• goatOPM
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    1 month ago

    my local libertarians unironically said that people shouldn’t pay for roads. They also ranted about drag queens despite them not existing in my area.

    Libertarian just screams to me, ‘remove minimum wage! more power to corporations! sell your health!’

    • Mac@mander.xyz
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      1 month ago

      Libertariansism is just edgy facism. They pretend to have different ideals but in reality they only care about stomping on others.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      1 month ago

      Well, there are those. But libertarianism is a big tent, with everything from socialism to anarcho-capitalism underneath it.

      I went into detail on my personal ideology using specific issues as examples. I think drag queens are great, and I’d love to take my kids to a drag queen story telling session (provided the show was intended for kids). I think road users should pay for roads, and they should pay roughly proportional to their destruction of the roads (i.e. trucking companies should pay much more than regular cars), and we should be investing in alternatives to using roads (so trains, cycle paths, etc) because that should reduce overall costs.

      I do believe in eliminating the minimum wage, but that’s because I believe in the NIT (Negative Income Tax), so if you make under a certain amount, you’d receive a check in the mail, which would replace the minimum wage (i.e. it would guarantee everyone makes at least $7.5-15/hour, adjusted to local cost of living). I also believe in less power to corporations, and we get there by making it easier for small companies to compete against large orgs (i.e. remove liability protections for larger orgs).

      • goatOPM
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        1 month ago

        No minimum wage is fucking stupid

        • sugar_in_your_tea
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          1 month ago

          Why? All a minimum wage does is prevent people from taking jobs that would otherwise go to automated systems. If someone wants to work for $5/hr, who am I to say that’s wrong?

          The real concern here, I think, is that the minimum wage isn’t enough to sustain an individual or a family. The solution there isn’t to raise the minimum wage, but to ensure everyone has enough, regardless of wage. So hand out cash so everyone has enough, and then let people work for whatever price they want. Cash handouts should only go to citizens or permanent residents IMO, but everyone is free to compete for whatever wage they feel is fair, and wealthy people can pay the difference.

          • goatOPM
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            1 month ago

            Without minimum wage, companies will pay their workers the absolute least. That’s why there’s a minimum wage!

            • sugar_in_your_tea
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              1 month ago

              And that’s irrelevant if we have other mechanisms to ensure everyone has a minimum standard of living. If you are above the poverty line regardless, you wouldn’t have to take poorly paying jobs if you didn’t want to, but that shouldn’t restrict others from choosing to take that job.

              • goatOPM
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                1 month ago

                Once you start talking about other mechanisms that don’t exist, then your ideology is a fairy tale. Libertarianism is stupid, it won’t ever work.

                • sugar_in_your_tea
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                  1 month ago

                  So, proposing policy changes makes an ideology “a fairy tale”? How else are we supposed to actually make changes?

                  I would never support eliminating the minimum wage w/o some kind of replacement. But I also won’t support increasing the minimum wage in lieu of a replacement, because increasing the minimum wage often does more harm than good in the short and medium terms (kills jobs and encourages longer-term replacement of those jobs w/ AI).

                  Some hardcore libertarians say “no welfare and no minimum wage,” but most serious libertarians take a more moderate approach. So ignore the crazies that say we should radically change the entire economy “because principles” and listen mostly to those who want to make smaller changes to reduce initiation of force.

                  • goatOPM
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                    1 month ago

                    What will stop manufacturers from putting cheap carcinogens in their products?

                    What stops monopolies from suddenly deciding to pay as little as they can?

                    What stops corporations from paying as little as they want?

                    What happens to consumer standards and laws?

                    How will you assist the impoverished?

                    How will you stop poverty?

                    How about taxes?

                    Social services?

                    Where even is your evidence that removing minimum wage increases job growth? Ridiculous line of ‘thinking’

                    In fact, I don’t even care. Libertarianism is fucking stupid and will always be stupid and will always fail because it is inherently stupid.