First off, for the umpteenth time,
please stop cherry picking my posts. I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish when you do that. If I wrote two things, and you were either wrong on or could not respond to one of them, then concede the point instead of lifting specific sentences to fashion a new argument against me. Don't hide behind excuses that you don't think it’s relevant or I'm throwing a tantrum. What do you think people will do if you conduct yourself this way in a real life discussion?
Quote from: Cameltoemcgee on October 28, 2014, 11:44:39 PM
He's saying that the same people who are doing it now will continue to do it but instead of putting tenders to government for funding, they will be directly funded by people. The argument could be made that in the absence of a violent (and inefficient) monopoly claiming responsibility for remediation of a VERY important issue, the quality of care that underprivileged get will be significantly better without them.
Yes.
I love how you highlighted this in red like you caught me out. Great job detective. How does what cameltoemcgee said contradict anything I said previously?
You just posted a bunch of things I said, but you haven’t described how I contradicted myself, and
I don’t see it.
I’m saying that the condition of the poor improves under Anarcho-Capitalism better than under state overlords. I’m not saying that all the poor will disappear immediately, no matter how many times you try to paste some quotes together to try to make it look like I’ve taken some extreme position.
The extreme position that you are trying to put me in is here plain as day for anyone to see and was never a position that I took.
First you say that altruism should mean that all the poor and all the orphans should be taken care of immediately, and since I said altruism already exists in society, I need to show you a society in which all the orphans and all poor people are constantly and completely taken care of. That’s an outrageous definition of altruism, and that’s not my position.
Altruism should mean that all of the 400,000 orphans that society as a whole do not want would be adopted by families annually - now.
Since the dawn of time, has this ever happened before? Has societies, collectively, voluntarily decide to adopt every orphan…
Of course you won’t admit it - even after presented with your own words. I expected no less. You don;t even realize how extreme your position is. Instead, you are arguing semantics, and are absolutely reveling in my use of the word ‘altruism’ and ‘altruistic’, completely oblivious to the fact that I am using the catchword of self-professed paleolibertarians.
You argue against government welfare, and stated that in a tax-free form of government, people and corporations will voluntarily give charitable donations to support the poor.
I’ve asked you why you think corporations that consistently exploit communities will suddenly develop a social conscience? You ignored that (but went on the make a remarkable revelation below).
I’ve asked you why there was no explosion in charitable contributions when the Bush tax cuts freed up $6.6 trillion. You said it’s difficult to make a prediction because it’s “a temporary tax credit” and “people can’t make decisions about charitable donations based on the whims of politicians that change from year to year”. Really? Thirteen years on?
And again, I have no ‘overlords’. You seem very convinced that you do – I am beginning to sense that is the root of your problem.
This of course brings up the question - based on what actually, other than blind supposition? Has corporations made measurable charitable initiatives today that exceeds the government in terms of reach and effectiveness?
I am not concerned with the effectiveness of charities in terms of “reach”, because government welfare crowds out private charity. You cannot lose money in taxes and then send that same money to private charities. You can give up even more of your income, but people have what is called “diminishing marginal utility” for their discretionary income. The more money that is taken in taxes, the less people will give in charity, depending on their prefences.
It's also more important for charity to be effective, than have massive quantity. "Charity" that makes the problem worse, is better off if it is smaller.
So the “reach” part aside, I think there can certainly be made the case that private charities in the United States are far more efficient than Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
However, I’m not going to do that. Society is so complex we could spend the next century trying to figure out why event X happened despite Y.
Austrian economists do not believe that economics is based on empirical research. Economic understanding comes from the outworking of logical principals.
For instance, we understand that raising the minimum wage, ceteris paribus, will mean that less people will be employed. Raising the minimum wage makes it illegal for the least productive members of society to work.
There is no need to go out and do research, or figure out if this is always the case, because you’re always going to find strange outliers where you haven’t been able to track down all the variables.
This is just the same as if your teacher told you the Pythagorean Theorem, and then you went out a measured a bunch of triangles but you found one where the Pythagorean Theorem didn’t seem to hold true. It was a right triangle, but your measurements didn’t correspond to what the Pythagorean Theorem gives you. Your teacher would rightly scold you, because whether or not the Pythagorean Theorem is correct is not based on empirical research; where mathematicians measured triangle after triangle and it just happened to be true most of the time. It’s based off of the fundamental principles of mathematics.
In this same way, no matter how much empirical research you do, you can’t disprove the logical effects of the minimum wage.
Now then, the welfare state is necessarily an entity that takes money from you by force, also known as “theft”, funnels it through its bureaucracy, and then deposits it back into the accounts of certain members of society. Who those members are is based on the whims of congress or appointed agencies. Because welfare is achieved through taxation, it can remain perpetually indebted, show poor results, and have high overhead. For the population to do anything about it, they need to have a majority vote hampered by the votes of the welfare employee’s themselves and the recipients.
Now consider private charity. In this scenario, the agency gets money by the consent of their customers, the benefactors. For them to stay in business they have to succeeded in several ways; Most of the money they receive needs to make it to the people they’re trying to help, they have to show positive results, and they must stay solvent. If at any time the benefactor’s don’t like what’s going on with this business they can withdraw their funding immediately, no questions asked, and no theft permitted.
There is no fundamental advantage to a welfare state. There is no positive improvement in any way over private charity. If a welfare state “succeeds” in any way, it is only due to the infusion of insane amounts of money; impoverishing society as a whole in order to benefit the chosen few.
So instead of asking for empirical evidence, I would ask you instead: In what fundamental way is the welfare system structurally superior to a private charity? What do we gain that we can’t gain from private charity in a better way?
Why aren’t you concerned about its effectiveness and reach?
Doesn’t the entire point of your argument rest on the fact that voluntary contributions in a tax free society trumps government welfare?
Yet you go on to state that
“I think there can certainly be made the case that private charities in the United States are far more efficient than Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.”
So can you or can you not demonstrate this empirically?
“… no matter how much empirical research you do, you can’t disprove the logical effects of the minimum wage.”
Which are?
“There is no need to go out and do research, or figure out if this is always the case, because you’re always going to find strange outliers where you haven’t been able to track down all the variables.”
How convenient. Is it because there is no empirical evidence to support your argument? Naturally, I expect you’ll want me to just ignore your statement (two quotes above) that private charities are more efficient that SS and Medicare.
“So instead of asking for empirical evidence, I would ask you instead: In what fundamental way is the welfare system structurally superior to a private charity? What do we gain that we can’t gain from private charity in a better way?”
So since you can’t substantiate your arguments, you’re asking me to disprove it.
Here’s the problem with that. Voluntary private charities have never existed in significant enough size to make that comparison – throughout human history. Why do you think that is so? And why do you think that will change in a tax free society?
“Because welfare is achieved through taxation, it can remain perpetually indebted, show poor results, and have high overhead.”
As I’ve noted before, U.S. welfare spending for families and children in 2014 ($264 billion) amounts to to
0.066% of the federal budget. And it’s decreasing annually relative to GDP.
Did you know that we spend $863.5 billion, three times as much, on defense?
Did you know that oil companies receive an average of $5.2 billion in subsidies annually, almost the same as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ($5.6 billion) designed to assist 14.5% Americans facing food insecurity?
Did you know that the tax rate of the 3 biggest US based oil and gas companies averages at 20%, which is lower than my rate, despite making $80 billion in profit?
Did you know that farm subsidies cost the taxpayers
$14.1 billion (2012), almost twice as high as the budget for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children ($7.1 billion)?
Did you know that the
$88 million worth of subsidies enjoyed by Koch Industries is almost as much as the $100 million allocated for the federal Emergency Food and Shelter budget?
Did you know that 965 of the largest corporations in the United States receive
$110 billion in subsidies, larger than the entire federal Food and Nutrition Assistance Program ($107.2 billion) - which includes the above cited subprograms?
And yet you here you are, a self-professed sympathetic guy, frothing on bringing down the welfare budget to zero. And you say you are not extreme.
But you can somehow predict their behavior post tax-abolishment?
All I predict is that the same demand for charity that exists with a government will still exist without a government, and that demand will be met more efficiently by private charity.
If society neglects the poor, that is a reflection of their values, and a government could do no better. (But often does far worse.)
Using your argument, altruistic people like Bill Gates shouldn't exists at all now. Remember your argument of “diminishing marginal utility” one paragraph above? Further, you seem unaware that Rockefeller and Standard Oil actually paid enormous amount of taxes in the form of import tariffs for their equipment and concession fees - not to mention systematic kickbacks to local, state and federal officials.
Diminishing marginal utility doesn’t predict that Bill Gates wouldn’t be charitable.
I was using Diminishing Marginal Utility as a way to show that just because some people have more money does not necessarily mean that those people will be more charitable because it depends on their preferences.
The fact that Rockefeller paid taxes has nothing to do with anything I’ve said about him. The amount of taxes he paid was the important part.
If I use your flawed argument about diminishing marginal utility, it actually does predict that “Bill Gates wouldn’t be charitable”. Remember what you said?
“when applied in this instance means that people certainly might not immediately put their money into charity as soon as discretionary spending comes up”
To be honest, I don’t think you really understand what diminishing marginal utility even means.
Re Rockefeller. You don’t even know how much he paid in taxes. You didn’t even compare how much he and Standard Oil spent in tariffs and what a similar company would pay today, but you are perfectly okay making a blanket statements like
“Rockefeller’s rule was he would tithe 10% of his earnings, so the benefit that he had for the poor depended heavily on him succeeding in business, and not having his income taxed into oblivion.”
Your definition of anarchy is, I'm sorry, just plain silly. Exercising my free will within the constraints of the law is not anarchy.
An Anarcho-Libertarian society is exercising free will under the judiciary of private law agencies, and the executive action of private defense agencies and individuals. In this way having “no rulers”, which is what I call “anarchy”.
No, you said.
“Every time you do something without permission from any authority but your own, you are acting under Anarchy”
That's silly, and you know it. Which is why you edited out my quote, and then wrote a different explanation.
“GDP per capita (PPP constant $) 836b 600c,e ?
Life expectancy (years) 46.0b 48.47c,g Improved
One year olds fully immunized against measles (%) 30 40h Improved
One year olds fully immunized against TB (%) 31 50h Improved
Physicians (per 100,000) 3.4 4h Improved
Infants with low birth weight (%) 16 0.3l Improved
Infant mortality rate (per 1000) 152 114.89c,g Improved
Maternal mortality rate (per 100,000) 1600 1100i Improved
Pop. with access to water (%) 29 29h Same
Pop. with access to sanitation (%) 18 26h Improved
Pop. with access to at least one health facility (%) 28 54.8k Improved
Extreme poverty (% < $1 per day) 60 43.2k Improved
Radios (per 1000) 4.0 98.5k Improved
Telephones (per 1000) 1.92d 14.9k Improved
TVs (per 1000) 1.2 3.7k Improved
Fatality due to measles 8000 5598j,m Improved
Adult literacy rate (%) 24b 19.2j Worse
Combined school enrollment (%) 12.9b 7.5a,f Worse
…Only two of the 18 development indicators in Table 1 show a clear welfare decline under stateless: adult literacy and combined gross school enrollment. Given that foreign aid was completely financing education in Somalia pre-1991, it is not surprising that there has been some fall in school enrollment and literacy…
…A substantial observed rise in consumption without an attendant rise in per capita GDP suggests an unmeasured increase in per capita income between the pre- and post-anarchy periods not reflected in the data.”
The lives of people in Somalia improved under anarchy almost across the board compared to under government, your prevaricating and sense of humor notwithstanding.
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdfPredictably, you copied those stats verbatim from self-professed libertarian Peter Leeson’s book. You didn’t even delete the question mark he placed on the huge drop in GDP – it makes me wonder if you even read it. Anyway, did you happen to notice that he was using UNDP data from the mid-80s and comparing it against UNDP data between 15 and 20 years later? In your eyes, is that a fair comparison? Do you expect society to stand still for up to two decades? Do you expect the presence of aid workers and funding from international organizations to have zero effect in the interim period?
Shall we take a look at the numbers of post-anarchy Somalia using the latest data from UNDP's Somalia Annual Report (2013), UNDP's Somalia Human Development (2012) and CIA World Factbook (2014) and watch them blow yours away?
http://www.so.undp.org/content/dam/somalia/docs/Project_Documents/Human_Development/UNDP%20Somalia%20Annual%20Report%202013.pdfhttp://www.so.undp.org/content/dam/somalia/docs/MDGs/Somalia%20Human%20Development%20Report%202012.pdf#page=1&zoom=auto,-100,794https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/so.htmlGDP per capita : $600
(Improved)Life expectancy (years) : 55
(Improved)One year olds fully immunized against measles (%): 85%
(Improved)One year olds fully immunized against TB (%): NA
Physicians: 0.04 physicians/1,000 population
(Improved)Infants with low birth weight (%): NA
Infant mortality rate (per 1000): 100.14 deaths/1,000 live births
(Improved) Maternal mortality rate (per 100,000): 1,000 deaths/100,000 live births
(Improved)Pop. with access to water (%):31.7% of population (urban, urban: 69.6%)
(Improved)Pop. with access to sanitation (%): 52% of population
(Improved)Pop. with access to at least one health facility (%): NA
Extreme poverty (% < $1 per day): 43%
(Improved)Radios (per 1000): NA, but there’s now
one government-operated radio station and
ten private FM radio stationsTelephones (per 1000): Total lines, 100,000 – works out to about 10 per 1000
(Improved) (There’s even stats for mobile [658,000] and internet usage now[106,000])
TVs (per 1000): NA, but there’s now
one government-operated TV station and
one private TV station stations Fatality due to measles: NA
Adult literacy rate (%): 37.8%
(Improved)Combined school enrollment (%): 78.4
(Improved)Do you understand now why self-professed libertarians and paleolibertarians stopped using Somalia as an example after a government was put in place in 2011? Do you understand now why I was laughing when you brought Somalia up?
Sadly, corporatocracy has always acted in its own self interest, not society's.
Business’s acting in their own self-interest is the same as acting in the interest of society. The only time this is not the case is when the business quickly fails, or when the business is getting favors from government.
I would suggest getting the book “The Myth of the Robber Barons” and learning the difference been entrepreneurship and political entrepreneurship.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315Since when? Left unchecked, land, natural resources and communities will always be exploited by corporations. The United States and especially third world nations are now being raped and exploited by American enterprises even as you read this. The myth of trickle-down economics is not “the same as acting in the interest of society”.
Thanks for the book recommendation, but to be honest, I don’t take anything published by Young America's Foundation seriously. You can only read so much revisionist accounts and half-truths before you get sick of them.
Also, you are laboring under the impression that free market equals complete deregulation - something that the United States nor any other nation have ever tried nor experienced.
Deregulation insofar as practices don’t conflict with the Non-Aggression principle, but otherwise yes.
A good example of free trade was inter-state free trade in the United States. One of the biggest reasons the Federal Government was instituted was to “regulate interstate commerce” which actually meant to remove any kind of barriers to commerce that states might try to erect amongst each-other. This is why when the Constitution we know today went into effect in 1789, all interstate tariffs, trade restrictions, and export taxes were banned. -Dewey, Financial History of the United States (5th ed. 1915) ch 1-3
If you’re going to quote Section 9 as an example of free trade, you should also quote Section 8 and the import tariffs designed to protect American businesses. I repeat, “you are laboring under the impression that free market equals complete deregulation - something that the United States nor any other nation have ever tried nor experienced.”
Answer to "There is absolute no justification at all to stop aiding people in need." here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245None? How about stopping theft? How about if the agencies responsible aren’t actually doing their job? What if there is a better way of providing for them? What if the same entity that is suppose to be helping these people is simultaneously starving woman and children to death due to trade sanctions? What if that same entity is outright killing innocent people by the tens of thousands, calling it “collateral damage”?
I guess that’s just altruism existing outside of reality again.
You've asked me this earlier, and I've answered you.
8. The government is you, me and other people like us. They are not some alien beings or members Alex Jones' ruling 20 families. Fix the government, from outside or inside. Don't let organizations like {url=http://www.alec.org/]ALEC [/url] write bills for your Congressmen. Pressure your Congressmen to repeal acts like Citizens United which allows companies to secretly fund political campaigns. Despise the war? Make it known, like the Flower Generation. They achieved results, despite the almost universal ridicule they received.
Voting can be gamed;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wIq2xeyal8Voting didn’t stop Hitler. He was elected before the Ermächtigungsgesetz, so I’m not sure why you brought that up.
Voting didn’t stop this;
http://www.usdebtclock.org/Voting didn’t stop the fall of Rome.
Voting can’t stop the tyranny of the majority.
Voting fails time and time again because it’s subject to social pressures, conflict of interest, Condorcet’s paradox, and the ignorance of voters.
Elected officials aren’t “me”, they don’t even necessarily represent the views of the majority.
Yes, I did say that. I also explained how it can be gamed. I also explained your weak argument regarding Hitler. Not surprisingly, you once again edited out the relevant part of my quote and pretended as if I hadn’t already answered you. Why? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Or are you just grandstanding for a silent audience?
Here, let me requote myself.
“You are resorting to Godwin's law once again. Yes, Hitler was elected. But you are intentionally ignoring the years of unchecked abuse he inflicted on the government culminating with him holding the entire Reichstag hostage while forcing the passing of Ermächtigungsgesetz, which elevated his powers to near monarchy.
Elections cannot be easily gamed - gaming it requires resource, patience and most importantly, depends on the apathy of the citizens. Case in point, you - you refuse to do anything about Citizens United, but have no problem complaining endlessly about the government. You just want the whole thing abolished in favor of some half baked theories.”
Your excuse on why “Voting fails time and time again” can also be applied to individuals and personal psychology in personal capacity.
“Elected officials aren’t “me”, they don’t even necessarily represent the views of the majority.”
I know. To you they are “overlords”, “aristocratic lords” and some other description I forget.
In your mind, are they humans or reptilians from another galaxy?
Or are they scions of Alex Jones' twenty families that secretly control the world?
Or are they shape shifters?
