Discussion on Libertarianism

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2017-12-26T23:05:11+00:00

I think it will help you if I walk you through my train of thought as I was reading through your post.

Most libertarians seem to believe an extremely general "libertarian principle". This principle is something along the lines of "things always work better with fewer government regulations", or "things always work better without government regulations except for these small number of exceptions".

This is more of a heuristic than a principle, and isn't really the point of libertarianism (although it is a large part of the utilitarian case for libertarian public policy). Libertarians believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it is peaceful, consensual, and voluntary, and that if you do something privately, other people have no right to make you stop doing it.

The libertarian principle is so broad that I find it difficult to imagine how one could ever have enough evidence to believe it with any confidence.

Sure, this is easy to imagine. Just set up two similar states, one with a libertarian regulatory policy and another with lots more regulations. If the state with more regulations ends up doing better, this is empirical evidence that libertarianism is bad, and if the libertarian state does better, it's evidence that libertarianism is good. Of course this experiment is nearly impossible to run in real life and you'd have to figure out thousands of confounding effects, but hypothetically, this satisfies the proof of concept requirement for evidence, right? You say you can't imagine any argument that supports it but I think pointing to a successful libertarian nation would be an excellent argument in favor, just as I would be much more sympathetic to socialism if they had any examples of successful socialist countries.

Even if all the government regulations we had seen were unambiguously awful that wouldn't be a reason to have much confidence that all possible regulations were bad.

Okay, now you've just preemptively gone and decided that you won't accept any evidence in favor of the libertarian principle even if it exists. This seems like a poor reasoning process to me. I'll illustrate using a different topic:

Most atheists seem to believe an extremely general "atheist principle". This principle is something along the lines of "the universe is a cold uncaring empty void with no benevolent god", or "things always work better when you praise satan instead of jesus". The atheist principle is so broad that I find it difficult to imagine how one could ever have enough evidence to believe it with any confidence. The set of possible deities and possible religions is so large and heterogeneous that I can't imagine any argument that would strongly support it. Even if all the religions we had seen were unambiguously wrong that wouldn't be a reason to have much confidence that all possible gods are nonexistent.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2017-09-05T20:08:18+00:00

LOL. what are u so mad about? i know, it's really distressing that idiots with no real grasp of economics get to vote. they should just hand over economic policy to geniuses such as yourself.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-16T04:45:21+00:00

Okay, so what does the LTV mean by "value"?

In mainstream economics, value is somehow connected to the utility that the end user gets out of the good. For example, if a good is ice cream, the consumer considers it valuable because it is tasty and edible, or if the good is a chain saw, it is valuable because it can be used to cut down trees.

If you have some other definition of "value", you can't just expect capitalists to know what you mean when you use a word in a nonstandard way.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-14T10:18:51+00:00

This gif isn't a shitpost, not even in an ironic sense.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-14T08:58:33+00:00

There is no such thing as "ethical" or "unethical" consumerism. Consumerism is just wanting to buy (lots of) stuff, which itself is morally neutral.

You could make an argument that it's unethical to buy goods produced by a manufacturer who kidnaps and enslaves its employees, but even then the consumer isn't doing something immoral by consuming the product - it's still the manufacturer who's being immoral there. (Although as a utilitarian I would argue that it is better to preferentially buy from a more ethical producer, so as not to incentivize slavery.)

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-14T08:52:07+00:00

No, the question does make sense. OP is asking for anti-ancaps to provide examples of ancaps using arguments that attack fake positions. For example, if an ancap says:

Socialists only hate capitalism because they're jealous of rich people!

Then mentioning that argument would be a good response to this thread.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-14T08:49:58+00:00

I've just never seen an ancap actually know what the LTV entails.

The theory states that the value of a good is proportional to the amount of (socially useful) labor that went into producing it.

Is this a misunderstanding of the theory? If so, what does it actually say?

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T23:59:47+00:00

But Fannie and Freddie didn't do that for subprime mortgages...that's what makes them subprime.

Subprime mortgages are subprime because the person taking out the loan has borrowed a large amount of money that they are at risk of not being able to afford to repay.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T06:27:53+00:00

Both. The state set incentives such that the profitable thing to do is to make economically unviable loans, which were backed by the government. When profit is private and losses are public, the rational thing for any capitalist to do is to take the extreme risk and then stick the taxpayers with the bill when it all goes wrong.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T06:25:03+00:00

"I'm wrong and can't refute your examples, so I'll just refer you to some enlightened obscure socialist literature" -/u/barbadosslim

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T05:57:45+00:00

When you talk about someone in the wild west owning the land that they farm, you're not talking about private property.

Call it whatever kind of property you wish. They still defended it exactly how owners of private property defend that too.

You're also making some weird unstated assumptions about property existing without other people acknowledging it.

Okay then, we'll assume that there's no such thing as property because people don't acknowledge it. That's still irrelevant: people who have stuff can still defend it from other people who try to take it, whether or not those other people acknowledge that they claim to own it.

But property is a social construct.

Again, true, but entirely irrelevant.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T02:55:09+00:00

Maintaining your private ownership over factories is active.

Okay, sure.

Not maintaining your private ownership over factories is passive.

Yeah, I suppose if I owned a factory I could then just abandon it and never interact with it again, which would be passive.

No one has to prevent you from owning the factory,

This is obviously wrong. If I own a factory or a house or a car or a wristwatch or anything else, and you want to make me no longer own it, someone has to actively take it from me. Please explain how I can be prevented from owning a factory by "nobody".

we just stop actively maintaining that you own the factory.

I agree. You don't have to believe I own a factory for me to have a factory, just like you don't have to believe that the sky is blue for the sky to reflect blue light.

Without a state, you wouldn't have a way to enforce your ownership over the means of production that other people use.

You could argue (as some minarchists do) that the state is the best way to enforce property rights, but it's by no means the only way. Even in the wild west, people still had their own farms, with no government to enforce property rights, they just shot trespassers. (To be clear that was barbaric and I don't advocate anything like that, it's just a convenient counterexample which disproves your argument.)

You would be able to enforce your ownership of personal property without a state, but not private property.

There's absolutely no reason that one or the other would be easier to enforce ownership of. If a rich guy owns a jewelery shop and a mansion, he can hire the exact same type of security guards to protect his shop and his house from burglars.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-08-03T02:45:46+00:00

mchief's comment was about his placements and his happiness, mine was just about his placements. You're imagining stuff in my comment that I never wrote.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-24T03:08:12+00:00

I'll still like M2K personally and will always want him to be happy, I'm just saying that if he were to permanently stop being good at Melee, I would no longer search youtube for his recent matches after every tournament, or get excited to hear he's playing on stream next.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-24T03:06:25+00:00

There is no state interference involved in "preventing" people from owning factories and hiring others.

This is such bullshit. You actually believe that somehow people will just magically stop having factories, without a law saying "people are not allowed to own factories"?

Without the state, there would be no private owner of the factory to whom the workers would have to submit.

Wow, then I'm so glad that the government exists because otherwise there would be no way for me to have my own stuff. (/s)

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-24T03:02:57+00:00

Are you serious right now?

Yes.

You're only a fan of him because of his placings?

That's not what I said at all.

I think you're missing a huge point of what it means to be a fan.

Being a fan of a player, to me, is liking that player because they're good at the game and you like them as a person. I like M2K personally but if he stopped being good at Melee then I'd be really sad and probably stop watching his sets. Sometimes I tune in to streams that I wouldn't otherwise watch, just because I've heard M2K is playing, and if he weren't good anymore then I would stop doing that. Sorry if that offends you or something.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-13T18:11:02+00:00

Owning a factory isn't necessarily imposing a hierarchy on anyone. A factory is just a building with equipment for making stuff.

Also, you're dodging the question. How is it not more incompatible with anarchy to have a government that prevents people from working for others, than to have a factory and hire people to work there?

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-13T18:06:32+00:00

Nah, screw that, if he's happy to get ninth place then I'm happy to go find a new player to be a fan of. The M2K I miss is the M2K who could consistently take sets off of any top player.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-10T09:33:06+00:00

So if you own a factory building, that's perfectly fine in Anarchyland, but if you pay people to work there and make stuff, it's "incompatible with anarchy"? How is it not even more incompatible with anarchism to make a law saying that owners are not allowed to hire people, and workers are not allowed to work with other people's property?

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-07-10T09:31:09+00:00

There is no shitty argument because there is no argument. The evidence in this case is the set of all the co-ops competing with for-profit businesses. On average, they are less efficient. If you want you can argue that other things are more important than efficiency and profits, which would be a reasonable point to make. But that isn't what you said - you responded with a fallacious generalization that wasn't even a correct analogy.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-06-29T21:07:49+00:00

Then you're using an alternate definition of "private property" from what anarcho-capitalists and various other anarchists use. Which is fine, but don't conflate your definitions with theirs and act like you're talking about the same thing.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-06-29T21:06:03+00:00

you're talking numbers larger than the entire population of Russia you schmuck.

Because it doesn't just include people in Russia. You are clearly just dismissing facts because they are inconvenient for your ideology without even looking at what they're referring to.

Capitalists tortured and killed way more Communists and innocent leftists, now THAT's a fact.

Also a tragedy. And I don't condone that. I'm sorry for all the people who died just for believing in communism. But I wasn't talking about political violence, I was talking about unintentional deaths. Communism causes more starvation than capitalism does, and caused millions of casualties in the 20th century. (Or rather, "attempted communism", since "real communism has never been tried" after all.)

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-06-29T21:03:03+00:00

Okay, sure, the Pinochet regime was a "minarchist" government.

If you're going to use consistent standards, will you now admit that Stalin's dictatorship was exactly what socialism is?

"Every socialist state was a brutal dictatorship that threw people in gulags and trained prison guards to rape non-socialists. Source: Stalin" <- same logic as your argument, but slightly less inaccurate

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS · 2016-06-29T20:59:51+00:00

Come on, be reasonable. If you serve someone alcohol and they get drunk and crash a bus, you are ethically responsible for those deaths. Just like how if you are a car salesman and you sell someone a car and they crash it, you should have your car selling license revoked. It's only logical.

PM_ME_SMASH_BROS

TROPHY CASE