I see that improv course was a wise investment.
I haven’t noticed any improvment at all.
Wow, I never thought of that! It’s always easy to get a better deal with another employer, isn’t it? I’m thinking of children working in coal mines and dying of black lung, children chained to their machines at the textile factory, children picking cotton in the scorching sun, children with missing fingers and hands because they’d gotten caught in the machines they were tending, children dying of black lung before they’d reached fifteen, children beaten with steel rods because they made a mistake or talked back to the boss.
Why the hell didn’t the little bastards just go find better jobs? Here I was feeling sorry for 'em!
Sure, many businesses will try that, but then libertarians fully support the right of workers to ban together and form unions to oppose those practices by corporations. What’s more, libertarians want a government that will protect those unions from violence initiated by the corporations.
Your sarcasm aside, few libertarians claim that a free market won’t have problems. A libertarian will instead say that the excesses of the market are not as bad as the excesses of government. If you want to stack up the evils of corporations and governments and compare them we can do that. I’ll start with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps you’ll contend that not all governments end up with Cultural Revolutions, and of course you’d be right. But not all corporations end up with children dying of black lung disease.
I’m not convinced that having workplace safety regulations dooms us to living under the equivalent of Maoist Cultural Revolution.
But not from starving to death. And a realistic libertarian government isn’t going to actually protect the workers anyway; they’ll send in the troops to massacre the strikers, like in the good old days the libertarians want to return us to. Just as the Communists were always willing to massacre the workers they supposedly idolized.
If a company doesn’t commit that or similar evils, it’s only because governments stop them. We have history to demonstrate this; all those laws against various forms of abuse, exploitation and outright physical harm were written because companies have consistently shown utter disregard for the lives and rights of both employees and customers, unless forced by the government to do otherwise.
Because we don’t let them. We’re ok with tobacco companies offering cool-cat Joe Camel as a role model for our youth. Death Lite.
Of course not – they don’t all operate coal mines. The cotton mills had brown lung disease. The shipyards and building industries had asbestos. The government researched and quantified the level of health risk and damage, which industry either wasn’t willing to do, or kept results secret when they turn out to be problematic. Then government asked industry to take steps to deal with the problem, which they don’t do – ever. And then they regulate, because time and time again the marketplace has shown itself unworthy to protect the interests of anyone except its investors.
Do you really want to go there? Because I can sit here and list tons of instances of environmental and public health and safety fiascos/disasters/problems/whatever you want to call them, caused by corporate malfeasance. Yes in many of these cases the governments in question turned a blind eye to said excesses, but that doesn’t excuse them (and often it was because the corps bought the votes).
In either case you have a huge impersonal power structure which has the capability of significantly affecting your life, for good or bad. At least government will sometimes do more than pay lip service to such quaint things like rights, environmental and health protections, and other such “higher” human aspirations, while big business has just one modus operandi: the profit motive.
That’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Sure, I can just ignore a thread about Dancing with the Stars, but nobody is trying to propose that Dancing with the Stars should be the guiding principle behind our society.
Oy, a lot of you quoted my “corporate” part and ignored the “Cultural Revolution” part. If we’re going to use history as a guide then governments are way more dangerous and oppressive than corporations. For every example of Joe Camel there’s another example of a government torturing its citizens.
What realistic libertarian government do you know? Massacring citizens is completely antithetical to a libertarian government.
Absolutely, bring it on. You got something worse than the Cultural Revolution? How about the government-run Chernobyl nuclear power plant?
WTF are you doing comparing the Revolution or Chernobyl to anything? We are talking about run of the mill, routine business practices (i.e., profit above all else, including the well being of employees and the general public), and you want to compare them to two of the worst episodes in history?
Oh, and you have to use examples of Communist governments? How about things the US does – since the start of the 20th century maybe?
“I understand your position on Welfare, governor Romney, but I still don’t know if you can cha-cha.”
Because it shows what can happen if government isn’t strictly controlled and regulated by business.
No there isn’t. If there was, there wouldn’t be anyone left, the governments would have killed every last person on Earth including themselves.
As has been said again and again, the America of the past. That is what you get when you let corporations do as they please. And the actual principles of libertarianism are “crush the weak, hand all power to the wealthy”; the use of force is perfectly consistent with their actual goals as long as the force is only used against the common people libertarianism is designed to dispossess and exploit.
I’d prefer not to hand-wave away the worst excesses in history. One of the points of libertarianism is that oppressive government is much worse then oppressive business. If you want excesses of US government how about these:
- Jim Crow laws.
- Tuskegee experiment
- DOMA
- Bailing out banks (dunno if you consider that a negative or not; I mostly do.)
It is my opinion (not shared by others) that American has slowly become more libertarian over the course of its history.
Even if that was true, oppressive government is not a given, while business can only be made non-oppressive by the constant threat of force.
I would say the opposite, and I think even most libertarians would agree with me. As the Federal government grew in size and power and scope of interest, it has become FAR less libertarian than it used to be. I might be persuaded otherwise in regards to private consensual behavior more or less within the home. I would like to know how you’ve come to your conclusion.
I don’t want to “wave away” the worst excesses, but you are the one who wants to compare the results of normal business practices to unusual catastrophes. Businesses have not had a chance to fail on that scale because they have not been allowed to operate on that scale without a great deal of oversight from government.
As to your list…
The first two represent excesses that the government eventually corrected by it’s own internal mechanisms. THIS is what I would argue that the marketplace does not do unless there is a profit incentive to do so.
Also, businesses had their versions of Jim Crow laws in place through their hiring and promotions processes. Some of them changed voluntarily, some of them continued on until forced by law to change. Some still don’t want to. Rand Paul got some attention no too long ago for opposing the Civil Rights Act as being excessively invasive of the prerogatives of business practices.
What about you? Are you ok with allowing businesses to discriminate by race?
DOMA? Well, I can’t defend it, but it’s part of an evolving public exchange about a social and religious issue that many people on both sides feel strongly about. By and large, court decisions in recent years have been tending to rule against acts like DOMA, which I think is correct. So, my argument is that we’re relatively early in that self-correction process.
The bank bail-out. I’m not enough of a financial expert to say if there were other reasonable options. But if the choice was allowing all those financial institutions to fail – which was caused in large part because regulators failed to regulate their behavior – or allowing the whole economy to collapse in depression, then the bail-out was the right choice.
But the bail out could have been avoided altogether had the institutions been more closely regulated and controlled. Even Alan Greenspan, almost the ultimate in libertarians as far as economic activities are concerned, admitted as much. Poor Alan looked so miserable and befuddled in his testimony before Congress when he acknowledged the mechanisms he imagined existed for self-correction had failed utterly.
In the first case (Jim Crow) we are overwhelmingly talking about oppressive state laws that were overturned due to decisive action at the Federal level which established enduring civil rights protections through legislation and/or and court action.
In the second case, you have a situation in which blacks enrolled in a study partially under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service were denied proper diagnosis and treatment. This led to mandatory rules affecting research studies involving human subjects, for example government regulations requiring institutional review boards to protect people enrolled in such studies.
In both situations wrongs were corrected through government regulation.
I have great difficulty thinking of any situations where businesses abolished grossly oppressive/improper practices on their own without being prodded into it by government regulation or at least the threat of such regulation.
*Incidentally, I believe the time may have come to establish a corollary to Godwin’s Law, in which the first person to improperly invoke the Tuskegee Experiment in a debate automatically loses. These references are already a plague on conspiracy threads; the idea of invoking the Tuskeegee Experiment to show why we should severely curtail government regulation is just about as daft.
And what is the government self-correcting mechanism to stop sending men to die in wars initiated on flawed ideology or false pretenses? Gulf of Tonkin. Weapons of Mass Destruction.
It seems like we have to invent some flimsy reason every 25 years or so to send soldiers to their death. What’s next? North Korea? Iran? What is the government solution to this? Or is this impossible to solve because government inherently has its own interests at stake?
It is true that libertarians are ok with military organization but that is related to securing borders – not worldwide police action.