there are more important issues right now than whether or not we should stop chopping off some random baby's wee-wee.
This is a fallacy, and it's also inaccurate. One's right to one's own body is a fundamental right that "give me my rights and stay the hell away" libertarians should be particularly interested in.
Let Bono and the free market handle that.
As a sidenote, I'll let you in on something about business and the free market: it can be abused just as badly, if not worse than governmental power. Libertarians, by hating government and endorsing business, are simply endorsing one kind of institutional feebleness over another. The free market is not some kind of savior. Where was the free market when Enron took advantage of deregulated electricity in California to manufacture brown-outs and conduct unethical trading on the chaos? Where was the free market when Goldman Sachs knowingly contributed to the economic crisis in advance through their own arbitrage? Where was the free market when new, poorly-understood derivatives were created, and where was it when bad debt was segmented and sold as good debt? Where was the free market in real estate when an unprecedentedly huge bubble developed over the last several years? I could go in interminably about corporate and business abuses of human rights and ethics, and I'd probably end up breaching the per-post character limit of this forum. I wouldn't even begin to have touched market efficiency, and why markets
aren't efficient and economically sound, but are instead dominated by wealth-capture arbitrage, human irrationality and fallibility, and greedy motives that cross economic self-interest into piracy—best exemplified lately by massive hedge funds.
Business is capable and willing to commit evil in the name of the "free market" and self-interest. It was government that stepped in and cleaned up and moved out Love Canal in New York after its corruption. It was government that stepped in and cleaned up the food processing industry around the turn of the century. It was government that codified into law essential labor standards. It was government that established the SEC to crack down on insider training that punished stockholders. It was government that created the Sarbanes-Oxley act after the crises of the turn of
this century (an act that business has bitched about ever since). And it was government that injected liquidity into the system and narrowly prevented a worldwide economic meltdown last September. If you'll notice, these are all reactionary events in which government is cleaning up business's mess. Government has also failed many times to curtail the excesses of business, most recently providing too much forbearance to institutions in the S&L crisis and championing deregulation that helped create the current problem.
Business is even arguably more capable of evil than government because of globalization. Multinationals can cow third-world governments, operate sweatshops and other deplorable practices, and commit other abuses; their activities have been one of the strongest reasons that governments and unions have called for international accounting standards. Things like Bayer's dumping of contaminated medicine in poor countries that caused widespread disease, Rio Tinto's destabilization of Papa New Guinea, or United Fruit's rapacious activities in South America fly under the radar of the American public's concern. The last big shakeup here over an American multinational's actions I can remember is the outrage over Blackwater in Iraq.
I'm not surprised by the lack of criticism of business, since criticizing it, the free market, etc. is inviting accusations of being a "socialist" or unamerican or a hippie, and because Libertarians and Republicans have utter, blind faith in business. It's the same shills in business school; my classmates are almost all unfailingly red-blooded boors who dream of owning their mini-mansion and fast cars, humanity and social policy be damned. We watched the documentary on Enron in one of my recent classes; the two tax major libertarians next to me smiled wide when a clip of Reagan played, and then disappeared into some kind of catatonic shock as the evidence of Enron's abuses of the "free" market mounted. Finance majors are taught how to arbitrage the most money; tax majors are taught how to deny the government its taxes, with the justification that "if a loophole exists, we're doing a good job by exploiting it"; marketing majors are taught how to tap into the lowest common denominator and unleash consumerist idiocy; management majors are taught how to whip inferiors into shape. I'm thankful I'm an accounting major, because anything other than accounting or business information systems would have probably repulsed me out of business school.
I just wonder how these free market advocates can despise the government so much while ignoring business's long and morbidly disturbing history of abuse and the good work government has done curbing them. When I came out of being a religious Republican fuckwad, I passed through my own libertarian phase, and it really just feels like a cult of tying in self-determination and individualism with the romantic idea of business and the American dream, with the total, irrational demonization of all government. It's very easy to feel that way; at the most basic level, government is gonna TAKE UR HARD-EARNED CASH that you earned working at a business, and most people don't give enough of a damn about politics or humanity to comprehend why taxation, government, and social policy are tremendously good things. If they bothered with an actual business education or a serious understanding of the Federal Reserve, they might realize that the market isn't as efficient as it's romanticized to be, or the Federal Reserve as evil. They might also realize how much of it is insane financial wizardry and runaway falsity; if more people knew, perhaps the CNBC channel would be taken off the air to celebration. Gordon Gekko summed it up well in Wall Street:
Gordon Gekko: The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.
It's the same thing that finance majors dream of: manipulating the market to steal wealth created by the businesses and employees involved. It's like foreign exchange; a diversity of currencies only creates inefficiencies in civilization. Some exchange arbitrageur is getting rich off exchange transactions while millions of people depending on them to travel or commute (like in Europe, where people live close to borders and commute often) get screwed over bit by bit.
Business is not some infallible dream of self-determination, efficient markets, and sensible economics, and it has no better claim to be the driver of humanity than government does. Both human institutions have committed good and evil, and should be approached rationally and neutrally in debate. This is too great a leap required of most Republicans and Libertarians, and the situation only got worse when wingnut Ron Paul and other tin-foilers categorically attacked the Federal Reserve and espoused ludicrous economic policy like the restoration of the gold standard. This was all done with the same infatuation with business and hatred of government. Though it's not necessarily the position I advocate, any libertarian should be able to realize that all institutions and organizations, not only governments, amplify human effort for better or worse, and that business and government should have checks and balances on each other, just like the intra-government checks and balances that they adore.
A good starting point for realizing the market is inefficient is
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Spirits-Psychology-Economy-Capitalism/dp/0691142335. And Gordon Gekko will return in
Money Never Sleeps, a sequel to Wall Street focusing on the abuses of hedge funds:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1027718/
