You’re serious? But maybe you’e right. Maybe the best defense of Communism is that the lines were orderly.
“Corporations growing larger” is not in itself a sign that markets don’t work and that they are exercising monopoly power. If you have a cite that monopoly power is becoming a problem or even increasing, please present it.
I can point to many, many examples of increasing diversity in the marketplace. Not just because there are more companies, but because the market has developed tools that allow consumers to reach out beyond the confines of their geographic location. Overnight package delivery, the internet, and other technologies have given consumers far more choices than they used to have.
Of course I can. Off the top of my head - television, radio, and music. When I was a kid, we had 3 channels. Now I have hundreds to choose from, plus internet video. Satellite radio has brought huge choice to regions that had very little. The television industry used to be completely dominated by ‘the big 3’ - NBC, CBS, and ABC. Now there are dozens of large networks. The music industry used to be dominated by a few huge record labels. Now there are hundreds.
The computer field was once completely dominated by IBM. The U.S. auto industry used to be dominated by the ‘big 3’ auto makers. Now you can choose from many different brands. The airline industry has seen the dominance of a few large airlines be challenged by numerous startups. Retail used to be dominated by a handful of large outlets like Sears. Thanks to the internet, I now shop at thousands of different stores. This, by the way has caused prices and margins to drop dramatically because department stores lost their ability to capture a geographic area and force them to pay higher prices. It also forced them to restructure their inefficient inventory methods.
So once again… You have a cite showing that the market is consolidating and the number of companies shrinking? That monopoly power is increasing? That consumers are being offered fewer choices and paying higher prices due to the monopoly power of a few businesses?
Note: “Big is bad” isn’t going to cut it. Just pointing to Wal-Mart doesn’t prove anything. You have to show that Wal-Mart’s increase in market share is hurting consumers, driving up prices, or otherwise preventing the market from working the way it is supposed to.
Really? The government set all those standards? You have some cites for that?
Everywhere you look, there are standards. Everywhere. Most of them - the vast majority of tem - were created by private industry. Because there is a need for standardization.
Apparently, you didn’t bother to read my previous message. You don’t need tollbooths. All you need is a GPS tracker in your car and a way to communicate usage informastion, and it could all be done transparently.
But I shouldn’t have taken on the road argument, because there are several reasons why it’s not feasible to privatize them now. The first is that roads give true monopoly power - if you own the only road out of a neighborhood, all of the residents are your captives and you can dictate pricing to them. So I would not advocate selling off the roads to private industry. What I WOULD advocate is the government engaging in market reforms such as peak pricing as a way of making roads more efficient and removing an externality that favors private autos over other transportation sources.
My Grandmother had a very good education. What she lost in diversity she made up for in quality. I wouldn’t hold up the public school system as any kind of government success story, considering the number of dropouts we have and the number of kids who are graduating as illiterates.
Again, the belief that absent all the forces that make private industry efficient, the government will somehow magically be more so.
I don’t have any particular dog in this fight. But many of the “zillions” of protocols used by computers today were originally developed by DARPA, and implemented in the Arpanet. Many others were developed by government-funded public universities. TCP, IP, DNS, and others owe their existence to Uncle Sam. (Or rather, they owe their existence to some very clever people who were employed by Uncle Sam, or some state government.)
HTTP, HTML, and many other web standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The list of members includes numerous names in tech: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla Foundation, Yahoo, etc. Note that while most of the members are corporations, not all members are for-profit and some are government-funded universities. More importantly, note the following line from the W3C’s Wikipedia page:
So the W3C was started by a guy coming from a government-funded group, setting up shop at a government-funded group, and getting support from a couple other government-funded groups.
I don’t know about the rest of your examples, and I am not taking a stance on your overall position. But while there are undoubtedly many protocols and formats that were createdly entirely by private groups, the very base that they run on and work with was largely government-funded. Corporations have done wonders by taking the Internet infrustructure and running with it, but the creation of that infrustructure has government fingerprints all over it.
How is this, “bad logic?” Are you saying that the government doesn’t waste billions of dollars every year on drug enforcement? Furthermore, I’d like you to make a positive statement on all of this: what’s your opinion on the war on drugs? Do you feel that it’s a success? Do you agree with long prison terms for people whose only crime was possession of crack cocaine?
If not, then will it just cause you to choke on your oatmeal and writhe around on the floor to admit that you agree with the Libertarian Party?
Furthermore, you’re right, we haven’t proven that gun liberalization will lead to increased violence, but we have provided correlational evidence for it. Now, as a scientist, I’ll freely acknowledge that correational evidence has proven to be spectacularly wrong in the past. But in governance, where exactly can you run an experimental study in an ethical manner. Is it okay to split a state down the middle and conduct a true experiment with giving one side of the state strict gun control and the other free access to weapons?
The fact is that nobody in politics has true experimental data to prove that their side is right. But comparing a single population over time before and after intervention is a decently respected method of study, and frankly it’s the best evidence that you’ll be able to find related to a topic such as gun crime. You have to admit that you’re own political position is in possession of no more valid type of evidence related to gun crime and you cannot dismiss the Libertarian party merely because we don’t have a perfect double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled study to back up all of our political beliefs; nobody does. But liberal claims that gun deregulation will lead to mass chaos and an increase in crime is patently false based upon the available evidence.
A Libertarian America would allow me to realize my true destiny as an ubermensch. I would shed the soft exterior of a pampered yuppy lawyer and reveal my true self: a rugged individualist. I’m capable of so much more, and I’d show you how much, except that the federalistas keep mailing me an annual tax form. They tie my superman hands and restrict my inalienable freedom by mailing paper to me, arggh, paper defeats the ubermensch. But know this, America: if I were set free of your nanny state, I would stride across the land like a gentle titan of self-determination, and use my rugged individualism only to play with the automatic weapons of my choice and keep everyone off my property. And if you let me do this, you dirty hippies can smoke all the dope you want.
Why, I can just imagine the parallel-universe version of Der Trihs making up absurd stories about a “government” launching a lethal paramilitary assault on some little community, establishing some controlled-but-legally-foreign enclave for the purpose of holding people indefinitely without charges, getting many thousands of people killed in wars launced on the basis of bogus evidence, etc…
All this and talking monkeys.
That’s right. According to one reknowned self-described libertarian author, one of the benefits of a libertarian government would be that apes could talk. I don’t recall the exact explanation he offered, but I assume government bureaucracy was repressing the speech centers of their brains or something like that.
Hey, it was every bit as realistic as the rest of the novel.
Are you talking about The Probability Broach by L Neil Smith? You should check out Forge of the Elders, it has talking mollusks! Well, nautiloids of some kind. And giant sea-scorpions. And Commies! All of which are as realistic as
As realistic as me being able to tell the difference between “Post Quick Reply” and “Go Advanced” :smack:
In all realism, here’s what I see happening:
Education:
Public schools must now compete with private schools subsidized with publicly-funded vouchers. Virtually all children who can migrate to these public schools, which vary widely in quality, as some would be based on experimental pedagogical techniques that seem attractive to parents but don’t necessarily work, and others would be founded more on ideology and religion than education, and still others would operate by virtue of being cheap and marginally better than the public schools. All of these would have the luxury of being able to reject and underperforming, troublesome, or special needs student they don’t want. All of these could find education elsewhere, if there’s one local and their parents can afford it even after the voucher, but many of them would fall back on the shoulders of the public schools. The public schools, now with less money and less teachers (on the plus side, the average teacher would probably be paid more at the private schools), and still burdened with the worst the district can give them, would crumble even further, but I admit wouldn’t dissolve entirely. The bar for higher education would become higher, as government subsidized loans and grants for college tuition fade away.
Net result: Better education for some, worse education for others.
Roads:
Stay exactly as they are. Sorry folks, but only the most wide-eyed ideologues actually want privatized roads. Industry, retail, emergency services, private citizens, even the freaking military are all so dependent on the modern highway system that they wouldn’t dare try to clog it with tollbooths or costly GPS transponders (which, btw, would raise a whole host of privacy concerns troublesome to a Libertarian state). Everybody wants public roads, we just dicker about where they go or who gets the contracts to build and maintain them. Funding may shift more towards gas tax and tollbooths on the larger interstates (not city roads), rather than general funds.
Food:
Prices increase. A portion of federal subsidies makes it back to you at the grocery store, after all. Quality decreases. Never underestimate the American public’s tolerance for shoveling complete crap into their mouths. The market will provide options for those willing to look and able to pay for high quality foods, and we’ll never fall back to The Jungle levels, but the average person’s diet will become worse by a non-trivial degree.
Medicine:
Here’s the only place where the term “chaos” is at all applicable IMHO. With the FDA gone or severely cut down, market forces and tort law are now the ultimate arbiter of drug quality. Medical associations and insurers (including the charitable ones) would eventually work out some system, but it’d take a considerable amount of time before all the competing factions were merged. The meantime would be pretty shaky, and I’d predict doctors and insurers would be very hesitant to prescribe anything that’s not absolutely tried-and-true to anyone. I wonder how the ultimate result, the big certifying body, will differ from the FDA as currently configured. Drug companies will still have to jump through hoops to get them to sign off on anything.
Drugs:
Hate to say it, but I don’t see the situation changing much here anyway. Pot will be legal and common, but nobody wants heroin around. It may be technically legal, but legitimate business won’t touch it. That leaves the same gangs that are selling it today, at practically the same prices. This means the same level of attending violence, and related enforcement and incarceration. You can’t lock up someone for possession, but you do need to go after the gangs shooting at each other or the junky who robs people for his next fix.
Labor:
Unions loose whatever legal protection they had, but regain their importance and purpose. Workers will suffer quite a bit before organized labor is able to bounce back, but it eventually will.
Corporate:
Less regulation means more Enron-style hijinks. Oh sure, they’ll fall apart sooner or later, but not before they cause a lot of suffering to their employees and stock holders.
So really, not that different from today. If you’re doing alright financially and have no trouble watching labels, you may be better off (except for the medical thing, that’d bite everybody on the ass). But the majority would be doing a fair bit worse. Still not the total collapse some above are predicting.
It’s not naive or wrong if you change that sentence to read: “If someone’s check isn’t guaranteed by the government, then naturally they are going to be more efficient”
I was in the Army. I don’t know of a more wasteful or inefficient organization on Earth, except for maybe other government departments that are also guaranteed a tax-funded paycheck. I’m not advocating the privatization of the military here, but I am saying that a little more fiscal responsibility is a good thing.
When you think about it, guaranteed money from the government is basically communism. And we all know the kinds of incentives for progress or frugality communism instills.
I don’t see why that’s necessarily true. The government has no direct incentive to keep employee salaries down (which is one of the things libertarians complain about) but a privately run school does, The people who are making the financial decisions for the school will essentially be deciding whether they want to spend money on their employees or themselves. Which way do you think it will generally go?
Look at prisons. Wages and employment standards in privately run prisons are generally lower that their equivalents in government run prisons.
Libertarians will argue that the free market will force these private schools to hire better teachers and offer them better salaries. But is that realistic? Which do you think will be seen as a more effective use of money - spending it on teacher salaries to improve the actual quality of the education being offered or spending it on an advertising campaign to convince consumers that you’re offering a better education regardless of whether or not that’s true?
Libertarians also place great faith in impartial review organizations that will replace government regulatory agencies and help consumers make wise choices about the services and products they buy. But who’s running these organizations and who’s paying them? Will it be the businesses? I assume people have heard the joke about corporate accounting firms being asked one question “How much is 2 plus 2?” - the firm that got hired was the one that answered “How much do you want it to be?” Or will it be the consumers who pay? If so, how does that differ from paying via taxes for government regulators. The two obvious answers are that the consumers will have the additional burden of having to choose which reviewers to trust (maybe there’ll be a market for review reviewers) and will have to bear the burden of the free riders who use the information without paying for it (if you want to know the best place to buy groceries just go to whatever store the Smiths use, they paid to have all the local grocers checked and reviewed).
Assuming the Libs would really follow through with this part: If the U.S. military establishment were scaled back to purely defensive levels and all U.S. bases abroad were evacuated – how would that affect the global geopolitical situation?
Oh that’s just super! So instead of being kept busy in school, and maybe, just MAYBE having no other choice but to improve themselves, they’ll be out on the streets, causing trouble and harassing everyone else!
:rolleyes:
This is Libertopia. The criminal element either shapes up, starves, or gets shot, remember?
You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m looking for the downside.
Yeah-and we’re starting with Baltimore fans!
d&r
Well, there is the minor problem of starving* criminals with guns, brutality, and no employment prospects shifting from selling no-longer-profitable drugs to simple violent crime. With a well-armed citizenry, it is likely that after a few aborted muggings, the criminal element will gravitate towards simply shooting to kill and looting the body.
It’s funny, but I’ve never read a starving-match-girl tale set in a Libertarian world. If you are willing to accept that until society as a whole makes a sea change, some people will literally starve in the street and others will be killed or arrested trying to sustain their basic needs. Most people view this as enough of a bad thing that they don’t mind the government taking a goodly chunk of their money to ensure that it doesn’t happen very often.
I should note that I’m not a social psychologist or a historian; stopping government-sponsered aid may well turn all or almost all welfare bums into productive citizens overnight. I very much doubt it, however.
*I am also of the belief that while more people will give to soup kitchens and food banks in the absence of government aid and welfare, not enough people would do so to make up for the lack of enforced giving.
Oh, yes, to address, Guin’s original point:
Schooling is important. It is, I would say, far too important to also serve as a holding pen for disaffected youth. If they don’t want to learn, you can’t make 'em, and you help no one by trying. If we’re going this route, we may as well make actual jails to hold the kids who fail out of proper school. It’s certainly an education of a sort.
Actually, while we’re on this debate path:
How would our Libertopia define adulthood, competency, and general able-to-participate-in-social-contract-ness? Does the 14-year-old who defiantly storms out and declares her intent to make it on her own have the right to do so?