But Seriously...

At least where I am (dark blue city in a dark red state), the Libertarian ticket seems to be the "jump on the bandwagon" vote. Of course I couldn't be happier, and I'm sure confirmation bias is a little at work here, but it's hard to ignore at this point. Hopefully it's indicative of a larger trend, as people in this city don't normally become vocally political.

I wouldn't call it a two party race just yet.

 

What's with the martial law in the US? Bunch of the rednecks at work won't stop talking about it. Obama coming for the guns again?

 

We'll see. We're still in the early phase of the general election campaigns. I could only partially fault either candidate for some character attacks. Hillary is a scandal magnet and Trump only takes his foot out of his mouth to eat.

There was an unusual amount of animosity between the Clinton and Sanders support bases, but we still got some pretty good debates. As for Trump, if he takes the same approach he did in the Republican debates it'll be tantamount to throwing the election. I guess he's at least taken a stance on a few things by now. I wouldn't go anywhere near calling it a comprehensive platform. His issues page is fucking hysterical. Maybe it's just me, but come on, all those one liners under 30 second clips complete with the drammatica music?

Oh Trump, that last one is a real sweetheart thing to say, but people think you're the most racist candidate since the southern secession.

It's a two party race until Johnson is at least polling high enough to get into the debates. As insane as this election has been, when it comes to a third party winning I'm still going to stick with I'll believe it when I see it. I agree that this would be the year to do it, but the 3rd party candidates don't seem all that viable either.

 

Since this board is the best place I know in terms of where I can get honest answers, I legitimately want to hear the counter-argument to my reasoning for wanting to vote libertarian. I've heard everything you can think of (mainly "you're vote doesn't matter"), and given that I'm in Texas, take that for what it is. Not saying I'll decide to vote another way, but I truly do want to hear a legitimate counter-argument to my reasoning, basically someone saying "you're wrong on this" and backing it up with facts or "you didn't consider XYZ".

Have at it, TiB:

Spoiler: Why I want to vote Libertarian

- in general, I'm socially liberal, fiscally conservative. I know that's broad strokes. As an example, while I don't personally believe that homosexuality is natural or should be encouraged (I think it's a genetic flaw), I equally believe that neither my beliefs nor anyone's should deny someone the right to love whom they love. Just because I think something is true, doesn't mean I won't fight for your own rights even if they run counter to mine. I like country music and you like hip hop, great, let's talk about our love for telling stories through music.

- capitalism and taxes. I think you should reduce taxes on large companies in order to allow them money to spend on their employees. Yes, I know the "trickle down effect" is a lightning rod. I generally believe (with exceptions) that people are not born evil. The companies that do survive are the ones who have happy employees, and you don't have happy employees if they aren't paid well. And you can't pay them well if the government takes a third of your shit. The government has no business in health care just like it has no business in education (my field). Get out of all of it and privatize every bit of it. The private sector will do better than the government sector, always. Because the private sector fights for their jobs and the cream rises to the top, whereas the government sector gets elected through scrupulous processes.

- drugs. Stop the "war on drugs" immediately. I could go on a soap box about the benefits of marijuana, but as far as the downside, well, if you get too stoned to drive the last thing you wanna fucking do is drive. You wanna lay on your couch and watch netflix and chill with whatever pillow talks to you. Harder drugs, just wanna get the cartels out of here. If you do it by yourself, no harm no foul. If you harm someone while you're doing drugs though, punish the shit out of them. Just like drinking and driving. You do it at home by yourself, cool. You mess up someone else because you can't control yourself, you're fucked hard enough that the risk scares people away from doing anything dangerous with it.

- Physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Not a crime. And yes, I'm all for it.

- As far as ' my vote not mattering.' Soldiers gave their lives for my right to vote. So I can't just sit at home and not vote (as a lot of my family and in-laws are planning to do). I've heard arguments about a Libertarian vote helping or hurting one side or another, but my reasoning to myself is, even if one of the big two parties wins, at least I can sleep at night knowing that I voted for who I believed was best, and that that right was what young men and women died to give me.

Again, I want to hear any and all counter-arguments to this. I want to have a conversation, because this board has taught me a lot (and feel free to take it to PM if you want).

 

I agree with you on all the other stuff but this. This kind of philosophy makes all of the sense when the landscape is full of Mom and Pop stores. It doesn't when multinationals come into play.

It's my understanding that the reason why people are enamored with capitalism is because it's supposed to foster innovation and competition. The belief that if you have a good idea and work ethic you'll be wildly successful is really seductive. Unfortunately, that isn't the case now.

Rolling back taxes on big companies doesn't mean the CEO of Comcast is going to lower your cable bill. All this does is make Comcast's profit margins higher, which means more value for stockholders, which means the CEO gets bigger bonuses. These executives are incentivized to pump up share valuations in the short term over any long term gains. They sure as shit aren't going to invest in their workers. Just ask the people who make iPhones.

With all this money that the government is now not taking from them in taxes, they can then use some of that money to buy legislators to pass the bills their lawyers write to stifle competition.

I have no problem with capitalism that rewards hard work and good ideas. As soon as you let the guys with all the money write the rules, money keeps going to the top. Then it stays there, to be passed onto the next generation of inbred dipshits CEOs, until a new Teddy Roosevelt is president.

 

This is why I can't take libertarians seriously. If the government wasn't involved, the poor wouldn't be educated.Explain how every citizen would receive an equal education under your proposed system. Or as an alternative, defend the idea that everyone is not entitled to an equal education.

I also would like to see your payscales as private schools are notorious for paying teachers less than public ones. How can you attract top tier talent with sub par pay?

 

And see this is why I come to this board for perspective.

Where I work, the more profits we get, the more we can pay the hourly employees. The salaried people like me are relatively structured; regardless of how hard I may work or what all I produce, I know roughly what I'm gonna be making in 5 years. It is what it is. I enjoy working with children and doing what I love so that's the reward, money pays the bills.

But reasonable guess is most places aren't like this. Thus, I turn to TiB for perspective.

 

I don't have much to say about the rest of your post (other than you must not have much experience with charter schools or the private sector in general). But I will say that those soldiers also fought for your right to abstain from voting. Vote for who you want to, or don't vote. But don't feel obliged to do so because someone used teenagers as political currency.

 

I can only speak for Texas (and, to an extent, Florida, which from my limited experience is much worse).

The educational standards, that being the standardized tests which the students 1st grad + must take, are not directly related to the scientifically-researched, proven, and commonly accepted developmental milestones for those ages. The main crux of the issue being, the pay for the public school teachers depends upon how many students pass this essentially arbitrary test (the younger you go, the more variance between the government stated "appropriate grade level" and the actual student; synapses still developing and all that). So you get teachers who teach to the test, because their students' grades dictate their pay and future raises.

So no, every citizen is not receiving an equal education. Due to the simple fact that every fucking single public school (sorry if I seem mad, I am mad -- at the school systems) is teaching students black and white when it should be shades of grey.

As far as your pay-scales go, I have a simple answer:

public school teachers are leaving those schools, en mass, for our preschools, where they'll make roughly half (again, we can only pay what the parents will pay). The reason is, they get to actually teach, and use their talents, instead of teach to the test. One of the few things that makes me proud, and I mean truly proud, of this new workforce generation is that they put their passion before profits. We're having way over-qualified teachers (I'm talking those with their masters in early education) taking far less to do what they love and be a preschool teacher. This new workforce generation is putting quality of life above material assets.

And I'm really proud of them for doing that.

And it's gonna shake the shit outta a lot of companies.

 

I'm kind of curious to know why you think the government has no business in healthcare. I'm of the belief that the one field that should be non-profit is the healthcare industry.

I don't believe that a corporation's profitability should be held in higher regard than a person's life, no matter the person. It's personally offensive to me that executives like Martin Shkreli exist, let alone have the ability to jack up the prices of life saving medicines because they want a garageful of Ferraris tomorrow instead of a year from now.

 

This is a more recent idea, and from my perspective, a bad one. It is not however, an argument against public education. It is an argument against a current trend in public education. And oh for good measure, it is an idea taken from the private sector.

Not my school. Or actually, I should just say, not my classes.

Hmmm. This doesn't ring true to my experiences in education. Teachers are leaving...but because of poor compensation. And I could hunt studies that show that. For what it's worth I left education in part because the salary doomed me to a low quality of life. Cutting my salary in half? Fuck. I honestly don't see how your employees live on that kind of money.

Kansas had huge problems with teachers leaving due to compensation issues. Why? Well, see there was this grand idea to cut corporate taxes to the bone and simultaneously defund schools. I mean sure it had a remarkable impact on business in Kansas and by remarkable impact I mean none at all. So as far as the libertarian argument that taxes need to be cut and business will automatically be improved and people will be better off, well, we have some real world data on how that can go. Didn't the same thing happen in Louisiana? No matter, this is about education.

One of the biggest challenges to education today is already unequal funding. Rich kids go to rich schools, poor kids go to schools that are schools in pretty much schools in name only. You're proposing a system that makes it entirely unequal and it would doom generations of poor people from receiving a quality education. And it would also be far more segregated.

 

I probably should have clarified:

I think the government has no business in healthcare. I also think the insurance "industry" is completely fucked up when it comes to health care. Simply put I believe, the government should not decide or even have so much as a remote hand in my health or what I choose to do. And I believe that private industry will provide the best medicine. Doctors know best, not the government.

But I firmly believe in regulations as far as pricing goes for *drugs* and insurance. A potentially life-saving pill that cost $0.25 cents to make should not cost the consumer more than, say, $5. I think all humans have a right to survive, and to benefit from the technology and discoveries made by others.

But yeah, to agree with you JJ: if it comes down to a matter of someone like (your example) Shkreli vs. govt healthcare, I'm on the side of government healthcare every hour of every day.


Again, thank you to everyone who has responded to me thus far. It has helped me enunciate my views, if not even question them.

 

I don't hate the libertarian concept. While it doesn't exactly align with my views, socially liberally and fiscally conservative sounds like a winning ticket to me. Libertarianism wades well beyond that, and forgive my saying this, but it gets downright delusional. Take your view on taxes. First off, human history is not on your side. Self interest dominates human motivation, which is the cornerstone of capitalism, but the economic pressures to do social good are the core misconception behind the party's entire platform. Lower taxes and executives pass those savings along to employees and/or customers. Everyone wins. Cheaper products make a business more competitive and high wages are necessary to attract and retain talent. That's the general idea, right?

Ok, except many of our industries function as oligopolies. Competitors follow each other's pricing to maximize returns, and trying to undercut their competition operates against their incentive. These multinationals can survive huge hits to the bottom line, so trying to forcing them out is a gamble at best. In addition they'll respond by lowering their pricing so as to not lose customers in the short term. It's just pissing money away. Then, there's the income gap, which is already quite substantial. Maybe you're sick of hearing about it, or don't even agree that it's a problem, but it makes it more than apparent that if the top executives at fortune 500s wanted to pay their employees more they already could. Now also consider that these companies are more than happy to lay off huge segments, plants, and departments to exploit cheap labor overseas to make even higher profits and dodge costly safety regulations. On the furthest left you get the disaster of communism. When you remove any and all government oversight you end up with slavery. And with all due respect to the rich, for every Warren Buffet there's about 20 billionaires who actually do find ways to spend nearly all of their money.

Lastly, these tax rates are not what you seem to think they are. Corporate tax rate policies are filled with backroom politics, subsidies, exemptions, write offs, and all of it often has very little to do with how profitable the industry is, or how well those employers support American workers, their communities, or anything else.

*That's not to say all tax exemptions and subsidies are absent from those considerations.

I don't feel like delving deeply into this one, but my general view is that decriminalizing all drugs is a good thing, outright legalizing everything is stupid. Even then, the comprehensive decriminalization isn't worth a shit if you don't provide quality health care and education. Regarding hard drugs, they do not only tend to be harmful to the users. I don't give a shit if there's people out there who can use meth sparsely and responsibly. There's too many people who can't, and simply not putting them in prisons until their addiction causes them to break a different law doesn't fix shit.

 

How did the article prove that? I was expecting the typical liberal arts nonsense passed off as intellectualism based on how you titled the link, but goddamn was that a weak argument based on their own data. Going by the facts of geographic distribution, and the fact that white people are more likely to know other white people who might recommend the school the data is already accounted for.

This isn't evidence of racism. It's not really evidence of much of anything. Maybe there's a study that can clarify the point you were making, but that wasn't it.

And fuck that author in the ass for writing school segregation persists because white parents want it that way followed by a picture of white children getting off a school bus like it's some evil shit.

 

Two Things

I probably went through a bit of confirmation bias with that article. I linked it as it popped up in my twitter feed about 20 minutes before writing that post. It isn't great. For more on school segregation read The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonothan Kozol. Lots of bits in there about how school segregation still exists and is worsening. Some of it by choice of white families. My copy of the book is in storage or I would find some relevant bits. Second, editors generally choose photos not authors. The author is legitimate. She wrote a great book about the history of teaching called The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession.

Then again, if we are talking about private schools I don't think that big of a case has to be made that schools would be more segregated since blacks still far behind whites in wealth and income. People would go to the schools they could afford. White people could afford better schools. I think that's a pretty simple idea, no?

Then again maybe my thoughts are liberal arts nonsense passed off as intellectualism.

Edit:

Just as an example, here is a post from Dana Goldstein about Michael Brown's school.

Education in America is fucked up in a lot of ways. One aspect of the clusterfuck is based on racism and/or the effects of racism which persist today.

 

- capitalism and taxes. I think you should reduce taxes on large companies in order to allow them money to spend on their employees. Yes, I know the "trickle down effect" is a lightning rod. I generally believe (with exceptions) that people are not born evil. The companies that do survive are the ones who have happy employees, and you don't have happy employees if they aren't paid well. And you can't pay them well if the government takes a third of your shit. The government has no business in health care just like it has no business in education (my field). Get out of all of it and privatize every bit of it. The private sector will do better than the government sector, always. Because the private sector fights for their jobs and the cream rises to the top, whereas the government sector gets elected through scrupulous processes.

This is the part of libertarianism I simply can't get behind.
1. The fantasy that corporations should pay less taxes than individuals. The notion that a company with a lower tax burden spends more on employees is a well-documented fallacy. If that were the case, we would have seen wages and benefits skyrocket since the 1970's, and the precise opposite has happened. Employee happiness, wages, and corporate taxes have very little in common. Example:

I own a pizza shop. I pay 25% in taxes (for discussion purposes). I get a break on those taxes, and now I get that 25% freed up to spend on whatever I wish. Am I going to increase the pay for my delivery drivers from $8/hour to $10/hour? No. Why would I? It wouldn't benefit me in the least, there's no return on that. I would probably go to a bank, secure a loan based on the extra capital and open a second pizza shop. The outcome of that is: bank grows, I go from a $50k/year income to $100K/year (and then I truly do not give a fuck about my employees wages), and I "create" 3-4 more jobs that pay less than a living wage. Those jobs that I "created" have to be subsidized by someone or something. I'm not paying enough to live on, so usually the government steps in with SNAP, tax rebates, or any number of programs to bridge the gap. My employee's happiness never factors into the fucking equation, and I can always blame their shitty pay on stingy customers that don't tip well or market factors. Extrapolate this out to a company the size of well, Domino's or Papa Johns: thousands of employees, only a fraction of whom make enough money to live independently. That's what corporate taxes are for: one, to cover the costs of subsidizing what amounts to an exploitative business practice (not paying a living wage), two, to ensure companies are paying their fair share for the massive infrastructure they demand (Domino's needs roads to drive on and drivers that have been taught to drive, and it provides neither of those things), and three, to discourage companies that won't make enough money to provide a decent opportunity. If you can't pay the ticket, you don't go to the show.

I hate to say it folks, but the jobs fetish is a bit out of control. Not all jobs are created equal, and I don't want to live in a society that mandates you must be a full-time employee to have things like healthcare. It's great for those of us that can, but there are millions of elderly, children, disabled and straight up crazy that will not ever be an attractive candidate in a job interview. That shouldn't render them socially useless and marginalized.

With that said, the fact that we do depend on employers to pay for healthcare is essentially stupid. Their costs have skyrocketed, because they are subsidizing an enormously inefficient system that they have no control over. I've lived in the countries where government healthcare is mandated, and it has perpetually been a better experience than healthcare in the US. More humane, better treatment, cheaper, and I had control over it: no insurance drone was telling me what would/would not be covered which at my income level essentially means go without. I absolutely want the government involved in my healthcare, because I do not want to be gouged for the price of the asthma meds that I need to not die. I also want to be treated regardless of my employment or financial status. So yeah, privatizing health care is a step in the wrong direction.

2. The fantasy that paying taxes doesn't benefit the corporations. The era that featured an explosion of private/public ventures was funded by what we would now consider a gargantuan corporate tax rate. Think about how many companies have benefited from government-led projects like DARPA, NASA, and the plethora of military research. The simple fact is that innovation is a scary venture, and the government does a pretty decent job of subsidizing or facilitating it over the years. We have a myriad of benefits from programs like NASA's Apollo program, and the companies at the time were desperately trying to convince us that smoking cigarettes was healthy. Give me a fucking break.

3. The private sector has one mandate: make money. The public sector has dozens of mandates: provide health, security, ensure fair treatment and equal access to things like rule of law and education. The notion that corporations are better at everything is myopic at best, at worst, it's scary. Tour a public prison and then a private one. Tell me which one you think is going to rehabilitate someone. Imagine if things like the CDC, the local court or the military were run by corporations and tell me you'd feel safe that they would prevent an attack or an epidemic even if they lost money doing so.

There are certain activities that are acceptable to seek profit in doing. Law, health, education, justice, security and a few other basic functions of our government don't number among them. I can accept someone taking issue with the implementation, but the idea that you should form a company and make a profit off of something like health or education (and by extension, exclude those unable to afford it) is sickening. The difference in mandates is how efficiency is achieved: private companies can ensure awesome outcomes for things like health and education, because they can exclude the group that would place more burden on the system than they pay into it. The public side of things, by law and design, cannot discriminate in this regard. It's like saying one little league team has to have the entire class play, even the wheelchair kid and the girls who'd rather do something else with no special coaching and their opponent only has to play the 11 best kids they can find and they can pay for all the coaching they want.

 

Well that escalated quickly.

Turkey is now threatening the US with war over an exiled Muslim cleric living in the US.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/690106/Turkey-threatens-war-America-cleric-Gulen-military-coup

They've also cut off the power to Incirlik US Airbase.

 

Turkey just declared the airbase as a no fly zone. They are really pushing their luck here. Do they realize we have nukes on that base that need to be protected and/or removed?

https://www.rt.com/news/351606-usa-incirlik-base-turkey-blocked/

 

I'm not sure what they think they will do here. I feel like much of this is some sort of attempt at a show of power after last nights embarrassment.