(This is Part I of III of the conclusion to a crazy debate on political philosophy. For the back-story to what follows, jump back to Factual Politics)
1. Being Logically Challenged
Benjamin said... Politics is force.
Politics is the regulation of force. Absent government, force is unregulated, and anyone can kill or rob or hurt or intimidate anyone they please. Government exists for the purpose of regulating when force will be used, on whom, why, and how. And in the best solution the people democratically decide these things so that each person will have an equal say. The only logical alternative is to give some people more say than others (by giving some people no vote, or counting some people's vote multiple times), and since that alternative can be ruled out as consistently less fair and more disastrous (it always violates someone's liberty more than the alternative), you are left, by process of elimination, with democracy as the only logically available option.
Cooperative Self Defense
Benjamin said... Only an individual is capable of action, and therefore only an individual can legitimately act in self-defense.
Societies are just collections of individuals. When ten guys with guns are coming after ten other guys, it makes no sense for the latter ten to act as individuals. They have a common interest to work together to defend their individual rights. To claim otherwise is simply retarded. And when ten guys with guns come after you, if you expect no one to come to your aid, because "only an individual can legitimately act in self-defense," you'll just be screwed. Darwinism will then eliminate your harebrained political ideology from the arena of debate.
Benjamin said... When you get rid of the gun in the room, people do cooperate and live much more peacefully because there's an incentive to.
But you can't. We can't vaporize all the world's guns. And even if we did, people will have sticks. Take those away, and they'll still have fists. Reality is, there are irrational people, psychopathic people, and ignorant people (and whole nations likewise), and whether with guns, sticks, or fists, they will use force upon you. Unless you stop them. Yet you alone can't stop them. There are far too many. They outnumber you millions to one. Government is therefore the necessity of organizing with your neighbors to defend yourself against them. It's the only means of evening the odds.
Politics is the science of calculating how best to use government to regulate the use of force to exactly that end. And just as it would be in any free market, to gain the cooperation of your neighbors, you have to cut deals with them. You need them to back your play to fend off vandals, looters, murderers, polluters; they need roads and hospitals. You counter-offer, let's say, with fewer roads, and emergency rooms instead of whole hospitals. They accept. You make the trade. And they defend you when the wolves come. That's government. There is no substitute.
Richard Carrier said... [Your theory] simply makes no sense. If the solution is to persuade people to make the right choices, then that's what you should be advocating. The solution is thus not privatization or the abolition of government. The solution is better government, i.e. voters making better choices. In short, abolishing government will not cause people to make better choices. Thus it can't in any way be the solution to our problems.
Benjamin said... Politics is the initiation of force. I advocate the philosophy of liberty. Privatization and the abolition of government are natural consequences.
Why We Need Public Schools
Benjamin said... [Regarding the need for public education] just listen to your statist language: "when given no resources." As if people are these things that have to be given stuff. No, people create stuff on their own, and government steals from them and redistributes it.
A school involves a vast outlay of resources (teachers, who in turn have to be educated, as well as housed and fed; plus janitors; builders and buildings; printers and books; bus drivers and buses; electricity and water; et al.). You can't just knit socks out of your own hair to get those resources. In plain dollar terms, the average American family of four cannot afford $20,000 a year to pay for their kids' education (that's the minimum cost of education in this country, public or private). Hence they depend on the wealthy, who have far more than they need, to subsidize the poor, who need what they can't afford. That's simply reality. The only question is how we, as a community, choose to deal with that reality.
The same goes for the maintenance of a community free of crime, vandalism, pollution, and all the other things that make economic success and human happiness possible. Wealth cannot be accumulated without depending on these community goods, these community efforts to create a healthy and prosperous environment. Therefore the accumulation of wealth entails the accumulation of a debt to the community that made that wealth possible. That debt is paid and collected in the form of taxes. Just as we would negotiate a price to trade with a neighbor for lumber to build our house, we must negotiate a price to trade with our neighbors for access to all these community goods that make our economic success possible. That negotiated price is the tax you pay.
And just as you might not like the price your neighbor forces you to pay for a flat of lumber, and you don't really get to choose that price (she does...you only get to try to persuade her to come down), yet nevertheless you have to pay it because there is no other way (short of stealing it) that you can get the lumber you need, so, too, you might not like the price your community forces you to pay for the enjoyment of a peaceful, clean, productive social and physical environment, and you don't really get to choose that price (the majority does...you only get to try to persuade them to come down), yet nevertheless you have to pay it because there is no other way (short of stealing them) that you can make use of them.
Banning Chemicals
Benjamin said... I work for a pest control company and we recently had to discontinue our goefer service because one of the chemicals that we use to kill them was banned by the government. It got banned because some idiot in another state ended up killing 2 children in a nearby home by not following safety precautions. He used over 10 times the correct dosage within 10 feet of a home - both of which are advised against. Does that mean that the product should have been banned?
You implicitly know this, since you carefully crafted your tall tale to avoid the obvious objections to your argument: if the chemical concerned caused thousands of human birth defects from pedestrians merely frequenting areas where it is used (as Dursban does), then you'd have no argument left, would you? Yet it is precisely such threats that we need a government to protect us from.
It's one thing to say government should let you use dangerous chemicals safely and responsibly (I agree it should and would vote with you on that), but wholly another to say we should let you use any chemical you want in any way you want. And only government can keep you or anyone else from using (for example) Dursban in public or residential areas, poisoning thousands of babies. Thus your case for anarchy is illogical.
2. Being Factually Challenged
Quality in Public Schools
Benjamin said... [Public schools should all be privatized because] of all of the students [nationwide] who entered 1st grade 12 years ago, about 70% of them are going to graduate this year. By school's own metrics, that's like a C-.
Did Clinton Balance the Budget?
Benjamin said... You might want to check your "knowledge" of history. ... [Bill Clinton didn't balance the budget.] In fact, during the height of the budget wars in the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration admitted that "balancing the budget is not one of our top priorities." Just Google it to find out more.
That's false. That quote is from 1993, not 1995. This is a stark example of how disastrously you make no effort to check your facts. You apparently just believe whatever conservative blowhards tell you. Start with Clinton's speech on June 13, 1995 (I trust you can find it without any help from me). That was the actual Clinton administration's position in summer of 1995.
As to what Labor Secretary Robert Reich said on 1993 (that's who you are quoting, not Clinton), you should go look at the actual context: first, Clinton had just taken office and Reich had just been appointed and was asked what his priorities would be; he did not say balancing the budget wasn't one of them, only that he had other things he believed more important to deal with first; second, Clinton came around to the balanced budget concept in 1994, a year later, so what his new appointee said in 1993 can hardly represent the administration's position in 1994, much less 1995 when balanced budget efforts actually began.
Indeed, Clinton canned Reich precisely because he didn't agree with making this top priority. Reich believed it was more important to close the widening gap between rich and poor. After Clinton fired Reich, the budget was subsequently balanced, and the state was even generating a surplus before Bush took power.
Immigration Law
Benjamin said... Immigration is only a concern because of governments. In a free world, what difference would it make if I lived in Mexico?
No one cares if you move to Mexico. That you think that's the "problem" proves you are completely out of touch with reality and don't even understand what the problem is that necessitates an immigration policy. The public and economic danger of millions of impoverished Mexicans moving en masse into our cities is the problem. Terrorists and criminals smuggling bombs, poisons, and themselves into our communities is the problem. Criminals running from the law by skipping the country is the problem.
Immigration is only a concern because of huge economic disparities, and disparities in education, moral values, and cultural assumptions, and the incongruity between population densities and the availability and distributability of resources, as well as acts of war against us by criminals and foreign enemies. Governments had to be created to deal with all these threats, disparities, and incongruities. If you got rid of governments, these threats, disparities, and incongruities will still remain, and thus return to smack you in the face.
TARP and Taxes
Benjamin said... Bush signed a $700 billion financial bailout bill, Obama signed a bailout too.
This is the cost of not checking your facts or understanding their context: the cost of TARP was not $700 billion, as most of that number was either never spent or has actually been repaid, in some cases already with a profit. That is largely Obama's doing, not Bush's: Bush didn't structure the payouts so that we'd get most of the money back; Obama did (we've already gotten nearly all of it back); Bush didn't give any oversight structure to how the money was spent; Obama did. That's the difference between good government and bad: the same TARP bill under Obama was competently managed, which under Bush was incompetently managed. Thus the solution to bad government is better government.
The actual effects of TARP were both necessary and wise (even if it wasn't perfectly managed, it still worked, and was still needed). But to understand that you'd have to actually understand what happened to the economy in 2008 and what TARP actually did and why, and from what I've seen so far, I doubt you do. I'll return to this point later.
Benjamin said... Bush signed a $152 billion stimulus package.
This is a laughable example of ignorance being a dangerous thing in the hands of a voter. That bill consisted entirely of tax cuts. Are you now saying you disagree with government cutting taxes? I actually agree (at this point in time taxes should in fact be raised--we should never be cutting taxes when we're at war), but somehow I doubt that's what you meant to be arguing here. Evidently you ignorantly thought "stimulus" meant "spending" when in fact, as in this case, it did not involve any spending whatever, but a $152 billion reduction in taxes.
The National Debt
Benjamin said... And the national debt will never be paid, I can guarantee that.
It wouldn't matter if it were. If you know anything about finance, debts can be eternal without significant effect on an economy--e.g. every corporation on earth prospers specifically because it remains in perpetual debt; in fact all trade depends on permanent revolving credit, without which we would have no market in anything.
As to whether our national debt will be paid down, that depends on whether, as with all private companies, we continue recycling the debt (taking out new loans as old ones are paid off). Otherwise the debt will be paid off, because it is legally mandatory, e.g. bonds last a fixed number of years, at which point they must be paid down. For instance, a five year bond (held by, say, the Chinese government) requires the U.S. to pay a fixed amount in five years, i.e. that five year bond must be paid off (completely) when it expires. The amount the U.S. pays to the bondholder is the amount the bondholder gave the U.S. plus five years interest. All bonds have a fixed expiration (ten, twenty, and thirty year bonds are typical).
You should also be aware that a lot of our debt is actually owed to ourselves, e.g. over $1 trillion of the national debt is owed to social security, i.e. we actually had that money (it wasn't borrowed, it was sitting in government coffers), but congress decided to "use" that money for other things (mostly war and military spending--by far most of what our money is spent on apart from social security), but by law it can't do that without promising to put that money back with interest (i.e. the interest that that money would have earned just sitting in the bank, as it normally had been).
Thus that money isn't really owed to anyone but the American people, and it will necessarily be paid off, since that's money earmarked already for social security checks in the future, which the government is legally required to pay. But since it was going to pay them out anyway, the actual net loss is zero relative to our country's budget obligations (i.e. we'd be paying that money even if we'd never borrowed it; borrowing it only made it harder to pay, since obviously, had we left it there, we wouldn't have had to come up with it elsewhere, as we'll now have to do). Likewise, the interest we are paying on that $1 trillion of our national debt is being paid to social security, and thus is not a net loss to the state, but just the shuffling of money from one public account to another.
Obama Care
Benjamin said... But even worse, [the health care act] has a mandate that insurance companies have to accept those with preconditions. That means that people won't pay for insurance until they have conditions, which would then drive the cost of insurance up because the whole point of insurance has been defeated!
That's not true. Pre-existing conditions do not entail greater costs than inputs. That's why excluding such people was unjust (not everyone with a pre-existing condition has medical bills at all, much less catastrophic ones). And even when they do cause greater costs than inputs, that's in fact exactly the whole point of insurance: a thousand people pay $100 so the person who gets hit with a $100,000 bill doesn't go bankrupt. Every one of the thousand gets the same insurance against bankruptcy, which is why they pay the $100. It doesn't matter if that bill came due beforehand. As long as a thousand people pay $100, the $100,000 bill is covered, whether it came due before or after the agreement was entered.
Even from the perspective of profits to the insurance company, the company need only add a premium, say $10, and everyone pays $110 to pay the $100,000 bill and the insurance company makes a profit of $10,000 on that bill. Thus it makes its profit regardless of when the $100,000 bill came due. Indeed it makes exactly the same profit either way. As long as the thousand people pay the $110. And that's why the mandate is required: insurance companies will lose no money at all accepting the previously sick as long as everyone (including the well) is paying their premiums.
Ultimately, though, its merit will be decided on whether it is too onerous on taxpayers. But even if it is it will simply get refined to the level the community agrees is the best balance between cost and benefits: the amount they are willing to pay, for the amount (of care) they are willing to receive. Just as in the private market. Only now everything will be cheaper: because everyone is paying premiums, and because the market will have a uniform infrastructure (greatly reducing the economic redundancies now plaguing the system) and will have outcomes-based pricing (instead of pricing based on number of procedures), and because cost-increasing abuses by medical providers (and consumers, in the form of fraud) will be policed by the Federal government.
The Wild, Wild West
Benjamin said... For a historical example of an approximation of a free market, and for a glimpse of the principles by which it operates and how it could work today I highly recommend you read "The not so Wild, Wild, West - Property Rights on the Frontier" which describes the period of American western expansion and how society functioned.
And I agree with its thesis: federal government shouldn't meddle in local affairs unless it has to (to uphold the Constitution, for example, e.g. to defend your rights). The federal government should concern itself with universal and nationwide issues, exactly as the Constitution establishes it should. But that still leaves us with state and municipal governments, not anarchy.
Economics Is Not So Simple
Benjamin said... You see, in a free market resources are allocated according to supply and demand. When demand goes up, so do prices based on how much demand there is.
The logical conclusion should be that the severe harm that is caused to all of us by deregulated markets compels us by right to protect ourselves from the assaults on our liberties caused by crashes and other systemic disasters and frauds. But that becomes a debate over what actual imperative follows from the facts. You first have to get straight what those facts are. And knowing how markets actually work is one of the most important of all facts to get straight.
Benjamin said... I don't fathom how you figure [inflation] has been under control for twenty years, except through some extreme ignorance of economics (i.e. Keynesianism). ... Under the gold standard, high levels of inflation are rare and hyperinflation is impossible as the money supply can only grow at the rate that the gold supply increases.
This is again why arguing with you is a waste of time. You don't even pay attention to what I say or check the documents I specifically direct you to, but instead go on claiming that what is false is true even though I conclusively proved to you it was false.
Continue to Part II
