this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile, I can't, for the life of me, understand why anyone would want to be communist rather than being a libertarian socialist or anarchist. Unless they think that they're the ones that will be telling people what to do, rather than be the ones getting told what to do?
They go around calling people bootlickers. That’s projection. They fantasize about cozying up to Stalin and his jackbooted thugs. It’s the same fantasy as the one shared by Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and their neofeudalist followers. Same goes for all the MAGA morons, the Putinist Z radicals, the 50 cent army, and countless other authoritarian groups.
The world is a very complicated, dangerous, and frankly scary place right now. When people are unable to cope with all the uncertainty they reach for a strongman. This leaves the rest of us Ambiguity tolerant folks to actually try to deal with all the insanity, or to keep our heads down.
Beautifully put. Never considered it's projection but that makes so much sense why they exclusively praise dictators as opposed to activists
M-Ls generally hold to the idea that revolution is necessary and M-L is, pretty indisputably, the most successful ideology at launching a worker's revolution.
Keeping Da Revolushion socialist is something I assume they think they'll be able to do a better job at, if they're not just in full on tankie denial.
Yeah, I got downvoted once the MLs found my comment (in a .world thread) for wondering why far leftists were so convinced that the only answer was socialism (as opposed to soc dem) when we haven't seen it work very well in the real world. I guess Cuba and China are good enough examples for them to be fully convinced that we shouldn't emulate Scandinavia, because that's built on oppression and China isn't, or something like that.
The funny thing about Scandinavian economics is that it proves that social democracy both improves the average standard of living and doesn't even inconvenience the oligarchy, the wealth gap in Scandinavian countries is (or was) larger than America's. That's also what they find unacceptable about it though.
But you do need to note that Marxist revolutions don't happen in countries where people are mostly comfortable or hopeful, they happen in Tsarist Russia and Warlord Era China, and I think that's ultimately why they're not willing to settle for compromise of what an actual centrist economic position looks like, it's an expression of accelerationist thought.
...And that's the really terrifying thing. How many vulnerable people are they willing to see die for their accelerationist fantasy?
I think they'd argue that capitalism is on track to kill every living human being, but it's not like China is meeting their climate goals so 🤷♂️
TBF, China is doing a good job at transitioning to renewables. Which isn't the same as meeting their climate goals, but it's better than we're doing in the US overall.
Yeah, China is more than aware than oil dependency is both a guaranteed disaster and a national security issue when you don't have any or enough, while our dumbass oil barons can't quite grasp the idea that it's a limited resource if nothing else.
We're trying to speedrun getting to the Fallout 2 prologue.
There's no way in hell I'm going to be able to afford a spot in any of the vaults.
Trust me bro, let's do this revolution what can go wrong 🤡
Yeah, I'm also libertarian and generally a bit to the left of mainstream libertarianism, and I honestly don't understand why anyone would legitimately be on the more authoritarian end of the spectrum.
I appreciate that just plugging in libertarianism today could be bad, but surely most people want fewer people telling them what to do, right?
You would think. I mean, that's the whole principle behind things like reproductive rights, or LGBTQ+ rights, isn't it? The freedom to control your own body without the government telling you what you can and can't do with it, as long as you aren't directly harming someone else? And yet. Ignore the fact that Stalin et al. almost always had purges of LGBTQ+ people, and that the rights of women were--and are in current Russia--sharply curtailed.
I don't like libertarians
Not sure what people call libertarianism here. For me it's the american mad child of anarchism, individualism and far right capitalism. Certainly not something I would support !
my local libertarians unironically said that people shouldn't pay for roads. They also ranted about drag queens despite them not existing in my area.
Libertarian just screams to me, 'remove minimum wage! more power to corporations! sell your health!'
Libertariansism is just edgy facism. They pretend to have different ideals but in reality they only care about stomping on others.
Well, there are those. But libertarianism is a big tent, with everything from socialism to anarcho-capitalism underneath it.
I went into detail on my personal ideology using specific issues as examples. I think drag queens are great, and I'd love to take my kids to a drag queen story telling session (provided the show was intended for kids). I think road users should pay for roads, and they should pay roughly proportional to their destruction of the roads (i.e. trucking companies should pay much more than regular cars), and we should be investing in alternatives to using roads (so trains, cycle paths, etc) because that should reduce overall costs.
I do believe in eliminating the minimum wage, but that's because I believe in the NIT (Negative Income Tax), so if you make under a certain amount, you'd receive a check in the mail, which would replace the minimum wage (i.e. it would guarantee everyone makes at least $7.5-15/hour, adjusted to local cost of living). I also believe in less power to corporations, and we get there by making it easier for small companies to compete against large orgs (i.e. remove liability protections for larger orgs).
No minimum wage is fucking stupid
Why? All a minimum wage does is prevent people from taking jobs that would otherwise go to automated systems. If someone wants to work for $5/hr, who am I to say that's wrong?
The real concern here, I think, is that the minimum wage isn't enough to sustain an individual or a family. The solution there isn't to raise the minimum wage, but to ensure everyone has enough, regardless of wage. So hand out cash so everyone has enough, and then let people work for whatever price they want. Cash handouts should only go to citizens or permanent residents IMO, but everyone is free to compete for whatever wage they feel is fair, and wealthy people can pay the difference.
Without minimum wage, companies will pay their workers the absolute least. That's why there's a minimum wage!
And that's irrelevant if we have other mechanisms to ensure everyone has a minimum standard of living. If you are above the poverty line regardless, you wouldn't have to take poorly paying jobs if you didn't want to, but that shouldn't restrict others from choosing to take that job.
Once you start talking about other mechanisms that don't exist, then your ideology is a fairy tale. Libertarianism is stupid, it won't ever work.
So, proposing policy changes makes an ideology "a fairy tale"? How else are we supposed to actually make changes?
I would never support eliminating the minimum wage w/o some kind of replacement. But I also won't support increasing the minimum wage in lieu of a replacement, because increasing the minimum wage often does more harm than good in the short and medium terms (kills jobs and encourages longer-term replacement of those jobs w/ AI).
Some hardcore libertarians say "no welfare and no minimum wage," but most serious libertarians take a more moderate approach. So ignore the crazies that say we should radically change the entire economy "because principles" and listen mostly to those who want to make smaller changes to reduce initiation of force.
What will stop manufacturers from putting cheap carcinogens in their products?
What stops monopolies from suddenly deciding to pay as little as they can?
What stops corporations from paying as little as they want?
What happens to consumer standards and laws?
How will you assist the impoverished?
How will you stop poverty?
How about taxes?
Social services?
Where even is your evidence that removing minimum wage increases job growth? Ridiculous line of 'thinking'
In fact, I don't even care. Libertarianism is fucking stupid and will always be stupid and will always fail because it is inherently stupid.
The same thing that stops them today... public outcry and lawsuits after the fact. Regulations are generally reactionary.
Likewise for monopolies et al. They happen with strict regulations, and it's pretty clear that corporations lean on regulations to protect them from what would otherwise be a lawsuit. Look at how ineffective fines are for violating regulations, they're largely a cost of doing business at this point and are almost never enough to actually compensate those injured.
The general libertarian position is that we can reduce a lot of them to fraud. Right now, companies can cover for their lies in the fine print, whereas a reasonable person would consider that to be misleading and fraudulent. If there was a real risk of that corporation going under and the owners getting sued personally for fraud, companies would likely act a lot more reasonably.
One change here could make a ton of difference: remove limited liability protections for corporations over a certain size. If Boeing fails to ensure their airplanes are safe, those in charge of cutting QC spending should be held liable for criminal negligence. If your local mom and pop restaurant has an ecoli outbreak, they probably shouldn't go to jail, but they may need to go out of business if they were negligent.
The more laws we have, the more having expensive lawyers can protect the wealthy from consequences by finding loopholes and whatnot. I'm not saying we should eliminate all laws, but we should certainly reevaluate the ones we have to determine if they're actually protecting people equitably, or if they unfairly protect the rich.
Libertarianism isn't an end goal, it's a general direction, so everyone is going to disagree on the exact policies here.
My personal opinion is to do something like UBI, more specifically a Negative Income Tax (NIT). If you earn less than some amount, you should be a net receiver of tax dollars, and that should scale back the more you make.
We could probably get this today by switching Social Security to this NIT program without increasing taxes. Basically, we'd ensure everyone eligible is above the poverty line, and nobody over a "living wage" (say, 2-3x the poverty line) gets benefits. That would turn SS into an actual safety net instead of a retirement program, and some back-of-the-napkin math says the current SS tax rates should be enough. I don't think we should switch to it overnight, but phasing it in while phasing out other welfare systems is certainly something I'd be in favor of.
This isn't consistent with the "ideal" libertarian policy of no public welfare, but it is consistent with the direction libertarians would like to go, which is simpler government. Making government less subjective is a good thing, and welfare programs are absolutely subjective and unfairly distributed (many don't bother applying when they'd totally qualify). A Negative Income Tax is automatic, you file taxes, and if you qualify, you get benefits. It's similar to the EITC, but removes the requirement to earn an income.
It's simple supply and demand. If you reduce the costs of supply, businesses will create more jobs. That's why reducing the Fed rates works to stimulate the economy, lower borrowing rates means fewer impediments to expansion, which leads to more jobs. That's the foundation of fiat monetary policy, and cutting the minimum wage is simply another way to accomplish the same thing.
I can also point to numerous examples where increasing the minimum wage, especially rapidly, results in fewer jobs. Yes, those jobs tend to be better, but that doesn't matter if you're not one of the lucky few who get it. Here's an article about just that.
Then I guess I'll describe a few policies I believe in and how that fits into my personal ideology. In general, libertarians believe in the Non-Aggression Principle, meaning if it requires an initiation of force to achieve some ends, it's immoral. Many libertarians are willing to throw some asterisks on there for pragmatism, so I'm more interested in libertarianism as a direction, not an end goal.
Welfare
I support a UBI-like program called NIT. Basically (FPL = federal poverty line, LW = living wage):I want to eventually replace current welfare programs, but I'd start with Social Security, which rewards based on how much you put in, instead of how much you need. I think we should flip that on its head and give more to people with less saved, and nothing to people above a certain retirement income (they don't need it), so it would be an actual safety net instead of a retirement plan. Benefits would be adjusted based on local cost of living.
Justification:
I find redistribution of wealth to technically go against the NAP (i.e. take from one to give to another), but welfare programs are worse because it generally rewards those with the time to navigate the welfare system. This would be automatic, when you file your taxes, if you're below a certain income limit, you start getting payments.
Immigration
I'd like to move toward open borders, and make the immigration process as easy as possible. I'd make a one-time offer to currently undocumented immigrants to become documented; if they currently have a job or means to support themselves, they can stay, with some contingencies (i.e. start filing taxes, etc). I'd also increase the quotas for legal immigration, and work visas would constitute a 5-minute form, monthly digital reports for the first year to document your job situation, and if you get a stable job, this temporary visa would transform into a permanent one.Justification:
Restricting free movement is immoral and against the NAP, unless there's a legitimate reason to believe you're moving with malicious intent (i.e. you'll likely hurt someone).
Taxes
We should require a balanced budget on average (say, over 10-years, tax revenue should match spending). A big part of this is spending cuts, primarily on our ridiculous defense spending.
Justification:
Taxes should be progressive, simple, and sufficient to fund the government. Taxes are a larger aggression against the poor than the wealthy. We should lean on Pigouvian taxes before resorting to regulations.
Social Issues
Justification:
In general, if doing X doesn't impact others, X should be allowed. If doing X hurts yourself, doing X should be allowed, but controlled such that those selling it would have a duty of care (can't provide to those they believe it would hurt). This would be broad enough to apply to things like credit cards, gambling, and microtransactions in games.
For abortion, the rights of the mother and fetus need to be protected. To do that:
IP Law
Justification:
IP law in general is illegitimate, but smaller creators need some protection from larger orgs that can beat them in production and marketing. IP law has been abused by large orgs against smaller creators, so it needs to be rolled back, but I think eliminating it entirely is also irresponsible.
Foreign Policy
In general, I believe in:
So I generally agree with Democrat rhetoric about social policy, Republican rhetoric about fiscal policy, and I disagree with both about most of what they actually do.
I lean authleft because it's too easy to manipulate people into voting against their interests.
I don't like Libertarians.
I also don't like most libertarians, especially those who believe in anarcho-capitalism or strict border controls.
If you care, I documented some of my personal views here, but in general I mostly want to leave you alone. I do believe in a social safety net, so even if you completely screw up, you will always stay out of poverty.
These ones love authoritarianism far more than they like leftist economics, so yeah I suspect that's it.