Other than a relative handful of anarchists and anarcho-capitalists is there anybody who doesn’t believe in “good government”? I think there are reasonable and serious disagreements about just what good government should do, how it should operate, and what strategies are likely to produce good government. Some think of a government that implements a more extensive welfare state as being good government (no word on how they’d finance it). There are some whose views I honestly don’t understand since they seem to think of good government as one that maintains many of the most expensive line items in “big government” but doesn’t interfere with their lives, by which I presume is meant that they don’t much want to pay for the things they want.
My own view is that a federal government that’s powerful and far away from the problems it’s trying to address will tend to make government at all levels less good and that a professional (or hereditary!) political class is unlikely to produce good government, either. I seem to be in a very small minority in believing in those things.
But aside from the few mentioned above does anybody not believe in good government? Or even that it’s not improvable?
There is no good government. It may, at times, be necessary, but that is not the same as good.
You may be in a minority, but you are hardly alone.
Steve, I think that “good government” defined as “necessary government efficiently and effectively executed” is a good thing. It’s better by far than anarchy. The problem is treading the line between too little government and too much.
Yeah, you’re definitely not alone Dave.
Ironically, good governance is something the US government, and the military in particular, is studying a lot lately in the course of trying to bring good governance to Iraq and Afghanistan.
How can you define as good that which is coercive? If I were to use the tactics that the government uses on you, you’d most likely resist, violently in many cases. This strikes me as defining away the meaning of good. The use of coercion, save in self-defense, is usually considered bad or immoral. You’ve opted for a “the outcome justifies the means” philosophy.
You are assuming that which you are trying to prove. For example, Pennsylvania went through a period of near anarchy and shockingly it was not like Somalia (that default assumption of what life would be like for Statists).
re: Steve V’s first comment
I wish I could write like that. I guess I’ve got a low IQ, and no hope of writing exciting episodes of Straight Eye for The Queer Guy……or whatever that show is.
Anyway. I don’t know who wrote that, Steve (although I’m sure I should). But if I could write that – and advance it forward to current times – I’d be President.
Perhaps those words, more than any other written on these dual blogs (GE and OTB) reflect my views, and the creeping, insideous nature of government.
At OTB on Sunday, cases were made (simple minded assertions, actually) that “liberals” possess “the vision” (“creatives,” you know) to make a better world through government, a world that stupid, hide bound conservatives (idiot businessmen and such) just can’t contemplate in their pea sized brains. As our nation now basically faces bankruptcy for this wonderful “vision,” I ask: can anyone make a coherent reply to what steve v posted??
And please, skip the emotional pleas and so forth……”I knew a woman who got cancer………her insurance compant forked her..”
What he posted was obviously a serious intellectual argument. Serious responses only.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that, it was his fear of how despotism could take root in a democracy.
I see government as, at best, a necessary EVIL, which I think seperates me from just about…well…everybody. I’m sure I’m seen by the more enlightened here as a kook and a crank, but considering that I don’t see myself too far from Tocqueville, I’m happy with where I am…philosophically speaking.
BTW to tie this in with the Liberals = Smart vs. Conservatives = Dimbulbs….
Back in his day I think de Tocqueville would be considered very liberal maybe even radically so. Today he’d likely be considered a hidebound dimwitted conservative.
And a more modern rendition,
I find it funny how today’s liberal likes government, and in some cases really likes it. They see it as the solution to just about any problem, “there oughta be a law….” But by definition is coercive. Try not to go along with the dictates of government. Don’t pay your taxes. Smoke in public. Put something in your body some bureaucrat or politician has decided is bad. Get caught and the results are not pretty.
I on the other had like markets. I see them as voluntary exchanges where the parties involved think that the exchange will make them better off. It might not always work out that way, but nobody said that a happy life is a sure thing, well unless we make it a right. If you don’t like the exchange walk away and try to find another. Markets don’t usually incarcerate people. Markets don’t usually put a gun to your or your family’s head for smoking something. Governments do that.
Back when the Patriot Act was passed there was much handwringing by liberals. Oh no, they’ll look at my library records. My privacy!!! But this is the same government that liberals turn to time and again. Regulate it. Outlaw it. Control it.
Government is a beast to be restrained, not to be unleashed.
I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a Statist. Thanks for the jumping to conclusions, and please try again.
As far as calling good that which is coercive, and relatedly noting that anarchy is a bad thing, I will just note that not all of us are angels. Many of us, particularly in rural areas, still maintain a strong civic sense, and would band together under an anarchy to form what amounts to local governments, for the collective protection of the group. In other places, particularly large cities, it would be the rule of the jungle. Some places would be in between. Were we all upstanding citizens with no will to power, or to unearned wealth, I would probably agree with you. As it is, I think it’s better to have a government to protect my rights, because I don’t want to live in a world of (at best) continual Hatfield-vs-McCoy feuds.
Actually, I’ll note one more thing. We humans are social animals, and as such, we value our security — our lives and safety and that of our family — above all else. Prosperity is, in a very real sense, nothing more than security extended into the future. (If I have enough food to eat tomorrow, I can spend today making better tools rather than hunting.) We are also intelligent, and as such value our freedom of action once our security and prosperity have been obtained to the best of our ability. We group together into societies because it increases our freedom of action. The division of labor, mutual protection, care of the ill or crippled and many other good things are possible — and they are good because they help us as individuals, since when we are ill or crippled we will be cared for by others, and when we are attacked we will be defended by others. Governments exist to ensure that we don’t have internal predators, and to organize our collective resources against external predators. To do these things, they must have some coercive power; they have no other advantage that the Rotarians lack.
I certainly think that our government is far too large, too intrusive, too controlling, too unaccountable. I think that the Constitution as originally meant was a little too loose on the powers allowed to government, for that matter. But I would still take that over anarchy, because there are exactly zero cases I have ever heard of (you may choose to enlighten me on the period of time you are speaking of in Pennsylvania, because I’m not aware of what you are talking about there) of ordered anarchies that do not quickly devolve into tyrannies, subjugations, or some other quite bad outcome.
I will be simple here: I always simply trusted that our Federal government would be “good”, and if it was not good, then we as a people & govt would learn from our mistakes. Vietnam I thought was a learning experience. To helplessly witness America sailing right into war again under Bush cane as a huge shock to me and my simple trust in good governance. This diminishment of my trust in the ability of good governance, has only increased under Obama, and I voted for him. This loss of my naievety makes me very sad, and pessimistic.
I didn’t call you a Statist but was pointing out that that is the default assumption by Statist as to what anarchy would have to look like.
Because one has shortcoming does not justify trying to do better.
Sure, and as long as it is solely voluntary then that is a good thing.
Not only are men not angels, they are demons who give into their most primitive urges as soon as the chance permits….unless they live in a rural area. Is that accurate?
Uhhmmm…hmmm well at least you didn’t say Somalia. :p
I’d argue that freedom and security are mutually exclusive in that the more you have of one the less you have to have of the other. More security implies less freedom. Problem with democracy is that if the majority wants more security, the minority gets dragged along whether they want to or not. This is why democracy is not a good thing really. Sure its better than all other forums of government (as Winston Churchill said) but that is a very low bar, IMO.
See, you’d have had me if you said security. I think we group together for increasing security.
You sound like you are making an argument for grouping together to improve security not freedom. To reduce both external and internal predation you have to have less freedom, as a trade off you get more security.
As for Pennsylivania, it was at the begining of the colony’s founding (1681 – 1690). William Penn managed to set up some institutions that basically said, “Okay, everyone can go home and get about making their lot better.” It took about a decade for Penn to get a government reformulated. You can read more about it here.
No, I disagree. Without security only those with the biggest guns have freedom.
Andy comes closer to the truth. Yes, there was a very short period in PA where things went well, but if you look at the sum of history, if you are not able to protect yourself, you lose, everything. In order to not have their lives, family or goods taken from them, people have always formed groups for mutual protection. Those groups who were cohesive enough to go beyond simple mutual self defense, developed cultures that allowed for innovation and economic development. They developed better agriculture. They subdued other cultures. I am not certain about Australian aborigines, but it has been true about darn near the rest of the world
So, you can either have government, losing some liberty, or you can join some group that usually has fairly rigid rules and hierarchies. I would say that Americans have more liberty than the vast majoority of people who ever lived. Some of that is because we have managed to work together, through government, for both self protection and for economic development. Pooling resources has been more of a boon than you seem to want to believe.
“The terrorists hate our freedom.”
Yikes, I canot believe anyone smart enough to post on OTB would cite crap like this.
Steve
My refutation of Mr. Verdon:
Go to your window, Steve. Open the blinds. Look outside. Come back and tell me what tyranny you saw.
All this hysteria is over a tax rate no higher than it was under St. Ronnie O’Reagan, and health insurance reform. Nothing else has changed. The secret police is not after you, Steve. We are as a nation far freer than we were 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago. So if we’re on the road to serfdom we’re taking a damned circuitous path to get there.
Our freedom of speech is essentially unlimited. Likewise our freedom of movement. And religion, and the press, and the right to bear arms, and to not have troops quartered in our homes, or to be taxed without representation. Our right to find out what our government is up to is infinitely greater than in times past.
True we’ve lost the right to own slaves, beat women and expel Asians, but many of us think those are advancements.
You really need to save the woe is me and the sackcloth and ashes for something important. Because if we ever do come close to actual tyranny it would be nice if that notion hadn’t been devalued to the point of meaninglessness.
Part of the patrimony of being a member (however attenuated) of humanity’s most persistently persecuted religious and/or ethnic minority is that one gets a pretty fair notion of what constitutes tyranny. And Steve, you paying income taxes is not it.
Libertarianism boiled down to its essence is nothing but the cry of every aggrieved teenager required to take out the trash: You’re not the boss of me!
Seeing it evidence itself in an otherwise intelligent person is like discovering someone is a Scientologist or a foot fetishist or a Holocaust denier. It comes to seem more like a psychological symptom than a philosophical position.
My apologies. I must have read too much into what you were saying, there.
There will always be bad people. As long as there are bad people, either we are constantly on guard to defend ourselves and ours (a tiresome prospect, to be sure) or someone has to defend the community collectively from bad people. (And that includes both criminals and enemies.) Though we may try to do better ourselves, that is no guarantee that all of us will try to do better.
Not even remotely. There are three things in greater supply in rural areas than in urban areas: civic sense, trained and armed people, and accountability. If someone in the town near where my Dad lives (population about 6000) were to start shooting up the place, it would be instantly known who he was. That is not true in a city, where anonymity is the rule. These three things conduce to better civic behavior. Even in a city, there is likely to be some period of residual order. But when it starts breaking down, it will quickly turn into a cascade of social failure. This isn’t theory: we see it all the time in disaster situations and in places where the rule of law has become ineffective.
Andy responded better than I could to the whole security/freedom point, so I’ll let that alone for the moment.
I’ll look into it. I do have to wonder, though, at two points. The first is that a population of 12,000 and a population of 300,000,000 are vastly different beasts. Population density matters greatly. The second is that it’s not clear that there was anarchy, in that there were both local governments (at least in Philadelphia) and some rudimentary government for the colony (a governor or a council). That is not anarchy; it is minarchy. Anyway, as I said, I’ll look into it when I get a chance.
The difference between good government and bad has recently been on display: Haiti and Chile. Under whose government would you rather live?
Haiti had a “libertarian” approach to building: put it up however you like. The Chileans by contrast established strict government standards and evidently enforced them. Depriving Chileans of liberty in the process. The difference is evidently about 200,000 dead.
Perhaps the singularly most stupid post I’ve ever seen on this site. What a ghoulish, twisted person this must be:
The difference between good government and bad has recently been on display: Haiti and Chile. Under whose government would you rather live?
Haiti had a “libertarian†approach to building: put it up however you like. The Chileans by contrast established strict government standards and evidently enforced them. Depriving Chileans of liberty in the process. The difference is evidently about 200,000 dead.
Here’s the thing: We live in a DEMOCRACY. It’s not Verdon vs. “the government”. If you don’t like “the government”, what you really don’t like is the 50+% of people who keep electing people who create it. The notion that there’s an evil faceless government closet monster we have to fight against is simply ridiculous. People who want to get rid of it rather than offering solutions to fix it incrementally (that 50% of us can agree with) are part of the problem.
There’s a difference between theoretically having a freedom and actually being able to exercise it. In a total anarchy situation, you theoretically have the freedom to plant and grow a crop . . . but I also have the freedom to seize the crop or pull up your field, preventing you from doing so.
On the other hand, in one of these arrangements, you might be somewhat more limited, in theory, in when and where you can plant, but you’ll have a greater chance of actually being able to fully exercise the freedom you have.
What’s your point? Most acts are considered “moral” or “immoral” based off of their consequences – people looting a store during a riot are considered “immoral”, but somebody scavenging for food after a natural disaster is generally not (even though both acts are technically theft).
Simply not true. When I was a kid, I could walk into a store and buy a knife, a fairly large one with a serrated edge. I could carry it anywhere I wanted, pretty much, including to school. I cannot do this today.
To take a purely frivolous example, by itself, I cannot give bikini waxes in (IIRC) New Jersey without the permission of the state government. In a more serious vein, there are any number of ways of making a living which are off limits unless you are part of a government-approved cartel, such as realtor or cab driver. This (in general, though the specific examples may have been cartelized longer ago than that) is freedom that existed thirty years ago that no longer does.
There are any number of degrees of freedom we used to have and no longer do.
It’s certainly a little better since McCain-Feingold was overturned. But there are still any number of speech regulations that exist, primarily for businesses and on broadcast media. Speech regulations that are not neutral as to the speaker or the content are simply tyrannies. Most of ours are petty tyrannies, compared to speech regulations elsewhere, but I don’t find that comforting. Particularly this is true with regards to campus speech codes, which are more and more being pushed into the wider world, often alongside “hate crimes” laws.
Granted, mostly. Of course, the police have the judicially-approved power to randomly stop everyone traveling through certain areas, designated by the police of course, to search for drugs or what have you.
Tell that last one to anyone in DC or Chicago or most (all?) of California or Boston or ….
Tell that one to DC, whose license plate reads “Taxation without Representation” because they pay Federal taxes but have no voting representatives.
You are clearly unaware of the amount of material classified by the government, or the various exceptions that have been carved in open meetings laws.
Given the above, I’m curious what you think real tyranny would look like. At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, most Germans in Germany in the late 1930s through the end of WWII were not harrassed by the government, did not have to be careful of what they said, had lost little economic freedom compared to what we have and in many other ways were not tyrannized. Tyrannies generally tyrannize at the margins, unless they are totalitarian also.
Agreed that paying taxes, even direct taxes, is not necessarily tyranny. Is it tyranny that the government has the sole ability to decide how much taxes I can pay, and that I have no way to avoid them, and that disagreements are almost always resolved in the government’s favor, and that in that process I am guilty until proven innocent? Is it tyranny that the government has the power to investigate my bank accounts or other transactions without my knowledge, to prevent me from opening bank accounts without government permission, or to prevent me from taking my money to another country in amounts greater than $10,000? Is it tyranny that the government can tax me for ten years after I renounce my citizenship?
For that matter, is there some level of taxation that would be tyrannical? The total tax level for the middle class right now is, IIRC, approaching 50% between state, local and Federal (the vast majority) taxes. Is that tyrannical? What about 75%? What about 100%?
As for your comments on libertarianism, that is false for all but the most doctrinaire party-line Libertarians. (Which, granted, Steve Verdon might be, given his statements.) Most libertarians recognize that the government serves a necessary purpose; we merely disagree about the powers and extent of that government. I’d be really curious, though, for you to tell me how in fact you should be the boss of me. So long as my activities are not violating contracts I’ve voluntarily entered into, or coercing someone to do something against their will, or violating someone else’s natural rights, what justification does the government rationally have for interfering in my life?
And now comes the ad hominem, so I’ll end here.
Michael,
Did you read the quote? I don’t think you did. You just made and assumption that you knew what I was talking about. Here let me re-post one of the parts you want to take a look at,
This is from de Tocqueville’s chapter on the form that tyranny would take in a democracy. You are looking for tyranny in an authoritarian state and you don’t see it. You thereby conclude, there is no tyranny…but de Tocqueville’s warning was for something entirely different…something you are not looking for.
Really, right now you can smoke your cigars while walking your dog in Irvine….someday you probably will lose that freedom. But don’t worry, it will be good for you.
Andy,
I suggest you look up what Benjamin Franklin had to say about those who would trade liberty for temporary security. He would say you are wrong.
steve,
I would respond, but you are not addressing my arguments, statements of position.
Isn’t that what we are told? If anything it is a bit of slight against George W. Bush who first uttered that statement. Guess that is a ding against how smart you liberals are, right?
Michael re. Haiti/Chile,
Stay classy man, stay classy. That’s nice implying that a country complete with cronyism and kleptocracy is the same as libertarianism and that people who are in favor of the former think 200,000 dead is the preferable outcome.
Sam,
Regarding the 50%+1 thing, yes, that is precisely it. I object to having to do things simply becuase 50%+1 think I should. It is not a good way of making decisions. Yes, democracy is the best form of government save all others that have been tried…that isn’t a high bar though is it?
What about those who see the incrementally fixing is to incrementally remove/reduce this method of making decisions and allocating resources? Nice job poisoning the well.
Brett,
Why can’t people secure their freedoms via voluntary means? You point to the possibility of having my private works destroyed, so why can’t I try to stop that destruction? Why can’t I hire someone to do it for me, or to seek redress for such destruction? We do it now, we do it via the government, but there is nothing voluntary about it. If you don’t comply with government laws, you are dealt with in a rather unpleasant manner, even if the infractions are just misdemeanors, see the link I posted above.
As for the ends justifying the means, many people have a hard time with that as it can sometimes result in some pretty harsh means being used. That is the problem.
Oh, and scavenging is not theft. How can you steal something another has discarded?
Jeff,
Let me see, you can’t give a bikini wax in NJ because the government wont let you and that is a tyranny. You must pay your taxes on the penalty of being deprived of your assets and possibly your freedom, but that is not tyranny?
Well…with 100% taxation I bet the government would find that their tax revenues dry up pretty fast. At that point, the only way to raise revenue would be to compel you to work…to make you slave. I’d say that level definitely qualifies. So lower tax rates are just lesser tyrannies? Tyranny-lite?
I’m a minarchist. That is I think that some minimal levels of government are necessary, that the voluntary provision of these (minimalist) goods/services will be severely too low/limited due to externalities and the public good nature of these goods/services. However, I am aware of the anarcho-capitalist arguments and I think most people don’t understand them and offer non-refutations (e.g. steve’s post up above).
Dammit…I knew I was going to mess up the html.
Appeal to authority arguments aren’t very convincing. Franklin seemed to like the tradeoff between freedom and security enough to support the federalization of the States, not to mention the States themselves.
I think your theory might be true given two preconditions:
1. No competition for resources.
2. No outside threat that would gobble up your utopian free society.
Do those conditions exist anywhere on Earth today?
I said that paying taxes was not necessarily tyranny. Being compelled to pay taxes is another issue entirely. My point was in fact precisely that I question the taxes per se less than I question all of the things required to enforce the tax code. Even a fair tax or a flat tax would suffer from these injustices (though they would remove much of the problem with people who pay no income taxes at all). A VAT would probably not be unjust, especially if it exempted food (at all stages) and shelter (end product) as necessities, though it certainly would have the possibility of destroying the economy if unwisely set. I personally am a fan of indirect taxes: it should be possible for me to avoid any tax I don’t want to pay, even if it takes some hardship (such as growing my own food, or not traveling by air, or whatever) to avoid it. That said, the argument for injustice of direct taxes is not taxation itself, or even the rate of taxation, but what must be done to ensure that it is paid.
First, differences in degree can be differences in kind. Look up the fallacy of heaps for why your argument doesn’t hold water. That said, I think that there are rates of taxation that are tyrannical merely because of the rate, and I think that there are taxes that are tyrannical because the laws are unknowable in their entirety, and I think our taxes have hit both of those points.
I am curious, though, what kind of revenue raising devices you might find non-tyrannical. Voluntary contributions from the States didn’t work; it’s why we have the Constitution we do now.
Perhaps the perfect example of the kind of narcissism and infantilism at the heart of Libertarianism. In the last 200 years we freed the slaves, ended Jim Crow, enfranchised women, protected the handicapped and gays. But you want to carry a large, serrated knife around. So, waaaaah, we’re less free.
That’s your example. You’ve lost the right to carry a big knife, and slaves are freed, and let’s see, carry the two, and dividing by pi, and yep, that totally equals less freedom.
I’ll stand by my suggestion that this is a psychopathology not a philosophy.
Actually, Steve, I’ve already had that freedom taken away from me. By health insurers. Was Blue Shield what de Tocqueville had in mind?
I’m not the one hung up on out-of-date paradigms, you are. It’s not government that most frequently impinges on my rights, it’s business. Who invades my privacy, the USG or Google? Who crafts deliberately deceptive and dishonest insurance policies with the intent of committing fraud, the USG or Anthem? Who steals my money with small, subtle thefts on a daily basis, the USG or MasterCard? Who do you think can more thoroughly f— up your life, the USG or Equifax? Who installed the defective accelerator on my SUV, the USG or Toyota? Who puts the overworked, undertrained pilots aboard commuter planes, the USG or every commuter airline in the country?
And who exactly was it that decided to take sh– mortgages, bundle them, get their pet ratings agencies to lie about them, slice and dice them until no one anywhere knew what the hell they were worth, and then threaten to bring down the financial systems of the entire western world? Was that the USG? No. The USG is what rescued us from that disaster.
You’re still clenching up, waiting for some soft Tocqueville or hard Orwell government-instituted dystopia, and you miss the private surveillance cameras everywhere, and the invasions of your privacy, the thefts, the deceptions, the frauds, the corruption, the outright murder that pours from the free market, and which are only kept in check because we have government to act as a check and a balance.
If your goal was actually to increase human liberty then you’d support clean, effective government as the only available restraint on corporate ruthlessness. The genius of the constitution is its cynicism, it’s jaundiced, experienced understanding that power corrupts and the only way to restrain power is to subdivide it, to set one part to limit the other. But you don’t get that in a modern economy, in a 21st century as opposed to 19th century world, the free market is as capable of denying you rights as any government, and that here too checks and balances are advisable.
Can you control what Equifax says about you? What they can do to your life? They can obliterate your ability to buy anything from plane tickets to a house to groceries with nothing more than a math error. Is there a free market solution for that kind of power? No. Because they don’t sell to you. Only a government can limit the potential destructive power of business.
I find this a surprising remark coming from you. The issue is size – once your group gets beyond a certain size, the social distance is enough that you get a major free-rider problem. It’s not a problem in a small group, where everybody knows one another and social pressure can be applied on people who exploit the security created by a group without contributing to it.
This is the same thing that critics of Communism often level at it.
Again, “free-rider” problem.
It depends on what you define your end-criteria as, and how you consider the effects of your “means” as part of determining the ends.
Who said it was discarded? I brought up the “natural disaster” example for a reason – most of the store owners didn’t voluntarily “discard” their stuff, and probably intended to return after the disaster. Yet we don’t generally consider the people stuck in the disaster zone breaking into a store to get food as morally equivalent to someone looting during a riot.
After doing some research, I think “near anarchy” is maybe a little too precious a phrase for Pennsylvania. It was minarchist and self-governing, but not in any reasonable sense anarchist. General rule of thumb: a recognized government capable of enforcing its writ is not anarchy.
That such a place would do well does not surprise me, since I am a minarchist (though I suspect I would give more latitude to government than Steve would).
Well, that was in the last 50 years. We are not more free than we were 50 years ago. Moreover, I note that you left out the other freedoms we’ve lost that I mentioned. And while I personally have no particular interest in carrying such a knife around, I note that what was once perfectly acceptable for children is now forbidden for adults, which is why I used that particular example.
And I’ll stand by my belief that using ad hominem so freely shows that you are not arguing in good faith.
So change insurers, or self insure, or pay higher premiums. When it’s private business, you have options. In fact, in large part the options that are denied you by insurance companies are because of government regulations on what insurance must and may not cover. It is good to keep in mind that health care in general, and health insurance in particular, are highly regulated cartels, rather than free markets.
Perhaps you should read up on J. Edgar Hoover. Or the Clintons’ manipulations of FBI files on political enemies. Or the actions of Richard Nixon’s administration towards its political enemies.
As noted before, health insurance is highly regulated. While I disagree with the tendency of insurance policies and most other public documents to be written in very precise legal jargon rather than plain English, that’s likely a rather inevitable outcome of having a society as litigious as ours.
Both. But Mastercard is legally required to let you know that it’s doing this. Much of the government’s thievery is legally required to not be disclosed at the point of purchase.
The USG, which can have me legally killed, confined away from other humans for life, conscripted into military service or in any number of ways injured far worse than anything Equifax can do to my credit.
If that turns out to be actually a problem (remember the similar Audi scare during the 1980s?), then it was Toyota. You can sue Toyota to redress the problem. Can you sue the government when its regulations on gas mileage get you killed because your car is too lightweight to protect you in an accident? (Hint: no, you cannot.)
Of course you realize the same option applies to government, right? There are what, 120 or so national governments, and airports with planes . . . It’s every bit as realistic as suggesting blithely that we can simply sidestep the depredations of the free market.
You keep saying free market like we have one. We don’t. Our market is highly regulated. For some reason, you want to have it even more highly regulated. So what you should be saying is, sidestep the depredations of government regulated markets.
In a market that’s actually free, every exchange is voluntary, and it’s therefore simple to sidestep any attempted depredations by other market participants. You keep asserting market “depredations” in the abstract, but any specifics you’ve given have tended to undermine your case, rather than make it, because each of them either was caused in whole or in part by government regulations or has a private cause of redress superior to any redress that would be granted if it were the government involved.
You don’t have to buy insurance. It is a voluntary agreement, not a coercive one. You’d rather have insurance than smoke a cigar so you give them up.
Sorry, nothing says you have to engage with any given business unless it is a monopoly–e.g. electricity. However, those are state sanctioned monopolies so not really in the same catagory.
You don’t have to use Anthem or Google. And I bet one reason why Google is so large is due to…wait for it…intellectual property laws. Nobody can compete because we’ve given them a monopoly. The government that is. And because you benefit form the same laws you wont advocate changing them, but you’ll just bitch about the negative effects. Shorter Michael Reynolds: I like it when it benefits me, but I hate when it doesn’t. Similarly with health insurance. Health insurance markets are probably accurately described as oligopolistic and the reason for that is state regulations.
The only infantile person here right now is you Michael. You run around implicitly calling others names. Jeff gave you an example, not an exhaustive list yet you act like it is an exhaustive list and drag in slavery as if to imply Jeff wants to keep slavery. For a creative smart (and liberal) guy it sure is a poor showing.
And yet again you are not addressing the point I’ve raised in the first post about “soft” tyrannies. It isn’t that you are going to be beaten down with a club, but that the tyrannies will be mild and in some cases even somewhat agreeable. Cass Sunstein with his “nudging” argument is a perfect example. Government wants people to do X, so it “nudges” them in that direction via taxes, regulations and so on. All the while saying, its for your own good. It is a parentalist view of government, where the bureaucrats and the politicians are the parent and you are the child. Which makes your “you’re not the boss of me!” comment even more humorous because that is precisely what you are arguing for, but apparently you just don’t seem to notice.
How many of them are the result of government regulations, laws, etc. When we had that hub-bub about the government listening in on cell phone calls was that private industry? No. When your ATM transactions are tracked and analyzed is it you bank, or the Federal government? The latter. And yes, they track and analyze all of your ATM transactions. Sure the bank keeps records, but they don’t go in and try and figure out what you are doing. By law they make that information available to the Feds so they can troll through it.
Here is another point that Michael seems to ignore: the government can pretty much declare itself immune from these things.
And Jeff also makes and excellent, the government can have you killed. Does it all the time in this country. We’ve given the government awesome powers and instead of viewing what the government wants to do with skepticism and wariness Michael seems to welcome it.
Uhhmmm police services are not public goods. They are private goods with positive externalities that we’ve decided to provide through tax dollars. As such, there is no real free rider problem, but more of an under-provision problem.
Now, the lack of clearly defined property rights and institutions to secure payment for the external benefits is one of the arguments in favor of some sort of government. But that doesn’t mean that there wont be zero provision or that as population increases the provision is driven to zero.
No, its not. With communism the rewards to private action are totally seperated from the effort required for that private action. Suppose we have Tom and Joe. Both have the same needs in terms of housing, food, clothing, health care, etc. Tom works really hard for 12 hours a day. Joe lounges around watching Oprah and other crap television. Both would get the same rewards at the end of the day. After awhile Tom notices this, and spends his days like Joe. Output drops and overall the level of welfare falls as there is less goods/services to be distributed.
A totally different issue altogether.
I don’t think you know what that term means.
Semantic hand waving noted.
It is part of the definition of scavenge. You scavenge amongst items that have been discarded. Thus it is not theft.
Then it is not scavenging it is looting. You used both terms, you appear to not know the difference between the two.
Scavenging–looking for items of value amongst discarded items. E.g. you scavenge through a pile of trash.
Looting–Taking the property of another during a time of crisis. E.g. during a natural disaster you smash the window of a shop and loot a television, DVR, and a laptop computer.
The first is not illegal in just about every society, while the latter is frowned upon at the very least (“looting” things like food and water is usually not considered as bad as looting high end electronics during a natural disaster).
That’s our Micheal, a classy, classy guy. First he tries to use the death of 200,000 people to shore up his position, now he calls all his opponenst mentally disturbed.
Oh, so there’s no possibility for free-riding off the guy paying for security when his people hunt down the local strangler, or set up a defined territory in which other aggressors may not intervene? Don’t make me laugh.
If this were anyone but you, I’d say they were just missing the point rather than being deliberately evasive. My point was that the problem arises from the same root – the fact that people in a large communist society are sufficiently remote from the social pressure you get with a smaller group that it creates an incentive to free-ride off of others’ work.
I’ll take that over your endless loops of circular logic and evasions. Let me guess, you believe in Rights, these intangible things that supposedly exist Just Because.
And you accuse me of semantics handwaving? Why don’t you actually address the point of the argument?
Ooh, ooh, ooh, pick me! pick me!
Every word has a definition, and every definition has two parts: a genus and one or more differentia. The genus is the type of thing the word refers to, and the differentia are those characteristics that separate its meaning from that of other words about the same thing. For example, let’s take the genus “conveyances”, which simply means ways to get things from one place to another. Within conveyances, there are are vehicles, which are man-made non-living objects, and there are beasts of burden, which are living beings. (Obviously, these are neither precise nor exhaustive definitions; the idea is just to get the point of how it is that words’ meanings can be grouped, and why that is important.) A law regulating vehicles, therefore, would not regulate beasts of burden. A law regulating automobiles, a type of vehicle, would not likely also regulate canoes, another type of vehicle.
OK, so now to rights, and here we are talking specifically about natural rights. (This is to distinguish from civil and human rights, which are somewhat debased in that they mix the concepts of “rights” and “privileges”.) What is the genus in which natural rights exist? Well, it could be “ways for society to govern human behavior” or it could be “reasons one may be allowed to do things.” The many meanings of words are contextual, based on which genus is being talked about. It’s one reason why language is so imprecise, with all the good and bad that entails. Let’s look at both cases, in reverse order.
One may be allowed to do things simply because no one is powerful enough to keep you from getting away with it (there are many words for this, and all are coercive, and most are either prohibited outright or reserved for government use only). One may be allowed to do things because no one cares. One may be allowed to do things because one is politically or otherwise favored, or has somehow by reason of status or purchase obtained the privilege of doing it. One may be allowed to do things because we recognize the concept of property, and specifically that one’s body is one’s own property and no one else’s. In that latter case, there are a lot of implications: if you own yourself, you also must own the labor you expend because that labor is inalienably bound to the body. And if you own the labor you expend, you own the product of that labor, unless you have sold or given away the labor itself (that is, exchanged the labor for something more valuable to you). Because the product of the labor is alienable from the labor itself, you can exchange the labor for other things, such as food, or a place to stay, or money (which itself is only a commonly accepted store of value).
That last category, things that you may do simply because you own yourself, and all of the implications thereof, are natural rights. Inherent in that is the concept that you do not own other people’s bodies. Thus, you cannot physically injure them. Nor do you own the products of their labor, direct or indirect, unless you have purchased or been given those products. For that reason, you also cannot take or damage their property, which is either a direct or indirect product of their labor. (That is, they may have exchanged their labor for money, and their money for the property.) Thus, anything that is a natural right cannot, by its very nature, cause injury to another, and cannot be alienated from the person.
Let’s look at the other category, ways that a society may govern human behavior. That societies must govern human behavior is obvious: if a society cannot protect you from predators within the society, there is no benefit in being part of the society (since security is the base requirement of all living things). How, then, can a government regulate human behavior? It has only four tools: prohibitions, obligations, privileges and rights. A prohibition is a thing you will be punished for doing. An obligation (or duty, if you prefer that word) is something that you will be punished for not doing. A privilege is something that you may do without being punished, even though the same act in other circumstances would merit punishment. (For example, a policeman may speed under certain conditions, and cannot be punished for doing so. Likewise, I allow people invited into my home free use of the kitchen, but would call the police to punish someone who came into my home uninvited. The former is a government-granted privilege. The latter is a privilege I grant based on my right to determine the use of my property.) A right in this context is something that you may do without being punished, because it does not harm to yourself or others and is thus not justly a concern of society.
Now, notice how both of those definitions converge? A natural right is not a nebulous thing: it is a behavior arising out of one’s self ownership, which cannot harm others and thus cannot justly be punished, regulated or prohibited.
It is intangible, in one sense of the word, as are love and happiness. But love and happiness exist nonetheless, and have real meaning and effect, and so do natural rights.
No, that is not the root. How do you know someone’s ability to do a given job? You don’t. That information is hidden. This leads to problems like moral hazard, adverse selection and so forth. Size of the population has nothing to do with it, it has to do with not being able to see an individuals ability to do a given task. Even in a small community you don’t know if someone is giving it his best or not, or if that is the best task for him. It is a problem in capitalist economies too, but since pay can be tailored to work effort there are ways to get people to reveal their abilities. In a communist setting there is no such mechanism becuase pay is not tailored to work effort.
No, there is not. There is a secondary benefit. If a security firm is patrolling a neighborhood it migh provide some benefit in reducing the chance burglaries for non-customers as well. Of course, if a house is being robbed and isn’t a customer the firm wouldn’t intervene, so the benefit is not the same. I don’t consider this free-riding. Free riding is usually a problem for public good, common resources, etc. Not private goods subject to externalities.
Free riding would be where you earn income but cheat on your taxes and don’t pay anything for national defense. You get the exact same “benefit” as I get.
It is not my fault you don’t know the meaning of the word scavenging.
Does not harm oneself? I don’t see that as part of self-ownership. If a person wants to do something that is harmful to himself and no others, I don’t see the problem for others.
Fair point.