I won’t tell them to be consistent, because consistent liberterians are scary.
You don’t like getting into very detailed conversations about age of consent laws and child pornography?
I’m not sure how it’s related to bikes, but I did get into conversations about age of consent on lemmy few times. And it seemed that people I talked to didn’t grasp concept of different countries having different laws.
What do laws have to do with morality?
Downvotes show that many people calling libertarians bad words are unable to grasp such a simple difference.
Hey I didn’t call libertarians any bad words, I mean obviously bad words. I called them all Republicans trying to have sex with a Democrat. That’s it. I don’t even know if it’s any more of a lie than wearing makeup is. Since you know, everyone fucking knows the deal.
I called them all Republicans trying to have sex with a Democrat.
From the point of view of an actual libertarian Republicans and Democrats are much closer to each other than both are to libertarians.
But there’s a weird kind of people in the New World thinking that libertarian is just something between the two, yes. Probably someone initially mixed up libertarian and libertine, and then it went out of control.
actual libertarian
fact: all actual liberatarians live in Scotland. With the True Scotsmen.
Probably someone initially mixed up libertarian and libertine, and then it went out of control.
No one is paying you to talk that way. Just a fyi.
Lol, next you’ll be telling me libertarianism only exists in any kind of numbers because the fossil fuel and meat lobbies want to pay less tax and abide by fewer regulations…
No, of course, they’ll still charge a levy for people using THIER stuff to make money for themselves. In fact, its their favourite part. They love that bit. They just don’t think it should apply to them.
In the same way an employee using their software/clients/computer/factory/property will be charged, a state will charge the owner for using their educated for force etc. etc. The only difference is the state-ness of one of the parties, even when companies can exist as a state.
However, they’ll act like you just asked to fuck their mum when the subject of paying taxes comes up. Then, theyll look you dead in the eye and claim its a moral issue, without a hint of shame.
States can do one too. I’m just saying, don’t fall for it. They either haven’t critically evaluated it properly or they think you’re an idiot.
Nobody forces you to buy from a private business. But from another business if you like. But there’s only one DMV in each state, it has a monopoly on licences.
Wonderful. Instead of a monopoly, I have the illusion of choice.
You have real choice. Don’t want Windows? Use Linux. Don’t want Reddit? Post on Lemmy.
Capitalism lets you use free software and contribute it to the people. Compare it to governments who are captured by corporations and just default to Windows in 90% of cases. The remaining 10% is Mac or Chromebook, which isn’t better
The biggest companies in the world used their influence to get installed in public schools and government jobs. Now most of us can’t use free software at work or for school
You’re most definitely forced to buy from private businesses, even if not generally from a specific one, because you’re born in a World were all Land has an owner (and “they ain’t making any more of it” ) and unless you’re gifted Land by your parents, you will have to pay somebody for Food since you can’t even grow your own food or build your own place to live without paying for somebody else’s Land.
Further, since Free Market Theory only works for Markets with low barriers to entry and hence high competition (so mainly for unimportant stuff like soap or teddy bears) for many if not for most things you will most definitely be constrained to buy from a single business or a handful of businesses operating as a cartel, especially in anything directly or indirectly affected by Land ownership, such as Food Retail.
Not all forms of coercion involve direct and hence obvious use of force - most of coercion in the Modern World is based on rules which indirectly limit your choices and if anybody tries to step out of those rules (which can be you trying to grow your own food in land you do not own or somebody else trying to sell you cheaper music whose copyright they do not have) THEN the use of force happens - you’re not directly forced to buy from a private business or one of a small group of private businesses, you’re indirectly forced to by rules making sure that in practice you don’t really have other viable choices.
Whilst I mostly mentioned Land because amongst the rules limiting individual and trade freedom Land Ownership is one of the oldest (all the way back to when Monarchs confiscated all the Land which before had common ownership) and with the widest impact (everything which requires something physical to be somewhere or to move, is dependent on access to Land), there are other rules such as Copyright or those rules regulating access to limited resources such as the radio spectrum (for example, mobile phone operator licenses) that similarly put access control in the hands of a few private entities and thus in practice force everybody else to go pay those private entities to get or access those things or anything that indirectly needs to have or access those things (this is how Food Retail market concentration relates to Land Ownership)
In practice there are a lot of what I call “taxes paid directly to the private sector”, caused by how the rules that limit access to scarce resources (or, even worse, resources made artificially scarce by certain rules, such as done by Copyright) place the access control or limited the access to only specific private entities, so most people’s “freedom” when it comes to those and related things is entirely “you can have if by paying these guys or you can not have it” which when it comes to life’s essentials (food, water, shelter, health) is not actually a choice.
Even before capitalism you had to pay for food. If not with money, it’s with time. That’s not a problem capitalism invented, it’s a problem it’s invented to solve.
My point is having choice in what you eat is good, the government should not be in charge in handing us a standard meal. My school cafeteria meals were very unhealthy, pizza, burger, tater tots, etc. I don’t know why they feed kids something more healthy
As I pointed out in my post, you can’t use your own work to get your own food if you don’t either own or rent Land.
So anybody not born to landed or wealthy parents (who give him the land or the means to get it) cannot directly trade their time for food, and has to trade time for doing something for somebody else (i.e. work) who does own Land and the means of production and gives him “trade tokens” (aka money) in return, which can be used to buy food.
At every one of those steps due to power imbalances and the rules themselves that person loses something for somebody else (their time and work produces way more value than the pay they get, their food is much more expensive to buy than the cost of growing it).
This person has no real freedom, only an artificiality limited set of choices.
All of this predates Capitalism (it goes way back to Feudalism) - Capitalism just entrenched it, making Money (specifically those who have lots of it) the top power instead of Kings and adjusting the Law so that it would be the tool of coercion for money as it was before for kings (see the two examples I gave in my previous post).
Capitalism was never meant to solve any problem other than how do you move power from kings to landowners and the trading bourgeoisie without the latter two’s infighting destroying the system - in Capitalism they seldom fight with violence.
If the powers of the state directly force you to give the money (I.e. taxes), the powers of the Moneyed force you go through a complex circuit to fullfill your basic needs, were at each step they take a slice of the product of your efforts, a disproportionately large one whenever they can sufficiently constrain your choices (for example, when a Market is dominated by a monopoly or cartel). Ultimatelly for you the result is the same: either way you have spent more of your time than you would otherwise have needed either to make up for paying taxes or to make up for all that was taken from the product of your work along the way and none of the two is your choice.
PS: I’m not saying the state should control food production, I’m just pointing out that you’re not Free in Capitalism and you have no choice but to lose part (often most) of the product of your work in ways other than tax and which, unlike taxes, will never be returned to you in another form (taxes get you things like schools, roads and security whilst giving a slice of the wealth you produce to a private party doesn’t return anything to you).
I happen to think that we need some Capitalism (though with lots of regulation, probably some minimum provision of human needs in the form of something like UBI and mostly subservient to the Democratic power of the vote) but let’s not hold wild delusions about it being a form of Freedom for anybody but the very wealthy or that being forced to unnecessarily lose part of your work at each step of the circuit you’re forced to run to merely get food under Capitalism is any better than paying taxes to the state.
Whoever posted that doesn’t understand libertarians.
If there were no government regulations, they would have nothing to complain about and their lives would be ruined.
Every Internet post about any political party is almost always about the wild caricatures people have in their head, because actually talking about politics IRL is a taboo because everyone is too damn scared and/or jaded to do anything but spout extreme bullshit online under an anonymous persona. All liberals are child-murduring blue-haired SJWs, all conservatives are rednecks bent on bringing back slavery and committing trans genocide, and all libertarians are secretly nazis or children who don’t get how the world works. The Internet says so.
I think you just probed my point for me.
If there were no government regulations, they would have nothing to complain about
I promise you that if you put a libertarian into a place without government regulation, they will still insist that there is a secret government regulation responsible for their lives being shit.
You seem to confuse us with leftists. No, it’s not the patriarchy/white people keeping you down. We’re the first to tell you that you are responsible for your own success
Keep on assuming we just don’t understand, despite libertarians spewing their shit all over the Internet for decades at this point.
Yet people still call us Republicans who smoke weed.
they will still insist that there is a secret government regulation responsible for their lives being shit.
We’re the first to tell you that you are responsible for your own success
The problem is being the last to admit that you are responsible for all your own fuckups.
To claim credit for your successes you need to also admit fault for your failures, it goes both ways
I’m dying right now. You must be going through life with horse-blinders on or something.
The last point is incorrect. Here in Belgium if they take your drivers’ license, you can be stopped on a bike as well. Anything except foot traffic really. Chances of getting caught are astronomically low, but it does happen.
Notable American territory Belgium.
Pretty much the only notable thing about south Belgium is the massive number of US military personnel due to the NATO presence. So yeah, you can probably make an argument about it being an unofficial American territory.
Ah yes, the only notable thing about Luxembourg is the US military. Nothing else.
Yeah and if not a bicycle then a Libertarian should at least go with an EV.
Gasoline requires requires far away refineries supplied with crude oil that comes even further away. The government needs to maintain a large military to secure foreign oil to keep the global oil prices down because that’s the rate everyone has to pay in a capitalist system. Even then oilt prices are subject to regulation by OPEC, which is an international organization that we don’t have any say in.
Meanwhile an EV can be charged by a wind turbine in your home town or even a solar panel on your roof. I suppose the lithium for the battery comes for further away, but once you own that battery you own it. You aren’t dependent of oil coming from very far away every week. Sure you’ll eventually have to replace that battery, but it’s way less frequent than having to gas up. And if it came down to it you could probably produce a battery more locally without lithium if you’re willing to sacrifice range.
The fact is a libertarian utopia simply isn’t possible with a dependence on oil. Oil is the most international business in the world and requires the most support form the government to function. But with EVs it may be possible to have everything needed for a society to function within a small region. You need big government to get a reliable supply of oil, but with EVs and renewable energy, big government isn’t as necessary.
And yeah bicycles are even better than EV in terms of libertarian ideals.
The sentiment is nice, but you can replace all the issues with oil you stated with lithium and cobalt as well. The replacement is like once every 10 or 15 years, but it costs 20k for a battery.
If we can invent new, scalable chemistries that don’t rely on a scarce mineral that lives deep down in specific parts of the earth it wouldn’t be as easily translatable. But alas…not yet.
I’m a big phev proponent, and battery production is still better than oil production when comparing pollution, but there would be a lithium cartel just like OPEC if oil didn’t exist and it had been batteries powering cars since WWII.
Note that if doing a LFP battery, then you don’t have the Cobalt issue. Also, as I could most recently find, prices on LFP are such that currently it could be about $7,000 for a pack that can get over 200 miles in a typical EV. CATL claims they’ll have it under $4500 for that capacity battery pack by the end of this year. Analysts are suggesting that 2025 might see that battery pack go under $2800 or so. If that comes to pass, then it’s a slam dunk that an EV will incur less cost over a decade than the ICE maintenance and repairs, even ignoring gas vs. electricity costs.
The price has been coming rapidly down, after the shortages have subsided. Of course, whether the supply chain and pricing of the big automakers reflect this… well we have to see. However, Ford at least proclaimed they “managed” to save $8,000 cost per unit of mach-e, and most of that is likely just the battery pack getting thousands of dollars cheaper (they also redid the rear motor and other touches, but the bulk of that number is probably just battery cost reduction).
Yeah the problem with lfp is weight and density. I’m excited to see what the big battery company’s innovations are. Í believe it once it’s happening.
Too much vaporware and false promises
