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Related: About this forumMrScorpio
(73,631 posts)Everything is on the surface to these people. They refuse to understand the underlying function of things.
JHB
(37,166 posts)...who have no problem with "coercive government" when it's coercing something they want. They only object when government coerces them into not coercing other people.
what do libertarians want?
baldguy
(36,649 posts)Anyone who promotes "Govt BAD, Private Sector GOOD" as a matter of religious dogma, with no supporting evidence & in spite of enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary has certainly never worked in the private sector.
lumpy
(13,704 posts)form of government. What us their plan for accomplishing this? Who knows. Unreal. Mind boggling.
JHB
(37,166 posts)Good for David for questioning some of the assertions, but they wound up resting on still more assertions.
WhoIsNumberNone
(7,875 posts)Bullshit. Private sector workers are underpaid. (Except for CEOs and executives of course)
Quantess
(27,630 posts)Looks like everything in her worldview gets discussed in the libertarian bubble.
truth2power
(8,219 posts)I wish that interviewers, David packman and others, would force these people to describe what daily life would be like under a Libertarian-run political system. Such a scenario would be chaotic and unworkable in a complex society such as our own, IMO.
I've had a number of conversations with self-described Libertarians, and those discussions always devolve into some sort of weirdness, one way or another.
One individual I spoke with believed that everyone should be responsible for his or her health care needs, as if, by being frugal, one could put aside enough money to pay for one million dollar cancer treatment, in the same way one can, arguably, put aside enough money to purchase a new sofa.
Another person argued against community fire departments, saying that if his house burned down he would simply have to "find another place to live". The most troubling thing, to me, was the lack of emotion this individual displayed when discussing such a scenario. He didn't seem to understand what losing his home would mean emotionally as well as financially.
I'm not making up either of the above conversations. What is WRONG with these people?
jollyreaper2112
(1,941 posts)Libertarians live in the land of spherical cows.
Repeating my post here.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022321100
The argument for and against government
Was listening to a podcast with a libertarian stating his case. Ugh. Personally, I can find some common ground with the small-L libs. The big-L libs I find to be very religious in their thinking and dealing with spherical cows rather than reality.
On spherical cows:
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer "I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.
The point of the joke is that physicists will often reduce a problem to the simplest form they can imagine in order to make calculations more feasible, even though such simplification may hinder the model's application to reality.
In this particular case, the interviewee is saying government has a monopoly on violence. That's not nice. How do you enforce rules without an authority?
eBay is brought up. Buyers and sellers have ratings. You get a low rating, nobody does business with you. Nobody comes in with guns to enforce the law.
Ok, so isn't ebay a private company owned by a central power that can exercise arbitrary authority? There aren't guns! Ugh. You simpleton. It isn't a co-op and management represents the final authority.
If it was an anarcho-libertarian model then it would be peer to peer, not client-server. If you want a comparison, napster vs BitTorrent. You could take down napster because it had an hq. BitTorrent has no master. The only weak point is needing centralized trackers to point you to the swarm and they're already working around that.
My view on government is like my view on a personal vehicle. "This guy drives an F150. It's too large." Possibly. What does he do with it? Oh, he hauls trailers every day. It's the right size. "This other guy drives a Titan that's just as big." What does he do with it? Oh, he commutes alone to an office job and does nothing with it on the weekend that would require the towing capacity. Yeah, it's too large.
Government is a tool, not an end unto itself. The right-sized tool for the job is what's required, nothing more or less.
In the same conversation the river that caught on fire is brought up and the libertarian said that common law already addressed that very issue with no need for government. He cited apple orchard owners whose trees were harmed by the soot from early factories. They sued and won in court. Uh, who provided the courts? Who enforced the rulings? And he then said the factory owners used their financial power to get the laws changed. So in other words, government was working as it should before it was coopted by businesses. And you're saying that by removing all government you'll have a better negotiating position to keep corporations from fucking your ass raw? Are you serious? He then came around to saying that government failed in the first place because it didn't keep the river from catching fire. Well, that's the way of things. Government is reactive, no proactive. Very rarely does government stop a problem before it happens, usually only after it becomes too big to ignore, and usually because, wait for it, VESTED AND SPECIAL INTERESTS PREVENTED GOVERNMENT FROM DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT WHEN IT WASN'T A BIG PROBLEM! You simpleton.
Whenever libertarians start talking about government being the problem and not a solution, whenever they talk about how things would work in their ideal anarcho-economy, I get the feeling we're talking about spherical cows again. Pure communism didn't work either for a similar reason: it based expectations on the behavior of ideal, rational humans, not the ones you encounter in the real world.
Anyone else have thoughts about this?