djsumdogI'm reminded of the Douglas Murry quote:
"... What are human rights, but a kind of derivation of a form of spilt Christianity? There’s no reason to have human rights. They’re not self-evident...."
Which I used in a post about Christian deconstructionism.
Even from my liberal/progressive days, I still think I can conceded the free market doesn't really work as such.
The other days a friend of mine was trying to make a point from drivers licenses: to get a license means driving is illegal without the exception from the state (ignoring Thompson v. Smith, which he didn't know about).
Interesting argument, and I can see its merit .. but it's also stupidly easy to get a drivers license. What is a license? It means you mean some bare minimum standard, that society has agreed upon, to ensure there is some level of safety or accountability.
Pure libertarianism/capitalism means someone can put saw dust in your meat, an people will just choose not to buy said food. A functioning high-income nation has a bare minimum set of standards, where the FDA labels x as actual meat and not sawdust. (I had a Chinese roommate who told me the meat stores in his town frequently injected meat with water and nitrates so they looked okay long past when they were good).
Everything has tradeoffs. So in a sense, yes, you never have a real pure-market capitalist society. You want to maximize rewards for merit and the value of people, but people who take greater risks are going to get greater rewards as well, even if they depend on the skill of lower risk takers. And society has to concede some power (a monopoly of violence) to the State, in order to ensure some minimum standards for food, flying a plane or driving a car.
It's a delicate balance for sure. You want clean water, but you don't want mandatory medical injections. If you don't want capitalism to nose dive into a corporate-state, some tradeoffs have to be made .. and it is always a struggle. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
iced quinnsmas :blobcatsanta:
† top dog :pedomustdie:
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