"Freedom for workers, government control for large businesses: this seems to be what you want, and it's not going to happen under pure libertarianism."
You mistake me. I want freedom. Liberty. The ability to say no. If you dilute that at all, you're not libertarian.
You cannot be "libertarian-socialist", they are opposites. A socialist believes in communal (state) ownership of the means of production, "property". A libertarian believes in private property. They two do not mix.
You don't have to retract any statement. Just go look at the socialist party platform, especially of 1932. That's the one that has been the most effectively enacted.
Then look at your own definitions of "left", which is socialist.
Since the socialist platform has been substantially enacted, though still lacking in the completely nationalized health care and other minutia, then by your logic the US government has slid "left". Yet at the same time you assert that "statist" is "right".
In fact, I can find nothing in your writings (yes, I did read them) which defines what YOU mean by "left". That is why I started this sequence by trying to define "left" because you had not done any of it.
Fact is, that the pure socialist is also a statist. They have to be, because they call for state control of everything they think the state should be controlling. That is also why the opposite of "socialist", the "fascist", is exactly the same. It's all just about control.
And yes, I did note your comment about libertarian being the new name for classical liberal, which is why I said "Not Democrat Liberal". It was in support and elaboration of your statements. I'm sorry you missed that.
You're missing an axis. Try the Nolan graph, which includes "statist" "libertarian" instead of just the "left" and "right" that came out of the French Revolution.
http://www.lp.org/quiz/
By the "deomcrat" definition, they are liberals. By the classical Liberal definition, they are statist.
You are absolutely correct that these policies end up being both "right" and "left". Remember that Nazi means "National Socialist", yet fascist is considered "right" while socialist "left". The fact is that both left and right come together under the simple aspect that the individuals involved come to desire control over everything.
That is why the original statement that the American Congress is "right" is so absurd. The efforts at control by Congress are both left and right, they are doing everything to build the welfare (left) and warfare (right) total state.
The classical liberals are now called libertarian. www.mises.org www.lewrockwell.com www.fff.org these are excellent sources of information on the "classical" liberals.
Bob-
Next Stop for Fisher, Guantanamo.
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Obviously an Enemy Combatant. Put the trator in irons!
But seriously, let the guy live his life as he sees fit. Has he hurt anyone?
Just look at the selection of senators and congress crawlers looking seriously at this filth. It's quite bi-partisan.
The Senator from Disney is a Democrat, Senator Hatch is Republican. There isn't any difference between the two. None. Zip. That's why they can trade members like baseball players and the same policies continue to be enacted.
That's because R's and D's have NO PRINCIPLES, they react to focus groups and think tanks with what they think will get them re-elected this time.
Read the Libertarian platform on this, and ask yourself what you're actually voting for when you cast your ballot.
==
http://www.lp.org/lp-blue-ribbon.html
"We defend the rights of individuals to unrestricted freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of individuals to dissent from government itself....
We oppose any abridgment of the freedom of speech through government censorship, regulation or control of communications media, including, but not limited to, laws concerning:
Obscenity, including "pornography", as we hold this to be an abridgment of liberty of expression despite claims that it instigates rape or assault, or demeans and slanders women;...
Electronic bulletin boards, communications networks, and other interactive electronic media as we hold them to be the functional equivalent of speaking halls and printing presses in the age of electronic communications, and as such deserving of full freedom;
Electronic newspapers, electronic "Yellow Pages", and other new information media, as these deserve full freedom.... "
==
http://www.lp.org/issues/internet.html
Politicians are trying to take away your right to read what you want, and to say what you want.
The Internet is making it possible for new voices to be heard -- the voices of people who simply could not afford to publish their ideas or display their artistic talents to a wide audience using older technologies. Established interests of both the left and the right fear new voices, and are trying to control what appears on the Internet through new laws and regulations.
America's Founders couldn't foresee the Internet, but they knew that government control of information was not only a violation of personal liberty -- it was a threat to their hopes for a nation based on the principles of self-government. So they gave us the First Amendment.
Wow! State the obvious and get moderated as "troll". Earth is indeed a collection of self-adapting systems. Humans haven't put into the atmosphere what Krakatoa did in one eruption. Humans also tend to reduce the occurance and severity of wild fires, reducing particulate effects of that natural process, balancing some of the soot and other particulates we generate.
Don't feel bad, I said that private space launch is more efficient than NASA, and got moderated as "flamebait".
Jgardn, have you ever visited the Ludwig von Mises web site? www.mises.org You'll love it there. Or the Future of Freedom Foundation, www.fff.org
Oh man, when I saw the article name that is exactly what I thought too.
I've been playing for years, and I just cannot get past level 8-12 area. If I'm really careful, I can get through Sokoban, but then BAM! one or two levels later, dead.
Something in Nethack obviously I just don't get. Still, play on.
The customers, for a private charitable organization, are the people giving the money, who have no real way of checking up on the organization. How efficient it is will have little effect on how much money is coming it.
Oh? Can you support that assertion? Since many billions of $$ are given in the US alone to charities, and there are charity watching groups as well, it seems to me that your assertion is handily disproven that way.
But I am willing to listen to your support for the statement that people have no real way of checking up on such organizations. Please.
In the optimal world
No, here is where you are wrong. It happens every day, in organizations and companies large and small. People are held individually responsible for their performance.
You need to do a google search for "public choice theory". Read it, try to understand it.
There three wonderful writers I can recommend to you: Smith, Kropotkin and Mises.
You might remember Adam Smith, even if you went to American public school. His name is usually mentioned in passing as having proven that government bureaucracy is less efficient than private enterprise. His investigation started by trying to figure out why England, relatively poor in natural resources, was beating the proverbial crap out of much larger countries economically speaking. His legacy lives on in places with tremendous wealth, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, that has nothing to do with natural resources at all. Just comparatively little market regulation.
Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat, who traveled in Siberia to study the people who lived there, far removed from any recognizable form of "government". Gee, how could people live? Wouldn't they need some governance to make sure they didn't starve? Let's just say he came back enlightened.
Luckily, Mises has had a wider audience. http://www.mises.org/ has most of his writings available, along with a large collection of ancillary writings by astounding intellects such as Murry Rothbard.
As far as my voting goes, your other suggested method is, how shall I put it, "suicidal"?
Maybe you thought you were referring to the many millions of eligible voters who choose to not vote specifically because they believe by doing so they are removing their consent from the corrupt, abusive thing we label "government". If so, then you're still confused because there are quite a number of different ways to register displeasure with the people in power. Not voting is one of them.
Less than half of the eligible voters register to vote. Less than half of those registered do vote. Getting 51% of that little number is hardly a mandate by any rational measure.
I gladly stand with the 87% who didn't vote for anyone presently in power.
And? How are you going to sanely distribute money throughout any system without collecting it, allocating it and disbursing it?
Exactly the point. A private system doesn't require the heavy handed and expensive processes that a system based on force does. It is not that those processes do not exist at some level, it is that they are done well when they are done privately.
Being a private charitable organization doesn't prevent a beaucracy from developing.
Natural selection takes care of that. By building a bureaucracy, the organization becomes less efficient. Other, more efficient organizations will satisfy the customers better, and the old one will reform or go out of business.
But if you were in the hiring department of IBM, or the president of Harvard, it might not be pointless to give you a bribe. It's not about government; it's about power.
Very astute. And what happens when the hiring manager at IBM hires inefficient workers because of the bribe? IBM itself becomes less efficient and loses customers. Management, always looking for more efficient use of resources, fires the corrupt individual.
The president of Harvard is under exactly the same kinds of pressures. In order to keep his job, he must not just act efficiently, he must be seen to act efficiently. His job hangs by a thread of confidence, and by allowing incompetence to exist within the organization he himself risks his job.
Then again, how much does that really hurt when the CEO of the clean operation is laying in a gutter with two bullets in his brain?
Another failure of gun control, I see. Glad to know you're against government being the only ones with weapons. Otherwise people could be burned alive in their own homes on suspicion of tax evasion or something like that. That would be a really bad place to live in.
But mobs and gangs can rack up quite a count, and would probably rack up an even higher count if there was no government to help them.
Can you name anywhere that had such problems that it wasn't the government itself complicit or directly involved?
Yndrd, you're very kind. If I had advocated reducing government by killing off politicians, rather than voting them out, imagine what kind of a furor that would have raised!
Those who deliberately choose not to vote, to withdraw their consent and invalidate the idea that democracy means people volunteer to live under a corrupt system, I also sympathize with.
Instead, I choose to say "NO!" as loudly as I can and stay within what little room left the law allows. Voting for someone who is actually not the lesser of two evils is one of those ways.
Thank you for your considerate and thoughtful response. I wish more people were thinking instead of just emotionally reacting.
Yet taxes are the least efficient method of funding a beneficial program, since that funding must go through three different bureaucracies before it gets to the program itself: Collection, allocation, and disbursement.
The program then wastes resources complying with regulatory and reporting requirements by those bureaucracies.
There is also the ill will generated by taxing people who do not agree with the various programs, such as Catholics taxed to pay for sex education, home schoolers taxed to pay for government schools they do not use, people against the death penalty taxed to pay for the murder of their fellow people, etc.
The base immorality of taxation is impossible to avoid, without deliberately trying to do so.
Interested individual people, coming together for common interests, will each put forth effort toward efficiency in the operation. That is why such private charitable efforts as Goodwill and The Salvation Army operate on rediculously small ammounts of money, while every government program is constantly wasting vast sums.
Oh yes, let us address the "monopoly" argument. I love that one!
Remember ITT? They, along with AT&T and a handful of other multinationals was going to rule the world. Go read "Roller Ball Murder" if you can find a copy of it, that is the atmosphere in which it was written.
ITT still exists, it publishes foreign language phone books. Its "monopoly" status didn't save if from the whims of the consumer.
Microsoft? This is Slashdot, you might have noticed. There are a great many alternatives, and Microsoft is not a monopoly, because there is no penalty for not using their product. The only monopolies are those that have government backing. One of the reasons that Microsoft became the huge corporation it is is because it was easier to write "IBM compatible", then "Windows compatible" on the GOVERNMENT procurement forms than to try to specify the swath of standards that were required. This too is changing, as most days news headlines on Slashdot or LinuxToday.com will inform you.
The myth of "natural" monopolies is based upon the theory of static economic conditions. That theory is false, there is always change. If there is only one supplier in a market, it is only because they have priced their product such that no other competitor could come in and undercut them and still make a profit.
Efficient managers are continually looking for something to give them the upper hand, and with the tool of Government force available, some of them will attempt to use that power to enforce their position to keep competition at bay.
For instance, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is nothing but a paid-for attempt to maintain dominant market positions of established businesses. It is even possible to identify individual Senators and Congressmen who are in the pocket of the very wealthy entertainment industry, just do a search for "The Senator From Disney".
It is government assistance that keeps such monopolies in power.
Lastly, it is the very power of government interference in peoples lives which attracts corruption. If there were no power to take property "legally" by force and give it do another, what is politely called "redevelopment", companies would have to pay an owner what the owner thought the property was worth. It is much cheaper to buy the double edged sword of eminent domain and zoning laws.
It is the very power of government that corrupts, it is the fact that the power is available and for sale that causes it to be purchased. It is pointless to pay me a bribe, for instance, because I cannot do anything in return. By advocating government, you advocate corruption.
A corrupt business is inefficient compared to a cleanly run one. Time is spent covering up operations. Money is wasted on bribes and payoffs that a clean operation would not be paying.
If you really want to do something about corruption, remove the temptation. Eliminate the power, and there will be no abuse of power.
Remember, only a government can get away with murder on a large scale. Even the most successful serial killer doesn't match one day of the war in Iraq. (yes, i am speaking in general terms).
The problem being that by voting for evil, even the lesser of two evils, things continue to only get worse.
Your objection is certainly valid, but only if the entirety of government were changed all at once. Electing any single, or even a substantial number, of libertarians to office wouldn't change anything quickly. Even a Libertarian president wouldn't be able to do, how did you put it? "[T]he whole fucking package at once."
Actually I'm quite interested. What is it about an entire package of political liberty and personal responsibility that you don't want? What is the terrible repercussion(s) of rolling back leviathan that you forsee?
If you see something I've missed, I want to know what that is. The more I learn, the more convinced I become that government does not work, that only free individuals making their own choices (rational or not!) create progress and advancement of the human species.
I just ran across an essay that you might find interesting. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1559
The author, Murry Rothbard, was an astounding writer with remarkable breadth of knowledge. His writing (and I'm told speaking) style is easy and clear, much better than my own.
I think you'll find that the core libertarian, as opposed to Party Libertarians, agree with you completely.
May I suggest the writings of L. Neil Smith, where he speculates on the speed of scientific and social development in an environment without patents and copyright?
Simply returning copyright to the limited scope written into the American constitution (by elitist nobility-wannabe's) would go a long way to removing the abuses you address.
If you really do like what are called "public schools" in America today, please read something by John Taylor Gatto.
While I would very much like to simply agree to disagree about your various other cited reasons, I cannot by law do so. I am forced to pay for them whether I agree with it or not, or be imprisoned and robbed to pay for them anyway.
How many times will people get raped by the party of state power before they realize that there is not a lick of difference between those two faces?
Neither face of the party of state power wants you to have any control over your own lives. One side puts a nice shine on further controlling your private life, the other face shines the increasing control of your business life. Both vote for each others programs knowing that quid pro quo, one hand washes the other. Or face licks.
D's and R's both want whatever they can get from you. They will push and only back off to keep the general population from riding in armed revolt. Remember that the "assault weapon ban" passed a REPUBLICAN congress, who were trying to make sure they could push even harder.
Because it is self promotional. It doesn't stop at saying that anthrax has been used as a weapon, it brings up the boogyman of "terrorism" and goes on to state that the CDC is fighting bioterrorism.
If they were certain of their position, they wouldn't be self-agrandizing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Freedom for workers, government control for large businesses: this seems to be what you want, and it's not going to happen under pure libertarianism."
You mistake me. I want freedom. Liberty. The ability to say no. If you dilute that at all, you're not libertarian.
You cannot be "libertarian-socialist", they are opposites. A socialist believes in communal (state) ownership of the means of production, "property". A libertarian believes in private property. They two do not mix.
Bob-
You don't have to retract any statement. Just go look at the socialist party platform, especially of 1932. That's the one that has been the most effectively enacted.
Then look at your own definitions of "left", which is socialist.
Since the socialist platform has been substantially enacted, though still lacking in the completely nationalized health care and other minutia, then by your logic the US government has slid "left". Yet at the same time you assert that "statist" is "right".
In fact, I can find nothing in your writings (yes, I did read them) which defines what YOU mean by "left". That is why I started this sequence by trying to define "left" because you had not done any of it.
Fact is, that the pure socialist is also a statist. They have to be, because they call for state control of everything they think the state should be controlling. That is also why the opposite of "socialist", the "fascist", is exactly the same. It's all just about control.
And yes, I did note your comment about libertarian being the new name for classical liberal, which is why I said "Not Democrat Liberal". It was in support and elaboration of your statements. I'm sorry you missed that.
Bob-
You're missing an axis. Try the Nolan graph, which includes "statist" "libertarian" instead of just the "left" and "right" that came out of the French Revolution.
http://www.lp.org/quiz/
By the "deomcrat" definition, they are liberals. By the classical Liberal definition, they are statist.
You are absolutely correct that these policies end up being both "right" and "left". Remember that Nazi means "National Socialist", yet fascist is considered "right" while socialist "left". The fact is that both left and right come together under the simple aspect that the individuals involved come to desire control over everything.
That is why the original statement that the American Congress is "right" is so absurd. The efforts at control by Congress are both left and right, they are doing everything to build the welfare (left) and warfare (right) total state.
The classical liberals are now called libertarian. www.mises.org www.lewrockwell.com www.fff.org these are excellent sources of information on the "classical" liberals.
Bob-
Obviously an Enemy Combatant. Put the trator in irons!
But seriously, let the guy live his life as he sees fit. Has he hurt anyone?
Bob-
First, define "liberal". It has come to mean someone who advocates the policies of the "left", embodied substantially in the socialist manifesto.
So, let's take a look at the socialist party platform and see what they advocate.
Regulation of business practices especially of stock markets. Both parties continue to increase the powers of departments that do that.
A graduated income tax. Social "insurance" for retirement and medicine.
Licensing of all professions by the state.
Oh, I could go on. These are all very "left" and all very "centrist" in the US.
Maybe you had some other policies in mind. Care to state what they are?
Bob-
Just look at the selection of senators and congress crawlers looking seriously at this filth. It's quite bi-partisan.
...
...
... "
The Senator from Disney is a Democrat, Senator Hatch is Republican. There isn't any difference between the two. None. Zip. That's why they can trade members like baseball players and the same policies continue to be enacted.
That's because R's and D's have NO PRINCIPLES, they react to focus groups and think tanks with what they think will get them re-elected this time.
Read the Libertarian platform on this, and ask yourself what you're actually voting for when you cast your ballot.
==
http://www.lp.org/lp-blue-ribbon.html
"We defend the rights of individuals to unrestricted freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of individuals to dissent from government itself.
We oppose any abridgment of the freedom of speech through government censorship, regulation or control of communications media, including, but not limited to, laws concerning:
Obscenity, including "pornography", as we hold this to be an abridgment of liberty of expression despite claims that it instigates rape or assault, or demeans and slanders women;
Electronic bulletin boards, communications networks, and other interactive electronic media as we hold them to be the functional equivalent of speaking halls and printing presses in the age of electronic communications, and as such deserving of full freedom;
Electronic newspapers, electronic "Yellow Pages", and other new information media, as these deserve full freedom.
==
http://www.lp.org/issues/internet.html
Politicians are trying to take away your right to read what you want, and to say what you want.
The Internet is making it possible for new voices to be heard -- the voices of people who simply could not afford to publish their ideas or display their artistic talents to a wide audience using older technologies. Established interests of both the left and the right fear new voices, and are trying to control what appears on the Internet through new laws and regulations.
America's Founders couldn't foresee the Internet, but they knew that government control of information was not only a violation of personal liberty -- it was a threat to their hopes for a nation based on the principles of self-government. So they gave us the First Amendment.
==
Then you're screwed. Get used to it.
Wow! State the obvious and get moderated as "troll". Earth is indeed a collection of self-adapting systems. Humans haven't put into the atmosphere what Krakatoa did in one eruption. Humans also tend to reduce the occurance and severity of wild fires, reducing particulate effects of that natural process, balancing some of the soot and other particulates we generate.
Don't feel bad, I said that private space launch is more efficient than NASA, and got moderated as "flamebait".
Jgardn, have you ever visited the Ludwig von Mises web site? www.mises.org You'll love it there. Or the Future of Freedom Foundation, www.fff.org
Bob-
Oh man, when I saw the article name that is exactly what I thought too.
I've been playing for years, and I just cannot get past level 8-12 area. If I'm really careful, I can get through Sokoban, but then BAM! one or two levels later, dead.
Something in Nethack obviously I just don't get. Still, play on.
Bob-
Did you look up "public choice theory"?
If not, do so.
Bob-
The customers, for a private charitable organization, are the people giving the money, who have no real way of checking up on the organization. How efficient it is will have little effect on how much money is coming it.
Oh? Can you support that assertion? Since many billions of $$ are given in the US alone to charities, and there are charity watching groups as well, it seems to me that your assertion is handily disproven that way.
But I am willing to listen to your support for the statement that people have no real way of checking up on such organizations. Please.
In the optimal world
No, here is where you are wrong. It happens every day, in organizations and companies large and small. People are held individually responsible for their performance.
You need to do a google search for "public choice theory". Read it, try to understand it.
Bob-
Step 1: Find exploit
Step 2: Compromise everyone
Step 3: PROFIT!
There three wonderful writers I can recommend to you: Smith, Kropotkin and Mises.
You might remember Adam Smith, even if you went to American public school. His name is usually mentioned in passing as having proven that government bureaucracy is less efficient than private enterprise. His investigation started by trying to figure out why England, relatively poor in natural resources, was beating the proverbial crap out of much larger countries economically speaking. His legacy lives on in places with tremendous wealth, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, that has nothing to do with natural resources at all. Just comparatively little market regulation.
Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat, who traveled in Siberia to study the people who lived there, far removed from any recognizable form of "government". Gee, how could people live? Wouldn't they need some governance to make sure they didn't starve? Let's just say he came back enlightened.
Luckily, Mises has had a wider audience. http://www.mises.org/ has most of his writings available, along with a large collection of ancillary writings by astounding intellects such as Murry Rothbard.
As far as my voting goes, your other suggested method is, how shall I put it, "suicidal"?
Maybe you thought you were referring to the many millions of eligible voters who choose to not vote specifically because they believe by doing so they are removing their consent from the corrupt, abusive thing we label "government". If so, then you're still confused because there are quite a number of different ways to register displeasure with the people in power. Not voting is one of them.
Less than half of the eligible voters register to vote. Less than half of those registered do vote. Getting 51% of that little number is hardly a mandate by any rational measure.
I gladly stand with the 87% who didn't vote for anyone presently in power.
Bob-
And? How are you going to sanely distribute money throughout any system without collecting it, allocating it and disbursing it?
Exactly the point. A private system doesn't require the heavy handed and expensive processes that a system based on force does. It is not that those processes do not exist at some level, it is that they are done well when they are done privately.
Being a private charitable organization doesn't prevent a beaucracy from developing.
Natural selection takes care of that. By building a bureaucracy, the organization becomes less efficient. Other, more efficient organizations will satisfy the customers better, and the old one will reform or go out of business.
But if you were in the hiring department of IBM, or the president of Harvard, it might not be pointless to give you a bribe. It's not about government; it's about power.
Very astute. And what happens when the hiring manager at IBM hires inefficient workers because of the bribe? IBM itself becomes less efficient and loses customers. Management, always looking for more efficient use of resources, fires the corrupt individual.
The president of Harvard is under exactly the same kinds of pressures. In order to keep his job, he must not just act efficiently, he must be seen to act efficiently. His job hangs by a thread of confidence, and by allowing incompetence to exist within the organization he himself risks his job.
Then again, how much does that really hurt when the CEO of the clean operation is laying in a gutter with two bullets in his brain?
Another failure of gun control, I see. Glad to know you're against government being the only ones with weapons. Otherwise people could be burned alive in their own homes on suspicion of tax evasion or something like that. That would be a really bad place to live in.
But mobs and gangs can rack up quite a count, and would probably rack up an even higher count if there was no government to help them.
Can you name anywhere that had such problems that it wasn't the government itself complicit or directly involved?
Bob-
Yndrd, you're very kind. If I had advocated reducing government by killing off politicians, rather than voting them out, imagine what kind of a furor that would have raised!
Those who deliberately choose not to vote, to withdraw their consent and invalidate the idea that democracy means people volunteer to live under a corrupt system, I also sympathize with.
Instead, I choose to say "NO!" as loudly as I can and stay within what little room left the law allows. Voting for someone who is actually not the lesser of two evils is one of those ways.
Thank you for your considerate and thoughtful response. I wish more people were thinking instead of just emotionally reacting.
Bob-
Yet taxes are the least efficient method of funding a beneficial program, since that funding must go through three different bureaucracies before it gets to the program itself: Collection, allocation, and disbursement.
The program then wastes resources complying with regulatory and reporting requirements by those bureaucracies.
There is also the ill will generated by taxing people who do not agree with the various programs, such as Catholics taxed to pay for sex education, home schoolers taxed to pay for government schools they do not use, people against the death penalty taxed to pay for the murder of their fellow people, etc.
The base immorality of taxation is impossible to avoid, without deliberately trying to do so.
Interested individual people, coming together for common interests, will each put forth effort toward efficiency in the operation. That is why such private charitable efforts as Goodwill and The Salvation Army operate on rediculously small ammounts of money, while every government program is constantly wasting vast sums.
Oh yes, let us address the "monopoly" argument. I love that one!
Remember ITT? They, along with AT&T and a handful of other multinationals was going to rule the world. Go read "Roller Ball Murder" if you can find a copy of it, that is the atmosphere in which it was written.
ITT still exists, it publishes foreign language phone books. Its "monopoly" status didn't save if from the whims of the consumer.
Microsoft? This is Slashdot, you might have noticed. There are a great many alternatives, and Microsoft is not a monopoly, because there is no penalty for not using their product. The only monopolies are those that have government backing. One of the reasons that Microsoft became the huge corporation it is is because it was easier to write "IBM compatible", then "Windows compatible" on the GOVERNMENT procurement forms than to try to specify the swath of standards that were required. This too is changing, as most days news headlines on Slashdot or LinuxToday.com will inform you.
The myth of "natural" monopolies is based upon the theory of static economic conditions. That theory is false, there is always change. If there is only one supplier in a market, it is only because they have priced their product such that no other competitor could come in and undercut them and still make a profit.
Efficient managers are continually looking for something to give them the upper hand, and with the tool of Government force available, some of them will attempt to use that power to enforce their position to keep competition at bay.
For instance, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is nothing but a paid-for attempt to maintain dominant market positions of established businesses. It is even possible to identify individual Senators and Congressmen who are in the pocket of the very wealthy entertainment industry, just do a search for "The Senator From Disney".
It is government assistance that keeps such monopolies in power.
Lastly, it is the very power of government interference in peoples lives which attracts corruption. If there were no power to take property "legally" by force and give it do another, what is politely called "redevelopment", companies would have to pay an owner what the owner thought the property was worth. It is much cheaper to buy the double edged sword of eminent domain and zoning laws.
It is the very power of government that corrupts, it is the fact that the power is available and for sale that causes it to be purchased. It is pointless to pay me a bribe, for instance, because I cannot do anything in return. By advocating government, you advocate corruption.
A corrupt business is inefficient compared to a cleanly run one. Time is spent covering up operations. Money is wasted on bribes and payoffs that a clean operation would not be paying.
If you really want to do something about corruption, remove the temptation. Eliminate the power, and there will be no abuse of power.
Remember, only a government can get away with murder on a large scale. Even the most successful serial killer doesn't match one day of the war in Iraq. (yes, i am speaking in general terms).
Bob-
PCL, just in case you don't know that thers are already "libertarians" in congress.
. ht m
http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2004/tst070504
That is, individuals more interested in invidiual liberty than in growing the state so they can line their own and friends pockets.
Bob-
The problem being that by voting for evil, even the lesser of two evils, things continue to only get worse.
Your objection is certainly valid, but only if the entirety of government were changed all at once. Electing any single, or even a substantial number, of libertarians to office wouldn't change anything quickly. Even a Libertarian president wouldn't be able to do, how did you put it? "[T]he whole fucking package at once."
Actually I'm quite interested. What is it about an entire package of political liberty and personal responsibility that you don't want? What is the terrible repercussion(s) of rolling back leviathan that you forsee?
If you see something I've missed, I want to know what that is. The more I learn, the more convinced I become that government does not work, that only free individuals making their own choices (rational or not!) create progress and advancement of the human species.
Government, at its best, just gets in the way.
Bob-
Dan, forgive me for replying twice.
I just ran across an essay that you might find interesting. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1559
The author, Murry Rothbard, was an astounding writer with remarkable breadth of knowledge. His writing (and I'm told speaking) style is easy and clear, much better than my own.
I look forward to reading your impression.
Bob-
Here we go again. Keep the KY jelly handy, folks, Jack Booted Thugs might have run out by the time they reach your door.
Both Democrats and Republicans claim they are doing it for your own good. Remember that next time you cast a ballot, or hear a knock on your door.
Bob-
I think you'll find that the core libertarian, as opposed to Party Libertarians, agree with you completely.
May I suggest the writings of L. Neil Smith, where he speculates on the speed of scientific and social development in an environment without patents and copyright?
Simply returning copyright to the limited scope written into the American constitution (by elitist nobility-wannabe's) would go a long way to removing the abuses you address.
Bob-
If you really do like what are called "public schools" in America today, please read something by John Taylor Gatto.
While I would very much like to simply agree to disagree about your various other cited reasons, I cannot by law do so. I am forced to pay for them whether I agree with it or not, or be imprisoned and robbed to pay for them anyway.
Have a nice day.
Bob-
How many times will people get raped by the party of state power before they realize that there is not a lick of difference between those two faces?
Neither face of the party of state power wants you to have any control over your own lives. One side puts a nice shine on further controlling your private life, the other face shines the increasing control of your business life. Both vote for each others programs knowing that quid pro quo, one hand washes the other. Or face licks.
D's and R's both want whatever they can get from you. They will push and only back off to keep the general population from riding in armed revolt. Remember that the "assault weapon ban" passed a REPUBLICAN congress, who were trying to make sure they could push even harder.
Bob-
Because it is self promotional. It doesn't stop at saying that anthrax has been used as a weapon, it brings up the boogyman of "terrorism" and goes on to state that the CDC is fighting bioterrorism.
If they were certain of their position, they wouldn't be self-agrandizing.
Bob-
Here I thought that those "Most Awful Criminals" cards were in bad taste.
Reading the back of the Anthrax card, it's just propaganda for kids to show mommy and daddy so they won't defund the CDC.
Bob-