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.
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.