I honestly didn’t think any existed anymore. Learned something new, I did.
Exactly.
Now imagine that those (and similar) laws, backed by the force of the United States Government, didn’t exist.
Wait, I thought more government oversight was statism, not less.
What definition are you using?
Gee, then we’d have . . . what we’ve got now.
I’m not a gun owner, but I have taken pistol and rifle classes, and shot at (but didn’t hit) skeet, and I don’t see any proposal affecting any gun I’m likely to own. I don’t feel my liberty is infringed from having a drivers license and taking a road test - in fact it is enhanced, since I can buy a small car and not a tank to protect me from unlicensed drivers). I make a lot more than $97K a year. I think it makes perfect sense to protect Social Security by increasing my payments on the high end. Neither taxes nor high gas prices affect my liberty. Not making millions, I’d much prefer the bad old high tax Clinton days to the low tax incompetent Bush days. The additional taxes I’d pay would be more than made up by the improved economy.
Our high schools require community service now. My kid is a better person for doing it. I did lots when I was in the Boy Scouts also. I’m not really in favor of that proposal, thinking it smacks of the draft, but it is not more an infringement of liberty than homework.
I don’t quite get the buying things from foreigners part. Is that about not being allowed to buy medicine in Canada? I assume you have never had to deal with US export control. That is an infringement on corporate liberty, but well worth it to keep some stuff out of the hands of the Chinese (when we don’t screw up, that is.)
My daughter is applying for a job in childcare over the summer, and will get fingerprinted if she gets it. Fine with her.
Unless you like certain types of guns, you mean. Or unless you’re a criminal or have mental issues? I’m neither a blue collar worker nor someone making < $75K, and I think I’ll do just fine. Much better than under the current moron, in fact. And I did much better in general under Clinton.
Luckily, we have a Constitution. We do have hate crime enhancements, but only when a regular crime is committed. I don’t think there is any danger of people getting prosecuted for writing anti-Islam books, though a few generals might get their butts kicked out of the military for anti-Muslim statements - and it would be about time.
I’m still waiting for you to give poll numbers showing that Canadians think your system is nearly as broken as Americans think ours is.
That does seem to be happening without the “investment” - as evidenced by the bunch of Republicans resigning early to be able to get cushy lobbyist jobs without waiting for a year, or our Vice President, whose actual employer these days seems to be unclear, being that he has probably made more money for Haliburton as VP than he did as CEO. But the investment I was talking about was infrastructure stuff, like the interstate highway system, which paid off $6 for each $1 invested. Cite As a kid I went with my parents in our car from New York to Washington DC and New York to Michigan, and I assure you it made a tremendous difference - and I’m not even a trucker. So, was it a good investment or not?
When I was in college there were no controls at all - no X-rays or anything else. You might count that as a reduction of liberty, but it is required and even I don’t blame the current administration for it. Now that they have government employees doing it, is is working much better. But whether I got wire tapped or not, my liberty is reduced by knowing it happens. Self censorship is the worst kind.
We’ve been through the lack of control in the proposals before. Why is taxation for police and fire any less “stealing” of your money than taxation for healthcare, or war, or the space program? David Brooks had an interesting column yesterday about how a big problem in the last 30 years is people thinking they can get something without really paying for it. Just borrow and the future will provide. That lines up nicely with the Reagan Revolution. Cut taxes, borrow, and spend, and the hell with the consequences. Unless you want to totally withdraw from society, or live in a society where you have no voice in how your money is spent, you shouldn’t complain about taxes while enjoying some of the services they bring. Those who are anti-tax, but take benefits, are no different than the guy running up a credit card balance. I’m allergic to debt - I wish politicians, and especially Republicans, were.
Isn’t it commendable that he will have advisors who will offer a range of opinions, unlike Bush? Doesn’t that increase the chance that he will make a pragmatic, not ideological, decision? You’re right about judging the policies, though I doubt that they will be fervently free market under your definition of that term.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
[li]Give all workers the right to unionize, and prevent employers from taking measures to stop them. Couple that with his plan to prevent employers from permanently firing union employees, and you’ve set the stage for labor to begin to increase in power both in overall scope and within companies, as it has in Europe.[/li][/QUOTE]
Here’s something I’ve never understood: What exactly do Libertarians find objectionable about labor unions?!
I’ve wondered that ever since I read the “Eonite” story arc in a collection of old Little Orphan Annie strips by the proto-Objectivist Harold Gray. Labor organizers are consistently portrayed as shaggy, dirty, dishonest foreigners or self-deluded Williams-Jennings-Bryanesque windbags, while honest working men are capable of horrible violent atrocities when aroused by them. This, even though the idea of the state intervening in labor’s behalf does not even arise.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Extending them special favors would be objectionable, but so would extending special favors to employers.
I think it’s kinda split. The reason I hear most often is the ‘Right to Work’ laws that some states have. They feel they shouldn’t be compelled to join a union in order to get a job.
Personally, I’d think keeping the government out entirely would be more libertarian. If an employer wants to be open/closed shop, that should be between the employer and the people they want to hire.
A “Right to Work” law means you don’t have to join a union to get a job, the state makes sure of it.
I’ve also always wondered about the portrayal of labor unions in Dickens’ Hard Times. (Published in 1854, before “Marxism” or “socialism” were so much as words in England.) Mill owner Josiah Bounderby is by no means your generous Dickensian Good Rich Man, like the Cheerybles or post-Reformation Scrooge (or Gray’s Oliver Warbucks); everything he says about the unrealistic aspirations of the workers is stupid and hamfisted cant. OTOH, the new union of Coketown laborers is presented as nothing but a racket – for reasons never made clear. It’s obviously a Bad Thing, because the honest and goodhearted Stephen Blackpool refuses to join, though he be ostracized for it. But while his reasons are personal (a promise made to Rachael), he also objects to the union for principled reasons that he somehow cannot explain, beyond, “I canna coom in wi’ ‘em. My friends, I doubt their doin’ yo onny good. Licker they’ll do yo hurt.” Why?
You are right. I had that backwards.
No. I can assure you that they aren’t.
Also, and this is just me speaking here, I never got the squabble over taxes. I understand that some feel that low taxes mean there’s less of a burden and the economy gets better and some think that higher taxes can fuel government programs/rebates/what have you. It seems that the REAL question comes down to “What do you expect of your government?” Do you want roads? Medicine? Education? Housing? Police? Something else? Each of those things need money and that comes from, in most cases, taxes.
Good for you. You’re also not likely to be detained as a terrorist and thrown in Guantanamo Bay, but I’m guessing you oppose that, right? So it would seem that your ethical positions aren’t always situational.
You do not have to take a road test and get a driver’s license to own a car. If you live on a farm, you can go ahead and drive around on your own property all day. You do need a license to drive on public roads. I’ve got no problem with laws requiring training if you want a concealed carry permit.
Ridiculous. If you believe that, then would you have a problem with the government instituting a $10,000 travel tax on anyone who leaves the city, then issuing tax credits if you can provide a good, state approved reason for traveling?
How about a tax on newsprint and web sites, set so high as to prevent the average person from publishing, then providing tax breaks if your material is ‘government approved’? Newsprint taxes have been used in several places to curb anti-government papers without ‘infringing on their right to speak’.
And I love how the same people who argue that the market is ‘coercive’ because people can’t afford to buy things and thus have their choices taken from them will then argue that taxes aren’t coercion because it’s just money.
So you think it’s high taxes that improve the economy? Can I have what you’re smoking?
Clinton ran surpluses because A) there was a ‘peace dividend’, B) There was a tech bubble, and because C) he presided over a divided government which did not allow him to enact huge new entitlements like Bush did. Also, the real boom years under Clinton came not after his 1993 tax increase, but after the 1997 tax cut.
Really? No difference between doing homework and having to put in four hours a month of labor in the service of the state? No infringement on liberty there at all, huh? So I guess those people who get sentenced to community service really didn’t get punished a bit. They should be happy to do it.
Trade tariffs hurt the lower classes more than anyone. Restrictions on trade of the type Obama is talking about would do the most damage to people who buy low cost clothing and other goods made in low-cost, labor intensive overseas factories. The other people it will hurt are the desperate poor of the third world nations who will have the first rung on the ladder to prosperity cut off.
Why do I suspect you’d be outraged if the Bush Administration proposed a massive fingerprinting plan?
What does that have to do with anything? We have a media which constantly sings the praises of our health care system, and you have one which constantly denigrates it.
Incidentally, I’m not saying our system is horrible. We have reasonably good health care here, for most people. But we are also the beneficiaries of the U.S. private health care system - our rich go to the U.S. for treatment, taking a burden off the health care system (they still pay taxes to support it). We get the benefit of U.S. medical entrepreneurship - drugs and medical devices and research that our public system can’t afford.
And our system is getting increasingly expensive, and waiting lists are getting longer. This is especially true if you need elective surgery, and if you are elderly or an at-risk person with bad habits. Our overcrowded and overworked system has a way of pushing such people aside. A co-worker of mine needed his gallbladder removed, and was on a several month waiting list for the surgery when it went acute and he had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Good thing he was near a phone.
You forgot the billions of dollars in earmarks that get sent back to campaign contributors. You’re making my point for me. You want to give these clowns more money, more power, and allow them to get into bed with more businesses.
I don’t know, because I didn’t get to see what alternative would have arisen. Hey, maybe the U.S. wouldn’t have become so dependent on the evil automobile.
That’s the problem with government intervention. It crowds out the alternatives, so the interventionists can always claim that it was the only sane thing to do. But you can look at cases where government intervention was ended, and the leftists screamed that chaos would ensue. I remember when the airlines were deregulated, and every leftie around was saying that fares would skyrocket, safety would plummet, and the airline fatcats would gouge the public. Instead, safety went up, fares got cheaper, and the lower middle class could afford to fly. I remember when New Zealand ended its heavy agriculture subsidies - a move that the left in New Zealand predicted would destroy the agriculture industry. That industry thrived, grew, and became much healthier.
Are you talking about the TSA and airline security? This is your example of a government program that works? I really need to get some of what you’re smoking.
There are differences in the nature of government programs and the justification for taxation. Some arguments against taxation are moral, others are practical. Libertarians have no problem paying taxes for government services which are necessary to allow society to function at all. Very few dispute that the proper role of government is to keep the peace, adjudicate disputes between citizens, and to protect citizens from coercion both foreign and domestic. To that end, they have no problem paying their share to maintain the police, courts of law, and the military. Others (like myself) extend this further and say that there is also a role for government in mitigating the effects of true market failures and in undertaking certain projects which the market is unsuited for. It’s hard to imagine any kind of free market arising to build a superconducting supercollider.
But where I, and most libertarians draw the line is at laws and taxes which attempt to control the direction of society, to punish people for behaviours which are personal, and which take property from one group of people and give it to another because the people in power think the other people deserve to have it more. We also think that governments are horrible at controlling industry and picking winning and losing technologies to ‘invest’ in. The tools government has, such as taxes, price controls, and regulations distort the economy, divert capital from its most efficient use, and inevitably lead to even more regulations and taxes. Hayek called it the Road to Serfdom.
You mean like the poor and middle class voting for politicians who promise to tax the rich and give them benefits for nothing? We agree.
I refused to accept the government’s 40% discount on my tuition loan, because I didn’t want a handout. It took me an extra five years to pay it off because of that. I’ve never taken unemployment insurance. My single-parent family was the only one in our neighborhood who refused to accept welfare, so my brother and I both worked from a young age and my mother worked her ass off while her friends stayed at home on the government’s nickel. Some government services I have no choice to participate in, like health care, because I have no where else to go. I try to live as consistently with my beliefs as I can. I’ve earned the right to bitch about this stuff.
And of course I can complain about the services I get if I wasn’t the one who asked for them. I don’t owe anyone anything for giving me a ‘service’ I didn’t ask for and can’t opt out of. Just like you’re not morally superior for advocating laws that take money away from other people to give to people you think are more deserving.
Me too. Which is why I don’t have any, other than my mortgage. Would you like to take a wager that if Democrats win the House, Senate, and White House that deficits will go up?
Nothing at all. So long as businesses don’t have to accept them, and can fire them when they want. The power of collective bargaining should stem from the power to have the entire workforce walk off the job, forcing the employer to shut down while he finds new workers and trains them. Then the next bunch can walk off the job of he doesn’t clean up his act.
What Libertarians object to are government laws which force employers to accept labor unions, and which force businesses to negotiate with them. This is exactly what Obama wants to do - make it illegal to fire striking workers, and make it illegal to prevent the formation of a union in the first place. This gives the power to control a business to the workers instead of the owners, which is flat-out wrong.
I also object to police and government looking the other way when labor-related violence takes place. Picket lines which obstruct people from doing business with a company. Striking workers who throw rocks at the cars of the workers who don’t strike. A lot of this stuff gets ignored with a nod an a wink, and shouldn’t. A striking worker who smashes my car window should get every bit as much punishment as a vandal who does it on my street.
Also, I object to Obama’s plan to allow unions to hold union votes without a secret ballot. This means organizers of unions will be able to intimidate workers into joining them or voting for the strikes they want. And you know that’s going to happen.
Once again, we have a case where Obama is stacking the deck to give massive amounts of power to labor unions, while making it seem like he’s a friend of business. He’s a typical leftie with a smoother patter.
Why?
:dubious: And why, exactly, should owners have the right or power to prevent the formation of a union in the first place?
Why?
Why? Because if I am not allowed to hire new workers, then the union has the power to shut down my business if I do not meet their demands, even if there are other people out there fully willing to work for me at the conditions I set. An employment contract is just that - a contract to provide services in exchange for pay. Such a contract does not give the employee the right to tell me how to run my business once I hire him or her.
Because he may not want to deal with workers collectively, and especially if once that union is formed he can no longer fire them and is now a slave to their demands or lose his business.
In essence, what Obama is proposing is that I can offer you a job for $10/hr, and you can accept that, then the day after you’re hired you can collude with your fellow workers to say, “Hey, now that you’ve hired us, we demand that you pay us three times the amount you offered to. And you can’t fire us, so pony up or go out of business.”
That turns the labor/employer relationship into a protection racket.
There are practical reasons here as well - some businesses simply can’t survive high-priced labor. Take Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s sole advantage is price, and it is a company that has a large labor component to its costs. If Wal-Mart employees unionize and gain the kind of power Obama wants them to have, there’s a good chance they will drive Wal-Mart out of business.
This almost happened to Safeway here in Canada. Safeway’s workforce unionized, with the result that Safeway was forced to pay student box-boys $14/hr in 1980, when their competition was paying less than half that amount. Safeway’s prices went up, and the chain almost collapsed until it managed to negotiate a new deal with the union which allowed them to hire new employees for half the union rate - the old employees got to keep their salaries. So you had a situation in which a bunch of stores closed, costing hundreds of jobs and hurting the community, and the ones that stayed open had a staff where similarly qualified people were making twice as much as others, simply because they happened to be in the right place to cut a sweetheart deal.
Because the owner OWNS the company. He created it, he put up the capital, he took the risks of losing everything if it failed (most businesses fail), he had the vision to create something others want, and he has the right to call the shots. Just because you get paid a salary by him to build his widgets does not mean you should have control of his company or equally share in the profits. You never took the risk. You can go get another job elsewhere if the company goes under - he may lose everything he owns.
The same is true for publicly held companies, except the shareholders are the owners. If the workers want ownership, they can pool together and buy shares in the company or arrange to have part of their beneifts paid in company stock.
You have got to be kidding me! I’m a good leftie that rarely agrees with Sam, and I think you are nuts. Completely and totally bonkers!
You think that employees should have the power to do what they want with a business against the wishes of the business owners? If I have a corner store with five employees, you think they should be able to set their own salaries, benefits, working schedules, etc, without any input from me? I would go out of business in a month!
What if they form a union and strike until I pay them all $100,000 per year? You think I should be forced to close down and negotiate with them even though there are hundreds of people that would work for me for < $25,000 a year? You think it should be illegal for me to fire them and get a new workforce? What if I just decide I don’t want to play anymore and liquidate my business? Should this be illegal? What if my union workers demand I hire their friends who don’t have the skills needed to do the job; should I just roll over?
I think labor unions are a good thing, and can make businesses be accountable to their workforce. That said, if a company wants to fire all their workforce and close the doors, they should be able to… If their are workers that are willing to do the job with lower benefits that the union workers agree too, then the company should be able to fire the union workers and hire who they want… If an employer is bad enough, noone will work for them and they will be forced to negotiate to stay alive or they will close down for good.
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which is the bill that Obama supports. It isn’t that he won’t allow secret ballots. It’s that he won’t allow employers to force secret ballot voting when employees have already approved a union by signing cards. Card check is a process by which the Supreme Court in 1969 said that unions may form.
But under current legislation, even if workers have stipulated by card check that they wish to form a union, employers may trump the process by demanding a secret ballot vote. What that means in practical terms is that employers get a snapshot of how much support a union has and exactly who supports it before it is actually established. While it waits for the the election to be organized, the employers can target specific signers and do everything short of firing them (though one in five are fired anyway), including forcing them to attend anit-union propoganda meetings during work hours. It effectively gives the employer the time and information it needs to squash the union before it can organize.
I don’t understand. How does the employer get information on how each employee voted, if they’re voting on a secret ballot?