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TuringAI

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  1. It's all in this article. I got this from a libertarian social network but that doesn't matter, since this is a true case of government abuse and we need all the help we can get. http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/19/blogging-business-privilege-tax-philadelphia Personally, while I believe all taxation is theft, it's especially wrong to tax blogs because it stifles the free speech of those who may have no other outlet.
  2. Hedonistic perhaps? Solipsistic? It depends on WHY they are acting 'selfish' but it usually boils down to either not recognizing that anyone other than themselves exists, or not caring because they're getting pleasure from the deal.
  3. Why don't you trust them? They are acting as faithful defenders of America and the U.S. constitution in combat, why shouldn't they be allowed to do the same outside of combat?
  4. Getting something for nothing is not intrinsically immoral, even if the one who got nothing for something believed they had made an even exchange. Compare this to a scenario where a business owner promises a team of interns that one of them will be hired, when said owner has already determined in advance which one will be hired. While I will accept if both the bookstore owner example and the team of interns example implies the immorality of their exploiters, and I will accept it if neither is immoral, you can't claim that one is okay and the other isn't.
  5. How do you know? Have you read the hypothetical bookstore's return policy? You can't have done that since it's a hypothetical example. Since you only have limited information you should make a judgment based on what you know, not on what you don't know.
  6. Yet if the bookstore had voluntarily made a refund policy a part of the contract, that's essentially the same thing as making payment optional.
  7. If the book store owner voluntarily decides to enact a policy whereby they make payment for the book optional, how is it fraud, or even acting in bad faith, to hold the book store owner to a situation to which he or she consented?
  8. Good job at removing the only relevant part of the analogy! Here, let me be more clear. Both buying a book and paying for someone's labor are voluntary transactions. Paying less for a book than the bookstore deserves and paying less for the labor than the laborer deserves are equivalent harms/vices.
  9. The analogy isn't between book returning and all business activities. The analogy is between book returning and a business which specifically pays its workers less than the employer has judged the employees are worth.
  10. You're the one attacking a straw man. I never said all business owners were dishonest. I said not all business owners were honest. Furthermore, I never justified that it was okay to be fraudulent, in fact there is no fraud in the legal sense of the term involved. I still think it would be dishonest to treat a book store as a free library but that's different than violating the terms of a contract. In fact this distinction isn't relevant in this context since I clearly agree that it is dishonest. Please read more carefully what I am saying next time alright?
  11. It's only flawed if you think that every business owner in the entire world doesn't cut corners and place money on a pedestal above morals. A lot of employers believe the myth that profit maximization is the same thing as having a productive business. It's not, and even Ayn Rand would agree that businesses need morals other than 'make the most amount of money without breaking the law' to flourish. The Enron Business Model is not moral. I think that the same fallacy is in play here for the person who believes that reading a book, benefiting from the value of the book, and and returning it just so they don't have to pay anything is moral. Suppose there were no laws in effect forcing the businesses to do that. How long can this kind of behavior hold? Either people will smart up to you and your behavior will bite you in the ass, or you'll get away with THIS but be led to do other corner cutting things that are more obviously immoral.
  12. The only aid they should get is to protect them from nations who threaten them. They do not deserve any other kind of support. Furthermore, we should require that they not squander the money by scaling back their own funding of their military. Their violations of rights in that region does not deserve support, and we should be careful not to inadvertently enable them.
  13. I was drawing an analogy, and it was a perfectly good one too. If as you say the worth of the labor is determined by the laborer in that respect, I say that the seller does value something more than the money paid to him or her for books otherwise he or she would not have such a policy in the first place. What it comes down to is that the book store owner getting the perceived worse end of the bargain is the same as the laborer getting the perceived worse end of the bargain at least with respect to the principles of justice since there is nothing more moral about being a book store owner than a laborer, at least not universally.
  14. The business is not MAKING them work for less than they deserve, but rather exploiting the fact that they do not know what is at stake and what their labor is really worth. In the very same way, the bookstore does not know that it is not worth it to have a 30-day return policy and they do not know that the buyer intends to read it and return it, but the buyer here is exploiting them nonetheless.
  15. I think a double standard is being presented here. If a business were exploiting its own employees, paying them well below what they deserved given the type of job they had and not giving them the benefits they did deserve, anyone here saying that it's immoral to do it even if they didn't claim it should be illegal would be cast out and branded as an anti-capitalist of sorts.
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