101–110 of 170 posts
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You're confusing Libertarians with Anarchists. As an aside: I've always been waiting for communists to declare North Korea heaven on earth.
North Korea is an absolut monarchy not a communist country, even if they say so, they also say they are a people's democratic republic and it's clear they're not.
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I have never quite understood why libertarians think that is the precise optimum for the amount of government activities and their "theft" of my money via taxation. Don't libertarians understand or accept that there are market failures that government is needed to solve? Or do they think that in every case government makes more bad than good when trying to solve market failures? Or is it just that freedom of individu…
There are a lot of literature about this. But to answer to your question, whole concept of "Market failure" is considered a myth. Just two articles among many: https://mises.org/library/market-failure-myth https://mises.org/library/response-market-failure-drones Thomas J. DiLorenzo's light book "Organized Crime" has some chapters about it as well. It is available there. https://mises.org/library/organized-crime-unvar…
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There are a lot of literature about this. But to answer to your question, whole concept of "Market failure" is considered a myth. Just two articles among many: https://mises.org/library/market-failure-myth https://mises.org/library/response-market-failure-drones Thomas J. DiLorenzo's light book "Organized Crime" has some chapters about it as well. It is available there. https://mises.org/library/organized-crime-unvar…
In other words a faith-based ideology, where markets cannot fail by definition
This highlights well some of the conversations I have with folks who want to replace fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies. Sure, one can design a better monetary system, but that doesn't mean people are going to want to use it. You have to incentivize and enable people in order to get them to change. M-PESA and the similar mobile money telecom products are doing more for digitizing and disrupting fiat currencies tha…
> You have to incentivize and enable people in order to get them to change. It's also possible the incentive will come by itself: if advocates of commodity money (money with an inflexible supply/stock) are right, inflation will occur in traditional currencies sooner or later. No better incentive to store your value in bitcoins than seeing the value you have in traditional currency slowly erode. Time will tell whether…
What I've never quite understood is how those things align with investment. If I have $1000, can I predictably make more money by buying $1000 worth of art than $1000 worth of stock? If so, why? Buffet's "you can fondle the cube, but it will not respond" would seem to stand, but at the same time artworks and so on seem to only be getting more expensive.
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Are implying that, for example, if Catalonia, Bask or Scotland become a country situation will be ripe for killing Spanish or English man living there?
"ethnic and religious groups" are the key words there. This is essentially what had to be dismantled in Northern Ireland - it was under the control of one "group" usually defined as Protestant. Transferring it to a situation under human rights law where all religions could live with equal protection under the law (including protection from the state and police by means of human rights law) was critical to ending the…
If one group have ethnic cleansing ambitions they will do it anyway. This whole "equal protection and human rights" rhetoric is laughable where on group seriously oppresses other. It is better off that all groups live in more autonomy and if one is not happy, moving to another place is better than living under threat. Of course, this is not the "liberty" people are longing for, but it is the preferable choice.
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The article emphasized that the counterfeit currency cost about the same amount to make as the actual trading value of the currency.
Yes, but that's just begging the question — where is value being created in this equation?
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What many libertarians want is decentralization. As much as possible. They probably want to get rid of all powerful Federal Government but local governments (as small as possible) and confederations are usually fine.
i.e. warlords
>Panama has been using the dollar for decades, and this hasn't prevented it from becoming one of Central America's most successful n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ tax havens. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/panama-... Fixed that for you :) Control over your currency is critical for maintaining national sovereignty, and the author waves it away like nothing. Just take what the EU forced upon Greece: https://en.wik…
Why restrict it to the nation then? Why not city currencies? There are lots of countries - like India and China - where the gap in income between regions is larger than between countries. It's a weird concept money, and I wonder what the right level is. I doubt it is optimised at the country level, but then a "better" notion like demographic similarity may be impractical, even if better, e.g. one currency for Norther…
As an aside: I've been waiting for Libertarians to declare Somalia to be heaven on earth. I wonder why they've never picked up on the obvious real-world example of a nation with no central state government with a monopoly on violence?
Start with Kevin Carson, "Somalia — Is That Really All You Got?" for a good primer on libertarian/anarchist thought on the subject: https://c4ss.org/content/2859
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Are implying that, for example, if Catalonia, Bask or Scotland become a country situation will be ripe for killing Spanish or English man living there?
"ethnic and religious groups" are the key words there. This is essentially what had to be dismantled in Northern Ireland - it was under the control of one "group" usually defined as Protestant. Transferring it to a situation under human rights law where all religions could live with equal protection under the law (including protection from the state and police by means of human rights law) was critical to ending the…
"The SNP believe that immigration is essential to the strength of our economy and adds greatly to our cultural fabric."
https://www.snp.org/pb_what_is_the_snp_s_policy_on_immigrati...
The SNP is sometimes described as being about civic nationalism rather than ethnic nationalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_nationalism
Edit: Arguably the closest we've got to ethnic cleansing was the Highland Clearances - which were inflicted on Gaels by landowners.