I never seen a government pull out a 99 cent store.
Governments destroy 99 cent stores.
Are you referring to my post?
You’re assuming non-indolent people. Some people don’t give a shit about initiative, ingenuity, productivity, etc. They just want free money. You cannot first appeal to their sense of economics in an effort to change that understanding. You have to first convince them to not be lazy. Once they want to start working and such, then you’re in a better position to make your free market case.
Of course. I think this is a matter then not of economics or theory, but a change in character for the person.
We must seek at first not to be economists, theorizers or debaters. We must first befriend those who need help, and help them.
@ Shackleton
Not true. Lazy people are often the beneficiaries of talented entrepeneurs in the market. It doesn’t take a particularly enterprising or talented person to buy a cheaper product. They don’t have to be excellent at anything, they can just take a standard job and just enjoy the wealth creating effects of the open market.
Who’s Shackleton?
I think in my first post I said you can have poor libertarians. I’m merely making the point that if you want to convince/convert someone of or to free markets/libertarianism, then they must first place value on the increased opportunities afforded under that system by virtue of that system. If someone doesn’t care about work/productivity, then why should they care about libertarianism?
Because, in addition to providing better employment opportunities, it provides cheaper goods and services. One need not care about working hard to care about attaining a better standard of living.
what demonstrates a good work ethic?
the example is a woman that works 50 hours a week at a job, and then works to take care of her children.
is the value of a stay at home mom zero since no ecomonic value come from it?
some baby can get a trust fund set up and contribute more economic value, but that’s not demonstrating a higher work ethic.
people can have a great work ethic and need assistance, the ishue is getting that assistance from voluntary means, not from coervice means of government.
plenty of people work 80 hours a week helping other at their church and arent getting rich out of it and may need assistance themselves, but the work in voluntary and the interaction is a voluntary handup or a real community. setting up organizations that are religous and secular and giving people options ought to help.
I already said you can have poor libertarians. I’m restricting my discussion to certain types of Obama-phone people.
Who says they want a better standard of living? My point is illustrated by someone who, just for example, prefers to not work with government money making $8/hour instead of actually working at $10/hour. A libertarian system does not reward indolence. Under a libertarian system, their standard of living would decrease without the gubmit money.
Ok I was misunderstanding you. I thought you were referring to people who didn’t want to work hard as entrepeneurs, rather than people who don’t want to work at all. In that case, yes, libertarianism doesn’t reward those who won’t work.
I think it’s hard to say, whether someone who is on welfare and working a shit job will have their standard of living decreased. There would certainly be more opportunity for them to move up to a better one. But it would definitely decrease for someone not working at all on welfare.
Yeah, I can see that I wasn’t explicit enough. Unfortunately, we have many of the latter case, and I guarantee you that, of the ones who actually voted, they all voted for Obama and the Democrats.
Yup, and they get more money to reproduce more. And republicans are against abortion why?
I am the son of poor immigrants, and the scenario described in the opening post resembles my mother to a large degree with the exception that she is married.
What I have found is that these type of people are already libertarians to a good degree. They don’t see any legitimacy in the government. They break laws as they see fit. They open up hair saloons in their apartments without licenses and could give a damn about laws prohibiting it. They even recognize that much of their suffering comes from the government. My answer to the OP then is this; we don’t need to convince the poor about libertarianism. They agree. From my personal experience at least I’ve rarely found a poor person who has any fondness for the state.
It is the middle class that I find are the most clingy to the state.
Heh, my friends from elementary school are working class whereas my friends from secondary school are mainly middle class. Now when meeting for a beer with the former there is always a good chance I will be hearing an impassionate rant about the state (taxes, corruption, traffic fines, public utilities, building permits, smoking bans…), whereas with the later any conversation involving politics is frustrating as hell and to be avoided if at all possible.
I, too, find that the degree of conditioning to believe in the state is dose-related to the amount of formal (perhaps, public) schooling a person gets. I believe that was the goal of progressive education.
Destruction of the purchasing power. . .
The younger someone is the less they can relate to how expensive things have become in dollars.
If the presumption is that I could do anything I think I would go around and start randomly talking to older people born in the 40’s-50’s who can talk about their first jobs making $70/wk., rent @ $15/wk. and having money left over after all the basic needs were met simply working one job.
I would focus on things like what a 1930’s silver quarter could purchase in the 1930’s and what the silver of that same coin melted down would be worth today in dollars if they were still in circulation.
There are now entire generations that have lived their entire lives under inflation who accept without question the notion that things getting more expensive over time is just the way the world works. . .
Good morning, JimmyJazz. I sure hope you didn’t think I was going anywhere, because I’m still here. Once again I’ll repeat my demand for you to show me just where I said I’d suggest to your hypothetical poor black single mother that she dig ditches. Thanks in advance.
Same way the left would convince her: give her money and stuff.
If you can’t do that, you have no “argument”.
Thanks for the additional replies. I don’t really have anything to say in reply to them (this was never intended as a debate thread whatsoever), but thanks for the replies.
It is interesting that some of you recognized the scenario as similar to your own lives of those of some of your libertarian acquaintances. Although some of the replies I got on the first page such as “become an escort” were truly outlandish, not to mention off-topic (they were more related to how the woman could better her life rather than how to convince her to become a libertarian) I think they got exponentially more reasonable as the thread progressed. The last 2 pages of replies were quite reasonable and were exactly what I was looking for.
have a private company give more stuff than the government, if people are that condesending to think that is the actual reason.
i think conservatives say it’s ok for a church to give but not ok for a government to give, as the church receives voluntarily and the government takes involuntarily.
Why should trying to convince this person be different from convincing any other person?