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Of course. We're the crazy ones, and yet you and everyone like you expect to be taken seriously when you ignore the inherent negative externalities in a system

Of course. We're the crazy ones, and yet you and everyone like you expect to be taken seriously when you ignore the inherent negative externalities in a system in which force is the sole pillar supporting it and distinguishing it from the alternatives? Few liberty minded people who wish to reduce the reach and scope of government have any in principle disagreement with the goals of most of the service providing branches of government, they just believe they could be far better handled by market entities directly accountable to economic forces for their performance rather than the political alternatives which fail to escape market forces entirely at any rate and just end up dumping their negative externalities on more productive sectors of the economy in the form of taxation. It's not that they don't want schools or fire departments, it's that they don't want people mugged on an epic scale to fund them. Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable, and that is far murkier territory when there are almost seven billion largely divergent ideas on what those ends ought to be. You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state. Some ends are only possible with the acceptability of certain means, and those ends are typically the ones people want to avoid like tyrannical police states. It's much easier to reach a consensus on means than ends, so do that and let the best ends win by competition amongst voluntary, enfranchised participants rather than slaves gradually falling into despair as they find that everything they believed in is a lie and there is no way out.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable Any means has to be weighed against the alternatives to decide whether it can be accepted. You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs without providing any effective alternative. "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor. > You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state. You do need force to run a fire department or a school. You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. That isn't any less a use of force than imposing the same penalty on someone who doesn't pay their taxes. The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes. But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. I never agreed that the gold in your vault or the land that you mined it from should belong to you and not me but you are still going to have to exclude me by force in order to exercise dominion over it. You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. The only way to avoid that is to somehow create a world in which everyone who refuses to work for existing owners of capital in lieu of pursuing their own interests will still be able to procure the necessities of life. We aren't there yet, so we have to pay taxes.
- etherael 13y ago
  > You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. The buyer pays no matter what, the provider doesn't have to take any notice of the level of satisfaction that the buyer has with the service. This is the root cause of government inefficiency, it is not "effective". > without providing any effective alternative If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives. > "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor. In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. This is completely false, in the absence of state environmental regulations there will still remain an enormous demand for pristine environments. Why are the contaminant levels in your local theme park well below the regulatory levels allowed in all cases? Because they have a vested interest in keeping that space maintained to an even higher level than the machinery of the state coerces them to, and so it goes for all agencies in similar positions. In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. That you'd call state education a success story defies belief. > You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? It's simply not good business to be a bad business, unless your customers don't have a choice on whether or not they pay your bills, like say state provided goods and services. Think of it in terms of Nash equilibriums, what is the stable state of a business that does not make good on its deals and cannot force new customers to patronise it? To go out of business. What is the stable state of the most efficient business in any given sector where customers are free to choose amongst all of the entities in that sector? To drive the profit margin toward zero, lower costs and increase quality. What is the stable state of an agency that is held accountable only by politics and is immune to the direct pressure of market forces resulting from poor performance? The agency with the best politicians wins, the performance of that agency is largely irrelevant except insofar as it is necessary to bolster the political goals of the agency in question. And that's what we end up with in all cases. > The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes Negative sir, that's a strawman. The argument I want to make is that taxes are an extremely inefficient way to actually fund the provision of goods and services, with all the concurrent effects you can assume from that. Providers that can only exist by extorting their customers should not exist, they should not be compelled to provide their sub par services for no return. > But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict. Or you could just try to actually provide value for your fellow humans in return for the things that you want and need in life. What is the path of least resistance? > You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this. As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival, and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them and would rather see them starve, freeze or die of disease. That is your sole remaining justification for the existence of the massively inefficient bureaucracy that forcibly confiscates many months of every year from the lives of the entire remaining productive populace. You'll excuse me if I'm not sold.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

>Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable Any means has to be weighed against the alternatives to decide whether it can be accepted. You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs without providing any effective alternative. "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor. > You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state. You do need force to run a fire department or a school. You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. That isn't any less a use of force than imposing the same penalty on someone who doesn't pay their taxes. The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes. But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. I never agreed that the gold in your vault or the land that you mined it from should belong to you and not me but you are still going to have to exclude me by force in order to exercise dominion over it. You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. The only way to avoid that is to somehow create a world in which everyone who refuses to work for existing owners of capital in lieu of pursuing their own interests will still be able to procure the necessities of life. We aren't there yet, so we have to pay taxes.

etherael 13y ago
> You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. The buyer pays no matter what, the provider doesn't have to take any notice of the level of satisfaction that the buyer has with the service. This is the root cause of government inefficiency, it is not "effective". > without providing any effective alternative If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives. > "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor. In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. This is completely false, in the absence of state environmental regulations there will still remain an enormous demand for pristine environments. Why are the contaminant levels in your local theme park well below the regulatory levels allowed in all cases? Because they have a vested interest in keeping that space maintained to an even higher level than the machinery of the state coerces them to, and so it goes for all agencies in similar positions. In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. That you'd call state education a success story defies belief. > You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? It's simply not good business to be a bad business, unless your customers don't have a choice on whether or not they pay your bills, like say state provided goods and services. Think of it in terms of Nash equilibriums, what is the stable state of a business that does not make good on its deals and cannot force new customers to patronise it? To go out of business. What is the stable state of the most efficient business in any given sector where customers are free to choose amongst all of the entities in that sector? To drive the profit margin toward zero, lower costs and increase quality. What is the stable state of an agency that is held accountable only by politics and is immune to the direct pressure of market forces resulting from poor performance? The agency with the best politicians wins, the performance of that agency is largely irrelevant except insofar as it is necessary to bolster the political goals of the agency in question. And that's what we end up with in all cases. > The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes Negative sir, that's a strawman. The argument I want to make is that taxes are an extremely inefficient way to actually fund the provision of goods and services, with all the concurrent effects you can assume from that. Providers that can only exist by extorting their customers should not exist, they should not be compelled to provide their sub par services for no return. > But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict. Or you could just try to actually provide value for your fellow humans in return for the things that you want and need in life. What is the path of least resistance? > You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this. As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival, and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them and would rather see them starve, freeze or die of disease. That is your sole remaining justification for the existence of the massively inefficient bureaucracy that forcibly confiscates many months of every year from the lives of the entire remaining productive populace. You'll excuse me if I'm not sold.