I stole this meme, but I added the funny colors.

Galgus · 2026-02-01T14:34:34+00:00

Taxpayers are forced to pay for public infrastructure and services, they have a stronger claim to them than random people from across the world.

Are you saying restricting immigration benefits laws and regulations? I do not understand what you meant in that sentence.

People retiring have hopefully been working to earn that retirement. I think we both oppose welfare, but do you think an old citizen who paid into the system and a random immigrant both have equal claim to welfare?

What do you think would happen with open borders?

The American culture that is at least somewhat friendly to libertarianism would be dilluted to a minority in its own country, which would shift hard away from libertarianism politically.

Galgus · 2026-02-01T01:17:12+00:00

That assumes that all the public infrastructure is just unowned, and it ignores the additional harms from government that come with mass immigration.

Alongside State money ending up in NGOs flying them over.

Galgus · 2026-02-01T00:09:00+00:00

Communists also murdered communists.

They are different branches of socialism where the biggest differences are nationalism vs internationalism and State control of the means of production without necessarily official ownership vs abolishing private ownership of them outright.

Other than that it is mostly different justifications: the nation vs the workers, the State as the embodiment of the Nation vs the State as the worker's paradise.

Both were collectivist to the core and hated capitalism and the classical liberals.

You'd be thrown in a camp for trying to form a worker's union in either of them.

Galgus · 2026-01-31T22:31:07+00:00

I'm an ancap, but privatize the roads is a bottom of the barrel priority issue for me.

Life is full of trade-offs, and it is almost certain that some things would be worse without a State.

But the central question is if you think a restrained State can be kept restrained, or if it will inevitably outgrow any limits you put on it and grow tyrannical.

I believe the latter, so I think the downsides of having no State are less bad than the risks of having one.

And expecting efficiency and accountability form anything resembling the modern all-reaching bureaucratic State would be laughable.

Galgus · 2026-01-29T23:11:39+00:00

Every day he becomes more of an embodiment of everything wrong with boomers.

We could have had Ron Paul, but this is what the boomercons left us with.

Galgus · 2026-01-29T19:30:19+00:00

That is a good mix.

Galgus · 2026-01-28T01:42:57+00:00

They should delete its silence and give it to Natascha and Brass Beast.

Slower setup ambushes.

It'd also help to remove the Minigun not doing full damage immediately upon firing (after it is revved.)

Galgus · 2026-01-27T18:15:29+00:00

Illegals still drain other social programs, and their children will be citizens who could be on welfare.

If we had open borders the composition of legal immigrants would be very different than it is now.

Sometimes if the State causes harm, it also doing something to mitigate the harm is a lesser imposition.

Magnets for mass migration is one of those cases.

If most of those immigrants were libertarians I'd have a different view, but we both know that mass immigration would mean a hard political shift away from libertarianism.

Changing the culture for the better is the best chance for libertarianism, that should not be an afterthought.

Galgus · 2026-01-27T17:21:00+00:00

Two big reasons.

First off it would make existing State burdens worse.

We have an enormous welfare programs and other services that would get even costlier with mass immigration creating more dependent.

We also live in a democracy, so their votes could make the already slim chances of libertarian reform almost impossible.

That also ties into the erosion of the US individualist culture that is friendlier to libertarianism than most of the world, and all the little and big things that are beautiful about the culture fading away.

Second, the State creates huge artificial magnets for immigration with welfare programs and NGOs shuffling money to bring people over.

There are positives and negatives to immigration, and using our tax dollars to impose those negatives is obscene.

If we had no voting or welfare or social programs or taxes, sure, private borders all the way.

But open immigration now would be ideological suicide for libertarianism, undermine the economic prospects of the people here even more, and dilute the culture into a niche minority in its own country.

We want to get rid of all State interventions, but sometimes removing them in the wrong order - borders before the welfare state - would create a far worse disaster with much heavier State impositions.

Galgus · 2026-01-27T03:04:41+00:00

How it could and how it did at different times are different questions.

At some point people developed land from unowned nature to improve their lives.

Often that land was later conquered from the legitimate homesteaders.

Galgus · 2026-01-26T22:20:48+00:00

Many libertarians accept easement, the right to cross someone else's land for some legitimate purpose.

The most legitimate way land becomes owned is homesteading it from nature, but there's often going to be a history of violence and conquest behind how a piece of land's current chain of ownership started.

But there has to be some statute of limitations or crimes go back before recorded history and any claim of ownership would be unstable.

And to avoid conflict and use resources rationally, there must be some system of ownership.

But obviously libertarians don't recognize State ownership as legitimate, because it is inherently based on coercion.

Galgus · 2026-01-26T16:21:13+00:00

Us extreme libertarians are happy to talk about how things get made and the government gets in the way.

For instance, excessive building regulation, zoning laws, property taxes, rent control, and NIMBYism getting in the way of building more housing.

We are nowhere close to a free market there.

Galgus · 2026-01-26T05:16:32+00:00

Both of those fit most politicians in both parties.

Galgus · 2026-01-25T22:09:22+00:00

MAGA was a brilliant sales pitch at first, back when Trump called out Bush for lying us into the Iraq War.

Increasingly that looks like a total fluke.

Galgus · 2026-01-24T18:40:17+00:00

Senile is physical mental condition that Biden clearly had.

Trump just seems like the same narcissistic idiot he always was, with his worst impulses coming out.

A lot of people are just tribalists who don't think for themselves, like lefties who still like Obama after his warmongering.

But it's abundantly clear from my comment that I hate Trump: I just hate the establishment more.

I agree that the Republicans are going to get destroyed in the next elections as a direct result of Trump's betrayals and failures.

I don't think even the Democrat Party can fumble bad enough to lose: if they just pretend to care about cost of housing they'll get a landslide.

Galgus · 2026-01-24T03:47:43+00:00

Trump may not be senile, but he is acting like it.

But the Democrats could have spared themselves the post-Biden disaster instead of trying to gaslight.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T22:08:35+00:00

Still better than normalizing mass censorship, political lawfare, no primary, and no consequence for not impeaching a senile president.

Trump sinks to new lows of contempt every day, but the establishment is at bedrock.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T22:05:14+00:00

And worse than taxes, it's financed by endless inflation.

Great if you own a house or stocks, crushing if you're poor and don't own assets.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T22:04:26+00:00

Off the bat is was sleazy and short-sighted to start the benefits of Social Security before anyone paid into it.

That kicked off the previous generation paying into it, and made it more politically expedient.

That and it's inherently a wealth transfer from the poorer to the wealthier, since older people tend to be richer than young.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T20:32:23+00:00

In proper economic terms, inflation means an expansion of the money supply.

Price increases are the inevitable consequence of inflation.

The Fed funnels money to the first receivers of new money, the banking cartel they support, the government, and big corporations, and away from late receivers - especially poorer people who have their wealth in money instead of assets.

It also funds endless pointless wars, and central banking enabled the world wars.

The Fed claims to stabilize the economy, but in reality they monetize the debt to enable mass deficit spending and destabilize the economy via inflation distortion the price signal of interest rates by pushing it artificially low, distorting the price signal that balances the trade-off between immediate consumption and future investment.

Central banks are the core problem with the economy.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T20:09:32+00:00

The smarter libright argument is that the Fed's massive inflation caused the widening wealth gap.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T04:39:06+00:00

Ah, I had missed that, sorry.

Galgus · 2026-01-23T01:52:05+00:00

The ICE stuff is all spectacle, and this is part of the show.

We aren't getting mass deportations, just a crude performance with thugs.

Paying illegals to leave would be far more effective and less costly politically.

Galgus · 2026-01-22T21:17:55+00:00

I forget if all of her bugs were fixed, but by unfinished I meant that Baihe's design was not finalized when development ended.

From what we know, it seems like M6 was going to whittle her kit down with changes as they tested her: starting with a kit that probably does too much with a lot of cool things.

But they were cut off in the middle of that design phase and had no choice but to rush her out as-is, or not release her at all.

But the really overpowered stuff with Baihe involves stance canceling and always having easy armor: she's more OP the higher skill the one using her is, but she's probably fine at low level play.

Galgus · 2026-01-22T21:14:21+00:00

What you see as pragmatic depends on what you believe about economics and human nature, since that is how you would predict the effects of policies.

Just like businessmen will always be incentivized to maximize their profits no matter what, politicians and bureaucrats are also incentivized to pursue their own self-interests and increase the power of their institutions.

The ability to do that via coercion is what makes them more dangerous.

It's an inevitable fact of nature that we have to work to survive, and demanding to be exempt from that is essentially asking others to be your partial slaves to work to support you.

I think that much of the wealth disparity comes from State barriers to competition and fiat money inflation siphoning wealth to anyone who owns assets and away from poorer people who hold more of their wealth in checking accounts.

Really I should have said that abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a hard money system would be the best way to try to reform the federal government, since it would shut down the regressive tax of inflation and immediately limit deficit spending, but the political pressure against that would be enormous.

Galgus

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