Originally Posted By: JetStar
Originally Posted By: Derid
The question is how far do you go with regards to taking responsibility for other people. A question you need to ask, is are you saving people from some outside force - or are you saving them from themselves. Without answering that question, you cannot begin to start contemplating just solutions, because justice looks different in each scenario.


As I said, no sport can function without referees and regulations. I would consider the same thing for all markets. You should be held to a standard of truth, where as what you say and claim, you will ultimately be held accountable.

The idea that you can have a free unregulated market is as preposterous as the thought of the NFL with no rules or referees.


Restrictions on acceptable behavior, even in regards to markets is not - as I have pointed out in the past -, necessarily un-libertarian.

If we are going to talk food, some cases for illustration:

Eating a hamburger is (barring extreme allergy) not going to kill anyone. It should not be proscribed for anyone to serve or eat hamburgers. If you eat nothing but, or too many hamburgers of course that might not be healthy. There is still nothing wrong with the hamburger, the problem lies with a person making poor dietary choices for themselves.

Maybe you feel bad for them, but so what. Tell them it is not healthy, see if they listen.

Now maybe someone is going around spending money saying that eating nothing but hamburgers is healthy. The problem still does not lie with the existence, or serving of a hamburger. The problem lies with the person committing fraud by claiming eating nothing but hamburgers is healthy.

Thus taking action to redress the fraud is just just as taking action to repudiate paid-off doctors who perpetrated a lie that smoking was healthy was just, however regulating hamburger production or consumption is not - because there is still nothing wrong with the hamburger.

----

Now maybe the hamburger is of particularly low quality, and is therefore making people ill. Maybe its made from sick cows, or maybe its actually marketed as beef but is really rat.

Well levying a tax to pay for food monitoring, inspections, and specialized officials trained and equipped to investigate and redress or bring to justice those who by intent or negligence serve up tainted, poisoned or misrepresented food is also a proper function of government or society.

---

What is not a just or proper function of society or govt is to persecute someone who makes or serves a perfectly good hamburger, simply because they may have created one more of an always-infinite number of avenues by which the willfully ignorant or simply uncaring individual may abuse themselves.

Last edited by Derid; 05/17/14 05:57 AM.
For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)