“I’m simple and don’t bother to look deeper into anything”
Either “I hate poor people but I love weed” or “I’m lying because my actual views would scare people off”.
I like weed but hate taxes.
Okay… I hate taxes too, but how else do you propose we pay for things like roads?
That’s that the position for American libertarianism’s.
I don’t particularly hate taxes because I like my government services well funded.
‘You’re lying to either me, yourself, or both. You’re a full on conservative and don’t want to admit it.’’
“US politics new speak, can’t relate.”
“I’m a liar, pretending to be a libertarian. Fund the police so they can shut down the protests for things I don’t like.”
“You’ve been duped”. Because people like this never acknowledge the amount of corporate welfare going on in America, if you want to be fiscally conservative, stop paying for profit companies from government coffers. Don’t go after food stamps, that is just veiled prejudice
I think we have countless words. We should use our words.
We all have a spectrum of social and economic and other ideals.
Those who want to lead us have theirs too, and they’re the ones who need us to commit and compartmentalize into ideologies and macro definitions that get twisted.
“I’m discriminating towards poor people”.
“Fuck the poor but I do like to smoke weed”
This is my father. Like, I’m happy that he doesn’t hate me because I’m bi and poly. He’s pretty open about how he thinks the Republican party is cruel and shitty.
His problem is that he associates fiscally progressive policies with California’s creaking and inefficient bureaucracy. In his career, he spent a lot of time interacting with various CA governmental departments and he grew to loathe them intensely. Whenever I discuss progressive policies with him, he always relates it back to his experiences living and working in California and then just shrugs and says “I hate both parties for different reasons.”
It’s funny, because like, shit man, I kinda agree with him on a superficial level. California’s state and local governments sucks at their jobs in a lot of ways (see the notorious San Francisco public bathroom). I agree that unions (of which there are many in California) can sometimes impede quick and efficient work (although I don’t fucking care, I just chill out and am patient with folks and the shit gets done eventually. The process would be more efficient if the company tried to have a more harmonious relationship with the union).
He just doesn’t seem to understand that as far as progressive polities go, California is a terrible example. There are plenty of places around the world that that have implemented progressive and socialist policies while still preserving the things he cares about (efficiency and relative frugality), but he’s never been to those places. He hasn’t engaged with those governments. All he can think of is the “progressive” state that caused him so much anger.
So basically, I think most people like this are fundamentally nice and decent, but they’re ignorant and are blind to the underlying dissonance between their social and fiscal philosophies. My dad has never voted for Trump (he wrote in a friend’s name which was basically a vote for Trump, but fuck man, it’s at least a little better), but I don’t believe he’ll ever accept that voting according to his fiscal philosophy directly contradicts his social philosophy.
EDIT: apologies if this is rambling or poorly written. I’m sleep deprived and distracted and very stressed, and I probably shouldn’t have commented at all.
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Likes lgbtq, doesn’t like spending money.
I’m someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that’s because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it’s not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.
Two caveats:
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I’m socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don’t hate a particular group aren’t (and often don’t want to be) tolerant in this sense.
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I’m economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I’ll repeat here that I don’t value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don’t care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.
Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.
How do you define a free market? Why do dollars have value?
What about a world where we both have $2,000?
Having $2,000 is better than having $2, but in practice I’m usually skeptical that plans to achieve an outcome like that will work out rather than failing and leaving both of us with $1. The manner in which the outcome would be achieved also matters - some of the plans seem to me like proposals to just steal the money and I object to that on moral rather than economic principles.
(I don’t mean to imply that people I disagree with think that stealing is OK, but rather that they and I don’t agree on the definition of stealing.)
That’s fair and reasonable.
I’m curious about the risk-reward chart, where how much you’d both need to end up with at what chance/via what methods to make you be for it.
(I’m probably one who you’ll disagree with a lot, as I think stealing can be OK.)
I’m genuinely curious about the fiscally conservative bit. When I hear that phrase I always assume people mean “I don’t want to pay taxes” but my immediate next question becomes how do you believe societal level infrastructure is constructed and maintained. Things like roads, police, military. I’ve never seen a society with private infrastructure for those things. An immediate second question, assuming you are OK with a small level of taxation to accommodate the costs of the three things listed above would be, what other society level services would fall into the bucket of things that should be paid from taxation vs things that should be privatised. Things like disaster recovery services, judicial services, child welfare services, national security, border protection. I’m going to also assume you object to education and healthcare being a taxation funded expense? What about currently public buildings like libraries? Parks? Town Halls?
I’m not one of those few completely uncompromising libertarians who don’t want public roads - I actually think the government should be doing all the things you list, and I pay my taxes. I do prefer individualistic ways of doing things, but I’m pragmatic and there are many problems for which the collectivist solution is the only practical solution. When I say I’m fiscally conservative, I mean that I think society should be more libertarian than it is now, not that it should be absolutely libertarian.
How do you feel about anarchism and/or libertarian communism? (just trying to see how much you think that way because of a sympathy for capital or because of a rejection of the state)
As someone who shares the views of the parent comment, I think anarchism is the end-road, utopia progression of these beliefs.
I think that conservatives are right to be skeptical of big government. Concentrated power always corrupts without fail. Whether that’s big government, big corporations, big religions, that remains true.
I think some pragmatism is required especially for things such as emergency services and common defense because market forces are kind of like Darwin’s evolution. It selects for the best chance of making the number go up and doesn’t specifically select the best outcome for all participants.
Bonus Analysis: (own section because my post was getting too long)
Republicans, in my analysis, however aren’t really that concerned about big government. The Republican Party is a big organization that has been corrupted, they are more concerned about feigning concern to further their own wealth and power. And thus the turn toward fascism.
We used to have a better standard of living. We used to have less depression. We used to have more membership in civic organizations and churches. Our country used to be far more distributed and decentralized than it is today.
It’s not surprising to me that all of those factors decreased and hate and division increased while power and wealth has became more and more concentrated the last 30 years.
I agree with you on most points, thanks for your analysis/opinion!
It’s very interesting, I rarely see someone with whom I absolutely disagree with everything they just said, and whom I think their belief system will actually make all society worse and not better. But to put a clear example. It seems to me that you beliefs on the first caveat, are logically incompatible with the second. Your belief on the second caveat is antagonistic with your stated desires. A lack of government, or low scale of a government, without central planning, with a free market, with low restrictions and tons on inequality, is the prime condition that creates and fosters hate and intolerance. I read your comment and can’t help but to interpret it as “I hate poor people, and you should tolerate my hate because I’m very articulate when I express it”.
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“I smoke weed but think you’re lazy if you make less money than me”
Probably racist but hides it
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the quote IRL, but I’ve known libertarians and they’ve seemed fine. If all you disagree about is the particulars of economic theory it’s not really worth getting worked up about.
I imagine this person being young and male, and possibly liking cryptocurrencies.
I have. Most people who say this IRL are very Libertarian and very not libertarian. If they like cryptocurrency, it’s something new so they can feel smart.
Public service announcement that crypto isn’t intrinsically dumb, but that the most popular cryptos are, and most of the fans definitely are.
The most popular crypto is one of the few that’s p2p and well-tested.
Bitcoin? It’s a first prototype that unnecessarily guzzles computing power, and has no privacy features whatsoever. We don’t drive the Model T anymore.
They’re all p2p, I don’t know what you’re talking about there.
Yes.
That computing power is necessary to secure the network, without introducing security holes or economic rent. And the rate of production gets cut in half every 4 years. The alternatives you’ve been told about are inferior.
The Lightning Network has onion routing like Tor, and drug dealers have been using mixers for literally a decade. If there’s an inflation bug in Monero (like the value overflow incident), then that will be invisible too.
We still use steam power quite a bit, and aren’t replacing it simply because it’s old. Most new cryptocurrencies are like a Tesla, solving problems they didn’t care to understand.
If you think every cryptocurrency is peer-to-peer, then I am literally begging you to slow down and look at how they actually work before investing more. They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance… you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.
I haven’t been “told about” shit. I actually have a math background and know cryptography, and I’ve read more than a few whitepapers.
Monero does it better with actual privacy. Ripple does it with the least overhead of all. Eth changes so much I’m not even sure what all they have going on.
Mixers give a very false sense of security, relative to actual cryptography. People seem to think if you mix enough it’s the same, but actually there’s like a million holes in that, not to mention the trust in whoever’s doing the mixing.
They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance… you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.
So? Anything worthy of the title is open source, so if someone goes evil it just forks. Monero itself started as a fork of something else IIRC. The actual algorithm isn’t centralised in any of the big cases I can think of, not counting vapourware scams.
I believe that you’re extremely qualified in math and cryptography. But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don’t know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice. They’re mostly centralized scams, and the concerns you’re bringing up have been discussed to death.
Monero is a great example.
You’re correct that it was originally forked off of Bytecoin, which had a premine. So Bytecoin was not peer-to-peer, because one user (the issuer) had a different set of rules than everyone else. If you had invested in centralized Bytecoin, you would have lost money because it was not p2p. They had to start over!
The problem with relying on “actual cryptography” for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won’t know until after it’s circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.
It depends what country they are in
