It's easier to move out? You are not born under a landlord. You do not swear fealty to the flag of the landlord. Nobody thinks the landlord should be able to draft you for civil service. The landlord cannot put you in jail for failing to pay rent. There's a long, long list of other differences where the landlord as government analogy breaks down. I'm surprised anyone still brings it up.

EDIT: Ha. You changed it. In reality, not necessarily that much, although it's nice to have extra governmental agency that you can choose to pay or not, and that is accountable to the government in a transparent way. Asking the government to regulate itself is almost as dumb as asking a logging company to regulate itself.

Municipal services are generally provided by a local government but this is largely an artifact of the way modern democracies are organized. Private arrangements are fairly rare in the modern world but cruise ships, private resorts, corporate campuses and on a smaller scale large managed apartment buildings provide examples of decoupling the idea of provision of municipal services and government.

Not necessarily. If you've ever been to Disney World, it's not like that. And hell, government roads in the states and Japan often dissolve into a complex and inefficient series of toll roads, at least in some areas.

I'm much more worried about uncompetitive practices, like powerful local monopolies and rent seeking behavior.

I think you're stuck in the mindset of 'if it wasn't for our government provided roads where would we drive our cars?'. Such a world would probably have fewer private cars and be arranged in such a way that many ordinary people could get by perfectly well without a car, as is the case in many European and Japanese cities.

This article might help you understand some of the hidden assumptions many Americans operate under. Note: this guy has some rather wacky ideas but his articles on 'traditional cities' are pretty interesting.

Well, my general approach is to think that we should continue political discussions as long as they are not indicating mind-killing.

If it's not there in your judgment then, I'll continue.

For example, I find your point about liability insurance to be very interesting, and not one I had thought about before. It is certainly worth thinking about, but even then, that's a different type of regulation, not a lack of regulation as a whole.

Yes, but it certainly makes a difference in how many choices and alternatives regulation chokes off. Even if you believe in regulation as a necessary evil, you should favor the kind that accomplishes the same result with less intrusion. And there's a big difference between "Follow this specific federal code for airline security", versus "Do anything that convinces an insurer to underwrite you for a lot of potential damages."

Similarly, when it comes to restricting carbon emissions, it makes much more sense to assign a price or scarcity to the emissions themselves, rather than try to regulate loose correlates, such as banning products that someone has deemed "inefficient".

If you consider all that obvious, then you should understand my frustration when libertarians have to pull teeth to get people to agree to mere simplifications of regulation like I describe above.

Some libertarians oppose limited liability for shareholders of corporations because it distorts the incentives to reduce the risk of harm to third parties. I tend to lean in that direction although I can see the merit in some arguments in favour of limited liability.

I'm not at all sure what any of this has to do with anything. I agree with the quoted section that having the government step in to regulate how much carryon luggage people can have is an example of people making bad assumptions about government.

This rather illustrates my point. You can see the lack of justification for a fairly extreme example like the carry on luggage but can't see how that relates to the question of airline security. From my perspective the idea that government should even be discussing what to do about airline security in the original example is at least as ridiculous as the luggage example is from your perspective.

Can you explain for example how the fact that airplanes are effectively large missiles is not a good reason for the government to be concerned about their security? The use of airplanes as weapons is not fictional.

Airlines already have a strong economic incentive to take measures to avoid hijacking and terrorist attacks, both due to the high cost of losing a plane and to the reputational damage and possible liability claims resulting from passenger deaths and from the destruction of the target. I would expect them to do a better job of developing efficient security measures to mitigate these risks if government were not involved and also to do a better job of trading off increased security against increased inconvenience for travelers. There is absolutely no reason why a potentially dangerous activity necessitates government involvement to mitigate risks.

Similarly, regarding my second point are you claiming that people in general do have the time and resources to determine if any given drug is safe or is even what it is claimed to be? I'm curious how other than government regulation you intend to prevent people from diluting drugs for examples.

You can make the same argument with regard to many goods and services available in our complex modern world. It is equally flawed when applied to drugs as when applied to computers, cars or financial products. There is no reason why government has to play the role of gatekeeper, guardian and guarantor. In markets where government involvement is minimal other entities fill these roles quite effectively.

Is there any good heuristics or principles for determining wether or not the government should regulate something?

A good heuristic is "no it shouldn't". Whether there are any exceptions to this rule is an open question.

I think there are some credit card practices that could be framed as fraud (You can change my interest rate without telling me? And without telling me you won't tell me? Seriously? What the hell?) so the government would have to be involved even in a strict libertarian society, but I never like where this is going.

Libertarianism, as a political concept was an idea invented by David Nolan to suit his political theories. He had a chart, and a quarter of it is various types of libertarians.

If you like more social liberties than the American center, and more economic liberties, and are willing to forgo some amount (even a small amount) of government services and protections to achieve them, then you are some where on that quarter of the map. You don't necessarily have to be way off in the corner with the anarchists or defend every idea they have.

That seems clearly within the scope of legitimate concerns of government, given that air travel is already heavily regulated

This argument doesn't work. Just because you already have heavy regulation, doesn't justify having more regulation. Also, many libertarians would say that the solution should be to simply remove much of the heavy regulation of air travel.

I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.

Don't take the adversarial attitude: "taking a stand", "against me". This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.

Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter's new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.

Uh... thanks?

Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It's obvious from your other contributions that you're not doing that, but someone who'd only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.

By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we've seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respected theists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question, and not be too offended by that. (Consider it a role reversal from an atheist's social interactions with typical Americans.)

I've enjoyed my exchanges with you so far, and look forward to more!

I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.

Awwwww, I'm not against you. I just think you're incorrect.

If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you'll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack - taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.

I wouldn't expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can't go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.

I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.

You're probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you're going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.

D: GAHHH!!! D: Hundreds of links to pages that contain hundreds of more links. D:

Hm, had you not noticed the sequences yet? The "sequences" button is next to the "about" button. There's quite a few more of them. :)