All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:24
Don't Feed the Libertarian Trolls - Rebutted!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Oh, it's been a while since we've disassembled somebody's prose in an article.
Let's get to it, shall we?
Don't feed the trolls another advice for dealing with libertarians.
I like it when they poison the well in the title.
That means that you don't actually have to bring any argument because you see libertarians are trolls.
I'm trying to think of libertarians who started wars.
Nope.
Libertarians who are really keen on the war on drugs, that would be none.
Libertarians who help indoctrinate children through public school and support of it would be zero.
But hey, we're just troubles.
Isn't that lovely?
This is by Emmett Horensen, and he starts, with its five syllables, iambic stress, and three open vowels, there's something so satisfying about saying libertarian.
Sort of reminds me of the beginning of Lolita by Nabokov, where he talks about how your tongue marches to the front of your mouth from the back by saying la-lo-lo-li-ta.
Right, you go, and you notice it does actually step to the front of your mouth when you say it.
He says, it's a beautiful word, elegant and old school with phonetic roots like quill-penned pamphleteers.
It's Terpsichorean click of complicated consonants rolls off the tongue like that sentence does too, like a jackhammer to the forehead.
It's Terpsichorean click of complicated consonants rolls off the tongue with gratifying ease and a stoic sense of moral certitude.
It's almost palpable!
in the sound.
It carries the ring of anachronistic heroism better suited to the hills of Port-au-Prince or revolutionary Spain than here or now.
Well, that's quite a haiku.
Clearly he's been storing up syllables like nuts for the winter and shitting them all out in his first paragraph.
Okay, so no arguments yet, no particular definitions.
And then we move to the next paragraph, shall we?
No wonder it appeals so steadily to precocious teenage malcontents.
According to FreedomWorks, libertarianism is undergoing a renaissance in this country and one hardly has to look further than Policy Mike's comment section.
Or the U.S.
Senate?
To confirm as much?
What?
Are you kidding me?
Do you really find an excess of small government in the U.S.
Senate?
Wow, God, I can't wait to read the rest of this.
Oh, this is delicious.
Alright, it forces a question we on the left have been asking ourselves for a long time now.
Must we take these people seriously?
Well, you could take thinking seriously.
I mean, I know you're a playwright and all, but you could take Thinking seriously as opposed to just, well, it's a snarky word and only teenagers who have bad skin like it, so victory over Socrates, say I!
There's a temptation to say no.
I was a teenage libertarian myself and it's tempting to believe that all libertarians fit the profile I did.
Rebels without causes, standing up in civics class and shouting, both parties are the same, in a bid for cheap applause.
Look, I mean in all seriousness, you may have moral, legal, ethical, empirical and rational problems with libertarianism, But it is a pretty serious school of thought.
It is deeply rooted in Western history and Western culture.
The struggle to contain the ever-growing tendency of state power to increase without limit has been a fundamental aspect of Western thought for about 2,500 years.
The Constitution was really the most strenuous attempt to bind down the government in the chains of restraint, which failed catastrophically.
But it is a very serious school of thought.
Lots of people have won Nobel Prizes.
Lots of people have written significant works, heavily footnoted and annotated.
Lots of professors have focused on this very issue of how we keep government power from growing and from serving economic and special interests all the way from the military-industrial complex through to public and private sector unions, through corporations, through the poor who've become increasingly dependent on government handouts.
There is an unholy, I wish we could just get it down to a trinity, an unholy Googleplexinity of people who want to rent, seek, or profit from the state and attempting to restrain that inevitable progress of state power is very serious business and So, saying that libertarians shout both parties are the same in a bid for cheap applause is actually what you're doing.
You know, people on the left, my God, can you look up the term projection?
I mean, just for once in your self-satisfied, pompous, twisting yourself into a Houdini-style pretzel to give yourself a pat on the back for your moral power lives.
Can you just look up what projection means?
Because you're complaining that Libertarians are snarky and immature, rebels without causes and bidding for cheap applause.
When you denigrate a system of thought that is actually quite rigorous and quite detailed and has as one of its many empirical supports say the Industrial Revolution and the revolutions in China and the revolutions in India which I've dragged literally hundreds of millions of people.
Let me say this once more because people on the left seem to think that it is only Barack Obama, his magic pen, the printing press of the Fed and the magical force of foreign policy or the ability to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries that that's the only way you can Help the poor?
Well, you help the poor by getting out of the way.
You help the poor by stopping corporations and governments from using licenses and taxes and regulations and all this kind of stuff to keep the poor out of competing with the rich.
The poor are really good at competing with the rich.
The poor are often very smart.
The poor have lower requirements for what it is they need to live on.
They don't have to pay for three cars and a house in Hampton so they can accept lower wages.
The poor will almost always overturn the rich within a generation or two, which is why there are of the Fortune 500 companies that around a hundred years ago, about five of them are left, because there's this churning, the creative destruction.
The poor always want to overturn the rich.
And what do the rich do?
The rich use the government to keep the poor down.
The rich use the government to miseducate the poor through public schools.
The rich use the government to laden the poor down with regulations to the point where you need a goddamn license to break people's hair.
And this is what the rich continually do.
So those of us who said less government equals more opportunities for the poor, less interference in free trade, that means more wealth for the poor, we're the ones who actually can wear the goddamn medal of having helped hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of people, sorry, out of poverty into the middle class.
50,000 a month in India are going into the middle class.
Alright, so take your smug, self-satisfied syllables And shove them up your thesaurus, okay?
Because we've actually been out there helping the poor by advocating for the free market.
I don't see what you have been doing other than taking money from the government to the right place that I'm sure nobody comes to see.
There is a temptation, he writes on, to believe that, like me, they've simply fallen into the unavoidable trap of arrogant adolescence, and that soon enough they will put down the F.A.
Hayek, meet some people with diverse and difficult backgrounds, and allow their brain to progress to a point where it's capable of feeling things like empathy.
Again, this is not any kind of argument.
This is just It's like what someone said about waiters in Paris that they serve you like they're peeing on you from a great height.
And this is what you're doing.
You're just creating a whole bunch of snarky, empty, stupid nonsense and not engaging with any of the arguments.
And my God!
Do you really think that Being on the left and being an intellectual is a challenge?
Are you seriously making that case?
Being on the left and being an intellectual, particularly on the arts, is a mind-grindingly boring cliché.
You understand that you are a cliché.
Oh, you're on the left.
Ooh, you write plays.
Ooh, you're down on libertarians for reasons that you cannot articulate in any rational or empirical way.
You are a cliché.
You are a boring hipster who's desperate to break onto Broadway and make some money while denigrating the free market because people don't want what you gotta sell.
I doubt that.
Not at all.
Oh, and things like empathy?
Paul, my friend, the free market has done more for the poor than any of your articles will ever do.
I mean, this is just a fact.
The free market has done more for the poor than all your articles will ever do.
And you complain that libertarians lack empathy?
What we actually care about are things that work in terms of helping the poor.
Right?
Not smug, moral self-congratulation.
Not snarky, bitchy little essays.
Not anti-capitalist plays like Mother Courage and Her Children rip-offs.
We actually care about what works and what actually does help the poor.
And what helps the poor is getting governments and corporations and guns and regulations and violence and coercion and jails and laws out of the way of the poor so that they can undercut the economic superiority of the rich.
That actually is having empathy for the poor, not paternalism towards the poor.
See, on the left, you all want to just pass laws and give money to the poor.
This is very paternalistic.
We don't view the poor as children.
We view the poor as perfectly competent to pursue whatever lives they want as long as people get out of their goddamn way and let them trade and compete freely and openly.
It's tempting to believe, he writes, that libertarianism is just a phase for bored suburban white kids, a philosophy that's discarded with adulthood as readily as those boots from Hot Topic.
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Canada.
You wouldn't have believed how many, you know, Canadians are libertarians.
I mean, it was just, it was totally hip.
I mean, I did it just to fit in with the cool kids.
It wasn't because I could not argue against the moral and empirical and rational evidence for the consistency and virtue of the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights.
It's not because I listened to my goddamn kindergarten teacher and took seriously when she said, "Don't use force to get what you want and don't take things that aren't yours." It's just all about conformity for libertarians.
To be on the left and to be an artist, a left-wing artist, My goodness!
I mean, whatever next?
A left-wing artist?
That's not conforming at all!
Like, being in Hollywood, or being in the media, and being on the left, and voting Democrat, and being a big fan of Barack Obama?
That's rebellion, dude!
Kudos to you!
I just went into libertarianism so I could fit in with all the cool kids up here in Canada, which, as you know, I mean, you can't turn around in a mall without stumbling over a libertarian.
Particularly when I went to graduate school.
Man, oh man, I really pitied the people on the left.
Like the people who were fans of socialized medicine in Canada.
I mean, we just spat on those people.
I mean, as you know, everyone in Canada hates socialism.
So it was just mindless conformity for me.
And it's really great that non-conformists like lefty playwrights can really call us out on that.
Thank you.
But giving in to that temptation would be a mistake.
Must we take these people seriously?
The short, maddening answer is yes.
The New Libertarians aren't just trolling message boards in study hall.
They're adults.
They rally, they blog, they cast votes.
Most important, they invest hordes of time and money in their cause.
From money bonds for French political candidates to building a billion-dollar media empire out of outlets like The Blaze, InfoWars, The Daily Poll, and the Cato Journal.
As much as it strains credulity to realize it, Reason Magazine is written by grown-ups.
My God, are you like a 12-year-old girl?
As much as it strains credibility... I mean, seriously, you've not actually advanced any argument at all.
Like a sneer is not a frown.
You understand?
Rolling your eyes is not an argument.
I mean, this may work in whatever girl guides of intellectual underachievement hangout you're currently at, but snarkiness is not an argument.
The fact that you don't know that is It's kind of chilling.
It's really kind of chilling.
What this means is that all you do is you hang around with people who agree with you all the time.
And there's nothing, nothing more deleterious to the growth of your rational capacities than hanging around people who you agree with all the time.
Where you say, Libertarians, and everyone's like, oh, Libertarians, can you believe it?
I mean, some people, they get their little Ayn Rand book and they go on this little rampage, these rich kids from the suburbs talking all about the working class, whatever.
I mean, the one thing that's great about libertarians is they're almost always around people who disagree with them, which means they get better, they get sharper, they get faster.
Right?
I mean, if you want to become a good boxer, go into the ring with people who are better than you, and faster than you, and meaner than you.
And I can absolutely guarantee you that this is written not to change anyone's mind, but to reinforce the prejudices of people who already believe what you believe.
Because all you have to do is make these snarky comments and everyone, what, agrees with you?
I mean, that's retarded.
Hang around some people who disagree with you.
Get into debates with smart people who disagree with you.
Hell, call into my show.
I run a call-in show.
Wednesday nights, 8pm to 11pm usually.
Sunday mornings, 10am to 1pm usually.
I've got hours.
You can email operations at freedomainradio.com.
Call in.
Have a debate with somebody who really disagrees with you and knows what they're doing.
That is how you get better at thinking.
Not rolling your eyes and having other like non-minded people roll their eyes along with you.
That's lemming-ness, not human thinking-ness.
They have influence, and whether or not we take them seriously, they are absolutely serious.
Yes.
That isn't to say we have to take their ideas seriously, because frankly their ideas are not serious.
From a fear of fiat currency that demonstrates a basic inability to read a comparative CPI stability chart, to positions on wage productivity and social welfare that suggest they haven't looked outside since the Battle of Blair Mountain, libertarian quote arguments are made in bad faith.
Oh!
Made in bad faith.
That's... wow.
That's a move no libertarian, no thinker, no philosopher has ever seen before.
I mean, I always feel ridiculous when stuff like this comes, because I've been studying philosophy for 30 years on how to refine my arguments and really go against my desire, you know, this confirmation bias that we all have and that kind of stuff.
And to find the flaws in other people's arguments can sometimes be a very challenging topic.
Particularly, you know, we all got this propaganda going on on our head from public school, so you really got to swim against the current, even within yourself.
When you have the momentum of historical propaganda at your back.
And I didn't realize that I spent like 30,000 hours or probably 40,000 hours by now and 30 years studying philosophy.
privately in conversations with friends and family in three different Ivy League universities across Canada in a show that I've been running where I have like 2,500 shows and the hundreds of experts that I've interviewed in the dozens of debates with highly intelligent lawyers and academics that I've engaged in I didn't realize I mean in hindsight it seems so obvious and I feel so ridiculous I didn't realize
That I could just say arguments, like with air quotes, and then say that they're made in bad faith.
Wow.
Do I feel stupid?
Libertarian arguments are made in bad faith, predicated on long discredited economic theories, repeated ad nauseam, and couched in an insufferably smug, perhaps ghoul sort of condescension.
At least the more traditional right has the decency to be openly Anti-intellectual.
Are you saying that conservatives are anti-intellectual?
Because that's just simply not true at all.
Some amazing scholars have come out of the conservative tradition and I find in general it is the media and the left and the artists on the left like when was the last time you saw any kind of Socratic dialogue in any kind of movie or play written by a lefty?
I mean that wasn't just socialist or communist propaganda.
When was it that you last saw somebody portrayed in the leftist media, which is to say the media.
The media is almost all leftist.
When was it that you last saw a libertarian or a conservative or somebody on the right win an argument or at least hold their own in an argument?
No, it's all engineered to make the lefties look good and to make the righties look bad.
I mean, that's ridiculously anti-intellectual.
That's just slander and very boring propaganda, right?
And so, at least the more traditional right has the decency to be openly anti-intellectual?
I mean, I think that's just complete nonsense.
Any traction they've achieved has little to do with these ideas and much to do with their almost admirably schizophrenic capacity to adapt to the latest political fad.
Libertarian rhetoric comes in flavors ranging from Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, depending on who they're trying to con that day.
You know, this is all ingredients in a bag.
You may think you've made a meal or a cake, but you've just got a bunch of crap in a bag, and you're trying to get people to eat it.
I guess if you've never tasted anything better, it might taste okay, but... Attempts to extend them credibility inevitably backfire.
Having been on both sides of the divide, I can say it's vastly more tiresome to feed the trolls than to be one of them, and no sane person has the endurance to run all the way down the rabbit hole.
Okay.
I'll go a little faster here because I'm really hoping that there's an idea or two here.
So, what do we do?
If we're going to say that libertarians are a serious political force without serious ideas, it seems that we are at least obligated to make sense of them.
No?
No, I don't think that's how thinking works.
In fact, I'm quite sure that's not how thinking works.
If there's a serious political force without serious ideas, and again, I don't really know what serious Ideas are?
I mean, what is serious science?
Is that different from like science with a clown nose on?
Or in a rainbow wig?
Or in a funhouse?
Or on Jupiter in a clown suit?
I don't know.
What are serious ideas?
Ideas are valid or invalid.
They conform to reason and evidence or they don't.
So you could say a serious political force with incorrect ideas or invalid ideas or ideas denied by empiricism or whatever.
But serious ideas, what does that mean?
Ideas you take seriously?
The Ku Klux Klan takes racism seriously.
Are they a serious... When they were the powerful offshoot of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, were they a serious political force with serious ideas?
I mean, they took their ideas very seriously.
They burned crosses on people's lawns.
They ran people out of town.
They lynched people.
They were very serious about it.
What is serious... What the hell does that even mean to say something is... Your scientific theory is serious.
Two and two make five is serious.
The earth is banana shaped.
Well, that actually is quite serious.
No, you're obligated, if you want to engage ideas, you're obligated to either confirm or reject them based on reason and evidence, not based on your capacity to whip up a souffle of snark and spread it over some intelligent people as they're trying to get some work done.
Well, any Libertarians reading this are busy readying their fingers for a good howl in the comments section.
God forbid anybody take the same dismissive tone with them that they've been taking with the sheeple since AP government class.
Hmm.
Okay, so... He's concerned that Libertarians are sensitive to being dismissed?
That what bothers Libertarians... My God, I mean, I... I don't know how to...
I mean, I feel I need to have like a bunny here and a little pet frog here to explain this to you.
Libertarians, we're not really bothered by people who are dismissive of us.
In fact, we'd love to be dismissed.
I personally would love to be dismissed.
Want to pay your taxes?
No.
I dismiss you.
Don't bother me.
The problem is that people on the left and statists, people who want the government to do stuff, want the government to pick up guns, point them at people's fucking necks, and pull the trigger if they don't comply.
The law is an opinion.
We're the gun.
Statism is violence.
The left worships the power of the state to socially engineer, to achieve what they consider, what you, my friend, consider to be the good.
The libertarian position is, listen, put down the gun, then we can talk.
It's not so much that libertarians are sensitive to what you call dismissive tones.
We're kind of sensitive to having to follow the deranged global central planning consciences of irrational people at gunpoint.
It's really the guns that are the problem with the state.
That's what makes welfare different from charity.
It's not that welfare helps the poor and charity helps the poor.
That's like saying rape involves a penis and vagina and lovemaking involves a penis and vagina.
It's true they usually do, but the rape part usually involves a knife to the throat or a gun to the head.
It's the knife and the gun that really is the problem.
It's not a goddamn dismissive tone that is the problem.
It's the fact that peaceful people who have earned their money and wish to spend it on charity on their children on building a house on buying paint supplies are not allowed to do it they must hand over their money to the government and if they don't the government will come to their house and if they resist the government coming to their house they will be shot down like dogs in the street which have foam on their mouths so I don't know about the dismissive tone is not really what libertarians are bothered by
I'd like to offer an explanation, he says to my fellow leftists, beginning with a clear picture of who these people are.
They're a homogenous bunch.
In Florida, for example, data from the Secretary of State suggests that libertarians are overwhelmingly young, white, male, and reasonably affluent.
Young republicans essentially accept for their rejection of pastoral Christianity and jingoism.
Pastoral Christianity?
So are you saying all libertarians are atheists?
That's not even remotely correct.
I mean, there's a massive fundamentalist Christian power and influence in libertarianism.
You may, you know, get some hint of that by noticing that a few of the people that you've quoted are centerpieces of libertarianism.
You quoted Infowars.
Alex Jones is religious.
Ron Paul, who you mentioned, is also religious.
So the idea that they are That libertarians reject Christianity is ridiculous.
Anyway, there's an irony in that.
Here we have a group of young people high on Austrian economics whose grandparents went to college on the GI Bill, whose parents attended accredited public universities and became professionals, and who consequently were able to grow up in leafy cul-de-sacs and Frank Capra neighborhoods with highways and power lines and fire departments.
Okay, so the GI Bill, for those who don't know, when you were drafted to go into war in Europe after the President basically promised, as he did in the First World War, to keep America out of the endless European conflicts that had consumed the continent for the last 2,000 odd years, when you were dragged off in America to serve for years in the armed forces, when you got home, there was a GI Bill that allowed you
to go to college and I don't know how it's really possible in any sane thinking rational universe to conceivably imagine that the GI Bill was the government being really nice and generous because you know
Again, I feel like I have to get some friendly-looking, cute and plumpy hand puppets to explain this to you, but generally people who are nice to you don't say, come and shoot other people or we'll shoot you.
That's not, you know, the United Way doesn't have, we're going to draft people to go and fight in Somalia, or we'll shoot them.
Because that's what the draft is.
You go and shoot whoever the government tells you to shoot, or do something along those lines.
You're ripped out of your civilian life, you're shipped overseas, you're given bad food, no sleep, and you're told to shoot people generally.
And if you resist that, and they catch you, and you resist being caught, they will shoot you down.
If you had the choice, you know, I mean, if you want to talk about empathy, let's talk about empathy.
If you had the choice, my friend, to not go to war for, say, three or four years, and at the same time as not going to war for three or four years, you weren't given some subsidies to go to school, would you think that would be an okay deal?
I mean, if you were, say, married and had children, would you say, you know, I think I can pay for my own college or maybe even go without or maybe even I just work a couple of night jobs like I did when I was in college so that I don't get dragged away from my home and my family and possibly my children for a couple of years and maybe get my head blown off?
See, the GI Bill was like the Band-Aid on the sucking chest wound of, sorry, we drafted your asses for a couple years to go and fight Nazis.
And the Japanese, was it a whole lot of fun out there in Iwo Jima?
I really don't think so.
So, I don't really... They would rather have stayed home.
And they would have made a whole lot more money staying home than they would have going off on this war and they're getting the GI Bill.
It is not an act of kindness on the part of the government to throw you a few bucks into the grave after they shipped you overseas.
Highways and power lines and fire departments.
Well, and this is the old problem that people on the left make, they mistake society with the state.
It's like the government builds roads and if the government didn't build roads we'd all just pitch into these Massive Mariana Trenches and go bursting into flames impaled upon Beelzebub's pitchfork because there's just no conceivable way that humans could ever conceivably understand how to do something as unbelievably difficult as put sand and tarmac on flat ground without the government.
It's, I mean, and my God, do you know without the government, human beings have absolutely no idea.
How to put water on flames.
Like, we'd just throw cats at the fire.
We'd dip the cats in gasoline, we'd throw them at the fire if there wasn't the government there with hoses.
You know, the hoses that were invented by the free market, driven there by trucks that were invented by the free market, paid for by taxes ripped from people in the free market by gunpoint.
I think that you may want to revise your estimate of the intelligence of the species.
We can kind of get things done without having guns to our head.
I'm fairly sure nobody put a gun to your head to write the article.
That's kind of how roads get built.
Without guns to people's heads.
Now they have reaped the benefits of the largest and fastest middle class expansion in human history.
Largely thanks to the legacy of the welfare state.
I'm sorry, I have to push these little Klingon veins of network-style head explosions.
questions.
I had a question for you, if you don't mind.
If the middle class expanded so nicely because of all of this government stuff, Why do you think America has about a hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities?
Why is there a seventeen trillion dollar national debt if there was this government power that caused people to become so wealthy and it was all just so wonderful and nice?
Why is there a massive debt?
Why are there 750 military bases overseas?
Why?
Because it was all built on debt.
Massive expansion of the middle class, my ass.
Well, my ass is expanding in a middle-aged kind of way, but that's a different matter.
I mean, my God, man, do you even think?
Do you even think, bro?
Oh, I think we know the answer.
Look, I mean, you can, yeah, you can get a middle class.
Yeah, it's pretty easy.
I mean, all you have to do is sell off the unborn to Chinese banksters, and bingo, bango, bombo, you've got your middle class.
Like, you can live pretty well if you quit your job and run up your credit cards.
And then you say, well, why do I need to work?
I've got this magic card, a magic card called the government.
Well, you know, Visa and math kind of have a way of, you know, back-flapping you in the face, and so does statism and the endless predation on the unborn known as national debts, which I guess the boomers are kind of happy about because they got a whole bunch of government services without having to pay for them.
But those of us who inherited the debt, not quite as satisfied with how this lovely middle class expanded so nicely.
But paradoxical, but paradoxical, sorry.
They have the luxury of loitering on the Internet and crying fascism every time their state adjusts the tax rate.
Because liberty.
Okay.
Okay, so you've never heard of the NSA.
You've never heard of national debts.
You've never heard of the military-industrial complex.
You've never heard of the war on drugs.
You've never heard of cop brutality.
You've never heard of the fact that you're seven times more likely to be killed by American policemen than you are by a foreign terrorist.
So it's just adjusting the tax rate.
Yeah!
That's it.
That's fascism.
When you go from 42 to 42.5 percent fascism.
Yeah, that's fascism.
It's not the 42.
It's the 0.5 adjustment that's the problem.
Please, please.
Talk to them people.
Call me.
The paradoxical as this is, it offers the explanation we're looking for.
The new libertarians are just the latest example of good old privileged blindness.
This time towards state largesse in general.
See, the moment you say state largesse, as if the state is giving people money, the state has no capacity for generosity.
The state has no money.
I mean, if you don't understand that, what are you doing talking about government?
I mean, you're like somebody talking about health care who thinks that human beings are filled with Klingon blood and river boats.
I mean, you're making no sense at all.
There's no such thing as state largesse.
The government doesn't provide anything.
It has no money.
It can print, it can borrow, and it can steal through taxation.
It has no money.
It's an agency of violence, counterfeiting, and enslavement.
In that, when children are born, say $200,000 in debt, yeah, kind of enslaved, right?
That used to be called debtor's prison.
Now it's called being born.
So, we are blind towards state largesse in general.
Libertarians sit on top of a world built by public welfare, kept safe by government from the squalor and violence of earlier times.
Oh yes!
Kept safe by government.
So the government that takes half of your property is only trying to protect your property.
The government that starts wars and provokes blowback from foreign terrorists is just trying to protect your property.
The government that puts your children into debt and into shitty schools is just trying to protect your children.
The government where there's bullying and violence and school shootings and metal detectors in schools built by the same people who build prisons, not even metaphorically, they're just there to protect you, you see.
And the funny thing is that most libertarians want a small government.
A government that actually does protect property.
A government of police, military, and law courts.
And so everything you're talking about is what most libertarians would actually agree with.
Debt is not wealth, my friend.
Government has nothing to spend.
Read Junichi.
Everything the government has, it is stolen.
You cannot steal your way into wealth as a society.
You cannot borrow your way into prosperity.
you cannot print your way into, you cannot money print your way into prosperity.
Libertarians sit on top of a world built by public welfare, blah, blah, blah.
Among the many benefits they enjoy is the luxury of ignoring that fact and believing their lot has come to them through merit alone.
Yes!
Yes, it's true that a lot of people who are in the world, in the West, are in the world because, or are successful in the world, in part because the government educated them.
Absolutely.
I fully, fully accept and understand that.
So what?
I mean, that's completely irrelevant.
Look, if I kidnap you, and let's say that you're fat, and I kidnap you, and I lock you in my basement, and I come down there with three rottweilers and a shotgun, and I say, I'm going to release these rottweilers to chew your legs off, and then I'm going to shoot you in the heart if you don't run on that treadmill for 45 minutes every five hours.
Oh, and here's your 1,200 or 1,300 calorie a day diet.
And then, after a month of this, you've lost, I don't know, 50 pounds, whatever it's going to be, 75 pounds.
And then I release you out on the street, and then you press charges against me for kidnapping you and threatening you and forcing you to exercise and restricting your diet.
Am I then to say, you ungrateful bastard.
Do you know how fat you'd be if I hadn't intervened?
Children are forced into public schools, for the most part.
The parents are certainly forced to pay, even if they don't have any children, even if they're not parents, even if they're infertile, they're forced to pay.
And the quality of government education is absolutely abysmal.
Absolutely abysmal.
So, the idea that we owe something back from the people who kidnapped our youths is insulting on so many levels.
That the idea of you lecturing libertarians on empathy is like me lecturing you on the best way to cultivate your mohawk.
But as long as we allow the privileged to ignore the origin of their advantages, libertarianism will continue to grow in scope and seriousness.
This means more gridlock, more shutdown, and financial hostage taking.
Right!
So trying to get taxes reduced is financial hostage taking, but Printing money stealing from the poor, printing money to pay for wars, and running up debts and unfunded liabilities to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt every time you fall out of your mama's hoo-hoo, that's not financial hostage taking.
Got it.
More one-sided compromises and more cost of vital services, all the ugly things that come with that lovely sounding word.
I mean, my God, I mean, the American income tax doesn't go to pay for any damn services.
It goes to pay debt.
It goes to service debt.
It goes to pay interest on debt.
It doesn't even go to pay off the goddamn principal.
That's all debt!
That's where your supposed wealth came from!
Debt!
So how do we dislodge them?
I don't know.
It won't be easy.
any social justice warrior will tell you that the privileged classes do not surrender what they have without a fight and fighting is easier when you've already got the spoils.
What?
Are you saying libertarians have won?
Like, we just have these amazing cloud cities of virtually no taxation?
The income tax?
Oh my god, I should have checked the paper today.
I feel like an idiot.
You know, I didn't realize the income tax had been repealed.
I didn't realize that schools have been left to the parents and the teachers in the community.
I didn't realize that the welfare state was now reliant upon voluntary charity, which is much more effective to the poor.
I didn't realize that regulations and legal requirements and barriers to starting businesses and competing the rich had all been repealed.
My God!
What a great day it's been.
I can't even believe I'm reading this.
I should be out there celebrating.
If we simply let them win, these fanatics might learn the hard way how reliant they are on the state.
Possibly after they contract E. coli from uninspected beef.
Yeah, because the FDA hasn't killed five million people by denying life-saving medications are available throughout Europe and other places in the world to Americans desperate to get cures from illnesses.
And also, I mean, by God, you know, if the government wasn't there, then consumers would just love to eat E. coli-laden beef.
Because that's what happened before, don't you remember, before the government came along?
I mean, what killed people was just Restaurants didn't care.
They could never get sued.
They could never drive away business.
They never got any bad publicity from killing people.
We were just retarded.
We were living in caves.
The government came along, like this massive obelisk from 2001, and then taught us everything that we needed to know, because without the government, we're all just completely retarded.
That would be a lovely irony to watch.
Wow.
So you would love to watch people get E. Coli from uninfected beef.
That is how you teach us libertarians about empathy, right?
Because you'd love to watch people get sick and possibly die from infected beef.
And that is the delicious, deep Christ-like well of your empathy towards your fellow man.
But better that we figure out how to act now before they permanently bite off the hand that feeds them caviar.
That hand is ours after all and holds up each of us as well.
So now the government is feeding us caviar.
Okay, hang on a sec.
Let me see if I can understand this.
So the government gives libertarians caviar and they're ungrateful.
Wow.
What parents you must have had.
▲
Export Selection