Continued:
“...that the political class have the moral right and duty to violate liberty and direct society from the top down...”
Political class? In a democracy, representatives can be elected from any 'class'.
Strangely, only rich people can belong to the rich class. Are you seriously suggesting that without governments, without legislation, without unions, corporations would offer a better deal to workers?
“So why didn’t you enter the market, offer milk to consumers at a lesser price, and put the the supermarkets’ out of business..”
Well gee, I wonder why I can't just enter the market, and compete against just 2 mega companies which effectively control it.
“If you assert that we can make the same quantity and quality of goods cheaper and more available by price restrictions, you are simply wrong...”
In the deregulation example supplied, small farmers were sent broke, and the price of dairy products to the consumer went up. Amazingly, Coles and Woollies managed to remain profitable in the regulated environment; which existed for several decades.
“An anarchist who believes in ‘monstrous government.” Cherrypicking. I believe -as I said- the only defence “the people” have against monstrous corporations is monstrous government.

Cameron
What would be an example of a relevant issue that does not boil down to the fact of the scarcity of resources?

Grim
You do realize, don’t you, that if everyone produced his own housing, food, and clothing, and repaired his own machinery, we would all be worse off? It is the division of labour - the fact that labour in co-operation is more productive than labour in isolation - that is the driving force for the existence of human society, which you seem to be opposed to.

If, as you seem to think, the division of labour operates to ‘tax’ people, then at the margins of subsistence, people who collaborated would have died out, and we would have evolved to be a solitary species, like the snow leopard.

You seem to be deeply conflicted or confused about wealth and the processes that produce it. On the one hand, you think the existence of poverty is immoral. But on the other hand, you think the division of labour is immoral and exploitative, even though it is this process that has lifted us all out of the poverty of pre-history.

(The comparison in question is between societies with a higher, as against those with a lower degree of division of labour; not between a ragged and starving band of exiles in the season of their worst misfortune, and the ordinary standard of living of specific Aborigines at Port Jackson in 1788 having no relevance to any other people at any other time. The straw man is yours; to which you have added the further false argument of accusing me of your fault.)

You think that transactions are exploitative notwithstanding the parties' consent, since according to your line of reasoning, a party who has more – who is richer – can take unfair advantage of one who has less. According to this theory, any transaction in which the parties are unequal, can be condemned as exploitative. This just happens to describe all transactions in the history of the world, and therefore human society itself.

But if the parties met as equals, they could obtain no advantage from an exchange, and would have no motivation to enter into any transaction.

So your theory is fundamentally anti-social and erroneous. You decry poverty while decrying the process that generates wealth; and believe that the basis of greater wealth and fairness is forced redistribution, which is ethically indistinguishable from armed robbery, and economically makes everyone poorer, not richer.

This fundamental ignorance about what makes human society possible and valuable also explains why, when socialism is put into practice, people starve to death by the millions. If the theory were true, the result would be a society that is more physically productive, as well as fairer.

> Well gee, I wonder why I can't just enter the market, and compete against just 2 mega companies which effectively control it.

According to you, the corporations are making excessive profits. But if you are not able to undercut them, then how do you reason that their profits are unjust?

By the way, milk isn’t deregulated. Government controls the price, so your example is invalid.

“Are you seriously suggesting that without governments, without legislation, without unions, corporations would offer a better deal to workers?”

Without governments and legislation, corporations wouldn’t exist – ie limited liability, separate legal entity corporations.

Your idea that forced redistributions make the workers better off takes account only of the benefits to them on the income side of the ledger, but ignores the greater detriments to them on the costs side.

If your fundamental assumptions and assertions were correct, then we would all be materially and ethically better off if we abandoned collaboration and living in society, and attempted instead to increase wealth by armed robbery.

> “I believe -as I said- the only defence “the people” have against monstrous corporations is monstrous government.”

And for that reason you are in favour of monstrous government? Yes?

Then it is not cherry-picking to call you on it.

Poor people exist because greedy people steal their share.
In my opinion everyone is entitled to a minimum of power, water and food. In fact it should be rationed. Take the case of electricity,
all houses should have say 1500 watts of solar power installed at the taxpayers expense and any more you have to install it yourself or installed by the power company and paid off your bill.
Whether it's a socialist or tory government everything is paid for by the workforce.-companies don't pay tax they pass their costs on to the purchaser.
Resources are not scarce. Too many people is the problem.

Grim,

Hume's is a world of abstraction in which any practical, collective decisions and actions are equal to socialism, which is axiomatically evil. The world's 'progress' (using the term advisedly) is down to individuals making rational decisions.

All human decisions made by individuals, not impinging on others' rights, are rational - this is true by definition, or axiomatically again, even when it leads to destruction of a person's own rights or life, or is made by those suffering from psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, desperation, hysteria, mania....

You can be bedazzled by what is allegedly simple but inexorable logic, and end up facing this ineluctable position: you're either a socialist/communist (hints of Stalin, Mao, Castro), or you MUST be a Libertarian.

All initiations of 'force' are wrong, and taxation is pure theft equal ethically to armed robbery. Thus, a pauper or group of paupers (heaven forbid, a group!) has not the right to satisfy his/her/their needs for very survival itself by taking from those who are so wealthy as to be able to satisfy their many superfluous 'needs', some of their excess, either by collective action (eg. taxation) or, failing that, any other form of compulsion.

And so on. Wearying it is, if you ask me. You've made a brave attempt, but Hume will follow you to the ends of Online Opinion, regardless of the topic. But perhaps I'm wrong, and you're enjoying it....

... One other thing:

Peter says,
>> Each time the socialists’ schemes result in chaos and disaster, like the destruction to ecosystems done by government’s ham-fisted “management” of “wilderness, the socialists are taken completely by surprise. But there is no need for this commitment to ignorance. This is because we already know in advance, on the basis of sound theory, that the effect of abolishing economic calculation in a particular field will be planned chaos, precisely because it will abolish the ability to prioritise more urgent resource uses over less. <<

It's worth reading about some of the Libertarian 'experiments', based on sound theory of course, that were, paradoxically, forced on the people of Chile by the Chicago group, 1973 to 89 (libertarianism for the wealthy, great economic progress!), on New Zealand by Roger Douglas (Rogernomics!), on Iceland since the mid-1980s, or just US health care until a few days ago. Or the USA period. And so on.

Unfortunately, there is no Libertari-opian state, and will never be - by definition? But Peter could find some countries that go close, in some ways, to satisfying his ideological needs - Somalia, for one. No government, no police, and it's tax-free.