These sort of libertarians drive me nuts. They decry what they perceive as an "infringement of liberty" but then fail to pay anything but lip service to the government-granted immunity from liability these companies are getting despite acting as publishers. Which they wouldn't get in AnCapistan.
Get rid of that and the problem fixes itself the first time a tech CEO serves life in prison for publishing and distributing child pornography.
Like almost everyone commenting on this, if they aren't missing the point intentionally (controlled opposition), they are pretty dense. The regulatory tools to deal with FB et al exist and are pro-liberty. Supporting free markets means opposing monopolies. Supporting free markets means corps are responsible for the shit they put on the Internet. Break up these monopolies now (in addition to what you said). If any regulators had any balls it would be done already. Congress can order regulators to act, if necessary.
Yeah, Texas LP is a particularly bad state affiliate. They're populated with the old guard of the party, who basically just want to use it as a social club to complain about weed laws together. Luckily, Mises Caucus is making good progress taking the party over. Texas will unfortunately be one of the last strongholds of the "pragmatists" to fall.
A Certain Classical Liberal reminded us that you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, in a video called Ideological Hegemony.
Back then, it was to try to reason with people who wanted GG to be more "anti SJW" than pro ethics during the GG era, and that ostracization of those who just wanted to be "pro ethics" is how you kill the movement. He was partially right, but he also realized that not addressing the SJW issue was ultimately going to be detrimental to everyone and that the key is to win over the "pro ethics" crowd to realize there is a bigger issue than just vidya ethics.
Now I think that can still be applied to "Lolbertarians" who have adopted the neverTrumper "muh freedoms" view.
They don't realize that by continuing to stick to their utopian libertarian stance, they are literally handing the weapon over to the enemy to silence them with.
You have to realize at some point that strict adherence to your utopian principles may actually be detrimental to the ultimate goal you're going for. If you remember the interview Ben Shapiro had with Tucker Carlson, Shapiro had the tradcon ultra-capitalist position. That the best business out there will rise to the top, and that there will be winners and losers in a situation and those who cannot adapt are simply in a "too bad, so sad" position.
Tucker, on the other hand, saw the right-populist position, he understands that the adoption of pure capitalism actually placed us in a quandry where we're going to "out-capitalism" some of our population, especially the current Gen X population that are already too old to learn new skills. Some will adopt, but others are essentially going to be "phased out" of the economy and be too old to be able to do anything while staying in the workforce.
That same pure capitalism has also allowed the proliferation of plagues like OnlyFans and other hedonistic degeneracy. From a lolbertarian standpoint, this should be allowed - none of it is directly hurting me, but we know this shit is harmful to society as it deteriorates the already crumbling foundation of relationships and essentially commodifying it. The girls who take advantage of this aren't exactly well adjusted people either.
This is the reason why people like Styx aren't pure libertarians either - he realizes that in order to protect a libertarian state, you NEED to take some nationalist policies that may come in conflict with your ideology but are ones built of absolute pragmatism. Be principled all you like, but at the same time one needs to realize sometimes you need to be realistic than idealistic.
The point I have been trying to drive home to one of my libertarian friends is that the heads of these companies:
All share the same values as the politicians (which are not your values)
All attend the same schools as each other (which are not schools they would let you attend)
See it as their sacred duty to shape society into a form that works against your interests
Are being encouraged and/or allowed to do this by politicians and a judiciary who would gladly do it themselves but need to launder it through the private sector to grant it legitimacy because it's not being done through legislation.
It isn't "My neighbor Joe wanted to sell some apples from his orchard, but he got shut down because he didn't have a food vendor's license and because his orchard wasn't zoned for commercial farming". It's "These Fortune 500 CEOs want to reshape society and change your way of life so that they can maintain a permeant neo-feudalist oligarchy".
To the extent the NAP has any teeth at all, your way of life is being aggressed against by these companies; and you are under no obligation to stand by and let them do it.
Well put. According to our lolbertarian friends, these megacorps having their boots on our necks is not a violation of the NAP, but us trying to remove it is.
That's because this particular brand of lolbertarianism when taken to its logical conclusion results in absolute monarchy. If a megacorp owns all the land in a region and can do whatever it wants with the land, and everyone on its land is obligated to comply with whatever dictates it wants, how is that any different than the old feudal system?
At least Hoppe is honest that he wants states to be absolute monarchies, and has the good sense to want to forcibly remove communists.
In defense of Hoppe, absolute monarchy is a lesser evil than corporate domination. The monarch in question is, at least theoretically, obliged to take care of the res publica, as opposed to serving private interests. If that does not happen, then you get revolts, because people expect some regard for the public interest. Not so with corporations.
If a megacorp owns all the land in a region and can do whatever it wants with the land, and everyone on its land is obligated to comply with whatever dictates it wants, how is that any different than the old feudal system?
Because capitalism and expansive private ownership is what fucking ended feudalism. Corporations are pushing for feudalism, which involved the state building guild systems which were the only legal entities allowed to engage in certain forms of commerce. Feudalism is the heaviest possible form of regulation outside Stalinist Communism.
Why don't corporations just buy up entire cities? Why did the mining towns stop?
Because it's utterly impractical and totally unaffordable without a state protecting them at every level, and subsidizing them to an extreme. Corporate Colonialism and Slavocracy is what they are doing. Colonialism and Slavery are unprofitable because they waste vast resources on shit that doesn't directly contribute to generating a good or service that someone wants. The American South was made under-developed by slavery as an institution. The British Empire was remarkably unprofitable by their own damn records. Colonialism is a shit business practice because it's inefficient.
Why did "Corporate Campuses" return? Because The government (both California and the US federal) subsidized them and convinced entire swathes of the population that private ownership of property was a vast right-wing conspiracy theory. Don't own anything, don't ask to own anything, let the insurance company pay for everything, give your money to the bank, and your pension to the investment firm, and you'll be happy. All while a corporatist legal structure attacks competition, entrapanuership, and sole proprietorship at every possible angle in an economy based on Keynesian Socialist economics and Fabian Socialist politics.
It's massively unprofitable for society as a whole and taxpayers in particular, but if you're the megacorp getting all of your costs socialised while you keep all of the profits private it's a pretty sweet gig.
Almost precisely. The corporations themselves are public entities, they do redistribute wealth to their public investors, but they keep the top cuts to themselves.
Megacorps dont exist without government intervention. An ancap society would likely stay mostly local, and corps like Disney or Microsoft would have died out decades ago like they naturally would have without all the lobbying they did for regulations that kept them afloat.
This is probably true. The problem is that you rarely see these types of libertarians talk about it (though more serious ones like Hoppe do, but you rarely hear about them in mainstream discourse for obvious reasons).
When Boeing was having problems with their 737 MAX, was the Libertarian Party of Texas tweeting out "If the concept of Limited Liability for company executives and investors -- a market-distorting legal fiction created by the government -- were eliminated, these issues would be far less likely to occur because the executives and investors wouldn't want to risk bankruptcy and prison time by putting out an unsafe product"? Or were they blaming the FAA?
Well yeah, because most official Libertarian parties in America are controlled opposition, much like the GOP in their own way. Its why I prefer discussing ideas and solutions over strict adherence to ideology or party.
I can't speak for the Libertarian Party of Texas on such a specific issue.
However, the argument isn't unfamiliar to me. The very nature of a Limited Liability Company is a legal structure to protect businesses from prosecution. It exists to privilege these corporations for the benefits of concentrating wealth and power into a few hands which can be taxed and monitored more easily.
Imagine if Boeing were a sole proprietorship. That is a private company. If Boeing built a shit airplane, the company as a fictitious legal construct couldn't be sued, the owner of Boeing could be directly sued. Not only that, he'd actually have to personally sue each of the employees that fucked up. The law would actually create a fixed chain of responsibility, person after person.
Why isn't that done? Because the government first presents corporations, non-profits, and LLC's and legal fictions to protect them from lawsuits, then they tax the shit out of sole proprietorships on top of that, then they offer the largest tax breaks and programs to the largest corporations.
The system is intentionally designed to support these mass, unaccountable, fictitious legal structures. First by promising no legal accountability to corporations, second by adding burdensome legal liabilities to sole proprietorships, third by taxing the shit out of those sole proprietorships which denies any incentive to do it even if you succeed, and fourth by reducing the tax burden on corporations.
Could a government bureaucracy have something to do with this arrangement? Sure, any government oversight agency is going to support the structure I just spelled out. Getting rid of it is one first step, but they can always be replaced by another "temporary" agency later.
It was always the intolerance of the "pro ethics" crowd (the very few who were) which was the problem. They wanted to ban generic "anti-SJW" content, while the anti-SJW folks made no such demands about ethics. If the roles were reversed, and the anti-SJW crowd was demanding bans on ethics content, I would have been on their side. Basically, don't ban stuff.
I agree with the rest of your comment. It's populism or political suicide for the right. "Muh capitalism" and "cut taxes for the 1%" aren't going to cut it. They were never popular, but going against a hard-left that is so radicalized, you're not going to win if you do not stand against it - nor do you deserve to win.
Yeah, I know. I knew from the very beginning of GG personally that there was a poisonous ideology fueling the behavior of game journalists. That just forcing game journalists to be "ethical" isn't going to fix the problem. Their unethical behavior is motivated by an ideology that believes in the ends justifying the means.
For the right-populist/actual libertarian side, we try not to adopt that "ends justifies the means" position, we only resort to it when it becomes impractical to maintain our position or if we end up risking being completely eliminated to maintain our position. For us, it's more of a "you left us no choice, I don't want to do this" position, which IMO is a far more defensible position than what the crazies on the far left use which is the "morals be damned, what we do is justified" position.
I stopped worrying about optics once the other side stopped being honest about their ideology.
Rolling out a pet theory here: positive goals versus negative goals; alternatively, constructivism versus destructivism. "I don't want to fight, I just want to play games in peace" is a positive goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is created or a lost thing is regained. "Your ideas are an evil and I must see you undone" is a negative goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is destroyed or a desired thing is taken.
Argument is simple, that the maintenance of civility demands positive goals, because negative goals are a direct threat to civility. The implication is basically a meme: that "ends justifies the means" may be just only under a positive goal.
I'm inviting feedback because I've hit a wall in development. (I'm still considering whether it could also apply to uncivil scenarios, such as military strategy, but it's looking doubtful so far.)
Because it claims that no objective standard can exist, by definition. As such, it instantly devolves into “that which causes the greatest pleasure” as a false dichotomy to the opposite of “do not cause others pain.”
Because it claims that no objective standard can exist, by definition. As such, it instantly devolves into “that which causes the greatest pleasure” as a false dichotomy to the opposite of “do not cause others pain.”
BREAKING: party that has debates about whether child pornography should be legal, thinks it is outrageous to prevent a billion-dollar corporation from controlling public discourse.
I am sympathetic to the end goal of libertarianism but anyone who doesn't realize that libertarianism is self-defeating is legally braindead. You will not get a free society if corporations are allowed to silence ideas that offend power. Additionally, but unrelated to this particular post, you will not have a free people capable of self governing if they are addicted to fentanyl porn and sugary drinks. Basically if you want to be governed like a libertarian you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies.
Basically if you want to be governed like a libertarian you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies.
Order is an emergent property of freedom. Order does not have to be imposed on a people, they generate their own order. The less you protect them from the consequences of their actions, the more they will be informed on how to conduct themselves in a beneficial and orderly fashion.
you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies
This is a feature, not a bug. If you got it from policy, you would inherently break libertarianism's disfavor of governmental manipulation. You must instead get it from other sources, like culture, upbringing, philosophy, intelligence, etc.
I support the flavor that permits entire civilizations to try and fail this process, which will likely destroy them completely. But I reject large scale civilizations, so it wouldn't be so bad for a few towns to fail.
The logistic reality is basically impossible, though. It'd be insane to attempt anything like this without enormous preparation or some desperate cataclysm. Or something outlandish like Bioshock's Rapture.
you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies.
So government is the only way to keep people disciplined? Culture and upbringing have nothing to do with it? With views like that, you'd fit right in with our SJW friends.
The issue I have with that thought is if you do remove such protections and it doesn't stop their behavior, then what?
That's why I agree with Judge Clarence's interpretation of these social media companies as common carriers. It's a last resort but a lot of companies including Google, et al. have become too big to fail. I can't think of an easy way to do this because we are treading a dangerous tight rope.
I don't like giving government the club, but none of us have the power as individuals to stop something like Twitter, Facebook, Google. They're an embedded part of our cultural lexicon we can't remove.
The issue I have with that thought is if you do remove such protections and it doesn't stop their behavior, then what?
Their behavior is fundamentally not profitable. The only reason they can continue to do what they are doing is because they are being supported outside of being unprofitable.
Think about YouTube for a second. Susan lost Alphabet something like $80 Billion in valuation because of her policies on YouTube. In a profit driven business, that kind of loss would be so utterly devastating that she would have been thrown out onto her fucking neck. The reason it doesn't matter is to Alphabet is because they are able to be supported by vast swaths of money being pulled not only from other sources, but from the government as well. Those protections, and that funding, means that no matter what the market says, no matter how much the program looses, they are going to keep pushing.
There is already a market demand for them to stop what they are doing, the state is protecting them. Stop protecting them and their behavior will change or they will die, as all unprofitable businesses must... unless they are protected by the state which never makes money.
Libertarians like you have no answer to what to do about monopolies or cartels. (Which are not free markets.) Just outcompete guys. The invisible hand will guide you.
More government is good when it balances extreme corporate power.
I think it's Francis Fukuyama who in his book on Political Order states that in the places where the monarchy was weak and the aristocracy was strong, you had local tyranny and national weakness (e.g. Poland). In places where monarchy was strong and aristocracy was weak, you get tyranny (e.g. Russia). In places where they are both strong, they balance each other out, and you get liberty (e.g. England).
Right now, we have the first case. We have corporate tyranny. And you can say that people get what they 'deserve'. Fine. But I don't want things to go to hell because of people's ideological commitments to 'free markets'. I want things to get better.
And it's very simplistic to state that people are voting with their wallets, when these megacorps are monopolies. Their monopolistic power must first be broken, and then maybe the free market will function properly.
More government is good when it balances extreme corporate power.
Extreme corporate power is literally the cause of the government's actions. Socialism does not save us from Keynsianism. Keynsianism is Socialism.
These companies are a) not actually private, and b) extensions of government power. The only way you can cause these companies to actually take a loss, *is to keep them from leeching off of the government's vast stolen wealth.
lawl at England being an example of a liberty focused country. The country where people get arrested for hate speech and rapists go free because they're a "protcted class".
More government is never good, and is literally how we got into this mess. Remove 230 protections and watch these social media sites crumble. Dismantle the Federal Reserve and all central banking, and watch actual competitive sites flourish. Until those things happen, "more government" isnt going to do jack shit but make the problem worse.
Every official Libertarian party is run by controlled opposition. They always come out in support of whatever the left is advocating for and will twist themselves into knots to justify it.
I thought I was Libertarian for a while. Still not sure I'm not in theory, but I'm not even in the ballpark of their party. They are nothing more than not-totally-socialist liberals.
The thing is I would love to keep all of this de-regulated, but it's clear that just won't work. At the sake of sounding extremely Communist (which is close to the pinnacle of insults to me), I just don't think these mega-corporations can be allowed to keep going. I love capitalism, but when it's nothing but giants that either buy up or crush the competition, you have what we are dealing with today. There's a lot of things I just can't find a small local business to buy from--price and all aside they just don't exist anymore. The bad part is I haven't the slightest idea how to fix it. I think regulation, such as Justice Thomas is suggesting here, is probably the best way. Otherwise, break them up--and watch them rise right back up.
Those megacorps only exist because of government regulation. Remove those protections, sites like Gab and .win will flourish, while twitter and facebook die off. Its that fucking simple.
Its funny because we're all aware of 230 and the protections it gives. Literally from the government. People here just want the quicker solution which is government smash
The thing that confuses people about 230 is that it's not a simple negative law. It's not saying "don't do this". It's an exception to a legal framework that promotes civil litigation against commentary.
The law already existed to strictly control speech by supporting expensive civil lawsuits, and then granted immunity if tech firms promised to moderate their comment sections. 230 actually exists to support content moderation, not remove it.
That's why if you remove it, you'd open up social media firms to civil lawsuits.
If you want to promote free speech, you have end 230 and simultaneously remove the underlying laws enabling the right to sue publishers for some of their comments. You get peace from an armed society, and you get more tolerant discourse when you refuse to protect people from attacks and insults.
If you want to free speech, you have to not protect people from it.
230 is written in such a weird and backwards way to how you would think a law would normally work, that it confuses people.
That's actually a super good point that I wasn't thinking about. Over-regulation stifing the smaller competitors. If anything just through red tape alone.
My mind was more on "tangible" companies (meaning those that deal in physical goods) when I commented that. Still though, I can see where dropping regulations would make at least some of them better able to compete. It's not perfect, but what we are doing now sucks...so...what can it hurt?
i support libertarian principles but obviously this so called "libertarian party " does not. If they think that its ok for social media companies that monopolize the public speaking sphere to censor and ban people
The only reason they are as powerful as they are is explicitly because the government gave them monopolitic power in the first place. These public companies exist at the behest of their government regulators to gain tax income for the government. Monopolizing the economy guarantees government control over the economy. The largest businesses do not compete with the government, they're the same damn thing.
Corporations don't have to corrupt the thing that grants them the right to exist.
Then you misunderstand the essence of power itself. Power needs no religious or ethnic justification. Those justifications are merely for the useful idiots that submit themselves to power.
I think that rule is really lacking. As best as I can remember his top level post, it was accusing jews of being to blame for some thing. That isn't the same as accusing them of conspiring. I can accuse my in-laws of doing something bad without them needing to have conspired it into action.
Maybe I'm wrong? No one knows but you now so the opportunity for me to potentially find I was mistaken is stripped.
Also, I would like the opportunity to discuss the use of labels with some of our members and it becomes impossible to do so organically when my opportunities are deleted.
So here's a proposition of compromise: get wordfilters as a mod power. Rule16 is there for the longevity of our survival, I get it. But straight deletion? I think it'd be sufficient to delete or change the offending word (and we have banned words within certain contexts, let's not pretend otherwise). Doing this would allow for bystanders to learn from secondhand experience what some of our rules actually mean by granting them contextual examples that no longer break the rule.
Wordfilters get used often on imageboards for moderation purposes and also jokes. Normally it's done to auto-translate site-wide one phrase to another phrase. 4chan filters the word "soy" to "onions" for example (long story). To be clear, I'm not suggesting you make a site-wide filter. I'm suggesting you force an edit on posts marked for deletion where it can be solved by changing one word.
Would that post have been okay using a euphemism like "vampire"? If it were something benign like "cats" it would surely pass.
To bystanders: yes, inviting spez shit sounds dumb as fuck, but I'd rather that than entire posts get nuked.
These sort of libertarians drive me nuts. They decry what they perceive as an "infringement of liberty" but then fail to pay anything but lip service to the government-granted immunity from liability these companies are getting despite acting as publishers. Which they wouldn't get in AnCapistan.
Get rid of that and the problem fixes itself the first time a tech CEO serves life in prison for publishing and distributing child pornography.
Like almost everyone commenting on this, if they aren't missing the point intentionally (controlled opposition), they are pretty dense. The regulatory tools to deal with FB et al exist and are pro-liberty. Supporting free markets means opposing monopolies. Supporting free markets means corps are responsible for the shit they put on the Internet. Break up these monopolies now (in addition to what you said). If any regulators had any balls it would be done already. Congress can order regulators to act, if necessary.
Yeah, Texas LP is a particularly bad state affiliate. They're populated with the old guard of the party, who basically just want to use it as a social club to complain about weed laws together. Luckily, Mises Caucus is making good progress taking the party over. Texas will unfortunately be one of the last strongholds of the "pragmatists" to fall.
Why does Libertarianism so often end with no standards?
Weed.
A Certain Classical Liberal reminded us that you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, in a video called Ideological Hegemony.
Back then, it was to try to reason with people who wanted GG to be more "anti SJW" than pro ethics during the GG era, and that ostracization of those who just wanted to be "pro ethics" is how you kill the movement. He was partially right, but he also realized that not addressing the SJW issue was ultimately going to be detrimental to everyone and that the key is to win over the "pro ethics" crowd to realize there is a bigger issue than just vidya ethics.
Now I think that can still be applied to "Lolbertarians" who have adopted the neverTrumper "muh freedoms" view.
They don't realize that by continuing to stick to their utopian libertarian stance, they are literally handing the weapon over to the enemy to silence them with.
You have to realize at some point that strict adherence to your utopian principles may actually be detrimental to the ultimate goal you're going for. If you remember the interview Ben Shapiro had with Tucker Carlson, Shapiro had the tradcon ultra-capitalist position. That the best business out there will rise to the top, and that there will be winners and losers in a situation and those who cannot adapt are simply in a "too bad, so sad" position.
Tucker, on the other hand, saw the right-populist position, he understands that the adoption of pure capitalism actually placed us in a quandry where we're going to "out-capitalism" some of our population, especially the current Gen X population that are already too old to learn new skills. Some will adopt, but others are essentially going to be "phased out" of the economy and be too old to be able to do anything while staying in the workforce.
That same pure capitalism has also allowed the proliferation of plagues like OnlyFans and other hedonistic degeneracy. From a lolbertarian standpoint, this should be allowed - none of it is directly hurting me, but we know this shit is harmful to society as it deteriorates the already crumbling foundation of relationships and essentially commodifying it. The girls who take advantage of this aren't exactly well adjusted people either.
This is the reason why people like Styx aren't pure libertarians either - he realizes that in order to protect a libertarian state, you NEED to take some nationalist policies that may come in conflict with your ideology but are ones built of absolute pragmatism. Be principled all you like, but at the same time one needs to realize sometimes you need to be realistic than idealistic.
The point I have been trying to drive home to one of my libertarian friends is that the heads of these companies:
It isn't "My neighbor Joe wanted to sell some apples from his orchard, but he got shut down because he didn't have a food vendor's license and because his orchard wasn't zoned for commercial farming". It's "These Fortune 500 CEOs want to reshape society and change your way of life so that they can maintain a permeant neo-feudalist oligarchy".
To the extent the NAP has any teeth at all, your way of life is being aggressed against by these companies; and you are under no obligation to stand by and let them do it.
Well put. According to our lolbertarian friends, these megacorps having their boots on our necks is not a violation of the NAP, but us trying to remove it is.
That's because this particular brand of lolbertarianism when taken to its logical conclusion results in absolute monarchy. If a megacorp owns all the land in a region and can do whatever it wants with the land, and everyone on its land is obligated to comply with whatever dictates it wants, how is that any different than the old feudal system?
At least Hoppe is honest that he wants states to be absolute monarchies, and has the good sense to want to forcibly remove communists.
In defense of Hoppe, absolute monarchy is a lesser evil than corporate domination. The monarch in question is, at least theoretically, obliged to take care of the res publica, as opposed to serving private interests. If that does not happen, then you get revolts, because people expect some regard for the public interest. Not so with corporations.
Because capitalism and expansive private ownership is what fucking ended feudalism. Corporations are pushing for feudalism, which involved the state building guild systems which were the only legal entities allowed to engage in certain forms of commerce. Feudalism is the heaviest possible form of regulation outside Stalinist Communism.
Why don't corporations just buy up entire cities? Why did the mining towns stop?
Because it's utterly impractical and totally unaffordable without a state protecting them at every level, and subsidizing them to an extreme. Corporate Colonialism and Slavocracy is what they are doing. Colonialism and Slavery are unprofitable because they waste vast resources on shit that doesn't directly contribute to generating a good or service that someone wants. The American South was made under-developed by slavery as an institution. The British Empire was remarkably unprofitable by their own damn records. Colonialism is a shit business practice because it's inefficient.
Why did "Corporate Campuses" return? Because The government (both California and the US federal) subsidized them and convinced entire swathes of the population that private ownership of property was a vast right-wing conspiracy theory. Don't own anything, don't ask to own anything, let the insurance company pay for everything, give your money to the bank, and your pension to the investment firm, and you'll be happy. All while a corporatist legal structure attacks competition, entrapanuership, and sole proprietorship at every possible angle in an economy based on Keynesian Socialist economics and Fabian Socialist politics.
It's massively unprofitable for society as a whole and taxpayers in particular, but if you're the megacorp getting all of your costs socialised while you keep all of the profits private it's a pretty sweet gig.
Almost precisely. The corporations themselves are public entities, they do redistribute wealth to their public investors, but they keep the top cuts to themselves.
Megacorps dont exist without government intervention. An ancap society would likely stay mostly local, and corps like Disney or Microsoft would have died out decades ago like they naturally would have without all the lobbying they did for regulations that kept them afloat.
This is probably true. The problem is that you rarely see these types of libertarians talk about it (though more serious ones like Hoppe do, but you rarely hear about them in mainstream discourse for obvious reasons).
When Boeing was having problems with their 737 MAX, was the Libertarian Party of Texas tweeting out "If the concept of Limited Liability for company executives and investors -- a market-distorting legal fiction created by the government -- were eliminated, these issues would be far less likely to occur because the executives and investors wouldn't want to risk bankruptcy and prison time by putting out an unsafe product"? Or were they blaming the FAA?
Well yeah, because most official Libertarian parties in America are controlled opposition, much like the GOP in their own way. Its why I prefer discussing ideas and solutions over strict adherence to ideology or party.
I can't speak for the Libertarian Party of Texas on such a specific issue.
However, the argument isn't unfamiliar to me. The very nature of a Limited Liability Company is a legal structure to protect businesses from prosecution. It exists to privilege these corporations for the benefits of concentrating wealth and power into a few hands which can be taxed and monitored more easily.
Imagine if Boeing were a sole proprietorship. That is a private company. If Boeing built a shit airplane, the company as a fictitious legal construct couldn't be sued, the owner of Boeing could be directly sued. Not only that, he'd actually have to personally sue each of the employees that fucked up. The law would actually create a fixed chain of responsibility, person after person.
Why isn't that done? Because the government first presents corporations, non-profits, and LLC's and legal fictions to protect them from lawsuits, then they tax the shit out of sole proprietorships on top of that, then they offer the largest tax breaks and programs to the largest corporations.
The system is intentionally designed to support these mass, unaccountable, fictitious legal structures. First by promising no legal accountability to corporations, second by adding burdensome legal liabilities to sole proprietorships, third by taxing the shit out of those sole proprietorships which denies any incentive to do it even if you succeed, and fourth by reducing the tax burden on corporations.
Could a government bureaucracy have something to do with this arrangement? Sure, any government oversight agency is going to support the structure I just spelled out. Getting rid of it is one first step, but they can always be replaced by another "temporary" agency later.
It was always the intolerance of the "pro ethics" crowd (the very few who were) which was the problem. They wanted to ban generic "anti-SJW" content, while the anti-SJW folks made no such demands about ethics. If the roles were reversed, and the anti-SJW crowd was demanding bans on ethics content, I would have been on their side. Basically, don't ban stuff.
I agree with the rest of your comment. It's populism or political suicide for the right. "Muh capitalism" and "cut taxes for the 1%" aren't going to cut it. They were never popular, but going against a hard-left that is so radicalized, you're not going to win if you do not stand against it - nor do you deserve to win.
Yeah, I know. I knew from the very beginning of GG personally that there was a poisonous ideology fueling the behavior of game journalists. That just forcing game journalists to be "ethical" isn't going to fix the problem. Their unethical behavior is motivated by an ideology that believes in the ends justifying the means.
For the right-populist/actual libertarian side, we try not to adopt that "ends justifies the means" position, we only resort to it when it becomes impractical to maintain our position or if we end up risking being completely eliminated to maintain our position. For us, it's more of a "you left us no choice, I don't want to do this" position, which IMO is a far more defensible position than what the crazies on the far left use which is the "morals be damned, what we do is justified" position.
I stopped worrying about optics once the other side stopped being honest about their ideology.
Rolling out a pet theory here: positive goals versus negative goals; alternatively, constructivism versus destructivism. "I don't want to fight, I just want to play games in peace" is a positive goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is created or a lost thing is regained. "Your ideas are an evil and I must see you undone" is a negative goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is destroyed or a desired thing is taken.
Argument is simple, that the maintenance of civility demands positive goals, because negative goals are a direct threat to civility. The implication is basically a meme: that "ends justifies the means" may be just only under a positive goal.
I'm inviting feedback because I've hit a wall in development. (I'm still considering whether it could also apply to uncivil scenarios, such as military strategy, but it's looking doubtful so far.)
Because they agree with every leftist belief when it comes to social/morality issues and only disagree with a few fringe econ issues.
Because it claims that no objective standard can exist, by definition. As such, it instantly devolves into “that which causes the greatest pleasure” as a false dichotomy to the opposite of “do not cause others pain.”
Because it claims that no objective standard can exist, by definition. As such, it instantly devolves into “that which causes the greatest pleasure” as a false dichotomy to the opposite of “do not cause others pain.”
BREAKING: party that has debates about whether child pornography should be legal, thinks it is outrageous to prevent a billion-dollar corporation from controlling public discourse.
I am sympathetic to the end goal of libertarianism but anyone who doesn't realize that libertarianism is self-defeating is legally braindead. You will not get a free society if corporations are allowed to silence ideas that offend power. Additionally, but unrelated to this particular post, you will not have a free people capable of self governing if they are addicted to fentanyl porn and sugary drinks. Basically if you want to be governed like a libertarian you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies.
Order is an emergent property of freedom. Order does not have to be imposed on a people, they generate their own order. The less you protect them from the consequences of their actions, the more they will be informed on how to conduct themselves in a beneficial and orderly fashion.
Everything you said seems correct. However:
This is a feature, not a bug. If you got it from policy, you would inherently break libertarianism's disfavor of governmental manipulation. You must instead get it from other sources, like culture, upbringing, philosophy, intelligence, etc.
I support the flavor that permits entire civilizations to try and fail this process, which will likely destroy them completely. But I reject large scale civilizations, so it wouldn't be so bad for a few towns to fail.
The logistic reality is basically impossible, though. It'd be insane to attempt anything like this without enormous preparation or some desperate cataclysm. Or something outlandish like Bioshock's Rapture.
There has to be some rules and leadership.
It's fantasy to think that the majority of people can live disciplined lives on their own.
The libertarian concept
So government is the only way to keep people disciplined? Culture and upbringing have nothing to do with it? With views like that, you'd fit right in with our SJW friends.
You advocating for a theoretical form of government that doesn't exist and wouldn't work in practice would fit in with our commie friends.
Im advocating for stronger communities with good morals. Why you think the government needs to be involved for that to exist is what im questioning.
Probably because government involvement has always been necessary for strong communities with good morals to even exist.
But that's quite irrelevant for whether or not moral enforcement by the government is necessary for strong, moral communities to exist.
Imagine calling yourself a libertarian and defending a monopolistic megacorp's right to silence you.
The issue I have with that thought is if you do remove such protections and it doesn't stop their behavior, then what?
That's why I agree with Judge Clarence's interpretation of these social media companies as common carriers. It's a last resort but a lot of companies including Google, et al. have become too big to fail. I can't think of an easy way to do this because we are treading a dangerous tight rope.
I don't like giving government the club, but none of us have the power as individuals to stop something like Twitter, Facebook, Google. They're an embedded part of our cultural lexicon we can't remove.
Their behavior is fundamentally not profitable. The only reason they can continue to do what they are doing is because they are being supported outside of being unprofitable.
Think about YouTube for a second. Susan lost Alphabet something like $80 Billion in valuation because of her policies on YouTube. In a profit driven business, that kind of loss would be so utterly devastating that she would have been thrown out onto her fucking neck. The reason it doesn't matter is to Alphabet is because they are able to be supported by vast swaths of money being pulled not only from other sources, but from the government as well. Those protections, and that funding, means that no matter what the market says, no matter how much the program looses, they are going to keep pushing.
There is already a market demand for them to stop what they are doing, the state is protecting them. Stop protecting them and their behavior will change or they will die, as all unprofitable businesses must... unless they are protected by the state which never makes money.
Congress steals from Us and gives it to pharmaceutical corporations.
Lockdowns destroy the competition.
Regulations destroy the competition.
Our federal government is totally corrupt
Correct.
Libertarians like you have no answer to what to do about monopolies or cartels. (Which are not free markets.) Just outcompete guys. The invisible hand will guide you.
I think you're a good guy, but very misguided.
More government is good when it balances extreme corporate power.
I think it's Francis Fukuyama who in his book on Political Order states that in the places where the monarchy was weak and the aristocracy was strong, you had local tyranny and national weakness (e.g. Poland). In places where monarchy was strong and aristocracy was weak, you get tyranny (e.g. Russia). In places where they are both strong, they balance each other out, and you get liberty (e.g. England).
Right now, we have the first case. We have corporate tyranny. And you can say that people get what they 'deserve'. Fine. But I don't want things to go to hell because of people's ideological commitments to 'free markets'. I want things to get better.
And it's very simplistic to state that people are voting with their wallets, when these megacorps are monopolies. Their monopolistic power must first be broken, and then maybe the free market will function properly.
Extreme corporate power is literally the cause of the government's actions. Socialism does not save us from Keynsianism. Keynsianism is Socialism.
These companies are a) not actually private, and b) extensions of government power. The only way you can cause these companies to actually take a loss, *is to keep them from leeching off of the government's vast stolen wealth.
Regulation is neither socialism nor Keynesianism - an Keynsianism is not socialism.
Regulation is an aspect of Socialism.
Keynsianism is absolutely Socialism.
Socialism is government ownership of the means of production.
Ergo, neither Keynesianism nor Regulation are 'socialism'.
Read the third paragraph again. It's exactly what I said. If that's too much for you to read, let me quote the part where it says that.
Powers have to be balanced for there to be liberty.
lawl at England being an example of a liberty focused country. The country where people get arrested for hate speech and rapists go free because they're a "protcted class".
More government is never good, and is literally how we got into this mess. Remove 230 protections and watch these social media sites crumble. Dismantle the Federal Reserve and all central banking, and watch actual competitive sites flourish. Until those things happen, "more government" isnt going to do jack shit but make the problem worse.
Maybe the use of 'aristocracy' in the context of Poland should have tipped you off that we are not talking about 2021.
Im only interested in the present, thanks. England has a very strong government and is a Orwellian laughing stock.
Then maybe don't start screeching about the present when people are talking about the past.
Comment Reported for: Rule 15: Slurs
Please do not direct slurs at the user.
Every official Libertarian party is run by controlled opposition. They always come out in support of whatever the left is advocating for and will twist themselves into knots to justify it.
I thought I was Libertarian for a while. Still not sure I'm not in theory, but I'm not even in the ballpark of their party. They are nothing more than not-totally-socialist liberals.
The thing is I would love to keep all of this de-regulated, but it's clear that just won't work. At the sake of sounding extremely Communist (which is close to the pinnacle of insults to me), I just don't think these mega-corporations can be allowed to keep going. I love capitalism, but when it's nothing but giants that either buy up or crush the competition, you have what we are dealing with today. There's a lot of things I just can't find a small local business to buy from--price and all aside they just don't exist anymore. The bad part is I haven't the slightest idea how to fix it. I think regulation, such as Justice Thomas is suggesting here, is probably the best way. Otherwise, break them up--and watch them rise right back up.
Those megacorps only exist because of government regulation. Remove those protections, sites like Gab and .win will flourish, while twitter and facebook die off. Its that fucking simple.
I'll try to explain that, but people are convinced that the government is the only way to protect them from institutions that the government created.
Its funny because we're all aware of 230 and the protections it gives. Literally from the government. People here just want the quicker solution which is government smash
The thing that confuses people about 230 is that it's not a simple negative law. It's not saying "don't do this". It's an exception to a legal framework that promotes civil litigation against commentary.
The law already existed to strictly control speech by supporting expensive civil lawsuits, and then granted immunity if tech firms promised to moderate their comment sections. 230 actually exists to support content moderation, not remove it.
That's why if you remove it, you'd open up social media firms to civil lawsuits.
If you want to promote free speech, you have end 230 and simultaneously remove the underlying laws enabling the right to sue publishers for some of their comments. You get peace from an armed society, and you get more tolerant discourse when you refuse to protect people from attacks and insults.
If you want to free speech, you have to not protect people from it.
230 is written in such a weird and backwards way to how you would think a law would normally work, that it confuses people.
That's actually a super good point that I wasn't thinking about. Over-regulation stifing the smaller competitors. If anything just through red tape alone.
My mind was more on "tangible" companies (meaning those that deal in physical goods) when I commented that. Still though, I can see where dropping regulations would make at least some of them better able to compete. It's not perfect, but what we are doing now sucks...so...what can it hurt?
i support libertarian principles but obviously this so called "libertarian party " does not. If they think that its ok for social media companies that monopolize the public speaking sphere to censor and ban people
If this companies would have censored leftists they would have demanded they be treated as utilities.
noooo you can't use the state to compel corporations to play by the rules!
Corporations exist at the convenience of the government. That's why you have to legally create them using a government bureaucracy.
Have you ever seen a sole proprietorship have this kind of power and scope?
They couldn't be this powerful without having corrupted the government to give them monopolistic power over the competition and spending bill pork.
Libertarianism enables this bullshit
There is a solution, and Antifa, libtards and libertarians will cry Fascism.
It's the only way to stop these Jews and Megacorporations from raping the world.
It does the exact opposite of that.
The only reason they are as powerful as they are is explicitly because the government gave them monopolitic power in the first place. These public companies exist at the behest of their government regulators to gain tax income for the government. Monopolizing the economy guarantees government control over the economy. The largest businesses do not compete with the government, they're the same damn thing.
Corporations don't have to corrupt the thing that grants them the right to exist.
Comment Removed: Rule 16
Go to Reddit, Commie
Oh, quit crying about Jews. Don't act like a White socialist wouldn't slit your throat all the same.
I see Jewish power as the adhesive, bonding corporations and government.
Then you misunderstand the essence of power itself. Power needs no religious or ethnic justification. Those justifications are merely for the useful idiots that submit themselves to power.
Comment Reported for: 16: Identity attacks
Comment Removed
I think that rule is really lacking. As best as I can remember his top level post, it was accusing jews of being to blame for some thing. That isn't the same as accusing them of conspiring. I can accuse my in-laws of doing something bad without them needing to have conspired it into action.
Maybe I'm wrong? No one knows but you now so the opportunity for me to potentially find I was mistaken is stripped.
Also, I would like the opportunity to discuss the use of labels with some of our members and it becomes impossible to do so organically when my opportunities are deleted.
So here's a proposition of compromise: get wordfilters as a mod power. Rule16 is there for the longevity of our survival, I get it. But straight deletion? I think it'd be sufficient to delete or change the offending word (and we have banned words within certain contexts, let's not pretend otherwise). Doing this would allow for bystanders to learn from secondhand experience what some of our rules actually mean by granting them contextual examples that no longer break the rule.
Wordfilters get used often on imageboards for moderation purposes and also jokes. Normally it's done to auto-translate site-wide one phrase to another phrase. 4chan filters the word "soy" to "onions" for example (long story). To be clear, I'm not suggesting you make a site-wide filter. I'm suggesting you force an edit on posts marked for deletion where it can be solved by changing one word.
Would that post have been okay using a euphemism like "vampire"? If it were something benign like "cats" it would surely pass.
To bystanders: yes, inviting spez shit sounds dumb as fuck, but I'd rather that than entire posts get nuked.
Go to Reddit, Commie