crazy-pages: dragonesseclectic: fierceawakening: fierceawakening: conservativemalarkey: fierceawaken
crazy-pages:dragonesseclectic:fierceawakening:fierceawakening:conservativemalarkey:fierceawakening:cocainesocialist:because what is freedom if it’s not getting fired from your job for doing something legal on your own time? what better indicator that right-libertarian ‘liberty’ is nothing but the freedom of bosses to control the lives of workers. what… how… why…K, so…. this isn’t actually a hypocritical position. Or at least not “mind-bendingly bzuh?!” levels of hypocritical. Libertarians tend to believe - hell, I do still believe- that democratic government is a big blunt instrument. The government is not good at finesse, nuance, or edge cases. The government is good at applying broad rules to large numbers of people and enforcing those rules on large numbers of people; it’s not good at helping people on an individual level. (Applying even the broadest rules to individual people’s cases requires an entire group of specially trained professionals, for example.) Libertarians also believe that the government is often not accountable to anything but more government. In a democratic government, technically, the government is accountable to the people, but in practice what that often means is that individual politicians are accountable to public opinion and the machinery of the government keeps doing what it’s been doing regardless of what people think. The People ™ most often do have a say at the lawmaking phase- you can convince a lawmaker that no, really, you want them to pass such-and-such law- but when it comes to day-to-day law enforcement or government bureaucracy, your average citizen can’t do shit to change things, and change has to come from the top down. Finally, libertarians often believe that the purpose of the government is to be the one body that’s allowed to use force to enforce social rules. In a civilized society, you can’t let everyone run around with a gun shooting anyone who looks at them funny. At the same time, though, there are bad fucking people in the world, and once you get out of the range of immediate moment-to-moment self-defense, you need some way to deal with them. So, governments exist to arbitrate disputes, punish the guilty, and keep their citizens from getting overpowered by rival countries or criminal gangs. (There are libertarians who very much do not believe this, don’t get me wrong, but most mainstream libertarians are not anarcho-capitalists. Most mainstream libertarians are not on team “Corporations Can And Should Have Their Own Private Army.” And the Cato Foundation, last time I checked, was pretty mainstream.) So if:the government is the only entity that can or should use violence to solve problems…the government, in its day to day operations, is often not accountable to its citizens without major reforms… the government is a blunt instrument, such that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail… then if you want to make something a law, you’d better make goddamn sure that it’s worth someone dying. Because any law is going to be enforced by violence, and violence has a nasty tendency to escalate. Sure, “you can’t sell cigarettes without a permit and without paying taxes” is a reasonable law… but is it worth someone getting choked to death because the cops think they mouthed off? Is saying “you can’t produce [art most people find repugnant]” worth someone dying? Is saying “you can’t own a big, aggressive dog” worth someone dying? What about “you can’t own a gun?” Everyone is gonna draw the line somewhere differently. Libertarians tend to draw it at “if you wouldn’t kill someone for it, it shouldn’t be the law; if it’s something you feel strongly about, make it a contractual condition with the people you live with/rent to/do business with that you will/will not support XYZ”. The idea is that people should be trusted to govern themselves, and The Government ™ should mostly be there for when they can’t or won’t.So from this standpoint (which is… deeply flawed, but not fractally wrong)… think about it. Yeah, it shouldn’t be against the law for someone to smoke weed, because it’s not hurting anyone and any punishment you could give would be wildly disproportionate to the crime. …But it also shouldn’t be against the law to keep people from making this kind of stipulation in an employment contract, because that’s denying people the right to govern themselves and potentially getting people killed for trying. There is a lot wrong with right-libertarianism, but it’s a coherent system of political thought. It’s not just “we like weed and hate poor people lol”. I think you might have missed what I was baffled by?I’m confused by the amount of power the boss has in this example. If weed is legal for recreational use, then firing your employee for using it during off hours is firing them for legal conduct they choose to engage in outside of work. Why should you be able to do that, if it’s not impacting work performance somehow?It’s like finding out I went to TFCon on my vacation, not liking Transformers fans, and telling me to clean out my desk.Maybe a world in which bosses can do that at Will is better than one where they can’t. But I want a bit more explanation of why, in that case.Taking the power from the government and giving it to the boss in this way… well, it’s hard for me to see a difference. Because a boss is more localized than a bureaucrat, but they seem to hold similar amounts of power in this example. It’s like finding out I went to TFCon on my vacation, not liking Transformers fans, and telling me to clean out my desk.You are aware they can do that in At-Will employment states? (which is most of them in the U.S.) In fact, so-called “Christian” employers are notorious for either not hiring or firing employees who turn out to be Not (the Right Kind of) Christian. Ditto conservative small business owners and employees with “liberal” politics, or Wal-Mart and anyone pro-union.Not saying it’s right (it’s not), but it is an actual thing, not a hypothetical.If nothing else, this was an interesting perspective on some ideal of libertarian thought. Not sure how correct it is, my experience talking to (admittedly college-age) libertarians is that their views are basically “I think that I, personally, am a good person who makes good decisions and the world would be better off if I was left alone to do whatever I want” and “I recognize that rules should not be lifted on a case-by-case basis for me specifically” but then jumping through the necessary cognitive hoops to construct a belief system in which they get do whatever they want anyway rather than acknowledging that maybe totally unrestricted personal freedoms is kind of incompatible with living in a society where other people matter. But then in practice this ends up running into conflict wherever, you know, two people want to do different things. Which is the kind of thing social structures are meant to mediate, but a philosophy of “everything will be fine if I, personally, make all decisions regarding my life” doesn’t really handle well. Because this type of thinking tends to come from a very privileged place where there’s no expectation of dealing with large hostile structures of power you can’t handle on your own, libertarians tend to operate on the assumption (or at least the wish) that they will be the person on top of any given hypothetical power differential. So when presented with situations like this where the choice is “let person A do what they want” and “let person B do what they want”, they don’t really make decisions based off of principle, but rather based off of which side they identify with more (i.e has more power and is the person they want to be). Actually wait, no. I thought on this a bit more and @conservativemalarkey’s spiel is not a useful insight into how libertarianism operates. How libertarians justify their views maybe. But if that actually were the ideological justification that libertarianism operates on, I would expect a fair chunk of the United States’ black community to have enthusiastically latched onto it. I mean, a message entirely about limiting state sanctioned violence over frivolous laws? Someone would sign up for that. But 94% of libertarians in the US are white, and 0% of black Americans associate themselves with the libertarian party, with only 6% even saying they have libertarian leanings. And that right there is reeeaaaaallly big red flag that libertarianism in the US does not actually act based on the principle of minimizing state violence. -- source link
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