Buenos Aires, Argentina — Thousands took to the streets of Argentina in the past few days to protest a series of economic decrees proposed by President Javier Milei. On December 20, Milei announced sweeping deregulations to Argentina’s economy, sparking backlash from opposition members and groups representing unemployed people. Riot police were dispatched at major protest […]
The last century has been a total and unmitigated disaster for Argentina. The two options Argentinians had in this election were:
More of the same by the guy who oversaw inflation reaching 160% (100% chance of things getting worse)
A total wild card (99.9% chance of things getting worse)
Unsurprisingly, they went for the latter. I don’t think anti-libertarians get to gloat in this context, given it’s the Argentinian establishment which has overseen one of the most remarkable examples of total state-collapse and economic failure in modern history.
That’s bad math. Yes, if you put the same people in office. There’s nearly 100% chance that they will continue doing what they have been doing. Good or bad. But if you put a lunatic with a grudge against reality in office. Who is aligned, or would align himself with the people who caused the problem before. You have 150% chance that things will get worse.
Yes, it was a jab at the logic. Things can always get worse. Always. Change for the sake of change is a bad proposition. So now the people causing the problems before aren’t in direct control. They have a go between patsy. Poised to push awful social oppression openly that they’d likely only thought about in wet dreams. And a large chunk of misguided populous supporting it. Because “it’s different”.
I don’t actually know anything. But casually to me it looked like a choice between 160% chance of it getting worse and a 300% chance of getting worse. And it’s not very surprising at all in these circumstances many go for the latter for all sorts of reasons (and delusions). But I don’t actually know anything.
What % of countries failed via communist policies vs countries that failed via libertarian policies? The top countries are liberal capitalist democracies. Anyone still simping for communism in 2023 is 9/10 times a brainlet child loser who lives in the west, never having suffered in a communist shithole, and decided to hang all their failures in life on being a victim of their country’s cApiTaListiC liBerAlisM. EDIT: tankie coping clowns (lemmy is full of them) downvote yet have nothing of substance to say zzzzzz
You might have had a point if A. I was simping for communism rather than pointing out hypocrisy. B. Your typical liberal democracy is in line with what Libertarian political parties actually want. The US, and it’s various industrialists, have tried, over and over, to implement Libertarian party regimes and have never gotten it to work for a single city, let alone country.
They all either rapidly fall apart as no major business, even ones that show interest in the project, want to operate in a system where there is so little to insure that contracts will be honored, among other issues. The others rapidly turn into police states where the company owners dictate literally every aspect of your life because they own everything. They then create a system where you are always in debt to the company to prevent you from packing up and leaving, when people get tired of it and start leaving. It doesn’t even have as good a track record as the Soviets.
If your country failed/is failing, it’s hard to hang it on capitalism when, again, all top countries are liberal capitalists. It’s more likely due to corruption/mismanagement than capitalism. And no matter how much it’s failing, it’s not failing at a soviet famine or great leap forward level is it?
Communism is bad for the people who want money. Capitalism is bad for everyone except the person who wants to hoard money.
this is just a cringe and childishly reductive statement that means nothing.
Is liberal capitalism how you describe centuries of colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the subsequent wealth drains?
Are you sure you’re not misattributing their success to capitalism and ignoring the centuries of colonial wealth that flowed to the EU nations? Whenever I mention this in a EU space or those with westerners I get heavily downvoted. It looks like Europe doesn’t want anyone to remember their Dark Ages through colonial periods.
Europeans just don’t want that closet of skeletons to be opened.
Are you sure you’re not misattributing their success to capitalism and ignoring the centuries of colonial wealth that flowed to the EU nations?
Are you sure you’re not ignoring all of the countries that are dominating out there that didn’t participate in colonial shenanigans and were even victims of them?
Are Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Ireland, South Korea, Taiwan, etc… ex-colonialist powers currently benefiting from the past profits of exploiting others? Tankies like to pretend the West only prospers exclusively from colonialism yet conveniently forget that the communist shitholes they simp for participated in just as much or even worse colonialism than the West (see: Soviet Union). The truth is liberal capitalist democracies are just better. Yes, we should implement many socialist policies, and many of these countries do. But to pretend that communism is a better path is just braindead ignorant childish thinking.
Hong Kong which currently lives under an authoritarian regime, or South Korea which is a somewhat participatory executive democracy birthed from the corpse of an authoritarian regime?
Neither is a hot spot of libertarianism. South Korea is peak neo-liberalism.
I don’t think China succeeded because of communism. They succeeded because Rich Industrialists in the west did not want to share their success with ordinary people and hence shifted all their work to China where the government ensured a steady supply of cheap labour. Of course, this only worked because the Chinese population was so poor that what were considered bad wages in the west was significantly more money than they would get back home.
Now this kind of outsourcing of labour is what lead to countries coming out of poverty: what made them poor in the first place? Rampant colonialism by EU nations. You can see this in Africa, South America, Asia.
To be fair USSR after communism was leagues better than USSR before communism ever could have been. But it’s not exactly proving much pointing out that an extremely unequal authoritarian regime is worse than a more equal but still authoritarian regime.
I don’t think the comparison works anyway because this is a true example of exactly what most libertarians have wet dreams of, while with communism people try to use e.g. the USSR and PRC to discredit leftism as a whole (especially socialism) even though any leftist worth their salt would realize authoritarianism is bad and creates a dangerous hierarchy, which is why Marx and Engels specified their ideologies to be democratic.
It’s the key ideological problem with the book. Rand was right that people do not inherently owe anyone else the fruits of their labor, but wrong about who was holding the world on their shoulders. It wasn’t the handful of elite, but the masses without whom the elite would be living in caves and running from bears.
Who is John Galt? We the people are.
And yes, throughout history pretty much every authoritarian regime ultimately collapses or sends their country back decades in progress by not knowing that lesson.
Argentina is about to become the latest case study that libertarians refuse to acknowledge when you tell them their policies don’t work.
I’m not a libertarian, I’m a social democrat.
The last century has been a total and unmitigated disaster for Argentina. The two options Argentinians had in this election were:
Unsurprisingly, they went for the latter. I don’t think anti-libertarians get to gloat in this context, given it’s the Argentinian establishment which has overseen one of the most remarkable examples of total state-collapse and economic failure in modern history.
That’s bad math. Yes, if you put the same people in office. There’s nearly 100% chance that they will continue doing what they have been doing. Good or bad. But if you put a lunatic with a grudge against reality in office. Who is aligned, or would align himself with the people who caused the problem before. You have 150% chance that things will get worse.
This isn’t exactly the best math either.
Yes, it was a jab at the logic. Things can always get worse. Always. Change for the sake of change is a bad proposition. So now the people causing the problems before aren’t in direct control. They have a go between patsy. Poised to push awful social oppression openly that they’d likely only thought about in wet dreams. And a large chunk of misguided populous supporting it. Because “it’s different”.
The calculation shouldn’t be “chance of things getting worse”, but “expected value of how much worse it’ll get”.
deleted by creator
FTFY
This makes a lot of sense if you pretend he didn’t say or promise anything during the campaign.
Anything to add beside a snide comment?
Not if you continue being wrong in easy to summarize ways
Not taking sides, but this was an amazing burn.
I don’t actually know anything. But casually to me it looked like a choice between 160% chance of it getting worse and a 300% chance of getting worse. And it’s not very surprising at all in these circumstances many go for the latter for all sorts of reasons (and delusions). But I don’t actually know anything.
You should probably read at least a little about Argentina’s recent history before commenting then…
Oof, yeah that’s not a good choice.
Argentina could’ve just gone for a new currency again
Wouldn’t solve anything.
After a century of Peronism, the current state of Argentina isn’t a case study about libertarianism. Quite the opposite.
Actually everything that’s wrong with Argentina is because of British colonialism. You haven’t read enough Foucault, clearly.
Nah it’s not that it’s libertarianism failing it’s just that idiots version of it failing
What they’ll say when it fails or next time someone else tries to implement their ideals
“It’s not that libertarianism has failed; it’s just that the wrong people have tried it!…”
then immediately turn around and mock communists for saying something similar.
What % of countries failed via communist policies vs countries that failed via libertarian policies? The top countries are liberal capitalist democracies. Anyone still simping for communism in 2023 is 9/10 times a brainlet child loser who lives in the west, never having suffered in a communist shithole, and decided to hang all their failures in life on being a victim of their country’s cApiTaListiC liBerAlisM. EDIT: tankie coping clowns (lemmy is full of them) downvote yet have nothing of substance to say zzzzzz
You might have had a point if A. I was simping for communism rather than pointing out hypocrisy. B. Your typical liberal democracy is in line with what Libertarian political parties actually want. The US, and it’s various industrialists, have tried, over and over, to implement Libertarian party regimes and have never gotten it to work for a single city, let alone country.
They all either rapidly fall apart as no major business, even ones that show interest in the project, want to operate in a system where there is so little to insure that contracts will be honored, among other issues. The others rapidly turn into police states where the company owners dictate literally every aspect of your life because they own everything. They then create a system where you are always in debt to the company to prevent you from packing up and leaving, when people get tired of it and start leaving. It doesn’t even have as good a track record as the Soviets.
Somehow personal failings never happened in communism? I am from a formerly communist nation. Capitalism has been a disaster.
Communism is bad for the people who want money. Capitalism is bad for everyone except the person who wants to hoard money.
If your country failed/is failing, it’s hard to hang it on capitalism when, again, all top countries are liberal capitalists. It’s more likely due to corruption/mismanagement than capitalism. And no matter how much it’s failing, it’s not failing at a soviet famine or great leap forward level is it?
this is just a cringe and childishly reductive statement that means nothing.
Is liberal capitalism how you describe centuries of colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the subsequent wealth drains?
Are you sure you’re not misattributing their success to capitalism and ignoring the centuries of colonial wealth that flowed to the EU nations? Whenever I mention this in a EU space or those with westerners I get heavily downvoted. It looks like Europe doesn’t want anyone to remember their Dark Ages through colonial periods.
Europeans just don’t want that closet of skeletons to be opened.
Are you sure you’re not ignoring all of the countries that are dominating out there that didn’t participate in colonial shenanigans and were even victims of them? Are Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Ireland, South Korea, Taiwan, etc… ex-colonialist powers currently benefiting from the past profits of exploiting others? Tankies like to pretend the West only prospers exclusively from colonialism yet conveniently forget that the communist shitholes they simp for participated in just as much or even worse colonialism than the West (see: Soviet Union). The truth is liberal capitalist democracies are just better. Yes, we should implement many socialist policies, and many of these countries do. But to pretend that communism is a better path is just braindead ignorant childish thinking.
It’s been a while since I even bothered arguing with libertarians, but wouldn’t they just point to Hong Kong and South Korea?
Lol is this a joke? South Korea that’s essentially a US military colony at this point? Yeah, totally libertarian.
Hong Kong which currently lives under an authoritarian regime, or South Korea which is a somewhat participatory executive democracy birthed from the corpse of an authoritarian regime?
Neither is a hot spot of libertarianism. South Korea is peak neo-liberalism.
Massive eye roll.
Yes, clearly they would be referring to Hong Kong post-97 unification.
Really? Come on dude. Drop the snark, you need better quality contributions if you’re going to take that tone with other users here.
Common neoliberal W
That’s what Communists always say, the only one they worship is Lenin cuz he didn’t have time to do anything anyway.
He had time to build the gulags
He just didn’t libertarian hard enough.
But what will Lemmy communists say when you point out USSR and China?
I don’t think China succeeded because of communism. They succeeded because Rich Industrialists in the west did not want to share their success with ordinary people and hence shifted all their work to China where the government ensured a steady supply of cheap labour. Of course, this only worked because the Chinese population was so poor that what were considered bad wages in the west was significantly more money than they would get back home.
Now this kind of outsourcing of labour is what lead to countries coming out of poverty: what made them poor in the first place? Rampant colonialism by EU nations. You can see this in Africa, South America, Asia.
To be fair USSR after communism was leagues better than USSR before communism ever could have been. But it’s not exactly proving much pointing out that an extremely unequal authoritarian regime is worse than a more equal but still authoritarian regime.
I don’t think the comparison works anyway because this is a true example of exactly what most libertarians have wet dreams of, while with communism people try to use e.g. the USSR and PRC to discredit leftism as a whole (especially socialism) even though any leftist worth their salt would realize authoritarianism is bad and creates a dangerous hierarchy, which is why Marx and Engels specified their ideologies to be democratic.
Libertarian and communist aren’t the only political options if your education didn’t top out at ninth grade.
I measure a country’s success by the quantity of weapons they produce
True libertarianism has never been tried bro
They’ll come out of the woods and start claiming he wasn’t a true libertarian.
Lol what policies? Everyone for themselves?
Who is John Galt? Looks like we’re about to find out.
It’s the key ideological problem with the book. Rand was right that people do not inherently owe anyone else the fruits of their labor, but wrong about who was holding the world on their shoulders. It wasn’t the handful of elite, but the masses without whom the elite would be living in caves and running from bears.
Who is John Galt? We the people are.
And yes, throughout history pretty much every authoritarian regime ultimately collapses or sends their country back decades in progress by not knowing that lesson.
Yet it never seems to actually be learned.
New York cut their libraries so who’s the real loser?