Part of the of the cost driver on ambulance service is insurance reimbursement. Just like with medical services, if insurance negotiates a rate based on the prevailing rate then it would amount to fraud for the ambulance service to charge less to the uninsured than they do the insurance company. And since much of the business for ambulances will come from insurance payers then there is great incentive to inflate the "normal" price - even if it means many of the uninsured eventually turn into uncollectible accounts to be written off. It's a terrible game that gets played.

I've done much more than merely disagree with you and say I'm not convinced. But no, I don't expect you to capitulate. I expect you to provide reasonable answers to reasonable challenges. Your premise mostly boils down to: if people expect things to be different then they will be. I'm simply challenging that assertion here.

Others are free to respond to your idea. So am I, and I'll continue doing so. This is a place for discussion, so discuss. Or don't. The choice is yours.

I don't question everything you say, nor am I following you around. I only question what you say concerning anarcho capitalism because: you admit that you don't know much about it, that it's unlikely to work anytime soon, and that you don't have answers to my criticisms. Yet  you keep bringing it up anyway. So I'll keep questioning as long as you keep bringing it up.

I wouldn't be opposed to privatized fire services (or other services - except lawmaking, law enforcement, and judiciary) but it's not a slam dunk case.

The biggest challenge that any model - public or private - faces is conflicting motives. In a public model or a voluntary model, the goal is public safety. Of course other goals creep in and start to crowd out the main goal; unions, job security, political payoffs, political attacks, personal safety (of the firefighters), etc. Private firms aren't immune to this and even start off with an entirely different goal: profit. Of course profit isn't a dirty word, and that profit must be derived from something valuable (ie public safety). However, these motives will come into conflict often, and don't be surprised when profit wins out more often than public or employee safety.

So it's all about tradeoffs. Privatization can certainly be better, but it won't always be.

And as we've covered in previous threads, Mike, the right circumstances you cite will necessarily involve either suppression of or evolution of human nature. I'm still not sure why you think that's plausible.

What is this opinion based on?

I didn't mean to suggest that you're making arguments thoughtlessly; your arguments are consistently thoughtful.

But who says that sufficient constraints can exist outside of government, aside from anarchists?

Also, if a belief in sufficient non-government constraints isn't the cause of a belief in less need for government constraints (as you explicitly argued in #185), then what is the correlation you're proposing?

I agree less with the rest of your post. It's not that I favor expansive regulation of business because I think loss reputation isn't much of a deterrent (I don't favor expansive regulation at all), it's that I think loss of reputation is hardly sufficient for keeping civil society civil or for preventing/punishing harm, and so therefore it's a reason that we need government at all and some government regulation and oversight of business in particular.

Also, I don't see any reason to suppose causality or even correlation between belief in government and belief in non-government constraints.

Ok, I agree with you on this, but we've been talking about constraints on government behavior. If most people end up agreeing too, then the constraint of democracy and elections comes into play.

Sure: the charter document and any other subsequent agreements, interpretation of such documents, self government, competing interests, elections.

These aren't quite principles, I understand (more procedures), but at a certain point it doesn't matter what principle I think should serve as a limit if those around me disagree. If people around me no longer care for a right to bear arms then I'm still protected by the prior agreement we have in place and I can have my day in court. They can change the agreement if enough people agree, but they'll have to go through that exercise at least as long as they still see value in rule of law. If they stop valuing the rule of law then I highly doubt that any abstract principle will constrain that monster anyway.

Because we're primarily talking about the different ways that libertarians and conservatives think about government and the specific ways that the power to make and enforce law is constrained.  And by "law" I mean law in the common sense as opposed to the "private law" sense that Sal was using on that Ethiopian Trucker thread.

I'm still confused, though. What's the alternative for a non-believer if not nihilism?

You're not alone in that struggle, GFL. I think it's a common one for Ricochet members (even us theists), one some of us weren't really conscious of until we came here and were afforded this civil room in which to explore and work things out.

I'm not sure we even need to substitute "intellectual" for "cultural" for your point to be valid. I'm not certain that "intellectual" can be removed from "cultural" without both coming to ruin. Different thread, I know, I just wanted to throw that out there.

First thing's first: I am not a lawyer; I'm an accountant.

To piggyback on Sal's definitions, I'd further say that a libertarian's narrow view of "harm" and "non-aggression" usually puts them in the substantive due process frame of mind while a conservative's broader interpretation usually puts them in a procedural due process frame of mind. For instance: the NYC soda size limit. Libertarians are more likely to argue that NYC has no right to such regulation while a conservative is more likely to argue that NYC (though not  the feds) certainly does have such a right even if we personally think it's a bad idea.

Sal, you beat me to it. "Keeping the government out of places where it doesn't belong" is a substantive or normative assertion if it's to have any real meaning or guiding influence. Libertarians use term like "non-agression", "harm", and "property rights" as if they have objective meanings in accord with libertarian ideals; conservatives also use these words, but we allow that others mean them differently than us and that the currently popular conception will breathe (understandably and acceptably so), so procedural limits are what we rely on to keep things within the margins.