What % of the so-called alt-right were just plain ol' libertarians before?

Zenaan Harkness zen at freedbms.net
Tue Nov 22 03:05:46 PST 2016


On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 05:30:01AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
> In 40+ years of going to libertarian meetings, I have rarely (and,
> perhaps never) been in the situation where another attendee was even
> in the position of demonstrating a "Libertarian [seeing] absolutely
> nothing wrong with the very rich 'gaming the system' for personal
> advantage".  It just doesn't happen!  They are usually a bunch of
> people in a room, talking, none of whom engage in "gaming the system."
>   They may certainly talk about living with the existing system, true.
>  But not "gaming". 

I think the poitn is, the greatest challenge may be how to handle "where
we're at now" wrt "where we want to get", and that the mega "wealthy" of
today have gamed the system, or played the games of the system as
designed and intended (thanks Juan :) , to get to where they are today
as, say $100billion-aires.

I spoke to this, but much clumsily a couple months back when I suggested
we ought consider how to transition "existing wealth/ structures" into a
"better" future.

At the moment, such transition will be, say, global hyper inflation
wiping out a lot of those billion dollar bonds owned by the global
elite, but unfortunately the transition will likely be set on their
terms.

Given that we know a big transition is not far away (perhaps just a few
short years), how can we libertarians, anarchists, etc, expect that
transition to be to the benefit of say 50% of the individuals in the
world (or more), rather than just the 0.01%, if we cannot even speak
clearly a sane/ better transition plan?

So Razyer may be saying "Libertarians are happy with system gaming", but
perhaps could challenge with "ok, you say you're a libertarian, what
system do you propose that won't be so gamable?"

It seems the real challenge here is envisioning a better system, and
more than that, not only the foundations of the ultimate libertarian
utopia, but the planks of action/ steps of system change (other than
"revolution") to get us there.

And don't get me wrong, "revolution" may well be a valid step - but as
we've seen so often (in -all- cases?) of historical revolution, the
result is worse, or at least no better, or worse within a short period
of time.

So, for the political philosophy acolyte, abstracts, absolutes and meta
discussions, along with bold statements and challenges, may well be
useful to help crack the existing mental programming.

But beyond these simplicities, we need a series of practical,
comprehendable, communicable steps, steps that we can see have a genuine
possibility of achieving something better than "democratic" corporate
fascism, something that has at least a reasonable chance of being
"better" in the face of our civilizational history of "revolutions".

Good luck all ;)



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