As I posted last time this came up, the problem to him is that the Tea Party they backed went out of their control. They wanted a nice biddable anti-government party. They got chaos.
They've not come to Jesus on global warming, they're upset they lost.
The web of deceit surrounding the Republican Party at this point is undeniable unless you have chosen to abandon reality entirely at the point it chafes your opinion.
Isn't it interesting that Trump had control of the reins of power for four years but was never able to actually prosecute Hillary for anything? This should be your clue that there wasn't any "there" there.
I think you're going to be surprised and dismayed at what happens now that the shoe is on the other foot.
What exactly is the big nefarious power in the background whipping the liberal mob into a frenzy?
I get that you want to come off as an enlightened centrist here but you’re gonna have to be specific. What’s the liberal Koch brothers and what’s the liberal Tea Party?
The funny thing is that "whipping the liberal mob into a frenzy" is a literal thing that happened this year that resulted in riots, looting, civil unrest and a full on "autonomous zone" in Seattle.
To my knowledge, the only real harm the Tea Party accomplished was rolling back environmental/emissions regulations.
So you don't think those riots, looting, civl unrest etc had anything to do with the militarization of police and the lack of accountability of law enforcement and public officials in general? Not a response to the George Floyd incident or the countless other incidents that are shockingly similar? Just a random media driven mob out there protesting things that don't actually reflect reality?
Because that is what a "whipped up mob" is. Not angry citizens demanding responsible and accountable law enforcement and action toward that end from their elected officials and unelected police forces.
The problem is that the Libertarianism/free-market policies simply don't work. They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life.
At some point, continuing to advocate those policies in the face of their outcomes becomes negligence at best.
I agree about the negligence, but additionally it's dishonest to talk about libertarian free market policies (for or against) without acknowledging the central bank and its current mission of grossly inflating the currency supply to force most everybody to work continuously. If the middle and lower classes could benefit from increasing productivity with reduced consumer prices, and were allowed to build wealth by saving currency instead of having it eroded away and existing hand to mouth, then they'd have a fighting chance to wield some market power. As it is, they're stuck on the rent treadmill that extracts wealth upwards.
Can you say a little more or link some resources giving a solid link between central banking, inflation, and forcing people to work continuously?
It's an interesting premise and I, like others, dislike the notion that I'll have to work on a treadmill for most of my life. But I don't see the 1-3% inflation rate as more than a sort of incentive to invest in equities (which I also resent), rather than a means of keeping the lower classes away from the fruits of increased productivity.
It's wrong, of course; deflation is not a paradise and even countries which have been pushed into negative interest rates (Switzerland) you still have to work.
Figuring out how the inflation rate is even calculated involves reading through a ~100 page manual. And while the formula are pretty simple, the consequences are actually pretty confusing (eg, if the basket is re-weighted to what people are buying, how feasible is it for inflation to increase faster than wages even if price levels on most goods increase faster than inflation? Are those items naturally removed from the index?). On the other hand, the M2 monetary aggregate is actually simple - and can be used to find a rough estimate of what % of "the money" an asset entitles somebody to.
If you bought a block of gold in, say, 1990, and use the BLS inflation rate it claims you've made substantial real returns over the last 30 years which seems extremely fishy for owning a pet rock. If you calculate what % of the M2 money supply it entitles you to on the other hand its value is about the same. Slightly less, if my figures are right. Seems much more reasonable, the economy should be gaining value faster than a block of metal.
Basically the sort of people who say complain about central banks and inflation are usually the sort of people who can't understand why everyone is so excited about the inflation rate. The issue is availability of assets which are what is needed to retire or live with a sense of financial security (it is 2020, productivity is off the charts - by the numbers people shouldn't need to work full time to live comfortably). M2 deflator instead of inflation also explains circumstantial stuff like why there was a large unhappy population who voted in Trump, or why the population seems to be a bit tense about money despite apparent real growth.
The biggest contributor to income inequality and biggest burden on the masses, is the rise in rental rates, produced by rising land use restrictions, particularly in high productivity coastal metropolitan zones (New York, San Francisco and San Jose):
> They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life.
But that's not a goal of Libertarianism. If anything, it if that problem were addressed, it would be an indication of Libertarianism's failure to meet its Social Darwinist objectives.
The statistical evidence shows that the US has become dramatically more social democratic since the 1960s, so any problems that have emerged can be attributed to social democracy, not libertarianism.
See the effect of public sector unions and collective bargaining on public education:
Annual spending growth (inflation adjusted) on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):
>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
>Healthcare: 5.7%
>Welfare: 4.1%
Annual economic growth over the time frame:
>2.7%
I have to reiterate that this is annual growth. Many people have turned around and said "4% over 40 years is nothing", missing the fact that it's not 4% over 40 years. It's 4.8% every year, over a span of 40 years.
This represents a massive shift to social democracy.
And the shift has been associated with plummeting labour productivity growth, plummeting wage growth, a slowdown in life expectancy gains, and an explosion in single parenthood:
More generally, there's a negative correlation between government spending levels as a percentage of GDP, and economic growth rates. Your implication, that society is better off with high levels of taxation, is not supported by the science on the matter.
The evidence strongly suggests economic development is most rapidly achieved through adoption of pro-market policies.
The last 30 years has seen the largest most rapid reduction in the global poverty rate in human history, and almost all the decline in poverty was due to economic development, which economists have concluded was massively facilitated by the spread of market institutions like property rights:
There is no reason to assume that this relationship between pro-market policies and high rates of economic growth stops existing for advanced economies.
We see indications of it manifesting across the developed world, like the superior performance of Hong Kong and Singapore relative to other developed economies, or Iceland relative to other Nordic countries, or in cross-European studies correlating low tax rates with high economic growth rates.
Economic growth is the primary source of all improvements in quality of life, so we should have policies that maximize it. It is how an advanced economy comes to be that way.
Distributing property to individuals is what gets that growth though, rather than property rights. Property rights are meaningless when only a couple people own most property.
Growth has stagnated because we've stopped taking land away from its owners to give it to new upstarts, and strong unions which redistributed power and thus wealth back to labour have been neutered by the rich.
A simple counter example: despite having very low taxes, Ireland is not an economic powerhouse; just a hideaway for money. Same thing with Delaware
No, if mandated redistribution was what got growth, countries with more redistribution would have more rapid growth. The opposite is the case.
It is the profit-motivated investment that emerges when people are secure in their right to their private property that expands capital, and with it per capita productivity.
Increases in per capita productivity result in decreases in consumer prices, which translates to broad-based real wage increases as purchasing power increases. Through its effect on consumer prices, productivity growth distributes wealth more effectively than any other mechanism.
>>A simple counter example: despite having very low taxes, Ireland is not an economic powerhouse; just a hideaway for money.
Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe 40 years and has massively closed the gap with its peers since then.
Apples and oranges here, the US is not a developing nation. The single largest contributor to the decrease in global poverty you cite is a communist country.
A communist nation that realized that the communist way of state ownership and central planning doesn't work and implemented private ownership and a market-based, capitalistic approach to their economy.
Cuba would be an example otherwise? Despite having the nearby superpower trying their hardest to destroy Cuba, their communist system continues to work fine
Cuba is an abysmal failure. People have their occupations set by the government, depend on meager monthly state rations, and have almost no disposal income for consumer purchases.
That's why people flee Cuba for the US and not the other way around.
Cuba was in much better shape than Haiti on the eve of the Cuban revolution. It is only due to its natural advantages and its starting position in 1959 that it is still doing somewhat well relative to very low-income countries like Haiti, despite the damage done by communism and US sanctions.
>Although corruption was rife under Batista, Cuba did flourish economically during his regime. Wages rose significantly;[119] according to the International Labour Organization, the average industrial salary in Cuba was the world's eighth-highest in 1958, and the average agricultural wage was higher than in developed nations such as Denmark, West Germany, Belgium, and France.[119][120] Although a third of the population still lived in poverty, Cuba was one of the five most developed countries in Latin America by the end of the Batista era,[121] with 56% of the population living in cities.[122]
>In the 1950s, Cuba's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was roughly equal to that of contemporary Italy, and significantly higher than that of countries such as Japan, although Cuba's GDP per capita was still only a sixth as large as that of the United States.[119][123] According to the United Nations at the time, "one feature of the Cuban social structure [was] a large middle class".[123] Labour rights were also favourable – an eight-hour day had been established in 1933, long before most other countries, and Cuban workers were entitled to a months's paid holiday, nine days' sick leave with pay, and six weeks' holiday before and after childbirth.[124]
>Cuba also had Latin America's highest per capita consumption rates of meat, vegetables, cereals, automobiles, telephones and radios during this period.[120][124][125]:186 Cuba had the fifth-highest number of televisions per capita in the world, and the world's eighth-highest number of radio stations (160). According to the United Nations, 58 different daily newspapers operated in Cuba during the late 1950s, more than any Latin American country save Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.[126] Havana was the world's fourth-most-expensive city at the time,[111] and had more cinemas than New York.[121] Cuba furthermore had the highest level of telephone penetration in Latin America, although many telephone users were still unconnected to switchboards.[122]
>Moreover, Cuba's health service was remarkably developed. By the late 1950s, it had one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita – more than in the United Kingdom at that time – and the third-lowest adult mortality rate in the world. According to the World Health Organization, the island had the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America, and the 13th-lowest in the world – better than in contemporary France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.[120][127][128] Additionally, Cuba's education spending in the 1950s was the highest in Latin America, relative to GDP.[120] Cuba had the fourth-highest literacy rate in the region, at almost 80% according to the United Nations – higher than that of Spain at the time.[126][127][128]
The association between quality-of-life metrics, like wages, and per capita GDP, doesn't disappear when an economy becomes developed.
And China is a highly market-based country, which saw a massive decline in poverty after its pro-market reforms that ended many state subsidies and recognized private property rights, as the Atlantic article I provided above explains.
What is your means for gauging what "works"? To where do you point as your evidence? I ask, mainly because the notion that "libertarian" policies (of both left and right varieties) have been tried in the modern era is a pretty big stretch, to me.
Not even the shallowest stuff people typically refer to, like marijuana decriminalization/legalization laws, qualify as "libertarian" policies. All the states that have legal weed also tax & regulate it heavily with specialized state controls, so we can't call it 'libertarian' in the least.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what libertarianism is - not to worry, though, because that's pretty common and says nothing about you otherwise. Libertarianism is a radical political position to take; it does not fit neatly into today's political infrastructure. By suggesting it fails to address X, Y, or Z, you are simply projecting your own values onto a system which does not share them with you.
> They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security
Libertarians have absolutely no interest in solving this problem. They are not trying to run peoples' lives, they are trying to relieve the people of the power that currently is wielded against them by the state and its cronies. The intent is to liberate people, so that they may be uninhibited in their pursuit of voluntary, peaceful interactions with others. What one chooses to do with this liberation is entirely up to them, and that's what being human is all about.
You are of course free to disagree all you want with these perspectives, but attacking libertarianism in the way you do isn't exactly fair.
No, lies and bullshit would require self reflection. Both of those things have always been things the well fed and well off let their children play pretend with while making sure they never have to figure out how to feed themselves.
I am 44. My entire life, speaking as someone who grew up conservative, libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs. And then about what degree of freedom one should have when arrested with either.
Ask a poor person or a minority what it is like to be arrested with either. Stop role playing nonsense and join the real world.
libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs
I'm not sure what libertarianism you've been looking at. Certainly stopping the war on drugs is one plank of the libertarian platform, but it's only one small piece.
Other issues include stopping America's eternal military actions, reining in public debt, stopping abuse of police power (some overlap with BLM here!), ensuring that civil liberties such as speech, voting, self-defense, and sanctity of private property are protected, and so forth. There's a LOT there (and so assuredly there's space for everybody to find disagreement). It's just wrong to claim that it's all about weed and drugs.
I'm not so sure how helpful this all is, to be honest. While I am sure almost all libertarian-leaning folks would agree with your policy positions, libertarianism is really a system of political thought - not a political party, nor a collection of specific policies.
Libertarians are really united more by their shared political axioms [0], rather than their specific policy views.
How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence?
New rule: if you don't condemn child rape every Monday morning then until you do it is assumed that you are in favour.
Tiny furors like the "who's wearing an American flag lapel pin" are is too often motivated by political opportunity rather than any real question of where the parties stand on topics. And yes, Democrats do it to Republicans as well, just generally not as frequently. Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.
>How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence?
Do you really think AOC et al are against it? I've seen so much left-wing justification of punching Nazis etc. that I'd be very surprised if there weren't at least a few Democratic politicians in agreement.
Ilhan Omar calls for complete dismantling of the Minneapolis police department around 1:30 in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj3vdaC4F7c Yes, that's complete dismantling, none of this "redirect a bit of the funds" stuff which got retconned (watch the entire video for more examples). So I wouldn't put anything past her.
The Charles Koch was accused of "whipping up a mob" earlier in this thread, but whatever mob he "whipped up" was a very mild-mannered one which didn't light any fires. It seemed worthwhile to highlight the disparity.
I don't think this is a "tiny" furor. (As you illustrate, even if Democrats don't endorse violence, they are very willing to downplay it!) I recommend this video: https://twitter.com/mrctv/status/1297707698788728832
> Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.
You need to update your views for today's political scene. These conditions were true up til around 2008. Since then, the Democrats are now the party that engages in the performative doxologies.
Need I remind you of all that tone-deaf BLM kneeling crap in DC? Or how about the mask mandates? The face masks are the Democrats' "American flag lapel pin."
Liberals and conservatives will rarely condemn the violence of their pet terrorists. As far as violence is concerned, that's the problem with conservatives and liberals. They generally lend tacit support to violence against people they dislike. All with a wink, wink and a nudge, nudge.
That's why we end up with dead police who walk into ambushes, dead black guys who make the mistake of relaxing in their own apartments when lady cops burst in guns blazing, burned stores, dead little old ladies who go to bible studies while black, and dead walmart shoppers who made the mistake of being minority while looking for a San Antonio Spurs dart board at the wrong time.
Extremists are just dangerous people. We should really be bringing the hammer against all these groups wherever we find them, but again, they are protected by their patrons. So they walk the streets tatted and masked up waving around AR's because they know their benefactors will not allow our counter-terrorism units to do what military sense would demand in a sensible world.
There are enough career civil servants out there that believe in the fundamentals of their roles that they keep the machinery of civilization turning along. I don't disagree with the parent's remarks at all - failure to condemn violent acts really is a both sides problem right now.
Chaos leads to distracted government, which we've had 4 years of. Now we'll have at least 2 years of divided government. Government occupied elsewhere is always good for Koch's business. Chaos will do.
They've not come to Jesus on global warming, they're upset they lost.