How are corporations accountable to no one? Someone - namely customers, people in society - has gotta like what they're doing otherwise certain corporations wouldn't be successful.
BTW corporations are a legal fiction created by the State so sorry Chomsky, but you've kind of missed the mark a little bit. Anarcho-capitalism, or capitalism without State protectionism, would likely result in a mostly level playing field as Smith described so I dunno what exactly is being "refuted" here.
@ChronJohn91 Don't you just luv these Left-Wing morons, they think it's corporations that are dangerous when, in fact, if you stopped by any of these businesses products for a quarter they would go belly-up. And at the same time, these (useful) idiots think gov't is the panacea, meanwhile, it is governments that have murdered people by the MILLIONS. The Left is not just evil, its moronic.
"For decades, Chomsky has vilified his critics as only a world class linguist can. However, for me . . . questions about life under the Khmer Rouge are not intellectual parlour games. . . . [I]n international affairs Noam Chomsky consistently falls short of Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that universities are 'based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'"
@amamerc Just for the record, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, murdered a third of the population of Cambodia. To put that in perspective it would be the equivalent of our government murdering 105,000,000 Americans! But only one major movie has ever been made about this evil regime (THE KILLING FIELDS) - that's because the Khmer Rouge were PROGRESSIVES.
@vince33x The numbers vary, but yeah, it was a tragedy. I saw the Killing Fields and I personally thought it was insufficient. No one dares to make a movie about S21, or any movie depicting the Gulag, because it would annihilate the credibility of communism. The greatest irony is that such a movie does not sell! It's far more profitable to rail against capitalism!
@amamerc Well, look who controls Hollywood. The Socialists murdered 120,000,000 people during the 20th Century while the Fascists murdered about 6,000,000. Yet there have been countless movies made about the Nazis and the Holocaust and scarcely any about the Socialist Holocausts. It seems if you kill Jews, they are somehow worthy of having their story told but if u killed in the name of Socialism (which, of course Nazism was but their victims were Jews) u get a pass from Hollywood.
@EndWesternTyranny Well moron, nazism is Socialism, which is Left-Wing, so if you wish to align urself with that ideology, go right ahead but anyone who aligns themselves with nazism is scum.
@vince33x someone has to be /really/ ignorant to think that Nazi Germany was left-wing. that shows what a twisted perception you have of politics. you're right wing and blame "the Jews"- i.e. you are a neo nazi...
@EndWesternTyranny Other than Hitler's insane hatred of Jews, the Nazis were Socialists. Indeed, the full name of the Nazi Party was the German Socialist Worker's Party. Their philosophy was the same as the Communists except they hated Jews. Since socialism always fails, they have to find scapegoats, in the case of the Nazis, it was Jews. But it could be any number of ethnic groups or businessmen or Property owners, whoever is convenient for the time, place and circumstance.
@vince33x Nazis are right-wing and if you can't see that, then i am truly wasting my time talking to you. to say that communists had the same ideology as nazis is extremely false.
@EndWesternTyranny Tell me what u mean by "Right-Wing?" Where, specifically, do Nazism and Communism differ? They are BOTH Socialist/Progressive doctrines.
@EndWesternTyranny U know why u can't tell me what it means to be Right-Wing? Because u have no idea. And u have no idea because u r a moron, no doubt "educated" in a gov't school.
@EndWesternTyranny It's interesting that it has been the Socialists who've murdered the Jews in the 20th Century and in far greater numbers than anyone else in history. "By their actions shall ye know them..." (Matthew 7:16)
@sarlokkin Because of their wealth, Jews will be scapegoated here in the USA if we have an economic collapse, which I think is almost inevitable. Ur already seeing massive anti-semetic activities on college campuses and this is where ideas (good or bad) germinate.
@sarlokkin Well, you've got a news media in the USA dominated by Jews and Hollywood & TV are also dominated by Jews, so I think most Americans are not conscious of the drumbeat being raised for war against Iran (I don't think we'll go to war against Syria unless it becomes a threat to Israel - right now Syria is in a state of collapse).
Stop making ignorant comments, no one can take you seriously when you say nazism is not right wing. Use an encyclopedia at least people, not just the one book you have read!
Have you ever heard the phrase "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist."
@vince33x Stalin killed many Jews as well. Timothy Snyder documents this.
Regarding whether the Nazis were left- or right-wing, I think this depends on how we define those terms.
This argument is interesting: "With the repeal of medieval regulations and mercantilist rules came an era of unprecedented increase in prosperity, population, freedom, peace. . . .
@amamerc There are two cornerstones of the prosperous, modern society: 1) Secure Property Rights (Kelo shows the Left wants to do away with these) and, 2) The rule of law, which includes in it the right to contract (again, the Left, as manifested in the NLRB, wants to do away with this as well). The Left also believes that "rights" come from government, which is a belief totally antithetical to morality and freedom. Our rights come from nature, God, and our very humanity and legitimately formed
@vince33x Governments exist to secure and protect those rights, among which are the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (note: NOT the guarantee of happiness). Quite simply, the Right believes in Individual Liberty, which leads to progress and prosperity, and the Left believes that Governments are the source of progress, prosperity and rights. That's it in a nutshell. Most of what the Poli-Sci Profs teach is obfuscating baloney. At the extreme, the Right is anarchy and the Left
@vince33x [cont] "And in his revolt against this liberalism (or "capitalism," his coinage) . . . Marx, history's first neo-con, was advocating nothing less than a revolving back to the ancien régime of the controlled economy. Herein lies his unicum opus and bequest to the Left: the rhetorical inversion of reality -- specifically, the presentation of reaction as 'revolution,' of the return to a past stage of history as a progression to the 'next.'"
@vince33x Libertarian Rothbard says: "The economic views of the anarchists present them with a crucial dilemma: how can capitalism and private property be abolished, while the State is abolished at the same time? The socialists proclaim the glory of the State, and the use of the State to abolish private property . . . The orthodox Marxist Communist, who pays lip service to the ideal of left-wing anarchy . . . would enlarge the State to the maximum and abolish capitalism."
@amamerc The problem with the anarchists position is that in order to enjoy Liberty and Prosperity you have to have Public Order. Raucous and riotous behavior results in businesses shuddering, resulting in a decline in prosperity. This decline eventually leads to desperate measures, which can easily swing the pendulum toward the Total State. This is why it's so important for people to have an understanding of what true Liberty is and what it isn't...and it ISN"T LICENSE.
@vince33x Therefore, considering all this, and considering how those who used to be in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, Constitutionalism, individualism, traditional values, etc., were considered liberal -- classical liberals -- I get the impression that so-called right-libertarians, would, in a historical perspective, be on the left, some conservatives on the left, others on the right. Marxist-Leninsts would be on the right with the Nazis. Whichever way, I see them on the same wing.
@amamerc Prior to the 20th Century, Liberalism essentially meant freedom and Liberty. The Left co-opted the word, just as homosexuals co-opted the word gay, which used to mean 'happy and joyful.' But this is the Left's modus operandi. The only way they can achieve their ends is to disguise what those ends really are.
@vince33x "Prior to the 20th Century, Liberalism essentially meant freedom and Liberty. The Left co-opted the word." Yes, I agree. The Declaration of Independence is the antithesis of what statists believe in. However, certain people on the Left do believe in liberty, etc., they just don't realize they're unwittingly influenced by Marxism; and on the right you have statist or "Federalist" people, who likewise believe in big government.
@amamerc This lack of understanding of Left and Right is by design of the Left. Remember, the Left controls the major levers of communication: The Academy, TV, Hollywood, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, TIME, NEWSWEEK, NYT, LATs, WashPost, etc.). they have so obfuscated the meanings of Left and Right that many on the Left are confused. But the distinction is simple: More Government - Left; Less Gov't - Right. Thus: Anarchy on the Extreme Right and Totalitarianism on the Extreme Left. The continuum
@vince33x is really not difficult to understand but one has to think in terms of linearity not a circle. Thinking in terms of a circle is patently ridiculous for how is it possible for Anarchy and Totalitarianism to meet. The concept is non-sensical.
While I don't agree with everything Jonah Goldberg says, this video makes sense to me:
watch?v=SfJSub3CDJk&feature=related
Paraphrase: Most of us had this in college and our Pol. Sci. prof. goes to board and says: "I'm not a fascist or a Communist and besides extreme ideologies, they meet, and he draws a circle, you go all this way, and you end up this way . . . but it is BIZARRE and IDIOTIC." No where in life do we say fat = thin, short = tall.
@vince33x You are a f--king lunatic, pull you head out of your a-- The one in the middle is on the left and the one on the right is in the middle and the one on the left is on the right and the guy in the rear (that's us) got screwed. It doesn't matter who is on the right or left they're both the property of the bankers and big business. Wake up and smell the coffee!
@vince33x This is why, in my mind, I split the spectrum into liberty on one side and tyranny on the other; or you could use a two-dimensional x-y axis to plot out the left and the right in terms of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Put simply, here's what Lenin has to say, who so thoroughly annihilates the argument on the left that government is good, and that that's the position of Marxism, that I can't resist from quoting him (Lenin):
@vince33x According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another."
However, Lenin goes on to advocate total tyranny; but he disagrees w/ the academic Left!
@vince33x if you "know how they differ" then you are fully aware that you have a right-wing ideology similar to that of Nazi Germany, including blaming "the Jews." i repeat: i have no interest in schooling a Neo Nazi...
@amamerc It's also interesting to note that all of these murderous ideologies have Socialism at their core. As Hayek clearly documents in the ROAD TO SERFDOM, fascism is the last stop before socialism. We are in that stage here in the USA. Hollywood, which is dominated by Jews, has chosen not to make many films about the other Holocausts of the 20th Century. I don't know why, someone will have to ask the powers that be there.
@amamerc Thomas Jefferson is overrated. He owned slaves and fucked Sally Hemmings like his property, which she was. Jefferson got 90 percent of his ideas from John Locke. Find a different hero.
@JayGatsbyOdysseus Jefferson owned slaves but there is no definitive proof that he had relations w/Ms Hemmings. To say so means ur either ignorant or an out and out liar.
@vince33x lol Jefferson didn't fuck Sally? Why do you think there are no white people named Jefferson in this country? Anyone with the last name Jefferson is black. u r an idiot,,i no longer speak to u philistine...u can not infer which is needed 4 science
@vince33x Christopher Hitchens called Ayn Rand an idtiot. Allen Greenspan, an ayn rand desciple, admitted his entire economic philosophy was wrong to congress. u loser any rand idiot
@JayGatsbyOdysseus If Allen Greenspan truly believed in Objectivism, he'd have never gone to work for the Fed. "By their actions shall ye know them." (Matthew 7:16)
"Writing about American leaders in At War with Asia (Pantheon, 1970), Chomsky poignantly argued that: 'Perhaps someday they will acknowledge their ‘honest errors’ in their memoirs, speaking of the burdens of world leadership and the tragic irony of history. Their victims, the peasants of Indochina, will write no memoirs and will be forgotten. They will join the countless millions of earlier victims of tyrants and oppressors.'
The idea that free markets impose tyranny only flies with academic elites like Chomsky who have never worked in a marketplace. Further he states that the tyranny imposed by markets is worse than that imposed by a state because at least with a state you can vote your opinon. This is not so, companies are far more responsive to criticism than govts are.
I would vote for a libertarian candidate simply because it's the closest thing to an anarchist candidate out there right now in many situations..not a big fan of capitalism but all systems have their strengths and weaknesses...socialism worries me partially because we have the capitalist system so firmly entrenched here...a change like that whether positive or negative would also change society as a whole greatly. Would rather improve upon what we have...and I'm not sure about Chomsky either.
This premise begins to fall apart if thought about even briefly. Where does wealth accumulate? In the hands of those that control the means of production. What are the effects of this system of distribution on the population? Dearth. This can be evidenced by the fact that as former Soviet countries began to undo the effects of industrialisation and wealth concentrated even more, the average lifespan dropped as a result. Why should the majority accept such a system?
VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLAR IS NOT DEMOCRACY. CONSUMER-CHOICE AND BOYCOTT ARE USEFUL TOOLS, BUT BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A REALISTIC DETERRENT TO BAD BEHAVIOR BY COMPANIES/ECONOMIC ENTITIES/MARKETS.
@IngeniousEpithet Don't be a moron. The best deterrent to bad behavior in the marketplace is competition. Look at how the products from Ford have improved since Nissan, Toyota, and Honda - and lately Hyundai - have come to dominate the American market. But then the nitwit in the White House saved GM and Chrysler, even though they'd been building crap for decades. Governments save bad actors if the bad actors have enough political clout (think UAW). U guys on the Left are such morons!
I suggest you take your own advice. While competition is all good and well... you ignore the fact that the marketplace can become its own closed-off playing field, where not only do companies compete to create the BEST or CHEAPEST product, but can also compete in a REVERSE manner to create the WORST product at the HIGHEST PRICE and advertise/market the shit out of it. Remember the days of snake-oil... they've not disappeared, remember planned-obsolescence. Greed can cause regression.
@IngeniousEpithet The snake-oil example is nonsense, since medicine at the time was in its infancy. Show me an example of where Free and Open Markets are advancing a "race to the bottom" today. "Planned obsolescence" is a B/S term that the media came up with. It wasn't an auto industry strategy - if anything, it was an appeal to the changing tastes of consumers. "Greed can cause regression" That statement is meaningless tripe. You gonna sell ur house to the lowest bidder? Phony!
Nope it's a perfectly legit example. Your "free" markets are leading to a race to the bottom in third world countries and also despotic regimes/economies like China, India, etc. Where ORIGINALLY decent-paying jobs (at least relatively) are shipped overseas where people are essentially enslaved to provide cheap consumer goods (with planned obsolescence) to first-worlders. Everybody loses except those who profit off of the labors/money of the masses/workers.
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE IS A REAL PRACTICE. You seriously need to do your homework and stop reading right-wing propaganda blogs that SHIT all over facts/history. They do it with a smirk, I'm sure, because they simultaneously practice the concepts while putting out disinformation and revisionist propaganda that tells fools like you that these practices magically don't exist and are part of the "commie conspiracy".
@IngeniousEpithet So who's practicing "planned obsolescence?" Ur words: "I'm sure, because they simultaneously practice the concepts while putting out disinformation and revisionist propaganda that tells fools like you that these practices magically don't exist and are part of the "commie conspiracy". WTF r u talking about?
Everything you've said here is meaningless tripe. Greed can cause regression... profit-motive DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY OR NECESSARILY MEAN PROGRESS. Products, services, and businesses can just as easily regress (even covertly) to an inferior (but more well packaged/advertised) version so as to increase profits. WHAT OF suppressed technology? WHAT OF the endless sea of useless/cheap products that are utterly unnecessary drains on resources/finances? You are completely naive to Capitalism
@IngeniousEpithet Ur words: "Greed can cause regression..." Again, WTF does that mean. All u Lefties speak in non-sensical vagaries. Tell me what "suppressed technologies ur talking about? All u speak is Left-Wing mantra and it's just pure BS.
As for the automotive bailout, that was largely crafted by CONGRESS and the BUSH ADMINISTRATION in 2008 during the various collapses. This was an economic emergency and Congress/the presidents would have been given hell for letting things collapse. That being said, I DIDN'T SUPPORT THE BAILOUTS. Many leftists question the bailouts MORE THAN RIGHT-WINGERS DID. Either way, it was damned if you do damned if you don't.
@IngeniousEpithet Baloney! Far more Republicans voted against the auto bailouts then Democrats. The Bailouts of GM and Chrysler was a sop to the Democrats best friends: The unions. And, it rewarded market failure by GM and Chrysler. Democrat Jimmy Carter, with a Democrat-controlled House and Senate bailed out Chrysler in 1979 as well. Democrats are scum; Republicans are gutless.
See... you just completely changed your story, typical.
The automotive bailout was to SAVE THE THREE MAJOR AMERICAN CAR COMPANIES FROM BANKRUPTCY during a time when we were facing the second great depression. There was unprecedented bipartisan support for TARP, so don't sit there and pretend it was some Democrat conspiracy... it had mass support in a volatile time. It was damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont. I don't really support the bailouts, but I understand their position.
@IngeniousEpithet The auto bailout only bailed out GM and Chrysler NOT Ford. We are still facing an economic crisis as a result of the reckless spending engaged in by BOTH parties. But it is the Democrats who have given us the two programs that are bankrupting the USA: Social Security and MediCare. As for bipartisan support of TARP - so what? That doesn't mean it was the correct course. At one time everybody believed the earth was the center of the universe but that didn't make it correct.
@IngeniousEpithet The Democrats being innocent is basically ahistorical. Wilson was a tyrant. In a word: Espionage Act. He got us involved in WWI and gave us the FED (which according to Greenspan: "No other government agency can overrule the actions that we take." Oh sure, that's not tyranny.) FDR "jailed" American-Japanese citizens, got us off the gold standard, rejected anti-lynching bills, used patronage (bribery), lied constantly (claimed he wrote Haitian constitution), . . .
As for your characterization of Dems versus Reps... I think you've got it backwards. Reps are scum, Dems are spineless. The reps have done nothing but bully the Dems and lock them into ridiculous fucking stalemates, stomping their feet like stubborn children at EVERYTHING proposed by dems. The Dems are gutless because they cave in almost every time to ludicrous right-wing demands.
@IngeniousEpithet I guess that's why the nitwit in the White House has been able to increase our nat'l debt by $5 TRILLION in just three years. U sir, are a complete idiot.
@IngeniousEpithet FDR quite possibly provoked the Japanese into attacking us, taxed income beyond $25,000 during WII at 100%, increased the upper tax margin to 79% (this is tyranny), and according to an increasing number of scholars, prolonged the Great Depression, and yet FDR is deemed the best president ever.
Harry S. Truman bombed two Japanese cities to the ground, started the Korean War and Cold War; LBJ continued the Vietnam War, Kennedy used CIA to piss of S. America.
@IngeniousEpithet In fact, many of the idols on the left (no, I'm not saying Kennedy was necessarily bad; no one is perfect), seem to totally disregard the Constitution and regard themselves as dictators. Ever since FDR and Wilson, the size of government has massively expanded. The Republicans have only continued their party, and the Democrats have lost all credibility thanks to Obama, who is one of the worst presidents in a long time.
Chomsky is right, in the U.S. "Libertarian" means extreme advocate of total tyranny! It means that power ought to be given into the hands of private, unaccountable tyrannies, which is what corporations are. The Corporate System as it has evolved in the 20th Century is a pure tyranny, because it is completely unaccountable. If you are inside one of these institutions, you take absolute orders from above, and you hand down absolute orders to the ones below. "Libertarians"~ Suck Corporate Dick!!!
He's right about the fact that the rich and powerful in a capitalist society pull for their own interests; however, he has exactly the wrong solution to this, in the short term setting up a more elaborate infrastructure to be exploited in the name of shutting down exploitation, and in the long term doing away with what society has come to feel necessary.
And his strategic redefinitions, for a linguist, I cannot but call evil - a conservative? However you slice it, he wants radical change.
Chomsky is calling slavery to contracts signed in peace with no treat in liberty, at least in a place like u.s, this is marxism, calling hiring "explotation". Then he says libertarianism in all the world rejects private property owners as tyrants, and that the real message of friedman was "perfect equality". CHOMSKY IS A PROPAGANDIST
No contract that is signed where one party possesses greater bargaining power than the other can ever be truly voluntary or libertarian in the true sense of the word. And neither, for that matter, can signing away your liberty to someone else ever be libertarian; it reduces both personal and social autonomy and increases the level of heteronomy and subordination.
Also, do some research on political history, the word "libertarian" means "anti-statist socialist" everywhere else.
@MsSexySocialist Libertarian means socialist? socialism without force is charity or a private organization that runs charity, libertarian means you follow liberty, how socialism hijacks libertarianism, socialists like Chomsky had the agenda of hijacking terms to promote marxism ideas like hiring = explotation, liberal in u.s means socialist while in the rest of the world everybody knows "neoliberals" are for economical freedom, socialism is not liberty.
Do yourself a favor, research some actual history.
The word "libertarian" as a political/economic term was coined in 1857 by Joseph Dejacque; who was an anarcho-socialist. Since then, the word libertarian has been used as a synonym for "anti-authoritarian socialism" throughout the world.
The word was co-opted by right-wingers in the US in the 1950s and only entered mainstream usage as a capitalist ideology in the early 70s (the founding of the US Libertarian Party)
@crazy3d Libertarian had always and everywhere been a synonym for anarchist, up until the 50s when some right-wing Americans began to use it. You're the one who hijacked the term.
@blackmichael75 and when contracts signed in peace with no threats are tyranny? private owners are tyrants? corporations are by itself tyrant? this has nothing to do with anarchism, this is marxism. Anarchists are libertarians but not all libertarians are anarchists, you are a fool
@UrbyKris Yes Ayn Rand did call herself a libertarian. Tesearch this a little more.. This is when I knew I was not a libertarian. Now, here is Chomsky on the other end of the political spectrum calling himself also a libertarian. It is a vague, panacea type word used for people who want to evade the titles democrat or republican. Ayn Rand was an extreme Republican, todays tea party. Chomsky is an extreme democrat. But, they like to call themselves libertarians
@JayGatsbyOdysseus No she didn't even like libertarians. I don't even know where you heard that. She also didn't like Republicans. Really just google it...
@UrbyKris OK, I google it. In Wikipedia it said that Rand didn't like the term libertarian. However, neither did Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sarte not like the term existentalist. Are you going to tell me that these philosophers were not existentialist? The wikipedia article went on to say that many modern libertarians quote Rand as their influence. OK, maybe Jesus didn't like the term Christian but all Christians refer to him. U can continue your delusion that rand was not a libertarian.
@UrbyKris I read Atlas Shrugged. I know that John Galt moved with Dangny Taggart to Colorado and started Galt's Gulch where they made a dollar bill the flag. I know that when Dagny was fucking Hank Rearden that she said, and I quote, "This is going to cost you." Everything was a commodity to Rand, even sex and love, so rand was a prostitute. I know that rand's favorite human trait is selfishness so we should all change kindergarteners to not share their blocks but to horde them...lol
Actually if you've read Marx, you'd realise that the bulk of his argument was against child labour and workers relying on charity from the Church. If you're a capitalist, you should be terrified, since those Marxist concepts (opposition to child labour and exclusive parochial charity) are now commonplace. It's not hard to see that workers displaced from traditional occupations by manufacturing had no real options either (Lincoln recognised this), it's still the case today.
@gamerunknown Actually if you read Marx you would know he was an advocate of child labor. The Manifesto, Das Capitol, and many lectures include calls to combine education with factory work. Imagine working in a sweat shop getting your education over a loud speaker.
I've read it, he was opposing the capitalist form of child labour (and chronistically, female labour). At the time, capitalists did not have a concept of informed consent (as they still don't, as evidenced by advertising) so their thesis was that if children worked reduced hours of manufacturing they'd be immoral, the antithesis was that they wouldn't and the synthesis was the 10 hours act. We've developed even further towards the antithesis than Marx.
@gamerunknown Marx's Ten Planks of Communism reads "Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production"
He also did lectures on the topic again advocating for the state to take children away from their parents and raise them to be good little communists
and did you read Ure's commentary in Capital about how the capitalists held that reduction in work hours for children would inevitably result in their delinquency? Again, Marx's conception is chronistic, whereas the capitalist's conception is absolute: any victory for human rights in opposition to property rights is a travesty.
Learn to separate your talking points between posts. You can't paint someone as delusional AND someone with bad intentions at the same time. Here i'll help you:
Post #1 He's just a hippy dippy pie in the sky utopian liberal who needs to wake up.
Post #2 He's wants to subjugate everyone in a labor camp like stalin.
@digidave10 Why the hell do you think he lives in a imaginable world? Just because his advocating towards a collectivist anarchist society? HOW THE HELL IS HE EVIL? Order, government and the state is the most authoritarian aspect of society, according to some anarchists. I myself I'm a communist, I'm in no way for statism, I believe in free-democratic communistic society which is opposed to leadership or the state.
Libertarian/Republican ideology is based on a false dilemma that implies that you must choose between an ethical system which is based solely on individual liberty or an ethical system that is based solely on the needs of the group. Why not a combination? The top ten economies on the planet are all a mixture of private and public institutions. Conversely there are no historical examples of absolutist free markets advancing civilization.
You're joking right? That must be the perversity of terms that Chomsky was talking about. What is utopian about NAFTA? What is utopian about not even discussing a system of healthcare like every other industrialised society (all of which have lower per capita costs and higher quality of life outcomes for healthcare)? What is socialist about dissolving democratic institutions and calling for "voluntarism" (Clinton)?
@gamerunknown NAFTA? I don't know what a government issued trade deal trying to join the economic and security interests of Canada, America and Mexico has to do with Free Trade, but I assure you selling off Texas highways to Spanish companies is absolutely socialism.Healthcare on a federal level is not voluntary, period. You are a forced payer. There are plenty of charities, religions, hospices, and other groups dedicated to increasing all of our quality of life. The Feds just kill
No, it really isn't. Chomsky has criticised the transport executive for not using domestic labour during a period of high unemployment as well, because it does not benefit society (something Adam Smith referred to, popularly called the "home bias"). No taxes are absolutely voluntary in a social contract (the second third man [first was Plato's]). Those that don't accept the social contract should be permitted to leave.
@gamerunknown There is no social contract. There is no set of rules mutually agreed upon anywhere between a people and their government. None of us are signators on this contract because it is fictional. Why should I have to leave my home or my property over this fictional contract?
We can argue over the theoretical existence of the social contract, but we cannot deny the impact it has on our existence. If we break a law we are ignorant of, we are still held liable in a court of law (barring the incapacity to never understand its implications). My position is consistent: those that reject the social contract (such as those living on Pitcairn island) should receive neither its benefits nor admonishments.
@gamerunknown Also, I agree voluntary cooperation is the only way, but there is no "out" for us. The tax farmers aren't going to let their livestock run away
Sorry, that's an ad hominem. One doesn't choose one's physical characteristics, nor one's family. It is an immutable aspect of our characters that we are born into societies. After all, can markets exist without societies and mutually shared premises? To be fair, it is consistent to argue for the dissolution of all public institutions and in favour of mercenarisation, but the proximal effects of that system are evident in Somalia.
C'mon man... the only thing that sounds like RELIGION is your ideology which insanely rejects reasonable social contracts (which have been employed peacefully/logically by humans for our entire evolution) and instead favors this kind of market-obsessed/voodoo economics ownership society. Keep in mind... wealth, money, ownership, etc. all erupted at the SAME TIME as nation-states/government, they are intimately intertwined cores of our civilization.
@IngeniousEpithet REASONABLE social contracts are the ones who are imposed to someone else. How is it reasonable to use force against others? You can have all the governments and social contracts you want as long as they don't have the monopoly over what they do. isn't a contract a voluntary, deliberate, and legally binding agreement between two or more competent parties. What if I don't want to be part of your social contract... is it a contract if it is imposed on me? Talking about insanity...
As for "the feds just kill": the right wing libertarian wants to maintain certain aspects of the state where the feds do precisely that: namely, the army and the police (and strict constitutionalists cede national post, too). No intervention to save lives, merely to end them. Pay for a baton to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, but not food for her starving child. Either that, or the only power structures would be feudalistic mercenary corporations.
@gamerunknown And while comparing average health of Americans to wealthier per-capita countries is not fair, it would blow you away to find out how much better TOP TIER health care in America and how few people in these european healthcare traps have access to it in their own countries. This is why wealthy people around the world flock to America and Germany for medical treatment when they can afford it... the MARKET creates innovation
If few people have access to healthcare, we'd expect to see epidemiological results of that: you know, evidence. Not dogma like "the market creates innovation" - presumably the civil rights protests were a result of a research and development lab? At the moment, the American pays more for healthcare for less results. Should they be happy that the few are benefiting from the work of the many? Wasn't that how things were under George the Second?
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare Medicade programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
love chomsky, but hes failing to address the importance of volunteerism that most intelligent anarcho-capitalists support. but of course, chomsky has always been a nitpicker... still love him, his new hopes and prospects book was dope!
I heard Jefferson and Adam Smith were also feminists and cultural marxists. and everyone knows that Google and Microsoft are bigger tyrannies than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia ever were. and African countries score the highest on economic freedom, and that is why they are doing so poorly economically = too much capitalism
It's pretty clear that the more capitalist countries in terms of economic freedom are the ones generally doing better, as the more repressed economies are the biggest miseries of the planet. Not the opposite as you said.
I would oppose myself to this because it's a false dichotomy. The best years of capitalism were 1945-1973 within which governmental intervention was very popular in all advanced countries. It's also the period in which human rights gained the most, in which the average citizen earned the most, in which there was actually a Welfare State...
The point is: some regulations are good, others aren't; sometimes spending is good, sometimes not.
I'd gladly pick the US if you want, where the richest people were taxed at over 90% in the 50's; or how both programs performed in dealing with the crisis in '29-33 and the Depression which followed: all countries tried not to spend, banks got bankrupted and we lost a decade until WWII; or how when Keynes proposed this idea, his own country had more debt (something around 180-200% of its GDP) than the US has, all proportions kept.
So, apparently we can manage more taxes, more regulations, more social programs and we can afford a fiscal stimulus which would work. And, to tell you, some of the biggest miseries of the planet are a the direct result of headless liberalization the IMF supported in the 90's.
Hence, no: it's not true that governmental intervention is always worst than markets. Depends on the conditions and on the intervention specifically.
@KrugmanTheKing The IMF is government. It was founded by governments. The ONLY legitimate purpose of government is to secure and protect Individual Liberty and Private Property. It should only tax to the extent necessary to do the aforementioned. If that's all governments did, we would live prosperously and have innovation, which is what happened in the West, even as governments kept getting more onerous.
To protect individual liberty, they should do more than what you say, although the structure of such government could be different from what we see and more direct in many ways. If you protect freedom for anything, you realize one statement is always observable: great power shall never be left in the hands of too few.
This comes back to saying that any form of coercion must be justified and that includes wage labor. There is only one way to justify it, do you know which it is?
@KrugmanTheKing Ur words: "To protect individual liberty, they should do more than what you say..." I said, government should also protect Private Property Rights. What else do u think they should b doing? And what is this B/S term u and Chomsky use: "Wage Labor?" What! Do you think paying wages in return for labor is evil? The alternative is called slavery.
It's very simple: if a relation of authority is instituted, through whatever process you may think of it, it is legitimate only if it is to the greater benefits of those who are led. To the extent that we concerned with freedom, I doubt current economic conditions will ever be justifiable. And the argument here goes that you have to be blind to think having the choice between being a tool or starving is freedom... it's a very pale imitation.
@KrugmanTheKing U people on the Left never make any sense. What the 'F' does this mean: "To the extent that we concerned with freedom, I doubt current economic conditions will ever be justifiable." Those r ur words verbatim and they make no sense whatsoever!!! What the 'F' are u talking about?
People live under the despotism of the few, by the rules of the few, everyday. Their abilities are reduced to a mechanical exercise... if you bother about freedom for anything, you find this disgusting. Some people enjoy very nice positions, such as teaching or being a lawyer or else and they get to control a lot of what they do, but many others are only toys to whom they rent their existence at designated intervals through the week.
You didn't understand the idea altogether. Wage labor is renting your services in exchange for money. It becomes a problem when you become more a tool than a person in working; when you execute yourself more mechanically and loose control over how you proceed.
Until you get involved in making choices in your work place, wage labor is, for all intent and purposes, the same thing as chattel slavery. I said it: all form of power, of authority, is illegitimate by assumption.
@KrugmanTheKing 1st, what worker at Ford is FORCED to work there? (Interestingly, Ford workers are FORCED to join the UAW) 2nd, the owners of Ford have every right to order their production processes in any manner they deem fit, presumably to maximize profits. 3rd, the 4 elements of PRODUCTION, in order of importance are: 1)
Management 2) Capital 3) Resource 4) Labor. When a worker suggests a new process he is performing a management function. Finally, Labor is a COST not an asset.
The only way to justify authority is for it to be used for the benefit of the people who are ruled. You can justify some power, you can justify this or that person earning more, but each time it has to be related to a gain you grant to those bellow: if not, it's exploitation.
The people who are clueless are libertarians in the US. You need to apply a double standard to not see that the argument you give against the government must also apply to workers and directions.
@KrugmanTheKing Again, those who work at FORD do so VOLUNTARILY. FORD cannot FORCE anyone to work there. And, again, governments have granted unions the "legal" right to FORCE people to become members. Unions are legalized extortion rings, indeed, they are borderline criminal organizations given government protection, not because of any benefits they provide but because of the POLITICAL CLOUT they can wield. Government is FORCE, that's why it needs to be kept in check.
I am not against inequalities: they are correct if the benefit they bring are justified. When I stop at a red light or when I wear a seat belt, I surrender my decision to a group of people to whom I am subordinated -- that's a vertical relationship. We're not equal on that claim, but it spares lives and pain. There, it's justified because it benefits those who are ruled. If the system is crafted the other way around, that abusing of your power and we call exploitation.
@KrugmanTheKing Government can demand that you require everyone under 18 (or the age of consent or whatever you want to call it) traveling in ur car to wear a seatbelt. If ur older than the age of consent it's none of the government's business. BTW, anyone who doesn't wear a seatbelt while driving is a MORON.
And, even if you despise it, it still is wrong to say that governmental intervention is inefficient all the time. It might appear to you as undesirable, but analytically, you cannot say the contrary: laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work.
Now, you can certainly say that maybe the current political structure isn't efficient in dealing with those problems and is often intrusive, but you can't just use the notion of freedom to justify what basically is a mistake.
Capitalism is based on a hierarchy from within a company, where a CEO is the leader of a system that works back down to the laborers of the company. This is the exact opposite of anarchy"
Capitalism is free market trading. No more, no less.
The word anarchy comes from archos, the Greek word for leader and an-, a prefix meaning no, the lack of or without. Therefore, anarchy means without leader. Because of this, anarchist belief indicates that no system- political, religious, or e
How are corporations accountable to no one? Someone - namely customers, people in society - has gotta like what they're doing otherwise certain corporations wouldn't be successful.
BTW corporations are a legal fiction created by the State so sorry Chomsky, but you've kind of missed the mark a little bit. Anarcho-capitalism, or capitalism without State protectionism, would likely result in a mostly level playing field as Smith described so I dunno what exactly is being "refuted" here.
ChronJohn91 2 days ago
@ChronJohn91 Don't you just luv these Left-Wing morons, they think it's corporations that are dangerous when, in fact, if you stopped by any of these businesses products for a quarter they would go belly-up. And at the same time, these (useful) idiots think gov't is the panacea, meanwhile, it is governments that have murdered people by the MILLIONS. The Left is not just evil, its moronic.
vince33x 21 hours ago
@vince33x learn some basic history, racist...
EndWesternTyranny 3 hours ago
Anarcho capitalism is awshum! stop spending other people's money on Keynesian bullcrap! It's the only way to save us economically
1337wafflezz 5 days ago
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amamerc 1 week ago
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amamerc 1 week ago
"For decades, Chomsky has vilified his critics as only a world class linguist can. However, for me . . . questions about life under the Khmer Rouge are not intellectual parlour games. . . . [I]n international affairs Noam Chomsky consistently falls short of Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that universities are 'based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'"
amamerc 1 week ago
@amamerc Just for the record, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, murdered a third of the population of Cambodia. To put that in perspective it would be the equivalent of our government murdering 105,000,000 Americans! But only one major movie has ever been made about this evil regime (THE KILLING FIELDS) - that's because the Khmer Rouge were PROGRESSIVES.
vince33x 6 days ago
@vince33x The numbers vary, but yeah, it was a tragedy. I saw the Killing Fields and I personally thought it was insufficient. No one dares to make a movie about S21, or any movie depicting the Gulag, because it would annihilate the credibility of communism. The greatest irony is that such a movie does not sell! It's far more profitable to rail against capitalism!
amamerc 6 days ago
@amamerc Well, look who controls Hollywood. The Socialists murdered 120,000,000 people during the 20th Century while the Fascists murdered about 6,000,000. Yet there have been countless movies made about the Nazis and the Holocaust and scarcely any about the Socialist Holocausts. It seems if you kill Jews, they are somehow worthy of having their story told but if u killed in the name of Socialism (which, of course Nazism was but their victims were Jews) u get a pass from Hollywood.
vince33x 6 days ago
@vince33x p.s. everyone is "Left" compared to your radical right-wing/neo nazi ideology
EndWesternTyranny 6 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny Well moron, nazism is Socialism, which is Left-Wing, so if you wish to align urself with that ideology, go right ahead but anyone who aligns themselves with nazism is scum.
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x someone has to be /really/ ignorant to think that Nazi Germany was left-wing. that shows what a twisted perception you have of politics. you're right wing and blame "the Jews"- i.e. you are a neo nazi...
EndWesternTyranny 5 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny Other than Hitler's insane hatred of Jews, the Nazis were Socialists. Indeed, the full name of the Nazi Party was the German Socialist Worker's Party. Their philosophy was the same as the Communists except they hated Jews. Since socialism always fails, they have to find scapegoats, in the case of the Nazis, it was Jews. But it could be any number of ethnic groups or businessmen or Property owners, whoever is convenient for the time, place and circumstance.
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x Nazis are right-wing and if you can't see that, then i am truly wasting my time talking to you. to say that communists had the same ideology as nazis is extremely false.
EndWesternTyranny 5 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny Tell me what u mean by "Right-Wing?" Where, specifically, do Nazism and Communism differ? They are BOTH Socialist/Progressive doctrines.
vince33x 5 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny Correct, Hilter was an extreme fascist, close to center but on the right. Communists are as far left as you can get.
audiopro316 4 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny U know why u can't tell me what it means to be Right-Wing? Because u have no idea. And u have no idea because u r a moron, no doubt "educated" in a gov't school.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x whatever helps you sleep at night, neo nazi...
EndWesternTyranny 2 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny It is difficult to sleep when you think about how most voters are nitwits, yourself included.
vince33x 2 days ago
@vince33x yes, because anyone who doesn't have a radical right-wing ideology and hate "the Jews" must be a "nitwit?" you're pathetic....
EndWesternTyranny 2 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny It's interesting that it has been the Socialists who've murdered the Jews in the 20th Century and in far greater numbers than anyone else in history. "By their actions shall ye know them..." (Matthew 7:16)
vince33x 21 hours ago
@vince33x Who are the scapegoats nowadays you think?
sarlokkin 5 days ago
@sarlokkin Because of their wealth, Jews will be scapegoated here in the USA if we have an economic collapse, which I think is almost inevitable. Ur already seeing massive anti-semetic activities on college campuses and this is where ideas (good or bad) germinate.
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x Aren't many Americans just tired of the fact that America is being pulled into a World War (Syria, Iran) because of Israel?
sarlokkin 5 days ago
@sarlokkin Well, you've got a news media in the USA dominated by Jews and Hollywood & TV are also dominated by Jews, so I think most Americans are not conscious of the drumbeat being raised for war against Iran (I don't think we'll go to war against Syria unless it becomes a threat to Israel - right now Syria is in a state of collapse).
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x
Stop making ignorant comments, no one can take you seriously when you say nazism is not right wing. Use an encyclopedia at least people, not just the one book you have read!
Have you ever heard the phrase "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist."
Who do you think ths is about?
drizztf88 5 days ago
@vince33x Stalin killed many Jews as well. Timothy Snyder documents this.
Regarding whether the Nazis were left- or right-wing, I think this depends on how we define those terms.
This argument is interesting: "With the repeal of medieval regulations and mercantilist rules came an era of unprecedented increase in prosperity, population, freedom, peace. . . .
amamerc 5 days ago
@amamerc There are two cornerstones of the prosperous, modern society: 1) Secure Property Rights (Kelo shows the Left wants to do away with these) and, 2) The rule of law, which includes in it the right to contract (again, the Left, as manifested in the NLRB, wants to do away with this as well). The Left also believes that "rights" come from government, which is a belief totally antithetical to morality and freedom. Our rights come from nature, God, and our very humanity and legitimately formed
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x Governments exist to secure and protect those rights, among which are the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (note: NOT the guarantee of happiness). Quite simply, the Right believes in Individual Liberty, which leads to progress and prosperity, and the Left believes that Governments are the source of progress, prosperity and rights. That's it in a nutshell. Most of what the Poli-Sci Profs teach is obfuscating baloney. At the extreme, the Right is anarchy and the Left
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x is Totalitarianism.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x [cont] "And in his revolt against this liberalism (or "capitalism," his coinage) . . . Marx, history's first neo-con, was advocating nothing less than a revolving back to the ancien régime of the controlled economy. Herein lies his unicum opus and bequest to the Left: the rhetorical inversion of reality -- specifically, the presentation of reaction as 'revolution,' of the return to a past stage of history as a progression to the 'next.'"
amamerc 5 days ago
@vince33x Libertarian Rothbard says: "The economic views of the anarchists present them with a crucial dilemma: how can capitalism and private property be abolished, while the State is abolished at the same time? The socialists proclaim the glory of the State, and the use of the State to abolish private property . . . The orthodox Marxist Communist, who pays lip service to the ideal of left-wing anarchy . . . would enlarge the State to the maximum and abolish capitalism."
amamerc 5 days ago
@amamerc The problem with the anarchists position is that in order to enjoy Liberty and Prosperity you have to have Public Order. Raucous and riotous behavior results in businesses shuddering, resulting in a decline in prosperity. This decline eventually leads to desperate measures, which can easily swing the pendulum toward the Total State. This is why it's so important for people to have an understanding of what true Liberty is and what it isn't...and it ISN"T LICENSE.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x Therefore, considering all this, and considering how those who used to be in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, Constitutionalism, individualism, traditional values, etc., were considered liberal -- classical liberals -- I get the impression that so-called right-libertarians, would, in a historical perspective, be on the left, some conservatives on the left, others on the right. Marxist-Leninsts would be on the right with the Nazis. Whichever way, I see them on the same wing.
amamerc 5 days ago
@amamerc Prior to the 20th Century, Liberalism essentially meant freedom and Liberty. The Left co-opted the word, just as homosexuals co-opted the word gay, which used to mean 'happy and joyful.' But this is the Left's modus operandi. The only way they can achieve their ends is to disguise what those ends really are.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x you're right-wing and racist. end of story...
EndWesternTyranny 4 days ago
@vince33x "Prior to the 20th Century, Liberalism essentially meant freedom and Liberty. The Left co-opted the word." Yes, I agree. The Declaration of Independence is the antithesis of what statists believe in. However, certain people on the Left do believe in liberty, etc., they just don't realize they're unwittingly influenced by Marxism; and on the right you have statist or "Federalist" people, who likewise believe in big government.
amamerc 4 days ago
@amamerc This lack of understanding of Left and Right is by design of the Left. Remember, the Left controls the major levers of communication: The Academy, TV, Hollywood, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, TIME, NEWSWEEK, NYT, LATs, WashPost, etc.). they have so obfuscated the meanings of Left and Right that many on the Left are confused. But the distinction is simple: More Government - Left; Less Gov't - Right. Thus: Anarchy on the Extreme Right and Totalitarianism on the Extreme Left. The continuum
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x is really not difficult to understand but one has to think in terms of linearity not a circle. Thinking in terms of a circle is patently ridiculous for how is it possible for Anarchy and Totalitarianism to meet. The concept is non-sensical.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x Right on.
While I don't agree with everything Jonah Goldberg says, this video makes sense to me:
watch?v=SfJSub3CDJk&feature=related
Paraphrase: Most of us had this in college and our Pol. Sci. prof. goes to board and says: "I'm not a fascist or a Communist and besides extreme ideologies, they meet, and he draws a circle, you go all this way, and you end up this way . . . but it is BIZARRE and IDIOTIC." No where in life do we say fat = thin, short = tall.
Haha. Yes!
amamerc 4 days ago
@amamerc In the inimitable words of Prof Doolittle: "By jove! I think you've got it!"
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x You are a f--king lunatic, pull you head out of your a-- The one in the middle is on the left and the one on the right is in the middle and the one on the left is on the right and the guy in the rear (that's us) got screwed. It doesn't matter who is on the right or left they're both the property of the bankers and big business. Wake up and smell the coffee!
atentio 1 day ago
@atentio U obviously have no powers of comprehension. Why do they let idiots like u post?
vince33x 21 hours ago
@vince33x This is why, in my mind, I split the spectrum into liberty on one side and tyranny on the other; or you could use a two-dimensional x-y axis to plot out the left and the right in terms of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Put simply, here's what Lenin has to say, who so thoroughly annihilates the argument on the left that government is good, and that that's the position of Marxism, that I can't resist from quoting him (Lenin):
amamerc 4 days ago
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amamerc 4 days ago
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@vince33x According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another."
However, Lenin goes on to advocate total tyranny; but he disagrees w/ the academic Left!
amamerc 4 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny OK, tell me: What is the difference between Right and Left Wing?
I want specifics in how they differ and keep in mind, I know how they differ. I want see if you know.
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x if you "know how they differ" then you are fully aware that you have a right-wing ideology similar to that of Nazi Germany, including blaming "the Jews." i repeat: i have no interest in schooling a Neo Nazi...
EndWesternTyranny 5 days ago
@EndWesternTyranny What a cop out! U have no clue do u?
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x This is interesting: hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM The Nazis killed more than 6 million.
Also: frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/05/dictatorships_d.html
This link appears to be more recent. Jung Chang claims China caused 74 million unnatural deaths.
Ron Paul cited 262 million in his book Liberty Defined. The second link above goes into further detail.
And yeah Hollywood prefers crap like Saw 9 versus real history.
amamerc 5 days ago
@amamerc It's also interesting to note that all of these murderous ideologies have Socialism at their core. As Hayek clearly documents in the ROAD TO SERFDOM, fascism is the last stop before socialism. We are in that stage here in the USA. Hollywood, which is dominated by Jews, has chosen not to make many films about the other Holocausts of the 20th Century. I don't know why, someone will have to ask the powers that be there.
vince33x 5 days ago
@amamerc Thomas Jefferson is overrated. He owned slaves and fucked Sally Hemmings like his property, which she was. Jefferson got 90 percent of his ideas from John Locke. Find a different hero.
JayGatsbyOdysseus 6 days ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus Jefferson owned slaves but there is no definitive proof that he had relations w/Ms Hemmings. To say so means ur either ignorant or an out and out liar.
vince33x 6 days ago
@vince33x lol Jefferson didn't fuck Sally? Why do you think there are no white people named Jefferson in this country? Anyone with the last name Jefferson is black. u r an idiot,,i no longer speak to u philistine...u can not infer which is needed 4 science
JayGatsbyOdysseus 6 days ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus Im just going to let ur idiotic statement stand on its own. It's so freakin stupid, it speaks volumes about its author's idiocy.
vince33x 5 days ago
@vince33x Christopher Hitchens called Ayn Rand an idtiot. Allen Greenspan, an ayn rand desciple, admitted his entire economic philosophy was wrong to congress. u loser any rand idiot
JayGatsbyOdysseus 5 days ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus If Allen Greenspan truly believed in Objectivism, he'd have never gone to work for the Fed. "By their actions shall ye know them." (Matthew 7:16)
vince33x 5 days ago
A victim of the Khmer Rouge writes:
"Writing about American leaders in At War with Asia (Pantheon, 1970), Chomsky poignantly argued that: 'Perhaps someday they will acknowledge their ‘honest errors’ in their memoirs, speaking of the burdens of world leadership and the tragic irony of history. Their victims, the peasants of Indochina, will write no memoirs and will be forgotten. They will join the countless millions of earlier victims of tyrants and oppressors.'
amamerc 1 week ago
The idea that free markets impose tyranny only flies with academic elites like Chomsky who have never worked in a marketplace. Further he states that the tyranny imposed by markets is worse than that imposed by a state because at least with a state you can vote your opinon. This is not so, companies are far more responsive to criticism than govts are.
mason72518 1 week ago
@sadisticbrujeria I'll have to look into that.
LexFeather 1 week ago
I would vote for a libertarian candidate simply because it's the closest thing to an anarchist candidate out there right now in many situations..not a big fan of capitalism but all systems have their strengths and weaknesses...socialism worries me partially because we have the capitalist system so firmly entrenched here...a change like that whether positive or negative would also change society as a whole greatly. Would rather improve upon what we have...and I'm not sure about Chomsky either.
LexFeather 1 week ago
@LexFeather America is completely socialists, look at Marx's planks of socialism, its not even a joke.
sadisticbrujeria 1 week ago
Corporations are accountable. Vote with your money.
optionism 1 week ago
@optionism
This premise begins to fall apart if thought about even briefly. Where does wealth accumulate? In the hands of those that control the means of production. What are the effects of this system of distribution on the population? Dearth. This can be evidenced by the fact that as former Soviet countries began to undo the effects of industrialisation and wealth concentrated even more, the average lifespan dropped as a result. Why should the majority accept such a system?
gamerunknown 1 week ago
@optionism
VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLAR IS NOT DEMOCRACY. CONSUMER-CHOICE AND BOYCOTT ARE USEFUL TOOLS, BUT BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A REALISTIC DETERRENT TO BAD BEHAVIOR BY COMPANIES/ECONOMIC ENTITIES/MARKETS.
IngeniousEpithet 1 week ago
@IngeniousEpithet Don't be a moron. The best deterrent to bad behavior in the marketplace is competition. Look at how the products from Ford have improved since Nissan, Toyota, and Honda - and lately Hyundai - have come to dominate the American market. But then the nitwit in the White House saved GM and Chrysler, even though they'd been building crap for decades. Governments save bad actors if the bad actors have enough political clout (think UAW). U guys on the Left are such morons!
vince33x 1 week ago
@vince33x
I suggest you take your own advice. While competition is all good and well... you ignore the fact that the marketplace can become its own closed-off playing field, where not only do companies compete to create the BEST or CHEAPEST product, but can also compete in a REVERSE manner to create the WORST product at the HIGHEST PRICE and advertise/market the shit out of it. Remember the days of snake-oil... they've not disappeared, remember planned-obsolescence. Greed can cause regression.
IngeniousEpithet 1 week ago
@IngeniousEpithet The snake-oil example is nonsense, since medicine at the time was in its infancy. Show me an example of where Free and Open Markets are advancing a "race to the bottom" today. "Planned obsolescence" is a B/S term that the media came up with. It wasn't an auto industry strategy - if anything, it was an appeal to the changing tastes of consumers. "Greed can cause regression" That statement is meaningless tripe. You gonna sell ur house to the lowest bidder? Phony!
vince33x 1 week ago
@vince33x
Nope it's a perfectly legit example. Your "free" markets are leading to a race to the bottom in third world countries and also despotic regimes/economies like China, India, etc. Where ORIGINALLY decent-paying jobs (at least relatively) are shipped overseas where people are essentially enslaved to provide cheap consumer goods (with planned obsolescence) to first-worlders. Everybody loses except those who profit off of the labors/money of the masses/workers.
IngeniousEpithet 4 days ago
@vince33x
Jesus christ... *facepalm*
PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE IS A REAL PRACTICE. You seriously need to do your homework and stop reading right-wing propaganda blogs that SHIT all over facts/history. They do it with a smirk, I'm sure, because they simultaneously practice the concepts while putting out disinformation and revisionist propaganda that tells fools like you that these practices magically don't exist and are part of the "commie conspiracy".
IngeniousEpithet 4 days ago
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@IngeniousEpithet So who's practicing "planned obsolescence?" Ur words: "I'm sure, because they simultaneously practice the concepts while putting out disinformation and revisionist propaganda that tells fools like you that these practices magically don't exist and are part of the "commie conspiracy". WTF r u talking about?
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x
Everything you've said here is meaningless tripe. Greed can cause regression... profit-motive DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY OR NECESSARILY MEAN PROGRESS. Products, services, and businesses can just as easily regress (even covertly) to an inferior (but more well packaged/advertised) version so as to increase profits. WHAT OF suppressed technology? WHAT OF the endless sea of useless/cheap products that are utterly unnecessary drains on resources/finances? You are completely naive to Capitalism
IngeniousEpithet 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet Ur words: "Greed can cause regression..." Again, WTF does that mean. All u Lefties speak in non-sensical vagaries. Tell me what "suppressed technologies ur talking about? All u speak is Left-Wing mantra and it's just pure BS.
vince33x 4 days ago
@vince33x
As for the automotive bailout, that was largely crafted by CONGRESS and the BUSH ADMINISTRATION in 2008 during the various collapses. This was an economic emergency and Congress/the presidents would have been given hell for letting things collapse. That being said, I DIDN'T SUPPORT THE BAILOUTS. Many leftists question the bailouts MORE THAN RIGHT-WINGERS DID. Either way, it was damned if you do damned if you don't.
IngeniousEpithet 1 week ago
@IngeniousEpithet Baloney! Far more Republicans voted against the auto bailouts then Democrats. The Bailouts of GM and Chrysler was a sop to the Democrats best friends: The unions. And, it rewarded market failure by GM and Chrysler. Democrat Jimmy Carter, with a Democrat-controlled House and Senate bailed out Chrysler in 1979 as well. Democrats are scum; Republicans are gutless.
vince33x 1 week ago
@vince33x
See... you just completely changed your story, typical.
The automotive bailout was to SAVE THE THREE MAJOR AMERICAN CAR COMPANIES FROM BANKRUPTCY during a time when we were facing the second great depression. There was unprecedented bipartisan support for TARP, so don't sit there and pretend it was some Democrat conspiracy... it had mass support in a volatile time. It was damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont. I don't really support the bailouts, but I understand their position.
IngeniousEpithet 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet The auto bailout only bailed out GM and Chrysler NOT Ford. We are still facing an economic crisis as a result of the reckless spending engaged in by BOTH parties. But it is the Democrats who have given us the two programs that are bankrupting the USA: Social Security and MediCare. As for bipartisan support of TARP - so what? That doesn't mean it was the correct course. At one time everybody believed the earth was the center of the universe but that didn't make it correct.
vince33x 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet The Democrats being innocent is basically ahistorical. Wilson was a tyrant. In a word: Espionage Act. He got us involved in WWI and gave us the FED (which according to Greenspan: "No other government agency can overrule the actions that we take." Oh sure, that's not tyranny.) FDR "jailed" American-Japanese citizens, got us off the gold standard, rejected anti-lynching bills, used patronage (bribery), lied constantly (claimed he wrote Haitian constitution), . . .
amamerc 4 days ago
@vince33x
As for your characterization of Dems versus Reps... I think you've got it backwards. Reps are scum, Dems are spineless. The reps have done nothing but bully the Dems and lock them into ridiculous fucking stalemates, stomping their feet like stubborn children at EVERYTHING proposed by dems. The Dems are gutless because they cave in almost every time to ludicrous right-wing demands.
IngeniousEpithet 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet I guess that's why the nitwit in the White House has been able to increase our nat'l debt by $5 TRILLION in just three years. U sir, are a complete idiot.
vince33x 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet FDR quite possibly provoked the Japanese into attacking us, taxed income beyond $25,000 during WII at 100%, increased the upper tax margin to 79% (this is tyranny), and according to an increasing number of scholars, prolonged the Great Depression, and yet FDR is deemed the best president ever.
Harry S. Truman bombed two Japanese cities to the ground, started the Korean War and Cold War; LBJ continued the Vietnam War, Kennedy used CIA to piss of S. America.
amamerc 4 days ago
@IngeniousEpithet In fact, many of the idols on the left (no, I'm not saying Kennedy was necessarily bad; no one is perfect), seem to totally disregard the Constitution and regard themselves as dictators. Ever since FDR and Wilson, the size of government has massively expanded. The Republicans have only continued their party, and the Democrats have lost all credibility thanks to Obama, who is one of the worst presidents in a long time.
amamerc 4 days ago
Chomsky is right, in the U.S. "Libertarian" means extreme advocate of total tyranny! It means that power ought to be given into the hands of private, unaccountable tyrannies, which is what corporations are. The Corporate System as it has evolved in the 20th Century is a pure tyranny, because it is completely unaccountable. If you are inside one of these institutions, you take absolute orders from above, and you hand down absolute orders to the ones below. "Libertarians"~ Suck Corporate Dick!!!
CosmicFork 2 weeks ago
@CosmicFork Accountability is often required or blocked by government, an entirely unaccountable institution.
SecondAgeOfReason 2 weeks ago
@MrYakkker
I was trying to be sarcastic, i guess I'll have to work on conveying sarcasm better
haydenslaymaker 2 weeks ago
He's right about the fact that the rich and powerful in a capitalist society pull for their own interests; however, he has exactly the wrong solution to this, in the short term setting up a more elaborate infrastructure to be exploited in the name of shutting down exploitation, and in the long term doing away with what society has come to feel necessary.
And his strategic redefinitions, for a linguist, I cannot but call evil - a conservative? However you slice it, he wants radical change.
IoEstasCedonta 2 weeks ago
Chomsky is calling slavery to contracts signed in peace with no treat in liberty, at least in a place like u.s, this is marxism, calling hiring "explotation". Then he says libertarianism in all the world rejects private property owners as tyrants, and that the real message of friedman was "perfect equality". CHOMSKY IS A PROPAGANDIST
crazy3d 3 weeks ago
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@crazy3d
No contract that is signed where one party possesses greater bargaining power than the other can ever be truly voluntary or libertarian in the true sense of the word. And neither, for that matter, can signing away your liberty to someone else ever be libertarian; it reduces both personal and social autonomy and increases the level of heteronomy and subordination.
Also, do some research on political history, the word "libertarian" means "anti-statist socialist" everywhere else.
MsSexySocialist 2 weeks ago
@MsSexySocialist Libertarian means socialist? socialism without force is charity or a private organization that runs charity, libertarian means you follow liberty, how socialism hijacks libertarianism, socialists like Chomsky had the agenda of hijacking terms to promote marxism ideas like hiring = explotation, liberal in u.s means socialist while in the rest of the world everybody knows "neoliberals" are for economical freedom, socialism is not liberty.
crazy3d 2 weeks ago
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@crazy3d
Do yourself a favor, research some actual history.
The word "libertarian" as a political/economic term was coined in 1857 by Joseph Dejacque; who was an anarcho-socialist. Since then, the word libertarian has been used as a synonym for "anti-authoritarian socialism" throughout the world.
The word was co-opted by right-wingers in the US in the 1950s and only entered mainstream usage as a capitalist ideology in the early 70s (the founding of the US Libertarian Party)
Case closed.
MsSexySocialist 2 weeks ago
@crazy3d Libertarian had always and everywhere been a synonym for anarchist, up until the 50s when some right-wing Americans began to use it. You're the one who hijacked the term.
blackmichael75 2 weeks ago 12
@blackmichael75 and when contracts signed in peace with no threats are tyranny? private owners are tyrants? corporations are by itself tyrant? this has nothing to do with anarchism, this is marxism. Anarchists are libertarians but not all libertarians are anarchists, you are a fool
crazy3d 1 week ago
@blackmichael75
Correct!!!
IngeniousEpithet 1 week ago
@blackmichael75 Do you mean Ayn Rand? She called herself a libertarian. Did she hijack the term?
JayGatsbyOdysseus 1 week ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus Her and people like her.
blackmichael75 1 week ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus No she didn't call herself a libertarian...
UrbyKris 6 days ago
@UrbyKris Yes Ayn Rand did call herself a libertarian. Tesearch this a little more.. This is when I knew I was not a libertarian. Now, here is Chomsky on the other end of the political spectrum calling himself also a libertarian. It is a vague, panacea type word used for people who want to evade the titles democrat or republican. Ayn Rand was an extreme Republican, todays tea party. Chomsky is an extreme democrat. But, they like to call themselves libertarians
JayGatsbyOdysseus 6 days ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus No she didn't even like libertarians. I don't even know where you heard that. She also didn't like Republicans. Really just google it...
UrbyKris 6 days ago
@UrbyKris OK, I google it. In Wikipedia it said that Rand didn't like the term libertarian. However, neither did Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sarte not like the term existentalist. Are you going to tell me that these philosophers were not existentialist? The wikipedia article went on to say that many modern libertarians quote Rand as their influence. OK, maybe Jesus didn't like the term Christian but all Christians refer to him. U can continue your delusion that rand was not a libertarian.
JayGatsbyOdysseus 6 days ago
@JayGatsbyOdysseus Well reasearch what she actually said and you'll see where she denaunces Libertatians and Republicans.
It doesn't matter if modern libertarians cite her... that proves nothing about her position
UrbyKris 6 days ago
@UrbyKris I read Atlas Shrugged. I know that John Galt moved with Dangny Taggart to Colorado and started Galt's Gulch where they made a dollar bill the flag. I know that when Dagny was fucking Hank Rearden that she said, and I quote, "This is going to cost you." Everything was a commodity to Rand, even sex and love, so rand was a prostitute. I know that rand's favorite human trait is selfishness so we should all change kindergarteners to not share their blocks but to horde them...lol
JayGatsbyOdysseus 6 days ago
@crazy3d
Actually if you've read Marx, you'd realise that the bulk of his argument was against child labour and workers relying on charity from the Church. If you're a capitalist, you should be terrified, since those Marxist concepts (opposition to child labour and exclusive parochial charity) are now commonplace. It's not hard to see that workers displaced from traditional occupations by manufacturing had no real options either (Lincoln recognised this), it's still the case today.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown Actually if you read Marx you would know he was an advocate of child labor. The Manifesto, Das Capitol, and many lectures include calls to combine education with factory work. Imagine working in a sweat shop getting your education over a loud speaker.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
I've read it, he was opposing the capitalist form of child labour (and chronistically, female labour). At the time, capitalists did not have a concept of informed consent (as they still don't, as evidenced by advertising) so their thesis was that if children worked reduced hours of manufacturing they'd be immoral, the antithesis was that they wouldn't and the synthesis was the 10 hours act. We've developed even further towards the antithesis than Marx.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown Marx's Ten Planks of Communism reads "Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production"
He also did lectures on the topic again advocating for the state to take children away from their parents and raise them to be good little communists
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
and did you read Ure's commentary in Capital about how the capitalists held that reduction in work hours for children would inevitably result in their delinquency? Again, Marx's conception is chronistic, whereas the capitalist's conception is absolute: any victory for human rights in opposition to property rights is a travesty.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
Noam Chomsky is EVIL.
he lives in an imaginary world
digidave10 3 weeks ago
@digidave10
You live in an imaginary world.
GuitarMannnnnn 3 weeks ago
@digidave10
Learn to separate your talking points between posts. You can't paint someone as delusional AND someone with bad intentions at the same time. Here i'll help you:
Post #1 He's just a hippy dippy pie in the sky utopian liberal who needs to wake up.
Post #2 He's wants to subjugate everyone in a labor camp like stalin.
catbuffalo 2 weeks ago
@digidave10 Why the hell do you think he lives in a imaginable world? Just because his advocating towards a collectivist anarchist society? HOW THE HELL IS HE EVIL? Order, government and the state is the most authoritarian aspect of society, according to some anarchists. I myself I'm a communist, I'm in no way for statism, I believe in free-democratic communistic society which is opposed to leadership or the state.
xCBKxScArFaCe 2 weeks ago
@xCBKxScArFaCe then how is it democratic? dude... you sound so fucking confused. Let me guess you're in your late teens early twenties?
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
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digidave10 3 weeks ago
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Libertarian/Republican ideology is based on a false dilemma that implies that you must choose between an ethical system which is based solely on individual liberty or an ethical system that is based solely on the needs of the group. Why not a combination? The top ten economies on the planet are all a mixture of private and public institutions. Conversely there are no historical examples of absolutist free markets advancing civilization.
MrSteveSpears 3 weeks ago
Why don't geniuses like Noam Chomsky get to be our leaders instead of the clowns we have today?
Yewon2001 3 weeks ago
@Yewon2001 Thank God we haven't yet become stupid enough to elect a BOZO like Chomsky.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@Yewon2001 our leaders are all socialists just like chomsky. Where is the utopia promised? lmfao
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
You're joking right? That must be the perversity of terms that Chomsky was talking about. What is utopian about NAFTA? What is utopian about not even discussing a system of healthcare like every other industrialised society (all of which have lower per capita costs and higher quality of life outcomes for healthcare)? What is socialist about dissolving democratic institutions and calling for "voluntarism" (Clinton)?
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown NAFTA? I don't know what a government issued trade deal trying to join the economic and security interests of Canada, America and Mexico has to do with Free Trade, but I assure you selling off Texas highways to Spanish companies is absolutely socialism.Healthcare on a federal level is not voluntary, period. You are a forced payer. There are plenty of charities, religions, hospices, and other groups dedicated to increasing all of our quality of life. The Feds just kill
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
No, it really isn't. Chomsky has criticised the transport executive for not using domestic labour during a period of high unemployment as well, because it does not benefit society (something Adam Smith referred to, popularly called the "home bias"). No taxes are absolutely voluntary in a social contract (the second third man [first was Plato's]). Those that don't accept the social contract should be permitted to leave.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown There is no social contract. There is no set of rules mutually agreed upon anywhere between a people and their government. None of us are signators on this contract because it is fictional. Why should I have to leave my home or my property over this fictional contract?
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
We can argue over the theoretical existence of the social contract, but we cannot deny the impact it has on our existence. If we break a law we are ignorant of, we are still held liable in a court of law (barring the incapacity to never understand its implications). My position is consistent: those that reject the social contract (such as those living on Pitcairn island) should receive neither its benefits nor admonishments.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown Also, I agree voluntary cooperation is the only way, but there is no "out" for us. The tax farmers aren't going to let their livestock run away
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown Social contract is not a contract. No one signs it.
Social contract should be called social religion because it only exists in the minds of believers and the believers persecute the nonbelievers.
Who's your god? Society, an abstract non-existent concept. Believers demand that you must contribute and obey this God.
optionism 1 week ago
@optionism
Sorry, that's an ad hominem. One doesn't choose one's physical characteristics, nor one's family. It is an immutable aspect of our characters that we are born into societies. After all, can markets exist without societies and mutually shared premises? To be fair, it is consistent to argue for the dissolution of all public institutions and in favour of mercenarisation, but the proximal effects of that system are evident in Somalia.
gamerunknown 1 week ago
@optionism
So you have NO social contracts??
C'mon man... the only thing that sounds like RELIGION is your ideology which insanely rejects reasonable social contracts (which have been employed peacefully/logically by humans for our entire evolution) and instead favors this kind of market-obsessed/voodoo economics ownership society. Keep in mind... wealth, money, ownership, etc. all erupted at the SAME TIME as nation-states/government, they are intimately intertwined cores of our civilization.
IngeniousEpithet 1 week ago 6
@IngeniousEpithet REASONABLE social contracts are the ones who are imposed to someone else. How is it reasonable to use force against others? You can have all the governments and social contracts you want as long as they don't have the monopoly over what they do. isn't a contract a voluntary, deliberate, and legally binding agreement between two or more competent parties. What if I don't want to be part of your social contract... is it a contract if it is imposed on me? Talking about insanity...
MrFmmcosta 1 week ago
@sadisticbrujeria
As for "the feds just kill": the right wing libertarian wants to maintain certain aspects of the state where the feds do precisely that: namely, the army and the police (and strict constitutionalists cede national post, too). No intervention to save lives, merely to end them. Pay for a baton to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, but not food for her starving child. Either that, or the only power structures would be feudalistic mercenary corporations.
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown And I tell them when they're wrong too, don't worry.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown And while comparing average health of Americans to wealthier per-capita countries is not fair, it would blow you away to find out how much better TOP TIER health care in America and how few people in these european healthcare traps have access to it in their own countries. This is why wealthy people around the world flock to America and Germany for medical treatment when they can afford it... the MARKET creates innovation
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
@sadisticbrujeria
If few people have access to healthcare, we'd expect to see epidemiological results of that: you know, evidence. Not dogma like "the market creates innovation" - presumably the civil rights protests were a result of a research and development lab? At the moment, the American pays more for healthcare for less results. Should they be happy that the few are benefiting from the work of the many? Wasn't that how things were under George the Second?
gamerunknown 2 weeks ago
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare Medicade programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
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@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
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@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
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@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@gamerunknown The American Healthcare system has been destroyed by the Federal government. The amount of expensive requirements, certifications, eduction, required to practice medicine is insane. Not to mention the pharmaceutical system inflates prices dramatically. Plus Medicare programs where we all pay and we all get stiffed.
sadisticbrujeria 2 weeks ago
Noam Chomsky Lew Rockwell Debate
fauxmocracy 3 weeks ago
love chomsky, but hes failing to address the importance of volunteerism that most intelligent anarcho-capitalists support. but of course, chomsky has always been a nitpicker... still love him, his new hopes and prospects book was dope!
devinthrash 3 weeks ago
Chomssky fucking rules.
hawanja 3 weeks ago
@hawanja His ideas have ruled in places like Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
I heard Jefferson and Adam Smith were also feminists and cultural marxists. and everyone knows that Google and Microsoft are bigger tyrannies than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia ever were. and African countries score the highest on economic freedom, and that is why they are doing so poorly economically = too much capitalism
haydenslaymaker 3 weeks ago
@haydenslaymaker You couldn't be more wrong there.
Just go check some economic freedom index chart.
It's pretty clear that the more capitalist countries in terms of economic freedom are the ones generally doing better, as the more repressed economies are the biggest miseries of the planet. Not the opposite as you said.
MrYakkker 3 weeks ago
@MrYakkker
I would oppose myself to this because it's a false dichotomy. The best years of capitalism were 1945-1973 within which governmental intervention was very popular in all advanced countries. It's also the period in which human rights gained the most, in which the average citizen earned the most, in which there was actually a Welfare State...
The point is: some regulations are good, others aren't; sometimes spending is good, sometimes not.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@MrYakkker
I'd gladly pick the US if you want, where the richest people were taxed at over 90% in the 50's; or how both programs performed in dealing with the crisis in '29-33 and the Depression which followed: all countries tried not to spend, banks got bankrupted and we lost a decade until WWII; or how when Keynes proposed this idea, his own country had more debt (something around 180-200% of its GDP) than the US has, all proportions kept.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@MrYakkker
So, apparently we can manage more taxes, more regulations, more social programs and we can afford a fiscal stimulus which would work. And, to tell you, some of the biggest miseries of the planet are a the direct result of headless liberalization the IMF supported in the 90's.
Hence, no: it's not true that governmental intervention is always worst than markets. Depends on the conditions and on the intervention specifically.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing The IMF is government. It was founded by governments. The ONLY legitimate purpose of government is to secure and protect Individual Liberty and Private Property. It should only tax to the extent necessary to do the aforementioned. If that's all governments did, we would live prosperously and have innovation, which is what happened in the West, even as governments kept getting more onerous.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
To protect individual liberty, they should do more than what you say, although the structure of such government could be different from what we see and more direct in many ways. If you protect freedom for anything, you realize one statement is always observable: great power shall never be left in the hands of too few.
This comes back to saying that any form of coercion must be justified and that includes wage labor. There is only one way to justify it, do you know which it is?
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing Ur words: "To protect individual liberty, they should do more than what you say..." I said, government should also protect Private Property Rights. What else do u think they should b doing? And what is this B/S term u and Chomsky use: "Wage Labor?" What! Do you think paying wages in return for labor is evil? The alternative is called slavery.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
It's very simple: if a relation of authority is instituted, through whatever process you may think of it, it is legitimate only if it is to the greater benefits of those who are led. To the extent that we concerned with freedom, I doubt current economic conditions will ever be justifiable. And the argument here goes that you have to be blind to think having the choice between being a tool or starving is freedom... it's a very pale imitation.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing U people on the Left never make any sense. What the 'F' does this mean: "To the extent that we concerned with freedom, I doubt current economic conditions will ever be justifiable." Those r ur words verbatim and they make no sense whatsoever!!! What the 'F' are u talking about?
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
People live under the despotism of the few, by the rules of the few, everyday. Their abilities are reduced to a mechanical exercise... if you bother about freedom for anything, you find this disgusting. Some people enjoy very nice positions, such as teaching or being a lawyer or else and they get to control a lot of what they do, but many others are only toys to whom they rent their existence at designated intervals through the week.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing Well here's the solution my friend: GET MORE SKILLS THAT CONSUMERS AND EMPLOYERS ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR!!!
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
You didn't understand the idea altogether. Wage labor is renting your services in exchange for money. It becomes a problem when you become more a tool than a person in working; when you execute yourself more mechanically and loose control over how you proceed.
Until you get involved in making choices in your work place, wage labor is, for all intent and purposes, the same thing as chattel slavery. I said it: all form of power, of authority, is illegitimate by assumption.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing 1st, what worker at Ford is FORCED to work there? (Interestingly, Ford workers are FORCED to join the UAW) 2nd, the owners of Ford have every right to order their production processes in any manner they deem fit, presumably to maximize profits. 3rd, the 4 elements of PRODUCTION, in order of importance are: 1)
Management 2) Capital 3) Resource 4) Labor. When a worker suggests a new process he is performing a management function. Finally, Labor is a COST not an asset.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
The only way to justify authority is for it to be used for the benefit of the people who are ruled. You can justify some power, you can justify this or that person earning more, but each time it has to be related to a gain you grant to those bellow: if not, it's exploitation.
The people who are clueless are libertarians in the US. You need to apply a double standard to not see that the argument you give against the government must also apply to workers and directions.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing Again, those who work at FORD do so VOLUNTARILY. FORD cannot FORCE anyone to work there. And, again, governments have granted unions the "legal" right to FORCE people to become members. Unions are legalized extortion rings, indeed, they are borderline criminal organizations given government protection, not because of any benefits they provide but because of the POLITICAL CLOUT they can wield. Government is FORCE, that's why it needs to be kept in check.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
I am not against inequalities: they are correct if the benefit they bring are justified. When I stop at a red light or when I wear a seat belt, I surrender my decision to a group of people to whom I am subordinated -- that's a vertical relationship. We're not equal on that claim, but it spares lives and pain. There, it's justified because it benefits those who are ruled. If the system is crafted the other way around, that abusing of your power and we call exploitation.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing Government can demand that you require everyone under 18 (or the age of consent or whatever you want to call it) traveling in ur car to wear a seatbelt. If ur older than the age of consent it's none of the government's business. BTW, anyone who doesn't wear a seatbelt while driving is a MORON.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
@vince33x
And, even if you despise it, it still is wrong to say that governmental intervention is inefficient all the time. It might appear to you as undesirable, but analytically, you cannot say the contrary: laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work.
Now, you can certainly say that maybe the current political structure isn't efficient in dealing with those problems and is often intrusive, but you can't just use the notion of freedom to justify what basically is a mistake.
KrugmanTheKing 3 weeks ago
@KrugmanTheKing None of what you've said here makes any sense.
vince33x 3 weeks ago
Does Chomsky realize that Corporations exist because of the state?
bulldogvillan 3 weeks ago
@bulldogvillan yes chomsky does realize this
EndWesternTyranny 3 weeks ago
Capitalism is based on a hierarchy from within a company, where a CEO is the leader of a system that works back down to the laborers of the company. This is the exact opposite of anarchy"
Capitalism is free market trading. No more, no less.
TheBuzzo01 3 weeks ago
@TheBuzzo01 the US isn't real "capitalism" and certainly isn't a free market
EndWesternTyranny 3 weeks ago
@EndWesternTyranny
Not you? Syndicalism is certainly anarho .lol.America has the right only for the rich,, and this capitalism..
TheBuzzo01 3 weeks ago
@TheBuzzo01 not me? is that supposed to mean something?
EndWesternTyranny 3 weeks ago
The word anarchy comes from archos, the Greek word for leader and an-, a prefix meaning no, the lack of or without. Therefore, anarchy means without leader. Because of this, anarchist belief indicates that no system- political, religious, or e