Not by violence, by taxes. I'd agree that taxes are equitable to stealing, in a sense, but I think you would have a hard time making the violence argument.
While physical violence may not be present, I still think it's a violation of one's humanity. We instinctively understand that a brute taking a purse from elderly woman at knifepoint is violent even if the woman obligated and gave up her purse. We still instinctively understand when a gang of hoodlums surround a well-to-do businessman and after roughing him up, take his fancy Rolex and sell it to a pawnshop. We instinctively understand that a group of brutes making rounds on protection racket is violent and remains the case even if they happened to conveniently keep out competing mafia out of their territory. But somehow it magically stops when a majority votes that everyone must pay a share and failure to do so means forfeiting their house in a lien? I don't think so. When you think about it, the difference between a government and a mafia is exactly one: the claim of legitimacy. In this respect, mafia is more honest because it doesn't try to pretend it has some special power. It's simply in charge, and tough luck if you don't like it.
I do think that an individual has right to wholly own and control the fruits of his labor and dispense of it as the individual sees fit. Telling the individual to do something else with it such as paying taxes, giving to charity or whatever with expectation that the individual must comply is just as violent as if it was at gunpoint. It's no different from the old lady example where no violence actually occurred but the threat was sufficient to coerce her into doing something she'd never do willingly, give up her purse to the stranger.
I don't know of any utopian forms for government where all individuals are happy & content. In the absence of that, majority makes right is arguably the best we have come up with so far.
Right, the same process that gave us slavery, segregation, apartheid, high rate of prisonment and many more. Majority vote is utterly and totally incapable of consistently affirming the underlying principle that all humans are equal. If nothing, majority seeks to be more equal than the minority. At least with the monarchial system, they're more honest when they claim that serfs are worthless dirt and should pay thanks to their wise and benevolent lords ruled by God-given privileges.
Just because everyone is not treated exactly equally does not mean the government is dehumanizing one group or another. Men are required to sign up for the Selective Service after their 18th birthday, women are not. Does that mean the government is dehumanizing women? Or men, possibly, since they're the ones that ahve to sign up for potential military service?
Yes to both. Again, we instinctively understand that once a child grows up, the child is free to choose his dreams and pursue as such, much to consternation of the child's parent who may have had different road for the child. Yet we affirm the child's right to decide for himself. We then throw this principle out of the windows when it's now a law passed by majority vote? Sorry, but I don't think principles would be much of a principle if they were going to change simply on the numbers involved.
To make it explicit, I'm asserting that each and every individual has right to wholly own and control the fruits of labors. They are free to participate in mutual and cooperative trading but no single individual can lay a claim on another individual's fruit of labors. To do so is to violate the individual's dignity and self-determination.
I think you're using charged terminology in order to try to prove your point.
Okay, let's say it's charged. What would be a better terminology for the problem of individual's liberty being violated by force by others, then? Can we honestly claim to respect an individual if we infringe on the individual's liberty & private property?
Agreed, but that is missing the point. Just because something has not happened doesn't mean it can never happen, but it does say something about the likelihood. The USA has never had a female president. It doesn't mean it is not going to happen, but the likelihood of it happening is not very high at this time.
Sure. It can be argued that the likelihood is low but I think I'll take my stake with a system that's far more consistent and principled than the present system which is really no better from the old monarchial system. When you think about it, there's too many similarities between the old monarchial system with the representative democracy system. That isn't surprising since they're both outward symptoms of much deeper flaw - granting the government absolute power to rule and enslave people in varying ways while dispensing special favors to some group of people.
Specifics don't have to be anecdotal. You're saying that a system as you describe would work really well, but you have nothing to base your claim on other than your own insight.
Whoa, you're giving me way too much credits. Please, don't think it was my own insight. I'm not that delusional or arrogant to think that I have insight nobody else has had. All of this is based in school of thoughts developed by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Halizett, Murray Rothbard and then few more.
They've done much more research and studies of various past events than what I possibly could remember & cite. So I do think there is good reasons to think it's well-founded and based on historical events that illustrate the success of the underlying principles discussed.
But private services are based on earning a profit, whereas public services do not have to be. Do you know what the costs of attending college in the USA are as compared to the costs of attending a university in Europe? Do you know why Europe's college costs are so much lower? It is because they are publicly subsidized.
Right, and we have publicly subsidized colleges in USA, too. What we'll never know is whether they were actually the best way to allocate the resources. A bureaucrat is always powerless and unable to gather enough information to make accurate predictions of how many a given resources is needed for a given moment in a given location. Yet when errors are made, bureaucrats won't get fired whereas the failing business go out of business, releasing the resources back into the market for other people to make a better use of it.
Or, in your terminology, the government there steals money from all of its citizens and then provides a low-cost college education to its citizens.
Just because you pay $X less to go to a college does not follow that it's the low-cost solution. You have to factor in the hidden costs. But let's be generous and say we are magically able to operate a college at same cost whether it's privately funded or publicly taxed. With private funds, students come and open their checkbook and make a payment to the bursar. Done. How does the tax-supported college collects the taxes. Well, they have to hire bureaucrats to go out and calculate how many people there are, how many they owe, write up bills to them all, then collect and verify that everyone has paid their shares, and pursue the shirkers. Now, would those bureaucrat work for free? Not likely. And already we're in deficit because of that very extra overhead. Even when we grant that both college has same operating costs and thus same efficiency, the tax-funded college falls in red and thus must charge higher price to support the underlying bureaucracy. This cost is easily overlooked because it's distributed along everyone but it's still there nonetheless. And what about people who for various reasons don't go to college? They're now forced to subsidize others' tuition. This in turns contributes to the tragedy of commons - everyone decides that if they're paying for tuition, they might as well go to the college anyway and do so. Which is actually what we're doing right now. In past it used to be that higher education was reserved for a small fraction of populace and most got by just fine with a high school diploma. Nowadays, one needs to hold a bachelor degree for the same job even though the skillset didn't change significantly and they're deeper in debt (after all the tuition is only partly subsidized but not completely covered). Going to a trade school or even making it a part of high school education would have been far better for most people and would be much more economically effective of producing productive & skilled workforce.
Even worse, when it's funded by tax, there's no measure of whether so many units of college credits is actually demanded. Since nobody knows for sure how many teachers they need to hire to cover the demands, it follows that there'll be shortage of classes, problems with scheduling. Just ask any students who has the frustration of where they had two required classes that didn't have a different schedule and thus extend their stay unnecessarily. At least with a privately owned college, they can bid up the price to cover the additional operating costs and thus hire sufficient teachers or when it gets too slow, release the teachers and lower the tuition. That flexibility won't be available with taxation.
Its not violence. Example: The government hires a private institution to fulfill the duties of the FDA. People in the public die because that private institution did not do everything in their power to prevent it (because it was too costly to do so).
Are the people that died simply costs of doing business?
Thanks for the clarification. Here's the question: Is FDA entirely bloodless on their hands? Have they had a perfect record of consistently rejecting dangerous drugs and approving effective drugs? I'd say no. Many people probably has died by some blunder on FDA's part. But hey, nobody's perfect. We can't always know all relevant facts and golly, sometime even after extensive testing, we're blindsided. Followup question: Are anybody then held accountable? I'd say likely not. FDA's bureaucrats aren't paid their handsome salary based on whether they prevent so many deaths. They're essentially tenured for life. That's downright frightening and we've not even touched the subject of whether there's corruption & bribing between FDA & pharmas.
With private organizations (note plural), they all have to have a reputation of successfully demonstrating safety of a drug and put it on line every time they stamp the seal of approval. Approve one too many dangerous drug, and one too many people dies as a consequence, they go out of the business. Why should we buy any products approved by such organization that had poor record of performance? Why should any pharma want their seal of approval when it actually could be a seal of tarnishment? Since there are more than one organization, pharmas can then choose to get multiple seal of approvals and public can choose their favorite organization to trust in and are free to switch allegiance at a whim. We don't have that luxury with FDA.
And before you say it's far-fetched, we already have such system. Notice two symbols that respectively appear on several food products and various appliances: the K in a circle and the UL in a circle? Those are the seal of approval certifying that for former the food products are kosher, and for latter that the device is safe to use. (I can't recall offhand the name of two major organizations that certifies kosher but UL is "Underwriters' Laboratory") Both are privately operated and has done for many decades. Many companies in respective industry recognize the value of winning their seal of approval and willingly open their checkbook to pay them to evaluate the products and win the right to bear their seal of approval.
To think such services can only be provided by government is to assume far too much about government's alleged benevolence. Again, the history has shown again and again that governments are anything but benevolent and are quite very corruptible. Possibly much more so since they tend to have monopoly and thus there's no escape for poor people under such system. To also think that it can be remedied via appealing in courts is delusional because it amounts to playing within tyrants' rulebook. Just like Aesop's fable about the wolf and the lamb, tyrants cannot be reasoned with.
In certain lines of work, maybe. A non-profit hospital, for example, would never be able to survive in a purely capitalistic society as you're describing. There would be no medicare, medicaid, etc. There would be only private insurance. Some people still would not be able to afford private insurance. So unless the non-profit hospital is able to turn away non-paying customers, they would quickly go bankrupt.
The whole plight of people without insurance comes down to this: there's no incentive to save for a rainy day. This and several other deplorable conditions such as paycheck to paycheck incomes are actually the result of government intervention. I won't claim that there will be zero people who is unable to pay in a purely capitalistic system; that'd be delusional. However, because we pay so many things through taxation, it completely conflates how much we need to set aside to cover for calamity, how much of insurance coverage we need. With employer-provided healthcare, the costs are completely inflated because nobody is paying for it directly - doctors figure they can charge as much as they think they'll get away with the insurance, while the insurance pass the buck back to the employer who do not alway see eye to eye with their employee for the healthcare coverage. Medicaid and Medicare only consume even more scarce medical resources and further distort the true cost and then there's licensing board that makes the supply of doctors artificially scarce, again driving up the costs. All of this were the creation of government intervention - it was the government that came up with the bright idea of giving employers tax break to provide healthcare (back in the period when they also had wage controls). It was the government that decided we needed Medicare & Medicaid and passed laws forcing provider to admit those patients even at losses, resulting in depression of the quality of the service rendered and rationing of same service.
Finally, it remains a fact that there isn't enough of everything to go around and nobody knows how much of a good they will need. IMHO the best mechanism for determining this is through the signal of pricing in a free market. It is impossible for government (or any entity) to guarantee a privilege to everyone. That's fraud because they don't have unlimited store of resources to do so. The guarantee is anything but a guarantee.
I think the President made a great point in his speech yesterday regarding the Republican's desired changes to Medicare. They would fundamentally change Medicare, and more globally, change our country into something many of us would not recognize.
I'd wager it's empty rhetoric. Even if the republicans had their ways, it'd be just a continuation of the same policies with new name and face, just as Obama administration was a continuation of Bush administration and many administrations before. Being a part of the system, they (and by "they", I refer to all politicians, regardless of their party allegation) have no interest in overturning it. The debate has been basically about whether one should buy more butter or buy more guns, but both agree on the same point that it should be spent with others' money and not theirs. How convenient is that!
