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http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=2

READ.

People who are in the business of promoting envy -- and that includes not only politicians and activists, but also much of the intelligentsia -- are increasingly forced to resort to statistics because serious differences between flesh-and-blood Americans are fewer than ever.

In other times and places, the difference between being in the top economic strata and the bottom strata was the difference between feast and famine. Being poor meant sometimes not having enough to eat or not being able to keep your home warm in the winter or not having adequate clothing to protect you against the elements when you went outside. It meant dressing your children in ragged or patched-up clothes.

In some countries it still means things like that. Someone in his native India told best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza that he wanted to see America because he wanted to see a country where poor people are fat. He was right. Americans in the lower income brackets are obese more often than those in the upper brackets.

Most Americans living below the official poverty line have air conditioning, microwaves and VCRs. About half have a car or truck. Moreover, most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in 1975 have also been in the top 20 percent at some point since then.

People who are genuinely poor all their lives still exist, but only about 3 percent of the American population remains in the bottom 20 percent for as long as a decade.

This is fine as far as most of us are concerned. But it is tough if you are in the envy or "social justice" business. It means you have to work harder to stir up indignation, votes and government programs to deal with "inequities" between the "haves" and the "have nots."

Look, I live in Louisiana and all of the meteorologists I've seen on tv and read articles from seem to concur that the increase in hurricanes is not due to Global Warming, but is on a 30 year cycle. Just ask Dr. Bill Gray the foremost expert on hurricanes (He's the guy Louisianians look to every year to tell us how many hurricanes are coming).
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4403

A Monopoly can only be created by Gov't. You might not like MSC products, and that's fine. There is no law that commands that you use ANYTHING made by MSC. So, there is NO monoply.

1. Microsoft has market share by virtue of hard work. A true monopoly can only exist with the use of force to quell competition. Gov't is the only entity we allow to use such force.

2. For decades, by law - there was only one phone company. And you could go to jail if you started your own phone company. That is a monopoly in the real world. Some of you socialists are too quick to use a term you can't comprehend. You've confused hard-work and marketing excellence with a monopoly.

3. To get the effect you desire, you have to use the force of law to limit the marketing of MSC products. Sounds good if your trying to catch up with MSC, huh? But what happens if you actually succeed, and YOU are suddenly forced to limit what YOU can earn?

Losers always hate winners.

See http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=866

A Monopoly can only be created by Gov't. You might not like MSC products, and that's fine. There is no law that commands that you use ANYTHING made by MSC. So, there is NO monoply.

1. Microsoft has market share by virtue of hard work. A true monopoly can only exist with the use of force to quell competition. Gov't is the only entity we allow to use such force.

2. For decades, by law - there was only one phone company. And you could go to jail if you started your own phone company. That is a monopoly in the real world. Some of you socialists are too quick to use a term you can't comprehend. You've confused hard-work and marketing excellence with a monopoly.

3. To get the effect you desire, you have to use the force of law to limit the marketing of MSC products. Sounds good if your trying to catch up with MSC, huh? But what happens if you actually succeed, and YOU are suddenly forced to limit what YOU can earn?

Losers always hate winners.

See http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=866

So Rand was right after all...you really CAN'T make money by rejecting reality.

Hence the reason for the Enron failure--the executives believed that their ideas SHOULD make money, so they ignored it when it turned out they didn't.

See http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4490

Sure. Here ya' go:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1981

Jim crow laws were opposed by business in pursuit of profit.

It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome that lured investors into the private consortium that attempted to sequence it in competition with the public effort.

It would obviously benefit the consumers as well as us who work in this industry if everyone small- and medium-sized wasn't afraid to go near the 900lb. gorilla in the room for fear it will sneeze out a legal document. Microsoft has successfully established itself as the "safe" choice both for corporations as well as uninformed consumers. Microsoft is after all the new IBM, and they are seemingly too big for even a coalition of competitors to gang up against.

Did something go wrong along the way?

Part of the problem is you guys. Yes, you. YOU have not fought management enough on their mindless devotion to Microsoft BizTalk, Outlook and Exchange Server. YOU have not spent enough weekends building a kickass app using open-source tools that you could use to prove your faith to management or the client or both. YOU have failed to convince your Windows-using friends to try anything else, even though they still go to you for Windows assistance. YOU know how hard it is for them to get past that mental block, so go ahead and put your money where your mouth (and heart) is and lend them a used or rebuilt machine for a while. YOU, the army of independent thinkers, of underdog fans, of any thought or decision that looks too lemming-like, you PHB despisers and abhorrers of the status quo... need to not only hold your ground, but advance! (Disclaimer: I'm not just all talk- I just quit my decent-paying, Microsoft-technology-focused and totally-time-consuming salaried-worker-abusing Big 4 consulting job so I could focus on mastering some open-source technologies that the corporate world has not gotten a whiff of yet, and to try my hand at building great stuff with it... and I already have a paying project...)

interestate commerce

read case here

other aspects

The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet.

Who Should Own Mars?

Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.

The day anyone comes up with a viable business plan (which the guys in the Wired article, unfortunately, haven't done yet - and probably can't do so long as there are no private property rights in space), put me on the first colony ship of homesteaders.

OK, I actually agree with you. Anti-trust is horribly arbitrary. There are times when it should be used, but it is a pretty flawed law. The idea behind it is good, but its implementation is pretty much crap. Here is actually a pretty good article about the problems with anti-trust (actually the link is to part 4 or a 4 part article).

Anyway, if what Intel has been accused of is true I think this would be good use of anti-trust law. That said I like their products and am frustrated at how hard it can be to find a PC with AMD. The previous statement clearly shows I'm a bit biased, but perhaps also shows there is something to this case. If customers want a product but have trouble finding people to provide it, there is something else happening which is screwing up the natural principles of supply-and-demand.

"real scientists" Do you mean climatologists, or do you mean "people who may have a degree in a completely unrelated field of study but are "scientists" so therefore their opinions are just as good as someone who ACTUALLY studies climates?" The original report that the White House started drawing their conclusions from included less than 2000 people - few of which were actually scientists who have climate related degrees.
try reading these two articles on the Global Warming reports:
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=50
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html

last year I had a research assignment based on modifying our dna and transgenics, and it's quite an interesting subject, i won't be so arrogant as to link to that assignment, but I will post links to some of the articles i referred to..

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Today-Food-Tomorrow-Hu mans.htm
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/index/fdavet/1999/july.html #transgenics
http://www.ifgene.org/proscons.htm
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0317,baard,43560, 1.html
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1640

and no, i did not RTFA.

Actually, this is the guy who's been advocating the strong FCC push during this time, so I would say that he's definiately NOT in favor.

From this article

Since the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl, there have been strident demands for a crackdown by a tougher, stricter Federal Communication Commission. The FCC's various commissioners now call for the power to regulate cable television, in addition to broadcast media. In June Congress voted to increase the maximum fine the FCC can impose tenfold, from $27,500 to $275,000. Commissioner Michael Copps has vowed that he will not be satisfied until "I see us send one or two . . . . cases for license revocation."

And, as others in this thread have pointed out, a Democrat.

Yeah, but given the U.N.'s history, they're likely to put the Christmas Islands in charge of domains.

The Kyoto accord is a sham. Yea mark me as flame bait if you wish but read on... Harvard Agrees that it is a sham, though not that particular word. Quoted from the linked article, for those that are click impared,

"But the choice of 1990 immediately introduced inequities into the ensuing political process to determine who should cut how much, says Butler professor of environmental science Michael B. McElroy. That particular date "gave the Europeans a massive advantage relative to other countries," he says, because "reunification of Germany led to the elimination (for economic reasons) of a lot of dirty, polluting industry in what was formerly East Germany."

By selecting a timescale that was almost immediate--a completion date of 2008--the Kyoto Protocol mandated economically inefficient measures to achieve its targets. "The economic lifetime of a power plant is maybe 30 years," says McElroy, "and the average automobile in the U.S. is on the road for 11 and a half or 12 years. If you try to change the energy economy too quickly, you are going to have to retire equipment that is still economically productive."

Chceck this out for other Interesting Reads. And for the kicker. All nations that are pressuring America stand to beneffit from a mass redistribuion of wealth from America. Don't believe me? Well what about THIS.

I may sound a little steamed, well I AM!!! I'm tired of the tree huggin' hippes deciding to listion to only one side fo the story. I've quoted Harvard here, and they ignore it! Everyone who is on the "green bandwagon," that I have talked to, has denied this material as being fringe. I beg to differ!!! The media is a sensationlist money maker. The more sensational they sound the more money they make. I ask this question, what is more sensational than Chicken Little screaming "The Sky is Falling"? Oh wait just a second, what is more sensational than an actor with almost as much plastic surgery as Michael Jackson stating that the coasts are going to flood, or that "The Day After Tomorrow" is reality, or "The End of the World"?

We need a dose of cold reality. The Tsunami at the end of 2004 was part of it. Nature is much more dangerous than some fickle mathematics. Just think of a volcano in Antartica... Hmmm... That would do more than global warming ever could!

And yea, I failed spelling all through my elementary years.

In my experience, anyway. If you haven't been brought up with guns freely available, it seems very strange indeed.

It was within living memory that most European countries had gun laws essentially identical to the laws in America today. In England before 1920, for example, you could pay 4 pounds at the post office for a license to carry a pistol, and take it with you wherever you went. The ONLY class of people who were prohibited from carrying a gun were policemen. And crime in those days was a trifling fraction of what it is now in England.

The laws changed because of fears of anarchists and communists, not because of any concern about controlling common criminals, but that seems to be how they are perceived nowadays. What I find puzzling is the average European's blind faith in gun control when it has been clearly shown to be such a dismal failure.

"No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever before."
- Inspector Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control, (Routledge and Keegan, London, 1972) p. 243

Rush is so 90s! Now, the great Liberal Mythbuster is Michael Chrichton!

Please provide an example of how twice democraticaly elected Chavez is a despot

Please provide a reason elections are a criterion for dictatorship.

Chavez doesn't respect individual rights. It doesn't matter if he was elected. What do Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, Saddam and Chavez have in common? I'll let you figure it out. But here's some reading material while you're onerously pondering it.

If you are speaking about the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, then I have the sad duty of informing you that it no longer exists. Don't get me wrong, I'm with ya - anything not explicitely laid out in the Constition is a power retained by the states. Unfortunately, the 10th Amend. has been eviscerated by the Courts. Only recently has a Justice (Clarence Thomas) spoken any words giving the 10th Amend. any effect, but that was in a dissenting opinion, but hey, it's a start.

...is that the regime waited this long to crack down on the bloggers. Expect much, much worse to come. Hey, after all, this is the regime that executed a teenage girl for the crime of making smartassed comments to religous authorities.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=168 The Cause of the California Power Blackouts

Fact number one: You cannot go on obstructing the building of electric power generating plants for years on end without eventually running out of enough electricity to supply your growing population and your growing industries. It has been more than a decade since the last power plant was built in California.

Fact number two: You cannot force California public utilities to charge consumers less for electricity from out of state than the utilities have to pay to get it, without reaching the point where the utilities' deficits exceed the money they have on hand to pay their bills.

Fact number three: You cannot continue indefinitely pandering to the shrill voices of people who call themselves "environmentalists" or "consumer advocates" without reaching the point where the chickens come home to roost.

Capitalism Magazine ... well, it is not really a blog. It is a site of politic/social/philosophic editorials, from an objectivist (Ayn Rand) point of view. I love this site!

I also like Polipundit , Instapundit , Cox & Forkum , and deliciously corrosive Ann Coulter .

For the portuguese-speaking: be sure to check Midia Sem Mascara and Diego Casagrande .

As for that, I haven't heard that argument from any conservatives

That's strange, because I can't think of a single conservative mouthpiece or media source who has not said something similar to the grandparent's posting. The following comes up in the first few pages of a Google search:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp ?ID=6317
The Hate America Left
Ben Johnson, columnist, FrontPageMagazine.com

http://anncoulter.com/columns/2002/070302.htm
Liberalism And Terrorism: Different Stages Of Same Disease
Ann Coulter, AnnCoulter.com

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/weekend_sites/080 904_081304/content/what_would_happen_if.guest.html
"For every eye that has to police the protesters, that's one eye less watching for terrorists. Do they care? No... You hate the president. You hate the country."
Rush Limbaugh Transcript, 8/12/2004

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/2/26 /124459.shtml
'Hate-America Leftists' Lead the Appeasement Movement
Wes Vernon, columnist NewsMax.com

http://www.americandaily.com/article/917
"People who hate America... these are John Kerry's constituents"
JB Williams, columnist, The American Daily

http://www.americandaily.com/article/2390
The Hate-America Crowd Speaks Its Mind
Doug Patton, columnist, The American Daily

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/07/04/loc_br onson4.html
Hate-America crowd has its own picnic
Cincinati Inquierer, columnist, Peter Bronson

http://www.wtoctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2028797
"Why are people who hate America still living here?"

Bill Carthcart, WTOC 11, Savannah Georgia
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp 20040706.shtml

Michael Moore and the problem of American self-hatred
Dennis Prager, Townhall.com

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArti cle.asp?ID=14125
Hate-America Advocates
Jean Pearce, Frontpage Magazine

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2159
American Academics Who Hate America
Daniel Pipes, Capitalism Magazine

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArti cle.asp?ID=9298
A Hate-America Superhero
Joshua Elder, FrontPageMagazine.com

The entire point of zionism was to eject the indigenous population of palestine and create a state of jewish people.

Of course there was no "intent to eject the indigenous population", the original claim of many Zionists was that there was no indigenous population (apart from a few Jews)in Palestine. "Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country."

I reckon the libertarian party is a lot more likely to eliminate unnecessary expansions of government than the greens or any "left wing" group.

Not when it comes to intellectual property. Go to their webpage (or the the Cato Institute) and look up their position. Remember that idiotic Rand Institute article on the subject? I realize that Libertarians are different from Randians are different from the Rand Institute, but it's only an exaggerated case. They are so obsessed with the sanctity of property that they can't see that IP is 100% a government invention. (And that's ok, but it's counter to most other Libertarian ideals.)

Many Libertarians don't feel that way, I'm sure. But it's not the party line.

But I see no reason to expect that the Greens are better. Most Americans fought over who had an idea first in kindergarten, and have never grown out of it. Everyone I speak to about the issue thinks of things almost like the French system: Artists have moral rights over their works, and it is wrong to infringe on them.

Google isn't bearing easy fruit, so I don't know what the Green position is. I see this, which is promising. Iduno. That's a reason to think that maybe the Greens are better.

Actually, that's basically what "Space Property Rights" means.

Currently, there are no property rights in space (or more accurately, on other worlds). By treaty, bodies in outer space are "governed" rather like Antarctica -- no government can claim the Moon for itself and issue deeds to explorers. Likewise, no private citizen can land on the Moon and claim it for himself or herself.

In the case of Antarctica, maybe that's a good thing - it's a nice lab, but it's pretty small and can't sustain a tourism industry.

In the case of the Moon, Mars, and (collectively) the asteroids - they're big enough that it'll take so damn long to "pave over 'em" or otherwise "despoil" their "natural" state, that scientific research wouldn't be jeopardized by private ownership of 'em.

Without space property rights, there can be no return on investment for the private sector. Without the private sector's involvement, the only entities doing space exploration, tourism, industrialization or colonization, will be governments. Problem is, governments have "better" things to do than establish offworld colonies. Space exploration doesn't help a government stay in power, and unsurprisingly, governments tend not to give a fuck about it except insofar as to use space programmes to spread the pork around.

A radical proposal:

"The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet."

- From Mars: Who Should Own It

With space property rights -- whether in the radical form above, or by following the more traditional "Homesteading" model in which government opened up the West by taking ownership of the land for the express purpose of giving it away to anyone who could survive there long enough -- we're much more likely to make it off this mudball.

Not a bad idea -- NASA's willing to write it off, there's a market for images from Hubble (from scientists who need to do research -- and even if it's grant money we're talking about, they could choose to spend that money for Hubble time, or spend it on adaptive optics from Earth, etc.) so why not let a private contractor salvage it and sell it out if he thinks he can make a buck while doing so?

While we're at it -- why not back out of that asinine space treaty that prohibits private ownership of offworld land? The first person to get to Mars, spend one year there, and return alive, owns Mars.

If it costs x dollars to get to Mars on the Zubrin plan, and you expect Mars to be worth more than, say, 10 * x dollars in 5-10 years, then founding Mars, Inc. is a worthy investment. Otherwise, it's not.

As technology advances, someday the cost to get there will drop, and/or the expected of Mars (tourism, science, people who want to colonize a new world just for the heck of it) will increase.

If there's a property reward of an entire farking planet available for the taking, human nature guarantees that the mission to Mars will start the same day it makes sense to go there. No worrying about NASA wasting $1T on flags-and-footprints PR exercises (going before we're ready). But also no waiting for NASA bureaucrats to twiddle their thumbs for decades after we're ready.

Totally agree.

1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".

2. And the current administration is the strongest proponent of lifting those restrictions on gun control.

3. The counter-party is blocking the appointment of new judges to replace retiring officials. Sounds like being against speedy trials to me.

4. Thank you Clinton for using executive orders to confiscate land and turn it into federal parks.

You're right, we need to clean out half of congress... but we will argue about which half needs to go.

There's a pilot plant outside Philly, and another in Montana or Missouri (don't remember).

With this available, I just wish we were far sighted enough to pop these up all over the country to process any and all recoverable waste. With this as an option, the need to drill for oil becomes greatly reduced if not eliminated.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being spoiled children, it's that our taxes on fuel use are not at the obsurd levels applied in many parts of the world. Just how much better would it be if the mostly hidden tax on gas wasn't there. Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, MD tax rate is 23.5 cents a gallon. Someone come up with a single reason why gas should have a 26% tax on it?

If you stop the knee jerk reaction, why are fuel prices in Europe so much higher than the US three times in some cases? Taxes. $2.82 out of every $4.07 gallon in France is tax. It's just insane.

A slight warning: To any properly (patrioticly) configured mind this is flamebait. So is the parent posters anyway, so who cares.

The US is a exceptional country. It is indeed so exceptional that people file lawsuits, because they werent told that:

• Eating fat food makes you fat
• Coffee is hot

And ofcourse for any other reason they may find. Like culture. We are all will-less victims of culture.

• My son got killed because you made a movie, which some mentally-disturbed person watched
• Again, mental, murder. New item: music
• Suicide? Blame the music! Can't be society, at least.

Ok. I could go on, but I'm feeling lazy. And yes, these lawsuits does not at all fully represent your country, we know.

But in a country where lawsuits like this even can be legaly filed (and not rejected as barratry, as they should), must at least consist of some exceptionally stupid people.

There. You got your exceptionlism. Be satisfied.

I've once been told, trying to understand this madness, that one reason for these amazingly stupid (and brave and creative, nevertheless. Takes guts and fantasy to come up with shitlike this), is that you don't have a public health system.

That is. If you gets hurt, you will either

1. Make sure you're still able to speak, inform personell of your insurance, get treatment.
2. Being able to speak, inform of none-existant insurance, get treatment. Debt for life thrown in as a bonus.
3. Being able to speak, inform of none-existant insurance, get no treatment. Death or permanent injuries may ensue.

Yes. This was very much flamish, but jeez guys. Have some modesty. You are by far the youngest country in the western world. Now show some respect for your elders, who might actually have some history on running a country properly.

BTW: Imposing armageddon on the entire world, because of one small attack, could be considered immature.

Kinda like scriptkiddies on irc with their nuking-tools, but actually dangerous.

Proposal: The first human being(s) to survive one year on Mars and return safely to earth... gets their choice: $100B of Government Pr0k, or ownership of Mars. Mars becomes his/her/their personal property, to sell to anyone whom he/she/they please, most likely the employer who put him there and brought him back.

(Yes, this is a shameless alteration of a more ideologically-proposed proposal I found here -- in which the only prize in the original scheme is ownership of Mars with the government pr0k option removed.)

lol second one down

Nice job capitalism magizine editors.

There are so many causes because there is so much injustice.

No, because there is too much free time for people who have only learned to emote and not to think. The things the Green Party advocates are always the wrong things, but they feel right. Social justice always means taking from those who produce and giving it to those who don't, or won't (if it's the case that they can't, that's what private charities are for). Anyhow, he was making a joke, and you greenie libs are notoriously humorless unless a conservative is the butt of the joke.

This will straighten you out.

Would this be a vioaltion of their anti-trust agreement? Seems like this could really put the hurt on Norton, etc.

Antitrust law does not forbid you to hurt your competitors.[*] All competition does that. In fact, that is what competition is. Given a fixed number of customers, any enterprise that tries to attract as many customers as possible necessarily hurts its competitors, who will either lose customers or not gain as many new ones as they would have otherwise. Thus, the competitors will be financially worse off than they would have been had if they had been able to lay their grubby little hands on those customers. Or at least they should be. Competition is supposed to punish inefficiencies and reward efficiency, thereby allocating scarce resources the best/most efficient way possible.

What antitrust law primarily seeks to protect is competition, not competitors. Now, it might admittedly be just a little bit hard to have the one (former) without the other (latter) and much of tension within antitrust law and the debate surrounding it centres on that particular problem: should antitrust regulate structure or behaviour?

In Alcoa[**] Justice Learned Hand stated that it was not the objective of antitrust law to punish efficient companies: in case a party has had a monopoly 'thrust upon it', its position was not unlawful. However, he went on to say:

'Nothing compelled [Alcoa] to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.'

This so-called Alcoa doctrine placed monopolies under a strict per se-rule: i.e., monopolies were prohibited as such. The issue became one of structure: does an enterprise occupy a position of monopoly (within a relevant market) or not. If yes, unless it can be proved that the company is a mere passive recipient of its monopoly position, it is unlawful.

The Alcoa doctrine was severly critized, notably by Robert Bork in his The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy At War With Itself. Justice Hand seemed to find Alcoa guilty of being nothing more than a better competitor; better at doing business; in fact, Alcoa was being punished for being more efficient. And as the criticism took hold, courts reverted back to an ante-Alcoa, U.S. Steel[#] rule of reason approach centring on the behaviour of monopolizing: simply put, intent + harm. This would appear to be the (established) law today.

Bork and the Chicago schoolers sometimes seem to go futher than that however: one sometimes gets the impression that to them, the existence of a monopoly shows nothing more and nothing less than superiority in the market place. In other words, a position of monopoly is evidence of superior efficiency; efficiency is a valid exculpatory defence as it contibutes to increased consumer welfare[##]. A lot of the defence of Microsoft's monopoly case seems to rest upon this premise. See, for instance, here and here; for a more sober view, see Posner's article Antitrust in the New Economy , in particular, perhaps, pages 8-9.

Neo-classical economic theory and its antitrust exponents (to which Bork and the Chicago-schoolers obviously belong) are not without critics however. See, for instance, this piece by Metzenbaum and Foer in which they write:

'Antitrust remedies, [Greenspan] says, tend not to be efficient. His attitude is, if we wait long enough, dominant companies (po

There is no tit-for-tat in crime.

The Germans managed to kill nearly 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, and whomever else they didn't like
According to Rummel, it was 21 million... Stalin killed double that, Mao about 38 million. Read about this here.

Still - all of them are criminals.
There is no tit-for-tat in crime.

Need I mention slavery, killings of native indians, crimes of war ?

Responsibility is inheritable.
Guilt is not.

If everyone is entitled to his or her own life, then doesn't that also include the doctors?

Pretty good theory, and it wouldn't be the first time the New York Times made up a story.

The foam on the last space shuttle was used because it was more environmentally friendly, even though it was inferior. At least that's what I read (just put 'space shuttle foam environment' into google).

I expect you read this article in Capitalist Magazine. The title of the article, "Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space", really brings home the high levels of dispassionate reporting and journalistic integrity enjoyed by the magazine. Truly, everything they say must be true.

The foam on the last space shuttle was used because it was more environmentally friendly, even though it was inferior. At least that's what I read (just put 'space shuttle foam environment' into google).

I expect you read this article in Capitalist Magazine. The title of the article, "Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space", really brings home the high levels of dispassionate reporting and journalistic integrity enjoyed by the magazine. Truly, everything they say must be true.

I think Davies has come up with a good idea, but it needs one thing - property rights. A development regime which provides some form of property rights will become increasingly necessary as space develops

Land property rights are different that plain, ordinary property rights.

Why is it that people think that you can't have capitalism without land property rights? Why do otherwise educated people from the west seem to fixate on this Medieval Idea of land ownership? Is it just because it is old and widespread in the west? Well, so is syphilis, but I don't think that makes syphilis a good thing.

The argument that it's the most efficient way to allocate scarce or valuable resources is bunk. Ever had to drive around an American city founded by a 'land run'? The number of ex-squatter 's houses that force otherwise useful through roads to dead-end is amazing (as well as other interesting geopolitical features.) Several slums exist in these cities where people refused to sell or improve the large tracts of land they got from the government at pennies on the dollar. These people forestalled development often just because they liked owning an (unused) farm.

With the exception of the freeloader and the tragedy of the commons, shared resources have many less problems than the 'stay off my land' model. (Including limiting NIMBY.) Look at the difference in progress in Open Source programming and the Intellectual-Property bound proprietary software.

I argue that space is much like the mental space or algorithms, programs and computer science/math theory. It is not like 'airable land' on the surface of the earth. The size of space is huge - and NONE of it is airable. The use of 'land' is ambiguous: your 'land claim' on a patch of surface on an asteroid is debatable if the whole asteroid is to be chewed up and used for raw materials to build something (like whole towns that are submerged under artificial damns that power serveral other towns and a small city or two and provide a conrolled body of water.) There is an inherent violation of use for natural resources in space, there's a reason NASA sterilizes spacecraft. And high cost of getting there, although it is cheap to move around once there. If you don't like IP patents like one-click or the DNS patent, I think you should object just as strongly to some one saying that they own the moon anymore than anyone else.

I'm no communist, but you can have capitalism without depending on property ownership! If the government must blow money to support and guard your property with troops and lawyers, they'll never be able to pay for important things for other people. Let the government 'own it' and everybody else use it just like any other public utility. It's just abstracting the ownsership problem back a level to force people to deal with affecting their neighboors with their so-called 'private' activities (you try living near people who plant weeds to which you and several other neighbors are dangerously allergic.)

I don't think there's any doubt that Standard Oil brought prices down while increasing quality and output. All the complaints were from their competitors, not their customers; quite the opposite of a real monopoly.

That predatory pricing is a myth isn't so controversial. Like many political issues, it's often a case of a special interest claiming government protection for their narrow interests, while pretending that it's for the sake of the general public. Netscape complained about Microsoft giving IE away for free, but I didn't hear complaints from any consumers.

One recent example comes to mind, namely the earthquakes in California and Iran.

Two earthquakes: Magnitude 6.5 vs 6.6.
Two social systems: Capitalism watered-down with welfare, versus Socialism watered-down with theocracy.
Two body counts: ...four orders of magnitude apart.

So to answer your question - Yes, I do think that there is a direct correlation between the quality of life in a given country and the degree of welfare support (read: "socialism") provided to its citizens. It just happens to be an inverse correlation.

Compare former third-world countries like Chile, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea... against any nation you want to choose in Africa.

Yeah, but look on the bright side. Thanks to Ms. Carson, we've had an additional three decades to prove that malaria thins out third-world populations pretty damn well.

As responsible stewards of Gaia's gift, we must abide by the precautionary principle, you know. But if another 30 million human corpses is what it takes to be absolutely sure that the next generation of pesticides won't harm the indigenous population of amopheles gambiae and plasmodium falciparum, then so be it!

I'm moving out of the Bay Area - can't afford to live here anymore.

The problem is zoning and the artificial scarcity it causes.

what would Jesus fly?

because transportation is a moral issue...
(especially to some people)

*scoove*

"For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science," said commissioner Sam Schuchat. "I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong."

Sure- An article