My wife is Chinese and we go there quite often. Regulation of consumer goods and services is very light and easily circumvented, and as a result the consumer market is a cesspit of shoddy, dangerous products and deceptive practices. Its so bad one of the most prized gifts you can take there is baby formula powder, because the local versions have frequently been found to be cut with dangerous chemicals. I’ve seen and have family with experience of a deregulated market and it’s not at all pretty. Individual consumers just don’t have the resources to deal equally with big companies that have no reason to care about consumer interests, without the ability to exercise their collective power - which is what a representative government is.
I think what I’m hearing you say is that China’s government regulations are “light”... :)
China has 8 different agencies involved in food regulation.
A government that doesn’t allow its subjects to express freedom of speech to its citizens is not “light” in anything.
The dangerousness of items produced in China is a symbol of the corruptability of the monopolization of power by government, underscored by the fact that business in mainland China starts with payoffs to local government officials.
Meanwhile, in Florida, where people are free to package up food items for sale with no license of any kind and no commercial kitchen (up to a certain volume), I don’t hear about many cases of people receiving brain damage from lead poisoning after eating cookies from their local coffee shop.
People that don’t have a foot on their neck are typically not evil by default, because they don’t have to be in order to just survive. That’s why things just work here in the US.
People accustomed to oppressive control just don’t understand these things.
No, the turn of phrase used to describe “baby milk formula” in powder form. “Baby formula powder” implies a kind of powder that produces a baby. Hence, the off-topic comment.
Simple desire for profit drove adding melamine to milk formula for babies. In that melamine cost less than milk powder. And that it reacted like proteins in the simple test that was commonly used.
Melamine is (C-N)3 in a ring, with NH2 on each of the carbons. And all amino acids have C-NH2 on one end. Thus the name. I gather that the test scored all C-NH2 moieties. So each melamine molecule looks like three amino acids, and contains less other stuff than amino acids on average. Making it a very efficient adulterant.
Political freedom alone won't solve tainted milk in China. People don't have the time or energy to audit every food product they purchase, establishing minimum standards to prevent death or injury from harmful food is one of the least costly ways to deal with the root issue.
Political freedom can lead to elect officials who care about such issues and take actual measures to create and enforce regulations instead of the current ones doing nothing or accepting bribes. A monopoly on politics is not optimal.
Thats what i am saying. There can be no accountability of officials if you cant replace officials with due process with folks coming out of several parties and not just one.
This is a pretty ludicrous statement. We wouldn't need any consumer protection laws, anti-fraud laws, or a really a majority of business law if the default modus operandi was pro-consumer. The reason Apple is different here is because their financial incentive aligns with the consumer. That is not the case with many businesses regardless of government involvement.
That's why we never had to do anything to address rampant fraud, cutting food with dangerous materials, straight up lying about what you're selling, con artists, snake oil salesmen, or irresponsible management of hazardous waste, right?
Not that I support the OPs absolutist statement, but courts could and do handle quite a few of those (I mean fraud is handled almost entirely by the courts). Especially if the effort over the last century was put into strengthening the law and property rights, instead of creating endless agencies, government economic power brokers, and pre-emptive hoops for companies to jump through, which encourage state-backed oligopolies to flourish at the expense of competition and any firm small enough to not afford a team of lawyers. Not to mention measuring efficacy and ROI on each individual agency involved in market intervention is largely absent once the agencies are in place.
Unless you're conflating 'removing government actors' as completely removing the justice system and law enforcement? Which are two things which libertarians are very much in support of being government responsibility...Smaller government != no government.
Laws are regulations, the courts you’re praising didn’t pull the laws they enforced out of their asses. If you remove government agencies specialised in regulating specific domains, then that responsibility will just fall on general law enforcement or just go unenforced.
Of course there are costs to any system of regulation, but most consumer regulation is there to prevent companies doing things some of them absolutely did. Busses in London used to have “no spitting” signs. Now they don’t. Why the change?
In general you regulate because hard earned experience shows you have to, not because you just feel like it. If regulations become unnecessary, ok it’s time to revisit it, but managing this stuff is what we elect people for.
On what grounds? Caveat emptor was the rule for a long, long time. It was only later when regulation and standards started coming into play that it was a thing. The courts can't just declare a legal thing to be bad.
You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive.
The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from 1850-1950. It didn't work. Federal agencies and government regulations were created because the courts were unable to adequately respond to ongoing problems. The proximate cause of death for libertarianism was the sequence of massive bank panics and depressions leading up to the final "Great Depression" in 1929, but there were many causes across wide-ranging areas of society.
To give just one example: The FDA was created (and later strengthened) in response to a long succession of disasters where well-established drug companies added known toxic (or lethal!) chemicals to their drugs, then placed them on the market without testing. Thousands of people were killed.
No legal decision can bring back the dead.
Most of these companies already had reputations to protect and judgements against them were expensive. Yet they continued to screw up royally.
We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is always less efficient to force millions of consumers to extensively research every aspect of the products they buy, then seek redress in the courts after suffering injury. It will always be a net win to set basic safety standards (for established product categories) and force manufacturers to follow the standards.
If you're a rich oligarch who hates paying taxes then libertarianism is a convenient excuse to shrink government (regulations = expense) and/or foist as much of the tax burden onto others as possible.
Libertarianism is also attractive to people who have grown up in a sheltered society and so see regulations and standards as unnecessary restraints. They don't have any basis for comparison.
It's similar to anti-vaxxers: Vaccines were so successful that whole generations have grown up without watching their kids or friends die and be crippled by disease, so they don't value vaccines any more than they value oxygen in the air.
For that matter it is the same as the current Boomer generation's FYGM attitude: growing up in a post-war boom when the effective wage was ~$18/hr and college cost 1/4 as much of course it was easy to work part time while getting your degree. And with a growing population and society of course there will be plenty of jobs waiting for you. Like oxygen in the air or water in the sea such conditions are completely beneath their notice and thus later generations "must" be lazy moochers and "of course" they should just "work hard like I did".
Sometimes I think humans really are doomed. As a society every time we get a good thing going we completely forget the toil, blood, sweat, and tears required to get there.
> You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive.
While I somewhat agree and don't consider myself a libertarian, I'm much more of Thomas Sowell supply-side economics fiscal conservative and social liberal, I believe this smug, self-righteous tone, littered with broad absolute dismissives, ("We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work") through-out your post perfectly typifies the problem with US tribal politics, especially the left-leaning sort.
You could easily change the wording and throw in some similar greatly over-simplfied examples, and you could say "We tried socialism and it completely failed", as a dismissal for modern big-government liberalism. Which is ridiculous and unhelpful.
These endless trite left vs right debates on the internet always seem to pigeonhole unique and complex historical moments (with distinct geography, historial circumstance, economic situations, cultural differences, broad incentives, birth rates, technological differences, etc, etc) into some ideal fantasy governments that never really existed or even marginally fit into the molds of ideologies being questioned.
I mean... even scale is a huge difference maker. I believe smaller country's governments function far better (see: Canada, Scandinavia). As do "early-stage" countries in the growth stage after being up-ended. To apply some generic economic political system broadly across every country, big or small, financially stable or not, old population, cultural work, etc) is not a interesting or helpful as people seem to think.
Example: I love hear people explain how "Iceland nationalized banks and look how great it worked", meanwhile Iceland has a total population of a small US city, 0.01% the size of the US.
So it's entirely possible you're right. A more pure form of libertarianism, which may have worked well in the past when the country was 5% the size with immature industry, is likely going to be a disaster if it was imposed today. That doesn't mean it's not a good or superior model more fundamentally as a guiding force when shaping current polcy, or even within the larger system in thousands of isolated situations (such as schooling for example). Nor does it mean it wouldn't be ideal for a different culturally or smaller or geographically distinct group of people or for certain states within a heavily federated system.
A few days ago I was pondering what it would be like if we treated government like a software project. You can never address all the issues at once unless you're doing a rewrite (at which point the old project is effectively dead). You just have to refactor as you go. Practically each section becomes organized in a way that more or less reflects the values and style of the author. Sometimes a codebse is able to maintain an overall style, but try as we might you can't delete the programmer entirely.
So then I had an idea for a "single focus president". This would be someone who is entirealy indifferent to everything except the one focus area they call out in their campaign e.g. healthcare. It's not that progress wouldn't be made in other areas it would just be entirely congressional and judicial. Once the president addresses their focus issue, they step down. There are probably anecdotes of how we've tried similar things and failed, but I know I would be open to considering a campaign on those type of grounds.
This argument can be used to justify any form of government as long as some share of extortions get invested for the benefit of extorted.
But I agree all of this is great if I only have to pay <$5K yearly but not so much otherwise. Not to mention having to emigrate to cancel "the services". That sucks too.
> The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from [insert date range of the most prosperous human development in the US].
And, the great depression was a direct result of government and bank collusion. The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply exactly after the market crashed. Take the federal government, which sanctioned the federal reserve, out of the picture, and you have a much smaller crash that weeds out all the idiots who fell for the securities fraud perpetrated by the Shenandoah Corporation, which precipitated the crash in the first place.
In fact, get rid of the federal reserve banking system that was created by the federal government in 1913, and you don’t have any of the major crashes in the ensuing 95 years.
Go one step further and remove the federal government’s control over the money supply in general and you have a system of multiple currencies, all controlled by their constituent markets, many backed by silver and/or gold. and you don’t have a nationwide gold seizure by the federal government in 1933, whereupon our distributed sovereign wealth was gifted to internationalist bankers. You have instead a wealthy population of the descendants of the colonialists that conquered this country for us.
They don’t really teach this kind of stuff in stated-funded “school”, now do they?
When you remove government actors from industry, except where absolutely needed (e.g., preventing monopoly) this becomes the default modus operandi.