Irish Tea party movement?

deise go deo

bryanw wrote: »

No, no, no. You're totally jumping the gun. I'm not saying that regulation will cause , I'm just saying that it can happen. I mean 10 or 15 years before Hitler came to power it would have been equally unthinkable that such a thing could happen to Germany, but it did. Have you ever read The Road to Serfdom? It's about tendencies towards collectivism.

No I havent read that book, I think you may be confusing correlation and causation, If a country has regulation and that country becomes a totalitarian dictatorship dose not mean that it was because of the regulation that the country became a dictarorship, nothing I have read on the subject suggests that Hitler comeing to power was in any way related to there being regulation in Pre Nazi Germany.

If you have any evidence to the contrary I would like to see it.

You can't escape that fact that the state cannot satisfy all the needs of the entire population, nor that it can provide services better than any private business. I'm very well aware that transitions to any sort of practical application of a free market structure would require a gradualist approach, otherwise some sort of violent revolution - which is not something libertarians wish to inflict.

Well I never said it could satisfy all the needs of the entire population, That would be communism would it not?

It can however moderate the bad effects of the free market.

I do beleive that there are roles for the state in setting up services that the free market cannot eg the ESB.

It is also untrue to say that private business can provide all services better than the state, I can not see how private enterprise could ever provide a replacement for the police.

Libertarians may feel that they have some sort of economic justification for their views. The statists may disagree, but where the hell do they get their faith in government?

If Libertarians feel that they have some sort of economic justification for their views it would be nice if they told us why rather than just pointing out flaws in the state system and saying that under libertarianism things would be better. I assume that they get their faith in goverment from the fact that although there are flaws the system works.

P. Breathnach

bryanw wrote: »

So you believe that the employer should be forced to provide the masks? Why?

Surely if your answer if yes, the employer should be forced, then you are diametrically opposed to my way of thinking, that you believe freedom and choice should be suppressed, and that any further argument is pointless on this point because you do not accept the same principles that I do.

Are you truly a libertarian? Or are you an agent provocateur whose ambition is discredit the libertarian movement by taking such an ugly position?

thebaldsoprano

bryanw wrote: »

So you believe that the employer should be forced to provide the masks? Why?

Yes, it could be masks or safe scaffolding, or a building free of asbestos. As for why, well I'd argue that a company's profits are important only up to a point, and pursuing them at the cost of someone's health probably passes it.

bryanw wrote: »

Surely if your answer if yes, the employer should be forced, then you are diametrically opposed to my way of thinking, that you believe freedom and choice should be suppressed,

Well, yes, in some circumstances. I'm opposed to my employer's freedom to employ me in an asbestos ridden building for instance.

bryanw wrote: »

and that any further argument is pointless on this point because you do not accept the same principles that I do.

That's probably a safe enough bet alright.

thebaldsoprano

P. Breathnach wrote: »

Are you truly a libertarian? Or are you an agent provocateur whose ambition is discredit the libertarian movement by taking such an ugly position?

If that's the case, other libertarians are more than welcome to discredit him by explaining that government regulation may actually be a good thing in this instance.

bryanw

P. Breathnach wrote: »

Are you truly a libertarian? Or are you an agent provocateur whose ambition is discredit the libertarian movement by taking such an ugly position?

Safety and the Market Economy

deise go deo wrote:

It can however moderate the bad effects of the free market.

I do beleive that there are roles for the state in setting up services that the free market cannot eg the ESB.

What bad effects of the free market? If you'd care to elaborate?

When you mention things like the ESB, that would be considered a technical monopoly. The state is not the only instrument capable of providing a technical monopoly. Also, technological advances make the case for technical monopolies less apparent.

deise go deo wrote:

If Libertarians feel that they have some sort of economic justification for their views it would be nice if they told us why rather than just pointing out flaws in the state system and saying that under libertarianism things would be better.

It would be impractical for me to teach you free market economics in this thread... the economic justification is something you will need to seek out yourself and acquire knowledge of - please don't just write it off because of what you perceive it to be. Here's a start: An Introduction to Austrian Economics

deise go deo wrote:

I assume that they get their faith in goverment from the fact that although there are flaws the system works.

The flaws are very big... how big do they have to get before you begin to think that the system doesn't work?

thebaldsoprano wrote:

Yes, it could be masks or safe scaffolding, or a building free of asbestos. As for why, well I'd argue that a company's profits are important only up to a point, and pursuing them at the cost of someone's health probably passes it.

Again, this video speak volumes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0dmRJ0oWg
I will concede that the case is stronger for somebody to be protected in their place of work... since they should be able to obtain work if an employer will have them, but the principles are the same.

View

The whole cigarette smuggling issue needs to be tackled so as to ensure the government doesn't lose out on any revenue (and that non-smokers have to pay higher taxes as a result).

The government could institute mandatory blood testing every 2-3 years. Any traces of nicotine in your blood (and they last a long time) and you get to pay higher income tax.

That should solve the problem of smuggling reducing the government's tax revenue. It'd also, I suspect, give people a really strong incentive to "kick the habit".

Permabear

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thebaldsoprano

donegalfella wrote: »

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I suspect any economy will feature people working in dangerous conditions as long as they're at the lower end of the labour market. While regulation itself won't eliminate this, it's unlikely to make it worse - and I can't see how removing it will improve things.

donegalfella wrote: »

Why is government regulation required? It's to the employer and employee's mutual advantage to make working conditions as safe as possible: the employee doesn't want to get hurt, and the employer wants to retain top-notch employees as well as to avoid enormously expensive personal injury settlements.

Okay, I hadn't factored in personal injury settlements and to what extent they'd be included in a libertarian system. If you could elaborate a bit on this I'd be grateful.

As for keeping good employees, yes this might hold for skilled work but again, not if you're at the lower end of the market. If you've no skills that are in currently in demand you can effectively be treated as a replaceable unit - there's no shortage of people who can turn up on time and give a reliable day's unskilled labour at present.

The Highwayman

View wrote: »

The whole cigarette smuggling issue needs to be tackled so as to ensure the government doesn't lose out on any revenue (and that non-smokers have to pay higher taxes as a result).

The government could institute mandatory blood testing every 2-3 years. Any traces of nicotine in your blood (and they last a long time) and you get to pay higher income tax.

That should solve the problem of smuggling reducing the government's tax revenue. It'd also, I suspect, give people a really strong incentive to "kick the habit".

What? Are you crazy? The government cant have a right to something like that!
My body is mine and I will not give up information like that.

And smokers are smokers if they smoke then it will show up regardless of weather the tax is paid or not

Permabear

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thebaldsoprano

donegalfella wrote: »

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True, and if a liberal economy consistently delivered close to full employment I accept there'd be little need for regulation in this area. I think it's fair to say though that there'll always be at least some fluctuation and with it people who could be taken advantage of. While I think liberal principles have a lot to offer, I'd also like to see at least some protection for people who find themselves in this position.

Permabear

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thebaldsoprano

I was thinking pretty much the same thing recently! And also wondering how much it'll make socialist models redundant - a lot of means of production are moving away from corporations/government and into punters' hands. I think the indy music scene is very interesting in this regard and probably well ahead of the curve. I'm hacking away at a couple of software projects that'll hopefully have me self employed in a couple of years - the means distribute them weren't there as little as a couple of years ago!

View

donegalfella wrote: »

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Is there a civil right not to have your blood tested?

Offhand, I don't think you'll find it mentioned in Bunreacht na hEireann. Possibly the ECHR might include it by implication (perhaps on privacy grounds?) if you are lucky...

Permabear

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Executive Steve

donegalfella wrote: »

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Not often I find myself thanking one of your posts, but you're absolutely right.

Executive Steve

bryanw wrote: »

You don't realise that it is not in the self-interest of a business to kill people, make them sick, sell faulty goods or pollute the environment. When government imposes regulation, oftentimes you will find that companies just try to satisfy those regulations and usually don't strive to do better. In a situation where companies are free to, and must compete for business, the need to try to sell to the public the best quality product at the lowest possible cost.

But where you have state control, taking for example environmental records, where you have large scale state control or oppressive regimes, environmental records are usually bad. Why is it that in the west, in mostly free societies, we have higher standards of living, lower scale pollutions, cleaner air...? Surely the state is in a more powerful and compelling position in the likes of Russia and China to impose stringent regulations that protect the public... hmm?

The elephant in the room being the fact that many of the businesses you feel would much rather compete to be the cleanest in a Libertarian business-friendly Utopia actually tend to outsource their production to places like China in the first place, to save money, or export their toxic wastes to places with even less environmental legislation (and a far more relaxed attitude) than the United States or Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/23/trafigura-dutch-fine-waste-export

Permabear

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Scofflaw

donegalfella wrote: »

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I think that's a very large claim, and one that would require supporting evidence. There is already a proposed correlation between wealth and environmental concern, and that's been investigated fairly thoroughly (see here and here, for example). There are certainly studies which demonstrate there is some correlation between property rights and environmental attitudes, but it is at best as part of a complex of related variables:

There is considerable evidence in the educational literature that environmental attitudes as measured by multi-item scales have a variety of components. Hoover and Schutz (l 1963b) discovered more than 10 factors in a survey of Arizona State students. Likewise, Steiner and Barnhart (1972) used a 250 item Likert scale which yielded seven interpretable factors for 305 Oregon High School seniors. Both of these studies indicate that these attitudes were tied to broader values such as individual liberties, property rights, democratic principles, personal responsibility, and regard for human life.

2 cited studies, the use of "considerable evidence in the educational literature" and "indicate", is a very weak linkage in terms of sociological studies!

Western Europe has had environmental regulation for a long time - I think a claim which simply disregards that history in favour of an unproven link with very little supporting evidence is not really worth making.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Laminations

I'm confused about this. Even with regulations here, we have the individual freedom not to dump, yet people still fly tip. So in the absence of regulations which they currently flaunt, these people will suddenly develop values such as individual liberties, property rights, democratic principles, personal responsibility, and regard for human life? I'd argue that less people actually hold strong values in this regard but the regulation has a dampening effect on the amount of fly tipping we'd otherwise see.

I mean before fines, people were free to clean up after their dogs, they had individual liberty in this regard and they chose not to bother, hence fines came in because dog sh1t on the street was becoming a problem

Permabear

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deise go deo

donegalfella wrote: »

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I dident say there were services that the ESB provide that the free-market could not.
I said that at the time the ESB was set up, private enterprise could not have set up a power grid across Ireland the way the state did because it would have been economically unfeasible and I see that the state has a role in providing nessary services that would be unfeasible for the Free-market.

Laminations

Can we not just evaluate libertarian principles by looking at industries and actions before regulation when people were acting independently of state intervention?

Laminations

donegalfella wrote: »

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So are you advocating the privatisation of all public spaces??

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bryanw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw

The above video covers many of the points that are being raised here. There are 4 parts.

Again, with regard to private property rights and pollution, is it the case that concentrated power could deal with pollution better if it wanted to? If this is so, why are the countries with concentrated power unable to (in practice) take care of the environment better than those where the people are more free and have better property rights.

Again - here is an opposing study from the CATO Institute:
Loss of Private Property Rights and the Collapse of Zimbabwe

This is linked to from here, and additional resource provided under the section "Capitalism Destroys the Environment".

Scofflaw

donegalfella wrote: »

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I think that's a separate point from your claim, though. Avoiding the 'tragedy of the commons' by instituting private property rights is an approach to conservation, whereas the idea that lower pollution in the West is the result of greater respect for property rights is a claim about causes. Arguments against using private property based solutions for conservation has no relevance at all to the claim that environmental concerns are based on respect for property rights.

A private property approach is often a good one - sometimes the only possible one, where the resource needing protection is simply too large to be protected by common action. Objections to it are often based on a naive notion of what constitutes the property in question. For example, it seems ridiculous to treat the sea as private property for fishermen, but in fact what is used as property is usually an individual transferable catch quota. More subtly, the problem is that such solutions only treat a part of the problem, and (from a libertarian perspective) are themselves the result of regulatory fiat. Sometimes, of course, the problem is a deficiency in the regulatory fiat - catch quotas set annually by administrative calculation are not really stable private property, and provide only a weak incentive for overall conservation. There is also the issue that by simply distributing such quotas, fishermen receive a valuable right for free.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Laminations

donegalfella wrote: »

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Capitalism may not have created labour exploitation but it has done little on its own to prevent it. I'm saying if we concentrate on individual actions in which we are not (or were not) required by the state to act. Did people wear seatbelts before it was a requirement? Clean up after their dogs before it was a requirement? Ensure worker safety in menial jobs (where workers are easily replaceable)? Provide information on the possible harmful effects of their products? Would people give to charity if social welfare didn't exist (e.g. Pakistan)? Have tragedies of the commons occurred where we have eliminated a species or resource for gratification and gain?

Today, we have moved far away both from the labour patterns of feudal agriculture and those of the Victorian factory—and we are beginning to move away from the 9-to-5 regimented pattern of the twentieth-century corporation, too. I'm quite convinced that a more economically free future will see people work more flexible hours, work more from home, and be more inclined to be self-employed. The only thing that stands in the way of that is continued state support for the corporatist model.

Self-employed people all trying to make their way in the world. How much spam would be out there? How much distrust would exist when all the players in a market are there to make profit. Company A says product X will cure cancer, Company B says it wont and their product will. Private standards body Y sides with company B (because it has shares in that company). Television station Z runs advertisements from Company A etc.

We can also look at the smoking debate that cropped up earlier in the thread. If the government repealed the "sin tax" on cigarettes today, smoking rates would probably increase somewhat, but they will never return to what they were in the 1940s because today's consumer is much more health-conscious. As Scofflaw has noted, even those who do still smoke have cut down dramatically—we don't have people puffing away on 80 cigarettes a day anymore—and that is not just a function of price elasticity.

Indeed, but why are we more health conscious? It is not due to the informative approach of tobacco sellers but to the endeavours of the state. It is state sponsored advertising, or more recently, state regulated tobacco advertising (where they are required to advertise the harmful effects) that has led to our appreciation of health issues. Were the state not in place and a new product, equally as addictive and harmful as tobacco came to market, who would ensure we knew the risks? The producers competitors? People will be fraudulent and destructive if they can make money from it and get away with it, there is evidence of this everywhere.

In short, we have to stop obsessing about regulation and legislation as if it were the only thing constraining behaviour. And we have to stop regarding economic freedom as some threatening monster that would ravage the world if not for the leashes and constraints imposed by government.

You yourself have engaged in short selling against Greece, exacerbating their problems for your own enrichment. Without regulation if the market ruled all, people would find many ways of exploiting the weaker for maximum returns. Do you for example agree with sweat shops? How would libertarianism prevent such practises? Since on a previous thread you argued that you agree with sexual harrassment as the employee consents to it if they remain in the job. So what about sweat shops?

Laminations

I'll ask you this - what do you prefer and trust more?

BBC or FOX?

Permabear

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Scofflaw

No, not really. Those who are opposed to liberalism love to trot out Dickensian caricatures to illustrate what a regulation-free economy would allegedly be like—but the reality is much more complicated. The Victorian factory system was shaped by the norms of pre-capitalist, feudal society, in which people (including children) commonly worked from dawn to dusk. Because these labour patterns had worked for centuries in feudal, agricultural societies, early industrialists presumed that they could deploy the same people for the same length of time in factories. So acting as if the Victorian factory owner was the first person ever to set a 12-year-old to work, and thus presuming that "exploitation of labour" began under capitalism, as the Marxists would have us believe, is just factually wrong.

Again, no, this is inaccurate. The change from agricultural to industrial society involved a very large change in working patterns and practices. Pre-industrial agrarian societies had a huge amount of off-time compared to industrial societies - that's not to say there wasn't hard work, but that it was not as constant, nor indeed as dangerous, repetitive, mindless, unsocial, etc.

Probably the only comparable change in human society was the change from hunter-gathering to agrarian societies in the first place - a change which similarly involved geographic concentration, new social organisation, expanded working hours, poorer diet and health, etc.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Laminations

A good rebuttal of all things libertarian can be found here

I particularly like his bit about the similarities between libertarianism and communism

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.
Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:

This concept of property originated in some of those primitive tribes when individuals claimed possessions for themselves as against the collective ownership of their groups. Based on individual initiative, labor, and innovation, some were successful at establishing a separate, private ownership role for themselves. [...]

Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.

The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.
Thanks to my essay on taxes, I routinely get mail featuring impassioned harangues which never once mention a real-world fact-- or which simply make up the statistics they want.
This sort of balls-out aggressivity probably wins points at parties, where no one is going to take down an almanac and check their figures; but to me it's a cardinal sin. If someone has an answer for everything, advocates changes which have never been tried, and presents dishonest evidence, he's a crackpot. If a man has no doubts, it's because his hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

Pure magic beans utopian fantasy

'In matters of human action no experiments can be performed' Really??

Must say goodbye to my day job so

Permabear

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Scofflaw

donegalfella wrote: »

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Such a thesis holds no water, though. To claim that environmental concerns are in some sense peculiar to the West because of its cultural notions of private property is entirely unsupported, and is contradicted by the fact that environmental concern correlates quite simply at the national level with average income - and that environmental concerns in the "non-Western countries" correlate on exactly the same scale, and have increased in line with affluence in exactly the same way as in Western countries.

In other words, if we draw a wealth versus environmental concerns graph, all the world's countries fall along the line - there is no distinct character to Western nations.

donegalfella wrote: »

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You're tempting me there, but I'll resist. Suffice it to say I have opinions quite independently of your belief as to what my opinions must be in order to disagree with your opinions.

donegalfella wrote: »

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It is a step, but the conservation problems in fisheries run very deep. Personally, I suspect a system of auctioning quotas might improve the situation, since it would make the reality of declining stocks rather more tangible. Unfortunately, like civil service budgets, there is no incentive whatsoever to save any of the quota.

I wonder if it would make any difference to treat the fisheries like company shares, though? Say instead of either distributing or auctioning quotas every year the CFP held a once-off share auction. The holding of a share entitles the holder to the appropriate share of the yearly overall catch quota. The advantages I see in that is that (a) conservation organisations can buy shares and lay them aside permanently, and (b) there's an advantage in laying aside shares as an investment, because the longer they aren't used, the more fish stocks recover.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Scofflaw

donegalfella wrote: »

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Of course - I can point you to the Qatar Supreme Council for the Environment. However, it would be irrelevant to do so, since picking one unstudied example out of a hat won't make any difference to a generally observed correlation.

This is a genuine question - do you really believe that if I had been, let's say,unable to find a raft of material on Qatari environmental regulation, and evidence of public and government attention to environmental issues in Qatar, that that would have meant something? That it would, in any sense, have disproved the generally observed correlation between wealth and environmental attitudes?

There are, obviously, other attitudes in play, particularly at the level of national ideology - we have a national ideology that favours 'development' as freeing us from the poverty of our past, while the US right-wing and the Communist countries shared an ideological view of nature as something to be tamed and harnessed for the benefit of man through heroic endeavour, the only difference being a case of whether the heroism was individual or collective in nature. However, the primary indicator is wealth.

donegalfella wrote: »

Would purchasers of shares then be permitted to trade those shares privately? If so, I'd be all for it.

There wouldn't be any point to the scheme if they couldn't. Of course, the likeliest outcome would be that some complete numpty would press for sales to be restricted to active fishermen, thus defeating the whole point.

But tell me - why are you "all for it"?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Laminations

donegalfella wrote: »

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Ok I accept that politicking and lobbying occurs with governments. Now how would libertarianism solve that? Just replace governments with private corporations? Why wouldn't the $500 billion food industry employ an army of lobbyists to tell the private television network what to tell the people to eat, or the private food standards agency? or the private anybody? Again you identify problems with the system but propose a fairy tale non-existant solution.

P. Breathnach

Laminations wrote: »

So are you advocating the privatisation of all public spaces??

Have you not read Libertarianism for Dummies? The idea of public property is anathema.

Permabear

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bryanw

P. Breathnach wrote: »

Have you not read Libertarianism for Dummies? The idea of public property is anathema.

Well... there's ignorance if ever there was!

Do you think that all Libertarians wish for every scrap of land to be held in private ownership? Surely you would know (or maybe not, to come out with a statement like that) that Libertarians value freedom, and that if all property were private, freedom would be reduced as people would be less able to leave their own property.

Do stop being ignorant and listen to other people's perspectives: A Plea for Public Property

Permabear

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bryanw

donegalfella wrote: »

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But you're forgetting that little people are all idiotic children and can't be trusted to make a decision for themselves. That's why the Nanny must step in.

veritable

I hate seeing the tea party denigrated. i just got back from a year spent in the US and the tea party is not how it is described by the international news media. I read in disbelief some articles in the Irish times completely distorting the reality.
the tea party people are whites, blacks, and hispanics who believe in small govt and personal freedom. there are hundreds of thousands of members and of course some fringe extremists but the vast majority are honest decent people fed up with the massive bureaucracy in washington trying to control their lives and put them under the foot of a nanny state.

oceanclub

veritable wrote: »

there are hundreds of thousands of members and of course some fringe extremists

The problem is, they pick fringe extremists as their candidates:

http://www.newsopi.com/politics/sharron-angle-black-jerseys-controversy-color-is-thoroughly-evil/3719/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/13/sharron-angle-suggests-us_n_681198.html
http://wonkette.com/417521/sharron-angle-is-a-founding-father-because-history-all-happens-at-once

P.

Scofflaw

donegalfella wrote: »

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Er, no. There's nothing different about those two points. The "generally observed" refers to the fact that observations cover a number of countries, while "in exactly the same way" is what is observed in those countries that have been studied.

If you're seeking a loophole to allow you to preserve your personal hypothesis, I would suggest choosing the point that the correlation has not been studied for every single country.

Of course, that's purely a face-saving exercise for you, as is your "goalpost-moving" insult. You've claimed that respect for property rights is the primary determinant of environmental attitudes, and that's not something you have any evidence for, while there are multiple studies showing what I'm claiming, which is that national wealth is the primary determinant.

donegalfella wrote: »

Because private trading of these shares takes them out of the hands of government.

And the benefit of that is?

donegalfella wrote: »

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Nothing more than happens at present - quotas are set and met. Even then, there will still be fishermen who may choose not to be active for a while while not selling their quota, or companies which prefer a period of inactivity, and whose share of the quota is thereby 'conserved' for their period of inactivity. Currently, such a fisherman would simply sell his quota to another fisherman, and it would of necessity be caught. If the fisherman does not sell it within the year, it disappears at the end of the year - a permanent quota share would not have that characteristic.

It still doesn't eliminate the 'highgrading' problem, which is dumping smaller fish in order to maximise the value of the quota. There's a limit to what market design can do. Setting quota by saleable weight would do it, but has obvious practical problems.

cordially,
Scofflaw

P. Breathnach

bryanw wrote: »

Well... there's ignorance if ever there was!

You say this in a thread where people discuss the ownership of the sea and the fish in it?

Do you think that all Libertarians wish for every scrap of land to be held in private ownership?

I don't believe that all people in any movement think exactly the same things as one another. Life's rich tapestry.

Surely you would know (or maybe not, to come out with a statement like that) that Libertarians value freedom, and that if all property were private, freedom would be reduced as people would be less able to leave their own property.

We have had discussion in this forum (although not in this thread) about the desirability of roads being privately-owned. It seems to be consistent with the thinking of at least some libertarians.

Do stop being ignorant and listen to other people's perspectives: A Plea for Public Property

You give me a defence of public property which even its proponent describes as "heretical" (nice word, suggesting that libertarianism is a faith rather than a political philosophy). His opening sentence is

Libertarians often assume that a free society will be one in which all (or nearly all) property is private.

I don't think I'm ignorant.

veritable

oceanclub wrote: »

The problem is, they pick fringe extremists as their candidates:

http://www.newsopi.com/politics/sharron-angle-black-jerseys-controversy-color-is-thoroughly-evil/3719/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/13/sharron-angle-suggests-us_n_681198.html
http://wonkette.com/417521/sharron-angle-is-a-founding-father-because-history-all-happens-at-once

P.

If you class "fringe extremists" as men and women who don't believe in a bureaucrat deciding how to tell them to live their lives?

You dont seriously believe what you read on those websites do you?