Right, because a rational economy has people running businesses at a loss, or not maximizing their profit by scaling success.
I'm not sure what this has to do with what I said. Or rather, what I meant. I admit I may not have been entirely clear on this point.
Businesses, particularly the largest businesses, often do what's best for
them - their owners and shareholders. Sometimes this is at odds with what is good for the customer or the public. They do this for the sole reason of maximizing profit.
Businesses sell hazardous products, pollute the environment, sometimes engage in what amounts to slavery. Basically, if the people at the helm are selfish and amoral enough, they'll do whatever they can to increase their profit. Bad outcomes. Laws, regulations are a way of mitigating that tendency.
I think it is moral for you to work to feed him, not for you to take my money to feed him and yourself. Politicians do the latter.
If you were a rich man, and I were a man who, despite my efforts, could only just feed himself, and there were five more men starving, I would feel justified in taking some of your wealth to feed them.
The impact on the quality of your life would be small, the impact on theirs great.
You care so much about people, work more, produce more, create jobs and provide charity. You have no right however to demand that I produce charity for causes which you care about. To argue otherwise, is an endorsement of slavery.
I have no right to take anything from you, but if enough of us agree,
we do. Consider it a condition for living and working in a society, and using its currency.
No man is an island; nobody ever got rich in a vacuum. Every person is dependent on many, many others. Whatever wealth you have would largely not exist if it weren't for the labors of others. In a sense, you owe your wealth to others, to a great degree. If you've achieved much, it's because you've leveraged the system to your advantage, or been lucky.
No one forces you to work, therefore you are not a slave. Are you forced to give up some part of your labor if you do work? Yes, and if not to a government, to an employer. But you can always choose not to work. You can choose to go live in the woods, and pick berries, and eat them.
People made the same argument why blacks couldn't be freed from slavery. That it would be too hard to integrate them into white culture, Lincoln wanted to ship them back to Africa. The social hurdles were too big to climb. That's the argument you are making. We can't have nice things because it is too hard to change.
My point was you need a significant number of people who believe in abolishing the state for it to actually happen. What percentage of the population do you think is in favor of that? 0.001%? It's totally impractical. You're an ideologue. I'm just being pragmatic. We work with what we've got.
Does this hand waving have any purpose? If I do not pay taxes, to fund the activities of others, I will be stolen from by force, incarcerated, and if I resist, killed. All for trying to protect my property.
Unless you want to argue there is no property, and everyone owns each other or no one owns anything at all. Make a real argument please.
Nope, you're right. That's what will happen, if you took it that far. Those are the rules as we've collectively agreed on. Not everyone's going to agree. You don't, obviously. There's a lot of things I'd like to be different too. If enough people can agree, maybe some changes will be made.
I am asking how they could. How could you have a monopoly where there is open competition?
I addressed this. It's easy for a big player to crush newcomers, particularly in an established market.
You're not the first one to have this argument with me. The sad thing, is that you don't see that all the monopolies you complain about, happen underneath your beloved state.
Now you're projecting a false characterization on me. I don't appreciate that. I never said I had any "love" for the state. It is what it is, good and bad. It could always be better. I thought I made that clear.
I also have no illusions that monopolies don't exist. But I also know that the government goes after monopolies from time to time.
Actually, I would argue that sometimes monopolies can actually be good for the consumer. Sometimes too much choice is worse than not enough. The difference is, without any regulation, a bad-for-the-consumer monopoly can often continue operating with impunity. The consumer can stop using the product/service, but if it's something relatively essential (e.g., phone/internet) they may have little else to do than suck it up and pay for it. Conversely, if enough consumers complain to the government, they actually have the power to do something about whatever bad practice is making people unhappy.
Sure, that's called competition. If you were not the dominant player in a market, you would do the same thing. Google didn't start out as the #1 search engine, and search engines were not regulated directly. How did Google overtake Yahoo? How did Facebook overtake MySpace?
Was it competition, better features and a better service? Why couldn't Yahoo and MySpace crush them?
Some markets are easier to break into and compete in than others. The internet, as a platform, facilitates innovative and disruptive ideas and businesses. It is a very fast-moving, liquid medium.
Other industries are much harder to crack.
Anyway, this entire debate I feel has gone a bit off track. My original point was speculating on how the internet would look if it had been privately, rather than publicly, developed. You know the big network owners right now would prefer to restrict and regulate the flow of data across their networks - that's what the whole network neutrality thing is about. Would it be more commercialized and controlled had it always been in private hands? Would democratized ad-hoc wireless nets spring up to fill a desire for an alternative? Maybe. I bet things would be pretty different, in any case.
It's a moot point though; things are how they are.
I'm not going to spend a bunch of time addressing the rest of it, it's pretty much the same stuff and I'd just be repeating myself.
The bottom line for me is that I hear a lot of fear-mongering, about socialism and tyrannical government and so on, but then I look at the rest of the modern industrialized countries in the world and they seem to be doing pretty well for the most part. A lot of them are more socialized than the US is, a lot farther to the left, and yet, I bet if you asked the average person-on-the-street in any of those countries if they felt less free or enslaved or something they'd probably laugh at you. It's not an uncommon sentiment to hear from a European that they think Americans are kind of crazy for not demanding things like universal healthcare. In many ways just being poor in a country without an adequate social safety net is tantamount to slavery or imprisonment.
This business with the TSA is a pretty uniquely American thing; it has more to do with our culture and a perpetuation in the national dialog of fear-based rhetoric. Fear sells - it gets eyeballs, it gets people to buy things. One of our political parties attracts a large part of its constituency by conjuring figurative demons and bogeymen and then promising them the solution.
So - state: good? Bad? Looking around the world - seemingly necessary, good on balance when done right. But ultimately a moot argument. It is, it will continue on. Work with what you've got. Try to change it, try to make it better.
