| "when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by and watched as the home burned to the ground..." |
This is what it is going to come to because of a fundamentalist belief that everything in our society should be dictated by the private sector. Same thing will happen with police and law enforcement. You didn't pay your subscription? Okay, let the robber rob your house, then. That's your tough luck!
Sick!
The whole entire system collapsed in 2008 and rather than abaonding this free market fundamentalism, we are buying into it even more deeply than ever!
Read this shocking article here.
The "invisible hand" was busy jerking off.
ReplyDeleteLOL!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI might be blind or maybe I'm having browser problems, but I don't see the link to the story...?
ReplyDeleteThis is right out of Ayn Rand and her political surrogate Margaret Thatcher — they deny the existence of society, public purpose, and public goods. For them what we call society is simply a random aggregation of individuals having no inherent relationship to each other.
ReplyDeleteSeething,
ReplyDeleteSorry about that. Try again. Link's there now.
Except, Fire service that denied them service at any price was run by the Government and was not for profit.
ReplyDeleteFree market system? You mean a system that has free market money, market-driven interest rates in lieu of centrally planned interest rates, no Federal Reserve system, no subsidies, no mandates, no public-private parterships, no government agencies that buy mortgages on the secondary market,no centrally planned retirment programs, no partial socialization of the heath care sector, etc. That free market?Yeah, (start sarcasm)that's the system that we have had for the last several decades(end sarcasm).
ReplyDeleteWe have had a mixed eocnomy for decades with much socialism and corporatism interjected into the once free market. The closest that we have came to a classically liberal laissez-faire system was the nineteenth century. The econonimc/governmental ideology that has been dominant for the last 4 generations is state collectivism. We've been following Keynes and neo-liberal economists for at least 70 years. Everytime something bad happens it is blamed on a non-existent free market. The real source of our problems is the government's constant efforts to centrally plan much of economic life.
Mr. Norman referred to market fundamentalism while the real faith-based ideology is this neo-liberal or Keynesian model that has ruled the roost for decades. Identifying our system for the last several decades as free market is a gross misidentification. It is a convenient boogieman for those who suffer form central planner's disease.
When did you stop buying gold Mr. Norman? At $400?, $500? Silver?
Tom Hickey,
ReplyDeleteYou can have a civil society without arrogant central planners. Classical liberals (read:libertarians) believe very much in cooperation with our fellow man. A corporation, church, mutual aid society, charity, frateranl org. are all collectivist enterprises after all. The difference between these organizations that arise spontaneously out of civil society is that there is no force involved. Compare this to the coercion of the welfare state. The state replaces cooperation and consent of the individual for the will of a central planner and the coercion of the state.
Perhaps it might help for you to read some of the Scottish moral philosophers (Adam Smith among others)or 20th century intellectuals like F.A. Hayek. It is not collectivist organizations that have the consent of every individual involved that we find fault; it is state collectivism that we object to. Hayek was always keen to point out that much of the organization of society (money-which came out of a market order, law, language, markets) is the product of human action but not of deliberate human design.
He is very much in the tradition of Aristotle, Hume, Adam Smith, the Spanish scholastics of the medieval periods, Frederick Bastiat, Spencer, Locke, and J.S. Mill among many others in this insight. It's too bad that 21st century collectivists and legal positivists haven't figured out that rational constructivism is a fallacy.