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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 10:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Great article. |
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wesharris
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 1:27 am Post subject: |
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How freedom was lost my foot. Freedom is lost when government gets to large. One can't socialize risk, one must learn to balance things. There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible, it MUST be scaled back ,for the good of the economy. We must liberate the faulty liberals and make them truly conservative again.
Down with the hippies.
I HATE hippies.
_+_+
Wes
NOT A HIPPY! |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 3:09 am Post subject: Re: How Freedom Was Lost |
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I would really be interested in hearing those of us who are against government regulation of business talk about how cases like these can possibly be even hypothetically prevented without governmental intervention. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 3:11 am Post subject: |
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| wesharris wrote: |
| There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible, it MUST be scaled back ,for the good of the economy. |
Which regulations are you against, exactly, and why? |
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wesharris
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 4:26 am Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible, it MUST be scaled back ,for the good of the economy. |
Which regulations are you against, exactly, and why? |
All of them. Anything that interferes with an individuals right to self control and right to self determination be interfered with by government or outside sources. IE It's generally a bad idea. Look at Soviet California for example. BAD idea.
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Wes |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 5:38 am Post subject: |
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| wesharris wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible, it MUST be scaled back ,for the good of the economy. |
Which regulations are you against, exactly, and why? |
All of them. Anything that interferes with an individuals right to self control and right to self determination... |
1) Good thing regulation of business doesn't interfere with your rights as an individual to self control and self determination then.
2) All of them, eh? Let's play a game then, I'll start, you finish: it's wrong of the government to enforce regulation that prevents companies from dumping toxic waste in local water supplies because... |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 6:16 am Post subject: Re: How Freedom Was Lost |
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| Fox wrote: |
I would really be interested in hearing those of us who are against government regulation of business talk about how cases like these can possibly be even hypothetically prevented without governmental intervention. |
Good luck with that. I predict that you'll only get 'faith-based' answers. You know, the kind where government is always the problem and business ethics/morals are inherently superior and virtually saint-like. My eyes glaze over when I try to read that stuff, a lot like when I try to read St. Augustine et al. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 7:59 am Post subject: |
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| wesharris wrote: |
| How freedom was lost my foot. Freedom is lost when government gets to large. One can't socialize risk, one must learn to balance things. There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible |
Win.
Using one crisis to justify a gigantic regulatory regime is no different from neo-cons employing 9-11 to detain non-citizens indefinitely and expand the size of the military.
Cost of gov't day (by State) 2008
Only in two states can Americans begin working for themselves before July.
[http://tpa.typepad.com/research/files/cost_of_government_day.pdf]
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This is the date in the calendar year on which the average person has
earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of government
spending and regulation. The result for 2007 is as follows:
The average person must work for 204 days of the year to pay off his or
her share of government spending and regulation.
The Cost of Government Day in 2007 is 23 July. |
Of course, these are aggregate costs, averaged amongst all Americans, including the top earners.
Costs of regulatory regime, 2007
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Regulations
� The cost of regulations as a percentage of national income remains at 16.9 percent for the fourth year. It is important to note, however, that revised data on regulatory costs reveal that COGD reports prior to 2006 were underestimating the cost of regulations.
� New regulations imposed following the War on Terrorism and corporate scandals significantly increased the regulatory burden in 2001 and 2002 in particular.
� In 2007, the average American will work 61.8 days to pay for regulatory costs, nearly 1 full day more than was required in 2006. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 9:48 am Post subject: |
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Let's take a look at the first example from the article. This is a classic case of a problem caused by socialism. In a free market this would not happen. But the socialists are befuddled by their own BS, except for a few who do understand that they are lying, but do so to obtain wealth and power:
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Sun May 03, 2009 at 07:02:05 PM PDT
On Halloween night, 1948, a fog rolled in to blanket the town of Donora, Pennsylvania. What came from that cloud wasn't the ghosts of vengeful pirates, or horror movie zombies. It was worse.
This wasn't the first time the industrial town of 13,000 had been socked in by a brown, pollution tinged smog. But this time the air had a peculiar, acrid smell. Those who breathed the fog felt as if they were breathing fire. It scorched their eyes, their throat, their lungs. Still, Donora was a mill town. Workers squinted against the bitter air and went on to their jobs. That night, as people were walking back to their houses, some of them began to die.
Soon doctors' offices were overrun and the hospital was filled with the sick and the dying. The fog held on the next day. And the next. A local hotel was pressed into service as an extension to the hospital, with volunteers serving as nurses. As bodies piled up at local funeral homes, the ground floor of that hotel became a makeshift morgue. Within five days, twenty people had died. Hundreds more were seriously injured with damage that would shorten their lives or affect their ability to work. A decade later, local papers still told the story of lives cut short.
The villain in Donora was the a toxic stew spit out by a local zinc refinery. It wasn't the first time the plant's fumes had turned the air around the town toxic, but this time a temperature inversion capped the smog. In the midst of the crisis, suspicion about the cause brought town officials to the zinc works, where they asked that the plant's operations be reduced until the weather changed. The plant operators refused. After five days, the inversion layer broke and the brown fog blew away. Eleven of those who died did so on that final day. A local doctor estimated that if the weather had held another day, the death toll would have been in the hundreds, rather than the tens.
That Sunday, as the sky broke and rains came, the zinc works finally agreed to reduce operations. They went back to normal the next day. |
This event was caused by socialism because it is socialism that allows pollution.
In a free market, the air, land and water - all of it - is privately owned. However in the US it is owned by the government. They allow it to be polluted.
In a free market the people who own their land and homes own the air on and above their property. And just as no one is allowed to drive up to your property and dump sewage or trash onto your lawn or into your living room, they would not be allowed to dump pollution into your air, your stream, your river nor your groundwater.
In a free market the legal pollution rate is zero. The government can make no law to allow pollution and pollution must end. Businesses must learn to produce without pollution or they can never even open their doors.
Of course, some forms of polluting production could never get off the ground. The world would be too green and clean for socialists, statists, and the conservative communists in the D and R parties. But, so what.
The libertarian, free market solution maximizes liberty, is environmentally greener than the greens and results in the greatest total prosperity when we include the costs of pollution and other so called "externalities," which are merely costs that have been socialized.
In a free market, pollution can only occur as the result of some accident or as a form of criminal tresspass. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 10:11 am Post subject: |
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This second case is the classic case of an accidental form of injury. Regulation can never prevent accidents and in many cases increases them. However, using the tenant of personal responsibility inherent in a libertarian form of government means that those responsible are held accountable.
Socialists use bureaucracy and regulation which is slow, antagonistic and leads to more accidents where the parties at fault are held blameless as long as they followed the rules. As long as you follow the regulations, you will have to pay few, if any, financial damages and you will face no criminal charges.
Libertarians hold those responsible accountable. Period. If your dam breaks, then you pay for the damage it causes. No excuses. If you have contributed to the damage, injury or death by your actions or failure to act if you could have prevented the accident or warned its victims you will face criminal charges. Period.
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February 1972 was cold and rainy in West Virginia. Toward the end of the month, the last of winter's wet snows melted down and for days rains fell almost continuously. The miners and shopkeepers around the little town of Saunders went to their jobs with rain sluicing from their hats, and the children splashed home on muddy streets. By the night of the 25th, the creek that ran alongside the town was running high and fast.
At 8AM on the morning of the 26th, folks in Saunders were seeing their kids off to school, making their way to work, and frowning at another morning of rain. They had only a moment to feel the rumble under their feet and hear the screaming roar that echoed through the town. Then a 20 foot high wall of midnight black water swept through the narrow valley. Buildings were crushed by the rushing wave as if they had be struck by God's own hammer. Trees didn't have time to be uprooted, they were simply snapped off at the ground. The water caromed from one side of the valley to the other and back again, sweeping down homes and gouging the valley walls. People were plucked from the streets before they could make sense of the thunderous sound. Others went tumbling as their homes were torn from around them. Cars, homes, sections of rail track, the shattered remains of stores, schools, and bodies -- they all joined the wall as it roared downstream into the town of Pardee. And Lorado. And Craneco. And Stowe, Crites, Latrobe, Robinette, Amherstdale, Becco, Fanco, Braeholm, Accoville, Crown, and Kistler.
For minutes after the wall had passed, the cold February rain fell on a world that was silent except for the sound of water. No birds singing. No dogs barking. No people talking. There were only piles of debris and cold gray mud.
In a matter of minutes 125 were dead and 1,100 injured. 4,000 more were left homeless.
That wall of water had originated from a coal slurry dam, a rude impoundment of earth and stone built high in the valley of Buffalo Creek. On the night before, workers at the mine responsible for the dam had noticed that water was straining the limits of the impoundment, and the dam was sagging under the force. Officials of the company were notified. They sent no warning to the people below. Deputy sheriffs from the county came up the hill only hours before the dam burst, to ask if they should evacuate the towns. They were sent away |
So, again this accident would likely have never occurred in a free market. The owners would have acted to prevent the damage for which they would have been held 100% financially liable.
Unfortunately, our socialist system lets those responsible escape most or all liability as long as they followed the regulations. The regulatory agency has to do the explaining and cover up to protect itself and the business and workers escape.
In a free market, the workers who had noticed the dam weakening, knowing that they would be held personally liable for financial damages up to 100%, plus criminal charges, would have immediately notified the people in the towns and the authorities about the danger. They would have acted to reduce the danger by lowering the level of water behind the dam even without orders from the top - or face life in prison for manslaughter. Their own personal responsibility in a free market would have induced them to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, in this actual case, the workers were able to hide behind the corporate skirts of our fascist-socialist system. Socialism kills again.
A libertarian free market based on liberty and personal responsibility reduces accidents to their lowest possible level. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 10:56 am Post subject: |
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The article is a complete fail.
The fire example occurred even with the regulatory reports of the fire department. Deregulated insurance companies that can use private regulation, refuse coverage, or refuse to pay, when businesses and buildings are not safe, coupled with private fire departments and personal responsibility of owners and managers, both civil and criminal, can prevent such disasters.
Social security has caused massive poverty. It has prevented the creation of at least 500 million good jobs around the world and threatens the bankruptcy of the US government and collapse of the financial system.
The recent financial bubble and depression was caused by the fiat money printing of the Federal Reserve. The solution so far has been to pay off trillions to special interests and more fiat money inflation of the money supply, which will lead to hyper price inflation in the coming few years. The inflation has already occurred, but it has not yet manifested itself in prices - but $5000/ounce gold is coming along with beer and hamburgers for $10 each and cheap cars from $60 to $100,000. All that money you've been saving in Korea, if you're holding cash, is about to lose 80% of its current purchasing power within the next few years.
Socialism has been proven again and again to make things worse. Socialism was the cause of the disasters in the article. Socialism causes poverty, unemployment, pollution and death.
Every example, from tainted food to the robber barons, has actually come as a result of failed government programs, spending, and regulation. But the socialists just lie about it, their ignorant and uneducated followers believe them, and so they can increase their power and make things worse yet again.
But, of course their followers are ignorant. They were educated in the schools that the socialists took over and nationalized. The actual literacy rate and real education of the people has fallen ever since. And, if you read the history of the socialist takeover of the schools, it was exactly to control the minds of the citizens and make them pliable that the admitted socialists of the era gave for their campaign for state control.
Faces of the future:
John Monds for Governor 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnXbR4Ab-SA&feature=channel_page
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5JT4lkJv1A
Munger for Governor 2008 and 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYaGNjMKPcM |
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wesharris
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| There IS a need for SOME government intervention ,but the current level is horrible, it MUST be scaled back ,for the good of the economy. |
Which regulations are you against, exactly, and why? |
All of them. Anything that interferes with an individuals right to self control and right to self determination... |
1) Good thing regulation of business doesn't interfere with your rights as an individual to self control and self determination then.
2) All of them, eh? Let's play a game then, I'll start, you finish: it's wrong of the government to enforce regulation that prevents companies from dumping toxic waste in local water supplies because... |
That's correct. It is unlawful for the government to interfere. Let things even themselves out naturally, not by government interference, hippy. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 6:22 pm Post subject: |
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I'm just going to merge the parts salient to my response into one larger post; the article (and the insulting sections that don't actually contain an argument) need not be repeated.
| ontheway wrote: |
Let's take a look at the first example from the article. This is a classic case of a problem caused by socialism. In a free market this would not happen. But the socialists are befuddled by their own BS, except for a few who do understand that they are lying, but do so to obtain wealth and power:
...
This event was caused by socialism because it is socialism that allows pollution.
In a free market, the air, land and water - all of it - is privately owned. However in the US it is owned by the government. They allow it to be polluted.
In a free market the people who own their land and homes own the air on and above their property. And just as no one is allowed to drive up to your property and dump sewage or trash onto your lawn or into your living room, they would not be allowed to dump pollution into your air, your stream, your river nor your groundwater. |
I have only one thing to say to this entire section of text: environmental regulation is Socialist, and environmental regulation tantamount to a 100% legal ban on any and all pollution of air, sea, and land is assuredly Socialist. All Socialism is, ultimately, is government control of the means of production. What you describe is, in fact, a government control upon the means of production. It's not as Socialist as the government fully and totally controlling the means of production, but it certainly is Socialist behavior none the less.
| ontheway wrote: |
| In a free market the legal pollution rate is zero. The government can make no law to allow pollution and pollution must end. |
This assumes pollution by default is illegal, which it is not. Without regulation, pollution remains legal. With regulation, you have a governmental control upon the means of production, which is Socialist.
Moving on, your entire second post is more or less predicated upon the following assumption:
| ontheway wrote: |
| [b]This second case is the classic case of an accidental form of injury. Regulation can never prevent accidents and in many cases increases them. |
So, regulation not only increases safety by literally 0% (that is what never is, after all), but actually decreases safety by some indeterminate figure. Please show the math behind this absolutely extraordinary claim, because this really is the kind of thing that requires some evidence to assert.
Moving on to article three:
| ontheway wrote: |
The fire example occurred even with the regulatory reports of the fire department. Deregulated insurance companies that can use private regulation, refuse coverage, or refuse to pay, when businesses and buildings are not safe, coupled with private fire departments and personal responsibility of owners and managers, both civil and criminal, can prevent such disasters.
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Can you show me some evidence which compares some safety numbers (e.g. deaths per incident, response time, total financial damage per incident, etc) under our current system with some under the system you describe, or are you supposing this would be the case?
Also, since you keep bringing up personal responsibility, can you talk some about how your system actually enforces personal responsibility? It would be incredibly easy for (intelligent) wealthy business owners to set up corporate constructs such that, while they retained the vast majority of the power and earning potentials, on paper the responsibility fell upon a "fall man" who acts as a personal legal shield. How can you stop this without, well, regulating it? And once you regulate it, you're outside your no public regulation system. Without regulating it, corruption isn't curtailed at all.
| ontheway wrote: |
| Social security has caused massive poverty. It has prevented the creation of at least 500 million good jobs around the world and threatens the bankruptcy of the US government and collapse of the financial system. |
Show the math. Remember to subtract from that 500 million figure any jobs within the government to currently support to the bureaucracy involved in social security when you do it.
| ontheway wrote: |
| Socialism has been proven again and again to make things worse. |
Where's the pure free market control groups of a comparable size you're comparing the systems of the world to -- which are all Socialist to varying degrees -- such that it has been scientifically proven? Conversely, where is your series of true premises, arranged in such a way that if you accept each of them individually the conclusion is logically true, such that it has been deductively proven.
On the other hand, do you really just mean "I really think it's true?"
Last edited by Fox on Mon May 04, 2009 6:26 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 6:23 pm Post subject: |
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| wesharris wrote: |
| That's correct. It is unlawful for the government to interfere. |
Unlawful under what legal system? |
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