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I Used to be a Libertarian

Social democrat, you say! Maybe this label is me. Unfortunately, too many right wingers automatically assume that I want to nationalize petroleum companies, banks, and airlines as well as set marginal tax rates at 95%. Then I would give everyone a job where they didn't have to work. Then I would set up a police state that jailed anyone who opposed me. Then I would kill others just to show how powerful I really am.

I just saw a documentary on a railroad that is run in the Norway and Sweden. I am uncertain whether this railroad is government owned or private, but it was interesting to see how the employees were quite motivated to adhere to schedules and deadlines, despite being such a socialist culture.

That doesn't mean that all social democrats are extreme liberals. I daresay a good many social democrats might be somewhat conservative on a good many issues, economic, social and legal, and even with regard to foreign policy.
It's just that in other countries, most of those "conservative" or "libertarian minded" social democrats see a line around a small handful of issues which are considered essential to human harmony and survival in a diverse modern industrialized world.

Thus, it is indeed possible to support universal access to higher education, health care and infrastructure while still being quite the Right winger OR libertarian on foreign policy or on the free market. I know social democrats in Canada who want the government to leave the petroleum industry alone and stop meddling in import/export markets.

I know Swedes who want tighter immigration rules, and who want new arrivals to demonstrate increased willingness to assimilation into Scandanavian values. And yet they are the first to insist on the right to a free or heavily subsidized university education and free health care.

Being a social democrat does not automatically turn a person into a confiscatory bolshevist, contrary to popular American opinion on the Right.
 
I Used to be a Libertarian

same here. then i had to use our overpriced healthcare system in between jobs during a paperwork error in my COBRA coverage. the gamblers had just wrecked the economy, as well, so it was really difficult to find a new job. this opened my eyes to several things. first, being a libertarian seems like a great idea if you're fabulously rich and live in a vacuum. secondly, a libertarian utopia would involve corporations filling the power gap and merging until capitalism stopped working anywhere near properly. also, labor rights would suffer even more than they have in red states, and trust me, pal, fire at will and right to work for less laws are not designed to help you, the worker.

so anyway, i was left with a dilemma. there was really no one for me to vote for, as the only thing that isn't significantly right wing in this country is the Democratic party, and it's still about as corporatist as you could want. however, the right went insane pretty soon after i left, so my choice became a lot easier. hopefully the majority of American society will eventually wake up, read a quality of life by nation study, and then agree that we need to make some changes.
 
We could...


That's kind of why I'm asking... My thoughts on what constitutes "rich" and "poor" are probably different than yours, so it's rather hard to use undefined terms equally... Plus, we don't even live in the same country, if your location is to be believed... How far one's income goes in Alberta (Canada) is likely different than in Wisconsin (USA). Heck, even different cities and regions within our states likely differ quite a bit...


Libertarianism... it was definitely NOT because of Socialism... Socialism creates no wealth. Capitalism is what creates wealth.

But the life of the poor became better when we started becoming more socialist (starting with the New Deal in FDR's time). How do you explain that?
 
same here. then i had to use our overpriced healthcare system in between jobs during a paperwork error in my COBRA coverage. the gamblers had just wrecked the economy, as well, so it was really difficult to find a new job. this opened my eyes to several things. first, being a libertarian seems like a great idea if you're fabulously rich and live in a vacuum. secondly, a libertarian utopia would involve corporations filling the power gap and merging until capitalism stopped working anywhere near properly. also, labor rights would suffer even more than they have in red states, and trust me, pal, fire at will and right to work for less laws are not designed to help you, the worker.

so anyway, i was left with a dilemma. there was really no one for me to vote for, as the only thing that isn't significantly right wing in this country is the Democratic party, and it's still about as corporatist as you could want. however, the right went insane pretty soon after i left, so my choice became a lot easier. hopefully the majority of American society will eventually wake up, read a quality of life by nation study, and then agree that we need to make some changes.

We in west are out of balance, especially the USA. Those four points I mentioned in the OP are not being applied as well as they should be.

"Make Changes", you say. Our democratic process for making changes is fundamentally flawed. I don't see any hope for better balanced solution coming from political parties. I have some different ideas. Unfortunately posting them would be breaking some DP rules, so I can't post them publicly.
 
But the life of the poor became better when we started becoming more socialist (starting with the New Deal in FDR's time). How do you explain that?

Capitalist driven advancements in technology...
 
We in west are out of balance, especially the USA. Those four points I mentioned in the OP are not being applied as well as they should be.

"Make Changes", you say. Our democratic process for making changes is fundamentally flawed. I don't see any hope for better balanced solution coming from political parties. I have some different ideas. Unfortunately posting them would be breaking some DP rules, so I can't post them publicly.

i have an idea. 1. look at the countries that have a better standard of living and that are delivering essential services better than we are. 2. do something like that.
 
i have an idea. 1. look at the countries that have a better standard of living and that are delivering essential services better than we are. 2. do something like that.

Just because the football team won a Superbowl a few years back, it should not be considered the best team today.

If you look at the world happiness report, USA is #18, meaning 17 countries are above it. Hardly a first-place finish here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

When I read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, my take was that Romans were not able to see the decay in their own society. The fall was slow, but inevitable. We should not assume the USA is going to remain on top forever.
 
Just because the football team won a Superbowl a few years back, it should not be considered the best team today.

If you look at the world happiness report, USA is #18, meaning 17 countries are above it. Hardly a first-place finish here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

When I read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, my take was that Romans were not able to see the decay in their own society. The fall was slow, but inevitable. We should not assume the USA is going to remain on top forever.

inertia only goes so far. as i said, we should look at how other first world nations address strategy and services.
 
...Ironically, I can now see how a libertarian philosophy could work. Those with higher abilities and drive should be allowed to keep much of their earnings. But they also need to be trained to recognize that they have talents, ambition, skills, and experience other people could never attain. The more talented need to become more compassionate and generous and recognize that a strong civil society helps them earn and enjoy a higher income. And for those on the “receiving” end, they must learn to be more grateful and responsible. They still have a duty to move themselves forward in life.

But we are not in a functional libertarian mindset yet. The only way to get there is to apply a better balance of individual freedom and collective action.

You've made some very large errors in your assumptions.

1) You're assuming that your farming father would be poor absent government. He wouldn't be, unless he's just a poor businessman or irresponsible with his money.
2) You're assuming that education costs would remain the same if they weren't affected by government.

Ask your father how government regulations and taxes affect his ability to make money. Consider how much prices of education would lessen in a competitive free market, and consider your increased ability to pay for them absent the 60-70% amount of your income being stolen from you by the government.
 
You've made some very large errors in your assumptions.

1) You're assuming that your farming father would be poor absent government. He wouldn't be, unless he's just a poor businessman or irresponsible with his money.
2) You're assuming that education costs would remain the same if they weren't affected by government.

Ask your father how government regulations and taxes affect his ability to make money. Consider how much prices of education would lessen in a competitive free market, and consider your increased ability to pay for them absent the 60-70% amount of your income being stolen from you by the government.

I'll bring back a section of the original post:

My father was a farmer, one of these proud traditional farmers putting in long hours to eke a meager living for his family while providing food for all the city people. Society honored such farmers. But we were still working poor.


My father was an exemplary example of the farmer myth. Actually it really wasn't much of a myth in 1960, it was true. We were dirt poor! Most farmers were in that same situation, but they loved what they were doing .

His income was not enough to pay any significant taxes. Lowering the tax rate would not have helped him much.

The only regulation he had to deal with was getting his name on the land deed. He would do whatever he wanted with his land. Regulations were not keeping him poor.
 
inertia only goes so far. as i said, we should look at how other first world nations address strategy and services.

And I just did that. There are 17 more countries whose citizens are happier than Americans.

We could cite all sorts of studies from longevity to scientific research to education standards. USA is no longer #1 in many areas. USA is falling behind.
 
I'll bring back a section of the original post:

My father was a farmer, one of these proud traditional farmers putting in long hours to eke a meager living for his family while providing food for all the city people. Society honored such farmers. But we were still working poor.


My father was an exemplary example of the farmer myth. Actually it really wasn't much of a myth in 1960, it was true. We were dirt poor! Most farmers were in that same situation, but they loved what they were doing .

His income was not enough to pay any significant taxes. Lowering the tax rate would not have helped him much.

The only regulation he had to deal with was getting his name on the land deed. He would do whatever he wanted with his land. Regulations were not keeping him poor.

Then you don't fully grasp the extent the government controls prices and the market of farming. They even subsidize some farmers to not grow anything.
 
Then you don't fully grasp the extent the government controls prices and the market of farming. They even subsidize some farmers to not grow anything.

Agriculture is one of the more subsidized industries in USA. Not as much in Canada, but we have joke that farmers are buried only one foot below the the ground so they keep their hand out. I pretty sure I get that aspect.

One more time: my father started farming in 1958. There were no subsidies back then. If a farmer mismanaged his farm or ran into string of bad luck, the banks foreclosed. I grew up in that farming economy, not the modern one.

If you can't make the transition to 1960 , there's not too much point in further discussion. Farmers were not rich back then like they are today.
 
Agriculture is one of the more subsidized industries in USA. Not as much in Canada, but we have joke that farmers are buried only one foot below the the ground so they keep their hand out. I pretty sure I get that aspect.

One more time: my father started farming in 1958. There were no subsidies back then. If a farmer mismanaged his farm or ran into string of bad luck, the banks foreclosed. I grew up in that farming economy, not the modern one.

If you can't make the transition to 1960 , there's not too much point in further discussion. Farmers were not rich back then like they are today.

Regardless if we agree on that point, there was more to what I said. The cost of education, for example. You can't imagine all the ways having a real free market, having no taxes, nor regulations would lower costs of not just that, but everything.
 
Regardless if we agree on that point, there was more to what I said. The cost of education, for example. You can't imagine all the ways having a real free market, having no taxes, nor regulations would lower costs of not just that, but everything.

Let me try to explain this a little differently.

In 1960, my father paid very little taxes because he was not making much money. Cutting the tax rate in half would not have altered his outlook in providing me with an education from his own resources.

In 1960, there were very few regulations in what a farmer could do with his land. So the regulations were no impediment to my father's income and his ability to pay for his children's education.

If we were living in a truly libertarian society, I likely would not have been educated. He was not making enough money to afford an education for his children. His small income was not because he was "oppressed" by government. He was a poor farmer, quite similar to most farmers of that time.

My grandfather farmed for 30 years (1935 to 1965). He too paid little taxes and had few regulations to deal with. He too sent his children to the government run school. He could not have afforded to pay for my father's education.
 
Let me try to explain this a little differently.

In 1960, my father paid very little taxes because he was not making much money. Cutting the tax rate in half would not have altered his outlook in providing me with an education from his own resources.

In 1960, there were very few regulations in what a farmer could do with his land. So the regulations were no impediment to my father's income and his ability to pay for his children's education.

If we were living in a truly libertarian society, I likely would not have been educated. He was not making enough money to afford an education for his children. His small income was not because he was "oppressed" by government. He was a poor farmer, quite similar to most farmers of that time.

My grandfather farmed for 30 years (1935 to 1965). He too paid little taxes and had few regulations to deal with. He too sent his children to the government run school. He could not have afforded to pay for my father's education.
This is a condition we find throughout our world. In most communities I've observed there still remains "educational opinions" regardless of level of state involvement due to the market demand…poverty, happen in clusters, and where there is a collectively will for change escape routes appear regardless of individual poverty….is no adult available in the community to teach? What are the children doing? Are the women educated? Are they working the farm all day as well?

So the real questions imho should be if that state run school is generally effective[at class mobility, allowing equality of opportunity etc] and would the likely scenario of being the next generation farmer instead engineer have been more beneficial, neutral or negative?

What leads you to think now this engineering path you went on was the most beneficial?
 
Let me try to explain this a little differently.

In 1960, my father paid very little taxes because he was not making much money. Cutting the tax rate in half would not have altered his outlook in providing me with an education from his own resources.

In 1960, there were very few regulations in what a farmer could do with his land. So the regulations were no impediment to my father's income and his ability to pay for his children's education.

If we were living in a truly libertarian society, I likely would not have been educated. He was not making enough money to afford an education for his children. His small income was not because he was "oppressed" by government. He was a poor farmer, quite similar to most farmers of that time.

My grandfather farmed for 30 years (1935 to 1965). He too paid little taxes and had few regulations to deal with. He too sent his children to the government run school. He could not have afforded to pay for my father's education.

Do the businesses that sell him tractors, feed, etc have to pay taxes? Are those businesses regulated to the point that it creates overhead for them? Is the fuel he uses taxed and regulated? These do affect his bottom line, even if you claim he paid little in taxes, or was regulated very little himself (which is bull****). These are just a few examples of how you're being short-sighted.
 
This is a condition we find throughout our world. In most communities I've observed there still remains "educational opinions" regardless of level of state involvement due to the market demand…poverty, happen in clusters, and where there is a collectively will for change escape routes appear regardless of individual poverty….is no adult available in the community to teach? What are the children doing? Are the women educated? Are they working the farm all day as well?

So the real questions imho should be if that state run school is generally effective[at class mobility, allowing equality of opportunity etc] and would the likely scenario of being the next generation farmer instead engineer have been more beneficial, neutral or negative?

What leads you to think now this engineering path you went on was the most beneficial?

This is a good question. I will answer it with a couple of points.

Primary education does not set up people for a certain occupation.It sets people up for options in life. Had I not been educated in the primary system, the engineering option would have never been there.

At 18 years old, I graduated in a class of 18 (rural school) and we all had a very similar education. Half of us were university bound: I am counting 3 teachers, 3 nurses, 1 psychologists, 1 preacher, and 1 engineer. The other half--3 became farmers--still had a good level of literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking inculcated into them. But we all had a similar education. When we left high school, we all had a lot of choices. We made a choice based on our interests and abilities.

To have been cast as a farmer when I was 6 years old---because my father could not have supported a primary education in those days---would have limited my choices in life. Although I could have been a good farmer, I recognize that that occupation is not for everyone. Had I been unfit for farming and with no primary education behind me, I would have had very limited opportunity for another occupation. A good primary education sets people up with more options for life. And when they can explore some of those options, they are more contented citizens.

My father had a stack of manuals for operating, maintaining, and repairing his farm equipment. He often referred to them. He didn't get the skills to read and comprehend the manuals while operating a tractor. My father learned how to weld by reading several books.

Like all occupations, farming is becoming more and more technical. My father's Grade 10 education probably would not work well these days. He might be a farm worker, but owning and successfully managing a farm might be out of his domain these days.

To get back to the original question, a state run school gives young people more options. With more options, they are better able to fill the niches that society needs filling to keep society moving forward.

And we have a lot fewer farmers than we did in 1960. If all farmers' sons become farmers, we would have a lot more discontented citizens.
 
Do the businesses that sell him tractors, feed, etc have to pay taxes? Are those businesses regulated to the point that it creates overhead for them? Is the fuel he uses taxed and regulated? These do affect his bottom line, even if you claim he paid little in taxes, or was regulated very little himself (which is bull****). These are just a few examples of how you're being short-sighted.

There was a fuel tax. But in Alberta, this tax was much less for farmers than the ordinary citizens. And this discrepancy remains in effect today. Farmers have more political pull than their numbers warrant.

In 1940, my home town had four farm machinery dealerships. By 1960, only one was left. And it disappeared before 1970. This does not seem to be a business that had lots of profits to pay a lot of taxes. So any taxes cascading on to my father's operations would have been minimal. He still would not have had enough money to send me to school.

As for regulations, these were the days were farmers--and just about anyone else--could pour their used motor oil on the road (to keep the dust down, they say). Today it is a bit of a hassle to deal with used motor oil. But we are talking about 1960. The only regulation I can think is that my father had to report his annual income to the government, which meant keeping receipts of all the things he purchased and all the product he sold. He did do a lot of his own bookkeeping, which saved some money. And I should add he got the skills to do bookkeeping indirectly with his Grade 10 education. He needed an accountant to finalize the statement. That probably cost him some money and he probably paid some taxes. But even if these costs were not there, he would not have had enough money to send four kids to school.

My father also paid county taxes. But for a few hundred dollars a year, he got a rural road system that he used a lot, especially to take product to town for sale and bring things back to keep the farm operating. It would have been impossible for my father to run his farm without those roads.
 
If you're going to use an anecdote to say that people can't get ahead without government, perhaps I should use an anecdote to say that people can get ahead.

My grandfather from my father's side grew up in the working class. When he came of age, he served in the navy and became a cop in Detroit while he was going to night school to become a lawyer. My dad grew up in the middle class in a family of three. He then went to college with the hopes of becoming a CPA. After a bit of time, he decided that he didn't want to become a CPA and went into related fields. After working his way up, he found himself in the upper middle class, he now works directly under a billionaire. My father and grandfather managed to pull themselves up by the bootstrap, all without any government assistance.
 
Lots of good discussion here. I was think thinking about responding to individual points, but maybe this response is a better way to keep things goin.

If we go back to 1900, Canada and USA were much closer to a libertarian society than we are today. There weren’t as many social programs run by governments. But there weren’t any income taxes either.

However, life was still not easy for most Canadians and Americans. The average worker struggled to buy food and pay rent. Neither food nor accommodations were of high quality. Food poisoning and vermin were normal. Other than church and the pub, there were few hobbies and luxuries. Work was hard, and lack of education meant most workers were limited in their economic advancement. Life expectancy was about 50. While child-bearing and childhood diseases were big factors, there was also a lot of food poisoning in those days. For many, life was not good in those more-libertarian times.

So we have a paradox. As North Americans started adopting various social programs (like the New Deal) and various regulations, life got better for the working poor. Housing got better. Fewer people are afflicted with food poisoning, children from this economic class can attend university, people were living longer, the middle class was expanding, etc. etc. If application of a libertarian philosophy is to be the “tide that lifts all boats”, it has failed historically---in that it was socialism that has been the engine to lift the plight of the working poor since 1900.

Since 1980, income increases for the professional and business classes have outstripped the increases for the middle and lower classes. Not only that, the wealthy are taxed less than they used to be. In this sense, we are again moving towards a more libertarian direction.

Yet the middle classes are not seeing the “tide that raises all boats.” There is growing frustration that economic opportunities are fewer than a decade or two ago. Part of Mr. Trump’s base comes from this frustration and, for the time being, are putting up with his unconventional political style.

Theories are great, but the evidence suggests that libertarianism creates a society that really doesn't benefit the lower classes.

The reason why life is easier today than it was a century ago is because of increased living standards. A lot of household appliances didn't exist back then or were only available to the upper class. What you should really be looking at is the RATE at which things were improving. The gilded age is often looked at as some dark time where the living standards of the working class were low and the rich were thriving. While this was for the most part true, living standards were growing at a pretty fast rate. Between 1860 and 1890, real wages grew by 60%.
Gilded Age - Wikipedia

You should check out the index of economic freedom some time. If you know a thing or two about which countries have high living standards, you will notice an interesting correlation.
Index of Economic Freedom: Promoting Economic Opportunity and Prosperity by Country

In case you haven't noticed, the poor countries are not libertarian in nature. They have corrupt governments where the politicians serve themselves and many have burdensome regulations.
 
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