How does one “ask for ridiculous assertions”? I have no idea what that even means.
Paying for something you don’t want is a subset of “compromise”. I don’t agree that interactions between human beings requires paying for something you don’t want.
BTW, asking for a cite does not necessarily mean you disagree. And reacting defensively when asked for one does not convey a sense that you fully understand your own argument.
You’re asking for a cite to a priori knowledge, so there’s no need to cite it. You know there is no cite, so you feel you’ve won some kind of point by asking for it. Not everything requires a cite. If you think Civilization is possible without compromise then you’re being pretty silly. Even the most powerful men in the world have to compromise.
As to whether you want to discuss what compromise should entail, then I can understand that. That’s a different subject. Personally I think the onus should be upon the one taking the Libertarian viewpoint to prove how the status quo is wrong. The fact that you’re paying is clouding the issue because ordinarily compromise doesn’t take the form of a transaction of money. But it could. We’re more than willing to sacrifice other limited resources in the sake of compromise (free time for example), but paying money seems like stealing. It’s unfortunate that there’s no way for individuals like yourself to opt out. But that’s the nature of the beast. We offer ways to alter the rules of the societal contract. But the rule is that you have to play.
And in any case, my OP doesn’t require that Civilization be based on compromise. All I ask is that people ask for some kind of evidence when stating that “Gee things would be better if we just got the government got out of the way.” I have seen way too many arguments that use some kind of blind faith in the free market to solve all of our problems. That simply won’t do. If civilization isn’t based on compromise, it is at the very least the status quo now. I find it curious that there are very few concrete examples of it working in real life. I think that was the point of my OP.
From context, I’d say that it’s an awkward way of saying that the “rules of supply and demand” don’t much matter when the demand side is inflexible, or when the supply side has too much control over the resource.
People extolling the wonders of the free market like to talk about the rules of supply of demand, but they are less fond of another catchphrase : “What the market will bear”. The market will bear quite a lot when people have no choice but to buy from you.
They are also not fond of admitting that competition can only improve prices or services if it actually exists; the magic free market fails when people set up a monopoly or simply decide to cooperate to keep prices high.
Anyway John, I like you and I don’t have anything against your positions in general. I realize you’re making an argument because you feel it needed to be made. So lets quit going around in circles here…
You believe that the status quo is theft.
I believe that it is part of the social contract.
Your side has maybe 2 percent support
A large majority sees the utility for paying taxes for things they don’t want.
Where do we go from there? Are we really supposed to bend to the will of the tiny percent? We do have precedent for minority rights, that’s true, but how exactly do you see it being fair to those who agree with the status quo?
Can’t find a cite, but I read once that back in Clinton’s first term, a leading right-winger – not pol, one of those behind-the-scenes funding powers like Rupert Murdoch or Richard Mellon Scaife – saw UHC as the ultimate irreversible disaster for conservatism because it would open the door to an American “social democracy,” a sociopolitical environment where Americans’ expectations of what government should provide are significantly greater than they have been up to now.
So much the better, say I. Things go better in Europe – even when a conservative government is in power.
Quite often it’s the guy who won’t compromise who ends up getting his way.
Only up to a point. Unless you’re dictator, never compromising will lead to disaster, and often even then. So, yes, “compromise is required in interactions between human beings”, unless you want to spend your life in prison or live as a hermit. Because without compromise, you can’t have cooperation.
Libertarians think “cooperation” means “I’ll dump toxic waste into the stream on my property and you agree not to come after me with a shotgun when your daughter’s born with four eyes and webbed hands”.
I regard Libertarians as a good thing, though that could change if they got into positions of real power. They’re idealists, like me (I’m an anarchist). They just haven’t quite reconciled the difference between ideal and real. Now, that difference is perhaps THE sticking point of political dispute, but I like that Libertarians raise points for debate, and sometimes good points.
I wish people would learn something about Libertarianism before posting about it. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread, but we go thru that with pretty much every thread on the subject.
At any rate, Libertarians put freedom first and foremost, and eschew coercion. The problem with that philosophy is that it does not sync up with human nature. Yes, most of us desire a good deal of freedom, but most of us also desire a certain amount of security. And I don’t mean just security in the sense of cops and military-- I mean security in terms of a social safety net. The key is to find the right balance, and on that there is much debate.
Libertarianism is not about not caring if people suffer, which all of us do to a large degree, btw. There is all kinds of suffering going on in the world right now, and most of us aren’t doing much of anything about it. Libertarianism is about not forcing Peter to pay Paul. But if Peter wants to pay Paul, more power to him.
Welcome to the party, comrade! Next meeting 9 PM next sunday at your place. I’ll bring the Vodka.
No, it’s government coercion they have a problem with. Mostly, I suspect, because that nasty old government prevents them from exploiting and abusing people as much as they’d like, and because it expects them to actually contribute to the society they live off of. They have no problem with, say, economic fraud or coercion; the fact that that can create just as much suffering and death as any army doesn’t matter to them.
That is exactly what it’s about. These are the people who think letting other people starve to death or be poisoned by bad food or medicine is a virtue.
But the demand side for those things isn’t necessarily inflexible. Your demand for water is in fact highly flexible, if you’re like most Americans; you use vastly more water than you really need to, largely because the marginal cost to you is nonexistent or tiny.
If the price of water were to become substantial, you’d use less of it. You can’t go below the basic amount necessary to sustain life, but you’d shower less, load the washer more, be more conscious of water usage in other area. And if the metered price at your house goes too high you’ll stop using it and buy bottled water.
That’s absolutely, unquestionably true. But the laws of supply and demand still apply. You’re just pointing out that the demand for some things at some points is inelastic.
Thing is, you DO need water. Create a totally unregulated free market, and you’d have the suppliers jacking the price up until most people could barely get what they need to live, and quite a few would die of thirst. And getting bottled water probably wouldn’t work either, since either it would be supplied by the same company at the same price, or they’d cooperate to keep the price high. And, of course, there’s the question of just how drinkable that water would be without the government watching over it.
One of the flaws of free market fundamentalism is it treats businesses as mindless. I think that it’s a matter of taking the evolutionary metaphor for the market too far, and treating competitors like genes, which are mindless. Libertarians and people with similar the-market-will-solve-everything-if-left-alone attitudes seem to consider it unthinkable that anyone besides the government would be able or willing to manipulate the market for their own benefit. They assume that people and corporations will relentlessly compete, and never, ever decide that it would be more profitable to get together, control the whole supply of whatever they sell, and crank up the price.
The notion that Libertarians believe that the free market will provide for everyone is a straw man. No libertarian I know believes that.
What we believe is that we live in a world of scarcity. Not everyone can have everything they want. So given that things are scarce, what’s the best way to allocate it? One way is to have a bunch of supposedly bright people sit in a room and plan out the economy and direct it from the top down to make sure it works for everyone. The other is to allow people to make the determination for themselves by freely trading with each other and working to build things that other people are willing to pay them for.
The Liberal’s faith in the ability of government simply astounds me. You are always claiming that Libertarians have ‘faith’ in the market, yet you’re always ready to vote for the man with a plan who, if you’ll just give him a lot of power, will fix everything. And you get suckered every time. The ‘war on poverty’ has been going on for 50 years, and the only poverty that has been alleviated during that time was due to the rise in the economy because of the free market.
Governments claim to have a plan to manage health care, but when you look at the things they already attempt to manage, it amazes me that you’d let them borrow your car, let alone decide what kind of medical treatment your mother should have. These are the clowns who build $233 million dollar bridges to nowhere while New Orleans levees crumble. They’re the ones who manage pension funds in ways that would get them thrown in jail were they in the private sector. The public school system they manage is a joke. Kids got better educations when they were taught in one-room shacks by young girls.
In countries where governments have run other parts of the economy, they’ve done equally disastrous jobs. Old Europe is a fiscal and political wreck with low growth. France and Germany have double digit inflation, ridiculous taxes and regulations, and public debts that make the Americans look like misers. Europe has fallen way behind the U.S. in standard of living. Japan’s highly managed economy is a basket case. Their public debt is six times higher than the U.S.'s as a percentage of GDP.
Canada has a public health care system built on the same arrogance - that central planning can outperform the market. I just read an article in the paper today that the waiting list for a diagnosis after a positive screening of breast cancer in Manitoba is now 6.8 weeks. Can you imagine? Your blood work comes back with a positive marker for cancer, and you can’t even get scheduled to see a doctor about it for 6.8 weeks.
Libertarians point to the endless string of government failures. But Liberals never blame government - it’s always the people. This time, by God, we’ve found someone smart enough to do it. All you have to do is believe in Change, right?
The fact is, there are solid reasons why central planning can never work. The primary one is that there is just too much information flow in a real economy. It simply can’t be managed from on top. And also, some of the information just isn’t available without a free market, because choices are required before people are going to think about them. If you just ask ten carpenters if they need new hammers, all ten will say yes. Maybe they even believe it - It’s easy to justify pork. Hey, free hammer. It’s not until you make them choose between having the hammer or having a pair of pants that they really have to sort out what they value and what they need the most.
The market forces all of us to make choices, to rank the things we need by value, then to spend our money accordingly. It makes us work to get what we want. It forces us to cooperate with each other. The monetary system ensures that information flows directly to those who need it through price signals. Prices provide feedback and are inherently stabilizing, because when scarcity changes, prices fluctuate to reflect reality, and people get the information they need to choose new resources. It is a positive force that binds people together through common interest.
Politics is a force that puts people into opposing camps, where they vote to see which camp gets to dictate to the other. It breeds animosity and hatred. Governments go to war. Countries that trade freely with each other don’t.
Governments have groups of people sit in committees, listen to a handful of experts with big ideas parade by, then write thousands of pages of regulations and force it on the public at the point of a gun. For their own good. They cannot hope to compete. And that’s the ideal vision of government. In the real world, politicians collect cheques from special interests, then get together and horsetrade away the rights of the people in favor of their special interests who keep them in funding to keep them in their powerful jobs.
The ‘bridge to nowhere’ Senator from Alaska just slipped a huge earmark into a bill having to do with Florida. People wondered why a Senator from Alaska would care about a Florida bill - of course it turns out that a Florida contractor who will benefit from the earmark contributed $40,000 to his campaign. That’s government in the real world. And you want them making your health care choices for you.
Liberals tend to think a market is a failure if it doesn’t achieve the social outcome they personally believe is desirable. In other words, they are imposing their values on the market, then changing it by force if it doesn’t provide. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that perhaps there is social inequality because people are not identical robots, and that attempts to force equality without damaging the economy in the process are nothing less than a denial of reality. And in the end, the equality of outcome they seek will only be achieved through a general lowering of the standard of living for all, or higher costs for the same products, or constant series of gluts and shortages as central planners attempt to manage the economy from on high. Oh, and by taking away people’s freedom to choose for themselves.
I don’t need to have ‘faith’ in the market. The results of it are all around me. And all around you. Just look around your room for a minute. Look at the computer you’re using. Think about the thousands of people, maybe millions of people who had to cooperate with each other to make it. Software Developers in India. Chip manufacturers in California. Motherboard makers in Japan. The people who made the tools to mine the gold used to coat some of your connections. The people who built the transportation networks, warehouses, and sales forces to move these products to the people who need them. All of these people found each other and got the information needed to know what to build and in what quantity and where to send it so that it could all come together and become a computer. It’s a self-organizing organic ecosystem of astounding complexity. Mess with it at your peril.
Every mundane thing in your room has a similar story to tell. And think of how fast and efficiently information flows. Think about how the market has reacted to the rise in price of gasoline, and compare it to the government’s reaction. SUV sales are down 14%. Sales of hybrid cars spike. There is massive sudden investment in oil exploration and alternative energy research. Airlines are mothballing their least fuel-efficient jets. The price of goods that have high energy components in them go up, giving a market advantage to lower-energy alternatives. I don’t even have to know why product A went up in price. The price system transmitted to the essence of the problem without having to give me any details. But the result is the same - a move to lower-energy products.
This starts happening immediately.
During the same period, what has government done? Let’s see… they passed a CAFE law that perversely rewards people for building bigger vehicles. They used the energy crisis as a way to justify giving their big agri-business donors a huge chunk of pork in teh form of ethanol subsidies, which has had the effect of driving up the cost of food for poor people driven up the deficit, depressed the economy in other areas, and not done a damned thing for the energy crisis.
Oh, and they hauled some oil execs up in front of a kangaroo court and berated them for having the audacity to provide oil to people for a profit.
This is the kind of reaction you can expect when your government health care program starts to hit the rocks.
This does not mean that markets are perfect. Markets flourish when people are free to trade, but that freedom can be interrupted not just by government, but through market failures, corruption, fraud, and external threats. You need government to set up the playing field so that prices can work. That means regulations occasionally to correct true market failures, and taxes sufficient to pay for the proper functions of government. But government should aways seek to interfere in the least possible way, because even when it’s necessary, it still sucks.
Not unless you somehow managed to corner the entire market on water it wouldn’t. Unregulated free market would mean that I could simply create my own water company, undercut your prices structure and steal your customers and your market share.
I wouldn’t be doing this out of any sympathy for your poor thirsty customers (in point of fact I WOULD actually care about that, but this is business)…I’d be doing it because stealing your customers means I make more money.
And if my price was also to high? Well, maybe Sam Stone would found a company who undercut us both and stole all our combined customers.
Why exactly should I cooperate with your water company? You have the majority of the market. Well, I WANT your customers to be MY customers. I’m not going to do that unless I go after them by lowering my prices. At that point you could lower your prices to of course…or face the fact that I now have the majority of your customers and a large percentage of your market share. Why should Sam cooperate with either of us?
(well, there is a question as to how great it is if the government is watching out for that matter…but it’s a good point)
Here is the thing. Say that you, I and Sam have those competing water companies. Lets say you get your water right out of a river near your plant and simply bottle it up as is and ship it out. Myself, being the greedy capitalist type, I get my water from the city pipes. Sam on the other hand has access to a mountain stream AND he has this idea that he can filter the water to improve taste, clarity, color and overall drinking appeal.
Sam sells his water for $1.50/bottle while you sell your’s for $1.25 and I sell mine for $1.00. Sam’s water obviously tastes and looks best. Your water has a funny smell and there have been a few reported cases of illness after drinking it. My water has a distinctly nasty look and smell and tastes horrible…and there have been many reports of serious illness and even a few deaths from drinking it.
Here we are in an unregulated free market. How’s water will you buy?
I agree with some of what you are saying here. Where I agree is that utopia types always see the world through rose colored glasses. The market completely left along and completely unregulated would degenerate into the guy or corporation with the biggest gun. I could certainly see corporations allying themselves with like minded corporations and having out and out wars for market share This is the part that the true blood Libertarian types never seem to contemplate…the stability of the free market rests on the power of the collective to protect it from force…and that collective power stems from a federal government. Without that it would be mob rule with the strongest controlling things and keeping the weaker ones down.
-XT
I would argue that Libertarianism hasn’t been tried. Take education-we spen MORE perpupil than any other country, and get the worts results. Do we ever evaluate this and maybe do away with coercive education? No! We spend MORE money(and get worse results). The forces protecting big government are HUGE-and these people don’t want to give up power. I predict we will end by spending more and more, and get less and less.
So, libertarian ideas are fine-but forget about implementing them.
That depends on two things: Consumer knowledge, and access to choice. If you were to manage to create a regional monopoly (say you got every retailer in Pennsylvania to only sell your water), then there’s no access to choice. Similarly, if consumers don’t have perfect information flow about the problems with your respective products, then they don’t KNOW that there are problems. So Mabel down the street got sick and died. How horrible. Oh, look! The paper you also own has a front-page article about whether or not David Archuleta III is going to win American Idol 2035. Hmm…nothing in here about bad bottled water…
Garbage. The free market approach was tried; the result was the Great Depression. The old and the poor these days aren’t reduced to eating dog food - or bark, or grass - or starving. The libertarian “let them suffer it’s for their own good” “solution” to poverty never works. It’s not a matter of having faith in government; it’s a matter of not seeing any reason to believe that any other solution actually exists that can even come close to doing as well.
That’s what happens when you put people who oppose government aid in charge of government aid. They want it to fail, and they are evil, so of course the result is disaster.
No, they didn’t. Quite often, they got nothing at all.
Better than for the people here who wouldn’t get any care at all.
But not the much larger string of government successes.
Yes, that’s why Germany would never attack France, their major trading partner, in WWII.
Yeah, that’s right ! Damn that liberal bastard Lincoln and his interfering with the free market ! If slavery was bad, the free market would’ve gotten rid of it !
Or in other words, the market isn’t a moral force. Sometimes, quite often in fact, doing evil is profitable. And if stopping evil requires interfering with the market, that’s too damned bad for the market.
No, you couldn’t. That sounds nice in theory, but in reality the big corporation/corporate alliance can always afford to undercut your prices long enough to drive you under.
Because I can lower my prices far enough, long enough to drive you and Sam out of business because I’m just that much richer than you if you try - OR you can cooperate with me and get part of the profits.
Well, too bad I decided Sam’s mountain stream looked like a good place to dump some toxic waste upstream of his property. Maybe if the government still had environmental regulations he could’ve stopped me. And out of the generosity of my heart, I think I’ll lower my price to 50 cents - at least until you go out of business.
One of the biggest problems with an unregulated society is that it essentially guarantees that the nastiest, most powerful, and the most ruthless people will win. It’s as if you legalized murder and theft; the end result would be that those who were most willing to kill and steal would become the wealthiest. Now, that doesn’t mean we have to go Communist and have a Five Year Plan; there’s a huge grey area between the government owning everything and economic anarchy. But I really, really can’t see any true unregulated market being anything other than a disaster; probably worse than Communism if it was somehow sustained. Just as even Communism is better than sustained outright anarchy; I don’t see economic anarchy as any better than any other kind.
Big if. There’s a reason that radical government-property economic models have survived long enough to outlive their founders, and that radical free market economies have never resulted in anything other than complete, utter misery and anarchy.