I KNOW RIGHT WTF.

air traffic control has already suffered the effects of deregulation- the Airline Deregulation Act (1978) lead to the controllers’ union striking in the early 80s for better working conditions- Reagan busted the union using WWII-era legislation disallowing federal employee unions from striking.  He fired them.  All of them.  They could not reapply for their old jobs, or Any federal job, until the -1990s-.

There’s a reason air traffic control has been a mess for decades.

Gee, without all those pesky government agencies doing their job to create informed decisionmaking, nobody can get any flack for not listening to scientists, economists, intel experts, etc.

This is basically a re-iteration of Michael Moore’s classic, “A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-class Republican,” which illustrates how your typical working class conservative benefits from liberal efforts of yesteryear.

That being said, I appreciate the effort.

Hey, on the bright side, no more FDA and Department of Health and Human Services.

But… but… but… the free market will provide, right?  Everyone will just run out and get a subscription to Consumer Reports.  The news media will happily keep us all informed of any outbreaks of salmonella.  Companies that abuse their workers will just not be able to hire anybody.  And if two planes crash into each other in mid-air… well… that just means you won’t ever have to risk flying on them in the future.

It’s survival of the fittest, baby!  Rich or savvy consumers survive while ignorant and uneducated peasants perish.  And the system only gets better after we dissolve the Department of Education, because free market education will see that everyone gets the knowledge and skills necessary to survive in a free market world.

It’s all part of the plan.

Libertarians are that special combination of sociopathic and bone-stupid.

Don’t worry, he just meant the programs his buddies don’t like. So the courts, the FAA and selected other services would keep running, as would social security payments to rich people. Oh, and the Bridge to Nowhere.

Reg: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken
everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers,
  and from our fathers’ fathers.
Loretta: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.
Reg: Yeah.
Loretta: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers.
Reg: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don’t labour the point. And what
have they ever given us in return?!
Xerxes: The aqueduct?
Reg: What?
Xerxes: The aqueduct.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true.
Yeah.
Commando 3: And the sanitation.
Loretta: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city
used to be like?
Reg: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the
sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
Matthias: And the roads.
Reg: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go
without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation,
the aqueduct, and the roads—
Commando: Irrigation.
Xerxes: Medicine.
Commandos: Huh? Heh? Huh…
Commando 2: Education.
Commandos: Ohh…
Reg: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
Commando 1: And the wine.
Commandos: Oh, yes. Yeah…
Francis: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg,
if the Romans left. Huh.
Commando: Public baths.
Loretta: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now,
Reg.
Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s
face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
Commandos: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
Reg: But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education,
wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system,
and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Xerxes: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace? Shut up

Imagine, no ban on insider trading. No one who is not an insider will want to invest in the stock market.  Corporations will continue to exist but be much less pervasive.

Anyone who imports Chinese products will go out of business, because no one will imagine (as they falsely do today) that the products are inspected for safety.

The mega-chicken, pork- and beef- farms will vanish and there will be a resurgence of family farms, after the Nth salmonella or mad-cow disease case rocks the nation.  You will buy from your local farmer.  No more grapes from Chile either.

With no intellectual property protections, Hollywood, TV, newspapers - all will have to change their business models.  Corporations will spend less on trying to build a portfolio of patents, and more on stealing others’ business secrets.

It is difficult to see all the consequences. If you believe that our technological civilization has grown, not in a healthy way, but more like a cancerous tumor, then libertarian type freedom is toxic to that tumor.

Arun, three words; “Concentration of wealth”.

Simply put, all of those quips assume that every person has equal buying power. They don’t. The less regulated the system, the harder it is for the least wealthy to make the intelligent choices necessary to protect themselves from the most wealthy.

Food has no “Null option”, you can’t choose not to eat. Which means if you can’t afford the safe food, you eat the unsafe food, or die of hunger. If you can’t afford the safe medicine, you buy the unsafe medicine, or the snake oil “Essence of Homeopathic Bullshit” that claims to cure that ails you. It gets even worse at the minimum wage is removed, along with labeling laws, the pure foods act, any sort of mandatory supervision, etc.

All this was life before federal regulation. Go and read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle, or take a nice little trip to visit the shanty towns of South America. Enjoy your liberterian Utopia for a month.

Shorter Arun: “Hey, if people get hurt, fuck them, I’ve got mine!”

Grover Norquist’s agenda is driving the republican party like no other one ever has.

The thought that the current ‘crisis’ snuck up on the administration in any was is a total outright lie. They know what they are doing and they are becoming successful at hoodwinking others to believe it.

I am totally astounded at the number of homes that appear to be lower-middle to lower class that now sport McCain-Palin signs in their front yard. Their voting against Obama is so dangerous to their livelihood.

I’ve seen so many McCain stickers on moving rust piles too. Someone has apparently been sending out old W04 stickers too because I’m seeing a lot more of them lately for some reason.

Is the abortion and ‘value voters’ meme really that powerful amongst these people that they would gladly jump off a cliff for it?

Instead of checking for ID, the democrats should push for an intelligence test. I’d wager that the number of republican voters caught in that could/would out number the democrat voters? Maybe not.

Here in Michigan, the republicans are going to be extra nasty at the polls. People should be ready for massive voter intimidation drives from republicans like never before. this election will end up looking like it’s from South Africa for the amount of minority voters harassed and turned away.

But, God bless America. The land of the stupid, afraid and hopelessly racist…

I often wonder how bad it would have to get before the ‘Bush base’ would rise up and oppose the fascistic state and I’ve come to the realization that it can’t get bad enough to turn them.THAT is a frightening thought…

Damian, sorry you should think so.  To me the market is a human-created machine, like any other, say like a car; and the libertarians are those who say the car doesn’t need brakes, because brakes are a regulation; and then they wonder why there are so many crashes.

But when you examine the nature of regulations we’ve put in, it seems they are all for the convenience of these legal pseudo-persons we’ve created, corporations, and that is a danger to people, democracy, the environment, even the rule of law.  So examining what effect libertarian ideas would have on corporations is interesting.

Imagine, no ban on insider trading. No one who is not an insider will want to invest in the stock market.  Corporations will continue to exist but be much less pervasive.

Considering that Teh Market has ruled the American economy since circa 1790, the complete disruption of that kind of institution is going to, oh, I dunno, probably drag our economy back to about that point. 

Anyone who imports Chinese products will go out of business, because no one will imagine (as they falsely do today) that the products are inspected for safety.

Consumer goods will become infinitely more expensive than they are now.  Most people won’t be able to afford things we consider ‘the basics’, like clothes, shoes, housewares, appliances, or electronics.  Even something as simple as office supplies will become precious. 

The mega-chicken, pork- and beef- farms will vanish and there will be a resurgence of family farms, after the Nth salmonella or mad-cow disease case rocks the nation.  You will buy from your local farmer.  No more grapes from Chile either.

Most Americans won’t be able to afford meat, and fresh vegetable options will be much more limited in the northern parts of the country.  Poor people will starve in winter, and middle class people will squeak by on things like bread and butter or beans and rice.  Poor people in temperate parts of the country won’t do that well, either, because in winter there will be huge incentives to ship what produce there is cross-country for the consumption of rich northerners.  There will probably be famines, as middlemen price-gouge in a bad year or rich people hoard food at lean times.

Arun, as others have said: wildly optimistic. Mostly insofar as you are either assuming a world where no one is lying, or one where every person can easily distinguish truth from lie.

Imagine, no ban on insider trading. No one who is not an insider will want to invest in the stock market.  Corporations will continue to exist but be much less pervasive.

And all the gain made my corporations will be given out only to insiders, and not even accidentially anymore to some working-class person owning a couple of shares.

Anyone who imports Chinese products will go out of business, because no one will imagine (as they falsely do today) that the products are inspected for safety.

However, finding out which products were actually made in China requires a Ph.D. thesis’s worth in research, deduction and testing, because nothing will be labeled and everyone will be lying if they think it benefits them.

The mega-chicken, pork- and beef- farms will vanish and there will be a resurgence of family farms, after the Nth salmonella or mad-cow disease case rocks the nation.  You will buy from your local farmer.  No more grapes from Chile either.

In the absence of labeling and labs, the local farmer you most like to buy from (biggest selection, lowest prices) is probably “cleaning” agricultural product from the big agri corporations, because buying cheap and selling expensive is so much more cost-effective than actually growing food. And if they get caught (but not punished, of course because lying and poisoning people isn’t illegal, and if it were, you still couldn’t sue them because it would interfere with their freedom of business), there’ll be dozens open to a little corruption on the side…

“with the assurance that you aren’t swallowing rat poison,”

Wait a minute! I AM swallowing rat poison! Warfarin, to be precise. So nuts to you!

In all likelihood, all cars would be Fords (and probably getting 12mpg), all computers would be from IBM (and none of them would be on your desk), etc.

Both corporations with some fascinating history circa WWII.

But when you examine the nature of regulations we’ve put in, it seems they are all for the convenience of these legal pseudo-persons we’ve created, corporations, and that is a danger to people, democracy, the environment, even the rule of law.  So examining what effect libertarian ideas would have on corporations is interesting.
Arun on 09/28 at 08:34 AM

Well, sure, Arun, once the “legal pseudo-persons” lost their struggle to prevent regulation in the first place (which they carried out with great success for quite some time and which stratagem still works for them here and there) their fall-back position has been to capture the regulatory agencies—to craft the legislation, control the appointment of executive branch heads, pack the commissions, and control the judges who review the outcomes. Often regulation is tantamount to its opposite.

That said, at least the mendacity is forced into a more public forum. They can’t just quietly do what they would be absolutely free to do in a world where regulation was unthinkable; now they have to come up with rationalizations. Now someone is legally and politically accountable. Now the mechanism is in place to provide real regulation, should we the people exert the political will to demand it and the organization to staff it. With that threat in place, corporations have often steered themselves away from the most egregious behavior (thus undermining public vigilance, since they can now argue “hey, look at our track record of self-policing, we aren’t the bad guys you thought we were—I can haz deregulation, kthnxbai!”)

That’s why your modest proposal is so regressive and reactionary, Arun. We know what the outcome of your “no regulation” experiment would be.

1. The lack of any Italian law against insider trading may be one reason the Italian stock market is so anemic.  Everyone assumes that no one is selling unless they know there is a problem with the company—>no one wants to buy.

2. Um, isn’t that exactly what we are seeing now with companies not wanting to deal with all the dodgy CDO-backed stuff out there?  No one trusts anything that anyone has for sale as a financial instrument—>credit freezes up.

3. God save us from Libertarians.  Very few of them have any knowledge of a)history b)finance c)law d)human nature.  If their theories were true, then Somalia should be an economic powerhouse.  Which it definitely isn’t.

Maybe I’m the only one who actually read Arun’s comment in depth, but I didn’t take it as a “this is a good idea” so much as a “this is an interesting thought.” Similarly, I like to think about how the Nazis came to power, how fascism arose, because understanding that stuff from THEIR perspective is important for preventing it. Thought experiments, provided they don’t bleed over to reality, are useful tools.

Sure, Ashley, but one very good “thought experimental” tool that so-called “libertarians” and the modern corporatist reactionary cultural apparatus refuse to use is history. In all the snarky “government is bad” contrarianism they serve up, they never once look seriously at how come, if according to their framing, all this regulation and progressive taxation and so forth is so self-evidently stupid and counterproductive and fatal to liberty and blah blah blah, why did our ancestors go ahead and do it anyway? If you talk to these people they generally start muttering about some conspiracy of evil elitists or other, about the stupidity of the masses easily bamboozled by promises of something for nothing and so forth. When we look at the disasters of the Great Depression, for instance, they steadfastly ignore the deep structural issues of a laissez-faire corporate economy and try to pin this tremendous, deep, and global collapse on some obscure shenanigans hidden in the corners. 

I daresay I’ve gone farther down the twisty corridors of fancy and what-if much farther than these guys myself, but there are certain elements of common sense I won’t defy. Giant mile-long airship cruise liners—been there. But I haven’t proposed to lift the things with lead.

People like Arun, whether they know it or not, are playing along with the ideological sleight-of-hand that is designed to get us nowhere.

I’m ashamed to admit that I was a lot older than 15 before I dismissed the fog generated by such “thought experiments” as the radical libertarian SF author L Neil Smith carried out in his parallel universe novels of the 1980s. But having been there, I dismiss out of hand the idea that “that government governs best that governs not at all.”

If you want insights into how the Nazis came to power, for instance, you should consider the effect of certain lines of thought being barred from consideration all right—but it doesn’t help to consider those lines that ought to have been barred by historical trial and error. Those are the very lines that closing off the untried but potentially viable lines by sheer ideological horror opens up again, with predictably disastrous results. If we buy the idea now, for instance, that governmental intervention must necessarily be elitist and counterproductive from the majority point of view, we are left with no directions to go but backwards as Arun suggests—a regression that simply hands over to the propertied elite the very totalitarian control and careless inefficiencies he suggests are the inevitable result of public regulation. The untried and hopeful course is really to get more serious about regulation of, for, and by the people, not the very sort of anarchic autopilot that preceeded our current flawed regime.

I pointed out at Reason (when I was still commenting there) that no society/economy higher than “subsistence farming basketcase” had managed to avoid having either a) government or b) warlords/Mafia, and which one did they prefer?

If pure libertarianism actually worked, I think you’d see some historical evidence of it by now.  (And no, some obscure village councils in 12-century Iceland isn’t what I’m thinking about, either.)

Amanda:

It would be pretty easy (although you might have to shoot a few judges) to revise the rules for management/officer liability in corporations—right now you have to have fully provable knowledge and intent for both criminal and civil liability. So if you keep saying La La La Make the Numbers when your underlings say “But we’ll have to commit fraud or skip the safety checks” you as CEO are not liable. See, for example executives in the current mess walking away with golden parachutes rather than being sued for the last 5 years of “incentive” compensation that is no longer operative.

In addition, criminal liability for corporations themselves consists only in fines and occasional loss of property, both of which can be considered costs of doing business. Imagine instead, for example, that imprisonable corporate behavior resulted in losing the corporate charter or handing over all outstanding shares to the imprisoning jurisdiction for the duration of the sentence…

The wacky degree to which corporate management is not accountable for the outcomes of their decisions is actually a good example of the sort of corporate captivity of the regulatory authorities Arun correctly alluded to (but didn’t think through). After decades of packing the courts with pro-business judges, during which there was a tremendous ideological struggle within the ruling Republican party of the post-Civil War 19th century, pitting largely agrarian populists against the wing devoted to business over all, the former were defeated by the latter by a series of shifting stances. First the states set out to regulate and the corporations (largely at this point railroads) argued they were subject only to Federal regulation since they were involved in interstate commerce, then when Federal legislation loomed the pro-corporate judges suddenly discovered that actually corporations were “persons” fully protected by the post-Civil War civil rights amendments. (Whereas say labor unions were no such thing but criminal conspiracies against these same sacred Persons, and all the language of laws such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act intended against collusions of the wealthy actually applied only against organizations of the poor).

As William Greider pointed out in Secrets of the Temple, the courts have regularly found that corporations have most of the rights and privileges of actual living citizens, but few of the responsibilities and liabilities. Thus, while you or I would risk going to prison or even being executed for egregious violations of the law, there is no such criminal code that applies to corporations. If murder is done by a corporate organization, suddenly its collective “personhood” is irrelevant and the law must enter the murky world of its internal operations (without the benefit of seizure and scrutiny of its internal records, which remain sacredly private until investigators prove the relevance of a particular archive, which may or may not still exist to be disclosed by the time due process gets to it) to try and fix individual liability, leaving all those protected by reasonable doubt presumed innocent and the organization they work for untouchable.

I think it is only reasonable that as long as we labor under this official delusion that corporations are persons in themselves (which does after all reflect a certain reality of collective interests and goals—better conceived of course as a human-run organization rather than a sort of living metaphor) that there ought to be such a thing as a corporate code of criminal, not just civil, justice. If an organization is convicted of crossing certain lines, it ought to be “imprisoned”—taken over by public authorities, with its inner workings fully exposed to them if not the public, and run for public rather than private purposes for a defined period or in defined spheres. Or even “executed”—its assets seized, its organizations sifted and repackaged, again in the public interest, and its normally “limited liability” stockholders subjected to scrutiny (from within the exposed record of internal structure) for collusion with the criminal intent. And then individuals prosecuted accordingly, or subject to civil penalties in the case of limited but provable collusion.

Or, we could just forget this nonsense about corporations being persons and revisit all the legislation and common law evolved around that fiction and rationalize it in the light of what corporations actually are.

Even in this crisis I am not holding my breath until either thing happens though.

Arun, a better idea to reduce the size and power of corporations is to revise our ideas of limited liability—-extend the amount of liability incurred by management of corporations that rape and pillage.

Why not the shareholders?  I mean the reasons why management do this is because they are expected to inhance shareholder value - they will continue to tread as close to the line as they can (or over it if they can get away with it) because of that.

Consider a law that held, oh, the top six shareholders of any company guilty of “cospiracy to commit…” any corporate crime…

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Arun’s repeating some left-libertarian lines of thought.  I don’t see him saying “I’ve got mine” at all.

Considering that Teh Market has ruled the American economy since circa 1790, the complete disruption of that kind of institution is going to, oh, I dunno, probably drag our economy back to about that point.

Well, it’s hard to imagine what the market would look like without government intervention/interference.  I don’t know American history that well on this point, but one of the points of the English Enclosure Acts was to turn peasants into cheap wage labourers by pushing them off the land.  This was explicitly stated at the time.  So it’s not just “the market” that we have, it’s one version of “the market”, which would probably look really different if huge numbers of people hadn’t been starved into horrible sweatshop jobs in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Most Americans won’t be able to afford meat, and fresh vegetable options will be much more limited in the northern parts of the country.  Poor people will starve in winter, and middle class people will squeak by on things like bread and butter or beans and rice.  Poor people in temperate parts of the country won’t do that well, either, because in winter there will be huge incentives to ship what produce there is cross-country for the consumption of rich northerners.  There will probably be famines, as middlemen price-gouge in a bad year or rich people hoard food at lean times.

As I recall, left-libertarians tend to want much more lax laws about property in land (use it or lose it, basically) and an end to government subsidies on roads, which means that shipping stuff over long distances becomes much more costly. 

It would also be hard for the large ag companies to function as they do without patent protection on their seeds or limited liability in tort when they put out tainted products.  Some left-libertarians simply don’t accept the idea of the limited liability corporation. 

To be clear, I’m not a libertarian of any sort, but I read RadGeek.com and Mutualist Blog and Jane Jacobs (who was very much a libertarian on some issues, not all) and I do find these ideas interesting, yes, as thought experiments, and sometimes I agree.

Why not the shareholders?  I mean the reasons why management do this is because they are expected to inhance shareholder value - they will continue to tread as close to the line as they can (or over it if they can get away with it) because of that.

Which is partly because corporations get so big that they have thousands or millions of shareholders, many of whom don’t or can’t vote at shareholder meetings, who aren’t consulted about whether they’d like to, say, dump toxic chemicals in major waterways.  The only thing that can be “known” about them is that they want more money.

It’s a pretty effed up system.

So it’s not just “the market” that we have, it’s one version of “the market”, which would probably look really different if huge numbers of people hadn’t been starved into horrible sweatshop jobs in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My point was more that, if we enabled insider trading or did something similarly idiotic that destabilized the market to the point where it couldn’t really function anymore, and American financial markets just collapsed and ceased to exist anymore, we would find ourselves in a completely obsolete economy that just can’t handle the complexity of a country of 300 million people spread across a continent, doing all sorts of jobs that have nothing to do with basic subsistence anymore.  The idea of “oh, let ‘em kill capitalism, then we can go back to square one and a magical pastoralist utopia will arise!” is bullshit, because of that very point.  We can’t just rewind to half an hour before those brokers started chatting under that tree in lower Manhattan and make it not have happened.  It doesn’t work that way.

an end to government subsidies on roads, which means that shipping stuff over long distances becomes much more costly

Oh, OK then.  That makes perfect sense….? 

SRSLY, I don’t think anybody here wants to end government subsidies on roads, and if Arun genuinely believes that, he’s a turdnugget who deserves to be mocked for it.

Oh, and I’ll also say that I know from left libertarians, and Arun’s posts in this thread don’t really strike me as having a whole lot in common with that ideology.  Arun’s posts strike me more as the ideology of “rainbow unicorn fantasylandism”.  Or regular ol’ libertarianism, with a side of “no, really, this will totally work to create the society that we liberals want” as opposed to an undertone of “I got mine, fuck you.”  And I have to say that in certain ways I admire the “I got mine, fuck you” line better, because it’s ever so slightly more intellectually honest. 

Because, no, seriously, eliminating food regulation is not going to dismantle big agriculture and bring us back to some sort of Thomas-Jefferson-meets-Alice-Waters vision of pastoralist yeomanry.  It’s going to get us all fucked over way, way worse.  If you want some specific examples, try googling the words “Chinese milk scandal” to learn about some of the awesome things companies are going to start doing to our food once we get rid of those pesky regulations that say you can’t put melamine in fucking baby formula.

Look, I don’t disagree with you on any of that.  I’m just saying that this stuff is, indeed, interesting, and I don’t see Arun as malicious, even if his ideas are wildly impractical (and I never said they weren’t).

I’m just saying that this stuff is, indeed, interesting

It’s really not.  Or at least no more interesting than it would be for me to propose, as a solution to peak oil, that we all just climb the tallest tree we can find, jump out, flap our arms, and fly wherever we want to go.  Sure, you can say that if you want to.  But you shouldn’t expect anyone to take it seriously or respect you for saying it.

I don’t see Arun as malicious

I don’t think anyone here sees Arun as malicious.  We just see him as parroting half-baked ideas that make absolutely no sense.