Jubbergun wrote:
The majority of the third world states you'd refer to as not being "proactive" aren't concerned with basic matters of justice and the rule of law. The industrial nations you point toward at least put up a pretense of concern for these matters. Where do you think business is more likely to flourish, in the country where the merchant is likely to beaten/robbed/murdered by his government for belonging to the wrong ethnic/religious group, or the one where the merchant's rights are actively protected not just from the government, but from any criminal element.
This is really the operative phrase. "Where do you think..." The correct phrasing would be, "where do you
see...". What is happening is, ideological inference is being substituted for objective reality.
America has one of the highest crime rates in the world. Jim Crow/Trail of Tears neatly debunks your "ethnic/religious" argument. Criminal justice systems are ubiquitous and have been for millenia. You don't think that Victorian England had a functioning criminal justice system? Or the USSR? Or any other utterly inequitable society?
If people could "do things for themselves" in a vacuum, the world would be a lot better off than it is, and it wouldn't have taken us thousands of years for a very few societies to make dramatic progress.
Weena wrote:
You know why a lot of regulations occur? Because a lot of politicians and close business friends make bank on it.
Americans in 2011 arguing that libertarianism will increase freedom are like Soviets in 1981 arguing that Communism will improve the quality of consumer goods. It's ideological hypocrisy - a basic failure to identify cause and effect.
Nature abhors a vacuum. If the political system is weakened that means that the powerful in the private sector will be all the more able to do as they will. Crony capitalism works precisely because the government here is so weak compared to most other countries. If what you say is true then the countries with strong proactive governments (the EU and basically the entire Western world other than America) would be far worse off so far as personal, political and economic freedoms go.
That isn't the case, because it's hogwash, and libertarianism is simply a philosophy of willful ignorance.
There is a reason that this philosophy is only seen as anything other than crazy in America and only amongst those who know almost nothing about the world outside America.
Honest question: why do you think that is?