Another link

[pecunium]

Liberal Tough Guy dotcom

Forget the picture of the Quad .50 (which is cool, in a gun-geek kind of way) and read the text.

I've no beef with social Liberalism but economic Liberalism is True Liberalism and must come first. I'll put it to ya like this: what some Mexican-American janitor needs is to be paid $25 an hour, not to have bi-lingual education for his kids or a translator at the Secretary of State's office. Get the money and the rest will follow.

There is a lot of truth to that.

Comments

(continuation)

[averros.livejournal.com]

It's just that one form helps more people than the other.

Some people are more willing or capable of helping themselves, sorry. Please don't feed me B.S. regarding how bad starting conditions prevent people from raising above their station - my own life is a proof by existance that this is a patent nonsense (I came to US with, like, $100 of my life savings and practically no English, no network of relatives or friends, and no clue about life in a capitalist country - basically, in much worse shape that any native-born - 10 years later, I work for my own company, and have never took any form of government welfare).

So it is difference in personal qualities and difference in motivation which makes people unequal, the starting conditions are in long term irrelevant.

As you cannot make stupid people smarter, it only means that equality can be achieved by putting down all smarter people. Or killing them. This was done, too, by the true believers in the egalitarianism.

Which, it seems, as a Libertarian (though fiscal libertarians tend to have some huge blind spots as to what they are arguing for. We tried a laissez faire economy,

Excuse me, when exactly US was laissez faire? Maybe in the official democratic mythology?

The last recorded examples of laissez-faire-kinda econimies were medieval trading towns (Venice, etc) - which also happened to be the cradle of the Western civilization.

As for trusts - Economy 101, part #2:

A trust is a group of independent producers engaged in price-fixing (i.e. coordinating offering prices) and, by necessity, in fixing the market shares. The trusts are effective only short-term - if they succeed in raising profitability of the companies involved, there's an increased incentives for independents to enter the market (as it becomes an attractive investment), and for existing trust members to desert and capture larger market share by offering slightly lower prices.

This means that trusts may exist long-term only by means of government-enforced exclusion of new entrants. Historically, all long-lived trusts were direct results of government intervention and collusion between businesses and governments.

Worse, it continues today in the form of patents and "intellectual property" laws - which are, basically, nothing more than government-sponsored exclusion of new market players.

where Adam Smith said it would go

On every historical opinion there's a better counter-opinion. For example, Socrates explained why democracies are evil and will fail :)

fiscal libertarians tend to have some huge blind spots as to what they are arguing for

Please, elaborate.

As for huge disparities in pay between executives and rank-and-file: this is the direct result of government regulations, ostensibly "protecting" investors. In fact, what those regulations do is protect executives from shareholders - their huge self-appointed pay comes from the pockets of shareholders, not from the pockets of employees.

I'm not sure that public in general is familiar with the mechanics of the scam called "publically-traded companies" - it is somewhat arcane (I had to learn it as I used to be an executive in few such companies) - but it couldn't exist without helpful government acting "for the good of the people".