Freedom is the ONLY thing that counts. I do acknowledge that Libertarians claim to want to pursue freedom.
However I believe that Libertarianism, will only replace tyrannical government with tyrannical rule by businesses.
The problem with governments no matter their political leaning is that most political ideologies lack any mechanism to deal with corruption and abuses of power. Libertarianism seeks to deal with this by removing government and instead hand the power to private companies.
Companies are usually small dictatorships or even tyrannies. Handing them the power over all of society will only benefit the owners of these companies. The rest of society will basically be reduced to the status of slaves as they have no say over the direction of the society they maintain through their 9to5s.
These companies already control governments around the world through favors, bribes or other means such as regulatory capture or even by influencing the media and thereby manipulating the public’s opinion through the advertisement revenue.
Our problems would only get worse, all the ills of today’s society, lack of freedom, lack of peace, lack of just basic human decency will be vastly aggravated if we hand the entirety of control to people like petur tihel and allen mosque.
Instead the way to go about this is MORE democracy not less of it. The solution is to give average citizens more influence over the fate of society rather than less. However for that to happen we all need to fight ignorance and promote the spread of education. It has to become cool again to read books (or .epub/.mobi’s lol)
The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power, instead having a distributed system.
More of a community-driven government. Sort of like these workers owned companies. We should not delegate away our decision-making power. We should ourselves make the decisions.
Although this post is in English it does neither concern the ASU nor KU or any other English speaking countries, in particular. It’s a general post addressing a world wide phenomenon.
Typical libertarian blather.
In each one of these cases the industry predates the regulation. The regulation of banking is a response to the shitty behaviour of pre-regulation banks. Ditto for airlines, health care, insurance, telecom, etc. etc. etc.
The old adage “each regulation is written in blood” applies (albeit the blood being metaphorical in some cases).
The libertarian cinematic universe (coughRandroidscough) has it that businessmen were just chugging along merrily making a profit when suddenly, out of nowhere, the government leaped in to slap regulations on things. The reality is that regulations (which are themselves, naturally, not perfect, often applied long after the need has vanished, and prone to being corrupted) are a response to corporate malfeasance. Very few regulations are made ahead of the fact. (Politicians are constitutionally incapable of thinking ahead, after all.)
So airlines being heavily-regulated? Go look at the history of the airline industry. Look at the accident rates caused by the complete and utter profiteering of early airlines. Then ask yourself if regulation made these industries evil, or if perhaps regulations came in because of the evil of said industries.
Typical ad-hominem dismissal.
Yeah, I preempted you and pointed out that’s the argument of the ‘other’ side.
There are some cases where you can argue that regulation was a response to abuses. I’d agree with banking. I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.
Telecom was largely rolled out by government monopolies, in order to do it quickly. Then (at least in Canada, where I’m from), the government basically passed monopolistic government bodies to private companies, with a little “make sure to allow competition!” clause. Surprise surprise, there’s basically 1-2 telecom companies per province in Canada today, and they’ve captured the fuck out of regulatory bodies. Corporations are corporations, and they’re gonna seek profit. That’s a good thing if they’re competing and struggling, but terrible if you pass them a harness and whip.
I’m skeptical about airlines & insurance. They’d have worked themselves out eventually, if left to market forces, but that’s never been allowed to happen.
Early airlines were a mess, but the last 50 years have been incredibly safe. You’re like 1000x safer in a plane than a car. I’ve seen arguments that such extreme safety regulations are actually causing thousands of deaths per year: the level of regulation significantly raises the price (I’ve seen 2x as a rough estimate, no idea how accurate that is), which causes a lot of people to drive instead of fly–and driving is 1000x less safe, so lots of them die in car accidents. If flying were only a few hundred times safer than driving, and prices dropped by 25%, it might save hundreds of lives due to fewer car accidents.
There’s this problem with regulation: nobody ever lost their bureaucratic job by being too careful. If you’re a government bureaucrat and you eased up regulations on airlines (or food & drug safety, or building codes, etc), and that caused some incident that killed a person or two, you could be offered up as a sacrifice to public rage–even if the same relaxation of regulations saved lives by encouraging (safer) flying over driving, or made drugs available that saves hundreds of lives, or made housing 13% cheaper in some given city. The benefits are diffuse, the harm is acute–and newsworthy. And what’s the upside for you, as a bureaucrat? You don’t get a raise, or a bonus, or even a pat on the back for lower housing prices or exciting new cancer treatments.
So: restrict, limit, contain, regulate. That’s the only sane thing to do. Make a big deal about how safe you’re keeping everybody. Nobody will ever know that thousands of lives could have been saved, or housing could’ve been affordable, or travel could’ve been quicker, etc, if you’d eased up on regulations. You, the bureaucrat, will never face the counterexample–or the costs associated with overregulation.
The nation noted for its “free market healthcare” on the world stage has shit health stats. Working real well there, Sparky.
Time to open up a history book, there, dude. 'Cause you are so fucking far off the mark it’s hilarious.
At what cost in bodies? I know to the libertarian mindset death counts are just number, but each increment of those numbers is a human life. The ultimate loss of liberty is death.
Want to see what “market forces” do in airline industries? Look at the 737-MAX fiasco, where government abrogated its oversight of the airline, permitting companies to “self-certify”, a decision that you can draw a direct line from to 346 dead bodies.
Seriously, go visit those 346 people’s families. Tell them that “market forces” would have eventually settled out the issues. Be ready to run. 346 times.
The idea of regulation is to stop the bodies from happening in the first place instead of waiting, while the body count racks up, for “market forces” to fix everything.
This religion of “the market solves all” is why libertarians are fuckwits.
You mean the nation where the government spends more per-capita on healthcare per citizen than almost anywhere else, while also claiming to be “free market”? The US healthcare industry is a fucking disaster.
Well, don’t trip over yourself correcting me or anything. Silly me, I thought SaskTel, BCTel, Manitoba Telecom Services, and Alberta Government Telephones were Crown Corporations (i.e. public). I’m not as familiar with the history of telecom in the US–but also, the modern-day telecom industry is a hell of a lot healthier in the US.
Did you skip the rest of my comment? Over-regulation of airlines is almost certainly costing bodies today. That doesn’t bother you, though, right?
Dereliction of self-assigned duty. The government claimed responsibility for airline safety, then quietly dropped it. If they’d never taken responsibility in the first place, there’d be independent bodies doing it–the same way Consumer Reports gives safety ratings for cars without government funding.
And even so, even with aalllll those 737-MAX deaths, airlines are still 1000x safer than driving your car. Per 100k flights, you can expect roughly 1 accident, of which fewer than half result in any fatalities at all. Keep the ‘fiasco’ in perspective.
Okay, how 'bout I do that, and you go console all the victims of car accidents in the US. Hell, restrict yourself to the ones where one involved party said something like “You know, we could fly…nah, it’s too expensive!” Hard to quantify, but given the car accident stats, I think you’ve got your work cut out for you.
Just ground all planes, and flight accidents would fall to zero! Brilliant! And incidentally, that is analogous to the situation today: we severely restrict airlines in the name of safety, resulting in more deaths elsewhere (but that’s not on us, the airline regulators!)
But the market solves a hell of a lot more than people give it credit for.
And there’s the name-calling! Boy, you sure showed them libertarians!
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Read up. It amazes me that we live in an age where information is at our fingertips in seconds and people still “debate” while saying things like “I don’t actually know …”. Read. The fuck. Up.
The reason the American telecom industry is “healthy” (FSVO “healthy”) right now is because the government stepped in. It was literally government intervention that caused telecoms to blossom.
(Hint: this happened in my lifetime, and not that long before your lifetime, likely.)
After government enforced safety regulations set the baseline standards, yes. Again, just as with the telecoms industry (and the airline industry, for that matter) Read. The fuck. Up. This is not esoteric information that’s concealed and known only to a select few. This is the motherfucking public record.
You. You libertarians. (It’s utterly adorable that you’re pretending not to be one and are just “giving their side”. You’re transparent as all fucking Hell, with about the subtlety of a riot.)
Man, fuck off. You claim to know everything? You sure don’t do much exposition if that’s the case. Content to just bitch, huh?
I know about Bell and the breakup. I don’t know as much about the original evolution of the telecon market in the US. I bet if I did some research I’d find regulatory capture, government protectionism, and at the very least abuse of IP law. Not sure how much explicit government funding I’d find, but I bet it’s a lot more than zero.
I know the government loves to set baselines. I’m very skeptical, in many cases, that they’re necessary. Just asserting that they are and telling me to “Read. Up.” is not persuasive.
I’ve listed some of the many reasons I’m not a libertarian elsewhere in this thread. See, I’m of the opinion that any intelligent person should be able to explain an argument, even if they don’t fully agree, because if you don’t understand an argument you don’t actually know if you agree or not.
But you wouldn’t know about that. If I were you, I’d stick to your forte: scanning pages of arguments and examples, ignoring almost everything while looking for cases where you suspect a person might have made a mistake or admitted they didn’t know everything, then jump out and yell “HA! You don’t know a specific thing, therefore everything you said is invalid! Do your own research to see if you’re wrong or not, because I’m like too important to spend time explaining my own beliefs! PUBLIC. RECORD.”
Explain to me: if I were a libertarian, why the fuck would I try to hide it, anyway?
No, on second thought…don’t bother.