things you're secretly kinda libertariany about

no easy stuff like drugs and the military

not secretly, I'm pretty laissez-faire about guns

adult consensual sex
maybe that counts as easy (hur hur)

define "libertariany"

believe that X would be better if we did not regulate it or regulated it 'less'

mostly #2

I believe everybody has a right to poop

http://flag.blackened.net/af/images/mlc_sm.jpg imo

that said i'm p 'libertarian party' when it comes to guns

my own money

i have misgivings about the welfare state and its effect on communities in my city. like it's definitely not a wholly positive thing. otoh im not sure i can really go for cutting the money given to vulnerable people. ambivalent really.

Market systems fail spectacularly in two fields. They don't make investments in education, research, infrastructure and preventative healthcare for which the forseeable payoff isn't immediate; and they don't price externalities like pollution and habitat destruction.

Outside those areas which Libertarians utterly neglect, and the ones there's consensus on (internal & external security, dispute resolution), there are countries that have done fine hewing fairly close to the libertarian line on quite a few issues.

The Netherlands are more permissive wrt recreational drug use & sexual identity/transactions, and don't seem much the worse for it. Singapore doesn't have government healthcare providers, a single payer, or directed elder care like the U.S. Medicare system, or public wealth transfers like Social Security, and they do fine. Costa Rica hasn't had a permanent standing army for 64 years. Monetary systems without central banks constantly intervening to set the time-value of money (interest rates) have worked fine for most of history.

I'll never vote libertarian again (my first presidential vote at age 18 was for Ron Paul in 1988) due to the gaping lapses in their thinking about market failures noted above, but I'm pretty open to a smaller government footprint in a lot of fields.

http://www.shotgunnews.com/files/2012/01/pink-pistols-logo-012412.jpg

the more interesting ilx thread i think: things you're secretly kinda totalitarian about

bit disingenuous to compare costa rica's lack of a standing army to the united states

also comparing monetary systems of most of history to today doesn't make a lot of sense. I'll take 20th century economic growth over 'most of history'.

guns, private property rights, some "public safety" stuff

alcohol regulations, especially in canada. (is that too easy?)

anything everyone on ilx agrees on is too easy

'I'm for gay rights and against corporate welfare' = zzzz

maybe smoking? Like I feel that if a pub want to allow smoking, that's ok

that's better

things you're secretly kinda totalitarian about

― Mordy, Monday, February 13, 2012 3:28 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can be no absence of a social safety net--i don't care if it's provided by solidarity communities or by strong central government, my conscience can't abide the nonexistence of a net for the least of us.

maybe smoking? Like I feel that if a pub want to allow smoking, that's ok

― sonderborg

yeah this too. and i hate smoking and enjoy smoke free pubs. but it just seems wrong that it's illegal to have a pub where people can smoke.

yeah lots of people thought that before smoking wa known to cause cancer and copd

xxp:
The U.S. Army was 98,000 in 1914 before mobilizing to 3+ million by 1918 and won WWI. It was 175,000 in 1939, mobilizing to 8+ million by 1945 and contributing the the Allied victory. So long as the ability to mobilize is retained, the U.S. could easily secure our own borders with cadre-sized standing forces, and be deterred from the post-WWII succession of foolish interventions.

The Federal Reserve was started as "lender of last resort". Ie, they stood ready to offer loans to banks facing a depositor run, but for short periods and at high rates. Now, they are the "lender of first resort", providing normal operating liquidity and buying trashy assets from member banks.

Arguably, the current economic morass was in large part created by Greenspan's Fed through its interventions after the 1994 Mexican crisis, 1998 Asian/Russian crisis, and 2001 Nasdaq collapse, which reduced risk aversion among lenders, reinflated speculative asset bubbles, and bringing about our decade's cascade of Minsky moments. Perhaps short sharp shocked treatment is useful for keeping the bankers wary.

that's an argument against bad central banking, not an argument against central banking

p. totalitarian about no smoking in bars tbh

tho cigar bar/hookah places should totally be allowed to exist

xp: Agreed, there are pretty good CBs, like the Deutsche Bundesbank 1948-2002. But any institution that can cause serious harm under the mismanagement of a few bad men (Alan Greenspan, Arthur Burns in the 70s) seriously requires scope reduction.

^for "bad men" above, read "short-sighted leaders"

xp cad - i'm also libertariany about the right to die/physician-assisted suicide, so a bar that allows smoking doesn't give me any moral qualms.

What about hate speech? I sometimes think the US got this one right.

Otherwise, I'm not sure I can think of much!

xp cad - i'm also libertariany about the right to die/physician-assisted suicide, so a bar that allows smoking doesn't give me any moral qualms.

― sarahell, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:15 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i'm fine with assisted suicide but i'm not really fine with general public health hazards?

zoning

recycling

bonfires

doin whatever i want (applies only to me)

freedom

cad - do you have a problem with people who smoke having a party at their house where they and their guests smoke?

Where do libertarians stand on Fair Use and copyright? They take the side of copyright owners, don't they? I bet they do.

oh yeah ip for sure I am liberty abt

that's an issue where there's gonna be a p huge divide I think xp

cad - do you have a problem with people who smoke having a party at their house where they and their guests smoke?

― sarahell, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nope!

children voting

see, i would be okay with a bar that allowed smoking, if everyone who worked there and attended the bar agreed that it was acceptable (assuming there are other bars that people who don't want to be in a smoking-allowed bar can go to).

Otherwise, I'm not sure I can think of much!

(To be clear, this refers to things that are 'not easy' that I'm libertariany about. There are lots of things that the US got right, especially jazz.)

yeah my thing with it is i'm pretty sure the bar smoking ban is an all-or-none proposition and i'll take none

see, i would be okay with a bar that allowed smoking, if everyone who worked there and attended the bar agreed that it was acceptable (assuming there are other bars that people who don't want to be in a smoking-allowed bar can go to).

How many bars like that were there prior to the bans?

And how much leverage do the workers really have in these situations?

xp

idg how my opinions on good public policy are 'a persona'. they might be absurdist in the context of modern american politics but remember I'm the dude who defends obama in the politics thread, so I'm p aware of their context within the spectrum of american politics. that doesn't, incidentally, mean they there's something wrong with pricing greenhouse emissions and encouraging environmentally efficient lifestyles.

summary execution of all pets

Man, people seem to be hearing "gas should cost $23/gal" what's actually being (accurately) said is "gas costs $23/gal (probably much higher), we're just not paying the full bill up front".

'people have to pay for the environmental effects of driving' = 'iatee is a fascist'

Or pets can only be fed food made from the remains of the elderly who die off

Full-blown libertarianism would eventually result in a world where nothing much lived besides humans, cockroaches, dust mites, algae and bacteria. But they would all reach a certain kind of equalibrium. Voila! Sustainability! (/doomer)

Did you know that overall, cooling air is a lot less power-consuming than heating? There's really no reason to have large cities as far north as NYC unless there's a significant stabilizing effect due to ocean/mountain proximity. Which NYC doesn't have.

totally agree, which is why we should be building more big cities in california

I think it's more that you have a lot of interesting ideas that proscribe what large swaths of society at large should be doing, but you seldom address your own stake in this!

btw I just completely misused the word proscribe, ignore me

I don't care what society 'should be doing', I care about pricing things w/ environmental goals in mind

and cooling is less necessary than heating - no a/c in the south would require reconfiguring houses to old vernacular styles with sleeping porches and shit, but you aren't going to die sleeping outside in a Mississippi summer

man ppl get really bent out of shape by this stuff

How is "pricing things w/ environmental goals in mind" not a thing that society would do?

eugenics program to breed people who can run marathons to deliver news from urban city-state to urban city-state

the chances of anything iatee 'wants' happening in america's political context are close to zero, so everybody can take it easy

Being libertarian doesn't mean not giving a direction for society! It means that specific direction is limited government, subsidies, and intervention

marketing campaign to turn unused NYC subway and sewer tunnels into 21st century artists' lofts
art supplies restricted for wastefulness (oops)

new TV production banned, all citizens have to watch media projected from a central location onto night-time clouds. No clouds, tough shit.

wow I had no idea raising the gas tax would have so many unforeseen consequences

no, this is the libertarian thread, you have to pose it as not subsidizing roads or subsidizing gasoline

Just spitballing ways to save the planet.

makes you think

haha

I go to a conference call and this place turns venomous. Waaahhh happen?

tbh, though, the effects from denying healthcare to the elderly is probably not that far off from designing policies to either uproot people or make living where they do untenable - going to be a lot of holdouts fighting back or dying off
and killing off old people would undeniably be good for the environment, whereas herding people together generally hasn't been

whereas herding people together generally hasn't been

Do you...have anything to support this or are you just mad now?

yeah now that i think about it probably better to just leave things as they are

milo

you are continuing on this path as if ppl have been arguing against your ideas to kill off (note- think about a better euphemism for this) nearlydeads, when tbf nobody is fighting you on these vital reforms

Do I have any evidence that urbanization (partic. rapid urbanization) isn't good for the environment?
Sure: the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary China.

I'm not mad, I just think iatee's views - or at least his ways of stating them - are tailor-made for reductio ad absurdum, in that they start off on the absurd continuum.

'raise taxes on things that cause global warming'?

Seriously - if iatee were more serious about needing radical ideas to save the world (rather than, as noted, wanting the NYC he loves), he would be encouraging agrarianism and population reduction. Mankind is never quite so sustainable as when it needs the farmland directly beneath its feet to survive.

why do people think I love nyc so much

killing off old people would undeniably be good for the environment

Wha? Old people don't reproduce. They have few years left to consume resources. They eat like birds. It's you young 'uns who will be vigorously spawning all those ravenous children, demanding ice cream and Gameboys, and ruining the planet for the next century!

I don't even own a I <3 ny shirt

my vision of the future is locking everyone into densely-packed urban gulag camps where only billionaires can afford to do anything more than 20 blocks away from their residence, including work.

― iatee, Tuesday, February 21, 2012 9:31 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do you own a I 8====) NY shirt?

why do people think I love nyc so much

well consider the possibility that climate change will make it worse

no

iatee wants to ruin the yokels' lives... to save them!!!!

Set up another round of tornados, floods, hurricanes, and droughts for everyone! They're on the house!

Climate change and other human impacts are going to make things worse, and (TMI) combine to be the reason I don't think I ever want to have kids. I don't want to bring people into a world where their kids probably won't get to experience seafood (as a minor example) or maintain a comfortable existence at all.
But making life shittier for most people right now - but in a way that won't effect structural change - is kinda dumb and punitive toward people for having the lives they were born into. And is clearly unrealistic to boot, since no one will buy in. Like I said, ideas about sustainability that accept the size of the US and its population (encouraging mass transit in any mid-sized city, better and faster rail networks, governments actively teaching people to grow some of their own food when possible) are a lot more valuable.

are you suuuuuuuure that raising taxes on things that contribute to global warming "wont effect structural change"

we're having a hell of a time getting buy-in on mass transit in mid-size cities and faster rail networks. i'd hate to see the reaction to the idea of "governments actively teaching people to grow some of their own food when possible"

the whole point of 'making' forms of carbon energy more expensive is that stuff like transit networks, farming and mfging processes, housing sizes, and so on, adjust or retrofit as needed

yup, mass-transit is uncompetitive in midsized cities when we build and fund its competition, gas is cheap and transit-oriented neighborhoods are illegal to build. dealing w/ those things are as important as spending more money on transit. making it difficult to drive or own a car is the best way to fund public transit.

are as important = is as important

Iatee, what do you think of cap and trade?

humanity's last hope