[QUOTE=Lachz0r;37175184]i don't get why people still try to claim that competition is what would make services affordable and of a high quality in a free-market society. didn't the industrial period pretty much show that the upper class would rather work with each other and form monopolies so they can get as rich as possible doing whatever?[/QUOTE]
According to a friend of mine, LCD monitor makers sorta did this some time ago. They covered it up by making it seem like LCD screens were SOOO hard to make when, in fact, by that time they were piss-easy, but they all pretty much agreed to charge exorbitant sums for their monitors so they could cash in big.
-snip-
[QUOTE=Noble;37155159]They wouldn't be charged for the call, they'd perhaps pay monthly premiums for coverage. Or a larger, single, charge for non-customers who use the service. Also perhaps banks would require fire protection as a condition for mortgaging a house to customers.
If a forest is burning and it threatens property, then there would be a demand for protection and the market will meet that demand. A forest fire with the potential to spread very far is a concern to many landowners, and perhaps several firefighting firms would get together to fight it. Again this is speculation, there's no way to predict exactly what types of services the market would provide, but it would necessarily have to provide services that meet the demand of consumers.[/quote]
Wait, so non-costumers would have to pay? So it's either paying or losing their life or property. That sure as hell sounds much less preferable to paying or being fined for tax evasion.
Other than that, you seem keen to confirming that you don't care about natural ecosystems as long as human property is not put in the line. Forests cover about 10% of Earth's surface, while actual human property covers a lot less, and it generally tends to be restricted to areas of higher human population, meaning that the majority of forests would be unprotected by any kind of property-related insurance policies, while forest fires still have an indirect effect to our life, through either the release of carcinogens or the dangerous destablization of the ecosystem, things that are relatively difficult to be predicted to detail even by experts, or something even more direct, like uncontrollable fires ending up to spread to this extent that by the time that they start to threaten human property, the situation is too widespread to properly handle.
[quote]The owner of the land/street/whatever that the crime takes place on would most likely have police protection already and want to keep their streets "clean" in order to attract business owners to set up shop and bring people to the area, etc. In the unlikely case that they didn't have police protection, it's pretty inconceivable that someone will just stand there as a crime takes place. Many police companies would want to develop a good reputation and often help out for free when they can. I think it's absurd to say that a free society will suck the empathy out of every human, and that people will just stand there and not help someone in need.[/quote]
Uh, what? The owner of the street? The police protection would certainly apply to the people owning their houses/apartments. It's absurd to expect a company competing to make money to start helping out when ever they can. It's like expecting a game developer to start sharing free games whenever they seem to be able to keep their company afloat.
Now, let's imagine that all threats will be properly detained and jailed while awaiting for trial. Which is not likely, because there is no regulatory mechanism to ensure that the procedures related to the detainment or the imprisonment of suspects are sufficient or respectful to human dignity. Keeping up with proper prisoner standards has a considerable cost associated to it, while lacking any motivation for the companies to keep up with these standards.
Following that, how is the trial going to take place? Who will pay the judges? Hell, who will be paid to investigate whether the arrest was lawful or not? Are we going to rely on a judiciary system [b]paid[/b] by companies or people interested in the matter? Or generally, who will be the higher authority to observe the upkeep of the law between competitive companies with guns and no one to stop them? They can terrorize people into paying security fees to them freely, they can fight for that 'turf' with other security companies, they can effectively create their own laws, and they have the freedom to carry them out in any manner that they choose to do so, whether that is torture, murder, unlawful prosecution, etc.
What, will the national guard step in? The army? Oh, yeah. Those don't exist, because there are no taxes to maintain them.
Your only suggested deterrent to this is per your words, 'empathy'. Oh, I have no doubt that people will still be empathetic, just as I have no doubt that those without any empathy or respect for human life, but plenty of greed will eventually take power, just as they have done so many times, historically. Profiteering is by definition a policy held because of lack of empathy and morals.
[quote]
Why wouldn't they be coordinated? They'd necessarily have to be coordinated or they'd quickly fail in the market, as better firms take their place.[/quote]
The competitive companies would not co-ordinate with one another, effectively or at all, even if their combined power is required to end a threat properly, or would cause considerable less chaos in first response, when the various callers have summoned the various companies they subscribe to.
To effective co-ordinate would be to give access to their own means of communication and to their logistics.
[quote]The fact that people spend money more wisely when their own well-being is on the line. When government spends, it's using other people's money. It's not coming out of politician's personal bank accounts.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard[/url]
Private firms succeed for meeting the demands of the market, government spends for political reasons.. re-elections, favoritism, and demagoguery. A private firm [i]has to[/i] operate with sufficient efficiency or they will not succeed in the market. The government is free to operate however they want, whether they do it efficiently or not is almost always of little consequence, and they don't collect revenue by voluntary means (as the private sector does) but by involuntary means.[/quote]
And what exactly is market demand? It's the demands of people with their own well-being, rather than well-beings of others in the forefront of their mind, people completely untrained and with zero expertise to contribute to anything, from construction, to law enforcement. The job of companies is to appeal to the inexperienced masses, to their wants and emotions, in order to achive a reward. That's not at all different from what a demagogue does.
And while governments don't necessarily have any higher level of expertise than a collective of companies who hire experts, they do what they do, following the instruction of an expert, not an inexperienced civillian. It's quite different to wanting to improve public tranport and building whatever an expert considers most cost-effective, rather than building a podcar, because some random civillians thought that it would improve public transit, when in fact it's not a very effective use of their money.
[quote]Well it's not my idea and many people have already written thousands of pages answering many of the usual criticisms, and explaining why society would on the contrary, thrive under these conditions.[/quote]
None of which you seem to have read, should these papers have any basis, or you wouldn't be coming up with the most ridiculous solutions you could come up with. And what's with this appeal to authority (which is a fallacy, btw) without even referring to it specifically?
[QUOTE]You could, but since communism involves the abolition of private property, in my view its DOA at the moral/ethical level. I'm also not saying you "have to" accept this system, just that if you want detailed answers to specific issues, there is plenty of speculation out there that's already been written.
Actually yes, I think there is a case to be made that paying taxes is comparable to slavery. You [i]have to[/i] give the fruits of your labor away to someone else against your will, it isn't a choice in any real sense. If you're going to argue that tax is justified because I have the "choice" of just moving to some deserted island where I'll probably die, as opposed to living in a free society where every exchange is voluntary, then you might as well try to argue that slavery is justified because a slave could just run away or kill themselves to escape tyranny. Yeah there is technically a way out, but it isn't a good way out, nor does it justify the actions that made me want out in the first place.[/QUOTE]
First off "DOA at the moral/ethical level"...what?
At least communism has some examples of it working in certain small communities, and despite its flaws it's not pulled off someone's ass, with 'much speculation about how it would work'. Well, OK. I think that everyone should live in a mansion and never go hungry. From a moral point of view, I think that's excellent, as it'd be the end of poverty. But don't ask me about how that would work. That's just speculation. And there's probably a lot of literature out there discussing how a community of people living in mansions would thrive. So there. Let's convert to Rathernotism.
As for the rest, cry me a river.
It's always fun to put yourself in the place of an actual victim of a horrific system and claim that you have suffered similarly. Maybe having to pass through exams while attending school is similar to the Holocaust. As a child, you get a series of (necessary for your survival) services which you don't have to pay for. When you become an adult, it is expected, for you to enjoy the same services to pay some taxes. Your living conditions and your mental or physical well being have a direct effect to the rest of society, so no, you don't have the freedom to abstain from these services. And stop acting like moving somewhere else would be the end of the world. If you want to live entirely tax free, go start a micronation with a group of like minded people. Just like any other sufficiently small community, any system with a non-existant or powerless gov should work just fine at first. As an adult, you have the ability to survive under these conditions. And while it may not be fun to experience the luxuries of a life in a bigger nation, these can be attributed due to regulation (and that means anything from social control and law enforcement to food and vehicle regulations) of another society, which you apparently made the choice to not live by.
[quote]The analogy was to demonstrate that just because there might be a benefit to some people for doing something immoral, that doesn't mean it's justified. Someone back then would have asked how you plan to run the economy without slave labor. I would simply say I don't care, stop the immoral part first, and then we can implement better, voluntarily solutions to these problems.
Would society exist without the individuals that it is composed of? No. Society is just a concept in our minds, it doesn't exist with any real force of its own. And again, there's no justification to be made for the majority to impose a contract on the minority against their will, and to use coercive force against them to carry out it's arbitrary terms and conditions.[/quote]
Yeah, uh, society is no more of a concept than the word fish is. Both are used to describe a system of things, be it human beings or organs and tissue and the relationships of interaction between these things. This faux philosophical reasoning is essentially an attack to democracy. In a proper democracy, things happen as the majority of people wants them to happen, because there is no chance that everyone will agree 100%.
And before you cry "tyranny of the majority". To keep a murderer locked up, or even executed is also active oppression. It's actual active oppression. He entered a society which had a "No Murder" rule, he broke it, and he paid the consequence. If you don't want to abide by the rules of the society, the group of people that live in some place, then you can move on to another place where their rules are more similar to what you'd like. Or perhaps a place where there are no rules at all.
And say what you will about democracy, but it is considerably better than corporatocracy.
[QUOTE]Then we're talking about two definitions of freedom and there's no sense in continuing down this path.[/quote]
The problem is that you are speaking about an idealized version of freedom which never extends or oppresses someone else's freedom.
In reality, in modern society, we all try to utilize our freedoms to a level with which everyone is content.
[quote]I've heard this argument several times before, and I simply refute it as being false. No individual or number of individuals ("society") has any justification to restrict my voluntary interaction with other individuals by imposing a debt upon me for doing so. No one gave them that right, it's something that's unjustly, and forcefully imposed by the majority onto the unwilling minority.[/quote]
Who gave you the right to remove the freedom of a murderer? Who told you that murder is false?
In life, society does both of those. And while I agree that removing the freedom of an active threat to the community is necessary and that murder is bad, I do so realizing that both of those are the results of the ethics society and I, as a person shaped. There is nothing objective that tells you what is right and what is wrong, and it is your construction of morals throughout your life that defines you as a person.
[quote]
[url="http://mises.org/etexts/hoppe5.pdf"]Every individual has a natural right to self-ownership[/url]. All other rights stem from that right.[/quote]
A second appeal to authority? Well, OK. Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about the social contract. And Rousseau is considerably more prominent than Hoppe. Therefore, by your logic, the moment I link to a pdf containing his work, I win the argument.
And by the way, you are better off linking John Locke rather than some anarchocapitalist who isn't too widely known.
[quote]No, they do not. I simply refute that claim. If it's wrong for one individual to violate the freedom of another (for example, by enslaving them), it doesn't magically become right when two people do it, ten people, ten thousand people, or any number of people.[/quote]
Who said that it's always wrong for one individual to violate the freedom of another? Jailing criminals, based on laws made by society is the violation of the criminal's freedom.
While it sure as hell is good to avoid, it can at many cases be necessary. And before you say that taxing you isn't justified, it sure as hell is. The society you live in wants to be governed, and that government requires some form of income for its basic functions.
[quote][url]http://seekingalpha.com/article/784761-what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate[/url][/quote]
[quote]The other one often cited is U-6 total unemployed, plus [b]all persons marginally attached to the labor force[/b], plus [b]total employed part time for economic reasons[/b], as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.[/quote]
lol, how are any of those groups actually unemployed?
[quote]It makes perfect sense. They can't offer affordable packages because regulations have brought the costs up too high. There is nothing those companies can do about the rising costs.
I already did. Government is forcing companies to provide products at government-enforced rates rather than rates that would be set by the market.[/quote]
Do you have any actual source of this, especially about these costs rising?
Regulation is there to keep monopolies at bay, which would indoubtedly be worse. And where are you getting this info about goodie-goodie Mr. Corporate wanting to lower their prices? You keep saying that there's money to be made, well, let's hear it. How can one make money out of a homeless person without a job, who has an accident and breaks his leg?
[quote]There's no reason to believe anyone would be poisoned without the FDA. [b]Frankly it's ridiculous.[/b] Companies would not want to poison their customers because as soon as your company develops that sort of reputation, it's in for big financial trouble.
There has been growth in that industry due to technological improvements. It grew [b]in spite[/b] of regulations, not because of them. My argument is simply that there would be [i]even more[/i] growth without the regulations.
My argument is that they are bad because they stifle competition and create inefficiency in the market, one example is by creating barriers to entry which keep competitors out of the market. They often act as protectors of big business more than protectors of consumers.
Without the FDA, new drugs could come onto the market at a much faster pace. People could get life saving drugs faster when they aren't being held up by bureaucrats in an extremely slow process of approval.[/QUOTE]
Wow, you [i]are[/i] dense.
There have been reports since antiquity of medicine poisoning or generally causing a negative effect to humans. It doesn't matter if a company feels like poisoning very few of its consumers and making a profit, hell it doesn't even matter that in recent years there have been examples of drugs being rushed through testing with the result being several casualties.
What matters is that regulations and extensive trials ensure that once a drug enters the market, it has been tested to that extent that people won't lose their lives due to sloppy mistakes. Yeah, no shit, no pharmacist would want to risk any lives. Point me to that God Emperor of Pharmacy who manages to get everything right at the first go, or who is confident that his or her drug is flawless because it got past some very basic trials.
FDA trials save lives. Even if they somehow had a negative effect to the nutrition or the drug industry, the fact that they are constantly flourishing in spite of regulations which save lives, just testifies to the fact that with just the proper amount of regulation, not only lives can be saved, but industries can also be allowed to flourish.
[QUOTE=mobrockers2;37176115]Yes, by regulating.[/QUOTE]
You have antitrust and anti monopoly laws and the government enforces patents so people will get paid for their invention and innovation as opposed to copying is encouraged. Some other regulations are more flatminded and disregard their secondary effects.
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