I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 2nd, 2004 |
 11 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Typewriters aren’t so prevalent these days. Most fools appear to use word processing programmes on personal computers. In fact I can’t remember the last time I saw a typewriter.
I blame these ridiculous statists who want to ban everything that is dangerous. They continually bang on and on about Health and Safety and European directives to improve the quality oof life of ‘the workers’ and all they do is get up my nose with their petty bureacracy.
Why don’t they leave well alone and allow people to make the choice whether they want to work in a dangerous job? After all no one forces people to go to work and they could always go work somewhere else if they felt it was too dangerous.
Anyway conditions have improved enormously over the past 30- 50 years for the average ‘working class’ person. They no longer have to go into dangerous coal mines or dangerous shipyards and their kids don’t have to work as chimney sweeps anymore. So why do these bloody socialist governments think they have to introduce more red tape and legislation that merely adds to the costs for a business.
The bank likes it better if you pay the mortgage. For most people, this forces them to go to work.
Although the superficial logic of this argument does work, in reality people cannot or will not necessarily exercise critical reasoning in determining where and how they should work, and even if they can they frequently don’t want to. Many people just take what they can get in order to pay the bills, and some simply don’t have the ability to work in “safer” jobs.
Most people would tend to accept that SOME degree of regulation on basic safety is not undesirable. If it is not put in place voluntarily, sooner or later it will be compelled either by state action or by inability to hire sufficient labour (although that could also boost automation as an alternative). I would agree, though, that current levels of safety regulation are excessive and in some cases plain daft. But something, I suppose, realistically, has to be there.
I think this is an important point. Whatever the theoretical advantages of libertarianism, in the real world it won’t necessarily work so well and there does have to be some form of ultimate regulating authority. After all, surely the free market only exists because the state compels it? Left to their own devices, corporations don’t want a free market, they want cartels and monopoly. So, the answer IMO is not to call for the utter abandonment of a regulatory state, but a (significant) trimming of its powers.
Having said that, is it all bad? Excessive safety regulation for the workforce only adds costs, so giving an impetus to automation. This will reduce costs again, and this cycle might go on and on. Ultimately, everything will cost nothing and although there will no work for anyone to do, no-one will actually need to work – however, that’s a couple of centuries away yet, I suspect.
EG
How about video cameras? They are an even bigger threat these days thanks to cretins like
fat arseholeMr Moore and his ilk.“The bank likes it better if you pay the mortgage.”
Well, actually, not to be flip, but when home prices are rising, the bank might actually prefer that you NOT pay the mortage, so that they can foreclose and then sell it for more than what you owe them.
The tools are the means of doing something. If that something is good or evil, it depends on the tool’s user morality (or lack of it).
They don’t. This is not cost-effective for them. Even in times of rising values, lenders normally will go out of their way to avoid foreclosure. Foreclosure involves considerable administrative expense, legal costs, and loss of future income, not to mention a potentially negative impact on client relations and costs associated with claiming on the re-insurers, so generally it’s something banks like to avoid.
EG
Unless you simply walk away from a home and the loan you can not pay the lender can only take what you owe them plus reasonable costs in repossession. Any remaining equity still belongs to the defaulter. As EG commented lenders are very reluctant to reposses.
Apologies in advance for this wild tangent, but wouldn’t that actually depend on either the terms of the mortgage and/or the property theory underlying security interests in land? My understanding was that in some minority of US states, legal title is actually vested in the lender until the mortgage is completely paid off. Based on that, I would guess that there are at least a few other common-law jurisdictions outside the US that do the same, though I wouldn’t claim to be certain of this.
AFAIK in Britain, the legal title in a mortgaged property does belong to the borrower, but the property is itself security for the loan and so the lender holds the deeds as a lien on the property until either the debt is discharged or alternative security is provided.
EG
I have always felt that money, guns, and alcohol should be kept out of the hands of the criminally irresponsible. Starting with the government.
Llewellin
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?