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Stupid Things Libertarians Say

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Hillary Squawk

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Sep 29, 2019, 11:04:38 AM9/29/19

Stupid Things Libertarians Say, Part I

with 14 comments

Well, I’ve already got one series going here (and there will be
a new installment of that ASAP) so I might as well start
another one. We’ll call this one “Stupid things Libertarians
say.” Now let me make one thing crystal clear. Not all
Libertarians are bad and stupid people. Only most of them.
That’s a joke, son. To be serious, I have empathy for
libertarians. Perhaps it’s the effect of too many John Wayne
movies on my febrile mind, perhaps it’s some rogue masculine
gene that wants to pack up a covered wagon and a pistol and
head out for Oregon. But I feel the same instinctive pull in
the idea of making it or breaking it on my own. And I think
this is a deeply human instinct. At root, we are pack animals,
but we have, thanks to that big ol’ wrinkly brain of ours, a
deeply rooted sense of the individual. It is possible to create
a human whose will is reflexively conditioned to see the group
first and the individual second. It’s not easy though, just ask
Jim Jones. Or the Marines. For the most part we’re a
cantankerous bunch of apes with nothing on our minds but
getting more bananas and more poon than the guy next door. (And
we painted the Sistine Chapel and wrote Moby Dick too, so don’t
go all high school nihilist on me, Jack.) The fundamental
reason that we have governments is that we can’t do it on our
own, so we create an overreaching organization to act
impartially. In theory, no man is beyond the law, though man
made it. Kings and peasants alike are bound by the law, because
we accept that to not be bound by our law is to be bound by the
jungles. And then you’ve got this schmuck. You’ve probably
encountered them before, the people so into capitalism you have
a sneaking suspicion they jerk off to the Wall Street Journal.
And they say things like this: “I’m sure the bleeding hearts
are going to hate me for saying this, but the only way to
really create a “green economy” is for government to get out of
the way.” Direct quote folks.
And I know that it’s like wrestling like a pig, but what the
hell. Let’s shred this quote-unquote idea, shall we. First of
all, do you know why there is an EPA? Because in 1969 the
Cuyahoga River caught fire. Yes, you read that correctly. The
RIVER was so polluted it burned. Several times, actually, but
1969 was the worst. Around the same time, the smog deaths in LA
lead to the creation of the Clean Air Act. Let me make this
clear. That wasn’t “Got lung cancer after twenty years” smog
deaths. That was “This smog is so bad people just died” smog
deaths. Now, these two events neatly illustrate two separate
and stupid misconceptions that lead to the statement above. The
Cuyahoga River fires were a direct result of industrial
polluters being absolutely incapable or unwilling to regulate
themselves. A simple free market analysis shows why. I run
company X. You run company Y. We’re both steel mills. You are a
responsible mill owner, and have your toxic chemicals hauled
away and disposed of, using a (now) basic, standard “Cradle to
Grave” tracking system. I run a pipe to the river. Gee, I
wonder which is cheaper? The second, the LA smog deaths,
illustrates the other problem. I have the right, in our
capitalistic society, to buy a car. You have the right to buy a
car. EVERYBODY has the right to buy a car, and, with the proper
certification, drive. Grand. The issue that we run into is that
when five million people within the same couple hundred square
miles decide to buy and drive a car, it starts killing people.
There is NO WAY for this problem to self regulate, because
everyone is 1/5,000,000,000th of the problem. What’s more, at
the time, there WAS NO WAY TO SELF REGULATE. There wasn’t an
SUV/hybrid continuum of fuel efficiency. There were 8mpg cars
and 7mpg cars, and that was about it. So the only way the
problem got alleviated at all was by the government stepping
in, including at the source of the problem, the car companies.
Blah blah blah, catalytic converters, mileage standards, you
get the picture. HAH! the libertarian shouts. That is one
situation, you cannot extrapolate from the specific to the
general. Or, at least, they would say that if they had any idea
how extrapolation works. Seeing as they are Libertarians, they
probably can’t. So, to continue our trip down memory lane, look
at the food and drug situation in the country before the FDA.
Again, let me illustrate my point with a simple example. You
run 1890 Drug Company X and I run 1890 Drug Company Y. Lil’
Upton Sinclair hasn’t yet started to think about what he eats
for breakfast. Now, you are a responsible drug company, ad you
decide to test these new compounds using (now) standard LD50
tests, wide spectrum animal testing (with a special focus on
using whichever animal is most similar to human beings in the
particular organ system that the drug affects) and double-blind
human testing. I notice that when I give my patients this
magical stuff called “heroin,” they have no more pain.

Again, which one of us is cashing in, which one of us is still
trying to figure out what the LD50 for laudanum in rats is when
we have to close our doors? Or what about the rifle companies
that knowingly sold sub-standard rifles to the US Army in the
Civil War because there was no such thing as standardization or
quality control inspectors? Or the ones that sold bad tinned
beef to the US Army in the Spanish-American war and WWI? Or the
factory workers pre-1920 and pre-union? The simple fact is that
a business exists for one reason- to make money. To make as
much money as possible, as quickly as possible. And there is
nothing wrong with that. However, it turns out that when you
use sub-standard products, and stop caring about quality, you
cut your bottom line and make more money. Which means that the
purely free market ends up being a race to the bottom. The job
of the government is to set up an artificial bottom. This is
the lowest quality X you can use, this is the oldest Y you can
sell, it has to be this clean, this sanitized, etc. etc. etc.
Many companies have made a killing, and will continue to make a
killing, advertising their higher quality products-Tyson
Chicken’s new ad campaign springs to mind. But it means that
you, the consumer, can safely buy and use any product on the
market, knowing that it meets certain minimum requirements. The
job of a business is to make money. The job of a government is
to protect its citizens. By farming quality control out to the
businesses themselves, you make quality control a cost. When
you have a cost, you have a cost that can be cut. All of which
is to say that there is currently no money in making a green
economy, because the bottom is still cheap plastic and cheap
oil. Until the government creates an artificial bottom, you
will see no progress in this area because there is no. damn.
PROFIT. Companies that are seriously trying to go green (and I
mean seriously, not like Pampers and their 50% recycled thin
plastic wrapping) are finding themselves the equivalent of the
responsible business owners in my examples above, spending
money to do good while their competitors happily profit from
poisoning the earth. The good companies get eliminated-either
through losing all their money, or because they give up in
disgust. Long story short: you want a green economy? Make it
profitable. And the only way to do that is to make pollution
unprofitable. And the only way to do THAT is through government
regulations. And of course, the Libertarian will come back and
point out that businesses that make defective products go out
of business, or are at least punished. Toyota! they will cry,
small bubbles forming at the corner of their mouths. BP! And
yeah, sure. If anyone knows that you’re selling a defective
product. But in 1910, “Milk” was often chalk and water. You
really, really, REALLY don’t want to know about sausage. Or
about the amount of fecal matter in beef. Or the people who
occasionally fell into the rendering pits for lard and got sold
along with it. (OSHA? Government agency.) But now, thanks to
government laws passed by government officials who work for the
government, there are watchdog groups. Like the FDA, the EPA,
OSHA, CDC…I could go on. But another example. You want to know
HOW recalls happen? They are, it’s true, sometimes at the
behest of the company, and good for them. But let’s say Jimmy
Dean accidentally sent out tainted sausage. And no one noticed.
Well, Jimmy Dean ships everywhere, so you might have the same
batch infecting people in Missouri, Texas, Maine, and Florida.
Fortunately, there is a group called the CDC that monitors
little things like E. Coli, salmonella, botulism, etc. And they
send government doctors and government scientists all over the
country with government plane tickets and staying in government
hotel rooms. And their job is to talk to people who suddenly
get E. Coli. And they discover that the people in Missouri,
Texas, Maine, and Florida have all eaten Jimmy Dean Breakfast
Sausage, and they have them a recall. And in our enlightened
age, you can’t just sell Doctor Trustworthy’s Liver Cure and
Goodforwhatailsya. (which, back in the good old free market
days, was usually grain alcohol, food coloring, and
occasionally laudanum) There is another group called the FDA
that does a shit ton of testing so you know a new drug is safe.
See, here is the problem. Even with the internet, most people
don’t have the time or ability to run down these patterns. The
most notable case of amateur work in that field was probably
Love Canal. In that case, a small, isolated area, with highly
noticeable physiological effects caused by chemical
contamination, in a fairly closely knit community. The doctors
didn’t notice it, no one figured it out for years, until a few
private people took it upon themselves to get it sorted. It
took them years to put together the evidence right in front of
them. So I could pull out the usual old saws about how are you
gonna pay for the roads without a government, or do national
defense without a government, but there’s my question instead.
And the next time a Libertarian, or Republican, starts
blathering on about Big Government or Progressivist Socialist
Nazi Kenyan Death Camp Government, ask them this: what is the
free market gonna do about the Jimmy Dean Sausage?

SATAN the Devil

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Sep 29, 2019, 1:46:07 PM9/29/19

Kevrob

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Sep 29, 2019, 5:31:45 PM9/29/19

On Sunday, September 29, 2019 at 11:04:38 AM UTC-4, Hillary Squawk wrote:
> Stupid Things Libertarians Say, Part I
>
> with 14 comments
>

> Well, I’ve already got one series going here .....

This would be copypasta from

"newscum: July 2, 2010 at 4:08 am"

https://newscum.wordpress.com/tag/morons/

9 year old rant that misunderstands the free market
criticism of environmental law.

If the right to clean water in our lakes, rivers
and harbors had been treated as a property right,
those harmed by water pollution could have sued
the polluting companies for destroying, for example,
habitat for fish and shellfish.

and Love Canal was a government screwup:

[quote]

.... the Canal property (which included a strip of land on either side of
the Canal) was donated by Hooker to the Niagara Falls Board of Education
in 1953, under pressure from the Board that if Hooker didn't willingly deed
the land the property would be seized under eminent domain for the building
of a school.

[/quote]

https://reason.com/1981/02/01/love-canal/

see also:

https://reason.com/2017/01/24/love-canal-down-the-memory-hole/

The local school board that was deeded the land by Hooker Chemical
knew, or ought to have known, that those deadly chemicals were
there. They sold to developers, anyway.

The common law, prior to the Federal EPA, did allow for
damages against polluters.

For a discussion of common law, statutory regulation, and some
combination, see:

https://www.perc.org/1998/05/01/the-common-law-how-it-protects-the-environment/

--
Kevin R
a.a #2310

Kevrob

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Sep 29, 2019, 5:41:13 PM9/29/19

On Sunday, September 29, 2019 at 11:04:38 AM UTC-4, Hillary Squawk wrote:

> Stupid Things Libertarians Say, Part I
>
> with 14 comments
>
> Well, I’ve already got one series going here

Look at all this cross- and/or multi-posting!

https://groups.google.com/forum/?#!search/%22Stupid$20Things$20Libertarians$20Say%22;context-place=overview

Pure spammer.

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