Are Libertarian Economics Fundamentally Sound?

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WinePusher

Are Libertarian Economics Fundamentally Sound?

Post #1

Post by WinePusher »

Abraxas and WinePusher have agreed to do a head to head debate on economics. We will be tackling 4 major topics and I will present my arugments and evidence for why a free market approach is the best approach while Abraxas will present his arguments as to how his approach is the better approach.

This debate will consist of 4 Rounds consisting of 4 Posts. Each round will have its own topic.

Round 1: The Enviroment, Energy and Food Safety

Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal

Round 2: Poverty and Healthcare

Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal

Round 3: Labor, Discrimination and Civil Rights

Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal

Round 4: Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy

Post 1: Abraxas presents an argument for why government intervention is needed
Post 2: WinePusher presents rebuttal
Post 3: WinePusher presents an argument for why a Free Market Approach is more fundamentally sound
Post 4: Abraxas presents rebuttal

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Abraxas
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Post #2

Post by Abraxas »

Thank you Winepusher for setting this debate up and organizing the structure. I would also like to, at this juncture, take the stereotypical debate action of thanking our readers in advance for following this debate. I will also apologize in advance for the incoming verbal avalanche. Now, on to the subject at hand.

I don't think there is any question that you and I agree that regulation of the energy industry, the environment, and the food industry are needed. I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that the difference we see is a matter of who should do the regulating. I hold that the government must be involved, you hold the industry is capable of self regulating. If this assumption is not accurate, I am about to waste a lot of page. There are a number of major points that I want to address for why self regulation is insufficient and why government regulation is required to ensure public safety.

Firstly, we need to know what causes the damage. Without the government sponsoring studies and actively testing chemicals for harm, how are we going to know? I know the line at first seems hard to accept as a legitimate point, but hear me out. I want to start by pointing to the tobacco industry. To this day they fund research and find there is insufficient data to link tobacco use to a number of diseases and conditions external research sponsored through the CDC, among other agencies, have found to be causally linked. The reason for that is simple, it is always going to be in the interest of a self regulating industry to find the products they use are either harmless or the results are inconclusive. Further, it is in their interest to staff positions of self regulation with individuals who will find that more research is (always) needed. This took the form of an organizations known as the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute who had the mission of undercutting any science critical of the product coming from outside sources. In the interim, as was found out down the line through litigation, they had in their possession documents from internal tests that confirmed the very science they were attacking.

We see something similar going on today already from the energy industry when it comes to global climate change. Despite what some on the conservative media like to claim, there is no debate, no controversy, no dispute in academic circles that it is real and it is causally linked to the enormous amount of greenhouse gasses put into the atmosphere by human civilization. However, the oil companies, are, in fact, paying people to in effect muddy the scientific waters and try to sell doubt and uncertainty where none exists. This is not surprising, after all, it is in their interests for there to not be regulations on oil consumption or to have regulations put in place that make oil consuming products more expensive. It is further not in their interests to end up in a situation where the government is subsidizing competing technology. I'm not even going to imply this is inherently malicious, people want to believe things that are in their interests and will argue with great ferocity they are true because they make themselves believe they are true (though I am not ruling out malice either).

Without impartial research done with the first and foremost goal being to get to the truth of the matter, how is the public supposed to get reliable information? Now, I expect you want to leap on the word impartial here, undoubtedly wishing to point to partisanship, competing interests for donors opposed to the industry in question, and so forth. However, my point and a running theme I intend to focus heavily on throughout this debate will be that the government is the people. The people are those to whom the government is ultimately accountable. The government is chosen by the people through elections. If the government behaves in a way that behaves the public trust, they can be removed and replaced. Further, the people can demand barriers put in place to prevent corruption and ensure objectivity if they feel corporate interests might be too persuasive in how they influence reelection bids. This brings me to my second point.

Corporations, or more specifically, those in policy making roles within them, are inherently unaccountable to the public at large (except in where they are regulated). They are accountable to shareholders. They are rewarded for the things that drive up revenue and drive down cost. They are punished for the things that increase expense or cut into profit margins. In addition to the corporate incentive to perform, you are also going to have to overcome the individual being pressured by the need to keep their job to take the actions most conducive to them maintaining their role. If that means cutting corners and having the environment or the consumer take one for the team, that is precisely what they will do. Because they answer to those who have a vested interest only in maximizing profitability, not maintaining public welfare, they cannot be expected to reliably look out for the latter at the expense of the former.

You might argue here the consumer can always boycott them, but that assumes both realistic alternatives to the product being offered and reasonable knowledge of the damage. People have to get to work, that means a great many of them have to drive, and they cannot drive without gasoline and oil. Our society has produced a number of captive markets, products people need to buy to survive above and beyond the bare essentials. Boycott is simply not an option, in particular when all major companies are prone to the same practices. Further, per what was discussed above, how does the consumer learn of the shady and dangerous behavior in the first place? There might be a whistle-blower or a media investigation at some point, however, can one count on that to be reliable, especially with no legal way to force companies to disclose internal information they do not want disclosed?

The next point I want to move to is the scope of the damage being done is something that far exceeds the scope of the company doing it. If ground water, for example, gets contaminated by industrial waste, absolutely everything linked to that ground water suffers for it, or, worse yet, a river or the air. Pollution does not respect property lines. Smog generated from dirty coal does not build up only in the land on which the power plant is built. It spreads out at the whims of physics and contaminates the broader nation. Why then, should the nation, as represented by the government, not regulate it? It seems only logical that if you produce an effect that is going to impact the entire nation, whether they use your product, potentially damaging your quality of life, state of health, and so on that the people, through the government, be allowed to regulate it.

What I want to discuss here is what drives companies as opposed to what drives government, ideally. Companies are driven by the profit motive, that is, to make as much money as they possibly can. Governments, at least, proper democracies, are driven by the will and best interests of the people. Where the profit motive works well is for maximizing productivity, innovating new designs (though only that which is expected to make money), and efficiency. However, that comes with a downside, that being, as touched on above, that when it all boils down to the bottom line, those who are the most willing to do anything to get to that bottom line are going to be those who succeed, and they don't necessarily care about what damage they do along the way. Further, it is less useful for longterm projects as a focus on the bottom line can make them reluctant to engage in activities that are drawn out and may have to be scrapped if the bottom line fluctuates.

Government, conversely, is strongest when it comes to long term projects, that is, things that are not profitable in the short term, but provide benefit to the nation or the people of the nation. It is also most useful for plans that require long term commitment and an underlying budget that can tolerate fluctuation. In the past, this has manifested itself in the forms of things like the Apollo program, the internet, the interstate system, nuclear energy, and so forth. I would suggest the modern energy and environmental crises are no different. Building the science and engineering technology necessary to produce alternative sources of powering the nation is best done in a way that maximizes quality at the moment, not efficiency and not profitability. The reason for that is we need a completely new paradigm in how we generate power, and when it comes to total paradigm shifts, industry moves very slowly because they are expensive, uncertain, and require completely new business models. Further, a cheap, virtually limitless supply of energy would be extremely counterproductive to the energy industry as it would be essentially impossible to justify charging for it what they charge now. There are technologies under development that fit that bill, such as nuclear fusion, however, without a sustained push from an entity not worried about the profitability of the end product, it is unlikely we will see those technologies come to fruition for a very long time; ie, when we run out of cheap oil and coal to burn instead.

Pollution, likewise, is a project that amounts to keeping America as a whole not poisonous to live in. Cleaning water, both in terms of rivers, oceans, lakes and so forth and also groundwater, and air over an entire country is a huge task, and also one vital to protecting the American people. If American national security, can be describes as preventing threats from killing Americans, pollution is one of the gravest threats to national security we face. The EPA estimated in 1994 the annual death toll for excess air pollution to be twenty thousand. Put another way, that is a 9/11 style attack on the US every two months with bodies to spare from air pollution alone. This is something that impacts us as a nation, hurts us as a nation, and the fact the industries have not yet effectively regulated themselves is pretty good evidence they will not effectively regulate themselves. If they won't step up and stop taking actions that result in innocent American dead, why not have the government do it for them?

Food, to which I have devoted relatively little attention to this point, is in large part the same. I will focus here primarily on agriculture and the use of chemicals which may be harmful if ingested by humans. The fact of the matter is, in order to sustain a population as large as we have in the lifestyle we are accustomed to, chemicals being added to food are completely necessary. You can produce enough corn, for example, to feed the nation and not use pesticides. However, it is equally undeniable that those chemicals do more than just allow crops to grow better, they get into and on the food we eat, and, if toxic, can destroy our bodies. Determining which chemicals are harmful in what quantities and taking the necessary steps to either replace them or remove them. The best way to ensure this is done in a fair and impartial way to meet the public interests would be to have the people through the government, inspect and regulate what procedures ensure public safety.

Self regulation produces the same problems as described above, if you have the industry police itself it is going to want to adopt standards that maximize profits first above all else and so may result in pressure on the self regulatory agency to be less thorough or more permissive. An independent inspection agency could be barred from performing tests if the industry decides they are not happy with them and move to an inspection agency more to their liking. Only through force of law can you have an inspector that is both impartial and able to get the access they need to get the job done correctly in any circumstance.

A couple of other points I want to touch on briefly is that if the US does not have the government act as a regulator of industry and pollution, how can we credibly expect other countries to fo the same? Climate change is a global problem, as is pollution, as is food safety, etc. If we will not regulate our own emissions, our own chemical disposal, our own food stores, on what basis can we criticize another nation for not doing the same? We import a lot, of, well, pretty much everything. That means a lot of the manufacturing and agricultural processes for goods we use are outside of our direct control, but the poison is still poisonous if it comes from here or comes from there. We need the credibility to go to China and tell them it is unacceptable to ship us food with arsenic contamination. If we don't control our own food production, how do we go about doing that? They would rightly point out that we let our industry control themselves and so they can do the same.

It also means that other countries have incentive to strengthen their own regulations, because, when importing goods, "will it kill our population?" tends to be an important consideration. When they have alternatives that they know are held to a high standard, like the US, to perhaps a somewhat shady food supply of questionable safety, even if our products are more expensive, we may still gain market share and improve our exports, thus improving our economy assuming everyone else doesn’t follow suite, and if they do, well, the food is safer for everyone.

Another question is how do we pay for all of this? The answer is and is always going to be taxes. At this point, economists and historians have demonstrated that you cannot tax cut your way to greater revenues, nor do tax cuts particularly help the economy. Instead, we see countries like Germany and Norway who have robust economies, strong business sectors, but also higher tax rates. This allows them to pay for public services we cannot afford. Cut military spending, we do not need to be 35 years ahead of everyone else in active military technology. You would have to be absolutely insane to attempt to provoke open warfare with the US on a national scale, not to mention the military hardware we have is going to be sufficient to keep us well ahead of any potential threat for decades to come. Maintain development during the period and if anybody else does start to catch up we can always enter production with the new technologies developed but not yet mass produced.

How do you keep the jobs in the US with those regulations? Well, you can always do things to make it more expensive to go elsewhere. Tax penalties on companies that move jobs overseas, remove tax exemptions for companies that do business in the US but are not registered here, disallow products to be sold in the US not subject to equally stringent inspection, and so forth. This is a challenge, certainly, but not an insurmountable one. The question we must ask ourselves is how do we want the America of the future to look? Do we want clean air and water for our children and grandchildren? Do we want responsible conservation of natural resources? Do we want our food to be safe to eat? Do we want our energy to come from sources not held by countries hostile to our interests? You are not going to get these things if you leave industry to regulate itself. The government, the people, must be involved in determining their own future and the direction of their country.

Finally, I want to examine a few case studies of what happens when companies in this industry are left to regulate themselves.

Case 1: Enron

Enron, I think, is an excellent example of why strict government is necessary. Enron's initial rise resulted from the deregulation of natural gas and subsequent gouging of consumers. Despite early efforts to reintroduce the regulations because of how bad things got for consumers, strong lobbying efforts kept them free to do as they pleased. Through manipulative financial practices, they were able to fraudulently represent the way their business was performing, and, in so doing, gained enormous wealth and power. However, in the end, they got too greedy, allowing the accumulated dishonest business practices to accumulate until they could no longer be hidden. The resulting collapse dealt tens of billions of dollars in damage distributed to over a million individuals.

Case 2: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Another example from recent memory, in this case an offshore oil drilling platform suffered a critical failure, resulting in one of the largest environmental disasters in modern history. In this case, the investigation after the fact determined that due to lax regulations and a desire to speed things along to increase profits led to corners being cut in terms of safety.

Case 3: Bhopal industrial disaster

A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, left more or less to its own devices, in an effort to save money and to drive profits, many safety devices that are standard in the US were never installed or were deactivated. Tanks of the chemicals were overfilled, maintenance was cut back severely, turning off mechanical safeguards to save on electricity and so forth. As a result, the plant developed a leak that killed thousands of people and contaminated the local water table. This could have easily been prevented with strong regulations and inspections, however, the market was left "free".

Case 4: Texas City Refinery explosion

Much like the example above, only this time it was in the US. Poor maintenance and lax inspection led to the disabling of multiple systems designed to alert them of dangerous chemical buildup and poor training led to ignoring important safety procedures resulting in an explosion leaving 15 dead and over 170 injured. This case was particularly noteworthy because even after BP had been found negligent, they still refused to implement safety controls in other plants following legal changes resultant from this incident, showing even when faced with irrefutable evidence their practice is harmful and destructive, private industry often will still continue it in order to maximize profit.

I believe I have demonstrated government regulation is in fact necessary for the safety of the public at large and the long term well-being of the US. I further believe that I have shown, both with logic and example, that private enterprise, left to itself, has a tendency toward profit at the expense of the environment, human life, and ethics. In order that we secure our own future, develop the means with which to sustain ourselves and leave a county inhabitable by future generations, it behooves us as the people to elect representatives who will ensure the highest standards of safety will be maintained. Thank you.

Citations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
http://www.wunderground.com/health/airpollution.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_ ... _oil_spill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City ... _explosion

WinePusher

Post #3

Post by WinePusher »

Round 1 Post 2.
Abraxas wrote:I hold that the government must be involved, you hold the industry is capable of self regulating. If this assumption is not accurate, I am about to waste a lot of page.


Your assumption is correct. My contention in this portion of this debate will be that corporations are able to sufficiently regulate themselves and the safety of their own products without the need for government involvement and I will be arguing in favor of a free market enviromentalism approach in my later post.
Abraxas wrote:Firstly, we need to know what causes the damage. Without the government sponsoring studies and actively testing chemicals for harm, how are we going to know? I know the line at first seems hard to accept as a legitimate point, but hear me out. I want to start by pointing to the tobacco industry. To this day they fund research and find there is insufficient data to link tobacco use to a number of diseases and conditions external research sponsored through the CDC, among other agencies, have found to be causally linked. The reason for that is simple, it is always going to be in the interest of a self regulating industry to find the products they use are either harmless or the results are inconclusive. Further, it is in their interest to staff positions of self regulation with individuals who will find that more research is (always) needed. This took the form of an organizations known as the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute who had the mission of undercutting any science critical of the product coming from outside sources. In the interim, as was found out down the line through litigation, they had in their possession documents from internal tests that confirmed the very science they were attacking.

No, the potential harm that a product or substance may pose will be evaluated and tested by the entity responsible for manufacturing it. Do you really believe that an industry will manufacture a product without first checking it for safety, or that an industry would manufacture a product they know would harm the public? If you want to talk about what the interests of corporations are, which you seem inclined to, then you should also menton that the primary interest of any corporation is to ensure the overall reliability of their product. Producing a flawed or harmful product is not in their interest as it will damage their long term growth. As for the tobacco industry, it is not as if the effects of tobacco are unknown and this product is being pushed upon an ignorant population. Consumers buy tobacco products with the knowledge of what the effects could be and will be on their body, so this example doesn't support your thesis. You also cite the existence of the tobacco industry as support for the work that government institutions like the CDC do. You claim the CDC has informed the public and raised public awareness on what the effects of tobacco are and use this as an example of how government intervention is necessity. Well, when it comes to public awareness on things such as drunk driving or teenage drug use it has been private enterprise informing the public on what the consequences are, not government run research institutions (known for waste). So public run institutions are not required, the private sector is just as capable in raising public awareness on harmful substances.
Abraxas wrote:We see something similar going on today already from the energy industry when it comes to global climate change. Despite what some on the conservative media like to claim, there is no debate, no controversy, no dispute in academic circles that it is real and it is causally linked to the enormous amount of greenhouse gasses put into the atmosphere by human civilization.
Ya, Abraxas is absolutely right. When it comes to the subject of Global Warming there is certainly no dispute among academia. Academics and the so called intellectuals of society stand at the forefront of groups that are extremely bigoted, exclusive and hateful. However, when it comes to the actual science, there is dispute, controversy and debate. When it comes to objective scientists looking solely at the evidence, when it comes to scientists who aren't looking to advance a socialist agenda, there is dispute and debate. Now let's be clear on what Abraxas is talking about. When he speaks about "Global Climate Change" what he really mean to say is "Anthropogenic Global Warming." Remove Anthropogenic and you have no basis for your argument. Humans must be the cause because if they are not you would have no thesis for why government should regulate human behavior. And the one thing I find to be really fantastic is the implication that enviromental harm and pollution would be non-existent if the government owned and operated the means of production and manufacturing. A predominant entity that expels large amounts of pollution and waste into the environment and atmosphere is the federal government itself, the very entity Abraxas would like to see expand in size.
Abraxas wrote:Corporations, or more specifically, those in policy making roles within them, are inherently unaccountable to the public at large (except in where they are regulated). They are accountable to shareholders. They are rewarded for the things that drive up revenue and drive down cost. They are punished for the things that increase expense or cut into profit margins. In addition to the corporate incentive to perform, you are also going to have to overcome the individual being pressured by the need to keep their job to take the actions most conducive to them maintaining their role. If that means cutting corners and having the environment or the consumer take one for the team, that is precisely what they will do. Because they answer to those who have a vested interest only in maximizing profitability, not maintaining public welfare, they cannot be expected to reliably look out for the latter at the expense of the former.

You might argue here the consumer can always boycott them, but that assumes both realistic alternatives to the product being offered and reasonable knowledge of the damage. People have to get to work, that means a great many of them have to drive, and they cannot drive without gasoline and oil. Our society has produced a number of captive markets, products people need to buy to survive above and beyond the bare essentials. Boycott is simply not an option, in particular when all major companies are prone to the same practices. Further, per what was discussed above, how does the consumer learn of the shady and dangerous behavior in the first place? There might be a whistle-blower or a media investigation at some point, however, can one count on that to be reliable, especially with no legal way to force companies to disclose internal information they do not want disclosed?
I want to draw some distinctions in what you're writing. You are wading between two types of harm that corporations can possibly commit:

1) The harmful nature of the product itself. You focus on this type in the beginning of your post, speaking about chemical substances and tobacco and claim that government is needed to test and check these substances for safety reasons. I've already explained why a corporation has a vested interest in doing this itself, but I'll give you one more reason. It's based in tort law. A corporation will vigorously test and ensure the safety of whatever product or chemical substance it produces out of fear that if it is indeed harmful, and consumed by the public, that they will be sued. The existence of tort laws ensures this and eliminates the need for proactive, redundant and wasteful government studies.
2) The harmful nature of the means by which the corporation obtains and produces the product. You focus on this type of harm in this section of your and basically imply that corporations will trample over the environment and are apathetic about the environments well being. Here's my premise: resources are meant to be used and all resources are scarce. Corporations understand this, they understand the fact that resources are scarce and that their operations are reliant upon these resources, thus it is within their interest to preserve and find ways to renew these resources. So it simply isn't true that corporations don't care a care about the enviroment, as any environmental harm a corporation commits will have adverse effects on the resources and materials they need to manufacture goods.
Abraxas wrote:The next point I want to move to is the scope of the damage being done is something that far exceeds the scope of the company doing it. If ground water, for example, gets contaminated by industrial waste, absolutely everything linked to that ground water suffers for it, or, worse yet, a river or the air. Pollution does not respect property lines. Smog generated from dirty coal does not build up only in the land on which the power plant is built. It spreads out at the whims of physics and contaminates the broader nation. Why then, should the nation, as represented by the government, not regulate it? It seems only logical that if you produce an effect that is going to impact the entire nation, whether they use your product, potentially damaging your quality of life, state of health, and so on that the people, through the government, be allowed to regulate it.
Part of pollution, and smog in specific, is natural. Yes, pollution bypasses property lines and can affect uninvolved third parties. Government regulation, which is generally ineffective and wasteful, is not the answer. I will appeal to what I said earlier as a more effective remedy, tort law. When the pollution emitted by an individual emitter trespasses over into the air/land of another individual and begins to produce negative effects on this individuals property, the emitter would be liable for whatever damages his pollution may have caused. This free market solution will incentivize businesses to reduce the amount of pollution they emit and search for alternative means of manufacturing.
Abraxas wrote:Another question is how do we pay for all of this? The answer is and is always going to be taxes. At this point, economists and historians have demonstrated that you cannot tax cut your way to greater revenues, nor do tax cuts particularly help the economy.
A vague assertion, I respond with a specific rebuttal:

Say's Law, appropriately named after the economist who developed this economic theory, states that the greater amount of disposable money within the pockets of business owners will lead to constant expenditures. Thus, when tax cuts are executed, business owners end with with a greater amount of disposable money which they in turn will spend (according to Say's Law) which in turn stimulates the economy. And yes, you can't tax cut your way to "greater revenues." Tax cuts will always lead to a shortage of revenue for the government. This forces government to constrain it's activity and interference, making it small and limited, an ideal scenario. We can discuss this more in detail in the fourth section of this debate.
Abraxas wrote:Finally, I want to examine a few case studies of what happens when companies in this industry are left to regulate themselves.
I don't really get what the point of this portion is, but whatever, I'll go with it. Let me preface this with two major points I think lie at the heart of this debate. First, no free market economist I know or have read would ever claim that the free market is not prone to failure. Every single economic model that can possibly exist will never be perfect, that includes the free market. Second, there is absolutely no guarantee that these disasters you list could have or would have been prevented had the government been more involved. All you have done is assert that government intervention would have prevented the diasters. However, since Abraxas has opened the gate and lead us down this path I'll cite four government failures to counter his four examples of free market failures, though ultimately, this proves nothing.
Abraxas wrote:Case 2: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Another example from recent memory, in this case an offshore oil drilling platform suffered a critical failure, resulting in one of the largest environmental disasters in modern history. In this case, the investigation after the fact determined that due to lax regulations and a desire to speed things along to increase profits led to corners being cut in terms of safety.
It is strange that Abraxas would cite the Oil Spill as an example to discredit my contention, because in doing so he also stimultaneously discredits his own contention. Yes, the BP Oil Spill is an event we all can call to memory, and from what I remember the response of the federal government to this disaster was nothing short of a complete failure. I hope this aspect of the Oil Spill did not slip your memory. When the government did intervene the United States got nothing but incompetence:

-The rejection of Foreign Skimmers by EPA Bureaucrats due to outdated legislation.
-The screwed up priorities of the Administration. In the wake of oil spilling from the rig, governmental agencies and commissions were created tasked with the goal of preventing future oil spills by halting all future deepwater exploration rather than being tasked with dealing with the spill at hand.
-The slow and sluggish response of government to the disaster. If government intervention is needed as you claim, it better not be immediately needed.

Interestingly enough, we see the same failures of the Federal Government (as so often claimed by the left) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Are we really expected to believe the claim that the government can effectively and sufficiently regulate industry and prevent disasters such as this when what we have witnessed is the government failing time and time again? As a memory refresher, which entity was it that actually plugged the oil leak?
Abraxas wrote:Case 3: Bhopal industrial disaster

A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, left more or less to its own devices, in an effort to save money and to drive profits, many safety devices that are standard in the US were never installed or were deactivated. Tanks of the chemicals were overfilled, maintenance was cut back severely, turning off mechanical safeguards to save on electricity and so forth. As a result, the plant developed a leak that killed thousands of people and contaminated the local water table. This could have easily been prevented with strong regulations and inspections, however, the market was left "free".
I see a looming misconception that needs to be dealt with. What we have as the subject of analysis are the affairs of the business or corporation, meaning the internal operations, day to day procedures and production of goods. Which entity is better equipped and more enticed to regulate these affairs, the business itself or the government? The clear choice is the business itself as they have a vested interest in doing so. For example, which entity is more concerned with airline safety, the airline itself or the government? What could the government possibly do to increase airline safety that the airline hasn't already done itself? Who possesses a greater understanding of how airline safety operates, the airline or the government? Also, Abraxas forgets or denies the established fact that bureaucracy at the federal level is very inefficient at executing its assigned task. Also, I'll go back to what I previously said, there is absolutely no indication that this specific disaster could have been prevented if the government you place so much faith in had been more involved.

WinePusher

Post #4

Post by WinePusher »

Round 1 Post 2.
Abraxas wrote:I hold that the government must be involved, you hold the industry is capable of self regulating. If this assumption is not accurate, I am about to waste a lot of page.


Your assumption is correct. My contention in this portion of this debate will be that corporations are able to sufficiently regulate themselves and the safety of their own products without the need for government involvement and I will be arguing in favor of a free market enviromentalism approach in my later post.
Abraxas wrote:Firstly, we need to know what causes the damage. Without the government sponsoring studies and actively testing chemicals for harm, how are we going to know? I know the line at first seems hard to accept as a legitimate point, but hear me out. I want to start by pointing to the tobacco industry. To this day they fund research and find there is insufficient data to link tobacco use to a number of diseases and conditions external research sponsored through the CDC, among other agencies, have found to be causally linked. The reason for that is simple, it is always going to be in the interest of a self regulating industry to find the products they use are either harmless or the results are inconclusive. Further, it is in their interest to staff positions of self regulation with individuals who will find that more research is (always) needed. This took the form of an organizations known as the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute who had the mission of undercutting any science critical of the product coming from outside sources. In the interim, as was found out down the line through litigation, they had in their possession documents from internal tests that confirmed the very science they were attacking.

No, the potential harm that a product or substance may pose will be evaluated and tested by the entity responsible for manufacturing it. Do you really believe that an industry will manufacture a product without first checking it for safety, or that an industry would manufacture a product they know would harm the public? If you want to talk about what the interests of corporations are, which you seem inclined to, then you should also menton that the primary interest of any corporation is to ensure the overall reliability of their product. Producing a flawed or harmful product is not in their interest as it will damage their long term growth. As for the tobacco industry, it is not as if the effects of tobacco are unknown and this product is being pushed upon an ignorant population. Consumers buy tobacco products with the knowledge of what the effects could be and will be on their body, so this example doesn't support your thesis. You also cite the existence of the tobacco industry as support for the work that government institutions like the CDC do. You claim the CDC has informed the public and raised public awareness on what the effects of tobacco are and use this as an example of how government intervention is necessity. Well, when it comes to public awareness on things such as drunk driving or teenage drug use it has been private enterprise informing the public on what the consequences are, not government run research institutions (known for waste). So public run institutions are not required, the private sector is just as capable in raising public awareness on harmful substances.
Abraxas wrote:We see something similar going on today already from the energy industry when it comes to global climate change. Despite what some on the conservative media like to claim, there is no debate, no controversy, no dispute in academic circles that it is real and it is causally linked to the enormous amount of greenhouse gasses put into the atmosphere by human civilization.
Ya, Abraxas is absolutely right. When it comes to the subject of Global Warming there is certainly no dispute among academia. Academics and the so called intellectuals of society stand at the forefront of groups that are extremely bigoted, exclusive and hateful. However, when it comes to the actual science, there is dispute, controversy and debate. When it comes to objective scientists looking solely at the evidence, when it comes to scientists who aren't looking to advance a socialist agenda, there is dispute and debate. Now let's be clear on what Abraxas is talking about. When he speaks about "Global Climate Change" what he really mean to say is "Anthropogenic Global Warming." Remove Anthropogenic and you have no basis for your argument. Humans must be the cause because if they are not you would have no thesis for why government should regulate human behavior. And the one thing I find to be really fantastic is the implication that enviromental harm and pollution would be non-existent if the government owned and operated the means of production and manufacturing. A predominant entity that expels large amounts of pollution and waste into the environment and atmosphere is the federal government itself, the very entity Abraxas would like to see expand in size.
Abraxas wrote:Corporations, or more specifically, those in policy making roles within them, are inherently unaccountable to the public at large (except in where they are regulated). They are accountable to shareholders. They are rewarded for the things that drive up revenue and drive down cost. They are punished for the things that increase expense or cut into profit margins. In addition to the corporate incentive to perform, you are also going to have to overcome the individual being pressured by the need to keep their job to take the actions most conducive to them maintaining their role. If that means cutting corners and having the environment or the consumer take one for the team, that is precisely what they will do. Because they answer to those who have a vested interest only in maximizing profitability, not maintaining public welfare, they cannot be expected to reliably look out for the latter at the expense of the former.

You might argue here the consumer can always boycott them, but that assumes both realistic alternatives to the product being offered and reasonable knowledge of the damage. People have to get to work, that means a great many of them have to drive, and they cannot drive without gasoline and oil. Our society has produced a number of captive markets, products people need to buy to survive above and beyond the bare essentials. Boycott is simply not an option, in particular when all major companies are prone to the same practices. Further, per what was discussed above, how does the consumer learn of the shady and dangerous behavior in the first place? There might be a whistle-blower or a media investigation at some point, however, can one count on that to be reliable, especially with no legal way to force companies to disclose internal information they do not want disclosed?
I want to draw some distinctions in what you're writing. You are wading between two types of harm that corporations can possibly commit:

1) The harmful nature of the product itself. You focus on this type in the beginning of your post, speaking about chemical substances and tobacco and claim that government is needed to test and check these substances for safety reasons. I've already explained why a corporation has a vested interest in doing this itself, but I'll give you one more reason. It's based in tort law. A corporation will vigorously test and ensure the safety of whatever product or chemical substance it produces out of fear that if it is indeed harmful, and consumed by the public, that they will be sued. The existence of tort laws ensures this and eliminates the need for proactive, redundant and wasteful government studies.
2) The harmful nature of the means by which the corporation obtains and produces the product. You focus on this type of harm in this section of your and basically imply that corporations will trample over the environment and are apathetic about the environments well being. Here's my premise: resources are meant to be used and all resources are scarce. Corporations understand this, they understand the fact that resources are scarce and that their operations are reliant upon these resources, thus it is within their interest to preserve and find ways to renew these resources. So it simply isn't true that corporations don't care a care about the enviroment, as any environmental harm a corporation commits will have adverse effects on the resources and materials they need to manufacture goods.
Abraxas wrote:The next point I want to move to is the scope of the damage being done is something that far exceeds the scope of the company doing it. If ground water, for example, gets contaminated by industrial waste, absolutely everything linked to that ground water suffers for it, or, worse yet, a river or the air. Pollution does not respect property lines. Smog generated from dirty coal does not build up only in the land on which the power plant is built. It spreads out at the whims of physics and contaminates the broader nation. Why then, should the nation, as represented by the government, not regulate it? It seems only logical that if you produce an effect that is going to impact the entire nation, whether they use your product, potentially damaging your quality of life, state of health, and so on that the people, through the government, be allowed to regulate it.
Part of pollution, and smog in specific, is natural. Yes, pollution bypasses property lines and can affect uninvolved third parties. Government regulation, which is generally ineffective and wasteful, is not the answer. I will appeal to what I said earlier as a more effective remedy, tort law. When the pollution emitted by an individual emitter trespasses over into the air/land of another individual and begins to produce negative effects on this individuals property, the emitter would be liable for whatever damages his pollution may have caused. This free market solution will incentivize businesses to reduce the amount of pollution they emit and search for alternative means of manufacturing.
Abraxas wrote:Another question is how do we pay for all of this? The answer is and is always going to be taxes. At this point, economists and historians have demonstrated that you cannot tax cut your way to greater revenues, nor do tax cuts particularly help the economy.
A vague assertion, I respond with a specific rebuttal:

Say's Law, appropriately named after the economist who developed this economic theory, states that the greater amount of disposable money within the pockets of business owners will lead to constant expenditures. Thus, when tax cuts are executed, business owners end with with a greater amount of disposable money which they in turn will spend (according to Say's Law) which in turn stimulates the economy. And yes, you can't tax cut your way to "greater revenues." Tax cuts will always lead to a shortage of revenue for the government. This forces government to constrain it's activity and interference, making it small and limited, an ideal scenario. We can discuss this more in detail in the fourth section of this debate.
Abraxas wrote:Finally, I want to examine a few case studies of what happens when companies in this industry are left to regulate themselves.
I don't really get what the point of this portion is, but whatever, I'll go with it. Let me preface this with two major points I think lie at the heart of this debate. First, no free market economist I know or have read would ever claim that the free market is not prone to failure. Every single economic model that can possibly exist will never be perfect, that includes the free market. Second, there is absolutely no guarantee that these disasters you list could have or would have been prevented had the government been more involved. All you have done is assert that government intervention would have prevented the diasters. However, since Abraxas has opened the gate and lead us down this path I'll cite four government failures to counter his four examples of free market failures, though ultimately, this proves nothing.
Abraxas wrote:Case 2: Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Another example from recent memory, in this case an offshore oil drilling platform suffered a critical failure, resulting in one of the largest environmental disasters in modern history. In this case, the investigation after the fact determined that due to lax regulations and a desire to speed things along to increase profits led to corners being cut in terms of safety.
It is strange that Abraxas would cite the Oil Spill as an example to discredit my contention, because in doing so he also stimultaneously discredits his own contention. Yes, the BP Oil Spill is an event we all can call to memory, and from what I remember the response of the federal government to this disaster was nothing short of a complete failure. I hope this aspect of the Oil Spill did not slip your memory. When the government did intervene the United States got nothing but incompetence:

-The rejection of Foreign Skimmers by EPA Bureaucrats due to outdated legislation.
-The screwed up priorities of the Administration. In the wake of oil spilling from the rig, governmental agencies and commissions were created tasked with the goal of preventing future oil spills by halting all future deepwater exploration rather than being tasked with dealing with the spill at hand.
-The slow and sluggish response of government to the disaster. If government intervention is needed as you claim, it better not be immediately needed.

Interestingly enough, we see the same failures of the Federal Government (as so often claimed by the left) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Are we really expected to believe the claim that the government can effectively and sufficiently regulate industry and prevent disasters such as this when what we have witnessed is the government failing time and time again? As a memory refresher, which entity was it that actually plugged the oil leak?
Abraxas wrote:Case 3: Bhopal industrial disaster

A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, left more or less to its own devices, in an effort to save money and to drive profits, many safety devices that are standard in the US were never installed or were deactivated. Tanks of the chemicals were overfilled, maintenance was cut back severely, turning off mechanical safeguards to save on electricity and so forth. As a result, the plant developed a leak that killed thousands of people and contaminated the local water table. This could have easily been prevented with strong regulations and inspections, however, the market was left "free".
I see a looming misconception that needs to be dealt with. What we have as the subject of analysis are the affairs of the business or corporation, meaning the internal operations, day to day procedures and production of goods. Which entity is better equipped and more enticed to regulate these affairs, the business itself or the government? The clear choice is the business itself as they have a vested interest in doing so. For example, which entity is more concerned with airline safety, the airline itself or the government? What could the government possibly do to increase airline safety that the airline hasn't already done itself? Who possesses a greater understanding of how airline safety operates, the airline or the government? Also, Abraxas forgets or denies the established fact that bureaucracy at the federal level is very inefficient at executing its assigned task. Also, I'll go back to what I previously said, there is absolutely no indication that this specific disaster could have been prevented if the government you place so much faith in had been more involved.

WinePusher

Post #5

Post by WinePusher »

Round 1 Post 3.

Thesis: Governmental regulation of markets and industry is not required to ensure the safety of the enviroment and the consumer, and any type of proposed governmental solution to an environmental problem will always be inferior, in terms of practicality, to a free market solution.

Preamble: There is no doubt that corporations, to a certain degree, act in a manner that is detrimental to the environment and to the consumer. But if we are to get anywhere in this debate, it is important to pinpoint what these detriments actually are. Below is a list of 4 detrimental behaviors that people like Abraxas often charge the industrial community with along with my own arguments.

Excessive consumption
Excessive consumption has long been a favorite talking point of the left, it is the idea that resources will be depleted to extinction to due the large quantites of consumerism that exists. Environmental resources are required to manufacture goods, thus when a population is consuming a specific good at a fast and constant rate the resource, along with the enviroment will be harmed. Abraxas proposes some type of regulatory policy that would limit this consumption and also preserve the sanctity of the enviroment. Well, I'm saying that he's wrong, government isn't needed to rectify this problem. What will actually and effectively rectify this problem is what is known as the Price Mechanism. Every good that is consumed comes at a price that the consumer must pay. If a good/resource exists in large quantites, it's cost will be inherently low and many people will consume it. If a good/resource exists and is near depletion the cost attached to it will spike up and only a few people will continue to consume it. Thus, the preservation of renewable and non-renewable resources is adequately handled by the price mechanism and government regulations are not needed.

Pollution and the Destruction of Commons

Corporate apathy towards safety and efficency

WinePusher

Post #6

Post by WinePusher »

Round 1 Post 3.

Thesis: Governmental regulation of markets and industry is not required to ensure the safety of the enviroment and the consumer, and any type of proposed governmental solution to an environmental problem will always be inferior, in terms of practicality, to a free market solution.

Preamble: There is no doubt that corporations, to a certain degree, act in a manner that is detrimental to the environment and to the consumer. But if we are to get anywhere in this debate, it is important to pinpoint what these detriments actually are. Below is a list of 3 detrimental behaviors that people like Abraxas often charge the industrial community with along with my own arguments.

Excessive consumption
Excessive consumption has long been a favorite talking point of the left, it is the idea that resources will be depleted to extinction to due the large quantites of consumerism that exists. Environmental resources are required to manufacture goods, thus when a population is consuming a specific good at a fast and constant rate the resource, along with the enviroment will be harmed. Abraxas proposes some type of regulatory policy that would limit this consumption and also preserve the sanctity of the enviroment. Well, I'm saying that he's wrong, government isn't needed to rectify this problem. What will actually and effectively rectify this problem is what is known as the Price Mechanism. Every good that is consumed comes at a price that the consumer must pay. If a good/resource exists in large quantites, it's cost will be inherently low and many people will consume it. If a good/resource exists and is near depletion the cost attached to it will spike up and only a few people will continue to consume it. Thus, the preservation of renewable and non-renewable resources is adequately handled by the price mechanism and government regulations are not needed.

Pollution and the Destruction of Commons
In abstract terms, pollution can be defined as any type of human behavior or action that has detrimental effects on the enviroment. In more specific terms, pollution is the destruction of property that we all commonly own. This problem is easily remedied when as we would any disputation between two or more parties. When party two is adversly affected by party one, party two is capable to take party one to court to have the disputation resolved and the damange halted and compensated. The free market solution to pollution is simple, inject property rights into common entities such as the air and the water in order to force polluting companies to be financially liable for any damage they committ. Also, individuals tend to be more cautious and protective of land which is their own. For example, a land owner who operates a farm would be incentivized to take care of the land and the surrounding enviroment as it would be in his best inTerest to do so in order to continue renewing the resources he needs to maintain his businees.

Corporate apathy towards safety and efficency
The key factor here is what could the government possibly do that a businees has not already done to ensure the safety of the businees' operations and products. I won't accept any premise that states that a businees is not inclined towards the prevention of disasters and harm caused by their products as it's simply a counter intuitive claim. The idea that both Abraxas and I accept is that a businees is inclined towards generating profit, well nothing could be more counter productive to this inclination than laxed oversight and apathy. An internal disaster, or the sale of a harmful product, would completely wipe out a businees and discourage consumers from supporting that businees. So it is already within their vested interest to ensure the safety or their products and operations. Thus, the question remains, what can the government possibly do to ramp up safety when the businees itself already has a vested interest in doing so itself?

Let me now go on to address a governmental agency that I haven't focues that much attention on.
-The Food and Drug Administration: As Abraxas seems to be in favor of information, I would expect him to oppose the FDA as I do as it has engaged in restrictive information regulations when it comes to foods and drugs. Essentially, a truthful claim about a drug (such as "Tylenol will reduce the amount of pain you fell") is prohibited from being labeled on the drug package as it does not meet specific FDA regulation standards. It is censorship. Also, the drug approval process of the FDA is inherently biased, as the FDA will weigh the potential harm of a drug as more significant than its potential good in order to maintain its public reputation.

And as I said in my previous post, I would cite four examples of governmental failures to counter the four examples of free market failures that Abraxas listed. It does not prove anything, as in the words of a debater on another forum, specific examples do not prove general conclusions, but since Abraxas took the lead I'll finish the act:

Case 1: EPA September 11, 2001 Pollution Contreversy

An example of intergovernmental failure and ineffiency. The EPA was apparently pressured by the White House to produce a report declaring the air quality near the destroyed remnants of the Twin Towers safe to breathe. This report was not genuine and was issued in absense of any actual research, it was essentially government propoganda and lies that worked against the safety of the population.

Case 2: Failure of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

In an effort to save the deteriorating everglade wetlands of Florida, the federal government put into law a comprehensive plan to restore this ecosystem to its former glory. Although the law was propelled into action about 6 decades ago, the everglades till continue to deterioriate and the law itself has been amended numerious times and challenged in court due to the disproportionate amount of funding put forth by the State of Florida in relation to the Federal Goverenment. This example shows how inefficent government is when merely trying to revive a dying part of the enviroment.

Case 3: FEMA Formaldehyde Trailer Contreversy

In the wake of displaced families after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sets up and provides temporary housing trailers. Indeed, it was so nice and kind for the federal government to do this. Unfortunately, these trailers
contained a toxin known as Formaldehyde. I doubt any further explanation is needed, this example quote bluntly demonstrates how efficent the federal government can operate for the safety of tis citizens.

Case 4: Corruption of The Mineral Management Service

The Mineral Management Services (A defunct subsection of the Department of The Interior, now renamed as Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) is charged with regulated and maintaining the nations off shore gas supplies. The corruption of this federal agency is well documented, employees of this agency have been charged with sexual misconduct and drug possession and behaved unethically in their treatment of oil companies.

Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... ontroversy
http://www.seolawfirm.com/2011/05/flori ... verglades/
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=42606
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_Ma ... troversies

WinePusher

Post #7

Post by WinePusher »

Round 1 Post 3.

Thesis: Governmental regulation of markets and industry is not required to ensure the safety of the enviroment and the consumer, and any type of proposed governmental solution to an environmental problem will always be inferior, in terms of practicality, to a free market solution.

Preamble: There is no doubt that corporations, to a certain degree, act in a manner that is detrimental to the environment and to the consumer. But if we are to get anywhere in this debate, it is important to pinpoint what these detriments actually are. Below is a list of 3 detrimental behaviors that people like Abraxas often charge the industrial community with along with my own arguments.

Excessive consumption
Excessive consumption has long been a favorite talking point of the left, it is the idea that resources will be depleted to extinction to due the large quantites of consumerism that exists. Environmental resources are required to manufacture goods, thus when a population is consuming a specific good at a fast and constant rate the resource, along with the enviroment will be harmed. Abraxas proposes some type of regulatory policy that would limit this consumption and also preserve the sanctity of the enviroment. Well, I'm saying that he's wrong, government isn't needed to rectify this problem. What will actually and effectively rectify this problem is what is known as the Price Mechanism. Every good that is consumed comes at a price that the consumer must pay. If a good/resource exists in large quantites, it's cost will be inherently low and many people will consume it. If a good/resource exists and is near depletion the cost attached to it will spike up and only a few people will continue to consume it. Thus, the preservation of renewable and non-renewable resources is adequately handled by the price mechanism and government regulations are not needed.

Pollution and the Destruction of Commons
In abstract terms, pollution can be defined as any type of human behavior or action that has detrimental effects on the enviroment. In more specific terms, pollution is the destruction of property that we all commonly own. This problem is easily remedied when as we would any disputation between two or more parties. When party two is adversly affected by party one, party two is capable to take party one to court to have the disputation resolved and the damange halted and compensated. The free market solution to pollution is simple, inject property rights into common entities such as the air and the water in order to force polluting companies to be financially liable for any damage they committ. Also, individuals tend to be more cautious and protective of land which is their own. For example, a land owner who operates a farm would be incentivized to take care of the land and the surrounding enviroment as it would be in his best inTerest to do so in order to continue renewing the resources he needs to maintain his businees.

Corporate apathy towards safety and efficency
The key factor here is what could the government possibly do that a businees has not already done to ensure the safety of the businees' operations and products. I won't accept any premise that states that a businees is not inclined towards the prevention of disasters and harm caused by their products as it's simply a counter intuitive claim. The idea that both Abraxas and I accept is that a businees is inclined towards generating profit, well nothing could be more counter productive to this inclination than laxed oversight and apathy. An internal disaster, or the sale of a harmful product, would completely wipe out a businees and discourage consumers from supporting that businees. So it is already within their vested interest to ensure the safety or their products and operations. Thus, the question remains, what can the government possibly do to ramp up safety when the businees itself already has a vested interest in doing so itself?

Let me now go on to address a governmental agency that I haven't focues that much attention on.
-The Food and Drug Administration: As Abraxas seems to be in favor of information, I would expect him to oppose the FDA as I do as it has engaged in restrictive information regulations when it comes to foods and drugs. Essentially, a truthful claim about a drug (such as "Tylenol will reduce the amount of pain you fell") is prohibited from being labeled on the drug package as it does not meet specific FDA regulation standards. It is censorship. Also, the drug approval process of the FDA is inherently biased, as the FDA will weigh the potential harm of a drug as more significant than its potential good in order to maintain its public reputation.

And as I said in my previous post, I would cite four examples of governmental failures to counter the four examples of free market failures that Abraxas listed. It does not prove anything, as in the words of a debater on another forum, specific examples do not prove general conclusions, but since Abraxas took the lead I'll finish the act:

Case 1: EPA September 11, 2001 Air Quality Contreversy

An example of intergovernmental failure and ineffiency. The EPA was apparently pressured by the White House to produce a report declaring the air quality near the destroyed remnants of the Twin Towers safe to breathe. This report was not genuine and was issued in absense of any actual research, it was essentially government propoganda and lies that worked against the safety of the population.

Case 2: Failure of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

In an effort to save the deteriorating everglade wetlands of Florida, the federal government put into law a comprehensive plan to restore this ecosystem to its former glory. Although the law was propelled into action about 6 decades ago, the everglades till continue to deterioriate and the law itself has been amended numerious times and challenged in court due to the disproportionate amount of funding put forth by the State of Florida in relation to the Federal Goverenment. This example shows how inefficent government is when merely trying to revive a dying part of the enviroment.

Case 3: FEMA Formaldehyde Trailer Contreversy

In the wake of displaced families after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sets up and provides temporary housing trailers. Indeed, it was so nice and kind for the federal government to do this. Unfortunately, these trailers
contained a toxin known as Formaldehyde. I doubt any further explanation is needed, this example quote bluntly demonstrates how efficent the federal government can operate for the safety of tis citizens.

Case 4: Corruption of The Mineral Management Service

The Mineral Management Services (A defunct subsection of the Department of The Interior, now renamed as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) is charged with regulating and maintaining the nations off shore gas supplies. The corruption of this federal agency is well documented, employees of this agency have been charged with sexual misconduct and drug possession and behaved unethically in their treatment of oil companies.

Citations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... ontroversy
http://www.seolawfirm.com/2011/05/flori ... verglades/
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=42606
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_Ma ... troversies

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Abraxas
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Post #8

Post by Abraxas »

WinePusher wrote:Thesis: Governmental regulation of markets and industry is not required to ensure the safety of the enviroment and the consumer, and any type of proposed governmental solution to an environmental problem will always be inferior, in terms of practicality, to a free market solution.
I would like to note here that nowhere in your post was any evidence presented, nor the argument even raised, that any government controls would be inferior or less efficient. Libertarians like to assert that government controls are "very inefficient" and "inherently inferior", indeed, in one place asserting without merit this is established fact, but this post continues the proud libertarian tradition of never substantiating this to be so.

Even the examples provided do not support your claims. The reason I provided case studies they show a specific pattern of behavior when companies are left to their own devices. Showing the deficiencies in specific regulations, however, does not show all regulations are bad any more than a bacon grease based fire extinguisher would prove fires should be left to burn themselves out.
Preamble: There is no doubt that corporations, to a certain degree, act in a manner that is detrimental to the environment and to the consumer. But if we are to get anywhere in this debate, it is important to pinpoint what these detriments actually are. Below is a list of 3 detrimental behaviors that people like Abraxas often charge the industrial community with along with my own arguments.
I do not accept there are only three kinds of harm unregulated business can do. I shall address additional behaviors later that corporations, if left to themselves can and do behave in that cause harm not covered by your list.
Excessive consumption
Excessive consumption has long been a favorite talking point of the left, it is the idea that resources will be depleted to extinction to due the large quantites of consumerism that exists. Environmental resources are required to manufacture goods, thus when a population is consuming a specific good at a fast and constant rate the resource, along with the enviroment will be harmed. Abraxas proposes some type of regulatory policy that would limit this consumption and also preserve the sanctity of the enviroment. Well, I'm saying that he's wrong, government isn't needed to rectify this problem. What will actually and effectively rectify this problem is what is known as the Price Mechanism. Every good that is consumed comes at a price that the consumer must pay. If a good/resource exists in large quantites, it's cost will be inherently low and many people will consume it. If a good/resource exists and is near depletion the cost attached to it will spike up and only a few people will continue to consume it. Thus, the preservation of renewable and non-renewable resources is adequately handled by the price mechanism and government regulations are not needed.
This has a huge number of unsupported, unwarranted assumptions built in to it. Firstly, it assumes that higher consumer prices will prevent corporate harvesting of the resource. Indeed, if the resources is running out, the opposite is likely to be good business practice.

In such a situation sale prices are already high and for a lot of resources, the cost of gathering them is much the same regardless of how much of it is left. Cutting down the last tree in a forest or draining the last drop of oil from a well is going to be much the same in terms of price, adjusted for inflation, as the first once the infrastructure is in place. Further, if the resource is gone, it is gone, there is no long term business model to be had, and so it is to my advantage to extract as much value as possible now and begin moving business assets to a new market sector, especially so when the death of one market sector tends to result in the niche opening up to competitors that would drive down demand, and thus prices, for my product.

You assume, incorrectly, that it is always in a business' interest to continue itself in the same sector it is already in, as opposed to cutting their losses and moving the capital to a new market.

Secondly, you assume that market reactions from consumers are sufficiently fast to change spending behavior before the depletion of the resource becomes irreversible and gravely damaging. Yes, it may get to the point where oil is a thousand dollars a barrel or soil depletion has led to food being twenty times what it is priced now, but by that point, the damage may have happened decades ago. See, the problem is you expect a gradual tapering off of the resource to slowly drive up prices until equilibrium is reached thus protecting the environment, the reality is topsoil depletion is already a massive problem in the US. The price of food continues to do up and yet demand skyrockets anyway. At the rate we are going, we will run out of topsoil and when we do, we will not be able to engage in effective agriculture, however, this has not stopped industry from continuing to abuse what is essentially a non-renewable resource.

Thirdly, you are assuming viable alternatives to continuing to pay more and more for depleting resources, which, for many individuals, many other companies, this is not feasible. Forget about electric cars for the moment, how long until we have developed electric airliners? How much plastic can readily be made without petroleum? Some industries, if they are to exist at all, are entirely at the mercy of the producers and the distributors on depleting resources and so will continue to pay ever higher prices for these products and pass the raise in operating costs on to the consumer in a distributed fashion, as they already do.

Government financing for searching for alternatives to the product is one way in which this can be offset to some degree. Another, as mentioned, would be to cap consumption at a level equal to or less than what we can replenish, which provides good incentive to create new ways to replenish resources. I'm sure you would argue that companies already have this incentive, but that is only true part of the time. One thing the government does very well is make certain modes of behavior more expensive. By default, a corporation will behave in a way to maximize profits, depending on the specifics of the corporation or even an individual project, that may be either short or long term profit. The government has an easy way to make those behaviors that are highly destructive more expensive or illegal and it is my contention they should do so to favor the behavior that maximizes the long term interests of the citizens of the US.

I finally note that nowhere in here did you actually show that government controls and regulations don't work or don't work as well, you merely listed theoretical market controls which I have now shown to be inadequate.
Pollution and the Destruction of Commons
In abstract terms, pollution can be defined as any type of human behavior or action that has detrimental effects on the enviroment. In more specific terms, pollution is the destruction of property that we all commonly own. This problem is easily remedied when as we would any disputation between two or more parties. When party two is adversly affected by party one, party two is capable to take party one to court to have the disputation resolved and the damage halted and compensated. The free market solution to pollution is simple, inject property rights into common entities such as the air and the water in order to force polluting companies to be financially liable for any damage they committ.
Doesn't work. For one thing, it is impossible to prove with any certainty in a lot of cases the specific cause of damage. If someone develops cancer, how can you prove it was the result of the chemical company dumping poison into the groundwater as opposed to the factory pumping pollution into the air? How do you make them whole again when they are diagnosed with terminal cancer or lose their child to contaminated lake water? Court cannot cure pollution related medical conditions nor bring back the dead. Further, this only ever works if it then becomes more expensive to pay out on damages to people than it is to change the business practice, and, if not, then you still do not have safe drinking water.

Of course, all of this assumes the damaged party has the capacity to hire a lawyer and pay the filing fees and risk losing and paying for everything to begin with. Might work with an infallible justice system but in a system where large corporations as a matter of routine retain all the top law firms in an area to ensure they are never on the wrong end of the most skilled attorneys that might actually win, this is entirely impractical.

Further, as noted elsewhere, you have to know the damage is taking place to take steps to correct it. I will reiterate, in scientific circles, people who study the Earth and the climate for a living, who are experts in their field, who are not on the payroll of companies that would suffer due to negative findings, there is absolutely no debate that humans are largely responsible for climate change. The damage from this could be catastrophic but, as also noted, the energy industry is spending a lot of money to undermine good science to avoid having to change their way of doing business. From a business standpoint, paying people to pretend there is no problem is often cheaper than fixing the problem.
Also, individuals tend to be more cautious and protective of land which is their own. For example, a land owner who operates a farm would be incentivized to take care of the land and the surrounding enviroment as it would be in his best inTerest to do so in order to continue renewing the resources he needs to maintain his businees.
Only applies if the company somehow suffers for the environmental damage. If a company suffers no downside for contaminating a water table, making it unsafe to drink, they have no reason not to. Same with air pollution. Case and point, see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Further, even in those cases where it does apply, sometimes it is more cost effective for a company to exhaust the resources in an area to the point they are unable to continue doing business there and then just sell the land and move somewhere else to start over. Further, despite the logical sense this would make in those cases where it would apply and moving elsewhere is impossible, we as a matter of routine see companies not behaving this way. As noted earlier, topsoil continues to be erased in order to maximize productivity even though those farming techniques will ultimately lead to the complete destruction of usable topsoil.

I will also note, again, no evidence was presented government controls cannot be effective.
Corporate apathy towards safety and efficency
The key factor here is what could the government possibly do that a businees has not already done to ensure the safety of the businees' operations and products. I won't accept any premise that states that a businees is not inclined towards the prevention of disasters and harm caused by their products as it's simply a counter intuitive claim. The idea that both Abraxas and I accept is that a businees is inclined towards generating profit, well nothing could be more counter productive to this inclination than laxed oversight and apathy. An internal disaster, or the sale of a harmful product, would completely wipe out a businees and discourage consumers from supporting that businees.
Really? So British Petroleum went under after that oil spill? All those food producers went out of business from the multitude of incidents of contamination of E. coli and so forth? I know we haven't started in on healthcare yet, but have all those pharmaceuticals that have had drugs recalled for safety issues collapsed? The idea a company is even likely to go under for a single internal error, or even a host of them is complete nonsense and is contradicted by an extensive record of corporate behavior demonstrating just the opposite.

After the Texas refinery explosion that killed 15 people and wounded 170, BP still refused to implement the legally mandated safety requirements resulting in over 700 OSHA violations just four years later. Leading up to the disaster, it had been cited with safety violations over 300 times and consistently refused to make recommended safety improvements. Companies do a cost benefit analysis every time they make any changes, and, as BP shows, sometimes human lives aren't enough incentive to make the workplace safer because dead bodies don't appear in finance reports.
So it is already within their vested interest to ensure the safety or their products and operations. Thus, the question remains, what can the government possibly do to ramp up safety when the businees itself already has a vested interest in doing so itself?
A lot of things. Inspections to check for damage, disabled safety systems, situations which could easily result in death or injury, etc. Regulated minimums on the quality and safety for equipment being used by a business. Laws prohibiting unnecessarily risky processes.

Further, all of this ignores internal pressures for employees within the company to come in on time and under budget with the projects they manage. Companies don't ignore safety recommendations because they are malicious, they ignore them because the upgrades can be expensive or time consuming. The company may have policies for safety that local managers ignore or circumvent to improve their personal careers because there is a one in a thousand chance something bad will come of it and by then they may have already advanced in the company or moved to a new one or received that juicy bonus.

Unless you are going to attempt to argue companies don't cut corners with safety and don't unnecessarily endanger people, something both demonstrably false and already demonstrated to be false, I don't see how you can possibly argue they do an adequate job of self regulation.

I will also note, again, no evidence was presented government controls cannot be effective.
Let me now go on to address a governmental agency that I haven't focues that much attention on.
-The Food and Drug Administration: As Abraxas seems to be in favor of information, I would expect him to oppose the FDA as I do as it has engaged in restrictive information regulations when it comes to foods and drugs. Essentially, a truthful claim about a drug (such as "Tylenol will reduce the amount of pain you fell") is prohibited from being labeled on the drug package as it does not meet specific FDA regulation standards. It is censorship. Also, the drug approval process of the FDA is inherently biased, as the FDA will weigh the potential harm of a drug as more significant than its potential good in order to maintain its public reputation.
If it is all the same to you, given your claims on this one are specifically related to drugs, I will wait to address this until discussing healthcare. However, I will again note that specific implementations of regulations do not demonstrate the concept of regulations to be flawed any more than broken glass and sandpaper brand baby wipes are a good argument for letting the infant clean itself.
And as I said in my previous post, I would cite four examples of governmental failures to counter the four examples of free market failures that Abraxas listed. It does not prove anything, as in the words of a debater on another forum, specific examples do not prove general conclusions, but since Abraxas took the lead I'll finish the act:
Actually, they do sometimes. A black swan proves not all swans are white. A heavy blanket proves not all cloth is light. A company acting in a manner to cut costs by engaging in policies dangerous to their own employees and the public at large shows that in a market solely driven by the maximization of profits will result in companies adopting policies that risk human lives to improve the amount of money they make. The examples were there to establish a pattern, as the over 1000 violations from BP alone have demonstrated, that the market does relatively little to weed out dangerous, hurtful, and deceptive practices that increase their short term earnings statements.
Case 1: EPA September 11, 2001 Air Quality Contreversy

An example of intergovernmental failure and ineffiency. The EPA was apparently pressured by the White House to produce a report declaring the air quality near the destroyed remnants of the Twin Towers safe to breathe. This report was not genuine and was issued in absense of any actual research, it was essentially government propoganda and lies that worked against the safety of the population.
George W Bush pressured the EPA to lie about an environmental issue for the benefit of business? Shock and horror!

I don't think you will find any dispute that a bad administration running a bad agency with bad regulations isn't going to help much. What is in dispute is whether this specific instance says anything about all possible regulations and methods of government intervention in the market.
Case 2: Failure of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

In an effort to save the deteriorating everglade wetlands of Florida, the federal government put into law a comprehensive plan to restore this ecosystem to its former glory. Although the law was propelled into action about 6 decades ago, the everglades till continue to deterioriate and the law itself has been amended numerious times and challenged in court due to the disproportionate amount of funding put forth by the State of Florida in relation to the Federal Goverenment. This example shows how inefficent government is when merely trying to revive a dying part of the enviroment.
This one is a complete misrepresentation of the situation. In 1948, the government put into effect The Central and Southern Florida (C&SF) Project, which was meant to perform a number of specific functions such as maintain a water supply, prevent salt water intrusion, and flood control, which it actually does relatively well. However, a side effect of this plan was some damage to the ecosystem. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was authorized in 2000 and is/was a project expected to take 30 years to complete through rerouting fresh water into depleted areas. As the project as not really started, I fail to see how you can claim it failed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehens ... ation_Plan

Also, an ironic nugget from your link of the market failing to regulate itself:

Nearby sugar farms and agricultural businesses unleash pollutants such as phosphorous and nitrogen as byproducts from fertilizer and farming practices. Sulfate is then used to kill off algae blooms that are created from these chemicals that choke the waterways. But when sulfate combines with other elements in the ecosystem – some natural and some from manmade waste – it creates methylmercury, which drifts into the Everglades vital waterways. [2] These potent chemicals harm plant populations, create serious neurological and hormone problems in animals, and over time diminish the livelihood of the entire area. [3]...


“Big Sugar and the state’s other chronic polluters have lobbied and litigated to delay the cleanup of fertilizer and hazardous toxins,� said the Everglades Foundation in their ad. [4] “While BP is paying 100 percent of the cost of cleaning up their oil spill, Big Sugar has successfully pushed the cost of cleaning up their pollution onto taxpayers.�

The EPA and state have not enforced tough enough regulations against agricultural back-pumping and chemical treatment, they said. Environmental advocates show that the permit process of discharging chemicals into the state’s coveted waterbody is lax to non-existent. Waste and stormwater treatment areas are not big enough and enforced appropriately to restore the Everglades for future generations to enjoy. Florida Governor Rick Scott asked the EPA to “…drop numeric limits for nutrients such as phosphorous in Florida waterways.� [5] With lower standards, polluted waterbodies would be deemed safe again and affect upstream waterways by increasing the flow of detrimental chemicals to these areas, say scientists. [6] Florida also reset deadlines from 2006 to 2016 for its cleanup plan to decrease the harsh levels of the chemical when it amended the Everglades Forever Act several years ago. [7]

http://www.seolawfirm.com/2011/05/flori ... verglades/

This one counts as an example for me, of how industry actively fights to be able to pollute wherever it wants and would do so but for government regulations that you want to eliminate. Thank you.
Case 3: FEMA Formaldehyde Trailer Contreversy

In the wake of displaced families after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sets up and provides temporary housing trailers. Indeed, it was so nice and kind for the federal government to do this. Unfortunately, these trailers
contained a toxin known as Formaldehyde. I doubt any further explanation is needed, this example quote bluntly demonstrates how efficent the federal government can operate for the safety of tis citizens.
If FEMA produced the trailers, rather than bought them from the private sector, you know, that sector that would never do things like use substandard materials and faulty construction practices, you might have a point here. However, the trailers were purchased that way from private contractors. I suppose you could accuse FEMA of not adequately testing their purchases before redistributing, sure, but in the end, this one is another example of cost cutting resulting in private enterprise putting more stuff dangerous to consumers on the market. Indeed, this may be the most ironic element of your entire post because the official report on this one concluded insufficient government regulations caused the problem to begin with.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... sec-health
Case 4: Corruption of The Mineral Management Service

The Mineral Management Services (A defunct subsection of the Department of The Interior, now renamed as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) is charged with regulating and maintaining the nations off shore gas supplies. The corruption of this federal agency is well documented, employees of this agency have been charged with sexual misconduct and drug possession and behaved unethically in their treatment of oil companies.
Even if true, all it shows is that our regulatory agencies must be created and managed with care by electing competent and skillful lawmakers and executives.

---------------------

A few more points here before I close, first, there are more kinds of harm than mentioned. The first and most obvious example is economic damage; when a disaster happens, such as the collapse of Enron or the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill, it has a ripple effect on the entire market. Another is unfair industry practices to prevent the emergence of competition, such as creation of monopolies or exclusion contracts (e.g agreeing to buy steel at an above market price on the condition that the company does not sell to competitors, depriving them of market entry). A third example overlooked is abuses inflicted on employees not safety related. As was frequently seen around the last turn of the century, an unregulated market had a remarkable consistency in creating abusive, hostile, and what would today be illegal work conditions.

At this point, I think the ultimate evidence that corporations cannot regulate themselves because, if it is practical, they would be doing it already. However, I want to cite the very article on the Florida Everglades Winepusher helpfully provided me earlier in this thread. Once more:

"Big Sugar and the state’s other chronic polluters have lobbied and litigated to delay the cleanup of fertilizer and hazardous toxins"

These are the people Libertarians want us to entrust the environment to. Does anyone honestly think that is a good idea?

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Abraxas
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Post #9

Post by Abraxas »

Round 2: Poverty and Healthcare

In opening, I would like to state something obvious. What we have now is not working. Even separating the US from the rest of the world and the moral questions of how much a good a nation with our wealth and power and technology could do for the impoverished regions of the globe, the situation within the United States is in and of itself a microcosm of the failure of the free market.

Every year, over 100,000 Americans die needlessly from causes, that, with adequate health care availability, could be prevented. Further, we lag behind every single one of the other 19 wealthiest nations in the most basic metric of keeping our own people alive.(1) Not coincidentally, we are the only nation on the list that lacks universal healthcare. We do, however, spend more than any other nation per capita on health care.(2) Further still, on the last WHO assessment of the relative level of care provided and the US placed 37th, just ahead of Cuba and Slovenia and just behind Costa Rica and Dominica.(3) Winepusher has indicated in the past he does not accept individual examples as evidence, I must wonder, if a trend of consistently poor performance as demonstrated by the above statistics qualifies as proof that leaving things to the market doesn’t work?

If what the Libertarians say is true, how can this be possible? They will shout from the rooftops that the free market is always more efficient, that the invisible hand will maximize results and minimize expense. They point out how people from other countries come here for care, but they neglect it is almost only the wealthy, that standard of care not existing for the American public. How then, can we, the freest of the health care markets, be doing the worst of the wealthy nations?

The situation with poverty in the United States is little better. On the Human Poverty Index, the US ranks 17th of 19 measured nations(4) and on the adjusted Human Development Index ranks 12th(5). What do the vast majority of the nations beating the US in these measures have in common? Extensive state sponsored welfare systems. In income inequality using the GINI index, the US scores extremely poorly, falling below such nations as China, Kenya, Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.(6)

It is worth noting at this juncture what poverty in America actually looks like. Recently, the Heritage Foundation put out a fantastic report (fantastic meaning “it could have been written by Harry Potter for all the relation it has to the world real humans live in�, not “good�) about poverty in America which seems to believe the poor live in relative luxury with all the goods they could ever want.(7) However, the truth is much more bleak. Over 50 million Americans lived in food insecure homes as of 2009.(8) Millions had to choose between food and medicine or food and electricity.(9) The poor are hugely more likely to have to liquidate retirement accounts early, meaning they will have no assets except social security to retire on.(10) Children born into poverty are 20 times less likely to go to college.(11) Men who live in the wealthiest counties in America have life expectancies 11 years longer than those in the poorest counties.(12) Almost half of children born into poverty are never able to leave it.(13) In the mean time, the report whines about how government assistance like food stamps and the medical care provided to the poor mean they aren’t as impoverished as is pretended as justification for taking away those programs and hanging the poor out to dry.

How is it, that in one of the freest markets in the world in the richest nation in the world consistently lags behind other first world nations in measures of poverty? The answer is simple, free markets left to themselves do almost nothing to reduce and remove poverty. There is nothing stopping the free market from working to solve poverty. Nothing to stop the greatly centralized money pools of America from donating or investing in causes that raise up the impoverished. Yet, as predictable as the sunrise, in the relatively free market, the poor continue to grow in number.

Frankly, the idea that the free market will help poverty doesn't make sense when compared with observed reality. The idea is that unrestrained capitalism will create jobs and boom the economy overall, thus resulting in less overall poverty. Nothing about this sentiment holds up. During the 1970s and 1980s, In Chile, often cited as a triumph of capitalism by people unfamiliar with the details, profits soared for the very wealthy, of course, but what was the effect on the poor, or, for that matter, the economy as a whole? Lower real wages, overall economic growth slowed to levels well below the majority of the rest of Latin America, unemployment exploded, and the whole of the economy became hugely unstable. None of this even touches on the gross human rights abuses suffered by the Chilean people under the free market Pinochet regime.(14)

We see it in our own history, during the War on Poverty, we see a massive decline in the number of impoverished Americans, about 13 Million fewer living in poverty when the government was taking steps to actively combat it, until 1973 when Nixon and the oft championed cause of deregulation caused poverty to begin moving upwards again, and, though the poverty rate has remained relatively steady, since the war on poverty was ended the number of actual impoverished began rising, now almost to the point it was when the War on Poverty began. During the period of the most intense deregulation, during the 80s, we saw only languid changes to the poverty rate, and some shifts in the wrong direction.(15) In the mean time, corporate charitable contributions have been in decline or level(16) while corporations continue to rake in record profits.(17) There is nothing standing in the way of the private sector working to end poverty, and yet, what we see is a complete and utter failure to do so. Since the 1980s we have had the weakest regulation since the turn of the last century, something that should work in favor of the free market economic model's favor, and yet, we see the exact opposite, poverty only making serious declines when the government was actively stepping in and regulations were at their strongest.

The free market in terms of healthcare doesn't even make sense on a theoretical level either, and it shows in practice. As shown above, Americans pay more than anyone else for healthcare of inferior quality, which, frankly, is what one would expect when the invisible hand is taking pulling the strings. Starting at the insurance level, it is worth noting that insurance companies make their money by denying care. They don't have to pay for your operation if you don't have an operation. As such, by the very definition of what it means to be a health insurer is to make money by preventing the sick from getting what they need to get healthy. Many insurance companies as a matter of routine will deny any and every initial claim to force policyholders to go through complicated, time consuming, and potentially expensive appeals processes to get any medical coverage from them.(18)

Likewise, pharmaceutical companies make money from treatments, not cures. If you have someone who can take a pill for two weeks and rid themselves of a deadly disease, or has to spend the rest of their life shelling out for pills in order to not fall over dead, which is going to get your company the most money? Every businessman loves a captive market. Further, you can see exactly where pharmaceuticals are investing their research money, that being in cosmetic and vanity treatments instead of treating diseases that kill people, especially not diseases that kill poor people.(19) Further, due to a lack of government regulation, Americans pay much higher prices for the drugs they do get because unlike every other government in the modern world, our government won't negotiate the prices of drugs.(20) Further still, in order to make as much money as possible, pharmaceuticals shovel drugs out the door as fast as the possibly can, the result of which is that in 2009, over a thousand different drugs had to be recalled due to safety issues.(21) Even worse, due to the for profit nature of pharmaceuticals, on more than one occasion they have been caught bribing doctors to prescribe medication not in the patient's best interest to improve sales.(22)

Simple competition doesn’t work to improve this market sector like it does others for a number of reasons. Firstly, competition relies on the customer having both sufficient chance and sufficient knowledge to judge the different options presented to them. However, when a patient is having chest pains, they don’t have time to shop around, or call up a variety of doctors to ensure their insurance provider will pay for their visit to that care facility, or check the internet to see which doctors get the best reviews. Likewise, when patients are told what treatment they need, they tend to accept it, not having the extensive background in medicine necessary to make an informed judgment. Even getting a second opinion is often not practical due to the costs and time involved. If you collapse somewhere and are rushed to the nearest hospital, you still have to pay the bill whether you were even given the opportunity to agree to the treatment and testing or not.

It is also worth noting that many of the conservative solutions to healthcare problems in America involve increasing the size and power of the Federal Government. For example, one of the favorite mantras of the American right is tort reform. One of the reasons they claim healthcare is so expensive is malpractice insurance being so expensive due to the litigiousness of the American public. However, in order to eliminate this, you would need a huge number of government impositions to either cap the damages at below what courts are finding the victims are entitled to, what the court finds is fair recompense for what they have suffered. In short, substituting the judgment of the government for that of juries. Likewise, interstate competition between insurance companies only doesn’t happen now due to individual states choosing not to allow it. Forcing the states and the people to bow down to the will of the government is inherently un-Libertarian.

So, having now explored the scope of the problem and what doesn’t work to solve it, the onus is now on me to demonstrate my position, that government intervention is a reasonable and effective mechanism to, if not eliminate poverty, at least dull the effects it creates on the poor and, likewise, demonstrate government intervention in the healthcare system is an efficient and powerful means of raising the quality of healthcare in America not only for those who can afford to pay for top quality health insurance, but also those who cannot.

Truth be told, we need not even be particularly creative about solving the healthcare problem in America, we need only emulate what every other developed country in the world has done, institute a universal public healthcare system. They figured out a long time ago that private only healthcare systems leave result in a lot of dead people. Going back to the first figure I introduced, one of the functions libertarians do agree with being a public institution is national defense, and yet, in terms of body count, the US suffers the equivalent to a 9/11 style attack every week and a half from deaths that could be prevented just by matching the quality of care of much of Europe and the rest of the developed world. From those figures, we know we have lost over 300 times the number of Americans to inadequate healthcare as we have terrorism. How is it justifiable it to accept we should spend money to protect ourselves from things not killing Americans but not on the things that are?

By contrast, the rest of the developed world doesn’t have this problem. Through a series of public healthcare systems that run parallel to, if not replace, the market in allocating care, we see profound results. Of the WHO best ranked healthcare systems on the planet, of the top 36 (those scoring better than the US), all(23)(24)(25)(*) but one, Dominica, ranked 35th, has a functioning universal healthcare system and Dominica has promised to implement one by the end of this year because they figured out private care wasn’t working.(26) Indeed, in a broad cross country comparison of healthcare, the US ranked poorly in almost every single category when ranked against other developed nations in a multitude of metrics including things like infant mortality, preventable death, and life expectancy.(27)

One of the chief claims made by the opponents of giving everyone in America access to medical treatment is that of care rationing. If everyone in America is able to see a doctor, and, heaven forbid that someone else pay for this, the level of care would drop as the system would become overtaxed. There are a number of problems with this claim, the first of which is that care is already rationed in America, it is just done so on a who can pay for basis rather than a most critical procedures first basis. They like to point to long wait times in Canada and the UK for certain procedures vs. a relatively short wait time in the US, neglecting of course that this is in part because not everyone who would be able to get the procedure in Canada or the UK at all would be able to do so in the US because they could never afford it.(28) Further, even in the US hospital staff report that wait times are a serious problem.(29) The UK reports that the vast majority of patients to go through their public system report being either satisfied or very satisfied with the wait times.(30) Other systems, such as France, have no problems with wait times.(31) Likewise, as demonstrated by their longer higher life expectancies and lower preventable mortality rates, their quality of care for the public at large is superior, contrary to what the Libertarian expectation would be.

Another claim put forward by the proponents of leaving health decisions of leaving your healthcare decisions in the capable and well trained hands of insurance adjusters and underwriters is that by moving from a “pay to not die model� of health care would be that it would result in a shortage of doctors. However, the fact is we see no evidence of this in other countries who have universal healthcare. Many of the countries have more doctors per capita than the United States. Norway in particular has a per capita rate of doctors and nurses about 150% of what the US has despite universal healthcare coverage.(32)

Likewise, in reduction of poverty, there is no great mystery as to whether or not welfare is effective in the reduction of poverty. In many other developed nations, the effects of welfare on the poverty rate have been profound. In the countries like Norway, Finland, Belgium, and Denmark, the poverty rate dropped below 5% between 1970 and 1997. Even the worst outcomes outside of the US had dropped a full 7%. In contrast, the US, through leaving it mostly to the free market to sort out, saw a mere 2% drop to 15.1%, 3.2% higher than any other listed country.(33) The numbers don’t lie, welfare works. These countries have robust economies, have had them for a long time, but still found the money to spare to keep their worst off citizens doing well. There isn’t even any good evidence they took a solid hit to their economies to do it either, with many of the countries having higher or a comparable GDP per capita when compared to the US.(34)

One of the most frequent objections to expansive welfare systems is that it can create a dependence and an incentive to never get off of it. There is certainly some truth to this, no denying it. There are abuses to the system. However, fighting against welfare on that basis is like fighting against vaccines on the handful of negative reactions or fighting against public education on the grounds some students will drop out. The vast amount of good it does far outweighs the potential and the consequences of abuse, and, right now, there is no solid evidence abuse is widespread. Further, safeguards can be put in place to push people back into the labor force, such as making continued receipt of the fund contingent upon receiving vocational training or job placement plans through the government beyond a certain point.

Now, four examples to demonstrate my point.

-----

Example 1: Ephedra(35)(36)

In the late 90s, the public was becoming concerned about a drug ingredient called ephedra, a popular diet and body building supplement manufactured by Metabolife, among others, after more than 100 deaths emerged linked to the product. The result was clockwork predictable. The lobbyists were mobilized to Washington and after spending millions of dollars to persuade them to look away, the FDA backed off. They further acted to block research from being released demonstrating wild inconsistencies between the reported potency of ephedra products and the actual concentration as part of the manufacturing process. During the course of the investigation, Metabolife concealed more than 14,000 complaints about the safety of the drug they had received.

In 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine released a study that showed frequent occurrences of death or disability from use of the drug. It was not until 2002 the Department of Justice forced a turnover of 15,000 complaints, and a year later, after the death of a MLB player that the FDA began considered regulating Ephedra again. Ultimately, in 2004, the FDA decided to ban ephedra as it was hundreds of times more likely than competitors to cause adverse reactions and showed little long term benefit. It doesn’t stop there. Rather than moving on from a drug killing and crippling hundreds and causing harm to thousands, Metabolife fought onward in the courts to keep it rolling, until it was finally stopped in 2007 when the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Well surely Metabolife was entitled to pursue their legal options if they felt the ruling against them was unfair, right? Well, turns out they didn’t. After ephedra was banned, the founder was found guilty of lying to the FDA to deliberately hide the effects of ephedra and sentenced to a fine and imprisonment. Put another way, he was perfectly content to continue killing people with a product he knew to be lethal to countless people just to stay on the gravy train. Metabolife itself went under as it was dodging taxes through fraudulent tax returns.

Example 2: Smallpox(37)(38)(39)

Smallpox has been one of the single greatest scourges upon humanity in the history of the species. Estimates place the cumulative death toll of the disease at upwards of 300-500 million in the 20th century alone, which is noteworthy not only for the body count but also for the fact that the disease had been completely eradicated by the last 20 years of that century, to date being the only human pathogen to be completely wiped out. What is also notable is how it was wiped out, that being a multinational government cooperative funded by taxpayer dollars to stamp this plague out of existence. The US, the UK, the Soviet Union, and countless other nations. Consider, the entire effort put forth by a multitude of governments cost less than 2 billion dollars and removed from the world a disease responsible for potentially billions of deaths. Indeed, it is estimate the US makes back everything it spent on smallpox treatment every 26 days as a result of not having to pay to treat it anymore. Efficient, effective, and not run by the private sector.

Example 3: Privatization of Welfare in Indiana(40)

In 2006, Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, decided that the state’s welfare system needed to be privatized. The state already had an exceptionally efficient welfare system that was already performing well above national average but, in a scheme that was supposed to save taxpayer dollars, the state of Indiana turned over control of the state’s eligibility monitoring system to IBM starting in 2007. Within one year of service, the error rate had jumped to over 13%, more than double the previous year. Immediately there were problems with lost paperwork, huge backlogs, and IBM denying people just to reduce the paperwork load even though they actually qualified. In the process of all this, however, a number of companies who just so happened to be well connected to Daniels made huge amounts of money on the contract. Eventually, even the free market, privatize everything types come face to face with reality and after the appalling failure of privatization that wrongly cost thousands of Indiana residents access to vital and necessary resources, Daniels was forced to admit the attempt at privatizing welfare was a disaster, quote “just didn’t work�. Of course, the year after cutting IBM out and returning the system to state management over private companies, their performance has sprung back. Coincidence?


Example 4: The G.I. Bills(41)(42)(43)

The reason America even really has a middle class, is in fact, government intervention. Certain free market proponents like to argue that the government spending money, and most certainly spending money on the poor, does nothing to help our economy. From our own history we know this to be completely false. Following World War II, the US had an abundance of young American males with too much free time and not enough jobs and education, seeing as how we no longer needed to employ them all as soldiers to fight in Germany, Japan, and a number of other unpleasant places of the era. So, in order to help deal with that, and to give the soldiers a proper thank you for their dedication and sacrifice in spending the last four years ducking Nazi mortar fire, a G.I. Bill was created. It provided for funding for creating businesses, purchasing homes, seeking higher education out of the government pocket. Clearly with government hand outs being the source of the money, these bills taught our soldiers to leech off society and they all became hopelessly addicted to government money as the libertarian theory of welfare dependence holds, right? Right?

Well, no, quite the contrary, the quality of life, and the power of our economy skyrocketed. The number of homes being built exploded, jumping from just over a hundred thousand per year in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950. It is worth noting those houses weren’t building themselves. Between the three major bills, millions of Americans were put through college or vocational schools and opened new businesses. These people would become the backbone of the skilled labor that America needed to maintain a role as a leading economic power once Europe had repaired itself. Productivity soared, wages exploded, and America for the first time had a middle class as we recognize a middle class to be today. America would scarcely be recognizable had the government not provided huge levels of assistance and support to a large segment of the population.

-----

Sadly, as long as this article is already, I haven’t had time or space to do it justice. I didn’t have the room to touch on the homeless problem in America, for example, or the problems with forcing people to wait until something is an emergency to seek treatment or the deaths caused every year by hospital infections and doctor mistakes, nor the influence drug companies exert over the FDA in approving medicines before they are ready, or the link between crime and poverty. The system we have is broken. If you ask doctors, medical professionals, what they think the solution is, overwhelmingly they support a public option for healthcare at a rate of 73%.(44) As already demonstrated, welfare has a long and successful history of raising people out of history and unregulated markets do not.

The ultimate reason for this is simple. For a government, the accountability lies with the electorate. If the government does a poor job, it can be replaced. If the government tries to hide misconduct, it can be exposed by political opponents in the same government or in later ones. They have the incentive to maximize the results, which, when dealing with poverty and health, is the important thing. On the reverse, the impetus on companies is to maximize profit. As we have seen, what is most profitable and what best serves individuals are often to contradictory propositions. One of the chief claims libertarians like to lean on is the importance of people having a choice in their medical decisions. Can you think of any system that gives less than one where you may not even be able to get care due to difficulty in securing insurance, and, if you can, everything must be approved by an organization completely unaccountable to you who has a vested interest in ensuring you receive the cheapest care possible or no care at all? Heath care must put health first, when it becomes about the money, it becomes corrupt and dysfunctional.

Likewise, the free market has unequivocally failed in keeping pace against poverty. We have seen the number of poor in America continue to rise despite unprecedented opulence all around us. That their standard of living has not greatly declined is a testament to the effectiveness of what welfare we do have. Where countries have implemented extensive welfare programs, we have seen poverty drop dramatically. In the past, when properly implemented, government spending on social programs has raised enormous numbers of people from destitution.

Government interventions is both good and necessary. When done well, when done thoughtfully, when done in a many consistent with the principles of equity and democracy, the government is a powerful and beneficial transformative force. When left to the principles of the free market alone, grad as much wealth as you can haul away , wellbeing, human development, and quality of life suffer. The market is a force every bit as powerful as the government, this cannot be denied, but just as the government requires the guidance of the people to ensure it is not used as a weapon of the few at the expense of the many, so too must the market be. I’m not saying leave it all to the government, I’m just saying don’t leave it all to an unregulated market.

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... cuTZz3sykc
2. http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO%27s_ra ... re_systems
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Poverty_Index
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... e_equality
7. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Report ... is-Poverty
8. http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-ame ... stics.aspx
9. http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-ame ... dings.aspx
10. http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/412108 ... roblem.pdf
11. http://www.feedmylambs.net/city-of-refuge/research.html
12. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press- ... ation.html
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
14. http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bell-p ... f-chile-2/
15. http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf
16. http://philanthropy.com/article/Big-Bus ... -t/128327/
17. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/2 ... 40538.html
18. http://www.health.com/health/article/0, ... 94,00.html
19. http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/ ... t_patents/
20. http://oversight-archive.waxman.house.g ... -74022.pdf
21. http://knowledgebase.findlaw.com/kb/201 ... 78819.html
22. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131602&page=1
23. http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/l ... ealthcare/
24. http://chartsbin.com/view/z1a
25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_system
26. http://www.caribarena.com/dominica/news ... -2011.html
27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_car ... omparisons
28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare ... ted_States
29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... Wait_times
30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialized ... ng_times_2
31. http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/ ... ad-france/
32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_car ... omparisons
33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27 ... on_poverty
34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... per_capita
35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedra
36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolife
37. http://www.cgdev.org/doc/millions/MS_case_1.pdf
38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
39. http://www.usaid.gov/unga/breakthroughs1.html
40. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/24 ... e-20110624
41. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... 47,00.html
42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_Bill
43. http://sociology.berkeley.edu/profiles/ ... /ZUNZ5.pdf
44. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =112818960
*Multiple sources were required to track down every single one of the counties in the WHO list and their method of healthcare, if a link for any specific country not in links 23, 24, and 25 is needed, it will be available on request.

WinePusher

Post #10

Post by WinePusher »

Abraxas wrote:Every year, over 100,000 Americans die needlessly from causes, that, with adequate health care availability, could be prevented.
Once again, Abraxas is not saying what he means. He did the same thing with his last post and his vague allusion to AGW. Abraxas has no real issue with healthcare availability because no issue exists, if an individual needs care and cannot afford it the individual will still recieve it (I'd like to see him try to dispute that fact). Healthcare availability is as adequate as it can possibly be. The real issue is Preventive Care. Preventive care is a method of medicine by which disease and illness are prevented from ever occuring in the first place, thus eliminating the need for costly treatment. The consensus of thought, amoung liberals, is that preventive medicinal measures save costs, not lives which is contary to what Abraxas asserts. However, the problem with Preventive Medicine is really quite simple: it is a safe haven for waste. For example, a perfectly healthy individual going in for medical screening will be wasting the resources of the clinic/hospital because there is nothing wrong with him. In reality, the goal of medicine should be directed towards those who are already ill and sick, not those who are fine and healthy. In addition, there is a large faction of the population who possess no desire to proactively safeguard their body from potential illness. If the government imposes healthcare upon them against their will, it is a service they are bound to use infrequently.
Abraxas wrote:Further, we lag behind every single one of the other 19 wealthiest nations in the most basic metric of keeping our own people alive.(1) Not coincidentally, we are the only nation on the list that lacks universal healthcare. We do, however, spend more than any other nation per capita on health care.(2)
I'm surprised at the slanted opinion you've presented.

1)You say that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world in terms of life expectancy.
2)You imply that this is due to our lack of UHC.
3)And then you end it with a fun fact, that the United States spends more than any other nation on healthcare.

Here's why you're wrong:

1)Life expectancy of a nation is not the standard by which you judge the quality of their healthcare system because there are causes of death that extend beyond the scope and reach of healthcare. Judgement should be based upon the likelyhood of survival after an individual as been diagnosed with a fatal illness. If you get cancer, what is your likelyhood of survival and for how lon, in this department the United States is superior to 'the other 19 wealthiest nations.'
2)UHC has been documented to be nothing more than a failure. The 'preventable deaths' that you care about are ever more prevalent within a UHC system due to 1 primary factor: a disproportionate patient:doctor ratio.
3)Yes, healthcare makes up a large percentage of spending. I'd think you of all people should look upon this with pride, Abraxas. I thought liberals believed we should judge a countries 'standards' and 'morals' based upon its priorities.
Abraxas wrote:Winepusher has indicated in the past he does not accept individual examples as evidence, I must wonder, if a trend of consistently poor performance as demonstrated by the above statistics qualifies as proof that leaving things to the market doesn’t work?
Your methodology of citing particular examples to support a generalized conclusion is erroneous for the following reasons. (1) You have to apply this methodology across the spectrum. If a trend in poor performance by the free market indicates that it is inherently impracticable, then a trend in poor performance by the government should indicate that it is also impracticable, and I will continue to cite examples to counter yours. (2) You attribute said 'poor performance' to the failures of the market and fail to take other, more pressing factors into consideration. Would a trend in 'good performance' by the market indicate its practicability? Do you believe that the market has ever demonstrated 'good performance' and if you do, does it not reveal its 'bad performance' is merely the result of accidents that all economic systems are prone to?
Abraxas wrote:They point out how people from other countries come here for care, but they neglect it is almost only the wealthy, that standard of care not existing for the American public. How then, can we, the freest of the health care markets, be doing the worst of the wealthy nations?
Here is a case where a specific example might be able to prove a general conclusion. Abraxas states the situation, that many people from other countries come to the United States for healthcare, but offers no explanation and is also unwilling to attribute this to the possibility that the United States privitized healthcare system is of extremely high caliber and outperforms the UHC systems of the rest of the World. But even if that's true, that only wealthy foreigners come to America for healthcare, how is it relevant. You and I both agree on the undisputable fact that people from other countries come to the United States for healthcare, but why does their social status within their indigineous country matter?
Abraxas wrote:How is it, that in one of the freest markets in the world in the richest nation in the world consistently lags behind other first world nations in measures of poverty? The answer is simple, free markets left to themselves do almost nothing to reduce and remove poverty. There is nothing stopping the free market from working to solve poverty. Nothing to stop the greatly centralized money pools of America from donating or investing in causes that raise up the impoverished. Yet, as predictable as the sunrise, in the relatively free market, the poor continue to grow in number.
Amazing, this claim is so much more distorted than the Heritage Report Abraxas takes umbrage with. When it comes to poverty, the market and society of the United States are not free due to the implementation of the welfare state in the early 1900's. So Abraxas is just wrong to say that the prevalence of poverty in America is the fault of the Free Market. It's quite the opposite actually, the prevalence of poverty shows that the entitlement system along with welfare state like policies are a failure. As for the free market solution to Poverty, I will be addressing that in my next post.
Abraxas wrote:Frankly, the idea that the free market will help poverty doesn't make sense when compared with observed reality. The idea is that unrestrained capitalism will create jobs and boom the economy overall, thus resulting in less overall poverty.
That is a mischaracterization of the Libertarian view of poverty. We should let Milton Friedman describe the Libertarian view; and in his book Capitalism and Freedom which sits upon my desk he devotes an entire chapter to the subect of Alleviating Poverty, surprisingly your idea of 'unrestrained capitalism creating jobs' doesn't seem to be in there. The problem of poverty is addressed by the Free Market primarily through private enterprise and charity. When governemntal welfare activity rises the activity of private charity declines, and when governmental welfare activity declindes the activity of private charity rises. Which system is more effective at alleviating poverty? Well, that depends on a variety of factors. A major negative factor that is absent from the free market solution but present within government welfare is the entitlement mentality, the idea that the government owes you something and you are entitled to these dues. We can already see what this dangerous mentality leads to, just look at civilized Europe, particularly Greece and England. Look at what happens when their governemtns need to reduce the amount they give out in handouts, the citizens violently riot in the street. Thus, when it comes to which is better for society and the individual, it's clear the private enterprise is superior to government welfare.
Abraxas wrote:Starting at the insurance level, it is worth noting that insurance companies make their money by denying care. They don't have to pay for your operation if you don't have an operation. As such, by the very definition of what it means to be a health insurer is to make money by preventing the sick from getting what they need to get healthy. Many insurance companies as a matter of routine will deny any and every initial claim to force policyholders to go through complicated, time consuming, and potentially expensive appeals processes to get any medical coverage from them.
That's an interesting point. I wonder how well that logic holds when applied to other areas. The goal of a healthcare insurance company is to insure their client against illness. However, it seems to be within the best interest of insurance companies to deny care, so the conclusion Abraxas reaches is that insurance companies will generally deny care at all oppurtunities. Similarly, the goal of Amtrack is to provide railroad transportation for their customers. However, it seems to be within the best interest of Amtrack to initially deny access to their trains and force their customers to go through an appeals process to gain access, so using Abraxas' logic the conclusion I reach is that Amtrack will deny access to their trains at all oppurtunites in order to increase profits. This logic is just absurd because Amtrack realizes that the cost of maintaining their services is lower than the money they recieve from clients needing to utilize their service, so any denial of their service would not be within their interest as a company.
Abraxas wrote:Likewise, pharmaceutical companies make money from treatments, not cures. If you have someone who can take a pill for two weeks and rid themselves of a deadly disease, or has to spend the rest of their life shelling out for pills in order to not fall over dead, which is going to get your company the most money?
If the pills pharmacies pushed out were actually this ineffective, they would have no customers. Do you really believe consumers are that dumb? The 'cure' is what ensures the pharmaceutical companies to be reliable and efficent places of businees.
Abraxas wrote:Simple competition doesn’t work to improve this market sector like it does others for a number of reasons. Firstly, competition relies on the customer having both sufficient chance and sufficient knowledge to judge the different options presented to them. However, when a patient is having chest pains, they don’t have time to shop around, or call up a variety of doctors to ensure their insurance provider will pay for their visit to that care facility, or check the internet to see which doctors get the best reviews. Likewise, when patients are told what treatment they need, they tend to accept it, not having the extensive background in medicine necessary to make an informed judgment. Even getting a second opinion is often not practical due to the costs and time involved. If you collapse somewhere and are rushed to the nearest hospital, you still have to pay the bill whether you were even given the opportunity to agree to the treatment and testing or not.
I actually addressed this same argument iussed by nursebenjamin in another thread: The cost of healthcare, or Healthcare Inflation (as you put it) is not judged by the cost of Emergency Care. Emergency Care is an unconventional manner of obtaining healthcare. When purchasing insurance, you are able to shop around. If I live in Ohio and can only purchase insurance out of this state, then that limits my choice. If I am able to reject the offers of insurance in my state and go to a state where insurance is cheaper, than those companies that work out of Ohio will lose businees because their prices are jacked up. Consumer choice is always a good thing, and sadly it's something liberals are always opposed to. Anyways, many of your other points will be basically addressed in my own post of this round which you can then rebutt.
Abraxas wrote:Example 1: Ephedra(35)(36)

In the late 90s, the public was becoming concerned about a drug ingredient called ephedra, a popular diet and body building supplement manufactured by Metabolife, among others, after more than 100 deaths emerged linked to the product. The result was clockwork predictable. The lobbyists were mobilized to Washington and after spending millions of dollars to persuade them to look away, the FDA backed off. They further acted to block research from being released demonstrating wild inconsistencies between the reported potency of ephedra products and the actual concentration as part of the manufacturing process. During the course of the investigation, Metabolife concealed more than 14,000 complaints about the safety of the drug they had received.

In 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine released a study that showed frequent occurrences of death or disability from use of the drug. It was not until 2002 the Department of Justice forced a turnover of 15,000 complaints, and a year later, after the death of a MLB player that the FDA began considered regulating Ephedra again. Ultimately, in 2004, the FDA decided to ban ephedra as it was hundreds of times more likely than competitors to cause adverse reactions and showed little long term benefit. It doesn’t stop there. Rather than moving on from a drug killing and crippling hundreds and causing harm to thousands, Metabolife fought onward in the courts to keep it rolling, until it was finally stopped in 2007 when the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Well surely Metabolife was entitled to pursue their legal options if they felt the ruling against them was unfair, right? Well, turns out they didn’t. After ephedra was banned, the founder was found guilty of lying to the FDA to deliberately hide the effects of ephedra and sentenced to a fine and imprisonment. Put another way, he was perfectly content to continue killing people with a product he knew to be lethal to countless people just to stay on the gravy train. Metabolife itself went under as it was dodging taxes through fraudulent tax returns.


What does this prove other than the already established fact that the 'founder' was a corrupt conspirator liable for the deaths of individuals? This example makes no sense whatsoever and does not even remotely bolster your case.
Abraxas wrote:Example 2: Smallpox(37)(38)(39)

Smallpox has been one of the single greatest scourges upon humanity in the history of the species. Estimates place the cumulative death toll of the disease at upwards of 300-500 million in the 20th century alone, which is noteworthy not only for the body count but also for the fact that the disease had been completely eradicated by the last 20 years of that century, to date being the only human pathogen to be completely wiped out. What is also notable is how it was wiped out, that being a multinational government cooperative funded by taxpayer dollars to stamp this plague out of existence. The US, the UK, the Soviet Union, and countless other nations. Consider, the entire effort put forth by a multitude of governments cost less than 2 billion dollars and removed from the world a disease responsible for potentially billions of deaths. Indeed, it is estimate the US makes back everything it spent on smallpox treatment every 26 days as a result of not having to pay to treat it anymore. Efficient, effective, and not run by the private sector.
When it comes to a pandemic such as smallpox, the government does have a role to eradicate it.......Going off of what he's written above, I'm afraid Abraxas is beginning to see libertarianism and anarchism as the same thing. However, when it comes to actual and effective epidemology it is the private sector the is the most effective. I will go into more detail in my next post.
Abraxas wrote:Example 3: Privatization of Welfare in Indiana(40)

In 2006, Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, decided that the state’s welfare system needed to be privatized. The state already had an exceptionally efficient welfare system that was already performing well above national average but, in a scheme that was supposed to save taxpayer dollars, the state of Indiana turned over control of the state’s eligibility monitoring system to IBM starting in 2007. Within one year of service, the error rate had jumped to over 13%, more than double the previous year. Immediately there were problems with lost paperwork, huge backlogs, and IBM denying people just to reduce the paperwork load even though they actually qualified. In the process of all this, however, a number of companies who just so happened to be well connected to Daniels made huge amounts of money on the contract. Eventually, even the free market, privatize everything types come face to face with reality and after the appalling failure of privatization that wrongly cost thousands of Indiana residents access to vital and necessary resources, Daniels was forced to admit the attempt at privatizing welfare was a disaster, quote “just didn’t work�. Of course, the year after cutting IBM out and returning the system to state management over private companies, their performance has sprung back. Coincidence?
This is really the only example out of the other four that attempts to prove your case, and I'll concede it to you. The corruption and inefficency of IBM's management of Indiana's welfare system is well known, even more so than Harriet Myers ineligibility for a seat on SCOTUS. I really don't have any issue with what you say, other than the unwarrented assumption that after the contract between Indiana and IBM was terminated, the performance of the entitlement system 'sprang back.' I hope you know that the move to privitize welfare in the first place was not only because of Mitch Daniels conservatism, but because the system was massively burdening the states debt and was also inefficent, but probably less so than when it was taken over by IBM.

Abraxas wrote:Example 4: The G.I. Bills(41)(42)(43)

The reason America even really has a middle class, is in fact, government intervention.
The middle class is not something that can be invented. It is simply a term used to describe the faction of people within a society whose social status falls inbetween that of the wealthy and the poor. The middle class is made up of self created individuals that are not the by-product of 'government intervention.' If Abraxa really believes this, would he also assert that the upper class and the lower class are also the result of government intervention.
Abraxas wrote:Certain free market proponents like to argue that the government spending money, and most certainly spending money on the poor, does nothing to help our economy. From our own history we know this to be completely false. Following World War II, the US had an abundance of young American males with too much free time and not enough jobs and education, seeing as how we no longer needed to employ them all as soldiers to fight in Germany, Japan, and a number of other unpleasant places of the era. So, in order to help deal with that, and to give the soldiers a proper thank you for their dedication and sacrifice in spending the last four years ducking Nazi mortar fire, a G.I. Bill was created. It provided for funding for creating businesses, purchasing homes, seeking higher education out of the government pocket. Clearly with government hand outs being the source of the money, these bills taught our soldiers to leech off society and they all became hopelessly addicted to government money as the libertarian theory of welfare dependence holds, right? Right?
You're interpretation of history is extremely skewed. First, government spending may or may not be effective depending on what it is being spent on. The history surrounding the economy of WWII is this: After Roosevelt delivered his Infamy speech, Congress declared war on Japan and the United States began to mobilize its military and devote large amounts of spending to create military equipment. During this time the United States manufactured literally thousands of new planes, armored units and sea vessels. This high scale activity cut the high unemployment and effectively ended the great recession, thus government military spending can effectively stimulate the economy and end unemployment. Second, as Abraxas says, after the war those manufacturing jobs that employed so many people disappered because there was no need for them. Thus, as Abraxas says, there were many 'young men' with to much free time on there hands. Thus, government spending on any section of the economy can and will only lead to short term job growth and short term economic growth.

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