I often post in a forum for English teachers in Japan being as...well...I'm an English teacher in Japan. There is one poster on the forum who is a dyed-in-the-wool, fundamentalist libertarian who loves to rhapsodise about the wonders of free trade, globalisation, and his "classical liberal world view" which he believes most closely equates with the Victorian era entrepreneurial class.
Whenever I give him actual, concrete statistics showing anything from the US slip from 1st to 6th in economic rankings, to the flip from the US being the leading creditor nation to the leading debtor under the Reagan/Friedmann economic system, to the poor state of day to day health care in the US, he either dismisses the studies as fundamentally flawed, resorts to personal attacks, or tries to shift the parameters of the argument to fix his world view.
If any of you have some time, please do have a look at these threads and give me some ammo to respond to the poster "Heretic" because I've lost patience and I feel that if I respond now, I'll just end up sinking to his level and hurling invectives.
I don't think there's a good answer to your question. Some people already know what they know, and don't want to know anything else.
Just go along and get along, or deconstruct what they say, and try to move it down to a specific point. When that doesn't work, why bother banging your keyboard against the wall, unless you've got some free time and some ego invested in it.
Welcome. I hope you breathe some new ideas into this little section of the internet.
Kate
--------------------------------------------------------------- "if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got." ---------------------------------------------------------------
Posts: 6804 | Location: usa | Registered: 09 February 2006
I must agree with Kate. The libertarian worldview is essentially ahistorical, if you listen to Thom much you probably already know this. For the most part wherever capitalism has been freer (more laissez faire) we've seen poverty increase and the middle class decrease. Countries with well developed welfare states are able to reduce poverty to near nothingness, and have healthy middle classes...
So any facts you give a libertarian, they will respond with free market dogma, that simply isn't backed up by reality (there are cases/countries where free market capitalism has worked for a limited period of time, but this is the exception not the rule).
What I do with the right-wing dogmatists on this message board is simply respond to everything I can give a good response to. I'm not obsessed with one-upping them, I just try to correct them, where I think they are far off (and if I'm armed with the facts/information to do so).
"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger
Posts: 731 | Location: Upstate, NY | Registered: 10 September 2006
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