>>3444 >There's no critical thought about how--say--maybe a ridiculously large government might be the cause of incredibly amounts of "corruption" or something. OP, they're all impatient fucks that care more about results rather than the process that leads to the results. Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and dictatorships are great government systems if you're looking for quick and effective fixes, or need a society under control 24/7, however they're easily swayed due to so much centralized power. Meanwhile, having a system of checks and balances in place prevents power sways as you will always have someone looking over someone else's shoulder. However, that then creates another problem as you have to keep playing political games in order to get effective results, and there's no denying the fact that some of those positions may be swayed towards different ideologies because we're all human.

Just tell them that corruption is not a bug, it's a feature of socialist government. All government is "corrupt" and the more power it has, the corrupter it gets.

>>3444 It's the fascist argument. Our government will work perfectly when we get the "right person" in charge. Just don't tell them anything about the calculation/knowledge problem or their heads might explode.

>>3452 It surprises me how many people realize that's a terrible structure in any other context. If I were to tell a programmer that "This computer only works with the 'right' PCs," 99% of the time they'd likely say, "That sounds like pretty shit code." If I was telling you how to beat a level, and one way only 1% of people could do it, but another way was really noob-friendly and 90% of people could do it first-try, you'd see hwy the former method was a shit method. But when it comes to government, having a system that requires "the best people" always keep getting idealized!

>>3478 Exactly. You can criticize people heavily on all kinds of things, but if you lightly brush on their political opinions, even the smartest people can become offended and start acting like immature children, that's also true for me, and especially for those who like to think they are super rational arbiters of everything objective, factual and logical. There's something about discussions on politics and religion, as well as the opposite sex and the dating market, that is so psychologically threatening to us, it's as if you aren't challenging someone's surface-level opinions but something else that's fundamental to the core of their being. So theoretically, if you can change the underlying psychology, or if you can identify their underlying values, motivators, traumas and desires, and change their attitude towards them, then the other higher level views they hold in regards to things like politics and economics will automatically change as well. I have personally always considered psychological healing and self-improvement to be a path towards libertarianism, but now I'm convinced of that more than ever.

>>3480 Are you sure it isn't something more engrained or even genetic? Because this concept of "We just need the right people in charge" has been around since Plato's Republic.

>>3481 And it will continue to be, because most of the mass of people will always try to find external things to put blames on it. Since they find exerting effort more than they could as not rewardable since they want to get the results as fast as they can so they'll go back to being comfortable.

Corruption is a tool of power, it is a way for the people to keep in power. Remember, in any structure of power you have to do literally EVERYTHING that you can to stay in power, otherwise someone else is going to use those means to fuck you over. When you realize this, everything else just becomes null and void. Ideologies are no more than smoke and mirrors for people in power to keep using useful idiots for their power plays. To a certain extent, Libertarianism is the same, but the idea of limiting power that the government can exert over you and decentralizing power to such an extent where structures of power become mostly meaningless over our lifes is the closest we will get to somehow trying to solve that problem. Definitely not perfect, but good enough to create a pretty good world for some time. Whether putting a libertarian system in place is actually viable power-wise, i.e whether someone can actually get into power and minimize the power that government has over society decentralizing it... is a completely different beast entirely.

>>3480 You are completely correct about this anon. Political ideologies are bastardized philosophy, and philosophy is a means of defense against psychological threats. As for "We just need the right people in charge", it is both a psychological defense against considering the idea that the crimes of rulers mioght be just as justified, human and reasonable as an outsider doing a good deed as well as simply an ignorant and incredibly childish way of thinking of "The people ruling are just evil, if they weren't evil, things would be good", which is completely underselling the extent of the issue. People in power don't do evil shit because they are evil, they do evil shit becaue evil shit simply works for keeping them in power, or for furthering their political goals. It's simple pragmaticism, devoid of any morality.

>>3486 People thinking of simple linear cause and effect instead of systemic interactions creating the problem. System dynamics management theory illustrates how many problems people blame on "unnatural" influences are really resulting from internal structural failures.

>>3481 Yes, I'm pretty sure. Arguing genetic predisposition, or saying that people are just flawed by nature is a cheap trick that people (with no knowledge or education in genetics/biology btw) use to explain away anything they think is good or bad about others instead of doing the hard intellectual work of finding the real reasons for why people are the way they are and making the effort of working properly with them. >>3486 >And it will continue to be, because most of the mass of people will always try to find external things to put blames on it. Since they find exerting effort more than they could as not rewardable since they want to get the results as fast as they can so they'll go back to being comfortable. Well then I guess you're right, since you're also doing the exact same thing. It's just too convenient to pin everything on genetics because you don't have to think too hard, and you also absolve yourself of responsibility when you say "people are just stupid, it's not my fault things are the way they are, so I guess I will just do nothing while holding contempt for these lower beings". It's impossible to achieve anything with this kind of misanthropic impotence. Right wingers like to pin all problems in society on nature because they like to be irresponsible misanthropes and do nothing but judge people from their high horses, leftists like to pin all problems on nurture because it necessitates a totalitarian government to mold the perfect society into shape, and the absolute worst human scum thinks humans are cancer either way. The fact is that we aren't educated people and we don't really know what human nature is, and neither do we know how much human nurture factors into this, so it's safest to be a radical centrist and assume it's a combination of both while also never forgetting to give the benefit of doubt and assuming human beings have a lot capacity for doing the right thing, (because they actually do) while also taking responsibility as much as you can instead of doing the easiest thing.

>>3499 Reminds me of this blog (I think written by one of the old Mises Forum members) where he writes about libertarians thinking in a systems view approach and Marxists thinking in a ___ approach (dialectic? I forget the word he used). The entire post was every point he could possibly be made would be countered by the Marxist because he simply could not entertain the systems view paradigm. Also, the "We just have bad leaders" argument kept being brought up by the hypothetical Marxist in this setup over and over again. ...it's a stab in the dark, but I'm wondering if anyone here knows of the post I'm thinking about.

>>3501 I don't know the blog in particular, but it reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyXjGCscM8I&t=712s

>>3501 Marxists believe in dialectical materialism and the "end of history" (an idea inherited from Hegel) in a linear progression to a final perfect system (communism), maybe that rings a bell. Before them the classical liberal Whigs were also guilty of "Whig history" in Britain where they viewed history as an inevitable march towards liberty. Later in the 1990s Washington neocons (some defected Trotskyists) subscribed to a similar theory of the end of history being a march towards American style liberal democracy after the collapse of the USSR, that they were bringing about as the elite class of the world's leading superpower. No matter the intention it's a flawed conception.

>>3503 Could you expand more on this?

>>3500 >assuming human beings have a lot capacity for doing the right thing, (because they actually do) while also taking responsibility as much as you can instead of doing the easiest thing. 2 issues: human beings also have an uncanny ability to do terrible things when their environment incentivizes them to do so, and if you take on the responsibility of malicious folk they will simply exploit you. As men are men and not God, it is not practical to suffer to take on the limitless torments of the world like Christ to absolve others of their malice.

>>3505 Which part? Human history isn't driven by grand narratives that suddenly seize the minds of every individual in an age and cause them to act spontaneously to change the course of human events. Those are narratives imposed (usually by government) on the past in hindsight to justify the results and the decisions of the victors. It is driven by private and personal interactions, local and regional events, petty disputes, gains, and losses, the whole body of the politics of man across the globe. The accretion of actions, which can be both deliberate and accidental, is history. The smallest events can have the greatest outsized impact in the long-term. You see this in economics: microeconomics versus macroeconomics. The latter is used to justify government manipulation of basic exchange value to fit a political goal, except in reality they never achieve them because central authorities are inherently too small to impress their will by fiat. When this happens they turn to legalistic machinations (thousands upon thousands of pages of regulation) and then pure coercion when their word becomes incomprehensible. Their authority over the economy is illusive, just as the word economy (derived from Greek for "household management") itself is. What really exists as Mises and Hayek described is a catallaxy: "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market". Government is but one element of dramatically greater whole, and not the lord and benefactor of the world.

>>3507 >Which part? The "end of history" concept. >The smallest events can have the greatest outsized impact in the long-term. Sort of like how all the Pennsylvanians losing the material that they loaned to General Braddock started the seeds of separating from England: https://infogalactic.com/info/Battle_of_the_Monongahela With everything that happened afterwards just adding wood to a fire that was already under?

>>3508 This is a pretty good summary of how leftists see it, except their idea of "freedom" ends up meaning a perfect government having total control over all aspects of economic life: >Despite many differences of detail and their fundamental metaphysical clash about Idealism and Materialism Hegel’s and Marx’s views of history are very similar. The assumptions they share in common are: >The development of human history falls into distinct stages or epochs. >These stages represent a change in gravity in the location of historical development from East to West. >World history is progressive. There is an improvement from the more primitive condition of mankind to the more advanced. >This is not just a material improvement, there is also a cultural and moral improvement. >Human freedom represents one of the main goals of this progressive development. >There is a distinct point of culmination where the higher level of society is achieved. For Hegel this point of culmination is in the Germanic Protestant world, for Marx it is communist society. >This end-point is dynamic. There is a high point reached, but the high point is a continuous process. >Both Hegel and Marx therefore take a teleological view of history. http://archive.is/DqozP Hegel saw it as a spiritual unfolding while Marx decided that history was instead an economic unfolding, therefore leftists make arguments such as that all revolutions are class based even in ancient times. >The notion that history conforms to a “dialectical” pattern, according to which contradictions generated at one level are overcome or transcended at the next, was incorporated—though in a radically new form—in the theory of social change propounded by Karl Marx. Like Hegel, Marx adopted a “directional” view of history; but, whereas Hegel had tended to exhibit it as representing the unfolding in time of an inner spiritual principle, Marx looked elsewhere for the ultimate determinants of its course and character. Humans, according to Marx, are creative beings, situated in a material world that stands before them as an objective reality and provided this field for their activities. This primitive truth, which had been obscured by Hegel’s mystifying abstractions, afforded the key to a proper understanding of history as a process finally governed by the changing methods whereby humans sought to derive from the natural environment the means of their subsistence and the satisfaction of their evolving wants and needs. The productive relations in which people stand to one another, resulting in such phenomena as the division of labour and the appearance of economically determined classes, were the factors fundamental to historical movement. http://archive.is/0DUql What was argued in the 90s by Francis Fukuyama: >The End of History and the Last Man (1992) is a book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."[1] For the book, which is an expansion of his essay, "The End of History?" (1989), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socio-economic epoch to another.[1][2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

>>3513 And a point I wanted to make in the original post; to academics, when major events have not occured, they deride their likelihood as "impossble"; once they have passed, they retroactively argue that they were "inevitable". They are the worse predictors of outcome. Perhaps it is tied to how they must create logical flow in essays so that they may be internally consistent even if at the expense of connection to the real world, and how higher education has increasingly shied away from debate and free discourse. Whatever the case may be with them, the truth is that nothing is impossible and nothing is inevitable, anything can happen and the structure of society should be organized in decentralized responsive units in accordance with this understanding; what Nassim Nicholas Taleb described as "antifragile".

>>3481 >>3486 Genetics is probabilistic, not deterministic and is involved in a complex build up to create tendencies for humans, some things are statistically common for most human populations and some arent, but human nature is the same in every human (survive, reproduce, search the best quality of life for yourself and your prole), what only changes is the "direct agressivity" one population of individuals can have more than other population and things like this, but the nature is the same. >>3500 Human nature is a constant, it can only change with a mutation, therefore not being human anymore. Nurture cant change human nature, it can make people morre agressive, more calm, create ilusions to a culture a population of individuals, but humans will still have the same fundamentals and any society that negates that will end up being shit any time. Perfect nurture can never exist because implys changing what makes humans humans.

>>3513 Holy shit marx and hegel were fucking retarded Why do low IQ people believe these brainlets?

>>3635 Public schooling and careful manipulation of language. I know in my case I was once sympathetic to socialist ideas because capitalism was portrayed as "what we have now", and of course we know what we have now and all of its imperfections, and communism was portrayed as an alternative to it. There was never any distinction made between the voluntary and involuntary components of our current system. But most people do not use the term "capitalism" the same way libertarians use it.

>>3756 This linguistic trick I think discourages people from looking at capitalism with a keen eye, since they assume they already understand it, when if you ask them they'll probably mutter something about "unhampered competition", "rugged individualism", "social Darwinism" (phrases that are commonly associated with capitalism in history textbooks). That, coupled with a Marxist historical view on events like 1929, is why they can blame so many problems created by the government upon the private sector while granting credit to the government for private sector innovations. History textbooks are where most of this happens; they'll make broad statements like "the Great Depression happened because of overenthusiastic investment", or "the Federal Reserve was created to stabilize currency and investment", or my favorite, "the FDIC was created to keep banks in check". These statements lack a distinction between the intent of a government policy and its actual effects. Since people at this stage of their learning and as well as by intention lack the economic understanding to really question statements like this, it all gets absorbed into their heads as truths they can repeat.

>>3444 At least it's a step above calling it "state capitalism" aka yet another not-true-communism excuse #6245.

>>3757 Elementary history gets told as "entity does thing and thing happens, therefore good or bad". The people writing the books don't even know what happened themselves, they got it from someone else. You end up with a simplified picture that explains nothing and is extremely dangerous when it is perceived as reality.

It's hilarious when you consider that SOCIALIST COUNTRIES ARE THE MOST CORRUPT OF THEM ALL! It's like they nitpick the corruption in capitalist countries but completely ignore the absurd amount of corruption in socialist countries. Corruption will always be inevitable with statehood. It's sad that they can't see this.

>>3767 To them the ends justify the means. That's what Goering argued at Nuremburg, that the violence the Nazi state engaged in was justified in the moral framework that the state was operating under. Their extortion is permitted under their perverted system of logic.

>>3770 To be fair, they were trying to kick the Communists out of a fractured country, but then things dragged on and on and on.

>>3771 Yes. They used a totalitarian state to defeat the left that wanted a totalitarian state. Once you have finished the job you no longer need the hammer. Except they were statists that inherited their thinking from their Prussian forerunners and thought the supremacy of the nation-state should be an end to itself. It may be noble but ultimately misguided, because the best outcomes for humanity probably involve the dismantling of nation-state actors for the realization of human freedom.

aka, let's instead disorganize while (((a certain group))) will have no compulsion in engaging in coordinated attacks against my own. great plan. 10/10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im349_aRx-Q Argentina failed because of corruption narrative again. But WHY is it corrupt?

>>3898 Read The Other Way by Hernando de Soto Polar. South America has weak property rights.

Americans are so enslaved today that Americans scream colleges that teach history lessons about tyranny must be closed.