Why is freedom good?

Libertarians see freedom through the eyes of employers and investors. For them it means low taxes, limited government, and not much of anything else. Low taxes and limited government are not good for employees, consumers, and the environment. Low taxes and limited government are consistent with racial discrimination and restrictions on intellectual freedom and the right to dissent.

 

How is any of this true? Low taxes means you have more of your own money to spend, less government means a government that can take away less of your rights, racial discrimination has nothing to do with government, if there's racial discrimination there's obviously a much larger problem of society that needs to be fixed. As for intellectual freedom, what?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school

Not all libertarians follow the Austrian school, but give it a read, maybe the ideas are just crazy enough to make sense. Really the only problem with a free market is it requires an educated populace to know what's going on and make decisions for themselves, which we don't have.

 

Uh... what are you talking about? How does limited government restrict intellectual freedom and the right to dissent more than large government?

 

You're confused.

go back to the page before this, read my big long post, and start again.

 

During much of the twentieth century it was dangerous to advocate socialism, criticize capitalism, and say much of anything nice about the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Libertarians supported Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un American Activities. They supported black lists, loyalty oaths, and witch hunts against Communists and Communist sympathizers.

During the Cold War Communist espionage was a legitimate concern. Communist subversion was not. There were legitimate reasons to keep members of the American Communist Party and Communist sympathizers from having access to classified material. There were no legitimate reasons to keep them from teaching in schools, writing for newspapers and magazines, and directing, producing, and writing film scripts for television programs and Hollywood movies.

There were also no legitimate reasons to keep them from most civil service jobs.

 

Now I am even more confused.

I do not see how what you posted refutes my argument.

 

Umm, no?

See, it's easy to look back and say "ohhh, that was so bad", same with the bombing of Hiroshima, yet, ask people how they felt at the time, all of Eastern Europe had fallen to communism, China had fallen, North Korea had invaded South Korea, and the Soviet Union was funding communist guerrillas around the world, the threat of communism was extremely real.

 

True, but a free market also assumes that consumers know exactly what they're buying, AKA transparency, which we don't have either.

When you look at some of the largest economic crises in recent US history, namely the S&L scandal of the '80's under the Reagan administration, and the mortgage melt down under another asshole republican administration, the root of the problem has consistently been deception on a grand scale, which is why we need oversight and regulation.

Notice how the banksters cry free market when they're making money, but now that they're strapped they're lining up for bailouts from the government. Talk about a double standard.

 

Some regulation isn't bad, and most regulation goes against fraud, which is illegal to begin with, most other things could be solved by people reading fine print and going "wtf, no fuck this"

As for the mortgage crisis, remember a good deal of this goes back to Freddie and Fannie, 2 companies that were government created and people assumed were still backed up by the government, and this started in the 90's with Clinton who urged them and banks under them to give our loans to people who could barely afford them as home ownership became a right vs a financial obligation/responsibility, Bush just continued on with this.

It may be true banks made a lot of shifty sub prime loans under the assumption nothing that bad could ever really happen, but at the same time people must take their own responsibility for taking loans they could not afford and not reading the fine print on things when borrowing $190,000 from somewhere.

 

I think that freedom is a natural desire of man (man and woman.) A year of incarceration in a small cell for 23 1/2 hours a day and a 1/2 hour/day to move around a few feet outside of your cell might answer this question lol.

 

This doesn't answer the question. Who 'Libertarians' have supported in the past is irrelevant. What I asked was: how is a smaller government, with less power, more able to restrict intellectual freedom and the right to dissent than a larger government, with more power?

 

When the government has less power private employers have more power. They usually choose to suppress opinions hostile to that power.

Also, who libertarians supported in the past is relevant. It reveals the hypocrisy that is at the heart of libertarianism.

 

You know your job is most likely that of a private employer, actually woah, most people's awesome jobs in this country are by private employers. Woah, most of our economic activity is supporter by private employers.

 

That power is subject to the economy, and people are mostly free to ignore it if they wish. I'm not really fucking scared of the big bad oil companies out for their own profit -- I'm way more scared of a government trying to force its citizens to do what it thinks is in their best interest. Both minority and majority rule fail in the end -- individual rule is the only path to freedom.

I guess if you care about Libertarianism it might be important. I'm not a Libertarian, so I don't see it as having much significance.

 

As far as the government is concerned, their only job should be to keep the folks at the top honest, not to subsidize failure and destruction as they've been doing.

And you're right, Fannie and Freddy are prime examples of how government intervention can fuck things up.

The only industry government should be involved in is the public infrastructure, namely roads, schools, safety, and national defense (not including shit we start to fulfill someone's corrupt agendas like Iraq and Afghanistan). I'll add to that a public health care option to compete with an insurance monopoly that the government helped make too big for its own good.

 

Because I am pessimistic about human nature I am skeptical of the value of freedom. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke wrote; "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints."

 

Edmund Burke was also on the conservative side of a time where democracy was considered pretty damn radical

 

Edmund Burke won elections to Parliament in the oldest democracy in the world.

Freedom cannot exist without democracy, but democratic governments have the responsibility to restrain freedom.

 

Just me, but I'd feel safer trusting human nature than a corporate bureaucracy. Freedom is, again, a basic right, and no government has the right or responsibility to infringe on it. People can sign away their freedom only on a voluntary basis -- they can agree to restrictions, but they always have the right to change their mind. This is not really signing away freedom at all, because freedom cannot be given away -- this is why it's called an inalienable right.

This whole idea of government steering people's actions in the right direction is just doublespeak for majority rule. Everyone seems to agree, I would say mistakenly, that democratic governments represent the desires of their people. If this is the case, being bound by the wishes of the people, they can hardly be forcing them to do anything. What they can do is impose the dictates of the majority on the opposing minority, which is no better than a minority imposing its will on the majority.

 

Because just like anything else awesome it can be taken advantage of.