Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

...that is the shit job you want to hold up as a testament to voluntaryism? If those stairs survive the winter, I'll be quite surprised, among other issues like lack of non-skid, that weird gap on the top landing, no foundation, stringers too close together with too much overhang, etc etc. I'd bet a lot he didn't build them to code, and thus he's opened the city and himself up to liability when someone slips and gets injured on them. I wonder if he'd still feel it was worth it if he gets hit with a lawsuit.

Sure, $65k for a set of stairs is high, but this job swung too far to the other side and will have to be redone. That's not a fault of big government, but bad government.
 
PelicanHazard said:
I'd bet a lot he didn't build them to code, and thus he's opened the city and himself up to liability when someone slips and gets injured on them. I wonder if he'd still feel it was worth it if he gets hit with a lawsuit.
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Ah, yes - we need big government to protect us from big government. Excellent!


PelicanHazard said:
Sure, $65k for a set of stairs is high, but this job swung too far to the other side and will have to be redone. That's not a fault of big government, but bad government.
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Big government IS bad government. That $65k tab probably includes a construction supervisor, police detail, countless permits, worker's comp, an impact study, signatures from the board of health and parks department (along with their inspections), and of course the work would be done with union labor. Really what you need is a guy with some hand tools and some experience (so he doesn't build quite that thing) but no, big government can't allow any form of self-help - much better to leave a dangerous slippery hill for several years while all of the studies are done and permits pulled before spending SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS on a freaking wooden staircase.
 
Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

Aren't union workers the same thing as just some experienced workers? Sure, they ask for far too much pay but, at least it eventually gets done. The problem is the over charging "because it's the government."

And when somebody does get hurt on the steps because instagram is more important, you know the city will go back and say "well, we didn't build it" and that dude with be sued or fined to hell and back as a giant fuck you.
 
LeVeL said:
Ah, yes - we need big government to protect us from big government. Excellent!
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Even you libertarian idiots generally acknowledge the need for a court system to settle disputes. Do you think people wouldn't sue under voluntaryism? What happens if someone is injured while using the stairs, can they distinguish between a simple accident and a malicious and therefore NAP-violating booby trap?

There's useless codes like lawn height in an HOA, but there are codes that exist for a good reason. This guy didn't follow them, which opens both the city and him (or just the city when the guy dies) to liability that isn't there if there's no structure.

LeVeL said:
Big government IS bad government. That $65k tab probably includes a construction supervisor, police detail, countless permits, worker's comp, an impact study, signatures from the board of health and parks department (along with their inspections), and of course the work would be done with union labor. Really what you need is a guy with some hand tools and some experience (so he doesn't build quite that thing) but no, big government can't allow any form of self-help - much better to leave a dangerous slippery hill for several years while all of the studies are done and permits pulled before spending SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS on a freaking wooden staircase.
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No, bad government is bad government. Imagine the US was your perfect little libertarian utopia that mostly handled national defense. Then suppose this little government decided on a defense project and bungled it like the F-35, changing scope, redesigns, bad testing, etc. Do you give it a pass on the overspending just because the government is the size you want it to be?

As everyone, including the city councilors have said, the estimate is too high. But you only heard of it because of that and because it took too long to put them in; if the exact same "big bad" government had put in a set of stairs under a reasonable estimate in a reasonable time, it would never have made the news.
 
PelicanHazard said:
Even you libertarian idiots generally acknowledge the need for a court system to settle disputes. Do you think people wouldn't sue under voluntaryism?
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Imagine the US was your perfect little libertarian utopia that mostly handled national defense.
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Yeah because clearly I'm an anarchist :rolleyes:

There's a very wide range of libertarians, some of who do border on anarchy. I'm not one of them. I'm simply of the belief that our government is way, way too big these days and we have way, way too much regulation. For fuck's sake, we have cops shutting down kids' lemonade stands!
 
I guess we know where PelicanHazard falls on the political compass...

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:p
 
Not as silly as that 8values test, I think, that one said I was Neo-liberal when I took it last month.

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LeVeL said:
Yeah because clearly I'm an anarchist :rolleyes:

There's a very wide range of libertarians, some of who do border on anarchy. I'm not one of them. I'm simply of the belief that our government is way, way too big these days and we have way, way too much regulation.
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Never called you one. But I do take interest that you responded only to this and left the other points alone.

LeVeL said:
For fuck's sake, we have cops shutting down kids' lemonade stands!
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Again, bad government, not big government. If the only government service was a minimal police force and they shut down the kids' lemonade stand, your complaint would still stand regardless of the government's size.

TC said:
I guess we know where PelicanHazard falls on the political compass... :p
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I stayed put; you yanked the compass down and to the right :p

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PelicanHazard said:
Never called you one. But I do take interest that you responded only to this and left the other points alone.
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What specifically would you like me to respond to?



PelicanHazard said:
Again, bad government, not big government. If the only government service was a minimal police force and they shut down the kids' lemonade stand, your complaint would still stand regardless of the government's size.
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My point is that shit like that goes hand in hand with big government. How useless have our legislators become if they're going after lemonade stands? What, no other problems to solve, we've run out of issues? But no, they just have to stick their hands into absolutely everything.
 
I get the feeling that wanting some government control and some red tape is directly interpreted as wanting ALL THE GOVERNMENT and no more free enterprises. I think it's important to find the right balance and quite frankly, that's hard and we can all come up with plenty of examples where this produces bad results - one way or the other. But these bad examples don't mean one has to run even harder into one direction (metaphorically) - that won't equal the (again, metaphorical) scales, that will just make them swing and tip harder.
 
Interrobang said:
I get the feeling that wanting some government control and some red tape is directly interpreted as wanting NO GOVERNMENT and unlimited free enterprises.
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FIFY.

Look, I think we can all agree that we do need government, right? It's just that some of us value individual freedom and responsibility a lot more than others. Ironically, the Democrats and the Republicans support some freedoms but not others, so neither side truly supports individual freedom as a general concept and they only do so selectively when it happens to fit their beliefs and values. That's the attraction of the libertarians to me - they don't pick and choose, they just believe in individual freedom as a principle; you don't have to "get" gay marriage, be comfortable with trannies, or agree with drug use - you just have to accept that other people are free to do all those things whether or not you find them morally acceptable, and they need to do the same if they dislike your guns or confederate flag.

What's that meme? I just want married gay couples to be able to use machine guns to protect their weed plants? But no, the left just has to bitch about icky guns and the right has to complain about butt seks and plants.
 
Did I miss something? Where do you all get those compass results?
 
PelicanHazard said:
Again, bad government, not big government. If the only government service was a minimal police force and they shut down the kids' lemonade stand, your complaint would still stand regardless of the government's size.
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In regards to big government, it has little to do with physical size, but rather the amount of authority they have over our lives. Now of course the more authority they grant themselves, the more people they're going to need to enforce that authority, and that will cost a lot of money, which increases taxes, etc. But it's still the amount of authority that is the problem. And it's why people get mad when they see the government interfering in our lives in pointless ways over pointless things. They have too much authority. Just like they had too much authority over what you do in your bedroom, for example, and they needed to be taken down a peg.

The reason the government tried to dictate what you could do in your bedroom is because they got too big, too much authority over too many things, it wasn't because they had legitimate authority over your bedroom but they made a few bad decisions over it.

There are some things government should not have any authority over, but when you have people who believe the government should have authority over everything, for our own protection, that is how you end up with a bloated overreaching government. That is how you end up with lemonade stands getting shut down by cops. That is how you get sodomy laws.

At least that is my stupid libertarian view of things.
 
LeVeL said:
What specifically would you like me to respond to?
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Whatever you want to, but I was honestly a bit surprised not to see you reassert the big bad point like you did below.

oh damn, lots of responses while I was distracted.
 
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I found some questions to be misleading, there were a few where answer shoulda been "neutral" for example
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LeVeL said:
FIFY.

Look, I think we can all agree that we do need government, right?
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I don't, I think all government inevitably becomes a tyranny in order to justify it's own existence.
 
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