They want to get rid of loopholes these companies use to avoid paying what they are supposed to be paying.
What makes you think that there is some particular amount of tax that a company is "supposed to be paying"?
A "loophole" is nothing more than a legal way that a company can legally keep their own money.
It's a bit like putting a lock on your garage, only to have the neighborhood accuse you of having a loophole out of the local street thieves pilfering your belongings.
You can rant and rave... until you realize they enjoy all the benifits of paying taxes without actually paying them
I agree some taxes are needed, but only for the purpose of protecting the individual, which means police, courts, and military. The vast majority of taxes are used to benefit specific groups of people at the expense of other people, which has had a vast, corrupting effect in our government.
If you don't want to pay taxes in the US, you are in no way required to, you CAN LEAVE
There is no other place to go right now, otherwise I would. Instead, I will work for more freedom in the U.S., and people like you can move to any of the other anti-individual countries, of which you have a wide selection.
Since Somalia has no guiding philosophical document, a la the Constitution, it is no surprise that the country is a battleground between Islamists, warlords, tribes, and clans.
Living in near-anarchy is as bad for the individual as living in a dictatorship. What is needed is a limited government whose functions and purpose are explicitly lined out (like in the constitution), but whose philosophic premises are rigidly pro-individual freedom.
Greed.....just as old as prostitution, war and slavery.
There is nothing wrong with wanting more than the bare minimum. The vast majority of wealth around you, including most of the comforts in your own life, were created by people who wanted to make a lot of money by providing people values that raise our standard of living.
Greed coupled with a way of achieving it (i.e. an idea for 'the next big thing') is a great thing.
I agree that the government should not take your money and give it to failed businesses.
Of course, most businesses are just like you, they are paying taxes and not getting bailed out.
The way to get business out of government is to get government out of business. There needs to be a separation between state and economics, just as, and for the same reason, as the separation between church and state.
The U.S. is becoming increasingly hostile toward business. I certainly wouldn't blame Microsoft, Google, Intel or any big company for leaving the U.S. if they can find a country that does not view them as a cash cow, does not attack them with anti-trust, and does not punish their energy-use with cap and trade.
A smart country could displace the U.S. as the economic leader in the world by recognizing and protecting the liberties required for individuals and companies to survive and prosper. If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government, freedom to think and act - I know I would move there.
I did not write "it is impossible to justify not trusting them" -- your contrapositive is the contrapositive of a straw man.
I know you did not say that. I said it. I was assuming you had some background in basic logic. You don't, and that's fine - most people don't. It's basically a way of proving something by showing that the negation of the opposite is false, i.e. NOT (NOT (P)) => P
I think you are confused here, or maybe it's just a terminology problem. If I say "I believe x" I certainly don't mean the same as if I say "I know x". "Believe" is (for me at least) a much weaker claim than "know"
You are actually quite amusing. I see you write things with "I think...", "I certainly...", "... is.... " - these are all statements of knowledge.
The next time you write back to me, try removing all forms of the verb "to be", since if you don't really know if anything really is anything in particular, then you certainly shouldn't be using the verb "to be" in a sentence.
I mean, just look at your sentence:
I think you are confused here, or maybe it's just a terminology problem. If I say "I believe x" I certainly don't mean the same as if I say "I know x". "Believe" is (for me at least) a much weaker claim than "know"
Now, bit by bit
I
You start your sentence with an identification of yourself. What makes you think there is a "you". If you can't know there is a "you", why are you flapping about on the internet?
I mean
You mean? If you don't know that you can mean something, why are you talking as if you can?
look at your sentence
If you don't know there is a "me", why would you instruct me to "look", (and if you don't know that there is such a thing as looking, why tell people to do it? And what makes you think there are sentences?
I think you are confused
If you don't know that your words mean anything, why are you saying them to me?
or
If you don't know there are alternatives, why use the word "or"?
maybe it's just a terminology problem
Maybe? Doesn't that imply that there is a truth, and you are just not certain? Do you know there is a truth? If not, why bring it up?
If I say "I believe x"
certainly don't mean the same
certainly? Sounds like a strong word coming from you.
I could go on, but the funny thing is, every time you try to convey a thought to me, you are betraying yourself. You allow things that you "know" to simply spill out into your sentences, and then try to tell me that you don't really know anything. It is a little amusing, and a lot contradictory and hypocritical.
it seems to be impossible to justify trusting them.
Just look at the contrapositive: it is impossible to justify not trusting them (without actually relying on them in the justification)
That seems to be a problem of terminology. As I intend it, "belief" is less than knowledge. You have to believe something to know it, but you do not have to know it to believe it.
You are confusing certainty with knowledge. A belief, a fact, a supposition - are all knowledge. They only differ in how you know them, and how certain you are.
The way you are trying to define would make it sound that nobody can know anything unless they are omniscient (i.e. only a person who knows everything can know anything).
you're either unfamiliar with more general usage of the word "faith" or you're being overly defensive
Go back and re-read what you said about faith - you used "faith" and "dogma" in the same sentence. You are accusing me of "not thinking" (why else use the word 'dogma'?)
You trust the drug companies when they pull these sorts of shenanigans?
Trust is something that thinking people have to learn how to do. Thinking and self-responsibility is what the government discourages. They basically tell people: "Don't worry about anything, we'll do the thinking for you... we'll make sure everything you ever do will always be ok".
So you're saying a system where criminal charges are applied after people are hurt (without any attempt to protect them from that harm) is better than a system where periodic FDA sampling of the milk or baby formula verifies its safety before my child ingests it?
Let me ask you this - why are you so in love with a government-force backed solution to food testing? Why do you have faith (good faith, not the bad one I don't like) that the government can do a good job, but that individuals whose lives and livelihoods depend on delivering a good product, can't? What is it about them wielding political power that makes you trust them so much?
Game theory says that the free market economics could arguably work, but only in scenarios with perfect (or near perfect) information among all players.
The justification for free markets isn't statistical gaming. The justification is that you own your own life and that the proper form for people to interact is voluntarily, trading value for value, by mutual consent and to mutual advantage. The only other form of government is slavery, and today's political parties only argue about how much slavery to impose on you, and how fast.
So you're saying a system where criminal charges are applied after people are hurt (without any attempt to protect them from that harm) is better than a system where periodic FDA sampling of the milk or baby formula verifies its safety before my child ingests it?
That is correct, people are innocent until proven guilty. How would you like to have an inspector from Health and Human Services check on your children periodically to see if you are still allowed to be a parent. Or have the FBI inspect the content of your computer periodically to ensure you are not doing anything illegal?
I never said, nor do I think, that the U.S. is imperial.
What I think we are is self-sacrificial...
... which is worse.
At least if we were being Imperial we would be gaining something.
Our soldiers don't need to be sacrificed to Democratize Iraq. The don't need to die to quelch the conflict between serbs and muslims. They don't need to get killed protecting poor Somalians.
3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells.
5) Philosophers base their careers trying to argue for or against (3).
That is a real sad state of affairs: at a time in the world when people are in the most desperate need for a philosophy that can conceptualize, integrate, and concretize the knowledge we need to survive and flourish as a species, instead we are inundated by the disintegrated quibbling over fragmented minutia.
In my opinion, philosophers are solely responsible for the unrelenting rise of religion, by virtue of the abdication their intellectual responsibility. Whereas the enlightenment philosophers gave us the (re)birth of reason, industrialism, individual liberty, Capitalism, and the general increase in prosperity across the globe, subsequent philosophers have largely worked to dismantle their tenuous work, leaving people to choose between the unknowability of a secular world or blind faith in a mystical world.
it's equally true that most atheists have at best a shallow understanding of theology.
I would agree with this, if by theology you actually mean philosophy which religion can be considered to be an early form of.
Also, you talk about "atheists" in general, but of course, atheism only tells what a person does not believe. It could equally well describe an environmentalist terrorist, or Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman - two completely different types of people with different philosophies of life.
The only justification for self-sacrifice, or any form of human sacrifice, is a mystical belief.
For people who believe they have only a finite time to enjoy life in a knowable universe - the idea of sacrificing your one and only life for others does not make sense.
Also - I do not consider it a sacrifice to do things for your kids, your family, etc. Sacrifice means giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower, or non-value. A real sacrifice would be to leave the people you love behind in order to serve people you cared nothing for, or better yet, for people you despised.
it seems to me to be impossible to justify why what we perceive as reason can actually be trusted
And just how do you intend to prove that one cannot trust reason without using reason and logic?
it's this argument that has led me to believe (not "know", obviously!) that nothing can be known.
This doesn't even make sense. A belief in something is a form of knowledge. Specifically, it is a type of "knowing" in which you have some evidence, some logical reasoning that lends credibility. But it is still a form of knowing.
If you want to say you literally don't know anything, then please - don't even bother opening your (what would logically have to be) useless mouth (I say useless because if our minds are actually incapable of doing the kind of processing you claim you don't believe in, then why inundate the world with the meaningless dribble of vocal vibrations?)
Any person who tries to negate knowledge, existence, identity, etc. must rely on those very concepts to even utter the negation. That is why they are considered, at least in the Objectivist philosophy, axioms
I think you can substantially answer "what should I eat for lunch". Just because you have a lot of options doesn't mean that all options have the same outcome.
You can eat a whole lot of ice cream, or a lean turkey sandwich, or a handful of bumble bees.
One makes you fat (maybe sick), another fills and keeps you healthy, the last makes you scream in pain.
If you only have one day to live, ice cream probably makes sense. Otherwise turkey sandwich is probably better. But the question of what you eat for lunch is a universal question that almost everyone has to answer. While the answers will vary for everyone, the principles for formulating the answer are universal - people who want to live, be healthy, and be happy need to use those principles to make decisions.
That is the real (not frequently mentioned) purpose of philosophy - to inform humans about the universal principles and premises required to know how and why to live life.
there are now a lot of [green] technologies that can't work without rare earths, and China is currently in effective control of the global supply.
So I am thinking to myself: 1) The U.S. is amassing trillions and debt, much of it held by the Chinese, and 2) The Chinese own the key elements required by certain Green technology - which the U.S. government is pushing toward.
Did I just catch a glimpse of the slow arc of the decline of the U.S.? Is the U.S. grabbing its own ankles, or what!?
I don't have faith in the free-market: faith is the belief in something without reason, or despite reason.
I have seen plenty of evidence that demonstrates how the rise of Capitalism (individual rights) and free-markets have led to a historically unprecedented growth in quality/quantity of life.
I agree that the government should work to protect the individual - but I disagree that having an FDA (or many of the myriad alphabet agencies), actually do that. In essence because what these agencies do is substitute their will for the will of the market participants. So even if companies could create better mechanisms for quality control, they are mandated (at the point of a gun) to follow the bureaucrats' whims.
In a free-market, reputation must be earned, and can easily be lost. Also in a free-market, harm or fraud is a crime (protection from criminals is a legitimate function of the government.
In Capitalism, your "nice cool glass of melamine laced milk" would land you a "nice long stay in the penitentiary". See? No FDA required.
When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack. You will have to buy somebody's cheaply produced yet unsanitary meat because it's the only thing available on the market.
Come on, seriously.
Why did Apple make the iPhone, when it could have made a junky piece plastic that falls apart when you touch it?
I'll tell you why - because in a free market, the spoils go to those who give people what they want and need.
Which is exactly why you would not see some kind of persistent "unsanitary meat" problem in a free-market.
It's not like this hasn't happened before.
Please don't tell me you are referring to the work of the hack-novelist-pretending-to-be-historian Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a fiction writer with an agenda to smear hard-working industrialists by pretending to give an historical account and passing it off as "fact".
read about why government started regulating things.
It invites itself to stock manipulation
Do you have an example of this? If you are talking about fraudulent activity, then this has nothing to do with a free-market, per se. Fraud is a criminal activity and the government should rightfully protect us from criminals, regardless of our economic freedoms.
trust schemes
No company has ever, or could ever, set its prices arbitrarily, independent of the market. Please give an example.
unsanitary products
You mean that in a free market, people will choose unsanitary products over sanitary ones? No. A free market is perfectly capable of providing all the packaging everybody wants, precisely because everybody wants it. (To the ire of environmentalists).
child labor and hazardous working conditions.
A free market means you are free. In particular, children are free and cannot be forced into harmful situations. That would be the opposite of being free. And nobody can be forced to work in a hazardous work condition. If somebody chooses a hazardous work condition, that is their choice, and it's none of the government's business.
I have to differ from this with my own experience.
First of all, I don't know where the drive to indoctrinate "sharing" comes from, like some latent urge to promote communal living. Certainly, no adult (at least one not living in a commune), would share everything he owns with anyone who walked up to his house and asked for it
I've had success teaching my 2 year old about respecting property rights. What's his is his, what's his 8 yr old brother's is his brother's. Sure, he doesn't always want to hear it, but a steady mantra of: "Is it yours? No, that's brother's. Where are your toys?" has given him a good understanding of ownership.
Think about it - when the government takes your money (taxes) and demands you share it with others - how do you feel about that?
asside from a few very small engagements (which usually went poorly) has only ever interceded militarily in international matters when US interests/security were at stake.
I actually wish this were true - since I believe the US should only be involved when its own interests are at stake.
However, the quelling of tribal conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo don't qualify.
56,000 Americans died in Vietnam, supposedly as a service to South Vietnam.
It's debatable that we had any interest in WWI.
Even today's conflict in Iraq is more about "civilizing Iraq" than it is about ending terrorist sponsoring regimes.
Sacrifice, aka altruism, holds that you have no right to exist for your own sake. The justification for your existence is as a sacrificial animal for the sake of others.
.
This is incompatible with freedom and individualism, which sanction your right to live and pursue your own happiness, which is inherently a self-interested idea.
.
Note that most people believe in an ethical dichotomy: either cut your neighbors throat for your sake, or cut your own throat for your neighbors sake. But there is a better alternative: to be against throat cutting. Respect each others' equal right to be free, and deal with one another voluntarily, as traders.
.
It is not a surprise to me that you advocate human sacrifice, since are obviously mystical (as per your religion). People who reject this world in favor of a mystical dimension, who reject reason in the name of faith - also usually gravitate toward rejecting joy, comfort, and self in favor of suffering and self-sacrifice.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to get rid of loopholes these companies use to avoid paying what they are supposed to be paying.
What makes you think that there is some particular amount of tax that a company is "supposed to be paying"?
A "loophole" is nothing more than a legal way that a company can legally keep their own money.
It's a bit like putting a lock on your garage, only to have the neighborhood accuse you of having a loophole out of the local street thieves pilfering your belongings.
You can rant and rave ... until you realize they enjoy all the benifits of paying taxes without actually paying them
I agree some taxes are needed, but only for the purpose of protecting the individual, which means police, courts, and military. The vast majority of taxes are used to benefit specific groups of people at the expense of other people, which has had a vast, corrupting effect in our government.
If you don't want to pay taxes in the US, you are in no way required to, you CAN LEAVE
There is no other place to go right now, otherwise I would. Instead, I will work for more freedom in the U.S., and people like you can move to any of the other anti-individual countries, of which you have a wide selection.
Why is it that corporations who want to keep the money .. are evil and greedy, but the government wanting to take ... that money is perfectly fine?
That is a great question, and I've used that same line of questioning regarding many of the intrusions of government into the private affairs of men.
Since Somalia has no guiding philosophical document, a la the Constitution, it is no surprise that the country is a battleground between Islamists, warlords, tribes, and clans.
Living in near-anarchy is as bad for the individual as living in a dictatorship. What is needed is a limited government whose functions and purpose are explicitly lined out (like in the constitution), but whose philosophic premises are rigidly pro-individual freedom.
Greed.....just as old as prostitution, war and slavery.
There is nothing wrong with wanting more than the bare minimum. The vast majority of wealth around you, including most of the comforts in your own life, were created by people who wanted to make a lot of money by providing people values that raise our standard of living.
Greed coupled with a way of achieving it (i.e. an idea for 'the next big thing') is a great thing.
I agree that the government should not take your money and give it to failed businesses.
Of course, most businesses are just like you, they are paying taxes and not getting bailed out.
The way to get business out of government is to get government out of business. There needs to be a separation between state and economics, just as, and for the same reason, as the separation between church and state.
Microsoft is having huge problems with the EU because, well they are actually interested in the public good.
Microsoft is not the only one. People who want privacy, liberty, and economic stability are also having huge problems due to the "public good".
The U.S. is becoming increasingly hostile toward business. I certainly wouldn't blame Microsoft, Google, Intel or any big company for leaving the U.S. if they can find a country that does not view them as a cash cow, does not attack them with anti-trust, and does not punish their energy-use with cap and trade.
A smart country could displace the U.S. as the economic leader in the world by recognizing and protecting the liberties required for individuals and companies to survive and prosper. If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government, freedom to think and act - I know I would move there.
Thanks for the reply. I think I would find it much more interesting if I actually thought that you "knew" any of it.
I did not write "it is impossible to justify not trusting them" -- your contrapositive is the contrapositive of a straw man.
I know you did not say that. I said it. I was assuming you had some background in basic logic. You don't, and that's fine - most people don't. It's basically a way of proving something by showing that the negation of the opposite is false, i.e. NOT (NOT (P)) => P
I think you are confused here, or maybe it's just a terminology problem. If I say "I believe x" I certainly don't mean the same as if I say "I know x". "Believe" is (for me at least) a much weaker claim than "know"
You are actually quite amusing. I see you write things with "I think...", "I certainly...", " ... is .... " - these are all statements of knowledge.
The next time you write back to me, try removing all forms of the verb "to be", since if you don't really know if anything really is anything in particular, then you certainly shouldn't be using the verb "to be" in a sentence.
I mean, just look at your sentence:
I think you are confused here, or maybe it's just a terminology problem. If I say "I believe x" I certainly don't mean the same as if I say "I know x". "Believe" is (for me at least) a much weaker claim than "know"
Now, bit by bit
I
You start your sentence with an identification of yourself. What makes you think there is a "you". If you can't know there is a "you", why are you flapping about on the internet?
I mean
You mean? If you don't know that you can mean something, why are you talking as if you can?
look at your sentence
If you don't know there is a "me", why would you instruct me to "look", (and if you don't know that there is such a thing as looking, why tell people to do it? And what makes you think there are sentences?
I think you are confused
If you don't know that your words mean anything, why are you saying them to me?
or
If you don't know there are alternatives, why use the word "or"?
maybe it's just a terminology problem
Maybe? Doesn't that imply that there is a truth, and you are just not certain? Do you know there is a truth? If not, why bring it up?
If I say "I believe x"
certainly don't mean the same
certainly? Sounds like a strong word coming from you.
I could go on, but the funny thing is, every time you try to convey a thought to me, you are betraying yourself. You allow things that you "know" to simply spill out into your sentences, and then try to tell me that you don't really know anything. It is a little amusing, and a lot contradictory and hypocritical.
it seems to be impossible to justify trusting them.
Just look at the contrapositive: it is impossible to justify not trusting them (without actually relying on them in the justification)
That seems to be a problem of terminology. As I intend it, "belief" is less than knowledge. You have to believe something to know it, but you do not have to know it to believe it.
You are confusing certainty with knowledge. A belief, a fact, a supposition - are all knowledge. They only differ in how you know them, and how certain you are.
The way you are trying to define would make it sound that nobody can know anything unless they are omniscient (i.e. only a person who knows everything can know anything).
you're either unfamiliar with more general usage of the word "faith" or you're being overly defensive
Go back and re-read what you said about faith - you used "faith" and "dogma" in the same sentence. You are accusing me of "not thinking" (why else use the word 'dogma'?)
You trust the drug companies when they pull these sorts of shenanigans?
Trust is something that thinking people have to learn how to do. Thinking and self-responsibility is what the government discourages. They basically tell people: "Don't worry about anything, we'll do the thinking for you... we'll make sure everything you ever do will always be ok".
So you're saying a system where criminal charges are applied after people are hurt (without any attempt to protect them from that harm) is better than a system where periodic FDA sampling of the milk or baby formula verifies its safety before my child ingests it?
Let me ask you this - why are you so in love with a government-force backed solution to food testing? Why do you have faith (good faith, not the bad one I don't like) that the government can do a good job, but that individuals whose lives and livelihoods depend on delivering a good product, can't? What is it about them wielding political power that makes you trust them so much?
Game theory says that the free market economics could arguably work, but only in scenarios with perfect (or near perfect) information among all players.
The justification for free markets isn't statistical gaming. The justification is that you own your own life and that the proper form for people to interact is voluntarily, trading value for value, by mutual consent and to mutual advantage. The only other form of government is slavery, and today's political parties only argue about how much slavery to impose on you, and how fast.
So you're saying a system where criminal charges are applied after people are hurt (without any attempt to protect them from that harm) is better than a system where periodic FDA sampling of the milk or baby formula verifies its safety before my child ingests it?
That is correct, people are innocent until proven guilty. How would you like to have an inspector from Health and Human Services check on your children periodically to see if you are still allowed to be a parent. Or have the FBI inspect the content of your computer periodically to ensure you are not doing anything illegal?
I never said, nor do I think, that the U.S. is imperial.
What I think we are is self-sacrificial...
... which is worse.
At least if we were being Imperial we would be gaining something.
Our soldiers don't need to be sacrificed to Democratize Iraq. The don't need to die to quelch the conflict between serbs and muslims. They don't need to get killed protecting poor Somalians.
3) The brain is still nothing more than a mass of cells.
5) Philosophers base their careers trying to argue for or against (3).
That is a real sad state of affairs: at a time in the world when people are in the most desperate need for a philosophy that can conceptualize, integrate, and concretize the knowledge we need to survive and flourish as a species, instead we are inundated by the disintegrated quibbling over fragmented minutia.
In my opinion, philosophers are solely responsible for the unrelenting rise of religion, by virtue of the abdication their intellectual responsibility. Whereas the enlightenment philosophers gave us the (re)birth of reason, industrialism, individual liberty, Capitalism, and the general increase in prosperity across the globe, subsequent philosophers have largely worked to dismantle their tenuous work, leaving people to choose between the unknowability of a secular world or blind faith in a mystical world.
it's equally true that most atheists have at best a shallow understanding of theology.
I would agree with this, if by theology you actually mean philosophy which religion can be considered to be an early form of.
Also, you talk about "atheists" in general, but of course, atheism only tells what a person does not believe. It could equally well describe an environmentalist terrorist, or Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman - two completely different types of people with different philosophies of life.
You know, I actually agree with you here.
The only justification for self-sacrifice, or any form of human sacrifice, is a mystical belief.
For people who believe they have only a finite time to enjoy life in a knowable universe - the idea of sacrificing your one and only life for others does not make sense.
Also - I do not consider it a sacrifice to do things for your kids, your family, etc. Sacrifice means giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower, or non-value. A real sacrifice would be to leave the people you love behind in order to serve people you cared nothing for, or better yet, for people you despised.
it seems to me to be impossible to justify why what we perceive as reason can actually be trusted
And just how do you intend to prove that one cannot trust reason without using reason and logic?
it's this argument that has led me to believe (not "know", obviously!) that nothing can be known.
This doesn't even make sense. A belief in something is a form of knowledge. Specifically, it is a type of "knowing" in which you have some evidence, some logical reasoning that lends credibility. But it is still a form of knowing.
If you want to say you literally don't know anything, then please - don't even bother opening your (what would logically have to be) useless mouth (I say useless because if our minds are actually incapable of doing the kind of processing you claim you don't believe in, then why inundate the world with the meaningless dribble of vocal vibrations?)
Any person who tries to negate knowledge, existence, identity, etc. must rely on those very concepts to even utter the negation. That is why they are considered, at least in the Objectivist philosophy, axioms
I think you can substantially answer "what should I eat for lunch". Just because you have a lot of options doesn't mean that all options have the same outcome.
You can eat a whole lot of ice cream, or a lean turkey sandwich, or a handful of bumble bees.
One makes you fat (maybe sick), another fills and keeps you healthy, the last makes you scream in pain.
If you only have one day to live, ice cream probably makes sense. Otherwise turkey sandwich is probably better. But the question of what you eat for lunch is a universal question that almost everyone has to answer. While the answers will vary for everyone, the principles for formulating the answer are universal - people who want to live, be healthy, and be happy need to use those principles to make decisions.
That is the real (not frequently mentioned) purpose of philosophy - to inform humans about the universal principles and premises required to know how and why to live life.
What really stood out to me in TFA:
there are now a lot of [green] technologies that can't work without rare earths, and China is currently in effective control of the global supply.
So I am thinking to myself: 1) The U.S. is amassing trillions and debt, much of it held by the Chinese, and 2) The Chinese own the key elements required by certain Green technology - which the U.S. government is pushing toward.
Did I just catch a glimpse of the slow arc of the decline of the U.S.? Is the U.S. grabbing its own ankles, or what!?
I don't have faith in the free-market: faith is the belief in something without reason, or despite reason.
I have seen plenty of evidence that demonstrates how the rise of Capitalism (individual rights) and free-markets have led to a historically unprecedented growth in quality/quantity of life.
I agree that the government should work to protect the individual - but I disagree that having an FDA (or many of the myriad alphabet agencies), actually do that. In essence because what these agencies do is substitute their will for the will of the market participants. So even if companies could create better mechanisms for quality control, they are mandated (at the point of a gun) to follow the bureaucrats' whims.
In a free-market, reputation must be earned, and can easily be lost. Also in a free-market, harm or fraud is a crime (protection from criminals is a legitimate function of the government.
In Capitalism, your "nice cool glass of melamine laced milk" would land you a "nice long stay in the penitentiary". See? No FDA required.
When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack. You will have to buy somebody's cheaply produced yet unsanitary meat because it's the only thing available on the market.
Come on, seriously.
Why did Apple make the iPhone, when it could have made a junky piece plastic that falls apart when you touch it?
I'll tell you why - because in a free market, the spoils go to those who give people what they want and need.
Which is exactly why you would not see some kind of persistent "unsanitary meat" problem in a free-market.
It's not like this hasn't happened before.
Please don't tell me you are referring to the work of the hack-novelist-pretending-to-be-historian Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a fiction writer with an agenda to smear hard-working industrialists by pretending to give an historical account and passing it off as "fact".
read about why government started regulating things.
It invites itself to stock manipulation
Do you have an example of this? If you are talking about fraudulent activity, then this has nothing to do with a free-market, per se. Fraud is a criminal activity and the government should rightfully protect us from criminals, regardless of our economic freedoms.
trust schemes
No company has ever, or could ever, set its prices arbitrarily, independent of the market. Please give an example.
unsanitary products
You mean that in a free market, people will choose unsanitary products over sanitary ones? No. A free market is perfectly capable of providing all the packaging everybody wants, precisely because everybody wants it. (To the ire of environmentalists).
child labor and hazardous working conditions.
A free market means you are free. In particular, children are free and cannot be forced into harmful situations. That would be the opposite of being free. And nobody can be forced to work in a hazardous work condition. If somebody chooses a hazardous work condition, that is their choice, and it's none of the government's business.
I have to differ from this with my own experience.
First of all, I don't know where the drive to indoctrinate "sharing" comes from, like some latent urge to promote communal living. Certainly, no adult (at least one not living in a commune), would share everything he owns with anyone who walked up to his house and asked for it
I've had success teaching my 2 year old about respecting property rights. What's his is his, what's his 8 yr old brother's is his brother's. Sure, he doesn't always want to hear it, but a steady mantra of: "Is it yours? No, that's brother's. Where are your toys?" has given him a good understanding of ownership.
Think about it - when the government takes your money (taxes) and demands you share it with others - how do you feel about that?
asside from a few very small engagements (which usually went poorly) has only ever interceded militarily in international matters when US interests/security were at stake.
I actually wish this were true - since I believe the US should only be involved when its own interests are at stake.
However, the quelling of tribal conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo don't qualify.
56,000 Americans died in Vietnam, supposedly as a service to South Vietnam.
It's debatable that we had any interest in WWI.
Even today's conflict in Iraq is more about "civilizing Iraq" than it is about ending terrorist sponsoring regimes.
The only way to eliminate mankind's effects on the climate is to eliminate mankind.
If people have a right to exist - the environment will be affected.
If people have a right to pursue comfort and happiness, it will be affected even more.
Sacrifice, aka altruism, holds that you have no right to exist for your own sake. The justification for your existence is as a sacrificial animal for the sake of others.
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This is incompatible with freedom and individualism, which sanction your right to live and pursue your own happiness, which is inherently a self-interested idea.
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Note that most people believe in an ethical dichotomy: either cut your neighbors throat for your sake, or cut your own throat for your neighbors sake. But there is a better alternative: to be against throat cutting. Respect each others' equal right to be free, and deal with one another voluntarily, as traders.
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It is not a surprise to me that you advocate human sacrifice, since are obviously mystical (as per your religion). People who reject this world in favor of a mystical dimension, who reject reason in the name of faith - also usually gravitate toward rejecting joy, comfort, and self in favor of suffering and self-sacrifice.