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Libertarianism, Wiccans and the freeish market
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(07-09-2014, 10:05 AM)Ares Johnson Wrote: The NAP also provides a means against things like pollution, seeing as pollution will somewhere, somehow, damage somebody's person or property. Granted this would not necessarily be neat or easy to figure out in some cases. However, given the increasingly widespread sentiments for being green, energy efficient and so on, it's not like companies don't have an incentive to clean up. Plus simple technological advance helps. Already industrialized countries are polluting less per capita, it's the poorer countries, with less efficient and advanced tech that are the biggest polluters now, and they'll improve with time as well.

Of course the reason those countries have any sort of less polluted option to aspire to is because some countries passed laws forcing businesses there to reduce/regulate/eliminate their pollution. If no such regulations existed, what would be the incentive to do this? Wouldn't it be more likely that, since the degradation of the environment is generally gradual, that companies would meme the population into either thinking that conditions were 'the norm' or 'the price of progress' while pointing to all the great stuff folks have? And why do they need trees anyway? We see some of this already around climate change and the loss of honeybee populations (the cause of colony collapse disorder has apparently now been traced back to a particular chemical. Yet the companies that produce it aren't rushing to stop on their own).

I think part of the problem with letting private industry police itself is that it has a strong incentive not to. While 'market forces' might force a change eventually, what evidence is there that this change wouldn't happen a lot faster if government forces it?

A common saying in the US is 'you should just be happy you have a job' in response to anyone raising any complaint about working conditions. The message being that you should just shut up and tolerate (nearly) anything the employer wants to dish out so you have a job.

Saying that modern people wouldn't tolerate working conditions from the past doesn't really cut it I'm afraid. People obviously DID tolerate such conditions in the past. And some jobs in the present have pretty awful working conditions for that matter (ask a factory worker in China or a migrant farm worker in the US). While an employer attempting to go back to treating employees as they were a hundred years ago tomorrow might raise a cry - gradually reducing employee rights and options over decades could eventually get us back to similar conditions as once existed - and people wouldn't know any better.

As far as child labor - this would seem to run into the issue of informed consent. Presumably there is an age below which a child is not considered competent to make decisions about getting a job or being able to do it safely - they might be pressured into it by family or think they know what's best - but do they? Virtually every society seems to have some concept of children and adults and an age at which one converts to the other. So not sure how you get around that.

For that matter, if a 14yr old says they want to make porn, is that OK? Presumably in a Libertarian system child pornography is legal since its a business and as long as the actors say they are doing it of their own free will.

Todd
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RE: Libertarnism, Wiccans and the freeish market - by Drashner1 - 07-09-2014, 11:29 AM

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