Debate: Free-Market Police: Better or Worse?
Side: Much, much worse...

And why not? The peasants of the middle ages thought there would always be a monarchy. We built our way out of that. Perhaps it will take time, but it's inevitable. Generation after generation, mankind has and is becoming more intelligent. We've working our way out of religion, the same can happen with the state.Humans are hierarchical creatures. We live in groups and this gives us a sense of communal morality. Creatures that lack this, and live alone without hierarchy and only meet to mate lack social intelligence and indeed any morality as we might know it. By stimulating humanity to evolve away from community into independent, single-person lifestyles morality must consequently evolve with it, until it vaguely resembles other creatures in the world who have this lifestyle.Show me some statistics backing up your claim.I'm surprised how brazen you are, asking for the obvious. I already gave you the freedomhouse link for a detailed synopsis.Perhaps you can have more firepower compared to your neighbor, but not all your neighbors. The old school fire-fighting method was everyone in town helps put out a fire. If someone didn't, they just didn't get any help if their property caught fire.Tankhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T-55_skos_RB.jpg VSArmshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M16A1_brimob.jpg In other words, the history of warfare is that might makes right, that the better-armed conquer the weak.Third world countries have governments and armies too, so that can't be it. You mean developing nations. They have government, police, and armies and most (IE those with functioning government, armies, and police) have relatively stable environments to live. When coups and anarchy takes over, then you have a place like Somalia, the picture of violent Africa.Why are you being so obtuse on this point? Post-collapse Somalia was a much more habitable place, so whatever it was that happened post-collapse was better than the government that existed pre-collapse.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Post-World_War_II I suggest you read this. An oppressive government formed by imperialists was eventually toppled, this is what gave way to anarchy but in this government before the late seventies it was stable and there were not factions constantly making war with each other.Quite frankly, you're stupid on this matter. You're so desperate for vindication of your ideals that you are defending an intermittent warzone as habitable. Quit looking at out-of-context data.Which they can only due by appealing to the state...Are you really this dense? Industrial Revolution. No regulations, a free market. Monopolies formed over critical goods (oil and transit). The consumers were locked into a position to demand goods from them. State intervention was required to make monopolies illegal.An analogy. Would it make much sense to get mad at a dog for chasing a squirrel? It's their nature, it's only to be expected. What happened:Companies advertised more than they could sell.Demand for bandwidth increased so as to crack their facade.They used their wealth which is greater than individual consumer and activist groups' wealth to buy state intervention on their behalf.Ergo capitalism undermined democracy, the wealthy having more say than the majority, because of disproportionate wealth.Regardless, there is an expected quality of working conditions demanded by the public. If they are not met (or at least not well) then the employer suffers from not being able to expand quite as well as his more generous counter-part.Which doesn't happen because:The thing is, employee labour at this level is expendable so it's always a matter of finding an unemployed person to fit the job.This happened a lot many decades ago.You also forget that workers put up with a lot before quitting.I don't know about you, but I don't much like the idea of persons breaking into my home and beating me. If I heard of a company that has done this, you can be sure wouldn't do business with them.Also, I'd hire a local police agency to watch my home in order to prevent this.You make what, 40000$ annually? The media companies rake in billions annually.This means that they can afford to make you look like a villain, and they can afford to keep your story from receiving air-time in the media. It also means that they could afford to run their own police force and offer it as a service to communities, eventually out-competing them because of the billions of dollars flowing in as revenue, so that when you buy police service what happens is that they obey their higher-up masters over your paycheck.That is how capitalism works.Did I mention that you can't complain to anyone over this, because now the media companies have their own private police force, and the only way to discipline them now is through warfare. Better hire some tanks and marines to storm their headquarters.Ha! Because it works sooo much better now! =3It actually does.No, private schools are much less expensive than their public counterparts. Companies can build roads just as well as governments and government health-care is a joke. Historically it was public schools that brought illiteracy rates down from about 20% of the population to less than 1%. They also increased understanding of maths and literature and history overall. Private schools are not bound by church-state separation so it is public schools that are secularising America into what we see today.Company roads are not bound by standards, expected source materials, and so on.Government healthcare in Europe has raised the life expectancy in those countries and has made the costs cheaper than what we have now.No, I got it. It's just, once again it didn't follow. Demand for super veggies and grasses emerged and the supply emerged from that. There is no foresight in evolution. They only kept picking the best seeds for the next planting, the best dogs for the next breeding, etc.It's juvenile to not want to be robbed? And you say you're an ethical man? =/Is it wrong to want what you earn to actually be yours? This is a particularly weak argument, even for a statist... =/Taxes are not theft, by definition. You're just defending greed, and of course we all know how a state run by those who think like you looks like: see the Industrial revolution and modern developing nations with no regulations on work safety and pay.What's the worst that a company can do to it's striking employees and still survive? Higher strikebreakers. If these strikebreakers have no problem with the working conditions, then the original workers were just being whiny. If the strikebreakers don't approve of the working conditions either, then the company has a problem and must change to meet market demand or they will go bankrupt.In the past, a century ago, the answer was "hire police to beat the union organisers and strikers, or kill/incarcerate the leader of the union." This is because unions were illegal....okay, so? What you're saying sounds rather Libertarian right now. Monopolies are not good. This is a fact.Society won't collapse without all-in-one media players. If there was a high enough demand for such a thing, it would come into existence because a supplier would see money in it for himself.The argument is not about society collapsing, but about practices that unregulated businesses take to stifle innovation.Ha! Then you really DO know nothing of the Austrian School of economics. Actually, I know that they propose free market, lassez-faire as it was called.Which is of course a wrong policy, as history shows us. Remember what I said earlier? In science a theory must conform to data and make predictions about the data. So even if they are fairly accurate at predicting market trends, they still have ignored the data which indicates that a free market is not socially viable.Then you read them with statist prejudice. I read them with reality-tinted goggles.I find this a particularity strange accusation as my main concern has always been on taxing the poor. =/I'm not saying we need no taxes for the rich, I'm saying simply "no taxes". Period.A taxless government is not a government at all.This is an example of the naive idealism I was talking about in my prior post. No redistribution of wealth just leads to sharp divides between the rich and the poor.You don't need to be taxed in order to have a comfortable job.Fine I'll simplify for you. A society that redistributes wealth appropriately (and has minimum work conditions) lowers the class divides and has fewer social problems stemming from this, while more people can work in comfortable jobs since the minimum work conditions prevent sweatshops and the taxes pay for social programs like public schools which let children have more education and avoid being forced into skill-jobs.It lacked any state. There was no taxation. Do you understand? Leaders will naturally emerge regardless of a state, actually finding leaders is better without a state because then to be a leader you must emerge based on your own merits rather than sorta-kinda being voted in. I'm not opposed to rules or leaders. I'm opposed to taxation. All I'm reading from you is: "It lacked taxation! It was better because of this, therefore however it was run was better because it had no taxes. Our system, however it is run, is bad because of taxes."There's no need to pool all our money together just so we can fight each other over what it's going to be spent on when we can just directly pay for whatever it is we want ourselves.Reality begs to differ.