Are libertarians our enemies?

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I had a wet dream once, but then the government took it from me: that's how ridiculous this is getting.

Rights is not something granted to you by a piece of paper or a man in a fancy office, it is something granted to you from the moment you are born. Some people call these rights "god-given", I like to call them "natural rights".

I swear, the founding fathers must be turning in their graves...

OK, if that is the definition of "right" you wish to use, I dispute that you have a "right" to property. Would you care to provide evidence to support your claim?

See - like I said, many libertarians seem to advocate genocide towards the lower class. People always think I'm crazy when I point that out, but it's right from the horse's mouth! I've been told to kill myself many times online when I've discussed economic issues and related my personal struggles to them.

Last edited by donnie_darko on 23 May 2015, 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You're absolutely right! Noone is entitled to safety, comfort, and security! Now you're getting it!

The thing is, though, that if I go and live outside in the forest, I would want to build my own cabin. What I would do, is that I would buy myself a plot of land in the forest, and chop down trees and use the logs as building materials to make myself a nice little log house, but I can't do that since the state would come and tell me what I can or can't do on my own privately owned land, which is the problem here.

No, seriously, asking people to not hurt me, and instead go do something else, whatever that may be, is perfectly reasonable. I am literally asking you to leave me alone and go do something else, but you have a problem with this idea since you feel like you have a right to tell me what to do.

No. I'm pretty sure I know more about Australia than you or the American who wrote that article.

Even the article itself says Australia tightened gun control laws in 1996 whereas the so called "Crocodile Dundee" Rodney Ansell had his shootout in 1999. You have put the effect before the cause.

The tightening of gun control laws in Australia was due to the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, a brutal killing spree in which a young man shot and killed 35 tourists.

Australia did not go "full ret*d" or "take everyones guns". Your article suggests since we tightened our gun control laws, Australia is fulled with "bandits" who gleefully ignore gun control and shoot at the unarmed populace. This is simply not the case. I haven't seen any gun toting bandits around the place.

The difference is that with Road Inc, you could chose for yourself what roads you want to buy/rent/own a stake of/whatever, and if you just said "I don't want to use or pay for your roads", nobody would come and jail/shoot you. It's voluntary.

You also have the fact that there would most likely be Road Inc, Acme Roads, and Road International, so you can pick which road provider to buy your road from, then Road Inc and Acme Roads would have to compete for your business, and thus you would get a better end product.

There are pragmatic and idealistic benefits, there you have them.

You currently are free to say "I don't want to use or pay for your roads" without having somebody jail/shoot you. I have never paid a penny directly towards road maintenance.

Competition doesn't really work in road building, since there can only really be one road. Building two, one slightly longer, is inefficient and unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.

And, of course, setting up a toll at every road junction would be extremely inefficient.

As I said before, I shouldn't have to move for people to stop stealing from me, it's simple human decency to leave people who want to be left alone, alone. Also, I sincerely doubt that Norway would turn into Somalia if we let people do what they wanted on their own land, Norway is a completely different culture with a completely different history and completely different culture. You also have the fact that Norway is an already economically and culturally developed country, unlike Somalia. Thinking that Norway is what it is only because of its government is in my opinion stupid, and I also feel like I should feel insulted, but I don't take pride or identify much with my country in the first place, so eh...

People don't just decide to interfere in other people's lives for a laugh. Sometimes they do it for personal gain, true, but the sorts of regulations that internet libertarians tend to protest loudest are the mundane ones which work towards a basic common good, like stopping people adding garish extensions to their houses that block everyone else's sunlight.

Do you even have the slightest notion how much road construction costs? It's out of bounds for the majority of people. In fact, it was President Dwight Eisenhower who had been responsible for the American freeway system, and he was a Republican, hardly a liberal Democrat. He clearly understood that there were many projects that private industry couldn't handle themselves without the government. And even if you had private companies building roads, what assurance would there be that they'd at all intersect? Great, you have a road, but very possibly a road to nowhere. And very likely you'd have roads of varying degrees of quality. And knowing the abuses of unregulated business, the chances are, those privately built roads would be of an inferior quality, as would other unregulated products be. Without an active government looking out for the citizenry, we'd be at the mercy of business taking advantage of us all for the sake of cutting corners to make a buck.

They want to kill off the lower class? Maybe.

Maybe they want the lower class to bootstrap themselves into middle class. Without welfare or assistance they want the lower class to work their way through a degree at an unsubsidized college, spending every waking moment studying or working to support themselves and pay their unsubsidized degree, which costs tens of thousands of dollars. If they're time and finances are already stretched to the limit and they happen to get sick due to illness, depression resulting from their crappy lifestyle or stress from overwork, it's game over.

It's quite absurd that the lower classes should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. A few do so but the majority aren't equipped to take on this herculean task. Even if they could all bootstrap themselves into professional careers, that would leave no one to take care of all the working class jobs.

It's just like in Brave New World. They set up an experiment on Cyprus. The island was populated entirely by the smarter upper class alphas. An island populated entirely by well educated geniuses would run pretty smoothly right? No. In their old life the alphas were accustomed to doing only professional work but on Cyprus the majority had to perform tasks that would normally be assigned to the delta and epsilon majority. There were disputes about who should do the lower class jobs, which lead to riots and civil war.

This cautionary tale illustrates why you can't have a society populated entirely by middle class professionals (unless you have a very very high rate of automation but our technology isn't there yet).

[meta hat on]When you say "the use of "ret*d" is completely unacceptable," does that mean I cannot talk about my ret*d classmate from elementary school? He was mentally and physically crippled, many would call him a "ret*ds" (although he was one of the nicer kids on the bloc, to say the least)?[meta hat off]

I'm sorry if that's how I come off. Sadly, you need a good bit of luck to earn money, and not everyone has that. Hard work and grit usually helps a lot, though. I am not unfamiliar with bad luck within the family and in my own life, but I still do not advocate theft.

Also, another example of people who died resisting government overstepping their bounds can be found here:
http://fauquierfreecitizen.com/seventy- ... in-boston/
If you need more info on that, just look here: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=people+ ... nfiscation

I'll agree with you there. A nation is more than it's government.

Maybe, it depends, really. It would still be better than having no options to chose between at all, though.

I never said Norway, or any industrialized western country would sink into being a Somalia-like cesspool; I said a libertarian like yourself should go there in order to see how a country works without government.
And if you choose to be insulted, then go right ahead. Maybe then you'll understand how you're making the rest of us feel.