That’s not my point. It’s not that the system fails them - I happen to think that a system that maximizes economic growth tends to help everyone. The poor in America are better off than the middle class in many other countries. The poverty line in the U.S. is more than double the world average income.
The thing is, though, that these effects take a long time, and they are impersonal. In the meantime, politicians are offering help NOW. If you’re a poor person who doesn’t think you’re ever going to be able to climb the ladder of success and be wealthy, you’ve got nothing to lose by voting for the guy who promises to take money from all those rich people and give it to you. It may hurt the economy in the long run, but in the long run we’re all dead, right?
Nonetheless, there are plenty of people who think that the system is rigged, that they are hopeless pawns in a world owned by rich white guys. Those people are not going to vote libertarian. It doesn’t help that demagoguing politicians and ‘community organizers’ build political power by amplifying that narrative and claiming that the people’s only hope for improvement in their lives lies in giving power to the politicians who will take for them by force what their couldn’t or wouldn’t earn for themselves.
Utter nonsense. I’d say it’s more like 10% inspiration, 80% perspiration, and 10% luck. Unless, of course, you’re considering ‘luck’ to include being born in America in the first place. And I would consider the 10% ‘luck’ part to be bad luck in the form of disabilities or horrific life circumstances - not the mundane ‘luck’ of a guy walking into a sweetheart deal or being in the right place at the right time. Most people who ‘make it’ do so because they work very hard and make good decisions - not because they stumble into a lucky break.
Of all the people I know who are poor (and I know a lot of poor people, having grown up in a very poor family), the vast majority of them are that way because they dropped out of school, or because they loaded themselves up with debt at a young age and never got out of it, or because they couldn’t hold a job or are lazy, or because instead of sacrificing and saving to build wealth they blew everything on toys, alcohol, drugs, lottery tickets, or whatever.
On the other hand, I know some very well-off people (not filthy rich, but more than comfortable) who got where they did by simply working hard and saving. They didn’t have wealthy parents, they didn’t get any lucky breaks, they had their shares of setbacks and bad jobs, but they kept it together, spent their money wisely, kept their families together, took care of their property, and slowly rose out of poverty and into the ranks of the middle class, and then the upper middle class.
The funny thing is the US used to be closer to a libertarian ideal than it is today. It did nor work well at all. That is why we ended up getting things like OSHA and the FDA and the EPA and so on.
The libertarian notion of the marketplace solving all ills and that contracts between people will effectively mediate most problems smacks of breathtaking naivete.
We do not need to guess at what might happen. History is full of examples of what happens when, for example, workers are not protected in the US (National Guard shooting workers leaps to mind). Heck, look around the world and you can see the results today. No OSHA and you get child labor and unsafe work conditions. If the workers protest they are fired or possibly shot (literally). Even with a mandated minimum wage we see companies doing all they can to pay workers less (e.g. paying them with debit cards where the bank claws back money in fees).
We have seen the results of no EPA (such as the Cuyahoga River catching on fire numerous times or or Love Canal.
Taking bad companies to court is not the solution either. The Exxon Valdez accident happened in 1989. Exxon was still litigating the case as late as 2007. Here was a case where the company to blame was strikingly obvious (hard to miss the name in five foot tall letters on the bow of a massive oil tanker leaking oil). Often the parties to blame are far from clear or if the damage is even being done (e.g. fracking cases).
We haven’t even started down the road of things like discrimination. Clearly in this country, when there were no laws governing discrimination, many people and businesses gleefully engaged in it. The “market” did not fix anything. People’s right to choose saw them choosing to discriminate.
The world is a complex place. Keeping a society functional is a complex task. Libertarians overly simplistic views run headlong into reality. We do not need to guess about it. We have seen it.
Then how do you account for the fact that most people in the United States – and, I presume, in Canada – tend to remain at roughly the same stratum of the heap from birth to death?
I never said anything of the sort. In fact, I made sure to stay far away from moral judgments in that message. I specifically mentioned disabilities, the vagaries of fate, etc. The basic point was simply that libertianism is going to have little appeal to someone who doesn’t think they can or want to compete in the marketplace to get ahead - not while politicians are promising to simply give them aid.
And if they come to believe that the main impediment to building their own wealth is evil capitalists and their main protector from such people is the benevolent government, well, libertarianism isn’t even on their radar.
However, I also said that the number of people who feel this way is not static. Libertarianism is gaining in popularity today because the government has failed to deliver on its promises. Well into the second term of the most left-wing president in history the U.S. economy is still struggling to recover and the unemployment rate is still way above where the government promised it would be. And in the meantime, the promises of improvements in civil liberties have proven to be a cruel joke - if anything, Obama turns out to be worse than Bush when it comes to the civil liberties of the citizenry. This is opening a lot of eyes.
The promise of a cushy civil service job with a good pension starts to carry a lot less weight when you come to realize that the government has no credible plan for being able to deliver on its promises.
Promises of free education don’t look as enticing when the ‘free’ schools are failing the students and bad teachers are allowed to stay in place because of union rules.
‘Taxing the rich’ only sounds like a good idea until the rich leave and services to the poor start crumbling. See: Detroit.
Promises of cheap student loans lose their cachet when the resultant big subsidy to an education system with inelastic supply causes tuition to skyrocket.
Promises of a government-kickstarted ‘green future’ start to look silly when much-ballyhooed ‘green’ companies fail spectacularly while providing much profit to the crony insiders who brokered the deals.
Claims of a government being responsive to the ‘people’ look pretty shallow when that government is populated by the same elitist grads from Harvard and Oxford and ex-executives of Goldman-Sachs and Citibank - who everyone knows will go right back to the cushy insider industry positions when they leave government - only this time with even more pay because of the value of their ‘connections’ in funneling public money to their cronies.
Add in an overzealous war on drugs, an NSA that seems to be spying on everyone, an IRS that everyone now knows will use its power to intimidate or damage enemies of the state, and a police force that is becoming increasingly militarized and which disproportionally affects poor communities, and you start to have more people questioning whether reliance on big government to solve their problems is particularly wise.
Some of the former Soviet client states have moved in a decidedly libertarian direction. And that’s not because they’ve necessarily experienced the wonders of capitalism - it’s because they’ve experienced the soul-deadening and wealth destroying effects of relying on the state to run your life.
I see. So the fact that an agency exists is all the proof you need that it was absolutely necessary? How about the Department of Homeland Security? How about the Interstate Commerce Commission? Oh wait… That’s gone. Because it turned out to be a really bad idea, despite existing for over 100 years and mucking up trucking and rail movements during that entire period. People like you made the same arguments when the debate over dissolving it took place. And all their predictions of disaster, inefficiency, monopoly control, and lack of safety turned out to be completely wrong.
Whereas I think the naivete is on the part of those who think that 535 people in Washington are capable of being our wise rulers and protectors, and that they never have interests inimical to that of the public. I would describe as naive those people who think that regulatory systems are never captured by the people they are supposed to be regulating and turned to their benefit.
When you count the ‘scandals’ of capitalism, the ripoffs and the scams and all that, do you keep some room on your balance sheet for the absolute failure of government to the people of Detroit? Do you keep room to count the billions of dollars the government has helped cronies extract from the public purse? Do you count the human misery in the government-planned inner city ‘projects’ or the massive failures of the inner city public school systems?
You’re going to have to explain that one.
No, you get child labor and unsafe work conditions when the people are so poor that children cannot survive without working. You get unsafe work conditions when safety is too expensive to manage.
When countries get wealthy enough, they do not send their children to work - they send them to school. This impetus has nothing to do with government - other than that once the desire to keep children out of the work force grows strong enough, there’s enough sentiment that people will be willing to pass a law against it. But if you look at the history of child labor, the law always came after widespread child labor had already stopped. There are a few small exceptions in some industries - I believe children were still used as chimney sweeps in some places in Britain until child labor laws were passed, but by then the widespread practice of child labor had already ended.
People who think that it always takes government regulations to protect people, to prevent them from making pennies per hour, and to keep employers from abusing them never seem to be able to explain why it is that in America the vast majority of workers make more than minimum wage, have better vacations than the government minimum, have better working conditions than those mandated by law, have safer cars than regulations dictate, etc. Could it be that market forces are a bigger determinant than government regulation?
I would agree that there are always outliers, and some regulation is needed to protect them. But the notion that we owe our workplace safety, our wage structures, and our general welfare to the protection of a vast regulatory state is the height of naivete.
Really? When was the last time an employer shot employees for protesting?
As for being fired, I have no problem with that, so long as it’s not against an employment contract. As an employee, you’re free to leave if you don’t like the conditions offered to you.
First of all, that doesn’t look to me like an attempt to cheat employees out of money - it looks like a misguided attempt by HR to find ‘savings’ in a more efficient way to pay employees. And perhaps they thought they were doing the employees a favor since the funds on the debit cards would be available instantly. Or maybe they cut a deal with Chase-Manhattan and got a kickback on some of the card revenue that they used to defray HR costs.
In any event, it wasn’t the government that stopped this. A lawsuit had been filed, but not acted upon. Rather, it seems to me that it was the 268,000 signatures on a petition that got the company’s attention. They probably had no idea that employees would hate the program as much as they did, and once they realized it they changed course.
Is this where I get to start listing the environmental disasters that resulted from government actions, or the messes that have been created on government sites? Should we go around the world and look at the environmental records of the countries with the largest, most intrusive governments?
But let’s talk about Love Canal for a minute. First of all, Hooker Chemical was dumping there under the express authority of the City and of the army, both of which also used the grounds. This was explicitly endorsed by the government. No doubt there were some crony arrangements in there, because that’s how government rolls when it comes into contact with private industry.
But when Hooker sold the dumping ground to the city (for $1), it explicitly and carefully detailed the toxic hazards that were there, and said that the entire area should be sealed off due to the risks and no construction should take place on that land. The government ignored those concerns, and started building freaking schools on top of the toxic dump. Not only that, but when the risks became clear and the architect of the school board protested, the government ignored the protests and continued development. Several other schools were built.
The city then approved construction of new homes on the site, which required digging into the clay dump barriers to run sewers and other services. The dump walls were breached, causing even more damage.
And unlike Hooker, which operated above the law at all times and fully disclosed the risks when selling the land back to the government, the government chose to hide those risks from future developers, parents, and other parties affected by their determination to make as much profit for the city as possible by selling off the land that they bought for $1 and were supposed to seal off and protect.
But it doesn’t even occur to you to blame the government, does it? It doesn’t give you a moment’s pause in your desire to give government the power to regulate the environment when you see governments behaving just as badly or even worse than the worst offenders in the private sphere.
Shall we talk about the levees in New Orleans, and about the corruption that kept their flaws from being repaired until a flood almost destroyed the city? This was entirely the fault of government. How about Hanford, a government site?
At least private businesses have to responsive to the market as well as to government. Governments have the power of force, and don’t have to respond to anyone. They’re far more dangerous.
What’s your point? The Exxon crash was an accident due to negligence by the captain. Are you going to regulate away accidents? And you have a strange definition of lawsuits ‘not working’ - Exxon was tied up in courts for a long time. Yes, it had its punitive fine reduced - by the government citing maritime law. In the end, Exxon was to pay out double the cost of the cleanup. And after all, it was an accident - not a malicious act. Oh, and the coast guard was found partially responsible as well - it failed to inspect the ship as required, and it failed to notify the ship that it had ended the practice of monitoring ships and notifying them if they got too close to a reef.
Just offhand, would you happen to know what the penalties were for those who failed to properly maintain the Levees in New Orleans? Oh yeah.. ZERO. No one was held to account for that. Because when governments screw up, they tend to cover up and enablers who reflexively defend big government don’t push the issue or look the other way. Or find some way to blame evil capitalists.
What’s your point? Governments around the world have been studying fracking, including the Obama administration, and they don’t have a problem with it. If a problem does turn up in the future, how would it be the fault of private industry and not the fault of government, if neither of them saw the problem coming?
So discrimination was pretty much equal all across the U.S., huh? It must have been, since the law was the same everywhere. Black people were discriminated just as much in Berkeley as in Alabama?
Keeping a complex society functional requires allowing it to organize itself using signalling and feedback. Some regulations are required when markets fail, but trying to micro-manage or optimize a complex economy through a byzantine process of regulation by central planners is a really bad idea. You’re the one who doesn’t appreciate the underlying complexity.
I love how the anti-libertarians (or pro-big-government) types seem to think that if a Federal agency vanished that overnight we’d have sawdust scraps and rotting meat in our sausage casings and businesses would start paying $1.00 to workers and making them work 12 hours days 7 days a week.
Um, no. If nothing else, we have several generations of people who have been raised with an implicit understanding that food should be safe and costs and wages should be reasonable - things that previously nobody knew was even possible. Pressure from private citizens (in the form of not buying crap products or working for Ebenezer Scrooge) will ensure that we’re still not drinking embalming fluid in our liquor and sending 5 year olds under the steam-powered textile machines to recover scraps of wool.
In a way, this is just another example of the Leftist view that humans are utterly helpless creatures that need someone else to look out for them or they’ll be squashed like bugs - thankfully we have People Who Know Better And Who Care ™ to look out for us.
Welcome back from me too Sam Stone. You are and always were a valuable assett to this board. I share almost all the same viewpoints but I am not quite as articulate as you are.
If your argument is that libertarianism’s optimal form can only arise if the state and associated social institutions have already created standards for social consciousness to be anchored to, then you have conceded a fundamental communitarian / liberal critique about the social precursors of individual agency.
This begs the question that if statism is necessary to lay the framework for libertarianism to operate in modernity, then any statist arrangement looks less like tyranny and more like a necessary and important transition phase. And then what happens after a couple of generations have past and these socialised expectations break down without their statist undergirding and it’s not your grandmother’s FDA guidelines anymore?
But what existed before federal regulation wasn’t libertarianism, free market or otherwise. It was a one-sided system in which the power of government was almost totally in favor of businesses against workers and the public at large. Historian Barbara Tuchman, in her book The Proud Tower in the chapter on the Anarchist movement, put it this way when commenting on events leading up to the Haymarket riot:
So what ended up happening was that eventually the people gained at least some counter-balancing influence with the government. But some suggest that stripping the power of government to favor big business would have been an equally valid solution.
Then again that begs the question of why you think that once social conventions are established that, absent a benevolent and all-seeing central power, mankind will revert to 18th century standards of treatment and behavior. That viewpoint seems to indicate an astonishing lack of faith in humanity’s ability to learn from the past and adapt for a better future without an all powerful, central authority to ensure we all behave and be excellent to each other, or face fines and Federal jail time.
That line of reasoning leads to a world where not only are past pronouncements from the State never to be repealed, but that more are assured in the future to keep people in line. For our own good, of course.
When does it end? I posit that for Statists of any stripe, it never will, and will only get more and more… corrective.
Modern Western Civilization has been shown, rightly so, that we should expect certain levels of treatment simply because we are humans of equal value and worth. Yes, of course, the State helped that come about, but in many ways it has outgrown its usefulness and, in an increasing number of areas, has become destructive to the ideas of individual worth and liberty. Nobody, and I mean nobody, goes to the grocery store and buys safe meat, goes to the car dealership and buys safe cars, and goes to a job with decent wages and benefits, and thinks “Thank god the government made it this way for me.” They experience all of these things because this is what we’ve come to expect - and to think that we’d suddenly expect or do with less absent government oversight sells all of humanity quite short.
It has nothing to do with lack of “faith” in human goodness or anything like that. I simply reject the extreme conception of emergent individualism at the heart of the libertarian story. I believe individual agency requires a sustained and supportive social environment which social institutions and the state provide.
And please spare me the hyperbole about a maniacal all-seeing central power, I was simply suggesting that social expectations might very well be expected to corrode over time, when public expectations reorientate to the new context. So, using the same example as above, we might very well expect health and safety norms to change to a much more reactive-kind of awareness relying strongly on caveat emptor and trust through repeat business. So, yes, a big chain store is still going to have strong incentives to maintain safe product lines, to the extent that they even worry about legal exposure in this universe, but that still leaves lots of room for nefarious vendor behaviour that would be precluded by the dreaded statist regulations of yesteryear.
So obviously consumer expectations would corrode over time when operating in that environment over a multi-generational period as people get used to it. The interesting thing is whether there is a floor in that corrosion that we find to be an acceptable standard of consumer protection. If not, then that begs the question of whether we might even need subsequent interventions to help lift social expectations to higher standards and re-establish stronger norms. If that’s so, then your political philosophy requires both a statist intermediary step and it isn’t actually sustainable, so why experiment with it in the first place?
But on what basis do they suggest it? With or without government involved, labor v. capital is not a level playing field. Capital can always hire strikebreakers, in the senses of both “scabs” and “thugs.”
But without government on their side, can capital for example get injunctions declaring picketing a crime subject to being arrested? Or call in the police/ National Guard/ Army if in fact there aren’t enough strikebreakers? Or have hired thugs sanctified as deputies? Or if it came to that, how safe would a truly tyrannical company’s leaders be against assassination, without the protection of the state? I’d say that government involvement makes an enormous difference.
Oh, nonsense. Companies to this day behave with utter ruthlessness whenever the government is unwilling or unable to stop them. The corporations will ignore or crush those “private citizens” if you remove the main tool those private citizens have; the government. Without the government to stop them, there won’t be anything but “Ebenezer Scrooges”, everything you eat and drink with be contaminated, and you’ll work for a pittance under horrible conditions. And if your boss wants to screw your daughter, you’ll have to hand her over or starve to death.
Welcome to the reason society exists; individual humans are weak, helpless creatures. There’s no such thing as a “rugged individualist”; there are only weak individualists. That’s why individualism is encouraged, it makes people weak and easy to dominate.
“Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?”