(chortle!)
Norsefire said:
The market adjusts accordingly.
It always does, doesn't it? After all, industrial corporations only dumped their waste into the water system because people
liked drinking poisonous water. Then the horrible government came along and told everyone what to think, and suddenly the market had to adjust to government-manipulated artificial demand.
Do I have that about right?
My point is, gov't legislation does not create productivity, or safety.
True. It is supposed to
enforce safety.
Why should they put anything before that?
Let me just check in here:
Am I supposed to take that question seriously?
With most people, I would just figure they were taking the piss. But it's not so clear in your case.
And these people represent a minority, I'm sure ...
Indeed. Not everyone can be a CEO, board member, or company executive.
... most people are decent and compassionate. You, for instance. In a laissez faire world, you would be among those attempting to help the poor, and so would I, and so would others and together we can.
In a laissez faire world I would have been dead along time ago because of my choice to not do more to fit in with the crowd. Of course, the fact that I was, oh, a
child and didn't have the money to pay for surgery to round my eyes, reshape my cheekbones, and bleach my skin a couple of shades in order to look more white is purely my fault, so I see your point.
And those damn blacks. They didn't need civil rights legislation. They just needed to stop being so stupid as to choose to be born black.
Individual choice; including the choice to help, and the choice to avoid bad business.
If I ask how old you are, it's not a stab after maturity or anything like that. I'm just wondering how much of the world you remember before the internet. See, it used to be considerably harder to find out about product safety insofar as people couldn't just go and Google their question. Analgesics that caused birth defects, cigarettes—
cigarettes, for fuck sake—with filters made of
asbestos, cars that would explode if rear-ended or just randomly drop their engines when you stepped on the accelerator for the green light.
Hell, there was a rise of specialty pet food in the late '80s and early '90s that saw Iams become a major player. Before that people figured pet food was pet food. And then, slowly, they started learning differently because, well, that was when the information became available to them. Like I said, they couldn't just Google their concerns and find out what's what.
Even so, in the internet age, people didn't expect dog food to be made with coal waste.
So what happened? Did the market misjudge the consumer? Or did consumers suddenly decide they didn't have a taste for melamine anymore?
I know ... people are just too lazy to become professional chemists themselves in order to test their own food. Between that and getting an advanced degree in economics in order to make sure the AAA securities they're invested in are rated properly, going to med school in order to make sure their kid's doctor isn't fucking up the diagnosis, and going to night school for a mechanical engineering degree so that they can know the car (and house) they're buying is properly built ... I mean, really, man. I'm right there with you. What the fuck is wrong with these lazy bastards? What, do they need someone to do
everything for them? If they can't be bothered to undertake the simplest efforts to protect themselves, fuck 'em.
Society is made of the voluntary interactions of individuals. What you are suggesting is that society can only exist if enforced, which makes your society illegitimate at its core.
Nobody says you can't opt out. Oh, wait, I'm wrong about that. Suicide is still a crime in many jurisdictions. I'll agree with you on that one; it shouldn't be a crime to try to kill yourself.
More to the point, though, society is not a one-way thoroughfare. Society becomes
civilized through convention, and this is theoretically a self-reinforcing process. Not that it always works that way; indeed, humanity is still struggling toward making it work at all. But we are not born knowing everything, so if, for example, a child is born into a brutal existence in which all manner of abuse is common, what is that child affirming or opting out of? And what does that adult, should the child survive long enough, carry through life?
If a group comes together for protection and preservation, it seems antithetical that it should condone murder within its boundaries. After all, why come together for protection from the outside just to tear themselves apart from the inside. So a basic idea of civility is born. Over time, instinct and emotion at first, and later logic will compel more diverse conventions: Do not steal, do not kill, do not rape. Oh, the
tyranny of it all! The next generation is born into conventions they never had a choice to join.
And so it goes.
"The history of all hitherto existing society," wrote
Marx and Engels in 1848, "is the history of class struggles." Early human civilization established certain patterns of authority and subservience, and these for millennia preserved themselves to the effect that some were born to rule, and others to serve. What our modern nations are engaged in is the continual struggle against that basic inequality.
Paine wrote that hereditary political authority is "as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate".
And yet this is what your pseudo-libertarian hatred of societal convention appeals to. Consider the idea of a road. People despise taxes because they are paid to a government. But would you rather pay a private entity for the right of passage? You might not appreciate an increase in your taxes to pay for road maintenance, but what if the private road toll doubles so the CEO can build a mansion in the tropics? Would you smile and hand over a ridiculous fee that is higher than taxes because, hey, at least it's
not government?
In this way, the owners of the roads can control trade and thus the economy, thereby preserving a
de facto, if not officially sanctioned ruling class.
And certainly you can opt out of it. Perhaps you will find a route to carry goods that does not infringe on anyone's claim of property. If not, pony up what would most likely, given human nature, be exorbitant fees, and do so happily because, hey, it's
not government. So the profits from your hard work will be greatly reduced while those who built a simple road will see their wealth increase proportionately, and their children will inherit their fortune.
This is, indeed, the sort of process that history is not unfamiliar with, and the resulting entrenchment of socioeconomic power is exactly what civilized societies strive to overcome.
And your appeal also tends toward a reduced quality of life and increased dangers. Clean water? Why have a municipal system? Get clean water yourself. Of course, there might be a factory nearby that is polluting the groundwater, so the wells are poison; and it might well—if not for regulatory legislation under the rubric of the coercive right of government—be so polluting the air that the collection of rainwater is likewise perilous. So pick up your rifle and do something about it, I suppose. Have fun storming the castle.
What you will find in any reasonably careful study of history is the detail of human experimentation in the field of society. Diverse systems with many variations have, indeed, been tried. While they have found certain successes, nearly all of them have ultimately failed. Indeed, the only ones to not have failed entirely are those still extant among nations.
It is highly unlikely that you could devise a system that cannot be rationally considered against history. It is well and fine if you wish to propose that we simply ignore history, but you will find that more people will reject that idea than agree with it.
One of the problems with such an individual devotion to theoretic liberty is that people are diverse, and thus any one assertion of proper liberty will conflict at some point with another. And, of course, for each individual, we might recognize that the only truly correct semblance of liberty is their own.
So people compromise. Where there is general agreement, there is little conflict. Certainly, we can find those who would say laws against murder are wrong, and we ought to be just fine with sociopaths because we can always form us up a posse and go shoot down the son of a bitch, but such a proposition will find that the majority of people don't want to spend their lives that way.
Civilization stems from certain ideas; the idea of the division and specialization of labor in order to better provide food; the idea of living together for protection....these things have little to nothing to do with taxes, or freedom, or tolerance for that matter.
They have more to do with one another than you understand. Tolerance relates to protection and productivity, which in turn relates to freedom. Taxes are a compromise. Historically, the factory decimated the specialized craftsmen and gave rise to the modern corporation against which the small business—the backbone of economy, as some would assert—struggles. And yet it is from the abuses of corporate masters that safety, environmental, and employment and hiring regulations spring. We have been through this before.
Brave New World, here we come! That is civilization.
Sarcastic or not, I would ask you to spare me the Brave New World bullshit. I'm a liberal, and
Brave New World is a conservative dystopia:
There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
(Huxley)
The deification of productivity is what liberals like myself despise. The subordination of humanity to statistical definitions of propriety is the forfeiture of liberty. A liberal notion of freedom does not appeal to a zero-sum competition, but rather the wealth attained through cooperation. If we could build a world in which everyone was wealthy, we would. And someday we might actually reach the point that the only thing holding us back from such an outcome is sentiment. Your appeal to liberty includes the freedom to abuse other people. Your demand includes the right to enforce superiority over another. And don't tell me it doesn't; your disdain for history and effective myopia in considering the outcomes of the future does not excuse you.
I will have no choice! What you still do not address is how my problem is your problem. Who else is going to pay? It is rather like saying "Hey, my house burned down? It's ok, I'll just take yours!"
On the one hand, that's such completely laughable bullshit hyperbole that one wonders if you intend to be taken seriously at all. To the other, how do you feel about insurance? No, not the requirement to carry it, but the scheme in general? Why should
your premiums go to repair someone else's misfortune?
Tragedy sucks. It sucks more when people that don't have to suffer are made to, though.
Oh, for fuck sake. Your solution would be to simply increase the number of people who have to suffer.
Who gets to decide the parameters of this society? You? Me? Should we have a Sharia society? Or perhaps laissez faire? Or perhaps communism?
There is a simple answer to the first question, and it's the people who make up the society. The more complex way to look at it is to simply call off society every twenty or so years, and let each new generation have its crack at fashioning the human endeavor.
Is it simply the majority? What if the majority wanted to exterminate the Jews? Should we stop exterminating Jews, and call off civilized society, just because they matter more than fucking society?
Most people recognize that if the sociopaths are left to run amok, any one of us could be the next victim.
You, however ... you're determined to cast yourself as a victim under any circumstances that suggest you have an obligation to your fellow human being. Pardon us if we don't weep for your unjust burden.
The main problem is that we don't agree on justice.
Indeed. But the reasons for this are often complex. Some disagree on the particulars, while others dispute the whole concept. For instance—
Justice is simply revenge, and you don't need gov't for that at all.
—if that's all you're capable of understanding about justice, there's not a whole lot anyone can do to reconcile you to it.
Revenge should be the last thing justice is about.
No, we're individuals voluntarily interacting. And again, who gets to decide how this society operates?
You might as well ask who gets to decide how the laws of physics interact. You are part of a larger process, and are certainly welcome to opt out of it.
Although you do rather annoy me with your talk of "human rights" and "justice" as if the bottom line is unimportant to you.
Your bottom line is worthless.
There's no such thing as human rights. There's no such thing as justice, past the idea of simple revenge.
Your handicap. Your problem. Don't make it anyone else's.
Who gives us our rights? God?
Actually, logic.
All of ours.
____________________
Notes:
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Australian National University. July 11, 2009. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Paine, Thomas. "Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution - part 7 of 16". The Rights of Man. 1791. USHistory.org. July 11, 2009. http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/c1-016.htm
Huxley, Aldous. "Chapter Three". Brave New World. 1932. Huxley.net. July 11, 2009. http://www.huxley.net/bnw/three.html