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It apparently blows right over your head that sentiments such as you quoted from FDR extended the great depression for another decade and that Germany and Israel just ran a nice experiment for us with regards to switching from European-style worker laws toward U.S. style levels of regulation instead and demonstrated quite clearly the economic and jobs damage your suggestions cause empirically.

It's amazing, if you stop passing laws either making it illegal to employ the least fortunate people among us (min. wage/living wage) or which discourages getting a job (lengthy unemployment benefits), suddenly people are working and being productive members of society.

You must really hate poor people if you're advocating for making it illegal for them to have a job. If you don't think that's what you're doing, then you don't understand economics. You might as well advocate for a law declaring everyone must have a personal fusion powerplant. That'll "solve" any energy issues in the same way.

Please explain Standard Oil and AT&T.

Ok. Here's Standard Oil. AT&T was granted a monopoly by the government, so no need to explain that to everyone, is there?

William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel in Economics for his model that includes the effects of externalities for CO2. His paper says that doing much more than a small increase in taxes is actually a net loss and we'd be better of putting the money elsewhere (which is also something Bjorn Lomborg also espouses. Pushing for the 1.5 deg C, or Gore's 90% cut goals nearly double the cost of doing nothing - and that's factoring in all those supposed externalities from fossil fuels.

"supposed externalities from fossil fuels" ??? Nordhaus isn't saying that fossil fuels have no environmental effects and that the byproducts created by burning them disappear into an alternate dimension or something and thus burning fossil fuels has no effect. He's basically saying that a 2 degree increase in global temperatures is more or less guaranteed because idiot politicians hooked on money from the fossil fuel industry have been sitting with their finger up their butt for far too long. Nordhaus acknowledges the potentially catastrophic impacts of this climate change so it is not as if he is in full agreement with the Trumpian/Kochian/Conservative point of view that climate change is a Chines hoax, not even close.

William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel in Economics for his model that includes the effects of externalities for CO2. His paper says that doing much more than a small increase in taxes is actually a net loss and we'd be better of putting the money elsewhere (which is also something Bjorn Lomborg also espouses. Pushing for the 1.5 deg C, or Gore's 90% cut goals nearly double the cost of doing nothing - and that's factoring in all those supposed externalities from fossil fuels.

There's a huge difference between writing a $3B check and not sending a $3B invoice in the first place.

Sure there is. The huge difference being that in both cases you have committed $3B to attracting a single business to the exclusion of all the other ways in which that money could be spent.

It is amazing how armchair economists who want something suddenly decide that the concept of "opportunity cost" doesn't exist and suddenly forget that the key word in the concept is "cost."The dead guy with nobel is bringing a reality bazooka.

The US did NOT sign the Paris accord; President Obama supported it, but per the US Constitution, the US cannot "sign" a treaty or accord unless it's approved by the Senate - and it never was.

As far as "what's a reasonable price", a guy just won a Nobel Prize in economics calculating that very number and it turns out the Paris goal of 1.5 deg C is about 1.63 times more expensive than doing nothing. And yes, that calculates all the costs of externalities. Doing the "full Gore" approach (that is supported by the Green New Deal) is about twice as expensive as doing nothing. Clearly, much of what's pushed for is NOT a reasonable price. Unless your purchase also seeks control of the entire world economy...

From the Encyclopedia of Economics:

A monopoly is an enterprise that is the only seller of a good or service.

50% isn't anywhere near a monopoly on something.

Amazon barely breaks even on the retail side. Until very recently, it lost money every year. If it was anything like a monopoly, it'd be hugely profitable instead.

Amazon is a cloud services provider with a marketplace business on the side, not a "near-monopoly" on e-commerce sales.

If buyers and sellers negotiate a price of $99 per gallon, why should that transaction be illegal?

Ah the Cole and Ohanian paper again, but with an extra heaping of customized unhinged exaggeration ("and that's likely an under estimate as it comes from UCLA"). Since the legislation was signed in June 1933, three months after FDR entered office (March 4 in those days), and the Great Depression did in fact end no later than June 1940 when the US per capita GDP had recovered to its pre-depression level (the NBER, who is the semi-official self-designated shot-caller for recessions places it much earlier, but there are good reasons to disregard their definition). I guess since the paper is from UCLA economists he believes FDR actually signed the legislation before he took office perhaps.

Gee how might that happen ?

Hoover did not stand idly by after the depression began. To fight the rapidly worsening depression, Hoover extended the size and scope of the federal government in six major areas: (1) federal spending, (2) agriculture, (3) wage policy, (4) immigration, (5) international trade, and (6) tax policy.

https://www.econlib.org/librar...

What do you know they had virtually the same policies.

You'd hit a lot harder if you actually knew your history, points for trying to slip that by though

The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.

Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price...

To the GP's point, the article is about environmental externalities.

The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.

Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price. Trucks can't drive around extra miles at US$0 / mile cost. No matter how cheap the gas or how little they pay their drivers.

Maybe prices don't differentiate between environmentally efficient or wasteful options. Maybe there are some externalities that enable Amazon to ship goods cheaper than they should be. But gas still costs money. Electricity too. More trucking miles = more trucks needed, more driver time, and more maintenance to do on those trucks. And with Amazon being a for-profit company, those extra costs will have to be recouped somehow. Either in higher prices for products, or higher prices for premium services.

So grandparent is right. The only thing (possibly) hidden is how end-user pricing is calculated.

First, this report doesn't match up with other estimates of the changes in temp from following/not following the Paris targets.

Bert Bolin, former chairman of the IPCC, notes that if Kyoto were fully implemented, twenty-five years later the global temperature would be cut “by less than 0.1 degree C, which would not be detectable.” Lomborg estimates that the world climate will increase by 1.92C by 2094 if nothing is done. If Kyoto is fully followed, it will take six more years to reach the same temperature.

Second, for many countries, it's not clear if an increase of 2 degrees is a net positive or negative.

William Cline and William Nordhaus, separately, have estimated the cost of warming of 2.5C (4.5F) to be about 1 percent of the U.S. GDP. Actually, though, Nordhaus calculated the cost at only 0.25 percent and then guessed, on the basis of unmeasured sectors, that the total might be as high as 1 or 2 percent. Interestingly, both Cline and Nordhaus explicitly ignored potential benefits from a warmer climate. Other economists agree that the benefits, at least to the United States and probably to most northern countries, outweigh the costs. Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University and his colleague James Neumann found that, on net, the United States would gain around 0.1–0.2 percent in GDP for the moderate warming (2.5C) likely to occur by 2060.

Third, they use a 3% discount rate for the sutdy, which skews it towards spending more now instead of later. A Typical Discount Rate would be in the 6-12% range.

For more info, read the Encyclopedia of Economics on the topic.

Something to look towards and plan for the potentiality, but we're not even CLOSE yet, no need to jump headlong into socialism at this point in time.

The Universal Basic Income isn't, or doesn't need to be, about socialism. The great free-market supporter Milton Friedman supported what he called the Negative incometax.

FalconWolf

Russell was of course referencing Adam Smith's example of the pin-maker. I.1.3 here in Wealth of Nations:
http://www.econlib.org/library...

Have them go the way of Enron and Ashley Whatshername...

Equifax is a "systemically important financial institution" like AIG, according to FedGov. You are (paradoxically) asking for bailouts, more risky behavior, and creeping fascism.

Toxic assets were "wealth" until labile traders reduced their value to $0, then the Fed stepped in with unlimited liquidity to make a market in them and rescue world finance.

Your very simplistic model of money was debunked by von Mises (no less) in The Theory of Money and Credit, Part II, Chapter 8, Paragraph 19:

According to this theory, all the things that are able to satisfy human wants are conventionally equated with all the monetary metal. From this, since what is true of the whole is also true of its parts, the exchange ratios between commodity units and units of money can be deduced. Here we are confronted with a hypothesis that is not in any way supported by facts. To demonstrate its untenability once more would nowadays be a waste of time.

If you want to play the extreme example game, it's a game two can play at in this discussion.

If all wealth were managed to be consumed tomorrow (apparently your ideal world), we'd have a really big party and then on the day after tomorrow life would suck horribly because we'd be in a rapid downward spiral to starvation for many.

No one has suggested no consumption. Obviously the point of growing wealth is later consumption. Ideally people decide for themselves how much investment vs consumption is useful in their life. They know their life better than others. So sure, I'd vote for absolutely no taxes to achieve that. They respond to market interest rates, which are the price accounting for the time value of consumption.

Short of that situation, the ideal tax from an economic perspective is a consumption tax, because that creates the least distortion and reduces ongoing wealth creation the least. In other words, over time it leads to the ability to consume more for everyone compared to an investment or income based tax system. If you doubt me, check with whatever economist you know.

Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it? What really happened is that Alice deferred her consumption in order to create something for other's to use so that she can have more consumption later. In turn, their preference was to consume that now in return for her deferred consumption of it. How much they pay for that privilege/preference is what we call interest. Without the interest, then Alice has no incentive to defer her consumption and thus Bob ends up with no place to live and both are ultimately worse off.

Bottom line, your proposed tax distorts the market for time preferenced consumption (by taxing it and thus resulting in less of it) and in the process makes the landlords and the renters both worse off. You can say you're fighting for the renters, but making it so they have to pay more in rent and/or otherwise have no place to live isn't going to feel like "help" to them!

If you want to play the extreme example game, it's a game two can play at in this discussion.

If all wealth were managed to be consumed tomorrow (apparently your ideal world), we'd have a really big party and then on the day after tomorrow life would suck horribly because we'd be in a rapid downward spiral to starvation for many.

No one has suggested no consumption. Obviously the point of growing wealth is later consumption. Ideally people decide for themselves how much investment vs consumption is useful in their life. They know their life better than others. So sure, I'd vote for absolutely no taxes to achieve that. They respond to market interest rates, which are the price accounting for the time value of consumption.

Short of that situation, the ideal tax from an economic perspective is a consumption tax, because that creates the least distortion and reduces ongoing wealth creation the least. In other words, over time it leads to the ability to consume more for everyone compared to an investment or income based tax system. If you doubt me, check with whatever economist you know.

Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it? What really happened is that Alice deferred her consumption in order to create something for other's to use so that she can have more consumption later. In turn, their preference was to consume that now in return for her deferred consumption of it. How much they pay for that privilege/preference is what we call interest. Without the interest, then Alice has no incentive to defer her consumption and thus Bob ends up with no place to live and both are ultimately worse off.

Bottom line, your proposed tax distorts the market for time preferenced consumption (by taxing it and thus resulting in less of it) and in the process makes the landlords and the renters both worse off. You can say you're fighting for the renters, but making it so they have to pay more in rent and/or otherwise have no place to live isn't going to feel like "help" to them!

128k

Newer estimates are higher:

On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.

So when you read "added 98,000" you have to understand "lost 108,000" relative to steady state.

And when the loyal press diligently repeats "and the unemployment rate fell" you can fall back on your fourth-grade mathematics to know that they're lying with statistics (like removing people who cannot find work).

Why this is important: since the Dot-Bomb the job market had not has a sustained period of permanent job growth. Throughout the "recovery" job rates have constantly declined. There is *no* evidence that the job market will *ever* recover.

Austrian economists understand that this is because of the time value of money and that artificially-suppressed interest rates prevent lending and by extension economic growth. But the Fed has both the responsibility to service the interest on the National Debt and setting the interest rates, and if rates rise to a more natural 8% or so, the US will default on debt payments. So they can either have the economy crash or crash the economy. That is their pickle and they have chosen to spread the misery rather than risk their seat of power. Unfortunately even for then, the current trajectory is unsustainable over a long term and this will eventually result in a currency crash, revolution, or tyranny (choose two). Keynesians believe that starting wars are the best way out of a bad economic situation and even though the Middle East wars haven't fixed the economy they're looking to knock over Syria and North Korea (damn the EMP's, or do those break wiindows?)

Fortunately we have the Feds' imposition of Common Core Math (Pearson style) so 4th-grade math won't be much of an impediment for long.

Companies such as Airbnb and Uber serve to show just how regulated most industries are. When they waltz into an existing industry with services just different enough to escape regulations, the suffocating nature of special interest-driven regulation becomes apparent. Entrenched taxi companies demand licensing restrictions. Hotels demand regulation and taxes. Unions demand classification of contractors as employees (and people realize they aren't so different from each other -- employees are just special contractors with government-mandated benefits). The New York decision is a classic example of special interests aiming to limit competition and creative destruction.

Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.

You might look at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.

Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:

http://www.heritage.org/resear...

For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Americans couldn't care less, however:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:

https://www.extension.purdue.e...

It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.

I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.

Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.

You might look at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.

Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:

http://www.heritage.org/resear...

For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Americans couldn't care less, however:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:

https://www.extension.purdue.e...

It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.

I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.

Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.

You might look at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.

Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:

http://www.heritage.org/resear...

For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Americans couldn't care less, however:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:

https://www.extension.purdue.e...

It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.

I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.

Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.

You might look at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.

Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://www.econlib.org/library...

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:

http://www.heritage.org/resear...

For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Americans couldn't care less, however:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:

https://www.extension.purdue.e...

It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.

I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.

If you want to discuss unsustainable actions, let's talk about fostering an underclass effectively locked into perpetual poverty.

GP did talk discuss a solution to that; encouraging birth control instead of rewarding living on the dole is the only sustainable long term solution. UBI, Negative Income Tax, whatever euphemism you prefer, doesn't work.

No, the real problem with socialism is not the harm it does to the economy due to the direct action of taking money from savers and giving it to spenders. That is bad enough, but the true problem is that those transfers due terrible things to the human psyche:

http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...

If you change the reward structure of society and make it random, moral behavior stops. If you take from workers and give to non-workers, not only do people stop working they also start stealing, raping, and killing at higher rates.

Socialism is the death knell of human societies.

On a side note, the intuition that transferring money from the rich (or savers) to the poor (or spenders) helps the spenders is false. It seems true because if you personally steal money from someone, it does make you better off. But the fact is that if everyone like you stole a million dollars from the Fed, the number of pizzas you could buy would not change. The number of pizzas being created per year cannot fluctuate that easily, but the price can. So when you take money from savers and give it to spenders two things happen:

1) There is inflation of the prices of things the spenders like to buy in order to soak up the money (you haven't increased supply, you haven't changed demand, so the only thing that can change is the price)
2) There are fewer savers, at the very least because you have confiscated some savings. This means fewer jobs available.

So, socialism is not good for anyone, even those it supposedly helps!

http://www.econlib.org/library...

Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”1

Similarly, another study reported that more than 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement.2 The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners milton friedman and friedrich hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate gunnar myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”3 His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”4

That cities like New York have clearly not been destroyed by rent control is due to the fact that rent control has been relaxed over the years.5 Rent stabilization, for example, which took the place of rent control for newer buildings, is less restrictive than the old rent control. Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.

Your economics term of the day is rent seeking.

Government regulators used to claim that there were things called "natural monopolies" to justify their stake to power, saying that competition was impossible, for things like telephone wires.

Now that 80% of the population has switched away from PSTN (many to cable providers) the regulators are looking for another hook to hang their hat on. Watch your back - the FCC is starting to dig in on regulating everything-Internet. Not because there's a need, but because they can't possibly admit that their job is obsolete.

Obviously the fact that price gouging aka "usage based pricing" exists is a perfect example of why the government regulators need to step in and regulate. The industry will not effectively regulate its-self. The fact that the government turns a blind eye to stuff like this is merely an indication that regulators (like all government types) are susceptible to corruption. Unfortunately, corruption will exist as long as people of any sort are part of the equation. I, for one, welcome our computerized government overlords.

Your economics term of the day is rent seeking.

Government regulators used to claim that there were things called "natural monopolies" to justify their stake to power, saying that competition was impossible, for things like telephone wires.

Now that 80% of the population has switched away from PSTN (many to cable providers) the regulators are looking for another hook to hang their hat on. Watch your back - the FCC is starting to dig in on regulating everything-Internet. Not because there's a need, but because they can't possibly admit that their job is obsolete.

Taxing capital instead of income is just another way of saying you want everyone to be less wealthy in the long run. You tax things you want less of, not things you want more of. We want more capital in use, more income created, more wealth created. What most people actually object to is what they see as excessive consumption.

Try listening to some economists and consider taxing consumption rather than capital, wealth or income.

That way you can get rid of most of the privacy destroying/controlling regulations/laws, tax the "black market" in illegal goods (because they still pay tax when they spend the money they make from illegal items) and simplify tax reporting to something businesses already have to do in 45 states, reducing the accounting pain/drain on the economy.

Taxing capital instead of income is just another way of saying you want everyone to be less wealthy in the long run. You tax things you want less of, not things you want more of. We want more capital in use, more income created, more wealth created. What most people actually object to is what they see as excessive consumption.

Try listening to some economists and consider taxing consumption rather than capital, wealth or income.

That way you can get rid of most of the privacy destroying/controlling regulations/laws, tax the "black market" in illegal goods (because they still pay tax when they spend the money they make from illegal items) and simplify tax reporting to something businesses already have to do in 45 states, reducing the accounting pain/drain on the economy.

Remember employees making iphones killing themselves, and the sweat shops in India and Vietnam for clothing and shoes?

The average "foreign sweat shop" worker can make 200% to 700% more than the average income of workers in their country.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are killed in rural agricultural accidents, and there is plenty of suicide in impoverished rural areas of developing countries where there are no good paying "sweat shop" jobs.

What's makes you think the FDA is a net benefit by regulating medical claims? How many people have to die for lack of FDA approval before you're willing to allow them to make their own decisions about their health? Why don't you want to allow customized medicine for things like cancer by making them prohibitively expensive via the FDA?

You don't have to be a libertarian to be willing to consider the results of empirical studies about what FDA delays cost. Can you at least be a utilitarian and go with the libertarian solution when it's the most effective based on the available evidence?

The FDA delay in approving beta blockers, by the FDA's own numbers, cost about 100,000 lives. Three years of delay on interleukin-2 after it was available in Europe? 3,000 lives. Every year of the approval process, every millions of dollars spent on approval fees to the FDA, equals lives lost and people who could have benefited who don't. Even Thalidomide, the one big claim people always have for the FDA, wasn't blocked by the FDA because of it's impact on embryos. They weren't even investigating that, it took news reports. Total Thalidomide affected children in the U.S.? 17. The rest of the world, 5-10K. Does that help the 10x as many people who died from lack of beta blocker approvals? Does anyone notice that currently Thalidomide is approved by the FDA to treat leprosy and cancer?

Yes, health choices can be risky, but rather than add information and give advice on them, you seem to want to tell adults what they can and can't decide to do, despite them knowing their own situation better than you do and despite their ability to consult with a knowledgeable specialist in the area of their medical issue before making an informed decision. There's no empirical evidence the FDA saves lives, the evidence points to them costing lives overall. But that doesn't seem to be the point of their existence. The point seems to be control and having the power to tell people what they must do. Which is where this conversation started.

You want pre-FDA history? Insulin was invented as a treatment and came to the market to treat diabetes in a couple of years when the FDA wasn't around. If the FDA was around, it would have taken at least 3-5 more years and might even have never made it to the market (or much, much later) because of the expense involved!

What's makes you think the FDA is a net benefit by regulating medical claims? How many people have to die for lack of FDA approval before you're willing to allow them to make their own decisions about their health? Why don't you want to allow customized medicine for things like cancer by making them prohibitively expensive via the FDA?

You don't have to be a libertarian to be willing to consider the results of empirical studies about what FDA delays cost. Can you at least be a utilitarian and go with the libertarian solution when it's the most effective based on the available evidence?

The FDA delay in approving beta blockers, by the FDA's own numbers, cost about 100,000 lives. Three years of delay on interleukin-2 after it was available in Europe? 3,000 lives. Every year of the approval process, every millions of dollars spent on approval fees to the FDA, equals lives lost and people who could have benefited who don't. Even Thalidomide, the one big claim people always have for the FDA, wasn't blocked by the FDA because of it's impact on embryos. They weren't even investigating that, it took news reports. Total Thalidomide affected children in the U.S.? 17. The rest of the world, 5-10K. Does that help the 10x as many people who died from lack of beta blocker approvals? Does anyone notice that currently Thalidomide is approved by the FDA to treat leprosy and cancer?

Yes, health choices can be risky, but rather than add information and give advice on them, you seem to want to tell adults what they can and can't decide to do, despite them knowing their own situation better than you do and despite their ability to consult with a knowledgeable specialist in the area of their medical issue before making an informed decision. There's no empirical evidence the FDA saves lives, the evidence points to them costing lives overall. But that doesn't seem to be the point of their existence. The point seems to be control and having the power to tell people what they must do. Which is where this conversation started.

You want pre-FDA history? Insulin was invented as a treatment and came to the market to treat diabetes in a couple of years when the FDA wasn't around. If the FDA was around, it would have taken at least 3-5 more years and might even have never made it to the market (or much, much later) because of the expense involved!

So to compensate for the FDA under regulating decades ago you accuse the FDA of over regulating now.

No, I accuse the FDA of doing the same thing now they did then, when large tobacco companies ultimately benefit from their actions at the expense of others. Ever heard of regulatory capture?

This idea that somehow government regulators are pure-minded defenders of the public and that they know better than everyone else what needs to happen is addressed in public choice economics.

>Most of it would be corporate-leaning.

Establishment-leaning. Yes, pro- corporate, but also pro- State, banksters, regulators, NGO's, etc. Which isn't all that surprising since the corps pay them and the regulators don't shut them down if they dance on cue.

http://www.econlib.org/library...

Thanks for this recommendation. The text is available here.

Ebay...isn't surge pricing in any stretch of the imagination.

What definition of "surge pricing" are you using that excludes eBay? Please paste the link, because I think you're making stuff up.

One definition of surge pricing is that it "occurs when a company raises the price of its offering if there is an increase in demand." And that's exactly how an auction works: the price rises until supply and demand are in equilibrium.

So please provide a link for a definition that excludes eBay, if you can.

Go look at teh stories about uber and surge pricing. You'll see a lot of time when it had to be turned off because of bad PR.

That's a good example of the "bandwagon fallacy." You're arguing that because people are opposed to something, it must be bad. But because argument from fallacy is also a fallacy, we'll have to agree to disagree on this point.

On the subject of bad PR, here is an interesting article about how a city shot themselves in the foot after a hurricane because they were offended by the high price of resupplying ice to the residents.

The problem with dynamic phone tariffs is that it incentives companies to never upgrade their infrastructure.

Could you elaborate on why high surge prices won't encourage other companies to start providing service? Because that doesn't make any kind of sense to me.

Except that "price gouging" isn't really a thing, and anti-gouging laws cause more harm than good: They Clapped

Governments, at least if they deserve the name, first and foremost have the goal of keeping a country running. There you actually have the chance that the service provided IS the primary goal.

There's a whole branch of economics which completely contradicts that, so let's start with some examples... can you name a few governments among the 196 or so in the world today which "deserve the name" under your definition and we can see how the people in those governments actually behave?

After all, how many lives has the FDA cost? What medical devices are we missing because the FDA delays them?

What you seem to see as a feature (long delays and hoops to jump through for government approvals), others have identified as a bug in the system.

A few of the "expert" ones I frequent:

Economics/Social Science:
Econlong
Marginal Revolution
The Money Illusion
Overcoming Bias
Bronte Capital - More short selling fund/capital management than economics

Law
Volokh Conspiracy (Now tied into the Washington Post)

Writing/Fantasy/SF
According to Hoyt
Mad Genius Club
Come Let Us Reason Together (more politics than writing)

He would call the government and protesters "Sisyphists," since they apparently believe it is better that the consumer has to work harder to get a ride. http://www.econlib.org/library...

Because that is exactly how the free market works.

"Free market power companies." Cool, where can I get one?

The ones I have available are state-granted monopolies (fascism). They take any operating profits and pay a "healthy" dividend to investors - there's no need to invest in future-benefit infrastructure because the PUC will always give them a rate increase if they can show present supply and demand data, discounting all past squandered opportunity. It would be foolish for them to ever do anything else because they face no competitive pressure.

That's where solar comes in ... the only feasible competition to the extant fascisitic power system. Solar itself isn't that smart, but a second choice is leagues better than no choice at all.

ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).

However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.

I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.

The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.

I'm still waiting for the first CEO to go to jail for refusing this.

Dude, you're fourteen years behind the news. The technique is not to get you on the "refusing NSA" charge, but any of the other countless criminal acts you commit every day. This is the primary purpose of a hyper-criminalized environment - so that everybody can be easily bent to the whim of the power structure. See also: charge stacking and the de-facto abolishment of the Sixth Amendment through the plea-bargain process (or, if you're a corporation, the no-plea deal for really efficient fascism.

People who lack a rudimentary understanding of economics make political-economic choices based on an intuition of fairness, often with results contrary to what they would have desired: They Clapped: Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity

For the best reasons to learn Python, see The Zen of Python. If Python happens to pay more, that's just gravy.

That said, it seems hard to believe that people would get paid extra to work in such a pleasant language. If so, maybe Adam Smith had it all wrong when he said:

First, The wages of labour vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment...The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.

Read on a bit more. By paragraph 10 he points to increased wages for jobs requiring skill, by paragraph 20 he's getting into jobs requiring trust.

Pity he living too soon to comment on large software project laborers.

For the best reasons to learn Python, see The Zen of Python. If Python happens to pay more, that's just gravy.

That said, it seems hard to believe that people would get paid extra to work in such a pleasant language. If so, maybe Adam Smith had it all wrong when he said:

First, The wages of labour vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment...The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.

Perhaps florists soon will be making more money than plumbers. Which would really stink.

I see no beauty, simplicity or elegance in the pythonic way variables are handled when shadowed (for example, global scope). You can read them BUT writing them fails silently! Explain how this is intuitive in any way.

For the best reasons to learn Python, see The Zen of Python. If Python happens to pay more, that's just gravy.

That said, it seems hard to believe that people would get paid extra to work in such a pleasant language. If so, maybe Adam Smith had it all wrong when he said:

First, The wages of labour vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment...The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.

Perhaps florists soon will be making more money than plumbers. Which would really stink.

Once you invite the FCC into regulating the Internet, you end up with a few appointed non-technical guys whose first loyalty is to a political party (In this case, Democrat, but I'm not saying GOP-controlled FCC would do a much better job of regulating) or to the special interest groups they support defining the various parts of the Internet in ways that make no technical sense, but allow them to accomplish their supporters very financially and power-based objectives.

As a result, the Internet becomes required to stagnate under their defined model, severely restricting the ability of the people who actually run it and use it to innovate in order to serve people better and slowing improvements in technology until they can be made to fit under stupid artificial distinctions like "end user" and "edge provider".

They're not actively trying to mess up the Internet, it's just a known side-effect of allowing them power to do so under public choice economic theory.

So for all of you who kept advocating for the FCC to get involved in regulating the Internet under the naive belief they'd impose your personal vision of Network Neutrality, this is the type of regulations you really get, plus distinctions between land lines and wireless, and all the other crap they're going to keep "refining" the rules to cover over time.

Those who kept pointing out the reality of the FCC regulating anything (that it really just puts Verizon, et al in charge) every time a network neutrality discussion occurred on /. will just quietly think "Toldja so" and hope people remember this the next time they advocate for a government commission which will inevitably suffer regulatory capture to control something else.

In the meantime, you'll eventually wish you could just purchase from a provider the service you actually want to have, but by the time they tell you that sort of service is now illegal, it'll be too late.