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This is NOT the same as "democracy".

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What most people seem to believe in, is a gov't that always "has to do something".

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Dr. Dave Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University, who led a study of the issue, that was published in the journal Current Biology, said:
Medium-sized sauropods like diplodocus, which was 150 feet tall and weighed up to 45 tons, made enough methane to amount to roughly 472 million tons per year, the scientists calculated.

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"No solemn titles, no pompous ceremonies, no enthusiasm on the part of applauding masses can conceal the crude fact that both the legislators and the directors of a centralized economy are only particular individuals like you and me, ignorant of 99 percent of what is going on around them as far as the real transactions, agreements, attitudes, feelings, and convictions of people are concerned. One of the paradoxes of our era is the continual retreat of traditional religious faith before the advance of science and technology, under the implied exigency of a cool and matter-of-fact attitude and dispassionate reasoning, accompanied by a no less continual retreat from the same attitude and reasoning in regard to legal and political questions. The mythology of our age is not religious, but political, and its chief myths seem to be 'representation' of the people, on the one hand, and the charismatic pretension of political leaders to be in possession of the truth and to act accordingly, on the other."

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Spontaneous order, also known as "self-organization", is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process found in physical, biological, and social networks, as well as economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.[1] Naturalists often point to the inherent "watch-like" precision of uncultivated ecosystems and to the universe itself as ultimate examples of this phenomenon.

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To Hayek the birth of civilization is due to the start of societal traditions placing importance on private property leading to expansion, trade, and eventually the modern capitalist system, also known as the extended order[1]. Socialists are wrong because they disregard the fact that modern civilization naturally evolved and was not planned. Additionally, since modern civilization and all of its customs and traditions naturally led to the current order and are needed for its continuance, any fundamental change to the system that tries to control it is doomed to fail since it would be impossible or unsustainable in modern civilization.

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If so, these charts commit the fallacy of omission, by concealing the fact that the 1970 Clean Air Act was not the first piece of legislation enacted to decrease air pollution, nor was the formation of OSHA the first regulation put in place to ensure worker safety.

They've simply chosen two "big name" laws, plotted them on a chart, and completely ignored that fact that, individually, each was only one chapter in a long history of regulation.

Could the EPA be more efficient? Of course. No bureaucratic agency will ever be "optimal" by any reasonable definition of the word. But is it better from the mob rule and functional anarchy that would result from complete and total individual liberty?

You betcha.

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Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

Law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike...

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.

If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.

Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.

The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.

...the statement, “The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign,” is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

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But in reality, I agree with you. This is a good example of the government overstepping its bounds. I don't feel that it harms me in any way to be forced to wear a seatbelt (I wear one anyway), but I do recognize the validity of your premise.

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No, those charts were simply misleading. My response is to point out the fallacy in the argument which I assume they were trying to make.

I could, for instance, point out the fact that over the past several centuries there has been a direct correlation between the decrease in the number of European men (as a percentage of the total male population of Europe) who wear hats every day and the increase in average global temperature.

If someone else then came along and read that data, and from it inferred that wearings hats prevents global warming, then I'd be guilty of using misleading data to deceive them, presupposing that this was my intention in generating the original observation.

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'Twas not I. But I will go ahead and bump you back up to 0 on it.

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The average person cannot maintain a healthy weight in this obesity-promoting environment.

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What sets this book apart from the others is the acknowledgement that information failures (i.e. ignorance and uncertainty) lay at the heart of the crisis. Neither the bankers nor the regulators adequately understood the nature or severity of the risks of low quality mortgage-backed securities flowing through the financial system. In hindsight, hardly anyone understood the risks or was willing to short the assertion that real estate values always rise.

But, the authors make an important Hayekian distinction: information failures work very differently among regulators and market participants. While there may be heterogeneous opinions among regulators as to the correct regulations, only one theory gets codified into law. In contrast, discordant theories between market participants lead to competition and a darwinian weeding out of erroneous strategies via profits and losses. Regulations, as codified by the SEC, the Federal Reserve and various other regulatory agencies worked in perverse ways to disable important information from reaching the market and led to unintended catastrophic consequences. In the meantime, bankers did what they always do - they maximized their incomes.

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