You really don't understand that the two are completely linked? That the shareholder's bottom line is determined by profits that are generated by customers that choose to turn money over for a product or a service?
Really? Your first response is the US monopoly Postal Service, which is currently expected to lose $238 billion over the next 10 years? The one that is asking to reduce service for the same price by eliminating Saturday delivery?
If you want to give me examples of what the government does right, I'm sure you can find one that doesn't hemorrhage taxpayer money for less service than I can get from a number of private companies.
Personally, I find the disparity between cocaine and crack possession sentences an absolute travesty of justice and far more harming than the idea of separate but terribly unequal government facilities and services. They're both racist. One involves taking another man/woman's freedom from them, physically, while separate but equal is more psychological than physical.
Jim Crow segregation was institutionalized in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is a case where the State of Louisiana passed a racist law, and after the case was argued, the State upheld the racism - it's not a private property matter. As a result of the 7-1 decision, the racists had the power of the federal government at their hands, telling the people that separate but equal was not just an option, but a mandated federal policy.
This is where people argue against "libertarian policies" when the reality is that government institutionalizes racism. Plessy is not the only case; the "war on drugs" is an equally vile racist policy that the US uses to discriminate against minorities and impose uneven punishments towards certain races. It's hard to argue that the government protects the people from racism when there are documented cases of the government making that racism law and upholding it through the use of force.
My straw man is satire, just an echo of the OPs argument in reverse.
If I were to argue anything, I would argue that the current system failed because of corporatism or "crony capitalism". Because of government regulations, BP has a ceiling limit on what it is liable for in damages. They may pay more, but that's really an issue of public image rather than legal liability (some would argue this is what keeps BP in check in the absence of gov't regulations, but I'm not even arguing for less regulation). Government is aiding BP, in exchange for money to win future political campaigns. BP gets to try and make as much money as possible free from the regulations that hamper its competition, thanks to government.
Pro-capitalists blame the government. Anti-capitalists blame the corporations. This is a false dichotomy: both groups share blame, because the system is increasingly set up so that the two of those groups benefit. Meanwhile the third group, the people, have to suffer.
"We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them."
This is where we get into opinion that neither of us can argue. I don't fear a corporation, because they only have as much power over me as I give them. I fear the government, because they have a monopoly on legal use of physical force. A corporation cannot come into my home, armed and without invite; the police can. A corporation cannot falsely imprison a person without consequence; the government can. BP is giant and ridiculously wealthy precisely because the government enables that behavior through back-office deals and anti-competitive laws. They create a system where I have little choice but to buy gasoline from BP, because regulation and favoritism has made it too costly for any new competition to do business against BP.
As I said, I'm not arguing that the existing rules on off-shore drilling should be eliminated. That's someone else's straw man opinion of the libertarian position. I'm arguing that, even with all the perfect regulations in place, BP can just pay some Senator and somehow get temporary exclusion from those regulations. Regardless of what other problems the "free-market" may come with (and libertarians rarely argue that those bad things don't happen, just that government tends to make them worse), at least "hands-off" capitalism means that the politicians can't give favors to these corporations and enable this kind of behavior further.
There is no "system". Push hard enough, and every libertarian will eventually find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of true "freedom" as to desire a legislated authoritarian solution. Push any authoritarian, and you'll find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of the use of government force as to desire a hands-off approach.
I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, it doesn't lie in calling every liberal a socialist. It doesn't come from straw man arguments that reducing the size of government means privatized roads and fire departments. The answer, like all things, is neither black nor white.
FTA: "The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely. The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf."
So, how come the multiple regulations and government agencies that are supposed to be watching the oil companies and their regulations didn't stop this from happening?
I don't hear many people making a case that BP should be unregulated, so your straw man is already leaning over a bit before you even try and knock him down. But if you're trying to make the case that government regulation would have stopped this disaster, you really should take into consideration the fact that these agencies are regulated, their well-trained government agents determined three times that this oil spell was not likely to occur, and even exempted them from some of the regulations. What good is an oversight board that can be bought?
Libertarianism does not mean corporatism, as much as you would like to believe. In general, it's the belief that even if you could construct the perfect government program, greed and incompetence will eventually sabotage its operations.
Opinion of the Court: "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
But you would know that if you actually, oh I don't know, studied or something...
Again, hilarious that the government is so easy to buy, but it's the corporations that are the evil ones for doing it, and not the government that allows these laws to be purchased.
1. Government law caps the liability of BP to $75 M under Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. 2. Government fails to properly tax the profit of BP. 3. Government takes on responsibilities like cleanup that should be BP's. 4. Government funnels money from taxpayers to BP allowing them to profit from good times while avoiding costs of bad times.
And your conclusion to this is about how evil BP is, and not how the government enables each of these to occur?
But that's rarely what's argued. The laws that are being pushed remove my ability as a private individual to decide what I want to allow on my private property. If I own a business, and I choose to allow smoking in my building, I don't really see that as an issue that the government should even be involved in. My property, my right to decide. Your life, your right to decide whether you want to work in my building, or do business with me in my building, etc.
Your suggestion would mean we treated smoking like we treat littering - if I drop trash in a public place, I'm subject to a fine for cleanup and penalty, but you can't tell me not to drop trash in my house wherever I want, or in my businesses. I think I personally could get more behind that idea than this push to mandate that individuals no longer have the right to choose how they use their property.
Yep. Washington Monument Syndrome - the first line of defense against any proposed governmental budget cuts is to quickly suggest that said cuts will result in the termination of services that people highly value, rather than finding relevant places to cut the budget.
"Moreover, it's the morally superior way to do things"
I reject your argument that using threats of violence against individuals to take money from them and give them to others is morally superior to anything, especially a system that provides the same care to individuals without requiring violence in order to maintain it.
The end, a "minimum standard of living and safety net" may be morally superior to the position "no minimum standard of living and safety net", but the means to that end are most certainly not moral. If I need health care, it is not moral to use force to take that money from my neighbor and use it for myself - so I certainly reject the notion that some third-party called "government" or "society" can do that for me.
There should be a Godwin's law for mentioning "privatized" roads in any discussion related to the expansion of government power.
You know that's a false dichotomy, right? I can believe that the government should run some public goods and also believe they shouldn't mandate purchase of health insurance.
So, the combined information of all the individuals that make up the market is "generally irrational" because of human emotion, but having a small group of individuals with less information control and regulate that market is less so?
Can you explain to me how we got rid of human emotion when we appointed some smaller group of individuals as regulators?
"The removal of mod tools effects people who don't fall in line with current trends, because it forces us to play the game as is out of box."
This word "force"... it does not mean what you seem to think.
You were not forced to buy MW2; you are not forced to play it. Should you choose to purchase and play it, you agree to use it under IW's terms. If you do not agree to the system that IW has created, feel free to purchase other games that have a mechanic closer to what you want to see. If there is no game that matches exactly what you want, feel free to create the game yourself.
IW doesn't have to make anything available to you. It's your job as a consumer to decide if their proposition has value to you. The game has made over a billion dollars, so obviously millions of people have decided that it does. But you really sound like just pure whining when you invoke some evil corporate overlord that's "forcing" you to play a game. You are the one that makes the choice.
I really hope this vein of story doesn't make front page Slashdot very often.
Because "Can't we all just get along?" doesn't really go well with "Let's use force against individuals to make them comply."
I'd love it if the argument was "hey, why don't you guys think about reducing your pollution, it will benefit your pocketbook and your health". Unfortunately, what's being argued is more like "you will adhere to our rules regarding pollution reduction, or we will hurt your pocketbook or your health."
The value of a song is what people will pay for it. The world doesn't owe you anything either. Just because you own what you create does not entitle you to profit from it.
I had Charter for years before Verizon brought FiOS into the area. It wouldn't matter if they had quantum routers that somehow got the internet to me microseconds before someone finished writing it; I am not enough of a sadist to do business with that black hole of customer service ever again.
If Comcast is really worse than Charter as I hear, I literally weep for their subscriber base.
The fact that you honestly believe that a man cannot do plumbing work without a license from the state shows how far this country has gone down the tubes.
I don't have to ask the government permission to make a living. The fact that I do is a travesty. If I agree to allow a man into my home to service my pipes, you want me to believe that he cannot do a perfect job just because he has not paid some licensing fee to the state? I'm responsible for letting him in my home, and he's responsible for the work he does under the contract we establish before he starts the job. Where does the state need to get involved except to enforce the contract?
No support for Joe the Plumber, I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. But the idea that I can't call myself a plumber if I'm as experienced as the best of the best because the state is the only one that can grant me that privilege is nonsense and harmful to the economy.
LOL, free markets.
In a free market, the government doesn't back the debt liabilities of private corporations, as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In a free market, the government doesn't pass laws requiring businesses to offer equal amounts of loans to subprime candidates as prime candidates, as in the case of the Community Reinvestment Act.
And, in a free market, the government doesn't step in and assist businesses that made bad decisions and took on too much risk. They don't use the money taken from the citizenry (by force!) to assist failed companies.
No, I assure you, Anon, there is no free market here.
Forget human assistance, Google, just let me delete a link (or entire domain) from my search results forever. I'm so tired of searching for something remote only to be sent to parked domains with spam keywords, or good quality information trapped behind a registration.
Sure, I can do this in other ways on my machine - but to do it once on Google to work for all machines would be 1000x more convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
You really don't understand that the two are completely linked? That the shareholder's bottom line is determined by profits that are generated by customers that choose to turn money over for a product or a service?
Really? Your first response is the US monopoly Postal Service, which is currently expected to lose $238 billion over the next 10 years? The one that is asking to reduce service for the same price by eliminating Saturday delivery?
If you want to give me examples of what the government does right, I'm sure you can find one that doesn't hemorrhage taxpayer money for less service than I can get from a number of private companies.
This should be +5, thx.
Can you give a reason?
Personally, I find the disparity between cocaine and crack possession sentences an absolute travesty of justice and far more harming than the idea of separate but terribly unequal government facilities and services. They're both racist. One involves taking another man/woman's freedom from them, physically, while separate but equal is more psychological than physical.
Jim Crow segregation was institutionalized in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is a case where the State of Louisiana passed a racist law, and after the case was argued, the State upheld the racism - it's not a private property matter. As a result of the 7-1 decision, the racists had the power of the federal government at their hands, telling the people that separate but equal was not just an option, but a mandated federal policy.
This is where people argue against "libertarian policies" when the reality is that government institutionalizes racism. Plessy is not the only case; the "war on drugs" is an equally vile racist policy that the US uses to discriminate against minorities and impose uneven punishments towards certain races. It's hard to argue that the government protects the people from racism when there are documented cases of the government making that racism law and upholding it through the use of force.
My straw man is satire, just an echo of the OPs argument in reverse.
If I were to argue anything, I would argue that the current system failed because of corporatism or "crony capitalism". Because of government regulations, BP has a ceiling limit on what it is liable for in damages. They may pay more, but that's really an issue of public image rather than legal liability (some would argue this is what keeps BP in check in the absence of gov't regulations, but I'm not even arguing for less regulation). Government is aiding BP, in exchange for money to win future political campaigns. BP gets to try and make as much money as possible free from the regulations that hamper its competition, thanks to government.
Pro-capitalists blame the government. Anti-capitalists blame the corporations. This is a false dichotomy: both groups share blame, because the system is increasingly set up so that the two of those groups benefit. Meanwhile the third group, the people, have to suffer.
"We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them."
This is where we get into opinion that neither of us can argue. I don't fear a corporation, because they only have as much power over me as I give them. I fear the government, because they have a monopoly on legal use of physical force. A corporation cannot come into my home, armed and without invite; the police can. A corporation cannot falsely imprison a person without consequence; the government can. BP is giant and ridiculously wealthy precisely because the government enables that behavior through back-office deals and anti-competitive laws. They create a system where I have little choice but to buy gasoline from BP, because regulation and favoritism has made it too costly for any new competition to do business against BP.
As I said, I'm not arguing that the existing rules on off-shore drilling should be eliminated. That's someone else's straw man opinion of the libertarian position. I'm arguing that, even with all the perfect regulations in place, BP can just pay some Senator and somehow get temporary exclusion from those regulations. Regardless of what other problems the "free-market" may come with (and libertarians rarely argue that those bad things don't happen, just that government tends to make them worse), at least "hands-off" capitalism means that the politicians can't give favors to these corporations and enable this kind of behavior further.
There is no "system". Push hard enough, and every libertarian will eventually find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of true "freedom" as to desire a legislated authoritarian solution. Push any authoritarian, and you'll find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of the use of government force as to desire a hands-off approach.
I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, it doesn't lie in calling every liberal a socialist. It doesn't come from straw man arguments that reducing the size of government means privatized roads and fire departments. The answer, like all things, is neither black nor white.
U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
FTA: "The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely. The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf."
So, how come the multiple regulations and government agencies that are supposed to be watching the oil companies and their regulations didn't stop this from happening?
I don't hear many people making a case that BP should be unregulated, so your straw man is already leaning over a bit before you even try and knock him down. But if you're trying to make the case that government regulation would have stopped this disaster, you really should take into consideration the fact that these agencies are regulated, their well-trained government agents determined three times that this oil spell was not likely to occur, and even exempted them from some of the regulations. What good is an oversight board that can be bought?
Libertarianism does not mean corporatism, as much as you would like to believe. In general, it's the belief that even if you could construct the perfect government program, greed and incompetence will eventually sabotage its operations.
Tinker v Des Moines (393 US 503 [1969])
Opinion of the Court: "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
But you would know that if you actually, oh I don't know, studied or something...
"I wish I had the money to buy the laws I want."
Again, hilarious that the government is so easy to buy, but it's the corporations that are the evil ones for doing it, and not the government that allows these laws to be purchased.
Let me see if I've got this right:
1. Government law caps the liability of BP to $75 M under Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.
2. Government fails to properly tax the profit of BP.
3. Government takes on responsibilities like cleanup that should be BP's.
4. Government funnels money from taxpayers to BP allowing them to profit from good times while avoiding costs of bad times.
And your conclusion to this is about how evil BP is, and not how the government enables each of these to occur?
But that's rarely what's argued. The laws that are being pushed remove my ability as a private individual to decide what I want to allow on my private property. If I own a business, and I choose to allow smoking in my building, I don't really see that as an issue that the government should even be involved in. My property, my right to decide. Your life, your right to decide whether you want to work in my building, or do business with me in my building, etc.
Your suggestion would mean we treated smoking like we treat littering - if I drop trash in a public place, I'm subject to a fine for cleanup and penalty, but you can't tell me not to drop trash in my house wherever I want, or in my businesses. I think I personally could get more behind that idea than this push to mandate that individuals no longer have the right to choose how they use their property.
Yep. Washington Monument Syndrome - the first line of defense against any proposed governmental budget cuts is to quickly suggest that said cuts will result in the termination of services that people highly value, rather than finding relevant places to cut the budget.
I reject your argument that using threats of violence against individuals to take money from them and give them to others is morally superior to anything, especially a system that provides the same care to individuals without requiring violence in order to maintain it.
The end, a "minimum standard of living and safety net" may be morally superior to the position "no minimum standard of living and safety net", but the means to that end are most certainly not moral. If I need health care, it is not moral to use force to take that money from my neighbor and use it for myself - so I certainly reject the notion that some third-party called "government" or "society" can do that for me.
There should be a Godwin's law for mentioning "privatized" roads in any discussion related to the expansion of government power.
You know that's a false dichotomy, right? I can believe that the government should run some public goods and also believe they shouldn't mandate purchase of health insurance.
So, the combined information of all the individuals that make up the market is "generally irrational" because of human emotion, but having a small group of individuals with less information control and regulate that market is less so?
Can you explain to me how we got rid of human emotion when we appointed some smaller group of individuals as regulators?
"The removal of mod tools effects people who don't fall in line with current trends, because it forces us to play the game as is out of box."
This word "force"... it does not mean what you seem to think.
You were not forced to buy MW2; you are not forced to play it. Should you choose to purchase and play it, you agree to use it under IW's terms. If you do not agree to the system that IW has created, feel free to purchase other games that have a mechanic closer to what you want to see. If there is no game that matches exactly what you want, feel free to create the game yourself.
IW doesn't have to make anything available to you. It's your job as a consumer to decide if their proposition has value to you. The game has made over a billion dollars, so obviously millions of people have decided that it does. But you really sound like just pure whining when you invoke some evil corporate overlord that's "forcing" you to play a game. You are the one that makes the choice.
I really hope this vein of story doesn't make front page Slashdot very often.
Because "Can't we all just get along?" doesn't really go well with "Let's use force against individuals to make them comply."
I'd love it if the argument was "hey, why don't you guys think about reducing your pollution, it will benefit your pocketbook and your health". Unfortunately, what's being argued is more like "you will adhere to our rules regarding pollution reduction, or we will hurt your pocketbook or your health."
Three more rules of music:
The value of a song is what people will pay for it.
The world doesn't owe you anything either.
Just because you own what you create does not entitle you to profit from it.
Your tin foil hat is showing. :D
I had Charter for years before Verizon brought FiOS into the area. It wouldn't matter if they had quantum routers that somehow got the internet to me microseconds before someone finished writing it; I am not enough of a sadist to do business with that black hole of customer service ever again.
If Comcast is really worse than Charter as I hear, I literally weep for their subscriber base.
The fact that you honestly believe that a man cannot do plumbing work without a license from the state shows how far this country has gone down the tubes. I don't have to ask the government permission to make a living. The fact that I do is a travesty. If I agree to allow a man into my home to service my pipes, you want me to believe that he cannot do a perfect job just because he has not paid some licensing fee to the state? I'm responsible for letting him in my home, and he's responsible for the work he does under the contract we establish before he starts the job. Where does the state need to get involved except to enforce the contract? No support for Joe the Plumber, I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. But the idea that I can't call myself a plumber if I'm as experienced as the best of the best because the state is the only one that can grant me that privilege is nonsense and harmful to the economy.
The Digital Copy versions on these discs are often DRM laced Windows Media files, or iPod formatted. My preferred format is neither.
If I can't use it on my devices in a way I want, then I don't own it. How hard is that to understand?
LOL, free markets. In a free market, the government doesn't back the debt liabilities of private corporations, as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In a free market, the government doesn't pass laws requiring businesses to offer equal amounts of loans to subprime candidates as prime candidates, as in the case of the Community Reinvestment Act. And, in a free market, the government doesn't step in and assist businesses that made bad decisions and took on too much risk. They don't use the money taken from the citizenry (by force!) to assist failed companies. No, I assure you, Anon, there is no free market here.
Forget human assistance, Google, just let me delete a link (or entire domain) from my search results forever. I'm so tired of searching for something remote only to be sent to parked domains with spam keywords, or good quality information trapped behind a registration.
Sure, I can do this in other ways on my machine - but to do it once on Google to work for all machines would be 1000x more convenient.