Bleeding Heart Libertarians

I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least a worthy goal -- there are many artificial reasons which currently make non-employer health insurance (and non-insurance health care) far more expensive than would otherwise be.

On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income…

> Another was a version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in feminist jargon

So rewritten it's difficult to identify how it's connected to Mein Kampf.

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/09/nothing-squared-is-still-nothing/ - "I read through their article Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism and then went through the chapter of Mein Kampf this article is supposed to be mimicking ... and couldn’t find a single phrase that matched."

Or from https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/why-the-grievance-studies-hoax-was-not-unethical-but-its-not-very-interesting-either/ - "However, the account of this given by the hoaxers is rather dishonest. Their re-writing of the text was so extensive that even a side-by-side comparison of the texts failed to show much similarity between them. Moreover, the part of Mein Kampf in question was making rather general claims about how to respond to (perceived) oppression. But to read the hoaxers’ account of things you’d think a Nazi diatribe had been published by a feminist journal with just a few words changed. And that’s not the case at all."

> What do 400-odd cases matter, after all?

It would be nice to put that in context, rather than make a rhetorical flourish.

That context should include the politics around UNC's decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure.

Suppose everything you say is true, and every single supporter of epistocracy is racist. It does not follow that epistocracy is bad. Consider the possibility that epistocracy is racist but it also produces better governance - e.g., perhaps the racial groups being discriminated against vote for bad governance.

(Define "bad" however you like, but strictly in terms of actions taken by the government rather than how those actions were decided on.)

If that were true then the racist epistocracy you discuss would be a good thing, in the sense that governments would provide better services to citizens.

The main argument against this is that voting rights are a way to express respect, membership and status to humans. But the solution to this conundrum is to stop using voting rights as a status symbol.

Here's a nice article that discusses this idea in much greater detail: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/09/expressive-meaning-democracy-plus-philosophers-enamored-semiotic-arguments/

I really liked being introduced to the Trolley Problem (especially the second formulation), I hadn't heard of it before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

I spent more time than I should reading about several possible answers :)

for example:

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/thomsonTROLLEY.pdf

some with a libertarian slant:

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/08/the-trolley-non-problem/

http://freedomed.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-trolley-problem-is-bullshit.html

Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).

No, that is not true at all. Fundamentally I support more of a Geo-Libertarian[1] system, so I support property rights for things you create from your own labor, but natural property that was not created by humans belongs to all. Those that want to make exclusive use of this natural properly owe a "rent" to all.

This rent is the only ethical tax[2] one can use to publicly finance a government. Taxes on labor, voluntary transaction, etc are all unethical theft of a persons labor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

[2] https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/04/the-geolibertarian-ethics-of-land-rent/

I think you're glossing over the point that markets that at least minimally restrain capitalists to keep them from screwing over other capitalists is a basic feature of capitalism-friendliness (at least to the extent that you agree capitalism-friendliness requires that a market be prevented from devolving into some form of feudalism).

That said, yes, I am aware of the 'what do you mean by capitalism' issue. I've found this article interesting in that vein: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/08/libertarian-anticapitalism/