In a libertarian utopia, I'd expect debt would be greatly minimized because special companies wouldn't be given the magical ability to create the common currency our of thin air OR there would be a variety of competing currencies and if companies magically created their own currency out of thin air it'd end up not used as much as one that better holds its value.
Not just central banks can print money -- normal banks magic money into existence through virtually unbacked debt and while fractional reserve banking may exist it would be a much higher risk endeavor subject to routine bank runs because people could and would demand their money back and the fraud that is the bank could not return it.
It's entirely possible and probable that people using a currency without magagovernments backing them would demand something backed by something of value or otherwise protected by devaluation caused by magical money printing.
Banking and debt is so deeply entrenched with the state at this point, I don't think we can correctly conceive of just how different things would look without it all. I doubt credit cards would even be a thing.
In the current system, a credit card represents money that was spent and magically spawned into existence so if you have $50,000 in credit card debt that's a you problem unless and until you go bankrupt. If they had to back it up if someone came looking for that money, they wouldn't possibly want to so cavalierly lend random amounts to random people for random purposes.
Not just central banks can print money -- normal banks magic money into existence through virtually unbacked debt and while fractional reserve banking may exist it would be a much higher risk endeavor subject to routine bank runs because people could and would demand their money back and the fraud that is the bank could not return it.
It's entirely possible and probable that people using a currency without magagovernments backing them would demand something backed by something of value or otherwise protected by devaluation caused by magical money printing.
Banking and debt is so deeply entrenched with the state at this point, I don't think we can correctly conceive of just how different things would look without it all. I doubt credit cards would even be a thing.
In the current system, a credit card represents money that was spent and magically spawned into existence so if you have $50,000 in credit card debt that's a you problem unless and until you go bankrupt. If they had to back it up if someone came looking for that money, they wouldn't possibly want to so cavalierly lend random amounts to random people for random purposes.
Seems to me that a lot of westerners are fundamentally disconnected from reality, in part because in spite of the imperfections of western society, it's the freest, safest, most equal society there is and possibly has ever been, and again while imperfect it also has things like relative legal consistency giving a modicum of fairness. As a result, people can get the mistaken impression that this state is normal when it's highly unusual and extremely fragile, and most societies today and throughout history have been brutal, tyrannical, strongly hierarchical, and unfair.
Two other factors contribute to this. First, western society in general has become extremely insular and doesn't know about other cultures except through its own narrow lens, so a lot of people might only know messages tailored for western audiences that sand over the fundamental value differences between cultures. Second, the boomer ethic says that the worst thing you can possibly do is judge someone so there's a reflex against judging things we ought to consider evil in spite of the glaring evil of the thing.
Most people don't know, for example, that muslims were unrepentant slavers, and the only reason the descendants of those slaves aren't around is their practice of castrating slaves. The only reason the slave trade ended was European imperialism imposing that behavior upon the entire world. Modern Muslim scholars saying slavery is wrong are likely engaging in an ex post facto rationalization of something that now is the norm. It is not clear that slavery wouldn't return once western political influence fades.
Another issue is the nature of the family structure of Islamic society. It is a true patriarchy with the eldest father having overwhelming control over the clan including all the sons, and it is also a society that allows cousin marriage, something that Christianity by contrast prohibited. This family structure puts women at the very bottom of the hierarchy since the sons who are dominated by the father need someone to dominate in turn, and the only saving grace for women in the Islamic world is that wives are often already closely related by blood. For western or westernized women who go to isis territory, they'll have the one downside without the other upside.
To be clear, I am not stuck in traffic in any of these regards, I am traffic. A little bit of study here and there doesn't mean I'm not still seeing the world through a western Christian liberal democratic lens, and it's only through the Herculean efforts of some truly gifted individuals that I have the slightest understanding that all I'm seeing are shadows on the wall and that there's a real world outside that's much different.
Two other factors contribute to this. First, western society in general has become extremely insular and doesn't know about other cultures except through its own narrow lens, so a lot of people might only know messages tailored for western audiences that sand over the fundamental value differences between cultures. Second, the boomer ethic says that the worst thing you can possibly do is judge someone so there's a reflex against judging things we ought to consider evil in spite of the glaring evil of the thing.
Most people don't know, for example, that muslims were unrepentant slavers, and the only reason the descendants of those slaves aren't around is their practice of castrating slaves. The only reason the slave trade ended was European imperialism imposing that behavior upon the entire world. Modern Muslim scholars saying slavery is wrong are likely engaging in an ex post facto rationalization of something that now is the norm. It is not clear that slavery wouldn't return once western political influence fades.
Another issue is the nature of the family structure of Islamic society. It is a true patriarchy with the eldest father having overwhelming control over the clan including all the sons, and it is also a society that allows cousin marriage, something that Christianity by contrast prohibited. This family structure puts women at the very bottom of the hierarchy since the sons who are dominated by the father need someone to dominate in turn, and the only saving grace for women in the Islamic world is that wives are often already closely related by blood. For western or westernized women who go to isis territory, they'll have the one downside without the other upside.
To be clear, I am not stuck in traffic in any of these regards, I am traffic. A little bit of study here and there doesn't mean I'm not still seeing the world through a western Christian liberal democratic lens, and it's only through the Herculean efforts of some truly gifted individuals that I have the slightest understanding that all I'm seeing are shadows on the wall and that there's a real world outside that's much different.
Doesn't matter, the whole system has been dead for 4 years anyway(which I'm surprised at -- I thought it was before the pandemic it went down, but everything I've got suggests it was mid-2020)
A lot has happened in the past 4 years, hasn't it?
A lot has happened in the past 4 years, hasn't it?
Reminds me of newproject2, a patreon alternative set up by a comedian named Dick Masterson (who ran a couple instances for a while) and got shut down by the credit card processors.
It's fuckin bullshit. Sorry to hear it happening to you.
It's fuckin bullshit. Sorry to hear it happening to you.
I think you misunderstand. The inhibitors were released. Every one was on full display, just as Mark Twain wrote it back in the 19th century.
I've got a wonderful leather bound anthology of several of Twain's works. And the N-Word inhibitors have been fully released.
I mean... The guy who was like "Let's kill half the life in the universe, that's a long-term solution to the problem of too much life in the universe" kinda fits.
For those of you following the Disney/reedy creek thing, Disney finally folded, the court cases are over. It's pretty funny given that guys like Leonard French thought it was a totally winnable lawsuit that was going to embarrass Florida.
In Canada the number of government employees at the federal level is up 40% in the past 8 years.
So we can fire 75% and not feel it.
So we can fire 75% and not feel it.
Write books. Make games. Film videos. Sculpt art. Play music. Because nobody is coming to save us, we can only save ourselves.
(And put your stuff out into the world so people can enjoy it! Publishing in particular is so easy today there's no excuse)
(And put your stuff out into the world so people can enjoy it! Publishing in particular is so easy today there's no excuse)
One thing about incels is that I feel like the whole thing started once we started telling men it was evil to try to become more attractive to women if you're not succeeding with them.
It seems self-evident that if you tell men they're just losers who, if they are not presently attractive to women, they will never be and should just accept they'll die alone, of course they'll become hateful and reclusive and sometimes violent, it's an existential threat men will feel at a genetic level.
Otoh, you tell women they're automatically worthy of the top 1% of the top 1% and have them all chasing like 15 guys worldwide and they'll have a different but equally existentially destructive threat on their hands because those 15 guys probably won't marry any of those women.
Becomes pretty obvious why everyone is miserable and the birth rate is less than replacement.. in car terms, the men are being told that if they can't immediately go out and buy a car with cash then they don't deserve a car ever, and the women are being told that if they don't buy a Ferrari then the car doesn't deserve to be bought by them. So everyone walks.
It seems self-evident that if you tell men they're just losers who, if they are not presently attractive to women, they will never be and should just accept they'll die alone, of course they'll become hateful and reclusive and sometimes violent, it's an existential threat men will feel at a genetic level.
Otoh, you tell women they're automatically worthy of the top 1% of the top 1% and have them all chasing like 15 guys worldwide and they'll have a different but equally existentially destructive threat on their hands because those 15 guys probably won't marry any of those women.
Becomes pretty obvious why everyone is miserable and the birth rate is less than replacement.. in car terms, the men are being told that if they can't immediately go out and buy a car with cash then they don't deserve a car ever, and the women are being told that if they don't buy a Ferrari then the car doesn't deserve to be bought by them. So everyone walks.
The best part is that it wasn't even like his fine was reduced. He just needed to pay slightly less but still more money than these journalists will ever see in their entire lives many times over to appeal the decision.
These are the same leftists who want to eliminate cash bail.
These are the same leftists who want to eliminate cash bail.
Anyone who owns a home probably paid a different price for their house than the government assessed for the purposes of land tax.
That isn't fraud, it's just how it is. You don't pay the city for your house, you pay the current owner, and the current owner accepts market rate, not the price the government has deemed your house worth.
We aren't yet living in a soviet utopia, so when the government says your property is worth one value, that isn't the actual price. The actual price is based on what the current owner is willing to take and what you are willing to pay. Then you go to the bank (you know, the ones with billions of dollars and entire buildings filled with risk assessment people), and they look at your property and say "ok, the amount you're asking us for is about right" and then they lend you the money.
I strongly doubt that Jon Stewart, if he has a mortgage, paid the city assessment for his property. He probably, like the rest of us, paid the market rate which was probably quite different. I wonder if he'd be willing to be fined millions of dollars for his "fraud"?
That isn't fraud, it's just how it is. You don't pay the city for your house, you pay the current owner, and the current owner accepts market rate, not the price the government has deemed your house worth.
We aren't yet living in a soviet utopia, so when the government says your property is worth one value, that isn't the actual price. The actual price is based on what the current owner is willing to take and what you are willing to pay. Then you go to the bank (you know, the ones with billions of dollars and entire buildings filled with risk assessment people), and they look at your property and say "ok, the amount you're asking us for is about right" and then they lend you the money.
I strongly doubt that Jon Stewart, if he has a mortgage, paid the city assessment for his property. He probably, like the rest of us, paid the market rate which was probably quite different. I wonder if he'd be willing to be fined millions of dollars for his "fraud"?
Libertarianism works as a general philosophy that sits in a basket of governing philosophies, but can’t work well on its own.
First, we live in the least libertarian era of all time. Taxation at the level we see would be considered tyrannical, kings would hang for the level of taxation we see. Governments micromanage our lives to an extent previous eras couldn’t possibly imagine. When people try to imagine a more libertarian world, it isn’t really possible at this point because government is so baked in.
Second, corporations are government entities. They exist as entities because government created that superstructure. It could change that superstructure and has, to make them more powerful. When people say “government need to control everything because corporations will otherwise” it’s a misnomer since they’re both government.
The world would be a lot better with much less government. There’s been times when more than one dollar of government money is spent for every dollar spent by the private sector. This has a destructive effect on the world. Even in the so-called “private sector”, the largest companies are the companies best able to leverage government largesse, not the companies best able to sell products and services to customers. People are pissed off at Elon Musk, but internet companies like PayPal grew on government, Tesla was built by government dollars and its stock price is puffed up by inflation, SpaceX is almost exclusively selling to governments, it’s a veneer for taking taxpayer dollars. Same with most other massive companies.
Now part of that basket is also going to be popular social programs whether I like it or not -- for example, the fact that the current government of Canada is evil and incompetent doesn't have any bearing on the fact that the single payer healthcare is quite popular. There are public goods that are worth pooling resources to create, and even libertarians believe in some common goods such as military.
That being said, there are good arguments against government too.
Single payer healthcare doesn't mean government run healthcare. It means that the market provides insurance and it is paid for by the government. The individual actors are private entities with their own freedom.
Progressives believe that capitalism creates greed, and that's backwards: Greed always exists, under every single system. The thing capitalism does is it systematizes it. If you want more, then under capitalism you have to do something to get more, and that usually means serving others in some way. Under most other systems, if you want more then you just need to step on innocent people.
Free market capitalism without the burdens of government tend to be blind. Minorities got power through commerce long before governments or universities recognized that those people could be useful if empowered. Women got jobs before they got the vote, and so on. People talk about the "Jim Crow south", but Jim Crow laws were laws, not anything imposed by capitalism or business. Just getting out of the way was what needed to happen.
Often the people who do a thing are the people who know the most about how to do a thing. State planning has in eras like ancient egypt and ancient sumer been able to engage in large scale planning that worked for a long time, but first, the megastates that formed were unable to deal with changing conditions such as we saw during the bronze age collapse, and when those states fell the individuals were powerless to help themselves, leading to mass suffering. We also know that many times bureaucrats aren't competent, and so the most manmade deaths in history didn't happen during some war, they happened due to central state planning by incompetent bureaucrats. When left to their own devices through mechanisms like liberalism, instead of being harmed, individuals found ways to thrive.
Many people think our anti-libertarian utopia is perfect, but in reality there are some very bad indicator -- according to many scholars, we're facing birthrates well below replacement levels in the majority of the world's countries -- Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, with the only region with lots of population growth being Africa, and I've heard reasonable arguments that such conditions are going to be temporary and are being bolstered in part by material conditions brought about by the massive amount of capital held by baby boomers who are slowly having to liquidate that wealth to live off of. Some really rough times are going to be ahead, with relatively tiny youth populations having to support multiple retirees, and an overproduction of elites who are all jockeying for power in a system that's already top heavy. We're in an era where Gen Z (and presumably Gen Alpha after them) are facing historic levels of mental illness and historically low levels of wellness by several measures. The whole world order is about to change, and it'll probably be into something completely different in response to the catastrophic failures of the bureaucratic state.
My hope is that the next phase will look at the eras of massive governments and reject that, bringing something considerably more libertarian. People cannot live by money alone, and we need connections to the people around us, to our local communities, to our spiritual sides, and I don't think you get any of that by relinquishing control to a heartless soulless bureaucratic machine.
That being said, you can't just eliminate government. The times libertarianism works is when you don't need government, and that happens when you have institutions other than government that are strong, such as religion or other social institutions that can bring people together and help support prosocial actions and oppose antisocial actions.
First, we live in the least libertarian era of all time. Taxation at the level we see would be considered tyrannical, kings would hang for the level of taxation we see. Governments micromanage our lives to an extent previous eras couldn’t possibly imagine. When people try to imagine a more libertarian world, it isn’t really possible at this point because government is so baked in.
Second, corporations are government entities. They exist as entities because government created that superstructure. It could change that superstructure and has, to make them more powerful. When people say “government need to control everything because corporations will otherwise” it’s a misnomer since they’re both government.
The world would be a lot better with much less government. There’s been times when more than one dollar of government money is spent for every dollar spent by the private sector. This has a destructive effect on the world. Even in the so-called “private sector”, the largest companies are the companies best able to leverage government largesse, not the companies best able to sell products and services to customers. People are pissed off at Elon Musk, but internet companies like PayPal grew on government, Tesla was built by government dollars and its stock price is puffed up by inflation, SpaceX is almost exclusively selling to governments, it’s a veneer for taking taxpayer dollars. Same with most other massive companies.
Now part of that basket is also going to be popular social programs whether I like it or not -- for example, the fact that the current government of Canada is evil and incompetent doesn't have any bearing on the fact that the single payer healthcare is quite popular. There are public goods that are worth pooling resources to create, and even libertarians believe in some common goods such as military.
That being said, there are good arguments against government too.
Single payer healthcare doesn't mean government run healthcare. It means that the market provides insurance and it is paid for by the government. The individual actors are private entities with their own freedom.
Progressives believe that capitalism creates greed, and that's backwards: Greed always exists, under every single system. The thing capitalism does is it systematizes it. If you want more, then under capitalism you have to do something to get more, and that usually means serving others in some way. Under most other systems, if you want more then you just need to step on innocent people.
Free market capitalism without the burdens of government tend to be blind. Minorities got power through commerce long before governments or universities recognized that those people could be useful if empowered. Women got jobs before they got the vote, and so on. People talk about the "Jim Crow south", but Jim Crow laws were laws, not anything imposed by capitalism or business. Just getting out of the way was what needed to happen.
Often the people who do a thing are the people who know the most about how to do a thing. State planning has in eras like ancient egypt and ancient sumer been able to engage in large scale planning that worked for a long time, but first, the megastates that formed were unable to deal with changing conditions such as we saw during the bronze age collapse, and when those states fell the individuals were powerless to help themselves, leading to mass suffering. We also know that many times bureaucrats aren't competent, and so the most manmade deaths in history didn't happen during some war, they happened due to central state planning by incompetent bureaucrats. When left to their own devices through mechanisms like liberalism, instead of being harmed, individuals found ways to thrive.
Many people think our anti-libertarian utopia is perfect, but in reality there are some very bad indicator -- according to many scholars, we're facing birthrates well below replacement levels in the majority of the world's countries -- Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, with the only region with lots of population growth being Africa, and I've heard reasonable arguments that such conditions are going to be temporary and are being bolstered in part by material conditions brought about by the massive amount of capital held by baby boomers who are slowly having to liquidate that wealth to live off of. Some really rough times are going to be ahead, with relatively tiny youth populations having to support multiple retirees, and an overproduction of elites who are all jockeying for power in a system that's already top heavy. We're in an era where Gen Z (and presumably Gen Alpha after them) are facing historic levels of mental illness and historically low levels of wellness by several measures. The whole world order is about to change, and it'll probably be into something completely different in response to the catastrophic failures of the bureaucratic state.
My hope is that the next phase will look at the eras of massive governments and reject that, bringing something considerably more libertarian. People cannot live by money alone, and we need connections to the people around us, to our local communities, to our spiritual sides, and I don't think you get any of that by relinquishing control to a heartless soulless bureaucratic machine.
That being said, you can't just eliminate government. The times libertarianism works is when you don't need government, and that happens when you have institutions other than government that are strong, such as religion or other social institutions that can bring people together and help support prosocial actions and oppose antisocial actions.
What do you mean? I was literally just walking down the street in NYC just as I read your post and I got punched in the face too! How does this keep on happening?!?!?!
