<When the Big Government BorrowAndSpenders do their concentration camps and Patriot Acts, you make a tactical alliance with the Peace Party.>
Jacob, it's Libertarian and Liberal to say that people shouldn't be incarcerated without habeas corpus, legal trial.
<The problem with the Libertarians is, their ideas have already been tried, and few people liked the results. >
That's the problem with democracy, not Libertarians. Most people like suppression, confiscation and dominance hierarchies. That's because people are basically chimps on steroids. Maybe they weren't really Libertarian ideas.
<The one exception to your otherwise consistent Libertarianism, is your NewUN idea, >
Whoa there. Having a NUN isn't anti-Libertarian. At the moment, rabid nation states can destroy individuals and confiscate their property. A NUN would ameliorate the ability of the likes of Saddam to attack people. I'm not advocating a gigantic bureaucratic Soviet Union type NUN. I'm looking for a Libertarian style NUN with protection of people and their property and their self-determination.
<The Europeans recognize that even France and Germany are too small, and only a pan-European entity can take on monsters like Microsoft and Monsanto, with any hope of ameliorating their predations. >
I used to work for BP Oil, which is as big as it gets. It's funny to me that you write of predations. The predators were in the European Union. The EU Environment Commission was funny because in the meeting I attended in Bruxelles, nearly all of them smoked. They have their noses deep in the taxpayer's trough. They create more and more and more regulations which are not helping the quality of life of citizens.
In particular, they wanted to have a European-wide diesel specification, which was my area in BP. I was arguing for a multiplicity of specifications but they, being big bureaucrats, wanted the Kremlin solution = a single specification, one size fits all, 5 year plan. What they should have been doing they weren't doing. I was promoting environmental protection by improved specifications. They were opposing me, going for the lowest common denominator. I said northern cities in winter needed vastly different diesel fuel from southern long distance truckers in summer. Without getting into the technicalities, every diesel user needs their own fuel specification depending on the particular conditions at the time, but of course the cost of producing and delivering individually-tailored fuel means some compromises are needed or the fuel would be too expensive.
All the power rests with governments. Corporations have no police, law, electorate, military, human rights and are completely at the mercy of the smallest government. All a corporation can do is withdraw their services.
Even the pathetic NZ government jerked BP around any way they liked. I used to set fuel specifications for New Zealand as well as doing a LOT of other things. The government decided they wanted to get in on the act and created a bureaucracy which created 20 times the work. Then, when they had control, they didn't do anything much to improve environmental matters, which is the one thing they should do and which I had been trying to get them to do.
For example, allowing lead in petrol was insane. It took many years for them to finally get around to reducing it and banning it. Similarly, there was no benzene control on NZ petrol and I introduced it for no reason other than I did not want to be responsible for people getting myeloid leukaemia and the cost of control at 5%mass was low.
The government should have controlled public health and environmental aspects of fuel specifications, but when they finally stopped lead being included, they didn't do what I'd been advocating and simultaneously control the aromatics content of petrol. By this time I had been 5 or 6 years out of BP, but had been writing very detailed advice [for no pay] on what should be done and what would happen if they messed up.
I bought the very first unleaded premium petrol at Mobil in Newmarket and told them they were going to get trouble, based just on the smell of the stuff, which was obviously full of poor quality components to get the octane number required, but on the cheap. Sure enough, fuel systems leaked and there was a big stink.
I got into a 'discussion' with BP on tv, [Holmes Show] and I was contacted by Ailsa Duffy who I subsequently found was a lawyer and a QC no less and whose brief was obviously to nail me if possible. It was me and public interest versus the dopey State and Big Oil. I won. They even went the extra mile, which I'd been promoting during that period, of introducing a good quality 98 octane petrol.
Big Business is fine, if stupid. Big Government is the problem and invariably stupid. Look at King George II and his latest lame comments on WMD and what it means in regard to pre-emptive self defence.
Big business is for the most part like a blundering dinosaur. Quick little hot-blooded mammals can out manoeuvre them easily. Notice that few big businesses remain pre-eminent for long. IBM in the early 1980s was a monster deserving anti-trust action. It's still a large company, but nobody thinks they rule the world. General Motors was huge and almost represented the USA. QUALCOMM is now much bigger and few have heard of them. Yet.
Mqurice
PS: In case you were wondering, I, or BP, couldn't have just left the lead out of petrol because the cost of the product would have meant huge market share loss. It was up to government to ban the stuff. If BP left it out and advertized less toxic petrol, most people would just save 5c a litre and buy petrol from Mobil or Shell. Interestingly, market research showed women [generally] were willing to pay more money for less harmful petrol. Males wanted it cheap. That figures - guys would live under a sack under a hedge if it wasn't for women.
In the USA, citizens could sue the lead sellers for damaging their brains [which did happen to the tune of about 0.25 IQ points]. Nobody did, though they should have and probably still could. I argued with BP after they bought Sohio that they should beware of Exxon Valdez size law-suits as they were now an American company too. That would have been another approach to getting lead out of petrol. A law suit could have ended the company. |
