Moon Bases Not Moon Lassos: New LOLConservatives Thread

[dieblucasdie]

And get off reddit for Christ's sake.

[Babar]

Yo dogg read some fucking Kropotkin or something

I've never read him. I'm curious, tell me about him.

[jebreject]

Kropotkin was what could best be described as an anarcho-communist. So he has all that fuck the state stuff libertarians like, but coming from an economic model that is fair and participatory. His big thing was that society should be based on voluntary associations between people. This was after being raised as part of Russian nobility; in fact, his father was a Prince. He became interested in the lives and conditions of the peasantry, which opened his eyes to the nature of labor relations and helped to instill in him the revolutionary spirit. His principle works are The Conquest of Bread, Fields and Factories and Mutual Aid. He believed that society should be organized from the ground up and made up of free and voluntary associations, and these ideas were based on his observations of communal life and cooperation in not just pre-feudal society, but among all groups of people at all levels of society (of course he was most interested in those who had the least).

His main contribution to economics was the idea of mutual exchange. He also believed that market forces would be nonexistent if all the goods and services required by society were produced and distributed fairly. He also wanted to eventually do away with money entirely, and felt that human's natural predisposition to cooperation suited them for such an economic model.

I was being somewhat glib, though, in that I don't think Kropotkin is necessarily what you need, but I feel that it might be worth it for you to explore leftist anti-authoritarian trends as well as rightist ones such as libertarianism and laissez faire approaches to economics and governance. I also highly suggest educating yourself further on economic systems that are alternatives to or outright opposed to capitalism, and though dense as hell, Marx's Capital is sort of the best possible critical analysis of capitalism. For what it's worth, even most staunch capitalists recognize its value as an incredibly important work in the field of economics.

[hannah]

You are a good egg, Jeb. One of the best eggs.

[fishjim]

You are a good egg, Jeb. One of the best eggs.

[dieblucasdie]

USDA approved

[jm]

word yeah

[Antero]

Cage free and shit.  No antibiotics.

[Thermofusion]

you egglands best, dogg!

[Ignatius]

Deep gold, velvety yolks

[Antero]

you egglands best, dogg!

I like how Achewood-y this sounds.

[Anne the Man]

Jeb Eggen

[FreddyKnuckles]

So one of those egg council creeps got to you too, huh?

[Babar]

Jeb, even though I don't believe in involuntary redistribution of wealth, I see nothing wrong with voluntary redistribution of wealth. I can see how a society of like-minded individuals as yourself could exist within a completely free libertarian state with no income taxes and minimal interference from government. It's just when you start forcing people to participate that don't want to, that I have problems with. Of course there would still be a head of state and there would still be billionaire and all that, but nothing could stop you from forming a communal society of cooperation and mutual exchange within the state. I know it sounds highly contradictory, but I can't imagine another way for a society like you describe work without the use of force. Unless 100% of the population was completely on board, but that's highly unrealistic.

[Good Intentions]

Why are we talking about this? I was calling Ron Paul dirty names and suddenly this is one of the boring sections of the Anarchist FAQ.

[Babar]

Nobody is forcing you to participate, GI. That's the beauty of liberty.

[Good Intentions]

Like you know the first fucking thing about liberty.

Wait a moment while I write something more substantive.

[Babar]

You really don't have to. Me and Jeb are amiably exchanging ideas and views with mutual respect and that's the only kind of internet argument I want to have.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

YOU HAVE A STUPID FACE

[Good Intentions]

You really don't have to. Me and Jeb are amiably exchanging ideas and views with mutual respect and that's the only kind of internet argument I want to have.

Mutual respect where you ignore everything everybody tells you.

[Captain]

Like you know the first fucking thing about liberty.

Wait a moment while I write something more substantive.

GI, I know you've got a lot of good stuff to say and I don't want to make light of that. But if there was ever a sig for the ages, this is it.

[Good Intentions]

Well, I might as well do some proper political philosophy, then.

Somewhere in the recent public debate about the role of government something that has dropped out of view is that the main task of a government is to govern - maintain the necessary infrastructure and institutions to keep a society going, organise and co-ordinate the resources of its constituents, and so on. A government is often being viewed and evaluated as you would an especially large and expansive company, but this misses entirely the task of government, because it neglects the part where governments have jurisdictions - domains in which they are expected (and required) to act with authority, otherwise they couldn't play their role as co-ordinating agency. Let me elaborate.

The libertarian model of government is as a collection of enterprises, modelled on or constituted by private companies. This is done in the view that private enterprises in competitive markets are, in certain rather common circumstances, extremely effective distributors of resources. There are two problems here. The first is that many of the traditional tasks of government are in circumstances where markets are very bad at distributing resources - earlier I mentioned how healthcare is one of these domains (look it up - it's been settled science since the 1950s), the same counts for extremely large projects the benefits of which are dispersed very widely, like transport and communication networks, or emergency response agencies, or monitoring programmes (again, look it up - something like earthquake prediction programmes are paradigm examples of a service no market could be expected to provide).

But let's concentrate on the second problem: that something a government has that no company has is a jurisdiction. Take the laughably stupid suggestion to privatise the FAA or the TSA. These agencies don't perform consumer services, they are regulatory agencies. So, earlier Freddy says that the TSA used to be private before Homeland Security came along, but that's wrong. The creation of Homeland Security didn't just change who writes the paychecks - it created a central co-ordinating authority. Homeland Security and its analogues have powers that no security firm has. I don't mean powers like 'now TSA has the power to force you to either receive a pat-down search or go through the body scanner'. I mean power as in capacity - there are things governing agencies can achieve that no alternative could. TSA decides that nobody can go through a US airport with certain liquids in carry-on luggage, and boom, it's done (given the resolution is enforceable, and not just a dead letter). Now every airport in the domain follows that resolution, and nobody goes through with certain liquids in carry-on. If the TSA was replaced with a series of security companies, a policy like that could extend only as far as the individual companies did. For the market to work effectively, there would have to be a variety of these companies (if there was a monopoly, it would be just like a government, but worse in every regard). Which means that there could be no resolution enforced across an entire domain.

You might not care about what goes in people's carry-on luggage, but the same point carries over to any government action. When slavery got banned by the UK, they were able to stamp out the intercontinental slave trade almost immediately because of the blanket prohibition on it across sovereign British territory (including large parts of the Atlantic). If slavery wasn't banned across the whole domain, individuals could have gained an economic advantage by continuing to use it while people around them don't, and as they took over more of the market slavery would then be reintroduced. This is how it is in general for regulation - there is no way for there to be any kind of competition among regulations, because a regulation isn't a regulation unless it is an uncontested authority over its domain. Similarly, a government can't co-ordinate without authority, and we need that co-ordination for goods like healthcare, transport networks, the maintenance of certain societal standards, etc.

(The above is one of the reasons the US's widespread use of security contractors in warzones is so pernicious - these security firms have all of the authority of the governmental agencies that back them, but none of the controls placed on the government. Also, There is another effect of this observation, regarding another lamentable shortcoming in a lot of public debate. Often when questionable market practices are pointed out - working conditions in China, financiers reneging on promises not to fund certain types of industry, etc. - the response comes that attempts to regulate this domain would be self-defeating, since there are agents outside the domain who will continue on regardless (here's an example). This is no comment at all about the desirability of the regulations. It's a comment on how far the jurisdiction of the regulators go. If we took this seriously as a reason not to have regulations, then we couldn't have any regulations whatsoever, and every domain would become a race to the bottom.)

The above is a comment on what is involved in something being a government. It shouldn't be read as a comment on the desirability of any particular system of government, or even of which domains a co-ordinating authority like described above is needed - the above is a schema that applies to all systems of government. Except the libertarian one, because they don't have a theory of government proper, because they are fucking idiots. It does apply to serious thinkers like Hayek and Nozick during his libertarian phase (they just think authorities like described above should have extremely limited domains), but Paul and his ilk bears as much resemblance to them as he does to the Emperor of Japan.

This is already absurdly long for a forum post, and I'm probably just pissing in the wind because Babar will act dumb again. There's only so much of my time I can be expected to waste.

[elpollodiablo]

That thing about protesting and doing too much of it

[Babar]

You really don't have to. Me and Jeb are amiably exchanging ideas and views with mutual respect and that's the only kind of internet argument I want to have.

Mutual respect where you ignore everything everybody tells you.

The main debate between me and LPTJ has always been Paul vs. Obama. I'm not ignoring anyone, I just haven't been presented with a compelling enough argument to support Obama over Paul. When I'm presented with two candidates to choose from, one being pro-peace and the other being pro-war, I will always be inclined initially to go with the pro-peace candidate regardless of other issues. When those issues happen to be Paul's emphasis on protecting civil liberties vs. Obama's horrible track-record of extending the Patriot Act and signing the NDAA and Paul's belief in the free market vs. Obama's belief in the welfare state, Paul is the obvious candidate that resonates more with me. Nobody has tried to convince me that war is a good thing, nobody has tried to convince that violating civil liberties is a good thing so the main focus has been on free market vs. welfare state and so far I am unconvinced to completely change my position on the subject, though I have heard some good arguments. I've never said Ron Paul is a saint or that he can do no wrong, he's not even my favorite candidate in the race since I actually prefer Gary Johnson over Ron Paul. But Paul vs. Obama is easy like Peace vs. War is easy. Paul vs. Kucinich would be a lot more interesting.

x-post: GI, this is the type of post I ignore because of how it's written in a smug, condescending style. But quickly I'll say that I'm not against all regulations, I'm against regulations that violate civil liberties.

[Good Intentions]

How do I phrase this? You have a strange view of what condescension consists in if you think it involves me taking an hour of my time to write an in-depth response to a point that has been raised. When I said the post would involve proper political philosophy, I meant exactly that - this is the type of thing we do when we do proper political philosophy (including the inevitable response where somebody tells me I've got it all ass-over-tit). I don't mind you telling me I'm wrong. But, you know, there are premises in there working towards conclusions. If the premises are true and the reasoning valid, to not accept the conclusion is to fall face-first into falsehood.