Who enforces the contracts? It's just a government by another name, which effectively has to step in and pick up the slack where there is no obvious profit motive. I think more effort should be made to make government accountable, rather than worry about its size. You cannot have an FDA without a large government; there is zero incentive NOT to release a drug and attempt to gloss over / pay off side effects; the situation is similar in large scale farming and the management of natural resources like mining. While all systems are prone to abuse, focusing on fixing or limiting the abuse will do more good than going with no system. There is a tendency to focus on failures, since these are pointed out when they fail; success is routine and you are rarely exposed to it in the media and have to research it yourself. In any event, since there are at least two sides in any dispute, whichever way a judge decides, someone is going to be pissed. That doesn't mean we don't need judges. A lot of the first year of law school is drilling into newbies, it's not always obvious who's right and who's wrong, even if everyone is telling the truth. If it were easy, they wouldn't be in court. But everyone needs a decision that doesn't involve Party A and Party B charging each other on the fens with claymores.
For example, how do you weigh the interests of doing open pit mining in a town of say, 10,000 people, versus the fact that it will employ directly and indirectly, 100,000 people? Who would you prefer making the judgement call? Nobody (i.e. whoever has the most guns wins), a private corporation accountable only to its shareholders, or an elected body that may get it wrong? Someone is going to be complaining about injustice anyway, the townsfolk or the people out of jobs or the mining company's shareholders. They are all people.
"What, cars pollute, have green house gas emissions and waste fuel?" "Horses I say!", which is the easy way. Electric vehicles is the hard way. I know which one I prefer frankly, but your mileage may vary; electric cars are unlikely to catch on without large scale investment in recharging stations and tax breaks/incentives to encourage their use. The world is very interconnected and extremely complex, simpler is only better if everything is simpler. You really can't pick and choose the bits you like (safe drugs, nice housing, roads, lots of food) and leave the bits you don't (corruption, decisions that don't go your way, taxes, lobbyists, people who don't share your world view). To give you another example, heat is the enemy in computing. That does not mean Intel makes the same processor they did last year; they solve the problem and invent new methods of generating less heat to get faster computers. But... there's always going to be heat. If you really hate the heat, you have to stop using computers.
For example, how do you weigh the interests of doing open pit mining in a town of say, 10,000 people, versus the fact that it will employ directly and indirectly, 100,000 people? Who would you prefer making the judgement call? Nobody (i.e. whoever has the most guns wins), a private corporation accountable only to its shareholders, or an elected body that may get it wrong? Someone is going to be complaining about injustice anyway, the townsfolk or the people out of jobs or the mining company's shareholders. They are all people.
"What, cars pollute, have green house gas emissions and waste fuel?" "Horses I say!", which is the easy way. Electric vehicles is the hard way. I know which one I prefer frankly, but your mileage may vary; electric cars are unlikely to catch on without large scale investment in recharging stations and tax breaks/incentives to encourage their use. The world is very interconnected and extremely complex, simpler is only better if everything is simpler. You really can't pick and choose the bits you like (safe drugs, nice housing, roads, lots of food) and leave the bits you don't (corruption, decisions that don't go your way, taxes, lobbyists, people who don't share your world view). To give you another example, heat is the enemy in computing. That does not mean Intel makes the same processor they did last year; they solve the problem and invent new methods of generating less heat to get faster computers. But... there's always going to be heat. If you really hate the heat, you have to stop using computers.
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