Because by depriving them of their own ability to provide those things, we become responsible for them. We can't evade that responsibility. We could of course use corporal punishment of one form or another instead, for a vast savings and possibly for better results. But that's considered barbaric, even though most people would prefer to take say, 2 lashes of a flogger per year. There's a pretty good argument that the prison system is both less effective and crueler than corporal punishment.
A liberal arts education does NOT make sense if it's financed via loans, because it may be personally rewarding but it to pay for itself. Note that the main article did NOT subtract the cost of repaying loans, or adjust for net present value.
If you read the second link, one of his arguments is that the expert witness provided by plaintiff's counsel provided a misleading testimony. The agreement was for equivalent hardware. Unfortunately, the class didn't all have the same hardware, so a one size fits all replacements is inappropriate and doesn't meet the terms of the class action.
Hmm, I didn't finish my post earlier I see. The current system doesn't allow people to opt out of the sytem in it's entirety. That is inherently coercive. The moral responses to a free rider are 1. don't provide the service. 2. lock out access to people who don't pay. 3. Allow the free rider. Governments always choose the immoral choice 4. Provide the service and make everyone pay, even those who aren't making use of it. Option 2 would have lots of variants, such as extracting pay after the fact, but is complicated and messy. In some cases, option 3 is more cost effective than any version of option 2. But because of the existence of free riders, governments choose to tax everyone.
There's some reason to accept a system that makes all government services and taxes a single lump, but that's not quite how things are actually handled.
I think you are wrong on a couple of points. If I, living on a deserted island, carve myself a nice chair, I have created wealth which is useful to me without having anyone to exchange it with. It's neither meaningless nor granted by someone else. Perhaps you are conflating wealth and money? Money is an arbitrary medium of exchange, and it's sometimes useful to use money as the units when measuring wealth.
Your example of roads is not as compelling as you think. There have been private roads in the past. The most heavily used crossing point from the US to Canada is a privately owned toll bridge, IIRC. There is no evidence that public ownership would actually reduce the cost of running the bridge. Also, private ownership does not preclude collective action. It does preclude coercive collective action. But not paying taxes as currently structured does not automatically lead to the elimination of all services currently provided by the government.
Taxation is the ability of one group of people to confiscate the wealth and effort of a different group of people without their consent. If they don't consent, the only way to get their wealth is by force. All force is incompatible with their right to bodily integrity, and potentially their right to not be killed.
I may change my signature at some point to: "There is no right to live. Only a right not to be killed." There are scenarios where one person's right to live can only be fulfilled by violating that right in someone else, which is incompatible with equal rights. There is no scenario where one's right to not be killed requires the violation of that right in someone else. If someone attacks me, they are voluntarily giving up their right, and killing them in self defense doesn't violate it because the already conceded it. There is always a resolution where the right is respected by all parties.
All that said, there are numerous violations of my rights which I really don't find onerous enough to fight about. Some of them I can even look at and say that I approve of the final results. However, achieving beneficial results with immoral methods does not erase the harm done. It's not actually possible to assign objective values to the harm done and benefit achieved, and the moral algebra people use to justify great harms lends itself to very large harms, so I prefer to always keep track of both.
Well, if it's not obvious why they are incompatible, you are an idiot. But here's a starting point: "Hey, we all really own that house you claim is yours, so we can search it any time we want." The remainder of the explanation is left as an excercise for the reader.
Most states are not pure welfare states. The ones that have tried it (i.e. pure communism) do in fact have to resort to either denying some people access based on effort or the threat and use of force. Increasing welfare does in fact lead to decreasing participation in the workforce, but there's a limit to how far provision of goods by government fiat can go without collapsing.
The right to bear arms = no one has the legitimate authority to stop you from bearing arms if they are acquired without violating the rights of others. The right to bear arms is not the same thing as the ability or power to do so.
To be fair, I'd say anarchism is a theoretical construct that has never lasted. Because I find the existence of a government which infringes on my rights is inevitable, I call myself libertarian, and accept certain violations of my rights for pragmatic reasons. I do my best to keep those violations from continually getting worse. That doesn't mean they aren't violations, only that they are tolerable, and significantly better than what happens if I try to not participate at all. I'm probably not the only libertarian who hold ethical beliefs which are compatible with anarchism.
Things other people must provide for you are properly called entitlements, not rights, and by necessity infringe upon someone's rights. Changing the name serves the cause of confusion and rhetorical trickery, and to allow beneficiaries of these entitlements to avoid feeling guilty about imposing themselves on others.
I basically agree with you. I would argue that some rights naturally arise out of the principle of equal rights, where one person can't have a right unless everyone else has the same rights, but all rights are ultimately illusionary. That said, something that is incompatible with equal rights, such as all positive rights, can't properly be called a right at all, and the term positive rights serves ultimately to confuse people.
That amendment is not compatible with the statement "...we, the taxpayers, we the citizens, own this nation and all of it's assets, to be used according to our wishes."
Human rights are not enumerated in the US at all. A subset of them is given explicit protection by the constitution. The complete set of human rights is infinite. Arguably, if you think of every possible thing that can be said as a separate right, it's uncountably infinite.
The existence of potential competition is what keeps the current supplier from raising prices above that limit price. I.e. prices stay low. If they are low enough to keep competitors out, they are below the marginal cost of production for smaller companies, and thus lots of smaller competitors in place of the monopoly would not have cheaper prices unless the marginal cost of production has an ridiculously steep drop off. Are you sure you want to claim that's an abusive monopoly? Unless you want to claim that making a profit is bad in and of itself, or that dominating a particular market is inherently bad, the limit price is not really a tool of abuse.
I would note that the ones arguing against both campaign finance reform and the institutionalized market advantages also argue against government power in general, which if they actually had their way, would eliminate most of the advantages of campaign financing in the first place. It shouldn't be necessary for growing companies to pay for lobbyists, but it is, and any company which tries to stay uninvolved suffers for it.
I agree with you about other members of congress attempting to distance themselves from the bailouts they voted for. I would agree with you about years of uncontrolled spending, except deficits didn't get out of control during the republican years of controlling the house, even without PAYGO. IIRC, PAYGO was never really followed in any case, and definitely didn't stop the growth of government spending with Dem control of the house from 2006 onward. The biggest complaints about republican spending came from their own base, and republicans are expressing outrage about spending, not the loss of PAYGO per se.
Paperwork. Tracking how you handle any of those limits is an additional hurdle for every company, but is generally a smaller piece of the budget for big ones. Mandating that you share equipment you install is a cost, which requires an internal layer of bureaucracy to handle. Not allowing you to put in your own equipment at all is a major barrier to starting up your own company.
I think you missed my point though. Even stipulating that some regulations are on net good (I may or may not agree with a given regulation) increasing the cost of entry is a cost of those regulations which must be accounted for. Costs are bad, even if the corresponding benefits are greater. I am NOT claiming that all regulation is on net bad, merely pointing out that most of those regulations tend to serve the interests of large companies better than small ones. Anti-monopoly regulation is only necessary as a corrective for other regulations. Non-abusive monopolies aren't problems, abusive monopolies create an incentive to compete.
You are incorrect. Bandwidth is consumed. Data is the amount of bandwidth consumed. Depending on rates charged, and the state of networking technology, it's perfectly possible for an ISP to be at capacity, but be unable to afford equipment to expand capacity. Especially if they aren't allowed to run even more wires. Those additional wires may cost a lot more to lay down than they are taking in.
Your argument is like arguing that they shouldn't charge for water usage, only per connection. If the pipes are at capacity, then the water company must have a lot of subscribers, and can afford to add desalination plants/pipes/infrastructure.
As near as I can tell, the FCC gained authority over wired communications by court decision, not by being granted the authority directly. Arguably, congress had a legitimate interest in establishing the ground rules for a commons such as radio waves, although I think allowing the homesteading style ownership of a channel by being the first to use would have been better. There's a reasonable argument that the federal government does not have the legitimate authority to regulate purely local wired communications, despite the current state of the law.
I see unprecedented use of filibusters claimed a lot. I see no actual evidence of it. The best evidence I've heard lists the number of cloture votes. Unfortunately, a cloture vote does NOT mean there was a filibuster, only that someone wanted to end debate. They did threaten to use the filibuster, but it's not clear that they are doing so more than dems did when the reps had a majority. Do you have better evidence? Even counts of threats to use it isn't necessarily proof of worse partisanship, IF the republican majority during Bush Junior's presidency threw a lot more bones to the democrats who were in office at that time. I want to emphasize that this is a hypothetical, although I don't recall any extremely partisan republican idea other than the failed attempt SS reform which compares in scale to obamacare. NCLB was probably about as large, but was bipartisan, and a decent example of conceding some things to the opponents who were in fact in power. Pseudo compromise, by including ideas which previous members of the opposition party supported, but continuing to exclude actual contemporary ideas, does not count as compromise.
Senator obama voted for the bailouts, and can't wash his hands of them. Also, you are simply wrong that we would have a surplus currently without iraq and the bush tax cuts. The current deficits exceed the maximum possible savings from both combined. Granted, they are a large portion, but even the best number produced by a left wing group show them causing no more than half of the current deficits.
I disagree. Metered billing is the natural mechanism to charge people when only factoring the price of providing service. Pure monthly charges which ignore usage patterns are great for consumers in terms of ease of understanding, and therefore helped a lot as a marketing tool.
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Because by depriving them of their own ability to provide those things, we become responsible for them. We can't evade that responsibility. We could of course use corporal punishment of one form or another instead, for a vast savings and possibly for better results. But that's considered barbaric, even though most people would prefer to take say, 2 lashes of a flogger per year. There's a pretty good argument that the prison system is both less effective and crueler than corporal punishment.
A liberal arts education does NOT make sense if it's financed via loans, because it may be personally rewarding but it to pay for itself. Note that the main article did NOT subtract the cost of repaying loans, or adjust for net present value.
If you read the second link, one of his arguments is that the expert witness provided by plaintiff's counsel provided a misleading testimony. The agreement was for equivalent hardware. Unfortunately, the class didn't all have the same hardware, so a one size fits all replacements is inappropriate and doesn't meet the terms of the class action.
According to the second link, this was plaintiff's counsel's fault.
Hmm, I didn't finish my post earlier I see. The current system doesn't allow people to opt out of the sytem in it's entirety. That is inherently coercive. The moral responses to a free rider are 1. don't provide the service. 2. lock out access to people who don't pay. 3. Allow the free rider. Governments always choose the immoral choice 4. Provide the service and make everyone pay, even those who aren't making use of it. Option 2 would have lots of variants, such as extracting pay after the fact, but is complicated and messy. In some cases, option 3 is more cost effective than any version of option 2. But because of the existence of free riders, governments choose to tax everyone.
There's some reason to accept a system that makes all government services and taxes a single lump, but that's not quite how things are actually handled.
I think you are wrong on a couple of points. If I, living on a deserted island, carve myself a nice chair, I have created wealth which is useful to me without having anyone to exchange it with. It's neither meaningless nor granted by someone else. Perhaps you are conflating wealth and money? Money is an arbitrary medium of exchange, and it's sometimes useful to use money as the units when measuring wealth.
Your example of roads is not as compelling as you think. There have been private roads in the past. The most heavily used crossing point from the US to Canada is a privately owned toll bridge, IIRC. There is no evidence that public ownership would actually reduce the cost of running the bridge. Also, private ownership does not preclude collective action. It does preclude coercive collective action. But not paying taxes as currently structured does not automatically lead to the elimination of all services currently provided by the government.
Taxation is the ability of one group of people to confiscate the wealth and effort of a different group of people without their consent. If they don't consent, the only way to get their wealth is by force. All force is incompatible with their right to bodily integrity, and potentially their right to not be killed.
I may change my signature at some point to: "There is no right to live. Only a right not to be killed." There are scenarios where one person's right to live can only be fulfilled by violating that right in someone else, which is incompatible with equal rights. There is no scenario where one's right to not be killed requires the violation of that right in someone else. If someone attacks me, they are voluntarily giving up their right, and killing them in self defense doesn't violate it because the already conceded it. There is always a resolution where the right is respected by all parties.
All that said, there are numerous violations of my rights which I really don't find onerous enough to fight about. Some of them I can even look at and say that I approve of the final results. However, achieving beneficial results with immoral methods does not erase the harm done. It's not actually possible to assign objective values to the harm done and benefit achieved, and the moral algebra people use to justify great harms lends itself to very large harms, so I prefer to always keep track of both.
Well, if it's not obvious why they are incompatible, you are an idiot. But here's a starting point: "Hey, we all really own that house you claim is yours, so we can search it any time we want." The remainder of the explanation is left as an excercise for the reader.
You seem to be conflating murder with killing. Murder is a proper subset of all types of killing.
So in other words, the countries aren't providing "all of this stuff" just "some of this stuff".
Most states are not pure welfare states. The ones that have tried it (i.e. pure communism) do in fact have to resort to either denying some people access based on effort or the threat and use of force. Increasing welfare does in fact lead to decreasing participation in the workforce, but there's a limit to how far provision of goods by government fiat can go without collapsing.
The right to bear arms = no one has the legitimate authority to stop you from bearing arms if they are acquired without violating the rights of others. The right to bear arms is not the same thing as the ability or power to do so.
To be fair, I'd say anarchism is a theoretical construct that has never lasted. Because I find the existence of a government which infringes on my rights is inevitable, I call myself libertarian, and accept certain violations of my rights for pragmatic reasons. I do my best to keep those violations from continually getting worse. That doesn't mean they aren't violations, only that they are tolerable, and significantly better than what happens if I try to not participate at all. I'm probably not the only libertarian who hold ethical beliefs which are compatible with anarchism.
Things other people must provide for you are properly called entitlements, not rights, and by necessity infringe upon someone's rights. Changing the name serves the cause of confusion and rhetorical trickery, and to allow beneficiaries of these entitlements to avoid feeling guilty about imposing themselves on others.
I basically agree with you. I would argue that some rights naturally arise out of the principle of equal rights, where one person can't have a right unless everyone else has the same rights, but all rights are ultimately illusionary. That said, something that is incompatible with equal rights, such as all positive rights, can't properly be called a right at all, and the term positive rights serves ultimately to confuse people.
That amendment is not compatible with the statement "...we, the taxpayers, we the citizens, own this nation and all of it's assets, to be used according to our wishes."
Human rights are not enumerated in the US at all. A subset of them is given explicit protection by the constitution. The complete set of human rights is infinite. Arguably, if you think of every possible thing that can be said as a separate right, it's uncountably infinite.
The existence of potential competition is what keeps the current supplier from raising prices above that limit price. I.e. prices stay low. If they are low enough to keep competitors out, they are below the marginal cost of production for smaller companies, and thus lots of smaller competitors in place of the monopoly would not have cheaper prices unless the marginal cost of production has an ridiculously steep drop off. Are you sure you want to claim that's an abusive monopoly? Unless you want to claim that making a profit is bad in and of itself, or that dominating a particular market is inherently bad, the limit price is not really a tool of abuse.
I would note that the ones arguing against both campaign finance reform and the institutionalized market advantages also argue against government power in general, which if they actually had their way, would eliminate most of the advantages of campaign financing in the first place. It shouldn't be necessary for growing companies to pay for lobbyists, but it is, and any company which tries to stay uninvolved suffers for it.
I agree with you about other members of congress attempting to distance themselves from the bailouts they voted for. I would agree with you about years of uncontrolled spending, except deficits didn't get out of control during the republican years of controlling the house, even without PAYGO. IIRC, PAYGO was never really followed in any case, and definitely didn't stop the growth of government spending with Dem control of the house from 2006 onward. The biggest complaints about republican spending came from their own base, and republicans are expressing outrage about spending, not the loss of PAYGO per se.
Paperwork. Tracking how you handle any of those limits is an additional hurdle for every company, but is generally a smaller piece of the budget for big ones. Mandating that you share equipment you install is a cost, which requires an internal layer of bureaucracy to handle. Not allowing you to put in your own equipment at all is a major barrier to starting up your own company.
I think you missed my point though. Even stipulating that some regulations are on net good (I may or may not agree with a given regulation) increasing the cost of entry is a cost of those regulations which must be accounted for. Costs are bad, even if the corresponding benefits are greater. I am NOT claiming that all regulation is on net bad, merely pointing out that most of those regulations tend to serve the interests of large companies better than small ones. Anti-monopoly regulation is only necessary as a corrective for other regulations. Non-abusive monopolies aren't problems, abusive monopolies create an incentive to compete.
You are incorrect. Bandwidth is consumed. Data is the amount of bandwidth consumed. Depending on rates charged, and the state of networking technology, it's perfectly possible for an ISP to be at capacity, but be unable to afford equipment to expand capacity. Especially if they aren't allowed to run even more wires. Those additional wires may cost a lot more to lay down than they are taking in.
Your argument is like arguing that they shouldn't charge for water usage, only per connection. If the pipes are at capacity, then the water company must have a lot of subscribers, and can afford to add desalination plants/pipes/infrastructure.
As near as I can tell, the FCC gained authority over wired communications by court decision, not by being granted the authority directly. Arguably, congress had a legitimate interest in establishing the ground rules for a commons such as radio waves, although I think allowing the homesteading style ownership of a channel by being the first to use would have been better. There's a reasonable argument that the federal government does not have the legitimate authority to regulate purely local wired communications, despite the current state of the law.
I see unprecedented use of filibusters claimed a lot. I see no actual evidence of it. The best evidence I've heard lists the number of cloture votes. Unfortunately, a cloture vote does NOT mean there was a filibuster, only that someone wanted to end debate. They did threaten to use the filibuster, but it's not clear that they are doing so more than dems did when the reps had a majority. Do you have better evidence? Even counts of threats to use it isn't necessarily proof of worse partisanship, IF the republican majority during Bush Junior's presidency threw a lot more bones to the democrats who were in office at that time. I want to emphasize that this is a hypothetical, although I don't recall any extremely partisan republican idea other than the failed attempt SS reform which compares in scale to obamacare. NCLB was probably about as large, but was bipartisan, and a decent example of conceding some things to the opponents who were in fact in power. Pseudo compromise, by including ideas which previous members of the opposition party supported, but continuing to exclude actual contemporary ideas, does not count as compromise.
Senator obama voted for the bailouts, and can't wash his hands of them. Also, you are simply wrong that we would have a surplus currently without iraq and the bush tax cuts. The current deficits exceed the maximum possible savings from both combined. Granted, they are a large portion, but even the best number produced by a left wing group show them causing no more than half of the current deficits.
I disagree. Metered billing is the natural mechanism to charge people when only factoring the price of providing service. Pure monthly charges which ignore usage patterns are great for consumers in terms of ease of understanding, and therefore helped a lot as a marketing tool.