100 replies to this topic

[Chuckie]

Seth Deathstalker, on 15 February 2012 - 02:13 PM, said:

*ah, holy grail, what fond memories*
Surely you mean that part about dictatorship with a king on top.....

Your fooling yourself..

[Ilithi Dragon]

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

I never said that just because it’s in the Constitution I consider it right. Prohibition was in the Constitution ya know.

And it was removed very quickly, because of the problems it caused.

The 5th Amendment has been with us since the Constitution was written. If there were some horrible injustice in it, I would think that it would have been addressed and at least revised by now. So many other problems with the Constitution, both the original document and various subsequent amendments, have been. We've had 220+ years to test it now, after all.

That's not to say that it couldn't have problems, it's just that it is very unlikely that there is a serious problem or injustice that has gone unaddressed this long, putting the onus on you to prove that there is an inherent injustice or fault.

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

Again, this proves my point. The assumption is that people can’t be responsible for their own safety. Here’s a thought, don’t patronize a salon that has unsatisfactory conditions. Also, if the government wasn’t responsible for certifying them, do you really think organizations like Consumer Reports wouldn’t exist to report on this stuff? Point being is just because the government took over this a long time ago doesn’t mean it is the ONLY way it could be done. Read some of L. Neil Smith’s work, both fiction and non-fiction.

But history has shown time and time again that private companies will throw the general wellfare of the populace, their customers, even their own employees to the wind to make a buck. The early days of the Industrial Revolution, before the days of child labor laws and labor regulations for basic working hours and pay and safe working conditions, all come to mind. If private business would so easily do this on its own, how come the 1800s are renown for their factories with horrible working conditions employing men, women and children 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week with no regard for safety, on pittance wages?

How many companies have spent significant amounts of money to hide, deny or obfuscate the unsafe or unhealthy nature of their working conditions or products? Sure, some private groups will crop up, but they can only do so much. They don't have the authority to force companies to change how they operate, and there's only so much a private reporting group can do to sway public opinion, especially when they have to compete with the advertising and marketing departments of entire industries. Besides, how are these private reporting groups going to make money, especially enough money to compete with the marketing and propaganda of the industries they're reporting on? What is going to keep them honest?

Government regulation of these things exists because there was a need for it. Private concerns were nowhere near sufficient, if they even existed at all. If there wasn't a need for those regulations in the first place, wouldn't have been put in place. (Privatge business has huge lobbies, after all, it's like pulling teeth trying to get any regulation of any industry through.)

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

Again, just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. Like the part where you say your right to eat outweighs my property rights. Isn’t that the same as saying you have to right to steal my food if you are hungry? In this case you are just having the govt. come take it for you. Also, why does your right to life outweigh mine? Say I have a 10 year supply of food for me and my family. If there is a real EOTWAWKI type event, who is to say that if the govt takes all but a 6 month supply that my family won’t starve in 7 months along with the rest of the town? Kind of like the Ant and the Grasshopper. We can both eat for a few months and then die or you can die now and we live.

A single person's right to continue living morally and ethically out-weighs a single person's right to property, in a straight-up, no-other-factors-involved consideration. Morally and ethically, the value of a life absolutely out-weighs the value of a piece of property. Now, the real world includes many other factors involved, so it's almost never a straight-up comparision, but a person's security of property is worth less, morally and ethically, than the continued survival of several other people.

Does this mean that it's okay to steal food for survival? Well, few would say that it is morally wrong for a person to steal a loaf of bread to keep from starving to death, and even fewer would say that it is morally wrong for a person to steal a loaf of bread to keep their child from starving to death. Technically it would be a violation of laws against stealing, so legally it would be wrong, but morally it would not. If that person had no other alternative but to steal food themselves to keep their child from starving, then there are other problems inherent to that society and the support structures it has for people facing hard times (**** happens, most people starving on the street are not there because they're lazy bumbs, but because they've had the worst luck and lost everthing, or they were born there and haven't had the rare opportunity to bootstrap themselves out of it).

Fortunately, we have support programs within our society, 'social safety net' programs that provide assistance to people who have fallen on hard times, so they're not forced to steal to feed their children. We pay taxes for this, because charity organizations do not receive enough funding, and do not have sufficient coordination, nor uniformity of coverage, to provide for all who have hit hard times. These taxes are not theft by the government, they're the bills we pay to upkeep the advanced, modern society we live in. Taxes paid to social safety net programs that provide food and shelter to the homeless, etc. actually come back to us in the security of the streets, and our own property, that would be face greater danger from impoverished, desperate, starving people otherwise.


Now, in a disaster scenario, say a horrible storm smashes through an area, causing massive flooding and destroying major infrastructures in a relatively remote area, cutting the local population off from modern society, if a single person had a large stockpile of food, enough to provide for their neighbors, who had no food, and who were facing starvation because the infrastructure that supported them was destroyed and won't be restored any time soon, then disaster relief forces or local government forces would be fully within their right to confiscate the stockpiled food to keep the larger community from starving. That person would be owed just compensation for the food that was confiscated, they would have to be paid back for the property that was taken, but the government's obligation to protect everyone overrides its obligation to protect the property rights of an individual.

Now, in most cases, the question of your continued survival won't even come up because in most cases, the confiscation will only be until the emergency situation has been dealt with and things will go back to normal (or as close to normal as things could get after such a major disaster) as soon the emergency and its fall-out have been dealt with. However, if we go the full worst-case-scenario, with the full collapse of our civilization, it would still be in your best interests to share the food with your neighbors. There is only so much that you and your family can do to sustain yourselves, and if you have the ability to stave off the starvation of your neighbors until they can recover enough to support themselves, you and your family will be better off in the long run because you will then have neighbors and a community to depend upon. More manpower to do work, provide for defense, more and varied skills for specialized tasks that not everyone can do, etc. It might tighten your belt in the short-term, but in the long-run it will be much more in your benefit to share your food stores with your neighbors until they get themselves back on their feet. And don't expect them to loaf around on your larder - in a total collapse of civilization scenario, 99% of people are smart enough to realize that they're going to have to contribute to their own continued survival. Even in a less-severe localized disaster, 99% of people are smart enough to know that they'll have to contribute to their own survival. You'll get the odd loafer here and there, they're in every group, but those are easily dealt with.

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

Depends on which version of Robin Hood you read. In the early ones, he only robbed from the corrupt nobles and church men. So in that case, he stole from crooks and gave the money back to the victims. In the versions where he stole from anyone who came by, then he was a crook with good PR. Wealth redistribution based on “need” etc is Communism and thus evil by my standards. Earn it or do without.

You have a funny definition of Communism. Would you define all taxes as Communism? If so, you are incorrectly applying the term. Even just applying the term to taxes taken from the wealthy to support the poor or impoverished would be an incorrect application of the term. Commmunism is a specific socio-economic system, and it doesn't even technically include the redistribtion of wealth, as in a Communist system, all wealth and resources are owned by the State (and by extension, the people), and they are distributed to where they are needed most (the system breaks down for a number of reasons, not least of which from a lack of sufficient checks against abuse of power, etc.).

Neverminding the historical reality that almost all 'nobles' and wealthy person in medeival times were 'crooks' who gained their wealth on the backs of peasants and serfs who were little more than land-bound slaves, a Robin Hood who stole from the wealthy without discrimination could be accused of being a theif with good PR, or it could be argued that he was a many trying to correct problems with the society that he lived in, and had no qualms about resorting to theivery of otherwise honest citizens to support his efforts (one could also argue that the wealthy, as members of that society/civilization, and members who had wealth and power, were lax in their responsibilities as members of that civilization by not directing efforts to correct the myriad appalling problems with the society, but that's another matter).

But the basic principle of Robin Hood's heroism is still the same: Taking from the corrupt rich, to give to the down-trodden poor. If this is a noble goal, then taxes or regulations designed to do the same, or to prevent the corrupt from becoming rich at the expense of the poor or not-rich, are also laudible.

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

But I would do more if it wasn’t for Mr. Obama forcing me to do so through taxes etc.

This is an illogical and non-sensical attribution of taxes to a man who had nothing to do with their enactment. All of the taxes that you pay today were put in place long before the sitting president ever ran for office, indeed many if not the majority of them were put in place long before he was even born. To accuse President Obama of forcing you to pay taxes he had nothing to do with putting in place in the first place, and indeed which he has mostly cut (95% of Americans have seen tax cuts under the current president - those who haven't are mostly the wealthiest who have a disparity in taxes they pay vs income anyway, and most of those 'increases' are merely the closings of tax loopholes), is inherently wrong-minded. It is a logically invalid inference.

[Catamount]

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

I never said that just because it’s in the Constitution I consider it right. Prohibition was in the Constitution ya know.

Your endorsement is irrelevant. Society does not need your permission, in particular, to operate the way it does.

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Again, this proves my point. The assumption is that people can’t be responsible for their own safety. Here’s a thought, don’t patronize a salon that has unsatisfactory conditions. Also, if the government wasn’t responsible for certifying them, do you really think organizations like Consumer Reports wouldn’t exist to report on this stuff? Point being is just because the government took over this a long time ago doesn’t mean it is the ONLY way it could be done. Read some of L. Neil Smith’s work, both fiction and non-fiction.

There are gaping flaws in this thinking, and it does take the myriad of historical and current-day examples of this not working to see them.

Look we've tried this, and some nations are still trying this. Surely you've read The Jungle? Did the Chicago meatpacking industry advertise its sanitation problems?

Or how about Monsanto rbst? Not only did they not advertise that it was potentially a powerful carcinogen, capable of horrendous side effects even according to Monsanto's own completely inefficient tests, but when two news reporters attempted to reveal that fact, the good old private market stepped in, and Fox News was pressured with advertising dollars to kill the story, which they did, before promptly firing the journalists (not only canning the story, but creating the "disgruntled employee" defense should they ever try to bring it up again). Fortunately, most of the world's GOVERNMENTS have banned rbst use.

When PG&E was dumping hexavalent chromium into the water supply in Hinkley, CA, do you think they were advertising that they were doing it? No, they were hiding that fact, the way companies are good at hiding those facts, because they have hundreds of billions of dollars. Fortunately, the law was there to set that right, otherwise even the knowledge of their activities would have been useless.


When ****** Chemical sold the Love Canal dumping site and warned a corrupt town government about its use, they stated the warning was only given to satisfy their legal obligations, and later, when gross birth defects and illness were found in the population that had settled there, who ended up coming in to fix the problem? The New York state government. It wasn't being done by any private entity, and ****** chemical wouldn't have even warned about the problems in the first place, according to their own statements, had it not been by law.


On the other hand, when railroads were grossly overextending themselves and causing economic trouble in the 19th century, government wasn't around to stop that. The result was the Panic of 1893. Do you think they put a disclaimer on their tickets saying "warning, use of our services may cause imminent economic meltdown"?


In the leadup to the 2008 economic meltdown, we had what should have been nothing but a housing collapse, something that wouldn't have made the status of a footnote in most history books. However the deregulated investment bank industry packaged those mortgages up, and thanks to new laws, weren't required by law to reveal that they were doing so. Of course, like you say, we have private consumer agencies who stop this, right? That's why there's S&P, and Fitch, and Moody's, right? Yes, except that they were rubber stamping these terrible investments with AAA ratings, presumably for payoff from the banks.

Honestly, I could spend the entire night, and this site's entire web storage, citing examples of companies who freely got away with murder right under the noses of their customers, and either only got caught because of government, or never did before a catastrophe struck, because of a lack of government.

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Again, just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. Like the part where you say your right to eat outweighs my property rights. Isn’t that the same as saying you have to right to steal my food if you are hungry? In this case you are just having the govt. come take it for you.

He isn't saying he has the right to come take your food, through government or otherwise. He's saying society does, because in that case, the majority of people in society agree that it's right.

Since there's no objective way to make either point right or wrong, we rule by the majority, so whether you think it's right, personally, would be irrelevant.

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Also, why does your right to life outweigh mine? Say I have a 10 year supply of food for me and my family. If there is a real EOTWAWKI type event, who is to say that if the govt takes all but a 6 month supply that my family won’t starve in 7 months along with the rest of the town? Kind of like the Ant and the Grasshopper. We can both eat for a few months and then die or you can die now and we live.

If there's that much society left, then who's to say they couldn't also use it to stave off starvation for everyone until getting up infrastructure to permanently feed people, thereby saving your family in the process? (10 years is not forever)

Or what if it's a vastly larger food supply than you could ever use?

Or what if the majority of it is perishable?


Sure, in your particular case, the argument against government might be valid because you're identifying the outcome as bad, but this is flawed logic, because you're then extending that argument to all cases, when it doesn't follow that the outcome would be tangibly bad in all cases.

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Earn it or do without. FTR, I told my 7 yr old son the above version of the Ant and Grasshopper last night, complete with having to make the hard choice of who lives and who dies.

What do you know about chimps?

You see, chimps are intelligent, a lot like us, and only a couple million years ago, you'd be hard pressed to find a fundemental difference between us, except one: humans are cooperative by nature, which extends to altruism; chimps are not.

You'll never see one chimp go out of its way to help another for the sake of some sense of community.

The result of that altruistic group instinct becoming the primary means for survival is that it became the very selective pressure by which our social behaviors evolved, and in turn, our large brains, and in turn our civilization.


The the moral of your grasshopper story, which is nothing but a narrow lens through which to see the world that denies your child countless other perspectives, would suggest that the very evolution of humanity as an intelligent race was wrong. From a evolutionary and sociological perspective, the ant might have died, or he might have lived but either way, it would have been a trend that would have forged a much stronger society between them, in the end. Were they of the same species, it would have even forged a stronger species.

This perspective is the kind of thing you miss when you continually focus only on yourself. It certainly shouldn't take someone with a major in evolutionary biology to figure that out.

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We donate to charity as well. But I would do more if it wasn’t for Mr. Obama forcing me to do so through taxes etc.

and that's just inane

Would you give more overall, than you presently do between taxes and what you freely give? If so, Why? Why would paying taxes make you a less charitable person within the means of your net income? The answer is that it logically shouldn't.


On the other hand, there are plenty of people who give nothing freely, so society ends up better off, in the end, when they get taxed for some of their wealth, and those people end up better off in the end too. If that statement sounds contradictory, consider this: altruistic societies might have stolen the wealth of the kings of the middle ages, but thanks to those societies, I live better than those kings, by far, which means so do their descendants. It's a positive sum game, much as it is in the earlier evolutionary example.


Social Darwnism, which is essentially what you're peddling here (or Randism, if you want), is a failed model precisely because its exclusive focus on the individual, and only the individual, fails to account for the benefits to society from being altrustic. The reason I live in a better society than those kings is because we have a society that "takes" your money to ensure education, basic health care, and basic necessities of living, and the result is a society which has a larger talent pool from which contributions can be made. If the majority of people did not think this right, regardless of objections such as yours, you would not likely have what you have anyways. In fact, history has shown that the US largely owes its present status to its emphasis on education, provided to people you'd sooner turn it away from (because they didn't "earn it"), because it's created a burgeoning class of hyper-qualified people, who otherwise wouldn't be here. My home state of North Carolina does the same thing, hyper-investing in education compared to most of the South, and guess what? We economically hand the rest of the southeastern states their rear ends in most respects. In 2010, we were chosen as the Third and Second best state for business by Forbes and Chief Executive Officer Magazines. We're frankly a better, more functional society.

The amount you owe in terms of having a livable society to the very altruism you eschew is quite enormous.

Edited by Catamount, 15 February 2012 - 07:12 PM.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Ok then.

Just gonna hit the highlights as I see them. Ref: the 1800s and all that. That was also before radio/TV etc. Information is a bit easier to come by these days. So what didn't work then could work now. Also, back then the culture was different. People had no problem buying goods made cheap even if that meant maimed children. These days we are a bit more enlightened or so we like to think.

As to the moral issues of stealing food etc. Once you start legalizing morality, you start stepping on toes. Where do we draw the line? It would be hard to find a sane person who objects to outlawing murder. What about alcohol sale and consumption on Sunday? Slippery slope and all that, so isn't it best to err on the side of caution and not risk trampling rights? Trampling one to secure another....didn't Benjamin Franklin have something to say about that?

The State owning all, including the product of your labor is wealth redistribution. You own nothing without the State giving it to you. I think you have been taught a odd definition of Communism.

Absolutely true on Obama and taxes. As far as it goes. So technically you are correct that I was incorrect. He was instrumental in raising the deficit and the debt to new levels. So it is safe to say that it will be much harder for the budget to be balanced due to the increased interest and so I will continue to pay taxes to pay for some people to sit on their butts. So in spirit my comments were valid. My taxes go to pay the bills of poor people. Government enforced charity.

As to me needing to endorse the Constitution, I was making my opinion known. I follow the laws of this country, even the ones that I think are bogus, unconstitutional etc. I believe the 2nd Amendment gives me the right to own and carry any weapon I so choose. I do not do so since I don't have the proper licenses to own a machine gun for example. I am a Libertarian, not an *****.

As to society's right to come take my food etc, ever heard the one about 2 men and a woman stuck on a island? If not short version is they decide to have a democratic society. One man proposes a law that the woman has to have sex with the men on demand. I assume you see where this is going. "Majority rules" is not much different from "might makes right".

As to Ant/Grasshopper bit. Seriously? You challenge my hypothetical with one of your own? If I truly thought that my stockpile could save the "world", then sure have at it. But it is mine. I paid for it. I chose to deny myself certain luxuries so I could get a water purification system set up for example. When the SHTF, all of a sudden you get to benefit without my say so? What happened to personal responsibility?

As to the apes etc. Last I checked they do work together on some issues. But the point again is if there is a better chance that sharing would save my life and my families, then of course I would. If it was a case like the flood we had here a few years back, then of course I would help out. I did since we live in a area that wasn't affected. As above, I am a Libertarian, not a ***** or a heartless *******.

Back on the tax issue, do you not understand the difference between being forced to and volunteering? As to Social Darwinism, your argument fails. Some people are smart enough to see that to truly succeed you invest in others. Just like investing your money in a company.

You see you assume since I value personal responsibility I automatically think people who fail deserve to fail and should be left to rot. That isn't true. If other people had felt that way, I would have never achieved the (limited, I'm no Warren Buffet) success that I have achieved. I pay it back by helping others. I teach what I know, I help where I can etc. Not because I expect to be paid back, in coin or in kind, but because it is the right thing to do.

As to teaching my son etc. You only got one tiny piece of the puzzle and yet you have me raising him to be a monster. Yes I teach him that if someone breaks into this house they will get shot if they don't leave after I tell them I am armed. I also teach him that once you make sure the area is secure you render aid to them. I will press charges, but I have no problem with the hiring of people with criminal records. By the same token, I also taught him that in the context of the Ant story that if the ant had sufficient food he should help the grasshopper. But that if the next winter rolled around and the grasshopper had failed to make ANY progress, that is grounds to consider you are no longer helping. I used the example of having that evening chewed his butt out over some infraction. I could have been nice and let him keep talking and wind up telling a lie. I could have been nice about it. I could have not threatened him with the belt if he did it again. But would I have done him any favors? Now he has been reminded of how I feel about liars. And while it hurt his feelings at the time, I know he was also reminded that I love him enough to get on to him and not let him grow up to be a "bad guy".

So in summary, yes I owe a lot to today's society. I believe though that a truly free society would have offered even more. L. Neil Smith wrote some so-so fiction that did a great job in positing a Libertarian society. I suggest reading it.

[yngvef]

Oh dear... Are you back at that point again. Is it me, or does the US seem to be going in circles sometimes?

Edited by yngvef, 16 February 2012 - 04:42 PM.

[Catamount]

Sorry if the text is poorly parsed and grouped funny.

The site gave technical problems with posting (character limit? I didn't say so), so I had to paste it to a word document editor and repost.

I've tried to re-split things up as much as I could, but the original formatting from when I typed is gone

Nick Makiaveli, on 15 February 2012 - 07:49 PM, said:

Ok then.
Just gonna hit the highlights as I see them. Ref: the 1800s and all that. That was also before radio/TV etc. Information is a bit easier to come by these days. So what didn't work then could work now. Also, back then the culture was different. People had no problem buying goods made cheap even if that meant maimed children. These days we are a bit more enlightened or so we like to think.

It's a nice hypothesis, but it still doesn't fit. Most of the examples I cited are modern, many within the last decade or two.

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As to the moral issues of stealing food etc. Once you start legalizing morality, you start stepping on toes. Where do we draw the line? It would be hard to find a sane person who objects to outlawing murder. What about alcohol sale and consumption on Sunday? Slippery slope and all that, so isn't it best to err on the side of caution and not risk trampling rights? Trampling one to secure another....didn't Benjamin Franklin have something to say about that?

You realize the slippery slope argument is generally considered a logical fallacy, right? You can use it to justify claiming anything will follow from anything, so it's kind of an argument of nothing
To answer your question, I don't recall a quote by Frankling specifically, but of course we should err on the side of caution, and heavily. It's what we understand that Europe often doesn't. That's why I get appalled at people who propose things like guns bans, or even mandatory safety seatbelt laws.
However, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr once famously said, The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
The goal of government should be to protect rights, nothing more or less. That job just sometimes gets complicated.

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The State owning all, including the product of your labor is wealth redistribution. You own nothing without the State giving it to you. I think you have been taught a odd definition of Communism.

No, he's right. Communism is a system of extreme government ownership, not just of wealth, but spefically of the means of production, and it doesn't necessarily include heavily redistributive systems. Why does government have to distribute the wealth it owns in a particular fashion?
Sure, the government has to distribute some of that wealth to maintain a functioning society, but so do all economic systems, including free market capitalism. The point of communism is the government ownership, and of most or all the wealth, not just some, not a particular degree of redistribution. Do you realize that the Soviets had a heavily uneven distribution of wealth, favoring a few over many? There was no "everyone is the same".

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As to society's right to come take my food etc, ever heard the one about 2 men and a woman stuck on a island? If not short version is they decide to have a democratic society. One man proposes a law that the woman has to have sex with the men on demand. I assume you see where this is going. "Majority rules" is not much different from "might makes right".

Of course I've heard the story, and I hate to break it to you, but basically 100% of nature works this way. In fact, your own story basically proves that the universe is arranged in such a way that might makes right.
There is no objectively determinable right and wrong, not by any evidence. Utilitarianism is probably about as close as you get, and even its not an absolute ethical system. So right is basically determined by whoever can back it up. Might more or less does make right in nature, of which we are a part.

Here in the corporeal world, if I think it's right to take your apple, and I have a bigger stick than you, by what standard can you claim I'm wrong? The answer is, of course, none.

So why have guaranteed rights at all? Why protect minority rights?
Well society figured out a long time ago that sooner or later, most of us end up in the position of the woman, rather than the two men. In fact, the majority of us end up there the majority of the time in most societal setups, because most societal setups give the majority of the power to the few, not the many, and those few wield it so serve themselves.

So we realized that it was beneficial to everyone to ensure that everyone had certain protections against power. If society ever wants to change that, they can anytime they please, because might does make right, because if I'm mighty, I can decide what I think is "right", and there's nothing anyone else can do about it.
Our society, however, is such that that might is now in the hands of the overall populace, who thus far wield it in such a way that that the most people get the most benefit, while still making sure everyone has a strong minimum of protections from many forms of exploitation. That's about as close to "right" as you can get in what's evidently a very amoral universe.

If some powerful figure ever overtook us, and our police and military could no longer protect what we've decided is right and wrong, then that figure would get to decide, and neither your objections, nor mine, would amount to anything. That's just the nature of the universe.

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As to Ant/Grasshopper bit. Seriously? You challenge my hypothetical with one of your own?

Of course. Showing that your analogy doesn't remotely work in all cases, and that it therefore can't be used for huge generalizations that go beyond that particular case is important.
You can't generalize about society based on one narrow example that precludes many other important points.

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As to the apes etc. Last I checked they do work together on some issues.

Of course they will. They hunt together, and if a male has ambitions for political power, they'll be supported by others for self-interest, but I'm not talking about cooperating with another to boost oneself up. I'm talking about altruism. Chimps will sometimes display such behavior towards direct family members (kin selection is a powerful force, so it's no surprise), but in general, two unrelated chimps will display little behavior other than to instantly kill each other. In fact, male groups will patrol around their greater family groups, looking for unrelated lone males, just to attack and kill them.

Chimps are capable of altruistic behavior, even towards non-family members, as it occurs in very rare cases, but their society operates in a way that precludes.

Here's what you won't generally see:
If a banana is a couple feet out of reach and can't be climbed to, you'll never see one chimp boost another up to get it. If they're unrelated, forget it. Humans figured out a long time ago that there's an interesting benefit to doing that for another human, any human, regardless of their relation to you. It meant that we became, not just social creatures, but hyper-social creatures. Here's what we figured out: If I boost you up, you can turn around and do the same for me. Then we both get a banana, instead of neither.

Societally, this is a powerful force for survival. Rather than chimps, we resolve potential conflicts, even with non-related members, by trying to cooperate with them to figure out a solution, rather than killing each other over it, so as a result, more humans live.

We are so inclined towards this tendency, that we even did it with other species! Humans have very long running histories of relatively peaceful relationships with other dangerous species, lions being a perfect example. Did you know that lions aren't predisposed to attack people? This was demonstrated by a rather wreckless, if extremely interesting experiment by zoologist Dave Salmoni (who's known for being in the public eye for doing controversial things, but again, always gets interesting results). He went and basically lived around a pride of wild lions, closer and closer each day, to demonstrate that they had no natural proclivity to attack humans. They essentially only started doing it because European settlers drove them to by killing natural food sources and attracting them to the only thing left: people and livestock.

Anthropoligst Elizabeth Marshall Thomas studied this issue extensively, and found that that was just the relationship that had been evolved with the cats by early Africans.

Cheetas are even more amicable towards people; in fact they're downright amicable. I have never, ever, ever heard of a fatal Cheetah attack on a person occurring. They're so amicable, that for over 1,000 years, people used to capture them, not cubs, but wild adults, and use them as hunting animals (basically really expensive hunting dogs; Europeans did this a lot). They've also been pets for as long as human civilization existed.

We simply don't conflict with one another, and it's something we've extended to numerous other animals. Basically a "we're powerful; you're powerful; let's not waste effort attacking each other" kind of a deal.

Cooperation doesn't just mean a lot less conflict, however. It opens up opportunities if you're intelligent enough to realize them, which is why our brains then exploded in size like no other evolutionary feature in a long time. This is significant, because we're in an evolutionary slow/stable point, have been since about the recovery from the K-T event, and probably will continue to be permanently barring a mass extinction, so things don't change that fast anymore.
Humans do this. Others do not (though bonobos come closer than other species). The willingness to expend effort, or even take harm, for one's society, especially in a species already as large and intelligent as human ancestors, is the most powerful force the world has ever known.

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But the point again is if there is a better chance that sharing would save my life and my families, then of course I would.

Of course you would, but here's a question: how much would you risk? If you had a 50% chance of dying personally, would you take it for the change to save ten people? A hundred? A thousand?
Helping at no risk to yourself is irrelevant. Even some of your pre-human ancestors would have done that. The question is, are you an extension of that evolutionary trend? For most people, the answer it yes, because biological and sociocultural evolution both demand it, and when push came to shove, I'm betting you would too, but do you consider that right?

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As to teaching my son etc. You only got one tiny piece of the puzzle and yet you have me raising him to be a monster.

I go by what you give me, if you teach your son more, then you need to put that caveat in there, rather than leaving me to deduce it.

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By the same token, I also taught him that in the context of the Ant story that if the ant had sufficient food he should help the grasshopper. But that if the next winter rolled around and the grasshopper had failed to make ANY progress, that is grounds to consider you are no longer helping.

and I agree; so long as you've given the opportunity, there comes a point when useless people don't stop being useless, and then they aren't worth the investment. In the ancient days, when those resources could have meant survival, leaving them to die would have been reasonable. Today, when that's just not necessary, it just means they should live in the lowest quality of life possible.
However, with that said, there should always be an avenue of opportunity for people to change. If you take that away, then you've done no better than to kill them. That investment should just be minimal.

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Back on the tax issue, do you not understand the difference between being forced to and volunteering?

Of course I do, but I don't think it's what you think it is.
The difference is that in a purely volunteer system, only the especially altruistic people share, while the selfish get to hoard what they have and not take part.
In a system where society demands that everyone contribute, the selfish have to give something up too, for the greater good (utilitarianism, remember?), because it's not fair for only the kind-hearted people to contribute.
Having a society which uplifts the poor is of benefit to everyone, so it's especially not fair for the selfish to not contribute, when they or their descendents will see the benefit.

Edited by Catamount, 17 February 2012 - 10:16 AM.

[Catamount]

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You see you assume since I value personal responsibility I automatically think people who fail deserve to fail and should be left to rot. That isn't true. If other people had felt that way, I would have never achieved the (limited, I'm no Warren Buffet) success that I have achieved. I pay it back by helping others. I teach what I know, I help where I can etc.

Then we are not so different, but understand, that there are many who do and have felt that people who fail, even if by no fault of their own (eg, the generations of poor immigrants who never had anything to get their foot in the door), do deserve to rot.
This is essentially the central tenet of Randism, and Social Darwinism before it, though Randism is especially heinous, because it holds that all altruism, is not only not morally obligatory, but morally reprehensible. Essentially, it teaches that if you see someone drowning in a lake nearby, not only are you not morally obligated to help under that ethical system, but you are morally obligated not to help, if it's so much as an inconvenience to you.
If Randism is not reflective of your point of view then I apologize; it means I misjudged your position.
What you are essentially describing is the social contract, and you clearly understand it, but be mindful that this applies to everyone, not just you. All of us are better off than we otherwise would be because of past investment by past generations of society, and in turn, we pass that on. In other words, society invests in all of us, and we give a return of investment to society.
But then why oppose taxation? That's exactly what taxation is: Society has invested in us, and we wouldn't be where we are without it, so society is just taking the return due on that investment. How much is due is certainly open to debate, but the concept is logically sound.

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As to Social Darwinism, your argument fails. Some people are smart enough to see that to truly succeed you invest in others. Just like investing your money in a company.

The argument might fail in the hypothetical universe from which this guess about what might happen proceeds, but here in the corporeal world, the evidence supports me, not you.

The United States hit its lowest points in societal progress when we relied upon private individuals to "invest" in making a good society, of their own free will, because an individual is only concerned with the individual. The industrial revolution was a period of essentially zero opportunity for the vast majority of people, because they were seen and treated as nothing more than cattle, not invested in to be contributing members of society, and they were held in virtual slavery, by making wages too low to actually live independently (they survived by getting "discounts" at company stores for food and other goods).

In other words, you pay then a cent an hour, then you only change them a cent for a loaf of bread, that way they survive, but can never ever leave.

Bother periods when we relied on solvely priviate entities to dictate the economic workings of society, the Gilded Age, and the 1920s, they did nothing like what you claimed they hypothetically should. Instead, they used their "freedom" to leverage their power to gain more power, to rape and pillage society and enslave mass numbers of people to then gain yet more power, and do you know how it ended, both times?

It ended in economic collapse, because these people, the real people in the corporeal world, not your hypothetical people in a hypothetical situation, cared about themselves and no one else, and sucked society dry for their own benefit, until their cheating and corruption eventually crashed the system. Both times, this ended in depression, first in 1893, and then in 1929.

In the 2000s this is what happened with investment banks. They used "freedom" to get ahead at everyone else's expense; to go back to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, they swung their fists, and cared not who's faces were in the way. The result is that they contorted every private institution to work for them, including institutions supposedly there to protect the public, like the private investment rating angencies, because at the end of the day, they're only there to help themselves too, and the whole system collapsed, again. This isn't some far back time of ignorant consumers; it happened right here, just a few short years ago.

As for when society operates best, well again, you can conjure up hypothetical worlds all you want, but here in the corporeal world, the United States achieved its best success when the public created robust educational systems, and when they were given protections by government that eventually created the middle class, during the Progressive Era (which was undone in the 20s by making society "free", and letting a few powerful oligarchs trample over everyone).

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So in summary, yes I owe a lot to today's society. I believe though that a truly free society would have offered even more.

but the very words "truly free society" are nonsensical. Concentrated power is part of human nature. Even Adam Smith noted that the greatest threat to human freedom and progress for the vast majority of human history was aristocracies of a few, hoarding wealth from the many.

This notion that we can have some kind of society where no one dictates anything to anyone else, and everyone will just leave everyone alone is a fantasty, and history has shown that, not just for the duration of US history, but for the past ten thousand years.

Government can go away, and laws can disappear, but when that happens, it doesn't become some magical Utopia where everyone is left to their own devices, and interaction only happens voluntarily. What happens is that I decide I want what you have, and I go and grab ten guys, get a few guns, and kill you and your family, or just enslave you if you're useful and takeable. Out of respect for you, I'll spare you the details of what we'd have done to you and your family in most of that "free" human history.

So let's start there. You're alone, and I'm a the leader of a band of petty thugs. This is how civilization began (those thugs became empires, and those leaders kings). What do you do?

There's no morality to speak of, no right or wrong. God isn't going to stand in my way if I want to hurt you. There's just me and my band of thugs, and what you can do about it.

The solution of our society is that you get together with all the other people equally under threat, and you collectively wield a bigger stick than me. Then you write laws to make sure the members of your group don't kill each other, and actually contribute to the group. That's your one option, because might does make right, and when no one mighty is there to say otherwise, the strong come in and rape and pillage the weak, and no grand morality of the universe, or magical deity, lifts a finger to stop them. Our own nation's history, and the 10,000 years of human sociological history before that, and the 3.5 billion years of biological history before that, shows just that.

So "truly free" for whom? Based on the protections of what freedoms? I like books like anyone, but frankly, I don't care what you or a fictional author conjure up as a hypothetical world, in which you can make anything work any way you like, because right now, our so-called non-free society works better to protect more freedoms for more people than has ever been achieved at any other point in history.

Edited by Catamount, 17 February 2012 - 10:22 AM.

[FACEman Peck]

Oh lovely, another reason to become like Iraq in the sense that you sell out your neighbor as a "spy" or what not just for a few bucks. Or even better, just shoot him because he's a "terrorist" for brushing his teeth with his left hand instead of his right. Who knew we wound become the way we are now?

[Exilyth]

"Is your neighbor suddenly showing interest in peoples personal matters?
Have you seen them peek through windows?
Does he/she mow the lawn on sundays?
Is he/she following you or other around?
Does he/she often take notes?

Well, your neighbor might be a snitch!"

[Nick Makiaveli]

Don't have time for a play by play.

The Franklin quote was to the effect that those who are willing to give up freedom for security deserve neither. When the govt. takes away rights in the name of protecting rights, then where does it end?

For those just joining, I am a Libertarian. If you don't know what that means, look it up before you flame me for the following.

What about about a business owner's right to choose who he does business with? Should the govt have the right to force one company to do business with another? On the surface the answer is obviously no. But they forced the original AT&T to let other companies use their phone lines to make money. Yes I know competition and good for the public etc, but the public doesn't have a right to cheap phone service. Cell phones came along and made the whole thing moot. Ever think that maybe if AT&T was allowed to keep control of their property things might have changed? *here is the flaming part* This extends to the personal level. Shouldn't a shop owner be allowed to choose who he sells to? You've probably guessed where this is going, but just in case why shouldn't a racist be allowed to put a sign in the window that says No Whites Allowed? If you disagree with him, then don't do business with him. Tell your grocer that if you see the racist in his grocery store you won't be back. I think if the majority disagreed the sign would come down. If not, well then what? People would get their feelings hurt? Little white kids would learn that some people don't like them?

I believe people are basically too stupid act properly in a true Libertarian society. I hope that if raised in such a society they would move past this and become truly enlightened people for the most part. The difference between you and I is that I don't think that because I am not stupid I have the right to make other people act a certain way. I will certainly tell them I think they are wrong, and I will for damn sure defend myself if physically assaulted, but other than that? Have fun living your life. Stay out of mine. Again this goes back to the I will donate to charity, but I will not pay for someone's habit or support a lifestyle that involves "being entitled".

[Catamount]

and don't misunderstand, Nick Makiaveli, I agree about personal responsibility, and I agree that we've lost too much of it, especially to the left.

That's why I hate seatbelt laws. If you get into my car and we go anywhere, you will buckle up, even in NH (no such laws there), but you know what? If I want to drive around without a seatbelt, or let other people ride without them, that's my damn choice, not the government's. If it costs society increased health care costs, then mandate health insurance for driving. Driving is dangerouns without or without such protection anyways. Society can demand I don't burden them, but I'm a firm believer in the right to be stupid with my own welfare.

Motorcycles are the same way. Again, NH has this right. Mandate a minimum of eye protection, because motorcyclists without them can get other people killed, but helmets? If I want to ride without a helmet, that's my choice. It's my choice to do something some might consider to be stupid, not the government's. The above still applies with health, insurance, however (I shouldn't be allowed to be stupid on society's dime).


The same goes with gun laws. Guns are tools, and as adults, we can be responsible when we use them. Gun ownership does not burden society in any significant way (I've seen fairly scant evidence that they have a net effect of making us safer, but there's also no evidecne that legal ownership makes us less safe, and in fact, gun crimes have even increased in some nations that have issued bans, like the UK). Want to put up waiting periods for handguns and mandate background checks? Sure. But let people have them. The same goes with assault and automatic weapons. If you want to put up stipulations, then sure, do it, but again, we're adults; we can be responsible, and banning them doesn't significantly stop criminals from getting them either (I don't know if it has any effect or not, it might, but if it's there, it's not significant).


The same goes with owning dangerous or exotic animals. People have been killed by them in a few rare cases, but do you know how many people have been killed by, say, privately owned big cats in the past few decades who didn't put themselves in that position voluntarily? Zero. Okay, sure, you have problems like that one mass release that shouldn't have happened, and got botched up, so some stipulations are required. Tax exotic animal ownership in case the state has to pay to take an animal away, or otherwise exert effort. It's basically a public safety deposit for your pet. Require certification for ownership from the Feline Conservation Federation if you want, too.

The same goes with things like Haley's law, which was to ban contact between the public and certain wild animals. You know what? I'm sick of government deciding what is and isn't a safe activity. If I sign a disclaimer, I should be able to engage in whatever activity I damn well please as a member of the public. It's a pretty sad society when nations like Australia, who are way to the left of us, are allowed to do things we aren't. Tiger Island would be all but illegal here.



Contrary to how I may come across, I am also a libertarian in many respects.

However, there's a difference between valuing personal responsibility, and not understanding that people tangibly sometimes aren't responsible, and that government has a role to play in some ways, especially in economics, because without that roll, society just doesn't tangibly function.

Even Friedrich Hayek believed in a limited role for government, and he openly despised people who eschewed accepting evidence for their belief system. Of course, evidence from history clearly indicates that even some of his ideas don't work in practice, but the point is that even a libertarian who is a pragmatist must recognize empirical evidence, and conform his system of beliefs to it, otherwise the point of view has no use.

It's on that basis that even as someone who is libertarian in theory, I accept that the evidence is clear that certain governmental functions simply don't get carried out, to to the detriment of society, if not by government, at least in any system we've devised so far.


Propertarianism and invidiual responsibility are important in their own way, but grossly fall short of solving many problems, from economic problems, to problems of enabling certain liberty in one group allowed them to be used to crush liberties in other groups, to gross environmental problems.


Where government isn't really helping, or we can solve problems without, let's get rid of it, but it's foolish to comment on doing so where this is not the case, insofar as no plausible alternative is presented that works any better.

Nick Makiaveli, on 17 February 2012 - 11:04 AM, said:

I believe people are basically too stupid act properly in a true Libertarian society. I hope that if raised in such a society they would move past this and become truly enlightened people for the most part. The difference between you and I is that I don't think that because I am not stupid I have the right to make other people act a certain way. I will certainly tell them I think they are wrong, and I will for damn sure defend myself if physically assaulted, but other than that? Have fun living your life. Stay out of mine. Again this goes back to the I will donate to charity, but I will not pay for someone's habit or support a lifestyle that involves "being entitled".

It's a wonderful sentiment, but again, it's a hypothesis about the workings of society conjured up in your armchair, that only works in an imaginary world you've created, that starkly contradicts all real-world evidence. Hypotheticals are fine, but when they do contradict all real-world evidence, they have little practical value.


Society has been "libertarian" for most of the past 10,000 years of human history, and all people do with it is exploit each other. Maybe, someday, we'll be advanced enough as a species for this system to work, but that day is not today, not by all evidence.


Beyond that, you miss the difference between us.

The difference between us is that I recognize that people will not leave me alone, or forgoe harming our society, if certain rules aren't imposed, and I recognize that people who benefit from society are indebted to pay back a return on that investment, and I recognize that tangibly, societies that work this way simply function better than they do in your model of a "free society". Maybe it shouldn't work that way in theory, I don't know, but regardless, it works that way in practice, and that's what I care about.

Edited by Catamount, 17 February 2012 - 11:32 AM.

[Exilyth]

Nick Makiaveli, on 17 February 2012 - 11:04 AM, said:

Shouldn't a shop owner be allowed to choose who he sells to?

Well, some places do have a 'no shoes - no service' policy.
Also, when you enter a store, you're pretty much entering their property. I'm no lawyer, but doesn't that grant them the right to have you removed & banned from the store if they wanted?

[Catamount]

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Shouldn't a shop owner be allowed to choose who he sells to? You've probably guessed where this is going, but just in case why shouldn't a racist be allowed to put a sign in the window that says No Whites Allowed? If you disagree with him, then don't do business with him. Tell your grocer that if you see the racist in his grocery store you won't be back. I think if the majority disagreed the sign would come down. If not, well then what? People would get their feelings hurt? Little white kids would learn that some people don't like them?

Again, it's a nice hypothesis, but in practice, this gets abused to cause more problems than it solves.

Organized racism wasn't some little insignificant problem that was as simple as deciding not to shop at a particular grocery store, again, precisely because, as always, you seem to forget that people do do these things in organized fashion. People are collective animals, and operate collectively, which is why most of your hypothetical situations that try to model the world on a person-by-person basis fail to model the real world.

You can't model society like that anymore than you can model the atmosphere by only talking about a single parcel of air.

I the real world, it became a gross campaign of racism that spawned considerable human suffering, so regardless of whether you think it should work that way, in practice, society is able to function better to the benefit of more people when your suggestion is not implemented.



Now, your questions are not unfair, certainly, but your fundemental problem seems to be that you confuse hypothesis and practice, and that you only think about society as a collection of disparate people, rather than the interconnected and organized group that it really is.

Edited by Catamount, 17 February 2012 - 11:29 AM.

[Catamount]

I believe that appropriate expression here is no man is an island.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Exilyth, on 17 February 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

Well, some places do have a 'no shoes - no service' policy.
Also, when you enter a store, you're pretty much entering their property. I'm no lawyer, but doesn't that grant them the right to have you removed & banned from the store if they wanted?

Gonna quote this since it's short and applies to what I am going to say.

I get that the racism was systemic and that bad laws were passed because of it. But I think we went to far and passed more bad laws in their place.

Catamount, you and I are not that far apart. I think you are probably taking a more realistic approach whereas I am tilting at windmills.

Exilith, a shop owner does have property rights, but the laws are not the same for places that are "open to the public". Many of these date back to the Civil Rights era.

These laws are bad in my opinion because they single out people. What rights does a minority have that the majority doesn't? None. The govt. has removed rights from people in order to prevent them from what? A person does not have the right to shop anywhere they want any more than they have the right to come onto my property just because I am having a BBQ with friends. So shop owners lost a right to preserve the illusion of rights.

Schools etc, that was needed. That was the govt being racist and there was not and will never be an excuse for that.

But take so-called hate crimes. Unless you have some mitigating circumstance, who the hell cares why you did it? Assault is assault. Murder is murder. First one should be punishable by whipping, the second by death. Doesn't matter why you did it. Don't do it again. Or else.

Recently here in Tn, a state rep. advocated special laws protecting nurses from assaults by patients. I think that is a stupid idea. If someone assaults my wife (she is now actually a professor not a practicing nurse anymore and has 2 master's...have to brag a bit ) I don't give a flip if they were a patient or not. As I said on the forum where I saw this, being sick isn't a defense, so use the existing laws. This is the slippery slope I mentioned earlier. The more laws we have, the more people want a special law to cover red-haired, left-handed people.

[Tezz LaCoil]

Cur, on 14 February 2012 - 04:09 AM, said:

You should look into FEMA camps also. for so called shelters/aid and organisation centres in the event of terrorist attack or natural disaster, they seem to resemble prison camps quite well. camers up the ********, huge barbed wire fences designed keep people in rather than out, most buildings have no windows, and the ones that do are coverd with metal bars , oh, 90% of the FEMA centres are located directly on a train track too. heh.

fun times ahead when theres a political uprising and martial law is enacted in a last try to retain power rather than let someone like Ron Paul win and take away their control over the populace.

Evidence please on the barbed wire fences that are designed to keep people in.

Buildings with no windows or barred windows are easier to build, maintain, and keep secure to prevent thefts, rapes, and other things that I am ABSOLUTELY SURE most of us would like NOT to have happen to our neighbors, or selves.

The reason that they are near train tracks is because trains are a reliable source of transport in the event that AIRDROPS don't work, or ROADS are destroyed. I can almost guarantee that EVERY FEMA camp is located near a major road too, and is within range of at least three airports.

Holy crap. Maybe they're not prison camps after all! Maybe they're designed for QUICK RESPONSE like has been suggested all this time!

Nah. I kid, everyone is doomed and we're all going to propell ourselves into a nuclear winter because Iran has a nuclear power plant, and the A-SAT defenses don't actually exist. DOOMED I SAY. WE ARE ALL... yeah.

Edited by Prower, 17 February 2012 - 09:56 PM.

[Catamount]

Edit: I swear this was supposed to be a short post...

Nick Makiaveli, on 17 February 2012 - 09:32 PM, said:

But take so-called hate crimes. Unless you have some mitigating circumstance, who the hell cares why you did it? Assault is assault. Murder is murder. First one should be punishable by whipping, the second by death. Doesn't matter why you did it. Don't do it again. Or else.

Recently here in Tn, a state rep. advocated special laws protecting nurses from assaults by patients. I think that is a stupid idea. If someone assaults my wife (she is now actually a professor not a practicing nurse anymore and has 2 master's...have to brag a bit ) I don't give a flip if they were a patient or not. As I said on the forum where I saw this, being sick isn't a defense, so use the existing laws. This is the slippery slope I mentioned earlier. The more laws we have, the more people want a special law to cover red-haired, left-handed people.

Well, my understanding is, and keep in mind I'm not expert on the Civil Rights Era, that there was, at the time, legitimate cause for these types of laws, the key word being was. As I understand it, there was fear at the time of retaliation for progress from the Civil Rights movement. It wasn't a some guy kills some other guy kind of concern, but rather concern over mass retaliations.

Again, racism wasn't the kind of thing where it was one shop owner putting up a "Whites Only" sign. This was an entire societal movement, clashing, sometimes violently, against an entire other societal movement, and you have to remember that there was a lot of organized brutality at the time.


Does it still make sense today? Probably not. Again, a racial crime today is just that: one crime. Maybe it's part of larger gang violence, whatever, but regardless, it's not a national society level thing.

I'm sure you can picture someone stabbing another person twenty seven times and being told in court "Oh, OH, well as long as you didn't stab him because he was black; then we'd REALLY have a problem". It's kind of stupid today, and you're right, it shouldn't matter why you do something heinous.


Is that a slippery slope, however? Well that really is just another way of asking do unnecessary laws become outmoded and fade away, and the answer is yes, they do.

You know back in the 1920s, the Christians had special laws up in states, outlawing teaching of evolution (this was before Everson v Board of Education outlawed religion in state and local government). I'm sure you've heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Today, the courts maintain that you can't make special laws like that, favoring religion. So the only real law anymore is "no law can be passed telling you you have to submit to a specific religion, or any religion". Sounds pretty libertarian to me. It's not government's place to tell me what religion I have to follow.

And of course, in 1973 you had Roe v Wade. States can't dictate that you can't have an abortion. If you want to, you're free to. Stipulations on that followed, but again, it was the courts restraining government from telling people they couldn't do something.


In 1919, you had Schenk v United States, which essentially curtailed freedom of speech. Now, the ruling and precedent were meant well, but they were poorly targeted, and applied to speech that should have been protected, so 50 years later, the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling was handed down, protecting all speech except that which incited "imminent lawless action". Again, the idea here was specifically to institute protections against government.

Hell, government used to be able to bring you up on charges and destroy your life if they so much as suspected that you were a communist! That is the kind of thing we need protection from.

Basically, there's a two word argument against your slippery slope worries: The 14th Amendment (okay three words, shut up ). That's what it's there for, to protect you against government digging too far into your life, and thus far, we've erected an astounding number of protections and restraints on what government can and can't do.


I suggest you really take a good look into our judicial history sometime; I've recently had the benefit of a college course on the subject, but honestly, just take a look at the Wikipedia page on Incorporation Doctrine to get a good idea of all the ways governments are not permitted to interfere in our lives, and that extends to all levels of government now, not just federal (see Barron v Baltimore for an idea of what it used to be like before the 14th Amendment).



Our society doesn't like outmoded laws, and the Constitution protects us from most that have been passed throughout history anyways. Between the two, we've done a fairly good job in that regard. Were there some truly slippery slope in play, we'd have slid right down it a long time ago, with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

That we didn't shows that our society is smarter than that.

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These laws are bad in my opinion because they single out people. What rights does a minority have that the majority doesn't? None. The govt. has removed rights from people in order to prevent them from what? A person does not have the right to shop anywhere they want any more than they have the right to come onto my property just because I am having a BBQ with friends. So shop owners lost a right to preserve the illusion of rights.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this.

These laws actually do the exact opposite of singling out people, imo. If establishments want to single people out, they can, as far as I know, and they can ban individual people, because the law does not single out people.

What the law says is that you cannot bar entire sectors of society from having access to an establishment, and that goes far beyond race. Again, it's not so much about creating laws that perfectly protect everyone from everything (including government); our judicial and legislative systems both work in such a way that you see a specific problem, and you solve it.

So we have a patchwork of laws, sometimes that are seemingly inconsistent, but that's because they're specific, fairly narrowly tailored laws, that are shaped by our history.

They're also shaped by what society thinks acceptable (see present marriage debate). The people have as much sway over laws as the Constitution does. That's why it's good that our society has a strong libertarian streak. In fact, I wish we had a serious libertarian party, a pragmatic, scientific libertarian party with people like Smith, and Hayek (whom I don't always agree with, but always seriously admire and respect), rather than the GOP, whom I can't even describe anymore (they're so weird! I say that as someone who used to be one), but I digress.



My point is this: We have a patchwork of laws, a very imperfect patchwork of laws, created out of need by specific problems, even Constitutional amendments. There is no perfect set of laws that's going to render our society a Utopia; there's just us seeing what goes wrong and doing the best we can.


To bring the conversation full circle, that's why government collects taxes. That power didn't used to be something the government meaningfully had, under the Articles of Confederation, or under Continental Congress and you know what happened? We nearly got our read ends kicked in the Revolutionary War because a formal military was hard to raise (no taxes didn't help), we couldn't pay the debts from that war back because we couldn't levy taxes, our own soldiers rioted and rebelled because they weren't getting paid for the war (and they needed that money to get their lives back together), because we couldn't levy taxes, so we tried to send in the army, but we couldn't afford an army, again, because we couldn't levy taxes, and so goes the history of Shay's Rebellion. If Washington hadn't commanded so much loyalty in those men, that he was able to literally talk them down, there would have been nothing we could have done.

So enough was enough. We wrote the Constitution and broadened Federal powers, including giving implied powers, because half the problem with the Articles of Confederation were their inflexibility (every time a new problem arose, they couldn't deal with it).


And it works, quite well, in fact. It means that Congress can do things like run a space program, and have the USAF, and protect the environment and public health (remember some of the examples I listed there?), even though they're technically not explicitly authorized to do any of those things. It falls under the first and last clauses of Article 1 Section 8, The Congress shall have power To provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States and To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers. It's a brilliantly flexible system.


It's also brilliantly restrained. There's a myriad of things the government is absolutely forbidden to do, a list we've created over two centuries of correcting government abuses on a case-by-case basis.

Given that fact, I'd say that tangibly, our system of governance works pretty darned well. It does just about what it has to, not too much more or too much less. It protects us from a lot of government's historical intrusions, and equally importantly, it protects us from each other.

Edited by Catamount, 18 February 2012 - 09:45 AM.

[Catamount]

Oh hell that was supposed to be a SHORT RESPONSE

That's the last time I drink three cups of coffee before posting

[Sug]

TL:Daahhh! AAAAHHHHHHH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

[Nick Makiaveli]

Catamount, on 18 February 2012 - 09:37 AM, said:

Oh hell that was supposed to be a SHORT RESPONSE

That's the last time I drink three cups of coffee before posting

Heh, but it was presented well

See what I hate most about you is now that you've calmed down, you make good points. I don't always agree with them, but you obviously aren't some empty-headed liberal.

What I hate about passing laws that apply to the here and now is they take on a life of their own. Remember a while back when they finally repealed the phone tax? You know the one that only applied to rich people to pay for the Spanish-American War? So when it comes to hate crimes, we have laws proposed about specific jobs. Also, didn't we just have another round of Creationism in schools debate?

To me that is proof of the slippery slope. We pass laws, so it makes it easier to pass more laws. First it was a tax on automobiles, now we have license plates, road taxes, gas taxes, "wheel" taxes, etc. I'm sure they will come up with a battery tax once electrics become popular and no one will blink an eye. Each generation grows up thinking the way things are is the way it always was.

How many people have ever stopped to think what existed before govt. welfare? How did roads get built and maintained before the govt owned them all? Point being you are going to win this argument because the majority is on your side. I will go down swinging because I truly believe if people were well adjusted we would only need a handful of laws. Pretty much whittle away the chaff from the 10 commandments and done.