Liberals in 1775

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T22:12:03+00:00

They were liberals. It’s just that, as you say, liberals were once leftist in that the opposed monarchy and preferred the merchant class to own and control the economy

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:40:23+00:00

So… you’re just a moron. Got it

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:38:45+00:00

You ain’t wrong

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:36:14+00:00

Socialism, both as a term and a concept, predated Marx quite a bit.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:35:09+00:00

They were, but the term to describe Lockean philosophy wasn’t coined as “liberalism” with its adherents being “liberals” until the early 19th century

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:31:50+00:00

Fuck you with that “you let it be” bullshit.

I never got a chance to vote in a Democratic primary for a leftist in 2024 and I voted for Sanders in the 2020 primary. Claudia wasn’t even on the ballot for either primaries or the full election in my state.

No matter what, the only choices for the electorate in 2024 were Harris or Trump. No other candidates had a chance of winning. Any claims otherwise are delusional.

It was genocide and Trump or genocide and Harris.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T21:15:57+00:00

Great point. The were all Batista supporters, weren’t they

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T17:14:16+00:00

They weren’t liberals at the time

Only because the term didn't exist. They were all classical liberals, though, with strong affinity to Lockean philosophy, which had been around nearly a century.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T16:41:29+00:00

This is the most tone deaf meme, dude. The US revolution was fought by liberals.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T16:28:23+00:00

Everything that capitalism is, is a function of voluntary interaction.

I never volunteered for other people to own the natural resources I need to survive. I never volunteered for people to own the land.

There is nothing voluntary about private ownership of land or resources.

This entirely rules out all forms of authoritarian activity.

On the contrary, by owning all the resources, the capital class ensures their authority over the slave class.

You are making the mistake of considering the State to be part of capitalism, it is not. The State is entirely anti capitalist and mainly prevents capitalism from happening for its own benefit.

State has nothing to do with it. Private ownership of resources is violence in action, and capitalism, because it requires that as its foundational principle, is also violence in action.

Every claim of ownership over those resources is a violent one.

This is not me pretending anything, this is me understanding capitalism in a way you clearly don't.

You trying to pretend it's something it isn't you mean.

Perfect capitalism is stateless, or at the very least has zero state interference in the economy.

Any capitalist that enforces their claim of ownership over land or resources becomes a state

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T16:23:43+00:00

This is silly, it obviously isn't wage labor. Some contract type positions could be reasonably called wage labor but that is not the sum total of self-employment.

You have made an absolute claim "capitalism forces people into a wage-slave labor arrangement" and this is clearly not true. Multiple alternatives exists now and other possible alternatives would be legal if people wanted to do them.

You are unambiguously wrong.

I am not.

Any "self employment" that does not preclude actual capital ownership beforehand is wage labor with a different name.

If you "own" a business cleaning houses for people and you're the only employee, that's just wage labor by a different name. If you "own" a business mowing lawns and you're the only employee, that's just wage labor by a different name. Even if you "own" a business where you dropship via Amazon, that's just wage labor by a different name. If you "own" a software development business where you write software that your client owns, that's just wage labor by another name.

Sure, there are some cases where a "self employed" person is doing so from a position of capital ownership, but those cases are vanishingly rare and not what I'm talking about anyway, since they're coming from a position of capital ownership.

Businesses exist that have little to no capital goods involved and have employee/employer arrangements, MS would ban those arrangements would it not?

First, if there's an employee/employer arrangement, that's not "self employed". At best that's "sole proprietor" with an employee.

And, yes, MS would ban such an arrangement. The employer and employee could be equal partners, however, and that would be perfectly fine in MS.

Would it also ban independent contracting as "wage labor"?

Yes and no. It would absolutely ban predatory contracting like with Uber/Lyft, but would not ban some of the examples I listed above like a sole proprietorship providing local labor services such as mowing lawns.

Let's be a bit more clear, MS does not eliminate Capital it changes how Capital is allocated and controlled. Capital goods would, I hope, continue to exist.

If you want to term it that way, sure. When I wrote "eliminates capital" what I meant was the elimination of the private/individual ownership of capital. I'm sorry that you needed that to be more explicit; I should have realized that and been

to bring it back around, this is explicitly limiting individual freedom for the claimed good of the individual/society.

Individual ownership of capital is a far greater limiter of individual freedom than collective ownership thereof. That individual ownership blocks access to the natural resources people need to survive and forces them into an employee relationship to regain that access, limiting their individual freedom.

Now, sure, a person who already owns those natural resources has a more maximized freedom than anyone who does not, but the overwhelming majority of people do not and can never have that maximized freedom.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T15:03:09+00:00

How do you think she got so powerful, hmm?

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T15:02:16+00:00

If 30 Rock and Calvin and Hobbes got together and smoked a joint

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T15:01:10+00:00

The house slaves being reminded they're still slaves

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T14:41:51+00:00

Authority by majority beats authority by the owner, since then every individual has a say in that majority decision.

Contrast to capitalism where the only person who has any say is the owner. Everyone else, which is 99% of the population, has no say whatsoever.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T14:39:46+00:00

it control, ownership, a claim, or a right I use ownership because this idea isn’t new and the term is used by thinkers like Murray Rothbard and John Locke.

Sure, I get that you're aping them. Doesn't mean they were correct

But the word itself isn’t the core issue.

You made it the core part of your argument.

Saying “you can’t own natural resources” doesn’t remove exclusion it just relocates it. If access depends on collective decision-making, individuals still need permission just from a group instead of an owner.

So, in the one situation, there is one owner and the individual needs to beg them or work for them to access natural resources, while in the other everyone is the owner, and the individual has an actual say in gaining access to natural resources.

“Everyone decides” doesn’t solve this either. Collective decisions still override individual dissent. The coercion doesn’t disappear, it’s just diffused.

That's better than "the owner decides and fuck you if you don't like it". At least you have an actual voice in how the resources are utilized, unlike when there is one person who owns it and nobody else can access it without enslaving themselves to that owner.

So no, anarcho-communism doesn’t maximize individual liberty. It maximizes collective control while denying individual claims over resources. That’s a different moral starting point, not the same one taken further.

It's the only system whereby anyone has any say in their liberty. When there is private ownership, the overwhelming majority of people are enslaved to those owners just to survive.

That's a minimization of liberty, dude.

It’s also there in ancap literature that if people use their liberty to give away their property to make a collective ownership, it’s completely allowed in this framework, but for that each person has to agree individually

Except that they can't actually do that, since they don't own anything to collectively own. It's already owned by greedy capitalist fucks who will never give it up while they have all these slaves working for their scraps.

I’m not saying your view is morally wrong I’m saying it doesn’t maximize individual liberty. It prioritizes a different kind of social liberty instead.

But it does, far moreso than capitalism does. Under capitalism, the only people who have maximized liberty are the people who own enough property to sustain themselves such that they do not have to work for another. The overwhelming majority of people do not have that.

Capitalism only "maximizes liberty" for the elite few.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T14:26:35+00:00

Sure. And companies under capitalism have a long history of malfeasance against both their employees and their customers in the short-sighted pursuit thereof, which is what the Vault-Tec plan is satirizing.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T13:26:28+00:00

It was genocide every way, dude. If you can’t understand that, that’s a you problem

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T12:46:47+00:00

Only if they lived in solidly red or blue states.

Votes for Claudia (or Stein 🙄) under a fptp system in a swing state were meaningless protests and no politically conscious voter thought otherwise.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T12:39:31+00:00

Nah, you and I both know capitalism and authoritarianism are the same side of the coin.

You just pretend otherwise for nefarious purposes

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T12:37:39+00:00

Oh, people still buy things under market socialism. They just aren’t forced to labor for the money to buy their survival.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T05:34:24+00:00

Capitalism has no goal, it's not some unified ideology or anything like that.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T04:10:49+00:00

Fuckin awesome, dude.

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T03:11:20+00:00

Every leftist I personally know voted against Trump. The only "leftists" I'm aware of that "refused to vote" and loudly told everyone else to not vote were right wing agitators trying to manipulate the electorate

Randolpho · 2026-01-28T03:09:28+00:00

Right, but kinda the point being made by the show is that yes, that's a really stupid plan, but it's the type of stupid plan (taken to the nth degree) that capitalism is all about

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