gunderwood wrote:Let's see.
dems4guns wrote:And, on economic and safety and commerce issues, the government has a large role to play:
- Creating a fair and competitive marketplace; That exists by two or more people trading freely without government interference. The only reason the government gets involved is because it doesn't like the terms to or more people would freely agree to otherwise.
- Preventing fraud and financial abuse; Amazing job they've been doing there...you know, like the housing market? My bad, government fraud doesn't count.
- Keeping the financial systems stable; I can't believe you actually posted that. Bang up job they've been doing. A fundamental question might be, why do you need government force to keep things aligned to reality? I would've thought that the only purpose of force would be to distort markets into unsustainable positions...kind of by definition you don't need government to decree gravity.
- Regulating the safety and availability of products; Ah, you mean regulation which removes the responsibility and the risk from large companies in exchange for political donations? Or do you mean the general nanny state which has nothing better to do than tell us how to live our lives, what we can and can not own, etc?
- Collecting duties; Why is collecting payments at threat of a gun a good thing?
- Ensuring the flow of international commerce; Ah, you mean "free trade" which is anything but you know, free?
- Ensuring the availability and affordability of health insurance and car insurance and home insurance and business insurance; You live in a fantasy land. Government regulation can not change the cost of anything in real dollars. Sure, they can regulate prices but that simply causes a shortage (demonstrated over and over again and supported by economic theory). Thus, they only thing they can do is hide the true cost by taxing other people for your services. Awesome ethics you have going here.
- Disaster assistance; You mean so that the rest of the country can subsidize people who knowing live in places deemed high risk? Certainly disasters happen and we should help out, but we should not be subsidizing insurance and engineering projects so that people can choose to live in bad places.
- Financial assistance to failed institutions that are essential to our economy; If it's failed it needs to go...it's the fundamental feedback loop of Capitalism. Offer goods and services that others want/need and you makes lots of money...don't and you go broke. Subsidizing failure extremely stupid as you'll just get more of it.
- Preventing monopolies and promoting anti-trust; I think you mean granting monopolies in exchange for political donations...e.g. telcos
- Securing the banking systems; You mean by absorbing all their risk so they are free to make any investment, good or bad, and make money on it? I really need to start a bank.
- Assisting our veterans; We kind of owe that to them as part of their contract of employment.
- Funding our educational systems; Except they don't. At the end of the day those funds come out of my pocket and are used for substandard services.
- Promoting public health policies; Yes, because I don't know that I shouldn't stick screwdrivers in my eye...
- Prevention of disease and epidemics; Seems to me they don't prevent anything, but rather track it after the fact.
And, on Security the governement has a large role to play:
- Protecting our borders; Which by and large the completely refuse to do unless it means molesting granny and 2 year olds.
- Preventing illegal immigration; Which they also refuse to do.
- Preventing importation of illegal guns and WMD's; Yes, we just export those to drug cartels instead.
- Protecting our commercial naval vessels from Piracy; Ah, yes they do do that.
- Preventing the spread of terrorism against the US and our allies; And that, but like all policies, how successful we are and what the best of course of action is debatable...at least they're trying unlike the boarders and airport security.
Being free doesn't mean having some bureaucrat dictate my life. I'd much rather suffer the consequences of my own actions rather than enjoy the tremendous blessings of a bureaucrats foolishness.
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Mr. Gunderwood sounds like you would rather live in Yemen, Somalia, the North Western Territories or the Tribal areas straddling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, or one of the valleys in Afghanistan. All of the things you want to do, you can without being bothered by that pesky guvmnt in those places. Of course in the anarchic state you so prefer, you might have a problem with some pesky none guvmnt people.
In Gunderwoods world 2 people enter into a contractual agreement. After a bit, one party defaults. Too bad, Gunderwood's government is not in the business of enforcing contracts, or establishing contract law. Call them what you will, rules, laws, regulations, whatever. No market place operates without them. someone or something beyond the individual makes them. The only question is who, or what.
I jokingly said you might prefer Somalia, but wait let's look at Somalia. Let's say you want in on the pirate action. Well it's not that easy. What began as a mission to protect Somalia's waters from predatory foreign fishing vessels, morphed into ship hijacking. Ship hijacking is now a business. It is highly regulated to include a strict division of labor, and an earnings scale. There are ship captains and crew, boarding parties, hostage and ship minders, communications specialists, ransom negotiators, bag men, financiers, risk analysis personnel, purchasing agents, armorers, etc. Who makes the rules, and sets pay? The financiers and their muscle. You want to get fired and banned from the business? Harm or kill a hostage, scuttle an oil tanker, or cargo ship and you're out. The government until recently turned a blind eye, or accepted bribes. No economy can operate for long in a vacuum. Businesses want rules too, albeit they want those rules to favor their business.
You're right government did a terrible job at preventing fraud and abuse in financial markets. You failed to mention that was by CHOICE and they were proud of looking the other way. So corporations like Enron, World Com, Country Wide, and guys like Madoff bilked average and the rich alike out of billions. Mortgaged back securities were totally unregulated and synthetic securities were virtually unregulated. When asked about all this malfeasance, excessive risk taking and out right fraud President Bush's Fed Chair say: He never thought CEOs would act in such a manner. Government didn't distort those markets because government was not involved. I guess you want to return to casino capitalism.
Hey, you can live your life as you wish. You want to smoke, go right ahead. You want to buy prescription drugs and other products in the underground economy fine. You want to buy knockoff products, or rotten food and unsafe food it's all out there. You want to sniff cocaine, pop pills, shoot up heroin, sniff paint, aerosols, etc.fine. As an individual, government will most likely not interfere unless you're careless. I'm glad my neighbor can't legally sh*t on his lawn, or burn sh*t in his backyard. Don't blame me and people like me for allowing Corporations to buy government, it was the conservatives on SCOTUS that conferred full person hood on corporations.
Import duties are fine on certain products, and they are not collected at the point of a gun. What's the problem?
Actually you're not correct, both the VA and DOD pay lower prices for prescription drugs than we do. The price of an airline ticket is a fraction of what it costs you. I guess you forgot that government essentially buys everything that most households buy and more. If government barred anyone who is unable to accept the oil from an oil tanker from bidding on oil, fuel prices would immediately go down as speculators left the market. There are ways short of price controls, which indeed don't work, that government can bend the cost curve.
Businesses hate competition, but again it's conservatives for the most part who love BIG business, the bigger the better. How many Republicans oppose the merger of AT&T with Sprint?
No, he meant international trade. Why do you think President T. Jefferson built a blue water navy, to protect international commerce. You want to know another reason we're in Afghanistan? Here's a hint, check out the planned and competing routes for energy pipelines in that region. Do you think we would give a rat's ass about the Middle East if there was nothing but more sand underneath all that sand?
Yep, you're right we should have let all those banks, and investment houses fail. Never mind that the dominoes were all lined up. Maybe we should have stepped aside and allowed the Chinese to purchase AIG, and the 6 largest banks in America. Sometimes you sound like a tenured college professor who has been divorced from reality for years. There really is such a thing as being dead right.
The only reason banks were free to engage in excessive risk taking is because you wanted it that way. You were fine with regulators looking the other way, and allowing banks to enter ever more exotic and risky financial instruments markets. Why complain now?
Speak for yourself, my kids went to public schools and they did not get a substandard education. Do you know of any thing that can replace public schools? I don't. Besides neither so-called corporate for profit schools, or charter schools are automatically better than the public schools they replaced. There are no silver bullet solutions that can fix the public schools because our problem with education does begin at the school house door, but at the home's door, provided the student has a home. There are those who seek to destroy the public school system whether an individual school is outstanding or not. Primarily because they can't control the curriculum, and can't teach the Judeo-Christian religion, faith, as science, or prohibit any mention of some people such as homosexuals, or teach anything about sex other than abstinence, or plaster the 10 Commandments all over the school. Every American has a stake in seeing that public schools survive and thrive.
Yep the nerve of the government spending money on pure research that has led to elimination of many childhood diseases. Cigarette manufacturers, chemical corporations and pharmaceutical corporations were doing a really fine job at protecting the public from diseases, why in heck did government have to get involved. How dare they engage in mosquito eradication programs, and prevention of diseases in hospitals. The Public Health Service should be ashamed of its inoculation services, and who needs the Centers for Disease Control. The society's health and children's health is of no concern to the government. So what if it's they are a national security and national economy issue.
Please define "prevent illegal immigration" what specifically does that mean? What would I see when that has happened? So the 20 plus thousand border patrol agents only harass granny and kids? As for the TSA while most agents try to do a boring job, you won't find me defending the agency.
Someone in the ATF starts this utterly stupid and dangerous operation with tragic results that allowed approx 1,700 guns to flow to Mexican cartels, and now you're claiming that they allowed almost 30,000 guns to go South? Is that your contention? So the prosecutions of at least one notorious gun dealer and numerous straw purchasers who agreed to cooperate about the number of guns smuggled into Mexico was bogus? There are approx 6,600 FLL holders along our Southern border. I wonder if they are concentrated near legal border crossings. Btw is there any number of military style guns that are purchased by a single individual on a single day that should trigger a report to ATF, or should require the FBI to report to ATF?
As I said before you can live your life whatever way you like as long as your actions don't harm others, or the nation. Most if not all safety devices on plenty of equipment can be defeated or dismantled. If you want to disable safety features on chain saws, power saws, table saws, etc. feel free. A friend's father in-law did, and it only cost him a portion of one finger.
At times I think you're just playing the devil's advocate.
Gat6
