Huh, I didn’t know that Suess did political cartoons…though I am more surprised that they are GOOD political cartoons.

Just slightly off here, but the title of this post is just too, too fitting: http://drpaul2012.wordpress.com/

Huh, I didn’t know that Suess did political cartoons…though I am more surprised that they are GOOD political cartoons.

Unfortunately, not all of them were good. And the bad ones weren’t just “Huh?” or “That’s awkward”…
http://bp3.blogger.com/_ir3J5uWAtvU/RpsAMRe57jI/AAAAAAAAAn8/gIgFK42UoTI/s400/jap6.jpg

‘And the bad ones weren’t just “Huh?” or “That’s awkward”…’

Right, political cartoons.

Right, political cartoons.

Right, that’s what’s USUALLY the definition of bad political cartoons.

Seuss did a bunch of *racist* ones (like the one I linked to)

Oh, you said weren’t. For being such an easy word to miss, “not” is a very important one.

And yeah, I remember “Slap a Jap.”

I think that one was mostly known for its Superman incarnation

http://www.headinjurytheater.com/images/oc%20slap%20a%20jap%20superdickery.jpg

…dabble in gold buggery…

*rimshot*

This was way before my time, you know!

Great analysis, though I’d write a concurring opinion, as it were, with slightly different rationale. Ron Paul’s position reflects no moral or ethical principle at work; but rather his principle that only private individuals, and not democratically elected govts, should use money to shape the world. Under this view, an atrocity like slavery is tolerable so long as it occurs in the “free market,” and its abolition only tolerable when the market for free labor dries up. Govt intervention to protect a powerless minority from an entrenched and privileged class who had everything to lose in the civil war? That is despicable in ron paul’s view.

This was way before my time, you know!

Mine too!
Sorry. Just a weird fascination of mine anyway. Just read an article on all of the horrific (buried) cartoons Disney and Warner and everybody did while seeing if I’d gotten confused somewhere in there and forgotten Seuss using that horrendous phrase, actually.
I didn’t really do that to correct you, though, honest! Just to sorta clarify the widespread awfulness of the time.

A little while back I saw that Obama was sending troops into Uganda. I started swearing and stomping around, because I’m still not sold on Libya and I’m still unhappy about Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and Somalia and… well, the rest of the Middle East, basically.

But then I saw that the hundred or so troops were being sent to deal with the Lord’s Resistance Army, and I calmed down. If ever there was a case for intervening, it’s this one.

(Plus, it pisses off Rush Limbaugh, and I fully support anything that pushes him towards a heart attack.)

ISTR Seuss was later quoted a  saying he was cognizant of the dissonance between his anti-racist (against blacks) messages and his tendency to portray Japanese people in the worst light possible. I don’t recall the details though.

I think that non-intervention is a much better default position than intervention is.  Obviously you need to evaluate on a case by case basis but I think that if you are going to go into another country (particularly without governmental or popular consent) you need to have strong justification to do so.

So the burden of proof lies on the intervention side? That’s basically what Just War theory is.

He was also vocal about anti-Semitic types of racism, but from what I’ve found the closest he ever came to that cognizance was Horton Hears a Who and its dedication to a friend in Japan.

I can find plenty of people apologizing for him though! Wow, the comments on these cartoons around the ‘net are disturbing…”I was around a bunch of Asians and they made jokes about white people, so I don’t see how this is bad!” and “We were at war with Japan,” and “Japan did horrible things,” and “what’s racist about that?” and so on and so forth…good grief.

I once saw a documentary about comics that briefly discussed how the Japanese were depicted during the war years.  One of the people being interviewed summed it up with something like, “Japanese characters came in two varieties:  buck-toothed or fanged.”

Basically, but I’m a pacifist who doesn’t like the implications behind the term ‘Just War’ because it implies that war can be a good thing.  I see war as sometimes being a less unjust choice than inaction but it is always an evil that is being chosen even if it is the lesser of them.

I’d take it farther, that there needs to be the presumption that a war is unjust.  And the standard of proof needs to be on the order of “overwhelming evidence verified by multiple neutral third parties.”

Because it is really tempting to label an conflict as a “just war”, or for people who want a particular war to exaggerate or even lie about the evidence.  Or just to see what they want to see, and not think about the harm even the most-just possible war creates.  (Particularly in the US, with its history of fighting wars elsewhere, so that much of the human cost is invisible or external.  Johnny goes off to war, Johnny comes marching home again – but friends, family, home are all safe and far from the conflict.) 

“You can make a case that this is a just war” isn’t enough.  

You say non-interventionism, I say isolationism…well, actually, I say GOVERNMENT isolationism.  These cats are fine with American corporate interests intervening in other nations.  Sweat shops?  Monocrops?  Patented GMOs?  Buying sustenance resources for resale to Western markets?  NO PROBLEM.  Why would the right hand intervene in what the left hand is doing?

Weeeell… personally I do somewhat favor non-interventionism on the principle that making decisions for other people tends to work out poorly.  If they ask for aid that can be different.  But in international politics, non-interventionism, especially by major powers, basically equates to unilateral disengagement, and isolation, and I think that’s often worse…but then again the US has a really horrible track record, not that plenty of other colonial powers don’t…it’s always More Complicated, aaargh.

Also, what Mordicai said about corporate interventionism.  If the Federation steps out the Ferengi will step in, or something.

Why are you surprised?  Seuss’s children’s books are uniformly wonderful. It only stands to reason that some of his political cartoons would be good as well.

Also what Ursula said.  I don’t think many wars are just at all.  They can be the least bad response, but that’s not quite the same.

It still baffles me that the same man who wrote about the Star-Bellied Sneeches was racist.  It’s the sort of contradiction that almost begs to be justified, even though it really can’t be.

Everyone’s racist to some extent.  Those who are wise eventually reevaluate their prejudices and grow out of them.  Justify it as a youthful mistake, exacerbated by war hysteria, and see later works as his attempt to make amends.

One of the things I haven’t heard much talk about is how the Paul isolationist/non-interventionist policy would play out in other areas of the world. Surely a strong, universal commitment to isolationism wouldn’t merely end the wars we currently disdain. It would probably also entail, for example, the explicit removal of the American nuclear umbrella from Taiwan and American troops and aid from South Korea, leading to two incredibly dangerous situations–and perhaps even two distinct shooting wars in the most populous corner of the globe. 

Now, maybe it wouldn’t. But Paul does not seem to care; I don’t see any reason to believe he would respond to such developments with anything useful or moderate–that is, not without compromising his own campaign promises!I’m all in favor of not mucking about in other’s business when not invited. But as far as I understand an admittedly complex and contradictory history, both Taiwan and South Korea prefer American involvement to non-involvement, even to this day. It’s easy to ask “what would Paul do about the problems we’re currently considering?” And since we’re in an antiwar moment, it sounds like “bring everyone home!” is a great idea. But, in fact, we’re in a moment where antiwar, but NOT anti-interventionist rhetoric is called for. 

I think that non-intervention is a much better default position than intervention is.

That’s skating awfully close to a strawman argument.  Even for interventionists the default position is non-intervention.  If the default position was intervention that would mean you’d be sending in the troops any time anything happened anywhere.  Genocidal maniac begins systematic wipeout of [insert people group here]?  Boots on the ground.  Tinpot dictator takes over tiny country in Africa?  Boots on the ground.  Riots break out in the streets of London?  Boots on the ground.

Until I saw that spoof Ron Paul website above, I hadn’t realised that he was an actual, qualified medical doctor.  So his story about standing by and watching an aborted baby die in a bucket means he’s either a damm liar or some kind of monster who doesn’t believe the Hippocratic oath applies to him.

His followers love pointing out that he delivered thousands of babies, sometimes for free without taking a single Medicaid payment (if someone accuses him of racism, they amend it to thousands of minority babies). You really need to hang out with more Paul followers!

I saw a PBS special on “The Political Dr. Suess” once.  He was a political cartoonist for a leftist magazine in the 1920s and 30s. Then in the 1940s, trying to deflect suspicion from himself (as a known leftist and a child of German immigrants), he became a comic propagandist for the U.S. government. I suspect that cartoon is from that era.

By WWII, Dr. Suess was in his 40s, so not so youthful. He worked as a propagandist for the U.S. govt during WWII, and  made a conscious decision to demonize Germans and Japanese in his cartooning during that time. He had been a political cartoonist for a leftist magazine during the 20s and 30s, and he was the son of German immigrants, so he was concerned about people questioning his patriotism. (Not to excuse his behavior, just to explain it).

That’s not true.  Everyone stereotypes to some extent but it doesn’t have to be racism.  I mean, I can stereotype Republicans because I think any non-millionaire who marks (R) on their ballots has got some serious issues with basic arithmetic.  I would never hire a Republican as an accountant!  (Not actually true.)

Anyway, stereotypes can be both useful and hurtful.  Being able to realize the difference between your perceptions of reality, and reality itself is a useful skill.

It may be my perception that white people like Conan O’Brien but clearly that’s not true of all white people.  Realizing the distinction between ha-ha-funny “All white people like Conan O’Brien! Ha! Cause he’s weird and dry and Irish!” and it being offensive to ask some white dude if they’d like me to change the channel to something “cultural” like Conan O’Brien is the is the key. 

Another thought – in addition to considering whether a war is a just war, there also needs to be careful consideration as to whether you’re starting an unjust war. Even in the case of a just war, one side isn’t just.  And there are many more conflicts where neither side is clearly just.  

To Godwin the discussion a bit, in the run-up to war, at least in the US, people like to bring up the example of WWII as a just war.  The fear of delay in stopping the next Hitler gets invoked.  But WWII is, historically, an unusual case.  Most situations don’t work out nearly as clearly as to who the good-guys and bad-guys are.  

And one of the reasons why WWII is as close to clearly-just as it is comes from the fact that people didn’t rush into that war, but took the time, years, to attempt diplomatic and other solutions.  ”We don’t think diplomacy will work” isn’t a reason to avoid diplomacy, and it indicates an unwillingness to genuinely try for diplomatic solutions on your part, which pretty much guarantees that you’re not going to meet the conditions for a just war.  You can’t just go through the motions of trying for other solutions, you need to give them your full attention and effort. 

Since he’s come up up, it might be worth noting that there was an article at the Slacktiverse about Dr. Seuss, specifically on gender in his works and how he responded to criticism.  It was more than half a year ago now.

That’s incredibally insightful Ursula! Unfortunately those diplomatic efforts became tarred with the epithet “appeasement” and from then on diplomacy has been considered a weakLings approach.

Some of those diplomatic efforts were appeasement. Calling something diplomacy doesn’t automatically make it good or right any more than a war is just simply because someone says that it is. Waiting for perfect moral clarity isn’t always the right thing to do. Especially when, as in the WW2 example, waiting allows millions of people to die. 

That’s pretty much the problem with Rwanda. Everyone wanted to be sure and to exhaust other avenues before resorting to armed intervention. And 800000 people were murdered while the whole world stood around watching. 

I don’t like the article because there are a lot of half-truths in there.  Regarding the non-interventionism, I think it’s a little too easy for us to say Bosnia good, Iraq bad, Afghanistan, well only to get rid of the Taliban, Somalia, well only if that helicopter didn’t crash!  I think a principled policy of non-intervention is the only way was can ensure that we don’t get stuck in foreign wars that have no timetable or clear exit.  You can always come up with a reason to go kill someone in a far away land, I think recent history has made that pretty clear.  Finally, on the issue of a “just war”, who died and made us judge, jury and policeman for the rest of the world?  Even assuming we were, who is going to pay for it?  Should we borrow more money from China to do that?  It’s not even an issue of whether these wars are “just” in my opinion.  We’re spending trillions on these pointless foreign wars and then we’re fighting over how much healthcare to cut for the poor and elderly at home.  It’s a complete joke.  Ron Paul really is the only person willing to speak out about this and I don’t much care that he’s not going to get the nomination because I don’t see a whole lot people with his exposure right now saying anything remotely close to this.  

On the drug issue, the article is even more misleading.  Ron Paul opposes FEDERAL drug regulation.  He believes the states should do whatever they want and I’m sure most states will keep dangerous drugs illegal.  Why are progressives ok with the Feds knocking down doors in CA and confiscating marijuana from sick people when it is legal in CA?  I can’t think of a more obvious violation of the 10th Amendment.  The problem with both sides is if it’s a cause they support, then it’s fine for the Feds to step in, but if it’s not, then it’s not ok.  Republicans do this all the time, I heard Santorum talk about smaller government and getting the federal government out of our lives and in the same breath talk about the need for an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment.  Liberals do this also on issues that they care about.  C’mon!  Are state an local governments THAT helpless?  

Why are progressives ok with the Feds knocking down doors in CA and
confiscating marijuana from sick people when it is legal in CA?

Straw individual argument.

Assertion without basis in fact.

Ask almost any left-winger of the last 20 years and quite a high percentage will tell you they disagree with Drug Warrior rhetoric and tactics. Me, I’ve been in favor of the legalization of ALL drugs since the mid 1990s*.

—

* a fairly extreme stance, but my relatively sketchy reading of the subject leads me to believe that many of the illicit drugs consumed today pose an active danger to people not because of the drug itself, but because of the adulterants often “slipped-in” to boost the yield and profit.

 
You can always come up with a reason to go kill someone in a far away land, I think recent history has made that pretty clear.  

History didn’t start recently. If we broaden our scope a bit we can see that the other thing people always seem to be able to do is come up with a reason to stand by while other people suffer and die. 
ETA:

I think it’s a little too easy for us to say Bosnia good, Iraq bad, Afghanistan, well only to get rid of the Taliban, Somalia, well only if that helicopter didn’t crash!

No one who actually knows anything about Somalia thinks that it was good except for Blackhawk Down. If you’re talking to someone who says that or anything close to that you can be pretty sure that person is talking out his/her bum.

Me, I’ve been in favor of the legalization of ALL drugs since the mid 1990s*.

I’m not 100% sold on this argument.  However, I come pretty close to it since my current rule-of-thumb is “Will taking this drug fuck up its user MORE than locking them in prison for 20-odd years for taking this drug?” So far, not many drugs being sold manage to meet that criteria.

–

Reason #6591 I don’t want a Republican President:  “Hey, you remember when Obama told the FDA to stop prosecuting medical marijuana users?  Yeah, ALL you fucking hippies are goin’ to prison now.”

Portugal just passed 10 years since they decriminalized drug possession and replaced jail time with a meeting with health and social service workers for users.  The results are enormous savings in law enforcement costs, more use of drug rehab and detox programs, vast reductions in property crime, fewer overdose and cutting agent deaths and injuries, and extremely significant reductions in overall drug usage.

Overall the Portugal experience leads me to conclude that drug possession decriminalization is a massive success and should be replicated everywhere.  The US might not actually benefit from it though due to lacking public health services like the rest of the civilized world has.

Some of them are not so good. They rail against free speech and japanese americans. i’ts ugly stuff really, some of it.

I was surprised at how bad that Mother jones guy was. It was real low grade think tank stype nastiness. David Sirota had a good piece in Salon a while back. 

Non interventionism isn’t just being opposed to all wars, it is very close to just war theory.

You should never bash people for opposing wars it puts you in very bad company. People always say this stuff “you would have let hitler conquor Europe.” to try and goad people into supporting wars.  events like ww2 or the civil war can be looked at critically. We don’t worship wars. Don’t get wrapped up in the nationalism. it doesn’t take away from the heroism of those who fought those wars to try and arrive at ways they could have been avoided and a resolution resolved at peavefully. We have too much war in our culture.

I guess I should have read the rest of the comments frirst haha. yeah that stuff is awful.

Taiwan and China are trading. There are planes going back and forth between the two countries all the time. not much to worry about there. As far as South Korea, i would have to agree with Buchanan, why should american men and women be the very first ones to face casualties from a possible north korean attack?

More to the point, these are minor details. getting our troops out of the middle east would reap humanitarian/ moral  rewards that are worth risk slight destabilization in Asia for.

I get that some poeple jsut don’t like ron Paul but to say “oh he can’t be elected because what about …regulating how much sugar goes in soda” or something. I mean no one is sayong that but you know what I mean. 

We have moral culpability for our current status quo. These drone attacks, that’s on us. We are paying for them literally and figuratively and history will remember that the way it remembers slavery.

That’s kind of hard to follow. Can you clarify your comment?

sorry, I thought my responses would appear under the things they were responding too. I guess my general point is that people are missing the big picture which is this

1.  We are 15 trillion dollars in debt 

2. we are being led by christian extremists and jewish extremists into a war with muslim extremists that no one can win.

Does you disagree with both or either of those?  I think they are pretty evident. I recognize that in the 60′s civil rights were a big issue and in the 80′s the culture wars were a big issue. I think we have different issues today and looking at Paul through a 20th century sort of lens is not the way to look at him.  He is the only one I can think of who cares about issue 1 and 2 or he cares about them the most by a long shot.

We have a responisiblity for our selves and our families and our country to stop the direction the country is going in. it’s not enough to just go out and vote for someone we like like it was in the past.  the current status quo is for more war, more spying on americans , more borrowing, etc  It couuld end badly.  I don’t care about Ron paul, run someone else I’ll vote for them as long as they are for getting us out of debt and ending the military industrial complex. I don’t think you’ll find anyone though.

So bottom line I guess my point is we have bigger fish to fry and alot of thes anti ron Paul articles just feel like fiddling while rome is burning to me. rather than bellyache about his isolationism or gold buggery come up with something better.

1.  We are 15 trillion dollars in debt 

2.we are being led by christian extremists and jewish extremists into a war with muslim extremists that no one can win.

Does you disagree with both or either of those?

[raises hand]

As far as 1 goes, “we” (I assume you mean the USA?) are mostly “in debt” to ourselves, and at the moment for darn close to zero interest, and what does that have to do with the issue at hand?

For number 2:  “we” (not caveat above) are being “led” by a lot of people, including the Obama administration — which for all its faults, I don’t think can fairly be characterized as “extremists.” 

Moreover, although there are any number of persons with theocratic impulses on the world stage exacerbating tensions, as near as I can tell, the Persons With Power in most countries aren’t acting on ANY sort of religious impulses, but out of a desire to protect the privileges of the powerful.

—-

Meanwhile, am I the only one who really really hates the term “interventionism”?  There’s all sorts of meddling with another country with the intent of changing the behavior of its leaders, but the only one that seems to receive the label “intervention” is the one that involves killing people.

I wouldn’t say that it is impossible to justify “killing the inhabitants of another country in order to change the behavior of it’s leaders-ism”, but giving things their proper names does tend to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

1.  We are 15 trillion dollars in debt

This is an exaggeration, because of the way the Social Security Trust Fund accounting is done. Because of the fact that the SSTF is now carried on the same books as the government budget, a “fudge” has to be used wherein the US government says “I have taken money from this fund and used it in the other fund.” To keep the double-entry accounting from going funny, this creates an IOU in the trust fund, and artificially inflates the size of the national debt, since the IOU is basically from the government to the government.

I’m not a Ron Paul supporter, he is the crazy uncle, but I hate to see someone’s position misunderstood. Especially when such misunderstanding can transcend to other’s opinion.

As you’ll see here in this transcript (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22342301/) from Meet the Press in 2007, Paul clearly states he thought Lincoln was wrong in going to war over slavery. He states the solution to the slavery problem should have been like Britain’s – buy the slaves and set them free.

Whether such a policy would have been possible given U.S. politics and demographics at the time is a different issue.

Paul clearly states he thought Lincoln was wrong in going to war over
slavery. He states the solution to the slavery problem should have been 
like Britain’s – buy the slaves and set them free.

Sooo… they keep people as beasts of burden, so they deserve a big, fat taxpayer bailout? 

Yeah, not seeing that.

Whether such a policy would have been possible given U.S. politics and demographics at the time is a different issue.

Not just no, OH HELL NO.  The North wouldn’t want to spend the money and the South’s Elites already made it clear they would fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood to hold on to their free labor.

Have you even read the US Constitution? Whether you like it or not, it’s the foundation of your nation’s modus operandi

Ta Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who has researched the Civil War intensively, says that Paul’s idea about buying the slaves in the U.S. ”displays a deep and shocking ignorance.” He further describes Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation and how it was rejected by the South in his comments: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/saviorism/250841/

But it isn’t really a separate issue. If the political system is different enough that that plan wouldn’t work, then it’s not a reasonable alternative. There isn’t really any evidence (that I’ve encountered, I could be wrong, of course) that slave owners would have given up their slaves for any reasonable amount.

Besides, Lincoln didn’t go to war specifically to free the slaves — that’s something he came up with well into the war. He went to war to preserve the United States; if he could have preserved the Union without freeing any slaves, or by only freeing some and not others, he would have done that instead. Slavery might have been the central issue but it was much more complicated than “South wanted slavery and North didn’t”.

There was this delicate system, in which powerful landowning aristocracy used the presence of a slave underclass to keep poor whites under control and in which Southern agriculture used the prospect of new slave states joining the US to balance out the political power of a more populous and industrialized North. Simply put, slavery was inextricably woven into the US’s economic and political system, to the point where it was a key issue in the Constitution and remained an extremely contentious issue all the way up to the War (Kansas-Nebraska Act, Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Acts) with neither side being clearly dominant. It’s unlikely that any bribe could have convinced the South to voluntarily smash up that system, and the North couldn’t steamroller over them and make them take the compensated release of their slaves.

Compare that to the abolition movement in the UK; while Britain had a long history of participating in and profiting from the slave trade, by that time slavery was on its way out. The House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to phase out the slave trade in 1792, and while there was some backsliding due to unrest on the Continent by 1805 Britain had already managed — with very little opposition or bribery needed — to pass a bill to dismantle the Atlantic Slave Trade (or at least its own participation in that). They didn’t get around to full abolition until the 1830s but the fact that they were able to directly attack the slave trade this way indicates that the planter aristocracy in Britain was not quite as entrenched and significantly less powerful than the “Slave Power” that dominated US politics all the way up to the Civil War.

Ron Paul is really good at almost but not quite understanding historical situations, or reducing them to really simplistic situations that he can solve with a handwave. I agree with him that the Civil War was a bloody and unfortunate mess but he’s kidding himself if he thinks that there was such easy, obvious options at the time and Abraham Lincoln just decided to tear the United States in half just for the Hell of it.

He states the solution to the slavery problem should have been like Britain’s – buy the slaves and set them free.

Three things wrong with this method:

1) You’re basically rewarding the slave owners for having slaves in the first place.

2) With the money bonus they got from the government for having slaves, what’s to stop them from buying new ones?

3) This is the equivalent of fixing a leaking boat by ignoring the hole and focusing only on the water: Sure, given enough effort you can postpone the inevitable sinking indefinitely. But you’re permanently expending the energy to pump the water out.

I agree with him that the Civil War was a bloody and unfortunate mess
but he’s kidding himself if he thinks that there was such easy, obvious
options at the time and Abraham Lincoln just decided to tear the United
States in half just for the Hell of it.

You’re not looking at it from the modern republican’s point-of-view: If the damned uppity North had just toed the line and done the South tells them, then none of that whole mess would have ever started in the first place.

Liberals and progressives love war when it’s conducted by a Democratic administration in order to “spread freedom” via bombs and bullets. Let’s not forget that it was the left wing who responsible for the majority of wars and millions of deaths in the 20th century.

I have to wonder if you even understand why World War II was fought. Oh, and the Vietnam war? Was technically started under a Republican Administration: Eisenhower’s. Don’t believe me? Go to the Vietnam War Memorial. First date will be in 1956 or 1957.

[citation needed]

And no ignoring the two Desert Storms and the Afghanistan occupation.

I’m guessing by “wars in the 20th century” we’re only counting those that Americans were directly involved in and care about?

The North wouldn’t want to spend the money and the South’s Elites already made it clear they would fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood to hold on to their free labor.

By the time Lincoln was president, all this was true. Before Lincoln’s presidency? Well before? Say around the time the British Empire bought and freed all the slaves in the British Empire? Who knows.

they keep people as beasts of burden, so they deserve a big, fat taxpayer bailout?

Nobody’s saying the slaveholders deserved anything. I don’t know about Paul, whom I can’t believe I’m defending, but I’m saying that paying the slaveholders would have been wrong wrong wrong. It’s just that leaving the slaves enslaved another thirty years and killing six hundred thousand people (counting only the war dead, not anyone who died in slavery) was wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Liberals and progressives love war when it’s conducted by a Democratic
administration in order to “spread freedom” via bombs and bullets. Let’s
not forget that it was the left wing who responsible for the majority
of wars and millions of deaths in the 20th century.

Huhwha?

Liberals and progressives love war when it’s conducted by a Democratic
administration in order to “spread freedom” via bombs and bullets. Let’s
not forget that it was the left wing who responsible for the majority
of wars and millions of deaths in the 20th century.

Wow, I wasn’t aware that Bush, Bush, Adolf Hitler and Hirohito were all ‘liberals’.  Tell us more!

Nobody’s saying the slaveholders deserved anything. I don’t
know about Paul, whom I can’t believe I’m defending, but I’m saying that
paying the slaveholders would have been wrong wrong wrong. It’s just
that leaving the slaves enslaved another thirty years and killing six
hundred thousand people (counting only the war dead, not anyone who died
in slavery) was wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Can’t really argue with that. 

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that even if the abolitionists had the power and the spare money, just paying-off the slave-owners wouldn’t have changed nearly enough – the South would still have desperately needed a bottom-class to distract poor whites from how badly THEY were getting screwed, and the blacks were going to be it, officially ‘free’ or not.  (Which is depressingly what they got ANYWAY after the Civil War.) 

What is up with this blockquote formatting?  Is there something I have to do to get rid of the end-of-line characters when I cut and paste?

This is the most blatant, and pathetic, example of guilt through association I can imagine.

Actually yes, state and local governments are run by morons who are even more corrupt than the federal government.  That’s one of the reasons why schools are doing so badly; local school boards are run by inept morons.

Oh and also liberals ARENT ok with the renewed push to close mj dispensaries in CA, I’m not sure why you would think that at all.

That’s a Glen Beck idea, I saw him talk about how LIEbrals love war and good conservatives would never send our boys to war many times on Faux news.  Like all other Glen Beck ideas, it’s just a sop to the right to make them feel good about their team so they continue to watch/listen to his show and make him money.

 
This is the most blatant, and pathetic, example of guilt through association I can imagine.  

How sad for you to have such a limited imagination. 

 
What is up with this blockquote formatting?  Is there something I have to do to get rid of the end-of-line characters when I cut and paste?  

Something seems to have gone seriously wonky during the last Disqus update. I haven’t found any way to fix it other than editing after you post. If someone else has found a better solution I really hope they share. 

 
Nobody’s saying the slaveholders deserved anything. I don’t know about Paul, whom I can’t believe I’m defending, but I’m saying that paying the slaveholders would have been wrong wrong wrong. It’s just that leaving the slaves enslaved another thirty years and killing six hundred thousand people (counting only the war dead, not anyone who died in slavery) was wrong wrong wrong wrong.  

The idea of paying off slave owners was given serious consideration. I don’t have the references at hand, but I imagine Google can help and if you like I could try to dig back through my reading notes and find them. 

There are a number of reasons why emancipation with compensation wasn’t tried, one of the key ones being that it wouldn’t have worked because the South would not have accepted it. Money was not the South’s sole reason for wanting to maintain slavery and they would not voluntarily have given it up just because someone paid them. 

Both the North and the South blundered into a terrible war because they completely miscalculated how long it would drag on and how many would die, but even if they had known I’m not sure it would have changed things markedly in the South. It would likely have sapped the North’s will to fight, but barring some absolute proof that the South would lose I think there would still have been enough people willing to go to war over the right to hold human beings as property. I have no idea what would have needed to happen to change that or how many years, and how many slaves, it would have taken

In short, the comparative wrongness of compensation vs war is really irrelevant. The issue is the comparative wrongness of war vs allowing slavery to continue, and spread into new states and gain more power in the federal government in hopes that the passage of time and the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution would cause slave-holders to be willing to give up slavery. 

Portugal just passed 10 years since they decriminalized drug
possession and replaced jail time with a meeting with health and social
service workers for users.  The results are enormous savings in law
enforcement costs, more use of drug rehab and detox programs, vast
reductions in property crime, fewer overdose and cutting agent
deaths and injuries, and extremely significant reductions in overall
drug usage.

If something works in Europe, it obviously can’t work here.  Why?  Because we won their war for them.  Or something.  I dunno — I’m not a Republican.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ series on the Civil War is a very good place to start. Here is one post:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/the-civil-war-isnt-tragic-cont/243713/

I read Coates regularly. What exactly are you pointing me toward? I ask, because I’m not the one arguing that the Civil War was tragic.

That wasn’t directed at you per se, but at your response to EllieMurasaki. You said you’d have to dig a little to give her documentation for your points, so I was providing another place she could look. Sorry for that.

I don’t see it as implying war can be a good thing, but rather it means that war is sometimes the right thing, i.e. it’s an act of Justice.  Only psychopaths actually *like* war, but sometimes you have to go stop the Hitlers (apologies for the argumentum ad hitlerum).  Just War theory also determines the right way to do war–don’t go after women, children, elderly, civilians, the feeble, sick, etc. because there sure are some wrong ways to go about it.

Oh. Sorry that I didn’t follow you. 

While Rwanda was horrible, that doesn’t mean that a war to intervene would necessarily have made things better.  Or that such a war would have been just.  

Taking WWII as an example, the European war began in 1939 over issues of German military expansion, not genocide.  And the German efforts at genocide accelerated as the war progressed, particularly as the tide turned against the Germans and they felt they were running out of time to complete their chosen task.  The fact that someone is waging a just war against you to stop you from doing something horrible doesn’t mean that you’ll actually stop it, rather than escalating your efforts both to complete what you’re doing and to stop the invading force.  

Throwing a foreign army into the middle of the mess could easily have complicated the situation, increasing the destruction and death toll.  

There is also the question of legitimacy in intervention.  Given the long history of intervention in Asia and Africa by the US and European powers, and the absolutely disastrous results for people in Africa, an intervention by war, particularly one that started before the genocide to try to prevent it, would have been seen as deeply suspicious and an act of imperialist aggression.  Particularly since France and the US had each supported and armed different sides of the conflict in the years prior to the genocide.  Intervention by either the US or France would not have been intervention by a neutral third party with clear moral authority in the situation.  

Just because something needs to be done, doesn’t mean that just anyone can do it.  The wrong parties getting involved is more likely to lead to escalation of conflict than resolution, if they’re known to have long-favored one side over the other.

There is a temptation, when facing atrocity, to think “The situation is horrible.  We must Do Something.  War to intervene is Something.  Therefore we must Do It.”  

I saw a game-theoretic article in Discover magazine about a decade-plus ago. A researcher had been looking at the Rwanda genocide and the UN peacekeeper response. What the researcher found out is that situations like this or the Yugoslav break-up are highly chaotic – i.e. highly sensitive to subtle shifts in the conditions of the situation as it evolves.

What the researcher also showed was that had the UN peacekeeping force been any bigger and been given more effective rules of engagement, the genocide could have been halted in its tracks, or even pre-emptively stopped before it got momentum.

So a “just war” wasn’t needed, just an effective response by a true multinational peacekeeping force.

1. what does us being 15 trillion in debt have to do with the matterr at hand? Look at what’s happening in greece and italy.

2. you’re nitpicking on this thing. We are involved in war up to our elbows for no good reason. i don’t care whose fault it is. We are paying tons and tons of money to spy on ourselves and antagonizing muslims into committing terrorists acts against us.

Ron paul is the 21st century candidate, the others are still living in the 80′s and 90′s. that style is over. it may go one for a while longer but it’s done. Why are we sending 33% of our paycheck to washington so they can subsidize corn and start wars in counties none of us will ever likely visit? 

and I stand by my assessement of the middl east shenanagins, the major players al queda, the republicans, and the neocons are religous extremists who are seemingly indifferent to the safety of their respective nations.

so you think we’re in great shape financially speaking?

Coates banned me from posting at the Atlantic. gave no reason. I’m not interested in his writings

I’ve seen him ban quite a few people. I’ve never seen him ban anyone without a reason. 

 
Ron paul is the 21st century candidate  

Good Lord, if you actually believe this I don’t even know what to say. Paul opposes the Civil Rights Act for infringing on the financial freedom of racist white people, wants the federal government to force women to give birth and opposes marriage equality. If that’s what you think the 21st century should be then all I can say is I hope a majority of the populous disagrees with you. 

Game theory vastly oversimplifies conflict.  It thinks about winning, but not about such issues as resentment, fear, pride, etc.  

And multinational peace keeping forces are an attempt at just war – a way in which humans try to organize to effectively wage just war by organizing military and political forces to recognize “just war” situations while avoiding allowing one nation’s political interests to control the decision to wage war. 

Multinational peacekeeping forces don’t come together quickly.  And given the potential for abuse (e.g., Afghanistan and Iraq) they shouldn’t come together quickly. One of the conditions that makes war just is that non-military means have been tried with serious effort.  And that necessarily takes time.  

It’s also necessary to see that the harm is actually happening before military intervention.  Waging war, not in reaction to aggression, but out of fear of aggression, is, itself, aggressive. 

And the UN, itself, is not necessarily a neutral player in every conflict or context, so that UN peacekeepers would be appropriate for intervention.  The permanent members of the UN security counsel all have long histories of waging proxy-wars and imperialist aggression.  In the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1993) France had supported the Hutu, while the US had supported the Tutsi.  Throwing US and French politics and policies back into the mess would blur the line between “peacekeeping” and military support from allies of one side.  

oh come on. his support is internet born. it’s because people use the internet and know that libertarianism is the future. the civil rights act can be looked at critically. that’s the challenge. Do I like that rascist guys were forced to allow blacks to be served at their thingies? of course. what if that same POWER was used for evil though?

the free market solution: open an establishment that is open to blacks. If people have any conscience they will go to it instead of the rascist one. if not, you are in a rascist place and you have to deal with that. this is my preference: don’t use violence for good.

If libertarianism is the future, kill me now.

This is not a joke.

Libertarianism will screw over my indebted bisexual female ass. Probably my genderqueer ass, too. And at that I’ll be lucky, because my ass is lily-white.

You know, looking through this thread again, it just occurred to me: The right-wing are Ferengi.

Motivated by profit, sees females only as objects, and then there’s the Rules of Acquisition.

Rule 181: Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit.

 
oh come on. his support is internet born. it’s because people use the internet and know that libertarianism is the future.  

The fact that people are on the internet doesn’t mean they know what the future is. Case in point, Libertarianism is not the future, it’s the past. It’s a fancy name for might makes right and we’ve been there, done that and gotten the ugly scars to show for it. 

Also, I suspect I’m starting to see the outlines of why Coates banned you. Now that you’ve landed here I suspect we’ll all soon be sorry that Fred is far, far less free with the ban hammer.

 
Do I like that rascist guys were forced to allow blacks to be served at their thingies? of course. what if that same POWER was used for evil though? 

 
You mean like, what if that power was used to force women to give birth or to prevent consenting adults from building families if they so chose? Yes, imagine. 

Ron paul is the 21st century candidate, the others are still living in the 80′s and 90′s. that style is over. it may go one for a while longer but it’s done. Why are we sending 33% of our paycheck to washington so they can subsidize corn and start wars in counties none of us will ever likely visit?

Because I like living in a fucking civilization instead of being a bondsman of the local fief.

Because I don’t care to owe my soul to the company store.

Because I have a fucking job that takes up a sizeable chunk of my time, so I don’t really have enough left over to research every product I buy to make sure that the meat is made of actual meat and the milk is made of actual milk and the peanut butter contains only a modest amount of insect parts.

Because I have a chronic medical condition and when I ask “How much do my pills cost,” there is no reason on earth that a completely free market wouldn’t answer “Well, how much is your life worth to you?”

Because I successfully completed 10th grade history, and therefore know that without the civil rights act, the only reason african-americans would not still be sitting in the back of buses is that there would be no buses.

Because I think buses provide a useful service.

Because there are many women I care about, and I think it’s nice that they have legal recourse when their boss decides that his position entitles him to the occasional grope.

Because I can do basic math, and know that if I had to separately pay for my roads, my schools, my fire protection, my police protection, to have my air cleaned enough to be able to breathe, to verify the safety of the food, drugs, and products I buy, to lay sidewalks where I might like to walk, to have my trash hauled away, if I had to pay private companies for all those things, it would cost pretty much every dime I make.

So I’ll happily pay 33%. Because I’m not a fucking moron.

Ah, the Magical Free Market Solution!  It ‘splains why sweatshop labor is extinct, slavery would have died by itself, and why a Real True Free Market won’t have any pollution!

That reminds me, whatever happened to Freedom Fighter?

—–

Libertarian is the philosophy of the 19th century – when the Robber Barons made their fortunes and had no problems with sending Pinkertons to murder unionists, taking patent medicine was like playing Russian Roulette with a bazooka, and the milk sometimes had fish in it.

I’m in sheer awe at how naive your statements are.

 
That reminds me, whatever happened to Freedom Fighter?  

Shhhh! We don’t want to invoke him. One Paul-bot who clearly failed history and logic at a time is plenty. 

I did catch a documentary about Dr. Seuss a few years back which included some interview footage. In it, he did say that he regretted having done the propaganda pieces. According to the piece, he’d felt pressured to make a Big Show Of It because he was himself of german descent. 

He also did live-action training films for the army. Weird stuff, about the post-VE-day mission in germany, going on at great length with a lot of weird racial stuff about the intrinsic untrustworthiness of the german character, and the need to make sure we properly ground-down their fighting spirit before leaving, as germans were genetically predisposed to a pattern of war punctuated by “faking” a desire for peace.

Not as sort of forthrightly grotesquely racist as the anti-japanese stuff, but wow.

I am glad I read the whole thread before commenting, because this…

“Libertarian is the philosophy of the 19th century – when the Robber Barons made their fortunes and had no problems with sending Pinkertons to murder unionists, taking patent medicine was like playing Russian Roulette with a bazooka, and the milk sometimes had fish in it.”

Is pretty much what I had to say.  I’ll add…
Barrack Obama may be stuck in the 90′s, but at least it’s the 1990′s and not Ron Paul’s 1890′s.     

Is pretty much what I had to say.  I’ll add…

Barrack Obama may be stuck in the 90′s, but at least it’s the 1990′s and not Ron Paul’s 1890′s.

Stuck in the 1990s?  That doesn’t sound bad to me.  It needs some improvement, certainly.  Keep current advances in QUILTBAG rights.  Get things better organized to get proper universal healthcare.  

But I wouldn’t mind undoing a decade of aggressive war, anti-choice legislation, “homeland security” that is neither secure nor good for the homeland, tax cuts for the super-rich, unfunded wars driving up debt, and unconditional surrender to al-Quaida’s primary stated demand, for war between “The West” and “Islam.”  

Why are we sending 33% of our paycheck to washington so they can subsidize corn and start wars in counties none of us will ever likely visit?

Excuse me, but exactly how much money is your average American earning that their federal incomes tax is 33% of their gross income? I don’t pay near that much and I’m in the top 20% of income earners in a country with a higher marginal tax rate.

I call bullshit. At least get the maths right.

By fascinating coincidence, I, an average estadounidense, have a paystub right here. In a pay period where my gross earnings were $837.00, I paid $143.27 in total taxes. Seventeen percent and change. And I expect to get most of that back in a few weeks. I make rather less than the median income, but still.

Lori- Why do you think Coates should have banned me? because i’m a libertarian? that’s nice. I could care less that he did anyway it’s a dull site.

Let me clarify. I’m not saying the thing called libertarianism is the future, I mean in general the direction things are going is less government involvement and more freedom. obviously there are still going to be democrats and republicans and other types of people, but the internet is more libertarian than anything I think. it’s allows people to associate with people lke themselves but it’s freedom based and competition based.

and Ron Paul quite famsouly or infamously gains alot of support from the internet. he gets way more coverage here than on tv and in the newspaper. All his online supporters are not people who want to live in the 1890′s.

Also, I like how everyone has deflected attention away from he subjects of war and massive government spending and instead brought up the 1964 civil rights act. this is my poinnt: liberals don’t seem to care about these issues as much as they enjoy nostaligia for the 60′s and the 80′s when they had their biggest victories. Their foreign policy and economic policy ideas are muddled.

No one is trying to undo the civil rights act, many people are trying to bring us to war with iran and we haven’t even gotten to the bi partisan (jon Corzine, bob Rubin) shenanagins on wall street.

so that is why I support ron Paul, because the issues he talks about are immediate and pressing. the civil rights act is not immediate and pressing.

I think it’s because people don’t really know what the word “marginal” means, or how tax brackets work. That doesn’t stop them from having strong, vehement opinions about it, which is wonderful for our democracy, but it does make having conversations about somewhat confusing.

(If your federal income tax is literally 33% of your pay, someone is ripping you off somewhere, contact the state Attorney General).

I just did a little Googling and Excelling, and by my calculations anyone who can honestly say that they’re sending 33% of their paycheck to Washington has a taxable income of at least $1,150,000. Um.

I thought Ron Paul fans were supposed to be the brilliantly intelligent ones.

Ross- so you like the fact that the money you work so hard for is used to start wars and subsidize corn syrup? 

“Because I can do basic math, and know that if I had to separately pay for my roads, my schools, my fire protection, my police protection, to have my air cleaned enough to be able to breathe, to verify the safety of the food, drugs, and products I buy, to lay sidewalks where I might like to walk, to have my trash hauled away, if I had to pay private companies for all those things, it would cost pretty much every dime I make.”

most of those are paid for in your state and local taxes not federal. The federal income tax is basically a slush fund for the horrible ideas of McCain, hillary and co. the 5 counties in and around DC are richest in the nation.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/washington-d-c-area-now-richest-nation-191806412.html

your tax dollars go to lobbiests, military contractors, beaurocrats etc. they don’t go to roads or poor people. They got to wars and rich people.

edit: when they bother to spend money on roads and bridges! Across the country much of them are in terrible shape. Imagine that, we have a 4 trillion a year budget yet there isnt enough to have decent infrastructure.

buses aren’t private companies they are public and they certainly should not have been allowed to be segregated.

sgt peppers- There are other taxes than income tax too thuogh. sales tax, gas tax (which I’m not opposed to oviously it is used to upkeep the roads whoch you are using if you are buying gas) taxes on booze, cigarettes and the massive tax known as inflation.

He also did live-action training films for the army. Weird stuff, about the post-VE-day mission in germany, going on at great length with a lot of weird racial stuff about the intrinsic untrustworthiness of the german character, and the need to make sure we properly ground-down their fighting spirit before leaving, as germans were genetically predisposed to a pattern of war punctuated by “faking” a desire for peace.

This reminds me of my father’s stories, as a six-year-old in Germany after the war.

There were some people, particularly young men (teenagers), who wanted to fight on, to establish a resistance.  The general population was utterly ground-down (as Seuss describes) and my father remembers older men (grandfather-age) telling they young men they’d better not.  The men in between those ages, of course, were either dead or prisoners of war. 

My father was also clearly taught that, whatever he might think about the occupying forces, or whatever he might hear other people say, he had to be careful about what he repeated.  As far as the occupiers were to know, everything was fine, everyone was happy that they were here and that they were “liberated” and everyone was properly de-Nazified.  

Right at the end of the war, my father, his mother, and his siblings were all in areas captured by the Russians.  They moved fairly quickly thereafter to a US occupied area, because that was where my grandfather was a POW. This added another element to his post-war training.  No one was thrilled with the occupation.  But it was considered prudent to make Americans think that they were very happy, because there was the unspoken threat from the Americans that they could leave, and if that happened, it would be back to dealing with a Russian occupation.  Which meant starvation and wholesale murder and rape, rather than deprivation and the occasional murder or rape. 

But this wasn’t just a matter of “German character.”  No one likes having their homeland invaded and occupied.  

And the pragmatic cooperation that US occupying forces experienced shouldn’t be mistaken for enthusiastic consent.  ”It’s this or the Russians” was a powerful motivator for cooperation.  And it speaks not about US virtue, but about the desperation and desire for revenge that motivated Russian occupying troops.  

My father had a similar experience with post-war democracy.  From his perspective, it wasn’t quite democracy, but more a choice between US puppets.  You weren’t allowed to vote for Communists.  You weren’t allowed to vote for Nazis.  And you certainly weren’t allowed to vote for anyone who would take too strong a stand in favor of German interests over US interests.  (It was quite clear that the US occupation would prefer sanitized Nazis to pro-Soviet Communists.)  

***

These points are pretty important, when judging the success of US intervention in other, more recent, conflicts.  What US soldiers and US bureaucrats hear in the course of their work is not going to be what anyone really thinks.  It’s going to be whatever people think is the safest way to negotiate their way through the occupation without becoming a target either of the occupiers, for resisting, or of the resistance, for collaborating.   With a generous spoonful of collaborators saying what they think is most beneficial to say, in hopes of reward, and resistors saying whatever will keep them out of official trouble and able to consider resisting.  

And these points are also important to remember when trying to decide whether US intervention in a conflict can meet the standards of a “just war.”  

 
Lori- Why do you think Coates should have banned me? because i’m a libertarian?  

Of course not. I suspect it had more to do with you being ill-informed and offensive on issues of race. See for example: 

 so that is why I support ron Paul, because the issues he talks about are immediate and pressing. the civil rights act is not immediate and pressing.

Although considering your persistent refusal to even acknowledge the problems with Paul’s positions on reproductive rights (and by extension women) and QUILTBAG rights I suppose it could have been sexism or homophobia as easily as racism. 

 
Also, I like how everyone has deflected attention away from he subjects of war and massive government spending and instead brought up the 1964 civil rights act. this is my poinnt: liberals don’t seem to care about these issues as much as they enjoy nostaligia for the 60′s and the 80′s when they had their biggest victories. Their foreign policy and economic policy ideas are muddled.  

A) you are in no position to be getting on anyone else’s case for deflecting. 

B) Civil Rights are an ongoing issue. See again Paul’s desire for the federal government to force women to give birth and to keep consenting adults form getting married. What white male heterosexual hole do you live in that you don’t know that? Oh yeah, the almighty internet. For Pete’s sake, almost everyone is on the internet. Two thirds of Americans are on freakin’ Facebook. You and the rest of the Paul-bots aren’t half as special as you seem to think you are. Which brings us to this:

 I’m not saying the thing called libertarianism is the future, I mean in general the direction things are going is less government involvement and more freedom. obviously there are still going to be democrats and republicans and other types of people, but the internet is more libertarian than anything I think. it’s allows people to associate with people lke themselves but it’s freedom based and competition based.  

The internet isn’t libertarian, the internet is a tool. It can be used for freedom and competition, but it can also be used for repression and manipulation and monopoly. If you don’t understand that, and use the tool accordingly, at some point it’s going to bite you in the ass.

delete

lori- Okay i said

“so that is why I support ron Paul, because the issues he talks about are immediate and pressing. the civil rights act is not immediate and pressing.”

you found that offensive?? I’m sure if you looked at any poll as to why people are voting for who they are voting for war and the economy wuold be near the top and the 1964 civil rights act would not. How in the world is saying that offensive?

“Although considering your persistent refusal to even acknowledge the problems with Paul’s positions on reproductive rights ”

?? he’s pro life, like about half of the country. You think people should be banned from forums for being pro life? Harry reid is pro life.

“What white male heterosexual hole do you live in that you don’t know that?”

Okay. so we can go to war with Iran which will probably bring more catastrophic terrorism to our shores, default a la Greece and our currency can be debased till it’s an international joke. As long as we aren’t rascist.

“but it can also be used for repression and manipulation and monopoly.”

if it’s used by states yeah. or their corporate buddies.

You’re all for freedom, right, Chris? How can you support someone who insists on having the freedom to deny others freedoms such as whether and when to have a child?

?? he’s pro life, like about half of the country. You think people
should be banned from forums for being pro life? Harry reid is pro life.

No, she thinks Paul is a misogynist [redacted] for that. Not that people should be “banned from forums.” (well, inasmuch as I have any ability to collate her thoughts into a response here, so she can obviously correct or elaborate)

How in the world is saying that offensive?

It’s “ill-informed and offensive” (to quote all of the qualities it contains) because it pretends that civil rights are yay done with!
It’s offensive because you think civil rights are peachy keen and equal now. They aren’t.

Okay. so we can go to war with Iran which will probably bring more
catastrophic terrorism to our shores, default a la Greece and our
currency can be debased till it’s an international joke. As long as we
aren’t rascist.

Hooray for deflection!

and our currency can be debased till it’s an international joke.

Yeah! Let’s pick the guy who thinks we should let the free market decide legal tender laws! That will TOTALLY work!

The internet isn’t libertarian, the internet is a tool.

Are you sure the internet is the tool in this conversation?

Well first, He wants to leave it to the states, not outlaw abortion at the federal level.  There are lots of libertarians who are pro life and they would say what about the freedom of the child?

You can’t have freedom for the mother AND freedom for the child in that debate so some people see it one way and some see it another way. and again there are pro lifedemocrats too, the afformentioned harry reid, Bob Casey, the late John Murtha. was probably a few more somewhere.

And exactly what choices does a fetus have the ability to make?

That’s right. None. Abortion doesn’t change that any.

that’s your opinion. Obviously abortion is a big issue for you thus you could not support Ron Paul. That makes perfect sense.

and again there are pro lifedemocrats too, the afformentioned harry
reid, Bob Casey, the late John Murtha. was probably a few more
somewhere.

No one cares if there are pro-life Democrats. Seriously. It’s irrelevant. No one here decided to be pro-choice simply as a response to Republicans being pro-life.
It’s an awful lot more thought out than that.

So either you condescended to everyone here who is opposed to pro-life stances (thinking “but there are Democrats” would somehow make people see it as okay, disregarding anything relating to the ACTUAL IDEOLOGY behind the stance)–or you yourself function this way and determine your beliefs based on whether others who label themselves as you label yourself believe it, in which case you’re incomprehensibly idiotic.

 Look, everyone, a rare bird! A libertroll with more than one brain cell!

Well first, He wants to leave it to the states, not outlaw
abortion at the federal level.  There are lots of libertarians who are
pro life and they would say what about the freedom of the child?

He has said that, but his actions tell a different story. Ron Paul voted for a federal abortion ban twice (in 2000 and 2003) and actually introduced the (federal, of course) Sanctity of Life Act of 2007 that defined legal personhood as beginning at the point of conception. Ron Paul would like the states to ban abortion on their own but he’s been willing in the past — and not even in the distant past, but only a couple of years ago — to run roughshod all over states rights when it comes to abortion.

Most adults have been through a situation where two deeply held values (in this case, a belief in federalism vs. a moral opposition to abortion) came into conflict and they could only really satisfy one. I don’t envy being in Paul’s position here — unless federalism is his *only* moral value, chances are he was going to face this sort of crisis in his career sooner or later.

It is interesting, though, that Ron Paul made an exception to his general hardline federalism only for abortion. I personally think it’s because, while GOP voters can overlook a shaky record on civil rights for minorities or an open hostility to the welfare state, an avowedly pro-choice Republican (or even a pro-life Republican who fails to support any abortion ban) can never be elected President. If that’s the case, that would be a profoundly cynical calculation — and not something that you should expect from a candidate who is often exalted as being so much purer than ordinary politicians.

#4 (I had 3 posts before this — I guess we’ll see in what random order Disqus spits them out.)

“multinational peace keeping forces are an attempt at just war”

I think that there is a way for a multinational force to be more like police than soldiers.  Even within an Army, MPs operate differently than GIs.  The forces of the African Union seem to be acting like this, and also seem to be getting respect where they go.

#5

And now we see why he banned your ass.

Wait, so in your bitching about sending 33% of your paycheck to Washington you include inflation? What does Ron Paul think the government should do to keep inflation at 0%?

I mean in general the direction things are going is less government involvement and more freedom.

Evidence, please. For both claims separately (for one does not necessarily lead to the other)

He thinks they should bring back the gold standard. gold was 20 dollars an ounce for most of our countries history, now it’s 1600.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2011/10/Gold%20Coxe.jpg

^most forms of inflation aren’t quite as quantitative as this but it’s as good a good way to show the effects of money printing as any.

Some things haven’t gone up in prce at all but have gotten cheaper, like cheap stuff from China or subsidized corn syrup instead of sugar. the food is cheap but it’s not as good. the toys are cheaper but they fall apart.

I probably wouldn’t be “bitching” quite so much if the state was actually spending this stuff responsibly but they certainly aren’t. DC and thwe surrounding areas are crawling with super rich contractors and young men and women are on doing multiple tours in wars no one cares about while our infrastructure decays. I often hear liberals talk abuot how infrastructure spending would be good for the economy. Think abuot it though, whhy is it we need infrastructure spending, and we do by most estimates need massive amounts of it?

We have a 4 trillion dollar a year budget. You’d think we’d have AMAZING infrastructure (I’m paraphrasing Ross perot here) schools, etc

we have tons of debt AND the fed prints tons of money, yet none of this is going to basic stuff Americans need or even want. DC has it’s OWN interests.

sgt pepper’s -as for my remark about things becoming more libertarian I guess that was subjective and considering we can be detained indefinately now it was flat out wrong. touche!

I’ll assume you’re amenable to discussion, so –

1. Infrastructure spending.

For all the visible effects of road building the fact is that it’s lagging behind. Nobody says “oh, let’s stop spending the necessary money!” baldly like that, but maintenance gets delayed or put off longer than usual, etc. The visible effects are the generally shoddy and slapdash appearance of major highways in densely populated states. I remember driving through Los Angeles once and being a little surprised at how… kind of just tired the road looked. And I have no idea when the last major overhaul of its highway network occurred.

Another excellent example is actually the bridges in the USA. Fred Clark here has written of the need to get into a serious program to inspect, repair and if necessary replace all bridges in the nation.

So many young people have been pulled into finance or computers over the last generation that this has fundamentally distorted the American workforce in ways which have only now been noticeable – one of them being a lack of qualified engineers and workers who could be turned loose by the thousands to do the aforementioned bridgework.

You know how you hear people aren’t going into the trades to the point where we’re gonna have a shortage of plumbers and carpenters? It’s kind of like that, tip of the iceberg stuff.

Another example of the workforce distortion is a “trade” called a millwright. Basically millwrights are highly trained machinery repair people. That’s right – all the cranes and other heavy equipment needed to repair a bridge? They need someone to be around to fix them. Well, how many have been trained per year since the 1990s? Not enough, I’ll bet.

2. Political effects.

I don’t know if you know this, but the ARRA spending, due to federal-state relations, was offered subject to final refusal or acceptance by state governors. Guess what? Some Republican state governors actually refused the money.

Apparently they were more interested in scoring ideological purity points as opposed to actually helping their state’s residents. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!

So there’s infrastructure spending, all right, in that $4 trillion budget. The difficulty is that a good chunk of that has been military spending, which has the least jobs bang for the buck, and a lot of the money doesn’t go to actual soldiers (if it did, did you think there’d be all those stories about soldiers’ wives needing freakin’ food stamps and welfare?), it goes to contractors, individual or corporate, most of whom aren’t going to spend their $$ in the USA.

Another huge chunk of that spending is now paying the interest on the (resumed since Shrub took office) increase of the national debt. One of the advantage of balanced budgets is even if you make no effort to actively pay down national debt, what happens is that it goes down on its own, mainly because bonds come due and are repaid, and no new bonds get issued to replace the old ones. So the available stock of US government bonds was beginning to shrink in 1999 and 2000. Remember Al Gore crowing about being debt free by 2020?

That said, the national debt problem isn’t as big as it looks, if we keep in mind two potential weaknesses the post-WW2 economy did not have:

First, the post-WW2 US economy depended heavily (more than today) on heavy and light manufacturing, so just the existing stock of people and materials on hand sufficed to create a backbone, if you will, for projects like road, bridge and sewer maintenance.

Second, the US government wasn’t under the mistaken impression that the economic growth it was measuring was real.

As you can see, depending on how true you think the official statistics are and how much “massagijng” you think there’s been, the US economy may not be expanding in a way that would help ease the burden of the national debt. By contrast, post-WW2, the resulting economic expansion was much stronger and more enduring and this alone helped bolster government revenues and shrank the national debt as a function of the economy’s ability to pay for it.

The analogy would be if you held a mortgage and you got raises every year well beyond your ability to repay the debt, so that in percentage terms your debt burden became less and less.

Compare that to just treading water on your paycheck and finding that in percentage terms, your debt burden does not shrink very much.

Basically, even if the US national debt didn’t have another dollar added to it right now from borrowing, on the SGS Alternate Measure of GDP growth, your country’s economy is becoming less and less capable of generating the necessary income by means of provision of goods and services of which the government may tax, in order to pay for that debt.

Neither of the two above situations are irrecoverable, and indeed, were taxes raised right now, even your $10 trillion GDP would easily raise the necessary tax revenues to swing the budget out of deficit and into surplus.

Addendum by edit:

Post-WW2, in percentage terms, the debt run up during that war was even larger than it is today. So if your ancestors in the 1940s and 1950s could pay for that debt, this America can easily pay for this debt.

I agree with pretty much all of that except the last sentence because the government has shown it is not capable of spending on things it’s supposed to!

if they raised taxes AND ended the behaviour that created the situation you would be correct.

Also, Clinton was fiscally responsible don’t get me wrong, but we were playing with fire and it was abuot to hit us hard:

1. our nosing around in the middle east grew exponentially during the relatively unproblematic 80′s and 90′s.  

2. Since Greenspan began his tenure in 87 the “maestro” had been papering over recessions with inflation which would come back to haunt us in the housing bubble.

So Clinton was good but he was lucky too that the big problems that were bubbling under the surface didn’t manifest themselves during his tenure as president.

I mean, people have said Al Gore might have prevented 9/11 if he had been elected because he was more in tune with ….everything but I doubt he would have ended our presence in the middle east in any meaningful way, which is the catalyst for the muslim hatred of us, by and large.

 
you found that offensive??  

No. I found it a sign of the kind of ignorance that tends to produce offensiveness. 

I’m not even going to bother with the rest of your post because there’s no point. 

 
It is interesting, though, that Ron Paul made an exception to his general hardline federalism only for abortion.  

Actually, he’s also wiling to use federal power to keep the definition of marriage one man, one woman. 

I don’t think either his anti-choice/anti-woman stance or his anti-marriage equality stance are cynical political calculations. He’s held both those views consistently for a long time and voted accordingly, even when he was voting against other hard & fast GOP positions. AFAICT he really is a misogynist  homophobe who claims to be committed to Freedom! but really only cares about the freedom of rich white men. 

No one is trying to undo the civil rights act

That’s what all the ‘states’ rights’ talk is about. You have to be working hard at ignorance in order to miss that dogwhistle.

 That money mostly goes to things like highways and libraries and parks and fire and police.
if you want separate bills for each piece of government service, go find someplace and start your own country. Stop trying to mess up ours in the name of a failed political theory.

Yeah, the Paulbot vision of twenty-first century politics consists of telling me I should support the candidate who actively wants to make things worse for me and most of the people I care about because some internet commenter asserts that absolutely every other candidate inevitably will declare war on Iran, and also having supporters on the internet equals being The Candidate Of The Future except for the case of candidates who are not Ron Paul.

(I’m trying to think if I know any straight white men who are well-off enough that they don’t spend a lot of time seriously concerned about their ability to get a job, keep a job, or pay for their health care.  The only person I know who even comes close cares too much about his various friends and relatives who are poor, queer, female, sick, or otherwise likely to be screwed over by Ron Paul to support that crap.)

A lot of that debt is caused by Bush’s tax cuts. You cut taxes, you cut REVENUE. Which means that you have less money to spend, without actually cutting the major expenses (military hardware, mostly, and the insurance and pharma corps that get paid for Medicare). Get rid of the tax cuts that Bush put in, and a large chunk of deficit goes away. But that would mean that millionaires have to pay more in taxes, and big corporations would have to pay more in taxes, and [s] we can’t have that happening because they’re ‘job creators’. [/s]

Also: the idea of gold currency? Making two simplifying assumptions here, that gold is $600 an ounce and that an ounce is 30 grams, a dollar would be 50 milligrams in gold. Which is too small to deal with. (There also isn’t enough gold in the world to run the US economy on it.) Ron Paul is effing CLUELESS about economics.

if a gold standard is impossible how did we have it for so many years?

I’d also point out the reason it ended was not that there wasn’t enough gold.

(the reason was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock )

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation_Ancient.svg

Perhaps you could point to the period during which the USA was on the gold standard AND had zero or even near zero inflation?

(I’m trying to think if I know any straight white men who are well-off enough that they don’t spend a lot of time seriously concerned about their ability to get a job, keep a job, or pay for their health care.  The only person I know who even comes close cares too much about his various friends and relatives who are poor, queer, female, sick, or otherwise likely to be screwed over by Ron Paul to support that crap.)

“well off enough that they don’t spend a lot of time seriously concerned…” is a *lot* of money. We’re certainly not talking “working poor” or even middle class. Heck, there’s a lot of people who’d be classed as *rich* who are still one medical emergency or one “We have to do what’s best for our stock prices” away from a bad fall.

Actually, re Newt and his “Paychecks not food stamps” thing, if you’re well-off enough to be properly secure in this society we’ve built for ourselves, you *aren’t* someone who makes their money from a paycheck — you’re someone who makes the bulk of their money through investments and bonuses.

Gold buggery isn’t good for anyone except for people who got invested in gold. The fact that we have a fiat currency *is what allows the economy to grow*. In this country, we’ve got plenty of manufacturing capacity. We’ve got plenty of labor. The ONE THING that prevents us from turning that into a functioning economy is that no one has any MONEY (Well, not _no one_. One tenth of one percent. And they’re inclined to sit on it.).  Inflation is not what happens magically when you print money: it’s what happens when you have more money than your ability to produce goods and services. Going on the gold standard would *cripple* the ability of the economy to grow by making it impossible to create more money when it was needed. 

ross- again, its instructive that what you stated, which I disagree with obviously, is NOT the reason we went off the gold standard! We went off because apparent liberal hero Richard nixon decided to.
 
the price of gold was 20.67 for about a hundred years. So, it’s not much of an investment when you stick to a gold standard. and it’s not all that much of an investment when compared to Apple or Google or something.

going OFF the gold standard was the great boon to gold bugs.
 
Donalbain- the rate couldn’t be zero but if you look at the rate between a gold standard era andd a non the rate of inflation is much much higher in the latter.

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_08/images/silva051611a.gif

We went off because apparent liberal hero Richard nixon decided to.

Woah now. I hate when people call “Troll!” because it’s such a discussion ender. And once it’s called for some, it doesn’t matter whether the person called it is of a differing opinion or misguided or just ignorant or stupid or mannerless or anything (even right…though, for all that I disagree with using the troll label willy-nilly, that’s generally not one of the adjectives to apply to those given the label here). They are assumed to be disingenuous no matter what.

But…seriously….”liberal hero Richard Nixon”? What planet are you from?

Sidenote: apparently, Paul himself does not support the gold standard– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQmYfY3R7c
In fact, he suggests we ADD gold and silver as legal tender. Optionally. Until we eliminate paper money. Because having multiple unrelated forms of legitimate currency would…wtf? What kind of stupidity is THAT?

I would argue that there are three driving forces behind the persistent inflation of the 20th and 21st centuries.

1. Population growth is exponential. As such, until we “level off” we will always have a situation where demand exceeds supply by some small but finite amount. This means, inevitably, a positive inflation rate. The approximation can be made in the 18th century, by contrast, that population growth was negligible and as such, inflation would fluctuate about some value close to zero instead of being always positive.

2. A fundamental shift in the nature of income distribution in the 20th century. The Great Compression, as it has been dubbed, squashed the layers of the economic sandwich in a big way, by pushing up the poor and pushing down the rich. As a result, the buying power of a lot of people was massively increased. Tie this in with (1) above and you can see why we have a positive inflation rate generally. (EDIT: Also see here)

3. Monopoly pricing power has become widespread. With large multinational companies in effective control over the prices of many basic necessities, it is a given, that as John Kenneth Galbraith, that it is possible to have inflation and recession at the same time; companies don’t have to lower their prices as much if they aren’t subject to competitive pressures, even if they have to fire a lot of people to preserve the bottom line.

As you can see, none of this had anything to do or not with a gold standard or lack of it.

Sidenote: apparently, Paul himself does not support the gold standard– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
In
fact, he suggests we ADD gold and silver as legal tender. Optionally.
Until we eliminate paper money. Because having multiple unrelated forms
of legitimate currency would…wtf? What kind of stupidity is THAT?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallism

Bimetallic standard.

fangsfirst- my point was that Richard nixon ended the gold standard THUS he is a liberal hero. I realize he is not, it was in jest.

arguing for competing currencies is just a smoother way to bring back gold as currency. If you wnated to use the new currency you could or you could use the governments.

The bimetalic currency is okay but they ran into problems with it when they tried to dictate the vaue. They tied to use silver and gold interchangably as the same unit of money and of course, people horded the gold. It’s called Gresham’s law.

neutrino- inflation is a monetary phenomenon, everywhere and always. Your list is simply examples of your own political causes. There’s no causation there.

  arguing for competing currencies is just a smoother way to bring back gold as currency.   

Which is a completely ridiculous thing to do, smoothly or not. 

The fact that anyone, anywhere takes Paul’s gold buggery seriously will never stop amazing me. The notion of returning to the gold standard is one of those things that is such a clearly bad idea that until quite recently I figured no one other than Paul and a tiny group of his fellow cranks would ever even bother to discuss it. And yet here we are, it’s 2012 and we have people both patting themselves on the back for being clever internet folks and getting all excited about the gold standard. WTF? 

lori- we were on it from 1789 to 1971!  However, if you think nixon was a genius and  we’ve done so much better since then you shuld have no problem with competing currencies.You could choose the pieces of paper with the pictures on them backed by nothing and I could choose a similar piece ofpaper which I could trade in at anytime for gold. and we’ll see which is more popular.

To be fair, Nixon’s policies were decidedly eclectic and fundamentally self-serving, since he mainly intended them to keep him elected and re-elected. That said, he was not fundamentally opposed (as Reagan and successors were) to the basic postwar consensus regarding economic management, which is why some of his policies were liberal by today’s standards.

The fact that we did something in the past, even for a long time, doesn’t mean that it makes sense to do it now. 

Paper money is not backed by “nothing”. It’s backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, which does have value. If you’re going to say that’s not “real” value then gold is also a problem for you because it has very little inherent value. You get that, right?

 However, if you think nixon was a genius  

For the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster could you stop straining to be cute about Nixon? Thinking that going off the gold standard was the right thing to do has nothing to do with any sort of general assessment about Nixon. I assume you’re smart enough to at least grasp that, so enough already.  

.You could choose the pieces of paper with the pictures on them backed by nothing and I could choose a similar piece ofpaper which I could trade in at anytime for gold. and we’ll see which is more popular.   

You do realize that we had competing currencies in the past and it was a disaster, right? 

But…seriously….”liberal hero Richard Nixon”? What planet are you from?

Compared to the current crowd of dingbats the Republicans have been foisting on us, Nixon looks like FDR. 

You could choose the pieces of paper with the pictures on them backed by
nothing and I could choose a similar piece ofpaper which I could trade
in at anytime for gold. and we’ll see which is more popular.

Gold is obsolete.  In the future, the only universally valid currency will be Starbucks gift cards.

For a very large percentage of the population coffee does have more inherent value than gold. 

Would you like me to provide you with a list of other things which we and other civilizations did for periods of at least 182 years? Because I can make you look like a fucking moron.

lori- and the fact that we stopped doing something doesn’t mean we did so for a good reason. We went off the gold standard because of richard Nixon and the Vietnam war as described several posts above, not because of any of the various criticisms raised here.

“Paper money is not backed by “nothing”. It’s backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, which does have value. If you’re going to say that’s not “real” value then gold is also a problem for you because it has very little inherent value. ”

gold’s value is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. right now it’s 1600 dollars an ounce. anything is worth whatever anyone is willing to pay for it. if the United states went bankrupt tomorow it’s currency would be worthless. it would just be paper. and again, if you feel gold doesn’t have value you don’t have to buy into it. gold has been used as a medium of exchange for ages for various mundane reasons I agree it has no “inherent value”.

we are getting mired in the details of gold itself rather than the function of the gold standard. whagt it did was in prevented the currency from being inflated by the banks or the state for it’s own purposes. I dont’ care about gold, it’s not about gold. if they could find away to shackle themselves without it that would be fine but it doesn’t seem to exist. whenver they get the chance they debase it not just by us but thruoghout history. it’s what empires do.

Also, the argument that we have screwed up so bad that it would be too expensive now to go on a gold standard is a little ridiculous on it’s face for obvious reasons. It’s at it’s core an argument FOR the gold standard.

neutrino- “we’re all keynesians now”. then stagflation hit.

Ross- I’m not saying it was valid because we did it for that long I’m saying we were on it for most of our history so it’s not hugely outrageous to suggest we hop back on.

Also, getting away from gold battles for a second I think the problem with this non interventionist vs liberal foreign policy is that it doesn’t ackowledge that there is a huge almost total overlap on certai issues. Obviosly liberals don’t like Pat Buchanan and they don’t like ron paul much either, but both mens opposition to the iraq war were very similar to thsoe from the left. They didn’t have some completely other logic or rhetoric abuot those opinions. I won’t post Buchanan’s “who war?” or Pauls floor speeches but sufficet to say if you read or seen either you know what I’m talking abuot.

All you have to do is change how many dollars per ounce of gold. That effectively allows inflation if the amount goes up, or deflation if the amount goes down. Don’t kid yourself.

I think the problem with this non interventionist vs liberal foreign
policy is that it doesn’t ackowledge that there is a huge almost total
overlap on certai issues. Obviosly liberals don’t like Pat Buchanan and
they don’t like ron paul much either, but both mens opposition to the
iraq war were very similar to thsoe from the left.

So?  Yay, RONPAUL! was opposed to Bush’s war.  That doesn’t make the rest of his policies any less ridiculous or terrifying.

consumer- I understand that. I’m just saying there isn’t much difference in terms of rheotoric and so forth between a dennis kucinich anti iraq war house floor statemetn and a Ron Paul one. there isn’t right wing being anti war and left wing being anti war. and it’s not because Paul and Buchanan are like hip or something. if you look at what republicans said in opposition to various Clinton interventions it douns very much like what democrats said a few years later in iraq.  and the Seuss illustrations and so forth get this all dangerously close to neoconservative chicken hawk type editorializing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation.svg

Um, you do know that gold bubbles exist, right?  Like the one going on right now?  Or the one that happened in 1981?  Or Gould and Fisk’s little escapade in 1869?

Also, stagflation was caused by one simple thing: two supply shocks in oil brought about by the OPEC embargo and the Iranian revolution.  As you might have noticed, both shocks were due to political decisions made outside of US control.  Stagflation was not some crisis of Keynesian economics.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2011/10/Gold%20Coxe.jpg

^ Turcano gold is simply responding to the low interest rates that have been on full blast since 2000.

We had bad inflation in the 70′s which gave rise to higher gold prices. if we had another Paul Volcker who came along now and raised interest rates the price of gold would go way down. that would be fine with me.

I’m not arguing in favor of gold as an awesome investment! I’m for shackling the fiscal “freedom” of the state and gold standard has historically been a good way.

you don’t think stagflation was SOMEWHAT of a crisis of keynesian economics? it was supposed to be impossible.

neutrino – look at page 4 of your second link.

This whole gold standard conversation is so stupid that I’m about to become really unpleasant about it and I’d rather not, so I’ll let someone else comment on the value of gold after the US goes bankrupt and just move on to the other point you raise. 

 
Obviosly liberals don’t like Pat Buchanan and they don’t like ron paul much either, but both mens opposition to the iraq war were very similar to thsoe from the left. They didn’t have some completely other logic or rhetoric abuot those opinions.  

A. The Left was not all of one mind about the Iraq war. 

B. Paul’s reasons for opposing the war actually aren’t that similar to those of many folks on the Left who opposed the war. Paul is an isolationist, in large part due to his loathing of federal power. The closest match on the Left would probably be to pacifists, although even there the match is obviously not perfect. It’s also important to keep in mind that, contrary to tales told by the Right, not everyone on the Left is a pacifist. There is a huge difference between “I oppose all wars” and “I oppose this war”. The overlap in goal in this one case does not mean that Paul’s foreign policy is something that those on the Left should embrace. 

I don’t entirely blame you for not seeing that this is a critical difference. Unfortunately, plenty of Progressive can’t keep it straight either. That failure is at the heart of what Gary Weiss at Salon amusingly called “Progressive beer goggles for Ron Paul”. Hopefully when this clown car primary is over folks will sober up and we won’t have to keep talking about this. 

lori- “Paul’s reasons for opposing the war actually aren’t that similar to those of many folks on the Left who opposed the war.”

can you cite examples?

It’s conjecture on your part. You havent listened to or read pauls floor statements or arguments against the Iraq war. or Buchanan’s. Theirs was a principled humane opposition to iraq. They were right, so were Kennedy and Kucinich. stop trying to spin it as isolationist or republican.

 and on the other hand Someone being pro choice and pro gay marriage but voted for the Iraq war still did the wrong thing.  Their enlightened attitudes are of very little comfort to those who are killed and maimed by our drones and bullets.

The point about gold bubbles is that switching to the gold standard won’t fix stability, and will in fact allow private parties to screw with monetary value instead of the government.  I included the Gould-Fisk gold corner for a reason, and I’ll remind you that that happened at a time when this country was on the gold standard.  Moreover, you need a certain amount of inflation anyway to keep up with population growth or risk de facto deflation.

Earlier Keynesian economics didn’t account for the possibility of stagflation because it did not distinguish between demand-pull inflation and cost-push inflation, largely because cost-push inflation had never been seen before.  The theory was refined to account for it after it happened, like all scientific progress.

there would have been no black friday if lincoln hadn’t suspended convertability. I gott a go more later

 
You havent listened to or read pauls floor statements or arguments against the Iraq war. or Buchanan’s. Theirs was a principled humane opposition to iraq.  

You don’t know what I have or have not done. I’ve seen Paul’s statements about the war. Not only did I live through that period (it wasn’t that long ago) you’re not the Paul supporter to wave them in my face. Paul’s statements about the Iraq war were fine, but when you go below the surface the principles they’re rooted in aren’t the same principles that caused me to oppose the war. Trying to tell me that they are is not going to get you anywhere. 

we have tons of debt AND the fed prints tons of money, yet none of this is going to basic stuff Americans need or even want.

Oh really? None? Hyperbole hasn’t served you well so far.

This gold standard stuff is all very exciting but I’m still unclear as to how Ron Paul will save America’s health and public education systems from being the shame of the developed world. Draw me a map?

Earlier Keynesian economics didn’t account for the possibility of
stagflation because it did not distinguish between demand-pull inflation
and cost-push inflation, largely because cost-push inflation had never
been seen before.

I wouildn’t say they “had never seen it before”, exactly.

It’s just that it went under a different name: They called it a price-wage spiral, and I’ve seen texts on wage and price controls from the 1950s that recognized that a situation could exist of limited supply (brought about by government intervention in wartime) triggering off an inflationary episode of prices dragging wages up as both went round and round.

I would call it more of a blind spot among American Keynesian economists that had to with failing to recognize, in a word, institutions outside the US. Failing to recognize that along with monopoly pricing power by companies there could be monopoly pricing power by states or quasi-states in a major commodity.

The textbook response was to use wage and price controls, but the crucial difference here is that the US government itself was not the agency generating the inflationary spasms of the 1970s. It was OPEC, in collusion with oil companies*, and as a result they had no interest in cooperating in ways to damp out the initial inflationary shock.

Contrast this with WW2 controls, in which the US government itself was generating the inflationary cycle and could adjust the entire US economy and the apparatus of wage and price controls to compensate.

The supply-siders were just extremely wildly hyperbolic about what their theories could accomplish, but the basic idea of trying to expand supply relative to demand is not something that is inimical to the teachings of Keynesian economics in some sort of fundamental way.

—

* who do you think maintained all the technical infrastructure? Sure wasn’t the locals.

so they have a working theory on the economy and something happens and they change it? that doesn’t sound like much of a system. How do we know the stuff they are prescribing now won’t also be re evaluated after it fails? Eveything in Human Action applies as well today as tomorrow or yesterday.

sgt pepper’s-I don’t know exactly how to make a map. I don’t want to just throw some links at you.

here’s one http://mises.org/daily/3643 this is how a free market in health care would work.

I agree with your assessment of the schools and healthcare. I don’t think government schools or healthcare is the solution because I think those things aren’t being prioritized by them now. to kind of paraphrase various people, if our schools were an airplane I wouldn’t fly on it.

 http://mises.org/daily/3643 this is how a free market in health care would work.

That link says that we should go to surgeons without any idea of whether the person cutting us up knows our gallbladder from our spleen. That link says we should eat food without any idea of what is in it. That link says anyone with a nasty health condition should be uninsurable. That link says anyone with a nasty health condition should get no help with medical expenses.

That link is abhorrent.

ellie- yeah it’s great isn’t it. Seriously we are getting way off topic here.

Topic? What topic? This is SLACKTIVIST!

Seriously, though, if your argument in favor of Ron Paul is that President Paul will institute a “free”-market health care system, all sensible people must band together to keep there from ever being a President Paul.

cuz what we have now is so awesome.

edit: I just saw a john Hunstman ad on tv

Yeah, what we’ve got sucks compared to Canadian health care and the UK’s NHS. No argument there.

I don’t think systems like that would work here but they are mostly better than ours. America is a different sort of place. Yeah, our system is basically the worst of both words in terms of the free market and governmetn intervention and that apllies not just to healthcare. it’s a bunch of corporatized nonsense.

“America is ~different~ and ~special~!”

I knew you were going to say that.

I’ve gotten it from other Internet Libertarians who all but concede the points made by liberals in every other respect.

America is a different sort of place.

How?

In what ways is America different?

Please be specific.

I often hear this tedious talking point, but never have I seen a convincing explanation of how America is so different that what works for every other developed nation will necessarily fail in America. In fact usually when I hear this it comes from someone who hasn’t got the faintest fucking clue how other countries operate, and has never been outside of the USA.

I have to admit, there’s a stunning level of stupidity there. My favorite part was the suggestion that the reason people get sick or injured is because they can get treated at a hospital for that. Wouldn’t that imply that the government could eliminate cancer if it imposed a ten billion dollar tax penalty to anyone who develops the disease? I mean, if this is true:

Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more
of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased
promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such
subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives

If subsidies “encourage” people to be be ill and diseased, then a levy should discourage that, right?

This is what happens when you spend too much time working for a rightwing think tank/echo chamber and not enough time actually living and working with people who don’t have that kind of resource.

Seriously, that has got to be the shittiest plan to reform health care I’ve ever seen. Generally, when I read these things, I can usually find one or two points that sound sort of okay (or at least understandable) but that idea is just unbelievably awful, in every conceivable aspect. Hadrick doesn’t even bother defending it, just posting the link and pointing out that the current system isn’t very good. Well, at least under the current system I’m reasonably confident that the doctors at the nearby hospital are at least familiar with the concept of medicine.

Charity- I can defend it all day. She wanted a map for how liberty would work and it was the first thing that came ot my mind because no aspect of it is reliant upon the government. it’s all private.
 
I’ve been defending my ideas for 4 pages of this and everyone is tired of me, I didn’t want to open a can of worms with the healthcare thing but i will go into it if you’d like.
 
that last section may appear harsh but on the whole its very humane.
 
and the point is not to go to people who don’t know what they’re doing. That’s where the market comes in.  
 
” Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market.
 
Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing — if health-care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.
”
 

Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing — if health-care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing — if health-care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.

So under this system, consumers are supposed to determine for themselves which accreditation agencies are licensing people who actually know medicine. And if they can’t afford a competent doctor, that’s just too bad, amiright? They just didn’t provide enough worship to the Holy Trinity–Paul, Rand and the Free Market.

This gold standard stuff is all very exciting
but I’m still unclear as to how Ron Paul will save America’s
health and public education systems
from
being the shame of the developed world.
Draw me a map?

Oh, that’s easy – the poor and the stupid will die, so the surviving population will be the healthy and smart ones!  PROBLEM SOLVED!

@facebook-100002974813787:disqus There is another, perhaps better known way to phrase the sentiment “Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more 
of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased 
promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such 
subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives”.  It’s this:

If they had rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population

I often hear this tedious talking point, but never have I seen a
convincing explanation of how America is so different that what works
for every other developed nation will necessarily fail in America.

Oh, that’s easy to explain.

What works in Europe won’t work in America because our Beloved Corporate Overlords and their government lackeys will burn this country to the ground before they’ll give up their revenue-streams.

I wish I thought I was joking.

It may very well be.  That is the scientific method.  When Einstein showed that Newtonian mechanics couldn’t account for everything in the known universe, nobody outside the ever-present handful of crackpots said, “Well this is all rubbish; let’s go back to Aristotle.”  But biology and economics are the only hard sciences that have to put up with this kind of shit from large numbers of the general populace, and apparently for similar reasons.

I’ve been defending my ideas for 4 pages of this and everyone is tired of me,

No, no, not at all.  Do go on.

But stop quoting that same chart at the bottom of every post, willya?

Economics is a “hard science”?  It seems more like a theology to me.

One with a major denomination that requires human sacrifice, at that.

I was going to ask that seriously. I didn’t think economics would be considered a hard science?

Economics is at or near the dividing line between hard science and social science, but economic data is more easily quantifiable than most social sciences.

Sigh. I made this point to the fighter of freedom a year or so ago with graphs and links and everything but I’m gonna have to go for the short version today: what you have now is indeed pretty shitty for a developed country. For the world’s richest country, as I said before, it’s embarrassing and shameful.

Heads up: The problem really isn’t that America is too left wing. Your health and education systems are more privatised than in most other developed countries, whose outcomes are better. America is arguably the most capitalist nation on earth. You’re telling me that becoming even more so will drag you back towards the standards of countries in which education and health care are largely controlled by government.

Again, some one please explain why Ron Paul supporters claim to be the intellectual elite of the Republican Party?

She wanted a map for how liberty would work

Actually, I asked for a map showing how Ron Paul’s (and your) libertarian philosophy would provide decent health care and education to US society. Libertarianism and liberty are NOT the same thing.

You think this is a scarcely relevant sidetrack, but the reason I asked is that I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about “freedom from taxes” and other privileged bullshit if a society can’t take care of the basic needs of its citizens.

Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market.

Show me some evidence. There’s a whole world out there where every different idea you’ve pulled out have been tested. They don’t work. Prove to me that they do.

Frex, I had a whole debate with Freedom Fighter some time ago about the effect of fee subsidies on the availability and cost of higher education. Short version: out here in NotAmerica, privatisation makes education more expensive. Lots more. And no better quality.

Show me where health care deregulation has led to almost instant increase in supply and fall in cost. Cos at the moment I see my health care in my semi-regulated country costing vastly, vastly less than yours in your private enterprise state.

That plan you linked to describes exactly what I fear from a libertarian health care system.  Lots of sick people being left to die because they can’t work or can’t afford life-saving treatment, and everyone who can spend money being offered an array of unregulated food and drugs, with unregulated doctors.  And everyone who suffers under that system being told “It’s your own fault really.  You’re sick/starving/dying because you’re just not good enough!” 

It seems to be a rule among people of certain political views that any government flaws negate anything good about the government, so if there are any wasteful or damaging programs, the good stuff doesn’t count in some undefined way.

Weirdly, the same people often act as if anything bad about the government negates everything bad about corporations, and “Yeah, well what about corn subsidies?” is an effective counterargument for every single criticism of the damage that unchecked corporate power can do.

Gah. I wrote a whole thing but it disappeared DAMN YOU DISQUS!*

*Hey, shouldn’t the market have designed perfect web stuff by now?

Shorter version: the stuff behind that link is intellectually pissweak, but worse it is evil. The guy says that the weakest, most vulnerable members of society should be left to die.

I hope you’re some upper middle class 19 year old who thinks he’s clever. Because dumb is not irreversible. Many of us are dumb about stuff for a time but hopefully we grow through it. But evil tends to reinforce itself.

Chris, maybe no one has told you before that this stuff is evil. You need to hear it and you need to think very carefully. If you want to walk away from it there are people who will be happy to help you, and you’ll make better friends than you lose. But you need to know that these ideas are evil.

Economics invovles math, therefore people have been conned into believing it is a hard science. 

In fact, economics is sort of science the way conservatives do science: you start with a theory that you like, and you make the data fit it. If the data does not naturally fit it, you massage the data until it does. And then you find someone who stands to gain from people believing your interpretation, and you ask for a grant.

But here’s the best quote I’ve ever seen about the science of economics: (via Jake Romero via Mike the Mad Biologist. Mike’s commentary is probably more succinct than the original, but the poetry of the original is really something.)

 In theory, economics is a science. In reality, economics is a science the way Ayn Rand is a literary luminary

Economics is, at its core, more like game-theory-the-mathematics mixed with game-theory-the-theory-of-making-board-games. It’s about generating models of how a hypothetical kind of creature (Mad Mike calls them “Homo Economicus”, probably borrowing from someone else)  which is almost but not _quite_ entirely unlike real live human beings will behave in a hypothetical situation which is almost but not _quite_ entirely unlike the reality in which we find ourselves.

But it models those unreal beings in that unreal scenario SO accurately that, like a kind of more realistic and less funny Mazes & Monsters, some of the players become convinced that their fantasy football wall street league is in fact reality, and then they go on a dangerous default swap spree that ends with Tom Hanks being institutionalized and the rest of us in the poor house.

Economics invovles math, therefore people have been conned into believing it is a hard science.

So does numerology…

Don’t you know that you’re never supposed to look at the results to judge the validity of libertarian plans, because the results will always lead you to make a non-libertarian decision? 

But seriously, pretty much all of my libertarian friends* use the same line of reasoning: It doesn’t matter that libertarian policies would fail to protect the hindmost, because the instant they were enacted, the economy would go into an instant permanent super-boom the likes of which had never been seen before, and suddenly, everyone would become so fantastically rich that the whole “Basically, if you’re not rich, you are completely and totally fucked in every possibly way,” thing would never come into play.

(* Except one. There’s one who is very honest and says “Yes, a lot of people get screwed. But those people aren’t me, and most people are terrible and deserve to get screwed.”  I respect his honesty.)

“So under this system, consumers are supposed to determine for themselves which accreditation agencies are licensing people who actually know medicine. And if they can’t afford a competent doctor, that’s just too bad, amiright? They just didn’t provide enough worship to the Holy Trinity–Paul, Rand and the Free Market.”

They can rely on charity which will be uncoerced unlike now. and probabnly alot more prevelent. higher taxes tends to lower the amount given to charities.

No.. I showed you the graph that was relevant. At what point in US history was there NEAR zero inflation and a gold standard. Please answer THAT question.

donalbain- did you see this chart?

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_08/images/silva051611a.gif

They can rely on charity which will be uncoerced unlike now. and proabnly alot more prevelent. (Emphasis mine)

“Probably’ is the key word there. Do you actually have any evidence to support the claim that, in the absence of taxes, people will instead donate larger amounts to charity?

You also haven’t answered the question of how people are supposed to know if a doctor is competent or not without regulated licensing agencies.

thats how all markets work, everywhere. You can’t artificially lower prices for long. the only way
to lower prices is to have more of the good and more competition for scarce dollars. healthcare, soda, whatever.
Citation needed.

He can’t. Ron Paul can’t do anything that will fix the mess we’re in.

al- it’s self evident. Why do prices come down. as others have noted, if some huge amount of gold was discovered the price of gold would go down. If there were no competition in mining and there was only a few companies that were allowed to mine there wold be all sorts of problems, they would be able to drive the price up via cartel. Unless they were really sharp they would likely not have the ability to go everywhere they need to to find new discoveries.

re: medical agencies. how do people know things are good now? reputation and the licensing agencies which have the power of law behind them but that certainly doesn’t elminate malpractice. Look sat the SEC, what they say doesn’t hold much water post madoff. In a free market they would have been driven out of business.

If there was somehow no governemnt, would you not go to the doctor? forget wether libertarian healthcare is better or worse. how would you seek to remedy an ailment if the current system didn’t exist? that’s the idea here, rebuild logically from the grtound up.

 When the gold standard was officially ended  – it had ended in practice long before that – the price was still fixed at $35 an ounce. That was, if I remember correctly, one of the main reasons why the price-fix ended: it was way lower than actual market price for gold.
I seem to remember, from my history classes, that the gold-backed certificates of deposit (aka paper money actually redeemable in gold) were recalled by the government in the 1930s. IOW: FDR, not Nixon.

BWAHAHAHAHA!

The market for soda isn’t driven by massive information asymmetries.

The market for health care is.

That’s just one issue: the idealized model of the market works when buyer and seller have the same information. Joseph Stiglitz, among others. demonstrated this effect.

In the case of soda, the exact production method may be a trade secret, but it’s pretty easy to figure out that Coke tastes a certain way, comes in a certain kind of container, and costs $x. Pepsi tastes different (ish), comes in a different kind of container, and costs $y. I mean, you don’t need much more information besdies “It tastes good” or “bleccch”.

That’s really all it boils down do, and for soda drinks, you can pretty much take it or leave it unless you’re reeaaaallly thirsty and need a drink. But barring gouging a can still costs around $x, and the market, aside from food safety regs, pretty much can run itself with competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Health – you can’t take it or leave it. If you fall ill or a part of your body doesn’t work anymore, you can either hope it gets better on its own (not recommended) or you can see someone who has spent years studying the human body and its maladies.

This is the driver of the information asymmetry in health care, among other factors. You can’t possibly self-diagnose with the same degree of confidence that a doctor or other health professional can. You don’t have the $200,000 MRI, the fully equipped blood test lab, the X-ray technicians, the… (insert long list here).

Left to the free market, this ends up being what economists call a market failure. The competition is ill-defined and vague, and there’s no simple basis on which to distinguish one doctor from another because the pricing is highly uncertain and highly variable.

This is why governments have stepped in and created a rare case of monopsony buying power as the corrective measure. By, in effect, creating a single payer to a wide variety of medical professionals, the government, with its own well-staffed research people, can determine the true cost structure of providing medicine, and can name the pricing schedule for various treatment procedures.

This is the origin of the Canadian health insurance system: single-payer health insurance.

I can choose my own doctor.

I can go to any hospital (though the closest one is usually better for obvious reasons!)

I am not “rationed” any health care in any true sense.

For most basic medical procedures, such as the ones I’ve had to undergo, the wait time has been minimal. I can literally walk into a clinic and be out inside of an hour – most of that being the standard “sit around and wait for the doc to finish writing up paperwork in the arcane script of the profession so he or she can get to you next” kind of thing.

There’s really no magic voodoo to the Canadian system. No jackbooted thugs at my door demanding I see a certain doctor at gunpoint. No special little card (I’ve seen some people in the states who are on HMOs get one) indicating which doctors in the city I may see to be eligible for treatment. Et cetera and so forth.

No, the system’s not perfect, but the long wait times you hear about are usually the result of provincial governments who thought they could pinch pennies and ended up looking very pound foolish. With proper and stable funding levels the system works quite well.

And not all pacifists are isolationists, either.
Our current Paulista isn’t actually paying attention to anything being said: it’s just a matter of getting a keyword for a talking point that can be pasted in to a new comment.

 Yeah. Right.
Provide real-world verifiable examples of this ACTUALLY happening.
Otherwise it’s all bullshit.

PJ evans- they actually required people to hand over their gold. pretty scary stuff. confiscating pieces of metal from people!

al- http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/26/charities-skeptical-obamas-proposed-tax-change/O

sorry for the FOX link but it was the best article. not only does raising taxes make giving to charity less likely but they want to lower the deduction you get.  There is a balance, practicaly speaking, between taxes and revenue but disincentivizing charitable giving at a moment when you have 48 million people living below the poverty line is terrible.

if some huge amount of gold was discovered
Major assumption, requiring suspension of disbelief: it’s like the assumption that there are major oil fields that haven’t yet been discovered that will somehow instantly reduce prices.

forget wether libertarian healthcare is better or worse
No. You’re the one who’s claiming that libertarians have better ways of doiing everything including healthcare. You brought it up, you have to provide the convincing arguments. Which, so far, seem to be all handwaving.

They can rely on charity which will be uncoerced unlike now. and probabnly alot more prevelent.

Do you have any evidence that it would increase enough to help all of the people who’d lose their access to health care (and in some cases, their entire income)?  And no, assertions and libertarian theory are not evidence. 

Also, I’d have a lot of concerns about charity being used for coercive purposes by religious groups who would be well-positioned to tell starving people “Join us and follow all of our rules if you want your kids to have dinner.”

if the governmet has less power there is less for them to lobby for and
less handouts for them to recieve. thats a much better way to stop
corrupotion than a bunch of anti corruption laws that no one will
follow. They haven’t been proven to work anyway.

Anti-corruption laws don’t work perfectly.  Neither, based on historic evidence, does having a smaller government.  The Gilded Age had a much smaller government than the present era, and historically, that era wasn’t known for a lack of corporate power over the lives of every day people.  Based on what I’ve seen of history, it seems that the imperfect success of regulations is better for ordinary people in matters such as “Your food is made of actual food and efforts have been made to minimize the amount of diseases and shit it contains” and “Buisnessmen are no longer allowed to force boys to climb chimneys until they either choke to death on soot or reach adulthood and die of cancer”. 

neutrino- so what if you had a doctor who cheated all the way through medical school and was actually terrible. what would happen to that person? they would get sued and or their reputation would be so bad no one would go to them.

“If you fall ill or a part of your body doesn’t work anymore, you can either hope it gets better on its own (not recommended) or you can see someone who has spent years studying the human body and its maladies.”

getting close to a labor theory of value there. obviosuly you want someone with experience but as in the above example putting the time in doesnt mean you are a good doctor thoughI’m sure this is a very strong correlation don’t get me wrong. The problem is the costs with having fewer doctors because of this. it makes their services more rare and thus more expensive.

I gotta go for now thanks for the responses guys and girls

If there was somehow no governemnt, would you not go to the doctor?
forget wether libertarian healthcare is better or worse. how would you
seek to remedy an ailment if the current system didn’t exist?

If there was no government, there is a good chance I simply wouldn’t be able to pay to a doctor, or safely travel to one, and would rely on the “Rest and hope it gets better on its own” approach to medical problems (which works well for most things when one is basically healthy, however will occasionally lead to either a severe problem going untreated, or something that my healthy immune system can easily shake off being spread to people who can’t recover from it nearly as well). 

If there was no government, it was safe for me to travel, and I somehow had a way of paying for it, I would go to whatever doctor I’d heard was good.  Without government regulation, this would read to a substantially increased risk of me falling into the hands of a dangerously incompetent doctor and suffering severe injury or death while seeking medical care.  Why would I want this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

I’m not sure you’ve even really tried to address the points I’ve made regarding why Libertarian concepts of how the health care sector should operate end up having issues that would only magnify the problems extant in the US health care system as it is currently constituted.

They can rely on charity which will be uncoerced unlike now. and
probabnly alot more prevelent. higher taxes tends to lower the amount
given to charities.

BRB LOL HISTORYFAIL

current events fail, too.

Assertions being made with NO evidence to support them, and hse still hasn’t figured out that saying something is so doesn’t make it that way.
Assumptions being made about what people would do if the world were run by libertarian principles doesn’t mean anything when the world is NOT run by libertarian principles, and never has been.
(yep, history FAIL.)

 Your repeated attachment of the same charts is not impressing us. It’s attachment-spam at this point.

I’m not sure it’s Chris Hadrick’s fault at this point. Disqus somehow attached to one of my posts an old image, so it could be a hiccup in the software.

PJ- I can’t figure out how to detach the charts sorry. as for evidence, these are basic economic laws. Yu want me to cite examples of when something became cheaper via competition and increasing the quanitity? cell phones, computers. or that people tend to buy things when they are cheaper? sales are a good example. am i answering your question.
 
Ellie -http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/26/charities-skeptical-obamas-proposed-tax-change/O

Obviosuly if you have less money to spend you will have less to give to charity. and making the deduction less also reduces incentive to give.

neutrino- and unlike nixon FDR IS a genuine liberal hero.

You notice how libertarians tend to sound a lot like Marxists with their whole “If we could just get the economy run in this particular way, everything would be better!  What, you say that when it was tried in the past, things became worse?  But that’s not the Real True version!  The Real True version would make everything better because my theory says so!” thing?

NOt if there was chaos out there how would you go to the doctor.

Ah, so you’re not talking about a realistic no-government situation like Somalia, but a purely imaginary libertarian version.

So Im saying what do you look for in a physician. How does the
government or the AMA determine what is a good physician and how is it
not possible for private companies to do the same thing??

What I want in a physician is someone who follows good medical practices.  And I don’t know how to tell if a doctor is doing that or not, because it requires specializes knowledge and education to figure that out.  It requires a lot of information, and if I was going to spend the time (and money) necessary to acquire all of the available information, get the education to help me understand it, and process it to judge how well physicians are doing by those standards, I wouldn’t be able to hold another job.

Now I could hire a private company to review these standards for me, but there’s one problem with that.  Private companies exist to make as much money as possible, which significantly biases the results.  If there is more money in feeding me bad information than in feeding me good information, they will feed me bad information and keep taking my money as I get sicker and sicker.

Now in Magical Libertarian Land, I’m assuming some unspecified mechanism would prevent businesses from forming trusts (as they historically did when the government didn’t stop them), so there’s always free market competition to eventually put the bad organizations out of business.  Which means I die of poor medical care, my family sues the company and loses because they can’t afford the high-powered legal representation the big company can pay for, the gradual accumulation of bad publicity may eventually drive customers away and if everyone’s lucky, a few decades after I die, that particular business will end.  (But, of course, new bad ones will keep springing up, because between the time of founding the company and the time of going out of business, there is a big pile of money to be made.)

I still prefer the government version.

Suppose I accept your premise that lower taxes means more money in the charitable-donation budget. (I don’t, but suppose I do.) What do you intend to do to protect the religious freedom of the atheist or Muslim or Pagan who finds herself reliant for food not on food stamps (because lower taxes means less money to fund food stamps) but on local Christian organizations, all of whom insist she convert to Christianity before they feed her?

 Okay, but there should be a way to fix it.

 Oh yeah. It’s magical thinking. ‘Just believe harder, and everything will work the way we think it should.’

 
She wanted a map for how liberty would work and it was the first thing that came ot my mind because no aspect of it is reliant upon the government. it’s all private.   

I absence of government =/= any meaningful liberty for the vast majority of people. This is the fundamental error on which all your other errors rest. 

They can rely on charity which will be uncoerced unlike now. and probabnly alot more prevelent. higher taxes tends to lower the amount given to charities.

That’s not true. That’s actually the polar OPPOSITE of true.

the point abuot not subsidizing something because when you do you tend to get more of it. If healthcare was free, i would go to the hospital mcuh mroe than I do now for any little thing. 

That’s also not true.

Look, I like cars and computers and video games and porn. If those things were free, I’d accumulate an unbounded number of them.

Even if it were free, I would not hop up and say “Hey, I’m not doing anything tonight, Ithink I’ll go get a couple of colonoscopies. I know I had three last week, but heck, it’s free.”

 
 I mean, you don’t need much more information besdies “It tastes good” or “bleccch”.  

Actually, you need at least one other piece of information—is it poison? The government takes care of that now. In Libertopia I guess we’ll all have to have our own testing kits or we’ll have to pay an enormous premium to purchase soda from a “trusted seller” who can verify that the drinks are safe. For those can’t or won’t pay the extra charge soda will become just like illegal drugs are now—a total crap shoot where adulterating agents are probably responsible for as much or more harm than the drugs themselves. 

At that point (some) people will look at poor soda drinkers the same way (some) people look at drug users now—they deserve what they get and if they die no one ought to really care. 

That sucks badly enough, but at least soda, like street drugs, is an optional consumable. As you said, health care isn’t optional. The Libertarian view about incentivizing people to live healthy lives assumes that all illness is fundamentally within human control. If you just live right you’ll never get sick. I have no idea why how someone manages to reach adulthood without knowing that that’s superstitious nonsense, but it’s really tiresome hearing it come from people who are patting themselves on the back about how smart they are. 

Chris: if some huge amount of gold was discovered

P J: Major assumption, requiring suspension of disbelief: it’s like the assumption that there are major oil fields that haven’t yet been discovered that will somehow instantly reduce prices.  

It also assumes that new gold finds would be allowed to effect the market, which isn’t necessarily true. Look at how long the diamond cartels have been able to keep prices artificially high for something that isn’t actually all that rare. The government is not to blame for that and getting rid of the government wouldn’t fix it.

ako- “Now I could hire a private company to review these standards for me, but there’s one problem with that. Private companies exist to make as much money as possible, which significantly biases the results. If there is more money in feeding me bad information than in feeding me good information, they will feed me bad information and keep taking my money as I get sicker and sicker.”

?? right, they exist to make as much money as possible. Who’s point are you tryin to make?  they HAVE to give good information or they will go out of business. which is why the SEC, which have no good reason to do a good job, missed the boat on Madoff, Enron and every other scandal ever.

I don’t think consomers would be willing to pay alot for bad information.

“Now in Magical Libertarian Land, I’m assuming some unspecified mechanism would prevent businesses from forming trusts (as they historically did when the government didn’t stop them), so there’s always free market competition to eventually put the bad organizations out of business. Which means I die of poor medical care, my family sues the company and loses because they can’t afford the high-powered legal representation the big company can pay for, the gradual accumulation of bad publicity may eventually drive customers away and if everyone’s lucky, a few decades after I die, that particular business will end. (But, of course, new bad ones will keep springing up, because between the time of founding the company and the time of going out of business, there is a big pile of money to be made.)”

thats more like what we have now. the corporations don’t need to form trusts, they own the government and can shape policy to make it impossible for smaller competitors.

Somalia is in sub saharan Africa, theres all different types of failed states there. I’m thinking more along the lines of http://www.heritage.org/index/

ross- the high price of healthcare makes people be overly cautious in deciding when to go to the doctor. If you were to lower prices they would be less so. if you were to lower prices MORE… beyond what their actual price is, people would tend to take advantage of that. it’s no different for healthcare than big macs.

elllie- if the organization requires them to convert to christianity to recieve help it’s not a christian organization.

“because lower taxes means less money to fund food stamps)”

?? food stamps are allocated via the budget, they aren’t a variable that goes up and down with tax revenues.

again, most of your tax dollars go to RICH people, not poor people. the areas in and around DC are the richest in the country. If they were only, say, the SECOND richest in the country, I know that would hurt us as anation but I think we could survive.

lori/ pJ – I wasn’t saying there are massive gold deposits that haven’t been discovered, I’m saying if alot of gold were to come onto the market it wold lower the price of gold.

if the organization requires them to convert to christianity to recieve help it’s not a christian organization.

BRB LOL FOREVER. Also, what the hell are they if not a Christian organization?

If I respond any further to this libertroll, somebody smack me.

 
 they HAVE to give good information or they will go out of business.  

LOL. I’ll give you this, you’re hilarious. You should consider taking your act on the road. 

Speaking of people who are divorced from reality, can we shift topics from the Almighty Paul and talk about another occupant of the GOP clown car, Rick Santorum? I thought I loathed him before, but I had no idea. Every aspect of his family history contradicts his politics and he doesn’t seem to even be aware of it. Or more likely he hopes that if he just pretends that his family history supports his politics no one will notice. 

Grandpa Santorum: Immigrated from Italy. He was lucky to get into the US at all since he came right around the time racists passed an immigration law to keep out those dirty, non-white Italians. He came looking for freedom–and ended up a coal miner in a company town and paid in scrip. IOW, he was essentially a slave and apparently he was well aware of that. 

http://crooksandliars.com/rick-perlstein/santorum-freedom-slavery

Mom & Dad Santorum: Worked their entire adult lives for the VA. That’s where they met and they even lived in VA housing while raising their children. Dad Santorum said that the GI Bill was the greatest gift he ever received.  

http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/the-santorum-taint/

Mrs Santorum: Experienced a problem pregnancy which would have killed her had it continued. Reports vary as to exactly what treatment she received, but the end result was that Mrs Santorum lives and the baby did not. However that occurred, her husband advocates laws that would make it impossible for other women to receive the same life-saving treatment. Because the Santorum’s life-threatening pregnancy was a “wrenching experience”, but other people in the same position are just baby killers. 

http://jezebel.com/5873158/rick-santorums-anti+abortion-stance-would-have-killed-his-own-wife

In spite of the fact that Rick Santorum apparently thinks the country is lousy with baby killers, he still thinks people should be forced to have children if they want to have sex. 

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/01/07/ladies-lets-all-calm-down/

In short, W.T.F?

I have never voted Republican in a national election and never expected to do so. However, I also never expected the GOP to get as bad as it is now and still continue to exist as a viable party. 

Ellie – I’ve never heard of a charity organization that required conversion before they gave charity. I would not donate to one.

Lori- as always no counterargument, just condescension. fine with me. all the more democrats to come over to our side when they see there are no answers on yours.

Actually, you need at least one other piece of information—is it
poison? The government takes care of that now. In Libertopia I guess
we’ll all have to have our own testing kits or we’ll have to pay an
enormous premium to purchase soda from a “trusted seller” who can verify
that the drinks are safe.

Indeed. This is actually how food and safety regulations can correct an information asymmetry for us and make the market work better*, since now the consumer isn’t faced with the need to determine if food or drink is potentially unsafe.

Libertarians: Information asymmetry isn’t an abstract concept. It is directly relevant to your health. The government can do collectively very easily what it would be very hard, individually, for each of us to do alone.

—

* I expect a mass befuddlement among Libertarians and some Republicans at this insight.

 
 I’ve never heard of a charity organization that required conversion before they gave charity. I would not donate to one.  

  
You need a broader exposure to charities then, because there are plenty of them that use charitable service as a tool of manipulation. They don’t say that right on the website or the cover of the brochure. You actually have to apply some thought to what they do say. Things like “Using X to spread God’s love” is code for, “In order to get the service they have to listen to the sermon”.

 Lori- as always no counterargument, just condescension.  

I did provide counterarguments and so have others. You mostly fail to respond to them directly (see Paul’s stance on abortion and GLBTQ rights) or you respond with counterfactuals which you label as self-evident truths. You make it pointless to do anything but mock you. 

neutrino- there is obviously demand for information regarding the safety of food.  people are willing to pay for that but to get it we have to fund bridges to nowhere, that’s the problem. People are saying ” I want the food safety information, but I don’t want the wars and the bridges to nowhere” now. There is too much waste in the government package deal.

Also, if you like ugly looking cartoons with robot voices check out my play

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGkZxgzxTlk&list=PLFC0967FBEDE53CC1&index=1&feature=plpp_video

it’s about liberty. it automatically goes to the next scene if you make it that far haha

?? right, they exist to make as much money as possible. Who’s
point are you tryin to make?  they HAVE to give good information or they
will go out of business. which is why the SEC, which have no good
reason to do a good job, missed the boat on Madoff, Enron and every
other scandal ever.

I don’t think consomers would be willing to pay alot for bad information.

Gods below, do you think about the words you type at all?

Taking money from would-be doctors (legitimate or not) in exchange for favorable ratings is the first revenue-enhancing move I see those companies making. It’s great to milk both sides. Case in point: the, you will notice, entirely private credit rating agencies, whose incentives were heavily weighted towards rating every mortgage-related security as high as possible.

As for consumers, they will only leave the company if they know the information is bad. This leads us back to the information asymmetry inherent to medicine, with a layer of PR on top.

Chris Hadrick: ” they HAVE to give good information or they will go out of business.”

This really isn’t true.  The free market only works with information being readily and freely available to people as to the quality of businesses and their products.  There is no reason to assume this libertarian society would run any differently than the current one in regard to this sort of knowledge. 
If a business is dishonest, it is in its own interest to keep people ignorant, through any means available.  Bribery, obfuscation through competing information sources, and flat out lies.

Obfuscation works amazingly well.  If you get enough people all saying the same thing, most who hear it will accept it as being true, regardless of its actual authenticity.  This is true even of readily testable things, like the idea that vaccines cause autism. We (as a society) have done the research, and there isn’t any evidence to show this, yet a great many people believe it fervently.

Patrick Anderson, Winter- first let me state explicitly I’m not referring to any kind of libertarian  utopian society. I mean THIS society. what is the FDA? it’s a bunch of people who are hired based on their perceived expertise to arrive at sensible appraisals of various components of food industry. We give the government money, they hire these people. ostensibly they work for us to determine waht is safe for us. So, we could hire these exact same people and pay them the same or more and not pay for wars and so forth. what’s the problem?

 He’s also never heard about the Better Business Bureau. which does exactly that: it gives better ratings to businesses that pay it. Or about Rand Paul’s ‘ophthalmology association’, which consists of him (and maybe some others) and is NOT accredited by anyone else. (I wouldn’t go to any doctor who invents an organization just to get a fancy certificate on their office wall. I’d suspect that all their others were also fake.)

what is the FDA? it’s a bunch of people who are hired based on their
perceived expertise to arrive at sensible appraisals of various
components of food industry.

Not just the food industry: also cosmetics and drugs. Most of the time they’re depending on information provided by the manufacturers. You should be able to see the potential problem there. And it isn’t caused by ‘big government’, but by people who want LESS government, and don’t want to pay for anything but their own personally-wanted stuff. JUST LIKE RON PAUL.

Patrick Anderson, Winter- first let me state explicitly I’m not
referring to any kind of libertarian  utopian society. I mean THIS
society. what is the FDA? it’s a bunch of people who are hired based on
their perceived expertise to arrive at sensible appraisals of various
components of food industry. We give the government money, they hire
these people. ostensibly they work for us to determine waht is safe for
us. So, we could hire these exact same people and pay them the same or
more and not pay for wars and so forth. what’s the problem?

Can you tell the difference between “label stuck on food by disinterested evaluator reflecting the honest results of tests” and “label stuck on food by clever wordsmith reflecting what his/her employer wants potential buyers to believe about the food”?

Right now, the latter is both illegal and likely to be found out quickly. Assuming, for the moment, that in your scenario it would still be illegal even though it’s not initiating force, how exactly would it be found out–short of giving your private enterprise so much government oversight that making it a private enterprise in the first place seems pointless?

kish- the FDA is ostensibly an agency of people giving their expertise on things. they simply have a monopoly on that service by government fiat. what would government oversight do?

If there were competing post offices would we have worse service? I doubt it.

I don’t think consomers would be willing to pay alot for bad information.

You don’t have to “think.”  It is a well-known FACT.  Ask anyone in the information business.  Ask me, that’s my job.

Consumers are DESPERATE for help in cutting through the hard, messy, difficult business of sorting out tons of apparently-conflicting and ambiguous data to give them a clear, simple, yes-or-no answer:  Will this doctor help me?  Should I buy this stock?  Is this diet safe?  Is this a real job offer or a scam?  Am I going to be okay?

They are so desperate that they don’t want to look at the information that I can give them for free.  I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked, begged, offered bribes to “just give me a name”, “just tell me yes or no”, etc., even when I tell them flat out that I am not qualified, that it is ILLEGAL (because of those protective regulations you sneer at) for me to do any such thing.

You want proof?  Which “news source” is making the most money:  detailed analysis with citations?  Quick simplistic summaries?  Soundbites fluffed up with infotainment?  Or bombastic opinions masquerading as facts?

sgp peppers- thanks for all the condescension. like I said, liberalism
seems to be lost in the 60′s and the 80′s and seemingly has no relevence
to the issues of today. Everything is evil and racist yeah i got it.

1. I said nothing about liberalism. I’m not a liberal.
2. I said nothing about racism.
3. What I did say, and will repeat below, is not a 60′s or 80′s issue. It’s a universal moral constant:

Standing idly by while the weak suffer is evil.

I’m not kidding around.

There are “competing post offices” of a sort: FedEx and UPS.

Both are fast, but also expensive.

They also both engage in dishonest practices regarding Canadian Customs “brokerage” fees – UPS more so than FedEx, but anyway, you get the point.

In short, they exist to provide fast service between domestic urban centers in the United States, and while they will deliver to rural locations, it almost always costs more to get things shipped to you by UPS or FedEx than it would US postal mail.

neutrino- but for basic mail the post office has the monopoly. You aren’t allowed to set up a competing postal service.

sgt pepper’s – I agree. There are 48 million people living below the poverty line under the current system. Our schools and healthcare are a joke and it all costs a ton. and we are dropping drones on people on the other side of the world. I’m not comfortable with having the moral culpability for that. i don’t think history will look kindly on it. It’s not the right or the left it’s the empire. we crossed the rubicon. We have to fight it. That’s what i believe.

?? right, they exist to make as much money as possible. Who’s point are you tryin to make?

Let me make this clear.  Businesses exist to make as much money as possible.  Therefore, if there is more money in, for example, selling consumers bottles of plain water and making these sound like useful medicine than there is in selling actual medicine, guess what’s going to be sold?  (If you think this is too far-fetched to be possible, consider that billions of dollars are spent on homeopathic remedies in the US alone.)

Somalia is in sub saharan Africa, theres all different types of failed states there. I’m thinking more along the lines of http://www.heritage.org/index/

I’m confused.  Right near the top of the list is Singapore, a country that executes people for carrying heroin, forces everyone to serve in the military, imprisons people for writing books the government objects to, officially still officially lists gay sex as a crime, and beats people for such crimes as overstaying their visa, and bans chewing gum.    That really doesn’t sound like small government or increased personal freedom. 

Also, that list is full of countries that actually have universal heath care, which seems to have very little in common with what Ron Paul advocates.  (If you want the US to become more like Canada, I advise you to find a different political label, as using “libertarian” to describe that will just confuse people.)

I don’t think consomers would be willing to pay alot for bad information.

How would they know it was bad information?  The only way for people to find out it’s bad information under a libertarian system with no government regulation is if there are enough people suffering and dying that there’s a clear correlation between the sickness and the product and they get together and share their personal stories enough that people have some idea of how much of an issue it is.  And tainted food and bad medical care aren’t always cases of “Take this and you fall ill on the spot”, but are often complicated things where you can’t figure out what exactly is going on without a controlled study.  Without any sort of neutral party to evaluate matters, people aren’t going to be able to know where the poison is or which doctors are dangerously incompetent.

I’m thinking more along the lines of http://www.heritage.org/index/

Australia is number 3 on that list! We have strong regulation and society-funded universal healthcare. At last we agree — the US would be better off moving its healthcare system to one more like ours (aka less private sector control).

“(If you think this is too far-fetched to be possible, consider that billions of dollars are spent on homeopathic remedies in the US alone.)”

so are you suggesting we ban homeopathic medicine? i’m sure big Pharma would be with you on that. if people want that stuff it’s their business.

“The only way for people to find out it’s bad information under a libertarian system with no government regulation is if there are enough people suffering and dying that there’s a clear correlation between the sickness and the product and they get together and share their personal stories enough that people have some idea of how much of an issue it is.”

So what if the thing that can save you isn’t being allowed on to the market because the FDA has decided it has to run more tests? So you die. where’s the morality in that? give me the medicine i’ll accept the risk. and again, whatever the FDA does we can hire people to do. we could hire the exact same personel! We just won’t have to also fund whatever hillary Rodham Clinton is talking about.

and the government isn’t a neutral party. They are filled to the gills with corporate stooges. look at all the goldman sachs clowns in the Obama admin.

and regarding Singapore- they have their own cultural baggage that affects the freedom of people in their country. Im’ not suggest we emulate that. it’s the index of economic freedom. It just says it’s easy to set up a business and hire people there and so forth there. Outside of that it has other less desirable traits but in general the countries at the top of that list have a higher quality of life than those at the bottom.

Therefore, if there is more money in, for example, selling consumers
bottles of plain water and making these sound like useful medicine than
there is in selling actual medicine, guess what’s going to be
sold?  (If you think this is too far-fetched to be possible, consider
that billions of dollars are spent on homeopathic remedies in the US
alone.)

My money would be on “patent medicines” concocted from whatever’s cheap and produces a bit of a high: meth, alcohol, cocaine, Ecstasy, etc. Something that makes the user feel like it’s working and can be sold as a sovereign cure for everything.

I agree. There are 48 million people living below the poverty line
under the current system. Our schools and healthcare are a joke and it
all costs a ton.

But when I asked you how healthcare should work you provided the example of a system that, quite literally, leaves the weakest members of society unsupported, with the justification that they’ll die off and leave society to the strong. That’s what is evil. You can’t support that and be a decent human being.

and we are dropping drones on people on the other side of the world. I’m not comfortable with having the moral culpability for that.

The aggressive military attitude of the US, in which it has been almost constantly engaged in warfare for generations, is not due to excessive government involvement in healthcare.

My attitude to war lies somewhere between pacifism and very, very strict application of just war doctrine. If you want to break the military-industrial complex, I’m with you. But any philosophy that offers up the poor and the weak as casualties to achieving its goals, as libertarianism does, is broken. Replacing one evil for another is no moral act.

so are you suggesting we ban homeopathic medicine?

No, I’m saying that companies will sell ineffective non-medicine when it makes them money, and the market doesn’t punish them for it.

i’m sure big Pharma would be with you on that.

You’re really fond of ignoring people’s actual points in favor of baseless “You, a liberal, are now on the side of something you hate!” assertions, aren’t you?

give me the medicine i’ll accept the risk.

See, I’d rather not take the risk of untested and unregulated medicine, and under a libertarian system, I will no longer have that choice.  I’ll be forced to accept the risk.

They are filled to the gills with corporate stooges. look at all the goldman sachs clowns in the Obama admin.

So replacing a system that’s tainted with corporate corruption with a system that consists entirely of those same corporations without any regulation is better somehow?

they have their own cultural baggage that affects the freedom of people in their country. Im’ not suggest we emulate that.

I’m confused.  What are you suggesting we emulate?  Canada?  Switzerland?  The “Probability Breach” comic? 

it’s the index of economic freedom. It just says it’s easy to set up a business and hire people there and so forth there.

So it’s possible to have high economic freedom and low personal freedom, and we shouldn’t necessarily emulate the policies of countries with high economic freedom, and it’s possible to have universal health care and still be a business-friendly environment.  What was your point again?

For the record, I don’t care much about being able to set up a business quickly and easily.  I care a great deal about being able to express my opinion without being jailed.

The fact that this:

 
so are you suggesting we ban homeopathic medicine? i’m sure big Pharma would be with you on that. if people want that stuff it’s their business.  

was your response to this

“If you think this is too far-fetched to be possible, consider that billions of dollars are spent on homeopathic remedies in the US alone.”

is a serious Logic FAIL and indicates some serious problems with the way you work through issues. 

Sales of homepathic medications are evidence of people’s willingness to buy things that don’t work. Pointing that out has nothing whatsoever to do with banning homeopathy.

Also, whether Big Pharma would like it or not is not the appropriate way to decide if homeopathy should be banned or not. 

 
and the government isn’t a neutral party. They are filled to the gills with corporate stooges. look at all the goldman sachs clowns in the Obama admin.  

To quote you, whose case are you making. Government has too many corporate stooges so the solution is to get rid of government and give the corporations direct control? Do you really not see why that’s a problem? I suppose you think that the magic of the Free Market will fix everything, but all available evidence says that it won’t so you’re going to need to come up with another response. 

lori- corporations have power because of their connections to the government. they hate competition, that’s what K street is all about. there is no corporatism without government power. That’s what they are lobbying for, access to all that power. less tax dollars = less corporatism., more social power.

“leaves the weakest members of society unsupported, with the justification that they’ll die off and leave society to the strong. ”

I never said that. The weakest members of society are unsupported NOW. I want to remedy that, not make it worse. inflation, for example, hurts the poor far more than the rich, that’s why i favor a gold standard. inflation punishes savers. You need savings in a society despite the nutty pronouncements to spend spend spend from the nuts from the right and left alike.

“Sales of homepathic medications are evidence of people’s willingness to buy things that don’t work.”

how do you know they don’t work? the argument is false because it accepts the notion that because it isn’t sanctioned by the state it’s bad. When was the last time anyone paid attention to the 2,2,3,5 or whatever it is we are supposed to eat from wach food group. it changes all the time. No one knows “the truth”. whatever happened to challenging authority?

Okay, so let’s take a really simply set of hypotheticals for this free market solution BS:

Slow-acting poisons. Placebo medications and similar “cures” that do nothing in reality.

Tell me how quickly those companies are going to go out of business again?

If people are dying of cancer 40 years on, who the fuck is going to be identifying this in product X? Seriously. So, Company manufacturing Product X is now in business for 40 years before they are put out of business by the Super Magic Free Market™

If people are not being cured by Magic Product Y, but believe they are and have been convinced by slick marketing and paid “professionals” (since we no longer want regulation on what a professional is AT ALL…or at least a decentralized form, meaning to find a professional you can trust, you have to find a professional judge of professionals you can trust, which means you have to find a judge of professional judges…) that it is?

That business survives. These businesses have no reason to not survive, because no one is testing their products. Or if they are, well, who cares? What’s going to happen? Their competitors come out and say their product is poison? Whooptydoo. We have no regulations on making crap up now, so we don’t know if it actually IS poison or their competitor just wants you to think it is. And we can’t do anything about it anyway. Okay, it’s a lie. Who the hell holds them accountable? It’s not regulated!

The central premise is the same as the working model for communism and a lot of other nice ideas: “People will choose the best thing for the common good.”
Look, I’m really up on people. Often probably more than I should be. One of the first things I started commenting on here was my reluctance to assign labels of “racist” to some comments, because I suspected racism might be inaccurate and disinterest in the poor more accurate. I think, given a system, most people will operate by the rules.

But I know from my own experience and from observing on macro and micro scales, that those boundaries are so grey that some things can be shifted pretty easily and leave people thinking they’re still doing all right.

It could even be, “Hey, we don’t KNOW it’s poison..” or even the sincere belief that it probably isn’t. Cloud that with, “I see the risk as really low and the profit margin really high,” throw in the people who aren’t that ‘average’ and ARE sociopaths and psychopaths: it doesn’t work. It can’t work.

No system can be perfect, but when you start decentralizing, you’re left with nothing BUT competition on EVERY level. Or you’re left with no options. Either way, there’s nothing to trust even a little. Not to take FDA recommendations with a little salt, which is reasonable, but to have to analyze the ever-loving shit out of everything forever, because there’s no sense of accountability, beyond the dubious claim that people will lose business if they’re assholes.

I’ve got news for you: plenty of people are assholes and still in business. And it’s not because of regulations. It’s because the motivators that exist are often monetary, both in maximizing profit on the part of businesses and on the part of minimizing cost for consumers. People will take endlessly shitty treatment if it saves them money.

It’s a lovely idea. But people are people so it won’t work.

ako- “No, I’m saying that companies will sell ineffective non-medicine when it makes them money, and the market doesn’t punish them for it. ”
 
the people byu it of their own volition. it’s their money. people see astrologers of their own volition. Shuold we have a government bunch of astrologers to police the other ones?
“You’re really fond of ignoring people’s actual points in favor of baseless “You, a liberal, are now on the side of something you hate!” assertions, aren’t you?”
because that’s how corporations trick people. see how green we are, lets pass thes green laws. meanwhile they have horrible polluting plants in Vietnam and China that add as much to global warming as anything despite all their green talk.
 
“replacing a system that’s tainted with corporate corruption with a system that consists entirely of those same corporations without any regulation is better somehow?”
 
yes because they wouldn’t be able to manipulate the laws. what is wall street without washington? and vice versa
 
“For the record, I don’t care much about being able to set up a business quickly and easily.”
 
well people who are entrepenours do. and I never said it was impossible to have universal healthcare and a good economy. there are all sorts of systems that work in different ways democracy, monarchies, republics. staying out of prolonged military conflicts, not screwing up the economy with over regulation or weird corporatized slective  de regulation ( and Bailouts) and spying on people. I want the US to be #1 for all forms of freedom.

“That business survives. These businesses have no reason to not survive, because no one is testing their products.”

If you had cancer, which I hope you do not have, why would you byu such a product. There is still a thing called science.

“Who the hell holds them accountable? It’s not regulated!”

the market holds them accountable. I’m Steve i tried product a I feel great, I’m Bill i tried product B I feel Horrible.

I’m Oki i am a scientist who used to work with the FDA and now works for the …Whole Foods green Energy reveiew and this matches my research.

The FDA is ostensibly something we want right? thats why the government funds it. ther eis DEMAND for such an agency. for their WORK, regardless of who or what it is named.

“People will choose the best thing for the common good.”"

No I’m not  saying that. there are tons of cheats and cut throats out there and they shuold be prosecuted. Instead our government bails them out. none of these regulations work. Sarbanes Oxley didn’t prevent the crash and it takes up tons of time and money leaving only the companies with the most cash the ability to compete. I was just listening to a woman who recently closed her commodities brokerage business (because of the dmaage done by MF Global, whole other story) and she had to spend 15-20 percent of her profits on paperwork for sarbanes oxley and MORE for the Patriot Act.

how do you know they don’t work? the argument is false because it
accepts the notion that because it isn’t sanctioned by the state it’s
bad.

Do you even think this stuff through before it spews out of your fingers?

We know homeopathy doesn’t work because scientific study conclusively demonstrates it doesn’t work.

We know homeopathy doesn’t work because there is no physical mechanism by which it CAN work.

I don’t need “the state” to sanction physical laws.  I need “the state” to support the education of people to make them competent to understand and apply these physical laws, to provide a neutral party (not being paid by Big Pharma OR the homeopathic industry) to investigate these claims, to disseminate the results, and to punish those who choose to continue to make fraudulent claims despite the scientific results.

Because it is more efficient for a society to do this as a whole, and to collect a small amount of money from each member of the society who benefits, than for every individual to do it for themselves.  Because it is less expensive to put this work in the hands of those who are supposedly intent on accuracy and the public good as their highest goals (whether or not they are absolutely pure from any taint of corruption), than in the hands of those who are explicitly motivated by maximizing profits, and have a financial stake in falsifying the results.

Is this really so hard for you to understand?

But then again, we see that you keep linking to Fox News.  No wonder you’re resistant to the concept that people might willingly sell and consume false information….

*fishsmack*

I never said that. The weakest members of society are unsupported NOW. I want to remedy that, not make it worse.

So you’re for a minimum wage that’s a living wage? Or you’re for reverse taxation such that anyone earning below a living wage gets extra money from the government to bring them up to a living wage? (That way no one has to rely on private charity that may not be forthcoming.) Good to know.

“Sales of homepathic medications are evidence of people’s willingness to buy things that don’t work.”

how do you know they don’t work?

Because they’re HOMEOPATHIC, moron. Homeopathic, definition: “A system for treating disease based on the administration of minute doses of a drug that in massive amounts produces symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the disease itself.”

the people byu it of their own volition. it’s their money. people see
astrologers of their own volition. Shuold we have a government bunch of
astrologers to police the other ones?

Astrology is for fun, and I’m a little disturbed that you don’t see the difference between an astrologer reading a horoscope and a surgeon cutting you open.

Are you seriously suggesting that it would be okay for a quack to butcher a patient like that? Because that’s what’s going to happen if doctors don’t need to be accredited and are completely unsupervised. The average person doesn’t know the difference between a real doctor and a charismatic fraud until it’s too late. There’s no “of their own volition” here because they don’t have access to the information.

yes because they wouldn’t be able to manipulate the laws. what is wall street without washington? and vice versa

 Stop big business from manipulating the laws… by removing the laws? Can you see how that might be problematic?

well
people who are entrepenours do. and I never said it was impossible to
have universal healthcare and a good economy. there are all sorts of
systems that work in different ways democracy, monarchies, republics.
staying out of prolonged military conflicts, not screwing up the economy
with over regulation or weird corporatized slective  de regulation
( and Bailouts) and spying on people. I want the US to be #1 for all
forms of freedom.

It is already very easy to start a business in this country. Unless you’re incorporating, it takes very little paperwork and no oversight whatsoever. If you want the liability benefits of a corporation without the tax disadvantages of one, you can operate a regular partnership as an LLC or an S Corp — both very easy to do. If there are problems with the way the state governments in US treats businesses in this country, it has very little to do with how easy it is to start a business. And since nearly all of the laws that affect businesses are state laws (not federal), there is very little that a President Paul could do to change that.

sgt peppers’ “Australia is number 3 on that list!”

you mean people aren’t stabbing each other in the street and jumping off of buildings due to the stress of living in a somalia like situation?

the people byu it of their own volition. it’s their money

I’m specifically responding to the bit where you said that you didn’t think people would be willing to pay a lot for bad information.  People are willing to pay a lot for bad information and bad products formulated on such transparently false ideas as “Diluting stuff makes it stronger”.  The market doesn’t stop people from selling ineffective medicine or false information (such as the astrology you mentioned), and if it’s sold right, people will buy it.

Shuold we have a government bunch of astrologers to police the other ones?

Why on earth would I want that?  What sort of bizarro strawman version of me are you constructing in your head?

because that’s how corporations trick people.

So you’re trying to trick me the same way corporations trick people?

yes because they wouldn’t be able to manipulate the laws.

No, they’d be able to pollute, pay starvation wages, cheat investors, and give dangerous jobs to children without any government interference.  How is that better?

staying out of prolonged military conflicts, not screwing up the economy
with over regulation or weird corporatized slective  de regulation
( and Bailouts) and spying on people.

If that’s what you want, why are you willing to have it wrapped up in all of the Ron Paul shit (denying people health care, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.)?  If you’re not going with a major party, why not go with a party that has less toxic shit associated with it?

how do you know they don’t work? the argument is false because it
accepts the notion that because it isn’t sanctioned by the state it’s
bad.

Are you serious?  Are you actually serious?  You think that people who disbelieve in homeopathy are only doing so because it isn’t government approved? 

I don’t think that homeopathy works because 1) diluting stuff doesn’t make it stronger, no matter how much you shake it, and 2) “Stuff that induces the same symptoms as the disease in higher doses” is not a reliable way to find medicine that cures things.

And no, that doesn’t mean I’m going to take away your little bottles of plain water.  I just don’t think they should be treated as the equivalent of real medicine.

I don’t do homeopathic medicine. or use it or practice it.

 
corporations have power because of their connections to the government.

Connections to government are one way that corporations can gain power, but they aren’t by any means the only way. Getting rid of government will not reduce corporate power. Your belief that it will is naive and shows that you haven’t studied history at all. The only place the world works as you believe that it does is inside the heads of Libertarians. Out here in the real world where we all have to live, unchecked corporate power turns the bulk of the population into virtual slaves. You need to take your blinders off and read up on the Gilded Age because your knowledge base is seriously deficient. 

 
the people byu it of their own volition. it’s their money. people see astrologers of their own volition. Shuold we have a government bunch of astrologers to police the other ones?   

Consulting an astrologer is optional 100% of the time. The vast majority of people will have some occasion when they have to consult a doctor. Do you not understand why that makes a difference? 

 
If you had cancer, which I hope you do not have, why would you byu such a product. There is still a thing called science.  

I have to agree with hapax. I don’t believe that you’re thinking about these things at all. 

First problem, you misunderstood the scenario Fangs First was asking about. 

Second, exactly how do you think independent scientific research is going to be conducted in the world of free markets and no government? We already know what happens when private entities control research that indicates that their product is unsafe—it gets buried or distorted. IOW, in the world you’re advocating that would effectively be no true science. 

so are you suggesting we ban homeopathic medicine?

Yes. I think it should be a violation of truth-in-advertising laws to market homeopathic products as “medicine”. If they’d like to sell them as a food product or candy or some sort of beauty product, that’s fine by me, but “homeopathic medicine” is a contradiction in terms, and selling a homeopathic product *as medicine* is *fraud*.

i’m sure big Pharma would be with you on that.

And Hitler ate sugar. So remember, if you take sugar in your coffee, you’re drinking coffee with HITLER.

So what if the thing that can save you isn’t being allowed on to the market because the FDA has decided it has to run more tests? So you die. where’s the morality in that? give me the medicine i’ll accept the risk. and again, whatever the FDA does we can hire people to do. 

Okay then. I’ll just roll 3D6 and…. Ooh. Sorry. Five. Your kidneys shut down, your liver turns to paste, and you now have four kinds of cancer. And you’re still dying of whatever you were dying from before.

Too bad you didn’t get a six or better. Six to 14 gets you all of that, but the heroin it’s cut with stops you from caring.

 Might not be worse mail service, in cities, but everyone would be paying a LOT more money for it. In rural areas, you’d probably have to go to the private carrier’s nearest office, which might be a once-a-week trip, AND you’d pay extra for the privilege, as well as the much higher rates.

Actually, I suspect Big Pharma has no problem with homeopathic medicine. They make better profits on it.

I don’t do homeopathic medicine. or use it or practice it.

And apparently you know MUCH less about it that the people here who also don’t use it, but who pay attention to reality.

I don’t think hse has ever heard of the hearings about tobacco use and cancer. It would be interesting to watch hir head explode at the executives lying their tails off about not knowing about the studies showing the connection.

This isn’t the only place the Paulistas are trolling.

I don’t do homeopathic medicine. or use it or practice it. I don’t know anything abuot it.

And yet, despite this massive information disparity, you are STILL protected from it being sold as “medicine” by those who DO know something about it — through the magic of government regulation!

Hurrah!

lori =” Out here in the real world where we all have to live, unchecked corporate power turns the bulk of the population into virtual slaves”

more condescension. I have a job thank you. the government doesn’t “check” corporate power. They run the government.

“Second, exactly how do you think independent scientific research is going to be conducted in the world of free markets and no government”

foundations, colleges, same as now.

ellie-

“So you’re for a minimum wage that’s a living wage? Or you’re for reverse taxation such that anyone earning below a living wage gets extra money from the government to bring them up to a living wage? (That way no one has to rely on private charity that may not be forthcoming.) Good to know.”

no. the wage is whatever someone can afford to pay met with whatever someone agrees to be paid. if my boss was forced to pay me twice what I made now he wouldn’t be my boss because he’d be out of business or working 18 hour days.

Where would government get “extra money” they’re double digit trillions in debt!

the best way to help people make more money is by having a better economy, if jobs are less scarce wages will have to go up to attract workers. No one is going to work for 8 dollars an hour if the guy down the street is paying 10. and they will pay 10 if they can afford it, if not they will go out of business.

Ross- I admit i know nothing abuot homeopathic medicine but ban it? seriously? is it that dangerous?

thanks for all the responses sorry if i either didn’t answer you or not to your satisfaction. this has been fruitful I will return tomorow. I’m going to go do something else besides type.

“Second, exactly how do you think independent scientific research is
going to be conducted in the world of free markets and no government”

foundations, colleges, same as now.

/blink blink/

Okay, that’s it.  I call Poe.

Before assuming that non-libertarians can only think something is stupid or terrible on “The government doesn’t like it and I believe everything the government says” grounds, I suggest you find out what that thing actually is and whether there are any really obvious reasons for thinking it’s a stupid or terrible idea.

I also suggest you abandon your “You like it?  So does Nixon/Big Pharma/The Devil!*” approach to arguing.  It didn’t convince me the first time I heard “Hitler was a vegetarian!”, and it’s not likely to convince anyone here.  It merely annoys people and increases the amount of anger in the conversation.

*Please don’t accuse me of misquoting you.  This was comic hyperbole and not a literal repetition of your statements.

neutrino- so what if you had a doctor who cheated all the way through
medical school and was actually terrible. what would happen to that
person? they would get sued and or their reputation would be so bad no
one would go to them.

Wayyyy too many Libertarian excuses for pointed-out flaws in their philosophy seem to consist of “don’t worry, the FREE MARKET!!! will fix everything (once the body count gets high enough)!”

Obviosuly if you have less money to spend you will have less to give
to charity. and making the deduction less also reduces incentive to
give.

As was previously said, “LOL HISTORYFAIL”.  Most of the US’s biggest charitable works were made back when the max tax rate was 90%.  Why?  Because guys like Carnegie KNEW they weren’t going to get to keep all that loot, so they might as well get a tax write-off for some of it.

I’ll just add this: the dailykos article was alot like this one and wihtout the funky albeit rascist cartoons. I don’t understand this whole “alliance” thing anyway. You gyus vote against wars for your allegedly progressive reasons and we’ll be against them for our ghastly rascist reasons. What more of an “alliance” does there need to be than that?

 
more condescension. I have a job thank you.  

I wasn’t being condescending, I was stating a fact. It doesn’t matter that you have a job now. We aren’t talking about now. We’re talking about your imagined post-government freedomland. 

If you think that government is currently totally controlled by corporations then what purpose do you think will be served by getting rid of government? If you’re thinking that government takes your money at the point of a gun and corporations won’t, allow me to introduce you to Blackwater/Xe/Academi. You should also look into the history of the Pinkertons.  

. Im’ not suggest we emulate that. it’s the index of economic freedom.

I want freedom for ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS before I worry about the poor suffering corporations.  If you prick them, they DO NOT bleed.

 
 We are lucky that some poltiicians like gingrich, Nixon and john edwards are one dimensionally villainous 

What in the world are you talking about? In what alternate universe does it make sense to group those three people together? 

John Edwards is not villainous. He’s an asshole in his personal life and if I had the misfortune to be his wife I’d have kicked him in the balls so hard he’d never have gotten up off the floor, but that’s not villainous. To the best of my knowledge no super hero has ever fought The Adulterer. (For the record, that’s sarcasm, not condescension.)

I think it’s fair to call Nixon villainous, but he was hardly one-dimensional. 

For Gingrich one dimensionally villainous is probably a fair cop. He’s done and said many horrible things, but they all come back to his giant ego. 

None of that has anything to do with your argument about government and corporations. 

“Sales of homepathic medications are evidence of people’s willingness to buy things that don’t work.”

how
do you know they don’t work? the argument is false because it accepts
the notion that because it isn’t sanctioned by the state it’s bad.

I am reasonably certain that homeopathy doesn’t work because if it DOES, about half of what we think we know about biology and physics is flat-out wrong.

Also because if homeopathy was real, a single glass of tap water would be the most powerful medicine (or possibly poison) known to humanity.

thanks for all the responses sorry if i either didn’t answer you or not to your satisfaction. this has been fruitful

No, it hasn’t been fruitful, and it hasn’t been fruitful because you are either incapable of or unwilling to offer a coherent argument. In lieu of addressing you opponents strongest arguments you construct straw men. When called upon for evidence you rely on assertions of self evidence and thought experiments that give the opposite result to the one that was actually obtained in the real world. You leap from topic to topic without bothering to make connection between them. When you do bother to provide sources, they are either know liars, or you misrepresent their content.

We’re not unsatisfied with your arguments because we’re biased, we’re unsatisfied with your arguments because you’re really bad at arguing.

It’s not so much that homoepathy is dangerous but that it’s ineffective. It’s essentially water given a fancy name. It won’t poison you but if you have a serious medical problem it will do nothing to help you because it’s just water.

 What more of an “alliance” does there need to be than that?  

One that doesn’t result in votes for a racist, misogynist, homophobic crank. 

 
No, it hasn’t been fruitful, 

I’m going to hope that it has been fruitful in the sense that it has given Chris things to think about, and that away from the heat of argument some of it will sink in. 

Maybe s/he will actually do some reading on the Gilded Age. Even the article I linked to a while ago about Rick Santorum’s grandfather would be a good start. 

I think the problem with this debate is that some of us think that privatization and free-market economics are an end in and of themselves and some of us think that free-market/privatization are just (one) method to achieve an end.

There are plenty of things that the free market can do very well. There are also things that it doesn’t do very well. It’s easy and comforting to take a dogmatic approach towards these complicated issues. I wish I could believe that the reason people get sick or out of shape is because of some apocryphal government subsidy for disease. I wish I could believe that left completely unregulated, all bad actors in the economy will be run out of business before they can hurt someone.

I also wish that Bambi’s mother didn’t have to die.

Unfortunately, real life is way too complicated.

“I’m going to hope that it has been fruitful in the sense that it has given Chris things to think about, and that away from the heat of argument some of it will sink in. ”

still more condescension from Lori. nice defense of John Edwards, yeah he’s super classy.

consumer- “I want freedom for ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS before I worry about the poor suffering corporations. If you prick them, they DO NOT bleed.

Economic freedom isn’t freedom for corporations. it’s entrepenours of all types. They have special knowledge so they emply it and bear risk. without that you’d have no economy.

Economic freedom isn’t freedom for corporations. it’s entrepenours of
all types. They have special knowledge so they emply it and bear risk.
without that you’d have no economy.

You think that getting rid of the social safety net, a move that will leave anyone who isn’t already a multimillionaire clinging to any job they can find as if it’s the only thing between them and dying in a gutter, which it WOULD be, would somehow result in MORE people willing to ‘bear risk’?

Does. Not. Compute.

“I’m going to hope that it has been fruitful in the sense that it has
given Chris things to think about, and that away from the heat of
argument some of it will sink in. ”

still more condescension from Lori. nice defense of John Edwards, yeah he’s super classy

We’re being condescending to you because you come across as horrifically IGNORANT.  Try to do something about that, would you?

 
still more condescension from Lori. nice defense of John Edwards, yeah he’s super classy.   

What is your obsession with condescension? How old are you?

I didn’t say that John Edwards is classy. In fact I said quite the opposite. Not being classy does not equal being villainous. Nice attempt to distract from the fact that your original comment didn’t make any sense though. 

 
We agree that there is to be no alliance between left and paleo-liberertarian right. I’m a little worried now about an alliance between the left and neoconservatives on “humane” interventionism. I ‘m used to neocons evoking ww2 and America First in regards to Paul and Buchanan they did it all through the last decade. didn’t think I’d see it at a progressive board.   

And again, way to dodge the point. You really don’t seem to have followed this discussion at all, so I’ll make you happy and take back my earlier “condescending” comment. This discussion has clearly not been fruitful.

The index of economic freedom isn’t a measure of which country has the smallest social safety net. i don’t know why your joining those two issues there. the hellholes are at the bottom of that list not the top.

 FAIL.

 
You think that getting rid of the social safety net, a move that will leave anyone who isn’t already a multimillionaire clinging to any job they can find as if it’s the only thing between them and dying in a gutter, which it WOULD be, would somehow result in MORE people willing to ‘bear risk’?  

Maybe the idea is that people will be willing to bear more risk because they’ll have nothing to lose? 

Obviously that’s not true, but equally obviously the fact that something isn’t true doesn’t prevent Chris from believing it. 

“What is your obsession with condescension?”

I should be asking you that question

 How old are you?

more condescension!

what point was i dodging. Did you make a point about the gold standard vs fiat currencies?

What is your obsession with condescension? How old are you?

I’d estimate a mental age of eleven or less, based on willingness to believe whatever hse’s told by an authority figure, and unwillingness to do actual research or adjust views when hir BS is called out.

you guys are gettin cranky!

 
Did you make a point about the gold standard vs fiat currencies?  

Did you? If so, you really need to clarify what Edwards, Nixon & Gingrich have to do with the gold standard vs fiat currencies. 

What is your obsession with condescension?

“You may have the facts on your side, but you’re stating them in a way that hurts my feelings offends me.  THAT MEANS I WIN.”

Or something like that.

If you had cancer, which I hope you do not have, why would you byu such a product. There is still a thing called science.

Thanks to Lori for already mentioning you misunderstood.

I realize that, like I often do, I glossed. Let me attempt to corral my words and put this more to the point:

In this unregulated free market world, a business creates, well, let’s say it’s a food product. It has arsenic in huge amounts. Tons of people die or feel ill. Okay, that’s probably gone pretty quick. With you there. I think that’s not an unfair guess.

But let’s say another company creates a different food product. In it are trace amounts of what adds up to a poison. No one dies of it for years, and even then people don’t make the connection, because it’s years later–they’ve eaten, drunk, and generally used all sorts of products and environments in that time. How do we know that that product needs to be tested?

If it’s a carcinogen previously unidentified, or the company doesn’t actually know that that component is carcinogenic, how does it EVER get identified?

There’s not a central agency that has to allow every food product on the market.

The company doesn’t have to be malicious or evil, they could just be ignorant and in a rush to get their product to market for business reasons. They could make up an agency and put that stamp on it, thinking they *know* their product is safe and they don’t need to slow it down.

Ta da! A company has, even unintentionally, managed to poison a chunk of the populace because you removed all regulation. It wasn’t evil, or callous, it just did something dumb for business reasons. And no one knows. No one can call them out, and even if they do, how long has the product been on the market?

So yeah. It might go out of business. After poisoning people for decades. Or it might not, as people might never think, “Oh! All of these people who died of cancer drank Nusoda!” Because cancer is not something with a solitary cause. So they wouldn’t go, “Hmm, cancer patients, let’s poll them on drinks and compare notes,” as you’d end up with people who got cancer by other methods and think, “Well, that isn’t in common.”

But if you have things being consistently tested? If you have someone who goes through each and every single product that comes out and verifies certain elements or combinations aren’t there?

Yeah. People are lazy, or careless and things will slip through. But you have some kind of net over all of it. Instead of nets here and there, with plenty of fish just ignoring nets and swimming straight on through.

It doesn’t work.

you guys are gettin cranky!

At this point I have to suggest that you’re not interested in engaging in any substantive way on any topic. You keep hopping hither and yon and seeming to revert to basic Libertarian talking points rather than attempting to make a coherent case for how the changes you suggest might benefit society as a whole, or even just a sizable number of residents within it.

You can’t simply suggest that free-market solutions will help without being cognizant of when the free market may fail.

You can get monopolies, price fixing, failure to adequately inform consumers, failure to do proper fiduciary duty*, and so on.

In effect, the best regulations essentially save the free market from itself, and work to keep it operating as best as it can as an approximation to the ideal free market.

Where that isn’t possible, the government can and should step in. Most Libertarians I know of recognize even this and express a “minarchist” ideology which relegates the government to ensuring the security of the nation within and without, so that the police forces and the military remain the province of the state rather than private agencies.

What Liberals** prefer is a much broader scope for government activity, even to the extent of stepping in even when a private sector approach might work as well as a government approach.

—

* an example of this might be conspiring to misappropriate funds from a company you work for and concealing this by manipulating the financial statements. A form of this is what did in Tyco, Accenture (what used to be Arthur Andersen) and Enron, when it was revealed that the executive officers of the companies involved conspired to misappropriate substantial sums from their companies.

** I’ve seen the term with the capital “L” used a lot by Libertarians, admittedly less pejoratively than I’ve heard it from Republicans.

I’ve never understood where, on a libertarian account, government regulations come from. After all, it is a libertarian article of faith that the free market is obviously and unambiguously superior to regulation in all things, but even a cursory overview of the past 200 years of the history of the english speaking world gives the libertarian worldview a collossal challenge. Why, in the libertarian view, has it taken the USA seventy years to see that child labour laws are harmful, and why can’t we see the harm in the historical record? Why hasn’t regulation caused something *worse* that the Triangle Shirtwaist incident? Why do *fewer* people die of food poisoning and food-borne pathogens since the establishment of the FDA? Why were the only two diseases ever eradicated not eradicated by the free market? Why was the internet a *government* initiative?

Not that I expect an answer form our newest troll, but what is the sophisticated libertarian response?

Not that I expect an answer form our newest troll, but what is the sophisticated libertarian response?

I think it’s something like “well, now that the government’s done THAT, we don’t NEED them any more.”  For the same reason it’s PERFECTLY LOGICAL to shut down the fire department after they’ve put out one fire.

I can add to this.

I can be reasonably certain that homeopathy doesn’t work because:

(1) One of the basic principles states that the more diluted a solution is, the more effective that solution is, and many homeopathic solutions are so dilute that they contain, on average, not one single molecule of the active ingredient(s). 
(2) No experiment has shown that clusters of water molecules carry any sort of a “memory” of the chemicals with which they have been in contact, and that they don’t typically last long enough to do anything, even in the event that they somehow DID.  Homeopathy advocates occasionally claim that the process of succussion–that is, shaking or whacking the solution against something–is what makes the solution effective–for all intents and purposes, they’re invoking magic. 
(3) Homeopathic treatments have not been shown in controlled experiments to be any more effective than placebo at treating any medical condition.

Unless some or all of these change, then there’s little reason to conclude that there’s anything to homeopathy except quackery. 

fangs first- again, I’m not opposed to an agency that provides the services that the FDA does. This part of the conversation started out in response to an author wanting to eliminate the American Medical associate because it was leading to too few doctors which led to too high costs.  It’s a radical idea for sure but neither he nor I took aim at the FDA or the srvice it provides.  Could what the FDA does conceivably be handled by the free market is the question. We have ascertained there is DEMAND for their services the way there is demand for other basic neccessities. No argment.

re: homeopathy from what you gyus are saying it seems like snake oil but I just can’t imagine banning it. Some things people need to figure out for themselves.

 
Could what the FDA does conceivably be handled by the free market is the question.   

No, and we’ve explained why not.

re: homeopathy from what you gyus are saying it seems like snake oil but
I just can’t imagine banning it. Some things people need to figure out
for themselves.

You were already told: no one is talking about banning it. At all.

the free market drove down the costs of computers to the extent that anyone could afford them.

…the free market that has been regulated? And still is? so it works WITH regulation?

This part of the conversation started out in response to an author
wanting to eliminate the American Medical associate because it was
leading to too few doctors which led to too high costs.  It’s a radical
idea for sure but neither he nor I took aim at the FDA or the srvice it
provides.

Well Ron Paul has taken aim at the FDA AND the service it provides, and you’re here to defend him, so, uh, too bad? He’s against centralized regulation. The end!

 
You were already told: no one is talking about banning it. At all.  

Chris does not seem to understand that “it should not be legal to sell it as medicine” is not the same thing as “it should be banned”. 

So we have a legal, part of the government food and drug adminstration now. yet, we have homeopathic …stuff being sold as medicine. so as it turns out the FDA doesn’t prevent fraud very well!

fangs first – well I asked consumer if he wanted to ban it and he said yes. So you want to ban it …being sold as medicine but not ban it ban it. thats not that big of a deal, its still getting sold it just has one word less on a package. why bother?

and my point about the internet was if we didn’t all have personal computers the internet wouldnt’t be of much use to us. and we have computers because of competition and the market. of course at the same time the internet is a selling point for these computers. I’ll give the state some credit on that.

Wikipedia isn’t an authoritative source, granted, but the site notes that the regulatory structure of the FDA, from the very beginning, was compromised by the presence of a homeopathic doctor helping write the laws that governed it. This is an early example of “regulatory capture” in which the regulated bodies (corporations, individuals) get too close to the regulators with the resulting effect that the regulation itself becomes weaker or less vigorously pursued.

Regulatory capture is a symptom of a regulatory apparatus compromised by policies that favor easing the hand of government on corporations. As such it can be traced to, in particular, Reaganite policies in the 1980s and following Republican-influenced policies in the years since then.

As such I would say that the homeopathic loopholes in the FDA procedures bear all the marks of the problems with unregulated medical remedies: lack of effective quality control; persistent adulteration of the product (note the presence of alcohol permitted, which is an antibacterial agent in its own right); claims may be made about the product without effective legal remedies for making false or inaccurate statements; et cetera and so on.

Regulatory capture is a symptom of a regulatory apparatus compromised by
policies that favor easing the hand of government on corporations.

“…which is why new need to abolish ALL government regulation!  Then the Free Market can make everything perfect!”

yet, we have homeopathic …stuff being sold as medicine. so as it turns out the FDA doesn’t prevent fraud very well!

The point isn’t that the FDA and other federal administrative agencies prevent fraudulent medicine from existing — no one can do that.The point is that it gives people an opportunity to tell the difference. It gives people the opportunity to walk into a drug store and choose whatever medicine they would like, and the opportunity to go to the mystical faith healer next door and choose whatever they would like from there, knowing that the mystical faith healer isn’t actually a doctor. The faith healer can sell any potion he would like; he just can’t put water in a medicine container and tell you that it’s Benadryl. No one is stopping you from eating newt eyeballs and horseradish; the only thing we’re doing is preventing you from telling someone that newt eyeballs is really Aspirin and horseradish cures AIDS.

Do you get it now? It’s not about stopping people from taking whatever medicine they like. It’s about making sure that people who buy medicine are getting what they ask for, not whatever the manufacturer or the clerk or whoever felt like putting in the bottle. It’s about making sure that the meat you bought at the grocery store isn’t filled with maggots or encrusted with human feces. It’s about making sure you can go outside without suffocating on toxic smog. It’s about making sure that your drinking water doesn’t glow in the dark.

You believe in freedom, but are you really free if you don’t know what you’re eating or what you’re drinking?

You believe in freedom, but are you really free if you don’t know what you’re eating or what you’re drinking?

Considering the ideology seems to be “ignorance=freedom”–yes! Absolutely!
I can never be more free than when I am not shackled by the limitations imposed by knowing with conviction what I am ingesting!

Plus it takes all the mystery out of things. Gosh.

How did I end up defending homeopathic medicine?

apocalypse review – “As such I would say that the homeopathic loopholes in the FDA procedures bear all the marks of the problems with unregulated medical remedies: lack of effective quality control; persistent adulteration of the product (note the presence of alcohol permitted, which is an antibacterial agent in its own right); claims may be made about the product without effective legal remedies for making false or inaccurate statements; et cetera and so on”

but they ARE regulated. right?

The regulations bear the hallmarks of unregulation?

The FDA does not regulate homepathic remedies with the same vigor as it does more conventional remedies. Weaker regs = more chanciness in the meds. It’s no surprise.

“The point isn’t that the FDA and other federal administrative agencies prevent fraudulent medicine from existing — no one can do that.The point is that it gives people an opportunity to tell the difference.”

OKay but in this case aren’t you guys saying that they are NOT currently doing this re: homeopathic medicine?

So we have a legal, part of the government food and drug adminstration
now. yet, we have homeopathic …stuff being sold as medicine. so as it
turns out the FDA doesn’t prevent fraud very well!

Do you not recognize the existence of partial success at all, or only when it’s being done by the government?  People have better information now, and are better equipped to make choices.  In an unregulated market, the main difference is that there’d be fewer sources of information pointing out that homeopathic medicine is ineffective, or certain herbal remedies are dangerously toxic, or that certain stuff being promoted as medical treatment hasn’t been shown to do any good, and giving people a better chance to make choices.  It doesn’t perfectly prevent the dangerous bullshit, but nothing can do that, and it works better than a completely unregulated market.  Better is a good thing. 

 
How did I end up defending homeopathic medicine?  

Being an ideologue tends to lead a person down dome strange paths. 

ako- Okay, so this is what they’ve done: they’ve analyzed homeopathic medicine and arrived at the conclusion that it isn’t good.

Now, how did we hear about this opinion of theirs? did they do like a press release or something?  Is there a statement on the package of homeopathic medicine or would a clueless person such as me have to “dig” to an extent?

I mean, basically it sounds like they are Siskel and Ebert giving it a thumbs down and not much beyond that.

They require supplements that claim to alter the structure or function of the body (such as anything that claims to treat illness) to carry the following disclaimer “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is
not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease”.  If you read the packaging, it’s there.  Granted, it’s not as effective as it could be, but it does provide a way for people who are interested in finding out the distinction to read the package and tell whether they’re getting real medicine or not.  (I’ve done this before, particularly with cold remedies.)

So it requires the effort of reading the box, but it isn’t incredibly difficult to find, and even companies that would happily claim to have effective medicine aren’t allowed to lie like that. 

You should really start looking up some of this stuff yourself before trying to persuade other people of your ideas.

ako- I’m not trying to persuade anybody of anything. I’m asking you about the FDA’s policy regarding homeopathic medicine.

Here you go: these articles — one two, three, and four. I chose these fourarticles because they’re in plain English and designed to be easily readable; you don’t need to have a hard science background to understand them. You don’t need to read all of them — each one explains what homeopathy is, the assumptions behind it, and why these assumptions are not borne out by actual scientific testing.

I get what you’re trying to do — you’re trying to say that government doesn’t need to regulate everything. But in doing so, you’re inadvertently wading into an area of law and science that you don’t seem to actually understand. If you don’t know what homeopathy is, what business do you have lecturing people about how effective it is compared to regular medicine? If you don’t know how homeopathy is regulated, how can you seriously expect people to take you seriously when you try to criticize regulations that you don’t even really understand what they do or even what they are?

In that case, here is some good information on FDA regulation of dietary supplements: http://www.fda.gov/food/dietarysupplements/consumerinformation/ucm110417.htm

john k – thank you for the links. I’m not pretending to know anything abuot homeopathy I was just trying to figure out what the FDA does to inform people that it is apparently not good.

I wonder if the FDA label has affected the sale of homeopathic medicine at all. I bet it hasn’t.

Please think this through again. The SS trust fund is in the green… only if the federal government intends to pay that money back. The US government debt is several trillion less than $16 T… only if the debt to the SS trust fund “isn’t a real debt”, i.e. they don’t intend to pay it back. It cannot be the case both that the SS trust fund is in the green and that the money owed it by the feds “isn’t a real debt”. If the US government wants to play sleight of hand by saying it’s an internal debt they don’t have to pay back, then they will do so by defaulting on our seniors.

So then: Ron Paul. Should we lefties be happy he’s in the presidential
race, giving non-interventionism a voice, even if he has other beliefs
we find less agreeable? Should we be happy that his non-mainstream
positions are finally getting a public hearing? This is a depressingly
common view.

“I’ll tell you what happens to you — you find out as Richard Nixon once
told me that when you are down or have either got a problem you find out
who your friends are,” Buchanan said. “And both in ‘92 and a ‘96 I was
astonished. You know, I challenged George Bush and ‘92 and we did great
in New Hampshire, and ol’ Newt Gingrich down there comparing me to David
Duke in Georgia because I was coming out for a border fence along the
San Diego line.”