Libertarians . . . .. . . siiiiiggggghhhh . . . . . [View all]

[HughBeaumont]

Topic on FB: Why does it always have to be about screwing the poor/working/middle class? How the hell can people adopt such a selfish and counterproductive ideology and have the unmitigated gall to suggest they're "HELPING the poor/working/middle by making them more self reliant"?? It's HERD culling. It's granny-starving. It's the moral equivalent of sending the "undesireables" out on an ice floe.

Libertarian: When it's done while pointing a gun, it's neither moral nor help, it's theft. You are confused in your morality.

Me: See: The Gilded Age for how well a voluntary society with no social services and no taxes whatsoever worked.

Libertarian: You mean the era when millions upon millions of people fled their European socialist/neomercantilist corporate state homelands in search of freedom here? When families took care of each other? You mean a time when I didn't have to deny my dying father a request because I didn't have the money since your all knowing, all caring and "benevolent" government took that money from me, under threat of incarceration and with the force of a gun, to pay for some retiree in Florida who has a million dollar portfolio AND collects social security? Tell me again how you are so morally superior? That stealing from the unwilling, using the coercive force of a gun, is some how chaste, blameless and laudable? Just because you vote to steal from someone doesn't make it right. Again, your are confused in your morality. Helping the poor is a noble aspiration for an individual. Helping the poor by pointing a gun at someone else and forcing them to do it is not, even if the majority voted yes.

Me: Not even remotely. I'm talking about the era where industrialists had workers shot to death for protesting unfair working conditions and bragged about doing so. And let's talk about those amazing working conditions in this great country in the turn of the century, shall we? Children worked alongside adults and those bright-eyed foreigners for next to nothing at the expense of their education in grossly unsafe factories where their limbs were at risk, as were their lungs, hearing, nervous systems and eyesight. Marshall Field's income was calculated to be around $600 an hour (awesome even by today's standards, let alone the 1880s) while his shopgirls earned $3 a week. Health-hazard-ridden steel mills belching poisonous gasses, industrial vapors polluting cities to night-black sooty skies, sweatshops that were no better than slavery when it came to long hours, unsafe conditions and abusive bosses, mines that could cave in and give you black lung disease, factories that got to 110 degrees regularly, unprotected powershafts that maimed workers' fingers, absolutely no protection, insurance or courts siding with the worker . . . YEAH, America was just one hunky-dory WORLD of opportunity and plenty!!!

And that's just work in the city. I could go on for paragraphs on how horrid, lonely, mind-numbing and fruitless farm/rural life was.

I'm talking an era where food was in such poor diseased condition because no livestock inspection was deemed necessary. Want to talk about how the markets regularly displayed raw animals exposed to polluted air for days and how the fruit wasn't fit for human consumption? Got Milk? You also got Plaster of Paris, molasses and chalk with that. What about them over-the-counter pharmeceuticals that are now Schedule II controlled substances?

How about the complete lack of sanitation services? Garbage, sewage and filth piled up in the street and then trod upon by horses who also shat up the street wouldn't disturb your nice walk, would it? Could I talk about how unsafe any kind of transportation was back then? Drivers received, what, $12 a week for a 16 hour day . .. and their demand for a 12 hour day was deemed "communistic" by then-State Assemblyman Teddy Roosevelt. You think the beaches nowadays are bad? Try regularly swimming in sewage, sludge and animal carcasses.

Corporal punishment ran rampant in schools, schoolteachers were regularly ridiculed and assaulted, the policemen were nothing more than incompetent criminals, the industrialists presided over maiming, murder and death at a 485% profit margin, the local "governments" were nothing but centers of graft, "justice" was purchased then as it is purchased now . . . and dare I mention the bright spot for certain American citizens known as LYNCHING????

This is your idea of FREEDOM?? Maybe if you were Jay Gould or Edward Harriman, it was a utopia. How many people out of millions could be those guys?

This is the sort of nightmare you'd be dealing with if you had no central government and no taxation. Privatizing everything not nailed down is a joke of a notion because it assumes grand benevolence by a handful of people to service large scale issues in a nation and reality where absolutely NO evidence OF that benevolence, economic or social, exists. How big of a absolute selfish prick do you gotta be to complain about a 39% TMTR if you're worth 7-9 digits and know that it wouldn't make even DENT ONE in the way you live? Cui Bono?

I'm not really putting any sort of faith in any individual to save us, least of all the Very Wealthy Individual. Maybe you should read this article by the ultra-leftist Brookings Institute to see just how "charitable" your beloved wealthmongers are:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2007/03/18useconomics-easterbrook

GOD I'm sick of this crap.

I really AM sick of it. Multiply this by thousands upon thousands and this is honestly how people think . . . that taxation is "Theft by gunpoint". What childish, crybaby nonsense.