Is Friedman Right?

[Sefarst]

I don't understand your position. If false advertising is fraud, do you not think defrauding someone should be a criminal offense?

I'm torn on the issue. I'm aware of the slippery slope argument, that if we allow companies to get away from criminal liability with making false statements and defrauding people, why not con men as well? So I need to decide if I think a corporation lying to people to get them to buy something is the same as an individual lying to scam you out of something. The FTC believes there is a difference.

Also, libel can be a criminal offense as well.

I'm not sure about that in the United States. I've always been told its a tort. From the Wikipedia entry on "defamation":

Some states codify what constitutes slander and libel together into the same set of laws. Criminal libel is rare or nonexistent, depending on the state.

So it appears there could be some state that makes it a criminal offense, though I've never heard of it.

 

[Sefarst]

I think you're making too much effort to phrase it in libertarian jargon. My goal is that the goods and services I buy are reasonably safe and reasonably close to what they are advertised to be. How that goal is accomplished I'm not too picky about. If I have a complaint, I'd rather my recourse be a regulatory agency which will act on my behalf with minimal effort on my part rather than needing to hire an attorney to pursue a civil suit.

Then I guess the difference between you and Libertarian is that they ARE picky about how it gets done. Essentially, the cost of keeping your goods safe for you falls to people who aren't consuming those goods. But even as it stands now, if you are injured by some product and want compensation, the burden of getting that compensation still falls to you. On occasion, the government can "join" a lawsuit, but it still has to go through the same court system.

I think one of the failings of libertarian thought is the idea that people will pursue legal redress. Most transactions are too small for the average person to bother.

Absolutely true. But just as is the case with all lawsuits, if you don't care about getting compensation and can't be bothered to do it, then you shouldn't get compensation.

I don't necessarily want to go charging up to the courthouse every time I buy something and don't get what I expect either. But in principal I think they have a solid argument. They want to match costs to the actually involved parties. As it stands, I share in part of the cost that it takes to keep your goods safe and you share in the cost of keeping my goods safe. The Libertarian argues that people should all just worry about their own goods.

In this context I mean "rights" to mean whatever rights we choose to legally grant ourselves. I think it would get almost universal agreement that outright lying to sell products should be a no-no.

True, but is there a better way of accomplishing that goal, one that internalizes the costs of it?

 

[Sefarst]

Mycroft,

Interestingly, as part of the Libertarian platform, they say:

Protecting the rights and interests of victims should be the basis of our criminal justice system. Victims should have the right to be present, consulted and heard throughout the prosecution of their case.

In addition, Libertarians would do more than just punish criminals. We would also make them pay restitution to their victims for the damage they've caused, including property loss, medical costs, pain, and suffering. If you are the victim of a crime, the criminal should fully compensate you for your loss.

I think that's an interesting idea to consider. What if restitution became part of the sentencing at criminal hearings? As it stands, if someone attacks you and even if he is found guilty, you will still have to go through a separate hearing to sue them.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

What is it about "concentrated wealth" that needs correcting?

The issue isn't if a few people have a lot of wealth, the real issue is the availability of wealth to the masses. Starving people will revolt regardless of the relative wealth of the upper class, but if the average person is comfortable and well fed, then it doesn't matter how many Warren Buffets or Bill Gates you got running around with their tens of billions of dollars.



I don't see how that necessarily follows. Certainly there can be corruption and cronyism with little concentration of wealth. Doesn't this have more to do with the rule of law in the society in question?

If there was enough to go around, then I agree with you. But that isn't the case.

My belief is if we had taken the path a century ago to support decent wages and human rights then there would be a gazillion more customers for big corporations right now. But instead, corporations looked just at their gain, often using what amounted to slave labor. As people who had very little resisted, we helped right wing dictators suppress those people at the behest of corporate influence.

The result is rich and abject poverty. In this country what has been so successful is the success of the middle class. As long as people see a way to decent life, you won't have resentment toward concentrated wealth. But in the last 7 years we've seen immoral corporate exec profits and workers making less and less. Now we have all these home foreclosures and gas is becoming unaffordable to many people. Corporate execs are taking home millions while my retired neighbors lost a good chunk of their retirement income when Exxon ripped everyone off. They had bought the utility stock when it was a secure bet and the utility was bought up by Exxon. out of their control. That is the current trend.

That kind of unrestrained concentrated wealth is not good in the long run.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Give me an example of a successful Libertarian philosophy that was put into practice? If it is such a good idea, where is there an example of a country it was implemented in and was successful?

 

[Mycroft]

Mycroft,

Interestingly, as part of the Libertarian platform, they say:



I think that's an interesting idea to consider. What if restitution became part of the sentencing at criminal hearings? As it stands, if someone attacks you and even if he is found guilty, you will still have to go through a separate hearing to sue them.

It's a fine idea in principle and would be a great way to punish the white collar criminals of the world. If the person didn't have the means to make full restitution, we could sell him into servitude until his full debt was paid.

 

[Richard Masters]

Totalitarianism doesn't follow a communist economic system necessarily either, and right wing dictators don't have to follow capitalism but we sure supported a lot of them in the name of capitalism.

What I am suggesting is that regardless of the pure economic principles, Libertarianism (aka laissez faire capitalism) and communism, there are certain qualities of those two economic systems that combined with human nature don't do well when put into practice. One is all individualism and one is no individualism.

One places responsibility on the individual. The other tells the individual what to do.

What has worked the best is what the Western world has really done, that is, put a combination of the two into practice.

Libertarianism is not mutually exclusive with collectivism, either. Under a libertarian system, you are free to associate with whomever you want. This means that within a libertarian society you could create a hippie commune and grow "organic" produce. Nothing about libertarianism strictly enforces individualism.

Some things do best as community sourced despite the belief by a lot of capitalists that the government can't do anything better than the market can.

I agree, but this is hardly an argument against libertarianism.

We are doing quite well with government sourced police and fire. Sherman argued with me that he wouldn't mind private police services like Blackwater. Well I would, and who polices the police when the guy hiring them decides to bully someone else?

I would mind, as well, if Blackwater was in charge of policing the U.S. However, Blackwater is not subject to U.S. law. At least not in Iraq. Therefore, it's Blackwater is not relevant to a discussion about privatized police.

It just is totally unworkable unless you have some kind of arbitration and that would be a mess. Bush has privatized all number of things and the result has been departments with all sorts of stuff outsourced to cronies and Bush will doers.

Privatization is not synonymous with corruption. You seem to equate the two in the paragraph above.

How does having private sources of government services being the cronies of the President serve the public better than a government source which is accountable to the public?

Which particular government services are you referring to? As far as I know, private corporations are accountable to the public, unless they get subsidies from the government, in which case, they are not really private.

It may not be inherent in the economic system, but privatizing everything lends itself all too well to cronyism and lack of oversight.

Under Bush, maybe. But if you are talking about subsidized industries, then you are not really talking about private industries, but instead, government-subsidized monopolies.

Obviously some things are better served in the private market. But the blanket myth that the government can't provide certain public services and that private markets are always more efficient is just that, a myth.

Agreed.

I can give you an example where the market produces a bad product. With insurance of all kinds the best product is profit for the insurer, not the best product for the ultimate consumer.

If insurance is not valuable, then why buy it? In many cases, this is because the government demands it.

I pay for medical insurance because it is valuable. If I made more money a year, and I didn't have to go to a doctor to get controlled substances, thus reducing the overhead of a visit to a General Practitioner (and the GP's overhead of mailing out insurance claims, and etc.,) medical insurance would no longer be valuable to me. But part of the problem here is not the insurance company which as it turns out, gets my business partially due to regulation.

That hasn't been working very well at all lately since some company has sold its consulting services to some of these companies and advised them to cut back on paying claims rather than increasing market share.

Then someone else can step in and provide better service.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

On the insurance thing, there is no market force (or at least it is imperfect) for the better service because the consumer in this case is the insurance shareholder. While there should be an insurance consumer, the employer instead buys the medical insurance. So the employer gets cheaper insurance, the insurance company maximizes profits, and the medical consumer gets a bad product.

Things get too convoluted in this situation (and in other situations) for market forces to be the best mechanism.

I'll address your other stuff later.

 

[a_unique_person]

Friedman is wrong.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opini...-to-go-it-alone/2008/04/07/1207420296241.html

The Government needs to do more to tackle this problem.
THE problem is that the Reserve Bank can have only one monetary policy. And it has chosen one that makes sense for Queensland and Western Australia, and not for the rest of us.
Take any data on the Australian economy, carve it up on a state basis, and you reach the same conclusion: the excess inflation the Reserve wants to stamp out exists only in Queensland and WA. In the south-east, inflation is not a big problem. Yet it is here that the main burden of higher interest rates will fall. If output except in farms and mining is to slow to 2% or less, as the Reserve implies, that will bring the south-eastern states to the brink of recession. Growth will slow to about 1%, and more people will lose their jobs.
As I have argued before, it is wrong to rely on interest rates alone to fight inflation. It is a job best done by all arms of government. Interest rate rises fall most harshly on low and middle-income battlers with little buffer against rising interest rates, who now risk losing their homes as repayments soar. They fall disproportionately on those — rich, middling and poor — who have bought a home recently. And they fall mainly on the south-east, when the real problems are in Queensland and WA, whose mining boom will shield them from the slump ahead.

Australia has an economy that is going in two directions, depending on which part of Australia you live in. The West and North are booming at a ridiculous pace, interest rates are going up and hurting the South East.


Another way to put it, would anyone ever expect interest rates to be set globally?