If I am missing your argument (and I use that term loosely), it's because it, like a chameleon, keeps changing color to fit into your newest point. The argument we have been having is about your justification for libertarianism, that the poor cannot be trusted to sip the tasty benefits of self-governance because they will drink too much, wreck the place, and the party will be over. For that reason, the argument (implicitly) is that only the better off (let's call them "libertarians" though many aren't) should get to drink and the unwashed should get to watch them and appreciated their wisdom in limiting government to the role of protecting the private property rights ("the law in its infinite majesty respects the right of the rich and poor alike to buy the only bridge in town and charge tolls for crossing").
In that argument you have given ground and given ground, and now are explaining that while government does screw the poor, we shouldn't think about how the rich gobble the food at the table (we've moved from drinks to the meal now), but should focus on the upper middle-class and the crumbs they get. ("Not crumbs!" you're going to say. "It's a full meal. The rich aren't eating because they filled up at Masa before they came over, and they don't like the government grub." Go ahead, just say it.)
What. ever. You are still saying, OK, so the government doesn't do anything for the lumpenproletariat but it just has to be that way because if it did, they'd drink us and eat us out of house and home, and then we'd have no democracy and we'd just be sitting by the side of the road, presumably without any of the benefits of the Schumpeterian destruction that you're otherwise always insisting is going to bring the phoenix-like rebirth of our economy -- somehow letting the government help poor people will nullify all of the advantages of heightening the contradictions. It's Marx for capitalists, I guess.
It's so nice that you believe the press clippings of the older generations' plutocrats.
My grandfather, the son of a man who got off a boat from Germany and homesteaded in South Dakota, once told me that the only two institutions that had ever done anything for him in his life were the Democratic Party and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Maybe he should have spent more time reading about what a swell guy Henry Ford was.
You just told me that the poor are irrational. I then told you that they are rational and want ordinary things, not incurious or narrowly focused. That's your myopia or stereotype, not mine. I think people are mostly the same. And you don't.
When the economy is growing and every is doing better, the fact that the well off are exploiting everyone else doesn't bother people as much.
I see a society that in significant ways is more equal than it used to be, and a government that can continue that progress. I also see a conservative movement that feels threatened by the change, and is trying to stand athwart history, yelling stop. Which side are you on? Oh yeah, Gary Johnson's -- I forgot.
Voting Democrats into office would help. Just sayin'.
If you think violence and instability are better ways to resolve disagreement, it's odd that you haven't moved to Syria or Somalia. Not sure what you mean by the "system," but the point of having a government is to avoid anarchy, which turns out to involve a lot of dead-weight loss. Civil war: Not as much fun as it's cracked up to be.
What you and other libertarians don't seem to grok is that everyone has "basic necessities" that differ, and that the things that matter to you aren't "basic necessities" for other people, while things that are "basic necessities" for them aren't for you. Of course you would eliminate a few. What government does is to take everyone's wish list and find a way to reconcile all the competing interests, imperfectly for everyone.
Of course, if you announce that the things that some people need aren't "necessities" and so they don't get to submit their wish lists, then those people get screwed, relatively.
It didn't. That's why it's gone. And The Great Gatsby wasn't science fiction when written.
No they don't. The poor don't need to learn lessons about what it's like to get screwed.
Please read this, because Marina Hyde is brilliant and it's totally on point. There will be a quiz later about the Self-Knowledge Impregnator, so better read it to find out.
In any crisis, the poor will be screwed most of all.
Trump is seriously uninformed and he is rich. Please don't tell me it's because he's new rich. Just resist the temptation.
