Libertarian Caller Strives For Nonexistent Native American Utopia 

This guy isn't a libertarian, he's a socialist. He just doesn't know it

"If he could not afford a horse or blanket, he would receive it as a gift." Sounds great. Now replace "horse" with "healthcare".

Libertarians phone calls always start with: "I think they are some misconceptions on the 'real' libertarianism"

Here are the biggest wastes of time ranked: 1. Being a libertarian 2. Listening to a libertarian

thanks for these libertarian caller videos sam they are great, they're single handedly responsible for ending my interest in the viability of the libertarian ideology.

I love how many libertarians accept Sam's challenge and end up failing every time

he means a commune??? he's so close to anarcho communism i'm rooting for this guy. and he's not entirely wrong reaching back a bit in history, eventhough it's not accurate. kropotkin explains a lot doing that

I love when some person says "Native societies", like as though they were all the same and all behaved similarly and never fought over these differences. Maybe some involved womens participation, maybe some didn't. There is never nuance in this kind of statement, which should make anyone suspicious.

As soon as the guy says "I'm here to accept your challenge to Libertarians" Seder gets this big smile on his face. LOL

he sounded like a Marxist towards the end talking about class consciousness and proletarians

I like this guy....he is pretty cool....wrong...but cool.

This guy sounds like a confused an-com

I like this caller. Sounds like he has his heart in the right place, he’s just young.

Native American society was basically socialist for the same reason your family is socialist amongst itself. “There’s this much to be done and this much resources to go around, let’s get it done” is the basic structure of ancient independent civilizations and that is socialist in my understanding.

He was talking about Noam Chomsky style anarcosyndicalism not libertarianism

Hes talking like about a resource based economy which is the opposite of libertarianism :D wtf he is confused

Both of those should read some Chomsky. The libertarian label is not appropriate at all here. Btw Seder is wrong when he says what the caller is talking about can't work in industrial societies with millions of people; it did in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell notably wrote about it.

"It's just a couple sentences" French voice: *Two. Hours. Later.*

These libertarians don't think

dude Sam's face ALWAYS lights up when he hears a libertarian wants to challenge him

The native American tribes had societies akin to anarcho-socialism at least within one's own tribe..the caller is confusing that with libertarian capitalism, direct democracies don't exists in capitalism because the market is what governs all social relations.

"Whole for free" means that there be a collection of basic sustenance & shelter; Healthcare & even entertainment provided to EVERYONE who lives in the borders of said state. That MEANS, Mr "Libertarian" that people be allowed a certain level of basic creature comforts-whether they have the ability to contribute to it or not YET-so that a person doesn't have anxieties over how they will survive.Because whether you believe it or not, almost EVERYONE wants everyone else to be Healthy, SAFE & Sound!

Oh, sure. "Imagine how great anarchy would be, now that we already have all the modern comforts that government has made possible." Way to stand on the shoulders of giants.

I know this is nearly a decade old but this guy was very pleasant which is a change from self identified libertarians. Hopefully he found his way.

Your 'Guess' about 'Indian' people is totally wrong. The Constitution was founded on the principles of the Iroquois Confederacy, written on Hemp. There wasn't a division between men and women. This is a Euro-centric notion that came from colonization. Women held positions that were equal, with different responsibilities. Representative Democracy was what was taken from Indigenous North American Tribes. Kinda like Thanksgiving, there's real information out here. We didn't have slaves the way you associate it to, in this culture. 'Slaves' were associated with War, not the basis of a society, and it was more of a punishment than an 'Economic' strategy, like t was to the Founding Fathers. We didn't have the death penalty, we had expulsion. All 'Native Americans', which is a derogatory term to me and alot of my Culture as that implies that 'America' is where we set our standards, had trade and respect for different tribes as intermarriage, even from opposing Nations (cuz that's what they were, different languages and traditions yet a similar Spirituality, also only way you can sign a 'Treaty'), were an integral part of our societal structure, which ,in turn, was 'used' for the basis of the United States. Our Society, which was so vastly different than anything being debated here, really can't be cited by someone outside of it. Not because we don't want them to, Howard Zinn makes an excellent point in this regard, but because no one wants to. The European notion of 'success' is this system we're living in. It isn't 'successful' to us, by the way, so that term being used to describe this country is truly relative. And to say that you couldn't run a country that has 300 million people having a say is contradictory to the founding of this system of government, regardless of how that was manipulated under the 'Capitalist' system. 'America' isn't a Country with 300 million people in one area. The population is distributed, unevenly, in class-driven localities. If everyone started to realize that self-sufficiency is what every Nation strives for, they may understand that Human Beings can ONLY live in Localized Government structures. Minimally weak centralized governments with more emphasis on municipalities and their self-sufficiency, providing the driver for perpetuation of the society lies in the realm of Human endeavor and well-being, is the only successful way Humans can live. Relying on importing and exporting in a world where knowledge is the only real power, is total suicide. We're seeing this now. More a symptom of 'Capitalism' really. The Indian Men when young are Hunters and Warriors; when old, Counsellors; for all their Government is by Counsel of the Sages; there is no Force there are no Prisons, no Officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.-Hence they generally study Oratory; the best Speaker having the most Influence. The Indian Women till the Ground, dress the Food, nurse and bring up the Children, & preserve & hand down to Posterity the Memory of public Transactions. These Employments of Men and Women are accounted natural & honorable, Having few artificial Wants, they have abundance of Leisure for Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life compar’d with theirs, they esteem slavish & base; and the Learning on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous & useless. - Benjamin Franklin Papers 1782-1783

you literally made him jibber. He could not make a coherent argument by the end of it.

"Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power " lord acton

I'd agree that Singapore's living conditions aren't the worst in the world, especially compared to Somalia or some other small-government paradise. As for your opinion of unions: I'd say the German auto industry blows that preconceived notion out of the water. In Germany, unions and corporations are not enemies. Collective bargaining is not evil.

Sam should not really baldly assert that women did not have voting rights within the native american societies that practiced direct demoracy. In the Iroquois confederacy the chiefdoms which formed the representative councils were all bestowed by the clan mothers, and passed on matrilinearlly. They could recall these representatives at any time. I'm not saying it's utopian, and there would have been many other systems in many other nations, but the best examples of direct consensus democracy among the native Americans definitely had female representation. We have this weird view of history from a western perspective that every non modern civilization must necessarily have been entirely patriarchal.

You understand. Please spread the word.

Currency by definition comes out of spontaneous interactions in the marketplace, not central planning. If gold coins were useless in the market, it would either be because of gov't policy or better currencies offered by the market.

I feel as if no one actually research the history and manifesto of what libertarianism is....

let me use your logic. there is no faster car than the fastest car that exists. therefore it never will. GENIUS!

Native Americans weren't capitalists so I fail to get the callers point. If American libertarians weren't staunch free market capitalists I'd get it

suppliers of a good have a natural incentive to regulate the parameters of their goods. and through competition the market as a whole will be more flexible with the rules, which is more likely to find the optimum parameter given the conditions. government regulation reacts after the fact, implements slowly, and by the time they do anything the market already adjusts causing an overcorrection which is just as bad if not worse than the original problem.

So native americans didn't fight? What is this guy reading? He said is someone was so poor that they didn't have a horse or blanket they would be Given one. There were no horses here before Europeans arrived.

On direct democracy: now IS the day and age when it could work. Either now or in the coming decades. A direct democracy can be handled as an eDemocracy. Get the population connected enough to electronic means of mass communication (let's say a $20 smart phone of some sort), and run a govt. run app on it. A vague idea, but I believe it has merit.

A free market society that failed ? I can name several of those in both American and European history . The Puritans ? They were a " free market " society , look how well they turned out . The Spanish Inquisition were also " free market " and they didn`t do much better . Pre-colonization Native Americans also had a " free market " system of a more tribal and proto-socialistic nature which worked pretty well before the Pilgrims came with their diseases and imperialist schemes .

Obviously Jamie wasn't around in 2012 but I would have loved for him to have had a discussion with her!

"Humans will never reach any type of Utopia unless they become more than human, hopefully through genetic engineering." You do understand how dangerous that way of thinking can be. If you'd start manipulating human thought, where would you begin and where would you end? Would you eliminate desire to eliminate greed? Would you eliminate independence to eliminate rebellion? Bliss comes through satisfaction or ignorance. Usually both. Satisfy some needs and make people oblivious to the rest.

This guy was the most sane smart libertarian

It would certainly be less expensive. It's impossible to know how cheap, but if you also got rid of all the regulations/taxes associated with healthcare, it would be even cheaper.

Medicare puts caps on what Dr.'s can charge medicare patients, and since medicare patients are already paid in and old, they tend to use the system more than they paid in, forcing Dr.'s/hospitals/insurance companies to cover the difference by raising the price on the rest of us. When Medicare was passed, we were told healthcare would be cheaper, but it got even more expensive.

I'd like to become a libertarian, but who can afford the drugs.

I consider my political views to be libertarian, and would like to express my appreciation to Mr. Seder for his many debates delving into philosophies broader than just "left vs. right"

This calls are gold

Yeats said it best: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." :-)

I know I do. I once considered myself a "Democratic Libertarian," though I FINALLY evolved to understand that what people like you "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps & hang all others that couldn't with their bootstraps (then take their bootstraps for ourselves)" --I finally evolved to see what you're saying for what it really is: Survival of the fittest. Even if "the fittest" were born into a life of privilege they had absolutely NOTHING to do with creating.

Digital coins has shown us how a libertarian commodity system would work.

also, theory points out the mechanism why government control fails. government has the same information problem that any other economic actor has. but it is a slow moving, slow adjusting leviathan and cannot adjust quick enough for a dynamic economy. economic theory shows that the very act of taxation and government spending causes a frictional loss, AND THATS BEFORE ANALYZING HOW EFFECTIVE THE SPENDING WAS. you cannot deny no one spends his money more carefully than the one who earned it.

I've heard that argument too. I've heard some people say that regulations are the cause of costs too. You gotta love libertarians. They've no grasp on reality. They think John Galt is a hero.

Actually, that doesn't make it automatically inefficient at all. In fact, because you can eliminate the need for extra profits from the single-payer (e.g. the government) that can easily save 15-25% right there. It also allows the system to concentrate on helping patients and providing services rather than the current system that spends huge amounts of time trying to justify NOT providing services. In the end you are just repeating prejudices, not offering us actual facts or arguments.

Actually, the Laffer Curve can easily be a good argument for HIGHER (compared to what the US has now) taxes, not less. It is certainly not the simplistic "lower taxes is always better, higher taxes always worse" definition you imply here.

Friedman's theories have not been tried in most countries. Yes, phD's can say something about a persons ability to comprehend complex system. Milton Friednman, Adam smith, Murray rothbard, thomas sowell and others have shown time and time again that they understand various human social systems as demonstrated in their writings(which you apparently have not read)

I hate when someone pushes for deflation under the argument that it empowers the consumer. Whatever gains they get from falling prices, they lose from a fall in wages. And then some.

How does the surgeon get such a bloated salary in the first? Partly market demand, but also bloated revenue coming into the hospitals because of medicare and other gov't contracts. 1/2 of every dollar spent on healthcare in the U.S., is spent by the gov't. Part of the reason Healthcare providers bill the insurance so much, is because they have a lot of costs, which gov't contributes to.

A question for anyone to answer: with the availability of the internet why should a representative democracy not be obsolete in the future? Casting votes across all layers of government could be a total trivial matter for each citizen willing to participate.

If I'm understanding this guy properly, he wants a system of what are effectively localized clans with a loose treaty among all of said clans for trade based on a commodity backed currency?

in my town i expect everyone would vote to change the traffic signals. red light means go. green means stop. just to cause a ruckus and because they could.

You wouldn't have to inflate the value of gold, just let prices drop.

The closed captioning is skewed.

their own food, water, and power. The way things work now, all these three things are far more expensive to have someone else ship to you. We need to power vehicles with oil so they can go fetch and deliver oil, for instance. When individuals make their own stuff, the "shipping" is loading something into a box and carrying it inside from the back yard. Also, on the part about dystopia to utopia - nature, given a state of chaos, will return to order. Government is sustained chaos...

Gold has no more value than the market agrees on. Which, incidentally, is the exact same way paper money is treated. We live in a world that has more value than it has gold, so unless you inflate the value of gold to a completely unreasonable amount, there is no reason or point in reverting to a gold standard.

My beats finally broke while watching this I hope you're fucking happy

I would be interested in what you mean, in the context of the Lacrosse game.

Exactly what are "better managed free market policies"? Do they include universal healthcare? In the case of Finland, more than 90% state operated schools? Public transportation managed by the govt? The Scandinavian welfare state has been succesfully operating for almost 150 years since it was implemented (second half XIX). Since then the so called "not real capitalist" economies have crashed numerous times. Economists have been speculating about the crash of the Nordic welfare state for decades

I said it would make it cheaper, not affordable. Of course if your paying out of pocket, its almost always going to be more expensive than having insurance. What about taxes, you don't think eliminating the taxes on medical equipment would make healthcare cheaper?

lmao at the end his quote was very anti-capitalist

No it's not. Also, you can't apply mechanical physics without considering fluid friction (and rolling friction given the mechanism). Again, I doubt you passed math.

the gold standard iS GOVERNMENT MONETARY POLICY. the market does not limit money to gold.

I actually have held a vision of what this country could have been had Native Americans been invaded and wiped out, so it’s a nice dream to envision that we live in nature, respect the Earth, have various tribes with their laws,and chiefs, etc. Maybe we could even still be riding horses! It’s not naive to just want a better world for our kids and grandkids, and think outside the box. Another party May spice things up, too. I give the guy credit for wanting a better society. I read about a tribe whose one law was to do nothing that harms a child, if you think about it that covers all the bases(stealing, abuse, murder , etc all harm) and making children a priority makes for a great society. Everyone should read “Bury my heart at wounded knee, to grasp what America is built on, slavery wasn’t the original atrocity. Way to burst his bubble Sam.

I enjoy these debates so much. I feel guilty about it.

The best example of free markets in the US is a flee market. Some might say they're places to find great deals, but have you ever noticed the same vendors there, week after week, gobbling up more & more table space near the entrance, pushing the people who use it for what it was intended(yard sale space for people without yards)all the way to the back corners of the lot, where they're ignored & sell little or nothing? Welcome to free market economics--poverty for all except the lucky few!

I feel like this caller got all his knowledge of Native Americans from the movie Pocahontas...

I've said it again and again; the majority of Native Americans didn't believe in property rights.

I do like the quote the dude read.

I've noticed that too. Their ideology is a house of cards, and they get really pissed off if you cause a breeze. FYI I knew a lot of Native Americans growing up. There were two neighboring tribes, the Menominee and Winnebago. I witnessed an awkward exchange between a Menominee and a Winnebago. After the Winnebago walked off, the Menominee explained that in the old days Menominee would capture Winn. and keep them basically as livestock, killing and eating them eventually. Libertopia!

Exactly. For libertarians the only freedom that truly matters is economic. They say they love freedom, yes freedom to hoard all the money the can disregarding the social and environmental cost. But for libertarians Singapur is awesome, it doesn't matter that you can spend 10 years in prison for smoking a joint of pot as long as the tax burden doesn't excede 13%. Paradise!

So you'd feel safe driving on an unregulated superhighway with no failsafes? It'd be populated with Mack trucks that are operating with not limits on weight or speed & its drivers wouldn't need to be up anyone's snuff to drive the vehicles. In the meantime, some nut could take a smart-car out on that same highway. Fuck it. Let people walk on that thoroughfare too. Yeah, That's a really good idea.

I'm Kanienkeha, which is known as Mohawk in English, a nation in the Six Nations Confederacy also known as the Iroquoian Confederacy which is a nontraditional name given by the French. The Six Nations Confederacy is the world's oldest democracy that has been continuously active until today. Of course Athenian democracy predates it, but also hasn't existed for Millenia. The Six Nations Confederacy has been active for over 600 years, and the United States through Ben Franklin modeled many parts of American Democracy on our confederacy. Sam raised the point about whether Women were able to participate and the answer is yes. However men and women had different roles. Each clan (extended family) had it's own representative, call it a chief if you want, and that representative was chosen by the women of the family with the final decision coming from the eldest female called the clan mother. Anyone in the clan could voice their concerns to the "chief" who would attend the councils of "chiefs" from each clan of all the nations in the confederacy. These chiefs were only men, however if the chief did not represent the family well the clan mother could depose the chief at anytime and choose someone new. Women played a significant role in the government and were able to voice their concerns, just not at councils but through their family representative.

donating to charity is subsidized thru tax codes. the best charity you can provide to society is to make profits. you agree voncocksmith?

@Barron Brust that guy needs some of if not all of those social programs lol

The Confederacy also started out as " free market " but as maintaining the slave trade became more expensive , they were forced to put a Federal Government and President ( Naturally , Confederacy founder Jefferson Davis was the only choice on the ballot and most Confederates were fine with that ) in place . The Biblical Hebrews after being led out of Egypt were a " free market " society that prospered but not until after they`d suffered one grievous loss and disaster after another .

It's the myth of the noble savage. Although they tended to do better than Euro-caucasians with the environment, even Native Americans weren't above wiping out their ecological resources on occasion. Some people (read libertarians) only think in hypotheticals and don't understand the real world. The leave many variables out of their equations; often the most critical variables.

Why would a private company build a shitty road and have no rules? Why would they risk pouring a bunch of capital into a project that gets a bad reputation and loses customers?

abundance is possible but not through central management. you need to let the free market and the many actors determine prices. it is the profit mechanism that allocates resources toward production the most efficiently. dont read an hippie commune mentality economics. especially if you havent taken a basic econ class.

Libertarians seem like the folks who watched those commercials about buying gold...spent way too much and now want us back on the gold standard.

Native Americans is a crazy broad statement. They were almost night and day every 50-75 miles

Inherently restrictive? You don't understand how a laissez faire economy would operate if you think its inherently restrictive. If it was heavily restrictive, the how come corporations wanted certain regulation in placed so that they would be protected from other competitors?

I mean, at least this libertarian was a nice guy. I could definitely see him being able to be moved left with a longer and more in-depth conversation.

Free markets (laissez-faire) don't exist, have never existed and will never exist. The free market system is inherently restrictive as competitors would always seek dominance thru the use -or creation-of an entity that gives them a differential advantage, such as govt. Besides, free markets -as Smith conceived them- only give abundance to a particular group, not to the general population, that's why regulation is needed. Inequality in Hong Kong or Singapur is huge compared to Norway or Sweden.

Thank you!

Call in to his show then, tough guy

profit is a indication that the person producing is providing goods that have higher value than the resources used to produced those goods.the fact that government provides goods without producing profit is an indication of waste. to make matters worse,the act of taxation causes dead weight loss, a type of wasteful friction to the economy.hence my analogy of confiscating two cars to produce one. a net loss for society, like your existence.

Bahrain, the happiest country on earth.

I like it when the hard right wing libertarians call.

The idea that Singapore is some kind of laissez-faire paradise is idiotic; it has one of the highest police prescences per capita in the world, highest amount of capital punishment, almost no civil liberties; but no capital gains tax? Wow that's freedom, libertarian style!

Well its not hard to make someone look foolish when their ideology is based solely on speculation an no hard evidence, I do that to right-wing nutters here in my country (Australia) on a constant basis and the amusing thing is its always the same group of people rambling on about something they don't understand and then resort to personal insults when I point out the inherent flaws in their reasoning.

Abundance is possible. We need a more intelligent management of current resources. Check the concept.of a Resource.Based Economy of Jacque Fresco.

i was typing fast without proof reading. of course i know this. again if you read my earlier comment i referred to a dependence on elasticity that will determine the effect on tax revenue. but this is the problem with supply side. it looks at how to maximize tax revenue instead of whats best for the economy. thats like trying to maximize how much a parasite eats instead of optimizing the host's health. taxes in the long run ALWAYS HURT AN ECONOMY.