wateroverfire posted:

It doesn't seem like a stretch to assert that if parties agree to a contract the parties believe that contract is to their mutual benefit and that they consent to the terms.

Enforceable contracts are pretty drat important. Without them all sorts of relations come down to the personal honor and willingness to deal fairly of the stronger party, or simply to naked force (You find out about your eviction when you come home and your stuff is on the curb, and your landlord has more goons than you, or whatever).

If you think the "underclass" does better with that dynamic then I've got a great deal on a bridge you might be interested in. No contract, of course. I'll hand over possession once you give me the $$.

LogisticEarth posted:

The counter to this is that if a guardian were letting the child starve or were otherwise dangerously negligent, one could argue that they had abandoned the claim to guardianship and the child would be free to be "rescued". In a broad sense this is not too much different than current child welfare systems.

tbp posted:

A very simple issue that we can start off with is the tyranny of the majority that comes with an excessively centralized society.

tbp posted:

"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

AstheWorldWorlds posted:

A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule. In short:

l. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and abolition of the IRS.

2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.

4. Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not "white collar criminals" or "inside traders" but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.

6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters. Money and banking are recondite issues. But the realities can be made vivid: the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating inflation, ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be chicken-feed compared to the coming collapse of the commercial banks.

7. America First. A key point, and not meant to be seventh in priority. The American economy is not only in recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than it was two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let's solve our problems at home.

8. Defend Family Values. Which means, get the State out of the family, and replace State control with parental control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing them with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit schemes are not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to privatized education; instead, they will make matters worse by fastening government control more totally upon the private schools. Within the sound alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community neighborhood control of the schools.

Further: We must reject once and for all the left-libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control. But that means: that the public schools must allow prayer, and we must abandon the absurd left-atheist interpretation of the First Amendment that "establishment of religion" means not allowing prayer in public schools, or a creche in a schoolyard or a public square at Christmas. We must return to common sense, and original intent, in constitutional interpretation.

quote:

We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like

Nessus posted:

And presumably they would have attacked those fishermen to keep them away? Sounds like pirates to me.

EvanSchenck posted:

Just let him have this.

Speaking of DROs, I had a question. If a particular DRO was more economically successful and grew to become larger than its competitors, what incentive would it have to continue negotiating fairly with other, smaller DROs in incidents involving its clients? If the super-DRO could throw its weight around and bully or intimidate the small firms to ensure judgments in favor of its clients, all the incentives would be in that direction. The usual answer is that people would boycott the company that did this, but rational self-interest would lead people to seek a company that gave them the best value for their money, meaning that bullying for favorable judgments would bring in more clients and be economically beneficial to the super-DRO.

Is this one of those things where the problem is resolved by everybody else in society spontaneously and voluntarily rising up to punish the bad actor?

VitalSigns posted:

I love how Libertarians claim things that actually happened would never happen. They just don't understand the world at all, it's so cute, like puppies trying to grab a tennis ball that's too big for their mouths

jrodefeld posted:

It is always fallacious to look to the distant past and apply our modern standards for worker safety and living standards to presuppose that modern "Progressive" regulation and minimum wage laws would have improved matters. I don't know the specifics of the case you cited, but unless the workers explicitly agreed that the doors would be locked, then this was a rights violation and the employers should have been held accountable and charged with murder. If an unexpected fire breaks out in a factory and the workers expect the doors to remain open for them to be able to exit the building and instead they are locked shut by order of the owner, then that is murder clear and simple.

The Mutato posted:

I find it amusing that you think that the free market in 2014 provides no incentives to cheaply avoid a gigantic PR scandal and possible lawsuit like murdering a factory full of workers.

The Mutato posted:

Sorry, in a developed country. This has been pretty much what the entire thread's debate has been assuming.


But hey, let's discuss this. It is crony capitalism that props up polluting businesses, not true capitalism. It is easy for big corporations to convince bureaucrats and government officials to allow them to continue polluting, because just as not all the rich company fat cats are not benelovent, neither are the government officials. Furthermore patents and regulatory barriers to entry prevent innovation and competition, further allowing the big companies to stay stagnant with polluting technologies. Without government laws defining what is and isn't pollution, there would be room for people to band together and sue companies they believe to be violating their property rights. Finally, there would still be private funding for climate science AND a market for information about how environmentally friendly certain companies are.

It may not be perfect, but I believe it is better than the current system.

e: I feel like a lot of the disconnect between you guys and libertarianism comes from not realising that many of the example failings of the "free market" that you point out come from corporatism, not true capitalism

The Mutato posted:

I think you'd be surprised. If I run some sort of transportation company and I want a bridge built (that no one else really cares about), in the current system all I have to do is bribe someone in the government a tiny fraction of the cost of that bridge (or maybe I have a buddy who can pull some strings) and he can redirect taxpayer funds to it. With no government, I have no one to bribe. My only option is to pay a bridge building company the entire cost of the bridge.

VitalSigns posted:

Got any ideas that haven't failed miserably? Because here are the results of individual citizens trying to sue huge industrial pollutors like US Steel

It's going to be a beautiful day if the smog clears and we can turn out these streetlamps that we still need to keep lit at 9:30 in the morning to see through the heavy black clouds!

quote:

Lawsuits were filed against U.S. Steel, which never acknowledged responsibility for the incident, calling it "an act of God". While the steel company did not accept blame, it reached a settlement in 1951 in which it paid about $235,000, which was stretched over the 80 victims who had participated in the lawsuit, leaving them little after legal expenses were factored in. Representatives of American Steel and Wire settled the more than $4.6 million claimed in 130 damage suits at about 5% of what had been sought, noting that the company was prepared to show at trial that the smog had been caused by a "freak weather condition" that trapped over Donora "all of the smog coming from the homes, railroads, the steamboats, and the exhaust from automobiles, as well as the effluents from its plants." U.S. Steel closed both plants by 1966.

wateroverfire posted:

D&D: Forum imperialists bringing the light of enlightened leftist civilization to the noble savages. No we don't see anything ironic about that, why do you ask?

wateroverfire posted:

You're not really in the target audience for this sort of thing.

Mr Interweb posted:

2) Does he think that the Gilded Age was in fact an extremely pleasant and wonderful time for those in poverty, and that he thinks all the negative stuff you hear about it is cause of evil liberal history professors?

asdf32 posted:

1) If a currency is backed by gold, or some other real life thing, then the money supply is limited by that thing. The government can't just print more of it if it wants too.

quote:

My point from earlier is "who cares". If the government already has the ability to take my money through taxes, it's hard to get alarmed by its ability to take my money through inflation. The net result in both cases is the same.

StandardVC10 posted:

Having competing currencies would make lots of basic transactions a complete pain in the rear end.

asdf32 posted:

They're related because the government can pay debt by printing money. Or just by generally causing inflation it can make the real value of past debts significantly lower.

For example most people who lend the government a car's worth of money today are doing it because they expect a car's worth of money back in a few years (and maybe some profit, a TV or so). But if government policy increases inflation by the time it pays back the agreed upon number of dollars those dollars might be worth significantly less than a car. That difference is profit for the government.

VitalSigns posted:

Babylon Astronaut posted:

So we pool our money, make some roads, and all we ask for is following some basic rules and some wise-rear end goes "but what if I want to get drunk and kill people? That's not fair." I find that to be terribly coercive. My right to conceal how dangerous I am to others trumps your right to live, I bet you felt like a real political philosopher coming up with that one.