Recently, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas took to the floor of the House to talk about Wikileaks, transparency in government, and the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the 
Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times. He spoke about how the Iraq War was based on lies. He asked how the U. S. government should prosecute a citizen of Australia for publishing classified U. S. documents that he did not steal. Paul also said the following: “Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.”
Paul posed a number of questions at the end of his talk:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Source: Huffington Post
– Elaine Magliaro
@Chan: I think you describe yourself; I do not have a low opinion of humanity, I have a low opinion of the two or three percent of humanity that deserves it, and it turns out many of them are running large corporations, or are politicians beholden to large corporations.
ekeyra,
Your justification for child labor was funny … I was a child laborer in the entertainment field and benefited from Child Labor protections. Talk is cheap without knowledge and, honest to god, you don’t know what you are talking about which makes you one cheap blog date. 🙂
Put the satchel on your head, darlin’.
Tony,
I posted this on another thread, but I thought you might find it relevant to this discussion:
____
A sociopath is someone whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
That perfectly describes not just Ayn Rand the person, but her works. Also you bunch of juvenile mirror neuron deficient clowns who follow her like she was the Second Coming.
Many people go through a “Rand phase”. They just usually outgrow it by the time they are sixteen.
It’s odd how the NIMH data shows that 1% of the population is afflicted with anti-social personality disorder and that it is 1% of the population fucking up the world for everyone else.
What is ASPD? “[D]efined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) as ‘…a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.’ People with antisocial personality disorder may disregard social norms and laws, repeatedly lie, place others at risk for their own benefit, and demonstrate a profound lack of remorse. It is sometimes referred to as sociopathic personality disorder, or sociopathy.”
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/1Antisocial.shtml
Sounds like a perfect description of not only Rand and her followers, but her philosophy as well. Also the underlying premise of Libertarianism.
“This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what its causal nature [or form]? And what is it doing in the world? And how long does it subsist?” – The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius – VIII, 11.
Your own actions and choices damn you as sociopaths.
Nothing else is required.
@ekeyra: No, you are apparently illiterate and criminally stupid for blaming people for something that wasn’t their fault.
@ekeyra: I don’t presume any such thing, what I know is what studies have shown time and again. I believe the evidence, and the evidence shows that the further people are removed from the effects of their decisions on others, the more they tend to sociopathy in those decisions.
Including me, including you. The CEO of a large company can make decisions that can ruin the lives of his employees or his customers. It is the nature of controlling any large economic resource like a large corporation; its deployment has effects.
I would expect that CEO’s decisions about people he doesn’t know and will never meet to tend toward the sociopathic; meaning purely rational and for gain without regard to the human consequences or pain caused or damage caused as long as s/he does not have to pay for that damage or pain. Decisions about his family, and people he works with daily, probably not, unless he is a clinical sociopath (which may be true, clinical sociopathy provides a competitive advantage in rising within a corporation, that has also been shown).
In any case, only about 1% of the population is clinically sociopathic, but I expect the majority of large corporations (where the CEO is insulated from the effects of his decisions on workers and customers) to score pretty highly on the sociopathy scale and to make sociopathic decisions if they are allowed to do so by law. That is why I think the law must constrain them.
Free markets won’t. You will be required to sign a contract before you buy eggs that the eggs are sold as-is with no guarantees or implied warrantability for any purpose including ingestion. Perhaps by the grocery store covering all of its contents, as you check out at the register: We don’t sell if you don’t sign. In as litigious a society as you envision for a free market economy, why whould any grocery store NOT do that? Why would any farmer sell to a grocery store that did not guarantee that?
Otherwise you might sue them for selling you bad eggs. So you can’t buy any damn food anywhere without giving up your right to sue; so you sign because you are hungry. Then you eat some bad eggs and get sick, and cannot sue. You signed a contract and assumed the risk in return for the right to buy them from the grocery store.
Free markets lead to ZERO protections on anything. I’ve signed contracts that prevent me from suing and relieve the other party from any and all liability. Libertarianism would allow the strong to exploit the weak by making such onerous contracts ubiquitous, you couldn’t walk into any store of any kind without signing one that prevents you from suing them for anything at anytime for any reason. You couldn’t get a job of any kind without signing the same contract with them: No rules, no protections, no safety, no guarantees, and if you don’t like it don’t work here.
This is why businesses and corporations must be regulated. Competition for customers based on products and services is a wonderful thing and I do not want to restrict that. Competition for employees is a wonderful think and I do not want to restrict that. What we need is to prevent companies from doing harm in order make a profit or win the competition, and that takes regulation.
ekeyra:
“Its also quite amusing to me that you possess such a low opinion of humanity yet you would enslave everyone against their will to labor for its continued existence.”
That is how most on this site look at human beings. They have a malevolent view of man and the universe and it colors everything they think. They are scared shit less of reality and wish to put it back in their limited box for fear they may actually be the ones who are wrong and their intellectual/philosophical house of cards comes tumbling down on their poor little minds.
“No, it is hardly EVER their fault, and demanding that others make some superhuman effort to escape poverty that you yourself were not required to make and in all probability couldn’t have made is both delusional and in my opinion criminally unfair.”
So…Its not their fault for being born where they were born, but im criminally culpable for being born where I was born?
Tony are you sure your not really a comedian? Thats the only line of work I see you having success in.
Its also quite amusing to me that you possess such a low opinion of humanity yet you would enslave everyone against their will to labor for its continued existence.
Do you just naturally assume everyone but you is a psychopath?
@ekeyra: I dont know why any of that offends your sensibilities.
None of it does, for a lemonade stand, which is regulated by parental authority. I have a problem if the kid thinks it is funny to pee in the lemonade; I have a problem if the kid wants to experiment by stirring in a pinch of rat poison, or is using a pitcher that wasn’t washed and had a nest of cockroaches in it 30 minutes ago that the kid just shook out, because that is what he sees his father do.
But as a rule of thumb I don’t have a problem with paper routes (I had one) or child entrepreneurship (I did that too), because as a rule of thumb it does not endanger the kid or the customers.
I have a big problem when an adult sends a kid into a pipe full of carcinogenic soot and tells the kid it is his job and he’ll do it or be beaten. I have a big problem when African children are hired by our big oil companies to clean old tankers and 10% of them die in the effort.
This is the problem with libertarians, cherry picking. When you want to justify child labor, you pick the most innocuous summer lark imaginable that can still be classified as “child labor” and use that to justify destroying the lives of other children. When you want to justify abolishing the FDA, you pick their most egregious handful of crimes and ignore the countless deaths and disabilities they have prevented.
It is always cherry picking, and never any valid logic as to how trying “free markets” once AGAIN will turn out any different than it has in the past.
Free Markets Do Not Work. There are a million insidious, evil, deceptive and coercive ways to “compete” that have nothing to do with pleasing customers or providing them what they want. If those ways are not prevented by the force of law (and I do mean force) then they will be used, and the free markets will fail.
Companies are naturally immortal; meaning they can be killed but have no natural lifespan, like a person does. The natural outcome of competition between immortal companies is somebody eventually wins. Sooner or later somebody makes a mistake or has an accident (like an explosion) that gives everybody else an edge, and the edge is exploited until one company is dominant: A monopoly. In a free market monopolies are simply too big for competitors to even start; the smart monopoly crushes them with pricing, advertising, lawsuits, or whatever before they can become a significant threat.
That is so they can engage in monopoly pricing and practices, which exploit workers and customers. If somebody has the monopoly on the drugs that keep you alive, your choice is pay or die. If somebody has the monopoly on water, your choice is pay or die. If somebody has the monopoly on food, your choice is pay or die.
You cannot prevent monopolies (or trusts, or semi-monopolies) without a government; you cannot prevent monopolies from abusing their power without a government; you cannot prevent companies from engaging in horrific abuses (and they WILL) of their employees and horrific endangerment of their customers (and they WILL) without a government.
Libertarianism is based upon cherry-picked examples in which people actually DO have choices, and that is probably why you think it is all so logical. It doesn’t mention or address the plethora of situations in which people have NO choice except to die, or become destitute, except to claim it must be their own damn fault.
No, it is hardly EVER their fault, and demanding that others make some superhuman effort to escape poverty that you yourself were not required to make and in all probability couldn’t have made is both delusional and in my opinion criminally unfair.
I am a realist, and smart enough to be humble in the face of poverty and deprivation and I do not begin to fantasize that everybody can escape it by their own efforts. I am smart enough to recognize that my success is not mine alone by a long shot, that I had the help of society and the luck to be born in the right place at the right time, and life could have easily worked out very differently for me. I worked hard, but hard work doesn’t guarantee anything.
ekeyra:
you are a magnificent human being. Thank you so much for posting here. I learn something new every time you post.
“The inspectors Holbrook refers to as being mentioned in Sinclair’s book were among hundreds employed by federal, state, and local governments for more than a decade. Indeed, Congressman E. D. Crumpacker of Indiana noted in testimony before the House Agriculture Committee in June 1906 that not even one of those officials “ever registered any complaint or (gave) any public information with respect to the manner of the slaughtering or preparation of meat or food products.” ”
“Historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair’s allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.” ”
Welcome to the conversation Mike.
Welcome to the conversation indeed.
Mike Appleton:
I for one am eagerly awaiting your obfuscation er refutation.
“Not communism, where ***all*** of your time is owed to the community effort, and not anarchy (or free markets or libertarianism) where ***none*** of your time is owed to the community effort. The optimal solution for humans, psychologically, physically and financially, is a mixture of the two with some significant responsibility owed to the community and a larger share of free time for one’s self”
Tony something tells me even a smart guy like you hasn’t figured out the mathematical equation to human happiness. Feel free to share when you do. Until then it is your premises that are flawed.
Tony kids may not be mature or think long term, most kids dont have retirement funds, but that does not mean they are completely unaware of their actions and interactions. Like I said, the kid who starts a lemonade stand is not only taking intiative, and working hard for anything that he earns, but he is also “contracting” with noone except his customers, who have no power to compel his to do anything he does not want to. He is free to set his own hours, work as early or late as he sees fit, take any day off he wishes, and close up shop when he reaches an amount of his own satisfaction. I dont know why any of that offends your sensibilities.
@ekeyra: All conclusions follow.
No, they do not. I am a professional logician, an applied mathematician, and a research scientist. I disagree, your conclusions are flawed and based upon false premises, or assumptions, or axioms, or whatever you want to call them: They aren’t true.
This does not fundamentally change whether you add 6 people or 6 billion people.
Yes, it does. It changes when you add ONE person. When you are alone, all the resources belong to you, including your time. When you are not, all the resources do NOT belong to you, and that INCLUDES your time and the time of the others you are with.
If the average person has 16 hours a day, on average each is entitled to the benefit of 16 hours a day. Giving everybody their own 16 hours is but one solution, and it is far from the optimal solution, as humans discovered at least 15,000 years ago with the invention of civilization and agriculture.
Cooperation in a group effort for part of the time and personal endeavors for the remainder of the time is the optimal solution. Not communism, where ***all*** of your time is owed to the community effort, and not anarchy (or free markets or libertarianism) where ***none*** of your time is owed to the community effort. The optimal solution for humans, psychologically, physically and financially, is a mixture of the two with some significant responsibility owed to the community and a larger share of free time for one’s self (except in times of crisis, like war or deprivation, in which case more time must be devoted to the survival of the community).
Swarthmore, you have me at a loss concerning johnson and johnson. I am not aware of any information that would suggest they have a quality control problem, but your question leads me to believe you may be?
As for your assertion, I would suggest that I would never advocate any policy that redirected or discarded personal responsibility. Quite the opposite, I would hold all individuals, coporations and governmental bodies accountable for their actions that lead to the harm of other peoples persons or property.
@ekeyra: No matter what you think, children do not have fully formed cortexes and do not have the maturity (physical maturity of the brain) to be able to make rational decisions about their future or their actions. They do not have the educational maturity and experience to do that either. Children are not small adults, if you had the least bit of intelligence you would understand that.
So yes, the problem is with jobs where children may be put in harm’s way. Just as they don’t have the necessary mental or physical maturity to consent to sexual activity or choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, they don’t have the necessary mental or physical maturity to consent to other forms of potential harm; including most work. Child actors have *very* strict limits on their work times and educational responsibilities.
As for other countries: First, pointing at crimes in other countries does not excuse crime in this one. Second, it is both stupid and immoral to expose a child (or a person) to almost certainly destructive harm, like starvation or death due to exposure, in order to protect them from a lesser harms like illiteracy, innumeracy, exploitation or the possibility of physical injury.
Fortunately for Americans, the choice between near-slavery and survival is only necessary in places that engage in either dictatorships or free markets.
Thanks tony. i learned something about the word bated. I will correctly use it in the future.
Free markets do not require people to act in any prescribed fashion, only that they act at all. All conclusions follow. Even in the most extreme case of isolation on a deserted island you are still beholden to the laws of economics. You have a finite resource, time, which you must allocate. The efficiency with which you employ your resources determines your success in meeting your immediate survival needs. Food, water, shelter. However if survival was not paramount to you, you could forgo all of these and simply spend your time making a guitar out of palm leaves and coconut shells. You would surely die, but the only judgement economics would impose on you is that you valued music more than your own life. Success or failure is not measured in survival but in meeting personal and subjective goals. This does not fundamentally change whether you add 6 people or 6 billion people.
Along with getting rid of the FDA, these people want tort reform so a person can’t recover damages when he or she is maimed or poisoned by the corporations. They want the corporations to have all the power but none of the responsibility. Ekeyra, don’t you think Johnson and Johnson has a quality control problem?
The word is “bated,” not “baited.” Bated as in “abated” as in holding one’s breath in anticipation.
Arguing that the FDA has fucked up, or been corrupt, is like pointing at a house burned to the ground and saying, “See? Fire Departments are worthless!”
The same is true for any government function. Fire departments probably save thousands of lives and a billions of dollars worth of property every year, I would fully expect any operation of that size to fuck up or act incredibly stupid once in a while, or to be corrupt once in a while.
The alternative libertarians propose is, metaphorically speaking, no fire department. The libertarian society is a selfish society of the rich; those that cannot afford fire protection, or police protection, or food protection, or drug protection, or fraud protection from their financial agencies simply must go without. If you cannot afford to sue for a breach of contract, you shouldn’t enter into any contracts. The result is obvious; the weak must submit to the strong, completely and without reservations. If you want a job, surrender your rights to life and liberty; because your “contract” will give your employer the right to poison you, endanger you, demand you work 15 hours a day and 7 days a week, live on their site and be implanted with a monitoring device so they can know where you are at all times and ensure by blood chemistry that you are expending sufficient energy. But don’t worry, it will automatically tase you if you are falling behind.
Pointing at the failures of our government does not indict the idea of government, it indicts our government. I am outraged, too. I think we have proven conclusively that our form of government is a failure; it fails to perform the basic functions of government. So was communism, another idiotic form of government that failed. Dictatorships are a failure, monarchies are a failure (unless propped up by massive natural resources and benevolent monarchs.)
Free markets fail too, because they are too unnatural. People simply do not act the way free market theory demands they act in order to work. This has been proven time and again in psychological and sociological studies. In anthropological studies from modern living tribes and back for thousands of years, people engage in limited forms of socialism; by which I mean enforced cooperation on some community projects.
By “enforced” I mean the members have no choice, they cannot opt out or buy out. Humans work in groups. They are wired to work in groups, and they expect the group to collectively punish those that refuse to cooperate or those that harm others. That includes those that harm others by being too selfish. Tribes do believe in personal property, but what trumps personal property is the well-being of other people.
So just for an example, letting a family go hungry while you feast can be considered a crime, and the reverse can be too: Refusing to help produce food and then demanding a share of it can be a crime. The first is a crime when the hungry family made a fair effort that failed; the second is a crime when the hungry family is exploiting the working family.
That is where the free market breaks down, it fails to account for what people naturally account for; which is INTENT. People that are willing to work but cannot find gainful employment deserve as much protection as people that are working, whether they can afford that protection or not. People with mental or physical disabilities that prevent them from working deserve just as much protection from food poisoning, fire, crime, disease and foreign invasion as everybody else. They deserve shelter, and food.
An Ayn Rand philosophy of selfishness is alien to people. Libertarians reject the idea that societal members have any responsibility to each other, and that is simply wrong. The vast majority of humans across the globe believe people are responsible for each other to a significant degree. That is why they form governments in the first place, to enforce those responsibilities. The level and extent of one’s responsibility to others is a point of debate for most people, but only a tiny percentage of people think that level is anywhere close to zero.