Are libertarians Aspies or extreme NTs?

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More short-sightedness. If you look at things simplistically, then yes you can say the givers feel good about themselves, what a bunch of narcissists. But if you just stop your thought process there, you are missing the big picture.

There has to be a real connection between the giver and recipient to result in what might be considered civic pride. If people pay for the social safety net through their taxes, they are much less likely to actually help people in their day to day life. If it becomes systematic, it removes the incentive for people to actually care about their neighbor. Essentially, it becomes someone else's problem. "I gave at the office" is the mentality.

The more bureaucracy there is, the less initiative individual citizens show. The more the system is built up, the less people use their own judgement. Sometimes urgency is of the essence, and people have stopped thinking for themselves and just turn to rules and regulations. "I was just following orders!" When everything becomes institutionalized, people are less likely to take initiative.

It's easy to get wrapped up in each individual case of need. Think bigger. Don't think just of the one instance individually, think of the cumulative effect of every instance for over 50+ years. Try and see how creating a dependence on the government, for generations, erodes the fabric of society itself.

Leave it to the people. I trust my neighbors far more than I trust politicians in a building far away.

If you study history of the 19th and early 20th century, you'll see that we have been here and tried this. This is where sociology and social work comes from. The problem, as previously stated, is that this system failed to muster enough resources to fix the problems--poor regions simply cannot raise enough money locally to deal. So, we shifted from a completely private system to one that is funded by everyone, everywhere via taxes.


I study social welfare policy (I hope to teach it when I get out of grad school), and I don't disagree with a lot of what you say. Government bureaucracy can be very wasteful. A much better way is to allow local nonprofits to administer programs,because local people are much more likely to care about their own communities and hence do a much better job than some career civil servant. BUT we still need to fund these programs with federal block grants paid for with taxes and we need to provide these NGOs with a set of rules so that the programs are consistent, fair and use evidence based practices.

A big problem with a lot of safetynet programs today is that they don't use evidence based practices and they do often provide some extremely perverse incentives, such as discouraging family formation, etc.

We need people to be invollved at a local level. Research suggests that one very effective way to lift people out of poverty is to pair them with 'middle class mentors' who can provide advice, encouragement, and support to struggling clients.

However, all of this still REQUIRES federal funding/support because history shows us that there is no other way to muster adequate resources to provide basic supports. Maslow's hierarchy of needs tells us (and this has been confirmed by TONS of research) that you cannot expect people to improve and grow until their fundamental physical and saftey requirements have been met.

For all the libertarian talk of individualism, the truth is, we are all members of a society as well, dependant on each other. And some members of society, due to age, poverty, or disability, just happen to be more dependant than others. That's something the libertarian ideology doesn't want to acknowledge. Also, there's an absolute callousness about forcing persons in need of extra help to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or to just get out of the way, which I assume means their expected to die. That being the case, I've never grasped why some Aspies ever embrace libertarianism.

It should be pointed out that before the so-called Progressive movement got a foothold, in around the 1890s, nearly everybody in America held views which would today be called "libertarian." Raise your hand if you think you're qualified to diagnose the neurology or psychology of an entire country.

I don't self-identify as libertarian, myself, unless the debate is being framed in the broadest possible terms as libertarianism vs. statism. Still, it makes perfect sense to me that someone who spent a childhood being bullied and belittled, and forced to do unpleasant things by well-meaning adults, would advocate a political system in which nobody is permitted to intimidate or initiate force against another and all interactions are voluntary. Statism just consists of putting the bullies and busybodies in charge of everything.

Should "some aspies" embrace conservatism instead? That would be the alternative for those like me who find liberalism/statism repugnant.

Last edited by Raptor on 18 Jan 2016, 1:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

And some people, like my neighbor The Biatch, want to go on disability because she has fibromyalgia which translates to "I'm just in soooooo much pain that I can't work, but I can spend oodles amount of time being out of my mind drunk and partying for endless amount of hours. Whaaa! Cry me a river of tears!" She's probably having all of her pain from falling constantly (which me and my neighbor have both heard her falling) in her drunken stupor and not able to remember it. Fibromyalgia my ass.

It wasn't "well meaning adults" who had made my life growing up miserable, but rather the bullies and jocks, who weren't restrained by those in authority when they could and should have.

No, you just embrace local government controlled by the bigoted majority suppressing any minority they hate, and a rampant free market that runs roughshod over workers, consumers, and even competition. I think most Aspies realize that in such a system, they'd be ground under foot.

How do you know what sort of pain she is or isn't in? And while staying drunk all the time hardly is a good thing, did you consider the possibility that she abuses alcohol because of the depression that invariably accompanies great physical pain? People in physical and psychological pain very often turn to substance abuse. Then again, I can't claim to know this woman. And even if she is just planning to steal from the system, that hardly means that most people needing help also fit that description.

No.

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

Not even close.

Not even in the same solar system.

Last edited by GGPViper on 18 Jan 2016, 2:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

And people who don't feel like dragging thier asses out of the sack to go to work like the rest of us often turn to feigning Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to cop out of it. My belief is that, while I would like to weed them out, in doing so bumbling government bureaucrats in thier incompetence would throw to many of the actual deserving under the bus. That being the case, I'll grudgingly stand by while the slackers play hooky at taxpayer expense but that doesnt mean I still can't b***h about them.

Have you considered that Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are in fact just symptoms for undiagnosed disorders? Who are you to say they're faking it? Despite what the right says, most people who apply for disability payments are rejected, and when they do get confirmed, they have to be diagnosed by a legitimate medical doctor working for the state. One of the icons of the right, Michael Savage (a real Weiner), has said that autism is fake, as have many on the right, so I'm not going to accuse people of faking some condition just because it's barely understood.

That's just my neighbor, dude. I haven't even mentioned the countless patients I've had who have been admitted on alcohol or drugs who were also on disability or unemployment They don't have time to work because being strung out is their full-time job. They come to the hospital after they overdose then we patch them up and send them right back home to do it all over again. Everyone on disability and unemployment should have MANDATORY drug tests - that's the least that they could do if they are on the up and up.

Last edited by nurseangela on 18 Jan 2016, 3:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not sure what you think you're refuting here, but it's "not in the same solar system" as what I said. To say that a certain ideology – classical liberalism – was dominant in the nineteenth century is not to say that people were always consistent in those views, nor to say that they were consistent in their application.

In say 1875 you'd find very few Americans who believed that the government, in particular the federal government, ought to strictly regulate wages, labor hours, number and duration of breaks, vacation days, hiring and firing policies, the use to which a landowner may and may not put his land, type and composition of goods which may be sold, size of toilets (if they'd had toilets), size of beverages, and a million other issues which we mostly take for granted now. You'd find fewer still who believed that the federal government ought to be the primary agency in charge of distributing alms. Clear?

As a matter of fact, I think it was in Florida that they tried drug tests for people on public assistance, with the intent of throwing masses of those people off the rolls. Instead, they found only a tiny minority of those needing state and federal help were drug users. I don't doubt you see people coming into the ER with drug related calamities who also happen to be on disability, but it isn't fair to describe them as representative of all those receiving help.

Not to mention the added cost of drug tests, and personal to do them. Then the right will complain about having to pay more. Also is it going be constant?

I work and I've been tested once that's it. Do you get tested weekly Angela?
Do you have any idea how hard and how long it takes to get on disability? Then you have to be revaluation per every 2-5 years where they try to get you kicked off even though you have a legitimate reason for being on it. For people with anxiety disorders this is a living hell when it happens and you want to subject them to weekly Monty or every 3 month drug tests where they have to worry about if the opine seeds they are will cause them to fail or what if one of ther many many drugs they are prescribed does. What about people who have medical weed? No your right they should have to choose between dying by their disorder or dying from starving and freezing to death .

All so people like u can have 5 cars , bunch of motor bike,s few boats and plasma ts more then they have now.
Yeah I know that might not be u but how's it feel to be generalized? I've meet lots of people on the right who call for stuff lik drug testing and kicking people off welfare who have 3-4 paid off cars, own their house, have lots of fancy electronics, Dam they hurting so bad. If not for the welfare people they could have s few more cars to sit parked in their driveway. That's how little people's human beings life's are valued to them.