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I am continually surprised by the Moderate Party of Sweden. One article in loosely translated Swedish I read stated their support for literally privatizing all of education, a policy that I would not find pushed by any other sensible conservative party in Europe.

The Liberated Territories wrote:

I am continually surprised by the Moderate Party of Sweden. One article in loosely translated Swedish I read stated their support for literally privatizing all of education, a policy that I would not find pushed by any other sensible conservative party in Europe.

They did a lot of radical things in relations to other places. Privatizing roads and medicine sectors as well. One of the better liberal conservative parties out there.

Sibirsky wrote:

Hahahaha. This would be a valid point if I said that governments cannot fail. You're going to teach me about Eastern Europe? Please teach me more about the failure of the government of the USSR.
You are the only one here that has this idea that a monopoly would form. Monopolies do not naturally form.
You seem extremely risk averse. Don't go out. Terrible things may happen. Then again, terrible things may happen at home. The world was built on risk. And North America was built on even greater risk. Reducing risk is prudent, to a point. Avoiding risk is idiotic.

The USSR isn't a valid comparison. How do you compare the government of the USSR to most other countries, while not perfect, are immensely preferable?

Prove why not.

Which is neither true in economics or psychology

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Alyakia wrote:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-gibson/kansas-tax-cuts_b_5589663.html
California did the exact opposite of Kansas. In 2012, when California was in a dire budget crisis, voters passed a critical ballot initiative undoing the state's requirement of a two-thirds supermajority vote in the legislature to raise taxes. Through the initiative, California voters passed tax increases for everyone, including the rich, marginally increasing the sales tax while creating new income tax brackets of 10.3 percent for those who earned between $250,000 and $300,000; 11.3 percent for taxpayers who made anywhere between $300,000 and $500,000; 12.3 percent for incomes of $500,000 to $1,000,000; and 13.3 percent for all incomes above $1,000,000. The richest Californians would barely notice it, given the immense wealth in California's major economic hubs like Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the wine country.
After monitoring the results, the New Jersey Policy Perspective, a non-partisan think tank, found that California's tax increases are paying off big time. The state's coffers will gain approximately $6.8 billion in new revenue every year, all of which will be invested in public education. California saw 2.9 percent job growth in 2013, making it the third fastest-growing economy in the US. California will have an operational surplus of $9 billion by 2018, meaning even more public sector jobs created and a better economy for everyone. And because education is now a funding priority, California's schoolchildren are set up to soar above and beyond national education averages. Well-educated kids means more people in the future able to take on high-skilled, good-paying jobs.

TAXATION IS THEFT SO YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID!!!!!

Sibirsky wrote:

This would be a valid point, if I was actually comparing the USSR to something. I was not.
The real world proves this. The only monopolies are mandated.
Put on your helmet and read what I wrote. The world is full of risk. Without risk there is no gain.
You are not very good at this.

The ones created by the state, yea. Which is why we should be vigilant. But the mere existence of a state is proof of being a natural monopoly - where in the state of nature were people following the NAP before the state came along? Nowhere.

There are entire organizations dedicated to minimizing risk. Too much risk is counter-productive. If a banker always went for the more risky option, he'd be broke or fired in a free market.

You are an authoritarian. You are not a libertarian. You wish to enforce your anarchist dictatorship without the consent of the people. You want to make it very easy for another PDA to come along in AnCap and fvck us harder than the state before it. You want to subvert the rule of law that people fought for for a thousand years for a more primitive statism, one controlled by gang warfare. You don't give two craps about the non-aggression principle, as you'd believe that people will voluntarily follow it, a laughable notion to anyone who studies history, psychology, or sociology...

Minarchism is the ONLY logical outcome of libertarianism. I'm sick of all these 'anarchist' edgelords everywhere - you guys are the reason why libertarianism won't ever be a serious political movement. You guys are the problem!

The Dark Ages were indeed a terrible time - but Roman civilisation has been in DECLINE for centuries before it collapsed.

The Empire was a time of stagnation - nothing much new was invented, and in the later centuries of the Empire things actually decayed.

The new states that grew up in Europe had many grievous faults - but they also had advantages over the Empire.

In 877 it was formally accepted by Charles the Bald that even a King of France could not take land from one family and give it to another.

That was not isolated to France - it became normal to think in a "Feudal" way that government was LIMITED that there were things that government was not ALLOWED to do.

No Roman Emperor (or Islamic ruler or Oriental Despot) would accept such limits on their power.

Under the Roman Empire ordinary people were unarmed and untrained.

In "Feudal" Europe most people (and most people were NOT serfs) were used to weapons - owning them and using them.

And the idea of "the law" was that it applied even to the King himself - that the law was not just the "will of the ruler" as with Roman Law.

Building out of nothing at the end of the Dark Ages - medieval Europe made vast progress - there were inventions, the European lands of the 1400s were vastly different to the lands of the 900s or 1000s(there was no stagnation).

Europe slipped back in its legal ideas - with the return to the Roman Law concept of law being the "will of the ruler" and nothing being beyond the ruler.

However, in some places (such as England) the idea that the law was NOT the "will or the ruler of rulers" remained - the liberty of the subject, unknown in the Roman Empire.

See Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (of Doctor Bonham's case and so on) and (even more) Chief Justice Sir John Holt of the 1688 period.

How is everyone today?

By the way - a short version of what I said above.

To use the test of even the arch statist John Rawls - I would rather be an random person in Kansas than a random person in high-cost-of-living California.

And when the Credit-Bubble (Federal Reserve generated) economy bursts - California is going to get worse, a lot worse.

The huuuge increase for socialism and progressive politics across the world is frightening. Sanders, Corbyn, SYRIZA, all of these huge spikes in socialist popularity are to the detriment of us. And what can the libertarian movement do when we are divorced from left and right? Should we adopt more leftist rhetoric like the early libertarians did and attempt to ride the wave?

Regardless, this might help us, or massively set us back. There is no denying the influence of the Tea Party on Ron Paul and Gary Johnson to libertarianism's modern popularity, but - if liberal ideas are once again demonized, what will tho mean for us?

Being home alone for a week when you have no friends in town is not as fun as you'd think.

So there's this Vox article focusing on Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton's exchange over capitalism in the debate, written by Ezra Klein, who is a pretty smart guy for a leftist. A part of the article caught my eye:
"Clinton walks in the tradition of her husband and President Obama, both of whom emerge out of a post-Reagan strain of Democratic thinking that sees the private sector as vastly more efficient than the public sector. As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope:

'[T]he conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight— that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie — contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money's worth. Not every government program worked the way it was advertised. Some functions could be better carried out by the private sector, just as in some cases market-based incentives could achieve the same results as command-and-control-style regulations, at a lower cost and with great flexibility.'"

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/14/9528873/bernie-sander-hillary-clinton-socialist-debate

It goes on to say that Clinton and Obama have favoured public-private partnerships like 'Clintoncare' and Obamacare to more New Deal-ish programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

So this begs the question: is Obama a centre-right 'New' Democrat of the Bill Clinton variety? Or is he an 'old' Democrat more similar to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt?