ON- TOPIC:
slappymcgee wrote:The reason it's ridiculous, formica, is because I never went "I AM LIBERTARIAN FREEDOM IS THE REASON WE SHOULD HAVE GUNS". If you'll recall, I'm talking about the safety of guns versus their benefits, but you repeatedly bring up the fact that I am a libertarian and challenge my points based on that.
I was assuming you were falling back on the libertarian thing, because your only argument against "Let's lower crime by making everybody better off, and then ban guns to lower homicide" was "This is the worst one. You might not reduce deaths; but you're leaving people with a life sans freedom. Some life, I say." It's an argument that only works if you grant "freedom" (in the libertarian sense of the word) higher value than, say, stopping people from starving, dying from preventable illnesses, or dying needlessly because somebody they're arguing with has a loaded gun on them.
The whole 5 model thing I put forward was an attempt to create an uncontroversial model everybody in this thread could buy into of where gun control has a beneficial effect on crime and where it doesn't, since I thought THAT was the heart of the argument. Your response was essentially "but then people don't have freedom", which (as the benefits of this for the recipients WAY outweigh the drawbacks of taxation for the capitalist class- which is how taxation should and used to be organised) seems to come straight back to libertarian ideals, rather than the shared values (avoiding unnecessary death good) the rest of the debate seems to be centred on.
Anyway. If you're ACTUALLY arguing "the enjoyment people get from having the liberty to buy a gun outweighs the deaths which ensue from gun ownership", then that's a plausible position and I'm way out of line. If you're arguing "but we can't reduce crime in any other ways because that violates
freedom, the most valuable thing in the world"- which it very much seems like you were- then the rest of the debate falls apart, and everything hinges on how well you can justify the ultimate value of "freedom". Sorry if I'm misinterpreting you, but surely you can see how that would happen.
If the former, I'd just like to point out again that even if take freedom to hold ultimate value you can argue against arrangements which would
subsequently restrict autonomy for those involved. Take slavery as an example- you can give people the free choice to sell themselves as a slave, but this then restricts their autonomy later on, as the scope of options available in life is mostly limited to what their owners will allow. THEREFORE, if freedom holds ultimate value, it still makes sense to ban some things, like slavery.
You might be able to apply the same thing to guns- you can give people the free choice to own guns, but this can impinge on other people's freedoms. If somebody is shot and injured, the medical implications may well restrict their options later in life. If somebody is killed, their freedom is completely, 100% taken away.
If guns are used in any contexts other than strict self- defence- and there's a LOT of evidence to indicate that this is the case (say, the New England Journal of Medicine study)- then this will compromise freedom for those shot in a huge way. It's not a hugely powerful argument, but it's worth considering, unless of course you want to argue that "freedom" and autonomy is all about options and not the run- on effects.
I wrote an essay about libertarian arguments for organ sales, which raises some similar sorts of arguments. If you're interested I could upload it.
Though that whole model thing seems a bit irrelevant in light of Jean- Luc's post and in the absence of Tsukatu posting some links demonstrating how "more guns = less crime" is universally acknowledged in academia, like he seemed to be offering to do earlier.
(Interesting tangentially relevant case studies- there are a bunch of countries that abolished the death penalty, in spite of it being supported by either a majority or a large proportion of people in that country. 30 or 40 years later the vast majority of people in the country were against re- introducing the death penalty, with virtually every young person believing it was inhumane and ineffectual as a deterrent against crime. The relevance? While the majority of Americans might not support gun control at the moment (though I came across a bunch of articles indicating that support was very high in the cities, including by gun owners) as soon as this becomes "normalised" and the benefits are felt, the majority of the population, including those born into the new system, might swing around into supporting gun control.)
OFF- TOPIC:
slappymcgee wrote:I also don't believe in your Machiavellian worldview that the second minimum wage laws are gone, evil corporations will all shoot down wages so that the slave proletariat only has enough to breathe and reproduce.
Export processing zones seem to prove that
as soon as they have the freedom to do so, that's what they do. Case studies include Brazil, Indonesia, El Salvador, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, and I'm pretty sure way more. Naomi Klein has a nice account of working conditions in No Logo, and there have been a bunch of writers I can't think of off the top of my head (Klein is fun to read and memorable, so I always remember when something comes from her) going into proper depth about their significance and how corporations treat them. Which essentially boils down to "stick around as long as you can, and then as soon as you reach the end of your tax- free no minimum wage period, lobby for an extension. If that fails, move your very temporary factory to a new EPZ elsewhere in the world."
Sure, they might need to put in place slightly higher wages for more skilled jobs, but that's all relative to a baseline of extreme deprivation.
slappymcgee wrote:Furthermore, the reason that workers had poor working conditions during early industrialization is because they did not have unions, which are still perfectly viable in a libertarian world, perhaps moreso, and also, they had a very limited job pool. With the modes of transportation available to us today, the job pool expands exponentially. This makes the employers competitive. It's why only the very shittiest of jobs are minimum wage these days (at least in Canada).
Unions mean nothing if emloyers are free to dismiss employees for belonging to a union. See again: export processing zones and most of the global South.
As long as there's unemployment, workers compete for jobs and employers don't compete for employees. As long as the only means of attaining food is the market, people are always going to need money and be willing to accept whatever they can get in terms of work, because the alternative- starvation- is always much worse. If there's another option- a miserable life on the dole- at least employers are forced to be a
bit competitive.
slappymcgee wrote:And that's mostly because minimum wage is actually a pretty great amount of money to live off of.
I work 2 days a week on a job that pays a little above minimum wage. I go to uni 3 days a week. As a student living out of home, the Australian government gives me, additionally, a little bit more than what I earn on minimum wage, on a bunch of conditions (I can never have more than $2000 in my bank account, I'm not allowed to earn above- well- exactly what I am earning on 2 days of minimum wage.) The amount is roughly equivalent to minimum wage, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Maybe a little bit less.
I split my costs with my girlfriend, who is doing the same thing. If we admit to the government that we're a couple, the amount we can earn gets slashed in half and our rate of payment goes down.
At the moment, we're living below the poverty line. My girlfriend is paying off a car, and with the money she earns at work/ from the government she can afford rent, bills, car repayments, and a bit of spending money. If she buys groceries or eats out, she's left with nothing. I'm using my Mum's old car, and with the money I earn from work/ the government I can afford rent, bills, groceries (provided I shop at Aldi and only buy what they don't sell at the major chains), and about $50 indulgence money a fortnight. If it's nobody's birthday, I usually buy one book or CD or video game and a movie ticket for me and my girlfriend.
Also- our rent is really cheap. This is mostly because we have amazing landlords who run everything themselves and want to be fair to everybody. Before the bought this property, the agency controlling the rent had it set way higher. Even with such amazing landlords, the place is a shit heap. It's made of asbestos, so there are fun health risks there, there's exposed piping, and I can see the sky at the moment through cracks in the plaster in my study.
There's NO WAY we'd be able to afford house repayments. There's NO WAY we'd be able to afford private health insurance. There's NO WAY we could afford a child and keep our sanity. And there's NO WAY I could afford a car of my own without giving up that tiny, tiny margin between being able to afford some indulgences here and there and living a completely skint existence.
Our life is pretty shit, with the shitness alleviated by how amazing our neighbours are and how nicely communal living here feels (we have lots of barbeques and all pop around to each other's flats to ask for ingredients for stuff if we're running low), the fact that my parents earn quite a bit and can help me pay for textbooks, give me a car, and buy me amazing birthday/ Christmas presents, like a decent computer, which I'm using right now in my asbestos study with a spider having just crawled in through the crack through which I can see the sky.
Minimum wage in Australia is pretty damn miserable.
slappymcgee wrote:I am not sure what your definition of slavery is. A lot of what slaves did continue to be legitimate jobs. If you mean, you'll hire somebody to do legitimate jobs that slaves did, okay, that's pretty reasonable. It becomes slavery when the person doesn't want to do it and has to. Like, you know, paying taxes. But if the person is getting paid a wage to pick fruit and cook dinner, they're a butler. :/ Don't try and attach some sort of slave stigma to something that isn't there.
The problem with slavery is that you're not just selling your labour- you're selling YOURSELF. YOU are a commodity, YOU can be bought, and suddenly YOU don't own your life any more, the people you're picking fruit and cooking dinner for own you. That's what I'd define as slavery, not the actual jobs that slaves did. You might, given the options, prefer slavery to starvation, and therefore slavery is something you want to do. That doesn't mean that you want to be owned by somebody and exist purely on whatever comforts they will grant you. Anyway, I'm not trying to capitalise on slave stigma, just pointing out that giving people the option to sell themselves is perfectly in line with how I understand libertarian thinking, and it's not far beyond existing debates where the libertarian corner is arguing for lax standards for medical testing in developed countries and the "freedom" to sell kidneys.
slappymcgee wrote:I think most of your arguments hinge on the transitional period here. I'm not saying that you're wrong, simply that the transitional period of any country is difficult. Moreover, the reason so much wealth can be held in the hands of the very wealthiest is because the government continues to put value in these dollars; presuming the government is mostly gone, this money wouldn't have value. So, you would start out the world even; no wealth, but some skills that might be more valuable than others.
You know, I can almost get on board this, with a few modifications. I read a really interesting honours thesis along these lines.
The very abridged version was: Primitive hunter/ gatherer societies had things worked out pretty well. People would only work 3- 4 hours a day, and they'd get lots of exercise and be surprisingly healthy. Traditional witch doctor- type medicine, using whatever materials on hand, actually worked fairly well, considering, and even know we're still discovering that a lot of traditional remedies have medicinal qualities we weren't previously aware of.
Get rid of "money" in the weird financial sense it's used in today, go back to communities producing what they can and trading what they need, with no extra effort put into marketing or managing capital or financial anything. Turn the world into a sort of anarchist neoliberal arrangement and everyone, especially the people in the global south, benefits.
My only real problem with this world is that, in all likelihood, it wouldn't have tf2 in it :(
DemonzLunchBreak wrote:
Are you actually a Marxist, formica? Or is that just a position you're taking in response to the rampant libertarianism? I'd possibly like to have a long conversation about that (we could start a new thread). I'm not a libertarian in the American fundamentalist sense, but I do tend to the right on economic issues and the far left for social policies. The main problems that I have with Marxism, off the top of my head, are 1) The inefficacy of central planning in distributing resources - turns out price signaling is pretty important. 2)The transition from private means of production to public necessarily leads to an authoritarian state (as does central planning). 3) The Marxist view of history, while certainly an interesting perspective, is very reductionist in its approach and makes no effort to understand actions within their historical contexts. Instead, it just shoehorns everything into its ideological framework. The whole materialist dialectic is also pretty mystical and vague.
...I like cans of worms.
I think Marxism and the Marxist materialist view of history is incredibly important for understanding the past and the forces shaping society today, and you can't understand capitalism without understanding the Marxist view of exploitation. I'm also really glad that there are still a handful of Marxist organisations (I belonged to one for a little bit) floating around, organising and gathering support for protests against some of the shitty things the government does, supporting unions, and just keeping this view of history and the power of the working class alive, and keeping people aware that there's a very real alternative to the world as it is at the moment.
And then there's the Marxist approach to improving the world, which (based on my own experience) is pretty much "My God, these people are trying to MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE? What fucking dicks. Don't they know they can't do that without abolishing capitalism? Dicks dicks dicks. They're just making things harder for THE REVOLUTION." And that pisses me off. You can make the world a better place without revolution, and if you do, that's awesome and you should be commended. Everything short of revolution isn't worthless, and things being "short of revolution" isn't how we should measure them.
And then there's the reductionist belief that nothing can happen without class being at the root of it. The Marxists got the Iranian revolution all wrong, because they failed to take into account religion, because for Marxists religion is
nothing outside of class struggle. And then there's the annoying fact that even respectable, intelligent, well- researched publications like the International Socialist Review are full of typos.
In short, I'm a Marxist in how I understand history, in the broad sense, and how I understand exploitation and class relations and how government works in liberal democracies. That's pretty much it, though.
And it's something I went into to show a counterpoint to libertarian ideas about the welfare state and economic freedom.
