I’m talking about all the ways Democrats dream up to hand out other people’s money. It’s never ending.
Getting people to pay for other people’s disfigurement fits in that broad category.
Pay for your own mutilation, thank you very much.
How Libertarian Are You?
- Thread starter What Would Jesus Do?
- Start date
Getting people to pay for other people’s disfigurement fits in that broad category.
Pay for your own mutilation, thank you very much.
hawkeyetraveler
HR All-American
I think there are a VERY large number of people who share more or less these types of beliefs. But we lack the party infrastructure to do anything about it.
Republicans are the kings of wasting money. Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt.
Can you remind me who worked with Trump to remove the debt ceiling?
Do you know their names?
Did those same people ever accuse Trump of signing too big of a budget?
Your head is so far up your ass you can’t see a damn thing can you?
Voters like you suck to high heaven.
Pretty much the same here, except that I voted Green in 2016.
Again, I believe we are talking about two totally different topics, which is partly my fault for bringing OIF into the discussion when the original topic was about our military bases abroad.
In the OP video, the Chase said bring EVERYONE home. So, I guess I need to understand what does he mean. Does he mean from every current conflict or does he mean close every base. I got the impression he was talking about both to which I disagree with. But said in post #6 I would be okay with closing some of them, but it depends on which ones and why. Can you imagine not having any military presence in any other country? There are strategic, Intelligence, and in times of conflict, tactical advantages to having bases like Ramstein, Al Udeid, Lakenheath, Misawa, etc.,
That was the point I was making.
I saw an interview with lefty economist Richard Wolff recently where he pointed out that Russia is learning the lesson from the US that war is profitable for those in power and good for the economy.
So I've been repeatedly told.So you voted for Trump.
Yes. Yes I can.
Can you?
Are we worse off not trying to partition Syria?
Or would we keep on keeping on after we leave that place.
Point I'm making is those bases enable the destructive neocon instincts to bomb and invade over and over and over and over... for decades. We're not keeping the peace, we're creating chaos and destruction.
Why pump the taxpayer funded salaries of 80 thousand military and civilians into the EU economy?
So we can bomb Libya? How'd that turn out?
A new report by the British Parliament shows that the 2011 NATO war in Libya was based on an array of lies.
"Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options," an investigation by the House of Commons' bipartisan Foreign Affairs Committee, strongly condemns the U.K.'s role in the war, which toppled the government of Libya's leader Muammar Qaddafi and plunged the North African country into chaos.
"We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya," the report states. "UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence."
The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the British government "failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element."
The Libya inquiry, which was launched in July 2015, is based on more than a year of research and interviews with politicians, academics, journalists and more. The report, which was released on Sept. 14, reveals the following:
- Qaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians. This myth was exaggerated by rebels and Western governments, which based their intervention on little intelligence.
- The threat of Islamist extremists, which had a large influence in the uprising, was ignored — and the NATO bombing made this threat even worse, giving ISIS a base in North Africa.
- France, which initiated the military intervention, was motivated by economic and political interests, not humanitarian ones.
- The uprising — which was violent, not peaceful — would likely not have been successful were it not for foreign military intervention and aid. Foreign media outlets, particularly Qatar's Al Jazeera and Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya, also spread unsubstantiated rumors about Qaddafi and the Libyan government.
- The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
We'll happily create a failed state to avoid having a hostile state. Syria is an obvious example, but Libya and Lebanon also come to mind. Ukraine could go that way - better a devastated country than a Russian vassal. (Which may also be the way Putin sees Ukraine.)
Did Finland join NATO because they were afraid of Russia or afraid of us?
I think Finland joined to piss Russia off. The Finn's hate Russia more than us. Friend in HS was born in Finland and family moved back there after we graduated. To say he hated Russia is putting it lightly
Canada wants to control every aspect of everyone's lives, for their own good.
once in the 90's by mistake, I did not realize how the primaries worked here in tx
Maybe 20% and that's being kind.
I'm sort of agree with @Hawk_4shur and @joelbc1 views on libertarianism. It's really easy to make it sound good but when rubber meets the road and puts it into practice what does it mean?
It often means massive deregulation of businesses that have harmed, endangered and even killed people because they were not regulated enough and pursued profits above all else. John Oliver had a good segment about how Boeing's pursuit of increasing it's own stock price has endangered the safety of the flying public.
It also often means that people who are economically struggling are simply left to fend for themselves because "economic freedom" means that we don't want to make anyone pay taxes to help them. This is where the selfishness comes in. It's about pretending that you never benefited economically from having a community around you and therefore deciding that you are going to actively oppose anyone else benefiting from being in a community.
Backing out of our security agreements and closing down our bases overseas just leads us back into the isolationism that failed us in the 1930's.
Quite frankly a major problem with our country is that we under-regulate in general.
I'm sort of agree with @Hawk_4shur and @joelbc1 views on libertarianism. It's really easy to make it sound good but when rubber meets the road and puts it into practice what does it mean?
It often means massive deregulation of businesses that have harmed, endangered and even killed people because they were not regulated enough and pursued profits above all else. John Oliver had a good segment about how Boeing's pursuit of increasing it's own stock price has endangered the safety of the flying public.
It also often means that people who are economically struggling are simply left to fend for themselves because "economic freedom" means that we don't want to make anyone pay taxes to help them. This is where the selfishness comes in. It's about pretending that you never benefited economically from having a community around you and therefore deciding that you are going to actively oppose anyone else benefiting from being in a community.
Backing out of our security agreements and closing down our bases overseas just leads us back into the isolationism that failed us in the 1930's.
Quite frankly a major problem with our country is that we under-regulate in general.
Bingo your last paragraph in particular. Sadly, humans being human, we need to be “overseen” closely.....and constantly.
And that is further irony……,Kinda like all the conversation about “AI” and how it might improve life/quality of l,ife…….Someone (other than God Almighty) is gonna program it…….and that’s the rub.
Regulatory capture is real.
Libertarians will tell you that the consumers best protection is free competition (which regulation invariably curtails), and a court system that protects their rights against force and fraud.
Keeping money you earn is selfish.
Using the government to take someone else's money that they earned is... not selfish?
The benefit of being in a community the enhanced productivity of specialized labor and trade. Not being able to steal what your neighbor earns by slipping into a voting booth.
Your grasp on history is poor.
FDR abandoned isolationism, after running for the presidency in 1940 on the fact he'd kept us out of the foreign wars.
Our bases in the Philippines, over four decade hold overs from the Imperialist spasm of the Spanish American war, and our agreements to 'lease' British bases in exchange for giving them ships they couldn't afford got us embroiled in WW2.
We were shooting at Germans before Pearl Harbor. That's not isolationism.
God Damn you spew a lot of nonsense. I will focus on just one of the WTF comments here.
Are you saying the US should not have engaged in the war at all before Pearl Harbor? (I use that date because I don't think even you are dumb enough to believe the US should have stood by after that. But then you've surprised me before.) That the aid to Britain and other allies was a bad decision? That FDR was elected primarily on the belief by voters that he would keep the US out of the war no matter what? That "shooting at Germans before Pearl Harbor" was unwarranted?
I fully expect your usual side-stepping, spinning and misrepresentations to again be your response.
If new competition isn't able to provide products safely than they shouldn't be in business.
Besides set up costs and competition from already established competition is far far bigger of a barrier to entry than regulation. Regulation being a barrier to entry is way way overstated.
When you are unwilling to pay taxes to benefit the people at the bottom of your community it absolutely is selfish. No one is taking away everything a person earns.
And you benefited from that community from the beginning, it likely provided you schooling, provided you roads for transport, police and fire protection. This aspect also extends to those in economic need.
Us providing material support to the UK isn't what pulled us into WW2. What pulled us into WW2 is we decided to stop selling the Japanese oil because we eventually decided we didn't want to be providing a foriegn power the oil it needed to invade other nations without provocation.
The lesson is with a world economy you can not realistically hope to have an isolationist foreign policy.
Regulation is often a cause for many of the set up costs, that’s why large, entrenched institutions don’t mind them as much, because they preclude smaller competition that can’t spread those regulatory costs across as many workers/consumers.
Libertarians aren’t anarchists, so they support the government operating a legal system, to create a publicly influenced monopoly on force to protect life and property.
But so many of the things that government has taken over could be better provided by competitive producers under the influence of consumer demand instead of bureaucracies that aren’t subject the constraints of consumer demand.
We give them ships in exchange for the ‘right’ to start manning their overseas bases. We were shooting at the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and for the benefit of the British.
Why do you describe a foreign policy intended to bend a foreign nation to our will as ‘isolationist’. What does that word mean to you, and how does it fit into the context of our actual policy which you’ve described?
I see the policy as a rejection of non-interventionism, and leading directly to the shooting part of the war.
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”
Our embargo on Japan was intended to compel a response (again, that’s not ‘isolationist’), and as Hoover noted, “we stuck pins in the rattlesnake” and it predictably bit us.
I think trying to describe an interventionist foreign policy as isolationist leads to faulty conclusions.
Non-interventionism isn’t economic autarky, it’s acknowledging Washington’s hard won wisdom:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible
I have to say, I'm a real mishmash. I'm a huge believer in limited government, but pragmatic enough to understand that most of the things true libertarians want would be profoundly dangerous in a world as complicated and dangerous as ours. At the same time, as I've aged I've become somewhat more socially conservative.
Now my neighbor...he's a libertarian. He and his wife used to host an annual "Friederich Hayek's Birthday" party, which I attended once. It was the biggest collection of navel gazing nerds I've ever seen assembled in a three-bedroom house. But I think he's toned it down a bit since he had kids.
Now my neighbor...he's a libertarian. He and his wife used to host an annual "Friederich Hayek's Birthday" party, which I attended once. It was the biggest collection of navel gazing nerds I've ever seen assembled in a three-bedroom house. But I think he's toned it down a bit since he had kids.
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Yes I'm sure it's regulation that's preventing people from getting into the business of manufacturing passenger aircraft and not the massive amount of money that would be required to not only design an aircraft up front but also create the facilities required to make something so large and complex. Nope it's not that. . . it's that the FAA would have to come check their work.
In my experience handing things over to for profit companies just makes them worse. On top of that how does helping the economically disadvantaged create a profit?
Yes but that's not what pulled us into the war.
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We made a business decision to stop selling to a certain customer and that customer attacked us. Choosing to not trade with certain nations is still isolationism.
So you are ok with selling someone a gun that he uses to murder people? Because that's essentially what Japan was doing with our oil, using it to go murder and rape innocent people.
I'm not sure even Washington would get behind that. But I don't know, I do know he liked to use violence to force people to work for him without pay. So it wouldn't surprise me if he backed that too.
Not remotely true, just what you've been conditioned to believe so you'll easily dismiss them.
I'd love to discuss this. Care to throw out some examples? Maybe we can find common ground.
I confess a bias in favor of what I call "protections" but conservatives like to vilify as "regulations." But I'm also quite happy to let the market handle a lot of things. It's just that there are some things that are too important or too dangerous to leave to the market. You already agree with a few of those, so perhaps we can agree on more.
There are also some interesting areas where markets and governments can peacefully coexist. Sometimes that's a good thing, but not always.
Ever read up on the Trabant?
The East German car with a multi-year waiting list and no gas gauge?
It wasn’t that the Trabant had a weak two-stroke engine, though it did. It wasn’t just that the Trabant was made with recycled waste (usually from wool or cotton), though it was. It wasn’t that Trabants topped out at 60 mph and “smoked like an Iraqi oil fire,” as one writer put it.
No, the Trabant’s biggest problem was that it never really improved. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the 1957 Trabant had no tachometer, no turn signal, no seat belts or fuel gauge, no trunk liner, and used an oil/gas mix. The fact that these basic amenities were still missingwhen Taylor Swift was born is a bit more surprising. Indeed, when the last Trabant was produced in 1989 it still topped out at about 60 mph, which it took 21 seconds to reach from a stop.
Compare to consumer driven market in West Germany, with parking lots and showrooms full of VWs, Opals, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc.
We take improvement in our consumer driven economy as a given, not always recognizing that improvement is a byproduct of competition, not simply a birthright of being in the West.
I wouldn't say he was fully mainstream Libertarian.
I simply won't vote for them because of one race I was involved in back in the day. The Libertarian candidate dropped out with the statement she needed to drop put since her platform was exactly the same as the Republicans, and the Republican candidate had been leading the charge on the core issues for over a decade. She wasn't going to run so she didn't drain votes from him.
The next day the state Chairman of the Libertarian put his name on the ballet just because he could.
I simply won't vote for them because of one race I was involved in back in the day. The Libertarian candidate dropped out with the statement she needed to drop put since her platform was exactly the same as the Republicans, and the Republican candidate had been leading the charge on the core issues for over a decade. She wasn't going to run so she didn't drain votes from him.
The next day the state Chairman of the Libertarian put his name on the ballet just because he could.
