walton@ametek.UUCP (08/06/86)
Keith Lynch writes:
Sorry, I didn't watch that (or any) TV program. Could you please
use books and magazines as references [for welfare history]?
Sure, but I'm not sure its any more accessible to you. There was a
multi-part series in the Los Angeles Times within the last year on the
poor, who they are, what they're like, and so on.
(You have a habit of arguing with anecdotes.)
Real life is made up of millions of anecdotes. YOU have a habit
of arguing from TV shows. Is that where you get all your
information?
Let us refrain from personal insults here. As I mentioned previously,
I do not at present own a TV set either. The Bill Moyers documentary
(which is the only TV show I've mentioned in this dialogue) was that
rare thing--a network program with real information in it. You argued
against welfare on the basis of people you knew who were collecting
welfare and not working (at one point--you have other arguments). I
might as well argue for gun control because I know of people who were
shot to death by the owners of legal handguns. I don't. Anecdotes
are a poor basis for public policy.
For every time a gun is used by a private citizen to prevent a
crime, there are 4 suicides and 10 murders committed with guns
by the owner of that gun.
I have seen this before, and I thought it had been given a decent
burial. It seems bogus statistics always come back to haunt us.
Do you claim that it is not a fact? If you don't, then it is not a
bogus statistic. If you do, please cite another study which shows
more privately owned handguns are used to stop crimes than are used to
commit murder.
1) A person who was considering a life of crime decides otherwise
when he realizes how many people are armed. If he would have
committed a burglary per week for 50 years, that is over 2,500
crimes prevented with guns. And how many of those do you count?
Zero.
Talk about bogus statistics! If you're going to count hypothetical
crimes not committed as the result of private gun ownership, you also
have to count hypothetical murders not committed as a result of the
ban of said ownership. [Note that I did not say, and do not say now,
that I favor a ban on all gun ownership.]
Many of the murders and all of the suicides could have been
committed without guns.
Yes, but a handgun (1) can kill at a distance and (2) is easily
concealed. How do you feel about private ownership of mortar shells?
Hand grenades? Land mines? Atomic weapons?
In Switzerland, every adult owns a gun. The murder rate is very
low there, much lower that in the US. There are few burglaries and
few other crimes. And the Nazis didn't even THINK of invading
Switzerland, despite having invaded or being allied with every
bordering country.
This is a fine myth for the gun nuts, which I am happy to now explode.
The guns in Switzerland are owned by the government, and are placed in
a sealed case in your home which is inspected every year. You are
heavily fined if the seal is broken except as a result of your annual
training in the militia or to defend yourself from another gun
wielder. I would actually favor such a system here. As for the
Nazis: they did consider invading Switzerland, but decided that the
strategic gains of possessing Switzerland were not outweighed by the
its value as a neutral country and the fact that they would not have
to fortify their border with it. The Alps are a great barrier as
well.
Are you willing to force gun owners to support families whose
breadwinner is killed by their gun, or to pay for day care
for children whose mother is murdered?
If THE OWNER shot the breadwinner, certainly! If the breadwinner
was shot with a stolen gun, of course not. The person who pulled
the trigger is responsible.
At last we reach an agreement. This raises a general point, which I
will get to below.
If someone steals your car and runs over someone, are you
responsible? A lot more people are killed by cars than by guns!
True, but cars are not DESIGNED to kill people. Handguns are.
Seriously, I consider it a grave insult to be told that I cannot
be trusted with firearms.
Not seriously, I consider it a grave insult to be told that I cannot
be trusted with 5 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium.
The only logical response to drunk driving is severe penalties.
That is also the only logical response to drugged driving.
Should it be illegal to drive drugged at all? Or should you only be
penalized if you actually injure people or property while doing so?
See also below.
I don't understand; you responded to my comment about having a
lot of people in prison by saying that we should have even MORE
people in prison, and for longer times.
No, I was giving examples to show how completely random the
justice system is.
I stand corrected.
Uniform sentences would require the federal government to pass
laws which would supersede the states'.
I don't favor mandatory sentence laws. Room must be left for the
judgement of the judge and the jury. What we need is more common
sense on the part of judges and juries.
We agree here. How do you reach this desirable goal?
Why do you automatically assume that such a law would have to be
a federal law rather than a state law?
Because if certain states had more lenient penalties than others,
people would move to those states to commit crimes. I suppose the
alternative is to have the states voluntarily band together and enact
uniform penalties (subject to the common-sense criterion above), but
this probably isn't possible--look at the huge state to state
variation in the penalties for marijuana possession, for example.
Do you think it should be illegal for a group of workers to
voluntarily band together and go to their employer and say,
"None of us are going to come to work unless you give us all a
raise?"
No. Do you think it should be illegal for the employer to say
"get back to work right now or you are all fired"? As happened
with the air traffic controllers strike?
No
The [social security] system is currently projected to have a
10 trillion dollar surplus by 2010, ...
This is bogus accounting. They don't have a surplus unless it is
possible to end the social security tax and to continue to give
social security benefits to everyone who ever contributed, equal to
at least the amount (plus inflation) that they contributed.
That's like saying that IBM is one billion dollars in the red (or
whatever), because they could not meet that much of their outstanding
obligations if they stopped selling any computers.
What they mean by surplus is if everyone continues
to pay taxes (to be increased as necessary) everyone retired will
continue to get benefits.
No, they actually mean surplus. The SS taxes now being paid are more
than the retirees of the next 30 years will require; the amount of the
excess is projected to be 10 trillion (yes, a 1 with 12 zeroes after
it) by 2010. The article I read this in was in the NY Times in August
1985. (I only read the NYT when I visit my parents in NJ, hence my
precision about the date.)
Please do not assume I am a Scrooge just becuase I think that a
person should have control over their wealth... Just as Scrooge
freely chose to voluntarily donate some of his wealth near the end
of the book.
Which doesn't change the fact that the plight of the poor in Dickens's
London was not improved much by voluntary charity.
Other responsibilites, primarily work and family, prevent me
from continuing this dialogue further.
I am sorry to hear that. Perhaps if you use a really good text
editor and practice rapid typing, a few hours each weekend would
suffice to continue the discussion?
Typing isn't the problem; the time to compose them is. I decided to
respond to your message on my lunch hour, but I must painfully admit
to not being very enlightened by it.
[Books you recommended:] Anything by Ayn Rand.
_The_Moon_is_a_Harsh_Mistress_ by Robert Heinlein. Anything by L.
Neil Smith.
I was hoping for non-fiction. I have read "The Moon is..." and "Atlas
Shrugged." The former was not set in the US of today; it is doubtful
that the latter was, and it did not in any event set forth a way of
moving the US to a libertarian society without extreme chaos. I might
just as well recommend Dickens's books, or The Grapes of Wrath, as
justification for socialism. They at least have the advantage of
being based on real people's real experiences.
SOME THOUGHTS ON LIBERTARIANISM
(At the risk of being pretentious.)
I. Public and private good
I just had an interesting discussion with someone here at work who
considers himself a libertarian by philosophy, though he admits that
he sees no practical way to move the US to a libertarian society at
present. He reminded me of something that we had both learned in an
introductory economics course at Caltech, though I had forgotten it,
and that is the distinction between a private and a public good. A
private good is an action (or inaction) whose benefits only go to the
person or persons taking that action (or inaction). A public good is
a course of action from which everyone, or at least most people,
benefit, even if only one or a few people take that action. It is
public goods, I maintain, which are the proper domain of the
government to provide, funded by mandatory taxes.
The classic example of a public good is national defense. Everyone
who lives in the US benefits from its existence, even if they
contribute nothing to it. Thus, every individual would decide to
contribute nothing to national defense, because he gets its benefits
whether he does or not. Result: no defense. Moreover, in the current
age of atomic weapons, it is clearly unreasonable to expect a
completely voluntary military (which I believe libertarians favor) to
defend the nation. (Some argue that welfare is a public good; I'm not
so sure.)
Do libertarians deny the existence of public goods? If yes, they had
better have some damn good ideas about how to defend us from Soviet
ICBM's in the absence of mandatory taxes for national defense.
II. Property rights, or "Whattaya mean I can't build my A-Bomb?"
Another thought from Econ 101: what one can or can't do with one's
property depends on how one defines property rights, and property
right conflicts can always be adjudicated by contract--a bribe, is
what my professor called it. For example, if property rights are
defined in such a way that you are allowed to build a factory on any
property you own, your neighbors should be willing to pay you not to
pollute. If, on the other hand, they are defined so that your
property right includes clean air above your property, then the
factory builder should be willing to pay you to allow him to pollute
or, equivalently, pay for pollution control devices out of his own
pocket.
The practical difficulty arises when one person's use of her property
causes harm to others who are either very distant, or causes harm far
in excess of her ability to compensate for such harm. Acid rain is a
good example. It is generated by Midwest coal-burning power plants
and mills. It harms a wide area, including killing of fish and damage
to potentially harvestable timber. If the power plant owners have to
pay for this damage, who do they pay, and how is it divided up? What
if they cannot possibly raise enough money to pay for all the damage
done? And if you can make the utilities pay, they will pass the cost
on to their customers--who aren't being hurt by the acid rain, but are
paying the cost of getting rid of it.
Governments have responded to these practical difficulties with a host
of laws, which are restrictions on personal decisions--you must own a
car with a muffler, and whose pollutant output is less than some
standard; your factory cannot put into the air less than a certain
amount of sulfur dioxide, and so on. Robert Oliver, an economics
professor at Caltech, has proposed another possible solution, which
uses the free market--selling licenses to pollute. The government
would issue certificates, each of which was good for the right to put
a certain amount of sulfur dioxide in the air. A free market would be
allowed in these certificates after their initial sale by the
government. Oliver addresses the practical implementation of this
scheme in his article in Caltech's "Engineering and Science" magazine.
But he warns that it only works in the LA Basin, where the effects of
the pollution are restricted by geography to a limited area.
How does a libertarian address these problems? Do you have an
alternative to pollution-control laws?
III. Capitalism, or "Dr. Peptide's Liver Pills"
A functioning capitalist system is the most efficient possible
allocation of goods and services. That said, capitalism can only
function in a given market if all of the following conditions hold:
(1) Free (as in no-cost) entry and exit from the market.
(2) Multiple competitors
(3) The market price of a good accurately reflects its cost.
(4) Buyers have all the information they need to assess the value of a
good.
All of these assumptions break down in the real world. Wheat farming
costs a lot to get into, and a lot to get out of. There exist natural
monopolies, such as electric power, where the largest producer is
always the most efficient and can thus drive all competitors out of
business. Prices of goods do not reflect "hidden costs" such as the
damage done to faraway trout streams by the excessive use of chemical
fertilizers. And manufacturers have a vested interest in hiding
harmful side-effects of products they sell.
Government intervenes when these conditions are not met, via such
things as labeling and truth-in-advertising laws, the Food and Drug
Administration, anti-trust laws, and government regulation of such
unavoidable monopolies as electric power and (until recently) the
phone company. Government also intervenes with such things as product
testing, to ensure that buyers know that a manufacturer's claims are
correct; such claims are often difficult to verify without access to
a large, well-equipped laboratory.
Do libertarians have a solution to these very real problems?
IV. Individual liberty, or "Bang, you're dead!"
Here is where I mostly sympathize with the libertarian ideal: that
you should be able to take any action which demonstrably does not harm
anyone else. The practical problem, again, is that there are certain
activities which are inherently very dangerous and have such a large
potential for really catastrophic damage to others. In these cases
(drunk driving, making home-made A bombs), the government feels
justified in banning these activities, even if a given instance of
said activity does not actually result in any harm to others.
Advocates of handgun control make a similar argument in their own
favor. On the other side of the political fence, those who favor bans
of certain drugs judge that legal alcohol and tobacco cause such harm
to those who do not engage in their use that it justifies continuance
of the ban on other illegal drugs (although attempting to reinstate a
ban on something after it is once legal is a practical impossibility).
I assume libertarians are against such bans on personal activities,
even those with large amounts of potential harm to others. What
alternative do you offer to protect those who are killed by handgun
owners or drunk drivers? If capital punishment, then how does your
abhorrence of government square with giving government the most
dangerous power of all--the power to deprive citizens of their lives?
V. Conclusion
I hope this hasn't been too long or boring! A final few points:
assuming that you can answer the above questions in a manner which
will satisfy a majority of your fellow citizens, can you lay out a
plan for the conversion of the United States into a libertarian
society? To borrow only one point from Lynn Gazis (sp?), how would
you compenstate those who are already committed by decisions made due
to past government actions? For example, many people moved to the
suburbs in the last 40 years because of roads which were paid for out
of general taxes, so they may not be able to afford their share of the
entire upkeep cost of those roads in the absence of general taxes or
afford the cost of moving someplace closer to where they work.
Stephen Walton, Ametek Computer Research Division
ARPA: ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu
-------kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU (08/10/86)
From: Steve Walton <ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu>
Anecdotes are a poor basis for public policy.
Whenever I use statistics, people reply with anecdotes. So I
thought I would try anecdotes. There are plenty more where that one
came from.
For every time a gun is used by a private citizen to
prevent a crime, there are 4 suicides and 10 murders
committed with guns by the owner of that gun.
I have seen this before, and I thought it had been given a
decent burial. It seems bogus statistics always come back to
haunt us.
Do you claim that it is not a fact?
Yes! What do you think the paragraphs after that one were for?
1) A person who was considering a life of crime decides
otherwise when he realizes how many people are armed. If he
would have committed a burglary per week for 50 years, that
is over 2,500 crimes prevented with guns. And how many of
those do you count? Zero.
Talk about bogus statistics! If you're going to count
hypothetical crimes not committed as the result of private gun
ownership, you also have to count hypothetical murders not
committed as a result of the ban of said ownership.
But you WERE counting those murders. Since ownership is NOT banned,
they are NOT hypothetical.
What sort of crime is EVER not committed except a hypothetical one?
If it wasn't hypothetical, then it WAS committed.
The purpose of handguns is not to blow away burglars caught in the
act. Deterrence is far more important. But you don't count it at
all. You only count crimes that handguns FAILED to deter as being
prevented! Crimes that weren't prevented at all, only interrupted.
The fact that a thing can be abused is no excuse to ban it for
everyone else.
concealed. How do you feel about private ownership of ...
Atomic weapons?
At last, a substantive argument.
I wish I had a good answer to that. I don't. Nuclear weapons have
NO legitimate uses. All I can say is that it is slightly unfair to
use the existance of nuclear weapons as an argument against
libertarianism when the weapons have been produced only by governments
for use against other governments. If most major nations had been
libertarian at the time, nuclear weapons would never have been
invented. They have no possible use and are very expensive.
I really have nothing to say in defense of private ownership of
nuclear weapons except that government ownership leaves me just as
uneasy. They are difficult and expensive to build. For that reason,
only a few governments have them. If private ownership were allowed,
few if any companies or individuals would be able to afford the damn
things. Those that would be able to would hopefully have enough sense
to see that there is no point in doing so.
Unfortunately it looks like the cost of nuclear weapons is coming
down as technology advances and as the world becomes a wealthier
place. This would make private ownership - whether it is legal or not
- more likely. It also makes ownership by more and more governments
virtually inevitable. I wish I had an answer. I don't. All I can
say is that libertarianism is not the problem, will not add to the
problem, and will not solve the problem.
Vernor Vinge has written a few stories set in an ultra-technological
libertarian future. Some individuals in these stories own whole
nuclear arsenals, starships, SDI systems, etc. Not that they are
especially wealthy, but that technology is very advanced. Great fun
to read.
And what about starships? I am sure they will exist someday. Will
they be privately owned, or government owned? Either way, they will
be very dangerous. A large spacecraft traveling at a significant
percent of the speed of light would do enormous damage if it were to
crash into the Earth. Even large interplanetary liners capable of
carrying a few hundred people to another planet in a few days or weeks
would be much more destructive that a nuclear bomb if it were to crash
into the ground. I don't have any good solution. I don't know of
anyone who does.
One possibility is that the owner of a device be required to post
bond equal in value to the most destruction that device could cause.
If that were to be done, obviously nobody could afford to post bond
for nuclear bombs. Most people wouldn't be able to post bond for
cars, however. On second thought, maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea.
:-)
If someone steals your car and runs over someone, are you
responsible? A lot more people are killed by cars than by
guns!
True, but cars are not DESIGNED to kill people. Handguns are.
So? You might as well say handguns are DESIGNED to deter crime, and
cars aren't.
Guns can be used for a lot of things besides killing people. For
instance killing animals, shooting a person to wound rather than to
kill, capturing crooks, target practice, skeet shooting, gun
collecting, etc, etc.
Regardless of what guns or cars are DESIGNED for, it is a fact that
a lot more people are killed by cars than by guns. Even if you
include justified killing with guns (i.e. self defense).
Should it be illegal to drive drugged at all? Or should you only
be penalized if you actually injure people or property while doing
so?
I can see it either way. What I *CANNOT* see is forbidding 20 year
olds from drinking on the grounds that they might drive. Should a 20
year old who drinks moderately and doesn't drive at all be imprisoned?
At the 7-11 there is a sign saying they will not sell alcoholic
beverages to anyone who does not show them a drivers license, no
matter how old they look. Seems to be they have it exactly backwards!
I don't favor mandatory sentence laws. Room must be left for
the judgement of the judge and the jury. What we need is more
common sense on the part of judges and juries.
We agree here. How do you reach this desirable goal?
I have no idea. I could say 'better education' but that begs the
question.
Why do you automatically assume that such a law would have to
be a federal law rather than a state law?
Because if certain states had more lenient penalties than others,
people would move to those states to commit crimes.
Well, then those states with the higher crime rate would be
motivated to enact similar laws. You could reason the same way about
countries and conclude that all nations should have identical laws.
This is bogus accounting. They don't have a surplus unless
it is possible to end the social security tax and to continue
to give social security benefits to everyone who ever
contributed, equal to at least the amount (plus inflation) that
they contributed.
That's like saying that IBM is one billion dollars in the red (or
whatever), because they could not meet that much of their
outstanding obligations if they stopped selling any computers.
Yep, it is like saying that. I doubt IBM is in the red. I know *I*
am not, nor is the company I work for.
The SS taxes now being paid are more
than the retirees of the next 30 years will require; the amount of
the excess is projected to be 10 trillion (yes, a 1 with 12 zeroes
after it) by 2010.
I think inflation is about nine percent (yes, I know the government
says otherwise). If it continues, 10 trillion dollars in 2010 is only
about 1 trillion dollars today (or 100 billion in 1960). Even so,
that is a lot of money. What do they plan to invest it in? And why
not simply reduce the tax instead?
Ten trillion is a 1 with THIRTEEN zeros after it, not twelve.
Which doesn't change the fact that the plight of the poor in
Dickens's London was not improved much by voluntary charity.
The world was simply not a very wealthy place at the time.
Productivity is enormously greater now than in the 1850s. The
majority would have had to have been poor at the time no matter what.
They were better off in the cities than in the countryside, however.
Otherwise they would have stayed on the farm. But you will find few
books and probably no TV programs showing the poor in the city as
being anything but downtrodden, exploited, and oppressed, or showing
the poor in the countryside as being anything but happy and healthy.
Consider "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prarie". Why no
"Little Rowhouse in the Slums"? Aren't city folk allowed to be happy
in their poverty?
I was hoping for non-fiction. I have read "The Moon is..." and
"Atlas Shrugged." The former was not set in the US of today; it
is doubtful that the latter was, ...
The latter was. At least at the time it was written. The former
was set on a Moon colony of Earth, a plausible and not too distant
future.
Ayn Rand has written a lot more nonfiction than fiction. Most of it
still in print, too. Check out the philosophy section of any good
library or bookstore.
The classic example of a public good is national defense.
Everyone who lives in the US benefits from its existence, even if
they contribute nothing to it. Thus, every individual would
decide to contribute nothing to national defense, because he gets
its benefits whether he does or not. Result: no defense.
How do you explain the billions voluntarily donated to various
charities every year?
And how did the Statue of Liberty get restored? Surely everyone
reasoned that it would get restored whether or not they personally
contributed, right?
Moreover, in the current age of atomic weapons, it is clearly
unreasonable to expect a completely voluntary military ...
Why?
Voluntary has two meanings here. In this context it is usually
meant to distinguish from a drafted military. I think you are using
it to designate an unpaid self-supplied force, like George
Washington's army mostly was.
Well, I definitely oppose the draft. I do not think it is necessary
for military forces to be unpaid and self-supplied, however. They
would be paid by the government. The difference from the present
system is in how the government would get the money to pay them.
A few things would change. We would not have a standing army in
Europe. There would be more reliance on reserves than on a large
peacetime military. We would have 100 or fewer nuclear weapons rather
than ten thousand. There would be far less waste, fraud, and abuse,
and fewer billion dollar boondoggles like the recently cancelled
DIVAD.
(Some argue that welfare is a public good; I'm not so sure.)
By your definition, it clearly is not. Welfare benefits
individuals, thus it is a private good.
Do libertarians deny the existence of public goods? If yes, they
had better have some damn good ideas about how to defend us from
Soviet ICBM's in the absence of mandatory taxes for national
defense.
Do you have some damn good ideas on how to defend us from Soviet
ICBMs in the *PRESENCE* of mandatory taxes for national defense?
... if property rights are
defined in such a way that you are allowed to build a factory on
any property you own, your neighbors should be willing to pay you
not to pollute.
You have the right to build a factory on your property, since it is
your property.
But that does not imply a right to pollute your neighbor's property,
which does indeed include the air on the property.
If, on the other hand, they are defined so that your
property right includes clean air above your property,
They are.
then the factory builder should be willing to pay you to allow him
to pollute or, equivalently, pay for pollution control devices out
of his own pocket.
Exactly.
The practical difficulty arises when one person's use of her
property causes harm to others who are either very distant, or
causes harm far in excess of her ability to compensate for such
harm.
Why 'her'? 'Him' is standard english for a person of unspecified
sex.
She should not cause damage that she doesn't pay for, regardless of
the distance.
Acid rain is a
good example. It is generated by Midwest coal-burning power
plants and mills. It harms a wide area, including killing of fish
and damage to potentially harvestable timber. If the power plant
owners have to pay for this damage, who do they pay, and how is it
divided up?
They pay the owners of the resources they destroy, of course.
What if they cannot possibly raise enough money to pay for all the
damage done?
Then they shouldn't do the damage. Either it is cheaper to use
anti-pollution devices or to compensate the damaged parties.
Whichever is cheaper is what they should do. If they can do neither
and still sell power, they should go out of business.
And if you can make the utilities pay, they will pass the cost
on to their customers--who aren't being hurt by the acid rain, but
are paying the cost of getting rid of it.
That is part of the cost or producing the power they are paying for.
If someone comes up with a way to generate power for less cost, then,
in a free market, the new technology will supplant use of coal.
Governments have responded to these practical difficulties with a
host of laws, which are restrictions on personal decisions--you
must own a car with a muffler, and whose pollutant output is less
than some standard;
Right. Since pollution harms everyone by damaging the public air,
these are reasonable laws, if not taken to unrealistic excess.
your factory cannot put into the air less than a certain amount of
sulfur dioxide, ...
I think you mean 'more than'.
Robert Oliver, an economic professor at Caltech, has proposed
another possible solution, which uses the free market--selling
licenses to pollute.
I think this is already being done. I read an article in a recent
issue of either _Discover_ or _Science_86_ that talked about pollution
brokers.
The government would issue certificates, each of which was good
for the right to put a certain amount of sulfur dioxide in the
air. A free market would be allowed in these certificates after
their initial sale by the government.
One problem with this is it presupposes that the damage the
polluters are doing is to the GOVERNMENT. Not true. Government is
not who should be compensated for pollution.
... capitalism can only function in a given market if all of the
following conditions hold:
(1) Free (as in no-cost) entry and exit from the market.
(2) Multiple competitors
(3) The market price of a good accurately reflects its cost.
(4) Buyers have all the information they need to assess the value
of a good.
It works best if those conditions hold. But they are not essential.
And 2, 3, and 4 are CONSEQUENCES of a free market, not pre-conditions.
Condition 1 never holds.
All of these assumptions break down in the real world. Wheat
farming costs a lot to get into, and a lot to get out of.
So?
There exist natural monopolies, such as electric power, where the
largest producer is always the most efficient and can thus drive
all competitors out of business.
Not true.
Prices of goods do not reflect "hidden costs" such as the damage
done to faraway trout streams by the excessive use of chemical
fertilizers.
They should. In a free market they would.
And manufacturers have a vested interest in hiding harmful
side-effects of products they sell.
And their competitors have a vested interest in revealing these
effects.
... those who favor bans
of certain drugs judge that legal alcohol and tobacco cause such
harm to those who do not engage in their use that it justifies
continuance of the ban on other illegal drugs ...
Well, there are several sorts of harm: (I include 'drunk' in
'drugged')
1) Drugged driving or operating any potentially dangerous equipment.
2) Crime while under the influence.
3) Medical costs of being on drugs.
4) So-called 'passive smoking'.
5) Making things safer for smokers makes them more expensive and/or
more dangerous for the rest of us.
6) Fires caused by careless smoking.
The solution to 1 is to either make the drugged activity a crime or
to make it a crime only when it has bad consequences (i.e. perhaps
drunk driving could be legal, but if you kill someone while drunk
driving it is considered murder).
The solution to 2 is for the same laws to apply to people under the
influence as to sober people. A crime is a crime and no amount of
drugs or alcohol should ever excuse one.
The solution to 3 is for none of their medical costs to be borne by
anyone but the drug (or alcohol or tobacco) user. No government money
should pay for their (or anyone's) treatment. Medical insurance
agencies should be encouraged to have seperate policies for users and
non-users, allowing much lower rates for the latter. Coal mines and
asbestos companies should be exempted from paying medical costs for
worker's lung disease for any worker who smokes.
The solution for 4 is a law against smoking around nonconsenting
nonsmokers and around children.
I can't think of a good solution for 5 or 6. It is unreasonable
that upholstry must be treated with fire-proofing chemicals that cause
cancer and that increase the cost and decrease the comfort of
furniture, simply because too many careless smokers managed to set
fire to themselves and their surroundings. But abolishing the law
would put nonsmokers who live in the same apartment building at risk.
(although attempting to reinstate a ban on something after it is
once legal is a practical impossibility).
Not at all. Most currently illegal drugs were legal before 1933.
When prohibition ended, lots of drugs were made illegal. Some say
this was mainly to provide continued employment for the prohibition
police.
I assume libertarians are against such bans on personal
activities, even those with large amounts of potential harm to
others.
I see nothing wrong with using drugs so long as no nonconsenting
person is forced to breath the fumes, pay the medical bills, be
robbed, be run over by a drunk or drugged driver, etc.
What alternative do you offer to protect those who are killed by
handgun owners or drunk drivers?
Well, there are severe laws against robbery and murder. The penalty
for drunk driving should also be severe, at least if someone is hurt
or property destroyed.
If capital punishment, then how does your
abhorrence of government square with giving government the most
dangerous power of all--the power to deprive citizens of their
lives?
I oppose capital punishment.
... can you lay out a plan for the conversion of the United States
into a libertarian society?
We are already closer than any other country I know of. And in some
ways, Reagan has brought us closer yet.
Sure:
1) In the next few major elections, Libertarians win the presidency
and most seats in congress.
2) A few new laws are passed, and many old laws are removed. If the
Supreme Court objects, amend the constitution as necessary.
... how would you compenstate those who are already committed by
decisions made due to past government actions? For example, many
people moved to the suburbs in the last 40 years because of roads
which were paid for out of general taxes, ...
Well, those roads aren't going to go away.
I see your point, though. The classic example is the tax deduction
for mortgage interest payments. This deduction is obviously unfair
and should be abolished. But if it was abolished, many people would
not be able to pay their mortgage payments.
The unfair policies are mostly in the form of extra taxes and
special tax deductions. However, since taxes would be radically
reduced or eliminated under a Libertarian administration, the lack of
deductions would not be a problem. People who had a lot of reductions
would get a little wealthier. People who had few deductions would get
a lot wealthier.
The only losers would be those who are getting money from the
government. People with government pensions should continue to
receive them, albeit without cost of living increases (which would not
be needed since the cost of living would initially go DOWN thanks to
lowere taxes for retailers, landlords, etc, and would then stabilize
as we go onto a gold standard or some other fixed standard). The REAL
losers would be Social Security recipients. This is unfortunate for
them, and I am sure they would complain, saying that they had made
lots of donations to the system and were now to get no benefits. This
would be true, but I don't see any other way. The first generation of
recipients received benefits without having made any donations. Like
any pyramid scheme, it has to collapse sooner or later, to the great
detriment of those who were about to profit. Or perhaps Social
Security could be privatized and made voluntary. Since the over 65
age group is on the average the wealthiest age group, I'm not too
worried about it. *I* don't expect to ever receive a dime from Social
Security whether the libertarians win or not.
...Keith
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