Jesus Christ.

Edit: The full debate is here. I highly recommend listening to it.

Yaron Brook is the chair of the Ayn Rand Institute - he's very well spoken, has very good debate skills, and is highly intelligent. I can easily see how he would run circles around most people. But this is where Sam Seder's brilliance shines through. He is also well spoken, has good debate skills, and is intelligent. He was able to counter each point Brook made and further the conversation till the natural end.

The debate was civil and w/o any insults while still being challenging and intellectually stimulating. So completely unlike the usual online debate-bros. One of the things I tried to do while listening was pause it and try to form a counter to Brook on my own w/o listening to what Seder said. I needed to take far more time than Sam did and my answers were nowhere near as precise or well-articulated or counterattacking.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The libertarians inability to admit the state's role in skill formation and cost minimization for capitalist firms is probably the second-biggest contradiction in their fantastical ideology

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I genuinely feel like a lot of their ideological shortcomings are a byproduct of reflecting the concerns of early American petite bourgeois settlers rather than the actual class interests of modern bourgeoisie. They only see society in terms of rapid formation of small businesses from readily accessible resources and land. It's also part of the reason for why modern libertarians don't seem to catch on to any modern social necessities like public infrastructure, education, or healthcare. In their minds it's still the late 18th century and there's a vast amount of land to plunder and everything an individual needs to survive is still there. Just go out west and build your own log cabin in the woods and start a fur trapping business. So they can only view poverty in terms of either state interference or a failure of personal responsibility to access these infinite resources.

      Is the largest contradiction all the normal capitalist profit motive stuff?

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Is the largest contradiction all the normal capitalist profit motive stuff?

        Kinda, their biggest contradiction is their delusion that states aren't necessary to create and maintain complex markets, for them civil governance and contract law just pops out of the frontier fully formed and somehow without the coercion of state violence, they mistake fantasy world-building for history and political theory