Hugo

For those who haven't seen for themselves what everybody is talking about when they describe Bush's poor public speaking style or his "deer-in-the-headlights" look, or for those who just want a good laugh, take a look at this: Quicktime movie If you don't have Quicktime, you can download a player here and, as a bonus, it isn't full of Apple spyware. The clip is from the movie A Patriot Act. It was screened in front of a live studio audience to make the final edit, which is why there's a laugh-track.

Ta-da! That is an excerpt from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. If all men are created equal, and have inalienable rights, these rights must be equal. Therefore, if a person has a right over me, I must have the same right over him. So if the US government (or rather, the individuals constituting the US government) can access confidential information about me without my knowledge or consent, I must have the right to access confidential information about the US government without their knowledge or consent. If this isn't the case, it is a gross violation of the principles on which the USA was founded. Ah, you say, but the government was elected by the people to do this. The US government has the mandate of the masses, therefore it can exercise these rights over me without reciprocity. However, if you do not have a right, you cannot defer it to somebody else. I don't have a right to murder. I can't grant the right to murder to my associates, friends or employees because I don't have that right myself. I cannot give what I do not have. For the government to be justly able to invade privacy without reciprocity, they must have acquired that right from the electorate, who could only defer that right to government if they had that right in the first place. So, do the majority of people in the USA have the right to violate my privacy without my knowledge and consent, and also the right to prevent me doing the same to them? Who are these people above people, these ubermensch who walk amongst us mere peons? Republican voters? The Bush dynasty? The Senate or Congress? I thought the US Government was supposed to be of the people and by the people, but if that government has rights that exceed those of the people, it is no longer a government of and by the people, according to its own founding documents.

The point is that granting an abstract concept, a metaphysical thing, a non-acting agent "legal personhood" is completely fallacious. A person has to be liable, and liability can be deferred. For example, the CEO of a corporation could agree to incur the liabilities of the shareholders (the owners) as part of his contract. Or the shareholders might agree to remain liable and release the CEO from liability. The market would decide. But they have to be able to sue somebody. You cannot say that nobody was responsible for the debt, otherwise there would be no debt. Debts don't just magically appear overnight, somebody runs them up. Looking at the example of the car, again, the owner represents the shareholders and the driver, the executives. If we assume that driver error caused the accident, the driver is liable. If poor maintenance of the car was the cause, the owner is responsible (but he could have transferred liability to his mechanic). But in no case is the car responsible, nor could damages be limited to the value of the car, and if damages exceeded the value of the car, the plaintiff would have to have somebody responsible that he could pursue for the balance. Incentives are irrelevant. It's about logic and justice. Unless, of course, it was in your contract that you would buy the whole trip and, in the event of cancellation, would pay the entire value. But that's just the thing: people should be able to draw up their contracts as they see fit. A contract can transfer liability but only to another party, not a non-acting agent.

Wayne hates Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis. He doesn't like the fact that somebody gave them a job with a steady income, that is independent of crop failures, droughts, famines, natural disasters and so on. His proposal is to drive the factories that employ them out of business and, in the process, kick them all back to the fields and the rice paddies where they used to eke out a miserable existence, living hand-to-mouth and risking starvation on an annual basis. Great idea, but you don't want to, you want to starve them to death, or permanently enslave them to your charity.

One would assume that you wouldn't be liable for my actions. Perhaps I would agree to be liable for your loss. However, somebody is liable. In your example, that somebody is implied to be me. But in limited liability corporations, nobody is held liable - not the stockholders, nor the directors, nor the employees. That is akin, as I stated, to holding the car responsible in your example. If the corporation owes beyond its ability to pay and goes bankrupt, limited liability states that the losses of the shareholders must be limited to their shares, that they don't get their investment back, but neither do they pay any of the debt. Thus, nobody is actually responsible for the debt (assuming the corporation was in negative equity). How can this be? Somebody incurred it, somebody has to pay it. The corporation can't pay it because it doesn't exist, and if it does pay it, what that means is the stockholders are paying it. You can transfer liability and assume it, but what you cannot do is to state "nobody is liable" or that an abstract concept, a non-acting agent, is liable. This cannot logically be true. In the case of the debtor corporation, somebody incurred the debt or caused it to be incurred. Limited liability destroys their responsibility for that and replaces it with nothing.

When I said "Arab culture" (which was the exact phrase I used) I meant "Arab culture." If I had meant "Muslim culture" I would have said "Muslim culture." Does that clear things up for you? I didn't say that it would be a great idea to pull out, don't imply that I did. However, trying to get Iraq to adopt Western democracy is the wrong direction to go in and is only going to lead to more problems for the Iraqi people. Saddam's regime is the logical conclusion of what would happen in a democratic Iraq. Read the thread I linked to, it saves me having to repeat myself.

Prove it. My contention is that only universal law backed by monopoly on violence can create something so ridiculous as a fictitious "legal person" who does not actually exist. Oh, you can divide risk, and you can transfer risk, but limited liability is a way to destroy risk, to abrogate it, and ethically, that is impossible. What limited liability does is to make it possible for the corporation to be held liable rather than any individual in it. However, as an abstract and as an entity that does not exist, the corporation cannot possibly be an acting agent and so cannot be liable for anything. If you have a car accident, many people might be held responsible - you, the person you hit, your mechanic, or a combination, or something else. But no sane person would hold your car responsible, or demand that your car pay damages or serve a prison sentence, and that is what limited liability laws do - force a non-acting agent to become liable. Financially, limited liability means that the owners - stockholders - are responsible, because they bear the ultimate boon or burden of what the corporation "does". But ethically, nobody bears the burden. No stockholders of Enron went to jail, and the directors only did because they couldn't make the case for limited liability, i.e. they couldn't claim that the corporation cooked the books.

Homeschooling generally produces better results than public schooling, if only because parents prepared to homeschool their kids have a far greater interest in it than teachers. Homeschooling doubtless isn't for all parents, but private schools invariably deliver better results than state-run schools. In any event, state schools seem to be the worst option short of no education at all. Bursaries are provided by the state. If private loans were the main method of paying for education you'd see it done very often and with good results. You are attacking a hypothetical system with the flaws of an existing and entirely different system. Furthermore, it gives the child an interest in completing education satisfactorily and getting a good job i.e. the bill for schooling hanging over them. With "free" state schooling, the cost is hidden, so they can waste time in school and don't work too hard at their career, all too often. Students coming out of university feel pressured to get a job, and a good one, because of their student loans. No, I mean things such as the Ontario government refusing to give parents of privately schooled children any kind of tax credit. Basically, that amounts to fines for private school. You're being elitist.

Very interesting subject, Sweal. It has been successful, however, consider too that legislation and regulation favour the stock corporation as a business mode. The biggest benefit is limited liability, which other organizations (such as, say, workers collectives) do not get. This phenomenon relies upon a state grant of legal personhood to an abstract. Another example is lobbying, when corporations can use money to try and attain a goal politically rather than economically, and the existence of lobbying makes bigger (richer) mean better due to political rather than economic reasons. Economics is the science of studying the optimal allocation of scarce resources. If resources cease to become scarce (I believe that's what you are theorising) then economics will have become defunct. Think Star Trek. Nobody works for pay and materialism is not an issue because they have replicators, items of technological magic that can duplicate or create things from nothing (gel packs or whatever geek-speak they use, but essentially, something from nothing). Therefore, in the Star Trek universe, material things no longer have value. How could gold be valuable when anybody could go to his replicator and say, "Computer: ten gold ingots" and have them instantly appear?

August, I have an answer to your question. The megacorporation concept is outdated, it is mostly a 1980s phenomenon. The latest trend, and probably one that will accelerate, is the microcorporation. Through outsourcing and subcontracting it is entirely possible for a multinational corporation generating billions of dollars in annual revenue to employ a mere handful of people, perhaps a hundred at most. For instance, Nike can subcontract its manufacturing to various independent factories. It can subcontract its advertising and marketing to a PR/advertising agency. It can subcontract its retail and sales operations to individual stores. It can subcontract shipping to a trucking or courier company. It could even subcontract design and R&D to independent designers. In the end, with the assistance of modern IT, Nike itself could be reduced to a couple dozen employees in a single office that serves to co-ordinate scores of subcontractors and to lend the Nike brand to the whole. In this way it restores the market from what you describe as the command-economy monolith of the megacorporation, because the various departments are outsourced, subcontractors have to compete for these outsourcing contracts, market rationality is assured and paramount efficiency is attained (or as close to it as is humanly possible).

India has also been the scene of a lot of violence and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. There's also the matter of the appalling amount of corruption within the Indian government, it's basically a way of life there. This is one of the primary causes of Indian poverty and economic stagnation. Don't forget Jammu-Kashmir, where the Indian government has seen fit to relieve the populace of 12 million people of their rights. I believe it is the case that any soldier of the rank of sergeant or higher has the right to shoot any civilian on sight in Kashmir if he believes they are acting "suspiciously", which is very ambiguous and poorly defined. This power was given to them in the Disturbed Areas Act and the Indian Armed Forces Act of 1990. India is indeed a functioning democracy. How does it function? Very poorly.

It wouldn't be made or endorsed by Coca-Cola, so it would be fraudulent to sell it in a way that implied that it was. Yes. I thought that would have been clear from my arguments thus far. But I'm not discussing this from a viewpoint of what's legal. I consider vast reams of current legislation to be grossly immoral, unethical and unjust, so to tell me that an act is legal or illegal will not sway me one inch. It depends, doesn't it? If you agreed to an EULA that stated you couldn't redistribute the software, you'd be in breach of contract if you did. But if you signed no such agreement, you wouldn't be contractually bound to do anything or not to do anything with the software in question and you could distribute it as you wanted.

But then I would be guilty of fraud because I would be misleading my customers into believing they were buying something manufactured by Coca-Cola, when in fact it was manufactured by me. No intellectual property laws required.

You're trying to apply concepts of the physical - ownership - to the metaphysical. Intellectual property rights are violations of individual rights, because they presume to order other people not to do things with their own "intellectual property." You can't control or limit the metaphysical, it is a universal capable of existing in many places at once, in many minds, and universals do not exist. For instance, say you write a poem and I buy a copy. You still have your poem, but now I have the poem too. Why can't I do what I want with that poem? If I just memorise your poem, do you consider it ethical for you to be allowed to dictate to me what I may do with information rendered by my own brain and stored in my own memory? That's a pretty convoluted thought experiment you're conducting here! I'd say the silliness of this example tells us something of the theory under it.

If you knowingly disseminated falsehoods, for example shouting "Fire!" in a public place when you knew there was no fire, or publishing pamphlets that state "Blacks are all thieves and criminals" when the evidence you used is fabricated, would you not be guilty of fraud? I completely agree with Sweal's assessment: the only 'free speech' that needs to be actioned against is lying. To show a beheading would be perfectly legitimate, if either 1) to the best of your knowledge it actually happened as you showed it or 2) the whole or a part of it may have been false, but you cautioned your audience with an advisory, gave your sources or at least advised your audience that they might not be 100% reliable. Of course, free speech also covers the option not to speak. If a network feels that footage of a beheading would not be well-received by its audience, or that such footage violates its values, it is perfectly within its rights to refuse to screen it. But a network that feels no such qualms should be able to show it, just as its audience can choose whether or not to watch it. One should not fear the truth. A person who wishes to hide the truth has an agenda that is probably reducible to self-interest.

I have heard it argued that the mortality rate fell consistently, that the population in England and Wales grew by 1.25% per year, which was unprecedented at that point. Mortality rates also fell across the board, even in cities. McCloskey states that the key source of this population growth was falling mortality rates. At any rate, it's difficult to reconcile falling living conditions, rising infant mortality and rising death rates with increasing population. The population boom is undisputed, and it refutes all the arguments you are making. --(McCloskey, Donald, "The Industrial Revolution 1780-1860: A Survey," The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ) It would, actually, by and large be a consequence of a population who had a steady, guaranteed wage instead of depending upon subsistence farming. Did you verify why this was? Perhaps because the government was busy passing laws to alleviate the conditions of the "poor" based upon faulty evidence? It was only necessary to link wages to the cost of bread because of the combined government policies of the Corn Laws and the Napoleonic Wars. During the Wars, food prices climbed by 25%. In summary, the evidence on which you judge the factories and capitalism is false, the argument that mortality and infant mortality increased cannot be reconciled with the very real population boom, and the ills of the age can be ascribed to government action rather than the lack of it. If that is true, it is because the government in the USA represents 55% of the economy, and during the 1990s, the Canadian government was 7% larger than that! In such a political atmosphere so stifling to economic growth it would hardly be surprising.

I don't believe any such effort will be successful in our lifetimes no matter what non-Iraqi entity spearheads it. See my musings here. Arab culture is inherently unsuited to democracy. They have not shared in the renaissance and the rise of individualism that has made democracy reasonable in the West. This talk of making Iraq democratic is far-fetched and in complete denial of the truth. This is a culture very different from our own, with very different values, and it is very foolish to try to apply concepts to it as though it were just another Western liberal, individualistic, material and secular culture.

Could be any or all. I think another possibility is that the biological purpose of sexuality is as I gave it, but homosexuality is also natural. For instance, God or nature or whatever you believe in seems to have given humankind a lot of checks and balances to control the population (diseases, ageing, etc), and homosexuality may be one of these things. In every generation a certain percentage may be homosexual in order to remove them from the pool of potential mates for procreation. As to the cause of homosexuality, it's probably exactly the same cause as heterosexuality or even pedophilia: genetic predisposition combined with the right environmental factors and influences. Why do we need a public policy on sexuality?

I don't think that is either true or fair. In my last post, I have argued against socialism and communism, the USSR, and the commissions held about working conditions in industrial Britain. Such arguments have been made by many people who are not anarchists, on this very forum I have heard August1991 argue against all of those things and he is definitely not an anarchist - just read his arguments in my thread on anarchy. Furthermore, I might ask why you are so prejudiced against anarchists that you consider the discovery that your debating opponent is one sufficient grounds to discount his arguments? You are being very closed-minded. Would you treat me this way were I a Communist? But, as I have already said, comparisons of life expectancy in the USSR before 1917 and after are going to be useless as evidence of healthcare provision, because the expectancy beforehand was dragged artificially down by the Great War and Cheka oppression, and afterward by Lenin's purges, the Civil War and the Bread War. Returning to the Commissions briefly, if we examine the works of the Hammonds that were crucial in these commissions we see that they made a division between "apprentice children" and "free labour children." In their findings they made absolutely no distinction between these children, but this was a very, very gross oversight. The apprentice children were all wards of the state, many were orphans, some had been taken from their parents for negligence or something similar and were in the care of the parish authorities. The conditions in which these children worked were terrible. THe free labour children, however, were sent to work at the request of their parents and were not nearly so abused. However, the evidence presented by the Hammonds against the state child-slavery system was used to legislate against the private labour market. Alfred Kydd and Philip Gaskell both confirmed the Hammonds findings - that the state child-slavery system was responsible for all the ills of child labour, and the free market for little to none. The Sadler Report was a key piece of evidence for child-labour reformers, however, it was highly controversial and disputed. W. H. Hutt lambasted Sadler for gross exaggeration and falsification of evidence. R. H. Greg said of Sadler that he produced "such a mass of ex-parte statements, and of gross falsehoods and calumnies ... as probably never before found their way into any public document." (W. H. Hutt, "The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century," in E A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 156-84.) Friedrich Engels, partner of Karl Marx and a vicious opponent of capitalism, said of Sadler's report: "This is a very partisan document, which was drawn up entirely by enemies of the factory system for purely political purposes. Sadler was led astray by his passionate sympathies into making assertions of a most misleading and erroneous kind. He asked witnesses questions in such a way as to elicit answers which, although correct, nevertheless were stated in such a form as to give a wholly false impression." (Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 192.) If Engels, of all people, thinks the key report of the Commissions was a pack of lies, how can it be trusted?

I think it fair to say that if parents are willing to abrogate the free will of their children on a large scale, humankind is going to be radically different as a species. Any discussion of social and political models is going to be very different because the rules of the game have been fundamentally changed. Well, this happens now, doesn't it? Rich kids get to go to vastly better-performing private schools and then to good universities, whereas other kids have to suffer in the underachieving state school system. As to how the poor would afford good schools in market anarchy, there are a wide variety of ways. For instance, a student who is very bright but poor and passes the entrance exams to a good school but cannot afford the fees will almost certainly get a long-term loan from a lending institution, since he represents an excellent credit risk as he is likely to get a good job once he graduates. Don't discount private charity. Studies and economic simulations show that as the tax burden decreases and prosperity increases, charitable giving is increased. Of course, with competition between charitable schools (for students, and for donated money), each school still has the incentive to do the best they possibly can for the student. As to whether charity alone can provide a service, there are many examples of charities that achieve all they set out to entirely with private donations. The Seeing-Eye Dogs foundation is an example. Everybody who needs a seeing-eye dog gets one, and the charity runs a surplus each year. Without the massive tax burden on households, families will have less pressure to have both parents at work. Sure, they'd have to pay for things they get "free" from tax money now, but firstly, the average family has to pay taxes for a whole load of stuff they never see a cent of return for, and secondly, we all know the free market will provide these services far cheaper. With less pressure to work multiple jobs, homeschooling becomes a very viable option, and the evidence of educational achievement shows that homeschooling is very superior to collective schools. This should tell you what the actual agenda of the state is. If the government truly wanted to provide "free" education to all, they would privatise the entire education system and issue education vouchers. The fact is that government jealously asserts control over the entire educational system and often viciously attacks private schools and homeschooling, without good reason (after all, private schools and homeschooling alleviate the pressure on the education budget). The only cause of such a policy can be indoctrination.

No, it will be driven by the desires of the consumer. Private industry caters to what the market wants, and private schools will offer the kind of education their paying customers - parents - demand, or they will go out of business.

Nothing at all. I'm not sure why you brought it up, when you said, "Communism did bring relative prosperity in the USSR... It did improve health and increase Life expectancy." You brought up the USSR as an example, and made some false claims about it which I felt obliged to dispel. The origin of the capitalism vs. socialism portion of this debate stemmed from my contention that capitalism was responsible for improvement in working conditions by way of simple market economics, to which you replied: "It is also arguable that they would be the consequences of a philosophy diametrically opposed to Capitalism. Such a philosophy, as we know, is premised on the betterment of social conditions for all. Economic growth also ocurred under such an ideal" You offered no proof of this contention, incidentally. The reason why we are discussing socialism, communism and the USSR is because you wanted to. Of course, life expectancy in the USSR between 1914 and 1953 is meaningless as an example of medical progress because the Great War, the Civil War, the Bread War, the Second World War, and the purges of Lenin and Stalin were responsible for so many millions of early deaths that they render such figures utterly meaningless. Since the exact numbers of those murdered by the Soviet government aren't even known, we cannot even start to analyse what the life expectancy figures for the period mean, and that assumes that those figures are even accurate in the first place. You can compare the life expectancy of Russians in 1910 to that of Russians in 1990 as a "success" for communism, but life expectancy for all sub-saharan Africans since 1910 has also improved, and does this prove the "success" of all that has befallen the region in the meantime, with the wars, civil strife, dictators and coups? It's also a legacy of communism that the country is falling apart. The free markets of the USA have been better than the USSR in providing for citizens in every respect at every time in history. The excuse that Russia was devasated by war or had less natural resources doesn't hold water either. Latin America has a lot more natural resources than North America and has had fewer wars and war dead, even on their own soil, and yet remains a backwater compared to North America. If the true reason for Soviet failures was war and poor resources, Latin America should lead the world today in prosperity and vibrancy. No, you said that the proof was that the government acted at all. Here are your own words: By that rationale, doesn't the US-led invasion of Iraq prove that Saddam Hussein was harboring WMD and linked to Al-Queda? When a witness makes a statement, and then refuses to make that statement again after having sworn to tell only the truth, that is an admission that the statement was a lie. Given that the people used as primary witnesses in the Commissions admitted to lying, I don't think asking for further proof is juvenile at all. If you are prosecuting a case and your principal witness confesses to perjury, you had better hope you have some more substantial evidence, and when the defence asks for that evidence, accusations that they are "juvenile" certainly won't sway anybody! In fact, they will probably confirm the suspicions of the judge and jury that your entire case is pinned on lies and half-truths. But they admitted that they were lying! How can you trust a statement made by one who later tells you that the statement was a lie? Fiction writers dream things up all the time, it's their job. Stephen King makes up absolute nonsense on a very regular basis, that's what he does, he's a fiction writer. However, Stephen King is not claiming to be an expert on any real-world phenomena, nor is he asking for his novels to be considered as evidence in a government investigation or the formulation of government policy. Then please, find me a court case where a work of fiction has been admitted as evidence. You don't have the right to state that, you must earn the right by proving that they are "too silly." So far your total lack of evidence, bait-and-switch arguments and frequent revisions and alterations of earlier so-called absolutes are proving the exact opposite.

I can't see employer manipulation of D2 gaining much acceptance. No employee with half a brain would accept such tampering, and if would be easy to spot any employer who had done it secretly by the fact that his workers so cheerfully worked without pay. This is an abomination, I agree. I don't think it's a curtain call for anarchy because without coersion I can't see anybody standing for it. The families of employees so tampered with would sue for millions, the customer base would vanish overnight, there would be non-stop protest marches outside the factory gates, harassment and ostracism of executives, and so on. Look at how much flak companies get about third-world sweatshops today - and that's voluntary! I think this technology will probably be very interesting to a totalitarian state like Cuba or China, that has armies to violently crush dissent, and can violate human rights as much as they please because they don't recognise that their citizens have rights at all. On the subject of Huxley, his vision and that of Orwell's 1984 are two visions of how totalitarian socialism could be accomplished. Huxleys is more sustainable, but needs more technology. Both are dire warnings against statism and concentration of power.

It also brought between 25 and 60 million people into an early grave. Was that good? To play on your Black Death analogy, were the dubious economic advances worth the executions, exile and slavery? I want to see evidence for that claim. You should also know that the Communist governments were in the habit of wildly falsifying their claims of progress, so official figures cannot be trusted. For instance, in the middle of a famine that killed perhaps 30 million Chinese the Communist government was recording record bumper harvests. Regarding allegations of better healthcare, here's what DS Schultz and MP Rafferty had to say in Am J Public Health, 1990 Feb;80(2):193-7: Soviet health care and perestroika. S. Kono in Integration. 1990 Oct(25):19-22: Recent trends of the population in the Soviet Union says: Life expectancy in the USA in 1960 was 70 for men, 75 for women, and in 1980 was 70 for men and 77 for women, and in 1985, 71 and 78. In all cases, American life expectancies were significantly above the Soviet, and American life expectancy consistently rose, whereas Soviet life expectancy did not. The facts don't fit the picture of Soviet healthcare you are painting. Prove it. No more novels, please, restrict yourself to facts. I see. And did the fact that Stalin's government acted on the "findings" of millions of traitors and saboteurs in the USSR prove that those millions of traitors existed? Did the American attack on Iraq based on WMD and terrorist ties prove that both existed? Are you seriously telling me that government is of Godlike infallibility? Or is it possible that a government can act on faulty intelligence and false information? Yes, it was, and no, it probably didn't, in that order. But thousands did not die in the Industrial Revolution. In fact, nobody's condition was permanently worsened. I have offered evidence of that. You have offered nothing. I have offered logic and evidence which illustrates that these "harmful effects" were not due to liberalism at all but the polar opposite, statism and collectivism. You have yet to refute them with anything more substantial than, as Tom Cruise put it in A Few Good Men, the "'Liar, liar, pants on fire' argument." Same again. I offered a logical argument that showed how the benefits of liberalism and industrialization were immediately available. You have no valid response.

That is absolutely untrue. Communist countries still had endemic shortages of vital goods (shoes, housing, clothing, power, water), unemployment, poverty far in excess of the West, terrible healthcare and correspondingly far shorter life expectancies, higher rates of infant mortality and of illiteracy, and so forth, right up until their collapse. I can find sources if you want. However, I wouldn't spend my time doing that unless you actually want to dispute something that is universally accepted. What was it competing for? Good, then we can move on. But in the context of what you were saying, it seemed that you were blaming liberalism for the Corn Laws and the Peterloo massacre when, in fact, it was the exact opposite of liberalism that was responsible. I apologise if I misread you. No, actually you said that the revolution (or, more specifically, liberalism at the time of the industrial revolution) worsened their standards of living, then you said that it worsened them only initially: Then That is not the same thing. What you originally said was, "Liberalism was worse for the working class than what went before", then you changed that to "Liberalism was initially worse for the working class than what went before" and now "Liberalism was indifferent to the working class." Those are three different statements. Which are you going to go with? You say this, but I don't see any evidence from you to refute this. You seem to acknowledge my criticism of the Commissions, but then try to play semantic games to pretend that they are not valid criticisms. I think it does. How can you describe what you have not seen? If you haven't experienced something, your description of it is nothing but hearsay, and a wise researcher would skip over you and find the person you heard it from. On the contrary, I think your sources are like the Holocaust deniers. They commented on a phenomenon they had never experienced and had not taken the time to inform themselves about from a position of prejudice and bigotry. Strawman argument. Argue against what I said, not what you would prefer that I had said. What I actually said, in full, was: So, do you have a rebuttal to this entire statement rather than an isolated and misquoted fragment of it? No, actually they were not, the benefits were immediate. For example, after the adoption of each new development in the textile industry, the price of textiles and therefore clothing fell and the quality rose. These benefits were immediately available to the consumer. Only amongst a very small percentage of the population. The rest of them - the 99% who were not weavers, spinners or whatever other profession had just had a new technology thrust upon it - saw immediate benefits with no drawbacks. So what you are arguing is that the industrial/liberal period was bad because a very small number of people suffered a temporary period of "dislocation"? Considering the vast benefits of the period I think that's a bargain. That's a beautiful piece of argumentum ad verecundiam, I must say. Worse, in fact, because your authority is vague, unprovable and anonymous. Because you cannot prove how learned you are, your statement amounts to a logically invalid and emotive attempt to browbeat rather than debate your position. Anyway, let's say by "thousands" you mean 3,000. That means you have 3,000 works of fiction and 12,000 works of reference, which is a number of works approaching that held by an average Toronto neighbourhood library. The average book on Amazon.com has 70,000 words. If we say you are an above-average reader who reads at 400 words per minute, that means you have spent almost 5 years of your life (43,750 hours) doing nothing but reading them. I think you might be lying.