Compromise is utterly foreign to libertarians such as corbetww, who (judging by his sig) is a superior person and thus shouldn't have to compromise. Compromise is for the weak, the strong take what they want. Giving in to your significant other's demands is the same as giving in to the State. Personal freedom means never having to compromise and always getting your way. The whole libertarian philosophy boils down to "You aren't the boss of me, I'll do what I want!" Which tends to make them bad citizens, neighbors, and especially life partners.
Valentines is totally understandable. Spring is too, and not because of the beach, but because of what spring is and what it represents. "Spring cleaning" generally means "Throwing out old stuff we don't want anymore" and spring is when most of nature thinks about hooking up, so it seems natural. But right before Christmas? Who wants to be alone on Christmas? I mean, that seems like a particularly bad time for a breakup, both for the dumper and the dumpee.
Yes, mcgrew, but you are an old coot. Old coots have the privilege of being able to say crazy things like "I won't fly on no gol-durned airplane no more because the security people want to look at my wiener" or "I don't go to movies because they are watching me." I'm actually looking forward to my coot-hood. I'm going to believe in something really crazy, like the basic decency of human nature, or the perfectibility of mankind or something like that.
What if you don't like that fact that XYZ Foods pollutes the environment? Not buying their product won't stop them from harming you. What if you don't like the fact that thy use transgenic foods? Roundup ready genes have escaped to the wild, who know what that will do? What if you don't like the fact that XYZ Foods uses monopolistic practices and extra market forces to destroy the competition of local farmers, or ships jobs overseas, or does any number of things that impact you and affect your life, but have nothing to do with what you do or do not purchase from them?
For those situations, we band together into groups to protect our interests and keep the more powerful from harming us. Those bands of individuals looking after their interests are known as "government." If someone does something we don't like, we make them stop. That is part of living with other human beings in a society, you have to trade some freedom you value less for freedoms you value more. For instance, I value clean air over the right to pollute.
Rather than accepting the status quo, we can teach people to think about marketing critically. Worked for me, my parents explained commercials to me really early. "Do you like it when someone makes you do something?" "No." "Do you like it when you get tricked into doing something?" "No." "Well, that's what all those commercials are trying to do, they want to make you like things you've never even heard of before, to trick you into whining to us to buy them for you. So don't be stupid and fall for it, okay, or no TV for you."
Not only that, but they are openly stating that if they don't get their way, "Second ammendment remedies" may be the only option. Whoah. That is truly scary. Don't get our way? Start a violent revolution! After all, your political opponents are godless communist muslim monsters bent on destroying America, so revolution is justified. Or something.
What, exactly, do I believe to be possible, that is not? Did I say that anyone could impeach and remove the president at any time? I don't even think that is a good idea!
There are politicians that get elected without compromising with special interests. And no one is 'beholden' their donors, any candidate can take special interest money and simply not give anything in return.
Spreading political hopelessness helps ensure the status quo never changes. You do know that is what you are doing, right? By putting out the idea that we can't change anything, that we are powerless, you are helping make that thought come true, and ensuring that things stay as they are. Is that what you want?
This is a position I can respect. If enacted, it would create a marketplace of governance such that failing states would lose citizens, while government that worked would bring in more people.
In such a system, I would simply shift my efforts from the federal to the state level while working for the same ideals: equality of opportunity, a social safety net providing the basic necessities, and strong regulations to reign in the power of the powerful and give some freedom and choice to the weak.
However, I must disagree with your assessment. Both parties are not in a race to create megabureaucracies. One party has consistently balanced the budget by cutting the fat while maintaining or even expanding services, while the other party has gone into debt while removing government services only for the poor. For example, contrary to what has been reported by, say, Fox News, the Health Care reform bill will actually lower government expenditures over time. That is what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says, and why would they lie? You'd have to invent a pretty clever conspiracy in order to indict the CBO.
My problem with libertarianism is that I feel it is a vast oversimplification, an explanation of human nature and politics for engineering types who are terribly uncomfortable with the messiness and uncertainty of real human nature, society, and politics. It has one stock answer for every problem: less government. If I am wrong, please point me to one single idea the libertarians have that does not boil down to 'less government.'
Libertarian thinking seems woolly headed, self serving and vague to me. Explanations as to how getting rid of government would make things better always seem circular, with the libertarian explaining it seeming to be baffled as to how one could even ask how getting rid of government would make things better. It's getting rid of government! Isn't it obvious? Getting rid of government makes things better because, if we had less government, things would be better.
There is no nuance to the philosophy, which seems tailored to adolescents whose idea of political philosophy is "You're not the boss of me! I'll do what I want!" Every problem the world faces has the same cause: too much government. Every solution is the same: get rid of government.
And the basis of all this, I find equally ludicrous. We own ourselves. Really? We are things that can be owned? It seems so obvious that someone really wanted to justify the concept of absolute property rights and reasoned backwards to reach the axiom "we own ourselves." Which leads to every person being their own little tin pot dictator, and no social responsibility. Property is theft, just as much as it is freedom.
Libertarians ideas about coercion and force are equally silly. For instance, I put up a fence around the only food source we have in our little valley. Now I own it. If you try to take the food to survive, you are initiating force against my property and I am justified in killing you. Its almost as if economic coercion is a fundamental goal of the libertarian system.
It seems as if libertarians really want to be allowed to exploit the less fortunate without society condemning them for it. The worst abuses are excused as "Well, they would have just starved anyway if I hadn't come along and 'offered' to screw them for cash. They bent over of their own free will! I'm a fucking savior!"
It's sick.
There also appears to be this unstated belief that power is its own justification, that the powerful are that way due to merit, and any attempt by the less powerful to assert themselves is unnatural and wrong. Going along with this is a personal belief apparently shared by most libertarians that they are superior people who, without an interfering government, would have the chance to exploit others instead of being exploited, as is their natural right as superior people. In fact, most libertarians would end up as serfs or slaves of the powerful.
Because, you see, there is already a horrific power imbalance, and simply getting rid of government won't reduce it at this point, it will only increase it.
Given that elections with high turn outs tend to go to the liberals, while low turnout elections go to the conservatives, one might even speculate that fueling voter apathy is a Republican ploy. "Hey, let's get them all to believe that voting is for chumps, that it is hopeless and a waste of time. Our rabid base won't care, and scared old white voters always vote, but the kids and the hippies will stay home. Brilliant!"
Really? Then why haven't we become a dictatorship? I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are, not the majority of them. In fact, it's really a very elitist attitude, and leads to the idea that these poor stupid people must be led about by the nose and told what to do.
Funny thing, we grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet about 4,000 calories a day. And yet people still die of starvation. And then other people excuse their inhumanity by saying, "well they would have just starved anyway, why shouldn't I profit off their misery?"
Now, how come what you describe didn't happen here, when we enacted child labor laws? And how come it does not happen in all countries, but mostly where then rule of law is weak? You see it in Africa, and southeast Asia, but generally not in other poor countries.
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the superhighway there is paved with selfishness. You can't discount good intentions by the mere mention of unintended consequences.
Well, you could always go live as a hermit. If you do not like what society offers, simply don't take the deal. Or, you could work to enact change. Run for office yourself, support someone who is honest and a good politician, get out and protest, create a work of art to express how you feel, write a manifesto.
I can't believe I'm really having to explain what you can do to make your country better. It is almost as if people really, really don't want to see what they can do, but would rather throw up their arms in despair and declare the whole thing hopeless.
Tell that to all the people constantly screwed by PG&E in California. The PUC gives them legal coverage and public resources to be total dicks.
The courts are supposed to be where things are set straight. When we turned them into forges of social realignment, we set ourselves down a very long, dark path.
Forges of social realignment? You mean, like giving women and blacks the right to vote? I know! For shame.
It is a better option than letting any arbitrary person have power over us. And you aren't finishing the equation. Yes, we put them into power based on what they promise, You forgot this part: we remove them from power if they do not keep their promises. Uhm, duh? That's pretty simple, I can't understand why it is a mystery to you.
Please try to come up with more sensible arguments that make an actual point. If said arguments are not trivially easy to refute as nonsense, so much the better.
Hey, I'm sorry you think it is false crap, but libertarians are for deregulation. When I point our the ridiculousness of deregulating something particular, libertarians always claim not to be against that particular case. Which is why I want to know that you DO want deregulated. Every libertarian I've talked to turns out to not really be a libertarian. I mean, you are all like Republicans who support gun control, or liberals who want the death penalty, it makes no sense.
As an example, let me quote off the page you link to, the nonsensical section on libertarian environmental policy:
We support a clean and healthy environment and sensible use of our natural resources. Private landowners and conservation groups have a vested interest in maintaining natural resources. Pollution and misuse of resources cause damage to our ecosystem. Governments, unlike private businesses, are unaccountable for such damage done to our environment and have a terrible track record when it comes to environmental protection. Protecting the environment requires a clear definition and enforcement of individual rights in resources like land, water, air, and wildlife. Free markets and property rights stimulate the technological innovations and behavioral changes required to protect our environment and ecosystems. We realize that our planet's climate is constantly changing, but environmental advocates and social pressure are the most effective means of changing public behavior.
Haha, yeah, property owners will control pollution, rather than profiting from it and then turning around and putting those profits into another chunk of land to ruin. Riiiight. Because that is what we've seen in practice OH WAIT, no, that is the exact opposite of what we've seen.
These are not straw men arguments. These arguments are based on what I have actually witnessed from libertarians, and what I have seen, historically, from laissez faire regimes.
Slashdot Mirror
You can hire those, too. They just cost about five grand a day.
Compromise is utterly foreign to libertarians such as corbetww, who (judging by his sig) is a superior person and thus shouldn't have to compromise. Compromise is for the weak, the strong take what they want. Giving in to your significant other's demands is the same as giving in to the State. Personal freedom means never having to compromise and always getting your way. The whole libertarian philosophy boils down to "You aren't the boss of me, I'll do what I want!" Which tends to make them bad citizens, neighbors, and especially life partners.
You just need to find a woman who also suffers from SAD so you can hibernate together for the winter.
It's meant to be a joke. Same interests? Well, you like women, right...
What you like are not lesbians, but rather, women hired to play lesbians.
All people want their partners to change. Some are just more self aware than others.
Somewhere, out there, there is a woman who has all the same interests you do. She's a lesbian.
Valentines is totally understandable. Spring is too, and not because of the beach, but because of what spring is and what it represents. "Spring cleaning" generally means "Throwing out old stuff we don't want anymore" and spring is when most of nature thinks about hooking up, so it seems natural. But right before Christmas? Who wants to be alone on Christmas? I mean, that seems like a particularly bad time for a breakup, both for the dumper and the dumpee.
If I could download a car, and the place I downloaded it from still had the car after I downloaded it, then yes, I would download a car.
Yes, mcgrew, but you are an old coot. Old coots have the privilege of being able to say crazy things like "I won't fly on no gol-durned airplane no more because the security people want to look at my wiener" or "I don't go to movies because they are watching me." I'm actually looking forward to my coot-hood. I'm going to believe in something really crazy, like the basic decency of human nature, or the perfectibility of mankind or something like that.
In the long run, "More and better education" is the answer to nearly every problem.
What if you don't like that fact that XYZ Foods pollutes the environment? Not buying their product won't stop them from harming you. What if you don't like the fact that thy use transgenic foods? Roundup ready genes have escaped to the wild, who know what that will do? What if you don't like the fact that XYZ Foods uses monopolistic practices and extra market forces to destroy the competition of local farmers, or ships jobs overseas, or does any number of things that impact you and affect your life, but have nothing to do with what you do or do not purchase from them?
For those situations, we band together into groups to protect our interests and keep the more powerful from harming us. Those bands of individuals looking after their interests are known as "government." If someone does something we don't like, we make them stop. That is part of living with other human beings in a society, you have to trade some freedom you value less for freedoms you value more. For instance, I value clean air over the right to pollute.
Rather than accepting the status quo, we can teach people to think about marketing critically. Worked for me, my parents explained commercials to me really early. "Do you like it when someone makes you do something?" "No." "Do you like it when you get tricked into doing something?" "No." "Well, that's what all those commercials are trying to do, they want to make you like things you've never even heard of before, to trick you into whining to us to buy them for you. So don't be stupid and fall for it, okay, or no TV for you."
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Not only that, but they are openly stating that if they don't get their way, "Second ammendment remedies" may be the only option. Whoah. That is truly scary. Don't get our way? Start a violent revolution! After all, your political opponents are godless communist muslim monsters bent on destroying America, so revolution is justified. Or something.
What, exactly, do I believe to be possible, that is not? Did I say that anyone could impeach and remove the president at any time? I don't even think that is a good idea!
There are politicians that get elected without compromising with special interests. And no one is 'beholden' their donors, any candidate can take special interest money and simply not give anything in return.
Spreading political hopelessness helps ensure the status quo never changes. You do know that is what you are doing, right? By putting out the idea that we can't change anything, that we are powerless, you are helping make that thought come true, and ensuring that things stay as they are. Is that what you want?
This is a position I can respect. If enacted, it would create a marketplace of governance such that failing states would lose citizens, while government that worked would bring in more people.
In such a system, I would simply shift my efforts from the federal to the state level while working for the same ideals: equality of opportunity, a social safety net providing the basic necessities, and strong regulations to reign in the power of the powerful and give some freedom and choice to the weak.
However, I must disagree with your assessment. Both parties are not in a race to create megabureaucracies. One party has consistently balanced the budget by cutting the fat while maintaining or even expanding services, while the other party has gone into debt while removing government services only for the poor. For example, contrary to what has been reported by, say, Fox News, the Health Care reform bill will actually lower government expenditures over time. That is what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says, and why would they lie? You'd have to invent a pretty clever conspiracy in order to indict the CBO.
My problem with libertarianism is that I feel it is a vast oversimplification, an explanation of human nature and politics for engineering types who are terribly uncomfortable with the messiness and uncertainty of real human nature, society, and politics. It has one stock answer for every problem: less government. If I am wrong, please point me to one single idea the libertarians have that does not boil down to 'less government.'
Libertarian thinking seems woolly headed, self serving and vague to me. Explanations as to how getting rid of government would make things better always seem circular, with the libertarian explaining it seeming to be baffled as to how one could even ask how getting rid of government would make things better. It's getting rid of government! Isn't it obvious? Getting rid of government makes things better because, if we had less government, things would be better.
There is no nuance to the philosophy, which seems tailored to adolescents whose idea of political philosophy is "You're not the boss of me! I'll do what I want!" Every problem the world faces has the same cause: too much government. Every solution is the same: get rid of government.
And the basis of all this, I find equally ludicrous. We own ourselves. Really? We are things that can be owned? It seems so obvious that someone really wanted to justify the concept of absolute property rights and reasoned backwards to reach the axiom "we own ourselves." Which leads to every person being their own little tin pot dictator, and no social responsibility. Property is theft, just as much as it is freedom.
Libertarians ideas about coercion and force are equally silly. For instance, I put up a fence around the only food source we have in our little valley. Now I own it. If you try to take the food to survive, you are initiating force against my property and I am justified in killing you. Its almost as if economic coercion is a fundamental goal of the libertarian system.
It seems as if libertarians really want to be allowed to exploit the less fortunate without society condemning them for it. The worst abuses are excused as "Well, they would have just starved anyway if I hadn't come along and 'offered' to screw them for cash. They bent over of their own free will! I'm a fucking savior!"
It's sick.
There also appears to be this unstated belief that power is its own justification, that the powerful are that way due to merit, and any attempt by the less powerful to assert themselves is unnatural and wrong. Going along with this is a personal belief apparently shared by most libertarians that they are superior people who, without an interfering government, would have the chance to exploit others instead of being exploited, as is their natural right as superior people. In fact, most libertarians would end up as serfs or slaves of the powerful.
Because, you see, there is already a horrific power imbalance, and simply getting rid of government won't reduce it at this point, it will only increase it.
All of them? Isn't that a bit defeatist?
Given that elections with high turn outs tend to go to the liberals, while low turnout elections go to the conservatives, one might even speculate that fueling voter apathy is a Republican ploy. "Hey, let's get them all to believe that voting is for chumps, that it is hopeless and a waste of time. Our rabid base won't care, and scared old white voters always vote, but the kids and the hippies will stay home. Brilliant!"
Really? Then why haven't we become a dictatorship? I don't think people are as dumb as you think they are, not the majority of them. In fact, it's really a very elitist attitude, and leads to the idea that these poor stupid people must be led about by the nose and told what to do.
I know, right? Nothing, really. But the social implications, if it ever got out that you'd had 'long pig' liver, well...
Funny thing, we grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet about 4,000 calories a day. And yet people still die of starvation. And then other people excuse their inhumanity by saying, "well they would have just starved anyway, why shouldn't I profit off their misery?"
Now, how come what you describe didn't happen here, when we enacted child labor laws? And how come it does not happen in all countries, but mostly where then rule of law is weak? You see it in Africa, and southeast Asia, but generally not in other poor countries.
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the superhighway there is paved with selfishness. You can't discount good intentions by the mere mention of unintended consequences.
Well, you could always go live as a hermit. If you do not like what society offers, simply don't take the deal. Or, you could work to enact change. Run for office yourself, support someone who is honest and a good politician, get out and protest, create a work of art to express how you feel, write a manifesto.
I can't believe I'm really having to explain what you can do to make your country better. It is almost as if people really, really don't want to see what they can do, but would rather throw up their arms in despair and declare the whole thing hopeless.
Tell that to all the people constantly screwed by PG&E in California. The PUC gives them legal coverage and public resources to be total dicks.
The courts are supposed to be where things are set straight. When we turned them into forges of social realignment, we set ourselves down a very long, dark path.
Forges of social realignment? You mean, like giving women and blacks the right to vote? I know! For shame.
It is a better option than letting any arbitrary person have power over us. And you aren't finishing the equation. Yes, we put them into power based on what they promise, You forgot this part: we remove them from power if they do not keep their promises. Uhm, duh? That's pretty simple, I can't understand why it is a mystery to you.
Please try to come up with more sensible arguments that make an actual point. If said arguments are not trivially easy to refute as nonsense, so much the better.
Hey, I'm sorry you think it is false crap, but libertarians are for deregulation. When I point our the ridiculousness of deregulating something particular, libertarians always claim not to be against that particular case. Which is why I want to know that you DO want deregulated. Every libertarian I've talked to turns out to not really be a libertarian. I mean, you are all like Republicans who support gun control, or liberals who want the death penalty, it makes no sense.
As an example, let me quote off the page you link to, the nonsensical section on libertarian environmental policy:
We support a clean and healthy environment and sensible use of our natural resources. Private landowners and conservation groups have a vested interest in maintaining natural resources. Pollution and misuse of resources cause damage to our ecosystem. Governments, unlike private businesses, are unaccountable for such damage done to our environment and have a terrible track record when it comes to environmental protection. Protecting the environment requires a clear definition and enforcement of individual rights in resources like land, water, air, and wildlife. Free markets and property rights stimulate the technological innovations and behavioral changes required to protect our environment and ecosystems. We realize that our planet's climate is constantly changing, but environmental advocates and social pressure are the most effective means of changing public behavior.
Haha, yeah, property owners will control pollution, rather than profiting from it and then turning around and putting those profits into another chunk of land to ruin. Riiiight. Because that is what we've seen in practice OH WAIT, no, that is the exact opposite of what we've seen.
These are not straw men arguments. These arguments are based on what I have actually witnessed from libertarians, and what I have seen, historically, from laissez faire regimes.