Jeff, your degree didn't seem to enable you to read. Where do you get that I'm "blaming others about [my] situation"? I'm as financially secure as it's possible for an honest person to be in the US, which means my future is still hanging by a thread. As is yours. My first thought when I wake up is how much I love my life, and how much I …
Jeff, your degree didn't seem to enable you to read. Where do you get that I'm "blaming others about [my] situation"? I'm as financially secure as it's possible for an honest person to be in the US, which means my future is still hanging by a thread. As is yours. My first thought when I wake up is how much I love my life, and how much I want everyone to have the same--the ability to take responsibility for the people and places that have been entrusted to them. I've been very competent in that and it's given me beautiful places to live and daughters who take responsibility for their own lives and who I could depend on, if I needed to. Everyone should have that.
What I see both in Appalachia and in California is a waste of human life, potential and joy because our economic system INCLUDING ACADEMIA makes the rich richer. A friend just sent a NY Times article that makes a point I've made repeatedly: "Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean."
Your original comment was "I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either ... You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life ... stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions."
Rather than changing the subject to Reagan, look at the derision in your opinion of me when you thought I was some loser without a degree. You still haven't been able to shake the idea of my 'bad situation'. You've completely proven my point.
Note that the wealth disparity started to really grow after 1980, when Reagan was able to implement his libertarian policies. Before that, we had above average inflation that caused the fed to raise interest rates in an attempt to control borrowing and some tax changes were implemented to reduce the loss on savings to inflation, which helped the rich who had far more savings, but also helped middle class people stem those losses. However, Reagan cut the upper marginal tax rates that increased the gap between rich and everyone below them:
What you're complaining about is the result of Republican governance as a result of their libertarian, pro-wealthy policies, not liberals in general. In fact, libertarianism is a big problem in California, with their anti-high rise, affordable housing zoning that made sprawl worse and forced housing costs higher.
You don't know what you're talking about. Reagan is THE subject because he and the Republican libertarians created this situation with their policies. Due to the success amongst those that you're defending, the Democrats made a sea change with the New Democrats that courted those same voters that elected libertarian Republicans, those Clinton Democrats.
This is a fact. That you see me deriding you proves my point, you don't get it and you blame me for your failures and your poor decisions, such as voting Republican. Own up to your mistakes, don't blame me or degreed professionals.
fwiw, as Dan Baum's 1996 book Smoke And Mirrors points out, it was President Reagan who quadrupled the Federal War on Drugs budget in the early 1980s, which pretty much disqualifies him from being a "libertarian" in the civil liberties sense. https://archive.org/details/smokemirrorswaro00baum
Also, David Stockman (who does qualify as a big-L libertarian, for better or worse) quit his post as economic advisor for the Reagan administration when it became clear to him that Reagan was going to base his economic agenda on perpetuation of Congressional earmarks and status quo spending policies financed by deficit spending (Reagan was the first president to push the national debt over $1 trillion.) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-04-13-8601260815-story.html
Actually, libertarians and conservatives share a common view that the wealthy should hold power, conservatives because the wealthy are god's elect, and libertarians because the wealthy are more industrious. So, to your point, it is kind of tough to discern sometimes.
So, I'll grant you that point, I should be more careful because I do know better. Reagan was aligned with libertarian ideology, that the wealthy must be unconstrained to empower the economy, due to either his religious belief or that he agreed with their doctrine. Now that you bring that up, I'm more inclined to agree that it's the former.
You've fallen for a common confusion related to political labeling- that there's no difference between libertarianism "in the civil liberties sense"- which is how I explicitly qualified the term- and libertarianism "in the economic sense", a la Peter Thiel. It's as easy to turn up examples of people who adhere to the label in one sense and not the other as it is to find examples of self-identifying libertarians who embrace the philosophy in both sense of the word.
The same holds for the label "conservative." There are plenty of people who are conservative in terms of their support for what might be termed "traditional values" who support left-leaning economic programs.
Getting triggered simply by the appearance of a term without acknowledging how it's modified- or without reading for context and content to get a grasp of the sense of it- is a formula for staying stuck at the Twitter mob level of political sophistication. There's more to the game than that.
Another point that you appear to be confused on: the notion that there's some inherent alliance between Christian religious doctrine and laissez-faire capitalist economics. I get that some proponents of the latter have in recent decades have propounded that fiction. But nobody has any business buying into it. Jesus didn't spent much time on economic prescriptions in the Gospels. But to the extent that his quoted words might be said to allude to economics, my readings indicate that he favored a "mixed economy." He endorsed individual enterprise and integrity, but also the social obligations summed up in the Beatitudes.
I don't find much evidence that Ronald Reagan was especially religious. To the extent that his religious views influenced his politics, it was expressed mostly in his abhorrence of the State Atheist doctrines and policies of Communist states like the USSR and the PRC. Paradoxically, the Cold War provided cover for all sorts of unscrupulous political extremism on the Right, mantled in "Christian Anti-Communism." American evangelical Christianity's Cold War and post-Cold War alliance with the American Right has benefited political Rightism a lot more than it's distinguished itself as a Christian religious example. There's a lot of compartmentalization and denial going on there. Nowadays we have a lot of "Ayn Rand Christians." Which would be funny, if the real-world consequences weren't so horrible.
standard Substack glitchery. I suggest that they farm out comments to Disqus, or adopt a different format- I can think of all sorts of Internet forums that work much more smoothly than the formatting used by Substack. And with many more features, at that.
"You've fallen for a common confusion related to political labeling"
I'm not arguing that libertarians are not liberal, they do believe in inherent right and so are liberal. However, most do not support the idea that we have obligations to others as evolved social animals as they follow Ayn Rand's "selfishness is a virtue" doctrine (https://aynrand.org/novels/the-virtue-of-selfishness/). This feeds into their "property rights" centric worldview in which they reject governmental regulation to protect our environment in preference for their failed "market based" solutions that produced the environmental problems in the first place (https://www.cato.org/speeches/environmentalism-market-economy-creative-ideas).
Peter Thiel and The Koch Brothers. I know individuals who align with me on environmental and animal rights issues and that government must regulate and so reject the Thiel/Koch view, but they are not the movement. The movement is not civil rights based, it is profit, property-rights based. It has not fought the conservative movement in their nullification of rights, such as in their unconstitutional nullification of a woman's right control her own life.
You're missing my primary point- which is that the word "libertarian" can be used as a descriptive label in more than one strict sense. Everyone who self-identifies as having libertarian leanings is not a supporter of the Koch brothers, okay? The term "libertarian" originated as a quite general philosophical label, not as a pigeonhole for a standardized set of political positions. This is an objective fact. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libertarian#h1
I get the benefit of Republicans turf-claiming that everyone who speaks positively of libertarianism in any sense as if they're GOP-leaning voters (despite the fact that many of them are not.) But what's the payoff for anyone identifying on the Left in agreeing with them? Does it hit some dogmatic ideological sweet spot to do so? It certainly doesn't pay off as a tactic in the politics of democratic persuasion. Because contrary to poli-sci categorical over-calculations, ultimately a political movement or candidate earns support one vote at a time. From the point of view of someone who views libertarianism as a philosophical stance that inclines toward respecting individual rights and agency over automatically defaulting to collective demands for conformity, reflexively sneering at the mere utterance of the word "libertarian" sounds like an imperious demand to for someone to admit the wrongness of bucking 'collective wisdom' in order to exercise their individual free will in any way, shape, or form.
So if you're bent on demanding that the word "libertarian" be seen as a synonym for Republican Party membership or something similar, be my guest. I've certainly recurrently found that insistence in articles and comments found in outlets ranging from Salon and Rawstory to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But don't be surprised when the results aren't to your liking. Epistemic bubbles are funny that way.
I suggest you re-read my initial reply analytically, sentence by sentence. I'm really quite surprised that you're taking issue with it. I had thought that my words were clear. But if you can quote some other passages that you find objectionable, I may be able to clear up your confusion in some respects.
So, libertarians, although they believe in rights, ignore the rights of others in their axiom of property rights. Until I see libertarians anywhere along the spectrum of libertarianism renounce the centrality of property rights as expressed by the Cato Institute and Milton Friedman:
Open space is wildlife habitat and so we are obligated to preserve what those beings require to live. We do not own the environment, it is not ours to do with as we please as we are obligated to take into account the well being of those we don't value and are obligated to ensure that they have adequate access to resources to live.
"The fundamental beliefs of libertarians is pretty much spelled out by Ayn Rand."
No, they aren't. As I've spent the previous two comments attempting to explain, only to find you Not Listening.
Ironically, you won't have any trouble finding Randian Objectivists who wholeheartedly agree with your sharply delimited definition. A basis for bonding, perhaps, over a shared requirement for doctrinaire framings expressed as if they held the weight of objective truth.
I loathe the abstractions of Ideology expressed as a system; ideologies are meant to be tools, and their contention in a dialectic is not to be confused with a cage match to the death. But given that Ideologues are apparently only capable of considering political and social questions in their idealized forms, have at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
I don't waste my time conversing with people who are Not Listening to my contributions. A problem that's indicated by your disregard for my request to quote any of my own words, or even passing acknowledgement of the first meaning found in standard dictionary definitions of the word "libertarian."
"As I've spent the previous two comments attempting to explain, only to find you Not Listening."
I hear you, I just don't agree with you. Don't you see the irony in your accusing me of not agreeing with your argument while you do not agree with mine? Why do you ignore what libertarians say about rights, obligations to others, morality, etc? They believe in rights, unlike conservatives, but not in universal rights as property rights are civil not natural as property is a contrivance of developing a social structure, accepting that one has a legal claim to something without having physical control or possession.
"Don't you see the irony in your accusing me of not agreeing with your argument while you do not agree with mine?"
That isn't irony; it's what's called disagreement. The difference being that I'm engaging with your observations and offering the reasons for my disagreement with your points, but you've shown no signs of listening to mine. Instead, you've constructed a strawperson caricature to lecture, while treating my posts as page breaks in your polemic.
Property rights are central to libertarianism as indicated in that post by a libertarian. The argument for property rights is an argument against the rights of others. For example:
"Environmental problems, whether uncontrolled pollution or the unsustainable use of natural resources, result when resources are left outside of the market institutions of property rights, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law."
The argument is obvious. It is arguing that a person will protect what he or she considers his or hers to the exclusion of others' well being and welfare and that they have no obligations to others except to acknowledge the property rights of others. That is selfishness and it is central to libertarianism.
I've already made several points to the effect that libertarian philosophical perspectives apply to a much wider arena of human affairs than economic questions. Beginning with my offering the Merriam-Webster definition #1, which you've ignored.
I've also made several comments alluding to the fact that there isn't simply One True Libertarian Perspective. For example, I view the exaltation of propertarianism to a "natural right" as laughable sophistry; "property" is a legalistic convention, and hence entirely dependent on the governmental monopoly on force that big-L Libertarian dogmatists claim to abhor. This fiction is particularly problematic in the case of real estate property, which the sophists seek to treat as identical in all respects with the ownership of chattel property consisting of cherished heirlooms and personal effects, and even with the individual physical body itself. So I'm entirely capable of making the argument opposing Real Property as Natural Right at least as effectively as yourself, and I'm willing to do so.
But you obviously can't wrap your head around anyone with libertarian leanings at any level holding the perspective I just expressed, because you are Not Listening- as is additionally shown by your absence of commentary on my link to Left-Libertarianism. Hence, this exchange is the equivalent of my arguing with a dogmatic Rightist who insists that the entire Left perspective can be summed up by Stalinism.
So I'm done here. You can continue your lecture without page breaks.
Jeff, your degree didn't seem to enable you to read. Where do you get that I'm "blaming others about [my] situation"? I'm as financially secure as it's possible for an honest person to be in the US, which means my future is still hanging by a thread. As is yours. My first thought when I wake up is how much I love my life, and how much I want everyone to have the same--the ability to take responsibility for the people and places that have been entrusted to them. I've been very competent in that and it's given me beautiful places to live and daughters who take responsibility for their own lives and who I could depend on, if I needed to. Everyone should have that.
What I see both in Appalachia and in California is a waste of human life, potential and joy because our economic system INCLUDING ACADEMIA makes the rich richer. A friend just sent a NY Times article that makes a point I've made repeatedly: "Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean."
Your original comment was "I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either ... You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life ... stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions."
Rather than changing the subject to Reagan, look at the derision in your opinion of me when you thought I was some loser without a degree. You still haven't been able to shake the idea of my 'bad situation'. You've completely proven my point.
See: https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
Note that the wealth disparity started to really grow after 1980, when Reagan was able to implement his libertarian policies. Before that, we had above average inflation that caused the fed to raise interest rates in an attempt to control borrowing and some tax changes were implemented to reduce the loss on savings to inflation, which helped the rich who had far more savings, but also helped middle class people stem those losses. However, Reagan cut the upper marginal tax rates that increased the gap between rich and everyone below them:
https://money.cnn.com/2010/09/08/news/economy/reagan_years_taxes/index.htm
What you're complaining about is the result of Republican governance as a result of their libertarian, pro-wealthy policies, not liberals in general. In fact, libertarianism is a big problem in California, with their anti-high rise, affordable housing zoning that made sprawl worse and forced housing costs higher.
You don't know what you're talking about. Reagan is THE subject because he and the Republican libertarians created this situation with their policies. Due to the success amongst those that you're defending, the Democrats made a sea change with the New Democrats that courted those same voters that elected libertarian Republicans, those Clinton Democrats.
This is a fact. That you see me deriding you proves my point, you don't get it and you blame me for your failures and your poor decisions, such as voting Republican. Own up to your mistakes, don't blame me or degreed professionals.
fwiw, as Dan Baum's 1996 book Smoke And Mirrors points out, it was President Reagan who quadrupled the Federal War on Drugs budget in the early 1980s, which pretty much disqualifies him from being a "libertarian" in the civil liberties sense. https://archive.org/details/smokemirrorswaro00baum
Also, David Stockman (who does qualify as a big-L libertarian, for better or worse) quit his post as economic advisor for the Reagan administration when it became clear to him that Reagan was going to base his economic agenda on perpetuation of Congressional earmarks and status quo spending policies financed by deficit spending (Reagan was the first president to push the national debt over $1 trillion.) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-04-13-8601260815-story.html
Actually, libertarians and conservatives share a common view that the wealthy should hold power, conservatives because the wealthy are god's elect, and libertarians because the wealthy are more industrious. So, to your point, it is kind of tough to discern sometimes.
So, I'll grant you that point, I should be more careful because I do know better. Reagan was aligned with libertarian ideology, that the wealthy must be unconstrained to empower the economy, due to either his religious belief or that he agreed with their doctrine. Now that you bring that up, I'm more inclined to agree that it's the former.
You've fallen for a common confusion related to political labeling- that there's no difference between libertarianism "in the civil liberties sense"- which is how I explicitly qualified the term- and libertarianism "in the economic sense", a la Peter Thiel. It's as easy to turn up examples of people who adhere to the label in one sense and not the other as it is to find examples of self-identifying libertarians who embrace the philosophy in both sense of the word.
The same holds for the label "conservative." There are plenty of people who are conservative in terms of their support for what might be termed "traditional values" who support left-leaning economic programs.
Getting triggered simply by the appearance of a term without acknowledging how it's modified- or without reading for context and content to get a grasp of the sense of it- is a formula for staying stuck at the Twitter mob level of political sophistication. There's more to the game than that.
Another point that you appear to be confused on: the notion that there's some inherent alliance between Christian religious doctrine and laissez-faire capitalist economics. I get that some proponents of the latter have in recent decades have propounded that fiction. But nobody has any business buying into it. Jesus didn't spent much time on economic prescriptions in the Gospels. But to the extent that his quoted words might be said to allude to economics, my readings indicate that he favored a "mixed economy." He endorsed individual enterprise and integrity, but also the social obligations summed up in the Beatitudes.
I don't find much evidence that Ronald Reagan was especially religious. To the extent that his religious views influenced his politics, it was expressed mostly in his abhorrence of the State Atheist doctrines and policies of Communist states like the USSR and the PRC. Paradoxically, the Cold War provided cover for all sorts of unscrupulous political extremism on the Right, mantled in "Christian Anti-Communism." American evangelical Christianity's Cold War and post-Cold War alliance with the American Right has benefited political Rightism a lot more than it's distinguished itself as a Christian religious example. There's a lot of compartmentalization and denial going on there. Nowadays we have a lot of "Ayn Rand Christians." Which would be funny, if the real-world consequences weren't so horrible.
What happened to this post?
standard Substack glitchery. I suggest that they farm out comments to Disqus, or adopt a different format- I can think of all sorts of Internet forums that work much more smoothly than the formatting used by Substack. And with many more features, at that.
I used to participate in plastic.com and it kept threads much more orderly and easily walked through.
"You've fallen for a common confusion related to political labeling"
I'm not arguing that libertarians are not liberal, they do believe in inherent right and so are liberal. However, most do not support the idea that we have obligations to others as evolved social animals as they follow Ayn Rand's "selfishness is a virtue" doctrine (https://aynrand.org/novels/the-virtue-of-selfishness/). This feeds into their "property rights" centric worldview in which they reject governmental regulation to protect our environment in preference for their failed "market based" solutions that produced the environmental problems in the first place (https://www.cato.org/speeches/environmentalism-market-economy-creative-ideas).
Peter Thiel and The Koch Brothers. I know individuals who align with me on environmental and animal rights issues and that government must regulate and so reject the Thiel/Koch view, but they are not the movement. The movement is not civil rights based, it is profit, property-rights based. It has not fought the conservative movement in their nullification of rights, such as in their unconstitutional nullification of a woman's right control her own life.
You're missing my primary point- which is that the word "libertarian" can be used as a descriptive label in more than one strict sense. Everyone who self-identifies as having libertarian leanings is not a supporter of the Koch brothers, okay? The term "libertarian" originated as a quite general philosophical label, not as a pigeonhole for a standardized set of political positions. This is an objective fact. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libertarian#h1
I get the benefit of Republicans turf-claiming that everyone who speaks positively of libertarianism in any sense as if they're GOP-leaning voters (despite the fact that many of them are not.) But what's the payoff for anyone identifying on the Left in agreeing with them? Does it hit some dogmatic ideological sweet spot to do so? It certainly doesn't pay off as a tactic in the politics of democratic persuasion. Because contrary to poli-sci categorical over-calculations, ultimately a political movement or candidate earns support one vote at a time. From the point of view of someone who views libertarianism as a philosophical stance that inclines toward respecting individual rights and agency over automatically defaulting to collective demands for conformity, reflexively sneering at the mere utterance of the word "libertarian" sounds like an imperious demand to for someone to admit the wrongness of bucking 'collective wisdom' in order to exercise their individual free will in any way, shape, or form.
So if you're bent on demanding that the word "libertarian" be seen as a synonym for Republican Party membership or something similar, be my guest. I've certainly recurrently found that insistence in articles and comments found in outlets ranging from Salon and Rawstory to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But don't be surprised when the results aren't to your liking. Epistemic bubbles are funny that way.
I suggest you re-read my initial reply analytically, sentence by sentence. I'm really quite surprised that you're taking issue with it. I had thought that my words were clear. But if you can quote some other passages that you find objectionable, I may be able to clear up your confusion in some respects.
The fundamental beliefs of libertarians is pretty much spelled out by Ayn Rand:
https://aynrand.org/novels/the-virtue-of-selfishness/
Libertarianism is based on inherent rights:
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/individual-rights
But more in terms of property rights:
https://www.cato.org/speeches/environmentalism-market-economy-creative-ideas
So, libertarians, although they believe in rights, ignore the rights of others in their axiom of property rights. Until I see libertarians anywhere along the spectrum of libertarianism renounce the centrality of property rights as expressed by the Cato Institute and Milton Friedman:
https://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Milton_Friedman_Environment.htm
Open space is wildlife habitat and so we are obligated to preserve what those beings require to live. We do not own the environment, it is not ours to do with as we please as we are obligated to take into account the well being of those we don't value and are obligated to ensure that they have adequate access to resources to live.
"The fundamental beliefs of libertarians is pretty much spelled out by Ayn Rand."
No, they aren't. As I've spent the previous two comments attempting to explain, only to find you Not Listening.
Ironically, you won't have any trouble finding Randian Objectivists who wholeheartedly agree with your sharply delimited definition. A basis for bonding, perhaps, over a shared requirement for doctrinaire framings expressed as if they held the weight of objective truth.
I loathe the abstractions of Ideology expressed as a system; ideologies are meant to be tools, and their contention in a dialectic is not to be confused with a cage match to the death. But given that Ideologues are apparently only capable of considering political and social questions in their idealized forms, have at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
Go on and argue with this diagram, not me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism#/media/File:Libertarianism-groups-diagram.png
I don't waste my time conversing with people who are Not Listening to my contributions. A problem that's indicated by your disregard for my request to quote any of my own words, or even passing acknowledgement of the first meaning found in standard dictionary definitions of the word "libertarian."
"As I've spent the previous two comments attempting to explain, only to find you Not Listening."
I hear you, I just don't agree with you. Don't you see the irony in your accusing me of not agreeing with your argument while you do not agree with mine? Why do you ignore what libertarians say about rights, obligations to others, morality, etc? They believe in rights, unlike conservatives, but not in universal rights as property rights are civil not natural as property is a contrivance of developing a social structure, accepting that one has a legal claim to something without having physical control or possession.
"Don't you see the irony in your accusing me of not agreeing with your argument while you do not agree with mine?"
That isn't irony; it's what's called disagreement. The difference being that I'm engaging with your observations and offering the reasons for my disagreement with your points, but you've shown no signs of listening to mine. Instead, you've constructed a strawperson caricature to lecture, while treating my posts as page breaks in your polemic.
"No, they aren't."
Yes, they are:
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/environment
Property rights are central to libertarianism as indicated in that post by a libertarian. The argument for property rights is an argument against the rights of others. For example:
"Environmental problems, whether uncontrolled pollution or the unsustainable use of natural resources, result when resources are left outside of the market institutions of property rights, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law."
The argument is obvious. It is arguing that a person will protect what he or she considers his or hers to the exclusion of others' well being and welfare and that they have no obligations to others except to acknowledge the property rights of others. That is selfishness and it is central to libertarianism.
I've already made several points to the effect that libertarian philosophical perspectives apply to a much wider arena of human affairs than economic questions. Beginning with my offering the Merriam-Webster definition #1, which you've ignored.
I've also made several comments alluding to the fact that there isn't simply One True Libertarian Perspective. For example, I view the exaltation of propertarianism to a "natural right" as laughable sophistry; "property" is a legalistic convention, and hence entirely dependent on the governmental monopoly on force that big-L Libertarian dogmatists claim to abhor. This fiction is particularly problematic in the case of real estate property, which the sophists seek to treat as identical in all respects with the ownership of chattel property consisting of cherished heirlooms and personal effects, and even with the individual physical body itself. So I'm entirely capable of making the argument opposing Real Property as Natural Right at least as effectively as yourself, and I'm willing to do so.
But you obviously can't wrap your head around anyone with libertarian leanings at any level holding the perspective I just expressed, because you are Not Listening- as is additionally shown by your absence of commentary on my link to Left-Libertarianism. Hence, this exchange is the equivalent of my arguing with a dogmatic Rightist who insists that the entire Left perspective can be summed up by Stalinism.
So I'm done here. You can continue your lecture without page breaks.