Ron Paul 2012!!! Your thoughts on who we should pick for our "Cause"?

Ron Paul not quitting



'You don't quit because you happen to be behind,' the congressman says.

By MACKENZIE WEINGER | 4/23/12 10:46 AM EDT

Ron Paul said Monday he has no plans to end his campaign and is staying in the race since “maybe somebody will stumble” on the way to the convention.

Paul told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that even if Mitt Romney secures the delegates needed for the nomination, he would likely continue his campaign “in a modified way.”
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“You don’t quit because you happen to be behind,” he said. “You want to see how you do. And who knows? Maybe somebody will stumble.”

When asked whether he believed Romney was a “flawed candidate,” Paul replied, “Well, I think the system is flawed.”

“He’s part of that whole crowd of politicians, Republicans and Democrats, that are much closer together than most people realize,” he said. “There’s not that much difference when it comes to policy. Rhetoric might be different.”

Paul added that his campaign remains “very, very viable.” His delegates, he said, will “have an influence” and “have something to do with the platform” at the Republican convention.

“This campaign is very, very viable for two reasons. One, they want to want to win if we can, they want to maximize the delegates and they do want to have an impact. That is very important to every single supporter,” he said.

The Texas congressman noted the high-level of support his campaign garners, adding that he has backers from every political party.

“We’re challenging the status quo of the entire country as well as the Republican Party,” Paul said. “People don’t like to give up their power. But the momentum is very powerful. I’m part of it, but I’m not it. It’s much bigger than me.”

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itisme said:

If it was true and not and not an April Fools Day joke.

I would have a new confidence in our system but I don't think it is true.

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dagnabit said:

Nostradumbass knows that the top 5 donors want influence it's why they "hedge"
But that is another thread...
Wonder if someone forgets what thread they are posting in.

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Hospital of Cards


The US healthcare system is a huge bubble fueled by misguided policies that are sustained by the government's ability to borrow money at artificially low interest rates. When either the policies change or the flow of credit to the US government stops, the bubble will burst.

For some perspective on the magnitude of the healthcare bubble consider that from 1990 to 2007 the cost of all items, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), rose by 159 percent while housing rose 163 percent and medical care rose a staggering 216 percent. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that between 1999 and 2011, health-insurance premiums increased 168 percent while workers' total earnings increased only 50 percent. Over that same time period, government spending on healthcare increased 240 percent while GDP increased 62 percent. The BLS reported that over the last 50 years, the percent of workers employed in private-sector healthcare has gone from 3 percent to over 11 percent and employment has continued to grow throughout the current recession. BLS further projects that "Healthcare will generate 3.2 million new wage and salary jobs between 2008 and 2018, more than any other industry," and that "The number of wage and salary jobs in pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing is expected to increase by 6 percent over the 2008–18 period, compared with 11 percent projected for all industries combined."

As figure 1 demonstrates, healthcare spending increased dramatically when the government (represented by total CMS spending in green in the figure) began subsidizing healthcare for the poor and elderly through Medicare and Medicaid. It continued to increase as legislation, most notably the HMO Act of 1973, and regulatory policy shifted the responsibility of health maintenance from the individual to all of those in his or her insurance pool. This was accomplished through regulations requiring insurers to cover medical services (e.g., office visits, cancer screenings, pharmaceuticals, and a wide range of therapeutic and rehabilitative services) for conditions that were not insurable events but rather part of routine health maintenance. Throughout the expansion, out of pocket spending (represented by the blue line) declined dramatically.

Figure 1

Source: US Census Bureau, The 2012 Statistical Abstract
America's healthcare system today can best be described as what economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo has termed "fascialist." According to DiLorenzo, "Fascialism means an economy is part fascist, part socialist." Fascism is characterized by private enterprise that is comprehensively regulated and regimented by the state, ostensibly "in the public interest" (as arbitrarily defined by the state). A variant of fascism is crony capitalism. Socialism started out meaning government ownership of the means of production, but it has come to mean egalitarianism promoted by progressive taxation and the institutions of the welfare state. According to DiLorenzo,

The problems of the American healthcare system are caused entirely by the fact that the government subjects the system to massive interventions, some of which are fascist in nature, while others are socialist.

Under the current system, consumers play virtually no role in shaping the pattern of resource use and the assignment of resource rewards. The outputs being produced, the methods of production being employed, and the rewards being given to the various owners of productivity are not dictated by healthcare consumers but rather by government and industry lobbyists, or the medical-industrial complex. This mechanism is directly responsible for inflating the healthcare bubble and costs have grown rapidly to reflect whatever the system will bear.

Prior to Medicare and Medicaid and the significant regulatory changes that have taken place, the healthcare system actually operated under near-capitalist conditions (it was never pure capitalism). I will term this the capitalist period of US healthcare. During this time, individuals paid for the majority of medical goods and services out of their own pockets and utilized health insurance as a rational tool for mitigating financial risk posed by catastrophic events. Although still a relatively new concept, participation in private insurance plans was growing, and by 1960 nearly 75 percent of Americans had some form of private health-insurance coverage.[1]During this period, rapid advancements were being made in pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and surgical techniques (e.g., the heart-lung machine, which made coronary artery bypass surgery possible). Furthermore, charitable institutions and hospitals often run by religious groups and fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons, whose mission was to take care of the indigent, abounded. Most importantly, the price of medical goods and services remained remarkably stable as measured against the consumer price index (CPI) for all items:

Figure 2

Source: BLS, CPI
As figure 2 demonstrates, medical-care price inflation corresponded with the change from the capitalist to fascialist model. The practice of medicine under the current system is less about providing patients with what they value and instead providing them with what is profitable to the medical-industrial complex. The game is rather simple; the outline follows:

Create a new drug, lab test, or device, or find a new indication for an existing product or service.

Sponsor a clinical trial to show that it has a statistically significant benefit for the indication in question.

Hire "experts" in the field to promote it.

Incentivize those experts to influence changes to the traditional "standard of care" through their professional societies.

Hire "lobbyists" who may or may not be the "experts" mentioned above to persuade Medicare to approve the new standard and thus assure coverage by nearly all third-party payers.

This process may seem rather benign, if not beneficial — it may even seem like good capitalism — but it is not. Obscured by this process is the fact that what often passes for "statistically significant" would be viewed by many patients as "clinically irrelevant" and thus not worth near the amount that Medicare or their insurance carrier reimburses. I'm not suggesting that these products and services should not be allowed to come to market. I'm simply suggesting that, given their risk-reduction profiles, under free-market conditions many of them would need to cost much less to be attractive options.

A great example is the drug Rivaroxaban. It has been approved for usage to lower the risk of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. However, a recently hyped clinical trial may expand its use significantly. The trial, reported on in the Janurary 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that Rivaroxaban, when combined with standard therapy, lowered the absolute risk of death, heart attack, or stroke by 1.9 percent over a two-year period in patients who had recently had a heart attack.[2] To be precise, those taking Rivaroxaban had an 8.9 percent risk while those not taking it had a 10.7 percent risk. Also of note, taking Rivaroxaban increased the risk of a major bleeding event by 1.5 percent (those taking it had a 2.1 percent risk, while those not taking it had a 0.6 percent risk).

Given this information, how much would this drug be worth to you for the above indication, if at all? If your answer is not hundreds of dollars per month then you can appreciate why I believe healthcare is a bubble. The above example is not an exception but rather the rule. Just within my own field of cardiology there are numerous examples (e.g., whether or not to get a stress test and what kind of stress test to do, how often to do an echocardiogram for a patient with asymptomatic valvular heart disease, how often to check cholesterol levels in patients with and without known heart disease, whether to use a stent or thrombolysis to treat an acute heart attack and what type of stent to use, whether to use brand name or generic drugs for blood pressure and cholesterol lowering and when to start these agents in the first place). In my opinion, these few examples demonstrate how and why the healthcare bubble has grown so massive. In almost each case, the standard of care for the particular issue in question endorses more frequent use and the use of expensive agents and modalities over less frequent and less costly alternatives; however, the absolute benefits of the more frequent and expensive options are usually quite small (if they exist at all) as in the case of Rivaroxaban above. These examples demonstrate why government-subsidized healthcare has been a panacea for the medical-industrial complex. But unfortunately, what cannot go on forever must come to an end.

Government healthcare spending has continued to accelerate rapidly over the last decade. The government now directly pays for over half of all healthcare costs in the United States. But more importantly (and this point cannot be overemphasized), Medicare approval drives reimbursement for nearly all medical goods and services whether paid for by the government or private insurers. At present, nearly half of Medicare is financed through general revenue (revenue not generated through dedicated payroll taxes and premiums charged to beneficiaries) and the federal government is running huge budget deficits that are not sustainable.

There is simply no way the federal government can indefinitely prolong the trend in healthcare spending. According to John Embry, chief investment strategist for Sprott Asset Management,

One of the few reasons that this remarkable debt edifice is still standing is the Fed's zero interest rate policy … in conjunction with massive Fed monetization of Treasury debt [which] has kept the interest rates on government debt ridiculously low, and thus the charade has been allowed to continue. If the interest rates on US government debt truly reflected both the real level of inflation in this country and the rising risk of some form of default, rates would already be sky-high and the US would resemble a massive Greece.[10]

There is no circumstance under which this degree of government spending can be financed indefinitely, and when it's not, the slack won't be taken up by individuals. Dr. Gilbert Berdine emphasized this in a 2011 Mises Daily article. Some of the salient points he highlighted include the following: In 2008, HHS estimated that national health expenditures per individual were $7,845 — over $31,000 for a family of four. At the same time, the Census Bureau claimed that the average household size was 2.63 and thus, the average household share of national health expenditure was $20,632. The census estimated that almost one-fifth of US households earn less income than their share of national health expenditure.

Regardless of their desire to do so, US citizens as a whole cannot afford what the United States spends on healthcare, and therefore I believe that, when government spending on healthcare declines, the healthcare bubble will burst. This could be brought about in several ways, such as a failure to raise the debt ceiling, as Dr. Berdine has pointed out; a failure by the government to raise capital at historically low interest rates, as John Embry alluded to; or government policies that actually reduce healthcare spending, like not renewing the infamous "doc fix," using the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to restrict which patients are eligible for certain medical care, or simply having CMS reduce reimbursement rates, which doesn't require any new laws or changes to existing law.

Conclusion

Entangled in the current debate over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), there are very few who have given much thought to the idea that healthcare could be a bubble. At the moment, I'm engaged in a debate with a reviewer at a particular medical journal who flat out denies that a healthcare bubble is even plausible. According to this reviewer,

Basic needs of life, such as basic food supplies, clothing, healthcare, water, etc. are things that are necessary to the maintenance of life. These things may all increase in cost secondary to the economic cycle and devaluation of the currency, but they do not become bubbles unless they somehow become luxury items, such as fur coats, etc.

On this point, I challenged the reviewer that shelter is a basic need of life, yet the housing bubble collapsed. I got no response. This reviewer, who I assume is a physician, displays the same hubris as so many others in the medical field — the idea that all healthcare goods and services are indispensable and, ultimately, either save or have a tremendous impact on the quality of one's life. The fact is that very few healthcare goods and services immediately impact whether an individual lives or dies, and most of their benefits will go unnoticed by the individual patient. Instead, most of these goods and services, whether consumed in the inpatient or outpatient, setting lower the medium- or long-term risk of something or another by a few percentage points and, in the end, we still die anyway.


The value of this risk reduction is ultimately subjective, but because of the policies mentioned in this paper, and the government's ability to support those policies by borrowing money at artificially low interest rates, many individuals have never had to give much thought to the value they would place on the medical goods and services they consume.

Unfortunately, due to our deteriorating fiscal condition as a nation, the day will soon come when the government can no longer subsidize healthcare to the extent required to keep the bubble inflated. At that point, individual patients will have to choose whether or not to pick up the slack.

When that day comes, look out!

Andrew Foy is cardiology fellow at Penn State-Hershey University Medical Center. The opinions expressed here are his own and are not intended to represent those of his employer. ..

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The Libertarian Manifesto on Pollution


All right: Even if we concede that full private property in resources and the free market will conserve and create resources, and do it far better than government regulation, what of the problem of pollution? Wouldn't we be suffering aggravated pollution from unchecked "capitalist greed"?

There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact: Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of pollution. Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable natural resource. But there is far more to the problem than that. Note, for example, the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem: the air and the waterways, particularly the rivers. But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not been permitted to function.

First, the rivers. The rivers, and the oceans too, are generally owned by the government; private property, certainly complete private property, has not been permitted in the water. In essence, then, government owns the rivers. But government ownership is not true ownership, because the government officials, while able to control the resource cannot themselves reap their capital value on the market. Government officials cannot sell the rivers or sell stock in them. Hence, they have no economic incentive to preserve the purity and value of the rivers. Rivers are, then, in the economic sense, "unowned"; therefore government officials have permitted their corruption and pollution. Anyone has been able to dump polluting garbage and wastes in the waters. But consider what would happen if private firms were able to own the rivers and the lakes. If a private firm owned Lake Erie, for example, then anyone dumping garbage in the lake would be promptly sued in the courts for their aggression against private property and would be forced by the courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further aggression. Thus, only private property rights will insure an end to pollution — invasion of resources. Only because the rivers are unowned is there no owner to rise up and defend his precious resource from attack. If, in contrast, anyone should dump garbage or pollutants into a lake which is privately owned (as are many smaller lakes), he would not be permitted to do so for very long — the owner would come roaring to its defense.[1] Professor Dolan writes:

With a General Motors owning the Mississippi River, you can be sure that stiff effluent charges would be assessed on industries and municipalities along its banks, and that the water would be kept clean enough to maximize revenues from leases granted to firms seeking rights to drinking water, recreation, and commercial fishing.[2]

If government as owner has allowed the pollution of the rivers, government has also been the single major active polluter, especially in its role as municipal sewage disposer. There already exist low-cost chemical toilets which can burn off sewage without polluting air, ground, or water; but who will invest in chemical toilets when local governments will dispose of sewage free to their customers?

This example points up a problem similar to the case of the stunting of aquaculture technology by the absence of private property: if governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology will — and has — become a water-polluting technology. If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then that is the sort of production technology we will have.

If the problem of water pollution can be cured by private property rights in water, how about air pollution? How can libertarians possibly come up with a solution for this grievous problem? Surely, there can't be private property in the air? But the answer is: yes, there can. We have already seen how radio and TV frequencies can be privately owned. So could channels for airlines. Commercial airline routes, for example, could be privately owned; there is no need for a Civil Aeronautics Board to parcel out — and restrict — routes between various cities. But in the case of air pollution we are dealing not so much with private property in the air as with protecting private property in one's lungs, fields, and orchards. The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants — from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides — through the air and into the lungs of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property. All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the private property of the victims. Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another's property or injuring him physically. Air pollution that injures others is aggression pure and simple. The major function of government — of courts and police — is to stop aggression; instead, the government has failed in this task and has failed grievously to exercise its defense function against air pollution.

It is important to realize that this failure has not been a question purely of ignorance, a simple time lag between recognizing a new technological problem and facing up to it. For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known to the extent that the American courts, during the late — and as far back as the early 19th century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to — and did — systematically change and weaken the defenses of property right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.

As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, "Sorry. We know that industrial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the 'common good.' And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare." And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the "common good"![3]

That this principle has guided the courts during the air age as well may be seen by a decision of the Ohio courts in Antonik v. Chamberlain (1947). The residents of a suburban area near Akron sued to enjoin the defendants from operating a privately owned airport. The grounds were invasion of property rights through excessive noise. Refusing the injunction, the court declared:

In our business of judging in this case, while sitting as a court of equity, we must not only weigh the conflict of interests between the airport owner and the nearby landowners, but we must further recognize the public policy of the generation in which we live. We must recognize that the establishment of an airport … is of great concern to the public, and if such an airport is abated, or its establishment prevented, the consequences will be not only a serious injury to the owner of the port property but may be a serious loss of a valuable asset to the entire community.[4]

To cap the crimes of the judges, legislatures, federal and state, moved in to cement the aggression by prohibiting victims of air pollution from engaging in "class action" suits against polluters. Obviously, if a factory pollutes the atmosphere of a city where there are tens of thousands of victims, it is impractical for each victim to sue to collect his particular damages from the polluter (although an injunction could be used effectively by one small victim). The common law, therefore, recognizes the validity of "class action" suits, in which one or a few victims can sue the aggressor not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of the entire class of similar victims. But the legislatures systematically outlawed such class action suits in pollution cases. For this reason, a victim may successfully sue a polluter who injures him individually, in a one-to-one "private nuisance" suit. But he is prohibited by law from acting against a mass polluter who is injuring a large number of people in a given area! As Frank Bubb writes, "It is as if the government were to tell you that it will (attempt to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood."[5]

Noise, too, is a form of air pollution. Noise is the creation of sound waves which go through the air and then bombard and invade the property and persons of others. Only recently have physicians begun to investigate the damaging effects of noise on the human physiology. Again, a libertarian legal system would permit damage and class action suits and injunctions against excessive and damaging noise: against "noise pollution."

The remedy against air pollution is therefore crystal clear, and it has nothing to do with multibillion-dollar palliative government programs at the expense of the taxpayers which do not even meet the real issue. The remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending person and property rights against invasion, and therefore to enjoin anyone from injecting pollutants into the air. But what of the propollution defenders of industrial progress? And what of the increased costs that would have to be borne by the consumer? And what of our present polluting technology?

The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton, and that therefore abolition, however morally correct, was "impractical." For this means that the polluters are able to impose all of the high costs of pollution upon those whose lungs and property rights they have been allowed to invade with impunity.

Furthermore, the cost and technology argument overlooks the vital fact that if air pollution is allowed to proceed with impunity, there continues to be no economic incentive to develop a technology that will not pollute. On the contrary, the incentive would continue to cut, as it has for a century, precisely the other way. Suppose, for example, that in the days when automobiles and trucks were first being used, the courts had ruled as follows:

Ordinarily, we would be opposed to trucks invading people's lawns as an invasion of private property, and we would insist that trucks confine themselves to the roads, regardless of traffic congestion. But trucks are vitally important to the public welfare, and therefore we decree that trucks should be allowed to cross any lawns they wish provided they believe that this would ease their traffic problems.

If the courts had ruled in this way, then we would now have a transportation system in which lawns would be systematically desecrated by trucks. And any attempt to stop this would be decried in the name of modern transportation needs! The point is that this is precisely the way that the courts ruled on air pollution — pollution which is far more damaging to all of us than trampling on lawns. In this way, the government gave the green light, from the very start, to a polluting technology. It is no wonder then that this is precisely the kind of technology we have. The only remedy is to force the polluting invaders to stop their invasion, and thereby to redirect technology into nonpolluting or even antipolluting channels.

Already, even at our necessarily primitive stage in antipollution technology, techniques have been developed to combat air and noise pollution. Mufflers can be installed on noisy machines that emit sound waves precisely contra-cyclical to the waves of the machines, and thereby can cancel out these racking sounds. Air wastes can even now be recaptured as they leave the chimney and be recycled to yield products useful to industry. Thus, sulfur dioxide, a major noxious air pollutant, can be captured and recycled to produce economically valuable sulfuric acid.[6] The highly polluting spark ignition engine will either have to be "cured" by new devices or replaced altogether by such nonpolluting engines as diesel, gas turbine, or steam, or by an electric car. And, as libertarian systems engineer Robert Poole, Jr., points out, the costs of installing the non- or antipolluting technology would then "ultimately be borne by the consumers of the firms' products, i.e., by those who choose to associate with the firm, rather than being passed on to innocent third parties in the form of pollution (or as taxes)."[7]

Robert Poole cogently defines pollution "as the transfer of harmful matter or energy to the person or property of another, without the latter's consent."[8] The libertarian — and the only complete — solution to the problem of air pollution is to use the courts and the legal structure to combat and prevent such invasion. There are recent signs that the legal system is beginning to change in this direction: new judicial decisions and repeal of laws disallowing class action suits. But this is only a beginning.[9]

Among conservatives — in contrast to libertarians — there are two ultimately similar responses to the problem of air pollution. One response, by Ayn Rand and Robert Moses among others, is to deny that the problem exists, and to attribute the entire agitation to leftists who want to destroy capitalism and technology on behalf of a tribal form of socialism. While part of this charge may be correct, denial of the very existence of the problem is to deny science itself and to give a vital hostage to the leftist charge that defenders of capitalism "place property rights above human rights." Moreover, a defense of air pollution does not even defend property rights; on the contrary, it puts these conservatives' stamp of approval on those industrialists who are trampling upon the property rights of the mass of the citizenry.

A second, and more sophisticated, conservative response is by such free-market economists as Milton Friedman. The Friedmanites concede the existence of air pollution but propose to meet it, not by a defense of property rights, but rather by a supposedly utilitarian "cost-benefit" calculation by government, which will then make and enforce a "social decision" on how much pollution to allow. This decision would then be enforced either by licensing a given amount of pollution (the granting of "pollution rights"), by a graded scale of taxes against it, or by the taxpayers paying firms not to pollute. Not only would these proposals grant an enormous amount of bureaucratic power to government in the name of safeguarding the "free market"; they would continue to override property rights in the name of a collective decision enforced by the State. This is far from any genuine "free market," and reveals that, as in many other economic areas, it is impossible to really defend freedom and the free market without insisting on defending the rights of private property. Friedman's grotesque dictum that those urban inhabitants who don't wish to contract emphysema should move to the country is starkly reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's famous "Let them eat cake" — and reveals a lack of sensitivity to human or property rights. Friedman's statement, in fact, is of a piece with the typically conservative, "If you don't like it here, leave," a statement that implies that the government rightly owns the entire land area of "here," and that anyone who objects to its rule must therefore leave the area. Robert Poole's libertarian critique of the Friedmanite proposals offers a refreshing contrast:

Unfortunately, it is an example of the most serious failing of the conservative economists: nowhere in the proposal is there any mention of rights. This is the same failing that has undercut advocates of capitalism for 200 years. Even today, the term "laissez-faire" is apt to bring forth images of eighteenth century English factory towns engulfed in smoke and grimy with soot. The early capitalists agreed with the courts that smoke and soot were the "price" that must be paid for the benefits of industry.… Yet laissez-faire without rights is a contradiction in terms; the laissez-faire position is based on and derived from man's rights, and can endure only when rights are held inviolable. Now, in an age of increasing awareness of the environment, this old contradiction is coming back to haunt capitalism.

It is true that air is a scarce resource [as the Friedmanites say], but one must then ask why it is scarce. If it is scarce because of a systematic violation of rights, then the solution is not to raise the price of the status quo, thereby sanctioning the rights-violations, but to assert the rights and demand that they be protected.… When a factory discharges a great quantity of sulfur dioxide molecules that enter someone's lungs and cause pulmonary edema, the factory owners have aggressed against him as much as if they had broken his leg. The point must be emphasized because it is vital to the libertarian laissez-faire position. A laissez-faire polluter is a contradiction in terms and must be identified as such. A libertarian society would be a full-liability society, where everyone is fully responsible for his actions and any harmful consequences they might cause.[10]


In addition to betraying its presumed function of defending private property, government has contributed to air pollution in a more positive sense. It was not so long ago that the Department of Agriculture conducted mass sprayings of DDT by helicopter over large areas, overriding the wishes of individual objecting farmers. It still continues to pour tons of poisonous and carcinogenic insecticides all over the South in an expensive and vain attempt to eradicate the fire ant.[11] And the Atomic Energy Commission has poured radioactive wastes into the air and into the ground by means of its nuclear power plants, and through atomic testing. Municipal power and water plants, and the plants of licensed monopoly utility companies, mightily pollute the atmosphere. One of the major tasks of the State in this area is therefore to stop its own poisoning of the atmosphere.

Thus, when we peel away the confusions and the unsound philosophy of the modern ecologists, we find an important bedrock case against the existing system; but the case turns out to be not against capitalism, private property, growth, or technology per se. It is a case against the failure of government to allow and to defend the rights of private property against invasion. If property rights were to be defended fully, against private and governmental invasion alike, we would find here, as in other areas of our economy and society, that private enterprise and modern technology would come to mankind not as a curse but as its salvation.

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bentom187 said:

this just keeps getting better,
The final battle is in sight. We knew this day would come. Paul VS Romney. LETS GET IT ON!!!

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CannaBunkerMan said:

Did he really deserve 2 unhelpfuls for that? I thought it was at least a little interesting and at least a little relivant.

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