• Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I literally spent a whole day trying to convince a now former friend that in the event of the glorious Ancapistan revolution, there will be nothing to stop Jeff Bezos from buying the entire country and making the United States of Prime. These people have no concept of power, money, and control.

    • happybadger [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      >Be me after the Ayn Randvolution

      >Rugged individualist

      >so many guns, so ready

      >got my gold, got my silver, got my bitcoin, got my $GME, and my dad scraped together a whopping $50k to loan me

      >I'm going to be a small business owner. Finally the main barrier to that, the existence of a state and basic safety regulations, is gone.

      >open a hammer store

      >Amazon sells hammers from its slave factories for $2 less and their drivers deliver it within an hour to be reunited with their families

      >No federal protection or incentives that counteract this

      >only payday loans because the banks say I'm not white enough for a business loan

      >No federal protection or incentives that counteract this

      >sell my wife and kids to pay rent after my landlord notices I'm not selling enough hammers using his secret police force and hikes the rent by 900% so that he could buy my hammer store and staff it with my enslaved kids being educated by their concubine mother

      >Credit score plummets in response to partial rent payment. Imprisoned by Amazon for social deviancy

      >Making hammers until I pay off my Amazon loans that covered my bounty hunter fees, the secret police fees, and the unpaid rent.

    • triangle [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Libertarians and ancaps have one piece of the puzzle, the bourgeois state is a problem for the average person. they're missing the other essential half, that your boss and the other bourgeoisie are also a problem and have even more control over you than the government does.

    • KarlBarx [they/them,he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Libertarianism is just utopian capitalism in the same way that pre marxist socialist were utopian instead of scientific

        • JuneFall [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Oi, don't do my bud Fourier dirty! This is esesntial leftist theory that precognized the incel movement and sex positive movement and also solved the underlying cause which is marriage which is patriarchy which is capitalism.

    • StalinistApologist [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Gates literally bought the country already. https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/why-bill-gates-is-now-the-us-biggest-farmland-owner/

        • anthropicprincipal [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Anything less than 100 acres for most crops is unprofitable nowadays.

          The era of 10-15 acre farms supporting a family of 4 is long, long gone.

            • anthropicprincipal [any]
              ·
              4 years ago

              To function as a family one needs to be able to pay for medical insurance, house repairs, etc.

              Ain't getting much if anything selling off a 2 acre farm.

                • anthropicprincipal [any]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  Subsistence farming is de facto not a good thing. You can live on licking slime molds off rocks, but that doesn't mean you should do it. Humans are omnivores, and have always raised or hunted animals for food.

                  Your metric is suppositions about a future collectivized economy. In the world we live in today selling goods at market for a fair value is what keeps small farmers not living a horrid subsistence lifestyle. Farmer co-ops start out as collectivizing family farmers to outcompete Big AG but can end up in the original families just becoming Big AG themselves in a few generations.

                  We all would love to have some form of socialism to operate under, but we first need to talk about how people operate and produce goods in today's world. Big Ag is not going to go away in our lifetimes, and collectivization efforts like co-ops often end up as problematic as what they are trying to replace. Theories aren't going to put food in people's bellies.

    • cilantrofellow [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      “No cause the people would decide not to buy that.”

      You mean, like, collectively? Maybe they would organize against Bezos doing that?

      • Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        He literally tried to say that. "People would just not buy from him." Like bro, he owns everything and you're now a feudal serf living on his land.

        • cilantrofellow [any]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          If there was a king I just would simply not allow him primae noctis

          • Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            "He couldn't buy MY LAND because I wouldn't sell it to him."

            You own it or you pay mortgage?

            "Mortgage but I own it."

            Says who?

            "My bank an I have a contract."

            Who would enforce that contract?

            "The police."

            Who pays them?

            ".............."

            Why couldn't Jeff buy the bank, and use a private police force to evict you?

            "I'd shoot them."

            Ok

            I even tried to suggest that he might stand a chance if the whole town worked to protect the land collectively, but he called that communist soooooooooooooooooo

            These people live in a LARP, but we already knew that.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Do ancaps really have a fixation with The Revolution like leftists do? My understanding was that without a concept of collective action, the most radical praxis they have is tax avoidance. The ones that start to think "we oughta get together and overthrow the government" are usually halfway to fascism already.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Tax avoidance and building a bunker hoping that "the collapse" will just happen and whoever's still alive when you come out will need to buy supplies you stockpiled and you can price gouge them.

      • Sen_Jen [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        They love talking about the boogaloo

        But then again you did just say they're halfway to fascism, so I'm just repeating you

        • JVissarionovichYT [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Even boogaloo boys and militia movements (there are some distinctions) usually can't understand mass collective action. This means they are more prone to lone wolf/stochastic terrorist tactics, it at most gathering in small groups. This goes back to the fact that they have no intent to build a base among the masses, or theoretical understanding of the need for this, at least from what I can gather. I'm other words, they may be good at the actual violent actions, but not the other necessary parts of insurgency

      • Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I can't speak on every ancap, but my former friend was 100% cryptofash. He's since fallen even deeper. So no he wasn't really interested in a revolution as much as an ethnostate full of white people.

    • stigsbandit34z [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      I don't even know what to say tbh

      It just seems so utterly ridiculous that people like this exist and continue to double down on their demonstrably flawed belief system time and time again

  • margaretsnatcher2020 [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    deregulation is when power to dictate your life goes from a semi-democratically accountable government to hundred millionaires and billionaire oligarchs lol

  • superdoctorman [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I was trying to put into words, to convince a libertarian friend of mine, the internal contradictions of his ideology. If anyone can phrase it better, please do.

    Civil rights, mainly property rights, cannot exist without a state. Money, property, possessions and Bitcoin can all be stolen. If they can be stolen without the punishment by a state, then that right to property does not exist. If the right is backed up by punishment, then other civil rights must be broken by the state in order to protect the right of property of others. Presumably the right to enforce a contract would be backed up by some punishment as well. Wealthy people will have more possessions and more land to be potentially stolen so, they would have more potential to utilize state power. As well as more opportunity to enter into contracts that benefit them which others would wish to void. This will give them a privilege others don't have which would only grow and compound over time. As already noted, the must be a state to enforce the right to property. The wealthy, with their accumulated privilege and capital, could very easily subvert this power to a point where it only benefits them and enriches them exclusively. The anti-authoritarian aspects of libertarian ideology are an oxymoron.

    Does this make any sense? And has any writer phrased this general idea in a more succinct way?

    • triangle [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah, sometimes they talk about "the non-aggression principle" but capitalism itself violate the non-aggression principle. You pretty much laid out how and why. If you want a society based on the non-aggression principle (which ancaps tend to say they do) then it cannot feature capitalism as part of it.

      • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
        ·
        4 years ago

        the NAP in libertarian thought isn't a prohibition against doing harm. it's a tool to re-cast the violation of property "rights" as an "initiation of force" which justifies whatever "retaliatory force" is necessary to reassert one's right.

        one wonders, in this moral universe, why the state couldn't justify its monopoly on violence by claiming ownership over everything and everyone, just like Sovereign Citizens claim it already does, especially since the entire country was already purged of its previous "owners" by force.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      If libertarians had been succesful at taking power in the cold war, the USSR would have won.

      Libertarians only exist in so far as marginalized settler colonialists exist. The John Butchers simultaneously existed to discipline concervatives and radicalize white nationalists against the Left. But as soon as they got anywhere near power, they became Nixonian.

      Libertarians don't hate government. They hate not being in charge.

  • Baoist [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    It's the only reason btc and other crypto went 100x this past year. It's becuase banking institutions bought it all up.

    And you want to know what

    That's good for bitcoin

  • comi [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Should ask opinions about scalpers