Cato: The Libertarian Alternative

[Trajan]

Please, the average libertarian is far wealthier than the average American. People like Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, David Koch, and Rupert Murdoch have been some of the more powerful billionaires in the global political scene.

He's an idiot that drank the Kool-aid.

Breh quotes Koch's Cato while the same Koch:

On the day before Danielle Smalley was to leave for college, she and her friend Jason Stone were hanging out in her family’s mobile home. Seventeen years old, with long chestnut hair, Danielle began to feel nauseated. “Dad,” she said, “we smell gas.” It was 3:45 in the afternoon on August 24th, 1996, near Lively, Texas, some 50 miles southeast of Dallas. The Smalleys were too poor to own a telephone. So the teens jumped into her dad’s 1964 Chevy pickup to alert the authorities. As they drove away, the truck stalled where the driveway crossed a dry creek bed. Danielle cranked the ignition, and a fireball engulfed the truck. “You see two children burned to death in front of you – you never forget that,” Danielle’s father, Danny, would later tell reporters.

Unknown to the Smalleys, a decrepit Koch pipeline carrying liquid butane – literally, lighter fluid – ran through their subdivision. It had ruptured, filling the creek bed with vapor, and the spark from the pickup’s ignition had set off a bomb. Federal investigators documented both “severe corrosion” and “mechanical damage” in the pipeline. A National Transportation Safety Board report would cite the “failure of Koch Pipeline Company LP to adequately protect its pipeline from corrosion.”

An inspection of just a few dozen miles of pipe near the Smalley home found 538 corrosion defects.

Koch repaired only 80 of the defects – enough to allow the pipeline to withstand another pressure check – and began running explosive fluid down the line at high pressure in January 1996. A month later, employees discovered that a key anticorrosion system had malfunctioned, but it was never fixed. Charles Koch had made it clear to managers that they were expected to slash costs and boost profits.

“Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else.” A former Koch manager, Kenoth Whitstine, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines “usually didn’t amount to much” and, besides, the company had “a stable full of lawyers in Wichita that handled those situations.” When Whitstine told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. The company could “pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead,” he said, describing the principles of MBM to a T.

The market will force billionaire businessmen to behave

 

[DEAD7]

The market will force billionaire businessmen to behave

Claimed no one

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

Only one branch of anarchists opposes all private property. Considering that many conservatives define liberals as inherently statist (I mean, didn't you basically call statists the opposite of libertarians in this very conversation?), it seems ridiculous to also define the most anti-statist extreme as being inherently liberal.

There are both liberal anarchists and conservative anarchists, just like there are liberal dictators and conservative dictators. It's not a position that fits on the traditional 2D spectrum.

Lol at this guy straight schooling you.

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

Dont get me wrong @DEAD7 if you wanna say libertarian and then start following up those words with anarcho-communism next...i could understand.

 

[DEAD7]

Lol at this guy straight schooling you.

Thats cool, cause Im not responding to claims i didnt make... i never mentioned liberal, and to be clear i draw a distinction between liberals and leftist.
My post:

You described anarchy...
... and the answer depends on how you define “anarchists”. I believe anarchism is inherently a left-wing philosophy... an anti-statist branch of the socialist movement and yes they all oppose private property.

His response:

Only one branch of anarchists opposes all private property. Considering that many conservatives define liberals as inherently statist (I mean, didn't you basically call statists the opposite of libertarians in this very conversation?), it seems ridiculous to also define the most anti-statist extreme as being inherently liberal.
There are both liberal anarchists and conservative anarchists, just like there are liberal dictators and conservative dictators. It's not a position that fits on the traditional 2D spectrum.

I agree with the bold part of his post.


I dont subscribe to or support anarchy so i really dont care either way to be honest(definitely not enough to argue)... it comes up only because its what most people think of when they hear libertarian.

 

[Cynic]

Socialism has been rejected by mankind around the globe and isnt on the table anywhere its time to stop for it.
Controlled capitalism is the wave.

Okay 4 points here :

It wasn't "rejected" - every socialist state is either sanctioned or toppled
by foreign powers who control global capital . The model presents a
direct threat to pre-existing elites and has to not only be eliminated but
discredited and actively discouraged.


Number 2 :

For all it's failures socialism has improved literacy rates, life expectancy, industrialization
for the masses.


Number 3:

Why do you ignore the successful example of Libya as a socialist state ?

Number 4

Controlled capitalism is what the Chinese are doing right now but this capitalism vs socialism
debate is both redundant and stupid since the U.S. itself has Social Security and Medicare
and has implemented many socialist programs throughout history.

I think going forward it will be more about market-driven vs government-driven economies

 

[Disclosure]

just play GTA Online for an hour and you'll get the gist of it

 

[DEAD7]

Controlled capitalism is what the Chinese are doing right now but this capitalism vs socialism
debate is both redundant and stupid since the U.S. itself has Social Security and Medicare
and has implemented many socialist programs throughout history.

I think going forward it will be more about market-driven vs government-driven economies

Define socialism?
Im defining socialism as public owned means of production... and i don't believe its practiced anywhere.


The rest of your points are debatable...

 

[TheDarceKnight]

You just summed up nicely how i feel about the state.
I believe the environmental, health, education and societal challenges we face are a direct result of central planning, and that the market based ideas libertarians favor(much like worker owned means of production)have largely been rejected by govt. and corporate elites around the world.




Ron Paul would have been great for this country
His son is an embarrassment.

Maybe it’s because I live in the south, but I think the idea (no offense) that slavery, segregation, etc, would’ve just worked itself out here anyways (because the market wouldn’t incentivize it) to be preposterous. There are still mad places here that wouldn’t serve black people if they could get away with it.

I don’t understand how people like Ron Paul aren’t for the civil rights act.

I still feel strongly that libertarianism is a utopian philosophy that falls apart when it’s taken off paper.

This is an ad hominem, but most libertarians I’ve known are upper middle class or upper class white guys (with the exception of one Asian guy) that don’t have a ton of empathy for those less fortunate than them, and/or just don’t grasp some basic concepts about life. One of these guys told me with a straight face in a libertarian society, poor minorities in the south that didn’t like their state’s discriminatory laws could just pack up and move states, as if that was actually a realistic solution.

 

[Cynic]

The rest of your points are debatable...

Rebut them

 

[TheDarceKnight]

Can someone explain property rights under libertarianism? In the absence of government, who establishes who owns what? Can you just Deeobo someone else's shyt with a gun?

They use the word coercion a lot. You can’t be coerced into giving up your shyt, and you can’t coerce people into giving up theirs. Etc. It’s not okay to take things by force or coercion, or use those things against people.

It’s sort of like, “if we exchange good or services then it has to be agreed upon, and we can’t just steal from each other.”

 

[skylove4]

libertarians are just republicans that are too embarrassed to call themselves republicans.....

I’ve heard them called republicans who smoke weed

 

[TheDarceKnight]

I’ve heard them call republicans who smoke weed

I might’ve agreed with that take a while ago, but honestly I think even a lot of regular republicans that that aren’t in the Bible Belt are fine with weed.

Most Republicans (that aren’t MAGA nut jobs) I’ve met in the past 5-10 years mostly concede they’ve lost the culture wars, and they have accepted things like weed and gay marriage, and have stopped fighting as hard for the death penalty.

The drug war has become synonymous with many of them to too much government, and honestly most of the non-MAGA conservatives I know just want to be able to love their guns and bibles in private and not be fukked with too much.

But I’m also in a liberal city so my understanding could be skewed. Maybe the conservatives here aren’t actually super conservative.

 

[Ya' Cousin Cleon]

Libertarianism is when you really really hate poor people.

libertarians are just republicans that are too embarrassed to call themselves republicans.....

 

[TheDarceKnight]

Libertarianism is when you really really hate poor people.

Or at the very least have zero sympathy for them.