This is along the lines of Kelvin Silvia's thread, and I'm not trying to steal his thunder here but this is something I've been wondering for a very long time and it's not really the same topic as his was.
At any rate, let's say that you can't be a libertarian, it's out of the question, it doesn't exist, what ideologies do you believe you would have fallen into because they are appealing to you? Because they play into your prejuduces and view of the world.
For instance I would have remained a moderate conservative. I find the idea of slight regulation to curve the "excesses" of captialism along with a minimal welfare state, backed up by private charity as being very appealing, the Rand-esque vision of a world in which the state only prevented major abuses or tragedies and where the creme of the crop rose to the top and made their fortunes since they were of greater stuff than the common man.
HBU?
Liberal hipster. Snap.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
You're just being ironic.
If libertarianism hadn't existed, I would have invented it. I was a libertarian before I even knew what it meant, having moved from left to right and been disatisfied with both, and spent some time in limbo thinking I was simply someone with whom no one agreed.
I was thinking of doing the "cheating" answer like xahrx, but if I had to give a true answer it would be Neodoxy's answer. It's pretty dang easy to be a moderate conservative. I mean, Golden Mean fallacy and BAM you don't really have to worry too much about anything.
I'd probably be a welfare state supporting anti-war leftist, seeing as how it runs in the family.
A frustrated Democrat hippy.
There is no such thing as a true answer to an impossible hypothetical. And I told the truth; I withdrew. Did it before I knew what libertarianism was. Luckily before I completely withdrew the web took off and I found some similar minded people. But, had that not happened and I lived in a world where for some unknown reason certain indeologies weren't allow to develop, I think I would have done what I did; which was to simply say "Screw it!' and slowly withdraw from the rest of society when it came to issues poitical.
What kind of "libertarian" is excluded? Can I be an an-cap, a voluntaryist, a Misean mutualist, a Stirnerite? Maybe I'll be a Platonic aristocrat or a Hegelian. If all else fails I'll simple be a Thorean Transcendentalist, or a Nietzschean, or simply an individual anarchist.
ya, i was a libertarian before i knew what it was, but i always categorized myself as a republican to the bones. Even when i learned i was a libertarian i didnt acknowledge it because the libertarian ideals were the same as republican to me (with a little hippyish feel to it/i dont want to be a part of mainstream society). Now ive changed a number of views since i found the mises institute and have become more of a pure libertarian.
i was a foreign interventionist - i believed in heavy counter intelligence to minimize blowback (be able to manipulate foreign nation's policy without them knowing it was us), and if we were forced to goto war no mercy send in the MARINES and destroy everything. Carpet bomb the rest. So obviously this is a LAST resort. The only wars i would of agreed with were the American revolution, wars fought in self defense, going after bin hiden, and WWII. I would also agree with any operation to retrieve American hostages. Virtually everything else was wrong to me. I just got out of the Marine Corps beginning of this year and it is still difficult for me not to agree with foreign intervention.
i believed in a government military in the National Guard sense. Also I believed that there should be a government run military leadership/counsel. I thought all ground troops (the troops actually doing the operations) should of been privatized. It never made any sense to me that we send in kids to fight the wars when we can have total professional badasses do it 10x more efficiently. I also believe that these people willing to give there lives for their country should be paid top dollar which government cant do/isnt doing.
I hated cops/still do and thought they should of been privatized too, though i believed a government oversite was necessary to ensure the privatized police force followed laws and procedures.
I'm 100% prolife now. Though I always knew it was immoral I just didnt believe in infringing on other peoples POSSIBLE rights. Pretty much this is too big of a moral issue for a single person/government to make rulings on.
i believed in public run and operated roads. I just never even gave that a second thought for some reason.
everything else was pretty ancap.
100% Pro-life? Not to derail the thread, but at my initial brush with these forums I fluctuated wildly on the issue until I came down solidly on "pro-choice." Again, I don't want to delve much deeper, but I wanted to say this.
Peasant radicalism.
Marko,
Do tell.
Disbelief in crop rotation, essentially.
Don't bow to false idols, don't lie, don't steal, don't murder, don't be a hipocrite, your genitals should be private, creating human life should be taken seriously and it starts at conception. Agnostic Christian as always. Jesus was an anarchist. Going from where I was to an Anarcho-libertarian was such a small step that I honestly don't remember it.
For a second I thought that was peasant radicalism. :P You're not Marko!
Ancap, atheist, freethinker, moral nihilist.
@Bert
The first two are exluded, what is a Misesian Mutualist? Sternerite would be okay as would CERTAIN forms of individualist anarchism.
Am I allowed to be a Humean, quasi-Burkean, spontaneous order type character? Or is this too close to libertarianism?
Lol I feel like the dungeon master.
Remember, this merely a thread asking what ideologies sort of naturally appeal to you besides libertarianism. Anyway, I don't know what a Humean is, a Burkean would be fine and more or less fits in with my own moderate conservatism which is close to mainstream classical liberalism.
I will be a fascist here. Fascist party ftw!!!!!! (but im not a jew hater)
In my thread ill be an anarcho leftist.
I told my aunt how the housing bubble happened today, the whole artificially low interest rates was able to fuel all the loans and drive up demand etc etc.
Her thought on this is because people had a crazy animal spirit trend to get houses and that is why (i guess thats plausible but not the root cause), but she wouldnt understand how artificially low interest rates helped fuel that.
How do i explain the housing bubble better?
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
Whylous: You're not Marko! Aren't I?
Whylous: You're not Marko!
Fascism hands down. The trappings of the ideology has this attractive appeal in claiming the superiority of the Italian culture over others. Plus we all know that the trains ran on time under fascism! Obviously they didn't have an awful TSA agent groping everyone or there would have been delays.
Well kinda fascism, since my yougner days (10,12,13 years of age) i had an extreme disgust towards homosexuality (u know eww or whatever), and a slight fascination with militarism, so u can see the way I was going.
But fate, her glorious hand that which dragged me from the dark veil of ignorance, Oh fate.... (mein kampf reference, since in main kampf hitler personified fate alot; btw dont call me a nazi was just wanting to read....); now that im 15, i have less hate (thought its still disgusting to think of dicks going into mens asses, but i dont want to see homosexuals die anymore), and i like to hold hands and sing kumbaya (which is why im an anarchist).
Introduce her to Tom Woods?
Reading this I was reminded of KITH "Doors Fan" sketch.
No no no my friend! Doors fans aren't made, they're born. I think right now in Africa there's some guy madly beating on a drum. He's a Doors fan. Or an old lady sitting on the bus sucking humbugs. She's a Rider On The Storm, but she ain't never heard the sounds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xillqqt0Y0
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine - Elvis Presley
seraiah - your link isnt working. I always considered Jesus a dirty socialist and use that as evidence that there is no god. So i would like to see why you think he was an anarchist.
Stephen adkins- Yes im going to let her borrow Meltdown, but my friend currently has hold of it.
How can Jesus be a dirty socialist? He is more of on the charitable side instead of forcing other to take care of others. How is it charity if the state has to force your money out of you to help a poor person? it isnt.
A mutualist who actually read an economics book.
Oh jesus did believe in the state and threats of violence. His King is not of this world...
"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
You didnt give me your stuff so guess what eternal fire with the devil.
“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
oh you saved your money and made profits? dont pass go, go straight to hell.
If this isnt socialist ideals i dont know what is.
It's tricky mixing politics and religion; one's physical and one's metaphysical. The way I look at it either you base your interest in political theory and philosophy or religion, balancing them out is a pain in the ass.
If you want to see Christianity put into political action, just look at northern Europe starting from 500 AD onwards. The old religion was removed and the politics changed.
If I wasn't a libertarian, I'd be apathetic.
Its not the fact that one has money or not. Its the attitude at which you look money at.
Truth be told, if I hadn't discovered libertarianism and never developed an interest in economics then I'd probably be a Marxist (maybe a Leninist, definitely not a Stalinist). I tend to view things analytically by nature, and because my first academic love was history then I have no doubt that I'd naturally be drawn to dialecticalism (being a pattern-oriented system of thought) and materialism was already the way I looked at the world (though I didn't have a word for it at the time).
Economically speaking, if I wasn't an Austrian then I'd probably be a New Keynesian, albeit a more free market-oriented one like Karl Smith.
kelvin - attitude at which you look at money? what is money other than a medium of exchange? its the fruits of your labor. If you have a dollar you put over a dollar worth of work into the world. The more money you have the more people you provided a good and service to (typically) and enriched their lives. By Jesus saying you should give your wealth away is a direct attack on the capitalist who 'squanders' his money on capital goods for the future to produce more and make more money. So if i know for a fact that capitalism is just and good then that would mean Jesus was wrong. how can someone who is all knowing and all powerful be wrong? wouldnt that mean God doesnt exist?
I think that's why I would've ended up gravitating towards some sect of Marxism; I remember (and since I'm still in high school I'm not going back decades by any means) that the stark atheism of the various historical communist movements had always appealed to me.
I didn't mean anything too clever by it. If I had never been exposed to libertarianism/Rothbardian anarchism I don't think I would have gone for any ideology at all, but would continue to find fault with all of them. So I would not have been ideological. But that doesn't mean I would have been non-political. You were also asking about what fits our prejudices and view of the world, and going on about moderate conservatism which is an attitude really, not an ideology. For me, just browsing through history, while not finding a certain ideology to like, I did always like the attitude and the manifestations of whatever militant, anti-establishment populism there was. And since the world has been agricultural through nearly all its history, this sort of radicals would almost always been peasants. Peasants, who either, like myself, did not have a terribly developed ideology to begin with so that their revolts may be liked as they are, or (much more rarely) peasants who seemed to be into a highly-developed ideology (like agrarian socialism), but whose revolts can be admired regardless for their anti-establishment component if not for their pro-socialism component*. *Albeit I did read something by a certain agrarian socialist once and he was way more anti-statist than his classical liberal contemporaries. He was essentially a confederative minarchist with a cultural bias for traditional patriarchal extended-family social structures and against the divison of labour (yikes!). So I'm under the impression it is not necessary at all for agrarian socialism to be the anti-thesis of libertarianism that for example marxian socialism is.
Paternalistic Aristocracy
A militarily strong paternalistic, on the social rather than economic, state ruled by an aristocracy.
The atoms tell the atoms so, for I never was or will but atoms forevermore be.
Yours sincerely,
Physiocrat
Upholding the status quo out of a feeling of submission to authority (the highest authority being God, of course), held in check by a recognition that human government can never be perfect and therefore feeling like politics is never going to make things better, yet invoking the role of politics in transforming the social fabric into being more godly/less "fallen"
In otherwords, non-analytical neo-conservatism.
kelvin_silva: How do i explain the housing bubble better? I like sharing this quick paragraph explaining the housing bubble by Tom Woods: http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods105.html "The housing bubble could not have arisen without the Federal Reserve. Had people started buying houses at unusually high rates, banks’ loanable funds would have begun to deplete, interest rates would have shot up, and that would have been the end of it. That would have discouraged any additional speculation in real estate. But Alan Greenspan and the Fed could create money out of thin air, thus giving the banks more to lend and driving interest rates down, thereby perpetuating the destructive bubble in housing." Check out my video, Ron Paul vs Lincoln! And share my PowerPoint with your favorite neo-con | Post Points: 5
grant.w.underwood: Oh jesus did believe in the state and threats of violence.
Oh jesus did believe in the state and threats of violence.
I have to respectfully disagree. Take the "Render unto Caesar..." passage. Jesus was being given a trick question (as usual) and so he gave a brilliant and tricky answer. He doesn't say what is owed to Caesar (the unspoken answer is that nothing is owed to Caesar). That which is owed to Caesar is the same as that which is owed to a highwayman (nothing). So why didn't Jesus just come out and say that, and why did he pay taxes? Not out of it being just to pay taxes, but merely out of prudence:
grant.w.underwood: You didnt give me your stuff so guess what eternal fire with the devil.
grant.w.underwood: If this isnt socialist ideals i dont know what is.