From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: The end of the Reagan Era
Organization: Texas Instruments Inc
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 03:59:23 GMT

In <1992Nov09.174449.1486@cpqhou.compaq.com> thomasr@cpqhou.compaq.com (Thomas Rush) writes:

>Oh, what a tangled web of attributions.  I'll try to shorten
>this response without killing sources.

>In article <1992Nov6.134927.26640@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>>In <1992Nov05.230556.24041@watson.ibm.com> johniac@austin.ibm.com (John Iacoletti/100000) writes:
>>
>>>The government doesn't use gas tax money to do anything about air 
>>>pollution.  
>>
>>What the government currently does is irrelevant to a discussion of
>>tax policy as a corrective action insofar as full costing goes.  The
>>government makes no effort to impose full costing via tax policy.
>>However, last time I checked the discussion was over hypothetical
>>changes, not over what we're doing now.

>Use a mirror, Fred.  "What the government currently does is
>irrelevant to a discussion of social policy as a corrective action
>insofar as full retirement benefits goes."

The situations can hardly be described as analogous.

>But you argure that we can't scrap SS, because "it's there."  Sigh.

Pardon me, but I said we should do away with Social Security some time
ago.  What I say we shouldn't do is simply chop off all those people
who are currently relying on it because they don't have the time to
change plans at this point in time (and hence we have to have income
from somewhere to enable us to continue to pay those benefits in the
short term).  I also don't buy this fallacy that the employee is
suddenly going to see the money that the employer has been
contributing to the system.

If the preceding is the sum total of what you've managed to get out of
what I've said, either I'm not writing what I think I am or you aren't
reading it.

>>>Are you talking about road maintenance?  
>>
>>In part.  Also about impacts on other economic choices from land use
>>for highways and roadways, the cost of injuries and deaths caused by
>>automobiles to society, the impact (cost) to others when one more
>>person elects to use roadways during a peak use period, and a number
>>of other things.  This isn't a great dark mystery.  The thing I find
>>funniest is that libertarians almost inevitably don't really
>>understand the concept because their whole philosophy ASSUMES that the
>>market is already imposing full costs on consumers.  If it doesn't,
>>then the market doesn't work in the nice perfect manner that it must
>>in order for libertarian claims about "free market forces" to work;
>>and unfortunately, the market DOESN'T impose such costs.  Hence
>>consumers make non-optimal choices on allocation of economic
>>resources, buying 'too much' of one thing and 'not enough' of another.

>What _I_ find funny is that you don't seem to understand libertarian
>positions, yet you have the nerve to tell us what we believe and
>what we understand.  That and the fact that you are arguing against
>some mythical group you have constructed and filed under the name
>"libertarians," (which coincidently happens to be the name of a
>political party in this country) instead of discussing the issues
>real people are raising.

I seem to understand you just fine, judging by what you go on to say.
It is also predictable, however, that anyone who tries to point out to
a libertarian how their pipe dreams won't work winds up being deluged
with personal insult, accused of being a thief, a socialist, etc.
Sure works to convince ME you're in the right.  Yep.

>To clear this up for you, the Libetarian Party believes that the
>initiation of force (either overtly or by fraud) is wrong.  We
>beilive that government interference in free markets, including tax
>policy, incentives, and regulation, are illegitimate uses of
>government authority.  It is because of those interferences that
>the current markets represent anything _but_ free markets.

Tell me something I don't know.  One more time, from the top.  The
'free markets' that libertarians extoll have their own distortions
because of externalities (both positive and negative) and the ability
of 'free riders' to benefit from the postive ones and for consumers to
foist the negative ones off on folks who don't get the benefit of
consuming the product.

>>Oh, one thing of note is that absolutely full costing is just about as
>>impossible to do as the 'perfect markets' that libertarians assume.
>>It is, however, an attempt to move in the right direction.  Hey,
>>nothing's perfect; not even a perfect stranger.

>We do not assume that today's markets are perfect markets.  If we
>did, we would be fighting to keep things just as they are.
>Instead, we know that the federal government, in particular, has
>created wildly _un_free markets, and we wish to eliminate that
>interference, while you seem to think that the same government that
>has screwed things up this well can straighten them out with just a
>little more regulation.

You seem to have missed my point, if you are under the impression that
I think that current markets behave as perfect markts and that that is
all there is to the point I'm trying to raise.  But you assume that
sans regulation, there will BE perfect markets.  That just won't
happen, which is why regulation and such arose in the first place.


-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.misc