Sure seems like a lazy way to dismiss the argument, just saying that he actually doesn’t know what he wants.

Because it’s the logical conclusion of mainstream pro-life rhetoric.

By what standard? Nobody genuinely believes that the “logical conclusion” of the mainstream “don’t murder homeless people” point of view must reasonably be a welfare state. Just because we don’t kill people, doesn’t mean they’re entitled to welfare.

At the very least, the way many of the pro-life policies are implemented cause direct and sometimes deadly harm to women.

And what would you say is the over/under on the amount of women who die as a result? And what does that number look like as a ratio to the children killed by abortions? Because at least from the numbers I’ve seen, it seems like an entirely trivial ratio to be putting at the front of concern.

There are times when abortion is medically necessary to protect women’s lives and we should allow them to make that choice for themselves

And you’ll find overwhelming support for abortion in those cases. Just as I can’t sucker punch some poor schmuck at the store and then just decide it was self defense because I wanted it to be, a medically necessary abortion actually has to be, well, medically necessary by some standards beyond “I want it to be”.

Because to reiterate, there are vanishingly few people who oppose any and all abortions, including in medically necessary situations, especially once you exclude the pedants arguing that those situations aren’t abortions by technicality, so therefore don’t count when they say they oppose all abortions. This is also where those stupid “80% of people support abortion” propaganda pieces come from. Almost everyone supports some form of narrow allowance, at the minimum, for abortion.

No, you’re just opposing freedom.

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Lmao doesn’t mean much coming from you

Then why are you here spouting your proud opposition to it?

When you go into business, You’re there to make money

And you should be free to accomplish (or not) that goal however you please. Should every mom and pop restaurant be striving to be the next big keiretsu because big business is where the cash lives? And while there’s an argument that publicly traded companies actually do have that obligation to cash above all else as a duty to shareholders, privately owned businesses don’t. The business is whatever the owners want it to be. They’re under no obligation to optimize their profits. If they want to make decisions based on their own personal views at the expense of profit, that’s damn well their right.

But hey, I know you aren’t going to bother responding to anything I say since you’re just here to sling insults since you lack the spine to outright say you don’t support personal freedom.

We already knew you didn’t care about freedom

Yes

How do you square support for Israel as a state when it’s merely an extension of British colonialism, and when Israel seems to actively seek to deny Palestinians any form of autonomy as a policy?

Asked and answered lol.

So, you’re an anarchocapitalists, then?

I wish. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in “reality” or something, and anarcho-anything is just a recipe for whoever does support government (or a functional equivalent) fucking you over. I’m more of a “government is a necessary evil” right-libertarian. That is, I believe the government should exist, but it should only do so with an extremely limited scope of function. International relations and a justice system, at the bare minimum, with the sole purpose of upholding individual rights.

within 15 minutes I have:

Proving my point about size being a key factor. The town I lived in also had most of that stuff in a couple blocks. It’s main street, and a bit off each side. It’s enough for the whole town. Only reason more than one grocery store even exists is because there’s a Walmart out near the interstate.

It’s not just the government that can fuck shit up, corporations are equally capable. Your friendly neighborhood wally world that is at least a half hour drive away did more than it’s fair share of killing good jobs in small towns.

I was there when it came in. It really only added jobs and saved the hour drive into another city to buy shit. Casey’s was the only thing that ended up closing, and nobody missed it.

But even within your own example, the government almost certainly is interfering through zoning laws or prohibitions on running a business out of your home. Half the reason why my girlfriend’s neighborhood has so many shops is because so many people are running shops out of their homes.

I’m not interested in going and looking up civil code, but a lot of businesses were out of people’s houses. Well, “a lot” as far as there was “a lot” of anything in that town. Which isn’t all that much.

What is practical is what services the most people as comfortably as possible, which as much freedom of choice as possible, and low density car-centric planning doesn’t do that.

It does when most people live further out, and there’s only enough people to support an extremely limited amount of businesses. In that case, having a centralized area where most commerce goes on is the most comfortable for the most people, since the alternative is having to drive to multiple places instead of just one.

You’re the one trying to dismiss dissent as just the result of propaganda, dude.

I’m getting some hostile vibes here, and that’s not really the tone I’m going for.

Apologies, I’m not good at tone over text. Hostility wasn’t my goal.

One thing that makes me left libertarian is that I believe the government has an absolute right to interfere with gross negligence

I’m of the inverse opinion, largely why I’m not a leftist. I believe the government has no legitimate place inserting itself into people’s personal affairs because something bad might happen. I’d rather bear increased risk if it means the government isn’t the one telling me how to go about my life.

and until civil lawsuits can unburn houses and bring people back from the dead, I don’t see my view changing there.

And I’m fine agreeing to disagree here. Just figured I’d toss in my two cents since you seemed interested in discussion.

Also, as a sidebar and not an argument for regulation, I’ve owned a few trucks and I think the trend towards mutant minivan truckzillas is about the stupidest thing going on in modern automobiles. But that’s just a personal opinion rather than a political position.

Similarly non political, I just think they’re cool. The cheaper of the two f-numbered raptors I want to own at some point.

Free markets include the freedom to fail, that’s true, but can it truly be said to be a free market when we’ve rigged it the way we have?

I fully agree that we currently don’t have much of a free market at all, but I don’t think the solution is to try and counter it with more non-free market policies in the other direction. I want the markets freed, and to let it balance itself out.

Ask yourself, how would life change for you if you couldn’t take a car where you needed to go; do you have some other viable alternative?

Depends how loosely you define viable. I full well took a job with no transit options because I would rather drive anyway. Not exactly like you can run too many transit options onto a military base anyway, security and all that crap.

As for Roman roads: Rome didn’t have Amazon Prime. Damage to roads increases quadratically according to vehicle weight, and high vehicle speeds also create increased damage, though not to the same extent.

So Amazon can pave the roads then if they’re unsatisfied with the quality. Or Walmart. Or whatever logistics company is interested in spending that money. Remember when dominoes went out and did road maintenance? That should be our standard. People who want it do it, and those who don’t, don’t. Me? I’m perfectly fine with just throwing gravel into potholes whenever they arise, and leaving it at that. We don’t really need everything to be all pristine as if it’s an f1 track or something. Good enough is just that. Good enough.

far better place to live despite being incredibly low population density

I highly doubt that it’s an incredibly low population density if you actually break it up and look at just the areas you’re talking about rather than everything in the boundaries of what is considered the town. Because I highly doubt there’s any decent amount of land attached to any of those homes, or open space between them. Just because it isn’t dense compared to new york or something, doesn’t mean it’s incredibly low either.

It works there because the zoning and bylaws permit it

Also because there’s enough people there. I spent a lot of my childhood in a town of ~2000-3000. Fuck half a dozen businesses on each street, there’s barely even two streets with any amount of businesses on them, and one is just the intersection with a major interstate. And all that’s equally without the government interfering. It’s more practical to centralize what businesses there are along Main Street and just have people drive in to town when they need.

Do elaborate on how the government legally mandating association and business deals doesn’t violate people’s freedom to do those things (or not) of their own will

Oh, my bad. It’s not because you disagree with it, it’s just that you happen to totally coincidentally line up with what you don’t support only having support due to propaganda.

I believe that it’s hard to make the world a better place while being dishonest.

Don’t worry, there’s already a few people here covering that role regardless.

Okay, so the state, non-profits, and charities spend an enormous amount of money on homelessness, poverty, and so on. Isn’t it a conservative tenant that nobody knows better how to use your money than you?

Yes, I agree that a ubi works better than conventional welfare. The problem is assuming it would entirely replace existing welfare. Because in my experience, the people who support greater welfare are significantly less likely than me to support letting the idiots who blow their ubi on drugs and shit just die in the streets of their own volition. So we would just have a ubi and other welfare, making it just another black hole of spending, and eliminating any benefit of efficiency.

The other thing is, I support neither a ubi nor conventional welfare. Just because one is better, it doesn’t mean I want it. It’s like picking how many legs I want broken. Yeah, 1 is better than 2, but I’d rather just not have my legs broken at all. Because yeah, I believe that the individual can best make their own choices with their own money. Which is why I don’t want the government taking it in the first place. Slash spending and slash taxes. Don’t just replace spending and keep raising taxes.

Nobody wants to make you live in a city if you don’t want to. Nobody wants to make you live in a high rise apartment. The point is to get bad regulations out of the way and facilitate cities that are more efficient, more affordable, and more closely resemble the cities that arise under normal free market conditions like you see in Europe and Japan (cities basically everywhere else in the world tend to go up rather than out).

I fully agree with cutting regulations and letting things develop as the market wants. The issue is, I find very few people advocating for this stuff actually just consider cutting regulations as the end goal, and letting things go from there. Rather, it’s nearly always coupled with calls for more regulations, just supporting their view of how things should be. Go to any of the communities like fuckcars or notjustbikes and ask how interested they are in removing car licensing and registration, lifting speed limits, or letting people drive big pickups. I’m sure you’ll get resounding support 😑.

Did you know that for every dollar a car driver spends on driving, the government spends $10 supporting that same driver? That is, we lose 10 dollars for every dollar spent on driving.

So stop spending it. Stop Taxing me for it as well while we’re at it.

The choice in terms of fiscal responsibility is clear. Don’t like cities? That’s okay, you don’t have to, but it’s important to remember that cities are, like it or not, our economic engines.

And they can generate their own fucking cash. I’d gladly take whatever economic hit if it meant not propping up cites just because.

Cars aren’t cheap, and practically forcing people into car ownership is against a number of things conservatives stand for, including freedom of markets, strong communities (car centric infrastructure tends to erode community identities and bonds because people don’t do business or anything else in their community besides sleep and occasionally wave at the neighbor), and affordable living.

Free markets include the freedom to fail. As for that other stuff, I couldn’t give less of a damn. I don’t care if my neighbor smiles and waves or throws me the bird and yells, as long as he stays out of my shit, and I’ll stay out of his. And if he wants a community, I’ll damn well support the government getting out of his way.

Cars also provide a convenient avenue for government overreach because of how dangerous they are to operate. There’s so many laws on the books around cars that it’s relatively easy for an officer to pull someone over first and think of a reason later, to say nothing of all the layers of bureaucracy that go into regulating cars and drivers.

So get rid of them. There’s no quirk of the universe tieing car regulations to transit. And as a mentioned earlier, the people supporting transit rarely ever support axing driving regulations. Go to any of those communities and see.

It’s also often the case that public transit is not only more affordable than owning and driving car, but also much cheaper to scale than continuously adding more and more lanes to a road

Rome fell over a thousand years ago, and plenty of their roads are still around without having trillions thrown at them. We already have roads. I’m not the one voting for politicians to throw money at them.

we can raise the bar on driver’s licenses to keep bad drivers off the road, and we won’t have to spend so much time and money hunting down and preventing drunk drivers because they’ll just take the train or walk (in the case of 15 minute cities) instead. What about fiscal responsibility? Public transit is cheaper in the long run than both road maintenance and road expansion.

Yeah, I don’t want to raise the bar. I want to melt the bar down for scrap and end licensing all together. As for responsibility, hold the people causing the problems responsible. Get drunk and hit someone? Enjoy working your ass off until they’re repaid for the harm you caused.

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Because surely the only reason someone could possibly disagree with you is propaganda.