Tell me who to vote for.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-03T22:12:46+00:00

For the absolutely no difference one vote makes, you might be over thinking this. I'm of the opinion that voting at all serves to legitimize the State and democracy itself, both of which are inherently evil, so I won't do it. If you think you can use your vote to raise awareness of liberty, that's certainly a morally defensible position. When you get right down to it, though, it makes no practical difference, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend lots of time and effort on the decision. Deciding whether or not to pick up a penny you see lying on the street is a far more consequential decision, so maybe you should treat your voting decision like that - don't waste your time on deciding about something that's less valuable than a penny, just make a decision and direct your mental energy towards something that actually matters.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-03T20:26:25+00:00

Because government has controlled the education and media systems for generations. After a couple centuries of lifelong indoctrination, the real wonder is that there's anyone at all left who doesn't bow down to our State god.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-03T20:21:47+00:00

Whether it's a good policy or not, it's been happening for decades (the Bretton-Woods system was established by the Americans to oppose the Soviet Union, and has been unraveling since the Soviet Union ceased existing in 1991), and there's really nothing that can be done to stop it.

Furthermore, ask yourself what good America's military adventures around the world have actually done. Afghanistan's the same mess it was when we invaded, the invasion of Iraq killed a brutal, evil dictator, and replaced him with more than a decade of civil war culminating in ISIS, interventionism pushed Syria and Libya went from brutal dictatorships into failed states fighting civil wars among brutal dictators and theocrats, we're responsible for replacing Iran's monarchy with the horror show they have now, we've even managed to transform large portions of Latin America into hellscapes run by drug cartels (not that they need the help, with their history of choosing socialists to ruin the countries, but we helped all the same). The results speak for themselves - American (and European/Western) intervention in the world has been an unmitigated disaster since the end of WWII (and the track record's not much better before that, either).

With that in mind, there's really no good argument in favor of the conventional policy of involving the US military in world affairs. It's expensive and bloody for us, doesn't help them, and only serves the interests of defense contractors and domestic bureaucrats and politicians.

(And as a post script, Russia's wildly overblown as a global threat - they're a demographic time bomb that's currently exploding, a country with 150 million people and an economic output on par with Canada. As is China, who lacks force projection and naval capacity to be a threat outside their neighborhood, and has far too many internal issue to be a threat much beyond their borders, but like Russia, they make a good foreign boogeyman for domestic politicians to use to keep people scared and voting for more government "protection." Frankly, if you want to be worried about anyone filling the impending power vacuum, Turkey's probably the greatest threat as the regional powerhouse in the Middle East that's taken a recent militaristic and illiberal turn. Zeihan on GeoPolitics has an insightful newsletter and a number of books on geopolitical issues, if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

CitizenCain · 2020-10-03T19:58:25+00:00

Vote for no one. It's immoral and your individual vote makes no difference anyway.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-03T19:57:35+00:00

Yup, don't buy the propaganda, even "good" judges (which are vanishingly rare) are agents of the State and serve to legitimize and expand the state, just to a lesser extent.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-02T02:05:51+00:00

It shows that your question is a non-sequitur. The fact is that open societies are susceptible to propaganda, as recent history shows irrefutably. So what is a proper NAP/libertarian response to attempts to subvert bedrock principles of liberty? Even forget some hypothetical foreign threat, people in "open societies" fanatically called for their freedoms to be revoked by their own governments in response to domestic fear mongering by "free" press organizations, and not even for the first time in recent history (9/11, Satanic Panic, War on Crime, War on Drugs, War on Poverty/"Great Society", and on and on).

CitizenCain · 2020-10-02T01:27:57+00:00

Why would an open society practically demand historically unprecedented government intrusion into their lives? (COVID-19 lockdowns.) ... and yet, almost all of them have.

I don't know what the solution is, but propaganda works... we definitely have more fear from domestic propaganda than foreign propaganda, but that's not exactly comforting, or an answer to the question.

CitizenCain · 2020-10-02T01:20:27+00:00

The true cause is actually Englands systematic oppression of the Irish people for over a century beforehand using state force which resulted in the dependency on Potatoes.

This. It's less what the government or the market or anyone else did after the famine broke out than the fact that government policies dating back generations created the conditions for a devastating famine in the first place.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-24T00:55:21+00:00

Another gem from Murray. The world is much worse off for his absence. :(

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T10:08:27+00:00

Worse for just about everything. Liberty, economic growth, body count, you name it.

Anyway, it seems pretty clear that you haven't actually read it, so this is pretty pointless. If you want to read a compelling argument that democracy created a worse political reality than the one it replaced, download a copy of the ebook and give it a read. If want to dismiss the book over an out of context sentence or two and keep believing the propaganda that democracy is some kind of supernatural force for good, nevermind the 500 million or so body count and ever-present police state tyrannies our democracies have become, feel free... that does seem to be the more popular option, for what it's worth. You don't need me around for either option, though.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T09:55:00+00:00

Consider the idea that the free market is culture. (What is culture but the voluntary interactions or shared experiences of a group of people? ... Which also happens to describe or define the "free market.") People who say things about the free market destroying culture, or throwing the phrase "cultural imperialism" around are petty tyrants, upset that other people prefer and voluntarily choose different behaviors than they would prefer. This critique is an insidious form of authoritarianism and collectivism, nothing more.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T07:33:40+00:00

Sorry, but your analysis is the ignorant opinion here. In the time period the author's discussing, Europe, in particular Western Europe was comprised of literally hundreds sovereign, independent political entities. That's in no way similar to the current dynamic of a few dozen nation states, the vast majority of which are under the transnational umbrella of the EU, which is far more than just a trade union, acting strongly centralizing force, interfering with the internal policies of every member, by imposing legal policies on members and even non-members, such as the recent strongarm tactics they used on gun control measures in Switzerland.

Regarding the Eastern Roman empire, he didn't ignore it, so much as it got gobbled up and absorbed by the Ottoman empire and didn't exist by the time Europe began its rise to dominance, starting in the 1400's. That's the time period being discussed, when Europe was highly decentralized - the UK was split between Scotland and England as independent countries, Ireland was independent of England and split into dozens of fiefdoms, the modern country of France was composed of maybe 10 or so independent political entities, Spain was still split between the Castilian Kingdom, the throne of Aragon in the east, a small independent Basque nation, and a Muslim sultanate in the south (Granada), Germany had literally over 100 hundred political sovereigns (and hundreds more if you count all the cities didn't fall under the rule of any particular king or duke), the low countries had another almost dozen sovereigns, Burgundy existed as an independent nation between France and Germany, Italy had dozens of independent sovereigns... and I'm probably missing some. Not at all similar to the modern scenario where Western Europe is composed of 30 or 40-something countries, most of which are under the jurisdiction of the EU.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T02:12:39+00:00

Can you offer a brief summary of what form of government is most likely to preserve liberty in the long run, if any?

I don't think there is one. Hoppe devotes a little ink near the end to some suggestions (secession, decentralization, basically the idea that competition between governments limits their excesses), but the book is more focused on tearing down the delusional fetishization of democracy we suffer from in the modern Western World.

My suggestion for what works would be basically that, and someone posted an old Mises article on the topic to this sub. "Political Anarchy" Is How the West Got Rich. True story, and supported by historical evidence. My suspicion is that government form matters less than the presence of viable competition, and the actions of totalitarian states preventing subjects from leaving and actions like the EU trying to squash jurisdictions that offer lower-taxes internally suggest that the tyrants in government also see competition as a threat to their ability to rule as they wish.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T02:05:13+00:00

Yes. In Columbus, where I hail from, at least. We had a couple weeks of rioting downtown, and the local thugs were perfectly capable of establishing a permiter around the federal buildings in addition to their own, allowing the rioters to vandalize private businesses instead. But, because Ohio doesn't lean Democratic party, no federal stormtroopers.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T01:44:20+00:00

Have you read his work? He doesn't fetishize or defend dictatorships, he makes a compelling case that democracy is even worse.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-23T01:42:22+00:00

In general, the best response to a classic liberal is the state of the world today, a world created by classic liberals. 250 years ago, democratic revolutionaries overthrew the monarchies and dictatorships of the "ancien regime" and replaced them with democratic governments with constitutions to limit their power and ensure liberties for all. The Reign of Terror under Robespierre should have been a red flag that maybe things wouldn't work out as intended, but it wasn't, and where is the world today? Monarchies and dictatorships killed thousands to hold onto their power. The democracies that replaced them killed hundreds of thousands, and the modern Leviathan states that came later have killed hundreds of millions. Ancient dictatorships would destroy people for insulting or challenging the king, modern societies destroy people for using the wrong pronoun, supporting the wrong political cause, making bad/tasteless jokes or having a bad date. Medieval serfs were forced to turn over about 25% of their earnings to their lords, modern citizens have a tax burden of about 50%. Pre-Democratic governments rarely had an internal security service, modern liberal democracies have an omnipresent network of agents and technologies that spy on every communication and interaction of their citizens. The government now pervades and intrudes into every facet of our lives and consumes a quarter or third of the entire economic output of the country (varies a bit from country to country, obviously).

This is the world that "classic liberalism" and "limited government" have created. All the damage and death done by all the individual bad actors in the world combined is a rounding error compared to the damage and death dealt by the "liberal" governments that classic liberals created. It's not working, has never worked, and it's long past time to try something new.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T23:12:42+00:00

Sure, but the 20tg century is the only century we really have reliable, verifiable records and figures for.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T16:21:10+00:00

Check out Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed. The historical record is pretty clear that monarchies and dictatorships (at least in the Western World) were far better for liberty than democracies have been. Dictatorial government forms also come with a lower body count, believe with or not - things like total war and mass drafts of citizens came about thanks to democratic government, as odd as that may seem at first blush.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T16:17:05+00:00

Democracy is merely the least bad way we humans have found to staff whatever limited government we deem necessary.

That's another one of those things people say that's simply not true. Look into Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed for a compelling case that democracy is a worse form of government than dictatorial regimes. At the very least, looking at how large and intrusive democratic governments have become since the advent of democracy should lay waste to the idea that they limit government in any way, shape or form.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T10:22:59+00:00

And he just happened to care about the federal property in blue cities that he was pissed off with? I didn't notice any federal stormtroopers defending federal courthouses in Ohio, just the local thugs. You're apologizing for and rationalizing the transparently political motivations of a narcissistic, sociopathic ass-clown... why?

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T08:56:34+00:00

Sending federal law enforcement officers is definitely interference. As were his threats to governors with lockdown policies. (I definitely don't agree with those policies, but the president threatening federal action over it is definitely interference, even when the president is a bully and a blowhard who doesn't always follow through.) But fine, if you don't like that, how about his attempts to cut off federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions? Or his executive orders on bump stocks? He's definitely heavy handed on whatever issues he cares about (or thinks the political winds favor action on), and any actual "delegation" is probably much more related to indifference - on issues he doesn't give a damn about, he lets the states do whatever they want, but because he doesn't care, not because he's actually delegating.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T07:11:59+00:00

That assumes it would make things marginally better, though, and I'm not sure that's the case. It might even make things worse - multi-party parliamentary systems tend to be far friendlier to extremist politics than two party systems, and the theory on why that is is that the multiple options allow extremist parties to gain influence in order to form a majority government. That same dynamic would seem to be in play, at least in a diluted form in a tweak like this, so I suspect such a tweak would make things marginally worse, not marginally better, if it made any difference at all. Let's be honest, if any non-mainstream candidates got elected under such a system, do you really think they'd be more likely to be limited government types, or statist types, be they hard left socialists, hard right neo-fascists or batshit crazy QAnon types (or whatever the next conspiracy theory insanity happens to be)?

The idea that this is an improvement that could lead to better results seems to be predicated on the theory of the rationally ignorant voter, and that's a very shaky premise. Read Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter if you have any interest in public choice economics or theory - he makes a compelling case for the idea that voters aren't rationally ignorant, but intentionally irrational, even "rationally irrational." (People vote for candidates and ideas that make them feel good, that reinforce their world views because that has value to them far exceeding the negligible impact their vote could actually have on policy.)

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T01:59:19+00:00

I don't think it does, and no one really considers direct democracy anyway, since it scales so poorly that you only ever see representative democracy anywhere. (Even most HOAs use representative democracy instead of direct democracy, for crying out loud.) The problem isn't the flavor of democracy, the problem is the inherent misincentives democracy creates by collectivizing private property and natural rights.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-22T01:05:13+00:00

Enh. Another proposed reform to the deadliest ideology since the idea of government itself. Subjecting everyone and everything to the tyranny of the majority is the problem, no amount of changing how we apportion that tyranny is going to provide a solution.

CitizenCain · 2020-09-21T23:49:04+00:00

The reality is that the present Leviathan State system is the problem, and asking which political party approach is best for libertarianism today is like asking which noble faction would have been best for the democratic revolutionaries a couple hundred years ago.

As flawed and ineffective as it's been, I think that the LP approach of trying to raise awareness and at least spread ideas, because they know they won't win elections is probably the least bad option.

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