"Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts." - Clare Booth Luce
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A: Libertarians accept full responsibility for their own lives because they've never been able to count on anyone else for anything beyond the happy convergence of mutual self-interest. They realize that the nature of all relationships is transactionary, because they don’t have very much to offer and have received accordingly. Rather than adopting the libertarian worldview as an ideal state of affairs, they recognize the principles by which it operates as the hard facts
of life. Life isn’t fair and it will never be.
The sooner that people like Derek and you accept that, the sooner you can take positive action towards happiness in life by providing value for value. It's tragic that not everyone will be able to do this, but that's just how it is.
But you cling to this fatal conceit that you can change human nature. The world doesn't work that way, and we pay in blood and treasure until you learn that some people winning and some people losing is better than everyone being equally miserable.
Me: By a curious confusion, some critics have passed from the proposition that life is unfair to the other proposition that life must be unfair and that it is right and proper for life to be unfair.
We'd still be living in the Stone Age if everyone had this mentality.
"Humans are mortal, so there's no point trying to invent a new treatment for gangrene!"
"We will never know all there is to know, so there's no point trying to know more!"
It is not hard to accept full responsibility for your own life if your parents are rich enough to raise you comfortably and provide you with a world class education.
It is not hard to accept full responsibility for your own life if as an expatriate you get paid more than locals for doing less work.
And where the hell did equal misery come in?! Once again a false dichotomy is presented - if you're not libertarian you must be communist. The top 10% of the people getting 40% of the wealth is a much better state of affairs than the top 0.1% of the people getting 99% of the wealth.
I must note, though, that you seem to be talking about a different form of libertarianism. Instead of asserting that libertarianism is the way to go because it leads to desirable outcomes, you assert that libertarianism is the way to go because this is the way the world works.
Suffice to say that not everyone lives in a world devoid of faith, hope, charity/love, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. If you do, then that will be the true tragedy.
"Gross National Product measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories, and the safety of our streets. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion, nor our devotion to our country.
It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country, except those things that make us proud to be a part of it!"
B: Oh dear. Libertarian drivel. I've often wondered about this -- a lot
of my friends in college are libertarians, at least on an economic level. I get along great with them though. Their economic libertarianism is predicated on careful thought about what kind of govt policy would work in certain situations, whereas yours seems to be some kind of sweeping weltanschauung based on little more than your
conviction that inequality is inevitable and that any kind of redistributive and insurance-based govt policy will lead to communist dystopia. It seems that you have discovered a particularly strange, Ayn Rand-esque strain of libertarianism. I also find it strange that as an objectivist you appear to be very thin-skinned.
> And this characterization that links a libertarian outlook to success
> and good fortune. Maybe that's true for some, but it can work the other
> way as well. Libertarians accept full responsibility for their own lives
> because they've never been able to count on anyone else for anything
> beyond the happy convergence of mutual self-interest.
I think he was making the sociological point that libertarians tend to come from successful backgrounds and this might - surprise surprise - have contributed something to their views.
> Life isn't fair and it will never be. The sooner that people like Derek
> and you accept that, the sooner you can take positive action towards
> happiness in life by providing value for value. It's tragic that not
> everyone will be able to do this, but that's just how it is.
Again, you have not understood that everyone is not an ubermensch who can 'provide value for value' against all odds or whatever. Can a child with Downs provide value for value? What is this value you speak of anyway?
You seem also to forget that there is such a thing as the state, which is an extremely powerful organisation. It can tax, it can subsidise, it can provide public services, etc. Now if you want we can have an argument about whether such policies aimed at poverty reduction, or protectionism, or welfare provision, are always going to be inefficient -- or if you are to be believed, so inefficient that we will all be dragged down into the pit of economic hell. But you have not made this argument. You have merely and conveniently assumed it.
> But you cling to this fatal conceit that you can change human nature.
> The world doesn't work that way, and we pay in blood and treasure until
> you learn that some people winning and some people losing is better than
> everyone being equally miserable.
What blood? No really what blood?