SC's Libertarian Candidate for US Senate Kasie Whitener: "What about the billionaires?"
Posted by 3369fc810ac9@reddit | Libertarian | View on Reddit | 19 comments
PercentageUnited2324@reddit
these "billionaires" are only so rich because of the government. their wealth was obtained due to government interference and not valid. corporations use the government to enrich themselves with other's money. Libertarians should agree that money illegally taken should be given back to its rightful owner.
3369fc810ac9@reddit (OP)
Yes, her point is that we should turn off the gov't hose through which they're enriching themselves.
PercentageUnited2324@reddit
agreed! turn off the hose and take back what was stolen
bjarneh@reddit
How can anyone argue that the competition between America's fast food chains, had led to improved "quality". Was quality of food in American restaurants ever worse than it is now?
You could just as well say that lack of government regulation (due to corporate funding of candidates extremely friendly to large corporations, i.e. corruption) has made it possible for small cartels to basically sell garbage disguised as food, making almost half the country obese…
SomeDude249@reddit
The quality of fast food was probably worse before the rise of "better" fast food such as chick-fil-a, in and out, chipotle etc.
At least compared to what we had in the 90s and early 00s.
Maybe its just where I live, but stuff like chipotle is objectively better than taco bell.
None of it is high quality, obviously.
SARS2KilledEpstein@reddit
The fact a comment advocating this is the top comment on /r/Libertarian is proof this sub rarely demonstrates actual libertarian values.
bjarneh@reddit
I'm not trying to advocate anything. I'm just saying perhaps his example of a product that had improved in quality due to competition was extremely odd, even to the point where you could reverse his entire argument (as I did), and people in r/Libertarian actually upvoted it.
Deep fried chlorine bleached bone slush of chicken is perhaps not what I would choose as an example of a great product.
Isaybased@reddit
I think regulating food safety and quality should be one of those exception to the rule things.
Chrisc46@reddit
Government is unnecessary for market regulation.
Isaybased@reddit
Enjoy eating your rats in ground beef and rat shit in food.
SadTumbleweed1567@reddit
Genuine competition can lead to better outcomes, but the market has to be competitive. If a market is imperfect, you get market failures.
The other point is that markets don't necessarily lead to ideal outcomes. An apathetic consumer will simply accept low quality products or services, particularly when its offered at a lower price.
As for regulation, I think it depends what regulation. I think a libertarians on the classical liberal side can recognize that monopolies and cartels are harmful to liberty. The question then becomes so monopolies and cartels have a right to exist to the economic detriment of everybody else or does the government have the prerogative to enforce a free market.
As to the claim that fast food companies are cartels, I have no evidence to substantiate that claim. I think it's more likely that fast food companies have seen that the market is willing to bear higher prices for lower quality goods.
Alchoholocaustic@reddit
This article confuses upward mobility with state tax revenue. The economy isn't broken because the rich don't pay enough taxes. It's broken because wealth begets wealth, and those without can work 50 hour weeks and not make enough to survive. It's like joining a game of monopoly after turn 10. Nothing to do with taxes.
LinuxMaster9@reddit
It's broken because the State and Federal governments squander the taxes they collect.
SomeDude249@reddit
And then print WAY more on top of that.
Heavy-Bell-2035@reddit
Yet more BS from 'libertarians' that comes across as defending the status quo.
Yes, the rich nominally pay more in taxes, the effective tax rate they pay relative to other US citizens is smaller, deal with it already. There are two ways of looking at this issue and they're both irrelevant, but they're also both true and it just makes libertarians look like idiots when they deny reality.
More importantly, in this economy and the reality in which we actually live it's arguable whether or not billionaires create value on net. They certainly create some value, however big business is inexorably intertwined with big government these days, at the local, state, and federal levels. You don't get super rich just by satisfying customers in the real world, every single business has lobbyists pushing for special favors, barriers to entry to de facto cartelize their industries, import and/or export quotas and other crony deals, handouts, and bailouts. But yet again 'libertarians' want to pretend we live in a ceteris paribus free market fantasy world that doesn't actually exist and ignore all that and pretend these people would be angels absent the government, as if they didn't actively seek these advantages.
You can't pretend the 'billionaires' are blameless in all this because they actively lobby for all of it. The problem isn't the spending or the tax code, the problem is human nature and the fact that a plurality of people think it's okay to steal rather than earn, and there are just as many billionaires in that group, perhaps more, as there are street level thieves. The business leaders that are alive and thriving today in this economy are not free market champions, they're ethics and morals resistant bacteria that thrive in an environment of corruption and graft. If we were to magically move to pure free markets tomorrow, even just a Randian night watchman state, the vast majority of businesses in existence right now would be out of business in under a year. They have no clue what it's like to actually compete for customers or employees without massive government subsidies and protections, and free money being printed and poured into their wallets on a continuous basis.
Libertarians have to stop appealing to this ceteris paribus fantasy world that's never existed and deal with the real world. In that real world people only experience the economy in two ways: buying and selling. When they go out and buy they see prices going through the roof and businesses reporting record profits while firing people left and right. They see housing prices in the stratosphere and no realistic way to afford one without their parents dying or going into hock for the rest of their lives. When they go to sell the majority of them are selling their labor, and they see the real prices they can charge going through the floor, their buying power turning to crap, and getting a job becoming exponentially harder, and when you tell them the guy who made them go through 12 rounds of interviews for a low-ball salary offer and who just threatened to throw their kid into a woodchipper if they didn't work 80 hour weeks is somehow the 'engine of the economy,' and that he's just being such an a-hole because there are too many government rules for him to follow, they instinctively know you're full of crap. The real explanation is that guy wouldn't be successful in a free market, but in this market in the real world we live in, he is, and he's in charge of people's livelihoods and accountable to nobody because his business is 'too big to fail,' so when he screws up he just gets a handout and fires half his staff, pays himself a bonus and then complains about no one wanting to work anymore.
The government is not the problem, people who steal rather than earn are the problem, the government is just one means of doing so, and in the billionaire class there exist few to zero people who got that rich without 'partnering' with the government to steal at least some of it. Stop defending these people, they are not John Galt. You're lucky if they're as benign as a James Taggart. The destructive nature of welfare is real, but in the US for the last century it's been going to businesses, not individuals. We have an economy of ossified zombie companies that should be dead or which should have changed dramatically by now, instead they've cemented themselves and the system that favors them into place to stop markets from working, and again they are not blameless in this, and if libertarians want to start getting people to take them seriously they can't keep talking out of both sides of their mouths. They'll spend hours telling you how the crony class is robbing you, how The Fed is destroying your wages and savings, creating the business cycle and making employment harder to find and hold, but the second someone criticizes a businessman or god forbid a self proclaimed entrepreneur. they immediately start defending the very people about who they just spent hours outlining how they steal from everyone.
3369fc810ac9@reddit (OP)
I mean, libertarians want to end all those special favors and lobbying by shrinking the gov't. To make it so small, it has no favors for sale. You've built a strawman and written extensively about slaying it. I agree 100% with you. And the old two parties built all those favors, handouts, deals, cronyism. Libertarians want to end them.
Her piece literally says that they're gaming the procurement system, and wants to end that.
Heavy-Bell-2035@reddit
I agree, but they need to make that clear by not pretending they don't exist anytime the discussion turns to 'billionaires.'
Her piece also says billionaires create value, in the real world that's at least arguable as to how much they create vs how much of their wealth is stolen, and that's the problem. In some perect free market ceteris paribus fantasy world you only get rich by creating value, in the real world you can get rich by creating value or just by stealing. I'd also say it's highly unlikely that in the real world you can get super rich without stealing a good portion of it because the state is so intertwined with and outright directly managing many industry markets.
So, the typical libertarian screed goes from decrying how wealth is destroyed and stolen via the state to defending and even diefying the people who are engaging in that desctruction and theft if they're ostensibly in 'the private sector,' and it leaves the lay reader justifiably confused. On the one hand they're being told that they're being stolen from, their wages and savings are getting decimated, their job opoportunities killed, and these claims beg the questions, destroyed by who, and stolen by who? It is not solely the state, it's the state and its cronies in the private sector.
By conflating reality with their ceteris paribus fantasy world of pure free markets libertarians always ending up lionizing and diefying the very people they accuse of being a bunch of thieving cronies who live off of theft. In the same essay they're the people lobbying for theft and cartelization of markets for their own enrichment at everyone else's expense, and the only people who will set the world free by 'creating value,' as if their desire to steal rather than earn isn't a part of the overall problem.
If you're a libertarian or an ancap you've already bought into the theory, you make the distinction in your head automatically between how value is created and wealth is earned in a free market vs a managed one. Regular people don't do that, all they see is libertarians calling people thieves and cronies and saviors and value creators in virtually the same sentences, and it makes no sense to regular people nor should it make any sense to libertarians either at least from a rhetorical point of view, but also in theory, because the 'billionaires' who thrive in this economy, the real economy, are not the mystical producers of a Rand novel. They are the very people begging for the system to be corrupted and manipulated for their benefit.
Look at it this way, if two people rob you, Person A holds the gun and Person B begs and pleads for A to rob you, they're both the problem. Libertarian essayists would have us believe only Person A is the problem and that somehow B would be a perfectly ethical and moral human being if A would just not enable him, but it's B begging for the robberies to continue. Then they write essays expounding on how B would behave absent A enabling him, but all people see in the real world is Be begging for them to be robbed, benefiting from them being robbed, and no one in their right mind would or should think B would all of a sudden turn into a saint just because A wasn't there anymore, no matter how many essays get written on the incentive structure B finds himself in.
B helped build this world, B asked for and benefited from the past robberies, B continues to ask for and benefit from current robberies, and 'libertarians' write their rhetoric assuming a difference between how B behaves now and how he would behave in a ceteris paribus world that's never existed, routinely conflates the two as one in the same pieces, and all the regular people of the world see are A and B robbing them blind.
LemmeGetDatOC@reddit
What if Bill Gates only funded vaccine research so he could keep more people alive so he could sell more copies of windows.
redpandaeater@reddit
Honestly I swear the excuses the left goes after the rich for way too closely mirrors NSDAP's excuses to target Jews. I suppose the main difference is that billionaires do actually have wealth, although it's intangible and certainly not liquid, whereas Jews did not in fact have secret troves of stolen wealth. Either way it makes me sick how Democrats seem to love making them scapegoats while simultaneously benefiting from the technological advancements of Silicon Valley.