(Part 3) Top products from r/EnoughLibertarianSpam

I wrote a paper analyzing Chilean politics last year. The thesis was that libertarianism, Friendmanite neoliberalism, etc., in pure form, can only exist under authoritarian or totalitarian (in the case of Ayn Rand's objectivist capitalism) regimes and are logically incompatible with democracy.

The conclusion was that if people are ever given a vote, they will by and large vote against purist constructs of these political theories, and I used Chilean politics to demonstrate the point. I presented the argument in class and the logic of it was accepted, even by the two libertarian leaning classmates, but sadly it didn't move them at all. They concluded essentially that political freedom is unnecessary for real freedom™.

EDIT: If anyone is interested in learning more about the very fascinating "libertarian" dictatorship in Chile, and how it was implemented with the help of Milton Friedman, I suggest checking out Naomi Kline's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She's definitely a leftist, and so it should be read with her bias in mind, but she's a fantastic writer and journalist and there's enough factual information to form your own perspectives on the matter without relying completely on her analysis.

I could spend a lot time responding to these counter points, but, first, I want to know - are you proposing a democratic system for controlling a monopoly on the initiation of force (domestic and foreign)? How would the system you are proposing solve fundamental economic problem for dealing with scarcity in a more efficient way than free market capitalism?

> What does brain surgery have to do with anything? Like, at all? No one is suggesting that we have Twitch Performs Brainsurgery or Rocket Design by Popular Vote.

This part of your response, though, really surprises me. Most people I communicate with easily grasp this point. Voters (direct or representative democracy) would have to thoroughly understand very complex economic issues to vote 'correctly' or 'optimally'. That's the point about brain surgery. You can't hand a small group of people a monopoly on the initiation of force and then have the majority of voters be extremely ignorant on the issues. If this is still unclear, the following from Bryan Caplan is highly recommended:

Myth of the Rational Voter

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies/dp/0691138737

That entire fiishing analogy and the whole Irwin 'The Tax Dodger' Schiff and Peter 'The Gold Shill' Schiff book: How and economy grows and why it crashes is aimed squarely at shallow thinkers. It appeals very well to those who would like to believe everything is just so simple.

That said I do actually like the book from a stylistic point of view, it really does present Austrian Economics spam in a interesting and easy to understand format, the style is brilliant I think.

But unfortunately dunning krugerand libertarians read it and subsequently think they are experts at socio-economic policies because herp derp everything in society is just like two men on an island fishing.

Private ownership of natural resources, discrimination, historical oppression all doesn't real and doesn't matter even if they were.

Our complex society can just easily be hyper reduced to two men fishing in the sea. (Two men who started off on equal footing btw)

As you said once you change the scenario to where one man owns the entire island and everything on it and the second man only has the option to either pay rent by working as a chattel slave or rely on mother nature and hope he can evolve into an aquatic mammal before he runs out of energy and drowns in the ocean., the fairy tale doesn't sound as great any more does it.

> The Fed has caused worse booms and busts than ever existed before. Why did they deserve to be stabilized? Should a gambler with a bad day at the casino get tax payers to stabilize them? The thing about allocating capital is you need real capital. Just creating money and handing it out for people to invest when nobody was really saving it to begin with just leads to booms and busts.

Before the FED, we had free-money banking in the US where banks issued their own notes. In theory, they would be backed by something of value. With open competition and a lot of demand for notes for commerce, the free market should have ruled and given us a great banking system, right?

So did we have stable banking? Nope. Head over to google any type the panic of and wait for auto complete to populate it. You'll see that we had a bank panic every few years. A band bank would cause runs on good banks and there would be a panic and then a depression.

You know what happened when a bank went under? Often some notes would be declared preferred or prime and would pay out at or near face value. Often higher than the discount value of the note. Others would pay at pennies on the dollar. And the bank owners would make this discussion, without disclosure, on their own. This is detailed in A Nation of Counterfeiters if you care to look.

The FED is hardly perfect but it is way better than what existed before. Before the S&L deregulation we went 50 years without a bank crisis. When banks did go under, the customers didn't lose their money.

I'm not for you creating news, then crossposting it here. It's just noise.

You got 90+ comments. A few people agreed with you. It reads like it went OK, given initial conditions. I don't know if you'd believe me, but for the most part, libertarianism isn't completely bankrupt, you just can't apply it to absolutely every part of society. I've read the Ayn Rand set, I like parts of the philosophy, but I also understand there is a place for government, regulation, taxes, and polite society.

Some guy wrote a great post about "going to die on the hill" when people bring up private roads. Libertarians want to deregulate drugs, get us out of foreign wars, and reduce regulations that monopolies use to stay monopolies.

There should be a common ground.

You going over there to deliberately post what is essentially garbage about a dictionary definition of "tyranny" isn't going to build consensus or get us any closer to political utopia. You're just making enemies.

I think in the end many of us want the same things, but starting out from the paradigm of "we are enemies, here are some shitty goalposts, let's debate", (Jesus Christ, there is a /r/AskLibertarians/) ... it's caustic.

Real people don't run on "logic, reasoning, and unambiguous verbiage". You're thinking of robots. I would recommend some books on Debate.

No amount of "being right" will make up for "being respected". If you want to win people to this position, I'd work on the mechanics of convincing others.

(I feel for you, this is a problem I'm very aware of myself, but you need honest feedback, not a circle-jerk.)

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Edit. Deleted the posts under (nothing of value) and unsubscribed.

Well, you're not far off. This book is very popular in libertarian circles: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

It's sort of like some people stole and made a fortune off of it, and their descendents talk about markets are fair and wealth is always fairly distributed and let's just let capitalism do it's job...but we didnt' start with a level playing field, the hsitory of hominids has been self-serving backstabbing for, well...millions of years.

Fully agreed on all points, and thank you for the link.

While I was taking that Micro 101 class, I was also assigned this book in another: Introducing Economics, which notes the presence of ideology, specifically noeliberal, in modern Econ classes. Those theories being presented as immutable fact was entirely obvious once I was looking for it. It wasn't a heavy-handed preaching kind of thing, but every issue was presented in a manner that left deregulation as the only clear solution.

I saw my Econ professor's name crop up in the local paper a year or two after taking her class. She was at a city council meeting arguing against raising the minimum wage.

Essentially cons/libertarians troll Amazon and review books that they don't read.

This is not more apparent than all the one-star reviews of Piketty's, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They simply give it one-star without reading it, call it Marxist propaganda, and tell us how discredited and dangerous Picketty is.

This works well on their low-info base, but it only drives away reasonable and intelligent people.

That's actually not anything an-cap at all, but an anarchist history of nomadic stateless peoples in Asia through the lens of groups of people avoiding the rule of southeast Asian states. It's a pretty interesting book, although I'm not sure about the author's arguments or conclusions.

It seems libertarians/an-caps have appropriated it, though.

This is an excellent rebuttal to the propagandistic "Economics in One Lesson". I contributed a little, and highly recommend it. I've got it preordered.

Essentially, it shows what's wrong with most of the unregulated market arguments of libertarians.

Here's a link to Amazon.

I agree. This macro is unfair and is Exhibit A on why I don't like image macros to begin with.

Some libertarians exhibit certain characteristics of cult behavior (cutting yourself off from family is the most extreme I've seen), but nothing like the psychopaths at Scientology. Most local chapters of any political organization/party require some kind of dues to provide basic communication and organization. Paying $25 per year is pretty damn low. Comparing it to joining SeaOrg is ridiculous.

Read Lawrence Wright's current book and tell me the Libertarian Party is the same.

i have a present for you, statist

What are you talking about? They've already read the greatest work of mankind.

When Affirmative Action was White

Not surprisingly, there are neo confederates who'll actually tell you that: Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War

The case has been made: The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire.

But too many bigots like you won't listen. It's true, most people don't want my society, but they also don't think carefully about political concepts and reject it out of hand on the basis of their moral "feels." "But what about the poor and vulnerable!" they whine.

The FACT is that we see a correlation between greater protection of individual rights and greater improvement in the standard of living of the "poor and vulnerable." We do NOT see a correlation between more social programs and general prosperity: the USSR, North Korea and Venezuela had plenty of social programs.

99.9% of the time, i would say you are right. in this case, these specific people are probably disparaging other white people aka "hillbillies".

Appalachia is a disoriented place (a peripheral, internal colony to the larger nation) that is very much divided against itself. in a ridge community of 30 households, there will be 15 tiny churches, few of whom care much for each other. communities on opposite sides of a ridge don't associate, often regarding each other with suspicion. people who live in the county seat consider those "out in the counties" to be backward, while those out in the counties consider those in-town to be pretentious, corrupt and politically connected. some families names are blacklisted by other family names, and they can't abide anyone with that name getting anything.

northeastern capital and their agents / strike breakers did (and still do) a hell of a number on these people. these are the geographies capitalism ravaged long before the suburban randroids and ancappers wanked themselves silly to propertarian dreams and rugged individualist mythos.

source: did community organization / anti-poverty work pretty much right around there.

if you want a very well researched book about this region--it also speaks to the Mississippi delta, which has its dispossession fall much more "neatly" along racial lines--i recommend:
World's Apart: Why Rural Poverty Persists in America

Well I'll go ahead and express my bias, because I do know a thing about *eminent domain. My family homesteaded property here about 100 years ago and we were always battling eminent domain with utilities and the parks dept.

As I explicitly said about 3 times already, fuck Bundy, but fuck the BLM 5 times harder.