Thomasio

I can't find the link anymore, but I remember seeing a video on YT, where some guys have invested quite a bit of money on research, setting up experiments, trying to find out on what the willigness to cheat depends and what factors can influence it. If I remember correct, there were no difference whatsoever by social status or wealth, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, among students as well as among random guests in a bar. They did things like handing out an envelope with $10 in it to everyone. Then they gave them 5 questions written on a piece of paper and told them to write the answers to the questions right under the questions. Then they told them to put the paper into a shredder they had put in the room, so nobody would know whether or not they had the correct answers. Then they gave them the correct answers and told them, everybody shall take from the envelope $2 for every answer they got correct and return the rest of the money. The shredder was prepared and didn't destroy the paper, just looked like, so they could afterwards not tell who cheated, but they could tell how many correct answers were given and how much money they got back. They did this experiment in several countries all over the world and made statistics about the results. From that they found out that in ANY group of people, entirely independent of social status, religion, race, or whatever other difference, the amount of cheating was always near identical, around 7-8%, meaning they got 7-8% less money back than there were wrong answers. Then they tried to find out what could influence the percentage of cheating and they got some astonishing results. If people had to sign the paper underneath the questions and before they put it into the shredder, that made no difference on the cheating, but if people had to write their name on top of the paper, before answering the questions, cheating dropped significantly. Then they placed a blonde girl in the first row of the room, who would jump up 20 seconds after the questions were handed out, claiming she had answered all questions correct and asking what she shall do now. She was told to put the paper in the shredder, take her $10 and may leave, which she did. After people saw her leaving and obviously getting away with definite cheating, the cheating in the rest of the group jumped to nearly 100%, again among ALL groups of people in ALL countries, British no different from Italians and South Africans no different from Americans. Then they repeated the same experiment, with the blonde girl wearing a shirt with the logo of a football team that was a sworn enemy of the local team. In this case cheating among the rest of the group dropped actually below 7%. They concluded, the willingness to cheat depends on everyones inner moral status. Seeing someone else cheating and getting away with it makes you more likely to cheat yourself, but seeing an enemy of yours cheating makes you more likely not to cheat, because you want to show your moral superiority. Either way, it's all entirely independent of wealth.

In this topic: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46284-what-is-the-mainstream-in-this-forum/ there came up the question, why I believe our current system will hit the fan within the next 2 years, so here is my answer. Before I get into it, let me state a few facts. I hope we can agree on these without further explanation, if not let me know and we can discuss it further. First of all, the following is NOT my opinion, it is NOT what I want to see, I do NOT support it, it's just a collection of facts and conclusions I draw out of it, all independent of what I believe should be done about it. Fact #1: Basis of economics. However much distorted economics might get through politics, the underlying basis is the fact that the money in circulation has to buy all the goods and services produced. If there are more goods and services on sale than there is money, either prices have to fall or some products cannot be sold. If there is more money in circulation than goods and services on sale, prices will increase. In short: No matter what, the amount of money in circulation is always a precise match to the sum of all goods and services. If productivity increases and more goods and services are produced, the money supply has to increase as well, or else you get deflation, because the same amount of money has to be able to buy more products. Fact #2: The world is a CLOSED economy. However much distorted international trade can become through imbalances, the world as a whole ALWAYS has a trade balance of ZERO. For every surplus anywhere, there will always be a deficit somewhere else and there cannot be any deficit if nobody has a surplus. However much advantage some country can get, there will always be some other country having an equal disadvantage (or two countries having half the disadvantage each). Why it is just that specific country having the disadvantage can be blamed on 100s of factors, from being lazy to being corrupt or whatever, but under all circumstances and no matter the reasons, for any surplus anyone gets, someone will have the deficit. Fact #3: Fiat money cannot exist without debtors. Currencies that are based on nothing at all, where the state just prints whatever it needs, are plain worthless, they get runaway inflation and disappear in no time, so let's ignore these for the moment. Aside of that absolutely all money in our current system is loaned into existence, there is not one single Dollar or Euro or whatever other unit of currency in the world that doesn't consist of a creditor and a debtor. Whether it's the state taking loans from the central bank or businesses taking loans to invest or private consumers taking loans to buy houses and cars makes no difference, fact is, all money in circulation exists exclusively, because someone somewhere took a loan. If a debt is paid back, the money loaned into existence upon creating that debt vanishes. If all debtors would pay off all debt, there wouldn't be any money. Fact #4: Interest rates are exponential functions. No matter how low the interest rate is on a loan, unless it is a flat zero, the creditor doubles his money within a given time. Upon 5% interest money doubles roughly every 15 years, upon higher interest rates it doubles faster, upon lower interest rates it doubles slower, but under all circumstances the money in the hand of the creditors will keep on doubling. We all know the wheat and chessboard problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem which clearly shows, in a finite world you cannot have anything exponentially growing, no matter how many debtors you can find, no matter how many loans you can give, sooner or later the exponential growth of credit will exceed the capability of loaning that amount of money into existence. Fact #5: If you create a logical impossibility and try to enforce it, something unexpected will happen. No matter what it is, if it is logically impossible it cannot be done, so if for example if you allow some country to have a permanent trade surplus somewhere in the world (i.e. Germany) you must allow some other country to have a growing deficit. You may shift the deficit from one country to another, but you cannot avoid that the total deficit of the rest of the world towards Germany will keep growing indefinitely. If any country manages to get out of the deficit, some other country must get into an even deeper deficit and there's no way around it. If you try to reduce the total deficit of the world towards Germany without reducing the German surplus, that's a logical impossibility, it cannot be done and any attempt to force it will cause something unexpected to happen. Fact #6: Savings are OUT of circulation. If you make some money and you decide not to spend it, this money is out of circulation, it cannot be used to buy goods and services anymore. Whether you store it at home or in a savings account in the bank makes no difference, it simply isn't in circulation. Since all money in circulation must always buy all the goods and services produced, all savings taken out of circulation automatically lead to lower prices or products that cannot be sold, unless someone takes your savings in form of a loan and spends the money for something, meaning he puts it back into circulation. If anything up to here isn't clear to you, you need a crash course in basic economics. If you have questions up to here, feel free to ask, all the above are simple verifiable facts. Now let's see why I believe our current system cannot keep going for long anymore. Private households in the western world are overall net savers, meaning some take loans to buy cars or houses, others save for their children or their pension and the total balance over all is more savings than loans. For example in Germany private households are saving roughly 10% of their income, they have done that during the greatest boom in the 60s, during the crisis in the end of the 70s, also during the crash of 2008/2009 and they still do it today. In absolute numbers, in 2015 German private households have saved roughly 250 billion EUR on top of all the savings they had before and in 2016 they will save over 250 billion on top of that. Just to make that clear, this is NOT a total of 250 billion savings, the savings INCREASE by this amount and result in an exponential curve of savings. Not sure about the numbers in other countries, but even if the numbers are lower or higher in other countries, I believe private households are net savers in ALL countries in the world and the amount of savings isn't important, the fact they do save already gives an exponentially increasing curve of required money supply, only faster or slower, depending on the amount of savings, or else the decreasing money supply would lead to falling prices (deflation) or products that cannot be sold (depression). This exponential saving doesn't even consider interest, even if interest rates would be zero (in fact they aren't far from zero these days) it wouldn't stop the exponential growing amount of savings. Any interest paid on savings makes the problem even worse, because it adds more savings on top of the already exponentially growing savings. Since ALL money is exclusively created through loans, an exponential increasing amount of savings necessary requires an exponential increasing amount of loans, just to keep the same amount of money in circulation. If for whatever reason the amount of loans given anywhere in the world cannot keep up with the growing savings, the money in circulation will become less which directly leads to falling prices or products that cannot be sold. No matter how many countries can manage through an export surplus to reduce the debt within their own country, that only shifts the required debt into foreign countries, but on a global scale it doesn't reduce the total amount of required debt at all. All of the above still doesn't include growing productivity. The world manages to increase productivity (the amount of value an hour of labor produces on average) at an almost steady rate of about 3% per year. This means, even independent of savings, the money supply and thereby the amount of loans that loan money into existence must increase by 3% per year, or else you get deflation. Now look into the world, look real closely, check statistics about inflation, money supply, wealth, debt, inequality and all that. It becomes absolutely obvious, there aren't enough debtors available in the world to keep up with savings and productivity. While savings are increasing continually, the money in circulation is shrinking, simply because the amount of money loaned into existence is less than the amount taken out of circulation through savings, while at same time growing productivity permanently increases the amount of goods and services on sale. Then consider the total amount of debt already existing in the world, consider the required increase and remember we have been in this exponential function for many decades if not centuries. You will discover that the world as a whole is already PAST the point where money loaned into existence could keep up with savings taken out of circulation. The only thing that currently keeps the system going is extremely low interest rates and the fact almost all countries in the world have taken on massive national debt. Still there is no inflation to speak of, whether in Europe, in Japan or in the US, inflation rates are at least near zero and in many countries already below zero. Large parts of the world are already in eternal deflation and depression and the areas that aren't in depression yet aren't far away anymore, they will get there soon, even China is now slowing down and we can already predict when they will fall below zero inflation. Did I make clear, the fiat money system cannot be sustained unless it finds ever greater numbers of debtors? Did I make clear the amount of available debtors isn't sufficient to sustain the system? Then consider the fact, throughout the whole world almost nobody wants to even talk about this problem. Throughout the world all people, all regions, all countries exclusively focus on creating imbalances through which a specific individual or a specific region or a specific country could still have a thriving economy, ignoring the fact that any such imbalance will always unavoidably create unimaginable poverty somewhere else in the world. At same time almost all politicians, almost all mainstream economists, up to the IMF try to enforce austerity on all debtors, commanding them to reduce their deficit, ignoring the fact that this will only shift the problem to some other place but cannot solve anything. Then we finally get to the "unexpected consequences". Enforcing austerity on debtors while at same time allowing exponential growth of savings is a logical impossibility, it cannot be done and the attempt to do it anyway will cause unexpected things to happen. What that will be in detail, I cannot know, that's the literal meaning of "unexpected", but I do know that some plain basic math of bookkeeping sets the date of when this fiat money system will collapse within the next 2 years. Look at the curve in this video from 2013 then look up the numbers from 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined and you discover, from 300 people having as much as the bottom 3 billion people in 2013, within only 2 years this has grown into 62 people having more than the bottom 3.5 billion people. This alone should show you, that the exponential curve is extremely close to becoming a vertical line. Last but not least, my conclusion: Since almost nobody is addressing the problem, almost nobody is doing something about it, the unavoidable crash will come unexpected and will be entirely chaotic. What the ultimate tiny little detail will be that will start the collapse, I cannot know, it may be the referendum in GB about their membership in the EU this year, or the elections in France next year, in case the right wing extremist Front National takes over, or even some near meaningless detail like another exposed scandal of fraud in the banking system. But if our society isn't prepared for this, if it comes over us over night, if nobody knows what to do, let alone how to stop it, the actual consequences of the collapse might very well exceed your wildest nightmares. The proposed gradual transition from our today's corrupt system to a free society over several generations will not work, simply because there isn't enough time left in the current system.

Even if it's useless, I still do it, because it's the only thing we can do. Our current system will hit the fan within the next 2 years (I'll be happy to explain why I believe that, but that's a rather long story and I don't have that much time today, if you like we can start a new topic about it tomorrow). Once the system hits the fan, the outcome of an entirely uncontrolled collapse are not predictable, but I'm tempted to believe it will be so drastic that we won't have to worry about government anymore, we will have wide spread borderless civil and religious wars worldwide. If then the wrong guys get hold of the nukes, you may kiss life on earth as we know it goodbye.

"Interesting" one way of looking at it. I'm convinced, the conflicts in between different religions without any force in between that keeps them under control, would lead to open civil war. It would be the dark ages all over again. But then, that might be just me being afraid of consequences in case the experiment goes wrong. I guess there's only one way to find out.

Good idea, but I'm afraid that might backfire. Since religious people are still a majority, they might decide the free society is a problem, they might not talk to free people anymore, not doing business with free people, until free people comply with religious laws. Do you expect atheists to be the majority by the time we get to a free society, or do you believe a majority of religious people could be convinced to follow the opinion of a minority, or do you believe atheism will at least be strong enough to stand up against religions until the visible effects of economic advantages of the free society drag more and more religious people out of religion?

I'm sorry Anuojat, I have the impression you're defending the existing system in order to contradict my points. Maybe it's just a wrong impression of mine again, if so, please clear that for me. https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46102-the-new-pyramid/ That's a really good explanation, where the wording of "super rich" I'm using stands for the top level takers. I'm not trying to defend politics and not the corrupt system we have either, I'm all in on abolishing government. Since libertarians believe everyone should receive the full fruit of his own labor, following libertarian ideas neccessary requires there cannot be any takers on top who steal from the workers and that does not only include politics and media but first and foremost the top level parasites. That's why I believe we not only have to abolish government, but also have to get rid of the top level takers. If you want to pick on the wording "super rich", give me a better one, I'll be happy to exchange the words. But if you're trying to defend the top level takers, I believe you will have most of this forum against you. Whether or not you yourself can launch a company that does better than the state is an independent question. I don't doubt you could easily do better than the state, but what does that have to do with your personal income? As a small business owner you wouldn't be a super rich taker, you would provide your own labor to the company and therefore receive the fruit of your labor. Whether you do that as the owner of your business or as a worker within someone elses business shouldn't make a difference, your work has a value and will be paid just that. If you as the boss work longer hours, do bookkeeping or other things on top of your other work, you make more money, all fine, all fair, all compatibel with libertarian ideas. But if you one day decide to pull out of work, you remain owner of the company, you hire someone else, make him a CEO, to do precisely the work you have done up to then and you pay him only half as much as you made while you were working, while you yourself don't do any work at all anymore, but cash half of the value of your CEO's labor for nothing, if you command your new CEO to lower wages for the workers and hand the increased profit on top of half the CEO's value over to you, for no economic reason, but exclusively to increase your own wealth, then you become a thief. Before you get that wrong: In case you remain active as in keeping your money available for investments, maintenance of the companies property and all that, of course you still have a value for the company and still get part of the profits the company generates, the above stands for completely pulling out, cashing in, in exchange for nothing and even increasing your income through paying your workers less than their labor is worth.

I would agree, indoctrinating kids is something a free society should talk about, but then, from where would a free society take the authority of telling people what they should or should not teach their kids? That doesn't seem to be anywhere near libertarian. Since I haven't made up my mind on this point yet, maybe you guys in here could share your opinion? If a free society cannot and should not tell people what they do with their kids, how would a free society prevent itself from being overtaken by religious laws?

No worries. I'm used to all kinds of possible misunderstandings in forums on the web, not only in political topics. If I want to say somthing ironic or sarcastic or anything other than the literal meaning of my words, I usually add a smiley (other than one saying thanks) or something to it. For the censoring in here ......... well yes, I was wondering already why this forum is so heavily protected, while that stands so much against the basic principles of libertarian ideas. Even after over 150 postings of mine, where all of them passed approval, every now and then one of my posting doesn't show instantly, but gives me a message saying (not sure about the precise wording) something like: Your message requires admin approval. I assume, the topics we discuss in here can easily lead to .......... (fill in a word, I don't have one), where independent of political orientation most people in the world would prefer not to see them written anywhere, so I guess for the time being and given the fact that "big brother surely is watching us" here, I'm fine with it.

Not sarcasm, that was my honest first thought when I saw that "Goodbye" post.

Wow, I may have been wrong after all. There are people in here who do not support right wing authoritarians and some of them are even Staff. I feel MUCH better already.

There we're on the same page. It's definately a bad idea and it's probably wasted time to fight it. I believe that's because the money power of the super rich combined with plain greed of their corrupt executors is a far stronger force than voluntary work and patient attempts to convince people in a discussion could ever be. This quote, I don't even know who said it first, keeps getting to my mind: "If you cannot beat them, buy them." I blieve this also applies to todays sick society, where just too many people have been bought by the system and not enough are left to turn the system around unless the source of the bribery gets eliminated. A welfare system that "bribes" the poor, subsidies paid for god knows how many reasons and many other sick things make too many people believe they would depend on the continuation of the system as it is. Furthermore the successful attempts of authoritarians to divide left and right wing libertarians to a point where many right wing libertarians rather vote right authoritarian before even considering left libertarian ideas, weaken the libertarian movement. I'd be happy if I was proven wrong on this though, but for the time being I believe we will have to begin the conversion to a free society by abolishing BOTH ends of the corruption.

Thumbs up on that one, makes a lot of sense. But how do you do that, while the super rich work not only on national but global level together and bribe not only national governments but make sure that entire continents all have the same laws, all in favor of legalizing the bribery and the theft? How could you split gigantic corrupt structures into small units without taking the source of the bribery out of the picture first?

I don't mind differences in opinion, that's the basis of discussion, without that a forum like this doesn't make much sense. This forum apparently DOES seem to reply as a group, where most of the downvotes I get come from right wing authoritarians, while libertarians might contest such an answer once in a while, like ProfessionalTeabagger in reply #11 in this topic (which promptly got him a downvote from an authoritarian Trump supporter) but don't give upvotes. This behavior in the end makes me look like an enemy of libertarians and that I DO mind. Then there are these ....... not sure how to word that ....... misunderstandings on purpose. Like reply #5 in this topic. He refers to an article that I pointed to as proof for a minimum wage under an authoritarian government actually creating jobs. Based on the content of that article he "urges me to question my libertarian ideals", while in fact I, without any room for misinterprettation, pointed out that this is an effect of an authoritarian system that has nothing to do with any libertarian ideas. Makes me wonder how else I could have worded it?

True, but how does that solve the problem of what will happen if you leave the outcome of the corruption in place upon abolishion of the bottom half of the corruption? Corruption requires two ends, one paying a bribe, one taking the bribe. To my mind abolishing government means getting rid of those taking the bribe, but leaving the ones paying the bribe in place to my mind cannot lead to anything but them finding someone else to pay the bribe to, who will continue the very same corrupt system, only under a different name, maybe a private army or something like that. I'm open for arguments of why this will not happen though. Edit: My answer to RoseCodex appears to be stuck in approval .... hope it will show up soon, before it gets out of context.

Very good points there. I did consider most of this already and I believe I have a few things I could answer to that. The very first and most important point is the difference between socialism and communism. I believe most right wingers misinterpret what socialism actually is, they assume it's all communism, while in fact communism is better described as state capitalism, where the state abolishes the takers above them and becomes the takers themselves. That's a left authoritarian system and has nothing at all in common with socialism. Socialism, at least the way I see it, is the opposite of central planning, in socialism EVERYTHING is decided democratically within small units. Richard Wolff defines the #1 priority in socialism should be "democratize the enterprise". That's literally what right wing libertarians want as well, unless I got it completely wrong. As far as I understood, all libertarians want the producers, the workers who are currently at the bottom of the pyramid to receive the full credit of the fruits of their labor, without any takers above them. Make the enterprise the property of the workers who decide themselves what they want to produce, where they want to produce, how they want to produce and how to split the profits, WITHOUT ANY interference from any government, does precisely that, it gives the workers the power and it is the core idea of socialism. I'm aware there are many hijackers of socialism, there is an overwhelming amount of left authoritarians who claim to be socialists, i.e. Bernie Sanders, who give socialism a real bad reputation, who are from true socialism as far away as Donald Trump is away from libertarians. I believe this is why so many right wing libertarians cannot see anything good in left ideas and I believe left authoritarians abuse this misunderstanding, to divide left libertarians from right libertarians, just so they can get the right libertarians to vote for authoritarian republicans. How I imagine a functioning society from a left libertarian point of view? Easy. Worker owned production in democratically organized enterprises, in capitalistic competition with each other and without a government above.

I'm not against capitalism, but I am strongly against the idea that we should launch a "free" capitalism based on the situation as it has evolved in todays entirely corrupt system. About taxation I'm not sure how to word it. Of course I don't advocate violence, that's why I'm strongly against violence from super rich takers who hire themselves forces that steal from the people and I'm afraid leaving them their money upon abolishing government will not stop their stealing. Of course a government that actually executes the violence on behalf of the super rich has to be abolished. But then I'm not so sure how much voluntarism could do against the money power of the super rich. I'm tempted to believe a free society will require some form of organization beyond voluntarism that prevents violence and theft and whatever you want to call such organization, it will require funds.

I mean stolen wealth shouldn't become legal. I mean upon abolishing an entirely corrupt system we shouldn't give the initiators and main beneficiaries of the stealing any kind of credit. I mean we the people should take back whats rightfully ours. There's nothing to say against property rights, I'm all in on that one, but definately NOT if it's stolen property. Or would you find it ok, if in a free society gangs of thieves were going around, stealing whatever they want to have and claim property rights on anything they have stolen based on the fact they can protect their stolen wealth? If you allow the super rich to keep their stolen wealth, you enable them to keep the stealing going, even if you abolish the government. They would use their money to hire some kind of private "soldiers" which would then continue with further stealing. Abolishing the state without sending the super rich takers to hell would only replace the executors. I mean look at it throughout the world, the super rich never had a problem stealing, no matter the political system. From feudalism, over democracy, socialsm and communism up to anarchic situations in some parts of Africa, in secular states as well as under religious fanatism, the super rich steal everywhere all the time. What makes you think a free world could be anywhere near free if you let these jerks stay on top?

Too bad I cannot upvote anything. THIS is precisely my point, or at least my impression. There seem to be a whole bunch of authoritarians in here and I wonder why they can downvote my libertarian ideas based on the fact my ideas aren't far enough right wing, while the actual libertarians don't give me any upvotes. That's what leaves for me the impression, there might even be a majority of authoritarians in here.

Why I care about the labels people identify with? Let me put it this way. I agree 100% with the pyramid shown in this topic: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46102-the-new-pyramid/ From that I take as #1 priority the need to get rid of the super rich takers on the very top, even above government and media. Furthermore I believe these top level takers are right wing authoritarians, who bribe politicians so they steal from the people to hand all wealth over to the top. Therefore I despise completely any right wing authoritarians, way more than even left wing authoritarians or right wing libertarians, right wing authoritarians are the precise opposite of my position. From my impression this forum is mostly in support of republicans, who to my mind are the biggest thieves in this story and even if they were not, they clearly are right wing authoritarians. Every time I try to say anything against those super rich takers, I get downvotes and replys that tell me, most people in this forum don't want to get rid of them, just the opposite. I get answers saying, the state should pay its debt, which obviously is mostly the wealth of those super rich takers, then the state should get ablolished and the super rich should be allowed to convert their wealth into property rights. So if despite the name of the forum, I am here in a forum that mostly supports right wing authoritarian ideas, I'm in the wrong place and I will have to find myself some other forum that actually supports libertarian ideas. But if that's a wrong impression, I would love to have that cleared, so I can stay here and feel home.

What can you expect? At least on this point I'm a fan of Peter Schiff, who points out pretty clear where the problems are. Well paid manufacturing jobs are replaced by low paid service jobs, a growing amount of people in the middle class has maxed out their credit limits, many are falling down below the poverty line and everybody has understood, taking on ever more debt isn't a good idea. So what do you get as a result? Consumers use every penny they can save, such as falling gas prices, not for additional shopping, but to pay off debt and if then they still have something left, they save it, for their children, for pensions, etc. Logic consequence is, a growing productivity that produces ever more stuff with ever less workforce cannot find buyers, which leads to falling prices and no incentive for investment, just the opposite, factories are closing and workers are laid off. What Obama, or better nearly the whole world is trying to do is, pump money into the economy to make businesses invest, but how could that possibly lead to anything else than gigantic bubbles in the stock market and real estate? After all the problem isn't on the offer side, the problem is on the demand side. More and more people cannot buy anything and the few who still can don't want to. You just can't create demand through expanding the offer, or better if you create jobs that expand the offer, the amount of extra demand created through this is always less than the expansion in offer. In such a setting every halfway intelligent CEO can predict falling prices and will decide not to invest. Building additional shopping malls won't change that and the well paid manufacturing jobs that could make a difference are by now all in China. Enforcing a higher minimum wage won't make a difference either, because in order to get anything out of that, one has to have a job and those are disappearing. I believe we will soon see "helicopter money", where the state prints even more money than they did in the past, where they hand out extra money not only in form of loans to businesses, but in form of free money for everyone, but other than adding runaway inflation to the existing problems, it won't change anything either. A solution? I can't think of one, not within the system of fiat money and authoritarian government we currently have.

I've been around for a while, but I still can't get a straight idea of what the majority in this forum thinks, so maybe you guys could clear a few things up for me? I see myself as a libertarian, meaning I feel welcome under the title of this forum. In this topic https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/44502-political-spectrum-test/ I figured out, most members of this forum are right wing libertarians, where I myself prefer left wing libertarian ideas. Still I would believe, I should be not too far off the main idea of this forum. There are a few differences, i.e. I believe a stateless society still requires some kind of rules beyond property rights, including some mechanism to enforce them, i.e. some protection against religious fanatics, also I have a different view on economics, but on the main point of wanting to abolish a corrupt government we're on the same page. But then there are all these down votes, where I point out right wing authoritarian ideas as bad and I never get an up vote on these, as if all the ones who vote on postings prefer right wing authoritarian over left wing libertarian. Like this one: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/46280-walmart-closes-la-store-over-15-minimum-wage/?p=423647 I pointed out a simple fact, not even an opinion or something, I've put a sentence before that making clear, this has nothing to do with a free society but is only a result of a state that has an authoritarian government, but someone in here sees that as so bad that one has to give it a negative vote, while nobody feels the need for a positive vote. Then there are users who identify in their nick already as left libertarians, who get massive downvotes to an extend that I'm tempted to believe the nick alone might give them part of the negative votes already. Like this one: https://board.freedomainradio.com/user/24148-libertariansocialist/ Is that really the case, is the orientation right before left so much more important that the majority of people in this forum if they had to choose between left libertarians and right authoritarians prefer authoritarians, or why is it that left libertarian ideas seem so unpopular in here? I've seen most of Stefan's videos, I never had the impression he was particularly right wing oriented, so I get the impression, his forum might have been hijacked by right wingers, where a good portion of them is actually authoritarian. Or is that just a wrong impression?

First of all a minimum wage is a state enforced thing, therefore none of any of this has anything to do with a free society. That said, within a state that does have an existing government that does steal from people and all that a minimum wage actually creates jobs. http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/09/the-german-minimum-wage-is-not-a-job-killer/

I don't think the UK system has anything to do with socialism, after all the UK government is (like ALL governments in Europe) right wing authoritarian. Aside of the definition of what socialism is or should be, the UK system is simply an authoritarian system, enforcing taxes on all citizens out of which health care for all citizens is provided for free. The "free" becomes a VERY relative term, if you include the fact of how much tax they charge from everyone to keep this going. The huge downside of this state organized system is the enormous waiting times you have when you get sick, I don't know the numbers, but I heard something about a huge amount of doctors appointments missed by patients due to the fact they had to wait so long that either the problem doesn't exists anymore or it's too late for treatment. On the upside a state controlled system is far cheaper, because the state also enforces low prices on the pharma industry. The US have the by far most expensive system in the world, which on first view and before Obamacare limits access to the medical system to those who can afford it, which explains why there aren't these extreme waiting times like in the UK, but that's not the main reason for the high prices. The pharma industry in the US has managed to abuse laws to avoid competition through (not sure about the correct english word in pharma terms) copyright protection on drugs. Once one single producer has the exclusive rights to produce a specific medicine, they are free to set whatever price they like and obviously they do set prices exceeding the wildest phantasies. In a free world, neither of these two would apply. A free market, including competition, would provide a free system, way cheaper than any state enforced system could be.

It's bad because it shows the entire world, there never was a real shortage in oil. Prices have been kept up through the OPEC cartel, while those were almost the only producers. Now that the US has converted from an oil importer to an exporter, where the US isn't member of the OPEC, not only does the OPEC without their American customers struggle to make money as they used to, there is no longer a control over the amount of oil produced, the only way to keep a share of the market is to bring up as much oil as possible and to underbid the competition in sales price, meaning there now is more oil on the market than the world economy needs. Furthermore many countries, like Russia, Norway, Venezuela, etc., who depend on the money they make from exporting energy cannot simply cut their needs for money, meaning they try to compensate lower prices through higher production, which obviously cannot work, but drives prices further down. This is the unavoidable outcome of a "free market" where the former cartel has lost its power. This will unavoidably lead to the bankruptcy of almost all oil producers except of the ones with the cheapest cost of production, including transport to the customer. Once this battle is over, some kind of cartel will be reestablished, production will be limited again, prices will be set higher again and everything returns to where it was before, until prices are again so high that alternative methods like fracking become attractive again, after which another round of this battle will begin. This surely will have quite some impact on the takers at the top of the pyramid, but from a libertarian point of view one can only welcome this as a step in the right direction and for private customers it's indeed an economic boom, allowing them either to repay their private debt or buy other things. But since the takers at the top of the pyramid still control most of the media, we now get to hear how bad this all is.

I have the impression that same as left wingers often generalize all right wingers, often as harsh as calling them all nazis, right wingers often generalize all left wingers. Both of that seems wrong to me. Both of these assume that the other side is always authoritarian. As we know from this topic: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/44502-political-spectrum-test/?hl=politicalcompass being a libertarian doesn't have anything to do with left or right. There are left wing libertarians same as right wing libertarians. I never understood why this forum appears to be mostly right wing libertarian. Dictatorship is first of all an authoritarian system, therefore the opposite of libertarian and should be separated from the libertarian left. Countries like Venezuela aren't socialist, even though they call themselves socialists and even though right wing libertarians tend to call them socialists, they are authoritarian dictatorships, which would fit much better under the term "state capitalism". Current governments almost worldwide are almost all authoritarian systems, independent from whether they are left or right. As you can see in this graph https://www.politicalcompass.org/usstates?ak=on&az=on&il=on&ny=on There you can even see, that even most blue states are in fact right wing authoritarian, only not as far right as the red states. US Senators are mostly right wing authoritarian, meaning they are from right wing libertarians just as far away as left wing libertarians would be, only in a different direction. If you ask me, if I were a right wing libertarian, I'd highly prefer left libertarians over right authoritarians and as the left libertarian I am, I prefer right libertarians over left authoritarians. The question of what would happen if a socialist government would take over highly depends on whether that would be an authoritarian left or a libertarian left. The core idea of socialism might be best defined in "democratize the enterprise" which from a libertarian point of view is shared in both, left and right wing libertarians. Almost worldwide all businesses are organized like a dictatorship, where the boss commands his workers what they shall do and how they shall do it, where the authoritarian state puts further limitations on it. Right wing libertarians as well as left wing libertarians share the idea of worker owned production, where workers decide themselves what they want to produce and how they want to do it and where workers actually receive the true value of their labor. Even the question of whether or not a government is required to organize things is an authoritarian vs libertarian argument and has nothing to do with left or right. As far as I figured the differences between left and right, it's that left wing libertarians want some kind of mechanism that prevents absurd inequalities, where a tiny minority of super rich have everything and a vast majority of poor people have near nothing, where left wing libertarians believe this won't happen by itself, while right wing libertarians believe, without government inequality will automatically adjust itself to an acceptable level. Bernie Sanders is nothing more than an authoritarian dictator, he has, except of the claim to be one, nothing at all to do with socialism, at best one could describe him as an authoritarian socialist, but then I believe the words authoritarian and socialist contradict one another, so I highly prefer the description of his ideas as authoritarian state capitalism. From this point of view democrats and republicans aren't much different from one another, they BOTH abuse the authority of the state to charge taxes, they only differ in the beneficiaries of whom they charge how much and whom they give the stolen money to. From a general point of view, as long as a government exists, I would highly prefer a left wing government that at least tries to avoid absurd inequalities, but we all know, trying to avoid inequality nearly always fails due to corruption, therefore I wouldn't want to vote for Bernie Sanders, but at same time I wouldn't want to vote for Donald Trump either. To my mind it would be far better to send BOTH of them to hell with their authoritarian ideas. This is why in Europe more and more governments that used to alternate between left and right authoritarians, mostly consisting of only two major parties, are currently seeing the uprising of alternative 3rd parties, because the people have understood that left or right makes no difference to "normal people" as long as both are authoritarian.