whakahekeheke

posthumanism:

whakahekeheke:

RE: evilsocialist on libertarianism.

Libertarianism only makes sense in the boiling tea pot of right-wing populism, or in the safe haven of campus abstraction where teachers and students can toy with country club anarchism between lunch breaks. Applied to the real world, the wheels fall off in seconds. Taken seriously, in whole or in part, it brings chaos, pain and disaster to millions..

I have to say I agree with evilsocialist on this one. Big surprise! 

But why? Where are the logical arguments? He’s just making assertions.

If we’re gonna cite evidence that is supposedly in support of some free market ideology and its benefits for all, can we make it more recent?

We have a lot of evidence with comprehensively more free market economies via the economic indices of economic freedom. We have evidence of certeris paribus no state being better for all measure of human welfare than having a state in Somalia. We have non-state international organization arbitration. We have rise of non-state schools in the slums of the world. 

Reagan completely fucking over the lower classes, as detailed in Kevin Phillips’ The Politics of Rich and Poor; the fairly well-documented instances in which the IMF and World Bank have fucked over countries like Jamaica, among others, that you can learn about via a documentary called Life and Debt;  the privatization of water sources in developing countries, which is examined in depth in a book called Blue Gold by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke). 

Agreed. Reagan drastically increased the total size of government, increased total tax burden, drastically increases military spending, increases welfare spending, fueled the “war on drugs,” cemented central banking, etc. Reagan was not a libertarian by any definition. He, like Bush and Obama, was functionally a corporatist.

The IMF and World Bank are entirely seeded, funded, and controlled by government. The IMF was created explicitly on the basis of old Keynesian macro logic that says governments should deficit spend to stimulate aggregate demand, so it lends heavily to governments to stimulate aggregate demand. It’s bad economics because it is statist.

There is a big difference between “privatization” when that means the government gives monopoly privileges to a “private” water company or phone company or Goldman Sachs (bad) vs. where the market is controlled by non-government human interaction (good). I’m very much against what most people “privatization” because it is statist.