Quote from: rainingbitcoins on July 28, 2011, 05:00:42 AM

Quote from: myrkul on July 28, 2011, 04:26:01 AM

So you're saying that agencies, which advertise now, and offer affordable rates now, would be less affordable, when they had more services to offer, and thus more revenue, with the same advertising budget?

I'm saying that you'd have even more industries producing even more pointless advertising (which is inherently coercive and dishonest, by the way) if everything was privatized. And we, the customers, end up paying for the privledge of being annoyed, coerced, and openly lied to if we want to use those products or services. I have no idea why he brought up insurance.

Dishonest, I'll grant you. Ads are as close to lies as possible. Like taking to an Aes Sedai. But Coercive? Find me one coercive ad, just one ad that puts a gun to your head. He brought up insurance probably because Insurance agencies will probably end up being the brokers for most of those services - Defense agencies, Arbitration firms, etc. the partnership makes sense.

Quote from: rainingbitcoins on July 28, 2011, 05:00:42 AM

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Well, no offense, but your ideas were tried. They didn't work... and catastrophically so.

There were many, many mitigating circumstances, a few of which I've already gone over in this thread, that seriously contributed to that. Even excluding all of those caveats, though, it isn't nearly as clear-cut as you make it seem:
http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/03/better-red-than-unfed-a-survey-of-post-communism/

Well of course a communist country is going to be better than a failed state - especially when that communist state takes it's price signals from the Sears catalog. Give the economies of those countries a few years to get started again, and we'll be seeing much better living conditions.