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Davethulhu posted:There's an implied belief in libertarianism that there's no such thing as power discrepancies. The lawyer you have access to and the lawyer that Megacorp Inc. have access to are exactly the same. I don't think that's quite it - they believe that, in a Truly Free Market society, any power discrepancy could be overcome by cleverness. A super-smart software engineer is only a few weeks and a few law textbooks away from being a super-smart lawyer capable of taking on big corporations, or a master public policy analyst, or anything else. It's the result of a society that's never required them to develop expertise on something outside their comfort zone, them never doing anything that teaches them "there's not always enough time to do everything worth doing," and escapist media where the hero's always a perfectly quick study.
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May 24, 2014 20:24
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TheRamblingSoul posted:I like to imagine a real-life DRO would look similar to a Mexican drug cartel, enforcing your The Sicilian Mafia is the best example of a DRO. Not in the "this is somewhat similar" sense, either; the history of the organization played out almost exactly the way supporters describe DROs. But, even though they managed to suss out omerta from first principles, they still manage to miss that when a completely unregulated profit-seeking organization advertises protection from criminals, their optimum strategy is probably "partner with criminals so they go after non-members."
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Sep 19, 2014 05:36
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McAlister posted:The question remains. How does anyone who wants to replace our nice impersonal justice system with a popularity contest think this is a good idea? The whole point of libertarianism is that the people at the top have disproportionate power and no checks on the abuse of their power. Libertarians believe that they'll be the one on top. If you want to talk about analogies to adolescence, this is closely related to the myth of the high school nerd (who inevitably makes millions) getting to lord it over the varsity quarterback (who inevitably works at the gas station) later in life. Libertarians tend to buy into this myth like crazy, to the point where they assume any deviations from it are a fault that will be corrected in Libertopia.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:32
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jrodefeld posted:Profit seeking entrepreneurs are not going to forgo such a massive market of people who desperately need healthcare but are priced out of the market unless there were some barrier to entry created by State monopoly privilege, licenture laws, and restrictions placed by monopolists. The medical industry is highly regulated precisely because of what happened when we, as a society, found out exactly what happens when medicine is deregulated and left up to the free market. Charlatans sell ineffective and dangerous patent medicine in unregulated markets. Consumers don't have access to the expensive analytical equipment and research infrastructure required to figure out whether their medicine actually contains what it says on the label, and whether those ingredients are actually effective. Deregulating the market for pharmaceuticals and medical devices might lead to cheaper medicine, but it would definitely lead to dangerous medicine. Cheating is easy, incredibly profitable, and reputation is no guarantee (a new player with discount medicine might be legit and offering a discount to get themselves established, or they might be an experienced scammer behind a false identity). And, unlike, say, durable goods, where getting scammed is just "really bad," bad medicine can literally kill you. This post brought to you by Stickney and Poor's Paregoric. Remember, if your newborn is crying, it's crying out for more Stickney and Poor's!  Seriously, before the FDA, "get babies hooked on opium" was a legitimate marketing strategy. This is why medicine is regulated.
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Nov 9, 2014 23:33
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Strawman posted:But why would you want a fascist leader in charge? Anarcho-Syndicalism is a far more reasonable system. Anyone who says total anarchy is a joke has no loving clue! I lived in total anarchy, when in 1990 soviets were driven of from Lithuania there was total anarchy for about 2-3 years, police had no resources, government was a bunch of idealists with no idea wtf to do, no taxes no law in practice. local "tough guy" would pop up, he could not be super cruel or hosed up as when intellect level of people is pretty high (unlike lets say Somalia or any other dumb country which always pops up as example why anarchy is poo poo, they would be exact same poo poo anarchy or not...) people expect certain living standards and will get mad if poo poo goes down, as local mob could not muster army like governments do they were always in check. it was very safe and taxes were at least 10 times lower, as very efficient 5-10 mobster guys ran whole town and would not take half your money like government does. back in those days there was no internet so organizing big scale stuff was hard, but now with internet, Bitcoin etc., why you would ever need government? what government does what could not be done by just people organizing poo poo on internet? Tell us more about the glorious Lithuanian master race and their superiority over Somalians  Strawman posted:In Lithuania in 1990? Bullshit. Local gangs handle everything. I really believe the state is obsolete. The only reason it is existing is because it has guns. As opposed to the notoriously gentle eastern European mafia organizations that arose during the collapse of the USSR.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:17
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Dirk the Average posted:I'm in med device R&D, and this is literally never a question we ask. The only questions are of the efficacy of the product and how quickly we can get to market. I've never worked in pharma, but i would be shocked if the R&D folks over there thought along different lines. Look up what happened with Glybera, the first gene therapy to make it to market. One course of treatment can permanently cure a rare metabolic disorder that's difficult and expensive to treat on an ongoing basis. The price was set at $1 million based on a market analysis. After all, ongoing treatments can cost a lot of money per year, and there won't be any return customers. The net cost of producing each dose of the drug is high, but nowhere near its price tag - that's just what it would take to hit acceptable ROI for the company that bought the rights from the people who actually developed the treatment. One person bought it, and then the drug was taken off the market. Three more people received commercial treatment when the inventory was liquidated at one euro. That's it. The free market has decided that everyone else with this disorder isn't worth saving. The CBC did a decent overview here if you'd like to read more: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/glybera E: it's worth noting that the R&D people - here, a public university - didn't think about the market either, and focused on developing an amazing treatment that made the cover of a major journal before it was yanked. But the larger pharma apparatus still killed it, because R&D is just one step between raw materials and Space Gopher fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 3, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 16:53
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OwlFancier posted:Are they though? I guess I've never been really clear on how they square the circle of capitalism's tendency towards centraliztion with supposedly not liking being beholden to people. The usual libertarian take is that capitalism will tend to centralize around the best* and most efficient point, and if it happens to not do that (probably because of dirty statist interference), then people are free to go move out to some uninhabited, unowned place, stake their claim somewhere, and Make Their Own Rugged, Individual Way Through Life. Eventually people will realize how right they were to do that, and a new, more libertarian community will spring up. This is why frontier mythology - both the view of an idyllic America of the past as an unpeopled paradise free for the taking, and the future-looking/sci-fi dreams of state-free paradise platforms in international waters or interstellar colonization - tends to be deeply important to libertarians. The ideology demands an owner for everything, and also an unowned space that anybody's free to move to if they don't like their current government and/or DRO.
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Oct 18, 2020 22:11
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Somfin posted:You do know why the "average IQ of the general population is between 90 and 110," right? Do you know why that measure puts the average person there? That isn't even the most interesting part. Just like the average IQ is definitionally 100 points, the standard deviation is definitionally 15 points. If Tesla had an IQ of 300, that puts him at 13 sigma. The probability of a right-tailed value at that standard deviation is - by definition! - roughly 6 * 10-39. Or, in the long form, 3 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. By that measurement, Nikola Tesla is almost certainly the smartest human who has ever lived or who will ever live, even if humanity manages to colonize the entire galaxy and maybe Andromeda too. He still died in poverty. Perhaps the libertarian ideal of "a sufficiently smart person can succeed at anything" is wrong.
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Feb 4, 2021 02:20
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He's already resigned, according to the local TV news  quote:COLORADO CITY, Texas — Colorado City Mayor Tom Boyd has resigned. His full followup statement is at the link. He is very very sorry for implying that good honest hardworking folks who are suffering right now might be lumped in with lazy parasites who deserve to freeze to death Space Gopher fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 02:12
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Panfilo posted:Can Libertarians cite countries that have minimal taxes/regulations that are super prosperous as a result? Like socialists will look to countries with extensive social safety nets, labor laws, and consumer protections as examples of how much better things could be. But I don't see libertarians do this. The closest thing they'll do is compare things now to how they were over a century ago before income tax became a thing. Singapore used to be a popular example of libertarian prosperity for the Reason-and-Cato set. And sure, it might be a repressive city-state that will literally beat up citizens for minor infractions or put them to death for drug possession, the judiciary and sovereign wealth fund might be nakedly corrupt and happy to throw journalists in jail for talking about their corruption, and it might have lots and lots of social-safety-net spending - but those low taxes really run up the score on the Freedom Index!
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Jun 8, 2021 16:19
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