On paper, perhaps, but not in practice. Most Europeans don't have to put aside huge amounts of money for healthcare and their children's education.
Healthcare is more expensive in the US, but practically speaking, the average American's healthcare is already paid for by their employer through insurance, so it doesn't much affect them as an expense. It's still absurdly expensive because of the gigantic mess of a regulatory system that governs American medicine, but that absurd expense only actually reaches Americans when they have to pay out of pocket for whatever reason and aren't friends with a non-Medicare using doctor.
American education actually is already paid for in taxes, so that wouldn't count towards disposable income unless they were paying for private school as well. It is also terrible in quality and has actually decreased literacy of Americans over the years.
Everybody who has to go anywhere without making long detours? Or do you envision some sort intrastructural landscape where several roads, owned by different road companies, that all go to the same places, lie right next to one another? Because that would never happen.
Hardly. Most of the time, road owners would have little incentive to gouge, not in the least because after a certain point no one would bother driving on them. People might actually build another road (though it would probably take a different route), or they might leave town or find another method of transportation. Whatever the case, the road owner would end up losing all his money.
It's also worth noting that a lot of roads wouldn't necessarily even be for profit. Some would be to encourage movement to an area (IIRC this was the case in Brooklyn) or to keep commercial trucks and so on going without delay.
But you just said that America is not libertarian at all so the failings inherent in its systems can't be used against it (even for this 19th century paradise you keep going on about)! It's like it's an example of a libertarian country only when you want it to be.
So what? Certain aspects are libertarian, certain are not, same as any other country. I doubt you have any "perfect" country to point to as an example of progressivism working completely.
Couldn't find any numbers on it, but I do know that, in Belgium, wages are automatically adjusted to preserve purchasing power. It's a pretty much unique system, and while it does work, it causes inflation to jump through the roof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wageThe "disposable income" list is a bit different and doesn't include Belgium, but at any rate going by this the average Belgian has about half the purchasing power of the average American.
Monopolies are mean.
Nothing about roads makes them much more monopolistic than, say, electricity, gas, or telecom, all of which were extremely competitive before being effectively nationalized.
Mid-19th century is not modern by any stretch of the imagination. I think I explained this to you before. Not least because there was no mass automobile use.
Shifting the goalposts. Again, we don't have an example because the government started to take things over in the early 20th century.
Nice original research I guess? These examples are so vague I can't even google them. Also not modern.
I haven't noticed you placing citations beside your claims, either. Besides that, "not modern" is meaningless in this context. We still use electricity, gas, and telecom last I checked, and most are used as examples of "natural monopolies".
Give me a time period and country that was close to this "ideal" then.
Closest would probably be the Icelandic Commonwealth, which existed in the medieval ages.
Back to the main point, "it's never happened before" is not an argument. At varying points in history, neither did republics, paper currency, or "nations" (in the modern, post-1812 sense).
They were also relatively insignificant and small-scale affairs; turnpikes of the 1800s are hardly comparable to, say, the interstate highway system (which would almost certainly never existed without a national government). I've also heard it put best like this: During that period of time, the corporate form had a much different ethos, one oriented more on serving the community rather than generating profits. In other words, almost exactly the opposite of corporations (and markets as a whole) in the modern world. Incidentally, that is one of the main roles of government.
What, so the government taking over charitable/community focused activities crowded out the alternatives? Whowuddathunk?
This also isn't an argument. Libertarians don't want "great profitsssssss", they want voluntary exchange. Under present laws, you can't form a corporation that exists for the sake of assisting a community or what have you. Under libertarianism, what a corporation could be formed for would only be limited by what the people involved were willing to agree to.
Steamers were actually in use a decent length of time before commercial railroads really came into their own, and were arguably a more important form of transportation up until around the 1830s. Incidentally, I don't see how government is to blame for inefficiencies and corruption caused by the absurdly large influence of the business magnates and trusts of the era. Do note that pretty much as soon as the government was out of the hands of the wealthy businessmen, it (in no small part thanks to Teddy Roosevelt) went about instituting progressive reforms and breaking up the monopolies that had allowed such an incredible degree of corruption in American business.
Government is only as good as the people controlling it; when the people controlling it are the same people abusing both it and the market for their own gain, it naturally follows that it isn't much good at all.
Steamers were noticeably less subsidized and controlled than railways, though, and weren't really part of the topic at hand, though.
The government is to blame because it was responsible for giving such magnates and trusts power in the first place. Rather blatantly, too.
Roosevelt actually didn't "destroy" the monopolies and trusts, he just changed the ways in which they are formed. Of those he "broke up", none were out and out private sector monopolies. Furthermore, he created the new method of forming "monopolies", which was to lobby the government to either impose heavy regulations on an industry (the method of huge companies that could absorb extra expenses) or to use antitrust against large companies (the method of smaller companies that weren't doing so well). Just look at the meat packing industry: the largest companies lobbied for "safety regulations", which Roosevelt promptly created. The small companies went out of business and the large ones just used the increased revenue from fallen competitors to cover increased costs.
Saying something is so doesn't make it so. Trying to pretend that a single person of average wealth has comparable market strength to a single multimillionaire is absolutely absurd. The market is not monolithic simply because there is no single individual with the vast majority of the wealth in the system. What it is, however, is a plutocracy. When the vast majority of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small group of individuals, the market tends towards things which benefit one of those few individuals. Misinterpreting one of those market actions that coincidentally benefits some "normal" people as the market functioning properly is akin to claiming that there is a plague because someone in the city angered Zeus.
Once again, you are approaching things from the attitude that the entire world is composed of tiny, insular communities connected by nebulous agents of the free market who provide funding for worthy projects. Maybe you were right three hundred or four hundred years ago. Today? Not so much. You can clap your hands as much as you want, but that won't make Ayn Rand right, either rationally or ethically.
How do such individuals make their wealth, then? If they aren't robbing people in some way, then they make it through satisfying the needs and wants of others. They would hardly have a reason to create a rich kids club excluding everyone else.
Besides that, this argument can just as easily be turned around against the present system. After all, the exceptionally rich of today (Bildebergers) are actually LESS limited in their power, since they have large, centralized organizations called governments that they need only indirectly control to exert coercive influence, whereas the exceptionally rich of libertaland would have to create large centralized organizations from the ground up, would ALL need to be in on it, and would need to have a way to prevent smaller competitors from stealing their niche and replacing them.
Also, you're still strawmanning by putting Rand in the picture. Rand was an objectivist and completely believed in the existence of government. Try Rothbard instead.
Social mobility is the load of crap that has been used to justify exploitation of the working class for as long as it has existed. I normally don't lean this far towards Marx, but geez. Do you know why poor, white sustenance farmers in the antebellum South supported slavery, despite not being able to afford slaves? Because the plantation owners instilled false hope that someday they would be able to buy a slave and live an easier life. The rich leading the poor on with promises that they, too can make it big is as old as the shift from noble/serf to business magnate/factory worker. Every generation you have one or two people who do genuinely make it big, usually through some latent talent. The vast majority of the wealthy people in the world were born to wealthy families. Most of the most prominent self-made million- and billionaires tend to be the ones who do the most charitable work.
Nirvana fallacy. Obviously the number of Andrew Carnegies is exceptionally few even in the best of circumstances. There aren't many people that are dirt poor who will become absurdly rich over the course of their lifetime.
However, you would find that a disproportionate number of early industrialists and entrepreneurs were not, in fact, landed aristocrats but people from the middle class. In Britain, the aristocracy was very much against industrialization because it devalued their land, moving the illiterate English peasants into the cities to become factory workers for a mixture of former merchants/burghers and former peasants themselves. In the US, the most powerful of the rich were generally not born exceptionally rich, they were born in the middle classes, as was the case of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller.
Meanwhile, the American poor began to move into the middle class as the standard of living improved drastically. It wasn't uncommon for an unskilled worker to work at the same company for his entire life, moving up positions until he ultimately was making enough to leave his family reasonably well off afterwards.
In short, social mobility would be a worthy thing if it wasn't largely a load of crap invented to pacify the working class. The bottom line is that in any closed system (such as our world) there is a limited amount of wealth, a limited number of resources. The wider the disparity between the resource distribution, the fewer people who can improve their condition. It is criminal that some people are more wealthy than some nations and that they waste that wealth on utterly trivial things. Not legally criminal, but ethically and morally evil. Come back to me when every person in the world has a roof over their head and food in their stomach, then maybe we can talk about social mobility. Until then, every bit of Smithian and Randian propaganda only exists to preserve the wealth and power of those who already possess it.
There is no such thing as a limited amount of wealth. The economy is not a pie.
Yes, there is a fixed amount of resources on Earth (ignoring space for the moment). That doesn't mean it is impossible to use new resources for different things, to use current resources more efficiently, or to find new things to use resources for. A hunk of iron and a pile of wood is basically useless in their unmodified forms, but they can be used to make axes, saws, farming equipment, and plenty of other things as well. So long as these things have a price, everyone has a reason to want to use the most efficient method (cheapness vs quality) or make the best of what they have.
Through the price system, people then can tell what people want and what is currently being provided. Thus, if there is a shortage of, say, pants, then anyone who wants to make some money goes out and sets up a pants factory, or else gets together with other people to make a pants factory.
It would, after all, be much better to cut out the private contractors altogether and do things properly. Government is a representation of every individual it governs, and as such has the welfare of each of those individuals as its first and most important goal. Any government acting in a way that is not in accordance with this is a flawed one. Things done by private individuals and companies are inherently flawed as they are driven by profit; government at least has the potential to be driven by the interests of its constituents. And for a final note, please don't start in on that BS about equating philanthropy to corporations rather than noblesse oblige, or worse yet trying to suggest it as a workable substitute for government.
tl;dr: Government is flawed, certainly, but has far more potential than private enterprise in terms of promoting the well-being of society as a whole and the individuals which compose it. As if that was a surprise.
Government is a representation of the people who control it, which is generally extremely powerful bankers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. What "the people" want is irrelevant when those interests are threatened.
Even assuming it is a representation of the people, that ignores the fact that each person has his or her own desires and wants. Under the best of circumstances, the government can't satisfy the needs or wants of everyone, so it has to make sweeping, clumsy attempts to satisfy the needs and wants of certain people. There are certain wants it can't satisfy, and there are certain wants it can satisfy for some at the expense of others.
Above all else, though, government exists to propagate itself. Try seceding from the government or not paying your taxes and see what happens. It puts its own existence above that of the people it supposedly represents often, such as when it drafts them to go die in a war they have no part in, or arrests them for a "crime" that hurts no one.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1293616 times)