Libertarians . . . .. . . siiiiiggggghhhh . . . . .

[HughBeaumont]

Topic on FB: Why does it always have to be about screwing the poor/working/middle class? How the hell can people adopt such a selfish and counterproductive ideology and have the unmitigated gall to suggest they're "HELPING the poor/working/middle by making them more self reliant"?? It's HERD culling. It's granny-starving. It's the moral equivalent of sending the "undesireables" out on an ice floe.

Libertarian: When it's done while pointing a gun, it's neither moral nor help, it's theft. You are confused in your morality.

Me: See: The Gilded Age for how well a voluntary society with no social services and no taxes whatsoever worked.

Libertarian: You mean the era when millions upon millions of people fled their European socialist/neomercantilist corporate state homelands in search of freedom here? When families took care of each other? You mean a time when I didn't have to deny my dying father a request because I didn't have the money since your all knowing, all caring and "benevolent" government took that money from me, under threat of incarceration and with the force of a gun, to pay for some retiree in Florida who has a million dollar portfolio AND collects social security? Tell me again how you are so morally superior? That stealing from the unwilling, using the coercive force of a gun, is some how chaste, blameless and laudable? Just because you vote to steal from someone doesn't make it right. Again, your are confused in your morality. Helping the poor is a noble aspiration for an individual. Helping the poor by pointing a gun at someone else and forcing them to do it is not, even if the majority voted yes.

Me: Not even remotely. I'm talking about the era where industrialists had workers shot to death for protesting unfair working conditions and bragged about doing so. And let's talk about those amazing working conditions in this great country in the turn of the century, shall we? Children worked alongside adults and those bright-eyed foreigners for next to nothing at the expense of their education in grossly unsafe factories where their limbs were at risk, as were their lungs, hearing, nervous systems and eyesight. Marshall Field's income was calculated to be around $600 an hour (awesome even by today's standards, let alone the 1880s) while his shopgirls earned $3 a week. Health-hazard-ridden steel mills belching poisonous gasses, industrial vapors polluting cities to night-black sooty skies, sweatshops that were no better than slavery when it came to long hours, unsafe conditions and abusive bosses, mines that could cave in and give you black lung disease, factories that got to 110 degrees regularly, unprotected powershafts that maimed workers' fingers, absolutely no protection, insurance or courts siding with the worker . . . YEAH, America was just one hunky-dory WORLD of opportunity and plenty!!!

And that's just work in the city. I could go on for paragraphs on how horrid, lonely, mind-numbing and fruitless farm/rural life was.

I'm talking an era where food was in such poor diseased condition because no livestock inspection was deemed necessary. Want to talk about how the markets regularly displayed raw animals exposed to polluted air for days and how the fruit wasn't fit for human consumption? Got Milk? You also got Plaster of Paris, molasses and chalk with that. What about them over-the-counter pharmeceuticals that are now Schedule II controlled substances?

How about the complete lack of sanitation services? Garbage, sewage and filth piled up in the street and then trod upon by horses who also shat up the street wouldn't disturb your nice walk, would it? Could I talk about how unsafe any kind of transportation was back then? Drivers received, what, $12 a week for a 16 hour day . .. and their demand for a 12 hour day was deemed "communistic" by then-State Assemblyman Teddy Roosevelt. You think the beaches nowadays are bad? Try regularly swimming in sewage, sludge and animal carcasses.

Corporal punishment ran rampant in schools, schoolteachers were regularly ridiculed and assaulted, the policemen were nothing more than incompetent criminals, the industrialists presided over maiming, murder and death at a 485% profit margin, the local "governments" were nothing but centers of graft, "justice" was purchased then as it is purchased now . . . and dare I mention the bright spot for certain American citizens known as LYNCHING????

This is your idea of FREEDOM?? Maybe if you were Jay Gould or Edward Harriman, it was a utopia. How many people out of millions could be those guys?

This is the sort of nightmare you'd be dealing with if you had no central government and no taxation. Privatizing everything not nailed down is a joke of a notion because it assumes grand benevolence by a handful of people to service large scale issues in a nation and reality where absolutely NO evidence OF that benevolence, economic or social, exists. How big of a absolute selfish prick do you gotta be to complain about a 39% TMTR if you're worth 7-9 digits and know that it wouldn't make even DENT ONE in the way you live? Cui Bono?

I'm not really putting any sort of faith in any individual to save us, least of all the Very Wealthy Individual. Maybe you should read this article by the ultra-leftist Brookings Institute to see just how "charitable" your beloved wealthmongers are:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2007/03/18useconomics-easterbrook

GOD I'm sick of this crap.

I really AM sick of it. Multiply this by thousands upon thousands and this is honestly how people think . . . that taxation is "Theft by gunpoint". What childish, crybaby nonsense.

[Zalatix]

1. They should move to their own little offshore island and live their paradise.

[Scootaloo]

6. Galt's Gulch, with hurricanes

[caveat_imperator]

11. They tried that with their 'Republic of Minerva' in the early 70's,

but apparently didn't lift a finger to defend it when Tonga claimed the island.

The libertarians had their chance and botched it up.

[Zalatix]

15. Ouch... do you have any info on this? That's damning! LOL

[HughBeaumont]

22. Right on . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva

The Republic of Minerva was one of the few modern attempts at creating a sovereign micronation on the reclaimed land of an artificial island in 1972. The architect was Las Vegas real estate millionaire and political activist Michael Oliver, who went on to other similar attempts in the following decade. Lithuanian-born Oliver formed a syndicate, the Ocean Life Research Foundation, which allegedly had some $100,000,000 for the project and had offices in New York and London. They anticipated a libertarian society with "no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism." In addition to tourism and fishing, the economy of the new nation would include light industry and other commerce. According to Glen Raphael, "The chief reason that the Minerva project failed was that the libertarians who were involved did not want to fight for their territory."[1] According to Reason, Minerva has been "more or less reclaimed by the sea".[2] The site chosen for the Republic was the Minerva Reefs in the Pacific Ocean.

(snip)

A Tongan expedition was sent to enforce the claim.[when?] The Republic of Minerva flag was lowered. Tonga’s claim was recognized by the South Pacific Forum in September 1972. Meanwhile, Provisional President Davis was fired by founder Michael Oliver and the project collapsed in confusion. Nevertheless, Minerva was referred to in O. T. Nelson's post-apocalyptic children's novel The Girl Who Owned a City, published in 1975, as an example of an invented utopia that the book's protagonists could try to emulate.

In 1982, a group of Americans led again by Morris C. “Bud” Davis tried to occupy the reefs, but were forced off by Tongan troops after three weeks. In recent years several groups have allegedly sought to re-establish Minerva. No claimant group has to date made any attempt to take possession of the Minerva Reefs territory.

Fucking morons!! "I'm rich, right and wealthy, this land is MINE!"

Tongans and all other SP Islands: "Uh, guess again, Slappy."

[Sick of the GOP]

40. There's a reason they're called LOLbertarians

.

[mikeytherat]

26. Haiti awaits

mikey_the_rat

[indie9197]

2. country life was usually better than city life back then

"And that's just work in the city. I could go on for paragraphs on how horrid, lonely, mind-numbing and fruitless farm/rural life was."

I disagree that being self-sufficient is mind numbing or fruitless.

[Zoeisright]

5. Do you have ANY idea how dangerous farming is?

http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/05/05/us-child-farmworkers-dangerous-lives

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2007-02-22/news/0702220038_1_farm-workers-migrant-workers-sprays

http://www.omaha.com/article/20111117/LIVEWELL01/711179878

[indie9197]

8. I thought the original post was about the "gilded age"

But sure farming is dangerous even now. Was probably safer before the internal combustion engine. In 1870 I would still prefer the farm.

[Scootaloo]

7. There's a difference between "gardening" and "farming"

[Warpy]

9. Knock the dust off those rose colored glasses, willya?

Most homesteaders didn't make it. The husbands left the wives alone on those lonely homesteads to tend the stock and do what they could about growing food and raising children while they went to the cities to find work. The women were extremely lucky if they did and brought back enough cash to get everybody through another year. If they weren't, the husbands drank it up, something that condemned their families to death.

The second wave of homesteading was in the 1960s-70s. They found out that they needed paid work, too, work that took them away from that pipe dream of self sufficiency. The chickens went for Sunday dinners, the goats and other stock got sold, the fields went fallow, and there was only a kitchen garden, if that, within about five years.

It was a wretched existence, trying to farm land that didn't have enough rainfall to sustain anything much but the prairie grasses that had been there, the boom and bust cycle of yearly rainfall wiping out stock as well as crops.

Self sufficiency? Not a chance.

[indie9197]

16. OK you can work in the city factories in the late 19th century

and I will work on my own farm in a small town

[Warpy]

17. You'd be crushed by either one

and that was rather the point of the OP.

No one with a brain wants to go back to any of those conditions.

[indie9197]

21. I don't know where you live but self-sufficiency happened then

and it still happens now to a large extent. My grandmother never bought meat from a grocery store even when she was in her 80s. Obviously if you live in the city it is not an option. Please know that there are a lot of people in rural and western U.S. that don't need the government looking after them.

[Warpy]

32. My grandmother raised her own chickens and grew much of

the family's vegetables in the city a couple of blocks from the courthouse. However, they needed money for staples, clothing, medical care, and a thousand other things.

Total self sufficiency is a myth. You can't do it all unless you're in an Ayn Rand novel.

[HughBeaumont]

23. Rural life in the late 19th century was just as bad as city life.

The farmer and his family toiled for 14-16 hours a day to merely sustain themselves on a barren landscape that produced little, if any, results. Most farms were foreclosed thanks to them needing machinery to survive and lacking it due to no money. They had to increase their debts to reduce pressure, and finally, the corporate farmers and railroad monopolies with their exorbitant land rates drove them away for good.

There wasn't really any hygiene or safety to speak of. The expanses of manure and lack of sanitation and proper drainage systems poisoned well water and attracted ticks, flies, mosquitos and worms to add to the misery. Dust storms were not uncommon in the Great Plains; prairie fires and locusts were also problematic. It's no wonder the children, particularly the females, were lured to the city to escape the drudgery and loneliness that often drove people insane. Waiting for them there, however, was everything I described above, and more.

What was galling in this particular exchange is that there's not any speck of a notion of "left version/right version". This isn't any fairy tale, it's all historical fact that anyone with access to books can read about. It's unbelievable to me that anyone not named Getty or Rockefeller would praise such a rotten era for workers (and, then as now, the 99%) as the Gilded Age. The only reason any of the Robber Barons were philanthropists at all was because of legacy and peer pressure, not because they were interested in parting with even one red cent of their wealth. Let's look at good ol' Marshall Field on this:

The Field Museum of Natural History was named after him in 1894 after he gave it an endowment of one million dollars. Field was initially reluctant to do so, reportedly saying "I don't know anything about a museum and I don't care to know anything about a museum. I'm not going to give you a million dollars." However he later relented after railroad supplies magnate Edward E. Ayer, another early benefactor (and later first president) of the museum, convinced Field that his everlasting legacy would be achieved by financing the project.

[Care Acutely]

3. best repy EVER

hat's off

[white_wolf]

4. Stop it, you're wasting your time. You can't argue with faith and that's all they have.

Faith in a mystical free market that has never existed and never will exist.

[steve2470]

10. you're correct

I watched the 1959 Ayn Rand interview that MADem generously posted, and she has complete and total faith (although she would deny the word faith) in this free market, to the point of claiming that all depressions and recessions are created by government intervention.

They want Somalia. They are afraid to say that, but that's what they want.

eta: 1959 Ayn Rand interview by Mike Wallace

[HughBeaumont]

24. Mike Wallace completely destroyed her.

Exposed her for the wholesale fraud that she and her rancid philosophy (if one would call it that) were.

Yeah, that hated gubmint wasn't so bad when she lined up to collect Social Security, was it?

[caraher]

12. The "gunpoint" thing in particular annoys me

I've resolved from now on to demand the particulars. What guns? Who is pointing them at whom? I want all the details of these acts of physical intimidation...

Oh, so now you say it's just metaphorical? Then please dial back the overheated rhetoric...

[KatyMan]

34. That's how you spot a Rand acolyte

That's her terminology IIRC.

[SheilaT]

13. Every time someone talks about how wonderful the schools used to be,

especially back when prayer was allowed, I recommend they read the first two chapters of "Farmer Boy" by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The relevant passage (and alas, I don't currently have a copy of the book in my possession) comes at the end of the first or second chapter. Almanzo Wilder (later Laura's husband. This book is about his childhood in northern New York State)'s family has just taken in the new schoolmaster to live with them while he teaches a term at the local school. The big boys of the town have bragged for years that no teacher has ever been able to finish out a term because they terrorize the teachers so. The new schoolmaster notes that a recent teacher was so badly beaten by those boys that he died.

There has NEVER been an era when everyone has been well-behaved, when schools have been wonderful havens of learning and excellent behavior, when those in power (of some kind or another) haven't done everything in their power to exploit those weaker.

We NEED government regulation and control.

[SilveryMoon]

14. Nice reply

How did he respond?

[Kablooie]

18. My guess is he didn't read it. They don't want to hear reasoned arguments.

[Taverner]

19. Libertarians think taxation is theft, I think private property is theft

[indie9197]

20. I admire your ability to be free of material possessions

I am still working on that but at least the government is helping me

[Taverner]

35. Well, there is a difference between personal property and private property

Personal Property = your home, your guitar, your clothes...

Private Property = land, factories, etc - - that which is used to produce capital

[sendero]

27. I've long since..

.... given up even talking to Libertarians. They are, as far as I can tell, all a product of some kind of arrested development issues, they don't see the big picture they are like a 3 year old rocking in the corner shouting "mine".

I think a certain number of them grow out of this eventually, but who knows what percentage.

[Duchess St.Rollins]

28. Beautiful response...

Libertarianism and Objectivism have a fatal flaw that cannot be overlooked if one is thinking clearly. Human beings and the marketplace they control are not even remotely rational, as has been proven time and time again (as shown in the original post). So, assuming that one will act in their rational self interest automatically and without intervention is fucking absurd.

There...stupid, adolescent theory debunked...next.

[HughBeaumont]

30. Someone once told me that I could never be a CEO because I have a soul.

He was absolutely correct on that.

Now just imagine the soul-void CEO mindset . . . a whole cabinet's worth . . . running a nation as big and as ubiquitous in power as the United States.

Um, yeah, that was called The 2001-2008 Bush Administration. And it failed MISERABLY on all fronts.

It's also the administration that, strangely enough , gets a free pass by many a Libertarian while they trip right to January 21st, 2009.

[nanabugg]

29. The term "libertarian" is what many people hide behind when they don't want to confess that

they are really selfish, and uncaring they are. And yes, many of the uber wealthy of them give huge sums to charity and that is a good thing but their motives are not altruistic.

[HughBeaumont]

31. "Libertarians" equal three types of people nowadays.

1. Actual capital "L" Libertarians who yearn for the prosperous Reagan years.

2. Republicans ashamed of the Bewsh 43 Borrow-and-Waste-a-thon and now call themselves "Libertarians".

3. "Both Parties are Crooks" types that not so mysteriously reserve 95% of their vitriol for the party that DOESN'T start with an "R".

[caraher]

33. I used to classify Libertarians in 3 groups too

Though I think my old 3 were subsets of your first group, but I fear they are becoming obsolete. Mine were

1. Pot Libertarians - mostly wanted to see government repeal laws against marijuana use.

2. Gun Libertarians - really believed The Founders (TM) wanted them to be able to take up arms against the government at any time and want the right to be as well-armed as the regular armed forces. Now this passes as the only serious position on gun control.

3. Tax Libertarians - wanted zero taxes. Also considered a moderate and perfectly reasonable stance in today's discourse.

[SidDithers]

39. Nailed it...

especially group #3.

Sid

[Ruby the Liberal]

37. Yes, here on the DU, its all unicorns shitting rainbows.

And nary a disagreement on anything, ever.

Oh, and Fuck Ron Paul.

Have a nice day.

[markpkessinger]

38. Essay: "Taxes can never be theft"

Great response. I thought you might also appreciate the essay linked below titled, "Taxes can never be theft," by British economist Richard Murphy. Although he is writing in a British context, the arguments apply equally well to the U.S.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2010/07/05/tax-can-never-be-theft/

[mzmolly]

41. So, he supports a means test for Social Security?

Fascinating.

Ask this 'independent' if he's voting for Rmoney. Chances are 90/10 that he is.

I'm sick of the crap too, Hugh. Good on you for standing up to it, though.

[HughBeaumont]

42. Not a Romney/Ryan fan by any means.

However, he (like our recently dismissed "thur all thuh same" troll above) is the third kind of Libertarian . . . one who says he's not into either party, but strangely enough spends 95 percent of the time disparaging the party that doesn't start with an "R". He regularly posts videos and articles from the Koch-paid profs at LearnLiberty (which puts out videos saying the minimum wage is too high), Reason.com and Arthur Laffer. Some would call him a "Denialican".

He's a Gary Johnson guy. 'Nother words, supportive of yet another right-wing economic flat-taxer/Social Services slasher straight outta the arse of Steve Forbes. Yeah, good luck paying for the repair on your crumbling bridges, pocked-as-hell roads and deteriorating schools with "charity".

[mzmolly]

43. I've noted that too. The "fair minded" Libertarians

who trash Democrats constantly, and ultimately plug their nose for the Republican candidate. Most of them have taken advantage of various social programs, but are not aware that student loans, social security and medicare fall into the social program category. ... They're Republicans who like their pot and porn.

[WCGreen]

44. Thanks for posting this in my Triangle Fire post of yesterday.

It's hard to believe people still buy into this shit.

All I have to say about this is we are all together. You need us and we need you. Why can't we work together in order to make this a more perfect union. You know there are millions of people that just want to go to work, earn enough money to educate their kids and take a vacation once and a while....

K & R