We should repeal this ‘law of unintended consequences’ and then burn down the NY Times so that this can never happen again.
Get a strong Constitution, that provides checks and balances on government.
Elect people who swear to uphold it, even if it means limiting their own individual power.
Then your problem is the same as our, convincing enough of the people to lend you their power. But I guarantee you, once you start talking to them about “fiat money”, their eyes will glaze over and they’ll switch channels to that show about the cute meerkats.
Those things are adorable, what were we talking about again?
Der Trihs, this is more of a Pitting than an argument. Cool it. You’re allowed to criticize the tenets of libertarianism, but some restraint is called for. Otherwise every thread turns into a trainwreck.
I think he is drunk.
As you wish.
Say what you will about the tenets of libertarianism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
And? That doesn’t make it desirable.
Ethos, Pathos and D’artagnan, the Musketeers. I know about them.
Out of curiosity, can you tell me why the government won’t let us by alcohol or cars on Sundays?
Leftover Christian influence.
Of course, without the Evil Government the churches would be running every aspect of your life that the corporations weren’t. Strong government is the central reason personal freedom can exist.
Depending on the wording, that would provide limitations for one of the powerful groups **Sam Stone’s **pointed to. But, while power isn’t a zero-sum game, I would tend to think that in such a situations limiting one group would also mean removing the limits from other groups.
I mean, a situation in which government and industry have a good arrangement to ensure each remains powerful comes to exist because, well, each has the ability to ensure that. It’s like me having a gun and you having a gun, and us coming to an agreement to leverage our power over others who don’t have what we do - and to stop them from taking it away from us. A mutually beneficial arrangement. But if, in the name of attempting to stop such abuses of power, the people decide to take *my *gun away, while I am certainly less powerful, you are more so, since you are no longer reliant on my help and might actually include me on those people you can dictate to.
In short, it only helps in very specific terms, and doesn’t help the spirit of the issue.
I can’t really understand what you’re saying. If you try again, I promise to read it and respond.
If you and I have “guns” and point them at each other, and use that to leverage our power over each other, we have committed an illegal act. That is prohibited by the laws of the land.
But the government has legal use of the gun. If they point their gun at us to enforce a law, it is completely legal. That is why the limits on the three branches of the government are so important.
There is a massive distinction between a private citizen using a gun to enforce his will and the government doing the same. Incomprehensibly massive. It might be the most massive distinction imaginable in the discussion of statecraft and politics.
Yet, so many on the statist left are extremely willing to sign over their rights, resources, and power to the government because they don’t believe there is a distinction at all.
They believe that if the government makes a mistake (as Sam Stone referred to in his OP about Unintended Consequences) with regards to ridiculous consumer protection regulations, or food safety, or a banking regulation, or whether funds will go to support ethanol subsidies year after year, or a poorly calculated benefit formula for Social Security that costs hundreds of billions of dollars, or Medicare rules that encourage fraud, or the Rural Electrification Authority, you can simply “vote” them out of existence. You can’t.
Once you have allowed politicians to take those powers from you, along with your money, you’re screwed. There’s no way to “un-vote” poor regulations implemented by the FDA. There’s no way to “vote” out overstaffed bureaucracies at the Department of Education. There’s no way to “vote” for more intelligent use of technology at NASA.
You can’t do it. Once you sign over your rights to politicians, you’ve lost. Because at the Federal level, all you can do is vote for 1 Representative every 2 years, 1 Senator every 6 years, and 1 President every 4 years. There’s no way that you, as a private citizen, can effect change in federal bureaucracies or regulatory agencies like the ones I’ve mentioned above using your vote as leverage.
The only way to keep as much power and control in your own hands is not to allow the government the latitude to take those actions, and create those rules, and usurp your own authority, in the first place.
Yet so many are willing to rush headlong in the other direction - to willingly sign over their rights and resources to others, to tell them what to do.
A nation of three hundred million sovereign states is somewhat unwieldy.
Sorry to be unclear. In the analogy, I was imagining a situation where there were no laws otherwise.
The point I was trying to make with it is this; in the analogy, you and I represent the government and “big business”. Imagine there are no laws; it’s a free-for-all, basically. You and I are the only ones with guns; we’re the only ones with that power. An impressive power, to be sure, though not omnipotent. As it stands in this situation, while we may be threatened by people in general, it’s only each other that we really have to watch out for. So we come to a decision to help each other out, and by so doing, ensure that the power we have is less likely to fall into someone elses’s hands, and also remove a potential threat. Likewise, with government and industry; they each have power, but likewise, each can use that power to hurt the other. The government has little to fear from an average joe. Likewise, the head of some great company. But they must fear each other, because each could cause problems for the other. So they come to an agreement; they help each other out, and in so doing, remove some of that threat from the people to take away their power, and ensure that the other won’t stab them in the back.
Going back to the analogy, imagine if some people decided that your and my agreement was unfair. And it is; our mutual agreement prevents them from getting at our power. And we may abuse it quite easily. So they decide to take away my gun. I’m left without power. But you, on the other hand, have your power increased - you don’t have to fear any threat from me any more, and you still have your gun to make your will known. And you don’t have to compromise with me. Likewise, with government and industry; if you endeavour to remove the government’s power, then certainly government will be humbled. But industry will only get more powerful. It no longer has the government as a threat to it. It doesn’t have to compromise with government.
That’s my problem with your position. You initially suggested that the way to solve the problem is purely removing governmental power. You’ve just now written a long post, again on removing governmental power. But that only addresses half the problem. And, in this situation, solving half the problem is arguably worse than solving none of it. At least, while government and industry share power, while you and I share power, we must make compromises between us. Neither they, or us, can entirely get our own way. But take away the power from just one - and the other is free to do whatever they want.
I guess to put it succintly, I don’t see the benefit in being able to loudly trumpet the liberty of the people from encroaching government - while industry uses its monopoly of power to erode those liberties instead.
Thanks the for post.
The point I will debate with you is that I don’t believe there is a second half to the problem.
You seem to believe that industry has “power”. They don’t. At least they don’t in a state that enforces the rule of law. They don’t control you. You have 100% control over your life in a stable, constitutional republic with taxes used to support the rule and enforcement of law.
How can industry have “power”? They might try and sell you something via a voluntary transaction. You refuse. There…you’ve won.
The only way they can effect the changes described by Sam Stone in the OP is to lobby and use the government as their enforcement mechanism.
What have I missed here? What sort of “power” do you think industry has, if they don’t use the government as their agent?
I’m sure many of us would be fascinated to hear more of your political philosophy. Opening a thread to discuss it would be the perfect solution.
Well, for example, without minimum wage laws, they have the power to pay me a pittance. Without anti-monopoly laws, they have the power to ensure that I won’t be able to get a job that pays better, or that if I want a service or goods that I won’t be able to pay below a certain amount. Or the power to set the standards of safety, or ethical testing, or fair hiring practices.
Having 100% control over my life isn’t particularly helpful if it means I have the “power” to accept a terrible job or starve. If I have the “power” to start any business I want without fear of governmental oversight or red-tape - and then get crowded out by a multinational corporation. It’s a very nice idea in principle that I may elect not to take up a company’s offer voluntarily. In practice, it’s a different story, sadly. There’s power, and then there’s power. And while I applaud the idea of stopping government from taking away what power I have in principle, that doesn’t do me a vast amount of good if another group is taking it away in practice.
Sure you can. Every federal agency is a creature of either the executive branch or Congress. All the powers they have are delegated to them, and derive either from the executive power exercised by the President or statutory authority given them by Congress. They have no independent existence.
That means that either the President or Congress can limit, modify, or reverse their decisions: the President, in the departments he controls, by Executive Order, and the Congress by passing a law stripping them of the power. And Congress and the Executive are, as you mentioned, elected.