I’d like to hear your opinion about some things. Please read the scenarios below and answer the following questions for each scenario:
A. Should the court find the business guilty?
B. Should the government regulate the behavior of the business in order to clarify what is expected from the business?
A costumer wants to end the contract with a cellular company but the cellular company keeps him waiting for a few weeks each time giving excuses, offering additional deals, and doing everything possible not to end the service.
A customer pays a construction company to build a house. A month later the roof topples but doesn’t hurt anyone.
well, being an anarchist, it is safe to say that choice B is eliminated as an option…
A contract is a contract, if you do not want to deal with the additional fees because you break the contract, then do not sign the contract to begin with.
2)This is clearly a court case sitiuation, even in a government society, this would be left to the courts to decide.
[quote=“Isaac “Izzy” Marmolejo”]
well, being an anarchist, it is safe to say that choice B is eliminated as an option…
A contract is a contract, if you do not want to deal with the additional fees because you break the contract, then do not sign the contract to begin with.
2)This is clearly a court case sitiuation, even in a government society, this would be left to the courts to decide.
3)Again, this is a court matter
[/quote]
In regards to the courts, he’s asking whether the business should be found guilty. Although I suppose it can change situationally.
In the case of roof toppling, is that really something that should be specified in the contract? I think that’s a natural expectation that the roof will not come crashing down. But what if it was after a year or after 10 years? How can the construction company know what is expected from them? Shouldn’t it be regulated?
In case of food poisoning. What if the restaurant had horrible sanitary conditions? Shouldn’t they be punished? On the other hand it is unfair to punish a restaurant for food poisoning if they did keep sanitary conditions. But how can the restaurant know which sanitary conditions are enough in order not to be liable for food poisoning. Shouldn’t it be regulated?
About the cellular company giving you a hard time when you want to quit. How much would be considered a “hard time”? If you had to wait two weeks until they got back to you, would that be considered illegal behavior? What is the exact number? Isn’t it unfair not to tell the companies what is the number of days in which they have to get back to the customer if he wanted to be cut off from the service? After all the cellular company has the right to know whether it will be liable in court or not beforehand.
How can a company know whats expected from them? by the market, there is competition and if they want to stay in business, they have to meet the market demands or else they will go out of business. So there is no need for regulation…regulation will only make things worse in the long run…
Again, if businesses do not meet up with the market demands, they will quickly go out of business. If they have unsanitary conditions and you have proof, take them to court. The courts would determine what requirements are necessary in order for sanitary and unsanitary conditions. Thus, there is no need for regulation.
Why should unelected judges choose what is sanitary and what is not. Why not give parliament that power? And as I said individuals should know BEFOREHAND what is considered sanitary and what not, I think it is fair.
Individuals can know beforehand if they wanted by requesting reviews on the restaurant, right? why do you need government to do that job for you? Why should unelected judges choose? because they are working for the market, public elected judges work for the State… BIG difference. The market never fails, once people get that point across, things will be much easier to explain. Also, would say the the free market is more fair than a State’s mixed market…
What I mean is that restaurants should know beforehand how sanitary they should keep their kitchen in order not to be later liable in court in case of food poisoning. To know that beforehand you need specific laws, not court decisions.
of course they need laws… do you think anarchy is anti-law or something? The whole purpose of courts are to obtain laws in society, so there has to be a set in stone law, and that set in stone law is the Non Aggreesion Principal…
Eugene, you do know that common sense usually reigns supreme unless there are statutes overriding it, right? Heck, even if we assume strict liability, the restaurant wouldn’t be responsible if they can prove the food was contaminated elsewhere.
If the construction company covered it, the construction job would cost more. If they didn’t cover it, you could buy insurance. Your insurance company would likely take into account what construction company you are using and the data on that particular company. If they are a poor construction company, insurance would cost a lot. If they are not an experienced company, insurance would cost even more.
If a restaurant is making people sick, welcome to the wonderful world of journalism. A bad news story on sanitation could be a knock-out punch to a restaurant. I’ve seen it happen several times in my city. My dad owns a restaurant and health inspectors are very harsh because it creates higher demand for their services. This is how it works publicly and privately. Keeping the place clean is > risking bad publicity.
If the cellular company is intentionally making you wait, you threaten (if that’s the right word) to charge them with fraud and they will likely cease. You don’t even have to threaten them. If you took them to court, 10 days of giving you a hard time would cost them at least twice as much as 5 days. 20 days would cost them at least twice as much as 10 days. They wouldn’t make enough off of trying to shake a little more change from their gullible customers than they would by providing better service than competitors.
I suspect Eugene implies, that government rgulations actually work.. but they don’t. Some of them maybe have short term effect. That’s what people see. But forget the unseen consequences. And there are much more to it.
Regulations simply slows and dumbs down the market. It’s like regulating what shoes people must wear, making some fashion standard and enforcing it. What is poison (or disgusting) for some people isn’t necessarily poison (or disgusting) for other people.
Two things. One, there is no way to prove that food poisoning is caused by eating a specific food at a specific point in time. If you make the restaurant liable for food poisoning, how do you plan to ensure that it was due to the restaurant’s food, i.e. you are punishing the right restaurant? Let’s say someone only ate 1 meal the entire day and it was pretty obvious that it was from a particular restaurant. Who is going to be the food poisoning police that verify that someone indeed ate one meal and it was at that restaurant. Do you see how impractical this idea is?
Two, in regards to “horrible sanitary conditions,” who exactly decides what these conditions are for every store that exists? The market is absolutely capable of demanding a certain level of cleanliness and a level of transparency to that cleanliness, with no government regulation.
Two things. One, the terms of termination can be easily determined in a contract. Two, if this exact scenario were to play out, this particular cell phone company would likely lose a lot of their client base and it would become advantageous for other providers to offer easy termination contracts. The market would correct this problem before you ever had the chance to enact any regulation that would attempt to “solve” this problem.
The question to me isn’t whether regulations but whence regulations. Also there’s the question of who is expecting what from the construction company.
Explain what you mean by “punished”, please. Otherwise, again there’s the question of who is expecting what from the restaurant.
For a third time, there’s the question of who is expecting what from the cell-phone company.
You seem to be arguing for the one-size-fits-all regulations we labor under today. Why is that? Aren’t you aware how contextually different situations can be from one another?
If history is any guide, parliament simply delegates that power to unelected bureaucrats. But why the emphasis on “unelected” in the first place? Even in such bastions of legal positivism as the US, judges (by and large) still try to find precedents in existing law, even if they’re only analogous precedents.
Are you implying that individuals cannot be entrusted to make such determinations on their own? If so, why can’t they? And can you explain to us your notion of “fairness”?
The problem as I see it that implied contracts, or in other words expectations, are indeed different in every community. For example an Israeli Arab will not necessarily expect that a roof will not collapse after one month, but a Jew living in northern Tel-Aviv definitely would. But is it fair for the business in each community to have no reference, no guidelines as to what is expected in that community and what can easily turn into a conviction in court? That’s where I think local and even federal regulations might be warranted.
Think of a restaurant opening in some neighborhood. There are many costs that need to be taken into account. How well should the kitchen be cleaned? Should the cooks wear special hats? Under what circumstances the cooks should wash their hands? Each such sanitary decision reduces the probability that the customers will get food poisoning, but each such decision also costs money. A restaurant owner might decide to ignore all sanitary precautions in order to cut prices. That might be a very bad business decision, but people make bad decisions. Such decision will dramatically increase the probability of food poisoning. In poor neighborhoods where the people expect poor sanitary conditions I don’t think the restaurant owner should be liable in court for food poisoning. But in a rich neighborhood where no one expects to get a food poisoning from a restaurant, a restaurant with no sanitary conditions is defrauding the customers. But who is to tell what are the conventions in each neighborhood? If the restaurant owner wants to do everything possible in order not to be later convicted in a court, how will he know what to do? Who is better to provide such guidelines than the local legislative authorities?
You might say that private regulating companies would be the best to provide these guidelines and keep the businesses complying, and I agree that they are needed for most regulations. But some things are just common sense. For example it should be common sense for the restaurant to clean its kitchen, especially in a rich neighborhood. Do we really want people to ignore all common sense and require free market regulators in every possible human interaction? On the other hand common sense is not always common, and people should be able to have a reference of what are the common conventions in a particular neighborhood.