OSSR: John Wick's Libertarian Fantasy Utopia

[ArmorClassZero]

^My face when members of the Den discover that redlining was established and propagated by Govt inserting itself into market affairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Owne ... #Redlining

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_H ... #Redlining

Fuck me, amirite?

[Mistborn]

So AC0 is now just unironically quoting Hoppe (who is totally a fascist) now. Can we just ban him now or do we have to wait for him to totally break down a start ranting about crisis actors or something.

[Whatever]

A quick note on the "austrian school" since some people may not be familiar with the term.

While they were the first to identify several important concepts in economics (such as the idea of "opportunity cost"), those ideas were quickly adopted by everyone. What distinguishes them is a complete refusal to use mathematical models, experiments, or the scientific method in general.

That is consistent with AC0's approach here. All of his answers are developed a priori, and his model of libertarianism is fundamentally non-empirical. He rejects real-world data, not because it contradicts his beliefs (though it certainly does), but because his beliefs originate completely outside of reality.

[ETortoise]

It really is an pre-scientific epistemology isn’t it? Natural rights are enumerated, principles are derived from them, and then the real world evidence is squidged into a shape that fits the principles. It reads a lot like medieval philosophy in that way.

Incidentally, the libertarian answer to the trolley problem seems to be that you shouldn’t pull the lever and divert the trolley, because it is worse to do violence against one person than to allow 5 people to come to harm. It also seems to count diverting the trolley to a 3rd track that goes through someone’s prized begonia patch as violence impermissible under the NAP.

[MGuy]

So just in case anyone would for a second buy into what AC0 is putting down, redlining was being done in practice before the government act. Strangely (read: purposefully) AC0 doesn't link the actual wiki page on redlining which says

Racial segregation and discrimination against minorities and minority communities pre-existed this policy. The implementation of this federal policy aggravated the decay of minority inner-city neighborhoods caused by the withholding of mortgage capital, and made it even more difficult for neighborhoods to attract and retain families able to purchase homes.

which tells you exactly that because of course. Now I wonder if AC0 thinks slavery was caused by government because government had regulations that enforced it. Who knows? It's hard to understand how someone who has been so thoroughly trounced will go next.

[jt]

Redlining wouldn't have had such a negative impact on black Americans if the government backed loan policies it excluded them from didn't work in the first place.

[souran]

AC0 you have to be one of the densest people I have ever seen post here.

Redlining is an example of REGULATORY CAPTURE, the builders and loan agencies wanted to exclude minority buyers and conspired to capture the portions of the government that could make their desires the law of the land.

Nobody is arguing regulatory capture is good. At least nobody on the left is arguing that regulatory capture is good. I am not sure what crazy position a libertarian or yourself would take.

[rasmuswagner]

Frank, Libertarians don't think think things are inherently inferior or superior, but logically one or the other.

Classic fucking "16 year old slightly autistic wiseass". Dude, "logical" is not a magic word that magically negates all criticism. Reading your posts is like arguing with a god damn "Sovereign Citizen".

[DSMatticus]

Logic is descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not saying this for AC0's benefit, he believes in natural rights fairies or whatever and is a lost cause, but it is something of a pet peeve of mine. The universe is not a "problem" to be solved. It asks nothing, wants nothing, prefers nothing - it simply exists. It does not give a single fuck about you, what you want, or what you do. The universe is a set of things being acted on by mechanical principles and is completely incapable of judging you and finding you worthy or lacking. Nothing is logically inferior or superior to anything else any more than 2+2=4 is superior to 3+3=6. They are both simply statements about the world as it is; nothing more, nothing less.

All ethical value and personal desires are alogical - not il-logical, a-logical - they are outside the scope of the questions logic can answer. "Suffering is bad" is not a logical statement. I cannot derive it from the laws of the universe. I can only declare that I don't like suffering. I do not like to experience it; I do not like to see it. And, acting in accordance with that declaration, I can use logic and other observations about the world to make decisions which I believe will minimize my suffering, and the suffering of others. Logic can tell me how to minimize suffering - it cannot tell me I should. I told myself I should, and logic told me how to get from A to B. And so we say logic is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Spock/Vulcans, Data, etc, etc - these were always, frankly, stupid characters. Stupid-fun, but stupid. A "purely rational" being has no preference for its own life or death, or anything else, because there is no rational argument that the universe ought be any way or another. A purely rational being is a calculator; it has no agency, no matter how much it can 'predict' or 'evaluate.'

[Username17]

Jesus, Frank. For someone so knowledgeable, it is a shame to see you stumble into the most basic economic fallacies.

To hop on the Austrian epistemology horse beating for a second, note that AC0 isn't claiming that our description of actual observed causal relationships in the real world are wrong, but that they are logically fallacious. This is a massive tell, because the Austrians reject the scientific method for being deductively invalid. I wish I was making that up, but I'm not.

Deductive Logic can tell you with iron clad certainty that if your premises are correct and if you apply your logical deductions correctly that your conclusion has to be true. But therefore Deductive Logic cannot give you any new information, all it can do is tell you what your own beliefs mean.

When I do medical research, we look at a few hundred patients and measure after particular interventions outputs and we get noisy data. Some people get better without intervention. Some people don't get better even when we do interventions. Treatment plans have failure rates and the body is also trying to heal itself. When we say that a treatment plan "works" we're saying that statistically it appears that if we give the treatment to a lot of people that more of them will get better. We suggest embarking on chemotherapy regimens that our statistical models tell us increase the chances of five year survival by four percent.

To the Austrian, this is "fallacious." The fact that we are 99.99% sure that starting a course of Bisphosonates in people with metastatic breast cancer will reduce their risk of bone spread during the treatment program and increase overall survival by 1% over 5 years means that we are "not sure." We don't have logical certainty and are instead making statements like "very highly probable" and they reject that as being knowledge at all.

Austrians can have certainty because they reject reality. And when they bang on about how the knowledge other people have is logically fallacious, what they are really saying is that other people value observed experience more than their own priors. I am proud of the "fallacies" that Austrians accuse me of. Because it's the scientific fucking method. Logical Deuction doesn't cure cancers or put a man on the moon, science does. Science is awesome, and the fact that Austrians reject science is how we know that it is right to reject them.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

There is a very common tendency to think of all statements of certainty as being either "definitely yes," "definitely no," and "maybe," and one of the most important early steps to properly understanding the world is learning that this is a really shitty heuristic that cannot accurately describe anything outside of pure mathematics, because in the real world everything is always "maybe" and you need to be able to work with enough granularity to say "90% yes" and understand that this means you can generally act as though the 90% yes thing is going to happen but that also 90 and 100 are different numbers and you need to have some tolerance for unexpected results in your model of reality and method of dealing with it.

It really cannot be overstated enough how bad the "yes/no/maybe" heuristic is. It is helpful in basically zero real world situations and is the kind of thing we should be training out of the entire populace in high school with some decent statistics classes. The specific thing where the Austrians treat all knowledge that can actually be had about the real world as fake because it's "maybe" is a moderately uncommon failure state of the "yes/no/maybe" heuristic, probably because it is such an obviously wrong failure state that you can actually use it to explain to people why "yes/no/maybe" is dumb, but it is one of many similar failure states and they add up across the populace.

Plus, even one guy trying to push the Austrian line that all knowledge is either absolute certainty or not real is sufficiently annoying that I consider it a public good if we can produce fewer of them.

[Thaluikhain]

natural rights fairies

Libertarian fey? That'd probably fit with a lot of descriptions of fey, actually.

Spock/Vulcans, Data, etc, etc - these were always, frankly, stupid characters. Stupid-fun, but stupid. A "purely rational" being has no preference for its own life or death, or anything else, because there is no rational argument that the universe ought be any way or another. A purely rational being is a calculator; it has no agency, no matter how much it can 'predict' or 'evaluate.'

Eh, I don't think they were supposed to be purely rational in that sense. Even Spock would say things like "logic is only the beginning of wisdom". Data was into emulating humans, so again, not totally logically.

[ArmorClassZero]

You guys have gone from building a straw-man to a wicker-man.

Dude, "logical" is not a magic word that magically negates all criticism.

I didn't intend it as such, you brainlet. Frank stated Libertarians believe emergent policies (free-markets, I assumed, based on his following sentence) are inherently better than democratic policies (state-mandated economic policies, I assumed.) I said they believe free-market are logically better than centralized bureaucratically controlled markets, and went on to explain the logic. I even said for him and you guys to critique the logic if you will, but don't make claims about what you think Libertarians believe based on your assumptions, when a Libertarian is here telling you what the core Libertarian principles and philosophies are.

AC0 you have to be one of the densest people I have ever seen post here.

Redlining is an example of REGULATORY CAPTURE, the builders and loan agencies wanted to exclude minority buyers and conspired to capture the portions of the government that could make their desires the law of the land.

Nobody is arguing regulatory capture is good. At least nobody on the left is arguing that regulatory capture is good. I am not sure what crazy position a libertarian or yourself would take.

I think you guys are some of the densest people I've seen post anywhere. I've spent 4+ pages arguing that regulation tends towards giving big business unfair advantages and control over their respective markets and that big businesses are the primary pushers for regulations for these very reasons, only to have you enlighten me that, yes, this is in fact what happened when Govt intervened in the housing market in the 1930s and on, and that it is indeed a not good thing. Well done.

So just in case anyone would for a second buy into what AC0 is putting down, redlining was being done in practice before the government act.

Wow, what an insightful observation. Next you're going to surprise me by observing that slavery existed before the Atlantic Slave Trade, or that people were moving and settling westward before the Govt passed the Homestead Act.

You write as if your observation invalidates what I've said and then proceed to rhetorically ponder whether I would think slavery was caused by government because government had regulations that enforced it, when I've literally spent the past 8 pages "regurgitating" the principles that: "just because something is legal does not make it just" and that Govt involvement in this or that market almost without fail tends to exacerbate problems and cause more harm than good. Oh, but I'm the one with a reading comprehension problem, riiiiight...

It really is an pre-scientific epistemology isn’t it? Natural rights are enumerated, principles are derived from them, and then the real world evidence is squidged into a shape that fits the principles. It reads a lot like medieval philosophy in that way.

Natural rights are enumerated, principles are derived from them, and then real world evidence confirms that everywhere and everyway these principles are violated, suffering follows, the human condition worsens, standards of living decrease. But none of that will make any sense to you guys, because you lot held up Kansas and Ecuador and examples of Libertarian philosophy failing in practice. Wrong. You fail. We have, however, seen Socialism fail multiple times: primarily exemplified by the USSR, and more recently by Venezuela, and soon by America as we are steadily adopting more and more Socialist policies.

So AC0 is now just unironically quoting Hoppe (who is totally a fascist) now. Can we just ban him now or do we have to wait for him to totally break down a start ranting about crisis actors or something.

LOL. Can you guys imagine someone stating TripleH is a Fascist with a straight-face? I can't do it. Imagine that same person linking to a speech/essay where TripleH takes every anti-Authoritarian, anti-Statist, anti-Totalitarian position in the book, and honestly believes him to be a Fascist. Really.

[MGuy]

So I say, redlining was happening in practice before they government got involved. I point this out because AC0 used the government redlining people as some sort of gotcha. AC0's response basically is a big 'duh but gub'ment bad and made it worse'. So here we have a person preaching about how when the government does something it is bad, while expecting you to believe believe that things are better when they don't. Even in the face of the very reality that testifies that even without government involvement the thing that's bad was still happening. So when I take the next step and point out that the government then is the entity that now is in charge of making sure that those practices don't happen now we'll reach another dead end because AC0 will have nothing to say other than government bad.

It's a strange thing libertarians like this do. They fret about government making markets worse but ignore the fact that when there's a major market failure, inevitably the onus is on the government to right the issues because businesses have no obligation to unfuck anything they fuck up. The government, however, has mechanism that obligate it to do something. Also, more often than not it is private entities that try to coerce the government into performing these actions. The idea then that these entities wouldn't exacerbate the fucked up shit they do among themselves, sans the involvement of a government, is clearly ridiculous.

[ArmorClassZero]

While they were the first to identify several important concepts in economics (such as the idea of "opportunity cost"), those ideas were quickly adopted by everyone. What distinguishes them is a complete refusal to use mathematical models, experiments, or the scientific method in general.

That is consistent with AC0's approach here. All of his answers are developed a priori, and his model of libertarianism is fundamentally non-empirical. He rejects real-world data, not because it contradicts his beliefs (though it certainly does), but because his beliefs originate completely outside of reality.

The Austrians do use some mathematical models, but they maintain that models fail to sufficiently illustrate the complexity of human behavior. The scientific method is great if we're investigating properties of inanimate objects or physical phenomena, but it falls short when applied to the social sciences. Austrian Econ and by association, Libertarianism start with 1st principles. Mine obviously differ from yours and the others here. The answers to various questions follow from those 1st principles. Not every answer is black-and-white; I never claimed things were that simple. Were do you get off telling me I reject real-world data? You guys have not presented data, only made claims and assertions.

To hop on the Austrian epistemology horse beating for a second, note that AC0 isn't claiming that our description of actual observed causal relationships in the real world are wrong, but that they are logically fallacious.

This entire thread is a record of me saying you guys are wrong because your descriptions of things in the real world and the perceived causal relationships between them are based on logical fallacies.

But then you just quicken your pace and continue building that wicker-man.

[ArmorClassZero]

@MGuy: My claim, over and over again, was and has been: Govt intervention exacerbates problems and/or creates new problems. The evidence supports things. And here you are defending a Govt having factually made things worse by saying "but the bad thing the Govt made worse would have continue to happen anyway." Which is amazing. And so when you take the next step and point out how the Govt is then the entity now in charge of making sure those practices don't happen again, what we reach is not a dead end where I mumble "but Govt bad" - rather, I will point out how we now have a situation where the Govt, in attempting to right past wrongs, has swung the pendulum in the other direction, with the result being the creation of a permanent African-American underclass created via good intentions.

As I said earlier, what is called "market failure" is what happens when Govt inserts itself into the market. Business don't have an obligation to unfuck things, because the market is a process that has been warped by Govt interference which will correct itself as private individuals (which is what society is composed of) change their behavior. The interference of Govt always creates warped incentives, which results in mis-allocation of resources, mal-investiments, mis-application of labor, etc. And of course, private 'entities' would lobby and plead with the Govt to do something. Why would you think otherwise when the past 80+ years of USA big Govt has proven lobbying and pleading to be effective for getting what you want? But I'm curious, what "fucked up shit they ['private entities'] do among themselves" are you referring to?

As an aside, it's hilarious to be called a useful idiot fighting for big corps, when you guys are the people who probably think the bail-outs saved the economy, when in reality, it just put billions of dollars into corporate pockets. No liability, no consequences for shitty business practices - what they got was a reward. Fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0NYBTkE1yQ | Alan Grayson: "Which Foreigners Got the Fed's $500,000,000,000?" Bernanke: "I Don't Know."

[Mord]

OK attention everyone who has or is considering following AC0 down the rabbit hole regarding redlining: you are being distracted. Nothing I said was about redlining. It was a casual example of an irrational racist practice that persists today and is systematically carried out by banks in spite of the fact that it has been illegal for 50 years. I mentioned this only as an example of how racism is a real thing that people today do even though it is irrational, and that people would presumably keep doing if the government vanished tomorrow. If you don't like redlining as an example, pick literally any other discriminatory practice; it is immaterial. The litany of racist things economic actors do is endless and it only takes one instance to establish that people do in fact behave in irrational ways that systematically disadvantage some people.

The fact that AC0's only response to my post, the broader point of which was not about redlining per se, was to spout "HEY DID YOU KNOW THE GOVERNMENT DID REDLINING SEVENTY YEARS AGO?" is as good an example of his bad faith as could possibly be asked for. He doesn't read so much as scan for things to take out of context and turn into gotchas.

An actual good faith response to my post would explain the process by which libertarian rules as applied to the world of today would mitigate and ultimately eliminate racism as it manifests in processes such as redlining. This is something AC0 will not provide, because libertarianism offers no such mechanism and is uninterested in mechanisms in general. Instead he will find some detail in this post and latch onto that in another pathetic, transparent attempt to distract himself from the fact that his beautiful, perfect, logically coherent world cannot exist because people factually do not behave in the ways his first principles require they should.

I think you guys are some of the densest people I've seen post anywhere. I've spent 4+ pages arguing that regulation tends towards giving big business unfair advantages and control over their respective markets and that big businesses are the primary pushers for regulations for these very reasons, only to have you enlighten me that, yes, this is in fact what happened when Govt intervened in the housing market in the 1930s and on, and that it is indeed a not good thing. Well done.

We're quite aware of what you have been arguing:

You fixate on how "big businesses sought and benefited from food quality regulation because enforcement harmed their smaller competitors" and see this as evidence that regulation is only and exclusively a weapon with which more powerful economic actors harm less powerful ones. You have consistently ignored the part where "the general public sought and benefited from food quality regulation because fewer members of the public sickened or died from causes related to food contamination."

You start a conversation you can't even finish it
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it again?

[saithorthepyro]

Reading this and based on what little knowledge I have on libertarianism, I have to ask what the difference between Libertarianism and Objectivism, as the former keeps on sounding a lot like the latter, and that is not a compliment.

[OgreBattle]

AmorClassZero, is libertarianism a Lawful or Chaotic alignment?

[RelentlessImp]

AmorClassZero, is libertarianism a Lawful or Chaotic alignment?

Well, libertarianism is all wet because of the tears libertarians weep, therefore it's Chaotic.

[souran]

Reading this and based on what little knowledge I have on libertarianism, I have to ask what the difference between Libertarianism and Objectivism, as the former keeps on sounding a lot like the latter, and that is not a compliment.

Objectivism is nominally a specialized type of libertarianism that also includes a philosophy of art and an approach to the scientific method. However, there is little daylight between libertarianism and objectivism on economics.

[ArmorClassZero]

In short: fuck you.

Forgive me for responding with such flippant disregard for the points you raise.

ArmorClassZero, is libertarianism a Lawful or Chaotic alignment?

Lawful.

[ArmorClassZero]

@Mord: Here, let's have a discussion in good faith.

An actual good faith response to my post would explain the process by which libertarian rules as applied to the world of today would mitigate and ultimately eliminate racism as it manifests in processes such as redlining. This is something AC0 will not provide, because Libertarianism offers no such mechanism and is uninterested in mechanisms in general.

You have argued that in a world run by libertarian rules racism would never come to be, but you have never described the process by which libertarian rules, implemented today in the world that exists, would mitigate the racism that factually exists in reality.

OK, simply: I never said that in a world run by Libertarian rules, racism would never come to be. Can you quote me? I do think that in a world "run by Libertarian rules" racists could not and would not get away with lynching people, burning people, bombing churches, vandalizing property, or intimidating people with threats of force, violence, coercion, etc. Why do I think this? Because one of the Libertarian core principles is, for the umpteenth time: freedom from violence, coercion, force, etc. as these things are unjust EXCEPT in (self-)defense. That means that the Law's sole (legitimate) purpose, is to prevent INJUSTICE - to prevent the use of violence, coercion, and force in any form other than defense. What is the mechanism of defense of individuals and groups? The use of violence, coercion, force. As far as I am concerned, that is the only legitimate use of violence, coercion, force, etc. To that extent, once the rights of liberty and property are secured by the mechanism of what we may call JUST violence, coercion, force, etc. then The Law, once limited to this sole purpose, safeguards the Rights of ALL, regardless of race, creed, sexuality, intelligence, weight, height, you name it.

But you mention eliminating racism. I don't think you can eliminate racism unless you were to eliminate people. But unless the racism is overtly antagonistic (using violence, coercion, force), people must be allowed to be "racist". I put the quotation marks because discrimination and preference go hand-in-hand. People must be allowed to associate with whoever they wish, and disassociate themselves from whoever they wish. If this isn't allowed, then we have violated the founding principle(s) - we are FORCING integration, of one group against their will at the behest of another. Now, this would probably result in ethnic, racial, religions, or political enclaves. That is fine, as long as they aren't violating the Rights of others. And this may very well be preferable, as groups of people would have increased local control over their own territories. Examples like Black Wall Street, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Amish prove that this can work just fine. Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore are even better. Further, I think that people who are looking to enrich themselves by serving their fellow man will not base their choices of partners, customers, clientele, producers, manufacturers, or whathaveyou on the basis of race, creed, sexuality, etc. I will try to find the evidence if pressed, but I've read that during the Jim Crow era, white business owners were complaining the "special accommodations" the law required them to make in order to serve black people was hurting their bottom line, when before they associated and dealt freely at their own discretion, even though the etiquette of servility and inferiority that was expected of blacks is distasteful by today's standards. But I have a feeling that these answers won't satisfy you, because you probably do not think equality of opportunity is enough, you probably want equality of outcome, which I think is impossible - people are too varied in their interests, talents, backgrounds, experience, etc, etc. And I think attempting to force equality of outcome by Govt decree serves only to stifle economic growth and prosperity, which the evidence indicates is exactly what has happened, on top of violating real Rights.

This is why I said libertarians are ignorant of the fact that 10,000 years of history have already happened, [...] the existence of history is important because any policies you propose have to be evaluated in the context of the world we live in, not a hypothetical blank slate society.

This is why I say you guys misunderstand or misrepresent Libertarianism. It is precisely because the preceding 10,000 years of human history are rife with examples of what happens when people do not recognize natural rights and work to secure them, that I think Libertarianism is so sound. The absence or disregard of such principles results in tragedies and travesties like conquest, pillaging, slavery, and genocide.

[Libertad]

Reading this and based on what little knowledge I have on libertarianism, I have to ask what the difference between Libertarianism and Objectivism, as the former keeps on sounding a lot like the latter, and that is not a compliment.

Objectivism is a philosophy of Ayn Rand, which includes a bunch of issues besides laissez-faire capitalism. For example, atheism and a disregard of any religious or supernatural beliefs is a prerequisite for claiming the Objectivist label.

Objectivists are also a lot more warmongering than Libertarians, and have consistently argued in favor of the US military using the force of the State upon non-Western civilizations up to and including terrorist actions against civilian targets.

Objectivists also have no pretenses about being a good person. Charity and performing selfless actions are regarded as immoral and that the ultimate moral act is to live for oneself. All acts of 'selflessness' therefore should be quid pro quo equivalent exchanges.

Later on in life Objectivism became more and more clearly Ayn Rand's personal tastes, up to and including what kinds of music one can listen to in order to determine if oneself is an Objectivist.

As such it shares several things in common with Libertarianism, although with more strictures of living extending beyond economics. Rand herself hated Libertarians, believing that they stole her ideas even though a lot of said ideology predated her work.

Edit: Libertarianism, by contrast as an ideology first and foremost, posits that private business and enterprise with zero-to-no government intervention is an ideal way to model society in almost every aspect of life. Religious beliefs, tastes in music, etc are irrelevant to this.

[Grek]

AmorClassZero, is libertarianism a Lawful or Chaotic alignment?

Well, libertarianism is all wet because of the tears libertarians weep, therefore it's Chaotic.

Lawful.

For once, AC0 is correct - as a philosophy that is intellectually underwater, you have to ignore the water content and instead look at crunchiness (Are the rules verisimilitudinous? Do they take evidence into account?) vs slime factor (Approximately what percentage of libertarians are ethic-less grifters?) in order to decide where it falls on the Law vs Chaos scale. And because Water is Chaos and Therefore Backward, the incredibly slimy nature of libertarian politics coupled with the lack of any connection with reality make it Lawful Evil. Which we knew already, of course, from AC0's spirited (if inept) defense of the institution of slavery.