Noam Chomsky on Libertarian Socialism

Senseless statist communial drivel. Totally devoid of meaning and substance. Just saying.

 

I don't know, seems to me that he was right. As is clearly indicated. Marxism in all its forms are for incompetent losers.

 

Shows how totally ignorant you lot are. Wholly brainwashed - a credit to your masters! Come abroad and entertain the people, do.

 

The state has no solutions that an empowered people with liberty and freedom can do for themselves. That is not ignorent, that is being a real American.

 

Marvelous how, as your money and power are removed by the Plutocrats, together with any social movement at all, you talk about losers, poor, feeble dabs.

 

I've never understood the 'socialist libertarian' idea.. to me, they are at opposites, either as a economic system or a political/ruling system. It seems to me to be more of a 'have you cake & eat it too' philosophy. Somehow you can have few govt regs, yet have lots of programs. But without the force of govt to take money from the people, how is it funded? Perhaps if you conquer & invade other nations & tax them? Functionally, this is how the us has been operating for a few years, & we have the $15+T debt to show for it. No taxes.. that's libertarian. Lot's of govt.. that's the socialist part. So i can see the attraction, & how it functions. It is just not sustainable.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Karl Marx

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
John F. Kennedy

Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon.
Rick Gaber

 

Plutocrats? Whatever. Leftist loserism is a fail everywhere all the time. Europe is drowning in debt because of statist incompetents employing socialist solutions that are failing if not already failed.

 

But who would enforce that in a stateless society?

 

Its all political theory and empty statist rhetoric.

 

I encourage you to read AbsoluteVoluntarist's posts in this thread and challenge them.

 

He can't do that, at least not with substantive arguments. For leftists their limited understanding of the world is confined to bumper sticker slogans. Thats it. People like Chompski, and Zinn try to fill that out a little, but ultimately fail when measured by reality.

 

Hilarious.



Strange how 99% of the population doesn't support your ridiculous Socialist twaddle...

 

Voluntary communal pooling of resources may work in very small groups in which everyone knows each other. Given tiny groups, the overuse and ill-maintenance inherent to communal property ("the tragedy of the commons") is less of a problem than in large groups and there are social pressures to limit it, while enclosure for sole use may relatively impractical. A household of four, for example, may share the food in the refrigerator in this fashion.

But the tragedy-of-the-commons costs are still there. Even people in households of four may complain when someone ate all the ice cream. That's the tragedy of the commons on a low scale. That's why even households make use of a significant amount individual enclosure: they have separate bedrooms, etc. These costs increase exponentially the larger the group is and outside a group of perhaps a few score, in which everyone knows everyone, become unbearable. Even on that level it's generally more efficient to enclose, for at least the vast majority of things.

The key issue, though, is whether or not the pooling of resources in question is achieved voluntarily or through coercion. The implication of "libertarian communism" is that the communism is coercively imposed in some way. If it were fully voluntary, it wouldn't be "libertarian communism," just libertarianism with a personal preference for living on a commune.

I like it when communists make this argument, since they're basically admitting that we were right all along: communism makes everyone involved in it poorer. Even voluntary communism. The old communist argument was that communism would make humans better off. The new communist argument (now that the old one has proven wrong to an embarrassing degree) is that communism makes humans worse off and that's a good thing because it's better for the snails

Sorry, most of us don't want to go back to living in mud huts, picking lice from our spouse's hair and wiping our backsides with tree leaves.

 

I said nothing of the kind. All my statement implied was that socialism (or communism) produces things at a more deliberate, sustainable pace. For example, if we were to take everyone's material possessions and redistribute them all equally all across the globe, everyone would live at a material standard corresponding to what somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000 to $11,000 a year provides for in the contemporary United States. Now most people on this planet would benefit substantially from that, as the vast majority live at only a fraction of that level. But yes, most of the populations of First World countries would have to make some real sacrifices. Now of course that doesn't factor in things like ecology (e.g. I am a bio-regionalist, not a globalist), but it does illustrate the point that any broad equal redistribution would realistically benefit most people.

If capitalism is so vastly superior, then why is socialism today once again making a comeback in popularity? Why are people all over the globe decreasingly happy with their lives the more we privatize every aspect thereof? Isn't happiness the bottom line?

(I have corrected your uncited remarks above.)

I have made no claim to represent the views of other communists. The overwhelming majority frankly probably disagree with my assessment on what material living standard is sustainable, mostly because the overwhelming majority of people really just don't give a rat's ass about ecology because they don't wanna have to change the life-styles at all. As a rare realist socialist, my views are my own.

 

So you believe that a slower rate of economic growth and slower rate improvement in the standard of living of everybody is better than a fast rate of improvement?

How do you propose to redistribute such resources? Through a world government?

This is what I don't understand about Communists. Instead of advocating a system which will inevitably make everybody's piece of the pie bigger, they prefer to forcefully keep the pie smaller but distribute it's portions more equally. That is of course only in theory. A world government would never distribute the pie equally, it would use force to distribute most of the pie to the elite while leaving the scraps for the non-elite peasants/99%/whatever else you want to call those who aren't in positions of significant power.

The free market, on the other hand by its very nature always makes the biggest pie and always distributes the pie most equally.

We're already trying that through the IMF/World Bank. The idea is for central banks to print money, lend them to the IMF/World Bank, who in turn lend them to third world governments supposedly as poverty relief. In actuality, third world governments pocket the money and use it to build up their military and personal wealth so they can more efficiently starve and persecute their own people. If you look, this has happened in almost every third world Latin American and African country. This doesn't help to raise the standard of living of the third world countries, but does in fact help to lower ours.

Becuase the masses have been re-educated into believing that the free market is the cause of all of their socialist problems, and that more socialism is the solution to our socialist problems.

That's not happening, you're just making stuff up now.

Happiness for who?

 

You are on something really powerful, kid. I hope it helps you forget your slavery, clown!

 

You just said, "communism probably isn't as productive in developmental terms," which suggests that people would have less under it than they would have otherwise.

As for what you're saying now, such a redistributive project (undoubtedly achieved through violence) would perhaps make most people $10,000 richer for a short period, right up until they consumed that $10,000 worth of wealth. At that point, it would all be consumed and there would be no incentive to produce since it would all be taken and given away. Thus, we would then all have $0.

How many times does these obvious problem need to be pointed out before communists get it? Wealth doesn't just exist; it comes from production. People won't produce anything if they see no return. And even if you could change human nature to motivate everyone to work for the "common good," they wouldn't produce the things most demanded by consumers because they would have no way of knowing what they were or how to most efficiently produce them without a pricing mechanism to know market value of various goods and services.

I don't know how you statistically quantify "happiness" but the idea that the world has become more "capitalistic" over time is a fairytale myth, a Big Lie repeated ad nauseum but opponents of economic freedom. The truth is precisely the opposite: the Western world has moved further and further away from capitalism for at least the past 100 years.

Pretty much all alternative ideologies to the current rotten system are becoming more popular these days: free market libertarianism, state sovereignty, hardline nationalism in Europe, etc. If socialism is also making a "comeback," it's because people are fed up with the current system--which is not "capitalism" but a muddled mess of quasi-socialism, quasi-capitalism, quasi-mercantilism, and quasi-fascism all mashed up together, which is euphemistically call a "mixed economy." Some people wrongly think this is somehow a laissez-faire free market and the socialism is the only alternative, in much the same way that they vote for Obama as an alternatively to McCain and McCain as an alternative to Obama, despite the fact that, when you get right down to it, they are as ideologically close as two bricks in a wall.

How much poorer would be have to be to be "sustainable"?

 

Don't worry. Since it's anarcho-communism, I'm sure it's a anarcho-world-state

 

If the faster rate will put the place where you live underwater and leave you with no space left to store garbage, yes.

As stated in my previous post, personally I am a bio-regionalist. I think resources should be redistributed within new nations that are ecologically capable of being self-sustaining. We need to redraw the boundary lines according to the natural distribution of environmental resources. That's my view.

Now a typical Marxist might indeed propose a temporary world government as the vehicle for such a redistribution, but I am not a Marxist.

...Pffff!

Even you can't honestly believe that. You and I both know that the distribution of wealth both in the United States and globally is growing ever more unequal, just as the capitalist system is coming to envelop the whole world. That is not a coincidence.

(I will now skip a few of your more pseudo-intellectual remarks for the sake of my own sanity.)

The overwhelming majority of the world's population, if not everyone.

 

Don't tell me what I am and am not saying!

Via how happy say they are in opinion polls over time.

Sheesh! Alright, I need a break. Maybe I'll reply again formally tomorrow. And maybe not.

 

Yet again we go back to the big myth that the current model is the "capitalist" model advocated by free marketers all and sundry. No matter how many times we repeat "we do not have a free market, we do not have a free market. The current economic model is not free market capitalism" it seems to fly right past them like the wind.

And this from people who are always insisting that none of the dozen communist regimes of the past 100 years was "true communism."

What are you saying then? Once again, it looks like the pro-statist side has petered off into petulant one-liners once the handful of "substantive" talking points were dismantled.

Sounds pretty dubious to me. Anyway, even if it's true that we've become less happy in recent times, it only proves my point, since we've been living under growing economic statism, not free market capitalism.

 

It wouldn't work at all, except in very small communities. Socialism lacks economic calculation. Humans have unlimited wants, and in order to prioritize them, either they must be forced to accept what they are given and only what they are allowed to take, or they rely on the price model to determine those priorities.

This is where the "perfect world" idea falls apart. Why is a world only perfect if human nature is drastically changed? Humans are what they are, it's socialists who, when people don't voluntarily change their nature, turn to force to make it happen.

 

Contracts imply title, since a libertarian contract is only valid if it involves the exchange of title. If socialism does not allow private property, how does one contract to exchange title?

 

I assume you're referring to AGW when you say "underwater", there is no consensus in the scientific community that global warming is man-made, and as time passes, it's coming out more and more that the sources of AGW studies are heavily politicized and riddled with fraud and corruption. I continue to remain skeptical that climate change is caused by humans, especially when it involves government violence intentionally slowing down the progress of humanity. If it turns out that climate change is not manmade, the free market would be far more capable of determining a solution than government or some other artificially slowed down communist economy ever could.

This is an absurd claim with no proof backing it up whatsoever.

Who is "we"? What authority is executing the redistribution of resources?

After being informed several times, you are still continuing to perpetuate the lie that the US is a capitalist system. It hasn't been for at least 100 years, probably more so. It certainly has not had anything close to a free market for at least that long.

Simply calling my remarks "pseudo-intellectual" and ignoring them is not a very effective debate tactic. I'll take it as an admission that you're incapable of defending your wildly irrational positions.

You're referring to the happiness of "society" or the "group". Happiness of the individual does not matter to Collectivists like you. How does one measure "happiness"? Is "happiness" really the goal of "society"?

 

Bulls-eye.