Ah, the halcyon days of private fire companies.
11 Likes
Not to quibble - but that wouldnât be what Kennedy did to the tax code then.
I love the smell of freedom in the morning.
In a just world people would be jailed over the theft of billions upon billions of dollars of public money.
5 Likes
So you also get the warm & fuzzies when the âwe all work togetherâ government does something horrible?
We each pulling alone in our unique direction is called freedom and pursuit of happiness. When some of us pull together itâs called voluntary cooperation.
Ah yes, just ârugged individualistsâ 24/7, thatâs a society. Something something Go Galt.
7 Likes
[quote=âfche, post:67, topic:77613â]
So you also get the warm & fuzzies when the âwe all work togetherâ government does something horrible?[/quote]
Oh, look, that quote goes onâŚ
Yes, we have some problems with implementation. That doesnât mean that the theory is invalid.
[quote=âfche, post:67, topic:77613â]
We each pulling alone in our unique direction is called freedom and pursuit of happiness.[/quote]
And no one is saying that that has to stop, but sometimes we need to all be pulling together. See: World War II, climate change, disaster relief, roads, sewers, etc.
The problem with voluntary cooperation is that it can only go so far. When you need people to act against their own short-term interests in favour of their long-term interests, when you need people
to agree on a neutral arbiter that will decide who is in the wrong, when you need to create a standard that will allow people to pull together in voluntary cooperation instead of running headlong into each other, thatâs when you need a state.
Life isnât a game, but the metaphor does have one thing going for it: In a game, there can be no winner unless everyone agrees on the rules. In a large enough tournament, you need to have someone act as the definitive arbiter of the rules, or else you wonât get an agreement on who actually won. These are the rules, these are the prizes, these are the punishments for breaking the rules, and, by the way, we need to rent the hall, so the tournament costs $50 to enter
The same thing is true in real life: you canât have a working society, unless you have someone to say, âThese are the rules: Donât kill, donât defraud, donât steal, etc. And we need to clean the bucket-loads of piss and crap off of the street so that people donât get cholera, so weâll need a certain percentage of your income to implement a sewage system.â
11 Likes
Which led to systems which failed wildly to function to serve the entire public. 18-19th Century public infrastructure is hardly a workable model today. Nobody picks up the trash in Galtâs Gulch. They are all too busy feeling too superior to do so.
Which doesnât make your point clever or refute my assertion. Keeping the government adequately funded ensures the liberties of the public. Especially enabling regulations and agencies which protect the public to function as intended. Enforcing laws which ensure equal protection under the law for all of its citizens. Keeping infrastructure meant for the entire public intact.
Again, I have yet to see a privatization effort which did not actively screw over the public with negative profit incentives (to provide less for greater cost to consumers).
9 Likes
The corporate libertarian paradise of Dubai has plenty of luxury hotels, golf courses, and private beaches does not have a sewer system. Nobody got around to creating one or considered it as important as making money on tourists.
7 Likes
7 Likes
So you cherry picked one thing and used it to make a nebulous example with no precedents to validate it. You still havenât answered my question. Has government improved American lives in the last two centuries?
7 Likes
The highway system, the largest public works system in history, was part and parcel of the most productive time in the American economy. Without the highway system that links major urban centers, I doubt we get the boom of the 50s and 60s. I doubt that a group of âprivate individualsâ could do the same thing that the US government did.
That should include freedom from being exploited by oneâs fellow man.
11 Likes
Does it smell like roasting dead humans who couldnât pay up?
9 Likes
Not even a good example. Private fire departments doubled as burglary gangs and extortionists in 19th Century NYC.
5 Likes
Exploitation can only exist from The State, all evils stem from The State in AnarchoCapitalistan, land of âMUH ROADSâ.
The only civil rights of worth are truly free markets.
Edit: and property rights.
6 Likes
(sorry, out of likes - take a Missy instead!)
8 Likes
Government, especially the military is one of the largest producers of new technology and scientific researchers for our society. Would private industry ever create something like the CDC? or NASA?
âThe private sector usually only funds research that has an immediate, or at least an obvious, commercial application. No private company would have paid to build the Large Hadron Collider, for example. And why would they? The potential return on investment is too low. If your goal is making money, youâre naturally going to focus on those ideas that youâre pretty sure will work â refining them, improving them, making them useful. And thatâs fine, someone has to do that.â
- Site ripping apart Ayn Randâs Atlas Shrugged and its Libertarian philosophy bit by bit
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/
4 Likes
But, but, TESLA! Private space industry! Drug companies! ETC!!! /s
4 Likes
So, government by another nameâŚ
8 Likes
You are committing one of the classic blunders. The most famous of which is ânever get involved in a land war in Asiaâ, but only slightly less well-known is this: âNever argue with a libertarian on a comment boardâ!
9 Likes
