• Matrim@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Libertarians are just Republicans who don’t understand how taxes work.

    • EmptySlime@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Some of the funniest shit in the world to me is watching a libertarian talk to pretty much anyone remotely competent in discussing policy and watching in real time as the libertarian reinvents things like taxes and liberal democracy trying to make their policy prescriptions make sense.

      • lobut
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        1 year ago

        I had a “debate” with a libertarian once. It’s annoying because they reply with: “it’s the government’s fault” or “free market can do it better” and citing examples just leans to their boring hypotheticals.

        Workers rights, healthcare, regulations, public transit, public healthcare, mail, etc, it’s boring how uninterested they are in how things actually work.

        • EmptySlime@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah that can get very boring. I suppose though if they had any interest in how things actually worked they wouldn’t be libertarians. That’s exactly what kept me from aligning with them back in high school when I first started getting into politics.

          Like I got as far as roads and it was like “Wait a second, how would you handle roads going into areas where where it wouldn’t be profitable to run them?” They either just wouldn’t have roads, or someone would build it and would make it profitable by charging exorbitant tolls. Neither of those were acceptable to me and my agreement with libertarianism died. There are always going to be things in society that are not profitable but are worth having because they have downstream benefits to society.

          • Asafum@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            The problem I’ve had with a lot of them related to what you mentioned is that their very base motivation for wanting libertarianism is selfishness. They don’t want to pay for things other people use so the argument becomes “well that area just doesn’t have roads. I won’t live there so I don’t care. That’s for the locals in that area to figure out.”

            From what I’ve gathered libertarianism is “I got mine, fuck you.”

          • uranibaba@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Like hospitals. Sure they can be profitable, but they should still be running with funding even if they are not.

          • bAZtARd@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Yea, like, you know, clean water, moderate temperatures and a livable environment…

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The argument is generally to favor non-coercive solutions to avoid centralized power breeding corruption (admittedly with a caveat that wealth can also create centralized power). I’m not clear how that would entail more taxes. Or exactly what you mean by “liberal democracy”, which in the conventional use isn’t something they disagree with?

        • EmptySlime@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t mean more taxes I mean taxes at all. Pretty much every libertarian I’ve ever heard talking about it says “Taxation is theft,” then the ones I’m talking about will for example get asked to describe their ideal society and when asked how to say maintain some key infrastructure they essentially describe collecting taxes from the citizens for it. Things like that.

          • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            That’s a special breed of American right-wing libertarianism. It’s not indicative of the ideology worldwide, nor does it reflect the beliefs of the more academic libertarians.

                • EmptySlime@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  So Australian Libertarians don’t believe in the free market above all else and that governments basically should only exist to enforce individual property rights? Awesome.

                • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  The True Scotsmen are hanging out with the True Libertarians in Australia. Good to know. Are the True Christians there as well?

                  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    I understand you’re being snarky with the No True Scottsman parable, but what I said is accurate. Libertarian has taken on a different meaning in America than it has in most of the world. There are Libertarians in most developed nations. I chose Australia because there’s an Australian commenting on this very post, expressing his surprise at what Americans view as libertarian. I’m sure you can find his comments if you look.

      • Hype@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I was a libertarian until I vacationed in a country where taxes were used on its people instead of it military.

        (Gross over simplification for comedy before anyone comes at me for my political beliefs)

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Pretty much. It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to figure out that if you are spewing out all these policies that are going to hurt people that cute coed isn’t going to want to hang out with you. So, you lie about what you believe. You aren’t mean nasty gop you are cool enlightened libertarian. You don’t respect her intelligence enough to expect her to figure out what you really believe.

        Quite a few years ago I came to the decision that if I had any opinion that I was embarrassed about, it was a sign that I should reevaluate it. That doesn’t mean always going with the herd. It means that I was only going to defend embarrassing ideas that I am so sure about I am willing to take whatever society will throw at me for holding them.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I wouldn’t say Democrat takes on libertarianism have ever been very good. Especially in recent years with the alt-right trying to occupy the middle space between “libertarian” and “Republican” and adding to the confusion.

      You have a problem on two ends - corporate interests can get out of hand, pollute, monopolize, etc., and you want to rein that in somehow. This can be done via the market, since corps do need money to survive, but a lot of people don’t care enough to make it happen. On the flip side, if you rely on government to just control everything and hope they’ll act benevolently, there are huge risks - a government agency could be benign or beneficial, or it can turn into a machine for oppression and monopolization.

      I feel like the Democrat takes never acknowledge the negatives of state control (at least unless it’s something Republican-associated) and also never acknowledge there’s a valid way to accomplish anything outside of the state. It seems like their answer is always to just throw state programs at everything. Well, we did try having the state run everything once…

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Democrats constantly complain about government control. Defund the police ring a bell? How about all the wars over school district control? Or wasting money on the military?

        Just because you lean towards moving power and resources from private to public sector doesn’t mean you always always agree with the public sector.

        If I support NASA does that mean I agree with every decision ever made by the Fed?

        • dx1@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Democrats constantly complain about government control. Defund the police ring a bell? How about all the wars over school district control? Or wasting money on the military?

          Look what I wrote:

          I feel like the Democrat takes never acknowledge the negatives of state control (at least unless it’s something Republican-associated)

          Wouldn’t really say “defund the police” was a mainstream Dem thing though, they mostly distanced themselves from it.

      • Samwise@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think it’s because, as you laid out, the only 2 current options are market led control which isn’t viable, and govt based which is viable but risky. Since it’s the only viable option it gets the risks downplayed.

        • dx1@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Well, in market or government, if you have bad people you get bad results. It’s not a simple “viable or not viable” - right now we’re in a mode where most people implicitly assume that any business allowed to exist is probably OK, and don’t really exercise boycott, while relying on regulators etc. to clean up the mess. But that kind of abdication of responsibility isn’t a constant of human nature or something, it’s just what we’ve lazily been doing in this society for a while. Likewise, it’s not the case where regulators, politicians, judges etc. are universally acting in good faith - it’s hard to put a number to it, but there are examples of abuse all over the board as well.

      • PerCarita@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Democrats in the US are not as left-leaning as they make themselves out to be. I’d argue they moved further right economically a couple of decades ago, which pushed the Republicans even further right to the point of absurdity. What to you seem like the Democratic Party’s attempt at “state controlling” things aren’t actually that extreme, or that left-wing for that matter. Both parties are right-leaning. There’s no center or center left in the US. Bernie tried to be center-left, but he was seen as too extreme.

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      No they’re not. That’s an American Republican appropriation of an otherwise complex ideology. Do you think Chomsky is a Republican who doesn’t understand taxes?