i apologize if you think i’m focused on the roads. i’m not veering from the current thread discussion. look at what i wrote. “it takes two hands and coercion isn’t going to move the shovels”. That’s liberty in action! my view is people wake up in the morning and go to work. they desire to work the career paths they have chosen. some people like or dislike what they do, but no politician wakes ‘em up each morning and tells them to go deliver the milk, get the criminals, or put asphalt on the road. sure people find obligations in their jobs, they need food on the table and would like to keep their house - the incentives are basic, the government is what acts like the middle man making it look like they’re makin’ it all happen. the milkman and computer engineer are doin’ it - with their own two hands!
When was the last time he said something favorable about the government?
i havent heard him deny or decry anarchy. lots of anarchists use the constitution to show liberty minded statists (a strange but common breed) how far the USA has strayed from its supposedly noble and libertarian ideals, yet using this rhetorical technique does not necessarilly imply that they believe the consitution to have authority. I think Woods, DiLorenzo and Ron Paul are examples of this. and maybe Schiff … of course I could be wrong about these individuals, but I think I’ve made my point that small government rhetoric does not entail that the proclaimer is not an anarchist. the smallest government is zero sized after all…
he’s running for the Senate office in Connecticut, i believe, but i don’t know if it’s official or not. yet some people believe they can worm into the system covertly and use the Constitution as their fallback so the average Bob and Jane don’t go runnin’ the other way. i don’t know if he would go all the way - touchdown[:P] - but he definitely wants to scale back the government, get it out of the economy, and affirm the Constitution again. He’s all for liberty. if he mentions the Amendments about succession and affirms those, like Ron P. does, then of course he’s for walking away from the beast and towards what! i think he’s an intelligent person and would think things through first. but to give a more black and white answer - i don’t know.
i wrote my post while you were writing yours[:P]
…liberty race
Well I hadn’t thought it though in any great detail, but I figured that if there are 1.1 million firefighters now then 150,000 for the total of all government workers seemed a little on the low side.
The government is inefficient as it is. Why should we give it more resources? If a plumber did a bad job cleaning your pipes, would you give him more money?
Why do you insist on planning our lives! As I asked you before since you’re thinking along these lines - Can I have a 20x20 swimming pool in this central plan of yours?
mickanomics, you assume a minarchist state would leave fighting fires to the government. You can make a case for the court system and the police, but beyond that is turf where the private sector has proven its ability.
No. Henry Hazlitt suggests leaving fighting fires to the government.
well he is wrong about that being a good suggestion, but even so, in Economics in One Lesson he writes “In the railroad industry, the unions insist that firemen be employed on types of locomotives that do not need them” this implies a resource misallocation doesnt it?
I don’t understand how anything I’ve said in this thread leads you to believe that I want responsibility to make the decision about whether or not you get your swimming pool. If this relates to a different thread then post there not here.
the swimming pool is analgous to a hydrant
That’s fine. The object of this thread was just to discover who thinks what, not the merits of what they think.
Is there a typo there? The grammar seems strange. What page is that, I can check it myself.
You are suffering a cognitive abberation. Individualist philosophies are unsuprisingly not dependent on hero-worship.
What are you trying to say? Maybe Hazlitt was being inconsistent? It sounds to me that he was just complaining that unions were bad. That’s not the same as saying that he thought public firefighters were bad.
In reply to several posts.
This thread was never intended to be “what % of GDP should be spent on public service provision” merely “what % of GDP did the guys in the list think should be spent on public service provision”.
it means if there are a dozen firefighters in a town and one of them is riding a train that doesnt need him because thats where union influence put them, then the headcount for the fire service can be dropped without reducing cover. ergo. lower percentage of spending. He was telling you that the fireservice is bloated and could be scaled back.