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TJD@sh.itjust.works 11 months agoI believe that it’s hard to make the world a better place while being dishonest.
Don’t worry, there’s already a few people here covering that role regardless.
Okay, so the state, non-profits, and charities spend an enormous amount of money on homelessness, poverty, and so on. Isn’t it a conservative tenant that nobody knows better how to use your money than you?
Yes, I agree that a ubi works better than conventional welfare. The problem is assuming it would entirely replace existing welfare. Because in my experience, the people who support greater welfare are significantly less likely than me to support letting the idiots who blow their ubi on drugs and shit just die in the streets of their own volition. So we would just have a ubi and other welfare, making it just another black hole of spending, and eliminating any benefit of efficiency.
The other thing is, I support neither a ubi nor conventional welfare. Just because one is better, it doesn’t mean I want it. It’s like picking how many legs I want broken. Yeah, 1 is better than 2, but I’d rather just not have my legs broken at all. Because yeah, I believe that the individual can best make their own choices with their own money. Which is why I don’t want the government taking it in the first place. Slash spending and slash taxes. Don’t just replace spending and keep raising taxes.
Nobody wants to make you live in a city if you don’t want to. Nobody wants to make you live in a high rise apartment. The point is to get bad regulations out of the way and facilitate cities that are more efficient, more affordable, and more closely resemble the cities that arise under normal free market conditions like you see in Europe and Japan (cities basically everywhere else in the world tend to go up rather than out).
I fully agree with cutting regulations and letting things develop as the market wants. The issue is, I find very few people advocating for this stuff actually just consider cutting regulations as the end goal, and letting things go from there. Rather, it’s nearly always coupled with calls for more regulations, just supporting their view of how things should be. Go to any of the communities like fuckcars or notjustbikes and ask how interested they are in removing car licensing and registration, lifting speed limits, or letting people drive big pickups. I’m sure you’ll get resounding support 😑.
Did you know that for every dollar a car driver spends on driving, the government spends $10 supporting that same driver? That is, we lose 10 dollars for every dollar spent on driving.
So stop spending it. Stop Taxing me for it as well while we’re at it.
The choice in terms of fiscal responsibility is clear. Don’t like cities? That’s okay, you don’t have to, but it’s important to remember that cities are, like it or not, our economic engines.
And they can generate their own fucking cash. I’d gladly take whatever economic hit if it meant not propping up cites just because.
Cars aren’t cheap, and practically forcing people into car ownership is against a number of things conservatives stand for, including freedom of markets, strong communities (car centric infrastructure tends to erode community identities and bonds because people don’t do business or anything else in their community besides sleep and occasionally wave at the neighbor), and affordable living.
Free markets include the freedom to fail. As for that other stuff, I couldn’t give less of a damn. I don’t care if my neighbor smiles and waves or throws me the bird and yells, as long as he stays out of my shit, and I’ll stay out of his. And if he wants a community, I’ll damn well support the government getting out of his way.
Cars also provide a convenient avenue for government overreach because of how dangerous they are to operate. There’s so many laws on the books around cars that it’s relatively easy for an officer to pull someone over first and think of a reason later, to say nothing of all the layers of bureaucracy that go into regulating cars and drivers.
So get rid of them. There’s no quirk of the universe tieing car regulations to transit. And as a mentioned earlier, the people supporting transit rarely ever support axing driving regulations. Go to any of those communities and see.
It’s also often the case that public transit is not only more affordable than owning and driving car, but also much cheaper to scale than continuously adding more and more lanes to a road
Rome fell over a thousand years ago, and plenty of their roads are still around without having trillions thrown at them. We already have roads. I’m not the one voting for politicians to throw money at them.
we can raise the bar on driver’s licenses to keep bad drivers off the road, and we won’t have to spend so much time and money hunting down and preventing drunk drivers because they’ll just take the train or walk (in the case of 15 minute cities) instead. What about fiscal responsibility? Public transit is cheaper in the long run than both road maintenance and road expansion.
Yeah, I don’t want to raise the bar. I want to melt the bar down for scrap and end licensing all together. As for responsibility, hold the people causing the problems responsible. Get drunk and hit someone? Enjoy working your ass off until they’re repaid for the harm you caused.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I’m getting some hostile vibes here, and that’s not really the tone I’m going for.
As for cutting driving regulations: I’m okay cutting some, but not all. One thing that makes me left libertarian is that I believe the government has an absolute right to interfere with gross negligence. That is, if you live in an area prone to wildfires and you decide to have a bonfire, the fire department is perfectly justified in coming and shutting that shit down. Maybe you had it under control, maybe you didn’t, but the risk to the life and property of those around you is too high to leave to chance. Likewise with drunk driving, the state has a right to prevent likely damage to other’s persons and property due to risky behavior, and until civil lawsuits can unburn houses and bring people back from the dead, I don’t see my view changing there. Cars are really dangerous, and speaking from 13 years of EMS experience, big, lifted trucks are really dangerous. Having some regulations to make sure people aren’t constantly killing each other and destroying private and public property is a pretty reasonable ask, imo. Also, as a sidebar and not an argument for regulation, I’ve owned a few trucks and I think the trend towards mutant minivan truckzillas is about the stupidest thing going on in modern automobiles. But that’s just a personal opinion rather than a political position.
Free markets include the freedom to fail, that’s true, but can it truly be said to be a free market when we’ve rigged it the way we have? What realistic alternative do you have to a car for getting around your town or city, or for commuting? Ask yourself, how would life change for you if you couldn’t take a car where you needed to go; do you have some other viable alternative? Free markets generally require the freedom to choose between different options and/or non-participation, but transport is a necessity for a lot of people, and we’ve deliberately engineered our cities so that there’s just one practical choice. That’s not a free market.
As for Roman roads: Rome didn’t have Amazon Prime. Damage to roads increases quadratically according to vehicle weight, and high vehicle speeds also create increased damage, though not to the same extent. You want roads that last as long as Rome’s? Return to donkey carts, or support expanded freight rail shipping and take more long and mid-haul semis off the road.
TJD@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Apologies, I’m not good at tone over text. Hostility wasn’t my goal.
I’m of the inverse opinion, largely why I’m not a leftist. I believe the government has no legitimate place inserting itself into people’s personal affairs because something bad might happen. I’d rather bear increased risk if it means the government isn’t the one telling me how to go about my life.
And I’m fine agreeing to disagree here. Just figured I’d toss in my two cents since you seemed interested in discussion.
Similarly non political, I just think they’re cool. The cheaper of the two f-numbered raptors I want to own at some point.
I fully agree that we currently don’t have much of a free market at all, but I don’t think the solution is to try and counter it with more non-free market policies in the other direction. I want the markets freed, and to let it balance itself out.
Depends how loosely you define viable. I full well took a job with no transit options because I would rather drive anyway. Not exactly like you can run too many transit options onto a military base anyway, security and all that crap.
So Amazon can pave the roads then if they’re unsatisfied with the quality. Or Walmart. Or whatever logistics company is interested in spending that money. Remember when dominoes went out and did road maintenance? That should be our standard. People who want it do it, and those who don’t, don’t. Me? I’m perfectly fine with just throwing gravel into potholes whenever they arise, and leaving it at that. We don’t really need everything to be all pristine as if it’s an f1 track or something. Good enough is just that. Good enough.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Ah, I see, thanks for clarifying. So, you’re an anarchocapitalists, then? I have a good friend of the same persuasion. Suffice it to say, I’ve done enough rounds with him to know where my own views as well as a fair estimate of yours on those points. I don’t think there’s any policies I can suggest that you’d be interested in, except for the removal of oil and coal subsidies.
TJD@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I wish. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in “reality” or something, and anarcho-anything is just a recipe for whoever does support government (or a functional equivalent) fucking you over. I’m more of a “government is a necessary evil” right-libertarian. That is, I believe the government should exist, but it should only do so with an extremely limited scope of function. International relations and a justice system, at the bare minimum, with the sole purpose of upholding individual rights.