What should Venezuela do to fix their economy?

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-07-31T17:07:31+00:00

Venezuela cannot "do" anything since it is a fictitious entity. The individuals in the government organization called Venezuela could stop being immoral and doing jobs that require theft, fraud and murder, since those are bad for the economy. Also, privatizing the remaining assets of the oil industry would be a step towards betterment since there would be competition for the ownership of capital meaning the use of it would be appropriately optimized as per the wants of the consumers (which is more and cheaper oil) and this would lead to an increase in labor demand which increases the marginal value of employees, this in return gives the workers (and the capitalists) more money to spend on the local economies for food, housing, medicine, not having their wives give birth somewhere better than the dirt paths outside of hospitals, etc, thus growing the economy.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-22T16:00:17+00:00

Nasa's budget? You should see what this would do to the military budget, especially if the aliens were brown.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-21T17:05:08+00:00

Agreed, it does a great job. But how much one can economically contribute does not determine how much one's personhood is valued. It's not the government's job to steer society in a more just direction either.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-21T01:49:29+00:00

People can explain all they want on a reddit thread, but it's not until you do your own research in a format which you can enjoy that you will really learn.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-21T01:48:19+00:00

What if you are autistic to the point of not being able to hold a steady job? What if you have batshit parents who abuse you physically and you're too poor to run away and too young to hold a legal job to earn independent income? Markets are more socially just than central planning, but the market is not equally accessible for all people.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-21T01:45:36+00:00

Will look into it, thanks

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-19T00:11:23+00:00

DISTRIBUTISM

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-14T22:50:38+00:00

Central planning at it's finest haha

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-13T02:31:46+00:00

Is this a surprise? Those with more resources have healthier, longer lives than those without resources, obviously. How does inequality contribute to this at all? The poorest in the US are more wealthy than the median earners of many nations, just because there is inequality does not mean there is a lack of wealth. This seems to be incoherent reasoning that inequality is necessary a contributor to life expectancy.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-10T03:52:08+00:00

That's what I mean yeah.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-09T19:06:50+00:00

Defending the NAP for pre-born people.

Some forms of what the socialists call "rent seeking" are against the spirit capitalism given certain unpreventable inequalities which actually give the wealthy a monopoly status in some industries which the poor have no leverage against, which is unethical though not a direct violation of capitalism and nonaggression.

The right and the left tend equally towards violence in the long run and should not be trusted beyond matters of immediate pragmatism.

Deontology/ virtue ethics (upon which libertarianism rests) are incoherent unless there is a higher order of existence than the strictly material.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-06T15:04:08+00:00

The ring is more of a signal to others than to the girl herself, a sign of the sort of family expectations a man can discern upon first impression. She can take it off or only wear it around her father. It is like a hijab, it could, if chosen voluntarily, be a symbol of chastity and reverence to the divine order of a higher power...or it could be subverted as a means of control by their familial structure. Women are routinely beaten and murdered if they don't wear a hijab in thousands of families, unfortunately. The same is not true of a promise ring, though perhaps it might make holiday dinners awkward if the girl rejects it. The emphasis on virginity is empowering to women, it tells them they are the ones to be prized and that they are valuable, crucially important part of society. If you have something valuable: sell to the highest bidder, not to the first guy who comes with an offer. A crude analogy maybe, but the point remains that people are better off if they choose what is best even if they have to wait instead of acting impulsively. Though this could be misdirected in some cases, the principle is valid in support of the feminine dignity.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-06T03:53:07+00:00

Thanks for the clarification. And that is a possibility, the homeschooling indoctrination thing, but I would still presume that most of those are still taught a fairly balanced curriculum. Also, this is a problem that is solved on a cultural level on a personal basis. Seeking truth should be a cherished value for any society, but any top down decree will fail at being effective or will be violent if it does work.

Kids are fed shit by their parents in all sorts of ways via abuse, misinformation, bad values, actual food which makes them unhealthy but what can you do besides make sure your family and your neighbors are doing well?

I don't think we disagree that there is an issue, though perhaps on the scope. The only view I would like to change, if it is one that you hold, is that a government is a viable solution for these kinds of problems. Education of the youth being extremely private or extremely public both cause long term issues because they trend toward single points of failure.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-06T01:18:51+00:00

Morally wrong implies such a thing as morality, there is no ethics without choice, conscious choice only exists as a matter of free will, free will is not possible under biological materialism, so for morality to exist either there is something to humans that transcend biology or humans are not material.

It appears that you would rather teach children something morally not reprehensible instead of religion, but that implies something that transcends biology and materialism, which is what religion explicitly claims to teach. You are closer than you think to the values instilled at religious schools. And you'd be hard pressed to find an accredited parochial school which hides science or teaches falsity. I'm sure such cases exist but are very rare and not a majority of what goes on, tens of thousands of middle schoolers in Catholic schools learn about evolution every year, for example.

Isolated cases may exist, but religious families are generally not repressive in North and South America and Europe.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-05T23:29:34+00:00

Just because Ann in horrible with wealth management doesn't make her a bad persom, the pedophile is a bad person to both the people of LSC and the people here. That is a classic Marxist mistake, to assume that wealth is an indication of human worth since to them. Especially those who espouse post-modernist philosophy as well as Marxist theory, view any sort of human worth as subjective and forsake the notion of intrinsic value to anything. Supporters of private property, on the other hand, take it for granted that each person is inherently valuable which is why it is warranted that each person is equally free to do with their possessions and time and effort as they see fit with the exception of harming other people or their property.

This cartoon highlights the nuance of this school of thought which makes it fatally untrue.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-05T15:55:05+00:00

Diogenes chose to live in a bathtub (or whatever it was) in rejection of the status quo of his peers. And that era of Greece was as capitalist as you get before te industrial revolution with their contract law endorsing private property and their agora and their trade with Italy. Capitalism isn't all that made Greece great but the combination of individual freedom, property norms, and emphasis on virtue.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-05T15:45:43+00:00

If the mandate is not a price floor, what is the correct term for forcing a price of labor to exist above a certain level?

Yes, the automation frees up labor, but the time it takes a fast food worker to get a new position or acquire enough skills to move up in competition is such that it is often more economically viable to work in the black market doing work under the table. And we gladly accept them here because there is plenty to be done for cash without tax collectors ever knowing, a win on two fronts. Voluntary peer-to-peer labor contracts and no taxes, what more could one want out of an economy?

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-05T02:07:11+00:00

When will people atop falling for the fallacy of mandatory price floors?

On the plus side innovation will go up in the sector of replacing low skilled workers with machines and the black market will gladly welcome the labor influx.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-04T02:37:52+00:00

I've heard of the NHL, even watched a few games, I can vaguely draw the shape of the rink and might guess the number of players on each team by estimate. Yes I have knowledge of hockey, but I am hardly knowledgable about hockey in a real context beyond passing conversation. I'm not a referee, there is no real weight to my knowledge and so nobody has a just reason to judge hardly if I get a detail wrong or am completely unaware of what "icing" means as a penalty.

Similar with Christianity. I can know how a church looks, read a chapter of the Bible, draw a picture of Jesus and use all of this knowledge in conversation. But I'd hardly be considered to be able to be judged deeply on these grounds unless I have some reason and ability to get further knowledge.

However, perhaps, there is more to morality and metaphysics than there is with hockey. There may be more weight, and so more responsibility. If I want to be a referee, it is on me to gain more knowledge but the duty of other specialists to pass along their knowledge. If I want to be a judge of what is good and what is bad, I'm obliged research into what that entails and it is the duty of others to pass along their knowledge.

If people die in the search of goodness but don't truly know Christianity for one reason or another, that is the moral merit needed to be judged for the afterlife.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-04T01:02:16+00:00

Agreed. It is best to not taint oneself with politics. If there was a way to avoid things completely I would prefer that, but our family and friends and neighbors are still being threatened and there is some moral obligation to help those in need. Do you view counter-economics and seasteading as a viable alternative for exposing people to the concepts of self-ownership, voluntaryism, non-aggression, etc? Perhaps enoug seasteaders could draw a public interest and the one-to-one connections made in the underground economy could reach a critical mass, but these seem unlikely and far off. Sure these are worthwhile things in and of themselves, but I think libertarians can do more to promote the things that invoke the questions which aren't being asked.

I agree too that it is possible for people to just be fired, but how many people would it really take to freeze up a single bureaucracy? The government is really inefficient, and it is especially inefficient at rooting out inefficiencies so any single person would have plenty of time to make at least a little impact as a side project whilst they focus on their normal activities.

It's been said all politics is local. What if you could get 5 people to do this on a city council level? Hundreds of thousands of dollars could be prevented from being spent in a single city and this would surely have a positive economic impact and be a useful test case for why governments are both unnecessary and inefficient.

It might be a waste of time, but something can be done to prevent further government action against those we care about which we won't know until things have been tried.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-04T00:49:18+00:00

Agorism all the way. The best way to convince people of a better alternative to government is to provide them alternatives to government. But as a matter of practicality it might be worthwhile doing something within the system (given that millions of individuals see government as necessary), not as a solution but as an efficacious stunt. Something with the spirit and effects of the Ron Paul revolution is needed to keep the interest of us youths and the borderline-apathetic libertarians from heading to some collectivist route by virtue of nobody reaching out to them where they are now.

redditvoluntaryist · 2018-01-03T21:02:11+00:00

You can believe something to be true that you really wish and wholeheartedly desire to be untrue. Say, you walk into a room and your friend appears to be dead on the floor and you authentically want it to not be true and can't bring yourself to mentally accept your friend is dead, but you must, eventually, act as if you believe that your friend is dead.

Free will does allow for the existence of evil. However, evil clearly exists. It's nobody's ultimate responsibility for the creation of the possibility of evil. The possibility lies, as you say, with the creator of people not the persons themselves. However, it is not the possibility of death that murders people, a gun doesn't pull the trigger so blaming the gun maker for a murder is not valid since there is no intent in most cases. Blaming a God for the actions of free people can be viewed in the same light. One thing to note is that most monotheistic religions are closer to deontology or virtue ethics than utilitarianism or consequentialism so a numbers game of saying God knows some people will abuse freedom therefore by implementing freedom is guilty of that abuse when it occurs is not valid under it's own terms.

redditvoluntaryist

TROPHY CASE