I take the unlicensed one every single time. They charge the same, but somehow they can afford to take me in a plush leather Lincoln Town Car. They typically have a small refrigerator with cold drinks and snacks and today’s paper available. It is basically a limousine ride as opposed to a half broken down Aiport Authority approved transport vehicle. Those ‘approved’ cars couldn’t compete in a free market because they have to pay larcenous medallion fees.
It has reached such a point of absurdity that people are starting to trade cab medallion rights like securities. There is even talk of an Exchange Traded Fund to allow investors access to the increasing value of a medallion.
I didn’t say government was always evil. And I’m sure that government inspectors catch crooked operations sometimes. But again, this is typical of the way your side argues. Any criticism of government must mean I’m an anarchist. Any suggestion that the market can regulate itself when it’s functioning property results in charges that we’ll wind up with robber barons and chaos. But confronted with the massive, worldwide failure of governments to carry out their basic functions, liberals shrug and just propose more government to fix the problem, or affix the blame to their enemies in government and use it as an argument to elect more people like them.
Let’s switch gears here and talk about the massive failures of government, because it’s not fair to demand perfection from the market, and any deviation from protection must result in more government. Instead, we should be comparing the potential failures of the market against the potential failures of government. It’s not a case of no regulation at all vs perfect government regulation - it’s a case of whether we want market-based regulation as the default as opposed to government regulation, recognizing that both have their limitations.
I can only imagine the howling we’d have heard from the left if it had been a private company in charge of the levees in New Orleans. But it was the government that failed and ignored the pleas of other people to shore up the levees. Then it failed again in the aftermath of the disaster, at both the local and federal level. Do you know who got food into New Orleans when FEMA failed? Wal-Mart.
State governments around the country have under-funded their retirement systems, screwing over their own workers to a total of some half a trillion dollars. That gets greeted with a yawn by the left or is blamed on Republicans. But if a private fund fails, it’s a sure sign that capitalism must have government oversight.
Detroit is a good example of failed government destroying an entire city. You want to talk about corruption in business? Chicago’s entire system is controlled from top to bottom by political machines that cut dirty deals with crooked real estate developers. For decades, New York’s construction regulation system was in bed with the mob and big developers. New York longshoremen and dock workers and convention workers ran shakedown rackets enabled by the government. It got so bad it destroyed the convention trade in New York.
Do you have any idea how many people in Washington have been convicted on corruption charges? How many of them bounce checks or commit criminal acts?
[ul]
[li]29 members of Congress have been accused of spousal abuse.[/li][li]7 have been arrested for fraud.[/li][li] 19 have been accused of writing bad checks.[/li][li]117 have bankrupted at least two businesses.[/li][li] 3 have been arrested for assault.[/li][li]71 have credit reports so bad they can’t qualify for a credit card.[/li][li] 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.[/li][li]8 have been arrested for shoplifting.[/li][li]21 are current defendants in lawsuits.[/li][li] And in 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving, but released after they claimed Congressional immunity.[/li][/ul]
This is your political class at the highest level. These are the people you would rather entrust with the power of FORCE over you, rather than trust that people can run their own lives.
Now imagine how many of them haven’t been caught for their corruption, and how much worse it must be in places like New York and Chicago where machine politics rule and there isn’t nearly as much light shone on what’s going on.
Remember Tony Rezko? Remember what he was convicted for? Wire fraud, embezzlement, shakedowns, influence peddling. All of this enabled by government. How many Chicago mayors wound up in jail again?
When Rod Blagojevich gets convicted for influence and shakedown rackets as mayor of Chicago, the left doesn’t see that as an indictment of government itself. It’s just a bad apple. But if Bernie Madoff gets convicted for ripping people off, it’s treated as an indictment of the entire capitalist system.
None of this is unique or uncommon. Government inspectors are routinely bought off by real estate developers, or pressured from within their own governments to pass inspections when the builder is a big campaign donator.
Countries around the world are going broke because they’ve cooked the books on their debts and/or made promises they couldn’t keep. The U.S. debt situation would have looked worse for a long time, except that the government has been borrowing money from social security ‘off budget’ to mask their behavior from the public.
Then there’s infrastructure management. Massive cost overruns are a feature of government. Private projects may go 20% over budget, or sometimes even 50% over budget. Government projects get so far out of control they cost orders of magnitude more than promised.
Canada’s government was supposed to cost $2 million dollars. It’s cost us over a billion. Boston’s big dig is over budget by what, a factor of 20? High Speed Rail in California is completely OFF the rails because of massive cost overruns. NASA’s space shuttle never came anywhere near the cost per lb to orbit numbers that were promised. The Constellation program had to be canceled because it was turning out so poorly. The superconducting supercollider had to be canceled after 5 billion dollars was spent on it because the project was a mess. The FBI spent $500 million dollars on a case file system so buggy it had to be scrapped before it went into use.
I could give you example of government ‘investment’ failures like this all day long.
Confronted with the massive failures of government that are so large they threaten to bring entire countries down, Liberals respond by just calling for ‘better’ government, or by telling themselves that all these problems will go away if only ‘their’ guys are elected. Your faith in government is just shocking. And yet you have the temerity to call those of us who think markets are better utopians with our heads in the sand.
I forgot the best example: The crash of 2007. There were market failures, and government failures. You could argue that the government failures were more severe - at one time, Fannie and Freddie held half of all the subprime mortgage paper in America. The CEOs of those companies were engaged in an arbitrage scheme that traded the value of the faith and credit of the United States for cash by transferring mortgage risk to the public. They made billions. Legislators responsible for oversight looked the other way, while the most powerful people on the oversight committees had ‘friends of Angelo’ loans and other perks paid for by the financial industry.
The fed held interest rates too low, helping to cause the real estate bubble in the first place. In the aftermath of the crash, the prime beneficiaries of bailouts just happened to be the companies that donated the most to Washington, and the government violated the contracts of GM debtors and put their own favorite constituents ahead of them in the repayment queue.
There were plenty of failures in the private market as well. But when the crash happened, who did the left blame? Capitalism. Their answer? More government. What a shock.
Are you kidding me ? Nobody knows what in the dimebag hocked on the corner. Nobody.
Not the fiend, not the street dealer, sometimes not even the kingpin if someone’s stepping on the drugs behind his back. Is it 90% pure coke ? 50 ? 10 ? Is it just 100% baking soda ? If it’s not 100% coke, what’s it cut with ? Baking soda ? Rat poison ? Is the bag a little light ? Nobody gives a shit. And if the fiend O.D.s or dies, who gives a shit either ? There’s always more fiends, and you know they’ll come back again and again no matter what crap you’re selling them. Hell, that’s why your dealer always keeps a few packets of the good shit on hand at all time. New face comes in, you give him the high of his life, free gratis. When he comes back, you know you’ve got a customer for life, no matter what you do from now on. What else are they gonna do, get clean ? That’s a laugh. And who are they gonna complain to if you rip 'em off ?
As for competition, well, you seen how many bodies drop every day because of the drug wars on the 6 o’clock news. That’s just maintaining a local distribution monopoly, baby. Because when only the Bloods, or the Crips, or MS13, or whoever sells drugs in that town, well, they can get away with all kinds of shit. They know all about scamming their customers. Sell the same weak shit under 20 different names, rotate the sellers… there’s no Buyer’s Guide to crack, is there ? And the fiends keep fiending.
Son, if you think the drug trade is the model of economy every sector should adhere to, there’s something wrong with your reality.
As someone who just complained about about being tagged with the most extreme exaggeration of your beliefs, I would think you’d tone this sort of thing down a bit.
Can you spot the logical fallacy in every one of these statements? As Robot Arm pointed out, you’re blaming me (and by extension, all Liberals) of exactly the sort of thing you’re doing. I don’t want capitalism to die. I don’t think it’s evil. Hell, I like money. I just think that unfettered capitalism is just as bad as unfettered government. We need both. For every governmental failure in your list, want to bet I can find equivalent corporate excess?
So we agree that legislators failed in their oversight. That would appear to suggest that you believe that legislators, or somebody, should have oversight over the financial system. So we both agree that more regulation of the financial system that we had in the early 2000s is necessary?
And the numbers show that Fannie and Freddie had no real bearing on the whole thing. They were losing vast chunks of their market share to private mortgage firms and Wall street during the bubble years. And there were housing meltdowns in other countries where the mortgage system was purely private-run. So can you make a case using facts and evidence that fannie and freddie caused the meltdown?
Probably consumers caught them and went to the weights and measures dept. That’s how another gas scam was caught.
Some independent gas stations changed the programming in their pumps to get around the W&M people. They knew there were two measuring standards (something like 1 and 5 gal), so the pumps were programmed to cheat after 5 gal. They were not caught during routine visits by the pump regulators. A few observant people noticed that they could seem to squeeze a little more gas into their tanks there than at other stations.
People who deal with regulations know they fall into three categories:
Lax
Sensible
Overly pescriptive.
People who don’t deal with regulations often seem to have a “magical” view of them – all progress is due to them, and all failings are due to a lack of them. When regulations have failed, they are often enhanced, but the additional regulations fall into those three categories.
Weights and measures often fall into the sensible category. But even in those, I think people overestimate the effectiveness of the regulations. How often do pumps get checked? Can the station work around their schedule? Is a small fine from the gov’t a bigger deterrent than lack of customers from bad publicity?
Holy shit, did you just excuse the government for letting that bridge collapse?
It wasn’t something that slipped through the cracks, it wasn’t an oversight or something missed. They stopped inspecting bridges!
But some how, when the government does this it’s okay, no big deal, shit happens. If a company does the same thing is malicious, and profit driven.
Only one fell down because the government decided after the fact that it should get around to inspecting the other bridges of similar design. You know what they found? Take a guess, go on, one guess…
The found dozens of other bridges not fit for use. Bridges that had to be closed until repairs made. That’s the system you think is supposed to save us. Those are the guys protecting us from evil corporations that put profit before lives. If they can’t be bothered to inspect bridges, what makes you think they’ll bother to inspect gas pumps, medical devices, or restaurants?
You guys are so blinded by your ideology that you’re fearful of what corporations might do without government, but ignoring what the government is currently doing.
I don’t really care how many levees are didn’t fail, it’s the ones that the Army Corp of Engineers is tasked with upkeep, to prevent cities from being flooded. They failed at that too. Yet you guys are terrified that corporations might make people sick.
In the recent ground turkey recall the government knew about the salmonella.
And nothing tops a government that makes up shit about a country to justify an invasion that cost billions, killed 4474, and injured over 33,000 service personnel.
You guys spent countless threads bitching about how unfettered corporations might try to kill people, but the US government had no problem starting (finishing) a war that caused the death of over 100,000 Iraqis.
Just how many people can the US government kill before it’s on par with unfettered capitalism?
I have something I feel I should admit: I flew to NYC on the weekend making one stop. We were in a bit of a rush so after security I threw all the crap into my bag and booked it for the 5am flight. Once on board I stashed my bag and promptly asleep.
Again, tight connection, bag stashed overhead, back to sleep.
When we landed in Laguardia I pulled out my phone to call the car service and realized I had left it on! Not just on, but I had everything going: 4G, wi-fi, bluetooth, cell service, gps!
I don’t know how we survived, I guess we’re lucky all that complicated communication equipment didn’t crash the plane. What I don’t understand is why the FAA doesn’t have a better system for enforcing the regulations requiring cell phones be turned off. Obviously phones shouldn’t be allowed on planes. Or maybe the FAA doesn’t know what’s it’s doing and is basically making shit up as it goes.
Either having cellphones on during flights is dangerous, or it’s not. If it’s dangerous take action. If it’s not, leave me the fuck alone so I can sleep.
Since you haven’t run away, maybe you can answer a simple question:
You guys are so scared that without your parents, I mean without government regulations, people will die from poisonous spinach.
But with government regulations plenty of people die from poisonous cigarettes. And not only that, the government profits heavily from their sale! Most people would consider that a conflict of interest. Based on everything said against libertarianism in this thread cigarettes should be illegal. But they’re not, why?
Once again it has to be pointed out that this is the same straw man you guys have been beating to death for years.
The point isn’t to have zero regulations. Nor is it to have zero government, zero laws, or zero taxes.
But to your specific question about more regulations, who is going to provide the oversight? What good is a regulation if there isn’t anyone with regulator authority? If you are going to have federally inspected bridges, you need to have inspectors actually out there inspecting things. Ditto for restaurants and drug makers.
Proposing more regulations is pointless when the issues is that the current regulations are flawed, easily bypassed, or unenforced.
What you are describing is the same thing as lowering the speed limit or the blood alcohol limit. But what’s the point if there aren’t enough cops enforcing the current limits?
But the simple fact is you did survive. I thought you libertarian types were all about results. You may not like the process, but recent history suggests that it works.
My post doesn’t contradict anything in your post. What I said, if you read carefully, is that we should have more regulation of the financial industry than we had in the first seven years of the century. Don’t you agree?
This post really bothers me and represents several fundamental flaws in how you guys view both your current world and a hypothetical libertarian system. Did you know that libertarianism is not anarchy? We’ve managed to convince** Der Tris**, I guess you’re next.
Libertarianism isn’t not anarchy. Repeat that out loud a few times, then re-read your post. See the world “stealing” in there. Theft is against the law, both in our system and in a libertarian system. So what that gas station did was illegal. What more do you need?
No, it’s your mindset that doesn’t want to look. Right now, how would you notice? You blindly assume the government is looking out for you, so you don’t give it another thought.
There is no reason we couldn’t. Like I said, measuring the volume of a liquid isn’t that hard, are you really that unaware? Do you think pilots just guess at how much gas they have? Do you suppose knowing fuel consumption is important to race car drivers? Your entire premise is so easily solved the government isn’t needed here at all*.
*The real issue at gas stations is that they represent the storage of highly toxic and explosive materials. Why you chose to ignore that in favour of a measurement issue is beyond me.