Your hyperbole is very interesting here. First of an employer would most likely have no desire to “crush” his employees. Happy employees work better than unhappy ones. But honestly in the absence of Government you are correct, some employers would crush their employees, which is why their should be a Government, a small one, that stops force. You freely enter into a contractual agreement with your employer, and can leave at any time.
For once I agree with you. The initiator of violence should be stopped.
I would like to know when we had that? The answer is we never have, you do not know what it would be like. But I do know what extreme socialism looks like. (North Korea, Soviet Russia, Cuba)
I never did say that Government is the only form of oppression. IT is the largest. Honestly governments have killed millions of people in the last one hundred years. Economic rights are important, clearly, because if a mans economic rights are taken away by the government he is no better than a slave.
You do not know me. I would ask that you would refrain from telling me what I want to do. I personally strongly believe in FREE interaction with other people. I do not want to opt out of society, I want to FREELY engage in society without governmental interference unless I coerce or threat to coerce.
I do not think I owe those less fortunate than me no consideration. My moral and ethical code tells me that I should help them, and I do. The moral conundrum is that I also think a man’s labour is his own and he can sell it as he sees fit. Do you see my moral conundrum here? I would love to be able to feel really good about my self by being a socialist and voting other peoples money to someone else, but I cant.
Sorry, my vernacular still is mixed. When I say surgery I mean what Americans would mean when you say surgery. A doctor’s visit (like a general care doctor) would not be hard to get.
Something urgent would be taken care of. But, let’s say I have a bad ankle as a result of a break. While that’s not incredibly “urgent”, it would be something that I would want to get done. However, such a surgery might take a year to get done. When I was in the US and had a surgery like this, I was scheduled within a couple of weeks.
I came here from Ireland, I do not mind the question. I have lived been back and forth quite a bit. I moved to the US when I was young. So, I have experienced both on a long term scale. I would prefer, any day, the system over here.
So, should the government coerce us into taking care of each other? That’s not meant to sound sarcastic, it was a real question.
I didn’t say a word about violence. Employer’s didn’t need to use violence to force women to submit; just the threat of unemployment.
The Gilded Age, the robber baron era comes to mind.
Straw man. They have nothing to do with the kind of socialism we are speaking of.
And so have corporations, and so has religion. How many people have died from tobacco ? How many from anti-condom propaganda ? And how many of the people killed by governments have died because corporations or religion used them as muscle ?
Then you oppose freedom; government is what makes freedom on any real scale possible.
Your “moral conundrum” is that you value the profit motive more than human life, which isn’t a moral position at all. Frankly, I don’t believe for a moment that you and people like you would lift a finger to help anyone else without being forced.
And you repeatedly have ignored my point that you OWE SOCIETY. Your precious profits are only possible because of society, because of the government you despise and all the other people you would let suffer and die. If you really have such a fetish for independence, go live out in the wilderness somewhere ( without anything dependent upon society like factory made steel tools ), instead of sucking up society’s benefits and whining how you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Unless you do that, you are benefiting without wanting to pay.
Of course. Like, say, roads; make road payments voluntary and most of the country wouldn’t have anything better than dirt roads. Or building codes; relax building codes and that’s when you see news stories about tens of thousands dead in an earthquake. People WON’T show a proper level of concern for each other without force.
I agree with you, that without government we would have no freedom at all. But if we had a government that only stopped coercion or the threat of coercion than we would be free.
You have yet to explain how being coerced to work for others is not slavery.
I only owe society in the sense that what I do builds on what those who have come before us have done and what other do now, that does not mean that the fruits of my labour that I freely sell should be taken forcefully away from me.
Human beings generally acknowledge that theft and slavery are wrong, the burden of proof is on you to prove that taking the fruits of somone’s labour and giving it to someone else is not slavery.
It seems to me that the people in the top of socialism do well, very well. The communist party officials in North Korea are doing just fine, the others not so much. You can say that that is not what we are talking about, so are you saying that those countries are not socialistic? OR are they just to socialistic for you? Do you not like them because you do not think you can be on top? With all the intelligence that you clearly have it seems to me that you want to manipulate socialism so that you are the central planner and thus can take all the money you want. (Note I do not believe what I just wrote concerning your morality, I only said it to show that that is what you do to others.)
Honestly to say that you do not think that people would help each other is to ignore every charity that has every been made. That is people freely giving of their labour to others and it happens all the time. Rich people do it, Atheists do, religious people do it, poor people do it. It happens, and you know what, libertarians do it too. Your argument that people with my view do not help others is completely without factual basis or evidence.
I agree it’s troubling. Socialism depends on a high percentage of the population behaving responsibly. People in the underclass – almost by definition – behave irresponsibly.
It looks to me like the ball has been pretty much squarely kicked through the goalposts you set up. But anyway, I suppose possible to take race out of the picture and observe, in a colorblind fashion, that the United States has a much bigger underclass than Canada. This is demonstrated by our higher crime rates; our higher HIV infection rates; and probably just about any reasonable proxy for the proportion of irresponsible, reckless people in the population. Thus, it would be a mistake to assume that a policy – which depends on people acting responsibly – which works well in Canada would also work well in the United States.
The world economy had been brought to its knees by the reckless actions of bankers and hedge fund managers. They are not poor. They sure were reckless though.
It isn’t slavery when part of the “fruits of someone’s labour” actually derives from “capital” originally [del]stolen[/del]expropriated from the commons. Until people can make land and resources from thin air, the commons has an interest in everything produced. To this anarchist, your slavery argument only applies to taxation of pure service industries (like prostitution, but only as long as it doesn’t happen in a brothel) where hey, I agree with you.
When people talk about how “unfair” it is to tax the rich at a higher rate than the not-so-rich, I like to quote the noted socialist liberal Adam Smith:
Ireland does not have a socialised system like most of Europe. Our health system is not the NHS and is not free to all at point of entry.
It was also very badly funded during the 70’s/80’s and has never recovered. Using Ireland as an example of a “socialised” health care system isn’t very useful as the service is in no way comparible to most of Europe’s UHC systems.
I was thinking about this last night. In a sense we have a two-tier system that works arguably worse than most of the single tier systems. Forever lost between Boston and Berlin.
Whatever. I am not opposing that particular line of thought.
I am sure that it looks that way to you, but as I noted, the whole idea that there is an ethnic component to the situation appears to derive directly from a misapplication of statistics at two separate levels, so to me it looks like a fumble, at best.
Really? Because to this libertarian socialist it makes perfect sense. In fact that first word ‘libertarian’ as applied in most of Europe refers only to people like me. But you can use anarchist if it makes it easier for you
Of course it looks that way to me. Need I remind you what you said before?
Your response is to speculate that the government report I cited doesn’t mean what it seems to mean. Well, the same can be said of any piece of evidence. Any evidence can be explained away with enough epicycles.
No, we wouldn’t. First, because being forced to do things by the sheer necessity of them IS NOT FREE. And the closely related point that you have such a narrow definition of coercion that what you consider a government that prevents coercion would barely prevent it at all. Under your rules, anyone bright enough to be more subtle than waving a pistol in people’s faces would coerce anyone less powerful than themselves.
So paying what you owe is slavery ? So acting like a decent human being is slavery ?
In other words, you are a parasite, or want to be one. Exactly what “fruits” do you think your labor would have without the support of society ? You’d be an uneducated primitive trying to survive with stone tools.
And if I buy into your sociopathic viewpoint that you owe nothing to society, then why should society CARE about your rights ? You may not care about society, but you sure want society to care about you. If society collectively returns your disdain for people, why shouldn’t it just use you as a slave or a forced organ donor ? Why show anyone any consideration at all if you owe no one anything ?
Again, it’s called PAYING WHAT YOU OWE. You just want to be a thief; a thief who claims that preventing him from stealing is theft itself.
No, because they are too tyrannical for me. Lumping South Korea in with Canada is ridiculous. And they are rather like what your proposals would actually produce if implemented; they’d just change “The Communist Party” to “The X Corporation” as the entity that owned and controlled everything.
Nonsense. Charities exist, but they are too small and always have been to do the job even when they actually try. Your way of letting private institutions and citizens has been tried before - for thousands of years. That was how humanity started after all, without a government. And it didn’t work; you had people starving right and left, a vast mass of hopeless impoverished people. Your way does. Not. Work. Government redistribution and the other safety nets were invented because your way failed, and has always failed.