It's only a shame you don't follow your own advice and actually think about it. You're too busy proselytizing to actually educate yourself.
Does a business owner have a right to say, "Don't come back?"
- Thread starter Bowser
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It's only a shame you don't follow your own advice and actually think about it. You're too busy proselytizing to actually educate yourself.
There might be some truth to the hardwired theory. I was watching our young niece while at a family gathering last night, she was very cautious around strangers. The familiar is much more palatable than the unfamiliar.
I think a bias perspective can be attributed to many factors, though often it is learned. I gave my children my opinions on various matters, yet they have grown into their own. Their values may change over time as they gain more experience, or they might stay steadfast in their convictions.
I tend to agree with you here, Michael. For me it's more about price. I will take a two dollar beer over a three dollar beer any day. I don't much care who is sitting next to me. However, I don't have a favorite bar, and I assume that some places draw on a specific crowd. I imagine that if I were gay, I would gravitate towards a gay bar. Apparently this is true for other people--hence the initial post and questions. I think we can't ignore the natural tendency that people often search for comfort in numbers.
The public is protected by the law regarding private property, false advertising, etc...
Again, I'm not saying NO rules. I'm saying no rulers.
It's just one of those things that really matters when discussing libertarian socioeconomics. Libertarians are extremely protective of private property. AND the body is the most central and intimate of all private property.
So, let's go back to the restaurant example.
In a free-market you have a choice to go to many different restaurants. I mean, even now in a highly regulated market there's plenty of choice. It stands to reason in a free-market you'd have even more choice. Now, imagine how much it costs to start a restaurant - and people are choosy about what they eat. You don't want to have a bad reputation about your food making people sick, or you're done and you won't be able to keep your business. In a highly competitive free-market you'd be toast. But, we'll suppose somehow you smuggled a bit of off cat into your food. Well, as a customer, perhaps you will ONLY go to restaurants that are insured against libel by various insurance companies. The insurance companies will enforce ungodly high standards as they don't want your to be sued as then they'll have to pay. Unlike the FDA who call up and say "Hi, we're coming by on Saturday, you may want to get rid of the off cat we know you're selling". An insurance company would actually make spot inspections of restaurants because their real money would be on the line. An infraction means high premiums for the restaurants with infractions. Good clean high quality means lower premiums on insurance. In this way restaurants are incentivized to keep up the high quality. Now, if you did get sick the insurance of 5 start restaurants make sure you get paid $1 million dollars (as an example). Secondly, suppose you didn't care, or you were lazy, whatever - you go into a uninsured cheap restaurant to buy food. It's understood if you were sold bad meat (as an example) that you were the victim of fraud. Thus, you are going to take the owner to court and soon you'll collect damages. Fraud is fraud. It's up to the jury to determine the outcome. Maybe the person loses their entire life's savings paying you out?
Now, I literally just came up with these very simple and effective means of providing the exact same service through a purely voluntary means. We don't need the State to regulate our interactions. We did and can do it by ourselves (by State I don't mean state of Michigan, I just mean a government).
Yes, it takes a little tiny bit of effort to live in a free-society. Well, tough! That's just what it takes. I'm happy to make the effort. Particularly we'll have that 35% of income tax to pay for private efficient services that will take most of the load off our hands.
We buy smart phones, we can manage to buy food, school, healthcare, etc... just as easily.
Also, please don't say 'we tried that once'. That's like saying, well, we tried to cure cancer, it didn't work, so we have to live with it. We don't. We are much more connected (hyper-connected). We are better informed. We are able to better spread the news and ideas to anyone in the world. These are new times. I want to see them used positively and reduce the size of the State. At least aim for under 5% GDP as a start (with the hope of going to zero say in 120 years).
OK, well, I'm also anti-copy write and patent laws. These slow innovation. All they do is give the give the patent holder a monopoly.
BUT that said DRM is market driven. If a business wants to use DRM then they can. We don't have to purchase their products. As a matter of fact, as you know, there's a lot of pretty cook freeware and freegames out on the web. No one has to buy the game. Unlike say a restaurant licence or a taxi licence or a liquor licence or soon a reproductive licence... no one is force to buy the game they can still play games just not those ones.
Yes, we can have a whole debate around private property and games. I maintain once I buy it I own it and I can duplicate it if I want to, I can alter it, I can add to it, I can share it. But, that's obviously another interesting discussion for another tread.
You seem to be rejecting out of hand the work of the Nobel prize winning economist. I'd like to at least see a citation because according to his research (admittedly, I take all macroeconomic modeling with a pinch of salt) ALL bigots in free-markets go out of business. They simply can't compete against liberal open minded businesses.
It's bloody mathematical!
This suggests to me there's something very fundamental about humanity, hell nature itself, that biases us towards being liberal. I actually think free-markets are why we became progressive and regulated markets make for a very conservative society. I also think it'll take generations of non-spanking parenting with love and logic, but again, I digress
When in doubt, why not try Ethics? When you hear politicians, simply put their ideas to an Ethical test. See how well they do. We teach children not to steal - maybe we shouldn't steal? We teach children not to hit, how about we don't use force? I essence, why don't we live up to the standards we expect 3 year olds to live up to?
I agree it's a possibility. But, I still think it's learned and I know for sure through neural plasticity it can be learned not to see bias.
Human's have bred with a number of other homo-like species, Neanderthals and Denisovans being two archaic hominid species we successfully mated with. I'm fairly certain we're pretty liberal when it comes to mating and in a moral society mating must be voluntary. There's some good evidence that finding other humans that don't look like your brother or sister, mom or dad... is a good way to find a mate. Inbreeding is taboo but I think it's probably also genetic not to inbred.
Actually I used to think, up until the GFC, exactly like you. Then I started doing research. Which is my profession so thinking about Natural Logic versus Formal Logic and applying these to arguments seems rather natural to me. I've come to understand that the most rational approach to society is the approach Greeks were debating 2500 years ago - Ethics.
I think most people agree it's immoral to initiate force against an immoral person. Where I think I differ is that I don't let notions of "America" (artificial constructs) deter me from following this logic to its conclusion. To me Nationalism is just another superstition we created to confuse people with. I sometimes wonder if Ethics itself isn't similar, but, again, that's a digression
I suppose people can be conditioned. I still believe that there is a natural defensive mechanism at play when confronted with the unfamiliar.
That "etcetra" includes civil rights laws, food and drug regulations, and health code standards, by the way. It appears the only difference between these and the "false advertising" laws is that you don't like these. Which is fine, if that's your opinion, but trying to apply "private property" as a blanket set of rules that applies to everything one owns is ridiculous.
That sounds like gibberish to me. You want rules, but no one to enforce them?
So extreme that they don't actually know what constitutes personal property? Because that's your situation. I sincerely doubt you're a classic example of a Libertarian.
Here's where the flaw is in your thinking (you already know where it is, so I'm really only explaining this for the people reading along): You assume that because getting a bad reputation is bad for business, either no one would allow their standards to sink so low, or the ones that do would immediately go out of business, thereby removing the threat. To the first, I'd say that you're probably right that places like Applebee's and McDonald's wouldn't have many problems. Big chains and swanky uptown bistros would probably maintain similar, if not exact, standards as they do now. However, the lower-income places--diners, upstart restaurants, etc--absolutely would cut corners to save money. Okay, say Ma's Diner has an outbreak of some nasty bacteria, and as a result nobody ever goes there again and they close down. Then another little diner does the same, and more people get sick. Sure, they go out of business within a month, but then another restaurant pops up a few blocks away and the same thing happens. Even if customers close down every dirty restaurant in every city, without a mechanism to prevent another from relaxing their standards, there will always be another to take its place. And there will always be the incentive to relax standards, because doing so saves money. You might say "Who would be so stupid?" Ask the same question now, of all the places in this country that do exactly that even in spite of having regulations as a deterrent.
No, you came up with another naive half-assed example of what would happen if there were only one dirty restaurant in the world, if everyone acted properly and followed through, and no one ever took a shortcut. Yeah, in that world, sure, there would be no need for regulations. Sadly, we don't live in that world.
Yeah! Tough to all those factory workers whose employers don't have to provide safe or clean working conditions now that President Michael is in charge!
It's nothing like saying that at all. We know what human nature is. It doesn't change. So long as there are incentives to take short cuts, peole will. We can deincentivize it through regulation, but even that isn't 100% effective. You think that without regulation, it's magically going to get better?
Of course you are. You've likely never created anything in your entire life, so you have nothing to risk in saying so. And it would be consistent if you were in favor of it, since DRM is just how creators protect their intellectual property.
And you prove my point for me. Even when the product has a net negative impact on the consumer, they purchase it. By purchasing DLC and DRM-protected products, they are lessening the value of their own dollar and taking away their own right to choose. Yet they shell out their money like lemmings. Then they log on to the internet and bitch and moan.
The free market doesn't protect the consumer. At some point, we need to protect the consumer from themselves.
Except that's not what he said. You're lying to suit your own purposes. At this point, there's nothing left to say.
So you used to be rational, then you lost your mind?
And you, who lies to make a point, talking about ethics is bloody hysterical.
I don't think you even know what you mean by that.
Where I think I differ is that I don't let notions of "America" (artificial constructs) deter me from following this logic to its conclusion. To me Nationalism is just another superstition we created to confuse people with. I sometimes wonder if Ethics itself isn't similar, but, again, that's a digression
Gibberish.
Sadly not true. Interesting that you would say that, though.
Fair enough.
It was, but only because I'm not.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You haven't studied the history of the Jews. They will happily loan money to anybody. During the Dark Ages when European Christians mistranslated the Hebrew word for "usury" in the Torah to prohibit any loaning of money for interest, the Jews saved the European economy because fortunately there was no rule against borrowing for interest. As a result they became Europe's bankers and their thanks was the Holocaust.
Mohammed Yunnus keeps trying to open a branch of his Nobel prize-winning Grameen Bank in the USA, to serve microbusinesses in poor neighborhoods. He's Bangladeshi, not an Arab, but he is a Muslim.
The problem with Arab-owned banks is that they have the same mistranslation in their scriptures so they believe that charging interest is a sin. (Anyone who thinks the Jews would worship a God who counts charging interest as a sin, raise your hand. It's their holy book and they know what it says because they can all read Hebrew. They don't allow a priest class to tell them what God said.) So they have to devise convoluted business practices that have the same result as charging interest, without actually charging interest. They end up being labeled "service charges," "transaction fees" and whatnot, the very practices that the U.S. is cracking down on in our own banks.
It's common for stores in the USA to have security cameras. If you walk in wearing a ninja outfit you're deliberately concealing your face from the camera--not to mention wearing a mask in a country where only robbers wear masks except on Halloween is not a great way to make people feel comfortable in your presence. For all the proprietor knows there could be a man under there, but even if not, a woman can stick up the place and never be caught because the witnesses could never identify her.
As I've noted before, we are a pack-social species so we're programmed to only trust and care for the members of our pack. The enlargement of our pack to include other families, then strangers, then people we've never even seen, is an overlay we have developed because it works, but it requires overriding instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior.
With a forebrain that is qualitatively larger than any other mammal or bird, we have the ability to do this. We can tell our Inner Caveman to shut up, drink his beer, eat his pizza, watch his TV, turn up his air conditioning, bask in the loyalty of the domesticated predator sleeping at his feet and ready to defend him with his life, go out and ride his motorcycle, and enjoy the fruits of civilization. Most of the time it works, but occasionally he gets restless and runs out into the street to do something Paleolithic to someone who is not a member of his extended-family tribe.
As was discussed earlier, it's our parents' job to teach us that the whole human race is our "pack." Some of them do a better job of teaching, but some of us do a better job of learning.
This issue has been covered at great length. People are born with the instinct to care for and trust only the members of their extended family: the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer clan of a few dozen. Beyond that, it requires overlaying instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior.
Not if you have a business or a career that thrives on contacts. Unless you live in Hollywood or the equivalent district in three or four other major Amerian cities, you're not going to be very successful catering primarily to the gay community.
Not to mention you apparently don't have very many gay friends. They don't want to limit their social contacts to other gay people any more than I want to limit mine to other straight people, or other atheists, or other dog lovers.
Not really true. I keep mentioning that the few hundred generations of evolution since the Neolithic Revolution have not been long enough for any major changes to take place in human psychology, yet smaller changes have occurred.
The Westermarck Effect is probably one of them. In the Paleolithic Era incest was de rigeur because contact between clans was unusual and often hostile. Yet today it's been documented that children who are raised together as family members (even if they're adopted or simply brought up in a foster home and have no actual blood relationship) very seldom grow up to marry each other. Incest is now a tabu that we are born with, not taught. This was first noticed on the particular kibbutzes in Israel in which all of the children are raised communally during the week and only live with their parents on weekends. Kibbutz-mates rarely marry.
There are surely other adaptations to post-Stone Age culture that we haven't identified yet.
Ah yes, the war cry of the Statist. "People are too dumb to look out for their own interests."
The problem with a benevolent dictatorship (or a democracy which every year looks more and more like one) passing laws like this is the Law of Unintended Consequences: "You can never do just one thing." In my parents' era (the 1920s) the government tried to protect Americans from the evils of alcohol. The second-order effects of Prohibition were ruinous, because you cannot legislate morality. Americans have absolutely no cultural memory, so the poop-for-brains government is doing exactly the same thing today with another class of popular drugs.
Okay, well you let me know when human beings stop taking shortcuts for short-term financial gain despite almost inevitable long-term negative ramifications, then we can talk about easing up on some of these regulations. Until that day comes, it seems pretty clear to me that many of the health and safety regulations--as well as civil rights laws--in place now are necessary.
Not too dumb. That's a straw man. Most consumers are aware of the incentive they give companies by agreeing to lopsided terms and purchasing products that employ some form of rights protection that makes the job of enjoying the product endlessly more difficult. On the topic of games, think of the Diablo III players who purchased their copy fully aware of the "always-on" DRM protocol. Because everyone had to be connected to the distributor's servers, when said servers crashed, hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of gamers were unable to play their game. Their game that was, aside from the DRM, an offline, single-player game. They all knew this was a possibility--perhaps even a probability--yet they bought the game anyway because, thanks to the hype and marketing, not to mention social ramifications of having the new "it" item, they set aside concerns of product failure as well as the fact that they were telling the distributors "Yeah, you can DRM me right up the wazoo! I'll buy anything you make!"
Or think about Wal-Mart, with its horrendous customer service. Ever go to one at night? There's one cashier for every hundred customers. Ever ask anyone at Wal-Mart about a particular product and get a blank stare in return? Don't tell me that given the opportunity to rail us, every company on the planet wouldn't do just that. Have you ever seen a cell phone contract?Now that I think about it, the Applebee's and McDonald's of the world would be exactly who allow salmonella outbreaks if the regulations were lifted, because they are so entrenched they'd always have a customer base. Do you remember the Jack in the Box incident years ago? Several children died and a whole bunch of other people fell ill. The reason? They ignored state regulation on cooking temperature.
Oh spare us the hyperbole, please.
Did you wander into the wrong thread, or something? Who's talking about drugs?
To the extent that the premise that all people are entitled to equal rights and protection under the law is "my own perception," you mean?
Then you are here to defend bigotry and oppression, and I am proud to note that the power of the State stands between you and the application of your "position" to society at large, thanks to the courageous, steadfast resistance of moral, conscious citizens for many generations.
"Privilege" does not merit the defense of the law, and to the extent that said bigotry impinges anybody else's rights - for example, through expression in "business dealings" - it is an unacceptable transgression that the State is perfectly justified in preventing and punishing through the use of force.
You probably mean something more like "you cannot enforce moral views through legislation that are not already shared by the overwhelming majority of the populace." Which is to say, stuff like "drinking alcohol is bad."
But there is no impediment whatsoever to "legislating morality" when the morals in question are already widely agreed upon by the populace. There is no difficulty in "legislating" such moral positions as "murder is bad" or "theft is bad."
It's on target- Fraggle Rocker is relating the effects of Governmental jurisdiction over morality. This is quite clear and straightforward and frankly, you seem more interested in pretending to misunderstand people than you are in understanding people and considering debating with solid arguments.
Just like in the other thread, you seem hell-bent on picking a fight with me, and it's costing you some of your dignity. Once again, you've let your lust for a fight fog your mind.
Fraggle's point has nothing to do with this, because civil rights laws do not attempt to legislate morality. People are still free to say whatever they want about whomever they want, it's just that they cannot oppress people anymore through discrimination. These are two entirely different concepts. No one has outlawed bigotry. Prohibition and the War on Drugs are an attempt to remove certain drugs from the country altogether.
As I advised you in the previous thread, do try to comprehend what you read before replying. It saves you some face, and it saves me the bother of having to correct you.
No, not really. Just pointing out the error. Deal with it or not, fight or not, be dignified or not; I don't care.
When it comes to PC topics, a lot of people seem to lose their head. Self included, I'm sure and I've really been trying to tone it back. Either way, I find it interesting how in a Politically Correct debate people can jump to the Ad Hom attack of accusing someone of political views they have not stated any support of and even denied support of. As if to say, paint an image of them as low and despicable characters in order to refute their arguments.
When it comes to PC topics, a lot of people seem to lose their head. Self included, I'm sure and I've really been trying to tone it back. Either way, I find it interesting how in a Politically Correct debate people can jump to the Ad Hom attack of accusing someone of political views they have not stated any support of and even denied support of. As if to say, paint an image of them as low and despicable characters in order to refute their arguments.
Yes, they are. Like all legislation regarding rights, they rest on an assertion that rights are morally good, and violations of rights are morally bad, and that it is the government's moral responsibility to use its power to impede and punish such violations.
Under your analogy, laws against drugs and alcohol do not prevent anyone from liking drugs or alcohol or desiring to use them, they just can't actually produce, sell, purchase or possess them. Nobody has outlawed the desire to do drugs or drink alcohol. Alternatively, under your premises, you could admit that Civil Rights legislation is an attempt to remove oppression from the country altogether. Either way, your point does not survive, because your analogy is flawed.
Fraggle Rocker,
It's sort of like religious delirium to me.
What do you think?
Big God, Little State
Little God, Big State
Do you really think it's all down to our pack like nature? Maybe? The whole in-group out-group mentality? I've, on more than one occasion, had people tell me "If you don't like this country leave". Isn't that funny? Once I cross the magic line ... then somehow the rules are different. It's almost childlike. One time I questioned the Iraq war (around family) and a family member just about had a conniption. Wasn't I a 'Patriot'?!? Apparently not
I'm coming around to thinking it's simply a lifetime of propaganda. Pretty simple propaganda at that. When "You use the roads!" stands as a rational argument.... I mean, come on.
Anyway, at some point it becomes a bit of a time waster. Particularly when the example of the restaurant couldn't be clearly understood. That sealed the deal on this thread.
It's sort of like religious delirium to me.
What do you think?
Big God, Little State
Little God, Big State
Do you really think it's all down to our pack like nature? Maybe? The whole in-group out-group mentality? I've, on more than one occasion, had people tell me "If you don't like this country leave". Isn't that funny? Once I cross the magic line ... then somehow the rules are different. It's almost childlike. One time I questioned the Iraq war (around family) and a family member just about had a conniption. Wasn't I a 'Patriot'?!? Apparently not
I'm coming around to thinking it's simply a lifetime of propaganda. Pretty simple propaganda at that. When "You use the roads!" stands as a rational argument.... I mean, come on.
Anyway, at some point it becomes a bit of a time waster. Particularly when the example of the restaurant couldn't be clearly understood. That sealed the deal on this thread.
The error was on your part, not mine, as I just explained to you. Do you understand now that you were wrong, or should I explain myself again?
Find a mirror, rinse and repeat. Clearly you have some issues you need to work out with yourself, not me. If you were merely pointing out errors, you would have simply said you thought Fraggle was making a good point. That you turned it into an ad hom attack proves your true motive.