Dear Libertarians,
The wealthiest country in the world is now the epicenter of a pandemic that originated elsewhere. A relatively hands-off federal response has given the free market free rein to facilitate situations like states entering into bidding wars with one another for medical supplies. Whether or not you support price gouging, bidding wars, or wage inflation for healthcare workers on the front lines is irrelevant if we're failing to make an adequate response to this threat. Right now, I can look and see that my county has tested 800 people out of 2 million residents. That's simply not acceptable.
People are willing to pay for tests! Perhaps tens of millions of Americans would pay to test themselves semi-regularly. Where are the tests? Who are the people preventing the market from responding to this situation in a way that prevents millions of deaths? Other countries managed to produce enough tests to track the virus spreading because of the big governments you warned us about.
Are we... not free market enough for you, yet? That might be what you tell yourself. "Yes, it's because we're not fully anarcho-crypto yet, too many laws preventing us from a true free market response to covid-19". OK! There is probably nothing that will ever convince you that government may have some proper place in keeping society on the rails. This would have been it.
It's actually quite radical that you cheer along any process that undermines faith in government institutions. It baffles me that you enjoy doing so, but most libertarians cannot point me to a good model showing how society should gradually transition away from our current gov't and economic systems, A previous model was electing Trump. Good fucking job!
Society's pretty fragile. Covid-19 has shown us such, in bold letters, with a billion exclamation points. I think you're going to have a bad time explaining how small government is actually doing a great job. Wow, it sounds Trumpian already.
Objectively, address why we are failing to respond as well to covid-19 as other developed countries who instated aggressive federal policy.
Good luck,
- am_U
You know what? I'll play. Because it's illustrative and gets more to the core problem here. Jared Dillian pointed out on Twitter that it isn't capitalism if the failures aren't allowed to go bankrupt. Pithy. But here's Matt Levine in Bloomberg: The LIBERTARIAN viewpoint is that businesses should choose their risk level, customers should choose their risk level and the government should stay the fuck out of it. The CAPITALIST argument is that the most successful businesses will have amassed a stockpile of money and supplies to ride this out because they have demonstrated themselves to be the most adroit at navigating unforseen crises. The problem here is that the invisible hand of the marketplace isn't being permitted to shake the tree enough. Unfortunately we've seen what libertarian economies do during pandemics. And I mean, if you ask Barron's, they'll point out that the Black Death of 1349 was the second worst economic shock in 800 years of history after the prorogation of parliament in 1629). So really, a third of the population dying did less damage than eliminating the mechanism by which taxes could be raised for ten years. Now that's an anti-libertarian argument! But the real problem here isn't capitalism, isn't socialism, isn't libertarianism, isn't AOCism or whatever, it's corruption. And the longer I spend looking at this stuff, the more I'm coming around to the idea that it isn't so much the rules that you follow, it's whether or not you follow them. I mean, the "free market" can't even compete if FEMA is just gonna seize ventilators: I don't think society is particularly fragile. The opposite in fact. I think society has pretended that things are normal and unchanged for the sake of its own mental health while the oligarchs and the sociopaths take over. I mean what if I told you a standing US Senator took the advice of a classified briefing and dumped all her travel stock while publicly proclaiming for a month that nobody had anything to do with it? That's Michael Bay shit right there. Dr. Evil crap. But here in The Darkest Timeline not only did she do it at least twice, she did it while being married to the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and she isn't even the only one. You can't really bitch about one person's philosophy over the other if the rules we all agreed to aren't being followed.The ordinary reaction, for a company that doesn’t make stuff or earn any money, is to go out of business and lay off all of its workers, but it is pretty widely recognized that that would not be a good reaction, for most businesses, right now. Your favorite local restaurant’s revenue has not gone to zero because its food was bad, or because it failed to innovate to keep up with changing tastes or whatever. Its revenue has gone to zero because a plague has caused governments everywhere to prohibit eating in restaurants, we hope temporarily.
I think I have to declare a mistrial, and admit that the Trump administration itself is an argument for libertarianism. Speaking of Ms. Trials, did you watch season 5 of the Bluths? I made it through once, and thought it was OK, but I've been re-watching it, and I now adore it. It's not S1 - S3, but it's a hella lot better than S4. Is it true that Ellen kept Portia from having an even remotely dependable filming schedule? I cried watching MTV's Catfish a few nights ago. Thanks, covid.
The Trump administration is an argument for decentralization. Orson Scott Card is an asshole who is well past his prime. However, back before he was the asshole right-wing opinionator of the Internet he was a sci fi writer and one of his best books is called Songmaster. Songmaster is basically this really weird sadomasochistic gay romance in an extremely bizarre Mormon way but buried in there are a number of insights about power. The most formidable, the one that really hooked 12-year-old me, was the observation that the Romans didn't invent nothing they invented bureaucracy such that vestiges of the Roman Empire continued to run Europe into the 1850s despite the fact that Vespasian was almost two millennia dead. The argument is that if you decentralize everything, and give everyone a tiny little piece of government, you have to destroy all the tiny pieces of government before you have no government. Kill the king and you have a revolution; kill the king when you have a dozen ministers, four dozen footmen, three hundred barons, eleven thousand mayors and twenty thousand magistrates and all you have is a state funeral. I made it through Season 4. It was a trial. The way that show is arranged now is you get one principal on set at any given time so that only one principal gets paid for any episode and you spread out the episodes so that nobody has a lot of actual screen time so that you keep your guild commitments to a minimum. Having one Bluth on screen for the whole episode costs half as much as one Bluth tallking face-to-face to another Bluth for two words. Having one Bluth on screen for the whole episode costs 10% as much as having ten Bluths in a room shouting "Surprise!" and then leaving immediately. Meanwhile everyone working on it is getting their union hours so their health insurance continues, but your rate is now 20% of what it was when you were shooting for fox because Netflix is "new media." Been there, done that, seen the paystubs for Arrested Development. Hollywood should die.
You know, I've never tried. The movies? I kinda like the movies. I especially enjoy how insanely fucking shrill Julia Roberts plays The Pelican Brief - it's like she's got emphysema the whole fucking movie. Sol Stein rips John Grisham a new one in Stein on Writing, though. Probably because when he wrote it Da Vinci Code hadn't been.
Me vs. me continues: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/04/cdc-coronavirus-blood-tests-165116 Yeah so I can’t invest in the CDC, but I would! Take my money, plzzzzzz. This entire debate is actually really complicated. Omg who knew?! I was just gonna address problems in a response to atRealDon’tfuckingcareafterthat on twibstee
No, you might not understand, 'ski? Honestly: I'm not looking for affirmation. Well wait it always feels great, but no. I want people to tell me how I'm wrong. Pick my shit apart! Because I've been trying to do that to myself VERY frequently over the last month, and it ain't easy anymore. Straight up. I'm exhausted. I've built environments for my outlets, though. Three! Hahah, holy hell, I just realized, three. Lots of hardware and software. In a month! Gon' be gud, possibly. And that's just a few reasons whyI'mspoiled af Edit: and you won't believe the stories my wife could tell you when she gets even a little tipsy. Remember this for IRL or videochats
Can't argue with you. I've been thinking for weeks now that the current situation has really monkeywrenched conservative/libertarian arguments in favor of small government and free market capitalism. I've ALWAYS thought that libertarianism of all stripes has only ever come off as appealing in times of plenty. Which of course is self-defeating, since one of the points of modern liberal democratic government is to provide a safeguard against instability. Come to think of it, that's just about any government. And a government small enough to drown in a bathtub may look good as long as the boom times are keeping cash in your pocket, but as soon as an uncontrollable calamity hits and you realize you don't have the funds or the institutions in place to organize a collective, central response and states start to look like independent fiefdoms and local governments have to bid against each other and the federal government and private actors and extra-national entities for supplies and there aren't enough tests around to properly contain the spread of a deadly disease because the government couldn't or wouldn't get their shit together in time and now there is no standardized test but a balkanized system of six or seven tests all with their own flaws and wait times and people are dying like crazy... yeah. Maybe we should have a stronger federal government. In case something like that happens. Fun anecdote. Last week we started a new policy at work. We're given one surgical face mask to use for the whole day; at the end of the day we drop our used mask into a box so it can be sterilized and recycled. We're now on the second cycle of masks. You can see smudges on some of them from the makeup of whoever wore them before. I have to take it on faith that they're actually clean. But the elastic on the ear bands? Already giving out. And the metal that shapes to the contour of your face is weirdly flimsy, so the masks hang loose now. And everybody is just glad that we haven't yet resorted to bandannas. Why does capitalism feel so much like one big Soviet workaround right now? At a fundamental, Lockian level, the point of modern liberal democratic government is to address the externalities produced by capitalism. Collective security? Externality. Consumption or national resources? Externality. Rampant inequality? Externality. But shortsightedness is an externality as well. Maybe the biggest, least-addressed of a free market system. And unfortunately, shortsightedness feeds itself until we as a society convince ourselves that government isn't useful. And then when we're reminded again of the whole point, it's too late, and we are forced to eat each other to make it through the winter. That said, I'd be interested to hear the stance of those here who are dyed-in-the-wool libertarians or conservatives. I know there are a few kicking around, and like you, am_Unition, I really want to understand the counterpoint.