Just one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization#Cochabamba.2C_Bolivia

And I know you won't read it, so here:

"In the previous years, despite funds made available by the World Bank to support the public utility of Cochabamba, access to piped water in the city had decreased to 40%, water losses had remained high at 40% and water was supplied only 4 hours a day. Those not connected to the network paid ten times as much for their water to private vendors as those who were."

For water. This is a good example pretty much because it's one of the few "goods" we need to live.

Yeah, you're just completely wrong. There are many methods of elucidating the value of public goods to people. It's certainly harder than for normal goods, but it's not a blind shot in the dark.

And I'm sure you wouldn't love the underproduction of public goods when you saw how fucking miserable your life would be with out any environmental regulation, public trash and sewer systems, utilities in some cases, fire and police protection, and public health.

Fucking people espouse all these ridiculous ideas from a featherbed.

HEY! I own the rights to every Mario Lopez portrait ever taken. I demand you take it down!
Again. It's kind of like when two children roll around on the ground, break up, stand off about 10 feet glaring, then get into it again. I just see this fight spreading across the forums. Fight!

No, it's called continued satire to show the ridiculousness of this whole ordeal. Sometimes a comical response has more of a point than to piss off other posters.

W cld rmv ll vwls. tht mght b fn.

All of these statements are reasonable, but you're right that we're passing each other on the important bits; a premise is left unsaid: money is the problem with government. It's big business with it's ability to buy government that assists the removal of public opinion as a pressure point for politicians.

We're talking about sources of power. If that source is financial, it is very very easily transformed into violence and manipulation. A simple case in point: can you imagine the U.S. government using military police with assault rifles to intimidate, harass, and loot the public without serious backlash, and the media not have a shitstorm? No. How about when a private corporation does this? Oh wait. Guess who's still the biggest private military contractor in the U.S.? Guess why? Because they  spent millions on public relations to hide their dirty side. When you're faced with dwindling profits, the first response is not "How do I improve my product?" It's "How do I improve my image?" If the answer is lie, cheat and steal, that is what is done. If your life is in the public eye, like politicians, you get less leeway.

There are a lot of holes in my argument. But this takes the cake: Why do you think that the first time you heard about Herman Cain's repeated sexual harassment problems was when he's running for president? Because public opinion matters when you represent people.

Don't get me wrong. Business does many, many things better than government. Allocation of scarce normal goods, merit-based advancement, responsiveness to customers, and competition are often valuable results from free-market operations when they aren't tainted by market power. But business is not in the business of preventing poverty,  supporting healthcare that's good for the population, embracing competition, and protecting human rights. These cost money to enforce.

Wouldn't you rather have that money under the scrutiny of people that can make changes just by opening their mouths, instead of mobilizing full-on consumer-changing behavior? I would.

BTW, my butt poops things. POOP ON!

lololololol, we haven't hit boiling temperature yet. (What do you think is boiling temp? $0.00? Can we test this hypothesis scientifically, because I don't want my analogy to be crushed on a scientific basis.)

I don't think the issue is management. It's about incentive. Private firms fall under the same problems of human management that public ones do, because of their human fallibility, by your characterization. The question is what is the driver of decision-making that is most responsive to actual human misery? "The bottom line" surely perpetuates this misery when the interests of the meek do not align with the interests of the rich. Any representation, however broken, is better than none.

In the US, specifically, the private sector worries about public opinion if it affects profits. That happens when people are both 1) wise to the problem, and 2) manage to find a way to undermine profits for their personal needs (which is very, very difficult to do). The public sector worries about public opinion when people simply show up on their door, physically. The representative system, however broken, requires positive public opinion to function. The unrepresentative "free market" only requires ignorant buyers, and they spend enormous amounts to make sure that ignorance abounds.

Don't get me wrong. Bureaucracy sucks, hard. But you can protest bad bureaucratic decisions and see large-scale policy change and protection. When you successfully boycott business, all you get is "less bad."

You've obviously never heard of anything related to the measures in front of Congress to hamstring net neutrality in favor of gatekeepers working the "free market."


And yet those regulations, working or no, are the only thing standing between you and toxic mountain sludge. You expect the companies to handle this for you as they currently do everything they can to skirt regulations and responsibility for the damage they're doing right now?

I was trying to make them much earlier, but everyone just hounded me with "bear" label, and I realized it was because I didn't fit into one of the main molds around here: self-important nerds, scam artists, and ideologues who could care less about rationale.

I like this a lot. But I don't think it's popular with libertarian movements.


I think you misunderstand the power that market share has on freedom of information. One of the first things to go in unregulated markets is necessary information to the consumer. Take a 5 second look at big media. There were Nobel Prizes in Economics awarded on this topic.

In addition, my point was that control over someone's financial life (the way unregulated banking, retail, and massive corporations maintain with discretion over pensions, loans, and property they own) can destroy lives as thoroughly as violence. This is why we have federal regulations regarding finance, and those regulations need to be funded.


I can't imagine a single captain of industry ever advocating higher taxes on business.

Oh, I was saying that someone just under the poverty line (90%) gets a full prebate on their "flat-distributed" % tax. Someone just over it (89%) get's absolutely no benefit. This is my argument for graduated taxes.


So, in essence: rule of law rests in your own hands. John Doe finds it an offense to his sensibilities when his daughter downloads internet porn, and so he crushes her head in with a baseball bat for her impropriety. Acceptable?

It's an extension of "John Q doesn't like Coca-Cola paying nothing for 5-year-olds in china to bottle, so he decides to not buy Coca-Cola anymore."

More realistic: what happens when Eric Prince decides he'd like an island and doesn't want the natives with it, in this no-law land of yours?

Ah, gotcha. Also not a terrible idea, but it's largely unpopular with American conservatives, who believe everyone should pay something in taxes.

I was talking about fixed percentage income taxes,  but we can talk about sales taxes, too.

At what point do you set the "poverty line"? I know how it's set here in the US. So you tax someone who spends 89% of their income on food, rent and health, but not someone who spends 90%?

The issue is around fairness. Graduated fairness based on what you need to survive.


What if you earned it by siphoning CPU cycles using embedded javascript code? What if you were exploiting child labor in China (where it's legal), and your customers didn't know? In short, does it matter how you earned it to deserve it? Who decides and enforces that?

I've usually heard any kind of pre-bate check is considered to be an unfair social safety net that would work better in the free market.

I'm not actually picking a fight, but I have literally never heard a big-R Republican, big-L Libertarian, or even little-l libertarian support basic subsistence/healthcare provided by the state to any degree.

That being said, it's not a terrible idea. But it still doesn't get at the one big problem non-libertarians and libertarians will always be embittered over, and where this discussion is eventually heading: if you have more money than someone else, do you deserve it?

The strategy is not deception, it's just reminding you and everyone else that claiming something doesn't make it true. (I have no short positions, so you can give up with that silly claim).

But you knew that, you just like to look like a fool, I think.

I also agree with it generally.

My problem with flat taxes is the boilerplate: a 9% income tax on someone who spends 80% of their income on basic housing and food is a big freaking deal. a 9% tax on someone who spends 1% of their income on basic housing and food is meaningless. This is problematic.

Most states in the U.S. have a statute that protects the receiver of unsolicited products from returning them. I am not sure if a mistaken order counts as "unsolicited," but I bet you could make a pretty damn good case that it is. Don't send the wrong merchandise.

Just out of curiosity, do you disagree with this, generally?