Basic Income is literally taking money from people by force of law (and therefore, threat of violence) and giving it to other people, against the first person's will. It is communism and completely antithetical to any reasonable definition of libertarianism. An argument that it's less bad than other forms of government-sponsored theft isn't exactly a solid libertarian argument.
And yet continual rent for a place to sleep (whether paid to banks and cities, or abstracted to private landlords) is also literally taking money from people by force of law.
I'm personally against BI in that pouring more gasoline on the inflationary fire is not going to put it out, but deflationary economics have never been popular - trying to get people to stop partying while they're having a good time is impossible, but so is bringing up the topic when they're hungover!
So long as the overriding monetary environment remains a biased towards centralized extraction, there most certainly is a libertarian argument in that those who wish to distance themselves from that technology should be able to, rather than being forced to cope within it.
> And yet continual rent for a place to sleep (whether paid to banks and cities, or abstracted to private landlords) is also literally taking money from people by force of law.
I concur. And we, IMO, ought to have a CIVIL way of determining land rights lest we go back to tribalism and might makes right determinations (individual violence).
>So long as the overriding monetary environment remains a biased towards centralized extraction
And how do we pay for the resources needed to civilly determine and enforce the outcomes of claims to land? Whatever government oversees the process, local, county, state, or federal will need a way to extract something of value from those governed which is why we have fiat currency and why taxes must be paid in the form of currency controlled and dictated by said governments.
>I'm personally against BI in that pouring more gasoline on the inflationary fire is not going to put it out, but deflationary economics have never been popular
I agree with you. Rather than collect taxes to force value extraction the government could just inflate the money supply by paying those that operate it with newly created dollars. No taxation needed. I think this is a worse solution as it's easy for loose money policies to snowball. People at least feel the pinch and pain of taxes to help restrain and reign in the cost(s) of government.
>there most certainly is a libertarian argument in that those who wish to distance themselves from that technology should be able to, rather than being forced to cope within it.
I believe people should be allowed to conduct business using whatever currency they wish except for paying taxes. They'll need to obtain or convert their currency into the fiat currency of choice.
I heard there's a Libertarian paradise East of Ethiopia and Kenya for those purists that can't accept compromise.
Sure, a person can employ a combative communication style to get ahead in the monkeysphere. But still, the road to being a shithead president doesn't start off with being a shithead forum commenter.
I failed to understand your stance from your reply to cgore. I took your response to be "agreeing while pulling back a bit on cgore's position.
I am interested in your thoughts on how to address "taking money from people by force of law (gunpoint)" You pointed out the parallel between cgore's point the BI is no different than rent on land.
It appears you're against inflationary policies and pouring gas (BI) onto the situation adds to it (unless money is taken out of supply via taxes, however the symptom of inflation is still likely to appear: an overall increase in prices.). Inflation of prices is a symptom of inflation of the money supply. But an overall increase in prices does not necessarily mean there is inflation (of the money supply).
I am also interested in your thoughts on how should we pay for the civilized framework (government) that sorts out disputes?
It's disagreement, but based on emphasis not axioms.
Singularly focusing on the tax aspect while ignoring the rest of the government-created conditions produces a biased conclusion. Basic Income seems to have gained appeal because of people's need to meet rent. But said rent is itself almost entirely due to government created conditions - the natural cost of building and keeping up dwellings is a small part of their budget.
Similarly while I do agree that taxes are inherently theft, applying this condemnation to any specific topic will just gain legs or not based on who stands to benefit. Condemning any new proposed program based on spending (rather than considering it in the context of rearrangement) is fallacious, and more befitting conservatism rather than libertarianism. I would be in favor of generally disbanding USG. But I'll be damned if such a push is going to result in cuts to eg NPS, NSF, NIH, EPA, NASA, and even USPS, while leaving eg NSA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and Raytheon intact.
Regarding taxes and jurisdiction, there really is little point in going back and forth between wildly differing perspectives, and I've stopped asserting that I have the answer. I will say that I've come to view libertarianism heuristically (as opposed to axiomatically), and things like the federal government collecting lots of money just to dole it back out to the states with strings attached can still be pointed at as decidedly broken.
That's kind of missing his point. "Russell's Teapot" is a mental exercise that states the person making the claim that is nonstandard of current thought needs to provide proof. He's suggesting that there IS some way to provide proof perhaps, one way or the other.
My old 1978 Chrysler Cordoba has it behind the license plate in the back, so you can fill up from either side, and so it doesn't interfere with the lines of the car. I think they stopped doing it because rear-end collisions are so common though :(
If he actually manages to halt massive importation of cheap labor, which directly competes with these people, both less-educated rural whites and less-educated urban blacks will quickly see wage increases. If you have tons of under-educated poor people without jobs, the last thing you want to do is import more.
I think that too is on the company. A good one-level-up manager will check up on their underlings, the managers in question, and figure out who's good and bad and resolve the situation.
Sure, Twitter could be a free speech venue. Or it could be a venue with content standards that apply equally. Either of those has a kind of fairness.
But it chooses instead to be a proaganda outlet that lets everyone participate, but select politicians participate on a preferential bases with greater latitude, reinforcing the power of the already powerful and further marginalizing the already marginalized.
There are famous public safety exceptions to free speech that we all agree on. We don't allow people to yell "fire" in a theater for example. The current discussion is about if nuclear posturing threatens public safety.
> We don't allow people to yell "fire" in a theater for example.
Can we stop using ungrounded dicta from a since-overturned decision suppressing core political speech as if it were an uncontroversial statement of an established valid limit on free speech?
It seems that every time someone mentions the dreaded three word phrase "freedom of speech", someone else pipes up with this thoughtless pre-canned response: "It's not government!! It's not government!!" (or that XKCD comic)
Has it ever occurred to anyone parroting this that you can discuss the actual concept of freedom of speech outside of the sphere of influence the government has on it?
It does seem to have become a bit of a meme, someone says free speech and a line of replies show up with variations of "That only applies to blah blah".
It would be nice if instead there was a discussion about the intrinsic value of free speech in society, and how the open marketplace of ideas has a pretty impressive track record.
I agree, and you can even disagree in that discussion.
But to not have the discussion in the first place because of this meme of free speech solely being a citizen/government issue and not a concept in itself is a damn shame.
My problem with the discussion of free speech as a societal issue and not a governance one is that free speech will be an effect of a more fundamental shift in society, namely thoughtful consideration of another's talking points.
If you want free speech, you must foster a society in which it can exist without being exploited to coerce masses of people to think in the way you want them to by deceptive means.
So in this way, crying free speech in the streets is useless until people start preventing themselves from falling under the corrosive spells of populists.
You fix deception (edit: originally used 'populism' here in the sense of manipulating the concerns of the average citizen) with more free speech. More and more to shed light on lies before it can become something nasty.
I think you're getting it backwards, you can't reverse engineer a perfect society to cradle free speech, the society advances and becomes less violent through more speech.
Going back to the original point though, I think that it's totally fair to discuss freedom of speech alongside twitter as the company has in the past used it in their PR for positive gain. I actually agree that twitter is private and can enforce or ban what they like. What I don't agree with is thought-terminating cliches like not being able to discuss it because of the narrow view that freedom of speech is solely a citizen/government relationship.
In saying that, thank you for expanding on your thoughts.
There is a certain threshold of gullibility that can swing the society one way or another if you just start encouraging free speech without any tools to interpret and deal with it and its cognitive load. Either you have people eventually start being able to handle intellectually honest discussions, or everyone starts spewing shit and the people just succumb to the most enticing argument they hear and start parrotting it. (The latter is what we are seeing in today's society.)
You seem confused about what freedom of speech is. It doesn’t mean you can run your mouth anywhere you want without repercussions. It’s about the right to criticize ones own government without prosecution.
People have the right to tell someone they disagree with that they aren’t welcome here anymore. It’s kind of like ‘yeah I heard your opinion and it’s not welcome here’ - no freedom of speech has been infringed upon; I have the right to tell you to buzz off if I do please too
Freedom of speech is not solely "about the right to criticize ones own government without prosecution". It's fair to discuss it as a concept in itself.
Especially when the past leadership of the very company the article is about has enthused the free speech angle of the company.
But kudos for putting it in a sentence and not lazily breaking out that xkcd comic.
I actually agree that with the second part of your initial comment in that a private company can enforce the rules of speech that it sees fit.
What I was getting at, is that there seems to be this knee-jerk reaction recently where when someone mentions freedom of speech and a private platform in the same sentence, it's like a trope that lets people say "a-ha! this isn't a freedom of speech issue as it's not government, disregard all of this!".
It seems that people treat freedom of speech solely like a legal doctrine, when it's a broad concept that has legal implications in jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's fair to say that the conversation will always sway towards what legal protections are offered or infringed, but that shouldn't prevent us talking about how private companies and individuals choose to explore it.
I think you're definitely getting at my point. There's the recognition of your inherent freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, but it is not derived from the piece of parchment, just recognized by it. And if the US Federal Government can't impede that right, why should some random corporation that's never even turned a profit be able to?
Maybe what we need then is a term separate from 'Freedom of Speech', which is inherently tied to the constitution, so that people can break away from what you see as a parrot-like response and engage in the greater debate of 'Should we be listening or not?' regardless of government involvement. It would make for a much larger and more rich discussion, I'm sure.
I just don't like the idea that private companies have some obligation to be bi-partisan; because that's the way some people are throwing around the term "Freedom of Speech" like it's this ticket to say whatever you want to anyone you want.
That goes to the core of the problem though. The term isn't at all inherently tied to the constitution. It's an American-centric trope. I'm neither American nor live there so the constant clawing of the phrase back to that is tiring.
I'm Canadian myself and it's not my constitution either. If you're going to get mad when people react to that term then maybe ask yourself if you could sway more opinions by finding an alternative way to express the same thing.
To me this is the same as a UX problem. Don't get mad at the user for the way they interpret your interface.
I don't know where you read that I'm getting mad. I pointed out that your interpretation of what freedom of speech actually isn't anywhere near where it is when it's discussed as a principle, and went on to highlight that that interpretation is often used to shut down conversation.
To say that it's a UX problem is to lend credence to the idea that all interpretations are equal. My assertion is that the narrow legal interpretation is a recent phenomenon that's nowhere near as 'equal' as talking about it as a concept.
Even the article on Freedom of Speech on wikipedia states that it's a principle, and then directs the user to other articles on legal implications of freedom of speech by jurisdiction.
Not that wikipedia is an absolute authority, but it acts as a demonstration that the language people generally use when talking about freedom of speech is that it's a principle and a set of ideas.
The fact that there are legal implications in jurisdictions doesn't mean that we have a UX problem with the word, nor does it mean that we need "new word" in order to talk about it from the angle in which it's most commonly approached anyway.
It won't let me reply a thread deeper any longer but I hear what you say and understand your perspective.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to accuse you of being mad; I honestly thought you were trying to express yourself that way given the frustration you have with the 'XKCD-like' responses.
That said, it's still been a much more amicable argument than many on the internet. I actually think you are mostly right, and probably more well informed on the subject matter than I.
I'd still be interested to see this whole discussion framed in a creative way that avoids the term 'freedom of speech' entirely because for better or worse, it's just one of those polarizing terms that seems to degrade conversation more than aid it.
Hey, the internet isn't the best place to hash out a common understanding anyway as we'll spend most of the time trying to level out our terminology before proceeding. But likewise, thanks for the perspective.
