Freedom is the ONLY thing that counts. I do acknowledge that Libertarians claim to want to pursue freedom.
However I believe that Libertarianism, will only replace tyrannical government with tyrannical rule by businesses.
The problem with governments no matter their political leaning is that most political ideologies lack any mechanism to deal with corruption and abuses of power. Libertarianism seeks to deal with this by removing government and instead hand the power to private companies.
Companies are usually small dictatorships or even tyrannies. Handing them the power over all of society will only benefit the owners of these companies. The rest of society will basically be reduced to the status of slaves as they have no say over the direction of the society they maintain through their 9to5s.
These companies already control governments around the world through favors, bribes or other means such as regulatory capture or even by influencing the media and thereby manipulating the public’s opinion through the advertisement revenue.
Our problems would only get worse, all the ills of today’s society, lack of freedom, lack of peace, lack of just basic human decency will be vastly aggravated if we hand the entirety of control to people like petur tihel and allen mosque.
Instead the way to go about this is MORE democracy not less of it. The solution is to give average citizens more influence over the fate of society rather than less. However for that to happen we all need to fight ignorance and promote the spread of education. It has to become cool again to read books (or .epub/.mobi’s lol)
The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power, instead having a distributed system.
More of a community-driven government. Sort of like these workers owned companies. We should not delegate away our decision-making power. We should ourselves make the decisions.
Although this post is in English it does neither concern the ASU nor KU or any other English speaking countries, in particular. It’s a general post addressing a world wide phenomenon.
Re: Hong Kong, I’m not talking about their system circa 1870, I’m talking all the way through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 and beyond. Very recent. Throughout, life expectancy and health outcomes rose steadily.
The fact that Western & Chinese doctors trained at Western medicine isn’t incompatible with libertarian values, at all–quite the opposite. Yes, there was some government funding during the century of British rule, but that’s not the sole source of progress, and it’s debatable whether it was necessary.
I think the pandemic is a good counterargument against libertarianism, because it required cooperative action (or at least, cooperative action dramatically improved outcomes). Interestingly, though, Hong Kong, which is still relatively light on regulations, did very well compared to Western nation. It was more of a cultural issue.
Global warming is another sticky point. Any place where externalities cause problems is a good point for argumentation. Again: I’m not a libertarian.
Pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and homes all get safer over time because that’s what people want. People buy cars that are rated as safe by independent bodies, so cars are often much safer than is strictly required by regulation–and getting safer every year. That’s because people want safe cars, and are willing to pay more for them, and because unsafe cars cause lots of bad press. There were very few restrictions on what could be sold as medicine in Hong Kong for a century, and yet people didn’t all die of toxins in their medication. Developers follow professional standards, most of which are not enforced by government. The government hasn’t been adding newer and stricter regulations year-on-year in these industries–and yet they get safer year-on-year. If regulations are the sole driver of safety, why is that the case?
You were scolding me for referring back to the 19th century in reference to HK healthcare (though I wasn’t doing that), and yet you suggest that the only thing keeping us from living in dirty hovels is government regulation. That’s silly. If libertarians (and incidentally, most economists) are right, fewer regulations would mean much cheaper, better-quality housing for low-income people. Shit, let me point you at the YIMBY movement: Fuck single-family zoning! Fuck building restrictions, and parking requirements, and set-back regulations, and dozens of other petty and arbitrary regulations–all put in place by well-meaning but naive bureaucrats. Getting rid of all that shit would drastically reduce housing prices, meaning better housing for everybody! And incidentally, the YIMBY movement is not only fully compatible with libertarian views–it’s basically torn straight out of the libertarian playbook!
Tell that to people with chronic conditions waiting impatiently for the FDA to approve experimental medications which might well help them with their sicknesses, which will kill them soon. Why shouldn’t they be free to try something that might save their life?
Fentanyl was developed and distributed right in the open, approved by the FDA, and distributed to doctors and pharmacists, and everybody happily prescribed it and took it believing that it wouldn’t be FDA-approved if it was dangerous. It’s only recently that it’s gone underground. Meanwhile…lots of less-regulated countries have no such opioid epidemic. A strict and overbearing regulatory regime (the FDA is relatively strict even compared to similar nations) did nothing to prevent it, and arguably exacerbated it.
You LITERALLY did. You began your premise by explaining how the British didn’t care about Hong Kong so the people there didn’t face any regulations.
Yada yada yada, they now have great hospitals. As I said, you skipped ALL the other stuff that led to today, including how most of the civilized world followed the same general trajectory.
I wasn’t suggesting that Chinese and western doctors working together was incompatible with libertarianism, I was suggesting it was an example of how your “the British didn’t care” bit is incompatible with facts.
you sure about that?
From another article: “Containing the virus in Hong Kong has depended on cutting off transmission chains as soon as they appeared. Any person with a confirmed infection, even if asymptomatic, was required to be hospitalized, while close contacts were sent to a government quarantine facility for up to three weeks.”
Externalities? You mean the kind of stuff that governmental regulations on private businesses are intended to prevent/mitigate?
You’re debating like all the libertarians I know. Poorly.
Which brings us to your next point…
They got safer over time because what people want is to not die and the government put rules on how those things can be manufactured and operated.
Sounds to me like the regulation on the automobile manufacturers pushed them towards innovation.
No, the bad press happens when the press leaks an internal memo proving that the car maker knew full well that they’re car had a flaw that could cause death or dismemberment but they decided not to do anything about it because it would hurt their bottom line.
Because they weren’t selling toxins. Traditional Chinese medicine is generally derived from natural ingredients. They still knew to avoid the dangerous mushrooms or berries.
What are you talking about? You sound like your just guessing about things. The FDA has a tremendous amount of regulatory oversight. They have an army of inspectors, investigators, and policy makers keeping bad shit off the market every day. I don’t know where you get the idea that they don’t enforce their guidelines, or that they aren’t constantly revising or writing new guidelines when they have new information.
I never suggested that, and I don’t believe anyone debating against a libertarian in good faith ever would.
Again, NOT what I was suggesting. I’m saying that if you don’t enforce a minimum level of safety, there WILL BE people who will sell dangerous things.
Cite your sources.
I agree with you to a point, but it you want to build lots of low cost multi family housing in the suburbs, you better have building and parking and set back requirements. My first house was a condo on a busy 4 lane street. The front door was maybe 50ft from the road. I spent years in that house dealing with the never ending noise of the traffic and the foundation shaking any time a semi drove by.
Again, I agree that there are some zoning laws that are due to be revised or repealed, but suggesting that they are all pointless and detrimental to society demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic civic planning.
No, the libertarian playbook says my neighbor should be allowed to open a gun range in his backyard if he wants to. The libertarian playbook says that a local businessman can buy and bulldoze the houses on the other side of me so he can build a new branch for his industrial widget factory, and that he’s allowed to dump contaminated waste water into the creek that runs through my backyard.
You know that’s actually a thing, don’t you? There have been plenty of people with a terminal condition who have volunteered in clinical trials knowing full well it may kill them.
It IS safe in clinical doses. It’s administered in ways that prevent accidental overdose like patches. And people don’t so much trust the FDA as much as they trust their prescribing physician.
Again, your just making things up. Opioids are a problem all around the world. Some countries are way worse than others, but it’s not at all unique to America.
So the FDA is strict and overbearing… but did nothing to prevent it?
You could argue that, but you’d be wrong. If anything, it was exacerbated by the obscene amounts of money it made for the makers of the drug, money that they used to lobby government officials.
Isn’t that the free market in action?
I LITERALLY was talking about Hong Kong from it’s establishment in the 1840s through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 (and beyond, really, because they were mostly left to their own devices for most of 2 decades after Chinese rule).
Hong Kong should have been the exception to that rule if heavy regulation is actually a requirement in the healthcare industry, but in fact it’s top of the heap. If you can achieve the same results without regulation, what’s the point of regulation?
I was speaking informally. I meant that the British didn’t govern with a heavy hand. They weren’t entirely disinterested, but they were a lot less paternalistic than they were back home in Britain.
Yes, exactly that kind. You do realize I’m arguing your side here, right? Are you having trouble keeping up?
Yeah well ur stupid. Zing!
So explain why things continued to get safer even when the government was not actively adding extra regulations? Why did life expectancy go up through the Reagan years, when the government was actively deregulating?
Regulation must have helped somehow, right? It served an an inspiration! There’s no way customers would’ve simply showed a preference for safer cars over time…
This is the status quo. Car companies sell cars, and car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US. I’m about to shock you to your core, here: car companies know about car accidents, and yet the continue to sell cars! Even weirder? People also know about car accidents, and continue to buy cars!
Every car on the market has known flaws that cause accidents. For example: they have rubber tires, and those tires have a tendency to wear and eventually blow out, a known cause of accidents which leads to a known and quantifiable number of deaths every year. Shocking!
It’s all shades of gray, man. Car companies can’t make perfect cars that never cause accidents, and even approaching that ideal would make for ridiculously expensive cars. So, they find themselves (like every producer of a product ever) in a situation of balancing costs & risks. Emails talking explicitly about that look bad out of context, but even the NHTSA has thresholds and compromises in their regulations.
What, without the government itemizing the dangerous mushrooms & berries in law? What stopped self-proclaimed Hong Kong doctors from passing off poison berries as medicine, if they didn’t have some FDA-equivalent telling them what to do?
I mean, the YIMBY movement has all kinds of pages and YouTube videos making my case for me.
An example: housing prices in Tokyo were going wild in the 80s, and they responded with massive deregulation. Now housing is Tokyo is much cheaper than comparable cities (I mean, to the extent that other cites can even be compared to Tokyo, with a metro population roughly equal to the population of Canada). I saw a graph a few years ago where there was an obvious elbow in Tokyo housing prices when the deregulation occurred, putting it on a totally different trajectory from New York, London, Paris, etc.
And notably lacking since then: stories of high rises collapsing or massive fires burning down whole neighbourhoods. Tokyo is incredibly safe, even though you can build a 5-story house on an area only large enough for 2 parking spaces and open a restaurant on the first floor.
Like Hong Kong: it only takes one counterexample to demonstrate that heavy regulation isn’t required. You can argue that it can be beneficial, or at the very least isn’t too harmful, but it’s hard to argue that it’s necessary when Tokyo does fine without.
But you did have a place to live. You weren’t homeless. You didn’t have to stay with your parents. You didn’t have a 2-hour commute to work & back. You made the choice to live there, and to stay there for years, in spite of the fact that there was road noise.
There simply isn’t enough land in and around major & desirable cities for everybody to have a nice, quiet, private 2-bedroom house with a yard. So the choice is: do you regulate as if it were possible, and fuck anybody who can’t afford the resulting $8M homes (see: the Bay Area)? Or do you allow lots of housing development so that people can at least find affordable places to live, even if they have to experience road noise?
Even most libertarians agree that some regulation is a good idea, they just think it should be minimal.
But also…that’s an easy assertion to make, and you could make it everywhere. “You just don’t understand X well enough to know you’re wrong”. That’s not convincing. I’ve faced similar dismissals in cases where I’m convinced the counterpoint was wrong, and I could make my argument at length (eg: rent control is great!). I reckon I could imagine approaches to civil planning that would be compatible with libertarian principals, but would avoid situations where industrial plants were stuck in the middle of residential areas. I’m sure there are think tanks that have worked on the problem.
Not all Communists are Stalinists, and not all Libertarians are this extreme either. Even the extreme ones tend to support courts & policing, and have an explanation for how this sort of situation would work itself out. I dunno, I don’t understand their perspective enough to defend it in this case.
Yes. But it’s also a thing that some chronically ill patients have to travel abroad for experimental treatments, because the FDA hasn’t got around to allowing trials yet.
It’s not unique, but it’s uniquely bad, in spite of the fact that healthcare is one place where the US leads the world in heavy regulation.
(cont)
Yes, exactly. They control what drugs are allowed in the country in the name of safety, and yet some of the most damaging drugs in history slipped right past them. So what’s the point, then? Much less regulated markets do just as well when it comes to drug safety, drugs are cheaper, and terminal patients can make decisions about their own health. So what’s the benefit of the FDA?
I listened to a podcast years ago talking about the FDA. Wish I could find it. It wasn’t some right-wing think tank or anything, in fact a lot of the issues it raised trended left-wing. For example, I remember one of the issues being that the FDA banned human trials on women of childbearing age–that is, 18 to 50. Of course, testing on children is verboten anyway, and over-50 is a whole different category because hormones change dramatically post-menopause. So, effectively: the FDA banned human trials on women.
This resulted in some ridiculous consequences: pregnancy or birth control medications being tested on men, for example. But more generally, all drugs are tested on men only, and men are substantially different from women. This meant that women tended to face much more severe side effects from drugs, since drugs that had gender-specific side-effects on men were filtered out by the trials process, but not those affecting women. There were examples in the podcast where these side-effects were fatal. This has been going on for decades, ever since the 1970s, and it’s only started to change recently.
That’s one example of overregulation having very concrete consequences. And yet, the FDA hasn’t faced any consequences, and in fact the consequences are largely hidden because they’re diffuse and aggregate: hundreds of thousands of women feeling sick or dizzy or tired.
I would say that counts as the FDA being “strict and overbearing” and yet failing to prevent harm to the public. And again, even as they protected a handful of women from the potential consequences of human trials, they let fentanyl out the front door (along with many medications that had adverse effects on women, discovered in the wild rather than in trials).
Are we sure this is all important and necessary?
Absolutely not! That’s regulatory capture in action. High levels of regulations result in high profits for drug companies by strictly controlling IP, excluding generic drugs, and making it nearly impossible to start up new drug companies. In turn, the existing companies use those high profits to influence further regulation, streamlining the approval process for their own (sometimes dangerous) drugs, giving them a veneer of safety, and blocking out competition. This is exactly the kind of thing that libertarians rail against.
The libertarian ideal would be more like: dozens and dozens of drug companies offering low-price, high-quality drugs, making a reasonable but profit in the process, with independent consumer- and hospital-funded organizations checking them for safety and effectiveness. People are less trusting, and more careful about the drugs they take, but in extreme cases, where a person is terminally ill, they’re free to try whatever treatments they want. A single drug with terrible side effects would be enough to put a drug company out of business (because they’re smaller and less wildly profitable) and severely damage the reputation of any rating organization that stamped their approval on it, so both are much more careful about putting out and approving new drugs.
But again, I’m not a libertarian. I’ve got views that would blasphemous to a libertarian. Hell, I’m pro gun control. I just get sick of the endless ridiculing of strawman libertarian caricatures on Lemmy and Reddit. They have valid points, they just tend to carry it way too far (from my perspective). I’m done defending them for now, I think I’ve managed to flesh out the strawman a bit for people who are open-minded enough to consider their POV, instead of just saying “LOL libertarians just wanna fuck teenagers and shoot guns” or whatever.
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