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Old 03-21-2012, 04:28 AM
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erimir erimir is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2005
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Default Re: This explain everything

Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs View Post
Keep in mind, at least one subset of "libertarians" is people who are themselves inclined to be generous, and who simply assume that, if the government weren't taking all this money to pay for social programs, people would do it individually with a lot less bureaucratic overhead. That was my assumption for a long time; I was genuinely surprised to find that most people who can consistently feed themselves don't usually have at least one or two freeloaders that they're covering for. I mean, why wouldn't you?

Answer: Because other people are not all like me.
I recently spent the night at a friend of my parents who has a very large house and is an extreme libertarian (and he likes to argue). But he is pretty generous. He probably is assuming that other people are equally generous.

A couple highlights from his conversation with me:

His basic principle is that the only reason to use aggression is for self-defense. Of course, "self" here is defined as including your possessions, a little trick they like to slip in.

My response was, of course, to point out that this is not the usual definition of self-defense, and that government-enforced property rights are as much of an unnatural state of affairs as government-enforced taxation and programs. I pointed out that property rights are not/have not been universally recognized by human societies, in particular land ownership. He kept on wanting to deflect that land ownership was a red herring. In his mind his libertarian-free market philosophy works equally well in a society without land ownership, I suppose, even though the ownership of most raw resources originates through owning the land they were taken from.

Anyway, I was trying to get him to admit that property rights shouldn't be considered absolute. He didn't want to consider "hypotheticals" at first (I can understand why), but I got him to respond. The hypothetical was to suppose that a single man managed, through no illegal means (or "un-libertarian" means, you could say) to own basically the entire world. Should the rest of the world respect and enforce his property rights, even if he was using them to be oppressive towards everyone else?

He said as long as he acquired his property properly, he should be able to use it as he wished.

Of course, the notion that this man would be no better than the "tyrannical" governments he opposes didn't cross his mind. If there were governmental forces of some sort enforcing his property rights, he would essentially be a monarch. He claimed that this was different, since his ownership would end with his death (unlike the government). But since he supports untaxed inheritance, that doesn't quite hold.

Other fun facts:

Global warming is hoax perpetrated for personal enrichment and because liberals and environmentalists want more control over your life. Look at how rich Al Gore has gotten! QED. His sources about global warming (such as the Cato Institute) are unbiased, oil companies have no vested interest in what the science says about it, there is no scientific consensus and my sources are all liars or ignorant, and he's soooo much more well-read than me, he doesn't have time to go over all the details, but trust him, he's right and I'm wrong.

In a similar vein, I don't have as much life experience as him, so like he was at my age I'm a liberal. And other variations on calling me an ignorant youth. Oh yeah, and I was brainwashed by the universities (when I pointed out that most of my economics knowledge has been through independent reading, that somehow makes me more brainwashed on the subject).

The crime rate in the US has not been lowering over the past couple decades, and the sources that say it has been are all liberal lies.

He also doesn't believe in evolution (although he doesn't believe in Creationism either). A welcome opportunity for me to condescendingly (and I'm quite sure, accurately) assure him that I have read far more on the subject than he has.
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