It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).
Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.
A ban on X and Meta would be a start.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.
I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.
Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.
But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.
Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumbents, and rich and powerful people run things.
Of course if you take a society which has managed to regulate some aspect of all that using government, and then take away that particular government regulation--while leaving all the other ways the governments puts its thumb on the scale in place--then things will get worse, at least in the short term.
But that in no way shows that the absence of a government's thumb on the scale in every aspect, long term makes things worse. Historically, there have been societies that had little or no government intervention in things (for example, saga period Iceland, or some of the American colonies before the British tried to tighten up on them after the French and Indian War), and they did not have the bad things you mention; they had the opposite, people being able to run their own lives and getting along just fine, precisely because there was no government that could force them to do stupid things because of some government granted monopoly or incumbent, or because rich and powerful people were using their wealth and power to co-opt the government--the way they do in societies that do have government intervention.
> The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check.
That's the ostensible purpose, but it doesn't work. Giving a government the power to intervene in what would otherwise be a free market just means the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to co-opt the government. Having a government actually makes their job easier: it's cheaper to buy a government than it is to buy an entire society.
> there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general
There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. I don't think the Right is any worse than others in that respect.
Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.
This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales.
> Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.
Historically, this is simply false. There have been societies that did not have governments that could manipulate markets, and they did not work this way.
In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal. (They also had less wealth inequality than modern societies with governments.)
Here is a list of transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms).
> In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal.
Tell me about power laws.
I recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true.
Whether the particular interventions governments make are good policy is a separate question. A free market is a tool. So are government interventions. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs. But that doesn't change the fact that they are tradeoffs: that every time the government intervenes in a market, it means the market is no longer a free market, because some transactions are not voluntary. (Or because some transactions that would be voluntary if they happened are prevented from happening; see further comments below.)
> Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary.
First, even taken literally, this claim is not true, because there are lots of other government interventions in place that dictate non-voluntary transactions (the most common, of course, being taxation).
Second, you're quibbling. I gave the short version of the proper definition of a free market; the full version includes that preventing transactions from occurring that otherwise would occur (because both parties benefit) by making them illegal also counts as making transactions non-voluntary. In other words, "voluntary" has two sides: not forcing people to make transactions they wouldn't voluntarily choose to make, and not preventing people from making transactions they would voluntarily choose to make.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
Of what? Where are you getting this from?
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.