Consumers vote with their wallets. Apple does not force people to buy their products and subject themselves to the DRM.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Apple removed the DRM restriction precisely to avoid the kind of customer backlash that would affect their bottom line.
They bring in scale and build quality until everybody is conditioned to only buy their products, then they cut out the quality.
You forgot the part about rubbing your hands together while your monacle shakes from your evil laughter
I'm not sure what business you work in, but most successful businesses struggle mightily to enhance the value of their products and grow their business.
Microsoft is no different, and while, as a developer myself, I certainly get annoyed by certain things, you cannot deny that their product line has improved drastically over the last 15 years since Windows 3.1
In fact, many thousands of organization, and millions of people, derive tremendous value from their products.
Everyone will have their personal preferences about what they think is good or bad about a particular piece of software, but the overall value proposition that Microsoft provides today is tremendous. Google can't touch it. (yet).
And who pays for hurricane damage or for flooded land? What about health problems from poison ivy?
If you choose to live in places that are susceptible to flooding and hurricanes, then you can use insurance, pay for it yourself, or live somewhere else in the first place.
Even if all humans were dead tomorrow, their would still be warming, or cooling, floods, droughts, and hurricanes.
Puget Sound is contaminated with PCBs and other man made chemicals [nwsource.com]. Orcas [thepetitionsite.com] and other wildlife can be driven extinct in the Sound because of them.
Property rights do not generally extend into bodies of water such as these, so it does not surprise me that they are allowed to become contaminated. Just like air rights over big cities.
Virtually all of the advances that raised everyone's standard of living was accomplished with carbon based energy, which is still perfectly viable today.
Pollution and such can be handled easily through protection of life and property - if you damage either - you are liable.
The answer to all of it is to protect individual rights and freedoms. That would allow natural, rational, forces to promote cheap, effective, healthy energy. Instead, we have a combination of power lusters, corporate puppets, and anti-man activists pushing an agenda that makes all of them richer and more powerful, and all of us poorer with less freedom.
I don't know the breakdown of immigration desires - but I would argue that if the country were was "freer", (no income-tax, much lower overall taxes, people responsible for themselves, not their neighbors), then you would certainly get more of a drain from other countries - certainly many more businesses would come here because they would have more profit, and labor would be cheaper for a similar reason, all of which lowers the price of goods, making everyone more wealthy (especially with no government-induced inflation)
the environmental benefit of wind farms is unequivocal and enormous.
The environment doesn't matter. What really matters is: how will people's lives be affected.
If energy prices rise, making people less happy and life less enjoyable, while simultaneously devastating businesses that depend on cheap energy, then your central-planning will be a disaster.
Carbon energy is already abundant and cheap, there is no need to tinker with the economy to try and change what everyone is doing.
There is no need to spend tremendous amounts of everyone's money to replace perfectly good energy sources with different, more expensive energy sources with their own problems.
I guess it depends whether human life is more important than an environmental status-quo.
Two billion people in the world don't have electricity. Carbon-based sources produce the most, and cheapest energy. Carbon-based sources are responsible for the doubling of human life expectancy.
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
Wrong. Two billion people in the world don't have electricity. Carbon-based sources produce the most, and cheapest energy. Carbon-based sources are responsible for the doubling of human life expectancy.
It's time to forget about environmental propaganda and start being concerned with the lives of individuals who need abundant, cheap energy to survive, and to thrive.
there's about a snowball's chance of nuclear plants being constructed near major population centers. In part that's because the economics suck, but mostly it's because Joe and Jane sixpack don't want them there.
There are already nearly 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. alone, and the people being served by them seem generally fine with it and do not fear it.
Most of the fear-mongering comes, historically, from environmentalists, who essentially place the environment above the well being of humans. Virtually every proposed form of energy production is disliked by core environmentalists, including wind (which takes 10's of thousands of acres of turbines to equal a medium-sized coal plant) and solar (taking 12.5 square miles of cells to match a large coal plant). And those only generate energy when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining.
The only form I haven't heard environmentalists condemn is geothermal (probably because I'm ignorant of it), but geothermal
causes earthquakes
... a careful marketing plan put in place by corporate powers who feel cheated when someone on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder makes ten cents more per hour.
I am pro-liberty because that's what human's need to survive and prosper. You should not speak from ignorance about why people believe the things they believe.
If we give everyone health care, after all, how are we going to force them to keep working for wages?
In a Capitalist system, force is abolished from human relationships. Only Socialist systems institute and regiment the enslavement of people.
If we educate people, after all, how are we going to fill the factories with minimum wage workers?
Millions, maybe billions, of people would be more than grateful to emigrate to the U.S. and make minimum wage (or less), just to have a hope for a decent life. (And we should let them).
If people stop believing in their patriarchal God the Father, expecting to go to heaven, they're going to expect better lives now
I am an atheist and I have no idea what you are talking about.
... and want to keep from fouling their planet, which would be bad for profits.
We are not fouling the planet, but if fouling the planet were the best way to have humans live long and happy lives, then by god - let the fouling commence!!
How do you avoid living in a state of constant guilt?
Its not hard.
That just means you don't really believe what you are saying. When you post online, you are a staunch advocate of self-sacrifice. But when you step away from the keyboard and live your life, you feel free to engage in selfish activities. You have joy and pleasure (which I advocate), while billions of other people are much worse off than you. You dabble in your altruism just enough to assuage your guilt and stop thinking about it.
We've barely even begun to tackle global poverty - we could all stop eating excess food, and having excess fun. If we cut back and leisure, joy, and pleasure, we could probably afford to give billions of people comfortable homes with hot food.
Since we clearly don't need anything near the amount of leisure and pleasure that we currently have - what would be wrong with the government, say, doubling taxes for everyone making more than $70k? Honestly - we could get by with that, and still afford cable TV!
Yes, actually it is. They cannot get it by dealing with other people =voluntarily=. They can get it by dealing with other people, but its not voluntary. They can't choose not to.
Sure they can. They can work, which is a voluntary arrangement, as opposed to stealing, in which one side has no choice in the arrangement. Or they can ask for help, which again - would be voluntary if someone agreed to help.
Suppose some crack whore blew her welfare check at a steakhouse, but now needs to eat and can't get more government money. Is it OK for her to steal whatever she needs from your house? But she NEEDS it!
And that is not a claim on your life. That is a claim on property. And in this case, a claim on property you don't even actually need.
When you eat steak, are you ashamed that you could have eaten hamburger instead, and fed an African child for a month?
Do you ever go to the movies, spend money doing fun things, or buy something nice for someone you love - when you could have used all that money to purchase new bedpans for AIDS patients?
How do you avoid living in a state of constant guilt, knowing that you are enjoying your life while 75% of the world is worse off than you, and you could be sacrificing until you get down to their level, too?
The fact that somebody needs something means they aren't entering into a relationship voluntarily to get it.
I can't even understand that sentence. Are you saying that everyone who needs something cannot get it by dealing with other people voluntarily? That is obviously not true, in general.
Their need doesn't give them a moral claim on your LIFE.
Sure it does - if you are required to give someone something, then they in turn have a right to demand that you give it to them.
You aren't a slave.
If an innocent person is forced at gunpoint to do things against their will, then to that extent, they are a slave.
as long as people need to eat that ideal can't be achieved.
"Need" is not a standard of morality. The fact that somebody needs something does not give them a moral claim on your life to give it to them.
And you can leave if you don't like it. You aren't a slave.
I want to live under a government that protects the rights of individuals, but does not violate their rights. The U.S. was founded under that premise (it was the first and only nation to do so), but strayed, so I fight to get it back.
There many people, such as yourself, that advocate the subjugation of people to accomplish their ends. You all differ on the specifics: some want to provide healthcare and housing, others want to provide education and retirement enefits, yet others want to run companies.
They all agree, in principle, that individuals do not have a right to exist for their own sake. Instead, people are merely servants, to be controlled and told what to do by their government masters.
I believe force should be abolished from human relationships, and people should deal with one another voluntarily.
You believe people should be forced against their will to do the things you want them to.
The abolition of force is liberty.
The subjugation of some individuals to others is slavery, even if it's only part-time.
I advocate liberty, because every human being must be free to think and act in order to figure out how to live and how to prosper. This is recognition of the reality of what it means to be the human animal. The human animal is not equipped to survive like other animals. We rely on our ability to think and reason to figure out how to live
Advocating subjugation to others, as you do, tells people: don't figure out how to think and live, because you can get what you need from others, who will do it for you. People who think, work, and succeed are your slaves, and you have a moral right to demand from them whatever you need. It is institutionalized mooching and institutionalized looting. It is the political expression of the Christian ideal that "you are your brother's keeper", and you must sacrifice your life as God sacrificed his perfect son for the lowly, sinning human race.
Let me be plain: one person's failure is not a moral claim on another person.
If someone fails, and you want to help them - fine.
If I knew someone, I might decide to help them, if I thought it was the right thing to do.
However, people should not be part-time slaves to serve the failures in life. If 10% of my work is taken from me by government force, and given to people who did not earn it, then I am 10% a slave to them.
I was not asked if I wanted to help. I have not granted my permission. I am a real person, with my own life and struggles, with a family that could take the extra 10% and make ourselves happier. But what I want doesn't matter. I don't matter. All that matters is that I bend knee before my government masters and sacrifice my effort to life's failures.
Notice that under Capitalism, you are free to practice your altruism, if you want to. But under your system, I am not free to not be an altruist. You believe it is proper to force people to sacrifice themselves.
Your system exists today. The government is looting as much as it can from people to continually expand their own power and wealth. Through this power, bureaucrats wield favors and political pull. Government, itself, picks winners and losers, by using the power of government force and the loot they have taken from us.
Thus we have the spectacle of banks that should have failed becoming moochers of government loot.
Car companies that should have failed are moochers, too.
Instead of allowing people that should fail, fail - and making room for the people that should succeed, the government is rewarding the failures, crowding out what should have been up and coming new successes.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily...
No, that sounds terrific. But if you think a Rand society represents that ideal you are delusional.
That is exactly what Ayn Rand advocates. What of her body of work have you read? I've read it all, I started and ran an Objectivist club at the University of Arkansas for 3 years, and am an active member in the Kansas City Objectivists.
My point being: I know her philosophy, and that is what she advocated in politics. I question where you are getting your information from. Do you have first-hand knowledge?
I don't think your 'business sense' or how much the 'market' values your skills should decide whether your kids get to go to school
I disagree with the premise that people have a "right" to an education, precisely because such a so-called right implies that someone must be forced to provide the education. There can be no "rights" that enslave the people who must, in turn, provide those "rights".
Education does not have to be expensive, and in a free system, there can certainly be a variety of educational options available to people, most of which would be much cheaper than today's dysfunctional government education.
The government educational system forces public teachers into unions, under supervision of government boards, that have to meet government guidelines on government curriculum standards. We have underpaid, overworked teachers providing generally mediocre education in hostile school environments.
It does not matter that I would prefer to choose to send my child to a school that with an educational philosophy vastly different than the government's. I don't have a choice, and neither do you. I am forced, at the point of a gun, to pay into a mediocre system and forced to indoctrinate my children with the government curriculum. Is that what you consider moral?
... or whether the police will investigate when you get raped
Like I said, police and their functions are a valid function of "protecting individual rights."
...or whether you get to "voluntarily" choose to work in a coal mine 22 hours a day because the alternative is starvation.
If someone has to choose between starvation and working in a coal mine 22 hours a day - are you going to tell him that he must starve?
A free market is competitive with winners and losers.
Guess what? Thousands of small businesses in Kansas City area fail every year. Is that wrong?
Being successful is not easy - it requires that people are effective thinkers, self-motivated, and hard workers. They must posses the virtues of rationality, honesty, integrity, productivity, and independence. These are not just abstract ideas, or religious commandments. They are what a living human being must practice in order to be successful in a free society. And notice that today's culture does not generally value an independent, reasoning mind. Most kids are brought up in cultures of popularity contests and group identification.
No social/economic/political system can stop people from failing. The only difference is: do you punish the successful, in the name of rewarding the failures? When I set my life's goals, is it to achieve my personal and family happiness? Or should I work hard in order to support the failures in life?
Why is concern with one's own happiness wrong?
Rewarding failures at the expense of the successful only encourages more failure, and discourages success.
In a Rand society eventually the vast majority of participants, even if they started out as equals will eventually be little more than serfs sc
That is an interesting psychological confession on your part: "People can't be free, otherwise children will die, houses will burn, children will wander the streets - uneducated and without insurance." So in your view, hard-working people, trying to be successful, cause death and destruction
In your mind, only a non-free, subservient people, who abandon their will to the collective group, can successfully be forced, by the government, into a utopia of educated, fire-protected life.
Profit means: producing more than you consume. Damning profit is the same as damning the hard work that people must to do be successful.
Today, teachers do work for profit - teachers want to make money. Moreover, many teachers want to make as much money as possible, by providing a valuable service to people who are able and willing to pay for it. However, most people know that, due to government coercion over all aspects of education, there is little chance to get rich innovating in education - so there is little innovation, while everyone complains that teachers make to little and the quality sucks. Is that what you want?
What could be more important than food? Should the government take over the growing, distribution, and selling of food? The people in the food industry are working for profit, and by your ethical standard, that is a world you do not want to live in.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily, then all hell is going to break loose, and children are going to die.
Without knowing more about you, I would say that you sound afraid of self-responsibility
I wonder - since you seem to damn producing more than you consume (profit), do you, in fact, profit by doing work? i.e., do you earn a living? If so, do you, gasp, use that profit to enjoy life? e.g. go to movies, play games, go on dates, buy gifts for your friend and loved ones? Wouldn't it be more of a sacrifice to send all that profit to an AIDS patient in South Africa? Isn't that your moral ideal in life?
I would begin by saying that the philosophy of law is one of the most complicated applications of politics, and therefore - everything I say can be expanded upon (much of it has been, especially by the Austrian school of economists). My top recommended reading for economics is: Von Mises, for philosophy: Ayn Rand. Anyway, thanks for the reply, and here is my response.
Er.. So the government would have a mandate to maintain a standing army to defend us, but have no means to fund it?
I am saying that the government has nothing to say or do about economic matters, which is largely the purview of the regulatory part of government. The only valid purpose of government is to protect your rights: with military, police, and the court system. There would have to be some form of taxation for those functions. The amount of taxes would be drastically less then what you currently pay, and there would be no income or sales tax. You could even make a pretty good argument that tax for police and courts could be voluntary: you pay for it if you want the service.
How do schools and roads get built?
The same way that skyscrapers, amusement parks, and private universities get built - by people willing to make investments on expectation of a profit, while competing with everyone else doing the same.
How do fires get put out?
If people want to pay for fire service, they would be free to do so. My guess is there would still be some sort of linkage to insurance, as there is today. Today, insurance companies decide how much to charge based on the proximity and "quality" of the fire department.
How do crimes get solved?
That's a legitimate function of government. Of course, you could also have private detectives like you do today.
How do we get a mission to Mars?
Certainly not through the government. Here's a simple way to get to Mars at no cost to the taxpayer: The first person to Mars, owns it.
I'm not baiting, I sincerely believe that many Europeans do, in fact, hold that existing as a servant to the needs or whims or others is the good, while being concerned with your own life and interests is evil (or neutral).
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers vote with their wallets. Apple does not force people to buy their products and subject themselves to the DRM.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Apple removed the DRM restriction precisely to avoid the kind of customer backlash that would affect their bottom line.
They bring in scale and build quality until everybody is conditioned to only buy their products, then they cut out the quality.
You forgot the part about rubbing your hands together while your monacle shakes from your evil laughter
I'm not sure what business you work in, but most successful businesses struggle mightily to enhance the value of their products and grow their business.
Microsoft is no different, and while, as a developer myself, I certainly get annoyed by certain things, you cannot deny that their product line has improved drastically over the last 15 years since Windows 3.1
In fact, many thousands of organization, and millions of people, derive tremendous value from their products.
Everyone will have their personal preferences about what they think is good or bad about a particular piece of software, but the overall value proposition that Microsoft provides today is tremendous. Google can't touch it. (yet).
And who pays for hurricane damage or for flooded land? What about health problems from poison ivy?
If you choose to live in places that are susceptible to flooding and hurricanes, then you can use insurance, pay for it yourself, or live somewhere else in the first place.
Even if all humans were dead tomorrow, their would still be warming, or cooling, floods, droughts, and hurricanes.
Puget Sound is contaminated with PCBs and other man made chemicals [nwsource.com]. Orcas [thepetitionsite.com] and other wildlife can be driven extinct in the Sound because of them.
Property rights do not generally extend into bodies of water such as these, so it does not surprise me that they are allowed to become contaminated. Just like air rights over big cities.
Virtually all of the advances that raised everyone's standard of living was accomplished with carbon based energy, which is still perfectly viable today.
Pollution and such can be handled easily through protection of life and property - if you damage either - you are liable.
The answer to all of it is to protect individual rights and freedoms. That would allow natural, rational, forces to promote cheap, effective, healthy energy. Instead, we have a combination of power lusters, corporate puppets, and anti-man activists pushing an agenda that makes all of them richer and more powerful, and all of us poorer with less freedom.
I agree reasonable people will have concerns, but the anti-nuclear movement as such is largely due to environmentalists.
I don't know the breakdown of immigration desires - but I would argue that if the country were was "freer", (no income-tax, much lower overall taxes, people responsible for themselves, not their neighbors), then you would certainly get more of a drain from other countries - certainly many more businesses would come here because they would have more profit, and labor would be cheaper for a similar reason, all of which lowers the price of goods, making everyone more wealthy (especially with no government-induced inflation)
the environmental benefit of wind farms is unequivocal and enormous.
The environment doesn't matter. What really matters is: how will people's lives be affected.
If energy prices rise, making people less happy and life less enjoyable, while simultaneously devastating businesses that depend on cheap energy, then your central-planning will be a disaster.
Carbon energy is already abundant and cheap, there is no need to tinker with the economy to try and change what everyone is doing.
There is no need to spend tremendous amounts of everyone's money to replace perfectly good energy sources with different, more expensive energy sources with their own problems.
1 Billion new energy efficient houses to replace the old non-energy efficient ones may be to a great advantage.
Benefit - to whom? Certainly not to the people who have to pay to replace their perfectly good homes...
I guess it depends whether human life is more important than an environmental status-quo.
Two billion people in the world don't have electricity. Carbon-based sources produce the most, and cheapest energy. Carbon-based sources are responsible for the doubling of human life expectancy.
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
Wrong. Two billion people in the world don't have electricity. Carbon-based sources produce the most, and cheapest energy. Carbon-based sources are responsible for the doubling of human life expectancy.
It's time to forget about environmental propaganda and start being concerned with the lives of individuals who need abundant, cheap energy to survive, and to thrive.
there's about a snowball's chance of nuclear plants being constructed near major population centers. In part that's because the economics suck, but mostly it's because Joe and Jane sixpack don't want them there.
There are already nearly 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. alone, and the people being served by them seem generally fine with it and do not fear it.
Most of the fear-mongering comes, historically, from environmentalists, who essentially place the environment above the well being of humans. Virtually every proposed form of energy production is disliked by core environmentalists, including wind (which takes 10's of thousands of acres of turbines to equal a medium-sized coal plant) and solar (taking 12.5 square miles of cells to match a large coal plant). And those only generate energy when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining.
The only form I haven't heard environmentalists condemn is geothermal (probably because I'm ignorant of it), but geothermal causes earthquakes
... a careful marketing plan put in place by corporate powers who feel cheated when someone on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder makes ten cents more per hour.
I am pro-liberty because that's what human's need to survive and prosper. You should not speak from ignorance about why people believe the things they believe.
If we give everyone health care, after all, how are we going to force them to keep working for wages?
In a Capitalist system, force is abolished from human relationships. Only Socialist systems institute and regiment the enslavement of people.
If we educate people, after all, how are we going to fill the factories with minimum wage workers?
Millions, maybe billions, of people would be more than grateful to emigrate to the U.S. and make minimum wage (or less), just to have a hope for a decent life. (And we should let them).
If people stop believing in their patriarchal God the Father, expecting to go to heaven, they're going to expect better lives now
I am an atheist and I have no idea what you are talking about.
... and want to keep from fouling their planet, which would be bad for profits.
We are not fouling the planet, but if fouling the planet were the best way to have humans live long and happy lives, then by god - let the fouling commence!!
How do you avoid living in a state of constant guilt?
Its not hard.
That just means you don't really believe what you are saying. When you post online, you are a staunch advocate of self-sacrifice. But when you step away from the keyboard and live your life, you feel free to engage in selfish activities. You have joy and pleasure (which I advocate), while billions of other people are much worse off than you. You dabble in your altruism just enough to assuage your guilt and stop thinking about it.
We've barely even begun to tackle global poverty - we could all stop eating excess food, and having excess fun. If we cut back and leisure, joy, and pleasure, we could probably afford to give billions of people comfortable homes with hot food.
Since we clearly don't need anything near the amount of leisure and pleasure that we currently have - what would be wrong with the government, say, doubling taxes for everyone making more than $70k? Honestly - we could get by with that, and still afford cable TV!
Yes, actually it is. They cannot get it by dealing with other people =voluntarily=. They can get it by dealing with other people, but its not voluntary. They can't choose not to.
Sure they can. They can work, which is a voluntary arrangement, as opposed to stealing, in which one side has no choice in the arrangement. Or they can ask for help, which again - would be voluntary if someone agreed to help.
Suppose some crack whore blew her welfare check at a steakhouse, but now needs to eat and can't get more government money. Is it OK for her to steal whatever she needs from your house? But she NEEDS it!
And that is not a claim on your life. That is a claim on property. And in this case, a claim on property you don't even actually need.
When you eat steak, are you ashamed that you could have eaten hamburger instead, and fed an African child for a month?
Do you ever go to the movies, spend money doing fun things, or buy something nice for someone you love - when you could have used all that money to purchase new bedpans for AIDS patients?
How do you avoid living in a state of constant guilt, knowing that you are enjoying your life while 75% of the world is worse off than you, and you could be sacrificing until you get down to their level, too?
The fact that somebody needs something means they aren't entering into a relationship voluntarily to get it.
I can't even understand that sentence. Are you saying that everyone who needs something cannot get it by dealing with other people voluntarily? That is obviously not true, in general.
Their need doesn't give them a moral claim on your LIFE.
Sure it does - if you are required to give someone something, then they in turn have a right to demand that you give it to them.
You aren't a slave.
If an innocent person is forced at gunpoint to do things against their will, then to that extent, they are a slave.
as long as people need to eat that ideal can't be achieved.
"Need" is not a standard of morality. The fact that somebody needs something does not give them a moral claim on your life to give it to them.
And you can leave if you don't like it. You aren't a slave.
I want to live under a government that protects the rights of individuals, but does not violate their rights. The U.S. was founded under that premise (it was the first and only nation to do so), but strayed, so I fight to get it back.
There many people, such as yourself, that advocate the subjugation of people to accomplish their ends. You all differ on the specifics: some want to provide healthcare and housing, others want to provide education and retirement enefits, yet others want to run companies.
They all agree, in principle, that individuals do not have a right to exist for their own sake. Instead, people are merely servants, to be controlled and told what to do by their government masters.
I believe force should be abolished from human relationships, and people should deal with one another voluntarily.
You believe people should be forced against their will to do the things you want them to.
The abolition of force is liberty.
The subjugation of some individuals to others is slavery, even if it's only part-time.
I advocate liberty, because every human being must be free to think and act in order to figure out how to live and how to prosper. This is recognition of the reality of what it means to be the human animal. The human animal is not equipped to survive like other animals. We rely on our ability to think and reason to figure out how to live
Advocating subjugation to others, as you do, tells people: don't figure out how to think and live, because you can get what you need from others, who will do it for you. People who think, work, and succeed are your slaves, and you have a moral right to demand from them whatever you need. It is institutionalized mooching and institutionalized looting. It is the political expression of the Christian ideal that "you are your brother's keeper", and you must sacrifice your life as God sacrificed his perfect son for the lowly, sinning human race.
Let me be plain: one person's failure is not a moral claim on another person.
If someone fails, and you want to help them - fine.
If I knew someone, I might decide to help them, if I thought it was the right thing to do.
However, people should not be part-time slaves to serve the failures in life. If 10% of my work is taken from me by government force, and given to people who did not earn it, then I am 10% a slave to them.
I was not asked if I wanted to help. I have not granted my permission. I am a real person, with my own life and struggles, with a family that could take the extra 10% and make ourselves happier. But what I want doesn't matter. I don't matter. All that matters is that I bend knee before my government masters and sacrifice my effort to life's failures.
Notice that under Capitalism, you are free to practice your altruism, if you want to. But under your system, I am not free to not be an altruist. You believe it is proper to force people to sacrifice themselves.
Your system exists today. The government is looting as much as it can from people to continually expand their own power and wealth. Through this power, bureaucrats wield favors and political pull. Government, itself, picks winners and losers, by using the power of government force and the loot they have taken from us.
Thus we have the spectacle of banks that should have failed becoming moochers of government loot.
Car companies that should have failed are moochers, too.
Instead of allowing people that should fail, fail - and making room for the people that should succeed, the government is rewarding the failures, crowding out what should have been up and coming new successes.
Well Capitalism is nothing like Monopoly because in Capitalism, most relationships are "win-win", people trade and both parties profit from it.
Life is not like a big emergency room where everybody is always in imminent danger of failure and death.
Anyway, the next time I play Monopoly, I'm going to laugh and think of the "Monopoly proves that Capitalism doesn't work"-guy.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily...
No, that sounds terrific. But if you think a Rand society represents that ideal you are delusional.
That is exactly what Ayn Rand advocates. What of her body of work have you read? I've read it all, I started and ran an Objectivist club at the University of Arkansas for 3 years, and am an active member in the Kansas City Objectivists.
My point being: I know her philosophy, and that is what she advocated in politics. I question where you are getting your information from. Do you have first-hand knowledge?
I don't think your 'business sense' or how much the 'market' values your skills should decide whether your kids get to go to school
I disagree with the premise that people have a "right" to an education, precisely because such a so-called right implies that someone must be forced to provide the education. There can be no "rights" that enslave the people who must, in turn, provide those "rights".
Education does not have to be expensive, and in a free system, there can certainly be a variety of educational options available to people, most of which would be much cheaper than today's dysfunctional government education.
The government educational system forces public teachers into unions, under supervision of government boards, that have to meet government guidelines on government curriculum standards. We have underpaid, overworked teachers providing generally mediocre education in hostile school environments.
It does not matter that I would prefer to choose to send my child to a school that with an educational philosophy vastly different than the government's. I don't have a choice, and neither do you. I am forced, at the point of a gun, to pay into a mediocre system and forced to indoctrinate my children with the government curriculum. Is that what you consider moral?
... or whether the police will investigate when you get raped
Like I said, police and their functions are a valid function of "protecting individual rights."
...or whether you get to "voluntarily" choose to work in a coal mine 22 hours a day because the alternative is starvation.
If someone has to choose between starvation and working in a coal mine 22 hours a day - are you going to tell him that he must starve?
A free market is competitive with winners and losers.
Guess what? Thousands of small businesses in Kansas City area fail every year. Is that wrong?
Being successful is not easy - it requires that people are effective thinkers, self-motivated, and hard workers. They must posses the virtues of rationality, honesty, integrity, productivity, and independence. These are not just abstract ideas, or religious commandments. They are what a living human being must practice in order to be successful in a free society. And notice that today's culture does not generally value an independent, reasoning mind. Most kids are brought up in cultures of popularity contests and group identification.
No social/economic/political system can stop people from failing. The only difference is: do you punish the successful, in the name of rewarding the failures? When I set my life's goals, is it to achieve my personal and family happiness? Or should I work hard in order to support the failures in life?
Why is concern with one's own happiness wrong?
Rewarding failures at the expense of the successful only encourages more failure, and discourages success.
In a Rand society eventually the vast majority of participants, even if they started out as equals will eventually be little more than serfs sc
That's funny - and they could call it a "security tax".
That is an interesting psychological confession on your part: "People can't be free, otherwise children will die, houses will burn, children will wander the streets - uneducated and without insurance." So in your view, hard-working people, trying to be successful, cause death and destruction
In your mind, only a non-free, subservient people, who abandon their will to the collective group, can successfully be forced, by the government, into a utopia of educated, fire-protected life.
Profit means: producing more than you consume. Damning profit is the same as damning the hard work that people must to do be successful.
Today, teachers do work for profit - teachers want to make money. Moreover, many teachers want to make as much money as possible, by providing a valuable service to people who are able and willing to pay for it. However, most people know that, due to government coercion over all aspects of education, there is little chance to get rich innovating in education - so there is little innovation, while everyone complains that teachers make to little and the quality sucks. Is that what you want?
What could be more important than food? Should the government take over the growing, distribution, and selling of food? The people in the food industry are working for profit, and by your ethical standard, that is a world you do not want to live in.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily, then all hell is going to break loose, and children are going to die.
Without knowing more about you, I would say that you sound afraid of self-responsibility
I wonder - since you seem to damn producing more than you consume (profit), do you, in fact, profit by doing work? i.e., do you earn a living? If so, do you, gasp, use that profit to enjoy life? e.g. go to movies, play games, go on dates, buy gifts for your friend and loved ones? Wouldn't it be more of a sacrifice to send all that profit to an AIDS patient in South Africa? Isn't that your moral ideal in life?
Er.. So the government would have a mandate to maintain a standing army to defend us, but have no means to fund it?
I am saying that the government has nothing to say or do about economic matters, which is largely the purview of the regulatory part of government. The only valid purpose of government is to protect your rights: with military, police, and the court system. There would have to be some form of taxation for those functions. The amount of taxes would be drastically less then what you currently pay, and there would be no income or sales tax. You could even make a pretty good argument that tax for police and courts could be voluntary: you pay for it if you want the service.
How do schools and roads get built?
The same way that skyscrapers, amusement parks, and private universities get built - by people willing to make investments on expectation of a profit, while competing with everyone else doing the same.
How do fires get put out?
If people want to pay for fire service, they would be free to do so. My guess is there would still be some sort of linkage to insurance, as there is today. Today, insurance companies decide how much to charge based on the proximity and "quality" of the fire department.
How do crimes get solved?
That's a legitimate function of government. Of course, you could also have private detectives like you do today.
How do we get a mission to Mars?
Certainly not through the government. Here's a simple way to get to Mars at no cost to the taxpayer: The first person to Mars, owns it.
I'm not baiting, I sincerely believe that many Europeans do, in fact, hold that existing as a servant to the needs or whims or others is the good, while being concerned with your own life and interests is evil (or neutral).