Collusion to fix prices may be illegal, but it is curious that you consider it "wrong". By what standard does it become wrong to sell a product at a mutually agreed price? It looks like typical government bullying to me.
What if all TVs cost at least $5000, so that you couldn't buy a cheaper set anywhere? And thanks to all that profit, the colluding manufacturers got so large and powerful that they could easily squeeze out any new competition, thus keeping the price high? You would hate it, wouldn't you?
Market collusion is a recipe for serious exploitation. You would have to be insane to want it, unless you were one of the manufacturers.
I showed you my numbers, my references, and my math. What part of "less than half of Obama's winning margin" do you not understand?
You have done nothing to counter any of it. Since you have no case, all you can do is flail about randomly. Anyone can see that you are a loser and a racist.
I showed you my math. You completely avoided discussing it, choosing instead to spew some total nonsense. The black percentage of the vote went from 11% in 2004 to 13% this year; it can't possibly have added an extra 20% to Obama's total.
As I said, the black effect accounted for less than half of Obama's winning margin, and therefore it was not decisive (the women's vote was much more important). Your totally racist assertion that Obama won because he was black is therefore disproven.
I thought you said you were done here. But like a typical neocon, it seems your words are worthless.
Everything I said was supported by just about every channel last night.
I have data; you and the networks you were watching (probably Fox) have only racist opinions.
Since you assert falsely that Obama's blackness was the primary reason for his election, that is the question I will tackle directly here, now that real data is available.
In 2004, blacks made up 11% of those who voted, and their choices were split as follows: Kerry 88%, Bush 11%.
This year, blacks were 13% of those who voted, and they were split thusly: Obama 95%, McCain 4%.
There is no way you can claim that blacks were voting by race in 2004, because Kerry wasn't black. The 11% who voted in 2004 went for Obama at a greater rate yesterday, but only slightly, accounting for 11 * (0.95-0.88) or 0.77 percent. More blacks turned out this year, but again only slightly, amounting to (13 - 11)*0.95 or an extra 1.9 percent for Obama. Therefore, at the very most, the Obama effect on blacks was 2.67 percent. Since his victory margin was 6%, it is very clear that the black vote was not anywhere close to being decisive this year.
The fact remains: as someone who voted for Bush in 2004, you demonstrated catastrophicly bad judgement. Forty-nine million voters managed to make the right decision, so you cannot complain that the choice was too hard. And yet you failed. What is your excuse?
Spreading a falsehood about Obama's race makes you a racist.
You said, "He'll likely be elected because first and foremost, he's black". That is false. Obama won because white voters left the GOP. White women especially: the Republican lead in this category shrank from 17 percent in 2004 to 5 percent; and this alone is more than enough to explain Obama's victory margin. So it is quite clear that he won as a Democrat, not as a black.
Go ahead and burn your KKK hoods; you'll feel better.
How long do you think those associations will stay voluntary? If you're benefiting from the peace enforced by the local cops, your neighbors will resent the hell out of you if you refuse to pay your share of the costs. Unless you're one of those resistant bastards who don't care what their neighbors think, you will be contributing, i.e. paying taxes, whether you like it or not.
According to the black communities, by in large, [Obama is] who most blacks are voting for. Period.
Blacks have been heavily Democratic for a long time. Obama's winning margin will be far greater than can be accounted for by the blacks who didn't vote in the last election. So put your KKK hood away, Goober.
Obama makes for another great example of the failure of the two party system in America. He'll likely be elected because first and foremost, he's black..... I'm not raciest [sic]
Yeah, right. You're not a racist. Only the Democrats are, because their nominee is black. Your KKK hood is showing, buster.
The two party system is broken. Until the US realizes that limiting our options to two parties is stupid, we will continue to (re)elect people that are unqualified for the position.... It's the same reason Bush was re-elected. Ironically, Bush was elected because Kerry was an idiot on military matters. And at the time, the war was number one priority in the mind of voters. Voters believed it was the "devil they knew."
You're not off the hook, not if you voted for Bush in 2004. However limited your choices were, the fact was that you did have options. Over 49 million people made the right decision; why didn't you? Please don't say that you had no idea that Bush would prove to be such a disaster; 49 million voters saw through him, and you should have done so too. Any moron can analyze the past; correctly anticipating the future is the basis of wisdom. What was your excuse for showing such appalling judgement?
If we are to run with your logic, it's safe to say, when you elect your leaders, you know before hand, in detail, every action they will ever make for the entire duration they will be in office.
So what is your excuse for re-electing Bush in 2004? That you had no idea what he would do in 2003?
Tax is not theft. It's the price you pay for a stable country. (It's not sufficient -- some violent countries tax their people anyway -- but in all stable societies the people pay tax.)
Did you not understand my last paragraph? Rich libertarians are working against their long term interests, and I explained why that is so.
False. The construction of highways and local roads has historically been funded by debt.
In addition, the Bush Administration has been stealing money from everywhere in order to fund its wars. What you saw was what they chose to spend that year, not what was needed to keep the roads and highways properly maintained.
I pay for my roads (approximately 3 dollars a day in gasoline tax collected).
You could not possibly afford to pay 100% of the cost. The $3 gas tax does not begin to cover to the cost of building and maintaining the U.S.'s hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of roads. If the rich could stop paying their taxes -- which they would love to do, and which is why they fund Libertarianism -- your roads would quickly rot.
If you advocate Libertarianism and you are not at least well-to-do, you are energetically working against your own interests.
Of course, in the long run the rich supporters of Libertarianism are also working against their own interests, because Libertarian societies are highly unstable. These people rarely think far enough ahead to realize that they stand to lose everything -- not only their wealth but also their lives -- in the highly probable chaos following a very brief Libertarian period. They are fools.
As I said, that was your last chance to prove your sanity to me. You proved instead that you are a True Believer who cannot be swayed by reasonable argument. You are arguing in circles, repeatedly taking positions I have already destroyed. I'm out of this thread.
What, you're still here? I see that your message is dated yesterday, but for some reason Slashdot chose not to notify me until this evening (Tuesday). Anyway, I will make one more attempt to enlighten you. I am probably wasting my time, because you are already arguing in circles.
It is exactly opposite of narrow circumstances. The only condition to be met for a voluntary society to work is that people to stop initiating violence on each other and legitimizing violence done by others (including all violence being done by the government, which wouldn't be government as we know it without it).
If you think about it, this is what I've been counter-arguing all along! Your touching faith that all people can be persuaded to abandon violence is as impractical and doomed as the Communists' hope that all people will be unselfish someday. Neither case is realistic.
Violence will never disappear from human societies, not ever. And the reason is that the first to break the peace stands to benefit; it's a tragedy of the commons. Whether the thugs continue to succeed depends on how large an army you can raise against them -- and then you have to worry about the army making itself the new overlords. Can you see that this what I've been saying since my very first message? Do you realize now that you have been arguing futilely in circles? Do you understand that a libertarian society is vulnerable to a tragedy of the commons (to several of them, actually) and therefore cannot be stable?
Again I am ignoring the rest of your post, because you are still refusing to address the central problem.
Thanks for the clarification. You still need to answer my basic point though: if you have to split hairs to make your system seem more likely to succeed than the Wild West, then you are saying that libertarianism can only prosper under very narrow circumstances. Since change is a wind that never stops blowing, this is equivalent to saying that libertarianism is fragile and unstable. Which is what I've been saying.
The "critical mass" argument is unlikely to work for you: a heavily armed society tends to be less stable, not more, the larger it grows. A bigger society has more conflicts of interest; if the various factions all have plenty of guns, that society's immediate future is dire indeed. (Look at Lebanon. Or Afghanistan even before we made it worse.) So a libertarian society needs to be small, probably smaller than Texas, maybe smaller than a major city. And something that tiny will not survive for long unless it is like Iceland, an island isolated by thousands of miles of ocean. Or unless the peace is enforced by a powerful overlord, such as the U.S. government. But if you have such an overlord, then by definition you don't have libertarianism.
And I agree that we need to explore different pollitical systems. Their number is nearly infinite, however, so we cannot try them all. We need to weed out the ones that are likely to be unstable, such as libertarianism.
Wild West was not necessarily a pure libertarian society, that is anarcho-capitalist and what ended it largely seemed to be the intrusions of external government rather than its own implosion.
You are splitting hairs now. The Wild West might have been "anarcho-capitalist", whatever you mean by that, but it had most of the important characteristics of libertarianism: very few laws and lots of guns everywhere. And that society lasted only 50 years or so, which by historical standards means it disappeared almost instantly.
Whether it imploded on its own or was warped by external force is irrelevant: if you want to claim that libertarianism is a stable condition, then it must work under a wide range of circumstances. A robust and durable society must be able to cope with a great deal of change, because there is never an end to history. If you have to split hairs to make your society seem a better survivor than anarcho-capitalism, then you are saying that libertarianism will work only under rare circumstances. And that is the same as saying that libertarianism is fragile and unstable. Which is what I'm saying.
I'm sorry for not addressing the rest of your post, but the above is the key point. Until you deal with it convincingly, whatever else you say is of secondary importance.
Enforcement is done by the individuals themselves. If someone tries to steal from you or hurt you, you can defend yourself. If everybody in a society is well armed it is much harder and there's much less incentive for anyone to go robbing or hurting people.
Just like the Wild West, right? Oh wait, the era only lasted fifty years -- an eyeblink by historical standards. If you are trying to convince me that a libertarian society can be stable, you're not doing a very good job.
This means that no matter how much would the existing protection agencies try to consolidate (merge, cartelize, whatever), competition would come up very easily.
And that competition would shortly be dead, literally. It is extremely unhealthy to fight a mafia that is much bigger than your own.
And your chances of raising a large counterforce are very slim. Why is the movie "High Noon" so believable? Because most people are like the cowardly villagers in that film. Which is not surprising, as in the enforcer business the barrier to entry is not low but high -- as high as your life is worth. And that is very bad news for the longevity of your libertarian society.
The weasels would simply snow us: instead of 500 pages of the PATRIOT Act, we would get 5 million pages, or worse. It would be like a Denial of Service attack. How do we prevent this? Or cope with it if it happens regularly?
If you think millions of pages of documents would be unlikely, remember the IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft anti-trust cases.
If you want somebody else to do something for you or believe as you do, do not apply force to make them comply
There is the flaw in your society (and in Libertarian societies as a group): how do you enforce the non-violence? If you have an enforcement agency, that agency will quickly become the most powerful organization in your country. And remember: power corrupts.
If you started out with several competing gangs of enforcers, in some faint hope of keeping them small and tame, remember: there would be huge incentives for them to merge -- like not dying in turf wars -- and nothing to stop them from doing it. (If there were something strong enough to bash their heads, then you would already be having problems with the bigger thugs.) So no matter what, your libertarian society would quickly degenerate into a vicious dictatorship.
This is why I believe that libertarian societies are unstable.
why not just pay politicians so much they can't be bought?
Singapore does this, and it actually works pretty well: the city-state regularly scores near the top as one of the least corrupt countries in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
What if all TVs cost at least $5000, so that you couldn't buy a cheaper set anywhere? And thanks to all that profit, the colluding manufacturers got so large and powerful that they could easily squeeze out any new competition, thus keeping the price high? You would hate it, wouldn't you?
Market collusion is a recipe for serious exploitation. You would have to be insane to want it, unless you were one of the manufacturers.
This rips the libertarian arguments to shreds. Well done!
If there aren't many changes, why don't they call it Vista SP2?
My guess at the answer: Vista is a toxic brand already, so Microsoft hopes to fool people into thinking that Windows 7 is substantially different.
You have done nothing to counter any of it. Since you have no case, all you can do is flail about randomly. Anyone can see that you are a loser and a racist.
As I said, the black effect accounted for less than half of Obama's winning margin, and therefore it was not decisive (the women's vote was much more important). Your totally racist assertion that Obama won because he was black is therefore disproven.
I dare you to show me your math.
Everything I said was supported by just about every channel last night.
I have data; you and the networks you were watching (probably Fox) have only racist opinions.
Since you assert falsely that Obama's blackness was the primary reason for his election, that is the question I will tackle directly here, now that real data is available.
In 2004, blacks made up 11% of those who voted, and their choices were split as follows: Kerry 88%, Bush 11%.
This year, blacks were 13% of those who voted, and they were split thusly: Obama 95%, McCain 4%.
There is no way you can claim that blacks were voting by race in 2004, because Kerry wasn't black. The 11% who voted in 2004 went for Obama at a greater rate yesterday, but only slightly, accounting for 11 * (0.95-0.88) or 0.77 percent. More blacks turned out this year, but again only slightly, amounting to (13 - 11)*0.95 or an extra 1.9 percent for Obama. Therefore, at the very most, the Obama effect on blacks was 2.67 percent. Since his victory margin was 6%, it is very clear that the black vote was not anywhere close to being decisive this year.
So you, the KKK clown, are full of it.
Immunity wouldn't be needed in a libertarian state because the telecoms would be free to snoop on anybody they wished.
Nice dodging of the central question.
The fact remains: as someone who voted for Bush in 2004, you demonstrated catastrophicly bad judgement. Forty-nine million voters managed to make the right decision, so you cannot complain that the choice was too hard. And yet you failed. What is your excuse?
Spreading a falsehood about Obama's race makes you a racist.
You said, "He'll likely be elected because first and foremost, he's black". That is false. Obama won because white voters left the GOP. White women especially: the Republican lead in this category shrank from 17 percent in 2004 to 5 percent; and this alone is more than enough to explain Obama's victory margin. So it is quite clear that he won as a Democrat, not as a black.
Go ahead and burn your KKK hoods; you'll feel better.
How long do you think those associations will stay voluntary? If you're benefiting from the peace enforced by the local cops, your neighbors will resent the hell out of you if you refuse to pay your share of the costs. Unless you're one of those resistant bastards who don't care what their neighbors think, you will be contributing, i.e. paying taxes, whether you like it or not.
Blacks have been heavily Democratic for a long time. Obama's winning margin will be far greater than can be accounted for by the blacks who didn't vote in the last election. So put your KKK hood away, Goober.
Yeah, right. You're not a racist. Only the Democrats are, because their nominee is black. Your KKK hood is showing, buster.
The two party system is broken. Until the US realizes that limiting our options to two parties is stupid, we will continue to (re)elect people that are unqualified for the position.... It's the same reason Bush was re-elected. Ironically, Bush was elected because Kerry was an idiot on military matters. And at the time, the war was number one priority in the mind of voters. Voters believed it was the "devil they knew."
You're not off the hook, not if you voted for Bush in 2004. However limited your choices were, the fact was that you did have options. Over 49 million people made the right decision; why didn't you? Please don't say that you had no idea that Bush would prove to be such a disaster; 49 million voters saw through him, and you should have done so too. Any moron can analyze the past; correctly anticipating the future is the basis of wisdom. What was your excuse for showing such appalling judgement?
So what is your excuse for re-electing Bush in 2004? That you had no idea what he would do in 2003?
Did you not understand my last paragraph? Rich libertarians are working against their long term interests, and I explained why that is so.
In addition, the Bush Administration has been stealing money from everywhere in order to fund its wars. What you saw was what they chose to spend that year, not what was needed to keep the roads and highways properly maintained.
You could not possibly afford to pay 100% of the cost. The $3 gas tax does not begin to cover to the cost of building and maintaining the U.S.'s hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of roads. If the rich could stop paying their taxes -- which they would love to do, and which is why they fund Libertarianism -- your roads would quickly rot.
If you advocate Libertarianism and you are not at least well-to-do, you are energetically working against your own interests.
Of course, in the long run the rich supporters of Libertarianism are also working against their own interests, because Libertarian societies are highly unstable. These people rarely think far enough ahead to realize that they stand to lose everything -- not only their wealth but also their lives -- in the highly probable chaos following a very brief Libertarian period. They are fools.
As I said, that was your last chance to prove your sanity to me. You proved instead that you are a True Believer who cannot be swayed by reasonable argument. You are arguing in circles, repeatedly taking positions I have already destroyed. I'm out of this thread.
It is exactly opposite of narrow circumstances. The only condition to be met for a voluntary society to work is that people to stop initiating violence on each other and legitimizing violence done by others (including all violence being done by the government, which wouldn't be government as we know it without it).
If you think about it, this is what I've been counter-arguing all along! Your touching faith that all people can be persuaded to abandon violence is as impractical and doomed as the Communists' hope that all people will be unselfish someday. Neither case is realistic.
Violence will never disappear from human societies, not ever. And the reason is that the first to break the peace stands to benefit; it's a tragedy of the commons. Whether the thugs continue to succeed depends on how large an army you can raise against them -- and then you have to worry about the army making itself the new overlords. Can you see that this what I've been saying since my very first message? Do you realize now that you have been arguing futilely in circles? Do you understand that a libertarian society is vulnerable to a tragedy of the commons (to several of them, actually) and therefore cannot be stable?
Again I am ignoring the rest of your post, because you are still refusing to address the central problem.
The "critical mass" argument is unlikely to work for you: a heavily armed society tends to be less stable, not more, the larger it grows. A bigger society has more conflicts of interest; if the various factions all have plenty of guns, that society's immediate future is dire indeed. (Look at Lebanon. Or Afghanistan even before we made it worse.) So a libertarian society needs to be small, probably smaller than Texas, maybe smaller than a major city. And something that tiny will not survive for long unless it is like Iceland, an island isolated by thousands of miles of ocean. Or unless the peace is enforced by a powerful overlord, such as the U.S. government. But if you have such an overlord, then by definition you don't have libertarianism.
And I agree that we need to explore different pollitical systems. Their number is nearly infinite, however, so we cannot try them all. We need to weed out the ones that are likely to be unstable, such as libertarianism.
You are splitting hairs now. The Wild West might have been "anarcho-capitalist", whatever you mean by that, but it had most of the important characteristics of libertarianism: very few laws and lots of guns everywhere. And that society lasted only 50 years or so, which by historical standards means it disappeared almost instantly.
Whether it imploded on its own or was warped by external force is irrelevant: if you want to claim that libertarianism is a stable condition, then it must work under a wide range of circumstances. A robust and durable society must be able to cope with a great deal of change, because there is never an end to history. If you have to split hairs to make your society seem a better survivor than anarcho-capitalism, then you are saying that libertarianism will work only under rare circumstances. And that is the same as saying that libertarianism is fragile and unstable. Which is what I'm saying.
I'm sorry for not addressing the rest of your post, but the above is the key point. Until you deal with it convincingly, whatever else you say is of secondary importance.
Just like the Wild West, right? Oh wait, the era only lasted fifty years -- an eyeblink by historical standards. If you are trying to convince me that a libertarian society can be stable, you're not doing a very good job.
This means that no matter how much would the existing protection agencies try to consolidate (merge, cartelize, whatever), competition would come up very easily.
And that competition would shortly be dead, literally. It is extremely unhealthy to fight a mafia that is much bigger than your own.
And your chances of raising a large counterforce are very slim. Why is the movie "High Noon" so believable? Because most people are like the cowardly villagers in that film. Which is not surprising, as in the enforcer business the barrier to entry is not low but high -- as high as your life is worth. And that is very bad news for the longevity of your libertarian society.
If you think millions of pages of documents would be unlikely, remember the IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft anti-trust cases.
There is the flaw in your society (and in Libertarian societies as a group): how do you enforce the non-violence? If you have an enforcement agency, that agency will quickly become the most powerful organization in your country. And remember: power corrupts.
If you started out with several competing gangs of enforcers, in some faint hope of keeping them small and tame, remember: there would be huge incentives for them to merge -- like not dying in turf wars -- and nothing to stop them from doing it. (If there were something strong enough to bash their heads, then you would already be having problems with the bigger thugs.) So no matter what, your libertarian society would quickly degenerate into a vicious dictatorship.
This is why I believe that libertarian societies are unstable.
Singapore does this, and it actually works pretty well: the city-state regularly scores near the top as one of the least corrupt countries in the world.