.agree

What's the difference

Men and women are the same thing anyway

- Protectionism sacrifices the benefits of comparative advantage for BOTH countries, but it encourages localized production of goods, which is essential if you ever go to war, because once you go to war you can't use the other country's industrial capacity anymore.
- I would argue that a libertarian "free market" actually doesn't make sense unless there is protection against trading with non-free markets. This kind of trade favors the non-free market, which is likely controlled by an authoritarian power actively seeking to undermine neighboring libertarian societies.
- The hidden benefit of protection is that when companies are producing locally, it becomes MUCH easier for independent citizens to compete in the marketplace, because they can work for themselves for free, whereas larger companies must pay relatively high wages. So while we might be theoretically "poorer" by not producing in the cheapest way across country lines, the protection creates a situation in which the protected market has more competition and relative equality.

The Chinese government, for example, limits how wealthy its people are getting by producing most of our goods through extreme inflation of their money - that is to say, they're using the money supply to confiscate most of that wealth. So rather than companies having to increase their wages for Chinese workers and rather than Chinese workers being able to afford goods and services from the United States, the price of their labor is kept artificially low and the proceeds go to funding the expansion of Chinese power.

By allowing trade with China, we make it so that the most powerful corporations in the United States are the ones that use Chinese slave labor. Meanwhile, these same companies that do all of their business with China lobby for higher regulations in the United States, either to virtue signal or to cripple competitors who try to produce domestically within the United States. If their production is oversees then environmental and labor regulations here don't apply - if they did, it wouldn't be so much cheaper to ship everything from China. This is why you don't see corporations giving any funding to libertarian political candidates, even though they could easily justify giving some proportion of what they give to Democrats and Republicans. Free markets aren't in the benefit of international corporations - they want politically protected profits.

I would also surmise that we're hearing 10-100x more negative news about Donald Trump than we otherwise would because national borders and traditional values are also inconvenient impediments to the supremacy of international corporations. It is in their financial interest to water down our political consensus and to lower our wages through H1B skilled immigration. This is the major scam of progressivism - capitalists scamming socialists into dis-empowering their workers relative to capital in the name of solidarity.

That's the most informative infographic I've ever seen in that it really shows the history of the 20th century

@CrowGoCaw
I would argue that classical liberalism properly conceived is the extension of the divine right of kings to the individual and that it's the divinity of the true self beyond materialism that implies Natural Law as a logical consequence of experiencing reality from the focal point of consciousness. Democracy was a form of soft communism which was kept in check by classical liberalism, but which did not create the incentives necessary to maintain the classical liberal order which had a particular theological and historic basis.

@CrowGoCaw Yeah, Rothbard intentionally stole it to piss off the Marxists as revenge for what they did to "Liberalism"

I will disagree with everyone based on the Aristotelian argument that a society is ultimately grounded in shared virtue and that virtue is the root of excellence, so that it's essential for the future citizens of a society to be taught moral values, such as being taught loyalty towards one's friends and neighbors.

A society requires that people have basic agreement on the ultimate goods and bads, otherwise they cannot create laws which are universally acceptable. So, the society's morals. It is only because some moral rules are unquestionably accepted that many others can be left up in the air.

That is false

@Alice Redacted Aristotelian virtue isn't a list of rules, it's a list of qualities that a person has. In my view you teach children qualities like wisdom and courage - you don't for the most part tell them exactly what to think.

@Alice Redacted I thought that's fluid and relative?

Don't confuse not being able to explain how bread is ultimately constituted with an inability to bake bread

You can build virtue without having an atomic understanding of it in the way you suggest

You teach virtue not through words, but by showing people how to muster their emotions to be disciplined

It's like strength training, there is a knowledge component in terms of skill, but they build that skill and they build their strength through practice

Animals most certainly have emotions

If you cannot control your emotions, you cannot keep promises, because you will only keep your promises until they become difficult and you no longer "feel" like it

@Alice Redacted When you want to eat sugar and don't feel like exercising, your emotions are not a guide towards health. When you want to cheat on your spouse and then you feel guilty after cheating, the guilt wasn't an effective guide. Emotions are not rational. They don't plan ahead.

One major component of wisdom is developing the foresight to emotionally understand how acting poorly will effect you in the future at an emotional level

@Alice Redacted But when "love" wins out over lust, one emotion is winning out over another

Emotions are controlled

@Alice Redacted
You simply don't want the same thing all of the time. Wisdom in this case would be knowing that you need to muster your emotions so that you feel good in the future and that you act consistently with your greater emotional needs.

You cannot simply do whatever you feel like doing and act consistently with all emotions at all times. Some emotions are stronger at some times, and they contradict each other.

Anger is an emotion, and you may have to control it if you love your wife, for example.

Impulse control is ONLY hard when there is a strong emotion under it

No, I am saying that they need to be structured rationally

If you try to cover them up, they'll come out somewhere else

Everything we do is based in emotions

It's just a matter of whether or not we're acting rationally

I don't believe that empathy is an emotion

Do you mean compassion

When oxytocin, the chemical that causes compassion, is increased it actually leads to warlike and tribal behavior

Altruism is game theoretic

And unconditional love for all people generally fails

Reciprocity is a better goal for empathy

3700 notifications

Even one is an outrage

Did they post dic pix

Barnie Sanders had a pretty good proposal recently:
"Col. Barnie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced a bill that would tax companies like Amazon and Walmart for the cost of employees’ food stamps and other public assistance. Sanders’ Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated “Stop BEZOS”) — along with Khanna’s House of Representatives counterpart, the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act — would institute a 100 percent tax on government benefits that are granted to workers at large companies."

Right now Walmart is able to charge artificially low prices because it's able to pay artificially low wages. It turns a profit doing this only because it's tax subsidized. I would rather companies actually provide goods and services at the price they actually cost, rather than supporting the business most able to capture regulations. A law like this would mean that everyone in the work force would actually be supporting themselves, as opposed to some weird mixture of wealth redistribution and slave labor for corporations who can underpay.

No cashiers should make whatever it costs to hire a cashier, not the difference between welfare and what it takes to hire a cashier

Rather than a government like New York paying to subsidize poor people to live in the city and work as Baristas in Manhattan, the businesses in the city should be subject to market forces that require them to pay higher wages or lose their baristas.

@Omniconsumerproducts It's hard to say what a good welfare policy is given the problems with central planning

But if we're going to be giving out "gibs" I'd rather it be uniform so that there's no incentive to being a piece of shit loafer

To naively put forward a suggestion, I'd say some uncomfortably low UBI which increases with years worked and which your employer 100% takes over if they hire you

@Milk
If UBI is on net cheaper than the current welfare scheme AND it eliminates the ability for people to game the system then I support it

I would rather the Federal government wasnt involved in welfare, but if they're going to do it either way, I'd prefer the best system of welfare

Alright dude, let's say you're 4 years old and your parents take you to burger king

You can pick something on the menu, or you can go home hungry - there is no going to McDonalds

Yeah, you can say how we SHOULD have gone to McDonalds and I may agree with you

But since the rest of the country insists on going to Burger King, we have to choose something from this menu

What do you mean when you work? You mean when you engage in actions which are only rational given the presence of a large defensive apparatus that maintains the system of property rights?

@Milk He's saying that if lowering taxes by 100% is good then lowering taxes by 50% should also be a desirable goal.

RT = Fake News

Get that shit out of here

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A likely story

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/2100AD-sucking-penises-real-story

@Euro-American Bandit They call him a centrist because it's a way to try to take the middle for themselves and to warm people up to the idea that communism is in some way a part of our national mission

Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe before the grubby Russians got there

The purpose of economic activity is to create societal inequality (for people to advantage themselves) and in very productive societies it ends up being a lot of inequality. That is because production is contributed to in a hierarchical manner with many people being peripheral to the work being done.

Whenever people complain that wealth brings advantages, they are complaining that advantages are advantages. People work so work so that they are relatively advantaged. Work creates inequality.