SimpleDon
Veteran Member
I'd like to thank the Libertarians for helping Biden win PA, GA, AZ.
Wait, I thought we always never had any impact on anything...
Libertarians have had an outsized impact on our politics and our economy—much to the determinate of the nation.
See the threads Libertarianism kills people and Libertarianism is killing our economy. As well as the argument below, Libertarianism killed conservatism.
As I have said before, the libertarians are the source of many if not most of the bad ideas of neoliberalism and movement conservatism, my comments and opinions are in italics;
1.0 | "The government is the problem" meme. |
The government has the same responsibility to police the economy as it does to police society in general for bad and criminal behavior. No economy has ever existed without some form of government to define the economy, to police the economy, and to determine who gets how much of the rewards from the economy, going back to the first tribal chief who decided who got what from the food produced by the hunting and gathering. | |
2.0 | The self-organizing, self-regulating free market -- either as a goal or as a description of our current economy |
They never seem to be certain which it is, promoting an economic system that has never existed in any economy in the world, much less a complex, modern industrial economy like ours. | |
3.0 | Laissez-faire capitalism |
the redundancy is intentional for emphasis | |
4.0 | Deregulation |
that brought us to the previous brink of a global financial crisis just a few short years ago, in 2007 and 2008 | |
5.0 | Free trade |
Triggering a race to the bottom to the bottom eroding wages in the US while increasing corporate profits and the income inequality. | |
6.0 | The free movement of labor and capital between countries |
Open borders! | |
7.0 | The gold standard - money that is really worth something! |
Unlike our current so-called fiat money worth what you can buy with it, which is everything in the economy! Without the threat of deflation that the gold standard for money brings, the current fiat money supply grows and shrinks with the demand for the money. | |
8.0 | Taxes as theft |
Leading directly to #9 | |
9.0 | The national debt is an evil |
That we are inflicting on our children or our grandchildren! Conservatives conflate the national debt with household debt. The national debt is much more than debt. It is also savings in the form of Treasury bills held by the wealthy by and large. It is our trade deficit as part of the current account balance. It creates a part of our money supply. This is why we can never pay it down. It would destroy savings and part of our money supply. The libertarian view of the national debt goes even further. From the 2018 to 2020 Libertarian Party* platform, * I have been assured that the members of the Libertarian Party aren't True© Libertarians. | |
10.0 | Deflation is good |
Usually expressed these days as the "Washington Consensus" belief that we should run a balanced federal budget or even a budget surplus to pay off the national "debt," which is self-imposed deflation. | |
11.0 | The only obligation for a corporation is to make profits for their shareholders |
By extension, they don't have any obligations to their employees, customers, or society in general? | |
12.0 | Natural law - things are the way that they are, and we can't change them |
When history stands that of course, we can, especially in the areas of income inequality and the continuing scourge of poverty in the wealthiest country in the world. Implicit in this discussion of natural law is that their fact-free view of economics from the first economists constitutes the natural laws of economics. Delusion squared. | |
13.0 | Private, not public, ownership of land but also natural resources like minerals, oil, and natural gas |
Sell Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon! Libertarians believe that property rights are absolute unless you are Native American. | |
14.0 | The government should be run like a business |
-- as Trump did? | |
15.0 | There is nothing that the government does that private enterprise and the free market can't do better and cheaper |
except for running the government? ... of running health care? ... for educating our children? ... of running the defense of the nation? ... for running our prisons? ... for back-stopping the banks too big to fail from failing? All of these have been tried, and none have achieved the "better and cheaper standard." | |
16.0 | The elimination of government enforcement of building and energy codes, at a minimum, to complete elimination of the codes altogether |
Witness Trump's unhinged and usually incoherent rants against showerheads and light bulbs. I covered this in a thread, A question for the anti-regulation types here #1. | |
17.0 | The elimination of Social Security and all forms of government-sponsored medical care, Medicare, Medicaid, and military TriCare. |
And instead funneling all of the money spent on these programs through Wall Street at a much greater cost for medical care and retirement needs than now. | |
18.0 | The elimination of the minimum wage, OSHA, child labor laws, anti-monopolistic and monopsony laws, and other intuitions by the government into the operations of businesses |
... all of which were put in place in response to bad behavior in those areas | |
19.0 | Herd immunity |
... the solution by choice for the pandemic of the "it is no worse than the seasonal flu" crowd, which now includes the official stance of the Trumpists. | |
20.0 | Modern public choice theory - as developed by Buchanan and Tullok |
Applying racism and the cultural wars to politics to achieve unpopular economic goals like income inequality. There is nothing wrong with Public choice theory. But James M. Buchanan weaponized MPCT and laid the groundwork for what is more commonly known as the Southern Strategy, the toxic blend of racism, the old-time religion, xenophobia, homophobia, gun rights, and white male grievance and replacement theory. What does this have to do with the libertarians? Buchanan was a libertarian, but it is for others to say if he rose to the exalted state of being a True© Libertarian. | |
21.0 | Dismantling the welfare state is a necessary condition before you can open the borders to the free flow of labor because the deadbeats in the world would relocate to the US to take advantage of our generous welfare programs. |
Welfare that primarily benefits mothers and their children. | |
22.0 | The tyranny of the majority in a democracy. |
And putting what in instead? Authoritarianism? Which seems to be the option on the table. | |
23.0 | Dismantling the federal government and the decentralization of that government. |
Because the state and local governments are never corrupt or repressive or incompetent. | |
24.0 | The proof of the superiority of the libertarian philosophy is how many of the approximately 200 nations in the world today are organized according to libertarian principles. |
Exactly zero, none. | |
25.0 | The insistence that man's progress through history and into the future is mainly due to individual brilliance and initiative battling against the opposition of the collective. |
When, at the very least, the majority of man's progress is due to collective action by man's institutions; corporations, governments, universities, science institutes, the communication infrastructure, etc. This championing of the individual over the collective is at the core of why the libertarian philosophy has damaged us. Currently, we are facing two massive threats to human life worldwide that can't be solved without worldwide collective action, covid and climate change. This much-needed collective action needs leadership to happen, and like it or not, the US has to provide the majority of this leadership. | |
26.0 | The modern gold standard, bitcoin et al. |
Money created out of thin air designed to create massive, devastating deflation, the worse thing that can happen to any capitalistic economy because some libertarians believe deflation is good. | |
27.0 | The bizarre explanations of what they propose to replace government action within their vision of the future - |
27.1 | The setting of prices by supply and demand driving prices down to the level of marginal productivity, |
forcing profits to zero, which requires nearly perfect competition, the commoditization of products, the elimination of corporations with their efficiencies of scale to keep the proprietor close to the business and its customers, reducing the scope and complexity of the products manufactured to reduce the costs of starting a business, | |
27.2 | Belief in the superior ability of civil lawsuits to better control bad behavior in the market than laws and regulations backed by enforcement, |
This is what libertarians sign into when they list what government functions are needed "to enforce contracts," to have judges in the multiple jurisdictions in the US tell companies what they should have done rather than to have a national regulation to tell companies what they are supposed to do, | |
27.3 | And, somewhat confusingly, either |
27.3a | 100% reserve banking, i.e., only loaning out long-term deposits, |
eliminating today's main source of money creation, | |
27.3b | or 100% reserve banking's polar opposite, totally free, unregulated banking, |
allowing banks to create as much money as they want to use for anything that they want, including stock and real estate speculation, | |
27.4 | Equally confusing is their stance on intellectual property (IP) rights, and the 40% of the total number of regulations in the US that support them, |
Do these regulations disappear in the libertarian vision of their future, thereby pissing off their corporate sponsors, or do they dance with hypocrisy and retain the regulations for the dollars? Does the strong support of property rights extend to intellectual property? An imaginary form of property that requires the government to define it completely and enforce the patents, copyrights, and trademarks that makeup IP. Once again, a few libertarians want to restrict the definition of "property" to real property that you can touch. But the majority seem to be happy and retain the government-defined IP along with its 40% of the regulations required or are afraid to commit to changing the corporate-pleasing status quo. | |
27.5 | The very fundamental theory of the self-regulating, self-organizing free market is flawed. |
Like the other 19th-century philosophy based on ideology and theory, not evidence, Marxism, libertarianism depends on a fundamental change in human nature, while Marxism requires the suppression of the interests of the individual to the collective, libertarianism requires the opposite, the suppression of the interests of the collective to the individual. | |
28.0 | The casting any of the opponents of the above as members of vast conspiracies who are only seeking personal gains, |
, i.e., projection, denial of altruism, and dedication to the well-being of the collective by others because the libertarians themselves lack those traits. | |
29.0 | And the latest addition to the list - the insistence on the freedom to infect yourself, your family, and random strangers with Coronavirus |
because you are petulant and don't want to wear a mask in public or get vaccinated, in the name of individual freedom, of course. |
In the 1950s, 1960s conservatism and conservatives were saying that we are moving too fast. That we are risking leaving too many people behind, especially on social issues. Which is not healthy for our democracy.
For the most part, they knew and accepted we have to have changed in our society, but we have to do it slowly. Now conservatives embrace the radical changes of the far-right libertarians.