I was watching the C-span Ron Paul interview and this guy called in and said if you want to deregulate then deregulate the roads take away the stop signs, red lights, and lines on the road. This is of course a red herring argument. I just wish there was an easy way to counter this argument.
I would say traffic codes are management of property, and different then regulating commerce. Also would think arguing that the price system is like the traffic signs in the markets, and if the government interferes with this it would be the equivalent to removing stop signs and red lights.
There just not really a good quick counter too this ignorant argument.
Deregulation can be smartly applied, similar to how deregulation and privatization in infrastucture can be beneficial. More regulation in a recession, is like trying to prevent traffic accidents by installing speed bumbs everywhere.
Just being pedantic here but I think that the argument is a reductio ad absurdum that just sucks because it is factually, but not logically, incorrect.
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Why not say that if he wants to regulate then why not regulate everything and have everyone chained down to floor or something?
That guy was one of those moron democrats who don’t know that the Dems have been the majority for the last two years of Bush, and that Obama voted for most Bush policy.
The biggest mistake of the Bush era, was that it allowed many people to frame the right and libertarians as being Bushies, and that Bush was pro-deregulation and free markets.
That’s basically the intellectual and emotional fallacy Kevin Carson and Roderick Long play to as well. Hence why so many of us are vulgar libertarians, if we don’t condemn any business model above home-work artisan.
You can always present our argument from the other end. We are for regulation. In fact we are in favour of massive amounts of regulation. We just don`t want the regulation applied on us by the government. Instead we want to apply regulation on the government. And we want such crippling amounts of regulation that government would find itself unable to do anything at all.
This way, having a giant unregulated government is just chaos. We should regulate it. Bring back the government in “government regulation”.
It doesn’t hold up logically either. He’s comparing the public sector to the private sector. The reason that regulation is unnecessary in the private sector is because of competition. There is no competition in the roads though, it’s a monopoly. If the government decides to do something with the roads that you don’t like, you don’t have an alternative. There’s no way for the public sector to self-regulate, so as it stands, the government actually has to regulate it.