BigBuckHunter likes little boys. No need for references as this is just a summary and specifics would be too much work. I could give entertaining stories though... like this one. BigBuckHunter's paedophilia is very real, and a naturally occuring thing. It comes. It goes. It has done this since BigBuckHunter's puberty. In the 80's poor dude looked at BigBuckHunter's collection of child porn and FREAKED THE FUCK OUT, CAUSE HOLLY SHIT, THERE'S A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF NAKED YOUNG BOYS ON HIS COMPUTER. Now, I don't blame the guy, cause we all would have done pretty much the same thing.
That's the problem with anecdotes. Any wingnut can claim just about anything, and no one has any way of verifying the claims. My anecdote is just as truthy as yours. Hope that helps explain why, without references, your stories mean absolutely nothing.
Who the hell checks themselves into a rehab center for World of Warcraft? WoW is not a drug. I used to suck dick for coke. You ever suck dick for WoW? NO! I didn't think so.
Yes, well, the two competing theories presented in that piece are the one that I presented, and a slightly modified version in which several periods of uplift and erosion take place. In this scenario, several different rivers did the eroding and the current day Colorado simply flows through the older river channels. Your out-of-context quotes notwithstanding, the article presents no serious challenges to accepted theory, merely slight revisions.
Very different from "The Grand Canyon was blasted into the Earth's surface by giant space-lightning." Not to insult your beliefs, but I have investigated the whole Electric Universe thing and it makes no sense whatsoever. It's predictions have been shown to be incorrect time and time again. Like most crackpot theories, it simply dismisses all contrary evidence as being the work of some vast conspiracy designed to keep down the truth. It is not science and it is not interesting.
I just had to respond to one of the many errors in this post. The Kaibab upwarp did not exist when the Colorado river first started flowing over the area. The upwarp happened gradually and as the land rose, the river stayed at about the same height, gradually cutting a channel into the rising land.
I certainly hope whoever modded this "insightful" was doing it out of some misguided idea that I needed more karma. The idea of some slashdot moderator sitting down and thinking, "You know, he's right! I probably SHOULDN'T suck the juice out of thermometers," while not actually outlandish given my perception of the IQ of the average/. mod, certainly gives me a moment's pause.
Well, with that said, here's some more insightful advice:
You probably shouldn't eat broken glass. Fire is hot! Best not touch it... Attempting to breath underwater without the aid of SCUBA gear can be dangerous. If a woman asks you if something makes her look fat, say no.
And of course:
Do not taunt happy fun ball!
There, if my last comment is any guide, that should get me A +5 insightful.
Funny, but on a more serious note, anyone who has read The Wealth of Nations knows that Adam Smith believed that free markets needed external regulation and order in order to remain free. Was he right? Who knows, but I'd like to see libertarian types stop using him as an example of someone who thought the free market needs no regulation.
Is this offtopic? Who knows, but I'll probably get modded offtopic anyway.
Freedom is something that must be agreed upon and enforced by the people. One man's freedom is another man's burden. I, for instance, can see no justification for the taking of private real property, and in fact consider it an infringement on my rights for someone else to unilaterally fence off a piece of property that I could have used and call it their own. It's limiting my freedom, and what do I get out of it? I get nothing from the deal unless I am also a property owner (and saying "We all own ourselves" is just pointless. What good is owning yourself if someone else owns all the means of survival?)
This is what Proudhon meant by "Property is theft." One must mingle one's effort with something to call it one's own, but one must own property before one can legitimately work it. I can see no rational justification for owning natural resources. When Proudhon said "Property is impossible" he meant it is impossible to come up with a moral justification for it, but you are right that he said that it is also the basis of liberty, in that unless one owns the means of survival, one can not be free.
But now I digress. Back to natural monopolies. You don't get the concept at all. The idea is that there are some things where it is just plain inefficient to have more than one seller or producer or product. What is the utility of having multiple competing roads, necessarily stacked one on top of the other because where else would you put them, leading from all possible points to all destinations? Same goes for sewers, water, end electric lines. It is just more efficient to have one supplier. Therefore it is not efficient to have a market, and that one supplier can not be regulated by market forces so they must be regulated by external means.
Are you against the idea of mandatory labelling? Truth in advertising? Personally, I see those as examples of agression and I see no moral problem with pre-empting things like that through laws and enforcement. I certainly think that solution is more conducive towards actual justice than having to sue every time you are wronged.
The problem with externalities is best explained by explaining the purpose of the free market in terms of Pareto efficiency. Given a set of people and a set of allocations of resources, a move to a different set of allocations is considered a Pareto optimization if at least one person is better off and no one is worse off. The free market is a generally very effective means of performing Pareto optimizations. There are certain times when it is not, and some other more effective method needs to be used.
In the case of externalities such as education, the free market does not do a good job of allocating resources. This is because no one can charge for education what it is worth, so fewer sellers will enter the market than is optimal. The resources society allocates to education will be less than optimal under a free market solution because of the externality.
In fact, there is a system that can do better than the free market in this case, and we are using it. I have watched the coming of the free market charter schools and I have been completely underwhelmed by their performance. I have read of one after another failing to live up to their promises.
Libertarianism is so alluring because it promises an easy, sound-bite answer to any problem: the free market. I really wish the answer to the problems of the world was that simple, but it isn't. Different problems call for different solutions and the free market is not a solution to everything.
Personally, I don't believe in the use of force except to deter aggression, and that aggression must be pretty forceful and clear cut. None of this, "Well, they might be a danger so let's pre-emptively defend ourselves." But I do believe in withdrawal of the rewards of being a member of society if one is not willing to live by that societies rules.
If we, as a people, decide that you can not burn trash and pollute
I suppose so. I'm just so used to taking food out of the oven before the thermometer says it's done, it seemed like the same thing must be going on in a microwave. A whole chicken or small roast may rise 5 degrees, while something like a turkey will rise 15 degrees after taking it out of the oven.
I say a free market needs regulation in order to be free, you say a free market needs some way to deal with externalities to be free. So cool, we agree! A free market needs regulation.
You try to dismiss natural monopolies, which is a common tactic amongst libertarian debaters. However, you don't present a strong argument. The bit about roads is particularly weak. Although you may have more than one route between two endpoints, at each of those endpoints there is only one choice. Unless you live on a corner, I suppose. The real definition of a natural monopoly has to do with the marginal cost of entry into a market, wikipedia has a good intro but I'm rather beginning to suspect you aren't so uneducated in economics as to need that. Sorry if I came across as condescending, but most libertarians I've debated have learned all they know of economics from places like the Mises Institute and therefore need a primer on what is considered mainstream economics.
The fact is, the second road, sewer or electric line to a building is simply not going to get made because total social cost of having two or more competing instances of these things is higher than if there were only one. Please read the wikipedia article if you still do not understand how these things are natural monopolies or how cases of natural monopoly are not efficiently handled by market forces.
As for imbalance of information, it is why we have things like truth in advertising laws, which are regulatory in nature. In an ideal libertarian world, from what I have seen, cases such as mislabelling of products would be handled by legal means, if the victim had the resources to pay and otherwise not at all. There is no room for any protective legislation in a libertarian ideal, and no access to justice except for the rich.
I realize I should have said "education" and not "public education" after reading your reply. The market can not fairly compensate any providers of education for their services, because much of the value of an educated populace accrues to the society as a whole. Would you rather live in a well educated or poorly educated society? Would you fork over some money to a seller of education for educating others in order to rectify this imbalance?
I need to wrap this up as I have to go pick up my wife from work, but I will leave you with this thought. You and I are both anarchists. We both abhor the use of force or coercion in political and economic systems. We both, for the most part, dislike the very idea of a state. The thing we differ on, really, is property. Libertarians are more properly "Propertarians" or protectors of property rights. I see property as theft. All taking of property precedes work on that property and is thus not justified by any first principles. Fencing off land is initiation of force, which is just as bad when an individual does it as when a state does.
I also happen to think that the free market needs a little help, and that in three specific areas needs to be protected from exploitation by the power hungry. It is no magic system that is impervious to being exploited. One just needs to focus on where it fails and regulate only in those areas.
Of course, one needs to regulate without using force, and one needs to figure out a way to keep ones regulating from itself being exploited. I'm still working on that...;)
We are fighting militant extremists. What does it matter what religion they are? Are you saying that Islam necessarily breeds militant extremism? More so than other religions? When many people claim we are fighting "crazy Muslims" what they are really saying is that all Muslims are crazy, and it is this kind of thinking that many liberal "PC" types have a problem with.
Fundamentalists are the same the world over. The PC fundamentalists suck just as bad as any other kind. But just as one Muslim or Christian fundamentalist does not make all Muslims or Christians fundamentalists, the fact that some advocates of political correctness are fundamentalist does not make all advocates of political correctness fundamentalists. Nor does it mean everything the PC types say is full of shit. When someone says that we are fighting crazy Muslims and they really (wink, wink, nudge nudge) are saying that all Muslims are crazy, I'm going to have to give them a piece of my mind. Just as I would with an Imam who says "death to America"
In the final analysis though, the fact that a fundamentalist who hates America happens to be Muslim has very little bearing on the problem.
Freedom is a funny concept. You can't have freedom without giving up some other freedom. Freedom isn't free, and not just in the sense that it takes effort. Want to be free from violence? You need to give up violence. Want to be free to own property? You must give up your freedom to go wherever you want. Want a free market? You have to give up the idea that you can make any transction you want to.
Roads are a natural monopoly. So are sewers, water mains, and electricit delivered through wires. Sure, the free markets may come up with replacements to those like they came up with railroads as a replacement for the natural monopoly of canals. But those canals were a monopoly for centuries. There are plenty of natural monopolies and they tend to last a long time, as anyone who has one can use the power and money that come with it to squash innovation that would threaten them.
I don't think you understand what imbalance of information is about. The most famous paper on the subject is titled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" and it basically states that used cars can not receive a fair price in the free market because buyers must assume the seller is lying about the quality, and they must therefore bid less than they think the car is worth. This drives the sellers of higher quality used cars out of the market excacerbating the problem. Certainly any system can suffer from an imbalance of information, but this particular problem is unique to the free market.
How do free markets deal with externalities at all? This statement illustrates the crux of your argument, which to me looks a lot like "I don't want to believe what you say, so I'm just going to contradict it without any sort of evidence." Again, how can the free market possibly deal with externalities? Goods or bads. How does the free market fairly compensate the provider of public education when said education benefits society as a whole more than the individual? How does it deal with the public bad of polution? Real world examples, please. I already know that everything just works perfectly in Libertopia, I've heard that from libertarians for over a decade, but I'd like some actual examples, not how it should work if only we all converted to libertarianism.
To say that all systems are effected by externalities just shows that you don't understand the concept. It is a market based concept. An externality is some good or bad effect whose benefit or cost is not covered in a particular market transaction. The definition of externality is based on market transactions. You can certainly use the word however you like, but then you aren't speaking the same language as everyone else and you aren't saying anything useful.
The fact is that more resources have been squandered by private owners than collective management. Private owners can squander a resource, take the profit, and use it to buy up another resource to squander. Collectives can't do the same thing. You claim that collective ownership and management of resources doesn't work. Examples? I can show you plenty of cooperatives and collectives in the US and abroad that prove you wrong. Look up the Mondragon Collective for a start.
If all I own is myself, and someone owns all the land that I could use to provide sustenance, am I free or a slave? Again, you just state things without explaining the specifics. It is as if you don't understand the implications of your ideology and are just parroting back a party line without even comprehending it. How, specifically, does the fact that I own myself preclude someone owning all the resources in the world and demanding that I do whatever they say in order to live?
How does your system prevent the accumulation of money and power, given that the more you have, the easier it is to get? How is the use of private power such as the power to keep people off your land any different than state power? You know, I can claim that kicking you
Hey, mod this down too, assholes. I have more karma than I can possibly burn through. That's the libertarian way: stifle any dissent and call it a consensus. You obviously can not refute anything I have to say, and are so scared of other people reading it and understanding what a crock of shit your failed iddeology is that you must mod me down.
Well, I have made tons of anti-libertarian posts for the last ten years on Slashdot and for the most part they get modded up because most sensible people can see how ludicrous libertarianism is. I will continue to make anti-libertarian posts and get modded up for them. Try as you might, you can't make black into white and you can't make libertarianism into something sensible, logical, or workable.
Why is libertarianism the only political ideology that has never been tried in the real world? Two reasons: first, libertarians are all such selfish assholes that you could never get a group of them to agree on what libertarianism is, let alone put it into practice. Second, libertarians know that as long as libertarianism remains purely theoretical, they can go on being theoretically right. As soon as it was put into practice, the world would see it as the failure it is and libertarians would have to shut the fuck up.
Please point out one place in America where some Imam has given any sort of weekly sermon entitled "Democracy is Unislamic" or "Death to America." For extra credit, point out one time when any American has ever felt rude telling anyone preaching any such rubbish that it is toxic, malicious buffoonery.
I completely agree with your main point, which as I see it is that we should publicly condemn outrageous speech, not ban it. But this somewhat histrionic right wing fear that American political correctness has brought us to a place where we can not publicly criticize the outrageous is so overblown as to be damaging to your case.
Food does not get hotter after coming out of a microwave. Where are you getting that info? The interior of a large piece of food will continue to get hotter, sure. But that happens with a regular oven. The outside is hotter and the heat moves into the interior, nothing mysterious. Where do you get the idea that food coming out of a microwave gets hotter in some different way than food coming out of another type of cooking appliance?
I agree with you about the specific ways in which conservative ideals have not been followed. But there are specific ways in which the Communist ideology was never followed, either. For instance, Communism was always meant to be a crutch, a transition from Capitalism to Anarchy. But all "communist" regimes that have ever existed pretty much started killing all the anarchists within a year or three of foundation.
Libertarianism is flawed in several major ways. First, the free market isn't free. Even Adam Smith knew that. Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that the founder of modern capitalism knew that free markets needed regulation to stay free. The free market has three major failure modes: Natural monopoly, where the marginal cost of entry into a market is so great it precludes competition; imbalance of information, where one party knows more about the value of a transaction than the other, causing inefficient pricing; and externalities where the true cost or benefit of a transaction is not covered in the market price.
Without regulation, smart players will use these modes of failure to game the free market system and gain unfair advantage. This advantage then snowballs, giving these unscurpulous players even more power with which to game the system. Regulation addresses these areas where the free market would fail if kept strictly free.
The second area where libertarianism fails is in the ownership of natural resources. One can only fairly own what one has worked on, yet in order to work land one must own it. People unfairly fence off land and then work it, using their work to justify the fencing off which occured before the work. Anytime you take a natural resource, you are initiating force against the rest of the world who could have shared in the benefits of that resource before you took it for yourself.Don't worry about the false "Tragedy of the Commons" either. Any managed resource is safe from that tragedy, whether it is privately or publicly managed.
Finally, the end result of Libertarianism is Feudalism or slavery. When all the resources of the world are owned, any non-owners must be slaves to any owners just to survive. And under Libertarianism, this situation is gauranteed to occur. The more money and resources one has, the easier it is to game the system and acquire yet more money and resources. There are no checks and balances to keep this accumulation from happening.
Conservatism is a failed ideology which has joined communism in the trash heap of history.
I hope you're not basing this claim on the past 6 years, because in the past 6 years there wasn't much conservatism going on.
That's why it's a failed ideology. Note that defenders of communism similarly claim that communism never failed as it was never actually tried. If your ideology invariably leads to gross corruptions that themselves fail miserably, your ideology has failed. Make all the excuses and apologies you like, but all that we are now seeing in America is what the conservative ideology necessarily leads to.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a paintball gun and some paintballs filled with glass etching cream
Uh, +5? I don't see a single upmod. What kind of crack are you smoking?
BigBuckHunter likes little boys. No need for references as this is just a summary and specifics would be too much work. I could give entertaining stories though... like this one. BigBuckHunter's paedophilia is very real, and a naturally occuring thing. It comes. It goes. It has done this since BigBuckHunter's puberty. In the 80's poor dude looked at BigBuckHunter's collection of child porn and FREAKED THE FUCK OUT, CAUSE HOLLY SHIT, THERE'S A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF NAKED YOUNG BOYS ON HIS COMPUTER. Now, I don't blame the guy, cause we all would have done pretty much the same thing.
That's the problem with anecdotes. Any wingnut can claim just about anything, and no one has any way of verifying the claims. My anecdote is just as truthy as yours. Hope that helps explain why, without references, your stories mean absolutely nothing.
Why wait when they can dupe?
Just run the edge of the package over a hard sharp edge like a counter or desk and most times the plastic will peel right off.
I suggest a new acronym, along the lines of YHBT. YLTTW: You Let The Terrorists Win. As in YHLTTW, YHL, HAND.
Who the hell checks themselves into a rehab center for World of Warcraft? WoW is not a drug. I used to suck dick for coke. You ever suck dick for WoW? NO! I didn't think so.
Stephen Hawking's theories of a donut shaped universe intrigue me, but I heard he stole them from someone else. D'oh!
Yes, well, the two competing theories presented in that piece are the one that I presented, and a slightly modified version in which several periods of uplift and erosion take place. In this scenario, several different rivers did the eroding and the current day Colorado simply flows through the older river channels. Your out-of-context quotes notwithstanding, the article presents no serious challenges to accepted theory, merely slight revisions.
Very different from "The Grand Canyon was blasted into the Earth's surface by giant space-lightning." Not to insult your beliefs, but I have investigated the whole Electric Universe thing and it makes no sense whatsoever. It's predictions have been shown to be incorrect time and time again. Like most crackpot theories, it simply dismisses all contrary evidence as being the work of some vast conspiracy designed to keep down the truth. It is not science and it is not interesting.
I just had to respond to one of the many errors in this post. The Kaibab upwarp did not exist when the Colorado river first started flowing over the area. The upwarp happened gradually and as the land rose, the river stayed at about the same height, gradually cutting a channel into the rising land.
I certainly hope whoever modded this "insightful" was doing it out of some misguided idea that I needed more karma. The idea of some slashdot moderator sitting down and thinking, "You know, he's right! I probably SHOULDN'T suck the juice out of thermometers," while not actually outlandish given my perception of the IQ of the average /. mod, certainly gives me a moment's pause.
Well, with that said, here's some more insightful advice:
You probably shouldn't eat broken glass.
Fire is hot! Best not touch it...
Attempting to breath underwater without the aid of SCUBA gear can be dangerous.
If a woman asks you if something makes her look fat, say no.
And of course:
Do not taunt happy fun ball!
There, if my last comment is any guide, that should get me A +5 insightful.
Funny, but on a more serious note, anyone who has read The Wealth of Nations knows that Adam Smith believed that free markets needed external regulation and order in order to remain free. Was he right? Who knows, but I'd like to see libertarian types stop using him as an example of someone who thought the free market needs no regulation.
Is this offtopic? Who knows, but I'll probably get modded offtopic anyway.
Wait, so you're saying I shouldn't suck the juice out of thermometers?
That is SO mammalist of you. Expect a call from the PC police.
Freedom is something that must be agreed upon and enforced by the people. One man's freedom is another man's burden. I, for instance, can see no justification for the taking of private real property, and in fact consider it an infringement on my rights for someone else to unilaterally fence off a piece of property that I could have used and call it their own. It's limiting my freedom, and what do I get out of it? I get nothing from the deal unless I am also a property owner (and saying "We all own ourselves" is just pointless. What good is owning yourself if someone else owns all the means of survival?)
This is what Proudhon meant by "Property is theft." One must mingle one's effort with something to call it one's own, but one must own property before one can legitimately work it. I can see no rational justification for owning natural resources. When Proudhon said "Property is impossible" he meant it is impossible to come up with a moral justification for it, but you are right that he said that it is also the basis of liberty, in that unless one owns the means of survival, one can not be free.
But now I digress. Back to natural monopolies. You don't get the concept at all. The idea is that there are some things where it is just plain inefficient to have more than one seller or producer or product. What is the utility of having multiple competing roads, necessarily stacked one on top of the other because where else would you put them, leading from all possible points to all destinations? Same goes for sewers, water, end electric lines. It is just more efficient to have one supplier. Therefore it is not efficient to have a market, and that one supplier can not be regulated by market forces so they must be regulated by external means.
Are you against the idea of mandatory labelling? Truth in advertising? Personally, I see those as examples of agression and I see no moral problem with pre-empting things like that through laws and enforcement. I certainly think that solution is more conducive towards actual justice than having to sue every time you are wronged.
The problem with externalities is best explained by explaining the purpose of the free market in terms of Pareto efficiency. Given a set of people and a set of allocations of resources, a move to a different set of allocations is considered a Pareto optimization if at least one person is better off and no one is worse off. The free market is a generally very effective means of performing Pareto optimizations. There are certain times when it is not, and some other more effective method needs to be used.
In the case of externalities such as education, the free market does not do a good job of allocating resources. This is because no one can charge for education what it is worth, so fewer sellers will enter the market than is optimal. The resources society allocates to education will be less than optimal under a free market solution because of the externality.
In fact, there is a system that can do better than the free market in this case, and we are using it. I have watched the coming of the free market charter schools and I have been completely underwhelmed by their performance. I have read of one after another failing to live up to their promises.
Libertarianism is so alluring because it promises an easy, sound-bite answer to any problem: the free market. I really wish the answer to the problems of the world was that simple, but it isn't. Different problems call for different solutions and the free market is not a solution to everything.
Personally, I don't believe in the use of force except to deter aggression, and that aggression must be pretty forceful and clear cut. None of this, "Well, they might be a danger so let's pre-emptively defend ourselves." But I do believe in withdrawal of the rewards of being a member of society if one is not willing to live by that societies rules.
If we, as a people, decide that you can not burn trash and pollute
I suppose so. I'm just so used to taking food out of the oven before the thermometer says it's done, it seemed like the same thing must be going on in a microwave. A whole chicken or small roast may rise 5 degrees, while something like a turkey will rise 15 degrees after taking it out of the oven.
I say a free market needs regulation in order to be free, you say a free market needs some way to deal with externalities to be free. So cool, we agree! A free market needs regulation.
;)
You try to dismiss natural monopolies, which is a common tactic amongst libertarian debaters. However, you don't present a strong argument. The bit about roads is particularly weak. Although you may have more than one route between two endpoints, at each of those endpoints there is only one choice. Unless you live on a corner, I suppose. The real definition of a natural monopoly has to do with the marginal cost of entry into a market, wikipedia has a good intro but I'm rather beginning to suspect you aren't so uneducated in economics as to need that. Sorry if I came across as condescending, but most libertarians I've debated have learned all they know of economics from places like the Mises Institute and therefore need a primer on what is considered mainstream economics.
The fact is, the second road, sewer or electric line to a building is simply not going to get made because total social cost of having two or more competing instances of these things is higher than if there were only one. Please read the wikipedia article if you still do not understand how these things are natural monopolies or how cases of natural monopoly are not efficiently handled by market forces.
As for imbalance of information, it is why we have things like truth in advertising laws, which are regulatory in nature. In an ideal libertarian world, from what I have seen, cases such as mislabelling of products would be handled by legal means, if the victim had the resources to pay and otherwise not at all. There is no room for any protective legislation in a libertarian ideal, and no access to justice except for the rich.
I realize I should have said "education" and not "public education" after reading your reply. The market can not fairly compensate any providers of education for their services, because much of the value of an educated populace accrues to the society as a whole. Would you rather live in a well educated or poorly educated society? Would you fork over some money to a seller of education for educating others in order to rectify this imbalance?
I need to wrap this up as I have to go pick up my wife from work, but I will leave you with this thought. You and I are both anarchists. We both abhor the use of force or coercion in political and economic systems. We both, for the most part, dislike the very idea of a state. The thing we differ on, really, is property. Libertarians are more properly "Propertarians" or protectors of property rights. I see property as theft. All taking of property precedes work on that property and is thus not justified by any first principles. Fencing off land is initiation of force, which is just as bad when an individual does it as when a state does.
I also happen to think that the free market needs a little help, and that in three specific areas needs to be protected from exploitation by the power hungry. It is no magic system that is impervious to being exploited. One just needs to focus on where it fails and regulate only in those areas.
Of course, one needs to regulate without using force, and one needs to figure out a way to keep ones regulating from itself being exploited. I'm still working on that...
We are fighting militant extremists. What does it matter what religion they are? Are you saying that Islam necessarily breeds militant extremism? More so than other religions? When many people claim we are fighting "crazy Muslims" what they are really saying is that all Muslims are crazy, and it is this kind of thinking that many liberal "PC" types have a problem with.
Fundamentalists are the same the world over. The PC fundamentalists suck just as bad as any other kind. But just as one Muslim or Christian fundamentalist does not make all Muslims or Christians fundamentalists, the fact that some advocates of political correctness are fundamentalist does not make all advocates of political correctness fundamentalists. Nor does it mean everything the PC types say is full of shit. When someone says that we are fighting crazy Muslims and they really (wink, wink, nudge nudge) are saying that all Muslims are crazy, I'm going to have to give them a piece of my mind. Just as I would with an Imam who says "death to America"
In the final analysis though, the fact that a fundamentalist who hates America happens to be Muslim has very little bearing on the problem.
Freedom is a funny concept. You can't have freedom without giving up some other freedom. Freedom isn't free, and not just in the sense that it takes effort. Want to be free from violence? You need to give up violence. Want to be free to own property? You must give up your freedom to go wherever you want. Want a free market? You have to give up the idea that you can make any transction you want to.
Roads are a natural monopoly. So are sewers, water mains, and electricit delivered through wires. Sure, the free markets may come up with replacements to those like they came up with railroads as a replacement for the natural monopoly of canals. But those canals were a monopoly for centuries. There are plenty of natural monopolies and they tend to last a long time, as anyone who has one can use the power and money that come with it to squash innovation that would threaten them.
I don't think you understand what imbalance of information is about. The most famous paper on the subject is titled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" and it basically states that used cars can not receive a fair price in the free market because buyers must assume the seller is lying about the quality, and they must therefore bid less than they think the car is worth. This drives the sellers of higher quality used cars out of the market excacerbating the problem. Certainly any system can suffer from an imbalance of information, but this particular problem is unique to the free market.
How do free markets deal with externalities at all? This statement illustrates the crux of your argument, which to me looks a lot like "I don't want to believe what you say, so I'm just going to contradict it without any sort of evidence." Again, how can the free market possibly deal with externalities? Goods or bads. How does the free market fairly compensate the provider of public education when said education benefits society as a whole more than the individual? How does it deal with the public bad of polution? Real world examples, please. I already know that everything just works perfectly in Libertopia, I've heard that from libertarians for over a decade, but I'd like some actual examples, not how it should work if only we all converted to libertarianism.
To say that all systems are effected by externalities just shows that you don't understand the concept. It is a market based concept. An externality is some good or bad effect whose benefit or cost is not covered in a particular market transaction. The definition of externality is based on market transactions. You can certainly use the word however you like, but then you aren't speaking the same language as everyone else and you aren't saying anything useful.
The fact is that more resources have been squandered by private owners than collective management. Private owners can squander a resource, take the profit, and use it to buy up another resource to squander. Collectives can't do the same thing. You claim that collective ownership and management of resources doesn't work. Examples? I can show you plenty of cooperatives and collectives in the US and abroad that prove you wrong. Look up the Mondragon Collective for a start.
If all I own is myself, and someone owns all the land that I could use to provide sustenance, am I free or a slave? Again, you just state things without explaining the specifics. It is as if you don't understand the implications of your ideology and are just parroting back a party line without even comprehending it. How, specifically, does the fact that I own myself preclude someone owning all the resources in the world and demanding that I do whatever they say in order to live?
How does your system prevent the accumulation of money and power, given that the more you have, the easier it is to get? How is the use of private power such as the power to keep people off your land any different than state power? You know, I can claim that kicking you
Hey, mod this down too, assholes. I have more karma than I can possibly burn through. That's the libertarian way: stifle any dissent and call it a consensus. You obviously can not refute anything I have to say, and are so scared of other people reading it and understanding what a crock of shit your failed iddeology is that you must mod me down.
Well, I have made tons of anti-libertarian posts for the last ten years on Slashdot and for the most part they get modded up because most sensible people can see how ludicrous libertarianism is. I will continue to make anti-libertarian posts and get modded up for them. Try as you might, you can't make black into white and you can't make libertarianism into something sensible, logical, or workable.
Why is libertarianism the only political ideology that has never been tried in the real world? Two reasons: first, libertarians are all such selfish assholes that you could never get a group of them to agree on what libertarianism is, let alone put it into practice. Second, libertarians know that as long as libertarianism remains purely theoretical, they can go on being theoretically right. As soon as it was put into practice, the world would see it as the failure it is and libertarians would have to shut the fuck up.
Please point out one place in America where some Imam has given any sort of weekly sermon entitled "Democracy is Unislamic" or "Death to America." For extra credit, point out one time when any American has ever felt rude telling anyone preaching any such rubbish that it is toxic, malicious buffoonery.
I completely agree with your main point, which as I see it is that we should publicly condemn outrageous speech, not ban it. But this somewhat histrionic right wing fear that American political correctness has brought us to a place where we can not publicly criticize the outrageous is so overblown as to be damaging to your case.
Food does not get hotter after coming out of a microwave. Where are you getting that info? The interior of a large piece of food will continue to get hotter, sure. But that happens with a regular oven. The outside is hotter and the heat moves into the interior, nothing mysterious. Where do you get the idea that food coming out of a microwave gets hotter in some different way than food coming out of another type of cooking appliance?
I agree with you about the specific ways in which conservative ideals have not been followed. But there are specific ways in which the Communist ideology was never followed, either. For instance, Communism was always meant to be a crutch, a transition from Capitalism to Anarchy. But all "communist" regimes that have ever existed pretty much started killing all the anarchists within a year or three of foundation.
Libertarianism is flawed in several major ways. First, the free market isn't free. Even Adam Smith knew that. Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that the founder of modern capitalism knew that free markets needed regulation to stay free. The free market has three major failure modes: Natural monopoly, where the marginal cost of entry into a market is so great it precludes competition; imbalance of information, where one party knows more about the value of a transaction than the other, causing inefficient pricing; and externalities where the true cost or benefit of a transaction is not covered in the market price.
Without regulation, smart players will use these modes of failure to game the free market system and gain unfair advantage. This advantage then snowballs, giving these unscurpulous players even more power with which to game the system. Regulation addresses these areas where the free market would fail if kept strictly free.
The second area where libertarianism fails is in the ownership of natural resources. One can only fairly own what one has worked on, yet in order to work land one must own it. People unfairly fence off land and then work it, using their work to justify the fencing off which occured before the work. Anytime you take a natural resource, you are initiating force against the rest of the world who could have shared in the benefits of that resource before you took it for yourself.Don't worry about the false "Tragedy of the Commons" either. Any managed resource is safe from that tragedy, whether it is privately or publicly managed.
Finally, the end result of Libertarianism is Feudalism or slavery. When all the resources of the world are owned, any non-owners must be slaves to any owners just to survive. And under Libertarianism, this situation is gauranteed to occur. The more money and resources one has, the easier it is to game the system and acquire yet more money and resources. There are no checks and balances to keep this accumulation from happening.
That's why it's a failed ideology. Note that defenders of communism similarly claim that communism never failed as it was never actually tried. If your ideology invariably leads to gross corruptions that themselves fail miserably, your ideology has failed. Make all the excuses and apologies you like, but all that we are now seeing in America is what the conservative ideology necessarily leads to.