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RE: Progressives Are Socialists. The Left is not "Liberal" at all. (Part 1)

in #libertarian7 years ago

The problem is that if you have one entity (government) that owns all the means of production, then it is impossible to engage in successful economic behavior.

When did I suggest that the government should own the means of production? Oh, I didn't.

Still, you are making an assertion here and there are counter-examples. In Chine the government does own the means of production, but their economy is booming...

Everything you are saying is kind of refuting things I'm not saying. When did I say there should be no prices, there should be no consumer freedom or that there should not be any free market?

The current justice system is surely imperfect, but it is orders of magnitudes better than the wild wild west or no justice system at all. As I said, at the very least, it enforces contract and without contracts the market is going to suffer quite a lot. And patent trolls are indeed a real plague, but at least the majority of intellectual property is properly protected. Throw away all patent law and what do you get? No good incentive to innovate...

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When you suggest that government should run X industry or service, you are in fact suggesting that it should be out of private hands and therefore the government will own the means of production of whatever it is. (Health care, law, etc.) And in such government run services there is no consumer choice since they are taxed whether they use it or not, and therefore there is no market pricing for those services and no measure of success (profit or loss) for the government to analyze their own actions.

Law and contracts are products of the market which existed before government took monopoly ownership of them. I provided you a recommended reading of a book called The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State. It provides dozens of examples private law and enforcement, and how they out perform their government counterparts.

Intellectual property could have its own debate. For instance, some hold that it is not even property, since two people can have the same idea, and not infringe on the other's right to do so. IP laws prevent the small business creativity they are supposed to help. Just because someone filed a patent before the next guy has no bearing on how good or successful the first idea will be. All it does is limit the property rights of others. A patent on the steam engine delayed the industrial revolution in the UK by over 20 years..

You keep refuting points I'm not making.

Regarding your book suggestion, if the book is full of good examples, it shouldn't be hard to provide me with one instead of asking me to devote the time to read hundreds of pages. Not that I might not get to this book at some point, but I don't think asking the other side to go read this or that book is a fair thing to do as part of a discussion.

For instance, some hold that it is not even property, since two people can have the same idea, and not infringe on the other's right to do so.

I'm not aware of jurisdictions where ideas themselves can be copyrighted. What gets protected by patents or authorship laws are particular implementations. As far as I know in most jurisdictions, if you can prove that you had no knowledge of the patent and you came up with something similar on your own and can demonstrate that, the patent is not enforcible against you.

Sure, there are a lot of questions to be had about IP and patent laws, but if you throw them away completely, you get a lot of industries going under too, so it's always a give or take. The idea behind patents as a whole is to stimulate innovation.

I doubt the book has convincing arguments if you are having a hard time summarizing them...

I did summarize it. You asked for examples, i provided a link.
Hoping that if you don't believe me, maybe you will hear out other smart people; )