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No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

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Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#101

Post by jivatmanx »

rektide wrote: post #83
dmix wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminded me of a famous libertarian quote: "If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Mises If humans are full of logical fallacies and poor decision making, just making a collection of humans and giving them unlimited power does not make the logical fallacies and poor decision making go away. It c…

Civics class never taught me about "unlimited power," so I'm having a little bit of difficulty getting spun up with the premise. The conclusion though doesn't share my outlook. The actual activities are not interesting to me. What is interesting to me is insuring ongoing changing activity and new things being tried. Libertarianism fails as badly as most government fails in this regard, permitting the accrual of power…

I don't believe that corporations are libertarian, largely because "limited liability" completely divorces them from the responsibility of the individual, which forms the basis of everything in the libertarian system.

I don't see any problem with partnerships and sole proprietorships, though.

As with any system, these people need to be ethical. But corporations have a sort of legally forced amorality.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#102

Post by Daniel_Newby »

Must we continue to carry water for U.S. political factions by discussing this manufactured pseudo-news? How about we get back to the real story of the IRS election rigging that the administration desperately wants to be forgotten. Or the insane war in Syria where they are backing Al Qaeda and their nasty friends.

No, we have to keep chewing over these planted stories about how we are shocked, shocked to find spying going on at the NSA. This week we are to believe that France, Germany, and Britain are poor helpless waifs who are going to pick up their alms bowls and go back to their orphanage because mean ole Unca Sam was sneaky.

Echelon bait: nuclear, cosmic ray backscatter, intrusion countermeasure.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#103

Post by embolism »

w_t_payne wrote: post #25
rorrr2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It deeply saddens me that a tiny tiny percentage of the population can really fuck up the lives of everyone - financially, socially, politically, religiously. The real problem is in how we set up the governments. We give to much power to a few people. What we really need to do is let people vote on individual issues. Want to go to war that will affect everyone and will cost trillions? Let's have a vote.

Our democratic systems are not really as democratic as they claim to be. Indeed, it could be argued that the democracy that we have is a thin veneer that hides the autocracy instead. Certainly, in the UK, the unelected civil service wields a huge amount of power, and whilst they do answer to elected officials, and do have to implement the policies of the ruling party, in reality they have a huge amount of freedom on…

Who other than Google could set such a thing up?

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#104

Post by [deleted] »

burntsushi wrote: post #92
tokipin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think it plays out like this in practice, for the reason that a government has to at least pretend it's for the people and there's at least some measure of accountability. the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be. there is a reason we have various regulations regarding child labor, for example. http://en.wikipedia.org…

> the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be The entire point of the parent post is that we don't underestimate the corruption that humans are capable of achieving when given power. Hence the revocation of a monopoly on the use of legitimized coercion.

[deleted]

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#105

Post by colanderman »

burntsushi wrote: post #100
tokipin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... in exchange for a system without even the pretension of accountability

You did not respond to the central point of my comment. I will respond anyway. Firms sell goods to buyers. If buyers stop buying said goods from a particular firm, that firm is going to be in trouble unless they get the buyers to start buying again. Seems like at least a "pretension of accountability". Accountability exists in forms other than democracy.

You must know that humans are very fickle creatures. People buy clothes and food from poorly-regulated industries all the time, not because none of them can be made to care about the conditions under which these goods are manufactured, but because not all of them can be made to care constantly.

If only a small group of people are ever interested enough to personally fund regulation, how can such free-market "regulation" effectively ensure good working conditions and food safety? Government solves this problem by low-pass-filtering the fickleness, thus ensuring continued funding.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#106

Post by aqme28 »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #102

Must we continue to carry water for U.S. political factions by discussing this manufactured pseudo-news? How about we get back to the real story of the IRS election rigging that the administration desperately wants to be forgotten. Or the insane war in Syria where they are backing Al Qaeda and their nasty friends. No, we have to keep chewing over these planted stories about how we are shocked, shocked to find spying…

How is this "pseudo-news"? It sounds very important and "newsworthy" to me.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#107

Post by embolism »

powertower wrote: post #51

It's political and economic theater. 1. Either the EU members did not want this trade agreement from the start, or they will use this as leverage to get a better deal, or something extra. 2. The various EU member countries knew full well what was going on. And have their own spying operations and networks in place. 3. The various EU member countries would do the same type of spying as the U.S. does - if they could. T…

Why is this being downvoted? It's somewhat cynical, but pretending that international competition isn't a major driver in all of this seems bizarre.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#108

Post by burntsushi »

colanderman wrote: post #105
burntsushi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did not respond to the central point of my comment. I will respond anyway. Firms sell goods to buyers. If buyers stop buying said goods from a particular firm, that firm is going to be in trouble unless they get the buyers to start buying again. Seems like at least a "pretension of accountability". Accountability exists in forms other than democracy.

You must know that humans are very fickle creatures. People buy clothes and food from poorly-regulated industries all the time , not because none of them can be made to care about the conditions under which these goods are manufactured, but because not all of them can be made to care constantly . If only a small group of people are ever interested enough to personally fund regulation, how can such free-market "regula…

My initial comment was pointing out that we libertarians very explicitly don't underestimate corruption; which factors very strongly in why we view centralized power in the form of legitimized coercion as A Bad Thing.

My follow-up to an off-topic but related comment was that accountability exists in freed markets; just not in the way you might be used to in democratic societies.

My intention is not to defend freed markets from every possible criticism. There is plenty of literature out there that does that much better than I could already. A nice place to start is David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" for pragmatic details. [1]

Just as accountability can come in many different shapes and sizes, so too can regulation. The only requirement is a bit of imagination.

[1] - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#109

Post by rayiner »

samstave wrote: post #98
justin66 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. People "believe in" government not because they love it or t…

> People "believe in" government not because they love it or think it is perfect, they do it because they believe the alternative is something like the Hobbsian state of nature. Utter BS. People "believe" in governments largely because they are indoctrinated into the belief system prepared for them based on what country they are born into. Then, based on the actions of that government, their upbringing and life exper…

> There are plenty of brilliant free thinking people in the world

Ah yes, and you are one of those brilliant, free-thinking people I assume. One of the enlightened ones, who sees the folly of government and the glory of anarchy?

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#110

Post by rayiner »

burntsushi wrote: post #92
tokipin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think it plays out like this in practice, for the reason that a government has to at least pretend it's for the people and there's at least some measure of accountability. the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be. there is a reason we have various regulations regarding child labor, for example. http://en.wikipedia.org…

> the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be The entire point of the parent post is that we don't underestimate the corruption that humans are capable of achieving when given power. Hence the revocation of a monopoly on the use of legitimized coercion.

The alternative to a system of monopolized coercion isn't the absence of coercion, it's the diffusion of coercive violence.
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