Hugo

You are very mistaken about the relationship between cost and price since they do not have one at all. Cost is the sacrifice made to produce an item, the price is what another will freely relinquish in order to possess it. Consider that if you built a car like a Ford Focus, it would cost maybe $100,000 since you don't have the mass production of Ford, but you will not sell it for more than $15,000 since nobody would pay more than that for a car that they consider to be worth $15,000. However, a Ford Focus built by Ford will cost them $10,000 to build and will also be priced at $15,000. If what you say is true, then build me a Ford Focus in your own garage. You should be able to sell it for more than what it costs to build. Perhaps $110,000. Your idea reminds me of when Homer Simpson happens upon a crashed sugar truck and decides to bag it and sell it for five dollars a bag (or so). Marge points out that the grocery store is selling them for 50 cents a bag, and they don't have broken glass and bits of metal in them. Homer made the same mistake you did. The price mechanism is actually an information relay. The car manufacturer does not know the intricate details of all the thousands of people and processes that went into his raw materials, equipment and tools, and he does not have to since the prices of these items convey all the information he needs, as they also convey information on his needs and desires back to the people who make those things. Public industry does not have the price mechanism, so it has to gather all this information another way, and since the price mechanism is the best way yet known to do this it becomes inefficient relative to the free market. Besides, you are refuting your own argument. You earlier said that Wal-Mart deliberately prices goods below cost, but you have just said that price and cost are related, so how could this be? Televisions have today a myriad features that were not present in early television sets, so how can the cost of televisions have decreased since the 1930s? According to you a television should cost $40,000 today. No, you couldn't. At least you couldn't give one that wasn't either directly provided or heavily regulated by the government. If you can, by all means, do. But I asked you to last post and all I got was a promise that you could. Well, Eureka, I can "promise" you that I could fly around this room if I wanted to. Delegating administration? I delegate administration of my garden to a landscaper. Is the landscaper my government? You are going to have to accept my definition of government. All your various definitions have too many silly examples that fit them perfectly. Reminds of of a story. Plato (I think) was asked to define man. He said it was a hairless, featherless biped. The next day a student brought in a plucked chicken and said, "Here is Plato's man!" Yes, I'm sure they would. Oh, and I just flew around this room. You couldn't see it because we're hundreds of miles apart. Sorry. How would you interpret this passage? You seem to be saying that the profit motive can only exist in an industry where government makes the goods universally available, or that better profit motives in such industries make their advancement faster than in markets without intervention. This, of course, is a nonsense. I'm also still waiting for an explanation on how so many goods and services have become universally accessible without government provision. Were you hoping I'd forget?

Michael asked me some questions that I answered. You didn't have to read them since they weren't addressed to you. You can feel free to ignore my anarchism and focus purely on economic matters. I suspect you don't because you feel that anarchism gives you a red herring with which you can derail the discussion since you are so obviously losing. No, actually government is an organization that monopolizes law and justice within a geographic area. 'Recognized authority' takes many forms, like a boss, a priest, a god, a mediator, a psychiatrist, a doctor, whatever. I don't think we would call a priest or a doctor "government". This cannot be true because public insurance lacks the price mechanism through which economic information can be communicated. Because it lacks this mechanism, a public institution has very imperfect information which destroys all possibility of an efficient outcome. That argument means that, if correct, planned economies must be better than free markets, because the Soviet Union had trains and the free markets of 18th Century America only had horses. Of course healthcare almost a century ago was rudimentary. Public provision did not change that. My illustration shows that since the state began to provide healthcare the cost has skyrocketed. You get a cigar if you can name me one single private industry where the prices of its products have increased in the same way. Heck, I'll give you the cigar if you can find one where the price has increased 1% of the increase in healthcare price in the same period. Medieval Iceland and Holy Experiment Pennsylvania are historical examples of anarchism. Societies that were very close to being anarchist include Anglo-Saxon Britain, and modern Somalia. There are more, but I would have to go look them up, and as you aren't seriously interested in learning anything I see no point in doing that. Perhaps by your definition, but as we've seen, your definition means that parents, priests, bosses, bankers, lawyers etc. are "government", so that just demonstrates how invalid your definition is. Seventy years ago, bananas were a luxury item affordable only by the affluent. Now anybody can get as much bananas as they could possibly consume. Even though bananas are extremely cheap, if you wanted to you could even find free bananas in many places. In fact, people in Canada who can't even get "universal" healthcare can still get bananas. Show me the state-run universal banana programme that made this possible, please. Most of the advances in medicine were for profit and private enterprise. Note that the private effort to map the human genome quickly outstripped the international government-funded effort to do so, for instance. Inoculation and vaccination, anaesthetic, antisepsis, and surgical technique are a few more examples of crucially important medical developments made by private individuals acting without the state.

No, Michael, I am saying that private healthcare was actually supplied for $9 per family per year. You don't have to wonder about whether or not it was possible any more than you have to wonder if it was possible for American colonials to secede from British rule by 1783. Is it possible now, after almost a century of government intervention, price-fixing and public ownership? Who knows? You can't roll back time and you can't undo the terrible damage that government did to the healthcare system. If it reverted to a free market, I would expect that prices would reach this level again eventually. It might take as much as several centuries to undo the damage that socialism has done, however. Initially, prices might actually go up because of the necessity to do things like pay off the massive debts that government builds up, modernize aging and obsolete equipment, attract more medical personnel and so forth. But this is a short-term problem that will solve itself. The free market is wonderfully self-correcting. No, it's from Murray Rothbard, and was also furthered by David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman). Much as the USA came into being. If you engender a culture of liberty you can make it possible. The problem is that anarchy in a state is a public goods problem. This, conversely, is also the reason why states tend not to arise again after anarchy is achieved: in anarchy, creating a state is a public goods problem. None! As I said, government does not arise again because of the public goods problem it presents. All historical examples of anarchist societies have been ended by foreign invasion. As to organized crime, we might ask how statism prevents the rise of organized crime! Short answer: it doesn't. Note that organized crime is closely linked to economic activity that is banned by the state: drugs, prostitution, gambling etc. In the libertarian society these things would not be banned, since there is no such things as crimes against society and any free trade is legal. Therefore, there's not much for organized crime to do except petty theft, and that would be hard against the private police forces, who will be much better than state police forces because they have to serve consumers rather than themselves. Note, for instance, that before Robert Peel introduced the first police force in London policing was done privately. Moreover, after the state police were introduced the crime rate did not actually drop at all. Evidently the state police were absolutely no improvement on the private police.

We already had one of those, it's here. You could resurrect it if you want.

Alright, but after I do this I expect that you will prove at least some of what you have said. Firstly, that goods provided by the state can be provided by the free market at better quality and cheaper cost. It's not hard to prove this. Looking at the example of healthcare it's difficult to find a modern country that actually practices private medicine. However, going back to the USA in the 1920s and before, medicine was truly private at that point and full medical coverage cost from $1 per year (Mutual Aid to Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, and Thy Brother's Keeper, Policy Review, Fall 1994, p. 56., David Beito). Therefore, from approximately $9 per year in 1920 (in 2003 US dollars), the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed to $4,270 per year. This is massively in excess of inflation. Consider too that the $1 per year also usually covered a family, so for a typical two-child family we are looking at annual costs of $9 in 1920 against over $17,000 in 2003! If you were to argue that this is because of new technologies and medical advancements since 1920, this should have had the opposite effect. In all other fields - cars, computers, foodstuffs, or anything else - technology has the effect of lowering costs. Furthermore, the cost of healthcare since 1920 should also have decreased since we now have more food of better quality, live in less crowded conditions, have by-and-large moved away from heavily polluted inner cities, replaced polluting heavy industry with cleaner industries, and so forth. The only explanation is that the massive inefficiencies of state intervention have caused massive increases in the cost of healthcare. Another example would be schooling, when in the USA the literacy rate actually dropped after private schools were abolished and state schools mandated. It took many years to get back to the level achieved solely by private schooling. Second, that socialists no longer claim that a planned economy can be as efficient as a free market. Well, it's hard to dispute the facts, so unless they want to look like idiots socialists have to modify their views. I have discussed this matter with two left-wingers on this board in recent months and both have opined that the free market offers greater efficiency, but that socialism offered greater equality, and equality is better than efficiency. Third, the question of whether division of labour is older than formal government. Well, we know that primitive humans divided labour along at least gender lines. Anthropologists and archaeologists find that from unearthed skeletons, grave goods, cave paintings and so forth that men hunted while women gathered and raised children. This arrangement seems to have existed even amongst the earliest hominids believed to have lived at least 4.2 million years ago. On the other hand, the earliest government that we would recognise (i.e. a government whose primary purpose is to govern others, rather than one that does so as a secondary function like a tribal leader) as such dates from ancient Sumer, approximately 5,000 years ago. So, we have division of labour predating government by around 4,195,000 years. This is your response? Stop wasting our time. I don't think any government as you would understand the term is worthwhile, period. It's not a good idea to make any kind of empirical deductions from Hollywood movies. In any case the Mafia is not the best option. Many Russian firms and individuals hire private security firms and consultants to help them against Russian organized crime when the state police fails to assist them. A lot of things occur "naturally", like murder, rape and slavery. That does not necessarily mean that they are just or proper. No, because this would mean a contract, and the social contract cannot exist because it is of undefined terms between undefined parties.

Even giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you are correct, all you have done here is establish the premise for the mathematical demonstration on page 4 of this thread. As that shows, this scenario is beneficial for people overall, not detrimental as you allege. But I'm not giving you the benefit of the doubt because "predatory pricing" is unsustainable. To pursue the policy you allege, Wal-Mart's management would have to be prescient. They would need to divine ahead of time how long and what price it will take to drive the competition out of business, which means they need to discern in advance such obscure phenomena as consumer preference and inertia, and exactly how much and for how long their competition will be able to compensate for their efforts, which will mean that they have to have complete access not only to the current but also the future assets, management strategy, suppliers and so forth of their competition. They also need to ascertain countless other variables such as the future rate of inflation, the state and price of supplies, future consumer confidence, and what natural disasters and other acts of God are going to occur in the future, when they will occur, what they will affect and by how much. Then they need to ascertain if, once all these variables are resolved as absolutes, if it is even worth their while to bother. Unless you can prove to me that Wal-Mart has gypsy seers in its employ, and that these seers are actually reliable by any metric, consider this argument disproven. The free market is, by and large, unpredictable because it revolves around human action, which cannot be scientifically or mathematically predicted. This is why nobody can tell you when the next stock market crash is coming. Furthermore, as I have worked in retail management I can tell you that the actual strategy behind loss leaders is not to eliminate competition but to entice people into the store in the hopes that they will then purchase something profitable enough to offset your loss - a bait-and-switch, essentially. It is as impossible to make a strategy for eliminating the competition with predatory pricing as it is to make a strategy for winning the lottery. Again with the supposedly common occurences that you cannot find any examples of. It doesn't matter what you think. You don't work there. The wages offered to Wal-Mart employees are determined by Wal-Mart, and the wages accepted are determined by the employees. You do not enter the equation, therefore, keep your nose out of other people's business. What all this nonsense amounts to is the supposed "right" of a third party to interfere in a transaction to which he is almost infinitely more removed than either primary party. Next time you buy groceries, Eureka, I should turn up at the store and demand that you pay more for your purchases. According to your logic this will be perfectly acceptable to you. This is not the fault of Wal-Mart, any more than the price of tires is up to Ford. The government decides who pays what taxes and how much they are, not Wal-Mart. You have already conceded this point, so I'm not sure why you have taken up the beating of this dead horse again. What a pathetic, shameless performance.

Prove it. One thing you should and may learn about debate is that you are required to prove your assertions. Prove to me that only the state can provide the infrastructure necessary for a modern economy, and there is absolutely no way that private enterprises can accomplish the same things. Again, you are assuming your conclusion as the premise of your argument. That is another fallacy. You need to prove what you claim, not just spout off unfounded statements. You also cannot conduct an argument in a circle that leads back to its own beginning without actually proving anything, as you have done here. Just in case you don't understand this, it is by no means proven that public systems in these fields are actually more efficient. The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies has prepared a great number of papers on the subject of Canadian healthcare, I suggest you review them - they stand your prejudices on their heads.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. You say that since the state has been in existence for as long as "large scale infrastructure", it means that large scale infrastructure requires a state. Let's replace your nouns. "Cars have existed as long as telephones, therefore, telephones cannot exist without cars." Another joke, surely! What do you define as a controlled market - the Soviet or Chinese economies? If they are more efficient or as efficient as ours, can you perhaps tell me why two of the most agriculturally productive countries in the world lost 50 million lives in famines that had absolutely no cause in natural phenomena? Not even socialists claim that a planned economy can be as efficient as the free market anymore. They generally prefer to claim that efficiency is merely a secondary consideration, except for you, who evidently has not been keeping up with the developments in his own economic school of thought. I find it very telling that the left-wingers in this thread speak of things that are "very common", occur hundreds of times, and are "well known", and yet when asked cannot come up with a single example!

Actually, the state is stealing from a variety of people to pay these costs, and it steals in proportion to what they earn, not what they use. Take that coercion away and the market will make the payment of those current externalities fair: those who use will pay, those who don't, will not. You must be joking! The division of labour, which is trade and therefore business, has existed since primitive human males went out to hunt while the females gathered nuts and berries and raised the young. The state is hundreds of thousands of years younger than that. Their prices might indeed go up. More to the point, without government confiscating half of all we earn (on average) we would be able to afford those prices, and we'd be better off too, since everything currently provided by the state can be provided by the free market at a cheaper price and better quality.

No, not at all. What is disingenuous is your ascribation of the sins committed by government to a private company. But this issue is now mooted, since your final sentence is an admission of your error. Let's move on. If there are over a hundred it should not be hard for you to find a few examples, then. Hop to it! No, it does not. These conditions are communicated by the price mechanism. If conditions at a given employer are worse, then the price of labour there will increase. This is why Henry Ford had to increase wages. As to regulations, these will also be reflected in the price of labour. Where? OK, so you want to replace a system where, of your own admission, coercion is not a factor with a system where coercion is a factor. Why, therefore, are you advocating the replacement of nonviolence with violence? Give me an example, please. I have read from several different sources that this has never happened. You write as though Wal-Mart were the only employer in existence. If a town was small enough where everybody had to work for Wal-Mart, it would be too small to support a Wal-Mart. If a town was large enough to support a Wal-Mart it would also support hundreds of other firms that would employ people. Even if, in the bizarro world perhaps, Wal-Mart was the only employer in a town, there's always the next town over. Your argument, again, is completely illogical. This is just a dodge. My demonstration is perfectly valid, exactly what Loblaws sells does not disprove it. I know. They're far too uncomfortable for you. It is worth noting that when your self-contradictions are pointed out, you stick your fingers in your ears. Your intellectual dishonesty speaks volumes about the strength of your arguments.

And it is successful not because Wal-Mart gets customers and workers by force, but because people choose to shop there. There is no other explanation. It's been alleged that Wal-Mart cuts prices to below cost to eliminate competition and then raises them, but Wal-Mart has never raised prices, so that is obviously just another lie. It was to demonstrate that abstention is always a choice. The fact is that for Wal-Mart employees, working at Wal-Mart is better than any other alternative available to them. What you would do is force them to accept an inferior alternative instead, and ironically you do this in the name of "helping" them - much as Stalin murdered the people in the name of the people. Socialists only differ in degree, not principle. I would have thought it was clear. Wal-Mart has nothing to do with taxes, the government levies and collects taxes. If you have a problem with taxation, then you have a problem with the government - but you are still naive enough to believe that government can be the solution to your perceived problem here. Let's see some evidence before we deal with that. These are serious allegations you are making. No. Now explain why you do and I will be happy to show you why you are wrong. Yes, it does increase the wealth of society. Your ignorance of economics is staggering and I can't believe I have to actually explain this to you. Lower wages don't generate profits, profits are generated by a temporary underpricing of the factors of production. When this is realised, either the factors of production will be priced upwards or their providers will maintain the current price because the cost of doing business elsewhere is too high, in which case the underpricing was purely subjective anyway. In any case, what Wal-Mart is doing is promoting the division of labour, which is where wealth comes from. Where division of labour occurs it will create greater wealth since any loss in earnings will be more than offset by lower prices, and if not, market forces will quickly reverse the division. However, as Ricardo pointed out a long time ago, division of labour never lowers overall welfare, even when that division of labour does not occur along the Smithian lines of division according to greatest efficiency. For instance, according to Smith, if American workers can produce 10 microprocessors or 3 bushels of tomatoes per day, and Mexican workers can produce 2 microprocessors or 5 bushels of tomatoes per day, the Americans ought to specialize in microprocessors and the Mexicans in tomatoes. But according to Ricardo, if Mexicans instead produced 2 microprocessors or 2 bushels of tomatoes, it is still better for Americans to make microprocessors and leave tomatoes to Mexicans even though Americans can grow more tomatoes, because of the opportunity cost of Americans growing tomatoes instead of making microprocessors. To return to your example, nobody forced Loblaws to lower wages. What happened was that the consumers chose the lower prices of Wal-Mart in preference to the higher prices of Loblaws of their own free will, and Loblaws chose to try and attract those customers back by cutting costs. In any case, if in a town 0.1% of people worked for Loblaws, then it is better for 0.1% of people to receive a pay cut so that 100% can get lower prices, is it not? Let's plug some numbers in. Say we have a town of 50,000, and the Loblaws employees lose $2 per hour, which per year amounts to $4,000. Multiply that by 50 people (the Loblaws employees) and you get $200,000. Now let's say that people in this town can save $200 per year by shopping at Wal-Mart. Multiply $200 by 50,000 and you get $10,000,000. So the net annual gain to the town from Wal-Mart moving in was $9,800,000, and the average citizen got an extra $196 in his pocket every year. Even if only half the people in the town shopped at Wal-Mart you are still looking at an annual net gain of $4,800,000. In order to break even here, Wal-Mart would have to offer savings of a mere $4 per year, and I think it highly unlikely that enough consumers would desert Loblaws for Wal-Mart in order to save a measly $4 per year! I would imagine that those examples are a little uncomfortable for you. After all, the objects of your abhorration and your praise are exactly the opposite of what they should be according to your principles. However, I'm not going to drop this just because you say so. Prove me wrong if you can, but it's a little silly to be begging for mercy in an online debate!

I don't have to, because the very existence of Sears, HBC/Zellers, Target, Price Club, Costco, Home Depot, Futureshop/Best Buy, Canadian Tire, Radio Shack, Zehrs, MDG, HMV, Blockbuster, Amazon.ca, etc. etc. prove you wrong. All of these stores are competing to buy the same products from the same wholesalers as Wal-Mart and all are competing to sell them to the same people. If you don't pay these taxes, who is it that arrests you and prosecutes you? Agents of the state, or agents of Wal-Mart? As August was alluding to, the same can be said of the spinning jenny, the water loom, the steam engine, electric light, canned food, etc. Are you against all of these developments as well? You would have to be, to have any measure of consistency. Yet the fact that you are obviously connected to the Internet would suggest that you are not an Amish. It is always a choice. I'll borrow one of Walter Williams' examples for a moment. If you are diabetic and need 50 units of insulin per day, is abstention a choice? If the price of insulin is $1,000 per unit, then I would say that abstention is the only rational choice. At those prices you would be worse off buying insulin than not buying it. You have not put any evidence forward that Wal-Mart actually lowers wages. This is because there is not any. Your contention is that Wal-Mart seeks to make wages as low as possible, and if that were true you would expect many Wal-Mart employees to be at minimum wage, with management hoping that the government will lower minimum wage so that they can pay even less. In actual fact, Wal-Mart Canada does not employ a single person at minimum wage. All are paid higher. You will find that the small businesses that you seem to be rooting for generally pay lower wages than the big companies. Well, then perhaps you can explain to me how it is "keeping the playing field even" to throw in jail any non-state agent who dares to try and deliver mail. You say you abhor monopoly, but this is exactly how you best illustrate your cognitive dissonance: the only monopolies in Canada are maintained by the government! This is why you are completely self-contradictory. Your arguments have no basis in logic.

Or a legally polycentric society. Who makes them pay the taxes - Wal-Mart, or the government? Wrong again, Eureka. There is always one alternative in the free market, to wit abstention, which is not the case with genuine monopolies such as government programmes. In any case there are actually many alternatives to Wal-Mart, and the problem is not Wal-Mart as an employer but its employees as underqualified, underskilled and inexperienced. Wal-Mart is offering a better alternative to these people, otherwise they wouldn't take the job. If the only thing that Wal-Mart is better than is no job at all, and no job at all is the only other option, then Wal-Mart has managed to create jobs where there were none. And if Wal-Mart becomes dominant in a region, it is because the consumers have willed it. I don't see anybody being led into Wal-Mart to buy at gunpoint. It is also the case that Wal-Mart can be broken just as quickly if the consumers will it. They have not been noted! How are they paying higher prices? I've read an economic study that shows (for instance) that for every dollar the US "outsources" they get a return of about $1.18. Lowering prices serves to raise real income. Are you going to tell me that higher real income makes us poorer? According to this argument the denizens of Bangladesh are inestimably richer than us. You are required to explain that a lot further, since the empirical evidence is unanimously against you. No more so than the companies that Wal-Mart pushed aside were, and no more so than the companies that will push Wal-Mart aside in the future will be. Monopoly is unsustainable, Eureka, and the only thing that can keep a monopoly going is violence (i.e. government), like the postal service. Even the companies that left-wingers lambast as monopolies (Wal-Mart, Microsoft et al) are actually no such thing. The only monopolies in our economy are run by the government. This is where you have some serious cognitive dissonance. You claim to abhor monopoly and want freedom and choice, but you are attacking those who don't hold a monopoly and offer choice, and advocating their destruction by an entity that holds a monopoly by the exercise of violence and offers absolutely no choice at all. Your argument is completely backwards and self-contradictory. Mindless rhetorical drivel. Make an argument or cite a fact, don't just mindlessly recite this left-wing mumbo jumbo. After all, according to Marx's definition we are all "pirates" now.

Government makes the law and government should punish those who break it? Replace "government" with "Mafia" and you have a good description of organized crime. And please, don't tell me that law is democratic or the will of the people. Law in our society lacks a price mechanism and is therefore quite detached from what people actually want. Wrong. The Canadian people - the consumers - have forced the "better alternatives" out, and they did it because they didn't share your opinion that the alternatives were better at all. But you think not sharing your opinion should be a crime. After all, Wal-Mart did not appear overnight as a corporate monstrosity. Like all large companies - Ford, Microsoft, Exxon - they started out as very small firms struggling against much larger competitors and, from the will of the consumers, rose to their present position. And the consumers can break them at will. Remember Commodore, Atari and Sega? All were once dominant, all are now defunct, because people did not want to buy what they offered. If people stop wanting to buy what Wal-Mart offers they will disappear too. Welcome to market economics. Lower prices make people wealthier, Eureka, since we can afford more consumer goods. Do you yearn for a return to the 1950s, when fridges, cars and televisions were luxury items for the few thanks to their high prices? What you are advocating is poverty for all. That problem is created by the existence of the welfare state. It is immoral to force one person to labour for another against his will, with the welfare state, all working people are, in fact, slaves.

No, it is not. This is actually the crux of the matter, but because you don't know anything about economics you don't recognise it - as I already pointed out, I might add.

So many despots in the making here! Wal-Mart exists and thrives because it offers people what they want. If they did not offer people a good deal, nobody would shop there. If they did not offer employees a good deal, nobody would work there. That someone works at Wal-Mart means that Wal-Mart is better for them than the next best alternative, and someone who shops there finds that Wal-Mart is better than the next best alternative. What you guys are proposing is to punish somebody for offering a better alternative than anything else out there. Good move. Your real issue, although you can't see it, is not Wal-Mart but the regrettable fact that there are no better alternatives. If a landlord offers a poor person a cheap but nasty apartment, the problem is not the landlord but the poverty of the tenant! If he were not poor, he would not have so little to pay for rent, and would not have to resort to a cheap, nasty apartment. Too many people have a serious problem discerning between causes and effects. People obviously want to buy from Wal-Mart. They find that what they sell is better value to them than the money they pay for it. However, in keeping with my first comment, Wal-Mart bashers presume to tell these people that they have no right to like what they like. "They should like what I like," the detractors say, "and if they don't, well, I'll use unions and the law to force them to like what I like!" If you don't like Wal-Mart, don't shop there and don't work there. Stop trying to run other people's lives. Nobody died and made you king. I find it amazing that so many people who are outspoken in favour of social and sexual freedoms are utterly disgusted by the notion of economic freedom.

Firstly, consider the original reason why Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms. The founding fathers, in their wisdom, recognised that an armed citizenry is more difficult to tyrannize. Throughout history and especially in the 20th Century, by far the greatest number of murders, tortures and other terrible human rights violations have been committed not by private citizens but by agents of the state. To restrict guns to the agents of the state is to restrict weapons to that class of people who have, historically, committed the most crimes! The most terrible mass murders and genocides in history were committed against unarmed populaces. Countries that allow or have allowed citizens to retain their right to bear arms (such as the USA, Canada, the UK or Switzerland) have generally conducted themselves much better in the respect of human rights than those that deny or have denied weapons to their citizens (e.g. the USSR, the PRC, North Korea, Nazi Germany or Cuba). As to the question of firearms registration, consider with whom are these firearms being registered. In our case, we are required to register firearms with agents of the state, who are historically the worst criminals and even today, among the most likely to actually injure or kill another person with a firearm. The question as I see it is not why the state should trust private citizens, but why private citizens should trust the state. It logically follows that to judge all citizens by the standard of the Washington sniper is to judge all governments by the standard of Stalin. Caesar suggests that people should be trained in firearms before being allowed to own one. Good idea, but we don't need government involvement to do it. It is unlikely that an insurance company would issue liability insurance to a gun owner who did not have a certification in its safe use, just as an insurance company won't insure a tradesman without the relevant qualifications, and people won't deal with uninsured tradesmen, as when a person moved into a neighbourhood with a gun and no liability insurance, people would be highly suspicious and mistrustful of that person and certainly keep their hands on their own holsters when they saw him. This certainly isn't foolproof or perfect, however, neither is a system that relies upon tracking down, arresting, prosecuting, convicting and jailing every citizen who fails to register a firearm or become certified in its use.

No, he was a Communist scapegoat, like Trotsky.

I think other people in this thread have debunked these figures. Suffice it to say that totalitarian regimes usually fudge the numbers, when China was suffering one of the worst famines in history the Communist Party was posting figures of bumper harvests. It's spelled "Guantanamo", and this is more of what I'm talking about: woeful ignorance. Anyway, the fact is that there are a lot more people being held without fair trial in Cuban prisons than at Guantanamo Bay. For example, there are a lot of teachers and journalists currently serving >20 year prison terms for criticizing Castro or talking to foreign journalists. Che Guevara's signature appears on about 1,500 death warrants, and Guevara admitted publicly that none of those people had even had a trial. Look up Sosa Chabau, who had documented the mass tortures committed by Castro's henchman Eriberto Mederos, known to Cubans as "El Enfermero" (the nurse). Armando Vallederes, a Cuban poet and UN human rights commissioner, testified to the UN Human Rights Commission in 1988. These are some extracts: Castro will never evict the Americans, and for them to lift the embargo would be his worst nightmare. The USA gives him a scapegoat for his economic failures, without them, he has to admit to the Cuban people that socialism has failed them. All Communist regimes find bugbears to blame for their problems, whether it's Trotsky or Kai-shek.

So you are telling me that Castro's main achievement has been to make no progress in some areas, and actually go backwards in all the others. What a legacy! This is a myth, and like all myths a few facts will quickly disprove it. Firstly, Canada does a lot of trade with the USA and a US embargo would be a disaster for the Canadian economy. However, the USA never actually did that much trade with Cuba. Even under Batista, US trade was a tiny fraction of the Cuban economy. Cuba's principal trading partner was always the USSR, and after it collapsed the Cuban economy took a predictable nosedive. The trouble is that a socialist economy is not self-sustaining. The Cuban economy could only exist with largesse from the USSR, and the USSR did not get largesse from anybody, which was why it collapsed. Now that Cuba has no patron state, it will collapse soon as well, probably after Castro's death, much as reform in China had to wait until after the death of Mao. Secondly, there are only two countries in the entire world that refuse to trade with Cuba: the USA and Israel. Are you telling me that these two countries control all the resources and money of the entire world, so that any country that does not trade with either but with others (say, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea) is doomed to economic failure? I don't think so! Why would you level such a charge when it can just as easily be made against you? I notice, for instance, that you don't have any facts to support your argument. Where I have presented facts, you have just tried to twist them around. You haven't even bothered to verify them! I can only conclude that you know nothing about Cuba and are buying into leftist propaganda, so, right back at you with brass knobs on. Oh, and riddle me this: of all the illegal human traffic on rafts and inner tubes between Cuba and Florida, how many were going south?

Nonsense. The only supporting evidence comes from the Cuban government, which cannot be trusted because it habitally invents figures and murders people. Castro declared a war on illiteracy, and several years later declared it won. What he claimed is not even possible, Also nonsense. Larry Solomon wrote of how he recently visited Cuba and was accosted by an old, homeless woman at a restaurant who asked for his chicken bones. She survived by begging bones from restaurant patrons and gnawing the remaining scraps of meat off them. The Cuban government assigns each typical Cuban a wage of 50 cents a day, which is not enough to live on, even in Cuba. Each month, each citizen gets 2.5 kilograms of rice, 1 kilogram of fish, 1/2 kilogram of beans, 14 eggs, 30 bread rolls, half a bar each of hand soap and laundry soap. Children are theoretically entitled to fresh milk, but right now the only people who can get any dairy products are Communist Party apparatchiks. The average working Cuban has a more miserable existence than the average homeless Torontonian. You say it as though it's simply an irritation. Twenty-year prison sentences, institutionalised rape and torture, and execution without trial are hardly irritations, and all are handed out on a very regular basis by the Cuban state to anyone with the audacity to criticize them. Here's the thing. In America, you have the "freedom to starve and shoot at each other." In Cuba, you are forced to starve, and forced to accept the government shooting at you. Which would you rather have? Also a myth. Cuba exports most of its medical services in order to buy foreign currency so that Castro can buoy up his primitive economy. The most common thing beggars in Cuba ask for is food for children and the second most common, medical treatment. The only pharmacies that actually stock any medicines are in hotels for foreigners. There are lots of doctors, but they don't have painkillers, penicillin, insulin or anything else, so Cuban medicine is pretty much where we were in the 18th century. Unless you're a Communist official or a Western tourist, of course. Google "Dr. Hilda Molina". She was the founder of Havana's International Center for Neurological Restoration, and she returned all the medals that Castro had given her and resigned in disgust because Cuban citizens were being systematically denied medical care so that it could be sold to foreigners instead. Whatever medical system Cuba has, Castro isn't even responsible for it. Under Batista, Cuba had one physician per 960 patients (ranked 10th by the World Health Organization) and Latin America's lowest infant mortality rate, comparable to Canada's and better than France's, Japan's and Italy's. Castro has basically been coasting off Batista's legacy and hasn't really improved anything medically. However, he has caused Cuba's per capita food consumption to fall from third highest in Latin America to dead last. I'm getting tired of making this point to you, Caesar. Of course they are friendly and happy. Cubans who fail to put on a happy face for foreigners risk imprisonment, torture and execution. No, I believe they will serve as yet another warning about the greatest horror in human history: communism.

It is a fact that these forums are a private enterprise and Greg can run them however he sees fit. However, since you're going to criticize him I'll weigh in. MS has quite often sworn at people and used very derogatory terms about specific posters on this forum. Quite often he/she will resort to foul language and bigoted terms ("whitey" being a recent example). MS will often start a thread and then not post again, or refuse to be engaged in debate. I have tried to debate his/her points on several occasions and been ignored. If MS wants to do that I would suggest he/she start a weblog, because a forum is the wrong place to do this. Actually, since MS is so annoying and disruptive it would be less work for Greg if he banned MS altogether. I return to these forums because there is a high quality of writing, no flame wars and intelligent debate. MS endangers all of this. I'm glad that MS is gone. I post here to have intelligent debates, not to listen to the childish ranting of half-wits. This forum is not Jerry Springer's show.

I must say I don't see what the problem is. If people wish to enter into an agreement with other people and share certain things, why would that be an issue? More to the point, why would people with far less involvement and far less vested interest get to have a greater say in these agreements than the people making them? That hardly seems fair. By the same token, next time Pateris goes down to Futureshop to buy an MP3 player, I should turn up and stipulate that he has to buy me one too.

Only if you are a bald man with nothing but the (metaphysical) memory of the flowing, vibrant locks of your youth. You don't watch it "metaphysically", you watch it physically. The projectionist passes light (photons) from the bulb that the cinema paid to buy and operate through a film that they own onto a screen that they own into your eyes while you sit in seats that they own. There are plenty of physical things involved in a trip to the theater.

No. The land physically exists, it is made of atoms. Ideas and emotions are not.