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nutranurse posted:I've always wanted to ask a libertarian this (but I know few in real life because they're crazy fuckers and tend to be racist): Why would a minority want to forgo government protection of their rights in order to embrace the libertarian "get government out of everything so I can be a feudal lord" creed? The naive Libertarian will say that racism is impossible in the free market because markets punish irrationality, and it's only government that makes racism possible. Then you've got Libertarians like Hoppe who dont care what minorities think because they believe the "natural social elites" should establish covenant communities that ban anyone from selling or renting their private land to inferior mud races.
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May 23, 2014 00:43
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LogisticEarth posted:The basic issue is that racism is profitable when it's popular. Of course, it's also politically favorable when it's popular too. An interesting question is if a minority of businesses who have anti-racist policies would help drive society towards integration and non-racism in the absence of state power enforcing the status quo (e.g. Jim Crow, modern drug law enforcement, etc.). No, they wouldn't. The local DRO would use retaliatory force against those integrationist businesses who are aggressing against the community norms, and the town would be quickly Redeemed.
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May 29, 2014 19:37
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Also the KKK didn't bother with things like community covenants and buying up land to put racist easements into contracts with buyers and tenants. They just pointed out to the race-mixers that the town isn't going to defend their degeneracy if some upstanding citizens should burn down their integrationist business.
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May 29, 2014 20:29
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Molyneux is also rapturous about how DROs will require you to agree to cameras mounted throughout your house, monitoring your property at all times to prevent crime and help with enforcement. Because the only problem with an ever-present surveillance state is the "state" part! As long as it's a private company doing it, libertarians are just fine with eliminating privacy for all but the very rich, and police powers so all-encompassing and pervasive that it would make the North Koreans look like rank amateurs at thought control. But that's all fine because you signed the contract voluntarily* and no one held a gun to your head**. *Refusing to sign the contract bars you from commerce and travel, sentencing you to starve to death along with anyone who aids or trades with you (trading with an uncovered person triggers automatic blacklisting by their own DRO) **Also not signing the contract makes it de facto legal for anyone to hold a gun to your head VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:59 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 22:52
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Pththya-lyi posted:Assuming that "private school" means the same thing in England as it does in America is perfectly in keeping with Rand, though: she believed that you could reason everything out from first principles, so you don't need to verify things empirically. For instance, she was mad about the existence of "kneeling buses" because she assumed that the word "kneeling" referred to something that the able-bodied passengers are forced to do when boarding the bus, not something the bus does to accommodate wheelchair-bound passengers. Plus the horror of able-bodied people having to look at the handicapped and even tolerate being in close proximity to them quote:Question from audience: Can't let those untermenschen inflict their existence on our precious white able-bodied children...maybe they could be shuffled off into camps or something where normal people don't have to see them unless they're interested in it.
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Jun 2, 2014 05:28
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Pththya-lyi posted:In The Fountainhead, the hero architect's Temple to the Human Spirit is ruined when it's converted into a home for children with severe disabilities. Not to mention that the arch-villain of the book was in a wheelchair, had always had weak legs, and in his childhood paid attention and cared for the outcasts, the sick, and the disabled. And these are supposed to be proof of his villainy, because a noble hero would have been all "gently caress those losers, I'm going to go suck the valedictorian's and the football team captain's cocks" The Fountainhead posted:At this period he began to acquire friends. He liked to speak of faith and he found those who liked to listen. Only, he discovered that the bright, the strong, the able boys of his class felt no need of listening, felt no need of him at all. But the suffering and the ill-endowed came to him. Drippy Munn began to follow him about with the silent decotion of a dog. Billy Wilson lost his mother, and came wandering to the Toohey house in the evenings, to sit with Ellsworth on the porch, listening, shivering once in a while, saying nothing, his eyes wide, dry and pleasing. Skinny Dix got infantile paralysis--and would lie in bed, watching the street corner beyond the window, waiting for Ellsworth. Rusty Hazelton failed to pass in his grades, and sat for many hours, crying, with Ellsworth's cold, steady hand on his shoulder. SedanChair posted:God loving loving drat bitch what? What the gently caress? gently caress you! Objectivism: there is always more and it is always worse
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Jun 2, 2014 07:09
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Radish posted:I wonder if the actors are true believers or think they are in some kind of story where the villains are the protagonists. Don't they have to get an all-new cast for each one because the previous cast bail from the sinking ship to salvage their careers?
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Jun 2, 2014 15:08
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Nintendo Kid posted:Anthem is the bargain basement version of the classic pre-1950 dystopia novel. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that her first novel, We the Living about Russia just after the collapse of the White forces is pretty good. The characters are actually complex and interesting, because it's before she got completely up her own rear end about Gorgeous Angular-Faced Superman and the pudgy, slouching, jealosy-eaten villains who want to burn it all down out of spite. One of the heroes is actually an honest-to-god true-blue (red?) Communist. Disclaimer: I am an engineer, I know gently caress-all about good literature, and I once fell on love with Atlas Shrugged so my taste is clearly suspect. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 17:40
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Which is why no wars happened ever before the Nixon Shock of 1971 when the US finally stopped pegging the dollar to gold in international exchange.
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Jun 3, 2014 21:17
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This picture should explain exactly how Libertarians decided those mixing their labor with the reefs to create wealth somehow "didn't count" as having a pre-existing property interest there.
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Jun 8, 2014 23:36
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Mister Bates posted:Their logic was that, technically, no one was using the land itself, and that was all that counted. Libertarianism and its variants are basically ideologies built entirely out of technicalities - indentured servitude technically isn't slavery, paying rent and protection money to a private defense agency technically isn't taxation, a vast corporate entity exercising sole policing authority over an area of controlled territory technically isn't a government, etc. But...but then how could they have the right to charge people fishing in the waters, since it's only the land itself that counted and the Libertarians weren't setting up homesteads on the water. Ngghgh! 
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Jun 9, 2014 01:47
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SedanChair posted:Charles Koch: Baal Heh. You do have a way of getting to the heart of things.
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Jun 10, 2014 19:12
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He was definitely being altruistic: "Personal hygiene wasn’t her strong suit. In fact, during the years of his mandated bi-weekly Rand-banging, Nathaniel Branden pleaded with his wife Barbara to discreetly ask Rand to bathe more frequently." Miss Rand, a rational integration of the evidence of my senses has produced the objective conclusion that you have rank pussy. And as every is implies an ought, I ask that you reach your full potential as woman qua woman by obtaining the rational life-affirming value of a loving shower. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 22:41
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The Mutato posted:Why do you think every single DRO is going to give you lovely offers? No one is going to sign up to a DRO that gives you service and uses ridiculous courts that rule in ways most people disagree with. In your case of a DRO raiding your home, there are lots of things that prevent that, such as a bunch of courts and the DRO's reputation. Why did it take an act of congress to get employers to stop locking the exits of firetrap factories, when surely it was in a worker's best interest not to work in a deathtrap. Why weren't they inundated with better offers from other employers? Sure wealthy people would be able to afford premium treatment or their own private armies, but what about the poor? What's more cost-effective for investigation: respecting privacy, getting warrants, and adhering to Bill of Rights protections? Or is it cheaper to require subscribers of basic service to install cameras in their homes and allow DRO police to dig through their poo poo whenever? And remember that poor neighborhoods have higher crime rates, so they're already going to be paying a premium for protection and have basically no ability to renegotiate their contracts because the alternative is death. If I'm a DRO, it's in my self-interest to collaborate with other DRO's to keep prices high and costs low with a cartel agreement and work together to push out newcomers rather than to engage in profitability-destroying competition. And the barriers to newcomers are pretty high, since only having a recognized DRO will allow you to engage in commerce, so as the established DRO I can threaten to cancel coverage to any business that accepts upstart WhiteKnightDRO. And what about employers who make signing on with the company DRO a requirement of the job? The choice of either society-enforced starvation or letting your boss come into your house and toss your bunk whenever doesn't sound like a free society to me: and keep in mind that mandatory employer home inspections actually happened and were entirely legal because the employees were only renting factory-owned quarters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman#Pullman_company_town posted:Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open discussion. His inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate workers' leases on ten days' notice. The church stood empty since no approved denomination would pay rent, and no other congregation was allowed. He prohibited private charitable organizations. In 1885 Richard Ely wrote in Harper's Weekly that the power exercised by Otto Von Bismarck (known as the unifier of modern Germany), was "utterly insignificant when compared with the ruling authority of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman." The Mutato posted:This is the cost of mental ill people. This cost already exists. If no one else wants to pay it you can either pay it yourself, or convince other people that they should pay it. Since the people are already voting for a government that helps out these people via their tax money, why wouldn't they want to help them out? "Everyone already votes for a government that funds the fire department through taxation, so why wouldn't they want to pay for it voluntarily?" *Watches Chicago burn to cinders again* "Huh, that was weird, I guess everyone must have made a rational decision to perish in a city-wide conflagration, all hail the free market!" VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 16:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:Again, consult the census data for the relevant times, see historical maps, and keep in mind what transport people had actual access to. The density map was just an illustration of general settlement patterns. Your local university or county library system probably has the appropriate historic maps. Haha. "I don't have to provide any proof and you should just assume I'm right, now please go do the research to prove that I'm right. Research that I've already totally done but don't want to post because that would make you lazy." Do you ever argue in good faith? Like, even just for novelty's sake?
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Aug 18, 2014 17:05
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Tezzor posted:The real-life court civil court system has already been almost completely sidestepped in all matters of people v. business cases into arbitration, which are basically privatized courts. Arbiters find in favor of the large business interest upwards of 92% of the time. Let me add that this is in a world where refusing to deal with businesses with a mandatory arbitration agreement means that you only face the inconvenience of not having access to things like credit cards. But I'm sure that a world where not signing such agreements is met with instant eviction, a total bar to obtaining food and water, and an announcement to all that you and your property are unprotected and you may be looted, beaten, raped, enslaved, or murdered without retribution will shift the balance of power in arbitration agreements toward the consumer!  Oh and let's not forget that if you walk away from whatever deal your DRO is offering you, the first thing they do is go tell your spouse to divorce you right then, take the kids, get in their van, and start a new life somewhere else and never talk to you again or face the same death sentence as you*. Surely a company that can take your family away from you for pissing them off wouldn't have an unfair bargaining advantage! *And this isn't even a strawman: Molyneux touts giving the mafia free rein to use the threat of breaking up families as a lever in contract negotiations as a positive feature of his ideal society. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 17:44
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Nintendo Kid posted:Sorry, everything you posted indicates it still takes days for most people in the time period to be able to get mail and get home. This is irrelevant. The question is whether those routes were profitable on their own or whether their operations were subsidized by more profitable routes back east. It doesn't matter how often farmers in the Nebraska Territory actually checked their mail. They weren't self-sufficient islands: they had to go into town to sell their produce and to pick up supplies (tools, cloth, bullets, gunpowder, tobacco, etc) that they didn't make themselves. Mail was one of those supplies, and the ability of frontiersmen to place mail orders, obtain credit, pay debts, etc was pretty crucial to their livelihoods and to development on the frontier. Which is why the Constitution enumerated establishing a post office as a congressional power, and why the government shut down people who tried to undercut the USPS in the big cities and therefore interfere with the government's ability to provide essential infrastructure to the developing territories. Are you arguing that rural routes weren't subsidized by urban routes? Or are you arguing that despite the dependence of frontiersmen on goods delivered from back east, somehow most people didn't actually bother to use the postal service and goods and credit just kind of showed up somehow when they needed them? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 18:29
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EvanSchenck posted:Speaking of DROs, I had a question. If a particular DRO was more economically successful and grew to become larger than its competitors, what incentive would it have to continue negotiating fairly with other, smaller DROs in incidents involving its clients? The same way that private industry was so good at eliminating workplace injuries, closing down dangerous factories, and mandating things like emergency fire exits. Employers who operated factories with dangerous working conditions found that they could no longer attract employees because more conscientious competitors sprang up and lured away all of their workers by promising things like basic safety precautions and "not locking workers in firetraps 12 hours a day".
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Aug 18, 2014 19:47
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800peepee51doodoo posted:So I'd never actually thought about this too much before but doesn't the NAP basically destroy the concept of private property? Like, if the one rule is that you can't initiate force, how exactly would you be able to kick people off your land if they are just peacefully hanging out? Because ancaps redefine force to mean conversion of property and only that. Remember, there are no human rights in ancap-world, only property rights. It is de facto legal to rape or murder homeless people or orphans for fun, because as moneyless beings they have no right to protection, and the only response ancaps have to this horror is that such crimes wouldn't happen because it would hurt the prep's reputation. As if (1) there's anyone in libertopia who would bother investigating dead vagrants for free, and (2) if reputation were a reliable deterrent to criminals then why do DROs even have a market for their police services?
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Aug 19, 2014 05:16
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The Mutato posted:Not what I said. I said that if a certain group people were worse off, then it is because people simply don't care enough. I still believe that people in general would be better off, and not just people are already well off. I'm still kind of wondering what happens to orphans, to the homeless, to those bankrupted by unexpected events like illness or natural disaster, to the mentally ill, to the handicapped, and basically to anyone else who either cannot afford to or is not mentally competent to sign a contract with a DRO. Because it sounds like it'd be de facto legal to rob, beat, or kill them and no one will protect their lives or property or investigate crimes against them; and I'm really wondering what the Libertarian answer to prevent that is or why I should support a society like that where orphans are free game for rapists and murders, thanks!
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Aug 19, 2014 15:16
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EvanSchenck posted:edit- to clarify you're right that you could murder all those people and get away with it, I'm just saying that I think the answer is yet another return to the universal answer of "everybody else would spontaneously and voluntarily ostracize people who murdered the helpless because that's transgression against the moral imperative of nonaggression" Yeah I get that that's their answer, but (even ignoring the massive counterexample of all human history where tons of people do business with criminals, join the mafia, support the KKK, etc), it still raises the question: if ostracism and reputation are such ironclad guarantors of nonaggression, why is there even a market for the policing and enforcement functions of DROs? Who would pay for police protection when apparently everyone is too conscious of getting bad Yelp reviews to dare commit a crime? Heck, the crime doesn't even have involve malice aforethought. I drive drunk and hit a homeless guy. I guess I can just drive off and never worry about it again! Or if I'm really afraid that he could go get DRO coverage on a contingency basis to sue me, I could just whip out my smartphone, use reverse image search to confirm that he's on the DROs' public list of non-covered unpersons, then back my car over him a few times to make sure. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 17:07
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Could you give me the an-cap answer to the criticism that their ideal society is one which makes it de facto legal to rob, beat, or murder anyone too poor or mentally ill to afford DRO protection? Because it kinda seems that that would be a bad society, and it also heavily implies that in Libertarian morality human rights don't exist and only property rights do since the system is set up such that already owning property is a prerequisite to actually having a right to live free from coercion and keep the products of your labor.
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Aug 19, 2014 19:27
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zamin posted:This is basically it, and was stated quite openly by Romney and his "they can just borrow money from their parents". Excuse me, the Romneys know what it's like to live in poverty Ann Romney posted:They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting. Oh also this: Ann Romney posted:“Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but here, rents were $400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent. Mitt saw that the Boston market was behind Chicago, LA and New York. We stayed there seven years and sold it for $90,000, so we not only stayed for free, we made money. As I said, Mitt’s very bright. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 22:04
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SyHopeful posted:I was just reminded that this exists:  
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Aug 28, 2014 21:54
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SedanChair posted:Libertarians, from jrodefeld on down, sure spend a lot of time accusing others of having poor reading comprehension. However, as a counterpoint to their own accusations, they themselves have become libertarians. So how good can their reading comprehension be? This is only mysterious if you don't consider "Free Markets" to be an all-problem-solving magic charm. If you persist in pointing out obvious consequences of their ideas, Libertarians assume that you can't read because they said "Free Market" so any problems you mention after that must be your failure to notice it. Hence: "Wanting to repeal the Civil Rights Act isn't enabling racism because racism can't exist in a free market, why is your reading comprehension so poor?" "Why do you think I'm anti-science just because I want to abolish all research funding? I said the free market will take care of it, can't you read?" "DROs aren't the mafia because a mafia would get ostracized in a free market." etc, etc. Ronald_Raygun posted:Universities, research trusts, and not-for-profit institutions already do exist in more than sufficient quantities. Goddamned huge quantities. What are you trying to say? Oh is this the part we completely forget about facts and imagine university research budgets don't critically depend on NSF grants? Okay. Hay guyz, we don't need welfare for the poor, look how easy a time the poor have getting food stamps on the Free Market! Since the market has provided so well, we can just eliminate useless SNAP expenditures! 
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Sep 4, 2014 18:45
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Ronald_Raygun posted:It's pretty evident that you're itching to make this argument but please, at least try and quote a semi-relevant post next time. Did you even read the context my post was made in? The user I was quoting said that the number of universities was insufficient, when in fact it's quite the opposite. He was talking about the amount of basic scientific research done with private funding, and you submitted universities: who depend on public funding for their research, so maybe you're just confused about what is being discussed here. Ronald_Raygun posted:"More education" isn't a panacea for every social issue - especially not when excess investment in public universities can trigger an economic butterfly effect (a la the Keynesian multiplier) that, among other things, can increase the risk of inflation and gently caress up the current account-exchange rate complex. I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Obviously education isn't a panacea because there's no such thing as a panacea...so what? You know what else isn't a panacea? Everything we do. But I'm excited to hear your explanation for why the public school system is bad for the economy. Ronald_Raygun posted:I didn't mention a goddamn thing about the poor, or food stamps, so you're projecting your argument at the wrong guy, bud - I'm not even a libertarian. I was making fun of you because you were engaging in the adorable libertarian tendency to use something that is only made possible by government as an example of the "free market" providing. Saying "universities prove that the free market will fund basic research" is exactly as dumb as saying "the internet proves the free market will build infrastructure" or "food stamps prove the free market will end hunger in America".
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Sep 5, 2014 01:35
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Hodgepodge posted:If only it were possible to form a legal body capable of holding people accountable for fraud. Oh well! And give up the honor of being scammed alongside the best businessmen in the world?! quote:I suppose there is some comfort in being fleeced in good company, in being in the company of some of the smartest businessmen in the movement. Being a good libertarian is proof of being the smartest and bestest at business, so if libertarian businessmen were scammed then the fraud was so good, nobody could have seen it coming. Oh, literally everyone did? Well that's just coincidence because those statists weren't smart enough to believe that Chile is totally down to sell off its sovereign territory to a few hundred white people wanting to start a new country.
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Sep 17, 2014 19:33
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All right, jrodefeld, explain the appalling work conditions of the 1900s, like say the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, in which 150 people burned to death because their employers let combustible materials build up and they locked the drat doors from the outside to prevent revenue loss from unauthorized breaks. There's no way those women's labor wasn't worth enough to justify not locking them in a firetrap. There's no way that paying someone to sweep the floor would have bankrupted the company. There's no way those women wanted to be locked in, so by your theories they should have been bid away by any employer willing to shell out the pittance it cost to not make it a deathtrap. The resulting fire safety laws didn't put anyone out of business. That whole situation is impossible according to your theories, could never have happened...but it did! How were employers able to push mortal risks onto their employees to save a pittance for the business? There is no way that was an equitable value-for-value trade, how was it possible? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 05:44
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jrodefeld posted:It is always fallacious to look to the distant past and apply our modern standards for worker safety and living standards to presuppose that modern "Progressive" regulation and minimum wage laws would have improved matters. I don't know the specifics of the case you cited, You don't know the specifics? It's the go-to example for why safety regulations are necessary and spurred major union action for workplace reforms....but okay I provided a link so I'm sure you'll read it instead of making up a bunch of bullshit. jrodefeld posted:but unless the workers explicitly agreed that the doors would be locked, then this was a rights violation and the employers should have been held accountable and charged with murder. If an unexpected fire breaks out in a factory and the workers expect the doors to remain open for them to be able to exit the building and instead they are locked shut by order of the owner, then that is murder clear and simple. Nope, the workers knew the doors were locked during business hours and continued working there voluntarily, they in no way expected them to be unlocked and still agreed to do the job. In fact wikipedia posted:Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits, a common practice used to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and pilferage, many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below. It was in fact, a common practice at the time. Employers should have been competing with each other to offer safer factories because for a tiny expense in shrinkage, they could offer workers their very lives on top of the wages, but this didn't happen. Why? "Ah," you say: jrodefeld posted:The truth is that the working conditions, poverty and child labor (among other similar phenomenon) in the 19th century had far more to do with the constraints of reality placed on an industrial economy still in its infancy. Wrong. This happened in 1911, not in the 19th Century. The constraints of reality did not make "keeping the loving exits unlocked and sweeping up fabric scraps" uneconomical. In fact afterwards: Wikipedia posted:New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer. So don't dodge the issue with this "the economy couldn't handle it, our businesses would fail, for fair Dame Industry could never move forward so cruelly hobbled by fire safety" crap. The cost of fire exits and fire safety was small, it was something businessmen should have been doing anyway to protect their assets, and after it was mandated by law the textile industry in New York continued on just fine. It should have been literally impossible, according to your theories, for owners of firetrap factories to find workers willing to put their lives on the line needlessly, yet they had no shortage of applicants. Please explain, did the women who burned to death just have shorter time-preferences than the owners who couldn't even be assed to safeguard their own capital assets by having the floors swept of fabric every day?
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Sep 30, 2014 12:25
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Voyager I posted:EDIT: here's something I've been thinking about and wondered what the more educated people of the D&D forum could make of it. Under a traditional supply:demand graph, the less I get paid for my labor, the less desirable it would be for me to work. Therefore, decreasing wages should decrease the demand for employment. However, since my needed income is a largely inelastic number, decreasing wages means I actually need to perform more labor to maintain my standard of living, assuming I want to maintain a similar quality of life or am living close enough to subsistence level that I have insignificant further room for downward adjustment. Thus, by reducing wages, employers have actually increased demand for employment and made the labor market more competitive in their favor. Theoretically, this could even turn into a cycle of decreased wages > more hours needed > greater competition > competition drives wages down further > etc. Ah you're thinking of this.  It's called the backward-bending supply curve of labor. Starting at point C, going down the curve, as wage (Y-axis) falls, labor supplied falls too because once their needs are met people would prefer more leisure (or time to do housework, cook meals, let their kids go to school, etc) over working 80 hours a week, but once you hit C', the family is just above subsistence and they start putting in more hours, kids get jobs after school, whatever to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. If wages fall further still, the family is desperate to supply more and more labor (working three jobs, pulling kids out of school to work full time, whatever) until point A, the maximum possible hours the family can supply, at which point they get sick and die and the labor they're willing to supply drops off toward AA. Go the other way from C and as the price of labor increases, the family is willing to supply more until they hit some point D at which they're indifferent to any more, after which the number of hours they're willing to supply drops off again. A high-paid lawyer may bust his rear end 80-hours a week to bring in $500,000, but that doesn't mean he'd be willing to work 100 hours a week for $625,000. Of course, this is completely different to the way Playstations work: if Sony could sell twice as many Playstations as it does now for the same per-unit price, Sony would do it: open new factories, hire extra shifts, whatever. Also unlike a person, Sony would cease supplying Playstations completely if the market price fell below what they cost to produce, rather than continue producing them desperately, and selling them for whatever they can get as the factories slowly fall apart from lack of maintenance. But of course this is expected, since Playstations and people aren't the same thing and only an idiot would blithely assume that they act the same way on the market. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 12:32
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The Mutato posted:Question: what do you suppose would have happened if there was no state to enforce those laws? Would the workers have continued to blindly work in the unsafe factories after such a major, publicised event like that fire happened? Well hmmm, did every garment worker in one of those similar unsafe shops in NYC quit the day after the disaster? No? Well. It's 100 years later and people are still working in collapsing factories in countries where safety laws aren't enforced. In that specific instance, the workers even brought structural problems to the attention of the managers and tried to get the regulators to do something about it, yet they continued to work there anyway because the alternative to maybe dying in a collapse was definitely dying from starvation. So no, they would not blindly work there after the disaster. They would hopelessly work there after the disaster. Stupid questions like this are why Libertarianism has failed on the free market of ideas. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 12:58
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LolitaSama posted:What if both consumer and producer are collaboratively "initiating force" on a third party? For example, forced sex-work where a pimp (the business) provides an underage prostitute to a john (the consumer). The consumer is satisfied and has no reason to revolt against the business, and so the market regulation model you present would fail to regulate an initiation of force on the unwilling underage prostitute. A rational john would not patronize the services of a coerced prostitute because engaging in risky criminal activity with a slaver would violate the john's contract with his DRO and they'd jack his rates or drop him for exposing them to increased liability. Removing or disabling his tie-clip cam would also violate his contract with his DRO, and even to get to the brothel he'd have to travel along some privately-owned road or property which would be constantly monitored by the property owner's DRO. All hail the panopticon, the all-seeing, all-knowing surveillance
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Sep 30, 2014 13:11
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The Mutato posted:Go on strike, form unions, start their own plants. To be fair these options are much less convincing when you are talking about 1911 America or present day Bangladesh/India. A free society that began in a modern developed nation would be incredibly prosperous and workers' labor would be incredibly in demand. My workers are striking for better pay and conditions? Time to call Pinkerton!
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Sep 30, 2014 13:13
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The Mutato posted:Unfortunately the government could pass a law that makes you wear one. The Constitution of the United States posted:Amendment IV Now read your own literature. Stephan Molyneux specifically cited cameras on every piece of private property at all times as the enforcement mechanism that would ensure anyone without DRO coverage is hounded out of every place in society. The Mutato posted:You know, or just put in a fire safety door which is much cheaper than hiring an expensive violent agency. Workers inevitably have other demands too. A fire door won't be the end of it, next you'll have to pay them a fair wage and stop demanding women let you gently caress them in exchange for keeping their jobs. I love how Libertarians claim things that actually happened would never happen. They just don't understand the world at all, it's so cute, like puppies trying to grab a tennis ball that's too big for their mouths 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 13:19
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The Mutato posted:You know, or just put in a fire safety door which is much cheaper than hiring an expensive violent agency. And hey, that's just it, my point. Leaving fire doors unlocked is absurdly cheap and saves hundreds of lives, yet the free market failed to provide incentives even for that. Like holy poo poo. That is a colossal failure.
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Sep 30, 2014 13:30
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spoon0042 posted:Like goddamn, you can't be serious. Man, you don't even have to go to Bangladesh for that. Just a decade of Texas not bothering to enforce common-sense regulations about storing tons of fertilizer and a town gets levelled even though no rational businessman would ever risk his capital assets and the huge liability of turning your plant into a 6 kiloton bomb just waiting to go off. Just kidding, actually the company officers didn't care about liability, because they were woefully underinsured and Texas law doesn't require fertilizer manufacturers to carry any liability insurance at all! How weird, the state completely declined to regulate minimum insurance, and the company didn't bother to get coverage for more than 1% of the damages they did...
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Sep 30, 2014 13:49
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The Mutato posted:Sorry, in a developed country. This has been pretty much what the entire thread's debate has been assuming. Nope, you're moving the goalposts. You claimed fire safety laws weren't necessary in 1911 in the aftermath of the Triangle disaster because The Mutato posted:Question: what do you suppose would have happened if there was no state to enforce those laws? Would the workers have continued to blindly work in the unsafe factories after such a major, publicised event like that fire happened? Nice try. The Mutato posted:there would be room for people to band together and sue companies they believe to be violating their property rights. The Mutato posted:Everyone whose air/water is hosed up by the coal pollution. Wait wait wait. I thought we could only take people's property if we had absolute proof they initiated force against me: jrodefeld posted:To conclude, stolen property should be returned, but those that seek to overturn existed property claims must be expected to provide proof of theft. The Mutato posted:Liability insurance would be necessary in a free society. Sounds more like the failing of a monopolised legal system to me. It's necessary now. I'm sure that in hindsight the owners wish they had had enough insurance to cover their assets, but they didn't get it beforehand. Who enforces this in Libertaria? Business owners are people, people are going to make bad decisions sometimes. Even if the free justice system works perfectly and the owners go to jail after the fact, what good does that do the widow who is entitled to cash compensation for her husband's death that she has no way to collect now that the underinsured business is insolvent and its owners are bankrupt prisoners? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 14:11
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How do I calculate the damages from pollution? Is it on the basis that an unwanted substance is wafting onto my property? Can I sue my neighbor for farting upwind of my yard? Or does there have to be actual damage? If it's damage, can I get an injunction or payout against estimated future damages from the motorists driving by with leaded fuel, or does that smack too much of arbitrary seizure because those damages may never materialize? Do I need to wait until my kid grows up with health problems from lead poisoning before I can sue, and will the owner of the street next to my house help me identify the drivers in the stack of pictures I diligently took of every passing car over the past 18 years so I can name them as defendants? Or should I have thought further ahead and bought a house next to a street whose owner requires auto registration plates for easy identification? Oh yeah, and what if it's determined during the case that my kid's toys contained lead because they relabelled by a dishonest supplier from a cut-rate Chinese factory. Does that destroy my case, or can I add the now-defunct supplier (who was, of course, long-ago ruined by the free market's reaction to his perfidy) to the list of defendants and have the court determine objectively the contribution of each to the levels of lead in my son's tissues. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 14:31
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Rhjamiz posted:What exactly makes Libertarians think that, sans environmental regulation and a strong state to enforce it, that business won't just loving dump their radioactive waste and toxic pig poo poo into the rivers or put lead back into gasoline? What exactly makes them so sure we won't wind up like Beijing or worse, with pollution advisories and smog so thick it disrupts traffic? Lead in gasoline is probably the best example of the unworkability of "just sue the polluters" because the obvious targets (gasoline and automobile manufacturers) aren't the ones actually doing the polluting and suing them for contamination makes as much sense as suing knife manufacturers for stabbings or accidental injuries, but suing the polluters means identifying every motorist who drives by you and going after them in court while having to stay home to continuously add more defendants as people drive through your neighborhood...or the courts have to deal with assigning specific damages in the class action case of Literally Everybody In America v Anyone Who Has Ever Driven A Car.
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Sep 30, 2014 15:14
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Who What Now posted:Necessary how? Why? Who the gently caress is going to take these businesses to task? A rational business would never risk insolvency by underinsuring their capital assets and opening themselves up to liability claims of many times what their business is worth. Oh, they did? Well, sorry about your crippling medical expenses from your injuries and the loss of income from your dead spouse, but your example will prompt others to do a full audit on the books of every company before they buy a bag of fertilizer, so comfort yourself with that thought cuz you ain't getting any money from those bankrupt clowns. Really though, if you didn't insist on opening the West Fertilizer Company's books yourself before living nearby, you have no one to blame but yourself for your misfortunes. A rational consumer would audit every business in town and then sell their house if they determined any one of them couldn't afford to pay out in case of a disaster. 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 15:32
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