Yes. Heard of the rations people were surviving on in Berlin at that time? Did the Berliners hire UK and USA contractors to provide supplies and carry them. Or was some public funding in these countries involved?
What government guided by what principle made the Berlin airlift necessary?
The Scottish Highland and Irish landlords certainly incentivized their tenants to find new places to live and work. Canada and Australia. Those who survived the voyage. It was called the Clearances. The resulting potato famine in Ireland certainly incentivized alternative ways to bring supplies in. Yes.
Was that a libertarian system?
Also, is there an alternative economic system where people are not negatively impacted by change?
Now not all landlords are bad people, true enough. That means I mustn't place any restriction on what landlords in general do with their property, even if what they do has social consequences?
Nice straw-man, but what I really say is that if you base your assumptions on one class behaving with malice instead of enlightened self-interest then it's going to fail no matter what model you use. If Charlie is a dick who wants Bob to die, then Bob will probably die regardless of whether Charlie is wealthy enough to buy up all of Bob's medicine, or if Charlie is a party leader who decides Bob really needs to live in Siberia where he can receive his re-education.
And again, it's not a religious dogma. Stating that placing limits on what landlords can do with their property may be anti-libertarian, but that's not the same as saying it shouldn't be done. The discussion shouldn't be about which extreme you choose, but where between the two extremes should guide the rules that society adopts.
Who says so? Mycroft says so when he's thinking about a similar issue.
A libertarian solution to that problem (predatory lending during the credit bubble) would have been to let those banks that were "too big to fail" fail along with the insurance companies that covered them. The resulting immense loss of wealth among the investor class would have done more to prevent these sloppy practices in the future than any sort of government regulation.
You don't know what "predatory lending" is. It wasn't predatory lending that led to the financial crises of 2008.
And yes, I would have let those banks fail. If that had happened, we would not have a Goldman Sachs, Citibank, or Wells Fargo today. Those are three banks that are know for perpetuating financial abuses for extreme profit.
Would it be a bad thing if these institutions no longer existed? If they were replaced by more responsible, conservative and stable institutions? Do you prefer the "corporate welfare" solution that saved these institutions instead? If so, why?
Immense loss, eh? World crisis. Lasting for years. Austerity suffered only by the investor class? No, by most of the population.
That's your opinion, but the assets of IndyMac didn't vanish, a new bank now exists called OneWest bank.Tell me that OneWest doesn't offer the same services as were offered by IndyMac? Those who lost out bigtime were not the mortgage holders of IndyMac loans, but the investors who owned shares of IndyMac. New shareholders own OneWest, and they're well aware of the risks of sloppy lending practices.
The financiers who were responsible haven't suffered at all. so this isn't a cartoon story about nefarious villainy, but a true crisis brought about by financial excess. Now is finance to to be regulated or not?
I'm with you on that one. People should have gone to jail, and nobody has.
At the same time, if those banks had been allowed to fail, then all of those financiers who were responsible would have been punished big time when their personal wealth collapsed, and the source of their extravagant bonuses were bankrupted. I think in this case the libertarian solution would have been better than the real life solution. Do you disagree?
If an owner of a factory refuses to hire Catholics, as we have discussed, is he to be sanctioned for that? How can he be? He owns the factory. It's his. That is Libertarianism, and you support it.Are you saying otherwise? Then say it clearly and we can discuss it.
A pure libertarian would say the factory owner has the right to refuse to hire Catholics because it's his factory and he can do what he wants. At the same time, that disadvantages that factory by denying itself access to an important part of the labor pool. His competitors will take advantage and have a better workforce for it.
Again, your model just assumes a certain class of people will act like dicks just because they can. A factory owner acting on enlightened self-interest would hire the best workers he can regardless of their religion. His profit motive is not to discriminate.
That's the continuing problem with your examples, that they always depend on the absolute worst behavior of the property owner. On one hand they're going to make people die because it gets them an extra penny in profit, but at the same time they're going to forego profit just because they would rather discriminate against Catholics.
Then again, it's not religious dogma. Just because the "Pure Libertarian" answer is that the factory owner is allowed to discriminate, doesn't mean you can't make a rule against it. 99% libertarian with the bonus of not being discriminatory looks like a bonus to me.
So...what's your alternative where everything is perfect and no compromise is required?
