I was going to try to engage in a reasoned discussion.
Then I read this.
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Wait, what? Robert Downy Jr. had a talk show in the late 80s?
Wait, he said Martin, not Morton.
I IZ CONFUZZLED
Thatâs a good one! Yes, have a reputation economy managed by the rating agencies whose totally corrupt ratings of mortgage-backed securities ushered in the economic collapse of 2008. Phew. For a minute there I thought you werenât driving trollies.
depends on their market share and advertising budget, Iâd suppose. The wheelhouse of free/competitive markets is for innovation and choice-based purchases. What innovation do you expect private fire insurance to bring to the game that makes all the hassle of privatization worth it? The same game-changing innovation that it has brought to private health insurance? i.e. finding ways to deny claims and refuse service to those paying in? Imagine working out a claim with your fire insurance company while your house is on fire. (if you havenât seen a fire before, itâs like really fast house cancer)
The next part RE: your roads scheme:
This is the point at which every libertarian starts to really show their tabletop gaming roots. Guys! I did it! I stayed up all night working out the game theory and I finally have a system that just has to work! As long as my vastly oversimplified model of human behavior is absolutely perfect and everyone behaves exactly like I need them to all the time, thereâs no way anything could go wrong!
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Maine is aâŚspecial place. Iâm grateful to have been born and raised there, but like all beautiful semi-unspoiled natural paradises, it can get a little stuffy, idea-wise. I think, like anywhere youâre born, itâs just not wise to stay your entire life. Clean Air Kids is a really important initiative, where inner-city kids can spend time in a bucolic setting, but even more important, in my mind, would be Dirty Air Kids, where kids from the country get a chance to be exposed to cities, with diversity of people and ideas. Maine is about 98.5% white, with very little population mobility. I certainly wanted for a marketplace of ideas and cultures.
I didnât leave the state for any significant amount of time until college, and damn the learning curve was steep. My sisters stayed in Maine and despite being raised by a totally hippy new-age mom, they moved further and further into the woods marrying successively more and more conservative dudes. They and their children now constantly write things on Facebook about the world that would curl your toenails. Historically, Maine has been relatively liberal, even the two republican senators were pretty mild aisle-reacher-acrossers compared to their compatriots, but Iâm not terribly surprised that the teabag spark lit a fire there.
Not sure what my point is here, just a little Maine oral historyâŚ
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That makes me think of Carlisle and Cumbria. Thereâs a similar lack of population movement and diversity (95% white British) there.
20 years ago there were a surprising number of kids at my school who were young Conservatives, although Carlisle itself tends towards Labour (the Conservatives barely won the seat at the last election after a boundary change included more rural areas, but they arenât expected to keep it in May.)
I am glad to be out of there, but sometimes I miss the countryside.
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And how are you getting your water?
In your âidealâ scenario, there wouldnât be a relatively small town only 10 miles away from you in the desert. Youâd be hundreds of miles from a town. How would you get to work? Get refrigerated food home before it spoiled? And what about that water?
You are benefiting from the very society you think you donât need.
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Randbot sez: If nobody values the forest (ie, monetarily) then it is not worth anything, and thus not worth saving.
UPDATED: OMG, I thought I was making an over-the-top joke, then I saw THIS
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And cats stuck in trees? Small little cat-farts that catch a spark. FWOOOOOOOOSHMEOW! Cat-in-a-tree.
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Look, I never said anything bad about Maineâs governor.
I just said âPeople can rise to positions of power despite being meth-addicts who rape dogs and secretly funnel funds to terrorists.â Followed immediately by âPaul LePage is the Governor of Maine!â
Two completely unrelated statements!
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Nope. No. Just stop right there. Numerous studies and a mountain of real-world examples totally blow that premise out of the water. Itâs not remotely true. Leaving aside the issue that governments are accountable and private entities are not, private businesses arenât even necessarily any more efficient, on top of which theyâre extracting a profit - sometimes at multiple points - that drive costs up. Competition drives prices down? More often it simply drives the amount of money spent on advertising up. The absence of a government âmonopoly,â even in cases where thereâs a profit to be made, doesnât necessarily result in competition - more often itâll result in private monopolies, which are worse in every respect. Governments can have access that private industry wouldnât, and provide many services that private companies would never do because thereâs little or no profit to be made there. Read up on all the history that lead to the formation of the FDA - thereâs quite a bit of it, and itâs all horrible. No private company is going to make sure the medicine you take isnât full of poison and the food you eat isnât full of rat shit - even if they wanted to, they wouldnât have access to inspect. It didnât happen before, it isnât going to happen now. Thereâs this thing called âhistoryâ - we can look at how terribly things operated back before the government didnât offer a particular service, and why the government started taking on that role. Or, hell, we can look at the present - health-care in the US versus other industrialized nations, for example. Weâve got pharmaceutical industries that spend more money on advertising than research (about twice as much, in fact), while ignoring serious diseases as insufficiently profitable, and weâve got health-care providers that are more expensive with worse outcomes than the rest of the industrial world (and, in terms of cost-to-outcome, worse than most of the world), with insurance companies and other private entities extracting massive profits at every point they can.
You can pull out whatever fantasy theoretical situations you want in which private industry works perfectly to replace government - we have real examples we can look at that disprove the notion.
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Hey, a privately owned forest thatâs been clear-cut and replaced with tract housing will never have a forest fire.
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Health insurance in the USA has totally helped me. Californiaâs rules 10 years ago that avoid cherrypicking insurance customers allowed me to get insurance when I left my corporate job to be self employed; no insurance company would have covered me otherwise. Then when Obamacare came along I no longer had to hide a condition that I had been avoiding getting help for, and I am getting a potentially communicable disease addressed to lower the risk to the public. Not to mention that my insurance saved me from being gouged five digits per day when I unexpectedly needed medical care.
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We get a taste of that with rural areas where they require people to pay an optional fee to get the city fire service to extend to cover them. According to news stories that BoingBoing has mentioned before, apparently the fire service shows up, finds out you havenât paid your fee and stands and watches while the house burns down with pets (and presumably family members, had any been there) still inside.
Whatâs interesting about public infrastructure is that before tax money was spent building it, governments (including the US) required a certain number of hours of work from every citizen to build public works such as roads. Obviously we should just go back to that, rather than fund them through taxes - I canât see any problem with having amateurs build modern roads, bridges, electrical infrastructureâŚ
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This is somehow more simple and cheaper than the way we do it now?
Seriously.
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But donât you see? That demonstrates the system works.
That smell emanating from the burning building? Thatâs the smell of Freedom. Those cries from inside the building? The cries of Liberty.
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We only have to look at how magnificent privately-run prisons and immigrant detention centers are. Oh, wait, they are a horror show.
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Liberty without taxes = rights without responsibilities. Itâs an adolescent way of thinking.
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The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
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The least damaging is sales a progressive income tax; the most damaging is property the regressive sales tax.
FIFY
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You do realize that weâve already been down the insurance company employing firefighters road before, donât you? In colonial times and early America, if your house didnât display the correct insurance companyâs brass identifier on your house, the fire company would let it burn down. This often resulted in entire blocks of houses burning down.
If you want a place with no government whatsoever, Somalia is a Libertarianâs wet dream.
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