Quote (Beowulf @ Jul 17 2016 08:03am)
Like many things on the surface lies all the appeal but when you go a little deeper it's not as pretty
As much as I support ending the drug war and staying out of people's personal lives I find that the waters are a bit too cold for me.
I would worry even more about the environment and the effects of volunteerism replacing government welfare programs.
If I were to ever vote Libertarian it would be a situation like we have now where we have 2 semi rational ex republicans at the top of the ticket and I still can't vote that way so I probably never will.
The more that I think of it the more I realize how much I actually disagree with Libertarians which is unfortunate because the good is pretty good
A libertarian society would be very different than what we see now, that is for sure.
When people say cut welfare it is generally a racial or ideologically driven impulse to quit giving lazy people welfare checks for popping out kids. But realistically less than 1% of people are doing and and probably much less so. We all receive the benefits of the welfare system in our system of distributed justice...and the people up top receive the most in benefits but the upper, upper-middle, middle, middle-lower, lower, working/urban underclass classes all receive substantial benefit from the arrangement. This is why the vast majority of people overwhelmingly support this stuff and believe it is insane to try to anything but tighten it up.
If we cut welfare altogether then everybody would be able to do substantially less in their life, on a day to day basis. People would be less safe, they would less healthy, there would be less food, it would be lower quality, roads would be really shitty for the most part. Homelessness would be much worse of a problem, and there would be nothing stopping families at risk from falling into poverty during economic downturns either, no safety net. People are going to say churches and private charities etc, but those are band-aids on cancer and people who say that tend not to understand how charity and human services actually works.
Americans would be very different too. It would no doubt make individuals stronger in ways, but we would be like Mexico in the end....shitty government, shitty water, going somewhere else with a higher standard of living to live, perhaps Canada where they aren't dumb enough to throw out their high quality of life to be ideologically pure.
Quote (dro94 @ Jul 17 2016 07:19am)
Got a few main points against Gary:
1. Slashing federal budgets by over 40% would cause a recession and be counterproductive in the creation of a paradoxical cycle where the debt to gdp ratio actually increases as gdp falls further in relation to debt. Austerity has been proven to be detrimental time and time again, it is always chosen as an ideological choice and never as a rational economic policy.
2. He made it clear he didn't support an increase in the minimum wage quoting the same old talking point of high unemployment, when small to moderate increases have been shown to barely affect unemployment or inflation. A trade off exists, especially with more significant increases, but it's all about managing the trade off to maximise the net benefit. Over 70% of the country supports a minimum wage increase too, and as a result I think Gary would struggle in debates on this issue.
3. Gary and his running mate mention 'fiscally conservative, socially liberal' in every sentence. Yes there are some social issues that are separate from fiscal ones like gay marriage, but they are related to an extent that I think it would be dishonest to continue using the buzzword of social liberal, fiscal conservative. The most important policies are ones that are intertwined, like health care and education, which a 'social liberal' like Johnson has starkly fiscally conservative views on.
These are all very good points and I couldn't have said them better. Especially in 1 with austerity being a choice driven by ideology rather than rational economic analysis.
And economics is social, this is true. People like him like to conveniently think you can make economic decisions with no moral implications and capitalism pretends that but it isn't true. All human life is social, and free trade as a right tends to nullify all other rights.