Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Don't Libertarians believe in laissez-faire capitalism? You know, that thing that kind of fell flat when excessive deregulation of the banks led to that whole housing debacle in the first place? The thing that historically made trade unions a necessity and, most importantly, the thing that let big trusts have their way with the government anyway?

There are a lot of factors that lead to the housing bubble, particularly the Franklin-Dodd act which Clinton signed and expanded on and then Bush also expanded on twice more. The act was more or less a bully pulpit used to intimidate banks into giving out loans to people that could never possibly pay them back. This also did lead to bankers gaming the system, which was also bad.

There's a lot of government red tape that needs to be removed to let corporations do what they do. Part of the whole reason we had health insurers being as screwy as they were was all these red tape the federal government put into the system and then you had bad people in the insurance sector abusing it. Are we seeing a pattern here? Its almost like the federal government creates these regulations to tempt people into doing bad things just so they can force down even more regulation when things go wrong.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

Its just amazing how much foresight guys like this had. The system they created is not perfect, but its the best damn thing we have and those in power are a like a gas fire that pours water on itself and opens up doors to gain more oxygen. The thing is, its harder for us to ignore what these people do in an age of social media and such high internet connectivity. We can see what they do at almost every turn now.

There are things like Romney just said that Clinton or Bush could have said that would have gone under the radar. Obama and Romney have never had this kind of luxury and I'm inclined to see this as a good thing. I like knowing Obama misses tons of security meetings. I like knowing this flippant shit Romney says. If it doesn't force them to hold themselves accountable we can see what a failure the two-party system really is.

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

And then watch them crumble again and again and again because they're human.

C'est la vie.

There's a lot of government red tape that needs to be removed to let corporations do what they do. Part of the whole reason we had health insurers being as screwy as they were was all these red tape the federal government put into the system and then you had bad people in the insurance sector abusing it. Are we seeing a pattern here? Its almost like the federal government creates these regulations to tempt people into doing bad things just so they can force down even more regulation when thing go wrong.

I'm sure someone will rightly say that in the absence of regulation those people would be exploitative anyway, but the point stands that regulations aren't able to prevent exploitation so much as influence the shape of it.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Life's like a multiplayer video game, or a trading card game. Okay, maybe not, but the players are essentially the same. Always, there are people who play just to have fun, and then there are people who are the problem. Your power-gamers, your min-maxers, your people who generally exploit the system to their fullest possible extent. Rules and mechanics are built (and in some cases patched) to minimize the degeneracy of the game the latter group can cause. Of course, game developers being human, this can not-infrequently lead to all together new exploits and dominant strategies.

A Libertarian game designer's idea of a game with minimalistic rules seems novel at first blush, but it can be pretty dangerous if not handled very carefully with knowledge of why those rules were implemented in the first place, lest the people with the shotguns end up dominating those of us left with only rocks, papers, and scissors.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

A Libertarian game designer's idea of a game with minimalistic rules

Now all I can think of is Ron Paul playing Calvinball.

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Sure, I'll agree to that. But to extend your metaphor ever further, games with highly emergent systems are often the easiest to balance. In a game like Starcraft or M:tG, as certain strategies become dominant, new strategies emerge and become viable based on the vulnerabilities of the current metagame. Persistent dominance only occurs when there's something major wrong on the ground floor, at which point the simplicity of the system makes the problem easier to identify and correct.

What we have now is more like a heavily overdesigned MMORPG, where the developers micromanage every facet of design to try to force the players into their preconceived notions of "correct play."

[Malacite]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

I dunno, I've read Libertarian philosophy and heard enough of 'em on various shows & interviews to conclude they're a bunch of selfish morons personally.

I mean do they really, REALLY believe that the free market is the answer to everything, that corporations will play nice without major oversight and that there's no need for any govt. services other than the Police and Army because we're such good natured people that charity will take care of the rest? It all sounds wonderful on paper, but so did Karl Marx's ideals.

Cutting off all foreign aid is a load of shit too. All told, it amounts to less than 2% of the annual budget. That's not to say there isn't some trimming needed, especially it comes to assholes like Egpyt and Pakistan, but to cut it off completely? Foreign Aid might be one of the only good things Bush did as president helping deal with AIDS in Africa... I also agree with closing down the majority (but not all) of foreign military bases. As Jesse rightly pointed out last night, the U.S. Army can be anywhere in the world in a matter of hours or less. There's no need to over-extend like Rome and police the world. But I do think it's reckless to pull out of the truly troublesome areas (Israel, South Korea, etc) where there's either real violence going on now, or serious tensions that could escalate.

Basically my core issue with Libertarians is the misguided belief that the freemarket can solve everything, and placing too much emphasis on individual freedom above all else. FDR proved that a competent government with good intentions can do great things for its people. The problem is there are just too many self-serving assholes playing in a system that's become rigged & corrupt. Lobbying needs to be constitutionally barred forever, along with real campaign finance reforms like we have here in Canada or the U.K. (which harper is trying to undo the asshole...)

In the U.K. each party has roughly the equivalent of $50k to spend for the entire election, over the course of 2 months. Now, granted it's a much smaller country geographically and population-wise, so the numbers would need to be adjusted but still! Restoring the FCC's powers wouldn't be a bad idea either (tyvm Reagan for fucking that up) - It USED to be illegal to lie in the news, but not anymore.

BTW, did you know there's roughly 7 lobbyists per Senator or Congressman, and that they almost never lose their cases? Pretty disturbing shit.

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Just like any group, libertarians have some douchebags and extremists among them, and it's the most forceful and sensationalist people, like Penn Jillette and John Stossel, that get the most attention. Don't be too quick to judge a group based on their least likable members. It's possible that libertarian rhetoric needs to be dialed back and become more nuanced, but the fact that it isn't is more of a symptom of our current political climate than anything inherent in the philosophy.

The free market is just an approach. Thinking the free market can solve everything is only exactly as misguided as thinking government control can solve everything. Libertarians only exist as a faction because the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of government control and away from individual rights and freedoms. How much of life is practical and ethical to solve with one approach vs the other is something we should explore, and that exploration needs to go in the opposite direction it's currently going.

Personally I hold the position of the Chicago school of economics that the government should administrate only matters of public good (which has a very specific definition despite its vague-soundingness!) which include defense, criminal justice, fire control, etc, safeguarding the commons such as the air and water, and matters where markets have clearly and specifically failed. I think there are government programs that most libertarians would reject that are actually appropriate for government to have a hand in as public goods, and that it's possible to support those things without fundamentally betraying libertarian ideals. You could make arguments for the social safety net, national healthcare, and education being among those things.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Don't be too quick to judge a group based on their least likable members.

Why not? We do it with Republicans all the time, and their least likeable members seem to be driving party policy more often than not.

Extremism within a political party should always be subject to scrutiny, lest it be left unattended and take root.

You paint a very nice picture of the Libertarian party TM, but it doesn't quite mesh with what I'm presented with elsewhere. I'd be more inclined to support them if some of their rhetoric didn't make me feel like doing so would result in a great many fail-safes and safety nets being removed much to the detriment of the population.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Every president has ideals and promises they use to get elected.

And then one gets elected and reality sets in - they realize not all their ideals are sound and not every promise was practical. For Obama, this was many things, but one of the most notable was Gitmo. Obama wanted to bring all the troops home, but we're still entrenched in Afghanistan. This is reality.

There is, however, some foreign aid we could have cut off during his administration - primarily to Afghanistan and Egypt. We've given them billions only to have them keep hiding Osama from us - so its good we didn't close Gitmo, I guess. Giving money to Egypt was really just arming the Muslim Brotherhood.

I don't think anyone with a heart is going to have a problem with foreign aid to Haiti when that earthquake. That devastated them. That's doing good. Giving money to MidEast nations, however, is questionable. That region has been in constant upheaval for hundreds and hundreds of years. Handing out money there just makes things worse it seems.

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Why not? We do it with Republicans all the time

I find that justifiable because:

their least likeable members seem to be driving party policy more often than not.

and really at this point I think we've had plenty of time to judge.

You paint a very nice picture of the Libertarian party TM, but it doesn't quite mesh with what I'm presented with elsewhere. I'd be more inclined to support them if some of their rhetoric didn't make me feel like doing so would result in a great many fail-safes and safety nets being removed much to the detriment of the population.

Well, I don't represent the libertarian party. I can only say what my views and understandings are as someone who identifies as libertarian. That said, I hear that kind of thing a lot, and I'd like to hear what other libertarians are saying that makes them sound like wackos, if you could quote or direct me to them. I only talk to a few friends on the subject and listen to some select public figures, so I'm kindof in an echo chamber.

As to your fears, it's not as if you have to worry that electing even the most extreme libertarian representative would throw us into anarchy overnight. For most things the wheels of government turn slowly, and if you don't like the way things are going with the erosion of regulations and social programs, there's plenty of time to vote them out before they can totally wreck things.

New Mexico survived Gary Johnson as governor and is still standing in quite decent shape.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Honestly I don't follow them very closely, partly because they don't turn up very often but mostly because I'm lazy.

It's just that every time I hear someone(usually Ron Paul) discuss something like health insurance, I come away with the sense that if life happens to just deal me a crappy hand that results in me losing my health insurance for whatever reason, their response would basically be something along the line of "sucks to be you, but that's the price you pay for individual liberties". If life kicks me in the balls, I want my government to extend a hand and help me get back on my feet.

rather than do this:

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Well I think, and this is again just my personal interpretation, that his response to that would be that if there were a more free and open market for health insurance, if health insurance wasn't mandated in some capacity as an employer benefit which gives insurance providers more price leverage, if health care providers weren't overburdened with paperwork and regulations for medicare/medicaid compliance that increases their cost, and so on and so forth that health care and health insurance would be priced much more reasonably such that we wouldn't have to rely on our employers or government to provide that for us.

I'm not sure if I believe that through to the end. I expect it's true that improvements could be made in each of those areas that would help, but I think the health care market is more complicated and broken than even he acknowledges. That it's so rife with perverse incentive structures and inherent inefficiencies that even under the most perfect conditions the market is destined to fail.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Pretty much. The government may be doing a piss poor job of encouraging the health insurance industry to Not Be A Dick, but the prospect of a completely unregulated health insurance industry is absolutely terrifying to me.

[Taskmage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

The trouble with economic ideas like this is that while you may be able to form testable hypotheses about what might work, there's practically no way to test them through experiment without releasing them in the wild. That's another good argument for increased control at the state level rather than the federal. That way these things can be tested on smaller populations who might be more likely risk a drastic restructuring of their health or education system than the entire population would be. The cost of implementation is lower, the cost of failure is lower, and you're likely to trample the free choice of fewer people as a result of the sample. Of course, before that can happen, the federal government needs to back off and stop mandating one-size-fits all approaches for every state.

Another angle on the problem would be to introduce analogous changes into a virtual economy, like an MMO, that could allow economic researchers to richly simulate the effects of a policy change without risking real individuals, much the way the CDC was able to collect valuable data about disease propagation from WoW Corrupted Blood plague. There are also some possible modeling techniques in the developing field of complexity theory, but I don't know enough to speak on that. These are the things I'm going back to school for.

[Icemage]

Re: Melody's Melodramatic Meltdown on Mitt Romney (Tounge Twister?)

Sure, I'll agree to that. But to extend your metaphor ever further, games with highly emergent systems are often the easiest to balance. In a game like Starcraft or M:tG, as certain strategies become dominant, new strategies emerge and become viable based on the vulnerabilities of the current metagame. Persistent dominance only occurs when there's something major wrong on the ground floor, at which point the simplicity of the system makes the problem easier to identify and correct.

What we have now is more like a heavily overdesigned MMORPG, where the developers micromanage every facet of design to try to force the players into their preconceived notions of "correct play."

That's not a reasonable model for what's happening because in Starcraft and M:tG, all players are putatively playing from the same baseline of access to resources. A Starcraft player has their choice of which of the three factions to play, and is unrestricted in which technologies they choose to research and deploy. An M:tG player is assumed to have access to all available cards in sufficient quantities for purposes of competitive play.

Extending the gaming metaphor further with M:tG, there's a reason why cards occasionally get banned and/or restricted, or the rules themselves changed, because certain strategies become completely dominant without any metagame element that can curtail them (see: M:tG's Necropotence).

What we have is closer to what a free-to-play MMORPG has; basic rules everyone tends to follow, but some of which can be bent by players with more starting resources, plus the people who abuse glitches and exploits in the rules in hopes of either flying under the radar so no one notices, or directly bribing the developers to change the rules for their own gain.


Icemage