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This seems… fine? And a lot less FUD-y than the original article. I find that talk of the “freedoms” being taken away often is propaganda by the corporate inter

• deleted 5y ago
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• Grim-444 5y ago
  Well you can't deny that options are being taken away for a portion of citizens. I stopped doing more than the minimum match into my 401K a long time ago because I could no longer trust that in 30, 40, 50 years nobody wouldn't have come after it as an easy target. It's kind of like gun control (which isn't a good analogy since it's too politically charged) - you're pointing at one restriction and saying "hey, it's not the end of the world, you can still own guns, this probably doesn't even affect you personally", but then a new restriction, law, permit, tax, ruling, regulation, is passed every 6 months from that point on every year for decades on end, every time pointing to the change as just a small little thing that probably only affects a small portion of people. Every time gaining more and more precedence for more restrictions and overall adding them all up having a much more massive impact than just a small change that only affects certain people.
  • kelseyfrog 5y ago
    If any restriction is intolerable then what remains?
    • nybble41 5y ago
      Liberty.
      • kelseyfrog 5y ago
        Not sure, I follow. That doesn't make any sense.
        • nybble41 5y ago
          It's pretty obvious. When you don't tolerate any restrictions, liberty is what remains.
          • c54 5y ago
            This is a common refrain but just false, restrictions and regulations are very often the only thing guaranteeing liberty. We’re often told “free market good, government bad” but the reality is somewhere in the middle (without even getting into the fact that the free market is itself created through government regulation) I’d recommend checking out Mike Konzcal’s recent book Freedom From The Market https://thenewpress.com/books/freedom-from-market https://thenewpress.com/books/freedom-from-market
            • nybble41 5y ago
              The free market is voluntary exchange without aggression (initiation of violence)–that's the "free" part. Far from being created by government, the free market is utterly incompatible with the claim to "legitimate" initiation of violence, which is the defining characteristic of any government and how it enforces its restrictions and regulations. You can have a market economy with a government, but it won't be a free market. People are perfectly capable of trading with each other on a voluntary basis without requiring any restrictions or regulations or any other form of violence. And if violence does occur people are perfectly entitled to respond in self-defense without depending on any government to intervene.
              • c54 5y ago
                I see what you’re saying, but it’s just not true. Trade takes the form of exchange of the rights of ownership, and this is a right enforced by government. For example, if I own a house, the house doesn’t care who does what. The owner is the one with the right to call the cops if a non-owner comes in unwanted. This instantly becomes an appeal to violence and the government. This is even more true in the modern sense of the free market, financial markets exchange very little actual physical goods, the thing being traded is rights to contracts, rights which are guaranteed by the government regulator. The only place this isn’t quite true is with blockchain based assets.