How much were the taxes in your country compared to the US? For example in the US, the top rate is 36% and that's only for the very rich, most people pay far less. Did you have a VAT tax in addition to a high income tax? It may be that those services were not cheaper at all, they were just paid for in a different way.
You do not understand liberty if you think that a freedom to punch someone in the face and a freedom to not get punched on the face are basically the same thing, to be traded off against one another. The first involves oppression of someone else's freedom, the second one doesn't. That is the crucial difference.
It is happening right now. If we don't act, we are screwed, the open Internet turns into a series of walled off enclaves, and if you have, say, Comcast, you will not be able to watch movies on the Internet that are not provided by Comcast.
What is happening right now? Can you provide some examples? If Comcast walls off the Internet and you can only access parts provided by Comcast AND Comcast really has monopoly (which it does not right now) then we can talk. It becomes an anti-trust issue which in this case might have some merit because of the government involvement in granting that "monopoly" but even then there will be other options such as wireless access over cellular networks through other companies etc. I don't see that happening right now though so I don't see why is there such rush to regulate..
Without force, the rich could not capture so much wealth without consequences. People would just take that wealth back.
See, this is your problem right there. You actually think that the economy is a zero sum game and if someone has more wealth, that means someone else must have correspondingly less. It is understandable given that we evolved as hunter gatherers and for 99% of our history the economy (consisting of a patch of berries) WAS a zero sum game. We don't do that anymore though. Of course we still use natural resources, but generally we don't pick wealth out of the nature, we produce it. When a person produces something and gets wealthy, that typically means that others have gotten wealthier too (just not as much as he did), not less wealthy. He did not take anything from them, he contributed to them indirectly. There is nothing to take back.
I'd rather have the government organisation. At least nominally it is supposedly working in my interest. Corporations are not even by the letter interested in my well being.
Wow, what kind of crap they teach in schools these days... So by that logic the countries in which the government, while working ever so hard in the interest of the people, organizes the economic activity more (ideally completely, right?) are SO much better off than those countries in which the government stays more or less out of it and there is a market competition of private companies, which do not care for the interests of the people?
You need a very good reason to regulate something (because ALL regulation of people's economic activity interferes with liberty), not a good reason NOT to regulate something. I don't see that very good reason here.
Really? Can you explain that accountability please? Accountability to the same Congress that people like you believe is in the pocket of big corporations? Even a true monopoly (which by the way no company has over Internet access) would not have anything like the same power over you than any government agency does because all government regulation is backed up by physical force which is something that a private company cannot have.
Yeah because if history's taught us anything, it's that the free market really works.
Since a truly free market never existed, we don't know. The history has thought us that more free an economy is the more prosperous it tends to be, while more state involvement usually means trouble. By regulation presumably you mean state regulation of economic activity, rather than providing the general rule of law, property rights, contracts, tort etc which are of course necessary for free market to function.
At any moment TWC could start throttling my connections to netflix, just to get me to buy their cable service.
At any moment TWC could shut down your service altogether, increase the price one hundredfold or only allow you to have Internet on Tuesdays and only while you wear a french maid outfit. Damn, you are right, we really don't have an open Internet!
Not really true. In some areas there is more competition, in others less but most people in the US have several options when it comes to Internet access. I live in a moderately large city and I have 4 ways to get broadband access. I would prefer if there was more competition, sure, but the tradeoff of giving FCC a foothold in regulating the Internet doesn't seem worthwhile to me, especially since the whole throttling business is mostly a hypothetical problem.
You are very naive if you really mean that. AT&T and Comcast are private companies at the mercy of the market and have no power to force you to do anything. You don't depend on their whims in any way. FCC is a government organization with power to regulate the hell out of things that affect you, with a history of censorship and ever expanding mandate over forms of media that were not intended to be regulated by it when it was initially conceived. To quote from the Senate Republicans letter to FCC: "Whether and how the Internet should be regulated is something that America's elected representatives in Congress, not the Commission, should determine."
There is no major reason for security checks if you are flying a small plane by yourself. If you crash it into a building it wouldn't be any worse than crashing a car into it. In commercial flights, you have the potential to kill 100s or 1000s of people if you manage to bring it down, while in a small plane you will most likely only kill yourself.
I don't think Fox News is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative. Sure there is more of a socially conservative/religious bent to most major shows (O'Reilly, Hannity, Becks etc) than libertarians would like but there is also a very strong fiscally conservative/small government bias which should appeal to libertarians. It's more like the Republican party than the Libertarian party. Fox Business News is the most libertarian channel there is though, with Stossel, Napolitano etc.
Well obviously those billions weren't generous enough to keep the site running without asking for more. What Wikipedia needs is to get lucky with a handful of really large donors, who are the kind that usually finances most free public institutions, museums, galleries etc. Universities are in part financed that way too. They might wanna put their name on it through, so it will be known as "Wikipedia courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Scrooge".
The same problem exists with the donations model. How do you know that large donors are not affecting the content? For that matter how do you know that the money they are asking for is even needed? Maybe they received enough already to run the site for a while and now they are pocketing the rest. The trust issue doesn't magically appear only when there is a for-profit (gasp) company involved, in an actual commercial transaction, free from "we do it for the people" bullshit. It exists all the time as long as there are human beings involved.
If your point is that every country is necessarily better of if it was run completely democratically (i.e. by the vote of the majority) Chile is one of the best examples to the contrary. Instead of being the most prosperous and most free country in the Latin America for the last 30 years or so and approaching the living standard of the developed world (after the moderately nasty post coup period in the 70s), without Pinoche and his US backers it would have been another Cuba, which is what Allende was planning together with Castro. Average monthly wage in Chile today: $800. Average monthly wage in Cuba: $20.
Sorry, but the government has no business imposing costs on me in order to protect ME against my will. So the seatbelts and airbags are exactly the bad examples of government overreach that GP should have been talking about and the fact that the government has been doing so for decades is completely irrelevant. Rear view cameras are in the category of protecting OTHERS against my carelessness which is reasonable when it comes to a dangerous activity such as driving a car, as long as: a) it represents a reasonable trade off of cost/safety. There is no limit to how safe you could make a car if the cost is no object but unfortunately it is. b) it does not infringe on my other rights in the name of safety (see TSA for more details) and c) it is not yet another example of government corruption where the maker of a gadget lobbies/bribes politicians to pass laws that make that gadget mandatory.
Wow, people like you are really not worth arguing with, but what the hell. Let me give you a hint: arguing does not consist of googling and copy-and-pasting quotes. Let me repeat my point again because apparently repetition sometimes works with morons who don't get it the first time:
This is what you said in a nutshell:
Adam Smith was in favor of Government doing certain functions: enforcing laws and building roads are the ones you mention. In your quotes there are couple more: collecting taxes with perhaps some degree of progressive taxation, providing basic education etc.
Let me repeat my point again so you get it:
If you read any of the libertarian economists and authors, from Friedman to Hayek to even Mises, you will not find anything that disagrees with the idea that government has important functions to perform, and in fact they list the very same ones above. You apparently cannot understand a simple point: you cannot have liberty for everyone (the main goal of libertarians) without impartial laws and the enforcement of the same and the only way so far found to do that is through the government. In your little black and white world you seem to think that every time you say that the existence of government has some useful purpose, you score a point against libertarians. You don't.
Here is a nice breakdown of the functions of the government libertarians would keep and which ones they would toss (I would recommend Friedman's books Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom but I think a video is more appropriate in your case): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw
Please read my post again and then tell me what part of it is not correct. I am not going to go through your quotes but let me just say that most of them either confirm what I said or are irrelevant. A society built on principles described in the Wealth Of Nations (no, you don't know that I haven't read it but I know that you haven't) would essentially have a laissez-faire capitalist free-market economy, a far cry from the mixed economy we have in the US.
Adam Smith believed that government regulations were absolutely vital to the functioning of a free market, that government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law, build roads and infrastructure,....Adam Smith WAS NOT a libertarian.
Your conclusion does not follow from what you said before it. All libertarians don't agree on everything but in general most will agree that the government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law (and laws in general) and more or less build roads and infrastructure (where it is impossible or hopelessly impractical for private sector to do the same). Those things are a tiny fraction of what the government does though. Adam Smith wouldn't like any of the entitlements (70%) of the budget, he wouldn't like the myriad of inane legislation such as regulating the sound of commercials, he wouldn't like the US tax code (all 6 million words of it) one bit, he wouldn't approve of ridiculous amount of health and safety and other business regulations lobbied for by the big businesses in order to present an artificial barrier to entry for small businesses, he would abolish the FDA, and he wouldn't nationalize the health care or regulate the Internet. So, no, Adam Smith would not support everything the government is doing in the economic sphere.
because people would go to a source without that commercial or without any commercials at all
They can: they can pay for channels without commercials. Oh, you expect free market to provide magic option as well: people who spend their own money to make television programs without any source of income at all?
Talk about missing the point. Free market capitalism assumes people WOULD be "greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and fuck everybody else." and that's ok because the only way they can satisfy that greed and selfishnes is by providing something in return, at least in a society with the rule of law which is required for capitalism to work. The only alternative to let people act in their own self-interest is to force them physically to act in some other way, i.e the way someone else (those in power) think they should act, which not only deprives them of liberty (see gulags) but also tends to produce economic disasters (see famines in almost all socialist economies).
Obligatory note for idiots who think that what I'm talking about is not socialism but communism: Socialism is an economic system in which the government owns the means of production. It has only ever been implemented in communist countries.
You said that Democrat voters subside Republican voters because "blue" states subsidize the "red" states (i.e. dumb hicks who according to you are the Republican base). You additionally said that Democrat voters are more educated. I replied by demonstrating that neither of those statements are true. On the contrary, the more educated and more affluent the voters the more likely they are to vote Republican. "Even" in California, those with no college education, are most likely to vote Democrat. Those with college education are more or less evenly split (slight edge to Democrats but then this is one of the most liberal states so that's expected). Those with income under 30K are voting Democrat by 51-39 margin, those with 50-100K are again more evenly split (though again small edge to D) etc. The whole point is that while the blue states might be subsidizing the red states, it is not true that Democrat voters are subsidizing the Republican voters. Forgetting about the California for a second, if you look at the same stats nationally you will find that the opposite is true: Republican voters are more educated, more productive, higher earning and pay far more in taxes than Democrat voters, so the truth is the opposite from what you said.
Slashdot Mirror
How much were the taxes in your country compared to the US? For example in the US, the top rate is 36% and that's only for the very rich, most people pay far less. Did you have a VAT tax in addition to a high income tax? It may be that those services were not cheaper at all, they were just paid for in a different way.
You do not understand liberty if you think that a freedom to punch someone in the face and a freedom to not get punched on the face are basically the same thing, to be traded off against one another. The first involves oppression of someone else's freedom, the second one doesn't. That is the crucial difference.
It is happening right now. If we don't act, we are screwed, the open Internet turns into a series of walled off enclaves, and if you have, say, Comcast, you will not be able to watch movies on the Internet that are not provided by Comcast.
What is happening right now? Can you provide some examples? If Comcast walls off the Internet and you can only access parts provided by Comcast AND Comcast really has monopoly (which it does not right now) then we can talk. It becomes an anti-trust issue which in this case might have some merit because of the government involvement in granting that "monopoly" but even then there will be other options such as wireless access over cellular networks through other companies etc. I don't see that happening right now though so I don't see why is there such rush to regulate..
Private companies use force all the time.
Really? Can you provide an example?
Without force, the rich could not capture so much wealth without consequences. People would just take that wealth back.
See, this is your problem right there. You actually think that the economy is a zero sum game and if someone has more wealth, that means someone else must have correspondingly less. It is understandable given that we evolved as hunter gatherers and for 99% of our history the economy (consisting of a patch of berries) WAS a zero sum game. We don't do that anymore though. Of course we still use natural resources, but generally we don't pick wealth out of the nature, we produce it. When a person produces something and gets wealthy, that typically means that others have gotten wealthier too (just not as much as he did), not less wealthy. He did not take anything from them, he contributed to them indirectly. There is nothing to take back.
I'd rather have the government organisation. At least nominally it is supposedly working in my interest. Corporations are not even by the letter interested in my well being.
Wow, what kind of crap they teach in schools these days... So by that logic the countries in which the government, while working ever so hard in the interest of the people, organizes the economic activity more (ideally completely, right?) are SO much better off than those countries in which the government stays more or less out of it and there is a market competition of private companies, which do not care for the interests of the people?
Why are you scared of the FCC?
You need a very good reason to regulate something (because ALL regulation of people's economic activity interferes with liberty), not a good reason NOT to regulate something. I don't see that very good reason here.
at least the FCC has accountability.
Really? Can you explain that accountability please? Accountability to the same Congress that people like you believe is in the pocket of big corporations? Even a true monopoly (which by the way no company has over Internet access) would not have anything like the same power over you than any government agency does because all government regulation is backed up by physical force which is something that a private company cannot have.
Yeah because if history's taught us anything, it's that the free market really works.
Since a truly free market never existed, we don't know. The history has thought us that more free an economy is the more prosperous it tends to be, while more state involvement usually means trouble. By regulation presumably you mean state regulation of economic activity, rather than providing the general rule of law, property rights, contracts, tort etc which are of course necessary for free market to function.
At any moment TWC could start throttling my connections to netflix, just to get me to buy their cable service.
At any moment TWC could shut down your service altogether, increase the price one hundredfold or only allow you to have Internet on Tuesdays and only while you wear a french maid outfit. Damn, you are right, we really don't have an open Internet!
Not really true. In some areas there is more competition, in others less but most people in the US have several options when it comes to Internet access. I live in a moderately large city and I have 4 ways to get broadband access. I would prefer if there was more competition, sure, but the tradeoff of giving FCC a foothold in regulating the Internet doesn't seem worthwhile to me, especially since the whole throttling business is mostly a hypothetical problem.
You are very naive if you really mean that. AT&T and Comcast are private companies at the mercy of the market and have no power to force you to do anything. You don't depend on their whims in any way. FCC is a government organization with power to regulate the hell out of things that affect you, with a history of censorship and ever expanding mandate over forms of media that were not intended to be regulated by it when it was initially conceived. To quote from the Senate Republicans letter to FCC: "Whether and how the Internet should be regulated is something that America's elected representatives in Congress, not the Commission, should determine."
There is no major reason for security checks if you are flying a small plane by yourself. If you crash it into a building it wouldn't be any worse than crashing a car into it. In commercial flights, you have the potential to kill 100s or 1000s of people if you manage to bring it down, while in a small plane you will most likely only kill yourself.
I don't think Fox News is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative. Sure there is more of a socially conservative/religious bent to most major shows (O'Reilly, Hannity, Becks etc) than libertarians would like but there is also a very strong fiscally conservative/small government bias which should appeal to libertarians. It's more like the Republican party than the Libertarian party. Fox Business News is the most libertarian channel there is though, with Stossel, Napolitano etc.
Well obviously those billions weren't generous enough to keep the site running without asking for more. What Wikipedia needs is to get lucky with a handful of really large donors, who are the kind that usually finances most free public institutions, museums, galleries etc. Universities are in part financed that way too. They might wanna put their name on it through, so it will be known as "Wikipedia courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Scrooge".
The same problem exists with the donations model. How do you know that large donors are not affecting the content? For that matter how do you know that the money they are asking for is even needed? Maybe they received enough already to run the site for a while and now they are pocketing the rest. The trust issue doesn't magically appear only when there is a for-profit (gasp) company involved, in an actual commercial transaction, free from "we do it for the people" bullshit. It exists all the time as long as there are human beings involved.
Ok, so what are the other options?
If your point is that every country is necessarily better of if it was run completely democratically (i.e. by the vote of the majority) Chile is one of the best examples to the contrary. Instead of being the most prosperous and most free country in the Latin America for the last 30 years or so and approaching the living standard of the developed world (after the moderately nasty post coup period in the 70s), without Pinoche and his US backers it would have been another Cuba, which is what Allende was planning together with Castro. Average monthly wage in Chile today: $800. Average monthly wage in Cuba: $20.
Sorry, but the government has no business imposing costs on me in order to protect ME against my will. So the seatbelts and airbags are exactly the bad examples of government overreach that GP should have been talking about and the fact that the government has been doing so for decades is completely irrelevant. Rear view cameras are in the category of protecting OTHERS against my carelessness which is reasonable when it comes to a dangerous activity such as driving a car, as long as: a) it represents a reasonable trade off of cost/safety. There is no limit to how safe you could make a car if the cost is no object but unfortunately it is. b) it does not infringe on my other rights in the name of safety (see TSA for more details) and c) it is not yet another example of government corruption where the maker of a gadget lobbies/bribes politicians to pass laws that make that gadget mandatory.
Wow, people like you are really not worth arguing with, but what the hell. Let me give you a hint: arguing does not consist of googling and copy-and-pasting quotes. Let me repeat my point again because apparently repetition sometimes works with morons who don't get it the first time:
This is what you said in a nutshell:
Adam Smith was in favor of Government doing certain functions: enforcing laws and building roads are the ones you mention. In your quotes there are couple more: collecting taxes with perhaps some degree of progressive taxation, providing basic education etc.
Let me repeat my point again so you get it:
If you read any of the libertarian economists and authors, from Friedman to Hayek to even Mises, you will not find anything that disagrees with the idea that government has important functions to perform, and in fact they list the very same ones above. You apparently cannot understand a simple point: you cannot have liberty for everyone (the main goal of libertarians) without impartial laws and the enforcement of the same and the only way so far found to do that is through the government. In your little black and white world you seem to think that every time you say that the existence of government has some useful purpose, you score a point against libertarians. You don't.
Here is a nice breakdown of the functions of the government libertarians would keep and which ones they would toss (I would recommend Friedman's books Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom but I think a video is more appropriate in your case): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw
Please read my post again and then tell me what part of it is not correct. I am not going to go through your quotes but let me just say that most of them either confirm what I said or are irrelevant. A society built on principles described in the Wealth Of Nations (no, you don't know that I haven't read it but I know that you haven't) would essentially have a laissez-faire capitalist free-market economy, a far cry from the mixed economy we have in the US.
Adam Smith believed that government regulations were absolutely vital to the functioning of a free market, that government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law, build roads and infrastructure, ....Adam Smith WAS NOT a libertarian.
Your conclusion does not follow from what you said before it. All libertarians don't agree on everything but in general most will agree that the government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law (and laws in general) and more or less build roads and infrastructure (where it is impossible or hopelessly impractical for private sector to do the same). Those things are a tiny fraction of what the government does though. Adam Smith wouldn't like any of the entitlements (70%) of the budget, he wouldn't like the myriad of inane legislation such as regulating the sound of commercials, he wouldn't like the US tax code (all 6 million words of it) one bit, he wouldn't approve of ridiculous amount of health and safety and other business regulations lobbied for by the big businesses in order to present an artificial barrier to entry for small businesses, he would abolish the FDA, and he wouldn't nationalize the health care or regulate the Internet. So, no, Adam Smith would not support everything the government is doing in the economic sphere.
because people would go to a source without that commercial or without any commercials at all
They can: they can pay for channels without commercials. Oh, you expect free market to provide magic option as well: people who spend their own money to make television programs without any source of income at all?
Talk about missing the point. Free market capitalism assumes people WOULD be "greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and fuck everybody else." and that's ok because the only way they can satisfy that greed and selfishnes is by providing something in return, at least in a society with the rule of law which is required for capitalism to work. The only alternative to let people act in their own self-interest is to force them physically to act in some other way, i.e the way someone else (those in power) think they should act, which not only deprives them of liberty (see gulags) but also tends to produce economic disasters (see famines in almost all socialist economies).
Obligatory note for idiots who think that what I'm talking about is not socialism but communism: Socialism is an economic system in which the government owns the means of production. It has only ever been implemented in communist countries.
You don't have to make a profit when you are too big to fail and your controlling shareholder is the US government.
It used to be imperialist pigs, now its plutocratic overlords. I love how you can rank how far left the site is by counting the latest buzzword:
The champion (957 results): http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=plutocratic+overlords+site:dailykos.com
HuffPo is surprisingly lagging behind with only 132: http://www.google.com/search?&q=plutocratic+overlords+site:huffingtonpost.com
Perhaps it too is getting taken over by plutocratic overlords?
I hear polonium-210 works better when its stirred into a drink rather than shaken
You said that Democrat voters subside Republican voters because "blue" states subsidize the "red" states (i.e. dumb hicks who according to you are the Republican base). You additionally said that Democrat voters are more educated. I replied by demonstrating that neither of those statements are true. On the contrary, the more educated and more affluent the voters the more likely they are to vote Republican. "Even" in California, those with no college education, are most likely to vote Democrat. Those with college education are more or less evenly split (slight edge to Democrats but then this is one of the most liberal states so that's expected). Those with income under 30K are voting Democrat by 51-39 margin, those with 50-100K are again more evenly split (though again small edge to D) etc. The whole point is that while the blue states might be subsidizing the red states, it is not true that Democrat voters are subsidizing the Republican voters. Forgetting about the California for a second, if you look at the same stats nationally you will find that the opposite is true: Republican voters are more educated, more productive, higher earning and pay far more in taxes than Democrat voters, so the truth is the opposite from what you said.