You think the Cold War was about economic policy?
Yup, I'm pretty much convinced; at the very least, your brand of libertarianism is a handmaiden to socialism.
Yes. The thing is that the economic policy of communism is fundamental to everything in the Cold War. Command and control economies combined with redistribution for imagined equity added onto any form of non-post-scarcity government through any means will result in a totalitarian dictatorship with all the evils involved. Because to keep people working when there is no incentive to do so will involve some sort of slavery, and to keep people from complaining about that will require speech laws, and so on and so forth. The USSR could not help being totalitarians even if Stalin was an angel.
Or it shows how your thinking is limited to short-term only. The very fact that USSR killed millions means that it was less dangerous, because it was obviously evil. Nazism is less dangerous than Communism because it was so obviously evil - it was evil and it did not hide it. Communism is less dangerous than Progressivism because, while it hid its evil behind the rhetoric, that was the only thing it did.
The greatest danger in the world is evil which pretends to be good. And that is what Progressivism is. Make no mistake, it will kill millions in the end - but nobody will understand how it happened, what exactly happened, how we got there... and most may not even realize that it is Progressivism which is guilty, which means somebody else may try again, because, utopia.
And speaking of which, the idea that you can have a utopia in the first place is, in and of itself, evil.
I misread your statement, and sorta agreed with you on progressivism in regards to danger to the US, but I do think that modern progressivism is in large part because of the USSR, and so it should get credit for much of progressivism's dangers.
As for utopias being evil, not really. It's more that Utopian thinking causes evil. I'm fully aware that a libertarian society will have societal problems, just less ones than the current US.
And this shows why the hiding evil is dangerous - it is so easy to misunderstand. Communism is lot more than just economic policy, because if it was that, there would be no difference between Communism and Nazism at all - both are, after all, socialist ideologies. But Communism is a holistic ideology, seeking to transform the entire society, not just economic relationships (even though economic relationships are a basis of Communism, they are merely the foundation of its point of view, and do not form the entire structure of the ideology).
Yes, communism is more than just an economic policy. But its core is it's economic policy, which was the cause of much of its problems and evil. Part of hiding evil is that people pretend that they can just use the economic policy without the totalitarianism of communism, but the two are linked. Yes, you might end up with a different type of totalitarianism, but it's still hell on earth.
eah, to the degree people like abhorsen represent mainstream libertarian/liberal thought, its fairly handmainly to socialism.
Abhorsen, you were actually one of the people that came to mind initially when I was firat watching the videos. My sense of you is that on your moral principles your a lefty, which suggests that whenever your rationalist libertarian side comes into conflict with your moral intuitions, your more likely than not going to side with leftism.
Um, no? Where did you get the idea that I'd side with leftism? What leftist, non-libertarian things do I advocate? The thing that's most likely to override my libertarianism is my civic nationalism.
In contrast, I actually side with libertarianism legally, even when it contradicts with my moral values. This includes letting lefties speak, my disagreement with antidiscrimination laws (I think it's morally wrong to not sell someone generic items based on their race, religion, sex, orientation, politics, etc, but I don't believe the law should say that).