The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Oh boy I've gotta chime in here. Here we have:

1. A display of lack of understanding of fields considered unworthy (worth is relative, FYI), and

2. An equivalence between labour-intensive jobs and relative merit of education.

No wonder you don't get the problems with the theories you espouse. You're so far removed from any potential consequences it's laughable. Try being the construction worker. Unless you have been, and you value the job on personal criteria because you were once one (FYI, bias). That would be funny.

One thing interests me @elodea- your ideas on how the private equivalent to essential services would work (i.e. Fire service) is based on an insurance system.

I gather you haven't had much cause to actually deal with insurance companies. The thing you need to remember is *insurance companies function by NOT PAYING* for things.

In your example of an insurance based fire service here is how it would work based on my experience:
1: You pay a monthly / annual premium for your fire protection. This won't be simple however, as you say you want choice, and oh boy doesn't the insurance company want to offer it to you? So you'll have 15 - 20 different cover options, all with different costs associated and ALL of them will have different get out clauses for the insurer.

2: You have a fire- as you say the service will quite possibly (depending on where you are at least) be more efficient with industry behind it (industry does do some things much more efficiently- look at the prices the new space launch companies operate compared to Nasa for a comparison). Your house is on fire- assuming you live in a densely populated area they turn up and put the fire out.

3: As soon as the fire is out a private fire investigator tours your house to ascertain the cause of the fire.
- They invariably find that you are the cause of the fire / the insurance cover is otherwise invalid.
- You finish up with a very large bill you have to pay despite your insurance.
- In the very best case you now have a hefty excess to pay even if the cover is valid.

The other issue I can see with this is industry only wants to work where there's a profit. Remote and sparsely populated areas simply won't get cover as it isn't profitable enough (or the cover is run from distant stations greatly increasing the response time).

This is where you need a national service- profit isn't the purpose so you get better coverage (people in sparsely populated areas arguably get proportionally better cover however I think this is better than the alternative). The fire services will deal with the fire no matter the cause and the only situation where there could be any repercussion to a fire (besides the loss of property and possessions) is if they determine the fire was deliberate.

So how insurance makes money is actually quite different from what seems to be popularly held. Ofcourse they don't want to pay out when they don't need to, but 'cheating' people out of money isn't the model they run on. That kind of behaviour opens them up to class action suits etc.

Every contract has specific terms that carry with them specific risk adjusted profits right from the get go. So even when they honour every single claim to the letter by the terms of the insurance contract in the most honest fashion possible, they still make money. You're essentially willing to pay more than you expect to get back and the difference between those two terms is the cost you are paying for the abatement of lumpsum risk.

Anyway no, my idea of how private services work is not based on insurance. It was used as an easy illustration showing why I may or may not want to buy fire department services by bringing in the concept of risk. What is stopping me from starting a fire department and selling my services to people the same way an ISP sells internet? As far as I know, it isn't any different than running a dog salon other than the specifics of the trade.

If there are many different insurers offering lots of plans, great, more choice, more competition, better for me. I wouldn't be just one insurer trying to trick me into thinking I had lots of 'choices'. And yea, some or all of their plans will have get out clauses but they are free to offer me these terms, and I am free to reject them as appropriate. I wouldn't sign an insurance contract that exempted them from paying if I was found to be the cause unless it was my intention to be bound by that for whatever reason.

I'm not so convinced by your point about sparsely populated areas. First, prices determine behaviour. If the cost of a fire service is high, I might find it cheaper to have a water tank and hose ready. If you go out into the countryside you'll find that farmers have different behaviours than city people. They don't rely on fire departments saving them and actively take steps to mitigate risks. Either that or they merely charge more for the food they produce and the cost gets reflected back to the consumer in place of a less efficient tax that had to go through government and eat up overhead.

If however you still find it reasonable to subsidise fire coverage for them, libertarianism certainly doesn't say you can't try and convince others to join the cause.

Don't be silly . "Behave well or we will take away the gameboy" isn't coercion as much as it is a leasing contract. The child doesn't own the gameboy, they only own themselves and anything they worked for in contract or was gifted.

That actually wasn't a fantasy situation and is a part of US history Slave Patrols

Ofcourse everything has downsides, but one should be able to choose what downsides to accept and what not to accept. This is just shifting the problem down the block. You might voluntarily want to pay for the package deal offered by government in either case, but that doesn't mean someone else would be willing to.

There's no need for the sarcasm. This always gets brought up by someone trying to be a smart alec like "Is there a stone that god can't lift?". A fun thought experiment nonetheless.

Realistically, in the example you gave the street is only out the front of your house so you aren't blocked in like you imply. I'm going to give you a generous reading though and assume you meant he built a road around your whole house or he bought the houses adjacent to yours in a case of malicious property blockading. Here's the little I know about how this kind of thing gets dealt with in ancap.

1. Not an escape clause because it's definitely bad behaviour by the road owner, but governments are not immune from the same. Regulations do this all the time as do land development restrictions. The point being, just because an-cap isn't perfect doesn't mean one should forget that the alternatives aren't necessarily perfect either. For full effect, i could also invoke godwins law as well.
2. Anarchy doesn't mean lawlessness as much as it means lack of imposed laws. Groups of people can come together and voluntarily form their own laws under which they agree to obey or get ostracised. Same kind of behaviour is observable in the business world all the time with customs and unspoken rules collectively agreed upon as being conducive to co-operation and trust. The difference is that no force is used.
3. Pragmatically speaking, it would be very strange/rare to buy a property without easement rights - like buying a car without tyres. And if the house came before the road, your use of an unclaimed dirt road to get in and out of your house could be seen as an easement due to prior use. Wouldn't really matter if the road owner came to hate you or not.
4. As for the economic incentive. If i knew a road owner was doing this, as a prospective buyer into the area i wouldn't want to buy property that required me to use his roads. Much the same way when an ebay seller screws over a customer, they leave a bad review and he loses reputation and business. You'll also be surprised how people will organise into union like groups that threaten the road owner to treat all their members fairly or else they'll stop using the road or sell up and move somewhere else. We already see the same behaviour in worker unions in the real world.
5. Homesteading theory also tries to deal with this in several ways although they seem to have funky implications for property rights. One of them is the idea that if you fence someone in, you are denying them the ability to claim unclaimed land beyond your fence. Basically, you can't homestead a road if it blocks someone from accessing virgin unclaimed land somewhere beyond your road.
6. Depending on the circumstance you may be able to invoke a violation of the nonaggression principle.If it is his evil plan to starve you to death, then yea you can respond in self defence the same way you would against someone standing outside your front door and preventing you from leaving. You kinda need to take care though in how you apply this. For example rich musician X is not acting in aggression to starve poor musician Y since X is not preventing Y from making music.
7. Build a bridge, tunnel with a spoon lol. Are you sure you tried everything yet cola? It's not easy being peaceful .

interesting

The Purge Planet episode was one of the best.

Month and a half necro; and here this thread was so close to killing itself.

I just randomly clicked on the alert the forums showed me and was shocked when I found myself here.

Politics never dies!

Don't think I've posted in like 2 years but f u c k a m er i c a

VICTORY FOR THE TRUMP BOIS.


ez win

Dear USA. I hope the next four years will be a very painful learning experience for you.

A President Trump with a republican senate certainly is a very good setup to straight out kill yourself.

So... that's it then.
Donald Trump.
DONALD MOTHERFUCKING TRUMP, REALITY TV SHOW HOST AND LIVING MEME.
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Even as someone who saw Trump as the lesser of two evils, by a LARGE margin, I can't believe this actually happened.

Meme'd his way into the white house.

On that note, why didn't we elect Harambe?

On a whole nother note, might as well use a southern dialect since the rednecks won the government, recreational marijuana was legalized in 3 more states today, Nevada, Massachusetts, and California, along with Washington and Colorado, make 1/10th the states to become pot-friendly.

Just think, Trump isn't a politician, if he's really as "renegade" as the old coots voted him to be, he might legalize marijuana. If he legalizes it, and republicans actually separate to back it, they may fill the Libertarian party. The lack of trust for the Democrat party may create a Progressive party. We may finally see the end of corporate agenda based parties in this election.

Lot of "if's", but it's a shot in the dark. There WAS once a time we had a "progressive" party and a "whig" party, and we had a "last president" for both of them. The sun may set on these bunch of f*ck-broccolis as well.

I hate everything right now.

The UK was top nominee for this years 'really dumb politics' award thanks to brexit- but those Americans just *wont* be outdone now will they?