FBXL Social

Most people don't realize just how fucked up the world economy is right now. Capitalism is long over. You don't have capitalism when 50% of GDP is the state in most countries, or when blue collar workers pay 50% taxes on the last dollar they earn. By contrast, my great grandparents paid no income taxes and the government was about 10% of the economy.

"But look at all the super-rich people!" Yeah, that happens every time the state becomes massive because the powerful people in government make sure their friends and allies are taken care of. It has gone on for millennia in every region of the world because power corrupts.

We're living in a totalitarian civilization because at some point we decided that "everything is political" and thus under the purview of the government. Of course there's corruption and greed. We used to have culture, and community, and even religion. We gave it all away.

And the worst part is that people can't even recognize something as simple as a guy who got rich on subsidies and fed money printing cranking up his stonks isn't a libertarian.

Pretty straightforward to just say "Libertarianism is wanting less government, as opposed to authoritarianism which is wanting more government". If you're hoping for a narrow and specific set of policies or something out of that, that won't really be possible because it's just a general direction. If I say I'm going South, that could mean I'm going to be anywhere from a Northern US state to central or south America, Australia, South Asia, the Mediterranean, Africa, even Antarctica.

Your examples of COVID vaccines and microplastics sort of suck, since those are both examples of things that happened under the non-capitalist regime. In fact, there's increasing evidence that the Government bureaucracy commissioned the creation of COVID-19, in an act that was illegal but completed anyway using a common trick of getting it done in another country. During the George W. Bush war on terror era, America "didn't torture", so they just outsourced the torture to Syria. A lot of microplastics in the environment are caused by recycling programs implemented by municipal governments in the US and Canada. Since the programs only cared about looking like they were doing something instead of actually doing anything (because bureaucracy cares most about face), they'd take the stuff from your blue box, pack it up in a garbage scow across the ocean to a third world country, and then have most of it dumped into the sea.

So as a start, how about we discuss cutting down on shutting down government like CIA dark sites where they can torture people in Syria? How about we discuss shutting down programs that illegally create viruses that can produce global pandemics that could kill millions of people -- even if COVID-19 wasn't created by a program like that, why not just stop having such programs? Do we really need to be funding research of deadly diseases in countries we're a hop skip and a jump away from war with? How about we discuss shutting down programs that ship garbage to third world countries and dump it so we can pretend we didn't just throw it out? It's 50% of the entire economy, I suspect there's a lot of "libertarian" government cutting we can do before we ever start getting to services that ever directly touch a regular citizen.

Since in the same way most of the earth is south of me, libertarian covers a broad spectrum when half your economy is government. Moreover, you don't need to cut every program, and you don't even necessarily need to cut bad programs and replace them with nothing! Imagine how cool it would be if those recycling programs instead of shipping garbage to the third world recycled the materials on-site and made subsidized materials available for local manufacturing? Instead, it just becomes an opportunity for a "corporation" which just like the bureaucracy using China or Syria to do things they can't do at home without getting caught, is really just an organ of the state and an opportunity for politicians to enrich their friends.