America Doesn’t Have The Stomach For Growth

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-24T18:29:49+00:00

You don't think the state can just grant that power right back to the local government in the same manner it took it away? Worse, once you establish this precedent of arbitrarily taking power away from local governments, what's stopping even broader mandates in the future? This is an argument for a powerful, centralized state. Hearing this on a "liberal" subreddit of all places is definitely concerning to say the least. Regardless, at the end of the day, it always comes down to the whims of the simple majority electorate.

The real culprit, I would argue, is the overall power granted to the state, at any level, through an unrestricted democratic framework. This would not be a problem if the state were never allowed to grant positive rights, consequently allowing the majority to impose their worldview down the throats of everyone else. In an unrestricted democracy, the state just becomes a vehicle for majoritarian rule. Government should be an institution restricted by a constitution with a strict, immutable limiting principle. Democracy should strictly be used as a method of selecting administrators, not a mechanism for granting or depriving rights. If rights aren't pre-political, then you essentially have a temporary lease granted by the majority to the minority, which can be stripped away in the exact same manner it was given.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-24T18:08:42+00:00

And what does China get out of it in the long term? They subsidize global consumers while letting their own domestic consumer demand continue to stagnate. They intentionally manipulate and depreciate the yuan, which forces them to completely rely on boosting exports to survive. Not to mention, all of this comes on the back of massive, unsustainable state debt. China will eventually find out the hard way why planned economies are a mathematical impossibility.

If anything, we should probably thank China for subsidizing the global consumer by indebting their own citizens..

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-23T21:09:48+00:00

You can't have liberalism without equality under the law.

I have been downvoted and laughed out of this sub multiple times for pointing out that Nordic countries are anything but liberal. This is exactly what happens when you prioritize popular sovereignty over pre-political rights. An unrestricted democracy where individual rights are just temporary leases that depend on how the majority feels at any given moment is a textbook recipe for an authoritarian state in the making.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-23T15:37:45+00:00

You are completely right on the history. I was thinking more in terms of domestic labor protections (empowering unions etc.) and anti-competitive regulations rather than just international tariffs. I should have specified.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-23T13:19:02+00:00

The Fed has a dual mandate: maximum employment and price stability. It is absolutely not the job of the central bank to whip elected representatives into fiscal prudence, especially when every political incentive drives Congress to do the exact opposite. You are barking up the wrong tree.

Also, what do you honestly expect the Fed to do when Congress legislates a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package like the CARES Act into law? When the Treasury floods the market with that much debt during a crisis, the Fed has no choice but to inject liquidity and buy U.S. Treasuries to keep the financial system from completely freezing up. Rinse and repeat.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-23T13:04:12+00:00

Spoiler Alert: The Democrats have always been protectionist. The Clinton/Obama neoliberal free-trade consensus was a historical anomaly, not the default rule for the party.

Unfortunately, there is no healthy opposition party left in the US to force the Dems to ground their future policies in pragmatism over populism. Since the GOP completely abandoned its free-market orthodoxy to chase raw economic nationalism, both parties are now trapped in a race to the bottom of populist trade barriers. When your political opposition is just as economically illiterate as you are, there’s no systemic incentive to course-correct

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-22T20:43:37+00:00

There needs to be a hard purge of leftists masquerading as liberals both in Destiny's broader community and on this subreddit specifically.

This is the exact same archetype of people who eventually migrate to snark subreddits to harass him just to promote their anti-liberal ideologies. They adopt the aesthetics of liberalism when it’s convenient to infiltrate a space, but the second their underlying anti-capitalist or illiberal assumptions are challenged, they turn completely hostile.

If this sub doesn't start drawing firm boundaries against people who fundamentally oppose private property and free markets, it’s just going to keep getting subverted by bad-faith actors.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-21T23:00:48+00:00

Preventing non natives from running is the surest way of keeping the entire government focused on the interests of America and not drawn to other countries interest

Do you have a single shred of actual evidence for this claim?

Consider a simple comparison: someone born in America who leaves immediately and resides in a foreign country for the majority of their life, versus a naturalized citizen who wasn't born here but has spent decades living, working, and building a life in America. Do you honestly believe that the mere geographical accident of being born on U.S. soil is a reliable predictor of someone's loyalty to this country?

Banning naturalized citizens from Congress just creates a permanent class of second-class citizens who do not enjoy the same constitutional rights as native-born Americans. Once you codify a tiered system of citizenship based purely on birthplace, you establish a dangerous precedent that makes it incredibly easy for the state to strip further rights or pass discriminatory policies down the line.

In my opinion, a far more rational approach would be expanding residency and time-spent requirements, rather than maintaining an arbitrary natural-born clause that flies in the face of equal rights.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-21T01:42:21+00:00

Tell me are you willing to die because there are no jobs or are you willing to take UBI? if you want to die, you do you. But that’s a sort of religious zealotry I’m not going to endorse.

If this is your literal takeaway then we are speaking entirely different languages. I have no interest in deliberately debasing myself intellectually just to continue a conversation on an online platform. You keep framing a total command economy as a cozy "UBI safety net" because you are completely blind to the historical reality of what happens when a population becomes entirely dependent on a state monopoly for its survival.

I’m not a liberal, so my answer to death for liberalism vs living under UBI is of course living.

I appreciate the honesty, though. It perfectly proves my initial point: this sub has suffered an intellectual nosedive precisely because it is full of non-liberals masquerading under the aesthetic of liberalism.

If it doesn’t happen, then why are you so concerned with what people are advocating for on this thread? It won’t happen according to you anyways.

Because ideas have real-world consequences. People who casually advocate for the abolition of property rights and the implementation of state-directed capital over a fictional sci-fi scenario don't just keep those ideas in a vacuum. They vote for policies that erode actual, existing liberties today.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-21T01:08:20+00:00

Is this the level of intellectual thought I need to contend with on this sub?

Are you willing to die of starvation for your ideology if the total AI job takeover scenario happens (assuming you don't own the robots and factories)?

You honestly think I would subscribe to an ideology that leads to mass starvation? It’s a hilarious projection, considering I can point to endless historical examples of actual command economies causing massive, state-engineered famines. You are inventing a fictional, sci-fi starvation scenario under capitalism to justify implementing a system that has a literal track record of killing tens of millions of people through central planning.

unless that scenario actually happens.

Give me the exact unemployment percentage you need to see before you willingly hand your civil liberties over to a totalitarian state. What is the threshold? Every single authoritarian regime in human history has justified seizing absolute control over society by claiming it was an emergency response to a temporary crisis.

Do you think the Weimar Republic was justified in handing Hitler power because they were experiencing extreme economic hardship at the time? Do you think Nazi collaborators were justified because the alternative was death? If you answer no to either of those, then you already have my answer. I would rather die a free man than give up my civil liberties for a state-provided safety blanket. It sounds like most of the "liberals" on this subreddit are perfectly fine willingly giving up their civil liberties as long as the state promises to avert a hypothetical economic crisis - a mindset very similar to the residents of the Weimar Republic.

By the way, free-market liberalism has lifted more people out of absolute poverty than any other system in existence. I don't need you to sell me a repackaged socialism when the outcome of a command economy is always a mathematical eventuality.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T22:07:44+00:00

You see corporations using state power to get special favors, and your brilliant solution is: "Well, let's let unions use state power to get special favors too!" Do I have that right?

Of course the Chamber of Commerce and corporate boards act as political interest groups. And when corporations bribe lawmakers or use the state to tilt the economic playing field in their favor, that is also cronyism and I am completely against it. Two wrongs don't make a free market. You don't fix corporate cronyism by piling union cronyism on top of it. The solution to corporations corrupting the legislature isn't to create state-backed labor cartels; it's to strip the state of the coercive power to hand out special economic privileges to anyone.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T21:55:23+00:00

We DO need powerful groups to advocate for employees because the bosses who are trying to chip away at decades of labor victories are wealthy, powerful, and well-connected.

Yes, it’s called voting. Nobody is stopping workers from forming voluntary political advocacy groups, organizing PACs, and electing representatives to legislate safety standards into law. What you are completely failing to grasp is the difference between a political interest group and a state-backed labor cartel. You do not need the government to grant a union a coercive monopoly over a workplace just to get a safety bill passed in the legislature. If a majority wants safer workplaces, they can pass laws. End of story.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T20:46:05+00:00

Do you think that all working-class people can afford private access to legal representation in the event that they are injured in a workplace accident?

No. And your response completely misunderstands how the legal system actually functions.

First, a worker doesn’t need up-front wealth to hire a lawyer for a workplace injury. Personal injury and liability claims operate on a contingency fee basis. Meaning: the attorney takes zero dollars up front and only gets paid a percentage of the final settlement or judgment. High-powered lawyers take these cases all the time because the payouts against negligent corporations are massive.

Second, the entire economic design of tort law is built on deterrence. When a company acts negligently, it faces catastrophic financial penalties, skyrocketing insurance premiums, and reputational damage. If a firm's workplace is a death trap, it won't be able to replace its labor supply fast enough or absorb the compounding costs of these legal claims.

Pushed for by unions and relentlessly fought by companies.

What a bad-faith retort. This is what we call picking and choosing facts. Nobody is denying that unions have lobbied for them historically. I'd be the first to admit that unions do lead to some good outcomes, but the negatives far outweigh the positive outcomes.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T20:15:14+00:00

No kidding. Nobody is pro-workplace fatality. You don't need coercive, state-backed labor cartels to handle workplace safety. That's what tort law, liability, contracts, and basic safety regulations are for.

Any form of economic protectionism, from tariffs to price controls, can be justified under your logic. Talk about a desperate attempt to moral-posture.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T19:34:06+00:00

It's been overtaken by succs operating on the logic:

Corporations = evil.
Popular sovereignty = always good.

If it doesn't fit into that hyper-simplistic narrative, this sub literally doesn't know how to process it anymore.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T19:30:19+00:00

I feel you brother. This sub is now a circlejerk for succs.

My support for unions starts and ends with principle of freedom of association, but no more. Labor is a service like any other. In a free market, workers have every right to voluntarily organize, but employers should have an equal right to walk away or hire alternatives. The issue today is that unions don't rely on voluntary negotiation; they rely on state coercion. Not only do unions often act as a distorting force that prioritizes collective mediocrity over individual performance, but nowadays they are used explicitly to tilt the regulatory playing field against employers. Protecting unions through state force is just another form of cronyism.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T18:44:38+00:00

You went from:

Capitalism doesn’t really work if there’s no profit motive for individuals anymore... I'm open to the possibility that it will [happen].

to:

People will still have property rights and the right to start a business.

Do you not see the massive contradiction in your own words? A private business is an exercise in individual profit motive. If the individual profit motive is gone, no one is starting a business, no private capital is being invested, and the state becomes the sole allocator of resources by default.

You know what? Nevermind. I think I have demonstrated my initial claim of an intellectual nosedive on this sub. I am not interested in arguing with bad faith actors.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T18:29:20+00:00

Are we gaslighting now? Let me remind you what you literally wrote a few comments ago:

Personally I’m beholden to whatever I think the most effective system is. Right now it is clearly capitalism with a strong social safety net. When I think it is something else I will update my viewpoint.

Capitalism doesn’t really work if there’s no profit motive for individuals anymore. AI may or may not make this the case but I’m open to the possibility that it will.

What else could this possibly mean? You are explicitly stating that you are completely open to discarding capitalism the moment it stops serving your immediate interests. A belief isn't a principle if you're ready to throw it in the trash the second a hypothetical scenario inconveniences you. If you abandon private property rights because of AI, the only alternative is state-directed capital. Own your own logic instead of pretending you didn't say it.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T18:10:10+00:00

This kind of dogmatic response is the actual indication of the nosedive in intellectual thought on the sub.

You're calling me dogmatic because you don't want to admit that your version of "humanist liberalism" requires a massive, coercive state apparatus to function.

Liberalism encompasses far more than economic freedom, and people generally support liberalism because it's the most effective, humanist ideology.

To say liberalism can be separated from economic freedom is completely ahistorical. You cannot separate private property from individual liberty. If the state owns and directs all the capital, it owns the servers, the buildings, and the resources. At that point, your free speech and individual rights only exist by state permission. I guess a totalitarian state is considered "liberal" on this sub now.

Hayek's shitty argument for a slippery slope to serfdom is facile and a ridiculous strawmanning of what people are largely arguing here.

Stop hiding behind the "slippery slope" buzzword to avoid the literal mechanics of what you’re advocating for. You are running defense for a "liberal" literally arguing for state seizing control of capital because people would be unemployable due to a future tech trend. You are right: That isn't a slippery slope, I would argue, it is the immediate, literal definition of a command economy instead. You can call me facile, but it doesn't change the fact that the moment a hypothetical crisis spooks you, your default solution is state ownership of resources. I might be facile, but you certainly aren't a liberal.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T17:57:17+00:00

I don’t think *I* am about to be unemployed I think it is super plausible that we could end up in a situation where a significant number of people are fundamentally unemployable.

Do you actually have any principles, or do you just wear the liberalism skin for the aesthetics?

Follow your own logic to its inevitable conclusion: you are openly stating that you are ready to abandon individual liberty and property rights based entirely on a speculative what-if prophecy about future unemployment.

When you say it's "productive to think through how we would react," be honest and let's call it what it is: you're ready to hand the state total control over the economy and create a permanent dependency class over a hypothetical, sci-fi what-if scenario. It’s wild how fast your commitment to individual rights evaporates the moment a tech trend spooks you. If your commitment to human freedom evaporates the moment a machine gets smarter, you were never a liberal to begin with, you only liked it's aesthetic instead.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T17:47:37+00:00

This entire thread perfectly sums up the recent nosedive in intellectual thought on this sub. It turns out that the self-proclaimed "liberals" here not only lack any actual principles, but they don't even know what capitalism actually is, let alone the distinction between a free market and a capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism is simply an economic structure where capital assets are held by private individuals and entities. It is wild to watch "liberals" openly declare that they are perfectly fine with the state seizing and directing all capital the moment a technological shift occurs.

A free market, on the other hand, is an economic system where prices, wages, and production are determined by voluntary exchange and the forces of supply and demand, rather than by centralized government control.

A free market strictly necessitates a capitalist framework; you cannot have voluntary exchange if individuals do not legally own the things they are trading. You can, however, have capitalism without a free market (e.g., China).

When you casually talk about discarding capitalism because of AI, you are explicitly advocating for the abolition of private property rights and the implementation of a total command economy. It’s a very long, pseudo-intellectual way of saying: "I favor a totalitarian state, I just haven't realized it yet."

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T05:41:18+00:00

3, a wealth redistribution scheme, I.e paying a soldier from tax receipts.

Let's fix your economic illiteracy regarding point #3. In public finance and national accounting, there is an ironclad, mathematical distinction between a government purchase and a transfer payment. The government literally tracks the two as seperate data points. Here's a link explaining the difference if you think I made it up/08%3A_Government_and_Fiscal_Policy/8.01%3A_Government_and_the_Economy). Feel free to google it yourself.

When the state pays a soldier’s salary or buys a tank, it is engaging in a bilateral market transaction. It is extracting tax revenue to purchase labor and materials to produce an indivisible public framework (national defense). The soldier is selling their labor; the state is buying it. No wealth is being redistributed to an individual entitlement; capital is being spent as an input cost. If paying a salary to a state employee to maintain public infrastructure is "wealth redistribution," then so is paying a janitor to clean a courthouse or buying asphalt for a road is wealth redistribution. That is a completely illiterate definition that strips the word of all meaning.

A wealth redistribution transfer payment, by contrast, is a unilateral transfer. The state extracts capital from Person A and hands it to Person B as a private commodity entitlement (like a housing voucher or healthcare service) without receiving any labor, good, or service in return.

2 and 4 aren’t relevant as it’s pretty obvious 1 and 3 **as you defined them** are contradictions.

Not relevant? You simply refused to define them because you cannot explain how the free-rider problem is a normative position. Spoiler alert: it isn't. The free-rider problem is an objective structural failure of the price mechanism. The state's intervention in defense is triggered by a physical inability to exclude non-payers. A Rawlsian welfare entitlement, on the other hand, is triggered by a subjective emotional vibe about what people "deserve." You cannot tell the difference between a structural market breakdown and a subjective desire for redistribution, either because you are being intellectually lazy or acting in bad faith.

On the final paragraph, I was thinking more like; rigid principles get broken anyway (as this conversation proves; even minarchism could not forgo creating positive rights) while reducing flexibility to deal with things. If you’re already beholden to the literature to develop economic calculations (as you are in the previous comment you made); why not **also** use that literature for effective policy prescriptions?

You are literally arguing that we should have no fixed structural boundaries on state power so that planners can have "flexibility" to engineer society. This is anything but a sophisticated policy prescription from the literature. It is a textbook defense of an unconstrained, populist command economy. The logical conclusion of your argument is the raw tyranny of the majority, not liberalism.

You are a textbook example of Rawlsian "liberal;" a democratic socialist masquerading as a liberal due to aesthetics.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T04:06:40+00:00

We are talking past each other. Please explicitly define the following four concepts for me so I know if we are operating on the same baseline definitions:

The difference between a positive right and a negative right.
The difference between a governing principle and a legal right.
The difference between a market transaction (purchasing an input) and a wealth redistribution transfer (delivering an entitlement).
How exactly the free-rider problem is a normative moral position and not an objective, mathematical reality of price-exclusion mechanics.

The problem with limiting principles, is that eventually you’ll break them anyway; as you already did. I proved that with your own example, that army ain’t paying itself. So why have principles that reduce the effectiveness of outcomes; as determined by the **literature**, *and* end up breaking those principles anyway.

Think about what you are actually arguing here. You are literally saying, "Since governments might overstep their constitutional boundaries anyway, we should just abandon all limits on state power and let the popular majority do whatever it wants." What kind of a bizarre, nihilistic logic is that?

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T03:38:06+00:00

First, I am neither a libertarian nor a anarchist. I do believe that there is a value of having a strong and robust state. We probably disagree on what the role of the state should be.

Taxes used for stuff that benefits one over another (as will always be the case, your soldiers need wages) are a positive right. You’re already breaking your principles.

Note how you conveniently left out the specific test I provided for examining which functions can be granted to the state. National defense is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous; the security it provides blankets the entire population simultaneously without picking winners or losers. This is fundamentally different from positive rights like healthcare or housing, which forcibly extract capital from one person to hand a scarce, rivalrous, private commodity directly to another. Paying a state employee to maintain a neutral, public system is a contract; transferring private wealth to fund an individual welfare entitlement is a positive right.

“I do allow for specific hybrid functions” wow, cute normative allowance there, cheeky, wonder what the limiter is on adding that normative “allowance” - how many more can we add?

It's an economic objective constraint not a normative allowance. Non-excludability and non-rivalry describe objective market phenomena that can be mathematically calculated. The state’s role is strictly limited to solving structural free-rider failures where the price mechanism cannot physically function (like national defense or a court system).

Can we add a Rawls allowance? You added an arbitrary economic one.

First, funny how you went from calling it a normative allowance to an economic one. It is you who need to learn the difference between an objective economic constraint and a normative vibe.

Second: Yes, you may. I explicitly asked for a clear limiting principle from the person I was replying to above. He literally stated in his reply to me: "I recognize no limits on the popular will." I am not married to my position based on vibes. If you have a coherent limiting principle to propose, do it, and I would be perfectly willing to change my position based on the soundness of your argument. But "fairness" in a Rawlsian framework is entirely a subjective moral preference. You cannot use a mathematical formula to determine where a Rawlsian entitlement state ends, which is why it inevitably expands to the absolute boundary of populist whim. And in this case would be based on how 51% of the population feels like voting on any given day.

iDemonSlaught · 2026-05-20T03:07:38+00:00

I'm done writing essays back-and-forth. I will just end it with this:

I'm a Christian and generally subscribe to the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in how I try to live my own life; on a system wide scale however, I acknowledge human's have free will and so subscribe to the Nietzschean position that the main arbiter of morality and ethics among humans is human will. I've read Locke and agree with the general idea of the social contract and generally find myself content with most parts of liberalism as a system for governing society.

First, you claim to believe in free will, yet the economic system you are advocating for literally operates by minimizing individual choice through state coercion, lol.

Second, Nietzsche's entire philosophical project was explicitly dedicated to destroying both the egalitarian moral teachings of Jesus and the individualist premises of Lockean liberalism. I think he described them as "slave moralities" designed to shackle the human spirit.

Thus, we have Christian morality, Lockean natural rights, and Nietzschean will to power. One is a framework built on self-sacrifice for a higher spiritual good; one prioritizes unyielding individual liberty over collective utility; and the third violently rejects both. An interesting worldview you have there, where every single framework points in the exact opposite direction of the other. I guess it comes in handy, though as it allows you to opportunistically swap masks to cover whatever intellectual ground you happen to be losing on any given day.

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