Be honest. What would it take to persuade you that
a) these market were highly regulated
b) government might have anything to do with the problems that you have blamed on unregulated markets?

Government regulated the *supply* and *price* of money and credit at all times leading into and during the GFC. What effect might permanently inflating the supply and lowering the price of money have on the financial markets, do you think?

According to interventionist theory, only government has the competence and selflessness to regulate the money and credit supply. So they failed, didn’t they? The theory is wrong, isn’t it?

And according to Austrian theory, lowering interest rates causes artificial bubbles and consequential busts, hardship and social injustice.

So either by interventionist or anti-interventionist theory, the assumption of government’s selfless all-knowing beneficence in regulating money and credit is indefensible isn’t it?

What if you are wrong in giving government a get-out-of-jail-free card? What if, in defending the violent suppression of voluntary arrangements, you are defending the causes of enormous social and environmental chaos and injustice? Think about it?

(If *I* am wrong in saying such government interventions are necessarily incompetent, then the GFC would not have happened in the first place, would it?)

Perfection is not of this world. There is no need for real people, and therefore real markets, to conform to abstract mathematical academic notions such as “perfect information” in order to justify their right to peaceable freedom from ham-fisted blundering aggression. Neither is government perfect! The wrongness of neo-classical economic theory on the point you cite doesn’t prove that government regulation is ethically, economically, or environmentally better than voluntary social relations.

Your argument about the Industrial Revolution has been demolished here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11993&page=0

To summarise
a) population doubled over the relevant period. So the capitalists weren’t degrading the lives of the growing population to poverty, as Marx assumed, they were elevating them from death - the first time in history any social system ever achieved this.
(That’s what you’re complaining about, remember? Does capitalism make the masses too poor, or too rich? Make up your mind.)

b) Please answer: if the government, following your line of reasoning, had passed a law to help the working class by mandating that the minimum wage be 50 pounds per day in 1820 money, do you think that would have made the condition of the working class better or worse?

Government can’t just magically create benefits by passing laws imposing costs, as you assume. You are ignoring the logical possibility that the result of government regulation was to cause *more* unemployment, hardship, poverty, and death, not less.

If you say voluntary relations are “ideal” but not “practicable”, the only reason they’re impracticable is because so many people like you keep supporting coerced and chaotic relations they can’t justify. So stop doing it and defend freedom instead?

“… [W]hy are you so unmoved by the amount of effective regulation that capitalist players have … over ordinary peoples’ lives?”

I’m still waiting for you to prove that any of such market order is based on “violence” rather than mutually beneficial voluntary social relations; or to concede the point.

You haven’t made any relevant critique of my argument about economic calculation and ecological sustainability.

In all your spirited complaints about humans being alive rather than dead, you have not made any suggestion as to how government can improve the alleged problem, considering the present and future values that are to be taken into account, and the downsides as well as the upsides of government action.

This completely disproves the possibility of your and Squeers’ interventionist dream you-know-not-how of a paradisical economic stasis achieved by centralized force and threats overriding voluntary economising of private property.

To deal with environmental problems by expanding the tragedy of the commons can only create more such tragedy.

Thus when we chase all the rabbits down all the holes, we find that the interventionists’ proposals have nothing to do with population or environment, and everything to do with their desire for forced redistributions; nothing to do with their concern for people, and everything to do with their desire to order people around – for *worse* economic and environmental results.

Hazza

1.
“The other measures simply ensure quality of live to existing families and children- while the BB simply encourages people to actually make them.”

How do you know the other measures don’t encourage people to have children they otherwise wouldn’t have if they had to pay the full costs of having them?

2.
You said “barring people making ads and permitting school volunteers who preach a contradictory message.”

So how are you going to “bar” them from expressing political opinions you disagree with? Barring means making illegal doesn’t it?

Well? What if they assert their freedom? What happens to them?

3
You said: “ensure all property development is at the discretion of local voters “
I said: “Why shouldn’t the voters also veto food production, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?”
You said: “Might have something to do with voters wanting to protect their own rights when they vote what should be allowed? But please tell me why a person would want to vote away their own rights to have children?”

What has this to do with reducing population? You reduce population by increasing homelessness, is that the idea?

You assume the people already agree with you, but if they did, there would be no need of your proposed policy, would there?

4- Improve workplace discrimination law regarding older employees

Since the original problem is that employers don’t rush to profit from the skills of older employees which you assume are undervalued, how do you know that they are as undervalued as you assume?

So you’re not willing to employ older people yourself, but you want to force others to?

> 5 How exactly am I "failing to understand" a process that most leading businesses are ALREADY DOING?

You’re failing to understand that businesses do it on the basis of profit and loss which governments don’t. Government cannot further or determine this process any better but only more wastefully.

I have already completely demolished your argument, or rather ASSUMPTIONS, which you have effectively conceded by your being COMPLETELY UNABLE to answer my 6 devastating last questions here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4305&page=0#109991

Go ahead. Try.

Peter Hume, your contention that lax government regulation caused the GFC implies that you think an entire lack of regulation would have done better and avoided both the GFC and all manner of "bubbles". Do you forget that it was the "unregulated" greed merchants and shysters who actually did the foul deed and created the GFC? So, how could you possibly think that no regulation at all would have achieved anything better?

How to reduce world overpopulation? Again I say the problem has to be addressed at its root, and that is to reduce the need for people in the third world to have large families. Why do they have large families? Partly for a workforce to tend crops and livestock, or to send off to work in factories to support the family, and partly to have some chance of support in old age, and partly because high infant mortality and general early death rates dictates having more progeny to ensure sufficient survivors to achieve the aforementioned objectives.

How then to reduce the need for large families? Education, hygiene, health care, improved agriculture, improved infrastructure and more and better money jobs. How to achieve these improvements? By a concerted effort by the developed world through hands-on and targeted aid programs, from a World Development Fund.

Why would the first world bother? Because the world's best chance to ensure food security and to reduce global CO2, or mitigate climate change, and to halt population growth is to do all this. That's why!

What to do to stop the boats? Work to relieve the problems causing people to need to relocate. Until these underlying problems are relieved - repression, oppression, hate and intolerance - there will continue to be an ever increasing refugee problem, full stop, finish.

Peter Hume (sigh)
If debates should be won by energy alone, you certainly deserve to win this one.
Since flogging dead horses has never been one of my passions, I'll just stick to the highlights, such as when you come out with such 'devastatingly' humble submissions as:
“I have already completely demolished your argument, or rather ASSUMPTIONS, which you have effectively conceded by your being COMPLETELY UNABLE to answer my 6 devastating last questions here...”
Although I note your predilection for numbering your points, I found it difficult to identify exactly which DEVASTATING questions you were referring to; so I'll just go with my favourites.

“0-1 Ethically, why should the majority be able to vote themselves the fruits of other people’s labour?”
Why should a CEO, or even a board of major shareholders be able to vote themselves the fruits of other people’s labour?”

“0-2 Practically, *HOW* are the people or the executive going to *know* how best to combine the factors of production in such a way as to satisfy the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority) and minimise loss and...”
I would suggest they employ the same tactic the marketplace does. Trial and error. Oh that's right, the marketplace is perfectly rational, and therefore is capable of unerringly accuratedly setting the price of all items the very time.
BTW, how does the marketplace 'satisfy the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority)”?

“0-3 *HOW* are the people or the executive going to have any incentive to do so?”
Why is it that the word 'incentive' is to you only monetary?
Do you believe the soldier who lays down his life for his country does so for personal profit?
Personally, I have always held that many of the problems with Democratic Government that you describe could be addressed by paying our parliamentarians less, rather than more.
Would that they had other incentives than just personal profit.

Oh dear Peter "demolish" lets run through these "demolishing" arguments.
-Direct Democracy does not improve accountability- let's see, if voters had the ability to veto decisions by politicians or any other interest group trying to impose its personal agenda on them- or actually HAD to be consulted in certain decisions affecting them, by virtue of its definition, then it does. As the public are the first to bear the brunt of the consequences of a policy or project- they are the most qualified to decide on whether or not to green-light it. A person who lives elsewhere but designated the area as suitable for his personal interests is not.

The implication that neither are true is so stupid it doesn't even make a good obsfucation- it just makes you look desperate to make an argument.

Moving on

1- because they are also 'laborers' and would be voting away their own rights also.
2- Same way a politician or private company would I imagine- what would make the motives any different? Putting aside that any 'assistance' would be in areas that majority would consider important, or would consider they themselves may need.
3- See 1. By setting policy to governance that enhances their own quality of life, they would also be enhancing other people's quality of life.

In short- every voted policy that would apply to everyone would be one the voters would consider beneficial for themselves.

"Just because people use a service, doesn’t mean they should be forced to pay for it,"
I'd re-read that line Peter- after a while you'll find out why it makes you look silly.