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

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.There's no objective moral code, so it's foolish to try and get everyone to conform to the same lifestyle. Humans can come together to enhance each others lives without taxing each other. Taxation is essentially robbery. The government is coercively extracting funds from a population whom just happen to have been born on land this government claims (but doesn't use outside of taxation). How is it that a moral society can only be built on the pillars of theft and robbery? I'm surprised how brazen you are, asking for the obvious. I already gave you the freedomhouse link for a detailed synopsis.You mean the the link to that freedom-by-colour map? Is that supposed to mean anything? It says nothing about pre-collapse Somalia having more doctors, or wealth or anything of that sort because that sort of progress didn't occur until POST collapse Somalia. My point about Somalia is that it became better without a state. Not that it because the greatest place in the world to live, but that anarchism was an improvement. It saw several hundreds of percent worth of improvement in nearly every field regardless of the fact that every major political power wanted to establish governance, despite the fact that it is a powerhouse of fundamentalist Islam AND despite the fact that none of the Somalians where anarchists.In other words, the history of warfare is that might makes right, that the better-armed conquer the weak.Lets assume there is no government. Lets assume everyone in your town has a shotgun. Lets assume you have a tank. How are you going to go about establishing a state? Religion? Persons aren't so stupid anymore. Convince them you can do more for them with their money than they can? Good luck. Even the current government has trouble with that, and they have the advantage of forcing children into twelve years of compulsory "education" camps to indoctrinate them in the values of the state. =/Threaten them with your tank? You wouldn't even conquer one town. With no government to surrender to you, you'd have to conquer each individual. Best case scenario, you'd still have destroyed everything worth conquering.You mean developing nations.All nations are developing. Perhaps you find "third world" harsh, but I just don't care.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.Yeah.... except that's not true at all. Somalia was never better off than when the government collapsed. This is an unavoidable fact. I mean, there's just no way to twist this. Anarchic Somalia out preformed pre-collapse Somalia in just about every way imaginable. 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.This is just embarrassing... You're saying that because there was a (stable) government before the one that collapsed that didn't collapse, Somalia is better off with a state.The thing is, Somalia was NEVER better off than it was when it was state free. Since the antiquity of Somalia every government to rule over it couldn't hold a candle to quality of life provided in anarchic Somalia. Never had there been so much wealth per home, never had there been so many doctors per Somalian, etc. etc.The fact that the federal government collapsed only proves that the federal government was the worst form of government to ever rule over Somalia, not that the governments which preceded it were better than anarchic Somalia.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.Alright, first of all state intervention didn't make monopolies illegal, it just made them illegal for everyone but the government. Which is rather ironic as monopolies don't happen without government intervention in the first place.Granted, the conditions of the industrial revolution weren't up to par with our standards, but it was clearly a step up from what preceded it.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZImO9O-Xkqw When you point towards the past you've got to consider what it is you're looking at relative to what came before it. 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.... I'm not quite sure what to say to this. You've already admitted these companies lined the pockets of the government for special advantages on the market. This should be the end of the debate right here. That's it. They used their wealth to buy government favours. Without the government, this couldn't happen. They didn't meet market demand so they should have failed, but they didn't because the government granted them special advantages. The government is the greatest threat to the market. It's (the market) unable to regulate itself while the government continues to artificially manufacture it to meet the states needs.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.You still haven't clarified at what level your talking about. Are you talking about retail? Don't retail workers have standards? Are you talking about miners? What is this "level" of worker you're referring to?Workers put up with a lot before quitting, perhaps. It depends on the worker. But, workers don't have an infinite threshold for abuse. A manager can only screw his employees so much before they quit.It's a simple thought experiment. Pretend you live in a free market. Pretend you open up a business. Now, which makes more sense to you; treating your employees well so they work productively and therefore have a higher rate of persons looking to be employed by you... or cut corners and provide poor working conditions in order to save a few bucks?Any good employer knows providing good working conditions results in more revenue than what spare change you could possibly save screwing your own employees.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.Lol. You're describing government. XDAnd from where are is this wealth coming from? Did you forget about that part? If a company goes against market demand, they pay for it via a loss in revenue.If persons fear a company is getting too big, they opt out and pay for another service. If a company starts provided a lesser service, they opt out and pay for another service. If a company begins to militarize, they opt out and pay for another service. Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. Are you beginning to understand yet? It doesn't matter if a company amasses billions of dollars because it can only accomplish that by providing the best service and it can only maintain that profit by continuing to do so. Any deviation from market demand done by a company will result in a loss of revenue. The media making me look like a "villain" doesn't mean much, especially now with the internet making it so that anyone can stream information just as well as anyone else.It actually does.It takes a special kind of ignorance to make such a claim.... =_=Lets follow the logic. Some persons want to give money to the poor, so they pool a donation and donate it. Fine, nothing wrong with that.Government sees that some persons want to give money to the poor, so they get these persons to allow them full control over their charity by promising they will force everyone to give to the charity (while taking a slice of the pie for themselves, of course).Now you have persons fighting with each other over which is more important, ones right to their own money or providing for the poor. Also, now that more money is being taken, more persons are in need of money, so they end up on welfare anyway.This results in a greater welfare demand, which means more government control.This is how the government operates. It takes over things persons already want done in order to make us dependent on them. There's no need to give the government our charity money when we can just give it to the poor ourselves.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.Government monopolized Education because there was a strong demand for education. The government didn't invent the demand, it merely took advantage of it.Illiteracy rates would have dropped with or without government intervention because of this and private school students have and still do out-preform their public school counterparts in the academics. Governments have separated church and state because they've seen that religion is a sinking ship and in order to remain in power they had to sever their ties to it. Company roads are not bound by standards, expected source materials, and so on.Company roads are bound by the same standards as public roads, perhaps even more so. They are bound by market demand and when you have many companies competing for customers you must offer a higher quality product than your competition or face bankruptcy.Government healthcare in Europe has raised the life expectancy in those countries and has made the costs cheaper than what we have now.The demand for new medicines exist independent of the state. If persons want better health care, then naturally, that's were the money will go.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.So because we have foresight we need government? Are persons unable to plan ahead for themselves? It doesn't matter because the government is also composed of persons. The only difference is the governments first interest is in itself, not us.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.I said robbery but whatever, taxation IS theft by definition as well. theft [θɛft]n1. (Law) The taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possessionTaxation is an example of this. Unless you have some weird definition of theft, you are wrong.Also worth noting, I've never said anything even remotely close to wanting a state of people whom think like me. If they truly thought like me, they wouldn't be politicians in the first place.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.A company can only hire thugs to beat striking employees so long as it still has money. If it's not producing anything (since it's workers are on strike) and it's spending all it's money on thugs to beat it's striking employees, it's bound to fall behind it's competition. Especially when word gets out to this companies customers.Monopolies are not good. This is a fact.Well, technically this is opinion as monopolies are good for those who have them.The argument is not about society collapsing, but about practices that unregulated businesses take to stifle innovation.Every software company is constantly working on their next big product. It's constant innovation, so much so that as soon as you've bought a computer it's already obsolete. So what if PCs and Macs aren't compatible. Saying that unregulated capitalism leads to a lack of innovation is just stupid. And using this as an argument for the state is doubly stupid as the state does nothing about this anyway.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.This is a lot like saying "sure, the Austrian school is more accurate than any other school of economics, but they're still wrong because I say so".They're able to make these accurate market trends because they know exactly how government fucks up the economy. They're more accurate than any other economist AND they're in support of free markets. Does this tell you nothing? It's not as though their predictions are separate from their views on the state. It's because they see the state for what it is that they can be so accurate.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.When did I say anything about redistributing wealth? If anything, without a state everyone's incomes will cluster closer together as there won't be taxes, which means there won't be different taxes for different persons. There will be no way for companies to enact barriers to entry so they won't be able to cripple the efforts of smaller businesses. There's just no reason backing your claim. 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.When you manually redistribute wealth you aren't making things more fair for everyone. You're doing just the opposite as now persons deserving of a high income are being dragged down and persons deserving of a low income are being propped up. Schools would exist with or without a state, this is clear because even with public schools there are still private schools in existence. These schools are both less expensive and provide a better education on the aggregate.Good working conditions are a market demand. Those supplying this demand the best will be able to expand more efficiently because they have more persons willing to work for them.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."Well, historically the less government intervention the better off a nation is. Since a government is backed by taxation the lack of this will result in a more productive economy.Reality begs to differ.And in what reality do you live in where fighting each other over how we get to spend our own money is more productive then simply spending the money on whatever it is we already want?