broncofan, "I will get to the rest of those points when I have a chance. But in the cyanide powder paragraph I was saying what would happen sans regulation [then the cyanide powder is added either because in the doses used it is beneficial or because the producer wants to kill or harm, or is reckless as to that possibility; in the former cases, no harm done, in the latter, both criminal and civil common law would come to the aid of the victim]. This is the world I deduced you prefered from some of your posts. I consider all of those things not to be the present state of affairs but the state of affairs if you had your way. In short, one part chaos, one part misery [no producer's enlightened self interest is served by landing himself with lawsuits or prosecutions; a producer's enlightened self interest is best served by best serving those he chooses to serve].
As for disability, it is fairly well-known that people have stereotyped views of the extent to which disability bears on an individual's other capacities. Surely an amputee should not operate manual machinery but a man who is blind can answer telephones. Private employers would not hire these individuals without some push from the government [why not, if they're as valuable as you suggest?]. People with HIV can work in all sorts of jobs but there was a point in time when such individuals were stigmatized to the extent they could not be hired for jobs where they posed no direct (or indirect) threat [such decisions may or may not have been ignorant, depending on the state of medical knowledge at the time, but you're overlooking the importance of freedom of association and of freedom of contract]. Employers have legal defenses to the government's mandate against discrimination and do not have to hire people who cannot in fact do the job. They are just barred from irrationally stigmatizing such folks and systematically excluding them from the workforce.
A great deal of crony capitalism results from a lack of regulation. Without regulators what is to prevent anti-competitive acts such as price fixing? [regulators are protection rackets. and having conferred their protection, they raise barriers to entry which entrench the anti-competitive behaviour you complain of] What is to prevent insurers from not holding enough money in their reserves? [the rule of caveat emptor] What is to prevent banks from lending more than they can afford to lend? [ditto; and, incidentally, central banks/governments acting as lenders of last resort underwrites irresponsible bank lending] Surely you're not going to tell me a bank would never do something so stupid or make an imprudent investment decision unless the government encouraged them to? [that is precisely what has happened]
The problem you cite with not being able to identify the exact number saved from such policies is a problem faced in all the social sciences [yes, and it's a profound problem, to put it mildly]. You can only get empirical numbers for the policy you enact and when comparing previous numbers with more recent figures to compare policy alternatives you don't have anything like ceteris paribus [so how do you know my utopia would be a hellhole?]. However, studies do attempt to address these problems and take a serious approach to developing a methodology to overcome them. For instance, when you force employers to provide a "reasonable accommodation" to their disabled employees, and the number of disabled people with income below the poverty line falls in a ten year period there could be causes other than the enacted policy.
But such studies attempt to account for those differences and certainly requiring employers to make some attempt not to stigmatize the disabled does bear a logical relationship to increased welfare for such people [For present purposes I'm content to assume you're right; the fact remains that this increased welfare has come at a cost of diminished human liberty, and in a 1,001 tiny ways a number of people's lives have been made slightly worse in order to achieve that improvement; you say that's a good thing; I say, who are you to trade one man's welfare for another's?] . The inability to control all extraneous factors and re-design the world in the form of a controlled experiment is hardly an excuse for ignoring the evidence we do have [I find this a curious argument given that it is the statists and collectivists who are so fond of collecting data and trying to apply levers and pulleys and incentives to that data to produce what they consider a desirable outcome].
Also, you don't have to prove you are philanthropic. I am just somewhat skeptical that those demanding to opt out of a system of taxation will help address the unavoidable problems that less fortunate people in society face [Actually I think the philanthropic instinct is stifled by state action. My perception is that this hasn't yet occurred in the States to anything like the same degree that it has in Yurp, what we see here, after decades of social democratic welfarism is an attitude that "I need not care, because the state will sort it out". Remember about ten years ago that sizzling French summer when 10,000 old folks died of heat in their un-airconditioned apartments? Well it happened in August, France's holiday month, and the unenlightened selfishness of the holidaying offspring of these oldsters (offspring also of the social democratic state) was somewhat distasteful] . "
