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Milton Friedman Puts A Young (and skinny) Michael Moore In His Place
- Thread starter thesniper
- Start date
why is that not a surprise? I don't think you get why he's wrong. Aside from yourself, it's not rational behavior to put a price on someone's life. Whether it be 1 or 1000. If you want to get technical there's also an opportunity cost to the ppl that lost that person. Milton's head is stuck too far in a book (among other places) to fully realize that.Quote from burn8:
nobody here seems to get Friedman's point which is not that much of a surprise.
-burn8
Quote from athlonmank8:
why is that not a surprise? I don't think you get why he's wrong. Aside from yourself, it's not rational behavior to put a price on someone's life. Whether it be 1 or 1000. If you want to get technical there's also an opportunity cost to the ppl that lost that person. Milton's head is stuck too far in a book (among other places) to fully realize that.
And thats exactly why you are wrong. Everyday you put a price on your life...when you decide to drive to work you are saying that those daily wages are worth the risk of dying in a car accident. When someone decides to become a police officer they are putting a price on their life. Now if you say that a life is priceless then by definition if 1,000,000 need to suffer to save one life it would be worth it correct? The kid is arguing something different , he is saying that Ford needs to make the risks clear not that life is priceless but he worded it wrong. Say the part cost 2,000,000 then it would not make sense for Ford to recall it for 180 lives , which the kid openly admits. His thought is correct his argument is not
friedman is a much better debater as he should be,but he twisted the kids idea around and eventually took it to tobacco ,, a straw man tactic,you can't argue with the strawman ,he's not in the room,he went one step further and got the audience to agree with the straw man,peer pressure, he came back to the kid and dismissed him,again using taping time and voice durability as another strawman,again straying from the subject, it was more about winning the debate than the subject,(principles or money involved)
Quote from burn8:
nobody here seems to get Friedman's point which is not that much of a surprise.
-burn8
I get Friedmans point. I just don't agree with it. 13 bucks is not a lot, to save lives.
Friedmans argument only makes sense when the cost of safety erases profit or competitiveness.
To suggest an additional 13 bucks on the Pintos sticker price would have bankrupted Ford or tanked the Pinto, is nonsense.
Quote from chaykapwr:
And thats exactly why you are wrong. Everyday you put a price on your life...when you decide to drive to work you are saying that those daily wages are worth the risk of dying in a car accident. When someone decides to become a police officer they are putting a price on their life. Now if you say that a life is priceless then by definition if 1,000,000 need to suffer to save one life it would be worth it correct? The kid is arguing something different , he is saying that Ford needs to make the risks clear not that life is priceless but he worded it wrong. Say the part cost 2,000,000 then it would not make sense for Ford to recall it for 180 lives , which the kid openly admits. His thought is correct his argument is not
And that's where you are wrong.
Individuals have a right to put a price on their own lives.
No individual has the right to put a price on OTHERS LIVES, without their consent.
And that's what Ford did.
They withheld key information on the Pintos safety from consumers.
Now if Ford had told consumers beforehand, the Pinto was a great, cheap car with a faulty gas-tank that could blow-up, Ford wouldn't be liable.
But because they sold a product under fraudulent pretenses, where the risks were known, but not disclosed, Ford was sued for damages, and rightly lost.
What Lee Iacocca did was unconscionable.
The choices before him were thus:
1) Increase the sticker price of the Pinto by a measly 13 dollars
2) Eat the cost of gas tank redesign by 13 dollars, per car
3) Some combination of 1 and 2.
4) Keep the faulty gas tank, hide the safety data, and subject thousands of lives to a firey death.
He chose #4.
I would not chose#4. Would you?
$13 back then was about the equivalent of $13,333 today.Quote from achilles28:
I get Friedmans point. I just don't agree with it. 13 bucks is not a lot, to save lives.
Friedmans argument only makes sense when the cost of safety erases profit or competitiveness.
To suggest an additional 13 bucks on the Pintos sticker price would have bankrupted Ford or tanked the Pinto, is nonsense.
Friedmans argument only makes sense when the cost of safety erases profit or competitiveness.
Who are you to tell a car company what makes cost sense?
One good reason why american liberalism is ruinious. Most people cannot understand Freidman's point, that there is a price on our lives because we live in a world of finite resources.
The childish retort 'how dare you put a price on human life' means for instance an open ended and economically ruinious gov't health care. Liberals will put an infinite price on human life as long as it isn't their own money. Later the reality forces a rationing unfair to all.
at the other extreme we have a liberal crown jewel which shows what happens when idiots like Moore get their way, and yes grown ups do have to put a price on human life ...
http://www.nofluoride.com/asbestos.cfm
http://www.nofluoride.com/asbestos.cfm
Asbestos removal, the biggest environmental cleanup project in U.S. history, has cost an estimated $50 billion over the past 20 years. It has forced schools to lay off teachers, caused owners to abandon buildings and added considerably to the cost of remodeling many houses.
But one thing this colossal investment hasn't done is produce a measurable improvement in the public's health.
A USA TODAY investigation has found incontrovertible scientific evidence that asbestos in buildings creates a cancer risk so low that it barely can be measured. A person who spends a career inside a building rich with asbestos materials is more likely to die of a lightning bolt, a bee sting or a toothpick lodged in the throat than an asbestos-related cancer.
Despite the minimal risk, asbestos continues to be removed from US. buildings at a cost of about $3 billion a year, largely because the risks were overestimated two decades ago and new scientific evidence has never changed the public perception that asbestos in any form is deadly.
The U.S. situation is very different from that in the developing world, where millions of people in mining and manufacturing are exposed to enough asbestos fibers and dust to cause incurable cancer and other diseases.
But in the USA, the amount spent on asbestos removal "makes no sense from a public health standpoint," says Michael Thune, chief epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society "People have a hard time understanding the magnitude of different risks. The risk of getting cancer from asbestos in buildings is so small that eliminating it wouldn't create a measurable blip in the (171,000) lung cancer deaths that occur every year."
Even the fiercest critics of asbestos doubt the wisdom of removing it from buildings.
"I'm sure you expect me to say, 'Take it out!'" says David Egilman, a Brown University doctor who is a critic of the asbestos industry and a frequent expert witness for workers suing asbestos companies. "But that would be lunacy, and I'm not a lunatic. There are far better ways to spend our money."
Adds Tim Flood, an epidemiologist at the Arizona Health Department: "Asbestos abatement is pretty much a fiasco. It's hard to think of a worse investment." Many more lives would be saved, Flood says, if the money were spent on drug prevention, guardrails, sunscreen, medical research "almost anything, really."
Indoor radon will cause 3,000 times as many deaths. Driving will kill 20,000 times more people. Smoking will kill 50,000 times as many.
For each life saved, asbestos removal costs $100 million to $500 million