What It Feels Like To Be a Libertarian

[Paulie]

A lot of your congressional democrats seemed to be looking out for Bush's best interests, I guess. How many voted yes?

How sad that you believe our economy should be based on how much debt people can continue to get into.

 

[Truthmatters]

How sad you can not see the damage that was created by people trying "free up" the market just like you wanted.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Great point and very funny.

great point if you realize that people are all taught that the government is a good thing.

great point if you like the learned helplessness that has been bred into our psyches

great point if you want your kids to be dependent on government for everything.

Is that what you were taught? I wasn't. It doesn't even have any bearing on Red Dawn's point: Your product sucks and no one is buying it.

pretty sad when self reliance, freedom to keep more of your own money, and smaller less intrusive less expensive government sucks.

and you say you're not brainwashed.

Tell me how does one come to believe that keeping more of what you earn, paying less for government, being free to raise your kids as you see fit, all while benefiting from the free flow of commerce and ideas where you and you alone are the master of your fate is a bad thing?

Conversely, how do you come to believe that a government that demands under the threat of incarceration, that you hand over ever larger portions of your income, that takes over private companies at will, that constantly meddles in the affairs of other sovereign nations, that is consistently trying to modify your behavior by penalizing activities via taxes, that tells you what you can and can't do in your own home all under the guise of protecting you is a good thing?

 

[Skull Pilot]

How sad you can not see the damage that was created by people trying "free up" the market just like you wanted.

we have never had anything even close to a free market in the last 2 centuries and don't delude yourself into thinking we have.

 

[Truthmatters]

Brain washed?


Who is the one touting a philosophy which has never worked anywhere in history?

 

[Skull Pilot]

Brain washed?


Who is the one touting a philosophy which has never worked anywhere in history?

it's pretty much the philosophy that built this nation.

you know a government with limited power, where the government existed at the will of the people not vice versa

when the Constitution was actually followed

 

[Truthmatters]

I seem to recall that the founders designed a system in which they hoped additions could make the country live into the future.

Making laws to regulate the market is part of that design.

Why do you think they allowed for that in their design?

Because they new we would have to have control over our country to keep it healthy in the future.

If a free market unfettered would work so well WHY did it never develop that way anywhere on the earth in history?


You are chasing a phantom that doesnt exsit.

 

[sealybobo]

How sad you can not see the damage that was created by people trying "free up" the market just like you wanted.

we have never had anything even close to a free market in the last 2 centuries and don't delude yourself into thinking we have.

Then how do you know it will work?

 

[Skull Pilot]

I seem to recall that the founders designed a system in which they hoped additions could make the country live into the future.

Making laws to regulate the market is part of that design.

Why do you think they allowed for that in their design?

Because they new we would have to have control over our country to keep it healthy in the future.

If a free market unfettered would work so well WHY did it never develop that way anywhere on the earth in history?


You are chasing a phantom that doesnt exsit.

just like a government for, by and of the people didn't exist and then existed only for a short time and we are now back to a government that exists to control the lives of the people. A government that takes more of our freedoms while at the same time tells us we are more free than ever.

What a crock of shit.

 

[Skull Pilot]

How sad you can not see the damage that was created by people trying "free up" the market just like you wanted.

we have never had anything even close to a free market in the last 2 centuries and don't delude yourself into thinking we have.

Then how do you know it will work?

how do you know it won't if it's never been tried?

 

[Skull Pilot]

I seem to recall that the founders designed a system in which they hoped additions could make the country live into the future.

Making laws to regulate the market is part of that design.

Why do you think they allowed for that in their design?

Because they new we would have to have control over our country to keep it healthy in the future.

If a free market unfettered would work so well WHY did it never develop that way anywhere on the earth in history?


You are chasing a phantom that doesnt exsit.

the reason free markets didn't develop is because governments did not allow them to develop. it's simple really.

 

[Truthmatters]

Theres teh deal friend.

It has been tried and done.

It works pretty good in a small frame.

Farmers who trade food supplies on their own. The village setting where they are just helping each other survive. Then someone gets an idea of how they can corner the market in the village an effectively have the people all helping him get fucking wealthy off their efforts. They play the people and pit them against each other or some foriegn threat. They then end up with the majority of the wealth and a subserviate masses. History is replete with the examples of this. How do you think the monarchies started?

 

[sealybobo]

I seem to recall that the founders designed a system in which they hoped additions could make the country live into the future.

Making laws to regulate the market is part of that design.

Why do you think they allowed for that in their design?

Because they new we would have to have control over our country to keep it healthy in the future.

If a free market unfettered would work so well WHY did it never develop that way anywhere on the earth in history?


You are chasing a phantom that doesnt exsit.

Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't had the time to study both economics and history:

1. There is no such thing as a "free market."

2. The "middle class" is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering).

The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System in the Twelfth Century. It's widely believed by those in power, those who challenge it are branded heretics and ridiculed, and it is wrong.

In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." Markets are the creation of government.

Governments provide a stable currency to make markets possible. They provide a legal infrastructure and court systems to enforce the contracts that make markets possible. They provide educated workforces through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, or airways provided by government. Businesses that use the "free market" are protected by police and fire departments provided by government, and send their communications - from phone to fax to internet - over lines that follow public rights-of-way maintained and protected by government.

And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by government. Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work.

The conservative mantra is "let the market decide." But there is no market independent of government, so what they're really saying is, "Stop corporations from defending workers and building a middle class, and let the corporations decide how much to pay for labor and how to trade." This is, at best, destructive to national and international economies, and, at worst, destructive to democracy itself.

Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business.

If you want to play the game of business, we've said in the US since 1784 (when Tench Coxe got the first tariffs passed "to protect domestic industries") then you have to play in a way that both makes you money AND serves the public interest.

Which requires us to puncture the second balloon of popular belief. The "middle class" is not the natural result of freeing business to do whatever it wants, of "free and open markets," or of "free trade." The "middle class" is not a normal result of "free markets." Those policies will produce a small but powerful wealthy class, a small "middle" mercantilist class, and a huge and terrified worker class which have traditionally been called "serfs."

The middle class is a new invention of liberal democracies, the direct result of governments defining the rules of the game of business. It is, quite simply, an artifact of government regulation of markets and tax laws.

When government sets the rules of the game of business in such a way that working people must receive a living wage, labor has the power to organize into unions just as capital can organize into corporations, and domestic industries are protected from overseas competition, a middle class will emerge. When government gives up these functions, the middle class vanishes and we return to the Dickens-era "normal" form of totally free market conservative economics where the rich get richer while the working poor are kept in a constant state of fear and anxiety so the cost of their labor will always be cheap.

When conservatives rail in the media of the dangers of "returning to Smoot Hawley, which created the Great Depression," all they do is reveal their ignorance of economics and history. The Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation, which increased taxes on some imported goods by a third to two-thirds to protect American industries, was signed into law on June 17, 1930, well into the Great Depression. In the following two years, international trade dropped from 6 percent of GNP to roughly 2 percent of GNP (between 1930 and 1932), but most of that was the result of the depression going worldwide, not Smoot-Hawley. The main result of Smoot-Hawley was that American businesses now had strong financial incentives to do business with other American companies, rather than bring in products made with cheaper foreign labor: Americans started trading with other Americans.

Smoot-Hawley "protectionist" legislation did not cause the Great Depression, and while it may have had a slight short-term negative effect on the economy ("1.4 percent at most" according to many historians) its long-term effect was to bring American jobs back to America.

The fact that the "marketplace" was an artifact of government activity was well known to our Founders. As Thomas Jefferson said in an 1803 letter to David Williams, "The greatest evils of populous society have ever appeared to me to spring from the vicious distribution of its members among the occupations... But when, by a blind concourse, particular occupations are ruinously overcharged and others left in want of hands, the national authorities can do much towards restoring the equilibrium."

And the "national authorities," in Jefferson's mind, should be the Congress, as he wrote in a series of answers to the French politician de Meusnier in 1786: "The commerce of the States cannot be regulated to the best advantage but by a single body, and no body so proper as Congress."

Of course, there were conservatives (like Hamilton and Adams) in Jefferson's time, too, who took exception, thinking that the trickle-down theory that had dominated feudal Europe for ten centuries was a stable and healthy form of governance. Jefferson took exception, in an 1809 letter to members of his Democratic Republican Party (now called the Democratic Party): "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."

But, conservatives say, government is the problem, not the solution.

Of course, they can't explain how it was that the repeated series of huge tax cuts for the wealthy by the Herbert Hoover administration brought us the Great Depression, while raising taxes to provide for an active and interventionist government to protect the rights of labor to organize throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s led us to the Golden Age of the American Middle Class. (The top tax rate in 1930 under Hoover was 25 percent, and even that was only paid by about a fifth of wealthy Americans. Thirty years later, the top tax rate was 91 percent, and held at 70 percent until Reagan began dismantling the middle class. As the top rate dropped, so did the middle class it helped create.)

Thomas Jefferson pointed out, in an 1816 letter to William H. Crawford, "Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association." He also pointed out in that letter that some people - and businesses - would prefer that government not play referee to the game of business, not fix rules that protect labor or provide for the protection of the commons and the public good.

We must, Jefferson wrote to Crawford, "...say to all [such] individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens [like corporations], on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease."

Most of the Founders advocated - and all ultimately passed - tariffs to protect domestic industries and workers. Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln actively stood up for the right for labor to organize, intervening in several strikes to stop corporations and local governments from using hired goon squads to beat and murder strikers.

But conservative economics - the return of ancient feudalism - rose up after Lincoln's death and reigned through the Gilded Age, creating both great wealth and a huge population of what today we call the "working poor." American reaction to these disparities gave birth to the Populist, Progressive, and modern Labor movements. Two generations later, Franklin Roosevelt brought us out of Herbert Hoover's conservative-economics-produced Great Depression and bequeathed us with more than a half-century of prosperity.

But the last 8 years the conservatives were back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression).

Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We The People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class.

If the remnants of that modern middle class are to survive - and grow - we must learn the lessons of the past and return to the policies that in the 1780s and the late 1930s brought this nation back from the brink of economic disaster.

 

[elvis]

You're all pissed off and Pauli is crying. I'd call that sensitive.

You haven't seen me pissed off.

being completely and utterly disgusted by how pathetic people have become is not anger it is sadness.

How far we have fallen to be so afraid of our own futures that we need the government to save us from ourselves.

We don't need the government to save us from ourselves. We only need them to save us from hostile forces. Like greedy twisted idiots on wall street and aggressive foreign powers.

The government just "saved" us with these bailouts.

 

[sealybobo]

I seem to recall that the founders designed a system in which they hoped additions could make the country live into the future.

Making laws to regulate the market is part of that design.

Why do you think they allowed for that in their design?

Because they new we would have to have control over our country to keep it healthy in the future.

If a free market unfettered would work so well WHY did it never develop that way anywhere on the earth in history?


You are chasing a phantom that doesnt exsit.

just like a government for, by and of the people didn't exist and then existed only for a short time and we are now back to a government that exists to control the lives of the people. A government that takes more of our freedoms while at the same time tells us we are more free than ever.

What a crock of shit.

Now? Now we are back to a government that exists to help the corporations and investor class at the expense of the middle class.

If the Government doesn't preserve the middle class, it will disappear.

You have it all wrong my brother. You think "big government" is the problem. You really need to wake up and realize this is class warfare. Its us against them.

Unless you claim to be rich? If not, then you don't know what you are asking for. Be careful. You just might get it.

PS. How do we know it won't work since it has never been tried? We see what Corporations will do if given free reign. Clearly they are not to be trusted. And besides, read the article I posted. The government sets the rules of business.

It's like you want to play basketball and not have any referee's involved. You claim you don't want them because it will make for a better game. But we all know you don't want ref's there because you want to cheat.

 

[Truthmatters]

The government is the US.

We exsist because the founders designed a great GOVERNMENT!

Quit saying the founders have cursed us or leave the country.

Government is why America is great.

 

[elvis]

get tired of people saying love it or leave it. the country was founded on distrust of the government. Jefferson said trusting the government creates the road to tyranny. the government is far different than it was in 1789.

 

[Truthmatters]

I dont mind you critizing it at all, its what makes it healthy.

The founders would call you an asswink to your face for saying all government is evil.

They constructed a wonderful system that has managed to save the American people time and time again.

Government is not evil, an unwatched government will become evil.

The same is true of the Free Market.

 

[Skull Pilot]

The government is the US.

We exsist because the founders designed a great GOVERNMENT!

Quit saying the founders have cursed us or leave the country.

Government is why America is great.

Don't put words in my mouth asshole.

We have deviated from the government the founders wanted by leaps and bounds and each one of those leaps and bounds have ground some of our freedoms into the dirt.

And when government rides roughshod over the people, it is NOT great.

i seem to remember when the people were the united States and the government was a necessary but untrusted tool of the people. Seems to me it's just the opposite now and you seem to concur.

 

[Truthmatters]

Dude that wasnt for you it was for the guy saying gov is evil.

BTW the founders didnt expect us to not tailor the country to our needs, they wrote it in the system so we could evolve with the unforseen things to come.

You may not like everything that was done but you are wrong about Unfettered markets so what the hell.