They're not the normal "hey, let's go buy a $100 microphone and record ourselves talking shit then put it on a webpage" podcast. (Youknowwho you are) They're a syndicated radio show that's been putting their archives up for download completely free since day one, almost three and a half years ago, when these "podcast" things existed, but there wasn't even a bandwagon to jump on yet.
Since they're primarily a radio show, the audio quality and production values are much higher than most other podcasts out there. You don't have to be an audiophile to recognize that most podcasts out there sound like underwater shit. The hosts also know what they're doing, having worked in "real" radio before.
They take calls and e-mails from podcast listeners, live internet stream listeners and radio listeners alike. In fact, podcast and live stream listeners make up the majority of their calls on weekdays, as the majority of their affiliates carry the Saturday show only.
If you go back and read the papers from the 70's and 80's, you'll see that the majority of car manufacturers did not provide shoulder-harness seatbelts and airbags until legislation was passed mandating their inclusion, despite widespread public support of these devices.
So some cars came with seatbelts, and some came without them. If a car buyer really wanted a seatbelt, they would buy a car with one. If someone didn't want one or was indifferent, they would buy a car without them. Now, either:
A) That's their choice to make and good for them.
B) That's not their choice to make, it's yours or someone else's because you know better than they do.
I really don't see any third options.
1. If this is true, then why are the rates of food and water contamincation higher in countries like Mexico? Shouldn't the free-market method of quality control have weeded out all of the bad restaurants by now?
Probably, as the AC pointed out above, because Mexicans have built up immunities to the stuff that's in their food and water, and thus they aren't nearly as picky about things like that as Americans are.
2. What if all of the restaurants and food sellers in your area subscribe to the cheaper-is-better business model?
Open your own restaurant if you want. I'm sure there's plenty of other other people in your town who also dislike the cheaper-is-better business model, and your restaurant will end up with a fair share of their business.
If you don't have the time, money, or whatever needed to open your own restaurant, then don't worry, because someone else will once they realize the potential profit to be made from the cheaper-isn't-better crowd.
And, failing all that, you just bite the bullet and go to one of the cheap but crappy restaurants, or you choose not to go out to eat.
4. Please explain why the notoriously unsafe aluminum wiring was used in just about every structure built in the 70's until the building codes were changed to prohibit its use. What happens to the free-market system when everybody uses the inferior and unsafe solution despite the consumer's wish.
Again, if the consumers had truly wanted copper wiring enough to insist on it and pay the extra for it, they would have had it.
And again, it comes back to that dichotomy - either it's the consumer's choice, or it's someone else's choice, because the consumer's an idiot and whoever is making the decision is supposedly smarter than them.
I really don't like Wal Mart and would like to shop elsewhere for my camping equipment. Unfortunately, Wal Mart has wiped out the other two stores in my town that sold camping equipment. What do people do when the free-market system creates a monopoly or a cartel as usually happens in unregulated economies?
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=camping returns 699,000 results. Sure, you might pay a little more on some of the bigger stuff once you figure in shipping, but that's the price you pay for being picky about where you shop. Wal-Mart's always there if you get tired of paying that premium.
And keep in mind that no one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy camping equipment. Even if there was no one else in the world selling camping equipment, that doesn't give you the right to meddle in other people's affairs.
1. If I were a restaurant owner, I would simply not allow that Consumer Reports person to inspect my kitchen.
As Ironsides pointed out, CR does everything they do anonymously. But supposing the fictional Restaurant Reports inspectors told restaurant owners who they were, and the owners refused to let them in, that would show up in their report, and potential customers would have to wonder what they're trying to hide.
2. What's to stop me from just paying a nice fat "consultation" fee to this Consumer Rating Company so they give me a good rating? (If you've ever been thro
I have a pretty good chance of those mandated seat belts and airbags saving my life in the event of an accident
Even if seatbelts and airbags weren't mandated, car companies would still offer cars with them, because consumers would demand them. So what would be stopping you from buying a car with such safety devices?
not getting salmonella with my burrito
The restaurant you're eating at has a damn good reason to ensure that their workers handle the food you're eating properly: if they don't, they lose profits. All it would take is one or two cases of food-borne illness before word would spread and that restaurant's business would dry up pretty quick.
and not having the restaurant catch on fire because of aluminum wiring
Again, the restaurant has a profit incentive not to use unsafe wiring: the money saved is far outweighed by the potential cost of having the entire restaurant burn down.
Remember that if you don't like some what some business is doing, you can exercise your ultimate right as a sovereign consumer and not patronize that business.
But, I hear you saying, how will I know whether or not a particular business is doing something I don't like? No problem. In the absence of government regulations, Consumer Reports-type publications will open up to test, survey and measure how well car safety devices work, how many people have caught food-borne illnesses from Bob's BBQ or Joe's Gyros, and whether or not the wiring in those restaurants is safe or not.
And I now I hear you asking, "what if people don't take the time to buy these consumer watchdog magazines, or ignore what they say?" This, of course, is just another way to say "I may be smart, but everyone around me is dumb, so I need to tell them how to live their lives at gunpoint."
The FCC has legal authority, but it doesn't need constitutional authority.
Bullshit. Anything and everything the federal government does needs explicit Constitutional authorization.
It was created by an act of Congress, not by executive fiat.
Where does Congress' authority to create the FCC come from? Unless that power is listed in Article I, Section 8, Congress did NOT have the power to create the FCC and the entire FCC and everything it does is unconstitutional.
THe second amendmend it useless in the face of modern firepower and intelligence. Go ask the palestenians how well those AK47s are working against the israeli tanks, helicopers, missiles, drones and bulldozers.
Classic gun control strawman. "You can't fight the military so why bother with guns at all?" The truth is that it was gun control who made it so that we can't fight the military in the first place.
The 2nd Amendment as written was meant to apply to whatever the "modern firepower" of the day was. It wasn't until 1934, when the National Firearms Act was passed, (as a response to alcohol smugglers with Tommy guns...yet Prohibition had been repealed the year earlier - go figure) that fully automatic weapons and "destructive devices" became so highly regulated that for the purposes of an arsenal able to withstand the military they might as well have been banned.
The gun controllers dig a hole for us, push us in, and use the fact that we can't get out as an excuse to dig deeper.
The change from shitting in holes dug in the ground to indoor plumbing happened over the last 200 years.
The change from shitting in holes dug in the ground to indoor plumbing is good.
Therefore, everything that happened over the last 200 years is good.
The change from strongly limited government to a welfare-warfare state has happened over the last 200 years.
Therefore, The change from strongly limited government to a welfare-warfare state is good.
Do you see the fallacy yet?
New ideas are not necessarily good.
Old ideas are not necessarily bad.
I know that the federal government has the right to tax the rich for all they want. However the government does not have the right to redistribute this wealth in any manner they see fit. The constitution laid out a groundwork for what the federal government could spend money on.
The 16th Amendment (not the 14th - please, at least read the Constitution before twisting its meaning) gives Congress the power to "lay and collect taxes on incomes". It did not, as the grandparent correctly pointed out, change in any way the things that Congress is allowed to spend money on. Other amendments have given Congress powers above and beyond those granted in Article 1, Section 8, usually through a "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation" clause. However, the amendments that have that clause (13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26) generally have little, if anything, to do with spending money.
The 16th means Congress could tax every income bracket at 99% if they wanted to, but they still could only spend that money on the things Section 8 (and relevant amendments) say they can spend it on.
In the hands of a good government, it's a great tool.
Sorry to break the news, but there's no such thing as a "good government." Just shades of bad government. Even if we had what you considered a "good government" now, that would not last forever and sooner or later we would have a bad government that would not hesitate to use all those things that were previously "great tools" to oppress the people.
Show the new license agreement to your boss. He'll probably drop AIM because having AOL Time Warner own every potential business/product idea any employee every talks about on IM is a Bad Thing.
On the other hand, he could also implement some crazy crack-smoker policy like 'no sensitive data over IM,' which will inevitably lead to conversations like this:
Alice: blah blah blah
Bob: blah blah blah
Alice: hold on, I've got a good idea. I'm calling you.
Of course, once no important information is sent over IM, there will cease to be a point for allowing employees to use IM, so it will be banned. Naturally, that won't stop the employees from using it, except now that the consequences for sharing sensitive data are the same as sharing non-sensitive data, they'll IM about whatever they want.
Both your education examples (college and elementary/secondary) have a fatal flaw:
Private education is expensive because the customers are rich.
If you want to send your kid to public school, all you have to pay is the school taxes, which you would have to pay anyway. If you want to send your kid to private school, you have to pay both the school tax and the private school tuition. As a result, almost all private school parents are wealthy, because they're the only ones who can afford to pay both the tax & the tuition. Thus private schools can charge more, because the parents can afford it.
If you implemented a tax exemption whereby any parent who did not have a student in public school did not have to pay the school tax, suddenly there would be thousands and thousands of parents who couldn't afford private school before but could now. In response to this increased market demand, more private schools would open up, many of them catering to the market of lower-income parents by offering even lower tuition rates.
And I can guarantee that they would offer a better education than public schools and a lower cost. How can I guarantee that?
Because if they didn't, parents would put their kids back into public school and the new private schools would go out of business. That means there's nothing to lose, yet everything to gain.
I was driving one time and the toll road I was on sucked. Then I drove onto a taxpayer-funded road and it was better. This proves that taxpayer funded roads are better than toll roads.
to this:
I was walking down the street one time and a black guy mugged me. Then I passed a white guy and he didn't mug me. This proves that black guys are more likely than white guys to be muggers.
Your anecdotal evidence doesn't mean shit. The grandparent didn't say "The best tax-funded road is worse than the worst toll road." What he said was "Toll roads are generally better-maintained than government-run roads," which is true for the same reason any form of private property is generally better maintained than the same property own by the government. Private property owners lose money if their property loses value, hence they have an incentive to keep it well-maintained. By comparison, a bureaucrat isn't going to lose anything (other than MAYBE his job) if the government-owned property he's in charge of loses value.
So change the law to stop eminent domain being used for developers private projects.
And how, exactly, do you propose to do this? What wording would you suggest that would stop land being given to developers for higher tax revenues, but would allow 'justified' uses of private property theft (which I'm still not sure exist) to take place?
As John Adams said, we must have a government of laws and not men.
Not matter what laws we pass, they will still be enforced by men. The officials of our government aren't law-executing robots, they're fallible, corruptible human beings. They will find ways around any and all checks and balances we put on any governmental power. Should our eminent domain law require that the stolen property remain in the hands of the city or state government that stole it? No problem, the government will just then lease it to the highest bidder. Any restrictions you write into the eminent domain law will have loopholes that will be exploited, because you, too, are fallible.
Any system of legal plunder, as eminent domain is, is fundamentally and fatally flawed. It cannot be reformed and can only be abolished.
We should be more concerned about what is good for humanity
And how do you propose to write into the law the definition of "good for humanity"?
How can write the law so that only things that are going to be used for the good of humanity are allowed to be stolen?
What are we going to do when corrupt elected officials (excuse the redundancy) simply ignore the "good of humanity" clause and take whatever they want and give it to whomever they please, leaving us in much the same state as we are in right now?
Even if you grant that eminent domain has legitimate, justifiable uses (which I'm not entirely convinced of) their abuse, like the abuse of all government power, is absolutely and totally inevitable. Better to restrict government power in this area completely. Private property rights are too fundamental to civilization to subject them to the whims of politicians, bureaucrats or judges.
If the majority of people did in fact support the war effort, then you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone willing to sell the government whatever it was that they were going to steal.
Read my reply to the AC above for the reasons that won't work.
Voting for candidates and then expecting them to cater to you won't work, because they already have what they want: your vote. You have to convince them that they need your vote, which means showing them what happens when they don't get your vote.
What you have to do is get people to vote for the third-party, then talk to the major party candidate you want to compromise with you, vote totals in hand as proof of your faction's clout. If you have enough votes, you may not even need to approach the candidate; he'll start appealing to your voters of his own accord.
All the Libertarian Party has to do is the same thing the Socialist Party did.
Long, long ago, Democrats believed in limited government. Then the Socialist Party came along and started running candidates with the strategy of taking votes away from Democratic candidates. The Democrats had to start catering to Socialist interests in order to stop losing votes. I wish I had my copy of Lever Action on hand so I could quote the example given there: the 1932 platform of the Democratic Party called for limited government. The Socialist Party platform of the same year called for everything the Democratic Party stands for now: heavily progressive income tax, higher minimum wage, welfare state, more regulation of business, etc. The Democratic Party has become the Socialist Party in all but name.
Libertarians are in an even better position than the Socialists were, because we're capable of taking votes away from both the left and the right. Paleoconservatives who oppose preemptive war and "compassionate conservative" welfare programs are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the neocons who now run the Republican Party. At the same time, anti-war liberals don't like how much the Democrats support Bush's War in Iraq. The Libertarian Party can siphon off votes from both of these factions.
For example, the 2004 gubernatorial race in my home state of WA was decided by 127 votes. The Democrat, Gregoire, beat the Republican, Rossi, only after two recounts. The Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett, is openly lesbian and ran a campaign focused on gay rights, with the specific strategy of taking votes away from Gregoire. It worked. Bennett got 63,000+ votes. Remember that the margin of victory was only 127 votes. If even 1% of the Bennett supporters had voted for Gregoire instead, she would have won outright, without the need for two recounts.
You are correct that in the long run, the Libertarian Party will need to compromise with one or both of the major parties. However, the major parties won't compromise with us unless they have to. The only way to make them realize that they need to deal with us is by taking away their voters until they realize we are a force to be reckoned with. To that end, in the short run Libertarians MUST vote Libertarian instead of Democrat or Republican, and encourage any Libertarian-leaning friends or acquaintances to do the same. We'll either force them to compromise with us, as the Socialist Party did, or we'll supplant them entirely, in much the same way the Republican Party came to power over the Whigs.
Before you deny widespread addiction, get your facts straight. It did cause widespread addiction, fool.
I do not deny that there were drug addicts when drugs were legal. What you seem to think, however, is the fact that there were drug addicts when drugs were legal implies that the addictions were caused by the availability of drugs. Correlation is not causation.
What you overlook is that there have always been addicts, and there always will be addicts. In fact, rates of drug addiction among the general population are fairly constant whether or not drugs are legal.
So we can have drugs be illegal, and try to deal with all the associated problems. Or we can legalize drugs, see no significant increase in addiction, and reap the benefits of drugs being legal, such as addicts being treated as sick people instead of being jailed as criminals.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still an endorsement of that evil.
The candidate who gets the "lesser evil" votes doesn't have a party at campaign HQ celebrating the fact that he's less evil. He sees every vote, regardless of why it was cast, as an endorsement of his policies. Vote for the D, he sees it as you voting for the welfare state, affirmative action and all the other un-libertarian Democrat policies. Vote for the R, you're voting for the War in Iraq, the War on Drugs, and all the other un-libertarian Republican policies.
If you're a Libertarian, please vote for Libertarian candidates or stay home. Anything else is harmful to the Libertarian movement.
If there really is a valid reason behind drug prohibition, why did Anslinger and his cronies have to lie so much about the effects of drugs when the government was trying to prohibit them in the early 20th century?
If there was a logical reason for drugs to be illegal, Anslinger would just have to go on the radio and say "Drugs should be illegal. Here's why." Instead, he had to go around spreading FUD like "$drug makes $minority rape white women/become unstoppable and go on a killing spree/etc."
Go after the big fish, and it will cut off the supply to the little fish.
Actually, go after the big fish, and more big fish will appear to replace them. If there's a demand, someone will find a way to supply it. Period.
In Why Our Drug Laws have Failed and What We Can Do About It, Superior Court Judge James P. Gray quotes a letter from a fellow judge about arresting every drug dealer they could find in one city (Phoenix), to see how quickly the market filled the gap. They bought drugs from every single dealer they could find, and arrested all 76 they found on one night. Can you guess what happened?
"For a week it was impossible to buy drugs on the streets of Phoenix. The single local drug treatment program was swamped. Addicts who could not get treatment left town to score elsewhere. But on the eighth day, new street pushers began to appear in the city, and before a month had elapsed, it was business-as-usual. We had spent tens of thousands of federal tax dollars, and sent scores of pushers to prison, but there was no lasting effect on the availability or price of illicit drugs."
Arresting the users won't work. Arresting the dealers won't work either. What's left?
The only rational option is legalization. Without an artificially constricted supply, drugs would no longer be insanely profitable, meaning gangs wouldn't be killing each other over drug distribution territories anymore and dealers wouldn't be trying to get people hooked. With drugs subject to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, manufacturers would have to label their products and say how much of what was in it, meaning accidental overdoses would virtually disappear. Drugs wouldn't have to be smuggled in compact, more addictive form anymore, so we'd go back to having cocaine be an ingredient in soft drinks rather than a powder you snort.
And before you reply that legalization would make more people addicts...
Before the early part of the 20th Century, a 12 year old girl could walk into a general store and walk out with as much heroine, cocaine and morphine as she could carry in one arm and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. If drug legalization would cause widespread addiction now, why didn't it back then?
Slashdot Mirror
They're not the normal "hey, let's go buy a $100 microphone and record ourselves talking shit then put it on a webpage" podcast. (You know who you are) They're a syndicated radio show that's been putting their archives up for download completely free since day one, almost three and a half years ago, when these "podcast" things existed, but there wasn't even a bandwagon to jump on yet.
Since they're primarily a radio show, the audio quality and production values are much higher than most other podcasts out there. You don't have to be an audiophile to recognize that most podcasts out there sound like underwater shit. The hosts also know what they're doing, having worked in "real" radio before.
They take calls and e-mails from podcast listeners, live internet stream listeners and radio listeners alike. In fact, podcast and live stream listeners make up the majority of their calls on weekdays, as the majority of their affiliates carry the Saturday show only.
Disco Stu: Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue - aaaaaaay!
native support for the PDF document format
In other words,
native support for the Portable Document Format document format
So some cars came with seatbelts, and some came without them. If a car buyer really wanted a seatbelt, they would buy a car with one. If someone didn't want one or was indifferent, they would buy a car without them. Now, either:
A) That's their choice to make and good for them.
B) That's not their choice to make, it's yours or someone else's because you know better than they do.
I really don't see any third options.
1. If this is true, then why are the rates of food and water contamincation higher in countries like Mexico? Shouldn't the free-market method of quality control have weeded out all of the bad restaurants by now?
Probably, as the AC pointed out above, because Mexicans have built up immunities to the stuff that's in their food and water, and thus they aren't nearly as picky about things like that as Americans are.
2. What if all of the restaurants and food sellers in your area subscribe to the cheaper-is-better business model?
Open your own restaurant if you want. I'm sure there's plenty of other other people in your town who also dislike the cheaper-is-better business model, and your restaurant will end up with a fair share of their business.
If you don't have the time, money, or whatever needed to open your own restaurant, then don't worry, because someone else will once they realize the potential profit to be made from the cheaper-isn't-better crowd.
And, failing all that, you just bite the bullet and go to one of the cheap but crappy restaurants, or you choose not to go out to eat.
4. Please explain why the notoriously unsafe aluminum wiring was used in just about every structure built in the 70's until the building codes were changed to prohibit its use. What happens to the free-market system when everybody uses the inferior and unsafe solution despite the consumer's wish.
Again, if the consumers had truly wanted copper wiring enough to insist on it and pay the extra for it, they would have had it.
And again, it comes back to that dichotomy - either it's the consumer's choice, or it's someone else's choice, because the consumer's an idiot and whoever is making the decision is supposedly smarter than them.
I really don't like Wal Mart and would like to shop elsewhere for my camping equipment. Unfortunately, Wal Mart has wiped out the other two stores in my town that sold camping equipment. What do people do when the free-market system creates a monopoly or a cartel as usually happens in unregulated economies?
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=camping returns 699,000 results. Sure, you might pay a little more on some of the bigger stuff once you figure in shipping, but that's the price you pay for being picky about where you shop. Wal-Mart's always there if you get tired of paying that premium.
And keep in mind that no one's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy camping equipment. Even if there was no one else in the world selling camping equipment, that doesn't give you the right to meddle in other people's affairs.
1. If I were a restaurant owner, I would simply not allow that Consumer Reports person to inspect my kitchen.
As Ironsides pointed out, CR does everything they do anonymously. But supposing the fictional Restaurant Reports inspectors told restaurant owners who they were, and the owners refused to let them in, that would show up in their report, and potential customers would have to wonder what they're trying to hide.
2. What's to stop me from just paying a nice fat "consultation" fee to this Consumer Rating Company so they give me a good rating? (If you've ever been thro
Even if seatbelts and airbags weren't mandated, car companies would still offer cars with them, because consumers would demand them. So what would be stopping you from buying a car with such safety devices?
not getting salmonella with my burrito
The restaurant you're eating at has a damn good reason to ensure that their workers handle the food you're eating properly: if they don't, they lose profits. All it would take is one or two cases of food-borne illness before word would spread and that restaurant's business would dry up pretty quick.
and not having the restaurant catch on fire because of aluminum wiring
Again, the restaurant has a profit incentive not to use unsafe wiring: the money saved is far outweighed by the potential cost of having the entire restaurant burn down.
Remember that if you don't like some what some business is doing, you can exercise your ultimate right as a sovereign consumer and not patronize that business.
But, I hear you saying, how will I know whether or not a particular business is doing something I don't like? No problem. In the absence of government regulations, Consumer Reports-type publications will open up to test, survey and measure how well car safety devices work, how many people have caught food-borne illnesses from Bob's BBQ or Joe's Gyros, and whether or not the wiring in those restaurants is safe or not.
And I now I hear you asking, "what if people don't take the time to buy these consumer watchdog magazines, or ignore what they say?" This, of course, is just another way to say "I may be smart, but everyone around me is dumb, so I need to tell them how to live their lives at gunpoint."
Bullshit. Anything and everything the federal government does needs explicit Constitutional authorization.
It was created by an act of Congress, not by executive fiat.
Where does Congress' authority to create the FCC come from? Unless that power is listed in Article I, Section 8, Congress did NOT have the power to create the FCC and the entire FCC and everything it does is unconstitutional.
Who else read this and thought 'boobs'?
Come on, this is /., 'fess up....
Classic gun control strawman. "You can't fight the military so why bother with guns at all?" The truth is that it was gun control who made it so that we can't fight the military in the first place.
The 2nd Amendment as written was meant to apply to whatever the "modern firepower" of the day was. It wasn't until 1934, when the National Firearms Act was passed, (as a response to alcohol smugglers with Tommy guns...yet Prohibition had been repealed the year earlier - go figure) that fully automatic weapons and "destructive devices" became so highly regulated that for the purposes of an arsenal able to withstand the military they might as well have been banned.
The gun controllers dig a hole for us, push us in, and use the fact that we can't get out as an excuse to dig deeper.
The change from shitting in holes dug in the ground to indoor plumbing is good.
Therefore, everything that happened over the last 200 years is good.
The change from strongly limited government to a welfare-warfare state has happened over the last 200 years.
Therefore, The change from strongly limited government to a welfare-warfare state is good.
Do you see the fallacy yet?
New ideas are not necessarily good.
Old ideas are not necessarily bad.
I know that the federal government has the right to tax the rich for all they want. However the government does not have the right to redistribute this wealth in any manner they see fit. The constitution laid out a groundwork for what the federal government could spend money on.
The 16th Amendment (not the 14th - please, at least read the Constitution before twisting its meaning) gives Congress the power to "lay and collect taxes on incomes". It did not, as the grandparent correctly pointed out, change in any way the things that Congress is allowed to spend money on. Other amendments have given Congress powers above and beyond those granted in Article 1, Section 8, usually through a "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation" clause. However, the amendments that have that clause (13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26) generally have little, if anything, to do with spending money.
The 16th means Congress could tax every income bracket at 99% if they wanted to, but they still could only spend that money on the things Section 8 (and relevant amendments) say they can spend it on.
Sorry to break the news, but there's no such thing as a "good government." Just shades of bad government. Even if we had what you considered a "good government" now, that would not last forever and sooner or later we would have a bad government that would not hesitate to use all those things that were previously "great tools" to oppress the people.
Show the new license agreement to your boss. He'll probably drop AIM because having AOL Time Warner own every potential business/product idea any employee every talks about on IM is a Bad Thing.
On the other hand, he could also implement some crazy crack-smoker policy like 'no sensitive data over IM,' which will inevitably lead to conversations like this:
Alice: blah blah blah
Bob: blah blah blah
Alice: hold on, I've got a good idea. I'm calling you.
Of course, once no important information is sent over IM, there will cease to be a point for allowing employees to use IM, so it will be banned. Naturally, that won't stop the employees from using it, except now that the consequences for sharing sensitive data are the same as sharing non-sensitive data, they'll IM about whatever they want.
Private education is expensive because the customers are rich.
If you want to send your kid to public school, all you have to pay is the school taxes, which you would have to pay anyway. If you want to send your kid to private school, you have to pay both the school tax and the private school tuition. As a result, almost all private school parents are wealthy, because they're the only ones who can afford to pay both the tax & the tuition. Thus private schools can charge more, because the parents can afford it.
If you implemented a tax exemption whereby any parent who did not have a student in public school did not have to pay the school tax, suddenly there would be thousands and thousands of parents who couldn't afford private school before but could now. In response to this increased market demand, more private schools would open up, many of them catering to the market of lower-income parents by offering even lower tuition rates.
And I can guarantee that they would offer a better education than public schools and a lower cost. How can I guarantee that?
Because if they didn't, parents would put their kids back into public school and the new private schools would go out of business. That means there's nothing to lose, yet everything to gain.
I was driving one time and the toll road I was on sucked. Then I drove onto a taxpayer-funded road and it was better. This proves that taxpayer funded roads are better than toll roads.
to this:
I was walking down the street one time and a black guy mugged me. Then I passed a white guy and he didn't mug me. This proves that black guys are more likely than white guys to be muggers.
Your anecdotal evidence doesn't mean shit. The grandparent didn't say "The best tax-funded road is worse than the worst toll road." What he said was "Toll roads are generally better-maintained than government-run roads," which is true for the same reason any form of private property is generally better maintained than the same property own by the government. Private property owners lose money if their property loses value, hence they have an incentive to keep it well-maintained. By comparison, a bureaucrat isn't going to lose anything (other than MAYBE his job) if the government-owned property he's in charge of loses value.
And how, exactly, do you propose to do this? What wording would you suggest that would stop land being given to developers for higher tax revenues, but would allow 'justified' uses of private property theft (which I'm still not sure exist) to take place?
As John Adams said, we must have a government of laws and not men.
Not matter what laws we pass, they will still be enforced by men. The officials of our government aren't law-executing robots, they're fallible, corruptible human beings. They will find ways around any and all checks and balances we put on any governmental power. Should our eminent domain law require that the stolen property remain in the hands of the city or state government that stole it? No problem, the government will just then lease it to the highest bidder. Any restrictions you write into the eminent domain law will have loopholes that will be exploited, because you, too, are fallible.
Any system of legal plunder, as eminent domain is, is fundamentally and fatally flawed. It cannot be reformed and can only be abolished.
"The ends justify the means" is much more concise.
And how do you propose to write into the law the definition of "good for humanity"?
How can write the law so that only things that are going to be used for the good of humanity are allowed to be stolen?
What are we going to do when corrupt elected officials (excuse the redundancy) simply ignore the "good of humanity" clause and take whatever they want and give it to whomever they please, leaving us in much the same state as we are in right now?
Even if you grant that eminent domain has legitimate, justifiable uses (which I'm not entirely convinced of) their abuse, like the abuse of all government power, is absolutely and totally inevitable. Better to restrict government power in this area completely. Private property rights are too fundamental to civilization to subject them to the whims of politicians, bureaucrats or judges.
If the majority of people did in fact support the war effort, then you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone willing to sell the government whatever it was that they were going to steal.
This is California we're talking about.
Voting for candidates and then expecting them to cater to you won't work, because they already have what they want: your vote. You have to convince them that they need your vote, which means showing them what happens when they don't get your vote.
What you have to do is get people to vote for the third-party, then talk to the major party candidate you want to compromise with you, vote totals in hand as proof of your faction's clout. If you have enough votes, you may not even need to approach the candidate; he'll start appealing to your voters of his own accord.
Long, long ago, Democrats believed in limited government. Then the Socialist Party came along and started running candidates with the strategy of taking votes away from Democratic candidates. The Democrats had to start catering to Socialist interests in order to stop losing votes. I wish I had my copy of Lever Action on hand so I could quote the example given there: the 1932 platform of the Democratic Party called for limited government. The Socialist Party platform of the same year called for everything the Democratic Party stands for now: heavily progressive income tax, higher minimum wage, welfare state, more regulation of business, etc. The Democratic Party has become the Socialist Party in all but name.
Libertarians are in an even better position than the Socialists were, because we're capable of taking votes away from both the left and the right. Paleoconservatives who oppose preemptive war and "compassionate conservative" welfare programs are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the neocons who now run the Republican Party. At the same time, anti-war liberals don't like how much the Democrats support Bush's War in Iraq. The Libertarian Party can siphon off votes from both of these factions.
For example, the 2004 gubernatorial race in my home state of WA was decided by 127 votes. The Democrat, Gregoire, beat the Republican, Rossi, only after two recounts. The Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett, is openly lesbian and ran a campaign focused on gay rights, with the specific strategy of taking votes away from Gregoire. It worked. Bennett got 63,000+ votes. Remember that the margin of victory was only 127 votes. If even 1% of the Bennett supporters had voted for Gregoire instead, she would have won outright, without the need for two recounts.
You are correct that in the long run, the Libertarian Party will need to compromise with one or both of the major parties. However, the major parties won't compromise with us unless they have to. The only way to make them realize that they need to deal with us is by taking away their voters until they realize we are a force to be reckoned with. To that end, in the short run Libertarians MUST vote Libertarian instead of Democrat or Republican, and encourage any Libertarian-leaning friends or acquaintances to do the same. We'll either force them to compromise with us, as the Socialist Party did, or we'll supplant them entirely, in much the same way the Republican Party came to power over the Whigs.
I do not deny that there were drug addicts when drugs were legal. What you seem to think, however, is the fact that there were drug addicts when drugs were legal implies that the addictions were caused by the availability of drugs. Correlation is not causation.
What you overlook is that there have always been addicts, and there always will be addicts. In fact, rates of drug addiction among the general population are fairly constant whether or not drugs are legal.
So we can have drugs be illegal, and try to deal with all the associated problems. Or we can legalize drugs, see no significant increase in addiction, and reap the benefits of drugs being legal, such as addicts being treated as sick people instead of being jailed as criminals.
The candidate who gets the "lesser evil" votes doesn't have a party at campaign HQ celebrating the fact that he's less evil. He sees every vote, regardless of why it was cast, as an endorsement of his policies. Vote for the D, he sees it as you voting for the welfare state, affirmative action and all the other un-libertarian Democrat policies. Vote for the R, you're voting for the War in Iraq, the War on Drugs, and all the other un-libertarian Republican policies.
If you're a Libertarian, please vote for Libertarian candidates or stay home. Anything else is harmful to the Libertarian movement.
If there was a logical reason for drugs to be illegal, Anslinger would just have to go on the radio and say "Drugs should be illegal. Here's why." Instead, he had to go around spreading FUD like "$drug makes $minority rape white women/become unstoppable and go on a killing spree/etc."
Actually, go after the big fish, and more big fish will appear to replace them. If there's a demand, someone will find a way to supply it. Period.
In Why Our Drug Laws have Failed and What We Can Do About It, Superior Court Judge James P. Gray quotes a letter from a fellow judge about arresting every drug dealer they could find in one city (Phoenix), to see how quickly the market filled the gap. They bought drugs from every single dealer they could find, and arrested all 76 they found on one night. Can you guess what happened?
Arresting the users won't work. Arresting the dealers won't work either. What's left?
The only rational option is legalization. Without an artificially constricted supply, drugs would no longer be insanely profitable, meaning gangs wouldn't be killing each other over drug distribution territories anymore and dealers wouldn't be trying to get people hooked. With drugs subject to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, manufacturers would have to label their products and say how much of what was in it, meaning accidental overdoses would virtually disappear. Drugs wouldn't have to be smuggled in compact, more addictive form anymore, so we'd go back to having cocaine be an ingredient in soft drinks rather than a powder you snort.
And before you reply that legalization would make more people addicts...
Before the early part of the 20th Century, a 12 year old girl could walk into a general store and walk out with as much heroine, cocaine and morphine as she could carry in one arm and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. If drug legalization would cause widespread addiction now, why didn't it back then?