Ironic that Libertarians are banning things in their own subreddit.
Not at all, there’s no such thing as a right wing libertarian. Just liberals who think their girlfriends shouldn’t need carseats.
That doesn’t cover the Republicans that want to be able to do drugs
Great read!
Ding ding ding! We have a winner. If Joseph Dejacqe were still alive. So called right wing libertarians would be the ones he was railing against.
Blame Grover Norquist for the absolute garbage right wing libertarian agenda now.
Nah, Grover is a nobody and not all that closely tied to the Liberals masquerading as libertarians. He was plenty up Republican asses as well. Milton Friedman and Murray rothbard share most of the blame. Along with the Koch brothers.
At least Rothbard realized as he was dying that the other conservatives were playing him for a chump.
And that’s always a good thing. I just wish they’d realize that before their mortality was before them and they had no chance to make amends. Lifetimes of damage are hard to un do.
My ideals are left lib, and I hope that social structure becomes feasible beyond small populations in the future. That said, leftism is centralized economics. And if you centralize that, you wind up with authoritarianism.
I hope trustless and decentralized protocols make up for the inefficiencies in the long run, we’re just starting to see technology catch up to make up for the inefficiencies of decentralized economics
That said, leftism is centralized economics.
<john cena> Are you sure about that? </john cena>
You should tell that to the Democratic Socialists, or the Social Democrats, or Marxists, or actual Libertarians, or anarchists, or communists. Literally I think the only group on the left. That is significantly centrally organized are Marxist Leninist. Every group on the right however depends on a central authority to make their economy fesable.
Either this is projection, or you don’t know what left is. Which if you are a fellow American is absolutely understandable. They did a lot to dumb us down and make us afraid to look to any groups that weren’t capitalist or fascist. To help us meet our needs. That red scare shit is still prevalent to this day. Though the Marxist Leninist did hand them the talking point on a platter post world war II. The rest of the left just got smeared with it unduly.
I said it’s feasible for smaller populations - but to be comparable to the size and strength of a world power AND have that sort of left wing economics how many examples can you provide that don’t end up needing authoritarianism?
By the way, I have nothing against the left or authoritarianism. Some geographic regions lead to power dynamics where authoritarianism is just a more sensible form of management since constraints on necessary resources make it easy for militant groups to seize control.
Everything is feasible in smaller populations. That’s why government should generally be smaller and more granular. It is also why businesses should be smaller still.
Just because insecure bullies make something impractical doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Nor does it mean that they are right.
Yes, (most) everything is feasible in smaller populations (not nuclear maintenance for example). But without technology, they’ve been isolated, uncoordinated, and easily bullied by those larger organized authoritarian bodies. There are billions of people, and narcissists make up about 1 in 5 of those billions of people. A smaller subset lack basic empathy, and an even smaller subset are intellectually competent. Multiply whatever that probability is by billions of people, and you have a guaranteed concern for every single government on the planet.
I agree with wanting smaller businesses as well. Capitalism isn’t bad (communism is state capitalism after all), but corporatism is the emerging problem from right libertarianism that most people conflate as problems with capitalism
My point being isn’t that I don’t like leftism, they are my ideals. I just don’t believe we live in an ideal world, so practically I follow a different set of beliefs. Thay said, I do think leftism is compatible with libertarianism in a way that it can compete in the global arena. And that starts off with solving how a decentralized governmental body “identifies” one and only one person to their “identity” (otherwise you get Sybil attacks)
Regardless of how you do decentralized economy you need a strong regulatory body to keep it that way. Otherwise you just end up right where we are now again.
Yes and Humanity has done it for thousands of years without a large centralized National body. Anarchism is not without an ability to regulate. What do you think anarchism is?
We also didn’t have a better way of doing math than an abacus for thousands of years. If Anarchy could regulate then we wouldn’t need all these laws about minimum wage, not using children as disposable machine tools, and not putting rat poison in their food products. Clearly there is some need for a body that can do that. And at that point, You’ve got a large centralized national body again because you’re going to need to vote for who you trust to do it, they’re going to need the physical capability to do it, there’s going to need to be taxes to keep it all going, and oh look. We have a national government again.
I don’t care what PCM told you.
Hmmm and who controls the tech allowing this decentralized society?
No one, there are already plenty of protocols defined for distributed computing and are made open source. In a hypothetical lib left social network, If you want different networks, that’s fine, you just have to make your own protocol. It’s like how countries shouldn’t have borders, or how computing platforms shouldn’t lock you in or out of others (take apple/Mac OS as an example, versus Linux)
Then it’s up to individuals to verify the source code and choose to be a node operator. Not everyone needs to be a node operator, just enough on that the common skilled worker can partake should they need to
If you don’t like the “rules of governance” of whatever network you’re in, that’s fine, go to a different one you do like, or make your own with your own rules. If it’s actually a better system of “decentralized digital government”, you’ll attract people into your Network.
Consumer grade tech is more than capable of achieving this. You don’t need cpus with 2nm transistors (which are heavily gatekept by oligarchs), there’s plenty of open software and hardware protocols/designs to prove not only this concept works, but has been done before by now.
The only problem in the past was with solving the identity problem and preventing Sybil attacks, but that’s becoming less of a concern for other reasons (which I could elaborate further on)
That works for social media like Lemmy but what about tech for trading goods or keeping the lights on? What about the Internet infrastructure?
This a great idea to build off of and advocate for rights. But it’s as possible in reality as the classical liberal “state of nature”.
So, I emphasized trustless and decentralized in social organizations. “It just works for social media” isn’t exactly addressing what I was getting at. For example, Lemmy has a bot account problem. All that freedom makes it harder to prevent that problem.
But if you’re talking about how a government is a system of voting bodies that authorize some action given state (policy), and authority is delegated by some means - say, voting - then the botting problem of Lemmy is not just “something that doesn’t work”, it’s a critical failure which would enable fraud.
So, when I brought up Sybil attacks, I was trying to avoid a long winded digression including arguments from Microsoft on Decentralized ID. But the point being, it can be decentralized. Policy is action given state but action is delegated to people inevitably. But when you vote, would you rather trust a person to count those votes or a trustless automated system?
I’m talking about you said you want to use tech “to make up for the inefficiencies of decentralized economics”. It’s not about making open source software that works. That’s easy. The question is who controls the wires? We can already see where ISPs and countries can check everything passing through their system. What’s to prevent someone from gaining control of a critical mass of physical nodes and blocking traffic from anyone who doesn’t pay them a “fee”?
You’re talking about the software but you’re forgetting that it all runs on hardware somewhere in a windowless building. Even if you decentralize that, you’ve still got the problem of gatekeeping. How long before each node requires .1 pennies per packet? How good is long distance trade going to be when just making the offer costs a significant amount?
Been banned from there. Basically only right-lib or ancap views are allowed there, left-lib (me) need not apply.
You think that’s bad? Heh Libertarianism is a leftist ideology. Not at all liberal. They HATE us.
Heh and all the down votes without rebuttal prove it. They know better. They still hate to admit it. But they know better.
Those downvotes are people’s way of telling you that your comment is so comically wrong it’s not even worth a rebuttal. I agree with them.
Please explain. None of you can explain how that is. You just pretend it is. You just redefined things to mean whatever you want ignoring their original meaning. I can point to actual facts and evidence. I can point to history. All you can do is claim something and not back it up. Do you honestly think Joseph Dejacque would be accepting or abide a group of delusioned liberal nuggets? Do you even know who he is?
For those actually curious. Joseph Dejacque is the man that coined the term Libertarianism and defined it. He fought against imperialists, mercantilist, and capitalist. He was literally active in the French Revolution in france. In the early 1800s. Fervently pro labor etc. For 100 years there were no “right wing” libertarians. But post red scare and the 1950s. A bunch of privileged economic liberals decided to redefine the ideology and it’s meaning from the ground up. To be the opposite of what it’s creator intended. And the easiest way to prove this is to ask a right-wing liberal about Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of the market. They literally fetishize him. The man and his ideology. Economic liberalism
“Libertarian” doesn’t mean the same thing today that it meant in 2001; it’s a far departure from what it meant in the 1800’s.
You do know definitions and usage change over time, right? That’s like comparing an Eisenhower Republican to trump. There may be a few similarities, but overall they’re wildly different.
Yes we are well aware. Up Is Down black is white love is hate war is peace freedom is slavery.
No, definitions don’t generally change. Especially not to mean the opposite of how they we’re initially defined.
You’re confusing a party for an ideology. There is no “Republican” ideology. Especially since Trump took over. Ideologically, since at least the 1930s Republicans were pretty solidly fascist. At least in private. They’re just more open about it today.
But hey, we can still compare our non aggression principles. This is mine.
It’s a French classic!
Golly! Look at that. The Liberals were so confident that they were right. I mean if I’m so ridiculously wrong shouldn’t it be easy to prove me wrong? Kind of by definition even? Makes you wonder why they aren’t trying. I’m sure they will continue to pyrrhicly down vote regardless.
Yawn.
That’s a sad response. But I know it’s the best you had liberal.😄
leftist yawn
Libertarianism (traditionally) is on the bottom of the vertical (authority) axis on a traditional political compass, if you want to use that. It is neither left nor right. It can be either. The people who have taken the name are on the right. They’re anarchy-capitalists who don’t want to be ruled by government but want to be ruled by capitalists. Anarchists, for example, are libertarian leftists, using the terms properly.
The political Compass is a joke. It’s more accurate than just left or right. But libertarian isn’t a state that spans from left to right at the bottom. Libertarianism as it was designed is strictly a left ideology. Oriented about social Freedom Above All Else. Economic liberalism. Is an ideology predicated on complete economic freedom. Economic Liberals are not libertarians. Never have been. Never will be. They have diametrically opposed ideologies.
The problem with economic liberalism is that it puts the cart before the horse. You cannot have a free economy without a free society. Economic liberalism doesn’t care about Society in general. Just the free market. And they figure that magically a free Society will somehow follow. It never has but that’s the magical thinking involved.
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
it’s the libertarians… you should’ve said the bicycle lowers the age of consent or something.
[Hapless user] “Kids are allowed to use bicycles! Government requires you to be a late teen or adult to drive a car!”
[Libertarian mod] “Banned. It’s not that age of consent we want lowered!”
Libertarians: people too stupid to fully understand their own ideologies
Libertarianism is for the philosophically lazy,or people born into a super conservative family and can’t handle the cognitive dissonance caused by realizing that liberalism is the more Christian political ideology. Source: I’m from UT.
It’s just a smokescreen for selfish/embarrassed economic liberals. This was the man that coined and defined Libertarianism. Right wingers need not apply. The modern “libertarian” party is a necrophilic oxymoron.
The crazy part is how much politics has evolved since Libertarianism was founded. Now it’s flooded with a bunch of right wing social agendas with the worst economic policies.
Grover Norquist should be who you link to now. He’s the guy who hates government so much he wanted one so small he could drown it in a bathtub. He’s also the reason their economic ideas are so embarrassingly bad the party never gets taken seriously.
He’s just an acolyte of Milton Friedman and Murray rothbard. Not all that special himself. But yes all the evolved “libertarians” evolved backwards.
Great point. Murray Rothbard made it, Grover Norquist marketed it, and the right couldn’t get enough. I blame Milton Friedman for a lot but he was just using Chicago School of Economics methodology so it was bound to be repeated by someone else. But Rothbard was instrumental in making it a hard right idea.
He was surely aware of the Mormons getting the snot kicked out of them by the Army right? If they couldn’t make a special rules enclave for their religion, what hope does an Anarchic commune state have? Some things are just better as thought exercises to apply rather than actual goals.
Such a mishmash of words that have no business together anarchic commune state?! What the hell even is that. That’s not at all what anarchists Etc advocate for. Anarchists further are not passivists. And anarchist can absolutely organize for their self-defense. There’s nothing ideologically stating they can’t. Though it is ideologically opposed to becoming a state in the terms of nation states.
Do you know what anarchism is beyond angsty teens and pejorative colloquialisms of Chaos?
It’s not about pacifism. The Mormons are my example expressly because they weren’t pacifist, and they got rolled by a national military. The point is that unless you’ve got some kind of world wide vibe going someone is always going to amass enough power to overcome whatever mutual aid defense you can setup. And you would in fact be creating a state.
States don’t have to be highly centralized bureaucracies. It’s literally just a term for a geographical area that works together under a specific governing regime. If you’re calling the banners for mutual defense then you’re fulfilling a key aspect of a state. A nation is a group of people. Nation State is a specific category of states that happens to cover most countries in the past 100 years. For example although the US is a nation state, anthropologists have identified 12 sub cultures that could be considered nations of their own, largely linked to major immigration waves.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, if you somehow get a world wide agreement to abolish centralized government, and tame the corporations, and then prevent the mega cities from becoming city states, how do you prevent Communes 1 through 10 deciding they want to band together and start forcing other communes to join them? That’s going to require the other communes to band together for defense, which is going to require pooling resources, which just recreates the international MIC at a smaller scale. The problem with anarchism of any kind is shitty people look at it and all they see is a power vacuum, and a comfortable life in power if they have the ambition to take it.
I completely concur, I had personal experience with this. In my case, rural Georgia.
Libertarians are ultra-edgy conservatives who realized that typical conservative talking points are far too easy to refute and find contradictions in, and that being a conservative makes you look bad. They’re people who are close to understanding the ways which authorities/the establishment work against the people, but are too brainwashed with conservative/anti-worker/bigoted propaganda to be able to adopt a more mature worldview – as long as they participate in/agree with culture war garbage like transphobia and anti-feminism/anti-SJW propoganda, they’ll never be able to “agree” with any sort of leftist ideology. Plus they’ve never actually had taxable income so they really buy into all the false information & propoganda about taxes.
The conservative -> conservative libertarian -> ancap -> social/environmental libertarian -> socialist pipeline is VERY real, and it’s usually 1:1 with middle school -> early high school -> high school -> new-fledged adult -> experienced adult, for suburban white kids growing up in a conservative area. The less you’re shielded from reality, the more you start to agree with leftist ideas (even hardcore brainwashed conservatives completely agree with leftism in practice as long as they don’t know it’s leftism).
They’re just conservatives who want to be able to smoke weed and fuck children.
Actually scratch that; conservatives already want to do the latter.
They already do the latter. They want to make it legal beyond child marriage.
The dodge ram or just ram these days is the libertarian god.
Just a frame, a chain, two wheels, and some grease!
I think that could also have been cross-posted into [email protected] as well.
A very similar post was on fuckcars, or something related, a few days ago.
The first time I heard the phrase “become ungovernable”, I assumed it was about home gardening and biking and reducing consumer waste. Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was actually about perpetuating institutional inequality and “fuck you, got mine.”
It’s just another thing right libertarians stole from anarchists. I’m pretty sure Emma Goldman was the originator of the whole “become ungovernable” thing (could be totally wrong about that so take it with a bucket of salt) and she definitely meant it haha. Part of that is gardening and various other community building acts, but the other part is very “seize the means of production” and assassinating authority figures. Less “fuck you, got mine” and more “give everybody everything or die”
What do you mean? It’s still an anarchist thing.
Right-wing “libertarians” only know how to steal actual libertarian thought and shit all over it.
You gotta wear a helmet though in some places, and depending on where you are you may have to do much more than that
Gotta keep one hand on the handlebars
Gotta have a light
CAN’T RIDE WITH TWO PEOPLE ON THE SAME SEAT
YOU HAVE TO USE FUCKING HAND SIGNALS I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA NOT JUST AMERICA BUT TEXAS FOR GOD’S SAKE
(Fun fact, I actually met someone who got deported after getting stopped by the cops, originally, for riding a bike at night without a light 🙁)
(Edit: Also… banning someone from the libertarian subreddit because they said something you feel like they shouldn’t be allowed to say, so you have to use your administrative controls to silence them, is frickin hilarious. Not that I am surprised.)
Tyranny!
Well, there is always the libertarian community at [email protected] to post it to instead.
And it does require subsidies… pavement isn’t just magically there.
Hmm, a 40-80ft wide road that needs to support thousands of pounds of cars, or 8ft of bike path that only needs to support a few hundred pounds of pedestrians/bikers.
I wonder which needs more of a budget.
If everyone is on a bike, 8ft isn’t enough…also now you’re going to have even bigger cities since most people will need to return to the city from living further out.
If everyone is on a bike, 8ft isn’t enough
This is silly for multiple reasons
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Bike paths have significantly higher throughput than roads
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This is not a mutually elusive choice, we can have multiple modes of transport
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Rail transport & busses are more than capable of helping to reduce the load
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I never once said “everyone should be on a bike”
also now you’re going to have even bigger cities since most people will need to return to the city from living further out.
This just makes no sense. The ratio of transportation types has little effect on city density, zoning is way more of a factor. And in addition to that, car centric infrastructure takes up significantly more space than other modes. Reducing car dependence would actually free up space.
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bikes don’t need pavement, just good wheels
Good luck with that, I highly doubt most of you have ridden off road, having pavement %100 helps with efficiency.
I wonder if someday they’ll make a bike that rides on unpaved mountains. Probably not.
Haha what a crazy idea, what would you even call that? A bike for mountains? A mountain-style bike? Don’t be fatuous!
Equally ridiculous would be of you made one for roads with gravel. Some sort of…gravel-friendly bicycle.
Cool, good luck with that efficient ride. Tell you what go ride through the woods to get to the store and then let me know how much easier it is.
Ignorance is hilarious from you lot. You have street bikes and tires because… they’re more efficient that a mountain bike…but you do you.
Subsidies and infrastructure are not the same thing though.
No but they’re closely related and often the same thing.
The whole concept of “economically productive downtowns subsidize white flight suburbs ability to exist” is because of infrastructure, but it’s basically a subsidy.
Woke mods can’t handle facts and logic
Yeah, american libertarians call themselves the wrong thing. The more correct term I find would be anarcho-capitalist, which is just all around a completely non-viable economic and governance system.
Anarcho-capitalism is actually perfectly viable for a “functional” society. Goods will be made, and the people will be fed in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class.
It’s just not anarchism, and it’s not good. It’s just the capitalist class fully assuming the powers of state and production with none of the responsibilities to the people or any of those pesky human rights.
So, you know. Corporate Fascism.
But it would work. It has worked. American company towns weren’t far different from what the ancap dream ultimately is, and they were functional, as long as you don’t define functional as protecting human and worker rights and allowing for social mobility.
That’s fair enough I guess, I suppose I was defining functional as protecting various rights that technically aren’t necessary for an extant society. On the other hand, I very extremely doubt any of the self proclaimed libertarian anarcho-capitalists believe the actual end results of such a system are what would happen, nor would they want such a system to be the one they live under.
No ban on riding a bike? Apparently they never met MOM!
Missed putting a bit about how cars erode fourth amendment rights.
Unfortunately, in many places, bikes do as well. At least in the US
they hated him because he spoke the truth
