Already, there's deeply untrue parts of this: We don't really know why the US emerged on top after WWII. There wasn't an A/B test that proves it. An argument can easily be made that the US came out ahead because it was the largest country which hadn't been substantially bombed and/or invaded. It's not well founded to say it was because the US was a mix of capitalism and socialism. There's not enough evidence for that.
David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
131–140 of 373 posts
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#132In computer science or math terms, the market economy is incredibly simple to understand:
1) People are encouraged to locally optimize -- i.e. optimize their own happiness. But as any psychologist would point out, lots of people have no idea how to do that. Kind of a problem.
2) Local optimization rarely achieves the global optimum.
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#133Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth." This demonstrates a basic confusion that we Americans have about ourselves, even most "lefties" and "libertarians": The false belief that we live in a free market economy. The truth is, the state plays a m…
The 2012 US GDP was 15.68 trillion. The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% of the economic activity in the country. Depending on how you measure, you can quibble with this exact choice of numbers, but no matter how you fiddle you're not getting out of the Federal government being a huge part of the economy directly. State and local gov…
It's an often repeated libertarian mantra that the 22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Unfortunately, the network effect ensures that a "government node" in the economic graph is always nearby, and the coplexity inherent in the system makes it easy to form a plausible argument assigning blame to any node within distance 2 or 3 of a problem, making the mantra non-falsifiable.
It deserves mention that this game can be played in reverse just as easily.
The only way that I know to introduce an ounce of objectivity into the discussion is to pick a single topic and dive so deeply into it that you are no longer fooled by the false but plausible statements hurled around by either side. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult task. I don't know how to scale the approach.
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with you wholeheartedly on the political front, but I'm right with you on what we're actually debating. Hearing fellow liberals claim that conservatives want the poor and disadvantaged to suffer is like hearing conservatives say that liberals just want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it. Both arguments are shitty, and both either imply that the speaker isn't listening or…
Here's the thing you don't understand: Yes, conservatives do want the poor to suffer, because they think the poor are poor because they're too lazy to work hard and overcome their poverty. Making them suffer is the only way to make them contribute to society, in their view. Also, yes, as a liberal, I do want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it. That is exactly what I want to do. Wha…
> I do want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it
And what give you the right to take what belongs to others?
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm pointing out really has nothing to do with libertarianism, for what it's worth it's not a political position that I personally adhere to. I'm pointing out that whatever your political leaning you don't "just" get the government involved. Even if you think you should have a larger government than you have now the question is what kind of larger government, and once you make the wrong choice there's a huge ine…
My point is this: the concept of a larger government is very murky, so we should be very careful when we're talking about it. The stereotypical libertarian will propose universal, strict enforcement of violence used to protect people to whom the State has granted monopoly access to material goods. I don't recognize that as a smaller State than someone who proposes that except annually taking some proportion of it and…
>> My point is this: the concept of a larger government is very murky, so we should be very careful when we're talking about it.
The US government is pretty fucking large right now, is it not? In fact, it's an Empire, and serves as a great warning example of what a minimal government can/will become.
>> One state may be better than the other, but it's still all pile of violence, configured in a different way.
Exactly. So how about no State then? They say that the difference between a Minarchist and an Anarchist is "about six months". The period of time in between is irrelevant. The point is that a lot of Libertarians end up going all the way once they start seeing reality for what it is.
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#136Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth." This demonstrates a basic confusion that we Americans have about ourselves, even most "lefties" and "libertarians": The false belief that we live in a free market economy. The truth is, the state plays a m…
Very well put.
Mariana Mazzucato talks about this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The libertarian and anti-government sentiments aren't saying that we shouldn't be all in this together, but that we shouldn't be forced to be all in this together. That difference is what the entire argument is about. Few people are saying saying "let's not do this" for some value of "this", they're saying "let's not force everyone to do this". That's a very profound difference, it's why having the government make an…
That argument is tiresome. Many libertarians want to enforce a very particular and ahistorical version of property rights, one dictated from above and with a studied blindness for the reason we've invented the group of rights we think of as property. They want to subject everyone to a society where state violence is used for and only on behalf of people who in the past were granted monopoly access to some material go…
I used to freak right wing libertarians out by following this like of thought with them when I was politically active. I had one in tears during a break in a debate because I was there representing a Marxist party, yet I agreed with him about most issues. He could not understand why, and he saw it as destroying his credibility.
I pointed out that to me, as a marxist (some would argue the term libertarian socialist, or left communist would be more descriptive), his arguments for individual freedom was the right starting point for evaluating most policy, but the only logical conclusion is to limit government recognition of property rights too, as a large portion of the laws to protect private property takes away more rights from the public at large than what it offers to the public as owners:
I may gain exclusive rights to a small area, but I lose access and even limited rights to most of the world.
And In fact most countries do recognize that property rights must be limited to various extents to safeguard the rights of the population as a whole, through things like guarantees of access to land areas held in common (or owned by the government) that will not be sold, or legal protections for access to beaches or wilderness that often extends to granting legally protected public access to privately owned land.
The question is not whether or not property rights must be limited, but where to draw the balance. Yet somehow right wing libertarians tends to want to want to tighten property rights, while at the same time they argue for reducing government intervention in pretty much everything else. The inconsistency is glaring to me.
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The libertarian and anti-government sentiments aren't saying that we shouldn't be all in this together, but that we shouldn't be forced to be all in this together. That difference is what the entire argument is about. Few people are saying saying "let's not do this" for some value of "this", they're saying "let's not force everyone to do this". That's a very profound difference, it's why having the government make an…
Take this as sampling bias if you will, but most of the well-reasoned argument that I've heard from libertarians or anarchists are really just arguments that we should go back to building societies on the scale of city-states, and stop having them on the scale of the US.
Scale is where the comparison between those two will break down. The first is power-assertive on an small scale (usually individual). The second has no scale, because the driving motivation would be the questioning of any power structure (not necessarily destruction, as it's usually stereotyped). But I'm describing the textbook version here, not everyday interpretations.
(Edit: i was trying to keep this out of quick searches, but to be clear, lib-----ian vs a-----ism ;)
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#139The hardest thing for me is that I'm super aware of how fucked up things are, but not totally sure what can done so just say "this sucks" and go back to work and whining about healthcare and listening to Slate podcasts. If I learned anything from the Wire, it's that these problems Simon brings up are so institutionalized that there's almost no way to fix them without some massive change, but I'm too small and irrelev…
Check out "Basic Income". For me, this is one of the few things that give me hope.
Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'
#140Capitalism isn't bad. Statism is.
There is no single argument against capitalism that doesn't involve government intervention fucking up everything and everybody.