0) You haven't refuted anything. I was critiquing libertarianism, which purports to support liberty. I attempt to show that it leads to the opposite. You say other systems lead to "slavery" as well. That does not prove that libertarianism doesn't.
1) Certainly it is not necessary that there will be anyone who owns nothing. I am extrapolating based on current conditions, systems analysis, and feedback loops. Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, and doing it faster the less regulated an economy is. The more wealth you have, the more power you have to get more wealth. The end condition where all important resources are owned by a relatively few people is not outrageous, and anyone proposing a system that seems to lead there should be prepared to show why it won't. All you do is speculate that it might not.
2) Point A is confusing. Everyone can agree that people need food, water, shelter and medicine. The amount of food is surprisingly small, you can usually get by with 1/2 what you think you need. But that hasn't been a problem since the green revolution (technology, not party). We throw away enough edible food every day to feed every human on the planet, just to prop up "fair" market prices.
3) Dumb. We are talking about systems we want people to buy into voluntarily. You can't use that "What I want vs. what everyone else wants" argument. People have no reason to support a system that only rewards individual strength. I mean, if I'm strong enough to just take it, why do I need a system? I won't support a system that is unfair to me, and others won't support a system that is unfair to them, so we have to reach a compromise. And violence? We are talking about systems of governance here. The point is to do away with violence. We've already seen in company oppression of labor unions how money can be used to turn one group of poor starving people against another.
4) I have shown the specific mechanism I accuse libertarianism of promoting. It's a feedback loop of accumulation of wealth leading to greater power and greater accumulation of wealth. The other systems have their faults. They are different faults, but we aren't critiquing them, we are critiquing libertarianism. As a debater, you need to show why the specific mechanism I mention will not lead to the outcome I presume it will. You have not done that
In short, your arguments are of a poor quality and do not address my points in a cogent way. But thanks for trying, by steering clear of outright flameage you've done better than most, even if your arguments would get you failed out of a high school debate class.
I think you're a doody-head. Now we're even, eh? And we've raised the level of discourse on slashdot in the process. Maybe you could say what you disagree with, rather than acting like a four year old. You act like a classic right wing bully who has no good arguments and so resorts to name calling.
If one dominates in private property, it infringes on everything. How can I eat without property to grow food? I must work for somone who does have such resources, and I must do whetever that person says. When only kings and nobles owned property, the fight for the right of the common person to own it was important. Now, property owners are the new kings and nobles, and the common person needs protection from property owners.
Haha, nice try at a slam, but I consider survival beneficial, and if the options are putting out or starving to death, any rational individual would have to choose the former. In your system, what is to keep owners from colluding to keep prices for necessities artificially high? Because of the fact that the more you own, the more power you have, people with a slight ownership advantage can parley it into a larger advantage. This feedback loop eventually leads to a small oligarchy of owners who then get to legally decide who lives and who dies, under your system. Please attempt to show why or how this would not be the case.
For bonus points, show how innate weaknesses in the free market, namely natural monopolies, externalities, and imbalance of information will not be exploited under your system to hasten the above-mentioned inevitable outcome.
Insightful. Why do you consider him an idiot? Is anyone who disagrees with you an idiot? If so, why would anyone ever choose to debate you in a public forum such as this. That raises (not begs!) the question, why do you even bother posting here?
Uhhhh, I am an anarchist. An anarcho-syndicalist. We think your concept of individual ownership of natural resources will automatically lead to an oligarchy of a few owning class people. We believe in democratic control of natural resources by the workers actually using those resources.
Government is a control structure, and like any it can be abused. That includes the control structures of private ownership, which aren't as efficient as you may think. In studies of privatization, privatization of competitive industries works well, while privatization of natural monopolies has always failed.
With government, there is a system of checks and balances. In the free market, there are no checks and balances to curb the runaway positive feedback loop of wealth accumulation. There are no checks to stop the exploitation of the natural failure modes of the free market: information imbalance, natural monopoly, and externalities. I have yet to hear a Libertarian give a cogent explanation of how their system would deal with those three factors.
You accuse me of not understanding Libertarianism, I accuse you of not thinking through the consequences.
If I have nothing, owning no property, and you own all the world's resources, then if you were to demand that I bend over and let you anally rape me in exchange for a bite to eat, it would be mutually beneficial for both of us if I complied.
"Mutually beneficial" is not the guarantee of moral correctness you seem to think it is.
You support slavery, do you? When all resources are owned, all non owners are slaves. If rights to basic necessities are not guaranteed, I can get you to do anything by denying them to you. You want a world where a small owning class controls all resources and the rest of us all have to do what you say, don't you? That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
If you owned nothing, and all the world's resources were owned, as they would eventually be under libertarianism, then you would be a slave. How would you survive without doing what an owner told you to do? You wouldn't. And you would have no rights, either. No right to assembly, all land is private. No right to free speech, ditto. Any owner could tell you to shut up or leave their property.
Face it, you want to own slaves, you just don't have the balls to admit it.
Slander is not a substitute, but logical discourse is impossible with libertarians. It's like arguing with flat-earthers, it's so absolutely wrong that I don't even know where to start.
I'm not a statist either, I'm an anarcho-socialist of the anarcho-syndicalist variety. I don't want the state telling me what to do, but I don't want an oligarchy of owning class assholes telling me what to do, either, and that is a certainty under libertarianism.
I like being called a socialist. Anarchosocialist, anyways. There is nothing wrong with caring about the important rights: the right to food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Without those rights, all others are meaningless.
Libertarians want the right to economically enslave others. When all resources are privately owned, all non-owners are defacto slaves, and it is this goal that libertarians work towards: the enslavement of the poor, worldwide.
Just because someone isn't crazy enough to buy into libertarianism doesn't mean they're a socialist. It just means they aren't completely stupid. Admitting to being a libertarian is akin to admitting to being a Scientologist, it's a fairly clear sign of mental derangement.
Libertarianism: Because simple minds like simple answers to complex problems.
I'm your LiberNuttertarian Guy! Are you tired, run-down, listless? Do you pop out at parties? Are you unpoopular? The answer to all your problems is in this little philosophy! LiberNuttertarianism!
Good point, except that poor people stand to gain from not believing the myth, if the myth is not true. And if it is true, it still means having to stand up to an unfair system. It doesn't mean "I'll just stand around and bitch about it!" If you are poor, and there is an option, you have to take it. I may be wrong, but I have the impression that you have absolutely no idea what its like to be poor.
The system is unfair to people who are not members of the dominant culture. People who are members of the dominant culture never have to question their assumptions and cultural myths. When society says, "you can be anything you set your mind to" to a member of the dominant culture, that is likely true. When members of non dominant cultures are told that same myth, they are forced by experience to question that myth, as it is likely not true for them.
I've known lots of people who were smart, made good choices, worked hard, and didn't achieve anything. I've also known plenty of lazy bastards who thought they were smart and hard working, but weren't, and still got ahead through social connections and dumb luck. Members of the dominant culture who make it through dumb luck never have to question the story they are told, that they made it through skill and right choices.
No man is an island. We are all shaped by our experiences. We have little choice as to the kinds of experiences we will be shaped by. Society creates individuals and individuals create society. Individuals should be held responsible for the kinds of people they create through their interactions. Individualists somehow see themselves as separate from society and the systems they both help create and take advantage of. They are not, and such thinking is a huge abdication of personal responsibility.
Current economic theory makes certain predictions, namely, that people will act selfishly. These games show that people don't act selfishly. These were carefully controlled double blind studies with games played for months worth of salary. The participants had no idea what the researchers "wanted" find. The studies weren't "worded" any particular way, you are obviously completely unfamiliar with the studies in question.
In one study, people were given a certain amount of money. They could keep it all, or give any amount of it to the other player. The amount given was multiplied by a small factor, say 1.25. The second player then had a chance to keep all the money, or give some back. Selfish actor theory says that people will keep all the money. They don't.
That's just one game, there are many more and they all show the same results. Selfish actor theory is wrong. You can spin that any way you like, it doesn't change the facts: the basic theory on which all of modern free market capitalism is based, is completely flawed.
You appear to want the world to be a certain way, and are willing to disregard any evidence that the world is not the way you think it should be. Certain people know that the game is rigged, and as long as people keep believing the lie, those selfish people keep reaping the benefits of a system that encourages selfishness. Those people would do anything to keep others from recognizing the truth about human nature.
Humans aren't selfish and they don't need external control to maintain civilization. There is extreme danger to the status quo if enough people were to believe that, so the agents of the status quo work hard to make sure people don't.
Why would we trust them with the important role of "eternal enemy" yet again, when they've proven themselves deficient in the "eternal" department? Terrorism is a MUCH better eternal enemy, precisely because it is so elusive and invisible. Have we won yet? Who knows!
Nice myth, it certainly keeps you in the clear. Ask yourself, what's easier for me to believe, that I got where I am through hard work and determination, or that I got where I am because the system is unfair. Funny how most people's beliefs end up making them look good.
When? The fifties. Look it up. Plenty of people think raising taxes helps the economy. In fact, recent events have shown that lowering taxes does not encourage investment. Businesses invest based on projections of future demand, not availability of capital. Duh.
People who forget history are doomed to repeat it. I just wish you wouldn't drag the rest of us along for that ride.
In fascist Amerika, one can not critique the rich. It's the new Divine Right of Kings: The Divine Right of the Rich to their Money. After all, Wealthiness is next to Godliness. If God didn't want people to be rich, why, he wouldn't have showered them with cash. I mean really, where do I get off criticizing the rich? Without them, we'd all starve. It is only through their charitable good works that we even have jobs in the first place.
I'm reminded of a quote: "God shows his contempt for wealth in the choice of people he chooses to shower it upon." The sad thing is, I bet the person who modded the above down is not even rich. They just identify with the rich, and think that if they protect the interests of the rich, someday they may be rich. Because that's worked really well for collaborators throughout history. Suckers.
That's just the thing, and it's so odd that it needs to be pointed out so that people don't misinterpret the results as you have done. There were no taboos against those things, meaning, and I will be explicit, that those things were not seen as wrong, bad or harmful in any way. You speculate that people wouldn't do them because of the consequences, and that misses the point entirely as well as misunderstanding the whole concept of "not a taboo." People in western cultures think of those things as inherently wrong and bad because of our conditioning. It is almost impossible to understand a culture where this is not the case, as witnessed by your reply. You still see the actions as bad, and you still think that they would be regarded as bad by the society, just not "taboo." Well, that is what taboo means. Bad is exactly what they are not.
Yet despite there being, let me paraphrase "taboo", no social stigma, punishment, or judgment placed on these actions whatsoever, these actions occurred less often than in societies where these actions did have such judgments or stigma placed on them. It as is if telling people what not to do automatically gets their back up and makes them want to do it, not because they wanted to, but simply because you've told them not to.
In short, not only is society not a force that keeps people acting rationally, fairly, and equitably towards one another, it is a force that causes the evils it purports to fix. And of course, when it fails, we just didn't apply the cure correctly, we need to be harsher, stricter and more punitive! The only reason that this dysfunctional vicious circle has not lead to complete collapse is that (most) people are inherently decent, equitable, fair, reciprocal, in short: good people. Society, for the most part, only gets in the way of that innate goodness.
I'd like to take things back to the good old days of 90% tax rates and a booming economy where the middle class could actually look forward to their children having a better life then they did. Wealth is a positive freedom: the freedom to make money. Survival is a negative freedom, the freedom from having the means of survival taken away from you. Extreme wealth means extreme imbalance of wealth, and thus extreme poverty, meaning that many will be denied access to the means of survival. This is a greater restriction on freedom than any restrictions on wealth.
As to who decides, the majority decides. If the minority of wealthy don't like it, tough. They would not be wealthy without society. If they don't like it, they can leave and go live by themselves on a deserted island some place. Which is more of a choice than most of them propose to give most of us, that choice amounting to: make money for us as "consumers" or die in a gutter.
Slashdot Mirror
0) You haven't refuted anything. I was critiquing libertarianism, which purports to support liberty. I attempt to show that it leads to the opposite. You say other systems lead to "slavery" as well. That does not prove that libertarianism doesn't.
1) Certainly it is not necessary that there will be anyone who owns nothing. I am extrapolating based on current conditions, systems analysis, and feedback loops. Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, and doing it faster the less regulated an economy is. The more wealth you have, the more power you have to get more wealth. The end condition where all important resources are owned by a relatively few people is not outrageous, and anyone proposing a system that seems to lead there should be prepared to show why it won't. All you do is speculate that it might not.
2) Point A is confusing. Everyone can agree that people need food, water, shelter and medicine. The amount of food is surprisingly small, you can usually get by with 1/2 what you think you need. But that hasn't been a problem since the green revolution (technology, not party). We throw away enough edible food every day to feed every human on the planet, just to prop up "fair" market prices.
3) Dumb. We are talking about systems we want people to buy into voluntarily. You can't use that "What I want vs. what everyone else wants" argument. People have no reason to support a system that only rewards individual strength. I mean, if I'm strong enough to just take it, why do I need a system? I won't support a system that is unfair to me, and others won't support a system that is unfair to them, so we have to reach a compromise. And violence? We are talking about systems of governance here. The point is to do away with violence. We've already seen in company oppression of labor unions how money can be used to turn one group of poor starving people against another.
4) I have shown the specific mechanism I accuse libertarianism of promoting. It's a feedback loop of accumulation of wealth leading to greater power and greater accumulation of wealth. The other systems have their faults. They are different faults, but we aren't critiquing them, we are critiquing libertarianism. As a debater, you need to show why the specific mechanism I mention will not lead to the outcome I presume it will. You have not done that
In short, your arguments are of a poor quality and do not address my points in a cogent way. But thanks for trying, by steering clear of outright flameage you've done better than most, even if your arguments would get you failed out of a high school debate class.
I think you're a doody-head. Now we're even, eh? And we've raised the level of discourse on slashdot in the process. Maybe you could say what you disagree with, rather than acting like a four year old. You act like a classic right wing bully who has no good arguments and so resorts to name calling.
If one dominates in private property, it infringes on everything. How can I eat without property to grow food? I must work for somone who does have such resources, and I must do whetever that person says. When only kings and nobles owned property, the fight for the right of the common person to own it was important. Now, property owners are the new kings and nobles, and the common person needs protection from property owners.
Haha, nice try at a slam, but I consider survival beneficial, and if the options are putting out or starving to death, any rational individual would have to choose the former. In your system, what is to keep owners from colluding to keep prices for necessities artificially high? Because of the fact that the more you own, the more power you have, people with a slight ownership advantage can parley it into a larger advantage. This feedback loop eventually leads to a small oligarchy of owners who then get to legally decide who lives and who dies, under your system. Please attempt to show why or how this would not be the case.
For bonus points, show how innate weaknesses in the free market, namely natural monopolies, externalities, and imbalance of information will not be exploited under your system to hasten the above-mentioned inevitable outcome.
Insightful. Why do you consider him an idiot? Is anyone who disagrees with you an idiot? If so, why would anyone ever choose to debate you in a public forum such as this. That raises (not begs!) the question, why do you even bother posting here?
Uhhhh, I am an anarchist. An anarcho-syndicalist. We think your concept of individual ownership of natural resources will automatically lead to an oligarchy of a few owning class people. We believe in democratic control of natural resources by the workers actually using those resources.
Government is a control structure, and like any it can be abused. That includes the control structures of private ownership, which aren't as efficient as you may think. In studies of privatization, privatization of competitive industries works well, while privatization of natural monopolies has always failed.
With government, there is a system of checks and balances. In the free market, there are no checks and balances to curb the runaway positive feedback loop of wealth accumulation. There are no checks to stop the exploitation of the natural failure modes of the free market: information imbalance, natural monopoly, and externalities. I have yet to hear a Libertarian give a cogent explanation of how their system would deal with those three factors.
You accuse me of not understanding Libertarianism, I accuse you of not thinking through the consequences.
If I have nothing, owning no property, and you own all the world's resources, then if you were to demand that I bend over and let you anally rape me in exchange for a bite to eat, it would be mutually beneficial for both of us if I complied.
"Mutually beneficial" is not the guarantee of moral correctness you seem to think it is.
You support slavery, do you? When all resources are owned, all non owners are slaves. If rights to basic necessities are not guaranteed, I can get you to do anything by denying them to you. You want a world where a small owning class controls all resources and the rest of us all have to do what you say, don't you? That is what libertarianism necessarily leads to.
If you owned nothing, and all the world's resources were owned, as they would eventually be under libertarianism, then you would be a slave. How would you survive without doing what an owner told you to do? You wouldn't. And you would have no rights, either. No right to assembly, all land is private. No right to free speech, ditto. Any owner could tell you to shut up or leave their property.
Face it, you want to own slaves, you just don't have the balls to admit it.
Slander is not a substitute, but logical discourse is impossible with libertarians. It's like arguing with flat-earthers, it's so absolutely wrong that I don't even know where to start.
I'm not a statist either, I'm an anarcho-socialist of the anarcho-syndicalist variety. I don't want the state telling me what to do, but I don't want an oligarchy of owning class assholes telling me what to do, either, and that is a certainty under libertarianism.
I like being called a socialist. Anarchosocialist, anyways. There is nothing wrong with caring about the important rights: the right to food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Without those rights, all others are meaningless.
Libertarians want the right to economically enslave others. When all resources are privately owned, all non-owners are defacto slaves, and it is this goal that libertarians work towards: the enslavement of the poor, worldwide.
Just because someone isn't crazy enough to buy into libertarianism doesn't mean they're a socialist. It just means they aren't completely stupid. Admitting to being a libertarian is akin to admitting to being a Scientologist, it's a fairly clear sign of mental derangement.
Libertarianism: Because simple minds like simple answers to complex problems.
I'm your LiberNuttertarian Guy!
Are you tired, run-down, listless?
Do you pop out at parties?
Are you unpoopular?
The answer to all your problems is in this little philosophy!
LiberNuttertarianism!
Good point, except that poor people stand to gain from not believing the myth, if the myth is not true. And if it is true, it still means having to stand up to an unfair system. It doesn't mean "I'll just stand around and bitch about it!" If you are poor, and there is an option, you have to take it. I may be wrong, but I have the impression that you have absolutely no idea what its like to be poor.
The system is unfair to people who are not members of the dominant culture. People who are members of the dominant culture never have to question their assumptions and cultural myths. When society says, "you can be anything you set your mind to" to a member of the dominant culture, that is likely true. When members of non dominant cultures are told that same myth, they are forced by experience to question that myth, as it is likely not true for them.
I've known lots of people who were smart, made good choices, worked hard, and didn't achieve anything. I've also known plenty of lazy bastards who thought they were smart and hard working, but weren't, and still got ahead through social connections and dumb luck. Members of the dominant culture who make it through dumb luck never have to question the story they are told, that they made it through skill and right choices.
No man is an island. We are all shaped by our experiences. We have little choice as to the kinds of experiences we will be shaped by. Society creates individuals and individuals create society. Individuals should be held responsible for the kinds of people they create through their interactions. Individualists somehow see themselves as separate from society and the systems they both help create and take advantage of. They are not, and such thinking is a huge abdication of personal responsibility.
Current economic theory makes certain predictions, namely, that people will act selfishly. These games show that people don't act selfishly. These were carefully controlled double blind studies with games played for months worth of salary. The participants had no idea what the researchers "wanted" find. The studies weren't "worded" any particular way, you are obviously completely unfamiliar with the studies in question.
In one study, people were given a certain amount of money. They could keep it all, or give any amount of it to the other player. The amount given was multiplied by a small factor, say 1.25. The second player then had a chance to keep all the money, or give some back. Selfish actor theory says that people will keep all the money. They don't.
That's just one game, there are many more and they all show the same results. Selfish actor theory is wrong. You can spin that any way you like, it doesn't change the facts: the basic theory on which all of modern free market capitalism is based, is completely flawed.
You appear to want the world to be a certain way, and are willing to disregard any evidence that the world is not the way you think it should be. Certain people know that the game is rigged, and as long as people keep believing the lie, those selfish people keep reaping the benefits of a system that encourages selfishness. Those people would do anything to keep others from recognizing the truth about human nature.
Humans aren't selfish and they don't need external control to maintain civilization. There is extreme danger to the status quo if enough people were to believe that, so the agents of the status quo work hard to make sure people don't.
Why would we trust them with the important role of "eternal enemy" yet again, when they've proven themselves deficient in the "eternal" department? Terrorism is a MUCH better eternal enemy, precisely because it is so elusive and invisible. Have we won yet? Who knows!
Nice myth, it certainly keeps you in the clear. Ask yourself, what's easier for me to believe, that I got where I am through hard work and determination, or that I got where I am because the system is unfair. Funny how most people's beliefs end up making them look good.
Nekkid Kate Winslet? I'd go down on that ship.
When? The fifties. Look it up. Plenty of people think raising taxes helps the economy. In fact, recent events have shown that lowering taxes does not encourage investment. Businesses invest based on projections of future demand, not availability of capital. Duh.
People who forget history are doomed to repeat it. I just wish you wouldn't drag the rest of us along for that ride.
In fascist Amerika, one can not critique the rich. It's the new Divine Right of Kings: The Divine Right of the Rich to their Money. After all, Wealthiness is next to Godliness. If God didn't want people to be rich, why, he wouldn't have showered them with cash. I mean really, where do I get off criticizing the rich? Without them, we'd all starve. It is only through their charitable good works that we even have jobs in the first place.
I'm reminded of a quote: "God shows his contempt for wealth in the choice of people he chooses to shower it upon." The sad thing is, I bet the person who modded the above down is not even rich. They just identify with the rich, and think that if they protect the interests of the rich, someday they may be rich. Because that's worked really well for collaborators throughout history. Suckers.
TMM! Long time no post, where you been? First posts haven't been the same without you.
There you go, bringing your rationality into a perfectly good conspiracy theory. How boring.
That's just the thing, and it's so odd that it needs to be pointed out so that people don't misinterpret the results as you have done. There were no taboos against those things, meaning, and I will be explicit, that those things were not seen as wrong, bad or harmful in any way. You speculate that people wouldn't do them because of the consequences, and that misses the point entirely as well as misunderstanding the whole concept of "not a taboo." People in western cultures think of those things as inherently wrong and bad because of our conditioning. It is almost impossible to understand a culture where this is not the case, as witnessed by your reply. You still see the actions as bad, and you still think that they would be regarded as bad by the society, just not "taboo." Well, that is what taboo means. Bad is exactly what they are not.
Yet despite there being, let me paraphrase "taboo", no social stigma, punishment, or judgment placed on these actions whatsoever, these actions occurred less often than in societies where these actions did have such judgments or stigma placed on them. It as is if telling people what not to do automatically gets their back up and makes them want to do it, not because they wanted to, but simply because you've told them not to.
In short, not only is society not a force that keeps people acting rationally, fairly, and equitably towards one another, it is a force that causes the evils it purports to fix. And of course, when it fails, we just didn't apply the cure correctly, we need to be harsher, stricter and more punitive! The only reason that this dysfunctional vicious circle has not lead to complete collapse is that (most) people are inherently decent, equitable, fair, reciprocal, in short: good people. Society, for the most part, only gets in the way of that innate goodness.
I'd like to take things back to the good old days of 90% tax rates and a booming economy where the middle class could actually look forward to their children having a better life then they did. Wealth is a positive freedom: the freedom to make money. Survival is a negative freedom, the freedom from having the means of survival taken away from you. Extreme wealth means extreme imbalance of wealth, and thus extreme poverty, meaning that many will be denied access to the means of survival. This is a greater restriction on freedom than any restrictions on wealth.
As to who decides, the majority decides. If the minority of wealthy don't like it, tough. They would not be wealthy without society. If they don't like it, they can leave and go live by themselves on a deserted island some place. Which is more of a choice than most of them propose to give most of us, that choice amounting to: make money for us as "consumers" or die in a gutter.