Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Libertarian Follies
Video below from some moron named Tim Hawkins who purports to be some sort of "Christian Comedian" with a libertarian parody of an old Sammy Davis Jr. classic.... see how long you can last I only made it 22 seconds into it.
He will probably get booked to play at the next Ayn Rand or various Libertarian conventions.
If he's a Christian, I'd say he probably comes from the "Soup Kitchen" sect.
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47 comments:
That's outstanding.
Note...Randians are virulent atheists. (But I'm sure you knew that and were just testing us.)
(Hey everybody! Gather 'round! I'm here to give you anything you like! You want free college, energy, money, mortages?! Whatever you like! You have come to the right place! Why? I'll tell you why!)
Who can take your money? (Who can take your money?)
With a twinkle in their eye? (With a twinkle in their
eye?)
Take it all away and
Give it to some other guy
[Chorus]
The Government (the Government)
The Government can! (The Government can!)
Who can tax the Sun rise? (Who can tax the Sun rise?)
Who can tax the trees? (Who can tax the trees?)
Let you run a business and
Collect up all the fees
[Chorus]
The Government can 'cause
They mix it up with lies and
Make it all taste good! (Make it all taste good!)
The Government takes
Everything we make
To pay for all of their "solutions"
Healthcare, Climate Change, Pollution
(Throw away the Constitution)
Who can give a bailout? (Who can give a bailout?)
Tell us to behave? (Tell us to behave?)
Make the Founding Fathers
Roll over in their graves
[Chorus]
The Government takes
Everything we make
They're power hungry
And malicious
Their economics are fictitious
Soon we'll have to eat our dishes
Mmm! Delicious!
Who can be a failure? (Who can be a failure?)
In so many ways? (In so many ways?)
Instead of getting fired, HEY!
We'll give ourselves a raise!
[Chorus]
The Government can 'cause
They mix it up with lies and
Make it all taste good! (Make it all taste good!)
And your government can 'cause
they mix it with lies and
Makes it all taste good! (Makes it all taste good!)
And I feel so good
Because the Government
Says I should! Oh!
He's got a point. What kinda of system do we have such that so much welfare is needed in the first place? An unjust one in which the banks and the so-called creditworthy get to loot the rest of us? Via government privilege?
Why not prevent the looting in the first place? Do you think the victims appreciate getting only PART of what was stolen from them and much of that in the form of shoddy, meddling social services that blame THEM instead of the banks?
Bob,
I knew YOU would love it!
I thought you were not a Randian?
F,
I take the position that no one in govt/academia/media/firms has a clue as to how our current system is supposed to operate.... including the bank managements they continuously advocate for fiscal policy that is against the interests of themselves and their insider cronies and sadly their shareholders...
rsp,
Don't really have to go to an Ayn Rand convention or a libertarian shin-dig for this sort of comedy. Congress, any government law enforcement agency or half the career bureaucrats in Washington will be playing the same tired jokes.
I got to 1:40 before the bile collecting in my mouth overcame the morbid curiosity. Just dumb. What a little cult we've got going in this country.
What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.
- Tom Clancy
Despite all of the media hype, government schools conditioning, and other institutional propaganda to paint political systems as noble, morally principled agencies devoted to serving the general welfare, the government is capable of doing no more than this: compelling people – through violence and the threat of violence – to do what they do not choose to do, or to refrain from doing what they do choose to do.
I find MMTers' love of violence and fraud fascinating.
Further, I don't see what all the violence and fraud is supposed to accomplish and I don't see any sort of problem that needs to be solved resulting from a prohibition on fraud and aggression.
Hey Bob,
Since Clancy is so opposed to govt and construction of free professional baseball stadiums are not on his list of what "govt is good at", if you see him tell him he can sign over his interest in the Baltimore Orioles who enjoy a free use of a 200M+ asset there at Camden Yards to me at any time... I'll gladly take his position over there for him...
... oh, and his interest in MASN which also has the monopoly rights to broadcast the Washington Nationals games also who also enjoy the free use of a 200M+ asset that the govt provided...
Clancy is a hypocrite extraordinaire....
bob, can you please go and discuss your mental problems (delusion, paranoia, narcissism, denial, confusion, obsession-compulsion, compulsive lying and distortion, superiority complex, victim complex, sanctimoniousness, inability to think logically, compulsive fantasizing, irrational hatred of others, etc) with a professional, rather than expressing them here on MNE. You clearly have serious mental issues that need to be addressed, and a public website is not the appropriate place to do that. Thanks.
y:
Thanks again for expressing in public your firm support for government violence and fraud.
What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.
- Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy needs to take a vacation to Somalis to remind himself what a country free of government looks like. Or maybe he just figures he would be one of the warlords in a Libertarian paradise.
bob, your comment falls under 'compulsive lying and distortion'.
Those were such brilliant deflection and avoidance moves so you could ignore the issue of the hour:
Further, I don't see what all the violence and fraud is supposed to accomplish and I don't see any sort of problem that needs to be solved resulting from a prohibition on fraud and aggression.
I don't see what violence and fraud is supposed to accomplish either bob.
I'm trying to offer you advice because you are clearly a sick man in need of help.
Collecting tokens because we think they are gold,
Collecting tokens because that's what we're told.
Life is a video game, what's your score?
Getting those tokens can be such a chore,
Unless you've got the cheat code, then all is well.
The cheats get theirs and the rest can go to hell.
In the Libertarian fantasy world, there is no fraud and no violence because there is no government and the only rules are an absolute right to private property and non-aggressions. This doesn't even make for plausible fiction, let alone reality. It's pre-adolescent imagination in which children are in denial about socialization.
The non-aggression principle and the prohibition on fraud are already and have long been essential concepts of the law of property and contract.
It is not a "fantasy" to PROPOSE that they be serious enforced without exception. It is the "progressives" that downplay and eviscerate the existing protections of private property and contract and leave poor and minority people, the alleged objects of the "progressive's" affection, living in a violent and impoverished "state of nature".
Why do you "progressives" hate poor people? Really.
Who makes the rule of law if there are no governing institutional arrangements? How is the rule of law enforced without government? Vigilantism?
How the law is enforced is a completely separate issue from what the rule should be. The fact that the poor and minorities need private property, contract rights and sound money to be safe in their bodies and things and to become affluent is a separate issue from whether or not such institutions can be voluntarily arranged or require an exogenous thug with a gun.
You "progressives" just want to change the subject.
And I'll bet $5 that sound money plus property and contract rights for the poor will not be the subject of tonight's Lenin-fest at Columbia.
Rothbard:
"when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors."
That's complete self-serving nonsense. Tribal people do fine on traditional custom based on the commons and property based only on current use.
In fact, when they are "helped" by land titles, it's not long before their ancestral lands end up in the hands of developers and they are consigned to living in slums. It's the history of Latin America, and it is not also happening elsewhere like India.
What I would like to know is why there have been zero Libertarian experiments, e.g., intentional communities when there have been numerous left libertarian ones. Seems to me that Libertarians are all in their heads rather than actually living the life they espouse. It's called walking your talk, and all I hear is talkers and don't see any doers.
Rothbard: property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more
And just when and where was that?
Mr Hickey:
Think real hard and real slow on this one.
1. "And just when and where was that" (property rights and the free market being triumphant once more)?
2. In fact, when they are "helped" by land titles, it's not long before their ancestral lands end up in the hands of developers and they are consigned to living in slums. It's the history of Latin America, and it is not also happening elsewhere like India.
According to you, No. 2 is allegedly an example of strict property and contract rights in action that you claim in No. 1 never existed.
So, were these "tribal" people in fact the beneficiaries of strict private property and contract rights or not?
It's like trying to nail jello to the wall.
right-wing "libertarianism" is a neo-feudal ideology, which appeals to delusional narcissists like roddis who like to justify their hatred of others by portraying themselves as morally superior victims.
The right-wing "libertarian's" basic belief is that superior rich people deserve more stuff and inferior poor people get too much stuff that they don't deserve.
That's it really. All the other crap is just an outgrowth of this basic belief.
Mises in a letter to Ayn Rand:
"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State."
http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_4/21_4_3.pdf
Bob, perhaps you should expose yourself to a different perspective. We love freedom so much that we decimated the culture of the freest people to ever roam this continent (and most of them while we were at it) and turned the land they occupied into real estate (private property) and domesticated cattle (both bovine and human).
We (of European and Middle Eastern descent) don't like freedom. Civilization doesn't function without coercion and our domestication is more important to us than freedom. "Freedom" is the bait and domestication is the switch. No amount of property rights and imaginary free markets is going to change that. Only a mass change in consciousness can change that and that isn't about to happen anytime soon.
There is no denying that the government is corrupt. However, folks like you can only see the trees and don't have a clue what a forest is. When the "Libertarians" start talking more about community and interdependence and less about individuals and "freedom," I'll start to listen.
According to you, No. 2 is allegedly an example of strict property and contract rights in action that you claim in No. 1 never existed.
So, were these "tribal" people in fact the beneficiaries of strict private property and contract rights or not?
Yes, exactly, Bob. This arrangement existed in communal societies prior to the Agricultural Age and the advent of surpluses resulted in a shift from communal societies to command societies under the temple and palace, i..e, priestly class and warrior class that where not only supported by the surplus but they diverted most of the surplus to their ownership. From this grew the institution of titles as in land titles.
The remnant of the communal society persisted in family and friendship but it was no longer dominant and was mostly a vestige of earlier times. Anthropologists have discovered that the Stone Age people of today live in communal societies rather than command societies and they do not have markets or money, or a modern concept of exchange.
In the industrial age the market society dominated by ownership of industrial and financial capital was overlaid over the remnant of the communal society (family and friends) and the hierarchical command society (clergy, aristocracy and landed gentry, and military) during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalism has all the chief features of feudalism wrt to command. What has changed is the characteristics of the ownership class and those who are privilege and in command.
Left libertarians in general take as their model the communal society that was ruled by consensus instead of hierarchical government, where territorial possession was common among the group, although often contested with neighboring tribes. There was no privileged status based on ownership, privilege, or power.
Historically, communal society based on sharing the commons, rule of custom, property based on current use, and consensus as governing principle, preceded command society with its hierarchical governmental structure based on the temple and military models, private ownership of property and enclosure, unequal distribution of the surplus, and rule of law as determined by the ruling class. The market society is just the iteration of the command society from land to capital.
Left libertarianism is based on history, anthropology, and evidence, you know, reality. Right Libertarianism is based on myth and imagination. Moreover, it disregards the fact that when presented with a choice voters in liberal democracies prefer a welfare state to a market state. All modern developed nations are welfare state. There are no market states.
The left libertarian view is somewhat akin to Rousseau's idea of the collective basis of society wrt a social compact as opposed to the Hobbesian notion of the law of the jungle in which individuals competed with each other based on force that the civilizing influence was necessarily government by the imposition of force. The collective aspirations of left libertarianism are based on freedom in a consensual community. The weakness of this view is that collective consciousness today is insufficient to make a quick transition to this scalable.
The individualist conception of Right Libertarianism are based on somehow restraining the law of jungle through a non-aggression principle but without the Leviathan to enforce it. The weakness of the Libertarian position is explaining how this transition would work in practice and also how it would be scalable.
Mises in a letter to Ayn Rand:
"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State."
http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_4/21_4_3.pdf
This is the basic principle of conservatism.
Political liberalism: All are created equal.
Political conservatism; Some are better than others.
Tom,
Yes that's a point right libertarians reflexively ignore, that libertarianism is radically egalitarian, anti-exploitative and and anti-authoritarian. But right libertarians are only against public forms of authority. They accept and even eagerly await concentration of power into the hands of a few extremely wealthy elites who will then act as the state. These libertarians have a conception of themselves as being far to the and to their immediate left are conservatives, yet Rothbard (whom so many of them claim as an intellectual influence) made clear that libertarianism is everywhere and always a product of the left.
A very confused group of people.
But right libertarians are only against public forms of authority. They accept and even eagerly await concentration of power into the hands of a few extremely wealthy elites who will then act as the state.
What pure, unadulterated bullshit. There is either the initiation of force or there isn’t. Absent the initiation of force, there is no “power” and no “concentration of power”. Kolko demonstrated this in 1963 when he showed that the “Robber Barons” could not monopolize the market without the help of the government.
http://tinyurl.com/lsfsvm7
This is undeniable. Nevertheless, “progressives” are congenitally unable to distinguish between laissez faire and crony capitalism. Since “progressives” are terminal cement heads (and deeply dishonest) they will call a regime where all troubled firms are allowed to fail by the same name as one where the financial elite controls the government which then bails out the elite to the tune of 125%.
But all of your dishonest ”progressive” subject changing and obfuscation will not change the fact that laissez faire and crony capitalism are quite different.
Strange how Libertarian societies never arose naturally after the development of surplus economies, especially in in the New World when Europeans had emigrated in search of greater freedom, land was readily available, and all sorts of experimentation were possible. There were several notable left libertarian experiments, but no Libertarian ones. Instead, governments based on the military, command model were instituted by the populace rather quickly to impose law and order. Where this did not happen quickly there was vigilantism and feuding.
I suppose the New England town meetings might be considered an exception, at least in some cases, but this never scaled up and only vestiges remain.
Rothbard:
“If, then, inequality of income is the inevitable corollary of freedom, then so too is inequality of control. In any organization, there will always be a minority of people who will rise to the position of leaders and others who will remain as followers in the rank and file. Robert Michels [fascist sociologist] discovered this as one of the great laws of sociology, "The Iron Law of Oligarchy." In every organized activity, no matter the sphere, a small number will become the "oligarchical" leaders and the others will follow."
“If, then, the natural inequality of ability and of interest among men must make elites inevitable, the only sensible course is to abandon the chimera of equality and accept the universal necessity of leaders and followers. The task of the libertarian, the person dedicated to the idea of the free society, is not to inveigh against elites which, like the need for freedom, flow directly from the nature of man. The goal of the libertarian is rather to establish a free society… In this society the elites will be free to rise to their best level… we will discover "natural aristocracies" who will rise to prominence and leadership in every field. The point is to allow the rise of these natural aristocracies”.
http://mises.org/fipandol/fipsec4.asp
“The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience... Socially and economically, this variability manifests itself in the universal division of labor, and in the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" – the insight that, in every organization or activity, a few will end up as leaders, with the mass of the membership filling the ranks of the followers...
The age-old record of inequality seems to indicate that this variability and diversity is rooted in the biological nature of man”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard31.html
Lets not forget that we vote our 'leaders' in/out every few years in our representative govt...
Tom did you watch the Columbia event?
Hans Hermann Hoppe:
“the natural outcome of voluntary transactions between private property owners is non-egalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist. In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority... Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families."
http://mises.org/etexts/intellectuals.asp
“what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social ‘discrimination’ and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.”
Democracy - The God That Failed: 207-08
“One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as it is implied in the idea and institution of private property, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States: to post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars or bums or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/hans-hermann-hoppe/on-free-immigration-and-forced-integration/
y,
are you sure you got that URL correct the file name you pasted there reads "intellectuals.asp"
rsp,
Tom did you watch the Columbia event?
No, I'll catch the video.
Matt, the link opens to Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Nice quotes, y.
Libertarianism is all about individual and property rights and nothing about human or civil rights, which don't exist for ultra-conservatives.
It's not liberty, it's fascism.
Tom I was attempting humor I should have included a ;)
I watched the event Wray was on his game....
rsp,
Yves just put up, RJ Eskow: 11 Questions to Ask Libertarians to See if They Are Hypocrites at NC.
Rothbard:
"The only important form of voting, in [a 'libertarian' society], would be that of shareholders in joint stock companies, whose votes would not be equal, but proportionate to their shares of ownership in the company assets. Each individual’s vote, in that case, would be meaningfully tied to his share in the ownership of joint assets. In such a purely free society there would be nothing for democratic electors to vote about... democracy can be only a possible route toward a free society, rather than an attribute of it."
http://mises.org/document/196/Power-and-Market-Government-and-the-Economy
“If, then, inequality of income is the inevitable corollary of freedom, then so too is inequality of control. In any organization, there will always be a minority of people who will rise to the position of leaders and others who will remain as followers in the rank and file. Robert Michels [fascist sociologist] discovered this as one of the great laws of sociology, "The Iron Law of Oligarchy." In every organized activity, no matter the sphere, a small number will become the "oligarchical" leaders and the others will follow... In the market economy, the leaders will inevitably earn more money than the rank and file."
http://mises.org/fipandol/fipsec4.asp
Rothbard is presumptuous.
There is nothing to stop a million (or 20 or 200 million) social "socialists" from buying up a bunch of land, owning everything equally and jointly while operating the venture explicitly as a VOLUNTARY socialist democratic society.
They could all share one bank account if that floats their boat.
Nobody has to do anything that Rothbard says except respect the non-aggression principle.
The application of libertarian principles means that the Na'vi keep their land and their Hometree and the private mining company respects the integrity of the Na'vi and their property.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)
You can twist, lie and distort that, but that's what you're doing.
To be consistent, the Libertarian position should be to return the land to the native indigenous people from whom it was stolen and start from scratch. Anything short of this is a farce that ratifies stealing at gun point. If Rothbard had proposed that, I'd be willing to talk. Otherwise, it is just more BS.
"The application of libertarian principles means that the Na'vi keep their land"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush#Conflict_with_Native_Americans
reality gets in the way of lazy ideology
I wonder if there was a "Rothbard" back in those gold rush days, beseeching the settlers and miners not to initiate violence.
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