| | Jordan responding to my question what distinguishes him from a Marxist:
Uh...tons of stuff. I don't accept the precept "to each according to his need."
Yes you do. You advocate people should get help from the government to have a competitive business, and not necessarily of their own ability. That is explicitly a philosophy of "to each according to his need".
Again, my point was just that lawmaking affects economics, a premise with which you seem to agree.
Of course lawmaking effects economics, obviously it has and to a great extent the lawmaking of this country has affected it negatively, that's not the contention here. You advocate a set of laws that adversely effect the marketplace by placing coercion on businesses that did not initiate force. Let's get our disagreements in order here.
I originally wrote:
You trust the government very little, but you do trust them to understand what is happening in a market? I find that to be remarkable.
Jordan responded:
I expect the gov to try and make just laws. I don't expect any miracles.
No you do not expect the government to make just laws, you expect them to continue enforcing unjust laws such as anti-trust legislation.
First, this is an "all or nothing" fallacy. The government doesn't need to know everything to see that something is wrong, i.e., that cheating is taking place.
Yes, whether something is wrong or right is an all or nothing proposition, and using force on the marketplace is wrong. That you think being competitive means someone is cheating is a fallacy.
Second, there comes a point where it's unreasonable to suspect that innovation will play out, even though such point might be rare.
No one could have predicted the wonders that technology has brought man as a result of free and creative minds. Over a century ago before the invention of the automobile the big environmental dilemma of the day was the pollutant "horse-dung", people made speculative predictions about the long term environmental disaster of what horse-dung would bring a hundreds years into the future. If only they knew the foolishness of their speculation. There was no such thing as cars, computers, CAT scans, shuttles, planes, LEDs, lasers, superconductors, fission bombs, GPS, microchips, cell phones, broadband, gene therapy, plastic, hybrid fuel cars, automated robots, etc. Unless you have insight into every creative mind more so than even creative mind themselves do, you can't possibly think you or anyone else will know what innovations will happen in even the next decade that would make a current product obsolete.
I originally wrote:
Anti-trust laws describe certain aspects of competition as "predatory" but in fact predatory means "competitive".
Jordan responded:
Wrong. You don't understand antitrust law. Competitive and predatory are not the same. And "natural" monopolies are just fine under antitrust law
Unbelievable! And you accuse me of not understanding anti-trust law? Perhaps if you studied it more closely you wouldn't be making these erroneous assumptions. Natural monopolies are NOT fine under antitrust law:
Clayton Act: mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition (Act Section 7, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 18);
This means a company that freely becomes a monopoly can be punished.
coercive or abusive monopolies are not.
Yes...yes they are allowed! I deal with a government enforced monopoly every week in my own business dealings. I have to deal with liquor distributors that have exclusive territorial rights over liquor products as mandated by Connecticut liquor laws. Laws obviously designed to protect a monopoly. Don't sit there and tell me the anti-trust legislation stops coercive monopolies.
I suspect you're committing what I like to call the "I'm not touching you" fallacy. This is the fallacy that claims someone is forced or harmed only when someone else physically attacks him. That was the fun premise we stuck with when we were kids. But it just ain't so. People can destroy you indirectly by severely manipulating the environment around you. They can starve you by taking away all the food around you. They can cut you by surrounding you with knives. They can paralyze you by surrounding you with off-limits places. And the list goes on. That's coercive. That's akin to what abusive monopolies do. Again, it's rare.
Jordan, you obviously have a poor understanding of Objectivism to say that and sounds surprisingly Marxist. Individuals do not have a right to have a material existence provided to them, only to be free to trade with other individuals free from coercion. There in fact does exist a harmony of interests between men where it is in an individual's rational self-interest to trade with other men because both parties mutually benefit. There doesn't have to be a conflict of interest man qua man, a dog eat dog world where one exploits another at the expense of another's rational self-interest as you seem to suggest. You propose anti-trust legislation because man may suffer from being surrounded and having their food taken away from them? Are you serious when you suggest that?
I originally wrote:
You said the word "cheat", you can't "cheat" someone you never had any agreement with. That has nothing to do with tort law, or at least just and proper tort laws.
You responded:
This might be the fallacy of idealist thinking. We can cheat someone without an agreement in the world we actually live in. It happens all the time on the road. Someone doesn't wait at the stop sign like he's supposed to and cheats the person who does wait. Someone runs the red light, cheating the person who had the green. Someone cuts in line to enter the highway. Someone cuts you off. Etc. Now, some Objectivists like to point out that if roads were private, then all this cheating could be couched in agreement-violation because everybody who drives would have to agree to the road-owner's rules, or something like that. But hey, tough shit. Those roads aren't privately owned. That's not the world we live in. So cheating without contract can happen.
Oh brother! I'd like to call this "context dropping".
Traffic laws are designed to punish people for engaging in behavior that endangers the physical safety of others around them. Just as you would punish someone for brandishing a gun and waving it around a McDonald's because people's physical well-being are threatened, so too can a moral argument be made that running a red light or reckless driving can endanger or threaten the physical well-being of others. A car is literally just as dangerous as a gun and using it in a manner that endangers people's lives is an initiation of force. You don't need an agreement with someone to be free from that person's initiation of force against you. But you have yet to make a case free competition is an initiation of force.
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