iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

[Vangel]

Re: 300,000 die in 1991-1992 Somalia Famine

good one.



yeh, right. as prone as socialists, if you ask me. socialists turned inside out. fanatical, utopian, incapable of valuing 10,000 yrs of civilization. "the state is evil!" too much state is evil. too little is evil.

humans are a fucked up animal. no way do you want them running round loose without a state strong enough to enforce the law.

did you see apocalypto? ok, so mel gibson has some "issues" but this movie is great. the spanish ships show up at the end. what do they represent? yeh, that's right. civilization. treasure it.

I think that you are confused. You have mistaken the modern state, which is what being discussed, with '10,000 years of civilization.' The simple fact is that history is on the side of those that advocate as little government as possible because there is a correlation between the size and the degree of control by government and the standard of living. The socialism that is being defended by the opponents of liberty has not delivered the goods and unless a country was very rich in natural resources and had a small homogeneous population it could not tolerate socialism for long.

As an aside, it is important to keep the terminology in this debate straight. Ayn Rand used to write about 'anti-concepts,' which were defined as unnecessary and rationally unusable terms that were designed to substitue for legitimate concepts. According to Rand the use of anti-concepts gave the readers or listeners a, "sense of approximate understanding." Of course, when you obscure the truth the approximate becomes worse than inadequate; it becomes the same as a lie. An important category of anti-concepts is something that Rand called the 'package deal.' Such terms had meanings that concealed an implicit assumption that some things go together when they could not and do not.

In this debate many of the folks are using libertarian society to mean a society in which men are free to ignore the laws. (That is a lot like using the term 'capitalism' to mean the free-market system that currently dominates in the United States and other Western countries.) But libertarians are just as interested in law and order as other people. The major difference is their support for maximum liberty in both the social and economic spheres. Those libertarians that tolerate governments want them small and limited to protecting individuals and their property. On the whole they stand for individual responsibility, the free market, private charity and civil liberties. They oppose taxes and government bureaucracies. Most importantly, a libertarian system does not need human beings to become something that they are not in order to work, which is the only way that statism can work.

[metalman]

Re: 300,000 die in 1991-1992 Somalia Famine

I think that you are confused. You have mistaken the modern state, which is what being discussed, with '10,000 years of civilization.' The simple fact is that history is on the side of those that advocate as little government as possible because there is a correlation between the size and the degree of control by government and the standard of living. The socialism that is being defended by the opponents of liberty has not delivered the goods and unless a country was very rich in natural resources and had a small homogeneous population it could not tolerate socialism for long.

As an aside, it is important to keep the terminology in this debate straight. Ayn Rand used to write about 'anti-concepts,' which were defined as unnecessary and rationally unusable terms that were designed to substitue for legitimate concepts. According to Rand the use of anti-concepts gave the readers or listeners a, "sense of approximate understanding." Of course, when you obscure the truth the approximate becomes worse than inadequate; it becomes the same as a lie. An important category of anti-concepts is something that Rand called the 'package deal.' Such terms had meanings that concealed an implicit assumption that some things go together when they could not and do not.

In this debate many of the folks are using libertarian society to mean a society in which men are free to ignore the laws. (That is a lot like using the term 'capitalism' to mean the free-market system that currently dominates in the United States and other Western countries.) But libertarians are just as interested in law and order as other people. The major difference is their support for maximum liberty in both the social and economic spheres. Those libertarians that tolerate governments want them small and limited to protecting individuals and their property. On the whole they stand for individual responsibility, the free market, private charity and civil liberties. They oppose taxes and government bureaucracies. Most importantly, a libertarian system does not need human beings to become something that they are not in order to work, which is the only way that statism can work.

well put! and no argument.

[jimmygu3]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

I do believe that your analogy about roads is a good one. But I would say that the issue is not about having signs on the roads but how those signs and placed, what they say and who owns them. I believe that it is implicit in your argument that it is all right for some bureaucrat to arbitrarily decide what the limits should be and that once they are posted everyone will (or should) try to comply. Well, I really don't know what the limits should be and would have a market process decide on the nature of the signs and the information they contain. Instead of having an arbitrary limit set by political hacks and lobbyists it is preferable that the owners of the highway can choose to have different limits on different sections on the basis on local conditions, customer feedback and rigorous analysis. If the owner does a bad job s/he will lose customers and will have to adjust just as businesses do now.

Vangel,

Private ownership of roads illustrates the folly of a society based purely on property rights. Those who own the roads would have all the drivers by the balls. There's a $.50 toll here on a highway here in Atlanta. If it were privately owned, the owner might decide to start charging $100. If people didn't like it, they would find alternate routes and the owners of those routes could then put up a toll booth and charge people $99, and so on until we had a city of toll booths. Who is the big winner in this situation? Certainly not the well-being of the city as a whole. In fact, it would be a much more restrictive and burdensome state of affairs than under our current government beaurocracies.

I agree that "lobbyists and political hacks" should not make the rules of the road. We have a system of democratically elected lawmakers who make the rules, and we need more regulations- not less- to keep lobbyists out of lawmaking and our electoral process. Though our system is far from perfect, it does have checks and balances in place to continually pull government back toward serving the will of the people.

I don't expect you will agree.

Jimmy

[metalman]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

Vangel,

Private ownership of roads illustrates the folly of a society based purely on property rights. Those who own the roads would have all the drivers by the balls. There's a $.50 toll here on a highway here in Atlanta. If it were privately owned, the owner might decide to start charging $100. If people didn't like it, they would find alternate routes and the owners of those routes could then put up a toll booth and charge people $99, and so on until we had a city of toll booths. Who is the big winner in this situation? Certainly not the well-being of the city as a whole. In fact, it would be a much more restrictive and burdensome state of affairs than under our current government beaurocracies.

I agree that "lobbyists and political hacks" should not make the rules of the road. We have a system of democratically elected lawmakers who make the rules, and we need more regulations- not less- to keep lobbyists out of lawmaking and our electoral process. Though our system is far from perfect, it does have checks and balances in place to continually pull government back toward serving the will of the people.

I don't expect you will agree.

Jimmy

these ideas about privately owned roads and schools and so on shows the most profound ignorance at how western societies arrived at current systems.

whenever someone's trying to sell me on a "new" idea (there are no new ideas... btw) i always ask: show me where it's working or ever has?

they say, "it's never been tried!"

i say, "bullshit". what arrogance. everything has been tried.

you can still find dark holes in this earth where money and power are left alone to create the best result for society.

so where did gov't fire depts come from? ok, i'll dispense with the back and forth with the folks here who might be weak on the history. they started off as private businesses run by insurance companies. insurance companies figured they'd save money if they put out building fires. the fire trucks did not respond to a fire burning in a building that was not a customer of the fire/insurance company. guess what? an uninsured building next to an insured building burns just as well as an insured one. they both burned down. didn't take long before the insurance companies were lobbying gov't to make fire safety a "public good". now fire insurance is universally subsidized by the government. why don't the libertarians complain and rail... STOP THE GOVERNMENT FROM INTERFERING IN FIRE PROTECTION! LET THE FREE MARKET SORT IT OUT!

why don't they complain? seems the complains about gov't impinging on economic freedom are awfully selective.

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

these ideas about privately owned roads and schools and so on shows the most profound ignorance at how western societies arrived at current systems.

whenever someone's trying to sell me on a "new" idea (there are no new ideas... btw) i always ask: show me where it's working or ever has?

they say, "it's never been tried!"

i say, "bullshit". what arrogance. everything has been tried.

you can still find dark holes in this earth where money and power are left alone to create the best result for society.

so where did gov't fire depts come from? ok, i'll dispense with the back and forth with the folks here who might be weak on the history. they started off as private businesses run by insurance companies. insurance companies figured they'd save money if they put out building fires. the fire trucks did not respond to a fire burning in a building that was not a customer of the fire/insurance company. guess what? an uninsured building next to an insured building burns just as well as an insured one. they both burned down. didn't take long before the insurance companies were lobbying gov't to make fire safety a "public good". now fire insurance is universally subsidized by the government. why don't the libertarians complain and rail... STOP THE GOVERNMENT FROM INTERFERING IN FIRE PROTECTION! LET THE FREE MARKET SORT IT OUT!

why don't they complain? seems the complains about gov't impinging on economic freedom are awfully selective.

Nice argument, metalman, and yes, I'm a weak-sister when it comes to history.

I did have one original idea, and I would tell you about it, except it isn't pertinent to making money by investing.

[Vangel]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

Vangel,

Private ownership of roads illustrates the folly of a society based purely on property rights. Those who own the roads would have all the drivers by the balls. There's a $.50 toll here on a highway here in Atlanta. If it were privately owned, the owner might decide to start charging $100. If people didn't like it, they would find alternate routes and the owners of those routes could then put up a toll booth and charge people $99, and so on until we had a city of toll booths. Who is the big winner in this situation? Certainly not the well-being of the city as a whole. In fact, it would be a much more restrictive and burdensome state of affairs than under our current government beaurocracies.

I agree that "lobbyists and political hacks" should not make the rules of the road. We have a system of democratically elected lawmakers who make the rules, and we need more regulations- not less- to keep lobbyists out of lawmaking and our electoral process. Though our system is far from perfect, it does have checks and balances in place to continually pull government back toward serving the will of the people.

I don't expect you will agree.

Jimmy

You are right. I don't agree. And I am certain that you won't agree with my response.

First, there are plenty of arguments about private ownership of roads that you seem to be unacquainted with. A road will do an owner little good if he can't attract customers to use it and he certainly won't attract many if his costs are prohibitive. The assumption made is that there will only be one means of getting from point A to B and that the person controlling it would have a monopoly position that can be used to abuse customers. But in a competitive world there are alternatives and incentives that you seem to ignore.

Second, the system does not seem to have very effective checks and balances at all. If it did we would not have bridges and roads to nowhere, snow covered roads that are not being cleared in a timely manner, and transportation infrastructure that is not up to standard and past its useful life. We certainly would not have bridges collapsing into rivers and killing dozens of motorists who were using them at the time.

The simple fact that the government can build roads that do not service any communities or that it can ignore dangerous conditions or skip standard maintenance requirements shows that the system is not working. In fact there is no incentive for bureaucrats to service users of transportation assets but plenty of incentives to serve their political masters. (How many people were fired when the Minneapolis bridge collapsed? What do you think would have happened if that was a privately owned (and insured) bridge? Would the insurance company have permitted the bridge to deteriorate and get to a dangerous position?)

From what I see it looks as if the US will need to spend more than $1 trillion to upgrade its neglected infrastructure. There is nothing to suggest that the money will be used wisely and everything to suggest that it will be used to reward those with political connections. All taxpayers will pay through higher taxes, deferred taxation in the way of more debt and through inflation. Motorists will pay through some other charges and fees that are above board or hidden. At the end, the cost will be much higher than it would have been if the transportation infrastructure had been privately owned and operated.

[Vangel]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

these ideas about privately owned roads and schools and so on shows the most profound ignorance at how western societies arrived at current systems.

whenever someone's trying to sell me on a "new" idea (there are no new ideas... btw) i always ask: show me where it's working or ever has?

they say, "it's never been tried!"

i say, "bullshit". what arrogance. everything has been tried.

you can still find dark holes in this earth where money and power are left alone to create the best result for society.

so where did gov't fire depts come from? ok, i'll dispense with the back and forth with the folks here who might be weak on the history. they started off as private businesses run by insurance companies. insurance companies figured they'd save money if they put out building fires. the fire trucks did not respond to a fire burning in a building that was not a customer of the fire/insurance company. guess what? an uninsured building next to an insured building burns just as well as an insured one. they both burned down. didn't take long before the insurance companies were lobbying gov't to make fire safety a "public good". now fire insurance is universally subsidized by the government. why don't the libertarians complain and rail... STOP THE GOVERNMENT FROM INTERFERING IN FIRE PROTECTION! LET THE FREE MARKET SORT IT OUT!

why don't they complain? seems the complains about gov't impinging on economic freedom are awfully selective.

Fire protection is your argument? From what I see fire protection services are way too expansive. You have bureaucrats and the unions rip off taxpayers and overpay for service that may or may not be adequate. In the old days you had the NY fire department unable to deal with fires over 10 stories even though there were buildings that were 50 stories high.

[metalman]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

Fire protection is your argument? From what I see fire protection services are way too expansive. You have bureaucrats and the unions rip off taxpayers and overpay for service that may or may not be adequate. In the old days you had the NY fire department unable to deal with fires over 10 stories even though there were buildings that were 50 stories high.

and your improvement is fire dept. for rich people living in 50 story buildings and fuck the people in 10 story buildings that can't afford the payments?

nice world you dream of. all yours. you're welcome to live in it. here ya go...

Guards Blocked Exit in Mexico City Disco Fire

By Julie Watson

M E X I C O C I T Y, Oct. 22

With flames and smoke filling a glitzy Mexico City nightclub, terrified patrons fled for the sole exit — only to find the club’s guards barring the way to some, demanding they first pay their bills, survivors said.
The blaze killed 20 people, and injured two dozen more.

The Lobohombo club was still packed at 5 a.m. when the blaze started Friday. “Please! It’s burning! Open the door!” Sara Falcon said she and others pleaded to the guards who stopped them asking for tickets proving they’d paid.

[jimmygu3]

Re: iTulip Guide for the Intelligent Libertarian

You are right. I don't agree. And I am certain that you won't agree with my response.

Your intuition was correct. Well, at least we can agree that the other is wrong.