The majority of people are not willing to personally prevent it without recourse to government. It would require some combination of theft, assault, and/or kidnapping, which would get them sent to jail (remember, we are talking about minimal government, not anarchy; everything on the preceding list would still be a crime) and/or physically chastised in self-defense.
No, it would just require employers to collectively decide that if you use marijuana, you are blacklisted from employment and starved to death. Or that your entire family will be blacklisted and starve together, as a terror tactic. Mostly, a libertarian society is really a plutocracy under another name.
Yes, as a matter of fact that is causing the rest of us problems.
Do you why that is? Could you explain it to us? Take as much time as you wish.
Or a willingness of employers to institute mandatory drug testing.
But you’re right, I’m talking crazy talk. Something like that would never happen. It would be a non-governmental form of coercion and that doesn’t exist. Only the government ever punishs marijuana users. Businesses are all Libertarian and would never dictate to their employees how to live.
That’s the Moral High Ground argument they’re making, Sam.
I would still make the claim that for the majority of the people on this board you need to peel back a few layers of the onion to understand why they make the Moral High Ground argument.
You’re trying to fight irrationality with rationality. It will never work.
I think there can be other segments of the population who make the Moral High Ground argument for slightly different reasons. Religious fundamentalists, of all stripes and denominations, for example. But I haven’t seen any of those on this Board for awhile. Actually, never.
Oh, and by looking at the two dozen or so posts that followed my last one, all I can say is…the prosecution rests it case. More ridiculous strawmen. More ad hominem attacks on me for things I never said, instead of a little self-reflection about why people make, or don’t make, their own choices. More concoctions of ‘artificial rights’ that immediately provide the poster with instant victimhood.
Which actually happened… after the government started strongarming private businesses into doing it.
Now that’s a good post. Thank you for that.
I’ll ask you a question that I asked someone else a while back.
Do you agree, or disagree that there are major differences between laws that are passed that
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REMOVE the threat of force and coercion from citizens, such as elimination of slavery and Voting Rights Acts?
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INVOKE the threat of force and coercion from the state on citizens?
If you do agree, do you think there should be a substantially different (if not infinitely different, as a hard-core libertarian would argue) burden for passing one type of law vs the other?
Give me a break. I’ll be more than happy to talk in more detail if you want. But this is a message board, not a Ph.D thesis.
And frankly, I find your point of view to be far more naive - your faith in the wisdom of regulators and central planners is touching, but flies in the face of centuries of attempted grand social plans by those who think they know better than the collective wisdom of the populace.
You are starting from the assumption that free markets lead to more people dying from bad decisions than does reliance on government. That’s the very assumption we’re challenging here, and you don’t get to just assume it’s wrong.
Yeah, me too. I’ve been involved in Quality Engineering, done the Six Sigma certification, TQM, ISO 9001, blah blah. All programs devised by industry in a never-ending quest to improve the quality of their products.
And yet, I’d much rather drive a Ford than a Lada. Fancy that.
Here’s where we get to the part where you are being simplistic. You simply don’t understand that knowing the quality of things does not have to be an explicit process. People learn about the quality of goods through intermediaries such as the reputations of business, brand names, advertising, word of mouth, and price. Everyone knows that if they go to “Easy Al’s Autos” they’re more likely to find a lemon than if they go to the certified used car lot at a BMW dealership. Much of the information isn’t even verbal. For example, BMW dealerships invest a lot of money in their buildings and make it clear that they have done so. Why? To send a message: “We spent this money because we plan to amortize it over a long period in business. That means we have a reputation to protect, and we’re not likely to screw you and vanish tomorrow.”
Don’t underestimate the amount of information we absorb through various market-driven cues like this.
So your assertion is that company image has nothing to do with the quality of their products? Quick, get on the phone to Rick Wagoner and tell him that GM can stop losing money on each car becaue they’re spending so much on quality to improve their image.
Yes, this happens. Which is why brand names have value and can command premium prices, and which is why companies have to work so hard to maintain quality to protect their brand.
Do occasional lemons get out? Sure. Are there crappy products on the market? Sure. I never claimed that the free market would bring utopia on Earth, or that if we went to a free market every product in existence would be the ultimate of its kind. The question is whether, on balance, you think the market is better capable of providing high quality products than is government, or whether overall quality to price ratio can be driven up through regulation.
There’s no doubt that government can set high quality standards - arbitrarily high if it wants to. But is it the appropriate amount of quality? Does it represent the best tradeoff between quality and price? Almost never, because government has no way to know what the optimal point is, because the information required to know that doesn’t even exist in any centralized form. Preferences like that are realized through the interaction of the marketplace, and aren’t something you can just sample for or derive through sheer bureaucratic brainpower.
Absolutely right. Which makes it even harder for government to come up with a one-size-fits-all standard that everyone is happy with. Luckily, the market is far more sophisticated and can accommodate people who want BMW’s along with people who want Corollas. Wonderful, isn’t it?
In my world, selling a counterfeit Rolex would still be illegal, because Libertarians respect property rights, including things like trademark and patent law. On a more general point, is it rational to buy faux-expensive watches? Of course - if you happen to value the appearance of wealth more than the actual function. Everyone’s got their own values. My mom used to have horrible plastic candle holders on the wall that were supposed to look like they were gilded, but instead looked like cheap gold plastic. But then, we were poor, so she enjoyed her $2 candle holders.
More specifically, they try to get as much value as they can, given the amount of effort they are willing to expend on the problem. Rich people can afford to not optimize every purchase, just like I can afford to buy a pack of nails from Home Depot without reading metallurgy reports. At some level, there’s only so much research I’m willing to do for 60 cent nails. But wouldn’t you know, those nails generally turn out to be high quality anyway. How come? I’ll leave that as an exercise for you.
I quite explicitly said that I recognize that information asymmetry is one way in which markets can fail or be inefficient, and that I had no problem with government acting as an information clearing house.
Uh, okay. It seems to me to be rather obvious that there may be some people who know more about a product than I do. I fail to see why that means anything.
Do you have a lot more of these? Let’s say I’m looking at two computer monitors - one of them has a superior grade of plastic on the PC board. I have no way of knowing. Horrors! Let’s create a ministry of computer monitor distribution so that the people more clever than I can let me rest my poor brain while they do the heavy lifting.
Facetiousness aside, this gets back to the point I keep making (over, and over again). You and I are surrounded by products that we scarcely understand, and yet which have high quality and do what we want them to do. Why do you think that is? I drive a high quality car, and yet, I’m not an auto engineer! How can that possibly happen? Why didn’t some shyster sell me a car made out of tin that fell apart after a week?
Let’s get back to your drug example. How might I learn about these two drugs? Well, one might be demonstrably better than another. That means more doctors will prescribe it, which drives up demand. This in turn allows the drug maker to charge more money. So just by looking at price I might get a clue. But let’s say they have equal demand, but each one is better for certain types of conditions. How would I choose?
I can tell you - I’d go to my doctor and ASK him. You know, the guy who is supposed to keep up on his journals. I pay him the big bucks because I get to leverage his specialty knowledge when I need it. I might even seek a second opinion.
Then I might read the newspapers, and read articles about problems with one drug or another.
But if drugs weren’t regulated at all, there would be many other ways for me to learn it. For example, a doctor who is insured by the best insurance companies, who have the best testing labs and most stringent drug approval processes, might advertise that fact. Just like I trust that the BMW dealership won’t sell me a tin car, the “AAA insurance rated” doctor isn’t going to prescribe Peruvian ditch-weed for my gout. Or perhaps the drug companies themselves will seek to collaborate and create a ratings agency that allows them to disseminate information about their drugs. Something like ISO 9001 certification, or Better Business Bureau membership.
And this is what you don’t understand - it’s not my knowledge against the expert government regulator’s knowledge - it’s HIS knowledge against the collective wisdom of the hundreds of thousands of doctors, chemists, engineers, analysts, ratings agencies, investigative journalists, price information, and iterative adjustments in the free market. He can’t hope to do a better job.
I have repeatedly agreed that the Pareto-optimal solution does not guarantee social justice or a perfect moral outcome. What it does do it guarantee that the solution will be economically efficient. It would at least be a start if socialists and regulators would admit that their attempts to push the market in what they see as a more ‘just’ direction will have economic costs. But they don’t. They claim that government can create jobs, that new environmental regulations will actually improve the economy, that we’re going to centrally plan and engineer a newer, better ‘green’ economy, that ‘fiscal multipliers’ mean the government can tax and spend with no consequences or even increase wealth.
All of it nonsense.
Really? It sure doesn’t look that way to me. It looks to me like regulations are designed specifically to help those groups who provide the most votes, who are by definition NOT outliers. Giving a ‘stimulus’ cheque to the middle class is not exactly protecting the outliers, is it? Nor is setting CAFE standards or providing tax breaks if you buy a hybrid. For damned sure, putting tariffs on Brazilian cane sugar isn’t protecting anyone but Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland.
I think you greatly underestimate how hard it is for ‘fly by night’ businesses to make a big profit and vanish. Most businesses do not make a profit at all for years.
I don’t dispute that bad products will occasionally make their way into the marketplace. What I dispute is that this problem is big enough to warrant a gigantic state imposing tens of thousands of pages of regulations and trillions of dollars in regulatory costs on the economy.
<cont’d>
Regulations and laws make it more expensive for everyone to operate. Which raises prices and reduces the purchasing power of individuals. Since price correlates to quality, it can ultimately mean less aggregate quality for the population. For example, regulations to improve the safety of cars have driven up the price and weight of cars. The greater weight of these cars decreased gas mileage, which required even more expensive technology to overcome. This has kept more people on the margin in older vehicles which are far less safe and more polluting. In this case, it’s precisely the outliers who are being hurt, so the middle class can feel safer.
It does, huh? I take it then that your assertion is that all the quality products I see around me only have quality because of government regulation? If ‘my system’ is thrown right out the window, what’s left?
What a typically glib, clueless liberal statement. “Oh, we care more about safety than we do the profits of companies.” How nice for you. Except that those companies are making their profit despite the average $200 million it costs to put a drug through FDA trials. Guess who’s paying for it? You don’t suppose it would be your Aunt Edna, who’s trying to buy drugs from Canada or settling on the latest ‘herbal’ drug because the proper drugs cost $100/week? Perhaps Edna would have gladly traded a slight increase in risk in exchange for only paying $20/week. But we’ll never know, will we? That information dies when the nice people from the FDA refuse to let the market decide how much it is willing to pay for drug safety.
And of course, the skyrocketing cost of drugs is yet another reason for statists to demand even more government control. So now we’re going to have government-run health care. This would be a perfect illustration of Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’.
And money isn’t always the issue. If a new drug can save 50,000 lives per year, but it’s held up in FDA trials for 10 years, that’s 500,000 lives lost. Risk aversion can cost lives. Maybe it would have been much better to accept a 10% increase in side-effect risks in exchange for getting the drug out five years earlier. But the FDA is risk-averse, and its incentives are different than those of sick people.
Where do you get this from? I filed two patents in the last year, and you’d better believe that my company’s lawyers made sure that patent searches were done. In fact, I had to document my own patent searches before legal would even accept my filing for their review. Then they did their own patent searches. Do you know why? Because it’s really damned expensive to spend 50 million dollars on a product, only to find you’ve infringed on someone else’s patent. Ask RiM how their Blackberry patents worked out for them.
As for intentionally not doing research to avoid uncovering negative facts… Liability lawyers LOVE companies who do this. Those are the companies that pay not just damages, but huge punitive damages when juries learn what they tried to pull.
I sit in meetings all the time where new products are discussed, and I’ve been involved in new products from conception to completion. I have NEVER heard anything remotely like what you’re claiming. What I DO hear all the time is that we have to stay focused on quality, that we have to make sure that we’re legal, that we always do due diligence, and that any safety concerns must always be elevated up the food chain. We have anonymous reporting practices for those who are afraid that their careers will be hurt by reporting this stuff.
We also have to take annual recurrent training on legal obligations, on how we must never do things like delete e-mails once a regulatory review has been called, etc.
And what happened to them again? How many billions did they get sued for?
How would you know? What evidence do you have that the FDA approval process represents the best cost/benefit tradeoff, both in terms of money and overall lives saved? How do you balance off the skyrocketing price of drugs against drug safety? What makes you think we wouldn’t be better off with a more flexible regulatory scheme and drugs that cost half as much, even if drugs were, on balance, slightly riskier?
No, actually it doesn’t. The complexity of the tax code generally comes from years of congressional wheeling and dealing and repeated attempts to use the tax code to influence behavior and distort the market.
That’s not what I meant at all. What I meant was that the government has no way of knowing what other products and services would have been created had the money not been taxed out of the economy and redirected to government programs. It is not possible to know, because the information doesn’t even exist unless the money is left in the economy.
You can’t balance ‘aggregate economic loss’ if you don’t know what it is.
Well, that’s turning the argument on its head. You’re saying that we need government to take our money and give it to others because it’s in a better position to know where that money should be better spent? Need I point out that the government doesn’t know whether the student needs it more than I do either. In fact, it doesn’t know anything about either of us. How is it supposed to make a rational decision, exactly?
What makes you think war and disasters distort the market? All they do is change supply and demand. Government should most especially stay out of price fixing during times of disaster, because that’s the one time when you really, really don’t want hoarding and shortages, and price controls are bound to create both.
So you think price controls are good in ‘health threatening’ situations? Do you realize that price controls generally cause shortages? Is that what you want when the product saves lives?
And I can think of nothing more destructive to the health insurance industry than imposing price controls on it. Health insurance has a definite market failure associated with it, but it’s one of information asymmetry, and price controls won’t solve that, and will in fact make the problem worse.
Don’t carry the analogy too far. But if we’re going to, let’s not forget that this system is adaptive and has feedback loops so that bad units are quickly isolated and removed, and better than average units are given more power.
NOTHING like the FDA. If each unit is constantly checking other units, that’s more like a market. What would be more like the FDA would be if you had a central ‘unit checker’ that made each unit go offline and submit to a battery of tests, and if it passed, injecting it back into the system and telling every other unit that it’s good and to trust it implicitly and never do error correction or fault testing on it.
Then God help you if you initial testing missed a defect.
Oh, that’s rich. I’m the one telling you that a modern economy is far to complex for a central authority to manage, and that information about our needs and capabilities is created through market transactions and not available to government, and that trying to control it is like trying to design an ecosystem by constantly tinkering with the balance of plants and animals in an attempt to ‘engineer’ a result that’s better than what millions of years of evolution managed to do through spontaneous order and without a grand designer.
You, on the other hand, toss out old cliches about trading lives for profits and tell stories about how companies don’t research their own products so they don’t find out how bad they are, and then you accuse me of being simplistic. Amazing.
Idaho… thanks for the kind words.
Truthfully, while I see the difference in the laws that you describe, I accept that both are necessary to have a functioning society. So I would disagree with the contention that the burden should be higher on one rather than the other. If we have a democratic republic where elected representatives serve the will of the people, it is up to the people to make their will known. I fully admit that sometimes does not happen, and even when it does, it is sometimes ignored due to special interests being served first. But that is why we have elections.
To be frank and remove any disguise of subtlety, a part of government is coercion by force. For some, that is what it comes down to. I accept that. Its like Martin Luther King said about lynchings - the law cannot make you love me but if it prevents you from lyinching me, thats fine with me. For some folks, the idea that they are going to get with one bigass club if they step out of line is what they need to stay in line. That works for me if that works for them.
Remove coercion from one person and you just put it one another. Look at your example of slavery. The slaves were freed - and the slaveowners had millions of dollars worth of what had been their legally aquired property taken away without recompense.
There’s no such thing as a law that doesn’t hurt somebody. If everyone agrees on an issue, there’s no need to write a law about it. So the question is when is it just to hurt one person to benefit another and what people should be harmed in order to benefit others. In practice, the Libertarian answer always seems to be that laws should be written to benefit big business.
Oh, puh-leeze; this argument depends on an absurd moral equivalence between a legitimate grievance over being oppressed and a faux “grievance” over not being able to oppress others, e.g.:
Nonsense. For example, a law that says you can’t murder people doesn’t “hurt” even would-be murderers in any legitimate sense of the word, because they never had any right to commit murder in the first place (and a general rule against murder protects them as much as it protects their would-be victims).
I don’t need to belabor the refutation of this line of argument, do I? I can, if anybody really wants me to…
Odd; libertarians tend to explain the origin of many statist laws as favoritism to big business. For example, a lot of them buy the theory that marijuana prohibition was a conspiracy to protect duPont and Hearst. (I don’t buy the theory myself, but the fact that some libertarian opponents of drug prohibition do believe it is still a counterexample to the notion that they favor big businss.)
What makes the latter type necessary? (The necessity of the former type is fairly obvious, and agreed by everyone other than pure anarchists.)
Even if both types were shown to be necessary, that still would not follow. For instance, writing traffic tickets and conducting SWAT raids are both necessary functions of the police, but obviously the burden for justifying the latter action is and should be far higher than the burden for justifying the former.
That doesn’t address the basic issue of which areas of activity do and do not fall within the boundaries of majority decision-making. (The quip that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on the dinner menu” is an illustration of why it will not do to suggest that there is no need for such boundaries.)
That’s all well and good, but it ignores the original question, which is the distinction between using force against (examples of removing threats of force) muggers and rapists on the one hand and using force against (examples of invoking threats of force) pot smokers and gays on the other.
My point is that Libertarians act like their points of view are universal laws of nature. They see murder and rape as wrong so it’s obvious that there should be laws against those. They now claim that slavery is also inherently and obviously wrong (although I strongly believe that if there had been Libertarians around back in the ninteenth century, they would have been strong defenders of the property rights of slaveowners) so that should be illegal. When you get on issues like prohibitons against child labor or mandatory public education, most Libertarians say those things are obviously right as well (although you start getting a few cracks around the fringe).
But suggest that a law should be written regulating pollution, for example, and Libertarians will start to argue. And they don’t just argue that pollution laws are a bad idea and people should vote against them; a Libertarian will invoke human rights and say that even if the majority wants to regulate pollution, it should be prohibited as a matter of unwavering principle. As someone once said, the problem with Libertarians is that while all of us would like to pay less taxes, only Libertarians turn it into a moral issue.
I guess that’s my main argument with Libertarians. I accept the general principle of democratic rule - which means I accept the idea that sometimes the majority of people will take a side on an issue that I strongly disagree with. But my acceptance of democracy means I accept it when the results of democracy produce a result I happen to oppose. Libertarians can’t make that leap - if the majority makes a decison that Libertarians oppose, they say that the majority is wrong and must be overruled. They’re willing to overrule democracy when it doesn’t go where they want it to.
A lot of people made bad decisions. Contrary to the libertarian line of the masses always doing the right thing.
Libertarianism is ten sheep and a wolf all agreeing that everyone should be free to eat whatever they want for lunch. It sounds nice in theory but the sheep would have been smarter if they had set some limits.
And maybe that drug that wasn’t properly tested for the full 10 years has long term side effects that weren’t picked up in the shorter trial and could lead to 2m lives lost. Or 5m.
A democracy does not make those sheep any smarter, it just lets the majority force their ideas onto the minority, for better or worse. So not only would the sheep still think it’s a good idea and thereby doom themselves by their stupidity, they would also doom the other three sheep which didn’t agree to the plan.
I’d say that the sheep who work together to avoid being eaten are smarter than the sheep who believe that they should be following some abstract theory to their death.
Sure, the majority of sheep forced the wolf to be a vegetarian - that’s the smart move if you’re a sheep. And I can see the wolf’s point of view when he argues in favor of his “open menu” policy - he’s just looking out for himself too. The idiots are the sheep who supported the wolf’s right to eat whoever he wanted in the name of liberty.
Besides Little Nemo’s point; the other problem is that most of the time, the majority are smarter, at least in a common sense, enlightened self interest sort of way. As for the rest of the time - that’s why you don’t have a pure, direct democracy.