Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!cmcl2!husc6!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!AI.AI.MIT.EDU!kfl From: kfl@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Newsgroups: mod.politics Subject: (none) Message-ID: <12272332455.35.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Tue, 20-Jan-87 00:35:36 EST Article-I.D.: RED.12272332455.35.MCGREW Posted: Tue Jan 20 00:35:36 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 21:53:09 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: kfl@ai.ai.mit.edu Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 149 Approved: poli-sci@red.rutgers.edu From: Richard A. Cowan ... However, my examples still illustrate the effect of market forces serving the needs of institutions. To show why this is "bad," I must give some examples of how institutions can affect BASIC human needs. How about: -The freedom to breath: Before federal emissions standards, automobile companies like General Motors (with oil companies) were perfectly content to produce inefficient cars that guzzled leaded gas and polluted the air. Lots of health hazards from this have been greatly reduced by regulation. Why do you contrast these regulations with the free market? Government has only one role in a free society - protecting individual rights. Anti-pollution laws are a legitimate exercise of this authority. -The freedom to drink clean water: There are unsolved serious problems with public water supplies all over the country -- hence the growth in popularity of bottled water. The amount of inorganic garbage our society generates, and ultimately dumps in landfills, contributes directly to this problem. It is not "society" which pollutes the water, but individuals and various organizations composed of individuals. They should not be allowed to pollute any water they don't own, since doing so would infringe the property rights of the owner of the water. And if they do own it, they are free to pollute it, but if they do so they are not then allowed to sell it as drinking water, for that would be fraud. -Survival: My right to live is being threatened by a nuclear balance of terror, This is the doing of states, not of individuals or voluntary organizations of individuals. perpetuated and intensified by the economic interests of military contractors who exaggerate the vulnerability of the US deterrent. The military }icontractors don't run the arms race, the Soviet and US governments do. I could go on, but I think that these examples aptly illustrate that we can't trust "free enterprise" to take care of all our concerns. You have made a telling case against total anarchy, and against statism. You have made no case against a free society. .. Obviously, there are structural constraints -- a limited supply of clean water -- that mean that if everyone in the 5% could rise up from the bottom, another group of people will be in the bottom five percent, and would bear the burden. I think there is enough water for everyone. If there wasn'}i~rt, adopting a totalitarian system could hardly change the fact, except for the worse. Unless everyone is given equal resources (at whose expense?) there will always be a bottom 5%. Nothing will change that. But those in the bottom 5% can be wealthier and happier than the TOP 5% are today. ... Executives who make decisions that affect the water supply are isolated from the very people that their policies will affect. Not in a free market system, they aren't. ... I mention a few man-made needs: -The right to education. (threatened by cutting funds for public schools, which sends people to private schools, further decreasing public school support) There is no right to an education, if by that you mean the right to force someone to give you an education. -The right to a job that can pay for affordable housing, transportation, and food. There is no right to a job, if by that you mean the right to force someone to give you a job. There is only the right to freely interact with others, trading or giving value for value. Again, the size of the institutions involved means that corporate heads who influence government policy are isolated from the people whom their actions affect. Which is one of the reasons for a strict seperation between economics and state. (Executives oppose full-employment legislation and tolerate high structural unemployment because it creates a favorable market for }i hiring people.) Any rational person who has given thought to the issues opposes "full-employment legislation", since it violates individual rights. I am not sure what it means to "tolerate" high unemployment. It even affects the general public: in Boston, or in Palo Alto, I am certainly isolated from the people on the bottom of the economic ladder. ... Who is isolating you? You are free to associate with these people. ... I now believe that capitalism in the U.S. and starvation are completely compatible, because we have adopted ideological barriers and psychological defenses that allow us to ignore the starvation. Starvation is a hundred times more rampant in nations that adopt your left wing ideology. How do you explain that? You are free to feed the hungry, and to talk others into doing so. You are NOT free to take money from others against their will with which to feed the hungry, even if you have convinced 99% of the population that doing so would be a good idea. The best way to help the poor is to not be poor. WHAT IS NEEDED is greater distribution of wealth, The distribution of wealth is up to the creators of that wealth. You are free to distribute your own wealth, but by what right do you claim the right to steal wealth that other people have created or traded, wealth that would never have existed but for their efforts, wealth which they would probably not have bothered to create if they knew it was to be stolen from them? and a drastic reduction in the power of institutions. The only institution with any political power is the government. The question of how these changes can be effected is a separate issue which we can discuss later. What's to discuss? There is only one way to do what you suggest, namely to steal the property of individuals and to imprison, torture, or kill any property owner who objects. Tell me, in a free society, what prevents any subset of the population who advocate views similar to yours from voluntarily banding together, at their own expense, and for their own benefit? All I can think of that prevents this is that this system can only work by stealing from people who do NOT consent to it, and never will. ...Keith -------