There’s two rules to live by that result in a better society for everybody:
1) Mind your own business.
2) Your right to do whatever you want to do ends at somebody else’s nose.
On #1, that’s why I don’t care about gay marriage, birth control, or a myriad of other things. Because as long as it doesn’t hurt me or mine (and I have an expansive view of the word “mine”, as in, everybody I know, or could know), it’s none of my business. And none of my government’s business, for that matter.
So far, so good. Capital-L Libertarians have the same view of #1 that civil libertarians have. Where we have a problem is that capital-L Libertarians then seem to say that we should not have all those laws that are about #2 — laws making it illegal to harm other people. They say we should be able to have contracts that allow harm if it’s between consenting adults, for example, if you want to run a coal mine that’s dangerous, well, it’s a contract between yourself and those consenting adults who hired on, you told them it was a dangerous mine, so that’s that.
But my take on it is that your right to run a dangerous coal mine stops at the point where it endangers other people, period, contract or no contract. It may seem to some Koch-suckers that it’s impossible for those two to coexist, that you cannot have #1 and #2 at the same time, that if you are going to have #1 allowing companies to engage in any business practices they want to engage in, you cannot have #2, which does not allow companies to engage in business practices that hurt people, but that’s just ridiculous. These basic principles are the fundamental principles upon which all modern democracies are based — that is, people are free to conduct their business in any manner they wish, unless it violates a law constructed to prevent harm to other people.
But of course the whole point of the Kochites saying that #2 isn’t viable is that it’s *profitable* to hurt other people. Properly disposing of oil well drilling fluids is expensive. Dumping them into someone else’s drinking water is cheap. And other people be damned, they want their profits, and more of it. Thus their attack on rule #2 of how we create a civilized society… and the difference between a civil libertarian, and a Kotch-style capital-L Libertarian.
– Badtux the Civil Liberties Penguin
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I would argue that companies (or people) operating in a non-competitive environment need to be limited by law. Utilities, communications come to mind.
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Yes, because they have the power to harm other people by using their market power to arbitrarily charge far above what a free market would charge and furthermore have the power to deprive people of things necessary for modern life without the possibility of the magical free market fairy coming in and creating competition (I’ve already talked about why competition in most of these “natural monopolies” is economically impossible) thus must be prevented from doing so. The Enron energy traders laughing about impoverishing Granny come to mind here. I would claim that health care has become such a monopoly also, given that four (4) drug companies control the vast majority of the world’s drug supply and similarly a small handful of private hospital chains control health care in most geographical areas and thus have arrived at an oligopoly situation where they can literally dictate who lives and who dies.
But of course that power of life or death over other people — “your money or your life” — i.e., indistinguishable from a Central Park mugging — is “free enterprise” to the capital-L Libertarians. Apparently they love muggers. As long as they are the muggers. Go figure.
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Companies whose business model involves activities that stand a half-decent chance of killing people need to be limited by law too. As in “regulated.” The higher the likelihood of death, the more regulatin’ is needed. A bit of regs for food providers who might poison some folks; more for activities that could cause sudden deaths, like driving trucks; a lot for enterprises that could wipe out whole regions if they screw up — like nuke plants.
(Tux, how closely do you follow the ongoing Fukushima catastrophe? It strikes me as Chernobyl x 4, with the entire Pacific Ocean to befoul instead of a corner of Ukraina. And it looks like the commies did a better job of containing their single mess than the Japs have done with their quadruplezilla. Any insights on that? You’re in the radiation pathway — something that my Xwife used to lose sleep over up there in Vancouver.)
Lastly, as far as a “legal contract” to do a job such as mining in a dangerous coal tunnel that’s likely to kill someone, I like the FDR quote that “a necessitous man is not a free man.” “Necessitous” being a pre-1930s word meaning “in desperate need of stuff to survive.” If you’re starved into a corner with your back against the wall and someone hands you a pen to sign your life away on the chance that you might get to live another day, that ain’t a freedom deal.
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Bukko, I’m not following Fukushima too closely. I regularly play in the desert not many miles from where multiple atom bombs lit up the sky, after all. I respect radiation but the energetic particles that are most dangerous have an extremely short half-life and will have decayed to the point where they’re not dangerous by the time they make it to me across a very large ocean, and I suspect working in the chemical stew of Louisiana oil refineries will have sent me to my grave from cancer well before any of the less energetic particles from Fukushima can do so. When you’ve already been fucked by the “free market” system (that’s where I left a good part of my hearing too), an additional tiny bit of fuckery isn’t worth worrying about.
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Too bad my X didn’t grok that. She would get beside herself worrying about Fukurads, while she continued to smoke cigarettes. (Only about 5-10 a day, plus loads of weed.) I gently pointed put the relative degree of risk between the two, but never too strongly, because she’d get irate for days if I tried to get her to stop the tobacco. People are more comfortable with a deadly risk they take themselves than a minuscule one that’s imposed from outside.
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[…] discusses the difference between “libertarians” (that is, persons who believe in protecting civil libe… (that is, persons who believe Ayn Rand had a clue, easily spotted by the little copy of the U. S. […]
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I see no difference between the physically strong using their physical strength to get what they want out of the physically weak, and the “mentally strong” using their “mental strength” to get what they want out of the “mentally weak” (“mentally strong” read “those able to better wield the force of law/forces of the economy/leverage their education”).
Whether you mug someone with your hands or with your mind, you are still mugging them. The actions are ethically and morally no different… both are evil.
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