CDZ A middle way between libertarianism and statism

[WheelieAddict]

Votto wants to disband our military and the VA because of his stupid ideology. Make note anyone reading this, never let anyone as stupid as Votto come close to our presidency. Trump is bad enough.

 

[grbb]

I think nothing should not be for profit. Humans are naturally profit seeking. When something is not for profit then something will go really wrong.

I think judges and jury should be paid extra if their decision is not "controversial" in latter years. But that would be too complicated.

As for health care, I am not sure how much it should be regulated. I think private sector can regulate itself.

Many doctors for example, prescribe more expensive drugs so they get commissions from drug factory. Again, doctors can "swear" they don't do so to private certification party that will try to enforce it.

In general things that's too hard to enforce is better left to profit seeking individuals.

 

[grbb]

And no. So many people say that profit motives should be eliminated from healthcare, politics, court, bla bla bla bla....

on "moral ground"

Again. May work. May not.

Humans are always selfish. It's our nature. What happens when you eliminate selfish motives is that people are still secretly selfish.

I'm a bit confused by your reply, I'm going to guess you disagree with me that health care should not be for profit.

Not that I disagree with you. However, I do not think your idea will work. I do not think anyone should be told not to maximize their profit. They will anyway. A system that only works if humans are not selfish are stupid system.

 

[Picaro]

At the end of the day it's about culture and what is acceptable to that culture. As Henry George said, morality is the key to any successful public policy, none work without a strong moral base to work from. His ideas were considered 'radical' in the 1890's, and we're a far less moral country now than then. F.A. Hayek also points out the importance of morality in his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. And neither does any form of capitalism work without a strong moral base either; there is no self-correcting component in either 'ism'.

Currently the U.S. is around #18 on the Corruption Index, when we should be in the Top 5. Singapore is at #7, after a 6 decade anti-corruption 'jihad'. So what, one might ask? Some 60 years ago, Mexico and Singapore were roughly the same position re corruption and GDP; they are far ahead of Mexico now, in nearly all areas, and much wealthier, Mexico is a failed narco state and declining even more.

You want the U.S. to boom beyond your wildest dreams, start a major anti-corruption campaign and lean on it for 20 or so years; there is far bigger money in that than there is just letting oligarchs and ideological loons loot the place and move off when it gets hot for them.

 

[grbb]

And due to tons of moral relativism, I am not even going to argue that capitalism is "right"

It's simply not compatible with socialism. Socialists and capitalist minded people should live in different states. The capitalists won't enjoy welfare and the socialists won't have businessmen paying tax for their welfare. Seems more fair to me.

You know, socialism may be right too. In china we tried that once and got mass starvation. As long as states that try that that suffer, who are we to argue it's right or wrong? Let the states decide and let the states suffer or prosper based on that.

 

[Slyhunter]

Libertarian says that individuals should decide what's good or bad for him.
Statists would say that society, government, and people as a whole should decide what's legal or illegal.

Libertarian says that individuals deserve merit and demerit for his productivity.
Statists say that society should decide that.

You know, I am thinking of middle way.

Rather than saying something right should be fully for individuals or fully decided by government, why not somewhere in the middle. Those right, are decided, by local governments.

A very successful sample of these is US government. It has states and federal government. You don't like rules in one state you go to another state.

Some "regional state", be it province, states, countries, or whatever, can choose meritocracy, free market, bla bla bla. Call that state A.

Some other can choose socialism, command economy, bla bla bla.... Call that state B.

Who knows which one is right? I am a libertarian. I will think A is the way to go. But I may be wrong. After all, who am I, a mere one person, decides what's right for every body. Of course, the decision where my state will go should be decided by reasonable political process, such as voting, among populations/citizens.

Then what?

Say I am right. State A will prosper. State B will be less prosperous. Look at North Korea and South Korea for example. Then people in state B will want to move to people in state A. Many mexican want to move to US. Many north korean wants to move south.

Then?

Think about it. You are a citizen in state A. You vote for free market all the way. That means mexican will come and compete with you. So you got lower salary. You did the right thing. You vote for free market libertarian party. But you are worse off. Is it fair? Well, fair or not, it doesn't work that way. You won't vote for libertarian party. You will vote for Trump.

A libertarian will say you're an asshole. I would say you're reasonable. After all, why aren't Mexico as rich as you? That's because they're even less market friendly than yours.

There should be some rewards for citizens in society, that as a whole, collectively, choose the right thing. What's the reward is up to the local society to collectively decide. Currently it comes in the form of welfare, infrastructure, free protection, free cops, and job protection. I'd propose that some of that can be replaced with straight forward cash dividend for each citizen.

A person can come from state B to state A and enjoy higher salary. Economy of A will improve. And all citizens in A will get more cash dividend. That gives incentive for more citizens of A to allow more cheap workers/robotic workers, etc.

The same way, a citizen in state A can enjoy retirement in state B and sell his citizenship to a citizen in state B that wants to move.

It's like corporation. You choose who you partner up with. You reap dividend based on your collective success. If you want to own another corporation and relinquish ownership of your current corporation you just have to pay some price different.

In fact, the incentive doesn't have to be that big. Workers in US hate mexicans. However, I am pretty sure South Korean won't mind accepting many of their brothers from North Korea. Nor will west germany mind having influx of east germany.

So some racial/ethnic similarity may actually improves your individual happiness. And your state may provide it. Something that pure libertarian-ism will never accommodate. I don't know what to say about this. I do not like state sponsored racism.

But I think people like me should go to pure meritocratic countries like Singapore. Or tolerate whatever strange behavior my state have. We do know that many people like to hang out with those similar to them.

So we have it both way. There is no pure libertarian country. Currently individuals cannot choose a pure libertarian country. Fine. The world is not perfect. But under this arrangement, if you like drugs, you can go to a state that legalize it. If you hate drugs, you can go to a state that criminalize it.

Who knows whether legalizing drug is a good idea or not. However, the more well governed state will be more prosperous and attractive to more people. The valuation of their citizenship will go up. Other states will either mimic the better rules or move to that state and have to follow whatever terms the more successful state demand.

It's already happening. Most asian countries are westernized. And that's awesome for both asians and whites. Asians enjoy greater prosperity. White guys have somewhere to go and invest and build factory too in case their government start being asshole.

If US government raise minimum wage, then jobs can simply move to China. This is as libertarian as it goes. Yes, true libertarianism means there is no minimum wage. However, the fact that jobs can move to China means that incentive to raise minimum wage at US will be smaller either.

Donald Trump can tax import. However, that means US will actually make less money as China will trade with more and more nation. Isolationism isn't a good idea as we all know.

Live in a country where each State makes it's own rules. That is what the Libertarians want. Allegedly our power comes from being The United States and joining our bargaining power behind one single negotiator for trade, military, etc. But the person in charge of such negotiations apparently doesn't know that. And that is the problem. That is why we need Donald Trump.

 

[Picaro]

Libertarians are always interesting.

What's 'interesting' about them? Some tiny minority of them might be genuinely serious, but most who spout it just like to hide under the pseudo-intellectual veneer they think it provides. It's a fantasy ideology little different than Marxism as a real life practice.

Marxism of the Right

...

This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.

Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

...

... and more at the link. It's just another variation of ...


"NAMBLA" logic - an extreme absolutist position which demands that for logical consistencies sake that certain gross crimes be allowed, in order that no one might feel restrained.-Stirling S. Newberry

 

[grbb]

Libertarians are always interesting.

Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

...

... and more at the link. It's just another variation of ...


"NAMBLA" logic - an extreme absolutist position which demands that for logical consistencies sake that certain gross crimes be allowed, in order that no one might feel restrained.-Stirling S. Newberry

This are good points. Very good points. Some issue are inherently collective, at least for now. Let the state decide, and move to states you like.

You don't like porn, don't just watch it. Go to a state where porn is illegal.

You don't like drug? Don't just don't use it. Go to a state where drugs are illegal.

Don't like Sharia? Or like Sharia? Don't just embrace or hate it. go to state where you prefer.

The more people that do not like rules I like go, the less people that vote for rules that I don't like.

I too will find places that I like. This is more win win I guess.

I too question individualism. What's the point of being rich if I don't have offspring to inherit too? In US, individualism is so paramount you think welfare parasites deserve hands up because it's not his daddy's fault. I like a country that held child at least partially responsible for their dad's lack of productivity.

 

[grbb]

I am more of a minarchist and meritocratist rather than libertarian. If people do not like polution just tax it. Most "crime" punished by long jail term should just be taxed and fined.

Prostitution, drug. Not exactly libertarian. But it's going to the right direction.