Sorry, but I’m not going to root around in that festival of nuttery to do your job for you. If you think Ernie is a dynamo of inspiration and common sense on major issues of the day, you hop to it and prove it is so. That’s the way things are done around here.
Don’t forget the Facebook-is-a-CIA-plot gem.
How many examples of government conspiracies, anti-fluoridation and antivax goofiness and other positions espoused by libertarians are you going to handwave away on the grounds that they are immaterial to the Big Picture of libertarian super-goodness?
I believe you have confused me with someone else. I have merely pointed out socially destructive and/or foolish policies supported by libertarians and asked for an example of a prominent libertarian figure whose positions make sense.
From what I’ve seen so far, Ernest Hancock doesn’t qualify.
That nonsense has nothing to do with libertarian or Libertarian philosophy. If you have a philosophy, please state clearly what it is, not what it’s not. Please be specific about defining the points in space that define the ‘axis of freedom’.
Well, Sam Stone seems to have taken his crayons and run away, but here are a couple of things I have been wondering about Libertarianism - perhaps someone can educate me:
**- Reactive vs Proactive. ** It seems that most of the remedies to problems under Libertarianism are reactive rather than proactive. If a business rips me off, I will be free to choose a product from a competing business. If a business makes an inferior product, a new competing business will arise and take all the customers. If a business pollutes a common resource such as air or water, the free market will correct them.
It seems therefore that the only remedy comes after the damage has been done. I don’t think I’d like this - say a car company cuts corners and uses inferior brakes on its new model car. If I go careening off the road, I don’t think I’d be thrilled to know that the company will go out of business soon. I know some might say that “well, the businesses KNOW that they’ll go out of business if they use inferior parts, so they will not do this.” The problem with this statement is that businesses currently do this all the time today, even in a regulated environment, with fines, punishments, and going out of business the result. What would make a business change if government did not have regulations (most of which were put in place BECAUSE of past business practices). I suppose you could say that business associations would self regulate. Perhaps this could work in a limited number of cases - but then again, there is nothing to stop business associations from self-regulating UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM, but they don’t seem to want to. They need to be forced to. Who is going to make them under a Libertarian system?
A complex world. In the past, I can see where the world may have been able to function in many ways under a Libertarian type of thinking. If I bought apples from my town market, I knew the merchant selling them, and I probably knew which farm(s) the apples came from. If the apples had some chemical on them that promoted growth/killed bugs/made them look nice, and that chemical sickened me, I knew exactly who was a fault, and I could make sure (with my future purchases) not to support that farmer/business.
Today, when I buy my heavily processed food, I really don’t know where everything comes from. An apple granola bar may have apples sourced from 2 countries and 12 states. Grains from China. Sugar from somewhere else. Packaged in one state. Shipped by another company. Sold by one of 100 merchants. If my granola bar sickens me, who do I boycott? The primary manufacturer? The grain seller in China who put melamine in the product to increase protein measurement? The packager who had unclean equipment? How am I going to find out who is at fault, so the hand of the market can punish them?
Who is going to regulate/test all these companies down the complex line? If you’re just swapping a government run testing/regulation system for a private one, why will that be so much better? Because government is “bad”?
See, I can respect the libertarians who work to take themselves off the grid. They don’t demand everyone live the same way they do, they just try to live their life the way they want it. I can respect that, even if it involves tax dodging/evasion.
But wanting to turn the whole US in that direction? No thank you. If you don’t want to live in society, don’t live in society. Don’t try to take it down with you.
This. Telling us that Libertarians are not Republicans or Democrats doesn’t really help. My cat is neither Republican or Democrat-are libertarians cats?
Actually, what happened was that I started a thread that was an attempt to avoid all the strawman arguments and misunderstandings of libertarianism by tying it to a very popular and influential libertarian work that we could then discuss, but it immediately became another generic anti-libertarian bitch thread, of which there were already two active. So I gave up.
The way it goes around here is if you try to say that libertarians believe in hard and fast rules, then they’ll be accused of being childish. If you try to say that libertarianism is a general philosophy that leads to different interpretations of specifics, then you get accused of being inconsistent or wishy-washy. People demand to know ‘the libertarian position’ on various policies, even though there’s often no universal ‘socialist’ position, or ‘Democrat’ position, or ‘Republican’ position. For some reason, it is demanded of libertarians that they be lock-step dogmatic about every issue - at which point they’ll be criticised for being dogmatic.
In the meantime, people here define ‘libertarian’ positions as being whatever the craziest position is they can find that is held by someone calling himself a libertarian, even though the same people would never dream of saying that the ‘Democrat’ position is whatever Cynthia McKinney or Al Sharpton says it is.
This and many other common argument just come up over and over again in these threads, and those of us that take the time to actually give nuanced answers either get ignored or get rebuttals that come from raw ignorance.
So, I thought it might be worthwhile to anchor a thread in some specifics. That went nowhere.
In any event, since you asked some reasonable questions that are fairly specific, I’ll answer them.
But in fact, businesses don’t do this all the time. In fact, the large majority of businesses go way out of their way to constantly improve the quality of their products, and the vast majority of quality decisions are driven by the market, and not by government regulation. No government told Apple it had to use expensive Gorilla Glass in its iPhone - it made that decision to gain market advantage.
Just look around you at the quality of the goods that you use. In comparison, go look at the quality of goods that come out of industries that are government-driven outside of the market. For example, the quality of goods in the Soviet Union were no better than the absolute minimum required by the goverment, because there was no incentive for the factories to make them any better. They had no competitive pressure. Cars in China were crap when they were only available through the state. Once China decided to compete in the world markets, they had to improve their quality, and it has taken them years to catch up.
People want safe products. They want high quality goods. Therefore, the market has evolved many mechanisms to allow people to find quality. Brand recognition is a big one - the whole value of any brand is tied up in its history of providing quality and safety. Brand value is enormous, and companies guard it zealously by ensuring they don’t make crappy products. Of course, once in a while they do, but they get punished by the market harder and faster than they do by government.
As an example, consider ‘no-name’ products. These are often made by the same companies that make the brand names, and sometimes on the same production lines. But they are lower in quality in very subtle ways - a box of Kellog’s cereal may open easier because they spend money on higher quality flap glue. Buy a no-name cereal, and you might shred the box trying to get it open. There may be a higher incidence of odd-sized flakes , or more ‘chaff’ in the bag. It’s perfectly safe, but it’s not as high in quality. So why doesn’t Kellog’s just make all their cereal like that and save some money? Because the competitive nature of the market doesn’t allow it. They have a brand to protect.
It goes beyond just product brands. Retailers also have brands to protect, and they don’t want them sullied by selling crappy goods (unless they’re ‘The Dollar Store’ or some other store that very explicitly lets you know that you’re trading quality for low price). But the corporate buyers for Home Depot or Staples act like government regulators to a degree - sometimes to the extent where they have their own quality assurance labs test samples before they’ll pick up a product line.
You would see more emphasis on this in a libertarian world. If government isn’t checking for food quality, you can be damned sure that Safeway would be doing more of it. They also don’t want to be exposed to liability if they sell tainted foods. The value of brands would go up, which would act as an incentive to maintain even higher quality among name brands. You might see fewer ‘no name’ foods, and fewer fly-by-night stores that have no brand equity.
The same is true for drugs. In a competitive market, you’ll see drug stores that either set up their own testing if they’re big enough, or more likely we’d see a market for private testing labs that sell their services to multiple businesses. Their whole competitive model would depend on the accuracy of their testing - screw up and certify a drug that’s dangerous, and your testing company’s reputation is shot. In the meantime, the drug stores that advertise “We sell only DrugTest certified products” hav a competitive advantage over the drug store that doesn’t. And because they want to make sure they don’t get screwed, they may do their own oversight of ‘DrugTest’, or demand that DrugTest take part in other certification organizations to ensure their standards don’t slip - much like some buyers today demand that their suppliers be ISO-9001 certified.
The “DrugTest” company might also be funded by a consortium of insurance companies like Underwriter Laboratories is, and they’ll have an incentive to make sure bad drugs aren’t released. Doctors may avoid liability by using only DrugTest certified drugs.
All of these are pro-active - forces that drive quality before anyone is harmed.
Many do self-regulate. Ever hear of ISO-9000? Or UL certification? In industry there are a number of certification standards and organizations doing certification to ensure adherence to standards and practices. But you have to remember that government regulation reduces the value of private certification - if the population just assumes that everything is safe because the government would never allow dangerous products to go on the market, then they’re more likely to shop for price instead of safety. In a libertarian society, this calculus would change, and the value of private certification standards and brand would go up.
And it’s not like government is infallible. It’s a lot easier to bribe a government inspector or rig an inspection than it is to fool a market. But there’s a real danger in having the government do this - it makes the public complacent. If you assume that you’re always being protected by government, you don’t take responsibility for your own safety. The result of this can be catastrophic: ask the people of New Orleans who assumed that the government was making sure that a storm couldn’t flood the city.
For example, when a drug is certified, it often goes into immediate widespread use because everyone assumes it’s safe. But if the FDA gets it wrong, the consequences are widespread. In a libertarian world, products would enter the market slowly - the people with the highest tolerance for risk would use them first, and the more cautious people would wait. Risky drugs would be used by people with nothing to lose such as late-stage terminal cancer patients.
In addition, you have to consider the cost of government regulation in the mix. If the government is overly risk-averse, it has the effect of keeping safe products out of the market. Beta Blockers were available for years in other parts of the world before the FDA approved them for use in the U.S. Beta blockers save thousands of lives per year. So during the years when the FDA lagged the rest of the world, they killed thousands of people per year just as assuredly as if they had allowed a dangerous drug to be released.
And the FDA knows that once they certify a drug it goes into immediate widespread use, and that in turn pushes them to be even more cautious before allowing one to be released - to the point where on average it now takes more than a billion dollars and a decade of testing to bring a new drug to market. What is that doing to innovation? How much cheaper would drugs be if the certification standards traded off a little more risk for a much less costly certification period? Would we be better off or worse?
When government is doing it, no one knows if the current strategy is optimal, because we don’t get to see the other alternatives. When private markets do it, you have choice. We’d learn where the best tradeoff between risk and reward is through competition and iteration.
There’s no doubt that there would still be poor products and products released that are unsafe in a libertarian world - we’re not talking about utopia. But I’ve seen no evidence that it would be any worse than what we have now. But at least people would be free to choose.
The supply chain will punish them. If Kellog’s loses market share because its corn flakes were made with an inferior intermediate product that came from another producer, who in turn produced the inferior product because of some other product HE used for his ingredients, then Kellog’s will stop doing business with him, and he in turn will stop doing business with his supplier. All of them will then have an incentive to correct the problem, and each will have to convince the other that their products are good (OR, Kellog’s will institute their own testing regime for the materials they buy).
I have a good understanding of this because I work in industrial manufacturing, and a large chunk of what I do is develop systems for testing exactly this kind of stuff. When a manufacturer gets an ingredient, they’ll often have their own lab to test the stuff, and they’ll put their own certification on it. If their tests differ from what the supplier said the material was, bye-bye supplier. The suppliers know this, so they do their own testing. Often a material will have been tested for quality multiple times before it makes it into an end product. Most people have no idea just how much quality control is voluntarily done in the supply chain for every product. And most of it has nothing to do with government regulations. For example, brand name breweries extensively test the quality of the hops and other ingredients that go into their beer, and they’re doing it for flavor as well as for safety. The government doesn’t tell them to do that - the market does.
Because government has skewed incentives, and because one size does not fit all. A government inspector is overly risk-averse, because if he refuses to allow a drug to come to market that might have saved thousands of people, no one will ever know. But if he approves a drug that kills thousands, his ass is grass. So he has an incentive to ‘play it safe’. Also, the government may not consider the cost-benefit of regulation. If a private certification firm sets standards so high that no one can can afford the products, it will go out of business. Government has no such balancing incentive.
One size does not fit all - people have different tolerances for risk, and should be allowed to choose how much risk they’re willing to take on. If I’m dying of stage IV cancer, I’ll be much more willing to take a chance on a drug than I would be if I were taking it to cure psoriasis. If I’m 80 years old, I’m more willing to take a drug that may cause long-term cancer than I would be if I’m 20. If I’m about to lose my job because I can’t hold tools, I might be a bit more willing to try an anti-arthritic with some risks than I would be if I had the occasional back twinge. Everyone has a different risk-reward curve, and they should be free to make their own choices.
Also, government regulation is expensive and inefficient. In some cities the biggest impediments to small business creation are the long delay and extreme cost of getting all the various permits, inspections, and sign-offs by government officials. I believe that the market is generally better at responding to changing demand than is the government.
Also, I see no evidence that regulation at the local and state level is any better than private regulation, and lots of evidence that much of it is corrupt and has been captured by special interests and used as an economic/political weapon. So let’s not start with the assumption that government is automatically going to be more objective and fair than the market - ask someone in New York who tries to run a trade show without greasing the right palms, or go look at some of the incredibly shoddy work that has been signed off by government inspectors because the ‘right people’ were the ones who built it.
In reality there are well-defined Democratic and Republican positions contained within party platforms, which while not agreed to universally within the parties provide a good basis for establishing their positions on key issues. The same exists for the state and federal Libertarian parties - but as we saw here, bring up the nuttiness of those planks and they’re ignored or declared irrelevant.
Ron Paul is probably the best known libertarian politician in the U.S. and touted as a dark horse Presidential candidate. His positions include notable examples of the crazy. Are you saying that he’s the Libertarian equivalent of McKinney and Sharpton?
As for Sam’s “specifics”: let it be noted that we had this Golden Age prior to all those nasty, competition-stifling, ineffective government regulations. What we got instead of carefully and proactively marketed products was useless, adulterated and addicting patent medicines, contaminated foodstuffs, flammable and otherwise hazardous consumer goods and horrific working conditions for the people who made/processed them. It was the Wild Wild West (oddly enough, a phrase I saw approvingly used on Ernie Hancock’s website).
The claim that the F.D.A. is ineffective and prevents innovative drugs from coming to market is one that I see repeatedly in the editorials and columns of the Wall St. Journal (a libertarian icon?). The Journal and its buddies in the pharmaceutical industry (not to mention the multibillion dollar supplement industry and all the other purveyors of quackery out there) would love to see government oversight removed so their costs would drop and profits skyrocket.
Don’t have time to read all this thread but this is absolutely spot on. It’s not like a bunch of socialist bureacrats woke up one day and thought “how can we use government to fuck up capitalism as much as possible?” Regulations were imposed on commerce, finance etc. precisely because the free market produced dangerous/poisonous/unsafe products, or produced financial products/markets which caused economic disater etc. etc. That’s why we had the regulations in the first place. Look how well scrapping financial regulations worked out for the financial system and global economy recently! The fact that there are people who can live through that and still be blinded by their ideology to continue to insist on more of the same would be funny if they weren’t still in charge of regulating the financial system.
