Yes, Amith and Jones give up some small personal freedoms for the greater good of society which is stable, and in which they can live without needing to strap on a gun to go to the grocery store. What a rotten deal!
How the hell do you deduce mass murder from my previous post?
You have yet to show why, if the “greater good” of every individual is fulfilled, it will not fulfill the “greater good” of the society, which, after all is merely the aggregate of the individuals in it.
If you already have your mind set on what the society will be, and then based on that, force individuals to conform, then, yes, the “greater good” of the society might (and usually will) conflict with the “greater good” of the individuals in it.
Is that what scares you, that society might turn out different from how you had schemed it should be? Because I fail to see why people would need to strap on guns to go to the grocery store when their government guarantees them a context of peace and honesty. I think it is disingenuous of you to hold up your own society of political expedience and moral chaos as a libertarian one.
I suggested that, were you to apply the Categorical Imperative, you should kill off everyone else, because you cannot stand them making decisions for themselves. It upsets your preconceived notion of how the society should be. You want to make their decisions for them, or else elect people who will.
Lib:
If you think that any society can fulfill the greater good of every individual in it, than more power to you. I haven’t shown why this idea would not fulfill the “greater good” of society because I haven’t been asked yet.
The short answer is because attempting to fulfill the “greater good” of every individual in a society is a stupid idea, and can’t be done. This idea has less substance behind it than the freedom budget for chrissakes!
If it’s in the best interests of 50% of the people to build a road and in the best interests of 50% of the people not to build a road, than how do you anticipate you will fulfill the greater good of every individual.
Jesus Christ! You claim to be a logician! You’re obviously smart and a talented debater. How the hell do you go about espousing these crackpot ideas without the slightest shred of evidence or even a modicum of thought behind them? Why do you refuse to see the flaws inherent in your ideas or even acknowledge their existence.
You gave me that freaking link to the Cato institute that had absolutely nothing to do with the issues at hand. I took the time to wade through that garbage on the assumption that there was something pertinent to the discussion in there. Did you even bother to read those articles yourself?
The reason your Libertarian society will not work is because it is simplistic, empty-headed, and does not accurately reflect or address conditions in the real world. A society based on the self-interest of individuals will produce nothing but self-interested individuals. By definition that is not a society.
You once said that Libertarianism was not a philosophy for lifeboats. Well, a certain portion of society at large is always in a “lifeboat,” is always desperate. Individuals rights will always conflict.
What world do you live in that you don’t realize these things?
Lib, I think this is an issue on which peaceful honest people might disagree. 
Poly
Of course, Libertaria is the only place where they may do so. Not do so in theory, like a rape victim having a “right” to yell, “Stop!” (some right, huh? :rolleyes but to do so in reality, free from the coercion and fraud of rapists and all other tyrants.
Scylla
By “portions of society”, do you mean people?
Yes, some people are in lifeboats sometimes. But that doesn’t mean rights conflict. The only one with rights to a lifeboat is whoever owns it. What I meant by saying that libertarianism is not a philosophy for lifeboats is that it will not solve your problems for you, as other philsophies pretend to do. Marxism will guarantee you a minimal material comfort. Libertarianism will guarantee you nothing but freedom. To sail. Or to sink. But only by your own hand or nature.
Lib:
What portion of society is not People?
Do you have a problem with synonyms?
Lib said:
“Yes, some people are in lifeboats sometimes. But that doesn’t mean rights conflict. The
only one with rights to a lifeboat is whoever owns it.”
Tell that to the person who watches the strongest member of the lifeboat keep all the water for himself!
So if it’s my lifeboat I can throw you overboard if I want?
I guess this guarantees your freedom to be eaten by sharks or drown.
How do these things not conflict?
I fail to see how Libertarianism gives freedom. I thought that was something you had to take for yourself. As far as I can see, the only thing Libertarianism provides is the means for the strong to have their way with the weak.
Based on my experience with human beings, which is probably a fairly typical mix of good and bad, I think a little coercion, well applied, can go a long way.
Yes, of course. Would you prefer that I call the shots in your boat?
It is the purpose of governments to guarantee freedom.
What things? If it weren’t clear who had rights with respect to your boat, then there would be a conflict. The stronger between the two of us would be able to stretch out comfortably until his rescue.
Hello? That’s what people hire governments for.
Same thing Mr. McGoo said.
Yes indeed it can. A long way.
Whatever your ends, achieving them is often most efficient with coercion. Why do you think politicians do it?
Lib:
Actually I think it’s the purpose of governments to govern. Some forms of government like Communism, or despotism for example, don’t guarantee freedom, quite the contrary.
As far as I can see I’ve never heard of the people “hiring” a government. But if I get to choose, I would buy a government with myself as totalitarian leader.
As far as lifeboats go, just because I may own the lifeboat doesn’t give me the right to throw you out. I personally place a higher value on human life than the right to property.
I am also not aware that I was quoting Mr. Magoo. If I was how does this detract from the validity of my point?
That point by the way is that Libertarianism in the pure form that you seem to espouse (please correct me if I’m wrong) would result in anarchy, or feudalism at the best.
What a hard and terrible world you seem to push for.
Lib:
Actually I think it’s the purpose of governments to govern. Some forms of government like Communism, or despotism for example, don’t guarantee freedom, quite the contrary.
As far as I can see I’ve never heard of the people “hiring” a government. But if I get to choose, I would buy a government with myself as totalitarian leader.
As far as lifeboats go, just because I may own the lifeboat doesn’t give me the right to throw you out. I personally place a higher value on human life than the right to property.
I am also not aware that I was quoting Mr. Magoo. If I was how does this detract from the validity of my point?
That point by the way is that Libertarianism in the pure form that you seem to espouse (please correct me if I’m wrong) would result in anarchy, or feudalism at the best.
What a hard and terrible world you seem to push for.
Because without at least some modest measure of what you define as ‘coercion,’ nothing can get done. At least in the real world.
For instance, take a simple thing like building a road. The likelihood that there will be unanimous consent to place a road anywhere of any meaningful length, let alone anywhere useful, is slim to none. So either everybody pretty much stays put, or has to travel by foot because they’re going to have to trespass a lot, or they can empower a government to take property by eminent domain, compensating the landowners.
By your lights, this last choice is coercion. But a society that has no such coercion will have no transportation, no wealth, and will have no effective military due to the lack of transportation capacity. (Also no communication capacity: if the government can’t coerce me by assigning wavelengths for certain uses, they can forget about telecommunications.)
Dictatoria next door, with a modicum of wealth and a viable military, will waltz into Libertaria and take it over in no time flat. A little ‘coercion’ can sometimes save a country from genuine coercion.
Because without at least some modest measure of what you define as ‘coercion,’ nothing can get done. At least in the real world.
For instance, take a simple thing like building a road. The likelihood that there will be unanimous consent to place a road anywhere of any meaningful length, let alone anywhere useful, is slim to none. So either everybody pretty much stays put, or has to travel by foot because they’re going to have to trespass a lot, or they can empower a government to take property by eminent domain, compensating the landowners.
By your lights, this last choice is coercion. But a society that has no such coercion will have no transportation, no wealth, and will have no effective military due to the lack of transportation capacity. (Also no communication capacity: if the government can’t coerce me by assigning wavelengths for certain uses, they can forget about telecommunications.)
Dictatoria next door, with a modicum of wealth and a viable military, will waltz into Libertaria and take it over in no time flat. A little ‘coercion’ can sometimes save a country from genuine coercion.
You might be right. You are, after all, a real smart man. These other men, who disagree with you, are doubtless moronic dolts who never even considered the issues you raise, issues that, I’m sure, you are the first ever to conceive.
Thanks for that heads up.
Don’t bother going to that site and searching for things like “privatizing roads”. I bet they never thought of that one!
Lib:
I *know[/i} you can’t be arguing that any idea that comes from a really smart man is a really smart idea. Isn’t there a label for that kind of reasoning?
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Well, if that were what I were arguing, it would be called argumentum ad popularum. Of course, what you’re doing is what’s called a red herring. You have fabricated an assertion from a lampoon, and are now trying to change the subject with it.
Sorry. That should have been argumentum ad verecundiam.
And what’s the label for lampooning a question as a means of deflecting notice from teh fact that yo have not answered it?
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
I believe that would be a Spiritus Mundism.
What I gave, in my lampoon, is what is technically called “a direct response”, linking the gentleman to papers he can read to assuage his hysterias.
Since I always at least make the attempt to be fair, I checked out the above link, and even went so far as to put in “Privatized roads” as a search topic. I see nothing pertinent to the discussion whatsoever.
You will need to be more specific than that if you expect your arguments to carry any weight. You can’t link a portal as specific proof.
As I see it Lib, there are only a copuple of possibilities here:
(what I believe) You are convinced of the truth of your arguments out of a fanatical fervor. You believe they are correct becasuse you have a personal investment in them. Anybody who thinks differently is obviously wrong, and your thoughts are not subject to the reasonable standards of proof everybody else’s are because YOU are correct.
You are seeing how far you can fuck with people. You do not answer direct questions, nor do you supply helpful links to support your arguments. I have read the Cato institute articles, and checked out your links and THEY DO NOT support your contentions as you claim they do. Shit, you might as well quote www.alta.vista.com as the source for any contention you care to support, and leave it at that.
If you feel that I am being unfair in these judgements, than why don’t you provide some quotes from these sources supporting your arguments?
I feel that I have a pretty good record of admitting when I’ve been proved wrong on an issue, and would gladly concede to any sensible argument.
By the way, I continue to bother with this because I believe you are sincere and are not deliberately being so obtuse.
[Sigh] The original question:
One article from the search results for “privatizing roads”:
by Peter Samuel
The first roads were probably not even made by humans but by animals. Herds of buffalo deer, and other grass foragers pushed aside the shrubs and trampled down the grass to make tracks for their mass migrations — tracks which humans exploited. Many of the first manmade improvements to these tracks were made by the military because the deployment of armies depended heavily on reliable supplies. There’s a saying among logisticians that soldiers fight on their stomachs, so in order to keep those filled, armies needed wheeled carts to bring in the supplies of grain, meat and other provisions to sustain the bodily energy, and the morale, of the soldiers. Military engineers were among the first road and bridge builders. Because the state depended on the military for its survival, it has always been interested in roads. At the same time, roads have always been a vital part of peaceful trade and commerce, and served the movement of people in search of new opportunities, so a tension has always existed over the role of the state in assuring good roads. They have always served state and private purposes.
Roads have varied from apparently haphazard and irrational in their organization to almost mindlessly regular.
“Road building is not a government monopoly any more. Those days are over.”
Federico Pena
U.S. Secretary of Transportation
(Transportation Research Board address)
Washington DC, January 8, 1996
George Washington complained in his dairy that New England’s roads were “amazingly crooked” but noted quickly that this was designed “to suit the convenience of everyman’s fields.” Local people built local roads to suit their own purposes, but this made things difficult for distant travelers. Washington, a great traveler in his first profession as a surveyor, then as an officer in the war against the French, wrote acerbically that the circuitousness of local roads made finding your way difficult also because “the directions you receive from people are blind and ignorant.” Some frustration! (Lay p11) In Washington’s time it was regarded as an act of enlightenment to have the military engineers lay out a new town according to a rectangular grid — so the layout of central Philadelphia, old town Alexandria, Washington DC (with diagonals added), or Manhattan north of the Dutch Wall Street area. Among the quite mindless applications of the grid consider the street grid of hilly San Francisco!
Such ‘grid’ road networks were laid down by rulers going back to ancient Egypt and Assyria, though the design is normally attributed to Hippodamus, the Greek follower of mathematician Pythagoras for its application in the rebuilding of the town of Miletus following its sacking by the Persians in 440BC. The grid he laid down in the rebuilt Miletus was extolled (Lay’s paraphrase p13) as a triumph of “reason” over the “wanton riot of nature,” and ‘Milesian’ road plans became widely applied in the classical world, especially by the Romans in their new towns, but also as far away as China.
Washington was not the only one of the founding fathers to take an enormous personal interest in roads. At Thomas Jefferson’s initiative, in the territories beyond the original 13 states, the 1785 Land Ordinance Act specified that land was to be divided into ‘parishes’ of 6 miles square with each square divided into 36 square-mile units each one being ‘quartered’ into farms of 160 acres. Farmers were required to deed 33 feet strips on either side of all the boundaries to provide 66 foot rights of way for roads, this being the estimated width needed for a horse and wagon team to execute what we now call a U-turn. This road geometry, which was reinforced in the Homestead Act of 1862, was an instrument of social and economic engineering in that it set a pattern for farm size and land subdivision over vast tracts of the west. It can be seen better today than ever — looking down on states like Iowa and Kansas from an airplane window.
“There’s a simple solution to this traffic problem. We’ll have business build the roads. And government build the cars.”
Will Rogers
Roads as well as serving the ruler’s military needs were seen as property lines and as serving safety and sanitation — safety through providing sufficient width to hopefully confine fire to a single city block and sanitation through providing gutters for drainage of waste water. Gutters were perhaps the beginning of streets housing a variety of different utilities — water supply, then later gas, electricity, now telecommunications. The state was involved to adjudicate rights and responsibilities with respect to vehicular safety, trash disposal and common rights of passage. Many roads were indeed commons in the sense that they were wide enough for livestock to graze and feed a bit while resting on a journey.
It was another kind of utility, the Postal service, that enshrined in the Constitution the interest of the U.S. Government in roads. Article I Section 8 Clause 7 gives the U.S. the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” Post roads were not defined, but in support of the U.S. Postal Service the founding fathers apparently gave the federal government broad powers in the roads over which the posts might need to be carried — almost any roads in theory. But it is one thing to be granted power, another to raise the funds to exercise it.
From the earliest days of the Republic there have been arguments about what was the fairest and best method to finance roads, and before the introduction of the spark ignition engine, early this century, there was no feasible way of collecting a fuel tax. A fuel tax is feasible when the fuel used is manufactured at a rather small number of major refineries or must be distributed via major tank farm delivery points. The taxmen can track the fuel when it is handled at a few major facilities. But before petroleum, road vehicles depended on horse and ox power, and their ‘fuel’ consisted of hay, oats and other feed which was so highly dispersed no tax system could possibly track it to tax it. The most common early method of getting roads built was the ‘corvee’ — a decree of the local court ordering all able-bodied men in an area report with pick and shovel for a couple of days of local roadwork. The well-healed were able to pay for substitutes to fill in for them. But in the new republic as trade further west developed, local people didn’t see why they should engage in forced road labor on behalf of distant interests. It is one thing to band together with immediate friends and neighbors for mutual benefit. A bunch of a dozen or so local people can always work together on a purely local basis. But it is quite another matter to labor for the benefit of through traffic — commercial carriers or travellers from far afield. Whenever the corvee was stretched to road improvements that benefited outsiders, it broke down.
Three alternatives were available to corvee-maintained roads, alternatives that remain today:
(1) State funded roads;
(2) Nationally planned and funded roads;
(3) Turnpikes or essentially investor-financed corporations to build and maintain a road based on user tolls (the turnpike being literally the light pike or spear-like barrier that was turned by the toll collector after the toll had been collected to let traffic pass)
At the center of American transportation politics has been debate and disagreement over how far each
What an amazing number of words to say, “All roads will become toll roads and we have no reliable means of securing right-of-ways for future construction.”
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*