this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
887 points (100.0% liked)
Political Memes
8081 readers
2887 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To clarify, I think it's when you help other people without expectation of reward.
A libertarian cop would happily save your life from an angry grizzly bear if you paid them for the cost of bullets used, services rendered, and the bear disposal fee.
Don't need a bear disposal fee so long as you have RFK Jr. around.
But is it really help if it is necessarily transactional? I wouldn't say my mechanic helped by fixing my car because I paid him. If my neighbor fixed my car, I'd say he helped me.
I think the concept of "hired help" is a thing, at least. They're not helping you out of the goodness of their heart, but they are helping you because they're being paid to. If my mechanic is able to solve a car issue that I struggled with for a while on my own, I'd still call that a help even when the relationship is entirely transactional.
I think what you're describing with the neighbor is more like doing a favor, if I were to put words to it.
Plus it's a psychological trick "Hey, if you help me out with this, I can help you with this". That tells the person you want their help, and you are willing to help them. That's a transaction as well, and improves relationships
100%. Humans are social animals primarily because we've been conditioned into behavior where helping someone means you are more likely to be helped in turn later on.
If other members of a social unit are dependent on you, that is a transactional relationship, but providing a service for the social unit helps improve everyone's overall quality of life, even if that service is transactional.
Libertarians would never win against bears.
People focus on the bears thing, and not that most of the libertarians who joined the Free Town Project were men (wonder why women didn't feel safe joining; it's a mystery), and many (surprise surprise) turned out to be sexual predators or even murderers. They also quickly (and deliberately) bankrupted the town through budget cuts and spurious lawsuits, making life worse for everyone who lived there. The whole thing was a shitshow. Who knew that a philosophy of self-centeredness would attract the worst sort of people?
Libertarianism. Not even once.
We focus on the bears thing because that's the unexpected, humorous part, as humor is about subverting expectations. The rest of it—sexual predators, budget cuts/bankruptcy, antisocial behavior, declining quality of life—is exactly what most people expect from a libertarian town experiment. It's the bears that turn a depressing shitshow into a hilarious shitshow.
Big L, not little l. Big L is the party, little l can vary wildly, even starting out along the lines of anti-state socialists / social anarchists.
Like so many things, the modern right in the US has polluted the meaning.
For example, left libertarians will support redistribution of resources, support of green policies, and is strongly anti-war.
The Libertarian Party is just maga that... Well some of them think smoking weed is fine. And they dont want to pay taxes.
Universal healthcare, universal education to a collegiate level, and UBI replacing most/all welfare results in much less government interference/involvement and results in the greatest individual freedom via geographical/socioeconomic/employment mobility.
It's also not incompatible with capitalism, and in fact the increased mobility will spur more entrepreneurialism.
I asked a CA Libertarian senate candidate where she stands on us left libertarians?
she said left libertarians don’t exist.
US is doomed.
So taxes?
Well, under a Libertarian model, t*xes are a dirty word.
It's "unfair" that you should have to help support public services that you might need someday, so it's better to push the full burden of cost on the specific people who need it at any given moment.
Insurance is fine though, which is basically privatized taxes. There'd probably be cop and bear insurance plans available in a perfect Libertarian world, so those with good foresight and the means to afford them wouldn't have to worry about having to pay to have their life saved.
As long as, you know, the situation also doesn't include the following criteria:
Only 1-3 bullets are covered by the plan, after which the policy holder is responsible for the full cost of any subsequent bullets used.
The policy covers the services of [1] officer at standard working rate. Additional cost due to surge pricing rates will be covered by the policy holder. One additional officer will be covered by the policy at a rate of 50%, with the remaining 50% covered by the policy holder. Any additional officer fees are the full responsibility of the policy holder to cover.
Bear disposal is covered in full by the policy, for bears up to 200kg. For bears greater than 200kg, the policy will pay 20% per additional pound up to 50lbs, after which the policy holder pays a flat rate of $50 per additional stone of bear.
The policy does not cover bear- or officer-related damages to your person.
The criticism of taxes is based on the idea that you, an individual should not be expected to pay taxes by force. Corporations, trade goods, products should be taxed and enforced, but tell a person "you have no choice and no option and there are serious legal troubles (fines, garnishments, jail time, etc...) is not just because you're given no other option. The individual person is being forced to pay taxes because they were born in a certain region of the world?
Now let's be pragmatic; it would take a lot of work, time, and money to change a taxing standard. However it is not right to force each head in a country to pay taxes.
Edit: Also even as a libertarian, I think most insurance is bullshit lol
I'm actually not seeing what's weird about it. They are using and benefiting from the infrastructure that is paid for by those taxes, and pooling the resources this way allows the whole community you benefit in ways that can't be done otherwise. The extension of this is that if you are able to pitch in but don't then you're essentially "stealing" from the rest of the population.
I'm not well versed in the subtleties of a libertarian system; in a libertarian community, what's done with people who try to benefit from what others are doing without pitching in?
That's because no such system has ever worked for more than a few months. In the few attempts that have occurred, there's no way to prevent tragedy of the commons type situations and everything quickly goes to shit. They either end up reinventing taxes or getting overrun with bears.
I'm having an "akshually" moment here. For what it's worth, the Tragedy of the Commons refers to over-exploitation of material resources that are held in common by a community, like public grazing land in Hardin's famous essay. That can't happen in a libertarian system, because there wouldn't be any commons; all of the land would be privately-owned.
The closely-related concept that plagues libertarian systems is the Free-Rider Problem, which refers to people not paying the cost of a public good, which is defined as one that is non-excludable (can't stop people from using it), and non-rivalrous (use or benefit by one person doesn't prevent use or benefit to anybody else). A classic example of a public good is a lighthouse. Any ship can use a lighthouse, even those that don't help pay for its maintenance. The incentive is not to pay, so public goods are the things that every successful society has to re-invent taxes to pay for.
"Akshually" away! That was well written and informative. :)
I identify as some sort of a libertarian. My idea of the ideology is that taxes are gathered to fund essential services that cannot be resourced in better ways. Just about everybody who's not insane or an asshole agrees that police, military, judicial system, assistance for less fortunate, some infrastructure (edit: + emergency services like fire brigades and I'm sure I forgot something else too) are part of that, while schooling, healthcare and certain natural monopolies are sometimes debated depending on how strict of a libertarian you are. Personally, I side on thinking that schools and natural monopolies should be publically owned and funded, whereas for healthcare I would model the system based on Switzerland's, which is mostly privatized but works a lot better than USA's.
Debt can be used to fund profitable investments (usually infrastructure and other one-time up-front investments like school buildings), not for upkeeping existing financial structures.
Things beyond those sectors probably should not be funded by taxes. Funding for housing, culture, private sector tax breaks/direct support, and sports (outside of youth sports possibly) are examples of some of such things. In fact, if you do fund other things by taxes, you're essentially stealing resources from those essential services. Sometimes I wonder why so many people don't seem to realize this.
Housing and healthcare are essential for survival. If anyone doesn't get those things because they can't afford them, while others have far more than they need, that's cruel and unjust. You should include both of them under "assistance for less fortunate".
Schools have more benefits than I can list here. It's absurd to not fund them.
Culture attracts people to spend money in your city, which benefits business owners and many laborers, and generates a lot of tax revenue. Usually that brings in a lot more money than it costs, and that turns into extra money for essential services, instead of taking away from them. Sports can fall into this category as well, but those have gotten out of hand lately and sort of turned into a dick measuring contest between different cities.
I'm mostly with you on tax breaks, though. They're supposed to incentivise corporations to create jobs in your city instead of somewhere else, which should have a good ROI, but in practice it's almost inherently corrupt.
I’d even go so far as to say “help an unknown person out financially without expectation of reward.”