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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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This is a straw man. If anyone critiques the present United States/Western economic system, he must believe in some terrible 19th century egalitarian philosophy book.

You have the same basic problem of the communists, you think you can decide better than market actors what labor is worth paying for. It's an incredible hubris. The employer wants to pay senior staff well, the senior staff wants to do work but you seethe separately at the arrangement.

The problem with this is that basically nobody who makes this argument is willing to let the fentanyl market come to full fruition. Or many other markets.

There's a lot of space between anarchism and not believing that you should get to decide who's labor is valuable and who's isn't for other people.

What are you talking about? In reality I am only allowed, with a ton of friction, to create a tax paying company that panders to the democratic market. If I create a business that actually crushes other institutions and takes, that's called a criminal enterprise in the vast majority of cases, and the commies come in and violently destroy you. We do not live under anarcho-capitalism.

Are you talking exclusively about state run businesses?

You have the same basic problem of the communists, you think you can decide better than market actors what labor is worth paying for. It's an incredible hubris.

You have the same hubris if you think you ought to ban two consenting individuals from exchanging fentanyl for other resources. Ultimately you are not preaching pure anarcho-capitalism. You are preaching massism. Therefore, regulation is okay when the mass votes for it, and free market is best when the mass says so. In 1910 you would have been hopeful about Marxism, since some masses seemed to want it. The mass hates fentanyl because it kills their cousins, so it's banned. The mass loves mindless entertainment, so a that has value, and I have hubris for disagreeing with the mass and holding to principals other than The Mass Is Always Right.

There's a lot of space between anarchism and not believing that you should get to decide who's labor is valuable and who's isn't for other people.

The average person does that to me, a minority, every day.

Are you talking exclusively about state run businesses?

I've just never seen any true wealth culling in recent capitalism. Seems like whoever gets money keeps money. Sometimes businesses close and the poor get poorer, the executives float on and stay rich. There is never really any catharsis. Whatever causes the right people to move down and the wrong people to move up is quickly regulated by Massism.