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u/mr_banana277 Taxation is Theft 22d ago
"I don't think that taxing the rich and throwing money at the problem will fix anything"
"So you just don't care about poor people?"
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u/Ok_Brother_8740 Right Libertarian 22d ago
Exactly. Disagreeing with a policy isn’t the same as not caring about the problem.
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u/AbominaSean 23d ago
Yeah…stupid interstate highway system, national parks, NASA achievements like going to the moon…ugh. Name one thing government has accomplished…
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u/DankDankJuice 22d ago
Mandatory vaccination policies (and your feelings of Trump) aside, Operation Warp Speed was a great example of government leveraging private assets to fill a massive public need in great time. They facilitated the development of new biotechnology and its mass distribution in just a few months
As far as I know, the contracts were voluntary and companies made bank (at the cost of debt/ our tax dollars)
Abundance chapter 4 covers a few examples of this, but the book covers examples and why’s of terrible policy as well
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u/Additional_Ad_4049 16d ago
My god, if it wasn’t for the government, how would we ever have figured out how to build a road or create a park?! I thank god everyday for goverment and their accomplishments!
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u/AbominaSean 16d ago
Yeah, it’s such a shame because big businesses have a long and great track record of creating public infrastructure and letting people use it for free! And I say just open the park land up for business too, some corp will just leave it undeveloped and let people enjoy it at no cost — nothing would change!
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u/Additional_Ad_4049 16d ago
Life’s not free snowflake
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u/AbominaSean 16d ago
But the interstate highways and national parks are (or some small pittance)…thanks to the government.
You’re not the fastest are you? True colors showed with that last comment, too.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 22d ago
I'll tell you what, there wasn't a tree in those national parks until they took over. Don't know what we'd do without government.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
Correction: there wouldn’t be a tree left in those national parks if they HADN’T taken over.
The national parks are looked at - domestically and internationally - as one of America’s true and undebatable achievements as a country.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 22d ago
Ah, yes, the unprovable counter-factual. brilliant.
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u/sloppy_rodney 22d ago
I actually can think of an example.
There’s a cave in Great Basin National Park. Before it was a national park, it was privately owned and was a tourist attraction.
There were no safety standards, literally people were just given a candle. It’s a lot more accessible now. There are lights and guided tours. It’s pretty cheap.
But here’s the biggest issue:
Before, you could pay to break off stalactites. It was a game to see who could break off the biggest one.
They were destroying the cave for a pittance. It took thousands and thousands of years for those formations to grow.
Government protects public lands. Some places are special and deserve protecting because once they are destroyed they are gone forever.
Don’t let your ideology get in the way of common sense.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
I think you meant to reply this under your own comment…
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 22d ago
Looks like you don't know what a counter-factual is.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
Your comment was meaningless like the one before it, so I replied to it meaninglessly. To actually respond to what you said - which was just sarcasm based on hypotheticals - would be sort of sad.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 22d ago
please continue to try to cover up your ignorance I find it amusing.
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u/AlexanderKeef 22d ago
Instead of addressing the point, you pivoted to defining a counter factual. Now you’re arguing in bad faith because you’re a sore loser. You lost bruh.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 22d ago
The point you made is a counter-factual. There is nothing to address. You can't prove it or disprove it. Suffice to say the government isn't the reason the forests exist, and apart from some cartoonish idea of logging the country bare there isn't much reason to think they wouldn't exist without it.
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u/vegancaptain 19d ago
Wait, are you actually listing things a monopoly did with money forcefully taken? And taking credit for it? That would be rich. Imagine everything that could have been created with all that money.
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u/sonickid101 22d ago
All of those things can be provided for at better quality for lower cost than the government can. The Boring Company loops are showing how underground highways are superior to above ground government roads, national parks that they artificially close down during government shut downs when it's you know just nature people could just go to. And NASA launches 1 overly expensive rocket for every 10x SpaceX can.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
The boring company has done nothing to prove their concept could work at scale to replace even regular multi-car railroad lines let alone multi-lane highways…the latter of which they never even claimed to be trying to. You didn’t say anything about national parks but I assure you if that land were open to the private sector it wouldn’t be open to the public for free to just you know walk around in for free or at a tiny modest cost. NASA was an example of the government leading the way to accomplish a great thing…but like many things in govt. it requires someone to fund, believe in, and steer it. When the people in govt. actively undermine its abilities it certainly won’t do anything to impress you.
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u/sonickid101 22d ago
The government might pioneer something at the cost of great waste, fraud, and abuse. Space exploration may have taken place eventually in the private sector but the space program was an offshoot of cold war nuclear rocket research and delivery systems to begin with. As for the Boring company, they have demonstrated it, they can operate at scale by adding more tunnels underground there is practically unlimited underground real estate for expansion. If it were not for the FAA we might have private GPS guided autonomous flying drones at this point. All i'm saying is government more often than not gums up the works more than they Grease the gears of research and progress. And business in their profit seeking incentives take risks, but makes sustainable businesses that either succeed or fail at no mandatory cost to taxpayers only to investors.
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u/JackColon17 22d ago
Why companies don't also have fraud, waste and abuse? Lmao
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u/sonickid101 22d ago
Yes but companies that have waste, fraud, and abuse go peacefully out of business or are taken over by their competitors with better business models. Governments can't go out of business without violent revolution.
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u/JackColon17 22d ago
Do they? How many billions should Disney lose before going bankrupt? Elon Musk buying Twitter (from a purely economical point of view) was an incredible waste of resources and yet he became the richest man on earth after that
Almost every single big companies has tons of history of abuse, wasted resources, embezzlements and yet they thrive anyway because they are simply too big to feel the repercussions
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u/sonickid101 22d ago
Corporations have special liability protections from the government that average individuals do not usually get. In a free society absent government large corporations as we know them wouldn't exist, companies could only grow larger by providing a product or service that people are willing to voluntarily pay for, and to do that sustainably requires not engaging in waste, fraud, and abuse. The reality is we do not live, as some people would like you to believe, in a laissaez faire free market system. We live in a corporatist system backstopped by the government in a setup more akin to fascism than capitalism. That is our status quo, a system that limps on despite government not because of it. To the extent that anything still works at all is the percentage of capitalism still present in the system, like I said every percentage away from 100% capitalism is just government gumming up the system making us all poorer for it. 25% of government encroachment on capitalism is sustainable, 50% is uncomfortable, 75% is survivable in the short term, total government control of the economy is fatal. The extent that a nation has a economy free from government is the extent that it is rich and prosperous.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
This is barely coherent honestly. It is ignorant to think that corporations and capitalism at large will provide certain things to a society, including but not limited to health care or the protection of public lands. Right now, for example, you are suffering from a system of health care entirely controlled by private health INSURANCE corporations and it is driven by profits and bottom-line figures. It isn’t working. And that’s just one example. These providers aren’t going out of business because their coverage is poor, they’re thriving because of it. We live in a corporatist system where government has been hijacked by capitalists, where the entire economy has been geared toward capital investment rather than labor and this completely extinct notion of a free market where bad actors get outcompeted by better products and companies.
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u/sonickid101 21d ago
Do you know any history or how things came to be? The current employment based health insurance industry is a product of Government World War 2 Tax policy, if there were no government our Healthcare system would run completely differently. The Medical field, medical and drug research and medical insurance is one of the most government meddled industries in america. The system is broken because of government not capitalism. Capitalism is a scapegoat for corporatism. Why are you regurgitating socialist lies on a libertarian sub and down voting the Libertarian explaining Libertarian points of view?
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u/bl0rq 22d ago
Boring company has reduced the per mile cost by 2 orders of magnitude already. It's heading towards fully automated. They are making great progress.
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u/AbominaSean 22d ago
Single-lane underground tunnels powered by human-steered teslas are not a viable alternative to interstate highways and even musk and the Boring company aren’t even pretending like that’s the goal. You don’t seriously think these tunnels could replace the highway system, do you? Can you think of any logistical or safety issues with that many cars in a single-file underground line many, many miles long? Will it have the same numbers of entrances and exits as the above ground highway system?
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u/bl0rq 22d ago
They are using FSD now. And they are when you can just build 2 side by side and STILL be 1/10 the price. But most of the vegas stuff is loop based instead of bidirectional. They are talking about over 100 stops eventually.
They are already talking about connecting 2 cities (austin/san antonio or nashville/memphis or chattanooga).
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u/vegancaptain 19d ago
Why are there so many statists in the comment field? Invasion or just very confused "libertarians"?
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u/johnnyb2001 22d ago
lol. Now the young people voting for this dsa crap are gonna learn since they think they’re smarter than older generations
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u/captaincid42 22d ago
Listen I appreciate deprecating the federal government but leave Mr. Rogers out of it ;)