And thus, this ongoing political "conversation" is mostly a waste of time for both of us.
I'm in total agreement with you there. |
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It's quite pathetic that you've taken after AyeYo. I used to have respect for you. We disagreed but at least you were rational. Now, you're just another statist troll.
Your opinion of me varies. Life goes on. Do you think my opinion of you varies? Or is it consistent? |
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We are here to protect you from theft and violence.... For which service we will make you pay us, whether you want to or not.  And in your fabled world, your various factions of hired thugs are any better? |
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Just because you consider your arguments in high regard, doesn't mean that I consider them worth responding to.
You are entitled to your brand of fringe politics and the blinders you think it's ideology entitles you to wear. |
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This is actually one of the better arguments for your 'benevolent statism' position.
We have had plenty of excellent arguments. And in fact, the more excellent they are, the more they're ignored. |
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No no no, see, it doesn't work like that. You can't nonchalantly, condescendingly even, tell someone to "stop buying crap" as if living without said crap is of no consequence, then when they point out that not "buying crap" isn't a realistic option, turn around and tell them tough shit, no one owes you anything. That just invalidated your theory that the making of crap is easily stopped by people not buying crap. If not buying crap is going to create life hardship, people are going to keep buying crap and crap will keep getting made, because when the alternative to a crap car designed to break down all the time is spending five hours per day biking to work, I don't really have a choice.
He will argue that you made the crap choice to select being employed 40 miles away, when clearly you should have chosen to work across the street from your home. Of course this doesn't account for the possibility of knife wielding jugglers you may encounter in your daily activities, but if in fact you did encounter a knife wielding juggler during your day's activities, clearly, you made a crap choice that led to that encounter. |
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We need a common procedure placed on our debate and conversation. I think it would also be nice if we had a repository of axioms covering what we all agree on and what we cannot. It's not that I am necessarily calling for order or a rigid structure for just the sake of it but a method that allows us to achieve more pleasure in our discussion while gaining more in our perspectives. Clearly, right now, things aren't very pleasurable.
Your thoughts?
I'm in a agreement to some extent, but not entirely. One of the currently active threads has actually provided me with a great deal of humor and entertainment this week. Yesterday was especially entertaining. |
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Do or do not citizens have the financial power to influence big business, namely to keep big business from turning tyrannical?
In theory, they do, but they don't have the unity, or collective organization, or motivation to make it happen. A government does, however, if some fraction of the citizens convince the government to. |
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AnCap model: Pay power company. Pay standards agency to keep power company in line. Other standards agencies keep yours in line via competition.
It's not at all clear to me that there will be consistent enforcement or enough payment to the standards agency(s) for them to keep the power company in line. Nor is it clear to me that the standards agencies aren't subject to bribery by the power companies. Furthermore, as evident by your general lack of interest in the details and complexities of global and local environmental issues, I can only assume that there are others like you, and that doesn't bode well for your model, from my point of view. I've offered you quite a bit of reading material. And I took you up on your offer to investigate The Tragedy of the Commons. Why do you reject the material I have offered you? |
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If citizens can overcome a private security company, why can they not overcome a coal plant company?
I think the deafening silence of his answer is testimony to the rhetorical nature of the question. Clearly he tacitly admits the persuasiveness of your logic, and chooses to deflect said admission by insisting on the importance of other statements he has made, which incidentally, are typically devoid of any sound explanation of his ideology. |
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But not proving that the system we have is any better. (or do you propose a different system entirely? I was never too sure on that.)
The system we have in place is far from perfect. You'll get no argument from me there. However, given the choice between your system, our current system, or a system that goes in the opposite direction as yours, I'd lean towards the latter two. But let's just say I opt to stay with the current system. It would then appear that I am under less pressure to argue the merits of my system than yours. The point being, that in order for you to affect the radical changes you desire, the burden falls upon you to make a cogent case for those changes. You are being asked to make a compelling argument for the changes you desire, and admitting flaws in your proposed system and choosing not to address them will not work. |
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Showing possible flaws in my suggestion does not back up your claims that a monopoly is better. Try harder.
Why should I try harder? Your statement seems to be acknowledging possible flaws in your system already. |
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I am suggesting that they pay a company to provide power, and then select a company (from several) to keep that company in line. Because not everyone is going to pick the same agency, there will be more agencies watching the power company than under any government monopoly, and it will be done for cheaper because there will be no government to keep in line.
Actually, there will be a few half-assed agencies, with competing agendas, watching the coal company. Not everyone will pay to have an agency watch the coal company. I will assume you're paying to do it, so I won't. Furthermore, who's going to pay to watch the agencies? And I can only imagine the coal company will have connections and insiders with regard to the various agencies, and so forth. |
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I didn't point you toward the paper, I pointed you toward the concept. That you found a paper is immaterial. Care to address my arguments?
You can also add Paul R. Ehrlich to the above two authors. Garrett Hardin also had mutual respect for him as well. Again, I can't thank you enough for recommending Garrett Hardin to me - by doing so you have given me further armament against your arguments. Right now I'm currently reading Ehrlich's book The Dominant Animal. I recommend it heartily. I think you would benefit from reading it: http://www.amazon.com/Dominant-Animal-Human-Evolution-Environment/dp/1597260975/I've quoted Ehrlich before in these forums, but I'll quote him again: "The scale of the human socio-economic-political complex system is so large that it seriously interferes with the biospheric complex system upon which it is wholly dependant, and cultural evolution has been too slow to deal effectively with the resulting crisis." —Paul R. Ehrlich Link: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/starting_over/So we have Garret Hardin, Herman Daly and Paul R. Ehrlich. Start reading. |
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I didn't point you toward the paper, I pointed you toward the concept. That you found a paper is immaterial. Care to address my arguments?
You most certainly did point me to the paper. There is no confusion on this matter. The Tragedy of the Commons is a term coined by the author of the paper in 1968. Any derivation of the concept is an interpretation of the paper. Let's quote your words: But I want you to look up 'tragedy of the commons' to see how difficult it is to allocate resources held in common.
Saying that I found the paper is immaterial is like telling me to read Jane Austen and then telling me that reading Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility is not representative of reading Austen. Regarding mutual coercion, it's very clear that Hardin is arguing for regulation. Care to address his points? And Daly's? |
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we mutually agree to coercion
This is ridiculous. If it's mutual, it's not coercion. If it's coercion, it's not mutual. You were the one who pointed me to the paper (which I thank you for). It makes a number of salient points, pretty much exactly in line with those of Herman Daly. There is nothing ridiculous about it. I don't know why you are now arguing against the paper that you seemed to imply would back your claims. |
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Excellent. Can't wait to see how that one is explained away/brushed aside.
Another great quote from his paper: To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.
An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance-that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.
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The Tragedy of the Commons by Hardin is an interesting paper. Thank you for sharing it. An excellent quote from the paper: The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream -- whose property extends to the middle of the stream -- often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.
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But I want you to look up 'tragedy of the commons' to see how difficult it is to allocate resources held in common.
I have read at least half of the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Hardin's theories are very similar to Daly's. I think you should read what Daly is saying in full, and draw from it what you will. I did notice several entries in the Wikipedia article that said that Hardin's material is often misinterpreted as an argument for the privatization of everything. For example, the following quote: Similarly, Hardin's use of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, leading Hardin to later remark that he should have titled his work "The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons".
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