual economic data from countries where large scale immigration happened. Those all agree that the immigration has always led to growth in employment rates for the economy as a whole that exceeds the number of jobs taken by immigrants - in other words, that for every job an immigrant takes, more are created for natives.
So yeah, I utterly disregard Friedman because his theories are not empirally testable and, indeed, has failed to hold up to empirical testing.
As it happens perhaps the single most scientific experiment in the history of economics was about a Friedman theory. Friedman believed that squatters could be lifted entirely out of poverty if they were simply given the titles to the land they squatted on. This theory is still very popular among libertarian-types. But it has been tested.
In Argentina one group of squatters petitioned the government for title, and got it. But it only happened for one block, the next block over (literally across the street from them) did not get title. That was more than 20 years ago.
So what happened in the 20 years since one group of squatters became legal owners of the land and the other group did not ? Well none of Friedman's predictions came true - nada. You can't blame different economic conditions or any other factors - all other things were equal since these two groups are in the same city, right next to each other and were under the same laws and economic events. Today - the group with title still lives in exactly the same shacks as their neighbours. Almost nobody built a proper house. Hardly any of those patches of land has ever been sold. And less than 0.001% of them has ever gotten a bond against that land.
Friedman predicted they would use that land as an asset to get bonds to start businesses, or sell the land to buy themselves better educations - none of this happened. It didn't happen because it turns out:
1) Nobody wants to BUY a patch of land where your neighbours are squatters living in shacks.
2) Getting a bond requires more than security, banks also want to know you can pay the instalments - and low income people can't afford the bonds.
3) Improving your land requires more than owning it, you also need capital or at least access to credit, the former wasn't there in the first place (or they wouldn't be squatting) and the latter wasn't available because of 2.
In short - Friedman's theories fall apart in the real world because he did not subject them to science's reality check known a empirical testing.
I did not define anarchism as big government. I defined it as 'a synonym for direct democracy'. I described this as being, in practise, the biggest government you can possibly have because all ctizens are part of the government.
These are entirely compatible things to say.
And the trouble with your beliefs is that the need outweighs the capacity of people to meet individually (and that need grows massively bigger the less you regulate markets as the poor and the needy are a consequence of bad behaviour in the market). The only way the need can ever or has ever been met is by ensuring all of society contributes.
It has benefits to everybody to meet that need. Maintaining a social safety net is kike maintaining roads. Everybody benefits from having it and we all venefit the most if individuals do not have exclusive control of it. And there is the issue of trust. When somebody raises a million for charity most often the charity gets less than 5%. Private citizens can lie, abscond, misrepresent and commit fraud because their finances are private. Government in a free country on the other hand is accountable to the public and is budgets are public record. If it spends less tgan allocated we can easily know and complain. It cant hide costs in fine print to take what we gave to the needy and keep it. This is why charity fraud is common but fraud by welfare departments is exceedingly rare.
Its funny though how libertarians never oppose the most common theft by government of them all. The obe known as privatization. Where that which we all paid to build is given to a private owner who now charges us to use what we invested to have for free. Or worse privatising formerly public natural resources. Depriving the entire populace of their former free access to this common resource is theft of the grandest order. Libertarians claim this prevents a tragedy of the commons. It does no such thing. It is a tragedy of the commons - it just has red tape added.
Nothing in libertarianism holds up to critical examination under empirical facts because it fails to understand a core aspect of humanity. All people are exactly as evil as they can afford to be. And the richer you are the more devastating your evils become. The worst thing I could probably do is kill somebody. It takes a corporation to talk politicians into needless wars that kill millions. I would almost certainly be caught if I did that. The corporation would get away scott free.
I could steal some money and maybe get lucky and not get caught. Only a giant bank can steal trillions from the world and cause a major recession and not only face no legal penalties but get paid a bailout.
Libertarianism fundanentally fails to understand how wealth magnifies capacity. I can give some money to the needy. Maybe feed one or put one poor kid through school. The Gates foundation have done billions of times more good than I ever could. Their capacity to do good is magnified by their vast financial resources. The capacity for evil is magnified in the same way.
But while humans do both good or evil corporations can only ever do evil. They are fundamentalky designed by law to preclude the capacity to ever do sincere good.
Thats the common speech definition. The philosophy of anarchism is a synonym for direct democracy. When Plato said democracy was anarchist he was not demeaning it as most people think. He was just describing it accurately.
In an anarchst state you have an all encompassingly large government. What you do not have is authority or unequal power.
The common definition is held only by those who think authority is a prequisite for order and its absense lead to chaos. You are debating philosophies with such ignorance you cannot tell a term of art from a common meaning in context.
Most dictionaries by the way define libertarianism as 'an anarchist form of socialism' because thats what it means everywhere outside the US and has meant fir 500 years. The American movement which coopted the name to mean almost the exact opposite is barely 40 years old. Yet I can tell which meaning is being discussed from context.
Basically you come across as a mom's basement libertarian whose belief in it is based entirely on teenaged narcicism coupled with ignorance. Most libertarians are exactly that. No judgement. 18 years ago when I was a teenager I was a libertarian too. I thought John Galt was a hero. The government is always evil. Social safety netts were theft. The rich were noble and the market was always best.
Then I llived in the real world. I saw firsthand what the market does when it goes wrong. Saw first hand the unmitigated death, destruction and suffering an unrestrained market rains upon the innocent. Studied philosophy and learned about how to think critically and found libertarianism utterly unable to stand up to critical analysis when subjected to actual empirical thought.
Real life, a conscience and learning the capacity for empathy made me a leftist. So I must extend you the benefit of the doubt that in time, if you see and experience enough you too will outgrow the horror that lives in your mind and pretends to he rational and objective while never even approaching either. Only that which is backed by empirical science can ever be rational or objective.
First I assume nothing at all. I based my post on the overwhelming evidence of every study on the subject that has ever been done. I stated a scientific fact.
Secondly the spiral problem, besides not being a problem, does not exist. Immigration is negative. And the biggest negative is Mexico. Few people come to the US from Mexico. Many leave tge US to go to Mexico.
The number of immigrants is declining all by itself not growing as you claim. Again this is a proven fact.
You cant have that. Its impossible. Strong and small cannot coexist. Small inevitably means weak.
And you misunderstand anarchism. Anarchism wants the biggest government possible. A government everybody is an equal part off. Where every citizen can vote on every law.
Complete strawman. Nowhere did I say 'a right to control'. I said 'a stake in the decision'. Thats a massively different thing which completely and utterly invalidates your response.
No the government does not get an automatic right to control healthcare. Though the international empirical facts prove incontrovertibly that giving them a duty to do so is by far the best way for healthcare to work it is not a right.
But they do get a stake. So they can establish regulations aroumd medical testing standards to protect the public from snake oil for example. Before the FDA 99% of what was sold as medicine in the USA was either snake oil or cocaine or opium. Real medicine was barely available and impossible to distinguish. You think homeopathy is bad ? Its a picnic nect to what Americans got as medicine less than a century ago. Homeopathy only does nothing. That shit was dangerous and highly adfictive drugs sold with no warnings or disclosure about the risks. Welcome to how every industry looks in the libertarian paradise. All tge real products go out of business very quickly when nobody stops people from competing by selling hot air.
In most sane jurisdictions thats not allowed. Im a landlord and there are definite restrictions around this I have to comply with. Cannot alter the lease agreement before it is up without tennants consent. Cannot evict anybody without a court order (so a judge can check fair play) cant market the property for sale until the last 2 months of the lease.
And as a landlord I call these things the restrictions of a sane system. As a decent human being I would never do any less anyway but it evens the playing field by forcing the evil types to do what a decent human being would never consider not doing.
Keeping evil people from getting higher profit margines by acting evil to those less well off is something many here would call an intrusion on liberty. Maybe but I for obe consider it a justified and valid one since liberty should not be restricted to those rich enough to own multiple properties.
The post you replied to was filtered for me before. I only saw it now but at the time I replied it looked like you were replying to somebody else entirely which quite warped the context.