@Brute:
Just when I thought we were finding common ground, I guess it's finally time to bring out the blunt ideological pitches.
I agree with some small portions of what libertarianism proposes. Riggerjack likes to proclaim that he used to be a liberal. Well, I used to consider myself a libertarian. Like I've said before recently, libertarians recognize some real problems, but the causes they attribute to these problems and the economic frameworks they work with take them to counter-intuitive and counter-productive solutions.
They don't like the government because they correctly believe that it's controlled by the rich and thus undemocratic and out to get the little guy. All true. However, instead of recognizing this as the inherent result of a capitalist system that pools wealth in the hands of a few who will inevitably buy disproportionate influence, libertarians invent a bogeyman, "crony capitalism" (frightfully close to the liberal bogeyman of "corporatism" or "corporate capitalism"... nah, all just plain capitalism).
They don't like affirmative action and identity politics because they correctly sense this is in some way a weird liberal shell game that amounts to rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. But instead of focusing on the sinking ship, their loudest focus is on retaining control of their particular chair and lashing out at anyone perceived as taking it away, in what amounts to its own form of identity politics.
They recognize that "taxes are theft", because it is the removal of some of the value of their labor to go to the evil "government" (which, again, really means subsidizing the wealthy who direct the government); but they fail to see that their employer's profits are also theft, because it too is extracted from the full value of their labor. Indeed, wages are definitionally what is left over after your employer takes an ever-increasing portion of the value of your productivity to hand to themselves and shareholders who don't work. In other words, taxes are no more theft than wage labor itself, and either way what is stolen goes to the same place--the wealthy.
So, yeah. You've presented some of the more reasonable ideas of libertarians tbh, but ultimately it still comes out wrong. The ideology cannot serve the purposes of equality or benefit the majority.
Decriminalization of non-violent offenses sounds fine. Great way to undercut some of the systemic oppression that disproportionately affects non-whites. Abolishing
for-profit prisons that incentivize incarceration, absolutely, and limiting the kinds of crimes we punish with incarceration, great.
"Increased voluntary intermingling" sounds like an Orwellian way of saying abolishing affirmative action. That could work as long as other changes were made in the system to create equality elsewhere, as otherwise it's basically just shifting the privilege shell game back to white males without addressing the sinking ship.
You lose me instantly with things like "freedom" of school choice. What libertarianism means by the word "freedom" in instances like this is, quite ironically, "available to those who can pay for it".
If the real structural issues holding down the disadvantaged 99% of white men are economic, how does that "freedom" help them? Are you saying that white meth heads and basement dwellers whose main problem is poverty will somehow be able to afford to "choose" a good charter school to improve their family's lot?
Aren't you really trading authority in their lives from one source--government--to another source--their employer? Considering that government is at least nominally democratic and representative, whereas private corporations are authoritarian, how does that change introduce more "freedom" into their lives?
Same thing for "decreasing subsidies for higher education." What that means is making higher education only available to those who can pay for it. Both college and trade schools should be free to attend and non-profit. Only then will poor whites AND blacks, women, et al, have truly equal access with the rich.
Your solution to poverty is to put more people to work at lower wages, selling more life-energy for wages that are ever-decreasing because of permanent trends in automation and human ingenuity that render labor of less and less value over time. This is the opposite of what I consider the humane solution, which would be allowing the bulk of mankind to benefit from those improvements and work less for more, not more for less. Why should only capitalists like ourselves get those benefits of productivity? And what about those poor white men in their mom's basements? If they can't better themselves on their current minimum wage jobs, how will lowering their wages help?
Minimum wage should increase and a maximum wage should be instituted. Better yet, abolish all wages, as the system of wage labor is theft, and provide all employees equal ownership in and equal share of the profits of any business that runs on their labor.
I agree that something should be done about illegal immigration. I don't have an easy solution, but my instinct says the regulations should be relaxed and made more fair. Interestingly, on the subject of quotas, I believe a lot of this problem stems from immigration quotas limiting the influx of residents from countries like Mexico. Not sure about that though.
Going back to the game metaphor to conclude my own counter-pitch: I've established that there are different difficulty modes to the game and that these roughly correlate to social identity groups, mostly due to causal chains related to historic or ongoing oppression like bigotry and disenfranchisement, such that straight cis white American-born males are generally playing on "Easiest" whereas someone like a gay trans Middle Eastern-born woman might be said to be playing on "Hardest", or something like that.
The way I see it, there's also a hidden "Developer" mode available to an ever-narrowing few. Far easier than even the public "Easiest" modes, the ones who get to play on this mode can rewrite the rules of the game as they see fit and therefore do whatever they want. Since this is an open-world survival game where everyone plays on the same server, there are limited resources available to all, and so the Developers naturally have an advantage over all the other players on the server. Indeed, the reason the game is getting harder and harder for the other players is because of the rules the Developers get to write for themselves.
Your propositions would result in ever-more stratified levels of difficulty while continuing to increase the overall difficulty level across the board. The Developers get to continue playing Developer mode. They get to keep being the big club George Carlin described, the one that gets all the good land, all the good resources. They own the game. They own the players. They own the world.
My proposition? Break the game. Deliver the promise of actual democracy and freedom from economic oppression.
Open Developer mode to all.
