Hello friends. I have found a blog you may wish to visit; or you may wish not to visit. Either way, here is the link.
http://amerrycangrrl.blogspot.com/
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
End The Drug War
The Drug War is easily the most repugnant domestic policy that our government pursues. It's more like a war on the black underclass. The government has created a system with policies like the minimum wage, welfare, and the withholding tax of social security, that disincentivizes legal employment and incentivizes black market employment. And when members of the black underclass rationally decide to sell drugs rather than take a minimum wage job that is taxed, precludes them from getting welfare, and requires a significant amount of productivity from day 1, our government persecutes them.
And in persecuting the breadwinners of the black underclass, the government has created even more disgusting consequences. They've completely disincentivized the formation of stable families as well as the impetus to sustain wealth over generations. Let me explain. When the expectation of the breadwinners is that they will be dead or in jail within ten years (dead, because without access to the court system disputes are resolved with violence; and jail, for obvious reasons,) they rationally choose high time-preference behavior over low-time preference behavior. Why save for retirement or for your kid's college fund when you'll be dead or in jail? It is completely rational for these breadwinners to spend extravagantly to enjoy the freedom they have while they have it.
This leads to every black generation having to start from scratch, with no accumulated wealth to build on. Think about how the white middle and upper class became wealthy - earlier generations had the freedom to make money unimpeded by outside forces, and they did so and passed on wealth to their progeny, who used the accumulated wealth to make even more money and so on and so forth. Our government, with its "liberal" and paternalistic policies, has left the black underclass in stasis, excluding them from the economic growth that the rest of us enjoy.
[censored] the costs for a second. Look at the effects. In communities like East St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore...everywhere we can see the wreckage of the drug war around us.
It has to stop.
And in persecuting the breadwinners of the black underclass, the government has created even more disgusting consequences. They've completely disincentivized the formation of stable families as well as the impetus to sustain wealth over generations. Let me explain. When the expectation of the breadwinners is that they will be dead or in jail within ten years (dead, because without access to the court system disputes are resolved with violence; and jail, for obvious reasons,) they rationally choose high time-preference behavior over low-time preference behavior. Why save for retirement or for your kid's college fund when you'll be dead or in jail? It is completely rational for these breadwinners to spend extravagantly to enjoy the freedom they have while they have it.
This leads to every black generation having to start from scratch, with no accumulated wealth to build on. Think about how the white middle and upper class became wealthy - earlier generations had the freedom to make money unimpeded by outside forces, and they did so and passed on wealth to their progeny, who used the accumulated wealth to make even more money and so on and so forth. Our government, with its "liberal" and paternalistic policies, has left the black underclass in stasis, excluding them from the economic growth that the rest of us enjoy.
[censored] the costs for a second. Look at the effects. In communities like East St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore...everywhere we can see the wreckage of the drug war around us.
It has to stop.
Monday, July 9, 2007
There is nothing wrong
There's nothing wrong with being innocent and not wanting a national ID card. If you seriously want to extend it to a logical conclusion, then all 'innocent' people should have no problem with implanted brain chips that show whereabouts and thoughts. I mean, if you're innocent you have nothing to worry about!
Which brings me to my next point. The state's view of innocence is markedly different from actual innocence. I don't smoke weed, but I have no problem with it and wouldn't call anyone that does 'not innocent.' There are plenty of laws that implicate truly innocent people, but the state's oft errant notions of public policy will make innocent people guilty, punished, and socially tarnished. Unless you're a perfect angel, please spare me the talk of 'innocence.'
I can't believe I actually have to argue this crap. A national ID card ON TOP of the bs we're already subjected to? How about a state agent in each home? How about detailed records of everyone's purchases? How about phone taps on every phone?
I mean, think about it; if you're innocent, why not?
Which brings me to my next point. The state's view of innocence is markedly different from actual innocence. I don't smoke weed, but I have no problem with it and wouldn't call anyone that does 'not innocent.' There are plenty of laws that implicate truly innocent people, but the state's oft errant notions of public policy will make innocent people guilty, punished, and socially tarnished. Unless you're a perfect angel, please spare me the talk of 'innocence.'
I can't believe I actually have to argue this crap. A national ID card ON TOP of the bs we're already subjected to? How about a state agent in each home? How about detailed records of everyone's purchases? How about phone taps on every phone?
I mean, think about it; if you're innocent, why not?
National I.D. card
History
National ID cards have long been advocated as a means to enhance national security, unmask potential terrorists, and guard against illegal immigrants. They are in use in many countries around the world including most European countries, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Currently, the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to debate the merits of adopting national ID cards. The types of card, their functions, and privacy safeguards vary widely.
Americans have rejected the idea of a national ID card. When the Social Security Number (SSN) was created in 1936, it was meant to be used only as an account number associated with the administration of the Social Security system. Though use of the SSN has expanded considerably, it is not a universal identifier and efforts to make it one have been consistently rejected. In 1971, the Social Security Administration task force on the SSN rejected the extension of the Social Security Number to the status of an ID card. In 1973, the Health, Education and Welfare Secretary's Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems concluded that a national identifier was not desirable. In 1976, the Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification rejected the idea of an identifier.
In 1977, the Carter Administration reiterated that the SSN was not to become an identifier, and in 1981 the Reagan Administration stated that it was "explicitly opposed" to the creation of a national ID card. The Clinton administration advocated a “Health Security Card” in 1993 and assured the public that the card, issued to every American, would have “full protection for privacy and confidentiality.” Still, the idea was rejected and the health security card was never created. In 1999 Congress repealed a controversial provision in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 which gave authorization to include Social Security Numbers on driver's licenses.
In response to the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, there has been renewed interest in the creation of national ID cards. Soon after the attacks, Larry Ellison, head of California-based software company Oracle Corporation, called for the development of a national identification system and offered to donate the technology to make this possible. He proposed ID cards with embedded digitized thumbprints and photographs of all legal residents in the U.S. There was much public debate about the issue, and Congressional hearings were held. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich testified that he "would not institute a national ID card because you do get into civil liberties issues." When it created the Department of Homeland Security, Congress made clear in the enabling legislation that the agency could not create a national ID system. In September 2004, then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge reiterated, "[t]he legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security was very specific on the question of a national ID card. They said there will be no national ID card."
The public continues to debate the issue, and there have been many other proposals for the creation of a national identification system, some through the standardization of state driver's licenses. The debate remains in the international spotlight – several nations are considering implementing such systems. The U.S. Congress recently passed the REAL ID Act of 2005, which mandates federal requirements for driver's licenses. Critics argue that it would make driver's licenses into de facto national IDs.
What's all the fuss with the Real ID Act about?
President Bush is expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill soon that will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the package--which includes the Real ID Act--on Thursday.
What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.
National ID cards have long been advocated as a means to enhance national security, unmask potential terrorists, and guard against illegal immigrants. They are in use in many countries around the world including most European countries, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Currently, the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to debate the merits of adopting national ID cards. The types of card, their functions, and privacy safeguards vary widely.
Americans have rejected the idea of a national ID card. When the Social Security Number (SSN) was created in 1936, it was meant to be used only as an account number associated with the administration of the Social Security system. Though use of the SSN has expanded considerably, it is not a universal identifier and efforts to make it one have been consistently rejected. In 1971, the Social Security Administration task force on the SSN rejected the extension of the Social Security Number to the status of an ID card. In 1973, the Health, Education and Welfare Secretary's Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems concluded that a national identifier was not desirable. In 1976, the Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification rejected the idea of an identifier.
In 1977, the Carter Administration reiterated that the SSN was not to become an identifier, and in 1981 the Reagan Administration stated that it was "explicitly opposed" to the creation of a national ID card. The Clinton administration advocated a “Health Security Card” in 1993 and assured the public that the card, issued to every American, would have “full protection for privacy and confidentiality.” Still, the idea was rejected and the health security card was never created. In 1999 Congress repealed a controversial provision in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 which gave authorization to include Social Security Numbers on driver's licenses.
In response to the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, there has been renewed interest in the creation of national ID cards. Soon after the attacks, Larry Ellison, head of California-based software company Oracle Corporation, called for the development of a national identification system and offered to donate the technology to make this possible. He proposed ID cards with embedded digitized thumbprints and photographs of all legal residents in the U.S. There was much public debate about the issue, and Congressional hearings were held. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich testified that he "would not institute a national ID card because you do get into civil liberties issues." When it created the Department of Homeland Security, Congress made clear in the enabling legislation that the agency could not create a national ID system. In September 2004, then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge reiterated, "[t]he legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security was very specific on the question of a national ID card. They said there will be no national ID card."
The public continues to debate the issue, and there have been many other proposals for the creation of a national identification system, some through the standardization of state driver's licenses. The debate remains in the international spotlight – several nations are considering implementing such systems. The U.S. Congress recently passed the REAL ID Act of 2005, which mandates federal requirements for driver's licenses. Critics argue that it would make driver's licenses into de facto national IDs.
What's all the fuss with the Real ID Act about?
President Bush is expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill soon that will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the package--which includes the Real ID Act--on Thursday.
What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.
What rights have you lost in the war on drugs?
I have lost the ability to not be intimidated by police during traffic stops. Prior to asset forfiture laws there was no direct cash incentive for police departments to unilaterally encourage officers to look for excuses to pull people over just so they can try to intimidate the driver into allowing a search intended to discover drugs/cash so they can confiscate the car/cash and have it go into funding their department.
I have lost the expectation of privacy on my person when inteacting with a police officer.
I have lost the expectation that I be treated in a dignified and respectful manner by police, rather than an intimidating manner.
I have lost the freedom that comes with the knowledge that we are safe in our homes and the feeling that police are on are side, the feeling that police desire to serve the citizens.
I have lost the expectation that I will be treated fairly if interacting wiht the police.
I suggest you look up some asset forfiture cases when some family had their house confiscated because their teenage son had a couple bags of weed and is accused of dealing. It does not have to happen to ME or to YOU for it to be harming both us, ALL of us.
The way it is SUPPOSED to be is that the government are our SERVANTS. The JUDGE is our SERVANT. The police are are SERVANTS. When we walk down the street, the police are supposed to be there greeting us curtiously and tipping their hats to us, "Anything I can do for you today sir?" "You have a nice day now, sir." None of them are supposed to be short tempered or mean spirited or act in a way that shows they have contept for us. Ever.
I have lost the expectation of privacy on my person when inteacting with a police officer.
I have lost the expectation that I be treated in a dignified and respectful manner by police, rather than an intimidating manner.
I have lost the freedom that comes with the knowledge that we are safe in our homes and the feeling that police are on are side, the feeling that police desire to serve the citizens.
I have lost the expectation that I will be treated fairly if interacting wiht the police.
I suggest you look up some asset forfiture cases when some family had their house confiscated because their teenage son had a couple bags of weed and is accused of dealing. It does not have to happen to ME or to YOU for it to be harming both us, ALL of us.
The way it is SUPPOSED to be is that the government are our SERVANTS. The JUDGE is our SERVANT. The police are are SERVANTS. When we walk down the street, the police are supposed to be there greeting us curtiously and tipping their hats to us, "Anything I can do for you today sir?" "You have a nice day now, sir." None of them are supposed to be short tempered or mean spirited or act in a way that shows they have contept for us. Ever.
War is not good for the economy
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War is always -EV. It can't possibly be +EV.
Let's look at the aspects of war.
There's control of resources (land, oil fields, whatever). This is basically EV neutral - either you control it or I do, we can't magically make more appear. Some of these resources will be destroyed during the conflict, but we'll account for that later.
There is the production aspect (tanks, bullets, bombs, etc). If this were +EV, why wouldn't we just build a bunch of bombs and constantly drop them in the ocean? Then we would get the supposed benefits of the increased production without killing anyone. Obviously, this production (in and of itself) is not beneficial, or else it would be conducted outside of war.
Next, there is the destruction (of buildings, infrastructure, etc). This obviously must be -EV, or else we would indiscriminately destroy things all the time. Of course, we do destroy buildings outside of war, but only when the alternative use of the property is higher than the value of the existing building. War destroys these useless buildings, but also destroys useful infrastructure (and in fact, seeks to destroy the most useful things).
Finally, there is the killing. Pretty clearly this is -EV. I hope that isn't up for debate.
So, every aspect of war is basically -EV (or neutral at *best*). On top of that, every aspect of war also violates human rights. Force is not a legitimate means of controlling property; taxation is not a legitimate means of increasing production; destruction of others' property is criminal.
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WWII didn't end the depression.
Before we examine why, it's important to note what caused the depression in the first place - mainly the Federal Reserve mucking with the money supply (i.e. stealing from the populace) and causing inflation.
The (incorrect) Keynesian view is that the depression (and recessions in general) was caused by consumers' failure to maintain spending levels. That's flat out wrong. The business cycle is caused DIRECTLY by manipulations of the money supply - inflation - directed by central banks.
War is expensive. The money that is poured into it has to come from somewhere - the people, through either taxes, or more inflation. Further, spending on war is money that is not helping the economy in the way typical consumer spending does.
During WWII, for instance, unemployment was low, but that was largely due to conscription. People who weren't in the service were working, and had money in their pockets, but didn't have a lot of spending choices due to rationing and shortages. In short, most people were still rather poor.
What actually ended the depression was the *end* of the New Deal, the government's "war on the economy". When the economy tanks, the government must be stopped from intervening - government monkeying is what causes the problem, why would anyone think more of it will help? Bad investments have to be liquidated. Government spending must be cut. Most importantly, the central bank must not try to "reinflate" the currency.
War is always -EV. It can't possibly be +EV.
Let's look at the aspects of war.
There's control of resources (land, oil fields, whatever). This is basically EV neutral - either you control it or I do, we can't magically make more appear. Some of these resources will be destroyed during the conflict, but we'll account for that later.
There is the production aspect (tanks, bullets, bombs, etc). If this were +EV, why wouldn't we just build a bunch of bombs and constantly drop them in the ocean? Then we would get the supposed benefits of the increased production without killing anyone. Obviously, this production (in and of itself) is not beneficial, or else it would be conducted outside of war.
Next, there is the destruction (of buildings, infrastructure, etc). This obviously must be -EV, or else we would indiscriminately destroy things all the time. Of course, we do destroy buildings outside of war, but only when the alternative use of the property is higher than the value of the existing building. War destroys these useless buildings, but also destroys useful infrastructure (and in fact, seeks to destroy the most useful things).
Finally, there is the killing. Pretty clearly this is -EV. I hope that isn't up for debate.
So, every aspect of war is basically -EV (or neutral at *best*). On top of that, every aspect of war also violates human rights. Force is not a legitimate means of controlling property; taxation is not a legitimate means of increasing production; destruction of others' property is criminal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WWII didn't end the depression.
Before we examine why, it's important to note what caused the depression in the first place - mainly the Federal Reserve mucking with the money supply (i.e. stealing from the populace) and causing inflation.
The (incorrect) Keynesian view is that the depression (and recessions in general) was caused by consumers' failure to maintain spending levels. That's flat out wrong. The business cycle is caused DIRECTLY by manipulations of the money supply - inflation - directed by central banks.
War is expensive. The money that is poured into it has to come from somewhere - the people, through either taxes, or more inflation. Further, spending on war is money that is not helping the economy in the way typical consumer spending does.
During WWII, for instance, unemployment was low, but that was largely due to conscription. People who weren't in the service were working, and had money in their pockets, but didn't have a lot of spending choices due to rationing and shortages. In short, most people were still rather poor.
What actually ended the depression was the *end* of the New Deal, the government's "war on the economy". When the economy tanks, the government must be stopped from intervening - government monkeying is what causes the problem, why would anyone think more of it will help? Bad investments have to be liquidated. Government spending must be cut. Most importantly, the central bank must not try to "reinflate" the currency.
Abolish Intellectual Property You Foolsh
One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents and not necessarily to their business savvy.
For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.
Certainly there is no shortage of narratives ready to back up this misimpression. Countless business histories of the US observe how profits come in the wake of patents and thereby assume a causal relationship. Under this assumption, the history of American enterprise is less a story of heroic risk and reward and more a story of the decisions of patent clerks and copyright attorneys.
As a result, many people think that the reason the United States grew so quickly in the 19th century was due to its intellectual property protection, and assume that protecting ideas is no different from protecting real property (which, in fact, it is completely different).
A clue to the copyright fallacy should be obvious from wandering through a typical bookstore chain. You will see racks and racks of classic books, presented with beautiful covers, fancy bindings, and in a variety of sizes and shapes. The texts therein are "public domain," which isn't a legal category as such: it only means the absence of copyright protection.
But they sell. They sell well. And no, the authors are not misidentified on them. The Bronte sisters are still the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Victor Hugo still wrote Les Miserables. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. The much-predicted disaster of an anti-IP world is nowhere in evidence: there are still profits, gains from trade, and credit is given where credit is due.
Why is this? Quite simply, the bookstore has gone to the trouble of bringing the book to market. It paid the producer for the book and made an entrepreneurial decision to take a risk that people will buy it. Sure, anyone could have done it, but the fact is that not everyone has: the company made the good available in a manner that suits consumer tastes. In other words, with enterprise comes success. It is no more or less simple than that. IP has nothing to do with it.
So it would be in a completely free market, which is to say, a world without IP. But sometimes businessmen themselves get confused.
Let's consider the case of an ice-cream entrepreneur with a hypothetical brand name Georgia Cream. The company enjoys some degree of success and then decides to trademark its brand name, meaning that it now enjoys the monopoly on the use of the name Georgia Cream. And let's say that the company creates a flavor called Peach Pizzazz, which is a great success, so it copyrights the recipe such that no one can publish it without the company's permission. It then realizes that the special quality of its ice cream is due to its mixing technique, so it applies for and achieves a patent on that.
So this company now has three monopolies all sewn up. Is that enough to ensure success? Of course not. It must do good business, meaning that it must economize, innovate, distribute, and advertise. The company does all these things and then goes from success to success.
If you suggest to the founder and CEO that we should get rid of intellectual property law, you will elicit a sense of panic. "That would completely destroy my business!" How so? "Anyone could just come along and claim to be Georgia Cream, steal our recipe for Peach Pizzazz, duplicate our mixing technique, and then we'd be sunk."
Do you see what is happening here? A small change that would threaten the very life of the business is indirectly being credited, by implication, for being the very life of the business. If that were true, then it would not be business prowess that made this company, but government privilege, and that is emphatically not true in this case. The repeal of intellectual property legislation would do nothing to remove from the business its capacity to create, innovate, advertise, market, and distribute.
The repeal of IP might create for it an additional cost of doing business, namely efforts to ensure that consumers are aware of the difference between the genuine product and impersonators. This is a cost of business that every enterprise has to bear. Patents and trademarks have done nothing to keep Gucci and Prada and Rolex impersonators at bay. But neither have the impersonators killed the main business. If anything, they might have helped, since imitation is the best form of flattery.
In any case, the costs associated with keeping an eye on imitators exists whether IP is legally protected or not. To be sure, some businesses owe their existing profits to patents, which they then use to beat their competitors over the head. But there are costs involved in this process as well, such as millions in legal fees.
Big companies spend millions building up warchests of patents that they use to fight off or forestall lawsuits from other companies, then agree to back down and cross-license to each other after spending millions on attorneys. And no surprise, just as with minimum wage or pro-union legislation, the IP laws don't really hurt the larger companies but rather the smaller businesses, who can't afford million-dollar patent suit defenses.
$16
"What you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity."
The Internet age has taught that it is ultimately impossible to enforce IP. It is akin to the attempt to ban alcohol or tobacco. It can't work. It only succeeds in creating criminality where none really need exist. By granting exclusive rights to the first firm to jump through the hoops, it ends up harming rather than promoting competition.
But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can't be considered to be owned.
Merchants are free to attempt to create artificial scarcity, and that is what happens when a company keeps it codes private or photographers put watermarks on their images online. Proprietary and "open-source" products can live and prosper side-by-side, as we learn from any drug store that offers both branded and generic goods inches apart on the shelves.
But what you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity, which is all that IP legislation really does. Benjamin Tucker said in the 19th century that if you want your invention to yourself, the only way is to keep it off the market. That remains true today.
So consider a world without trademark, copyright, or patents. It would still be a world with innovation — perhaps far more of it. And yes, there would still be profits due to those who are entrepreneurial. Perhaps there would be a bit less profit for litigators and IP lawyers — but is this a bad thing?
For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.
Certainly there is no shortage of narratives ready to back up this misimpression. Countless business histories of the US observe how profits come in the wake of patents and thereby assume a causal relationship. Under this assumption, the history of American enterprise is less a story of heroic risk and reward and more a story of the decisions of patent clerks and copyright attorneys.
As a result, many people think that the reason the United States grew so quickly in the 19th century was due to its intellectual property protection, and assume that protecting ideas is no different from protecting real property (which, in fact, it is completely different).
A clue to the copyright fallacy should be obvious from wandering through a typical bookstore chain. You will see racks and racks of classic books, presented with beautiful covers, fancy bindings, and in a variety of sizes and shapes. The texts therein are "public domain," which isn't a legal category as such: it only means the absence of copyright protection.
But they sell. They sell well. And no, the authors are not misidentified on them. The Bronte sisters are still the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Victor Hugo still wrote Les Miserables. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. The much-predicted disaster of an anti-IP world is nowhere in evidence: there are still profits, gains from trade, and credit is given where credit is due.
Why is this? Quite simply, the bookstore has gone to the trouble of bringing the book to market. It paid the producer for the book and made an entrepreneurial decision to take a risk that people will buy it. Sure, anyone could have done it, but the fact is that not everyone has: the company made the good available in a manner that suits consumer tastes. In other words, with enterprise comes success. It is no more or less simple than that. IP has nothing to do with it.
So it would be in a completely free market, which is to say, a world without IP. But sometimes businessmen themselves get confused.
Let's consider the case of an ice-cream entrepreneur with a hypothetical brand name Georgia Cream. The company enjoys some degree of success and then decides to trademark its brand name, meaning that it now enjoys the monopoly on the use of the name Georgia Cream. And let's say that the company creates a flavor called Peach Pizzazz, which is a great success, so it copyrights the recipe such that no one can publish it without the company's permission. It then realizes that the special quality of its ice cream is due to its mixing technique, so it applies for and achieves a patent on that.
So this company now has three monopolies all sewn up. Is that enough to ensure success? Of course not. It must do good business, meaning that it must economize, innovate, distribute, and advertise. The company does all these things and then goes from success to success.
If you suggest to the founder and CEO that we should get rid of intellectual property law, you will elicit a sense of panic. "That would completely destroy my business!" How so? "Anyone could just come along and claim to be Georgia Cream, steal our recipe for Peach Pizzazz, duplicate our mixing technique, and then we'd be sunk."
Do you see what is happening here? A small change that would threaten the very life of the business is indirectly being credited, by implication, for being the very life of the business. If that were true, then it would not be business prowess that made this company, but government privilege, and that is emphatically not true in this case. The repeal of intellectual property legislation would do nothing to remove from the business its capacity to create, innovate, advertise, market, and distribute.
The repeal of IP might create for it an additional cost of doing business, namely efforts to ensure that consumers are aware of the difference between the genuine product and impersonators. This is a cost of business that every enterprise has to bear. Patents and trademarks have done nothing to keep Gucci and Prada and Rolex impersonators at bay. But neither have the impersonators killed the main business. If anything, they might have helped, since imitation is the best form of flattery.
In any case, the costs associated with keeping an eye on imitators exists whether IP is legally protected or not. To be sure, some businesses owe their existing profits to patents, which they then use to beat their competitors over the head. But there are costs involved in this process as well, such as millions in legal fees.
Big companies spend millions building up warchests of patents that they use to fight off or forestall lawsuits from other companies, then agree to back down and cross-license to each other after spending millions on attorneys. And no surprise, just as with minimum wage or pro-union legislation, the IP laws don't really hurt the larger companies but rather the smaller businesses, who can't afford million-dollar patent suit defenses.
$16
"What you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity."
The Internet age has taught that it is ultimately impossible to enforce IP. It is akin to the attempt to ban alcohol or tobacco. It can't work. It only succeeds in creating criminality where none really need exist. By granting exclusive rights to the first firm to jump through the hoops, it ends up harming rather than promoting competition.
But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can't be considered to be owned.
Merchants are free to attempt to create artificial scarcity, and that is what happens when a company keeps it codes private or photographers put watermarks on their images online. Proprietary and "open-source" products can live and prosper side-by-side, as we learn from any drug store that offers both branded and generic goods inches apart on the shelves.
But what you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity, which is all that IP legislation really does. Benjamin Tucker said in the 19th century that if you want your invention to yourself, the only way is to keep it off the market. That remains true today.
So consider a world without trademark, copyright, or patents. It would still be a world with innovation — perhaps far more of it. And yes, there would still be profits due to those who are entrepreneurial. Perhaps there would be a bit less profit for litigators and IP lawyers — but is this a bad thing?
The next few years in America
With the Democrats taking charge in Congress, we will surely hear talk of mandatory national health insurance, more spending for health care for the poor and elderly, and more taxes on individuals and business to pay for the whole scheme. This is admittedly not that different from what Republicans have been doing since taking over. In some ways, Republicans are even worse, driving us to socialism in the name of market reform and other sloganeering. Either way, we are stuck with a system that is moving the health sector ever more into the hands of the state.
There are two popular images of socialized medicine. I don't think either captures what the reality is in our prosperous and largely capitalistic country.
The first image is that held by the delusional left. They imagine that if most health care were publicly provided and administered by the state, people of all social classes, age groups, and races and sexes, would have equal access.
Enlightened public bureaucrats would make the essential decisions about health priorities. Leftists imagine that this will save money in the long run because people will be prevented from doing things that cause them to get sick and die prematurely, such as smoke, eat fast foods, and fail to go on long nature walks.
Mostly the left-wing view is of the negative sort. It makes them crazy, and offends their moral sense, that the rich can afford better health care than the poor. They believe that it violates a sense of fairness that the rich have the means to live longer, healthier lives, than the poor, who are left to the mercy of life's exigencies.
But let's say that we can show that under a capitalist health market, the poor will be better off in absolute terms. I doubt very seriously that this will satisfy the true socialist. What bothers him is not so much bad health as the unequal access to good health.
For the same reason, the socialist is not persuaded by the argument that the poor will be richer under capitalism because they are aware that inequality will continue to exist under capitalism. It is more important to them to reduce the well-being of the rich than it is to improve the lot of the poor, so long as the poor still constitute an identifiable class within the population.
It is because of these normative assumptions that left-socialists can rightly be called the party of envy, for their desire to destroy and expropriate is more intense than their desire to uplift. That is to say, they are more interested in equality than general prosperity. What Mises called the destructivism of socialist theory is merely the next step in socialist logic.
The second view of socialized medicine sees the problems with socialism, that it leads to building up a state apparatus that has life-and-death control over the population. Because bureaucrats have no strong incentive to see to the wellbeing of people, they make decisions based on politics.
And because entrepreneurs are cut out of the picture, innovations cease to be brought to the health-care market in a way that makes them accessible. We end up with a bureaucratically controlled nightmare in which no class in society receives the level of medical attention it would receive in a marketplace.
So far as stated, this critique is a good one. But the opponents of health-care socialism also have in their minds a vision of what life would be like under socialism. Mostly these visions are drawn from experiences under socialist countries that have been driven into poverty by state ownership of the means of production. The state in these cases does not have much money. There is no private store of wealth to speak of, and no private business that has the motivation or the means to provide customer service.
What happened in these countries is entirely predictable. There was an undersupply of medical services just as there was an undersupply of everything else. Yuri Maltsev tells harrowing stories of how people would suffer relentlessly in the USSR. When the death rate per hospital would grow so as to embarrass the state, the state would simply order the rate to be lowered, just as they ordered grain production to be higher.
The hospitals would respond in perverse ways. Instead of providing better care, they started rolling people out the door if the personnel suspected that the patient was near death. The result was a decline in per-hospital death rates, but an overall increase in deaths.
One thing that the state has not been able to lie about is vital statistics. The Soviet state did its best to keep them from being revealed. But once the data were collected, the truth came out. Between 1971 and 1986, the Soviet state faced a calamity. Life expectancy decreased. Infant mortality increased. In fact, the Soviet state stopped collecting data again. But later, once the truth was revealed again, it turned out that infant mortality was on the increase, in some cases as much as 58 percent between 1971 and 1986.
A similar experience was repeated in every socialized state. Health declined. Vital statistics did not keep up with capitalistic standards. It is a great irony that Marx had thought socialism would be the next stage of history, following capitalism just as capitalism followed feudalism. And yet socialism itself had been systematically driving these countries back to feudal-era forms of health care that were increasingly deprived of modern technology.
Not that these countries didn't invest in scientific medical research. People from the old Soviet Union said that sometimes it seemed like every fifth person had a medical degree. Indeed, no societies in human history ever invested more in science than socialist countries did. But they kept sinking further into the abyss. Why? The problem was economic rather than technical. You can put 10,000 government medical scientists in a gigantic cushy building, pay them all a million dollars a month, give them access to every journal and all the equipment they need, and let them invent whatever they want. But the population will still be without.
Inventions and scientists might be a necessary condition for popular access to medical goods and services. But they are not sufficient. We need an economic system that can calculate the best use of resources. It requires the division of labor and a complex capital structure for products to reach a general market. What's more, not every innovation needs to go to market. There must be a way for consumers to transmit information about their most urgent needs to producers, and there needs to be a means for producers to decide among alternative uses of resources. In other words, there must be a system of profit and loss, which in turn must be based on private property exchange.
In short, without capitalism, medical services cannot reach the multitudes. The experience of socialism reinforces what the theory would suggest.
We might raise the question about why it is necessary that consumers themselves be in a position to pay economically rational prices for the medical services they consume. Wouldn't it be better if everyone could just consume all the services and drugs and surgeries that they needed? Mises addressed this point brilliantly in 1922. He pointed out that that there is no clean division between sickness and health. We ourselves are capable of making misjudgments on this matter, believing ourselves to be sick and even making ourselves sick if we so will it.
The will to health, Mises wrote, is an important determinant of our well-being. But socialism, by pricing all services at zero, destroys the will to health and thereby generates sickness. Here is Mises from 1922, in a passage that was criticized for decades as being completely outlandish:
"By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining.... It is an institution which tends to encourage diseases, not to say accidents, and to intensify considerably the physical and psychic results of accidents and illnesses. As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify diseases.... We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness."
Note that he said this 42 years before the US created just such a situation. We can observe this to some extent in the way disability law has been misused in this country. After the Americans With Disability Act was passed, millions of Americans found that they were themselves disabled. So too with poverty. The welfare state actually succeeded in driving people to adapt their life conditions to the make themselves eligible. I'm quite sure that if the government were to institute a Good Samaritan Office, we would find the streets strewn with people who had been beaten and robbed. It is the nature of a government program to multiply the problem rather than solve anything.
I find it striking that after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, virtually no effort was made to privatize health services. To be sure, there are now private health services in these countries, but the official systems of socialized medicine still exist. This fact is a testament to the reigning orthodoxy. The world seems to understand that it is a mistake to nationalize agriculture and factory production. No one advocates a Department of Software Development, even if there are far more interventions in this sector than there should be. And yet health care, all over the world, is assumed to be a normal function of government.
In this area, as in many others, the former socialist countries – under US advice, bribes, and pressure – took social democratic economies as their models. So they not only created a panoply of new regulatory departments, and imposed a series of destructive taxes, they also did not question the assumption that health-care provision cannot be left to the market alone.
This is despite the vast number of stories we hear about English and Canadian health care socialism, mostly having to do with a lack of innovation and a grim shortage of medical, surgical, and emergency services. In these countries, there is much that mirrors the former Soviet experience, except in one area: their governments are not as poor. This changes the incentive structure. The government has incentives to spend money. Indeed, governments win from passing money around, and that can mean making more money available rather than less, unlike in the Soviet system.
To understand this point is to add an additional factor to the way we understand socialist medical care. It's time that we change our expectations concerning what socialism will look like in our future, though we have it partially now. The key problem with socialism is that it misallocates resources, and when applied to the U.S. medical sector, this means a vast overconsumption of medical services as well as artificially high prices. The system is carefully structured in a mercantilist way to socialize losses and privatize profits. In this way, the largest players in the market benefit and a small group of semi-private cartels are insured against financial failure.
Let's take a closer look.
First, there are severe limits on the number of service providers, as there have been for a century. We brag about the specialization we have among doctors, but what we do not have is a range of choices among levels of training. When we want our car fixed, we can go to the dealer or we can go to another 40 places with a range of mechanics, some of whom have had extensive training and some of whom have not – a fact which may or may not reflect on the quality of their work.
In medical economics, however, we are supposed to believe that physicians are a class set apart like ordained priests with special powers. You are either ordained to practice medicine or you are not. The limits on the numbers – which are built into the cartel of medical schools as well as the licensure system – are nothing but a mercantilist effort to increase prices and incomes. Of course every profession has its licensure system, but the medical one has been uniquely successful in making the barriers to practice incredibly high.
This sad situation began in the states in the 19th century, and nationally in 1910. Originally, our medical sector was nearly 100% free. It would have been inconceivable that the federal government should have ever intervened in this critical area of life. Then came the Progressive Era, with its fashion for central planning. The medical sector came under mercantilist control during the same period in which we got the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the direct election of Senators, the Federal Trade Commission, and US entry into World War I. An important part of this medical cartelization was the suppression of homeopathy and other non-allopathic schools of treatment.
As an offshoot of this monopoly, we still live under the absurd system whereby doctors must give prescriptions for the drugs we want to buy. The pharmacy industry and the doctors cling to this system for life support. But it is an insult to consumers and a ripoff of the sick. In a free market, you should be able to consume wherever medications you want, official or alternative, purchased in ways that accord with market demands, not government dictates.
Second, we have a third-party payment system whereby insurance companies, contracted by businesses working within government mandates, are paying the bills for services. So the insurance company, not the patient, is the customer, with the doctor responsible to those paying him.
The mandatory aspect of the program led to a cartelization of the medical insurers, who stopped behaving like insurers and began acting like a cartelized payment system. Hospitals were paid on a cost-plus basis. Thus the vast artificial boom in this sector. The insurers paid for routine and not unexpected services. The risk pool was cobbled together in a way that had nothing to do with the actual risks.
These features all led to a vast overuse of the system that benefited the medical industry. These features all became part of the 1960s welfarization of medicine with Medicare and Medicaid. And the inevitable huge increases in costs have led to ever more government price caps, and patch-work interventions to keep the system afloat and its customers from engaging in political revolt. It has also caused a general overmedicalization of the population, especially older people under institutionalized care.
Everyone has horror stories to tell of how aging people are treated by our medical system. What strikes me as strange is how the financial incentives of hospitals and insurers are rarely considered to be a factor in the medical decisions made on their behalf. We are all supposed to believe that our medical establishment is purely interested in human welfare. But if we understand the financial incentives at work, we have a new window into why it is that so vast a percentage of medical resources are used to treat people in the last months of their lives.
Think of the entire field of medical ethics that has become particularly important when technology has permitted an ever greater control over the time and circumstances of death. Everyone speaks as if the resources that are required to sustain life beyond its natural term belong to all of us to spend how we as a society have decided. Think of the debate over Terry Schiavo, for example. Not once in the public clamor over this tragic case was the issue of who was paying brought up. This is a very dangerous trend. There is no getting around the fact that the institution that is the source of funding will ultimately make the decisions on how resources are used. The more that programs like Medicare and Medicaid pay for life extension, the more the government will be in a position to decide when a person's life must be sustained and when it must end.
Now, many people have written about the coming meltdown of these programs. But not many are willing to speak about the true origins of the payment-system mess. The medical insurance cartel got its biggest boost in World War II, when wage controls caused business to compete based on benefits rather than pay. Here we see a direct connection between the warfare state and the welfare state. As usual, they work hand in hand.
Third, innovations in official and alternative treatments are very seriously shackled by the FDA, an institution that overrides patients' freedom to choose their own treatments, and constructs its approval process to favor only the largest pharmaceutical companies. So we face a peculiar situation in which there is an overuse of approved drugs and nonuse of needed but unapproved drugs and other remedies. The way around this problem is to leave it to the market, but that is a solution hardly anyone wants to consider.
You might be able to argue that in past ages, a government bureaucracy was necessary to collect and assess information about a drug, and finally approve it, on grounds that consumers did not have the information to make their own decisions. I don’t happen to think that argument is correct, given the universal efficiency of markets over government. But in these times, the case for bureaucracy is even more obviously incorrect.
Consumers have more medical information from more sources at their fingertips than at any time in human history. The people who need specialized but unapproved treatments are aghast to find that the FDA is withholding approval. Increasingly, we see cases where a manufacturer doesn't even bother to file for approval in the US.
In this context, too, we need to raise the subject of medical patents, which are nothing but government privileges given to an innovative company to prolong the period of profits that come from being the first firm to gain approval for the drug. Patents have no justification in a free market. There is no patent given on recipes for food, and yet that has not inhibited innovation nor diminished the quality of food at restaurants. The high profits flowing to pharmaceutical companies from patents, combined with increasing government subsidies, have led to an untenable situation. The prices of prescription drugs have soared by 50% in the last 10 years. Non-prescription drugs have gone up by 6%, which in real terms means falling prices. I suggest to you that this data set tells us pretty much all we need to know.
Recently, Wal-Mart made the remarkable announcement that it would begin making generic drugs available at its stores for $4. This program has been a phenomenal success. People wonder how they can do this. It might be true that Wal-Mart is using drugs as a loss leader, trying to get people in the store who might otherwise be going to smaller drug outlets. If this is what they are up to, I say it's all to the good. The fact is that in any market exchange, both parties benefit and human welfare improves. The very existence of the program has pushed prices down in competitive businesses. This is the way the market is supposed to work.
Wal-Mart has helped solve some of the problems that have been generated by the scandalous prescription drug benefit program pushed by the Bush administration. Not only will this cost far more than the Clinton medical reform might have cost, many people have found the program itself to be a bureaucratic headache.
But with Wal-Mart we once again discover how the market comes to the rescue. The striking fact of all of human history is how the market works around government's failure to solve human problems and, indeed, the market finds the way to correct for human problems that the government itself has created.
To watch the flow of history is to observe two great streams of activity. In the private sector, we find innovation, efficiency, cost cutting, human service, dynamism, and problem solving. In the public sector we find stagnation, bureaucracy, inefficiency, cost overruns, human coercion, and problem creating. If the government alone had been in charge for the last 500 years, our world would look very different. Indeed, we might have no civilization to speak of. But fortunately the market – meaning innovating and cooperating human beings – seems to find a way around the problems that government has created.
This is nowhere more true than in the medical sector. It is thanks to the market that there is more medical information available today than ever before in history, more life-saving techniques, more access to services, and more choice. Ideally, we would have radical reform so that government programs would be abolished, medical cartels smashed, and medical service provision wholly privatized.
But what if that doesn't happen? It could be that 50 years from now, the competitive private sector, with its dazzling capacity for finding ways around every barrier, will be completely dominant in the medical industry, and those sectors that have lived off government largess will be reduced to near insignificance. For the sake of our health and prosperity, let us hope for this as a 2nd best solution to the complete separation of health and state.
Ideally we would come to see health and medicine the way it's been seen in the whole of human history prior to the century of socialism. At every level and in every sector, it should be subject to market discipline. The money we use to purchase medical services should be private money, whether out of our own bank accounts or from charitable sources. We need to rethink the meaning of medical insurance, which, if it exists at all, should only apply to catastrophic cases to cover life contingencies over which we have no control. And of course we need freedom for all schools of treatment.
The path for progress here, as in every aspect of economics and civilization, lies with privatization, the elimination of restrictions and welfare, and freedom itself.
There are two popular images of socialized medicine. I don't think either captures what the reality is in our prosperous and largely capitalistic country.
The first image is that held by the delusional left. They imagine that if most health care were publicly provided and administered by the state, people of all social classes, age groups, and races and sexes, would have equal access.
Enlightened public bureaucrats would make the essential decisions about health priorities. Leftists imagine that this will save money in the long run because people will be prevented from doing things that cause them to get sick and die prematurely, such as smoke, eat fast foods, and fail to go on long nature walks.
Mostly the left-wing view is of the negative sort. It makes them crazy, and offends their moral sense, that the rich can afford better health care than the poor. They believe that it violates a sense of fairness that the rich have the means to live longer, healthier lives, than the poor, who are left to the mercy of life's exigencies.
But let's say that we can show that under a capitalist health market, the poor will be better off in absolute terms. I doubt very seriously that this will satisfy the true socialist. What bothers him is not so much bad health as the unequal access to good health.
For the same reason, the socialist is not persuaded by the argument that the poor will be richer under capitalism because they are aware that inequality will continue to exist under capitalism. It is more important to them to reduce the well-being of the rich than it is to improve the lot of the poor, so long as the poor still constitute an identifiable class within the population.
It is because of these normative assumptions that left-socialists can rightly be called the party of envy, for their desire to destroy and expropriate is more intense than their desire to uplift. That is to say, they are more interested in equality than general prosperity. What Mises called the destructivism of socialist theory is merely the next step in socialist logic.
The second view of socialized medicine sees the problems with socialism, that it leads to building up a state apparatus that has life-and-death control over the population. Because bureaucrats have no strong incentive to see to the wellbeing of people, they make decisions based on politics.
And because entrepreneurs are cut out of the picture, innovations cease to be brought to the health-care market in a way that makes them accessible. We end up with a bureaucratically controlled nightmare in which no class in society receives the level of medical attention it would receive in a marketplace.
So far as stated, this critique is a good one. But the opponents of health-care socialism also have in their minds a vision of what life would be like under socialism. Mostly these visions are drawn from experiences under socialist countries that have been driven into poverty by state ownership of the means of production. The state in these cases does not have much money. There is no private store of wealth to speak of, and no private business that has the motivation or the means to provide customer service.
What happened in these countries is entirely predictable. There was an undersupply of medical services just as there was an undersupply of everything else. Yuri Maltsev tells harrowing stories of how people would suffer relentlessly in the USSR. When the death rate per hospital would grow so as to embarrass the state, the state would simply order the rate to be lowered, just as they ordered grain production to be higher.
The hospitals would respond in perverse ways. Instead of providing better care, they started rolling people out the door if the personnel suspected that the patient was near death. The result was a decline in per-hospital death rates, but an overall increase in deaths.
One thing that the state has not been able to lie about is vital statistics. The Soviet state did its best to keep them from being revealed. But once the data were collected, the truth came out. Between 1971 and 1986, the Soviet state faced a calamity. Life expectancy decreased. Infant mortality increased. In fact, the Soviet state stopped collecting data again. But later, once the truth was revealed again, it turned out that infant mortality was on the increase, in some cases as much as 58 percent between 1971 and 1986.
A similar experience was repeated in every socialized state. Health declined. Vital statistics did not keep up with capitalistic standards. It is a great irony that Marx had thought socialism would be the next stage of history, following capitalism just as capitalism followed feudalism. And yet socialism itself had been systematically driving these countries back to feudal-era forms of health care that were increasingly deprived of modern technology.
Not that these countries didn't invest in scientific medical research. People from the old Soviet Union said that sometimes it seemed like every fifth person had a medical degree. Indeed, no societies in human history ever invested more in science than socialist countries did. But they kept sinking further into the abyss. Why? The problem was economic rather than technical. You can put 10,000 government medical scientists in a gigantic cushy building, pay them all a million dollars a month, give them access to every journal and all the equipment they need, and let them invent whatever they want. But the population will still be without.
Inventions and scientists might be a necessary condition for popular access to medical goods and services. But they are not sufficient. We need an economic system that can calculate the best use of resources. It requires the division of labor and a complex capital structure for products to reach a general market. What's more, not every innovation needs to go to market. There must be a way for consumers to transmit information about their most urgent needs to producers, and there needs to be a means for producers to decide among alternative uses of resources. In other words, there must be a system of profit and loss, which in turn must be based on private property exchange.
In short, without capitalism, medical services cannot reach the multitudes. The experience of socialism reinforces what the theory would suggest.
We might raise the question about why it is necessary that consumers themselves be in a position to pay economically rational prices for the medical services they consume. Wouldn't it be better if everyone could just consume all the services and drugs and surgeries that they needed? Mises addressed this point brilliantly in 1922. He pointed out that that there is no clean division between sickness and health. We ourselves are capable of making misjudgments on this matter, believing ourselves to be sick and even making ourselves sick if we so will it.
The will to health, Mises wrote, is an important determinant of our well-being. But socialism, by pricing all services at zero, destroys the will to health and thereby generates sickness. Here is Mises from 1922, in a passage that was criticized for decades as being completely outlandish:
"By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining.... It is an institution which tends to encourage diseases, not to say accidents, and to intensify considerably the physical and psychic results of accidents and illnesses. As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify diseases.... We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness."
Note that he said this 42 years before the US created just such a situation. We can observe this to some extent in the way disability law has been misused in this country. After the Americans With Disability Act was passed, millions of Americans found that they were themselves disabled. So too with poverty. The welfare state actually succeeded in driving people to adapt their life conditions to the make themselves eligible. I'm quite sure that if the government were to institute a Good Samaritan Office, we would find the streets strewn with people who had been beaten and robbed. It is the nature of a government program to multiply the problem rather than solve anything.
I find it striking that after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, virtually no effort was made to privatize health services. To be sure, there are now private health services in these countries, but the official systems of socialized medicine still exist. This fact is a testament to the reigning orthodoxy. The world seems to understand that it is a mistake to nationalize agriculture and factory production. No one advocates a Department of Software Development, even if there are far more interventions in this sector than there should be. And yet health care, all over the world, is assumed to be a normal function of government.
In this area, as in many others, the former socialist countries – under US advice, bribes, and pressure – took social democratic economies as their models. So they not only created a panoply of new regulatory departments, and imposed a series of destructive taxes, they also did not question the assumption that health-care provision cannot be left to the market alone.
This is despite the vast number of stories we hear about English and Canadian health care socialism, mostly having to do with a lack of innovation and a grim shortage of medical, surgical, and emergency services. In these countries, there is much that mirrors the former Soviet experience, except in one area: their governments are not as poor. This changes the incentive structure. The government has incentives to spend money. Indeed, governments win from passing money around, and that can mean making more money available rather than less, unlike in the Soviet system.
To understand this point is to add an additional factor to the way we understand socialist medical care. It's time that we change our expectations concerning what socialism will look like in our future, though we have it partially now. The key problem with socialism is that it misallocates resources, and when applied to the U.S. medical sector, this means a vast overconsumption of medical services as well as artificially high prices. The system is carefully structured in a mercantilist way to socialize losses and privatize profits. In this way, the largest players in the market benefit and a small group of semi-private cartels are insured against financial failure.
Let's take a closer look.
First, there are severe limits on the number of service providers, as there have been for a century. We brag about the specialization we have among doctors, but what we do not have is a range of choices among levels of training. When we want our car fixed, we can go to the dealer or we can go to another 40 places with a range of mechanics, some of whom have had extensive training and some of whom have not – a fact which may or may not reflect on the quality of their work.
In medical economics, however, we are supposed to believe that physicians are a class set apart like ordained priests with special powers. You are either ordained to practice medicine or you are not. The limits on the numbers – which are built into the cartel of medical schools as well as the licensure system – are nothing but a mercantilist effort to increase prices and incomes. Of course every profession has its licensure system, but the medical one has been uniquely successful in making the barriers to practice incredibly high.
This sad situation began in the states in the 19th century, and nationally in 1910. Originally, our medical sector was nearly 100% free. It would have been inconceivable that the federal government should have ever intervened in this critical area of life. Then came the Progressive Era, with its fashion for central planning. The medical sector came under mercantilist control during the same period in which we got the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the direct election of Senators, the Federal Trade Commission, and US entry into World War I. An important part of this medical cartelization was the suppression of homeopathy and other non-allopathic schools of treatment.
As an offshoot of this monopoly, we still live under the absurd system whereby doctors must give prescriptions for the drugs we want to buy. The pharmacy industry and the doctors cling to this system for life support. But it is an insult to consumers and a ripoff of the sick. In a free market, you should be able to consume wherever medications you want, official or alternative, purchased in ways that accord with market demands, not government dictates.
Second, we have a third-party payment system whereby insurance companies, contracted by businesses working within government mandates, are paying the bills for services. So the insurance company, not the patient, is the customer, with the doctor responsible to those paying him.
The mandatory aspect of the program led to a cartelization of the medical insurers, who stopped behaving like insurers and began acting like a cartelized payment system. Hospitals were paid on a cost-plus basis. Thus the vast artificial boom in this sector. The insurers paid for routine and not unexpected services. The risk pool was cobbled together in a way that had nothing to do with the actual risks.
These features all led to a vast overuse of the system that benefited the medical industry. These features all became part of the 1960s welfarization of medicine with Medicare and Medicaid. And the inevitable huge increases in costs have led to ever more government price caps, and patch-work interventions to keep the system afloat and its customers from engaging in political revolt. It has also caused a general overmedicalization of the population, especially older people under institutionalized care.
Everyone has horror stories to tell of how aging people are treated by our medical system. What strikes me as strange is how the financial incentives of hospitals and insurers are rarely considered to be a factor in the medical decisions made on their behalf. We are all supposed to believe that our medical establishment is purely interested in human welfare. But if we understand the financial incentives at work, we have a new window into why it is that so vast a percentage of medical resources are used to treat people in the last months of their lives.
Think of the entire field of medical ethics that has become particularly important when technology has permitted an ever greater control over the time and circumstances of death. Everyone speaks as if the resources that are required to sustain life beyond its natural term belong to all of us to spend how we as a society have decided. Think of the debate over Terry Schiavo, for example. Not once in the public clamor over this tragic case was the issue of who was paying brought up. This is a very dangerous trend. There is no getting around the fact that the institution that is the source of funding will ultimately make the decisions on how resources are used. The more that programs like Medicare and Medicaid pay for life extension, the more the government will be in a position to decide when a person's life must be sustained and when it must end.
Now, many people have written about the coming meltdown of these programs. But not many are willing to speak about the true origins of the payment-system mess. The medical insurance cartel got its biggest boost in World War II, when wage controls caused business to compete based on benefits rather than pay. Here we see a direct connection between the warfare state and the welfare state. As usual, they work hand in hand.
Third, innovations in official and alternative treatments are very seriously shackled by the FDA, an institution that overrides patients' freedom to choose their own treatments, and constructs its approval process to favor only the largest pharmaceutical companies. So we face a peculiar situation in which there is an overuse of approved drugs and nonuse of needed but unapproved drugs and other remedies. The way around this problem is to leave it to the market, but that is a solution hardly anyone wants to consider.
You might be able to argue that in past ages, a government bureaucracy was necessary to collect and assess information about a drug, and finally approve it, on grounds that consumers did not have the information to make their own decisions. I don’t happen to think that argument is correct, given the universal efficiency of markets over government. But in these times, the case for bureaucracy is even more obviously incorrect.
Consumers have more medical information from more sources at their fingertips than at any time in human history. The people who need specialized but unapproved treatments are aghast to find that the FDA is withholding approval. Increasingly, we see cases where a manufacturer doesn't even bother to file for approval in the US.
In this context, too, we need to raise the subject of medical patents, which are nothing but government privileges given to an innovative company to prolong the period of profits that come from being the first firm to gain approval for the drug. Patents have no justification in a free market. There is no patent given on recipes for food, and yet that has not inhibited innovation nor diminished the quality of food at restaurants. The high profits flowing to pharmaceutical companies from patents, combined with increasing government subsidies, have led to an untenable situation. The prices of prescription drugs have soared by 50% in the last 10 years. Non-prescription drugs have gone up by 6%, which in real terms means falling prices. I suggest to you that this data set tells us pretty much all we need to know.
Recently, Wal-Mart made the remarkable announcement that it would begin making generic drugs available at its stores for $4. This program has been a phenomenal success. People wonder how they can do this. It might be true that Wal-Mart is using drugs as a loss leader, trying to get people in the store who might otherwise be going to smaller drug outlets. If this is what they are up to, I say it's all to the good. The fact is that in any market exchange, both parties benefit and human welfare improves. The very existence of the program has pushed prices down in competitive businesses. This is the way the market is supposed to work.
Wal-Mart has helped solve some of the problems that have been generated by the scandalous prescription drug benefit program pushed by the Bush administration. Not only will this cost far more than the Clinton medical reform might have cost, many people have found the program itself to be a bureaucratic headache.
But with Wal-Mart we once again discover how the market comes to the rescue. The striking fact of all of human history is how the market works around government's failure to solve human problems and, indeed, the market finds the way to correct for human problems that the government itself has created.
To watch the flow of history is to observe two great streams of activity. In the private sector, we find innovation, efficiency, cost cutting, human service, dynamism, and problem solving. In the public sector we find stagnation, bureaucracy, inefficiency, cost overruns, human coercion, and problem creating. If the government alone had been in charge for the last 500 years, our world would look very different. Indeed, we might have no civilization to speak of. But fortunately the market – meaning innovating and cooperating human beings – seems to find a way around the problems that government has created.
This is nowhere more true than in the medical sector. It is thanks to the market that there is more medical information available today than ever before in history, more life-saving techniques, more access to services, and more choice. Ideally, we would have radical reform so that government programs would be abolished, medical cartels smashed, and medical service provision wholly privatized.
But what if that doesn't happen? It could be that 50 years from now, the competitive private sector, with its dazzling capacity for finding ways around every barrier, will be completely dominant in the medical industry, and those sectors that have lived off government largess will be reduced to near insignificance. For the sake of our health and prosperity, let us hope for this as a 2nd best solution to the complete separation of health and state.
Ideally we would come to see health and medicine the way it's been seen in the whole of human history prior to the century of socialism. At every level and in every sector, it should be subject to market discipline. The money we use to purchase medical services should be private money, whether out of our own bank accounts or from charitable sources. We need to rethink the meaning of medical insurance, which, if it exists at all, should only apply to catastrophic cases to cover life contingencies over which we have no control. And of course we need freedom for all schools of treatment.
The path for progress here, as in every aspect of economics and civilization, lies with privatization, the elimination of restrictions and welfare, and freedom itself.
Stop e-mailing me your stupid questions
Hello everyone! Thank you for the responses so far; I always enjoy hearing from my subjects. Many of you have asked me questions about the basis of Anarcho-Capitalism and how it would 'work'.
1) What is anarchocapitalism?
Anarcho-capitalism (also known by other names, such as free market anarchism) is an individualist political philosophy that advocates the provision of all goods and services —including systems of justice, law enforcement, and national defense—by competitors in a free market. Anarcho-capitalists argue that a pure free market system, based on private property would maximize individual liberty and prosperity. For them, the only just way to acquire property is through trade, gift, or original appropriation. Anarcho-capitalism rejects the state as an aggressive entity that steals property through taxation, initiates physical force, uses its coercive powers to benefit some businesses and individuals at the expense of others, creates monopolies, and restricts trade.
2) What about Monopolies in AC land?
Monopolies cannot occur without the state. The only way for one businesses to dominate the market is to supply the best product at the best price, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. If the company then raises prices and/or lessens the value of the product, it opens the doors for other competitors to gain market share.
3) What about price fixing and cartels?
Price fixing is morally wrong because one party is telling the other how much he has to sell there own property for. If you don’t want it you don’t have to buy it. Cartels also create a paradox. The higher it fixes it’s prices the more incentive it gives (1) companies within the cartel to break the deal, lower prices and gain more market share, and (2) incentive from outside individuals to begin competing and selling it’s products at lower prices.
4) Without a government that provides a military and police, how do we defend ourselves?
The free market can and will provide these things. There is a demand for people to be defended from outside threats, and there is a way to supply it. Both these things can be done voluntarily.
5) What if the security companies start waging war with each other, or forcing people to either take part in the service or be killed?
Violence and particularly war is very expensive to wage. For instance the War in Iraq at this point is costing the US government close to $2billion a week on average. Have we gained $2Billion for every week we've been over there? Certainly not. Furthermore, who will sign up and fight in the Wal-Mart Army? Without Nationalism millions less will be willing to fight in wars, and the ideas and appeal of nationalism will be long gone in a society of individualism and rejection of the state.
6) Why wouldn't people work 100 hour weeks without the government's ability to legislate laws concerning labor?
Libertarian principles recognize everyone's right to agree on what one's labor is worth. If you don't want to work 100 hour weeks, no one is forcing you to. Competition of industry's in pure capitalism creates better working environments, wages, and benefits.
Statists point to conditions such as the industrial revolution and say that it sis evidence that a government is needed for good working conditions to exist. The differences are enormous, that being (1) Working in a factory was an improvement over working on a farm which is what most were doing beforehand, (2) Unions had not existed yet, (by the way unions would likely exist in AC society, in most cases they would have less power though because they would not have the power of government funding and support). (3) it was the industrial revolution and people as a whole were much poorer at the time, and (4) the influx of immigrants to the US temporarily overwhelmed the labor market.
7) Why wouldn't stateless society quickly develop a state?
Most simply, because when states have fallen there has been a demand to raise another state. Anarchocapitalism cannot and will not come about without a large amount of people supporting it, otherwise another government will rise again. Unlike other philosophies that use force to come about, Anarchocapitalism relies on the idea to be popular. People in an anarchocapitalist society will as a whole reject of the state, nationalism, taxation, and coercion and therefore would resist such acts of aggression (taxes) and propaganda (nationalism).
8) So it seems Anarchocapitalism depends a lot on private property and it's defense. Is private property natural is it just arbitrary?
I don't think I speak for all the ACist here but I don't think property rights are natural, it's just the best way to solve the problem of a large (well any) population and how it uses a limited amount of resources. If everyone owned everything I'd have to get permission from 6 billion people before he could use eggs and bacon to make some breakfast.
9) How can private property exist without government?
Under ACism, property comes about as an effort of labor. If you take a branch from a tree and work it into a bow, that bow is your property. You might trade your bow for something else and then that something else would be your property. You might also go out hunting and kill a deer. Now, through your effort, the deer meat and the deer skin is your property. This is pretty obvious to most people. It's the land property part where people get confused, but it's not that much different.
Let's say a person goes out into the wilderness by themselves and builds something. They take 5 acres of land, and on that land they build themselves a home and turn the rest into farmland and grow crops, which they use to trade to other people for other stuff, for the benefit of all. By what we've established, the crops are obviously their property, but is the land itself? How can it not be? The land is much improved from its natural state due to this person's labor. If this person died and someone else took over, that person would have a *much* easier time with the house already built, the trees already cleared and the soil ripe for farming. Thus, by this person's labor, the land has significantly gained in value. Certainly they have more of a right to reap the rewards of this value than anyone else, and this translates into ownership.
To take it one step further, if this person decided to move on to something else and they pay someone else to take care of this land, they are still contributing to the upkeep of the land. If, on the other hand, instead of paying someone to take care of it they instead neglect it, they start to lose the right to the land. A person maintains a right to own land only so long as they care for that land. By neglecting it, they can lose that right and leave someone else with an opportunity to claim it for their own.
10) What about the free rider problem?
This is a problem that people might potentially not invest in security because they could get a free ride off someone else's security that he paid for. The thing is this really isn't a problem. For one, positive externalization (when something benefits more then just the participants) is not a problem at all. For practical purposes, these types of "problems" can be solved by voluntary contracts.
11) Why has AC society never come about?
It has, well kind of. ACism is a stateless society. A traditional definition of a state is one that monopolizes things like police, military, and other "public goods". Celtic Ireland at one time did not have that.
12) If we have no safety nets enforced by the government, won't people starve and die in the streets when they're unemployed or disabled and have no means of making money?
Basically, people having to pay taxes every year adds to this problem more then anything else. Forcing people to pay for the services of others when they might need that money themselves also brings up questions about the legitimacy of taxes. People are free to voluntarily donate time, money, or anything else they’d like to help others, however initiating force on others to achieve those needs is immoral
13) So you think charity can take care of all the problems? That sounds like pretty wishful thinking.
Well for one clearly the state isn’t fixing the problem by any measure, in fact, more often then not it hurts the poor (minimum wage laws which lead to higher unemployment, progressive taxes that hurt a businesses ability to both create cheaper products and higher more people, regulation enacted to stifle competition and thus less jobs and higher prices). Also, right now under a state that claims to take care of poverty and thus people generally consider it the state’s problem to solve it rather then individuals that care about the plight of those in bad situations.
14) Isn't anarchocapitalism just some impossible utopia like true communism?
No. No one that seriously and intelligently promotes anarchocapitalism thinks of it as a utopia. There will still be problems, it's just that anarchocapitalism allows people to deal with their problems and assess risk on their own terms, without a coercive force telling them what they should do. Those who oppose it’s ideas on the basis of it being utopian are using a straw man fallacy.
15) What about environmental considerations? Who will keep private businesses in line from destroying the environment?
Businesses are allowed to pollute right now because the government authorizes it to happen. In reality, pollution is an act of aggression that private parties are able to seek reparations for. In free market anarchy the environment (water or air for instance) are privatized, as it solves the tragedy of the commons.
16) Ok, well then how does one seek reparations against another party since there is no government supplied court system?
Court systems can be supplied by the free market. Competing courts would have to be very good at supplying justice in order to get business, and thus ones that gave out unfair judgments would be rooted out, unused, and go out of business.
17) I think that without limited liability, the risk of investment in corporations would be too great.
A: From Borodog: "Too great a risk" is of course a normative, subjective statement. There is no reason a priori why society needs a particular amount of investment in risky schemes; there is no "correct" amount of risk or investment. By limiting liability you are promoting risky, negligent behavior and decisions amongst the real people shielded by these fictitious people, meaning you are purposefully increasing the damages that they inflict on innocent bystanders of your (and their) scheme to sub size their risky undertakings. You are externalizing their costs onto their hapless victims
18) Why would I invest any amount of money in a business if I would incur unlimited liability for everything that business does?
A: From Borodog: “A market solution might be that you are responsible for the damages caused by the firm that you invest in in proportion to your investment. I.e. if you own one ten-thousandth fractional ownership of Company X which does $10M in damages, you would be responsible for $1000 dollars in damages. If this leaves you open to ruin, you should perhaps be more careful in your investments. If other investors are unable to cover their portion of liability, that may leave the suitor out in the cold, but no one seeking redress for damages can be assured that their aggressor will have the funds to make them whole.”
It is also possible that the original owner agrees to take the liability of damages that could occur as there is obviously a value to people interested in buying stocks not to be liable for damages it didn’t directly cause.
19) Many government regulations and laws today are based on an attempt to gain greater transparency or knowledge for the consumer. Without these laws in place, how will the consumer be protected?
Consumer advocacy groups, forums, any form of media.
20) Is Somalia an example of AC society?
"I've posted on this subject many times. The absence of a state does not set a society on the road to utopia. The key to anarchocapitalism is not really the "anarcho" part; it is the "capitalism" part. The West's history of capitalism and culture of property rights is what has made it wealthy, not the form of government. There can be no capitalism without property rights. The Third World is the way it is, in both Somalia (which has government, by the way; it has 4 the last time I checked), and in well over a hundred countries around the globe because there is little culture of property rights, no systems in place for establishment of title of property (ownership), or peaceful systems of resolving title disputes. Because of this, capital cannot be leveraged, there is little investment, hence most of the population stays very close to subsistence because productivity is low. Why invest in something or save if you are uncertain that you will be able to keep what you've saved or produced?
There's precious little capitalism in the Thrid World, and hence there can be no anarchocapitalism, including Somalia. Asserting that Somalia is anarchocapitalistic is simply a canard."
21) How do I support AnarchoCapitalism now?
1) Practice libertarian values (responsibility, independence), educate yourself on economic matters and encourage others to do the same.
2) Either vote libertarian or simply do not vote at all. Some think that not voting sends a signal that people are dissatisfied with their government, others think voting libertarian more directly demonstrates a preference for less government and more personal liberty. Personally, I will be voting libertarian in this election.
3) Own guns and be able to protect your property. The ability to defend oneself greatly aids the cause of individual sovereignty.
1) What is anarchocapitalism?
Anarcho-capitalism (also known by other names, such as free market anarchism) is an individualist political philosophy that advocates the provision of all goods and services —including systems of justice, law enforcement, and national defense—by competitors in a free market. Anarcho-capitalists argue that a pure free market system, based on private property would maximize individual liberty and prosperity. For them, the only just way to acquire property is through trade, gift, or original appropriation. Anarcho-capitalism rejects the state as an aggressive entity that steals property through taxation, initiates physical force, uses its coercive powers to benefit some businesses and individuals at the expense of others, creates monopolies, and restricts trade.
2) What about Monopolies in AC land?
Monopolies cannot occur without the state. The only way for one businesses to dominate the market is to supply the best product at the best price, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. If the company then raises prices and/or lessens the value of the product, it opens the doors for other competitors to gain market share.
3) What about price fixing and cartels?
Price fixing is morally wrong because one party is telling the other how much he has to sell there own property for. If you don’t want it you don’t have to buy it. Cartels also create a paradox. The higher it fixes it’s prices the more incentive it gives (1) companies within the cartel to break the deal, lower prices and gain more market share, and (2) incentive from outside individuals to begin competing and selling it’s products at lower prices.
4) Without a government that provides a military and police, how do we defend ourselves?
The free market can and will provide these things. There is a demand for people to be defended from outside threats, and there is a way to supply it. Both these things can be done voluntarily.
5) What if the security companies start waging war with each other, or forcing people to either take part in the service or be killed?
Violence and particularly war is very expensive to wage. For instance the War in Iraq at this point is costing the US government close to $2billion a week on average. Have we gained $2Billion for every week we've been over there? Certainly not. Furthermore, who will sign up and fight in the Wal-Mart Army? Without Nationalism millions less will be willing to fight in wars, and the ideas and appeal of nationalism will be long gone in a society of individualism and rejection of the state.
6) Why wouldn't people work 100 hour weeks without the government's ability to legislate laws concerning labor?
Libertarian principles recognize everyone's right to agree on what one's labor is worth. If you don't want to work 100 hour weeks, no one is forcing you to. Competition of industry's in pure capitalism creates better working environments, wages, and benefits.
Statists point to conditions such as the industrial revolution and say that it sis evidence that a government is needed for good working conditions to exist. The differences are enormous, that being (1) Working in a factory was an improvement over working on a farm which is what most were doing beforehand, (2) Unions had not existed yet, (by the way unions would likely exist in AC society, in most cases they would have less power though because they would not have the power of government funding and support). (3) it was the industrial revolution and people as a whole were much poorer at the time, and (4) the influx of immigrants to the US temporarily overwhelmed the labor market.
7) Why wouldn't stateless society quickly develop a state?
Most simply, because when states have fallen there has been a demand to raise another state. Anarchocapitalism cannot and will not come about without a large amount of people supporting it, otherwise another government will rise again. Unlike other philosophies that use force to come about, Anarchocapitalism relies on the idea to be popular. People in an anarchocapitalist society will as a whole reject of the state, nationalism, taxation, and coercion and therefore would resist such acts of aggression (taxes) and propaganda (nationalism).
8) So it seems Anarchocapitalism depends a lot on private property and it's defense. Is private property natural is it just arbitrary?
I don't think I speak for all the ACist here but I don't think property rights are natural, it's just the best way to solve the problem of a large (well any) population and how it uses a limited amount of resources. If everyone owned everything I'd have to get permission from 6 billion people before he could use eggs and bacon to make some breakfast.
9) How can private property exist without government?
Under ACism, property comes about as an effort of labor. If you take a branch from a tree and work it into a bow, that bow is your property. You might trade your bow for something else and then that something else would be your property. You might also go out hunting and kill a deer. Now, through your effort, the deer meat and the deer skin is your property. This is pretty obvious to most people. It's the land property part where people get confused, but it's not that much different.
Let's say a person goes out into the wilderness by themselves and builds something. They take 5 acres of land, and on that land they build themselves a home and turn the rest into farmland and grow crops, which they use to trade to other people for other stuff, for the benefit of all. By what we've established, the crops are obviously their property, but is the land itself? How can it not be? The land is much improved from its natural state due to this person's labor. If this person died and someone else took over, that person would have a *much* easier time with the house already built, the trees already cleared and the soil ripe for farming. Thus, by this person's labor, the land has significantly gained in value. Certainly they have more of a right to reap the rewards of this value than anyone else, and this translates into ownership.
To take it one step further, if this person decided to move on to something else and they pay someone else to take care of this land, they are still contributing to the upkeep of the land. If, on the other hand, instead of paying someone to take care of it they instead neglect it, they start to lose the right to the land. A person maintains a right to own land only so long as they care for that land. By neglecting it, they can lose that right and leave someone else with an opportunity to claim it for their own.
10) What about the free rider problem?
This is a problem that people might potentially not invest in security because they could get a free ride off someone else's security that he paid for. The thing is this really isn't a problem. For one, positive externalization (when something benefits more then just the participants) is not a problem at all. For practical purposes, these types of "problems" can be solved by voluntary contracts.
11) Why has AC society never come about?
It has, well kind of. ACism is a stateless society. A traditional definition of a state is one that monopolizes things like police, military, and other "public goods". Celtic Ireland at one time did not have that.
12) If we have no safety nets enforced by the government, won't people starve and die in the streets when they're unemployed or disabled and have no means of making money?
Basically, people having to pay taxes every year adds to this problem more then anything else. Forcing people to pay for the services of others when they might need that money themselves also brings up questions about the legitimacy of taxes. People are free to voluntarily donate time, money, or anything else they’d like to help others, however initiating force on others to achieve those needs is immoral
13) So you think charity can take care of all the problems? That sounds like pretty wishful thinking.
Well for one clearly the state isn’t fixing the problem by any measure, in fact, more often then not it hurts the poor (minimum wage laws which lead to higher unemployment, progressive taxes that hurt a businesses ability to both create cheaper products and higher more people, regulation enacted to stifle competition and thus less jobs and higher prices). Also, right now under a state that claims to take care of poverty and thus people generally consider it the state’s problem to solve it rather then individuals that care about the plight of those in bad situations.
14) Isn't anarchocapitalism just some impossible utopia like true communism?
No. No one that seriously and intelligently promotes anarchocapitalism thinks of it as a utopia. There will still be problems, it's just that anarchocapitalism allows people to deal with their problems and assess risk on their own terms, without a coercive force telling them what they should do. Those who oppose it’s ideas on the basis of it being utopian are using a straw man fallacy.
15) What about environmental considerations? Who will keep private businesses in line from destroying the environment?
Businesses are allowed to pollute right now because the government authorizes it to happen. In reality, pollution is an act of aggression that private parties are able to seek reparations for. In free market anarchy the environment (water or air for instance) are privatized, as it solves the tragedy of the commons.
16) Ok, well then how does one seek reparations against another party since there is no government supplied court system?
Court systems can be supplied by the free market. Competing courts would have to be very good at supplying justice in order to get business, and thus ones that gave out unfair judgments would be rooted out, unused, and go out of business.
17) I think that without limited liability, the risk of investment in corporations would be too great.
A: From Borodog: "Too great a risk" is of course a normative, subjective statement. There is no reason a priori why society needs a particular amount of investment in risky schemes; there is no "correct" amount of risk or investment. By limiting liability you are promoting risky, negligent behavior and decisions amongst the real people shielded by these fictitious people, meaning you are purposefully increasing the damages that they inflict on innocent bystanders of your (and their) scheme to sub size their risky undertakings. You are externalizing their costs onto their hapless victims
18) Why would I invest any amount of money in a business if I would incur unlimited liability for everything that business does?
A: From Borodog: “A market solution might be that you are responsible for the damages caused by the firm that you invest in in proportion to your investment. I.e. if you own one ten-thousandth fractional ownership of Company X which does $10M in damages, you would be responsible for $1000 dollars in damages. If this leaves you open to ruin, you should perhaps be more careful in your investments. If other investors are unable to cover their portion of liability, that may leave the suitor out in the cold, but no one seeking redress for damages can be assured that their aggressor will have the funds to make them whole.”
It is also possible that the original owner agrees to take the liability of damages that could occur as there is obviously a value to people interested in buying stocks not to be liable for damages it didn’t directly cause.
19) Many government regulations and laws today are based on an attempt to gain greater transparency or knowledge for the consumer. Without these laws in place, how will the consumer be protected?
Consumer advocacy groups, forums, any form of media.
20) Is Somalia an example of AC society?
"I've posted on this subject many times. The absence of a state does not set a society on the road to utopia. The key to anarchocapitalism is not really the "anarcho" part; it is the "capitalism" part. The West's history of capitalism and culture of property rights is what has made it wealthy, not the form of government. There can be no capitalism without property rights. The Third World is the way it is, in both Somalia (which has government, by the way; it has 4 the last time I checked), and in well over a hundred countries around the globe because there is little culture of property rights, no systems in place for establishment of title of property (ownership), or peaceful systems of resolving title disputes. Because of this, capital cannot be leveraged, there is little investment, hence most of the population stays very close to subsistence because productivity is low. Why invest in something or save if you are uncertain that you will be able to keep what you've saved or produced?
There's precious little capitalism in the Thrid World, and hence there can be no anarchocapitalism, including Somalia. Asserting that Somalia is anarchocapitalistic is simply a canard."
21) How do I support AnarchoCapitalism now?
1) Practice libertarian values (responsibility, independence), educate yourself on economic matters and encourage others to do the same.
2) Either vote libertarian or simply do not vote at all. Some think that not voting sends a signal that people are dissatisfied with their government, others think voting libertarian more directly demonstrates a preference for less government and more personal liberty. Personally, I will be voting libertarian in this election.
3) Own guns and be able to protect your property. The ability to defend oneself greatly aids the cause of individual sovereignty.
Citizens of Zimbabwe : Good luck you're screwed
This is part of the problem as a whole. As seen in the past when shit gets out of hand people rebel, protest and strike, the government of Zimbabwe is threatened. Westernized states have figured it out, you don't steal a person's cow, that's to obvious, you take 10% of the milk the cow produces, 10% of their eggs from the chickens, 10% of the grain they produce ect, add it all up and its just as good as getting the whole cow without the immediate angry reaction that threatens your position. Sure inflation is only at 3% annually, and maybe the post office runs a couple of billion $ loss per year (whats that $10 a person?), and we pay a few pennies more on gas and cigareetes, and health insurance prices are higher than they ought to be, and we build hundred million dollar stadiums for billionaires to use, and we don't have any idea how much SS money we are going to get when we retire (do i need to keep going?). The western governments are acting just like the worm in office space, take a penny here and there, but take it enough times until your fat and rich off the work of others.
Inflation is even more insidious because it seems like a service.
Adios
Inflation is easier to control, and thats part of the problem, you are enabling the monopoly further by granting the government the ability to control aspects of pricing. If deflation would occur the government's ineptitude at bargaining for resources would show much sooner as the prices they pay for materials (to build roads, deliver mail ect) would continually grow while prices in all other sectors would decrease. Both incompetence and corruption would soon be exposed, inflation is a tool in which they can confiscate money without using direct taxation and force all sectors to charge higher prices which hides their unwillingness/inability to correctly bargain for resources. Its win win, unless of course your not in the loop.
Wages are harder (not impossible) to renegotiate downward which gives the employee a stronger position relative to the employer. On the other side wages are generally the last thing to rise in correlation with inflation which generally allows employers to stiff you on 1-2%. When your wages are tied to inflation you generally get the raise at the end of the year (or the beginning of the next one) but not retroactively, but inflation (the CPI) is measured in prices that have already increased meaning your purchasing power is down the inflation percentage for that year. Your raise is just a correction for the previous year but you will still lose out to that current years inflation rates. Again, inflation is good for employers, bad for employees.
When something is easy to control you end up with a small group exercising power over the larger population which enables them to manipulate the market in ways which are preferable for them, and highly likely not preferable for you (the citizen, the consumer). This is the problem with monopolies, and government institutions are not exempt from such "corruption".
Inflation is even more insidious because it seems like a service.
Adios
Inflation is easier to control, and thats part of the problem, you are enabling the monopoly further by granting the government the ability to control aspects of pricing. If deflation would occur the government's ineptitude at bargaining for resources would show much sooner as the prices they pay for materials (to build roads, deliver mail ect) would continually grow while prices in all other sectors would decrease. Both incompetence and corruption would soon be exposed, inflation is a tool in which they can confiscate money without using direct taxation and force all sectors to charge higher prices which hides their unwillingness/inability to correctly bargain for resources. Its win win, unless of course your not in the loop.
Wages are harder (not impossible) to renegotiate downward which gives the employee a stronger position relative to the employer. On the other side wages are generally the last thing to rise in correlation with inflation which generally allows employers to stiff you on 1-2%. When your wages are tied to inflation you generally get the raise at the end of the year (or the beginning of the next one) but not retroactively, but inflation (the CPI) is measured in prices that have already increased meaning your purchasing power is down the inflation percentage for that year. Your raise is just a correction for the previous year but you will still lose out to that current years inflation rates. Again, inflation is good for employers, bad for employees.
When something is easy to control you end up with a small group exercising power over the larger population which enables them to manipulate the market in ways which are preferable for them, and highly likely not preferable for you (the citizen, the consumer). This is the problem with monopolies, and government institutions are not exempt from such "corruption".
Follow up questions on A/C legal system
"Under such a system wouldn't the richest people be able to act with complete impunity? IE I'm a multi billionaire, so I can kill all the hobos I want because the cost of doing so is something I can easily cover (IE I can easily pay off the insurance company for whatever damages they seek) "
No. This has been gone over any number of times. Can you pay off the arbitrator enough to recompense him for the wages he could expect to earn for the rest of his natural life, because that's what he will lose when his judgements become valueless in the market. Also, since he would then be liable to legal action himself, he has no guarantee he would be able to keep whatever it is you paid him.
If you just reject these out of hand, I will again ask, how is this different under a state? Do you think multi-billionaires could not get away with murder under a state monopoly justice system, where the judges are virtually invulnerable? OJ Simpson? He didn't even kill hobos. He killed people with friends and families. Robert Blake? Not to mention the hundreds of millions of murders perptrated by states on their own citizens in the 20th century alone. Where is their justice? What courts do they have recourse to?
Find a criticism of free market justice systems that actually differentiates them from state monopoloy justice systems in the monopoly's favor and you might have a leg to stand on.
All of this is external to the fact that the majority of conflict resolution, arbitration and adjudication actually already occurs in the private sector because of the enormous costs and time involved in attempting to use state monopoly systems, not to mention the often perverse and unjust results thereof.
Edited by Borodog (03/29/07 04:20 PM)
No. This has been gone over any number of times. Can you pay off the arbitrator enough to recompense him for the wages he could expect to earn for the rest of his natural life, because that's what he will lose when his judgements become valueless in the market. Also, since he would then be liable to legal action himself, he has no guarantee he would be able to keep whatever it is you paid him.
If you just reject these out of hand, I will again ask, how is this different under a state? Do you think multi-billionaires could not get away with murder under a state monopoly justice system, where the judges are virtually invulnerable? OJ Simpson? He didn't even kill hobos. He killed people with friends and families. Robert Blake? Not to mention the hundreds of millions of murders perptrated by states on their own citizens in the 20th century alone. Where is their justice? What courts do they have recourse to?
Find a criticism of free market justice systems that actually differentiates them from state monopoloy justice systems in the monopoly's favor and you might have a leg to stand on.
All of this is external to the fact that the majority of conflict resolution, arbitration and adjudication actually already occurs in the private sector because of the enormous costs and time involved in attempting to use state monopoly systems, not to mention the often perverse and unjust results thereof.
Edited by Borodog (03/29/07 04:20 PM)
Anarcho-Capitalist Legal System
Here is how private security and justice might work in the free market. Since free market solutions are organic and evolutionary, this scenario might not be complete, but it shows that reasonable free market solutions can work.
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Aggression against an individual, or having their contractual agreements violated, or being defrauded, are inherently unpredictable risks. In other words, we cannot in general predict when we will be robbed, otherwise we would arrange not to be in that palce at that time. We cannot in general predict who will break their contracts with us, else we would not contract with them. We cannot in general predict who is defrauding us, else would would not deal with them.
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These risks are insurable risks because they are unpredictable. The frequency of some risks can be affected by our decisions, such as choosing to live in a better neighborhood versus a crime ridden neighborhood, but we cannot predict anything about individual events. People who fall into the same risk pool pool their money in the form of insurance premiums to insure themselves against unpredictable losses.
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There are also uninsurable risks. You cannot insure yourself against the risk of suicide. You can easily influence and predict such events. An insurer that provided such a policy would attract suicidal individuals who wanted to leave money to their family and the insurer would rapidly go broke. Similarly you cannot insure yourself against robbing someone else.
.
Since aggression, breaking of contracts, and fraud against individuals are insurable risks, the natural model for resolving such matters is an insurance model. Insurance companies are numerous and large. They indemnify tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. They do this by investing premium dollars in diversified appreciating hard assets like real estate, which are also the source of their profits. In a security insurance model, individuals purchase polices that indemnify themselves and their property from loss due to aggression, broken contracts, and fraud. Their premium is determined by their risk pool. Competition amongst insurers insures that insurance customers are subdivided into smaller and smaller groups of indistinguishable levels of risk, and ensures the lowest possible premiums. For example if Company A placed desk jockeys in the same risk pool as pro football players for getting injured, the premiums of the desk jockeys would clearly subsidize systematic payments to the football players, whose risk of injury are far higher. Another company that subdivided the groups could offer much lower premiums to the desk jockeys, and they would leave Company A, forcing them to either go broke or raise the premiums for the football players to the natural level that represents their actual risk.
.
When I am aggressed against, I file a claim to recover my losses. Say you steal my car. I file a claim. The company first investigates to make sure I am not defrauding them and discover who actually stole the car. They have an incentive to find out who did it, because regardless, they have to pay for my new car. They want to recover these costs from the actual aggressor.
.
Once they identify you and gather sufficient evidence, they take the case to a reputable arbitrator. They will not simply go to an arbitrator who will always find in their favor, for the judgements of such an arbitrator would simply be ignored. There is no financial incentive for an arbitrator to simply hand out judgements to the highest bidder. Such an arbitrator would quickly gain a reputation for worthless judgements, his judgements would be ignored in the market, and hence there is no incentive to pay for his judgements in the first place. He will rapidly go out of business. This is why Underwriter's Laboratory doesn't just hand out it's seal to any product whose manufacturer pays a fee; if they did the seal would be worthless and they would go out of business post haste.
.
Now, you can report the action against you to your insurance provider, they can perform their own investigation, and they (or you) can take your side of the case to an arbitrator of your choice as well. But again, there is no incentive for him to simply rule in your favor because you pay him. Again a disreputable arbitrator is an out of work arbitrator.
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In the majority of cases the facts are clear, the investigations will agree, and so will the rulings. Your insurer does not have any incentive to tilt their investigation in your favor, because you haven't insured yourself, indeed you can't, from committing auto theft. It's no skin off their nose if you lose the case.
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When the judgement comes out against you, you have a couple of choices. You can simply pay up, and be done with it. I would highly advise this cource of action. Because if you don't pay up, my insurer will send a security firm to show up and extract compensation for their loss (they already paid me, remember). They will seize funds or property, or whatever assets are required to fullfil the judgement.
.
Meanwhile, your insurance company won't lift a finger to stop them, because doing so would be extremely costly, and because you can't insure yourself against you committing autotheft. If you try to resist yourself, or by hiring personal security forces, it will be extremely costly and probably get you killed. I guarantee the resources of my insurance company with its hundreds of billions of dollars in holdings will exceed the resources you have at your disposal to resist.
.
Note that my insurer is not initiating force against you. They are simply closing the force transaction that you initiated against me when you stole my car.
.
In the few cases where the facts are not clear enough to produce identical judgements, the two insurers will simply come to a negotiated settlement between themselves, since having security forces "battle it out" to settle the dispute would be incredibly costly.
.
Hence we have a simple insurance based model of criminal justice that incorporates competition amongst insurers, arbitrators, and security firms that does not require a territorial monopoly for any of them. There are clear market mechanisms that result in compliance with reputable arbitration.
.
There are a number of benefits from such a system. For example, since your premium depends on your level of risk, personal responsibility is incentivised. Those who have alarm systems and guns and take other security measures will have lower insurance premiums, and communities are incentivized to expel criminal elements because those elements raise their premiums, just to name a couple.
So, on to the questions:
1. How do you bring suit against someone without legal/security contract(or)?
I don't really understand this question. If I'm understanding it right, I think my answer is that you just file with a reputable arbitrator, who would probably then notify them. I don't see why they would need to have a "legal contractor" ahead of time.
2. Who tries a murder (or other “state” crime) whose victim has no relatives/friends?
This has been discussed many times. I'm going to phrase "Argumentum ad Hobocide" for it: argument by killing hobos. There are a number of simple market possibilities, including but not limited to:
a) The victim's life insurance policy (if he has one) would almost certainly contain a clause providing for the investigation of their death. This would be an obvious market response in the absence of a monopolist of murder investigations for a couple of reasons: people would want their death investigated an the murderer brought to justice, and b) the insurer would want to recoup their loss from the murderer.
b) The murderer's neighbors. Their insurance premiums would certainly go up living next to a murderer, so they would have an incentive to do something about him. His own insurers would probably drop him because of the liability he represents, and his neighbors insurers have an incentive to do something about him because they don't want to pay out on a claim if he kills one of their clients.
c) Charitable foundations. This happens all the time. There are charitable foundations for legal defense, for example. Wealthy patrons who had relatives murdered would endow charitable justice foundations, just like wealthy people who have relatives die from diseases endow medical research and treatment foundations now.
3. How does the legal/security company get paid in question 2?
In the normal ways, given my response to (2). Also, they always accept lower rates or do some work pro bono. This also happens a lot in the legal field. People like justice.
4. Won’t debtor’s prisons eventually be necessary (not necessarily a bad thing) for repeat offenders (destroying someone’s credit may not be enough deterrent for what is ultimately a cash society and contracting out prisoner’s labor will handle question 2.)?
No. Debtor's prisons are a terrible idea because they always operate at a loss. It costs you more to force people to do the work than it does to just right off the debt. Not to mention the fact that I doubt seriously whether forced labor would fly in a libertarian culture, which would have to be in place for free market anarchism to work. This is exactly the contradiction that tore apart the original Democratic party in the 1840s, the clash between the extremely libertarian political philosophy of the time and the existence of slavery, the most unlibertarian of institutions.
Also, there is no reason that a society with a hard currency has to be a "cash society."
5. What prevents a community of X peoples unfairly prosecuting Y peoples as a cheap labor source, in the event of debtor’s prisons being necessary (insert any two ethnic or socioeconomic groups for X and Y)?
It isn't economically feasible to do so in a modern industrialized society. There is a reason that slavery died out peacefully in almost every nation on the Earth (except the US) in the 18th and 19th century. Unskilled forced labor has no hope of competing with the voluntary skilled labor required to run the highly productive machinery of the industrial revolution. This is why slavery had already died out in the industrialized North decades prior to the civil war, and was already dying in the South prior to Lincoln's invasion.
.
Aggression against an individual, or having their contractual agreements violated, or being defrauded, are inherently unpredictable risks. In other words, we cannot in general predict when we will be robbed, otherwise we would arrange not to be in that palce at that time. We cannot in general predict who will break their contracts with us, else we would not contract with them. We cannot in general predict who is defrauding us, else would would not deal with them.
.
These risks are insurable risks because they are unpredictable. The frequency of some risks can be affected by our decisions, such as choosing to live in a better neighborhood versus a crime ridden neighborhood, but we cannot predict anything about individual events. People who fall into the same risk pool pool their money in the form of insurance premiums to insure themselves against unpredictable losses.
.
There are also uninsurable risks. You cannot insure yourself against the risk of suicide. You can easily influence and predict such events. An insurer that provided such a policy would attract suicidal individuals who wanted to leave money to their family and the insurer would rapidly go broke. Similarly you cannot insure yourself against robbing someone else.
.
Since aggression, breaking of contracts, and fraud against individuals are insurable risks, the natural model for resolving such matters is an insurance model. Insurance companies are numerous and large. They indemnify tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. They do this by investing premium dollars in diversified appreciating hard assets like real estate, which are also the source of their profits. In a security insurance model, individuals purchase polices that indemnify themselves and their property from loss due to aggression, broken contracts, and fraud. Their premium is determined by their risk pool. Competition amongst insurers insures that insurance customers are subdivided into smaller and smaller groups of indistinguishable levels of risk, and ensures the lowest possible premiums. For example if Company A placed desk jockeys in the same risk pool as pro football players for getting injured, the premiums of the desk jockeys would clearly subsidize systematic payments to the football players, whose risk of injury are far higher. Another company that subdivided the groups could offer much lower premiums to the desk jockeys, and they would leave Company A, forcing them to either go broke or raise the premiums for the football players to the natural level that represents their actual risk.
.
When I am aggressed against, I file a claim to recover my losses. Say you steal my car. I file a claim. The company first investigates to make sure I am not defrauding them and discover who actually stole the car. They have an incentive to find out who did it, because regardless, they have to pay for my new car. They want to recover these costs from the actual aggressor.
.
Once they identify you and gather sufficient evidence, they take the case to a reputable arbitrator. They will not simply go to an arbitrator who will always find in their favor, for the judgements of such an arbitrator would simply be ignored. There is no financial incentive for an arbitrator to simply hand out judgements to the highest bidder. Such an arbitrator would quickly gain a reputation for worthless judgements, his judgements would be ignored in the market, and hence there is no incentive to pay for his judgements in the first place. He will rapidly go out of business. This is why Underwriter's Laboratory doesn't just hand out it's seal to any product whose manufacturer pays a fee; if they did the seal would be worthless and they would go out of business post haste.
.
Now, you can report the action against you to your insurance provider, they can perform their own investigation, and they (or you) can take your side of the case to an arbitrator of your choice as well. But again, there is no incentive for him to simply rule in your favor because you pay him. Again a disreputable arbitrator is an out of work arbitrator.
.
In the majority of cases the facts are clear, the investigations will agree, and so will the rulings. Your insurer does not have any incentive to tilt their investigation in your favor, because you haven't insured yourself, indeed you can't, from committing auto theft. It's no skin off their nose if you lose the case.
.
When the judgement comes out against you, you have a couple of choices. You can simply pay up, and be done with it. I would highly advise this cource of action. Because if you don't pay up, my insurer will send a security firm to show up and extract compensation for their loss (they already paid me, remember). They will seize funds or property, or whatever assets are required to fullfil the judgement.
.
Meanwhile, your insurance company won't lift a finger to stop them, because doing so would be extremely costly, and because you can't insure yourself against you committing autotheft. If you try to resist yourself, or by hiring personal security forces, it will be extremely costly and probably get you killed. I guarantee the resources of my insurance company with its hundreds of billions of dollars in holdings will exceed the resources you have at your disposal to resist.
.
Note that my insurer is not initiating force against you. They are simply closing the force transaction that you initiated against me when you stole my car.
.
In the few cases where the facts are not clear enough to produce identical judgements, the two insurers will simply come to a negotiated settlement between themselves, since having security forces "battle it out" to settle the dispute would be incredibly costly.
.
Hence we have a simple insurance based model of criminal justice that incorporates competition amongst insurers, arbitrators, and security firms that does not require a territorial monopoly for any of them. There are clear market mechanisms that result in compliance with reputable arbitration.
.
There are a number of benefits from such a system. For example, since your premium depends on your level of risk, personal responsibility is incentivised. Those who have alarm systems and guns and take other security measures will have lower insurance premiums, and communities are incentivized to expel criminal elements because those elements raise their premiums, just to name a couple.
So, on to the questions:
1. How do you bring suit against someone without legal/security contract(or)?
I don't really understand this question. If I'm understanding it right, I think my answer is that you just file with a reputable arbitrator, who would probably then notify them. I don't see why they would need to have a "legal contractor" ahead of time.
2. Who tries a murder (or other “state” crime) whose victim has no relatives/friends?
This has been discussed many times. I'm going to phrase "Argumentum ad Hobocide" for it: argument by killing hobos. There are a number of simple market possibilities, including but not limited to:
a) The victim's life insurance policy (if he has one) would almost certainly contain a clause providing for the investigation of their death. This would be an obvious market response in the absence of a monopolist of murder investigations for a couple of reasons: people would want their death investigated an the murderer brought to justice, and b) the insurer would want to recoup their loss from the murderer.
b) The murderer's neighbors. Their insurance premiums would certainly go up living next to a murderer, so they would have an incentive to do something about him. His own insurers would probably drop him because of the liability he represents, and his neighbors insurers have an incentive to do something about him because they don't want to pay out on a claim if he kills one of their clients.
c) Charitable foundations. This happens all the time. There are charitable foundations for legal defense, for example. Wealthy patrons who had relatives murdered would endow charitable justice foundations, just like wealthy people who have relatives die from diseases endow medical research and treatment foundations now.
3. How does the legal/security company get paid in question 2?
In the normal ways, given my response to (2). Also, they always accept lower rates or do some work pro bono. This also happens a lot in the legal field. People like justice.
4. Won’t debtor’s prisons eventually be necessary (not necessarily a bad thing) for repeat offenders (destroying someone’s credit may not be enough deterrent for what is ultimately a cash society and contracting out prisoner’s labor will handle question 2.)?
No. Debtor's prisons are a terrible idea because they always operate at a loss. It costs you more to force people to do the work than it does to just right off the debt. Not to mention the fact that I doubt seriously whether forced labor would fly in a libertarian culture, which would have to be in place for free market anarchism to work. This is exactly the contradiction that tore apart the original Democratic party in the 1840s, the clash between the extremely libertarian political philosophy of the time and the existence of slavery, the most unlibertarian of institutions.
Also, there is no reason that a society with a hard currency has to be a "cash society."
5. What prevents a community of X peoples unfairly prosecuting Y peoples as a cheap labor source, in the event of debtor’s prisons being necessary (insert any two ethnic or socioeconomic groups for X and Y)?
It isn't economically feasible to do so in a modern industrialized society. There is a reason that slavery died out peacefully in almost every nation on the Earth (except the US) in the 18th and 19th century. Unskilled forced labor has no hope of competing with the voluntary skilled labor required to run the highly productive machinery of the industrial revolution. This is why slavery had already died out in the industrialized North decades prior to the civil war, and was already dying in the South prior to Lincoln's invasion.
Dear Neighbours to the South : Listen to me, I'm the King of Canada, I know what's up
Have any of you liberals ever taken a minute to think about just who is going to die if we de-regulate health care?
Most of America is insured as it is, and the status quo isn't making a whole lot of money. Now let's do the following:
- Stop forcing all these Americans to pay the Medicare/aid taxes that they're getting nothing for. Their bills will also be lower, because they're not picking up the slack for treatments that medicare/aid only partially paid for.
- Deregulate the insurance carriers so that the customers can actually choose what they do and do not want to be covered for.
- End the war on drugs, and thus make all the drugs cheaper.
- Reform the tort system so that doctors don't have to pay six figures in malpractice insurance every year.
Insurance will become very, very affordable, and many more Americans will have it.
The only people that won't have it under such conditions are the dregs of society. Drug addicts, lazy bums, criminals, those with horribly untreatable physical conditions...these are the people who are going to die. You know good ol' middle class hard-working Joe? Joe is going to benefit from this system. He's not going to get hurt. You know that perennially unemployed pothead friend-of-a-friend of yours who sleeps on the couch all the time? He's going to be screwed.
It is so freaking easy to succeed in a free market. The only people that are going to get the shaft are going to be the losers that frankly most of us do not want in society anyway. That is who socialism helps.
Still sound like a good idea?
Most of America is insured as it is, and the status quo isn't making a whole lot of money. Now let's do the following:
- Stop forcing all these Americans to pay the Medicare/aid taxes that they're getting nothing for. Their bills will also be lower, because they're not picking up the slack for treatments that medicare/aid only partially paid for.
- Deregulate the insurance carriers so that the customers can actually choose what they do and do not want to be covered for.
- End the war on drugs, and thus make all the drugs cheaper.
- Reform the tort system so that doctors don't have to pay six figures in malpractice insurance every year.
Insurance will become very, very affordable, and many more Americans will have it.
The only people that won't have it under such conditions are the dregs of society. Drug addicts, lazy bums, criminals, those with horribly untreatable physical conditions...these are the people who are going to die. You know good ol' middle class hard-working Joe? Joe is going to benefit from this system. He's not going to get hurt. You know that perennially unemployed pothead friend-of-a-friend of yours who sleeps on the couch all the time? He's going to be screwed.
It is so freaking easy to succeed in a free market. The only people that are going to get the shaft are going to be the losers that frankly most of us do not want in society anyway. That is who socialism helps.
Still sound like a good idea?
A story from my youth
I was in this film course, it was only 1 credit but was really easy, we just went to watch a film in this local film festival 6 times during the semester. You fill out a survey and that's it. The theme for this particular one was Spanish/Latin American films. Usually a speaker would come who was in someway involved with the filmmaking process.
Well, one week, we had to watch a series of short videos about spreading equality around the world. How capitalism was destroying third world countries and how the answer was more government and more socialism. They were essentially documentaries that take to the streets, etc. So the films end and after an hour and a half of squirming in my chair, the speakers begin to talk about how they helped to create these films and, best of all, how they distribute them!
"We often travel all over the place, and meet up with other groups. We will sell our videos to them or if they are low on cash, we will exchange them for other videos."
I turned to my friend and whispered, "Otherwise known as capitalism."
On a related note, while browsing through a facebook group for Anarcho-Socialists, I saw a post where a bunch of people were whining that no one wanted to pay for their website; I thought that perfectly mirrored how their society would work.
Well, one week, we had to watch a series of short videos about spreading equality around the world. How capitalism was destroying third world countries and how the answer was more government and more socialism. They were essentially documentaries that take to the streets, etc. So the films end and after an hour and a half of squirming in my chair, the speakers begin to talk about how they helped to create these films and, best of all, how they distribute them!
"We often travel all over the place, and meet up with other groups. We will sell our videos to them or if they are low on cash, we will exchange them for other videos."
I turned to my friend and whispered, "Otherwise known as capitalism."
On a related note, while browsing through a facebook group for Anarcho-Socialists, I saw a post where a bunch of people were whining that no one wanted to pay for their website; I thought that perfectly mirrored how their society would work.
A callous but realistic analysis
Human beings really aren't calibrated to fathom the macroeconomic social world (national/global markets, 9-10 figure population sizes) as they are with the microeconomic social world (cliques, families, offices, 2-3 figure population sizes). The rules that govern macroeconomics are very different from the rules that govern microeconomics, so trying to comprehend global economies in terms of the basic "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" rules that we use in our every day lives doesn't work very well. It's like trying to comprehend galaxy cluster behavior with classical physics (which is basically how we think) rather than general relativity. It just doesn't work.
As far as we know, death is the worst thing that can happen to us, and we go to great lengths to avoid it and preserve life. Yet on a macroeconomic level, deaths matter much, much less. When you die, how many people in the global economy do you think will care, or would be willing to exchange a sum of personal property/money to save your life? The answer is very, very few. Individual human lives are much more like units rather than wholes on this unthinkably large social level.
It sounds cruel and inhuman to think this way, but that's because we're dealing with concepts that can't be understood intuitively; they must be understood theoretically and scientifically. No scientist can truly comprehend the size of a galaxy, and no human being can truly comprehend a global economy.
While it does sound very arrogant and cold-hearted, the facts of the matter are as follows: humans do follow incentives. They do prefer more goods to less. They will not provide altruistically for the greater good without a gun to their heads. Individuals that consume more than they can produce are a drain on society's resources, and a system that selects against such individuals must lead to surplusses and prosperity.
As far as we know, death is the worst thing that can happen to us, and we go to great lengths to avoid it and preserve life. Yet on a macroeconomic level, deaths matter much, much less. When you die, how many people in the global economy do you think will care, or would be willing to exchange a sum of personal property/money to save your life? The answer is very, very few. Individual human lives are much more like units rather than wholes on this unthinkably large social level.
It sounds cruel and inhuman to think this way, but that's because we're dealing with concepts that can't be understood intuitively; they must be understood theoretically and scientifically. No scientist can truly comprehend the size of a galaxy, and no human being can truly comprehend a global economy.
While it does sound very arrogant and cold-hearted, the facts of the matter are as follows: humans do follow incentives. They do prefer more goods to less. They will not provide altruistically for the greater good without a gun to their heads. Individuals that consume more than they can produce are a drain on society's resources, and a system that selects against such individuals must lead to surplusses and prosperity.
Belief and analysis
That there may be no concept, does not preclude existence. It is quite possible that a detailed concept of God is beyond our capacity, just as Principia Mathematica is beyond an ant's capacity to comprehend.
A scientist may be unlikely to take the position that God exists. Yet he would not take the position that God does not exist to be absolutely certain.
Some beliefs which may appear to have no basis, may appear differently if we have more information. It has been argued that supposing God exists, is like supposing a chocolate cake orbits the Moon, and neither can be disproved. Yet if I were to tell you, in all seriousness, that my uncle's stepson was one of the astronauts that went on an Apollo moon mission, and that he told my uncle, who told me, that they routinely jettisoned any food suspected of contamination, and that among the items jettisoned were: some powdered milk, some freeze-dried apricots, and some freeze-dried desserts - including some freeze-dried squares of chocolate cake - might your estimation of the probability of a chocolate cake orbiting the moon now be changed somewhat?
So:
1) a lack of clear concept does not preclude existence, and
2) a seemingly frivolous supposition may, upon introduction of supporting or suggestive accounts, become more likely than before.
There are eyewitness accounts, reported in the Bible, of various miracles performed by Jesus. That alone makes them more likely to have occurred than if they had never been reported at all. The reliability of those accounts may of course be questioned and may be doubted by many. Yet the existence of those accounts makes the matter less like the original chocolate cake proposition, and more like the chocolate cake proposition after the introduction of the anecdotal account of occurrences which took place aboard the Apollo mission. Of course, there are differences too, but the point is that a seemingly frivolous proposition cannot be ruled out completely and that our estimation of it may change after the introduction of new information.
A scientist may be very doubtful of the existence of God but he cannot be certain that God does not exist, without violating his own rigorous approach to logic and analysis. This is all the more clear as the conception of God is taken to broad instead of narrow. Since our capacity to think and imagine is limited, a very broad idea of the nature of God may make more sense than a narrow conception.
I'm don't know what you meant by claiming that "(theist's) brain is wired (through mental abuse) fundamentally against knowledge discovery", so I can't really respond to that. If you'd care to expound I will try to address that matter as well. Hopefully you have found my post interesting and worth thinking about, and as always, thanks for reading and responding to my posts (which goes for everyone on this board as well).
A scientist may be unlikely to take the position that God exists. Yet he would not take the position that God does not exist to be absolutely certain.
Some beliefs which may appear to have no basis, may appear differently if we have more information. It has been argued that supposing God exists, is like supposing a chocolate cake orbits the Moon, and neither can be disproved. Yet if I were to tell you, in all seriousness, that my uncle's stepson was one of the astronauts that went on an Apollo moon mission, and that he told my uncle, who told me, that they routinely jettisoned any food suspected of contamination, and that among the items jettisoned were: some powdered milk, some freeze-dried apricots, and some freeze-dried desserts - including some freeze-dried squares of chocolate cake - might your estimation of the probability of a chocolate cake orbiting the moon now be changed somewhat?
So:
1) a lack of clear concept does not preclude existence, and
2) a seemingly frivolous supposition may, upon introduction of supporting or suggestive accounts, become more likely than before.
There are eyewitness accounts, reported in the Bible, of various miracles performed by Jesus. That alone makes them more likely to have occurred than if they had never been reported at all. The reliability of those accounts may of course be questioned and may be doubted by many. Yet the existence of those accounts makes the matter less like the original chocolate cake proposition, and more like the chocolate cake proposition after the introduction of the anecdotal account of occurrences which took place aboard the Apollo mission. Of course, there are differences too, but the point is that a seemingly frivolous proposition cannot be ruled out completely and that our estimation of it may change after the introduction of new information.
A scientist may be very doubtful of the existence of God but he cannot be certain that God does not exist, without violating his own rigorous approach to logic and analysis. This is all the more clear as the conception of God is taken to broad instead of narrow. Since our capacity to think and imagine is limited, a very broad idea of the nature of God may make more sense than a narrow conception.
I'm don't know what you meant by claiming that "(theist's) brain is wired (through mental abuse) fundamentally against knowledge discovery", so I can't really respond to that. If you'd care to expound I will try to address that matter as well. Hopefully you have found my post interesting and worth thinking about, and as always, thanks for reading and responding to my posts (which goes for everyone on this board as well).
Taxation is theft
I am no fan of the slogan "taxation is theft", but the fact of the matter is that simple one-liners like that are more effective in getting your point across to the status quo than saying something like "economic systems with internalized productive consequences are more conducive to productivity than economic systems with externalized productive consequences." Yeesh, what a mouthful. Unfortunately, those that actually are intelligent enough to understand what we are talking about look at this like dogmatic nonsense. It's as though we have a forum of many different grade levels; things directed at later grades are too confusing to those in earlier grades, and things directed at earlier grades look stupid to those in later grades.
I notice a lot of times that ACists also try to say things so that they won't appear heartless, despite the fact that heartlessness is necessary to macroeconomic development (after all, the results of our economic decisions will make an impact on whether large groups of people prosper, fail, starve or die). I don't understand why there is an apologetic group claiming that private charities will help the homeless under anarchocapitalism; the whole point is that a capitalist system selects against unproductivity, thereby alleviating the problem of poverty. Worrying about how we subsidize the unproductive is like worrying about what's going to happen to the poor tapeworm living in my intestines after the surgery.
Personally, I could give a rat's ass whether taxation is "theft" or not. If socialism induced more productivity and happiness from purposefully acting human beings than capitalism, I'd support socialism.
I notice a lot of times that ACists also try to say things so that they won't appear heartless, despite the fact that heartlessness is necessary to macroeconomic development (after all, the results of our economic decisions will make an impact on whether large groups of people prosper, fail, starve or die). I don't understand why there is an apologetic group claiming that private charities will help the homeless under anarchocapitalism; the whole point is that a capitalist system selects against unproductivity, thereby alleviating the problem of poverty. Worrying about how we subsidize the unproductive is like worrying about what's going to happen to the poor tapeworm living in my intestines after the surgery.
Personally, I could give a rat's ass whether taxation is "theft" or not. If socialism induced more productivity and happiness from purposefully acting human beings than capitalism, I'd support socialism.
Why not all economists are austrian economists
In the hard sciences, it is much easier to conclusively and empirically demonstrate your theoretical claims. A biologist wishing to back up his claim that a certain hormone increases the amount of testosterone in a lab mouse can create a very controlled experiment, compare a large experimental group against a large control group under otherwise equal conditions, and demonstrate his claim very conclusively.
Economists, on the other hand, cannot do this. It is far too difficult to construct macroeconomic experimental and control groups to test whether, for example, the gold standard is more conducive to productivity or less, or whether and to what degree price floors are constructive or destructive. You cannot observe the economy under a microscope. With little more than theory to back our claims, it is no wonder that there is more disagreement in the social "sciences" than in the hard sciences.
However, given the funding source, it should be obvious that the state (who provides nearly all the economic funding) would be biased against a school that claims it should not exist and toward a school that advocates its existence.
Economists, on the other hand, cannot do this. It is far too difficult to construct macroeconomic experimental and control groups to test whether, for example, the gold standard is more conducive to productivity or less, or whether and to what degree price floors are constructive or destructive. You cannot observe the economy under a microscope. With little more than theory to back our claims, it is no wonder that there is more disagreement in the social "sciences" than in the hard sciences.
However, given the funding source, it should be obvious that the state (who provides nearly all the economic funding) would be biased against a school that claims it should not exist and toward a school that advocates its existence.
" Like protecting kids from abusive parents.
"
Please explain what makes it impossible for the free market to protect children from abusive parents. I would be particularly interested since the question has already been addressed multiple times on these very fora.
"
Like a particular county saying gays or blacks can't live there, and forcibly evicting them.
"
Ahahahah. You slay me dude.
How does a "county" say gays or blacks can't live there in the absence of government to artificially create such a law? And if all property owners in a contiguous geographical region decided that they did not want to sell or rent to a particular group, what is the problem? They own the property, don't they? That community would suffer in the market compared to other communities that did not restrict the pool of potentially productive members by arbitrary factors like skin color and sexual preference.
This is of course diametrically opposed to YOUR prefered system, which has a long and storied history of institutionalizing violence against minorities in the LAW. They were called Jim Crow LAWS for a reason. Segregation was the LAW. Slavery was the LAW. Fugitive slave LAWS were the LAW.
What next, you're going to defend government as the agent that (eventually) cleaned up these messes? The ones it created? How generous!
"
Please explain what makes it impossible for the free market to protect children from abusive parents. I would be particularly interested since the question has already been addressed multiple times on these very fora.
"
Like a particular county saying gays or blacks can't live there, and forcibly evicting them.
"
Ahahahah. You slay me dude.
How does a "county" say gays or blacks can't live there in the absence of government to artificially create such a law? And if all property owners in a contiguous geographical region decided that they did not want to sell or rent to a particular group, what is the problem? They own the property, don't they? That community would suffer in the market compared to other communities that did not restrict the pool of potentially productive members by arbitrary factors like skin color and sexual preference.
This is of course diametrically opposed to YOUR prefered system, which has a long and storied history of institutionalizing violence against minorities in the LAW. They were called Jim Crow LAWS for a reason. Segregation was the LAW. Slavery was the LAW. Fugitive slave LAWS were the LAW.
What next, you're going to defend government as the agent that (eventually) cleaned up these messes? The ones it created? How generous!
"That's all great until you talk about specifics. Like stopping organized crime from taking over and controlling key industries.
"
Like it does now?
Strange how you never seem to acknowledge that organized crime only dominates those industries made black by government fiat. And how you never have any comeback except platitudes and assertions and moving of goalposts for the fact that criminals cannot dominate free markets because of factors like time preference, costs, and decision making skills. On a level playing field, businessmen outcompete criminals day in and day out. This is why businessmen dominated the alcohol industry before and after prohibition, but violent criminals dominated during. Why did the criminal grip on that industry not survive the end of Prohibition if violence is such a great market strategy, hmm? The only place criminals can dominate is in places where the playing field is made unlevel by government. High time preference individuals make poorer decisions because they cannot include long term costs and consequences into their economic planning. Criminals are the epitome of high time preference individuals; they want immediate satisfaction and damn the consequences. Violence is costly. People who made poor decisions and incur higher costs will never outcompete people who make better decisions and incur lower costs in a free market.
Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn't supposed to talk, again, about these "specifics" that you accuse me of not talking about.
It amazes me how you apologists for the state trot out the same tired old beat-down arguments over and over, as if you never heard them debunked the first thousand times.
And my favorite part is this, that your answer to "preventing organized crime from taking over and controlling key industries" is to . . . have organized criminals take over and control key industries.
"
Like it does now?
Strange how you never seem to acknowledge that organized crime only dominates those industries made black by government fiat. And how you never have any comeback except platitudes and assertions and moving of goalposts for the fact that criminals cannot dominate free markets because of factors like time preference, costs, and decision making skills. On a level playing field, businessmen outcompete criminals day in and day out. This is why businessmen dominated the alcohol industry before and after prohibition, but violent criminals dominated during. Why did the criminal grip on that industry not survive the end of Prohibition if violence is such a great market strategy, hmm? The only place criminals can dominate is in places where the playing field is made unlevel by government. High time preference individuals make poorer decisions because they cannot include long term costs and consequences into their economic planning. Criminals are the epitome of high time preference individuals; they want immediate satisfaction and damn the consequences. Violence is costly. People who made poor decisions and incur higher costs will never outcompete people who make better decisions and incur lower costs in a free market.
Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn't supposed to talk, again, about these "specifics" that you accuse me of not talking about.
It amazes me how you apologists for the state trot out the same tired old beat-down arguments over and over, as if you never heard them debunked the first thousand times.
And my favorite part is this, that your answer to "preventing organized crime from taking over and controlling key industries" is to . . . have organized criminals take over and control key industries.
"
From what I've read from AC theorists it seems like they are saying that the free market would handle these issues perfectly.
"
You don't read very carefully. The free market is not utopian. Problems exist in free markets. The market is, in fact, a system for dealing with problems at minimal cost, not for magically making them go away. If there were no problems, there would be no need for markets.
Think of it like this. There are two general strategies that you can imagine employing to solve the problems that arise due to being alive. You can allow people to freely cooperate and compete, innovate solutions, and allow consumers to choose amongst alternative solutions for their various problems, allowing good solutions to flourish and bad solutions to falter. Or, you can institute a violent monopoly that arrogates to itself the tasks of a) unilaterally deciding what is and what is not a "problem", b) unilaterally deciding what is and what is not a "solution" to the "problem", c) force everyone to buy into that solution, regardless of whether it is actually a good idea for them (in their opinion), and d) institutionalize these "solutions" in the absence of any sort of market testing.
It is clear to me which of these is the better strategy, and which the worse.
From what I've read from AC theorists it seems like they are saying that the free market would handle these issues perfectly.
"
You don't read very carefully. The free market is not utopian. Problems exist in free markets. The market is, in fact, a system for dealing with problems at minimal cost, not for magically making them go away. If there were no problems, there would be no need for markets.
Think of it like this. There are two general strategies that you can imagine employing to solve the problems that arise due to being alive. You can allow people to freely cooperate and compete, innovate solutions, and allow consumers to choose amongst alternative solutions for their various problems, allowing good solutions to flourish and bad solutions to falter. Or, you can institute a violent monopoly that arrogates to itself the tasks of a) unilaterally deciding what is and what is not a "problem", b) unilaterally deciding what is and what is not a "solution" to the "problem", c) force everyone to buy into that solution, regardless of whether it is actually a good idea for them (in their opinion), and d) institutionalize these "solutions" in the absence of any sort of market testing.
It is clear to me which of these is the better strategy, and which the worse.
Response to Anarcho-Capitalism Questions
" As far as I understand it, an AC world rely on perfect information . . . Is this true?
"
Of course not. Since such a thing does not and can not exist. Imperfect information merely represents arbitrage opportunities that allow the market to function.
"
...and no barriers to entry for new companies.
"
In what sense? In the sense that there is no government to erect artificial barriers to entry? Yes. In the sense that you still actually have to have the knowledge and capital to enter a market competitively? No. Obviously.
"
I agree that the free market could take care of almost anything under these circumstances. But consumers never have perfect information.
"
Don't worry about it. You're dealing with a strawman characterization of the theory. Perfect information is not necessary for the market to work, quite obviously, since markets exist and perfect information does not. The same is true of capital-free competitive entry; markets don't require such a ridiculous condition to exist for them to work. Again, quite obviously, since they do work and it doesn't exist.
I am truly mystefied by these bizarro objections to markets that always pop up. How exactly are these supposed to be points against the market and in favor of government? The information available to government central planners is infinitely MORE imperfect than the information available to individual market participants making individual decisions about their own lives and circumstances. A government's very EXISTENCE is by definition an exercise in erecting barriers to competitive entry in practically every industry.
Up is down, left is right, dogs are cats and destroying markets makes better markets, apparently.
"
Of course not. Since such a thing does not and can not exist. Imperfect information merely represents arbitrage opportunities that allow the market to function.
"
...and no barriers to entry for new companies.
"
In what sense? In the sense that there is no government to erect artificial barriers to entry? Yes. In the sense that you still actually have to have the knowledge and capital to enter a market competitively? No. Obviously.
"
I agree that the free market could take care of almost anything under these circumstances. But consumers never have perfect information.
"
Don't worry about it. You're dealing with a strawman characterization of the theory. Perfect information is not necessary for the market to work, quite obviously, since markets exist and perfect information does not. The same is true of capital-free competitive entry; markets don't require such a ridiculous condition to exist for them to work. Again, quite obviously, since they do work and it doesn't exist.
I am truly mystefied by these bizarro objections to markets that always pop up. How exactly are these supposed to be points against the market and in favor of government? The information available to government central planners is infinitely MORE imperfect than the information available to individual market participants making individual decisions about their own lives and circumstances. A government's very EXISTENCE is by definition an exercise in erecting barriers to competitive entry in practically every industry.
Up is down, left is right, dogs are cats and destroying markets makes better markets, apparently.
Questions on Anarcho-Capitalism
As King of Canada I demand Canada turn immediately to the socio/political/economic structure that is Anarcho-Capitalism. This is the only moral style for my country to be run on; further it is the most efficient and most humane. Allow me to share a discussion on the subject :
"As far as I understand it, an AC world rely on perfect information and no barriers to entry for new companies. Is this true?
I agree that the free market could take care of almost anything under these circumstances. But consumers never have perfect information. Hell, they rarely even have semi-accurate information. It also seems like there would be huge barriers to entry into a lot of fields of commerce. This seems especially true if we try to go to an AC system from our current state.
And in terms of education and health care, it seems like purely profit seeking organizations won't maximize learning and good health. It seems like it would be in your best interest to look like you're doing a great service, but to instead provide spotty service. As long as a large percentage of your clientele is not aware of your shortcomings you'd probably do well. I'm thinking of health care in particular when I say this since so many insurance companies seek to deny compensation wherever they can.
Yes, I could probably search for some of these answers on the internet or through the archives. But a cursory search didn't reveal anything and I'm sure there are enough ACers out there who'll be happy to respond. Right?"
"As far as I understand it, an AC world rely on perfect information and no barriers to entry for new companies. Is this true?
I agree that the free market could take care of almost anything under these circumstances. But consumers never have perfect information. Hell, they rarely even have semi-accurate information. It also seems like there would be huge barriers to entry into a lot of fields of commerce. This seems especially true if we try to go to an AC system from our current state.
And in terms of education and health care, it seems like purely profit seeking organizations won't maximize learning and good health. It seems like it would be in your best interest to look like you're doing a great service, but to instead provide spotty service. As long as a large percentage of your clientele is not aware of your shortcomings you'd probably do well. I'm thinking of health care in particular when I say this since so many insurance companies seek to deny compensation wherever they can.
Yes, I could probably search for some of these answers on the internet or through the archives. But a cursory search didn't reveal anything and I'm sure there are enough ACers out there who'll be happy to respond. Right?"
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Abandon the Neo-Conservative Philosophy
Neo-Con's are the Machievillian courtiers of our time; fundamentally they serve power. Henry Kissinger, in my mind, is the original Neo-Conservative. They favour of the expansion of the state before the interests of liberty. Generally they want to expand the power of the state and expand taxation; they favor both welfare and warfare all paid for by the tax payer. Generally they also favor corporate welfare. They essentially favor state involvement and control in all areas of business as it furthers the power and welfare of the state.
'War is the health of the state'
I am a Paleo-Conservative. I favour personal liberty, freedom and the limiting of the state. I oppose neo-conservatives and indeed it is clear they have simply transformed the Trotskiest Ideals of Permanent Revolution and State Ownership of The Means Of Production all the while campaigning and preaching the ideals of capitalism and freedom. They practice a form Orwellian 'newspeak' that has frightening prophecy of things to come.
'War is the health of the state'
I am a Paleo-Conservative. I favour personal liberty, freedom and the limiting of the state. I oppose neo-conservatives and indeed it is clear they have simply transformed the Trotskiest Ideals of Permanent Revolution and State Ownership of The Means Of Production all the while campaigning and preaching the ideals of capitalism and freedom. They practice a form Orwellian 'newspeak' that has frightening prophecy of things to come.
Dissent?
In a free and open society like ours it is interesting how little genuine dissent there is. While I mean this in the specific sense of political discourse it has much broader ramifications you can ponder to yourself.
Not one of the three main political parties varies in their platforms. On the fundamental issues, that of governments role in society, that of how the system that is our nation should work, they are all in agreement. In a world of radical and broad opinion, the Canadian political discourse is one of tiny, almost minute degrees of difference between the parties in policies. A comma here, a decimal there; and yet people hold passionately to their view points and to their party loyalty...
Why is there no dissent in our media? Who drafts these policies and why do all the political parties adopt them? Why is there no alternative to what we have now? Indeed, the seemingly most progessive party the NDP is the most conservative! They want to maintain the system not only how it is but how it has been going.
Why is there no dissent?
Not one of the three main political parties varies in their platforms. On the fundamental issues, that of governments role in society, that of how the system that is our nation should work, they are all in agreement. In a world of radical and broad opinion, the Canadian political discourse is one of tiny, almost minute degrees of difference between the parties in policies. A comma here, a decimal there; and yet people hold passionately to their view points and to their party loyalty...
Why is there no dissent in our media? Who drafts these policies and why do all the political parties adopt them? Why is there no alternative to what we have now? Indeed, the seemingly most progessive party the NDP is the most conservative! They want to maintain the system not only how it is but how it has been going.
Why is there no dissent?
Hello! I am an athiest but I feel that religion is a wholesome and overall extremely beneficial organization within society, especially when compared to the state, which is a parasitic, coercive and oppressive organization.
In Canada, over the last 50 years of modern secularization and 'liberalism' (in the modern sense, not the classic sense of freedom) the state has waged war on the church. It has done so in any number of ways, two of which I will examine at this moment.
The first is through the seperation of church and state. I believe strongly in the original intent of the seperation of church and state, which was to protect the church from being controlled by the state. This is a good thing; in fact we should have a rule in our constitution that says "the government must make no laws concerning religion". Religion should be a wholely private affair; what people want to believe, for whatever reason, is their choice.
Now the role of the state, in Canada especially, has been evolving over the last 50 years. With material prosperity and wealth abundantly circulating, the state has grown and grown unabated. Today, in the name of helping the poor, the state has expanded to a point where most people work half time for the government (taxes). As a response to the large amounts of money availible to it, the state has spread throughout our society. It dominates business with oppressive regulations that harm small businesses and favour large, souless corporations and it controls completely the education system. Seperation of church and state is not a problem when the state is small, but when the state is ubiquitous as it is today, you are left with Godless society. No one can speak of, teach, or mention their religion in public schools for fear they may 'corrupt' people into believing 'thou shalt not kill' or 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Heavens forbid someone taught our youngsters morality! By providing "free", monopolistic education, we have crushed most of the religions, except Catholicism which is granted special status as the baby religion to the new state religion, which is secular liberalism.
The second, and more disgusting assault of the state on religion is in the matter of charity. Throughout history, the Church has usually (not always :P) come to the aid of the poor, in large part negating the harm that the state inflicts upon the poor. This has provoked the harshest and most severe response from the state and to see this one simply has to look at Latin America, where priests have been struggling with the most disenfranchised members of society to battle the poverty and oppression in that society. In response, the state has exectuted dozens if not hundreds of priests and nuns and of course countless peasents.
In Canada, the government monopolizes charity, by stealing from the citizens through tax and providing it free. Like everything the government does, it's wasteful and inefficient, especially compared with the systems the church has set in place. This drives, in part, donations to continue as people in society see the government programs, put in place to benefit the poor only ever seem to benefit the rich and powerful in special interests. This is not something we can change! It is the nature of the state to take and take and take and never give, except to those who fund their pocketbooks. We cannot change this! Everyone in the world will tend to act in their own self interest... it is counter productive to posit scenarios that rely on benevolance. Certainly there are examples of the opposite... and indeed the church is so often the best example of this, but over all it is the case and it is especially true in the case of politicians, who are by neccessity the hungriest for power and money. So by monopolizing charity the state further and further drives the church towards extinction.
In Canada, over the last 50 years of modern secularization and 'liberalism' (in the modern sense, not the classic sense of freedom) the state has waged war on the church. It has done so in any number of ways, two of which I will examine at this moment.
The first is through the seperation of church and state. I believe strongly in the original intent of the seperation of church and state, which was to protect the church from being controlled by the state. This is a good thing; in fact we should have a rule in our constitution that says "the government must make no laws concerning religion". Religion should be a wholely private affair; what people want to believe, for whatever reason, is their choice.
Now the role of the state, in Canada especially, has been evolving over the last 50 years. With material prosperity and wealth abundantly circulating, the state has grown and grown unabated. Today, in the name of helping the poor, the state has expanded to a point where most people work half time for the government (taxes). As a response to the large amounts of money availible to it, the state has spread throughout our society. It dominates business with oppressive regulations that harm small businesses and favour large, souless corporations and it controls completely the education system. Seperation of church and state is not a problem when the state is small, but when the state is ubiquitous as it is today, you are left with Godless society. No one can speak of, teach, or mention their religion in public schools for fear they may 'corrupt' people into believing 'thou shalt not kill' or 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Heavens forbid someone taught our youngsters morality! By providing "free", monopolistic education, we have crushed most of the religions, except Catholicism which is granted special status as the baby religion to the new state religion, which is secular liberalism.
The second, and more disgusting assault of the state on religion is in the matter of charity. Throughout history, the Church has usually (not always :P) come to the aid of the poor, in large part negating the harm that the state inflicts upon the poor. This has provoked the harshest and most severe response from the state and to see this one simply has to look at Latin America, where priests have been struggling with the most disenfranchised members of society to battle the poverty and oppression in that society. In response, the state has exectuted dozens if not hundreds of priests and nuns and of course countless peasents.
In Canada, the government monopolizes charity, by stealing from the citizens through tax and providing it free. Like everything the government does, it's wasteful and inefficient, especially compared with the systems the church has set in place. This drives, in part, donations to continue as people in society see the government programs, put in place to benefit the poor only ever seem to benefit the rich and powerful in special interests. This is not something we can change! It is the nature of the state to take and take and take and never give, except to those who fund their pocketbooks. We cannot change this! Everyone in the world will tend to act in their own self interest... it is counter productive to posit scenarios that rely on benevolance. Certainly there are examples of the opposite... and indeed the church is so often the best example of this, but over all it is the case and it is especially true in the case of politicians, who are by neccessity the hungriest for power and money. So by monopolizing charity the state further and further drives the church towards extinction.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Dear Subjects
This may shock you but currently Canada is ruled by the British. It is time for this to stop. My name is Zachary Young and I am the true King of Canada. What you will read in this blog will frighten, terrify and inspire you but every word of it is true.
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