Peter Hume,

Did conditions improve in the mills, factories and mines without state intervention? Or was it out of the goodness of the mill and factory owner's hearts? (I seem to recall reading that they fought tooth and nail against the various factory acts).

Oh dear, Peter I am not surprised by your personal attack or the lack of any suggestion that you wanted to understand how I came to have such a different opinion to your own.

I think there is little point in refuting the many illogical assumptions in your reply. One example though is your apparent failure to understand that nothing can be 'proved'. Things can only be disproved.

I can say that I know I wouldn't have gone to school because my parents would not have been able to afford to pay for me to go, and they would not have acccepted charity from any rich person or organisation funded by rich people.

What a government provides is not charity, and as Spinoza says, we should aim to do the best for the well-being of the stste in order to derive for themselves the maximum of happiness and safety from it.

The main thing I regret is that you have not responded to the statement that Hayek makes about people who lack confidence. So I assume that you have no answer except that people like me would just be collateral damage while your perfect system is implemented.

And silly me, asking for understanding. Ayn Rand clearly(not!) explained why the essential human emotions of pity, shame, humility etc should not be politically correct.

I think - in my arrogant educated misfit Asperger's way - that you libertarians have Asperger tendencies. The lack of empathy for others is striking. As an Aspergers with some insight, I can see that I only developed the ability to empathise by being among the poor and uneducated and seeing how impossible it is for them people to cope with the choices you want to force on us or to develop real confidence in their ability to make the correct choices.

Mollydukes,

Bingo!....you've hit the nail on the head. For it is the human ability to empathise that connects us to our fellow man and allows society to exist. Our "theory of mind" is our greatest asset - and when empathy is not present all our systems fail, wither in an individual sense or a collective one.

Poirot and Mollydukes,
that incapacity for empathy is also know as neoliberalism : )

So true, Squeers.
Greed, self-interest, self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement are the natural outcomes of a system that has evolved based on the diminution of empathy.

Rusty

So does that mean if I’m desperate for an ice cream, it would be unfair of the seller to charge me the market rate? Or that therefore the government should subsidise me?

But if not an ice cream, then how about a steak sandwich, a biro, a mobile phone, or a Shakespeare CD? Clearly the answer would depend on the person’s circumstances, and could only ever be arbitrary. There might be no “need” for a mobile phone to sext one’s girlfriend, but what about to call search & rescue when lost in the bush? And the biro might be needed to scribble an important message?

As there are six billion people in the world, there would be six billion constantly changing opinions on what basket of goods that “desperate” would qualify.

And if *the seller* of ice cream was desperate to make the sale, does that mean he would be entitled to a subsidy, paid for by coercing everyone else?

Or perhaps his desperation might cancel out mine, and we’d be back to a free market?

As the issue is whether government can provide a superior service, there should be no pre-determined bias in favour of government. So, in a spirit of impartiality, since all tax is a compulsory impost and all policy is enforceable, *no* government would qualify on the same terms as the market, would it?

To say someone is desperate , is to say in other words, that the thing in question is high in the scale of values of the person in question. Someone who enables him to satisfy his urgent want does him a *greater*, not a lesser service, so there is no reason to discriminate against such transactions. It would make the desperate worse off, not better.

In the context of education, those “desperate” must obviously exclude people who, in priority to education, spend money on biscuits, wide-screen TVs, mobile phones, caravans, McDonalds, boats, make-up, cigarettes, overseas holidays and so on. As this describes virtually the whole Australian population, that effectively disposes of the case for government education on the basis of desperation.