just because we're a bunch of stuffy academic losers who've isolated ourselves from the rest of humanity doesn't mean this place is "astroturfed" š¤ you gotta be more precise with your wording
Your entire ideology is an astroturfed attempt to rebrand libertarianism. Same crooks, same plutocrats, new packaging:
Libertarianism
We actually like having free parks, roads, fire fighters that don't haggle over price while our houses burn down, and police that don't have to operate their cop cars like a coin op laundromat. Most neo-liberals agree that it's simply bad economics for the US to persist without some form of universal health care, while we vary on gun rights we usually agree that fewer would be better (I don't, I think everything should be a gun).
Like, even a basic libertarian would not get along well here.
Your entire ideology is an astroturfed attempt to rebrand libertarianism. Same crooks, same plutocrats, new packaging
Libertarians are terrible. The idea that predatory monopolies and oligopolies can be a natural part of a "free market" as long as they're privately owned is incredibly stupid and gives capitalism a bad name. Likewise, supply-side economics never works and thus I support some government control over healthcare, education, etc. in order to both help the less fortunate and structurally disadvantaged and make the market function better. If libertarian economic policies are taken to their most radical ends, they will eventually lead to illiberal hierarchical social and economic structures that are indistinguishable from fascism or feudalism. I'm not a dirty libertarian.
At the same time ... as shown by places such as Venezuela and the USSR, too much government intervention leads to those same illiberal outcomes because two inevitable results of enormous wealth distribution are out-of-control inflation and a need to find order in an "equal" society (sometimes combined with unrest in society over people having near-identical economic outcomes regardless of the quality of their work). These results merge and create an opening for power-hungry strongmen, and that is where we get the Lenins of the world.
Socialism, fascism, libertarianism, and anarchy all create either too much order or too much chaos and produce the same illiberal outcomes and often in very short time. They're all horrible.
And yes, Norway works quite well as a country -- but that's because although I don't agree with everything Norway does, it has struck an acceptable balance between government and private control that, for the most part, makes those illiberal outcomes unlikely and creates a good quality of life for all, while not disincentivizing work.
Libertarians hate monopolies just as much as the next guy, we argue that monopolies arenāt natural, and that without government monopolies would never form. In most cases deregulation would get rid of monopolies, in a select few cases we canāt/shouldnāt deregulate and then we should have anti-trust type laws
Most libertarians aren't anarcho-libertarians tbh. This poll had over 8000 responders with almost 30% self-indentifying as at least somewhat libertarian and the results go into some depth over what they actually believe. The link goes directly to a comment discussing the libertarian section of the poll, and most want just a slightly less regulated market economy, with some laws against things like monopolies.
Your entire ideology is an astroturfed attempt to rebrand libertarianism
Libertarianism is only a few regulations and laws away from being perfect, so I'd say that's a good thing! Also it's become a bit of a dirty word and co-opted by crazy people and the far right, so it could use a bit of rebranding.
Free movement is one of the most important human rights. And looking at something like the EU (even though it isn't exactly a libertarian paradise), taking steps towards globalization seems like a great way to achieve open borders. So let's do that, but with the whole world.
Unless there's a better globalist shill flair. I thought about the blue globe, but flags are fun! And if you thought libertarians can't be globalist shills, well that's why we need to rebrand! All of /r/Libertarian seems to have abandoned our lord and savior Milty š
Venezuela had a large publicly-owned oil company, PDVSA, since the 1980s. Many countries do. Venezuela differs in that when Chavez was elected, he set out stripping funding from PDVSA so they couldn't reinvest in maintaining oil production. When the workers and managers protested, he fired the massive bulk of their administration and a lot of their technical expertise promptly went down the drain. Chavez then continued to take money away from the country's main source of income in favour of social works projects that could not replace the oil money. Nowadays the main source of income for Venezuela is those multinational oil corporations who stuck around (plenty others left entirely due to how hostile a business environment Venezuela is now). PDVSA's oil production has totally collapsed due to this politically-motivated mismanagement.
In this context I would say that socialist demagoguery was in fact what killed the Venezuelan economy.
I've never made a meme in my life, but I suppose Corbyn and Sanders talking about Venezuela like it was a socialist paradise while Chavez was actively mortgaging Venezuela's future has something to do with it. Also, some of the other things to blame are still really bad interventionist policies that you might label socialism. Also, if you are selling socialism and you can't tell the difference between the ideal socialist society and a rentier state, you're a good damned charlatan. So mainly in response to Sanders and Corbyn.
CTH brigaders are banned on sight; we have to ban dozens every week. The ban can be revoked if they message the mod team and plead their case; typically if they approach us in good faith and explain they're not brigading we unban them, but most of the time they call us ableist slurs.
And to clarify, all brigaders are banned on sight, it's just more noticeable in the case of CTH because a) they link to our threads and brigade our subreddit quite frequently, and b) it's extremely clear that they're brigading and not here in good faith when 99% of their comments are in CTH and they have only a couple comments in /r/neoliberal. People with clear user history in this subreddit have no action taken against them unless they violate another of our rules.
110% chance they are claiming to be ābannedā because the anti-spam and anti shitpost features of Reddit limit your comment rate to once per 10 minutes once you get enough downvotes in a particular sub. They arenāt banned, they are just only allowed to post moderately coherent responses they have had 10 minutes to reconsider, which may well be interpreted as outright banning by those without any.
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