Letters to the Editor
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Unregulated markets (the OT side of this thread)
Leave out the FDA, FTC, and the unfettered glory that is the web.
There is one truly unregulated, unfettered market out there right now.
Fraud.
There are black market sites on the web where you can buy credit cards, identities, hacking tools, botnet use, freight forwarding services; i.e., anything you need to rip off other people.
Generally, you need to be sponsored to get on, then have to prove your fraud credentials to get significant rights out there. About as free and self regulating a market as you can find, really. It exists completely outside of government control, too. And its only purpose is to take money from other people.
Some of the players hijack other player's control and identities. Others rip them off through fraudster to fraudster scams. If you really want to see what happens to a market that does not have external monitoring, enforcement, and control, go there.
Granted, the entire basis of the market is criminal activity, but to some libertarians, any government is the same. But without watchdogs, any market can become a company of wolves.
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@ Paul Dirks - Framing Evolution
A small point…I suggest when discussing evolution we use the phrase "acknowledge evolution" as opposed to "believe in evolution."
Bravo, Paul D. I heartily concur.
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Smart Fellah
Dave Frishberg's take on the journalistic integrity of sports journalism, in his song, "The Sports Page," which is, he sings, "The one place to turn, when a fellah wants to know the score."
-- Paul Rosenberg
And who could argue?
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Evolution
Paul Dirks:
A small point by I suggest when discussing evolution we use the phrase "acknowlege evolution" as opposed to "believe in evolotion"
You're absolutely right, Paul. Mea culpa, and thank you.
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Mona...
In fact, the FDA has killed people, by not expeditiously approving drugs or procedures, nor letting people assume the risk of medical means to treat terminal conditions before approval. (Commenters please send me links to support for that fact and I’ll update with it.)
People who don't trust the government, for whatever reason, don't govern well. In many cases it's business interests who don't want to be regulated. I do think your cite NCLB as a reason to do away with the Dept. of Education is too cute by half. Self-fulfilling prophecies and all that. I'm no expert but comparing the FDA today, to the regulatory agency it once was is likely a similar exercise. As soon as we purge all of the ideologues from government, it might start to function normally again. My guess is that Milk Thistle extract can't be patented. There is no money in it for big pharma. Nice try tho.
I still think your reaching. It sounds kind of shrill. How did you feel about flouridation back in the 60s?
That same day, the FDA granted the permission needed. Under FDA regulations, the agency doesn't discuss investigative new drugs but Madaus Pharma confirmed that the approval came swiftly.
"Surprisingly he was able to get this within a matter of hours," said Veilleux. "People were asking me, 'What are the chances he'll get permission?' I said, one in 1,000"
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/January/14/local/stories/01local.htm
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@jackackroyd
The trouble with libertarians is that they claim to an aversion to collective actions, but would not actual want to live in a state that is not organized in a collectivist fashion.
Simply put, your statement is false.
Libertarians are opposed to collectivism, to command and control economies, wholesale wealth redistribution, and to coercing individual choices that directly* harm, if anyone, only the person making the choice.
We are not anarchists, and endorse some collective action to secure all the rights we enjoys as individuals. Which is to say, we pool our resources to police against homicide to vouchsafe the right not to be murdered, a right with which we are all vested. We are not all vested, however, with a right to be "protected" from making a poor choice, or a choice different from one you would make, about what drugs to take. And so that is not an individual right you or I can, morally, act in concern to secure.
*What constitutes direct harm is itself a lengthy debate, and I avoid it here since this is already rather OT vis-a-vis Glenn's post.
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Mona vs. John Locke
Mona:
But in any event, the state has NO BUSINESS saving me against my will.
Libertarians almost reflexively invoke John Locke as their patron saint. "John Locke good! FDR bad!" pretty much sums up their philosophy. Except... it just ain't so. And Mona's statment here goes directly against the main thrust of Locke's argument for the social contract.
Locke's social contract argument is that in a state of nature, all rights are insecure, and thus of only theoretical value. Governments are formed to secure rights, and thus give them substance in fact as well as theory. The state exists precisely to save people, so that they can exercise their rights in practice, not just in theory. And it necessarily has the right to do this against the individual will, when it does not infringe on an inalienable right. Rights which are not inalienable are fair game for curtailing, much less pure whim.
Now, not being an authoritarian, I don't worship John Locke like a god. But I do think that his views at least merit the respect of getting them right, and not turning him into a sock puppet. In practice, I'm probably much closer to Mona than to Locke, but I know how I get that way, and it's not by simplistic, ahistorical claims of morally superior self-evident truths.
The sort of extreme consumerist individualism that Mona espouses is not the true and original form of liberalism that liberals have abandoned, leaving only the libertarians to defend it. It is, rather, the ideology of convenience of the Gilded Age robber barons, who wanted absolute and total freedom to use the mechanisms of the marketplace (including healthy doses of bribery and collusion) to create vast anti-competetive monopolies.
After a series of devastating economic crises--most notably the panics of 1873-4 and 1893-94--the relatively modest economic reforms of the Progressives seemed to have things right, when the mother of all crises--the Great Depression--came uncomfortably close to destroying the capitalist market system once and for all. That's why we have the mixed economy--it's a pragmatic response to the market failures of the past. And the ideologies that justified those failed experiments deserve to be recognized for what they are, rather than what they pretend to be.