A true liberal would never support democracy, and democracy is an attack on liberty, period.
The liberal tradition is about a negative state to begin with - that since the state by definition is about restricting or coercing, it is the state that must be disempowered.
Democracy is a soft communism to be gradually introduced into free society, where despite the existence of private property and contractual exchange based on it, there must be a means of bypassing the existing claims of people on what they own, and vote on other people’s property.
Every act of voting is an act of voting against liberty.
"With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, “we are the government.” The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.” The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that “we are all part of one another,” must be permitted to obscure this basic fact." - Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State
The Democrats are similar but they are not the same. We are all statists but they tend to prefer social programs, I have no interest in those.
Obama is the chief executive, he’s not a lawmaker. I have very much in common with many of my Republican representatives in Congress though. We have similar viewpoints and I think they got elected by constituencies that have similar viewpoints. They are not literally us, but they do represent us. That’s what republican government, as it was established in the Constitution, is all about.
I don’t think we’ll every see a third party that ever draws away more than 10 percent of the vote in any race. Mostly what third party candidates do is divert votes from whatever major party they most closely resemble.
I have never thought that long term peace was possible. War is part of human nature, human nature being revealed by human action. It’s something that all humans are capable of and it’s not something I believe I can rid the world of. Same for poverty, I don’t think that’s curable. If by slavery, you mean slavery to the state then obviously I support that. We can always try to change the tax laws but people are going to have to pay taxes, myself included. I don’t like the idea of people being able to opt out. People can expatriate though. If you don’t like this country, you can always leave. But to expect everyone to change just to suit a small minority seems unrealistic to me.
What I want is ultimately to get what I want. I do not care if other people get what they want, particularly libertarians. Libertarian happiness is not my responsibility in my opinion. My only responsibility is to myself and I feel much better served by our Republican government, no matter who’s running it, than I do by libertarian ideals or free societies.
It’s all just rhetoric. At the end of the day. they support the same bankers, military companies, media, and pharma interests. No one votes for this. Do you support the federal reserve? Do you know Austrian Business Cycle Theory?
Human nature is no apology for anything. Even if you were right, we should at least try to resist it, no? Its nature for some people to get fat. Fight it. Its nature for people to get cancer and heart disease. Fight it.
Why. We can grow enough food for everyone. We can sew enough clothes for them. Regardless of how you define poverty virtually everyone in the human race wants those things. Poverty is just a technical problem with the right institutional setup.
Lol. And if I started looting your house would it be okay just because you could move somewhere else? What about the people who don’t live in the USA but are still attacked by our “defense” policies?
Not asking everyone to change. You can still have your crazy military arms buildups and fancy multibillion dollar planes, but leave me out of it. Leave everyone else out of it. Don’t attack innocent people. That’s all we’re advocating.
Yeah, I wasn’t so happy about the Medicare expansion but that’s the way it goes.
I do support the Federal Reserve now even though I didn’t used to. I understand how Austrian Business Cycle Theory works but the Fed is a powerful and useful tool, I wouldn’t want to get rid of it.
I’m not apologizing for anything, I just don’t think I’m going to get rid of war so I don’t worry about it. It’s been around before me, it’ll be around long after I’m gone.
Because there will always be people who suck at making and keeping money. Either way, it’s too big a problem for me to worry about, so i don’t worry about it.
If you started looting my house, I’d be legally justified in killing you. If I use the government to take a piece of your money every year, I’m perfectly within my legal rights. It may not be moral, but I don’t really care, and it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t want that to happen you can either move or just pay up. The people who are attacked by our military are not legally protected by our courts, if the American people are ok with attacking them, that’s all that matters from a practical perspective.
Well that’s too much to ask. You will not be left out, and innocent people may be attacked from time to time. I don’t expect you to like it or even accept it but it is what it is.
So do you not buy ABCT? The fed is a powerful tool for its masters. But for the economy as a whole it is only disastrous. The solution is free banking/currency.
Actually it really does matter to a lot of people . But i guess if it doesn’t matter to you then its not worth talking about. I’m crappy at drawing comics, but you can imagine how the following might look. Single panel.
The scene: An elaborate torture chamber, miles beneath the earth’s surface, bloodstained
Snowflake/Mises.org: “Wow. Innocent people shouldn’t be tortured.”
Bloomj31: “If you fasten the buckles, the victim can’t escape. No matter what, they are at my mercy. I can do whatever suits me.”
We take 2 things from this picture
Bloomj31 is completely amoral. He doesn’t care. To him, might-makes-right. Its okay to do something if you have the power to do it.
Bloomj31’s discourse is entirely limited to technical aspects, of which we are all aware, but not interested in.
So, why are you on these forums? You’re not interested in our moral outlooks. You support the homogenous administration despite our prudential recommendations to the contrary (calculation problem, knowledge problem, incentive problem, vs free market). So you’re on an Austro-Libertarian forum, and have no kinship with either Libertarianism or Austrian Econ.
Do you like the fact that we’re honest on these forums? We say “don’t kill innocent people”, so you get to say “killing innocent people is fine by me” and feel reall Machiavellian about yourself. Its a place you can be seen as a psychopath while still clinging to fashionable ideaology.
If I were a psychopath i’d have some guts about it and just be a full out neo-nazi. But then people wouldn’t think I was cool. I guess this is a way for you to save face and appear normal to the majority of people, but revel in your self-absorbedness on the side. Shrug
If it works for you, then do it! Aw but I don’t need to tell you that.
I buy ABCT, but I’ve read enough to know that the business cycle has happened without central banks. The business cycle doesn’t require a central bank it just requires an expansion of the money and/or credit supply and that can happen without a central bank. I think that maybe without a central bank the booms wouldn’t be as severe and so the busts wouldn’t be as severe. Either way, the central bank has some uses that are very valuable. It doesn’t make sense to me to throw it away just because it can cause bad things to happen as well.
I don’t really think might makes right, I just don’t think right and wrong matter from a practical perspective. They’re just values. As you pointed out, I look at the technical aspects, the legal aspects in particular, when making decisions. I try not to make decisions based on morals.
I’m on these forums because I enjoy a lot of the conversations on here.
If you had no values you would collapse in a motionless heap for lack of reason to act. Practice is acting on values. Saying that you don’t have “right and wrong” values just tells us that your values involve no respect for others.
Since you’ve been on these forums for so long, I’m sure that many people have tried to “convert” you in many ways. I’m just curious about which books you have read from the Mises library. I find most of the arguments from the Austrian school very difficult to dismiss just because it may be more practical to accept the status quo.
What wildcat banking? Yeah maybe it wasn’t centralized, but it was all chartered by the state. But we’re advocating free banking not “not central banking” as a solution to business cycles.
You’re downplaying one of the biggest reasons why our economy is 20 years behind where it should be.
You’ll have to elaborate on what these uses are. If I understand you correctly, you see the central bank as a tool that has simply been misused in the past, but might be used for good under other circumstances. The Austrian claim is that price controls are always counterproductive.
Practicality cannot inform anyone as to the correct choice of action. It can only tell you that A will cause B. This is only useful if you have ideas about what B entails morally. A man without morals cannot act. His behavior will be purposeless.
There is nothing other than credit inflation that the Federal Reserve can do, except maybe dropping money from helicopters, which is technically not credit.
@Snowflake, “good” is a relative term. Good to whom?
Practicality tells me how things work. I understand that might makes possible. Whether I like it or not, that’s how things work. As far as morals, I suppose I have them, but they’re ascertained by weighing pros versus cons.
Actions are evaluating by weighing pros and cons. Morals tell you what kinds of results you’re looking for. There’s nothing “pro” or “con” about letting people starve if your morals don’t include caring about other people.
