The reaction of humans to evil is quite slow. Government intervention, being driven by the same humans as every other institution, is thus just as slow. For example, there were plenty of people around at the time who noticed a certain dissonance between “All men are created equal” and “2-for-1 sale on slaves; today only”. Resolving that contradiction took a while to get onto the government’s to-do list.
You’re confusing ‘rational’ with ‘good’. People are behaving rationally with food in the sense that they act in ways that tell the market to give them the food they want. That the food is not perfectly healthy for them is irrelevant - it still represents what they happen to want.
People probably also watch too much television. But given the fact that they desire to watch a lot of television, the market responds by giving them high quality programming distributed across the nation, flat panel TV’s, magazines about their favorite shows, etc.
But we’ve hit upon the crux of the problem here - interventionists don’t like the choices people make, and seek to change them by force. The market doesn’t guarantee a society that lives by your standards. It’s more a reflection of the standards that happen to exist. But if you think that the market isn’t adequately protecting the environment, or doing enough to help poor people, or is causing too many people to smoke and eat Cheetos, or results in brain-dead reality TV shows instead of highbrow arts programming, you want to intervene with government and impose your choices on others. That’s the impulse of the interventionist - always seeking to push society in a direction other than what it has chosen for itself through the aggregate free choices of the citizenry.
No, you’ve made assertions that this is the case, without presenting real evidence that this is so, and ignoring the fact that libertarians are not anarchists and do not believe that all regulation should be eliminated.
Here’s some evidence for you: The Heritage Institute publishes a ranking of economic freedom around the world. This year’s report also publishes quality of life information, based on various well-established quality of living standards.
You can read the Executive Summary here. Note that there are stong correlations with economic freedom and almost every standard of quality of life. As a country becomes more economically free, life gets better. End of story. Even at the most free end of the spectrum, this is true. If we needed more government overall, you would expect to see a peak somewhere on the scale between freedom and regulation. But that’s not the case, except for one measure (the environment). In every other measure, the curve is still sloping up, suggesting that we could be doing even better if we reduced government more, instead of adding more government.
That raises an interesting question. If the government is so beholden to We The People (more so than a business that merely depends on We The People’s patronage for its very survival), how did it get so uppity about sticking its nose into We The People’s private personal behavior?
I mean, if I hired a servant who did stuff like lock down the computer because he thought I was spending too much time online, I’d fire his ass. If the government is the people’s servant, why does it still have a job?
Do you really need me to cite the litany of abuses that happened in the 19th century when health and safety regulations were non-existent?
Sam, as I responded to you in the Hong Kong thread, that is a straw man. Nobody is arguing against economic freedom, the free market, or capitalism. What we are arguing against are these things taken to the extreme that libertarians favor.
With regards to your assertion that libertarians don’t believe in the elimination of all regulation, I’ve specifically argued about regulation of food and drugs, which, if I go by the representative posts in this thread, libertarians are against. Maybe libertarians are ok with the FDIC, SEC, or EPA; I don’t know. But that hasn’t been the subject of this discussion.
As I have repeatedly said, I agree when it comes to food.
We let it. “For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing” to quote somebody (but whom I have forgotten I may search later when at a PC)
As I’ve said, it’s not a perfect system. But it’s better than nothing which is the libertarian alternative.
As you noted, the government prohibits people from smoking marijuana. Why? Because the majority of people want it that way. If there was no government would you be able to smoke marijuana? Probably not, because all those people who want to stop you from doing it would still be there. You’d be one guy who wants to light up a joint and they’d be a million people who want to stop you. Who’s going to win?
It’s the government that protects the rights of minorities most effectively. Convince the majority of people to protect your right to smoke marijuana and the government will then protect your rights from the other people who want to stop you.
Microsoft doesn’t like it if I buy a Mac. They’d certainly “intervene” in my choice of which computer I’m using if they had a chance. So when a big corporation like Microsoft tells you how great Libertaianism is and how government regulations are bad, do you think really they’re thinking about your well-being? Corporations want to limit or abolish government regulation because government power represents a counterbalance to corporate power. They’ll say “stop letting the government control your life…” but what they’re thinking is “…so we can control your life.”
Libertarians like to think they’re John Wayne or Clint Eastwood and they can fight off the forces of the world all by themselves. But that’s just movies. In the real world, individuals cannot fight organizations and win. So the best choice is to have an organization of your own that will fight for its members like you. And that’s what the government is - an organization we created to fight on our behalf.
There is another thread on this board which asks the question “will libertarianism ever be more than a fringe movement”? A few people have answered the question, but the thread has been dominated by the usual debate over libertarian philosophy.
So I have a very direct question: If indeed libertarians want to take their philosophy beyond the discussion and message board stage, what is the plan to make libertarianism a viable and successful political movement that competes, even successfully, for elected office and actual political power?
Is there any plan beyond discussion and holding forth on the internet?
The one you’re in, actually. 
The stuff I was talking about was not pure libertarianism, but the position that government can’t do anything right. I wonder if anyone is naive enough to believe that if a real libertarian is elected he or she wouldn’t start interfering with stuff in about a week. Communism was all about the withering away of the state, remember, and look how that worked out.
That’s a very good question. It takes a bit of maturity to realize that you don’t have time to do all the stuff you want to do with a modicum of quality. Maybe they think that they can five minutes with Google and evaluate the safety of a new drug?
This can happen at the local level. When I was in college the Cambridge cops came to our dorm and basically said you can’t get busted for pot unless you did stupid things like selling to kids or growing plants in a window overlooking the police station. The fact that a majority of the citizens didn’t care - and a lot of money for city government came voluntarily from MIT and Harvard - made pot effectively legal in 1970 Cambridge.
Even today, how much enforcement do you think there is at the local level - at least in places where there isn’t majority sentiment against it.
That’s a false dichotomy. Obviously there are better choices than government controlled food distribution, simpler regulations like forcing restaurants to post calorie counts in visible locations, right by the menu choices. Next there are the bans on bad fats. I’d prefer the calorie choice option be tried first. We can also tax the fatty food higher and use the money to pay for healthcare for the obese. I heard about a workplace where they are charging more for unhealthy food, and using that to subsidize healthy food.
But the real point is that the libertarian contention that people do long range optimization of their choices is clearly not true, not even on average. They tend to optimize short term desires, and heavily discount long term benefits.
Surely no one would borrow more money than they can afford to pay back for that house they desire so much would they? OK, ok maybe a few people but never enough people to cause the rest of us any problems?
Eh? Oh.
Surely credit card companies only charge the interest they do to make up for the risk of defaults, and if tougher bankruptcy legislation were enacted, interest rates would decline.
Eh? Oh.
Exactly. There might not be a better way, but that doesn’t mean I have to get all misty-eyed about the wisdom of the aggregate.
Heck, to use an even more pertinent example, libertarians are always telling the rest of us how stupid we are to trust government. Do these same libertarians think we stupid masses are going to become brilliant if only government disappeared? After all of these posts dripping with contempt for us, for our judgment, for our goals, for our limitations?
In the marketplace of ideas, hasn’t big government won?
Sam, how delightfully naive and classical your analysis is.
In the following, the choices I’m talking about are life threatening or lifestyle threatening ones. I happen to believe that the benefit of a free market outweighs the negative of people getting ripped of by bad decisions. However a fully free market is not worth people dying from their poor decisions. If libertarians believe that it is, I think we may have found the crux of the disagreement.
I know a little something about quality. In real life, the level of quality of a product is not well known by consumers, and isn’t even exactly known by suppliers. A lot of consumer perception of quality is bound up with company image, not actual quality. I’ve already mentioned the curious case of the crappy telephones after the AT&T breakup. Some companies slip through low quality high prices products on image, or perceived image. Yes, they go bust, but not before the owners make tons of money, and then do it again with another product. In addition, you are assuming an optimal quality/price tradeoff, but there are actually tons of them, depending on the knowledge, wealth and image of the consumer. In your world street vendors would never sell a single counterfeit Rolex.
Really? The rich pay as little as possible? You are of course assuming perfect knowledge here. Say you are looking at two nearly identical products, at different prices. A third party, working in the industry, knows that the quality of the slightly more expensive one is much better than the cheaper one, though the details are proprietary. Wouldn’t his advice on the choice be better than yours? This might seem a bit farfetched, but I have done product evaluations which I can’t reveal outside my company, so it does happen.
For another example, say you are looking at two drugs that make similar claims, but which used different formulations. Don’t you think a choice made by you by one skilled in the area, who knows the impact of the differences, is better than yours?
I assume you know what that term means, but I suspect it can mislead many readers. Here is the definition from the wikipedia article:
So you can have a pareto-optimal situation where improving the life of a poor person will kick it out of the optimal state by requiring a rich person pay more taxes. In fact the next sentence of the article reads:
In any case, the purpose of regulation is not to affect the lives of those in the middle of the distribution, but rather to keep the outliers safe, or protect us from the outliers. 99% of businessmen may work honorably and for the long term, but 1% may not. Since it is difficult for the consumer to determine that 1%, those people might establish very profitable businesses in the short term. Regulations and laws both make it more expensive for the outliers to operate, and also directly protect consumers from life-threatening products which the outliers may sell to them.
Now, at least you admitted you assume perfect information, which, since this never happens, throws your system right out the window. We are getting close to perfect information on pricing thanks to the web, but certainly not on quality.
Yes, the FDA person deliberately cares more about consumer safety than about the profits of the drug companies. They also push to get complete information about the safety of products they are reviewing. Now, if a drug company exec is looking at a product that looks very profitable, and which does well on preliminary tests, how much money do you think he is going to spend to be absolutely sure? Remember, it is likely that his liability will be less if he doesn’t know about a problem. He has tested, after all. If you doubt this could happen, you should know that engineers in the US are told not to do patent searches, since the penalty for infringing a patent you know about is greater than for one you don’t.
Now, we can regulate and require all drug companies to do the same tests the FDA would require, but then you have the problem with them lying or covering up the results. Cigarette companies were unregulated, and they certainly covered up the data they had about smoking and health.
Which leads me to ask what value you put on the lives lost under your scheme in optimizing company profits? There is a hard tradeoff in getting a drug to market faster to save lives in the face of a risk of costing lives, but I don’t see that companies can do better on that one than the FDA.
Actually, this is where the complexity of our tax code comes from. The government does recognize certain cases where you might want to spend your money on something beneficial to society, like charity donations, and gives tax breaks for these. Tax policy also balances aggregate economic loss with societal benefit. No one person is going to be able to do this, since we tend to discount the benefit to Joe Blow vs the benefit to ourselves. If all of us were Mr. Spock, and could compute that an incremental dollar of earnings would be of more benefit to a struggling college student than to us, we wouldn’t need such tax policy. But we’re not like that, and economic policy that assumes we are is fundamentally flawed.
And government should stay out of pricing except in cases where the market is distorted, like in war or after a disaster. Price controls seldom involve life threatening situations, so are usually bad. Health insurance is a possible exception.
There is one thing you forget in your analogy. Processing units can be faulty, and can poison a calculation by sending out bad data. If each unit trusts all others, you are guaranteed to get a bad result. In real life, (and my PhD is in computer architecture and have worked on highly reliable computing systems for several decades) each unit checks stuff coming from other units. Kind of like the FDA. A large chunk of a modern operating system, and lots of hardware hooks, is devoted to making sure no bad actors are involved. There are outliers here just like there are in real life. Now, processing units are identical, unlike people. A better analogy might consider that some units prefer to do floating point and some prefer vector arithmetic and some prefer string manipulation. Some unit might be faster than others also.
It is not surprising that you are a libertarian given your overly simplistic view of the world.
Might it be, with the same confidence that has >> 50% of drivers think they are better than average, that these people know the dopes out there are going to lose, and that they’ll be able to capitalize on this. As the libertarian Dr. Fields said, never lighten up a chump.
That reminds me of Colbert now supporting Obama since he won in the marketplace. It is curious that all these people who have perfect information and optimize their choices have chosen regulatory capitalism.