Maybe the reason you’re so against taxation is that you’re lousy at estimating the tax burden! 
That family would owe probably a hundred bucks in Federal taxes, because you have neglected personal exemptions and child credits. That’s a far cry from your $5,000 to $7,000 figure. Cite. Even anti-Bush groups acknowledge that this family would pay next to nothing in Federal taxes. See halfway down, “Bush’s Family Of Four Has Little To Do With His Tax Cut Plan”
That is incorrect. Your not liking what I say does not constitute my not saying it.
Nowhere in your post did the words “afford its basic needs” or “an average person” appear, at least not according to Microsoft’s text search. In other words, because I refuted your post, you are now rephrasing your questions and claiming that I evaded them.
That’s right. So, why do you criticize Libertaria for having no disadvantage over the US with respect to your concerns?
There weren’t any questions. That entire section of your post was a list of statements — a manifesto of sorts — culminating with this declaration: “In short there is no way that an average family in Libertaria will be able to pay for its basic needs.” There isn’t so much as a question mark in all that rambling, much less a queston.
Again, you have rephrased. You said that you — specifically — had to work or die.
The rest of my response was, “That may be true for you; however, many people know how to farm, or want to be entrepreneurs, or have marketable skills and talents.” If you want more, study and work for it.
You forgot to delete your “either”, and it makes me wonder what you originally typed. I cannot imagine what you were about to accuse me of before you settled on accusing me of not giving a socialist response.
You said absolutely nothing about factory owners. It was I who mentioned them.
Wrong again. The word “coercion” never appeared in my post anywhere. It is unfortunate that you ignored what I said.
Since you didn’t read it, how would you know whether I responded or not?
Because Sir Robert Peal would not have been forced to appeal to any Parliament. He could have appealed directly to the market the way Henry Ford did when he increased wages, reduced hours, and expanded benefits, whereupon he began to trounce his competition.
I have no quarrel with that assertion, and in fact I said something similar before you did. People ought to make sure that they can afford the basic necessities before they haul off and buy cars or have kids.
No, that response was to your claim that “[all]we are doing is eliminating the basic human needs so that the rich cannot exploit them for their own gain.”
That is a remarkable thing for you to say, given that you say they must be dependent on an employer. You have taken employers away from these people. (Although, in fairness, Bill Clinton did quite a bit of work in that area, and achieved some marginal success.)
I’m not a socialist — I don’t make your decisions for you.
Touche! 
Well, only 61% of the 90% who qualified are married filing jointly. So even granting every possible advantage and stroke of luck to the hypothetical family — (would that my opponents would grant every possible advantage to me with the libertarian monster hypotheticals) — the family can now afford to eat. Barely.
There cannot be both freedom and equality. Not without a statistical miracle.
Did you take nothing from the current 7 page pit thread about you? I said paid for which is synonmous with afford.
So your answer to “A family in Libertaria can not afford its basic needs. How would this be addressed in Libertaria and why would an average person want to live in Libertaria over a more socialist state.” is an inaccurate portrayal of the current U.S. system and some nit picking?
Answer the fucking question.
Gee maybe if you go to the very next line you will find a question.
Another pointless fucking nitpick. Address the damn question already I am sick of your bullshitting.
I was going to say either you didn’t understand my point or you ignored it but I decided that you were just ignoring it. You are further proving to me that I made the right choice.
More god damn nit picking. Answer the question.
That doesn’t make sense if Sir Robert Peal could have done what Mr. Ford did why did he go to Parliament and convince them to step in? Why wouldn’t he have just treated his workers better and trounce his competition?
Also please provide a cite for Mr. Ford’s labor practices.
At least a semblance of an answer to a question!
Unfortunately it makes no sense. I am not forcing anyone to depend on the state. I am providing a way for them to stay alive if they cannot afford to pay for their basic needs themselves. They are free to provide for these needs by other means if they wish.
People are either dependant on an employer to survive or they are supported by their family. Anyone who has gone into business for themselves know that you can’t expect to turn a profit within the first year. Since your needs still must be met you would have to work for someone else.
Liberal: Our fire protection is volunteer, and of excellent quality. So is our garbage collection.
Zakalwe: Unless you have multiple garbage services to choose from there is still no competitive pressure on your garbage collector to provide better/cheaper service.
Liberal: There are three to choose from.
This sounds as though you have three competing volunteer garbage collection services where you are. How does that work? Or am I misunderstanding you?
JM: The “problem” is that people don’t want absolute freedom if it means they can’t lay claim to other people’s property if they feel they need to. I put “problem” in quotes, because that seems to be a fundamental part of human nature […]
I agree. I would say that what you call “laying claim to other people’s property” is more accurately described as the human awareness that to some extent we’re innately social animals, and that we innately have shared property and mutual obligations, as well as individual rights.
This is why I think extreme libertarianism is essentially a waste of time. Take away all of the legal forms of our shared obligations—the things that libertarians call “government coercion”—and human beings will just spend a lot of effort, sorrow, and money restoring most of them again, in a slightly different form. You can’t change human nature, and human nature recognizes that to some extent, we’re all in this together.
Charity, compassion, and greed (we want to help others, and we want them to help us) keep alive our sense of mutual obligation, just as independence, ambition, and greed (we want to struggle for ourselves, and we don’t want to share what we get) keep alive our sense of individual autonomy. The two perspectives perpetually compete with each other, but I don’t think either of them can ever cancel the other out. And IMO you can’t build a stable, successful society without including both of them in the laws you live by.
I’ll let you and **Lib **work out those other issues, but this statement is just silly on the face of it. First, you are taking an average expectation (a business not turning a profit in the first year) and make an absolute statement out of it. Surely there are SOME businesses that are profitable in the first year. But besides that, most businesses are started with loans-- ie, money speficially designed to pay expenses, including payroll, until the business is profitbale.
John Mace-
Maybe I am ignorant on this subject but can you really go to a bank and get a loan for the cost of starting up a business and a years worth of expenses? Even if this is possible surely you must have some collateral which unless your family has wealth must have earned through employment.
Regardless the point I am trying to make still stands. The average person does not have completely free choice in regards to employment. Certainly they still have the choice of picking the best employment for them but they do not have the option of choosing no employment if they find none suitable. If they want to go into business on their own they will need to enter into an agreement with someone to procure capital. Again they still have the choice of picking the best offer but they must take an offer.
I hesitate to do this but I feel I must:
Your federal tax number has already been shown to be in error. The information I get for Oregon state tax is that the lowest rate is 5% which I presume this family is paying. They get a 3000 deduction for being married so their raw tax is 1950 -302 tax credit for being married and -302 for 2 children so their tax is 1350 for state. There is no sales tax in Oregon so we won’t add any sales tax. Eugene doesn’t appear to have any sales tax either so it looks like we are in the clear for that. Adding in your social security and medicare and 500 lets say for Federal taxes that comes to $4794. Property tax is 1% so adding that in we get a total of $5794. The total for schooling and military was 8746 so our family comes out ahead by 2952 (I was generous and assumed they saved the same amount despite getting SS). I am not entirely sure if they are paying a tax for fire and police but if they are it will be less than what they would be paying in Libertaria due to the unequal tax burden.
In short our family has $2952 more in there pocket plus all of the benefits of the Federal, State and Local governments.
http://www.eugene-oregon-homes.com/r_mortgage-calculator_rentvsbuy.asp
I don’t understand the point you ARE trying to make, though. Is there any society anywhere which offers people the choice of not working? If you are criticizing libertarianism over this matter, how does that criticism not apply to every other political or economic system?
No if the government provides for every citizens* necessities of life then they can choose not to work. Now the vast majority of them will choose to work becuase they desire luxuries. The difference is that they won’t work for 50 cents an hour in wretched conditions like someone who does not have their basic needs met.
It seems to me that it is you who could take some lessons from the Pit thread. Your posts here are incredibly hostile, nonresponsive, and pittish.
Unlike socialists, I don’t pretend to speak for average people. Why don’t you say why an “average person” would want to live in Socialista over a more free state? Which is average, the person who wants to suck the teat of his neighbor, or the person who wants to strive to achieve to the best of his ability?
And you have the nerve to ask me what lessons I’ve learned about civility and rudeness?
The next paragraph, you mean? Is it the socialist position that I am responsible for organizing your thoughts for you?
You are behaving very much like the governors you want to assign to me. Your hostility is off the scale, particularly in Great Debates.
I think you are making all the wrong choices. You are choosing to behave like a shit slinging monkey. You are choosing to pretend that you’re asking questions when you aren’t. You are choosing to believe erroneously that I am even obligated to answer your questions. And you are choosing a position overall that is utterly untenable.
I’m confident that if I corrected you and said that Titan is a moon and not a planet, you would call it nitpicking. Your unwillingness even to hear responses puts you in the position of holding a self-imposed monologue. Your decision to do it in a rage, complete with cursing and rhetorical arm flailing taints it with a certain pathetic humor.
Because it was on Parliament’s watch that these things happened. The governors whom you praise for their nonexistent benevolence were the very ones who encouraged the practices that so horrified Sir Robert. They sat on their fat asses, raking in tax revenues while allowing rampant coercion to fill the mills and factories. It was Sir Robert, incidentally, who established London’s Metropolitan Police. Not Parliament. Parliament didn’t give a rat’s ass.
There are so many cite’s for this common knowledge fact, that it is hard to choose. Here’s one from Willamette University:
“In 1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day (compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry) and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day. Overnight Ford became a worldwide celebrity. People either praised him as a great humanitarian or excoriated him as a mad socialist. Ford said humanitarianism had nothing to do with it. Previously profit had been based on paying wages as low as workers would take and pricing cars as high as the traffic would bear. Ford, on the other hand, stressed low pricing (the Model T cost $950 in 1908 and $290 in 1927) in order to capture the widest possible market and then met the price by volume and efficiency. Ford’s success in making the automobile a basic necessity turned out to be but a prelude to a more widespread revolution. The development of mass-production techniques, which enabled the company eventually to turn out a Model T every 24 seconds; the frequent reductions in the price of the car made possible by economies of scale; and the payment of a living wage that raised workers above subsistence and made them potential customers for, among other things, automobiles–these innovations changed the very structure of society.”
Another of your imaginary questions. Here was your “question” in its entirety: “Your Response: I am condeming them to dependency on the state”. In what way is that a question? Don’t you think questions ought to end with question marks, and seek information rather than make declarations?
Not according to you, they are not. You have said twice already that people depend on their employers to live. First, you said yourself, but then you broadened it to all people. Plus, I don’t think you know what freedom is. Were it up to you, I think you would put innocent people in jail and call them free because the criminals can’t get to them. You want to seize one man’s property by force and give it to another, and then you call the net result being “free”.
I’ve been in business for myself as the CEO and Chairman of a corporation. The greatest obstacle to my success was government.
It is your complusions that are your undoing.
No, my federal tax number was exactly accurate, as the link to the official United States IRS tax table for the year shows. What was shown was that, assuming your hypothetical family wins a coin toss, it might qualify for a reduction in taxes — that only came about this year by a fluke in the tax law. Your claiming that as validation for your argument is reminiscent of Michael Jackon accepting a nonexistent award for Artist of the Millennium.
I gave you a link to the official State of Oregon Department of Revenue, which showed what families actually paid in taxes, based on income.
What? I selected Oregon at random for state tax. (It was in the middle of the page on Google.) If you’re going to give your family every advantage, why don’t you put them in Alaska, working on subsidized oil production? Make the mother retarded, and dependent on the husband as head of household. Make the two children Siamese twins, receiving free medical care from a Norwegian Nobel laureat.
No it doesn’t. I already computed those taxes for you, with a link to the official Social Security Administration website. Your figure is too high for their income.
It is? Where? Oregon? Oregon has no individual personal property tax. But its property tax for businesses is “81.7% of its initial market value for industrial property and 71.87% for commercial property” (Cite.)
So the difference by your mysterious calculations is about a thousand dollars. After a temporary fluke in the federal tax law. After pretending they don’t have to pay any of the dozens of other taxes that homeowners pay in my list above. Your case is extremely weak.
You’re not sure whether they are paying a tax for fire and police? And you expect me to take your projections seriously?
You mean benefits like higher prices due to frivolous regulation and layer upon layer of marked-up tax expense by the businesses they buy from? I estimate that the fee that Libertarian government would charge to defend your rights in a nation state the size of the US would be about $1,359.72 per year.
That didn’t work out so well for Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, or Poland.
Treis, ratchet back the hostility, please. I wouldn’t want to see you step over any lines.
I think you’re confusing father and son here. Robert Peel Senior was indeed a factory owner who campaigned for the 1819 Factory Act. However, he campaigned from within Parliament as he was also an MP.
Sir Robert Peel (the son) was Home Secretary for the Tory government, and later Prime Minister. It was as Home Secretary that he established the Met. and as Prime Minister that he passed the Mines Act and the (1844) Factory Act. More accurately, he sponsored the bills and Parliament, far from not giving a rat’s assed, made them law. He was not a lone voice desparately beseeching a heedless and uncaring government to remember the poor downtrodden. He was, in fact, right at the centre of government, and had been for almost all of his adult life.
Lib-
quality of life issues aside, because I don’t think that we can ever see eye to eye on that, what do you think of my question of the feasibility of your system in an international arena? Do you really see a libertarian or anarchic (I’m really not sure which the OP is advocating) will work in the context of an international community? You can refer back to my last post for some of my specific issues. But the long and short of it is that I don’t see any advantage for a state in following this path, and several disadvantages.
Also, I apologize for what appears to be another Lib pile-on in the making, and understand if it takes time to frame an answer. Does anyone know where the OP has gone?
I appreciate the clarification on the father and son, a distinction which my source, The Story of the Royal Martian Constabulary, did not make. (It also spelled the name “Peal”.) So, on that detail, I stand corrected. However, even your own source says that he was “[confronted] with political objections and fears of potential abuse”. It was not a popular move. Unless my other sources are in error, it didn’t even have teeth — i.e., no provisions for enforcement. There is nothing wrong with citizens working through their government to effect change. Ron Paul is a libertarian who is doing exactly that, serving in Congress under a Republican ticket (because of onerous ballot access laws) in order to work for freedom. But citizens, like Martin Luther King, Jr, have also worked outside government, mainly because they had to. They lacked the political clout to break into the system.
It pretty much depends on what you mean by “work”. If you mean achieving a particular end, it is hard to say. Free people will do what free people will do. And libertarian government is concerned, not with the end, but with the means — suppressing coercion. All I can tell you is that a libertarian government will not conduct diplomacy. Its only role is to secure the rights and property of its citizens. Its citizens, on the other hand, are free to trade, negotiate, and conduct diplomacy with anyone they wish.
John Mace:
I think treis’s point is that something need not be initiated by other individuals in order properly to be called coercion. We are coerced into action, as he says, by virtue of being human. No one, for example, can choose not to eat. So a political/social context that is predicated on the prevention of coercion that doesn’t address this type of coercion is proferring an insufficiently comprehensive “solution” – and will, in my opinion, be ridden with the kind of baseline inequities I talk about in this thread: Libertarianism: The Baseline Problem.