Rapscallion
You are only demonstrating that misrepresentation satisfies your intellectual standards. The question is not whether you *disagree* with my arguments; it's whether you can *refute* them. You have not proved anything that is in issue.

The USA government currently takes about 50 percent of the GDP of that country. Similarly, even before the recent unconstitutional take-over of health insurance by the government, the provision of health services was intensively and extensivelly regulated at all levels, you name it.

To allege that that represents a libertarian state of affairs is laughably stupid or dishonest. I challenge you to debate any issue when you have something other to offer than mere intelletcual dishonesty Rapscallion, on one condition: three counts of misrepresentation, personal argument or assuming what is in issue, and you lose. That pretty much rules out anything you have ever been able to advance against me.

Rapscallion, you're right of course.
It's clearly impossible to argue with a libertarian who enjoys the liberty of changing history. Apparently the deregulation of the NSW dairy industry (July 1, 2000) was just a socialist fantasy. Didn't happen.
Also, the recent GFC so closely and clearly following Bush's deregulation of the US banking industry was caused by too much regulation, rather than too little.
And the propping up of the world (and particularly Australia's) economy by socialist China doesn't appear to rate a mention.
How strange.

Grim
Do you deny that the price of milk is regulated by the NSW government?

Do you deny that the banking industry in the USA is governed by thousands of pages of regulations every word of which is intended to, and does, change supply, or price, to something other than it would otherwise be; that government's monopoly cartel the Federal Reserve exists to do nothing but change the price of money from what it would otherwise be; and that it is therefore a complete furphy to claim that the banking industry is deregulated?

Having been thrashed and beaten on all the issues you raised, and all your furphies called as such, you retreat into snivelling more fallacies and untruths.

But why don't you answer the question: if the division of labour is immoral or creates poverty, why don't you live without it and enjoy the better standard of living and of ethics that result comes from producing your own food, housing, and sandals? What are you doing tapping away on the internet? Why, in your own terms, do you exploit people by buying their products and services, enslaving those who are poorer than you?

As usual, when the socialists are stripped of their fallacies, there is nothing left of their argument. Their two favourite fallacies they always rely on are: assuming what is in issue, and personal argument - as both Grim and Rapscallion have used in their last posts.

Is that the best you can do?

It is hard to know whether socialists
a) constantly use these arguments because they know that if they abandoned them, they would be incapable of sustaining their side of the argument, or
b) genuinely can't understand that they are fallacies, which is why they are socialists in the first place.

The living standards we enjoy here in the first world is dependent on lower living standards elswhere.

Jasper
Lower than what?