Police Stop, Handcuff Every Adult at Intersection in Search for Bank Robber

[bloomj31]

@mmmark

I think you’ve missed the point, which is: The government road-and-copopoly cannot calculate costs, consumer wants, and the most efficient use of resources, nor does it have any incentive to even try. Taxpayers, forced to pay for the road/copopoly whether or not they like it, even whether or not they use it, have no effective way of expressing their values or punishing the monopoly. Sure, they can protest or “vote,” but that won’t change the behavior of the monopoly, nor will it compensate the hapless motorists for the two hours (and associated opportunity costs) they can never recoup.

I understand the economics involved I just see no reason why I should value two hours of someone else’s time over potentially catching a criminal. Napalming them all seems excessive but handcuffing them for a few hours is something I can live with. Particularly if they actually got the guy. If they didn’t then that would change things too. To me catching the criminal matters more than potentially wasting two hours time of people I couldn’t care less about. Perhaps if I’d been detained for two hours or something I’d be more inclined to care but it didn’t happen to me it happened to people I care nothing for nor have any reason to care for. Perhaps if this were happening more frequently I might care more but I see no reason to think this was an example of an ordinary practice. Additionally, as far as I can tell, the law does not require me to care for them either unless their constitutional rights were violated in which case I would investigate the legal reasoning behind such a claim. As far as I can tell no such claim has been put forth yet.

I also don’t care about the plight of the people who wish there were more liberty in this society but simply cannot seem to make it happen. If they don’t like it they can leave. If they choose not to leave they can take their grievances to the legal system. If they find no satisfactory recompense through the legal system then, as far as I’m concerned, their case is closed. The only thing they can then do is complain to people and hope someone listens. I probably won’t be one of those people. If you choose to live in this country, you choose to live by its laws. If you don’t like it go away. If you don’t go away then you understand that it’s theoretically possible that you might be detained against your will for two hours.

@clayton

The whole point is that consumers matter

Consumers seem to “matter” insofar as their preferences provide a method of calculation for the proper distribution of goods throughout an economic system, assuming that one cares about properly allocating resources throughout a given economic system and also assuming that such proper allocation is weighted more heavily than other possible goals in one’s moral considerations. Consumers matter to you more than they matter to me because I have other priorities than just properly allocating resources within our economic system.

@clayton

But the fact is that there are laws of morality because there are laws of human nature.

The only law of human nature that would seem to apply here is the universal understanding that if it can be done to them it can be done to me. There is a sort of possible reciprocality at work here that one must recognize. However I cannot say that I would not be willing to trade two hours of my time if it meant that a criminal might be caught particularly if such a situation only occurs occasionally. There are ofcourse other possible considerations that might lead me to weigh such a trade differently but no such information was presented in the article that would cause me to do so.