If you're from the U.S. you seem to be forgetting some very hard lessons that were paid with blood in the past. There is a reason why we have a bill of rights. There is a reason for our rule of law, of requiring warrants before searches. That our 'forefathers' said that it's better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be falsely charged. Racial profiling is wrong because you're infringing on the freedoms of innocent people that have committed no crimes.
Racial profiling works to some degree, but it means that innocent people who match the profile have to put up with a lot more intrusion into their lives. It's similar to the moral question about where to draw the line: would you rather imprison an innocent, or let a guilty person go free?
>One potential solution is directly government funded news
Where does the government get its money to fund news? Either from the local population which is enforced support for an economically non-viable business or it can get money from other people who have no interest in the local news of another place far away.
If good local news is not profitable, then that means there is not enough interest to justify the cost of making good local news. This is not a failure of the free market to provide a critical public good. The free market is working exactly as intended, and what YOU call 'critical' public good, isn't really that critical, according to people who would actually consume said good.
And then you want the government to enforce your personal idea of what is 'critical' by forcing people to buy things they don't want.
Giving money to retirees, giving medical care to poor people, having an FDA controlling what companies are able to sell that might harm the public (long or short term), and other regulatory organs are not economically viable either. Should we abolish those?
"Free market" might be a fun catchphrase, but everything judged through one lens is extremely narrowminded.
My opinions: Abolish social security, abolish medicare, keep the FDA but allow unapproved treatments clearly marked as such(possibly require signing a document confirming they know it's unapproved, or require them to file some paperwork with the local government in order to allow unapproved treatments). Of course, you'll never actually get elected advocating the first two, since the elderly have a stranglehold on politicians.
A more electable opinion: Allow people to invest their government-mandated retirement accounts however they want: SS is required to be invested in treasury bonds, which are not what I would invest in.
We don't need the government propping up the news companies, either. Professionals can stay informed to issues relevant to their work by subscribing to a trade magazine. Local communities often congregate at a church or similar(abolish tax exemption for churches, while we're at it), and that's as good a place as any to talk politics or gossip about celebrities.
For purely factual local community items requiring action(new sidewalk repair ordinance requires 30% of houses to replace their sidewalk trees, there's an upcoming mayoral election, a real estate investor just bought the last empty lot in the city and is building a huge apartment complex, etc.) can be reported by the government through the city or county websites, or by mailing notices to everyone.
I also wouldn't mind a government-operated television channel, intended for government matters(the president making his state-of-the-union speech, results of elections, warnings about emergencies, a brief summary of recent Supreme Court rulings as they happen, etc.).
Literally the entire point of a safety net for individual people is to prevent people from falling into despair and dying (of starvation or illness) due either to poor decisions or pure chance. To remove said safety net is to say that you value having a bit more money over people's lives - you would prefer that people die than lose money.
To put that a way you might understand - humans have an almost universally recognised right to food, water, shelter and medical care because these things are really, really important. To deny people those things is to say that those things are less important than having a little more money. You can't seriously be saying that.
The parent can seriously be saying that. People believe different things, many people believe that they have no responsibility to other humans that they do not know. Further there are those that believe humans may be in someway responsible for other humans that they do not know, but that the government is absolutely the wrong vehicle to address this responsibility.
Personally, I think for people like that, who think that "taxes are theft" and that they shouldn't have to pay for stuff they don't agree with, that we should allow them to opt out of paying taxes and the entire social contract.
In exchange, they give up all police protection. If someone wants to rob them or kill them, no problem, it's not a crime and the police won't intervene.
If all Internet advertising were paid just by the billion richest people of the world (essentially: the OECD nations, mostly the US, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, NZ), the cost would net out to $20 per $30k of income (about the per-capita median).
If you wanted to cover all advertising, it'd be $100 per $30k. Or an 0.3% tax rate.
And no more advertising or advertising-supported crap.
When I was at university my roommate was a rich mainlander chinese whose dad bought him an AMG mercedes. So the average car for that household was in the 100k's needless to say i wasn't driving anything near that.
I thought about downloading all the youtube videos that I consider have future watching values but then i realised it would take way too much effort and storage space to download and tag/categorise them and that there is no limit to my hoarding tendency.
I find it absurd that I can have a copy of a video in my brain, but potentially not be able to show it to someone else. It feels like an arbitrary limitation on knowledge transfer. If we had brain-computer interfaces I could just push my (analog fuzzy) version out into the screen again!
Tagging and categorization can be fixed later. I generally find grep -i a good enough solution.
who consented to the conditions of your house when entering. If he is not sure he ought to hire a civil engineer to inspect and verify the safety status of the house or ask the host to do it.
>your children,
who is your ward and is subjected to the decisions of its parent with regards to all of life choices
>the person that buys your house next,
ditto the guest situation except for buying
>the person that lives next door
this is the only legitimate case for regulation, to protect the public and/or third party.
>so they threw their (still very hot) excess soup from their pot out the window and it got all over me.
This is not a problem of housing but of manners. You can get rid of hot soup without infringing of other people's ability to walk around the public area and not be wet.
>Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes.
In your opinion.
Some people think driving cars are bad. Some people think eating meat is bad. Some people think space heating is a waste of electricity.
Everybody seems to think their particular way of living is perfect and everybody else is either too wasteful or doesn't know how to live.
Your argument really is just "this is my subjective opinion of how to live and people who disagree are wrong".
People do like to hero worship. I think it's a psychological thing.
Although I disagree with saying that you can never reach a level of somebody that's you idolise. What I observe with myself and others is that people emulate those they idolise and emulating people who are really good at something would help you improve.
Confucianism was chosen by the chinese power-that-be because he encouraged obedience and conformity. It's the reason Chinese society stagnated with a monolithic central authority. With a more libertarian approach, there would be more trade and research and given chinese huge population and food availability, they might have made a lot of technological progress and we would have a colony on Mars by now.
So in that way confucianism was similar to christianity during the dark age in that they were used by the powerful to sedate the masses.
Aren't you just making statistical inference based on past experience?
if that is wrong then all learning is wrong.