The Big Debate: Big Government Vs. Big Business
Intro by James Johnson
In the spirit of Independence Day, we thought it’d be a good time to highlight that which has kept our country so darn independent in the first place: intellectual debate, also known as “that thing we do when
we run out of bullets.”
Honestly - this idea stemmed from one of those “Godzilla vs. Optimus Prime” type moments. Take two FEED contributors who are both known for being impossibly bright, and who both have completely opposite
personal ideologies, then lock ‘em in a cage together and make the survivor buy everyone pizza. In this case, we are referring to contributing writer Ash Smith and photographer Albert Stichka.
Now Smith is a passionate and very vocal libertarian - libertarians, for those who haven’t read the pamphlet, believe in “individual liberties,” which is another way of saying; they like their government
bite-sized and out of their way.
Stichka, on the other hand, is an American socialist - the nasty buzz word that was frequently tossed around during the last presidential election. American socialists basically feel that government exists to ease the burden on the people and that it is big business that society should be worried about.
Feel free to write into the FEED and let us know who you think made the most persuasive argument - or add fuel to the fire for all we care. No matter what, somebody’s buying us pizza.
Give us Liberty or Give Us …
By Ash Smith
Medicare and social security are going bankrupt, we are involved in two wars with no end in sight, we are facing the worst economy since the 1930s and we can’t control a major oil leak in the gulf because our politicians and major corporations would rather worry about how they look on the evening news than actually work to solve the crisis.
Have I left anything out? Oh yeah, and as a nation we currently owe $54,000,000,000,000 in debt. That’s $175,000 per person.
We’re in bad shape. Yet, republican or democrat, liberal or conservative, the answers given to us by government are always the same: “Give us more power and we can stop that problem,” or “give us more money and we’ll be able to fix or avert that crisis.”
You’d think that we would have wised up by now, instead of electing the same bureaucrats who continually dig us into deeper holes. There is an alternative to this mess and the endless cycle of economic recessions, wars and the loss of your inalienable rights and civil liberties. That alternative is libertarianism.
Libertarianism is more of a philosophy than a political party or political ideology. It’s a way of looking at the world.
Libertarians believe that people are entitled to life and liberty, and that no other person or entity (i.e. the government or a corporation) has a right to take away those things. We know what life is, but what is liberty? To us, liberty is the freedom to live your life in any peaceful way that you choose.
The government, nor your neighbors, should be allowed to tell you how you can live your life if you aren’t harming anyone else. They shouldn’t be able to tell you who you can marry, where you can live, what to do with your own money or property, or whether you can have trees covered in old skateboards outside of your business (cough,
cough). Those are personal decisions for the individual.
Libertarians also embrace the idea that you should be able to keep what you create or what you earn, your property. For instance, The FEED sells advertising space in their magazine and online (their property). They hope to make a profit so that they can grow their business, hire more people and provide a service to the community by being a premier hub for artists, musicians and cool stuff about Fayetteville.
Libertarians think that taxes should be kept very low so that businesses like The FEED can have more money to expand and provide those services to the community. We believe that if you take their profits by taxing them ridiculously in the name of creating more government-run programs, that you actually hurt more people than you
help. Instead of using their profits to hire more employees, The FEED would have to pay taxes to support unemployment benefits for the employees they couldn’t hire because of taxation. Does that make sense?
Yet big-government advocates use that flawed logic continually. They say that if we just give our government more tax dollars or more power, that it could solve all of our problems. They’ve been saying that for years, and look where it’s gotten us. Government is involved in every business in America and every aspect of your life, and yet
the problems seem to be getting worse, not better. However we see that industries with very low government involvement, like internet sales, seem to thrive.
That is why libertarians believe that small government is essential to the recovery of both our economic and civil liberties. Besides, do you want the same people who run the post office (which runs continually
in the red) or the Department of Motor Vehicles (which makes me want to shoot myself) to make the important decisions about your life for you?
Libertarians are the only group that consistently respects your choices as an individual and that continually opposes war. And they are the only group that has consistently touted small-government. Conservatives and republicans sometimes posture as small-government advocates, but seem to not see a contradiction when they call for bloated military budgets, undeclared wars and bans on personal decisions like gay marriage and recreational drug use. They’d rather have discipline and security than freedom.
Liberals and democrats don’t want the government to infringe on their civil liberties, but are more than happy to tell people what they can or cannot do with their own property. They are eager to use their “superior” judgment to determine who should get what, and in what fashion. This can be seen in calls for smoking bans in privately-owned
restaurants and bars, calls for higher taxes, and the constant denigration of the wealthy.
Both liberals and conservatives claim to embrace liberty, but both see fit to exclude certain types of liberty with which they disagree. Libertarians believe that you can’t pick and choose which aspects of liberty that you embrace. You either embrace it as a whole, or not at all.
I encourage FEED readers to do your research, and look at the pros and cons of libertarianism to see if it’s right for you. You can learn more at www.LPNC.org, or feel free to contact me at CumberlandLP@yahoo.com.
For the People and By the People
By Albert Stichka
Oftentimes these arguments devolve into a simple philosophy of “government = bad.” These are usually backed by baseless arguments centered on statements like “look at the job they’re doing now, I
mean, come on.”
Government is not by definition corrupt, inefficient, and inept or any number of things it’s become characterized as. It is essentially an organization that exists to offer people things they would find more difficult to secure on their own - things like roads, schools, hospitals, police, military, protection from disasters natural and man-made; they exist to assist us and they exist because they offer sufficient help and request such a sufficiently small price that the
people are content to continue living under their government.
Does government function perfectly? No. Are all forms of government able to function in a stable manner? No. Are all people helped by all governments? No. Does this mean that smaller government is always the
answer? Only if you’re basing your arguments on subjective evaluations of a system that has kept you and your parents alive for a very long time with a reasonable standard of living. There are several governments in the developed world that I feel function better to secure the well-being of their constituents, but all in all the one
that we have here in America isn’t doing so bad that we need to throw all our babies and bathwater out into the street.
Essentially what my problem is with arguments about small government in every case, no matter the case, is that those arguments seem to be coming from jaded individuals who want to boot government out of their lives as a concept in general. I hate to break it to you, but people with children in schools, people with medical or financial problems, people who are made victims by other people - they all need the government.
It seems like it is always the people who already have their needs met who make the case that the government should shrink away.
In a worse case, those people who are depending on the government and who would have nothing without the government are themselves sometimes so deluded by the idea that all government is bad and are so jaded by
the inconveniences of their first world lives that they too decry the idea of increased or consistent government involvement - not realizing that the common alternatives in these arguments are far less
appealing.
The government’s motivations are varied, if you put things under a microscope, but for the sake of simplicity their goal is “to remain the government.” We have built into our system various methods to demonstrate to those in power that they need not remain in power. We have a populace so bored and needy for conflict that the notion that
someone’s parents weren’t born in this country or gas costs 50 cents more than it did a few weeks ago is enough reason to assemble in the streets and threaten a revolution. Beyond that, the system of elections and political involvement makes it possible for any sufficiently motivated person or persons to make their influence felt.
Is this system perfect? No. Do we get lied to? Yes. But we still have freedom of speech and we still don’t have a clear alternative for a government more stable than the one we have while still being controlled by the people.
So what is the alternative offered by the people who cry for small government? Who takes over the tasks that, for my part, I believe the government should control? Well, the idea I find most repulsive is that of libertarianism. Private industry and the free market are proclaimed by far too many to have the efficiency and motivation to get things done. Well let me make the crux of my point painfully clear:
Being motivated by profit will not lead to keeping people safe.
How many examples do we need in the modern era before we understand what should be a simple concept? If someone controls a company and that company can make slightly more money by not helping, potentially harming or killing some number of people then that company will hurt, put at risk or kill those people. It happens all the time. The consequences of those actions very rarely if ever stop the person who got rich and who had the control from continuing to be rich.
The free market will fail to keep people safe again and again and again until it is made less free - until it is policed by someone not motivated by profit.
The government has people in it motivated by money. There is corruption, I concede this, but those people stand to lose something if they hurt the people. They stand to lose the power that let them get everything they have. People entering government know that by acting in a way that hurts their people they risk being kicked out of government. People entering a corporation, on the other hand, know that if they act in a way that increases profit they will be valued and allowed incredible leeway to hurt.
I mean, it’s so simple I don’t even know how to explain it to people who don’t seem to understand. A private industry has very little reason to even pretend to be altruistic, except to achieve tax cuts or to convince the people that they are worth trusting. They don’t exist to help people. They don’t exist to provide a service.
Companies exist to produce profit.
Governments exist because people want and need them to exist to avoid a state of anarchy. Sometimes the government makes choices that hurt the people, but at the end of the day the government is an organization given legitimacy by all of the people; the corporation is an organization given legitimacy by itself and by money. The
government is working to achieve greater levels of faith and happiness in their people - to secure those things its people want. The corporation has one end goal: money.
So why can’t Mr Stichka actually name the countries whose better forms of government provide for their citizens better than America’s. The truth is he has no clue. Bigger government hinders the freedoms and the order of Natural Selection that made this country the greatest in the history of civilization. I encourage him to travel the planet and live at the mercy of any other country’s health care system , or judicial system for that matter. He obviously has a problem with the self sufficient being successful..Being “motivated by profit” is how his employer pays him to maintain his particular level of comfort. If he happens to be self employed and providing jobs for others as I am then he can’t possibly be motivated to lose money or give his profits to those who will not work to provide his business the income necessary to continue. This country needs to wake up fast to the fact that our current administration is spending more money than any other in history and our debt is unsustainable. They can’t tax us enough to pay it off in a hundred years without leaving us all in the poor house and at the mercy of government ‘entitlements”. This is America, you should be entitled to nothing more than life liberty and the pursuit of happiness…..at your own expense, NOT MINE!
Tony Harrison, if you ever become injured and unable to work I trust that you will save us all the burden of supporting you and kill yourself. Also, should you ever have a child with a learning disability or terminal illness, I trust you will either kill the child by your own hands or will shut up and not burden us all when you can’t afford the care necessary to provide basic quality of life. After all, it wouldn’t be fair for anyone else to help you get through those difficulties.
exactly the tolerant compassionate answer i would expect to hear from a socialist/progressive type
remember…socialism is DIRECTLY resposible for the deaths of well over 100 million people world wide since it’s inception..socialism is really nothing new…it’s about a group of a few “elites” who think they know better than the average person about how to live thier own lives…
liberatarianism is really the way to go…i don’t personally agree 100% with it..but it’s the closest thing to natural law there is….socialists think they can defey natural law…it’s a silly and arrogant viewpoint
@Tony Harrison,
I think its funny that you say Stichka has no clue and call on him to go experience other health care systems before talking, but you obviously haven’t experienced other health care systems either. Ive spoken to many people who love their health care in other countries, such as Switzerland and Japan. The US has great potential for health care. Hawaii currently is rated as the best state for health care, but funnily enough 92% of the population there is supported by state government run health care. So much for socialized health care leading to death panels.
You seem to live in an idyllic fantasy where everything would be solved if we didnt have taxes or authority. You glorify “freedom” and treat it like the cure to all our problems. You seem to conveniently leave out the fact that my freedom might infringe on your freedom. What if my “pursuit of happiness” involved putting a bullet into your head so I can take your wallet? What if, in exercising my liberty to make as much profit as possible, I cut quality control expenses and sell tons of meat infected with salmonella? Sure, I might eventually get caught and punished, but not before many die and many more suffer.
If I am allowed to pursue my own goals to the furthest extent, I could end up harming many other people merely because I am exercising my own entitlement to my pursuit of happiness. Government is here to help. They were elected by the people to watch over us and to make sure society doesnt fall into chaos. Business, on the other hand, was created for the purpose of making profits. Yea, both have chances of becoming corrupted, but Ill take my chances with the organization that was actually made by the people for the people, since the alternative is the organization that was made by some guy who would squeeze the public for every dollar regardless of human consequences if it wasnt for government regulation stopping him.
Before you go off thinking Im some thrifty kid who just wants a free ride, my parents are doctors and my family is well into the highest tax bracket. If you love small government so much, maybe you should move to Somalia. Go ahead and exercise all your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness there - their “government” sure as hell wont stop you. Then again, government wont stop those pirates from exercising their liberty to kill you and your family for your belongings.
Wow, I’m glad to see that the debate has continued into the comments on my and Albert’s articles. I guess the whole point of this section of the FEED was to spark intellectual conversation amongst readers, and in that it has succeeded.
I wrote a response to Albert’s piece, but it was too long for comments on The FEED, so I uploaded it to my website. For those interested check it out at:
http://cumberlandlp.org/the-news/latest/124-response-to-albert-stichka.html
Now to address some of the points made in the comments above:
@Albert: You are still responding to libertarianism and actual arguments with faux arguments about killing sick babies and such. Your points are nonsensical. There are times in the past when families, communities, churches and nonprofit organizations pulled together to help the poor and to help people in hard times. Government growth in the United States (in the area of welfare) really didn’t appear until the 1930s, and has continued to ruin lives and skyrocket costs ever since. There are actual, principled, logical arguments to support your position that can be made (though I disagree with them), but your insistence on demonizing anyone who wants less government as hating poor people or not caring about the sick is utterly baseless.
@Steve: Thank you for pointing out to Albert that Socialism and socialistic ideas have been responsible for the deaths of well over 100 million people in just the last century alone. So, even if he’s right and companies don’t care about people, I’d take them any day over the Stalins, Lenins, Hitlers, Mussolinis, Maos, and Ches of the world of socialism. I don’t know of any company that has managed to kill even a fraction of that amount of people.
@The Truth: Couldn’t you have at least put your name on your comment? I know this debate is online and all, but it would somewhat contribute to the conversation’s legitimacy if you used your real name.
Anywho, your argument that people love their healthcare in other countries so it must be good is a baseless argument. Tony never said that socialized healthcare is bad because of death panels. He said that it is bad because massive entitlement spending is unsustainable. He’s right on that one. You mentioned Switzerland and Japan as too countries with great healthcare systems. Well, they just happen to also be two countries with massive debt loads and extremely shaky economies. Japan has been going through massive recessions for the past 10 years, and the Swiss are in hot water over there fiat debt holdings. Both of those countries are now looking to cut spending and are looking at their entitlement programs as places to do that, with healthcare at the forefront.
You also mischaracterize the libertarian idea of freedom and you also show very little understanding of basic business strategies. You and Albert both live in this fantasy world where the provider of your steak is out to get you or something. As a business, if I kill people with my product and the government doesn’t protect me from lawsuits, then I stand to lose far more than I gained from the sale of that product. The problem now is not that corporations are out to kill people, but that government limits the liability for such corporations and protects them by having them pay fines instead of being held really responsible for their actions. See my response to Albert for more.
I don’t care if your the child of space astronauts, doctors, a garbage man or Rick Astley… A bad economic and political philosophy is bad regardless of family status or background.
And about Somalia…. It never fails that big government advocates try to use Somalia as an example of anarchy. You read it on some blog or some website and regurgitate it.
Since Somalia got rid of their government in 1991 it has one of the fastest growing economies in that region and has seen a standard of living increase over neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia (both which have been trying out socialist-style mercantilism as economic systems. See: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/so.html) The warlords that have arose have done so precisely because of attempts by other clans to force the creation of new democratic governments where the majority ethnic group, or majority clan, can control smaller clans or ethnic groups by means of majority rule. When attempted, the majority usually goes on a massive killing spree of the minority groups, which causes the smaller clans to go to war.
That’s why we were there in the 90s, to help force a new government. And that’s why we were fought as well, because minority clans didn’t want to be subjugated by the group placed in power by the U.S.
In fact, many of the most brutal killings by warlords in Somalia have been by clans supported monetarily and with weapons supplied by the United States (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/world/americas/08iht-somalia.1930502.html?_r=1)
While customary law prevails in many parts of Somalia and has brought peace and increased trade to those areas, Somalis have to be constantly on the lookout for warlords supplied by the U.S. who want to slaughter everyone in their village in an effort to gain power. That’s not anarchy at work. That’s government-sponsored terrorism.
Somalia’s recent conflicts have been over their provisional government established in 2004 and their current provisional government. The problems in Somalia are the same as the problems in Afghanistan: You can’t force a central government upon a tribe/clan-based society.
@Tom Harrison: Thanks for the supportive comments. I would caution you on a few things though. 1) It’s not just President Obama’s administration that has done the massive spending. Bush did it, Clinton did it (though he balanced the budget with a Republican Congress), Bush I did it, and pretty much every other President. Even Reagan doubled the national debt during his administration.
I’d also warn you abou the natural selection mentality. I understand what you mean, but there is fine line between people needing to make it on their own and nature selecting the fittest. If you go the wrong way with that argument it leads back to Eugenics, a sick progressive left idea that I hope we can all agree is terrible.
Keep up the debate.
“@Steve: Thank you for pointing out to Albert that Socialism and socialistic ideas have been responsible for the deaths of well over 100 million people in just the last century alone. So, even if he’s right and companies don’t care about people, I’d take them any day over the Stalins, Lenins, Hitlers, Mussolinis, Maos, and Ches of the world of socialism. I don’t know of any company that has managed to kill even a fraction of that amount of people.”
For starters, socialism hasn’t killed anyone, just as guns don’t kill but the people pointing them and pulling the trigger do.
The British in a horrific act of terrorism firebombed Dresden killing a recently revised, 18,000-25,000 civilians mostly women and children. The revision was down from 500,000 which Nazi propaganda used to strike fear into the hearts of the German people and make them resolute in the fight least they be defeated by a group of people who have no qualms about firebombing, old people, women and children.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 240,000 civilians. It is estimated that about 120,000 were vaporized around ground zero and another 120,000 the horrible death from radiation over the next few, weeks, months, years. Now, that is a freaking act of terrorism for ya and it worked.
Churchill and Truman are not considered terrorists because We Won.
Prior to dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan, the US under the direction of General Curtis LeMay we firebombed 67 Japanese cities, killing an estimated 300,000 civilians. LeMay remarked to Robert McNamara, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
You see, right or wrong depends to whom you think you owe allegiance, a government, a religion, an economic system or humanity. If you think that you owe allegiance to any of the aforementioned other than humanity, they you will kill or support the killing of any who oppose or threaten your view.
If you think that you owe your allegiance to humanity then the killing of any other human being is wrong and cannot be tolerated because the only logical conclusion of thinking you owe allegiance to religion, government or economic system is we kill each other off. The US and Russia achieved it during the cold war it is known as mutual annihilation.
There is a way out.
“As a business, if I kill people with my product and the government doesn’t protect me from lawsuits, then I stand to lose far more than I gained from the sale of that product”
This has been untrue since the industrial revolution. I agree that corporations should be liable for crimes, but there was a decent stretch of history where they were and it didn’t keep them from killing people for profit or as the consequence of cost/benefit analysis.
I’m tired of this debate. I’m not participating anymore. I would like to point out, though, that Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao were not socialists. Che never ran a country. Stalin, Lenin, and Mao were Leninist Communists. Mussolini was fascist, and despite the name “National Socialism” Hitler’s brand of government was also fascism.
If you don’t laugh out loud at the invocation of these names in a discussion about modern socialism then you don’t have any business talking about socialism.
Libertarians are crazy and can’t hold an honest discussion. That was what I thought of them before this all started, and that’s all I’ve learned since.
I wish I could say “out b4 godwin’s” but I can’t. But it is the sign to abandon ship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
Huh. And here I thought Big Gummint and Big Bidness wuz the same thing.