Reading this book reminded me of a lecture by John Stossel("the 'stache), which I attended a couple days ago. The main point(s) of his lecture included
-lessening government controls (because:_)
-government controls usually end up hurting the people they are trying to help
and more importantly,
-government controls and regulations hinder new improvements and discourage experimentation and creativity
In the book, the idea of common sense was cited as reason for ruling against an airspace/property law, to protect the commercial enterprise. Even though this covers the main topic/thesis of the book, I'm still going to repeat: Where is our common sense? Where is the voice of reason when the consumer, the very people the companies are making a living off of, is being violated?
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I also attended the lecture a couple of days ago - he's awesome, isn't he?
and I agree with some of his stuff - but i do think that some controls are necessary (but then again, I guess I'm semi-conservative when it comes to being my own guinea pig when it comes to medicine, etc).
what did you buy into everything he said - or were there points when you were skeptical?
Also, his book... ghostwritten or real John Stossel?
Well, I had been exposed to these ideas (free market capitalism) before, in high school. Hearing Stossel speak reminded me distinctly of my high school econ teacher, and many, if not all of his points matched with my teacher's.
Getting to the his arguments, I was skeptical about health care even before stossel's lecture. In economics, there is a price on a life, and that can most directly be measured relative to other lives. So, in order for laissez-faire system to truly work, it would be at the cost of a certain amount of lives, usually those of the poor (but not necessarily only the poor), which I don't necessarily agree with. Also, I don't agree with stossel's "hands off" approach to global warming. The sheer amount of scientific data that describes global warming as a man-influenced epidemic is too surprising to deny.
I haven't read his book, but it's probably ghostwritten to some extent.
P.S. sorry, this strayed off topic from english/free culture
Hmm, I missed the Stossel lecture but it sounds like it was really good. It's interesting that he and Lessig have such similar stances. It stands to reason there are thousands of other relatively famous people with the same position. Yet I don't seem to remember hearing much (if anything) about this particular threat to free culture before Lessig came along. Why is that? I'm familiar with the idea that too much regulation is no good for anyone and that there comes a point when creativity, etc. is affected. Still, where is the free culture awareness club?
Haha...where is our common sense. I think the problem is that alot of people lack it. Now, I am saying people in America are stupid, but sometimes I wonder what people are thinking
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