Perhaps some facets of libertarianism are really fucked up?
Slavery and child porn are debated by libertarians because the only way to address both is centralized government. However, since most (though not all) libertarians are opposed to any central government, they end up justifying with “well if you want to sell yourself as a slave, why should anyone stop you?”.
But yeah, obviously it’s us that are aware of this who are the fucked up ones.
This is a minor innovative being overly puffed to get clicks.
The number came from “if every power plant in the world was 2% more efficient, this is how much CO2 we’d save”.
This will not be deployed globally and there’s a lot of 2%s to be found outside the condenser. Including 100% reduction by shutting down fossil fuel plants.
Not just as easy. There’s a lot of room for someone to say “this was actually just metaphor” or even “these are just stories to convey values”.
Take the tower of Babel, for example, we know it never happened. However, a more progressive Christian or Jewish tradition can use the story to talk about how sometimes cultural differences are simply surface level, we are all ultimately the same people. Mormons aren’t so lucky because the book of Mormon was pitched as a literal history and part of the book has literal refugees from the tower of Babel.
Unlike the Bible, we have the author of the religion who very well documented how literal everything is. We don’t even know who authored nearly any book in the Bible or their motivations.
I’m not arguing for a god, I’m an atheist exmo. However, there’s a pretty big difference between a bunch of old stories compiled together into a book and a book of fiction that the author went out of his way to claim was “the most correct book ever written”.
Left libertarians are still opposed to a strong central government which is a core issue with libertarianism.
In your ideal government, how would child porn or slavery be addressed? Let’s assume there’s a community that formed because they think it’s a good thing.
Pretty sure the libertarian stance on slavery is that it is wrong
Libertarians are VERY individualistic (shocker) which means no 2 libertarians define libertarianism the same way.
HOWEVER, you literally just have to search for “slavery libertarian” in the google box to find all sorts of fairly high profile libertarians arguing about how slavery can actually be a good thing that we should allow.
The evidence for it is overwhelming. We can watch it happen with bacteria. We can make it happen with food and fruit flies. We have fossil records of it happening with pretty much every species.
The only way you disbelieve it is you are taught a strawman version of it that Jesus can easily knock over.
We currently have a set of laws that’s like twenty feet long when you print it out, bind it, and put it on the shelves.
Turns out, life is complex. It’s either this or you end up having “rules for me but not for thee”.
But to this point, what would you have your central government in charge of? I’m certainly for axing parts of the central gov and expanding others (For example, I’d nationalize healthcare and drug production and abolish ICE and the DEA). That is, I’d push for a government more concerned with taking care of citizens and less concerned with penalizing inconsequential things like not being born here.
The reason for the miles long laws is because when you don’t have them, a capitalist society will work around them. A recent behind the bastards episode on the hawks nest tunnel ( podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/…/id1373812661?i=10… ) is a perfect example of how these sorts of regulations get created and grow.
Child porn and slavery are being produced in societies with central government right now and very little is being done about it.
There’s a difference between very little and nothing. In pretty much every libertarian model I know of, if a bunch of child porn producers band together to make the child porn production center, nothing would stop them. The socialist libertarian movement relies heavily on local community action, but that falls apart quickly when the community is, say, a cult.
Centralized gov doesn’t have 100% of a solution here, obviously, but it has a lot more power to act, criminalize, and/or force treatment.
In a stateless, moneyless society there would be no incentive for slave labor and I think that would largely/entirely disappear.
I disagree. So long as there’s a need for labor, slavery is going to be a possibility. Some jobs suck and in a moneyless society figuring out a way to incentivize someone to take that job will be tough.
There’s more than a few examples of slavery in non-capitalist societies.
There hasn’t been a lot of research into what causes pedophilia or how to treat it in a way that would reduce/eliminate people acting on those urges.
Yes, there has. Just because there’s not sure fire solutions to it doesn’t mean it’s not widely researched. Would it surprise you to learn that one of the best treatments for pedophilia is talk therapy? It doesn’t eliminate the urges but it lowers the risk of injuring a child. The problem is, like other mental illnesses, we don’t have cures only long term care to reduce harm.
Putting that aside, covering a philosophical flaw with “Maybe someday research will solve this” is sort of like saying for capitalism “Maybe someday replicators will solve this”.
Poverty is strongly linked to sexual violence of all kinds and the abolition of poverty would surely have a big part to play in the reduction of many things, including child sexual abuse. A society formed around the ideals of libertarian socialism present a real opportunity to end the cycle of abuse and that would certainly play a role in reducing child sexual exploitation.
A doesn’t follow B. There’s no evidence that libertarian socialism would eliminate poverty. And, in fact, I’d argue that while it may solve poverty in some regions it would exacerbate it in others. One of the benefits of a global economy is that we can take advantages of the growing season in one world region vs another. Libertarian socialism imagines a world of isolated islands which is entirely counter productive general efficiencies with the production of goods.
Think about it this way, You can grow oranges in California. You cannot grow oranges in Alaska. In a world where libertarian socialism has taken hold, how would an Alaskan community survive and thrive? On the charity of other communities? What happens when one community sees that “Hey, I could send my aid to alaska, but if I send it to Florida they have some delicious gator meat and maybe they’ll be willing to send me more”… opps, just reinvented capitalism.
One of the strengths (and weaknesses) of capitalism is the global marketplace it creates. Localizing with libertarianism presents the same problems faced by rural communities in the old west. If you can’t grow it, you do without it.
There are certainly benefits to libertarian socialism, it allows for very fast actions at the local level. But there’s a major downside in that without an overarching government getting every community to play nice with one another is basically impossible. In a lib social world you couldn’t stop the an-cap dingbats from creating their feudalistic hellscape.
This comes to another fundamental issue with libertariansim of all flavors. They all envision of world where everyone has the same ideology. That world doesn’t and will never exist.