Nonsense and you have the cheek to call yourself a "philosopher"? You're so desperate to win the argument that you'll churn out any rubbish. Is this what they teach you at Objectivist boot camp?
Are you a) seriously saying that "laissez-faire" is NOT an idiom!?!?!? b) even if by some cosmic mistake it should turn out that laissez-faire is not an idiom and should be really be literally translated to "let do" rather than "leave alone"/"leave in peace" are you seriously claiming to base your judgment of me as a *philosopher* on my knowledge of the *French language*!?!?!? Seriously!? You don't see anything remotely absurd about that?
I mean, of all the things you could get me on, all my alleged misconceptions of socialism, THIS is your best argument!? Wow. Wow wow wow. Serious mind blowing moment here.
This is straight out of Rand. You don't have a coherent argument. Give it up.
As opposed to "this is straight out of Rand" which IS a "coherent argument"? In what theory of philosophy is making a mere statement about Rand a "coherent argument"?
Not true at all. All you need do is look at 19c Britain to see that laissez faire contributed to unspeakable poverty and gross social injustice.
Aah, finally something that approaches substance. If I behaved like the people in this thread I would now demand that you provide me with a specific academic reference, or otherwise dismiss your claim as complete fabrication. But I am not going to do that because I've read many books about 19th century Britain and I know what you are referring to, and unlike many of the people on this thread I am interested in learning the TRUTH, not winning a debate with silly arguments.
So to answer this argument: you are right that the conditions of 19th century Britain was absolutely horrible, worse than most third world countries today. But still, the conditions during the 19th century was significantly BETTER than during the 18th and 17th centuries. During the 17th and 18th century the average age of living was by some estimates as low as 25 years. By the mid to late 19th century the average age of living had more than doubled to 50-60 years. Also, during the 19th century there was in addition an explosive population growth. During the 18th century there were only two classes: the upper class and the lower class. By the mid to late 19th century Britain had a sizable middle class, people who came from poor families or had themselves been poor at an earlier age. This completely new phenomenon which had never existed anywhere in the world before, the middle class, had access to banks, they had saving accounts, their kids did not have to work but was instead sent to school, they owned not only a single set of clothes or shoes their whole life as was common in the 18th century, but even had several pairs of clothes, and while not fat, the newly emerged middle class was not hungry.
To a socialist all the facts I just mentioned are completely and utterly irrelevant. All that matters is that there were many people who were living in awful living conditions. But to someone who is actually interested in the truth a whole set of questions arise from these facts. a) what caused the living conditions to improve, longevity to rise and population growth to explode? Why did i significant portion of the population whose ancestors had been dirt poor all of a sudden become quite wealthy? What was new to the 19th century that did not exist in the 18th century? The answer is: capitalism.
Any honest person will conclude that it was capitalism that caused so many people to live longer and become wealthier. The question then immediately becomes: was it capitalism that caused people to live in extreme poverty? Was it capitalism that caused child labor and 12 hour work days? The honest person finds the answer to this by looking whether these things existed PRIOR to capitalism. And lo and behold, in the 17th and 18th centuries people worked 12 hour days or more, there was child labor and people lived in dirt poverty. If you're intellectually honest you will conclude that capitalism did not create these bad conditions, but rather inherited them from the feudal system of the past. In fact, you will celebrate the fact that capitalism CURED these problems. For 10.000 years there was child labor, and then 50-100 years after the rise of capitalism: BAM! Gone. Socialists don't hesitate to take the credit for this, but the honest thinking person asks why socialism and government intervention wasn't able to get rid of child labor until AFTER capitalism had worked its magic.
