Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government • Hacker News Board

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#111

Post by ehsanu1 » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #105

scarmig wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree that without a monopoly you'd have lots of deals being struck. If you're just talking about violence-suppliers, the likely equilibrium is no violence at all. But you're always fighting over stuff and, moreover, people. In all the cases I can think of, violence-suppliers would look at all the people it can extract value from, look at each other, and then combine forces to extract the most value from people.…

Wait, so if you say the likely equilibrium is no violence at all, what's bad about it? If violence-suppliers form a cartel and people are happy about the way it serves them - what's wrong with that? If some become unhappy, they do 2 things: stop paying their monthly fees and seek a new company to protect them (which will inevitably emerge, because there's a demand). On a side note, libertarians call violence supplier…

I think scarmig means that the equilibrium would be a monopoly which would then take the role of government. And in fact, on an international scale, there's an oligopoly violence suppliers, it's just that they're not "private", but "public".

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#112

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

ericHosick wrote: post #50

snitko wrote: post #33

What makes me sad is that a lot of people, even here, discharge Ron Paul as some sort of crazy guy without even listening to what he says. In comments to this post "thesagan" wrote that some of his ideas are "batshit crazy" as if his ideology is composed of many different unrelated parts. Not true, Ron Paul ideas are ideas of libertarianism and if you study them diligent enough, you'll eventually be used to thinking…

Most people seem to have good intentions but good intentions don't always lead to good results. The intentions of laws with compulsory fees (taxation) and compulsory who marries who are based on good intentions (in the minds of those who create them). In both cases, these good intentions are based on theft of basic rights. But, in the long term, how can you make society better off when your core beliefs are based on…

[deleted]

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#113

Post by scarmig » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #105

scarmig wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree that without a monopoly you'd have lots of deals being struck. If you're just talking about violence-suppliers, the likely equilibrium is no violence at all. But you're always fighting over stuff and, moreover, people. In all the cases I can think of, violence-suppliers would look at all the people it can extract value from, look at each other, and then combine forces to extract the most value from people.…

Wait, so if you say the likely equilibrium is no violence at all, what's bad about it? If violence-suppliers form a cartel and people are happy about the way it serves them - what's wrong with that? If some become unhappy, they do 2 things: stop paying their monthly fees and seek a new company to protect them (which will inevitably emerge, because there's a demand). On a side note, libertarians call violence supplier…

I think this is getting to semantics, but revealing semantics. I would say a situation where "violence-suppliers form a cartel and people are happy about the way it serves them" to be a wordy way of saying the State. And the same agglomerating forces that lead to a cartel in the first place make it difficult for another violence-supplier to appear: if it offers a better deal to customers than what the cartel is offering, the cartel will point its guns at it and say, "are you sure? You should reconsider."

That's why "private protection agencies" really doesn't get at their nature: being plural is contradictory with having a single cartel supplier of violence. And it's hard to say "private from whom" when there's only one party you negotiate with. And when you're negotiating for protection from violence with the only likely source of that violence... the word racket comes to mind better than protection agency.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#114

Post by vitno » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:06 AM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #71

baddox wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's odd. Can you give me an example of a common libertarian No True Scotsman argument?

Well, it's not really a pure free market system, so it doesn't count.

you do realize that is a valid argument though, right? The core concept of the no true scotsman argument is the wishy-washy definition of what is being debated. He isn't a true scotsman because a true scotsman would wear a kilt! something like that. If the definition of scotsman is "wears a kilt" the same way a libertarian would say "pure free market" then it is totally valid.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#115

Post by smacktoward » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

a_bonobo wrote: post #104

smacktoward wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, there's some folks in Afghanistan and Iraq who did pretty good for themselves against our high-tech arsenal with just some old automatic rifles and homemade explosives. Vietnam, too.

All of the insurgents in these conflicts have been armed by third parties. The Vietcong got weapons and supplies from China and Cambodia, the Afghani insurgents got weapons and supplies from the US to fight the Soviets (including explosives [1]), and the current Iraqi insurgents get money and supplies from extremists all over the place, mostly from the Emirates (afaik). All of these fighters did not build their own w…

None of which is relevant to the original assertion, which was that defeating a modern army requires heavy armor (which we can use for discussion purposes as a proxy for the complete spectrum of modern, high-tech weapons) rather than small arms. The Chinese weren't funneling tanks to the Viet Cong, and the US wasn't funneling A-10s to the Afghan insurgents. It was small arms and man-portable weapons like mortars and MANPADs.

And while those armies did eventually get arms supplies from abroad, in their early days they had to improvise. Viet Cong fighters early in that war, for instance, had to scrounge old French weapons or even homemade shotguns fashioned from galvanized pipe. The Iraqis' first IEDs were jerry-rigged artillery shells lifted from abandoned army depots. The foreign arms pipelines generally don't open up for a revolutionary army until it's proven it can fight and win at a small scale on its own.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#116

Post by rayiner » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:11 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #38

astrodust wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is Ron Paul is a crazy guy. He's trying to rigorously apply principles from the 1700s to today's world. He's not willing to compromise in the face of evidence that contradicts his firmly held opinions. I've studied Libertarianism to the point of finding out that, not unlike other extremist philosophies, it's too far-fetched to ever work. People are too "human" for Libertarianism to ever work. It's too eas…

I challenge you to give me one very specific example of how something is not going to work in a libertarian world and I'm going right here right now to prove you how it actually would work. (because, with all due respect, I think writing comments that basically say "it's not gonna work because it's puppies and rainbows" is not helping us find out the truth).

Explain how environmental protection works without regulation, taking into account negative externalities as well as transaction costs.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#117

Post by rayiner » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:18 AM UTC

praxeologist wrote: post #93

astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have chimed in with similar explanations but it often revolves around the principal problem of how do you allow "freedom" without infringing on someone else's? For instance, if I want to drink radiation laced water, Libertarians would think I have the right. They'd also say I should have to pay for my own medical treatment resulting from that. Reasonable enough. However, if I drank radiation laced water becaus…

>However, if I drank radiation laced water because a chemical company was disposing of their waste in my backyard and I didn't know, Libertarians would tell you it's your fault for not having the proper testing equipment or paying a company to run these tests for you. This is simply false. Pollution would be treated as a tort. Now, you can't set up a home near an already existing, noisy club and complain about noise…

> This is simply false. Pollution would be treated as a tort. Now, you can't set up a home near an already existing, noisy club and complain about noise pollution. If you set up a home in a quiet and unpolluted area, you have a right to maintain the structural integrity of that area.

Let's analyze this situation with some economic rigor. What you're invoking is Coase's theorem. The idea that if you create property rights in what would otherwise be externalities, and let people transact freely in those property rights, the end result will be an optimal allocation of rights that maximizes value.

Now, I'll get to the punchline before going further in depth. It's deeply ironic that libertarians invoke Coase's theorem in this context, because Coase himself used smoke pollution as an example of a situation that called for regulation rather than the creation of property rights.

You see, there is an important assumption underlying Coase's theorem: transaction costs are zero. But in the environmental context, transaction costs are not zero, and in fact they totally dominate the relevant transactions. A polluting coal plant might cause $1,000 of health damage to each of 100,000 people, and it isn't worth any of their whiles to litigate such injuries. Yet the cumulative impact of such activity is large--the coal plant is essentially "stealing" $100m, but getting away with it by stealing a little from a lot of people at once.

Multiply that by the hundreds and thousands of pollution sources that have a measurable impact on each person, and what you get is an unworkable system. And Coase himself recognized this and said as much in his papers.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#118

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:20 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #60

dstorrs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm actually pretty much onboard with a lot of the Libertarian policies that I've heard. Like anything, of course, I think it can be taken too far. So, when you ask for a "very specific example", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind: - City governments have health inspectors that check local restaurants, and food-product companies to ensure they are using good ingredients, t…

When you tackle a certain problem and try to apply a libertarian framework to it, odds are you have to check if it's an implicit monopoly that you're dealing with and go from there. In your particular example you're dealing with a city government monopoly for health inspection. It's not free and is paid by citizens in the form of taxes. If there was no government and citizens believed it is in their interest to have…

Libertarian belief system fails because it bases it's ideology around the idea of ownership.

You explain the problem pretty well yourself when you say that we have to think in the framework of libertarianism.

Thats like saying you will believe in Jesus once you let him into your heart.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#119

Post by philwelch » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:20 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #33

What makes me sad is that a lot of people, even here, discharge Ron Paul as some sort of crazy guy without even listening to what he says. In comments to this post "thesagan" wrote that some of his ideas are "batshit crazy" as if his ideology is composed of many different unrelated parts. Not true, Ron Paul ideas are ideas of libertarianism and if you study them diligent enough, you'll eventually be used to thinking…

And after that, if you keep thinking critically about it instead of taking comfort in having a seemingly logically coherent ideology, you start realizing that the entire framework of libertarianism is batshit crazy and your initial intuitions were not actually that far off. This leads to a healthy distrust of ideologies in general, which is only a win.

Re: Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

#120

Post by rayiner » Sat, Nov 17, 2012, 5:21 AM UTC

snitko wrote: post #60

dstorrs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm actually pretty much onboard with a lot of the Libertarian policies that I've heard. Like anything, of course, I think it can be taken too far. So, when you ask for a "very specific example", this is the sort of thing that comes to mind: - City governments have health inspectors that check local restaurants, and food-product companies to ensure they are using good ingredients, t…

When you tackle a certain problem and try to apply a libertarian framework to it, odds are you have to check if it's an implicit monopoly that you're dealing with and go from there. In your particular example you're dealing with a city government monopoly for health inspection. It's not free and is paid by citizens in the form of taxes. If there was no government and citizens believed it is in their interest to have…

Man, isn't it easy to explain things in a world where there are no transaction costs, no information asymmetries, no externalities, and no collective action problems?