laughing dog
Contributor
Pointing to actual statements made by posters will give your posts the appearance of valid claims instead of pointless whining. Or to quote someone in this thread "Try facts sometime".
-
Features
Libertarian Party Goes Crazy
- Thread starter Cheerful Charlie
- Start date
laughing dog
Contributor
It is pretty ironic that the NH Mises caucus of the Libertarian party does show that Libertarian does have 3 silent K's in its name.
bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 33,967
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
Libertarians understand that government is necessary to protect them against other people's bad behaviour; While at the same time demanding that it must not protect other people against the bad behaviour of Libertarians.
It's a political movement ideally suited to teenagers who hate being told to help others, or even themselves, while remaining utterly oblivious to the myriad ways in which people thanklessly help them.
Politics is largely a matter of attempting to find the optimal compromise position on the authoritarianism continuum between the two diametrically opposite extremes of freedom (anarchy) and law (dictatorship).
Law is to freedom, as heat is to cold; Grown up political movements try to have enough law to protect people from each other, while having enough freedom to protect people from their rulers.
Libertarianism is the desire to have high levels of freedom, along with strict rule of law. This is as reasonable and sensible as wanting to be a married bachelor.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
The Mises Caucus wants to remove civil rights legislation. And proclaims your life style is your property. And of course property rights are very, very important.
If your life style is living in a gated community that does not allow Blacks, Jews, or Asians, that is your Libertarian right. If your all white community has covenants not allowing sale of property to Blacks, Jews or Asians, that is their right.
They can have a company that does not hire Blacks, Jews or Asians, that your all important life style property right. And women in that company can be forbidden to hold managment or executive positions in your Libertarian company.
No more U.S. dollars? You can be payed with company script redeemable at a company store.
Halleluah! We's free again! We are free again!
If your life style is living in a gated community that does not allow Blacks, Jews, or Asians, that is your Libertarian right. If your all white community has covenants not allowing sale of property to Blacks, Jews or Asians, that is their right.
They can have a company that does not hire Blacks, Jews or Asians, that your all important life style property right. And women in that company can be forbidden to hold managment or executive positions in your Libertarian company.
No more U.S. dollars? You can be payed with company script redeemable at a company store.
Halleluah! We's free again! We are free again!
Jimmy Higgins
Contributor
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2001
- Messages
- 44,024
- Basic Beliefs
- Calvinistic Atheist
A Contrarian is never wrong.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
For more information, check out the Mises debate he participated in and posted to his facebook, here.
You can see Vermin's introduction beginning at 7:45 in the video.
Btw, this could be informative to everyone else as well.
SigmatheZeta
Senior Member
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2021
- Messages
- 615
- Gender
- she/her
- Basic Beliefs
- Generally, I am rooted in both ancient Epicurean and ancient Pyrrhonist sentiments, although I am somewhat sympathetic toward the intentions behind ancient Cynicism.
*kneads her temple with her wing-spur*
I need to stop predicting things. Being right is seriously damaging to my health.
I predicted years ago that the libertarian party was on its way to taking a dangerous ultra-authoritarian turn.
I am tired of being right, now.
I need to stop predicting things. Being right is seriously damaging to my health.
I predicted years ago that the libertarian party was on its way to taking a dangerous ultra-authoritarian turn.
I am tired of being right, now.
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Hunh? I saw the quote and thought it typical Jason. It doesn't describe Jason's Libertarianism. It doesn't even really describe the Mises Caucus beyond saying that it's almost the same as "all the other factions."
When we're talking to or about YOU, we want to know where YOU stand on issues. (Google is our friend if we're curious about the "Mises Caucus.") If YOU wanted to help us understand YOUR positions — you don't — you'd tell us more about, for example, "supporting individual liberty." Should innkeepers have the Liberty to refuse service to nigras? Do adults have the Liberty to sell themselves into slavery? How old must a child be before its owners no longer have the Liberty to sell it into slavery?
Perhaps you are a "moderate Libertarian" — what an oxymoron! — and think nigras should have the Liberty to visit inns whose owners hate them. Then I've annoyed you by "putting words in your mouth." I had no choice; you won't even tell us what "Liberty" means. The closest you've ever come is to suggest looking the word up in a dictionary.
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Many Libertarians have a very clear position on government regulations. They support GOOD regulations, but oppose BAD regulations. (This is one topic on which my thinking converges with the Libertarians.)
Unlike Jason, many Libertarians on The Other Message Board were happy to expound on their views. The lack of government but need for police and courtrooms is no problem: Police and courts of law are privatized. When you eat at a restaurant you check the fine print on the menus: "Contractors agree that all disputes will be settled by Judge Bean's court of law in El Paso." If you prefer a different court, you have the Liberty to negotiate that with the owner before ordering your food.
Yes, whatever their other pretensions, Libertarianism is primarily focused on property rights. That's all that Charles Koch and others financing Libertarian Party care about.
The meaning of "personal liberty" is deliberately left open to gull the gullible.
* You think people should have the liberty to stay at any inn? Join the Libertarian Party!
* You think innkeepers should have the liberty to refuse any guest? Join the Libertarian Party!
* You think woman should have liberty over their own bodies? Join the Libertarian Party!
* You think fetuses should have liberty to be born? Join the Libertarian Party!
SigmatheZeta
Senior Member
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2021
- Messages
- 615
- Gender
- she/her
- Basic Beliefs
- Generally, I am rooted in both ancient Epicurean and ancient Pyrrhonist sentiments, although I am somewhat sympathetic toward the intentions behind ancient Cynicism.
See, I think differently about regulation. I think that alternatives to punishment and fines for non-compliance ought to be explored first, rather than being looked upon as a go-to. The crime-and-punishment perspective, on regulation, is really worrying and toxic, from my point-of-view.
It is bad enough that the government has to exhaust a lot of its popularity on taxation enforcement. I agree that taxation is necessary, but when you pressure or force people into doing something they might not always want to do, then that tends to turn the tide of public sentiment against you a little bit, and frankly, I like it when my guys win. I just also think that the tax burden of the poorest voters has untapped potential for exercising the power of tax-relief to promote popularity among the voters, and I honestly think that people that are super-wealthy really won't die of not being trillionaires. I have never heard of that being a cause of anyone's death, anyway. The thing is, we need to both acknowledge the necessity of taxation to keep up with our budget and the total political cost of taxation. We can't just ignore that cost. It is a cost that can be understood and quantified.
Also, you know, there are alternative means of presenting social obligations to the people, such as giving them the ability to direct more of their particular tax dollars to specific things. It would actually be an interesting experiment if we had part of the tax bill that you still had to pay, but you could have some kind of choice about what programs you really wanted to support with your money. I think that a lot of taxpayers might actually take being obligated to pay a tax better if they could actually direct the money into things that directly benefited themselves and people and causes that they cared a flying rat's ass about. It's nice that a lot of voters want to support the arts and a lot of voters want to support homes for the homeless and a lot of voters want to support clean energy, but it would be interesting to see what they did when they were asked to put their money where their mouth is. In the balance, everything WOULD get the funding it needed because everyone really has different valences and ideals, which is really how democracy goes around anyway. I think that there might actually be some Nordic countries that have tried this on a small scale, so don't mock it before asking if there might be a precedent.
Also, I think that transparency really helps people better accept their responsibilities. It helps people to know why everything is being done. It helps people to understand in detail the reasons why certain things are necessary. If money is needed for FEMA and other disaster relief expenses, then people are going to want to see what that money is doing. We live in the digital age. Why can't we coordinate a means of showing everyone a count of how efficiently their tax dollars are supporting their stated purpose and how much of their tax dollars are paying for administrative bullshit. At least if the government were to quantify how well everything was being spent, our political leaders could argue with each other about who can make the government more meaningfully efficient, rather than who can dupe the people into thinking that a tax-cut constitutes a free lunch.
But when you use force and take away people's options and choices when you really don't have to, that scares people. They feel a loss of control that is really seriously upsetting, and that tends to lead to political leaders that are just trying to take responsibility being seen as bullies. I think that political leaders that call for new regulations and tax-increases and other obligations really ought to get serious about weighing political costs instead of blaming the voters for being voters. It's true that you have no choice except to give a dog his shots, but you do have the option of weighing how much the dog resents you for poking him in the but with needles, in a rational way, against how much fun stuff you did together the same day at the dog park. You don't just avoid vet visits just because they are an unpleasant responsibility, but you weigh the cost of fulfilling necessary obligations in a rational way.
At heart, I have generally lefty views, but I also have a realistic view of human psychology. I think that it might be a pipe dream to imagine a world where we don't have any social obligations at all, but I still see imposing such obligations as something that needs to be expensed. I think that ignoring that expense is irresponsible and politically reckless. I am tired of seeing political leaders I otherwise agree with lose because they won't get serious about finding ways to mitigate the political cost of putting more burdens onto people that inevitably must resent being burdened.
But the difference between myself and a libertarian is that libertarians are not looking at liberty in a rational or socially conscious sort of way. They have adopted a sort of child-like perspective where any sense at all in which they are asked to take responsibility is looked upon with anger and disdain. They even sneer at being asked to honor transgender people's pronouns as if it were somehow an IMPOSSIBLE burden on them to just be respectful.
And I don't even try to force people regarding my pronouns. I just exercise my own liberty to state clearly and firmly how I prefer to be called. I don't see it as an affront or a reason for anger if someone misgenders me, but I do see it as an opening for me to assert my identity as a woman in an unmistakable way. If people were uncertain BEFORE someone made a mistake and misgendered, they could not possibly be uncertain AFTER I was misgendered and I politely but firmly called out a correction. I don't see it as a type of morality policing. I just also know that misgendering is sometimes used as a means of harassment and intimidation, especially against transgender people that are trying their best to stealth it and never really wanted to be controversial in any context (unlike me, a person that is too tall and broad-shouldered to ever stealth it in any context, although my mother and my sister are also broad-shouldered for women in spite of having florid giganticomastia), and it is not really taken seriously enough. The point is, there are a lot of ultra-transphobic libertarians that don't really care about liberty, but they only want the "liberty" to harass and intimidate transgender people in a way that obstructs and negates transgender people's liberty.
And as a zoo, I find that a lot of people only care about freedom of speech in the sense of giving themselves the right to harass, intimidate, defame, and threaten me over that aspect of my identity. Even the government is not actually threatening me over stating my identity and my views on current statutes. That level of repression is all being done by vigilante cyber-terrorists. When "freedom of speech" only means "freedom to repress other people's freedoms," that is not freedom of speech, but that is vigilante authoritarianism. It's ochlocracy. It's mobile vulgus, and rule by mobile vulgus does not really lead to people being more free.
It doesn't make you libertarian if you only want to have liberty for the sake of negating other people's liberty.
It doesn't make you libertarian if the only liberty you care about is the liberty to deny people the right to choose their publicly expressed gender identity. A transgender person's right to choose their identity and how they wish to be perceived is a PART of their liberty. Freedom of speech is something I generally support, but a part of a transgender person's freedom of speech is the right to be known as the gender they want to identify as.
And while some sexual identities might be controversial because it is genuinely complicated to identify and protect the rights of all stakeholders, we can never really succeed at understanding or attempting to address those complications if most of us that try to have open and honest discussions about the subject are becoming victims of cyber-terrorism, doxxing, swotting, report-brigading, and vigilante deplatforming. Because people that have legitimate concerns are also too cautious to risk their safety or reputations, the only people that seem to get attention, on these subjects, are people that are too impulsive to observe any type of commitment to rational behavior at all, which leads to sensationalist reporting and the development of a seriously distorted public image. Therefore, it's not "freedom of speech" to defame and terrorize people that have controversial views, but that actually constitutes vigilante authoritarianism. If all stakeholders could be identified and discussed in a rational, level-headed sort of way, then we might eventually reach the same sort of compromise that was eventually reached in Germany, but as things currently stand, vigilante authoritarianism has taken the place of lawful government in a seriously harmful way.
My problem with people that call themselves libertarians is that they don't pay attention to the problem of vigilante authoritarianism, and they don't pay attention to liberties that don't happen to apply to them in their selfishly narrow-minded world, such as freedom of gender identity. They don't care about anything except themselves.
That is why I call myself a moderate anarchist. What is an anarchist? An anarchist cares about all levels of freedom, not just from the government but from corporate monarchists and vigilante authoritarian thugs. Also, I identify myself as "moderate." Yes, moderate because I think that compromises do eventually have to be reached with people that feel comforted by rigid boundaries, and I realize that my own sloppy-but-effective intuitive style of thinking is not really everyone else's cup-of-tea. I can still have a more anarchist perspective on life and realize that I also am obligated to try to coexist and compromise with people that have a psychological or practical need for a more clearly defined way of life.
And I refuse to ever call myself a libertarian because libertarians only see force if the government is doing it. The problem is that they have such a narrow-perspective that they would take away the authority of the government to protect them from a corporate monarchy that would put them literally into chains and an authoritarian mob that would beat them to death with clubs if they stepped out of line or looked or acted too different. As long as "libertarian" only refers to one kind of liberty, it doesn't describe me.
"Libertarian" has become a code-word for "corporate monarchist" and "totalitarian ochlocrat." Fuck them.
Join the anarchists, people. We actually do ask the government to exercise moderation, and occasionally, we outright defy the government. However, we are also against corporate monarchism and totalitarian ochlocracy, and right now, those are bigger problems than anything the government is doing. The government is too disorganized to even get my mail to me on time. The government is not currently the biggest threat to my liberty, although I am always wary of government overreach into my personal life. Right now, we are living under a toxic corporate monarchy, on one hand, and on the other, we are edging our way into a dangerous future of totalitarian ochlocracy, where violent demagogues can suppress a religion they disagree with by calling for rampage shootings against people that practice it.
When you only want to check one type of authoritarianism while ignoring others, you end up with a serious shit show, and it just doesn't work. If you recognize and feel concerned about all types of authoritarianism, then call yourself an anarchist because I think that only anarchists genuinely care about liberty, in an unstructured and intuitive way, rather than just bitching about taxation and insisting on the dumb idea that gold-backed currency is still realistic in the 2020's.
It is bad enough that the government has to exhaust a lot of its popularity on taxation enforcement. I agree that taxation is necessary, but when you pressure or force people into doing something they might not always want to do, then that tends to turn the tide of public sentiment against you a little bit, and frankly, I like it when my guys win. I just also think that the tax burden of the poorest voters has untapped potential for exercising the power of tax-relief to promote popularity among the voters, and I honestly think that people that are super-wealthy really won't die of not being trillionaires. I have never heard of that being a cause of anyone's death, anyway. The thing is, we need to both acknowledge the necessity of taxation to keep up with our budget and the total political cost of taxation. We can't just ignore that cost. It is a cost that can be understood and quantified.
Also, you know, there are alternative means of presenting social obligations to the people, such as giving them the ability to direct more of their particular tax dollars to specific things. It would actually be an interesting experiment if we had part of the tax bill that you still had to pay, but you could have some kind of choice about what programs you really wanted to support with your money. I think that a lot of taxpayers might actually take being obligated to pay a tax better if they could actually direct the money into things that directly benefited themselves and people and causes that they cared a flying rat's ass about. It's nice that a lot of voters want to support the arts and a lot of voters want to support homes for the homeless and a lot of voters want to support clean energy, but it would be interesting to see what they did when they were asked to put their money where their mouth is. In the balance, everything WOULD get the funding it needed because everyone really has different valences and ideals, which is really how democracy goes around anyway. I think that there might actually be some Nordic countries that have tried this on a small scale, so don't mock it before asking if there might be a precedent.
Also, I think that transparency really helps people better accept their responsibilities. It helps people to know why everything is being done. It helps people to understand in detail the reasons why certain things are necessary. If money is needed for FEMA and other disaster relief expenses, then people are going to want to see what that money is doing. We live in the digital age. Why can't we coordinate a means of showing everyone a count of how efficiently their tax dollars are supporting their stated purpose and how much of their tax dollars are paying for administrative bullshit. At least if the government were to quantify how well everything was being spent, our political leaders could argue with each other about who can make the government more meaningfully efficient, rather than who can dupe the people into thinking that a tax-cut constitutes a free lunch.
But when you use force and take away people's options and choices when you really don't have to, that scares people. They feel a loss of control that is really seriously upsetting, and that tends to lead to political leaders that are just trying to take responsibility being seen as bullies. I think that political leaders that call for new regulations and tax-increases and other obligations really ought to get serious about weighing political costs instead of blaming the voters for being voters. It's true that you have no choice except to give a dog his shots, but you do have the option of weighing how much the dog resents you for poking him in the but with needles, in a rational way, against how much fun stuff you did together the same day at the dog park. You don't just avoid vet visits just because they are an unpleasant responsibility, but you weigh the cost of fulfilling necessary obligations in a rational way.
At heart, I have generally lefty views, but I also have a realistic view of human psychology. I think that it might be a pipe dream to imagine a world where we don't have any social obligations at all, but I still see imposing such obligations as something that needs to be expensed. I think that ignoring that expense is irresponsible and politically reckless. I am tired of seeing political leaders I otherwise agree with lose because they won't get serious about finding ways to mitigate the political cost of putting more burdens onto people that inevitably must resent being burdened.
But the difference between myself and a libertarian is that libertarians are not looking at liberty in a rational or socially conscious sort of way. They have adopted a sort of child-like perspective where any sense at all in which they are asked to take responsibility is looked upon with anger and disdain. They even sneer at being asked to honor transgender people's pronouns as if it were somehow an IMPOSSIBLE burden on them to just be respectful.
And I don't even try to force people regarding my pronouns. I just exercise my own liberty to state clearly and firmly how I prefer to be called. I don't see it as an affront or a reason for anger if someone misgenders me, but I do see it as an opening for me to assert my identity as a woman in an unmistakable way. If people were uncertain BEFORE someone made a mistake and misgendered, they could not possibly be uncertain AFTER I was misgendered and I politely but firmly called out a correction. I don't see it as a type of morality policing. I just also know that misgendering is sometimes used as a means of harassment and intimidation, especially against transgender people that are trying their best to stealth it and never really wanted to be controversial in any context (unlike me, a person that is too tall and broad-shouldered to ever stealth it in any context, although my mother and my sister are also broad-shouldered for women in spite of having florid giganticomastia), and it is not really taken seriously enough. The point is, there are a lot of ultra-transphobic libertarians that don't really care about liberty, but they only want the "liberty" to harass and intimidate transgender people in a way that obstructs and negates transgender people's liberty.
And as a zoo, I find that a lot of people only care about freedom of speech in the sense of giving themselves the right to harass, intimidate, defame, and threaten me over that aspect of my identity. Even the government is not actually threatening me over stating my identity and my views on current statutes. That level of repression is all being done by vigilante cyber-terrorists. When "freedom of speech" only means "freedom to repress other people's freedoms," that is not freedom of speech, but that is vigilante authoritarianism. It's ochlocracy. It's mobile vulgus, and rule by mobile vulgus does not really lead to people being more free.
It doesn't make you libertarian if you only want to have liberty for the sake of negating other people's liberty.
It doesn't make you libertarian if the only liberty you care about is the liberty to deny people the right to choose their publicly expressed gender identity. A transgender person's right to choose their identity and how they wish to be perceived is a PART of their liberty. Freedom of speech is something I generally support, but a part of a transgender person's freedom of speech is the right to be known as the gender they want to identify as.
And while some sexual identities might be controversial because it is genuinely complicated to identify and protect the rights of all stakeholders, we can never really succeed at understanding or attempting to address those complications if most of us that try to have open and honest discussions about the subject are becoming victims of cyber-terrorism, doxxing, swotting, report-brigading, and vigilante deplatforming. Because people that have legitimate concerns are also too cautious to risk their safety or reputations, the only people that seem to get attention, on these subjects, are people that are too impulsive to observe any type of commitment to rational behavior at all, which leads to sensationalist reporting and the development of a seriously distorted public image. Therefore, it's not "freedom of speech" to defame and terrorize people that have controversial views, but that actually constitutes vigilante authoritarianism. If all stakeholders could be identified and discussed in a rational, level-headed sort of way, then we might eventually reach the same sort of compromise that was eventually reached in Germany, but as things currently stand, vigilante authoritarianism has taken the place of lawful government in a seriously harmful way.
My problem with people that call themselves libertarians is that they don't pay attention to the problem of vigilante authoritarianism, and they don't pay attention to liberties that don't happen to apply to them in their selfishly narrow-minded world, such as freedom of gender identity. They don't care about anything except themselves.
That is why I call myself a moderate anarchist. What is an anarchist? An anarchist cares about all levels of freedom, not just from the government but from corporate monarchists and vigilante authoritarian thugs. Also, I identify myself as "moderate." Yes, moderate because I think that compromises do eventually have to be reached with people that feel comforted by rigid boundaries, and I realize that my own sloppy-but-effective intuitive style of thinking is not really everyone else's cup-of-tea. I can still have a more anarchist perspective on life and realize that I also am obligated to try to coexist and compromise with people that have a psychological or practical need for a more clearly defined way of life.
And I refuse to ever call myself a libertarian because libertarians only see force if the government is doing it. The problem is that they have such a narrow-perspective that they would take away the authority of the government to protect them from a corporate monarchy that would put them literally into chains and an authoritarian mob that would beat them to death with clubs if they stepped out of line or looked or acted too different. As long as "libertarian" only refers to one kind of liberty, it doesn't describe me.
"Libertarian" has become a code-word for "corporate monarchist" and "totalitarian ochlocrat." Fuck them.
Join the anarchists, people. We actually do ask the government to exercise moderation, and occasionally, we outright defy the government. However, we are also against corporate monarchism and totalitarian ochlocracy, and right now, those are bigger problems than anything the government is doing. The government is too disorganized to even get my mail to me on time. The government is not currently the biggest threat to my liberty, although I am always wary of government overreach into my personal life. Right now, we are living under a toxic corporate monarchy, on one hand, and on the other, we are edging our way into a dangerous future of totalitarian ochlocracy, where violent demagogues can suppress a religion they disagree with by calling for rampage shootings against people that practice it.
When you only want to check one type of authoritarianism while ignoring others, you end up with a serious shit show, and it just doesn't work. If you recognize and feel concerned about all types of authoritarianism, then call yourself an anarchist because I think that only anarchists genuinely care about liberty, in an unstructured and intuitive way, rather than just bitching about taxation and insisting on the dumb idea that gold-backed currency is still realistic in the 2020's.
Last edited:
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
I'm going to express this more broadly and apply it to the Party itself:
A strict view of individualistic freedom is contrary to a collective group imposing structure to the benefit of the group. The strict individualism allows for secession even at an individual level but the collective group tries to agree on a structure through mutual consent such as majority voting. Mutual consent (or contract) is an important facet of group dynamics and to both allow it and promote that it has no term of enforcement is immature and impractical in the real world. Therefore, unless the Libertarian Party has a platform of meaningless platitudes, it can never be a big tent party because factions will always splinter off once specific policies are put into place in the platform.
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
I agree with much of your post, but have singled out just two paragraphs, and especially the sentence I've colored red.
I know you address much more than this, but wealth and income inequality is an important problem in the U.S. It is the Ds rather than the Rs or Libertarians that represent the less wealthy, and many Americans of limited means feel let down. The elite have just too much political power. The Ds need Manchin and Sinema just to get to a razor-thin majority, and this situation will probably get worse after November.
The world's ten most expensive private yachts have a total value of over $10 billion.. One could improve the education and nutrition of a million children with that kind of money. (Admittedly the most expensive superyachts are owned by billionaires from SE Asia, Russia, or the Arabian peninsula, but Bill Gates used to lease a superyacht for $5 million per week.)
SigmatheZeta
Senior Member
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2021
- Messages
- 615
- Gender
- she/her
- Basic Beliefs
- Generally, I am rooted in both ancient Epicurean and ancient Pyrrhonist sentiments, although I am somewhat sympathetic toward the intentions behind ancient Cynicism.
The D's often miss out on opportunities to sell the idea of tax-cuts on their own terms. The people that are not really making it, in the country, shouldn't have to shoulder so much of the burden of maintaining and growing a country that is not really working out for them as well as it is for others. They ought to try to market the idea of getting tax-relief for the poorest Americans.
What we ought to do is restructure the tax burden so that it isn't wrecking the lives of the poorest Americans. That ought to come before raising taxes on anybody. The people that control the majority of the country's wealth need to repay some of their plenty to helping make more for everybody, including themselves, rather than expecting the people that are not really making it to continue carrying the burden for them.
The tagline "tax-relief for the poor" would be more marketable than "hike taxes on the rich." It shouldn't be about the rich. I don't care if someone else is a trillionaire or not. The poorest Americans are just barely able to survive, and there is only but so far that they can be ravaged before they are not just broke but broken. How much the richest Americans pay should not even be in the discussion. They will pay however much is necessary to keep the country running when we are also trying to get some tax-relief for the poor. They are not going to die of not being trillionaires. Nobody ever died of that illness.
I like the idea of a wealth tax. Instead of just shifting the income tax, let's go ahead and cut the overall income tax for all Americans and replace the revenue with a wealth-tax, put there specifically to make sure that the people that benefit the most from the economy are also doing the most to help keep the country it comes from running properly. Put it toward paying for the military. I guarantee that if overseas conflicts and insecure international relations were the primary cause of the richest Americans' tax burden, the richest Americans would all become the biggest peaceniks in the land. What does the military really do except guard a rich man's loot? If the poorest Americans owe anything to the protecting the country, then they pay it through service, and during a time of war when we had to reinstate the draft, they wouldn't have the resources to buy their way out of their responsibilities.
Last edited:
Jason Harvestdancer
Contributor
If you think individualism is equated to racism, that absurdity explains your entire posting history.
Jason Harvestdancer
Contributor
We're now on page 2 and yet none of those who enjoy the original "news" article have been able to tell me what makes the Mises Caucus different from other factions.
They say the quiet part out loud. It's not that difficult.
laughing dog
Contributor
Naturally, your premise is a straw man.
It has been two days and you have yet to produce a jot of evidence to rebut the OP (which is a report). As a self-appointed expert of Libertarians, you ought to be able to provide something of substance instead of these increasing risible straw men.
Bullmoose Too
Member
The Civil Rights act is Federal interference that infringes on the rights of business owners. If the Libertarian Party opposes it it is because of some type of Federal regulation that effects business.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
So, the Libertarian party supports rights to run whites only restaurants and whites only hotels. Or for a business not to hire Blacks, Jews, or Muslims.
When I was in high school in the late 1970's I was swept up into it. I recall thinking that the magic market and greed could solve the world's problems. Then I went to University and learned that it was stupid to think so.
I haven't given the Libertarian Party much thought in several decades but it does seem that they've ditched the civil liberties half of their agenda. That was the only thing that gave them some credibility.