That’s rather naive, isn’t it? Who writes the laws? Who donates their campaign funds?
You seem to miss an important part of my argument. I am arguing that we can have the Department of energy monitor the whereabouts of nuclear materials or the NRC, but why should we have both? Either one can be centralized and have all necessary powers.
There are many advantages to this; I have mentioned some, but another advantage is we cut out inter-agency competition. How often have we heard that such and such agency knew about something but due to poor communication with another agency, nothing was done? If we make one agency responsible for all, this stops happening. We won’t hear anything along the lines of “Well, the NRC knew about this, but nobody at the DoE wanted to listen.”
I am not in favor of having no laws to deal with the proliferation of nuclear materials. I am in favor of eliminating redundant deadwood, which in a lot of cases means getting rid of an agency if their purpose is duplicated.
Who writes regulations? Who employs the same people responsible for fining them and gives them big bonuses and then sends them back to work in the federal agency?
Neither scheme is perfect or without its problems.
Unelected bureaucrats who don’t need campaign funds.
What is it with you and forms, anyway? Throughout the thread you’ve harped on forms repeatedly. We get it, you wish you didn’t have to fill out so many forms, because filling out forms causes all sorts of evil consequences, so we should get rid of regulatory agencies because they make us fill out forms.
But you are making a strawman argument. “Having regulatory standards” is not at all equivalent to “filling out some forms”. And repeating it over and over does not make it so.
Instead you want to create “laws” to accomplish whatever parts of regulation you believe to be necessary. So when Acme Corp is suspected of dumping raw sewage through its pipes into Pristine River, which flows through Halcyon Villas, the townspeople shouldn’t send their agents to Acme for a round of paper shuffle. All they’d do is ask if Acme had the proper forms for dumping shit, and Acme would just mark all the forms “Yes We Do” and that would be the end of it. So instead we should “write a law”. Then we can send the jackboots to arrest – who? Acme’s President? Its Board? The guy who installed the sewage pipes? Everybody in the secretarial pool? And of course we’ll prosecute them using some esoteric, yet to be invented technique that doesn’t involve any forms.
I’m just not seeing the beauty in it. Sorry.
As if all I had said was to complain about filling out forms. You should read Phillip K. Howard’s book I cited before. I far more complain about fining millions when the profit was billions; about revolving door employment between industry and agencies; and deadwood duplicated functions.
Cut out the deadwood, stop the conflicts of interest, and inappropriate punishments. As regulation works in the same manner as any other solution, I’d complain less of regulatory law if it didn’t have these features.
But you dismiss all these concerns to say that my complaining of forms is too weak a reason to complain.
yeah, they want the million dollar bonus for cocaine and hookers. Who cares where all the dough winds up. It’s bribery either way.
Your repeated complaint about forms *IS *weak.
I have zero disagreement with cutting dead wood, stopping conflicts of interest, making punishments more equitable, and closing revolving doors. But your original solutions were to remove regulatory agencies and the “forms” they entailed, substituting either nothing or some nebulous “laws” that the rest of us couldn’t tell from “regulations”.
You seem to have now dialed this back a bit, accepting regulation if “these features” were addressed. I think that is a far more reasonable – and far less Libertarian – position than the one you first espoused.
This is exactly the problem, CEOs aren’t prosecuted, the company is. Why, because the company is a person obviously.
So a company can kill all kinds of people, in defiance of all the regulations you could possibly dream up, go in to bankruptcy protection, then reform without worrying about the mistakes of the past–GM is currently doing this.
It really doesn’t matter whether you have regulations or not. Imagine if Charles Manson could simply change his name then walk out of jail a free man. “Nope, I didn’t kill those people, I’m Charlie Mansen now, and your warranty is void.”
If, say, Bayer releases a faulty drug, do you actually think it’s realistic to expect the German government to extradite the CEO of the company to face criminal charges in the US?
Where exactly do you draw the line of responsibility? The CEO of a large company doesn’ t make every single decision – sometimes people under him/her do, and the CEO reports to the board of directors.
What individuals would you have prosecuted at Ford for the Pinto case?
I kind of feel silly now.
I don’t know why I didn’t see the logic in merging the DOE with the NRC before now. And in that light, we can merge the FDA with the DEA and the FAA with the USAF. What about the US Treasury with The Federal Reserve?
It makes total sense, right? Think how many forms we could eliminate.
Maybe you wouldn’t think so if you knew the department of defense in a recent calendar year has spent 2 billion on travel expenses and an additional 2.2 billion in shuffling forms so that no one is to blame if some of the original 2 billion comes up missing instead of spent on travel. Mr. Howard cited this in his book, I’ll let you know sometime soon what his source is.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but our nation is trillions in debt and practices like spending 2.2 billion to show 2 billion wasn’t stolen without there even being suspicion it got stolen is far to wasteful to continue.
When private industry has a monumental waste caused by forms that prove they didn’t do wrong, they pass the cost on to you.
As it turns out, nearly always, when they do commit wrongs, the forms were all filled out “properly” anyway.
Umm yeah I’m generally in favor of eliminating regulatory agencies. For all the reasons above. If we do so, though, we’ll have to approach criminal law a little differently.
I didn’t dial it back, you’re just closer to understanding.
People who call Libertarianism anarchy are mischaracterizing it.
You see, we’d prefer congress make the rules that govern business. We can vote them out of office. But a regulatory agency gets to make decisions about rules dictator style, outside our “democratic” process. I hate that too. We think that there is no need to duplicate the criminal and civil law because we can write criminal and civil laws and craft them any number of ways.
You accept that most of the qualities that makes a regulatory agency a regulatory agency are bad, except for forms, which if you truly understand what that means I think you’ll agree. I mean, isn’t it just silly that 2.2 billion is spent on the pentagon’s procedures to ensure that 2 billion wasn’t stolen? We’re better off if someone steals the two billion and there’s no complaint. We come out 200 million ahead that way.
We can prosecute cases far cheaper.
I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around “shuffling forms” as a line item budget expense. Or are you in fact talking about some portion of the general overhead any organization normally spends assuring accountability and compliance with standards? If the standard is “all yardsticks produced are to be three feet long” is it “shuffling forms” for the compliance department to state “We have measured a random sample of 5% of the yardsticks we have produced from 1 Jan until 30 June and found that less than 1% of the sample deviate more than 1/16 inch from the three foot standard.” ‘Cause I’m just not seeing that as either a bad thing or a waste.
Oh, and since you never provided one for this assertion anyway-- Cite?
Of course they do. All you offer as an alternative though is to simply ignore, or not regulate, their actions at all. Except of course for your intent to “prosecute” someone, somewhere on the corporate ladder, after some amount of actual harm has been done to some innocent or innocents. You believe that the cost savings from not having to demonstrate compliance, or in fact from not having anything to comply with at all, will be somehow greater than the externalized costs to others and/or to society at large. This though has been amply demonstrated by history to be incorrect. The Hudson River circa any time before 1975 and the air over Los Angeles come to mind as immediate and widely recognized examples, although others abound. It is exactly this that demonstrates the resounding failure of what may be generously termed Libertarian “philosophy”.
This is clearly an article of faith with you, but nevertheless I feel compelled to ask – Cite?
Strawman. I, for one, have not so mischaracterized it.
No I don’t. I accept that duplicitous practices and failures of conscience are part of mankind’s lot, whether we are referring to individuals, businesses, corporations, regulatory agencies, or governmental entities. And these are all bad. But it is a fact that the profit motive is a powerful motivator for less-than-ethical conduct, and this operates to a much greater extent in the business world than it does in the bureaucratic world.
And we can do this without any kind of paper shuffle? Bullshit.
Again, who exactly do we prosecute when a company pollutes the air or water? Or, more to the original subject of this thread, who exactly do we prosecute when a company makes and promotes an antibiotic for broadcast use that enhances survivability and growth rate of food animals, but also results in a selective advantage for ever more resistant bacteria, and those more resistant strains cause negative health consequences in non-target livestock or humans?
Presumably Libertaria wouldn’t have any pollution controls either, so all those nice woods and streams that they’re going to live off of the land on will soon become poisoned wastelands.
If they’re serious about being Libertarians why don’t they just emigrate to the Horn of Africa ?
Of course they won’t have the U.S. military, or police departments to protect their way of life, but that won’t be necessary as they’ll have their own small arms to protect them.
They can home educate their kids, which won’t be a problem as they won’t have any jobs to go to, and they’ll only be in competition with other H.E. kids.
I’ll doubt if they’ll want or need the internet, t.v. radio etc. as they can organise their own entertainment.
And no doubt they’ll be able to organise their own hospitals etc.
Or is this the part where they start saying “Oh no we’re not against this and that”, just against big government .
Ignoring the fact that without a government organised and regulated society the services and industrial products that they themselves use, wouldn’t happen.
It reminds me of children saying that they don’t want to help with the chores, or go to school or tidy their room.
But they’re not against family holidays, allowances, birthday presents or sweets.
Yep, Libertarianism is great when theres no real liklihood of you really getting it.
Once again, the strawman that libertarianism equals anarchy.
Once again, your excluded middle does not a strawman make.
excluded middle? Please explain.
Trying to debate with libertarians is like nailing jello to the wall.
If there are 10 libertarians in a debate, you’ll have 26 different opinions as to what constitutes “a libertarian”. More than 10 opinions, because some of them will change their minds half-way through.
Lust4Life’s quote that you responded to never equated libertarianism to anarchy. You are the one that made the leap from specific weaknesses to “Anarchy!!!” That is known as the excluded middle fallacy, because you create a false dilemma; either I must accept libertarianism, or I am labelling it anarchy, without recognizing that there can be a middle ground where reasonable people can recognize that there are many weaknesses in libertarianism that are short of anarchy.
Lust for Life’s quote that libertarians would have NO pollution controls, NO military, and NO police sounds like anarchy to me.
No police is not a specific weakness of Libertarian thought. It’s a strawman, because no libertarian in this thread is advocating abolishing police.
No police pretty much means anarchy.