@TheBridge
The thing is that libertarianism holds as the highest virtue selfishness (even if you choose to help other people it’s because it makes you feel good, not because it’s the right thing to do) whereas Christianity holds as the highest virtue self sacrifice. The two are not compatible. Libertarianism also holds as a high virtue private ownership whereas in Christianity literally everything is owned by God and God can recall anything that has been lent to you, including your life, at any moment.
There are
less bad libertarians who
choose to live good lives but still I think they’re confused and parrot talking points that don’t gel well with the way they live and the way they want the world to be. I’m thinking they’re confusing the desire to be left alone and other people out there in the world can live however they want and to practice nonviolence (which started the whole monastic movement and other groups like the Amish and Hutterites) and the worship of money, the worship of “the invisible hand of the free market”, and other stuff like that.
And the good ones aren’t the ones who appear on the Internet: the “self-made” youtube stars who are making six figures on donations like a bum on the street claiming that’s capitalism and everyone who is poor is just lazy or stupid. That’s the thing with that video. Basically it challenges the idea that your job can treat you like shit and pay you substantially less than enough to live and dispose of you at any moment and force you to train your green card replacement who they can pay 1/10th what they’re paying you and offshore all their money so they don’t ever have to pay taxes and collapse the economies of small towns and then get golden parachutes and do it again somewhere else and if you don’t like it you can pull millions of dollars out of thin air and start your own company. LOL free market.
Other Western post-industrial societies can find ways to incorporate living wages, worker protection, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare and not have everything be super expensive. Maybe stuff will be twice as expensive, but stuff was more expensive 30 years ago and no one complained. Stuff is cheaper now because it’s made by literal slaves out of shit that is designed to fall apart. I’d pay $100 for a pair of jeans that will last me multiple decades over having to get a new $15 pair every year or every two years, because I lived back then and I did. I’d be willing to pay more to guarantee that all workers are making a living wage because I did pay more decades ago. A big mac meal in 1980 was $2.59. It’s $5.99 today but that’s still less than it was in 1980 because of inflation. The 1980 meal would be almost $9 today, so while the cost in nominal dollars has increased the cost in real dollars has decreased to almost half.
An example I keep going back to is the rabies vaccine. Rabies is 100% curable if it’s caught before symptoms develop and 100% fatal afterward, so getting the vaccine is essential for survival. In India a Rabies vaccine is free, in the US a rabies vaccine costs $40,000 (a single treatment consists of multiple doses over several weeks, the price is for the total course, not each single shot). That’s more than most people make in a year and a whole lot more than most people have saved up, guaranteeing that someone either go into massive debt or die.
This is bullshit and unsustainable.
Allegedly there is a labor shortage, but there isn’t, there’s a glut of greed. The “problem” is people are making more off unemployment than they were at their crappy jobs. The “free market” solution would be to increase wages to the point where people were willing to work again. The LOLbertarian solution is for corporations to bribe the government to not pay people the unemployment benefits that they paid for when the government took it out of their paychecks when they were working, forcing people to take jobs that pay shit and have no job security or starve to death. LOLbertarians on youtube have literally said “starvation is a good incentive to force people to get a job.”
“Just negotiate better brah!” You can’t negotiate if you are starving to death and your brain isn’t functioning properly. You can’t negotiate if all employment is “at will” and you can be fired for no reason at all. You’re forced to accept whatever terms the slave master dictates to you.
The problem was NEVER people not wanting jobs, the problem is people don’t want to work and not get paid enough to live.
“But people were never meant to live off minimum wage jobs.”
But they do, so that argument is worthless. People weren’t meant to live in cities, have electric lights, and drive cars but they do, so suck it. People DO have to work multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and not just because they have no skills or because they got bullshit degrees.
“Just do STEM brah! Just go to trade school!” And flood the market STEM degrees and trade certifications, recreating the very same problem they tried to escape from.
There are people with masters degrees in engineering working stocking produce at grocery stores because of visa programs that let corporations hire 4 Indians for the price of 1 American and still make a profit. “The free market brah!”
Fuck the free market. No other country has a “free market” and “free trade” because that’s bullshit. It drains money and talent from the country. Why is the US operating at a trade deficit with every other country on the planet? Because the US is the only country retarded enough not to have tariffs. The US is the only country retarded enough to believe in “free trade”.