Where are my libertarians?

[Hollywood Jack]

Yep. It isn't an accident Karl Marx endorsed free trade.

That should ring a few bells, but liebertarians can't let go of their autism for long enough to think about it.

If Karl Marx endorsed puppies and ice cream would those suddenly become bad things? I guess literacy campaigns suck too because Castro did one in Cuba after the revolution.

 

[emefer]

NOT a Rand fan, but that's factually not true. Plenty of real stuff to criticize Rand on, but also a lot of fake stuff floats around about her. Anyhow, I seem to line up with the libertarians more than anything else, but am not strictly a libertarian, especially with a big L.

What's not true about it other than me declaring where all the libertarians are. Are you saying Ayn wasn't receiving SS and Medicare? What are some valid criticisms? That her hero character is based on a man who kidnapped and dismembered a young girl for a small ransom?

 

[Hollywood Jack]

What's not true about it other than me declaring where all the libertarians are. Are you saying Ayn wasn't receiving SS and Medicare? What are some valid criticisms? That her hero character is based on a man who kidnapped and dismembered a young girl for a small ransom?

Ayn Rand was never against people collecting SS, she just advocated against it being taken out of your paycheck by force. Here's her actual view on the issue:

In a 1966 article for The Objectivist newsletter, she wrote about the morality of accepting Social Security, unemployment insurance or similar payments:

It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

It's a false charge of hypocrisy by holding her to an almost impossible standard. You pay money into a system, you're entitled to take money out of the same system, especially when it's involuntary. She'd only be a hypocrite if she criticized people for taking SS money and then did the same thing herself. But in fact she went ahead and did the very same thing that she had advocated for, meaning she practiced what she preached in this instance. Anyway, I don't like Rand and she's not even a libertarian and she disliked libertarians, she only liked objectivists and she demanded 100% ideological adherence from them.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Are you the guy that gave that Newsweek writer (Eichenwald) a seizure or something?

 

[Thurisaz]

If Karl Marx endorsed puppies and ice cream would those suddenly become bad things? I guess literacy campaigns suck too because Castro did one in Cuba after the revolution.

I'm content to point out that he understood the results of it better than you do.

 

[Hollywood Jack]

I'm content to point out that he understood the results of it better than you do.

I'm not a free trade absolutist. Even Trump is going to engage in a healthy amount of free trade, he just wants to "get the best deals". And as an American I wish him good luck with that...

 

[Thurisaz]

I'm not a free trade absolutist.

Good.

Even Trump is going to engage in a healthy amount of free trade, he just wants to "get the best deals". And as an American I wish him good luck with that...

For varying degrees of free trade. There's no reason to call it free trade in any other but absolute circumstances.

 

[Thurisaz]

Mises wrote a bit about the problems of allocating resources without a price mechanism in socialist countries. Marx wrote almost nothing about socialist countries or how to allocate resources in a socialist state. It's suspect that you actually think Mises was engaging Marx and not--y'know--a totally different 20th economist who had been writing about planned economies.

Von Mises sure speaks a lot about Marx, by name, in his Human Action, but maybe that's just a particular dyslexia of mine, to read "Marx" where really reads "a totally different 20th economist".

Let me know when you actually have something you'd like to add, though.

Ok. You're living up to your handle name.

Also, Happy Holidays

Fuck "holidays", it's Christmastime.

 

[Pixelated Porn]

I dated a librarian once, does that count?

did she ever shush someone?

 

[Hans Gercmiov]

Apparently this thread took on a life of its own.

Spoiler

Im drunk again.

Spoiler

Merry Christmas.