Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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You've spent your last few posts blaming government for every single one of the world's problems. (Tangent: We're in Libertopia, which *does* have a government. Ancaplia is that way.) But you've yet to say a single word about how trusting the free market - in other words, the aggregate sum of millions of profit-margin driven corporations, most of whose shareholders aren't even concerned with *long term* profits because nobody holds onto a stock that long - improves on any of that or does anything except increase the content of human meat in my sausage back to good ol' 1910.

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What you describe as the free market is not so. Without government, corporations would not exist as they are today. Limiting the liability of shareholders to the amount of their investment spreads the burden of bad/evil corporations over all of society instead of concentrating it with those who choose to fund and run the business. That is, it distorts the market in a way that allows bad/evil corporations to exist because their shareholders and managers are protected from certain costs associated with the operation of the corporation. Such arrangements would probably still occur through special types of insurance, but either the shareholder or the business management would be paying for offloading that risk instead of the cost being spread across all individuals via government fiat.

Edit: typo.

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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I realize it's been a while since you guys have had any fresh air in here so you're used to everyone agreeing with you

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Yeah. You're the first person who's disrupted our neat and tidy echo chamber in the last, what, three minutes?

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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Without government, corporations would note exist as they are today.

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Okay, that's Ancaplia. We're talking about Paulmerica, where we still have a government, an industrial base and Microsoft. What's the Paulmerican solution?

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer . Neither the United States nor any State shall compose the words of any prayer to be said in public schools.

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I don't see how this is going to change the effectiveness of schools.

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With that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and say Paulmerica is not going to be very good about training biologists.

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You do realize guy is a Doctor right?

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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Ron Paul is only as fanatic as those who drafted the Constitution.

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exactly, that's why he gets more popular every day.

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Speaking of that, back on the first page, we had three different people agree with this gem:

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" "Why do we need the federal government? There's no Cold War and no Communist threat. Many other nations are breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. The centralization of power in Washington occurred in a different time. Why not think about getting rid of the federal government, returning to the system of our Founders, and breaking up the United States into smaller government units?""

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"The system of our Founders" replaced the Articles of Confederation, which were so bad that it took less than a decade for thirteen different governments to unanimously decide to scrap them. Which of the two does this quote's author seem to want?

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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Without government, corporations would note exist as they are today.

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Okay, that's Ancaplia. We're talking about Paulmerica, where we still have a government, an industrial base and Microsoft. What's the Paulmerican solution?

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Issac do you have anything that can back this assertion up, I've heard you use it several times now.

Cody

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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I might take a stab later, but you appear to be logically unconvinceable.

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Why, because I'm not a libertarian? I'm politically well educated and went to law school with a big heap of you for three years. The small-l libertarians - the guys who aren't in the party and won't be voting for Paul because they're not religious fundamentalists, don't hate immigrants and feel that letting the market decide the level of rotten food in the pipeline is not a *good* thing - have a lot going for them. The president of the Federalist Society, who's probably fresh off an appellate clerkship right now, was my roommate - good guy, but probably hated the drug war less than I did. So go ahead and tell me how I'm close-minded and "slandering" (there's some more quotes again) Ron Paul with his own words/cherry-picking votes that he made exactly one week ago, when, in fact, I've barely scratched the surface.

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You simply ignore most of the points I make without comment. So what would be the point in making more points? The only answer would be for the interested yet less rabily closed-minded reader; but it seems like a slim chance that anyone who isn't already singing in the choir would be convinced by your irrational sophistical appeal to emotion and slander.

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Your candidate's political philosophy leads him to publicly state on the House floor that there's a slippery slope between divesting from genocide and divesting from businesses in Europe. "First, they came for the genociders..."

Let's have the people who aren't singing in either of our choirs mull that one over for a while and get back to us.

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I find it funny that you accuse libertariansm of fundamentalism, since that is exactly what you appear to be in the viciousness of your apologetics for the status quo: a fundamentalist believer in the ability of government to deliver us from evil, when it demonstrably does not. People like you always seem to neglect that part of your calculus. Free market letting you down? What [censored] free market is that? We don't have one.

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Well, first off, you might remember that people like me are roughly 95% of the population, so while it's entertaining being sarcastic right back at you, if you're hoping to convince someone with that, it's getting pretty old. Ann Coulter's not very good at converting Democrats, either.

Second, let's go ahead and talk about the government protecting me from stuff. That *has* steadily gone up since that "America in 1910" place I mentioned earlier; furthermore, I think you'll agree with me that the market was pretty damn free in 1910. Oddly enough, though, the human finger content in sausage has gone *down* since then, similar to the amount of Dickensian chimney sweeps, workhouses and any number of other fun relics of the time period. Do you, by any chance, know why the FDA, one of the first things in line to be shut down in Paulmerica, has the power that it does to regulate drugs? It's got a lot to do with the free, unregulated market's love of having people drink radioactive water and wearing radioactive underwear. Again, all of this is barely scratching the surface. (Speaking of things scratching the surface around 1910, which part of the free, hardly regulated passenger ship industry caused the Titanic to have plenty of lifeboats?)

You've spent your last few posts blaming government for every single one of the world's problems. (Tangent: We're in Libertopia, which *does* have a government. Ancaplia is that way.) But you've yet to say a single word about how trusting the free market - in other words, the aggregate sum of millions of profit-margin driven corporations, most of whose shareholders aren't even concerned with *long term* profits because nobody holds onto a stock that long - improves on any of that or does anything except increase the content of human meat in my sausage back to good ol' 1910.

You've got a vision of Libertopia (or perhaps Paulmerica, they're interchangeable enough) in your head that's full of rational consumers making rational, optimally moral decisions based on perfect knowledge. Therefore, it should logically follow that, were it not for that pesky government getting in their way, consumers would be doing the same thing *now*.

Would these consumers be the same people enthusiastically supporting Paul's desire for ID in the science classroom, the ones ingesting enough colloidal silver to turn themselves blue because they thought Y2K was going to destroy the world's antibiotic supply, or the ones wearing radioactive underwear?

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Wow. For someone who's supposedly one of the smartest two posters on this site, this post is chock full of the very fallacies the OP was talking about.

LOL IRONYAMENTS.

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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Without government, corporations would note exist as they are today.

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Okay, that's Ancaplia. We're talking about Paulmerica, where we still have a government, an industrial base and Microsoft. What's the Paulmerican solution?

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Issac do you have anything that can back this assertion up, I've heard you use it several times now.

Cody

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Are you kidding? You've been in this forum long enough to know this. Coprorations as we know them are government-protected entities. They have limited liability, provided by government-issued charters.

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

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"The system of our Founders" replaced the Articles of Confederation, which were so bad that it took less than a decade for thirteen different governments to unanimously decide to scrap them. Which of the two does this quote's author seem to want?

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Wow. Yes, it was "so bad" that power-hungry politicians scrapped it and replaced it with something that would more easily allow for the ever-expanding juggernaut we have today. Exactly as predicted by the anti-federalists.

Re: Libertarians: Stop Using Logic
 

Yeah, the awesome OP is good at attacking fallacies such as "citing facts to support your argument" and "attacking the other side" (when that side is making one completely untenable assertion after another).

Instead, I should sit here and listen to people say things like "we're better off with the freest of markets" without offering a shred of historical evidence (when there is a wealth of it on the other side) why that would be true.

Okay.