Where the GOP goes from here

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If so many people are going to be selfish dicks criminal behavior is pretty much inevitable. People will find a way to survive in any case.

No. If I produce 10 units of a product, and 10 units of that product are consumed, no wealth is created. Wealth creation is an accumulation, not a consumption. If you produce 10 units and consume 11 units (one from savings), then you are consuming wealth. In order to create wealth, you must produce more than you consume, resulting in savings that are later used to acquire capital goods that facilitate further production. Wealth cannot be created by consumption, no matter how you run the numbers.

If the government uses capital goods in order to produce, then it's operating as a business, not a government. Government that uses taxation in order to pay for production is reallocating resources, not producing wealth.


I don't fault people who cannot survive on their own due to a medical issue. I don't fault people who can survive on their own for needing help for a few months to get back on their feet.

I fault people when they don't try. I fault government when it encourages people to not try and destroys resources people have to succeed on their own (jobs). If there aren't enough jobs, then people should make their own jobs in their own venture. It's disappointing that so many people think it's someone else's responsibility to get them work.

As for "the fundamental problem is people are not sharing", I don't even know how to take that statement seriously. We live in a world full of opportunities. Instead of going and taking from this huge pie of opportunity, you want me to go get my slice of the pie and then share it with you? Please, get off your ass and cut your own slice.

If I consume a bottle of anti-biotics and get will it enables me to go back to work and produce a value greater than the bottle of anti-biotics. You have a mistaken view of consumption. Consumption is not destruction. It is using one thing or service to produce another thing or service which often is of greater value than the thing used.

You have a zero sum view of the world which is just plain wrong.

ruveyn

As usual, the libertarian position is being grossly misstated, probably willfully. The libertarians I know are all about efficiency, lack of it is one of their majors issues with the state. You wanna know why libertarians tend to dislike things like government healthcare and welfare programs? Because they think about the experiences they've had with other government services such as the social security office or various licensing departments, or even worse, have had first or second hand exposure to Medicare/Medicaid/VA health services, and have seen just how "efficient" the state is at running such programs. It's not "let the bums die in the streets", it's "why should I pay for a bloated and incompetent agency to offer shitty service at great inconvenience?". This rationale can be used with minor tweaking to explain quite a few libertarian positions, purely on efficiency grounds.

If the state had a great track record of running efficient programs that delivered vital services to people who need them when they need them without employing brigades of bureaucrats to sort reams of paperwork who soak up all the money put into the programs, then I and many other identified libertarians would have no problem supporting things like universal healthcare and strong welfare programs. But that's not the state's track record, is it?

As to the GOP, between the exile of the Paulites and the alienation of virtually every minority group in the country, they've dug themselves a pretty deep whole this time. Maybe, just maybe they'll reevaluate some of their political choices and associations after taking a real hard look at the numbers, but I'm not holding my breath yet. Ironically, on many levels, this is political Darwinism, and they've got to evolve or die.

But instead of being positive and presenting ideas to reform programs, the libertarian message is to tear it all down.

In some case privatizing the programs is the best way to improve them. In general, governments do a mediocre to bad job of administering programs because there is no penalty when the civil service burocracy does a poor job. Example: after the debacle of Katrina, was FEMA disbanded or totally reorganized? No, it was not. If FEMA were a private entity it would have been allowed to go bankrupt after Katrina.

ruveyn

I'm sure the people good people in New York would just love to have to pay a bill for the continued privilege of living after a hurricane destroyed everything. I have never seen a libertarian answer that.

For ultra ueber disasters there is probably no better solution than government action. Only government can make the funds available and only government has the authority to impose emergency restrictions and rules.

Government exist primarily to keep the peace in society, protect the nations shores from enemy attack, try criminals and administer punishments and provide a uniform standard of justice to settle non-criminal disputes.

That is why we have government at all. From this it does not follow that government is the ideal engine for dealing with illness. Virtually all medical advances come from the private sector.

ruveyn

First things first:

What libertarian message? We're not a monolithic bloc you know. Are you cruising Reason, the Volokh Conspiracy, Cato, etc looking for libertarian proposals and not finding any? Do you even know any libertarians? If yes, do you ever actually talk non-superficial politics with them?

Secondly, even if I granted you the idea that libertarians are much more critical than constructive, which I am not, that would justify the constant progressive distortion of our philosophy how? Whether it's being lumped together with conservatives or being attacked as heartless or cruel, it is constant and it is a distortion.

Jonathan Haidt did a study a while back suggesting progressives are less able to understand their opponents' point of view than other ideologies and that the tendency increases with the degree of progressiveness, which would explain if not excuse some of the behavior. I even did a thread on that study when it came out, here's the link to the relevant part of the study: http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/10/born-this-way/2 (near the bottom of the page). Here's a new study finding that liberals are also less tolerant of dissenting opinion online (I, for one, am shocked!): http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012 ... itics.aspx

Anyway, the flip answer to your questions would be that you don't build a new house on a rotting foundation, and flip or not there is some truth to that. There is a lot of "rot" that needs to be cleared out of various areas of government before "renovations" can be made, but most of that "rot" has entrenched constituencies that would fight tooth and nail against removing it. It's the nightmare scenario of the people voting themselves largess from the state checkbook, whether those people be defense contractors, public sector unions, crony capitalists, or the very representatives entrusted to steer the state. Reform is nearly impossible when every move to cut anything is opposed by a well funded organized lobby with a lot to lose because they're profiting from the inefficiency or wrongful policy, e.g. the drug war. If the libertarian position appears more destructive than constructive on cursory examination, it's because a lot of destruction is necessary to get this country back on the right track, and it's not going to be a painless process. I really, really hate to quote him, but once upon a time Rush Limbaugh said that it's easy to be a liberal, you just have to say yes to everything, and I kind of agree with that. It's that refusal to make the hard choices and just say no sometimes that gives liberals their spendthrift reputation, and the mindset behind it that makes voices of restraint sound like voices of oppression.

You seem to have us confused with anarchists. Common mistake.

He said that FEMA ought to be privatized on one hand, then when I came back with that enormous problem, he showed another hand. Cherry picking is an epidemic among your party. That's the source of my decoder ring and secret password crack about libertarians.

I will give you an historic example.

The San Fransisco Earthquake of 1906. What the quake did not take down the fires destroyed. The Army came in to do two things.

1. Deter looting.

2. Blast fire breaks with dynamite to hinder the spread of the fire.

Once the Army had restored order to the area, private parties and firms undertook the rebuilding of the city. The city was mostly rebuilt in three years!! Can you see any government operation being that efficient? You bet you can't. After ten year, almost all signs of the destruction ceased to exist. San Francisco was rebuilt -privately- and every successfully. So the idea of having a private version of FEMA is not all that ridiculous.

ruveyn

Hey now, I thought Destruction for the sake of Revolution was a liberal monopoly.

FEMA has now twice proven that it's far too incompetent to deal with widescale disasters. It's a model of the inefficiency of big govt.

And then the private sector does all it can to squeeze money out of people in order to get access to that advance.

For example, see here: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 09885.html

This company has rebranded a drug in order to make it 20 times more expensive. In the UK, this will mean that the NHS has less resources to buy treatments with. In the USA, it would mean that poor people with MS can no longer afford the drug.

What is needed is a government organisation to act as an intermediate, either by regulating the drugs companies to try and crack down on this sort of thing (one far more effective and powerful than anything that exists in either country at present), or by providing a greater pool of resources (such as an NHS) to absorb the impact of this price rise.