Long, tedious tit-for-tat ideological battles are right out.
Long, tedious tit-for-tat ideological battles are right out.
No surprise these clowns hope to legalize lead in food too.
It also explains that in the case of drunk driving what's criminalized isn't harm to people, but an increased potential to harm people. If you have principles that say that racial profiling is wrong because you shouldn't punish people that haven't harmed anybody, then this principle should also apply to drunk driving.
Note that I am against drunk driving, but it does cause an inconsistency in my principles.
Also, isn't it silly to dismiss mises articles because a person posted an article in 2006? Would you think it's fair if somebody dismissed all of your opinions going forward because of one opinion you held in 2006?
Racial profiling is wrong because being of a particular race does not by itself represent any greater risk of harm to anyone else. Not analogous to driving while impaired, IMO, so your principles are likely more intact than you might think.
Surely no one is arguing that you can walk down main street firing your gun into the air and as long as no one is struck by a bullet and no property is damaged, we're cool.
With DUI, there's a clear causation. Alcohol in blood will make you lose coordination and slow your reflexes. More alcohol, the worse it gets. And reaction is individual. That will increase the probability the driver will harm someone.
So it's different.
Should government deal in probabilities? Depends whether you want it to do prevention or not. All prevention is basically dealing with probabilities.
> why not ticket the swerving or recklessness and leave the alcohol out of it? Why indeed.
Argument ad absudrum: Swerving may not lead to an accident either.
The values they use to punish you is completely arbitrary (probably varies from state to state) and we do not take any other factors related to the individual into account which is important if we are not so keen on ruining other people's lives. Look for behaviors that show there are issues with coordination regardless of substances. We can do that. We already do it. We do not need to punish based on arbitrary values. You could fail the test and yet have perfect coordination. See my issue? It gets even more problematic when you consider alcoholics who are actually better off drinking vs. not drinking when it comes to coordination and reflexes. Anyway, the emphasis, in my opinion, should be on behaviors that indicate loss of coordination, reflex issues, etc. not some arbitrary value. It works well with prevention, too, so there is no need to give up on that.
> Argument ad absudrum: Swerving may not lead to an accident either.
I agree, but depending on the situation, it could easily indicate that there is an issue regardless of the substance used.
Anyway, thank you for the calm-headed response.
Any such test is likely to be highly subjective and therefore open to bias and abuse. A breath alcohol content of 0.008% might be fairly arbitrary in terms of risk, but it's objectively measurable. A cop can claim that I was driving erratically just because he doesn't like the look of me, a jury can interpret dashcam footage unfavourably based on their prejudices, but a correctly calibrated breathalyzer doesn't lie. Drawing an a line in the sand between "sober" and "too drunk to drive safely" based on a biological marker of alcohol intake is almost certainly the fairest means of enforcement. There is of course the broader issue of who the police choose to stop and test, but there's no obvious technological solution to that risk of bias.
Typical roadside walk the line test might not be all that objective, as it's judged by the eye of the officer, and some people may be better walking the line, while still having reduced reflexes and being a increased danger on the road.
Though, I'm not an expert and despite this feeling arbitrary, there may have been studies comparing effectiveness of various forms of testing on predicting the harm of DUI, or comapring breathalizer with the walk the line test, or touch your nose test or whatever.
I'm not for locking people up, but I also prefer safer roads. And what helps and what does not may not be all that obvious on the larger more aggregate level.
If the officer wants you to do a field sobriety test you tell them blood test or GTFO.
Drunk driving should be legal because sometimes you make it home safe. Lead in food should be legal because some people will eat it and not get sick. Putting others at risk isn't a crime, the government should not deal in probabilities. That job falls to "insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis."
Cripes, what a totally fucked up worldview.
If food makers (or the makers of school supplies in this case) didn't want to kill you, then why is there high levels of lead in the food, a substance which is known to be very toxic? The free market should've caused any lead products to be free market'd out of existence by now, given how much we know. Even more absurd is your claim of violence, considering you don't seem to consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being 'violent' in this scenario. Or is it just less violent then having to pay taxes?
We do not have free market, we have a pretty tightly regulated market.
> Even more absurd is your claim of violence, considering you don't seem to consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being 'violent' in this scenario. Or is it just less violent then having to pay taxes?
Excuse me? They are two different instances of violence. What you are trying to do is solve violence by more violence. How did that ever work out?
It is funny how my claim of an instance of violence is absurd merely because of an assumption which is "you don't consider people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead as being violent". Governments stealing money at gunpoint is violent, regardless of the second part, which, again, was just an absurd assumption from you.
I am not sure what you are trying to achieve here.
A novel that triggered a major investigation, followed by food safety regulation, and testing in the USA within a year of its publication. It also halved US meat exports and created what became the FDA.
You want to take that away again? God help us.
At this point, excessive amounts of lead should be seen as malice and regulated out of existence. What other excuse would there be for such phony products to be sold, other than to make a quick profit at the expensive of other's health?
And no, they are not completely unrelated. This is a thread and topic about toxic school supplies having excessive amounts of lead. When people proposed regulations to fix this problem, you equated that to violence. You are directly connecting the two.
"Government stealing money from taxpayers" is what I equated to violence. Do you care to argue that it is not violent?
Too bad you cannot renounce education, healthcare etc that were also forced upon you by the state.
Not without paying taxes you can't. The US government charges you $2000 to renounce your citizenship and if your assets are worth more than $2 million they will give you a massive tax bill as though you had sold all those assets. Furthermore, you can only renounce citizenship if you accept the citizenship of another country, which kind of defeats the point you're making - you can't actually exit the system legally.
No requirement to have another citizenship to renounce.
I, for one, am happy to not fund the bombing of innocent people through the taxes I pay. I am not sure you could say the same. :)
And for the record:
> Renouncing U.S. citizenship doesn't free you from U.S. tax obligations and means that even after the renunciation, the IRS could still audit and assess taxes and penalties.
Even on Mars there would be society that will enforce its rules on you. See a pattern here?
The free market is awesome, but it can't effectively price externalities, especially those which have diffuse origins or targets.
It is making the assumption that they are doing it to kill you against which I spoke.
Parody libertarians should remember that the "violence" of taxation prevents actual violence of the blood in the (unpaved) streets kind.
Maybe not resisting in this case would prevent another (but not all) "actual violence", too, completely ignoring the fact that it does not have to actually come to it in the first place.
I am never going to understand people who propose that violence is a necessary evil in all cases to prevent further violence. Maybe the US needs to do more of that effective bombing of countries. Think smart: no humans to stick around to be violent! We successfully prevented violence!
Renounce citizenship and nobody would care about your taxes. If you do not want to then you as free willed entity chosen that being citizen paying taxes bring you more benefit than not being one.
Nice try.
I wonder which one of us is being melodramatic here.
From what I read, it basically said things like: "government isn't doing a good job, therefore we should get rid of it" and calls for (direct quote) "government to get out of the way of the productive and ever-inventive energies of the public as expressed in voluntary market activity".
Maybe we should stop prosecuting people for murder, since it's obviously not stopping it from happening. Maybe we should just allow the market to play betting games over subprime mortgages as it sees fit. Maybe we should just allow banks to launder money for drug cartels and terrorists as long as they're making a profit off it. Am I getting close to the unregulated dream?
HSBC still does business in the US to this day after being prosecuted for exactly this, because they paid the speedbump fine.
Additionally, here's a list of currently 37 countries that rely on taxation from wealthier countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavily_indebted_poor_countrie...
His link even mentions this:
> Contrary to popular belief, most child labourers are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing or formal economy.
> Preventing children from participating in productive work would be more harmful to their welfare and that of their group in the long run
Child labor is not inherently wrong, and no one says the kids should have to work in harsh conditions just like the adults. Child labor != children dying.
It is not an answer to your question, he just has absolutely no clue what he is talking about. It is yet another instance of "think about the children" gone wrong. I mean, yeah dude, working at retail or assembling whatever is killing our children! Absurd.
Edit: I am against forced labor when it comes to both children AND adults.
I don't think that's the comparison. It's more child labor = forced labor. It's not centrally about preventing death, it's more about preventing slavery. Children are particularly vulnerable to coercion, and if children are working in a factory, it's likely that they are doing so against their will.
In fact, the article says:
> Other schemes included 'earn-and-learn' programs where children would work and thereby learn. Britain for example passed a law, the so-called Masters and Servants Act of 1899, followed by Tax and Pass Law, to encourage child labour in colonies particularly in Africa. These laws offered the native people the legal ownership to some of the native land in exchange for making labour of wife and children available to colonial government's needs such as in farms and as picannins.
> Beyond laws, new taxes were imposed on colonies. One of these taxes was the Head Tax in the British and French colonial empires. The tax was imposed on everyone older than 8 years, in some colonies. To pay these taxes and cover living expenses, children in colonial households had to work.
Seems like it actually did the opposite of what he claimed?
So one country conquered another, and said they can have land they already had back if agree to forced labor according "to colonial government's needs". Doesn't seem much different than enslaving a population directly.
The original question was about a country where raising taxes would improve the situation. Name me a country that solved child labour and improved the economy by raising taxes?
If you could accomplish that point without comparing me and my family members to the Nazi party, extra points.
That was not me. :P
https://mises.org/library/safety-and-market-economy
https://mises.org/library/what-keeps-us-safe-0
https://mises.org/library/what-will-keep-our-food-safe
https://mises.org/library/do-food-makers-want-kill-you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY5OYdGevAQ
Bonus: https://mises.org/wire/government-road-management-there-bett...
On top of that, your justification ("who the fuck else is going to do it?") of violence ("steal money from taxpayers") is quite alarming.