My solution to the Libertarian dilemma

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[CgDs]

[skyhook77sfg]

Libertarianism as an impartial ideal of maximum freedom and justice seems to be a kind of fantasy.

We are all born into a world in which property is neither evenly distributed nor freely available. This situation came about through history, in which piracy, imperialism, genocide, slavery, etc. have all had an important part. No individual is free just to live their own life, since (for instance) there is no free land to farm. We all depend on others (especially if we are poor or handicapped by low social status, low intelligence, unpopular ethnicity, or disability, etc.) A government that adopts a completely laissez faire approach effectively sides with the pirates, slave-owners, etc. and their descendants.

Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right.

If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

APPARATCHIKS OF THE CHAIN SMOKING ADULTERESS AYN RAND ROSENBAUM
who secretly applied for social security in her later years....


BTW

There already is a libertarian society you can immigrate to....

Mogadishu Somalia.

Bon Voyage.

[CgDs]

[CgDs]

[Mr. Perfect]

[noddy]

only the totalitarian people want capitalist libertarianism to have morality.

cant get around that fact - the ruleset that allows me, the chinese guy, the sikh guy and the motley collection of other guys to all live and work together is the ruleset which assumes we all come with our own private, functioning morality.

the immoral "economics only" approach allows that - it doesnt delve into the details of lifestyles and families and other hot topic politics of the modern mindset.

anyone that goes on too much about immoral capitalism is really saying they want the world crushed to the specifics of their particular preferences.

im being a tad disingenous here - but in the spirit of this forum i think its appropriate

--edit--

anti hyperbolic avoidance.

im not talking in the extreme here - there is much that many cultures agree on, the worrying trend for me is the centralisation and then enforcement of an increasingly narrow band of cultural ideas - I favour the benefit of letting people have more scope for boundary pushing over the restriction of not letting bad things happen.

[Tinker]

Yeah, if only we lived in a free country where we could dump our chemical waste into the rivers without anyone trying to quash our freedom to be capitalists without authoritarian influences.

[noddy]

speaking of hyperbolic - chemical waste in the rivers sounds a tad like "poisoning/vandalism" to me.. and covered by the "dont kill and maim people" rules which pretty much every culture that lives in the west agrees on.

the complicated set of bribes and power games that lets people get away with such things happens in left|right|communist|capitalist systems - russia, china, india, europe and america all have this happen, and its not libertarian to let some people be more powerful than others and kill and maim without consequence.

it happens when the population isnt actually together and democratic and standing up for themselves, the ideology symbols are meaningless.

... and feh, we are talking nuances here, not anarchy.

the bits i dont like about the direction we are heading are specifically to do with the massive centralised increase in rules about all aspects of life

the specifics of implementation is extremely culture dependent - they should not be tackled from afar (national/international) but only tackled regionally (local/state) imnho... the way that fashions and trends come and go in a pendulum like extremes, means that any one grouping will be caught up in nonsense at different points in time.

if i get caught with fundies, i need to be able to move my ass to somewhere different, spaghetti forbid its all the same everywhere

the reason i think all this needs to be made explicit and "by law" on national/international standards is because i think technology has got to the stage that previously unworkable and largely irrelevant "social engineering" laws done by remote authorities are now enforceable and diabolical.

before they could rant and rave about how i should be, and i could ignore them

[CgDs]

[noddy]

[noddy]

women should look to a husband to look after them and support them as many of them are too weak and delicate to run their own lives. these husbands should manage their finances and protect them from the evil thats in the outside world, as their ignorance and selfish vanities would run lead them astray.

s/women/adult/g
s/husband/government/g

[Mr. Perfect]

[Tinker]

[crashtech]

It's ever the case when an opponent of a group (or way of thinking) characterizes such, he will always choose some repugnant outlier as being representative of what he opposes.

It's tiresome.

[Colonel Sun]

[amos]

Here is what John Galt (the fictional hero of free market libertarianism) looks like, except this is the dirty truth, not fiction or some aberration.

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/04/06/39 ... gn=twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Colonel Sun]

Must be the silly season as both Kochs and Wieners are in the news these days.

[Mr. Perfect]

[crashtech]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I'm pretty sure the world changed when Michael had Freddo killed at the end of Godfather II, so now Socialists and Libertarians are the only options for a non-family world. Outside of that, there is no dilemma unless you know how to bring Freddo back- but do you really wanna bring him back???

[Mr. Perfect]