Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Originally posted by: Dissipate
Actually, I am one of the only non-idealogues around these days. Idealogues are people who believe in government, because they actually believe that it can yield ideal results.
Umm... actually an ideologue is someone who espouses a particular viewpoint, all the time, regardless of conflicting evidence or mitigating factors, because that viewpoint is the only thing that matters. It's like a lexicographic preference, for a particular philosophy. I say 'everyone is better off with no government' and support it with 'because government makes everyone worse off'. When the facts of a situation support the second claim, they lend limited support to the first one. Universal support is missing because there are many situations where the second claim simply doesn't hold.
Let's set up an experiment then. Let's have the federal government allocate a portion of land that is exempt from all taxation and regulation. Tell me, why will they not do this? Why won't they let my experiment fail and prove the anarcho-capitalists wrong?
No, I understand your arguments perfectly. They are basically the same arguments I hear over and over again from statists of virtually every stripe.
If you understood them perfectly, you would stop building straw men out of them so frequently. While I appreciate the effort, reductio is one of the hardest argument forms to use effectively (maybe even harder than slippery slope) because it often rests on composition and division, and issues of scale,which lend themselves to fallacious reasoning ('we would be better off with less government intervention in 'X' does not imply 'we would be better off with no government'; conversely, 'we would be better off with intervention in 'Y' does not imply 'we would be better off in a communist state').
I've used the reductio ad absurdum to refute a number of your arguments, namely that of the "impossibility" for people to value information.
WRONG! Ludwig von Mises clearly deliminated the differences between bureaucracies and private firms in his book bureaucracy decades ago. You are conflating hierarchy with bureaucracy. Private firms and government both have hierarchies, but private firms do not have bureaucracy, at least not anywhere near the kind of bureaucracy that government has.
Sadly, the division he makes is artificial. I'm really interested in knowing if you have worked for major corporations previously. I've worked for an automaker, a government, and a drug company (among less applicable jobs) and I can tell you that the government and the automaker were both pretty bad, but the internal beaurocracy at the automaker was both larger and more restrictive than the parallel structure at the government.
Artificial? Even mainstream economists like Milton Friedman are going to part company with you here. No matter how bureaucratic you believed that automaker to be, there is a fundamental difference between it and government: it must turn a profit. From this standpoint it is objectively allocationg resources rationally. This is an objective aspect of the automaker which sets it apart from any government bureaucracy. Your evaluation of it, on the other hand, is completely subjective.
My system is ideal in relation to the government, and I have thought about the merits of government for about the past 18 years of my life. It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized that everything I thought was completely wrong.
Well I can't say if what you thought was completely wrong or not. But clearly whatever merit your chosen system has is highly non-obvious. Most of the arguments I've read in your links are composed of clever wordplay that doesn't hold up to any examination.
Clever wordplay? I think not. Murray Rothbard was not a distinguished economist because of "clever wordplay."
Simplistic arguments they are not. They are actually relatively complex, and this is one of the main reasons that people today still believe in government. Most people can only see the artificial products of government that are right in front of them, and completely ignore the natural products of the free market that would have been created in absence of government intervention. Actually, I would say that one of the biggest fallacies that is committed when it comes to government is that of the defilement of the entrepreneur and the hailing of the bureaucrat. People, such as Winston Smith have been led to believe that entrepreneurs are "greedy bastards" out there to make a buck at the expense of everyone else, while politicians are wonderful altruistic individuals looking out for the "common man." Words cannot describe the fallaciousness of this viewpoint. Neither the entrepreneur or the politician are altruistic, but the former actually solves problems in society, while the latter just turns to chaos everything that it touches.
Politicians don't need to be altruistic. They need to have incentives to act in the best interests of the people.
Bwhahaha. Classic. What incentives do they have to act in the best interests of the people, when people demand things from the government that are not in the best interest of anyone i.e. free wireless Internet?
Elections are one such incentive (I'm not interested in rehashing your election math argument; I'll concede
that they may not be a 'perfect' way to reign in government power; courts are a good second source though.) And entrepreneurs don't need to be 'greedy bastards'. In fact entrepreneurs are rarely the source of problems at all, they just aren't able to solve problems that are difficult to frame from a market viewpoint.
I do not agree with everything that the public choicers have to say, but one thing they did get right is that voting and elections are extremely piss poor way of "reigning in" government. I've already explained the problem of rational ignorance, and the completely irrational act of voting. Furthermore, you have not been able to explain how to solve the problem of people being able to make arbitrary demands of government i.e. free wireless Internet, with almost no connection between their demands and their willingness to pay for the government "services."
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