But this has been addressed. First of all some of the “abuses that so many fear” are not really abuses in any meaningful sense. The fact that one person gets much richer than another is not in and of itself an abuse of anything or anyone. Secondly, by removing the need for businesses to coopt governmental functions to defend themselves, attack their competitors, and or expand their markets, many of the other “abuses that so many fear” become impossible.
I must appologize if this answer seems vague, but the phrase “abuses that so many fear” is too vague to answer more specifically. Perhaps you could be more specific.
No, we are not. John Mace (although certainly able to defend his thesis without me) was talking about those vague abuses again. The idea is not who killed more people in absolute terms. The question was regarding abuses of position. That is, perhaps the statement could be rephrased “Governments have killed more people (or done more harm in general) through abuses or misuse of their power than businesses have ever done.” The point being that governments have a far greater capacity for harm than businesses do. The point of this, being that granting more power to the government (and thus more capacity for harm) in order to curb the abuses of business when the abuses of business are hardly more dangerous than abuses by government seems illogical. (That sentence is not easy to follow, sorry)
-Removal of minimum wage, so that whereas now one person may work full time to pay rent in a shitbox, it will take 10 people living together and sleeping on the floor to afford the same place.
-Removing OSHA laws, creating a hazardous environment for workers.
-Removal of usury laws.
-Removal of the 40 hour work week, essentially forcing workers to work 16 hour days just to make ends meet.
-Removal of product safety standards.
-Removal of employee harrassment laws.
That’s not a complete list, but it will work for starters. In case you think such things will never happen, I remind you that they already have. You and others have said that such things will never happen in a lib’ian society. With no government regulation, I’m asking how.
For this, you have the same problem you mentioned above. You have to prove that Ajax is putting enough chemicals into the air/soil/water to have an effect on the value of your property. Nearly everything produces some sort of pollution, from your neighbor’s new top-of-the-line hybrid car, to the factory down the street billowing out smoke. These are at the two extreme ends of the scale, but where is the line drawn between something that pollutes sufficiently to be dangerous/cause property damage, and the level of polution that is considered safe? If the court decides that X level is safe, and Ajax stays below that level of production, don’t they still have a defence in court?
I’m not sure that you have demonstrated that removal of the minimum wage will necessitate 10 people living in the same home to support themselves. Certainly that could happen. Probably will in some cases. I’m sure it happens now with minimum wage laws and all. The question is really about whether or not this will happen on a larger or smaller scale with or without minimum wage laws.
I understand that trickle down economics is not fashionable. But there is still some cache for the idea that putting money to the most efficient use is better over all for the economy. Allowing services to be paid what they are worth is the most efficient use of money. Of course, the libertarian argument has little to do with whether or not money is used in the most efficient manner. That argument would center on the concept that the money being paid and the service being offered are teh private property of those involved. The government has no business forcing one to pay more (or the other to work less).
But your question is about “abuses that so many fear”. It is not clear to me how earning only the amount that my employer is willing to pay me for a job amounts to an abuse. If you could, would you expand on this point?
I’m not entirely sure how removing OSHA laws would “create” hazardous environment for workers. Would workers not be able to sue for compensation due to an employers negligence? Would companies not have to take resonable precautions against such liability? As far as I know, OSHA creates rules that companies must follow. It performs inspections and investigations. It imposes penalties. I’m not sure how disbanding it would “create” hazardous environments. Perhaps you mean that removing OSHA would allow hazardous environments to be permissible?
I’m not at all sure what “abuse that many fear” you are refering to here. I assume that you are fearful that banks will charge far too much for credit if the usary laws are removed?
Well, again, I’m not at all sure how removing the mandatory 40 hour work week will force workers to work 16 hour days. If you can earn a living with 40 hours a week, why would your employer suddenly require you to work 112 hours a week (I assume that you fear the repeal of weekends as well)?
Well, this seems similar to the OSHA complaint above. Do you really think the corporations are simply chomping at the bit to produce dangerous products? I’m not at all sure what “abuses” you are afraid of here.
Well, now here is an interesting one. Which harassment laws are you reffering to?
Again, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “such things will never happen”. You have listed some laws that some libertarians want to repeal or at least lessen. But I really don’t see a list of “abuse that many fear”.
I hope I have addressed some of the items on your list. I fear that I have not. I fear that you meant something else entirely by many of them than I understood. We might be able to facilitate this discussion if we could arrive at a more understandable use of the phrase “abuses that many fear”. If you could rephrase your list in terms of abuses rather than current laws, it might help.
Yes. But only in the context of that one case. The difference is that you have a specific case where the damged party has specific rights to input arguments and evidence vs a bureaucrat deciding a level that applies to the whole country and a damaged party has to overcome this in order to have any standing at all.
Additionally, if that level of pollution is later determined to be harmful by legaly acceptable evidence, then Ajax is liable. They cannot say as a defence that they were “following the law of the time”.
However, my only point was that the standard of proof in property liability cases is much lower than it is in murder cases. I was really only responding to the idea that libertarians would require proof that a specific company killed a specific person in order for any penalties to be imposed.
This is pretty disturbing. Ajax may be killing people, but you’re saying that the only thing we can ding them for is the value of someone’s property?
Bear with me a minute.
I live on some land near Ajax’s factory, let’s say. I rent the land, as do a hundred other people nearby on their plots of land. I’m no lawyer, and the contract I have with the landowner isn’t real specific.
Ajax dumps PCBs onto their land, and twenty years later, the pancreatic cancer rates in the surrounding community has risen by 500%. Lab tests show that PCB levels can cause pancreatic cancer. I’ve now got pancreatic cancer.
I spend a bunch of money to have “my” well tested for PCBs (“my” well because it really belongs to my landlord), and it comes up positive.
What recourse do I have? Against what person or organization?
How does this change if I own the crappy piece of land I live on?
How does this change if their pollution is airborne, and therefore not part of anyone’s property–or does a libertarian society sell the air?
This is true; I’m not saying our current system is perfect. It’s just a helluva lot better than what we’d have under any libertarian model I’ve heard about.
I confess I don’t get this point. Are you conceding, then, that under a libertarian system it’d be just about impossible to rake a corporation over the coals for polluting the property of poor people?
Note that when I say the current system is imperfect, I mean it. Specifically I’d like to see corporate shield laws and corporate personhood laws abolished. If Sam Smithers, head of Ajax, makes the decision to dump PCBs, and if someone provably dies from it, I’d like to see Sam go down for murder in the first. Forget lawsuits: let’s see some real justice for such crimes.
No. I am simply suggesting that, contrary to your point that proving harm can be difficult, it does not have to constitute the high standards of criminal justice proofs. That is, damage to property can be shown to be damaged without necessarily proving that a specific case of cancer resulted from a specific instance of pollution.
I agree, conditionally, with this. I think that corporations should not be considered persons. I also agree that some of the liability shield laws are archaic and should be removed. However, I would add, that if you are going to punish an individual for murder, you have to show specific actions which caused a specific death. And if you are going to charge first degree, then you have to be able to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” an intent to kill. Otherwise, I agree. I seriously doubt that tobacco executives would have lied so vociferously if they had known they could be personally held liable for the deaths resulting from the use of their products.
No. I was making a point that you do not have to prove murder to enforce justice. I did not mean to say that the value of the property would limit the liability of Ajax. Remember there are such things as punitive damages as well.
Well, it seems that you have recourse against your landlord and the company who polluted your well.
Well, you no longer have recourse against your landlord.
I don’t think it does change at all. Except that you’d have to be able to prove that breathed as opposed to ingested PCBs can cause the cancer you have. Additionally, you’d probably have a more broad claim due to the fact that air potentially covers more of your property than your well.
If I may suggest, and I don’t mean this with any disrespect at all, that may be because you have not heard good arguments in favor of libertarian principles. My posts certainly do not count in this regard.
Ok, I was trying to understand the question you posed. I took your statement to mean that you wanted control over the actions of a company even if you had no interaction with them.
Pervert, I’m not sure why you don’t get the phrase “abuses that so many fear.” But let me try to define it better: Back in the “good old days”, children were made to work 12+ hour days in toxic factories for mere pennies. Those that complained were fired on the spot, and they had no recourse. Women could be asked to play a little game of slap-and-tickle with the boss, and if they refused, they could face demotions, firings, or other reprisals. Food manufacturers were held to no standards at all, and consumers were getting sick right and left. Workplaces often had no fire egresses, no emergency plans, etc. Yes, one can say that people had a choice to not work in those places, and not buy that food, but one would be wrong. When the only jobs available were such as I described, the only choice was work under such conditions or starve. That’s not much of a choice.
One has only to look back at the good old days when there was no minimum wage. That vast majority of people worked long hours for small pay, and 12 to a room living was common. “They could have looked for better jobs”, to be sure, but in those days factory jobs were all that could be had, and lines for employment usually stretched around the block. In theory, choice. In reality, workers were stuck with whatever meager earnings employers deemed to part with.
Yes. And many employers will remove whatever safety precautions they can in order to make a few more bucks. Are you OK with this?
I’m not even sure why I put that in. Ignore it.
Maybe you’ve had a much better work history than I have, but every place I’ve worked I could not pick and choose my own hours at my leisure. When a boss says work X hours or lose your job, you work X hours or you are unemployed. Once again, one only has to look at the past to see that long work hours were the norm. Teh 40 hour work week was instituted to prevent the sorts of abuses that all employers engaged in.
Chomping at the bit to produce dangerous products? No, but chomping at the bit to produce products cheaply. Once again, look at history. Read Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” Hell, look at laws that prohibit the sale of flamable toys. The reason that laws were passed to protect consumers was precisely because manufacturers were not doing so.
Uh, well, many, but let’s take sexual harassment as an example.
Really? Which of the above would you repeal or lessen? (Other than the minimum wage thing – you’ve addressed that and it seems there’s no convincing you.)
I’m not sure how I could be more plain.
Let’s focus on one example: The Triangle Garment Factory fire. There were no fire safety precautions in that building. According to lib’ism, was that a good thing?
I’ll second this. I forget whether it was in this thread, or the other one in the Pit, but I asked the question earlier about many of the laws that Libertarians find unnecessary, excessive, etc. They were put into law to address the needs of the electorate. Assuming we began at day #1 of Libertopia, what’s to stop these laws from being voted back within a generation?
I’m sorry, but being a ‘rugged individual’ is not that attractive an option if it means having to negotiate a minefield of unregulated food, water, air, etc.
I misunderstood your point when I posted this; my apologies. My original point, however, remains: how do you prove that Ajax initiated force or fraud against you when they gave you cancer? After all, maybe they didn’t give you cancer; the only epidemiological certainty is that they gave it to somebody.
Because so many people use the word abuse to mean things that I don’t think are abuses. So I often find myself confused as to what a person means. Thank you for listing a couple things.
The history of child labor is long and complex. It is fallacious to claim that the only causes were greedy corporate fat cats. I assume that is what you are asserting.
This continues to this day, although it is ostensibly unlegal. I’m not sure that a libertarian argument against harassment cannot be made. If an employer were to change the scope of employment unreasonably, I’m not sure that libertarians (some of them anyway) would oppose some sort of redress by such an employee. The objection against sexual harassment laws has much more to do with the abuses by the government. I’m sure you’ve heard of the 6 year olds put out of school for kissing a girl.
Well, I don’t want to ask for a cite, but it seems to me that people were getting regularly less and less sick. At least as measured by life expentancy. That was increasing long before any FDA type organizations were in place. Secondly, I think it is entirely false to suggest that food manufacturers were held to "no standards at all". Certainly they were subject to the same laws that individuals were. If not, can you really claim this was a failure of the market? Perhaps you meant that food manufacturers were not subject to government inspections, which is another thing altogether.
Yes. This changed as people became aware of the needs inherent in working in larger buildings and as they developed new methods to deal with those needs. The situation was addressed legally in some cases, and privately in others.
But also you have to look at the fact that minimum wage laws did not change many of the things you mention. When jobs are hard to come by, they are hard to come by. Forcing companies to pay more than they are willing to pay will not change this.
On another note, I’m not sure why you keep saying “the good old days”. Have I said that we need to revert to the legal, social, or economic models used in some bygone era?
Some would. They would find themselves quickly in trouble, IMHO. How many stories about such places of employment would be necessary to shut down a company? Seriously, get one story with pictures showing a company trucking out the fire sprinklers, or removing the fire escapes from a building and that company would have serious problems. Perhaps you are not aware of how paranoid many companies are about bad publicity?
Again, you use the word abuses in a way I do not fully understand. Also, I think you are mistaken about the history of the mandatory 40 hour work week. I recall that its main purpose was to increase the total number of jobs. Perhaps that is only the purpose I remember.
I disagree to an extent. Laws were passed based on over reactions and popular sentiment. Very rarely were they considered carefully and passed with all due caution. They were passed in part because politicians agitated for more power over companies (the more value to sell in some cases). They were passed in part due to agitation by newspapers inflaming their readers in order to sell papers. And, yes, they were passed because tragedies happened. It is somewhat disengenuous, however, to claim that corporations were at some point in the past abusing everyone and only the benign hand of government was able to rein them in.
As I indicated above, I think I could make a coherent argument in favor of making sexual harassment illegal. As long as we are talking about real sexual harassment. That is forcing sexual advances on an unwilling victim with the threat of economic hardship. I’m not sure I can support the idea of an “unfriendly workplace environment”. I’m pretty sure I cannot support the idea that the vicitm’s angst is the final arbiter of what constitutes sexual harassment.
Your first paragraph did wonders. Thank you. I appologize if I have seemed obtuse. I have made assumptions on this subject before only to be caught unawares with the whole property is theft cannard.
I’m not sure exactly what you are asking. Are you suggesting that libertarians might think the 147 deaths in that fire were a good thing? Are you suggesting that libertarians might think that the absense of reasonable fire precations is a good thing?
Forgive me, but you seem to have the notion that most if not all companies are irresponsible people intent on doing as much harm as possible. This is simply not true. It is true that many things were unpalatable in the past. One of them was the common working conditions that newly arrived imigrants found themselves in. But these working conditions were not somehow foisted on an unsuspecting workforce by greedy corporate fatcats. They were certainly not so foisted despite the well intentioned work of government bureaucrats. The history of working conditions in America (and the west in general) is a complex subject not well translated into the soundbites commonly found in high school history courses.
OK, so what happens when you start getting back into trusts and monoplies? What happens when the corporations are so strong their legal muscle makes them invulnerable?
Well, but according to your hypothetical, they demonstrably polluted your well. Certailny this led to a measurable increase in your risk for that particular cancer. You may not be able to prove that Ajax gave you cancer in the “beyond reasonable doubt” sense. But you could certainly prove it in the “preponderance of evidence” sense.
I’m not a lawyer. But I think that the principle of initiation of force includes concepts like property damage, trespassing, and other things which imply that reducing the value, decreasing the safety, or otherwise harming the home of a particular person (or a group of people as seems much more likely in the hypothetical you posed) constitutes an initiation of force.
I hope I have addressed your question. I’m starting to get confused with multiple conversations going at the same time. Perhaps I will bow out for a couple hours.
It should be fairly obvious to all that, if the regulations governing workplace safety were eliminated, some businesses would trade their workers’ health for a few extra bucks. Businesses like to make money, and an unsafe workplace is quite often cheaper than a safe workplace.
But would the workers have any recourse? Some here have argued yes, but according to certain libertarian worldviews, this is not necessarily true.
A contract for employment could easily stipulate that a worker is employed at the worker’s own risk. A guy loses his arm at work, sues for negligence, and a libertarian court would rule, rightly, that the worker entered the contract freely and has no legal recourse.
Some libertarian purists have argued that this is a fine and dandy thing (though I haven’t yet seen this argument in this thread). Do any of you actually believe that?
If not, then you favor at least some regulation, which is where I am. I am strongly sympathetic to libism, but in its distilled form, it would often sacrifice the safety of the little guy in favor of the big guy’s wallet. Society shouldn’t protect a nonexistant ideal of freedom just to let a business sacrifice a few precautions to cut costs.
I share the concern about an out-of-control bureaucracy, but if the more prominent libs in this world were of a more moderate disposition, favoring fewer, better regulations instead of an elimination of regulation, I truly believe they would receive more popular support, perhaps even enough to stop the continual expansion of the federal government which occurs under both major parties.
Maybe that’s my own naivete speaking. But then again, maybe it’s an accurate perception of our current situation.
I must confess to having a fairly strong Libertarian streak- I find little to disagree with on a philosophical level. But I am also a pragmatist. The main problem I have with Libertarianism is that it simply fails to take human nature into account.
A large portion of landlords and potential employers are simply greedy bastards who, without the force of law to restrain them, would screw anyone and everyone they could over to make a buck.
As much as I would love to be able to hang my shiny new Certificate of Completion on a wall of a room and start doing massage, I recognize that there are a lot of people out there who would set themselves up as massage therapists without the proper training and necessary knowledge of pathology and anatomy, and of conditions that contraindicate massage, and do a lot of harm to a lot of people, hence the need for licensing.
I do think libertarianism on a mass scale would be somewhat of a more viable option if it weren’t for the fact that much of American (and indeed, world) commerce is dominated by a handful of mega-corporations which, if deregulated, could, and most likely would, conspire to drive down wage scales by creating artificial job shortages. The evil part of my brain strongly suspects that they are doing this already. Wal-Mart, for example, already deliberately short-staffs their stores to save money. Probably not doing it deliberately to make jobs scarce, they’re just too cheap to pay for enough staff to meet the needs of their customers. But, they are America’s single biggest employer right now, and as such, do have it in their power to shut down a few stores, which would throw a couple of thousand people out of work- devastating to a small community.
If the economy were more oriented toward, and favorable to, small business instead of big corporations that have multiple layers of management each requiring six, seven, and eight figure salaries, then I think it likely that prices of goods and services would come down enough that even if there were no minimum wage, people could still afford them. Of course, that would also assume that apartment complexes were owned by small entrepenuers, instead of big corporations with the aforementioned layers of management. Rents might just decrease. A small, local businessperson would most likely price his goods and services (including home rent) at a rate the people in his local community could afford because it would be in his interests to do so. A small, locally based businessman might also find it in his interest to pay employees a living wage because another business might just be competing with him for those workers. Thus if the guy you hired to dip solder spliced wires in a period of a few years learns to run every machine in the shop, and has enough mechanical savvy that he can figure out how to repair more than one or two of them, his employer might just see him as a valuable asset and give him a healthy raise in pay so that he won’t go looking for a job at the other wiring-harness assembly plant across town. If the plant is owned by a company located in Fargo, North Dakota, then the bosses there would be more inclined to think, “Goody for us,” and continue to pay him six bucks an hour, knowing that the corporate-owned assembly plant across town would pay him about the same.
That’s pretty much the way I see things, too. I’d like to see us move, slowly, toward a more libertarian society, but you have to be prepared to stop or pull back if the theory doesn’t translate well into reality. As I said earlier in this thread, there are government solutions that are more libertarian and less libertarian, and I think we should try the former before just ditching the whole process.
2 small problems. Unsafe workplaces are not often cheaper than safe ones. They can be, but only in ceratin circumstances. In general it is much cheaper to keep workers alive and healthy. Secondly, I’d point out that some businesses ignore safety dispite the current regulations. In some cases this seems to be lazyness on the part of the business and the employee. Go through this list of penalties from OSHA and you’ll see cases where workers did not tie off while working on a scafold and sat on the back of a moving truck with large signs amongst others. Now certainly this sort of thing would occur at least as often if OSHA were disbanded. But is it really certain that a significant number of businesses would dismantle their safety apperatus?
Do you believe that the government should deny me the right to enter into such a contract? Even if I do so with a full understanding of the risks involved? Seriously, I can understand the argument that many people would not understand the risks of a given job. But if I did understand them and still choose to accept them, do you think I should be punished in some way? If the business has done something wrong in your hypothetical, why has the employee not?
How about if OSHA were to make it impossible to work from home? Where would you draw the line? If freedom is a nonexistant ideal, what would you say it was worth?
Now, this I agree with entirely. This is the primary reason I am not a member of the Libertarian party. They tend to advocate policies which have no reasonable chance of passing. Though part of their craziness is due to the fact that they are a third party in a 2 party system. Part of it is because the party is made up of the truly fanatical adherents to the ideals. That is, they are not merely sympathetic to it, they are devoted to it and are unwilling to comprimise many of its premises in order to gain power.
Personally, I think that many of the libertarian ideals should only be implemented in very cautious ways. I much prefer the ideal of a smaller government, but acknowledge that America is not exactly falling apart at the seams. In the absence of drastic circumstance I would not favor drastic actions. Luckily for me posting to SDMB is not considered (by most) to be drastic actions. So I can advocate all sorts of things.
Maybe that’s my own naivete speaking. But then again, maybe it’s an accurate perception of our current situation.
[/QUOTE]
There are many reasons for this. One, of course is that larger entities are able to profit from efficiencies of size. But another one is that larger companies are more able to afford to adhere to some of the regulations we are discussing here. If it could be shown that the growth of the mega corporations are due more to the influence of governments than to economic efficencies, would you have the same opinion of them? What if the reverse were true? That is, what if it could be shown that virtually all mega corporations are so large merely because they produce the best product in their industry?
I recall from history that one of the reasons that the meat packing industry in Chicago acceeded to regulation was that the large producers knew that the smaller operators would not be able to afford to. That is, one of the reasons the safety regulations were instituted in the first place was that some of the larger operators knew they could use them to bludgeon some of their competition out of existence.
