Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
In 1780, John Adams succinctly defined the principle of the Rule of Law in the Massachusetts Constitution by seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men”. This reflects the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The very foundation of our legal system says that the law should work for us all, not just a select few.
This raises the question of what is a good law that serves the majority of society and what is a bad law that doesn’t serve the majority of society?
This idea is further bolstered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The latter addition of the 14th Amendment as well as the Preamble of the Constitution both reflect the spirit in which this country was founded as set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Clearly, the pursuit of the Rule of Law under the Constitution as informed by the Declaration is a pursuit of the Utilitarian concept of the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action; what is in the best interest of greatest numbers of We the People is in the best interests of the country.
Utilitarianism is a quantitative and reductionist philosophical form. Utilitarianism, however, is not a unified philosophical view. It comes in different flavors with the two primary flavors being Rule Utilitarianism and Act Utilitarianism. Strong Rule Utilitarianism is an absolutist philosophical view and rules may never be broken. Like any absolutist view does not take into account that reality occasionally presents situations where breaking a rule results in the greater good. For example, the strong reductionist rule that murder is bad is countered by the exceptional example of murder is not bad if performed in self-defense or the defense of others. This result of practical application is reflected in what John Stuart Mill called Weak Rule Utilitarianism. It becomes apparent that since not all rules are absolutely enforceable when seeking the common good and exceptional circumstances require flexibility in the law, that the Utilitarian pursuit of the Rule of Law must be in Mill’s Weak Rule formulation of Utilitarianism. But is considering the greater good and circumstantial reasons for breaking or modifying rules the best way to judge whether a law is good or bad?
If one considers Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” – then any law not universally applicable should not be a maxim worthy of being recognized as universal. This is contrary to Utilitarianism in general as well as Weak Rule Utilitarianism specifically, but while Kant’s view takes subjectivity into account when dealing with circumstances it does not take into account that there can be objective differences in circumstances as well. It is part of the judiciaries role as a trier of fact to consider not only subjective differences but objective differences in circumstances in formulating the most equitable and just solution to a case at bar. In seeking to be universally applicable in defining maxims, Kant is an absolutist as surely as Strong Rule Utilitarians are absolutists. As a consequence of reality not being neatly binary in nature and thus not often compatible to absolutists approaches to formulating laws for practical application, what can be done to keep Weak Rule Utilitarianism from degenerating into Act Utilitarianism where actors will seek the greatest personal pleasure when presented with a choice rather than the greater good? Utilitarianism conflicting with the Categorical Imperative? Is there a unitary philosophical approach to evaluating whether a law is good or bad?
The answer seems to be no. If there is no single view, absolutist or otherwise, that leads to a practical system for evaluating whether a law is good or bad, then there is only one option for building a framework for evaluation. That option is synthesis.
Consider that absolutist systems as they are not applicable in reality should be confined to being considered theoretical boundaries rather than practical boundaries. This does not negate the value of considering systems like Strong Rule Utilitarianism or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but rather puts them in the place of aspirational goals rather than practically attainable goals in every circumstance. Given that Mill’s Weak Rule Utilitarianism can degrade into Act Utilitarianism and that degeneration can be compounded by the number of exceptions there are to a rule, are there ways to minimize the defects of using only Weak Rule Utilitarianism to determine the societal value of a law? What supplements can be made to that framework?
I submit that one such supplement is found in the form of Negative Utilitarianism. Negative Utilitarianism is exactly what it sounds like; the inverse function of Utilitarianism. Whereas Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action, Negative Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that requires us to promote the least amount of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. If one takes both into account in evaluation of the social value of a law (a synthetic approach), the test becomes a balancing act. On one side of the scale is the societal value of overall good consequences, on the other side is the societal value of preventing overall harm. This proposition suggests the following framework for evaluation of whether a law is good or bad.
- How many people benefit from the good consequences of a law?
- How many people benefit from the reduction of harm as consequences of a law?
- Does the benefits from promoting good consequences outweigh the costs of reduction of harm?
- Does the benefits from reducing harm outweigh the costs to the greater good in taking no action?
- Are the net consequences of a law perfectly knowable from either perspective or does the possibility of unforeseeable consequences exist? Can the unforeseeable risks be minimized either by construction of the law(s) to allow for contingencies or by regulating other risks or contributing factors?
- Do solutions from either perspective negatively impact human and/or civil rights? Do those negative impacts outweigh the positive effects to the greater human and/or civil rights of all?
This is but one way to evaluate whether a law is good or bad for society. What are other methods? Are there ways to improve this method? What do you think?
Tony C.
>>@HumanEgg: Those road systems are NOT free. They cost billions of dollars.
>>They are free to use
You restate his point with greater complexity but it is, essentially, the same point. Socialist roads are not free to use because the resources used for them are resources that our socialist govt has stolen from private, productive individuals. Those individuals were thus forced to act against the judgment of their own minds, man’s basic means of survival, including the basic means of producing material wealth. Socialist road users would have been able to use the products of man’s mind but, with socialism. must use the loot stolen force. That is impractical, tho Pragmatists consider only the loot of the moment before the economic and political bill comes due.
@Grossman: My post on that topic is here.
I am aware of and disagree with the philosophies of Locke (1600s) and Rousseau (1700s) and Adam Smith (1700s). I believe they all start their philosophies from a false premise, or unrealistic “toy problems.”
I fully understand the value of toy problems and beginning philosophical reasoning from highly simplified states, but theirs do not capture reality because they treat too lightly several aspects of reality, including the life arc of humans themselves, from complete dependency to complete independence and (if we are lucky) a decline to partial dependence.
They also fail to treat the problem of virtual infinities. Libertarians, for example, often claim that Smith’s invisible hand will keep the sellers from ripping off customers, because it is in his long term self interest. But what if he has an essentially infinite supply of customers, and doesn’t need repeat business? (think of a shop for tourists). What if his customers don’t know they are being ripped off? (think Bernie Madoff, health insurance buyers, sub-prime mortgage buyers) What if he has a monopoly and knows his customers do not have any realistic choice? (Microsoft, any E.R. doctor or hospital when you have a potentially life-threatening injury or illness).
I will also point out that our reverence for Locke or Rousseau or Smith, centuries dead philosophers, would probably have seemed alien to our founding fathers. Locke, Rousseau and Smith were essentially their contemporaries. The American revolutionaries did not feel constrained to reason only with philosophy from 250 years in their past; they felt free to independently assess what was to them very modern philosophy and then literally bet their lives on executing it.
They felt free to follow their own version of logic unconstrained by their past, and I see no reason to be constrained by them in my own reasoning. Like them, I will come to my own conclusions and beliefs based on what I know of biology, evolution, sociology, logic, statistics, system dynamics and psychology, which, in part due to them, is considerably more than they ever knew. I am not claiming to be smarter than them, some of them seem wicked smart to me, but I am far better informed, and I have the benefit of seeing how their experiment has turned out to see plain the glaring flaws of their system.
Mike Spindell
>>“And just precisely where is the implication that I am a student. I’m not saying I’m not”.
>In your writings and in your immaturity, plus you don’t deny it.
Thats another association ,not an inference, which you _feel_ validates your invalid ideas. You are as intellectually empty as the university intellectuals to whom naive parents entrust the mind’s of their students and whom naive voters trust as advisors to govt.
Roco:
>>These are induced from common human experience.
>[Tony C]NO, they are not. No human was ever plopped down in a state of nature with no parents, no family, no nuthin’. That is an imaginary construct divorced from reality.
Roco, what are you claiming is it that is induced from common human experience, a claim that Tony C denies. I can’t find the earlier posts. However, the state of nature is, I believe, regarded as a logical starting point for some ideas, eg, Locke’s individual rights, not as a real, historical fact. If that is the topic of your argument w/Tony C, consider that Rand makes no use of a state of an alleged nature and its alleged natural rights needing a trimming in society. She bases rights in the need of the mind’s functioning in society, ie, freedom from the initiation of force. Ie, there is no absolute freedom in nature limited in society. Freedom and rights are relative to society (tho not granted by society) because society presents certain conditions that affect man’s life.
@HumanEgg: Those road systems are NOT free. They cost billions of dollars.
They are free to use, that is the point. Or technically, our taxes maintain them at cost, so we get to use them at cost, and if we earn a profit using them, it is 100% ours to keep. They are a public resource that reduces shipping costs and other transportation costs, and that ripples through the entire economy and benefits everybody and provides greater opportunity for relocation and wider markets.
@HumanEgg: I will begin in the middle, just because I find this comment hilarious. I literally almost laughed out loud. You haven’t been in business long, have you?
HumanEgg says: the ONLY way [..] is by doing the job either better than other competing firms or individuals or cheaper than their competitors.
No, it isn’t. They can also scare customers away from the competition by spreading lies; they can do the job “cheaper” by surreptitiously using dangerous ingredients or processes while purposely disguising their source, in markets where jobs are scarce they can lower costs by cutting corners to endanger their workers and threatening them with job loss in a tough market if they do not comply.
If they are rich, they can file frivolous lawsuits to drain the capital of their less-rich competition, they can temporarily reduce their prices to less than their own costs in order to starve their competition of revenue, and then recover the entire cost with monopoly pricing later; they can simply copy the features of their competitor’s products and incorporate them into their own and then use predatory pricing and their larger selling resources to steal the competitor’s advantage, they can hire away the key employees of their competitor. If they are very big and supply their customers with more than a specific product (like Microsoft does) then they can threaten their customers with higher prices or being cut-off from other products if they do not buy an inferior product from the big company (as Microsoft was convicted of doing with browsers and operating systems).
If all attempts to drive the competitor out of business fail, I have also seen this: Buy out the competitor, and raise prices to consumers again to make up for the cost. I also heard of this trick: A large retail company opened a store literally next door to an entrepreneurial startup competitor, then advertised prominently that they would beat his prices. They ended up splitting the consumer traffic with him, but cutting his revenue in half was enough to put him down. Once he closed, they closed their little assassin store too. They were selling for essentially their own wholesale cost, the point wasn’t to take advantage of their location, the point was to eliminate the threat.
Or here is another actual tactic: If you are the larger business, threaten your suppliers if they dare to supply him. In an unregulated free market, I suppose you could legally bribe the utility companies to cut him off.
Business offers essentially four points of product distinction: Price, quality, service and cachet. All of them are hard to improve; so in a free market (or even our current market) businesses WILL compete using deceptions and bullying tactics that have nothing to do with the product or their offering, because bullying tactics are easier. The idea that this will lose them customers doesn’t work, most national companies have an essentially infinite supply of suckers, and the suckers have no effective way of communicating with each other (not even the Internet), and don’t have the time to research every little thing they might buy.
HumanEgg says: Companies don’t make money by increasing the wealth of the company – they make money by generating wealth in a society.
Also not true. Companies make money by solving people’s problems. You seem to use your own definitions of words, like ‘wealth.” Products like entertainment and food and tourism and services like haircuts or massages are just consumed, they are not “wealth.” I cannot trade my last haircut for anything. I am not “richer” for eating a sandwich, I am happier, or at least less hungry. My wife’s manicure makes her feel good, she cannot then trade that feeling for a new blouse.
HumanEgg says: Doing a job better or cheaper creates profit.
That is ridiculous. Doing a job cheaper creates LESS profit, and if companies competed ONLY on doing jobs cheaper, it would be a race to the bottom; all entrepreneurs would be working for sub-minimum wage. But that isn’t the case, is it? Reality disproves your assertion.
What creates a profit is a reduction in (usually metaphorical) pain. If a person’s pain is boredom, then the reduction is often accomplished by one of the arts or sex or sport. If the person’s pain is a lack of customers, then the reduction may be accomplished by better marketing, ideas for new features, or better engineering. If a person’s pain is time pressure, the reduction may be accomplished by hiring help and delegation of responsibility. If a person’s pain is incompetence, then the reduction may be accomplished by education, training, experience, or hiring a consultant that already has education, training and experience. If the person’s pain is loneliness or mating angst, then the reduction may be accomplished through a dating site or matchmaking service.
There is not necessarily any useful residue or anything more than a feeling to point at. How many people want to hit every touristy sight in Rome, or London, or Paris? Plenty, I think, they are filled with tourists right now. For what? A feeling, because if they come back with any trinkets those baubles won’t be worth the $5000 trip. But those shiny new neurons might be, and might reduce the pain of feeling left behind, or inexperienced, or just confined and missing out on whatever sights the world has to offer. The values are in “sensation,” not in “wealth.”
“Pain” is the metaphor for whatever their problem is, and “reducing the pain” is a far more apt metaphor than “increasing the wealth” when thinking about business. I say that from the perspective of somebody that has succeeded multiple times in business.
More later, perhaps.
@Stephen_Grossman
re: >Government created the Internet, all by itself.
I was quoting another – I don’t believe that the government created anything all by itself. Did you jump in in the middle of my long rant in support of your statements and misinterpret what I said? :-/
@Tony C
>You are characterizing taxes as theft, which is a fundamental axiom of yours that I disagree with
What is your definition of theft?
I usually work with this one:
Theft is the taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession.
This is exactly what taxation is. The government takes property that belongs to another with the intention of never returning that property.
If you want to make taxation ‘not theft’ somehow, you’ve got to explain how it’s voluntary (it wasn’t taken – it was given) or how the government intends to somehow return the seized property (which I’ve never seen anyone attempt to argue).
Note that if someone steals your TV and then leaves (say) a hundred bucks on the counter, they still stole your TV. They just also gave you money. This was not a market transaction – it was theft.
Most arguments I’ve seen state that taxation is voluntary. That’s a pretty commonly held belief. My usual response is something like this:
Do you support the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Do you support the ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska? Do you support the subsidies given to corn farmers? Etc… Eventually I’ll find something that my debate opponent doesn’t think is a good idea. Nobody supports everything the government does. Okay.
So I’ll imagine for a moment that you think that high fructose corn syrup is terrible, and that you object to corn farmer subsidies.
Yet you think your taxes are voluntary. So you’re voluntarily funding corn subsidies while objecting to the funding of corn subsidies.
You’re fooling yourself – If you could actually spend the money the way you wanted to, you might be willing to pitch in a few bucks towards road maintenance and police and fire services (as most people would) but you’d probably skip out on supporting big chunks of the war machine and corporate subsidies etc.
So if the government isn’t spending money the way you think they should, how can you possibly say that you’re voluntarily funding them? Realistically, you’re funding them because if you didn’t pay your taxes, you’d get into massive legal trouble. This is not voluntary. This is like saying that you voluntarily gave the mugger your wallet. In _some_ sense, that’s accurate – your brain commanded your hands to pull the wallet out of your pocket and hand it to the other person, but you were doing it under the threat of violence / coercion, which is not a truly free action.
I can sympathize with your desire to support those who help you – but I’m not sure that I can sympathize with a desire to support any ‘system.’ I am willing to support the people who offer to provide me electricity, so I pay them, and they provide electricity. It’s a nice quid-pro-quo. Similarly, I support providers of various kinds of food, furniture, computer software, tools, gadgets, etc. If I felt endangered, I would be willing to support a security concern that defined well how it would protect me.
These are all voluntary market interactions. What I don’t sympathize with is the mandatory ‘support’ that is demanded by governments. If you could be safe and productive without mandatory taxation, would you take that option instead? That’s what libertarians are generally aiming for – the minimization of that coercive confiscation of wealth.
I’m sorry for giving you another big chunk of stuff to respond to – The other one was actually written for a friend of mine who sent me your comment. I responded and decided that it would probably be worthwhile posting it here for everyone to see. It’s been a while since I got into interweb political/philosophical debate mode, so I’m totally happy to have a delayed response. I don’t feel that you owe it to me, and if you respond do me, I hope you’ll understand if I either fail to respond or take my time in doing so – there’s only so much arguing on the internet that one can do before it begins to wear you out.
Cheers!
@Grossman: Youre dropping the context.
No, I am not.
So if I stole your wallet and bought some stock, that would be investment?!
You are characterizing taxes as theft, which is a fundamental axiom of yours that I disagree with. I do not agree with your definition of theft. We have no grounds for discussion because we cannot agree on the meaning of fundamental words and concepts. As far as I can tell, you believe you owe nothing to anybody, and I believe I owe a portion of my time and energy to support the system that I believe keeps me alive, safe, and professionally productive. The reason I believe that are reasons that I assume you reject, but of course YOU are constantly avoiding any argument or establishment of axioms from which we can reason together, because as far as I can tell and from my point of view:
1) You prefer to hurl insults to engaging in reason,
2) You aren’t actually capable of thinking of something new, or changing your mind, or doing much of anything besides screaming that your cult hero was right.
There is no point in discussing things if we use different definitions; so come up with your axioms and we will discuss that, using the common dictionary or wikipedia definitions of words or concepts. Here is a serviceable definition of AXIOM.
Get back to me with a few.
Tony C
>The government … invests tax dollars in infrastructure that adds value for all of us.
Youre dropping the context. So if I stole your wallet and bought some stock, that would be investment?! No, its theft regardless of whether I bought a hooker’s time or a stock. The govt steals from the productive, the productive who invest their savings and profits. But when govt steals, that production, savings and investment ceases. The alleged govt investment has a cost, the real, private, production-based investment that never happens. The 19th century French economist, Bastiat, wrote a book, _What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen_, in which he identified the fact that bad economics only sees what is there but not what is not there. Ie, the production that never happens because short-range statists evade identifying the indirect effects of their theft from private production.
Further, the govt has no way to know where to invest unless there is a market of price signals in which every good and service is related to every other in a ratio. Eg, 10 goats for one cow. In socialism, there is no market, thus no price ratios. In a regulated economy (fascist socialism), govt intervention sends misleading price signals that cause shortages and bubbles. Soviet planners never knew how many shoes relative to potatoes to produce. In practice , they used the market prices of other economies, the economies they intended to replace with their failure to coordinate production.
How ,literally, can govt know how many bridges to produce relative to, eg, hospitals or roads or schools or trains, etc.?! There is nothing in the science of economics which can solve this outside of a market. And this problem must be solved because man’s unlimited wants interacts with resources limited in any given moment. Even Bill Gates cant design computer programs and play golf at the same time. Priorities must be concretely set. Computers were proposed decades ago but what should be fed into the computer?! Govt cannot know ALL of the other things, potential and actual, in which it could “invest.” And it must know all of the possibilities, as any non-economist in a market economy does by simply knowing what HE wants, with his personal values and with his personal wealth and relative to all the other things on a market. He may buy a shirt, not a yacht, without the slightest knowledge of the economic complexities of either.
The price of a good on a market is an integration of a vast amount of _constantly_ changing buying and selling information. In fact, there is no equilibrium in a market, merely constantly changing tendencies toward constantly changing equilibriums. Govt planners have no such knowledge, not even which social groups they should serve first and which second, etc. Where should money go first and second, SS or Medicare? There is no way to answer without a market of producers voluntarily buying and selling with other producers. Consumer as consumers are not even part of a market.
Weimar Germany collapsed economically because of pressure group Pragmatism in which govt failed to satisfy anybody. The Nazi solution of totalitarian economic control merely shifted limited resources away from production and toward destruction. Even without losing a war, the economy would have collapsed without market-coordinated production. Tigers and Stukas dont satisfy anyone’s desire to participate in production with other people. Keynes was wrong. War is not productive.
Ludwig von Mises identified this problem in his 1920 article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Its possible to get a Ph.D in economics without knowing of this. See: Bernanke, Geithner.
The key to economics, as of politics and ethics, is man’s independent mind.
humanegg [which, hopefully won’t hatch]
>Government created the Internet, all by itself.
Youre dropping the context of private ideas (including the ideas of individual judgment and individual rights), science, technology, and capital that enabled the the govt of the most capitalist economy in history to create the Internet. But youre a Pragmatist meathead, with a strong intellectual habit of considering one isolated fact at a time, including causes without effects and effects without causes. Man’s mind is the source of the production of material wealth. Or do you think that tribalism is the source of our scientific-industrial civilization? The Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union stole our technology, some of which they lacked the ability to duplicate. Inside your collectivist ideals, consensus creates reality. But, out here in reality, the independent mind is needed for production.
Govt produces nothing. It is totally parasitical upon private production. Govt is a gun in your face and nothing more. This is not an advocacy of anarchy since govt should stick a gun in the wormy faces of militant collectivists and other thugs.
“And just precisely where is the implication that I am a student. I’m not saying I’m not”.
In your writings and in your immaturity, plus you don’t deny it.
Gene H.
>Grossman,That would be your incorrect and ill-informed opinion.
And you couldnt even dash off a brief alternative? Cowardice? Ignorance? Sleaziness? You decide.
THE BALANCED AND FAIR POSTER
Gene H
>I’d suggest looking into… Auguste Comte
What happened to your denial of altruism?
@Roco: I have worked as a consultant for several Fortune 500 companies; and I was there to do the work and solve the problems that their workers should have done and solved. The phenomenon you describe is not inherent to government, it is human nature: If you can get somebody else to do the work and it doesn’t cost you anything personally and you still get the credit for it — Why not?
I worked for one manager that literally, and openly, played solitaire on his computer ALL DAY LONG. He never did anything except discuss the problems with me over a few lunches a week, then directing somebody else to solve my resource or personnel problems.
His salary wasn’t changed by hiring me to do his work, and in fact he had a reputation for making things happen in his company and getting jobs done! He got the credit for my work, I got big paychecks, and we were both happy, and his managers were dumb but happy. Essentially, his contribution was picking ME to do his work.
@humanegg:
This is too long a post for me to respond to in one go; so I will respond in pieces as I see fit, as I have time. Perhaps this afternoon or on Saturday; at the moment I have professional duties to which I must attend.
Tony C:
my mother inlaw used to work for one of the departments as a subcontractor, she basically said she was there to do the work the government workers were supposed to do but didnt.
Mike Spinfromhell
>>“On the other hand, I just returned from a university bookstore where my perusal of next semester’s books brought to light an interesting claim in an ethics text.”
>How does one who has never worked in his life, but always had his parents support him at school, think that he can understand the way the economy, and business work?
This is very sad, a perfect example of modern thought’s growing rejection of inference for association, ie, the anti-conceptual learning style of schizos. See Kasanin’s _Thought And Language In Schizophrenia_, a study of Russian head injuries in WW2. There is no inference from my above comment to your implication. Do you seriously think that only students go into university bookstores? How stupid did you have to make yourself to not consider this? And just precisely where is the implication that I am a student. I’m not saying I’m not. Or that I am. I merely ask for evidence (beyond your emotions). I will say this, however: your amusingly feeble attempt to refute Objectivism or even to understand it is as entertaining as watching the three rabbits that seem to be living in my neighborhood. A groundhog recently dashed in front of my car as well. That’s not relevant to philosophy of law, of course, but, like a bird on a wire, you might turn your fragmented ability to focus on that for a moment. You and Gene and Tony have a great intellectual circus here. Thank you! But where’s the popcorn?
Caio!
Mike SpinFromHell
>The young man, living off of his parents, who says he owes them nothing but gratitude. You don’t have any money to steal yet, unless you’ve got a trust fund set up.
Apart from your uneducated Marxist obsession with economic determinism as sleazy, wimpy substitute for judging ideas, your selection of “living off of his parents” and “trust fund” is, perhaps, revelatory of a view that such economic situations are insulated from the baleful effects of Obamanomics. Unfortunately, everyone will be destroyed as our socialist govt steals productive resources from the most productive and gives the altruist loot to the least productive and even to the unproductive. We will then have the Progressive ideal: egalitarian suffering. Your complaint against your fellow socialists of Nazism was that they liked unequal suffering.
> No more so than businesses do; I have seen businesses waste millions on complete bullshit.
>
The difference here is that a ‘misallocation’ by a company only hurts
the company. Also, the company, by definition in a free market, did
not take the money they have by force from the public. It was given
freely. They have incentive not to waste it on useless crap. The
government has no such incentive. If they waste money, it doesn’t
come out of the bureaucrat’s pockets – it comes out of
taxpayer/citizen pockets.
> A good many of those things you mentioned could be done by private enterprise for profit,
>
> Whether they could or not is besides the point; most of us do not WANT our lives in the hands of somebody that has a profit motive, >which is a motive to cut corners, or save their job, or increase their personal wealth.
The author dramatically misunderstands a profit motive. Companies
don’t make money by increasing the wealth of the company – they make
money by generating wealth in a society – by freely exchanging desired
goods. If a company is providing services, like security, for
example, then the ONLY way that a company (or non-profit organization
depending on donated money) doing this can continue to pay salaries
and increase wealth is by doing the job either better than other
competing firms or individuals or cheaper than their competitors. This
is the basis of the profit motive. Doing a job better or cheaper
creates profit.
>A profit motive is a direct conflict of interest in a protective role; we do not want law enforcement to HAVE a profit motive. it is fine if the >individuals in law enforcement are doing the job for a paycheck, but if their paycheck is increased by how they use their job discretion to >do their job, that becomes inherently unfair to the poor in favor of the rich.
First off, I’m not sure what ‘using job discretion’ means. I don’t
think the author here knows what a libertarian (or anarchist) would
suggest is the correct way to handle security. As it stands now, with
our governmental systems set up the way they are, our police are
directly funded NOT based on how well they protect the population, but
by how much they ticket, fine, harass, and confiscate property from
the population. Asset forfeiture, speeding tickets, red light
cameras, parking violations ALL go to fund the police machine.
In a libertarian / anarchist security force, the rule enforcement
agents would be paid based on whatever metrics earn them the most
clients. The VAST majority of people want their local crime rates low
but don’t want to be harassed by bullshit authoritarian cops enforcing
rules designed to get their agency more money. If you look at how
private security is handled in Vegas or in the red light district in
Amsterdam, you’ll see an example of near-flawless private security
concerns making sure that peace and order are the rule of the day.
They are polite and courteous – helpful, even, to those who are
normal, but when something undesirable is happening, it is dealt with
swiftly and efficiently. This is an example of how personal security
and the security of property can be maintained by private
organizations.
>
> most likely with more efficiency and create wealth in the process.
>
> Who gives a crap about creating wealth? I don’t want some police captain using his position and authority to amass wealth of any kind. That is the definition of corruption.
The author here is completely misunderstanding wealth. Wealth is
created when voluntary trade occurs. If I have two apples, and value
them the same as a single orange, and that guy over there has two
oranges, and values them the same as a single apple, and they each
trade one of their fruits, then wealth is created. The first person
is wealthier by 1 apple, and the second is wealthier by 1 orange. If
they’d merely gotten the minimum they wanted, then no wealth would
have been created. But because they each had different desires and
motives, they were able to trade and produce more societal wealth.
When a private company perfoms its job well it provides services or goods that other people want more than they want their money, and that exchange represents the creation of wealth.
When the government confiscates money through taxation and bureaucrats and politicians decide how to spend it, rather than the people who actually MADE the money through their labor, wealth is destroyed, or
at best, shuffled around.
Nobody wants a police captain to use his position and authority to
ammass wealth. That is totally possible in a public government
organization. It’s essentially impossible in a private company. If
any individual in a private company abuses their authority to
accumulate wealth, they are generally fired and frequently subjected
to legal sanction. When was the last time you heard of a police
officer ACTUALLY getting punished for an abuse of their authority? It
basically never happens in a public organization because it’s
centralized and there’s no alternative. In a world of private
security concerns, they can all hold each other responsible and if any
one appears to be becoming corrupt or abusive, then the individuals
funding it can simply unsubscribe.
Also, with private concerns, there are incentives for the metrics used
for evaluation and payment to be made public. There are no such
incentives in a public agency.
> Government does not create wealth in any way.
>
> That is a lie; if you start lying too, I will stop reading your posts too.
This is a simplistic reading – that’s like saying that ‘evolution is
just a theory.’ The author does not appear to undestand what economics actually says about the creation of value and wealth. I think I covered this up above. It’s certainly a debatable point, but it’s not a lie.
>Government created the Internet, all by itself.
Government funded researchers did spearhead the initial protocols that
became the internet. But the reason it’s not a lone part of the
defense network is because the protocols were released and
commercialized by private concerns. The government is not an ISP. it
does not provide internet access. It does not produce hardware that
enables internet access, it does not write software that enables
internet access.
> Millions of business are getting rich off of that phenomenon.
It’s not a phenomenon. Businesses are getting rich because they are
building cool technologies that people want.
>Government created plastic,
um… what? How many government-run plastic manufacturing plants have you seen?
>Government created the Interstate highway systems and states realized the economic benefits of road systems and built their own, and millions of businesses for fifty years have been using those free road systems to get rich.
Those road systems are NOT free. They cost billions of dollars.
Also, the gov built the interstates at the request of GM and Ford, and
actively tore up existing railway lines to build the interstates. It
was a colossal waste of wealth. We’ve managed to make the best of it,
but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be better if they had emerged when
people actually wanted them and paid for them willingly, rather than
when the government arbitrarily decided to confiscate a couple billion
dollars and spend 2-3x as much as a private company would have to
build the same thing.
>FedEx wouldn’t exist without government roads to ride on, and no way in hell was any individual investor or company going to create the >Interstate Highway System. Or the bridges, dams, and water works built by the government that ALSO increased the economy >immeasurably.
There are 2 reasons I can think of that a private concern wouldn’t
build those things:
1) Because it’s not actually profitable. These systems operate at a
loss. Our society is poorer for them. If that’s NOT the case, then a
private concern would DEFINITELY build them. That’s what the profit
motive does – find a way for society to be richer and take a small
portion for yourself by providing that additional wealth.
2)Because the government wouldn’t let them. All the massive
regulations and bullshit and interstate taxes and other costs, not to
mention the fact that the government has confiscated the rights to
waterways etc. subverting hundreds of years of laws regarding
homesteading all combine to make it difficult for private
organizations to actually create value by improving underutilized
property. This would be the government standing in the way of
progress by restricting liberty and the free trade of goods and
services.
>Government funded research has led to literally millions of products that others use. Government created computers for goodness sake; the first computers were for the census, and research on the transistor style computer was funded by the government to help compute missile trajectories.
This is a total non-sequitor. Saying that these things came about
because of government funding doesn’t mean that government spending is good. If you look at the economic value of research products, dollar
for dollar, between private and publicly funded research, the private
research wins every time. If every dollar that was spent on ‘public’
research instead went to a private research firm, we’d all be richer
by an order of magnitude.
> Government creates wealth for citizens, not for itself.
Nice propoganda – the government doesn’t create wealth. Government
agents – politicians, bureaucrats, etc. act in the name of the public
good to enrich themselves and their supporters. There are exceptions,
but if you look at the ‘pork’ in the budget it becomes abundantly
clear where politicians direct their loyalties.
@Roco: P.S. I failed to mention a very big wealth creator: GPS, the Global Positioning System, built, owned, operated and maintained by the US Government as a national resource (and really a global resource). The exploitation of GPS (which is encouraged) has produced many billions of dollars in wealth for private citizens, and astonishing new applications. The government doesn’t create wealth for itself, it invests tax dollars in infrastructure that adds value for all of us. Those fancy little navigators in cars, that OnStar emergency communications system, you can thank the US Government for those handy tools. They even funded the algorithmic research at universities that are used by those tools.