[Cobnat]

civilian_number_two
I agree with the last sentence of your post, Cob, but nothing else. You still don't understand the economy of scale I'm referring to. People pooling together to fund reseach into heart transplants will never match what a social system was able to do. And this is because of the huge amounts of money (billions of dollars) that can be pooled from government monopolies and the tax system. So too research of more questionable value, like the space program and particle accelerators. And even with amazing community pooling, lacking any centralisation there would be loads of redundant and competitive research that dfailed to advance the sciences. After all, you can't be suggesting that everyone would just intuitively agree on exactly what and whom to fund, and that all the money woul be pooled across the country into just the right places? Who exactly would be making THAT happen?

Cobnat
While I do not oppose government spending on disease research. It is very easy for a government to decide not to put the money into research but rather into the armed forces or invest into a corporation.

civilian_number_two
I know what you're getting at with "no one should have to pay" blah blah, but everyone gets access to the medicine and everyone gets to use the roads. And everyone gets access to the 843 acres of Central Park, not just the folks in your example who pool resources to by a 10x10m park to walk their dogs. Incidentally, ouside gated communities with Strata governments, I can't think of any examples of private parks (I don't count theme parks). It's just impossible to keep a thing like that without someone wanting to sell it to a condo builder. The only way to maintain a thing like that is by designating an area untouchable. And the only way to have that is to have a parks board. I know you believe that it's a higher tax that has caused all of the problems for mankind, but people will just NOT be more community-minded and peace-loving just because they make less money and pay a smaller percerntage of that lowered income in tax. Tax cuts are not the magic formula to fix society; Reagan proved that with Reaganomics.

Cobnat
This begs the question, what makes the park theirs? What makes it anyone’s? It seems to me that the human concept of ownership is somewhat flawed. So if you give money to… who? If a person wants to start building condos there and there are people opposed to that… and they have guns… well, I think I have said enough.

J m HofMarN
Charities can discriminate. Especially under your system. Maybe you only get help if you're Christian, or Muslim, or if you dont smoke, or if you're white. Thus, the people recieving your systems charity are beggars, I wasnt talking about the charity themselves.

Cobnat
Charities discriminate even now, or haven’t you heard of the UNCF?

J m HofMarN
So this libertarian government will stand until some group of people, any group of people, become displeased with it. And you believe that magically, because of the lower taxes, when some state secedes no militias or state/federal armies will want to fight to change that?

Cobnat
There will always be someone who wants to fight for the libertarian ideal.

J m HofMarN
Ok. Point conceded. If you dont think corporations are regulated now theres no point in me explaining that they are. A lot of your points around this one are just so fundamentally illogical "Medicine will cost the same without government funding as with it! Wheeeeeee!" as to not require rebuttal.

Cobnat
I guess price competitions will not exist in an economy without price controls. I guess its fundamentally illogical the corporations are just waiting for the government to crack so they can raise their prices so high that their customers cant buy any medicine. I guess there is no way I can rebuttal you.

J m HofMarN
So the community will be paying for their own parks and their own medical care and sundry other things and you claim that the difference between this willing payment and the enforced taxation currently in effect would be negative? In other words that paying for a park and paying for a heart transplant ammounts to less money then paying income taxes? What numerical system are you using here because it seems different from mine.

Cobnat
If people come together then yes, they can pay for a park or heart transplant or whatever.

J m HofMarN
So, under your system if the economy falters and someone blames government weakness in a bid to be given extreme powers, the people will magically (because of lower taxes) know that he'll destroy their country? Thanks, Cobnat. Just thanks.

Cobnat
Except that you are forgetting that the people will be armed to the teeth so that if a Nazi or Communist or Democrat tries to make them do something, they can easily rebel.

J m HofMarN
Wow. Thats possibly the best debate tactic ever: "I'm not going to respond to what you said, but if you'd said this here's what I'd say"

Cobnat
I made my points.

J m HofMarN
In that spirit, if you'd said "I am a silly silly person and my argument that lower taxes solve everything is fundamentally flawed" I'd have said "Why yes, yes you are." Then you'd have said "I've wasted enough of your time. Let us go have tea and crumpets" And then we'd have tea and crumpets.

Cobnat
I don’t like crumpets so your statement fails.

J m HofMarN
And who will keep the wealthy from buying out all that land and owning everything again?

Cobnat
Most people aren’t dumb or greedy enough to sell their lands to a baron.

J m HofMarN
Research would be limited to unscientific quick solutions "Hey, if we burn this plague victims house down the plague won't spread. Weeeeee!" Also, it is fucking awesome that you put the burden for researching disease on those afflicted with diseases.
"Fucking hell... my arm just fell off. Better fund more leprosy research!"

Cobnat
Nope, I put it on the burden on the family of the diseased, remember how much funding Alzheimer's research got when Ronald Reagan got the Alzheimer's? Or what about all the times an actor or actress have endorsed cancer research? Or how many rock groups have endorsed other less known diseases? How much does a governments invest into leprosy research? The answers will shock you.

J m HofMarN
And the parks, and the medical/scientific research, and the animal shelters...

Cobnat
Does that seem so strange to you? That a group of people would come together and support themselves?

J m HofMarN
What charities and researches would be funded under your system? The most popular ones, more than like. Battered womens shelters maybe, orphanages, sure its possible, but who's going to fund drug rehab or job training for former prostitutes? And same goes for research. Aids and cancer might be marquee diseases with their names in lights, but who would be funding bird flu vaccines and so on and so forth?

Cobnat
It has taken humanity 100 years to find a cure for bird flu… wait a minute, no it hasn’t, we still don’t have a vaccine despite millions of people dieing from it! Wait, might it be because government funding goes to something more important (in their eyes) such as cancer or weapons research? The government pays more for artillery pieces used to bomb a country no one can pronounce (thanks to our great education system, oh wait) then to important life threatening diseases.

J m HofMarN
Maybe its better having a central government since a lot of constituents can write to them telling them what to do with the money rather than them just picking by personal fancy of what sounds nicer.

J m HofMarN
Sure is!

Cobnat
Rapid…

[civilian_number_two]

Actually, billions have been spent researching the avian flu, while the worldwide human death toll is under200. JM's is a pretty good example of the argument for the economy of scale. Billions have been spent researching first of all the existence of and then possible treatments for an illness that has affected so far a handful of people spread all over the world. In the "affected community pools together their resourses" scenario, it's unlikely the affected peoples would have collected billions of dollars, let alone become in contact with one another so as to determine a common problem to begin with. And all those slaughters opf bird populations to mitigate the spread of the disease? That ain't free neither, and those birds belonged to farmers.

Remember mad cow disease? It hurt a bunch of cows, and then started to spill over to the human population? Came up a few years back. Basically how it spread was beef farmers ignored government directives on what to feed their livestock. This was exposed because those same government types exposed it and the beef industry was put under heavy watch and loads of cattle were slaughtered and burned at great cost. All this was done because a handful of people died. And there was no profit motive for the farmers to burn their cattle; all they needed to do was to hire some scientists to tell the population that "all is well" and then continue with what they were doing. When lead was accumulating in people's bodies and causing dementia and death, the official position of the corporate-bought scientists was "these workers with lead products went mad from working too hard. Lead is totally safe." It took independent study to deal with that problem, and that study was damned expensive. You may thank that research for getting the lead out of canning product as well as gasoline, and by by that measure out of the air you breathe.

I like central authority and huge pools of money when it comes to scientific research. A history of the same has made the life expentancy of man a lot more than it was even 150 years ago. If you think the government wastes of mismanages the pools of money, that's something to work on. Assuming that just by taking that sum away altogether and by leaving people to fend entirely for themselves (essentially removing the need for a community altogether), you will in short order create the world described by Hobbes.

And yes, I do think it's ridiculous to imagine that the people of New York would ever have collected the money to declare a huge postion of Manhattan a National Park and that they would continue to fund its upkeep all these years. It is completely ridiculous and without precedent in any society anywhere in history.


As for the whole "ownership" argument and the description of a society where people take shit away from one another repeatedly at the point of a gun, well yeah. That's another flaw of Libertarianism. I like the society where people don't do that. You want the one where they can and do, then vote for it I guess. But you might want to keep that argument away from the polling booth. You're not going to win over a lot of folks with THAT one!

[J m HofMarN]

Quote

Charities discriminate even now, or haven’t you heard of the UNCF?

Which is why it's good to have a "welfare state" since the government relief groups cant discriminate.

Quote

There will always be someone who wants to fight for the libertarian ideal.

So, basically any time someone feels like leaving the government there'll be civil war?

[quote]I guess price competitions will not exist in an economy without price controls. I guess its fundamentally illogical the corporations are just waiting for the government to crack so they can raise their prices so high that their customers cant buy any medicine. I guess there is no way I can rebuttal you.[quote]

You know, you're right. Maybe the medical corporations will cut prices of medicine once Libertarianism is in place. They could take steps to lower prices for consumers like using cheeper packaging, eliminating unecessary jobs and, I dunno, not testing their products.

Quote

If people come together then yes, they can pay for a park or heart transplant or whatever.

There are a million people in NYC. 2 out of, I believe, every 10 Americans will have heart trouble or cancer. Now the basic family unit is: husband, wife, child, grandmother 1 grandmother 2 grandfather 1 grandfather 2. That's 7 people. So basically every family will have someone that needs to be hospitalized with a life threatening illness at some point. And that's not even including unemployment, under employment, medications, etc. Every family will need to pay for a hospital stay of someone in their family. No one will have money or time (in the infinite-hours-workweek system) after that to try to build a park.

Quote

Most people aren’t dumb or greedy enough to sell their lands to a baron.

Assuming he has a black spirally moustache, maybe. But I don't think anyone would logically say "You have a lot of money, so I won't sell my house to you" After all, isnt the libertarian ideal survival of the fittest? And shouldn't it be permissable in libertarian society to sell one's belongings to the highest bidder?

Quote

Nope, I put it on the burden on the family of the diseased

Dr. Cobnat: I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith. There's no cure for Billy's condition. But if you'd like to pay me some more money on top of the thousand dollar hospital bill I'll start researching one.

Quote

Does that seem so strange to you? That a group of people would come together and support themselves?

It seems like a bad idea is what it seems like. Without a government to help them if their support base fails, and with corporations ready to take advantage of them, I'd say their community government has little chance.

Quote

wait a minute, no it hasn’t, we still don’t have a vaccine despite millions of people dieing from it!

Dr. Cobnat: Yes Mrs. Smith, it's me again. Just wanted to let you know I think Billy may have Bird flu, a disease that's been plaguing humanity for hundreds of years and killed millions.

Mrs. Smith: May I see your doctor's license?'

Quote

The government pays more for artillery pieces used to bomb a country no one can pronounce (thanks to our great education system, oh wait) then to important life threatening diseases.

Something Civ said... It's so cloudy... Can just barely remember... Something about bath water and infants...

I dont like that fact either, but there are a lot of better ways to solve that problem than this Ayn Randinism. Anarcho Communism, Socialism, Communism, Hell I wouldnt have anything to say if you just suggested anarchism, but basically suggesting anarchism only with corporations completely intact, it's kinda looney to believe that society will still be on an even keel.

[Cobnat]

civilian_number_two
Actually, billions have been spent researching the avian flu, while the worldwide human death toll is under200. JM's is a pretty good example of the argument for the economy of scale. Billions have been spent researching first of all the existence of and then possible treatments for an illness that has affected so far a handful of people spread all over the world. In the "affected community pools together their resourses" scenario, it's unlikely the affected peoples would have collected billions of dollars, let alone become in contact with one another so as to determine a common problem to begin with. And all those slaughters opf bird populations to mitigate the spread of the disease? That ain't free neither, and those birds belonged to farmers.

Cobnat
I am talking about the bird flue disease that hit Spain (and the rest of the world) in 1919. The current bird flue is a mutation of that disease. Why didn’t they cure it back then? Why? Because there was not sufficient technology. Is there going to be a cure for cancer or aids in our lifetime? Perhaps but doubtful. How long did it take to cure the black death? 500 years?

civilian_number_two
Remember mad cow disease? It hurt a bunch of cows, and then started to spill over to the human population? Came up a few years back. Basically how it spread was beef farmers ignored government directives on what to feed their livestock. This was exposed because those same government types exposed it and the beef industry was put under heavy watch and loads of cattle were slaughtered and burned at great cost. All this was done because a handful of people died. And there was no profit motive for the farmers to burn their cattle; all they needed to do was to hire some scientists to tell the population that "all is well" and then continue with what they were doing. When lead was accumulating in people's bodies and causing dementia and death, the official position of the corporate-bought scientists was "these workers with lead products went mad from working too hard. Lead is totally safe." It took independent study to deal with that problem, and that study was damned expensive. You may thank that research for getting the lead out of canning product as well as gasoline, and by by that measure out of the air you breathe.

Cobnat
A cure is found by time and chance, not millions of dollars of research. People are not motivated to do good by money but morality.

civilian_number_two
I like central authority and huge pools of money when it comes to scientific research. A history of the same has made the life expentancy of man a lot more than it was even 150 years ago. If you think the government wastes of mismanages the pools of money, that's something to work on. Assuming that just by taking that sum away altogether and by leaving people to fend entirely for themselves (essentially removing the need for a community altogether), you will in short order create the world described by Hobbes.

Cobnat
I am not proposing the destruction of government, I am proposing the decentralization of government.

civilian_number_two
And yes, I do think it's ridiculous to imagine that the people of New York would ever have collected the money to declare a huge postion of Manhattan a National Park and that they would continue to fund its upkeep all these years. It is completely ridiculous and without precedent in any society anywhere in history.

Cobnat
There are plenty of instances where local people have come together to fight a corporation that has come to destroy ground that is not safeguarded by the government.

civilian_number_two
As for the whole "ownership" argument and the description of a society where people take shit away from one another repeatedly at the point of a gun, well yeah. That's another flaw of Libertarianism. I like the society where people don't do that. You want the one where they can and do, then vote for it I guess. But you might want to keep that argument away from the polling booth. You're not going to win over a lot of folks with THAT one!

Cobnat
People would use guns to defend themselves. They would not risk losing their homes and their families for some more land.

J m HofMarN
Which is why it's good to have a "welfare state" since the government relief groups cant discriminate.
So, basically any time someone feels like leaving the government there'll be civil war?
There are a million people in NYC. 2 out of, I believe, every 10 Americans will have heart trouble or cancer. Now the basic family unit is: husband, wife, child, grandmother 1 grandmother 2 grandfather 1 grandfather 2. That's 7 people. So basically every family will have someone that needs to be hospitalized with a life threatening illness at some point. And that's not even including unemployment, under employment, medications, etc. Every family will need to pay for a hospital stay of someone in their family. No one will have money or time (in the infinite-hours-workweek system) after that to try to build a park.

Cobnat
So what you’re telling me is that NYC is a welfare paradise in which everyone has free access to food, medicine and schooling? Yeah right.

J m HofMarN
Assuming he has a black spirally moustache, maybe. But I don't think anyone would logically say "You have a lot of money, so I won't sell my house to you" After all, isnt the libertarian ideal survival of the fittest? And shouldn't it be permissable in libertarian society to sell one's belongings to the highest bidder?

Cobnat
No, we want power to the majority of people, who don’t happen to be rich.

J m HofMarN
Dr. Cobnat: I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith. There's no cure for Billy's condition. But if you'd like to pay me some more money on top of the thousand dollar hospital bill I'll start researching one.

Cobnat
Certain disease research doesn’t get enough attention or funding it deserves until a lot of people have it or a rich person has it.

J m HofMarN
It seems like a bad idea is what it seems like. Without a government to help them if their support base fails, and with corporations ready to take advantage of them, I'd say their community government has little chance.

Cobnat
Again, communities have no power because corporations control the government. If you reduce governments then corporations would have less of a control over the population. All the abuse by corporations on the common person has been done with government backing.

J m HofMarN
I dont like that fact either, but there are a lot of better ways to solve that problem than this Ayn Randinism. Anarcho Communism, Socialism, Communism, Hell I wouldnt have anything to say if you just suggested anarchism, but basically suggesting anarchism only with corporations completely intact, it's kinda looney to believe that society will still be on an even keel.

Cobnat
Corporations would loose their massive power eventually. Without governments to back them up while they shutdown small businesses.

This post has been edited by Cobnat: 16 October 2007 - 05:00 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Well, that's enough for me. I'd like to leave with a last word about how "some diseases don't get researched until a rich person gets it" and ask how that system would be IMPROVED with absolute private funding of medical research, but I'm guessing the answer would be "people would pay for it and all would be well."

It's been fun, but really I've had enough. Cobnat, I wish you the best of luck with getting rid of or decentralising all government, of fracturing nations into smaller commnities, of building a completely privatised system of everything (except, conspicuously, military and policing), etc etc. When your system saves the world, you can say "I told you so," and I'll buy you a Coke.

[Spoon Poetic]

I think the problem here is that Cobnat has too much faith in humanity. He thinks people are actually inherently good and selfless.

[Slade]

Cobnat: I also take issue with the second main incentive for appropriate behavior from a Libertarian society once morality fails to greed: guns. Do you really want a system where the main form of retribution is a civilian waving a gun around to ensure that his parks aren't taken away and his wages aren't slashed? What's going to prevent the corporations (with billions of pooled capital) from getting more/better guns/troops to kill off its opposers once shots were fired? How will they lose their power? Once they are allowed to pay what they want and do what they want, they will either use their hired mercenaries to kill off opposition, force everyone into slavery or wage slavery, or a mix of both.

And no, it is not blind chance that causes scientific progress. Money is given to intelligent, creative people, who use said intelligence to solve problems, create new innovations, reuse old ideas, etc. Yes, some chance is involved with some technologies, but by being given more funding, more time/effort is allotted to the research, giving more of an opportunity for those initially low chances to finally pay out. And I know that probability is not cumulative, I don't mean that it's a guarantee that eventually something will happen (i.e. trying to say that because a coin is flipped 999999 times and comes up heads, the next time MUST be either outcome), just that more opportunity means better chances in general.

And if you want power to the majority, not to the rich, why do you advocate a system that allows the wealthy to more easily take advantage of a weaker system of government and seize control?

[Spoon Poetic]

Because he seriously doesn't think the wealthy would be in power for some reason. He seriously thinks this system wouldn't let the rich and powerful walk all over the less fortunate even more than they already do. He's just going to give you the same arguments he's been giving Jm and civ2, that are basically rampant speculation based off of the assumption that people are inherently good and selfless.

[Cobnat]

Spoon, just for the record, I do not believe people are naturally good, I just don’t believe they are naturally evil.

Cobnat: I also take issue with the second main incentive for appropriate behavior from a Libertarian society once morality fails to greed: guns. Do you really want a system where the main form of retribution is a civilian waving a gun around to ensure that his parks aren't taken away and his wages aren't slashed? What's going to prevent the corporations (with billions of pooled capital) from getting more/better guns/troops to kill off its opposers once shots were fired? How will they lose their power? Once they are allowed to pay what they want and do what they want, they will either use their hired mercenaries to kill off opposition, force everyone into slavery or wage slavery, or a mix of both.

And if you want power to the majority, not to the rich, why do you advocate a system that allows the wealthy to more easily take advantage of a weaker system of government and seize control?

Lets pretend for a second that government is no longer around to pay certain corporations money (mainly arms and food manufacturers) then those corporations would soon have to break down into a small corporations or firm to remain above water. Now, this would happen to all companies that really on government funding as its main client. So now all the companies have to lay off their workers. They do so and now we are facing another economic depression. Now, if you remember what happened in the depression you will know that the rich also gained nothing (and lost a lot) from it. Though it was hard for workers, it was much harder for the unemployed. Now in order to gain jobs or seek revenge, those now unemployed workers get weapons and start destroying the industries at which they worked at, essentially causing a new dark age since now there is few if any heavy machines to mass produce products. So now people in big cities have decided that they are hungry, so they decide to ravage the countryside in order to find food, the problem with this is that the farmers and villagers are armed to the teeth, so a civil war ensures. After the civil war is over, massive casualties, no food, no clothes, but worst of all, no TV! (oh the humanity!)

Now this is the scenario that will play out if Libertarianism or Anarchy was introduced overnight. But if you had read my posts CAREFULLY then you would know that I am against this and for using the current system to decentralize the government, you see, I am a moderate. I know that what I want will probably never become reality but I can live with that, though I know that libertarianism is not for everyone because either they are too sceptical and don’t believe any government would work (like I used to be) or because they do not believe that human beings deserve to have economic or social freedoms because they believe that human nature is to be evil or because that system would not be best for their lives. I am not for enforcing my beliefs on everyone like Fascists, Communists and Democrats tend to do, so do not worry, I am not going to become a rebel or terrorist or whatever.

And no, it is not blind chance that causes scientific progress. Money is given to intelligent, creative people, who use said intelligence to solve problems, create new innovations, reuse old ideas, etc. Yes, some chance is involved with some technologies, but by being given more funding, more time/effort is allotted to the research, giving more of an opportunity for those initially low chances to finally pay out. And I know that probability is not cumulative, I don't mean that it's a guarantee that eventually something will happen (i.e. trying to say that because a coin is flipped 999999 times and comes up heads, the next time MUST be either outcome), just that more opportunity means better chances in general.

Science is about trail and error. Unless we start something immoral such as human experimentation, a cure will come up because of chance.

[J m HofMarN]

Corporations would loose their massive power eventually

Oh dear god come on. Basic Marxist principle: The power will never cede power willingly.

[Cobnat]

Oh dear god come on. Basic Marxist principle: The power will never cede power willingly.

This isn’t about giving power up, it is about losing it. Without a source of power/funding (I.e. the government) they will eventually fall.

[Slade]

So basically, we'll all get owned by McDonalds, Pepsi, and Disney instead of defense contractors? There are many, many corporations that don't need the government's help and probably wish that they could hire private security forces to enforce harsher working conditions for workers so that they could make more profits.

And I know you say that you would prefer a slow move toward libertarianism and aren't trying to advocate violence, but that's what you bring up when someone mentions a criticism of the ease with which power will be abused by the wealthy.

[Cobnat]

So basically, we'll all get owned by McDonalds, Pepsi, and Disney instead of defense contractors? There are many, many corporations that don't need the government's help and probably wish that they could hire private security forces to enforce harsher working conditions for workers so that they could make more profits.

1. The people would be armed.
2. The customers are the workers.

And I know you say that you would prefer a slow move toward libertarianism and aren't trying to advocate violence, but that's what you bring up when someone mentions a criticism of the ease with which power will be abused by the wealthy.

I am sorry but are you suggesting the ‘wealthy’ do not abuse power at the moment?

[Spoon Poetic]

So everything is solved by violence. (Your constant arguments of "the people being armed would solve that problem, and that one, and that one," suggests that you believe that.)

And the wealthy abuse power, sure - but the system you propose is like, handing them more power and more ways to abuse it.

This post has been edited by Spoon Poetic: 19 October 2007 - 08:25 PM

[Cobnat]

So everything is solved by violence. (Your constant arguments of "the people being armed would solve that problem, and that one, and that one," suggests that you believe that.)

Everyone being armed would be a deterrent.

And the wealthy abuse power, sure - but the system you propose is like, handing them more power and more ways to abuse it.

Yeah, I hand them more power by getting rid of the institutions that grant them power, makes sense.