PC1 said:
You know, my parents were idiots but by some miracle, I was blessed with a fascination for the mechanics of the human body, the inclination to want to study medicine, and had the grey matter and drive to develop a cure for childhood leukemia. But that cheap bastid, my father, that fvcking libertarian, put our family into a fire hazard of a house practically built out of popsicle sticks so he could save his money and spend it on his booze and dope. Despite showing early signs of prodigious talent in grade school, I went to sleep one night only to never awake because the damned fool was drunk and stoned,
"in the privacy of his own home", as he used to say, and flicked a roach into the corner of his garage. 10 minutes later, my entire family had been incinerated.
I was supposed to be the guy who develops a cure for your kids leukemia, but I'm sorry, I'm not around these days and the next medical prodigy won't be along for another 14 years or so, and unfortunately, your kid's only got about 2 years left in this world. Sorry.
Then please, define the limit at which the cost of protecting this possible miracle's existence becomes unreasonable.
BTW, Who said ALL government is good? I'm only saying that in some instances it can and does more good than harm.
Which I'm not arguing. The
nature of the harm is what needs to be understood in order to limit it as much as possible. For example take your position to the logical extreme. Take a safety standard, any one that you think is so incredibly reasonable and is provably so, or just assume that for the argument. Its implimentation harms no one in any way and does incredible good. Enforce it on people one hundred years ago, and you end up screwing them because the processes and the wealth needed to impliment it aren't available. This is true to some degree about
any standard that isn't willingly adopted, both in the aggregate and in individual cases.
You see a trend towards safer conditions over time because that's what people want, but can't afford all at once. They live, they learn, the adjust their values and buy what they want. Businesses want better workers so if they can afford it they offer higher standards and people increasingly try to get jobs there. Other businesses must compete or put up with employees who want less but who will also tend to be less productive. Enforcing a standard from today on people one hundred years ago would supposedly lead to the same increase in safety that it does today, but it would also put them out of business so they'd never have the chance to create the wealth necessary to develop those safer conditions on their own.
Another example is foreign "sweat shops." The people in those factories would not be there if there was a more desirable alternative available. While you or I wouldn't work there, for them it's a step up. And as they work and become more productive and capital piles up, they demand more and they get more and their economy develops over time. If the highest standards are forced on them all at once the ones working in the factory could arguably be better off, but the company employs fewer of them overall because their productivity at that point doesn't justify the costs and their economy is stifled and doesn't develop as quickly as it would or doesn't develop at all if the costs are so high as to make the investment not worth it. Plus the ones who are disemployed don't have a better alternative open to that other wise would have. You're dealing with giving fewer people the best conditions as opposed to giving a lot more people better conditions than they've currently got. The standards imply a cost, and if they could afford it, if their productivity justified it, it would be there shortly. If the goverment mandates it you get the above described effect.
In the case of building standards, they've been developed and implemented over time. It doesn't matter to me if people within government or within private industry develop them. Bottom line is that here in MA, and probably within all states that have adopted similar standards, they've become part of the law of the land, and statistics bear out that deaths from fire in homes and buildings is down since those standards have been implemented and enforced. I don't see how anyone other than a stubborn fool can argue thats a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing. But if it was already happening anyway... Let's say the amount of deaths from head on impact accidents is going down by 3% each year due to improved technology, and I as a great ruler impliment a law about standards regarding front impacts. They continue to fall at 3% a year. Exactly what have I done that's useful? Let's say they fall at 4% a year. More people have been saved faster, but what was the cost? You bring up the point of lost opportunities with that kid who would have cured cancer, but dies in a fire. That's a what if.
What if the capital that people were forced to spend on 1% fewer deaths in accidents would have otherwise been invested in that kid's research when he was older, but because people were forced to spend it on this or that safety feature, it wasn't, so the cure was never developed and even more lives were lost to cancer because of the lack of this cure than were saved by the safety standard. What's more the simple process of implimenting the standard costs capital, and let's say the first scenario happens and the death rate still falls at 3% a year, no improvement. I've still removed capital from the system that could have been spent on that cure.
"She" is dead. If the name doesn't ring a bell, Sharon Tate was one of the victims of the Charles Manson cult murders. This example simply serves to underscore the point that we have laws against people using hallucinogens, even in the privacy of their own homes, because it serves a greater good.
No it doesn't, because the risk is small. It certainly doesn't serve the greater good of the peopel who use those drugs responsibly. You're wasting finite resources getting law enforcement to target a nonproblem population. It's the difference between outlawing drinking and outlawing drinking
and driving. The peopel who do the latter are the problem population, not the former. On a practical level even if the problems are inherent to drug use prohibition laws are self defeating. What about the millions of people who have taken hallucinogens and
not killed their neighbors? Their freedom is now forfeited, and they've harmed no one, nor were they likely to.
YOU'RE ignoring the fact that once a victim is harmed or DEAD, there is no answer. Be it through negligence or willful intent, having an imposed standard building code is an effective means of preventing injuries and deaths.
Those specific standards haven't done anything to stop such problems. Did prohibition stop drunk driving? No, it didn't. It didn't even stop drinking. In fact, by pushing a behavior that is not inherently criminal underground it amplified the problems associated with it.
I don't believe I have said that anywhere in this thread? I've simply stated a few instances where government has worked and done some things well. I'm what most people would say is a small "c" conservative who thinks that our government is too big, too invasive, and too much in the business of wealth redistribution. Yet I can also acknowledge the good in some things they do. You on the other hand seem to be espousing that market forces can and will always do a better job. And the problem is that in too many cases, people have been irrepairably harmed or have died waiting for that to happen. You haven't presented anything in the cases we've been discussing to make me think any differently.
Then you haven't been reading carefully. Take the case of the sweatshop workers. Let's say some young girls have a choice, work in a shoe factory under conditions that aren't the greatest but are better than living on the street and being a prostitute. The government decides to impliment safety standards, the cost of which won't be justified by the productivity of the workers. Fewer or none of them are hired as a result. The ones who are disemployed are left on the streets. Those standards
are a form of wealth redistribution. The standards come at a cost and someone has to pay for it, either directly or in lost opportunities.
Wealth redistribution isn't just from rich to poor. It's merely from haves to have nots, either of which can be of any class. It just comes down to you have something someone wants, so he votes himself that thing. You could be richer or poorer, it doesn't matter. The rich routinely vote themselves money from the poor in the form of inflation. The poor don't see those inflationary loans, they just see devalued wages and savings. They've essentially had the future value of their money stolen. The middle class votes themselves workplace standards that their productivity may not justify. They want them anyway and someone has to pay the cost. Let's say I vote myself a certain standard for fire safety which imposes a cost on my employer. Either everyone gets paid less, the employer highers fewer people in which case someone loses a possible paid position for my increased safety, or the whole tax payer base picks up the tab to buy my added safety and capital is removed from other productive possibilities, perhaps that cure for cancer.
The nature of the free market is to increase wealth over time, which leads to a natural increase in savings and availability of investment capital. This lengthens the structure of production with sustainable growth and allows for a rising standard of living for everyone. This function is thwarted the more of that wealth the government sops up.
We live in a constitutional republic and elect our government officials democratically. In instances where people collectively decide reform is needed, we elect new politicians to do so. We will always be hearing stories about government corruption, scandal, special appointments and favors, etc. And we'll be hearing the same things at the corporate level. Because people are people.
This is true, but when it's a corporation you have a
choice as to whether or not you're going to buy their products. You don't have that choice when it comes to the government. In the end, no matter what, somehow, someway, you pay.
