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Originally posted by SignyM:
This brings up the fundamental question whether certain programs/ services can ONLY be provided governmentally, which ones should be left to individual effort/ market forces, and which ones can be provided either way (and which path is more advantageous).

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Originally posted by oddness2her:
None taken. The concern many of we "commie-lovin' pinkos" have with extensive privatization is the lack of accountability. Public-owned or government-run institutions may not be perfect, but at least their officials are elected, and therefore answerable to we the people. Private corporations are only answerable to their major stockholders, which I'm pretty sure does not include you or me. Sure, we can vote with our dollars. Until huge, unchecked monopolies eliminate market competition. There's a balance to be struck between total government control and total anarchy. If we keep talking, maybe we'll find it.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
"traffic control,"

Air traffic control? Hmm. Another good point.

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[B}"sidewalk repair..."

Or you mean local? I thought we were on federal govt.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

"sidewalk repair..."

Or you mean local? I thought we were on federal govt.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Sidewalk maintenance could be done by Sidewalk Inc. A company I just invented. If you want special sidewalk things, benches, driveways, ramps, all sort of other things, better pay your dues. That would more than pay for regular maintenance.

Sidewalk Inc. makes out like a bandit. Every home owner and buisiness is paying for upkeep and shelling out for bonus extras and Sidewalk becomes like port authority. Then it uses this money to build World Trade Centers.

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Sidewalk maintenance could be done by Sidewalk Inc. A company I just invented. If you want special sidewalk things, benches, driveways, ramps, all sort of other things, better pay your dues. That would more than pay for regular maintenance. Sidewalk Inc. makes out like a bandit. Every home owner and buisiness is paying for upkeep and shelling out for bonus extras and Sidewalk becomes like port authority.

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Assuming no state and local govt involvement means that the price is outside the reach of property owners. Our city can't actually pay for the improvements. We supplement our own funding from State and Federal Grants in aid. That still leaves the average property owner on any given street with an assessment usually in the $5,000-$20,000 range. That means the average actual cost is between $10,000 and $20,000 per.

So your company, which actually exists because many smaller communities outsource this to independent contractors, would flounder with sidewalks being limited to the richest neighborhoods. You could offset by offering lower quality sidewalks, since in your no govt world their would be no liabilty for substandard work.

I suspect that were this the case the poor would become so abused by people like Sidewalks, Inc. that they would revolt and demand a govt to protect their class interests. Almost a reverse Communist Revolution.

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Yes, but... The fallacy is that everyone WILL pay. Some people may not want to pay for sidewalk upkeep. Perhaps they always use their car. Perhaps they would rather buy a plasma TV. Perhaps they simply can't afford it. Then the problem becomes that the sidewalk becomes less useful because some segments are cracked or even non-existant. As it becomes less useful, it becomes less used, and therefore other become less interested in upkeep. Eventually, the whole system falls down. That is what is called "the problem of the commons".

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Most of the other services you describe are actually provided by for profit businesses here in upstate new york. We have garbage collection, recycling, etc. We pay for everything. So does everybody else, since they all pay taxes. The thing is, paying directly for these services, which if essential, everyone will pay for, but paying directly will help lower the cost. With taxes, costs grow, fat grows, and red tape grows, and soon you have the numbers Hero quoted

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And let's take a little moment here to address the issue of Korea.

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Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

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If someone has reform ideas of how to prevent the private sector from falling victim to environmental catastrophes, corrupt medical schemes and other potential pitfalls, I'm intersted in hearing them. If someone wants to continue to argue for socialism, I'm quite frankly not interested. This is a what if sort of debate, and if people want to carry that what if to socialism, then don't address me with it. It's just more or less an ideological personal attack, and not an argument based on substance.

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Unfortunately (for you) you're the only representative of free-market capitalism in this thread and so the arguments tend to take on a "pile on Dreamtrove" feeling, altho I don't think that is the intent.

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The first has to do with the nature of people. In your view, people work best for reward, and since "government handouts" are disconnected from effort, they foster dependency and laziness.

The second has to do with the the necessity of competition. Since government represents a monopoly, it is inevitably less efficient and more costly.

The third point is that competition drives progress. Without competition, newer/ better products never get implemented or distributed.

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tomato patch

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Generally - I've found that people adopt worldviews that reflect an image they want to have of themselves.

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did competition drive the discovery of langauge, fire, writing?

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In the very general sense, we agree on the concept 'it either works or it doesn't'. Destructive wave forms cancel each other out, constructive ones add. Universal constants either lead to stable phenomena and existance, or they don't. Certain biological variations are advantageous, or they are not.

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The third is the value judgement that anything that has any kind of survival advantage is necessarily better (in human society).

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There are new studies which elucidate human responses and show how they are adaptive to humans living in cooperative groups - an essential evolutionary condition for human survival.

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A sense of fairness is one, rewarding neurochemicals for cooperation is another, profound hormonal drives for caregiving (oxytocin) is a third. There are others.

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By your logic, a monopoly, which works well enough to amass complete control over a market, is a great thing simply b/c it works well enough to continue near indefinitely.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
I posted on another thread a long thing about how this cooperative governance led the nazis and commies to kill hunrded million plus people, that wouldn't have been possible if the same a**holes had been in our competitive individualistic society.

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The problem with this world view is that it's too simplistic.

First, you assume that the "advanced" feature of society A is what makes it triumph over society B. That isn't always the case. For example, democracy is a better system than Nazism, but the things that won world war two was the untouchable production capacity of the US, targeting of German production by allied airforces and the almost unlimited man power of the Soviet Union.

Had Germany had the manufacturing resources of the US it would have been a close thing. You could argue that western democratic principles built the US industrial base, but the US's raw material and land advantages are purely geographic and independent of its form of governmen

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Athens fell to Sparta

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What right do you have to stop someone making a business selling crack on your street corner?

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I wish I had more time to this thread. I just wanted to toss in an observation: I alos used to believe in the perfectibility of society by competition between societies- until I read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. In essence, he points out a number of societies that manage to compete themselves into non-existance by ignoring fundamental environmental and technological problems. I no longer believe that competition automatically evolves the "fittest" societies, and I no longer believe in the ability of the collective to "eventually" learn from experience. Ideology has in the past trumped reality- until reality trumps the entire society. The many cases of societies running headlong into extinction was distressing.


In fact, the most durable societies are those the cooperate internally AND pay attention to reality.

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I haven't read the book, but I do have some ranting response.

1. Sure, societies without environmental conscience exinct themselve repeatedly, it's part of evolution, but it's damaging to the planet. I think we as a planet can agree that certain things are proven failures and prevent them from resurfacing. It's like if there was an eat-everything bug, and all the other bugs realized that the eat-everything bug was going to destroy the food source and then extinct everyone including itself, and so they ganged up on the eat-everything bug. But past that,

2. This "success of cooperative societies" is not the case. Cooperative societies collapse all the time. The most extensive cooperative societies, such as the Soviet Union tend to be disasters in the long run. A russian woman I knew who worked in a govt. research lab in the Soviet Union. She said that everyone some time ago had agreed on the right way to do things, and then they cooperated towards that effort, until she got very advanced in the field, which was information theory, she thought they were right. As some point she realized that they were all, cooperatively, doing it wrong. But the organization was large, and had a vested interest in the wrong way, and so became unshakeable on the point. It was much easier to simply end the conflict by pushing her out, than by changing the way of doing it. Since there was no competition, there was only one way to do it. Sometimes there is more than one way to do something, and you don't know what is best. This is why compeition is essential to survival. So, she quit, and as such, the lab lost it's most educated member, and she went to work for the only competitor that she knew, which was of course, us. Now she works for the US Navy.

From the point of view of the Soviet society, this is a clear evolutionary failing, because if there is no competition within your society, there is always competition outside of it.