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Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2024
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Are you an anarcho-capitalist?

“Relationships” in the personal sense and the issues of immigration, including citizenship, are not really the same. In a better world, the whole world would be open borders (enforced by the one world government, of course) and the lamb would lay down next to the lion.

It’s not about the government being competent at it. Competent compared to what? It’s that it’s a situation where there’s no better alternative, similar to the related issue of national defense.

But then I’m a (bad) libertarian who thinks seat belt laws are justified on utilitarian grounds.

But then I’m a (bad) libertarian who thinks seat belt laws are justified on utilitarian grounds.

Are you against tobacco and alcohol? If not, is it a cost-benefit situation with very specific numbers and math, or something unique to seatbelts? The right to not wear a seatbelt is a natural consequence of self-ownership.

As I recall all of these things have been shown to if anything reduce total lifetime healthcare costs, as most of them tend to kill you relatively young (if at all) -- so before you have time to rack up a bunch of bills for long-term care and general age-related degeneration.

So I'm more curious about the actual nature of his utilitarian grounds than how he squares it with any sort of libertarianism.

Now adjust for lost productivity and taxes due to disability and/or early death.

Had we more sensible healthcare policy the gap would be even bigger.

Please refer to my second point -- your argument appears to allow for unbounded government intervention into career/life decisions of any kind. Retirement, for instance, would seem to be right out -- much less FIRE or hobo-ism.

I'm not sure what to call this system, but it is very not-libertarian.

I gotta say it’s funny to basically be advocating for good old-fashioned American style government with a GMU Econ-pilled approach and be told it’s verging on totalitarianism.

Not at all, it's a very popular normie position -- but it's not libertarianism. The specific arguments you are making do seem unbounded in the direction of totalitarianism, which I think is because you are trying to somehow encompass the libertarian label for whatever reasons. I suggest just saying that you think you and/or the government knows best what the citizenry should do with their bodies, and has the right to rule accordingly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

I suggest I know better than you about the range of ideas under the label of “libertarianism”.

My views on speech, guns, trade, and taxes put me pretty far from “popular” and “normie” in the US let alone globally, but it’s cute that you think you can extrapolate all that from my thinking seat belt laws are justified.

I suggest I know better than you about the range of ideas under the label of “libertarianism”.

Define yours then -- as you say there are many. For the record I would not self-describe that way, although there's some intersection and I'm probably on average more likely to agree with a libertarian than not.

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