Libertarians

[nino_savatte]

Because it fucking works

Top 20 best countries to live in the world social democratic.
Making leaders accountable to the people means they deliver what the majority want or they are out of a job .
Your 5 year plan doesn't work?sorry we will try somebody's elses plan doesn't matter how great the theory was and how many dead Germans you quote it didn't deliver.

That's why people know who runs the torys and labour they get shit dome it may be done badly or maybe stupid shit but if it is they are out of a job. Nobody knows or cares who runs the swp because they will never have any power.

Choice "works"? What kind of nonsense is that? Choice is an illusion. Do you honestly think people in Eastern Europe are better off because they have 'choice'? Seriously, have a word with yourself.

You still didn't deal with my point about non-Marxist countries being tyrannical.

But I'm also interested in what you would define as a "so-called Marxist country"? The USSR? China?

 

[DotCommunist]

which 20 countries are social democracies?

 

[butchersapron]

Because it fucking works

Top 20 best countries to live in the world social democratic.
Making leaders accountable to the people means they deliver what the majority want or they are out of a job .
Your 5 year plan doesn't work?sorry we will try somebody's elses plan doesn't matter how great the theory was and how many dead Germans you quote it didn't deliver.

That's why people know who runs the torys and labour they get shit dome it may be done badly or maybe stupid shit but if it is they are out of a job. Nobody knows or cares who runs the swp because they will never have any power.

What top 20 countries?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Reason is the biggest libertarian publication in the world - very influential in powerful elite circles. Here's something about it/them.

As Reason’s editor defends its racist history, here’s a copy of its holocaust denial “special issue”

Missed this post at the time. What a sewer.

 

[likesfish]

http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/rich-countries/the-10-best-countries-to-live-in-2014/10/
OECD list strangely no Marxists on it

 

[likesfish]

http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/rich-countries/the-10-best-countries-to-live-in-2014/10/
OECD list strangely no Marxists on it

Any country that calls itself marxist

 

[butchersapron]

http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/rich-countries/the-10-best-countries-to-live-in-2014/10/
OECD list strangely no Marxists on it

Let me get this right - you say:

Top 20 best countries to live in the world social democratic.

and to support this you give us a list of 10 countries- none of which are social-democratic. Well, you could maybe argue that one is.

 

[butchersapron]

Missed this post at the time. What a sewer.

That should be read alongside this excellent companion piece about the real life effect of these swines today:
Ferguson is our “libertarian moment,” but not in the way some libertarians want you to believe

Let’s leave aside for now the weirdness of using Rand Paul — a paranoid gun-nut who wants to weaponize every nook and cranny of American life, from arming all school teachers as the answer to Sandy Hook, to arming our border with a giant “underground electric fence, with helicopter stations to respond quickly to breaches of the border” (to be fair, Paul’s spokesman clarified his mega-fence vision as a “combination of thermal imaging, satellite technology, motion detection and helicopters at key checkpoints”) — as the libertarian pitch-man against police militarization. Or the fact that Michael Brown was killed by a non-militarized cop. The point is this: Libertarians say that Ferguson proves we’re at the Libertarian Moment, and that they’ve been developing the answers to our current police and criminal justice problems “for decades.”

And the scary thing is, they’re right: Libertarians have been coming up with reform programs for our city police and criminal justice systems for a long time. In fact, some of these reforms have actually become law in places like Ferguson.

Take the shocking “discovery” — actually years in the making — that Ferguson shifted many of its revenue burdens away from taxpayers and onto something the New Yorker described as the city’s “offender-funded” justice system, designed to “shift the financial burden of probation directly onto the probationers…. charging petty offenders — such as those with traffic debts — for a government service that was once free.”

Poole’s writings in the mid-late 1970s for Reason magazine (which he edited) and the Reason Foundation (which he co-founded, both with the Kochs’ support) provided the neoliberal blueprints for Thatcherism, as recounted by one of her advisers and hagiographers:

“The intellectual case for ‘contracting out’ came from an American MIT-trained engineer turned policy wonk, Bob Poole, head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and author of a little book called ‘Cutting Back City Hall.’ In this book he explained how all you needed to run a city was a CEO, a lawyer to review contracts and a secretary. Everything — literally everything — could be outsourced and he littered his book with examples and figures….[Thatcher advisor Michael Forsyth] translated Poole’s work into an English context and, led by the Westminster City Council, ‘contracting out’ spread like a contagious disease throughout the country.”

Contracting was just one of many forms of privatization proposed by Poole in “Cutting Back City Hall.” Poole was particularly interested in finding ways to privatize America’s police departments and its criminal justice system, and in his handbook, Poole proposed replacing taxpayer-funded police departments with private contractors — Poole named Pinkerton, Burns and Wackenhut as three fine examples. The only thing holding America back in 1980, he lamented, was the country’s “attitude problem — that somehow only government should be providing police services…”

 

[Batboy]

Here they are at the premiere of Atlas Shrugged - Part 2.

Surely this is from a Man united recent game? The prawn sandwich brigade must be moving across the city... Or down to Chelsea.

 

[nino_savatte]

Any country that calls itself marxist

What? Like political parties that call themselves 'liberal' but are actually conservative?

 

[likesfish]

What? Like political parties that call themselves 'liberal' but are actually conservative?

Exactly but how else can you judge Marxism?, otherwise you enter no true Scotsman country.
It's a system that so far has been impossible to implement until either human nature radically changed or we get a post scarcity economy it's best avoided.

 

[nino_savatte]

Exactly but how else can you judge Marxism?, otherwise you enter no true Scotsman country.
It's a system that so far has been impossible to implement until either human nature radically changed or we get a post scarcity economy it's best avoided.

But you forget, there are no Marxist countries (that is to say, those countries whose economic system is Marxist). There's Cuba, which has suffered from 50 years of being blockaded by the US, so that hardly counts.

As for social democratic countries, you haven't found any.

 

[likesfish]

The rest sort of collapsed didn't they when the Russian boot was lifted

 

[nino_savatte]

They weren't Marxist.

As soon as the Berlin Wall collapsed, the neoliberals rushed in.

 

[seventh bullet]

http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/rich-countries/the-10-best-countries-to-live-in-2014/10/
OECD list strangely no Marxists on it

By 'Marxist' you crudely mean Marxist-Leninist (Soviet or Chinese derived, or a mixture of both). A whole thread could be started on the nature of such societies (personally I don't think they can be so easily dismissed), but for now at number three on your list is Vietnam since 'doi moi' (neoliberalism cautiously facilitated by an authoritarian state).

With this gradual transition the children of dispossessed peasants are 'happy' in their choice stitching trainers for a pittance?

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Choice "works"? What kind of nonsense is that? Choice is an illusion.

The libertarian vision of choice seems to boil down to choice to spend your money on what you want, a choice limited to how much money you've actually got. But the idea of imposing market choice into every area of social life is incredibly dystopian when you think about it. Libertarians always make the point of saying that individuals know how to spend their money better than the government does. Whether or not that's true, imagine having to make financial calculations about every area of your life: working out which road tolls to pay, which health plans to adopt, which fire insurance policy to take out etc. You'd have to devote significant amounts of your leisure time (assuming you have any) to being a fucking accountant. Paying taxes that are collectively used to fund public goods gives you are a far greater freedom than libertarians ever give it credit for: freedom from the tyranny of permanent economic calculation.

 

[nino_savatte]

The libertarian vision of choice seems to boil down to choice to spend your money on what you want, a choice limited to how much money you've actually got. But the idea of imposing market choice into every area of social life is incredibly dystopian when you think about it. Libertarians always make the point of saying that individuals know how to spend their money better than the government does. Whether or not that's true, imagine having to make financial calculations about every area of your life: working out which road tolls to pay, which health plans to adopt, which fire insurance policy to take out etc. You'd have to devote significant amounts of your leisure time (assuming you have any) to being a fucking accountant. Paying taxes that are collectively used to fund public goods gives you are a far greater freedom than libertarians ever give it credit for: freedom from the tyranny of permanent economic calculation.

For the 'libertarian', everything is reduced to the calculus of profit and loss.

One thing that I've noticed about 'libertarians' is their obsession with numbers, especially statistics. When I point out to them that you can extrapolate any meaning you like from a set of stats, they have no answer and will start lashing out. They can't see anything beyond sets of numbers. Fucking weirdos.

 

[likesfish]

Liberarians have some point privately run bars restaurants etc etc are better than a government run pub chain.
Not sure private security police fire service roads etc etc a good idea at all.
The new liberals were able to rush in because the society with out the threat of ever present informers and foreign military didn't work.
You want to replace capitalism fine you have to come up with something better not something that's shitter but claims to be better.
The west managed to produce guns and butter and shiny stuff to distract the proles and allow protest and communists party's and a massive amount of soviet espionage.
The sovet system was threatened by jazz musicans
it could t even cope with people voting with their feet that's how shit and rotten the whole system was it only survived because it put up a fence to keep people in.

 

[nino_savatte]

In which country are you likely to find a government run pub chain?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

In which country are you likely to find a government run pub chain?

Well, bars not pubs, but Cuba.

 

[likesfish]

Exactly it's a bloody stupid idea
Much like libertarian ideas of toll roads everywhere and competing private police/ defence forces.
Much like communist party's but with out the cool flags and the fiction of being for the majority of the population.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Offies in Sweden are govt-owned.

 

[nino_savatte]

Offies in Sweden are govt-owned.

Yes, they are but does that make them necessarily a bad thing?

 

[nino_savatte]

The new liberals were able to rush in because the society with out the threat of ever present informers and foreign military didn't work.

No, they circled like vultures waiting to pick off profitable parts of the state's economies. If you think Eastern Europe is a better place for neoliberalism, think again.

Was Pinochet's Chile better because of its free market economy?

 

[butchersapron]

The state used to own pubs and breweries in northern england scotland and london - right up until the heath govt.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Subsidised beer sounds pretty good to me.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes, they are but does that make them necessarily a bad thing?

I think it depends what you want them to do. State-owned restaurants in Cuba serve pretty uninspiring food, but are cheap. They serve a purpose. Mind you the state-owned fast food chain in Cuba is both shit and expensive. It's mysteriously popular despite its shitness.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Mind you the state-owned fast food chain in Cuba is both shit and expensive. It's mysteriously popular despite its shitness.

You could say that about McDonalds, to be fair.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You could say that about McDonalds, to be fair.

Yes, true. State-owned ice cream places in Cuba are cheap and good. Being state-owned doesn't have to equal shit.

 

[Dogsauce]

State-owned software houses used to be quite good - British Telecom's 'Booty' platform game on the ZX Spectrum was ace.