(05-08-2019 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  Curious, what's the percentage who say it's un-American when you phrase the question like this?
Is Socialism, defined as the following:

Quote:1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Un-American?

I don't know what the percentage would be, but for me absolutely un-American, and I would find it scary if less than 80-90% agreed.

Of course, given the current state of our education system, I'm not sure thet 80-90% would know what those words mean.

(05-08-2019 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  Curious, what's the percentage who say it's un-American when you phrase the question like this?

Is Socialism, defined as the following:

Quote:1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Un-American?

Yes. Absolutely.

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  ...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

All parties are ideological messes. That's the nature of collectivization of millions of people. You think you're going to find intellectual consistency within the Republican or Democrat Parties? The GOP took a hard left turn on populism with Trump and the Democrats responded by fleeing to the economic even harder left. To the extent that there even are people who believe in free trade elected as Republicans in Washington, they hold ZERO power or even influence over policy. The economic mainstream of both parties has been turned over and moved a standard deviation to the left at least.

I never claimed it was American -- nice shifting of the goal posts there. I did however claim it's utterly and laughably bogus to claim it's predicated on 1980s thought. Whatever aspersions you hoped to cast, all you really demonstrated is you know *almost nothing* about the intellectual foundation of the Libertarianism. If you wanted to be more honest or accurate you'd start by walking that ridiculous claim back.

If your goal in a political ideological is for it to be "American" ... well good luck with that. You'll need it. This country is only just over 200 years old. Adam Smith was born before this country even existed. When Karl Marx was around America was too busy rebuilding the White House after the British burned it down. Genesis among many areas of contemporary political thinking goes back AT LEAST into the early 1800s, and in some cases considerably earlier than that. And what exactly is "American"? The founders were all big on The Enlightenment ... which started and flowed out of Europe. Or is it now "American" because it came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson instead of Kant or Rousseau?

(05-08-2019 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  Curious, what's the percentage who say it's un-American when you phrase the question like this?

Is Socialism, defined as the following:

Quote:1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Un-American?

Based on those definitions, I'd say anyone who doesn't think it's Un-American IS Un-American.

(05-08-2019 08:29 AM)Redwingtom Wrote:  Curious, what's the percentage who say it's un-American when you phrase the question like this?

Is Socialism, defined as the following:

Quote:1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Un-American?

Un-American. Naive. Stupid. Willfully blind and ignorant of human behavior. Will lead to the inevitable death of millions more. It is the most lethal ideology yet devised by man to govern, and that is impressive because it has killed more people through sheer starvation that Hitler could manage with gas chambers. I will oppose any stupid or malicious enough to peddle this bankrupt claptrap to my grave or to my citizenship in another country.

Clear enough?

(05-08-2019 09:45 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  ...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

All parties are ideological messes. That's the nature of collectivization of millions of people. You think you're going to find intellectual consistency within the Republican or Democrat Parties? The GOP took a hard left turn on populism with Trump and the Democrats responded by fleeing to the economic even harder left. To the extent that there even are people who believe in free trade elected as Republicans in Washington, they hold ZERO power or even influence over policy. The economic mainstream of both parties has been turned over and moved a standard deviation to the left at least.

I never claimed it was American -- nice shifting of the goal posts there. I did however claim it's utterly and laughably bogus to claim it's predicated on 1980s thought. Whatever aspersions you hoped to cast, all you really demonstrated is you know *almost nothing* about the intellectual foundation of the Libertarianism. If you wanted to be more honest or accurate you'd start by walking that ridiculous claim back.

If your goal in a political ideological is for it to be "American" ... well good luck with that. You'll need it. This country is only just over 200 years old. Adam Smith was born before this country even existed. When Karl Marx was around America was too busy rebuilding the White House after the British burned it down. Genesis among many areas of contemporary political thinking goes back AT LEAST into the early 1800s, and in some cases considerably earlier than that. And what exactly is "American"? The founders were all big on The Enlightenment ... which started and flowed out of Europe. Or is it now "American" because it came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson instead of Kant or Rousseau?

Rousseau and Kant were informed by the Greeks. So a bit older than even that I would think. That said Rousseau's concept of the social contract, first implied by the Magna Carta under a monarchy, was at least transformative for our young nation and represents even today the symbiosis between private rights as a citizen and social obligations to the state, something wholly lost on the new left in this country which is why I see them as anathema to continued freedom. But before we go jumping on the left, the real enemy here is the same old foe championing those miserable leftest tenets because a healthy government supported by a free and thinking society has always impinged the power of the uber wealthy. So now Corporate America's largest international conglomerates are fully behind the left because they see the healthy nation state as an impediment to their global trade and domination.

However, because most Americans have never grasped the notion that business entities could be a threat to their way of life as readily as another nation state (although T.R. fully grasped this) we focus on the politicians and ideologies of the left rather than their corporate backers, a mistake which is presently costing us dearly. It is this mistake that Eisenhower clearly detailed to an anesthetized electorate in 1959-60. And which was summed up best by Harrington when he said, "If it prosper none dare call it treason."

(05-08-2019 07:16 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I don't agree with all libertarian policies. Open borders is a show stopper for me, and my idea of military and foreign policy is to have absolutely the biggest, baddest, strongest military in the world, by leaps and bounds, but never have to use it because nobody picks on us and we don't go picking on them. Never fight a war that you don't intend to win. If it's not worth winning, it's not worth fighting.

But like Badger, I'm with them on the economy, taxes, spending, balanced budgets, the welfare state, personal freedoms. I usually find that my differences with libertarians are less severe than my differences with republicans or democrats. If either R's or D's (in my case usually D's) puts up somebody that I absolutely despise, I will vote for the other major party to vote against that candidate. Last time that happened in a presidential election was 1980 (for Reagan against Carter). I think the next time may vey well be 2020, as I see no democrat that I would want to see in the white house under any circumstances. Otherwise I will vote libertarian, a luxury that living in Texas affords me.

Open borders and abortion are two areas where there is famously no concurrence in the LP. The Republican Liberty Caucus even has as their formal policy that they have no formal policy on abortion. Ron Paul was and is decisively against open borders and he is still to this day the most popular Libertarian (unless Justin Amash or Thomas Massie wishes to pick the torch up). I don't know very many (maybe any?) libertarians who would rank border immigration policy in their Top 5 most important issues. And even those who support open borders usually do so with caveats such as the welfare state must be ended because an open border cannot coexist with a welfare state. That just doesn't work.

(05-08-2019 07:48 AM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  Is universal public education a Socialist policy?

No.

The biggest problem with this is that socialism and its counterpart on there right, libertarianism, obscure the reality underneath.

To socialist, everything that favors property rights and individuals is bad. To the libertarian, anything that isn't free market fundamentalism is bad.

You either worship at the alter of the collective or at the feet of the omnipotent free market.

(05-08-2019 01:09 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 07:48 AM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  Is universal public education a Socialist policy?

No.

The biggest problem with this is that socialism and its counterpart on there right, libertarianism, obscure the reality underneath.

To socialist, everything that favors property rights and individuals is bad. To the libertarian, anything that isn't free market fundamentalism is bad.

You either worship at the alter of the collective or at the feet of the omnipotent free market.

This sounds like the sort of hemming and hawing that would lead George W. Bush to "abandon the free market to save the free market" via TARP. There are a lot of CEOs who would find you useful in a position of power.

If this is more about being willing to trust bust ... then go for it. Behind every true monopoly is typically a firm handshake between the CEO and government, though ... and I won't sully the reputation of capitalism by confusing it with croney capitalism, which is certainly the brand of capitalism most politicians practice.

(05-08-2019 09:45 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  ...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

All parties are ideological messes. That's the nature of collectivization of millions of people. You think you're going to find intellectual consistency within the Republican or Democrat Parties? The GOP took a hard left turn on populism with Trump and the Democrats responded by fleeing to the economic even harder left. To the extent that there even are people who believe in free trade elected as Republicans in Washington, they hold ZERO power or even influence over policy. The economic mainstream of both parties has been turned over and moved a standard deviation to the left at least.

I never claimed it was American -- nice shifting of the goal posts there. I did however claim it's utterly and laughably bogus to claim it's predicated on 1980s thought. Whatever aspersions you hoped to cast, all you really demonstrated is you know *almost nothing* about the intellectual foundation of the Libertarianism. If you wanted to be more honest or accurate you'd start by walking that ridiculous claim back.

If your goal in a political ideological is for it to be "American" ... well good luck with that. You'll need it. This country is only just over 200 years old. Adam Smith was born before this country even existed. When Karl Marx was around America was too busy rebuilding the White House after the British burned it down. Genesis among many areas of contemporary political thinking goes back AT LEAST into the early 1800s, and in some cases considerably earlier than that. And what exactly is "American"? The founders were all big on The Enlightenment ... which started and flowed out of Europe. Or is it now "American" because it came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson instead of Kant or Rousseau?

I didn't shift any goal posts. The title of this thread is, "57% Say Socialism is Un-American." I stated that libertarianism is as well being little more than a bunch of rejected ideas in Europe applied at a very particular point in American history.

In truth, we do have several forms of largely American political thought, Jacksonian Democracy and early 20th century progressivism.

It is or is not American based upon how separated it is from the base thought. If you are simply re-skinning ideas directly from elsewhere it is not American. If the idea or thought is a fully digested or boiling down of exterior influences, as opposed to direct, then they qualify as American political thought. That's not something that is up for debate so much. That's well established criteria for what is and what is not American political thought.

Libertarianism is as alien to the US as Socialism. Both stand in stark contract, ideologically and policy wise, to long standing American standards.

That's to say nothing of pragmatism, which is perhaps not an entirely American thought but one that America has taken to its greatest extent.

(05-08-2019 01:19 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 01:09 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 07:48 AM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  Is universal public education a Socialist policy?

No.

The biggest problem with this is that socialism and its counterpart on there right, libertarianism, obscure the reality underneath.

To socialist, everything that favors property rights and individuals is bad. To the libertarian, anything that isn't free market fundamentalism is bad.

You either worship at the alter of the collective or at the feet of the omnipotent free market.

This sounds like the sort of hemming and hawing that would lead George W. Bush to "abandon the free market to save the free market" via TARP. There are a lot of CEOs who would find you useful in a position of power.

If this is more about being willing to trust bust ... then go for it. Behind every true monopoly is typically a firm handshake between the CEO and government, though ... and I won't sully the reputation of capitalism by confusing it with croney capitalism, which is certainly the brand of capitalism most politicians practice.

If the cornerstone of the underlying society in your mind is entirely libertarian or entirely socialist in nature then yes. However, your thought process gives you a way a little bit here.

This idea of "the slippery slope" or "who controls that" is a byproduct of this socialist or libertarian dichotomy.

Before either, the concept of the reasonable person was more than sufficient. But, alas, neither socialist nor libertarians are reasonable.

(05-08-2019 06:53 AM)DustMyBroom Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 05:37 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 03:56 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  It isn't. However, it is important to note that neither is libertarianism which is nothing more than a political philosophy of the 1980s in spite of being cloaked in faux Thomas Jefferson.

Today I learned that despite the Libertarian Party being founded in 1971 it was built upon the political philosophy of the 1980s. Presumably the part where somebody came back in a DeLorean on fire to deliver the philosophy of a decade later was edited out. And they also went back to change history to make sure the following people reached their intellectual prime in the 1980s and published all their books then too:

- F.A. Hayek
- Milton Friedman
- Ayn Rand
- Murray Rothbard
- Frederic Bastiat
- Henry Hazlitt
- Ludwig Von Mises (Hey, you're an Alabama guy ... how did they build the LVM Institute in Auburn, AL so fast in the 80s? I mean they only broke ground in '82 and they already had a library full of books. Who the hell wrote an entire library on new stuff in 2 years? I'd like to meet those people!)
- Lysander Spooner
- Ron Paul (hey look, our first person who was actually participating politically in the 80s!)

Go read some more. And not just Jefferson quotations. Until then your claims are dismissed. With prejudice.

...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

I can’t stop laughing at this: “Your political ideals don’t perfectly align with mine? You intentionally seek out writers and politicians who share your views? How dare you! Here, let me call you stupid!”

I don't even know what this means. My guess is you don't either.

(05-08-2019 06:57 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 05:37 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 03:56 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  It isn't. However, it is important to note that neither is libertarianism which is nothing more than a political philosophy of the 1980s in spite of being cloaked in faux Thomas Jefferson.

Today I learned that despite the Libertarian Party being founded in 1971 it was built upon the political philosophy of the 1980s. Presumably the part where somebody came back in a DeLorean on fire to deliver the philosophy of a decade later was edited out. And they also went back to change history to make sure the following people reached their intellectual prime in the 1980s and published all their books then too:

- F.A. Hayek
- Milton Friedman
- Ayn Rand
- Murray Rothbard
- Frederic Bastiat
- Henry Hazlitt
- Ludwig Von Mises (Hey, you're an Alabama guy ... how did they build the LVM Institute in Auburn, AL so fast in the 80s? I mean they only broke ground in '82 and they already had a library full of books. Who the hell wrote an entire library on new stuff in 2 years? I'd like to meet those people!)
- Lysander Spooner
- Ron Paul (hey look, our first person who was actually participating politically in the 80s!)

Go read some more. And not just Jefferson quotations. Until then your claims are dismissed. With prejudice.

...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

The problem I have with the Libertarians is that their policies are SO "all over the place" that they really don't appeal to anyone.

I love their ideas about the economy, taxes, spending, balanced budgets, the welfare state, personal freedoms.

I DON'T love their ideas on foreign policy, immigration, the borders.

People who like their fiscal policies aren't likely to feel the same way about those others and vice-versa.

I think you hit pretty close to home.

Two good examples of why libertarianism is not functional and why it is lazy, as I said, is that is a contradiction in itself.

First, the free market is a worshipped creation which can't be manipulated or evaluated and is instead entirely sacrosanct. The idea that it crushes people, families, falls entirely into the justifiable category since you can't question the omnipotence or wisdom of the market. However, its basic cornerstones require government force, patents, property, corporate laws.

Second, and to take the point a little further, it separates entirely the idea of morality from economic consequences. If you **** people as hard as you can the world will somehow work if everybody else does it too. 400% interest rate? That's fine because the market is sacrosanct and that's free people making a bargain. However, as I said before, they will be the first to go crying to the government to enforce their fraud on you.

It's just a lazy line of thinking. It's nonsensical when you take it to its logical conclusion.

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  I didn't shift any goal posts. The title of this thread is, "57% Say Socialism is Un-American." I stated that libertarianism is as well being little more than a bunch of rejected ideas in Europe applied at a very particular point in American history.

Quote:However, it is important to note that neither is libertarianism which is nothing more than a political philosophy of the 1980s

Those two are not the same. And I'll offer as well that an idea being rejected in Europe politically in the modern era doesn't count against it as far as I'm concerned ... if anything it elevates its credibility. Europe has largely been either fascist, socialist, communist, or comprehensive nanny/welfare state since 1900. Even those who had the balls to stand in front of Russian tanks at TV stations as recently as the 1990s (Estonia) have slowly traded freedom and liberty for the illusion of state managed security. (Careful throwing stones in the American glass house on that one).

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  In truth, we do have several forms of largely American political thought, Jacksonian Democracy and early 20th century progressivism.

That uncomfortable moment when the first American political movement you name would be economically most at home in the Libertarian Party. Jackson killed the Central Bank. That puts you shoulder to shoulder with Ron Paul. With almost no non-libertarian allies. I'm more fond of Jackson that most Presidents, despite the Trail of Tears.

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  It is or is not American based upon how separated it is from the base thought. If you are simply re-skinning ideas directly from elsewhere it is not American. If the idea or thought is a fully digested or boiling down of exterior influences, as opposed to direct, then they qualify as American political thought. That's not something that is up for debate so much. That's well established criteria for what is and what is not American political thought.

What relevance is it where the idea came from? Do you want to take down the Statue of Liberty because it came from France and celebrated the US for taking on poor citizens from around the world? The primacy of the individual over the collective is fundamental, and quite frankly I don't give a flying fornication who wrote that idea first or in what language or what continent, the point is the idea is sound and valid and correct.

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  Libertarianism is as alien to the US as Socialism. Both stand in stark contract, ideologically and policy wise, to long standing American standards.

Oh I don't know, I think a country that started rioting over a tax of three shillings per pound on tea is off to a pretty damn libertarian start, at least economically.

- Government is the collection of power in the hands of the few to rule the many.

- Taking power from the many to concentrate in the hands of the few is evil.

- Thus, all governments are evil.

Now, just because the government is by definition evil, doesn't mean it is not necessary, but that also doesn't mean we should overfeed it by giving up our sovereign rights entirely to it. The Founders wanted a Federal government on a starvation diet, with basically only the ability to represent us, defend us, and resolve disputes between us. The Fed Gov was designed to be the ultimate check against the State Govs should they become tyrannical against their citizens, not the fountain of tyranny itself. Socialism, at the Federal level, is thus the endorsement of evil policies that crush the individual's rights in the name of the "greater good".

(05-08-2019 10:01 AM)JRsec Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 09:45 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-07-2019 10:01 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  ...that's not how a dismissal with prejudice works.

The Libertarian Party has been a winding ideological mess since its creation and it only ever coalesced around concepts and ideas born in the Reagan era.

While the truth may be upsetting, the bastard ideology that is Libertarianism is neither truly American nor founded in deep seated American political thought--hell your list of names demonstrates that quite well.

It's the right's equally vapid and shallow response to socialism in this country, a great tasting medicine for the historicaly illiterate and the intellectualy lazy.

All parties are ideological messes. That's the nature of collectivization of millions of people. You think you're going to find intellectual consistency within the Republican or Democrat Parties? The GOP took a hard left turn on populism with Trump and the Democrats responded by fleeing to the economic even harder left. To the extent that there even are people who believe in free trade elected as Republicans in Washington, they hold ZERO power or even influence over policy. The economic mainstream of both parties has been turned over and moved a standard deviation to the left at least.

I never claimed it was American -- nice shifting of the goal posts there. I did however claim it's utterly and laughably bogus to claim it's predicated on 1980s thought. Whatever aspersions you hoped to cast, all you really demonstrated is you know *almost nothing* about the intellectual foundation of the Libertarianism. If you wanted to be more honest or accurate you'd start by walking that ridiculous claim back.

If your goal in a political ideological is for it to be "American" ... well good luck with that. You'll need it. This country is only just over 200 years old. Adam Smith was born before this country even existed. When Karl Marx was around America was too busy rebuilding the White House after the British burned it down. Genesis among many areas of contemporary political thinking goes back AT LEAST into the early 1800s, and in some cases considerably earlier than that. And what exactly is "American"? The founders were all big on The Enlightenment ... which started and flowed out of Europe. Or is it now "American" because it came from the pen of Thomas Jefferson instead of Kant or Rousseau?

Rousseau and Kant were informed by the Greeks. So a bit older than even that I would think. That said Rousseau's concept of the social contract, first implied by the Magna Carta under a monarchy, was at least transformative for our young nation and represents even today the symbiosis between private rights as a citizen and social obligations to the state, something wholly lost on the new left in this country which is why I see them as anathema to continued freedom. But before we go jumping on the left, the real enemy here is the same old foe championing those miserable leftest tenets because a healthy government supported by a free and thinking society has always impinged the power of the uber wealthy. So now Corporate America's largest international conglomerates are fully behind the left because they see the healthy nation state as an impediment to their global trade and domination.

However, because most Americans have never grasped the notion that business entities could be a threat to their way of life as readily as another nation state (although T.R. fully grasped this) we focus on the politicians and ideologies of the left rather than their corporate backers, a mistake which is presently costing us dearly. It is this mistake that Eisenhower enunciated clearly to an anesthetized electorate in 1959-60. And which was summed up best by Harrington when he said, "If it prosper none dare call it treason."

I'm glad you posted this line.

My overarching point is that same line applies equally to the left's socialists as it does the right's libertarians.

Each side skews the ratio between those rights and obligations to the side of their choosing. They are equally as dysfunctional.

(05-08-2019 01:34 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  I didn't shift any goal posts. The title of this thread is, "57% Say Socialism is Un-American." I stated that libertarianism is as well being little more than a bunch of rejected ideas in Europe applied at a very particular point in American history.

Quote:However, it is important to note that neither is libertarianism which is nothing more than a political philosophy of the 1980s

Those two are not the same. And I'll offer as well that an idea being rejected in Europe politically in the modern era doesn't count against it as far as I'm concerned ... if anything it elevates its credibility. Europe has largely been either fascist, socialist, communist, or comprehensive nanny/welfare state since 1900. Even those who had the balls to stand in front of Russian tanks at TV stations as recently as the 1990s (Estonia) have slowly traded freedom and liberty for the illusion of state managed security. (Careful throwing stones in the American glass house on that one).

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  In truth, we do have several forms of largely American political thought, Jacksonian Democracy and early 20th century progressivism.

That uncomfortable moment when the first American political movement you name would be economically most at home in the Libertarian Party. Jackson killed the Central Bank. That puts you shoulder to shoulder with Ron Paul. With almost no non-libertarian allies. I'm more fond of Jackson that most Presidents, despite the Trail of Tears.

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  It is or is not American based upon how separated it is from the base thought. If you are simply re-skinning ideas directly from elsewhere it is not American. If the idea or thought is a fully digested or boiling down of exterior influences, as opposed to direct, then they qualify as American political thought. That's not something that is up for debate so much. That's well established criteria for what is and what is not American political thought.

What relevance is it where the idea came from? Do you want to take down the Statue of Liberty because it came from France and celebrated the US for taking on poor citizens from around the world? The primacy of the individual over the collective is fundamental, and quite frankly I don't give a flying fornication who wrote that idea first or in what language or what continent, the point is the idea is sound and valid and correct.

(05-08-2019 01:23 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  Libertarianism is as alien to the US as Socialism. Both stand in stark contract, ideologically and policy wise, to long standing American standards.

Oh I don't know, I think a country that started rioting over a tax of three shillings per pound on tea is off to a pretty damn libertarian start, at least economically.

I'm just going to assign numbers for the sake of time.

1) It is a particularly nasty habit of the libertarian party to lay claim to all the good things and shift away from all the bad. You cannot affix a positive or negative conclusion to a disparate set of facts and then claim that if you said positive then it falls into your camp.

If anything, it underscores my point that libertarians is not a functional system. What is "trading" freedom and liberty? Is that the 1980's concept? It would appear you cede that point as you specifically chose a country like Estonia and its march away from communism.

I reject the limits you are attempting to place on the discussion. Limiting this to 20th century political thought prevents a fair evaluation.

2) Again, this is that laying claim to all the good and none of the bad. A central bank is not a creature of the left or right in truth. It's a pragmatic answer to a problem. Affixing a left or right meaning to it is indicative, again, of the false dichotomy I've mentioned in my other posts.

3) I've said nothing about the Statue and I'm not attacking anything on the basis of its Americaness. I'm simply pointing it out, as is the point of this thread.

This fight between the collective and the individual is a false one. I said it in my second point and I will say it again here. This is not the default position in American political thought. This is the default position since libertarianism burst onto to the scene in the 80s. There is a middle ground and one that existed for most of our history.

4) I honestly don't know how to respond to that because I think it is more tongue in cheek than an actual point.

(05-08-2019 01:34 PM)49RFootballNow Wrote:  - Government is the collection of power in the hands of the few to rule the many.

- Taking power from the many to concentrate in the hands of the few is evil.

- Thus, all governments are evil.

Now, just because the government is by definition evil, doesn't mean it is not necessary, but that also doesn't mean we should overfeed it by giving up our sovereign rights entirely to it. The Founders wanted a Federal government on a starvation diet, with basically only the ability to represent us, defend us, and resolve disputes between us. The Fed Gov was designed to be the ultimate check against the State Govs should they become tyrannical against their citizens, not the fountain of tyranny itself. Socialism, at the Federal level, is thus the endorsement of evil policies that crush the individual's rights in the name of the "greater good".

Your syllogism isn't very tight on this.

Government being evil is an extreme example of an overly ideological belief.

A government is not inherently evil. It is just a collection of people that takes on the features and characteristics of those people.

This belief that our founding fathers hated government is an historically illiterate stance. It is yet another reason that I have little regard for libertarian political dogma because it is one of two cornerstones of it.

There is a major difference between government and bureaucracy which seems to be the more accurate target of libertarianism.

However, the founding fathers were entirely okay, and in fact were major supporters, of regulatory schemes, laws, etc. which very harshly curtailed things regarded as absolute rights in modern libertarianism.

A simpler way to word all of this, is that libertarianism, like socialism, is not compatible with the common law foundations of this country.

(05-08-2019 01:32 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  First, the free market is a worshipped creation which can't be manipulated or evaluated and is instead entirely sacrosanct. The idea that it crushes people, families, falls entirely into the justifiable category since you can't question the omnipotence or wisdom of the market. However, its basic cornerstones require government force, patents, property, corporate laws.

Second, and to take the point a little further, it separates entirely the idea of morality from economic consequences. If you **** people as hard as you can the world will somehow work if everybody else does it too. 400% interest rate? That's fine because the market is sacrosanct and that's free people making a bargain. However, as I said before, they will be the first to go crying to the government to enforce their fraud on you.

It's just a lazy line of thinking. It's nonsensical when you take it to its logical conclusion.

The free market crushes families. If you just take that one sentence out and placed it in another thread at random it would be impossible to tell it came from you and not Bernie or AOC. The free market does have creative destruction. There are losers. But overall society as a whole gets wealthier. Bernie loves to cry about how the richest 1% have had a 200% increase in wealth in the last several decades in America. How has the bottom third done? They're about 33% wealthier than they use to be as well. Both in inflation adjusted terms. Usually when you scratch an anti-free market person, you find somebody jealous of the rich and wanting to use the government to confiscate "more equitably manage their wealth" behind the veneer. It's not perfect. The poor and uneducated can drop. But by every objective measure it produces a better end result than anything else society has ever tried. You've found some not-too-pretty spots in Capitalism? Congrats on having vision. Now what exactly do you propose to do that's better, and for bonus points explain where you found the knowledge on how to manage 350,000,000 people better than they can manage themselves.

Government force is always required in any society period, unless you're arguing for no law enforcement. I don't see police enforcement of private property (which is taxed to pay for said enforcement) or a judicial system to adjudicate contractual conflicts as a problem or unusual. The US Patent Office existed before the term Libertarian did. The free market, by making everybody wealthier, generates far more tax revenue than it consumes. It's only when you hitch up the wagon of the welfare state that the balance sheet goes to ****.

You then bring in another AOC-ish example in somebody charging a hypothetical 400% interest rate. First off ... nobody forced them to sign that loan with a gun to their head. You cannot protect people from their own stupidity no matter how hard you try. In another life I actually served papers for a payday lender from a court. I could see in full gory detail the "wringing of the sponge" of poor people by payday lenders. On the flip side, I started doing the math on how much I was getting paid and how much everybody on the judicial side was getting paid to push all this paperwork into a court room and how many people defaulted. It's gruesome all around. These are desperate people with no credit worthiness who cannot get any money from any traditional source. It's payday or noday. You can make payday lending illegal outright entirely .... but I don't think you eliminate suffering in doing so, you merely make it less visible and you sink the ship for the small percentage of people who have a life tragedy and use a payday lender to bail themselves out and pick up a second job to get out of debt etc. Not pretty. Not perfect. The best we've got so far. I'll take a bunch of payday lenders over dekulakization any day. If you've got some system of government that puts stupid people in a NERF bubble without ruining everything let's hear it. Be heavy on principles, because without guiding principles it becomes a giant tapestry of "it depends" ... which is just the sort of environment that croney capitalism loves and thrives in.

(05-08-2019 01:54 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(05-08-2019 01:32 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  First, the free market is a worshipped creation which can't be manipulated or evaluated and is instead entirely sacrosanct. The idea that it crushes people, families, falls entirely into the justifiable category since you can't question the omnipotence or wisdom of the market. However, its basic cornerstones require government force, patents, property, corporate laws.

Second, and to take the point a little further, it separates entirely the idea of morality from economic consequences. If you **** people as hard as you can the world will somehow work if everybody else does it too. 400% interest rate? That's fine because the market is sacrosanct and that's free people making a bargain. However, as I said before, they will be the first to go crying to the government to enforce their fraud on you.

It's just a lazy line of thinking. It's nonsensical when you take it to its logical conclusion.

The free market crushes families. If you just take that one sentence out and placed it in another thread at random it would be impossible to tell it came from you and not Bernie or AOC. The free market does have creative destruction. There are losers. But overall society as a whole gets wealthier. Bernie loves to cry about how the richest 1% have had a 200% increase in wealth in the last several decades in America. How has the bottom third done? They're about 33% wealthier than they use to be as well. Both in inflation adjusted terms. Usually when you scratch an anti-free market person, you find somebody jealous of the rich and wanting to use the government to confiscate "more equitably manage their wealth" behind the veneer. It's not perfect. The poor and uneducated can drop. But by every objective measure it produces a better end result than anything else society has ever tried. You've found some not-too-pretty spots in Capitalism? Congrats on having vision. Now what exactly do you propose to do that's better, and for bonus points explain where you found the knowledge on how to manage 350,000,000 people better than they can manage themselves.

Government force is always required in any society period, unless you're arguing for no law enforcement. I don't see police enforcement of private property (which is taxed to pay for said enforcement) or a judicial system to adjudicate contractual conflicts as a problem or unusual. The US Patent Office existed before the term Libertarian did. The free market, by making everybody wealthier, generates far more tax revenue than it consumes. It's only when you hitch up the wagon of the welfare state that the balance sheet goes to ****.

You then bring in another AOC-ish example in somebody charging a hypothetical 400% interest rate. First off ... nobody forced them to sign that loan with a gun to their head. You cannot protect people from their own stupidity no matter how hard you try. In another life I actually served papers for a payday lender from a court. I could see in full gory detail the "wringing of the sponge" of poor people by payday lenders. On the flip side, I started doing the math on how much I was getting paid and how much everybody on the judicial side was getting paid to push all this paperwork into a court room and how many people defaulted. It's gruesome all around. These are desperate people with no credit worthiness who cannot get any money from any traditional source. It's payday or noday. You can make payday lending illegal outright entirely .... but I don't think you eliminate suffering in doing so, you merely make it less visible and you sink the ship for the small percentage of people who have a life tragedy and use a payday lender to bail themselves out and pick up a second job to get out of debt etc. Not pretty. Not perfect. The best we've got so far. I'll take a bunch of payday lenders over dekulakization any day. If you've got some system of government that puts stupid people in a NERF bubble without ruining everything let's hear it. Be heavy on principles, because without guiding principles it becomes a giant tapestry of "it depends" ... which is just the sort of environment that croney capitalism loves and thrives in.

I don't think you could have taken a more "libertarian" approach if you tried.

You managed to include everything from calling any criticism of free market fundamentalism communist (Bernie, AOC), celebrating social darwinism, appealing to the only metric of importance GDP (or "wealth" as you call it), all while relegating the roll of the state to little more than police.

Yes, the patent office exists prior to libertarianism--which is part of my point. One cannot rationally be for a dog-eat-dog society and yet rely on government force to enforce the right to usury and the right to own ideas.

To further drive my point home, you further enforced the idea that there is either your way or the socialist way. In actuality, there are other directions, one of which is what actually made this country what it is and what the founding fathers had in mind. The two faux ideologies of socialism and libertarianism are imposters and alien here.