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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

Libertarian has been diluted to meaningless.

These days, if you go by majority vote, it generally means "doctrinaire conservative who decided deficits were really important on January 20th, 2009".

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Here are some articles by libertarians criticizing deficits as early as 2004.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp87.pdf

http://reason.com/archives/2005/02/13/revive-gramm-rudmann

http://reason.com/archives/2007/02/12/the-beltway-cut

I'm sure you can find a token libertarian criticism in between enabling these guys every other spare second. Ron Paul even opposed the war in Iraq. (I'll give that guy credit for being principled even though half of his opinions are loony-bin crazy).

But I'm talking about the totality -- check out Fox News and the Tea Party if you want the beating heart of the conservative movement. These are the exact same people, not figuratively, literally, who defended the Bush admin for 8 straight years. And CATO? How many pieces did they put out as cover for the Bush admin during that same time period? They're basically part of the republican messaging system.

I just did a quick google search, and picked the first few items from prior years.

Here is the Cato archive, form your own opinion: http://www.cato.org/pubarchives/index.php?type=opeds#year=20...

For the one month I bothered to look at, most of it seemed pretty anti-bush (with the exception of one article advocating for looser immigration rules).

Well, ok, maybe I was unfair to Cato there by lumping them in with the rest of the republican messaging organizations. From a quick glance it does seem like they were calling out Bush on libertarian grounds when it was appropriate to do so.

Anyways my original point was that if you add up all of the people calling themselves libertarian these days, you generally get the guy saying "keep the government out of medicare" who had no idea he was a libertarian until about 5 minutes after Obama was inaugurated. It's not about government, it's about Obama and all that he represents (liberals, anti-americanism, illegal immigrants, manchurian candidates, radical islam, etc etc etc crazy talk).

Sorry that your movement's been hijacked.

(notes that someone went down this thread blindly modding you up and me down -- this is what I'm talking about when I say sorry about your movement -- it's not about reasoned opinions on how government should work, it's about "us vs them" cultural warfare).

"(I'll give that guy credit for being principled even though half of his opinions are loony-bin crazy)"

Which opinions? I doubt you comprehend the first thing about any of them. Let's see if you can even restate them correctly.

P.S. You can disagree with someone without mudslinging. I disagree with Paul on a number of things as well, but all his ideas have a large amount of thought and scholarship behind them (a hell of a lot more than anything the establishment parties come up with). Dismissing them out of hand with no backup is definitely below the standard HN tries to reach.

Two words: Gold Standard.

I'm not falling into that "restate them correctly" trap where you interpret some phrase differently than me so I'm an idiot. Gold standard is crazy without even needing an explanation.

Yeah, being able to restate an argument you've called crazy is a "trap". Give me a break.

Seriously, the goal here is to have mature discussions. If you aren't even willing to back up your assertions, just don't post.

Ok, "moving from fiat currency to gold-backed currency" is crazy. "Disbanding the federal reserve" is crazy. It would involve massively reducing the money supply and liquidity for the overall economy, and destroy the current counter-cyclical levers we have to lower/raise interests rates when we want to either stimulate the economy or cool down inflation. Take a look at the extreme boom/bust cycle from the late 19th century if you want to see what happens without those levers. There's a reason they went to fiat currency in the first place, and it wasn't, "I'm a liberal caricature and I want to do this to increase government control". It's because the gold standard wasn't adequate to the job. Let alone that there's no way to get from here to there in the modern world where the entire G20 has fiat currencies.

The gold standard is a position of "I don't care what's been proven to work in the real world or what's possible to actually accomplish, I care about what I find emotionally satisfying".

EDIT: Regarding civil discussions, you might consider chilling out on the ad hom attacks yourself. You've called me uninformed multiple times while misinterpreting my comments to mean something that I don't see any possible way to construe from what I said. Bringing Chinese actions from the 1950s and 60s into a discussion of "modern china's" propensity for militarism above, as if anyone would consider maoist China the same thing as the current regime, and implying that I had no idea such events happened.

Look, the Fed printing money doesn't "stimulate" anything except the balance sheets of its own member banks and their friends. It is functionally equivalent to counterfeiting on a mass scale. Why do you think counterfeiting is illegal? It gives the counterfeiter a (stolen) financial benefit, then dilutes the value of existing money. Anyone posting on a hacker forum should understand this basic functional relationship. It really isn't hard to grasp. Inflation doesn't create wealth. It transfers wealth. It's not very difficult to see which direction it's being transferred. Trying to stop this is not 'crazy'. It's common sense.

International food prices recently hit an all time high. Americans really need to wake up from their fantasies quick. Their incredible ignorance of how their leaders operate is costing the world a nearly unimaginable toll of suffering and death, and it's getting worse every day.

Lowering the interest rate is not equivalent to printing money. If you want to redefine terms, you can prove whatever you want to prove.

The Federal Reserve has responsibility for both interest rates and creation of money (check out the Wikipedia page). I believe the parent was referring to the Fed increasing M0, the base money supply. Interesting things have been happening to M0 over the past couple of years. Also, the Fed sets reserve requirements on the banks, which directly affects how much money they (the banks) can create (M1 and higher).

Lowering the interest rate isn't printing money, it's making the money they print to give out as loans to corrupt banks cheaper to obtain, thereby causing them to print more of it. Where do you think they get the money for these loans? The Fed's whole reason for existence is to create money. Greenspan or Bernanke would tell you that.

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