Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!MC.LCS.MIT.EDU!kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu From: kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU Newsgroups: mod.politics Subject: Re: Welfare, gun control, and philosophy (long) Message-ID: <12229554724.51.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Sat, 9-Aug-86 21:10:31 EDT Article-I.D.: RED.12229554724.51.MCGREW Posted: Sat Aug 9 21:10:31 1986 Date-Received: Sun, 10-Aug-86 03:47:36 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 475 Approved: poli-sci@red.rutgers.edu From: Steve Walton Anecdotes are a poor basis for public policy. Whenever I use statistics, people reply with anecdotes. So I thought I would try anecdotes. There are plenty more where that one came from. For every time a gun is used by a private citizen to prevent a crime, there are 4 suicides and 10 murders committed with guns by the owner of that gun. I have seen this before, and I thought it had been given a decent burial. It seems bogus statistics always come back to haunt us. Do you claim that it is not a fact? Yes! What do you think the paragraphs after that one were for? 1) A person who was considering a life of crime decides otherwise when he realizes how many people are armed. If he would have committed a burglary per week for 50 years, that is over 2,500 crimes prevented with guns. And how many of those do you count? Zero. Talk about bogus statistics! If you're going to count hypothetical crimes not committed as the result of private gun ownership, you also have to count hypothetical murders not committed as a result of the ban of said ownership. But you WERE counting those murders. Since ownership is NOT banned, they are NOT hypothetical. What sort of crime is EVER not committed except a hypothetical one? If it wasn't hypothetical, then it WAS committed. The purpose of handguns is not to blow away burglars caught in the act. Deterrence is far more important. But you don't count it at all. You only count crimes that handguns FAILED to deter as being prevented! Crimes that weren't prevented at all, only interrupted. The fact that a thing can be abused is no excuse to ban it for everyone else. concealed. How do you feel about private ownership of ... Atomic weapons? At last, a substantive argument. I wish I had a good answer to that. I don't. Nuclear weapons have NO legitimate uses. All I can say is that it is slightly unfair to use the existance of nuclear weapons as an argument against libertarianism when the weapons have been produced only by governments for use against other governments. If most major nations had been libertarian at the time, nuclear weapons would never have been invented. They have no possible use and are very expensive. I really have nothing to say in defense of private ownership of nuclear weapons except that government ownership leaves me just as uneasy. They are difficult and expensive to build. For that reason, only a few governments have them. If private ownership were allowed, few if any companies or individuals would be able to afford the damn things. Those that would be able to would hopefully have enough sense to see that there is no point in doing so. Unfortunately it looks like the cost of nuclear weapons is coming down as technology advances and as the world becomes a wealthier place. This would make private ownership - whether it is legal or not - more likely. It also makes ownership by more and more governments virtually inevitable. I wish I had an answer. I don't. All I can say is that libertarianism is not the problem, will not add to the problem, and will not solve the problem. Vernor Vinge has written a few stories set in an ultra-technological libertarian future. Some individuals in these stories own whole nuclear arsenals, starships, SDI systems, etc. Not that they are especially wealthy, but that technology is very advanced. Great fun to read. And what about starships? I am sure they will exist someday. Will they be privately owned, or government owned? Either way, they will be very dangerous. A large spacecraft traveling at a significant percent of the speed of light would do enormous damage if it were to crash into the Earth. Even large interplanetary liners capable of carrying a few hundred people to another planet in a few days or weeks would be much more destructive that a nuclear bomb if it were to crash into the ground. I don't have any good solution. I don't know of anyone who does. One possibility is that the owner of a device be required to post bond equal in value to the most destruction that device could cause. If that were to be done, obviously nobody could afford to post bond for nuclear bombs. Most people wouldn't be able to post bond for cars, however. On second thought, maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. :-) If someone steals your car and runs over someone, are you responsible? A lot more people are killed by cars than by guns! True, but cars are not DESIGNED to kill people. Handguns are. So? You might as well say handguns are DESIGNED to deter crime, and cars aren't. Guns can be used for a lot of things besides killing people. For instance killing animals, shooting a person to wound rather than to kill, capturing crooks, target practice, skeet shooting, gun collecting, etc, etc. Regardless of what guns or cars are DESIGNED for, it is a fact that a lot more people are killed by cars than by guns. Even if you include justified killing with guns (i.e. self defense). Should it be illegal to drive drugged at all? Or should you only be penalized if you actually injure people or property while doing so? I can see it either way. What I *CANNOT* see is forbidding 20 year olds from drinking on the grounds that they might drive. Should a 20 year old who drinks moderately and doesn't drive at all be imprisoned? At the 7-11 there is a sign saying they will not sell alcoholic beverages to anyone who does not show them a drivers license, no matter how old they look. Seems to be they have it exactly backwards! I don't favor mandatory sentence laws. Room must be left for the judgement of the judge and the jury. What we need is more common sense on the part of judges and juries. We agree here. How do you reach this desirable goal? I have no idea. I could say 'better education' but that begs the question. Why do you automatically assume that such a law would have to be a federal law rather than a state law? Because if certain states had more lenient penalties than others, people would move to those states to commit crimes. Well, then those states with the higher crime rate would be motivated to enact similar laws. You could reason the same way about countries and conclude that all nations should have identical laws. This is bogus accounting. They don't have a surplus unless it is possible to end the social security tax and to continue to give social security benefits to everyone who ever contributed, equal to at least the amount (plus inflation) that they contributed. That's like saying that IBM is one billion dollars in the red (or whatever), because they could not meet that much of their outstanding obligations if they stopped selling any computers. Yep, it is like saying that. I doubt IBM is in the red. I know *I* am not, nor is the company I work for. The SS taxes now being paid are more than the retirees of the next 30 years will require; the amount of the excess is projected to be 10 trillion (yes, a 1 with 12 zeroes after it) by 2010. I think inflation is about nine percent (yes, I know the government says otherwise). If it continues, 10 trillion dollars in 2010 is only about 1 trillion dollars today (or 100 billion in 1960). Even so, that is a lot of money. What do they plan to invest it in? And why not simply reduce the tax instead? Ten trillion is a 1 with THIRTEEN zeros after it, not twelve. Which doesn't change the fact that the plight of the poor in Dickens's London was not improved much by voluntary charity. The world was simply not a very wealthy place at the time. Productivity is enormously greater now than in the 1850s. The majority would have had to have been poor at the time no matter what. They were better off in the cities than in the countryside, however. Otherwise they would have stayed on the farm. But you will find few books and probably no TV programs showing the poor in the city as being anything but downtrodden, exploited, and oppressed, or showing the poor in the countryside as being anything but happy and healthy. Consider "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prarie". Why no "Little Rowhouse in the Slums"? Aren't city folk allowed to be happy in their poverty? I was hoping for non-fiction. I have read "The Moon is..." and "Atlas Shrugged." The former was not set in the US of today; it is doubtful that the latter was, ... The latter was. At least at the time it was written. The former was set on a Moon colony of Earth, a plausible and not too distant future. Ayn Rand has written a lot more nonfiction than fiction. Most of it still in print, too. Check out the philosophy section of any good library or bookstore. The classic example of a public good is national defense. Everyone who lives in the US benefits from its existence, even if they contribute nothing to it. Thus, every individual would decide to contribute nothing to national defense, because he gets its benefits whether he does or not. Result: no defense. How do you explain the billions voluntarily donated to various charities every year? And how did the Statue of Liberty get restored? Surely everyone reasoned that it would get restored whether or not they personally contributed, right? Moreover, in the current age of atomic weapons, it is clearly unreasonable to expect a completely voluntary military ... Why? Voluntary has two meanings here. In this context it is usually meant to distinguish from a drafted military. I think you are using it to designate an unpaid self-supplied force, like George Washington's army mostly was. Well, I definitely oppose the draft. I do not think it is necessary for military forces to be unpaid and self-supplied, however. They would be paid by the government. The difference from the present system is in how the government would get the money to pay them. A few things would change. We would not have a standing army in Europe. There would be more reliance on reserves than on a large peacetime military. We would have 100 or fewer nuclear weapons rather than ten thousand. There would be far less waste, fraud, and abuse, and fewer billion dollar boondoggles like the recently cancelled DIVAD. (Some argue that welfare is a public good; I'm not so sure.) By your definition, it clearly is not. Welfare benefits individuals, thus it is a private good. Do libertarians deny the existence of public goods? If yes, they had better have some damn good ideas about how to defend us from Soviet ICBM's in the absence of mandatory taxes for national defense. Do you have some damn good ideas on how to defend us from Soviet ICBMs in the *PRESENCE* of mandatory taxes for national defense? ... if property rights are defined in such a way that you are allowed to build a factory on any property you own, your neighbors should be willing to pay you not to pollute. You have the right to build a factory on your property, since it is your property. But that does not imply a right to pollute your neighbor's property, which does indeed include the air on the property. If, on the other hand, they are defined so that your property right includes clean air above your property, They are. then the factory builder should be willing to pay you to allow him to pollute or, equivalently, pay for pollution control devices out of his own pocket. Exactly. The practical difficulty arises when one person's use of her property causes harm to others who are either very distant, or causes harm far in excess of her ability to compensate for such harm. Why 'her'? 'Him' is standard english for a person of unspecified sex. She should not cause damage that she doesn't pay for, regardless of the distance. Acid rain is a good example. It is generated by Midwest coal-burning power plants and mills. It harms a wide area, including killing of fish and damage to potentially harvestable timber. If the power plant owners have to pay for this damage, who do they pay, and how is it divided up? They pay the owners of the resources they destroy, of course. What if they cannot possibly raise enough money to pay for all the damage done? Then they shouldn't do the damage. Either it is cheaper to use anti-pollution devices or to compensate the damaged parties. Whichever is cheaper is what they should do. If they can do neither and still sell power, they should go out of business. And if you can make the utilities pay, they will pass the cost on to their customers--who aren't being hurt by the acid rain, but are paying the cost of getting rid of it. That is part of the cost or producing the power they are paying for. If someone comes up with a way to generate power for less cost, then, in a free market, the new technology will supplant use of coal. Governments have responded to these practical difficulties with a host of laws, which are restrictions on personal decisions--you must own a car with a muffler, and whose pollutant output is less than some standard; Right. Since pollution harms everyone by damaging the public air, these are reasonable laws, if not taken to unrealistic excess. your factory cannot put into the air less than a certain amount of sulfur dioxide, ... I think you mean 'more than'. Robert Oliver, an economic professor at Caltech, has proposed another possible solution, which uses the free market--selling licenses to pollute. I think this is already being done. I read an article in a recent issue of either _Discover_ or _Science_86_ that talked about pollution brokers. The government would issue certificates, each of which was good for the right to put a certain amount of sulfur dioxide in the air. A free market would be allowed in these certificates after their initial sale by the government. One problem with this is it presupposes that the damage the polluters are doing is to the GOVERNMENT. Not true. Government is not who should be compensated for pollution. ... capitalism can only function in a given market if all of the following conditions hold: (1) Free (as in no-cost) entry and exit from the market. (2) Multiple competitors (3) The market price of a good accurately reflects its cost. (4) Buyers have all the information they need to assess the value of a good. It works best if those conditions hold. But they are not essential. And 2, 3, and 4 are CONSEQUENCES of a free market, not pre-conditions. Condition 1 never holds. All of these assumptions break down in the real world. Wheat farming costs a lot to get into, and a lot to get out of. So? There exist natural monopolies, such as electric power, where the largest producer is always the most efficient and can thus drive all competitors out of business. Not true. Prices of goods do not reflect "hidden costs" such as the damage done to faraway trout streams by the excessive use of chemical fertilizers. They should. In a free market they would. And manufacturers have a vested interest in hiding harmful side-effects of products they sell. And their competitors have a vested interest in revealing these effects. ... those who favor bans of certain drugs judge that legal alcohol and tobacco cause such harm to those who do not engage in their use that it justifies continuance of the ban on other illegal drugs ... Well, there are several sorts of harm: (I include 'drunk' in 'drugged') 1) Drugged driving or operating any potentially dangerous equipment. 2) Crime while under the influence. 3) Medical costs of being on drugs. 4) So-called 'passive smoking'. 5) Making things safer for smokers makes them more expensive and/or more dangerous for the rest of us. 6) Fires caused by careless smoking. The solution to 1 is to either make the drugged activity a crime or to make it a crime only when it has bad consequences (i.e. perhaps drunk driving could be legal, but if you kill someone while drunk driving it is considered murder). The solution to 2 is for the same laws to apply to people under the influence as to sober people. A crime is a crime and no amount of drugs or alcohol should ever excuse one. The solution to 3 is for none of their medical costs to be borne by anyone but the drug (or alcohol or tobacco) user. No government money should pay for their (or anyone's) treatment. Medical insurance agencies should be encouraged to have seperate policies for users and non-users, allowing much lower rates for the latter. Coal mines and asbestos companies should be exempted from paying medical costs for worker's lung disease for any worker who smokes. The solution for 4 is a law against smoking around nonconsenting nonsmokers and around children. I can't think of a good solution for 5 or 6. It is unreasonable that upholstry must be treated with fire-proofing chemicals that cause cancer and that increase the cost and decrease the comfort of furniture, simply because too many careless smokers managed to set fire to themselves and their surroundings. But abolishing the law would put nonsmokers who live in the same apartment building at risk. (although attempting to reinstate a ban on something after it is once legal is a practical impossibility). Not at all. Most currently illegal drugs were legal before 1933. When prohibition ended, lots of drugs were made illegal. Some say this was mainly to provide continued employment for the prohibition police. I assume libertarians are against such bans on personal activities, even those with large amounts of potential harm to others. I see nothing wrong with using drugs so long as no nonconsenting person is forced to breath the fumes, pay the medical bills, be robbed, be run over by a drunk or drugged driver, etc. What alternative do you offer to protect those who are killed by handgun owners or drunk drivers? Well, there are severe laws against robbery and murder. The penalty for drunk driving should also be severe, at least if someone is hurt or property destroyed. If capital punishment, then how does your abhorrence of government square with giving government the most dangerous power of all--the power to deprive citizens of their lives? I oppose capital punishment. ... can you lay out a plan for the conversion of the United States into a libertarian society? We are already closer than any other country I know of. And in some ways, Reagan has brought us closer yet. Sure: 1) In the next few major elections, Libertarians win the presidency and most seats in congress. 2) A few new laws are passed, and many old laws are removed. If the Supreme Court objects, amend the constitution as necessary. ... how would you compenstate those who are already committed by decisions made due to past government actions? For example, many people moved to the suburbs in the last 40 years because of roads which were paid for out of general taxes, ... Well, those roads aren't going to go away. I see your point, though. The classic example is the tax deduction for mortgage interest payments. This deduction is obviously unfair and should be abolished. But if it was abolished, many people would not be able to pay their mortgage payments. The unfair policies are mostly in the form of extra taxes and special tax deductions. However, since taxes would be radically reduced or eliminated under a Libertarian administration, the lack of deductions would not be a problem. People who had a lot of reductions would get a little wealthier. People who had few deductions would get a lot wealthier. The only losers would be those who are getting money from the government. People with government pensions should continue to receive them, albeit without cost of living increases (which would not be needed since the cost of living would initially go DOWN thanks to lowere taxes for retailers, landlords, etc, and would then stabilize as we go onto a gold standard or some other fixed standard). The REAL losers would be Social Security recipients. This is unfortunate for them, and I am sure they would complain, saying that they had made lots of donations to the system and were now to get no benefits. This would be true, but I don't see any other way. The first generation of recipients received benefits without having made any donations. Like any pyramid scheme, it has to collapse sooner or later, to the great detriment of those who were about to profit. Or perhaps Social Security could be privatized and made voluntary. Since the over 65 age group is on the average the wealthiest age group, I'm not too worried about it. *I* don't expect to ever receive a dime from Social Security whether the libertarians win or not. ...Keith -------