What are you talking about? Just because someone thinks, say, Jakarta is sufficiently interesting to warrant a visit doesn’t mean they prefer the hygienic conditions there, nor consider them acceptable for everyday life.
The protected classes clause restricting private businesses was only one part of the civil rights act. I think Paul has indicated that he supports every other aspect, so it’s wrong to imply that he’d oppose every aspect of the civil rights act. I would imagine he would’ve stood for the segregation of schools, banning back of the bus policies on public transport, no seperate water fountains on public property, etc. In addition to the other aspects of the act like increasing voter accessibility and all that.
Rand Paul now says he supports the whole bill.
case closed. He’s a fruitcake,.
Maybe, but considering that, according to him, at least, he wasn’t called Rand until he was an adult, it suggests he wasn’t.
How does that make him a fruitcake? He said he didn’t support the one portion of the bill, he got holy hell because of it, and now he’s backing down in the attempt to save his command.
He was kind of stupid making the original statement in the first place, even if he believed it, but having done that, everything he’s done since makes sense.
If they aren’t acceptable for everyday life, then why would those travellers go?
What does everyday life mean anyway? Is visiting Jakarta not part of everyday life? Says who…you? Are you segmenting out your life, and the lives of others, into ‘everyday’ portions and ‘non everyday’ portions on which you are willing to take a flyer every now and then?
You’ve chosen one factor of utility for the traveler, which is that Jakarta is ‘sufficiently interesting’. There are an infinite range of utility factors, as well as an infinite range of costs (including risk) that exist for each individual. Other such utility factors might be visiting a relative, going there on business, moving there permanently to take advantage of a lower cost of living, scoping out the opposite sex and trying to get married, etc.
If the utility of the trip <= cost of doing so (which includes cost of risk) then the person won’t go. If it does, they will.
You make this tradeoff a hundred times per day or more without even realizing it. You use cues like appearance, brand, familiarity, the recommendations of friends, and other factors to make your utility vs cost decision. You might even use the endorsement of a rating agency, of which the FDA might be a participant.
But for some reason, you are willing to sign over the rights to use those cues, and make those choices for yourself, to a government employee. Those choices will then become irreversible, non-negotiable, and backed up by the use of force. You will not be able to conduct business with someone who does not abide by the rules. And those rules are no longer made by you. Good luck trying to get them changed.
You are willing to throw away that freedom and disempower yourself. Why? Why would you do that?
For example, there is a Salvadoran woman in my neighborhood who makes great food. I’ve been in her house. I’ve talked with her about opening a small business and selling her food.
I’d buy food from her off a street corner in a second. But she would not be allowed to do this. It would be illegal. The government would prevent a voluntary transaction from occurring between her and me. What right does the government have to do that?
Why would you voluntarily throw away your rights to make such choices for yourself? For restaurants, for the type of car you want to buy, for the financial products you want to use, for how you want to plan for your own retirement. For anything, really. Why are you so willing to give away the final say on what is, or is not acceptable to you, to a government employee?
You seem to be clamoring to give away as many of your rights of choice as possible. Why?
I am having a difficult time believing anything he says. He can’t answer simple questions and then he is for what he said he wasn’t for before he was for it.
I didn’t know Rand Paul was in command of anything.
Yeah, if anything you say is going to blow up in your face (because it’s so goddamned stupid), you might want to just hide in a cave.
Poor lil Rand.
-Joe
I stayed in a 10’x10’ hotel room in Christchurch once. Do you think I would choose a permanent residence of similar design?
If you don’t visit it every day… then no, it’s pretty clearly not part of every day life, is it?
Because it’s easier and safer, obviously. I don’t have the time or expertise to personally vet the safety of every food I eat or product I use. Having a dedicated agency do this for me is an enormous time saver, and is far more likely to result in a safe product.
Of course she would. She’d simply have to get a license to do so, which is not a particularly onerous requirement, as should be obvious from the large number of street corner food vendors.
It has that right because it has been invested with such by the majority of voters.
Because it’s entirely to my benefit to do so. Why wouldn’t I want the government to do this? What am I losing by not being able to patronize a restaurant that serves rancid meat, or drive a car that’s little more than a rolling death trap? How is my standard of living damaged by not having these options? Why would I want these options in the first place?
Are you high? Does the idea that people accept temporary lifestyle changes while on vacation so foreign to you?
Again, I like eating salad. I accept that when I travel, salad is not a safe food to eat. That’s fine.
Salad is safe to eat here because we have laws that mean that lettuce can’t be fertilized with human waste, and that the restaurant making the salad can’t rest the veggies on uncooked, bacteria-ridden chicken parts.
Clearly, those rules don’t apply in many other countries, WHICH IS WHY SALAD IS UNSAFE TO EAT THERE. Just because your libertarian vision can concoct scenarios in which street vendors in Vientiane or Nairobi will vigorously protect the cleanliness of their food, DOES NOT MAKE IT SO.
What is the next Third World country you intend to visit? I will PayPal you some money to get a tasty bundle of strawberries, a nice ackee plant salad, and a tall glass of farm-fresh milk with lots of ice cubes. Let’s see what you think about the safety of Third World food then.
Incidentally, I think that the focus on these discussions harm libertarianism generally. I mean - there are so many easy low hanging fruit ways that they could make progress on the government in terms of cutting spending and removing the most egregious violation of rights (patriot act, etc.) that even if libertarians could somehow get into the government, it would be a long time before issues like these ever came up. Debating on whether we should disband the FDA or privatize roads looks kooky to most people, and quite frankly, there’s so much work to be done before those were even slight considerations that it’s probably not worth much debate.
Quoth panache45:
Incorrect. To say that something should not be prohibited is to say that it’s acceptable. If it can’t be accepted, then we don’t accept it. Now, one could make the argument, as Paul apparently is, that it’s an acceptable evil, but he is quite emphatically not saying that it’s unacceptable.
Yeah, because I really want to spend my time individually meeting and vetting the kitchen staff of every restaurant I go to. :rolleyes:
Good Lord, you’re overthinking this! Just give the nice woman a twenty and ask her to make you some tamales. The government doesn’t care about voluntary transactions between friends. Your Salvadoran friend isn’t going to poison you – she knows you and likes you and will certainly take care in preparing your food.
But once you have a large food preparation establishment serving the general public, now you have a dangerous situation. Now the customers and the kitchen staff don’t know each other. There aren’t any informal social ties between them to encourage good behavior. Some of the kitchen staff will be conscientious, but some of them won’t give a crap about protecting strangers. Accidentally leave a piece of meat sitting out on the counter for a few hours? Ah … fry it up anyway … it’ll probably be okay. And even if the staff WANTS to do the right thing, competitive pressures or ruthless management might thwart them. So the government steps in to perform a service that in a small, intimate community would be accomplished through interpersonal relations.
Dude, it’s called democracy. We are the government. We choose what powers to grant to the government. Though our elected representatives we have decided that limiting our rights to open a restaurant, or eat where we please, is a good trade off for increasing the safety of eating out. Don’t like that trade off? Get enough like minded people together and elect some morons like Rand Paul.
We have made other trade offs as well. My right to live where ever I please is balanced off by your right to own land and control it’s use. My right to control my own property is balanced off against your right not to have a pig farm next door.
I don’t think I have ever seen a bunch of people as whiny as Libertarians: “Wah, wah, wah, I can’t do what ever I want”. It’s like a bunch of two year olds. It’s not like we haven’t seen what happens when we allow people to discriminate based on race, or the results of no regulation on the food supply, or any other of a hundred other places where we have regulations in place. Sure we could bring back the days of bread adulterated with sawdust, or unsafe milk, or filthy slaughterhouses, or lax building standards, or unregulated banks. It’s just that most people are not willing to do so.
It’s because conservatives espousing libertarian philosophy don’t mind things like the Patriot act that actually are scary, they just don’t want their sons to have sex with another guy or their daughters to marry a black man.
They won’t be happy until evolution is banned from schools, we start off every day by swearing an oath to Jesus and the flag, and gays are put in jail.
The mistake you are making is that w/o government inspections, there would be no alternative, or that restaurants would have no motivation to police themselves. I can easily see a type of “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” developing for the specific reason of good restaurants wanting to stand out.
Every weekend, there is a farmer’s market where I live. There are lots of stalls of independent operators cooking all kinds of foods for people. There aren’t any inspections there, and no one has ever gotten sick there.
BTW, I’m not making the argument that “since government can’t function effectively at all times, then it can’t function effectively at any time”. I didn’t mean to imply that by throwing out that anecdote. But I would say that I bet all of us have passed on eating at certain restaurants at various times because they didn’t look clean. I don’t feel that I need the government to look after me when I decide to eat out.
The things you just lumped together are nearly opposite philosophies. Libertarian philosophies aren’t espoused by conservatives, they’re espoused by libertarians, generally. And libertarians, especially in recent years, are probably further away from mainstream conservatives than mainstream liberals, even though most don’t recognize it.
No. He says he would’ve voted for the bill because he was in support of most of it (9 of the 10 parts). He’s still opposed its application to private businesses, but that’s not the way legislation works-- you vote on the whole bill, not just parts of it.