Well with that said, I think we are looking at this all wrong. Rand Paul isn’t trying to tout his libertarianism. He’s simply trying to see if he can get Rachel Maddows head to explode. She wasn’t on her show tonight, maybe he succeeded.
Sure; like every other political ideology, it embraces a wide spectrum of views, from vanilla-type civil libertarians all the way over to the flat-out delusional market fundamentalists. IdahoMauleMan appears to be at the “pompous and unrealistic” point of the spectrum.
So what? It’s also illegal today to manufacture infant formulas containing opium, automobile windshields made of non-laminated glass, and pest control products with sodium cyanide.
All of those products were formerly used by many people who experienced no problems with them. That doesn’t mean that they posed no safety problems in general, or that we’d be better off if we could freely buy and use them today.
And you are in the “out of line in Great Debates” end of the spectrum.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Okay, sorry folks.
Short answer: I am willing to trade the small personal costs of such regulations for the greatly decreased likelihood to not be screwed over by anyone who thinks there’s a buck to be made by doing so.
Long answer: Let me see where my attempts to protect myself might lead, and who is the ultimate arbiter I could appeal to.
I want to go out with my family and have a sandwich. Now, I can’t realistically inspect the kitchen facilities of every sandwich place in town. I don’t have that kind of time. Even if it looks clean, there could be microbes and contamination that I can’t see. Do I take samples and send them to a lab? Besides which, I’m not the only sandwich buyer in the city, and all those other customers traipsing through the kitchen would probably bring in contaminents of their own.
Now, that does present a market opportunity. Some new company could spring into being, conducting inspections and doing the labwork. For a small subscription price, they let me have access to their list of restaurants that are certified to be correctly handling food. But who watches the watchers? How do I know they’ve really conducted the inspections they say they have, and that I’m paying for? Before I subscribe to their service, I’d better make sure my agreement with them has some safeguards.
So I’m off to a lawyer to review the service contract with the restaurant certifying company. I hope he’s a good lawyer. I’m counting on his advice to make sure the food I eat is safe. I don’t know what his incentive is to do a good job. Once I’ve paid him, I have no more leverage. He could be retired or dead by the time his incompetence is discovered. Or worse, he could be taking kickbacks from the company I’m hiring him to protect me from; there’s certainly no law against it.
But let’s suppose he’s done his job, and my contract with the food certifying company has real teeth in it. I go to an approved restaurant, we all get food poisoning, my family all die and I barely pull through.
It’s time to hold that company to account. I could take them to court, or I could just publicly announce how they failed to do their job. Either way, I’d better have proof; don’t want them suing me for harming their business. I’m gonna need to prove that I got sick, that it was food poisoning, and that the food that caused it came from one of their certified restaurants. I’ll have to keep a sample of everything I eat, so that it can be tested later. I’m gonna need sterile sample containers with me every time I eat. I better have a notary with me to verify that my samples are correctly labeled. Then, of course, they’ll have to be handled in a way that preserves the chain of evidence. I hope the sample doesn’t degrade too much while I’m in the hospital fighting for my life.
But I do sue the company. My family is dead, poisoned by one of their restaurants. But how do I prove it? I hire a lab to analyze the sample I’ve kept from that meal. I hope the lab is not on the take. So they check the sample, and sure enough, they find e. coli. Is that what made me sick? I’ll have to have a doctor testify in court about what level of e. coli in food is enough kill people. The company I’m suing could hire their own doctor, who’ll testify that the levels in my food were perfectly safe. Who’s to say how much is too much? The government is not setting the limit anymore, right?
The courts see through all the legal maneuvering, and I’m awarded a huge settlement. How do I collect? My settlement is against the company, but it turns out the owners have paid themselves a fortune while keeping the company’s assets very small. And now it’s cheaper for them to declare bankruptcy, fold that company, and pay me pennies on the dollar for my settlement. Then the owners of that company file the incorporation papers the very next day for a new restaurant certifying company. You think the bad press from the trial will make people not trust them? It’s set up through a series of holding companies; no one knows it’s the same people running the new company that failed with the old one. What’s to stop them, and who’s going to dig deep enough to find out?
So, that’s my tale of protecting myself. You know what I think?
That’s too goddamn much trouble to go through for a fucking sandwich.
If there is some part of that scenario that you think is unrealistic, tell me what it is. Just please, don’t resort to the goodness of people’s hearts (I believe in it, but won’t stake my family’s life on it) or any sort of pre-emptive government intervention.
There must be some ultimate arbiter. I figure that’s the courts. If this whole thing is going to wind up the in the lap of some branch of government, I have no problem with the government setting some rules that we all play by in advance.
You wanted to know what happens next; I hope that’s answered your question. Now I have one of my own.
You keep phrasing this in terms of the right of consumers to have more choices, access to products and services that they currently can’t have. I’m not exactly hurting for restaurants to choose from; there’s more now than I could go to in years. If the regulations were lifted, I suppose I might have a few more choices, and save a few bucks on my taxes if the government didn’t do research, set standards, and hire inspectors. It seems to me that the burden of regulations falls much more heavily on producers than it does on me. They have to learn all the regs, educate their employees, maintain their equipment, keep necessary records, etc. When you extoll the benefits of an unregulated world, whose rights are you really fighting for?
And that precise point, at the end of the day is going to be the most interesting part. The Libertarians have energy and a coherent focus (however flawed) the conservatives (IMO) lack, but they are too few in number compared to the mass of conservatives to effectively carry their desired social views to fruition. It will be interesting to see at what point the social conservatives wake up to the fact that Libertarians are heart attack serious about wanting policies that are utterly unpalatable to the mass of the electorate. At that point the Libertarians will be thrown under the bus.
Beyond this, one thing I don’t quite grok is why die hard racists and true Libertarians are such inseparable fellow travelers in US politics. In this storyabout the fallout from the Ron Paul campaign where it was discovered his campaign newsletter was blatantly racist, there was a lot of noise, but little to no action taken by Ron Paul. Normally racists are (typically, but not always) from very conservative political roots 180 degrees from the moral laissez faire of main line Libertarian philosophy.
Coherently put. And life is tens of thousands of those situations strung together. People with pure Utopian ideas aren’t fit to run dog pounds, much less legislative committees. Making law and passing government budgets is a hell of a lot more complex than dictating to a privately owned corporate staff. It is why Meg Whitman will make such an awful governor of Cal if she is elected. The idiot never even voted for 30 years and she thinks other people will go along with her ideas? Where she needs 2/3rds of the legislators to agree on a budget? None of whom she can fire or discipline in any way? Digression.
The Paul family kind of libertarianism is the kind where if some government function is too complicated their solution to their failure to understand the problem is to privatize it or have some pie in the sky dream solution that is so fucking stupid that no one will ever put it to the test. Like Papa Paul’s gold standard. These tards are so stupid they don’t understand that a modern economy cannot be on a gold standard. They are for it anyway. It’s like trying to explain Schrodinger’s Cat to an 8 year old, except that an 8 year old actually has an open mind.
How many people continued to eat at Denny’s regularly in the 1990s when they paid the largest financial settlement in the history of Title IX discrimination lawsuits, because of their racist treatment of black patrons? How many people continued to eat at Denny’s regularly when after that settlement was paid, the restaurants continued to have problems with mistreating minorities?
How many people intentionally patronized Cracker Barrel when it was under a national boycott for its appalling treatment of LGBT employees?
I think you have altogether too much faith in people to give a damn about discrimination that doesn’t apply to them.
And how do I know what standards the John Mace Restaurant Approval service holds for food safety? How am I to know that the standards are reasonable, as I am not educated in the nuances of food safety regulations? Heck, how do I even know that the John Mace Restaurant Approval service exists?
What happens when I have to go somewhere that the John Mace Restaurant Approval service doesn’t operate? When I’m driving across country, am I forced to know what Restaurant Approval services operate in each state or region I drive through, and know which ones are trustworthy and hold a standard that I can agree with, since I’ve now had to become well-versed enough in food safety standards to make such a judgment?
How do I distinguish between the mark of the John Mace Restaurant Approval service, the swoopy navy blue J and white upright M and the mark of the wholly untrustworthy Joe Moose Restaurant Approval service that’s a swoopy royal blue J and beige upright M? (Surely if we’re opposed to governments enforcing matters as serious as food safety we’re opposed to governments enforcing trademarks and service marks, nu?)
While I’m spending my time researching food safety and Restaurant Approval companies, are you going to pay me? Because I’ve got to tell you, this sounds like it might eat into the working hours of a lot of days, especially if I’m planning a road trip.
I think you’re being intentionally sarcastic, but this is actually a really good illustration case. In the United States, no infants were harmed by melamine-tainted formula, though it was found to exist. 4 children died and more than 50,000 were injured (kidney problems which they’ll carry throughout life) in China from melamine-tainted formula. In China, where there is *no *robust system of regulation regarding baby formula production.
U.S. federal regulators specifically looked for melamine in baby formula in response to the China crisis, focusing especially on Asian markets where imported formula (and other milk-containing products) might be sold, but also testing all formula produced by American manufacturers as well.
So, no American babies were harmed by melamine because our FDA regulations were robust regarding safe manufacture of baby formula to begin with, and a number of other (non-formula) products were pulled off of shelves in Asian markets because of melamine contamination discovered because of the increased scrutiny the FDA imposed. Because of regulation, in a circumstance no one had previously anticipated (because there’s absolutely no reason for melamine to ever be added to a food product) American consumers were protected from being harmed due to a practice that had come about specifically due to companies undertaking criminally dangerous means to increase profits in a highly competitive market.
Libertarians suggest that companies should be left to their own devices because a company that abuses the public trust or offends the public sensibility won’t make a profit and will therefore go out of business. But in food safety, lack of robust regulation and oversight means that abuses of trust or offenses to sensibility come with the cost of health and in some cases, life.
And in terms of discrimination, there’s another cost. Back on page one of the thread, there were a few instances of people saying the ultimate cost to a business would be the driving reason not to engage in discriminatory practices. But this ignores the fact that the victims of discrimination are not the business owners, particularly not the mythical business owners who have to close their doors because their segregationist policies destroyed their profits. (By the way, can anyone provide any examples of companies forced out of business due solely to public disapprobation of a discriminatory policy?)
But don’t you see?! You are trading your liberty for a sandwich! You will get neither!
“Giant Squid” comments in 3…2…1…
Indeed. I’m afraid Rand Paul and this thread are not advancing the cause of liberty in practice.
In the Maddow interview, I got the impression that this was the first time that Rand Paul had to talk to anyone who didn’t agree with him. He was completely unprepared to answer questions that he should have known were coming. If he gives N interviews, he will give N+1 variations on what he thinks about the Civil Rights Act. Now apparently if a coal mine or oil well explodes, we’re just supposed to think “tough titties” and act like it never happened. It would be un-American to go after the company responsible. What a putz. Congrats Kentucky, you nominated someone with Sarah Palin’s brain inside Eddie Haskell’s body.
Two other examples - the Southern Baptists boycotted Disney for over a decade because Disney offered health care to partners of its GLBT employees. So its tried the other direction as well. It isn’t like everyone shares the same “right thinking” values.
Mitsubishi - makers of very good looking cars, IMHO - is still in business despite behaving horrendously over sexual harassment in its factories.
For that matter - number three - despite the fact that many people feel that U.S. jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs, going overseas is unacceptable, I can’t think of a “Buy American” movement that has really succeeded. When push comes to shove, we value a cheap price for us over our neighbor’s job.
Libertarians seem like people with no idea of how to fix actual problems, but plenty of ways to break things that already work.
Aren’t you forgetting Rearden metal, the strongest and most reliable metal in the world?
Like many Libertarian imbeciles, Rand is an absolutist whose principles don’t hold up under ten minutes of close scrutiny. He blabs the improbable truth about his beliefs from time to time because he lives in a universe that mostly doesn’t question what would happen if free enterprise were to take charge of desegregating lunch counters in the south in the 1960s, and babbles some weak shit about “moral disapproval” driving bigoted lunch-counter owners out of business–eventually. (Maybe five generations, maybe ten–the point being that good would triumph, he claims, without the evil of governmental intervention. Hell with all those blacks being discriminated against today–gotta think of the big picture!!)
Who gives a crap about that when you have Galt’s perpetual motion/unlimited energy machine?
Who is John Galt?
While I generally agree with a libertarian philosophy, the problem is that there is never a shortage of assholes in the world. For everyone that you drive out of business through market forces because they are a racist, don’t have proper sanitary conditions, or whatever, there is someone else rich, stupid and/or crazy enough to keep taking that person’s place.
You will always have to put up with such things in society, and it seems that I agree that I am willing to trade that small part of my liberty to live in a world where these things just can’t happen by force of law. Maybe that makes me naive and starts down the slippery slope to totalitarianism, but I think not. I’m definitely against the next step.
FTW.