ROB wrote:The main thing that terrifies me about the Libertarians is their economics.
What's so scary about libertarian economics?
What should really terrify you is Keynesian economics. It's all bullshit built on an inflated money supply. Ever since Breton Woods the US has been exporting it's domestic inflation to the rest of the world because our industrial base (things of real value) has been eroding, but our ability to print dollars keeps on chugging along, and...given that until very recently you could only buy oil on the global market using dollars and the US was a de facto reserve currency, that created a demand for dollars even amongst the countries that didn't engage in any trade with the US. That's a house of cards that is going to collapse (hard) sooner or later. Chinese currency is no better and the Euro is a mess as well. Fiat currencies will always lead to seigniorage and financial collapse because it's easier to print money to temporarily solve problems than it is to actually fix problems or raise taxes.
The problem with libertarianism is, sort of like communism, it only works with a moral and conscientious people. And people, on the whole, are not moral and conscientious. Communism fails to minimize-maximize optimizers (which is genetically, in historical terms, the optimal strategy for Homo sapiens - why expend energy if we don't have to?), and libertarianism fails to economic populism ("it's not fair that Bob has twice as much as stuff as you, let's tax Bob / rob Bob and redistribute his stuff to us!"). Libertarianism does NOT mean if you don't work, you don't eat (that's more what you get from bureaucratic socialism like in Canada, where they strongly suggest euthanasia if you are no longer an economically productive member of society) - it just means that libertarians don't support using the government and government violence to take money from one group of people to give it to another group of people for whatever cause (one, it's immoral, two, government is really inefficient at re-distributing money). Charities fill the voluntary void that government does today with a nanny state.
In any event, libertarianism fails to automation. The basic economic function of y = f(k, l) or output equals a function of capital and labor is on the cusp of being replaced with y = f(k), rendering people progressively more economically useless. And we're going to hit that point in our lifetime (maybe in the next 10 years), and so the people that control all the capital, and it will only be a relative handful, will either have to use that capital output to take care of 99.9999% of the rest of the population, or they will decide to kill us off like some of the WEF presenters are more or less suggesting.