a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  3452 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Democratic Tea Party

    What you said there is literally why I am a Libertarian.

I see. Perhaps I can get you to reconsider.

    government can do good things as well

It would be stupid to claim that government investment produces no benefits.

I have found that the dialog is more constructive when framed as "better or worse" than "good or bad." Is government the only way to get the thing we want? If not, is any alternative better, when we consider both costs and benefits?

Sorry for all the self-promotion, but it looks like you took a long nap and missed some of my best work.





shiranaihito  ·  3451 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Is government the only way to get the thing we want?

How is government a way to get what we, its subjects, want?

wasoxygen  ·  3451 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The usual answer is that you want to be able to get from point A to point B. For some reason you and your neighbors can't figure out how to lay asphalt, so you sign some invisible contract and people take money out of your paycheck and build roads and nuclear submarines with it, and now you can drive around.

shiranaihito  ·  3451 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah. So I guess you're a Libertarian of sorts then?

user-inactivated  ·  3452 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think we're actually already on the same page. What I said before is that Libertarians want to limit the government so it can do the least harm, but in pursuit of that goal you must temper your zeal with the truth that government can do good.

In the same extremist view that would produce that "Libertarian Paradise" we could extend the Rupublican Paradise nightmare to include Abortion Death Penalty and Gay Compassion Camps where the impure are forced into hard labor to think about sin. Then you'd have the Democrat Paradise where we don't spend as much as possible on making all people equal leaving us poor but full of love and hugs.

There's no such thing as a Libertarian paradise that doesn't include compromise with everyone else. And though your post is a very cynical view of Libertarianism, we can assume that it would be impossible to actually have that come to fruition in the current system.