A (Rhetorical Question)

[SPC]

http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=279

That's an even shorter health-care plan.

[SPC]

Eliminating medical licenses is most probably the worst idea that I have ever heard.

There's nothing wrong with being board-certified, I just think that that shouldn't be required in order to sell medical services. So long as you say up front that you are not board-certified, what is the problem?

[SPC]

SPC, why do you think the free market can solve everything? I ask this as an honest question because I've always found arguments against it and very few for it.

That's a loaded question. I do not believe that the free market can solve everything. I simply believe that a free market can solve problems better than a monopolistic central state can.

[SPC]

SPC, why do you think the free market can solve everything? I ask this as an honest question because I've always found arguments against it and very few for it.

That's a loaded question. I do not believe that the free market can solve everything. I simply believe that a free market can solve problems better than a monopolistic central state can.

You propose privatizing the police, the oceans, the army... everything. How can you justify that?

I just did. Logically speaking, natural competition in services provides higher quality and lower priced services than a coercive monopoly. Would you like for me to go into more detail about the specific topics, or just a brief on voluntaryism in general?

[SPC]

It's better than a private monopoly in my opinion, yes. But a public one.

Anyway, I'd like to see you justify privatizing the police force/army.

Worst case scenario is that you're back to having a government again, and as Etienne de la Boetie demonstrated, governments can't do anything without the tacit consent of the majority. So voluntaryism at it's worst is simply what we have right now.

Police today have more in common with tax collectors than they do with protecting people. Occasionally they do catch violent criminals. However, socialized law enforcement gets a paycheck regardless of whether their "customers" like their services. If their behavior is really distasteful, they will get a paid vacation. Therefore, it stands that the socialist system encourages them to have reckless behavior and go after nonviolent offenders. Additionally, it is pratcially impossible to sue the state for any damages it may cause, so they face no penalty for acting unnecessarily violently. Since they get indirectly paid through extortion, it stands to reason that nonviolent activies that the state fines or takes away through asset forfeiture will be the activities socialized law enforcement will go after most. Thus why you see much more drug raids, parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. then you see police actually preventing violent crime (which socialized law enforcement usually "enforces" after the fact so they can punish the criminal rather than provide restitution for the victim). On the other hand, a law enforcement agency that was actually subject to competition would be far less likely to endulge in any of these behaviors, since they would have to pay for damages they cause and would have to keep their customers in order to stay in business.

[SPC]

So you trust these supposed "stupid" people to vote for good politicians to manage your health care, but not to exercise clear judgement themselves about which doctor to use? Other than that, your "argument" is entirely ad hominem attacks. Please explain why a totalitarian corporatist health care system would be preferable to a free market in health care?

[SPC]

So you trust these supposed "stupid" people to vote for good politicians to manage your health care, but not to exercise clear judgement themselves about which doctor to use? Other than that, your "argument" is entirely ad hominem attacks. Please explain why a totalitarian corporatist health care system would be preferable to a free market in health care?

It's very simple; without a medical license you aren't "a doctor". At the very least, it stops or curtails these snake oil salesman from doing more harm.

I don't trust anyone to vote for 'good' candidates, so it's beside the point. Politicians no more manage healthcare, then they manage my personal finances.

I'm not playing along to this silly dichotomy of "totalitarian corporatist health care" versus "the free market". Find someone that'll take that argument seriously.

Again, what is the problem if the person says up front, "I am not a licensed doctor"?

[SPC]

So you trust these supposed "stupid" people to vote for good politicians to manage your health care, but not to exercise clear judgement themselves about which doctor to use? Other than that, your "argument" is entirely ad hominem attacks. Please explain why a totalitarian corporatist health care system would be preferable to a free market in health care?

It's very simple; without a medical license you aren't "a doctor". At the very least, it stops or curtails these snake oil salesman from doing more harm.

I don't trust anyone to vote for 'good' candidates, so it's beside the point. Politicians no more manage healthcare, then they manage my personal finances.

I'm not playing along to this silly dichotomy of "totalitarian corporatist health care" versus "the free market". Find someone that'll take that argument seriously.

Again, what is the problem if the person says up front, "I am not a licensed doctor"?

What makes you think that not licensing doctors now would be any different than in the 19th century?  Especially when you have no way to recoup your losses should the snake oil salesman harm you.

Earth:  It's not really worth arguing with SPC.  He's an anarchist that believes that the dollar is a better tool for democracy than your own person.  So if you have two dollars and I have only one.. your'e worth twice the votes.

http://mises.org/daily/4276

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Anyway, if the afformentioned snake oil salesman didn't say up front that he did not have a medical degree, the swindled client would be able to sue that salesman to fraud. You also fail to mention that such "snake oil salesman" exist today in the form of chiropractors and homeopathic medicines, who are exempted from the restriction from practicing medicine in exchange for paying the state for a degree in chiropratry.

[SPC]

Snowguy, you seem to be misinterpreting his statement. The idea is that if such subsidies were eliminated, people would take greater precautions to safeguard against a potential medical problem happening. Since your stooping to using an argument from pathos, might I ask whether it is moral to use a third-party to force your neighbors to pay for your mother's medical bills?

EDIT: Speaking of bankrupcy, you might want to look at what share of the national debt Medicare and Medicaid make up http://www.usdebtclock.org/

[SPC]

Snowguy, you seem to be misinterpreting his statement. The idea is that if such subsidies were eliminated, people would take greater precautions to safeguard against a potential medical problem happening. Since your stooping to using an argument from pathos, might I ask whether it is moral to use a third-party to force your neighbors to pay for your mother's medical bills?

EDIT: Speaking of bankrupcy, you might want to look at what share of the national debt Medicare and Medicaid make up http://www.usdebtclock.org/

I think it is perfectly moral for our society to pay the medical costs of the sick and disabled.  In this made up world you seem to inhabit, it might make sense to get rid of all medical care to the poor or the sick and disabled to cannot afford it and just say "tough!"... but in the real world, we abandoned that cold social darwinism long ago.

But I also think the entire argument is bunk.  People already decided long ago to safegard against potential medical problems, which are much less affordable by the elderly due to higher frequency of problems or by the poor due to lack of funds, by voting for politicians that enacted Medicare and Medicaid.  By doing this, everybody gets medical coverage.  This is necessarily much better, in my interpretation of what is moral, than telling 9 people they must die early so that the 1 person can have enough money to save himself 10 times over and thus go buy a 3rd home for his grandson.

You're setting up a strawman. I'm not against society paying for the medical costs of the sick and disabled. I just feel that would be more efficient if conducted by private charities. Currently, Medicare and Medicaid are run by the same organization that ran Walter Reed Hospital. Additionally, your social contract argument is "bunk" because it assumes that a legal contract is binding that lacks an exit clause and is not consented to by most people (in reality, nobody consents to it). What if they voted for those politicians for different reasons besides their passage of reditributionist policies? Since voter intent can never be determined, one cannot say that they "consented' to those programs. By that logic, Jim Crow was alright because the majority of Southern voters voted for policians that implemented it. But, even all that aside, it shows that the argument for "social democracy" completely lacks any substance since the circumstances could change in the next election.

[SPC]

Snowguy, you seem to be misinterpreting his statement. The idea is that if such subsidies were eliminated, people would take greater precautions to safeguard against a potential medical problem happening. Since your stooping to using an argument from pathos, might I ask whether it is moral to use a third-party to force your neighbors to pay for your mother's medical bills?

EDIT: Speaking of bankrupcy, you might want to look at what share of the national debt Medicare and Medicaid make up http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Because if nothing else, even ignoring the obvious moral/sentimental reasons and assuming your worldview, it's just being pragmatic. Do you really think the uninsured or impoverished wouldn't eventually revolt and impose a system even more draconian than whatever comparatively tame social democracy snowguy wants? It's just self preservation. Know when to pick your battles.

If they're healthy enough to revolt, I would question how sick or disabled they were in the first place.
But seriously, you're saying that I should support these policies because of the potential for violence? Should we also implement Sharia law because fundamentalist Muslims are "revolting"? Of course, the argument you provide is telling of the true nature of government programs: that they are ultimately backed up by violence rather than logic.

[SPC]

Let me put it this way. How do you think property emerged? Was that a purely 'voluntary transaction.' Of course not. The vast majority of 'property' that exists now has been essentially taken from someone else violently. And if it wasn't then that's probably because whoever claimed it for themselves had enough guns, mercenaries, 'money' or sheer influence to make contesting it pointless. The fact that something like the United States as we know it even exists should tell you something about the 'non aggression principle' and how viable it generally is IRL.

In Western societies, we have this principle called "presumption of innocence". Thus, unless someone can prove that a particular piece of property was stolen from them or their direct ancestors, the current owner of the property is presumed to have acquired it legitimately. Lockean homesteading theory teaches that previously unowned property can come into private ownership by the mixing of a person's labor with the unowned property.

[SPC]

As far as Mint's original post, SPC, you're darn tootin right we should at least make government policy based on the fear of violent revolt.  Unless you threaten the revolt with overwhelming government force or throw the riff raff enough peanuts to satiate them, with today's educated citizens, things will go badly very quickly.

As I've said before, your political ideology would only work in a vacuum, or, perhaps at some point in our evolutionary future when we've become much more agreeable.  But I have a feeling eventually humans will probably drop all forms of capitalism instead for a form of economic collectivism as a simple means of practicality as we devote our minds to other, more important matters.

Sorry, but Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek already explained that socialism is inherently unworkable because it cannot account for all the calculations that automatically occur under capitalism. The idea that implementation of libertarianism would require us to "become more agreeable" is ridiculous. It is statist ideas such as social democracy that create a conflict of interest between people in the first place. To provide an example: Statist social democrats believe that government should be involved in several areas of our lives, so necessarily politics s a zero-sum game: not everyone can be happy. However, if government stayed out of peoples lives, they would be free to make decisions for themselves like whether to own health insurance or which school to send my chlild to or whether my money should go to Wall-Street fatcats or the literally billions of decisions people make on a constant basis that statists naively think can be handled by some faceless bureaucrat. As far as humans rejecting capitalism in favor of collectvism, doesn't it make you wonder when every single attempt to do that throughout history has failed within a matter of years?

[SPC]

Sorry, but Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek already explained that socialism is inherently unworkable because it cannot account for all the calculations that automatically occur under capitalism

Appeal To Authority.

Maybe the Hayek introduction, but you haven't refuted his actual statement.

[SPC]

Does no one think it might be possible to have an economic system that involves both a state and free market forces?

(because that is what, you know, a lot, well, most, well...all, really, economists would say)

No, not all economists say that. Most worthwhile ones don't.

Give an example of an economist who believes in completely abolishing the state. Or is that too intellectual a thing for you to do?

Murray N. Rothbard and David D. Friedman are the two best known ones.

[SPC]

So? Again, none of that would exist in the first place if we had followed the non aggression principle. Plus the legal system you cite is by definition based upon coercion for enforcement (taxes, prison, etc.). Besides even if we were to abolish all that over night and implement the 'private court system' you dream about somehow, it would still boil down to two things:

1. Who was better armed.
2. If people had some sort of strong incentive to play along with the people claiming to make the 'rules' (threat of ostracizing, banishment, etc.).

Those things are present in our current legal system. In suits where the government is one of the parties, the government court is more likely to deliver a verdict favorable to the government. You would think it would make more sense to hire a court in which one of the parties didn't pay the judges salary. Juries are intentionally selected for ignorance of the law. The government's agents (as well as the judge himself) also possess legal immunity from the consequences of their actions, so how can you expect that to yield an unbiased result? How does presumption of innocence involve the initiation of force? And could you explain how homesteading is in violation of the non-agression principle?

[SPC]

Does no one think it might be possible to have an economic system that involves both a state and free market forces?

(because that is what, you know, a lot, well, most, well...all, really, economists would say)

No, not all economists say that. Most worthwhile ones don't.

Give an example of an economist who believes in completely abolishing the state. Or is that too intellectual a thing for you to do?

Murray N. Rothbard and David D. Friedman are the two best known ones.

So, you have two guys: one who actually isn't an economist and one dead guy who doesn't appear to have any major contribution to the science beyond his political views.

I think my point pretty much stands.  

What is your qualification for being an "economist"? And are you serious about not having an major contributions? I take it you've never heard of Man, Economy, and State or  The Machinery of Freedom. Also, those were merely the most notable economists. You can also count Gustave de Molinari, Walter Block, Hans Herman Hoppe, Thomas DiLorenzo, Bryan Caplan, Robert Murphy, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thorton, etc.

[SPC]

I don't believe David Friedman's father Milton had a degree in Economics either, but that didn't preclude him from receiving the Nobel Prize in the subject. Also, it should be pointed out that their theories are primarily derived from the Austrian (Rothbard) and Chicago (Friedman) schools of economics. Would you deny that Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek (also a Nobel laureate) had an impact on economics?

[SPC]

IIRC, the "Nobel" Prize in Economics was established by the Norwegian Government in 1974. Keep in mind that they gave their last award to neo-Keynesian hack Paul Krugman, which ought to tell you something about how credible those prizes are. Also, to call me a creationist is ridiculous; you're the one demanding that some authority figure do the thinking for you instead of doing it yourself. So far, you have not tried to debunk voluntarism but instead have simply been trying to use "appeal to authority" as a substitute for debate.

[SPC]

IIRC, the "Nobel" Prize in Economics was established by the Norwegian Government in 1974. Keep in mind that they gave their last award to neo-Keynesian hack Paul Krugman, which ought to tell you something about how credible those prizes are. Also, to call me a creationist is ridiculous; you're the one demanding that some authority figure do the thinking for you instead of doing it yourself. So far, you have not tried to debunk voluntarism but instead have simply been trying to use "appeal to authority" as a substitute for debate.

LOL!

1. It was the Swedish central bank.
2. It was in 1969.
3. They've given it to both von Hayek and Milton Friedman. The fact they give it to people regardless of political views ought to speak in their favour, not against them.
4. You started with appeal to authority yourself! You tried an authority argument and now that you're losing it you're trying to wriggle away.

But, hey, let's get serious. You show me why Krugman's model of trade under imperfect competition is not a valuable contribution to economic science. I'm assuming you're familiar with it since you are so sure he was undeserving of the prize.

(and, please, don't ask me to debunk your claim that Earth was created in 7 days. I have better things to do. I can throw some key words at you though: public goods. Contract enforcement. And look at empirical studies, for crying out loud)

Like I said, that was just from memory. I may have wrongly used appeal to authority in my argument, but contrary to what you claim, that was not my whole argumen! Rather than debunking what Hayek said, you are attacking me for having cited Hayek in the first place! Also, while we're talking about logical fallicies, you use a straw man by comparing free markets to creationism. As for Krugman's Nobel Prize, it would seem that he won it for one of the few topics he's correct on. It's unfortunately that someone of his intellect could fall for something as stupid as the Broken Window Fallacy on other matters.

[SPC]

Okay, so why would you think enforcement of contracts is best performed by a coercive monopoly? If I make an agreement with someone and decide to have some other neutral arbiter play the role of enforcement, are we infringing upon anyone's rights? Wouldn't having the mere possibility that we may seek another arbiter if one of us believes that an arbiter is unfair be incentive to provide fair rulings? Additionally, allowing some institution to have a monopoly on contract enforcement is even more ridiculous when that institution is a party in the contract. At the very least, surely you may admit that there is a conflict of interest when government courts hear cases in which the government is the plaintiff? As far as public goods, almost anything can constitute a public good if you want it to, but that doesn't mean we should revert into government control of everything. If one accepts that there are public goods, doesn't that mean that one also has to accept public costs? To give an example of a small town, if I am a beneficiary of my neighbors hiring a security guard, doesn't that mean that I am losing on potential customers when the money they spend on security guards is not being spent at my business? As far as correlation between economic prosperity and the state, one only needs to look at a ranking of free markets to see that relatively freer countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, United States, New Zealand, etc. tend to have great prosperity than countries with less economic freedom such as North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. (and before you say it, a country ruled under Sharia law by al-Shabbab is not "anarchy") One reason that the creationism analogy is innacurate is that you are comparing a physical science with a social science. Economics generally assumes that human beings act to fulfill their own self-interests most of the time.