On Sat, 14 May 2016 10:41:28 PM David Zuccaro via luv-main wrote:

On 12/05/16 11:54, Russell Coker wrote:

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Do you own a house if banks can destroy your neighborhood by robo-signing forclosure documents that the residents can't afford to legally oppose?

Libertarianism opposes fraudulent practices. Hopefully down the track AI will make legal procedures a lot cheaper.

Libertarianism opposes any measure to stop fraud. The idea that Libertarianism could work once we invent AI is a new one.

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Do you own a house if corporations own the roads, water, and electricity supplies and can cut off your entire neighborhood if it's not profitable or if there are mostly non-white people living there (IE Flint)?

The Flint water crisis was actually caused by corrupt *government* officials. I doubt private company subject to the rigors of the free market would have engaged in such dubious practices.

Why not?

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Do you own a house if a corporation can pollute the air and give you a high probability of cancer if you choose to keep living there?

It's true that the environment is the Achilles heel of libertarianism.

Well that and the starving kids to death thing.

I've come up with a possible solution the air pollution that does sound far fetched I agree but may go some way to addressing this problem. So basically the atmosphere is treated as an asset and all people living on the earth are given an equal share in the atmosphere as an asset.

That's not an original idea.

Industries that pollute must basically pay compensation to the shareholders. This is very much like a carbon tax except that it is more market based and would ensure polluting is dis-incentivised.

But you need a world government to enforce it.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

If you look at the comparison of countries by tax rates Australia doesn't seem that high. With a couple of exceptions it seems that the countries with higher tax rates than Australia are places you probably wouldn't mind living (Belgium, Finland, Sweden are all good places to live). The countries with the lowest tax rates include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and UAE - places where I don't even want to change flights. The middle-eastern countries with low tax are also fairly positive towards slavery, no-one who likes liberty wants anything to do with that.

I have an old school friend that lives in Kuwait -- he seems to live the life of Riley regularly flying to Europe for the weekend due the the middle east's centralised location.

You mean he chooses to be rich rather than free?

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Libertarianism is all about liberty for the super-rich and serfdom for people like us.

I'd rather be poor and free than rich and overburdened by regulations. Additionally regulations seem to be being used by corporations to entrench their position in the market rather than to give the consumer benefits. Of course this stifles economic mobility.

If that was the case then corporations would be lobbying for more regulation! While some companies lobby for regulation to prevent competition most of the lobbying is for less regulation. That's because most of the regulation protects people from corporations rather than the other way around.

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Libertarianism is about helping the powerful subjugate the weak. That's why mistreatment of children is so important to influential libertarians such as Rothbard and Rewart.

I believe that society should protect the weak. We need a legal system to protect children from sexual abuse etc, a welfare system to prevent them from starving etc. The Libertarian approach of legalising child porn, ceasing welfare, and essentially forcing children into sex work is unacceptable to me.

This is a ridiculous strawman.

What is ridiculous is when people argue for things they know little about. http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1808384,00.html From the above article about Libertarian leader Mary J. Ruwart: # Ruwart wrote. "When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child # performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children # against their will." She's not just arguing for child porn, but she's arguing for so much child porn that the prices go down. That's a huge amount of child porn! https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights From the above article by Murray N. Rothbard who personally invented the political system referred to nowadays as Libertarianism: # But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to # allow it to die.2 The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to # feed a child or to keep it alive. Libertarianism was FOUNDED on the idea of permitting parents to starve their children to death. Many people who call themselves Libertarians don't support this because Libertarianism is too horrid for Libertarians. But the fact is that Libertarianism was based in philosophy. In philosophy if you reach a conclusion that is disgusting (like permitting people to starve children to death) you don't say "let's do everything logically about from the logical end result", instead you revisit the assumptions that you used to base your philosophy. This leads to the conclusion that unrestricted personal liberty is not acceptable unless starving children is also acceptable. More from the above article: # Parents would be able to sell their trustee-rights in children to anyone who # wished to buy them at any mutually agreed price. Slavery as Libertarian philosophy! Seriously you could buy "trustee rights" to children of poor people and then tell the kids that you won't feed them unless they work. Libertarianism was too awful for Ayn Rand. Need I say more? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/