(February 1, 2018 at 6:12 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: Yeah, I think libertarians are principled folks. Truly I'll take them over your average Republican dickhead any day, but they simply put too much trust in free market capitalism. It's tantamount to believing in unicorns to think that laissez faire capitalism will solve everything. We had that once: it seriously sucked, and we've been trying to replace it ever since. Why do you think unions came about in the first place? Greed? Hell no! Survival.
I'll put exactly the right amount of trust into free market capitalism - you have to prevent failures of the free market (extremely interesting topic IMO). It's the field I find the most interesting to study, personally. I love striking that balance... seeing how the corporations are so cleverly exploiting things, and devising regulations that actually prevent them, but not interfering more than what keeps the playing field even. There is plenty of regulation to be had, and plenty we're missing (like a huge amount of environmental regulation!). But it just shouldn't be excessive in any way.
That's basically where I stand on the issue. You can write it off as me being a libertarian, but really I just see there being so much power in free markets, that it would be a crying shame to have a purely socialist society, where you lose all of that beautiful efficiency.
