Scott Alexander's early site raikoth.net hosts the Non-Libertarian FAQ and essays on consequentialism, charity, and political reasoning.
HN commenters cite the Non-Libertarian FAQ as a strong statement of their views, though one wants a good dissenting take, and link the dead-child currency essay.
Please see section 12.2 here[0], quoted below, for a refutation of the idea that "taxation is theft":
"""Consider the argument "How can we have a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King? After all, he was a criminal!"
Technically, Martin Luther King was a criminal, in that he broke some laws against public protests that the racist South had quickly enacted to get rid of him. It's why he famously spent time in Birmingham Jail.
And although "criminal" is a very negative-sounding and emotionally charged word, in this case we have to step back from our immediate emotional reaction and notice that the ways in which Martin Luther King was a criminal don't make him a worse person.
A philosopher might say we're equivocating between two meanings of "criminal", one meaning of "person who breaks the law", and another meaning of "horrible evil person." Just because King satisfies the first meaning (he broke the law) doesn't mean he has to satisfy the second (be horrible and evil).
Or consider the similar argument: "Ayn Rand fled the totalitarian Soviet Union to look for freedom in America. That makes her a traitor!" Should we go around shouting at Objectivists "How can you admire Ayn Rand when she was a dirty rotten traitor"?
No. Once again, although "traitor" normally has an automatic negative connotation, we should avoid instantly judging things by the words we can apply to them, and start looking at whether the negative feelings are deserved.
Or once again the philosopher would…
In general, I think you might consider [0] a beneficial read; it pretty much answers all your questions and debunks your points. For me, your comments sound a lot like libertarianism turned into religion. A lot of dogmas that sound nice, but are trivially easy to be shown false.
To respond to a particular point,
> Not having to compete with anyone does not make a product cheaper, it makes it more expensive. Competition drives prices down. So the government having a monopoly over a service makes that service more expensive.
True in many cases, especially if you only care about end-buyer price, but false in others. Some things fail spectacularly when you make them competitive. Things like basic research, things like exploiting a limited pool of shared resources, things like schools and prisons - they all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules. Some would say medicare is another similar thing. The market price is not the only important metric; some others are: quality, accessibility, efficiency, externalities.
> Advertising is not a waste of resources, it is investment of resources - literally, money spent buying leads in order to try and convert them into customers.
Who, were you not to convert them, would go to the competitor. It's a total waste of resources - you spend money (and more importantly, fuel and man-hours) trying to one-up your competitor, he does the same; on average, you still get the same amount of clients, only both of you wasted…
I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful...
> that thinks too-logically about politics
There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html
If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9WU9TGrec&index=1&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU&index=1&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNjasccl-WajpONGX3zoY4M
For…
From http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/:
As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you. And it certainly isn't good for our hapless readers who have to read through all the angry comments your blog post inspired.
Criticizing political ideologies isn't very productive (especially when its party has never won a seat in congress), but if you're going to do it, please follow this example: http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html.
The author addresses specific issues and injects a bit of humor into his responses. He uses statistics and facts instead of anecdotes. Most importantly, he doesn't strawman or condescend. That's the sort of writing that convinces people. The submitted post will most likely just annoy any libertarians who read it.
This sounds like a coordination problem [1]. If only one person writes a letter to their representative, it doesn't do anything and that person is the only one who comes out at a loss of x hours of their time. No policies are changed and everyone is stuck in a bad situation.
If a significant portion of the representative's constituency sends letters and the net political effect overcomes the amount of donations the representative gets from intelligence companies, maybe they will actually begin an initiative for policy change. Everyone is better off, but it's hard to convince a critical mass of people that think it will succeed.
[1] http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems
Oh god, a deontic argument for slowing down self-driving cars. Yes, we choose to let several people die every day by not spending every available dollar on healthcare. Even then, we would have to decide where the large but still limited budget would be invested. There's no pure white way to get out of consequentialism. Might as well accept it and work with it rather than shutting your ears and singing la-la-la.
Sorry for the rant, for those that care for a reasoned argument along the lines of the above, Scott says it better than I ever could -- http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html