Despite budget cuts and ban, Obama buys Russian helicopters

[lnrw]

[The Dharma Bum]

Free trade means international trade free from obstructionism that is biased toward a partner's nationalistic interests.

Does this exist? It's debateable. The doctrine is currently in place, but a lot of the time it is obstructed because, say, people don't feel like we should buy helicopters from the Russians, but should instead promote US manufacturers.

I'm not a proponent of free trade, or even trade at all for that matter, but that is the explanation for why free trade is so difficult to implement.

[lnrw]

If you're not a proponent of free trade, then are you proposing some sort of trade where force is involved? Where trade is controlled and alllowed by permit?

There's no point being pushed about buying Russian goods or buying American goods. I don't care what you buy or from where or who. buy them from Mars if you want. It doesn't matter.

I'm trying to clarify what it is that you call free trade, because you have not offered an example of free trade or a policy that legalises free trade. What would those trading circumstances look like? Having Free in the title of a trade policy does not make it Free trade. Would you say the Patriot Act is the work of or for Patriots?

I don't think you can define government spending as capitalism. It may involve capital, but it's not capitalism any more than rape is making love.

[The Dharma Bum]

I wasn't proposing anything. All I did was comment about some of the remarks.

Also, I may as well add, capitalism entirely depends on intervention by the state on the part of private owners of capital.

Statism and capitalism are two features of the same system, by which a tiny elite class has literally domesticated humanity.

You will never have liberty and capitalism. The two are mutually exclusive. American libertarians have yet to become conscious of that fact, which is why US libertarianism is basically ultra-right capitalism. The state exists to control the population in the name of orderly business occurring, but it does also serve the purpose of restraining the owning class, which would eat the working class alive if it could.

The only way for humans to liberate themselves from the iteration of society which has developed over the generations is to become conscious of the facts as individuals and consciously engineer a better society than the one that has developed on it's own in the wild.

So society has domesticated the individuals that make up society? The best way to fight back is for the individuals to in turn "domesticate society" and turn it to the needs of the individuals that comprise society instead of letting the system prey upon individuals, at the behest of whatever group is in control. The only way to do this is to abolish private capital and make all collective production serve the public interest.

That is the aim of libertarian socialism, at least according to my own conception of the concept.

[The Dharma Bum]

You have a choice.

One system has the "free rider" problem, but the other system has the "enslave the entire planet in a unrelenting dystopia of poverty and war" problem.

I'll take the free riders.

[lnrw]

If that's all you can see, it may be your only choices.

but it is very very far from all that there is.

And I choose neither of the scenarios you offer.

For your free rider idea, you may as well tell people if they flap their arms hard enough, they can fly.

I like you Dharma, and I know you're intelligent. But what you propose is not remotely possible and your descriptions and definitions are representative of some the problems I have with the language being loaded to convey the idea of either/or, and that being cast as the only 'real' options. For one they're not real and for another, they aren't the only options.

[dontworrybehappy]

[The Dude]

Wait, someone believes we don't have enough nukes right now?

lol

Did you seriously compare our involvement in Iraq to Libya?

double lol

[eynon81]

[dontworrybehappy]