Lots of Poles, libertarian or not, do that for the massive quality of life increase.
We have a lot of social programs for the poor, especially in regards to health. No its not Euro-style universal healthcare, but this idea that they'll starve in the streets if they lose their jobs is ridiculous. That's on top of COBRA, which allow you to stay on your employers plan for a bit while you work out a new provider. Or subsidized ACA exchange insurance. We are down to 11% uninsured right now. In the 90s we were getting close to hitting 20%.
There's a lag period before you can apply for and get benefits, but that's what unemployment insurance (which is mandatory) is for and you know... your own savings. You are putting away savings right?
The real problem here is that I find most middle-class people have no idea how welfare works. None. They've never had to apply for these things. They just think they're for "welfare queens" and "drug addicts." They don't realize that these programs are pretty much everywhere in the USA. For example, food stamps are mostly used by white people. So these people have unrealistic ideas of what loss of income means. They think they're going to debtors prison and being forced to die in their basements from lack of healthcare. Europeans like yourself buy into this nonsense because they have an anti-US bone to pick. The reality is that you're both being incredibly disingenuous. Perhaps you should do some basic research before making these shoddy generalizations?
Its also worth mentioning that every HP product we use is fairly terrible. All of our servers, printers, etc. A lot of sysadmins I've talked to are either considering moving to Dell or already have moved. These jobs are going to migrate to Dell or elsewhere I imagine. That's how competition works. Yeah, its ugly, but HP has not been competitive for some time in many areas. You can't expect a lifetime of labor without shake-ups, especially in the volatile tech sector.
I got a taste when I applied for PFL in California when we had a baby. The scale of people the State serves is insane, and navigating the system could be a full-time job in itself.
(PFL is California's supplemental program that pays some fraction of your salary for family leave - in my case new child bonding)
I took 3 weeks leave, and on the last Friday got a phone call from the PFL office: "We have a question about your PFL application, and if you don't return our call today we will deny your claim". I call, and after battling the phone tree got, "Our system is over capacity. Please try again later click". I finally got through at the end of the day via email.
I finally got paid the first day I returned from leave (!). Luckily for me I wasn't depending on the money or else my kids would have been eating rice. What a nightmare. I don't envy anyone who has to use social services.
Not how ratios work. In absolute terms, there are more white people who use food stamps than non-white people because 3/4s of the country's population is white. Per capita, many more non-white people are on food stamps than white people.
While things may be less extreme here than in Europe, you aren't just left to die if you become unemployed. Government-provided insurance that you have to be either poor or old enough to get is actually much better than a lot of the private insurance plans that are the only option for the middle class.
Crony capitalism still is not capitalism.
Cronyism is central to capitalism, and you can't have one without the other.
Cronyism only exists when competition doesn't work by means of a government. Get some politicians, create regulations, build a monopoly. No matter how uncompetitive it is, you're still a billionaire.
The "free market" in which that is a defensible claim is a counterfactual construct that is sometimes useful as a simplified analytic model, but fundamentally incompatible with the behavior of real human beings and conditions in the real world.
> merciless competition destroys any underperfoming organization.
In real unregulated markets, that may happen initially, and the most successful parties in that situation mercilessly move to lock-in advantages against future competitors by use their economic power they have as a result of that success to monopolize key inputs, preventing competition.
> Cronyism only exists when competition doesn't work by means of a government
Yes, and a particular, common, real-world version of cronyism by which government structures the economic regime to favor the interest of the capital-holding class was identified by its critics in the 19th Century, and given the name "capitalism".
That's it. If there's central planning(no matter to whom) it's socialism. And, regarding 'lock-in advantages', without a government-backed credit expansion, it'd be really difficult for companies to get as much market cap.
No, the dominant system of the developed world in the 19th Century that socialists reacted against and coined the word "capitalism" to describe isn't socialism.
This reminds me of some people who pointed out that communism was never implemented and all the totalitarian regimes were still in the socialism phase. A phase which was obviously never going to be replaced with the communist utopia.
This is just a delay tactic. We all know what we talk about when we say "communism" and it's the same for "capitalism" - we mean the real-world, flawed implementation.
Anyone with a background on classical economics realizes the U.S is much closer to socialism than capitalism. The existence of 'prices' and greed doesn't imply it's capitalism.
Anyone should recognize that the dominant system of the modern developed world is a hybrid retaining largely the capitalist structures and property regime, but adopting many strategies with origins in socialism (including advocated in the communism of Marx and Engels) for mitigating some of the effects for which 19th Century socialists criticized the dominant system of the developed world at that time, for which they coined the term "capitalism".
Its probably not particularly productive to argue about whether this synthesis is "closer" to socialism or capitalism.
Neoliberalism doesn't mean watered down free-market liberalism. The term describes a certain movement in (classical) liberal thought which wanted to seperate itself from former thinkers primarily based on the time they where living in.
While those thinkers have little in common, they genuinely disliked a productive state (as in the production of goods or the delivery of a service), cartels, interventions in the price mechanism etc.
All of that is far away from what the US or European countries are currently doing.
At least in Europe it's also used as a meaningless buzzword to scare people who think that the prefix "neo" means evil.
I love both countries though.
But your employer having a gun to your beloved's head - that what it basically is - is just rotten.
I genuinely wish that any libertarians here (in Poland) move to USA or, Friedmans beloved, Chile. I hope they get to experience shit like that. I guess im a filthy little commie for expexcting to be able to live my life without shit like that /s