Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries?

Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything.

Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the invisible hand of the market.

The American healthcare system is not libertarian. The US has the highest total health spending per capita in the world, more then France and the UK combined. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

It seems like you are confusing two different terms, liberalism and libertarianism.

Can you explain the difference? Googling it is quite hard, as it mostly throws me biased views.

In the U.S.:

"Liberalism": Broadly, what other countries call social liberalism, i.e. liberty, individual rights, equality, all rooted in Locke's notion of the social contract.

"Libertarianism": An American revival of what's formally called classical liberalism. Broadly: Small government, strong individual rights, free market capitalism, etc.

No, they are using the term “liberalism” in its historic meaning, not the current, US meaning.

> Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries?

Yes, its in the post you're replying too. The USA run an oligarchy system where by the vast majority of money, power and influenced and controlled by an impossibly small interconnected group.

But its ok because every four years the peasants get to chooses which billionaire is the least worse and cast their vote.

What does anything in my post have to do with liberalism?

Well, oligarchy is the eventual result of liberalism. Even though we may have started equal, some people, through luck or questionable methods, have attained a position of power, possibly by being owners of a company that has a monopolistic status. And now, via regulatory capture and targeted actions against competitors, looks to subvert the "free" hand of the market.

Why can't you get decent internet in the States? Because on each location there are two or maybe three companies that collude to keep prices high. And when you try to start your own ISP, suddenly these companies offer crazy good/under cost prices so that your new ISP is unable to survive, and then jack up the prices again.

Of course, at any point, as a consumer, you are absolutely free to enter into a contract with whatever ISP you want. If only there were a few more...

Now tell me how do you fix that without bigger state imposing specific regulations.

Ok just to be clear, your the only one here talking about Liberalism.

Liberalism and libertarianism are two very different things.

Sure, can you explain the differences? Google is not being helpful here, it seems both words have quite a bit of propaganda behind them.

GP seems to be using the "classical liberalism" definition of liberalism, which largerly overlaps with what's generally considered libertarianism.

>Why not give libertarianism a shot?

Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc.

We urgently need to slow down, not speed up.

The most developed countries should show us an example then. I am not Argentinian or from South America at all, but we have the same problems. As long as an average American keeps their consumption levels at more than 10× of ours, I am not listening to what they think we should or shouldn't do. Same for other poor countries, I guess.

That's the spirit. There really is no other way than development. If we try to go back to 19th-century resource consumption and CO2 emissions we also need 19th-century population numbers. If the "degrowth" (a euphemism for poverty and societal collapse) movement got absolute power that will be precisely the result, intentional or not.

This is such a tired argument. The socialist block was, at least by the 1980s, much more wasteful and destructive to the environment than the capitalist world. I encourage you to search for videos like "1980s krakow winter" or "Elbe river GDR" to see a few examples. Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

More than that, it's easy to make abstract statements like "we need to slow down", but how do you imagine that could be done? Who decides which sectors need to be frozen and how do we make sure we don't accidentally starve millions of Africans while doing it (look up food self-sufficiency numbers)?

> Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

Then, for comparison, research the position people describing themselves as libertarians hold and held on the existence of these laws...

(I'm not a big fan of blanket statements on growth like "we should slow down" either, but libertarians deserve no more credit for the enactment of environmental laws they campaigned against than Stalinists do for the reunification of Germany)

My comment was specifically a response to the "because it is capitalism on steroids" line of reasoning which implied that global warming and environment destruction are consequences of capitalism.

>Why not give libertarianism a shot?

You'll soon see.

We did. Until the 1950s. We gave the states so much power under a confederacy the government didn't work and we had to go back to the drawing board to make a new constitution.

Things weren't regulated for a long time, and that's why there were literal snake-oil salesmen blowing literal smoke up your ass while their 10 year old kids worked 7 days a week. It was only around the 1900s that we really started regulating things -- and for good reason.