Yep. These are the standard knee-jerk reactions to the horrors of freedom. You're basically assuming people are stupid and gutless, but that is wrong given that you yourself are raising these as concerns and preferences. If you are genuinely interested there's a host of good literature that has been written over the centuries about all these topics. In essence, the fact that there are concerns and preferences automatically means that there will be markets and institutions designed to deal with them. Critically, the private entities will be more fluid to meeting the revealed preferences of consumers and are essentially guaranteed to provide the same or better quality services for less cost of scarce resources (it's almost a mathematical certainty). Again, lots of literature. Big A.D.'s mention of the Xeer Common Law is a good example of a fluid non-centralised legal system. Also it's been discussed a bit HERE previously. Edit: And trew, given the rapid growth in the thread did you happen to see my post where I realised we had been going back and forth on slightly different concepts?
^^^^ it's almost a mathematical certainty Tip #1 Dont use almost & certainty in the same sentence its either one or the other : Thats a flip flop in the same sentence :lol:
Yes, that's right trew. You too can enjoy the benefits of Somalia's legal system simply by renouncing Western civilization. Of course some adjustments will be necessary to fully appreciate how superior a 7th century African tribal system of justice really is, however you only need to look at the wonderful lifestyle of people living in Somalia to see for yourself how successful Xeer can be.
^ And yet again, Somalia's problems are not the result of Xeer but the presence of Xeer presumably is why it was possible to gave stable economic regions in between the warlords etc wanting to overthrow Xeer with religion based legal systems etc. And what the heck is with your comment about wanting to overthrow Western Civilisation?
Yes I saw that but I still think my question above is addressing that issue. If the goal is not to give people powers in the first place, how will things actually get done ? Assuming essential services are always needed, let's take things like education, health and welfare (biggest bits of big govt . If education and health were completely private, only the wealthy would end up being educated and having access to a doctor. It would not be profitable to educate and treat the poor who couldn't afford it. Without any unemployment system, the unemployed would be on the street and starving. Crime rates would rise. You might think that's fine, because you assume you would always be one of the wealthy ones in such a system. But it's not that hard to fall from the top to the bottom. You need to give power to some people in order to provide services to the community. But you also need checks and balances to prevent those in power becoming corrupt and others from abusing the services. The extremes of human nature always needs to be kept in check - that is why we have laws in the first place. The idea of removing the services completely leads to more problems than it solves.
Either that or it's such a weak legal system that it allowed the warlords to gain power in the first place. I'm sure it worked perfectly well in a primitive society without the effects of modern civilisation to complicate things. Who said anything about overthrowing Western civilisation? You've made your arguments in favour of a libertarian system assuming that it's possible to retain all the benefits of modern society while simultaneously returning to the sort of practices much of the Western world grew out of a hundred-odd years ago. If you want to live a libertarian lifestyle, you're going to have to make choices. Some of them involve renouncing what until now has been called "progress" because that "progress" has involved the sacrifice of individual freedoms which you argue should be reclaimed.
This is actually a really great article. I especially like the part where he talks about how the mass education system was originally designed to turn independent farmers into disciplined factory workers, and how after the 60's, the Tri-Lateral commission (which forms the core of the Bilderberg Group) got together and analysed what went wrong i.e. people demanding civil rights, people demonstrating against war, youth in revolt, etc., and the conclusion they come up with was that the education system had failed. It had failed to turn the young people into robots void of all free thought. And so Chomsky goes on to explain that that is what this National Curriculum is all about. Well, he talks about "No Child Left Behind", which is the Bush/Obama plan in America, but its the exact same thing in Australia with the National Curriculum that was instituted by Gillard, and the whole purpose of it is systemised, standardised indoctrination of the young with bien pensant ideology and to trample out all free thought. I think Chomsky's on the money here, and that IPA article I linked in my previous comment also talks about how illiberal the National Curriculum is, and how it should be vehemently opposed by the Opposition and the Liberal Premiers. http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/2080/be-like-gough-75-radical-ideas-to-transform-australia The upshot of all this is clear: it is absolutely irresponsible for ANYONE who values freedom to vote for Labor at the next election. Even left-wing thinking people should be appalled by this current government's Statist NWO agenda, and should do everything in their power to ensure that the unfashionable Tony Abbott is elected PM. Because the only reason he's unfashionable is because the info triad (media, education and entertainment) has painted him that way, because he is such a threat to the establishment of the NWO that they are working for.
It's disappointing that something promising, ie a thread with the exchange of ideas between similarly minded people sharing information on an interesting subject, is hijacked into flat out attacks on the idea of the thread. Why don't those who disagree with Libertarians and the concepts of libertarians just start a competing thread titled 'why we will not have a more libertarian system' and see which gets more replies and discussion. I will use my free will and not bother to read it! Why the hell are we talking about Somalia? Corruption? Complete timewasting diversions.
Too right. And to wit, I found this post under a despicable Greg Jericho article on the drum which excellently outlines exactly what needs to be done for us to move to a more libertarian system: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4422064.html Don't read the article itself; it is nauseatingly smug and invariably wrong in every conclusion and inference it makes. These types of authors are just so wrong they should be forced to defend themselves in debate against a well versed Austrian economist like Peter Schiff so every one can see exactly how wrong they are.
Because Somalia has a large number of the attributes which Libertarians claim are important and desirable. Somalia is what a libertarian country looks like when you strip back all the cute theories and pop philosophy. You can "transition to a more libertarian system" just by moving there. Or many other countries in the world for that matter. Many of them don't even have an immigration process to impede your sovereign right to move freely about the place as you choose. And if wherever you end up isn't up to your libertarian standards, you've got more chance of affecting change there than you do here because most of those places are shitholes and have no reason not to change. Just do what al Qaeda does and open up your own schools to indoctrinate the locals.
I'll say it again Big A.D., this is just nonsense, and I challenge you to actually try to respond to my argument, instead of just scoffing out a complete non-answer like you did last time. A valuable insight contributed by Marxist theory is the idea that civilisation progresses through stages: You have tribalism, then slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, and so-on. (Marx thinks the next stages should be Socialism and then Communism, but on this he is demonstrably wrong, as I could prove at length if I chose to). The point is, you can't take a society which never even progressed beyond the most primitive, tribalist level and try to compare it to an advanced capitalist society. Its just complete non-sense. A non sequitor of the highest order.
Okay then: What many libertarians seem to be asking for is, in effect, a regression to a previous stage of civilisation. It seems to be somewhere from the mid-1800s to about the beginning of the 20th century, depending on who's talking. For example, you mentioned privatised libraries earlier. We had private libraries. They were quite common up until the end of the 19th century. There was great debate at the time about whether allowing anybody to be able to read books for no up-front charge would completely destroy the motivation for authors to write books and therefore the social progress would stall and civilisation would grind to a halt. As it turned out, having a population that knew how to read not only massively increased the market for authors to sell their books but it also lead to the most rapid period of technological and social progress the world had experienced up until that point. You also mentioned abolishing the minimum wage and eliminating welfare. These are particularly ridiculous suggestions, given that this country was founded as penal colony for people who had committed petty crimes in England. My family ended up here as a result of one of them being so poor and destitute that they were reduced to stealing food in order to survive, got caught and were shipped, literally, to the other side of the earth as punishment for depriving someone else of their all-important private property. The reason we introduced welfare and the minimum wage in the first place was because paying taxes was a much better alternative to the extreme poverty that results without a recognised minimum standard of living. The origins of our minimum wage go back to 1907. The core of our welfare system was set out in the Constitution in 1901 and expanded in 1946 after a successful referendum of the Australian people allowed the Constitution to be altered so as to allow for things like health care, unemployment, pensions for windows and support for children. All these reforms that libertarians say we should be trying to achieve are actually the circumstances we already had at some point, rejected, and moved on from. There are plenty of places in the world that haven't yet developed to the stage we're at right now, so like I've said earlier, the easiest and quickest way to achieve a libertarian lifestyle is to just move there. But again, most of those places suck because they're using simplistic, undeveloped social structures and small governments.
All a minimum wage does is increase unemployment and therefore the need for social security payments in the first place. The second you forcibly make someone's labour more expensive than it is worth, is the second you make them redundant. Or in the case of low skilled/younger people without experience, you force them to never gain or at least hinder them getting the experience to be worth a higher wage.
Going on a slight tangent but I just feel the need to say it. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about how different Libertarians really are from the Liberal Democracies we physically experience. As I have said elsewhere (including objectivists) we are all of the broad church and a lot of the details are whether one stream of thought are Protestants versus Anglicans or as Redback recently quoted whether one group are "1862 post neo conservative movement pre revolution Reformist Baptists" or are "1873 post neo conservative movement pre revolution Reformist Baptists". In many respects, as important as the differences are for certain fundamental reasons, the similarities far outweigh the differences. Hence, the "leap of faith" between the different groups shouldn't actually be that hard. If someone wants to take Australia towards the Constitution of the federal Liberal Party, I would be more than happy (with the key exception being their 'conscription' clause). If however, someone wants to take Australia toward the Labor Party Constitution then I'll whinge and complain and hate every step of the way. If someone is actually interested in the political state of Australia but have never read the two documents and more importantly understood what the various clauses really mean then I encourage them to do so. (Don't bother looking for the Greens one as they don't actually have one and just make stuff up as they go along based on standard watermelon propaganda and what seems fashionable.) Importantly, there is a lot of misperception about what the various parties stand for because the Hawke-Keating Government largely ignored the ALP Constitution while the Howard led Liberal Party only partially followed its own Constitution. In contrast people like Conroy, Swan and Roxon largely embrace the ALP Constitution and I despise them all. Consequently, if people want to advocate for the Liberal Democracies espoused in the Lib's Constitution or the US (particularly of the founding fathers) then I'd embrace you as a close ally until we get to a situation where the differences separate us more than the things that are the same. Within the group notionally called "Libertarians", are the minarchists like Hayek (who I would argue are closely related to the Liberal Democratic principles) and the anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard and Block (who are the ones that Big A.D. etc don't understand and attack). [Apologies to Hawkeye and others who hate the use of the labels.] As I have said in other threads, I would voluntarily go to war to preserve (certain) Liberal Democracies against socialist aggressors and this is fully consistent with my beliefs that they themselves are unnecessary and immoral compared to my (currently) preferred system of anarcho-capitalism (or similar systems/labels). In other words, up your nose with a rubber hose if you think I don't like Australia and Western Civilisation and want to renounce/obliterate it. But similarly, up your nose etc if you think I'll stand by and hear people argue that increasingly socialist policies are a progression towards the next stage rather than a regression back toward the period before liberty became prominent in our societies. The significant and continual reduction in freedom of speech that is being imposed on Australia (and around the western world) is NOT a progression. Further, much of how this "progression" would occur due to the negatives inherent in the system were predicted over a century (or three) ago so the fact that the negatives are raising their ugly heads does not mean that they are somehow "better".
On another tangentially related topic, Trew/Big A.D. - as you guys can access THIS THREAD, I would appreciate your thoughts on what is missing if you have the time. Unfortunately the thread has gotten a bit cluttered by people focusing on an appropriate level of compensation or the effective enforcement of justice [or random anecdotes of friends ]. But the basic question is clear.
Well the OP asked for "others views on the practicality of change towards a more libertarian government structure." Didn't specify that the views should only agree with him/her.
Glad you would have no problem in having your wages slashed if your employer thought you were overpaid. Or does that only apply to other's wages, not your own ? Guess it would be great having people working for peanuts - you could employ more people to do your housework etc. - much like many parts of the world with huge rich/poor divides. Great that is, unless you happen to be one of the many poor.
I'm not rising to bite this poisoned apple you offer. It's already been stated on this thread - Somalia has no rule of law (in the Western sense we understand). And a sharia-derived legal system of jurisprudence is NOT the same as the Common Law generated in the English speaking nations. Transplant Somalians into the New England Free State movement (Google it) or into the management of Reason Magazine or ask them to re-implement the US Constitution somewhere and the whole system would fail as they don't have the knowledge, processes and cultural imperatives to bring about libertarianism. So everything past the first few posts on page 1 are stupid diversions and everyone else forced into reactions to the stupid diversions. Even this post of mine! Goodbye, back to the Silver pages.
If my employer thought my wages were too much he/she would be welcome to offer me a lower salary. If they thought there was someone else with the same or higher qualifications/experience that could replace me at a lower rate, then they would be certifiably mental to people not hire them and fire me. It would firstly, ensure that not only am I always willing to give 100% and continually better myself to ensure that I am indispensable to my employer. But also make me that more attractive to thier competitor should the "greedy" employer try to exploit me for profit in a "free market". Furthermore, in the instance that I am a new/inexperienced member of that style of workforce (name it) and they wanted to "exploit" me, I will only work for them until I have the skills and experience to take a better offer from a competitor that seeks my "new"and hard earned skill-set. Should I be FORCED to work for a higher wage (which by law is exactly how it happens in Australia) I run the very real risk of not having a job at all and not gaining the required experience and skills to warrant a higher wage. Most importantly, as this individual scenario plays out on a wider scale, not only does my job prospects deminish, but my whole industry goes offshore because the government has mandated that my(our) skills are worth more than is physically profitable. The business owner gets driven to the point of either off shoring the work to people willing to work for a wage that keeps him making a profit or he folds his business and either way everyone here loses. Your comment about the rich/poor divide makes my blood boil. The left media use it all the time to create a class warfare argument. Who gives a flying f$ck what the difference is between the "rich" and the "poor"! It's a waste of time and money to even talk about it. All that really matters is that the "poor" continue to have increases in their standard of living. If I had the ability to click my fingers and say " the lowest standard of living in Australia would be that the very bottom 5% of the population had a standard of living equivalent of (in today's terms) of a 80-100k a year salary, but the pay off would mean the top 40% of the population (in today's terms) would be earning multi million or even multi trillion dollar salaries/lifestyles". Only a full blown retard could argue with a system that created such a scenario. Yet the "rich/poor" divide would be even greater than anything we see today. You want to get rid of the "rich/poor" divide (or at least give the poor a shot) and have it equitable? Fix the monetary system! This system of evolving inflation of the money supply, where governments keep the people empoverished because those at the bottom have very little chance of creating any wealth on top of their cost of living increases will ALLWAYS ensure that the people at the bottom stay at the bottom as those that don't need to worry about how much the price of milk/eggs/bread/rent increases every week get to exploit everyone else.
